And would you agree that that was kind of a turning point, the revelations you had in that experience? It was pretty seminal.

Yeah.

So that was, I think, my... yes early on in my psychonaut journey and so i was in the army at the time uh so from 1923 i was in the army so this is part of my kind of backlash against hippie culture i didn't join the army because i was i wanted to go to war or kill anyone i joined the army for different reasons but i wasn't so opposed to the army to not join um whereas you know my dad cried when i told him i joined the army And I've become very anti-imperialist since I was in the army.

But at the time, I wasn't particularly clued into the nature of American empire.

But anyway, to your point about my kind of pivot, I was in the army for four years, did not particularly enjoy it.

I was feeling an urge to have more freedom because it's a job where you can't actually quit because if you quit, you go to jail.

It's called going AWOL.

without thinking really sufficiently about what the consequences are, what the implications are.

Um, but so maybe explain a little bit about that 'cause it really shapes and forms the overall trajectory of the book.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I tried to strike a balance between being, you know, a popular book accessible to anyone but also presenting cutting edge rigorous philosophy and neuroscience, and I, I'm a kind of a, a strange bird in that I do straddle many worlds in my work.

Like I said, I'm a lawyer by day, um, philosopher by night, academic at UC Santa Barbara at, on a part-time basis for like 13 years now, and published many peer-reviewed papers, a number of books now.

And so, you know, our approach called general reson- general resonance theory is catching on.

Our primary paper has gotten now over 200 citations, which is a lot for an academic paper, and it, it was a slow burn, so it's kind of getting there, and I think it's gonna have probably 500 before, you know, another couple years is done.

Right