Perhaps before we dive deeper into the neuroscience, you could share how New Zealand has been part of your story.

Yeah.

So New Zealand really was the beginning of my psychedelic neuroscience journey, which is kind of wild to say.

But when I was about ten years old, my family moved to, um, Kawakawa, which is a tiny little town, um, in the North Island.

And then we lived in Paihia as well.

And my dad was a doctor at a hospital in Kawakawa, and we had moved there from our very small town in Georgia, the Bible Belt here in the US.

And when I moved there, it was the first time that I was introduced to a lot of topics.

Uh, what are your thoughts on belief?

So give us a little bit about your story and what got you into psychedelics and this work.

Okay, yeah.

So first of all, thank you so much for all the kind compliments.

Yeah, of course.

So my PhD is in neuroscience.

And so what brought me to that was I grew up evangelical, living in the South.

And I really, from a very young age, was asking pretty deep questions, pretty hard questions about the whole thing.

That would seem to go in the opposite direction of what we would predict.

Like, where would somebody put their piece to start?

I would say if you can, therapy, a therapist that is familiar with psychedelics and can help with preparation and integration afterwards.

Um, and then the other piece is community.

Um, I think a lot of cities around the US have, uh, really great psychedelic communities where people can kind of come together and talk about their experiences.

Um, and then I also think just, um, taking guided actions.

Obviously, after psychedelics, sometimes people wanna make huge changes in their lives, and a lot of times those can be good.

Sometimes they can be a little, um, uh, what's the word? Impulsive.

And like, what were some of their stories?

What were some of their stories?

Yeah, so everybody's story has been so different.

The outcome, the outcome has been so different.

But the starting place is always the same.

People raised in high control religious environments across generations.

I've talked to people from, you know, 25 to 70. who have experienced religious trauma growing up in evangelical fundamentalist Christianity.

And a lot of times, all of these different people have held really harmful beliefs, beliefs about God, kind of like we've talked about already, but also beliefs about the self.

okay

I- I've saw you write about this on your Substack, like the, the main function of the brain or of consciousness, whatever you wanna call it, is primarily a pattern recognition machine, no?

Yes.

Yeah.

So what you're getting at is what we call predictive processing.

And a little bit of background.

So our brains evolved not so that we perceive the world in the most accurate way, but so that we perceive the world in the way that's going to be best for our survival.

And so what that means in our normal everyday waking consciousness is filtering a lot out.

I would love to hear you share a story about that.