ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the true life podcast I hope that everybody's day is going beautiful I hope that the sun is shining I hope the birds are singing and the wind is at your back I got a great show for you today He's been on the show before. Incredible guy. And I want to welcome everybody to this space where boundaries dissolve and the depths of self-awareness are the ultimate frontier. Today's guest is someone who thrives at the intersection of entrepreneurship, mental health and psychedelics. A true pioneer of the inner world and outer worlds. After two decades as a serial entrepreneur, he recognized that the path of true fulfillment lies not just in building business, but in building better versions of ourselves. Meet G.V. Freeman, unstucker of humans, optimistic, and a fearless tipper of sacred cows. He embodies a Venn diagram where ancient wisdom meets modern dilemmas using centuries-old tools to address the struggles of today. G.V. stands at the sacred, secular crossroads, guiding those who feel stuck. those who have achieved outward success but are still yearning for inner peace, inspiration, and purpose. Whether through transformational coaching, a psychedelic consultation, or masterminds, GV helps clients break through barriers and unlock deeper levels of satisfaction. He's the guide you call after all the other guides have fallen short, and he's here to take us on a profound journey, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome, GV Freeman. How are you, my friend? I'm doing fantastic, George. Thank you for having me here. That's quite an introduction. You did a lot of research and concatenation to come up with all of that. So I appreciate your wisdom and expertise. Well, it's coming right back to you. We have had some really interesting conversations in the past, and I wanted to do justice to this conversation. I know you've got some new work out there, some new ideas, some of them controversial, some of them novel. And before we really jump into that, though, what's on your radar, man? How have you been? What's on your radar and what's going on? Well, how I've been has been as usual in this kind of work. It has been mountains and valleys, to be sure. Totally. This year has been a pretty wild year. I started this upcoming project, which we're going to talk about called Healing with Psychedelics. I started it last November, about a year ago. I drafted the table of contents for that book in Peru last November, and I spent the better part of this year working on that. And what's coming up next is in about three weeks, I had back to Peru, uh, myself and some folks are going to go down there and do some deep work. I spend a, I typically spend a month in Peru in November, uh, down there with my teachers. So that's what's on the horizon. And then when I come back, we go into full swing of publishing and marketing this book and seeing what happens. So, yeah, it's, it's, What was it like? What was there something that that this book or these ideas that have come to you was is the process like, OK, here's some new ideas that I've been thinking about. They're finally catalyzed and finally ready to go. How does that process look like for you? So it's important to remember that I spent almost twenty five years in corporate and I spent most of those years in technology. My original degree is computer information systems. I have realized over the years that my brain sort of is a systems thinking brain. So I take a whole. whole bunch of information. And I've done this a couple of times before. My first book was called the SAS field manual. And I essentially did the exact same thing. I had spent a number of years helping and mentoring founders of tech companies and who had no idea what they were getting into when they built the software company. They thought that it was just build like it's sort of the field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. And that was not how software worked. And there were so many people who just were missing so many pieces of the puzzle of starting a company. So I wrote this first little like eighty, ninety page book. And I handed it to entrepreneurs and said, here, read this. It'll take you a few hours. At the end of this book, you're either going to say, yep, this is for me. Or you're going to say, oh, hell no. Like this is way more complicated than what I thought it was. That is what essentially has happened over the last decade with Healing with Psychedelics and the framework that I put together for this. Because what I realized was there's so many people that are wanting to do this work. And there's so many places for information, but there was no easy to follow path or container that held all of this information in like a reasonable way. I have to be honest, eighty percent of the content that people are going to find in this book, especially those that are experienced in the field. They're going to look at this and say, well, duh, like I know that. And that is absolutely true. And the problem is that you most of the time we learn all of that through enormous amounts of trial and error, through enormous amounts of like seeking online and reading blog posts and research studies and all sorts of stuff. So what I did was I used the same kind of methodology. I took a whole bunch of topics. I put them into big buckets, and then I name those buckets, and I write about them. So that's essentially what we did. It's basically like designing a big, giant psychedelic website. Yeah, it's... The deeper you go, the bigger it gets. And I find myself sometimes thinking about, you know, even... things that people who read about psychedelics especially people who do a lot of them think that they may understand microdosing is one of those on some level like everyone I know has experienced macro dosing, micro dosing, but I can still see how in today's world, it's beginning to catch a certain type of fire that may not have been caught before. And it seems that micro dosing is spreading out through the world and maybe reaching people it's never reached before. I recently read a blog post of yours. It has some kind of interesting ideas about the relationship between micro dosing and coaching. And I kind of wanted to put you on the spot here and see if you could just hash out some of those ideas with me. Well, thanks for starting a fire with the second question. I would say that out of... There's only been two posts that I have ever created or published on LinkedIn that have caused quite a ruckus. And this was one of those posts. In fairness, it started... with a researcher from the Imperial College of London who published a paper that was discussing the success rate of microdosing. And he all but said, there's a good chance that microdosing might not work as well as we thought it did. And research shows that a lot of this is the placebo effect. And my... very flippant in all honesty my very flippant comment to on his post was I look forward to the day when microdosing coaches are irrelevant and holy did I upset the apple cart in the psychedelic landscape uh at least those on linkedin I don't know today. There is some more research that has come out. This was probably a year and a half ago. There's some more research that has come out that does give a little more credence to microdosing. And I know people who have received enormous benefit to microdosing. So if it is a practice that you're interested in and you feel like it is legal enough in your jurisdiction to try it, feel free to do that. My problem is not with microdosing and the outcomes that come out of it. My, my challenge that I offer to people is, and this goes for psychedelics and microdoses or macro doses. If you remove the substance, would you still work with this person? So the, the way that I kind of frame it is Don't necessarily work with a microdosing coach, work with a coach who might use microdosing. It's a subtle shift, but when you place all of your eggs in the basket of microdosing, That you're missing a lot. So find a coach who actually knows what they're doing. Find a coach who can take you to where you want to go and knows the path. And then let microdosing be the tool that widens your window of tolerance. Whether it does or doesn't, if you believe it does, great. And you will get more positive benefits if you believe it does. But it doesn't, in all honesty, it doesn't require a coach to use microdosing. There are fifty journals online that you could probably buy pretty inexpensively on Amazon that will teach you how to microdose. It's not a complex process. So to all of the microdosing coaches out there, I honor the work that you are getting. I honor the the outcomes, the positive outcomes that you are getting from your clients. But take ownership of your coaching ability and let the microdosing do whatever it's going to do. But don't focus on the substance. Focus on the quality of the content and the coaching and all of the work that you're doing with that human. So I don't know if that's what you wanted or not. I brought it up because I feel like the same thing too. I'm not against... on some level I'm for a lot of the world of psychedelics. Like I want to see change. I want to see people find a way to become the best versions of themselves, but it's, it's almost irresponsible to say that there's not a lot of cash grabs out there. You know, it seems to me on some level, you're beginning to see the instrument become institutionalized. And when I see micro dosing coaches or, or guides on some level that are offering, you know, forever counseling. Like, okay, that's a problem. Like, especially for microdosing, like microdosing should be, if you need someone for an introduction to show you the head of the trail, I got it. There it is. Hey, here it is right here. I'm gonna take you on one quick hike. And then there's all these flags. You go off how you want to, but to, to be with a microdosing coach for more than like three months, I, I think that the coaching is being a little bit, you know, there's a problem there. There seems to be a relationship that's starting out a little bit disingenuous. Like this should be like, I'm going to show you how to use this and you're on your own because you can handle it on some level. Is that, what do you think? I would, I would totally agree. If you are truly a microdosing coach, it shouldn't take more than a month. Right, right. You can teach people how to microdose and how to be, You can give them a few practices and journal prompts that they can do on their own pretty effectively. But after you have taught the basics of microdosing, you're no longer a microdosing coach anymore. So at that point, become the coach that you really are destined to be. I think there's a huge number of coaches out there who are doing amazing work with their clients. But it's not solely related to the microdosing. It's the work that as coaches, we are trying to get clients to move into these deeper and deeper realms that create ongoing sustainable change and transformation. The microdoses are just there to help us maybe calm our nervous system a little bit, to widen our window of tolerance. There's a whole bunch of things that it can do. And if in fact, I don't know today if we can actually prove that microdosing increases neuroplasticity. We know that macrodosing does, but I don't think there is actually a study that shows microdosing increases neuroplasticity. If there is, somebody please comment and tell me that I'm wrong because all publicity is good publicity, I guess. yeah yeah it's true I I've always found that the macro dose is where the change is and that the micro doses on some they seem to keep those tendrils of ideas connected on some level so if you if you have whatever your strategy is for me it's been some pretty big doses and then I'll use a micro dose to stay in tune with the frequency with which I've been kind of guided on that level, but it's interesting. And I know it works for different people in different ways. I just want to send everybody within the shadow of my voice. If you're going to microdose, it's something you could do. Be careful. Choose your stuff out there, but don't get sucked into being with someone strictly for microdosing for a long period of time. I think you're on the wrong path there. If you go down that road too much, but. And in fairness, just recently, within the last two, I don't know, two, three months, there has been sort of a, let's call it a scandal in the world of psychedelics with people producing chocolate bars that were intended for microdosing that have put a whole bunch of people in the hospital. So your microdoses don't need to come in chocolate. They don't need to come in capsule form. They can literally be picked out of your garden and dried and used in a scale that and dropped in your yogurt in the morning if you want to. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than people are making it. Yeah, you know what? I was talking to the incredible journalist Jack Gorslin the other day, and he was talking about some of these head shops that are being rated for psilocybin-like substances or these derivatives that are finding in these chocolate bar gas stations and stuff like that. Do you think that that's a real threat, GV, to be this whole thing kind of being shut down and trying to put the genie back in the bottle? I don't think it's a real threat. I don't think it helps. I think for anybody who wants this to not happen, I think that that is evidence to slow the process. Maybe that is. I don't think the genie is going to go back in the bottle at this point. It will be too hard for politicians. and lawmakers to interrupt the research that's happening right now. And frankly, Lycosmaps and the failure that they recently had with the FDA, that hasn't stopped any research. The research is continuing. We know that these things work, but it will definitely slow the process down. So I think that the commercialization, the fast commercialization of all of this in some ways, has slowed it down. I think that we're, you know, in the Gartner hype cycle, you know, we have, we have reached the peak of an, maybe maps, the conference psychedelic science conference of was maybe the peak of inflated expectations and the hype cycle. We are probably entering into sort of a trough of delusion meant at one level, At the marketing capitalistic level, we have now fallen into or are entering into a trough of delusion. But I will tell you, there's been people that have not changed their practice, not changed their offering throughout this entire course, throughout this entire last three or four years of hype. There's a lot of folks that are doing the exact same thing they're doing today as they were doing yesterday. And it hasn't changed. Yeah. the on the topic of of that I can't get away from this idea of like power dynamics on some level gb like the idea of whether it's gas station chocolate or it's it's the maps and lycos debacle that kind of happened what like Let me ask you this question. Is it possible to have a thorough relationship in guiding people? Like there's like, how do you as an individual deal with attraction and power in non-ordinary states of consciousness? I know that's kind of a big question, but like, I think it's relevant. Attraction and power and altered states of consciousness. Give me just a second here. It's a big one. I know. Yeah. What I started to write down was the word Aini in Quechua, A-Y-N-I, is roughly translated to sacred reciprocity. And to translate that even one step further, sacred reciprocity is this idea of today for you, tomorrow for me. And I think that when we're in all of these relationships, sacred reciprocity must be the foundation that we're building upon. I think of a lot of this, what you just referred to as the difference between givers and takers. Yeah. Capitalism, late-stage capitalism, and our culture today tends to focus on extraction. We extract as much value as we can from a lot of things and a lot of cultures. And if you take before you give, you are out of the sacred reciprocal agreement. So when we're in a session... We have to give first and the giving in this case, I think is, I'm gonna use some weird language here, but it's the giving of the reduction of suffering. So we are giving people the tools, we are giving people our skills, our energy, our transmission to reduce their suffering. But we have to give that first, you know, one of my first bosses years ago, when I asked him for a raise, I went in during my yearly review and said, I'm doing all of this hard work. I want a raise. And you know what he told me is great. Go out and make more money, make more money for the company. And I will give you a raise. I will. And in this case, he said, I'll pay you one third of the revenue that you generate next year. He already had the model in our industry and the technology industry consulting that salaries were one third of revenue generated. But the important part is that I had to generate the revenue first and then I got my reward. It's the same thing in, I believe, in the healing space. We have to give first before we can take. My teachers in Peru, the maestro that I study with, when I go down there in November and I will pay for him and his brothers, all of their expenses. I cover that up front. And at the end of that experience, they ask me, brother, how much do you want to pay? Do what you feel. They believe that God will take care of all of the finances for them. They don't specifically set a price for me to come down and do my work. I pay them what I can and what I feel like is in sacred reciprocity. Yeah, I like that. I wish more of the world could work that way. you know, it, and maybe like, maybe that is how it works on a cosmic level. This idea that we live in this idea that we're paid a salary or just maybe is the illusion. Maybe the real payout is you are getting in your life, which you've given already. I mean, therein lies the, the secret, the movie, the book, right? It is a universal law. And while I don't, The Buddha said, don't worry about karma. It's too complicated to understand. We do not understand how karma fructifies in our life and whether it's going to fructify in this lifetime or the next lifetime and where our karma came from. But yeah, I think that everything is balanced. From the one becomes the two. The yin and the yang. The dark and the light. And from the two become the many. And we all have to go back from the many through the two and back to the one. And it's all just different levels of reality. Absolute reality is one. Then we have dualistic reality, which is two. And then all of that two is one. Shown in our life by all of these little human beings walking around trying to do the best they can and I think that if we were able to Think on a more sacred reciprocal level We wouldn't have so much suffering in the world today but it's really hard to do that when our nervous systems have been hijacked by scarcity and Yeah, it's a good point. It's such a great tool for growth to see this bigger picture when you are down in the deep valleys of despair. In your book, you get into a really cool story of an individual that that his journey with psychedelics influences understanding of self-reality and healing kind of what we're talking about now maybe if you don't want to can you share a little bit of the the magic in this story of an individual that you spoke to in the book for sure I think that it's interesting there's a couple of interesting parts of his specific story and one is that It evolved the concept of psychedelics being a silver bullet or a magic pill. And that when we take this thing, we do this journey one time and all of our problems are solved. But what happened to him is that in his mid-fifties, He began suffering from treatment resistant depression that was so severe. And he, if I'm not mistaken, this individual, his undergrad at Stanford, his MBA at Harvard, and he was in the finance world and everything was going great. He had a few kids, he had a loving wife. And then in his mid fifties, this depression set in and he didn't know why nothing significantly changed in his life. Now, what we came to realize later is that for at least two or three generations in his family, his, his mother and his grandmother, and maybe he's like great grandmother, uncle, somebody had all had this happen and they had all begin to suffer depression in their mid fifties. And I think there's a book called, it didn't start with you that talks about epigenetic trauma. And I, he came to me to start doing some of this work and he had tried pharmaceuticals and they somewhat helped but the the side effects were really intense so he wanted to try and find a different way and for his path it was a one-on-one psychedelic experience first which was then followed by two or three group experiences. And after that, it was followed by some really intense coaching work that we're still doing today. He and I work on a weekly basis. And it incorporates a lot of concepts from Advaita Vedanta and from Buddhism and from many sacred traditions. But what he realized is that so much of his thinking was distorted. And as he began slowly uncovering and learning the truth, his depression began to subside. And today he would tell you that he is living a better life than he was living before the depression. And he is so incredibly grateful, which I would tell you is a part of his practice, is the gratitude practice that we have incorporated into his work has been profound for him. But it took multiple experiences and it took dedicated work in integration and what I call activation. To actually put these changes, implement these changes into his life. And as a result of that, he has adopted psychedelics as a practice, not as an event. And the practice of that combined with a lot of deep integration and activation have totally changed his life for the better. Yeah, I like the word that you use, activation. And in your recent writings, you have put together a lot of newer things that I haven't seen before, particularly around integration and the ideas of the healing with psychedelic cycle. Maybe you could talk about, first off, what was it that made you come to these sort of new ideas? Was this something that you saw maybe wasn't working anymore, was not working in your practice, was not working in your life? Was it just something, was it just an addition that came to you? It's like, you know what, this would work better if we added this in there. Can you tell us about that trial and error and how this came to be? It goes back to this idea of systems thinking. And it goes back to my experience both doing my own work and also helping the members of our church do their work. And And then I think it culminated. I wrote a book in twenty twenty one called it was just a short book. It started off as a blog post that then turned into a thing called the Psychedelic Field Manual. And that was the beginning of this book, the beginning of the new book. And really what I did was I came up with all the topics that I wanted to talk about. And in the marketing world, there is a concept called card sorting. So if you were creating a new website, you would actually create an index card, whether it's on paper or online, but you would write a topic down on an index card. And then you put those cards into piles. You group them into piles of similarity. So you have all of these cards, you stack them into piles. And when I did that, I took all of the topics that I thought needed to be addressed in psychedelics for beginners. I took all those topics, I put them into piles, and then I named those piles. And those piles then ended up becoming what I now refer to as the psychedelic safety wheel. And there's really, there's, if you think of a circle with, twelve different vertices or axes, I guess, that start from the center and move out to the outside. That is the psychedelic safety wheel. And for anybody who is experienced with psychedelics, none of this is inherently novel. So I don't claim to take credit for let's say, eighty percent of this content, I think I have I'm taking credit for the ability to put it in a usable format. But right. If I if I just went through them roughly that it starts out with benefits, then it looks at risks. Psychedelics do have risks. They are all low, but they do have risks, intention, dosage, substance, what medicine you're going to take. Facilitation, preparation, mindset, setting, the experience itself, your journey, then integration and activation. Those twelve buckets hold just about everything a seeker needs to be aware of. And the other part of this that I think is really important is there's so much emphasis right now being put on the guides, the facilitators, the clinicians. All the responsibility is being put on these people. to manage all twelve of these aspects and to keep seekers safe in an ethical way. And I think that's a mistake. We are pumping. There are one hundred and fifty plus psychedelic training companies out there right now pumping people through certifications. Yeah. And a lot of these people do not have any psychotherapeutic background. They've not been trained. I worked with with researchers, clinicians, whose only psychedelic training before they were serving twenty five milligrams of psilocybin to their to their research participants was going through holotropic breathwork. That was the the amount of their training. So if you're a seeker out there thinking about going into a research study, just know that the people that are doing research on you might have a whole hell of a lot less training than an underground guide. But what I really created this framework for was for seekers. This is what I refer to as bottom-up harm reduction. Rather than placing all of the responsibility on the guide to manage the whole process, what I think we should start doing is educating the population that says, hey, if you want to come do this work, great, come do it. But buyer beware. You do more work, you do more research buying a washing machine on consumer reports than you do with a psychedelic facilitator or doing a journey down in Peru. And I think we need to swap where the responsibility lies. For sure, the facilitator has a lot of responsibility. But as a seeker, if you're going into brain surgery, you or mind surgery, as the case may be, you should probably do a lot of research. So sorry, that was a big, long winded answer to a very short question. No, it's beautiful. And I think it's it's relevant. You know, when I lived in Hawaii, I so many people would come to Hawaii and just stay in Waikiki. Like you would fly. They pay all this money and they would go to Oahu and they would just stay in Waikiki and never leave. Like in some ways, I think that it's that sort of. surface level tourism that we're seeing in psychedelics. Like you are on some level by just by going someplace, you're already getting leverage on yourself to make a, to make, to have a change in your life. Like, okay, I'm going to do this thing. So you go to a brand new area. All of a sudden you have a change of scenery. You have a change of heart. You It's important to understand that if you do the work yourself and you start analyzing and looking at all these different dimensions of measurement that can change in your life. And you know what? You can go right on your website. If you have so much free content on your website, that's one thing I love about it. You can go on to get free manuals. free meetings. There's so much cool free stuff on your website. Everybody should go check it out in the show notes. But yeah, I think that's a big part of it. You don't need to really go outside of yourself when you can go inside yourself and begin this journey on some level. And that's what I think that in this new book, you're really hammering in. Like, look, it's right here. If you want to begin this journey, here's all the things you can do right now. I think that that is something that seems to be... And that's kind of a roundabout way of saying everyone right now is commercializing and certifying. Hey, go do this. Go meet these guys. Just do it yourself. Here it is right here. And then the teacher will show up. And then you'll know what it is you want to look for in order to solve the problem that may be unique to you instead of just going and getting the McDonald's of transformation. That's exactly right. Most people start their transformational journey with the body usually the body is one of the first places that we see dis ease yeah so weight weight gain high blood pressure you know things like that start to pop up first so we we start eating healthy we go to the gym we try and change our physical appearance our physical body then You're running on the treadmill one day and you're listening to a pie. You're listening to the True Life podcast. You're listening to Brene Brown. You're listening to something that is like, huh, I learned something new today that helps me explain why I eat the way that I do or why I think the way that I think. Now we have moved into the mental body. So a little subtler than the physical body. The mental body is our thoughts, our knowledge, our wisdom. From there, then people say, huh, I am starting to recognize that I have a pattern that when this person says this specific thing to me, it makes me mad or it makes me sad. Now you start moving into the emotional body. Again, a little more subtle. And this is where we start seeing a therapist or we work with a coach. And typically where people are going to for psychedelic work, like the psychedelic work tends to originate when we start noticing maladaptations in our emotional body. And then finally, we move into a more subtle state of the spiritual body. And that's where. people come to spiritual practices personally. There's, there's a lot of differences between religion and spirituality and you can choose whether or not we want to go there or not. But, um, spiritual practices I believe have they they show their rewards in the moment religion has a tendency to push the rewards off until we die religion says if you do good now you'll get your just dessert once you uh leave this human body spirituality promises that we get our rewards now and everything that you seek is already within us, we just have to find it. It is a process of remembering who we truly are. And self realization. Yeah, I've been reading quite a few articles on on the way in which particularly science is showing the Nate is finally kind of catching up to spirituality on some level, you know, for so long, we have put these things on two different sides. Science seems to throw out anything. It can't measure. Okay. We can't measure that. It doesn't exist. Spirituality seems to have a way of pointing towards that, that change that we want to be. And, and, And it being something we can't thoroughly put into words. What's your take on science catching up to spirituality? Or is it just part of the same? Is it part of the same picture? Part of the same wholeness? Or how do we tackle that? Science and spirituality. What do you think? First off, I think that we are driven by scientific materialism. And that concept originates from... Maybe as simple as we can make it, you have to see it to believe it. Well said. And spirituality originates from the reverse of that. You have to believe it to see it. And do I think that science and spirituality are merging closer and closer together? Absolutely. I think that what we're seeing in quantum theory, and I am not a physicist and I don't know if string theory can, it cannot thus far be proven, but I think that just based on how close science is, is actually coming to what the Rishis in India were teaching three thousand five hundred years ago and what they talk about in the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata. String theory proposes that everything is energy. We're all strings of energy vibrating at different frequencies. And when you compress or bind together these strings tight enough, these pieces of the strings of energy look like matter. They look like solid structures. Well, that is exactly what the Rishis talked about when they referred to the Brahman in Vedanta. The Brahman is this substratum of everything. It is an energetic source that has always been and will always be. It moves from unmanifest to manifest. And when it becomes manifest, it creates solid structures, right? this is the foundation of the idea. Like when we say we are God and God's a really tricky word for people. So maybe I should say we are infinite source. That's a, that's a more generic term that people are universe or spirit or like whatever you want to use. But the idea that the Brahman creates us and that we are at our deepest level of The same thing as the Brahman, which the rishis referred to as the Atman. That is our own little piece of the Brahman that exists within us. It's part of our soul, our psyche. It's hidden. What the rishi said, it's hidden in the Hridayam or the heart cave. It is the place, if you put your hand in the center of your chest, which would be over your fourth chakra, it exists in the heart cave. And this Atman and the Brahman only have three characteristics. Only three. Universal existence, meaning that it always was and it always will be. universal truth, meaning that it knows everything, therefore we know everything, and it is the source of bliss. So at our core, we are blissful. We have just forgotten that. But where science and spirituality meet is in that place. We are all just energy, right? And depending on how tightly bound together that energy is will change how we've the frequency of our vibration. Yeah. It's interesting to think like you work with a lot of different people and you have seen people create big changes in their life. You have created giant changes in your life. Do you, Do you think that that – and you had mentioned the term dis-ease when we look at people's bodies, or you could probably just pull up the DSM and look at that as a – It seems to me like all these diseases, this dis-ease is our problem trying to function in a world that is sick. When you help people and the help that you've done in your life, do you think that helping yourself and healing is just coming to terms with the idea of finding out who you really are? Yeah, that's exactly what it is. If we imagine... a moment that this this brahman the source of everything the substratum of everything if a little piece of that is within us and that's called the akhman that's our soul right our soul now I'm going to switch over to another concept so david hawkins wrote power versus force What was the name of that again? I'm sorry. Power versus Force by David Hawkins. I think it was in nineteen ninety four. And David Hawkins presented what he refers to as the map of consciousness. And through a whole bunch of kinesiology, muscle testing, millions of muscle tests over twenty years. that on average humans vibrate at a or have a frequency of a certain level and his lowest vibration is shame and that's a shame vibrates it he calls an energetic log of twenty and enlightenment vibrates at a thousand So remember, we started talking about energy and waves. We know that energy has a certain frequency and a certain amplitude. So if we look at the average vibration of ourselves... We are vibrating at an average rate. The most suffering that I experience in people are those who vibrate at a level of two hundred or below. So this is shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire. So. When we, all of that stuff is just extra residue that has been, all of those low vibration frequencies are just residue that we have collected over the years. And some of it was handed to us, karma from a past life. Some of it we create in this life. Some of it, if we led traumatic or neglectful childhoods, we hold a lot of this low vibration residue. healing we need nothing to heal you need nothing new to heal you only need to release what is not you because you at your deepest level at self with a capital s self with a capital s vibrates at this pure satchitananda enlightenment level And all we need to do is get rid of everything that is not that. That's what the, in Advaita Vedanta, we call it neti neti. We figure out not this, not that. We figure out everything that is not us. Everything that is not us, we can let go of. And then what we are left with is us, is the self. And the self is pure bliss. So healing is just remembering who we are from the very beginning. We just forgot. That's what they called Maya. It is the grand illusion. I think on some level now I'm connecting the idea of the wheel we talked about earlier and all these buckets in which you can begin your journey. Sometimes like the first step of that journey is hard. Like when we started thinking about getting rid of the things that aren't you. And then, okay, well, how do I do that? How do you do that? How do you get rid of the things that aren't you? I'm sure the first part is awareness. However, how do you start taking these steps to get rid of the things that aren't you? Well, we sort of talked about it, right? We start with the physical body. You go work out. You want to change your physical body. You want to get healthier. That's the beginning way. And then we learn a little bit. We move to the mental body. We start experiencing our emotions and we realize, you know what? I don't want to be angry anymore. One of the first ways to start healing is to begin recognizing that we are not our feelings. I think in cognitive behavioral therapy, they say feelings aren't facts. Right. And in Advaita Vedanta, we would say, if I can observe something, it is not me. So if I can observe my anger, that anger is not me. And if I want to be a less angry person, I need to figure out what's causing that anger. Usually anger sits on top of fear. Fear sits on top of sadness. So I go back and I find the source of that anger and the fear and the sadness, and I release it. When I release that low vibration piece of energy in yoga or in traditional Eastern wisdom, we would call it a samskara. Besser van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, says that trauma is stored in the body, in the nervous system. Well, the nervous system runs on electricity. If trauma is stored in the nervous system, then it's just low vibration electricity. And if we release the low vibrations, over time with the more vibrations that we release, the higher our average frequency grows. And once you make it past, in Hawkins' map, once you make it past two hundred, you start You move away from a survival paradigm. So, two hundred and below is survival. We're just trying to get by. And this is where most people start their healing journey. They are just surviving. But once you build enough strength in your system and you release enough of the old crap, Then you move above two hundred courage. Courage is the swing point. Courage is the middle of the pendulum. When you move into courage, now you are growing. Now you start to actually experience life in a in a new and profound way. But we have to get rid of all that low crap first. And we do that with working out. We do that with therapy. We do that with coaching. We do that with meditation. You can start your journey anywhere. I spent ten days in silent meditation in Vipassana, and that was my first moment of self-realization. It felt like ants were eating off the side of my face for at least a minute. And in that practice, we become equanimous to these feelings. So I chose not to be happy or sad that my face was being eaten off by a swarm of ants. But in that moment... What was happening, what I didn't realize until three months later after sitting in that moment, was that the feeling of being broken had been taken away from me. I didn't even know that I thought that I was broken. I didn't know that I felt that I was broken. But for whatever reason, that was taken away from me in that one minute of meditation. So... Choose whatever path is most accessible to you. If that's going to the gym, if that's going for a walk for thirty minutes a day, that's where you start. Psychedelics are not the entry point. I would tell most people do not enter your healing journey with the trail ahead of psychedelics because it could be a really challenging experience. How old were you when you had that experience of the ants in that particular meditation? That happened in twenty twenty. It was the first Vipassana meditation retreat that came back online after COVID. It was in the middle of rural Idaho. And I had been I had been intended to go to a Joseph Goldstein retreat in on the East Coast. And that retreat was canceled because of COVID. And the next day I woke up and said, well, if I can't go on that, I've always kind of wanted to do this Vipassana thing. And there was one retreat center in the entire world that had just opened up registration spots. And I happened to be one of the first people to sign up. So it was a little bit of divine intervention. Einstein said, synchronicity is God's way of remaining anonymous. And this was... I'm sorry, he said coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. I think synchronicity was a Carl Jung quote. But that's how I ended up there. It brings up the idea that you talk about in your book too about us being both divine and human. But before I jump into that one, everything prior to – I want to tie in the idea of – of courage, healing, and low vibration. It seems to me, and not starting your journey at psychedelics, was everything before twenty twenty necessary in order for you to find the courage, the role of the trials and tribulations in your life, living in the corporate world, some of the letdowns, all the the family drama, all the relationship drama. Was that all necessary in order for you to have that moment at that retreat? Yeah. Of course, right? And if we zoom far enough out, we start to realize that everything is perfect. The way that I diagram this to my clients is if you imagine a horizontal line, and in the middle of that line, you draw a straight vertical line. So it looks like an upside down T and when we're born, we start at where those lines intersect. We start at the base of that upside down T and we are that the, the horizontal line represents suffering. The vertical line represents Dharma or destiny. Um, This is the way that I really think of the difference between fate and free will. So at the beginning of our journey, we're born where suffering is zero. And our dharma or our fate are exactly at the origin point. And for about three years or so, all we can do is just be ourself. If we're hungry, if we want something, we cry. If we're happy, we laugh. Our insides look like our outsides. we have not adapted to the world yet. But then adaptation starts. Our ego begins to form and we begin adapting to the world. And depending on our primary caregivers, we may adapt very well to the world, or we may adapt in a really challenging way. We may have to adopt behaviors that keep us safe or that get our needs met. Now, what happens over time is that your path in life veers off of this vertical line. The farther you veer to the right or the left, of the center line, the more your suffering increases. This is free will. We have relative free will. I don't believe that we actually have free will. We just have the illusion of free will. Because if I act in alignment, if I knew my Dharma, if I knew my Atman, if I knew my true self from the very beginning, I would only do what is in the best alignment with my true self. But that's not how we live. We go out like there's the can I say can I say naughty words on this podcast? Please feel free. There's a great graph. There's a great graph that shows a graph of the more you fuck around, the more you find out. Yeah, totally. So the more we fuck around, the farther our our free will line veers off of the Dharma line. And then we hit a point where life gets really hard. And that's where we then turn back and say, I need to make changes in my life. That's where our line that was moving away, our free will line that was moving away from Dharma now reorients and we move back towards Dharma. And we go back, back, back, back, back. And our life feels amazing. And that's when we're crossing over our Dharma line. And then what do we do? We're like, oh, I should go fuck around a little bit more. And we go to the other side and we fuck around a little bit more until our life gets really challenging. And then we find out that we don't really enjoy that. We start to come back. And at some point in time, we start to realize who we truly are. We start to truly heal. And at that point, we start making decisions that are in alignment with our Dharma. And we stop fucking around quite so much. So yes, the answer to your question is all of this stuff had to happen for me. I was, when I was, when I was, when I was, when I was fourteen years old, I got, I lived in a small Nebraska town, thirty five hundred people. I got outed as a gay kid. Uh, when I was fourteen years old and my whole sophomore year was absolutely horrific. I experienced tremendous bullying and trauma. And so what did I do? I moved to Belgium. I became a foreign exchange student and I lived overseas for eleven months and I started drinking and I started using drugs. And that was the way that was the adaptation that I used to hide all of that difficult experience. All of the relational trauma that occurred to me was being shoved down. It was heavy energy that I stored inside of my system and I made, I numbed it all with substances. And I did that for fifteen years. And then finally, in two thousand seven, I got sober. I started working with a qualified sponsor and and in a lot of ways, twelve step recovery saved my life and it started me on the journey that I am today. And that had to happen for me to heal and for me to end up at a Vipassana retreat and for me to go set with ayahuasca in twenty fifteen and for me to continue doing the work that I'm doing today. It's all perfect. Yeah, I think that that sort of explains the idea about being half divine and half human. I think there's a little bit more that you have in the book. We don't want to give away everything, but is there anything else on that particular topic of being half divine and half human that you want to talk about? Really simply, the Brahman, the Atman, is our divinity. It's always inside of us. we pack on all of this trauma, all of this nervous system dysregulation, all of our relational issues that we've had through life, all of that just shows up as shame and guilt and anger and fear. And it's all just residue waiting to be relieved. Here's a really great analogy. Think of a fishbowl. And the fishbowl itself, the glass bowl is our body. And the water inside the bowl is our mind. If you don't clean that fishbowl, the sides of the fishbowl, they get dirty, they get algae, stuff gets caked on. Again, fishbowl is the body. It's pretty easy to clean the sides of a fishbowl. We can see where that is. algae is and we can reach our hand in there and we can scrub it away that's like going to the gym but now the water is more challenging over time if you have fish in that bowl or even if just if you put the bowl outside dirt is going to collect in the bowl and over time the the dirt in that water filters down settles down to the bottom of the bowl and it creates this layer of sediment on the bottom I think of this layer of sediment as our unconscious mind. We don't have access to our unconscious. It's down there. It's where all this low vibration trauma is stored. And over time, if we don't clean the bowl, it gets thicker and thicker and thicker. But there's always a little bit of dirtiness that's floating around in the water. All we have to do to heal is is find a filter. And filters can be made of all sorts of things. Filters can be going to the gym, they can be therapy, they can be coaching, they can be meditation. And in my case, and what the book is about is how to use psychedelics as a powerful filter that not only can clean the water in the bowl, but it also has a chance to stir up some of that sediment on the bottom. And once that sediment is stirred up, we have an opportunity to clean it, release it. Psychedelics at their very simple nature Transmute, transform, and liberate low vibration energy from the water. They help clean the sides of our bowl. They can heal the body, the mind, and the spirit. That's all we're doing. And the Atman inside of us is pure. It's just waiting for us to find it again. That is our divinity. It never changes. Everything else that is not that is our humanness. And the closer we can make our humanness resemble the divine, the better our lives get. We can enjoy our lives more with less residue, less dirt in the water. Yeah, it seems a lot of people just medicate the fish. Yeah, that's exactly right. Let's just, let's just like this. The fish gets sick. There's algae and bacteria in there. The fish gets sick. So we give the fish some drops and we like, here fish, drink this medicine. And it doesn't ever clean the bowl. That is the pharmaceutical. That is modern medicine today. It is the modern medical complex, right? Modern pharmaceuticals, dude, they don't heal us any more than NyQuil heals a cold virus. All NyQuil is doing is just numbing the symptoms, is decreasing our symptoms long enough for our body and our immune system to clean itself. But our body can't clean by itself. It cannot clean all of this trauma. We need help to do that. Most of the time that help, does have to come through another human being. It has to come in relation. If, if we are injured, relationally, we usually have to heal relationally. So you can take psychedelics alone. But most of the time, the healing that we receive comes through the interaction with another human being. So if you're seeking a facilitator, since we've talked about the map of consciousness, I would tell you always find a facilitator. who is vibrating at a higher frequency than you are never set with anyone who is sitting at a lower vibration than you. And ideally you want to set with a facilitator who understands and vibrates at, at a level of love or higher, because that's really all you're trying to do. You're just trying to remember that you are bliss. You're trying to remember your divinity. Why do you do it? GB? Like why, why do you, want to help people like what what is it that rings true to you about helping people? Because after plus years in corporate America thinking that I was going to be the CEO or chief marketing officer of a tech company, infinite source, the universe smacked me upside the temple with a frying pan and said, this is not what your Dharma is. Every action, every job, every marketing plan, every brand refresh that I did was filling up my bucket of external satisfaction and validation and was doing nothing to nourish my soul. And this is what I have found is my calling. When it's your calling, it will keep calling. And finally I decided to listen because I had suffered enough by not listening. So why am I doing it? I think it's because I think at least with the level of consciousness that I'm operating from today, and that changes every day and it could change tomorrow, but today, I was asked to help relieve the suffering of others. I'm not doing anything to be sure. My teachers in Peru always remind me, we work for our clients, but we always serve God. So in the Native American tradition, they call it the hollow bone. I'm simply providing the structure A safe and stable structure for people to come do their own work. And if Infinite Source chooses to work through me, awesome. But everybody is doing their own healing. I'm just there as the spotter. Yeah, that's really well put. I was speaking with... Dr. Stewart yesterday, who spends a lot of time in palliative care, and a lot of what you're saying echoes some of our conversation about people who find themselves trying to live a more meaningful life have often come in contact with something greater than themselves whether it's sitting with someone who's dying whether it's you know getting to the peak of the corporate ladder and then realizing this things up against the wrong wall what have I done maybe it's losing a relationship but it's these giant traumas in life that give us the courage Maybe that's a higher vibration to start doing meaningful change in our life. And it sounds to me like that's a huge part of what you're doing. And I know when I talk to you and speaking outside of here that you are going out of your way to create a more meaningful version of yourself. And in doing so, it's contagious to other people, man. Maybe we could talk about meaning for a little while. Well, this is hard. This is really hard. And I'll tell you that I spent the better part of a decade, well, eighteen years starting with recovery through lots of therapy, through lots of inside work, yoga teacher training, Peru, all sorts of things. And I spent almost. Eighteen of those years. Not. Knowing. Who I was. And what I was supposed to do. I was doing things. That felt good. But I had no awareness. Of that. And. Last May. I was sitting with Ayahuasca. And I heard. the medicine say to me, you are love. And it was like, I knew that that was not a thought that I had. It was not a conscious thought for me. I would have never said that about myself, but when I heard it, something felt true. And the moment that I was willing to believe that, a process in the medicine started that felt like cellular surgery that lasted a good couple hours and was probably one of the most intense medicine experiences that I've ever had. I've had one since that time, which was equally as intense that involved some surgery. But meaning what I have come to realize for me is if my dharma tells me that I am love, then anything, any action, any word that I say, any judgment that I make that is not coming from a place of love is out of alignment with my dharma, with my true purpose. So that's what meaning means to me. And all I'm doing today, I screw up all the time. I undoubtedly said something on this podcast that is probably going to not feel not feel loving to somebody. Here's how I look at meaning or how I help my clients understand meaning. If you think of a Venn diagram, One bubble is success. I believe that we do have to feel successful in our life in some way. Another bubble is inspiration. We have to feel inspired to create something to be inspired at our work, inspired with our family, inspired by creative pursuits, whatever that is, but success inspiration. And the last one, which is really the most important is enjoyment. We're so this culture is so focused on. working hard now for some future payoff. And in reality, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. I have a client who six months ago experienced the death of his son. And one day, his life was great. And the next day, his life was horrible. And he had no idea that was going to happen. But I can tell you that he would probably live his life different had he known. So success, inspiration, and enjoyment. If you're not enjoying your life today, if you're not at least trying to enjoy your life today, you're doing something wrong. That's why we're here. When you combine success, inspiration, and enjoyment, where I think the center of that Venn diagram is, is freedom. When we live a life of freedom... So many things happen for us that we don't have to worry about. There's a sort of a phrase in the Dow that says we are the maker of music stands, but we make no music stands and all music stands are made when everything happens. But I don't have to. Effort. to do them, that's when I'm living my true purpose. That's when I'm living a life full of meaning. That is a beautiful answer. It's got to take a minute to think about that. Do you think it's culture? It takes so much courage to do that. And it seems so counterintuitive. Why does it take so much courage to do the things you want to do, to be the person you're supposed to be? Is that because we're bombarded since youth of... When I think of culture, I think of the first four letters of cult. We have all these preconceived ideas. Be this, be that. You're not enough. Be this person. Look how pretty they are. They drive this car. Do you want this person? You know, like... Are we just bombarded with so much distractions that the signal gets blotted out by all the noise? Yeah. It is purely cultural indoctrination. I have a theory. There is no proof to any of this. So what I'll share here is just personal opinion at best. But We have a culture built on power, money, and control. Yeah. And when I look at so many people who are striving for more power, who are billionaires looking for more money... and who want more control, the first thing that comes up for me when I hear that is, what is the energy that is generating those desires? The Buddha said all suffering comes from craving and aversion. So we crave more power, we crave more money, we crave more control. What is the source of that craving? And my hunch is, That it's fear. It's fear and scarcity. Some people are just given massive amounts of money when they are born. They're just the intergenerational wealth. It happens. They can't do anything about it. But I do think that so many people are operating from a place of scarcity and fear. And no amount of money is ever going to make them feel safe. But when you are... educated, when you're too rich, you're too pretty, and you're too smart. You don't have to heal. So you don't have to let go if you can just buy everything that you need to mask your discomfort, to numb your discomfort. There is no need to heal. We, our brains have gotten amazing. We stitch together discrete moments of happiness to make it feel like we're happy. So we go out, like if you're thinking about a night out, you talk to your partner and say, hey, let's go on a date night. And they say, yeah, that's great. Let's do that. So you go out and you eat a nice meal. And in the middle of that meal, you're feeling so wonderful and you're eating this beautiful steak. Everything is great. But then when the meals start, like you're halfway through your steak, you're like, oof, the steak's almost gone. Dessert! So you notice your level of enjoyment starting to decrease. So we add it. We go to the next thing and we look at dessert. And then after dessert, we're like, oh, what's going to happen next? And you think about, well, we'd go for a nice drive. OK, let's go for a nice drive. And that that nice little drive gets you bumps you back up again. And then you start to sink again and you're like, well, maybe we'll go home and like we'll go to the bedroom. And each time we're stitching together this discrete moment of happiness that starts to fool our brain into thinking that we're happy. But the reality is if we're generating happiness through outside sources, they will always go away. But when we can start generating through inside sources, through connecting with our divinity, they never go away. We're really good at two things in this culture. We're good at addition, adding things to make us feel happy, or thickening. So I'm going to take a bath. Oh, a bath would be great right now, but a bath with music would be even better. Or a bath with candles would be even better. How about I add someone to the bath? Now that's even better. We thicken this experience to happiness. increase our perceived level of happiness. And at the end, the water all goes down the drain, the candle gets blown out. And now we have to start all over finding that happiness again. This is how our culture, our consumer culture has created our thinking. We have been trained and indoctrinated to think this way since we were about, well, I'll say early middle school or elementary school when we start having to test for college and get good grades because we need to change our future in some way. But a lot of people are being indoctrinated into this far earlier than that in their families. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting to hear it put that way, but I agree one hundred percent. When you look at your trajectory, GV, maybe this switches back and forth, but do you feel as if something is pushing you or something is pulling you? You know what I mean by that? Sometimes there's a force of a wind beneath your wings, but sometimes there's this idea of a great attractor, the same way a marble finds its way to the bottom of the bowl if you drop it. What do you think on the difference between that? pushing and attracting. Yeah. And the old way I feel what comes up for me first is the old way of life. My corporate way of life. Someone, something was always pushing me. Something was always demanding that I do better, that I make more, that I achieve more today. Something is very much pulling me. I don't have to effort at all anymore. I'll be honest. When I moved from corporate to corporate, solopreneurship the first eighteen months was probably the most difficult eighteen months of my entire life because I was nothing was pushing me and it didn't feel like Anything was pulling me and I did not yet have the trust in my system to trust source, to trust that infinite source, to give me exactly what I needed. That eighteen months was hard and it taught me a lot about trust. And today. I'm trying to decide if I should say this out loud. I'm going to just because it's the truth. And that's all I can do is speak the truth. I'm going to knock on wood to say I've not actually worried about finances for a couple of years now because I know that the I know that source will. Bring me the clients that I need to pay the bills. I don't have I'm not a rich man. I don't have an enormous amount of extra in my life. But I've also never gone hungry and I've also never gone without a roof over my head. And I, you know, I think the doctors and source for that. But I trust today. I trust that everything's going to work exactly the way that it's supposed to. And I've stopped trying. Marketing has, after twenty plus years in marketing, it's amazing how much effort I put into trying to get people to manipulate people to buy shit. Now I actively encourage people to not buy stuff. I say buy it or not. Come on, come on this trip or not. Do what your heart feels, because I never want to manipulate or encourage someone to do something that's out of alignment with their own authentic self. I'm trying to be my authentic self. I should be trying to get everybody else to be theirs. And if I'm manipulating someone, then I am going against their dharma. And that is bad karma. If I have the intention of trying to make someone do something that's against their Dharma, that will create bad karma for me to resolve. And I know I'm done with bad karma. I've had enough of that. Yeah. Yeah. It brings me to an interesting idea of, no one can tell the future or whatever, but it seems to me, maybe it speaks volumes of where I'm at in my life, but it seems that I feel like we're on the cusp of a whole new creator economy. Maybe it's the people I'm talking to. Maybe it's getting to hang out with you for a while or speaking to some really cool people, but The journey that you talk about, about courage in these eighteen months of like, OK, nothing is pushing me. Now I'm being pulled. Do you see like and maybe it's the circles that we spin in, but do you see the future emerging as more of a creator economy? I think everyone is creating, I think that, yes, desire makes the world turn like that. And we're all creating, but there's a lot of people that are creating from their adapted self, not their authentic self. So I think that the feeling that I would imagine that the feeling that you're feeling, the shift that you're feeling is that people are creating from a place of authenticity. Now it's creating from the heart, not from the head. Yeah. And it's coming from a place of love. It's not coming from scarcity and fear. It's truly creating from somewhere in Hawkins map. It's coming from two hundred or above. It's coming from your willingness or acceptance or love. It's not coming from fear and scarcity. Yeah, that's well said. It's it's so contagious in some ways, too. And maybe that's the idea of that great attractor at the end of time, or this thing that's pulling us towards, it's also pulling things towards you. As you're moving forward, it feels like it's pulling these ideas, these thoughts, these people, this potential towards you on some level. It's kind of intoxicating. You know, in yoga, they talk about the yugas. There's four yugas. We're in the Kali Yuga right now, which is the, I guess this period of time when the, it's our darkest age. And I think they say that the Yugas are four hundred thousand years. Wow. So I don't know where we're at in the Kali Yuga right now, but. We're, I do feel, I don't know, I would like to say that we're coming to a tipping point. There's a lot of people that are focused on consciousness a lot now in the way that they were focused in the sixties. I think it's interesting. If you look at a, a You will see the influence of creativity and psychedelics in our culture. And I think that if you... Richard Tarnas... did work with Stan Grof and he looked at archetypal astrology. And he proposed that so much of what humans create is actually in the cosmos. It's actually in the alignment of the planets. And the most transformative Parts of our culture have been, you can go back and look through the astrology at that time and see why. And I think that we are entering, we have been entering into a very transformative phase. And I'm not an expert in any of that stuff, but there are definitely people out there. And Rick Tarnas has written a few really amazing books if people are looking for them. so interesting that you bring up a car metaphor I was I can't help but think how much the cyber truck looks like the delorean same door same stainless steel like john delorean like it's just like I just saw one yesterday and I'm like dude we're back to the future let me look at something yeah please do so the delorean was created in How was the year I was born? I'm going to go out on a limb and piss some more people off here. I love it. And I'm going to offer that the individual who probably is running the majority of the creation of that, of the new DeLorean is probably operating from a level of consciousness that is far below love. And that it would not surprise me that we're, that we create a tank of, We create a car that the average person can drive that looks like a vehicle that could be driven on a battlefield. It feels like a car that would be created and driven by someone that operates out of fear. And there is a big difference between intelligence and wisdom. Just because you use a typewriter doesn't mean you're not wise I think that we have we have mistaken we have swapped the idea of intelligence and wisdom in our culture we have stopped listening to the eldest of our culture and as a result of that if you are still wanting to use a typewriter instead of a smartphone we deem you as unintelligent and unwise our relationship with age and the elderly in our culture is is really not very productive and if we would start listening to people who still want to use typewriters or at least have experience using typewriters, we might not be in the situation that we're currently in. But instead, we look to twenty, thirty somethings who are building AI as our brightest of our generation. And I think that that is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. And we have focused on a knowledge culture and not a wisdom culture. Yeah, especially in the West. It's interesting you bring that up. I feel like it's been severed, this rite of passage, this ritual passing down of knowledge to the next leaders on some level. And there's a lot of blame to go around. I see so many people in positions of authority. They should stop trying to be an authority and start handing down some wisdom to the people that desperately need it and are thirsting for it. And we've created like just like look at look at all these ideas of like longevity, like how much money is spent on living forever. Like if you want to live forever, don't build a monument to yourself. Don't build a museum. Pass down your knowledge to the next person that can carry that and keep that dream alive on some level. I really hope that it's something I got a project I'm working on where we take people in palliative care and give them the microphone and allow them. to talk about the transgressions, talk about the wins, talk about the losses, talk about the heartache, talk about what you would have done different. There's some real, and maybe that's the return to ceremony. Maybe that's the new Eleusinian mysteries that we have upon us where we can pass that down. But man, I think we're hitting on a really big nerve here because it's not the first conversation I've had about this, but wisdom is something the world is in desperate need of right now. You bringing up rite of passage, I think, is a really, really important thing that we've never had in the... It's hard to say the West, because I think that even in some Eastern countries, rite of passage has also started to diminish, but it's probably a little more profound. Of course. The bar mitzvah, the quinceanera. Yep. Those are rites of passage, and... There's residues of rites of passage. Yeah. There's implications that come with those rites of passage. And for many people, myself included, I never went through that. We don't have those in our modern culture. And I think that for many people, the first powerful and profound message psychedelic experience you have is that rite of passage. It is literally where before that experience, your consciousness was focused outward on achievement and power control and money. And then something happens. You touch fire for that first time. And your consciousness, rather than being focused outward, shifts and we turn our consciousness inward. It is literally a re-turning towards the self. And when we make that change, you cannot unring that bell. Once you fall onto the path, however you do it, you can't ever get off the path anymore. This is what happens when people show up at a, you know, they show up at burning man, taking a couple of grams of mushrooms for fun. And they have some amazing, powerful self-realization moment. And they have a hard time. integrating that experience because they weren't really thinking that that two grams of mushrooms or a couple hits lsd was going to make them meet god and when we meet god coming around the corner in an unexpected way it's sometimes hard to integrate that kind of experience and sometimes we don't want to be on the path and that's even harder when you don't accept your responsibility to start honoring your dharma the universe will put up every resistance that it can to show you how you're supposed to be living. Yeah. Yeah. It, I can't think of the guy's name is going to kill me, but as a gentleman, I follow him on Twitter, who was big on AI and SAS, and he had all these investors and he just had this moment where he came on. He's like, I'm not doing this anymore. Like, what are you talking about? You're not doing this anymore. And he's like, it's meaningless. How the offense is like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know, what have we got on here? He's like, I can't do it. Sorry. You know, it's like it's that exact touching a fire. It's that exact. And this is why people say, hey, be careful. And this is why some people don't ever do drugs. You know, don't ever do this is like, look, you may have a boundary dissolution, returning life affirming. you know explosion in your life that you cannot unsee this this awareness that blossoms in you that allows you to see things or or you know this the the the moment of clarity that happens sometimes in a program like oh my god I see it you can't unsee it ever again it's it's beautiful and terrifying at the same time you're you see you mentioned another word that I think is really important or maybe a concept of legacy. The for a hundred years, we have been focused. So many people have been focused in handing down a legacy that includes usually includes wealth of some kind wealth or property. Yep. And I like to talk to my clients about creating a legacy of wisdom. Like if you think of the legacy as children your children or the the difference that you're making in someone else's life the wisdom that you're passing down let that be your legacy focus less on what you own and focus more on what you give coming back to our sacred reciprocity that feels like a really good way to transition out of this body into my next body you know you also mentioned you have this big, powerful moment. This is that you can't unsee the thing. Yeah. And this is where if you're considering psychedelics for the first time, especially if you're considering ayahuasca or DMT, five MEO specifically, these medicines can sometimes open up these really powerful experiences and we can see things and we can receive messages that sometimes are hard to decipher. And I think it's important to remember that the medicines speak in metaphor a lot. So when the medicine says you need to sell your house, liquidate your four one K and build a retreat center in Costa Rica because now you're supposed to be a shaman serving ayahuasca, like slow your roll on that one. Like if that's the message that you got, I say the bigger the change, the longer you have to wait to put the message into practice. So small changes, thirty days, big changes, getting a divorce, selling your house, moving to Costa Rica and quitting your job. Wait ninety days and see if you still feel the same way. But I like to think of this like I was a DJ for fifteen years before I was like the peak of my addiction years were spent on Carnival Cruise Lines as a DJ for two and a half years. I had a lot of fun, but I got paid. To keep dancers on a dance floor and good DJs. When they're doing it right, you never really know when one song starts and another song stops. So good club DJs could play for four hours and you never hear a break in the music. And they're really good at mixing out one song and mixing in another song. Nobody would stay on the dance floor if you just hit pause and cut one song and started another song from scratch. And I think that this is a really good way to think about integration and activation after psychedelics is you don't just want to cut your life off and start a new life. Slowly mixing out the tune of... who you thought you were and slowly increasing the volume on who you want to be or who the medicine has shown you to become is a much safer and stable way to go about Change, sustainable transformation. Don't go to a psychedelic journey and come out of it with a New Year's resolution to say, I'm going to be a new person and I need to lose a hundred pounds and change my life. There's way more effective ways to incorporate the new learnings into your life. It's so well said. I love the transition there. GV, we just did an hour and a half, like it was five minutes. And I feel like I have like a million more questions, but this is just such a, this happens in all our conversations. And I feel it's the mark of a great conversation. I'm super thankful, man, to get to. talk to you and spend some time with you and read some of the new things you're writing. And for everybody within the sound of my voice, I would encourage you to go down to the show notes and check out, just go to GV's site, check out what he's written. There's so much free material there that's worth, that is worth reading and understanding and can show you different cool things. But before I let you go, GV, where can people find you? What do you have coming up and what are you excited about? So where can people find me? My personal site is gvfreeman.com, letters G and letter V, freeman.com. Where I would tell people to start heading more so than that is psychedeliciq.com. The book, if you're interested in the book coming out, the book will be launched the first week in February right now. It's called Healing with Psychedelics. And it's really a practical guide to safe and sustainable change. Psychedelic IQ, we're also launching the second season of the Psychedelic IQ podcast. That'll probably come out in December. That's guidance for guides primarily, but there's a lot of great information in that for both guides and seekers. So those are two places to go to find me. What's happening next? The book is everything right now. This has been like birthing an energetic baby that I don't want to do for a long time. I didn't realize how hard this was going to be, but I'm glad that it's happening. We're actually going to Peru in three weeks. We'll be taking people down to Peru again next year. So if you're really interested in wanting to... Do work with a true indigenous maestro who is so deeply connected to this medicine. Let me know. It's a beautiful experience down there. We spent a couple of weeks in the mountains. We spent a week in the jungle. We take a little jaunt to Machu Picchu. Two medicines, wachuma and ayahuasca. So any of that, if that's interesting, please reach out. And if you're stuck and you want to get unstuck, The work that I do is coaching and psychedelic work, and those are really great ways. So if any of that calls, just reach out. I'm not going to sell anything to anybody. Yeah, it's beautiful. Thanks to everybody who's participating. I'm just now getting my Rumble feed coming in from Apple Eater. What's up, Rome? Thanks for hanging out with us for a little bit. Thank you for spending some time on the new platform that I got over there at Rumble. Go back. Romeo will love this. I promise you. I know you're just jumping in now, but go back. Listen to some of the stuff we said. GV's an incredible human being. He's got a lot of unique ways in which he can explain some of the trials and tribulations in his life. I don't know. They speak to me. Clint Kiles, thank you so much. Everybody else has been hanging out with us. I hope you have a beautiful day. Go down to the show notes. Reach out to GV. GV, hang on briefly afterwards. Everyone else, I hope you have a wonderful day. And that's all we got. Aloha.