Greg Voisen
Welcome back to Inside personal growth for another amazing podcast with Matt Zemon and Matt, you're joining us from where

Matt Zemon
I'm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, all right.

Greg Voisen
Great place. And Matt sent me all three of his books, so I'm going to actually show him up to the screen, even though my video editor brings them up on the screen. Anyhow. The first one is psychedelics for everyone, a beginner's guide to these powerful medicines. The other one that he's really proud of, that we'll try and get a few questions in about, is the veterans guide to psychedelics by Matt Zemon. And this one, obviously for people dealing with PTSD. And a big one, a big shout out to that, because there's lots of people dealing with that. And the other one is beyond the trip, and I presume this was your first one. It's

Matt Zemon
actually the second that's really just a workbook for preparation and integration.

Greg Voisen
Okay, so, oh yeah, he's got a workbook. So it's a journal for psychedelic preparation and integration. So he's got it pretty well taken care of here. Let me let our listeners know a bit about you. Matt is the author of psychedelics for everyone, it's a groundbreaking exploration into transformative potential of psychedelics for mental health, personal growth and spiritual well being as an advocate for safe and intentional use of these power substances, powerful substances, Matt combines personal insights, scientific research and expert interviews to demystify psychedelics and their role in modern society. Matt's work is inspired by his own transformative experiences and a deep desire to help others unlock healing and expanding consciousness. He's a thought leader in the field. He's dedicated to educating individuals and professionals and communities about the therapeutic and life enhancing possibilities of psychedelics. Through this book and all of his book and speaking engagements, Matt's helping people to shape the conversation around mental health and personal transformation, and again, to get more information about Matt, His books, His speaking, everything that Matt does, go to Matt, and it's z, e m o n.com, it's Matt M, a t, t, z, E, M O n.com, and by The way, Matt has a m, s c in this as well. So he's got a master's and so he is well qualified to speak about it. Well, let's dive deep into psychedelics for everyone, because I think that is the groundbreaking book, and it is one probably everybody wants to know about what inspired you is it to have that kind of you know title, because that's like for everybody. Maybe psychedelics is or isn't for everybody, and what do you hope readers will take away from it? Because that's a pretty bold title, right? Psychedelics for everyone, because not everybody out there is going to believe that it's for them. So let you deal

Matt Zemon
and under no circumstances do I mean that everyone should take a psychedelic. But I do believe that psychedelics are good for society. So I'm hoping from this conversation that those who choose to listen are either listening because they're thinking about a psychedelic for themselves, or for someone that they love, or they just want to have more information so they can maybe think about how they vote differently in the next election.

Greg Voisen
Interesting though, that accidentally may that psychedelic experience would probably change someone's thought about their oneness with everything that's for certain. So what was your first psychedelic experience like? And how did you how did it really shape your journey toward becoming an advocate for psychedelics? Because they know, I have lots of friends that have done Ayahuasca to to the truth to everyone out there. I've never done psychedelics, so I don't know. So you're actually speaking to me, Matt,

Matt Zemon
I appreciate you asking these questions and then having this as a conversation. I fell into this by accident. I had some friends who had hired a guide to do a guided magic mushroom journey, and they invited me to go. I was like, I don't do drugs. It's not I'm not interested. I said, No, no, you really you want to do this one. We have a guide. He knows what he's doing. You love to travel. Think about this as a big trip. You love to learn. This is a great way to learn about yourself. You want to do this? So I agreed, something inside of me, said yes, and I went in with pretty low expectations. I thought I'd see some cool colors and have kind of a pleasant day, yeah, and it blew my mind. I reconnected with my mom, who died when I was 22 she was 49 I could feel her and pull like a string from her to me, to my kids and see how we were all connected. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. And I felt incredibly safe and loved. And then I realized, wait a minute, I don't feel that level of safety and love in my everyday life. What's going on, what's missing. And in that first experience, Insight after insight, and I left it going, what the hell was this thing? And I knew I needed to learn more. And I went back to school to study psychology and neuroscience, focused on psychedelics, and I started traveling the world, experiencing different psychedelics, from Titans and shaman and MDs and PhDs, all in an effort just to learn more. And yeah, it's been, it's been an incredible journey, and I love sharing that some of the things I've learned along the

Greg Voisen
way, well question for you, because you know when friends prompt you to go on a trip and then say hey, when I don't mean trip, just trip, trip, but a trip to go experience mushrooms, right? In this case, this was mushrooms. Mushrooms was your first experience with psychedelics. It was, yeah, okay. And prior to that, had you smoked marijuana? Had you done other things, maybe a

Matt Zemon
handful of times? Not. It was not something. I didn't enjoy the experience. And I really was, I kind of bought into the just say no. I mean, I grew up in that, that whole, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs. And I was like, Okay, I believe that. And yeah, so this was way out of my comfort zone for me.

Greg Voisen
I think I mentioned to you that I had the honor and pleasure to interview Rob Doss. And so if you go back in the world of psychedelics with the Harvard University and and he being experimental in that area. It was, it was phenomenal. Because I tell a lot of people, go watch the video that was done with Ron das about psychedelics, because it really, it really is quite revealing. So you shared this experience about your mom and the kids, and this string that kind of held you together and not feeling love outside the same way as you felt while you were on this psychedelic experience. And that's that's really kind of a true, deep, personal story. What role does vulnerability play in helping others understand the transformative potential of psychedelics? Because vulnerability is one of those things that I think a lot of times people are really opposed to allowing to happen to themselves.

Matt Zemon
I love the word you're using, the vulnerability word, the word we often used in circles I run in, is surrender. Are you able to surrender to the medicine? Are you able to just allow whatever needs to happen to happen? And I think for a lot of us with Type A personalities that are driven it's hard to surrender. Yeah, so, and I know that that's that's the name of the game, that when you come into this, you've got to trust that you are in a safe space, that the medicine, that you're ready for the medicine, and that you're willing to go in whatever process it takes you on, and I think that's part of why having intention around the set and setting, the set, meaning what is your mindset, setting, meaning the physical environment, right? Makes that process easier for people. The more intention they can put to that, the less they're worried about, oh, I need to. I now need to worry about the music, and I now need to worry about this, and what if I get scared? So set and setting helps people be more vulnerable, which then allows the them to go deeper on this medicine.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, remember the Michael Poland Netflix special where the people were lying in the beds, when you talk about the environment, right? It's like they had someone by their side. They was very controlled. It was micro dosing at best. It was, you know, whatever it was, whether it was LSD, whether it was MD and a, whatever it might have been. And almost 100% of the people came out with a mind bending experience, to say the least, as they explained it. But you know, psychedelics have historically been pretty polarizing. How do you think the conversation around substances is changing, and why is it changing now? I mean, I know we have a lot of like your this book, the one around veterans, obviously, is PTSD. We're seeing a lot of the post traumatic stress disorder, not just from military, but really we're seeing it a lot in everyday life.

Matt Zemon
We are, it's not just military. I mean, victims of sexual assault, is another major, major category of people who have PTSD that, um, that some of these psychedelics are, are appearing to be able to reduce that outcome and that that that diagnosis. So what's going on? Why are we talking about this now? Why is the conversation shifting? Is what you're asking, and I think part of it is that we are, we know we have depression and anxiety, and we are over prescribing our medications that aren't working on enough people. When they work, they work, but they don't work in more than half the population, and that's a challenge. We were also prescribing these medicines younger than we've ever done before. And these medicines weren't meant to be lifelong prescriptions. They were meant to be episodically prescribed. But in our medical system, we really don't have the time or the money to get people off of these medicines once they get on them, and they have a they're hard to get off of. So we now have people who are saying, well, I don't want to get hooked on a prescription. I or the prescription is not working for me. I need something else. And that's where psychedelics are potentially stepping in on a medical front. We have a culture of loneliness. We have people leaving churches, and we have lack of community in the way we're structured. And so we have another group of people saying, There's got to be more than this, and I want to explore what that is, and they're looking at psychedelics. And then finally, we have over 200 academic institutions that are studying psychedelics, and after this 50 years of prohibition, where we were all taught over and over, these are bad. They're going to fry our brains. They're going to cause addiction. We have academic institutions that are saying, No, psilocybin is non toxic and non addictive. No, they do have some medical uses, and I think that is shifting our cultural perception of them. So back in the 70s, we had the Nixon administration, the crackdown on drugs, lots of people persecuted, and now fast forward, and we have this, what's been affectionately returned, referred to as the psychedelic Renaissance, but we're really talking about hundreds of universities studying these and our culture, saying we need something else. You know, you talked about veterans a moment ago. We have 17 and over 17 veterans killing themselves every day. We've had four times the amount of veterans and service members die from suicide than from combat. When we look at all the action since 911 this is part of this is that these antidepressants, the drugs they're most often prescribed, just aren't working on enough people. So when we in phase three clinical trials, when they gave people with treatment resistant Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, three sessions of MDMA with therapy before and after, over 70% emerged without a PTSD diagnosis. It's a tremendous number. Now the FDA has not approved it yet. They've asked for more data, but this is these are the types of numbers that we're talking about. This is the type of life changing experience that's happening with in that case, MDMA and people with treatment resistant PTSD.

Greg Voisen
Just a side comment. I mean, for people that are truly interested, we might see a big shift in the FDA based on the new administration. It might be approved tomorrow or Monday or Tuesday of next week. So stay tuned more to come. I was just making a little joke about that, but we'll see now. Look,

Matt Zemon
Kennedy put that as a platform. He was running a legalized psychedelic so who knows that would be? Obviously,

Greg Voisen
he was a heroin addict himself, so who knows. But I think that you'll see some loosening of the of the laws in this area. So look, you you speak that in the book, you explore psychedelics to help trauma and grief. And I deal with another doctor. I just had a doctor on here, Adam Dorsey, wrote a book called super psyched, and you were talking about loneliness. And Adam addresses how big of a what he calls it epidemic. It really is, and I think we're living more enhanced lives, but we're living them further apart. We have more than we've ever had before, but we have less connection than we've ever had before. And so can you share a moment or a story where you witnessed some kind of healing in action as a result of the psychedelics. Because now we're talking about not only PTSD, but loneliness, depression, anxiety in the in the list goes on, whereas before it was, well, okay, just give the guy a Zoloft, right? And send him on his way. And here, just take Zoloft. And before you know it, they're they're taking more and more Zoloft. And I actually did some interviews with some people where they were fully addicted to Zoloft and it ruined their life.

Matt Zemon
It's um, in our culture, we are so used to thinking about, I'm going to take a pill and it's going to cure me, right? And what I talk about when I talk about psychedelics, is that these aren't cures for anything. These are catalysts, and that the meaning the comes from within, not from without. So you asked for an exit for a story. I'll tell one from me. When we work with psychedelics, they one of the things we're taught is to explore with wild curiosity. If we see something in front of us that scares us, not to resist it, not to run away. If we see a dragon crawl up its nose and look at its eyes, what are you here to teach me? So that's the best practice, explore with wild curiosity. So in a in a in a psychedelic session, I had a memory resurface of an experience from puberty with a with a family member 10 years older. That was I was mortified about. And instead of I flipped. I did what I was told. I flipped the experience. I started looking at it and not through the lens of my pain and shame, but through the lens of hers. And I was able to to not look at her as someone who is a perpetrator, but as someone who is sad and was lonely and was dealing with substance use. I didn't have to condone her actions, but I could understand the humanity, and with that understanding, my feelings of shame and blame and guilt went away, and I was able to heal, and I was able to now talk about something that had that I couldn't even if you even brought this topic up, my ears would turn red. I'd get a pit in my stomach. It was I just didn't talk to anybody about this, and now I can talk about it openly, without any of it due to the medicine enabling me to reprocess my own story. So we talk about how again, psychedelics, they don't bring back people we've lost. They don't change the past. They help us make more meaning of the present through this process that they take us through, I

Greg Voisen
think they help you rewire and re fire from neural pathways in your brain. You know, whereas you looked at that before as a negative, you now were able to switch it. It's almost like I work with a physician who's really big with an app on adverse childhood experiences. You know, if you go look back in the history with people, they don't see those being supplanted in the subconscious, and they don't know why they're actually taking a certain deviation off someplace else to go do something, but when they go back in and looking at what psychedelics can do is open up that area where you're not dealing with the grief, where you're not dealing with the pain, and as You just said, look at in a different way. So talk about the integration process being as important as the journey itself. How can someone ensure that the experience that they're going to take is truly impacts kind of their daily life? So if they say, Hey, you know, I'm gonna go do the mushrooms, and I'm hoping I open up and and I find this pathway to release this emotional pain and suffering that I've been occurring. Do you can you set them up through a series of questions to say before they go in, like, Here, here's your journaling, you know, book and set them in my subconscious before I actually take the mushrooms or the MDNA or whatever substance it might be. Yeah,

Matt Zemon
it's the image. Yes, to all of it we talk about in advance. There's a preparation process, and part of preparing is getting clear in your intention. Why today? Why psychedelics now? What is it that you hope to achieve during this session? Part of that process is getting comfortable with whatever medicine you're going to take and how it's going to feel in your body and whoever is going to serve it to you. And there are different other exercises depending on which which psychedelic you choose to prepare your body, maybe you eliminate some foods or some some some other substances or some behaviors, and then afterwards, and then during, when we start back up for a minute, then you have the the experience itself, and you have these insights and awakenings and awarenesses, and you leave this experience. And the question of integration is, what do you do with that? And where a good coach or a therapist or or a spiritual community can help is helping you unpack whatever it is that you saw, help you convert that into action. So okay, I had these insights, and now I want to make real, meaningful, lasting change. And to do that, I said to myself, Wow, I want to do more of this, or I want to spend more time with this person. I want to spend less time with these people. How do I then do that? And then, how do I, probably, most importantly, remember that on this psychedelic experience, I saw that I was loved. On the inside, I saw that I was worthy. I knew that I'm a spiritual creature having a human experience. How do I not forget that knowing and that's that's all in this integration process that that happens so we can have it like in the beyond the trip and in the veterans guide, there are lots of activities, especially for that first 30 days, but then keeping that going integration can be a lifelong process. It becomes the practice that we do, following these, these insights, awakenings and awarenesses. I

Greg Voisen
know when people do ayahuasca, frequently, there's a lot of purging and throwing up and things that happen to them. For people, there might be out there listening, that's going, Wow, this could be a way to treat but they're also afraid. They're afraid of maybe some of the outcomes, and also the fact that, you know, I know there are incidences where people actually have died, right? It's like, it's not they, you know, they haven't come out of it, per se. Is there any, is there any concern for that about, hey, afterwards, what might I be like? What? How am I going to change? Is the rest of my family gonna look at me is like crazy because of the way that I'm now looking at life. I mean, there must be something associated with that, Matt, you

Matt Zemon
brought up so many questions in that one question, so I'm gonna try to unpack it a little bit. So you first talk about risk. So I don't like using the word safe. Nothing is safe acetaminophen and over the counter, pain killer ingredient kills over 400 people a year in America alone. So there's no such thing as safe when it comes to medicine. What we're talking about is relative risk. Dr David Nutt from Imperial College said, let's look at a bunch of drugs and harm to self and harm to others. What's the most dangerous drug in his study, alcohol. It's a 72 you go through a lot of drugs before you find psilocybin mushrooms. At the far right of his chart, it's a six, LSD is a seven, MDMA is a nine,

Greg Voisen
oh my goodness, wow. There's different lot in between there. There's

Matt Zemon
a lot in between, and a lot of harm can happen in that six, that seven and that nine. So then what do we do as people who are thinking about or using psychedelics to mitigate that risk? And there are three things that science says you need to pay attention to source. Where did your drugs come from? Real harm can happen when they are laced or contaminated. So paying attention to source is one way to keep yourself reduced to risk set. Is that mindset? Are you clear? Do you know why you're doing this? Are you doing this because you want to do this? Are you doing this because someone's kind of talked you into it, all of that. Do you have someone on the other side who's going to help you, in case there is any psychological distress? Is there somebody in the room. Who can help you? If you're truly scared, it can help move your your mind from one experience to another, and then setting is the physical environment. Are you going to be interrupted by dogs, by neighbors, by Amazon? Are you going to do you trust the people around you not to touch you? Do you know that you're not going to have you're highly suggestible? Are things going to be said that you don't want to want to hear? What is that setting like? And then also, are your are their eyes on you? Are you able to wander off and cause harm to yourself? Are you in a safe container? When we pay attention to source, set and setting, we've reduced our risk even more than the already low relative risk. Now, are there people who have contraindications? They're taking a specific already taking a prescription, and with that prescription is unsafe to take a specific psychedelic, absolutely and in advance, having a medical intake is important, and making sure that the prescriptions, supplements, family history is all looked at before choosing which psychedelic, if you don't have a doctor who you're willing to do that with, go to a spirit pharmacist and.com Ben Malcolm, he's a PharmD. All he does is medical intakes in in psychedelic world. So spirit, pharmacist.com, it's a great resource for that.

Greg Voisen
That's a great resource for listeners too, that might be considering this. And you know, obviously there's societal and cultural impacts. It still has a stigma attached to it, really. And obviously there's more people like you out there now that are writing about it, advocating it, supporting it. One Where would people actually go if they said, Hey, I'm ready to actually do this after I listen to this podcast, or they've been encouraged, they've read your book, they've any, read any one of numerous things. I mean, you know, we, we have a lot of states here in this union, you know, and I don't know which one I want to go to. Do you have any that you recommend or centers that actually control the environment and control the setting and the mindset and help people through it?

Matt Zemon
Yeah, what I'm what I talk to people about, is there's really a few different ways people access psychedelics, there's the medical model. We have ketamine legal in all 50 states. And again, the same questions about source, set and not so much source, because the medical it's going to be prescription, but set and setting apply to legal ketamine, just like it would to any other psychedelic. We then have people who are choosing to get on airplanes and go to Central America, South America, Jamaica, Ayahuasca, yeah, for Ayahuasca or psilocybin. So that's another way people access and then we have underground churches and therapists and coaches who are running their own types of ceremonies and sessions. And those can be 100% spiritual, and they can be 100% medical, just all done quietly the I'm gonna just stick on the churches for a moment. In America, we have country found on religious freedom. We have the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but in a but we've only had four psychedelic churches actually be granted a true exemption where they're able to practice legally. The other 500 I know this, there are yes yes for them, the other 500 to 1000 churches say, You know what, there's no path to exemption that we can afford. We're going to continue to practice, and we are protected by law and statute, and we will defend ourselves if needed. I don't love that, but that's the way those psychedelic churches work. I don't love it because I don't think it's I don't think it's right of our government. It doesn't make any sense to me that we have this tool that's been used for 1000s of years in every other culture, and for our government to say, Well, you can't practice that. Religion isn't what our we're supposed to do in this country. For those are in who are looking though to find a non medical church that the or sorry experience, the best option I can suggest is you go type in psychedelic society near me, psychedelic society, big city near me and see what pops up. Go to those meetings where there's different people talking about different things, and just ask around who's doing. What? Who can I trust? What types of things, services are they providing? How much does it cost? What is the set setting and that they're using? Buy this book first. Buy that book. Psyched for everyone, absolutely, this

Greg Voisen
one is a great resource for that. Now you know, you were just speaking about the indigenous cultures, and you know, much of this does derive from shamans, or you're talking about the religious practices and this spiritual out of body experience that people are doing. There's people now doing somatic breathing that are saying, Hey, we're having a very similar experience during somatic breathing with connection with loved ones and and all of these kind of things. And I have absolutely nothing against that. How do you look at this whole arena of societal and cultural impacts and mainstream and bring it all together, Matt, so that somebody sitting out there is feeling more comfortable with the whole idea of embracing a an experience like this. I mean, you've talked about, you know, mindset preparation, environmental preparation, right? And I think that mindset preparation is probably the biggest one it seems like it should be. And what would you say to people are skeptical about psychedelics being labeled as a miracle cure, and how do you manage the expectations while embracing that potential,

Matt Zemon
I embrace the skepticisms. I don't believe psychedelics are a miracle, miracle cure. What I think is interesting is when we talk about breaking repetitive thinking patterns and lighting up parts of the brain that don't normally speak to each other, that works when we're thinking about, how do we conquer parts of depression or anxiety that breaking of repetitive thinking patterns works when it comes to OCD and it comes to eating disorders, that breaking of repetitive thinking patterns works when it comes to substance use challenges, even has implications with autism. So it's not that it's a cure, but if we can break repetitive thinking patterns and from the inside, understand differently ourselves, not being told I physically know something different because I saw it myself, I think then I am able to enable change in myself, and you're able to enable change in yourself, and that's just a different paradigm than how we've worked. You brought up the spiritual component. In the old days, we just had healers, and the healers are medical healers and spiritual healers. Well, this medicine dances across both and our medical people don't have any spiritual training, and many of our spiritual people don't have any medical training. So if we're going to use these compounds, we need to invite a new type of collaboration, and this collaboration does need to come above ground. It needs to be where medical people aren't worried about losing their licenses if they're helping out some on a psychedelic experience.

Greg Voisen
So I think how much of it is, how much of it is plant based medicine, in other words, like we look at where these substances come from, LSD, MDMA, what percentage is coming from the origin of some plant versus fentanyl, which is made in some factory in China somewhere, which is giving people great experiences but horrible outcomes. Yes, right, meaning the death rate from it is just way too high, and the addiction rate is way too high. So can you address that?

Matt Zemon
Yeah, I think when we, when I talk about the classic psychedelics, things like psilocybin, Ayahuasca, Iboga, MDA or Sassafras. These are all natural. That's an extract, but the other three are true. Growing from the ground, psilocybin grows all over the world, every continent except Antarctica. We've used it. We've used different naturally growing substances and ceremonies in Africa, in Greece, in Siberia, in Scandinavia, in Europe, in North America, South America. So there's, again, it's all over the world, the natural ones. Now we then get into things like LSD, MDMA made there. They are synthetic. We would. There's an argument that, okay, but we are nature. We you and I are both nature, and whatever we make is just an extension of nature. And yes, therefore those are also nature, just different. It gets complicated, gets nuanced. I think it's easier to talk about. There's, there's there's a whole movement called decriminalize nature. I think it's easier to understand no adult should tell another adult that they can't put nature in their body. And I can. I can understand that. I think there's also an access thing that that I didn't pay any attention to before doing this work, which is being in the privileged class, we have access and we can afford things, right? Part of the decrim nature movement is helping people understand that. Okay, great. I'm glad you can afford it. For those who can't, shouldn't they have the right to be able to grow their own mushrooms and use their own mushrooms as part of their own healing. And I get that,

Greg Voisen
oh, yeah, I have seen some documentaries on this exactly what you're talking about. So what role do you see psychedelics playing and transforming not the in just the individual who's listening today, but the collective system, health care, education and even governance? Because, you know, if you look at the bigger picture here, this is still an outlier. You're not like the Tylenol across the counter where I can go pick it up, even though you said 400 people die from that. Do you ever see number one, this becoming that available. And two, what would be the arguments for and or against that? Now I know it's a two prong question. One was about the systems, health care, education and governance, and two was about the availability of this and how accessible, I should say accessibility of these substances right now, they in my world. I don't know about anybody else's, but it's not like if somebody said, Hey, I wanted to go get some LSD, I don't know where would I go to go to the streets and find some LSD? No, hopefully not, because that's the one that's going to probably be laced with something?

Matt Zemon
Yeah, I get that the Okay, so let's break this into pieces again. When it comes to availability, I see a world in where there are religious exemptions get granted to more churches that are operating in a responsible manner, um, so that people who want to practice under sincere religious belief, they don't want to have a diagnosis, they don't they're not looking for a medical cure. They're looking for an ability to connect with source and expand consciousness. They're going to be able to do that. So I see that happening in America, um, where there'll be more of that. I see a world where the FDA grants, I mean, they've already given psilocybin and MDMA breakthrough therapy designation. They're seeing the power. They're seeing the power for end of life distress. They're seeing the power for PTSD. They're seeing the power for depression, for substance use, for smoking cessation. I see a world where there would be more access through the medical system, of these tools, where I have a medical challenge, and I use this as a way to work towards a cure. So I think both of those things are gonna I don't see a 711, model where these, these, these are, these are available in a recreational model, whether I believe they should be or not as irrelevant, I just don't see us getting there as a society anytime soon. And then I do have to remind myself that mushrooms grow everywhere, so in some ways, they are out there. We just don't know where to look for them,

Greg Voisen
and that well, their specific type of mushrooms are, they

Matt Zemon
are the psilocybin mushrooms is the ones we're talking about. Yep. And I do think part of why these grow kits and these companies selling spores are getting more and more popular is people are realizing, you know, it's just not that hard to grow them. And they're taking it under their own wings and doing that themselves,

Greg Voisen
so long as they don't OD on it, which I don't think they could, but there are

Matt Zemon
all so stick with psilocybin. I mean, there's multiple studies that say psilocybin is both non toxic and non addictive. As far as I know, in the all the literature, there's only three known fatalities from psilocybin total.

Greg Voisen
Yeah, very Yeah,

Matt Zemon
it's that, and there's, yeah, there's arguably no leads.

Greg Voisen
I think more important for our listeners is not the fact that they'd OD, but the fact that something radically might change for them, that they'd be afraid of

Matt Zemon
so or that they are put in a position where, by when taking the mushrooms, that then they are not in an ordinary state of consciousness, and then they do something that causes them harm. They walk off a balcony, they walk into traffic, and that's where, again, set and setting is so important. Yeah,

Greg Voisen
yeah, you bring up such an important point. So that being the case, and you writing all of these books and dedicating your life to this, you much, you must think there's a huge future for psychedelics and all these other plant based medicines we've talked about what concerns would kind of keep you up at night as somebody who's advocating this, and maybe you're not kept up at night at all. But the reality is, what are the things that you'd like to see put in place, and what's kind of your what's your future? What's the future look like here?

Matt Zemon
Yeah, I, I am generally an optimist for the human race, for all of us. And I believe we're entering a time when the amount of abundance in this world is just phenomenal. To think about how little food scarcity. There is a little shelter. There is not, there aren't challenges. But relatively, we are in an amazing period of life with with food, with shelter, with access to technology, access to information, clean air, clean energy. All these things are happening. Even this, this advent of AI is happening. So we're moving into a period where making money is no longer going to be the driving force. It can't be well, just too many things are happening. So then we have time to think about, what are we here for? Why are we here? So what I I get excited about psychedelics as a tool for understanding as a tool, for remembering that we are all connected to, for remembering that we might look like different waves, but we're part of the same ocean. And with that understanding, I believe we can go even further in the things that we're doing to take care of this planet on which we live, and that we are a part of, that we're not separate and apart from nature, but we are nature. I think we can do more in terms of going even further in terms of making sure everybody is fed and clothed and housed and and and finding pursuits that are more meaningful versus the scarcity paradigm, which we all grew up in, which is there's not enough. You've got to take what's yours. It's a zero sum game. And that's not, I believe, the reality in which we live. So I get super excited about that. What do I get concerned about? I don't love gatekeepers, I think, and I don't love people who who are approaching this of I know more than you about what you can should do for your life, for you to be happier. I think these tools help us all find that inner wisdom in ourselves, and a great coach and a great therapist and a great community can help us ask great questions, but it's done in the more of a peership manner versus a top down manner. So I think when we put on gatekeepers, when we put on certain types of certifications, it can lead to challenges. And I don't I get nervous when we create any gates, but I also understand I'm realist, where some gates are needed to do this responsibly and to get this out at scale.

Greg Voisen
Well, you have written what I would consider to be the de facto book, and it is endorsed by a lot of people in the field. And you said in this book, you'll learn how to micro dose where, and how you can take psychedelics legally, techniques for psychedelic preparation and integration and much more. This book was published by psyched publishing, which is obviously your own publishing company, and I want to thank you for coming on and opening up this world and then providing a resource, a really good resource, for our listeners to access. And we're going to put a link to the book, obviously, and it's Matt Zemon, M, a, t, t, z, E, M, O n.com, that's where you want to go to learn about Matt his books, how he can help you reach out to him, most definitely, send him a kind of send him in a memo or an email through there been a pleasure having you on now in the last few seconds here, half a minute or so, if there's one thing, Matt that you'd like people to take away from this podcast and what we've talked about for the last 45 minutes that they could apply right now that they literally could make an application of and do something. And that doesn't mean applying the psychedelic it just means something around the mindset where they're at in their life, questioning whether or not this is the right road or journey to take. What would you tell them and what would you encourage them to explore

Matt Zemon
after a psychedelic journey, we often ask people to participate, like in a 30 day gratitude challenge, and part of that is to reprogram our brains towards the positive. The actions I always recommend is, how do we find the positive and all around us? How do we remember that just being alive is such a gift by itself, and how supported we are in this world in which we live period and as an action, it would be, yeah, jump into whatever gratitude practice, or start a gratitude practice. If you're still listening to this podcast after 45 minutes, something's calling you in this direction. Yeah. Go grab one of these books and then go find out, find a way to answer your own calling.

Greg Voisen
Well, for all my listeners, Matt Zemon, the book is psychedelics. For everyone, I've given out his website several times. There'll be a link to that as well. Matt, Namaste to you. Thank you for being on the show.