Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast on this beautiful Friday morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you are. I'm so excited that you're here. Hope the birds are singing. Hope the sun is shining. Hope the wind is at your back. Live. from the edge of the psychedelic apocalypse where law meets mysticism and a blaze of legal DMT. Comrades, consciousness pirates, mushroom mystics, do not adjust your perception. Do not consult the clerk because what's about to walk through this dimension is not just a lawyer, it's a revelation. Eric Postow, Esquire II, high commander of Holon Law Partners, diplomat to the invisible realms, and barista of the blessed sacraments. Not born unleashed, forged in the fires of regulation and religious liberty, tattooed in the ink of constitutional bloodlines, this man does not merely interpret the law. He bends it like a prayer. He breaks it like a fever, and he builds new ones with the elegance of a psychedelic architect sketching temples and court briefs. They tried to put them in a box, but he smoked that box, distilled it into hemp extract, filed it as a five oh one C three and turned it into a sacred beverage served at shamanic shareholder meetings. Eric Postel, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? I'm blown away by that. Those are those are so. wildly authentic and awesome and I appreciate it. I'll make a few lawyerly statements that I'm not, I won't help anyone break the law. My role is to help people understand their legal frameworks in layers, and I work in highly regulated and emerging regulated spaces, have a religious freedoms practice, and I've been in the psychedelic legal space since two thousand fifteen and really watched a lot of changes in the last decade. So grateful and privileged to be able to think about these issues and so happy to be back with you. So thanks for having me. Yeah, man, I'm excited you're here. You're doing some interesting work out there. And beyond that, like the name Holon, you and I were talking briefly afterwards. And if you have that book behind you, maybe you could hold it up because I think it underscores exactly so much of what you're doing, what you're based on, and what we're kind of going through here today. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, I'm happy to do a very short book report. um so this book is uh the ghost in the machine it's by arthur kessler he is a uh twentieth century um thinker philosopher professor and he wrote about um you know the reality of the universe through systems theory approach and he's the first to describe uh holon as a concept, as a system, as a process and it's Holon Law Partners and the name derives directly from that and it takes on the meaning. Holon means a whole part that is part of a transcendent state through its collaboration with other whole parts. So a whole part you and a whole part me come together And what emerges is this interview. We've designed our system off of that. And it's very effective in a pragmatic business sense. It's also, in my mind, a smart way to align with the nature of reality, that everything works this way. And it's through relationships, connectivity, where new things can emerge from and it's in those new things those transcendent things where real change real impact is uh is is available and so uh thanks for recognizing the book it's a very meaningful book to me personally uh and to to our firm so um glad I could share a little bit about that yeah me too I think it speaks to this idea of an emerging awareness eric like I see it both you and I run in some similar circles and in the in the psychedelic world that we see today that's kind of emerging it seems with it is emerging a new awareness the ghost in the machine on some level and we're beginning to recognize it what are your thoughts on the new awareness and just the state of the psychedelic movement today Well, uh, I think, you know, to talk about any thing is to recognize a few things. Okay. Nothing exists in a vacuum, right? Psychedelics conceptually and theoretically and legally doesn't exist unto itself. It exists in a, in a, a larger, um, you know, collection of, of experience and things. And, um, our human experience historically, temporally, religiously, spiritually, has been a development along an awareness continuum from less aware of reality to more aware of reality, from more primitive-oriented life, the what's happening right now in the present, the experience of survival, into more developed communities, and relationships and then collaborations, so on and so forth, thereby creating societies, et cetera, et cetera. And we're on that continuum historically. So kind of the purpose of life in some sense is the development of awareness, awareness of who we are individually, awareness of who we are relationally, and then awareness of the greater goings on, all around us what that bright thing in the sky is towards naming it it's a star it has certain properties it does certain things it's interacting with me somehow whether just visually or some other way And then we develop learning from those things to answer questions and to make ourselves more aware. Psychedelics is a great lens by which we can observe the whole thing. We can talk about the experience of it. We can talk about the legalities of it. We can talk about the socio-cultural historical aspects of it. um but fundamentally psychedelics plant medicines natural medicines fungi medicines that produce altered states of consciousness which is another way of saying it allows you to view reality differently and from that new awareness the experience itself you become a little bit more informed about something What is that something? Maybe it's about yourself. Maybe it's about relationships. For some people, maybe there's not a great learning occurrence. I don't know. Every person's experience seems to be very unique, and yet there seems to be some commonality across the board in some way. Things like interconnection, relationship, understanding of self, and this thing called awareness. That's that I think is a very important aspect to the question. May have gone off on a directional tangent. So bring me back to reality where you're at. Well, I think it's a beautiful answer. And to me, it brings up the question of how do you how? As someone who's working with the law around these substances, a lot of the words we hear, a lot of the terms we hear are awareness, ineffable. It seems like it presents a very difficult challenge for someone who's navigating the bureaucratic landscape to bring these substances and sort of fit them in into a legal framework. Is that like a challenging thing to do? How do you navigate that? It depends what you're trying to do, you know? Okay. And so what does that mean? It depends what your intentions are. Okay. Psychedelics wasn't discovered by the West. Right? Right. Of course, psychedelics in their natural forms have been used ceremonially, ceremonially, ritually, socially, for thousands and thousands of years. by human populations on every continent, maintained over that time in many instances by the original holders of the medicine, the people that learned the properties of the plant or the fungi or the root or the secretion whatever and the culture is developed from that cultures built around uh the relationship of the individual people and the medicines and the community and things like that they're so inseparable and typically tied to a place because it's the natural medicines of a place right yeah um humans also trade with each other and have interconnected and related to each other for thousands of years and certainly traded medicines historically and I believe that the archaeological records would would support this in in many different ways. So the idea that a medicine that is originally from, you know, South America somehow is being consumed in the northern part of the continent, this likely could have been the case for thousands of years and just not documented. And in some cases documented, but uh so I think that's that's an important thing so when you're talking about psychedelics you're you're talking about a very old thing a very old shared communal experiential consumption of something entering the united states now talking about the rest of the world but the same rules apply And the United States historically has suppressed the traditional medicines and tried to separate land connections from indigenous tribes. And since the medicine was so integral to the whole you could sever those relationships you did it now how did it happen it happened through the spirit mind through uh forced conversion to catholicism and other western accepted religions and then eventually prohibition of uh certain um types of you know medicine and then that got you know warped in the drug war and conflated with um You know, narcotics created by people that are harmful, that aren't part of a community, that don't have a history in the same ways, at least not in their synthesized form, their manufactured form, right? Yeah. And that has clouded everything because now we have to view everything through that lens. So now you enter the Controlled Substance Act. And there's where all the complexity around how do you balance the original traditional religious, cultural, societal, indigenous uses within this world. And we've had cases that our religious freedoms were limited by the Supreme Court. And those religious freedoms of using traditional medicines weren't protected from employment terminations. Then we have the Religious Freedoms Restoration Act and similar acts related to sovereign Indian tribe medicine in the peyote church and things like that. And then we had the continuation of migration of medicine from South to North through ayahuasca trade, but not just to trade. The trade is actually a wrong word. I want to kind of remove trade as a word to focus on. The spread of the syncretic indigenous Christian hybridized religion from places like Brazil. the vegetal churches, the Ocentro cases, and the RFRA's clear protection of that right. Okay? And so from that religious freedoms perspective, we now have people finding religion, finding experience, wanting to preserve and protect that religious experience, And you run into the, uh, issue of community safety and the true, uh, role of government, which is to protect the community from itself sometimes. Yeah. Um, and, and, um, that's, that's the current climate. And now you enter the states following the cannabis path, states like Oregon, Colorado. which have implemented regulated psilocybin therapeutic wellness, Western in some sense, certainly hybridized and maybe some misappropriation or appropriation, I don't know. Depends how you think about it. But certainly a new regulated space here. and in Colorado an even more expansive space than Oregon that accounts for the religiosity aspects of these things. And that medicine holders in the religious context could be equally as viable and valuable as the medicine holders in the therapeutic wellness medicine side. So that's an interesting thing. And then we have divergence of policy initiatives through legislation across the state. So we're seeing a really rapid transition. But I think it is important to kind of acknowledge that that's the landscape. There's a soup of a lot of different histories and things going on in social context. It makes it very difficult to talk about because we want to talk about things in a linear kind of way. And this is a very nonlinear kind of thing. Did that answer any of your question? Yeah, without a doubt. I think it speaks volumes of the nuances and the complications and the soup that is messy sometimes. There are so many different lenses to see it through and so many responsibilities to try to do it. It kind of makes me begin to think that you know maybe when things get too big they get put away because it's just too complicated there's too many hands in the pie there's too many regulations there's too many things going on so sometimes when things become so complex they get put back away and I know on the there seems to be sort of a that going on right now like there's this sort of debate between legalization and decriminalization Curious, do you have any thoughts on that sort of debate? Do you lean on one side or are there pluses and minuses for both sides? Can you frame the question again just so I can focus on it? Do you have any thoughts on the future of psychedelics? Would it be better to decriminalize them or to legalize them? I think in terms of the intentionality again, I think when you profit, you incentivize the profit motive in psychedelics, you're doing something that is potentially harmful. Psychedelics are a very powerful, transformative tool. When done poorly... when done without intentionality without set setting integration without support in unhealthy ways in abusive ways that is bad for society yeah um but at the same time you know you have to account for that reality I described that there's already a human right a core human right to the natural medicines of this world, and that we've had a historic human relationship with those medicines that goes back to our very beginnings. And this is an inescapable truth. And so when we put a layer of structure, which is a legal framework, is a layer of structure around something that just, you know, it's bound to break through that thing. can't be contained like that because it's just a part of our um so you leave open the reality that uh that this is also true so how do you account for community safety how do you account for the harmful the clear harmful things the bad actors in any space that want to chase money and don't know what the heck they're doing, but they say they do and have other toxic traits about them that make them a poor representation of the honest and high character historically within the natural medicine world. I think that we should reflect on what what does the bad look like you know come come to some kind of a consensus on what is what are the true community harms that we want to mitigate against and let's leave open that we are a transitional era here and transformation is happening that you can't necessarily prevent people from experiencing life If someone wants to consume a mushroom for an experience, they're going to consume a mushroom for the experience. If that is contained in a religious perspective, let's suppose a Christian church had integrated some form of psilocybin into its christian uh experience of the root christianity that it is providing now this is not to to say yes no maybe this is just to uh hypotheticalize what let's suppose that is that a good thing if it falls under a container that has structure that has uh um a lineage in it in and of itself that is also historically syncretic and integrating and changing in its form all the time that's why we have so many christian uh denominations um that it's going to continue it just always does that and also other containers that are religious oriented perhaps buddhist perhaps multi-religious perhaps non-religious at all therapeutic wellness clinical psychological You can imagine that there's lots of containers where the community could say, yeah, I feel good that this Christian church is taking this seriously and has good risk mitigation, emergency procedures, shows care and concern, is reaching a person using their teachings, the things that are relatable to a person's core beliefs, if they're a Christian or if they're a Jewish Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or whatever it is. whatever, whatever someone's core belief, if that is reaching them and connecting also, and this tool is part of that, that happening, wouldn't we at the community level say that feels good compared to the alternative of, um, we have no idea where these controls are coming in. Some people are just doing it and not putting any thought into it and not doing any integrative work on the other end, not making sure someone was safe throughout the experience, not knowing when to get real help if you were in a situation where someone's life is at risk, their health is at risk. You know, so, you know, King judgment and discernment, um, important there, you know, so this is the world it's so complicated, but you can start to imagine it that way to ask the bigger questions. Yeah, it's such an interesting time to be here at this space now. I've got a couple of people chiming in the chat over here, Eric. And the first one comes to us from Ryan. Ryan from Oceanside says, can the law protect what it cannot define, like spirit, soul, or healing? So... The law doesn't go out and say what a religion is in a lot of sense. It says that it wants to protect your deeply held religious beliefs and that that's your First Amendment. So what is a religion? This is the personal question. There's organized religion. There's decentralized religion. There is personal religiosity, your core spiritual beliefs. And in furtherance of that, we here in this country want to protect that under our First Amendment. And then we want to protect it under our RFRA. And then we want federal. And then we want to protect it under our various state-level RFRAs, if we have them. And so it's... There are lots and lots of religious beliefs about soul and spirit. I guess that question is the spiritual question. In pursuit of that core concept, what's happening? What are you doing? Are there rituals involved? Are there ceremonies involved? Are people involved besides yourself? What happens when those people get involved? What do they do if they're using a sacrament? Are they being safe? What does safe mean? Reasonable standards, right? What people expect in our community that is safe and so on and so forth. And then the responsibility that we owe to each other in those spaces. So if I... If I invited you into my sacred circle to serve you medicine and to help you with this spiritual quest that you're on, and this is what you're doing, I owe you. I have a duty of care to you. I'm taking you into my hands, and I'm doing something with you for you. And I'm obligated to make sure that I keep you safe and okay and not molested and right yeah not harmed that if something's happening to you that requires medical attention that I get that for you right then and there um and that I that I handle myself for you know responsibly uh for those types of things um so I think that that that's an that's that's an important frame I don't know if that answered his question but yeah I think so. It was a beautiful answer. Thanks, Ryan, for chiming in. We got LinkedIn coming in over here. They said, the magic word you said was intent. The shadow makes the obvious invisible. The law should simply say that before any journey, a small invocation must be made. Shamans are in this world to protect during the returning. Any thoughts on that? I'm reading it. yeah I don't know if the law should say anything uh about it because you don't want the law to start defining how to do your religious practice what you what you want the law to say is you're obligated to keep people safe um and that you know I think at the heart of your question is you know am I protected for my religious freedoms and the answer is yes to a point You have the protections to your religious beliefs and you can pursue those beliefs protected under law and in the cases and in the federal law that I've described and in the First Amendment. You have the right to pursue that religious experience and then there's there's the the I guess what you might call the transactional occurrence of doing this with other people and in a larger setting or doing this in a way that was um safer by accounting for things that are harms right and mitigating against those kind of concepts know I would always advise anyone talk to a lawyer before you do anything and this is not legal advice this is right this is my uh these are my thoughts and observations from seeing lots of different variations yeah it's a great point I'm stoked to hear the perspective this one we got coming in from betsy betsy says if an altered state produces truth can it be submitted as evidence So the truth, I guess, is your knowingness that it's true? Yeah, I suppose. I don't know what evidence for what, but what happened to Moses at the burning bush? god spoke to moses through a burning bush so there was an experience happening this is in the christian and uh I think in uh I don't know about the quran but um in western religion in abrahamic so the occurrence the happening the burning bush uh some symbolic real occurrence some kind of experience his divine presence is being felt truth is revealed so it's a revelation and actions on the other side to live within that revelation to live closer to god um Was Abraham in Hebrew or English? Moses? I forget. One of them. Sorry. Someone correct me. But you get my point that, yes, truth can be evidenced. In that case, it was evidenced before a group of people. Hey, this is what God says. This is how to live life. This is how I'm going to live life. I invite you to live life like this because we all believe this is the right. This is God and this is what we're doing. uh so today you know truth could could very well be revealed but what does truth mean and who does it mean it to you know if it's a personal truth if it's a knowingness truth but there are potentially universal truths there is the universe works a certain way we observe this in science we can see uh that it works a particular way aware again on that continuum over time of how the universe works we we have to describe it history we have physics we have astronomy we have spirituality we have lots of things to describe the nature of reality but but in truth it does operate a particular way whether we can say what it is or not Whether we're wrong about what we're saying is, and at some point in the future, it becomes revealed. Truth becomes revealed. So in a sense, back to our awareness piece, the awareness is the revelation of truth, the awareness of truth. And then something transforms within you because you became more aware at all. Yeah, it makes sense to me. I'm curious, Eric. I know with cannabis, there started to be a whole legal framework sort of around it, which you were a huge part of, and moving into psychedelics. It seems that there's a burgeoning field of psychedelic lawyers and a guild. What's going on there? What are you guys talking about when you guys get together, and how is it shaping up? There's so many brilliant lawyers working in the space. I'm very fortunate to be in relationship with a number of them. The Psychedelic Bar Association is a wonderful organization. It was founded by brilliant people that cared a whole lot about these things. And I sit on the religious use committee. And again, it's a collection of really wonderful people who are great lawyers and legal professionals that want to come together to think about this kind of stuff. And that's the tradition of American law, that the lawyers find themselves that want to be on the front of something that's changing and learn about it together. So I'm very privileged to be able to work around those folks and learn from them as well. What kind of conversation you guys having in there or can you talk about it? Yeah, I mean, we're constantly in transition and there's lots of different groups within it. Some folks think more about policy and legislation and some groups think more about those things and other groups more about the pragmatic business concepts sensing and things like that. And then there's the more, I guess, the spiritual, philosophical, religious concepts uh and and giving voice to that very um you know uh core original use frame uh so I think um it just depends there's a lot of issues going on and um I think we've just together been discovering discovering through observing and working within this transformative wave and the ability to start identifying, I think, things that are more healthy for society, things that are less healthy, to be able to voice that so that decision makers can be informed and have more awareness themselves. And hopefully the laws and legislation will reflect a more complete picture, a more informed picture, a more holistic picture. That was wandering, but I think that's kind of the arc of the conversation over time. Yeah, there's been a lot of interesting events. Like Texas just sort of came up with a pretty big decision on Ibogaine. And it's interesting. I was looking at a, I think Dennis Walker put out a post that they were talking about the win in Ibogaine in Texas. But then they also showed these pictures of like Iboga on that you could buy, you know, like sort of like a candy bar on some level. I think that harkens back to the ideas we were talking about it being messy. When you start looking at these big, what are your thoughts on that? You know, I think back to the profit motive. If the, if the intention is money, we're probably going to run into problems. If the goal is money, if the goal is a diversified portfolio, and now I want to sell psilocybin chocolate bars at the, uh, uh, the hemp product store, uh, that's obviously right for, for features on who gets it and how they use it and what happens. Yeah. It's up to the individual, but yeah, that's not a good idea. It is a, is a good idea for, um, Access, safe access, I think that's the real heart of what we would want to hopefully see from my perspective. Protected access. Yeah. Protections for those traditional cultural, social uses, the religious, so that folks that are properly relating to these medicines in the community and thinking about the overall welfare of people are also the ones that are serving these types of things. War, a regulated space, I think that should continue. I don't have any problem with that. I think it's necessary that our Western medicine integrate these things and become more effective as a result in the right ways. Ketamine therapy is a very promising area that I see problems and opportunities. So, yeah, I think it starts and ends kind of with intention. And if it's all about the money, you're not thinking about the right stuff. I love that answer. I'm a big fan. I'm a Gen Xer. So I grew up kind of catching the echoes of the sixties and listening to the doors and just being drawn in by those magnificent Fillmore East posters and all like that incredible artwork. But all of that seems to talk about rebellion to me. When I can't, for me, my personal opinion is I can't separate psychedelics from rebellion and maybe not like a full out rebellion against government or something like that, but a rebellion against a system that's no longer working on some level. I'm kind of seeing that happening a little bit now in the psychedelic space where we're kind of pushing back against industries that may not have the best interest of the individuals in mind. Do you see that relationship there or what are your thoughts on that? Well, so now I'm going to bring us back to kind of my original thought that nothing is occurring in a vacuum. So you could also reflect on what other really transformational thing happening right now in real time in society across the globe. It's AI. Yeah. And AI is another really important tool. that allows us to observe ourselves because we see how AI is converging with everything and transforming it. Therefore, we're all transforming. And again, it's about awareness. It makes us more aware in a lot of ways. It performs tasks. It does these types of things. So you have to understand with AI that in real time, we're transforming, so we're in, again, when I say transitional era, that is what we're in. We are transitioning. You can see it if you're paying attention to global politics. You can see it with the emphasis of this administration on kind of, I don't know, is it dismantling, upending, changing, transforming the kind of the global structures, the global lines? It's in the form of tariffs. That's how we see tariff as a concept. But it's about disruption of the way things have been, which means that there's going to be a future where it's altered, it's changed, it's transformed somehow, and we're living through that transitional transformation period. AI is driving a lot of that. Whether anyone would say it like that or not, I don't know, but it's what I observe that AI is going to transform how we work, how we live, how we play, how we connect, how we learn, and fundamentally can make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. Same concept in psychedelics. Yeah. Transformation, transition. The power of these tools to usher in really impactful personal transformation, which is where it all starts. Knowing who you are as a person, as a human being, knowing who you are in relationship to the world around you, to your spirit, mind, whatever. this self-awareness and this transformation that's happening at a personal individual level that's happening in the coupling and in the grouping and in the communitizing and in the societizing, on and on and on and on. This is happening also. So I think that the future is for the making right now, for the creating, for the... for the people that want to see change because they want to live on a healthy planet. Would anyone disagree with that? We all want to live on a healthy planet. If the planet is not healthy, we are not healthy. This is a true statement. So what do we do about it? Nobody knows. But perhaps with shifting of perspectives, we might acknowledge the relationship to begin with. that there is a relationship between us and the planet's health somehow, and that we can transform the way we live to live more co-creatively. This will not happen overnight, but it's a mindset. It's an intention starter. And I think that that's something to observe and a lot of room for optimism, but a lot of room for reality checking that know there's different interests some interests are more selfish other interests are more pro-social I don't know through more than one that's selfish selfish from a different direction I don't know yeah yeah it's well said yeah yeah Who do we got coming in over here? We got, let's see, this one is coming from, who's coming from? Desiree. Desiree, thanks for being here. She says, is breaking a broken law the highest form of fidelity to justice? That's a philosophical and political question. You know, people have broken laws for the higher form of justice historically, right? There is such a thing as bad law. Laws can have harmful consequences. The question is, what do you do about it? Breaking it can bring attention to it, but what needs to happen isn't the breaking, it's the acknowledging that it's being broken and that it's gonna continue to be broken and that the laws need to reflect the true free will of the people, in our country anyway. Freedom is what we're after. And when the law becomes an oppressive tool This is called lawfare. When law becomes an oppressive tool, and in the instance where a government oppresses the citizenry that makes it, that's incoherent in our country. We have to do something about that. We have to think about the value propositions. We have to understand who we're really trying to be. Is it more important that we punish a person for working around being in relationship to making money from a plant Is it more important that we do that and put people in jail for nonviolent crimes because of their affinity for the plant while maintaining a lie that the plant has no medicinal value? A lie? It's at this point beyond fathomable. There is no room for doubt that it has medicinal value. It has established medicinal value and the United States government has profited from this. through its patents and licensing of cannabinoids from cannabis. And yet we try people, we convict people, and we send people to jail. And the great crime was working around the plant. So in that sense, and the will of the people as expressed through the political momentum, Pew polls, the voting patterns of people across the country, the legislative bodies and the reflection of the will of the people through those is moving towards acknowledging the value of this plant and making it available and accessible and then reasonably regulating it to make sure that it is as safe as it could be for what it is. So that's incoherency. That's a... That can't be the way we do things because it's oppression. And the citizens here are free enough to say, we don't like that. We don't want to be oppressed by you government, which we made and formed and created and give all the power to. We are the ones in charge. That's the we the people concept. So I think that using the process, the democratic process, is the way we agreed to do it in this country or at least we were born into and that's our system and I think that the most the best way to be involved is to get involved and highlight this um these types of oppressive things and demand change and vote for change on those things and and even folks that aren't interested in the plant itself can recognize the fundamental problem we have um in our country right now um regarding that plant and its status and it's and the inability of of uh government to um to do what's obvious um is a confounding and it it transcends one administration this is administration after administration after administration failure to address this type of thing and it has harmful consequences and we just accept that. Yeah, it's true. You've been in the game for a long time, Eric. Do you see the laws around cannabis as precedent for the laws around psychedelics? No. I think from some sense that the plant medicines, cannabis is a plant medicine. So botanical medicines as a category, yes. Fungi medicines, yeah. I mean, in some sense, we're trajectoring that way. But each thing is unique enough. that it requires its own thinking and it's also consumed very differently you know cannabis can be a daily consumed uh product most people aren't consuming psychedelics daily like that um it's not addictive uh according to the you know the research out there in the same ways and I'm not an expert on this so if someone knows research that says it is I'm not here to argue um but I I believe that it's it's not addictive and it's really relatively low consumption somebody might use it one time and never again because the the experience was what it needed to be and did what it was hoped for other people might return to it as, as needed. Other people might consume it more regularly than that. And I'm not here to tell anybody how to live their life, but, I don't think it's the same thing as the vast majority of the cannabis marketplace, which is about daily consumption of a consumer product in multitude of forms. But daily consumption of cannabinoids is different than daily consumption of psilocybin or DMT or whatever, whatever else. And they should be, I think, thought about like that. Yeah, I like that answer. It's interesting just to see from the outside kind of the way in which cannabis has exploded onto the market and has kind of seemed to find a lot of pitfalls and a lot of nuance and a lot of difficulties sort of emerging as a commodified product in a sort of way. I don't think it's supposed to. In my opinion, and I'm a glorified truck driver, but I just don't think that these substances want to be commodified on some level. Like there's no real way to do it. And when we start commodifying them, it just, it lets loose a torrent of bad actors. And, you know, all of a sudden you got art link letter yelling from the back room, like, Hey, look at this thing, you know, and everything goes back in the box. Is that, is that too dark of an outlook? Um, I think it's a very pragmatic. If, if, you know, ill-intentioned is a strong concept, but less informed, more, again, more about the money than about the safety or efficacy or something like that. Bad outcomes lead to bad story. The story is what drives everything. Yeah. So if the story is someone took psilocybin and it was a pilot and he wanted to commit suicide in the airplane, that is what everyone thinks. Yeah. So it can hijack, no pun intended there. Well played. The story and become the story even when it's not. Yeah. So I think that bad decisions, harmful decisions, antisocial decisions, intentional acts of criminality can sully the underlying reality of psychedelic consumption. But that's just who we are. So you address the criminality. You address the things that are harmful. You address the person who says, I'm a shaman, come do this thing with me, and then molest people. It wasn't about the psychedelic. That was the tool in furtherance of a crime that's different. Someone who preys on the religious interest, the personal wellness interest, creates a vulnerability. in a relationship dynamic, a power dynamic, someone is under the influence of a substance, and someone is there and can do bad things. That person should face legal consequences for those behaviors. And the greater community should not allow for this to happen either. So I, and I think that that's, uh, you know, that's what the communities can do is self govern and, and, uh, and do things, you know, act with the greater society's interests in mind when you're doing these things and recognize that though you may have a closeted, um, you know, relationship experience. these things especially as communities evolve and grow so uh something centered around this or with it very well integrated into its community makeup and intentional community um should be very you know reflective of um pro social or healthy um behaviors and and their uh that they are um a representative from diverse viewpoints. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great answer. Thank you. You know, I've been talking to quite a few people in the iboga space, and I am... just blown away by the success rate of people that are using iboga to get over addiction it's first off it just it blows my mind to think that that could even be considered no medicinal value like that when you start seeing them walk away from suboxone or heroin or even fentanyl in a very short amount of time I might add like it blows my mind to see that kind of success rate and I'm so excited to to see it happening out there on some level It shouldn't be a surprise that the antidote to the drugs is the natural medicines. Right? Yeah. I mean, there's a number of natural medicines that are showing a lot of promise in the addiction space and a lot of history in different countries where their consumption is focused on addiction recovery and things like that. So what's happening is we just view it through our lens, and we want stats and proof and FDA, and there's all kinds of things that we need in our system and our government to say something is useful, it has a medical value. But all you can say is that our system is broken and too slow to recognize true medical value. And then you have to ask yourself, well, why? Why is that the case? And I think your listeners will have their own answers on that. Yeah. You guys, you have a beautiful command of the English language, Eric. And I'm curious. Sometimes I think we get trapped in language. Like, we have all these labels we give people, especially when it comes to diagnosis. Or you look at the DSM. And even with something like PTSD, like post-traumatic stress disorder, Could things be better if we just change the language to like post-traumatic growth opportunity? Maybe putting these labels on people, allow them to be stuck in an identity, and then they're on this treadmill of like an industry that wants to provide them with, you know, patches instead of cures. Yeah, that's a good, it's true. It's a truth. Language is expressive power limits and excludes. If I say what something is, I'm excluding all other possibilities. If I define something, I'm limiting its meaning to that definition. Language is our ability to label things that just are. They're occurrences. They're happenings. And then we use language to give meaning, symbolic meaning. And then we accept it. And then we form communities around that. And here we are today speaking English and how many hundreds of languages in the world. so yes don't miss the substance for the form right the form is the word and the substance is that the actual which isn't limited it's unlimited in many many instances So I think we should reflect on language and meaning. And it's very in a regulated space, which we spend a lot of our time in our firm. Language and meaning and key terms can mean the difference between compliant or not. It can mean the difference between illegal or not illegal, right? So we are very mindful of our language and word use. And I think it's good to reflect on language as a great limiter and excluder in addition to an expressor. Yeah, I think it's a beautiful answer. And so much around, it's interesting. We talked earlier about AI and psychedelics, but I think both of them have an incredible influence on language. You find yourself up against a tragedy and maybe you use psychedelics to help you through that tragedy. You find yourself seeing it, seeing language in a different way, which is weird, like seeing language or seeing yourself in a different way. Do you think this is, you spoke earlier about this convergence of all these things. Do you think that we're going to be moving into a new sort of language to understand all these things? Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly so. You know, linguists would know more about this. But it's my understanding that there's a great concern about the rapid escalation of AI in its ability to, I don't know, transition language so that some languages will be gone. so that some languages will disappear as we continue to converge all data information into these language processing systems that then will express it back in how many languages, right? So I think that language loss is important to reflect on from a cultural identity loss perspective But language will always change in a holistic sense. It has always been changing. It's in a constant state of change. The way we talk today, if someone, you know, a thousand years from now would watch this video, good Lord, help us. But if that were to happen, they might not understand us, because we would be speaking in a way that's primitive in its evolution, because language continues just the same as if we were to read Old English English in its true forms and hear it, we wouldn't understand a word of it. And yet, that's the lineage of how we got to now. So AI is going to accelerate this thing in a lot of ways. And that has consequences that are beyond. Now, on the psychedelic side, the experience is outside of language. That's why there's a great word, ineffable. You've used it. The ineffable experience, the experience that can't be described. Well, it could be described, and it is described all the time. Yeah. But there's an innateness to it that it's just a raw happening, a raw knowingness, relational, emotional thing happening there that is different than every other way that we experience reality. And therefore, we don't have the language to describe all of it and its meaning, except to say that there's real meaning. And then we use words like connection and relationship and empathy. And so the values come through. But you wouldn't want to limit the experience itself in a few words. because that gets to the greater what's happening here. Now we're in the metaphysics and the religiosity of it, which could be a fun other conversation. Yeah, it's such a deep experience, the language of experience. And how do you translate that into something that people can understand? Sometimes I feel AI is teaching us how to communicate meaningfully. On some level, when you look back at all of the things that we have going on, there's all this side monologuing, or people have different definition of words, and no one ever sits down and says, let's define our words before we have this conversation. And so there's so less meaning that gets moved in between the conversation. There's no... wonder things are so diluted and cataclysmic at times. Yeah. Everyone just take a pause. Yeah, yeah, COVID. Chill the F out for a little bit. Like, yeah, I think we're all living on one planet. Some of us want to go to another planet. Some of us might be from another planet. But we are all here and We don't have the answers and there's not one right way. And we don't live in a real, what's the word? Bipolar, we don't have a bipolar life. You know, it's not this or that. Yeah. You know, and we don't live in a linear straight line. Yeah, it's all imagination. That's just the constructs that we've come up with to explain it to ourselves. So it's the story we're telling so that we can continue our propagating into the future. But all we are is just experiencing life here, just being here. And the sole purpose, I think, is awareness, to be aware that we're here, to be aware that our intentions create the reality that we're experiencing. And that if we were more intentional, And our actions reflected that intentionality towards healthier output, that we would have healthier output. And healthier is a very broad and holistic term. And I mean it in every way possible. I love it. I love it. We already blew past an hour, man. I feel like our conversation is just getting started, man. It always happens in the midst of an awesome conversation. Thank you for the space to do it. A lot of time in between our last conversation. Way too long. Way too long. This is the way it goes. I sit here and I think about these things and I reflect on the people I'm working with in a lot of different spaces, whether it's psychedelics or the religious space or hemp beverages or cannabis or AI. I do pull out patterns of commonality. You know? But the most important thing is that I understand that we're all human beings, that we don't have the answers, that we're finding our way through, and that my role is to be a guide in a lot of ways and help people make impact in the world. And that's what our firm is for. It's an impact firm. this transitional era can be very scary and volatile. And I think that we need good guides in a lot of different layers with a steady hand and a poise to get us through it. And yeah, that's what I try to do. And I appreciate that with you. Yeah. Where can people find you? What do you got coming up? What are you excited about? Oh, I can find me all the time. Just shoot me a note. Um, I talked to a lot of people, um, you know, uh, I'm, I'm very, um, I have a real life outside of the virtual and it's taking care of my family. And I have a couple of small ones and. I don't get out into like conference scenes and things like that as much. But I like to connect with people. So I think the best way is just to, you know, shoot me a note, send me an email, send me a LinkedIn connect. And if you're doing something you think I could be helpful or my firm can be helpful, then, you know, happy to explore it. Nice. And that's at holonlaw.com. Yep. Holonlaw.com. Hold on law partners. Nice. Yeah. Nice. Transcending. That's what it's all about. It's such an interesting time. I love talking to you, man. You're an awesome individual and I love the insights and, and helping me understand a little bit and the listeners understand a little bit where we're at, where we're going. So hang on briefly afterwards, but to everybody within the sound of my voice and everybody that participated today, thank you so much for being here. I hope you have a beautiful day. Go down to the show notes, check out Eric, reach out to him. He's an incredible human. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha.