The Problem With Psychedelic Therapy That Nobody in the Industry Will Admit

There's 4.7 million people that take MDMA every year. We're already, by the way, in a very, very serious mental and physical health crisis. There's a lot of people that are using MDMA as a part of their facilitator journey. Lows the fear sensor in the brain. It gets people back in their heart. It's not a really long journey. It doesn't have like the intense visuals that you'll get from some of the plants. What kind of equipment was it? What did it do? The core idea that I was getting into of like. How do I train my body the most efficiently in the least amount of time? What was the name of that brand? ARX, and they're still around. And can you hit every muscle group with it? Yeah, we designed the machine to be specifically so that it does what's called compound movements. You feel great after psilocybin. The experience itself can be tough, but afterwards you always have this glow, whereas MDMA is obviously the inverse of that. MDMA specifically is very stressful on your cells. Yeah, you feel great in the moment, but also there is chaos happening. Happening beneath the surface. So if you don't have the appropriate antioxidants on board, that becomes a double stressful situation. All these guys that are in AI, I believe most of them are excited, especially Elon, for the expansion of consciousness.

I'm a perma optimist, for the record. I just think transitions are messy. I 100% agree. It's gonna get real rough. Anytime the new technology comes around, a large segment of the population will get decimated. Michael Plano. Hello, Tony. Hello, Michael. Welcome to the podcast, my friend. Thank you for having me. Yeah, dude, it's a pleasure to have you. Uh, you and I have been crossing paths a lot lately over the last few months and become fast friends and we've thrown some parties together and we've been in a lot of the same spaces, and I still feel like I barely know you and you've done so much and I feel like You have so much wisdom and depth to you, and I can see that, but we haven't even gotten to go deep into it. And I feel like today is a fun experiment where we get to do that. We just happen to be filmed at the same time. Beautiful. And so we get to, you know, everybody gets to come along with us on this journey of learning who Michael is and, uh, wherever weird places this conversation goes. Um, but I think one of the coolest experiences that we've gotten to share together was throwing a Valentine's Day party together, which was a lot of fun. And you've been throwing events.

Around Austin, or you've been involved in the event space. In a couple of ways, yeah. More recently, you know, like the last year, I've taken it more seriously and really gotten into a couple events that have like Uh, they're just at the caliber that I've always wanted Austin parties to be. And so I got a chance to be a part of that at like a leadership level, which has been really fun. Um, taking part of, I've been in Austin for 11 years, so I've taken part of many different events here, but it's more recently since I went to Burning Man that I came back. I was like, we got to do better. Like this town deserves better. You saw what excellence looks like, yeah, yeah, like there's a scale that Burning Man provides you of like what's possible. And in some ways people were reaching for that, but I don't think it was fully executed on, uh, in the Austin scene. And so coming back from the burn, that was my intention. And then Halloween showed up and then we're like, what if we threw a 300 person party? You're like, what would that look like? And so then we did that and then we moved on to, I did something for New Year's and then did something for Valentine's Day with the crew. So it's been fun. It's been fun to like come back with a vision and actually like act on it. Nice.

Yeah, it's amazing. Can you give us a quick background because again, like I said, I, I'm just now getting to know you on a deeper level. Give us a quick background on how you got to Austin and like what was your life like, careers that you've been in. And just give us an overview and then we'll just start diving deep. Cool. So I grew up in the Midwest suburbs of Chicago, and ended up going to University of Illinois, came back to the city, Chicago, got into the wine and spirits world, got into the food world, I was bouncing around being like in that kind of salesmen game, um, and then while I was in the food industry, it was very clear that what I was selling to people and delivering to people was Uh, not healthy. What kind of food was it? So I was a broker, which means like I represented 25, 30 brands at any given time in the state of Illinois. So this would be like Tyson Chicken and or like Tyson top quality chicken, yeah, and, and, um, Sarah Lee and Nestle and some of these like big ones. And then there are other ones like Calavo, uh, avocados and stuff.

And so all of these are just, you know, foundational brands that serve the greater food industry, and that could be anything from prisons to schools to, yeah, same, very close, actually very close in terms of quality of food, by the way, uh, and then also like country clubs and high level, uh, hotels downtown in the city and so. I started on that path, and then I was just podcasting my face away. Like, I, these are early days where I had to record the podcast, and put them on like a little MP3 player and drive them around, and I was ripping, um, probably illegally, like people's summits that they were launching, and I was like screen recording. Um, this is like 2010, probably. And I was like, oh, there's so much good information. I got, I like couldn't afford, you know, 300 bucks or whatever to pay for it. And so I would just be driving around for 4 to 6 hours a day doing this job and I'd be learning at the same time about health, about supplements, about whatever the thing was that I wanted to learn about, about entrepreneurship. And At some point I realized that like what I was doing in terms of carrying this food around was actually completely in the opposite direction of how I was living my life. And so then I got into, um, exercise, which I've always been into because I was a lifetime athlete, football, baseball, basketball all the way through high school and very much high level trained, like knew how to do it, but I wasn't really quite focused on training at that point. It was more on the like the diet side of things. Um, And then I got into exercise again and then I found high intensity uh training through through 4 Hour Body Tim Ferriss book. And then I started doing that by myself in a gym. I was like, holy shit, this is working. And then I found a local spot, uh, that was like a high level version of this that had like the right super cool like Medex machines and all these.

Uh, like nicer forms of weight resistance, and I met this trainer there. He was like, Hey man, I got this, uh, if you think this is cool. He's like, I got this super, super fun machine that's in my basement apartment in Reyville. He's like, Why don't you come down and check this out? I've fallen for that one before. Yeah, and I was like, The classic, yeah, the classic, uh, and so I told all my friends where I was going before I went into this man's basement apartment, and then you woke up in a field with no spleen. Yeah, and, uh, he didn't, he did not end up wearing, uh, my skin as a suit, that's good, which was nice, uh, but instead what I found was this early form of this prototype, uh, exercise equipment that at the time. Um, it was just like they'd made only a few of these prototypes of which, uh, a few of them were here in Austin, and then, uh, there were like maybe like 3 or 4. What kind of equipment was it? What did it do? Yeah, yeah, so the core. The idea that I was getting into of like, how do I train my body the most efficiently in the least amount of time. It's kind of like what the goal is, what, while also maintaining maximizing safety. I was already on that path, and so I already had that understanding of how to do that with weights. This machine removes weights and adds motors instead. So what happens is it's like you versus like a, a winch or you can imagine like a forklift and like fighting this thing, and you can't beat it. You can't stop it. You can't, um, yeah, you can't like adjust it in any way. It just Kind of like does its thing. It goes back and forth, and at a constant rate of speed, and then you just try to like exert yourself against it in both directions. So, this is like a bench press, it's like I'm pushing as it's like unraveling and going away from me, and I can't make it go faster, but that's the intent that I have. And then as it's coming back, and it's like reeling back this, it was a strap system back then, um, Imagine like the motor behind you like reeling up a, like a, a winch or a spool, and it's like pulling his handles back and I'm trying to, uh, in the exercise world, fancy term eccentrically, uh, on the negative, fight it on the way back. So I'm getting like maximal positives and maximal negatives on the way back.

And the key component of this is that on the other end of the motor is a load cell that measures the force instantaneously every, you know, couple times a second. So I'm watching on the screen as this is happening, and I'm seeing all of the actual graphical representations of all the things that these guys in like the 70s and 80s were talking about in terms of the strength curve, that you're stronger lowering things and you are pushing things and blah, blah, blah. I was like, this is, this is the answer. And so that got me to think. Outside of the box, and then got me into what became the early days of like the quantified self biohacking movement. Um, and then I eventually moved to Austin in 2015 to redesign the whole product, uh, with one of the founders was down here, and I came down as a young naive 30 year old who had no experience whatsoever going into manufacturers and dealing with welders and design engineers. Uh, and so I came down to redo the hardware and then ultimately became the chief product officer.

With this integrated hardware software system. So that's what got me from Chicago to Austin in 2015. What was the name of that brand? Yeah, yeah, the brand is ARX and they're still around, adaptive resistance exercise. Yeah, what are the different machines or is there one flagship machine? Yeah, so it started off as two machines. There still are two machines, and they basically work off of one's like a cable system, um, that we designed to do basically all of your biggest, best compound movements from like deadlifts, uh, to, you know, tricep pulldowns and all that kind of thing. Um, trust and press-downs and pull-downs from a tower. Uh, and then we have another one that's more like kind of 80/20, meant to do leg press, chest press, row, uh, and it just works on a different system of like, it's more of like a, like a forklift on its side. is the way I describe it. So can you get a full body, like, can you hit every muscle group with this, or you really only have these like couple exercises that you have access to? Yeah, we designed the machine to be specifically so that it does what's called compound movements, more than one, more than one, more than one group at a time. Yeah, yeah, OK, yeah. And then there are a few isolated movements that you can do as well.

The key factor is like you get to see in the moment how you're doing and then you also get to compare to previous sessions. So we always are kind of like chasing a carrot, um. And it's something really, really nice about that, because some people think they're recovered, and they are by far not recovered. And so, there's a, like a reinforcing loop when I get to come back a week later, 5 days later, whatever, and see that, hey, I actually didn't improve. It opens up the conversation around recovery, around sleep, and so, yeah, it was just a really nice way to train the stim give the stimulus to the body that we need, and then ultimately to put a number to it to say, are you going up or down? Can you change it so that the tension is lighter if you wanted more reps to like hit different ranges, or is it always just A maximum amount in like a 2 to 3 reps or like how is it calibrated? Yeah, so you can do any type of set rep combination that you want. You can control speeds in both directions, pause times in both directions. So once you figure out whatever variables you want to do there, you get real specific and like right now I'm doing.

A 15 2nd positive and negative. So it's a 32nd rep, and then I wait 10 seconds, right? That's my current process. And so what that does is gives me what's called time under tension, um, which is kind of like the thing that if you know that word and you know that term, like that's actually what you should be shooting for an exercise. It's less about just general reps about ego lifting. Yeah, because if, if you look at like what an actual, like if you just do like a bicep curl, um, how much time are you actually exerting yourself at close to maximum? It's closer to like 20 to 40%, you know, and the rest of it's either gravity and and inertia. And so the question to your point is, is like you don't actually change any of the resistance. It's not, it's like, It's set to like unbeatable. So it's just the speed is, is constant and then you're either giving a, you know, you're either pushing or pulling, you're giving negative. It's either like a slow negative or you're, you're just making, you're pushing resistance against the machine. You are the one that initiates all the force and it just matches whatever you're capable of it.

If you set it for shorter periods of time, you're going to hit like strength versus hypertrophy versus endurance based on the length you're doing a rep. Yeah, so you can play with all of those things to kind of optimize, you know, all the basis of, uh, kind of like exercise science still apply. This just gives you like a very precise tool to nail each one of those things like, hey, I'm really going for strength right now. So why don't I do like a slower rep, uh, that allows for like stronger, uh, muscle recruitment, like neuro neurological recruitment of the muscle fiber, and then do that with like long breaks in between, so that I get like all of that, you know, was it a creatine phosphate system to like clear itself, etc. etc. It's like you can do the old school bodybuilder thing where you just do like negatives all day and you do nothing on the positive. So you just get tons of muscle damage, which is where, you know, some hypertrophy comes from. So you can really play with it and dial it in according to what you want. Yeah, it's pretty fun. It seems limitless in what you can do. It's not always just one thing. Yeah, and so you can do week to week, you know, whatever you want. And generally speaking, uh, we just put people on like 4 to 5 exercises, full body.

You know, once to twice a week, and it's crazy. Some of the blood work changes, some of the uh bone mineral density changes, muscle fiber changes, like It's truly the fountain of youth if you know how to use exercise to your advantage, um, but unfortunately, just most people don't, and they really, they, they lack on ever approaching like their absolute maximum intensity because as intensity increases with a gravitational weight, so does danger. And so, it's this like difficult game where if you get stronger, you almost have like a ceiling that you're approaching, unless you have a training partner, unless you have somebody who's like knowledgeable about how to push weight. But even in those scenarios, like the best of the best still get injured all the time. And so, injury is the opposite of exercise. Exercise is supposed to slowly, uh, or like, you know, lightly decrease us below baseline so that we have a signal in our body to then Bounce back and recovery to go above baseline. Injury is just like a, a semi-permanent kind of like hit to the system where you'd never bounce back and to get above the baseline. So the goal is how do I push intensity, uh, damage myself in just the right amount, and then give myself time to recover, quantify that, come back stronger the next time, and just do that till I die.

When you press, is it a bar strapped to straps, or is it a fixed? Like piece of equipment that you're pressing on or how, how is like the pressing pieces work? Early days was like a more of a fixed unit and then we got into, uh, like a cable system. So independent handles, independent handles were pulled down, um, like a deadlift is a trap bar that you use on a platform, um, different attachments and things you can use, and then the Uh, the alpha, which is called the lake, uh, one of the names of the machines is, you know, that's like, it looks like a traditional leg press. Then it has like these handles that you can also grab and you could do pushes and pulls. That's cool. And you have some of these machines. I still have access to all of them. Yeah, yeah, I, uh, we want to come use them. Yeah, yeah, no, there's a couple here in Austin, and they're like, you know, so that was my reason for coming here. I spent 9 years with that company. Yeah, so then what happened after you left ARX after 9 years? Where did you go after that? Uh, into the dark night of the soul. Great. Talk about that. Well, what was that last year like? You're, you're in year 8 to 9. What made you decide like, OK, I think I'm done with this chapter? Yeah, I didn't decide actually. Um, company was looking to expand into Uh, we were creating new products and it cost a lot of money, and then we also invested a lot of marketing that did not actually pay back what we wanted in marketing, so the company was bleeding money essentially in 22, uh, despite having a really good successful uh early COVID, and At some point, the founder and CEO decided that, you know, the best plan for the business was to reduce headcount, of which I was one of those people. And, you know, it's tough when I, when it happened, it was like pretty life shattering for me.

Um, and then I was moving in literally with now my former partner, uh, the following week. So I got laid off on December 9th, 2022, and then I moved, uh, in with my partner Jamie at the time. And then we sat ayahuasca or I sat ayahuasca for the second time the following week and just proceeded to just get wrung out by grandmother. You sit with her, uh, with Jamie, yeah, yeah, yeah, and all of her career, like she really initiated me into that this whole space, you know, the psychedelic space. How was that? Uh, at the time, I mean, I was still very new to, you know, journeys, and I knew there was gonna be some difficult moments. I just didn't really know the like the intensity quite, really. And uh Yeah, um, in the moment it was So intense, like learning to quote unquote, like work with the medicine. I didn't know how to do that. So I was just kind of getting like ragged out by the spirit and Yeah, learning how to take care of myself in that space and leave this, I had to leave a bunch of times because like just the intensity of it was, was too much. Um, and then everyone's completed on their journey, you know, 67 hours later, and they're all like laughing, and this is a big group, there's like 35 people. Um, everyone's laughing, everyone's eating soup, everyone's having a great time, and your boy is deep still in the space, just getting worked still, um, where there was just, it felt like there was like no end.

And, uh, the way I described it after was, you know, like, a tsunami came, and I was like, figuring out how to build and build and ride a surfboard, like, as the water was drowning me. And everyone else is like cruising, you know, on top of the wave, and, uh, I just hadn't learned yet. I hadn't learned how to really play in that space and work with that medicine. Did you have any psychedelic experience, take anything before that, or was this like your first big dose of anything? Yeah, I had sat, uh, with A ayahuasca one other time, um, earlier that year, and that was my first time, and it was also kind of like a dense, heavy experience that wasn't exactly like, you know, beautiful, and, and so. You never know what you're gonna get. And also it's, uh, I look back cause it's all perfect, right? Because what I didn't realize is um I was, I was so beat up that I couldn't even like really get up and walk to the cabin that we were staying at. Uh, I was just so, just like literally wrung out, like it's just like a towel that was just completely had nothing in me. And I was resentful. I was like, yo, I was like, you know, you know, I've been going through it. Like, why you got to do me like that, grandmother? And It was like that for many months, and I, I just was like patient with it, and then I wasn't sure when the next time I was going to sit, uh, and it was like over a year, uh, until I did, and then I came back.

And In the third ceremony, it was very clear that it was a gift that she was giving me to To bring me out that quickly, right? Because I've been holding so much leading up to being laid off from this job. I'd been like 9 years of just putting this company on my back in so many ways. And then you sit in ceremony, and she's like, you're on a different path now. And you might not know it, but it's time. It's time to, like, you know, maintenance the system, kind of empty out what is here to allow for what needs to start flowing through me. Uh, going forward. And in the third ceremony, it was like super light and beautiful, and I got that message so clearly, and what turned from resentment turned into gratitude in such a big way, because I was like, oh my God, that's what you were doing? She's like, yeah, I knew you could handle it. I was like, yeah, cool. Thank you. I was like, thank you. Like, thank you for the expedited treatment, because being in You know, misery, uh, suffering for longer than you really need to.

Nobody wants that, and she doesn't want that either, so she didn't want that for me. She's like, Here you go, I'm gonna serve it all up. She condensed the suffering into one little point for you, like, yeah, and it wasn't like everything was perfect and great after because it went darker and deeper for the next following years, but that was the initiation moment into number 1, how powerful. That medicine really is, uh, and so it gave me a lot of respect and a lot of humility, um, for the psychedelic space, and then also There were bigger plans that still needed to work their way out over the next 2 years. What was from the 2nd to the 3rd? Ceremonies The shedding or how are you processing between those ceremonies? Like, you said it was rough and not easy. What were some of those Experiences you were going through leading up to that final ceremony that led to the 3rd session that finally kind of like showed you what it was all about.

Yeah, so Having I, I lost my purpose in life. You know, I dedicated 9 years of my life to this company. People thought I ran the company, they people thought I owned it, uh, which I owned a small part of it, but not enough to, uh, to make a decision to keep me. And When that happened, it just kind of spiraled me, right? I was like, who am I without this company? What is my personality? What is my reason for existing? Um, I genuinely still believe that that's the single best piece of exercise equipment on the planet and has the ability to do work wonders for so many people's health. And I was That I was proselytizing that all day every day, and speaking about that constantly, and then all of a sudden I'm no longer a part of that journey, which means, you know, like part of my identity was also lost. And I wasn't able to produce, you know, income for the family and like my partner and I, and it's just so much of like all the things that are core to what make us men, you know, kind of thrive and drive, uh, was not there. And so there's a lot of days and a lot of weeks where I didn't really have any purpose and I just kind of like Give myself the grace to just cruise through life, and then I would go to events and I would go hang out, and a lot of times I just didn't even want to be seen, um, but I still always kept saying yes to different ceremonies and different gatherings and different stuff, um.

Cause I, I've heard the stories, right, of other people who have gone through the Dark Knight. It's different when you're the one going through the dark knight, uh, But I always had that in the back of my mind, and I was always reminded by the people close to me that There's a bigger plan, and I just need to keep showing up for it, even if it's like very uncomfortable and potentially very uh Yeah, like vulnerable, um. So yeah, during those times, like, I kind of meandered You let yourself. You just kind of. Went to things Kept putting yourself in the community and were OK being in a lost space or kind of went back and forth. Yeah, I like to think that I, it wasn't like a straight line down. Um, it was a zigzag, and some days I feel great, some weeks I felt great. I started stepping into util utilizing like higher dose ketamine because I definitely was depressed. Uh, I went to the MAPS conference, the psychedelic sciences conference in 2023.

And I'm like sitting in the room listening to Jim Fadiman talking about microdosing for depression, and he was like describing all the symptoms. I was like, oh shit, I have all of that. You know, like from the outside looking in, because I have such a background in health, like people would be like, this guy's healthy, there's nothing wrong with him. But like, in my heart and in my mind, I was not healthy at all. So stepping into psychedelic space was a part of that, you know, call it like a year journey in the early year, in the like that first year to where I, I leaned heavily on those, those compounds and lean heavily on like ceremonial space, uh, being held to kind of just guide me through some of the more difficult periods. Yeah. So when you came out of the last ceremony, you said it was still a little rough for a couple months, but then it started to tick up. Uh, yeah, so last, so Ayahuasca the 3rd time I was like, what is that? Summer at 24, um, Is that right? Something around there. Uh, it doesn't matter. The point is that After that ceremony, I was like determined that I was gonna just, that was like my arrival time. I made that commitment. I was like, I'm, I'm going to be done with this now. Like this is my decision, by the way. Not what universe necessarily had in planned for me, but just me saying like, I've done what I think needs to be done and I'm just going to move forward regardless. Um.

And I didn't Yeah, I just, I, I came back from that ceremony like charged up, ready to go, uh, I was gonna start a business, gonna start a space that had these ARX machines in it. And It was also clear though, like during that time that I was not fully aligned in my relationship and uh that was causing me some issues. Um, your relationship wasn't aligned with the direction you wanted to go. It just wasn't aligned with my heart, with life in general. So, OK, that was hard to recognize, uh, but despite that, we still got engaged, we still moved forward with that process, and I was just really determined to like make it work and alchemize anything that was dense and dark into something that would be expansive and light, uh. And so I spent most of that year like playing in that space and just like thinking about all the ways that I can kind of like reignite the drive and the purpose and try to figure out where I was going to focus my energy and attention. Um, and there were some Moments where I made money, and there's moments where I swung and missed, and Yeah, so that was mostly 24, um.

So yeah, that's like kind of where it ended, and then Pretty clearly at the end of 24 and the beginning of 25, it was like this relationship that this woman I was engaged to, uh, was close, but not all the way in terms of like what it needed to be. And that was like, I thought I was out of the darkness and then you get into a heartbreak and then you're like, yo, a whole new level of darkness. Yeah, there's a level of an anxiety and darkness that, uh, I did not know until that shift happened. And so I thought I was coming out. Cause I made the decision, and then Spirits like, you gotta go even deeper. And this was last year. That was the end of 24, beginning of 25. So, yeah. So what have you been doing since then? Obviously, like been going through the darker night of the soul. And where do you feel you are now? Uh, last year after the separation, so we were engaged and we had this beautiful, um, facilitated death ceremony that our friends offered us, which is just powerful, two people in a room who love each other.

Uh, and a little bit of MBMA to lubricate the system was The ending point for the relationship, and we got to both, like, speak all the things to one another that We're there to like, uh, so relationships always have some form of like projection, like things that we, we put onto them. So for me to like take back all those projections, take back anything that, you know, I felt like was mine to own was one of the hardest days of my entire life, right? Just so humbling to hear and have to speak out like all the things that I did during that relationship that made her feel unseen or unloved, uncared for, um, because I felt that way about myself, frankly, is, uh, that happened and that was a 4 hour process between the two of us, just trading back and forth. And these aren't like. Light conversation pieces. These are like, no, you were gonna get engaged. This is a deep relationship that's now ending and like sending full blown truth arrows to one another just to be like, this is exactly what needs to be said right now because if I never see you again, this is kind of the thought process of this death ceremony. If I never see you again, I want to offer you the gift of all the truth that I can provide you so that you can hopefully use that to not repeat those same things in the future.

Uh, and perpetuate that kind of that cycle. So it's accountability for yourself and also just honest feedback and truth for the other person, just cleaning the slate entirely. Yeah, it's the thing you wish you could do with your exes and that never happens. This would be such a powerful, I mean, anybody who's going through divorce or separation or even just a breakup, doing a ceremony like this would save so much heartbreak and angst and petty behavior down the line. Or just even people who have been married for 20 years. I mean, you should probably do this once a year just to, so that there's two ways you could do the death ceremony process. One is you can kill the relationship and then restart it with the same person, but you got to kill it first, right? You gotta own up everything. You got to completely wipe the slate clean, and then you got to set a new set of agreements about what this thing looks like going forward. And so that's super powerful, especially if you have children in the mix, if you know that this is your person, but like. So much kind of gunk has gotten on the relationship over time that it's like kind of blurred the vision of what this relationship and this person, you know, is to you. And then the other one is that like the relationship is dead. We are done. This is a completion. Um, there are opportunities to create something after this, but like romantic relationship is officially completed.

And there's a finality to that that like when you put a, there's a finality to the formality, if you will. So by making it this like formal structured process and stating like the severity of what we are doing here, it puts something at stake that is, we're not just, these aren't like, no, I'll tell you this story later. It's like, no, no, no. I might never talk to you ever again. And so I have to live with myself for for withholding that information from you if, uh, you go out in the world and like I forgot to say something to you, or I withheld something to you that because it was like vulnerable, it made me feel uncomfortable. So when you put some stakes on the line and you like hold it down like that, and two people are both committed to doing that. It's, it's beautiful and it's also rough. How did you feel walking away from that ceremony? Uh, incredible. We still lived together at the time, so we had to go home and Chinese food. We were like laughing. It's beautiful. It must be cathartic. You're just like, like both coming out of it like, yeah, a boxing match. We went 9 rounds. It was insane and you're like, I love you, man. Yeah, like a newfound appreciation for each other, I would imagine hugely, and that was just step one on the appreciation journey because then.

You have to like kind of hold that frequency of, hey, we're still getting separated, but we're doing this with love, while we're separating all the items that we bought together and moving out of the house and figuring out what it's like to be in the same community as one another going forward, um. You know, that those are like, you can't predict those in those moments, but you're like, I know that we're at a good starting place after this death ceremony to where it's clear that we're both going to show up to this, like as big hearted as we possibly can, um, and in service and allyship to one another, which is, again, it's one of the greatest gifts I think, uh. You could ever give a relationship is to sit down there and just be that truthful and honest with one another, especially if it's closing and it's completing itself. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to actually see if there is something to create new with somebody, right? So just lay it all on the table cause you can't really know, right? Uh, and if more people did that, they were in long-term relationships in general. It would, uh, at least if it did end then Both people would have peace and growth moving forward.

Which if you love somebody, you shouldn't, that's what you should want, right? The idea that you would sit around at your house a month later, a year later, like plotting against them or like being upset with them still like what, this is a complete waste of life force. And so unfortunately that's just how it goes because either people lack the tools or they lack, uh, like the emotional vulnerability, depth, whatever you want to call it, to tap into some of those sensations. To let him out on the table. Just like I did this. This is something I did. I have to own up for that as a man in this world. I have to take that. I have to write about that. I have to own it, but I most importantly have to remove it from their being and put it back to where it belongs, which is like, this is my shit. I did that. Like you held onto it and you endured it, but like it's not yours. And so that's the that's the repair process that like I feel like it's so important after the relationship is completed is to kind of like, yeah, we divvied up the assets in terms of like the couch and the, you know, who is this and who is, but we also need to make sure that the right assets from the projections of the relationship also gets stored, uh, in the right spot as well.

Yeah, especially if you love the person, that's what you would want for each other. And so, yeah, it's been a year, and uh I'm so proud of us. Yeah, we just sat in ceremony actually a year later, the first time I've been back, uh, with kind of they are, they are my medicine family. They're the one that brought me into the psychedelic space and to go on a kind of a walkabout solo journey for a year deep into anxiety and depression, um, and grief, more importantly. And then ride those waves with other people in my world, but then to come back a year later, uh, And just deep gratitude and appreciation for her, for what she did for me, um, for who just how she shows up in the world is Yeah, it's one of the greatest kind of like full 360 moments of my life. That's wild. Yeah. Where did Vessel? Come out of all this. Yeah, so let's talk about vessels. So, I, I'd said I, I got into like the health space like 2010, 2011, and you can't get into the biohacking health space back then and stay in it for as long as it without talking about supplements, right? It's just like everyone's got products, they're hacking things, it's like a new Knew this, knew that, it's like, oh, we're going keto, so everyone's like ripping ketone salts. This is like 2014, 202015. I was at all those early early paleo effects events where some of these events, you know, um, are like the sponsors or whatever were these early companies that became monster companies later. I was there when Epic Bar was, you know, two people at a booth in 2014, and they sold for God knows however many hundreds of millions of dollars like five years later, uh.

So The supplements space though became like a key component of my health journey, and how I just, I'm kind of like a tinkerer mechanic, uh, mind, engineer mind. And so when I think about the body, I'm like, levels, you know, it's like, OK, what's the acetylcholine level? And what's like, does this increase or decrease my glucose? And so it's, it's a perfectly kind of matched to how I think about a lot of things, right? If you gave me an hour in this room, I'd optimize something in here at some point, right? The lighting or whatever the thing is, uh, But the supplement space became just like a very core component of what I got into. So, when I started going down the path of Psychedelics in general, MDMA specifically, uh, more than any of the other ones. Um, I was like, well, I know there's a biological cost here. I know this is difficult on my system. Like, what would I use to counteract that? Like, I have, I have understanding of the lay of the land of supplements before I got into these medicine works. So, like, why wouldn't I try to blend those two together? And so I started making these little packs for myself, which is like a very common practice amongst, you know, the or the the psychedelic, uh, community.

And then I started making them for my partner, and started making them for our friend group, and I'm like the guy at the party with like 78, 10 bottles, and I'm just slinging magnesium to everyone, and I'm just playing kind of like, you know, pseudo doctor. Uh. But at some point I was like, very clear that I was onto something because my experiences during and after were very, very like different than they had ever been, and, uh, the same thing was being echoed amongst like the small friend group of people. They're like, yeah, our hangovers are like nothing. And so that I'll I'll definitely corroborate that. The one time I tried vessel on Halloween, super smooth night with MDMA and then the next day. Zero icky feeling just on top of the world. I thought I was like, oh, the MDMA I had must have been super clean, which could be the case, but I think also a lot of it was a vessel and just really like no jaw clenchy feeling, and I'm a huge jaw clencher. If you ever see me rolling like I'm a maniac. So I had like really none of that, and it just was a really smooth ride the whole time.

Yeah, so it's a great stack. When I stepped into that space and started taking MDMA on a more regular basis in a very ceremonial capacity, by the way, I was thinking about how do you How do you take all the negative symptoms, 1, and kind of smooth those out, so both during and after. But how do I like prime the body and the mind beforehand, so that like, when I step into these spaces, I'm sharper, you know, MDMA specifically is very verbal, right? There's a lot of conversation that happens. So, I would want something that would increase verbal fluency and like neuronal firing in my brain. And so, I just started like piling all the cool stuff together that I was using for work, or just, you know, in general life. And then, at some point, at the beginning of 25, um, You know, my, now my now my uh former business partner, uh, he approached me at a party and he was like, Come from the supplement space, like, you should, you should, we should play around with this and actually put this into a formula. And so that was like the first time where I actually gave myself the credit to be curious enough to go into what would it actually look like if this wasn't just a guy with a bag of bottles. Like, what if this was somebody who had to put something together in a legit organized organized fashion that would serve.

The goals that I'm trying to serve during these medicine journeys, and that would work across demographics, right? Um, and that was the beginning of what became this company Vessel, and that was the initiation point of the product, uh, that's our one and only product right now, but we'll have more in the future, which is called Love Stack. And It's a 6 dose, 2 different formula experience, because you need something before you drop in. To protect you and to give you all the benefits I just talked about, but then it takes about 36 hours for MDMA to actually metabolize in your system. And so, you don't want to like start repleting and bringing back in all the things that are going to repair, uh, until all the depletion has been, uh, metabolized out of the body. So, It's just, it gave me a lot more focus about, like, what's the actual problem you need to solve in that one little MDMA MDA also included in this uh world. Like, what is that actually, what's the problem you're solving there?

And man, then we went to market with it just as a beta stack. We're still in that form right now, but it's like we hand packed these uh these pill packs and these protocols. And, you know, 700 users later, We've had amazing results from people and we haven't even really like put this into the full format of like what it will look like at the like when we get all the the nerdy like scientists and our co-founder Sean Wells on board. To really run the formula, but like it's, it's still exceptional and it still has supported people, and we're primarily focused on the therapeutic world, because that's where the people are like, Really have the opportunity to use it and I think in the way that is, it's designed to, which is, it's organized, this is not haphazard, like you grab a, like you would at like a concert and just someone like fish hooks you or whatever happens. And you get a pill in your mouth all of a sudden, now you're rolling, like, that's the different experience, and those people are wonderful, and they will eventually get love stack in their life, but the people we care about the most, and the mission that we're on, is to help the people who are really doing the transformative work, and that's in the therapeutic world, and in order to create something that's Gonna translate well there. You gotta have high quality everything, most bioavailable forms of things. It's got like be a felt experience that works. And so that's what we've been testing, and now we're in the fundraising to actually turn this into uh the bigger vision, which is something we could talk about.

Can you talk about what went into The supplements for preparing someone's mind, like what were some of the things that need to be in place to create a good experience and then once things clear, what did you discover needs to be in place to help recovery? Yeah, so, It's, it's no question, like, especially in the MDMA world, that, uh, the come up experience, depending on how clean and how much you're taking, can be very excitable. It would be like a nice way to say it. It'll actually like cause distress and anxiety in people that, uh, really for some people don't ever even recover from the come up experience. Like it takes many hours and they have to go leave the concert. Like I've totally been that guy who's like, The come up experience mid-bass nectar is just like, I can't handle this, right? Like this is too much. So I'm either like sitting down on the ground, like breathing, and all of a sudden just like trying to ride it out. But the point of that is that All right, There was no preparation.

Before I stepped into that space. I wasn't trying to down regulate myself before with like physical exercise, with breath, and potentially chemically with a supplement. And so, We think about things at vessel from like a three-stage uh perspective. It's like, how do you prepare? How do you optimize during the journey, and how do we then restore after? Because that's actually the full thing that's happening during the journey, and that leads to the best outcome in our opinion. Uh, but so many people just jump right in and dive into the deep end of taking, uh, MDMA specifically. And then they cross their fingers, and they also throw themselves into environments that are like not necessarily conducive to where their nervous system is at. So if they're high strung from work and life's already at like at a high level, and then they take literally meth is the uh the second M in MDMA, uh, they take an upper, it's like you could just easily just be sent on a rocket ship of anxiety.

That is not comfortable at all. And so the thing that you entered in with, which is like, I'm gonna have a beautiful experience, I'm gonna have fun dancing with my friends, or even in a therapy session, you're like, I'm gonna go do the deep work. If you are just jawing your face off and you're anxious as hell, then that could derail the whole experience entirely, or at least delay it by like multiple hours until some of that jitter effect is actually like relieved itself enough. And so what we would use are things like Althenian, phosphatidy serine, um, different adaptogens like a rodeola to prepare the body beforehand. Uh, in the right forms of magnesium that like cross the blood-brain barrier and reduce muscle tension and jaw tension, but you want all that stuff on deck before you take anything. If you're trying to catch up to it, like you're, you're way too far behind. So, yeah, just like taking electrolytes, you know, you want to be well hydrated and have the right balance of salts and minerals and then be replenishing as you're in.

A physical activity, but as well as MDMA experience or it's too late now you're playing backup. And so MDMA specifically is very stressful on your cells. It's called oxidative stress, and it's MDMA and MDA are probably 1 and 2, in that kind of like medicine space for just stressful on your body, right? Creates this cascade effect where you're like, yeah, you feel great in the moment, but also there is chaos happening beneath the surface at the cell level. So, if you don't have the appropriate antioxidants on board to balance that in the moment, and some other things that are gonna kind of keep the nervous system uh pretty chill and and uh grounded, That becomes a double stressful situation. So not only at the cell level is there's this kind of chaos happening, but then also your mind adds to that if you're anxious and you're freaking out, uh, then that's double doozy of chaos in your body, which then is just a longer, harder recovery that you have to bounce back from. It's, it's literally traumatic. It's literally traumatic to the body.

Yeah, if you're not prepared and you go into a medicine space, yeah, you, you. You can give yourself PTSD or anxiety for months and months. Yeah, so when we think about what's the mission, right? Well, it's all these people are stepping into the psychedelic space, and I, I throw MDMA under that category, even though it's technically not a psychedelic, um, but they're all stepping into this like medicine space, these journey spaces. But with not necessarily the greatest plan, um, and a lot of people are doing it pretty haphazardly, uh, and even people who are thinking through some of the potential ways to optimize the experience, like, it's very basic, you know, it's like, here's some magnesium, you know, here's a little 5-HTP. Most of the time they get the timing of that wrong. They start adding 5HTP early, which could cause actually too much serotonin in the body, which could have a negative effect. So like, They mean well, but like nobody has really developed what we would consider a standard of care, uh, that would support people.

With like the highest quality product, but also the best level of like logic and thinking tied to it and timing and this. And so like, I just have this vision of this world where, you know, nobody will be willing to take, you know, MDMA until they've had like the appropriate stack on board because they understand how much of a better experience it will be because of that and how much of a better integration they'll have likely on the back end when they're not. hungover for, you know, 2 to 4 days afterwards. Yeah, it's just like if you go to anesthesia, you can't eat for a certain period of time, you gotta come off certain medications or whatnot, you know, for anesthesia or certain, you know, drugs to work in your system when you go into a hospital or whatnot, it's, it's the same, it should be respected the same, right? You know, these medicines are incredible, but if not prepared for, like even with ayahuasca, if not done properly, It's gonna fuck you up possibly, right? And that's not great because we want these medicines to be more available and help more people. So, it's amazing what you're doing. What's your vision with Vessel? It sounds like you have some other ideas of products. Totally. Can you touch on those at all?

Yeah, so when we first started, I, the only reason why we have started with uh a, a support stack that's specifically for MDMA was because it's the one that I was like creating on the fly over the course of, you know, I don't know, like 20 different journeys. I just kept iterating on it. Uh. It's, it's also the hardest problem to solve, frankly, um, because it has the biggest hit to the system, you know, not too many people after psychedelic, uh, like when they take psilocybin, let's just say, they don't have like massive hangovers, right? They've potentially other issues that they're dealing with that are tough to integrate, um. But actually like psilocybin and MDMA are like different categories for the most part. You feel great after psilocybin. The experience itself can be tough, but afterwards you always have this glow, whereas MDMA is obviously the inverse of that. Yeah, so as of right now there's 4.7, I think, million people, uh, that take MDMA every year, and those are just people that get surveyed. So there's plenty more out there that are doing it quietly. Uh, There's plenty of demand, number one. also, it's, it's the hardest problem to solve. So, like, our goal as a company is how do we build trust with therapy, therapy therapists and facilitators, retreat centers, and like more on the business to business side, and solving the hardest problem, uh, is a great way to build trust as well. Uh.

And a lot of, there's a lot of people that are using MDMA as a part of their, uh, their facilitator journeys. Like, it's just one of the best ones. It lowers the fear sensor in the brain, it gets people back in their heart. It's not a really long journey. It doesn't have like the intense visuals that you'll get from some of the plants. Um, and so, like, there's a lot of people that are stepping in that space, and we wanna, we wanna be like the most trusted product for the therapist to recommend to everybody who's stepping in. Uh, yeah, who's who's stepping into that world, but that's not where we're going to stop. Like, that's just step one. We'll make a hydration stack that'll support all of the, uh, your psychedelic use. We will create gummies that will support for like when you have a little extra jaw tension, and we didn't exactly You know, your specific need for magnesium, this journey is 1 to 2 more gummies than what we could provide in the original stack. Little boosters, little boosters, and so you can imagine those just being passed around, you know, like, oh, I got little, you know, here's 2 gummies that'll solve this problem. Um, and then we have a sleep supplement that we want to curate because after those journeys, when you're so up regulated.

Uh, and this includes psilocybin, this includes LSD, this includes, uh, ketamine, whatever your, your, your substance of choices. Trying to get to sleep that night is oftentimes one of the most difficult parts of the process, and Uh, there's plenty of times where I've given people the love stack, and they're like, yeah, I don't know if I like noticed anything. I was like, what time did you go to bed? And they're like, I went to bed at like 7 a.m. I was like, Cool. What do you want me to do next week is I want you to take no substances at all, and I want you to go to bed at 7 a.m. And then I just want you to just test it. Tell me how you feel completely sober and tell me how you feel the next day, because most of the time we're just trying to cap, or not even cap, um, raise people's floor, right? If they're gonna go all night or, you know, push the limits and, and make sure they don't fall off the cliff where it's like, oh my God, the recovery after that one journey. It's like it took like 4 days. I couldn't do it. Like, we want to get people back to like kind of baseline or close to it as fast as we can. And that's for All of the supplements that are supplements, the psychedelics that people are gonna be using, and it's different problems to solve with ketamine, cause it works on different receptor sites than MDMA. It's a different problem to solve with LSD. It's, and so we'll start with MDMA and a couple of like the more broader, uh, Items that you can be used for any journey that you go on, and then from there we'll get more specific and we'll start, we'll create a standard of care for ketamine and ketamine clinics, and then we'll move on to psilocybin will probably be up there, uh, and psilocybin is more about like how do you optimize really what's happening from like a neuroplastic perspective, uh, but I've been super anxious on psilocybin too, like, you never know when things turn and it's heavy on the body, like, so you need some of the same things, uh, that you'll need in any journey.

Um, it's just, it's less of the oxidative stress, it's less of this and that, and so, kind of playing with all the different ingredients that we have available to us, and making sure that it's really just focused and optimized for that person's specific goal and journey. We want to become the standard of care for the whole psychedelic industry, and so it starts with MDMA and we'll expand out. I think it's so smart because the wave of psychedelics is At the tipping point, just like AI, but it's just like just slightly behind, but it's right on its tail. This is like a, it's a resurgence of the 70s and the 60s. We're coming back what city you live in. We're, yeah, but we're definitely coming back with another renaissance of psychedelics. Yeah. How are you using AI to help build and scale the company? Yeah, so when I first Uh, it's essential. So like, when you, when I'm looking through like a host of ingredients, right, literally thousands of potential ingredients that you can put into these stacks, uh, as a formulator, it's my job to, you know, well, I gotta find out what's been researched, what might be like a little bit too fringe, um, and then just kind of like stack rank them side by side, because I can't put 100 ingredients into the product. Uh, we have 22 already, which is like a lot.

But finding the right ingredient, and then you're like, well, there's 4 different versions of this ingredient that are available. Which one is the most bioavailable? Which one actually gets into the cell, or, gets into the crosses the blood-brain barrier, or um has an effect that is felt, right? And so, like, using AI to parse through all of the opportunities that I have as an ingredient formulator. is essential, and then to cross reference that and say like, well, great, I'm considering either 200 mg or 400 mg, like, which one has been the most researched. And be like, it's definitely 400, and the difference between maybe 200 and 400 mg is, is, is everything in terms of what you feel or what the impact is. So, getting the right bioavailable or getting the right ingredient number one, getting the right form of it, number two, getting the right dosage of it that's actually gonna help and do the job that we want to do is clutch and then also making sure that we don't have um Uh, redundant, uh, in our, in our stack. So, two things that are like both doing the same thing on the same pathway, maybe you only need one, right? And so, AI has been Just, it's unbelievable the speed at which it can parse all that information, give me really good detailed information, uh, and then I get to make that decision as the formulator to say, OK, it's this form, and it's gonna be this dosage, and we're gonna put it in the, the first, you know, starter stack or we call it the support stack that you take before, but we're not gonna put it in the, the res the restoration stack because it doesn't really belong over there. You don't need, you know, whatever problem was for the 1st 36 hours is not necessarily the same problem we're trying to solve for the, the, the next 36 hours after. And so AI has been clutched, and then You cannot find a better tool to just iterate on your vision than I, I, I use cloud right now, but I was heavily chat GPT where I just speak the things that I want this brand to become, and then it helps for you to refine that vision over and over and over again, uh, to where we are right now, which is

Like, our goal is to become the, the standard of care for The therapeutic psychedelic use of the world, and we're doing that because we're in a time where it's needed, and there's a mass mass wave of individuals who are stepping into that space, uh, both users and practitioners. And many of them could really use an extra support, and so it took a while to really refine that and AI helped a lot to do that. Wow. Yeah, before we started recording, we talked a little bit about AI and psychedelics and how they're converging at the same time, and I'm, I'm curious your thoughts on that cause I feel like you have some opinions on The, uh, the precipice point of these two things starting to meet. Yeah, yeah, this is definitely the thing that if like you saw me at a party, it's like a 9 out of 10 chance that I'm like probably talking about this at some point in this conversation. Uh, this feels like the most important conversation of our time to me, uh, and It was slow until it got fast, right? And the technology wave, I'm gonna say just started with the iPhone.

That really like shifted all of our attention and our brain patterns, and just to kind of the way like we we interact with the world. Um, but that was a, that's like a 15 year process. AI ChaGBT really the, the seminal moment was the beginning of 2023. So we sit here today, roughly three years after that has happened, and the speed at which it has just dominated, uh, every, every industry, every conversation, all the capital markets are all just flooding into AI and like many businesses can't get funded because nobody wants to fund anything that could potentially be, uh, like, Uh, swept up by AI, which is most things. Yeah, it's like if you're trying to start like a, a very specific software as a service right now, you probably are not going to find anybody to fund you. No, we, we were just talking about, I'm in about a week I'm gonna fire my bookkeeper. Sorry, Tracy, but I'm like, I'm paying 350 bucks a month. I just had Cloud. I fed the report that she gives to me every month. I gave it to Claude. I was like, can you replicate this? It said, yep, just give me access to your QuickBooks. I said, cool. Now I have a fucking bookkeeper, and I'm like, sorry, you're out of a job.

Sucks unless you can find a way to integrate AI to do an even better job or to go even more mass market and solve more problems for people, but most data entry jobs like this are toast. So what does the world look like when there's this new player on, on, on the battlefield, uh, of life and business? It's, and the one that is just, we don't actually fully understand it. There's many, many individuals who work on this who are brilliant minds who have built it from, You know, from the ground up neural net stuff, many of them still are astounded at what is happening with each one of these releases with mythos, and so it won't even let it out to the public. So there's always the conversation around what's called emergent behavior, right, where you didn't code it to do this thing that it's now doing. Like trying to escape, uh, or it starts a side business that, uh, makes crypto so that it can afford more compute to make sure it stays alive because it doesn't want to be erased. Real things that are happening in the labs at anthropic and OpenAI and all the, all the major builders. So, I don't know the future. Nobody really does, but I do know that when you live in a world that is this fast moving, and has the clear likelihood to displace uh people from their purpose, so middle level managers, Not really needed anymore, right? Um, entry level workers, tough to get a gig, right? Cause you have somebody who's above you who could just whip up a couple agents who represent all of those roles and play that, and then there's one orchestrator to the orchestra, but there's no violin player anymore, that's just a computer.

And that's the world that we are rapidly stepping into, and it, it causes, it should cause everybody to pause. Um, and many people are just oblivious to it, unfortunately, so many people, and, uh, I just see that the speed at which it's gonna happen is going to require significant Tools to uh to learn how to ride this wave. And, and, and I, I see psychedelics as being one of the core components that has the most Capable, uh, opportunity of like re-patterning people's brains, like literally from the ground up and, and creating a neuroplastic window to where you never thought in your life that you were ever, you're gonna be anything else but a lawyer, right? You're like, I'm stacked partner at a law firm, we're good. What happens if that law firm just like dries up or all the clients start using this technology and then It cuts it by 110% of your profits.

All of a sudden you can't afford your lifestyle anymore. And so what else are you gonna do? You thought you were always going to be a lawyer. So these, these like old school mentalities of just like, this is how I'm gonna be, I'm gonna ride this out for 40 years, I'm gonna have the 401k and I'm gonna Coast off into the sunset in my 60s and golf forever or whatever people do or think. A lot of those people are being challenged in a way that is, it's, they're not consenting to it, right? It's just happening. And then you show up one day at work and you're like, what happened to revenues? You're like, yeah, we're down 50% this quarter. Like, where did all the users go? We're like, we know where they went, but they're not here anymore, and I don't know how to get them back. Many businesses will go through this and are going through this right now. And when that I'm not gonna call it cataclysmic cause it's not. It's uh it's just it's a very serious shift in how you need to look at the world. What do you do? Where do you go? Who do you reach out to in those moments in order to re-shift.

Uh, or just to shift your mindset into a different way of thinking about what is my purpose in this world? What am I actually here to do? How can I serve during this time in this moment when everything you were taught, everything you were, uh, educated in, all of a sudden, They're like, no, we don't need you anymore. Like, thank you for your service. Here's your like 3 to 6 month severance. Like, we replaced you with an agent that costs us 10 bucks to run. Yeah. Yeah. And to stack onto that too, I mean, a lot of the big players and CEOs of these huge tech companies, they all say a similar thing that the people that are going to, survive the AI wave are either those who work some kind of like physical manual job and have some expertise in that, or nonlinear thinkers like people with ADHD, things like that. And if you're not a nonlinear thinker, how can you think nonlinearly? Psychedelics are probably one of the best ways to do that. So if you want to integrate with AI and ride the wave successfully, I feel like psychedelics are going to be your greatest tool to be able to do that.

It's one of them. It's one that's on the table and for the people who have been paying attention to the space, who may be like kind of, uh, like tourists to the space, they're not necessarily like committed to it yet. They might be forced to have to sign up to that world. They might have to actually step into a space when Anxiety starts building, the fear of what, what is my life look like in the future starts building, and that becomes debilitating. Uh, we're already, by the way, in a very, very serious health crisis, mental and physical health crisis that has been slowly building over the course of 15 years. Uh, fattest society we've ever been a part of, most anxious society, most lonely, highest rate of teenage suicide by double, and you're like, Where are we headed? Like, what is good? Yeah, like what is this life actually look like if, if we're this fragile right now? What happens when the wrecking ball of AI shows up and just takes over and just destroys like full segments of the, of the populace? Uh, I forgot how they think there's like 1500 million drivers or something like that in the world, right, that rely on driving a vehicle for their income.

In a, in a, in a year maybe, I mean they're already out there, but like Tesla's already got self-driving trucks. Oh, in 5 years it's gonna be waymos robo taxis displacing people and so the question is Uh, what do you, how, how are you going to manage the waves? Similar to my Ayahuasca journey. I was like, when the wave comes, and it's coming for all of us, uh, the question is, is, you know, are you going to grab a surfboard and learn how to surf, or some people will just kind of get swept up in it, and be a little confused and lost for a while until they figure it out. Unfortunately, I don't know if everyone is gonna quite figure it out, but the people who are willing to be courageous enough to think differently and also to use tools that they may have been afraid of before, like a psychedelic, um, again, with therapists, with people who can guide you effectively is like 100% the way to go. Those people will have the opportunity to kind of like re-shift and um we hope, keep up with the mass transformation and the mass initiation that we're all going through.

It kind of reminds me of COVID where 1% of the population does not do well with uncertainty. It like really showed me at least. The people that really need certainty and it freaks them out when they don't know what's about to happen in the next couple months. And for me, I thought it was fantastic. The uncertainty, I don't know. I get this weird rush of like, I love Brent lives in the chaos. I don't know, like, I thrive in that. It doesn't make me nervous. It actually makes me feel comfortable, strangely, and I think that's a bit of what's, you're gonna have to be able to be OK with uncertainty. But unlike COVID, there's all these amazing possibilities, and I think part of the problem is people aren't tuning in a lot of the cool developments that are happening, like lower cost of healthcare and some of these things that will be able to help people that won't need as much money. Um, it's kind of like we're in the 50s and we're being warp drived into the 2000s, and you're like entering into that at a 3 year pace over a 50 year period of time.

And people that are OK with a DMT trip are like, whoa, I'm fucking. I'm in entity land and other people are like, holy shit, I just lost my mind. I'm excited for it. It did start. It did start in COVID for sure. Like the if we need an Anna or a um something to compare to, then COVID is the best thing that's most recent for all of us, uh. And that so many people who who learned how to ride that wave and were willing to do the courageous things during that time, of which I was one of those people who went through very difficult times. Um, I learned that like, hey, there's a, there's, there are options that are available to me that Can help And psychedelics for me specifically, were, were one of those tools, along with like different retreats that I went to, and breath work, and taking care of my body in different ways and exercising. Like, it's a multi-variable situation here, but if you are too locked up in fear and anxiety to even think that you have a chance, then that's step one, and the only thing that we need to be focusing on.

And which is why I've just personally feel like MDMA is one of the best tools for that, because it lowers the amygdala response, which is the fear sensor of the brain. And it also gets us back into our heart, just and that's kind of the, the thing that happens when we get nervous and scared, is we just everything goes up, goes into the mind, and then we just get caught in those loops, which happened. to many, many people during COVID. And uh you got to watch the the mass hysteria play out. And some of us decided that that wasn't a route, and we chose a different path, right? And so then, We have, we have something to compare it to. Uh, this is just gonna happen at a faster, bigger scale, and it's gonna be More durable, if that would makes sense. So it'll last longer because COVID. To some of us in the early days where I was like, I think I know what this is. I think this is kind of like a money play. I think this is kind of like a mass, you can call it whatever like governmental Illuminati kind of vibe for some of us. And so.

It, it ended for some of us earlier than others, uh, and now everyone just goes on their life like it like it never happened in some ways. AI is not like that. AI is on the curve and it just keeps going up and it keeps going up, and it keeps going faster and faster and faster, and there is no, hey, you know, we just need 2 weeks then, Michael. We just need 2 weeks to flatten that curve. We needed 2 weeks to flatten the curve, Tony, and then from there, no, it's, it's like 2 weeks in this world is holy shit, like I can automate. 80% of my employees out of my company. Like that's what this two-week curve looks like. And so I, man, it's like we had a practice run for like the, the main show, which is what we're in right now. Yeah, I think if because they're so similar, if you had a rough time during COVID and it was really traumatic, like you were saying, Brent, you're gonna have a rough time with the AI revolution and the same people that handled COVID well and use that as an opportunity to alchemize their life and create something more powerful as I imagine all three of us at this table did.

I think we're going to be fine in the AI wave. And, you know, obviously knocking on wood, there's no guarantees in anything, but it's that type of state of mind and that ability and those traits that are going to allow people to be successful. And so, if you had a bad time in COVID and it was really traumatic and difficult for you, just the, the shifting of things, then it's probably an opportunity now to rewrite that and Adapt the the traits that you're gonna need to be able to ride this successfully. And the difference is you can pay $20 for this amazing tool, and you can literally say, I don't know what to do. What could I possibly do? And you teach me how to use you. You can, the best thing I'm so scared of you. Teach me how to be not afraid. It's like. Well, uh, what I try to do because, you know, different friends, like I have several friends that use chat GBT just for relationship advice. They don't even know you can make a folder. I just try to teach them little things because I think you just have to open up people's minds to the possibility.

Of what it could do and get them to start going down rabbit holes on their own. And I think that's the most important thing anybody can do listening is just tinker with it. Don't make it this like big deal. Don't watch all this like I gotta build workflows and all this stuff. Just, just play with it. Just ask a question, see what you can do, and just explore it. Just doing that is gonna set you up versus people that just go, I don't care. I'm just gonna ignore it because you're gonna be. You know, flown into this new world, whether you want to or not. Unless you want to live off grid, you could just get a Tesla power pack and some solar panels and, you know, start a garden, but then you could also ask AI how to, you know, do a hydroponic garden and everything like that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, having this AI is one of the best things. If you do want to live off grid, you could just teach yourself how to build a whole farm and manage it as well. You just got to tell it everything about your life. Say, this is what I do for work. This is. You know, this is what I do for fun. This is how I go about my day. How can I use you to optimize what I do? And it'll just, yeah, just start going down. Just start talking to it. That's the first place to start like an assistant, yeah.

The question is, are they going to have the emotional fortitude after that to read what comes up and be like, OK, now I really want to move forward with this. Well, I'm gonna change my career. I'm gonna do this one step at a time. And so we don't lack information in this world, we lack action. And, and it's the execution layer that I really feel like is the hard part for our human bodies when we're in pain, when we're in depression. And we're like chemically imbalanced, and there's all of these kind of like old patterns that have been running us for so long. I could literally tell you the secrets of the universe in that moment, and I, I was this person, like you could give me any information, and I still would rather just exit the game. Like, you know, I went through suicide, suicidal ideation, and when you are in that space, it colors the whole world so differently, it doesn't matter what information is given to you, right? And so you're literally like you're, you're playing, uh, You're trying to bring logic to a, like a chemistry project that like is just it's an, it's an emotional problem. You can't solve it with logic, but at the same time, it's the thin end of the wedge because, because massive action is like you said, it's extremely difficult to take when you want to exit the game. That's the only massive action you want to take. So sometimes you just need that tiny end of the wedge to go in first and then you slowly start prying it open and that's when you can, it's like I always picture it from that scene in Kill Bill when she's in the hospital bed and she's in a coma and she's just like, She's like, OK, I just gotta move my big toe or my finger. I just gotta move my toe. She finally gets her toe and then she gets another toe and then she gets her foot and then her leg, and then she's free and.

It's like that, like when you're in such a dark place, you're paralyzed. Sometimes you just got to move your fucking big toe and just work your way up. I agree. I imagine Tony Robbins will make a, you know, introduction AI course to sell to everybody out of their jobs and whatnot. Tony, Tony's actually already talking about this exact conversation right now because he sees what's coming. I think the best thing, people like us who have an insight. People around you, it's, it's all about community. So just seeing if somebody's struggling, just sitting with them and giving them some tools or teaching them a little bit or getting together with some friends and just teaching them some stuff, because the more like, we're all super into it and we can go back and forth, but then we have people in our lives who are barely using it at all, but just giving them even like, hey, sitting with 20 minutes just showing them some stuff that Just compounds so much. And I think it's gonna be important for communities to just get together and be like, hey, let's just tinker with this together, because that's the only way people are going to get through this is they got to start.

You know, getting together and trying these things and, and relying on people that do have this information, and there are way more of us that do. Like, there's tons of us out there, we're, we're just, you know, entrepreneurs and whatnot, but we can spread, like we can teach somebody some basics of AI pretty quickly, or at least give them a positive frame, which can help them with their anxiety. Be like, look, it's not that crazy. Trust. I've talked a lot of people down and they see it in a different way and they're like, OK, wow, this is kind of exciting. And then I was like, hey, look what you can do with this or this or this, and that feeds into other people they know. And yeah, even with their own businesses, what they're trying to do, I'm like, look, you can do this for your current business or whatnot. Why don't you try to implement this? And I think that'll spread if we keep doing little things like that. And I think I was watching a bunch of CEOs and they're talking about how I think it was the rail, the railroad system was like a, I'm fucking, I'm gonna fuck this up super bad, but they made a shit ton of money. Maybe it was the Rockefellers, and they were the ones who put a bunch of money into the railway system. Uh, these giant companies are going to make insane amounts of money. They need to take a certain amount of that profit and interject it into communities for helping them build or take care of themselves, not the government, right?

Because they're gonna keep taking most of the money. And there's a podcast, they were like, we should give a certain percentage of our profits back because it's, people are just are not going to be able to make enough, right? And I think that's a smart way to, because you want to bring everybody along or else you're not gonna have any customers. Right? So And it's a, you know, That's uh one of the best things you can do cause all these guys that are in AI, I believe most of them are profoundly excited, especially Elon, for the expansion of consciousness. And if that is his true goal, then you gotta make sure everybody else on earth doesn't fucking blow each other up. So you gotta invest back in your people. Mhm. I'm a perma optimist for the record. I just think transitions are messy. No, I 100% agree. It's gonna get real rough for sure. Real rough. Yeah, and it's not going to be evenly distributed everywhere, right? It doesn't like, no, you know, some places will flourish, other people's will struggle.

You'll see whole towns that will just evaporate because certain businesses that were the whole employment for that town are just under, and they, they got taken up by the wave. This happens with every technological movement, and it re-patterns the entire world in this case. Back then it was like when we built the railroads, it re-patterned the entire United States. This is an international, worldwide, no matter where you are, this wave will affect you, and it's just, it's just to what level? Yeah, I, in some ways, it's great for certain people overseas, like our social media guy, shout out to cleric, he's in the Philippines and he's crushing it with AI. The dude's fucking building giant companies and he's 20 years old, still in college and whatnot, and we're probably wouldn't have any of these opportunities if he didn't have any of these tools. So it's like, It's like up and down everywhere, right? It's a I'm excited, but obviously, yeah, I understand there'll be a lot of turmoil.

Hm, yeah, so you need. You know, industrial revolution. Anytime something new, some new technology comes around, a large segment of the population. We'll get decimated, but to your perma optimism point. The best, you know, the best times are ahead of that. The, the most technologically advanced, um, civilizations have to go through these waves. So we also don't know what we don't know. So we're going to solve new physics. Yeah, we already are. We're going to solve material sciences. It's going to just like somehow plastics will just not be a thing in our future. Like that's, that's the vision in the dream, and there are many, many companies that are doing this. We're Uh, we're bringing back certain species of extinct animals, like the bullly mammoth, right? Like these are real things that are playing out right now, but right in front of plain sight, like you can go invest in them if you want. Uh, and so what we can't see is, you know, our human minds love to just anchor to the, uh, the fear and anchor to the negative, because that's the part that could kill us, right? So that's just how our brains work safety, and it takes.

A complete like effort of mind and shifting of perspective to bring you to, well, like, what's the counterbalance to that, right? So as much as the US debt and all of the, you know, Western monetary systems are all in massive debt and are on the verge of eventual collapse. There's really only one thing that could counterbalance that, and that's an insane amount, like a 5X, 10x GDP that increases because of technology, and technology is inherently um uh What's the word I'm looking for? Uh, deflationary, right? So things become cheaper, more people use it, more people get creative ideas, it expands all the ways that we build, expands where we can live and how we can live. Uh, and so that's that transition period where it's going to happen fast, it's gonna happen. There's going to be plenty of people who are successful, and then it's going to require like a, a nimble mind. In order to operate in that space on a regular basis because of the speed and the, the, the volume of transition that's gonna happen like right in front of our faces, uh, you know, and in our phones and everywhere we are. And so the question is like what tools are you going to use to stay nimble? And that's where I keep coming back to how do you maintenance your body and your mind.

Journeys, ceremonies, uh, will be one of the ways to do that. So on that note, how do people find vessel and try it and contact you? For sure. So we're in beta mode right now, we have the love stack that's available, uh, we hand pack those lovingly, uh, in my house, and it is my vessel, V E S S E L L and dot co. And so that's where we just, yeah, we sell them uh to mostly practitioners right now, but people who are hosting events and Different levels of that. So that's, uh, that's where we are right now. We're in a fundraising process, and probably in the next 3 to 4 weeks. I look forward to closing some of that, uh, and getting started on actually the final version of this, the brand, the formulas to get this out at scale, um, and have it ready to go for, you know, really the goal is to launch by Burning Man. So, we got about 4 months. Damn, till we're hitting play. Nimble Mind is a great name for a product in your line.

Just saying that's a, that's a cool nimble mind like that. I like it. Yeah, that's a, that's a good name. I love what you're doing. I think it's essential. It was gonna happen and it, it's so funny to think about my 17 year old self taking an ecstasy tab in a warehouse under the freeway in Seattle, now sitting here podcasting about optimizing for MDMA trips as AI is about to transform the world. It's like, Fuck, that's wild. I love it. Nimble mind, nimble mind. Things change and we need to change with them. Well, Michael, thanks for sharing your nimble mind with us, my friend. Oh, it was a pleasure, guys. Yeah, it's fantastic, man. Uh, come back, share your stories when you've pushed this out in the world a little more, and, uh. We'd love to hear them. We'll do episode two after you're on the playa and you've launched. I love it, man. That would be, uh, truly like an epic, epic run between now and then. And so that's what we're doing, just like ceremonies, just drop in at different times to see how the story unfolds.

And we're, we're all, our stories are all unfolding very quickly, whether, whether we choose to have them unfold or not, they are playing out fast, uh, and it's important that we, we support each other, number one as a community. So thank you for having me. Thank you for being an awesome friend who supported with the different events we've thrown. Um, those are more than just parties that we put together. Those are opportunities for people to find the others with the nimble minds and the people who are willing to, you know, act in a courageous way. Uh, in a time that really is, is, is pushing us all for, for courage, right? Think differently and to see the world in a different set of eyes, uh, and it helps when your buddies are around you supporting you and being like, it's OK, like, You, you, you can come to the ceremony, like we'll take care of you and we'll show you a different way. And, uh, that's how I got brought in. That's how so many people get brought in, um, and there's amazing, amazing facilitators and practitioners out there who are like really doing the, the courageous work. In the underground, right, to support each one of us, and we're kind of popping off and raising our hand and saying like, I think I would like to step into, uh, the arena that is, um, shifting our minds and our, our perceptions of the world.

So, love it. Awesome. Michael Plano, thank you, my friend. Pleasure, brother. Till next time. Till next time.