The Entrepreneurial Edge: Branding, Resilience & Psychedelics with Scott Omelianuk

with Scott Omelianuk

Feb 21, 2025 · 00:40:33

Today's guest is Scott Emilianuk, who has worked for Time Warner, Time Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst, Cablevision, NBC, and other well-known companies. He's an advisor to and board member for leadership of fast-growth companies, entrepreneurs, and C-suite stakeholders. He's a highly sought-after consultant on branding, marketing, and purpose. A longtime media expert, author, founder, and patent holder, he has successfully repositioned multiple well-known brands by redefining brand purpose, Refining product-market fit, anticipating shifts in consumer and competitive behavior, and reorienting properties for multiple revenue streams and attendant financial gain. Welcome to The Total Entrepreneur: Mind, Body, Spirit, where we turn cutting-edge science into practical strategies for entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Dr. John Torrance, Entrepreneur Inc. 5000 honoree and professor of entrepreneurial practice at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management. Each episode, we dive into mental, physical, and spiritual health with expert guests offering actionable insights to help you thrive and perform at your highest level. Let's get started. Scott, welcome to the podcast. Really excited to talk to you today.

My pleasure, John. Happy to be here.

Really happy.

All right.

Well, before we get into psilocybin and how that can be used by entrepreneurs, Give us a little background on yourself. You've got a pretty interesting and deep background in business.

Yeah, so I have a deep background in media, which I spent a good chunk of my career at, and in a variety of different places. GQ and Esquire. I was at Time Inc. running This Old House, which is the television show that's been— it was on PBS for, I think, 45 years. Most recently, Inc. magazine and the Inc. 5000, which obviously speaks to entrepreneurs. And through it all, or maybe because— or the way I got to do all of that is because I was always very entrepreneurial, right? So I was always looking at the next thing. I was always looking at new technology, looking at consumer behavior shifts, and trying to force the companies I worked for in that direction. Not always easy when you're a publicly traded company, for example, or a big family-owned company. So that was all a little frustrating. Sometimes I found myself taking breaks from the corporate career and going off on my own or with a partner and deciding I was going to work for myself. But God, I was terrible at it. And so I was a bad salesperson for myself. And obviously you have to be a really good salesperson to sell your ideas. And so I found myself always returning to that corporate role. And at Inc., I would get up on stage to talk to the people I thought were real entrepreneurs, and I would tell them I was a failed entrepreneur, and I admired what they had done and what they had accomplished, you know, somewhat not realizing that, of course, probably half of the audience had already failed at 1 or 2 or 5 things themselves, but just kept going, right? Um, I didn't. Uh, but I left Inc. at the end of 2023, so beginning of 2024, and now I I run a brand development agency that I started, and we use the tools of media, things like content and community and events, but do it with corporations. So I'm not reliant on the old and now failed business model that has sort of undercut so much of media.

Yeah, I can relate to the, you know, not being a great salesperson, promoter or something. It always feels kind of weird, you know?

Yeah.

So your time with Inc. was probably pretty amazing in terms of the people you were able to meet and access. top couple things you learned from interacting with those entrepreneurs? Which, by the way, I'm a 3-time Inc. Entrepreneur, Inc. 5000 Entrepreneur, super excited about that. Congratulations, really fun designation.

And not, not an easy thing to do, so congratulations.

Thank you.

I think there are a couple of things. One is just the need, the amount of grit, the perseverance, the dedication that you need to have to be successful on your own is just astonishing. And we see that in, say, professional athletes, right? And we admire it. But I don't think we have enough of an understanding, or the general public doesn't have enough of an understanding, that everyone who's out there starting their own business and making it successful has an equivalent ethic. I think that's one thing. I think the other thing is that being an entrepreneur is incredibly lonely. You might have a partner or spouse who you want to talk to about what you're doing, but you can't show them any fear because they're worried about whether the mortgage is going to get paid or not. You might have a team and you have to be pretty resolute for them because you want them to stay tucked in, not running for the doors. And you might have investors who, you know, you're not gonna lie to them, obviously, but you have to put on the happy face. And so in all of that, there can be great loneliness, I think. And then the third thing that is fascinating to me, and people bristle at a little bit, but so just Give me a minute to talk through it, is that there's a construct in psychology called the dark triad. The dark triad represents like 3 segments of a triangle. One is narcissism, one is Machiavellianism, and the other is psychopathy, right? And if you have those things, you're supposed to be in the dark triad. I argue that all really good entrepreneurs dance right up to the edge of the dark triad And don't go over unless— Elizabeth Holmes went over, right? Travis Kalanick maybe went over. Maybe a certain advisor to the president has gone over. But you need to be narcissistic enough to think your idea is the idea everyone needs. You have to be Machiavellian enough to, with maybe just a few dollars in your pocket, get to the end results and game the system for you. And you'd have to be enough of a psychopath to push the people who work with you as far as you can without pushing them over the line. So I think, you know, and I mean it in the most loving way possible because I would say the best friends of my life I made among people who were in the Inc. 5000. They're all just a little bit crazy.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Even people I know. For sure, yeah. I like that the dark triad. Yeah, yeah.

Don't don't go over just right up to the edge of right?

Yeah, no, I've seen it. And you know the athlete metaphor is really or the I guess the comparison is really good at the university. I work with student athletes in my classes a lot, and they make really good entrepreneurs. And one of the students told me it's because when they're in a game or even in practice, they have to have a really short memory. They can't dwell on the play. They just messed up or the mistake they just made, because if they think about it, it gets in their head and it affects the next play. So they have to forget about it and move on, which I think is a really key part of resilience among entrepreneurs.

Yeah, I think that's right. And it makes sense. And I think that was one of my shortcomings as an entrepreneur. The wellness startup I was involved in right before the pandemic, I would think about our last meeting and whether it went well or not when I was going to the next one. And that was not helpful. It was better if I had focused on making this a success, not worrying about the last not being a success.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about your experience with psilocybin and mushrooms. It's been something that's really interesting to me lately because of its effect on mental health and mental health's effect on entrepreneurial outcomes. So there's definitely a relationship there. So I'd love to hear how you, how you got to this. And yeah, tell us some of the things you've learned along the way.

I think for me, the desire was rooted in personal experience and growing up in a fairly violent and chaotic environment, and that I used traditional therapy to work through, but always felt it never got me quite far enough. And then having my own son and being worried about repeating some of those mistakes. And I was out with a bunch of entrepreneurs and a bunch of folks in the fight, in the Inc. 5000. And a couple of them had mentioned that they were microdosing. And I said, well, that sounds interesting. And then one or two others mentioned that they had been working with a therapist and found it really revelatory. And this is the wonderful thing about entrepreneurs, right, is that they're early adopters and optimizers. So they're always looking for something special. And I thought, well, maybe this is something I could try because I just don't feel like I'm getting far enough anymore with the therapy I had been doing and doing for decades, right? So I managed through someone who knew someone who knew someone to find a therapist who has been working in what they call the underground for 30 years as a therapist, but also as a therapist who— has a medical team and administers psychedelics to people in what's called a medicine day. So a day-long, essentially a day-long experience on daybed, and then the sort of lead-up sessions to that and the processing of that. And so that can be, you know, we know that ketamine is legal now, and there are ketamine clinics, and that helps with depression. We had hoped that MDMA would be legalized for PTSD that didn't— the FDA would smile on it. That didn't quite happen this year. But I think any legislation— and there was legislation around investment in MDMA research that is supported by both Andrea Ocasio-Cortez and Matt Gaetz together. They co-sponsored this bill. There's hope for, right?

What a duo, right? Right?

You don't expect them to get together. So maybe there's something here. And so with ketamine now done in clinics, with MDMA, with psilocybin, and in some cases with LSD, and using those experiences to essentially reframe how you see the world and how your brain works. And there's lots of research, and folks can look this up, and many probably already know it better than I do, but that shows that these substances tend to, one, reduce ego when you're in a journey, and two, disrupt what's called the default mode network, which is part of your neurobiology that sort of allows you to move through the world without having to make decisions about every single input. It's like, this is— I'm in the default mode, I'm moving forward. And that's terrific for us navigating the world around us, but it also tends to internalize and dig ruts of behaviors that we have. So by disrupting that, you can start to think differently. And I've done all of those therapies now. And, you know, I like to tell people that I won't say I'm a good person, but I'm a much better person than I was before I started. I will say in a leadership context at work, I'm probably 80% less of an asshole than I was. It gives you this remarkable ability, I think, to think differently about every situation you're in. And obviously everyone's mileage is going to vary on this, right? It's such an intensely personal—

Right.

thing, and the work you do both before and after the medicine day, you know, that's sort of like the medicine day is opening the door. You still have to walk through the door and continue on afterwards, right? Um, the work you do can be really powerful and let you think, see things differently. I think Steve Jobs had said that doing LSD was the most, one of the most important things in, in his life. And I think for him that meant seeing solutions to problems in a very different way. And again, that's disrupting the default mode network. We're not doing this as we always did it. There's another way to do it. And so I have become something of an advocate, which is to say, I encourage people who feel that they have the desire to do this to do it, because I think that's fundamental. You need to want to do it yourself. This can't be pushed on you. It's not going to work for everybody. Not everyone is going to have good experiences. I've had really terrible, grueling experiences. But even within those, if you approach it correctly, there's a lot of growth and a lot of opportunity.

Yeah. So everything you were saying, like in terms of what it did for you, right? Making you more agreeable, or as you say, less of an asshole. These are all amazing things for entrepreneurs, right? Because you have to, you have to instill trust with your team. You have to be You have to move forward. You have to get through hard times. And you just have to be able to regulate. So yeah, talk a little bit about what you've seen with entrepreneurs who have gone down this path. Any tangible outcomes or differences, or even just maybe some stories or some examples?

All anecdotal, obviously.

Yeah, of course.

But I know one woman who I had dinner with last night who works at a large and well-known design SaaS company. has started her own business around psychedelics and connecting people because the journeys she had were so powerful. And, when I say journey, just to give some context to those who might not know, essentially, in therapeutic psychedelics, which is what I do, I'm not a party drug person by any stretch of the imagination. I have great reverence for these things and think they should be done in the right way, or I don't want to steal any of their power by doing them. at a dance club or something. Um, I will take the mushrooms, which are generally ground up in chocolate in a way to be tolerable to, to swallow, or the MDMA, which is in a gummy or capsule form. I'll talk to my therapist a bit about how I'm feeling. I will put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones and a pair of eyeshades and lay on my back. And they all have their own sort of idiosyncrasies, but I think one of them is the elasticity of time when you have them. And suddenly it's 6 hours later in the case of mushrooms, 8 hours or 12 hours later in the case of LSD, and you've been a whole bunch of places if it works right, and you've seen lots of things. And it's not necessarily what you expected, but you feel that there's something different about you. And you feel like you have the opportunity to engage in the world in a different way. So, just to place it like that. But I have seen entrepreneurs who use it a lot to reframe how they engage with their teams. And so, again, to move from that hard-driving, really tough boss to understanding that there's another way to get those same results. And this is just the way you might have learned or the way you might have thought you had to do it, but you don't necessarily have to do it that way. So I think that's one big one is seeing, seeing the people you work with in a very different way, having more capacity to, you know, like or love them as human beings, not just as not just as resources. I think that has been a huge one that I've seen. I've seen other people understand their personal relationships in, in different ways, why they maybe had a terrible track record at being a spouse and, and reexamining that. But I would say for the most part, it comes down to this measure of, of just reframing. And whether that's reframing your ego or reframing how you attack problems, it can be really powerful, I think, as a practice. But again, in the right circumstances, you having to want to do it and going in with the right intentions. It's not a cure-all. It's not like you suddenly are speaking 7 different languages that you didn't speak before. Nothing like that. You still have to put in a lot of work and be quite committed to it.

Yeah. I did a little research, just maybe more of a literature review before we had this interview, just to get an idea for what the science is saying. And of course, there's not a whole lot, at least that goes back very far, because it was hard to do it. But it seems like there's at least 5 key findings or areas of consensus. One is that there's a reduction in depression and anxiety, which we know, right? Which is a great thing. It actually annihilates any kind of pharmaceutical drug out there.

That's amazing.

It helps with emotional and cognitive benefits, neuroplasticity and brain function, lowered psychological distress and suicidal thoughts, and complementary effects with mindfulness, which we know is helpful for creativity and ideation and relationship building and things like that. So it seems like there's a lot of benefit, and I just— it seems like we have to jump through a lot of hoops to access this and get the benefits. Is that— has that been your experience? Like, when you did your journey, how difficult was it?

I mean, well, so arranging the journey was really hard, right? Because it's not legal yet. And there are trials now, and that's useful, but Nixon's FDA made these drugs illegal. People argue essentially as out of fear that people who use them were not as controllable or beholden to the system, right, as they were before. And that's so with the anti-war movement and civil rights, that was all very scary to the establishment.

Yeah.

So for a long time, they've been outlawed. Johns Hopkins and a few other places continued to do research with what they had left, and that was very valuable. You're, you're right about the efficacy relative to SSRIs or other antidepressants. These seem much better and long-lasting with fewer side effects. There really are no— in very vanishingly rare circumstances, there are side effects. You can't really overdose on them either. And so they're really useful. The neuroplasticity thing to me is the most fascinating component too, because I think— And not a scientist, just That's right. Making that clear. But to me, that, like, undergirds all of the other things you mentioned and supports the idea that the depressive thoughts, the ideation, the creativity, the social engagement, all of those other things can change. And one of the things that I do when I have a medicine day is in the days after, I will try to do everything I do differently, right? So if I walk home a particular way, I take another route. If I brush my teeth with my right hand, I try my left hand. just to sort of encourage this idea that we don't have to do all these things as we thought we have, right? It's all just social constructs, and we can reorient those constructs if we want and use them if they're useful, but don't have to be beholden to them if they feel like they're holding us back. And for some people, it's very spiritual. For others, it's very practical.

Mm-hmm.

And again, you know, it's such an intensely personal thing, and even Each journey I've had has been so different from the other one. And I think that's a little problematic with respect to our healthcare system is that it's not a dosable pill right now, right?

Right.

And there are companies, Lykos and Psibin, that are working on this. Lykos is part of MAPS, which is the original nonprofit psychedelic company. They're having financial troubles now. They're the ones who had hoped to make MDMA available but got knocked down by the FDA. All of these differences, you know, it makes it hard for me to say, this is what's gonna happen for you. I can't do that, right?

Right.

'Cause I can't do that for myself. I go in one day thinking, I think this is what I'm gonna address today in this journey. And the medicine takes you somewhere else entirely. I mentioned before that I grew up in a fairly rough environment. My father was a pretty violent alcoholic, and I expected at some point in the last handful of years that I've been doing this, that there would be some sort of reckoning with him during one of these journeys. He's never appeared. And so it's quite surprising what happens. And so just to say, anyone who's contemplating this, just know that your— that YMMV, your mileage may vary thing, is very true. And it's not just from me to you, but it's for you between journeys. Your mileage varies as well.

Yeah, I think that's one of the questions that a lot of people have, right? I think Philosophically, you can understand the benefits, you could read about them, but especially if you're of a certain age or a certain generation, we just grew up hearing that these were bad. Only bad people did them. This is your brain on drugs. We still might feel like we're going to go to jail or whatever.

Sure.

So for the person out there who's maybe mushroom journey curious, what could you tell them to alleviate their fears and anxieties?

Yeah, I think it's a couple of things. If you do it with someone, there's someone there to remind you that you're always coming back from wherever you think you are during the journey. And I think that's very important. I one time did a high dose by myself. It was actually at South by Southwest in my hotel room before an Inc. event. And I absolutely regret every moment of having done it by myself because it was a tough one. The hotel fire alarm went off in the middle of it.

Oh my gosh.

I did not— I could not— the TV came on and I couldn't turn it off. It was just everything was horrible. So I think in the right hands, whether that's a professional or a very trusted friend who's been through it before, and I stress professional first, you're going to get back. The potential for permanent damage is, as I said, vanishingly rare. There's some research that suggests if you are predisposed to psychosis, that psychedelics can trigger that.

Mm-hmm.

Some research that suggests if you have true bipolar disorder, not bipolar II, but, you know, the real one, you might not want to do it. If you have schizophrenia in the family, you might not want to do it. But otherwise, I will say, you come back. I would say, don't just wander into a field and think you've identified right mushrooms, if that's the way you get them, because that can kill you. That part can kill you. But to be curious, to go into it with an open mind and open heart, and to— and this is hard for entrepreneurs, right? Give up control for a minute and just see where you go. Because in that journey, you tend to go to the places that you might otherwise be resisting. And by going to those other places, you can learn remarkable things. And in learning those remarkable things, you can be after the fact a very different person, and that is where the value is, I think.

I've heard people say that you get the journey you need, not necessarily the journey you want.

I would say that's a good way of explaining away really tough experiences, and I have had a couple where it felt like I was being physically abused. And when I say felt like, literally I could not tell the difference between this imagining this happening to me or really happening to me in that moment. I can experience things that are stored, traumas that are stored in the body and how they're released. You might find yourself shaking and vibrating, but—

Mm-hm.

That's some sort of tension release. I had a remarkable experience I still don't know what to make of. It was maybe my second journey. I was cold to the point of shivering, and my therapist came over and put her hand on my shoulder, and I took my headphone off, and she asked— said, it looks like you're cold. Do you want a blanket? And I said, no, I think I need to be cold. I don't know why, but I just need to be right now. Everything was blue, and I was in a tunnel, and the tunnel was constricting and keeping me trapped. Blue and cold and I was yawning and grabbing my throat and trying to open my mouth, and I had no idea what to make of this in the moment. And soon that, that, that passed, or I had to go to the bathroom. There's some reason that I got up, I went to the bathroom, I came back, because the therapist asked me if I wanted to tell her what I was experiencing. And I recounted the details I just did to you— cold, messing with my mouth and my throat, and yawning a lot. In this pulse— pulsing, peristaltic sort of tunnel. And she said, wow, that sounds a lot like reliving a birth experience.

Hmm.

Do you know anything about the circumstances of your birth? And I was like, my mother told me that I was what was called then a blue baby because I was born with the umbilical cord around my neck.

Wow.

And so it was constricted. And she said, yeah, I think we think of our neurological memory as the memory we have, but the body stores memories too, and pre-rational memories. And maybe you were just experiencing that. So it can be— the journeys you have can be absolutely fascinating, not at all what you expect. And yet, if you have the right approach, an open-minded approach to what you're going to experience, yeah, in the end, that is the journey you need. It's not going to be all rainbow unicorns and everything with an aura and all of that stuff. It can be tough, it can be surprising, but there can still be growth through the reflection of that.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I would just say, John, to give a little bit more context, when we talked about SSRIs and efficacy with respect to— and I have enormous respect for therapists that I've had and worked with in the past, but I would say one day with psilocybin makes me feel like I've done a year or two of talk therapy. I feel like that is how the progress trajectory is. It's an accelerator like none I've experienced.

And entrepreneurs are looking for accelerators and ROI, right? Why take 2 years to get somewhere that you can get to in a day?

That's right.

So, for people who have maybe done recreational mushrooms, say, as a college student or something, and they might say, yeah, I've already done that. I don't know if I need to do another one. How is the experience different in your experience?

Everyone talks about set and setting, right? And that being the difference, Right? So your mindset in going into it and the seriousness with which you're taking it— what are your intentions for the day? And having really thought through that, what do you want to get out of— and like, like we just said, that you might not get out what you want, but you're going to get something out of, out of the day. And the setting being different too. So lay on a very comfortable daybed in a therapist's office for my medicine days. I am not out moving around. I'm internal. I'm I have eyeshades on so that I can have my eyes open, but I'm not seeing the world around me. I'm seeing what the journey is. And I have a soundtrack that my therapist will manipulate depending upon what she sees. And Johns Hopkins has created a psychedelic soundtrack. You can find it on Spotify.

Mm-hmm.

And use your own version of— you can use that if you'd like. But that sort of mimics the come up and the plateau and the come down. So the set and setting just makes all the difference in the world. And when I've done— I guess I'm just admitting this, but when I've taken mushrooms outside of that experience with friends, walking around or something, it's just entirely different. It's a lark. It's not the work. This is the work wrung out at the end of it, right?

Yeah. And I think that's the common element that I hear from a lot of people is that it's work.

Right?

It's not just recreational, it's fun. It's not a night out, it's not a rave. Like, you've got to approach it as if you're doing some work, you're doing some self-care, that sort of thing. Is that— would you agree with that?

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It's a big difference. And yeah, I just can't explain how much more seriously you take it. And I'm not interested really in doing this recreationally because I have reverence what it can do at the right dose in the right circumstances, and I don't want to mess with that. It's quite different. I just want to say too, this is not just me saying this, right? There are very esteemed entrepreneurs like Blake Mycoskie and Tim Ferriss who have donated tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to psychedelic research because they think it's so important.

Yeah.

Especially at a time when We're sort of in a mental health crisis, right? And in terms of the seriousness, again, Chip Conley, who I'm sure is a friend, says the CEO is chief executive officer, but also chief emotional officer.

I like that.

And when you think about that, and you think about the ripple effects of entrepreneurship, not necessarily financially, but emotionally, if we could get every apparent Blake or Tim or Steve Jobs or whoever to explore this. And if they were able to treat their immediate teams themselves, if they were able to treat themselves differently because of it, and if that caused them to treat their immediate teams differently, and if each member of their team suddenly treated, because they were being treated differently at work every day, treating their families and friends and their employees differently. differently, like what an amazing, impactful ripple effect that really could be. And so that is why I'm an encourager for people who are curious, because I think it has great potential. And these substances have been around and part of humanity for thousands of years now. And I think there's a reason for that. The wisdom of our elders is real in some cases, and these substances exist for us now because of their realization that they were helpful.

Yeah, I think that the wisdom of our ancestors and elders is really important. And like you said, these have been around for thousands of years. They've been used in ceremonies and rituals. And I think as time goes by, we just, we lose touch with that part of ourselves, right? For example, when I'm in Costa Rica and you're meeting and talking to people who live off the land, they know how to do it. It's very normal for them. I feel like we're like one generation away from not being able to do that in the States if we're not there already. Like, could you— if the power went out for more than a few days in the Northeast US, what on earth would we do? Right? I mean, it is quite amazing.

Yeah, absolutely. That, you know, like, that, that is when you appreciate psilocybin for what it's said to do for end-of-life care. Because I think that's, that's where we would be, right? And then I'm, I'm half joking but quite serious about research studies that show how powerful psilocybin is for people with terminal disease and how comforting it is for them. I think that has a lot to do, again, with a dissolution of ego, an understanding of our connectedness, and an appreciation that all the constructs were just constructs. And what's coming next is coming next, whether I want it or not. So, let's accept it because the ego's gone a little bit.

Yeah, it's got to be comforting, right? Just to know that you're connected to the whole and that once you die, it's not over or whatever it happens to be. I think there's a lot to that for sure. So one final question on the psilocybin. Could you just describe when you get to your medicine day, what does this experience look like? What is the dose? And I know dosing is going to be different for everybody, but for you, what does this medicine day look like?

Yeah, so I arrive late morning at my therapist's office in very comfortable clothes, knowing that at some point, probably Most of them are going to come off because I get so hot, or they get—it's interesting. Your sensory experience can be amplified, so just a wrinkle in your shirt can feel like you're being bound down by something. But comfortable clothes, having not eaten, so an empty stomach, and trying to have hydrated well and slept well the night before with no significant agitation. I want to go into it. I don't look at the news before I go. I want to go into it with as or send emails or any of that stuff. I wanna go in as clear-minded and unbothered as possible. We'll talk a bit about how I feel and the intention for the day and what I think might happen, what I want to explore, I should say. And my therapist, who is quite a spiritual person, does work with her own work with the Shipibo people in the Peruvian Amazon and ayahuasca.

Mm-hm.

Will sort of say a little incantation and light a candle and give me a bowl that has, generally speaking, a couple of chocolates in it that have ground mushrooms in them. For me, I'm in a place right now where I'm doing higher doses, which are not necessarily better. You have to figure out what dose is right with you. I would say when I started, it was 2.5, grams maybe was enough, but now maybe I'll start with 2.5 or 3 grams. We'll talk a little bit more after having the chocolate. At a certain point, she'll have been watching the clock and say, maybe it's time for you to go inside now and just relax. And that's when I put the eyeshades and the headphone on, and there's a pillow and a blanket, and I lay down and I just wait to see what materializes. And it almost is like You know, the Star Trek transporter materialization, just little flickers until something comes into coherence. And it might be a person, it might be an experience, it might be something fantastical. But I am encouraged by her to not only just focus on the narrative, which is what that would be, but where I'm feeling it in my body. And again, not trusting your mind as much. as trusting your body and where you're feeling it and what you're feeling. And then about 45 minutes or so into an hour in, there's a window where you can up the dosage. And so I might take another couple of grams there. There's— I think it was Terence McKenna who called over 5 grams like a heroic dose. And I think that is quite a disservice because I think people think, oh, I got to be a hero, I have to do this.

And Right.

That's it. You can have a perfectly good day on less. You can go deeper and certainly more emotionally intense on more. And then, it's just a bit of a roller coaster for the next 3 or 4 hours or so of different experiences. Sometimes, I've sat up screaming in pain once in a while just because I thought I was in pain. laughed a lot. I've cried uncontrollably a lot. I'll go to the bathroom and she'll ask me if I really need to go to the bathroom or I'm trying to avoid something that I shouldn't be avoiding. And I think that's the power of having someone there to guide you, to help you understand that—

Right.

You're still on Earth, right? You're just seeing things differently. You need to pay serious attention to what you're doing today. Don't go on a lark and spend time in the bathroom if you're just trying to avoid something. And then a gentle comedown where the world starts to piece itself back together again, where the veil closes. And generally I'm pretty tired. And at this point it's, you know, 5 o'clock maybe. And, and then I just sit there for the next hour or so collecting my thoughts and not necessarily trying to make sense out of anything yet, just sitting with the experience. She'll make me a cup of tea, blessedly, and that's it. And, and some days it it works well and there's a lot to talk about. And that days after, sometimes it's more elusive. And I tend to— some people journal, I tend to sketch. I draw instead of journal because I somehow, for me, the words— and maybe that's being a writer and an editor— I, I start to be too artful with the language. And I think sketching to me is the better path. And And that'll be it till the next time. And the next time is at best a month away. You build a tolerance. So, you know, the psilocybin attaches to your serotonin receptors and it takes time for that to be flushed out.

Mm-hmm.

And you need to reset before you can take more, right? And so it's at least a month between journeys for me. People say you have to have at least 2 weeks. I do a month and I do it strategically. Streakily, there are sometimes where I'll do it 3 or 4, 5 months in a row, and then I'll take a 6-month break. Or I'll switch medicines. I'll do MDMA instead of psilocybin to see a different angle on what the psilocybin did. And that's kind of how it works.

Well, you've certainly motivated me to try it with a guide or a therapist. Like most people, I've done it just recreationally. Of course, Never before a big event where I had to function, but I've done it in the past and always enjoyed it. But yeah, I think the time is right to really take advantage of everything that can be had from it with that kind of professional guidance. And it seems like the return on investment for business owners and entrepreneurs is real. I mean, if you can improve your mental health, that's a win. If you can improve your neuroplasticity, which entrepreneurs always need, also a big win. Being a better leader, just leading your teams better, it seems like the ROI is there for sure.

I would say the biggest— really quickly, the biggest thing or sort of reason I've heard not to do it is, I don't have the time. I don't have a day to give to this, right? And obviously entrepreneurs are incredibly busy.

Sure.

But I fully believe that day has, as you said, an ROI that is so much more significant than the 6 or 8 hours you actually spend there.

Yeah. Well, this has been really helpful, I think very informative. And if people are interested in learning more about you and what you do, where can they find you?

Yeah, on LinkedIn is the best way, or babyrobot.co, which is my new company. And whoever reaches out, I'm happy to talk to them about this, more of this, or what It's like having gotten to watch people like you, John, and the fastest growing companies in America as the editor-in-chief of Inc. Any of that stuff is great to me.

Awesome. Well, Scott, thank you so much. This has been really informative. Appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to the Total Entrepreneur Mind Body Spirit podcast. If you liked what you heard or heard something interesting today, please give us a like, share a comment, or better yet, subscribe to the podcast. Thank you.