Calm Is Power: The Secret Science Founders Don’t Know

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Vladislav Andreev

In this conversation, you’ll discover:

• Why founders and high-performers fail when they chase constant action.
• How stillness can become your competitive advantage.
• The science behind rewiring your nervous system to boost clarity, resilience, and decision-making.
• Practical strategies to align biology and behavior so your leadership is not just effective — but alive.
• Why calm isn’t passive — it’s a currency of power in the modern world.

Static. Breath. Pulse.

In the noise of the modern mind,

founders chase velocity —

but Vladislav Andreev teaches stillness as strategy.

He rebuilds leaders from the inside out —

rewiring sleep, light, movement, and meaning

until biology and behavior move as one.

From UC Berkeley to the frontlines of human potential,

he decodes the nervous system —

our original operating system —

and shows how calm becomes power,

clarity becomes currency,

and leadership becomes alive.

This is TrueLife.

http://entheogen.expert/

http://osapiens.expert/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreevvv

One on One Video call W/George
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Support the show:
https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US

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Creators and Guests

Host

George Monty

My name is George Monty. I am the Owner of TrueLife (Podcast/media/ Channel) I’ve spent the last three in years building from the ground up an independent social media brandy that includes communications, content creation, community engagement, online classes in NLP, Graphic Design, Video Editing, and Content creation. I feel so blessed to have reached the following milestones, over 81K hours of watch time, 5 million views, 8K subscribers, & over 60K downloads on the podcast!

What is TrueLife?

TrueLife is a story-driven documentary podcast that explores the invisible threads connecting us to each other, the world, and the mysteries of life. Every episode uncovers extraordinary journeys, human transformation, and the relationships that shape our stories.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's Wednesday. Welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. In the noise of the modern mind, founders chase velocity. But Vladislav Andreev teaches stillness as strategy. He rebuilds leaders from the inside out, rewiring sleep, light, movement, and meaning until biology and behavior move as one. From UC Berkeley to the front lines of human potential, he decodes the nervous system, our original operating system, and shows how calm becomes power, clarity becomes currency, and leadership becomes alive. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Vlad. Vlad, how's it going, my friend? George, I'm excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for this conversation. It's always a pleasure to have a chat with an old friend, man. And yeah, thanks for the introduction. I couldn't have said it better. Yeah, man, I'm stoked to be here. We were just saying it's been like a year since the last time we got on here and chopped it up. Yeah, my entire life changed since then. I mean, I went through some transformational periods, man. It's like a lot, a lot of things changed. Time flies, though. yeah what kind of changes man like what what's happened in the last year oh so let me try to recap um so last time we spoke i was living in lithuania and since then lithuania imposed new limitations for the russian passport holder and i was born in russia so you know hence the limitations uh so i had to make a choice to you know relocate to a new place and back in the day me and my wife said and considered like what are the options available for us so we looked at the map of europe and then decided on some and then agreed to move to spain because of many reasons One is there's a lot of sun and, you know, it's really important for healthspan and lifespan. And I'll talk about that later. Food is great, you know, fruits, veggies. And third is the drug policy. So in Spain, yeah, even though it's not like complete decriminalization as it is in Portugal, which is a neighboring country, but still here, yeah, I mean, police doesn't really chase you for consumption or anything like that. Yeah. The psychedelic community in Spain is quite big. There's a lot of psychedelic research happening in universities of Spain, not only in Barcelona. So anyway, we picked that location and then decided to pack our bags. But then during that period, we decided to part our ways. So I went through a divorce after a seven-and-a-half-year relationship. And then, you know, all that built a lot of tension, a lot of stress for me. So I went to Thailand for a month and a half, and then I went to Spain. And then my old autoimmune disease, which was still with me for, like, nineteen years, and nineteen years ago it manifested and almost paralyzed me, I couldn't walk. but then it re-emerged and you know um just said you know you need to recover I'm like okay so what do I do and you know usual direction would be to go to a doctor get pills and you know just consume immunosuppressants but I decided no no no no no since I haven't been taking any pharmaceutical drugs for a year and a half I'm not gonna go that route again So I built my own recovery plan and well, I'm now in remission, no pharmaceuticals at all. So that's one. The second thing, which is really huge, is that during that period of time over the last year that we haven't spoken, I built a product that is designed to help people build a bulletproof system for their mental health. The beauty of the product is that it's science-based, evidence-based. It has latest World Health Organization's mental health guidelines. And it's purely behavioral. I call it the knowledge that you need on Monday once you have that revelational transformational journey over the weekend when you decided to have to live a healthier life, but you don't have the tools. So now I'm working on that product, which is called Ossapiens. Be delighted to go into that. So, yeah, a lot of changes. Now I'm in Barcelona and my plan is to build my life. already enjoying it yeah that is a lot of changes man it seems like everyone right now is going through this incredible transformation maybe it's society maybe it's the world maybe it's just us but i mean you're not alone in these huge changes man i'm excited to get into What you got working on, I'm working on over there, like those sapiens. You know what? I recently came across this paper that you had sent to me and that you had posted on a bunch of different forums about what's the real cause of depression and other mental health problems, man. I thought we could start there and get into that, man. What do you think? Absolutely. I would love to. And I wanted to talk about it, actually, even though I don't possess any degrees behind my back about it. clinical background or anything like that. But when I published that paper, I received a lot of good, positive feedback from doctors all over the world. And basically, the idea behind that paper, it's currently self-published, but I plan to collaborate with other researchers and publish it in a journal at one point in time. But the idea there is that the issue behind the vast majority of um of issues with mental health and physical health for that matter is inflammation and inflammation on itself is not the cause per se because while Inflammation is a reason of an underlying process. And then once you start to look deeper and in a more holistic way around biology of human species, of homo sapiens, we then realize that there are so many different aspects that create that type of inflammation that then leads to various issues with mental health. So I noticed that there's an emerging evidence that shows up that is clearly supporting that line of thinking. And when I had that epiphany roughly in March this year, I thought, oh, wow, that's a brilliant idea. I mean, seriously, I should check it. Then I thought, you know, that was the one who came up with it, but apparently I wasn't the only one who came up with it. So there are other publications that pretty much indicate the same idea. Although in my thinking, I tried to make it a more integrative approach and build a system around it so that it explains more nuances and details. So if I take a step back and talk about inflammation as a consequence, I then need to talk about the reasons. The reasons are mainly quite basic in terms of biology, and they are all connected with this disruption of our innate evolutionary mechanisms, neural circuits, and basic behavioral aspects that have been with us for millions of years. And over the past hundred and fifty years, in some cases thirty, fifty, or a decade, a lot of things changed. visual lightning, like mass-produced food, like technology, social media, et cetera, et cetera. And all that in a compound way disrupted the way we live, the way we interact with each other, the way we basically just live our life on a daily basis. So the system... that I started to build that helps people regain their mental health is around that biology. But then once you start to dig and understand that sleep is disrupted and it leads to inflammation, it leads to issues with mental health because of artificial light, because of blue light in the evening, scrolling news, social media that doesn't let our brain to produce melatonin and then relax properly. Then nutrition is messed up completely. I mean, the vast majority of people are eating ultra-processed food, which is, well, linked to mental health issues, physical health issues, cancer, and other variations of issues that you may experience. Then a lack of movement. We're sitting at home. We're not doing much. It's office work, work from home, et cetera. We're not exercising. We need sleep. hundred fifty minutes of cardio to strength trainings per week etc and then we're not dealing with stress properly stress is a major factor that is causing inflammation and previous ones as well but you know there are more other layers that leads to inflammation but there are those are biological aspects right and then there's psychological aspect like trauma like adverse events in childhood like some really severe I don't know events in life that led to this suffering that also causes inflammation and then it becomes a vicious cycle pretty much it causes inflammation inflammation leads to issues with mental health and then you know it's just connected to each other it's just spiraling but then once you started to rebuild your biology and get rid of reasons for inflammation once Fix your sleep, eat properly, you know, good food, not ultra-processed type of. You move regularly and then a lot of cardio. You manage your stress. You connect with others. You regulate circadian rhythms. You understand why are you doing this for. You gather agency around your choices. You rest properly and then you're curious enough. And then your biology becomes your supporting system. So this is the biological aspect and the psychological. And then, of course, there's psychedelic aspect that can help you. But that's a slightly separate topic. I'm not sure if I'm expressing clearly a native language or Russian as well. it's perfect man it's perfect and i agree so much it seems that there's so many contributing factors to living a life of stress and inflammation and those two things definitely seem connected from from where i sit in my lens of experience and i i guess i'm curious to to see or to ask you Is it possible to – like in the world we live in, there's so many stressors, like financial stressors. There's all these sort of ideas about expectations in life or surrounded by the social media that has just this lens that's so odd to look through. Is it possible? What are some strategies that you can do to sort of – Get out of the system. You know what I mean by that? Like, it seems like there's so many external stressors out there that are causing you to live a life of inflammation and stress. We've talked about sleep. We've talked about eating right. But it seems like it's pretty hard for people to do that. Like, what are some tricks that people can use in order to start getting into the right frame of living? Right. That's a great question. I actually reframe it a bit, if I may. Yeah. Would initially steer people towards implementing any change in life? Right. And to me, this is even more fundamental question because, you know, I mean, people usually know what they need to be doing, right? Yeah. better, sleep better, you know, move more, but they don't do it, right? Yeah, right. Why don't they do it? Yeah, exactly. There's no point, right? So the existing status quo is not that difficult enough, or maybe there's no future scenario that's inspiring enough. There's nothing that is motivating enough to start implementing change. But I dig into this aspect at some point in time, and I try to search for answers, and the The answers were actually quite interesting. Typically, whenever people decide to implement positive change when it comes to their life, it's happening in some key moments, such as they get diagnosed, you know, like diabetes or whatever. And then they're like, oh, okay, I guess I need to stop eating that sugary stuff that I've been eating every single day, you know, or maybe they won't do They just keep on with their life. Second is when a friend, a family member, somebody, again, gets diagnosed. And then because it's their close circle, they're like, oh, okay, maybe I need to do something about my life. The third element would be probably something like near-death type of experience. Oh, you know, I survived a car crash or maybe I nearly drowned. And then, oh, you know, I start to value life and I want to live longer. The other element here is that Well, age. People get to a certain age and body starts to feel different. They're like, I don't remember having this ache in the back. Or maybe I used to wake up full of energy and now it's no longer the case. Or some other aspects that lead to them starting to think. So I'd say it all starts with an internal inquiry. Like, oh, okay, maybe it's time to change. But then... The next step is the hardest, right? So where do I begin? Where do I start? Well, the answer here would be start with sleep. Because if you want to change anything in your life in terms of health, whether it's mental health or physical health, by far, sleep is the most important aspect. The rest is just not that important. People can live longer without food than without sleep. So, you know, if you go to the doctor and doctor doesn't ask how's your sleep, I suggest you change the doctor because it is indeed fundamental. But going back to your question, like, how do you do that? So the change process takes time, right? There are many mistakes people make on that journey, but there are typical ones, right? So the first mistake would be to change it all in one go. It's just not going to happen. It's like trying to climb Everest. I mean, you're not doing it in one go. There are base camps that are built specifically for that purpose so that you get to the first one, you establish it, you know. yourself, you get adjusted to the altitude, et cetera, then you move to the next one. It's the same. It's a step-by-step process. So when people try to, you know, start a new life on Monday or on January first, yeah, it's doomed for failure. It's just not going to happen and people are just going to fall apart and crumble and, oh, you know, it's not going to work for me. I'm not that person, et cetera. So the second most common mistake would be to expect progress too early. Yes, you know, any change requires time and then you cannot just, you know, become a healthier person, get rid of your habits or build new ones. It takes time. But then the other element that is absolutely critical and fundamental here for any change to stick or lost is the attitude. I don't know, the mental framing, the self-perception, the identity of, you know, Old person, old me who was, you know, living my life, you know, getting used to the discomfort of whatever is happening versus new me, a person who is, I don't know, leading a healthier lifestyle, a person who wants to see their grandchildren go to, I don't know, prom, whatever. You know, once you start cultivating the identity, the rest is just basically details. How do you... If inflammation is the problem, like, how do you measure it? You know, I know that so many of my friends in the science-backed community, like, they want to see something that they can measure. And inflammation seems like a quiet killer. You know, obviously, you could see it when you start living a better life. That could be anecdotal. Like, listen, I feel like I'm crushing. I'm up earlier. I'm working out more. I got my microdosing program. Like, I'm in this relationship now. There's all these things that you could sort of measure on the outside. But is there a way to measure inflammation on the inside? Yeah, great question. So there are certain biomarkers that give you a clear indication, a quite objective one. So the most common one is called CRP, C-reactive protein, which is, yeah, it's quite basic. And it's typically tested in the vast majority of cases, regardless of the type of issue that you have with your health. But not in many cases, it is seen as, you know, a source. They say, oh, you know, you have high inflammation markers. Oh, It means something going on in your body. And just one important thing here. Inflammation on itself is not bad. It is good. And when it comes to repairing tissue, when we got a cut, I got a cut here. I was cutting tomatoes with nice and sharp knives. And inflammation is nice so that I can get that fixed by my body. But then if it's low-grade systemic inflammation, that means it's no good on all levels. so crp the second would be interleukin six il six and the third one would be tnf alpha tumor necrosis factor alpha so those give you an indication that there is something happening in the body but then you need to understand what exactly because the inflammation markers on themselves they don't give you clear picture of the exact reason behind the problem they give you a signal that you know something is going on your body is fighting and in people who have autoimmune disease that could mean that you know that immunity is fighting yourself and this is a problem as well because it's like permanent inflammation in some cases not at all But then once you see that those factors, biomarkers are quite high, you then start to dig. You dig until you find the reason, because there is a reason. They don't just go up. It doesn't happen like this. And speaking of the topic of microdosing, by the way, there is plenty of research that clearly indicates that entheogens are anti-inflammatory, which is beautiful, especially with psilocybin. It's... It's really, well, I don't know if I can say it out loud, but for me, for instance, it's my case, and it's NF-LON, but there's research, of course, that you can check. But for me, it works better than non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs because those are prescribed whenever you have the pain, whenever you have some. chronic pain or whatever. And with my illness, which is ankylosing spondylitis, I had episodes when I had this pain for quite constant, like long period of times. i remember waking up in the morning doing all my stretch routines as i do every morning then before going into meditation taking a microdose and while i meditate i realized that pain just dissipates i was like what and then i started to dig and understood that yeah indeed the infusions are anti-inflammatory which is amazing yeah that blows my mind to think about I feel like so many in the community, especially in the entheogen and psychedelic community, we're really focused on the neuroplasticity and the changes happening inside the brain. But a lot's going on inside the body, too, that we don't really talk about, like the gut-brain connection and the inflammatory response. What are your thoughts? What are some other things in there that we might be mislooking or not seeing? Yeah, well, once you start to... understand a bigger picture um you start to realize that it's um it's not that straightforward there is no like uh silver bullets single solution you cannot just you know do that and that's it i mean you take entheogen and that's it i mean no it's not not a magic deal absolutely so when you start to treat the body as um whole structure without this strange division between the mind and body that was imposed at some point in the past. And then you approach to it in a holistic manner. You then realize that it's basically like a walking nervous system in a sense, right? So you got aspects that are affecting your judgment, the way you feel, you know, how you behave, whether or not you're full of energy or, you know, you're surviving or full of anxiety, whatever. And then you have traumatic events that also are stored in the nervous system and in the body. So it's not like you identify one reason and that's it. You need to fix the whole system. And the problem with modern approaches... exist in the world and the medical system as it is, is that they try to give you pills for symptoms rather than the cause without understanding that the lifestyle interventions need to be made in order for a person to, well, truly thrive rather than survive. Because again, sleep is critical. Food is critical. Ninety percent of serotonin is produced in the gut. So depending on what you eat, you either support your brain and immunity or nervous system, or you suppress it and destroy it by indulging in alcohol. You're destroying microbiome by consuming ultra-processed food or sugary food. You are destroying microbiome. And the funny thing about microbiome is that if you take the number of cells of human body and you equate it to one, the amount of cells of microbiome that sits within us and on top of us, on our skin, et cetera, would be one point three. So the proportion of cells between human body and microbiome is one to one point three. So technically speaking, we're just, you know, vessels for the microbiome in a sense. And then when we take antibiotics, we destroy it all. And yeah, this is where it becomes really tough to rebuild. It's so interesting to get to, first off, I love the systemic approach to mental health that you're taking. This idea that we can find the trauma in the body, like whether it's inflammation or whether it's a different part of our body that's acting up, that's causing us to be mentally, you know, ill in some way. Like I love the systemic approach. This is a little bit deeper question, but do you think that the way we treat ourselves in our own body is the way we treat other people? You know what I mean by that? Like the relationship we have to ourselves, is that sort of mirror our other relationships in life? Well, that's a deep question, man. I'd say yes in a nutshell, but then again, you know, you want to go deeper on that, right? So for sure, for sure. I mean, if we're talking about treating ourselves, I'd say... vast majority of people i don't know roughly maybe eighty five to ninety percent they don't even take care of themselves and i'm working with interpreters you know high performing individuals and those are people that are you know doing a lot of work and then what they're doing they're sacrificing their own biology relationships etc and then of course it leads to all sorts of issues yeah then once you start to take care of yourself once you well become more self-loving and supporting and maybe even embracing your own vulnerabilities rather than fight them. Embrace all your shadow, all your parts, all the trauma that sits in there. And once you harmonize your internal world and you harmonize it with biology as well, then The external world is not a threat. It's more of a loving universe, so to speak. But then again, if you have a lot of issues, if you have a lot of stress, if you have a lot of trauma, your body feels more reactive. You're more aggressive even at times. You're not in line with just general common sense at times because you... react because of all patterns but then again once you're more whole and healed you recognize that yes there are patterns that are manifesting and this or that conversation on the core interaction but I will not go there I will not react out of you know pain out of suffering out of whatever there is so Yeah, going back to your question, I'd say it all starts with the way how we treat ourselves. We don't take care of our body, of our own biology. How can we even take care of the entire world or even be a better human for that matter? Yeah, it's interesting. Like I bring it up because for me, sometimes the people I love the most stress me out the most. You know what I mean? Like you want to take care of the people you love and, you know, the relationships that we find ourselves and that are very meaningful to us can also be not only a great sense of joy, but also a great sense of stress. And when I see that in a relationship that I have with someone, sometimes I see it in myself like, oh, maybe this is me. You know, maybe this is me. Maybe it's me coming up with this. And then that makes me think of my body. It makes me think of the stressors in my body. And that probably creates some inflammation. And next thing you know, I'm like, I need to take some LSD. Interesting. It's interesting. Maybe you could tell me a real life story about how you have incorporated psychedelics in your life and you've seen the way in which it has changed inflammation or it has changed the struggle. How have you found your relationship with psychedelics to change your mental health? Right, yeah, that's probably like a couple of hours of speech. So even though I have long lasting relationships with entheogens for roughly twenty three years of my life, I quite early discovered their healing properties. But in a more conscious approach, I started to apply them only several years ago. mainly because of the stigma in the society that i was living in and said i was born in russia and russia you know even talking about this right now i'd be probably put in jail and for all the type of work that i do in terms of uh sharing the scientific knowledge with russian speaking audience well you know if i go home probably that's it you're never gonna see me here on that podcast but anyway so i left the country you know the worst thought is like killing people is just like against everything I stand for. So no, I cannot be part of the society. So, and then, you know, when I left the country, I was so stressful event, you know, relocating to a place, not knowing what's going to happen next, et cetera. So I, I drank, like I was drinking like a lot. Well, not like a lot, a lot, like not like from the very morning, you know, but then, you know, in the evening I could have like a couple of beers or, a bottle or another bottle of wine with my ex-wife and then at some point i realized that no it's it's like completely a self-destructive behavior i need to do something about it and then i started to i found the medicine and i started to microdose and then when i started to microdose and because i'm a coach i started to implement basically the approach to updating my software like my mental neural networks in a way that i rewired it to a like new me that is a healthier person that doesn't need alcohol at all so it's been well two years now yeah since i haven't had a single uh drop of alcohol it's not that i like oh you know i probably don't have any chips i've never been to twelve steps or whatever i just did it by myself and you know i only now i recognize that it's been two years now or three shit anyway two is enough anyway and then um But then with the pain also, because, well, I have chronic pains, microdosing helps me to deal with pain better than any non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs. But then I also go from time to time to have a macro experience in a safe environment, you know, with a sitter so that I don't do it myself. And recently I had really two symptoms. nice profound deep ceremonies uh basically nearby downtown uh yeah there's a wonderful place where you can just you know go for a journey within a day you know ten or eleven pm you walk out of the place and you're in downtown barcelona you're like yeah wow anyway so um the first journey uh was really deep in terms of helping me understand a bit more about the traumatic events that were stored in my body. And the second journey was like physiologically releasing in a sense. So I felt as if the pain, the trauma that's been with me for many, many, many years was just releasing that pressure that's been sitting there. And when they talk about trauma, the level of understanding is probably something around, you know, whenever you get out of the house being a child, there is like a chance, fifty-fifty, that you can either get bullied or, you know, beaten, whatever, depending on your looks. around eleven years or so there was a nice ice cream joint nearby that was basically blown to pieces in the turf war so you know that that's not safe environment to be living in so i recognized that that was stored along with some other issues and sitting in my body and not letting me go and i realized that you know i've been surviving throughout my life like you know i got to the age of thirty nine years and i was like yeah how did it happen make it this far? I was just lying there with eight grams of mushrooms in my system. I was like, how did I make it this far? And that realization on itself helped me to, of course, calm down and understand that I'm finally landing. It's finally safe. I'm starting a new community. I'm connecting with people. I don't need all those protective things that I've been carrying around. And I felt as if I was just shedding some armor from, you know, my right part. And it felt so liberating. It was just like purifying on many levels. But then again, the most important thing about the type of experience is that you don't just go through it and that's it, you're healed. No, no, no. I took that material and brought to therapy, of course, where then I worked with trauma and then you know processed it so that i can then integrate it all on a daily basis and get rid of it because that's the thing about entheogenic experience people miss out many times is that they go on those retreats they have revelations and then they come on monday to their work life or whatever and you know it's good old whatever circumstances that basically just take them back to what they were before and they don't change at all so yeah that was a lot of transformation recently and i also had really interesting journey with ayahuasca in april where it was a beginning of my transformational period that lasted for several months during summer it's it was when uh we invite XY decided to part our ways and then it was a deep a submergence into like The layers of psyche that I haven't been in contact with, I was able to connect with some elements of my identity, unearth it. I have this interesting metaphor that that type of experience on itself is like going deep into the Marian Trench. And the Marian Trench is the deepest part in the ocean. It's like kilometers deep or something like that, like Everest backwards, right? And then when you go there, it's so scary. It's so painful at times, you know? But the beauty of it is that I found that the entheogenic experience on itself, well, it is healing, of course. But the healing aspect of it is that when you, first of all, surrender to the pain, you don't fight it. You just embrace it. And then you go into it. You don't try to put any walls. You get to experience pain. And then you just, okay. Let's do it, you know, come on, show me, teach me, guide me. What do I need to heal? Like, well, let's, you know, experience all the pain there is so that, you know, there's no longer anything stored or suppressed. Just that on itself is healing because pain, as I learned over the course of the past months, is like frequency. It's like a language of our body. Our body communicates with our consciousness. in pain. And pain is a signal that we usually tend to ignore or dumb or numb with, you know, like alcohol, tobacco or Netflix or, you know, self-destructive behavior just to, you know, get distracted or pills, pharmaceutical pills to numb the pain. And our body keeps on telling us, you know, there's something wrong. And we're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Everything's all right. All fine. No, I don't need that. And then, you know, it continues that way, and then it just gets to a point where you can no longer ignore it, and you get diagnosed with something really severe. But by that time, it's usually too late. So when pain manifests, instead of numbing, listen. Like, ask it. Like, okay, what are you doing here? Tell me. I mean, what am I missing, you know? And then in the entheogenic experience, usually you – can get to the bottom of the reason because well your body knows it all there's a lot of pain there's a lot of trauma there's a lot of dysregulation it's going to tell you you just need to listen and then well ideally take notes so that you can then bring it to the therapist or coach or you know whoever can help you support it man it's so true i kind of feel like It's all necessary, at least for me, like the first forty years, it was all learning. And there was a lot of pain. There was a lot of mistakes. A lot of shame and a lot of guilt. And I didn't even know how to face it. I didn't even know how to address it. And for me, it was psychedelics that allowed me to see it as like a third party. You know what I mean? When you talk about going into the Mariana Trench and just seeing all the strange creatures and the darkness and the pressure and the weight, like... it's hard to even go in that place unless you have an ally like psychedelics to go in there with man, for me, like, but, but the older I get Vlad, the more I realized like that's necessary. Like the, the, the, the holding everything back and then the breaking and then the realization, like that's all necessary, man. And what do you get the same vibe? Like all of whether it's seeing the turf war or it's going out as a young kid and not knowing what the hell is going to happen or living in a place that's unstable and then having different relationships in your mind, was that all necessary for you to be who you are today? Well, sure, if it didn't happen, I wouldn't have been myself sitting here right now with all that, you know, survival baggage behind my back. But yeah, of course, of course, it was necessary to a certain degree. I mean, I'm still alive and kicking and, you know, it's amazing. I mean, seriously, there's this beautiful phrase, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right? Yeah. But then, of course, it solely depends on how you look at things because some people, you know, face... circumstances and they just fall apart they crumble they're like oh no i can't handle this some people decide to you know end it all because pain is too much but yeah how i mean the life is so beautiful and even though you can and it will be hard at times it's just it's it's a miracle i mean wow yeah That pain is the teacher, in a sense. But then, of course, there are circumstances where it can be really tough. And this is where the nervous system regulation comes into place. Because, again, if you are stable in terms of basic behaviors, again, sleep, nutrition, movement, stress management, social connections, You can weather any type of storm. There's this interesting example that also happens that the Dutch, they build the dams so that they can withstand a storm that can happen once in a hundred thousand years. whereas in new orleans they didn't think of it that way right so you know when you invest in you know protocols and daily routines that support you you're building that dutch down that you know is going to hold you even if you know you get Your country starts a war and you need to relocate to a new place and then you need to relocate to a new place without understanding how you're going to live your life with all the sanctions in place and divorce at the same time and you need to remove the dog and things. You know, like, yeah, well, at least, you know, my sleep-nutrition movement supports me and I can handle it. And that's the beauty of, like, self-managing, you know, the tough periods of life, I guess. Yeah, I think so too. I feel like you have to go through all those in order to teach someone else what's right or what's wrong. That's the real education is going through it yourself, all the tough stuff and all the ups and all the downs. But eventually you find yourself on the other side with some tools to help other people that might be going through it. Sounds to me, maybe that's where some of this paper came from is you going through the tough times you figuring out about sleep and about the body keeps the score and about all these ways in which you've developed these tools what if you if you put on your forecasting glasses what does the future of mental health care look like for you well for me it's a major shift from this reliance on pharmaceuticals and the doctors that are considered as gods right and then if you Seriously, I mean, if you look at the US and the OxyContin, the opioid epidemic, what happened there is that you go to the doctor, the doctor gives you a prescription that is paid by the pharmaceutical company, and then you don't even question the doctor because he or she got a degree and you're like, oh, who am I to question the doctor, right? So that lack or even absence of agency whatsoever is, well, in my view, is the reason why people struggle with health because, well, they go to the doctor. They don't even go into details. For them, it's easier to prescribe your pills and off you go because, again, you've got like four in line and waiting for you. And so my thinking is that the shift that needs to happen is from that current model and i don't really know how to like explain it in a nutshell probably yeah relying on the existing medical framework or the pharmaceutical companies or the doctors that give that tell you what you need to be doing with your life towards a totally different approach which is preemptive like self-control of life and you know like controlling your own biomarkers going and doing the block work on like quarterly or at least, you know, six month basis, managing your level of, I don't know, glucose in the body, managing your sleep, et cetera. You don't need a professional to tell you what to do. You need to understand, you know, your own biology, your own peculiarities, whether or not you have like rare autoimmune disease that I have or don't have it but there is still some nuances to your biology basically and you need to take those into account so for me future is in the hands of people of each and every one of us because if we don't do that well we'll face another epidemic academy epidemic or some other epidemic right because again the more we rely on somebody to you know tell us what to do and the where is it going to take us? And I've come to learn that over the years, it's so strange that people rely on the power of a diploma so much that they think, oh, you know, the person is a clinical psychiatrist. Oh, you know, that person knows better. And then I have so many cases of people in the Russian speaking community that went to the therapist And they told them that they're consuming entheogens. And therapists were shaming them for this. And I was like, what? I mean, seriously, you're supposed to be a supporting person. I mean, come on. How can you? And then, of course, it's an example, right? And then there are doctors who are prescribing opioids here and there because they got paid by a pharmaceutical company. So the presence of a diploma behind someone's back doesn't guarantee shit, unfortunately. This is where people need to open their eyes because, you know, ah, that's a doctor. Oh, that's a specialist. They know better than me. No, your body knows better than they. I mean, seriously, your body been with you for your entire life. They've seen you, what, like, fifteen minutes? Yeah, there's something about the ultimate authority and who you give it to and what your future can look like or what your body can look like if you're willing to take your health into your own hands. Like there's clearly there's lots of people out there that really want the best for you in the medical field. But no one knows your body like you. No one knows the connection between your mental wellness and your body the way you as an individual do. And for me, that's where psychedelics come in. There's a lot of times in a deep psychedelic journey where you figure it out. Like, you know what? You know why I think I've been super stressed out lately? It's because I'm fucking unhappy with who I am. You know? I think that's why I have this pain in my knee all the time. That's why I have this pain in my ass all the time. It's because I am unhappy. What the hell am I unhappy about? You know, but it's that, it's that combination of understanding what's happening inside your body and understanding your thought patterns because those two things are directly linked and No doctor is going to know that no psychiatrist that has been given a book full of DSM labels is going to know that like no one knows it, but you and you're the ultimate, you're the ultimate doctor of yourself. Not saying that we don't need help from time to times, but. Yeah, the individual. I really like that. I like the idea of us in the future being more focused on our own health and taking that into our own hands, especially with new tools like all these biomarkers. You can go get these blood tests done and you can see where you're at and you can put it into maybe a chat GPT model and understand inflammation. What do you think? Yeah, well, I got something to say on that. Okay, let's hear it. First point is that there has to be common sense in everything, even what I'm saying here. It's not like I'm telling, oh, go abandon doctors. No. Right. but there has to be a balance right you just need to be quite critical about it but the second thing that actually helped me specifically to uh go into remission over the past few months is not only understanding of my biology and the protocols that i have the system that i build etc etc but the tools that i've created myself so what i did is that i created a custom-made chat gbt that i basically trained on my condition i trained on a nice set of knowledge about biology uh well physiology and then other aspects that are related specifically with my condition as well as you know all the blood tests and the blood work and other tests that i did and then what i've been doing with it is that i told it look i have this issue what do i need to be doing and then you know the recipe here was okay go with anti-inflammatory diet stick to intermittent fasting limit your ratio to you know two meals per day at certain points you know add these supplements etc so like okay i'm gonna do it so i went with it and i had really tough moments you know sometimes it was hard i just arrived in spain and i had to eat like two times a day very specific food nothing else like for for a duration of like one month just to uh lower the inflammation just to quiet it down and then i was passing by a person who was apparently without a home eating like a bread with jamon and i was like that was tough but anyway I followed that direction and every single day I was uploading photos of both the food that I've taken and well, photos of my stool as well, you know, so that they could analyze my digestion. But jokes aside, it was really insightful, man, because it can really nicely analyze photos and pictures. I mean, that technology out there is just amazing. then you couple that with the latest uh information that clearly indicates that about fifty or sixty percent of use cases of ai bots is around like self therapy i was like oh okay so i built myself a therapist ai therapist of course right and it doesn't mean that i just abandoned my regular therapist but you know it's nice to have support whenever you need did right so that you know i was walking in the evening i was feeling like really blue and i was like oh you know i'm not getting better it's been three weeks why it's not helping me and then i go to my ai therapist and again trained on really nice set of knowledge some books etc and then i speak with it and tells me no no you're doing good you're going through phase it's hard it's tough but you're in the right direction etc etc it's like okay, you know, and just continue doing what I was doing. And while it eventually worked, but again, going back to your comment and the AI tools, once you understand how to use them, they can be your ally. But then again, you need to remember that there are limitations and they elucidate, right? And then they can give you some made up shit. So you need to be able to understand what type of advice is plain harmful for you, or, you know, really good so with me i know how they work and i trained it on you know a very certain set of instructions and books etc so i know that and of course i know a lot about biology neurophysics etc so for me it made complete sense that was the way to indeed address inflammation and well it worked so yeah hail to you know wonderful tools that we have Yeah, I think it's just getting warmed up too. I think we're going to see all kinds of new technology come in that's going to be helpful for our mental health, for our relationship to ourselves. It's interesting. What role do you think isolation plays in the world of mental health or in inflammation or in that relationship? Yeah, great point. So isolation is, well, for me, it's the pillar number five in my system, which is social connections. And it is incredibly critical. It is one of the key factors of what's like early death in older citizens. And when we're living in just regular life isolation on itself is plain harmful for mental health and physical health no wonder in you know um what's the penetration of nutrition that's the what's the incarceration system right so when you go to jail the worst punishment is the isolation right so you put in the chamber you're by yourself and historically evolutionary speaking is the worst punishment ever you know primates to be isolated that means like certain death pretty much because you're on your own and that's it you're not going to survive but we are pretty much voluntarily heading towards self-isolation on many levels and I um I felt how hard it can be on my mental health when I used to live in Lithuania I I work from home because well my business is still in Russia it's uh so strategic marketing consultancy. I'm a managing partner. I operate remotely and hire people, fire people and grow. But anyways, I'm working from home. So because of, again, the trauma that sits in the society and the pain from the ex-Soviet times, the local people are not that friendly towards people who were born in Russia. I was born in Russia, so I guess I was the one experiencing that on the other receiving end, not, you know, being able to connect with locals, et cetera, et cetera. And then that lasted for quite some time. And then I felt that isolation on itself really was hard on me. But then when I realized that, I was like, shit, I need to do something about it, you know. So I reached out to a friend and I said, oh, first of all, I need to reboot. I need to go to a ceremony, to a retreat with Aya or something else. And then she said, oh, you know, I know a good place in Peru. I was like, yeah, OK, OK. So I spoke with the guy and we almost agreed. It was supposed to be like two week trip there, many ceremonies, etc. And then I speak with her again and say, you know, I have this thing. I feel like isolated. I crave human connection, like, a lot. And then she tells me, you know what? You better go to the island of Pangang. It's an island. I've been there before. It's next to Samui. And she says, you know, every single day there are many networking events, you know, all types of activities. People are, you know, all the time connecting with each other. I'm like, yeah, that's actually a better decision. Never regretted it and went for filing. But even now here in Barcelona, where they just landed and started to build my network, I see the difference. It's like completely changing the way I feel. How I can tell whether or not human connection is working positively for me or not is that by logging information. So I have at least two diaries. Those are apps. One is the sleep app that I use to log whatever information that happened throughout the day or the substances that they've consumed, etc., so that it then analyzes my sleep and shows, you know, these or that was either contributing positively or negatively to my sleep, etc., and the other app is called how we feel which is brilliant brilliant brilliant app it's free of charge and it's like an emotional diary that helps you understand on a very granular granular level the type of the feeling that you're experiencing in the moment so when i log consistently information that oh you know i was socializing i was with friends i was with my girlfriend we were very tactile, etc., etc. I noticed that indeed that is now improving my mood, improving my sleep. So the data clearly demonstrates that. But again, going back to the isolation on itself, we evolutionary have been living in tribes. In tribes, well, back in older days, you know, we've even been sleeping all together. I'm not saying that we should be sleeping all together all the time, no, no, no. Nothing like that, but we lose the tactility, like, you know, the COVID hit, that changed, it was a big game changer. And now wherever you go, people are on their smartphones. I mean, even couples or, you know, friends, you look at the cafes and restaurants, people are sitting in their smartphones where they could, I don't know, hug, sing, you know, dance, whatever. But good thing about Spain, though, is that the culture here is still highly social. So you can walk on the street and, you know, just see two random people bumping into each other and starting the conversation. Oh, wow. That's that's unusual, you know, or at the gym or at the grocery store. Like I was buying groceries and then some guy comes to me and says, oh, you know, you don't take that. Take that. It's less sugar. Oh, thanks, man. and then we have a conversation for another seven minutes about various types of products amazing ah love it so yeah social connections help us again balance our nervous system and then if we are dysregulated it can help us restore well our health or our emotional stability if we have a partner we can just sit hold our hands look into our eyes breathe together synchronize for i don't know just five breaths just wait there with no gadgets no notifications no nothing just be present in the moment That on itself is the medicine. Community is the medicine, especially in the context of entheogenic experiences where it can be really isolating in some places and countries where there's a lot of stigma, prohibition. You cannot even talk about it. So, yeah, social connections are highly, highly critical for our mental health and physical health. Yeah, it's really well said, man. The community is the medicine. That should be a bumper sticker. We should write that down. I like it. Yeah, for you, the community builder. Yeah, I love talking to people. I think there's so much medicine in conversation. There's so much medicine in connection. And the things that I see in other people are things I recognize in myself. And so I'm always grateful to get to hang out with people. And I feel like an eternal student getting to listen to people all day and ask them cool questions. What about let's say there's some people listening right now, Vlad, and they're like, man, what's this? Oh, sapiens. Like maybe you could tell people a little bit about what's going on at the site. I know you've got a couple of different sites over there, but what can people expect if they come and check these sites out? Sure, yeah, thanks for the question. So AuthSapiens is the model framework for resilient mental health, designed initially for high performers like myself, but then it is the knowledge that should probably be taught at schools, as one of the people that went through the course said. So basically what it is, it's a system that I built after listening to eight hundred hours of lectures science and latest scientific evidence reading books reading world health organization mental health guidelines that were issued in march and then i compiled a system that consists of the ten pillars of mental health and those are i think everyone through did i know sleep nutrition movement stress management social connections, right? Then it's light and dark, sense of agency, purpose, rest, and curiosity. So the brand is called Ossapiens for a particular reason. The O stands for that moment when it clicks, when you realize and recognize that, ah, it's the biology. It makes sense. And the sapiens is basically linked to our evolutionary, well... innate biology because we're all one species regardless of what people say you know regardless of all the xenophobia and racism we all came from africa so the biology is the same the foundation is the same there are slight differences but ninety nine point seven percent were same in terms of genetics epigenetics though differ significantly in some cases but nevertheless the mechanisms are there and that they govern whatever we're doing on a daily basis. So, what OSapiens is right now, it represents a micro-learning course that is structured around three programs, and actually there's going to be fourth and fifth issue soon, but the three programs are called Sapiens OS as an operating system, basically. Sapiens OS one-on-one, Sapiens OS Core, and Sapiens OS Deep. And they are dividing the ten pillars into basically three courses. Each course has twelve videos, five to seven minute each. And each video is filled with protocols, actionable tools. There is no like massive hours of theory. It's all condensed. It's all boiled down. It's distilled. And you have practical knowledge that you can implement today. So the first course covers the first three pillars. The second course covers the fourth to seventh and the third one, eighth, ninth. and tenth. So then there is another course, which is Sapiens OS Habits that I'm releasing right now. And it's basically knowledge that helps people build habits because people know that they need to be sleeping better. But how do you implement it? Right. You need to build habits. It takes time, but you need to know how to build it on a daily basis. So I'm releasing that. And the fifth one is designed for entrepreneurs and managers that are either going to burnout or creative people. or having issues with mental fog and unable to concentrate, rotting on caffeine and just surviving. So it's a group coaching format for six weeks that is designed to basically help people rebuild their biology in a safe coaching container where you can get personalized approach to your specific needs but at the very core of it sits the same foundation habits and the first four pillars which is sleep nutrition movement and stress management and those four actually five taking social connections they come in the order of importance so again sleep is by far the most important etc etc so any person can go to the website and you know go through the course there's a sample that you book and give it a try. If you feel like it's helping you, well, you can go and buy it and ingrain this information in your life. But generally speaking, the idea behind Osapiens is to provide people with specific actionable tools that can help extend healthspan and lifespan. And the gap between healthspan and lifespan on average in world, if you were taking like all the UN countries, It's roughly ten years, meaning the last ten years people get to survive with chronic conditions, illnesses, etc. It's not fun. So the idea here is to extend health span so that the later years of your life are full of mobility, know ability to connect with others enjoy life basically right and of course extend the lifespan on itself because people who get to live to hundred fifty years already born but yeah well it's up to you and up to our daily decisions of whether or not we're gonna be there oh and by the way the gap between lifespan and health span in the united states is fifteen years which is a lot yeah yeah i'm hopeful that in the future we'll see that gap sort of shorten up because i think that people are starting to make better decisions and i think if people tune into this podcast right i think go to sapiens they can check out vlad and uh try to close that gap themselves out there so let hang on briefly afterwards but to everybody within the sound of my voice i hope you're having a beautiful day go down to the show notes check out vlad check out oh sapiens check out some of these courses and that's all we got for today ladies and gentlemen aloha thank you very much Stay healthy.