Psychedelics as Medicine with Will Siu

Episode 295: Will Siu, MD, DPhil, completed medical and graduate school at UCLA and Oxford University, respectively, before training as a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. He was on the faculty at Harvard for two years prior to moving to New York City to further pursue his interest in psychedelic medicine as a practitioner and public advocate through speaking, writing, and social media. Dr. Siu has been trained by MAPS to provide MDMA-assisted therapy and has a private practice in LOS Angeles where he provides individual psychotherapy and ketamine-facilitated psychotherapy.

Show notes:

• To get a free 30-day trial of Audible + 1 free book, go to http://audibletrial.com/mindbodymusings

• Madelyn's must-read books: The Big Leap https://amzn.to/2TCvFJL The Red Tent https://amzn.to/38kSHdz The Wild Woman's Way https://amzn.to/38uKOSY

• How psychedelics were Will's gateway into healing/spirituality.

• What it means to be a "psychonaut.”

• The main difference between psychedelics vs recreational/party drugs.

• Will's definition of a psychedelic drug.

• Why everyone’s experience is different when taking these drugs.

• Will discusses what MDA and ketamine drugs are.

• How he facilitates these drugs into his private practice.

• “Psychedelics are neither necessary nor sufficient for healing, but they’re the most powerful tool we have when used with the right support.”

• The preparation for doing these psychedelic drugs, as well as the aftercare. 

• Why most people that see Will have never done any previous psychedelics.

• Madelyn’s experience with Ayahuasca.

• The way that healers did Ayahuasca in the very beginning is very different from how it's performed now.

• Ayahuasca Retreat Center in Costa Rica https://soltara.co/ 

• Must read books: Eastern Body Western Mind https://amzn.to/39q7MvG The Alchemist https://amzn.to/2IkOewP, Conversations With God https://amzn.to/3cyIBcn

Connect with Will:

• Website: https://www.willsiumd.com/

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/will.siu.md/

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READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Madelyn: What’s up, y’all?  Welcome to episode 295 of the Mind Body Musings Podcast. We’re speaking today about psychedelics as medicine, using psychedelics in a therapeutic sense. I haven’t talked about this on the podcast before — very excited to be bringing to you an expert on the matter, Will Siu, who is an MD and DPhil.  I don’t know what a DPhil is, but he’s a DPhil. He completed medical and graduate school at UCLA and Oxford University respectively before training as a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. He was on the faculty at Harvard for two years prior to moving to New York City to further pursue his interest in psychedelic medicine as a practitioner and public advocate through speaking, writing, and social media. 

Dr. Siu has been trained by MAPS to provide MDMA-assisted therapy and has a private practice in Los Angeles, where he provides individual psychotherapy and ketamine-facilitated psychotherapy.  We did this interview here in New York City together in person. Will is such a warming soul, and fun fact: he is in the new series on Netflix called Goop, episode 1.  So if you watch that and they’re talking a lot about using these kinds of psychedelics as medicine, you’ll see him speaking with another gentleman about the profound effects of this, especially around MDMA, which is think is fascinating, on how MDMA is actually a tool that we have been using — “we.”  We? Am I included in this? That doctors have been using to help people with PTSD coming back from the war and from other events in their life as a method for healing. 

We’ve got a really exciting interview today. This is a new category for the Mind Body Musings Podcast, but it’s something that I myself am personally getting more and more interested in.  Another fun fact is that I want to get this episode ready to go, lined up, already in the queue, so I’m recording this intro now rather than waiting. But I am about to be doing a plant medicine journey this upcoming weekend. By the time you are listening to this, I’ve already had it. I will be interested in what I’m going to be like in one week, because I will be doing it this weekend, and perhaps I will be doing a follow-up episode on a plant medicine journey that I go on. 

To be clear, I have gone on a plant medicine journey before. In today’s episode, we’re talking more about MDMA and we’re talking about mushrooms, but we also just touch briefly on ayahuasca, and the experience I have had doing ayahuasca has not been a very positive experience, which is why I have been hesitant to come on the podcast and speak my truth around it, because I didn’t feel that I had enough experience with it to give my opinions and revelations and a well-rounded view on my thoughts on it, because the way I went into it was not the way that I personally need to do ayahuasca.  I’m having the experience that I know is much better for me. Well, when I say experience, I mean I’m having the atmosphere, and the situation, and the timing — all of those logistical pieces are much more for me this time — aka the masculine, the masculine structure feels more aligned with how I work as a human.

So I’m really looking forward to my feminine revelations to come forward. The tighter the container is, the deeper you can go. Because my container feels much more nurturing, and safe, and held this time around, I have a very good feeling that my experience is going to be different. I’m looking forward to sharing with you that if I feel called. I don’t know what’s in store at all, so I’m going into the experience with a blank slate, saying, “Medicine, show me what I’m meant to be shown.” So yeah, that’s exciting. 

But today we’re talking about using psychedelics as a medicine tool for healing, and deep growth, and recovery, and what that actually looks like in a therapy landscape in a way that’s much more official, because there’s a whole organization called MAPS that is doing extensive research and studying on how we can start using this in a legal way. And we’ve got a review of the week that we want to share today. 

This comes from mononymous_sko, and they say, “As someone who doesn’t Stan people, I stan,” with five stars. “Maddy is incredible. She’s my go-to person for emotional support when I’m feeling lost in my life. It doesn’t matter who you are, everyone has something to gain from listening to this podcast. I’ve heard her described as a walking permission slip and it couldn’t be more accurate.  Since I began internalizing her teachings, I’ve renewed my sense of inner peace while I give myself permission to feel into my body and my emotions and create the space for myself to learn and grow.  Much love!” Thank you. Oh, my goodness. Those words are just washing over me like ooey-gooey chocolate, and I’m the marshmallow because I’m white and fluffy, and I’m just sticking to this German chocolate because it’s so delicious. So thank you for this adorable, kind, sweet, generous, loving review. 

If you have been listening to the podcast for a while and you want to support it, leaving a review is an amazing way to do so. You can do that on iTunes by clicking Ratings and Reviews. That’s all I’ve got to share today. 

If you want to get a free audiobook, the sponsor of today’s show is Audible. You can go to audibletrial.com/mindbodymusings. I suggest you get the book The Big Leap. I just finished it, and I’m already listening to it a second time. I also suggest the book The Red Tent, phenomenal. And the last book that I’ll recommend for today is The Wild Woman’s Way by Michaela Boehm. If you are interested in harmonizing that feminine energy of yours, and finding new feminine rituals that go beyond what the New Age world is teaching, but going into our ancestry, it’s a great book for that.  That’s all. Wow, let’s go do this. Let’s go listen to this amazing conversation with Will Siu, MD.  

Madelyn: Thank you so much for welcoming me into this beautiful space. 

Will: Yeah, thanks for coming. And you said there’s a friend of mine, that someone had suggested to —

Madelyn: I was thinking of this today. As I was getting on the subway heading here I was like, “All right, how again did I get connected with Will?” And I can’t remember. I know that someone originally recommend you to me, to look into your work, when I said, “Hey, I’m looking for something just new to go into,” because your specialty is not something we’ve talked about on the show before.

Will: Meaning like psychedelics?

Madelyn: Yeah.

Will: Okay.

Madelyn: Yeah, we’ve never talked about psychedelics on the show before. That right there really intrigued me.

Will: Cool.

Madelyn: But then I ended up listening to your interview that you did with someone else I’ve had on the show, and that would be — no, you’re good.

Will: No, I was noticing, when I was exhaling through my nose, that it was hitting the microphone, which we probably don’t want.

Madelyn: Oh, no, you’re okay.

Will: It’s okay? 

Madelyn: Yeah.

Will: All right.

Madelyn: Oh, no, it’s okay, a little bit of breath. When we hear the breath on the podcast, it just reminds us all to breathe.

Will: Oh, nice. Okay, perfect.

Madelyn: I listened to the episode you did with Ruby Warrington, who I also on the show.

Will: Oh, she’s wonderful.

Madelyn: Yeah.

Will: We just messaged her this week, because I was actually like — yeah, I thanked her a lot, because she may have been the first podcast, or definitely the first bigger — I mean, she has a good-sized following, and then a lot came from — actually, no. First, she had me do a live event with her last year in Williamsburg, and things really — 

Madelyn: At the SÖDA thing she runs?

Will: Yeah, I think it was Club SÖDA. That’s right. It really just beautifully ballooned into many, many other things. I just let her know this week how much I appreciated her and her support. She’s wonderful.

Madelyn: I read her book. It’s so good. Sober Curious, I remember reading that. Now it feels like this time last year. Time flies. Wow. I was just like, “This is so well written,” bringing to light a lot of the things that I typically don’t — do you drink?

Will: Very socially these days, but in the past, yeah, I definitely had. I used to go to it for escape for sure.

Madelyn: Yeah. I want to know. The show is called Mind Body Musings. What are you musing about in life? What’s kind of new that has you really curious and intrigued, that might be different from what you normally are into?

Will: Yeah, a lot of things come to mind, but I’m like, “How different do you actually want?”  Because we haven’t gotten into it too much yet, to know kind of how woo-woo to get with your audience. 

Madelyn: Go deep.

Will: I don’t know.  A lot of things recently — it’s interesting that you said getting into my profession, really psychedelics, because it’s become — I think most of stuff that’s out there is about psychedelics, but really in the last few months it’s been really just about alignment, is something that I like to say. What I mean by alignment is aligning our true self, our soul, our heart, to this material physical world that we’re in and this human experiencing, aligning the true self to our thoughts. Our thoughts aligned with the true self is our word, the way we’re speaking about in the world, the way we’re moving about the world, the body also is all of that. Are we embodying essentially soul here as human beings? 

That’s all to say that I’ve started seeing psychedelics and other tools of wellness simply as tools to help us align something that we’re here to do anyway. A lot of it recently has been in line with that, just thinking like, “Oh, interesting. Why am I even thinking about this, the fact that we’re humans, and we’re here in bodies?  What is this experience that we’re all going through?” The more I dove into that, I found even deeper connection with Eastern philosophy. 

I spent like half the day yesterday at The Met looking at all these statues of the Buddha and —bodhisattvas? I can’t remember what they’re called. But really realizing that like, “Oh, this thing that I’m really interested in, that I’m curious about, that seems to be linked to healing and wellness, is something that humans have really been pondering and looking into for millennia.” To answer your question, that’s really the greater question of why we’re here. How do we make the most of this human experience? That’s what’s been on my mind lately.

Madelyn: That’s a great answer. Just out of curiosity, is there a correlation between psychedelics and the Buddha?

Will: I mean, I happen to think so actually.  Interestingly, I was at Kripalu last week for a training.  My spiritual teacher — which the fact that I’m even saying I have a spiritual teacher is a big deal for me.  It’s really honoring that my path into Western medicine, into psychiatry, really didn’t honor almost any spirituality whatsoever. And I ended up becoming more reconnecting to spirituality, because I was raised Jehovah’s Witness. So I think I was definitely spiritual as a kid, but then really shunned the religion, considered myself atheist/agnostic probably from 15 or 16 to probably 36.

Madelyn: Wow. 15 or 16 to 36 is a long time.

Will: Yeah, but really the psychedelics were my reentry really into healing, true healing, and kind of by default, into spirituality again.  I didn’t expect to become spiritual. I never believed, other than when I was super young, that religion was some sort of path or answer. But the more I look into myself, again, this alignment of my soul with this human experience.  I’m like, “Oh, whoa, this correlates with a lot of the stuff that these — “ Psychonauts is a term that we use for people that explore psychedelics a lot.

Madelyn: Psychonauts?

Will: Yeah.

Madelyn: Like astronauts?

Will: Yeah.

Madelyn: I like that.

Will: In the ’60s and ’70s, Ram Dass, Terence Kemp McKenna, and all these guys were talking about all these things, and, “Oh, I’m having these similar experiences,” and, “Oh, wait.  That correlates with Buddhism. This is interesting,” or, “That correlates with Hinduism. Why is it that all these things seem to point to the same kind of fundamental human experience and what seems to matter the most to us?”

Madelyn: I watched a — around the time that I did my first ayahuasca journey — my only ayahuasca journey so far actually.  I was watching all of these documentaries and videos about ayahuasca, and this culture does it, and this is where we can find it in history books, and such like that.  There was one video that I found, and it was talking about not just ayahuasca, but also mushrooms. That was correlating — and I’m not saying this on the podcast to make it sound like this is fact and this is what I believe, but if found it fascinating. 

It was making a correlation between — in the Bible when they were saying they ate manna. They were doing all of this research around why manna is actually mushrooms. I can’t really quote anything else from that video, but I watched the full thing through.  It was like 30 minutes of talking about all the research, why when they were talking about in the Bible, that the manna — breaking the bread, or eating the manna in the morning, whatever it was — is actually mushrooms. Have you ever heard of that?

Will: I have heard of that actually. Yeah, in the Eleusinian Mysteries also, which is a big part of Christianity, people also suspect that psychedelic fungi was being taken really at this secret thing. I think it was in Greece. But yeah, there seems to be a lot of correlation, I think, between psychedelics and spirituality for sure.

Madelyn: So take us back into your history, whenever you were around that period, being agnostic and first getting into psychedelics. What was that first experience like for you, and why did you go for it? 

Will: Well, to me it really built up over the course of time. I’m 39 now. I was 33 when I was a second-year psychiatry resident at Harvard, so I had finished my medical education. I went on to what should’ve been my last step, in theory, to become a psychiatrist. I went to the best program in the country, and, “Okay, I’m going to be here. I’m going to do the doctor thing. I’m going to become a professor. I’m going to do research in a lab, and I’m going to develop new drugs to treat depression and anxiety.” 

Really from that I ended up — at that time I considered myself atheist/agnostic, and what I realize now is that I was continuing to jump through different hoops, thinking that I would find happiness.  After college I was like, “Okay, if I just get into a great medical school, I’ll be happy.” Then what I realized during medical school was like, “Oh, okay. If I finish that hoop, I just need to get into residency.”  But then I decided to do a PhD. I’m like, “Okay, if I jump through that hoop, I’ll get it.” What I realized at the beginning of this training was, “Oh, my god, I’m in my early 30s. I don’t think this thing is going to make me happy. I’m depressed.” I was suicidal. I wanted to drop out, and I’m like, “But what’s left for me?” So it was really this crisis of life that was like, “Oh, shit, what do I do now?”

Madelyn: Around 33?

Will: Around 33, which again, I had put — I think at that point it was like 15 years straight after high school of education to do this thing, and I was realizing I’m miserable. It was around that time that my best friend from childhood, he had kind of done the opposite of me, where he was in a band after high school. He worked with his dad installing windows in houses. It wasn’t until the financial crisis of ’08 that he decided to go back to school, so he was like in college, literally his first or second year of college as I was going through this process. 

A friend of his introduced him to DMT, so for months he was like, “Will, you’ve got to — oh, this is a psychedelic,” and blah, blah, blah.  I’m like, “No, these are dangerous. They’re addictive. Let’s not do that.” I was worried about him, but then eventually he told me how DMT is thought to be made in the brain, and that’s when it’s released, and then we dream.  That was the first time I was like, “This is interesting,” because while I was in therapy, I was doing dream work, dream analysis. Those correlated the two, where I was like, “Okay, this makes sense scientifically. Okay, well, maybe if we use these psychedelic things that help us dream, we can analyze the experience, and then I could use these for therapy,” because I was finding that helpful. 

But it wasn’t until about a year or year-and-a-half later, after he suggested I try this, and I did tons of reading and research, that I finally was able to have my own experiences later. I don’t know. It’s interesting. I think Terence McKenna used to say something like, “If you do certain types of psychedelics, or if you have a strong psychedelic experience, you can turn someone who’s an atheist into a devotee of Shiva immediately essentially,” and I had an experience like that, where basically it was like so — I was in this place that I don’t even know how to put words on. I describe it as a place that we come from, a place that we will go to.

Madelyn: Consciousness?

Will: Consciousness to me, that’s a whole — we could probably talk a whole hour or two just on consciousness.  But no, I would call it — or maybe that which is greater, God, whatever want to call it. But it was so real. It felt more real than real. I guess that’s another term, that people have — 

Madelyn: It felt like a place you actually went to, rather than just nothingness?

Will: Yeah.

Madelyn: Interesting.

Will: It was a place that I — but it was interesting because it was my first time in that space. It was familiar. I had been there before, and it was waiting for me, and it was more warmth and loving than anything that I have ever experienced. And again, this is me like depressed, suicidal, atheist, agnostic. I go to this place, and I’m like, “Oh, shit. Okay, well, throw all that out the window. This is real.” That has really catapulted my own self-healing. 

Yeah, it was not something that I took very lightly, and it was months, and I did my research on where I was going and the people that were serving it. When it finally came to actually having my own experience for the first time, I felt very safe — or as safe as could be, going into an experience that essentially I had never had before, and that I was kind of almost assured that it was going to alter my consciousness beyond anything that I’ve ever experienced in life.

Madelyn: So if we were to talk about psychedelics in a way that someone who had never even heard about psychedelics before could understand, what’s the difference between psychedelics and, say, other drugs that some people hear floating around, like MDMA or party-type drugs?  What do psychedelics do? 

Will: That’s a great question, and interestingly, I actually categorize MDMA within the category of psychedelics.  People will go back and forth in the psychedelic community, “Oh, this is the definition,” or, “That’s the definition.”  My favorite definition is that of Stan Grof, who’s really considered the psychiatric grandfather within psychedelics. He worked with Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD, when he was a psychiatry resident.  At this point Stan Grof, who’s still alive — he’s like in 80s — has done something like 4,500 legal LSD psychotherapy treatments himself, before it was all made illegal. 

His definition of a psychedelic is something like a nonspecific amplifier of the unconscious, and I love that definition because it’s essentially addressing many things.  It’s saying it gives us access to something that we already have within us, that we already have access to anyway. It’s just something that facilitates that. The non-specificity, I think, also honors that that’s why your experience or my experience of taking a psychedelic is going to feel completely different. Even if you or I took the same dose of the same batch of a psychedelic two different weeks apart, we would have a very different experience. It’s not honoring the molecule itself as giving you this experience. It’s just something that’s facilitating this process within yourself. 

The way I think about it is that there’s some amount of experience that we have in the conscious state, and then we have subconscious that we can dip into at different times, depending on what’s happening our waking life or in our dream state. We can access subconscious stuff. And then we have a pool of unconscious things that really we need help with accessing. What I think about is like if there’s a filter between conscious, subconscious, and unconscious, that psychedelic kind of opens those filters and allow what’s underneath to pop up.  I think the higher doses or the stronger psychedelics allow more depth in terms of what goes through that filter. But it’s really just kind of a pool of unconscious stuff under there, whether it’s emotions, or memories, or tactile experiences, et cetera.

Madelyn: I have so many questions. How do you do the type of work that you do? How do you facilitate these kinds of experiences or journeys in your professional life? 

Will: In my professional life right now I use ketamine in my private practices. And then the other experiences that I’ve had are also with MDMA as part of the MDMA for PTSD clinical trial, so we had training through that. I would say that overall they’re very similar. I get a lot of emails from people saying, “Oh, I listened to this podcast, and I want to do ketamine therapy,” but really in the end no one ever walks in my door and I’m doing ketamine with them that first time. There are some practitioners that do that, and if anybody’s willing to do that, I would actually probably say to steer away because it’s not a good setup. 

I usually meet with people at least three or four times, and then really talk about these kinds of things that we’re talking about. “What are you looking for? What’s going on in your life?” And I explain to them the way psychedelics work, because a lot of people right now, after Michael Pollan’s book, or reading articles or podcasts, everyone’s like, “Oh, my god, this is like the silver bullet that’s going to cure me,” and I really want to set it up to people to be realistic, because that’s not what happens. But with the right preparation, I do think it’s the most powerful tool that we have. I like to say that psychedelics are neither necessary nor sufficient for healing, but that they’re most powerful tool that we have, when used with correct preparation and support.

Madelyn: What is ketamine?

Will: Ketamine is a medication that any doctor can prescribe right now, and it’s really the most available — really the only available legal psychedelic that we have right now. The reason why it has been available is because ketamine initially was an anesthetic, or it still is an anesthetic, and it’s probably the most commonly used anesthetic in the Western world. There are many reasons for that, but it happens to have this effect on people that is also opening up the unconscious and psychedelic. 

It was like 50 or 20 years ago that there was an orthopedic surgeon that was doing a bunch of procedures and started noticing that there was a chunk of his population of patients who had depression and suicidality that were getting better after these orthopedic procedures that were being done with ketamine. So it was finally correlated that ketamine was helping people with depression and suicidality. That started a whole string of research within psychiatry of ketamine for depression, which is why we’re hearing about it right now. Ketamine definitely really at different doses and different modes of administration is an incredibly powerful psychedelic. That’s a longwinded answer.

Madelyn: It was so good. I’m so curious. This is great. When you say preparation, what are some of the key things that you prepare people with?  Expectations was one of the things that you mentioned, making sure that they don’t think it’s this magic pill, and understanding it’s not even necessary.  It’s doing the work. What are some other things, like aftercare, or just how you treat your body in between sessions that someone may do with you, or anything else?

Will: It’s all of the above within that. I think if someone comes in — most people coming to see me these days have never tried a psychedelic. They’re just really out there, and they’re curious, and they just want to feel better. We kind of call them jokingly the Pollan-ators, people who read Michael Pollan’s book who are now for the first time interested.  They tend to be people who are not already super spiritual or super religious. It’s just kind of your average American person who, again, has not found relief in other — 

Madelyn: Probably someone like — sorry.

Will: No, go ahead.

Madelyn: Like New Yorkers. Imagine, here we are on Madison Avenue where your office is.  I imagine you get some people who are on Wall Street that are seeking happiness.

Will: Yeah. Exactly, or just a relief of pain. Really it’s starting out with talking about what we’ve been talking about, and honestly back to what we started with, which is about alignment.  It’s like, “Okay, we’re here, so how do we align our mind first to our hearts?” I think of this concept that I describe as true values versus perceived values. An example for me in the story that I told you is that I was chasing perceived values. I was chasing faculty positions, degrees from prestigious universities, making X amount of money. They’re things that were so ingrained in me by culture, by society, by family, that I thought those were the things that I actually wanted in my life. 

But what I and most people really in the Western world right now are finding is that we achieve those things, we’re not actually finding happiness. It’s really noticing, “Okay, so what are my true values? Why am I really here? And how do I get through all the fogginess of what family, culture, religion has really strayed from?” It’s describing to people just that. How does the mind become misaligned, and how do we realign it?

For most people that’s like, “Oh, wow, that’s a big deal,” and then for each person we have to actually work our way around that, because these things are so ingrained that it takes a chunk of work just to do that.  But say, for instance, I’m working with someone for a few weeks, and that is just not really — what am I trying to say? I would want someone to be able to have that perspective and buy into that, to be able to then take the next step of actually having a psychedelic experience for them. Madelyn: How do you know when they’ve reached that place? 

Will: I mean, you can just feel it, and interestingly, it’s almost rare that I don’t get to that point with someone. I’m almost thinking, “Does it ever not happen?” I think by nature, by the type of person that comes in and sees me — again, usually most people are coming to see me after they read something that I’ve written or a podcast, so I think they kind of get the gist of who I am beforehand. 

But the reason why that’s important is because it’s saying, “Okay, I buy into this.  I am living a life right now that is not aligned with the way I want to be living it,” so it’s taking ownership basically, and it’s also saying, “The issue is within me, and I can do something about it,” because that’s a big thing, in comparison to saying, “The world is doing something to me,” and that’s the solution then, that the world has to change, which is not something that I’ve gotten to the point where I can do, meaning changing the world around people.

Madelyn: I imagine in the sessions — like we’re in this really beautiful, very colorful office. I imagine that a lot of times when people take psychedelics, it’s a very external experience where they’re really focusing on everything that’s outwards, like beautiful trees, or nature, or friends that they’re with, and then coming in and doing it in a professional atmosphere where you’re being guided and in a session. You’re really focusing inward. You’re really feeling things, feeling the textures of your own heart, and feeling the crevices of your own internal caves and that, instead of this external world, which is a total focus shift for most people who use or take psychedelics.

Will: Yeah, this kind of gets back to what you were saying. What else do we do to prepare? A lot of people who have done psychedelics or have read about psychedelics, a lot of the stuff that’s out there is talking about doing recreational or nonintentional experiences. The experience in the office is much, much different, whether it’s ketamine or MDMA through one of the clinical trials. We always offer an eye mask, and there’s always music, so it’s really the experience is meant to facilitate one going into oneself, instead of an external experience, as you were mentioned. 

I kind of talk about the mind in terms of preparing the person, in terms of potentially rewriting the narrative of the mind.  I also focus on the body, and breathing, and meditating, because I think about the body holding trauma or holding the history of ourselves. In many ways that is not narrative, meaning there isn’t a memory associated with it. 

I’m not sure if you’ve heard of this. There’s an author called Bessel van der Kolk who wrote a book called The Body Keeps the Score, and he’s just one early example of a lot of people who are really honoring that the mind/body connection is a real one, or psychosomatics is something real that’s happening. The reason I’m throwing that in is because I think people can suffer and feel anxious or depressed, and it’s not necessarily correlated with a specific memory. So there are ways and techniques of preparing people for an experience, or helping them during the experience, to facilitate the movement of trauma outside of the body. 

That may not happen through talk therapy, so that’s getting into breathwork, and meditation, and really allowing people to move or to verbalize if they need to during a psychedelic experience, or cry — even something as simple as that.  I was talking to someone last week, a Wall Street person actually, as you had mentioned. We were talking about these traumatic things that happened, and I asked him, “When do you let yourself cry?” He’s like, “Only when I’m alone,” and this guy is, in every other way on paper, incredibly successful.  But he’s like, “Yeah, I essentially don’t allow myself to emote. Society, and family, et cetera, has told me I’m not allowed to do that.”

So that’s part of the preparation, too, just being like, “Okay, well, it’s okay. This is normal to be crying, no matter how successful, no matter what your gender is, et cetera,” meaning because you can have these really intense experiences come up during ketamine, or MDMA, or ayahuasca, but at a certain level you can really fight it. You can choose not to cry. You can choose to not go through a certain experience that you’re having on psychedelics. So really helping people to see that and navigate it when they’re in it is kind of another big piece of preparation. 

Madelyn: So ayahuasca isn’t something that you facilitate then?

Will: I don’t, no.

Madelyn: The one time that I did ayahuasca it was four nights in a row.

Will: Wow.

Madelyn: Yeah, it was four nights in a row. It was a center. It was all certified and everything, and I felt like I was in good hands doing it that way. I ended up not having a great experience at all, and I’ve never really talked about it on the podcast, so this is kind of nice to be able to bring this in here, because a lot of people ask me how it went. I think a big part of it for me was that at the center there were like — I think it was 80 people. 

There were a lot of people, and my body just decided, “Uh-uh.” There’s so much energy that’s being released in others, so we’re not going to — and I was frustrated because I was like, “Damnit.  I flew here. I’m taking this medicine. I want it to work. I hear other people throwing up. I’m ready to throw up.” My body, in all four nights, nothing came out, no purging, no seeing anything or feeling anything, and I was so frustrated. Do you have any thoughts? This is a great opportunity for me to just ask.

Will: We may end up just talking about this the rest of the time. Even though I don’t facilitate ayahuasca, a lot of my clients, if not most at this point, have had their experiences. So I have a lot of experience preparing people, but I’ve also had my own personal experiences with ayahuasca, down in Peru twice or three times.  I had three different sets of experiences where I went down to Peru, and then two in Costa Rica. So I feel like I understand and know the experience very well.  And that’s another thing when people get very interested in psychedelics. I think people talk about psychedelic-assisted therapy, but I think ketamine therapy is very different than MDMA therapy, is very different than ayahuasca. 

So it’s really important, I think, to prepare and pick and choose what’s actually best for me. Is there one of these that’s better for PTSD, or anxiety, or depression? And I do think there are big differences between them, but I think the research and clinical community is just starting to tease that stuff out. But yeah, back to your experience, another thing that — and I’ve spent a lot of time talking to Shipibo healers. Shipibo are the indigenous community within the Peruvian Amazon. 90 percent of the ayahuasca centers out there use Shipibo healers. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to them, and the way it’s being used right now as it’s Westernized looks nothing like what it’s actually used like in their own communities. 

For instance, the Shipibo healers are really plant-medicine healers, so they start with dieting, they call it.  So they eat the plants that they’re essentially trying to build a spiritual connection with, and it takes them at least ten years to actually become an independent practitioner. They start with the plants that are lowest to the ground, so grasses, et cetera, and they eventually work themselves up to this tree that’s really the most holy one for them, which is called Noya Rao. It’s this beautiful tree. I’ve actually seen one, and it reminds me of Avatar.  This tree is massive. It’s tall. It’s gorgeous.  You find one, and then there isn’t another one for hundreds of miles in the Amazon. But the beautiful thing, and the reason I mentioned Avatar, is when this tree drops its leaves, it glows.  they’re bioluminescent, so you go at night, and this tree is just like surrounded by these glowing leaves.

Madelyn: What?  Stop. Oh, my god. 

Will: So ayahuasca is only one plant along that entire path of learning how to be a medicine healer, but we’ve taken it, and we’ve said, “Okay, this is this thing that’s going to be the end-all be-all for  us,” and it’s not like that. The other thing is that they really think about ayahuasca as almost like an X-ray or an MRI. So when they use it in their communities, really it’s only the healer that takes the ayahuasca, not the participant.  So they’ll sit in front of the person. Ayahuasca gives the healer the vision to look within you to say, “This is what’s going on. Let me give you this other plant medicine in the weeks to come, so that you can heal this.” So we’re not even using it anything like they use it.  Like I said, it’s one on one, so this adding 20, 30, 40, 60 people, it’s huge.

Madelyn: 80.

Will: It’s a big, big — I don’t want to say it’s a misuse or a bad way, but it’s definitely changing. You just have to honor that this is not the way they’ve been using it. I’ve also talked to the same healers and said, “Well, okay, you’re telling me the story, and we’re sitting here at this center, and you’re serving it to me,” so they also say, “Yes, it’s definitely still helpful. It is changing.” But there’s a lot of stuff that because of business and capitalism going into the healing field, there’s no doubt that having more people equals more profit. And there is a spiritual opening and energetic opening. 

Back to your saying, “I’m feeling all this stuff, but there’s so much energy here,” that totally makes sense to me. I’m going to be going down to Peru in a couple of weeks, and I’ve really set up for myself that really in the future I’m only going to do it with either very small groups, or one-on-one with the healers themselves, because there’s a depth at which I think when you have a room full of so many people, with so many different struggles — or for a lot of people it’s their first time. It really impacts the energy of the group, and you can only take it so far. 

Or if the group as a whole is struggling with something, that impacts everybody. So your experience is not that uncommon for me to hear about. And I would also say, yeah, maybe there was an intelligence within you consciously and perhaps unconsciously that was saying, “This is not the time to let this it because it’s not spiritually or emotionally safe for me to let this out right now.”

Madelyn: Yeah. There was a lot of emphasis before we did the ceremonies on what’s probably going to happen also.  So rather than, “Let’s all just lay down and set our own intentions, and let’s do a big intention ceremony and then go into the journey,” it was like, “A might happen. B might happen. You might see C. You might feel D.” All these expectations were being built of what everyone that had come to the facility had seen before, what they experienced, how they were healed, all these things. 

So then I went in having 15 things that might happen. I might see an alien. I might feel a color I’ve never even seen before, and I’ll be feeling it, and embody it, and then walk away like it. All these things, like I might wrangle in the moon. And then I lay down on here, and I just everyone else having these experiences, and then the comparison starts.  I think on one level there’s most likely — I believe in my body’s intelligence. I do think that there was a part of my body that physically just like wrapped around itself and said, “Not here, not now.”  But then also mentally there was some closure happening around frustration, things not going the way that I wanted them to go. 

Overall it was an interesting ford of that, and it took me to some places. It was really during the day that I went to those places of unpacking, “What’s happening?”  Rather than at night. But I did learn things. I learned about the way that I would feel best to be in ceremony doing any kind of plant medicine moving forward. I’m just curious if you have a simple way to match the different types of medicine with what, because you had said for depression there’s a different thing, and for anxiety there’s a different thing.

Will: Yeah.

Madelyn: So what do you recommend for the different symptoms?

Will: I’m just trying to think back to your story though because there was something that was coming up for me. Maybe I’ll remember it later.

Madelyn: Yeah, if it comes to you.

Will: We know that your average American is Christian and doesn’t have, say, a deep spiritual belief into reincarnation, for instance, or past-life trauma, or that we can connect to dead relatives, et cetera. So when I think about plant medicines or psychedelics that are palatable to your average American, I think of things like MDMA. MDMA to me is number one, because MDMA, the way I like to say it, it stays on the plane of this reality, meaning from this birth to your current time. I think at certain doses or certain people, depending how open they are, can connect to past lives, or they have visual experiences on MDMA.  But the vast majority of people don’t. 

Again, so if we have these people post-Michael Pollan who are very interested in psychedelics, they just want to feel less depressed and less anxious. They don’t care to be vomiting and purging in the middle of the Amazon, taking ayahuasca, and then seeing this panther, and the panther converts into your great-grandmother, and that reflects this.  It’s a lot for someone who just wants to feel less anxious and less depressed. So to me, on that end of the spectrum of just ease of just someone who wants to feel better is MDMA and then low-dose ketamine. On the other end of the spectrum you have ayahuasca. 

You have 5 MeO DMT, or you have a smoked version of ayahuasca, just regular. It’s called N-DMT, where you will have a spiritual experience for the most part, depending on the set and setting, if the dose is right, et cetera. And those experiences are incredibly beautiful. I think they’re very profound, but in the beginning of my healing, I had some of those powerful experiences, and for me, I was like, “Oh, my god, this is so divine. I believe in God,” et cetera. But I’m like, “Wait, I’m still feeling anxious most days. I’m depressed. I’m losing my temper with my friends. I’m still being an asshole. How about I just work on this stuff that’s bothering me in everyday life?” 

So I kind of put that to the side, and then was kind of really just continuing with psychotherapy. I also have had ketamine experiences legally here in the United States which were very profound. And then once that stuff, everyday life, just became really less painful, now I kind of rarely get — I mean, I’ll have a few hours here or there that I’m depressed or something, but I don’t actually feel — it’s nothing like the weeks before that I used to have.  Naturally what happened for me is that as I started just feeling better with this life that I have in front of me, then the bigger questions about spirituality came in. 

So then I started dipping back into ayahuasca, et cetera. It became really about consciousness, why we’re here. What’s my purpose as a human being? That’s kind of to say that I think ketamine and MDMA is really good to start with, and then as people do their journeys, what I’ve noticed is that almost all those people end up getting really interested in spirituality and their meaning of life, et cetera.

Madelyn: What are your — well, this is a different question. When you said connecting deeper with your own purpose, what do you feel like your purpose is right now?

Will: It’s interesting.  I think what it really feels like is that I’m here to help other people. It’s interesting, because at this last ayahuasca retreat that I went to in Peru, they actually had us write down our calling and work on our calling. I would say my calling is that people embody Spirit. That could obviously be broken down in many different ways, but really that they embody the uniqueness that is within them, and they’re able to manifest that out in the world, whether it’s their romantic life, friendship, work life, et cetera, but to help people essentially live their life the way they want to live it, and to get through a lot of the distractions that we have in front of us, based on our experiences.  So I see myself as being someone who can really facilitate that for people.

Madelyn: Yeah, distractions.

Will: I’ve got one or two still left.

Madelyn: What are they?

Will: Yeah, I still have a lot of things that I’m working through, but I definitely think fear is a big one for me, in certain specific aspects of things.  I think these stem from my religious upbringing in the Jehovah’s Witness Church. I think — why am I hesitating? It’s really, say, around dating and sexual experiences, because I was talking to a friend of mine recently actually, and she was raised Jehovah’s Witness, and it made a big difference, talking to someone who was raised the same way, because you’re essentially taught literally that premarital sex, fantasy, et cetera, will take you to hell, and that these are the work of the devil. 

We were talking about the mind/body difference.  For me, my mind knows that none of that is true, but in some ways my body still holds the history of those sorts of teachings. I’m finding that’s an aspect of my life where still I can hesitate or not live what I would call within my integrity, or not say the things that I want to say a woman because in the back of my mind there’s some hesitation because of this history of the religion I was brought up in.

Madelyn: Gosh, yeah. 

Will: There, you got it.

Madelyn: Thank you for sharing that, because I have a feeling a lot of people are going to relate to that, even if they’re not Jehovah’s Witness. I was raised Baptist, and it was very, very similar. I always remember them talking about in sermons like, “Stay out of the fire place.” This square like from my chest down to the top of my thighs is the fire place, and don’t go into that, because you’ll get burned. Don’t let anyone else touch it because they’ll get burned. They’ll die. They’ll go to hell. And you don’t either, and I had the True Love Waits ring, so I wore that ring saying I was married to God until I was married to a man. I had thought — 

Will: So you stopped wearing it?

Madelyn: I stopped wearing it long ago. I still have it because it’s a beautiful ring.  It used to be my mom’s, her little pinky ring. It’s really pretty. But yeah, I have memories of being in church and wearing that ring on my finger, and then seeing a cute guy in the church sitting in the pew, and me taking my ring off because I didn’t want him to think I was married. And then I would put it back on whenever I would have lunch with my mom or something like that. Yeah, those beliefs are so deep in the body. 

My past several years, the places that I’ve been called to go do my work in has been, of course, sexual tantric work. That’s where I’m starting, mostly energetics, so feeling sexuality through eye-gazing, through eye contact. That’s been so deep for me.  In some ways that’s been how I’ve healed in a way my body can handle, because the body’s keeping the score. And if it’s like, “All clothes off,” that’s just too much for me. Not to say that’s exactly where I want to be, but that does feel like the edge next for me, being more liberated in my sexuality. 

And I feel, too, the body keeping the score around that.  I was just having a couple of client calls, and both of those women were raised Christian, the same thing.  Pleasure is a bad word.  Female pleasure, owning your pleasure, being caught in sex shops — bad, bad, bad thing. And just feeling like their parents are watching them from around the corner. It’s so wild how that is the mentality that is so seared into so many of us here in the Western Hemisphere, whereas around other places in the world, so much liberation exists.

Will: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a huge one. You’re right. It’s interesting, because yeah, this isn’t just a Jehovah’s Witness thing.  It’s definitely a Christian culture thing, which we are very much in. Related to the body and also the question of how to select a psychedelic, that is a place that I have found a huge source of healing of the body, is ayahuasca, which I don’t feel is as easily present with MDMA or ketamine, for instance. You were talking about hearing and watching people around you vomit, and I like to think of it as purging. 

Purging I think of as like the removal of the body of these traumas, the memories, the energy, and really letting it move through, because it kind of stays stuck within us in the fascia — which I’ll just throw that out there, just in case people are interested. I mean, that we can talk another few hours by itself, but there is a way, and ayahuasca seems to be very unique in that if one prepares well and knows how to work with the medicine, that really you can remove these traumas, and I have not found another tool that is as powerful as ayahuasca. 

And that’s where the preparation is really important, I would say. There’s only two centers really in the world that I recommend, that I think really understand ayahuasca healing, of all the ones that are out there.  Because also, just because you take ayahuasca again, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to have a purging experience where you will remove this from the body. Or sometimes if you’re not actually connecting the purging with the experience that you’re having, you could purge and actually not move the stuff out of the body.

Madelyn: Because you don’t believe it?

Will: It’s not connected.  It just becomes this — you can purge and just suffer. A lot of people hate the purging. Or there are some people out there right now that are adding other medicines to ayahuasca to try to limit the purging.  Or there’s this pharmaceutical company right now that’s working on a molecule to try to remove the physical aspects, they said, of the DMT experience. DMT is the psychedelic that’s in ayahuasca, to try to get rid of that.  But I’m like, “No, no, no. Let’s not do that. That’s looking at it very Western,” again, being just a mind culture, like, “Let’s heal the mind and we’re okay,” but it’s like, “No, the physical aspect is very important.” Yeah, that gets into body stuff, which I think is really, really important.

Madelyn: What are the centers that you recommend?

Will: One is called Soltara, which is in Costa Rica.

Madelyn: I have a friend who you may even — do you know Hayley Rosenberg [phonetic] or Rosebud?  I’m forgetting. She is there right now.

Will: Hayley?

Madelyn: Hayley.  She has a podcast too. She’s there interviewing people for her podcast, or for them.  I don’t know exactly what she’s doing, but I can say hello. Hi, Hayley.

Will: Hi. Yeah, I’ve been down there twice, and there, to me, I think is — they’ve only been open like a year, but I’m sure most of their retreats are going to be full very soon.  But I think they are the most complete center beginning to end. Getting there is easy. They do a full medical responsible check, and they have a doctor on call. It’s also very clean, so nice flushing toilets and warm showers. I think for someone coming from the United States, I think it’s important to make things as easy as possible your first time doing this. 

And the other place is called Niwe Rao Xobo, which the spelling I can give you later if you’re interested, but that one’s in Peru. That one I think of as almost taking it to the next level. You can do plant diets there, so not just drinking ayahuasca, but you can kind of build connections with other plants and stuff.

Madelyn: Oh, that’s interesting.

Will: That one I kind of recommend to people if I’ve worked with them and they’ve gone to, say, the center in Costa Rica, and then they want to kind of take their healing to another level. I ask them to check that one out.

Madelyn: What do you think about people who are like, “I love shrooms. I’m going to start hosting my own shroom parties, and inviting my friends over, and doing ceremonies.”  Do you think that’s pretty irresponsible?

Will: It depends. I mean, I think about it as — I don’t know.  I think of like five different uses for psychedelics.  What we’re talking about I put in the category of healing. I also think psychedelics can legitimately be used for recreation. I think they could also be used for spiritual development, enlightenment. I think of them as also tools for human potential, so Silicon Valley, how can I think through ideas and develop new — ?

Madelyn: Creativity.

Will: Creativity essentially

Madelyn: I like that.

Will: And the four is people use it as an escape, basically to not be in touch. I think any of those are uses that exist. I just think people should be clear, when they’re going into it, what they’re doing and what they’re providing for people — meaning if people get together intentionally with a group of friends, and they’re like, “Every week we’re just going to meet, say, for two or three hours on a Sunday night, and we’re not going to drink.  We’re just going to get together and talk about what’s going on in life, and be authentic with each other. And, say, once a month during that, or once every two months, we do something like MDMA together.” That’s something I think can be incredibly powerful, and very intentional, and has the healing potential.

But I think that’s not the way most people are doing it right now. Education of the public is really important to me in terms of the unfolding of psychedelics, because it used to be like one big community that was very heart-centered, and now you’ve got pharma companies that have already come in. Big money from the marijuana industry is coming in. So it’s starting to kind of just take a form of its own. Again, they’re powerful tools, but to really have them work, we need to know how to use them.

Madelyn: Respect them. That’s really what I’m getting from a lot of this, is just respecting the lineage, respecting the unfolding of the process, respecting the care that needs to go into doing all of this.  Yeah, respecting the plants, just respecting all of it. 

Will: Yeah.

Madelyn: Is there any last thing that you’d like to share, maybe about your sessions, how people can touch base with you and work with you, moving forward from here?

Will: Yeah. I mean, my website is just my name, willsiumd.com, and I have an Instagram account that I keep public for education and that sort of thing.  So either of those two places. But I’ll be moving Southern California and Los Angeles by 2020.

Madelyn: So people can work with you now from Los Angeles by coming into your office there?

Will: Yeah. My practice is generally full, but in 2020 I’m going to be doing more workshops, retreats.  I’m really moving into a space of being able to try to help more people, because this year was very beautiful for me, but also I tend to be full, because I see people weekly.

Madelyn: That feels so abundant, like, “Well, my practice is full.”  It just feels so good.

Will: Yeah, it feels really good, but I’ve also learned to see, “Okay, well, this is what is being put in front of me. This is what the universe is saying. I have too many people right now asking to be my clients, that I can’t meet the demand. Or, say, practitioners that want to learn how to do and how to work with psychedelics,” so I’m trying to think, “Okay, how do I structure my life to meet that need?”  So that’s been moving into workshops and retreats now, to be able to impact more people, and then maybe perhaps also throwing training in there for professionals that want to learn how to use this stuff.

Madelyn: Amazing. 2020 is going to be a good year.

Will: Exactly. Yeah, good things are coming. 

Madelyn: I’ll make sure that I have the Instagram and the link to your website in all of the show notes that we talked about this at maddymoon.com/will-siu.

Will: All right, I have my own little spot on your website.

Madelyn: Yes, and the transcripts will be there, so everything will be typed out. I’m so stoked about these transcripts. I’ve never done transcripts before, and I just think it’s a really cool thing to have a whole conversation typed out.

Will: Awesome.

Madelyn: Before we wrap up, we have one last thing, and that is the divine deep-dive round where we ask deep questions in a divine fast way.

Will: All right.

Madelyn: So, question number one. If you were an inanimate object, what would you be and why?

Will: Deep-dive, fast? I would be a plant, a cactus.

Madelyn: I knew you were going to say cactus. Swear to god, I was just thinking — but isn’t a cactus alive?

Will: Yeah. See, that’s what’s why I’m like — you’re talking to this person who is really into consciousness.  I think almost any — 

Madelyn: Maybe you’d be a cactus pot. 

Will: A pot?  I mean, yeah, I guess if it’s — 

Madelyn: So you could hold the cactus.

Will: If I could design it, and it’s like a custom-made really healing look.

Madelyn: Totally.

Will: Okay, I’ll take it.

Madelyn: What’s the best investment you’ve made in the past year under $10,000?

Will: Into myself, investment into my own healing, whether it’s — 

Madelyn: What was the investment?

Will: It’s really in the last year my own psychotherapy.

Madelyn: What archetype, any archetype — ?

Will: The Jester.

Madelyn: The Jester?

Will: That’s an easy one for me.

Madelyn: I like that. You didn’t even need me to finish my question.

Will: Yeah.  Did I answer it?

Madelyn: What?

Will: Did I answer your question?

Madelyn: Oh, yeah, you did. It’s perfect. Who do you consider to be your teacher?

Will: Right now it’s this man named Ron Young. It’s interesting. Yeah, he’s my spiritual teacher.  When I think of legit, like my greatest teacher — he’s a guy who has a website that looks like it was made in the ’90s.  He has no social media. He wears like dad jeans and T-shirts. 

Madelyn: Aren’t they the best?  I love those people.

Will: This guy is just like the least assuming person, but the most powerful human I’ve ever encountered. Yeah, he’s provided me lots of gifts.

Madelyn: My next question is — do you take off your necklaces every night, or do you leave them on?

Will: What do you think?

Madelyn: I think you take them off every night.

Will: I don’t actually.

Madelyn: You don’t? You leave them on? You shower with them, everything?

Will: Absolutely. Everything.

Madelyn: How many are you wearing?

Will: Four. The rest of my jewelry I take off, except my nose ring. Yeah, four. Three are from my travels, and one I just started wearing recently. This was my father’s before he passed away. He left it to me, but I just started wearing it about a month ago, because it has — I mean, it’s gold, and there’s a lot about allowing myself to have gifts, like we were talking about, the impact of religion and stuff.  So I just actually started allowing myself to wear gold, so this is a very meaningful piece to me, because he always used to wear it.

Madelyn: I really like it. I like that it pops. It adds a little something to the other earthy feel.

Will: Thank you. Yeah, they always stay with me for sure.

Madelyn: Okay, two more questions. What is one book everyone needs to go out and buy right now?

Will: I’m going to say — oh, god, there’s three.  If I say one — 

Madelyn: You can say three.

Will: Okay, Eastern Body, Western Mind, I think, if anyone’s looking at doing their own healing.  And I’m a really bad reader in general, so I read The Alchemist, which most people have read, but this was like two weeks ago, and I read it in like two days, and it’s the first time in two days that I’ve read — like I’ve been so excited about something. Most people have told me, “Oh, I read that in high school,” but right now as I’m continuing my spiritual journey, it just meant a lot to read something like that. And the third one is a book called Conversations with God. I’m not sure if you’ve read about it or heard about it, but that’s been one of the most powerful things I’ve read in the last few years.

Madelyn: Do you read it every day? Isn’t it one of those that it’s like you — it’s a new day, a devotional-type thing?

Will: I listened to the audiobook, which is great. It’s just so full of enlightenment and knowledge, but God takes the form of both a man and a woman in the book.

Madelyn: Yes, yes, yes.

Will: Being able to even hear — and they switch back and forth between a man’s voice and a woman’s voice in the audiobook. 

Madelyn: Ah, healing.

Will: I’ve gone like two or three times through that thing. It’s very beautiful.

Madelyn: I love when people are like, “Oh, my Goddess,” or they just say something like they prayed to God.  She said — I started doing that more and more this year, and it just feels so good because God definitely absolutely 100 percent is nongendered, but hearing she more feels — yes, we need to move in that direction.

Will: Yeah, absolutely.

Madelyn: She’s so powerful. We love you, Goddess. Thank you so much for coming onto the Mind Body Musings podcast and sharing all of this really, really insightful, creative, informative information with my audience and with me. I can’t wait to follow along your journey and what happens in California.

Will: All right. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me. It’s an honor.

Madelyn: Everyone, like I said, you can go head on over to the show notes, maddymoon.com. You can get the transcripts. You can get all of the links we talked about, including the links to the books he mentioned. And let us know what you thought about this episode by leaving a comment on the show notes or heading on over to Instagram. We will see you next week for another episode.