The Behavioral Corner 
Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano. And this is the Behavioral Corner, you're invited to hang with us as we discuss the ways we live today, the choices we make, the things we do, and how they affect our health and well-being. So you're on the Corner, the Behavioral Corner, please hang around a while.

 

Steve Martorano 
Hey everybody, how are you? Welcome to the Behavioral Corner. I'm Steve Martorano, hanging, as usual, here right across from the convenience store. We got a little stoop. Mrs. Manicotti keeps clean for us if you want to sit down. And we know if you stay in one place long enough all kinds of interesting people will come by. And we've been really grateful to the folks that have hung with us on the Behavioral Corner. When we talk about the choices we make, the decisions and how it affects our way of thinking that has an impact on our mental, our spiritual, and our physical well being. So we got a lot to cover and we try our best. We're going to take you on and you'll pardon the pun a little trip on this episode, I've been looking forward to talk about what is referred to as "psychedelic-assisted therapy." A fascinating topic that's been, if you pay attention, around for a very long time, but it's only just recently reemerged and something serious and worth examining and utilizing for that matter. So we're going to talk about that psychedelics and therapy, and find out once and for all whether mushrooms, if not magical, can be medicinal. And to that end, welcome to our guest, Kyle Buller. Kyle is the founder and co-host of something called Psychedelic Today, which is the name of his podcast, the veteran in podcasting, I think five years ago. He is also just so you know, I haven't decided to do something about psychedelics and I just went and found an old hippie friend of mine, who has been doing dope forever, and thinks he's an expert. I didn't do that. I could have done that but I didn't do. I went and found somebody who is serious about this stuff because it's a serious topic. And Kyle is that in spades, he has an MS in clinical mental health counseling, emphasizing somatic psychology, we'll find out what that means. His background is in mental health he consists of working with at-risk teenagers, and well, lots of individuals on lots of basis. And in his bio, and I got to tell him this, he uses a phrase to describe his interest, as "exploring non-ordinary states of mind." Non-ordinary states of mind is one of the great euphemisms I have ever heard in my life, for a psychedelic experience. So we welcome Kyle Buller to the program. Kyle, how are you? 

Kyle Buller 
I'm doing well, thank you for having me on, Steve. 

Steve Martorano 
That's a great turn of phrase. I've been surrounded and a victim of a non-ordinary state of mind for a very long time. So I'm grateful to have you here. Before we get into sort of a thumbnail sketch of the long history of psychedelics and their uses, how did you get involved in this?

Kyle Buller 
It's been a long, long story, I'll try to condense and make it short. But the short story is that you know, meditation was around 15. So I guess really just starting to become curious and conscious and whatnot. And then around 16, I had a near-death experience got in a really bad snowboarding accident ended up rupturing my spleen. And the doctors said, If I came in five or ten minutes later, I would have been pronounced dead on arrival. But as I was going through this experience, you know, I guess I would describe it as somewhat mystical, you know, this voice came over me told me I was going home, I was going back to the stars, where we all come from, and I started to kind of accept my faith at that point. And coming back from that experience was really challenging, you know, the blissful experience of the near-death experience definitely had its time for, you know, a couple of months, you know, people usually report how life-changing it is. Everybody always talks about the valleys, how deep it can actually go, and it was kind of dark, you know, I was 16, so, really kind of fell into a heavy existential crisis, just trying to figure out what I'm doing here. And I couldn't really conform to school. I don't want to do any of this stuff - my life's too short. And so kind of spiraled out into a pretty dark depression during my teenage years. And it wasn't until I think I was 18 or 19. I forget how old I was, a friend of mine had some mushrooms and we decided to go out into the woods and eat them. And I would say what I preach now is about set and setting. I don't think I was in the right mindset, but it actually ended up being pretty beneficial. But I took it in this I wanted to escape, you know, really kind of struggling with this depression. And like I was definitely dealing with a lot of kind of suicidal ideation throughout those teenage years. And I was associating with that blissful experience of dying. And so I kept wanting to return that bliss stayed. And I was like, well, I just want to go back there living here is actually really hard. So, you know, I went in with this mindset of just wanting to go back into that blissful type of experience. So not really taking it with this conscious, you know, I want to go in and do something therapeutic. But it actually ended up having that outcome. This experience was pretty profound and, you know, I had a mystical experience all over again. I really experienced -- the near-death experience. And it helped me to kind of, I guess, recontextualize, maybe what happened to me on a psycho-spiritual level? And it helps to provide a little bit of answers. You know, I think there are always more questions, but it helps to provide some sort of answers. So what happened to me when I was dying, because after I woke up, in like the ICU, I felt like part of myself, my soul, my spirit, whatever, consciousness went somewhere, and I didn't know how to really kind of put it into words, I didn't really know how to describe it, there was anything visual there. Sometimes people talk about the near-death experience, they talk about a tunnel light, maybe meeting, you know, angels or ancestors, I didn't have that type of traditional near-death experience, I had a voice saying I was going back home. And I all I knew I was really excited for that journey. And it told me it was a journey, it was a transition, that my physical life was gonna cease to exist, but I was going to continue onward. And so there was something deep in my bones that felt like I went somewhere, I didn't know how to really understand that. And so my experience with psilocybin, it kind of provided some sort of context to it. And it helped me to kind of, I guess, like, work with that trauma, both the physical trauma of the accident and also the psycho-spiritual aspects. So after I came back from that psilocybin experience, I just started scratching my head going, you know, that was so similar to dying. And there's this eerie feeling about how similar it was. And I just became so fascinated, I just said to myself, how could somebody eat something that grows from the earth that could produce something so profound, and reminded me so much of dying? I didn't know anything about the research, I didn't know anything that happened, you know, back in, you know, the early days in the 50s and 60s are actually treating people with a terminal illness, the near death anxiety, and you know, now I read bang on it makes sense. I think about my own experience and, and how similar it felt. But that was my entry point, I became super fascinated and decided to do a degree in transpersonal psychology where I got to just study all this stuff, any research paper that I could write about psychology, I was reading the academic literature and psychedelics, trying to understand you know, what's going on here? And how these substances could be beneficial for healing.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah. Cool. Let's hear it for snowboarding. 

Kyle Buller 
Yeah. 

Steve Martorano 
Here's, what coming -- and we're gonna get away from the personal backstory. It's fascinating, though, and more into the nuts and bolts of this whole field. But I do want to, I do want to sort of talk about a couple of things you just said because they're fascinating to me. Now, by the way, in the interest of complete candor, for anyone who hears this podcast, when I discuss what little I know about psychedelics and the experience, I'm going by what some guy told me. It says nothing that actually happened to me...he said, That's not true. Anyway, here's what I heard you say, and I know it completely. We hear near-death experiences that people think morbid thoughts. You mean, he wants to recreate the thought of dying? I didn't hear that at all. I heard you say that, at that moment, forgetting about white lights and come home, in that moment, there was a sense of something transcendent. undefinable, just something new. For instance, I remember thinking, "Oh...ohhhhhhhh." That's all. For hours. "Ohhhhhhhh." Okay, that goes away, as you point out. That experience is almost never accompanied outside of, you know, psychedelic experience. Occasionally, sports, music art, you can have a moment of transcendence, but it's never as powerful. Trying to get back to that is an amazing process. I don't even think further uses of psychedelics ever match the first one.

Kyle Buller 
No. 

Steve Martorano 
It's like a curtain has fallen. And you can't even describe the difference, but it's different. Okay, I get that completely. And so it doesn't surprise me at all, you and many others would set your life's work on that. I mean, you have the option to just sit around, you know, eating mushrooms and you know, getting high, or you could take a serious look at this. What's great about that is that as many of us know, this thing, psychedelics, and their therapeutic and medicinal benefits were the original impetus for looking at them 50 -- 60 years ago. They began for a multitude of reasons to become demonized, and driven, underground, and made elicit and so all of that research was lost for many, many years. What has changed recently that has gotten the mainstream world to bring these back out of the shadows and say, we've got to look at it?

Kyle Buller 
I think there are a couple of things, the research, I mean, obviously has kind of taken off and I think it's captured a lot of people's attention. And there has been that stigma and taboo that's still attached to the 60s of, you know, Timothy Leary, "tune in, turn on drop out" and just everything that was mixed up with the counterculture. And this is bad for you, and some of the propaganda around, you know, LSD stores and your, your spinal cord, and you'll have flashbacks, and you'll go crazy, and all that stuff. And so, you know, the science now has really picked it up and it's more rigorous than it was back then, as well. And, you know, the evidence is there. I mean, that at least the preliminary evidence is saying that these do have therapeutic potential. And I think something I think about, and I don't know, it'd be interesting to hear some of your thoughts too, but having access to information that we do nowadays, versus say, back in the 60s and 70s, with the internet, right? I mean, things are just at the touch of our fingers right now. And it feels really hard to put it back in the bag. 

Steve Martorano 
Ironically, it's become both much, much easier to lie, but much, much easier to uncover the truth, if you really look for it. You're absolutely right. Yeah, incidentally, before you leave the history of the demonization solely to the responsibility of the hippies and my generation, the government had their hand too, because as we know, they wanted to weaponize LSD, they thought they could mind control Soviet agents, or at least drive them crazy. And that all contributed to the bad reputation that psychedelics got them. But we're coming out of that. And what I'm interested in finding out about, and I know you know a lot about is the types of drugs that are being used, because we're not talking about one drug here. They all act differently. We lost all that time, seeing what the long-term effects can be on this drug and this illness. So I really want to get this far down into this as we can. Tell us if you can, in very late terms, and as briefly as possible, how these drugs work in our brain, what happens and we know?

Kyle Buller 
We know a little bit. Something I always come back to is, you know, neuroscience is pretty young still. And, you know, I think a lot of the neuroscientists that I speak with from time to time, understand the mechanism of action. But I think if you talk to neuroscience that really understands that they all admit that, you know, we still don't really know too much about the brain. So what we do know, with the classical tryptamines, so that would be something like psilocybin, which is the compound and mushrooms, LSD, DMT. Some people might know DMT, as the compound in ayahuasca. And these bind to the serotonin 5-HT receptor. And so we know that binds to that certain receptor. And there's been also a lot of research talking about decreased activation in what's called the default mode network. And Dr. Robin Carhart Harris talks about this as the "orchestrator of self." So there's a decreased activation, it's like part of ourselves goes offline. So you know, that's where you're getting into the concept of ego dissolution. And there are also neural pathways opening up so parts of the brain haven't communicated before starting to communicate. There's a really great image online showing like placebo versus like, what your brain looks like, or at least the connections that are being made after psilocybin or LSD. And so that's a little of the basics.

Steve Martorano 
What's interesting about that, is those neural pathways that shut down over a long evolutionary period are opened up on this therapy. And I wonder if that's so therapeutically beneficial or potentially beneficial. Why then did they shut down? What shut them down? 

Kyle Buller 
Do you mean the research or the pathways in the brain?

Steve Martorano 
Yes, I mean, clearly, there was a capacity tens of thousands of years ago, for that state to be sort of normal, or certainly not extra normal. And then it got shut down. Something blocked them off. And now it's only these drugs that can open it.

Kyle Buller 
I think from like an evolutionary standpoint, like if your brain is constantly taking in that much information and communicating like that all the time, be really hard to function. And so I think like the brain is looking for simplicity, right? Cuz I mean, it's a very complex organ, but I think like it's a function in this in this reality can't be an ego dissolving state all the time. The lion will eat you eventually.

Steve Martorano 
Exactly, it becomes a case of here comes the tiger. Far out. Yeah. I get it. Okay, so what do we know about the kinds of mental health situations that these drugs might be beneficial for?

Kyle Buller 
Yeah, great question. So what kind of really kicked off a lot of this interest was the works that MAPS was doing -- the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. You know, there was research done in the 50s and 60s, and they're exploring all sorts of different use cases, for psychedelics, you know, for alcoholism to you know, serious mental health disorders. And that was a little bit more, maybe, I would say, looser back then just really trying to explore what could this be good for. And some of the work that I've really read from was Dr. Stanislav Grof and who was a pioneer in LSD research. And he gives lots of different case examples of different mental health disorders that they treated with LSD, in Czechoslovakia, and then in Maryland, in the 60s. And some of the stuff that happened over here in the United States during those early years was with near-death anxiety, for those suffering from a terminal illness. And so the research then started to kick off with that entry point, with a terminal illness in, I think it was the mid-2000s, Johns Hopkins picked up a study with psilocybin for near-death, anxiety, and also wanting to see them, you know, maybe the mystical aspect and what's the similarities there. And then MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, they've been really focused on MDMA -- and some people might know that as ecstasy. And they've been really looking at that medicine for the treatment of PTSD. And they just wrapped up I think, their first part of their phase three trials. So they're going through FDA trials right now, I think they're going on their second -- the second part of their phase three. And so this medicine could be available. I think they had to push the timeline back a little bit to COVID, and everything. But I think they're guessing by 2024, maybe 2023. So that could be a medicine that could be available for therapists for the treatment of PTSD. And, you know, some of their preliminary researches is really wonderful. I think the studies that they just put out, was a little bit over 60% of the participants that went through it no longer had diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Which is pretty amazing.

Steve Martorano 
I guess, if they see success with post-traumatic stress, then careful management of the drug and therapy, could be applied to anxiety, depression, all sorts of things. Can we divide these drugs into two classes, those that occur organically, and those that are manufactured?

Kyle Buller 
With like, within the psychedelic community I think some people do classify that. So some people will talk about entheogens -- like plant medicines -- and so that would be something like psilocybin-containing mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, San Pedro, more than of the natural plants. Yeah, you know, there is a debate within the community of like, you know, I want my all-natural and plant-derived versus the synthetic or semi-synthetic compounds that are made in the lab.

Steve Martorano 
Some of that strike you is fashion rather than science?

Kyle Buller 
I think so. I mean, if you talk to, you know, chemists or pharmacologists, you know, they'll tell you compounds or compounds right? But I think there is that interesting, you know, the argument about the entourage effect with, you know, the whole plant being consumed with all the different other compounds that may be in there.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah, you could be like Hunter Thompson and go to South American. What was it Aberdeen?

Kyle Buller 
Aberdeen.

Steve Martorano 
That's when he wrote the famous Super Bowl piece while ingesting. Anyway, so these are not for everyone? People who've looked at this no even have personal stories of a lot of people who did a lot of LSD, and some people had a very negative reaction to it. Some people were hospitalized because of these drugs. So here we are today on the dawn of maybe opening this up to real use. And yet, how do people know whether they're the ones that shouldn't do this? How are they training people to make sure they diagnose and then prescribe properly?

Kyle Buller 
If we're looking at what's going on with the research right now, there's only going to be a limited amount of, you know, criteria for these medicines. So with MDMA, for example, that's only really being looked at through the FDA for PTSD. And so if somebody met a PTSD diagnostic criteria, and this was a legal form of therapy, they would be able to engage in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Some other things that people are looking at are again that that near-death anxiety for terminal illness with psilocybin. I know Johns Hopkins was running a study on quitting smoking with psilocybin. There have been those studies around alcoholism and so that might be it. I guess to get a little bit nuanced on what's going on in the field, too, is that you have the medicalization of psychedelics and so that's going to be within the mental health framework. And so you would need to meet some sort of criteria to be able to get treatment for those specific mental health disorders. There are also some other initiatives that are going on with like decriminalized nature, where they're trying to decriminalized plant medicines for people's own personal and maybe spiritual-religious exploration. And what just happened in Oregon, they just pass it an initiative called Measure 109 and that's to legalize psilocybin therapy. And I believe that they're not saying that you need a mental health diagnosis to receive treatment or services. And so that also takes that a little bit out of the medical context saying you need to meet the criteria of depression or PTSD to receive these services.

Steve Martorano 
Is that a good thing? In your view is that a good thing -- because you're verging on recreational use rather than medicinal use?

Kyle Buller 
Well, it's still under the supervision of trained experts. And from my perspective, I think that is a good thing. I guess, if we're just thinking about medicalization in general, is that it can be very limiting. And when we think about the potential applications of psychedelics, you know, there's a lot of unexplored application within creativity and just this idea of what about well, people getting well and better. You know, why do we just need to focus on sick people getting better. And so I think it does open up the possibility for people that just want some sort of self-exploration to be able to have that and have it accessible. But it would -- under Oregon's measure -- still be undertrained supervisors. And the people are doing this already, right. They can go to a place like Jamaica, where psilocybin mushrooms are legal, or Amsterdam, people that are suffering, and also people that are just curious to learn a little bit more about who they are. And so I think having that access is beneficial than just limiting it to a medical diagnosis.

Steve Martorano 
How much pushback is there from the mainstream psychiatric medical community? I mean, I could see where psychiatrists might view these drugs as not so much a threat to what they do, but a shortcut that they might say, "No, no, you can't do that. This is a long process." Is there some of that going on?

Kyle Buller 
I think you see this, it's, it's kind of funny to think about, but kind of like these turf wars. Again, thinking about the differences between medicalization, where you need these substances are only for sick people that meet a medical diagnosis. And this is, you know, the drug that we prescribe. And so psychiatry, you know, there's definitely the side of psychiatry that wants to be able to contain it and say, you need to be able to operate just within the medical paradigm and so to some extent, you know, it might just be kind of like, a turf war thing...

Steve Martorano 
Turf war, right.

Kyle Buller 
We want to own this to some degree, and it needs to be medicalized. And then you have other people are saying, Yeah, but what about people that find a benefit that isn't necessarily meeting those criteria, and, you know, it's should it be accessible, you kind of get into, like cognitive liberty. I come back to that, I think, really appreciating different use cases, and understanding when those use cases are appropriate. And so I'm not saying like, you know, against psychiatry, I mean, I'm a therapist. And so I'm excited about the potential of this being a treatment that I could potentially offer in the future. And there are people that are going to need that type of framework, and they're going to need the medical model, they're going to need mental health treatment within this. And then there's going to be the people that are saying, you know, I suffered from a mild form of depression, but I'm really just kind of existentially stuck. But I don't meet these other criteria. But hey, maybe there's a service out where I can kind of do more self-exploration, spiritual development work. And I think that's important as a human. 

Steve Martorano 
That's absolutely true. And we've seen already in a more limited way, medicinal assisted therapies for alcoholism and drug addiction. And it's always accompanied by also long-term therapy afterward, just stopping the craving and the behavior is just part of it. Some people will need that even if they get psychedelically assisted therapy. Others, you're right, will not. The journey will be over for them, they will have found what they want to do where the fog lifted, and they can move on. Just this one other point about that. What's fascinating is, again, in the history of this drug, and you talk about who should be the gatekeeper, who says you can get it and again. You can go and read about the very famous people who took this stuff, under the cover of you know, darkness in the 50s. Everybody from Clare Boothe Luce, whose husband was, you know, a titan of publishing to Cary Grant, who was seeking LSD, because it helped him figure stuff out. I mean, they may have had guides, but they certainly weren't sick people. Quote unquote. So now we're getting back to something like that, and it's great, and this is the other thing. So you know, the stigmas are gone, the medical community is in charge. And you know, I'm approaching this as I want to do this. How do I pick a therapist? You mentioned set and setting. And again, if you know anything about this, in the beginning, there were a couple of schools of thought one was set and setting -- where you are in a controlled environment with someone you trusted, because who knows where this thing's headed. And the other which was popularized by Ken Kesey was drop acid and you know, go to a Grateful Dead concert. So how does somebody choose a therapist making sure they get the right way to this thing?

Kyle Buller 
Yeah, well, right now it's not available. So I don't think that's an option to really choose a therapist to be doing this. There are medicines like ketamine that are available legally. And that would be a question to ask for, say, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, where people are exploring this isn't legal medicine to use. It's not a traditional psychedelic, it's a dissociative anesthetic but it does have transpersonal-like qualities at higher doses for depression. And it seems to do really well. So right now, there's like ketamine infusion centers, where, you know, maybe they're typically run by like anesthesiologists. And they're just getting IV, there's no prep work, there's no sort of like, hey, this is what's going to go on. It's more coming from like, a biochemical moderator coming in, you're getting your drug, and the drug is treating the depression. And so people aren't getting as much support. And then on the ketamine assisted psychotherapy side, you know, maybe it's a little bit different, you're doing some prep work with a therapist, your understanding of the therapeutic process. And the difference here is that we're not saying the drug is what's also creating the change, the drug is acting like a tool. And so I think that's the emphasis is that in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy protocols, is that the psychedelic substance is an adjunct to therapy. And so, you know, say with, like ketamine, with the IV, there's no therapy going on to some extent. I mean, there are some clinics that understand the therapeutic aspect there and they will have that but some are just viewing it as a drug that can help treat whatever's going on. So again, it's really the emphasis that these are really powerful tools that can help enhance the therapeutic process. And if you're interested, I really emphasize finding somebody that understands that because these aren't magic bullets, and they're not going to cure you, right. And I think there's a lot of emphasis on the power of the drug, which the substances are really powerful. But again, you know, even I talked about like this with my near-death experience, profound openness, insight, and then you kind of come back, right, the drug wears off experience starts to die down. And that's where a lot of the work really starts to take place. So really viewing the drug as an adjunct to the therapeutic process. And I also wanted to come back to your question about psychiatry. I think psychiatry, in general, is pretty excited about this, because there hasn't really been a lot of great advancements in psychopharmacology. So I think a lot of psychiatrists and people in the mental health field are really excited about this. On the flip side, I think it's really gonna shift it right. I mean, what's psychiatry now, it's a lot of prescriptions and drugs that are taken daily. And I think this is going to change psychiatry and a new way of wait, we can't really prescribe these drugs daily. And so I think there is going to be some sort of paradigm shift if psychiatry starts to adapt psychedelic medicines. What does that look like in the future when you don't have a drug to prescribe to stabilize your mood. 

Steve Martorano 
The talk therapy, which we know from movies and television is, you know, the Freudian guy sitting on a couch and the guy saying, "Well, what do you how do you feel about that?" You know, when you hear about people being in psychotherapy for 55 years, it's because it's hard to get past all the defense mechanisms and all that suppress memory. So these drugs may make it easier for people to talk to therapists in a more profound and important way. That's very interesting. I could go on forever because I love the topic. And here we are at the dawn of it. And thank you for reminding me that this is not something you can go to CVS and get, or have your doctor prescribe it. Nevertheless, I know that you have probably had the experience of people saying to you, you know, off the record, "Hey, we want to do some ecstasy. We've never done it before." Or we may take our first acid trip or eat some mushrooms. Do you advise them about okay, here's what you want to remember? What is the sort of thing you would say to somebody you said that to you?

Kyle Buller 
I mean, we got this question all the time? And the question that, hey, where can I find a guide? Where can I, you know, find access to this? And it's a really tricky question to answer on that side because these are still illegal. And, you know, people are doing it there, there are things happening underground. There are therapists that are taking a huge risk to provide these services. And so I really take a harm reduction approach. When people do ask this, they come to me, and they're really curious about it, really just trying to provide as much information around the science and what I understand. So people can make their own informed decisions, and really putting out the potential risks that are involved here. Because there are psychological risks involved. These, again, are very powerful substances and so, you know, really just educating people around this concept of dose, you know, how much are you actually going to take? Purity. I mean, that's a huge, huge concern when people are buying stuff from the black market, especially with semi-synthetic or synthetic compounds, you don't know what you're getting, there's a lot of research chemicals floating around out there. And so you know, a lot of people may not even think about testing a substance. And I think that's super important, just from a harm reduction, like lens where it's like, we have no idea what's in some of these substances that are in the underground black market. And, you know, sometimes fentanyl finds its way in there. And that's dangerous, right? And so really just educating people around the potential harms that are involved, as it's really an underground and black market at this point unless you go to a place where it's legal. If you go down to Peru, where ayahuasca ceremonies are happening, or again, you go to a place like Jamaica, the Netherlands, where psilocybin is legal. And there are actually places that provide a service that, you know, they create that set and setting, that container, where you can go and have an experience. And, you know, with underground guides, I mean, sometimes you don't know what you're getting this is people are very excited, there's a lot of people that had one experience, and they're all of a sudden, they want to be a guide. And so there's a lot of harm, that can also happen within the underground where people you know, they go to, quote-unquote, psychedelic therapists that may not really have that much experience. And, you know, things come up, or, you know. We get reports quite often about just like, you know, sexual abuse that happens, and just a lot of abuse that starts to happen. So that's also a danger of people that are really... You know, it's a really hard conversation, because a lot of people are trying to find healing. And unfortunately, a lot of this is pushed into the underground, where also harm continues to happen at times. And so it's like your heart aches when somebody really could possibly benefit from this, but it's just not available.

Steve Martorano 
Well, it's a great life lesson. And you can't learn it fast enough. That just because the people you're associated with, like the same recreational activities you do doesn't mean they're all good people. 

Kyle Buller 
Yeah.

Steve Martorano 
There are bad people out there so be careful. Thanks so much. I could do this, you know, a lot longer. And we're at the dawn of this stuff. So there's going to be new stuff to talk about going forward. We hope we can have you back many times. 

Kyle Buller 
It's evolving every day. It's pretty wild to think about when I started to get really interested in this everybody's like, "What are you interested in?" Whereas still that taboo and stigma and now people are coming out of the woodwork saying "I'm really curious about this? I read this report, I read the science behind it." And it just really fascinated so things are moving forward.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah, stealing it back from the hippies. Come back with a corner any old time, man. 

Kyle Buller 
Thank you appreciate it.

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