Right.

I used as a foundation for my academic work, a Soviet psychologist who is mostly not known about in the 20th century.

He was working in the 1910s, 1920s in the Soviet Union named Lev Vygotsky.

I think his work only got translated into English in the 1960s, but he kind of became big in education circles in the 70s and 80s.

And I picked up on his ideas and he developed a kind of alternative understanding of childhood development different from Piaget and Skinner and some of these other behavioral psychologists and child development experts that were dominant throughout the 20th century in the West.

He argued that becoming educated and developing is becoming versatile with cognitive tools and that's the term that I found really really helpful and he talked about literacy reading writing numeracy you know skill that those types of things as becoming performative with cognitive tools that learning to read and write is learning how to use a cognitive tool and you know literacy is not a natural thing to learn learning a language is a natural thing to learn spoken and you know we've spoken languages for hundreds nobody knows how long a hundred thousand years plus but literacy has only been around for like five thousand years and there's lots of ways that it can go wrong in terms of education So that idea of cognitive tool I found really helpful to think about how to frame psychedelics or entheogens as ways to harness a particular kind of tool that has been respected and understood in other cultural traditions but lost from our own and think about how to integrate those for potentially educational purposes as well as obviously healing purposes and see that obviously is a important component as well but to catalyze you know again creativity wonder awe sense of connectedness and partly not just the experience, but the stories that are told about the experience.

So again, in many indigenous traditions, you're told stories about meeting your ancestor spirits and connecting with the animistic forest spirits that will happen for you when you have the opportunity to use the medicine of one's community the appropriate time and age and so the growing up with that kind of respect and anticipation is a kind of placebo enhancer for when the opportunity finally comes to have those experiences you're already well set and prepared for it.

And did you work on any ayahuasca issues in Canada?

How present do your previous journeys, whether back in, as a teenager or as an adult, how often do you think about or reference or have space for those previous experiences? And the answer can be not much, but I'm just curious.

Not much overtly, but I think they all stick with me and, you know, I had many years of drinking ayahuasca in a regular way and that definitely impacted lots of elements of my life in fact i would say it saved my life in in retrospect i had profound insights about my relationship with sugar uh in a couple of sort of acutely in a couple of ceremonies where I had a sense of like blood sugar dysregulation and insulin dysregulation that was happening in the moment and my father had died of complications of the type 2 diabetes so I was well aware of what the disease of diabetes was and the symptoms and a sense of you know I've got a genetic predisposition to it but I hadn't made any kind of significant life changes to think about prevention of that but a couple of ayahuasca ceremonies i had this like strong sense of dropping blood sugar and panicking like clammy cold hands and feeling like oh i need to get some fruit or something i need to get some sugar into my body or and i remember one was pure like it was actually a terror thinking i'm going to go into a diabetic home like it was you know i think in retrospect it was like a deception or hallucination or a kind of lesson that was being taught in a hard way i don't think it was probably true but it was a sense of panic and terror and when i did sort of get some, somebody gave me blueberries and I felt better, but it led me to reflect on my relationship to sugar and had some insights of like, well, sugar is a white powder that we've taken out of a plant that, you know, in its plant form probably isn't so harmful, but in its white powder form, it's pretty toxic.

And it's like, where have we heard that story before? And I didn't become kind of so preachy about it other than to realize that my own relationship to sugar is what I needed to change and really shifted my sugary-oriented breakfast and desserts after meals, tried to cut all of that out.

And then that kind of stuck with me for the most part.

Having my stepdaughters come into my life about it, 10 years ago, sugar's more rounded, definitely, you know, partook in chocolate and birthday cake once in a while, but never in the way that I had been doing it prior to those experiences.

And really have a sense now of learning, sort of keeping up on the science of what's happening with our understanding of metabolic disease and how sugar is probably a major, major culprit in that.

So, you know, that's another example of a big insight that came to me through these kinds of experiences.

As we're wrapping up our conversation today, Kent, Just to tie it back to your childhood, I'm curious, what do you think little Ken would think about how your life has unfolded and the kind of work that you do now?