Paul F. Austin: Mastering Microdosing and Unlocking Human Potential

In this episode of Divergent States, host 3L1T3 and co-host Bryan sit down with Paul F. Austin, founder of The Third Wave and the Psychedelic Coaching Institute.

We dive deep into microdosing psychedelics, intentional use for peak performance, and the rise of psychedelic coaching as a professional path. Paul shares insights from his book Mastering Microdosing, his vision for conscious entrepreneurship, and how psychedelics are reshaping the way we think about healing, creativity, and human potential.

If you’re curious about LSD or psilocybin microdosing, psychedelic integration, or building a career in the psychedelic space, this episode is packed with actionable takeaways and inspiring perspectives.

🔑 Key Topics & Takeaways:

• How Paul F. Austin became a pioneer in the psychedelic space
• The science and practice of microdosing for focus and creativity
• Why psychedelic coaching is the next frontier in mental health and personal growth
• Entrepreneurship and psychedelics: Lessons from building The Third Wave
• Best practices for safe, intentional psychedelic use
• Where the psychedelic movement is headed in the next 5–10 years

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 – Welcome to Divergent States with 3L1T3 & Bryan
2:15 – Introducing Paul F. Austin & The Third Wave
5:30 – How Paul discovered psychedelics and microdosing
10:42 – The benefits of microdosing for focus, creativity & emotional balance
18:20 – Psychedelic coaching: What it is and why it’s growing
27:55 – Lessons from building The Third Wave & conscious entrepreneurship
36:10 – Integration, safety, and intentional psychedelic use
44:15 – The future of psychedelics, careers, and community
52:30 – Closing thoughts & how to connect with Paul

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Transcript

0:18

Hey, welcome back guys. You're listening to Divergent States, the unofficial r/Psychonaut podcast. I'm Elite, founder of the subreddit with over 500,000 Psychonauts now guys. And with me is Bryan, USMC vet and fellow explorer of consciousness. How you doing? oh doing great, doing great. Glad to be back. Yeah, me too. Super excited tonight. Dude, after this episode comes out, we're going to hit 5,000 total downloads all time. Uh, mean, yeah, it does. days. mean, within days of us recording by the time this comes out, this is going to be August, but it's out. By the time this comes out, we're going to be... Maybe like 7500. Yeah, we're gonna put this will be psychedelic science. We've already taken care of all that by this point. So tonight we've actually got a Paul F Austin. He's the founder of third wave and psychedelic coaching Institute as a pioneer in the field of intentional psychedelic use, especially around microdosing and psychedelic coaching. His book Mastering microdosing as a go to peeve. his book, Mastering Microdosing, as a go-to for people for just starting to explore this world. Yeah, it's going to be a great interview. He's a real intelligent guy and just we're out to try and keep it toned down for everybody. we'll take a listen to some music and we'll be right back. you you you you you you Welcome back everybody. We're here with Paul. Paul, you've been at the forefront of integrating psychedelics with performance, healing, and entrepreneurship. Before we really get into that though, I just kind of wanted to know what your personal story was and what brought you into psychedelics. Yeah, thanks for the opening question, Lee and Bryan. It's good to be here with you. So my journey starts in West Michigan, outside of a small city called Grand Rapids. I grew up in a small town, religious family, where drugs were, especially illegal drugs, were pretty frowned upon. And at the age of 16, like many 16-year-olds, I started experimenting at first with cannabis. And my parents found out a few months after I started to experiment with cannabis and they sat me down one Sunday after church. And my dad looked at me and was like, you know, I haven't been this disappointed since my brother passed away in a car accident. Like that's how impactful it was for my parents. And also I think generally that was the vibe of my community for this sort of golden boy to be doing. illegal drugs. And yet the experience that I had with cannabis was fun, connecting, super interesting. And so it was sort of this like, you know, the sort of path in the woods and it's like, I was going this way and my parents were clearly headed in another direction. and a few years after that, the same friend that introduced me to cannabis introduced me to psilocybin mushrooms. I was 19 when I first started to experiment with psilocybin mushrooms. And You know, over the span of a couple of years, I experimented with mushrooms and LSD probably 15 or 20 times, usually at higher doses, not like insanely high doses, but like think of it as like a tab or two or three. and I'd go out in the woods with a friend or two and just explore the woods and go hiking and whatnot. And these experiences were really profoundly impactful for my psyche at the time, because it really helped me to. I think first like release a lot of the shame that I had been inculcated within growing up in a religious environment. So a lot of shame and guilt around who I was and what was important to me. But it also allowed me to see that at my core there was nothing sort of wrong with me, nothing to fix. And I had been teased quite a bit, you know, when I was 10 or 11 and had been bullied quite a bit through middle school. and even the high school. And so to have that experience where I just sort of felt released from all of those, those stories, I suppose, was, was super liberating. And so after those early experiences with psychedelics, I made a choice in a decision that, you know, instead of following a more conventional path and, you know, going to grad school or getting a corporate job or, you know, doing kind of what everyone else does, I'd go and I travel and I live abroad. at the age of 21, I moved to Turkey. Uh, where I taught English, and while I was teaching English, studied and learned sort of, know, how do I start up an online business so I can travel more places? And so, before I knew it, I was living in Budapest in 2015 psychedelics, especially microdosing was just starting to enter the conversation. You had folks like Joe Rogan and Tim Ferris and, you know, Sam Harris, who were starting to be a little bit more open about these experiences and bring in researchers about it. And yet in 2015, there was still a lot of stigma that was communicated around psychedelics. There wasn't a really good educational platform. There was Erowid Erowid looks like it's from the mid-90s, basically. And so I wanted to create something that was a little more accessible and focus on microdosing as the leeway into that. And so in 2015, I started Third Wave as an educational platform. And now for the last decade, I've... I've had a few different projects and I just feel really fortunate and privileged that I found something I really care and love about. And it just so happens that I can also make a, it's not a crazy living, but a reasonable living from it. And just share a message that I think is important at this point in time, which is if psychedelics are used with a certain level of safety, responsibility and intention that they're a really phenomenal tool and can help to heal trauma and to become more aware of who we are. can help us to, you know, quote unquote, find our purpose and, you know, these sorts of things. Yeah, I really empathize with your story a lot there. I wasn't really aware of it, but I grew up in a really religious household too. I know that feeling of my dad just really disappointed. And it really, can be kind of a, you look back on that and when that's some of your more formative experiences growing up. It can be, you know, traumatic a little bit. So I empathize with that a lot. What was your like first real psychedelic experience kind of like though? Was it kind of awe inspiring or just more kind of crazy or? That's a good question. So when I did the mushrooms, it was December 2009, like a few days before the new year. And the school that I went to, it's called Hope College, it's a liberal arts school in West Michigan. My dad also worked at the school that I went to, which is a big reason I went there, because I ended up having free tuition at this university, which was also a massive blessing. That semester I was a sophomore and undergrad. was living in a fraternity house that was on campus. And over the winter break, they changed the locks, right? So people over the winter break can't go back in. And so I sort of said to my dad, hey, you know, I forgot something at the house. Can you get the code from the school so we can get back into the house? So I stuck into the house, left the back door open. And then later that evening, drove back with two friends, stuck in the back door and ended up doing about two grams of mushrooms in the basement. of this fraternity house and just sort of like, we had a projector, so we put up Pink Floyd's The Wall and watched Pink Floyd's The Wall and just sort of like hung out. Like it wasn't particularly transformative, that first experience. It was interesting, it was unique. I remember being very nostalgic, like having this experience of nostalgia and I remember how like sensual things felt. it wasn't until about five months later that I did LSD for the first time. And that was the experience for me where I was like, holy shit. It was like before acid and after acid where with four or five friends, we went out to the woods and spent like five or six hours out there. And it was just like, I felt deeply connected to nature. felt like, I've never been clinically diagnosed with depression, but I definitely had depression and probably quite a bit of anger at that point in time. And I just felt sort of liberated. from that and I was just like, this is what it feels like to feel really good for once. know, like I just felt like all my, you know, my brain's working and I'm online and I'm present and I'm aware. And I struggled a lot with social anxiety growing up. But it felt like after that experience, it was much easier to connect with other people as well. And then about a week or two after that first experience with LSD, I went to Tanzania. on like a school trip and we were doing some sort of safari in Tanzania. was studying biology at the time. And so I brought acid with me to Tanzania. And then I did a bunch of acid on safari in the Serengeti, which was awesome. Yeah, I want hear about that. That sounds awesome. Well, it's like, you know, at that point in time I was getting acid on paper tabs, so you could just cut up the tabs and I think this is when digital cameras were still a thing. So I put the tabs in like my digital camera, you know, little container or whatever. And when you go on Safari, you just, you know, you're in like an open Jeep basically and driving. And so first thing in the morning, I just dropped it. And then, you know, out in the Safari, like. It was. a tab. So it's not like I was like super out of my mind, but I was definitely high enough where I just remember not being able to like, was sort of nonverbal for much of the time. Like people in like people, my classmates were like asking me questions and I like just couldn't respond to them because I was so like, fascinated by nature, you know, cause it's like, we're going through the Serengeti and there's World of Beasts and there's lions and there's cheetahs and there's giraffes and I just felt so it's very cliche but I felt so plugged into like, you know, the circle of life. Like it's like the biggest predators and the herbivores, you know, everything. I can hear playing in my head right now. The Lion King song coming out for that's exactly what I was thinking about too. I was like, dude, I would have had a profoundly different experience, uh, cause I would have been terrified. I'd have been like, dude, there's lions out there, bro. There's cheetahs and I am not equipped to handle this right now. That's true too. can kind of a balance there. And to me, that would make me feel almost like just raw, like, like back in nature, you know what I mean? Like grounded a little more, but you know, that's just me. Yeah. You kind of have to, to, to enjoy LSD a little bit. got to be able to uh kind of confront your own demons and conquer them to be able to like really enjoy it is what I found. So, go It's interesting that you mentioned like the raw part because I think that for me was like the anchoring of the experience was this sort of, you know, they talk about it as like rewilding. Like I almost imagined myself as like you know, like Terrence McKenna has this, you know, stoned ape theory where our ancient ancestors took a bunch of mushrooms. I almost kind of felt like, you know, even on that trip actually, we went to the, I forget what it's called now, but the crevice where they first found. sort of homo sapien or whatever 1.8 million years ago. And so I sort of felt that way. Like I felt like I was just part of the environment and part of that nature. so after those early experiences of LSD, I started to wear at that point in time, these Vibram five finger shoes that just come out, which were like the shoes that were like a glove for your feet. So I started to wear those everywhere and I refused to put on deodorant. like you got really healthy with everything. That's pretty cool. It reminds me of like, I get the same feeling when I go to Rainbow Gatherings. I brought him up a few times, but you know, you go down way down into the circle and there's just, there's no phones or, you know, like music, you know, the music's all like hand percussion or, you know, there's one guy that hikes a piano. I've talked about that before. He hiked a whole piano down there. You get two or three people and they'll bring a piano three or four miles down the trail and just, you know, play that with. Yeah, it's not a keyboard a piano. Yeah, full on like piano. yeah, so I mean, they're really dedicated about it. But it's yeah, it's just it's all acoustic music. It's it's drums and stuff like that. know, they put on plays and but it's all very, it's very tribal and feels very primitive. And yeah, it's that same kind of grounding and raw like you're part of the earth. Anyway, yeah, that I get that I really do. And Yeah, that's always a good time. We always have to kind get back to our roots like that, So how did you decide to lean towards the performance and entrepreneurship crowd versus the traditional therapeutic model of that? Well, I'm not a therapist, know, I'm not a clinician, I'm not a medical doctor. I don't have any really credentials. That one of the big North stars for me coming out of the psychedelic experience was the desire for freedom, for lack of a better term, right? Like I really felt this sort of connection with what it means to be sovereign, what it means to have autonomy and agency. And as I became more professionally involved in the space, you know, I was an early entrepreneur, right? Because I saw entrepreneurship as this path of freedom as well. Like I didn't want to work for a boss. I don't want to work for someone else. I wanted to do the hard work to be able to develop my own sort of way of living and way of life. Cause I, I just hate taking directions from other people. So I was like, the only way I can do life is if I'm in charge in some ways. And so it just sort of felt like a natural fit. Like that was my own path that psychedelics sort of helped me to recognize the value of entrepreneurship and more than anything having the courage to pursue that because it's not like I had a lot of money or a lot of traction. I just was like really committed and dedicated to doing it. And then when I started to microdose with LSD, which was March 2015, April 2015 is when I started to microdose with LSD. I found that it really helped me to be more creative. and helping to be much more social, sort of to stop drinking alcohol to overcome my social anxiety. And it was really, really useful for that. And so think the larger vision that I was driven by is, you know, like in those early experiences, there was a real deep love for nature and the natural environment. And I saw sort of business as like the sort of the biggest destroyer. of the natural environment, right? That the way business is done in the sort of capitalistic age, industrial age, especially now that we're towards the end of it, is it just takes from the earth what it wants, extracts it, and tries to turn it into financial value, mostly for the ultra wealthy and elite. And so I thought if there's a way that we can get more entrepreneurs in those leadership positions to sort of wake up to how deeply connected we are to our natural environment, Maybe they start with microdosing, like that's an initial tool because that gets them sort of open and curious about an illicit substance like LSD or mushrooms. But many of them then want to deepen into that work and process. And so I think for me, the big motivating factor has been, can we actually transform business from being this thing that's extractive and encourage a separation? And it's really just... destructive in many ways. Can we actually transform that so it's regenerative and supportive of life, really? And not just for billionaires, but for all of life in many ways. And so I just got really deep into that. And I started studying it. I started learning about it. it felt like the only way that I, like the only credible thing that I could stand on, because I don't want to be a sort Instagram shaman who's trying to tell people how to heal their childhood trauma when I've had no clinical training myself. You I think that's problematic and in many ways. And so I thought this is my lane. This is what I know. This is what I'm good at. I'm not going to try to be something I'm not. And if I'm Frank, also think psychedelics in many ways have been over-therapeuticized, right? And that's actually taken away a lot of their sort of wildness in many ways. And so I also am a really true believer in Yes, we need intention and we need great containers and these should be done ideally in community with a friend or two or three or five. But if we get so fixated on just fixing ourselves or so fixated on just, like I know a lot of people who have been healing trauma with psychedelics for two decades. It's like sometimes we just never get out of that bubble. Like there has to be more to life than just fixing ourselves. Like what about all the beauty that we can experience through these medicines and how can we really you know, carry that flag, so to say, and make sure that's more at the forefront of the conversation rather than just being like, you know, a side conversation that happens here and there, especially a side conversation. Like I'm also very anti-elitist when it comes to this. So I think, you know, one of the big criticisms of microdosing as an example is like, it's just a bunch of tech bros, you know, do an asset. And I think the truth is, Even those tech bros doing asset, they're doing it because it's helping them because they're probably a little miserable because they need that support. So think we do need to have compassion for that. But my, I think, slightly naive optimistic hope is that as we have more leaders who wake up to the potential of these, they will feel a sort of compulsion to give back and support with philanthropic dollars or investment or other ways that really help more more people to be able to access this. And we're seeing this more and more. Like today, the day that we're recording is Texas just passed a bill to provide $50 million of public funding for Ibogaine research. And that was really pushed forward by Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas. Yeah, I just read about that. fantastic news, right? And so I think there have been a lot of really wealthy people who have donated millions, tens of millions of dollars to this work. And it's been really helpful in moving it forward. Yeah. We, I mean, we talked to Sam Chapman a little bit at one point. I'm going to have to try and redo that interview at some point, but I'm kind of the same. There's just so many people that they come together and really, mean, behind the scenes is a huge part of it too. You know, the people all, like you said, given tens of millions of dollars just uh to try and get, you know, some kind of treatment out there like Sam Chapman or, you know, Rick Perry. you know, the magic mushroom fight that's been going on. It's just, you know, it's, it's amazing. Just all the people that can kind of come together and how it's kind of building. It's finally getting there. Even, you know, as he said, even Texas is doing it. So, I get that. And I'm just going back to kind of what you're, excuse me, once you're going back to earlier saying, seems like corporations, you know, when you started founding it, that it's, it's, it's almost the antithesis of nature is how I'd probably describe it. You know, the corporations are taking from the environment, pulling and extracting for value and profit where, you know, it's the, the antithesis of that would be, you know, giving back and putting back into the earth and still maybe even trying to make a profit by doing it, but you're still trying to give back instead of take away. So I really, I appreciate it. I really understand. You know, I see your vision on that. Um, and you to. There's like Dr. Bronner's, which you may be familiar with the sub company. You know, they do, I think 200 to $250 million in revenue a year, but like the CEO only makes four times what the lowest paid employee makes. And they have donated millions of dollars to psychedelic research and, you know, other environmental regeneration projects. And so I think there are examples and models out there of companies that are I think the triple bottom line is a phrase like profit, purpose, and people. So it's feasible, but right now a lot of the corporate structure is not set up to support that because if a corporation isn't doing everything it can to make more money, then minority shareholders can actually sue those companies. And so I think it's just sort of like, how do we change these? business structures and systems, they're incentivized to regenerate and take care of, you know, everyone. Right. You almost have to kind of work almost from the ground up on that because it's just so ingrained in that culture of, yeah. You talked earlier about AeroEd and I guess Psychonaut would almost be included in that, the very early on. There really weren't many solid resources. That was kind of the motivation behind even starting it, but what gaps specifically did you notice with psychedelic education when you were found in Third Wave? It's a great question. So I'm um really big fan of what I would call like user experience, portraying something in a brand that is accessible. So a lot of folks who have found Third Wave or reviewed its content, these are people who sort of, they come from what I'll just refer to as maybe a slightly squarish background. And so I wanted to create sort of a website and platform that would appeal to more of like a mainstream audience, folks who wouldn't necessarily identify with, you know, rainbow gatherings or, you know, lightning in a bottle. you know, trippy psychedelic art, but they've maybe read an article or a research paper or saw something about psychedelics. so our platform, I really wanted to have this sort of like quote unquote professional look and sort of like, just nicely branded and easy to sort of navigate and have it balanced. Like even the name third wave of psychedelics, it assumes there's a first and a. and a second wave of psychedelics. And so through the podcasts that we've hosted and through the guides that we put together and some of our educational content, I've always asked, what's this middle way between the ancient indigenous use of psychedelics where we really honor the traditions and the rituals and the sort of animistic lens that so many indigenous peoples have worked with psychedelics in while still honoring the science and. the ethics of modern psychedelic use, the research that's been coming out, what's the sort of middle way between that? And so that's what I've always attempted to do is how do we both honor the ancient routines of this work with also, you know, the cutting edge research and science that's coming out every day so we can be not only more precise, but more effective. with how we work with these, because I think if we lose either one of those aspects, then the power of psychedelics becomes denuded, right? We just lose so much of the potential with them. We really need to hold both the ritual and the traditions and the ceremonial aspects with assessment, preparation, ethical space holding, an appropriate dosage, right? If you go and you just go drink ayahuasca in the Amazon, they're just gonna load you up, not in every case, but in many cases. And I've heard a lot of stories of, you know, male shamans in the Amazon who are creeps, you know, and sort of patriarchal and shamanistic. So I think this isn't necessarily to romanticize the indigenous use. I'm not saying everything with it was great, but I think we can sort of choose what are the ideal sort of pillars from that use and the ideal pillars from sort of the more modern use and what's the middle way between. Yeah, even just us doing it, you we've been doing this six months now, I guess. But even even with that, it can be tough to kind of try and walk that line between, you don't want to you don't offend anybody groups. But also, you know, you got to put science in there and understand how what's actually happening there, you know, the chemistry behind it. Kind of even working off that, you know, the same subject. know, you've been one of the most vocal advocates for microdosing. But in 2022, there's a systematic review that found many of the benefits may just be a placebo. What is your kind of take on that? Great question. So the University of Chicago has done some interesting research with Harriet DeWitt where they provided different doses like five micrograms of LSD, 10 micrograms of LSD, 20 micrograms of LSD specifically to see its impact on BDNF. And even at doses as low as five micrograms of LSD, there was a dose response to. psychedelics. So they were able to show and measure that there was an increase in BDNF. And sort of one of my speculative hypotheses is that a lot of the efficacy of psychedelics comes from their impact on neuroplasticity. So BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, is a precursor to neuroplasticity. so I think it's interesting that even at these very low doses, we are seeing at least some dose response. Like there is some physiological response with the microdose in and of itself. I also, what I'll often point to as well is there's a clinical research trial that's being carried out in New Zealand right now through a company called MIME Biotherapeutics where they are doing a naturalistic study of microdoses of LSD where for, I believe, six weeks, folks who were enrolled in this clinical trial for depression are taking LSD home with them. And they're taking about 10 micrograms of LSD twice a week for those six weeks. And in that clinical research, they saw a 63 % reduction in symptoms of depression and 52% of people no longer qualified for depression after those studies. I think part of the biggest, yeah, part of the biggest challenge with microdosing right now in terms of assessing, it placebo? Is it not placebo? Is the fact that these are still schedule one. that it's prohibitively expensive to do research on them. A lot of the research that has been done on microdoses of psychedelics usually just looks at it like done two or three or four times. Typically people who take the microdose are in like a hospital or a clinic and they just take it and they're just kind of hanging out rather than going about their normal every day. And so my bet is that as there is more accessibility to do research that will find more more clinically significant impacts of microdosing. I think the big distinction though is just gonna be what is the dose level. So another interesting tidbit is in the 70s and 80s, there's a lot of research done on what's called psycholytic dosing. So in much of the modern clinical research, the focus is on what's called psychedelic assisted therapy. which is a very high dose of a psychedelic done maybe once or twice with therapeutic support before and after. And the researchers are really measuring, after this one very high dose experience, what shifts and changes as a result of that. Psycholytic research, which was done quite a bit in like Germany and Switzerland in the 70s and 80s, explored, if. If someone takes a low dose of a psychedelic, not necessarily a microdose, right? I think there is a distinction microdosing is typically more sub perceptual. These low doses were noticeable and perceptible, but not, it's not like people were going on journeys and having visions. They were still able to be verbal and communicate and talk through what was coming up for them. And so when they did this once a week in conjunction with talk therapy, they noticed that over the long term, people would experience a lot of the same benefits as just doing one single high dose. experience over the long term. And so my focus and sort of the reason I focus so much on microdosing publicly is because since we have an educational platform and I'm openly talking about these, you know, LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, it's more of a harm reduction thing than anything, where I really believe that if people start to come into this work, rather than jumping in the deep end right away, they really should first sort of experiment with these lower doses, kind of get a sense of how it feels, what they notice, what they observe before they're willing to sort of fully jump in the deep end. So I'm not necessarily a guy who believes that you should microdose and you should only microdose. I think it should be an option. And I think for a lot of people who are new to this, it's a great opening or introductory option. But, you know, I still would make the argument that a lot of the more deeper transformative work comes from this sort of spiritual connection. that psychedelics elicit and that spiritual connection is most prevalent when we're working with two tabs or three tabs or three grams of mushrooms or four grams of mushrooms. However, that level of depth requires a lot more holding, requires a lot more preparation, it requires a lot more intention. And I think one of my concerns with sort of where we are at in 2025 now is As you both may know, mushrooms are everywhere. It's really easy to buy a chocolate bar. It's really easy to get gummies. It's really easy to get. And I think there are a lot of people who are new to this who just do a bunch and they have no idea. And so I think if we can emphasize, hey, start low, go slow. There's no rush here. Like first get a sense of this before you go deeper. I think it'll just mitigate any risk of a potential backlash happening again, like what happened in the sixties and seventies. Yeah, especially these chocolates. We talked to Ali Schaefer about that, the gas station mushrooms. And she was talking in Moab. She just saw them just in the gas station hangout. And some of them are really decent quality. But a lot of times, you don't know what you're getting. And especially with the chocolates, what I think is kind of worrisome, and for me, anyway, has always been, you're not exactly sure how much you're getting. out of a dose a lot of times. But I mean, maybe that was just what you know, when I was younger, and they were all homemade chocolates. Well, have you watched this new episode of the studio? Yes, that was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, yeah. There's just two eights. Yeah. It's just an eighth. And he two eights in each chocolate. And he's like, Oh yeah. Two eights of a gram. We can know it was two eights of an ounce in each. So was a quarter of each chocolate. It was. Yeah. That was freaking hilarious. One of the, you know, the shows, what was that common side effects? I've been wanting to bring that up on the show for a little bit. That show was, I mean, so spot on and amazing. Just Was that the adult swim? Yes. Yeah. It it caught so much of even just like psychedelic culture that, you know, the big business around it to, you know, to all the way to almost the mushroom cults to, know, just the dude that's just trying to help people. So, you know, it was really a good kind of, you know, all of that. But yeah, kind of getting back on track. How do you separate the narrative hype from neurochemical facts? This is a good question. So narrative hype from neurochemical facts. as we saw like prior to 2018, much of the narrative around psychedelics was negative, we could say. mean, leading up to 2018, was, you know, like Michael Palin published the TRIP treatment in the New Yorker. And like I said, there were a few podcasts, but generally the narrative was still pretty, pretty negative against psychedelics. And yet you had a lot of people in those early days, even prior to 2015, who were working with MDMA or taking LSD in the underground. And it was clearly effective and helpful and useful for. for folks in 2018, Michael Pollan's book came out, which I consider still to be sort of the main inflection point in terms of when this really started to take off. And then we saw investments start to come in in 2019. And then with the COVID pandemic in 2020, it really started to take off like psychedelic use quadrupled from 2019 to 2023. So I think there is something very distinct about the fact that psychedelics have been used for thousands of years. This is what I often refer to as the Lindy effect, which I learned about through Nassim Taleb, who's a really well-known author and writer, wrote Anti-Fragile and The Black Swan and Skin in the Game. And so he talks about this idea that the longer an idea or technology has been around, the longer it will be around. In other words, longevity is an indicator of utility, right? And so I don't think it's any coincidence that, and this point is debated depending on how much you're into Terrence McKenna. or Bryan Muir rescue in the immortality key, but I don't think there's any debate that we've been using psychedelics as a human species for potentially thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, right? So there is a reason that this continues to come back into the narrative as a medicine or as a tool or as something that can really help to support our overall survival for lack of a better term, right? Now, with that being said in the last, you know, four years now we've seen sort of like the opposite where there is a lot of hype. And I think what that does is it gives people an excuse or a reason to jump in and try these medicines oftentimes without the necessary safeguards or context or proper education. So I think so much of effective psychedelic work. is not only down to the sort of neurochemical effects, but also the set and setting of how we use these substances. I think- I was about to say, it sounds a lot like you. Setting all the time. Yeah, the set and setting matters, right? And so if we have all the psychedelic work that's done within this hype cycle, then naturally there's going to be a lot of enthusiasm behind it. And I think for good reason, these are really helping people. But honestly, in the last year, since MDMA was rejected by the FDA, that hype cycle has died, for lack of a better term. We're sort of starting to see it even out. And yet the clinical research that's coming out is still showing incredible results. Like two weeks ago, there was a paper published that shows a single dose of psilocybin can reverse Parkinson's, as an example. And so I think having the clinical research and the structure in the setting is still really key and important. Understanding that the narrative will sort of shift and change as it does. It's more noise than signal. And that for folks who are coming into this work, it's really important to have a relationship with these substances, to be able to do them in such a way that is safe and effective. And usually what I tell people is like, there's no rush. Here, like some people are like, okay, I gotta have the mystical experience. Like I gotta see God. gotta, you know, like just get, just, you know, like have ego death and ego dissolution. Usually what I tell people is like, this process for you could be like a five year process. Don't traumatize yourself by trying to go too hard, too fast, right? Like take this slow, take it easy. I the first time I met God. Yeah, exactly. I love the way that you put that. You don't have to traumatize yourself. I feel like that's how I kind of see it myself. It's like, you don't have to take such a big dose that you experience this traumatic event and that's ego death. It, you know, coming back to that, he had mentioned earlier about, you know, the kind of the mid doses and that was always our rule when we were younger as virgins get two. So, you know, we always felt like that was kind of how you initiate someone. It's not so, not so harsh that they're, you know, the full psychedelic, you know, paisley walls trip. It's just enough. They kind of start, they'll see the tracers, maybe see some fractals. And, you know, get a nice head change. yeah, kind of just reminded me of that. You're talking about that. Those doses, those middle doses. Yeah, it's like the museum dose or the concert dose is sometimes what I'll Yeah, it's like, you know, you don't have to go to the club and drink a whole bottle of vodka right a time Yeah. Are there any specific compounds that you've noticed that work better for microdosing LSD or psilocybin or anything else? Well, allocene and psilocybin are the two most common, Psilocybin being the most common. I read a statistic last year that over 8 million people took mushrooms in 2023 in the United States and about 4 million of those were microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms. So because of how prevalent mushrooms are and how the DEA is essentially not doing anything about it, right? They're just sort of turning a blind eye at this point in time. Like a lot of people can easily access mushrooms, which I think is why it's the most common and the most prevalent. LSD is my favorite, just can be difficult to find. We do with Third Wave, work with a, we have like a partnership with a company, it's called Golden Rule that does LSD gummies out of Colorado. And so we'll now sort of point people there. But for a lot of people, it can be hard and difficult to find, which is why most folks work with mushrooms. But Alicea I prefer because it's slightly more dopaminergenic, so there's more dopamine tied to it. And so I just feel like it's a little bit more of like a mood lifter and I can focus better and helps with energy. Whereas at psilocybin, I find it to be a little more somatic and emotional. So if I microdose the psilocybin and I'm trying to go about my normal every day, I'll just be a little bit more like in my feelings. which isn't always a bad thing, you know, but it can be a distracting thing if attempting to have meetings and work with folks and whatnot. And then the one that I've started to explore more more lately is San Pedro, also called Wachuma, which is a cacti from the Andes. And Wachuma is everywhere. It's ornamentals. You can go to San Pedro and buy Wachuma. It's totally legal to grow. It's just illegal to harvest. And the active ingredient in San Pedro or Wachuma is mescaline. which is sort of the third classic psychedelic psilocybin being a tryptamine, LSD being a lysergymide, and then mescaline being a phenethylamine. And what's interesting about San Pedro is that out of those three compounds, it has the greatest impact on inflammation in the body. So there was a researcher, Charles Nichols, who did clinical research at LSU. They published this paper in 2018, sort of exploring psychedelics as anti-inflammatory agents. And so one of my sort of pet hypotheses or speculative hypotheses about the efficacy of microdosing and why it seems to be working for such a range of conditions is because of its anti-inflammatory impact and how it's helping to lower or reduce chronic inflammation, which allows the body's sort of natural healing to be more turned on or open or absorbed. And so I've been starting to experiment more with microdoses of Wachuma. because it still has that sort of dopamine focus and attention like LSD does, but it feels a little bit more integrated and grounded like psilocybin. And so I think as more research comes out, and this is not in the next year, but hopefully in the next five to 10 years, we'll come to discover that San Pedro is a really effective microdose for a range of conditions. The final one that's really interesting is iboga. So I was interviewing Bryan Hubbard. Bryan is the lawyer out of Kentucky that has been a head of this Ibogaine initiative to get public funding for it. And he was describing, was telling me the story about how a German guy had Parkinson's. It was getting worse and worse. He tried all the traditional treatments. Nothing was happening. It got so bad that he signed up for euthanasia and, you know, like assisted dying. He then heard about this research that was being done in Switzerland with a medical doctor Tobias something. I can't remember the medical doctor's last name who was experimenting with low doses of iboga to help reverse Parkinson's. And so this patient ended up microdosing with iboga for 45 days straight. It got him into such a good place that he went off to euthanasia and were started to reverse his Parkinson's to the point where he can now ride a bicycle three, three miles a day, which is insane. And so I think iboga in particular and ibogaine, it's very different than some of the classic psychedelics. Like the classic psychedelics, what they often talk about in terms of their impact on the brain is neuroplasticity, right? We've talked about this a little bit today. How would neuro, and oftentimes with neuroplasticity, what's happening is it's not making new neurons. It's helping to open up dormant pathways or pathways that have died off, right? Whereas with iboga and ibogaine, it actually helps with neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons. And so that's why they're seen and noticing that for neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, MS, there are some case studies in ibogaine for MS and how it can help to reverse those symptoms, reducing brain lesions, which are often attached to the spine or whatever, reducing lesions, I should say, which are often in the brain or attached to the spine. And now they're exploring it for Alzheimer's and dementia, as well as TBI. There's been some really interesting research on ibogaine for TBI. So I don't necessarily like publicly, promote LSD and psilocybin because it's accessible and it's available. San Pedro will become more accessible and available. I don't, I would not say to anyone who's listening to this, go find iboga and start to microdose it because there's more contraindications with it. Like that's one of the beautiful parts about LSD and psilocybin is it's the only thing that's really contraindicated with is lithium. You can pretty much be in any other medication and it's not really contraindicated with LSD or psilocybin. That's not necessarily the case with iboga. And iboga is a little bit different in that LSD and psilocybin, your tolerance gets reset pretty quick and the body tends to excrete it and get it out of the system. With iboga, when you're consistently microdosing, it sort of builds up in the system. And so sometimes people will be microdosing for like 30 days straight and at the end of those 30 days, it's like, they're almost experiencing like what a full dose would look like with iboga. So you have to be much more careful, intentional, and you want to have a really great practitioner who knows what they're doing with iboga if that's like a path that you want to explore. Yeah, a couple episodes ago, we talked to Tom Fiegel, who runs Beyond. so, he talked about how you have to be real careful with it, and how it can be counter indicative or just get messed with stuff. yeah, it's a really interesting kind of vein that needs to be definitely studied more. was what the... I want to say Psychonaut was already going, so it had to been probably like 2008, 2007, the first time I heard about Evoga becoming a thing. wow. Yeah. So it's been, it's just, mean, it's just really started coming, like becoming more popular now. So that's really cool. Well, and we just got, you we already mentioned this, but the $50 million fund for Ibogaine research and I think a lot of that was inspired by a clinical study that Stanford published last year showing that a single treatment of Ibogaine essentially reversed TBI symptoms in all 30 special ops, which is... That's pretty insane. It is really interesting to me that how we're finding that psychedelics just in general are really helping with a lot of these degenerative brain or nerve disorders. It's just, yeah, that just the fact that it's psychedelics that all of a sudden, just the neuroplasticity, neurogenesis like you're talking about, just, yeah, that we've had these compounds for years that for 50 years were just kind of off limits that... Probably what got us to this second psychedelic renaissance is just discovering that, oh wow, there's a lot of use still in these substances. wanted to get the travesty as well that these are still largely schedule one because like we now know with pretty like strong conviction that these are useful for PTSD and depression and addiction and anxiety. But what about pain? What about autoimmune conditions? What about neurodegenerative diseases? What about, I mean, you know, like metabolic disorders? Like there's, there's so many things that we don't know because research has been so restricted and so expensive. And it's like, we really need all hands on deck at this point with the crisis and the health crisis and where it's gotten to in this country. so these aren't, this isn't to suggest that psychedelics are panaceas and they're going to fix and address everything, but they certainly need to be an option and a tool that's available for whoever wants to use them because a lot of things that don't work are legal and available or have nasty side effects or whatever it is. And so I think it's clear that something good is happening with these medicines. And my hypothesis is the more people who have safe access to them, the better off our world would be. Yeah, that's a very good. gonna go down the rabbit hole here for just a second. It's gonna get a little weird. So hang in there with me. But if you think about it, we have kind of a tendency as people to like find value in something, even if we don't know what the value really is yet, right? Think about it, like gold, platinum, stuff like that, right? Back in like ancient times, we knew it was valuable. We wanted it, we wore it, we still do wear it as jewelry. But what is it? It conducts electricity like better. than other metals do. So how funny is that, that we value it more, but it has this bigger use. It sounds kind of like the same thing. We've been using psychedelics for thousands of years. There's research that suggests even longer than that. Who's to say that it's not because there's more value to it than we truly understand it to have just yet. That's a really good point too, yeah. Yeah, it hits the nail on the head. Like I think the biggest value of these substances, this is just my personal opinion, is that they reconnect us to something greater than ourselves. And that something greater than ourselves is oftentimes inevitable. It's mysterious. It's, you know, quote unquote, spiritual, whatever, whatever you want to put it. But it has a way of opening us up to a humbling worldview and recognizing that maybe we're not the most powerful creature or intelligent entity that what if, you know, a simple mushroom that grows in cow shit might actually have way more capacity and power than, you we could ever imagine. And I think that's also sort of like a interesting, I think another interesting rabbit hole that I've been exploring lately is what does it say about 2025 when psychedelics, artificial intelligence and aliens are all sort of converging at once. And that's something that I haven't quite, you know, come to terms. It's a little bit of a little bit of a psychic overlord overload there for you know, aliens on one side and second. Yeah. Maybe we're actually in a bad trip of a hippie from the 60s. There it is. It's interesting. This is Douglas Rushkoff, who's a well-known author and writer. He wrote a book called Team Human, but he's written many other books as well. He talks about that. He's like, what if this is the bad trip? Right? And so it's sort of ironic that we're now all taking second elves to try to sort of get out of the bad trip that we find ourselves in. That's kind of funny. Have you ever had like a dream where when you wake up, it's like you remember like a whole life? Has that ever happened to you before? I've heard a story of a guy actually who I want to say there was a story on Reddit. In fact, this guy was talking, I think it was maybe even a Salvia trip where he lived this whole life when had a wife and like all this stuff. And he just started noticing one day that there was something off about this lamp. And he was just like, he kept staring at it and staring at it and just like, what is wrong with that lamp? And people tell him to leave it alone or whatever. And he'd stare at it and One day he was just like, what is wrong with that lamp? And looked at it and suddenly he was awake and he was back in his real life. He was like, wait a minute, I just had a whole like wife and family and what am I doing? Yeah. So I've heard of stories like that. Yeah. It's a pretty sure as a reddit story, it's something that's the key part. I remember is that there was this lamp that was something was off about it. It was just an awful little bit. Yeah. It was kind of one of those older famous Reddit stories, if I remember. I'll have to look for it again. yeah, it's crazy how much, you like even you find like, you know, we talk about like this ancient wisdom, but even kind of that the, you know, the sixties kind of rainbow child wisdom is the counter-cultural wisdom from there still pushing forward and in today, you know, lot of that. Sort like the counterculture has now become the mainstream culture. Exactly. Kind of as you were talking earlier with Michael Pollan in this book, know, like Oprah coming out recently and, and, know, endorsing psychedelics. It's one of those huge kind of cultural shifts where people start looking at this stuff a little more and, and examining it. So yeah, kind of already got an answer on one of these questions down. So maybe just we'll go on to, you think commercialization has been, uh diluting the sacredness of this word. Kind of along the same lines. Yeah, it's like, what is this relationship between commodification, accessibility, ensuring that people can have access to these medicines and sort of the deeper sacred nature of these? You know, it's, it's not a continuum, right? Like, something that is purely commodified as a nick factor and something that is only sacred is not accessible to most people. I this is why like hermeticism or alchemy is really inaccessible to the vast majority of people. So I think You know, I have a friend who runs a company called numinous and they have a lot of ketamine clinics or they used to have a lot of ketamine clinics. And he said, a lot of people who come in, they just want to feel better, right? They don't care about the spiritual stuff or, you know, the transcend, they just, they're depressed. They want to feel better and they offer ketamine as an option for those folks to feel better. So I do think like we need more options and within the structure and system that we have that requires investment, that requires clinical trials, that requires getting an FDA approved that requires insurance covering it. So there are things in sort of matrix 3D land that have to be handled in order for these medicines to become more accessible to more people. And some people will just hang out there, right? They wanna feel better. They'll go in, they'll get a treatment. It'll help them feel better. And that's that. What Terrence McKenna would often talk about is this sort of like, there's a psychonautic core. is what he talked about. it's not that everyone needs to be taking psychedelics, but if just five to 10 % of the population is sort of really rooted and steeped in these sort of deeper esoteric aspects of working with psychedelics that will create this sort of nucleus or psychonautic core that will allow for the sort of paradigm shift that many of us are enthusiastic about. I believe that deeper work is always sacred and should never be commodified. And that if we are choosing to engage with these medicines as allies, if we're choosing to engage with them in relationship, if we're choosing to learn from indigenous teachers and healers, that we have to be very, very careful with how those experiences or how that medicine is commodified. And I think a good balance even there is like, you know, I mentioned this at the outset, I grew up in a church, right? We had a pastor who was a phenomenal man. And the pastor becomes the pastor of the church, not because he wants to make a bunch of money. Believe me, there are much better ways to make money than becoming a pastor of a church, because he really cares about being a sort of spiritual guide and leader for the community and these people. And in response to that, the church pays him a little bit, right? Like enough, but they provide him with a house to live in. They provide him with, you know, the fundamentals that he needs to be taken care of. And he... in response to the acts and reciprocity and takes care of the community. And then how does the church pay for that? Well, through tithing and through donations and through this deeper service that it's a part of. And I think we're going to have both. We're going to have clinics with ketamine and psilocybin analogs and LSD and DMT IVs where people go in, they get treatments, it helps them feel better. And there'll be health insurance that covers it. And there will be some people who make a lot of money from that. And that's just how it's going to be. I think the vast majority of work though will happen in these sort of church circles. I do think there's this sort of revival of spirituality that is happening and that's sort of converging with the reintegration of psychedelics. And so my hope is that those of us who are really deeply committed to this, where it's really part of a life, you know, the practitioners, even the entrepreneurs who are involved in this work are committed and involved with a larger mission and a larger community where they're acting in reciprocity and giving back. in a way that is accretive and supportive of the sort of intelligence of this medicine. yeah, because commodifying the sacred just is... Yeah, it's just, it's very icky. Yeah, I get that feel. feel the same way. when I have a head stash or something, a friend, I had a friend is like, I've never tried it. Someone gave me half a hit once. Didn't really. I'm like, no, no here. Let me hook you up. You know, they're like, Oh, here, let me get, no, no, believe me. I want to do this for you. This is just please, please. I want you to experience this, you know, and it becomes more of a giving of yourself rather than commoditization of it, you know? And so I really, I really understand that. But kind of going back to a little bit about what we talked about earlier, there's a lot of excitement around the decriminalization and state level legalization now like Colorado and Massachusetts and stuff. What's the biggest threat you see to this movement? I would say the biggest thought is probably... That's a good question. There's a couple of things that are coming up. One is that they become overly medicalized and that pharmaceutical companies actively lobby against other decriminalization measures or state by state measures because they want more of the profits to stay within the company. So J &J has started to do this because they developed Spravato and so they've started to hire lobbyists to crack down on compounding pharmacies that are creating generic ketamine. So I think one is... what big pharmaceutical companies could do to potentially squash this. I think outside of that, the other one would be that too many people are doing too high doses of psychedelics. This goes back to the conversation around microdosing. I think microdosing or low doses are the ideal way to culturally integrate psychedelics. And so as this has grown like rapid fire, it's not like it's, you know, if only 1 % of people have bad experiences with psychedelics, that could potentially be. a very negative for the broader ecosystem that's doing it because those negative experiences really become amplified because we really find ourselves drawn to bad trips and sort dramatic experiences. I think the, the, the probably third and final one is, that we just, this sort of becomes subsumed by this paradigm of a pill for every ill, right? And that there's not a really deep recognition that it's not just the drug itself that is really facilitating the healing or the transformative process. It really is the drug plus community or the medicine plus the therapy or it, you can't have true transformation. without the human experience of it. And so I think that's probably another big risk is that this just becomes subsumed by a medical system, a sick care system that really focuses on the drug itself rather than the full context of someone's healing or transformative path and process. Yeah, that's a good point. All three of them really just, they kind of bring it together. I kind of agree with the medical big pharma. Kind of afraid of that, maybe getting too much into that or too quick. We're getting kind of running on time. Maybe we just hit this last, what is your personal hope for where psychedelics are in 10 years, both culturally and legally? That's a great question. So in 10 years, my hope is that the FDA has approved a litany of psychedelic or psychedelic adjacent medicines to treat a range of not only mental health conditions, but also neurodegenerative diseases, autoimmune conditions. So I would like to see at least 10 to 15 to 20 psychedelic or psychedelic like medicines, because we have the classics like LSD and psilocybin and MDMA and DMT, but now there are a lot of biotech companies that are creating Sort of these like Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin like chemicals that they're bringing through which are which are really interesting Yeah, had something came out the other day that was real big about uh LSD analog or something that had like two molecules flipped and you get all the benefits of the neuroplasticity of LSD with no side effects of trippin' Of course, the big word around us was, you know, we like the trypid part. Why would you want to get rid of that? But yeah, I mean, for people that aren't interested in that, what a great, you know. potential, right? Yeah, great potential for that. And I think the other thing would be all of these should be off schedule one within the next 10 years. I want to hear LSD, psilocybin, DMT. So they should all be descheduled. And then my hope would be that at least 50 % of the US states have legalized some form of psychedelic therapy or psychedelic medicine. On a personal note, one thing that I'm working on with Ali through the microdosing collective, which is a nonprofit that we started together, is to also advocate for the legalization of microdosing. So a lot of the legal landscape right now is focused on service centers where you have to go in to a center or a clinic. You get the psilocybin. This is in Oregon and now in Colorado, soon to be in New Mexico as well. And so I'd also love to advocate for just the adult use of low doses of psilocybin that can be purchased, probably not at a dispensary like cannabis, but through maybe certified practitioner of some sort. And I would love to see that as well, just accessibility. Yeah, I think that would be a good model to do it. Like make sure maybe through a therapist or something like they could be like, yeah, I'll recommend and say it's okay for you to do it because you've done a session with them or something and they know you're mentally stable enough to do that and physically stable enough. So I like that model. That's a good idea. Do you ever think we'll ever reach a place where a psychedelic experience is just as common and safe as going to regular therapy? Probably not, at least I hope not, at least these deeper, these deeper sort of transformative psychedelic experiences. I do think it will only be for like the more courageous, but my hope is that low doses of psychedelics do become that accessible. And ideally they are used in conjunction with talk therapy, right? so I think it's like, yes and no, right? Like I do hope that psychedelics become more accessible and available. Do I wish that every person who's going therapy now did like five grams of mushrooms? Probably not, but it should be accessible to them at least. Like it should be available for them to do it if they wanna do it. Yeah, should at least be an option on that. Well, thank you, Paul. was great having you here and great talking to you. Yeah, we're welcome to have you back any time. And that's great. It's been a lot of fun. I'm getting each time. you you All right, guys, welcome back. That was our interview with Paul F. Austin. He's yeah, great interview. I agree. Just very, obviously very intellectual, really knows his stuff. And very heady kind of conversation a little bit with the chemicals and brain. I mean, it was a brain, I guess, a neuro nerds fucking wet dream, but. Definitely a neuro nerds conversation for sure. felt like I needed to study for that and then I didn't. yeah, it's reminded me of all of high school. Right. Yeah, it was, it was fun. He's a, yeah, yeah, it was a great time. Yeah. Found out I didn't know he knew Ali that much or knew any of the, some of our other guests. So I know it's a pretty small world. So I imagine a lot of people know each other. So you guys, if you're following it, you know, thank you. If you guys want to follow us on Spotify, Apple, you want early access. We just got it all integrated with. Patreon. So Patreon and Spotify are integrated together now. you can kind of see the bonus episodes and what we've got that. So yeah, we've got, you know, thank you for the music. Flintwick been rocking it, keeping us with some good music and got a couple of people. If you guys have any more music, anybody out there want to, you know, hit us up, DivergentStates at gmail.com. He's definitely used the music. We'd love to feature you. Yeah, absolutely. It's really just about community involvement and making sure that we're taking care of the same people who are out here taking care of us, listening to the show. We just wanna look out for you guys. Yeah, exactly. mean, we're doing this and what better to showcase the community that we come from and kind of show off our world than the freaking amazing talent we have in the community. Well, plus I think we addressed this earlier. By now, we're famous. Definitely want us to tell people about your music. Right. We had press passes for psychedelic science 25 guys. Like we're there. at this point, see right now actually we have not gone there yet, but by the time this comes out, we will have been there. Yes. So famous. is what do they call that when you when you think about it? Manifesting. Yes, we're manifesting. Anyway, you guys, you want to come join in the conversation? You can go to r/psychonaut. You want to get high quality, early downloads? us up on Patreon, patreon.com/DivergentStates. And those who can't, if you can't afford it or whatever, just hit the likes. Hit a like on YouTube. Give us a five star on Spotify or Apple. Support us any way you can. Share with your friends and family. Do what you can, and guys keep exploring. you you