 When you started, let's say, your first psychedelic experience or, you know, other experiences on top of that, how did they or did they influence your thinking? You know, was this already inherently in you on some level or did the psychedelics wake it up to a whole new level of seeing things differently or seeing, you know, this reality and then also did it shape any of these books that you've written? Yeah. So my first psychedelic experience was with LSD when I was maybe 21 or 22. Yeah, it's not, you know, it's funny how LSD is not really a trendy medicine these days. But it is a extremely powerful psychedelic. And I have great reverence for that medicine because especially, you know, when it came onto the scene, it was just what was needed. And there is kind of an intelligence, I think, to the medicines that they are attracted to the cultural need. The illness seeks the medicine and the medicine seeks the illness. So they were a potent awakener and then, you know, maybe set the stage for the medicines that are whose time is here right now. And who knows what the future will be. But anyway, so I had a very, very powerful experience that, as the cliche says, can't really put into words. But, yeah, as I said before, it revealed to me the enormity of mind, reality, the mystery, the profundity of our confinement and what could be outside of it. And what it did, and I think what one of the potencies of psychedelics is that when I came down and came back into this reality, it didn't seem quite as real as it had before. This is one reason why psychedelics can sometimes cause psychotic breaks, because, like, but it's a truth, actually. What we take conventionally as real isn't. And that doesn't mean that we should treat it as not real, because we signed up for this reality for a purpose. You know, if you're an actor in a play, in a theater production, and you go around saying to the other characters, well, this isn't real. Like, no, no, no, you're supposed to actually be in the play fully. But it gave me a sense that this isn't all that there is, and that we have some degree of authorship over the play. We're not just the players, we're not just the actors. So, yeah, I guess it confirmed and then amplified my protest. Because, you know, as a teenager, I became aware of the horrors happening on this planet, the wrongness in the world. And that was one reason why I couldn't get with the program in college and have a career, because on some level I'm just, no, I don't want this. This can't be it. But there wasn't really an alternative. So psychedelics showed me, they didn't show me what the alternative was, but they showed me that there was one. That my protest wasn't just, you know, some playing out of my defiance against my father or whatever. You know, it was real. Yeah, that's one of the ways that it impacted me. Yeah. And now this is fascinating. So I have a similar story working with LSD at the age of 14. And I, you know, barely knew what it was and it just came to me and that was that. And I look back on that experience and see how much that really shaped the trajectory of my life, right? Like, that experience of like that truthiness where it's like, well, wait a second, I've been taught all of this and now I'm seeing something differently. And, you know, being part of the system, you know, I was raised in suburban, suburban USA. You go to college, you get a job and you do that until you die. That's what I was taught. It was that program, right? Like, same thing. Go to Yale. Go get a good job. Go get the internship. Yeah. But I'm curious, you know, over the years with me, what I started to experience, especially as I got older and worked with psychedelics more intentionally and less recreationally. You know, things started coming through. You know, and I also have a Buddhist background and it was, you know, like the same things that the Buddha said just now confirmed in a very visual way where it just seemed easier to grasp these concepts. You know, like, oh, this is actually ancient wisdom that has been said by all these great sages, but now I get it. You know, how do you, how do you understand the illusion of our reality? It's not easy to the human mind to conceive this. A question for you I have. So during my very first ayahuasca experience, I had, and it was probably to this day, my most powerful experience or one of the top, you know, three. I was able to see certain things that I didn't know, you know, at the time, like, is this real? Is this showing me the future? Is this, you know, when I came out of it, it was like, is this even worth living? Because I got to see, you know, like what you've been saying, like the nature of all the reality, the systems that are broken, the financial system being just this grand illusion, which of course we all know you don't need any psychedelic to see that. But, you know, and I came back and I did not have a psychotic break, but I had that period of maybe six months questioning, like, what is the whole entire point of being alive? And I'm curious if you've ever gone to that place, you know, your work goes really deep into this, you know, this nature of our reality, where there's a lot that's broken and then there's a lot of beauty, you know, it's like this polarity of the world that we live in. It's the nature of all, right? There's always going to be these, those polar opposites. But for some people, especially the last two years, it's hard, right? It's hard to even justify being alive. But I'm curious, you know, psychedelics are not, have you been taken to this state of like the ultimate doom of like, what's the point of it all? Oh yeah. So burrs, psychedelics. Oh yeah, no, I had a very hellish Iboga experience. Whoa. In fact, more than one hellish Iboga experience. But this particular hell was God's cosmic eternal loneliness where, like, the hell of being alone in eternity. And basically God goes crazy and invents all of this to temporarily, even if it's for eons, even if it's for billions of lifetimes, to temporarily lose God's self in this delusion of separation and this play. But even all of this is just as nothing in eternity. And it's inescapable. And like that's, I was in that state. So the funny thing is, after that, oh, and then it was followed by the worst nausea. And like, people call it purging, but it didn't even feel like purging. It felt just like hell, you know, that was just, you know, 12 hours long, unremitting. And then the weird thing is though, after that experience, I felt good. Like, I felt like even that state of being was something that had to be felt and experienced so that it wasn't lurking in the background all of the time. So it was like the very core of meaninglessness, like meaninglessness taken to its utmost cosmic dimension. That is actually inherent in the dominant worldview today. We might call it the Newtonian worldview, which despite 100 years of quantum mechanics still rules our thought forms.