Parenting, Polyamory, and Accepting Paradox

Podcast Highlights

• The power of a group psychedelic experience.
• Can psychedelics allow us to see the future?
• How plant medicines can help us be better parents.
• Hanging out in victim mode vs. choosing to see blessings.
• Breaking the generational curse, tapping into our inner wild person, and taking good care of our kingdoms.
• When the child becomes the teacher.
• The different ways our masculine and feminine sides speak to us.
• How polyamory is similar to psychedelic experiences—and how to navigate open relationships thoughtfully and ethically.
• Reintegrating tribal lifestyle through intentional communities.
• The resilience of humanity, handling paradox, and overcoming our judgmental instincts.
• Why the meek will inherit the earth.

Show Links

1. Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, by Jeremy Narby
2. Iron John: A Book about Men, by Robert Bly
3. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette
4. Ram Dass
5. Temazcal ceremony
6. Soltara
7. Walking With Bears: On Bridges to Earth's New Era, by Will Taegel
8. Carl Jung
9. Aubrey Marcus’ Fit for Service
10. Nassim Taleb
11. Mary Margrave
12. Eckhart Tolle
13. Onnit
14. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
15. A Little Book on the Human Shadow, by Robert Bly
16. Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
17. Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free, by Wednesday Martin
18. The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship: A Toltec Wisdom Book, by Don Miguel Ruiz
19. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships, by Marshall B. Rosenberg
20. Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment, by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks
21. More Than Two: An Ethical Guide to Polyamory, by Franklin Veaux
22. Geoff Hanzlik
23. Santo Daime
24. Kilindi Iyi
25. Graham Hancock
26. Sam Harris
27. Gregg Braden
28. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert
29. Zach Bush
30. Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm
31. Food, Inc.
32. Roam Ranch
33. Alan Levinovitz
34. Falco Tarassaco and Damanhur
35. Huachuma
36. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, by Charles Eisenstein
37. Buckminster Fuller
38. Fantastic Fungi
39. HeartMath
40. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt
41. The Hopi prophecy
42. Göbekli Tepe
43. Kyle and Natasha’s Instagram
44. Kyle’s podcast

Podcast Transcript

0:00:00 Paul Austin: Kyle Kingsbury. Welcome to the podcast, man.

0:00:02 Kyle Kingsbury: Hell yeah, brother. It's good to see you.

0:00:02 PA: It's good to sit down from you again.

0:00:04 KK: Yes.

0:00:05 PA: Back here in the office.

0:00:06 KK: I like this. And I got a little refresher, a good night of sleep, so I'm good to go.

0:00:19 PA: Yeah, you're good? I was like... I was talking with Ben about this. I was like, "Man." I just felt like... I was coming off a couple of sleepless nights. I know you just had a child...

0:00:19 KK: Mm-hmm.

0:00:20 PA: I mean, that's huge. Let's start there. July 4th.

0:00:20 KK: Yeah, that was fourth of July. We're now officially one week away. I think we recorded Wednesday, right?

0:00:28 PA: Mm-hmm.

0:00:28 KK: So about four days after. Yeah, it's funny because... It always reminds me of when my brain is off and I know I'm not my best self, either before a podcast or presentation or any of that and I somehow step up, I always think of Will Ferrell in Old School when he says, "I don't know what snapped over me." He's like, "I don't know what came over me. I don't know what happened." And he's like, falls and faints right after. Yeah, we did my podcast, and then we were gonna do yours, and you're like, "Cool, man. We got... That's great timing. I got plenty." And I was like, "I can't. We gotta reschedule."

0:00:57 PA: I'm out, I'm out.

0:00:58 KK: I'm done. I'm done. Or I don't know if my brain just... The second I had a break, it just fell, like, "Uh." That's a weird thing to consider too, when you consider how much demand there is of energy from the brain. So if you've been sitting all day working and you're like, "I don't know why I'm so tired." It's like, "Well, yeah. You've been using something that consumes... "

0:01:22 PA: What is it? I think it's like...

0:01:22 KK: A very high volume...

0:01:22 PA: A third or...

[overlapping conversation]

0:01:26 KK: I'm not gonna be good at quoting anything right now. Don't ask for statistics. Normally, I like to geek out and rattle off stuff, but I got none of that now.

0:01:34 PA: We'll just have to connect to the heart then, that's all it is.

0:01:35 KK: Yeah. That's it. There no random access memory right now. Yeah.

0:01:39 PA: Yeah, that's done. That's a done thing. So Wolf...

0:01:43 KK: Little Wolf is here. She's our little girl. Bear is five now. So we got two. Yeah, really powerful. It's powerful to bring a girl into the world.

0:01:54 PA: How do you choose their names? What kind of... I'd love to hear about that process.

0:02:00 KK: Yeah, yeah. They're different names for sure. I think most people can get along with Bear for a boy and maybe Wolf for a boy. We actually had boys' clothes sent as a gift for Wolf. And then we're like, "No, she's a girl." And then they're like, "Oh, my God. I'm so sorry." We didn't really pick the names. I've had multiple shared experiences with my wife in Ayahuasca, something I read about in DNA and The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby, was that shared experience, a shared vision. And I was like, "Woah. No way." And I read about that before hand, and also the ability to tune into other people's energy. And sometimes it's not yours.

0:02:41 KK: So like my first experience of that, I was on a Native American reservation and I just got filled with rage, and it was so out of nowhere. I was like, "What is this? Is this mine? No, it's not mine." And I could see directly across from me in the circle, this 15-year-old kid just pacing, gritting his teeth and like just really processing rage. And what was cool... And I've learned later, their business is not my business. I'm not the healer and I'm not the shaman and I don't need to get in their stuff. But at that point early on, I asked, "Where is this coming from?" And I immediately knew it was from his father. And what was crazy about that ceremony is, I had one of my best friends that I grew up with since I was 12 to the left of my wife, my wife Natasha, me and a five-year-old kid next to me. And all four of us...

0:03:27 PA: This is in the Amazon or...

0:03:29 KK: No, this is on a reservation.

0:03:30 PA: Okay, okay.

0:03:32 KK: An undisclosed location in the Americas. [laughter] Which is still a legal gray area. But the four of us all had father experiences. My good friend that I grew up with on the far left, he had to process stuff with his father so he could know this is why I need to step into fatherhood. And he had been serial dating and avoiding any real commitments because he was afraid to be a father. My wife, it was her first ceremony, and she lived the whole day with her biological father who killed himself when she was one. And the way he showed up was as a brown grizzly bear. And as she walked towards him, she became a bear. And what's cool about her visionary experience that day was that every time she came out of it to purge her anger and to purge her rage around him leaving and choosing to leave, she would go back, laying down with her eyes closed and the vision would pick up where it left off. I've never had a continuing vision like that, and that's her only one, too but the whole day she got to spend with her father. And for me, it was my first of many times processing a bunch of stuff with my dad.

0:04:41 KK: And this boy to the right of me, his father left him when he was really young, and he only spoke Spanish. So as the guides came over, they would speak to him in Spanish, and my first thought... It was only my second experience, was like, "Look, this kid's gonna take me out of my experience. I'm not gonna be able to drop in and have visions and all that with him wailing next to me." And then it was like, "Oh, this is our experience." And that was a very important lesson that I think people can miss out on if they're only used to the small groups or to solo journeys as the shared experience, which people that are familiar with these medicines understand, there are many parallels from the personal experience to... Within the medicine that they experience personally, without the medicine our experience in life. And I think kids... It's funny that we'll... Bear's five and he's learning what it's like to not be an only child. That concept that everything we do in life is a shared experience, the ceremony of life is our ceremony. It's not my ceremony.

0:05:45 KK: But because we have the self, we look at through the eyes of me, me, me, as a child, and then we grow into moving past that, into being connected, not just to ourselves, but to our family, to all of humanity, to the Earth itself, to all our relations, which we talked about on my show. So yeah, we all connected to that dead energy, but I could really sense that was, that's what that kid across from me who was enraged was going through. It was all processing with his dad, and then I went back into my own experience. And of course, the five-year-old next to me didn't ruin anything. He was perfect. He was perfect medicine. But, at a certain point, Bear... Circling back to the original question, both Tasha and I had a vision that was shared and we went in a closing circle... Of course, we didn't know. We weren't talking during it. And she started sharing that she had a vision of me holding a child in my lap and her holding the two of us. And I was like, "Whoa. I don't mean to cut you off, but I had the exact same vision." A month later, same place, same vision, except now I see it's a boy. Mind you, we're just dating. She's living with me in my mom's garage. There's...

0:06:52 PA: Oh, so this is...

0:06:53 KK: No plans of being married. This is like...

0:06:55 PA: These is like early days in your relationship.

0:06:57 KK: This is early. This is like a year into being together. It's like, "Whoa. This is forward thinking." And there's only been a few times where I've really seen the future. And you could say, "Well, that's just self-fulfilling prophecy," or whatever. It doesn't matter. I saw the future... One possible future that did actually come true, and that's happened a handful of times between mushrooms and Ayahuasca, but that really... We really processed right then what it meant to be a dad like, "Oh, shit. This is real." And I had all the fears coming up like, I don't have medical insurance. I live in a garage. I have no savings. Is the time right? And then that snowballs and moves away from me. And of course it is, there's no perfect time to have kids. And you guys are ready, and Bear is ready to come here. And it was like this... He basically told us his name. And a couple of years later, after he was born, I've had visions of having three kids, two boys and a girl. And for whatever reason, the mind had constructed a narrative that it would be two boys and then the girl last.

0:08:00 KK: And I was in a ceremony and this soul came through and it was in pure darkness. I looked down into my mat and pure black, didn't see anything, just sensed the presence of another being. And this is out there for people who haven't done mess like this. I fully acknowledge that, but this being came in and it told me, "I'm going to be your daughter. I'm coming next. I'm your next child and my name will be Wolf." And I was just like, "Woah." And then a flood of pink, like this pink warming energy that was very soothing and calm, which is to me just... It opened the flood gates. I was sobbing. And that was the first of many communications that I've had with her prior to her arrival. That was in 2016. She took her time coming here.

0:08:45 KK: And another piece of wisdom before I stop rambling was just that there was a lot of processing with that. We had a miscarriage in between. A lot of hard stuff, and I couldn't figure out for the longest time. Even though in many ways, the medicine... Different medicines would tell me in different ways, this is not up to you. It's up to her on when she comes, and there is an importance to that timing. And that's something I've had to remember and relay to my wife during a time like this where... She's cool. You're born on the fourth of July. You're also smack-dab in the middle of COVID-19s resurgence, race riots, like this reconciliation of our past that can no longer be ignored. Huge economic impacts, just huge, huge, massive things on a global scale happening. Why show up now? Why bring a kid into the world now? Maybe that's on purpose. Maybe that is supposed to happen, and this isn't me just saying like, "Oh, she's here to save the world and bring 500 years of peace." It has nothing to do with that, but...

0:09:48 PA: The divine child.

0:09:50 KK: We all have our own missions in life. We all find our own purpose, and it's not up for me to decide that for her. But it is very interesting and peculiar why she would choose this time to come. And I just understand that there is something greater behind that, that I maybe can't wrap my head around with a monkey mind, but I can just let go of needing to understand. Yeah.

0:10:10 PA: I listened to one of your old podcast with Peter Attia when you were really opened up about your plant medicine use, about your story, where you came from and I'd love to just go a little bit deeper into that. What was your model of being a father that you grew up with? And how have you, through plant medicine and through all of your own work, 'cause it's been intense for you to heal that and to come through that and to evolve into this sort of model of masculine, mature masculinity. I've read Iron John by Robert Bly and King, Warrior, Lover, Magician, this archal type of stuff, and I remember we spoke maybe just 10 to 15 minutes a few years ago. I'd started this retreat center in Synthesis and we just briefly talked.

0:10:55 PA: I remember being like you and Aubrey, and what you guys have built here on and what you're representing and embodying on a cultural level is this sort of integration of masculinity, speaking openly and honestly. Meeting you and being with you, it's almost intimidating because you're just like... You're a giant in so many ways, physically and so intelligent, and you bring the whole package. And I'd love to hear more about what has been your process of coming into fatherhood and how has plant medicine helped you to accept and own that responsibility so you can help to create this path for Wolf and for Bear, and for... Those are your two children, but you have so many other people that you're influencing through the podcast and through your public work. It's a huge responsibility and it's a huge burden at times as well, I imagine.

0:11:45 KK: Yeah, it's interesting because there's... Shit, there's so much that I've been grabbing recently. I'd read Iron John a couple of years ago, and I only recently read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover which is... I can't recommend that book enough. I'm re-reading it with Tasha right now, because of course that also has a lot to lend to females. Females entering relationship, females that have not seen the noble king or the peaceful warrior, have seen the shadow sides of this archetypes being expressed through all of the world that we've known. So there's definitely a lot there that I've really taken on recently that I think has been massive for me. If I had to say one book, it's funny as I'm five years into being a dad with Bear, if there was one book that gave me a lens of which to view the world more appropriately in terms of being a better father, it's King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. There's no question. It's at the top of the list. That said, the long journey here... I think I grew up like a lot of people did. My parents fought all the time, and there was... We got spanked and things like that, and there was some stuff that was a bit rougher than that physically that went on.

0:13:06 KK: I think the most damaging thing was that I didn't know when my parents were gonna blow up. They were both very short fuses, two rams, two fireballs. No one softened, no one had a water energy. No one could apologize until it was too late. And it was only a matter of time before something would set one of them off or I would, by being a kid, set my dad off, which would then set my mother off in protecting me and then I would be blamed for being a kid. And that was some heavy shit to work on. Again, in saying all this, and this is something that I try to convey to people, I can hang out in victim mode. I can talk about all that happened and hold that or I can see the blessing in all that and I can see what did that actually give me? Everything is a teacher. Like Ram Dass says, "Your guru is everywhere." It's god in drag. So that gave me fire, and fire led me to football. Football led me to mixed martial arts. Mixed martial arts led me to wanting to actually take care of myself because I very much lived this polarized life of perfectly healthy, perfectly clean, meditating, breathwork, reading, in fight camps and then after the fight, total debauchery. Give me an 8-ball, let me shove three pills of molly in my ass and fucking go until the sun comes up.

0:14:29 KK: Like just... And eat shit, drink, shit, watch shit TV, not meditate in between fights, all those things. And I had a coach who was Mexican and Native American, and he would bring me to the reservation and we would do sweat lodges, traditional Mayan sweat lodges, Temazcals. And he'd sing and he'd worked with the Lakota Sun Dance and he knew the plants inside and out. Then he started working with me for the first time with psilocybin in the sweats and doing a lot of work with that. And then eventually, Ayahuasca, and that just cracked me wide open. And at that point, somewhere between 2012 and 2014, when I actually retired, I had an injury and I got to work with him quite a bit on the other side of that coin, not just as a boxing coach, but really in nature with the medicine. Fighting became less important to me, but I still had all these gifts from fighting. I knew how to take care of myself, I knew how to meditate, I knew how to do yoga, I knew the importance of those things, 'cause I could feel the difference between how I felt in my daily... In fight camp and how I felt in my daily out of fight camp. And really just how to take care of myself.

0:15:40 KK: And then, of course, the medicine peels back layers of onions and peels back more and there's always more. But something I got recently was... So I was frustrated. We went to Soltara last year and my 25th Ayahuasca ceremony, I spent the entire night reliving every hard memory of my dad, specifically. And this is a guy who I think my relationship is largely healed, we've done Ayahuasca together. My wife and I led him in a mushroom ceremony. That's my dude, he's awesome. And there was still so much more to process. And so it was on a microdose of psilocybin, working with a guided experience, where this messaging started coming in that, I can't look at it as more weeds to pull. I'm not weeding the garden of this stuff from my past. Those seeds have been planted in me, and they are... Those seeds, when I water them and give them sunlight and give them fresh air and the right soil and environment, that's when they burst into being. And the burst into being is the flowering of my consciousness. It's for me and it's well beyond the need to try to excavate all the crap that happened.

0:16:53 KK: It's like, "Oh, there's more? Awesome. Let's look at it. Don't run away from it. Let me process that. How does this make me feel now? In what ways does this impact me in my life now?" And one of the guys that I've been working with, Dr. Will Taegel, who wrote a brilliant book, Walking with Bearshttps://amzn.to/3kjXUrN

, has a PhD in physics and a PhD in psychology, also Native American, also worked quite a bit with indigenous cultures and really blends and marries the two, modern science with ancient wisdom. From a psychology side, from the union side talking about, we all have these sub-selves. And every time I choose, with my son, to parent in a different way, the way it didn't happen to me, the more gentle way, but still firm, that little guy inside gets to witness it. 'Cause it's still there. And they talk about there's a king... Well, the boy psyche is always in there, that first pyramid does not leave you. The large masculine, positive masculine psychology that goes above that, that's there too, but every time I do something positively where I don't react in a knee-jerk reaction way or with rage or with severe discipline to my son, that small self inside gets to witness that. And that is healing, going forward. And it's not even something I consciously think about.

0:18:12 KK: Once you become aware... Once I've become aware and gained more emotional intelligence, you know what's right. Like, "Damn, I really wanna spank my kid," or "I really just wanna throw him in his room and say, 'Hang out here for 30 minutes, I'm tired of you'." And if I don't respond that way, and if I hold him and I sit with him and I get on his level and we communicate and he calms down and we take 60 breaths together, that's magic sauce. Like if I can get through to him that way and start to imprint on him emotional intelligence as a five-year-old, that's a huge win. That's something I never had. I only started getting outlets through football where I could head butt somebody or tackle somebody and outlets in fighting. I didn't have other tools then. Fighting gave me some other tools, but I didn't really have those tools as a kid. And so to be able to give that to him now, it's huge. And not just for him, but for me too. So I think about those... It's odd because the plants, as you know, they work in the ceremony for sure, but they work well outside of that.

0:19:16 KK: And as Jung says, when you're on track, those synchronicities start popping up left and right. And being a part of Fit for Service, we get people all the time that are like, "Dude, that's amazing. Check out this book." And I'll check out that book and if it resonates, it's like, "Oh, this is exactly what I was supposed to read right now, and it's solving all these riddles and keeping me on track." And one thing leads to the next, and it kinda just bounces back and forth, and anyone who's a parent knows it's... You never actually figure it out. There's no end to it. Anahata is a lady that I've worked with and a brilliant woman out in Sedona that we take out all the crew and Fit for Service gets to meet her when we're out there and definitely a medicine woman in her own right. She's got twin kids, a boy and a girl, who are now in the early 20s. And she's like, "You don't figure it out. It's just a stage. You figure out that stage and bam they're in the next stage." She's like, "I don't have it figured out. I'm now trying to help a young man who's in college figure out what to do in a world that's changing rapidly, and how to be a man, as a woman." She's gotta help inform him what the divine masculine looks like, but from a woman and that's tricky.

0:20:30 PA: Very tricky.

0:20:30 KK: Very tricky. And yeah, there's just so much there. It's like that never-ending process. One thing I try to keep in mind, too, and I think it's really important if parents do this, is to really look at your kids as your teachers. And I've had that download come through so many times on medicine, it's unequivocal. It's not a belief, it's a knowing, and they are our teachers. All you have to do is think about how frustrating it is to be around your parents and not have them listen to you, and to think I can help you if you would listen and not look at me as your kid right now. And we just had my mom in town for 10 days, and I'm not gonna run their mouth about my mother, but let's just say some of that was on the menu. You know what I'm saying? She's gained weight recently, I mean, the lowest hanging fruit is what I can teach to people about fitness. That's the fucking absolute lowest hanging fruit, and she doesn't want butter on her toast or doesn't want butter on her steak, because fat makes you fat. And it's like, we solved that riddle a decade ago. Let's...

0:21:37 PA: We're moving on now. [chuckle]

0:21:38 KK: "Come on, I just want you to hear," and then that's a practice in just, I don't need to be right. Let me let go of that. But if you can't help your parents that can... There's some stickiness there. And I think Iron John does a beautiful job for dudes who are hung up on moms on how to move through that, how to tap into that wild nature of our inner being and cut the cord. But it's a weird thing. But I think it's important to remember that as we grow, at every age, to look at our kids as our teachers. What can I learn from you? Even when they're super young. And don't forget that when you become old and rigid. Stay flexible, stay flowing, stay in tune to where your kids are at because they already know more than we do and they will know a lot more than us as the world changes because they're paying attention to that stuff that we no longer care to pay attention to.

0:22:27 KK: And if we can keep them in that, we can continue to learn and never really grow old. Growing old is the... It's the stagnant water that doesn't want to continue to learn, continue to grow, continue to do anything. They wanna keep things the exact same way, and in that rigidity, we get stale and old.

0:22:44 PA: Taleb, Nassim Taleb who's written Black Swan, Antifragile, he has a great quote. He wrote this book of aphorisms, which is like The Bed of Procrustes. You know Procrustes? The ancient Greek guy who, on the path to Eleusis, if you came to his house and you were too short for his bed, he would extend your legs so you fit his bed. If you were too long for his bed, he would cut off your legs so that you could fit on his bed. It was basically like, how do we take chaos, this unknown, and try to fit it into something structured? Because that's our tendency, especially as men, to go... There's all this unknown out here. I'm gonna try to make sense of this. I'm gonna try to put containers around it.

0:23:25 PA: And in fact, what plant medicines teach us is that allowing the unknown to be is one of the greatest lessons that we can learn. In other words, we're not here to figure everything out. We're here to be with life as it emerges. We're here to be with Bear and Wolf as they emerge into the beings that they become. For you and your own process of emergence, what's next for you? What are you emerging into now that you have Bear and you have Wolf, you have a beautiful wife. You seem to have all these things that are phenomenal, like where's your own growth going forward? What are you stepping into right now as we're having this podcast?

0:24:07 KK: It's funny you mention that because it's a question... It's a great question. It's also a question that's... The way you worded it's a lot better than the one that I'm gonna use as an analogy. But when any time someone would ask me like, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" I would laugh. Because five years ago, Bear was born, I didn't think we were gonna have a kid that soon. Five years before that, I was fighting, and I would assume that I'd still be fighting until I was 39 or 40. I didn't know I was gonna retire at 32 and move on to other things.

0:24:37 KK: When I retired, I didn't know what I was gonna do in five years. And we moved to two different states, from Cali to Vegas, Vegas to... Well, I guess Cali to Nevada, Nevada to Texas if we are sticking to states. And at no point have I been able to solve that riddle of what life will look like down the road. To answer it more directly, I know the trajectory has a lot to do with... The only trajectory that I'm really confident with is my own. And as I continue to solve the riddles of myself, that gives me great guidance.

0:25:20 KK: So a teaching that I got from both Wachuma, San Pedro cactus and this awesome lady out in Sedona named Mary Margrave was that the feminine does not speak to you. We all have masculine and feminine. The feminine doesn't speak with language, it doesn't speak with visions. It speaks in an internal knowing, it speaks through your intuition and it speaks through emotion, how you feel. So what does that actually mean? Like, "Oh, I feel angry. Oh, that's the feminine talking to me." And it's like, no, these are all pointers. Like Eckhart Tolle says, "They're not the thing, but it's pointing to the thing." So if I can investigate the emotion, it will show me what's out of order, and it'll show me how to get back on track when I'm not on track.

0:26:04 KK: And it also leads me to things. So in terms of where I'm going in life and what the trajectory is, it really is a matter of feeling into it. It's not a thought process for me anymore. One thing that I felt into very recently, prior to COVID was, I wanna be home more. I don't wanna travel as often. And we've got a house right next to Onnit, right next to the airport, so I could fly out for all the events for Fit for Service and all my podcast trips. And of course COVID happens, it ends here with Onnit. I'm still happy with my home decision.

0:26:40 PA: What is the universe telling me?

0:26:44 KK: Yeah, but one thing I looked back upon when I had retired from fighting, I was also working at a pseudo strip club for the whole time I was fighting, basically. And I worked there two days a week, paid in cash, had really low overhead, mom's garage, and I was able to work just Saturday, Sunday. So it was like the inverse. It was like a true four hour work week kind of thing, even though I worked more than four hours, but I worked the opposite schedule of most people on earth. I worked the weekends and I had Monday through Friday off to be in nature, to be with my son, to be with my wife, and to go to the beach, to go for hikes, to do all the things that we actually wanna do when we retire.

0:27:18 KK: And one of the things that taught me was, when it comes to our goals and manifesting or creating more abundance, we focus so much, myself included, on gaining more income. And we do it at the expense of our time. Some people go so far that they get rich and they have no time to spend it, they have no time to enjoy it. And so really realizing that, life was damn good. I didn't have a savings. I didn't have things to call my own. It wasn't my house. There's a lot of things that I have acquired now through financial gain, but at the same time, that question Ferriss poses, how much do I actually need?

0:28:01 KK: And as I think about that, I don't need as much as I thought once I have the things, I need more time. And so right before quarantine hit, and right before COVID-19, I was already leaning that way. And then no more Onnit. And then now I'm just running the podcast and working with Fit for Service and coaching people privately. And all of a sudden, I have extra time. I have extra time, I can work... I'm already working from home, so there wasn't a huge shift for me with COVID-19 and quarantine. There was some changes around routine and how do I create schedule for my son, but outside of that, it was kind of an easier transition.

0:28:39 KK: And then now as I look forward, I really have felt called and intuited that I wanna be around Wolf for her first year of her life, and I want Bear to be around her, too. I wanna form those really tight bonds that most dads miss out on because they're the provider and they're gone all day at work. And I have that opportunity. I'm not saying like, this is not prescriptive. I had to fully realize how hard that is, most men do wanna be home more, and can't. And I get that. I feel blessed in that I have the opportunity, through what I've created, to be home more and still pay the bills. And for Tash to be able to be a stay-at-home mom, which is a massive, massive job. And her decision too, not mine. It's not like I grew up in an old era.

0:29:27 KK: My mom works the whole... She was in real estate since I was a little kid and made a ton of money. What ever thing you choose is fine. I don't have a... There's no right or wrong in that, how you construct that family. But I have it, found it odd that when both a mom and a dad are obsessed with success and obsessed with financial gain and what's the word? Validation through their work, so obsessed that they would outsource who raises their kids, through someone they don't know, like a hired nanny or an au pair.

0:30:04 KK: If you have multi-generational people in your home and your grandparents are raising the kids, awesome, awesome. And maybe your nanny is awesome, but that's not your blood. That's not you getting it in, it's not you having that imprint, and best case scenario, they do a good job, anything less than that is an issue. And again, that's not to pass judgment on anybody who's doing that, it's just for me, the importance of having family raise family is critical. It's super important. And if you look at... Especially when you read King, Magician, Warrior, Lover and I always fumble up which the order of those words are... [laughter]

0:30:42 PA: Me too. I'm like, is it King, Warrior... I don't...

0:30:46 KK: It starts with King, I know that.

0:30:50 PA: That's what that is. It starts with King.

0:30:52 KK: When you think about all of the issues that are wrong with society today, with gender role issues, gender identity issues... And again, I'm not painting with a broad brush, women need to stay at home. It's none of that stuff. But when it comes to confusion, and when it comes to really seeing a lot of adults are children dressed up in adult suits. And a lot of grandparents are children dressed up in old man, old women suits, through the lack of initiation, through the lack of ritual process, through the lack of what the Amazon and a lot of these places are offering.

0:31:30 KK: It's something that I know is a very important foundational piece that I will give to my kids. They will have us around more often than not. They will have our imprint, they will be in nature more often than not. It's not so rigid in that they don't get cookies, but if I'm gonna give my kid a cookie, he's gonna eat a ketogenic cookie that's organic. I'm not gonna flood his brain with sugar and a ton of nasty shit. They will have the ability to dip into the normalcy of childhood, but at the same time in a more thoughtful way.

0:32:07 KK: Tasha had a vision of us getting rid of our TV three years ago on mushrooms, and I was like, yeah. We did. We read more. We have sex more often. And our kids are not addicted to TV. And we still have a little iMac for Disney movies or for Magic School Bus on Netflix, but that's once a week maybe, maybe once every two weeks. And it's a real treat for him, but it's not the same as flipping through the channels mindlessly, "What are we gonna put on?" And, "I'm pretty tired, let's just throw something on the TV." And it's like, if I'm pretty tired, maybe we should just talk and communicate. And in that communication, maybe that softens us and irons out some stuff and maybe in feeling better about ourselves and our day, we wanna fuck. Like, huge win. Or let me read, while Wolf is nursing, let me read some of this book by Robert Moore. Let me read some of this King, Warrior action and we can process it together and talk. And all of those things, with the space for it, are so much more valuable than anything I'm gonna see on a screen. It's just... There's no question there, and to not be inundated with constant stuff, there's just constant stuff.

0:33:17 PA: Bullshit. There's just constant bullshit.

0:33:20 KK: Yeah. And I think that there's medicine there too, but I just bring up these what seems like random different pieces that plants have told me to connect a picture of what we're trying to do. Because what Will Taegel told me as well, which was really important was, we all have this inner wild person. And for people who haven't tapped into that, Iron John for men, Women Who Run with the Wolves for women, and then we have this domesticated animal that man has become that must live and operate in society. How do we marry those two? But you can't forget your wild nature.

0:33:53 KK: I think that's been snuffed out of boys for so long through physical violence and society as a whole. And they talk about that in the beginning of Iron John, through the... What patriarchy looks like and blanketly painting that as masculinity has done to men incorrectly, really leads boys to not... It's one of the other ways that they don't become men. It's one of the ways they stay boys. And there's just... There's a lot there.

0:34:23 PA: There's a distinction that Robert Bly makes. I read... He came out with another book called the Little Book on the Human Shadow, which is this, it's like 80-90 pages. I read it front to back four times in a row. And the distinction he makes is between being savage and being wild, and that so oftentimes we confuse the two. We think being savage means being wild, when in fact, the sense of being a savage is not being able to step into maturity. It's not going through the initiation, it's just acting on impulses. It's allowing whatever we need to come through. It's the outburst, it's the emotional sort of chaos that comes from that.

0:35:02 PA: Whereas being wild means you're still going inwards, you're still practicing stillness, you're still practicing quiet, and I think what I'm hearing from you, it's almost like what you're doing as a man for your family is creating that boundary, that container to keep out all the bullshit that we go through in a modern life and say, "Hey, we're gonna do it different here. We're gonna create this tight container." And instead of being so focused on this grandiose attitude of, "There's so many things to do out in the world and so much to accomplish." Actually, the greatest work we can do is see that as a distraction, take that energy and move it inwards to invest in the family. And that's something in modern life that we've totally forgotten.

0:35:42 PA: We've been so caught up on material wealth, we forget the importance of what I like to call existential wealth. What's the wealth of existing? What's the wealth of having full autonomy and control over your time so you can go, "I'm not gonna live that life like everyone else has chosen to live, almost by default, but in fact the buck stops here." Right? It's the same thing when we do plant medicine. We realize, "Oh, we've taken on all these stories and beliefs and traumas of our lineage." And for most people that goes back, not just a generation or two but dozens of generations. And so what I'm hearing in your story is you recognize that, and now you're going, okay, well, starting with just the nuclear family, like two kids, a wife. And there's more within that as well, which I wanna dig into because...

0:36:30 KK: It's more than nuclear, that's for sure.

0:36:32 PA: Because, you have that but you've also chosen to be in an open relationship and to explore polyamory and to explore all these other elements that are evolutionarily inside of us that we've forgotten because of modern life. Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan, Untrue by...

0:36:52 KK: Wednesday Martin.

0:36:53 PA: Those are all exploring these other things, like how do you hold all of that? How can you both recognize the importance of commitment and still have the capacity to open it up if you need to? How have you managed that process? Has it been difficult? Has it been like... What's come up in that for you?

0:37:14 KK: Nothing has been more challenging than opening our relationship in my life by far, with maybe exception of my childhood. There's nothing that's been... As my adult life more challenging, more disruptive, and also, thanks to the foundation that we built through seven years of monogamy and working with each other with the plants and really reading a lot together. Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz, Nonviolent Communication, Conscious Loving by Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks... You name it, we've taken a deep dive into relationships. We've taken a deep dive into communication.

0:37:46 KK: And of course, we've both read Sex at Dawn and Untrue. But the thing is, that goes back to what Will Taegel was talking about in how do you live with your inner wild person and your domesticated modern animal? How do you successfully navigate those waters? The inner wild person does have the impulses. It is attracted to fucking everything. It does want to explore and feel and sense into that, and it doesn't give a fuck about society's rules or what religion has told us about, what marriage looks like, or how we should live. I've had a rebellious nature since I was a kid, too, and that has good and bad elements to it. And I think as I acknowledge that, I can see where maybe I've just pushed against the grain, just for the sake of pushing against the grain.

0:38:41 KK: But if there's... Like we talked about with Kilindi ie, giving me permission for 30 grams, if I get permission to explore something that's already there in me and it feels right, then it comes back to, "Okay, how do we sit with this? Let's talk about it. Let's try to construct this in a way that's not damaging." Because the most important thing is our family, that is the Kingdom. And that's one kingdom first, and you talk about the king having control over the kingdom, or the queen over the queendom as Godsey likes to call it.

0:39:14 KK: You have your own inner world, your own inner sanctum, that's the first kingdom. Then you may have the kingdom of relationship, the kingdom of family. Then you may have the kingdom of work, the kingdom of your community, the kingdom of America, the kingdom of society as a whole, and however you fit into all of those matters. But the thing that matters the most is the own inner kingdom. So what shakes that up can be good for us or it can burn us. Fire can heat the house... Rogan just said this with Levinovitz, something like that, this guy he just had on, "Fire can heat your house or it can burn the whole thing down. Cook your food or it can scar you and kill you."

0:39:55 KK: And so how do you manage that flame appropriately so that it's not just, "Let's open the relationship. I wanna fuck everyone," or "Let's be conscious about this, let's really be choosy and picky." Because if you already have your partner... And that's something I recognized, and we read More Than Two: An Ethical Guide to Polyamory, which is a brilliant book, talks about all the different ways people actually go through this. There are many ways people do it, but in a primary relationship where you're married or not, and you wanna keep that, and all the other stuff is extra. It can be very easy just to follow your genitals for the most part. Because home base is solid. I've already found the person to spend the rest of my life with, so I don't need that level from other people. But the thing is, if you have kids involved, you do... There is a standard of who you bring into the equation that matters. Because any energy you bring into the home matters because that's gonna be around your children. And if you're bringing around unconscious people or even people who aren't the same page with food or things like that, or if they have their own kids and they do it differently... And we've run up against all this. It's like... Who was the guy's name? Not Moore's Law. Somebody's law where if anything that can go wrong, will.

0:41:14 PA: Yeah.

0:41:14 KK: Does it start with an M? I can't... Birth brain. Anyhoo. I'm sure people are like, "Ah, it's such and such." Anyways, it really has been that. It's been incredibly challenging. It's been incredibly helpful in helping us grow and seeing each other again. That's something I always appreciated about Ayahuasca, and of course, people will be rolling their eyes like, "I see my partner. I don't need to let some dude bang her for me to truly see her and recognize her as my queen." Cool. I saw my wife and I saw her to a great degree and loved her and cherished her, and knew I'd spend the rest of my life with her. And at the same time, me having another female partner showed me her in ways that I couldn't believe. It showed me Tash in ways that I couldn't believe and allowed me to hold her in a higher light than I had previously.

0:42:03 KK: Her having another man, same thing. And her having another man showed me to her in a way that she hadn't previously recognized. It strengthened that. It strengthened our bond. And I just had Jamie Wheal on the podcast. It's phenomenal. Hope people listen to it, it's two and half hours. He talked sex, magic and fucking tantric and all this stuff, but he has this concept of hierogamy.

0:42:26 PA: Hierogamy?

0:42:27 KK: Hierogamy. And it's gonna be in his new book that comes out in 2021, so definitely listen to the podcast if you are...

0:42:34 PA: It's a phenomenal podcast. I listened to it before our interview, and...

0:42:35 KK: Thank you, brother. It's one of my favorites I've ever done.

0:42:37 PA: It's incredible.

0:42:39 KK: And you get to know hierogamy. And he's like, we have baseline conventional monogamy. I'm doing this because I'm supposed to. Eventually, we either stop having sex, or we cheat on each other. It's conventional. Now, that's not all of monogamy. Again, you can... There are plenty of people that make it well into their... They die together. They love each other and they still fuck when they're old, and it's awesome. That's a very small fraction. Polyamory, conventional polyamory. We're gonna do this because we wanna have sex with other people, and new relationship energy is always gonna win out, and I'm just basically a serial monogamist who is informing the person that I'm going to have sex with... My previous person that I'm gonna have sex with another person and it's all open, so it's less sticky. But it's still not for growth.

0:43:25 KK: And then as we get into hierogamy, it could be monogamy or open relationship but with the idea that it is for the divine union. It is for that ultimate growth with another person, that can lead us to higher levels of consciousness through ascension, the same way that plants does. And as he's getting into that, he goes, "If that's your goal, you have four things... " and he studied this with multiple camps of open relationship and polyamory people from Burning Man to the conscious communities down in Costa Rica and in San Francisco and all over the world. And I'm not claiming he's spoken to everyone who's polyamorous, but I'm just saying what they've said is, "You can have a primary, like a husband or a wife. You can have children. You can have a vocation, which is not your job, but the thing you're most passionate about that actually matters in life, the thing you care about that much, and you can have other partners. Choose three."

0:44:24 KK: They've never seen anyone successfully do all four without burning down the house. And that's something to me... When I had a girlfriend, it was only two months and I realized... I feel like I'm being pulled in all directions. And even though the new relationship energy is awesome, and the novelty is awesome and it is helping me see my wife better, and it is doing all these things that I had hoped for, but it's also pulling... It's too much. And so I jokingly told them like, with my bandwidth, I would rather learn Native American flute than have another girlfriend. I would rather do anything else. I'd rather read a book like King, Warrior. I'd rather do anything else than taking my time trying to build another relationship because onboarding is a real deal.

0:45:09 KK: If you're just dating and you're young, cool. But if you have somebody that you've cultivated a real relationship with for eight years now, and you think that bringing someone else into the equation is just gonna fit perfectly like a puzzle board, no, not even close. And they may never fit. And more interesting than that is, we don't really get to see the other side of that honeymoon effect until a year to a year and a half to three years into the relationship, and there's a lot of shadow. We've done a lot of shadow work, my wife and I together. And even if somebody's willing to start to drop in with us and go to the Amazon and do different things, there's no shortcuts. There's no shortcuts to the shadow, there's no shortcuts through our own personal ascension, and I'm not sure that this is something we'll do forever. You know what I'm saying? I don't necessarily think it is.

0:46:06 KK: I think the benefit to it, in large part, has been gifted to us. And no regrets about it at all. But at the same time... Duncan Trussell told me that as well, because him and his wife have been open at times and monogamous at times, and he's like, "Who the fuck cares?" It's like if you're a bisexual and you didn't care to be called bisexual, sometimes I wanna fuck dudes, sometimes I wanna fuck girls, like it doesn't matter. I'm going based on where I'm at in life, and that changes. And we got a guy doing yard work out here, so hopefully it's not picked up. [chuckle] Acknowledge what's happening in the world. So I think to have those labels now, talking about all this stuff on social media and real-time is a funny thing, and that's something I wanted to bring up because it's like a lot of people ask me, like I can't believe your courage, or I can't believe how stupid you are to talk about this. You can look at it through both lenses, and there's a hair of truth in both of them.

0:47:01 KK: I see a line of polarity with Chris Ryan and Aubrey Marcus. Both of them are homies. Aubrey's one of my best friends. Chris Ryan doesn't say anything publicly about his own personal life other than, "Yes, this is what I do and these things happen," and there's no names, and that's it. On the flip side of that coin, Aubrey will tell you that day if he broke up with somebody, that's like...

0:47:24 PA: Or, if he just got married. Or, you know, where you're like, "Oh. Aubrey, got married. Okay, yeah." [chuckle]

0:47:28 KK: Yeah, you're gonna know about it. What's happening? You gotta know about it. Now, there's a benefit to both of those, particularly with a family involved there and as a king and a warrior, and a magician, a lover, there is a sense of wanting to protect that kingdom and holding a lot of what is sacred within that for us. Not for everyone else. And so I might lean a little bit towards Chris Ryan's camp when it comes to that. But at the same time, for every guy that's called me a beta cock online, there's been a family that said, "This changed our lives. Thank you guys so much for your honesty." And it's not to say that one model is right and the other one's wrong. It's not to say that... Right or wrong have nothing to do with it. It has to do with, if we want to live what's right for us? How do we go about that and then where are the pitfalls there? And that's where the honest communication around what this actually has been for us does matter because it's not rosy.

0:48:31 KK: There are benefits to it, but just like with some of the harder Ayahuasca or an iboga experience like, yeah, that was awesome. Wasn't fun. 30g of penis envy mushrooms wasn't fun at all, but it was one of the most important experiences in my life. But eternity in hell... And when I say eternity, I mean because you don't understand time on 5g, you really don't understand time on 30. And I would loop a single narrative of a very personal version of hell over and over again until I finally surrendered, until I actually was calling it like, "Oh, yep. And then my wife's gonna explode and then the Earth's gonna explode... " And it's like very personal things, my version of hell. And as I'm able to surrender through that, it goes away. But at the end of that thing, I look at that, the most challenging psychedelic experience in my life, and I'm like, "That was fucking brilliant. I am reborn. What am I gonna do with my life now? And when am I gonna do that again?" Because it's not something I would do once a month, I might do it once a year. I really gotta feel called to go that deep, and I do want a guide.

0:49:37 KK: Taking it back to open or poly, it's been that challenging. And the problem is... Not the problem, I guess the gift with it is that it doesn't stop. Ayahuasca has a window, 30g had a window, and you come back and you're like, "Oh, thank God. Okay." But this doesn't really have a window. It just stays that way. The gifts or the challenges keep arising and the growth is there, or the potential downfall is there at every single turn. And I think, once again, all of this, the reason we have been able to do it, and I don't wanna attach... I don't wanna say successfully, 'cause that's all a fucking opinion. The reason we have been able to do this and keep our family intact is because of the work that we've done with each other and the continued work we do on ourselves, the continued work with the tools from meditation, to breath work, to ice baths, to movement, to eating clean, to sleeping properly, to a very consistent communication practice. People are like, "Yeah, do you guys schedule a weekly thing or every, twice a week?" And it's like every opportunity we get, we check in with one another. And that may seem like too much for people, but again, when you're juggling, like Chuck said, "If you can't juggle two, why juggle three?"

0:50:53 KK: And if we're juggling a lot, and we got kids, and we have vocation, and we have all these things that matter to us, and the world that's going on outside of us is also where it's at. There's a lot to talk about. Let's talk about it. Let's come back to our center. Let's find a way to remain calm in the hurricane and just know that if I can find this space inside where there is peace and equanimity, then it doesn't look so bad, then it doesn't look so chaotic, then I can find order and then I can know the way forward.

0:51:23 PA: Right. And holding that and finding that center because we make the best decisions, especially as men, when we're not reacting to the chaos around us, but we're allowing it to percolate, whatever that means. And we don't get distracted by it, but we just stay in our center. We stay in that container that we've created for ourselves so that we can make the wise king decision about, well, what's not best for me, 'cause it's not, as you've probably learned, it's not about you. It's now about your family and your wife. And before it was about Onnit, and what you're stepping into now as a coach. It's really just like permeating the kingdom that you've chosen to permeate with this sort of balance and centered energy. And one thing that came up for me as you were talking about this... I have a mentor of mine who, I had him on the podcast before. He's an executive coach, his name is Geoff Hanzlik. He's sat in over 750 Ayahuasca ceremonies, so he used to play with the Santo Daime, the legal church up in Oregon, and would travel around with them throughout the States and throughout Peru and Brazil and play the music, and so he was drinking Ayahuasca all the time.

0:52:36 PA: And he talks about how he was doing that through his 20s and 30s, and then in his mid-30s, he like, he was sitting at breakfast with his daughter and just had an emotional outburst and realized that he was in the medicine too much, that he needed space from it, that he needed time away from it, that if things can get too chaotic, then you can't actually find that center anymore. And we experience this, and we notice this with people who go back into Ayahuasca, back into Ayahuasca and back into Ayahuasca, thinking it's gonna fix their problems, so to say, but they never actually take a step back to integrate and to do the work of, okay, when we're back in this reality, the constant communication with your wife about... That's difficult. That's probably the most difficult thing to do, to be able to feel something that it's like, "Can I talk about this? Is it okay to talk about this?" And still talking about it because you realize it's best for the kingdom, it's best for where you're at.

0:53:34 KK: Yeah, 100%. There's no doubt about it.

0:53:37 PA: So you hinted a little bit at the 30g trip, and I wanted to like... I don't want a trip report necessarily, but I would like to hear a little bit more about what led you to that point. Why in the hell would you sit down and do 30g of mushrooms by yourself? What was sort of the impetus for that choice?

0:53:58 KK: Yeah. Well, this isn't a short story, and even without getting into the... [chuckle] Yeah, let me think where I start. It started with Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, I was traveling the Amazon and I didn't have local guides that I really wanted to work with anymore after having experienced the high-level black belts that I had in the Amazon. And so I asked, mid-ceremony, on my last night with Aya, how do I continue to work with medicines at this depth knowing that the care that's here is not available where I live, or I at least don't know. Maybe you can connect me. And Aya showed me a mushroom sprout in gold, like a spore turn into a full mushroom cap, and I was like, "Oh, psilocybin. Awesome. How much?" And then I saw in gold letter or gold numbers, 7, 10, and then 14. And it was showing me how to scale up the mountain with psilocybin. And I was like, "Wow. Awesome. Done." That's what I'll continue to do until the next time I can make it out here because it is a financial commitment and a time commitment. And I never did get to climb the mountain.

0:55:03 KK: I had a couple ceremonies where I did 7g, but often when I would work with psilocybin, there'd be other people there, and even though I'm by no means a black belt, I would at least be somebody steering the ship if somebody was gonna have a bad experience. So I wouldn't push the envelope for myself, knowing there was people with less experience around. So I never did get to go up. And then at some point, a member from Fit for Service sent me a video from Kilindi Iyi, and she's like, "You ever heard of anybody taking this much?" 'Cause I was talking to her about her doing her first 5g journey and of course, just regular Golden Teacher, not even penis envy. Like yeah, this is your standard entry point, and then from there, maybe 5g of penis envy. You can work your way up to 3, 4, 5, that kind of thing. So she sends me this 20 guy does... I think the clickbait was, "Guy does 20-30g of psilocybin in one sitting for the last 20 years." And I was like, "This guy's a quack." That's what I responded and I just email, sent, reply, "This guy's a fucking quack."

0:56:06 PA: That's it.

0:56:06 KK: Then I had something... Again, feminine intuition is like, I gotta watch this. So I watch it. And just in his presentation, you talk about people that go back to Ayahuasca, go back to the wishing well too often, and they're not really grounding their experience or integrating what they're working on, and they look like the same person they were five years ago. That's very common. What I saw in him and the way he was speaking was a very grounded person who was highly intelligent, had a ton of knowledge on the ancient tribal traditions of psychedelic use within Africa. And what he was saying is, there's nothing wrong with medicines like Ayahuasca and iboga. They are medicines. Psilocybin's different, it's not just for healing, it's for exploration. And what makes it different is that there's no ceiling. If you have enough Ayahuasca, you're gonna puke and shit your brains out for the whole experience and not really be in a visionary space. You're gonna need to be tended to and may even need medical care. Too much iboga, you can die. Right?

0:57:02 KK: But there doesn't appear to be a ceiling around psilocybin. So this starts to click and I'm like, "Huh." And he starts getting into all sorts of fantastic stuff. He's talking about astral travel and the equivalent of a four-hour DMT trip and coming in contact with other beings and insectoids, and he's describing them as like different versions of them, whether they're alien or not. And that's debatable if you listen to a guy like Graham Hancock, if they are actual physical bodies like us, or if they're just in spirit form, whatever. I was fucking hooked. I was like, "Tell me more, dude." And after I finished the video, I watched a couple more and he talks about... And we'll get into it, but the birth of the Marvel Universe and that coming from high-dose psilocybin and high-dose LSD, and I was like, "Alright, I love these movies. I wanna explore more." Anybody who's seen Doctor Strange knows like, "Alright, these guys were, they were dialed in. They had gone down the rabbit hole more than once to have that type of experience and understand and put it into art in a movie."

0:58:02 KK: And so I thought, "Cool. Now I just need the mushrooms," because I had gotten some penis envy and it didn't look like the normal phallic symbol penis envy I was used to, so I questioned if it was. And I had fought Jason Ellis about a year and a half ago on a microdose of penis envy, 95 mg. And it was, it's Jason Ellis, he's not the same level fighter as me, but it was the best fight that I've ever had in terms of my own internal kingdom. There was no negative mind chatter. There was no, "Dude, you haven't trained in four years, what are you doing?" There was no anything, it was just like instant flow state. We re-matched in a boxing match maybe a year ago, and I took the same dose with this new batch of penis envy and did not have the same experience. There was some negative monkey mind. There wasn't instant flow and I automatically assumed, because of how it looked and because of my experience in the fight, this cannot be penis envy. Now, I actually have mushrooms I can do 30g with.

0:59:03 KK: And so I had the 30g experience. It was only... I only realized it going back to 10, when I did a 10g journey later, thinking like, "Alright, this will be a walk in the park." And I was like, "Good God, this is penis envy." There's no question 'cause I've had 5g of it before, that 10g felt like double the 5g. 30g of anything for the first time when all you've done is 14 of Golden Teacher, you're gonna...

0:59:22 PA: Blow your mind out. Really, yeah.

0:59:24 KK: Yeah, it's gonna be different, no matter what. But full realization, that was penis envy. Talked to the guy about it and he's like, "Yeah, they were just young." So you can pull mushrooms when they're fully grown or you can pull them when they're young, and that's why they weren't giants. But, yeah, that experience to me, nothing comes even close to it. Everything has a seat at the table. Ayahuasca, giving me the vision of Bear before we had him, and of Wolf. Unquestionably, those visions are some of the most important I've ever had. I've had brilliant, brilliant experiences on 5g. It's not like, "Oh, I have to keep going further, and what lies ahead and I need more and more and more." But at the same time, halfway into that experience, it felt like I had a fresh hit of 5-MeO, it was that deep. I thought, when I came out of this, that there was puke and shit all over the room because one of the versions of hell was me throwing up into space. Like I'm in a spaceship and I throw up and it floats, and it slowly comes back to me and I'm like, "I don't want it, I don't want it, I don't want it," and I gotta swallow it and eat my own puke. And then I shit diarrhea out and that floats up and I'm like, "I don't want, I don't want it, I don't want it," and it goes back into my mouth and then I throw that up and it was fucking gross. I don't say this to gross people out...

1:00:41 PA: This didn't actually happen.

1:00:42 KK: I thought it did actually happen. Now, it did in the astral. Thank God, I looked in my puke bucket and I saw two snootses and a little spit afterwards. The whole room was crystal clean.

1:00:53 PA: Good, okay.

1:00:53 KK: You know what I'm saying? But it's like, wow. Okay, that didn't actually happen. But to experience that for eternity, and that's one of five layers. Each one of these was... I don't know how long I was in there, but it felt like forever until it moved and it changed, and then it would play the loop for three or four more, or five more times, and then I'd be like, "Oh, I'm in a new place. Oh, this is gonna happen next." And with enough, the shred of consciousness I had left as I entered into hell, the only thing I could remember was saying, "The only way out of this is surrender." But if I just said, "I surrender. I don't wanna see this... " it's not real surrender. I had to come to a point where I actually didn't care that I was there and didn't worry that my consciousness was trapped there forever. And once that happened, I'd move to the next layer of hell. My understanding now, those layers of hell all exist within me. Those are all parts of my... That's the, as above, so below. All of that existed within me. Some conscious fears, some completely unconscious fears, and I had to process that.

1:01:54 KK: But as I remember, it was a solo journey. I wouldn't do solo again, but I remember eyes wide open looking at this mandala that started spinning out and I could see giant green insectoid beings in the room. And I'm like, "This is exactly what he's talking about. This is fucking weird." And then, "Oh, wait. Are you guys here for me or is this... Am I not supposed to be here?"

1:02:18 PA: Are they nefarious or are they after you?

1:02:21 KK: Yeah, understanding how DMT works. I'm like, "Man... "

1:02:25 PA: Are they here to dissect everything and cut you open and like...

1:02:27 KK: "Are we cool?" Yeah. "Are we cool?" And then they would just touch me. They spoke in a clicking noise and they would touch me, and when the second they had touched me with two fingers, this ball of love would just well through me. And I was like, "Okay, they're here for me." And as the mandala spun out, it separated the room. And as I looked inside it, like a glass of water, it was pitch black. And I was like, "Oh, that's the darkness. Is it okay to go into there?" And I said, "Yes." Of course, when I'm there, I didn't remember how the fuck I got there, but as the ceremony ended there, I remembered, "Yeah, I said yes to that. I said yes to be able to process that." And I don't get that on a microdose. I don't get that level of shadow work, playing with the small doses. I don't get it playing with the moderate doses where if I have a sticky feeling, if I didn't wanna look at it, I could just go outside or I could go for a walk or I could change the music, or I could start doing breath work and yoga, and all of a sudden everything's fine because I shift my energy and I release it and I purge it out through one of the many forms of purging. Like if I didn't have any degree of control, it can be a positive experience, but I can keep it positive.

1:03:28 KK: I like the doses. The doses to me where I'm not in control and I'm not driving and at the steering wheel, those are the ceremonies to me that have done the most amount of work in my personal experience. Again, strongly recommend, as you climb the ladder that you have a high level person there, and I would never do that again without a high level person there. Not a sitter, I mean a fucking black belt.

1:03:52 PA: A guide, yeah.

1:03:53 KK: Yeah. A real, a true...

1:03:54 PA: Super experienced.

1:03:55 KK: A truly dialed-in person that can guide through song, not through an iPod, but somebody who can sing your way to a different dimension, can pull you back, can be your grounding cord to this reality. Like, "Don't worry, you're getting through this." And to know, to be able to tap in in real time through the WiFi, you're good. I know where you're at, you're good. You're coming back," that kind of thing. But yeah, still even with that, one of the most brilliant experiences I've ever had in my life.

1:04:23 PA: And I just can't imagine to go through with that, to even just the physical part of eating 30g of mushroom.

1:04:32 KK: Grind them up, shake 'em. I'm not gonna eat those.

1:04:35 PA: No, you didn't.

1:04:36 KK: Ground them up.

1:04:36 PA: 'Cause I think that that was the interesting part about Kilindi from... We talked about this on your podcast as well. I don't know if I've told the story on my podcast before, but when I first met Kilindi in 2016, and we were speaking at a conference in Prague, and it was a panel about low doses to high doses. So I'm talking about microdosing and creativity and flow and biohackers and how you can be a little bit more productive or it helps with social anxiety or it helps to be a bit more present with sex. And then Kilindi goes up there and he's like, "Yeah, I eat." He didn't drink them, he physically would eat the 20-30g of mushrooms, and then as you were talking about going to explore all these sort of quantum ancient Egyptian, weird hieroglyphic areas and elements. And what's so interesting about those perspectives, it reminds me a lot of Graham Hancock. It opens us to seeing the world in a totally new way, totally new light and seeing these new possibilities and it's like, it's fucked up, it's weird, there's so much shadow, there's so much stuff that comes up with that, but to hold your center in that is often the greatest lesson that comes from psychedelics.

1:05:46 PA: It's like, "Okay, I can totally... " All these hacks that we talk about how we have this filter in the mind, and the filter that we have in the mind allows us to be in this conscious reality, allows us to navigate it, it allows us to have relationships, it allows us to get things done, etcetera, etcetera. And when you take a psychedelic, that filter is just completely removed. So you're opened up to the gates of heaven and hell, and then whatever comes through comes through. And that's why, like you were saying, it's so critical to have a guide because if you don't, and you're not experienced with this, then... We were talking about this on the podcast with Godsey yesterday, you can literally break your brain and it's so hard to piece it back together. And I think that's the most, like with all the psychonaut stuff and the DMT and going out into these other worlds, that's a big risk and fear that a lot of people have, "If I am to go down this path, will I come back?" And I think the answer, the short answer to that is always, "Not the same person you were before."

1:06:51 PA: It's basically impossible to go through a high-dose psychedelic experience and not have something happen, right? Sam Harris talks about this in the very first podcast he ever did, it was something about the meaning of drugs. And he goes, "Look, you can meditate for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes and sit down on the cushion for 30 days and something might happen, or you can do breath work and something might happen or maybe go to a sweat lodge and maybe something will happen, but if you take 5g of mushrooms, something's gonna fucking happen." That is sort of the button that anyone can push to access the unconscious realms. And as you made clear, like when you tap into that collective unconscious, you don't know what you're gonna be faced with. And that's where surrender and training for that and all of that is so critical, because if you don't have the tools to navigate that then it could lead to a break. You might not come back. That's very rare, but that's a total risk. And that's where... Especially with what we're doing with Third Wave intentional responsible use, being mindful, having an intention, preparing properly, creating that container, integrating... Integration is so key.

1:08:11 PA: It allows us to split apart, to welcome that chaos in and then to come back in a new sort of cohesive whole, a new person who realizes, "Oh, that anger that I've repressed or that sadness that I've repressed or whatever, those emotions that are in my shadow, those are part of me. And the only way I can fully go forward, especially after a psychedelic experience... Once you recognize that, you can't ignore that shit anymore. Because if you ignore it, you realize you're going to continue down the same path that you've always been going down, which for a lot of people is suffering. And the only way that you can heal suffering is to go through it. And to go, like you said, to look into the blackness and say, "Fuck it. Going into the blackness." And I think that, for me, more than anything, like tracking this whole conversation, the courage to go into that is what people have missed in modern life. That initiation of, look, you can ignore that for as long as you want, but as long as you're ignoring it, you're still that 12-year-old boy, that 13-year-old boy. You're never going to see what's beyond the boy psychology.

1:09:21 PA: And that's why initiations are so important, which leads me sort of into the next sort of part of this conversation, which is, I'd love to hear just open dialogue, your thoughts about intentional communities. 'Cause we're seeing a big push right now where people are buying land in Costa Rica, they're buying land in British Columbia. People are buying islands, and they're starting to recognize that doing a polyamorous or open relationship or trying to sort of re-integrate our tribal lifestyle that we evolutionary have been programmed for, it's just, it's really difficult to do when you're living in suburbia USA. There are too many distractions. There's too many things you have to cut off. What are your thoughts about the transition of human culture in terms of how intentional living, intentional communities are becoming more of a thing? Why are we having that urge to get away from suburbia, to get away from cities, and get back into the land and plant medicines and open relationships, and the Paleo diet? All of that is sort of part of the evolutionary past. What are your thoughts on that?

1:10:32 KK: Yeah, it's interesting. I think there are intentional communities that... As far as I know, there are intentional communities that are... That's known. You're moving in and it's open. You're not forced to, but you'll have your selections, but they have a strict screening process on who gets in, and then you live in an open community. And there are others that have that ability, and if you wanna be monogamous, that's fine, too. There's no, again, no right or wrong, live however you want here, but no judgment about anybody else's way of life. And usually in these communities, there are organic farming, permaculture, there's regenerative agriculture. There's a lot of systems that are being put in place that are also more mindful of what Native Americans call the sacred hoop, that we are paying attention to our place in the world and how it interacts with all things, and truly having sustainability as a practice, as one of the foundational pieces of the entire community, to having compostable shitters or whatever, and that's a lot of hippie stuff for a lot of people.

1:11:40 KK: But at the same time, if you think about systems that are broken in the world, if we don't return to understanding that we are a part of our environment, indistinguishable from it, that we are a part of the all, and that we can't rape and pillage and fucking profit off the earth, that this stuff does have an end point. And if, whatever side of the fence you're on, if you think climate change is a hoax from China, if you think climate change is real and it's caused from factory farmed meat, that's wrong, too. If you think climate change is real and it's caused from all the petro chemicals in the air, probably a little bit more correct. Or if you're like Gregg Braden and think that it's solar cycles, and that usually the CO2 happens after the climate has changed and the heat has gone up, and you can look at the ice cores to verify and all that other shit, no matter what side of the fence you're on with that, all you have to do is read the book, The Sixth Extinction, and see how many animals are dying, how many ecosystems are dying at the acidification of the ocean. We are having a fucking impact, period. Period. Whether that causes ocean levels to rise at the rate that science has projected or not, that remains to be seen, but massive numbers of animals and plant species are dying off.

1:12:51 PA: Anthropocene period, right?

1:12:53 KK: Yeah. And we're at the same time mowing down the very thing that can save us in the rain forest and with forest fires in Australia and different things. Like these natural disasters are going to pick up. There are going to be big changes in our lifetime. We're already seeing some of it. With that, how do we become more conscious about the whole? How do we understand the soul better? I just had Zach Bush on the podcast who's phenomenal, also a vegan, so that... Disagree on that, but you understand the quality of the soil matters. There's a lot of scientists that project that if we don't change the way we farm in 70 years, it's gonna look like the beginning in Interstellar, where we have one strain of corn that we have to grow with chemical fertilizer and that's it. That's our whole food supply. And it's not gonna look that overnight, but we will be pressed into chemicals like whatever glyphosate has to morph into. I know they're using two different chemicals now because nature continues to evolve, and there's a lot of glyphosate-resistant insects now that are like, "Fuck off. I don't care if you spray me with glyphosate."

1:14:05 KK: Yeah, it changes rapidly. And at that scale, it changes very rapidly. So again, are we gonna continue to spray this shit into the ground that ruins our soil? Are we gonna continue to irrigate, flood irrigate waste water in that way and ruin our water supplies? Are we gonna continue to do all these things, or are we gonna somehow figure out a way to manage all of this in harmony? And Joel Salatin, who runs Polyface Farms, he had a big role in the documentary Food, Inc, and was also just on Joe Rogan's. Can you do this at scale? The answer is yes. And Rogan asked him, "Can you do this for New York City?" He's like, "Should we have a city as big as New York City?" It doesn't really answer the question, but the answer is still yes, if you have more than one farm supplying New York City. How do we supply our food? I had the guys from Roam Ranch on, and one of the things they're doing, regenerative agriculture, about an hour and a half away from here in Austin, Texas, with buffalo.

1:15:00 KK: And two of the things that they mentioned to me that absolutely blew my mind when they had a soil expert come out to visit their farm was, they used to think organic material in the soil used to be at 8% before we started tilling it and fucking with it and doing European farming practices, and then with the chemicals. With that, create soil erosion, and then we actually lose it the next time the rains come. It's happened in California all the time with landslides. They think that it would take 10 years to gain 1% back. Most soils are down at 0.5% organic material. What they found in their farm, they're back up between 2.5% and 3.5%, and they've only been on it for three years. The rate at which nature responds is much faster than we anticipated. So when we do it right, when we do plant and animal husbandry, when we let the microbiome of grass-fed ruminants like cattle and bison walk around and stomp their shit into the soil and feed the nutrients and pump it back in, when it's a full circle like that, when we participate in the hoop, we have the ability to create massive change. Not only change to restoring the soil, but again, restoring the benefits, the vitamins and minerals to our plants. The benefits to the animals are better. The food we eat is better. No need for chemicals in that system either, right? If we can move to that, we can change.

1:16:19 KK: And one of the things that the soil expert said that really blew me away was, if you didn't add a single farm on the planet, but you changed all the factory farms into regenerative agriculture, we would have enough organic material in the soil to feed the entire earth right now, and sequester 100% of the carbon at our current rate right now. So again, it's not... This guy, Alan Levinovitz, whatever his fucking name is, that was just on Rogan's, one of his things he's talking about in his book is that we have a tendency to describe things in black and white and say, if it's not natural, then it's bogus. Or clearly this new society doesn't work, we have to return to the old. And it's like, no, there is no right answer there. It is grey. And the best answer will be a marriage of the two. And so this isn't to say people shouldn't live in New York City or that the only way is we get 100% of people on board, or we have to stop flying, we have to stop using commercial air, we have to stop... That's not gonna stop. We're not gonna stop with gas until there's something better, that's the nature of the economy.

1:17:26 KK: The market will determine when it's better. When Teslas are eight grand, people are gonna be driving electric cars. When everyone has solar on their house, and solar actually works really well and it's affordable, people are gonna do it because it'll be available. It'll be reasonable price. It doesn't mean those things are wrong or right, or right now, it just means that somewhere in between, we're gonna see those answers come forward. And what's cool about these conscious communities that are being put together, is they are exploring the possibilities of what it would look like to tie in the best of regenerative agriculture, of permaculture, of non-judgmental living through our own sex lives, of how we educate our children so that they're not stuck in a box at a desk all day long learning how to become a cog in the wheel, but they're actually out in nature. They have a connection to the land, they have a connection to each other, they have emotional intelligence, and they find purpose in their lives without the need for a sense of validation of what true success actually is versus something that's been handed over to them from society.

1:18:29 KK: And I don't know, I haven't lived with any of these guys. I don't know who's doing it right. I think there's one in northern Italy that has little springlets up all over... I'm forgetting the name right now, Falco is the name of the guy who runs it. But the point is like what's really cool is even if you're not involved in that or you can't afford to get in 'cause there's a price tag for a lot of these places, or maybe you don't agree with everything that they're doing, so you don't wanna live there. Whatever the case is, we get to kinda watch that. We can be the witness of those things. In tandem, as we witness the old model is still going, as we witness people turning a blind eye to the destruction of the earth, as people just continue to try to go about their business. And the interesting thing is that there is no going back to normal. It will never go back to normal.

1:19:21 PA: We wouldn't want to go back to that normal anymore.

1:19:25 KK: Some people... That's through the lens of somebody who's been on the other side. That's not through the lens of most people. The lens of most people want consistency, they want certainty, they wanna control every aspect of their lives. And one of the beautiful teachings in the ability to surrender is the idea that I'm not in control, and I can acknowledge that and I can surrender what I don't have control over. And even if I take that further, I can come to a place where... As again, I'm quoting this guy, Alan, if we look at the world outside of us without certainty, but as uncertain, and we begin to use wonder, we have the ability to acknowledge the Great Mystery. And that is exactly how Native Americans did it. They called it the Great Mystery, Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, The Great White Buffalo Woman, the Great Mystery of life. We can see it as that and be along for the ride in some aspects as we choose to navigate in a conscious way within that hoop, within all our relations. If we start to operate that way, nature does respond quickly. But the longer we play make-believe that we're not having an impact, the more of an impact we're gonna have, the more of a hole we're gonna be in.

1:20:35 KK: And so, again, looking outside ourselves... I did a Wachuma ceremony with this brilliant medicine woman from Northern California, who had studied with Dr. Will Taegel and many other brilliant thinkers. And she said, when you think of the earth, you have to understand your own inner earth. And if you're wondering how to fix everything outside yourself... Again, this all circles back to be the change you wish to see in the world. Focus on your own inner ecology, focus on your own inner earth. And when you have that, a certain degree of equivalency there and mastery there, that starts to bleed into all the systems you're connected to. I talked to Dr Will Taegel about wanting to have land and wanting to be in nature and not stuck in a city's eco-field, but at the same time had done the best I could with this tiny ass backyard. We planted bamboo and we planted fruit trees, and we've got bird feeders out. And in doing that, we have created like this own eco-field. Like there is a lot going on in our backyard, and as small as it is, it's a zen garden and there's Wachuma in the ground, and it's phenomenal.

1:21:41 KK: And that's something that he mentioned, that is something that's of value, however small. And one of the keyest, one of the biggest concepts that we can get from plant medicine journeys or hydo-psychedelics is something that Charles Eisenstein beautifully said in The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible. The understanding that however small a decision is made, however small an act is done, if it's done in the good, for the good of all, that is reverberated through all of consciousness. That's how a holographic universe works, that's how us being fractals of God work. As above, so below works that way. As we do the smallest thing, it is reverberated through the all.

1:22:22 KK: And I told... I was telling Will, I was like, I was on a little bit of medicine in my back yard. Careful, I was in my backyard. People say ketamine, I have a prescription for that. [laughter] And I'm looking at the bamboo that I just planted and I was like, "Wow, this is so awesome. I've got this bamboo back here, and it pumps out more oxygen than like most any other plant and the world really needs that right now." And then my conscious mind was like, "You have four fucking bamboo plants back here, you idiot. That's doing nothing for the world right now." And I started laughing and I was like, which one is right? I'm thinking about that and it was almost like my inner critic was just belittling me for having this lofty New Age idea. And the second I thought that, I thought of Eisenstein's book. However small the act is, it's felt through all of consciousness, all of existence, and all is conscious. All is God, all is soul. That's another understanding you get in the medicines, it's undeniable. It is all animated from the same stuff. And right as I think that, oh yeah, I remember that. Okay, this does matter. Boom, the red hawk circling.

[vocalization]

1:23:35 KK: And for a lot of people that don't understand why that would be important, like, ah, fucking coincidence. Some fucking red hawks up there...

1:23:41 PA: The synchronicity. That's the synchronicity again, right?

1:23:44 KK: Yeah, but for a lot of people, that's just coincidence. For me, that is definitive synchronicity. And the wind picks up at the same time and blows the bamboo in my face and it's like, okay. How these things are interconnected, it's hard to piece those dots together without the knowing. But once you've seen it, once you've experienced it and felt it, it's undeniable. It goes way beyond belief. It goes into the small amount of things that are certain in life. And to me, whether that's true or not, I would rather live in a world where I subscribe to that. I would rather live in a world where any small act that I do does have an impact. And if I believe that, that's more encouraging for me to wanna continue that. It's easy for me to walk past a piece of trash and think, "Eh, somebody else will get it." Or, "Eh, that's on this guy's lawn. He can pick it up." But if I think that it does matter and that it does have an impact and it is important, then that'll make me wanna pick it up and that'll make me wanna pick up another piece of trash, and so on and so forth. In every little aspect, you can shift yourself in that way.

1:24:47 PA: It's like a reverence for everything that's around you, for anything that's in your energetic sort of container and boundary. It's a reverence to go, "I wanna keep this clean and beautiful, and I wanna cultivate it and I wanna be with it." And it's almost like, in your story, when you were in the backyard with the four things of bamboo that are going back and forth, just to be in that moment, to be present with what you've already cultivated. That's so nourishing in itself because you realize, oh, if I can do this in my small family, in this tiny backyard in Austin, and I know that there are thousands of other people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who are also starting to think about this, then that provides... It's a sense of optimism, totally, but it's more a sense of like... I love Buckminster Fuller. And he has a quote where he's like, "Look," and I'm not... It's not the exact quote, but he's like, "There's no point in fighting the old. There's no point in trying to fix the old. What we're here to do is to create the new."

1:25:47 PA: And what psychedelics can help us to do is to understand since we are so interconnected to everything around us, that when we create the new, we have to be mindful of everything. There's nothing more sacred than that, than just having the awareness of my energy is connected to everything that I find around me. And one other thing that I wanna touch on, 'cause I heard you... After our podcast on Wednesday, we were talking outside with Godsey a little bit, and you had mentioned the concept of paradox. And so what I'm also hearing a little bit is, and I've been getting into this as well, it's like we have this tendency to think in black and white, or either/or. It has to be this way, or it has to be this way. And what we're learning is that to handle the complexity of where we're at right now, we have to start thinking in terms of both/and. It's both. Yeah, things are getting worse and worse. There's COVID, and there's the protests, and there's all this chaos happening, and there's hope for something greater because of plant medicine and because of this resurgence of interest in the south, and because of...

1:26:57 PA: Humanity is so resilient. Like resilience, resilience, resilience. And you can break pieces of us and you can break big pieces of us, but at the end of the day, humanity will survive and we will thrive and we will evolve and we will go on. And those who can sort of hold that gift and that beauty of what we're stepping into, those will be sort of the new prophets or renaissance gurus or whatever else you wanna think, that will then hopefully help to influence what's coming. I go back to the renaissance, like the printing press. And before the printing press, there was no literacy, basically. No one could read, nothing, all of that. And the printing press came and then we had da Vinci, and we had Michaelangelo, and we had all this stuff, and I see us at a similar point in time right now with the Internet as this next renaissance that it's birthing. And what it's teaching us is that we are interconnected, and that we can overcome this by the hive mind mentality. And a lot of that is dampening the ego and keeping it low and allowing that to emerge and not trying to control it. Because when we try to control nature, as we have done, when we try to be too masculine around it and get everything into light, we lose the mystery, we lose the feminine, we lose the wonder. And when we lose the wonder, we lose hope. And wonder inspires that. I was speaking with Louie Schwartzberg yesterday, the director of Fantastic Fungi.

1:28:27 KK: Fantastic Fungi.

1:28:28 PA: And the next documentary that he's working on is about wonder. It's called Wonder. And so he's actually, the next thing that he's exploring into is how do we find wonder again? How do we find awe? How do we find reverence? Because people right now just look out and it's like, it's bleak. What do we have to hope for? There are thousands of people dying from opioid addictions and the benzo crisis and fucking climate change and all this shit. If you turn on the news just for 30 seconds, you're just inundated with like, fuck, it's hopeless. And speaking with someone like you and knowing the work that you're doing in the world and knowing what you're bringing, and many other people like you, it gives, at least me personally, a sense of it's gonna be difficult, the next five, 10 years, but we will adapt. And that's what, again, what psychedelics and plant medicines help us do. They realize, okay, we can adapt to this. We can grow. We can change, so we can step into what we're being called into, this greater being, this integrated being that can actually hold the complexity of both/and. It's about the paradox. Can you handle paradox? I think that's the skill of the 21st century. It's how can you hold paradox and not go fucking nuts with it?

1:29:41 KK: Yeah, yeah. There's a lot with that. There's a lot with communication, too, and the internet itself, all the pros and cons. And a lot of the cons we see in the way we communicate with one another through social media, not actually having conversations and not communicating face-to-face. Rogan was saying that, too. I know I've been quoting him a lot on this podcast, but what's lost in text versus an actual conversation, and what's lost over the phone than face-to-face. We are sitting in each other's energy fields, and that's also proven by HeartMath at Boulder and many mystics for thousands of years prior to that, but scientifically proven. We are interconnected right now through our light bodies, whatever you wanna call that, and I can sense where you're at and you can sense where I'm at. That's important. As we grow, we can't forget the importance of that. It's, I think, one of the most important things about our being interconnected is to remember the importance of how we talk to one another, how we treat people, whether it's online, in a car. If there's any degree of separation, let's not forget that's another human being there. And we watched Trolls 2 with my son when my mom was in town, and Trolls 2 was awesome because it was like this... How do I explain this? But it was like...

1:31:00 PA: What is Trolls 2?

1:31:01 KK: Trolls the movie, and then Trolls 2 is the sequel.

1:31:03 PA: Okay. Yeah, of course.

1:31:05 KK: And it's like, "Timberlake's fucking tapped in, dude. He's fucking tapped in. This guy's got it." But this idea that we are all different in that we don't always agree with one another, but if we can learn to accept that, we can cherish our differences. Jonathan Haidt talked about that in "The Righteous Mind", and Godsey's mentioned this a bunch of times, but it was important to have liberal progressive people in a tribe as well as conservative people. And there was reasons for both, valid reasons for both. And the opposition of those things, as you wouldn't even call it opposition, the yin and yang of those energies...

1:31:45 PA: The tension that it sits between, right?

1:31:46 KK: Yeah, that tension provided the growth for new thinking, and for the traditions to stay that were meant to stay, for the old ways to hold. That balance of those energies is important. Again, it's not... I lean both directions on different issues. I'm not saying that I have an equivalency in politics or any of that kind of stuff, but I am saying that could they be both right at the same time? Could the paradox be something that I must come to grips with on both sides of the equation, just to be able to navigate some middle path, like the Buddha? And I think that's the case. And I've had another gnarly experience that wasn't quite as gnarly as the 30g, on ketamine was just this... Any time I had a thought of something positive, almost in real-time it immediately turned to the flip side of that coin, the negative. And then if I would get into the lull of, "Oh, God. Now it's going dark." And it's showing me something dark and I'd be like, "Yup, there's the darkness," then it would flip that on its head and show me the flip side of that as a positive.

1:32:52 KK: And it did it so often and so quickly and rapidly that it was like, "Is everything here duality? Is everything here paradox?" And to a degree, yes. Where we're living right now, that is true. And we chose to come here, whether you subscribe to that or not. We chose to embody and incarnate to learn here. And we chose to learn through these opposing forces that help us learn. And I think that's something that's also missing from certain psychedelic communities or yoga communities or polyamorous communities, is that it's not all love. And even if God is all love at the top, we're not at the top right now. We're in a world to learn, and we can learn through these things and through coming to terms with both sides of the coin, through acknowledging the beauty in both sides of the coin, and through acceptance of both sides of the coin. And while trying to navigate a middle path, communicating in a way that doesn't paint the picture of other.

1:33:49 KK: And Eisenstein really hammers that home better than anyone I've ever read before. And one of the things he communicates is the old model of force always looks for opposition. It always looks for us against them. 99% of our movies are that way, there's always a bad guy. I'm realizing that now, even the kids movies like The Incredibles and shit like that, 'cause my son's always like, "And then the bad guy came and blah blah blah... " And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah. Actually, yeah." So that's encoded in us from a young age. The bad guy versus the good guy, us versus them, that tribe versus our tribe. And if we can begin to break through that model of paradox and navigate some sort of middle path there, we can see how interconnected we are and not just as humans, all the way to the earth. And then it's not airy-fairy to call the earth Pachamama or Gaia, 'cause you recognize its own divinity. You recognize it is a super-conscious being. There was a dope... Remember those Larson... I think Larson was his last name, he'd do the little cartoons in the paper, and they went to online.

1:34:56 PA: What were those called? The...

1:34:57 KK: I forget.

1:34:58 PA: Oh, fuck!

1:35:00 KK: It was something like that. And it was like a group of bacteria inside the intestines, and one was kicking the microvilli of the intestine, and the other bacteria was like, "Hey, don't do that. This is... That thing's conscious." It's like, "What are you talking about? It's just some stupid inanimate object." What we think of as a mountain or a tree. And it's like the bacteria within our gut is conscious, all the way outward, to the planet, to the solar system, to...

1:35:30 PA: The fractals. The fractals.

1:35:31 KK: You know what I'm saying? Everything, right?

1:35:32 PA: Yeah, everything.

1:35:33 KK: And that, I could never read that and fully understand it, and I think that's one of the most important lessons I've ever received from plant medicines that's been shown to me in many different ways from many different medicines, is just that, to see and to know and to feel that interconnectedness. So then how do I practice that when somebody is telling me GMOs and glyphosate are not an issue? How can I see that? Like, "Alright, you work for Monsanto, big deal. Okay, I get it. You're playing for the home team." Or maybe you're just unaware, or maybe that person wants to paint the brush of everything I'm believing is because I take drugs. Or everything I'm believing is because I don't live in a regular family, or because I was raised... Or whatever the case is. And I think if they can view me that way, how am I mirroring them? In what ways do I look at them and say, "That's because you haven't done these drugs. That's because you grew up conservative watching Fox News, that's because of... " blanket statement, blanket statement, blanket statement.

1:36:40 KK: And if I can understand that we are mirroring each other in some way, then I can also find a bit of compassion and non-judgment around how we come to terms with our own agreements, how we come to terms with our own beliefs. And again, always circling back to, not separate, interconnected. And I think all those modes from the Charles Eisensteins of the earth to many other great thinkers, and many of these tools that help crack open that code and allow us to see with new eyes and soften us in a way that we could live in a way with our communication that is inviting to others, that's non-aggressive, that doesn't use force in the way we talk to one another. If we can begin to implement those things, I think the wisdom of our ancients in terms of how we treat the earth, that's already been known, we can solve that riddle. It's how do we soften to a point where we can communicate with each other, again, like people would?

1:37:36 PA: There's a Ram Dass quote, which is like, when you see a tree, you don't go, "Oh, man. I wish the branch was a little bit lower or it had a better flower on top, or it wasn't so gnarly or... " No, you just go, "That's a beautiful tree." And I feel like that's sort of the energy when you look at a person, we always have a tendency to go, "Oh, if they were just like this, or if they did this different, or if they... " And it's really just like, if you're choosing to be energetically with someone, whether it's intentional or not... Like we organize this podcast. We came here to sit down, we knew each other beforehand, but there's also strangers that we meet at the cafe, or there's people that we run into at the airport or whatever else it is who we feel triggered by or we get frustrated by. But if we just hold that knowledge that they are perfection, and they're here to live their life however they're meant to live.

1:38:32 PA: And it's not my place to judge them or try to fix them or try to make them do something different but just to let them flourish as they will flourish, and to understand that that's their path, and that's my path, and that's just where we're at. That's just what's happening. Okay. The Hopi prophecy. Can I get one more of those? [chuckle]

1:38:52 KK: Heck, yeah bro. It's my third.

[laughter]

1:38:56 KK: I'm not dogmatic about my nicotine use on podcast. It's funny. I'm not throwing a freshie every 20-30 minutes.

1:39:03 PA: I don't know anything about the Hopi prophecy. This is a Buddha Ben thing, what he said, "Ask Kyle about the Hopi prophecy." What is the Hopi prophecy?

1:39:14 KK: So this will be me not having distilled this from my work with the Hopi, it would be me distilling this from Dr. Will Taegel's work with the Hopi, and what he talks about at the end of his book Walking With Bears. So again, talking about the sacred hoop. There's been many prophecies that have come down from different Native American cultures that we will return within a certain section of humanity, not all are coming. And within this sacred hoop where we understand all things interconnected, all things related, which is everything. Everything is interconnected and interrelated. So when we live by that model, that will usher in a new stage of humanity, and the Hopi believe that's the fifth stage of humanity.

1:40:01 KK: Again, I'm not gonna dive too deep into that, but you listen to a guy like Graham Hancock, who through his work can really re-write what we think about, "Did we have other stages of consciousness that were as developed as us?" He would argue yes, and pretty definitively. And I believe him. And if you don't wanna read his books, he's got a great episode. Who did he go on with, with Rogan's the last time? It's another guy. Another guy who's... Anyhoo. Search Graham Hancock if you wanna get into that. We have had other stages of humanity that have made it pretty far.

1:40:35 PA: Like Atlantis, and...

1:40:36 KK: Yeah. And even Göbekli Tepe, 30,000 years ago, which may even date further than that, like community and ways that we would only think of in the last 5000-6000 years have been going on much further back. So this fifth stage of humanity that gets ushered in, they have a rock art drawing of two lines that run parallel initially. On the bottom line, and this is not to scale, it's a smaller number of people. There are only, I think, four people on the bottom line, connected to the earth. Their line goes straight across into the new era, they're who usher in the next stage of human consciousness, the fifth stage of humanity, if you will. Connected to the earth, less than the majority, those are the people that go. Above that, there are several more people, but all those painted people have their heads disconnected from their body, they're floating above their body. So not connected to their body. Their line goes straight for a while, then it zig-zags up on a trajectory that leaves the circle.

1:41:40 KK: So you may say that leaves the hoop. You may say it leaves the planet, maybe that is the Mars mission. You may say that they no longer live, something happens and they don't make it to the next place. When I think of that, it's interesting 'cause in the Bible they say... I'm not a Bible thumper, but I have gained a lot of wisdom. Thankfully, two plant medicines, as I've revisited some of this stuff without anger towards my experiences with mono religion. I can actually read this and absorb some of it. And the answer is yes, the meek will inherit the earth. And Graham Hancock talks about this. If the grid goes down, we might lose 80% to 90% of people who live on electricity, who live in cities. It's gonna fucking wipe out everybody, right? And I'm not saying that's gonna happen, but let's say something did happen or there was an astral impact, or the next ice age or fill in the blank on any possible thing that could cause a severe catastrophic event to happen. You're gonna see a lot of deaths among people who live in a modern world.

1:42:47 KK: And the meek, the people who know how to survive off the land in these conscious permaculture regenerative agriculture communities, they get to carry the torch forward. The people of the Amazon who've been working with Ayahuasca for thousands of years, that know exactly where their food and their water have come from for thousands of years, those are the people that carry the torch. I understood this viscerally five years ago. While Bear was in the womb, I had a thought, I'm gonna go to Central and South America and spend a week in each of my favorite cities, to determine if we can live closer to the Amazon in case shit hits the fan. I spent a week in Costa Rica, a week in Panama, a week in Miraflores, Peru, and a week in... And of course, that's not the Amazon, but can I get closer, best of both worlds type deal? And a week in Medellín.

1:43:37 KK: And in doing that, I realized... When I realized I wasn't going to be able to move there, I was in Medellín and I looked on Facebook and there was a place Santa Elena, it's a mountain town, not far. Said, "Let me drop in with the medicine if I'm not gonna actually move here. Let me gain, gain something from this." So, they call it yagé there for Ayahuasca. I went and I participated in a beautiful yagé ceremony. And the people that were there talked about what the elders said, they call it the word. So the people that were too old, the oldest elders with the greatest wisdom of their tribe that were too old to travel, would give them a transmission to talk about at the beginning of each ceremony. And so they're talking about this pre-medicine, and a lot of the stuff that was coming up was the importance of connecting to the earth, the importance of connecting to the circadian rhythm and the seasons, the importance of knowing how to grow our own food, all this stuff that makes sense today.

1:44:30 KK: And the vision I had was, I can't leave America. I can't leave the US. For as shitty as it is, and as awesome as it is paradoxically, I chose to be born here. I chose to come to this place at this time. And the reason for that is, that's where the change is needed. If all the people that were thinking about returning to a sacred hoop moved to the Amazon, we may not have an Amazon left because everybody else is gonna go on believing that shit is okay will ruin the Amazon. And will burn down and cut down every last tree, and ruin every last clean water source until there's nothing left. And of course the earth will still live, and give it enough time there will be new consciousness, new life, new everything here. But for people that don't wanna see it in that way, it's almost like the buffalo medicine where they get shoulder to shoulder and go head first into the storm, knowing that's the fastest way through it.

1:45:25 KK: So I think for everybody who's decided to move to a mountain top and meditate, that's cool. But now is the time, now is the time to stand shoulder to shoulder and go head first into the storm, and actually look at it and actually talk about it, and collect the great minds like the Eisensteins and the Hancocks, and the people who can show us a possible way forward. And continue to have those conversations so that we're the people that are connected to the earth that usher in the new era. And we're not caught with the people whose heads are detached from their body that leave. With that, I've sprinkled in my own ceremony, as my own thoughts around the Hopi prophecy, but something that I brought up to Will around that was like, "Hey, what is this timeline? If scientists are right on the seven years... " And he's like, "You are already connected to the earth, because of the fact that you do grow your own food, that you do... As simple as a plant that you have in your backyard."

1:46:23 KK: That isn't enough to survive off of, correct, but I also know where to get my bison and I know how to hunt. And I've connected those dots purposely and mindfully, not just in case, but because I know it's important. And it's an important thing to teach my children. We've become so good at specialization we've forgotten how to live. We've forgotten how to survive, and that's not, "I'm gonna get a bunker and have 20 AR-15s... "

1:46:49 PA: That's just more separation.

1:46:51 KK: Yeah, it's none of that stuff. It's, how can I actually learn what's on my land? What are the natural plants here that are edible? What is medicine here? What do the seasons look like? How did people survive before electricity, in case the grid goes down? Little things like that. And it's not my day job to think through those things, that's something my intuition led me to. That's something that I listened to from the feminine coming in saying, "Hey, you should try this. It's really cool," And then I get into it and it's like I love hunting, I love all of it. And again, a lot of people won't have time for that, they won't make time for that. It's a conscious effort to learn more about what it might mean to carry that torch going forward. And it's as simple also as voting with your dollar, that's something that they really hammered home at the end of Food, Inc. Walmart and some of these mega companies that you could argue are not the best places to shop, that might be the only place you can afford food.

1:47:47 KK: But if you choose to buy organic, if you choose to buy grass-fed beef or something that's free range and grown a little bit better than factory farm caged chickens and things like that, you're voting with your dollar. And you can see it in places like Costco and Walmart, because they have a huge organic section now. And that's different if you're in Des Moines versus San Jose, California, what that organic section looks like, but again, you vote with your dollar. All these companies understand. All these companies say, "Okay, we'll do it a little differently for you. We're gonna adhere to the market." And so voting with the dollar is a brilliant way that we can affect change going forward, it's not the only way, but it's one very powerful way that we do affect change going forward.

1:48:28 KK: More important than any of this shit, like becoming a hunter or moving to the Amazon, or any of these things is simply coming to the fact that there is something off. The realization there is something off, and the humility to say, "I don't know how to change it. I don't know how to fix it. Can you guide me there? Can I be guided towards these things?" And then watch what synchronistically pops up for you. It may not be hunting, but it may be gardening. It may be getting in touch with a local rancher who's doing it correctly. It may be going out and actually picking apples from an orchard. It may be getting a group together and cleaning your local water supply. It may be anything that makes a difference on however small of a level in the right way that actually impacts the whole.

1:49:13 PA: These little incremental changes that over time add up to a new world that we live in.

1:49:17 KK: Yeah, brother.

1:49:18 PA: Kyle Kingsbury. Where can people find out more? I know you have a podcast and... Yeah, just a few details about if people wanna find out more about your work, where should they go?

1:49:27 KK: Yeah, Kyle Kingsbury Podcast. We release weekly. I generally release on Wednesdays, but having the new kid in I'm three days late on this week's episode. There will always be one released a week, at least there. People can contact us on Instagram @livingwiththekingsburys. Again, it may be a couple of months before I get back to the DMs or questions on post, but my website kingsbu.com is basically out of order. It's still on, but I'm not responding to anybody there, so that'll be something I re-address in about a year.

[laughter]

1:50:01 KK: We'll give it a facelift. And again, after both the kids are in a better space, and sleep is restored and family life has kinda set that trajectory of my imprint and Tasha's imprint and the wholeness of that, then I can begin to focus on what's in front of me in terms of expansion and website shit, that kind of stuff. So, again...

1:50:25 PA: You got a family, though, and a newborn and...

1:50:26 KK: Yeah. Best way, Instagram livingwiththekingsburys, and Kyle Kingsbury Podcast. That's about it, brother.

1:50:32 PA: Great. Thank you Kyle.

1:50:34 KK: Hell, yeah. Thanks for having me.

1:50:35 PA: That was fun, wasn't it?

1:50:35 KK: Yeah, brother. Always.

1:50:35 PA: That was good.