It has become safe in the mainstream to discuss the sacred or medical use of psychedelic medicine. But that’s not the whole story. There are drugs and medicines being used all the time, and no one except for comics are talking about it from a lens of experience. This doesn’t make it less dangerous, it makes it more dangerous. Today I am joined by veterans of the game: Caitlyn Howe, Erick Godsey, Kyle Kingsbury for a deep dive tell-all, as we discuss our comprehensive personal experiences with altered states of consciousness through a pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic lens. In this completely uncensored conversation, we discuss the lessons we’ve learned along the way and the vision we share for a new kind of container for celebration and ecstasis, made manifest in our upcoming production of Arkadia Festival.

AUBREY: There's more of a blurred line of distinction between medicine and drugs than people realize. Because even sacred psychedelic plant medicine can be utilized as a drug. And it can lead to abuse, or it can lead to other problems. And oftentimes, many things labeled as drugs can have medicinal properties, can have connective properties, can allow you to experience and explore an aspect of yourself that was formerly hidden. So, we're offering this podcast with Caitlyn, Kyle and Erick, to share our experiences, not to encourage anybody to do anything. But, just to understand that it's going to happen. When you're at a festival, or where you're at a party, you're going to be around people or perhaps participating in the utilization of these substances. So we wanted to share, all right, here's where it might go okay, and here's where it could turn absolutely tragic. And it's important to understand both of those categories. And to realize that abstinence and pretending that we're not going to interact with these substances is just not real. It's not helpful. So, as veterans of the game, we just wanted to offer our wisdom, advice, experience from a loving place, and say, here's the field as we know it and understand it. Here's where we've fallen. And here's where things have gone all right. So, without further ado, sharing this podcast with Caitlyn, Kyle and Erick.
Starts after intro at 2:54
AUBREY: All right, fam, here we are. For everybody. This is Caitlyn, Erick and Kyle, my best friend's. Good job, Kyle. Kyle's in a mood today. This is going to be great.
KYLE: I'm ready.
AUBREY: This is going to be great. So, one of the things that I wanted to talk about is, we recognize and we have all the statistics in that you just teach about abstinence, and it doesn't actually work to encourage kids to understand sexuality, to understand what's going on with STDs. Also, denies them the actual real pleasure of fucking, right. Come on, y'all, it's going to happen. There's a strong desire for it. And, so much better is to actually explain from experience where things have been beautiful, where things have actually gotten ugly and messy. But sex isn't our subject today. It's drugs and medicines, and the blurred line between drugs and medicines, and how medicines can be drugs, and drugs can be medicines, and how sometimes there's somewhere in between. And actually, that becomes the post tragic stage of this development. And that's not actually a bad map to look at. But, I first want to say the first caveat, being, this is not a podcast to encourage anybody to do drugs.
KYLE: Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
AUBREY: Exactly. It's not the purpose. The purpose is, y'all are going to do drugs.
All: You guys are already doing drugs.
AUBREY: So, why don't you hear from people with experience in doing both drugs and medicines, and actually have some guidance instead of people just saying, no, let's not talk about it, let's keep this part of our life quiet. Except if you see us at Burning Man, we're going to be fucking blasted. And we're all going to know that we're blasted but we're still just not going to talk about it. So, this is an opportunity to open that up. And yeah, so we'll talk about festivals, we'll talk about parties, we'll talk about sex will probably come up. But we'll talk about these drugs--
ERICK: Sex and drugs do go together.
AUBREY: Sex and drugs and house. So, where did you guys begin? Because I think I have a unique path, in that, really my first experience with drugs was my experience with medicine. Now, I did get high with my stepbrothers, and it was just purely recreational. We were just eating junk food and laughing and it was like, so, that did happen prior to my first vision quest journey. But it was a very small kind of limited experience. And now, cannabis is like a real sacred medicine and the recreational medicine for me, both. But still, I prefer it more on the sacred side. I don't find myself smoking a lot, out, just social situations. It's not just my go-to, but nonetheless, I recognize it has application on both sides. But for you guys, where did your first kind of experiences with anything, drugs, medicines, really start to kick in? And then what did you start to learn really quick?
ERICK: You want to go first, Caitlyn? We're just going in order. It's not because of any reason.
KYLE: That makes it easy to go in the line.
CAITLYN: This one question could be an entire podcast, but, I will try to distill it down. No, I was actually, I grew up pretty timid about things like this. I grew up Catholic. Sex was not a bad thing in my house, but it just wasn't talked about. My mom really tried to protect her five daughters, and just keep us innocent and young for a long time. And so, I had this imprint of skepticism, and kind of, I was conservative and nervous about intoxication. So, there were like a couple of--
AUBREY: So, let me bring in one concept here that I think will help, because something's coming to me, is that the pre-tragic stages, three stages of really anything you want to talk about. There's the pre-tragic, the tragic, and the post tragic. In the pre-tragic, that just means that things are clear. So, drug negative opinion; drugs are bad, all drugs are bad. That's pre-tragic, actually. Everything is simple, everything makes sense. There's clarity. Sex is a sin. That fundamentalist belief, that's pre-tragic. Or there's the way that animals would look at it. The dolphins that get high, puff, puff, passing on that puffer fish with the toxin and then they dazed off, and the elephants and baboons that eat fermented fruit. Baboons will steal barrels of fucking beer and get drunk, and all of the jaguars that be tripping. Like all of the animals, it's like, yeah, this is awesome, and it's very simple. And, it can be simple for humans too. Think of the way that people used to look at wine or you looking at beer. You watch any old movie, all they're drinking, and every time the warrior stops is ale. You never see them drink water. How many times did you see people in "Game of Thrones" drink water or hydrate? There's always ale or wine the whole time. We understand that there's this pre-tragic view. Like, yeah, this is good, it makes me feel good. And then things get complicated as we start to understand, all right, there's dangers, there's checks and minuses, there's addictive tendencies, there's all that. And that's where things are confused. And then, where we're trying to land this podcast is the post tragic which says, there are aspects of the pre-tragic that are true and that we need to reclaim. There's some bad aspects, there's some beautiful aspects, and there's a first simplicity and incidence that can be reclaimed after embracing the whole field of the tragic where things get confusing and complicated and complex, and painful, and we're kind of sorting it out into the post tragic, where we can actually enter into this field with full understanding, full awareness, full consciousness, and have the best fucking time.
CAITLYN: 100%.
AUBREY: So, within that framework, we had a little bit of what you were talking about, which was kind of like the pre-tragic, it's all bad. Drugs are bad, sex is bad, it's all bad.
CAITLYN: Yeah, it was intimidating. And then--
AUBREY: Yeah, but there's some part of you that knew, like, hmm, I don't think this is quite right.
CAITLYN: 100%. There was, of course, I think when you're given that framework of suppression and this stark delineation between good and bad, there's an allurement to the unknown of the "bad". And that definitely influenced the way that I proceeded to be drawn to intoxication. But for me, there was a little bit of experimental dabbling with alcohol in high school like on prom night. But it wasn't really until I was in college, and I was working at a Mexican food restaurant, and they had a shots night, and they asked me to be the shots girl.
AUBREY: As I would.
CAITLYN: And then I had my first vodka and sprite, and it was like, all my inhibitions. See, I grew up feeling, I was pretty shy, but also had this really big personality, which eventually got to--
AUBREY: Yeah, you were a girl about to go wild.
CAITLYN: I was a girl about to go wild. Oh boy, did I. Yes
AUBREY: She gone.
CAITLYN: She gone. Girl Gone Bad. Yeah, so I started to drink. And the drinking, when I worked in my first bar job, was this euphoric sense of freedom. And I think this is really important for me to bring into this conversation, is really, ultimately, reclaiming that sense of freedom in yourself without feeling like you need the substance to do it for you. But it did do it for me, and it felt like freedom. I felt confident enough to be myself and to be wild and big and loud in this way that I hadn't really felt before. But I was still pretty nervous about "drugs", and it was like this taboo. So, I think I was about 21 or so, and I was at a party. I grew up also having really big challenges with diagnosed ADHD. It was very hard for me to stay present and stay on track and feel awake. So, I was never really drawn to anything that made me sleepy, like pills or cannabis, anything that brought me more into that deep out-of-control state. But I remember being at a party, and there were some girls that were doers, doing cocaine. And I was like, "Oh, my God, they're doing cocaine." And I remember I put a little bit on my gums after some encouragement from my friends. And suddenly, I felt like zing, I'm awake, and everything's really exciting. It was these introductions through the substances that helped me suddenly feel an expression of myself that I hadn't had the freedom or capacity to feel before. And that opened up into this relationship throughout my 20s, and I think of when I was around 23, having MDMA for the first time with my boyfriend and massaging each other, and just the aliveness, ultimately, was the feeling I started chasing in the pre-tragic world, was, I haven't felt this alive before.
AUBREY: Right. So, it almost flipped from this, this is all bad. And then you actually recognize the allurement to the reason why people are drawn to these things, because it's unlocking aspects of yourself that you can't access normally. So, it's providing like a bridge to states of consciousness, which unlock expressions of yourself that are desirable, and fundamentally--
CAITLYN: Yeah, that you can't necessarily attain in day to day, mundane life.
AUBREY: Right, yes. Then after, in the post tragic, after you've gotten there, and the medicines or drugs have gotten you there, then you can learn, alright, can I get there without them? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But either way, ao, in that process, it almost flipped over to a pre-tragic. Like, this is good, it's allowing me to access these states. But then, certainly, pretty soon in, you had to start experiencing the tragic. Whether that was that first fucking horrible hangover, because I wasn't even talking about alcohol. But I remember my junior prom, there's a girl who said yes to go to prom with me, and then got immediately back with her boyfriend. And I was like, oh, cool, you can take her to prom. And he's like, "No, man, you take her."
ERICK: Oh, man.
AUBREY: I was like. "Oh, this is the worst." I was like, this is fucking terrible. And so, I blacked out on Goldschläger.
KYLE: Yes, with the gold flakes.
CAITLYN: Goldschläger on prom was my favorite
AUBREY: It was so bad, and I was so hungover and so sick. I was just in the shower on like medium temperature, and just puking and then drinking the water that was coming off my face. That's that first tragic moment, you're like, fuck, alcohol feels like the most incredible, amazing feeling. And then you do one of those things, you're like, fuck.
CAITLYN: I'll never forget my sister, my sister and her boyfriend were staying at my house at one point way back in our 20s. And I remember he came home at like 7:00am and I could hear them in the bathroom, and she's like, "Stop drinking water out of my hair.". It was great. You get real thirsty after a long night. But yes, I went deep into the tragic and I can go there later. But, I'll pass it down to you guys to share about your first experiences. There was a lot for me for sure.
ERICK: Yeah, so for me, I was one of those people that was arrogant, and believed that he was better than everybody else because he wouldn't drink. But really, I was just afraid to change my consciousness. And it wasn't until I was in college, I think I was a freshman where my friend finally talked me into smoking weed. So, I really didn't drink and I kind of just jumped right to weed. And in my arrogance, I ended up smoking three blunts in a row, because I kept saying I don't feel high, and he just would look at me after the first blunt and he was like … and I'd smoke another one. By the time that we got midway through the third one, for people who have gotten really high, there is an experience that happens that's called time skipping, where you just end up in a moment and you don't know how you got there. So, my first time being hired was absolutely tragic, because I ended up face down on the floor, convinced that I had actually gotten my dick slammed in a car door. And then I had gotten to the hospital, and that I had lost my dick and I was in denial of the fact. This was the first time I ever got high.
CAITLYN: Never heard this story.
ERICK: So, I started tragic first. I just went in tragic. And then-
AUBREY: Well, no, you had a pre-tragic clarity that there was a value proposition--
ERICK: I'm better than everybody who does drugs.
AUBREY: Of sobriety is good, drugs are bad. I'm sober so I'm good, and I'm better. It was very clear. And then the moment you jumped in, you slammed into actually, a confirmation of your original thesis.
ERICK: It was so bad. I still remember my friend's face. He was playing Call of Duty, I hope he's listening to this. He was playing Call of Duty. So, I got so high where it felt like my entire face melted, and I was just eyeballs. And then that's when I had the remembering of the fact that my dick got slammed in a car door. And he's playing Call of Duty and he's so high that his eyes are only red. He doesn't even have an iris anymore. And I look over to him, like, I just go from zombie to, what the fuck did you do? The way he was like, “huh?”. He was just so high, and so innocent. And we had a third friend who was on the bed because we were basically bachelors and there was a bed in the living room. I don't want to talk about it. He's just laughing, and laughing at me. So, it was horrible. Anyway, after that, I figured out how to smoke weed and not hallucinate and everything became beautiful. I wanted to relisten to every song I'd ever loved and just like, I would just be in my room listening to music and re-watching movies and just re-experiencing everything that I had ever liked as a kid because I was convinced weed made it better.
AUBREY: Red Hot Chili Peppers is so good.
ERICK: For me it was Linkin Park.
AUBREY: For me it was the Chili Peppers, the Rolling Stones.
CAITLYN: And it’s true though
AUBREY: But definitely, the Chili Peppers fucking got me. And then also Taco Cabana chicken quesadillas. They are so good.
CAITLYN: And cheese tacos.
AUBREY: But they're not really that good.
ERICK: They're not. You got to be on drugs.
AUBREY: Yeah, you have those experiences. All right, Kyle, you go up into the pre-tragic, and then we'll go into the tragic stage.
KYLE: I grew up kind of similar to Caitlyn in that drugs were bad, kind of vibe. Both my parents did quite a bit of drugs and never told me that until I was older, which was comical that they would withhold all that.
AUBREY: And it's dumb, right?
KYLE: It is.
AUBREY: Because if they would have just told you, you could have had a head start. Instead of slamming into the fucking tragic itself.
KYLE: Like these aren't good, this is where it can go south, that kind of thing. My parents got divorced at 13. And because my mom knew I was going to drink no matter what, she said I'd rather you drink here at the house, than then go off and get drunk and get in a car accident. So we had a little bit of leeway there. She came to that decision not on her own. She came to that decision because I was getting drunk in other places at 13 and showing up drunk. Mad Dog 2020, St. Ides Special Brew, Goldschläger, there was another shitty one. Aftershock, that was another city cinnamon drink. So we got into all that stuff. I have many memories that came up for me in ayahuasca later, where I was asking ayahuasca, why wouldn't my sister do Ayahuasca with me? And it showed me all the times I had introduced a drug to her and gone completely over the rail. So, literally, I'm in my chonese hanging over a railing, barfing, saying, "Get the fuck away. I don't want you to see me like this," at 15 years old, 16 years old, 17 years old. I went hard to the paint right from the jump. So, I kind of experienced hangovers like that. But when you're young, you just bounce right back from it. I get hung over and I'll be like, worth it, totally fucking worth it. And there is no real meter there. I looked at people who did other drugs like cannabis and psilocybin, a lot of them were like the skater community where I was like, I don't want to wind up a loser like these guys, you know? So, I was like, I'm not going to fuck with those. I dabbled a little bit with cannabis. When I got to college at ASU, all bets were off. I started working with cannabis pretty early like in junior college, and that was, really, it was addictive. It was a crutch and a numbing agent, but it was the most beautiful. It's kind of like how Russell Brand talks about it. It was a beautiful numbing agent for me at that time of my life. And then at ASU, it was cocaine and ecstasy and shoving pills in my poop chute and fucking, all bets were off. Those were the good old days. The number one party school in the nation. And then, I had a few poor experiences with plant medicines. But when I left college and got into fighting in the UFC, my boxing coach Wheatie was the first to introduce me to plant medicines. And that kind of shifted the trajectory of everything.
AUBREY: Right. And there's an interesting pre-tragic stage to plant medicines where people think that any plant medicine is a good idea. It's holy water, and the more holy water you have, the better. And you can really run into some, gnarly, dangerous territory on that side of the game, too. And we've been there, so we can follow that thread, if that ends up coming up through this conversation. It's certainly one of the subjects I explore at length in my upcoming book, "Psychonaut" which talks particularly about the plant medicine side, but talks also about where the lines get blurred with recreation and where some medicines were being used as drugs, etc. But there's the same arc in the medicine journey as well, where you realize, oh, this is all good, this is potentially dangerous, you can wind up in night school like Kyle did, and a two-year recovery from different things that can happen on these medicines, right? And so then there's the tragic. And then there's the post tragic of what you learn, what you gather and what you come back from. So, alright, so then speaking into, again, the pre-tragic of this situation. I think one of the things worth mentioning is, you mentioned drunk driving. My cousin, Eric, was killed when I was 16, in a drunk driving accident. He wasn't drunk, but somebody else was. And I fucking loved Eric. He was the best of us. All my other cousins, and my stepbrothers, they were cool sometimes, they're assholes at times. But Eric was, he was the fucking best. I looked up to him, he was a college athlete. Just such a good dude. And I remember just fucking being devastated. Just absolutely devastated. I still have a picture of Eric in my meditation room altar, that I'll go in, and I'll say hi to him. This is one of my first experiences with death, and it was linked to one of the tragedies of alcohol, which is the danger that can come from decision making, including driving cars. So, I think that early baptism in the danger of that, I haven't had dangerous alcohol related situations, because I was very wounded by the tragic early. And I learned that, so I always stayed away from drunk driving. I had parents who also, like you, were like, listen, I don't care how fucked up you are anywhere in the country. If you need a fucking ride, even if you didn't tell us what you were doing whatever, you lied your whole way there. You can lie your whole way back, doesn't matter. We'll give you a ride, and we're not going to punish you for that. So, to teach you. So, those were some good aspects that I think are important. Because if you have a policy where you're going to punish somebody if they're out drinking and that's really going to be it, well, they're just going to hide it from you by whatever means necessary, which includes driving somewhere where they won't get caught.
ERICK: I saw that so much, almost all of my friends because their parents would punish them for it. They would lie, and they would drive drunk.
CAITLYN: I think we lie also when we're afraid, even like, because my parents weren't condemning. They weren't encouraging, but it was also just the whole atmosphere of the world that we're in is this is bad. And so, even if your parents might be more open to you just being honest, there's just so much pressure, at least there was when I was younger. I can't speak to what it's like to be in that coming of age time right now. But that's one of the real, these things that society feels like it's protecting, but it's actually creating an atmosphere where people are more inclined to lie and conceal the truth of who they are and what they're doing, and end up coming to more harm paradoxically. So that's what I felt like I experienced was, I can't talk about this because everyone would judge me.
AUBREY: Yeah. All right, so let me go tour now into, again, also some pre-tragic experiences with sacred plant medicines. My first vision quest at 18, I didn't actually experience the tragic, any tragic aspects of that probably until, like really doing the ceremonial work, it started to get a little sketch probably in my 30s where I started to run into places that were dangerous places. Places that if I took this off ramp, I would have ended up in some kind of psychosis that would have lasted a certain amount of time. And I found myself in certain psychotically broken situations for short periods of time, but also, they helped me along. So, it took me a while for the sacred medicine path to actually reveal the tragic. But, the other aspects of the tragic that came in as I started to get exposed to other drugs, so, one of the drugs that I was exposed to was GHP. And that was like, hallelujah, when I found it. First of all, has a horrible reputation, because it's like the date rape drug. So, even if you talked about it, somebody thought you were being sketchy. But I was just giving it to myself. I wanted to date rape myself, because it was...
ERICK: Well, most people don't know what it does.
AUBREY: Yeah, so GHP is a is a GABA agonist that used to be a pharmaceutical that can be prescribed, actually, think it still might be a--
ERICK: They still do it for sleep apnea and things like that.
AUBREY: Yeah, so it's a GABA agonist, which is the same as alcohol, fundamentally, but it doesn't have all of the kind of really toxic effects, like the downstream effects of alcohol that include acid aldehyde, and all of the different inflammatory processes. So, you can actually–
ERICK: The hangover.
AUBREY: Yeah, the hangover, so you can actually experience what it feels like to be drunk, like the good aspects of "good" feeling aspects of being drunk without the downside. Now, you're still going to get a pretty savage glutamate rebound, which is the kind of opposite neurotransmitter to GABA. So, a GABA agonist means you're creating more of it. So, alcohol is creating more GABA in your brain. GHP is creating more GABA in your brain. And that GABA is a kind of a disinhibitor of your expression. And unlike alcohol, too, it's very, very pleasurable to have sex on GHP. It kind of connects you to your animality in a way.
ERICK: Can confirm.
AUBREY: And very quickly, you start to discover the tragic because this is playing with fucking fire. And I want to mention this. At least Caitlyn and I, in particular, have friends who know somebody who's very close to them who died from a GHP overdose. And I both experienced and known people who've, what's called G'd out, which is they've taken too much and they're completely non-responsive, and it's a very sketchy fucking situation. And I don't know anybody who's played with this drug that hasn't gotten fucked up, or know some situation that was a little fucked up. It is one of the most, you're really fucking playing with fire, and you really got to be fucking careful if you decide to play with this. Now, again, this is not a fucking--
ERICK: Disclaimer, disclaimer.
AUBREY: Encouragement to do this. I'm saying if you are, and if you're around it, be aware, it can feel very good. Yes, we know it. We get it. I understand why you're doing it. I fucking understand. I promise. And I've also seen both personally, and some really kind of sketchy situations arise from that particular drug. So, that's kind of the down. But also, there's different types of GHP. One of the worst situations I got myself in is that there's some GHP that you kind of feel it in this kind of tingling in your feet, after about 40 minutes it kicks in. Some types take like an hour and a half, and then can send you on this really much longer ride. And actually, you can start to learn to taste the difference. I don't know the actual chemical molecules that are different, but it's like butyrate, or gamma hydroxybutyrate, butylene, or butyl. There's different ways, like MeO-DMT, or N, N-DMT. It's still DMT. But it's acting in a much different way. So, you don't know exactly what you're getting, because there's not like a, you're getting it from the fucking streets. You know what I mean? So, it's intense and sketchy to play with that drug and definitely learned that lesson. So, that lesson was learned. And then, back in our days, Caitlyn, we were partying a lot. We were trying to do molly a lot. And oftentimes the experience of molly was fucking great. Most of my first experiences were really, really great. And then, sometimes you could do too much, and that's not so great. But not as terrible as when you try to do molly and you're not doing moll, which is like, one time we did fucking crystal meth on accident.
CAITLYN: We thought we were doing. And it was the best salt era.
AUBREY: And also, there was the bath salts that were coming in and being distributed as molly, so you don't know what the fuck you're getting.
KYLE: Was that a 72-hour mistake?
CAITLYN: Oh, yeah. On Christmas Eve.
KYLE: Oh, God.
AUBREY: Yeah, the fucking math situation was like, that was the worst, because, I mean, at a certain point in the afterparty, we recognized that there was a certain crowd that came in right around dawn, that was just on a different program.
ERICK: You never want the dawn crowd...
AUBREY: It was like, it was always a little sketchy but--
CAITLYN: You think you do. You're like, "There's the dawn crowd. We can keep going!"
AUBREY: But the fucking dawn crowd, somebody in the dawn crowd, was like, "Oh, yeah, we have some more molly if you guys want." We're like, "All right, we'll have a little bit more." But, it was in shards. And we're, it's really, and it's like, oh, yeah, it's like crystalline. No, bro, it was fucking meth. And so we took it. And it was the worst experience I've ever had.
CAITLYN: It's the worst.
AUBREY: We just up and up and up and up. And it felt like I was losing my fucking mind. And it was a fucking nightmare experience. Absolutely. And then, my experience with cocaine, it never really took to me. I never really liked it. I feel a little cool, a little talkative. But I don't like what it does to the energy of the place that I'm in. And also, we would always, like when there was cocaine involved, we always got in a fight. And then we would get in fights about getting in fights about cocaine, right? So we would start fighting immediately.
CAITLYN: We might have turned a little bit into the devil.
AUBREY: Cocaine wouldn't even, it didn't even have to go up your nose until we were actually fighting about cocaine. Cocaine was making us fight. So, I started to really see the tragedy of that without ever actually getting into, and still to this day, it's like one of those things that, I have a little bit of mambe in my mouth sometimes, but that's the coca leaf ground up. It's the same as a coca tea you get in Peru, and there's different ways to access that, that I think are a lot healthier. But that was kind of my first foray into the tragic element of these kinds of drugs slash medicines.
CAITLYN: Yeah. I would say my tragic period with drugs, which can also always be medicines depending on how you hold them, for the most part. Maybe someone could argue against crystal meth. But my tragic period was very long. I would say it was probably, I didn't really transcend the tragic relationship with it until about a few years ago. I think my first big wakeup, there were so many wake up calls that tried to happen, but essentially I went from loving the sensation of myself with particular intoxicants; alcohol, cocaine. I've always been an upper’s person. And I know that this reading Gabor Maté's "In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts" has been really supportive for me, and also reading "Scattered Minds" which is about ADHD, but it's essentially the development of my prefrontal cortex is structured in such a way where I have less impulse control. And that's something that was problematic in school and all of these things. And I'm just excitement driven. So anything that sparked excitement in me, I had a very hard time stopping. And that was the real tipping point. It's so sad, right? It was quite fun.
AUBREY: You had a very hard time stopping.
CAITLYN: And I would get hell bent on keeping going until my body just wouldn't go on. And it would be essentially anything that would get me up, which if that was MDMA, or cocaine or whatever. Really, those were the two that I really had the most fun on. But then I could drink more. And so, it would be this constant dance of, oh, I feel too high, I better drink some more. And now I feel too drunk, so I better do some more stuff to seek this balance, where I was still having a good time until my body just wouldn't go on. Actually, in some ways to honor the blend of pre-tragic and tragic, it actually brought me into certain realms of embodiment that I don't know if I ever would have found them otherwise.
ERICK: That's a good point.
CAITLYN: The confidence to dance on a table in a nightclub, and just be like, loving people and bringing joy to people and being super crazy and surprising people, and I was always like a maestra of the party. I loved that feeling about myself. And I loved it so much that I never wanted it to stop. And that has a huge press
AUBREY: Just imagine Caitlyn's radical, heart-open, benevolent, beneficent, beautiful loving energy with the ever increasing percentages of Harley Quinn. It just fucking went up, over and over and over until--
CAITLYN: 100%. I connect to her.
AUBREY: Until she was in a fully regressed state of just her pure five-year-old demiurge.
CAITLYN: Yes, but this is the part of the mysteries is really fascinating. I still meditate on it, I ponder it, this streak of like wild Dionysian madness that I actually love to feel at times as part of the full spectrum of my beingness. And that took me to places where I blacked out, and didn't know how I got to places that I was. I remember specifically, one night, my last memory driving up to Taco Bell and saying, "I don't have any money, can I have some food?" Hitting a median. And, somebody picked me up off the side of the road and took me to my mother's house where I threw up on the floor and passed out on the couch. I was only like 22. That was before I even met you. And then this would happen periodically, where it was like this earth shaking thing where my impulse, my drive for this ever receding horizon of fulfillment in my intoxication would take me to the darkest places, and I would, effectively destroy relationships, humiliate myself, which created a shame spiral, which drove me to want to distance myself from my emotion. He's just so entertained over here, and I love it. I love it, it makes it light. It's true. It's like, there were comic, I know what you're thinking about.
AUBREY: So, for those of you who don't know, Caitlyn and I, we were engaged, we were in a romantic relationship for six years from when I was 24, to 30, and you were--
CAITLYN: 22, 23 to 29.
AUBREY: Yeah. So, we have a lot of funny stories--
CAITLYN: It was the heyday.
AUBREY: And this one story doesn't actually involve a lot of substances other than absinth. So, we're in--
CAITLYN: Oh, that one? I was thinking of the penguin.
AUBREY: Oh, you were thinking of the penguin? The penguin's a whole other story. That's where her mouth is actually black and frothy and her face was ghost--
CAITLYN: Google "Batman Forever" Batman 2--
AUBREY: Ghost white. She was just bubbling ochre saliva at the corner of her mouth, and just fucking losing her mind. But that one wasn't as funny as when we were in Prague, and we did a bunch of shots of absinthe at GoldFingers Strip Club. And you got so drunk that we were with our buddy Mike, and you kept going, "Punch, punch."
CAITLYN: I turned into a toddler--
AUBREY: And punching him. And then we got out there and you made, we had an amazing time. But then eventually you got to this completely regressed stage where you're walking through the streets of Prague just screaming at the top of your lungs, "I pee pee in my pants! I pee pee in my pants."
CAITLYN: I have a strong suspicion that something in toddlerhood happened with pee, and it guides all of my addiction. I still don't understand it.
AUBREY: Oh, man.
CAITLYN: Yeah, I would get like that. And the thing that was really tough for me...
AUBREY: I gotta finish this story. So, the funniest part of the story. I get her back up to the hotel room, she's punching bushes, she's yelling in the street. People in Prague are used to it, because people are always there fucking partying balls. We get into the room. I get her into the door, and then I'm closing the door and she just passes out on the floor. And I was like, "I'm going to take a picture. I'm going to set up a picture here." And so her skirt was kind of falling down. So I just gave her the biggest front wedgie.
CAITLYN: And he told me this the next day.
AUBREY: I took a picture of it, and I was like, "Caitlyn, you'll never believe how you passed out." And I would show that picture then with our closest friends, I'd show that picture, for like six years.
CAITLYN: Yes, worst hangover of my life, Paris airport. I felt like I was literally dying. And then there was that picture to capture everything that I missed. This memory of the camel toe, of my ultimate debauchery stayed with me for so many years. It wasn't till way after we broke up, way after we didn't see each other for years, and we reconnected and became friends, he was like, "Oh, I did that." Just imagine, during a state where someone can give you a front wedgie. That was my rhythm. But yeah, so, this alludes to, just to bring in medicines a little bit, because my first big deep dive with plant medicines was going to do iboga. A lot of the impetus, which iboga is used pretty widely for...
AUBREY: Opiate addiction?
CAITLYN: Healing opiate addiction, yes. And there was this kind of felt experience between us in our relationship at that time, which was, we were both aware that I had a real issue with having an off switch. And it was really tough because I got so much positive validation, because for the most part, I was delightful, except for some rare moments. So, it was like I was accessing this part of myself, everyone loved her, everyone wanted to hang out with her and for her to come to their parties. And so, it was even harder for me to extricate who I am and what I love in myself without all of these substances. And we went to do iboga together, which was right before we broke up, but it was really kind of my first attempt, my first brave attempt to bridge this disconnect that I had with substances into where I now sit, which is in a healthy relationship with substances and plants as medicine. But, I went there to fix myself in this way that took me a very long time. Very long time. That was 2012. And I don't think my real breakthrough is where the screams got loud enough for me to make the changes that I need to make happen for another seven years. So yeah, I'll let other people share a little bit. But there was a lot of tragedy for me. And it was a hard relationship to transform, because of all of the positive feelings and the intricacies of the hooks that it had in my system, to get that positive validation and to feel excited about life, which is ultimately what, it just opened my heart even more, but to the point where I was destroying myself a lot of the time.
ERICK: One of the stories that I'm remembering just listening to all this that I actually forgot was a different type of pre-tragic, tragic, post tragic that I think a lot of people will resonate with was, when I was a senior in high school, I was in a weird situation where I lived alone in a house. And I tore my rotator cuff, and it was the end of my basketball career, and I got surgery. And this was back in the heyday of OxyContin, and I got prescribed something like a four to six-month supply of OxyContin, and I lived alone. I didn't have the insight to know that I was depressed. I got to the point where I would skip breakfast, I would take two pills. I would drive to school and I could time it where the moment I would park I would be high. I'd be high all day at school. All my teachers and my friends could tell because I was the class clown that would always argue with the teacher, and I just stopped speaking. And the photos of me from that period in my life are tough to look at. And because I didn't know anything, my pre-tragic state was, well, if the doctor gave it to me, it's good. After I ran out, I didn't know anything about it being addictive. And so I just started eating and eating to try to replace that opioid. And I gained like 40 pounds. I was like 220 pounds, I was 40 pounds heavier. It was terrible. And I remember looking at myself in the mirror and taking a photo and being like, this is the moment that I'm going to heal myself. So, the pre-tragic was, well, if the doctor gave it to me, it's good. The tragic was I lost a year of my life that I can barely remember, what happened my senior year. I have a photo from me at prom, and I'm in a big sling, and I just look ridiculous. I just look like I'm not even there. But the beautiful thing was the post tragic of that is, that's the thing that sparked me to start to do my own research and to learn about how to eat and learn how to work out. It changed my life, but it was fucking terrible. And I think a lot of people in our country, it's less so now, but before the rise of the internet really has started to expose this stuff. Millions of people are like, if a doctor prescribes it, it's good.
AUBREY: Adderall, same thing. Lots of these different drugs that are just from a different drug dealer.
KYLE: Yeah, I have a similar tragic. In college, I got to a point where I had a really dope, depending on how you look at it, naturopathic doctor who gave me anything I asked for. So, I had 60, 10 mg Valium, 60 2 mg Xanax, 60 Vicodin, the Narcos, which I didn't even like. I would just trade those for ecstasy and shit with different people on the team. And, I told him what I was doing. I was like, "Hey, man, I have trouble going to sleep after cocaine and alcohol." So, we started with Xanax and Valium. Valium was great if I just wanted to chill. These things work so well on quelling anxiety, but the second you come off of them, all that shit's still there. You've done no work to clean the closet, you just stuff more shit in the closet, shoving more stuff under the rug. I'd really put myself on, like learning everything that I've learned now through my fight career and beyond on neurochemistry, why sleep matters, what's actually happening in the body, when you lose sleep, all those things, I set myself on a course where I wasn't using shit every night. But every weekend, I'd have two or three days where I'd go out, and we'd stay up late, and I'd use chemicals to get up and chemicals to get down. That went on long enough. And then I kind of hit rock bottom in a relationship that I was in where I really felt at my core, I was never going to be loved. And it happened, we were at a bowling alley, and I was being obnoxious, "being me". And really turned her off. And I just thought, "Well, if she doesn't like that, then she doesn't like who I am." And so I went home and basically just took every pill that I had left. And thankfully I didn't have enough to die from it. But I took them all, I drove to the top of Parking Lot 7 at ASU, I stripped down and I got ready to jump. And I felt, clearly for the first time in my life, I felt another presence. And it just washed over me, and that might have been all the chemicals kicking in, but I just felt, not yet. Not yet to me meant the piece that I'm looking for is guaranteed, but not yet. Your life doesn't end yet. And right when that washed over me, I was like, "Oh shit." And then the guard looked up at me and he goes, "Oh, shit, you're naked." And I was like, "Oh, there's a guy down there." He was like, "Can you come down?" And I was like, yeah, I got clothes. I brought a robe. So I threw the robe down, and I came down and--
CAITLYN: "I brought a robe."
KYLE: 36 hours later, I woke up in a hospital. My family had all flown out from California. That was the first time where I really got to hash out a lot of buried shit that I had buried from my childhood. And the therapists there are great. They said, "Don't expect your family to acknowledge what you're saying. Don't expect an apology, don't expect anything. But say it because you need to say it." So, that was great, because a lot of shit wasn't heard in the way that I thought it would be, but I just still voiced it anyways. I voiced all the stuff that I'd dealt with. And that was alleviating in many respects, but what that period of time did, that week that I was there is it burst the bubble of all the should do’s. I was done with football, it was my senior year at ASU. I should finish college so I can get a job in a cubicle. I should do this, I should do that. All that vanished in that state. And for the first time, I was able to ask myself, what do I want to do? And so, I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I started tracking what I missed. And what I missed was my teammates. I missed camaraderie, I missed sport, I missed being an athlete. And that led me to training in mixed martial arts which very quickly led me to fight career. Won my first couple fights in under 30 seconds, and then it was like, alright, now I gotta take care of myself. Fighting was beautiful because I hadn't exorcized the demons fully. I still love to party hard. But like you Caitlyn, I had a hard time saying no, when it was game on. It was like, fucking game on, let's go. I just fought, win or lose. It's time to fucking party. I've been a good boy for eight weeks, I've been meditating, doing breathwork, hitting saunas and ice baths. I've earned the right to get fucked up. And so, in fighting, I really lived a pretty polarized life where half the year in camp, I was perfect. Not even watching TV, just reading books, learning, doing all the things my body wanted. And then the other half it was total debauchery. I kind of went back and forth on that, really trying to fine tune where is this right way to party? Where's the right relation? And it was thankfully that I had a coach that led me through the plant medicine path that became to illuminate in layers, and in layers and layers and layers what I was doing to myself, without anyone else having a say. It couldn't come from someone else, it had to come from within. And Ayahuasca revealed that. I mean, 10 journeys in, my 10th journey I had that vision, where I saw, why does my sister not want to do medicine with me? I was like, "Oh, shit." There's hundreds of experiences, right? I used to get liquid ketamine and spray weed down and sun-dry it. And I'd roll joints and fucking get people blasted like Ari Shaffir. I wouldn't tell him it was kweed, ketamine weed.
ERICK: Don't do that.
KYLE: Yeah, I mean, I went hard to the paint, and plant medicines allowed me to see for myself what I was doing to myself but that's more on the post tragic. The tragic was coming close to ending my own life. The tragic was introducing my teammates to their first hit of ecstasy, first Vicodin pill. And then over time, watching them get into Oxycontin, and then over time watching that turn to heroin when they couldn't get more Oxycontin, and then OD and die. Three people in college from ASU died from heroin overdose. And two of them, I was the guy that introduced them to partying. I introduced them to drugs. That was a hard pill to swallow.
AUBREY: Yeah, the tragic is real. It's real. And that's the thing to know. It's not just an illusionary stage, there is a real tragic stage. And sometimes, the tragedy is not lack of clarity. Sometimes the tragedy is a permanent tragedy. And that's really important for people to understand is that, the guidance against it, is true, but partial. And what we're trying to say here is, it's not that that's not true, that this has extreme danger. But also we have to talk about the allurement, we have to talk about, and then also the integration of how to actually reclaim these things. It's something that Dr. Carl Hart talks about, when he talks about, it's not just legalization of psychedelics, but legalization of all drugs based on some fundamental principles of the sovereignty of our own consciousness. And also, he's trying to dissolve the split between, these are medicines and these are drugs. And so, it all depends on context, depends on your intention, depends on who you are, depends on the context, no matter what. And I think he's been the lone champion of that voice. But I think it's an important voice carrying, and I find a lot of truth to what he's saying in that there may be certain things where I just can't devise a context where my body and that substance would actually mix in a way that that is anything that's remotely productive or beneficial or positive. But that's just me. I can't say that that's the reality for anybody in any given situation. I mean, fuck, you can imagine, and I think there's better ways to do it, but if you're on a three-night overnight mission, and you have to stay awake or you and your platoon are going to die, and all you have is some fucking street meth that you pulled off somebody else that you found in combat or whatever, and you're like, fuck, either stay awake or die. I can fully imagine these situations. And that's why I want to keep the field available, and understand that there is context in the situation. This is ultimately the Hebrew way, is to find the nuance. People like Ari Shaffir and his hilarious comedy special "Jew", and of course, if you don't know, I'm of the Hebrew lineage. I'm really connecting with that more and more. But there's the Torah, which is like the Bible and kind of the guiding principles that they operate in, like the divine, like the commandments and these other things that are also, the lessons that are contained within the ancient scriptures. And then there's the Talmud, which is the Talmud is basically Jewish masters' kind of arguing about what is the right way and what is the wrong way. And Ari Shaffir points out this hilarious story about arguing about how much ham, because in the kosher law, you're not allowed to eat pork. How much ham you have to have in your soup before you throw away the soup. And, they ultimately determined it's 160th ham. Anything more than 160 of ham, you gotta throw away the soup, otherwise you eat the soup. But it's funny if you look at it patently, but what it's actually teaching is it's teaching that everything has nuance. And that's what that group of masters in figuring it out, working it out, trying to understand it, being guided by what they felt like was the divine principle, but then actually, being willing to wrestle with the nuance. And we all have an urge to just declare things, stay in the pre-tragic, declare things black or white, good or bad. And guilty, innocent. All of these things, we try to be in this really clear pre-tragic stage where when you start to mature in your consciousness, which is something that's actually taught in the Hebrew lineage. That's I think one of the beautiful aspects of this tradition is teaching you to look for nuance, and it's teaching you to "wrestle with God" which means basically, you've got to figure it out together. You and the divine are working this thing out together.
ERICK: I think that's a huge insight that's missed a lot in our culture, that's predominantly Christian, whereas for most people, there is no wrestling with God. It's whatever version of God was given to you that's the rulebook.
AUBREY: Yeah. And that's the same case. And it's the same case with New Age fundamentalism as well, where all non-ceremonial use of medicines is bad, no matter what. And then I think, so what I want to talk about is where that started to really, where I started to see the nuance of the difference. And I started to be able to experiment with psilocybin at a dance party, and then a little psilocybin with, and we would go to our raves, and we would have like a little bit of MDMA and a little bit of psilocybin at a rave--
ERICK: Hippie flip.
AUBREY: And it used to be like fucking unbelievable. We're just feeling the base pumping, and this magical universe of this festival in a rodeo barn or in a fucking field somewhere. Skrillex was just coming online, and he was blowing our minds with songs, and we got to be his friend, through a crazy situation. And then we're on stage with him and we're feeling like, and that experience of exstasis was actually just pure medicine. It was medicine to tap us into the joy and the ecstasy of life, and how beautiful life can be and then the shared exstasis of the field, when you're in the field of that. I mean, we think of the old bacchanalias and the orgiastic rituals. When you say orgy, everybody thinks sex. Sometimes it includes sex, sometimes it's just actually like a fucking festival, where you're generating this, cultivating this group energy.
CAITLYN: And this has been done with intention by all cultures.
AUBREY: All the old cultures.
CAITLYN: Throughout the history of humanity.
AUBREY: Yep. Hebrew cultures, everything.
CAITLYN: And was just wiped out and distorted by this puritanized oppressive ideology that came through really a lot with fundamental Christianity, especially in America.
ERICK: And in 2023, you have to almost choose to be ignorant of the evidence that this has been going on for thousands of years in every major living culture that we have recorded off.
CAITLYN: And that it was sacred. There's temples for it.
ERICK: It was holy.
AUBREY: They recognized the feeling that was created was of God, it was of life. There was like a real life force. And I'm sure they also recognize the shadow of those experiences as well. They had the tragic aspect of, but they didn't have the pre-tragic fundamentalist view. They probably had a post tragic, a more post tragic view where they recognized, alright, here are the bounds, and maybe it wasn't as developed from our own awareness of science, and our own awareness of the specifics of what we're taking, etc. But, so, I started to kind of understand that the line between ceremony and recreation started to get blurred. When I think of some of the best experiences of my life, a lot of them was like doing psilocybin while skiing with my friends, and just connecting and feeling the mountain, and feeling the crisp air and the snow and then laughing on the fucking chair, and then ripping down a run with everybody, and then laughing and howling at the bottom, and then finding those quiet moments where the music's just hitting and the sun's over the peak. And it's just unbelievable experiences that happened there. Which, what is that? Is that recreation? Or is that ceremony? Same thing at Burning Man, you're constantly blurring the lines between that. And actually, the place where I've arrived now. So my last two birthdays, which I get to be the maestro, it's my fucking birthday. And fortunately, I have great maestras like Caitlyn, who helped me kind of plan it out. And Vy helped me plan it out.
KYLE: Make sure there's enough glitter.
AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. So, my last two birthdays were a perfect example of this continual blurred line between ceremony and party where all of a sudden, we're at from this kind of crazy, wild sexy dance party situation, playing games and laughing, to then Blu is leading this deep prayer and this healing, and then moving energy, and I'm feeling everybody push energy into my body. And I'm having this 5-MeO experience, not with any 5-MeO, but just feeling the energy of it in my body. Then I drop into my own prayer. Same thing with my last birthday, my 42nd birthday. We're having this crazy wild celebration in the hotel room, and then we go into one of the other rooms, and I start telling the story. That's where I told the story of the fourth six, and my father, and like–
ERICK: One of the most powerful movements I've ever been a part of.
AUBREY: Yeah, like, deep ceremony, and then popping out. And, then, what are we doing again? It's a lingerie and dance party and fun and our best friends, and it's the best time. So, I've found a way to really kind of blur those lines for myself, and understand that each one has its distinct lane, where sometimes it's purely ceremony. It's like you're really in it. Ayahuasca has been that way. I've never recreationally done ayahuasca. Although the last ayahuasca session, we... Erick, that's a hilarious story, by accident. And then there's certain times where it's like, yeah, no, clearly this is just for recreational purposes. But I've always had this, and I think Caitlyn you can attest to this. I've always had this, I even wrote an old, old blog post, it was Party With Your Third Eye Open, which is like don't ever lose that level of consciousness. Like I always wanted to be, like if the king archetype within me needed to show up, that he was on duty. And if the warrior archetype needed to show up, which did that one time we got into that horrific street fight with those four fucking guys, like at the end of a long night of partying at the club. Like, if the king needed to show up, if the warrior needed to show up, if the lover needed to show up, those are some of the most tragic actually. When the lover needed to show up. But if the lover did too many drugs, and the lover couldn't show up, I was like, "Oh, this is the worst."
ERICK: We'll let the audience interpret that.
KYLE: This is resuscitation, you gotta take--
AUBREY: This is the worst. I remember one time, man, that was bad. But in either case, you learn those lessons. Like I wanted to have the full capacity, and also the magician, the ability to change and alchemize the energy of a situation with the application of the right energy, or the application of the right words or--
CAITLYN: To recognize that the situation needs to be changed. That's not common.
AUBREY: Exactly. So, I always had kind of an intuitive knack for that type of party. And it didn't mean that I wouldn't fall and fuck up and make mistakes along the way.
ERICK: You don't get to this point if you don't trip a couple of times.
AUBREY: Yeah, and then just be honest, and learn about it, and then recognize it, and then really look at it, and look at like, how did that happen? Where did that happen? Why did that happen? And also, understand that as your experience with medicines changed and you understand they're different. For me, ketamine and alcohol have a very weird relationship that it's not very good, fundamentally. And so, I've experienced ketamine, alcohol, cannabis together, and it's been fucking horrible. It's like the alcohol God bomb, and it's terrible. You know what I mean? It doesn't really work that well. And so, even in my maturity, understanding, I know all of these medicines so well. Sometimes, the combinations are like, no, this combination is actually fucked. Be really mindful with your how and the order. Even early, like Rapé , which is tobacco, tobacco and ketamine, you can get super fucking nauseous if you try to combine those two early. Sometimes you can get adapted. But there's just different ways to understand how these things actually work together or don't work together. Some of them have dangerous, actually biological, and kind of chemical reactions, and some of them are just going to create an experience that is a little wobbly. Like for me, cannabis and psilocybin is a dangerous combination.
ERICK: 100%.

AUBREY: Because it can really spin you out into some anxious, disoriented, confusing places that I've seen a lot of things go squirrely with that particular combination. Whereas with like MDMA, and psilocybin in the right combination, which is my first medicine journey, that typically is a very good pairing. You know what I mean? MDMA brings the energy up into your heart center, and kind of this airy energy. You want to talk. And this psilocybin brings you down--
ERICK: And you feel safe--
AUBREY: On the ground. And then your crown can open up. So, there's a whole kind of field of understanding that you get, but you just have to be really mindful that these are, like you're playing in treacherous waters, you're surfing on the open ocean, and there's ways you can fall in every direction. And if you're able to navigate it and desire it, then there's ways that you can do it that are like a boss, and then there's ways that you can do it like a rookie. And then other people have to take care of you, you're diminishing the energy of the environment that you're in. You're taking away from the experience, from your experience, and from everyone else around you. We see that all the time. And we've selected ourselves to be in groups where people, if they're going to be on medicines, and again, no pressure to be on any medicines, but if you are, fucking handle your shit, you know what I mean? We didn't go through all of these lessons ourselves to be holding your hand as you learn them along the way. Be mindful, handle your shit, minimum effective dose. You don't think you can handle your shit, stay the fuck away from this, if you don't know what you're doing. And that's also a key thing, is just being super mindful of any type of peer pressure that could push someone out of their comfort zone, and get them to a place where they're not actually going to be comfortable. That could even be alcohol. Yeah, I mean, where the peer pressure, and it's the alcohol motherfuckers collectively, in this culture, ever. It's like, can I get you drink? Can I get you a shot? It's been a long time since I've seen you. Let me get you a shot. No, I don't want more alcohol now. I appreciate the gesture when you're young, you might be like, oh, free shot, sweet. Saved me $6 or whatever the fuck. But ultimately, you have to be really mindful of those social influences and have a very strong perspective on what are you trying to get out of this situation. How is this going to enhance it? And then what are the potential dangers that you have to look out ahead and advance and figure out, and then that opens you up into the freedom to kind of get a little bit more loose with what you're doing.
ERICK: One of the things that I've learned being in this group that really surprised me, was when I saw you guys party the first time, I won't get into the details, but I remember it very clearly. I got terrified. I had a panic response. But it was because I was projecting that I thought that I had to take drugs, and that I had to do things I didn't want to do. And like, Liv actually could like feel it. She came up to me and she was like, are you okay? And this is like when I first started at Onnit, and I was just a fucking guppy in every way. And one of the things that I've learned since then, because I've run the experiment multiple times where we get into that space, and I don't do anything. And no one has ever acted weird about it. No one has ever pressured me. And I got to feel safe. Caitlyn's laughing because there are times where she does pressure me, but it's great.
CAITLYN: It's for his own good.
KYLE: "Come on, babe."
CAITLYN: I'm just kidding.
ERICK: But one of the things that I've learned, because when I was in high school and college and I was in a party situation, I felt like I needed alcohol or something to have a good time. Because of the work that we've done with things like ecstatic dance, like the first ecstatic dance that I did that you led, changed my life. In that, I got to feel what it felt like to fully express without the help of anything. And now I can be in any situation and either take nothing or take a very small micro dose of something like Iboga, and I can just go for like six hours. And it's just, it's the best and no one's trying to make me do anything. And one of the things that I think is beautiful for people to learn, to at least even experiment with is, can you be in the places that you touch with medicine, sober? Because the thing that the medicine can do is it can unlock rooms in your psyche for the first time, but once it's unlocked, you can get back there if you want, and just train that muscle, and at the same time, everything's better with the right amount of mushrooms. You can put that in a fucking clip and give it to people.
AUBREY: Right amount, being the key phrase in that. Yeah, about for you Kyle, where did it start to transition from the tragic, which was really heavy and deep for you into the post tragic, and where have, on both sides of the journey, where has the tragic stepped back up, reared its ugly head. So, tell us about your journey.
KYLE: Yeah, the tragic. As I mentioned, Witty introduced me to plant medicines. The first thing we did for two years was just the inipi. We worked in the sweat lodges. And it took me kind of pressuring him to work with la medicina, and he just burst out laughing. We started working with psilocybin and eventually ayahuasca. The medicines themselves are so revealing, but in the correct set and setting, with the right guidance, the right container. And that allowed me to see for myself, kind of the ways that I was, and how I treated myself, and how polarized my fight career was. I retired at 32, and I'd only been really been working with the medicines for three or four years when that happened. And then, now I don't have a fight camp anymore. What does that look like? Cool, I can do more medicine, I can figure out more. And then, holy shit, now there's a point of diminishing returns based on how often I go back to the wishing well, and really figuring out what is appropriate. Really learning how to listen to my intuition, like what am I guided to? And there is a point where you go into the deep ceremony and you come out. And for many of us, we get into it, and it's like, we fall back into the matrix. And we're like, "Well, when's the next ceremony?" I got more questions. And when can I go have these answered? And then at a certain point, you have the ceremony and you come out and you're like, life's the fucking ceremony. This is all God consciousness. This is all the eternal game working itself out. Why don't I take that respect and reverence to the game itself? Why don't I take that to my daily? And fundamentally, that didn't shift for, I don't know, really, until probably like 2018, 2019. So I'd moved here, we had been partying, we've been doing different things, and then it just kind of hit. And I don't know when it hit but it just settled in my body. And even after that hit, and I was taking care of myself and finding right relation with the different ways that I express the celebration, or push the joy button, like the bliss button. Alright, we're going to do the bliss button tonight. Finding right relation with that meant I didn't hurt the next day, I could still parent, I wasn't going to be a douche, I wasn't going to be a shitty dad, that's important. And it has been a guiding light for me. Because it's different when you've got to wake up the next day and be a dad, it's completely different. At the same time, the tragic has slipped back in plant medicines, and you guys are all well aware of it. But having some of the deeper dives with medicine, through guys like Kalindi eye and 30 grams of psilocybin, to doing combo before an initiatory dose of 5-MeO, where I was completely cleaned out, and having to go to night school where for 17 days straight, I was on medicine. I hadn't taken any more medicine, but every night I went to bed, it would fucking, if I actually slept, I would go back in full on into a journey for six hours. And all dark, all unconscious. And no real guidance there. It took Paul Chek doing a closing ceremony with me over the phone on Christmas Eve, I snapped out of it, and actually got my life back. And there's been a lot of alchemy from that. Like you said, two years. It's a fucking process. And we've met different helpers along the way. I just finally got to meet Hamilton Souther last year. And there was extreme alchemy with getting to sit with him. Gafni and Churchill and these different people that are breaking down first principles, and my understanding of consciousness, they're giving me a framework to sit with, has been really beneficial as well. Because the point on plant medicines is that you can have really positive experiences. And you can revisit some of the dark, hard parts that you might avoid as a rookie, but later you realize that it's actually beneficial. And you go through those and you're like, wow, I've worked through the dark shit. I've healed and done all the things, and then it's like, you can still go way the fuck out beyond one's own capability.
ERICK: Hell is always available.
KYLE: Yeah. Hitting those spots, especially having responsibilities, like being a dad and a husband and things like that are the scariest fucking thing I've ever done in my entire life. When you blur the lines of reality to the point where you question everything, it's a hard road back from that. And as Paul mentioned, he was like, my guess is you're going to have a lot of people that go through this that you know, and it's going to be up to you to help them out.
ERICK: This is a great point.
KYLE: It's been the case for me. It's a hard fucking pill to swallow initially, but that has been the case for me. And it has been positive to have gone through that experience and to be able to allow people to track back. But that is, without the intention of fast track into self-mastery, a fast track into really deep diving the principles of consciousness and how we work with that. And I don't recommend that for anyone. I remember coming out of that, I was like, I wouldn't wish that on Bill Gates, I wouldn't wish that on no person. Whatever enemy, not enemy. I wouldn't wish that on no one to have that experience ever. In many ways, it felt like pure torture. And from that, there's been a lot of alchemy. I felt with Hamilton that ayahuasca would help finish the job. Not that it's finished. But when we went out to Soltara in April, there was a lot of alchemy there, physically too. I had PTSD basically in my body where if I had a memory of that experience, I would feel a cortisol dump, an adrenaline dump in my body, like "Oh, fuck." And Aya was able to help me work through that, through breathing and just feeling that shudder, the tremor in my body, I had to release that. That was from medicine journeys. That wasn't from, I don't have PTSD from war that I'm working through. That came from medicine journeys going the wrong way. And then I had to track that back to heal from it. And now, I'm in a position where I can work with the medicine when I feel called to it, and it's less often than it was. Maybe quarterly, maybe three times a year. That changes and there's variety there. But with that, I have the ultimate respect and reverence for it. And with that, as well, I see the ceremony of life as it is. It is a ceremony. And with that, you talked about the hummingbird medicine and the joy and drinking the nectar of the light from the flower. That is equal to the importance. We weigh the darkness of Empire with the challenge of returning to the kingdom. We have to experience that. How do I push the celebration button, that is going to leave me more whole than when I started? That isn't paid for on credit, where I have three days of fucking beating myself up for what I did that night, but actually come out of it better. And that's been a really cool trajectory to have where I can now know, this is how I can party, this is how I can get down. And I might need to sleep for 10 hours or take a nap the next day, but I'm going to feel fucking good. I'm not going to be sad, and I'm not going to be short tempered with my kids or anything like that. I'm going to be me the next day. But I can still fucking say yes to joy and bliss and celebration like that. I think we're all looking for that because we want to get out of our heads to break the habit of being ourselves. We want to get out of our heads to change and have an altered state. And that doesn't always mean going to see God on 5-MeO. It might just mean, I want to fucking let loose. I want to dance away the fucking struggle. And having ways in which we can do that has been paramount to balancing the tipping point of Empire and seeing all the shit that I've seen.
ERICK: I think a really important context for people listening is that as above, so below. Our consciousness is mediated because we have two hemispheres. One hemisphere focuses on the particular. It's the thing that cuts up reality, so we can look at one thing, and that's the left hemisphere for most people. And the right hemisphere sees the Gestalt. It's able to see the forest and it zooms out. And culture is like that, too. Nietzsche had a really great essay where he talked about that we get this from the Greek culture, but that it was ruled by two Gods; Apollo and Dionysus. And Apollo is the god of the left hemisphere. It's the god of the particular, it's the god of the daylight, it's the god of order and government and all that shit. But what the Greeks figured out was that that has to be balanced by the god of Dionysus. And that's the God of the right hemisphere. That's the God of getting out of the pattern of who you think you are. And culture seems to require that, and individuals seem to require that. And there's actually evolutionary biology research that all, and Aubrey talked about this at the beginning. But the higher the intelligence of the mammal, the higher the drive to change its consciousness with drugs. So, like the dolphins and the jaguars and all that stuff. We have the burden of this incredible intelligence, and we have a biological drive to flip back into the other hemisphere, because it's how we actually learn new things. It's how we have insights, it's how we have epiphanies, and we have this drive. And so, talking about the tools that allow us to mediate this drive and not destroy our lives is really important and dare didn't do it.
AUBREY: Yeah, I think what we're talking about here is in this Dionysian urge is the desire to break out of the patterns, because we're such creatures of habit and pattern. Once a pattern is established or a bias is made, like I decided that I didn't like opera or ballet at a certain point, along my path. It was like, I don't like these things. And then through my medicine journeys, and opening and unlocking, I was able to actually, and now, I'm able to actually see a deeper layer in there. I'm like, wow, like I can get into this, I can actually slip into this consciousness and really appreciate what's going on here. So, it opens up the world to possibilities that are beyond what I ever thought possible. I really, really started to get at this last Burning Man that I went to. Because I started to be able to understand which medicines I could do, how I could do, I had a kind of pattern for the day. I would have one meal which was like breakfast kind of early, and then which would be I don't know, two, three o'clock, something like that. And then in the heat of the day, I would go into my own journey with my headphones alone in the bed, my own energy. And then I would pop out of that, after people were finished with dinner somewhere around like seven or eight before dusk, and I was just energized, charged up on fire. And then I would just kind of mediate that consciousness for as long as the night was going with a variety of different tools in my medicine bag. And I was able to unlock a joy at Burning Man that even for the previous three years, which was wild and expansive, I still hadn't unlocked the secret joy of every little art installation, and how you could unlock each different puzzle and each different piece. And so, it was like seven days of basically perpetual exstasis. And it was really incredible. And so, this year, I'm not going to Burning Man, which I've already paid for, like 70% of it, which is hella annoying, but ultimately, there may be some people who can take our spot or whatever. But the decision was ultimately made that even though this is the funnest time I've ever had in my life, I met my wife Vylana there, and we had an amazing time, the world's actually calling me to something different. I think also one of the reasons that decision has been easier, is that there were many things about Burning Man that I loved, and some things that I thought like this could be better. And, I think starting to feel that was one of the impetusess for us to create Arkadia, create our own festival. Very different than Burning Man. Nothing is going to be like Burning Man. But like, what are the best ways to bring the post tragic consciousness of a celebration of life that's not substance dependent in any direction, but can snap you into that state of awe and wonder and consciousness and focus and purpose? And that the aftertaste, what Gafni talks about all the time is like, what is the aftertaste? Usually the aftertaste of masturbating to porn is, man, that's not a good aftertaste. Like the aftertaste is not good. The experience might--
KYLE: Damn it, not again.
AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. The aftertaste is not good. Certain other sexual encounters are not good, other medicine experiences or drinking experiences, the aftertaste is not good. But when you're doing it right, the aftertaste is fucking sweet. And you're laughing and you're telling stories, and you can't wait to get together with everybody to talk about what happened. And you still tell stories, it brings a smile to your face, to the same day when you get to tell it. Because the aftertaste is really sweet. And I think that the idea for Arkadia is just to create this ecstatic experience, bringing in both Apollo and Dionysus, allowing them to merge. Allowing the masculine and feminine principles to merge, allowing awe and wonder to be available, which is something that Meow Woof, which is part of our experience, does an amazing job, putting you into an altered state of consciousness by the environment that you're in. It's like going through an augmented reality, but actually, in the physical 3D. It's wild. And that's really kind of what I see as this kind of future, kind of post tragic scenario where we're creating the best music, the best speakers, the best sense of communitas and freedom. But still, with all of the awareness of the tragic and a kind of mature approach to, all right, and having proper support staff like they do at the Zendo Project for Burning Man. And make sure that we have a full awareness of the full landscape of this. And that we can really guide like an ecstatic experience, which then anchors in that passion and drive and joy and zest for life, and a world that you want to protect. Because unless you experience the world as like heaven, the more that you experience the world as heaven, the more you want to fight to save it. Of course.
CAITLYN: For sure.
AUBREY: The more you love something, the more fiercely you're going to protect it. And the more you love life, the more you want to build a beautiful life, and also share. Because your cup is full and abundant, you want to share that beautiful life with everybody else. So, I think it's kind of cool that we're now in this position of initially just experiencing these things as passengers, and now stepping into, alright, now let's create this. And same thing with medicine experiences. I'm not there yet, but there'll be a time where we have a medicine facility somewhere, where we're cultivating, and we're already doing this in our own private ways, but cultivating, like renting out Soltara, etc. But really cultivating every aspect of the experience, based upon our decades of experience with the medicines.
ERICK: Because one of the tragedies of our time is that the vast majority of people, so, if you imagine like a pie chart, probably at least half of the people are so stressed that they don't think about the future at all. And then the majority of the remaining pie are people who have absolutely no belief that there is a possible future that's beautiful, that's worth fighting for, or trying for, or doing anything to help create. And so, there's not a lot of hope or passion for a potential future. And just like you said, the more that you can have experiences that can help you imagine that there is a future worth fighting for, because the present is so fucking beautiful, people will actually start to make these micro changes in the ceremony of life that can start to change the momentum of the apathy of our culture. And the thing that I really appreciate about Arkadia that I haven't seen at any of the festivals that I've gone to, is the speakers have a type of mythopoetic intention. That's the Apollo. And then there's the music, and the festival part where you get to break yourself out of the disbelief that the future that they're painting is possible. And then you just stumbled into the fact that you believe it. And then once you believe it, you actually become an agent in the world after the festival that can start to change things.
CAITLYN: I think my first shift towards the post tragic, I was actually living in Las Vegas, which is where I went after we separated, and I lived there for four years. For somebody who derived most of her sense of self-worth, and self-love from external validation, combined with having very low impulse control, to live in that city, was the perfect setting in the place that I was at that time to go even deeper into the tragic. It was the ultimate period of tragedy of my life. I ended up hitting such a point of, it felt like the vampire archetype that we talked about recently, which is kind of one of these mythic, symbolic concepts I've been exploring of the vampire slayer as truth and aliveness. But the hunger of that impulse to derive a sense of aliveness from outside of yourself, took me to a very, I felt like I was starving spiritually. And so, I went down to meet with Don Howard, and drink ayahuasca in 2014. And I remember sitting on that boat in the middle of the night, it was super dark. And I had never traveled anywhere like that by myself. I couldn't speak the language. I was all alone. And I remember thinking, I don't actually know if I know where I'm going, but if I die here, it will be better than me dying in Las Vegas. Because, I'm seeking to help myself. And basically, it was breaking the pattern of self-destruction for that easy pseudo aliveness that I felt in the party environment, to actually be brave enough to take a risk, be terrified, be uncomfortable in the pursuit of healing. And so, I went through many years of pursuing that healing. But there was a fracturing between where I still had Dionysus, but she wasn't allowed in the room of my healing Apollo. And so, the bridge really into the post tragic came with me unifying myself without the shame of keeping her in a cage, where she got to go crazy every now and then. But then I was just expressing in this new enlightened way. And that's a trap I think we fall into when we start, many of us, I definitely did, where we start to exile the part of the self that loves the Dionysian experiences. And we go into our spirituality so seriously, and it's like, I gotta do the work, and I've got to heal. And we ended up doing this for years, where we're just rehashing trauma, and taking ourselves incredibly seriously
ERICK: No humor, no humility.
CAITLYN: And then we're missing the piece, which is, to have the fervor and the passion to be here, and to do the work that we're meant to do, we have to enjoy it. And I had a very profound, beautiful experience on the plane descending into Las Vegas last year, where I recognized that for one, setting is everything. And that's something that ceremony taught me, which is, you can create an intentional space that yields beautiful benefits, if you set the intention and you choose the environment that you're partying in. So, it's not just a matter of, I'm going to go drink now. It's like, well, where do I want to go? I'm actually making choices about what I would enjoy, and really feeling into that before I choose yes or no, do I want to do this? And then with every opportunity to have another margarita or to partake in some kind of substance, it's really feeling into breaking that pattern of autopilot, which for me was the hunger to just fill this empty void, and starting to break that pattern in a way of just making intentional choices. And I remember specifically at your birthday party in 2022, I had been on about five months of absolutely no intoxicants, because I was going through a deep process, which is a very long story. But a deep process of reckoning with all of the grief that I had, for the times that I lost consciousness, and harmed myself and harmed my relationships. But I chose, I was like, this is a party I want to be at. This is an environment that I want to say yes to. I want to trust myself. Absolute, indefinite renunciation doesn't feel like it's going to marry within me, to give me the sacred marriage within myself that allows all of me to live this life. And I need both. BSo, I intentionally took my first drink for five months down to the water, and I said a prayer. I asked the margarita to help me with the things that I was seeking out of the experience. And so, going back to Las Vegas last year, felt like just bringing in this quality of intention and love back to this place that I perceived as so dark, because--
ERICK: That we've exiled.
CAITLYN: I was in darkness, and so I was meeting all of the darkness there. And I had this beautiful full circle moment of bringing my unconditional love, and my passion for what Vegas does offer, which is this playground of enjoyment for humanity to come have a taste of the Dionysian aspect of self. But using that intention that I brought to that first margarita with all of you to create a space where you know playing is medicine.
AUBREY: That's one thing we saw, definitely with Las Vegas, is most people are stuck in the tragic of Las Vegas, which is very clear. There's the pre-tragic of Las Vegas which is yarders, which is a yard-long drink or a fucking football of some shitty fucking corn syrup and grain alcohol, or whatever the fuck is in those things, and just fucking Hawaiian shirts and sunburned faces and then zombies walking through the casino with their shoes in their hand, fucking--
CAITLYN: Used to be me.
AUBREY: The whole thing. And, then also the people just losing a bunch of money and still gambling more, and not able to. So, you get stuck in a tragic. But there's also a pre-tragic urge to it. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, you're free, your record's clean, you get to actually break out of the bounds, and it gives you permission to do that. So, there's that kind of pre-tragic, then there's the tragic, and then there's the post tragic Vegas. We didn't want Arkadia originally to be there, but through a series of circumstances completely out of our control last year, it guided us directly to Area 15, where that was the only place where we could make it happen or cancel it entirely. We went for it, even though it wasn't our first choice. And then we got to actually claim the post tragic of Las Vegas with what we did, creating a bubble inside not only the Area 15 complex, but also, reunderstanding and reimagining Las Vegas in its entirety. Matias who hates Las Vegas, Matias de Stefano, because he'd experienced the tragic and been swarmed by a bunch of demons when he went there. He was like, "Fuck, Vegas." And then he immediately goes out to the mountains and connects with the spirits of the land. And then, believe this or not, depending on your belief field, but I know it to be reality, because we saw it happen recently in fucking Greece. He conjured a storm in Las Vegas, and it just dumped rain--
CAITLYN: And rain bugs.
AUBREY: And rain and rain bugs, bringing what he calls the new information and connecting the spirit with the spirits of the land, and then the spirits of the sky. And really creating this novel environment of a post tragic Las Vegas.
ERICK: And the record will show that after we left, many casinos got flooded from the amount of weird rain that they got. So, you guys can take that
AUBREY: Take that for what it will. But once you've seen it with your own eyes a couple of times, you start to lose the materialist reductionist skepticism and understand that there's things that are going on beyond our imagination that are happening. So, when it came time to decide what we were going to do with Arkadia, because we could have done it anywhere, we were like, no, that was special. What we were doing was reclaiming a sacred spark, in a place where most people think there's only desolation. And I've seen that in many different environments, not just Las Vegas. I remember, one particular, I've told this story before, one particularly strong, kind of recognition of this was when we were in Miami, and you invited me down to this kind of spiritual circle. And all I saw was people flaunting this kind of superficial spirituality, and talking about how many ceremonies they'd done and how evolved they were. And it was just like, ugh, let me vomit on myself and get out of here as soon as possible. And then we did a little bit of, this is during the kind of, even Florida had these quasi curfew lockdowns, even in the thick of it. So 11, which is this famous strip club nightclub, was only open till like midnight, which is crazy for 11. Because nobody goes to 11 until like 2:00 in the morning, right? That's the nature of the club. So, we took a little medicine early on in the day, probably like 7pm and got there about like 8pm. And, as soon as I got there, the people there, just like at Burning Man, but with radical authenticity. Because they weren't rushed, they weren't stressed. They just looked me in the eye, looked us in the eye, they're like, "Welcome home." I was like, what? Not only what they said, but what they expressed. And every single person in there, free, and I've been back to 11 in the busy times. And it was like, what happened to this haven? I went there, and it was like, there was the divine, living inside that place, which is only known for debauchery, and it was this really post tragic experience with everybody from the dancers, to the people who were sweeping up the money, and sweeping up the floor, and to the other people that we met there, and to the staff. The whole situation was reclaimed in a new way. It's like what Paul Selig says, it's like another octave, you can find it at another octave.
CAITLYN: You can't underestimate, for anybody out there who's wanting to just subtly but profoundly shift your relationship to whatever, for example, I want to say the phrase, pick your poison. How would it feel to say something like mind your medicine or mediate your medicine? And the way you just said before we went to 11, we took a little medicine. It's just a little language change, but the whole, our perception was shifted because of the relationship that we had to what we were taking. It was like, we're taking some medicine to go have a good time, a good time.
AUBREY: Exactly. So, our intention was aligned with actually the experience that we had, and so the aftertaste, the whole thing was sweet. It was sweet the whole way through.
CAITLYN: It wasn't shameful.
AUBREY: It was sweet the whole way through, and sweet the whole way after. Still thinking of those times, it was like, oh, yeah, that was a good fucking choice.
ERICK: Yeah, a couple of things. Kyle and I talk about this all the time, but how we bifurcate between, when is it medicine and when is it a drug is, do I wake up the following day with more in me? And there's also this essence, and it can apply to any chemical is. Am I taking it to get deeper into the now? Or am I taking it to avoid more of the now? And if you take it to go deeper into the now, I mean, I think it makes sense to use something like the word medicine, as opposed to drug. The thing that was coming up as you two shared is, again, this as above so below thing. So, from a Jungian/Internal Family Systems standpoint, whatever part of your experience of life you exile, it becomes a stranger at the window trying to break in. But all of the parts are parts of you. And you have the capacity as the king or the queen of your psyche to invite them in, like Rumi says, and have tea with them. And what people miss is that whatever your conception is of Las Vegas, or drugs, it's a part in your psyche, like as above so below, that you're exiling. And those parts, they all want to come in, they all want to be held, they all want to be seen, they all want to have a chance to come through and be on the throne and play in the game of life. The thing that comes to mind is the Rainmaker story, which I have told that, ad nauseam. I won't tell it again, but the spiritual, I think, highest game is to go to the place where no one else goes, and bring the Rainmaker energy to it. Bring the order, bring the love. The warrior aspect of the spiritual game is, go where everyone else is afraid to go. People are afraid to go to the symbolic Las Vegas. That's like, from "The Lion King" when Mufasa says, don't go where the sun doesn't shine. But what does the hero do? He fucking went.
CAITLYN: What place needs the light?
AUBREY: Yeah, the light. The light is like, all of those places that are murky, they're actually trying to draw in as much light as possible. And there's the kind of vampiric element of that, where there's a force that wants to suck the life force out of you, and create more deadness and numbness. This is what the Kabbalists would call Sitra Achra, the upside down world with the turning of the face from God. And there's forces that are pulling and almost harvesting that energy from an egregore, from a collective perspective. And there are dark energies that feed off of that. Then there's also where the angels want to be. Do they want to just hang out with each other in the country club of heaven? Or are they looking down at the places that need them the most and be like, "No, I'm going there to that slum."
CAITLYN: Angels are badasses.
AUBREY: Exactly. They're drawn to it. By its very nature, they're drawn into the fray, drawn into the muck, drawn in to bring God everywhere, where God is not. And God is everywhere on that perspective. But, what I'm saying is--
CAITLYN: God is not seen.
AUBREY: The face of God that I'm describing as life force itself, as that life energy itself, rather than the opposite force, which is the drawing into the deadness of the universe. Which again, there's a conception of God, which includes both void, vacuum and light. I was kind of pondering upon this recently. Nature abhors a vacuum. What does that mean? It means that in nature, there's hardly a vacuum. When there's a void, there wants to be molecules, which represents life and Eros, the attraction and allurement between even quantum particles, quarks and atoms and everything. It wants to draw that into the empty space because that's where Eros is, which is another face and way to understand God as allurement and attraction, and aliveness, always wants to draw it into that moment. So, all of this dark energy you can start to see from the highest, highest perspective is just, oh, it's just trying to get a little taste of God. Even the pseudo Eros like you talked about. And what Gabor Maté would talk about, this attempt. The addict is trying to solve a problem, it's trying to bring God into a place where there's deadness in a vacuum. It's trying to draw it in. But if it's drawing in the false god, like the Rosicrucians would call like that Luciferian energy, the false light which is never satiating and satisfying, but masquerades as light but it's not really the light. It's just the false light. It's like the saccharin or NutraSweet version of the sugar that--
KYLE: That aspartame.
AUBREY: The aspartame that the hummingbird might find as sweet but it would die. If the hummingbird had aspartame flowers, be fucking dead hummingbirds everywhere. It needs the real nectar, the real honey, and then its little fucking wings can flap, and it can have little hummingbird wars with its friends and fucking shine its beautiful iridescent feathers all over the place. And so, it's really learning how to distinguish between the light, the real light, and then the false light, and where that lives within you, and make peace with all of these forces that are inside. There's just levels on levels of mastery of how you actually navigate this in a way where you're really seeing things clearly, you're balanced, you're aware of the traps and pitfalls of inflation that can come. Where you start to think that you're somehow the only one or the special one. It's like--
ERICK: Red flag, red flag.
AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we get it surprisingly too much where someone will claim to be both either Jesus or Lucifer himself, or like one of these massive, the one and only. And you're like, no, no, you could be tapping into Christic energy. For sure, all of us. That's the whole point, as he was talking about tapping into Christic energy.
CAITLYN: It's like if you get wet, and you're like, "I am the ocean."
AUBREY: Exactly, or I am the ambassador of water. I've had that conversation where someone is, "You're the ambassador?" "The only one." Wow, all right. See you later.
ERICK: Anti-Highlander.
AUBREY: Yeah, see you later. But yeah, it's really trying to understand this whole field. And if people don't have conversations like we have, and also guide experiences with this knowledge, and actually understanding the whole field, then we're not going to be able to enter that kind of post tragic ability to bring the beauty of the pre-tragic, the awareness of the tragic into a post tragic environment, which is part of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, which is the synchronicity machine that a festival can create. You meet people you never would have met. Again, I met my wife, Vylana at Burning Man. Wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for Burning Man. I mean, I don't know how else it would've happened. But the forces that were working found a way through synchronicity after synchronicity to bring us together, so we came into contact. And then that unfolded in the sequence of four years, which included a lot of tragedy, but eventually brought us together into that. And that's the beauty of what these festivals or experiences can have both personally and collectively.
ERICK: And the thing that comes to mind that just popped up is it's like the post tragic, requires community in a sense, and there's a couple of aspects to this. One, conduct yourself with your friends in a way where your friends feel safe to call you out when you've tripped. Like, if you get too inflated or too depressed, having friendships to outsource your sanity to is like a requirement. And also, you just brought it up. Festivals allow for synchronicities to emerge where, the metaphor that comes to me is it feels like we're all born oriented towards a different type of constellation. And that's the type of horizon that our soul wants to look at. A part of the game of life is finding the other people who are drawn to that same horizon. And there's something about a festival that confesses something about reality that we don't understand, where there's something inside of us, that can be in a crowd of 80,000 people at Burning Man. And if you feel the intention of wanting to meet X person, you just stumble onto them. And you have the opportunity to create a connection with someone who's going to be like a brother or a sister, that could go on your bead necklace for the rest of your life. And this is one of the things that it's hard to explain about, like Fit For Service. The thing that makes it medicine is not the talks we give, or the initiatory experiences we give, even though all that's dope. But you have almost a 100% chance to meet someone that will know you when you die. There's something about the festival that allows for that to emerge, and that the post tragic, is a community. It's not an individual.
CAITLYN: I feel like it's really important to just hone in on what I see there, is that what happens when you go to a festival is similar to what happens when you go to a well curated medicine space. If you take ayahuasca in your living room by yourself, I don't believe you will have the same experience, the medicine won't be the same. And when you go to a festival, you are in this unspoken agreement with everybody who's there to fully express yourself, to expect magic, to expect wonder, to expect beauty. You're looking for it. Everyone's looking for it. When everybody comes to Fit For Service, there's a shared implicit understanding that you're safe to be who you are, you're safe to open up. And that's what happens at Burning Man too is there's a guiding principle that allows freedom that actually changes reality. So, if we go to Las Vegas Strip, for example, and we have this preconceived notion that there's all of this darkness there, and we feel shame in our bodies for being there, well, shame and darkness is what you're going to experience. But if you go there to look at all of the creativity, the mind boggling wonders that are everywhere, the beautiful sunsets, the Red Rock horizon, that's what you'll see, and that's what you'll get. It's important, it really changes everything we can bring that little bit of, it's choosing our reality, and every chosen reality that each person will initiate unlocks the medicine that we all get to share and actually changes the world.
AUBREY: Yeah. Well, this is also an invitation. If you want to be on this journey with us and see what we're trying to build here. And I think we did a hell of a job last year, and we created an unbelievable experience. It's like the highlight of the year for so many of the people who attended and us being there both facilitating and attending. And this year, we're just going to blow that out of the fucking water. Yeah, it's going to be next level. And who knows what this becomes. But really, we believe in it, and that's why we're doing it. The financial models of it are all fucking backwards. It's a huge losing proposition at this point. But ultimately, there's something about it that we believe in, and we believed in it passionately enough to ante up and say, now we're going to run this back because there was something special that was created. I remember, I gave my closing talk. And there was, without any prompting, I go off stage. Everybody in the room comes and huddles in this giant spiraling circle of 500 people and just starts holding each other's shoulders, and erupting in a raucous cheer and roar. That just happened because of that shared space that was created. So, when I saw that, I was like, all right, we're on to something here. And we're going to fucking keep it going.
CAITLYN: Yeah, we are.
ERICK: It's a fucking honor. It's an honor.
CAITLYN: And it's the ultimate alchemy of everything that I used to enjoy in the pre-tragic world that I now get to enjoy in full aliveness. So, I'm so excited for it.
AUBREY: All the thanks. If you're interested, fitforservice.com/arkadia. Yeah, we'll fucking see you there.
CAITLYN: We'll see you there.
AUBREY: Kyle, Erick, Caitlyn, you're all on my necklace. I love you forever, forever and ever to the end. All the way.
CAITLYN: All the way.
ERICK: I love you too, man.
AUBREY: Yeah, love you guys.