Paul Austin | How Psychedelics Supercharge Performance and Accelerate Healing

Srini Rao

Paul, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Paul Austin

Thanks for having me on today. This was one of the first podcasts I ever listened to. So it's cool to be able to join the show and drop in on creativity.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, you know, I heard about you by way of your publicist who told me that you're somewhat of a prominent figure in the world of psychedelics and microdosing. And naturally, of course, I'm interested in all of this because of the things that I've seen, of course, you know, guests that we've had with Dylan from Mind Bloom here recently and talked to a few others. But we haven't had anybody talk specifically about psilocybin. But before we get into all of that, I wanted to start asking you, where in the world did you grow up?

and what impact did that end up having on what you ended up doing with your life and your career.

Paul Austin

So I grew up in West Michigan. And for any listeners out there who are maybe unfamiliar with West Michigan, it's a pretty Republican stronghold, conservative traditional values. The city Grand Rapids is known to be sort of a thriving small city. It used to be the center of the furniture empire because of all the wood that came down from Northern Michigan. So small town.

traditional values. My parents were both more liberal Democrats, so progressive in terms of what they valued socially, but family life was very, I would say sheltered. Traditional rules were of the utmost importance and morality was often dictated by going to church on Sunday and following the sort of laws of the Bible. And when I was 16, my parents sat me down after they found out that

smoking cannabis a little bit. And excuse me, just so your listeners know I'm kind of recovering from a cold. So excuse the slight nasally voice. But they found out that I had smoked cannabis a few times. They were inculcated in the time of just say no, the war on drugs, the Nixon and... Can you hear me now? Okay. It's recording on my end still. Hold on. I'm going to just...

Srini Rao

Paul, I lost you.

Okay, there you go. Yep.

Paul Austin

cut some bandwidth things just to make sure that.

Srini Rao

Hey Josh, do a cut here please.

Paul Austin

Okay, if I drop out again, just let me know and I can restart.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Pick it up from a cannabis story.

Paul Austin

So at the age of 16, my parents sent me down after church one Sunday. They found out that I had been smoking cannabis and my parents had both been inculcated in the war on drugs, just say no era of Nancy Reagan. And my dad looked at me, my dad's a very sweet man. We have a great relationship. But he looked at me and said, you know, I haven't been this disappointed since my brother passed away in a car accident, you know, 25 years ago. So it clearly impacted them. That then impacted me. And even

when that was communicated, that level of disappointment, it never struck me as if I was doing anything wrong. There was something that was guiding me that says, okay, this is not what it's made out to be. There's something more here. And so a few years after that, I continued to be the sort of natural rebellious teenager, but never went overboard or too extreme, always did well in school. I played, I was an athlete, I played violin. So,

I had things that kept me balanced, but I was just on the edge enough to sort of have this slightly rebellious streak. And so, in 19, I'm at college, a liberal arts school in West Michigan called Hope College. My dad had worked there for 30 years and I went there to play soccer and joined a fraternity and was initially studying medicine. And at the age of 19, I found, this is my sophomore year in college, found myself some LSD.

Uh, the same friend who introduced me to cannabis introduced me to psychedelics. And I had this just wonderful experience on like a pretty moderate dose of LSD, probably 200 micrograms, which is about two full hits of LSD. Definitely not a micro dose and just felt connected to nature. Felt like a lot of the shame and guilt that I had been raised within just sort of dropped off my shoulders. Uh, I was able to release it and it really set me down a path of valuing.

the sort of creative force, right? Feeling compelled to pursue a mission or a craft that would provide a deep sense of meaningful fulfillment. And so my path started just, you know, I moved abroad. I taught English and Turkey for a year. I moved to Thailand where I lived for a year in Chiang Mai building my first online business. Soon after that, I moved back to Michigan, re-enrolled and did some more studies at which point I was listening to this podcast. This was early 2014. And eventually found my way to Budapest.

Paul Austin

This was mid 2015, had been microdosing LSD a couple of times a week, experimenting, trying it out, thinking back to those early LSD experiences where for a week or two weeks after, I always felt more connected. I meditated more often. I made better decisions about the food that I ate. And because I was on a personal development kick for much of my 20s, I was like, maybe microdosing would be a great tool just to help me further develop as a human being.

And so I started microdosing a couple of times a week for like six months. I just found it to be really helpful. It helped me to significantly cut out alcohol and decrease the amount of alcohol that I was drinking. It also helped me to just sort of minimize creative resistance. I could sit down, I could write, I could brainstorm, I could get right into things without having to feel like I had a block in the way. And it was such an impactful experience that in 2015, I started Third Wave about eight years ago now and just...

you know, for the last eight years have been professionally evolved in the psychedelic space. You know, we've educated probably 30 million people at this point in time through our educational resources. I started a retreat center in the Netherlands, a legal psilocybin retreat center. We did high dose psilocybin retreats for over a thousand people. And then my most recent project is training coaches, practitioners, facilitators. So a lot of executive coaches, holistic health coaches, life and relationship coaches.

you know, are looking at psychedelics as the cutting edge of any sort of coaching toolbox. And so really training people on how to leverage psychedelics for neuroplasticity, creativity, leadership development, better behavioral decisions. Those are all things that I really love and care about.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, we'll get into all of those. I want to go back to this moment with your dad. You're like, cannabis doesn't seem like something that would be so serious. Was it because his brother died in a car accident due to smoking cannabis? Like, why was the reaction what it was?

Paul Austin

My mom's sister had her, according to my mom, her life ruined by certain drugs, let's say cocaine and cannabis and other drugs that my mom sort of blamed for her sister being on welfare and living in a mobile home and having a lot of rocky unstable relationships. So I think it was actually

My mom's personal life had been more impacted by drugs than my dad, but my dad was, you know, a kid who grew up in a small town in Michigan. He went to seminary for a year. He's still to this day never been drunk. He's still to this day never smoked weed. He has done mushrooms. We did mushrooms together a few years ago, which was interesting and sort of an interesting come around. But I think he was just so, you know.

naive, maybe an ignorant about it that he thought, oh, cannabis is this really evil tool and you know, probably influenced in large part by my mom and how she felt about it.

Srini Rao

Well, growing up in an environment like that, where you're this sort of edgy, pretty progressive kid and surrounded by all these conservative people, what are the pros and cons? Because I feel like there probably are some pretty solid benefits that come from being raised in an environment like that as well.

Paul Austin

So the biggest pro is definitely a sense of individuation and sort of uniqueness. There was definitely a distinct sense of I'm not like the others necessarily. When I was in my early adolescence, 11, 12, 13, that was very difficult to accept, I think, and confront.

you know, the natural impulses to want to have peer groups and get along with folks. And, you know, but it just always, I always felt like a little bit of a fish out of water. And I learned how to flow with it and adapt to it throughout high school and college. I learned how to sort of play that game, but I wouldn't say I'm particularly, you know, close friends with anyone still from my childhood. A lot of my close friends I've met over the last eight or nine years. And I always, you know, when people,

When people will find out that I'm from West Michigan and that I'm not doing this professional work in psychedelics and just have really sort of lived on that, they're always shocked and surprised, those who know about West Michigan or maybe from West Michigan, because it is such a small town place. So really getting to paint my own story, that was a huge pro and feeling like I can do my own thing here and individuate. And that I would think really came from, you know, my-

My parents, I had two sisters as well, like typical suburban, midwestern family home life, middle class. And I think my parents just, there was always a lot of love. I had a really healthy and safe and nurturing home environment. There was a ton of stability. My parents still live in the same house that I moved into and I was three months old, so they've lived in the same house for 35 years now. So that I think then allowed for, oh, I didn't have like a lot of...

major trauma to sort of throw off with psychedelics to heal from. And so as soon as I got into psychedelic work, it was really like, you can do whatever the fuck you want. And so that I think provided a real sort of stable nurturing anchor for me to go and travel to 80 countries and put myself at legal risk to some degree with working professionally in psychedelics for eight years now. And I just never felt...

Paul Austin

like overly at risk or like I was gonna get in trouble, which is ironic because my parents sort of did that themselves, you know, when I was growing up.

Srini Rao

Well, I think that before we get into your work, you've got to give us sort of a history of drug policy lesson here in the United States, mainly because you alluded to the just say no era. So it's kind of funny because I remember when my parents found out I smoked weed for the first time, it was like this very amusing moment. They were like, do you smoke weed? And I was like, what do you guys think? I went to Berkeley. They're like, we're not idiots. We're your parents.

Paul Austin

Oh, you went to Berkeley, yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, like we were your parents. We found your drug paraphernalia before. And I'm like, great. You should know your precious daughter, who was a chief anesthesiologist, your resident at Yale, also got stoned in high school every now and then. But it was kind of surprising because at that point, it had become legal in California. And so they were a bit more open to it. And so I got them to actually do it. It didn't go well, unfortunately. My friends were friends like, wait, you gave you overdose to your parents? I'm like, not on purpose, because.

They didn't want to smoke and I was like, okay, well, let's just do edibles and the edibles were pretty strong and my friends like, wait, you gave them the same dose. I don't remember. They were these green hornet edibles. Yeah, maybe something like that. They were these like green hornet edibles. And, uh, you know, I, I remember the first time I got them from the store. The guy says cut this square in fourths, take a fourth and you'll be good. And I remember taking it and I was like, damn, this is some good way. You know, I was watching parenthood and I was like in tears and I'm just like, man, this is good.

Paul Austin

How strong, how strong? Okay, like maybe 10 milligrams or something like that. Yeah.

Srini Rao

And you know, I told, I only gave them a fourth of that square, but like it didn't go all that well. Like my mom got sick and it was just, you know, bad news. But all that being said, I think that, you know, what's important, more important here is really kind of looking at sort of the narrative that we have constructed in America around drugs in particular.

Paul Austin

Oh no.

Srini Rao

You probably have to take us back before just say no, because I know there's like a history of psychedelic research and that gets cut off at some point in the 70s. So walk us, give us a history lesson here first.

Paul Austin

Thank you for that invitation. History is what I studied in undergrad. It's even the context and the rooting of third wave, right? The third wave of psychedelics, the first wave being the indigenous and ancient use of psychedelics, the second wave being the counterculture in the 50s and 60s, and the third wave being now, how do we find the middle way between ancient ceremony, ritual, indigenous wisdom, and precision medicine, science, novel substances? That really is the third wave, exploring the middle path between those two.

You know, the best history lesson starts in ancient Greece, where, you know, major influential thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero engaged in the Eleusinian mysteries. They were part of these greater mysteries that happened once every four years. Some only went once or twice, others went many times. And they would drink a beverage called Koukian, which is made from air goth.

a fungus that grows on rye. And they would have kukion as part of these sort of reenactments, these theatrical performances that were always a mystery. You never told anyone about it. If you told anyone about it, you'd either be dead, executed or excommunicated. So there was always a sense of mystery in which it was shrouded. And of course the biggest breakthrough was, when people would drink this kukion, they would have this connection to the divine, this connection to God, this connection to source, something greater than

than what we know. Unfortunately, when the Christian church became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century, they shut down all of these pagan mysteries, eradicating the Western canon and thought from our lineage from psychedelic plant medicines. And it really come back until 1943 when Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist, found out that-

this substance that he had made, LSD25, which he had intended for childbirth for women, actually had incredibly psychedelic properties. And so April, 1943, he takes a little bit of acid, 250 micrograms, which was about two and a half hits. What he thought was a little bit, which as we all know now is certainly not just a little bit and ended up riding his bike home.

Paul Austin

in the middle of World War II from his office back to home. And he wrote this whole story about kind of what happened on that first acid trip. And that kicked off the second wave. You know, LSD was legal federally till 1968, I think in California, till 1966. You had a thousand clinical papers published on the efficacy of LSD in the 1950s on a range of conditions like addiction and alcoholism and depression and autism and many other things.

But, you know, the 60s happened, the Vietnam War happened, and the Nixon administration said, okay, we can't make the drugs these people are doing, I'm sorry, we can't make being a protestor illegal, just like we can't make being black illegal, but we can make the drugs they're using illegal so we can criminalize them and throw them in jail. And so, you know, the hippies were using LSD and cannabis for the most part, so those were made illegal. The blacks were using a lot of heroin, so that was made illegal.

And we entered this sort of never before in the history of the world has this happened before where there's essentially a widespread prohibition on almost every psychoactive drug known to man besides three, caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco. And if you look at the history of why those drugs were normalized, it has to do with colonialism and slavery and the sort of triangle trade. It has to do with...

industrialism and the traits and values that were prioritized for industrialism, alertness, focus, convergent thinking. And then of course, alcohol is a central nervous depressant in the evening to wind down so you can go the next day and work, work. And it wasn't until the 1960s during the second wave of psychedelics that LSD comes on the scene and helps us shift from the industrial age to what Elvin Toffler, the famous futurist called

the information age, what he called the third wave. And so that information age was really catalyzed by the widespread use of LSD in Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, the whole computer revolution came out of that early use of LSD amongst other factors. And LSD finally helped us to get back to the sense of interconnectedness. So we saw the environmental movement, we saw, you know, the sort of...

Paul Austin

Earth movement, which has been always a hallmark of meaningful psychedelic experiences, that people feel really connected to the Earth and to the environment. And so this all happens in the second wave, but of course it goes overboard, right? Like you have a lot of people doing acid, you have a lot of acid casualties, you have widespread media that went from initially being very positive to very against psychedelics because of all the harm that people were witnessing with it.

And then it wasn't until 2006 that this is the year that John Hopkins published a paper on the efficacy of psilocybin to occasion mystical type experiences. It wasn't until then that, you know, we had this resurgence of interest in research and now, you know, 2023 Colorado has legalized plant medicines, which we just hosted the first kind of legal business mastermind event in Aspen in Colorado this past weekend.

Oregon legalized psilocybin. So now we're at a point in time where, you know, California may legalize it in the next month if Gavin Newsom, the governor, signs the bill that's on his desk to legalize mushrooms, ayahuasca, and wachuma. So we are quickly catapulting towards widespread accessibility. And I think the big question a lot of people have in their minds is, how's this gonna go? Because we saw how this went before, it didn't go so well. So what are the parameters and regulations and structures?

And even lessons from the elders in the sixties that we can learn from to actually, you know, create a third wave of psychedelics that really helps to integrate these substances into our cultural framework.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, how did the media play a role in basically shifting the narrative to LSD being this like god-awful thing where because, you know, you read about the consequences, like, where did they get it wrong? And did they tend to glorify sort of exceptions to the norm when it came to this? Like, were they using outliers as examples or was it common enough that it became truth? Because, I mean, I remember the Just Say No commercials and like

the if I remember correctly, I read somewhere in some book that just say no was like basically so ineffective that actually ended up increasing drug use. And I had a friend who told me when he sat in just say no, you know, his immediate reaction was like, shit, now I want to try all these things. Because they were like, he was so intrigued. Well, he was so intrigued by he was like, wait, these are gonna make you feel, you know, like weird and good and like all this other stuff. So he was they've been he'd done every drug under the sun by the time he got to college.

Paul Austin

No idea.

Paul Austin

trying to tell you what to do and it's, and we're like.

Srini Rao

But I think that was kind of an interesting reaction. So like, talking about the role of media in sort of creating this negative narrative around psychedelics and, you know, and then we'll get into sort of the performance enhancing benefits.

Paul Austin

Well, look, I mean, media's job is to create attention. And the media was covering a lot of the Vietnam War and the protests that were going on. And so naturally, as part of covering the protests, they were also starting to cover LSD and kind of how a lot of these hippies were using LSD. And I didn't live through the 60s, and I don't know it well enough, but my senses are compared to people who lived through it and historians of it. But my sense is the dominant.

narrative at that point in time was not necessarily in alignment with what a lot of the sort of these hippies wanted in terms of living in communes and meditating and studying with gurus. It really was the counterculture. It really was more of a subculture. And what's happened now is we've come to realize sort of the wisdom that emerged in that era. We hadn't had, let's say, any practice with psychedelics for 1700 years as a culture.

I mean, it's just, you gotta walk before you can run. And I think we just try to run. And so a lot of what the media covered was, sure, it was some very extreme stuff because that would generate the most attention. But by and large, I think there was a sense of this is quickly spiraling out of control. We're seeing and noticing more and more acid casualties. Was a heavy handed, you know.

This wasn't just in the United States, by the way, that these drugs were banned. This is a global ban because the United States as a nation state has hegemony at this point in time and forces the entire United Nations to also adopt this charter. There were like seven countries that did it, but for the most part, everyone did it. And so I think the heavy-handed approach was not necessary. There definitely could have been a middle balance just to just say, make it illegal, don't touch it, right?

That was a poor, I would say, choice and decision that has negatively impacted, I would say, the last 40 or 50 years of our lives.

Srini Rao

Yeah, well, I mean, I always think back to that Dave Chappelle joke when he talks about weed. And he's like, people say weed is a gateway drug. It leads to other things. And he says, yeah, mostly junk food. Well, let's talk about the performance-enhancing benefits of this. Because we've had every performance expert here on the planet, like from Steven Kotler to Michael Dreyfus's sports performance. So I mean, you alluded to the fact

Paul Austin

Right, yeah, exactly.

Srini Rao

coaches are now integrating this into their practice. And I feel like that this is one of those things that has to be done responsibly with proper intention because I've had maybe three or four civil-civil experiences and I noticed there was one huge difference between the first one, which was really like this just amazing, mind-blowing experience where it was me and two friends on New Year's Eve, it was during COVID, and we knew we couldn't go out anywhere. So we said, okay, well, what if we did mushrooms? And it ended up being this like really, really beautiful thing.

But then there was another time when it was just a random Saturday afternoon and we popped these chocolates and I was just like, okay, now I want this to end. I'm actually not enjoying this. And I, I realized what it was. It wasn't intentional, but so first let's talk about, you know, one the benefits, but give me the science behind the benefits. You alluded to things like addiction. So let's start with the sort of negative ailments that it cures and then talk about the performance enhancing benefits.

Paul Austin

So my expertise is more in the betterment of the well, the wellness angles, but I've hosted a podcast myself in the space for seven years, so I know my way about the clinical. So MDMA is on the verge of becoming available to treat PTSD. MAPS, just in the past week, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit that's in the psychedelic landscape.

Srini Rao

Okay.

Paul Austin

They basically published the final results of their phase three trials, which shows basically three X the efficacy of the currently available treatments. They expect the FDA to approve it, to reschedule MDMA, I believe, to a schedule three substance instead of a schedule one substance and make it available through clinics that a psychiatrist can prescribe for PTSD. Whether that will be covered by health insurance is TBD. What is...

currently legally available is ketamine. Ketamine is covered by health insurance if it is the official pharmaceutical called Spravato that's made by Johnson & Johnson. Generic ketamine is not covered by health insurance because it's being used off-label, and off-label typically isn't covered by insurance. So I think the biggest challenge right now, or thing to solve in this space is how do you get health insurance to cover what is a very different treatment than SSRIs, where it's...

Srini Rao

So pharmaceutical companies are actually participating in this now instead of fighting it.

Paul Austin

So the first major acquisition just happened two weeks ago where a Japanese pharmaceutical company acquired a psychedelic startup for $80 million. Just this past week, Stephen Cohen, who is a hedge fund billionaire, the movie Billions is based on his life. Stephen Cohen just bought 19 million shares of a company that I'm actually an advisor for called Sibin, C-Y-B-I-N. So there is...

a shift happening just in these last six months where big, big money is becoming very interested in this. They're seeing this as the future of mental health and they want to start to get on board. With that being said, the model is so different from a mental health perspective that it's a completely new paradigm because to get into the science of this, the reason psychedelics help at healing so much is because they allow us to confront challenging emotions.

traumatic stories, traumatic events, and by confronting them, by sort of say looking the dragon in the eye, as Jung would say, you get the gold. So by confronting the pain, by confronting the sorrow, by confronting the trauma, psychedelics create this open window where the amygdala, the fear response is dampened from the amygdala. Both hemispheres of the brain are communicating at a higher level, so there's a sense of playfulness that comes forward.

people can essentially process very traumatic experiences and emotions, which is often underlies a lot of these clinical conditions. Now, PTSD is different than depression and MDMA and the way it impacts, you know, why it's so good for PTSD is different than why psilocybin is so good for depression. And the distinct difference is that psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in mushrooms,

often facilitates what is known as a mystical experience, this connection to divinity, to God, to source, to oneness, to something greater that is unexplainable and ineffable. And the efficacy of the clinical treatment is the more powerful that mystical experience is, the more powerful the healing is, the longer it lasts, the more effective it is. So in other words, these researchers at Johns Hopkins showed this distinct relationship between

Paul Austin

spirituality and healing. A lot of it coming down to the sense of, I would say, existential disconnection, a lack of purpose and meaning, disconnection from nature and the environment. And so that's proving to be a really effective healing modality for depression, addiction.

specifically some anxiety, end of life anxiety in particular, because people realize that death is somewhat illusory, that you can see beyond the veil, that energy is just something that recycles. All these sort of like truisms and cliches, people feel and experience oftentimes for the first time in their life. Whereas, so that's psilocybin. MDMA is a little bit different. MDMA just basically helps to keep the client stimulated.

enough so they can process a very, very specific, difficult and traumatic emotion that has caused post-traumatic stress disorder. This is most commonly with women who have been sexually assaulted or raped or men who go to war. And so we're finding incredible efficacy with MDMA specifically to treat PTSD because it dampens the fear response even more in the amygdala. It really helps to down-regulate it so these very overwhelming memories can actually be brought up,

given. And that allows them for the healing. It's a catharsis more than anything.

Srini Rao

Well, let's talk about the performance-enhancing benefits of this because I remember the early days of ecstasy becoming pretty popular. This was like Berkeley in the late 90s when I was in college. And I told her, the friend that I was telling you earlier who thought Just Say No was bullshit was the one. He was a freshman and I was a senior and he was the first one to introduce me to ecstasy. And I remember taking it, waiting an hour as anybody who does for the first time.

And I remember when it hit, I was like, holy shit, this is amazing. And I probably had a good year, but it was not healthy use by any stretch of the imagination. I remember at a certain point, I started having digestive issues, and I thought to myself, I gotta stop this, I can't go on like this every weekend. And I saw kids who literally had been partying at raves every weekend from the time they were 14, and they looked like they were a mess.

So talk to me about how we go from that to now finding these performance-enhancing benefits. And how do we, like I said, do this with intention in a way that it doesn't lead to that, but instead to the positives that you talked about in terms of more creativity, more productivity, more flow, like all the things that we're generally seeking as knowledge workers, creatives, and people who are building things.

Paul Austin

So I think this is where like drug pharmacology comes in to be useful and effective. And there's this interesting divide between natural and synthetic that's very particular to psychedelic substances. LSD kinda straddles both worlds, but MDMA and ketamine, which are the most commonly used synthetic psychedelics, can both be addictive. There can be issues of neurotoxicity, specifically with MDMA. Oftentimes,

when MDMA is pressed into pills, it is with other drugs. It's not pure moly, which is what they're using in clinical trials. And so I think there needs to be a lot of caution exercise specifically around ketamine and MDMA, that if they're used too often, especially in a set and setting that is recreational in a party environment, they can be more detrimental than helpful. Now look, I've done moly and gone to a music festival.

I've started a line of K on the dance floor. I don't make it a habit, you know, it might happen. It's probably happened in my life, maybe 10 times to 15 times. Using MDMA, using ketamine more recreationally, a lot of it is like, especially with ketamine, cause it's short, it's like an hour and a half, two hours. I would, I used to do like Keditations where I would do deep meditations with ketamine at home, sort of as like a wellness routine just to help.

with some anxiety and stress. In fact, I went through Mind Bloom. I went through Dylan's program early on in 2000 during COVID and had some of the most incredible experiences I've ever had with ketamine. So that I think the distinguishing factor is the drug pharmacology, right? There are levels of neurotoxicity when MDMA is used too often and same with ketamine. With psilocybin though, the active ingredient in mushrooms, you know, oftentimes people

will use these in recreational settings. They'll eat chocolate bars, they'll go to parties. A lot of people are now doing it instead of drinking alcohol, this whole Cali sober notion. A lot of people, myself included, will have microdose to help with cannabis addiction and using cannabis too much. So I do think there are substantial benefits to these lower doses done socially when compared to alcohol. And I'm talking specifically psilocybin.

Paul Austin

and low doses of psilocybin mushrooms, these chocolate bars. I have a chocolate that I make that combines it with Kana, which is a natural heart opener from South Africa, theobromine, which is the active ingredient in cacao, LinesMain, and Damiana, which is an aphrodisiac. And so it's like taking mushrooms and MDMA, but it's fully natural. There's no sort of downstream neurotoxic effects. So I think part of this as well is like, as more and more herbs become available, psilocybin's a great amplifier.

And so when there are going to be these incredibly synergistic, herbal formulations that are put together and created that end up being actually way more effective than synthetics. And my hope is that we go in that direction. And a lot of the legal policy that's developing is going to be supportive of that direction, which I think is a very, uh, very good.

Srini Rao

No. Well, talk to me about, you know, we've kind of addressed the sort of negative, you know, issues that these things help, but talk to me about the performance enhancing benefits. Because this is something that, you know, I know Stephen Kotler and Jamie Will covered in stealing fire as well. And this seems to be, you know, quite common, like that, you know, this is becoming more of the norm in Silicon Valley. Yeah, for people who are working in the tech industry, like what

What kinds of things does this lead to that are positive? Because you mentioned Mind Bloom, and like I said, we had Dylan here, and it made me kind of think, okay, I don't have any serious issues, so if I was thinking about this from the standpoint of my own work as a creator, as an entrepreneur, what role does this play in enhancing performance in these different areas?

Paul Austin

So, fun anecdote to start with. In the 1960s and 70s, there was this dirt bag, extreme sport, underground. They climb mountains, they would climb mountains and snowboard down them. Extreme sports really started to become a thing and what was known as the underground secret in those extreme sport environments was that they were all taking microdoses of LSD and mushrooms. The writer James Orrick.

wrote about this, I think in 2011, sort of saying, you know, people would take 15, 20, 25 micrograms of LSD and they would go out snowboarding and skiing and they just noticed that they were more aware, they had better reaction times, they could easily access the state of flow to sort of have and be part of that no-mind and that they did this quite often and it was well known that it helped.

We also know that, you know, I mentioned this as part of my historical story earlier, that there was a lot of LSD that was done in Silicon Valley and Palo Alto at Stanford and Berkeley, right? There was a distinct and direct relationship between the use of psychedelics and this computer revolution because it helped to see things as interconnected. It helped to think of new systems and new paradigms. So with that as a historical reference.

I, you know, we're starting to discover more and more about the performance aspects of psychedelics. I think low doses, micro doses are a better, like if the intention is performance, the low dose, the micro dose is a better use unless there's a way in which, for example, as a leader, the way you communicate your, your ability or inability to be vulnerable.

If you're a writer and you felt stuck creatively for a long time, you feel depressed, you feel sort of whatever, like people go through phases in life. I think in those phases, higher doses of psychedelics can be a great sort of forcing mechanism to get you out of your typical kind of day to day or maybe out of a rut and really be re-inspired and re-energized to pursue something creatively. But once on that path, I find, you know,

Paul Austin

these lower doses in combination. I love to go hiking. I play the violin, so I'll play music and every now and then I'll take low doses of LSD. It just helps with intonation. It helps with tonality. It helps with just a little bit more softness and sort of finesse. And look, the other interesting thing that's going on outside of just the flow, the creativity, the mood.

Physiologically, psychedelics are anti-inflammatory agents. So a lot of chronic disease, a lot of physiological issues are related to too much inflammation because of all the seed oils we eat or because of the gluten that we eat or because of how much we work or because of how stressed out our lifestyles are. So there's been clinical research done that shows that psychedelics, the most common one being Wachuma san Pedro, which is a cacti.

has incredible anti-inflammatory benefits on the gut and therefore the mind. And so that impact on inflammation physiologically, people will notice that they've had this chronic issue for five, 10, 15 years. They go and they sit with ayahuasca for a week or with Chuma for a week and they notice it's cleared and it never comes back. So I think there's also these sort of really interesting outside the box, like people have healed their shingles with microdosing.

Women will find that they can re-regulate their menstruation if they've had off cycles or their cycles are too painful with microdosing. There's a way in which the impact on inflammation, the impact on neuroplasticity, when these are used with intention and responsibility, they can be helpful at a range of things. Any executive coach, health coach, life relationship coach, they can be helpful at a range of things.

they're going to benefit from being able to work with these substances because the number one prerogative of a coach is to help your client change, to help them shift, to help them let go, to help them transform, move on, whatever it is. And I have found no greater tool that does this more reliably and effectively and consistently than psychedelics. And that's reflected in the scientific literature. And that's also reflected in-

Paul Austin

this sort of abundance now of anecdotes of people like Aaron Rogers, the NFL, you know, MVP saying Iowaska was incredibly transformative for him or other folks like Brad Pitt saying how he microdoses or, you know, there's just a litany of stories now of folks who are at the absolute top of their game who say psychedelics have really helped me do X, Y, and Z, whatever that.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I remember in the Will Smith biography, he wrote about his own IOS OASCOPE experiences as well.

Paul Austin

Mark wrote that, right? Mark Manson, the ghost writer, which I still haven't read that book. And now that you bring it up, I'm like, all right. Because for me, books are always like, okay, if I hear about it from five people, that's when I buy it. Unless I just have my interest picked. Right now, I'm reading a biography on Ezra Pound who helped to discover

Srini Rao

Mark. Yeah, Mark was the I think the ghostwriter.

Srini Rao

It's good. It's very good.

Srini Rao

then.

Paul Austin

that's sort of off topic, but also very.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no, it's good, but he alluded to that as well. Do you know, there's one thing I wondered, you know, I come from a long line of academics, my sister being a doctor, where do you get pushback from the medical community on all of this?

Paul Austin

So the APA has basically come out and said, until these are approved by the FDA, we do not support the use of psychedelics. There needs to be more research and there needs to be more money poured into it. So a lot of medical, the medical establishment definitely is anti-psychedelic at this point in time. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of medical doctors and medical professionals in our training program.

For Third Wave, most of our faculty are licensed clinical professionals, MDs, and doctors of Chinese medicine and clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. All of them now are doing some level of performance, executive coaching because they found the clinical and the medical model to be too regulated, to be sort of too old school.

not able to adapt quick and fast enough. And they're just sort of, um, in a way over it because they've had their own experiences, whether psychedelic or otherwise, and they've come to realize that the medical establishment is, you know, basically in the business of sick care rather than true, true healing and, and wellness. So, um,

My sense is when MDMA becomes medically available next year and approved, that will significantly shift sort of the public stance on it. But we're not there yet. And so that remains to be seen.

Srini Rao

Give me some concrete examples of performance changes, whether it's more income, greater levels of creativity. Give me some concrete things you've seen with people who have come to your programs and your retreats, changes in their lives.

Paul Austin

That's a great question. I'm gonna take a minute. So.

Paul Austin

One example is a CEO who was part of our training programs, did one of our coaching programs. He noticed that he was becoming burnt out. He noticed that he was having to start to rely on SSRIs, that he was becoming depressed. And to help manage this burnout, he basically did a high dose of psilocybin.

followed by a once a week microdosing protocol. And so that psilocybin really helped to reset his nervous system. It really helped him to feel less burnt out. It was almost, psilocybin can often be like, or psychedelics can be like a, it's like a supercharge, right? Like breath work, you know, they're like those little meditation maybe, they're like those little EV chargers that you plug into, but.

when you take a psychedelic, it can often be like a supercharge. So you get re-energized really quickly, which can help a lot of these CEOs and entrepreneurial types manage and deal with fatigue and burnout in a sort of a biohacking way. And then the microdosing on the tail end of that just allows for an integration of some of those lessons and learnings. And I think what's key to this, and I've experienced this myself as a CEO,

I work with an executive coach. I sometimes will take microdosing, microdoses of psychedelics like psilocybin before my executive coaching calls if I wanna be more about brainstorming and ideas and creativity. I would say the other way I've seen it transform someone's life, this is a one-on-one client that I worked with. She was making seven figures at Metta.

and had worked in the Silicon Valley, I think for 10 to 15 years, had become very successful. Her husband was a very successful product engineer and developer, but she noticed in these corporate cultures, there's all this talk of consciousness and, you know, presence and depth, but like, it's all talk, it's no action. Like most people in corporate culture are not necessarily walking the walk of these things. And so that set her down a path of,

Paul Austin

quitting her seven figure job, enrolling in the Berkeley executive coaching program, working with me one on one to help to mentor and guide her for six months. And now she is actively coaching tech, let's say middle managers and leaders in working with psychedelics through intentional containers. And so the process and path that she went down of leaving corporate culture, coming into psychedelics, becoming an executive coach.

she's now gonna help 10, 20, 50, 100, 150 other people also make that journey in transition, using psychedelics as a catalyst for that. Because psychedelics in these transition moments and these periods of uncertainty, they often help with courage. They often help with making the difficult decision that we know is difficult, we know it hurts, but we also know that by making that decision, our life is going to substantially improve for the better. We're gonna be...

We're gonna make more money. We're gonna be more happy and content. We're gonna have better relationships. We know that, but like the most beneficial decisions are often the most difficult decisions. And so psychedelics seem to help people with that process of making the difficult decision, having the courage to say yes and to go and explore something that may be uncertain. It's often this liminal space, right? Like the metaphor that I use is we leave the island.

and we're out in the choppy seas, and we're trying to find what's the new island. But those in-between periods, those transition periods, often allow for the greatest lessons and learnings, even if they can be quite difficult and challenging.

Srini Rao

So I have two final questions for you. I've had so many conversations with people about what I like to now joke and call the self-help industrial complex, where we had Wiley McGraw who described it as the self-help hell loop, where people are just endlessly going to seminars and reading books, but they're trying to basically consume all this self-improvement content, but nothing actually improves in their lives. And just to add to that, I think it's

the throughout the course of our conversation, I couldn't help but think, like, what is this going to do to the personal development industry? Like, what is the impact going to be of psychedelics? Like, is it going to be better? Like, am I going to get more out of going and doing an I wasca ceremony than I would sitting and listening to Tony Robbins rattle on for two days?

Paul Austin

Right, so it becomes less unidirectional. There's more sovereignty and autonomy that's created with it. People can actually make substantial change rather than just continuing to play the old story again and again. I mean, I think this is partly what drew these people into this mastermind program in Aspen that I just hosted last weekend. It's, you know, some people who have sold, you know, nine-figure companies, some folks who are Inc. 5000 entrepreneurs, some folks who have, you know, helped.

to scale six different nine figure companies. And they were really wanting to come together to connect in a deeper level, to connect in nature, right? To work with psilocybin in a container that would allow for discussion, that would allow for brainstorming, that would allow for creativity because that sort of collective co-creating is much more interesting than just getting told what to do for hours, if not months, if not years on end. So there's a lot more participatory

spirit that comes from that. And I think psychedelics though can get like that as well. And I think that's also something to be aware of, right? Like for me, I was on a self-help kick from the age of like 19 to 24, which I feel like is not necessarily normal, but that's like, okay, on a self-help kick, that makes sense. I was reading Nietzsche, I was listening to a bunch of podcasts. I was like in a deep.

mode of absorption and learning. And then like at some point I was like, I'd rather read, I don't know, war and peace compared to, you know, how to make 22 more million dollars if you do this one simple trick better. So my taste just started to change, my perspective started to change, but I've always continued to work with psychedelics as an ally. Some people I know I've been working with, you know, Ayahuasca for 22 years, 25 years, 30 years, they've gone to hundreds of ceremonies.

And they're not much different than when they started. So I think that's also the thing to be mindful of is psychedelics can also help us to check out, they can help us to disassociate, they can help us to forget about things. It really comes down to the intention behind it. It really comes down to the sort of reverence and responsibility that's brought to it. And I think it's also like the acknowledgement that some people are born into better situations than others. I know people who

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Paul Austin

have been born into heroin experiences and a lot of early childhood trauma. And they've come so incredibly far, partly through psychedelics, and it's been a lot of hard work, but they've made that commitment. And there are other folks who are given a really, you know, clean slate and just don't ever do much with life for better or worse. So I think part of this is also getting out of the, the self-help, the navel gazing, right? And getting into how do I contribute to something greater than myself? How do I leave a lasting sort of impact or legacy?

The indigenous people often talk about how, let's leave this place in great shape for the next seven generations. How do we think about that? What are we doing now, today, this week, this month, this year to steward the earth and the land for seven generations from now? And I think that mindset, rather than seven years from now in the VC sort of model of scaling a company, that mindset of a long-term orientation, I think will be

will really help to manage some of this neurotic frenetic energy around, I gotta become something, I gotta do something, I gotta, you know, like we can last a little bit longer these days.

Srini Rao

Well, this has been fantastic. It's been really thought provoking and insightful as I expected it would be. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Paul Austin

The courage to confront, the courage to commit, and the courage to create. I think for me, it just comes down to courage. How much can you really say yes to the difficult things? How well can you look into the face of uncertainty and go forward with it anyway?

Paul Austin

you know, how can you leave a legacy that you think will last for the next seven generations? How do you just so dramatically positively impact the world around you through that courage that the world has to become a better place to live for others?

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with us. Where can people find out more about you, your work, and everything else?

Paul Austin

So the Third Wave is a great educational platform, thethirdwave.co. We have guides in every psychedelic. We have a directory of clinics, retreats, therapists, and coaches. So if you want to find a vetted retreat center, a vetted clinic, a vetted coach or therapist to work with, just go to our website. And we also have a free community that folks can join to start to connect with others who are also interested in psychedelics. And then if there are any practitioners, coaches, or those who are looking to become more professionally involved in how they might weave this in,

That's our psychedelic coaching institute, which is psychedeliccoaching.institute. There's details on the training program there. If you're an executive coach, holistic health coach, life relationship coach, even a therapist practitioner who wants to expand, that's a 10 month program with a six day intensive at Costa Rica. And then I'm on social at PaulAustin3W on Instagram and Twitter. And I post that Instagram every now and then, I tweet every now and then. So if folks are listening to this and you have any questions or wanna reach out, I'm pretty responsive to that.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.