The Meat Mafia Podcast

Alli Schaper is the founder of Super Mush, a company dedicated to promoting the benefits of functional mushrooms. She is a passionate advocate for mental health and functional mushrooms. Alli's story is one of self-discovery, healing, and a deep understanding of the interconnectedness between gut health, brain health, and overall well-being. Through her studies of psychedelics and involvement in the mental health community, Alli has emerged as a thought leader and advocate for the healing potential of functional mushrooms and psychedelics.

Key topics discussed include:
  • The relationship between gut health and brain health
  • The potential of psychedelics for human optimization and healing
  • The Western approach to grief and death, and how psychedelics can help process trauma
  • The history and stigma surrounding psychedelics and their role in human culture
  • The importance of understanding the context and history of our belief systems
  • The potential of microdosing and consumer products for subtle neuroplasticity and mental health
Timestamps:

(00:02) Personal Growth and Transformation Through Life
(05:15) Journey From Partying to Wellness
(10:54) Exploring Psychedelics and Grief
(22:57) Exploring Eastern Traditions and Western Detachment
(29:30) Psychedelics, Legalization, and Healing
(34:22) Exploring Benefits of Microdosing Psychedelics


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Creators & Guests

Host
Brett Ender 🥩⚡️
The food system is corrupt and trying to poison us... I will teach you how to fight back. Co-Host of @themeatmafiapod 🥩
Host
Harry Gray 🥩⚡️
Leading the Red Meat Renaissance 🥩 ⚡️| Co-Host of @themeatmafiapod

What is The Meat Mafia Podcast?

The Meat Mafia Podcast is hosted by @MeatMafiaBrett and @MeatMafiaHarry with the mission of addressing fundamental problems in our food and healthcare system. Our concerns with our healthcare system can be drawn back to issues in our food system as far back as soil health. Our principles are simple: eat real foods, buy locally, and cook your own meals.

When you listen to our podcast, you will hear stories and conversations from people working on the fringes of the food and healthcare system to address the major crises overshadowing modern society: how do we become healthy again?

themeatmafiapodcast.substack.com

Part 1 Script
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[00:00:00] We are live. Allie, welcome to Austin. Thanks for joining us.

I'm so happy to be here. It's gonna be great. This is the last stop in my Austin tour before I head to the airport. You literally bumped your flight for us, so we're very appreciative of that. I'm stoked. This is, this is meant to be. And so you, so you're in town for South by, so you've been here for eight days, but you used to live in Austin too, right?

I did. I went to grad school here. Okay. So it was kind of. I didn't really fully get the full Austin experience when I went to UT. UT and got my master's, so I was here for one year, but it was like my very internal beginning of my spiritual journey year. So it was very, um, I wasn't as social as I am now, but yes, I used to live in Austin and I love it here.

How is it coming back with a fresh perspective? Do you see like new things that you didn't see before in the city? You know, it's funny as I went, one of the weirdest. mind tricks you can play on yourself is when you haven't, if you haven't been somewhere in a while and you walk down that street and like re [00:01:00] walk the path you used to walk.

So I actually did this the other day because I had like an extra hour of time and I went and walked back through the same path that I used to walk to school, like around the capital and like do this path. And I was like, Oh my God. And you start, your mind starts reflecting. On what a different human you are and like the way that you see the world.

And I remember just like what type of thoughts were going through my head when I was in school here. And just like the completely different versions of myself that I've been. So it's really cool to come back and like touch base and that's when you really witness your own growth. Yeah. It's been, it's been beautiful, completely different human, um, than I was when I went to school here for sure.

Yeah. That's cool. Cause I bet you that gives you a moment in time to just reflect on what you were worrying about at that time and how insignificant some of those worries actually were into the person that you've grown in today. Like into today. It's like, why [00:02:00] was I worrying about those things as I was taking these steps however many years ago it was.

I was taking the CPA when I was in school here. So. Yeah, completely different, you know, and now most of my waking time is talking about mushrooms for a living. Mm. All mushrooms. You don't need a CPA for that? It's a completely, it's actually, you know, it's actually been very useful for, for varying degrees of things.

Yeah. But, yeah, it's been a, It's been a trip. It's one of my favorite things to do when I go back to, back home to New Jersey or New York City. Because when, before doing Meat Mafia, moving to Austin, I used to walk a ton. So I love going down to like the water in the financial district where I used to work, or like even certain paths in New Jersey.

And I'll walk back those paths and have the same reflections that you're having thinking. This was only like two, three years ago where I was living here, but I feel so different. I do remember those quality of thoughts that I used to have. And to Harry's point, it makes you realize that a lot of those problems were insignificant, but it also makes you proud of yourself because you realize how much you've [00:03:00] changed.

Literally, when you were here, you're studying for the CPA. Now you're the founder of Super Mush, this incredible CPG brand. You're doing so much for adaptogenic mushrooms. introduction into like psychedelics and plant medicine and all this great advocacy for the work you're doing there. So I feel like you've kind of, when we caught up at Sun Life a few days ago, when I first met you, my initial reaction was like, you've kind of lived like three or four lives and one at a very young age, which I'm sure you get a lot.

So I think it would be cool to give the listener a little bit of context and backstory into you from the consulting days, the accounting days, the modeling days, to now being this amazing founder of this brand. Yeah, I've tried on a lot of different versions for sure. Um, what feels most, most present is here.

I always, I always kind of tell my, my story, if you will, differently every time I, I think about it, but a lot of what has happened over the course of my life is I think I've tried on a lot of different things, like taking it all to the extremity and like seeing [00:04:00] what resonates from that area and like what my current version of life is, is like pulled on, um, The best parts of all of those and that's still a continued journey like when I was when I'm reflecting on that walk that feels like 15 people ago.

Yeah, you know in the six months ago version of me felt like two people ago because so much I Feel like I'm changing at such a rapid pace, which I love But like the chapter points of my story. So first of all, I'm from Missouri. I'm from the middle of the country and And I was talking about this yesterday, but it's like pretty comedic what I'm doing now.

Cause I grew up with the dare program. I grew up with like, just say no to drugs, pretty conservative, um, Christian upbringing. And my original path in life led me down, you know, I was a huge party or in high school, mostly based around alcohol. And when I went to college I Googled number one party [00:05:00] school in America.

with my sister. I'm a triplet, so there's three of, there's three of me. Um, so my sister and I wanted to go to school together. Our brother stayed back and went to school in Missouri, went to Florida State, and because of, you know, I was always a really good student, so I always, like, tested out of the classes that I needed to take, so I had, like, a lot of freedom in what I wanted to explore in college, and so I tried out a little bit of everything.

I wanted to be a sex therapist originally, So I got my, I started to get my degree in human sexuality, they took away that degree the year that I was there. So I was like, okay, I gotta pivot. I was gonna drop out of school, join the Peace Corps. I was like, next passion area. And then through a variety of different conversations and awakenings that I had, I realized that I wanted to do the hardest thing I could possibly do, um, school wise.

Make a lot of money and be able to like, You know, have resources so that I could apply them to the things that I really wanted to do in the world to make, you know, what in my mind at that [00:06:00] time was like a really big impact. And so I kind of did this hardcore pivot. I went from like being a, I was a bartender all, all in college.

Um, and this all kind of like loops back to what I'm doing now, but, um, bartending in college, like really into hosting parties. And I still do a lot of that now. So like, there's a through line for sure. Um, and then I did this pretty, like, hardcore pivot and went to UT. Went to UT Austin. Um, I stopped drinking.

I started to take my health really seriously. I started to like, you know, we were talking about at Sun Life the other day, kind of like the process of extracting myself from the Western medical system because I had been like in and out of it for gut problems I'd had since I was a baby. Since like before I can remember.

And I started to like really become my own citizen doctor and study the healthcare system and like start to unwind all of these paradigms that I had in my head around like outsourcing my healing in a lot of ways. And that was really here in Austin, which is [00:07:00] beautiful. Um, it was like also simultaneously this part that started my spiritual journey.

And so I did that. I got my master's in accounting and my CPA and then I went to work in corporate. Um, very passionate about the U. S. healthcare system and how fucked up it is and, um, wanted to play a part in creating like a more value based healthcare system. I very quickly realized that I wanted to work in wellness after like a bunch of crazy stories and I worked for Ernst Young for a while.

Amazing experience. And then like through that entire process, I started to become familiar with functional mushrooms and I felt like. They took my health from an 8 to an 11, so like it was the first time my body fully experienced flow states. Like the substances that I was taking were obviously not serving me, so I got off all my Western medications, started to discover functional mushrooms, and became obsessed with fungi from that perspective, and then simultaneously was [00:08:00] studying the psychedelic space when like early days when Tim Ferriss's of the world were like first starting to come out and talk about it and fund it.

Um, and then was fascinated with the fact that like functional mushrooms are fungi as our psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms and no one was really talking about them holistically at that time. And so became a student of that space, quit my corporate job, started modeling to fund my first startup. I had a wellness startup before this and started also like hosting a ton of events, just like really widening my aperture and like the way that I.

I thought about the world, building a really cool community in New York at the time. And yeah, I just like continued to follow down the path of obsession with functional mushrooms, met my co founder at a retreat, convinced him to start a company with me. And yeah, that kind of like led me to everything that I'm, that I'm doing now.

Was there a moment in time where you were going from this like heavy party stage to starting to have [00:09:00] these realizations about your health? of that really made you turn that corner and be like, I actually really need to start taking my health more seriously? Um, or was it kind of like a smooth progression to finding some of this?

I think what I started to realize is, and I This is not new information. If anyone's listening to this podcast, it's probably stuff you guys talk about all the time. But my like awakening moment was really like following the money around pharmaceutical medications and realizing that everything that were prescribed can often be directly related to profit margin.

So if you look at like all of the misdiagnosis I had and like look at where that prescription was coming from, it was like very directly related to Profit margins, like the pills I prescribed had the highest profit margin and were like the most commonly prescribed pills in the United States at the time.

And so I was like, Oh, this makes sense from that lens. Um, and I, and I stopped, I guess, outsourcing [00:10:00] my healing once I realized where the information was coming from. And a lot of what my current, I was just kind of like a pivot answer to your question, but like a lot of what my current obsession is. Um, that was very much informed by my earlier path in life is the substance journey.

And like, you know, the average American, like the path that we go down is so fascinating because so much of our lives can be informed by the substances that we take, not the entirety of it. But I was even having this thought yesterday because I accidentally, I ordered a, I ordered a decaf coffee and I was given a regular coffee.

Like, for someone that doesn't drink a lot of caffeine, if you drink, you know, 200 milligrams of caffeine, like, I felt like my heart was exploding out of my chest and I felt angry and I felt like so wired. Um, and caffeine has a time and place and like, I drink a little bit of it, but the point is I like just was reconnected to how imbalanced [00:11:00] most of our nervous systems are because we're like taking crazy stimulants and then crazy, um, you know, Substances to counteract the effects of those stimulants all the time.

Yeah. And so like the path that most people are put on, like mine included is, you know, you're, you are born and you're exposed to all of these microplastics and food, these toxins, um, sugars at a really young age, like all of these processed foods, then around like age four or five. Your parent may take you to the doctor because they're like, my kid can't focus because you're put into a school system where we're not, you know, using our creative brain and like not operating in any sort of flow state.

We're like really putting kids in. very operational, structural, you know, structured environments where we're not expressing our artistic, um, talents in any way. And so then, you know, you will start to be stacked on all of these medications and, and pills. And so much [00:12:00] of that path is like, there's, there's no education around it.

And so by the time, you know, people go to college, they're often like on four or five different medications, ADHD medications, SSRIs. Sleep aids, etc. And so I was lucky enough to come to Austin and like extract myself from that system because I had the time and space to like really look at my life in a different way because I had this like kind of gap year I guess of grad school so it's like such a blessing year in my life.

Um, a lot of people are just thrust into the corporate America system and then you get to the work to get to Friday mentality, um, alcohol, caffeine, other stimulants may be involved. And so your brain and body is just completely out of balance. And so one of the things that I'm the most passionate about is like I extracted myself from that system and was like, I'm high on life.

This is incredible. I will never engage with any substances ever again. And then started studying the psychedelic space and then realized that there is this whole smorgasbord of things to alter your consciousness with. They can make you a better person, happier, healthier, more conscious, [00:13:00] alter your brain in a different way, like get you into your heart, less into your head.

All the substance that I was taking was getting me, they were going the opposite direction. Right. Productivity, obsession, into my head, um, and so that's kind of what developed my passion for that space. I studied it for a while and then started to explore other things that I can alter. My consciousness with hmm.

Yeah, there's such a clear connection between gut health and brain health and it seems like there was a very awesome progression for you where it's like When you finally start to take your health seriously and kind of clear out some of these chronic gut health Issues that you had for your entire life which is similar to what I had too.

There's like this clarity of thought that comes from that and you start to explore what else is out there. How else can I improve myself? Where you're interested, you're very interesting because when you were telling me your story at Sun Life, there wasn't necessarily this need to take psychedelics where there wasn't, it seemed like there wasn't anything traumatic at the time that happened to you.

You just kind of wanted this like deeper exploration. It was like, is there a deeper version of Ali that I can maybe take myself to? And I think a lot [00:14:00] about, you know, Tim Ferriss's impact in the psychedelic community and Aubrey Marcus because it was really like 2016 to 2018 they were putting out a lot of really like Educated work and research on that topic and I think they really legitimize the space especially someone like Tim who's experiments on everything He's so diligent.

He's so smart as soon as he started talking about The positive connection between his impression, his depression and the way he was able to effectively like mediate some of those things through psychedelics. Like, I think there were so many people that started to really be like, Alright, there's probably something here that I should go deeper on.

It sounds like you were a byproduct of that too. Yes, and there's so much nuance to this conversation. What is being legalized across the country right now is psychedelic assisted therapy for, like, very issue specific. Things like most of the trials are on PTSD, depression, anxiety, eating disorders. Like there's hundreds of trials going on and That's all amazing.

And then you have like this whole other group of people that are using psychedelics for [00:15:00] human optimization so to speak and so like the way that I like to think about it is You know, if you're using psychedelics or like really deep healing It's kind of bringing you from a zero to a five like can't get out of bed in the morning Or not really like functioning in society to like healthy normal state You And then there is a side of using psychedelics for human optimization, healing.

So kind of like taking you from healthy normal and exploring like deeper, deeper parts of yourself. And there's always like an overlap. There's always healing involved, whether it's um, whether you're microdosing or not. Like there's this Venn diagram, there's like stuff that always lives in the middle.

But my interest in it originally peaked from the human optimization side of things. And then like I discovered so many deeper layers of, Like things I guess that needed to be healed within me, but it wasn't birthed from a place of of trauma like to your point and then where it's kind of taken me and where I've landed and we kind of chatted about this a little bit, but All of [00:16:00] my work with psychedelics was so important in the process of understanding death and grief in a totally different way and like preparing for that process in my life.

My dad passed away a little over a year ago and And Um, one of the most impactful things was all of the work that I've done with psychedelics to like kind of prepare me to experience grief in a different way. And it's like this whole, there's a lot of context to that situation, which we can dive into.

But I realized that a lot of what I saw around me, um, what you can, you know, what you can call it trauma, you can call it, um, nervous system dysregulation, whatever it is, is like a product of not being able to process grief well. And so because, you know, I had that experience after psychedelics, I had such a juxtaposition of, oh my gosh, you know, um, psychedelics give you this more natural understanding of grief, death, you know, um, and so that was also such an important process [00:17:00] of, you know, Like, preparing my nervous system to go through that.

Yes. That was something that I was fascinated by the way that you were explaining how, just some of the things that you noticed with the Western grieving process, where it's kind of like, have the service really quickly, go to that service, and then it's like, alright, this event is kind of done, and then you kind of like shutter up those emotions.

and people grieve so differently. Like, I know someone whose dad passed away two years ago, and it's hitting him now because he was like the older brother. So he was being really protective to his younger siblings, making sure they were good. Didn't really worry about himself. And now like two years later, he's getting hit with all those emotions of grief right now.

And it sounded like for you when your dad did pass that there was like a very particular way you wanted to like celebrate his life and make sure you were there for him. So if you'd be comfortable sharing that, I think that could be super helpful for other people that are experienced that heavy, heavy loss of a parent or a sibling or something like that.

Yeah. It's been, it's been a beautiful journey. And I also found out in like a really interesting way. Actually, I [00:18:00] wrote something about this. I'll, I'll send it to you after the show. Like it kind of, um, it took me a year to feel comfortable sharing it cause it still was like, it was so, so fresh. But, um, I found out my, I found out my dad passed away on the way to, I was in Costa Rica at this juice cleanser treat.

So I also hadn't eaten food in seven days, which is like an interesting element of the story. Cause we're talking a lot about like gut health and how connected it is to our brain. So like my gut was super clear and therefore my brain was super clear in a different way, but I was on the way to, um, the Liberia airport from Costa Rica to fly back to Los Angeles.

I found out that my dad passed Stop breathing on the way to the airport. I was on the phone with my friend and got a message and it was like completely out of nowhere. And so there's like a lot of details that happened in between now. And then basically like, as I was taking off on the runway, I got on a plane to go to Georgia and I was taking off on the runway.

My mom called me back and told me that my dad didn't, didn't make it. He stopped breathing. And I [00:19:00] literally lost service was in the sky for five and a half hours by myself. Um, And the reason why I'm sharing that, and the reason why it's an important part of the story, is like, I was able to completely make my own interpretation of death without all this outside input from a very, like, kind of Western processing.

Usually when that happens, you're like, on the phone with everyone. You're getting all this input into your own, into your own, you're not able to separate and make your own interpretation of it. So I was given this gift in a lot of ways. Um, and I also had Academy in Los Angeles with me, which I'm legally prescribed to.

And it's like a very low dose ketamine lozenge and it's super, ketamine is very, um, very, very, uh, like in the NPR world right now is very like stigmatized and misunderstood. And there's like a lot of truth to the reality of ketamine addiction and all of these things. It's also been an amazing, really impactful part [00:20:00] of my mental health and hundreds of people that I know.

So all of them are true. I wrote, I wrote about this in my story. I almost even like left it out cause I was like, Oh, I don't want to like, I don't want to like include this and or have it be misinterpreted. But I was like, this is a super important part of the story. If I were to take a Xanax on the plane, no one have questioned it anyways.

So I had that with me and I was able to kind of like dissociate from the panic attack that I was having. My body was having like a full panic attack cause I was in so much shock that this had happened and had an amazing, really beautiful life changing experience. Being able to process my dad's death in this, like, steel tube in the sky surrounded by strangers by myself.

Um, and so by the time I had landed, a lot of the lessons had kind of, like, integrated in a weird way and enabled me to, like, go and experience, like, the process of, um, grieving him in, in a completely different way than I otherwise would have. And a lot of my experience was also informed by all the previous [00:21:00] work.

That I had done with psychedelics, which just gave me a different vantage point and made me really aware of like how, when we process death in the West, like we literally, you know, we take bodies, we freeze them, we put them in boxes and then we bury them and then we, you know, we have a few ceremonial funerals wakes, but there's not, at least in my world, there wasn't a lot of like really deep connected.

understanding of what death meant. It kind of just happened and then we moved on from it. It was, it was, just didn't feel integrated. And so, um, yeah, psychedelics have been a huge part of that process. And mushrooms, my understanding of mushrooms and like how they operate are also so informant of the way that I see death.

Because mushrooms literally, like, they eat, they eat death. Fungi literally decompose dead materials and return it. to the earth. And so in the West, we interrupt that process by the way that we [00:22:00] even treat, you know, deceased humans. And so it's just, it was just such an interesting full circle and like coming together of a lot of these lessons.

I don't remember what your original question was. I think it was just like, no, I, you're, you're answering it right now. Just the things that you were very mindful of during that experience with your dad to make sure that you, that you and your family, like we're grieving the right way and really honoring his life in a way that's very different to the traditional Western process of grief.

Yeah. And a lot of what I think is really interesting about this that I've been reflecting on is just, you know, in Eastern cultures are so many beautiful examples, like whether it's India, Tibet. Yeah. Indonesia, like they're the grief and mourning process is so, um, elaborate and so beautiful. And in Western world, everything, one of my teachers said this to me and I loved is everything in the West is designed to make us forget that we're going to die.

And you can see that [00:23:00] from, you know, obsession with longevity to. You know, I was walking down the street in New York a few months ago and I saw this thing that said, erase your smile lines. And I was like, Oh, that's so funny that we're, we're literally conditioning people to erase history of emotions from their faces and conditioning, especially women, like as with aesthetic and beauty to forget that they're going to die.

And we don't have this like reverence for aging and reverence for even elders that, that other cultures do. And I think that's one of the biggest lessons that, that psychedelics and mushrooms have taught me is just to like really have this respect and reverence for death and to welcome it. Um, and especially in the world of like, I love biohacking and like all my best friends are biohackers and I'm, I, I want, you know, to, to really like clearly differentiate between that with myself of like, am I [00:24:00] doing something for longevity to live better, but also never to like escape death.

Death because no one has been able to do it thus far So it's been a huge part of my like recent lessons from mushrooms. It's like super fun of It's really, it's interesting hearing you talk about this because just our model of thinking around death can be transposed into basically like every area of life.

And you see how we think about things in this very mechanistic way, like you were talking about school earlier and how we have kids in very much a box where they're. You know, learning this one subject, and then they don't really get to kind of experience things in this way where it's actually how life works, where it's very interconnected, and there's multiple different disciplines that are being applied, but we try to, like, make everything like a industrialized conveyor belt where, you know, we process things in a vacuum, like, Even when you're talking about death, I'm thinking about how we put old people in retirement homes And we almost [00:25:00] start distancing ourselves from the emotions even during that process So we have this way of detaching ourselves from very important human processes and for our show it's like we have detached ourselves so far from the food system that we no longer know where our food is coming from and We don't have that reverence for the life and death that went into creating food so now Um, we're living in this world in the Western world where things just show up.

We don't really have that gratitude for the process in terms of how it got there. And it's very much just this industrial mechanistic way of approaching basically every aspect of life in the West, um, that I think, you know, really programs us to have that detachment and not be prepared to handle grief and, and things that are just ultimately going to happen in life.

And a lot of it comes from the fact that we don't know the history of anything. Mm. Yeah. You know, if you, if you really look at like most of the problems. Like even if, you know, as I was telling my story, like most of my awakening came from understanding the history [00:26:00] of a lot of these things. Like my obsession with sexuality originally came from like questioning, like, where does the construct of marriage come from?

And like, how was sexuality, you know, what was the state of the state with sexuality and like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates era, like completely different. Um, yet like so much of the downstream belief systems that we adopt, like modern conservative Um, democracy come from those people, but they operated completely different in the world of like sexuality.

And that was a huge awakening for me. I was like, Oh, we're piecemealing things that serve, you know, a lot of capitalistic principles and just implementing them into current life. Same with the food system. Like, I didn't have any consideration. Like, we didn't know recycling was a thing when we grew up, because we don't question, like, where things go, where they come from.

And that sounds really stupid to say it out loud, but like, if you don't, if you're not conditioned, if you grow up in, like, kind of a cave, Or a box, so to speak, like you don't question these things and, um, [00:27:00] same with, with psychedelics. If you look at the history of psychedelics, every human society since they have been documented, every human culture has altered their consciousness since the beginning of time.

And if you look at the way the human's brains developed, whether you believe in the stone dape theory or not, like you can literally find fossilized cave people that have a reishi mushroom, which is a. non psychedelic functional mushroom, which we can talk about more. Um, and a psilocybin mushroom. In the other hand, there's a fossilized cave people.

So they've been a part of human culture for ever cave people. And a lot of the stuff I'm sure you guys are talking about is like how to return our diets and the way that we're living to when humans were thriving and didn't have all the modern diseases that we have. And so like really understanding the history of things is such an unlock.

Yeah, there's yeah, there's definitely these interesting parallels between Nutrition and psychedelics for sure I was on an interview last week and one of the things that I [00:28:00] said was like The concept of eating like raw liver or full organ meats is makes people squeamish and uncomfortable Yeah And what I said was it the hot Cheetos should actually make you uncomfortable not the organ meats and remind it reminds me of what?

you said to of like There, there's definitely a subset of people that would be like, why did you take, um, ketamine lozenge when you were taking off on the plane? Yet, if you'd experienced such traumatic news and you took a Xanax, no one would question it at all. It's like, we've really just normalized a lot of things that shouldn't ultimately be normalized.

And I think the history, to your point, is such a huge unlock of what we should ultimately be doing. And a lot of what is really, just to like double click on that point, something I love to think about and talk about is, you know, even, even now, like in the mainstream, like, Psychedelics are becoming sexy and cool and, um, there's a different reverence for them because the legal system is kind of catching up and the studies are kind of, you know, catching up even though, you know, these are fungi that grow in nature, like the [00:29:00] movements to decriminalize them are called decriminalized nature.

Um, so it's, it's funny that we've criminalized these substances to begin with and the process now of, of like the legal system. Catching up is starting to rework people's brains, but there's a really great book called drug use for grown ups by Dr Carl Hart and it goes through each compound and Shows how it actually affects your brain and what it really kind of points to that's really fascinating is so many of the things That are acceptable in society, whether it be like ADHD medications, like if you were just to say Adderall and compare it to the chemical profile of, of meth.

It's very similar. And so a lot of things that we are, um, stigmatizing and condemning are very similar to things that we deem acceptable because right now in our culture, like what is legal is good. And something I love to talk about and just like reframe my own brain around is we live in a [00:30:00] society that calls our medicine, drugs, And our drugs, medicine.

So anything that's ever actually healed me, truly ever actually healed me has been what our society has called drugs. And anything that has ever, you know, taken me away from my heart into my brain, created this whole montage of other problems is what our society calls medicine. Mm-Hmm. And so the languaging around these things are really interesting.

And it's so cool to see the legal system kind of catch up because the way that we've been conditioned to think, there's a large part of culture that's only going to shift perspective once the legal system tells them what to do. That this is now acceptable Are you hopeful that the legal system can actually get there in a time frame that can actually start to help people deal and process with some of the grief ptsd depression that I think a lot of people in a lot of these use cases are dealing with and it's the type of grief That's [00:31:00] like we had um, kelsey sharon on our show who was talking about You know her military experience and how she has used psychedelics to help people Process a lot of that and I think that those are like the most impactful use cases in a lot of ways for this type of medicine Yeah, I'm really excited about it I think there's a lot of nuance and a lot of things to be cautious around but If you were to kind of pull back and just look at the state of the world right now Like we're in the worst mental health crisis.

We've ever been in mental health is all time low therapy's at an all time high Psychedelics are a huge impactful tool in that journey Again, like tool being the keyword, like psychedelic assisted therapy is the key, um, especially for people that are suffering from, from severe PTSD, something that I'm really interested in specifically to this point, I haven't seen a ton of studies on it, but I think it's, it's happening.

Um, and it was actually brought to my attention because I was sharing this story around my dad and the way I found out and like my processing of trauma and the ability to be essentially immediately neuroplastic. It's [00:32:00] like, you know, within 10 minutes of finding out my dad passed away, I was in an airplane surrounded by strangers.

In a dissociated state and it was so impactful for my processing of that trauma and so like the idea between Behind PTSD is like you have a trauma you experience a trauma and then that trauma gets essentially stuck in your nervous system Creates inflammation because it's not able to process in and up and through so you Could both experience the exact same thing or you and I could experience the exact same thing I mean it lands in my nervous system as trauma doesn't land in your nervous system as as trauma and And I'm really fascinated between like the time duration that that happens in because a lot of what is happening specifically with, with people in the military is they're experiencing these trauma coming back from war and then start to develop these crazy PTSD symptoms.

So if you can interrupt that landing and the nervous system. And help it move up and through and also help [00:33:00] reframe your brain's perspective around what that meant for your life. That's really interesting. Definitely. And so that's kind of point number one. And then point number two on, on the legal system, like, yeah, it's happening.

You know, psychedelics are in their third wave, the third renaissance, or, you know, there's so many different ways that people are speaking about it. And don't really know exactly how it's going to happen. Like right now, the state of policy in the United States is we're legalizing, it's happening.

psilocybin assisted therapy at service centers, and then decriminalizing on either a state by state basis or on the local level. What I'm really excited about, um, and I love the work that, you know, organizations like MAPS is doing to push through like MDMA is going to be legal for PTSD later this year because of all the work that Rick and his team have done and it's incredible.

I'm really interested in microdosing and consumer products and that slight neuroplasticity. that we can also [00:34:00] give as tools to people that maybe are not ready to open their consciousness and rip open their, you know, their experience with five grams of mushrooms. One of my friends said this to me and I loved it.

It's like we're legalizing the entire bottle before we're legalizing a sip of wine. Right. And so I'm really interested in that subtle neuroplasticity, like sub hallucinogenic experience. It's been a huge part of my mental health journey of my cognitive performance and I'm excited about where that's going.