Wired for Peak Performance: The Biology Factor

What are you kind of striving for with Third Wave in addition to just educating people about these?

I found microdosing to be that perfect bridge for the cultural integration of these psychedelics. Education towards literacy, towards really doing a deep dive on that overlap of psychedelics for leadership performance and wellbeing.

You were talking a little about low and slow. Can you go into that?

It's important that people start low, they go slow. What I think is important to honor as part of this process is that microdosing is for those who are beginners, you're really looking at what are the shifts from day 1 to day 30. Microdosing is not a magic pill. We're so conditioned to rely on an external substance to do something to us. And the fact is microdosing and psychedelics and breathwork, they open up the channels for change. There has to be a clear why. There has to be a clear purpose behind that because that is really going to be sort of the golden thread that ties together the entire microdosing experience. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before?

What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting?

Nothing is ever the same again.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your your oldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Doris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio.

Welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. I'm Dr. Tori Higgins, the head coach at the Flow Research Collective, and today I'm sitting down with Paul Austin, who is one of the most prominent voices in the world of psychedelics. Thanks for taking the time today, Paul, to hang out with us.

Thank you, Tori, for having me on. I'm really excited to talk about psychedelics and flow and leadership and everything. I this is a hot topic with your audience and it'll be fun to dive in.

It truly is. We get questions about this all the time. So this is going to be a much referenced episode in our collective. So for folks who aren't familiar with your work yet, you are the founder of Third Wave, which through which you've educated millions on the importance of safe and effective psychedelic experiences. You are a pioneer at the intersection of microdosing, personal transformation, and professional success, and you've been featured in Forbes, Rolling Stone, and the BBC's WorkLife. You're also an expert in helping others use microdosing as a tool for professional development and increased self-awareness by treating the use of psychedelics as a skill refined through mentorship and courageous exploration, which we're definitely going to be diving into extensively in this episode. So let's start though with just talking a little bit about your path to founding Third Wave. How did this happen? Can you, you tell us a little bit about how this work became your purpose?

Yeah, the story that I love to anchor in, it's a bit of a difficult story, but I think it really tells the story of my context, the way I was raised, the culture that I was raised in. So at the age of 16, it's a cold, rainy Sunday after church. I'm sitting down in the family room with my parents, and a couple days ago they had found out that I had smoked cannabis for the first time. And my dad looks at me, and my dad's like a really kind, loving human. We have a great relationship, but he looked at me And he said, you know, I haven't been this disappointed since my brother passed away in a car accident many years before. And so I remember just like exploding with like anger, rage, and sadness and grief, walking outta my parents' house, going for like an hour-long walk just to let it off. And then coming back and realizing that, okay, there's a clear disconnect between the truth of what cannabis is and what my parents perceive it to be. What this speaks to is, I mean, it speaks to one, the sort of container that I was raised in, West Michigan, Midwest, pretty traditional morality was really dictated by the church and the law in terms of what was good and bad. And when I started to work with cannabis at the age of 16, it really helped me to sort of overcome feeling ostracized and left out in my social group in high school. So it really helped me to feel a little bit more connected and part of something. And what that experience taught me is that these plant medicines, for lack of a better term, and we can get into defining that later, or psychedelics, are heavily stigmatized. They weren't well understood, and education is significantly lacking around them. And so fast forward a few years later, I'm in university and I try LSD for the first time at a reasonable dose, like 250 micrograms, and had just this really kind of the classic profound, beautiful psychedelic experience of seeing as everything interconnected, of feeling like a deep appreciation, gratitude for my life, for the way that I was raised, for even the nature that I was surrounded in. And at the age of 19, I was in a sort of, what am I going to do with the rest of my life situation? I had studied medicine for the first couple of years of university. I had also played soccer in college and I was also in a fraternity. And so there was a lot that was coming to the head at that point in time. And in those early psychedelic experiences, what really came forth was to really, as cliché as it is, to follow my passion, to follow my heart, to really listen to what it is, to not live by the conditioning or conventionality of what everyone else is dictated by, but to really invest in my 20s in charting my own path and creating my own existence and having the courage to do that, even in the face of what probably looked like insanity to most people around me. Because when I graduated college, I moved to Turkey. I taught English in Turkey for a year. I ended up traveling to over 70 countries throughout my 20s. And in that process, while living in Budapest at the age of 24, I was with a couple friends and we were again doing LSD at higher doses. And just sort of reflecting, this was in 2015 now, reflecting on the state of psychedelics, reflecting on the fact that Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan had started to publish podcasts about psychedelics at that point in time. NYU, Johns Hopkins had started to publish a lot of research about the efficacy of psilocybin. And back to cannabis, by 2015, there were several states that had legalized recreational cannabis, and many, many states that have medicalized cannabis. And so we had this sort of aha moment in 2015 of, okay, psychedelics are definitely going to be this sort of next big thing after cannabis from an entrepreneurial perspective, but we can't repeat the mistakes of the '60s. After I studied medicine, I went and I actually finished a degree in history and business. I had a double major. So I'm a huge student of history and lover of history. And when it comes to history, a lot of these patterns repeat themselves over time in sort of the human dialogue and human context. And so when I started to go deep into what had happened in the '50s and '60s, what I quickly discovered is we had 1,000 clinical papers that had been published about the efficacy of LSD for everything from alcoholism to anxiety, to depression, to addiction. But the issue was not the research. It was when that research started to tip over into culture.

Yeah.

And that we as a culture didn't have a context for these ecstatic states of being, for these non-dual states. And so Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert come out, they start encouraging everyone to turn on, tune in, drop out, high doses of acid everywhere. And so when we came up with this idea of the third wave of psychedelics, it was how do we take the best practices, sort of the primordial and archaic practices of indigenous use of psychedelics for thousands of years, ritual, ceremony, privacy, And how do we marry that with some of the cutting-edge scientific methodologies that had been invested in the '50s? And how do we marry that in this third wave of psychedelics, almost walking the middle way for a fully integrated experience of psychedelics? And what I thought was the key in all of that was microdosing, that these substances cannot be contained within the confines of clinics and hospitals, that the way that these are used is in ceremony, is in the jungle, is with friends, is at the beach. And that what went wrong in the '60s is we just went too deep too fast. And so the key for, I think, this third wave of psychedelics is how do we normalize a relationship with these plant medicines by starting low and going slow and recognizing that the vast majority of people don't necessarily want full ego dissolution and ego death. Maybe they just want a little bit more energy, a little bit more clarity. They want to have a little bit better of a mood. And I found microdosing to be that perfect bridge for the cultural integration of these psychedelics.

That makes so much sense and explains the Third Wave name. And I want to go— I want to dig into what is microdosing, and we can get to protocols later. But before we do, I wanna double-click on, you know, you're referencing all of the research that's been done thus far that indicates that there is so much possibility, so many indicators of these massive benefits to psychedelic tools. I guess, what is, can you speak to what is your ultimate vision for this pursuit? What are you kind of striving for with Third Wave in addition to just educating people about these?

I love it, Tori. We're just like, Go in there. We're not holding anything back.

It's not how we roll at FRC.

This is a beautiful question. So as I mentioned, and as you emphasize, right, in the 1950s, over 1,000 clinical papers were published on LSD in particular because of the stigma that existed around LSD from the counterculture of the '60s, the anti-war revolution. There has been very little research done in LSD in the last probably 25 to 30 years. However, There has been extensive research on psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in psilocybin mushrooms, on MDMA. There's been some research on ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, iboga, et cetera, et cetera. The vast majority of that research is looking at the therapeutic mechanisms of these substances. In other words, how can psilocybin help to heal treatment-resistant depression? How can it help to heal alcoholism? How can it help to heal other addictions? MDMA, right? The research that— shout out to MAPS and the research that they've been doing. MDMA is being looked at as a treatment for PTSD, which is incredibly important. And what I love about this research is it's showing 2 to 3 times greater efficacy than conventional treatments like SSRIs and benzodiazepines and things like this. However, the purview is extremely limited in that it is only focused on the clinical and therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics. And we've only had a handful of research papers that have been published about psychedelics for, let's say, the betterment of the well, to use a Michael Pollan phrase. One of those research papers was published in 1966 by a guy named Dr. James Fadiman, who has come back on the scene as the father of microdosing. And in that study in 1966, he took 27 professionals who were in the San Francisco Bay Area and gave them approximately 100 micrograms of LSD, told them to come in with a problem that they had been stuck on for about 3 months. And out of those 27, I think 25 were able to come up with an innovative solution to that problem that they had been stuck on through that psychedelic work. And the sort of list of inventions that came out of that are really quite impressive. And so my background has always been in psychedelics. I was very fortunate that although I grew up in a traditional and sheltered home, It was also very loving. I had a great family life. I played the violin for 12 years. I played soccer. I was in great athletics. I didn't necessarily have any deep trauma or adverse childhood experiences that had to be integrated. And so when I started to work with psychedelics, there was some initial shadow work of, you know, healing the shame and guilt of being raised in such a Christian conservative environment. But pretty quickly I went into vision, I went into creativity, I went into what we might even call self-actualization, if not self-transcendence. And if we look at the sort of origins of the, the human potential movement, which I'm sure has been talked about on this podcast from time to time, it roots in the Esalen Institute and it is really overlapping with the sort of initial foray into psychedelics in the '60s. And yet still to this day, we have very little research that exists about the overlap of psychedelics for leadership, psychedelics for creativity, psychedelics for flow, psychedelics for optimal wellbeing, psychedelics for relationship. Relationships. And so what I'm most driven by on a tactical level is how do we encourage conversation about the importance of psychedelics for the betterment of well? How can we start to facilitate research at that overlap and intersection with the core intention of— I love one of the futuristic thinkers that I love is Bucky Fuller, and he has this great quote of, don't fix the model that's broken, create a new model, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. And so for the last 300 to 400 years, we've sort of been— Industrialism brought a number of incredible benefits to us as a populace and a species. It raised tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The technological solutions and innovations that came out of industrialism, have changed our lives for the better, I would argue. And we've reached this sort of holding pattern over the last 60 years where that frame, that context no longer serves us. And there's actually a phenomenal book on this by Alvin Toffler, a well-known futurist. He wrote a book called The Third Wave in 1980, which I found out about after the fact, after I'd actually started The Third Wave. And in that book, he outlines how the first wave was agricultural use. The second wave is industrial use, and the third wave is the information the information era. And so what I'm most motivated by is how can psychedelics help us to fully step into that integrated worldview where we don't see things like, for example, in industrialism, it's the producer and the consumer, right? In industrialism, it's you versus me. And what I sense to be true is that the core teaching of psychedelics is that we're all connected. There's a sense of interbeing in everything, and that the new systems that we build in education, in healthcare, in business, in politics, have to recognize that truth and have to come from that truth. And that the more that we can, particularly for those who are in leadership positions, for those who are in creative positions, for that 5 to 10% of people who are responsible for building the systems of tomorrow, if we can inform that philosophy with an embodied sense of gnosis or through plant medicine experience, I think that will go a long way to building and creating new systems that are, for lack of a better term, more harmonious, more in alignment with nature. They're more in alignment with what we really need to be nourished and healed as human beings. And that for me is like, that's my big why, that's my big hairy audacious goal. That's kind of what gets me up every day in the morning to really drive towards education, towards literacy, towards really doing a deep dive on that overlap of psychedelics for leadership performance and wellbeing.

Yeah, I love that. We call that your massively transformative purpose at FRC. Yeah, that's the one. And it just feels like, you know, all of the research that's coming out, I mean, it's just gaining more and more momentum to indicate the huge clinical implications for psychedelic tools like you were talking about in for depression, anxiety, PTSD. But it feels like your work at The Third Wave is exposing that that is only the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more potential here. And there's something here for people that don't necessarily have that type of work to do, that are just looking for ways to, I think, connect, to really explore their potential in new ways, become better leaders, et cetera. So I'm really excited to dive into all of that. But before we do, I think we'd be remiss to not actually define microdosing. So can you talk a little bit about how you define microdosing? You were talking a little about low and slow. So can you go into that?

Absolutely. So microdosing as a term came on the scene in 2011. Dr. James Fadiman, who we already spoke about, published a book called The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide. He had a single chapter, chapter 16, dedicated to the anecdotal stories of people who were starting to microdose. He then went on the Tim Ferriss podcast in 2015, talked about those stories, and that's when we saw microdosing really start to blow up. It was in about 2015. It's when I heard about it, when I started to do it myself. To contextualize this a little bit more, when I had those early LSD experiences that I spoke about when I was 19 and 20, what I noticed is that for a week or two after that experience, I had this sort of afterglow where I was more dedicated to meditation. I was more mindful about the food that I ate. I was more connected in my relationships. And inevitably, I noticed that after maybe 2 or 3 weeks, that afterglow would start to dissipate. I made some changes and improvements, but a lot of my old patterns and behaviors would start to sort of find their way back in, if you will. And so when I heard about microdosing, what I immediately thought was, interesting, I bet this is a way to elongate that afterglow, to keep that window of neuroplasticity open for longer, to make it easier to integrate new behavioral change because the resistance from the ego and the personality and the sort of our default mode isn't as present. And the key to microdosing is that it's a subintoxicating dose level. So the initial term that came out about microdosing was subperceptual. And inevitably what ended up happening is people were really confused about, am I perceiving this? Am I not perceiving this? Am I feeling this a little? Am I not feeling this at all? And a lot of people started to get hung up on this thing that actually was not that important. So in the last little bit, the term that is much more in alignment is subintoxicating? Is it a dose level that you can take where you can still navigate everyday reality? I could still work, I can still do calls, I could still go to the gym, I could still, you know, hang out and I'm not altered. I'm not journeying. I'm not going into like, there's no sort of deep emotional catharsis necessarily. There's just a slight loosening around the edges. And so when we look at the two most commonly microdosed substances, we're looking at LSD and psilocybin. So LSD, a microdose tends to be anywhere from 6 micrograms to about, I would say, 25 micrograms. For psilocybin, anywhere from 50 milligrams to about 300 milligrams. And what your listeners may be sort of reflecting on is there's quite a bit of variance there, right? I'm not just like, a microdose is 10 micrograms or psilocybin is just 100 milligrams.

Sure.

And the reason for that is because it's, it's very personal. To the individual because we all have different type levels of sensitivities. Some people who have been working with psychedelics for years may end up being more sensitive, so they need less. Someone who's been on SSRI medication— disclaimer, I'm not a doctor or licensed psychiatrist or medical professional, so for anything that we talk about as it relates to that, make sure you check with someone who is a qualified practitioner. But what we notice is that those, for example, who have been on SSRIs or those who are on SSRIs have more of a blunted response. And so to have the same impact, they actually have to take a little bit more. And that speaks to the importance of what we call calibration. We don't learn by reading, we don't learn through books, we don't learn by listening to podcasts, we learn by doing. And the same is true of microdosing. So it's really important that if folks are interested in microdosing, as I mentioned before, to start low and go slow. What I always tell people is you can always take more, you can't really take less.

There's no undo.

There's no undoing. There's no undo. But as Hunter S. Thompson said, You buy the ticket, you take the ride. And it's important that people start low, they go slow. And usually for a microdosing protocol, it's not just, oh, I, on day X, I took a little bit of a psychedelic and that's a microdose. What I think is important to honor as part of this process is that microdosing is, especially to start with, for those who are beginners, you're really looking at what are the shifts from day 1 to day 30? Not what are the shifts from day 1 to day 2. And the commitment as part of that is to take a microdose 2 or 3 times a week for at least a period of 30 days, if not 60 days, and to just notice and observe changes in mood, changes in creativity, changes in relationships. And as part of this, what I emphasize every time is that microdosing is not a magic pill. We're so conditioned to rely on an external substance to do something to us. And the fact is, microdosing and psychedelics and breathwork and all of these practices, they open up the channels for change, but there still has to be what Huberman calls willful participation. There still has to be a commitment to actually make those changes ourselves. And so really looking at microdosing as a catalyst for neuroplasticity, recognizing that it's going to help make it easier to shift and change, but that they're still going into that microdosing protocol has to be a clear intention. There has to be a clear why. There has to be a clear purpose behind that because that is really going to be sort of the golden thread that ties together the entire microdosing experience.

I think that's a really important frame that you need to have that intention or that goal. What are some of the most common reasons that you see people try this out? What are the kind of goals or objectives that they're striving after here?

Yeah, it literally— one of, I think, the downsides of microdosing is that it's being sort of contextualized as maybe a panacea. And there could be some responsibility that even I hold for that because it's like a meta-supplement in a way where because it has such a profound impact on neuroplasticity, you're then opening the channels for any, and you know, like you want to go here, great, go here. If you want to go here, just like, where do you want to point the compass essentially? So with all that being said, the most, I would say the most common reasons that people are microdosing, I would boil it down into 3. One is to get off conventional psychiatric medications, specifically antidepressants and like ADHD medication. So folks are finding that microdosing can both help with withdrawals from those psychiatric medications, and it can also act as a replacement for those psychiatric medications. Now, again, I'm going to emphasize this. If someone is listening to this and they're on those medications, to do that under the guidance of a trained and licensed medical professional is essential because these medications, especially if they've been on for a long time, SSRIs or ADHD medications, just quitting cold turkey can be quite daunting and potentially detrimental to people. So it's really important that they have the guidance of a licensed medical professional if they want to go through with that. So that's, that's one of the core main reasons. I would say another core reason that people are looking at this is for performance. You know, they're looking at this to help access flow. They're looking at this to be more productive. They're looking at this to be a better communicator. They're looking at this One of the really interesting mechanisms of psychedelics is that they're anti-inflammatory. And so they're also looking at this often as a way to help with lowering chronic inflammation in the gut and the brain to just make ourselves more energetic, more free, more whatever. So I would say the other, the sort of second core thing is gonna be, yeah, leadership performance, overall wellbeing, kind of getting back into what we were talking about before. The betterment of the well. And then I would say the third main reason is as sort of an adjunct in a spiritual practice. So people are looking to deepen their meditation, if they're looking to deepen their breathwork, if they're looking to do it as an adjunct for cold plunges and saunas, right? Microdosing is a really good adjunct to a lot of holistic practices that people are already participating in.

So yeah, I'm hearing not to be done in isolation. And I think the conceptualization of it as metasupplement really tracks for me because we talk about flow as a meta skill and we train people to get into flow on demand, but not to get into flow just for flow's sake. It's about having an intention about how you want to deploy flow to actually achieve your most audacious goals, to achieve new levels of wellbeing and fulfillment, right? So I'm hearing a lot of alignment here. So with that in mind, Steven Kotler and Michael Mignogna just published a paper recently about psychedelics and flow state and how there is so much opportunity to better understand flow by studying altered states.

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So can you talk a little bit about how microdosing can potentially improve people's ability to get into flow on demand?

Totally. And I would love for this to be a little bit of a back and forth conversation, cuz you know a ton about flow. I know a decent amount about flow, but I know a lot more about psychedelics and microdosing. And it's interesting, I had the opportunity to have dinner with Stephen a couple times at a conference that we spoke at together about 5 years ago, and we started to talk about microdosing and flow. And when I told him that microdosing could be potentially useful for flow, he was surprised. And it had some— I don't remember the specifics of it, but it had something to do with the neurobiological mechanisms of flow versus psychedelics. I think psychedelics are more serotonergic. There's some dopamine, there's some oxytocin, whereas the neurobiology behind flow is maybe more related to norepinephrine. And there were a couple other things in there as well. So I think My sense is it acts as a great adjunct, and that also depends a lot on the type of medicine you're using, or sorry, the type of substance you're using and the amount of the substance that you're using. And so we already talked about kind of what is a classic microdose. What I've noticed, and we talked about psilocybin versus LSD, so let's start there. Psilocybin, because it's more serotonergic, I found tends to be better if it's done just by itself. As an adjunct for emotional regulation, as an adjunct for dropping more into the body, even as an adjunct potentially for different types of therapy. What's interesting though about psilocybin is a lot of the microdoses that are coming on the scene, if you will, are combining psilocybin with things like lion's mane, bacopa, skullcap, cordyceps. So they're actually taking the microdose of psilocybin and using it as an amplifier for these other supplements that help with neuroplasticity, that help with focus, that help with attention, that help with motivation. So I think one is if someone is really interested in psilocybin, my sort of perspective would be if you're looking to utilize microdosing for flow state, to choose a psilocybin supplement that is combined with other herbs, functional mushrooms that really help with that more sort of dopaminergenic lens or orientation. Whereas with LSD, LSD is really interesting because LSD is more dopaminergenic, and we know that dopamine is tied to focus, attention, and motivation, all of which are part of, I would say, the subjective experience of flow, right? You're kind of in that You're in the focus, but yeah, you're, you're in the zone, you're in the focus. Motivation is just moving through. Attention is sort of there and present.

Yeah.

And it's challenging. It might be a little more creative. And so I find with LSD that doing a microdose at the lower threshold of maybe 10 to 15 micrograms What's key about this story is to not just do a microdose and go, yeah, I think I'll work on that paper, or yeah, I think I might play an instrument, but to actually be intentional about setting up that day. So let's say someone is like, okay, I'd really like to utilize a microdose of LSD to enter into a flow state. Well, then set up the day in such a way where you're like, okay, I'm going to set aside a 2-hour gap in my morning calendar. I'm gonna microdose at 8:00 AM on an empty stomach. I'm gonna do maybe 10 to 15 to 20 minutes of, could be transcendental meditation after that to sort of start to get in that focus mindset. And then I'm gonna cue up a creative task maybe that I've been procrastinating on. Maybe it's working on a book, maybe it's writing out a strategy that you're gonna share with your team. I'm gonna set aside a 2-hour gap. I'm gonna block out everything and just utilize the energy of that LSD microdosing to go deep and dive in. And what I've noticed is it just, it's like a flow plus where it's like when we get into flow, maybe every now and then there's a little kind of like, what about this? What about like little distractions? And what I've noticed with LSD is it just allows for absolutely full immersion as long as that structure of the container is really well held and really well set because the risk with adding microdosing into something like that is if you get distracted, you get really distracted. And if you get sort of off course, you're going way off course. You're going to go way down that rabbit hole. Yeah, exactly. With that extra energy, it's really important to have a tight, full container to keep the energy focused in.

But yeah, I mean, what you're describing is absolutely how we, how we coach people to set up flow blocks. So ensuring that it's time constrained to drive focus into the task, having a clear goal for that time block so that you have a finish line so that you can win it, right? Again, harnessing the dopamine into the task. And I just think, I mean, just listening to you, it feels— there's a reason that Stephen just published this paper asserting that, you know, the neural dynamics of the psychedelic state is this huge opportunity to have a much better understanding of what's happening at the level of the brain when we're getting into flow. And just as you were talking through that, it just strikes me that there is so much overlap between being in an altered state and being in flow, right? Like that diminishment of self, that merging of action and awareness. You know, there's the time dilation or, you know, alterations in time. So there's so many instances that these are such similar states that I, I do think that it's just such a huge opportunity to better understand what's going on. And of course that then that informs how we actually master it on demand.

And what I would add, I would add two things to that. One is also the marriage of hemispheres. So we've already shown with high dose of psychedelics, there's been brain scans that have been done that shows that there's incredible communication between the two hemispheres of the brain. And that's also happening at these lower, I mean, it's not as pronounced, but it's also happening at these lower doses of psychedelics, which I think speaks to, especially for probably a lot of your listeners, for myself, for a lot of entrepreneurs and founders, we tend to be much more linear. We tend to be much more Type A. We tend to be much more sort of like do, do, do, do, do. And that's why I personally love LSD microdosing because it starts to bring in some of that nonlinear, some of that creative, which I find to be like playfulness for me is such a key component of flow. If there's a substance like LSD that can help to sort of amplify that playfulness, then whatever task I'm focused on is going to be that much more enjoyable. The other thing is endogenous versus exogenous, right? And so I, my sense is what you've really covered and done a great job through Flow Research Collective is flow can be elicited from an endogenous perspective. And I think it's important that that's cultivated as a skill so that way, you know, if people do choose to engage with microdoses, they realize that regardless of whether they're using the microdose or not, they still have that capacity. That capacity is innate within themselves to be able to get into flow. And that the microdose is just like, it's like a little bit of a performance enhancer. It's a little bit of an amplifier. It's just a little bit more sort of gasoline in the gas tank, if you will. But it's not crucial or 100% necessary to be able to access and enter a flow state.

100%. I mean, that just brings me back to the differentiation between metasupplement and metaskill, right? Different uses. But it also feels like, you know, one is learning how to get that default mode network online. I think that to your point, executives, people working in fast-paced, highly volatile environments, that executive attention network is fully engaged, right? We are deeply paying attention. We are linear. We're bouncing from one thing to the next. And really what we're talking about here is either practicing how, or using a supplement to get that default mode network online where we can actually downregulate our nervous systems a little bit, get more divergent, get more creative. And really what that enables us to do is tap into our subconscious where all that wonderful mastery and life experience lives, right? So that totally informs different types of decision-making, more creative ideas. Right. And I'd love to hear a little bit about, you know, what you think this does for collaboration and the ability to connect with other people. It feels like it would really help.

So when it comes, yeah, it's super, super helpful. So leading into that, I want to touch on one more thing and then it will be a really great transition into that collaborative mindset.

Sure.

Oftentimes what I've found and what a lot of teachers and other folks find is that if they have a client or there's someone in their life who really wants to, for example, start meditating, but they just can't figure out how to like really shift themselves to consistently meditate, something like a high-dose psychedelic experience or even a moderate-dose psychedelic experience or even microdosing can be that thing that helps them to get enough lift to actually commit to doing the thing. And so I think also with a lot of folks who are overly stuck in sort of that linear, rational, Type A mind, and they're finding it hard to really access flow in any way, a microdose or a psychedelic experience can be that— could be a really great catalyst or shift to actually sort of anchor into the felt experience of what it means to be in no mind, of what it means to be in a place, in a context, in a situation where things are just flowing through you. So that's the only other thing that I would add is like that exogenous catalyst of psychedelics can be a really great thing to create some lift. Now, when it comes to collaboration, a good friend of mine, Keith Ferrazzi, I don't know if he's been on the podcast yet, but he wrote a book called Never Eat Alone back in the day. And he recently wrote a book called Co-Elevation. And he talks a lot about how the future of work is collaborative. The future of work is potentially asynchronous. The future of work is more remote. And that those who are fantastic leaders have an ability to lead, let's say, from the back rather than the front. And if you look at the two key indicators of leadership efficacy, and this comes from something called the Leadership Circle Profile, the two biggest indicators for leadership efficacy within organizations is vision and teamwork. And so vision, we've already talked a little bit about that. Psychedelics help us to get maybe that 30 to 40 to 50,000 point view. They help with divergent thinking to see how maybe unrelated ideas can come together to form a new cohesive perspective. A lot of people will talk about, yeah, I went and I drank with, you know, I drank with Mother Ayahuasca for a week in the jungle and I came out and I have this brilliant new idea for an app, which of course is such an unfortunate endpoint. But at the same time, the sort of energy is there of these can help us to be visionary. They can help us to be courageous. They can help us to think outside the box. And no leader is going at it alone. And so when it comes to collaboration, when it comes to teamwork, our capacity as leaders to be vulnerable, our capacity as leaders to admit to our faults, our capacity as leaders to be aware of our shadows so we don't project those onto our team or onto the people that we're closest with. That is what I believe psychedelics help with so much is in helping us to expand our awareness of of who I am, we see that the way that we communicate, we see that the way that we encourage collaboration, right? So much of that, even though leaders, quote unquote, leading from the back, so much of that still comes from a modeling perspective. And so if we as a leader can model vulnerability, if we can model empathy and compassion, which psychedelics often help with as well, really opening that heart to listen to be with and to understand. You know, I've just noticed in my own team, as we started to ramp up over these last few years, when I lead from that place of vulnerability, when I lead from that place of having my heart open, when I lead from that place of admitting when I'm wrong, and when I don't know what I'm doing, the humility that comes from that, all of those are skills. All of those are insights and downloads that I've learned from working with psychedelics, and that tends to be at the higher dose, but also at a microdose level. When I had my first microdosing protocol many years ago, about 8 years ago now, one of my core intentions was to help with social anxiety. And so I often— we often find that these lower doses, microdoses, or what we call mini doses, can really help people just speak from the heart, to be open, to be transparent, to communicate well, all of which are necessary and important with any team dynamic, because the more that we keep hidden, the more that we keep repressed, the more that we keep behind doors, I think the more likely there is that something's going to come and bite us or that, you know, there's going to be an unhealthy or toxic team dynamic. So it really is important to come in with full awareness if we want to be more collaborative and work together.

I think that tracks. And as you were kind of listing the different, you know, benefits there, I was thinking of the group flow triggers that are outlined by Keith Sawyer, right? And it sounds like psychedelic tools have the potential to mitigate some of those group flow blockers. So really, you know, better enabling or facilitating blending of egos, trust, open communication, and obviously building clarity in vision because without vision, we can't—

I don't know where we're going. Right.

We can't leverage any kind of collective ambition, which is just a key driver of group flow. So I love that connection. I think that all makes a ton of sense. And another kind of reason why you're using it in the leadership coaching space.

And I think this— exactly. And I think this also speaks to like the future of work, which is for so long we've been driven and motivated by the carrot on the stick. And we've made the assumption that financial wellbeing and monetary incentives are what are driving people. And what's happening slowly but surely is we're entering what might be called a post-materialist paradigm. We're entering a paradigm where money is less important, where things are less important, where actually community experiences and a shared mission matter a lot more. And so what I've even found, I'm glad you mentioned the collective ambition, because that's what sort of kicked this off. What I've even found with my own team as we're working towards this, Third Wave's mission really is to legalize psychedelics for all adults, right? We want to make psychedelics accessible and available for all adults, cognitive liberty. And what I found in sort of building the team, it's like they all have had such profound and powerful experiences themselves with psychedelics that I simply need to chart a very clear vision and path and all of their energy will fill that in to actually bring us there because they care so much about this. And I think that has to be the future of business. For too long, we've had businesses where it's like, I'm this person at home and I'm this person at work, and there's a clear bifurcation and a clear separation. And the future of work is recognizing and allowing us to bring our entire selves to our mission, our entire power and energy, and to actually get behind something that we genuinely care about and that we think is going to make a meaningful impact on the world around.

100%. And I think all of the research on team flow and group flow are coming back with results that validate exactly what you just said, that the most effective teams are composed of people that are not only aligned with clarity on the team mission and purpose, but also their personal goals are in alignment with that team mission and purpose. And even more than that, they feel as though they're leveraging their strengths in service of that. So that's how you get a team truly on the same page. We talk about it at FRC, untapping limitless motivation. That's the formula right there for a team. Exactly.

I love it.

I love it. So can you talk a little bit about, you know, you have a ton of experience working with folks in the corporate space, in the business world, how are you integrating microdosing into that world? Because I would assume that there, you know, is some resistance or some skepticism. What does that kind of look like?

A little anecdote that will, that'll I think help with this story. So in 2017, September 2017, it was about 2 years after we started Third Wave. I published, I had self-published a book on microdosing. At that point, I was starting to get some of these features in the in the New York Times and Forbes and Rolling Stone and all those sorts of things. And I was invited to speak at a South by Southwest conference in Frankfurt, Germany. And this South by Southwest conference was a collaboration with Mercedes-Benz. And so they had me facilitate a workshop on leadership development for about 80 people on like the first day of the conference. And it was sold out, right? Like at capacity, no more people could come in. The conference organizers came to me after that first workshop and said, Paul, There's an interesting situation developing. We're hosting this conference with Mercedes-Benz and we have all these people at Daimler who want to learn about microdosing. Can you do an encore workshop, another workshop to actually bring them into the fold and teach them all about this sort of interesting and new modality? And of course, we're in Germany. I have a lot of German friends. Germans are all about productivity, efficiency, precision. And so there was a really interesting fit there with microdosing as this sort of innovative nootropic that could help with productivity, efficiency, and precision. And those workshops were well attended. People were super engaged. People were super interested, all those sorts of things. And so for the first few years of Third Wave, 2016, 2017, 2018, I was doing a lot of one-on-one coaching. I was doing a lot of microdosing coaching. I was doing a lot of broader psychedelic coaching. And then a couple years ago, what I noticed is, and what I perceived to be true, is that there would be a lot more leverage to be had in coaching the coaches. And that my role is much more— I am a coach and I still do coaching, but much more as a teacher, philosopher, trainer than it is to be in the trenches with executives as they're moving through X, Y, and Z. And so a program that we've rolled out Over the last 2 years, we did the inaugural program in June 2021. We're now in our 4th cohort. We'll have our 5th cohort that starts in a few months. It is a training program for coaches, executive coaches, performance coaches, health and wellness coaches, life and relationship coaches, to integrate psychedelics as a modality for their coaching practice. It's not necessarily we're going to help you become a psychedelic coach. It's that you are a coach, you're an executive coach, you're a health and wellness coach, you're a performance coach, and you've had clients who have started to ask you about psychedelics, ask you about microdosing, ask you about ayahuasca, and you're interested in how do you help assess, how do you help prepare, and how do you help them integrate from these experiences? Because, and, you know, in big thanks to Stephen, actually, because when I did this, when I did this workshop in Frankfurt, Germany in September 2017. It was 3 weeks after Stealing Fire came out. And so when Stealing Fire— Stealing Fire was actually the book that helped to shift the cultural perception about the utility of psychedelics for executives, for high performers, and for general leaders. And so what I found time and time again is that the people who you would— like people who you would never expect to be into microdosing, to be into psychedelics, are expressing interest in this. Like as an example, one of the clients, one of the coaches that we've trained, he is an executive coach for a really high-level arts company in Chicago. He's also an executive coach for a Fortune 50 company. And both of their CEOs are interested in working with psychedelic medicine. There are, you know, you obviously like the whole Silicon Valley thing, unicorns, billion-dollar companies, they're really interested in psychedelics and microdosing. Probably even, even I've heard people in DC, a lawyer who's part of our faculty in the training program is in DC, and he talks about how there are a lot of high-level government officials who are actively interested or working with psychedelic medicine to help them with their own process. Final anecdote, and then I'll loop it all around. About 6 months ago, I had the opportunity to speak at a summit called the Concordia Summit, and it's the biggest summit that runs parallel to the UN General Assembly in New York every year. So Jill Biden spoke, the Queen of Jordan, and we had a panel on psychedelic medicine, and our panel followed the president of the World Bank. So the president of the World Bank is up there talking about World Bank things, and we come on and we have a great discussion on psychedelics. And I look down and in the front row is the former president of Uruguay, the former president of Spain, the former president of, I believe, Argentina or something like that. And so for me, and this was September 2022, this was a moment of, okay, yeah, I've spoken at some tech and business conferences, but now we are on a platform with major world leaders. Who are, some who are actively considering what might a legal framework look like for psychedelics, for psilocybin mushrooms. And for me, this goes back to that sort of MTP that we landed on before. I'm really driven, you know, even through our training program, our coaching certification program, how do we equip sort of like the ambassadors of this renaissance to feel confident, to feel supported, to feel skillful enough to be able to guide the leaders of tomorrow through experiences that are ultimately transformative and meaningful for everything that they are building in the world.

I love, I love that that was your answer because it's so in alignment with what I see as a coach at FRC. We get questions about this this all the time, and I'm seeing more and more diverse clientele at FRC. And it just feels like more and more people in different industries are recognizing that it's probably time to think outside the box in terms of how to tap into and expand their potential. It's not about working more hours and grinding. We're really getting away from that. And I loved, you know, the way that you phrase it as far as learning how to keep that window of neuroplasticity open for longer. I think that that is exactly it. That's really how we explore our potential as human beings. So phenomenal. And also why I knew that this is gonna be a much loved episode at the Collective. I know also we have, you know, many coaches at FRC that go through our High Flow Coaching program, so they become flow coaches that probably their ears perked up when they heard you. Reference your program. So can you speak a little bit more just to close out here about if, if folks are coaches, how could they go about getting the certification with you?

Yeah, thank you for, for asking that, Tori. So the program is currently a 6-month program. We're looking to elongate that to a 10-month program in 2024, but I assume this will be published in the next few weeks. So we have another cohort that starts in August, and those cohorts are very— we have about 36 people in each cohort. And the focus is on what I call inner transformation leads to external mastery. And so what I continue to emphasize in the training program and what we even have as part and parcel of it is an actual experience. And so, you know, we have lectures, we have incredible guest faculty. A lot of our faculty are clinicians, MDs, clinical psychologists, doctors of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Who have now gone into performance as well and have coached some of the top leaders in tech and health and wellness and things like that. The program sort of follows this arc of theory, right? Let's learn what is the theory of psychedelics for leadership performance and wellbeing? What's the historical context? What are the different medicines? What are the safety and ethics? What's the difference between microdosing and high dosing? What's the difference between therapist, guide, and sitter, and what are the roles for each one of those. So we go a lot into sort of the theory of, as a coach, what do you need to know to be able to feel, uh, like you have the knowledge and information to weave this into your practice. We then have a 6-day intensive in Costa Rica where these plant medicines are legal. And so we do that at a center that's close to Mount Arenal. And in that intensive experience, there's a lot of hands-on practice. We do a, what I call a hydrodose, which is a microdose in nature. We also have a ceremony that we do with higher doses so people can start to get more and more familiar with the terrain. And then things like breathwork, cold plunge. We have other workshops and whatnot that we lead as part of that as well. And then the last part of the program is what we call our practicum. And so right now that's 4 months in length and that's okay. How do you take now what you've learned through theory and what you've started to experience through the retreat? And apply it to either the coaching clients that you're working with or new coaching clients that you may work with. And the overall trajectory, again, is it's not necessarily focused on, you know, if you want to become a guide or facilitator for the actual experience. Our training program is much more focused on if you're a coach and you're looking at assessment, prep, and integration and weaving psychedelics in as part of a larger coaching container, then we're gonna help you feel confident. We're gonna help you feel assured. We're gonna help you feel knowledgeable so that way you can best support your clients as they're going through that process.

Sounds incredible. And we will definitely be posting links to learn more about that in the show notes for people that are deeply intrigued along with all of your social media and link to your website so folks can dive in and learn more about you and your work at Third Wave. With that, I just wanna say thank you so much for taking the time to share all of your knowledge with the collective and for hanging out with me. I, I deeply enjoyed this conversation. So thank you.

Thank you, Tori. This was a ton of fun. And, uh, if anyone has any questions, just, you know, please reach out to me and I'll be happy to support. We'll be happy to support.

Fantastic. Thank you.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Question for you. When was the last time you were in the zone?

The zone.

When you were in so deep that afterward you were stunned by how much you got done, even though very little time had passed. Now you've got bold goals, yet you're slammed with work and you're short on time. And you know the heights of productivity you can achieve when you get into the zone because you've been there before, but it's a mild form of torture knowing how productive you're capable of being without access to that level of output all the time. So how do you get into the zone whenever you need it? There's still a lot that we don't know about flow states, but over the last 25 years of researching it, we've learned a lot, and we've shared our findings with thousands of high performers. You're in flow during those moments of total absorption when you're so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Time passes strangely and performance just soars. I mean, motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, cooperation and collaboration all skyrocket. In some studies, as high as 500% above baseline. Now imagine what you can accomplish if you could reliably increase your productivity 5x. And the best part? Flow is accessible to everyone, anywhere, at any time. You don't need to pop a pill. You don't need to be surfing a monster wave. You don't need to meditate on a mountaintop for 10 years to get there. Flow is accessible to you right here, right now. If you'd like to amp up your productivity and get leverage on every second, go to getmoreflow.com. Just think of your 10 out of 10 days when you get more done in the morning than you typically do in a full day. Now imagine if you tapped into that level of performance with push-button consistency every day. All this is possible when you trigger flow frequently and reliably. Just go to getmoreflow.com, unblock your flow, and unlock peak performance.

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