How Psychedelics Rewire Your Brain's "Default Mode Network"

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. This is episode 90 with Tyler Strauss, and today we're talking about psychedelics, most notably psilocybin or what other people would call magic mushrooms. And the reason why I wanted to bring Tyler on the show is because he is the VP of product development at EI Ventures and silly.com.

Sean Weisbrot: He has extensive experience in hemp and marijuana as well as psychedelics, and they're focused on two aspects of psychedelics. One of them is psychedelics in vr, so psychedelic assisted therapy. And on the other side, they're developing a drug that synthesizes psilocybin that makes it so that the people who consume it will be able to have the same exact dose every time that they take it.

Sean Weisbrot: So they're synthesizing it, putting it into a pill, running it through the FDA. And we talk all about his experience with psychedelics. What is the default mode network in your brain? And the things that he's learned as a human being in general through these experiences with psychedelics. It's a very fascinating, high level intellectual, deep, philosophical conversation, and I really enjoyed hearing what he had to say, and I know that you will too.

Sean Weisbrot: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me, Tyler. I appreciate it. It's not very often that people are willing to talk about their personal journey with psychedelics, and I know you also have some, higher level experience with the physiology and the psychology behind all of that. So I'd love to get into both of those aspects with you.

Sean Weisbrot: So, why don't you introduce yourself, tell everyone. What it is you do now, how you got there, and we'll go from there.

Tyler Strause: I appreciate you having me. My name is Tyler Strauss. I am a VP of product Development at EI Ventures and silly.com. We are a sort of metaverse focused, psychedelic company. We're also focused on the natural product side of things as well, as well as sort of related technologies, associated with, you know, psychotherapy, telepsychiatry.

Tyler Strause: And those sorts of technologies, I guess it makes the most sense to kind of start from the beginning. You know, my journey really began as a consumer. First and foremost. I discovered plant medicine and psychedelics in college and found them to be very helpful for me personally. It was a long time before I was really able to talk and connect with people more generally.

Tyler Strause: For a long time it was still very much a, you know, taboo subject that, you know, didn't really come up in casual conversation. That's obviously changed a great deal in recent times. I started to get more serious about plant medicine as a caregiver. Back in 2008, my father Randy, was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Tyler Strause: We used medical cannabis primarily, to manage symptoms and side effects, and I got to see, sort of firsthand, the real therapeutic benefits of cannabis in plant medicine. That led to a multi-year journey in the unregulated cannabis space, as well as the sort of federally regulated industrial hemp CBD space.

Tyler Strause: A few years ago, I came up with an idea to develop a transdermal delivery platform for psychedelics after working with a company to develop some, transdermal CBD products. One thing led to another and I came on board with EI Ventures to, you know, really bring this product to market. And so that was how my relationship with David Meek's side, EI ventures and silly.com began, you know, after about six months of, sort of working together as a.

Tyler Strause: Sort of outside consultant. We came on board full-time with my mother, Linda, who's president of EI Ventures, as well as my brother Brendan, who's our VP of operations. We sort of come together as a package. My mother brings a great deal of clinical drug development experience. She's been in that industry for around 35 years, and as well, she's a professor of human nutrition at UCSD, so she's the one who's most comfortable, you know, sitting on the fence with, you know, FDA regulated drug products and technologies on one side.

Tyler Strause: And then natural products, vitamins, dietary supplements on the other side. And you know, I like to say that I ride comfortably on her coattails. I have no shame about that. I'm really, really grateful and, and lucky to be able to take advantage of her experience and her credentials in order to do the work that we do.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's talk about your experience with psychedelics as a consumer. What made you wanna try it the first time and what was that experience like

Tyler Strause: growing up as, as sort of one of those, you know, somewhat gifted kids that often sort of struggled to connect with, you know, my peers? It was something that really helped me to build.

Tyler Strause: Healthier connections and to, you know, learn to be kinder to myself. And that in turn sort of enabled me to be able to relate and be kinder towards others. And so it was really a, you know, a, a heart opening. You know, a mind opening experience that gave me a perspective that I was not able to find in normal, everyday life.

Tyler Strause: You know, I found the benefits of psychedelics to be very fundamental. You know, very much sort of bottom up in terms of supporting resilience and the ability to relate and connect with. You know, myself, my environment, and other people.

Tyler Strause: And so in doing so, it really kind of allowed me to honestly be a better person, be a better version of myself and you know, to be able to relate to myself in a way that where I was able to overcome a lot of the anxieties and depression associated with.

Tyler Strause: Not being able to relate to who I felt like I was and, and how I was sort of, you know, seen by others and, you know, psychedelics were really the only tool that I found that even when it came to therapy and talking with sort of professionals in that regard, you know, there was always a disconnect between, you know, what I was hearing and what I was being shown and my ability to really integrate that.

Tyler Strause: You know, into something that I could understand internally and implicitly and not have to trust the process, if you will, where I could actually believe that what was being shared with me and what I was learning was true. It's sort of like the difference between seeing what you see and really believing what you see, and just because you see something doesn't necessarily mean you.

Tyler Strause: Buy it and, you know, avoid my natural tendency to disconnect and self isolate in the face of, you know, stress, and instead really lean into it and really try to get through it. Because at the end of the day, I feel like all of my problems are all sort of human sized problems, no matter how big I imagine them to be.

Tyler Strause: When I believe that my problems are human sized. Then I can accept that I can overcome them. But when I imagine them to be, you know, bigger and, and stronger and insurmountable in the way that I can sometimes imagine them to be, well, I, I'll just avoid them. Right?

Tyler Strause: Not gonna pick a fight that I believe I'm gonna lose. I'm only gonna pick a fight that I believe I can win. And you know, when it comes to those internal battles that we all, you know, sometimes struggle with, you know, you have to believe that you can overcome them in order to begin the process of. Overcoming them.

Sean Weisbrot: I definitely have encountered some things that I logically understand should not be things I am thinking about or feeling because they're just absolutely ridiculous and yet I can't separate the emotional aspect of it making sense to me as something that is important and I.

Sean Weisbrot: Think that the mushrooms are starting to help me just not care anymore. It's like that thing I thought was important actually just doesn't really matter that much.

Tyler Strause: It's, it's interesting that you put it like that and I, I hear what you're saying about how difficult it can be to put into words. What is ultimately an experience that it's not at the level of language, right?

Tyler Strause: It's not something that you can describe to someone in a way that's going to really make them understand what it feels like. And I think that when it comes to how we relate to the world, I. We've been trained and educated to think about things first, and we forget that we often feel things first. And so when you feel things and you're not able to overcome those feelings, it becomes very hard to think about them because you first have to make sense of the emotional reaction to something.

Tyler Strause: And so, you know, a lot of times. We talk about resiliency in an anti-fragile nature where when something stressful or traumatic happens to us, instead of shattering into a million pieces, we actually are able to be sort of resilient in the face of those stresses and traumas, and then in turn become more resilient because we're able to process the experience in a way that teaches us.

Tyler Strause: That we can then apply the next time something traumatic or stressful happens to us. And I think that most people. Want that. They don't wanna be so afraid of the next stressful situation or traumatic situation that they find themselves in and worry that that may be the straw that breaks the camel's back and sends them off into the psych ward.

Tyler Strause: It's important that we first and foremost, you know, learn to be. Compassionate towards yourself and understand that sometimes the things that we need to work on the most are the things that we are most likely to actively avoid working on because they're either too painful or too difficult for us to imagine overcoming them.

Tyler Strause: And so instead we choose to avoid them. Unfortunately, what that often means. Is that those experiences, those memories, those emotions that we, that we generally try to avoid may come up at less than ideal or in inappropriate ways. One of the features of a psychedelic experience is their ability to provoke strong feelings or memories that we would otherwise seek to avoid and to really place us front and center in front of those feelings or those memories.

Tyler Strause: To the extent that they sort of force us to confront them, they don't necessarily prevent us from looking away, but they really make it very difficult to deny the fact about them. You can choose to engage with those feelings or those memories in a way that will help you to process them to hopefully overcome, you know, whatever obstacles they represent for you.

Tyler Strause: You know, the term of art that's used often in the psychedelic space is integration. As being a key component in addition to the sort of preparation that happens beforehand. But integration is sort of an imperfect term to describe what I feel is really going on, which in a way is it's more of a kind of metabolism, you know, in the sense that when you eat food, you know, you metabolize the nutrients, the vitamins, the minerals that your body uses to build itself, and then simultaneously you get rid of all the wasteful byproducts.

Tyler Strause: It's a process of both. Lessons, but also letting go of the lessons, you know. Sort of maladaptive behaviors and beliefs we have about ourselves and other people are not maladaptive in the sense that they're bad. They often came about because of a situation where they were actually adaptive. They actually helped you to survive.

Tyler Strause: Whether it was a difficult childhood, whether it was a, you know, horrible accident or a personal loss, or even something just as mundane as an everyday stressor, you know, working in a, at a job that you don't like, where you have to be able to. Live the situation that you're, that you're dealing with without necessarily allowing it to change you in a way that you don't like.

Tyler Strause: And so being able to metabolize those experiences good and bad, take the good parts, incorporate them into who you are. At the same time, let go of the bad parts so that you don't end up getting weighed down by not only an experience that may be, that can be at times overwhelming, but also sort of the, the maladaptive lessons and beliefs that you, that you brought into it, along with these sort of new ideas about what's possible and what you're capable of.

Tyler Strause: So it has to be a dynamic process of taking in what's good and letting go of what's bad.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, you hit on some different points, all very interesting, where you were talking about first feeling something before you think about it, and I actually just interviewed someone who we talked about how to better get your emotions and logical centers to work together, and that was a really interesting episode.

Sean Weisbrot: Was published with the idea of integration versus metabolism. I've heard the term integration by many different shamans, and I've been a trip sitter on two occasions because I spent a significant amount of time researching it. So I knew how to make sure that they got the best experience that they could, and I feel like even from a single experience, it helped nudge them a little bit.

Sean Weisbrot: But I feel like, and maybe your experience would be useful to know because I'm sure you've had multiple experiences over the years. That one experience is enough to get you started on changing your life. I. But you need multiple experiences to really reinforce that change and possibly even every experience is so wildly different that all of the experiences provide different nudges in different ways for different parts of your personality or your mind.

Sean Weisbrot: What kind of experience have you had in that regard?

Tyler Strause: You know, one of the remarkable things about psychedelics is the experiences that people have. Tend to be sort of the same, same but different. What I mean by that is that we're all having a human experience at best. It's confusing, and at worst it is utterly overwhelming and completely destabilizing and just incomprehensible.

Tyler Strause: But at the end of the day, you know, we're all having a human experience and that is a human experience that we all have. Share, but obviously have different perspectives on and experiences of, and so. The fact that a single experience can sort of open yourself up to the possibility of a perspective that you perhaps had not even considered or even been aware of existing.

Tyler Strause: And now that you've been able to get a glimpse behind the curtain, you know, there's usually a somewhat persistent desire to look again. And oftentimes what you realize. Is that there's no there there and that the destination that you had imagined was really just a figment of your imagination and the journey or the process, or really the experience is.

Tyler Strause: All there really is, and that is sort of the fundamental nature of reality is our conscious experience of what we call reality and how we relate to those experiences ultimately dictates our experience. And again, this is kind of where language just sort of really, really quickly falls short of.

Tyler Strause: Ideal because we oftentimes find ourselves appealing to metaphors, stories. We sort of begin to understand why myths and legends became such an important part of. The human experience because while it's helpful to be able to find a yardstick and start measuring things, doesn't take long for us to realize that the yardsticks we're using are not necessarily fixed and the things that we're measuring are not necessarily fixed.

Tyler Strause: And so while we can go out and we can measure something at one point in time, and that measurement can certainly be valid, it's not necessarily as universal. As we would like to imagine it to be, there are experiences under the influence of psychedelics that are utterly ineffable. And when you're talking about something that is essentially ineffable, you have to sort of concede that any measurement you take is going to be a partial measurement and is not going to be a complete measure of the experience.

Tyler Strause: And so when it comes to, you know, determining whether a treatment. An approach is valid or not, you have to just kind of stop and say, well ask them, you know, was, was this a meaningful experience for you? Do you feel like this had a positive impact on you? Quality of life and believe them, they say yes, then that's really all that matters.

Tyler Strause: Now you can try and find neural correlates or biomarkers or you know, psychometrics that you can use to try and impose some structure on it. But whatever structure you impose is ultimately gonna be a partial reflection or model of a real experience that people have.

Sean Weisbrot: Quite a scientific answer for sure. You kind of already covered your overarching experience, how you feel like it's helped you, but I think people are also probably pretty curious about what an individual experience is like. I know that it's difficult to explain and it's difficult to understand if you've never experienced it, but I think it's important because a lot of people are afraid of things that they don't understand, and so if it's possible to break down that experience, a singular experience.

Sean Weisbrot: Into what it might feel like. You know, what the visualizations, even if there's no context, you know, for expression for what the experience is like, just explaining kind of what that experience is like will help demystify it, and make it so that people are less afraid of it.

Tyler Strause: It's okay to be afraid.

Tyler Strause: There's lots of things in this world that we should be afraid of. I think what's important is to learn how to be brave. In the face of fear and to understand at a very deep level that when it comes to human problems, that they're always human sized and so you can handle it. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be afraid.

Tyler Strause: That doesn't mean that you shouldn't have some, you know, trepidation about an experience that can be overwhelming at times. That can provoke. Strong emotions and strong memories that you know, you, you may not necessarily be prepared for. And the fact is, there's only so much preparation that you can do that will make you prepared for them.

Tyler Strause: The experience will ultimately be what the experience will be, and the importance of preparation is really about setting expectations and giving you enough information. So in the face of fear that you are able to be brave, and that's really what it boils down to. The experience itself can be highly variable depending upon what kind of preparation you do, what kind of setting you find yourself in a psychedelic experience.

Tyler Strause: At a festival is gonna be very different from a psychedelic experience in the forest, which is gonna be very different from a psychedelic experience in a clinic with therapists. And so it's difficult to pin down any single experience except to sort of describe, you know, the connection to nature that you may feel.

Tyler Strause: Using psychedelics in a forest, your willingness to sort of sit for a period of time allows you to really see the dynamic nature of mother nature that you might not necessarily even notice if you're simply walking down a path. Being at a festival with hundreds or thousands of people, some of whom may also be having their own psychedelic experience, and being able to connect with the music and the people that you're surrounded by, and their experience can be very nurturing in the way that really only a community can be nurturing to feel like you're a part of a whole that is bigger than yourself.

Tyler Strause: Not just in the sense of being connected to nature, but also being connected with a community of other minds, other people having their own human experience. You know, working in a therapeutic capacity is also very different because you're going to be relating your experience to the lessons and insights that you're gonna get from a.

Tyler Strause: Trained psychotherapist who will hopefully help you to make sense of your experience and to be able to better integrate that experience in a way that allows you to metabolize it so that you can take the positive lessons and let go of the things that you might, might have been struggling with. So for myself, it's really been a.

Tyler Strause: A collection of sort of highly meaningful experiences that I can recall with a degree of fidelity that, you know, I'd have a hard time recalling any other memory. It really seems to crystallize in your mind, in your memories in a way that few other experiences do, and. What that means is that when I think about my very first psychedelic experience in the redwoods up in Northern California as a 18, 19-year-old, I mean, I can remember walking down the path at night with, you know, with no light and just by the light of the moonlight, being able to see the fern sort of unfurling in front of me and perceive the way that the earth sort of breathes that is really difficult to recognize when you're not able to be.

Tyler Strause: Open and aware and patient with an experience that by its nature, demands that you, you know, stretch out your sort of conception of time, and that the natural rhythm by which you perceive the world becomes stretched and elongated, and as a result, you're able to sort of be present and focused in a way that is really, really challenging without these tools.

Tyler Strause: That is so affecting of this sort of human experience that I keep coming back to as, again, it's hard to put into words. It's something that if you have had a similar experience, you may understand implicitly, you may just be nodding along and going, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Tyler Strause: Whereas if you haven't had that experience, it may just sound like, you know, a whole bunch of gobbledygook. That just doesn't make any sense. And so when it comes to people who ask me. What should I expect? Well, first and foremost, you should expect the unexpected. You should be prepared to experience, you know, strong feelings and memories that you might not necessarily be prepared for.

Tyler Strause: You should be prepared to be brave in the face of, you know, it may feel very overwhelming, but you should also feel, you know, assured that you know you're stronger than you imagine yourself to be. That you will be okay, and that it will very likely be one of the most meaningful experiences of your life.

Tyler Strause: Positive or negative. You know, we often try to avoid terms like a bad trip and really sort of emphasize that it may be challenging. You know, one piece of advice that I often give people when they're considering using psychedelics for the first time is that when they have these overwhelming experiences, that they really will, will have two choices.

Tyler Strause: They can either hold on and it may be very, very painful, but that they're strong and that those feelings will pass. And, and they will, they will still be holding on to whatever it is that they were holding onto or, you know, they can let go. And when you let go of something, it may be extremely scary. It may be, you know, it may, you may feel, you know, a great deal of fear because oftentimes the things that we hold onto are the things that we begin to identify with.

Tyler Strause: When you let go of something that you've come to identify with, you may feel like you're letting go of a piece of yourself, and that can feel very scary. But oftentimes what we discover as we sort of pass through that fear is that, you know, the thing that we were afraid of. We really didn't have any reason to be afraid of, and that as a result of letting go, we get that positive benefit of a, of a real cathartic release.

Tyler Strause: And you know, as anyone who's experienced any kind of catharsis that processes quite often is painful or scary.

Tyler Strause: Because it wouldn't be a cathartic release if there wasn't something that was previously causing you tension or, or anxieties, or was a source of fear or depression. Because you know, the truth is, is that, you know, when it comes to those feelings.

Tyler Strause: There's often a good reason for them. If you're feeling depressed because something bad happened, well then there's a reason for you to feel that way. I think that what people often forget is that it's a dynamic experience and that the ability to feel our feelings without becoming attached to them, without getting stuck in those emotions that we're no longer able to feel.

Tyler Strause: The complimentary emotions. So in order to be capable of feeling joy, you have to be able to feel sadness and so you know, to extend and expand that dynamic range so that you are able to feel those feelings as fully as they exist in you. I think it is a big part of growing and maturing as a human being.

Tyler Strause: Having a human experience in this, you know, strange universe that we find ourselves in.

Sean Weisbrot: An ex-girlfriend of mine had a lot of childhood trauma. I had heard about psychedelics being potentially really, I. Mind altering in a good way, life changing. And I had recommended for her to try mushrooms or LSD to help her deal with her issues because she was struggling to accept that they were there.

Sean Weisbrot: I could see them, but she refused to acknowledge them. And after we broke up, because I, I didn't see that she was going to change and I didn't wanna spend the rest of my life like coddling her about it. She finally was given an opportunity about six months later to experience LSD. About six months to a year after that, we happened to meet randomly on the street.

Sean Weisbrot: And so it was a really interesting thing that she was like, I had an opportunity to try LSD. I had a full blown trip and I felt like I could, I could see those things you were talking about. I could feel them and just how stupid they were for me to like to keep such a strong hold on them and, and by the end of the experience I just felt like completely free and ready to just be, just live again.

Sean Weisbrot: It's almost as if I was reborn. She was not a religious person. So for her to feel like she was reborn, I would say is quite a strong positive review for a psychedelic in a single experience. I think some people get that, but I think a lot of people also need multiple experiences to really see that change for themselves.

Sean Weisbrot: So there was something we had talked about before off air called the default mode network.

Tyler Strause: We don't have a really robust or complete understanding of what the default mode network is or, or what it does. It seems to be involved in, you know, what we would generally characterize as our sense of self. And so, you know, the default mode network is most active when we're not really thinking about anything in particular.

Tyler Strause: So one example would be like flow states when things sort of come. Naturally and effortlessly without us really having to expend a great deal of cognitive resources to do the thing. So the default mode network is active when we're least active, but not inactive because as far as our brains are concerned, we're never inactive.

Tyler Strause: Even when we sleep. Our brains are highly active, and so the default mode network sort of helps to maintain a consistent, coherent. Sense of self. So it's, it's something that sort of creates and sort of weaves that thread of our experience from the past into the future. Now, when it comes to psychedelics, I think it may be helpful to think about sort of three elements.

Tyler Strause: One is the connections between the different parts of our brain. That is in part regulated by the default mode network, which is inhibitory. So it prevents parts of the brain from communicating with other parts of the brain that they shouldn't or don't normally communicate with.

Tyler Strause: Another element is activity, you know, as measured by an E, EG, how much energy is the brain utilizing? And then the third element is what's sometimes described as concordance, which is really sort of the harmonic rhythms of those connections between those different parts of the brain that characterize the patterns of thought, if you will, that we have. So we have the connections. We have the amount of energy that is going from one part of the brain to the, to another part of the brain, and then we have the sort of rhythms and harmonics of those connections.

Tyler Strause: classical psychedelics seem to do a few things. The first thing they do is they seem to downregulate the default mode network. And so the default mode network, which is responsible for sort of inhibiting. Connections between parts of the brain that don't normally communicate are now being inhibited.

Tyler Strause: And so as a result, parts of the brain that don't normally communicate will start to communicate. That may explain some of the sort of perceptual alterations that we experience under the influence of psychedelics. At the same time, they also increase the amount of energy, and in turn, it increases the level of.

Tyler Strause: Harmonic concordance, so you have more connections being made in the brain. You have more neurons being generated, which is neurogenesis. The connections in our brain are mediated by the synapses, so you have synaptogenesis. Those two are sort of very closely related. You have more energy going from one part of the brain to the next, and then simultaneously you have an increase in this sort of.

Tyler Strause: Subjective, concordant harmonic. So you know, your brain is sort of communicating more, it's communicating. More energetically, and it's also communicating more harmonically. And what we find is that that feels good.

Tyler Strause: People like that. There's a positive association with that experience. Even when that experience may be challenging, people will still report that it felt good, which is a little strange because normally we would think that a difficult experience would feel bad, but oftentimes.

Tyler Strause: People who have a challenging experience might actually come out of it feeling better than they did an experience that was perhaps easier. Again, a lot of these terms don't really fully capture what actually happens or what people actually experience. Because these experiences happen at a level that is not at the level of language.

Tyler Strause: It's not at the level of discourse such as what we're having right now. It's experiential, and so the only way to really, truly, fully appreciate it is to take a chance and have an experience so that you can understand at a level that you can make sense of. And to be less concerned about convincing other people that they should have this experience and instead show them why the experience may be valuable for them.

Tyler Strause: You know, be the change you wish to see in the world type thing. You know, if you wanna convince people to be a better person, be a better person. You know, I don't know how to convince people that they should care about others, but they should. You know, but it's, you know, to try and convince someone that they should care about someone other than themselves is a fool's errand.

Tyler Strause: Like, you know, unless, unless they find it in themselves to recognize the inherent humanity of other people, then it will always be easier for them. To take care of themselves. You know, forget about anyone else.

Sean Weisbrot: There's a few things that I, I believe strongly in. One is that everyone should be given a one year free college anywhere in the world.

Sean Weisbrot: So if you're an American student, you have to leave America for one year and study in any country, it doesn't matter where a hundred percent of the costs are covered by the government. And every government should provide this to every student so that there's less bs, less racism, less cross-cultural issues for people.

Sean Weisbrot: Because they just don't understand each other. Another is that everyone should have some sort of psychedelic experience so that they can better understand themselves.

Tyler Strause: I agree with you. I've, I've been very fortunate. I've been able to travel, I've been able to live overseas. I appreciate that it's a privilege to be able to have that opportunity that not everyone I have.

Tyler Strause: Is able to have such an opportunity. But I think that if we could encourage and empower more people to have cross-cultural experiences, really deep experiences, not just as a tourist, but you know, as someone who is, you know, a resident, even if it's just temporary, so that you can overcome the initial, oh my goodness, wow, this is an amazing new place I'd never been to before.

Tyler Strause: You know, get through that period of, you know, sort of a fish outta water and really get comfortable. To a level where it starts to feel like home and can really begin to connect with the people who also call those places home. You know, whether it's for a month or for six months, or years or a lifetime, it's really hard to have strongly negative generalized feelings for people when you've lived with them, when you've had a chance to experience the diversity that is present everywhere.

Tyler Strause: We're all having a human experience, but we're all having that, you know, our experience from, from a perspective that is unique. We all have a history of, you know, life experiences that are unique, that sort of shape our perspective on our experience and, and in turn our shaping our experiences to come.

Tyler Strause: And so we do need to be very mindful of. What kind of energies we welcome into our sphere of influence, right? Who do we allow to get close to us? What kinds of experiences are we really, are we willing to indulge? And what kinds of experiences should we have? Avoid, you know, it can be, you know, it's one thing to sort of try something once, but as you know, the expression goes with, for, for example, with, with, with addiction or dependency on, on substances, it's not what you're necessarily doing today.

Tyler Strause: It's what you're gonna do next week or the week after, or the year after. That ultimately determines whether you're gonna be dealing with a dependency issue or whether you're simply having an experience in order to expand the scope of what you. Believe it is possible in terms of your experience.

Tyler Strause: And so what's really exciting about this whole psychedelic renaissance that we're experiencing is that we're really rediscovering something that is an ancient technology.

Tyler Strause: And you know, we're acting like we're discovering it for the first time, when the truth is people have been here the whole time and have always been here. And so I think that is part of the process. That is somewhat common is a moment of humility that comes when you realize, oh my goodness, I'm, I'm not the only one who's here.

Tyler Strause: And that this experience is something that is timeless and that this connection that I feel is not superficial. That this is a deep, deep connection. And when you realize that, you know, there's an element of sort of. It's almost like a joy that feels sad or a sadness that feels good, where you really are just like, oh my goodness.

Tyler Strause: You know, I, I, I finally opened my eyes and, and now I'm able to look around and I, I just wish I'd opened my eyes sooner. Why did I wait so long? What was I afraid of? What has to happen is you have to be able to sort of forgive yourself and be like, it's okay. You know, now that you've opened your eyes, that's all that matters.

Tyler Strause: You know, don't feel bad that you didn't open your eyes sooner because the last thing that you need is someone criticizing you for not opening your eyes sooner when you've just opened your eyes and now that your eyes are open, you're no longer going to be able to continue to lie to yourself. About what's real in the sense that nothing is real.

Tyler Strause: That really is what you make of it. It's, it's the connections and relationships that you, that you nurture and meaning is what you make. And purpose is what you do. You know, don't worry so much about it. Where you're going because the likelihood that when you get there, you'll discover that there was nothing there and that there's really just the next step.

Tyler Strause: There's a perspective that I like to take. This idea that we don't have a map. There are no signs that are directing us which way to go. At best, we have a flashlight, and that flashlight can illuminate the path forward and we can choose where to direct that flashlight and what we shine it on. But beyond that, we have no choice.

Tyler Strause: To keep moving forward. And so the best advice I can give is keep your eyes open, pay attention, and use that flashlight so that when you see something coming, you can prepare for it. And that is really, I think, the source of. Resilience and how we become more antifragile so that when something comes along that might threaten us, that might provoke that reptilian brain that's going to react in that aggressive fight or flight manner is something that is.

Tyler Strause: Under our control and not something that is controlling us. It's the difference between reacting to something and responding to it. Feeling the feelings that we feel, thinking about those feelings, thinking about what we should do about those feelings, planning. What might happen if we do those things and then do it?

Tyler Strause: One of the most important lessons I learned is that sometimes the smartest thing you can do in any situation is to just stop, put your feet on the ground if you need to close your eyes for a moment so that when you open your eyes. You actually are seeing the world as it is, instead of perhaps as you imagine it to be, to really think about what's happening around you, to observe closely and to really appreciate that, you know, when it comes to our vision, there's really only about, I think like a 3% field of vision where we're actually able to capture fine detail.

Tyler Strause: The rest of it is really just broad strokes, and so, you know, the act of observation has to be deliberate. It has to be patient in order to really take in enough detail to understand what's going on and to be able to really think about what's happening and what we need to do in order to respond appropriately, because otherwise we'll just react to external stimuli and then we'll spend the rest of the time trying to figure out or justify why we reacted that way.

Tyler Strause: Because we do that so well, we will almost always rationalize our reactions in a way that is. Most compassionate to who we believe we are. So if you react in a way that hurts someone else, you will find a way to justify that reaction so that you are the good guy and they're the bad guy because the last thing we wanna be is, is the bad guy.

Tyler Strause: But if you hurt someone, then it's very likely that you did something wrong or that you didn't do something as well as you could have. And so by being able to just slow that tempo and give ourselves a chance to feel, to think. To plan and to act in a way that is consistent with our core values, with our core, you know, idea of who we are, is much more likely to allow us to be honest and kind, you know, so that we're not necessarily being honest at the expense of someone else's emotions or feelings, but that we're actually able to be honest from a place of love and kindness.

Tyler Strause: Because, you know, when it comes to people that we care about, hopefully you care about them. And so you care if you hurt them. And so you wanna be honest with them, but you also wanna be honest in a way that doesn't hurt them. But sometimes people do things that bother us or that hurt us. And so it's, it's very difficult and you just have to be able to care enough.

Tyler Strause: To take your time to be honest with someone in a way that's going to be kind and not hurtful for them. Because if they hurt you and you react in a way that hurts them, what's the likelihood that they're gonna react in a way that hurts you and creates a, you know, an adversarial cycle that just ends up blowing up in both of y'all's faces?

Tyler Strause: And I don't think that's the outcome that either of you wanted if you truly cared about each other. It sounds like my marriage. Well, you know, it's, it's natural because we do, you know, the, the, the feelings and the reactions come like that. Like they come in an instant. You know, it's easy to feel something and react to that feeling without really thinking about it, because we don't have to engage those higher faculties.

Tyler Strause: We don't have to engage the prefrontal cortex that really thinks about things and really contemplates the consequences of our actions. We're more than capable. Of just feeling and reacting without ever actually thinking about what it is that we're doing. Only in, you know, after the fact that, you know, we finally have the time to really consider what we did and rationalize it in a way that sort of justifies everything that we did, even though what we did might not necessarily be justifiable.

Tyler Strause: Right? Time is often our greatest ally in these situations and just being able to stop. Not allow ourselves to react one way or the other so that we can give our brains time to really think through what's going on, that we're actually able to, you know, act from a, our highest self, if you will. It's something that has taken me, you know, years to really appreciate, and I don't presume to be anywhere close to where I would like to be, but I think that, you know, being on this journey and doing this work.

Tyler Strause: Is a big part of my own personal progress in my own sense of what I'm doing. I, I'm still, I'm still figuring it out. I don't, I don't presume to be an expert on any of this stuff.

Sean Weisbrot: A lot of the people that I know that I, not only interview, but people that I am close to me are in their forties, fifties, sixties.

Sean Weisbrot: They've lived a lot more than I have in some ways, and I've lived a lot more in other ways than they have. And so I love talking with them because I can get the benefit of being like that. 20 year difference of experience without having to wait 20 years to figure it out for myself. And I, I like to mentor people that are younger than me because oftentimes they're 18, 20, 25, and I'm, you know, maybe I'm only 10 years older than them, but I've had so much more experience than them that I can go, Hey, you know, look, this thing you're talking about, like.

Sean Weisbrot: Let me save you three years of your life. Just don't do it. Like I know you think you, you need to do it, but like you don't need to do it because, so everything you said made complete sense and made me feel like one, you would make a great therapist, and two, you would make a great podcaster.

Tyler Strause: Well, I appreciate you saying that.

Tyler Strause: And you know, and I hear what you're saying and I, you know, I'm, I'm sometimes resistant to ideas that I feel are shortcuts because as you said, you know, your life's experience has been different from mine. My life's experience has been different from other people's life's experience. At the end of the day, I think we can all stand to learn from one another and.

Tyler Strause: Just because I've had more time to have experiences doesn't mean that I haven't spent some of that time in the kinds of ruts that we may all you know, that we all might experience in our life where we just kind of get stuck in a pattern of being, and it takes something sometimes dramatic or painful or traumatic to really.

Tyler Strause: Shake us out of those ruts. You know, if you can find a way to connect with others that is sympathetic and synergistic where you can exchange your experiences in a way that you know, I'm not gonna tell you not to do something that you really want to do because that's probably just going to encourage you to do it more.

Tyler Strause: But if I can help you too. Manage your risks so that you should experience consequences of your choices, that those consequences are proportionate to the risk. We should be able to explore and experiment without taking unreasonable risks to our personal health and safety, or the health and safety of others.

Tyler Strause: That's not reasonable. I think that harm reduction principles are important for everyone to really learn and understand and internalize because we can't eliminate risk. We can't avoid stress or trauma in life. These are inherent features of the human experience.

Tyler Strause: If we were to try to avoid all risk, all stress, and all trauma, we would be denying ourselves.

Tyler Strause: Valuable life's experiences that would otherwise help us grow and develop. So we have to be able to do dangerous things carefully, because that's when we will actually learn the most. When a kid is, you know, climbing on the rocks, you know, you don't wanna tell them, you know, don't climb on the rocks. You want to tell them, be careful climbing on the rocks so that they don't fall and hit their head and kill themselves.

Tyler Strause: If they fall and they scrape their knee, if they bang their head and it hurts, well, they've learned something about the limits of their ability to climb those rocks, and the next time they go and try to climb those rocks, they're gonna be a little bit more careful. And maybe as a result, they're gonna be able to climb a little bit higher.

Tyler Strause: And so being able to take risks from an informed perspective. To be careful and reduce harm wherever possible will actually allow you to have more types of experiences and, and from those experiences, learn more about yourself and your relationship to yourself and to others, and to your environment and your community, and all these, all these webs of connection that sort of make up our shared experience because those relationships and those connections.

Tyler Strause: In a way, what really defines us, you know, it's, it's the relationships with things that really determines their usefulness for us. You know, whether it's a person or whether it's a cup of coffee, you know, my relationship with my cup of coffee has to do with its ability to deliver, you know, my daily dose of caffeine.

Tyler Strause: And so it's not the value of the cup. Or the coffee, it's the relationship between the cup, the coffee, and how that coffee makes me feel after I take it inside my belly in the morning and it wakes me up or makes me feel more alert. And so I think that it's helpful in reconstructing what we naturally tend to deconstruct about our world, where, you know, we try to put everything into categories and we try to describe them as.

Tyler Strause: Perfectly as possible so that we can believe that we understand them. And if we don't sort of reconstruct those relationships and the connections and, and recognize the nexuses that exist between all of those things, that we're actually really able to begin to understand in a very deep, fundamental and somewhat ineffable way where we stop trying to describe them and we really just try and experience them.