No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Psychedelics and Sensemaking with Alexander Beiner
What if the key to understanding our complex world lies in altered states of consciousness? Join us as we sit down with Alexander Beiner, author of "The Bigger Picture: How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the World," and episode co-host Sonja Blignaut, for a compelling conversation on the intersection of psychedelics, sensemaking, and extended states of consciousness. Discover how traditional shamanic practices and modern research shared by the likes of Stephen Kotler, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Michael Pollan can help us see the world through a more interconnected lens.
Explore the revolutionary concept of 4E cognition, which posits that our thinking processes are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. Learn how psychedelics can foster creativity and openness, improving problem-solving abilities and facilitating breakthrough innovations. We delve into how these altered states can transform organizational dynamics, enhance communication, and foster empathy, laying the groundwork for a more flexible and adaptive approach to complex systems.
From the healing potential of psychedelic-assisted therapy for veterans with PTSD and TBI to the broader cultural implications of ego dissolution and the challenges of MDMA legalization, this episode offers a wide-ranging exploration of how psychedelics can reshape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Hear about the latest shifts in medical paradigms, personal journeys through mental health practices, and the ongoing necessity of deliberate practices to navigate new traumas and distractions. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion that promises to expand your mind and challenge your perspectives.
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Acta Non Verba – with Marcus Aurelius Anderson
Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
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OODAcast...
I'm fired up to have Alexander Beiner here today with us. He is the author of the Bigger Picture how Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the World. Also with us today is one of our good friends, sonia Blinio. She's calling in from South Africa today. Fired up to have you both here, welcome, thank you. Thanks, bunch. So Sonia introduced me to Alexander's book the Bigger Picture. So Sonia introduced me to Alexander's book the Bigger Picture. She and I had a couple of conversations in Portugal last year about what would it look like if we brought psychedelic-consistent therapies and again, we're not promoting the recreational use of psychedelics here on this podcast but what if we were to use these medicines, if you will, to help us understand what's going on around us? And lo and behold, uh, the bigger picture comes out and alexander has been looking at this. So I just kind of want to start there and sonia, uh, want to add any color to that conversation we had a few months ago in portugal no, I, I think what.
Sonja Blignaut :What really excites me about this book is, um, it brings together, you know, psychedelics, or these medicines, as you call them, or extended states of consciousness, with sense making. You know, normally you know many of the other things in the books that I've encountered. It's more about the therapy or this. You know, the use of ceremony or shamanic practice, and so I think I was really excited about, you know, this particular combination of psychedelic, sense-making complexity.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So, yeah, very happy to be here, thank you and as I'm reading your book, alexander, you reference quite a few folks. You have Stephen Kotler. You look at Robin Carhart-Harris Actually I believe he wrote not a forward for you but an endorsement on the book Not a forward for you, but an endorsement on the book. Robert Hart Harris for those of you that aren't familiar really influenced how we look at the free energy principle and combine that with the OODA loop observe, orient, decide, act and put a boundary around that. So his work influenced how we now sketch the OODA loop, which is not a new sketch, just a new boundary, and his entropic brain hypothesis also influenced us. You also bring up Michael Pollan, a great author out there. But your book is well-researched and I just want to turn it over to you to kind of describe for our listeners what brought you to write this book and what kind of response have you had since it's been published.
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, great. Well, first, thanks for having me. It's great to be talking about complexity and psychedelics specifically. That's one of my favorite topics and something I talk about in the book a lot.
Alexander Beiner:So I think the book really came about because of another project that I was one of the founders of, rebel Wisdom. So we had a media channel and a community really focused on sensemaking, so cultural sensemaking. So I was lucky enough for about a five-year period to interview or run courses with or otherwise learn from and engage with some really brilliant thinkers in the space of complexity, psychology, lots of different areas, and the idea was to find rebellious thinkers in different areas. And I think there's something rebellious about having a complexity mindset in a world that doesn't really fully understand complexity and generally focuses on solving complicated problems badly and not understanding that they're trying to solve complex problems. So that and then, alongside that, you know, for my whole adult life I've been involved in the psychedelic world, mainly as a kind of a from a sociological perspective and kind of political activism perspective as well executive directors of the UK's or sorry, europe's largest conference on psychedelic research and culture breaking convention, which happens every two years in the UK, and I've also just been always sort of perpetually fascinated by the psychedelic experience. It's been a very powerful and important experience for me as well in my life, very formative, and so the book was really an opportunity to combine those two things.
Alexander Beiner:So shamans traditionally have been the people in a society whose role it is to enter, in their view, enter different worlds, enter the world of the spirits, make alliances with different beings, whether that's, you know, beings associated with, like a local river or the trees or elements, and then gain information that they can bring back. That's useful, and much of that information is quite practical. It's like when is it going to rain? Where are the antelope going to be roaming next week? Should we go that way? Should we go that way? So that requires, like it does today, when you have a complex system that you're in, let's say, the savannah or a jungle, you're in a complex system and your cognition is limited in making sense of that complex system.
Alexander Beiner:And what altered states do, which can be achieved through psychedelics and also through deep breathing or meditation or intense exercise or deep group activities, what they do is they help us to widen our frame of perception, and so more is included. So what previously looked like disparate units like, for example, the sky is slightly gray over there. Yesterday I saw a few footprints from a particular animal over there. This person's reported this from over somewhere else Three days ago. This happened In a normal frame of consciousness where we have a narrow focus and a narrowed attention.
Alexander Beiner:We're not necessarily seeing the way all those things connect into a greater whole when we have a deep experience, like the shamans having with the psychedelic experience they're engaging in. What cognitive scientist John Verveke has pointed out is it's soul flight. Right, this is a really common thing in shamanism, where you get a bird's eye view of the situation. It's like having a drone that gives you reconnaissance over a situation. That is a hugely important skill to be able to have in a small society or in a big society, to be able to see how disparate things connect and then get a moment of insight into. Ah okay, you know what? I think it's going to rain in three days. How do you know? I just know because the spirits told me.
Alexander Beiner:Or you could say how do you know? I know because I was able to change my perceptual frame to include more of what's there and have a sort of a flash of insight. That's a cognitive process called intelligent memory. That probably happens all the time with us. That's why we have eureka moments and like flashes of insight, where we get an idea that comes to us fully formed um. It's basically how napoleon managed to take over all of europe and the um.
Alexander Beiner:The military strategist von clausowitz studied napoleon um specifically because he was like how was he able to just go bam, that way, that way, that way? And napoleon was was engaging in this process of um sort of um intelligent memory where he's looking at the bigger picture of what's going on strategically and then from that boom, a flash of insight. So there's always been this link between psychedelics and navigating complex systems, and so what I'm trying to do in the book is bring that link back, along with a bunch of other things that have been lost with the over-medicalization of psychedelics, because psychedelics for the treatment of mental health is really important and very powerful and should absolutely be happening, and at the same time, there's loads of other important applications that we need right now to navigate a world that is increasingly fractured and facing a lot of existential threats. So that's the main impetus for writing the book was to explore that capacity of psychedelics.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I want to add a few things for our listeners to make a connection to what we talk a lot about here on the podcast and that is John Boyd's Observe, orient, decide and Act loop. There are some nice connections to things like the Tao of physics. So you go back in the 1970s mysticism and physics being combined to look, you know, looked at by physicists to understand, hey, what's actually going on here. And then John Boyd's spent a lot of time looking at Eastern philosophy, the Sun Tzu. You brought up Clausewitz, which is not Eastern philosophy, but that's more about warfare. How do you, how do you understand what's going on from a big picture? And then you look at things like I'll classify the Toyota production system in there as Eastern philosophy as well Outside and bottom up.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You get into Heisenberg, google, you get into the second law of thermodynamics. You get into these things that say, hey, we can't change the system from within, we have to go outside the system to change it, and I think that's what you're getting at here. That connection is we have to be able to have access to a larger world reality space, because right now it's kind of limited by our consensus reality space, if you will, and we want to expand that view and I think leaders and organizations that can do that, or individuals that can do that, are the ones that, using John Boyd's language makes make snowmobiles or adjacent possibles, which we know from Stuart Kaufman. We get to create new things, we get innovation and we hopefully have a better civilization emerge out of that. So, sonia, any thoughts on what you heard this for?
Sonja Blignaut :now I I am what. What came to my mind as well is um, I think along with this expanded view is also this notion of you know, along with sense making, there's also a need for sense breaking. It's also how do we get out of our very mechanistic, linear ways of looking at the world, and this is why I think you started in the beginning saying we like to solve complicated problems very badly instead of actually seeing the complexity. And something that comes to mind of what you wrote was that psychedelics give us a lived experience of navigating complexity, and I think that's so important. To kind of break out of these old ways of thinking is the best way that I can describe them. I don't know if you've got anything to say about that.
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, definitely that's. I think a really important point on this topic is, like you know, I also talk in the book about cognition in general and how, actually how we think and feel as human beings isn't just limited to our brains, but it's what in cognitive science is called 4E cognition, so that cognition is embodied. You know it's inseparable from being in the body. It's embedded in your environment, it's enacted. It's always about the feedback of doing stuff and it's extended through the rest of us. It's true for each other of doing stuff and it's extended through um, the rest of us. It's true for each other. And um, it's also um. There's a phrase from, or a suggestion from, john verveke that there should be two more e's one's, emotion, because actually cognition is always related to what you care about. Like the reason you're motivated to do something is you care about it in some way.
Alexander Beiner:Um, and it's also exapted, and exaptation is a word from um, evolution. And if you don't know it, you're not alone. Because of, like the I don't know 60 experts I spoke to for my book, not one of them had heard of the term before and I had to triple check it was actually a thing. But John Ravick is a smart guy, so he comes up with terms like that. But exaptation evolution is is when um evolution uses something you already have for a new purpose. So, for example, I'm talking to you right now with my tongue, but my dog has a tongue. But you know, if she my dog were to learn to talk, evolution might be really efficient and go well. There's already a tongue and there's already a windpipe, so why not use those things instead of making a whole new um? You know, organ for speech, um, and so this happens a lot, and the idea in cognitive science, or one theory, is that all of our cognition works like that.
Alexander Beiner:So you know, there's a researcher called Barbara Tversky who argues that the way we move through space uses the same. We use the same cognitive machinery for talking about ideas. So we talk about taking a step back or looking up to someone. So that literally means that when you move through a room and you touch something on a table and you sort of automatically judge the distance between where you are and the door, that same machinery is what's being exacted to think about ideas. How far away am I from a solution to this idea? Like what is it actually? Oh, there's something. Quite. I can take skills you learned in one domain like Tai Chi or boxing, and you could apply it to, say, running a business. Right, and people talk about this all the time. It's like, okay, what did kayaking teach me about being a father? Whatever it might be right, this is a constant part of being a human being.
Alexander Beiner:So, then, psychedelic experiences can be exacted and applied to real world domains, and there's a bunch of different areas I talk about in the book, one of them being maybe the most important, that they give us a lived experience of complexity, that, instead of just being able to think conceptually that the world that we're in is a complex system and there's emergence and there's it's more than the sum of its parts it's changing as we're trying to make sense of it you live that, you feel it in your body. If you're in nature during a psychedelic experience, very often you really can see the way that the trees are connected to the soil. Sometimes you might have the experience of actually seeing photosynthesis happening, or perceiving that you are and you're getting a deeper view into the complexity of it. And the same is true of social dynamics, of feeling in a group of people. Oh whoa, I can know, I feel what this person is feeling about this person and about me. I just you know and you know sometimes you're wrong, which is an important thing to say. It doesn't make you psychic but very often you're right because your sensitivity goes up and your ability to perceive really ramps up no-transcript huge implications for how we actually solve problems moving forward, because I know this is true in my own experiences I solve problems differently after having had a psychedelic experience more recently than I do when I'm a little bit more what Robin Carter Harris would call canalized.
Alexander Beiner:Like you know, my habits and biases are a little bit more rigid and and burned in. What it tends to be is I'm more open, I'm more I entertain multiple possibilities, I'm less attached to the outcome, um, I'm more fluid, I'm more playful, and that I've seen that happen with people over and over again. I'm, in fact, involved in a. I'm an advisor to the center for minds, which is a new non, a new nonprofit, funding psychedelic assisted innovation processes and creativity, specifically around this idea that you know, if we could get 10 scientists together who are trying to solve an important problem and take them through a psychedelic process in the right way, there's a good chance that they will not only be able to perhaps come up with interesting solutions in that experience, but in the future be able to approach those solutions differently than they did before.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So, alexander, I want to comment on a few things and I'll turn it over to Sonia, and mainly my comments are going to be focused more on what we talk about on the podcast and some of the language we use. John Boyd used the word what we talk about on the podcast and some of the language we use. John Boyd used the word invariance to talk about exactive practices and that's we use the word, the term exactive practices quite a bit in the complex domain when we talk about Kenevan. So we're very familiar with that. And then John Boyd's language, invariance from him. Something else you brought up. You brought up the four E's. You're calling those four, two more six E's of cognition.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:One of the things that we this is a personal opinion when people use John Boyd's orientation as the brain, we disagree with that because of the four E's of cognition. Right, it's connecting more to what the medium is. The message from Marshall McLuhan I think you referenced that in your book as well. We're still, when we make decisions, when we make sense of our environment, it's not just up in the brain, right, it's, it's, it goes beyond our body, actually, from what I understand from the research. So it's very important that when we represent the ooda loop. You do not put the brain as the center of the ooda loop. That's not true. You're dismissing all the science that came before that, or um, john boyd looked at before that as well.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Uh, and maybe we should come back to the mediumism message. That's something that's popping up in our world quite a bit because we're seeing that everywhere now. It's that extended mind thinking, it's that 4E or 6E cognition that you brought up as well. But I just want to make those comments, to make that connection for our listeners that in what you just shared with us, those are some of the some of the key things that popped up. There's more and I want to see what Sonia has to. Has any insights on what you just brought up as well?
Sonja Blignaut :Nothing, nothing for now. I'd actually love to hear you know your thoughts on what Bunch just said, ali.
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, yeah, I think, on the point of the medium, is the message. I think this is a very interesting thing to explore. Mcluhan was talking about that in terms of technology, and I think we've seen that A message coming through TV isn't just the message itself. Actually, the format it's coming through changes what the message is because it's broadcast in a particular way. Similarly, a conversation on social media isn't just the conversation, it's the conversation mediated through the algorithm, through the nature of it, like you know X or you know Twitter, having the character limits completely change the way people spoke. It doesn't allow you to speak in certain ways, it only allows you to communicate. You know, increasingly, you know, tiktok and Instagram and other networks are becoming video networks, short-form video, and that changes the way we communicate.
Alexander Beiner:I think that points to something bigger as well, which is the importance of context psychedelics really show us, but also is maybe something that is increasingly people are exploring in areas of systems change, and Nora Bateson springs to mind. You know Nora talks very eloquently and has great you know, research and theory on the way data changes across contexts, you know, and so something in one contextual setup is not exactly. You know, even a piece of information, um, is not the same as it is in another one, right. And so that means again that the old model of thinking, okay, this particular piece of information is true in every single situation and it doesn't change based on the context it's in. That's pretty much never true. Maybe sometimes that's true with certain things like perhaps love, right. So more qualitative aspects. You could say that a parent will love a child across contexts, and there's something really sacred and quite amazing about anything that can survive across contexts. The sacred, I think, survives across context, but in terms of our day-to-day lives. That's why, in the legal system that's part of the reason we need a legal system because someone's perception of what happened is radically different depending on where you're standing.
Alexander Beiner:And I'm not a relativist in the sense that I don't think there's an ultimate truth, because I think there is. But I think human beings are, we're just prone to have a lot of cognitive biases and a lot of our sense making tangles are, I think, about forgetting that things are contextually driven to a large extent, and that also frees up a lot of mental space, because it's actually a lot of mental effort to demand something is true across context. That's usually what ideologies do. An ideology says. This is always true. Marxism will be like. It's always about class dynamics or it's social justice activism. It's always about power dynamics. It's always about that, of course.
Alexander Beiner:Ken Wilber said no one's smart enough to be what did he say? No one's smart enough to be wrong all of the time. I think it's basically they're always going to be right. You're going to be right in certain contexts. In certain contexts, the dominant thing may well be class dynamics, but there's a million other things going on that are influencing something, and so that means that, again, we need to be. This is something I argue in the book. We need a kind of very deep cognitive and emotional flexibility to meet the world and to make sense effectively. Effectively, and definitely psychedelics. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that they do that very, very well if used in the right way. Other practices do as well, but having tried many of them, I would say that psychedelics do it incredibly effectively within the right context.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, Again, so many things to dive into. You know, state management in an organ or with a group of people. Getting people to stop and just breathe is hard to do, right, let's just take take 10, 20 seconds to do some breathing exercises. That's tough to do. Now we're going to talk about potentially gaining giving access to psychedelic therapies or psychedelics to increase awareness of the external world and what that can do to the default mode of operating of an individual, the ego, suppressing that ego that's out there. I kind of wonder what that would look like here in the near future, what your ideas in the bigger picture would bring to an organization that's trying to innovate, trying to achieve some type of peak performance. I want to talk about that, sonia, you and I talked about this in the past too. What would that look like for leaders of an organization bringing in these ideas from Alexander's book?
Alexander Beiner:Did you want to comment, Sonia, or do you want me to jump in on that?
Sonja Blignaut :No, I am very interested to hear your answer on that one. As punch said, we've had various conversations on this, so please go ahead yeah I think, I think it's possible.
Alexander Beiner:I think it's also very, very, um, complicated, uh, because, when you, okay, so let's, let's just take a. Let's imagine a company, right, and let's imagine a leader, and I've I have actually done this before, so you know, um, but I don't have enough data points to say exactly what it would be like in every situation. But let's imagine there's a company and the senior leaders are doing psychedelics together in order to, um, yeah, get into better, more peak performance, more flow, more of a sense of empathy with each other and then, hopefully, with the wider stakeholders in the business. That can definitely be done. The issue is, when people take psychedelics together, all of the relational dynamics are going to show up. So that has to be worked on very consciously and be brought into awareness before the psychedelic experience even happens. You know, so it's like, okay, what's under the surface about the power dynamics of this particular organization and the team dynamics overall? Right, you know, maybe there's maybe one person was passed over for a promotion, you know, in favor of another person, or maybe someone got more shares than they feel like. You know the other people feel like was really fair, or whatever it might be. All of that is likely to come up right and so it's best. For that, you know, it needs to be sort of a very carefully thought out process, because that is a very, that's a very important process to surface and explore what is under the surface in an organization or in a group of people. That is a separate though perhaps related process that has to happen before, I think, really getting into exploring peak performance together.
Alexander Beiner:For I think, really getting into exploring peak performance together because and it might be there they're very intertwined but generally peak. But I think a lot of peak performance comes from a deep sense of understanding one another and a real deep sense of having being in an extended cognition with one another. And you know, like, like kotler and we'll talk about in stealing fire, um, that requires, uh, getting getting rid of the gray man, so to speak, the person who's really excellent individual performer but can't be in group flow with the others. Um, not necessarily getting rid of, but allowing that process to allowing a particular process to unfold where everyone can drop in together and be bonded. So, and that can happen very effectively.
Alexander Beiner:On psychedelics, particularly MDMA, which isn't really a psychedelic but it's more of an empathogen and is used, you know, to treat post-traumatic stress disorder for veterans, but it's also, you know, used for marriage counseling. That's what it was first used for before it was made illegal. It might be legalized in about a month's time, in August, for PTSD We'll see. So you need to have this real sense of doing the work, let's say right right, of going deep into interpersonal processes, really seeing one another, really understanding one another. That creates a sense of bondedness. But then I think there's a gap then between okay, listen, we're all bonded in this company, we all really get each other, we're all deeply connected.
Alexander Beiner:Then there's more to be done to actually peak, perform together. Like you could have a you know, it's the euros right now so you can have a soccer team, or a football team, as we call them, and you can get them really, really bonded together and they could be best friends. But if they don't practice drills, they don't have strategic insight into how to be the best team. They're just a bunch of really nice guys on the field losing right. So you need to the best team. They're just a bunch of really nice guys on the field losing right.
Alexander Beiner:So you need to, you need to combine those two things and very few people, if any, are doing that at the moment in in combination with psychedelics, in a very methodical way, but that it has huge potential.
Alexander Beiner:And then there's also a lot of ethical considerations of like do you want to get the people, want to get that close with their co-workers, for example? You know, because you would. You know there's a question of consent. There's a question of what kind of psychedelics really dissolve boundaries in general, sort of neurologically but also emotionally, and you know, um, and there are particular boundaries at work and in organizations that are there for a reason. They might be constrictive, but they're sort of enabling constraints. You don't want necessarily everyone breaking down in tears every five minutes In an organization. It might not allow the organization to thrive. So all of those considerations have to be taken into account and that's all doable. It's just that you really have to have people bought in 100% and really knowing like, okay, this is going to be, this isn't another team building exercise, this is going to be transformative. So, yeah, so lots of potential but lots of complexity.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So this is down, maybe further along in the future than you, and I would like right now the psychedelic side of the house in organizations. Where you have consent, let's take psychedelics off the table and talk about what organizations can do now. I kind of hinted that state management breathing exercises, things like that, but what are the type of things they can do now to achieve those flow states, peak performance?
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of really simple things people can do, and I go into organizations and teach this occasionally as well. So what I've noticed works quite well is introducing curiosity as a foundational principle that people abide by, because curiosity as an attitude, as a default attitude, will always open up the conversation somewhere new. So that kind of rigidity that can form that then stops good performance and people start siloing and defending their own turf and et cetera. Curiosity is a great remedy for that, but it has to also be built in structurally. It's very difficult, if you have an organization that is structured in such a way that people are incentivized not to work together or incentivized not to be curious, to introduce curiosity. But I think most organizations worth their salt who really want their teams to be thriving don't run operations, know operations like that because they tend to be quite toxic workplaces and people leave and they don't, they're not competitive after a while.
Alexander Beiner:Um, so curiosity, I found, is really simple because everyone knows what it is, everyone has a human capacity for it and there's there's, you know there's practices that I use, uh, dialogue practices like circling, for example, or one that I'm trained in called inquiry, which comes from the diamond approach, um, which is a sort of a school of depth psychology and spirituality, and the idea there's a kind of talking meditation.
Alexander Beiner:So as you talk, you know two people sit opposite each other and they might have five minutes each. They don't know you don't interrupt the person as they're sharing and you also don't sort of um and ah and tell me more. You have to, you know, and it's difficult for people sometimes because you have to shut off your social engagement system in a particular way, but once you do, it's very amazing. But firstly, being heard and feeling like your voice matters is hugely important for team motivation and group dynamics and this is a really simple way to do that because I mean it's, it's incredible how powerful it is and how simple it is just to be listened to for five minutes without knowing you're not going to be interrupted.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And while I usually encourage but yeah, I was just kind of wondering here if you and I were doing that together, would my facial reactions change your, your narrative at all? Would that does that influence, uh, what you think if I was?
Alexander Beiner:yeah, it's a good question so in the, in the ridwan tradition, they ask the person listening to be like a, like a, like a statue. So no response, right, and that can be like that. Takes a while to get used to that. But I usually encourage people to do like a little like there are social cues of a kind of a nod or a smile, or you know, you might if I, if I in my sharing or in my inquiry, I tap on something really like wow, that's a big, powerful thing. You know the person kind of. You know, having some kind of recognition of the depth that you've just gone to in your face can be quite, you know, containing and quite a nice thing, quite containing and quite a nice thing. But generally when we're in a normal social conversation we're in a relational exchange which is different. We're kind of weaving something together and that means that often we all have different social strategies and some people might be pleasers or they might dominate conversation and either way, the social dynamic is a different thing to a kind of process of personal inquiry. And so you could also wonder like, okay, why not just journal or do some kind of personal inquiry like that, which is also a great exercise to do, but being witnessed by someone, ideally, who you're working with or engaged in some way, it creates a very different psychological frame around the whole thing. You really feel like, wow, they know me better now and therefore it builds trust as well. So that's, that's a really simple one.
Alexander Beiner:And, as you mentioned breathing, uh, introducing breathing into the mix, um, uh, I usually do kind of you know, I'm trained as a breath work facilitator so I'll usually do more uh, like kind of wim hof style breathing which punches through a little bit more, rather than a kind of slow breathing exercise, because people's nervous systems are already pretty like charged up and I find, you know, having, you know, I started in my facilitation and kind of career as a meditation teacher and then trained as a counselor, and when I was a meditation teacher I used to teach meditation in organizations a lot and then trained as a counselor.
Alexander Beiner:And when I was a meditation teacher, I used to teach meditation in organizations a lot. And it's kind of like a drop in the ocean when you're kind of going in and you're asking people something very challenging which is go from, go, go, go into, basically, a state that people live in monasteries to attain, and it's great, it's great to be mindful, but I actually disagree with that approach and I think you know what? Let's reset the nervous system using some punch, because you meet fire with fire, and then let's do some proper breathing and then drop into meditation so it actually clears the mind and then we can um kind of go into it, because you see, when you ask people to meditate in a company, you just okay, everyone stop doing what you were doing and sit and they're all twitching and kind of yeah, yeah, it's hard.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So, alexander, if we had this conversation four or five years ago, I would hang up on you. I would just walk away and go. This is absolutely crazy, you know. Why would anybody want to be doing these things? That's not true anymore. Why is that?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, because several of my friends and I, and several of my friends around me in fighter aviation with PTSD, experienced psychedelic system therapy and it opened up their worldview. It doesn't mean we all see the world the same way. It just means that we accept things that we normally wouldn't have accepted years ago, one of them being breathing exercises to meditation, three, you know, just sitting silent. You know, being alone. Some of these things work out for folks now more than ever. Psychedelic assistive therapy. Just for our listeners out there, in the context of the folks that are recovering from PTSD and TBI. It's not like folks are on psychedelics every single day. They're not taking these it's. You know, they lose their effectiveness over time. So for the folks out there that are kind of like well, this is weird, why am I hearing this on this podcast about how to improve the quality of your observer-oriented side, acclub? Well, that's what we're telling you is these are all possible. We come from different tribes, if you will. You know I come from University of Colorado. University of Colorado, boulder drank a lot of beer when I was growing up. By the way, alcohol is probably the worst thing you can put in your body, but we still do that anyway.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Fighter, aviation, multiple degrees came across Sonia, dave Snowden, complexity theory and all these other things over the years and got to see the world from different lenses and why that's important. Now you just need to look around what's going on globally to see how this type of thinking thinking outside the box, if you will, going outside the system to find out what you don't know and bringing it back in could help bring us all together. So I just want to point that out for our listeners out there that we are talking about improving peak performance. What you take away from it is for you to decide. We're not telling you you need to go do these things. We're just providing these insights, because what if your competition does this? Will you exist tomorrow? I think the answer to that is no. You'll probably be obsolete. Any thoughts?
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, I mean, I agree, and I think there's a kind of fear often around these practices being kind of woo and weird and kind of understandably, you know, maybe from the legacy of the 60s. Probably one of the biggest legacies of the 60s was things like yoga, meditation, eastern philosophy coming into the culture, but they also came with a lot of messy baggage and weird communes and cults and things like that. And I think that time is sort of finished now and it's a very different world. And I've been really struck actually by you know, I was going into companies teaching meditation in about 2012. And it was when mindfulness was booming in some sense or becoming more. People were becoming more open to mindfulness because there was a lot of research coming out around, you know, mindfulness for stress reduction or mindfulness for other you know beneficial capacities, and it was. It was very interesting because you know, it was tricky, it was a hard sell. It was definitely a hard sell but there was a lot of interest, so it was kind of both.
Alexander Beiner:And then I didn't do that for years and I was invited to do some, um, corporate work, uh, while we were doing rebel wisdom, and I thought, okay, yeah, I'll give it a go and I noticed that the the landscape has really changed, you know, in the sort of maybe decade or so between those, or maybe like eight years or so. I noticed much more of an openness, um, and much more of a effectiveness in the companies that are doing that, because the well, especially retention and just, uh, creative effectiveness any company that involves some kind of creativity for doing what they're doing, um, I've worked with big hotel companies, I've worked with NGOs Quite a range, actually Wine company, interestingly and they all involve some level of creativity, whether that's strategic creativity, et cetera. And so the ones that actually embed practices to some degree, they tend to be more effective. I mean, it really requires a commitment, though more effective, I mean it's. It really requires a commitment, though, and what I've noticed is actually requires a commitment from the senior leadership team. So that's not there. It's just not really going to happen in the first place.
Alexander Beiner:Um, which you know, for me, as someone coming in um doing these, bringing these processes in or offering them and, you know, inviting people to try them out, um, I'm always very attuned to whether there's actually where the appetite's coming from. You know, if it's coming from like the hr person, I'm like, yeah, but it's not up from top. But if it's coming from the top and there's a real energy, I think, okay, this, this company could go somewhere, this could be, this could be interesting. And I there's a couple companies I advise who are like that one in particular that is embedding it from the get-go as a startup into the fabric of the company, which I think is going to be really effective.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:One thing about the veteran community. You know we have big egos, or had big egos. Our backgrounds are more conservative, if you will. The fact that many of our brothers and sisters are coming out and saying that these things are working, the psychedelic assistive therapies are working, kind of gives credibility to that space. Now, going back to that woo-ish 60s and 70s feel that you brought up earlier, I see that resurgent happening there. Where the veteran voice and this is true in Europe as well. We know a lot of folks in Europe that are going through therapies, but can you talk a little bit about that, what you're seeing from the veteran community as far as highlighting the value of psychedelics from your perspective?
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, absolutely. I mean yeah, I'm in touch with a lot of researchers who focus on veteran, usually PTSD, veteran healing. But also what I've observed is that this is kind of known about PTSD in general is that your chances of developing PTSD from a traumatic, potentially traumatic incident are very linked to your childhood and how much trauma was in your childhood. And so there are. You know, I have a friend who is running Ayahuasca really interesting group called Anaya and run by Simon Ruffell, who's a psychiatrist. He's a psychiatrist here in the UK but he's also trained with a Shipibo curandero for about five years, which he kept silent for many years because he thought as a psychiatrist it would be a little bit out there. But now then he kind of, you know, let people know. So they take people out to Peru to drink ayahuasca veterans specifically in the traditional Shipibo tradition. And so there's this beautiful blend, I think, of Western psychiatry and indigenous wisdom that they're trying to reach. And I asked him, you know, of the people you had there, what proportion had you know some kind of childhood trauma? And he said every single one of them. And then I also asked the same question to Rachel Yehuda, who runs veteran, is very um accomplished therapist who does veteran work at mount sinai hospital and she, she said it's, it's, it's very, very high. The proportion is very, very high. So I think that's very. Um, I think that's very interesting because it it points to the fact that, of something that psychedelics do, which is that they take us to the depths of ourselves and they and they reveal what's really going on under the surface, and that is absolutely the most incredible thing nothing else does that. There's, no, there's no other practice that will do that in that way, except perhaps for five years of psychodynamic therapy with the therapist you trust. So you can do that. But that is very long, expensive. It tends to be only middle class people who can either access or afford it. Um, you know that's, if you were doing that here in london, uh, that would be a hundred pounds a week, perhaps 400 pounds a month. What a? You know six, six hundred dollars a month just for that, and then, and then multiply that by years and years.
Alexander Beiner:A psychedelic experience. It's not a fix-all, it's not a cure-all. It doesn't mean you don't have to do the work of really like you know. You know, bringing things into your life and relationship and making decisions. You know all of that. That's still there, but what it does is it opens a doorway to an incredible level of self insight. Um, that that is just unrivaled, and and so that's why there's such good results for MDMA, for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Ayahuasca now as well and I think it's been actually the veteran community has been really instrumental in getting us in the psychedelic community to where we are, because they've been such advocates for the power of these experiences.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So within the context of John Boyd's Observer-Oriented Side and Act Loop, you have orientation and orientation you can think about as an internal map of the external world. You want to update that the best you can. Going back to your point about childhood trauma and how our orientation is built, there's something known as a triple hit hypothesis. That basically says you have genetics, you have culture and you have your experiences that determine how you experience the outside world. And that's what John Boyd brought together through his OODA loop is those three things.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:With new information coming in, we go through a process of synthesis and analysis and that determines how you make sense of the external environment, how you act and how you decide in it. So I just want to make that comment there that there's a solid the way we explain John Boyd's Zooto Loop. There's a solid connection to help organizations and individuals understand what trauma is like and what we're trying to do with the or what different modalities can do, including psychedelic therapies, by changing that ego, giving you access to higher entropic states, if you will more confusion, more disorder, and have your brain kind of reconnect things in a new light. So that's an awesome connection to, I believe, the world of sensemaking, as well as when we're going back to that which we started the conversation on how can we use psychedelics to make sense of the external world. And, sonia, I know you had a question earlier. I want to turn it over to you.
Sonja Blignaut :No, I was, and I think it links to some extent to this conversation, because I know one of the things that you also like to explore, ali, is this whole idea of the metacrisis and the polycrisis you know, whatever you want to call it and this idea of being in a time between worlds. I think you know many of the people that I work with. It's like we are being bombarded by various transitions and almost being forced to let go of old identities, old certainties. Many people talk about feeling unmoored, and there's a sense of trauma in that as well, and it reminded me of something that you wrote in your book that when we have to let go of our maps, we are forced to come to our senses.
Sonja Blignaut :This is, you know, something that I've experienced is, you know, once you start um, you know whether it's it's a euro dose psilocybin journey or if it's a breathwork practice. It does seem to bring you back to your senses. It there's a, there's a sense of being more embodied um, and you also talk about embodied sensemaking. So I was wondering if maybe you can expand a little bit about that, the importance of not only trying to figure everything out cognitively and relating to complexity cognitively, but kind of dropping into the body as well the body as well.
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, definitely it links back to a few of the things we talked about. When people talk about sense-making and let's take the first part of the OODA loop orient, who's orienting? We're not all orienting in the same way. The way you orient yourself when you're really hungry is different to when you feel relaxed and you've just had a good meal. It's different. You see different things, you perceive different. You place yourself differently in the environment. You see things as threats. Perhaps If you're really hungry you might see things as threatening, and if you're not, you don't. So your whole nervous system is inextricable from your sense-making. I think that's easily forgotten. Because we have a culture, western cultures, for various reasons, we abstract things. We abstract things away from the body, partly from language as well. We have very noun-based languages. I'm half German and we have such a noun-based language. The noun is everything. You've got to find out what it did at the end of the sentence. It did something, but don't worry.
Sonja Blignaut :It's all about the thing.
Alexander Beiner:And so that, in part, it encourages us to think in terms of objects instead of in terms of the relationships between the objects, and different cultures with different languages or different philosophies see things differently. There's been experiments done on this between, uh, english speakers and japanese speakers, where they show them a video, um, of a bunch of people, you know, walking around in a room and someone knocks over a vase. And they ask the english speakers well, what, what happened? And they go, oh, yeah, okay, the guy in the red shirt knocked over the vase. And they go, okay, great, what was going on in the background? I'm like, uh, I don't know, I didn't notice that. And then they asked japanese speakers and it's the exact opposite, right, and they asked, and they know exactly what's going on in the background, the whole context.
Alexander Beiner:But it's my struggle to figure out who did what when, why, which is what we're obsessed with in our cultures, not better or worse. It's just different cultural adaptations, right? So so we have this very abstractive capacity and I think it makes it very easy to forget that. Um, you know, it is an embodied process. To make sense of anything, you are also embedded. To go back to the four e's, you're also embedded in your environment in a particular way and it's extended. So we're making sense with each other too, like we're never making sense in.
Alexander Beiner:No human being on earth is doing that, because we all were raised in some way. Uh, you know, if we had parents, if we didn't have parents, we were raised somehow by society, by some people gave us input from the world. We don't all grow our own food and make our own clothes and make our own technology. We're completely we're participating in and part of an extended cognition which changes as well how we think and feel. Like it's changing what information is coming to me that then like influences my frame, and that's really, really important to remember.
Alexander Beiner:I mean, it seems so simple but it's so easy to forget, because when we forget that also, we cut ourselves off from a huge amount of information about the environment and about the world and about ourselves. So even just the process of coming into our bodily sensations as we're making sense of something can change how we make sense of it. It can give us more insight, even if it's as simple as you know what. I didn't get a lot of sleep last night, so probably the way I'm thinking about this isn't entirely accurate, very important, because otherwise my whole yeah, I guess that we're going to use the, to use the example of the loop all of the um, the, the, the decisions I make after orienting myself are going to be wrong or poorly, poorly kind of thought out because they were based on faulty premises. So if I can at least have the awareness of being in my body, um, then you know you can mitigate some of that, and then you can mitigate some of that and, I think, also just expand your attention in a lot of effective ways.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I tell you, after my psychedelic assisted therapy experience, my sleep habits were improved. I stopped drinking caffeine, I stopped drinking alcohol for two years straight. It was amazing. Right away, right, you get a better sense of your connection to the world, if you will. But life continues, right, and you still get inundated with information. The trauma comes back, not the trauma comes back. The trauma comes back or not? Not, the trauma comes back, but newer trauma comes back and it changes your orientation again, right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So you have to be deliberate about these practices and I wasn't up front, you know, right, I didn't jump into meditation right away. I took about a year to start doing that after the therapy. And then breath work. What, where I'm starting to really understand the breathwork now is from actually Steve Kotler's organization, floor Research Collective, and going through their courses there to understand how important it is in your day-to-day world and things like you know, hygiene as far as your computer goes and your phone goes. You're not distracted all the time. So it's not a one and done thing. I mean, it's a good experience to go through, in my opinion, to get you reset. But you still have to change your habits, things and teach my kids music, and teach them math and things like that. I would never have looked at books like that in the past.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I have folks coming on the podcast to talk about the Akashic records, you know, and there's a nice connection to physics and it doesn't mean I believe in it, it just means that there's other people have a different orientation of the world and we have to. You don't have to listen to them, but it's good to listen to other folks, right? So I'm just saying it fundamentally changed the way I experienced the world and my curiosity. Going back to your point about curiosity, what else is out there? And I've noticed that folks that don't have this experience or don't have that experience for the most part are pretty static in the way they view the world. And, sonia, you and I had a conversation about this. Anything to add on it?
Sonja Blignaut :No, what I might add there, panchi, is also just the. I think it reconnects you to a sense of the sacred I think you mentioned it in your book as well, ali this idea of myths and that we need coherent myths to live by, and that was an enduring thing for me. It was kind of that, really the sense of the sacred, and I find it quite hopeful, well, quite interesting, that all of these technologies and medicines are kind of co-emerging with the almost, want to say, chaotic state of the world. It's almost like they know that they're needed. Now a friend of mine is a shaman and he says he actually almost can't keep up with the number of people who feel called by, in his case the mushroom.
Sonja Blignaut :And linking back to what you said about language, I was speaking to a friend of mine in nova scotia and he says he spoke about a um, an indigenous tribe there where their language is 80 or 90 percent verb based, and so they, their world is very animated. You know it's, it's, it's, and so they have such a. They retained that sense of the sacred and um. I think that is just something that's so, so needed now, you know, in in almost all of our contexts yeah, absolutely.
Alexander Beiner:There's so much there I'd love to unpack, I mean, the. The thing that's coming to me is is, um, that binds a lot of, I think, is that we need some way to make sense of and process pain and suffering. That's absolutely essential for human beings and it's what many religions are founded on. I mean, christianity is really centered around the crucifixion and resurrection, specifically right, but the image of like christ on the cross or or buddha's exploration of suffering right, suffering and pain are the foundational, like. That's the place, I think, to start. We have a culture which is very novelty seeking and and sort of wants-seeking and consumer culture wants the quick fixes and how to attain happiness, etc. But attaining meaning is much more important. We know from research, I think we know, as human beings notion it's very ephemeral, you know, but meaning is something that is much, much deeper and is what to live for. It's what do you live for.
Alexander Beiner:Meaning also helps us process pain and the sacred does that. The sacred is something beyond the day to day that helps us to process pain. The sacred can be spiritual, but it doesn't have to be, and you know, there's a whole branch of sociology started by Emile Durkheim, where he points out that, like all of life is, is got the profane, which is like the day-to-day, and the sacred that this is like a dynamic that we see constantly in life. So for many people, you you might ask people okay, what's sacred to you? And say I'm not into all that kind of stuff. It's like, well, what about your children? Are they more? You know? Would you die for your children? Yeah, sure, okay, well, that's sacred, right, because it's more important than the day-to-day or your sports team. You know that can be sacred to people as well. It's like this matters, this is something collective. So, um, you know, once you ask, like what's out there, I think there's a lot of um things that we already do that are our way of kind of getting into a collective process of expressing joy and pain and kind of exploring that. Sports, you know, big concerts, or you know I just was at Glastonbury Festival last week.
Alexander Beiner:These festivals exist for that reason. In part, they are this third space where you go. Like you know, in ancient greece, this was, and many other places in the world, there was a process of getting to the festival where you know you might be on pilgrimage for days with other people. Then you arrive there and then you engage in these, you know practices where you live, the myths of the culture, and then you would, you would, sometimes they would take what were probably psychedelics and wine and have revelry, um, and a lot of people have pointed out, like scholars, that like modern festival culture, like when you go to a festival here it's like okay, I got my tent and I went on this, like journey, and it's like in a field and you kind of have to set it up, you're in the elements, it's, it's wild and like, um, there's there's revelry and it's different and it's like a third space where, where normal life is kind of transformed. This is something human beings have done for thousands or probably tens of thousands of years. A big sports game, right like the roar of like 10,000 people all connected around one particular thing that's happening. So all of these things that we do are, you know, a way to get into group flow, states with each other, as they point out, in Stealing Fire and I think what else is out. There is ways to intentionally, I think, most crucially, you know, punch to your point.
Alexander Beiner:Why do we drink alcohol? Well, many, many reasons. One of them is to dull pain, even if that's mild pain of like. Well, I've had a really tough week at work. Really nice to sit back with a beer. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that at all. It's just that, you know, if I observe my own drinking habits, I'm thinking, yeah, in some way that's a big part of it.
Alexander Beiner:There, own drinking habits, I'm thinking, yeah, in some way that's a big part of it. There's an element of even like after a long week, having a beer where it's like relaxing the nervous system, processing some sense of when I say pain, I just mean like the tension that any organism feels. You know that you're in the world, it's pushing against you and you've got stuff to do. And like stress, it's stressors, right. So we need ways that are healthier to process that. So for me, exercise is one. Um, I like hitting a punching bag. I did boxing in university. I like anything that involves impact and and the sublimation of aggression. Um, which could also be like being on a sports team. Um, breath work for me is very powerful because breathwork also has this intensity to it, the kind of breathwork that I do, which is breathing through the mouth, conscious, connected, breathing so deep, continuous breathing for maybe half an hour 40 minutes.
Alexander Beiner:It brings you into an altered state, which generally is. It's different to a psychedelic experience, but it has similarities and it really helps to process some unconscious emotional material. Yeah, and sometimes you might laugh, sometimes you might weep, um, you know, one time I got a message from the whatsapp group in my apartment building, people asking is everything okay? Because I was, uh, I was roaring and bashing a pillow, um, so I had to tone it down a little bit. But you know, it's cathartic. Catharsis is the thing, cathartic practices that help us. That's what all these festivals of breathwork are.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah Well, I try to do Wim Hof at least once a day. Last night I did some vagus nerve breathing before I went to bed. It was awesome. But I tell you again, before psychedelic assist therapy, no way I would have ever done a Wim Hof session. Afterwards you can get back to a pretty interesting place pretty fast. I'm not seeing any small creatures or anything like that, but you sense that you're connected to the world and I enjoy doing that. Want to start my day, and then sometimes I'll do it in the afternoon, just to kind of reset. I want to start my day, and then sometimes I'll do it in the afternoon, just to kind of reset. But again, these are things that are going to, in my opinion, allow us to achieve peak potential or peak performance, and you, uh, I, I think others, um, uh, would benefit from as well, uh, so, so just fantastic connections there between a lot of things you're talking about. I'd have a couple of questions for you, alex. Uh, you don't mind me asking uh, what's like? What's your favorite band?
Alexander Beiner:What are you listening to today? Uh, and then, um, band. What are you listening to today? Uh, and then, uh, what are you reading? Uh, you know what's. What's what's top of your reading list at the moment. All great questions. So, favorite band? Um, oh, that's a tricky one. I have quite a eclectic mix. I'm going to come back to that one. I'm going to talk about what I'm reading first, because I was just reading it. I'm reading a book right now. So I mean, okay, to be honest, I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. So I'm reading a book right now. So I mean, okay, to be honest, I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. So I'm reading a fantasy book at the moment. And I also read nonfiction because it's part of my job as a writer and a journalist, but I prefer reading fiction. I have to say it's my kind of you know, especially sci-fi unfettered imagination. I absolutely love that.
Alexander Beiner:So at the moment I'm working on the book proposal for my next book, which is around ai and spirituality and the intersection of you know how technology is changing our spiritual and religious ideas, um, so I'm reading a book called the ai mirror by shannon valor, which is quite interesting, which is quite new um, and she's pointing out the you know, know, the way in which AI is effectively. The AI we have now is effectively a mirror for the human experience. It looks like new information but actually it's just fed on everything we've done already and so when we're, when everything we're projecting into it, what we think it is is really just about us, really, you know, and so that's a that's quite an interesting. Take and know, and so that's a that's quite an interesting uh. Take um and uh, then listening to um, man, okay, what, let me think what.
Alexander Beiner:What am I listening to? I'm listening to a lot of. I play traditional irish music, so I'm often listening to um, spotify surprisingly large connect collection of obscure irish tunes which they seem to have managed to get everything on there. Um, but I like um, I like uh electronic music. I also like uh rock music, um, of pretty much all types. So, um, I was listening. What was listening to earlier I was spotify was playing sort of uh, cat stevens and super tramp and random, you know like, uh, just kind of rock.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Um, that's not my normal listening, but that's what I've been listening to because I uh yeah, so the other reason I bring that up is, uh, I recently came across tool, uh, the band oh yeah, yeah, it was great, yeah, so the.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You know their, their music and their. There's the connection to geometry and, uh, song Numa. I was like you look at that. You're like wow, these guys are pretty deep when they write these lyrics. Anyway, just again, another connection I would never have made prior to the therapy. Amazing conversation today. I just want to turn it over to Sonia and see if she has more areas to dive into. She always has brilliant points and I want to hear from her on them. Likewise, into.
Sonja Blignaut :She always has brilliant points and I want to hear from her on them likewise. No, I, I just um. I wanted to just step away from the book a little bit, ali, and just say I really enjoyed um, something you wrote on substack a while ago about the ego doesn't die yes and um, I you know it's, it's something that you hear so often.
Sonja Blignaut :You know it's almost like people are chasing this idea of ego death and I really enjoyed how you reframed that. I think you actually called it an ego reframe. But yeah, and that would be the last thing I'd just love to hear you talk about.
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, that's a real bugbear of mine, which is where that article came from. Yeah, this idea, there's this idea. You know, if people aren't familiar with it, in um, especially in the way that eastern traditions have been imported into the west, that the way to attain kind of deep knowledge is for your ego. So you know the, the part, the narrating you, although it's actually really ill-defined what the ego is, and a lot of these ideas sort of dies and then is kind of reborn. Um, I think there's something to that to some degree. I like the definition of ego, that it's the part of you that believes it has control across time, right, and so that really you can have experiences where you come deeply into the present moment and sometimes people experience a sense of sort of fatedness or like this was always going to happen. There's a kind of real unifying moment of everything is as it should be. But there's loads of different mystical experiences that people have. That's just one of them. You could also have like the overview effect that the astronauts looking at the Earth from space had in the sort of 60s and 70s, where seeing the Earth from space and even the picture of the Earth from space, the very picture of the earth from space. The very first one changed people's conception, because what it does is it reframes what you think is important. So you might think like, yeah, this particular problem I'm facing at work or this particular relationship thing, or my own ambition or my own status is really really key. And then you have an experience where you realize, yeah, that actually doesn't matter as much as I thought it did. So that's a reframing of what you think matters.
Alexander Beiner:But my argument is that the phrase ego death doesn't make sense, because the idea that your ego sort of dies and then is magically reformed I don't think makes cognitive sense. And of course, the ego is also the body. And the other confusing thing is that you can have an experience where you're just kind of totally gone. That's like general anesthetic, that's like your conscious awareness has disappeared, and so I disagree. I think the phraseology is really messy. And the reason I think it matters is because you have young people who are like oh great, I'm going to take loads of psychedelics in order to have an ego death and then I'll become enlightened, and that's not what happens. What happens is they have a very difficult experience. And they shouldn't be also adults too, you know, like older adults, I've had people come to psychedelic retreats who say they're looking for ego death, and then that becomes a really interesting conversation of like, well, what are you looking for?
Alexander Beiner:Is that annihilation, is it? And usually it's not that, it's usually like no, no, I want to kind of see, really often because I want to see in a new way. Or when I kind of get the answer um, and that's not how these experiences often work, interestingly, um, so yeah, so I think it's just a. Um, I think there's. I mean, the point is there is a lot right now in the west that we need to still figure out around these big experiences like psychedelics. Primarily, we have to figure out what we actually think consciousness is. That's a. That's a key question like what do you, what do we actually think it is to be alive? Um, and you know that's that's a question for philosophy, but it's one I always have time for.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Sonia, that was a great question and I want to build on that some more. Talking to John Turner over the last few weeks and I had a conversation with Stephen Kotler about blending egos, which is a key component of entering a flow state from a group perspective, and what John brought up was hey, you know, it's not ego death, kind of like what Alexander brought up as well but and it's not blending the egos, it's dissolving the egos a little bit more, if you will, and this connects to psychological safety. That's what you're trying to do to create psychological safety and, in my opinion, when you're, if there is a group of people doing psychedelics together, they're creating space to create the psychedelic psychological safety as well. So it is a blending or dissolution of egos that allow you to be your full self when you're amongst others. So I think your question was spot on with bringing up that ego death point as well, and we have a lot of friends that talk about ego death.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I felt it underneath the 5-MeO DMT. You blended the world, but guess what? I still came back as having my ego. I mean, I'm a little bit more aware of it, but it's still there, right? Yeah?
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, absolutely no, and I agree, and I think you know I did a. I was on Imperial College doing a 5-MeO study at the moment that I was on about three weeks ago and it was. It was interesting because you know, it was quite ego dissolving.
Alexander Beiner:It was kind of difficult having someone having headphones on and having someone asking you ego dissolution zero to ten every two minutes, which, uh, so I had a lot of issues with the study design, which I let them know about, because I had these moments where I was like dissolving into kind of a ocean of being, and then I'm a little bit neurotic as well. So then I had the thought, uh, I don't know if I can really do this, because they're gonna like come and ask me in two minutes if I'm dissolved and I'm gonna be like if there's a conscious me commenting on that. So I had a. You know that really brought this whole question to a floor, um, but I did notice, you know, very often after a psychedelic experience where the ego boundaries dissolve, when you come back, the ego can come back more forcefully um, and so, like the, I had this like really intense urge to have a deep dish pizza and some beer after it, which I went and did.
Alexander Beiner:And then I was sitting there and I was like this is such a deep dish pizza is not a thing in London, by the way. I got to find somewhere to go, um, and then I realized like, oh, interesting, there's some part of my mind was wanting to ground in the body and like sort of ground in the normal in some way, because when you have these expansive experiences, um, that there is a part of the yeah, part of the mind which maybe we'll call it, yeah, you can call the ego that wants to reassert um itself, um, and that's something that people talk about. But, um, but yeah, I think ego dissolution is a nice phrase for it. And I think, yeah to your point as well, Ponch, about when people are in a group together. You know, as a facilitator, building psychological safety is something that is the main part of my job, whether it's an especially in a psychedelic retreat, but just in a regular retreat as well.
Alexander Beiner:Creating an environment and this applies probably to organizations very much as well like creating an environment where people feel they can be honest, like that's fundamental. Because when people feel they can't speak, that's fundamental. Because when people feel they can't speak, that's when you get stuff going into the shadow and then it starts to play out and act out in the group and then it gets felt and everything. Everything. I mean we're just incredibly perceptive as human beings. You can feel you might not know what you're feeling, but you can feel the vibe is a little bit off, and so the the job of facilitation is, or or a good manager, frankly, and a good leader is to create an environment where there isn't so much of an underbelly and there's a sense of freedom and expansiveness, where people can be themselves.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Hey, one last question to me, and it was triggered by your comment about the design of a study, and I want to come back to the MDMA point you brought up earlier and the potential that it may be legalized here in the US for PTSD. So we have a couple of companies out there that were mentioned in your book. One is MAPS, which is now, I think, lycos, and they had a study that was kind of rejected by I think it was an ICER thing a couple of weeks ago, and then you have Compass in there as well. Let's talk about the design and potentially how that's getting in the way of psychedelics for therapy use being promoted here in the US. Any thoughts on where we are on that?
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, I mean this is an important point. So the FDA is deciding whether MDMA will become a medicine for PTSD in August and they did an advisory panel, which is not legally binding, but they do this for this kind of thing and that was a few weeks ago. It's a very long story but some, some activists were involved and it didn't go well for maps and like. So, like us, right, because, um, for one, one of the reasons was because one of the activists claimed that maps is a therapy cult, which I think is an overstatement. Some interesting points she raised, but it was a bit sensationalist. But the other reason was that and this kind of points to what you just raised the double placebo-controlled clinical trial model is not a good fit for psychedelics. But it is the gold standard of how you get a drug to market and the reason it's not a good fit. One of the many reasons it's not a good fit for psychedelics is that it's incredibly obvious that you have the placebo. Like there's no real way to kind of do a placebo for a psychedelic experience because it works so differently, basically, and so there was a lot of back and forth. Or there is a lot of back and forth or there is a lot of back and forth around this and around the dynamics of the clinical trial model and how you actually measure something like transformation in people.
Alexander Beiner:Question was like psychedelics aren't the treatment, it's psychedelic assisted therapy. That's the treatment. Otherwise everyone who went to a music festival and took lsd would just come back with all their trauma healed and their life is totally on track. And that's just not what happens right sometimes. That not to say that people don't really have beneficial moments. They do, definitely. But um, it's the thing you do around the psychedelics.
Alexander Beiner:So for the fda, that it's a very confusing proposition for them because they're like what are we judging here? Are we judging MDMA or are we judging the therapy model or are we judging both together? And they're not used to doing the both together piece. They're not even really used to doing the therapy thing piece. And so some commentators have said the mistake that MAPS made was going in with too much focus on the therapy thing piece. And so you know some commentators have said the mistake that maps made was going in with too much focus on the therapy. They should have just been like it's a drug and you do it with along with other stuff and other drugs have done this and gotten through, but now all the attention is on. Well, what's the therapy and how does it work? And how does it work in combination with the drug? And these are very difficult things to quantify in the particular way that you normally would with, like an alzheimer's drug, where you go right, okay with 10 000 people.
Alexander Beiner:This many people have this experience. This many people saw a remission of that. So it's raising a lot of questions about. I mean, psychedelics are different, are a different paradigm of mental health treatment period right, and so they don't fit into the mold of the existing system. So it it remains to be seen how it will pan out with MAPS and Lycos' application in August. They're doing a very intensive PR campaign right now, involving many veterans groups, in fact, as the primary avenue, so we'll see.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, I think there's a couple of articles that came out from the Economist this last week and there's a big push right now. I saw Jesse Gold. His name is on a lot of uh articles that came out in the last week and Jesse's been on our podcast and he's a good friend of of of our community as well. So, uh, you know, who knows what's going to happen here, um, in the next couple of weeks? But, uh, hopefully, uh I'm going to say this that people come to their senses and really dig into what the possibilities are with psychedelic assisted therapy. Sonia, I'm going to leave it over to you if you have any last words for us today or questions for Alexander.
Sonja Blignaut :No, I've come across several training courses the last few weeks for psychedelic assisted coaching, and so I was. I mean, if you had a crystal ball and you had to kind of make a prediction, where do you think this is going? Do you think that we will see a time when coaches will be using this with their executive clients, or do you think that's a bit of a? That's still far out.
Alexander Beiner:We're already seeing that at a pretty large extent, it's just underground no-transcript, you know, perpetuating the exist. You know psychedelics being used to perpetuate a system that is broken and in need of novelty and in need of new. You know, we need new paradigms in all sorts of areas, whether that's mental health, whether that's government, whether it's economics. That's kind of the story of the times in my view, and so I like to see when psychedelics are used to move us towards something new rather than embed the old. And so you get, you get executives being, like, going to ayahuasca ceremonies to see, you know, where they should invest their Bitcoin.
Alexander Beiner:Um, you know, and so that's um, you know, that's not ideal in my view, um, but I think right now we're also kind of in a wild west with psychedelics. So we're at the stage of there's an attempt to kind of find a way to regulate what exactly is a psychedelic coach and what qualifies someone to give coaching advice and get people to pay for that with them. You know, it's an open question, um, you know, and then people don't necessarily want the medical community to gatekeep it. I don't want that either, but I also am not up for um, completely quality control free. Anything goes. Um, everyone's a psychedelic guru, suddenly. I think that's a that's a thing we want to avoid as well. So I think, like many things, it'll it'll find its feet. You know, like many new, new areas of human endeavor, it'll find its feet and it'll it'll um grow up, basically, yeah, hey.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So for our complexity friends out there and the friends of the flow consortium and all the folks that are following us on on uh, aglx and the podcast, I highly recommend getting this book uh, the bigger picture. A lot of great insights in there, diving into some of the things we talked about today, and plus there's more in there. Alexander, I want to turn it over to you to kind of share out with our listeners how they can reach out to you and any other last comments you may have.
Alexander Beiner:Yeah, well, firstly, thank you both of you. This was really enjoyable. This is one of my favorite conversations to have around the book because we really got into complexity and that's that's kind of what I like to talk about. So, on that note, yeah, if people want to check out what I'm doing, the easiest way is to follow me on on substack. I have a best-selling sub stack that's also called the bigger picture. Um, and I write uh pretty rarely about psychedelics. I mainly write about um cultural issues, systems change, um popular culture, what we can tell about what's going on in the world by looking at what's happening in movies and TV shows, drawing on complexity theory and I have guest writers like Nora Bateson sometimes, so all sorts of stuff on there. For anyone who's interested in systems theory or complexity or just cultural sensemaking, yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Great Well, I appreciate you being here today and I'm going to keep you on for a few moments once I stop recording. But thank you so much for being here and Sonia thanks you being here today and I'm going to keep you on for a few moments once I stop recording. But thank you so much for being here and Sonia thanks for being here and introducing me to the book. By the way, sonia sent me a text a while ago and said I needed to pick up this book, and I did.
Alexander Beiner:Thank you.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Sonia Big pleasure.
Sonja Blignaut :This was a lot of fun. Thanks for inviting me, Ponch.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Thank you for being here.
