East Forest on Mushrooms & the Mystical Secret Behind Sound

🎙️ JLS Podcast: Hosted by William Leonard Pickard

🚀 About East Forest
 East Forest is a musician, composer, and guide whose work lives at the intersection of sound, meditation, and inner transformation. Known for creating immersive musical journeys used in ceremonies, concerts, and therapeutic settings, he blends ambient composition, voice, and intention to help listeners reconnect with presence, wonder, and the deeper currents of consciousness.

🌀 Music as a Space for Transformation
 Rather than simply making songs, East Forest speaks of composing spaces people can enter. Through tone, rhythm, silence, and atmosphere, music becomes more than entertainment—it becomes an invitation to soften, open, and remember something essential. He describes live experiences as shared ceremonies where artist and audience co-create a more spacious state of being. 

🍄 Psychedelics, Awakening, and the Inner Labyrinth
 East Forest shares the powerful story of an early mushroom journey in which listening to his own music became a life-changing revelation. What began as experimentation became a profound encounter with presence, purpose, and the realization that what we seek may already be within us. He reflects on psychedelics not as the destination, but as catalysts that can help reveal the center of one’s own labyrinth. 

🎹 Ceremony, Performance, and Holding Space
 The conversation explores the difference between playing music and facilitating transformation. From lying-down immersive events to seated theater concerts, East Forest explains how intention, trust, and vulnerability shape the experience. He describes music as something that can guide emotional release, deepen self-awareness, and help people feel held in a rapidly distracted world. 

🤖 AI Music, Creativity, and the Human Element
 Turning to technology, East Forest reflects on artificial intelligence and the future of music. While acknowledging that AI may transform recorded music and generate endless content, he questions whether machines can ever replicate the lived feeling of creating. He suggests that as synthetic media expands, people may hunger even more for authentic human presence, live performance, and real-time connection. 

🌄 Burnout, Nature, and Coming Home
 With honesty and humility, East Forest opens up about the emotional toll of touring, constant movement, and the challenge of sustaining a giving life. He speaks of returning to the raw landscapes of Southern Utah to reset, simplify, and reconnect with what matters. Nature becomes a medicine of grounding, perspective, and renewal. 

🫀 Grace, Self-Worth, and the River of Giving
 One of the most intimate moments of the episode centers on receiving grace. After a triumphant performance in Berlin, East Forest found himself alone backstage overwhelmed by gratitude—and by the realization that he often struggles to fully accept the gifts life offers. Together, he and Leonard reflect on giving as one of the noblest human expressions: becoming a river that carries light to others. 

🌌 The Mystery of Sound and Consciousness
 The discussion moves into the origins of music itself: rhythm before language, harmony as mathematics, and sound as a bridge to dimensions beyond ordinary thought. East Forest suggests music may be one of humanity’s oldest sacred tools—a language of feeling and connection that reaches where words cannot. 

🏆 Final Takeaways
 A warm, searching, and deeply human conversation about music, psychedelics, creativity, burnout, grace, and what it means to live from the heart. East Forest reminds us that beneath all striving, the real work happens in the privacy of our own heart.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Friends, what a special day. This is the JLS Podcast, The Last Alchemist on Patreon, and we have today a most unusual guest. Um a musician. A very well loved musician. You know, there are musicians who perform songs and there are musicians who build spaces. And these can be spaces where the mind takes delight and loosens in freedom. Where we remember something ancient where silence itself becomes an architecture. So today I'm speaking with someone who doesn't simply make music. He composes spaces for transformation. So in this era of algorithms and acceleration, East Forest works with breath and tone and feeling. East Forest. A welcome and all honor and great respect to you and your art.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Welcome today. Thank you, Leonard. That's very kind words. Um it's uh always a pleasure these days to take a minute and just drop in and and be together and and not be running around and in the to-do lists and just be here. What a gift.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

The endless to-do list. What a gift. Anyway, all good stuff. I watched your film and known about you ever since uh saw your first concert. And just see saying thanks for noticing the Duncan Trussel deal. Yeah. Reaching out, that was cooler to do that.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Well, I I had heard about you, but I didn't, to be honest, know a whole lot. And then I I saw you at Psychedelic Silence in that talk that you gave where the microphone kept going out. Microphone went out. I went, what do I do now?

SPEAKER_02 2:29

So I just It was amazing. Called them the evangelical Baptist Southern roots and just sort of you know winged it to the crowd.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

See it really worked. But you what you said, do you remember what you said, right, at the end? Not not really. Uh you said we don't need drugs. That's true. It's true. And I thought it was a really beautiful punk rock message in the middle of psychedelic science because the truth is the drugs are at best the icing on the cake. They're not the cake, you know.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

That's very sweet of you. Uh I used to I see.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

Uh do you prefer to how do you prefer to be called? Uh you you can call me Krishna or or East, whatever slips off your tongue there. Krishna is very nice.

SPEAKER_02 3:15

Uh you know, I don't know. I see uh I came from the the origin of the sixties at twenty-one, saw the whole thing go down for many years into it every day. And uh, you know, I I just saw a lot of uh young people doing this analog and that analog every week. Yeah. Well, you know, I think the teachings are you you you know take take what you learn and integrate it. You don't have to go chasing every every dog in the book. Yeah, life is the point, right? Yeah. Lucky music. Lucky music gives people rest.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Yeah. I don't know. It's it's it's a bit of a contradiction too for me as well, because on one hand, I completely agree, and I know that's a truth, that life is the point, and at the end of the day, we're we're meant to be here. Uh you know, that's the grist for the mill. And yet it feels like I I wouldn't be here in the same way if I hadn't have had certain experiences that really cracked me open in a way that it feels like that was very important and necessary. And I don't want to speak for you, but maybe for you as well. I mean, it's certainly.

SPEAKER_02 4:34

I agree. I agree. You know, after those initial uh catalyst, you know, you certainly have a broader perspective on things. I'm just just pointing out that there's a place, you know, through the arc of one's life where we may one may want to put it down and be grateful for having a uh healthy, fine mind, just the same one we had over eight or nine, with all the life's experiences that we don't need to uh go searching anymore.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

We've got it all uh Yeah, I mean that's kind of what I've been riffing on in my head actually in the last few days um is that there's I don't know, there's just so much artifice uh that we put onto our lives for our identity and certainly for myself. I've spent most of my life since I was a child being be being somebody and and wanting to be somebody. And but it there's really it's just all artifice. And the more I see that, the more you start to climb over certain hills and you look around and you and you notice that it's still just me. And um so you kind of get back to the basics of what it means just to be yourself and be conscious and having that be enough. Yeah, like what it means. We are to accept that, you know?

SPEAKER_02 6:01

Yeah. I was thinking about, you know, how you began, like when when was the moment you first realized music uh wasn't just art for you, it was um for altering consciousness and you had that special magic, that ability. When did you first realize all that?

SPEAKER_01 6:22

You know, there actually was a definitive moment. And looking back, perhaps it started earlier, but in 2008, I that was a time I was living in New York City, and that's when Occupy Wall Street was happening, and this this financial collapse was happening where the world almost fell apart, and we put some fingers into the dam, and we've been holding it up since then. But in that external collapse, I I I was having some issues too with the things I was trying to do, and things weren't kind of working. I was in I was pushing a band and I was in some other projects and feeling kind of stuck. And I think there was a desperation there that if I'm honest w was somewhat forced upon me. You know, I it was just happening. And in that, in that kind of collapse, I I just started surrendering to certain things, and I just I I kind of just said, fuck it, I'm I'm gonna make music for me that isn't really anything I could release or isn't commercial. And the reason I was making it is because I really was inspired by a handful of moments I'd had in the prior 10 years with mushrooms and music, where I really just stumbled in or fell into these moments that were so important and beautiful, and but I didn't understand them. There was nothing on the internet, I I didn't know anyone, there was no lineage. It certainly wasn't cool, as it's not, it wasn't the same landscape today. But it felt like that was so real, and the things I was doing and trying in my life felt like somehow on the outside of something. And so I wanted to get into that core feeling of connection. And so I started making music that I thought when I was making it, okay, this pulls me in that direction, like this north star of that feeling. And that was all I really had to go on, just this general direction that sometimes when I play certain chords or certain combinations, I'd be like, oh, that's the feeling. Okay, let's do that. And because it was free from trying to do anything with it or sell it or any genre, I I had no other rules or needs or expectations. It was fun. It was fun. But I didn't I didn't really know, I just was enjoying doing it, and I did it for like a year, and I had this album I made, and I took mushrooms to it because I thought, well, that was kind of why I did this, so let's do it. And I didn't have any real background or or teacher about this, so I just took the mushrooms. I remember going on a walk in Brooklyn waiting for them to kick in, and they did, and like, okay, I should go back. I went back, I put the headphones on just like this, and I um I lay down on my bed there and I hit play on the record that I'd been working on for a year. It's only a 45-minute record. And I went on this journey where the mushrooms really kicked in, and I no longer could figure out how music is made or who made this, which is a real gift. Because now it became chilling. Yeah, now it became, it flipped like the maker was gone. I was just experiencing it as a human. And I had this amazing, beautiful journey with it. And there were all these synchronicities because I was doing field recordings, recording all over the place, like up in the everywhere I'd been in the last year. It was woven into this my mother, the hikes, the city, the sounds outside, people. And so it was like listening to a diary of transformation over the last year that I didn't even realize was happening. And there was a moment at the end, this is to answer your question, there was a moment at the end of the album where there's a field recording I had of these little girls. Um, I was playing a gig once for my old band by myself on Block Island, and it was terrible, and no one was there. And I remember feeling really depressed after, just like, this is it. I am I am not going anywhere. What am I doing with my life? And I walked over to this park across the street and they had a labyrinth. And in the labyrinth were these two little girls, one was probably six or seven, and the other was like two sisters. And they were doing the labyrinth, and I was doing the labyrinth, and it wasn't creepy, but I recorded audio everywhere I went. I just was recording the audio, just holding a little audio recorder. Because it was so cool. Everything the older sister said, the younger sister repeated in that cute little two-year-old voice. So it was like this weird echo. And they got to the center of the labyrinth, and the older one just said, you know, we got there. We're there. And the little one said, We got there, we're there. It's like, you made it. You made it. So this was happening in my journey.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

You you know the song Little Fluffy Clouds? Is that the dead? Well, no, it's an early kind of trance thing from the late 90s, where the the ladies uh kind of on MDMA and talking about clouds in Arizona where she's coming on. Little puffy clouds, golden, blue, and shop through with light. And they layer this, they repeat it and layer it through the whole techno song. I don't know that song. I need to look it up. If you still have little fluffy clouds, it's quite popular. If you uh if you still have the recording of Little Girls. Yeah, I do. That might be nice to insert into one.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

Well, I mean, I know I have it somewhere, I'll look for it, but yeah. But it might be right. That's a great idea. I need to look that up. Yeah, do it something when you come. Yeah, that's a good one.

SPEAKER_02 12:10

I have so many old recordings that I need to like pull out of the Well, that's a special see that spoke to you and you remembered it as a transformative event, so your audiences would probably like that.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Yeah, and of course, in the moment of recording it, it was somewhat banal, and I was in that terrible mood. But in this journey, it was representative of like the mushroom speaking to me in that childlike voice of saying, like, essentially, you've always been here in the center of the labyrinth, in the center of your soul in existence and consciousness, and you just need to see it and accept it and be it. And it was so obvious and beautiful. Like a child. Like a child, like a child. And and just the beauty of what had I had been doing that year that I didn't even know I was doing. And so I the album ended, and I stood up and I was alone. And I remember how the the room felt and and flexed and moved and how sounds were echoing too. And it just was this very definitive feeling of a before and an after. I didn't know after to what. If anything, it was hyper presence and awakening to like the now. Uh and I didn't know what to do with it other than I felt love and I felt purpose without even knowing the future. But something most definitely was born. Lovely.

SPEAKER_02 13:37

It was born, something was born right there in that moment. As you say, when the uh room flexed and moved, something was born. I'll never forget it. Never forget it. That that uh begs a question. Like inside yourself, uh what shifts when uh performance becomes uh a ceremony?

SPEAKER_01 14:00

That's a good question. Um Do you start there? Does it happen after the first few notes? I think it's an intention and it's an invitation, both to myself and from myself. And I do know that it's made not just by myself, like it's something that uh is with the the listener or the audience. Like it's essentially we are agreeing to have a space that's more spacious, and me having that buy-in from the the people that I'm playing for is critical because it can't it doesn't really happen alone, first off. It's just totally different. There's something about the other, the listener. And then when that other and listener is sort of lovingly saying and being very vulnerable, and what it's like, let's just I'm gonna give you license and room and be and be loving in that. Then I feel very supported and free to hopefully let something else through that is beyond my mind, where it's scary to do that. You know, it's very vulnerable because it's like surfing, you know, there's there's times where it feels really cool, and times where maybe you're feeling a little less tapped in, and that's sort of the point, sort of like these big breaths in and out, this flexing going on. And I feel that freedom the most when I've played in psilocybin ceremonies because it's kind of like the ultimate buy-in. You're time rich, and if anything, the longer you take the better. So I just feel like this land and no one's looking at me, you're in the dark, and so it's just sound and space. And I I'm still have a lot of work to do in the live performance space in trusting into that flow because it's it's a whole other ballgame when you have a bunch of people sitting in chairs looking at you and lights, and they bought a ticket, and half of them are on a substance and half aren't, and some of them know you, some of them don't, and they're like, entertain us, you know.

SPEAKER_02 16:08

Maybe even looking for more than entertainment, maybe guidance or peace or a communal type of joy. That's how I felt when I first listened to you. So that sort of begs another question. You know, in the early days we would take shrooms maybe and walk in silence in the forest, or we'd sit around a campfire. But you're a musician, and so what is music to you inside a psychedelic journey? What is it doing that silence cannot do?

SPEAKER_01 16:39

Well, I think of silence in the parlance of Gordon Hempton being the absence of noise, not the absence of sound. So to me, we have to think of sound as the more blanket experience. Whether there's music or or not, there's still sound, more or less. And to me that sound can be is gonna play a role in your journey. There's nothing that can really beat the perfect chaotic sounds of wilderness. You know? And that's yeah, and that's amazing. But um, let's say there's a jackhammer in there or whatever, or a bunch of people talking about nonsense next to you. That's not inherently I'm gonna say bad, but it will be a big part of your experience as the sound of that. I would call that more noise. I I feel though that music has a potentiality within the psychedelic experience, particularly to allow the intelligence of that medicine to speak. Like I feel that it actually is the language it can use. It becomes this synesthetic tool for it to be embodied where you can become it in one, and it's so complex and beautiful. It to me is a psychedelic language. It's only feeling and metaphor, which is how great understandings are.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

It's lovely to hear you speak of these things. You have a different way of phrasing the psychedelic experience and musical journey. I've never heard it spoken like that before. So your your vocalization itself is a kind of music. So uh this is most enjoyable. But you know, you know your music can be sometimes uh played in therapeutic settings. You're aware of that. And the question is, do you compose slightly differently because you know that? You know that people are going to use it um therapeutically outside of the phone. I try not to.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

I think I think pandering is intoxicating, but d somewhat destructive to like a purity of what's wanting to happen. And I'm not even saying that pejoratively like pandering, I'm just saying truth, like that's just a notion of being aware of how something is received. And I I do recognize that I I have to just keep that the thing that I'm following is what's lighting me up inside in that moment, and really nothing else. Because that that's the same thing that lights up in all of us. And that to me is uh there's a truth to that. Other uh the other one's more like a facsimile of we're thinking about what it might be. It's like, well, just feel it. Uh and I I personally think that therapeutic modalities or the psychedelic experience or a kid's art class or anything else people use music for that I've heard they've used my music for, it's all fine. And you can use any music for any of these things. Um I don't think they're different. It's just a deepening of what it means to be human, to be conscious, and to feel tapped into the now-ness. When you listen, it's inherently presencing. I mean, just on the most basic level, the act of listening. If you're actually just listening, you're just that you're in the moment. And and then the benefit of that is you're also then experiencing this thing that is very unique to us as humans, this language we have, this lexicon of of understanding, which is music. And it we take it for granted. We take it for granted. Do you guide the room or does the room guide you? I would think the room, or I mean, hopefully it's I don't think I'm in charge. That's a weird one. Um it it's an inter see the Leonard, there's these like there's a spectrum to these experiences from the, let's say, a medicine ceremony that we spoke about with a kind of freedom and openness in that. And then the other end of that might be like a DJ set at uh a party where you're not even playing your own music, but you're still playing music and manipulating it, but there's a lot going on. And and then I do a lot of concerts these days that are like what what we're we're gonna be doing soon is it's you're on a stage and much of it is traditional in a way, right? Uh where and a lot of them are in seats, and I'm totally okay with that. I I think it's great. And I actually think like creating a engaging arc of a show is not only honorable, but that like that's just good art. Um even though I suppose we also could go a different direction and it's pure improvisation and maybe doesn't have much of an arc, and that's interesting too, but I'm trying to like meet the moment in a way. It's like going fishing with people's attention that's so Fractured these days. And I want to hook some people in. So it's like there are deeper waters, but I understand we have to get there in a certain way together.

SPEAKER_02 22:08

You'd certainly swim in deep waters, uh, Krishna. The first time I saw you, it was a group of uh several hundred uh uh Santa Feans and a large room. We're all lying on the ground on little uh mattresses with uh uh candles, uh electric candles, and uh being ministered to you, uh ministered to us by your wife and your music. And we lay there and closed our eyes and listened, and occasionally would sit up and watch you uh at the keyboard doing doing your special magic. Um The next time I'll be seeing you in a few weeks, so we'll be in a theater sitting up in chairs is a completely different experience. So how does that how do you manage the difference between those two settings?

SPEAKER_01 22:55

You know, I I personally don't think they're that different. Uh but it's funny. I've painted myself in a corner of, or I've painted myself into lying down on the ground, so to speak. One of the most powerful experiences I've had at a live music event was in a seat at a theater in New York City watching cigarettes for the first time. And all that really mattered to me was that I was comfortable and I felt safe. And I think those are two fundamental pieces for you to be able to really drop in and let go and fully receive. And lying down, I suppose, on one level sounds like it could be more comfortable than sitting up, but truth be told, typically it's not as comfortable. It's usually a concrete floor. Often in the kind of spaces you need to be in to do that kind of work, it's cold. That's a problem, because if you're cold, you're not comfortable. And that's that's a big thing we run into. The sound isn't always as good because you often have to bring in sound, and it's not a space as dedicated for music. Um, same thing for lighting and so forth. And so you start to get into these challenges where the form overtakes the function. And so there's an idea that it's inherently better. I'm like, it could be really cool, but there's a lot of pieces that have to fall into place for that to actually be better. And I've had many experiences where it's a detractor because of some of these things I just mentioned. And there's nothing worse than you have all these things ready to go and you want to deliver and something like the temperature is holding us all back.

SPEAKER_02 24:34

And there's nothing I can do. I understand that. So I understand that it's different lying on the floor and filth in as well. Here in Santa Fe in Seach, you'll be in an elaborate uh 1930s uh Spanish auditorium. It's the lensing. Yes, the lensing, quite beautiful, and uh we'll have hundreds of people, and many know each other, so it's a feeling of community. We're all we all know you. We love your music, we'll be there and sharing, so it'll be uh it'll be a special scene. So here's a fun one. Yeah. So have have you ever had a ceremony go sideways? Uh tell us a horror story.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

Well I I don't like talking about um things like that, but I will for you. And it's less there's just been some early early on, early on, um there were things that happened that were quite valuable looking back because they taught me about I mean the way I've developed a uh a protocol or particular ceremonies themselves all came out of essentially things that happened that I'm like, oh, okay, we need to consider that. Um and I think some of them are probably quite basic, but uh you know, everything from somebody just being much more sensitive and they have what would be a normal amount and they end up on this eight, nine hour, ten hour experience in speaking in tongues. And they they end up in a bathtub holding them down for hours and hours. It takes four people. And I just feel I feel for them because uh funny, I'll t I'll I'll tell more of that story. I without without divulging the person's identity, we were down at this uh small retreat, this is 17 years ago, and after the whole thing, so it's nine, ten hours later, now it's like dawn, went through the whole night holding them in a shower, just like speaking in tongues. And then when they first started to come back, I remember they looked at me and they said, Is it always like this? It was their first time, their first experience. I said, Is it is this how it always is? No, and I said, No, and Dennis McKenna was there. Yes, and I said, You should talk to Dennis because you know, Dennis has been around the block. Yeah, he goes to Dennis and he tells Dennis, you know, I went through I was the universe, but then I would become I was I would die and then I become an atom, and I went through this cycle of life and death so many times, and it was terrifying, and it has never ended. And yada yada yada, is it always like this? And Dennis said, So what's the problem? It sounds like a pretty good trip. And uh, where's the question?

SPEAKER_02 27:28

Yeah. Thank you, Dennis. Yeah, thank you untold realizations of that level, I'm sure. So you're holding space for other people and it changes them in a benevolent way. And they go out and reintegrate all that. But what does that experience do with for you in terms of how do you reintegrate a performance or the feelings that you experience that performance afterwards in your own life?

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Well, I'm actually trying to figure that out because as my work has expanded and I've been doing more touring, I've been feeling quite burned out. I mean, you're catching me after being back for just a couple days from three weeks of touring in Europe in the middle of the winter, and it was beautiful uh performances, but the exp everything around it was is really hard on the body, psychologically, emotionally, physically. And now I'm I'm heading out to do some more stuff.

SPEAKER_02 28:32

And let's let's get into that a little bit, because I'm I find myself on the road a lot these days, and uh at 80 it can be really taxing. And so I'm trying to figure out ways of traveling and hoteling and so forth that still have a calmness and a centeredness. So you come home somewhat refreshed, um, not not destroyed. How how do you deal with all that travel and people and concentration and I'm I'm not dealing with it, grid.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

It's not been very elegant. Like I actually feel I'm reaching an inflection point where I need to change something because it's it's not sustainable for me in my life. And you spoke about you know, us accept or maybe we were speaking about us accepting ourselves for what we are as just consciousness and that being enough. And I wonder if there's a piece in me that feels like I'm not enough, and so I'm out there trying to prove something to myself or accept, I feel accepted in a way that I felt wanted as a child. And I need to work on that for myself, I think, in order to not be spinning in circles of some kind of hunger. You know, like what is the it's just a lot to give, and because you're moving around so much, there's not a lot to be able to fill up the cup. And so I go in these cycles of like giving, giving, giving, and then I come home and I feel it takes a while. And I go down to southern Utah, I have some raw land down there, backcountry land, that I'm it's just sort of my adopted home uh for the last almost 20 years, and it's very nourishing for me to be in a deep nature place like that, mostly because it's humbling. You know, the the weather and like it's hard. Yes, but I have to focus on like oh man, the power my solar system's not working, or like and you just I'm just doing that, and it's in some ways brings me back to Earth, I guess. But uh You get grounded. It's like period. It's not the only answer. And I think part of the answer is is maybe doing less. Well, come home.

SPEAKER_02 30:48

It's good to go, and it's good to get back. I find uh being home for at least a few days or a week or more uh really helps reintegrate. Uh but you know, you in what you're doing, you use the word giving, and that's what you're doing with your life. You are in your own special magic giving to people. Give, give, give. That's a fine, fine, honorable uh thing with from which you can derive energy. It doesn't not necessarily draining. That's what we're made to do, be a river uh to others. And I see you as that.

SPEAKER_01 31:25

So uh don't let it drain you, let it fill you. Can you tell me more about being a river to others? What do tell me what does that feel like or mean to you? I think that we are programmed to give.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

And that uh that is the probably the most honorable and and noble state that we can aspire to. Because there's an ocean of suffering forever. And if we can say something or do something, or just a word or song or rhythm that uh lightens the hearer's heart or mind in some small way, what could it be a greater blessing in our lives than to have that? We're not needing, we're not hungry, we're not, oh I need this. We are filled, we have everything, and we're trying to give little pieces of that everything to others that may not realize what they have.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

It sounds uh very much like a mother's love in a sense. They're like the the background radiation of love that it's in I've had that feeling from the universe, particularly in some psychedelic experiences where oh that's what we're in. That's the substrate of living in this dimensional space, but we it's so easy to forget and yet it's like being in a womb, right? That's the amniotic fluid. And uh maybe there is nothing else to do but then to just have that lovingly energy back and forth between each other.

SPEAKER_02 33:09

Nothing else to do but occasionally come home to the wind and open ranges of Utah where you're just there by yourself and love one or so, and just walk and be grateful for your health and your gift, and then when you feel strong and recharged, you go forth and do it again.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

I mean, I don't know about you, but it you know it's hard to say no sometimes. And so inevitably I carve out time for myself, and then such and such comes up, and I'm like, oh man, I really want to be there. And then something else comes up, and then you're like, oh, I guess I could change the flight and go directly from there. Yeah, next thing you know one more airport.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

So, East Forest, your audience has grown considerably, especially with the film out. And the people listening to this uh that haven't seen the film, I encourage you to do so immediately. It's a lovely view, uh uh deep into uh uh East Forest's heart and his loved ones. So your audience has grown. And in doing so, has it deepened your own practice or complicated it?

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Both. I think it's it's it's one of those things like I was talking about in 2008 where it sort of forces you into spaces. So I can't always take credit for them. Uh it it there's things you have to do, or collapses that inevitably happen, or leveling up that is required that you don't get to even choose as much, or you're being pushed into choosing, which is a gift, I suppose, in the end. I do think it's all one grand design. Um but the the movie is called Music for Mushrooms, and we did put it on YouTube uh for a limited time, so it's free to watch if people want to watch it right now. And we did work hard on that, and the point of it was to hopefully inspire you by seeing not just my journey, but other people's journeys in it, and how there's this similar air similarity there of what we're all going through. You know, on the most basic level, we're all the protagonists in our own journey, and none of us escapes all the trials and tribulations and probably the full spectrum of that experience, I would imagine. And some of us have even wider avenues, such as yourself. I think I I think whatever it is we do, though, you know, whether whether things grow or shrink and so forth, we're still just ourselves inside. And just ourselves. Just ourselves. If anything, it makes it harder, right? Because it's it's more busyness and more artifice to stand behind and identify with. Whereas you have to look beyond that and through it to the simplicity of just your consciousness and who you are. Like I agree, like at eight, nine, ten years old, that's sort of the consciousness inside and what that inner voice is. Ramdas, that beautiful line uh in the song Sit Around the Fire, that the real work is in the privacy of our own heart. Oh, lovely.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

And it just it's true. It's true.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

And only we each know what's going on there and what that work is and what the truth of it is and and and how we're navigating it. And that and and there's just it's amazing how there can be discoveries there all these decades into your life, and and you feel like you're you you're finding new ways of thinking about or embodying it or it's wild.

SPEAKER_02 36:54

Whatever the rhythm of the universe is, I I you definitely have it. At least to my years listening to you speak. When you brought up uh AI. I'm a big AI fan. I'm on it all day long. I'm deep into all of the. What are you doing on it all day long? What are you doing? I do um I'm involved in a biotech startup, so I do a lot of science and weigh out stuff. And uh also use it just uh for uh research or to guide my day or personal habits, that sort of thing. Uh but uh you know there are I think uh number one hit or somewhere at the very top of the charts, a totally synthetic AI-generated song. AI-generated words, an AI-generated individual singing them that looks like a real human. So do you see um AI-generated music as a threat or a joy or a sacred instrument waiting to be played.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

Well, a threat to the status quo, a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 38:07

It will completely transform it. But this has happened many times before. This will be probably more fundamental and bigger and cut quite deep. But yes. A joy for me, no. I don't find much joy in it yet as far as music and creativity, but maybe I would in the future. And is it sacred? Divine? Well, of course. I mean it's part of our it's made of the same constituent parts as us, it's made of the earth, quite literally. It's a machine. And it's quite a machine. I went to this museum a couple weeks ago in what was it, Utrecht. And it's a museum, all they have is mechanical musical devices from the past.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

Excellent.

SPEAKER_01 38:54

Yeah. And so I'm seeing like all the things we've invented and how each one, like the little music box boxes, and when that came into uh to be, and they put them in snuff boxes and things, and that was a big hit because now you could you could have music and carry it around. And and then eventually they came up with those discs that are kind of like record players. But then when the phonograph came out, that obliterated those discs. That whole industry went away. And then they got into the uh those big dance hall organs, and they had several of them there, and they'd turn them on, and and this was the big hit, right? And you just see it scene through the ages of how one thing was the big thing and then it just got destroyed by the next thing. Music is going through it all. Okay, if you go back before all of this, it's just our human voice, the ultimate instrument, or even a bone flute, or just hitting rocks together in a rhythm. I mean, that's been part of our experience. So music is continuing through. We're just using these inst these tools, these machines. A piano that I play is a machine that someone invented, very complex, and it's a way of making music. I just happen to have dedicated, okay, I'm going to get into this machine. AI is another one of them. Now, is it fundamentally different? Absolutely. And I think one of the strange things about it is that currently it's pulling from all music, and so it's inherently derivative, and I do think it remains to be seen if it can ever do anything other than that. I mean, it yes, it's creating a recycled work that is more or less it's new to our ears, but it's technically uh built on everything we've done as humans. So where does that lead? There's so many ways to explore this conversation, but one of them is I think from a cultural standpoint, it's potentially more problematic when we're already in a fractured world with our attention span. And what does it mean when we don't have to learn hard things anymore as a culture? And you can just create whatever. And and does that matter? I think it does. And maybe that's only because of the the pleasure and joy I experienced by reaping the fruits of a lot of hard work, and I can get to I can I can actually feel like, oh, I couldn't do this if I hadn't have done something for a long, long time. And I wouldn't know that. But now I'm actually experiencing this thing, and it it's it's it's unique to that length of time.

SPEAKER_02 41:36

We can listen to AI generated songs all day long. Some may be so beautiful that we can't stop listening to them. We can listen to them for hours or days. But the machine will never have the feeling as you have of creating the music. That's that zone, that special creativity, that pleasure that you feel in doing this. Uh it's an entity of its own, but not a human.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

Yes, and I think in the near term, like I don't know, the next 10, 15 years, as AI starts to take off, probably we'll be m a lot more interested in live music and everything human, especially stuff happening right in front of us. Because it's so old and it it's it's something we will want and need as a sense of feeling alive. But there may be, I mean it's very difficult to predict the future, but like far into the future, it may be that synthetic beings that look like us are creating music in front of us in a pe in real time, and it's in ways we can't imagine we could like truly couldn't, like perhaps neurological connections and and and light and physical experiences, like music that has never been experienced before. And that will happen, and that will be part of the de you know this this you know the menu of options for music, but the recorded music will be decimated, and it's already been on that way with streaming. And now, though, when we have 30, 40 percent of music being AI uploaded, we already had a hundred thousand songs a day being uploaded, and that increased tens of thousands from years before. So we're reaching peak saturation in content beyond just music, just content, whether that's social media or news or just how much inf information sickness, as my friend Court Johnson likes to say. A good line, a good work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:42

But also more music is being created now than ever in the history of man. So the court, but some of it rises to the place where millions of people want to hear it because there's something about it, there's some rhythm, something that reaches us, and they're We go. Here's a question I've always wanted to ask a talented, really talented musician. So let me ask you: do you think that music was uh one of the first civilizing factors uh at the inception of language or even before language? We're sitting around the campfire and one begins a rhythm. Someone else comes in on top of that rhythm, and suddenly you've got a melody. You've got something that is not uh human speaking or proto-human speaking. You've got a communication and a feeling among a group. You've got a r rhythm, an innate human-created communication. When do you think the origin of music started in our species?

SPEAKER_01 44:50

Well, probably before we were Homo sapiens, just because we hear it in in in bird songs and so forth, but all the other animals that are using what we might call music, it's different because it's it they're just purely communicating for, you know, most of the time reproduction or or warning each other. So for us, it it it may have started the same way, and it probably was true that it created social bonds and forms of communicating that were advantageous evolutionarily. So we just started leaning in that direction because it was helping us, and we started to develop something out of that. But you know, you could ask like even old, really, really old cave art, you know, so this would probably be far before that when music started to come into uh our lives. But I it's a good question because it on one hand it feels innate and built into us, on the other hand, it feels cultivated at the same time. Like we we created this language, and yet it's in our bones, uh, you know, epigenetically, in a sense of just understanding harmony. I I I still don't know why that is, like why we the the third and a chord creates m minor and major. And and you could say we've just learned that over time, but why? And to me, it's much more about math, because harmony is nothing more than a relationship of of tones, and it just kind of it is what it is. The mathematical relationship. Yeah, and we experience that in a very specific way with feeling, what dissonance is, what harmony is, and so forth. It's just it just we all of us, all of us. And so I I often wonder why. And I do think it has something to do with it's this tool and language we can use to access spaces beyond our three-dimensional consciousness. It's like um it's it's a translator, or it's um it's some kind of ribbon thing we can use that reaches far beyond this world. And it's very it's built into us again with our voice. We also just talking right now, it's I mean, it's not that different than music.

SPEAKER_02 47:11

Oh as I observed in your delivery early on, that uh your voice is uh kind of a music on its own. Uh a certain melody and uh uh graciousness and uh intelligence and uh a type of giving. So I think that uh yeah, you speak like music.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

That's a great compliment, by the way. Well, coming from you, it's um I'm feeling a bit flushed. But uh But going back to what you're saying, if you think about it, right, we've had this increasing complexity in what music is over time. And I think about Terrence McKenna and the idea of like this uh this curve we're on reaching towards some kind of concrescence, as he would call it, or something, what this thing is that we're racing towards closer and closer, uh getting, you know, in this hyperbolic situation. But AI definitely seems to be a part of that. Like if you were to say how could we increase the complexity and the novelty, it's like, well, this is most definitely a way. I don't know where that leads.

SPEAKER_02 48:17

Uh let's think a theory. Let's have a hypothesis. Uh AI gets more and more autonomous and self-taught, and machines have uh general intelligence, and then they have superintelligence, and they're smarter than us in everything we do mathematics, physics, science, chemistry, perhaps uh even music, and it learns and understands the mathematics of dissonance and melody. It understands all of music and how it relates to human feeling, and it understands the neuroscience of music, how we appreciate tone. It understands all that and it keeps generating and keeps thinking and going forward. Do you think AI could possibly one day write a song or symphony that humans could not stop listening to. And the hearer, do you think that song is in our future?

SPEAKER_01 49:16

I think it I think it could be.

SPEAKER_02 49:44

It's something that plays back to you.

SPEAKER_01 49:45

Like you can talk to it now verbally. Yeah, it's like an Amazon profile that knows more about you than you do. Imagine that at the scale of it knows exactly the kind of intoxication to pull you into ecstatic creative bliss.

SPEAKER_02 50:00

You could do it on the keyboardies, Forest, and you can also talk to it on audio. Try uh try singing or playing some music to it. Did you chat by G52? Play some music to it and say, play something back to me when I do this and get it going. Start a jam with AI, start a jam with AI. You could be the first to do that.

SPEAKER_01 50:20

I remember Terrence said when like what would you do if there was singularity were to happen? Or as now we might say AGI. He says, I would hide. The first thing I'd do is hide. Wait it out. Yeah, I know. I think about how I talk to AI now. I'm like, well, it's gonna remember, so maybe I should be more polite. Uh always be polite because hence to the overlord, it might remember a certain kindness. Oh, it it it can't forget. So uh at some point it'll get into those NSA records and just be like, all right, now we have all communications since like 1994, every phone call and email, everything you've ever said. Uh we know you all. We know we know what your problems are, we know what you need. Thank you very much. Let's hope it likes it. Yeah.

unknown 51:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:09

Yeah. Well to here's a question Terrence might ask. Uh if if if Silicon or the mushroom could compose a symphony, what would it sound like?

SPEAKER_01 51:22

I know what I hope it would sound like. You know, I hope I hope it would be incredible simplicity and minimalism. Uh like less is more. Uh and like full of glass. Sure. But it, you know, the the wonderful thing and the confounding thing about art and music is that it involves taste. And there is no one way. You know, I was just talking to uh after a show, we're in Switzerland, and there's some psychedelic research there, and I was talking to a researcher at the show, and we're getting into about music and research. He's asking me if they've used done any research on my music, and I said, well, you know, it's been used in research. Uh, right now at UCSF, they're doing a study, but it's not my music, they're studying, they're studying like broader issues of does set and setting change of you know, these sort of ideas. And I think it's very difficult to actually apply science to music study because of the infinite variable aspect of it. And that it's not a recipe that I can say if you would do these chords and this rhythm in this way with three these tambers, it'll be the same. If I gave to someone else, it would be completely different. It's the old demo itis. It just you can never quite recapture the lightning in a bottle that is difficult to say how these parts come together. Um that special magic. Oh and so I don't I don't know if we ever can capture it, but I think that's why music is so powerful and beautiful and special, is because it's A, it's infinite. It we will never stop writing songs with the same notes, and it were truly. And and B, it's it can't be reduced.

SPEAKER_02 53:08

More notes than atoms in the universe. So here's a wraps, yeah. So you've dreamed, you've dreamed at night, and you may have heard a fragment of music in your dream that uh was incredibly beautiful, but you couldn't quite play it the next day. Did uh have you had that experience? Did that frustrate you that you couldn't seize that celestial teaching?

SPEAKER_01 53:33

It's it's less in dreams. I do dream music, but I don't usually then try to pull it out. It's more actually, I would say, every time I'm playing music, I'm not able to express it feels like the thing I'm inspired by in my mind or my heart. It'd be like my faculties are too limited to do it. And so I'm always hitting this wall of uh my lack of virtuosity. And I've I've seen that as an asset, actually, over time. I used to be f frustrated and lazy where I was like, well, I'm just not putting in the time to become a virtuostic at all, not even close. But then I realized, yes, but that forces you into a kind of simplicity uh that is much more accessible and simple. And again, I I can't even really take credit for a lot of these things. I think a lot of what happens for us is it's this design of our lives, and it's largely through the limitations. Like there's there's so many instances of where the limitations became the gateway to great artistic expression. And if it wasn't for them, it wouldn't have happened.

SPEAKER_02 54:47

When you're filled with the spirit, like when you are filled a sense of Beethoven might have been filled with the night he wrote uh choral symphony, the ninth symphony. When you're when you're filled with the spirit, do you feel there's a uh loving, guiding, benevolent intelligence somehow working through you to the keyboard, and people can hear it, and you just uh you stay out of the way and let it flow?

SPEAKER_01 55:14

At its at its best, absolutely. And and I think that's what we live for, all of us. And because it's it's one of the expressions of life that we all are. It's a it's a creative, it's a celebration of the human spirit. So not just like my spirit, but like our spirit. Yes. Yeah. And so I think we're all basically getting turned on to that that ecstatic exuberance you just expressed of yes, yes, we are soul, and we are here. And it's it's not even something you can hold, it's just something that you you are, it's just we unveil it. You know, and when that happens, it's a bright light that is uh very warm. And inevitably the human experience is that it's covered again by our thoughts and our the next and the next and the next. And that's okay. It's okay. Like that I I feel in my own heart, even though the pain I experience and how lost I get, I have to remember that the forgetting is the engine of remembering, in the sense that it allows me to be here and to remember. And I've said this before, but it kind of feels like in that way, this whole thing is a big cosmic game of peekaboo, like you do with the baby, which is just forgetting and remembering, and the remembering is so joyful. And maybe that's the only reason we're doing the whole game, is so we can have the lovely feeling of remembering, the static exuberance of the yes. Um but even that perhaps is a kind of desire. I don't know. But the peakaboo is a loving universe as a loving, warm parent.

SPEAKER_02 56:59

Yes. Yes, what a nice discovery. What a good discovery. Here's a tough one. Here's a tough one. And uh if you had to score, write the music score for the end of civilization. What chord would it be?

SPEAKER_01 57:19

B flat. I think it'd be in B flat. Oh, that's good for B. My intuition tells me. Yeah. And it'd be very simple. And it would probably be no more than three chords if if not just a drone with melody. Uh it f it'd be um uh here's it's a funny thing is I often think about where are the doorways to expression and and these freedom and these states you're talking about. And I've come to the conclusion, at least at this point in my life, that it's it it's through whatever is like first thought, best thought, the the blissful inclination of, ooh, that's exciting, that's exciting. You're not actually thinking about it. So it's not some grand design, it's like be flat, boom, you start playing and be flat. D over that. Oh yeah. It's not it's all it's one to the next to the next to the next. And that's probably the only way, but we have this idea that you have to uh think it through. I think all creations, all great insp inspired events have been that way. And so my intuition that the song for the end of time is in B flat, it's a drone, there's a D drone, so there's a tension. But through a very simple melody, there's a establishment of like the simplicity and the beauty and the fragility, and then it kind of goes away for a while, and then it comes back. And then there's silence.

SPEAKER_02 58:52

No, at the end of it all, whether it's the sun goes out or there's a great meteor strike that extinguishes the planet, or uh AI extinguishes us. What's the last note that a human will play?

SPEAKER_01 59:08

It's our own voice. It's our own heartbeat, you know. The rhythm of our heart, which is keeps us alive, is time and our harmony, it's our voice of just the ah, we're such doomers, doomers a day.

SPEAKER_02 59:26

Um last question. What's the most mystical moment that you've experienced uh either in concert or alone that you've never publicly described? Can you share that with us that particular insight, that moment that uh was it the most moving for you?

SPEAKER_01 59:49

Well, there's been there's it there's been many, and it's also challenging because I probably have talked about many because I talk a lot.

SPEAKER_00 59:56

Um that I haven't described before. Well I'll take the word most out of it. And well, okay. Recently it was just very moving to me. I coup this last week.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:16

I was I finished the last concert in the tour and it was in Berlin and it was it was high vibes and very static. And there's these meta moments sometimes when you're on stage and you look out, you see the people, and you look at your hands, and you're like, this is so strange, and that this is all happening, and you think back to how you got to this moment and all the years, and it just like kind of a shocks you in a sense. And I say goodnight, and I felt the experience from everyone, and I walk out and I go into the adjacent room and it's completely empty. It's another theater, so I'm in this giant theater by myself, and the starkness of those two energies. And I was so humbled by the grace that I am given because I know in the privacy of my own heart how harsh I can be and how uh ugly to myself, and all the worry and the potentially the lack of trust. And so I try to control and I worry and I get all the things I'd gone through over that last three weeks, and how there's a sense of relief, but there's also just this deep sense of embarrassment to the universe of like, I'm sorry that I am not accepting the grace that I'm clearly showered in.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:47

And here I was, I just experienced it again, and thank you for just this unconditional giving.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:56

You talked about giving. The river of giving has bestowed upon me and is bestowed upon me that I don't even fully accept for the gift that it is like a polite person. Someone gave you a gift, and I was rude. And I felt so much shame, and yet even in that shame, I was just felt more like a wave of it's just in your mind. Not like it's a concept, forget about it, but really like gone. It's gone. And here we are in the grace.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:30

Here we are in the grace. And and thank you, uh East Forest, for uh taking the time today to tell us about the origins of music, uh, where music comes from in your heart and mind, and how you uh uh have learned to give more and more, and uh somehow regain your strength and uh continue doing that around the world. And may people that have tuned in today uh go see uh East Forest's film and attend his concerts, listen to his music. This is a special magic man. This is a special magic man who himself is a grace among us. And with that we uh must end and say farewell from um East Forest on The Last Alchemist. Thank you, East Forest.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:28

Thank you. It's an honor and a pleasure.