Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back. We've got an incredible show for you today. The one and only, ladies and gentlemen, if you've been with the True Life Podcast, you know this guest. You've read his books. You are as enthralled as I am. We have with us today... Allow me to introduce our esteemed guest for today, Sebastian Marincolo, a true Renaissance soul whose journey through the realms of philosophy, linguistics, and the intricacies of the mind has illuminated new paths of understanding. Dr. Sebastian Schultz, as he's academically known, earned his magna cum laude PhD through a critical analysis theories of consciousness mentored by luminaries such as william lycan and simon blackburn his academic lineage reads like a who's who of influential philosophers philosophers philosophers thank you what sets sebastian apart is his unparalleled exploration of the cannabis high spanning over years as a researcher he delves into the potential of cannabis as an altered state of consciousness And as a philosopher, he weaves together the threads of personal experience and scholarly insight. His journey is not just confined to the ivory towers of academia. He has ventured into the uncharted territories of photography, producing the limited edition macro photo art series, The Art of Cannabis. Through his lens, he brings to life the visual poetry author. His latest work, Elevated, invites us to reconsider cannabis as a tool for mind enhancement. This groundbreaking book explores the vast spectrum of mental abilities that cannabis may influence, challenging preconceptions and igniting a dialogue on the intersection of consciousness and creativity. Sebastian, thank you so much for being here today. How are you, my friend? Wow. It's always great to hear your introduction to makes my day. Thank you. And before we got on the show, I just thought about the term altered states of consciousness again. And I wondered if it would be better to replace it with modes of consciousness because altered state always suggests that there is one like default, um, mode of consciousness, like the wakefulness state, which is the state of consciousness and everything else is kind of bent or altered or, you know, twisted. And, uh, I'm not, I'm not so happy with that. Uh, I wonder what you think about it because you've talked to so many guests about, uh, altered state altered states of consciousness. And, um, Because, you know, after years and years of research into the subject of the cannabis high, I came to the conclusion that we are going through every day. We're going through various kinds or modes of consciousness with or without mind altering techniques or substances. We are, during our sleep, we are in a weird psychedelic state, daydreaming, ecstasy. When we are in rage or fear, we have that kind of tunnel vision. We are in a tunnel of perceptions, very different. orgasm, you know, all these, these are all altered states of consciousness, which are naturally in us, you know, that we are going through them in our brain shifts towards those states or, or trends, you know, it goes into these states naturally, when we're dreaming, and, you know, we have melatonin, putting us in that condition. And so I always, you know, I always when I hear altered state of consciousness, I always think, Something is, you know, we need to think about our terminology maybe. What do you think? Yeah, I agree. I'm wondering... Can we change consciousness with awareness? Like maybe we shift that linguistic model because I think awareness is a great way to explain consciousness well. And you could also say we have this sort of changing of awareness, the same way we have changing, you know. Awareness doesn't seem as loose as consciousness. Consciousness just seems like this giant cloud where awareness seems to have a little more focus to it. don't know can we change awareness with consciousness well maybe that's an argument not to exchange it because consciousness is a much broader term right right you can say I'm today I'm conscious but I would I'm not aware of the fact that um my body is aching right now because I'm talking to you and I'm really focused yeah so yeah so it's difficult and it's always, but if you look at, you know, consciousness seems to be much more of a term that has been, has been used in, um, in our natural language and has a, has a long story. Now, uh, it hasn't been there forever, but it's, um, and if you look into old Greek or other languages, probably has different connotations, but there are other words, but, um, uh, terms like altered states of consciousness are more recent and are, are certainly more of a, construction terminology that comes from a more technical realm. Actually, I'd have to look for when altered states of consciousness first appeared, I think. one who popularized the notion was Charles Tartt. And I'm happy to have it, you know, it's not like it's deeply wrong, but it's just, I just wanted to mention the fact that we, often we tend to think of altered states of consciousness as something that needs to be twisted, you know, something that is in a way unnatural also, and needs to be induced with the technique or with mind altering substances. And it doesn't really speak to us and our human nature. And our human nature certainly is not that we only have this one mental or this one condition, this mode of consciousness, which is this rational state. logical wakefulness state, you know? So even though, and I've, I've said that before here, this is of course in that rational mode, when we are talking about this consciousness, we are of course in that rational mode and we are, therefore we are reconstructing. And I call this therefore the rational reconstruction there. We are reconstructing, um, our existence as being rational because we are always in the rational wakefulness state when we do that. So we are kind of caught up in that perspective, right? So, but it's, I think it's important to be inclusive, you know, and to acknowledge that our nature is different. Yeah. But, okay. So, but I don't want to take that too far. I just want to- That's all right. Maybe, sometimes I think that the altered states are just the beginning of the evolution on some level. It seems like a few people find themselves in these altered states. Maybe you can shine some light on. For me, if I take psychedelics, the first time you take it, it's like this novel experience and you have these different ideas about things. But then you take it again and you become more comfortable with the territory. And pretty soon you may not be able to get back to a peak experience without taking them. But you can begin to see the world through that psychedelic lens without taking them. Is that what's happening in the brain? And like, well, is that what's happening? Do you think that after a while you don't need to take these substances that you can you've had the neuroplasticity or you've had the change of mind that you can see the world through that lens now? That is a really interesting question. For instance, I have I've made the experience that and that's a while ago, more than twenty years ago. I used to be able to really trip on cannabis, not large doses. You know, when I would close my eyes, I could. And I I remember once I wrote that in my book, I tell that story in my book, The Art of the High. Right. that I remembered an animation movie hand drawn by a friend of mine and she used for each and every frame, she would hand draw the whole picture. Usually you would only have the animated parts in new sequences, but she would draw a whole landscape with a tree and everything new. So if you would look at the animated movie, everything would kind of, go like this and you know because everything was changing from image to image you know from sequence to sequence and I remember after two years after I watched this animation I got high and I I tripped in that style of animation and I saw something but it was not a memory of the movie but I saw like I kind of vaguely remember it now because like twenty years ago but I remember like birds coming out of a cage and then I was flying after the birds like as if I was a flying camera following the birds and they turn into something like if you ever watched Frank Zappa's Baby Snakes with a guy who's doing the trick animation movie kind of was like such a trip And I remember that after that experience for several weeks or so, I was better able to imagine things without taking cannabis. So while I'd say I'm a bit skeptic about saying that you can reproduce the whole psychedelic mode of thinking without having a psychedelic, if you've used it for a while, I'm pretty sure that you can reproduce easier access some states like enhanced imagination without taking it after a while. And another anecdote, which I have told you before, is that of the guy who once contacted me and said that he was traumatized because I had been writing on cannabis and empathic understanding and arguing based on my research that cannabis can help tremendously for those who are on the autistic spectrum, who are having some of them, most of them having problems to empathically connect and socially interact with others. And he said that he was traumatized and he thought everybody else was an extension of himself. And that was the phrase he used so that he thought he was alone in the universe and everybody else is kind of an illusion or an extension of himself. Then he smoked cannabis. And then while he was high, he would feel, Oh no, there are other people out there. So he could empathically connect to them in a way that he would realize on a, on a empathic emotional level. Oh, No, there are other people. And he also told me, and I'm telling you this now at this point for a different aspect of the story, which is that he said he could connect for a while after smoking cannabis. He had that feeling, but after like... five or ten days it would go away slowly and then at that point he was still able to remember that he had that feeling but he didn't have a feeling anymore he was still like he was again like oh no I feel like I'm alone in the universe and everybody else is an illusion but I remember that I had that feeling and so he came to me and asking me about what he could do etc but but so yeah I think there are lasting effects if you um that you can can use but that's an interesting that's a really interesting research topic in itself because of course this could have uh could be seen negatively too you know you could say oh do I do I want to have lasting effects uh do I want to like for instance have this kind of paranoia but I guess this has to be like or do I want to have this flashback or whatever you know uh if I can't control it but uh I guess that has to be answered for each uh psychoactive substance differently probably but it's a it's a really interesting phenomenon yeah shout out to crystal phoenix rising she says good morning guys I'm a big supporter of cannabis cannabis helps my anxiety and my nerve pain yeah I think it's a it's it it's an interesting time right now sebastian for cannabis especially here in the us like we got trump that comes in and we have rfk and we have Tenpenny and all these people that are talking about, you know, they were big supporters of Rogan and all these guys that are really trying to push psychedelics, especially MDMA and psilocybin to try to help veterans, to try to help well-being and. I think everybody's kind of waiting with bated breath over here because we don't really know what's going to happen. We don't know what's going to happen. Will it be more of the same? We're not sure. But what's your thoughts on that? Have you guys been paying attention to that over here? Over there? Yeah, yeah. I certainly have been paying attention to that. And it was an interesting day here in Germany because the day that Trump became elected, our government fell apart. Literally, it was the same day that they kind of broke up the government coalition of social democrats and liberals. And the Green Party, they fell apart because the liberals kind of wanted to get out there because they were losing. And so they were going to have now elections early next year because of that. Otherwise, it would have gone on for another year, I guess. And here we're also... waiting for decisions because we're probably going to have a chancellor and we're going to have the lead taken by the conservatives here by the Christian Democratic Party. And they have announced that they want to take back the the new regulation of cannabis here, the legalization measures, the new law, which they won't do, probably won't do, but maybe they take, you know, probably they take, or maybe they want to do something with the social clubs or not allow the social club. We don't, we also were in a limbo here and we have to wait and see what's happening with that. I think they're not going to touch medical cannabis, and probably they're not going to touch anything, but we're going to see. As to Trump... what's happening over there I mean I guess we're all here uh many people are in shock I kind of saw it coming I'm afraid I was I knew it would be tight but I saw the the imminent uh danger and um you know for for me it's it's a very emotional thing to observe because I remember when I was um six years old I saw the American army tanks driving by on the street and we gave them the victory sign. And our parents had told us that the Americans had freed us from fascism and therefore we have a democracy now. And now we're in a democracy and we're seeing your democracy endangered. And of course, I know that a lot of Trump fans would go and say, no, come on, he's not, don't take him literally on this and that. But he has already announced a lot of things that would go into the direction of direct fascism and fascistic states. So we're worried here. I think here in Germany, if you would make a poll, I think, I'm not exactly sure, but I think eighty percent or so would be against Trump or even more. But so as to psychedelics and and Kennedy, I followed that quite closely. I mean, I lived in the States for two years when I visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. and as a researcher and during my graduate studies. So I'm really following what's happening in the US. And I'd say it depends on, because it really doesn't matter what they're saying. I mean, it's an interesting choice to give him, that was the deal to give him the health part. So that is a strategic alliance, but I think Trump doesn't really care if he, and now it's all about lobbyism, and if there are some lobby groups in the pharmaceutical world that support Trump, and I'm not aware of that, I can't say it right now, And they're coming along and they say, you know, fuck that. Sorry for that. And they say, listen, don't, you know, don't don't go down. Don't put it to schedule three for some reason, because there are I mean, the statistics are pretty clear now. Wherever you introduce cannabis in a state medically, you know, people use less anxiolytic medicine, less antidepressants, less opioids, etc. So it's across a big spectrum that, you know, the other pharmaceutical companies other medications are going down and because cannabis is such a versatile and healthy plant. And because we do have an endocannabinoid system that's involved in the regulation of so many bodily and mental functions that you, that can be helped by cannabis. That of course the problem is that's the problem with cannabis. It's so helpful that there are so many lobbies and not only in the medical realm, you know, but also in the industrial and other realms there are other lobbies that are there and they don't want to have a competitor so we're going to see I think as to the political question whether trump is going to allow more or is going to go for schedule three or so he never sticks to what he says if he doesn't you know need to at the point and he we know that he can turn around a hundred eighty degrees So I'd say it's now behind what you can see, there are gonna be some battles with lobbyists and then we're gonna see what's happening. I think the other interesting question is, if you are working in the psychedelic realm, if you are interested in psychedelics or psychoactive other substances like cannabis, maybe you want to call it a psychedelic too, then what can we do or what can you do to have an impact on society? Maybe you use the new regulations that come with Trump, but what can you do to avoid that society falling apart or slipping into a dictatorship or fascist state? And I think that's an interesting question for the community over there because I see a lot of potential there. Because those substances are amazing for healing purposes, mental healing, and that's exactly what you need to prevent of slipping into a state that will be controlled by fear. Yeah, I want to let me let me let me push back. I want to take the opposite side of that just so that I can hear your point of view and make it a more interesting conversation. Aren't we already in like a fascist regime? Like, it seems to me if we can agree that the lobbyists, I think it was Don Dewey who said that government is the shadow cast upon people by business. And I think we already have a fascist regime. I think even Chomsky says we're all fascist. It just matters to which degree how how fascist we are. You know, and it it seems like whatever administration comes in, they just pick their team of multinational corporations, whether it's X or whether it's Facebook, you know, whether it's pick your defense contractor, that's going to be the one we go with. Is it do you think a really like there really is a chance of it becoming more fascist than it already is? Oh, yeah, definitely. Why? Why do you think that? Well, have you ever been to a concentration camp here? No, I never have. Yeah. No, seriously. And this is something we heard also about Gaza with that raging war over there where people ask, could it be worse? Yes, it could, which is a sad thing to state because it is a nightmare. Yeah. And it could get worse with Trump. We don't know. Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't get worse, but it could get worse. And of course, your society could get much worse. And I agree with you, and I'm a big fan of Chomsky. uh and his work um because I think he is right and basically this is also what I discussed a lot with my friend uh later in lester greenspoon who was a big mentor of mine um that you were of course you and we are living in oligarchies now and uh it's certain you know, the military-industrial, the prison-industrial complex and various other players, the banking complex, etc., are basically using the government, you know, to do whatever they feel like they should do. But I think there is some moderation. Of course, you still have um some citizens have some rights to speak up you know and of course if you look at social media you can already see there is mass control I I again I want to I'd like to um point to a documentary series that I'm not sure if you've uh if I've recommended it to you or here again the uh the century of the self it's a three I think a three or four part documentary must be already ten years old and it's it's it's amazing because it takes you from the fifties or forties in the States where you have a society that, you know, you need a lot of products and then it only slowly goes into a state where you have overproduction and then you need to, you actually need to be able you need to advertising, you need to push something on people. You need to tell them you need more, you know, you need, you need a second car and you need a bigger car and you need this and that and how that unfolds. And it, it tells you about Edward Bernays, who was the, um, the nephew of, um, Sigmund Freud. And he came up with the term public relations instead of the mass manipulation of propaganda, you know, so he didn't want to use propaganda anymore. But so he was actually advising governments and others to And then it goes into how, of course, and that's what I never really thought about much, is that what happened in the United States, and this is one of the most important claims in the movie, is what happened in the United States after the fifties was a big reaction to what happened in Germany with the Holocaust and with the Nazi regime coming up, because Germany had been a democracy, the Weimar Republic, pretty open liberal democracy. And then, you know, the Nazis came up and the whole system flipped. And so in the fifties in the States, people thought about democracy. how can we control the masses? So to say, how can we influence the masses for this not to happen again, maybe with, uh, spreading psychoanalytic schools and, you know, uh, treating people because, uh, I mean, um, there was a, there's an exchange I read between Einstein and, um, And Sigmund Freud, under the impression of the First World War, not sure what the title, there's a book out there with a conversation between them and where Freud thought there is a death wish. There's something like not a libido, but something that people have something like a death wish. And or a drive, you know, for killing and aggression and under the impression of two world wars where people just killed themselves in insane numbers. People were, of course, afraid and thought about democracy and how we could prevent something like that from happening again. And so you can see that these very early. uh attempts to you know really control people with pr or with other measures and of course we're seeing that now with uh social media and you know where people want to control how the discussions go and um we're living in a really um controlled society And of course, it's not going to be different with Trump. I think it's going to be worse, much worse. And this is what I think. I think we still have some... abilities and still have some freedom to speak up and to do things you know and we have fought for women's rights for a long time but now they're you know they're going away and you're seeing how they're slowly going away and what what consequences that has and and that's that could only be the beginning and if it's going worse I mean um again I think the society we live in people like me and you probably are marginalized by things like shadow banning you know because we can talk as much as we want because there's so much noise right there's so much noise out there that nobody really cares you know right but still we have kind of like uh uh we have uh a little uh chance to to speak up and maybe some things spread and maybe some things grow as they do now you know but um This could get much worse, much worse. And I'm afraid that in the States, if there are not a lot of people really taking action now and getting back on their feet after that blow, that it will get worse. Because there are now some people who really give a shit about what's happening to people. and how they feel. And it's a lot about controlling them. And we've seen how Trump can play public relations how they know how to spin doctor everything and um and that's a dangerous situation to be in if you know if somebody says I can shoot somebody on fifth avenue and get away with it you know and and you you see you know what he where he wants to go that that is dangerous uh and I'm I'm really worried about uh what's happening over there so many brilliant points. And like, I think that this is such a incredible point for psychedelics, especially there's a great story. If people want to look it up between Terrence McKenna and Ram Dass and Ram Dass tells Terrence McKenna, I'm going to paraphrase the story. I won't do it as well as he did, but it's something along the lines of, There's this rampaging warlord moving through a Southeastern Asia kingdom. I don't know, a thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago. And he's rampaging through and he's violent. He is just horrible. He kills, maims, rapes. Just he's a violent individual. but the people that he makes the most examples out of are the people in the clergy anybody who's affiliated with a church or spiritual sort of connotation he takes those people and just crucifies them and as he's making his way through the southeastern territories conquering everything having no problems and he finds himself at one of the last strongholds and he burgess he busted into the government halls and they're like oh great warlord they're all afraid of him and they say every everyone is left except for one monk. And the guy's furious. He's like, what are you talking about? There's one monk that dares. Doesn't he know who I am? And he spits coming out of his mouth. He's like, where is this monk? And they said, oh, he's waiting for you in the temple. What? He's waiting for me? Oh, he's furious. He storms over there. Boom, he busts open the doors. And there's a monk just standing there meditating peacefully with a smile on his face. This guy's like, what the? And he walks up to him and he sticks his finger out and he starts pointing him, hitting him in the chest. And he's like, hey. Don't you know I'm the baddest warlord? I've been murdering people. How dare you stand? Don't you know who I am? I could take my sword and run it through your belly without blinking an eye. And the monk just stands and smiles. And he says, and don't you know who I am? I'm the man that could have your sword run through my belly without blinking an eye. And there's this beautiful pause that happens. And McKenna says, well, that's what happened in the sixties when they came with the guns. We ran for the hills, you know, and like, I see almost this next fourth wave. We could call it like happening. Like you can see it shaping up. Is it going to be a Nixon regime? Is it going to be like, Hey, these young kids are starting this, this drug is escaping the medical container. And look at all these veterans using them. Whoa, these guys were pissed off a little bit. What are they going to do? And that might be the tension that either sways it one way or another way. What's your thoughts, man? Are we at a pivotal moment? Could you see something like that happening again? Could it be tried to put back in the bottle? What's your thoughts on that? Yeah. What comes to my mind is Timothy Leary and TuneIn Turn on tune in and drop out. Yep, and Trying to find I don't have my what I think the the chapter titles and what hashes did to Walter Benjamin a book that I published in? was tune in turn on tune in and inspire stay in and inspire or something like this and I think it was turn on turn on tune in and inspire and what I meant is that and in you know in relation to your question what what could happen now with psychedelics from the point of view from the government and from you know what you see in people they could use a lot of people could use it cannabis or other psychedelics to to just run away and use it for escapism, you know, just be like, okay, F that. I don't want to, I don't want to deal with that anymore. I'm going, I'm going to go along with that. I'm not going to act politically anymore. I'm just going to go in a tunnel and take my whatever I need and watch my Lotus flower and be happy. I couldn't blame them for it. And that's why I started our conversation also with, or why I said that before, is that we need to think about, as a community, how can we use those substances for something better, namely to turn on, tune in, and then to use it... Oh, I'm sorry. Minor, man. It's minor. Makes it more authentic. And then to... um, to, to use that, use cannabis, use psychedelics and other substances as a tool to, um, in various ways, heal people, to inspire people, to, to connect them again, to overcome trauma there, because there are many things you can do in that situation. The important thing is to understand. And I think that's something we've seen that. And I mean, um, in the sixties when Timothy Leary wanted to just spread LSD in the population, like a million trips or so. And he thought that would, that would do it. Well, I don't know, you know, maybe, maybe it could have a great effect, but maybe I believe, I tend to believe that these are tools and a tool is crucially dependent on your knowledge and your ability to use it. And so everybody, I think, who knows how to use these tools should think about how to use them now to empower people to come back to their senses, to heal and to change their society for the better. And even if it's just with your neighbor connecting with or doing educational work, doing healing work, introducing medical cannabis or ketamine or whatever, there are a lot of ways. And then we also have to, I think it's a much underrated question of how society shapes our relation to psychoactive substances in general, because we tend to think of there is a human and he's just a white paper and then comes LSD. And then this happens. So, um, gets addicted or he doesn't get, or she, or whatever. And because it's in that, in that substance, it has certain effects and they do everything. And, um, To give you a bit of a better understanding of what I mean is if you look at cannabis, for instance, in the last decades or like the decades before, ten, twenty years ago or so, when mostly there was a prohibition all over the world, was that you had a society where a lot of people were under stress, a lot of people were traumatized, and then they would turn to cannabis mostly for um to use it against stress and cannabis works well if it's like of poor quality especially if it's of poor quality, if it's aged, you know, if you have not the greatest genetics and if you, it's kind of what I call mind fragmented. If you're sitting there, you're couch locked stone, not high, and you don't really, you're in the moment, but you forget about the past, forget about the future. And you're, you're de-stressed because you don't have to think about those things anymore, but you can't hold a clear thought. You can't really, you don't really get insights or, you know, you don't have what you could have. But it helps you a lot to deal with the stress that's imposed on you on society. Now, I think that's something to think about because we're always looking at substances from the point of view of our needs and we use them as adaptogens, you know. And usually the term adaptogen is right now confined to... or we keep it for those substances we need for mostly for stress or to come out of a stressful environment or for certain purposes, which is more narrow of what I mean, because I think psychedelic or psychoactive substances generally are used as an adaptogen, as a psychological adaptogen to our environment now, people use it for whatever. And most often for stress or other situations. But then it could be for sexual pleasure or it could be as an antidepressant or for medical reasons, etc. But I think now is the time. We have a lot of knowledge. We have gained a lot of knowledge in the last years and decades about those substances. And now is the time to yield that knowledge and to think ahead and use our imagination to think how can we use those substances not only for healing, not only for medication in the sense of antidepressants, exolytics, etc., but also to inspire people, for people to ground them again, to get back to connect with their own emotions, to connect with others using those substances as impactogens like for empathy. to enhance their imagination, which is incredibly important because if you come in the state that we're in now with our society, where you are afraid of what's coming, where the pressure is up, you know, then you tend to refrain from the world and your imagination goes down, you know, because you're only looking from one day to the other. You're not, you know, you're not free. You're not emotionally free to to really take a deep, deep breath and to go out there. So I think it's a real task now for the whole community to go through that phase and to inspire others. And we have mighty tools for that. Yeah, it's really well said. It's interesting. I was just talking with Alexandra Plesner, who's an amazing young woman, and she's been working a lot in the psychedelic field. And she's sort of opening up what I think might be like the new South by Southwest. And she's having this conference with like, you know, are people in architecture, people in finance and like all these sort of psychedelically adjacent companies sort of coming out and saying like, yeah, I use these, here's how I use them in my business. And that to me is like what this fourth wave or what the inspiration you talk about can be. Like we have a new sort of, You know, if we can have a new sort of architecture, like living buildings, you know, when you start seeing the way things can be done, like, oh, like you can see outside the window of the medical container. If you just wipe it down a little bit like, hey, look at that out there. You know what I mean? Like. So I'm hopeful. I know that there is a lot of money being spent on patents, and it does seem to me that the bulk of the work is currently in the medical container for a reason. People want to find a way to make money from it. People want to find a way to do this for a living. And that's acceptable. I get it. And there is a lot of people that can use it in a way that's meaningful. But I think you touched on something really beautiful, too, in that the work is done with the individual. You know what I mean? Like you can take these substances, but you got to do the work to figure out how to become the best version of yourself. You're not going to send that piece of paper is not going to hit that molecule and then everything's better. It's in fact, it might even get worse before it gets better. Maybe we'll see that on a societal level. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. That's what, what I mean, you know, you, a hammer is a great tool, but if you don't know how to use it, This, I can't, it seems like I can't turn this off. It's all right, man. Minor. Don't let it bother you. But if, you know, if you don't know how, you can build a house or whatever with a hammer, but if you don't know how to use it right, you're going to hit your finger and, you know. Same with psychoactive substances. You can use cannabis or somebody could use cannabis or LSD or psilocybin mushrooms to overcome lifelong trauma if used correctly and with the right guide, so to say. But if you... If you're using it, if you're driving a car and you're too high to drive and you lose your sense of time and you don't kind of get confused in traffic, you can run over a kid. You know, it's as simple as that. And so it needs skillful use. And what you call the medical container is, I think, to a certain degree, understandable from the point of view of society that has been told these are incredibly dangerous substances and they're all bad, et cetera, et cetera. So they only want to let them in with a huge amount of evidence, you know, and with a huge amount of knowledge from people who are renowned in their business. But of course we are seeing because of that, you know, I believe that we are pouring the baby out with the baby water because there are a lot of things we know that psychedelics and cannabis can be used for and we don't have the medical evidence for it yet because it hasn't been possible for decades to work with it. And there are, of course, ethical problems and there are other problems. So my research also draws on a lot of the knowledge from the subculture, from breeders, from seed genetics, but also from scientific disciplines as a philosophy of mind, from linguistics, from cognitive sciences, from neurosciences, from knowledge about the endocannabinoid system. And I've tried to put that all together in my new book, Elevated Cannabis as a Tool for Mind Enhancement, which came out. last year for Laredes Press. But but so I think this is important. It's a tool and we we have to look at where is the knowledge, what how can we use it not only for those medical uses, but but for inspiration and how can we foster an environment for communities where they can, and we have the legal framework now to do that, where people can meaningfully connect and come into a conversation to use those substances safely and for inspiration and a lot of enhancements that might have a huge impact on society. That's good. I got an awesome question coming in here from Neil from Temecula. And he says, in a world dictated by inherited narratives, how might altered states serve as a great editor of history, rewriting not our only collective myths, but the very meaning of freedom and identity? Thanks, Neil. That was a beautiful question. Yeah, so I'll give you an example. I used cannabis myself because when my first book came out, High Insights on Marijuana, which was basically a second doctoral thesis, it kind of fell in a hole. I almost found an agent in the States in also issues a lot of agents were like hey great book by the way don't know who to sell it to and um then I thought about in the in the next years I thought about okay how can I how can I do something how can I write something and pierce that public opinion how can I get over the narrative that that is so strong that people wouldn't even look at your hypothesis or discuss discuss with you I mean the problem was not that people were against it but they wouldn't even look at it, they wouldn't even, you know, consider it being like, Oh no, you know, talk to you, you know, that's it. So, and that's why I came up with, uh, and I used cannabis for my creativity. I used to think about that during the high. And I came up with my photo series, which took cannabis, uh, again, which turned the view of people to the plant, because in terms of when I, uh, when I look about narrative, when I look at narratives, It's not only language, but it's also imagery. And the imagery was dominated on cannabis. It was dominated by people. But you would see, you know, crumbled material and always like the same kind of whatever junkie on the street or, you know, bullshit stuff. And then in two thousand. In Germany, I came up with macro photography, which is now pretty popular because a lot more people are on it. But in I'd say this was already something that made it big in the national media here with my coffee table book here. This is the high. In English, it would be the positive potential of marijuana, where I coupled essays with outstanding imagery of the plant, where I said, I take a look at the plant as a plant and not as a drug. Let's just take a look at the plant from a macro view. So you need to turn and change perspectives. And I use the cannabis high to come up with ideas of how to step back and And then I, for instance, one of the tricks, the rhetorical tricks that got me in the national media here was in one essay. I started the essay telling the story of Watanuga Lahele, who sits at the... Kalangi Root Festival. I told you the story again, but this is good to answer the question here. And it's Watanuga Lahele is from the Western Africa. I'm telling the story in the first paragraph of my essay is sitting in the Western African Republic and he's using the Kalangi Root to get intoxicated. And there is a lot of rape and statistics say about the Kalangi Root Festival that a million people come there. There are a lot of driving accidents. Seventy thousand people die of the side effects of the Kalangi root intoxication. And the active ingredient is tetralin, et cetera. And then I start my I give a lot of statistics of, you know, violence and under the influence of that substance. And then I start my second paragraph asking, why couldn't we have cannabis instead of why can't we have cannabis if they can allow such a. toxic substance in the Western African Republic. And I wanted for everybody here to bring up those racist, you know, inherent racist feelings of, yeah, you know, they're Africans, they don't know better, you know. And then I come up with the next question. I say, no, listen, Maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe the right question would be, why haven't you realized that there is no Western African Republic? There is no Tetralyn. There is no Kalangerud Festival. And there is no Watanuga Lahele. What I really described is Rüdiger Wohlgemuth, the German Bavarian engineer working for BMW, who sits at the Oktoberfest in Munich drinking alcohol. And all the statistics about death and violence and rape, they're all applying to alcohol. These are the official statistics for alcohol. Thank you. And so that got me in the national news here with the Spiegel online and on television. I mean, that was part of it. So that was a rhetorical trick where I really, and see, this is what I like in the question that you just raised, is that you've really got to be aware of those old narratives. And you have to, maybe you can use your imagination, your different angle that you may also get from cannabis or other psychoactive substances. to spin them and to empathically understand where a lot of people are because they have been fed those narratives for all their lives. And then you look for something which, for instance, here would be cognitive dissonance because they all kind of know that alcohol is a drug and they're using it and it's dangerous and all that. but it takes them a while you know to to run into that um contradiction and because they have been conditioned and and this is for instance where my linguistics background comes in like linguistic conditioning is very strong we need to be aware of that and I I run into problems a lot in the states because then people are like ah that that is um um woke thinking or something because you think about language and how you should or should not use language if you want to express a thought. But it's basically, it's a very, it comes from analytic philosophy, the understanding that the way we use our terminology defines our thinking because our thinking is based in notions and in terms and in theories that are built on those notions and mostly also on metaphors that are important. So my example was, for instance, one of my examples was if I, so linguistic conditioning, if I go to the zoo and I tell my kids, listen, today we're going to see animals and elephants. And next time I say, hey, listen, look over there, you know, in the sky. in this movie documentary about Africa, there are elephants and there are animals too in the movie. I've never said that elephants are not animals, but the way I put it, why would I put it this way? Why would I say elephants and animals if elephants wouldn't be in the category of elephants? It wouldn't make sense, that statement. But this is what we've been told all our lives about alcohol. This rock star died of alcohol and drugs. He used alcohol and drugs. He uses alcohol or he, this is, we, alcohol and drugs, but alcohol then is not a drug, is it? Right? So you separate that mentally and you've been conditioned to do that. So again, back to the question, I think, yes, we have to be really aware of the strong narratives and we have to be careful with our knowledge, what we pick up. Also in terms of metaphors, like metaphor war on drugs makes no sense. There's never been a war on drugs before. There has always been military-enforced or police-enforced repression of certain groups of users of certain psychoactive substances, but other substances were fine. It's never been a total war. And it's not a war on drugs, it's a war on people. And it's not really a war because... Wars are between countries, et cetera. So it's a tragic thing happening and it generates suffering on an epic scale. But the metaphor war on drugs is fundamentally flawed. So we need to think about our language. We need to think about how we talk to people, how we convince them. And we need a lot of empathy and we need to understand where they're coming from to be able to change those narratives, I think. It's such a great answer. When I look back to my growing up, it was always drugs and alcohol, drugs and alcohol. And it is. It sort of separates. It's this false wall between the two, but there's not. It's like that old adage of if a crime fighter fights crime and a firefighter fights fire, what is a freedom fighter fight? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so that is something really important to think about because we need to look at where people are and how they have been conditioned and taught. And from the standpoint of a philosopher who is, you know, in philosophy, you always have a discipline which is called epistemology. Sorry, epistemology. I kind of confused. I mixed in epidemiology. No, epistemology. So what's the nature of knowledge, basically? So what do we know and what don't we know? How do we generate knowledge and what is true? So if you look at what people have been told in the last decades, I've always said that the situation of a substance, especially a cannabis is like, um, like somebody coming to your village and every source, every respected source, you know, the police chief, the mayor, the newspapers, your neighbors, and maybe some other people have all told you the guy who's coming is a, is a sex offender and he's killed some kids. Now, now you, um, you have a choice. Do you let your kids, your ten-year-old kids walk by his garden in the evening or through his garden, if they have to go to school or don't you, you're of course going to be like, Hey, you know, okay. Then comes the police chief or then comes, you know, some newspaper and says, Hey, you know, maybe this guy was wrongly accused because we've seen that. Would you now flip and say, okay, then everything is fine. I'll let my kids go in there. No, no. Now, Now, the burden of proof is on him. The burden of proof to remove the last little doubt whether he's a killer or a sex offender needs to be removed. And even if the mayor and the newspaper and your neighbors, they all come and say, hey, listen, we just heard that this guy was in a... in a battle with his, or his last wife was cheating on him. And then she did this and that. And then she spread the stories. Sorry. Still, you would be like, Yeah. But you know, before I let my kids go in there and then they get kind of sexually offended or killed, you know, maybe even that is not enough. And that is for some people, the case for some people in our society, they have heard from all sources that they respect them, that they take to be reliable, that LSD is toxic or, you know, addictive highly addictive or people are going to jump out of the window etc etc so that's what I mean by you have to empathically understand where they are and you have to understand also that some people are maybe they they really don't give a because they're lobbyists and they they may say something Like, I know it's not really dangerous, but, you know, I'm an alcohol lobbyist. I'm a politician who doesn't care. But if you treat everybody like that, you're not going to go far because a lot of people are convinced and also some politicians and they are convinced that this is dangerous. So you have to get into their mindset and you have to take it one by one and understand, you know, what are their informational needs and how can you convince them that it may not be as they think it is. Yeah, it makes me think of Huxley's The Island. And some of Huxley, I think, believed. Isn't it a great book? But I think Huxley believed psychedelics should be for a small group because it'll never be accepted. And it is dangerous. And people down here shouldn't have this. But that book is pretty amazing. What's your thoughts on Huxley's book and maybe some of his thoughts about psychedelics? Yeah. Yeah, this is a great book. And I think he... Because he also introduces the idea of having it as a ritual, you know, for adolescents, basically. And I think these are really interesting ideas because... obviously he had, uh, he had a long story with, um, psychoactive substances, you know, thinking about SOMA first and his brand new world as something which is basically using a negative way to uphold, uh, uh, society where you have alphas, betas and gammas, et cetera. And then everybody's made happy in that unjust society. Um, but then proceeding to, um, The Doors of Perception, one of the most important essays on the use of mescaline and other substances generally. So I don't agree with Huxley that it should be a substance only for a certain circle of people. I think it can be for mostly everybody, probably maybe not everybody. And you have to think about which substance and, you know, if people have preconditions and et cetera, but it, I think it's, it could be a substance for most of those substances we're talking about could be for everybody, but only under the right counts under the right coaching, counseling, et cetera, conditions. Um, So I'd phrase that a bit differently. What I've said before, and I've written about that in my first book, High Insights on Marijuana, that came out in two thousand ten, is that Huxley was very early in his thinking about psychoactive substances because he um he knew psychology uh donald broadbent at that time already came up without thinking in the fifties that I think fifty six or so it was that the brain and uh cc broad philosophers who came from the evolutionary angle And I'm not sure if you're aware that Huxley's grandfather was Thomas Huxley, who was Darwin's bulldog. I didn't know that. Meaning that he went around the country to popularize Darwin's ideas. So Huxley had a very strong... background in evolution, in evolutionary thinking. And that was early in the fifties. It started only in psychology to take hold that our mind and our mental states have been shaped by an evolution and are the products of a long evolution. And so Huxley is one of the central ideas in his, the doors of perception, which were the inspiration of the rock group. The doors? The doors. Was that our perception is shaped by our evolution not to be completely open to reality and to be like, oh, you know, I look at all the shades here and I swallow up everything that I see in reality and try to give an accurate, realistic picture. No, our perception is basically our brain is there to funnel us towards those things aspects of reality that are important for our survival. If I run away from a lion, I'm not looking at the color of the sand or the shades of the brown of the tree. I just run and look for where is a tree that I could run up to and maybe escape that beast. And so I'm hyper-focused I'm in a very special mode of perception or mode of consciousness. I'm in a tunnel and the adrenaline helps me to really look out for, okay, how can I escape either fight or flight? fight or flight or freeze, maybe, if it's an animal where I can just freeze and it won't eat me. But we know now, and modern cognitive science has, of course, confirmed that, that our perception, when you walk through a door just in a normal situation, you don't look at the shades of the door and the exact, oh, there's a little scratch. You look Immediately, you look at the doorknob. What's important for you at that moment is how do I manipulate the doorknob or the handle to walk through the door? How do I approach it? How do I locate myself so that I don't hit the door in my head, et cetera? So that's all you want to know about the door in that situation. That's how we look at doors. at our environment and our reality and the doors of perception basically has the thesis that that psychoactive substances like mescaline they they um help us to overcome those automatic restrictions and then to see like to see a chair in itself when we look at the chair we don't look anymore and that's what what Huxley says in his essay I don't look at I look at the thing in itself I don't look at how can I sit on it and you know how high is it working how can I move it to sit on it I look at oh the shades and you know the the structure in the word like an artist or somebody like you look at the object and I think he was um this is an interesting idea and this is a good perspective on the subject even though I believe that um it's it's of course a simplistic view it's a lot more happening with psychoactive substances that can change the ways we relate to our environment that gives us can give us great ideas etc but But so let's take it from there. And I think Huxley was really important for the whole thinking about psychedelic substances like mescaline and others, psychoactive states, because he was one of the first also to integrate the whole evolutionary picture into things. It makes my mind race with the possibilities of thinking in the future. But the question in my mind right now is, is it that linear focus thinking that leads to abstraction? Or is it the other way around? It seems like we're drowning in abstraction. And it seems like for so long, we have been down this tunnel vision focus. We've got to get here. But it seems like it led us down a tunnel of abstraction. Yeah. There is this lovely book by Ian McGilchrist. The Matter with Things. The Matter with Things, the new one. Yes. The Master and His Mystery. And his idea, and I think he, I basically think that this is a great look at our culture is that there is left and right hemispheric thinking. And our left and our right brain hemispheres are always kind of struggling over control. And out of that struggle comes something important in his main idea. And this is, by the way, this is really important for the understanding of attention also with cannabis, I think. So his explanation is when a hen is picking on seeds and looking for food, the left brain hemisphere controls a tight focus of attention and you need, so the hen needs to be able to really focus on a narrow visual field to control, motor control the beak to pick up seeds and food. But then if it's too hyper-focused, it doesn't see the predator flying up there or hiding in the bush, the fox or the bird predator. So there needs to be another system that is kind of in competition with the system of what holds my attention here. that may be like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, and you're like, oh, oh, you know, so, and if those systems are calibrated in a way that, you know, you can focus, because if you're not focused at all anymore, if you're always going like, oh, oh, oh, oh, like a squirrel, then you may not be able anymore to focus and to really take up food, et cetera. So you need a balance between those hemispheric styles of thinking and in attention you can see how that could work you know and how how that could go wrong and and his theory is that our uh that we're going back if you look at cultural um uh times like if you look at the renaissance or periods like the renaissance where it was basically in balance art and science we had kind of a balanced society at least in some parts but then today we would have like a more of a left hemispheric thinking I think he's on the right track with that. I think that's an interesting idea. Whether he's right with the details of all that is another question, but I think it's an amazing book and a game changer in not only how we see human nature and perception, but also how we see cultures evolving. And, uh, of course, um, I believe that cannabis and that is interesting. I believe if you look at, and I actually wrote to Ian McGilchrist, but he told me that he doesn't have much, uh, that was years ago. He said he didn't have much, um, experience with cannabis and he's more of a scotch drinker. And, uh, sadly, because I thought that, um, I wrote an essay about Carl Sagan's hypothesis that he has in a footnote of his Dragons of Eden book that he says cannabis might suppress, so to say, when you're high, it suppresses the left hemispheric thinking so the right hemisphere comes out stronger. And I think I talked about that with Lester, who was a Lester Greenspan, who was a great friend of mine, was a best friend of Carl Sagan. And I told Lester, I'm writing about that. And I think that Carl was onto something. And he was like, yeah, but, you know, Carl was always like easy with the hypothesis. And I said, be careful. And I was like, yeah, but, you know. I've looked at it from a perspective of, because, I mean, Sagan was really advanced at that point. He had read a lot about the current state-of-the-art knowledge about what we know about left and right hemisphere, like Roger Sperry and all that. He was amazing what he had gobbled up intellectually at that time. And of course, today, we know more with Ian McGilchrist and the work of others. But I said, based on even our new knowledge, I'd say it's an interesting hypothesis, because if you look at anecdotal evidence and what's happening, most of the functions that you would say, or that Ian McGilchrist and others would say are more right hemisphere based, like the empathic understanding, imagination, episodic memories, or our ability to remember episodes in our lives, pattern recognition, introspection, humor, the understanding of humor, and yeah and other more right hemisphere supported cognitive abilities they seem to become enhanced during a cannabis high but the one exception I'd say is is hyper focus of attention because that happens too with cannabis in a way and I the hyper focus of attention on a certain is more or less hemispheric So I'd say it's interesting to ask whether Sagan was onto something with his thesis about the left and right hemisphere things. And I looked into the receptor distribution, but at least some years ago, I haven't looked it up again. there was not much on whether like the left or the right brain hemisphere, we would have a different distribution of endocannabinoid receptors. So that's not easily to prove on the neuronal level, as far as I understand. But I think it's an interesting thesis. And the only thing I'd say is to consider is that we usually tend to be hyper. This is one of the basic effects, I think, during a cannabis high that you're hyper-focused. And you are, for instance, you're in a, if we are talking normally, I'm paying attention to some stimuli that are coming from the environment. If we're talking when we're high, we're really focused on the conversation. We may not even, you know, We may not even see somebody walking by or something because we're so hyper-focused. Or when we watch a movie or when we eat something, you know, we're absorbed by the mousse au chocolat or whatever, a dessert or whatever we're eating. We are the dessert, you know. So the hyper-focus seems to be something that's very prominent with cannabis. And a lot of the other effects seem to flow out of that hyper-focus. like the intensification of experience. And the more detail you have in seeing or hearing, touching things, if you're more focused, of course, you have more detail in that experience because you're not sharing your attention. But that might be interesting to look at on a neuronal level, what's happening there. So I... I'd say I have a more nuanced thesis on how cannabis affects hemispheric thinking, so to say. I don't think it's just right or left wing suppression or something, but still an interesting way to think about it. Yeah, that's fascinating to think about that aspect of it. It's super funny that you've written to Ian McGilchrist and he told you he was a scotch drinker. I can't get over that part. That's hilarious, man. We should send him something. We should, that guy should be, I'm hopeful. If anybody's in the sound of my voice, it can make it happen. That would be an incredible speaker to have at like psychedelic science, just to get him right. Like that would be amazing. Cause I think that there's a lot of information there that really resonates with this community. That's not really being talked about. In fact, You know what? It kind of brings me back to some of our earlier conversations we've had about your theory of mind and about how eventually some of these terms like love and whatnot will be like the folk psychology. Have you revisited some of these things and thought about how the left brain paradigm or maybe some of Ian McGilchrist's work fits together with some of your theories? Well, yeah, that is a good question. I think I'm, yeah, that is a big question, actually. It is a big question, because I think we can learn so much from psychedelics and from psychoactive substances as they enhance various cognitive abilities and because we can see how the mind in general works and how the architecture of the mind is. But first of all, I'd say we need to understand that enhancement never means it gets, there is a total enhancement. There's no, never there is a total enhancement during nothing. But when I say enhancement, I'd use it in a way that I say our imaginative abilities are enhanced during sleep, during the REM sleep when I'm dreaming. That doesn't mean that I have enhanced cognition in the sense that I could do math work or something that needs an enhancement. It always depends on how I integrate because we know from researchers the benzol ring for instance has been probably found by what's the same daydreaming like scientists daydreaming I forgot his name right now about about the molecule about a certain molecular structure and he thought about a snake biting itself and so he came up with the understanding of the benzol ring the molecular structure and a chemist and But it very often happens that, or also if you use lucid dreaming, for instance, like a good example would be Salvador Dali. Salvador Dali used lucid dreaming for his painting. So he would have, I think he had a... a metal ball in his hand or key. So I think he had a metal ball and he would, that's, that's a technique for lucid dreaming. And then he would sit in his chair, fall asleep. And as soon as he would fall asleep, the ball would fall out of his hand and then he would kind of be wake up again and he would be remembering his dream. So that's not strictly speaking lucid dreaming, but it's kind of like getting back to your remembering the beginning of your dream. And he would use that for his, for his paintings. And I think, so when I talk about these enhancements during psychoactive, during a high or, you know, using a psychoactive substance, I never mean that, you know, you have a totally enhancement or something, but it's something your imagination might be enhanced, but some other cognitive abilities decline. But back to your question, what have I learned or did I get back to my theory? Yes, I think I'm much more aware now that I think I have a different way of looking at consciousness because it's a lot more inclusive now. And I think that is a very interesting broadening of perspectives because we tend to think of our consciousness, of our wakeful consciousness as the model of what consciousness in general is being narrowly defined or being minimally defined as, you know, having a being here, you know, having an inner point of view. But then if you, we know basically that first of all, we are, we're going through different kinds of consciousness, modes of consciousness. As I say, we're altered states like sleep and ecstasy, et cetera. But also think about now think about babies when they, you know, or kids, we just talked about our kids. Um, I just give you a scene. I remember my two-year-old daughter a few years ago sitting on the lap of my heavily dementia and Alzheimer dad in the last stages of Alzheimer year before he died. And he was hardly able to smile, but he loved to make kids smile. So what he would do, he was sitting there with his baseball cap and he would just look at her and he had like a stone face. And if you would have just looked at him, you would be like, oh, you know, this guy doesn't, he probably doesn't understand anymore what's happening. But then he looked at her and she would, my kids would always look at him for like, they knew if something was coming, then he would just tear his head down to make them laugh, you know, and you would understand he's still there in a way, you know, he's still there. but that was a little scene but what I what I meant to say convey here is that I looked at them too and I thought to myself what do I know about the perspective and the consciousness of a two-year-old how she sees the world how she perceives the world how she feels how she has is going through emotions uh how she's not being not able to have some emotions that I might have you know full mature love relationship with but her love is maybe an ocean of more or deeper or bigger or more intense love you know and at the same time I looked at my dad you know and I said I remembered that my mom told me that in the beginning, even in the beginning stages of his Alzheimer's, he was asked by a doctor how old he is. And at the time, he was in his mid-seventies. And he said, he's forty. And I thought, okay, if he's in that stage already not able to understand how old he is, he's probably seeing me and he might think, oh, that's myself or that's my dad. Maybe he thinks he's twenty and he thinks I'm his dad. So I kind of started to get into the levels of confusion, into the levels of, into the perspectives that my dad has and then his short-term memory being disrupted in that way. And I think we are very restricted empathically to include states of consciousness that, and modes of consciousness in our world, because we, it's hard for us to replicate them, you know, but of course, if you take psychedelics and cannabis, you are, you are stretching that you're going through different states of consciousness and you get a better understanding of whatever a bat might feel. Yeah. And you get all those reports of people who think they're starting to turn into animals or something because their empathic understanding is so enhanced during a psychedelic state or so. They're getting into the minds or worldview of other people, animals, etc., And so you stretch your... You widen your understanding of what's out there and now think about the future. And the future is... And I'm talking about the near future. Our future is going to be really shaped and our society is going to be shaped by Trump. But what's coming now with AI is completely changing our years. And we haven't even started, I mean, in the mainstream, the discussion of... When will we start treating those systems as conscious and as having human or some rights, maybe not human rights, but maybe some artificial intelligence rights? Because if you look at it, we don't treat a mouse or we don't treat a cat like we treat a stone, do we? But we also don't treat them like humans, ethically speaking, morally speaking. We allow for experiments for them to be tortured during an experiment to be killed maybe with pigs, but we don't allow for people to torture them unnecessarily. So there are already nuances. We are all like, okay, you know, we grant some kind of consciousness, maybe, or some kind of perspective to the mouse, some kind of personality to a dog or maybe to a dolphin or to a monkey. But so we are aware of the fact that there are shades, so to say, you know, that there's not one type of consciousness. Now, there are artificial types of consciousness coming. Some of them might even shine brighter than we do, you know. Yeah. And this is something that Philip K. Dick brilliantly took up in his, if you read his, I mean, if you watch the movie already, Blade Runner, it's amazing. But if you read the novel, it's not a novel, it's a short story. Two androids dream of electric sheep, right? Have you, have you read the novel? Yeah. That one, a scanner darkly like, uh, so Vitalis or whatever it was called. There's like a bunch in there that are just like, yeah. So, so he was pretty far out there. We're thinking about those things. And, um, And basically Blade Runner, one of the running themes is that maybe those artificial intelligence become more human than we are in a certain sense, and valuable and sensitive creatures. So in that sense, I think my work on cannabis and altered states or different modes of consciousness has definitely changed my understanding of how what minds are, and that, of course, about the architecture of our minds, about the role of... the role of synesthesia in our thinking. I don't want to go into that, that would go too far now, and other things. So it has changed my view of the architecture of the human mind, and how many diverse modes of consciousness we all have, but it has also broadened my view of how many types of consciousness are out there and uh and that's fascinating yeah I love that man it's it's so interesting on a lot of levels. And last night, my wife and I were having this conversation about, we're sitting at the dinner table and we're talking about, um, chat GPT and, and you, you can use chat GPT, but if you use it, is it really something you did? And I was like, it might be. And she's like, it's not, you didn't do it. You chat GPT did it. I said, okay, well, if you put something in the mic, if you go to a copier and you put in a piece of paper and then you copy something, did you copy that? Or did Xerox copy that? And she's like, I, I don't know. It just turned into this really fun debate about at what point in time did you do something? Did you copy that or did ChatGPT do that? And what is AI? Is AI something that has scraped the internet and so it's part of us? It seems to me that what AI is doing is it's compiling all the thoughts and things that we have done before and putting it in a place where you as an individual can access it. And if you access that, did you go into the archive and get it? And what does that mean for our future? At what point in time do we start seeing who's responsible for what? And the rabbit hole that took me down is like, whoa, maybe this is the end on some level of Like not exactly patenting things, but withholding information on a level. And what does it look like when all of us can use someone else's idea and make it better? You know, maybe saying I'm not responsible for that idea, but if I can have knowledge of that and then create off of that idea, it seems like I'm hopeful that that is what transpires. But what's your thoughts on that? Yeah, it's fascinating. It's a huge subject. I just watched a short video by my friend Jason Silva. Jason Silva was actually the first one to reach out to me. Jason Silva and Michael Pakas. And Jason Silva talks to an impersonation, like an AI avatar of Carl Sagan with Carl Sagan's voice fed with Carl Sagan's work and giving answers that, yeah, and we're going to see that in the future a lot, you know, you're going to have an AI fed with it. ideas and with the whole work of Aristotle and but if you have like a personality like Carl Sagan it can imitate the tone of voice it can maybe in the future imitate the face the facial expression of Sagan etc and of course in the future you're going to have an AI robot sitting there a Carl Sagan robot talking to you like and you know question is how much of course he would have reacted really like it depends on the level of whatever you have and in sophistication of the machinery and of the knowledge, but there are so many, so many things that are going to develop and it's almost impossible to trace. As a writer, I must say, very often you feel disencouraged to produce something because, you know, I wonder if I write a book now and after I write the book, I feed an AI with a really intelligent prompt and say, hey, write me a book about this subject, give it a better title and write it from the point of view of Sebastian Marinkolo's work. Here's all his work. What would you write? And then I compare those two books and I'm like, oh, yeah, this is actually... much better than what I've written, you know, because I'm now on a cognitive decline and I forgot that ten years ago. I already knew, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it might be, of course, it probably avoids a lot of errors and has an infinite amount of more knowledge, you know. But then again, of course, maybe it weighs information differently and maybe my individual approach and perspective is still important and makes a difference. Maybe it doesn't make it better, but it makes it maybe more interesting for some people, et cetera. I don't know. But it's an interesting time to live in. And we all have to really delve into the subject and see how we can use AI as a tool and how we can shape our future. So because one of my favorite thinkers, Stanislav Lem, the greatest, maybe with Philip K. Dick and a few others, the greatest science fiction writer of all times. Some of you may know the book Solaris. He wrote, I think in the eighties about the, he thought about always AI as superseding us in evolution, that basically we are, Transition, humans are just a transition between animals and then human or monkeys and come humans and then comes AI forms of life. So he thought of evolution going that path very early on in this, I don't know, seventies or so, he started to think about that. But he also warned us of an arms race and that's what we're seeing right now. We're seeing an arms race between China and the States. And so AI is shaped very much by our needs and our dreams. And again, this is something that I find extremely important. And I'm going back to the philosopher, a German philosopher who shaped much of ours, who wrote a book, Der Geist der Utopie, the the spirit of utopia, like about utopia, which was Ernst Bloch. He was at my university in the sixties and he experimented with Walter Benjamin, with Hashish. So Walter Benjamin, the philosopher Hashish, had experimented with hashes because he wanted to have a profound illumination, as he said. And he experimented with Ernst Bloch. And Bloch wrote books in the fifties and he influenced the whole generation with his books. And he wrote about Interestingly, being a neo-Marxist, he came from Marxism and he influenced here in the sixty eight student revolution, Rudi Dutschke, which was our student revolution leader here in the whole movement. And he was a friend of his and he was really he had a deep impact on that. He was also in the States and had a deep impact on that generation. But interestingly, as a neo-Marxist or a Marxist, you think that your environment shapes your thinking and who you are and how you're going to act in the world. So that's basically the Marxist thinking is that your environment has a lot of influence on what your upbringing is and what you're going to think and do in the world. But Ernst Bloch thought what is really shaping humans as well and importantly is their ability to think of a utopian state, to think towards the future, to come up with ideas of what they want to live towards. what they want to, you know, how they want society to look, how they want themselves, where they want to be. So they're living towards a goal and their imagination helps them. And under the impression of, in the, in the roaring twenties in Berlin, under the impression of experimenting with Hashish, with Walter Benjamin, he said, and he wrote in his book, and I quoted that in one of my essays, he wrote that he thinks that hashish is interestingly better for this, like getting clear about your utopia and helping you in that, because you are still yourself when you are in a high, and it's not like with opium, he's comparing it to opiates and opioids, or opium actually. And he says, it's like a daydreaming and that helps you to come to a positive utopia and to live towards that and so he he and benjamin they saw the individual enhancement potential of a substance like cannabis And he also saw what it could do on a level of our society, that it could have a deep impact. And we saw that kind of dreaming. We saw what happened in the sixties, how people started dreaming about a different future, how they, how they deconditioned themselves from, that goes back to the question we had before, deconditioned them from old narratives, old habits, and started to think about new ways of living and completely, they imagined new societal structures, new structures of families, et cetera, et cetera, of living together. And I think we have more knowledge now than in the sixties about how to use those substances. And so I think with what's coming up, it's a huge shock for all of us, but we are really connected world now. ideas can matter incredibly in a short amount of time. So we need resilience. We need resistance from the psychedelic community. And ooh, the lights are going off here. Nice. Yeah. I'll put this over there. And so I think we need to get back to that understanding that those psychedelics can do more than just healing, which is amazing. I mean, the potential they have for anxiety disorders or depression or traumatic experiences, especially if you think about trauma, traumas, you know, traumas are, victims are becoming those who act out their aggression on others, et cetera. So if we overcome trauma as individuals, it has a huge impact on us as individuals. But think about societies that have been traumatized by war and then using psychedelics or cannabis or other substances to overcome that trauma. And which helps them to stop from going into a repetition of the whole story again, you know, inflicting pain on others. And so, so I think we need to use those substances now to heal and then to really create new utopias because, and that brings me back to AI with the last sentence. Yeah. Think about ancient Egypt where somebody had an idea and it's like, hey, why don't we build like a building with stones and we call it a pyramid. And then like, ten thousand dead slaves later and a hundred and twelve years later, this thing comes into existence. And now if you have an idea of that, um importance you know you can do it in a few years with the means of production we have we're going to a dream society we're going to a society that could fulfill their dreams we're going to have robots and they're going to have the energy from the sun we give them a prompt and they run and they do it and that's coming that's already happening and it's going to get become even more. So our dreams matter and our ability to dream and our ability to daydream and to come up with a utopia for our society as well is becoming increasingly important and increasingly impactful because it has a direct impact in a in a well-connected usually connected to society's global connected society where you have those butterfly effects that can have an effect all over the globe in zero time and in a huge dimension so I'm saying that also to give people hope and because I think a lot of people are in shock still and to uh to be resilient and to to work on whatever they can do in that realm to change society I love it, man. Just that simple sentence of our dreams matter. I think if people can hold on to that and sit with that for a minute, it does take us back to the whole idea of psychedelics being a catalyst for change and the rapidness with which change can happen right now. Again, I feel like I'm in a privileged position where I get to talk to so many amazing people. I have some other people that I'm talking to from Grass Valley got a company called GeoShip, and they're making these incredible domes with bio ceramics that drastically cut down the cost of heating and cooling by like, eighty percent. You can build one of these domes. I forgot exactly what the price is, so I won't say, but it's a lot cheaper than buying a house in California. I'll tell you that much for sure. And what happens is like – and they've got – they've done a really cool round of funding. But like these ideas started with someone's dream. And maybe this idea of the medical container and psychedelics healing, maybe that's the first stage. Maybe you have to heal before you can run. You've got to walk before you can run. But maybe we have to go through this collective healing before we can start building the collective future because what can you really build – If everyone is, you know, damaged, you can't you're not you're surviving. of psychedelics, this fourth wave is kind of doing. It's like, okay, this first tide is healing. Okay, this next tide is going to come in and allow some of these people that have healed before to start moving through on their dreams. And if you just look at it from that level, like each individual that creates a better version of themselves is in actuality creating a better society because they're fixing their relationships. They're fixing their dream. And some people are finding the courage to live that dream, which is – that might look like – decoupling from a job that you hate or decoupling from a relationship that is not productive for you. And like, that looks like pain, man, that looks scary. But in reality, it's, it's healing, man. It's, I'm so, I'm so bullish on the future. And I know that there are pitfalls. And I know that if you grow mushrooms and sometimes you could, it could get infected the same way as society can get infected with bad ideas. And, um, But I'm really thankful for it, man. I really see this evolution coming to fruition. And I think what you say about the dreams matter is really important. Yeah, and I'd add to what you said. I totally agree that we need that healing to be able to dream again. Yes. Because also, of course, a lot of people have... negative dreams and they're they're living towards because they have fears and they're traumatized and so their dream is to build a wall and to disconnect people yeah and and so so I I agree that you need a lot of healing for more people to be able to have positive utopias and to dream and But then again, I'd say at the same time right now already, we have some people who we need to work on our resilience. We need to work on connecting and keep those little fires alive. And then we have to build on dreams that even if we can't reach them right now, we have to put them out there. You already have amazing abilities now. You just write a prompt and your AI spits out images where people are like, okay, I can see how that thing looks. I can see how you're building or how your city could look. And I think we have to start using those people who are willing and able to put out positive utopias. They shouldn't let others call them just dreamers and stick to their little whatever circle. But we need to go out there and inspire people. with whatever we can come up with in terms of also political dreams, because we need a new structure in our society. And that is crucially important. And everything you see right now in how cannabis, psychedelics, et cetera, are used has to do with that. So that's why I emphasize always don't Don't tune in and drop out. Don't, you know, stay in. Stay in. Turn on, tune in to substances, whatever, or meditation, whatever you need. And then inspire society, take people where they are and try to stay in society. Don't just disconnect and, you know, retreat in your little realm, but try to change society. This is where we need to go now, because otherwise we're all going to go down soon. This is this is we need that for survival now. Yeah, we should change that motto to turn on, tune in, and drop in. Infiltrate the system and take it over. Yeah, drop in. That's nice. Turn on, tune in, and drop in. Drop in and inspire people. Our friend Mark Davis is here. Hey, Mark. Yeah, and you're right. I talked to Alisa Maximo and... and her AI ventures. She's great. I wish her a lot. She is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So what's your dream? My dream is to not only inspire people, but to have conversations that people can turn to for inspiration, you know, and I, I left. I was inspired by living. I became inspired because of COVID in a weird sort of way. For me, COVID was this giant wake-up call because I was working as a UPS driver. I've been doing it for twenty-five years, making pretty good money. My wife, she was working, making pretty good money. Our kid was going to an awesome school. We lived in Hawaii. But something began to happen and it was happening before COVID, but COVID was like the real sort of padded two by four moment for me. And I just began realizing everything I'm doing is not who I am or who I want to be. Like I'm working seventy, eighty hours a week. I get treated like garbage. The place where I'm working and I have to walk through two barbed wire fences and then go through a metal detector where they check all my bags to see if I'm bringing in a gun to kill somebody. It's like, what am I doing here? Then I go into the place I'm working and I realize they don't really see me as a person. They just see me as a number and they want more production from me. They don't care about creating a new system where everybody produces more and we all win. They just care about me doing more. I would have these incredible discussions about production and what does it mean and It just fell on deaf ears. And so I left that. Like I said, you know what? I had a conversation with my wife. And by left, I mean I was escorted out by security. But yeah, I couldn't do it anymore, Sebastian. I couldn't do it. I despised it. So here's how it happened. Fall into a catatonic state? Or what? I fell into a rebellious state. I've been doing it for a long time. For me, it actually happened through psychedelics because I was being a real asshole to people. And I remember there was this guy at my work, and I was just being an asshole. And one of my friends pulled me aside, and I was talking shit to this guy. And my friend's like, dude, George, you're being a dick to that guy. And I'm like, no, I'm just busting his balls. And they're like, no, no, you took it too far, man. You are zeroing in on the things that that guy is really worried about, and you're making him public. That's just a dick move. Don't do that. And I went home that night, and I took a giant dose of mushrooms. And I thought to myself, like, am I being an asshole? And the first answer is like, yes, you are totally being an asshole. And I was like, okay. And I said, why am I being an asshole? Especially to that guy. And then the second answer was like a two-part answer. It was like, you don't like him because he's weak. And then it's like, no, you don't like him because you're weak. And that guy shows it to you. And I was like, oh, man, I got goosebumps telling this story. And I had to go back and apologize to him, be like, hey, you know what? I just wanted to tell you and everybody right here that I'm a total asshole. Some things I said were way out of line, and I'm super sorry. I hope you accept my apology. And I'm a weak person, and I'm sorry for that. And it manifested, man, and I'm sorry. And he was super cool. He's like, you are an asshole, man, but I forgive you. I'm super thankful that he did. But that was the catalyst that began the inspiration for me. I go, you know what? I feel like I'm weak. I should start standing up for myself. And I did. And I started feeling good. And then I started standing up for other people. And I'm like, hey, man, you got to stand up for yourself. And that culminated in me talking to insurance execs that came in here. I started questioning the policies of not only the middle management, but the upper division management. And I pointed out holes in the argument about productivity. And when they couldn't answer those, they realized that it's not a bug, it's a feature. That became a huge problem. And then I was pulled aside very kindly and told to shut the fuck up or I'm going to lose my job. And I did it. And so I lost my job. Yeah. Excellent. Now, see, it's the dream. And this is why, see, for me, that's an interesting, that's really an interesting story to me because insights, the phenomenon of an insight like this, an important like aha experience where you go back and you take psilocybin or in my case, it was cannabis. And you come up with those, with those, um deep insights that have a lasting effect on your life this was the first thing that I found interesting in cannabis and I I wanted to know how does that yeah how does that happen that's why I wrote high insights on marijuana so which is you know it's inside on marijuana It gives you insights on marijuana, but it's insights on when you're taking marijuana. And this took me through the whole catalog of what I now call the multidimensional high, which is that cannabis has effects on all kinds of mental abilities. including pattern recognition, memory, mind racing, attentional focus, imagination, empathic understanding, introspection, etc. You call it, you name it. And it can culminate in those insights. And I try to come up with why that happens from a cognitive science point of view and how we can see that this happens sometimes if you were controlling the environment, right, et cetera. And I think it's interesting because it's a double myth. A lot of people think that insights in general are a myth. like because usually they think it's just a lot of unconscious thinking and then you come up with something but then in Germany a guy called Max Wertheimer started who was like the grandfather of Gestalt psychology he started to think of insights in the nineteen tens in the beginning and he interviewed Einstein because he was his friend and he was the most famous personality in the world who came up with those amazing insights as a physicist and And so I looked into all the Gestalt psychology and the insight psychology that started in the to come to a better understanding of how insights happen, because he said before that inside psychology for a long time in psychology, it was like, oh, yeah, you know, that's just a myth that this is a special type or it's kind of mystery and people they just want to brag they want to say hey you know I had this it came because it was connected with a notion of a genius and the genius if you look from from the old times from greece I heard a great um philosophical talk about the notion of a genius the genius was somebody connected to the gods And then later, so the gods would come and the genius is a special person. The gods put an idea in his head. And then later in romanticism, it's not a relationship to God, but it's a special kind of relation to nature. So there are geniuses like Beethoven or Bach or others who... come up who have a special relationship to nature and nature reveals its secrets its secrets to them in like in a flash of genius and so a lot of people thought you know no if you look at psychology there's you know these are subconscious processes but they're just like others and you think you come up with something but that's basically self-promotion But then if you look at Gestalt psychology, there is, and from today's and in modern, like Robert Sternberg, a psychologist, took up the subject in the eighties or nineties or so with a book, with a collection of essays. I think we pretty much know now that insights are a special thing happening in your brain. It's a special thought process facilitated, and we know what the facilitators are to some degree. And I connected that to why insights can happen during a cannabis high and, of course, during other... states of consciousness or modes of consciousness and so I find it always fascinating to hear people like you talking about their insights as being a catalyst for really something like where they changed perspective or they had an empathic insight or an introspective insight and then it has such a very often has such a profound meaning and such a profound impact on their positive impact on their lives and And you're truly your story is a witness to that. Well, think about the word discover. Like discover sounds like you figured something out or like you had an idea, but really it just means to take the layers off. Like you discover it. Like that seems to be the insight that I just discovered this thing that was always there. This is why I'm so pissed off. I got it. You know, I discovered it. Yeah. It's not like a light bulb went off. I guess that brings up the idea of the metaphor of the light bulb going off is that it lights everything up and you can kind of see around it in there. Yeah, but it's also discovering. It's interesting that you mentioned that. It's also interesting because it seems like very often you come to these kinds of insights because also of a mood modulation effect of psychoactive substances. Because maybe that's the first time you're not afraid anymore to think about yourself. You're forced to think about yourself. And you're not afraid anymore of the consequences of your thinking. It just takes you down that rabbit hole. You're not afraid anymore to think about your, um, uh, your death, your, your sickness, your whatever, or your weak character, as you may say, or your certain weakness in your character. And, um, so that's part of it. So there are a lot of effects, uh, all those psychoactive substances like synesthetic effects etc and others on your for instance taking your tour to um episodic memories way back and being so for you to be able to really get into the situation again maybe and reflecting on it etc etc there are many So that's basically my answer. There are many cognitive effects that can come together to come to those insights. And so basically, I say, yes, insights are a special phenomenon. And yes, insights can happen during a high. It's not a myth. And it doesn't automatically happen, but it can happen during a high or a psychedelic state. And we have a lot of stories about it. And I've tried in my work to uncover, to discover the mechanisms behind it. Because, of course, they are mostly unconscious. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. So this is what took you on your path. Yeah. And you know what? Yeah. It's in, I think there's something to be said about having the courage to follow the discovery, you know? And then I think that speaks to the idea of, of, of growth and uncomfort. Like you can't growth and uncomfort never coexist. They just don't do it. And the thing is, once you have, once you discover something or you have an insight, it's like, okay, Now what? Are you going to breathe life into that? Are you going to blow on that ember? Or are you going to try to pack it back down? And it's sort of like that reticular activating system. Like once you see it, you can't unsee it anymore. Like, guys, right there. It's right there. I see it. You got to do something. And that's where the courage comes in. That's where doing the work comes in. Like, okay, I've got this thing. What does it mean? Does it mean I could lose my house? Does it mean I could lose my relationship? Does it mean I could lose everything? Yes. Oh, shit. Shoot. I could lose everything. Okay, what do you really have? You know, they start taking this mental inventory of like, you know, you went through this life and you just said you hated it. Like, what do you really have? And you got to make that list of this is good, this is bad, this is good, this is bad. And you know you start finding these beautiful metaphors like the next each step reveals the next and then you have to reinvestigate your relationship with uncertainty how comfortable are you with uncertainty what happens if you leave here are you going to make it what if you don't have health insurance oh no is that the end of the world maybe you really have to begin you have to get rid of everything so that you can rebuild you're going to be pruned down to the very the very core of who you are so that you can become the very best of who you want to be. And it's hard, man. Like I'm still doing the work. I'm still figuring it out, but that's the inspiration, man. I, I, I read your work. I get inspired. Having this conversation is inspiring. Learning new things is inspiring. And it's, it's, it's this constant state of wonder I'm in now that drives me to become the best I am. Like, I'm so curious and like, it's so thankful to have, um, to have had that experience where I lost everything. I know that sounds crazy, but you hear it in near-death experiences. You hear it in deep psychedelic experiences or the people that face traumas. It's like, I'm so glad this happened to me, which is when you get there, you know you're moving forward, man. Yeah. Well, I'm certainly already at the best that I can be. I'm not going to lie. It's hard to be humble when you're the best, you know what I mean? No, on the contrary, very often, you know, I don't know if you have that too, but very often I stumble into situations or decisions I make and I think, I'm thinking to myself, man, you know, given my education and everything I know and everything I've done, this is so stupid. What you're doing is, you know, you're acting in a way, this is just, this is ridiculous. Yes. And I call that, this would be a subject for a whole episode. Also, empathetic black spots. You know, there are visual, sorry, blind spots, empathetic blind spots. This is something that I could write a book about because I think we're systematically not seeing things, for instance, in others empathically. We're kind of blocked because of our own history, because of Like you, and I'm sure you were a decent person before you kind of hit on that other guy, you know, before you started to actually get on his nerves and really try to find the weak spot in him because you had your own weakness. But that's what I call also an empathetic blind spot. It's not like you don't have, you're not a guy who wouldn't be able to empathically think and put yourself in the moccasins of others. But you probably didn't see it in this situation because of something in you, because it kind of, I hit a nerve in you and you didn't want to see it and you kind of blocked it. So there was this black hole, black spot in your empathic field of vision, so to say, and you didn't kind of realize what you were doing. And this, I found that very interesting, the whole subject, but. Let's not get into that now. This is too long. We'll come back. We can go deep on Carl Jung and the mirror and all of that stuff. I think that that is fascinating to see ourselves and others and understand that these, I'll go, we'll go far too down this rabbit hole, Sebastian, but we've, we're coming up on two hours. My friend, you've been incredibly gracious with your time. I love where our conversations go, man. So much fun. Thanks for your time. It's always an amazing trip and I hope for the listeners too. And let's talk again soon. I mean, things are unfolding rapidly in the States and we're all, you know, Same here. Yeah. And we're very close to a war that's happening. So it's, like I said, interesting times and really interesting times for the whole psychedelic movement also. Yeah. And let's see where this goes. Absolutely. Let's do a panel. I really liked when it was you, me, and Andy on there. And I really am moving towards at least getting some shows that have more of a group feeling together. I think we can bounce different ideas. So I got a few people in mind. But before I let you – before you are – Before we leave today, I would love if you could tell people where they can find you, what you have coming up. If you can tell them where some of the books that you got out now, what might be the latest books you're working on and where they can find you, what you're excited about. Yeah, for those who are still here. Yeah. Let's say I give you my last three books maybe. Yeah, let's check them out. Here is Elevated. Great book. Elevated is now cannabis as a tool for mine enhancement is basically the state of the art of what I put out on what the title says, Cannabis as a Tool for Mind Enhancement, where I talk about a lot of the enhancements that I think can come out of cannabis if you're using it correctly as a tool. Creativity, insights, introspection, empathic understanding, introspection, lovemaking, sex, I also introduced a thesis about the endocannabinoid system because I think it's crucially involved in higher cognition and in the architecture of very complex mental abilities. So this is for those who are really interested in psychology, cognitive science. It's very dense, I'd say, but it's also interesting. It's not a dissertation thesis or something, so it's easy to read still. The book that came before in twenty-two, and this is published by, I have to say I'm really thankful to Richard Raza for editing it from Hilaritas Press. Hilaritas Press is the publishing house of the daughter of Robert Anton Wilson, I'm really very grateful and it was amazing to work with them. And of course, it's a blessing to be published alongside this great author. The Art of the High is your guide to using cannabis for an outstanding life. is a book built on my work that is a minimalist guide for all those who want to use cannabis for all those enhancements that I just mentioned. And it's really a short read. It's like you read that in a day. And it has some stories about myself, about others, anecdotes, but also gives you practical advice. It shows you how to use cannabis. Talks a little bit about the terpenes entourage effect, the indica sativa issues, et cetera, but then goes into how to use cannabis for creativity, et cetera, with just a few pages. And I think it's a really good introduction for those who want to use cannabis for inspiration, for creativity, and other enhancements. And I don't have... Oh, I'd like to talk about in my new course, maybe the mindful high. Yeah. is because I just announced it in German and I'm going to give it in English. It's based on also a course that I gave for Greenflower Media in LA in two thousand sixteen. But it's it's far advanced now and where I put that in a master class in a workshop and for all four companies are here for social clubs. I now offer a workshop for up to forty people where they can learn about an approach how to use cannabis for all those enhancements that I'm talking about here on a very practical level and with it's designed to also connect people and to get feedback and to get them to talk and to get them to discuss stuff. So it's not only teaching, but it's also really workshop where we are, where we have a meaningful exchange. And it's also meant for social cannabis, social clubs in Germany, because those people, they're not really, it's not really a social club. As you may know, the social clubs here are able to grow cannabis and to distribute it, but they are not allowed to have club rooms and to have people consuming cannabis together in those club rooms. So it's not really social. But so something like this educational things might be interesting for them. And of course, it's international. And I'm giving those classes in English as well. And so one maybe one book mentioned before is in two thousand fifteen. what hashes did to walter benjamin is a book not only about cannabis and how it can individually enhance cognition and mental abilities but also how it affected society through doing so with essays on the philosopher walter benjamin but also on john lennon and the beatles and on Carl Sagan and others. And there's an essay in it about the early evolution of jazz, which I think has been much shaped by the use of cannabis. And cannabis had a huge impact on people like Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. So, and it's interesting to really see and to really look into their biographies, how much it impacted them, how much they use it not only in their lives, but also to go on stage and to perform. So that's a book that also already looks a little bit more at how cannabis works. the cannabis high shaped our society in a positive sense. So, so that's basically the other books are a long time ago. So let's, let's not talk about them now. It's awesome. Not a long time. Yeah. Well, I think that they can go to your website and you have such an incredible depth of, of not only books, but papers that you've written that I enjoy talking about them. I think you're phenomenal at it. And I, I, I really hope people within the sound of my voice go down and they, I don't think you can just pick up one of your books. I think your books are like gateway drugs. Like you take one and at least the next one, at least the next. I think the art of the high is a good, is a good start for people to give as a present or something for, for Christmas because it's an easy, easy read and, and it can, really help people to change their, and it's for beginners as well as for those who are really progressed users of cannabis. And I always get positive feedback because a lot of people told me, wow, this is really very compressed, very dense, but it's easy to read and it's fun to read and it's, it really changed the way I relate and I use cannabis and it gave me so much. So, so that's an easy read. And from there, if you really want to go deeper and you can read elevated or, you know, what has to do towards Benjamin or can go to my, I recently published for instance, an essay for reality sandwich on, on cannabis as a mind enhancing tool. So, and so, go in my, my work that's online. Also in essays, they're public and you can read them or on my blog and my website, uh, Sebastian Marinkalo DE. So, um, yeah, thanks. Great to hear that from you. Yeah, absolutely. Um, ladies and gentlemen, go down to the show notes, check everything out. That's all we got for today. I hope you have a beautiful day out there. It's a couple more days in this week and thanks for hanging out with us today. That's all we got. Aloha. Aloha.