Transcript

Intro (00:00:33)
I am the experiment. You can write your own story. Not stop trying and don't give into the fear.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:00:38)
So I often say to patients, as a physician, of all the things I've learned in medicine, recommendations I could give you, I think that the most important thing for the health of your mind, body and spirit is for me to teach you meditation, or for you to learn meditation. So I'm trying with everybody to help them develop a mindfulness practice, start their day with it. If they can meditate twice a day, if they can. And I think it's the most important thing you can do.

Justin McMillen (00:01:30)
How long have you been? I interrupted you, but how long have you been meditating?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:01:32)
I'm 30 years, for 30 years I've had a daily practice. Have I meditated every day for 30 years? No. There are periods where you're on it and then you're off it. You fall off, whatever, and there's periods where your practice is really strong.

Justin McMillen (00:01:30)
30 years?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:01:57)
But I've had the intention to have a daily practice for 30 years. Mostly, part of that, or a big part of that, is that if you have a daily practice, you want to have a period. If you're doing interval practice and you're really trying to evolve, you're going to do a period every year where you go deep. So you do a retreat. For me, that started in the tradition of vipassana. So ten days in silence. When I started, every year I would do ten days in silence. My third year, I was so jazzed by it, I did 21 days in silence. Okay. Mentor's mind, do three months in silence. Well, two months in silence, once a year.

Justin McMillen (00:02:32)
My best mentor. Spends two months in silence, at this rock meditation center every year.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:02:51)
Yeah. What do you, what do you, how long have you been doing that?

Justin McMillen (00:02:54)
How many retreats have you done?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:02:59)
But, you know, the intention was to do one a year. I've had some years where I haven't done an extended retreat, but of the 30 years I try to do a retreat every year. Last year was in October. I did an eight day retreat, the Maranasati retreat at Spirit Rock, on contemplating death.

Justin McMillen (00:03:29)
And it was something else. Wow. That's incredible. That's, one thing that I might have said this before, but there's a book called Tools of Titans, and it's, a guy named Tim Ferriss, and he went around and interviewed the most successful people in the world in different arenas. And one of the common threads with all of them was that they all meditate. CEOs, athletes, they all have some sort of meditation practice. So if people are listening, it might be something to consider. If you have a goal to go somewhere, become something, maybe meditation is part of the recipe or one of the ingredients in the recipe.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:04:11)
No, I would not say maybe. I drop the word maybe. I'd say for sure it is. Your eyes are looking into the outside world, and they think that all the answers, then the rest of the mother that's going to give you food as an infant, it's all outside yourself. So there's all this focus outside yourself on what you're going to get, how much money you're going to get, you know, who's going to give you the answer, what book are you going to read. It's all out there. Okay. What about the internal world? Okay, so I did a little thing with you. Let's go inside, pay attention to the world that's inside, because if you have an intuition or a spirit or a soul in your body, you might as well access that. Allegedly it knows your life purpose.

Justin McMillen (00:04:33)
Oh, sure.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:04:35)
Okay. So maybe we should be paying attention to that every day, listening in to the intuition every day. I've often said, I think the most important tool a physician has is a microphone.

Justin McMillen (00:04:33)
I was going to say something about your, yeah, that's what it is.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:04:59)
To I think the most important tool a physician has is their intuition. Okay. How much do you learn in medical school or a psychiatry residency about accessing your intuition?

Justin McMillen (00:04:59)
Zero?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:05:25)
Okay. It's your most important tool. Why aren't they teaching that?

Justin McMillen (00:05:25)
Do you think it's, do you think it's because they don't have a frame to put it in that makes it scientific?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:05:25)
The intensive focus on evidence based medicine. I mean, medicine has always had some, as far as I know, some kind of research, some kind of like, how do we figure out, you know, whether this plant is going to help us or not? There's hopefully been some kind of scientific approach, but modern science has taken many years to develop. I don't know when they started sitting at benches and looking at stuff in petri dishes, and I don't know when the microscope was developed, but there's been an ascending thing, and then there's evidence based medicine, and that means that we're going to try to provide the evidence basis for what we're doing. That trend, I don't know when it started. We could pull out a phone and ask, when did evidence based medicine start? But then we started saying, hey, some of the stuff that we're doing makes sense, but we didn't really do the research to find out if a coronary artery bypass graft, or taking out a woman's uterus, really does fix the problem, what have you. Wait, I hear about you, we've been talking for years. We've known each other for at least 12 years, I think.

Justin McMillen (00:06:38)
Now, I'm quite a while, but. Okay. So if you say so. We sort of just went down a chute and we're moving fast, and I want to make sure the people listening know who you are.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:06:53)
Oh, shit. Yeah. So this is Dr. Gary Dylewski. And maybe you could introduce yourself. You're a physician. You've been practicing, an osteopathic physician. Okay, what does that mean compared to an MD? Okay, osteopathy versus MD. So I'm a holistic psychiatrist. I've been in practice, this year starting in August, next month will be my 30th year in practice. My motto is, I'd rather teach a skill than prescribe a pill. But somehow my spirit got me involved in specializing in getting people off of psych meds. I'd rather teach a skill than prescribe a pill, but I will prescribe. Okay, I will give people meds at the beginning of treatment before they can, you know, get a meditation practice going, or so that they can get out of bed if they're so depressed, or if they're horribly suicidal and, you know, they're at risk. Let's say psychosis. If they're psychotic, let's give you an antipsychotic. And even though it's a little bit of a blunt tool, I often say, let's beat you over the head with an antipsychotic sledgehammer, just so those thoughts that are driving you batty will calm down, so that you can get some sleep, so that we can start to work more holistically.

Justin McMillen (00:08:07)
Okay, so you're a Western trained doctor, osteopathic medicine, holistic doctor, holistic psychiatrist. But you practice medicine in a different way. And we have some things here that are part of understanding you. We won't talk about this yet, but can you explain, is this how you dress at work every day? What do you wear?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:08:30)
I take Wednesdays off, and I got started doing sculpture classes when Covid started. Okay. And we'll get into my belief that you have a committee in your head. This sculpture, my first sculpture I did is called The Committee In Your Head. My artist archetype birthed itself in my mid-fifties, or however old I was when the coronavirus started. I had no idea I had an artist in me. My handwriting is, you know, sloppy. The nurses in the hospital always said, well, it's not pretty, but I can read it, so it's legible, but it's a mess. And although my mom was a painter, I never thought of myself as an artist. And all of a sudden, I've been doing sculpture ever since.

Justin McMillen (00:09:22)
And you're good. I mean, this is super impressive. And I've seen some of your stone work.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:09:22)
Yeah. It's not about being good, but I love how committed you are to it. It's like, if I want to talk to you on a Wednesday, I'm going to sculpture. And you just got back from, you were in Colorado, right? I was just in Colorado for eight days doing a sculpture symposium, but I was just at my weekly sculpture class, and I was so knee deep in trying to get this thing to look this way, and channel the, I'm doing a three part thing that is trying to, well, if we want to get into what I'm sculpting, we can. I think it's part of who you are and I think sculpture, project. But let's do D.O. versus MD first. Okay. So a lot of people don't know, okay. Yeah, please. So to make it simple, although it's not exactly, right, both are medical, they're both exactly licensed physicians, licensed to practice medicine in whatever state they're in. Okay. So osteopathic medical schools produce D.O.s, doctor of osteopathy. Allopathic medical schools produce M.D.s. Okay, what's the difference? I'm going to say that a D.O. is an M.D. plus a chiropractor, plus somebody whose medical school is holistically based in philosophy. There's more to the osteopathic philosophy, but M.D. plus chiropractor plus holistic philosophy, that's a D.O. So we come in.

Justin McMillen (00:10:35)
Are they, we can't use funds because, can you tell me how many medical schools there are in America? Because they've exploded, even snubbing.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:11:10)
No, no, we are still the poor, beaten stepchild of medicine, just like psychiatry. War between the two types. They respect each other. I mean, they're both licensed in the same way, right?

Justin McMillen (00:11:10)
They both have the same. Yes. It's come on even playing field, it.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:11:10)
I don't know, because it's been 30 years since I've been in medical school. It used to be a little bit easier to get into a D.O. medical school. But then again, they took the people who were more humanistic or less, like, brilliant. You know, when I made the grades and I got the score on the MCAT, me, for example, I'm not some, you know, amazing intellect. I'm a scrapper. But I have the ability to relate to people. And, you know, I have more, I have different people skills. And I kind of, put me in a research lab and say, okay, no, you don't. Do you deal with people, or like pathologists, put them down in the lab, because they're not always great at relating to people. They should be in the lab doing that thing instead of giving somebody a cancer diagnosis, or trying to help somebody who's suicidal, or, you know, having a mental health crisis, that takes a certain amount of, I don't know, people skills.

Justin McMillen (00:12:24)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's D.O. versus M.D. Okay. So, and this is part of why, I mean, I could interview doctors all day long. There's so many traditional doctors. But you come at medicine in a different way. And from the first time I met you, I was like, who the hell is this guy? Because you got kind of a big personality. There's a lot going on with you. And I'm a Gemini.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:12:46)
What's that? I'm a Gemini too.

Justin McMillen (00:12:46)
Yeah. And you are for real, too, because you're actually, you have all the traits of somebody who can be very rigid and structured. You know, I got to go, I got my schedule, I got this, I got that, you're just like, toot toot. And then you also have this other side that's deeply intuitive, and constantly thinking about the edge of what we understand, which is part of why I like you. When I say understand, I mean people work to understand things through science. And once you get out to those edges, then they just declare magic. And you go out there and you dance in that area, learn about it, you bring things back and you apply it to your work, and it's highly effective. So that's my interpretation of you. I love the fact that you, I've seen you prescribe medication tons of times. I mean, you're not anti-meds, but you have an incredible ability to, go ahead.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:13:38)
I think the philosophy about psych meds is in need of evolution. I think it's riddled with reductionistic, neuro-biological reductionism. You know, God, everything is neuroscience, and it's all about the brain and what region of the brain. And okay, it's great, I'm glad we're studying that. But the mind, I think, exists in every cell of the body. So if we're just sitting here doing scans of the brain, are we going to understand how the mind functions? I mean, what is it, we have more serotonin receptors in our gut than in our brain. So should we do scans of the gut too?

Justin McMillen (00:14:25)
Are they thinking they're always starting to do that? Is that a thing? Like people analyzing gut biome?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:14:25)
Oh, definitely, definitely. You know, the gut microbiome is another one of the bandwagons.

Justin McMillen (00:14:46)
If we get into talking about bandwagons, which I am certainly interested in talking about, what is it, is this gut biome thing a bandwagon? Is that a new frontier, or is it something everybody, I don't know that everybody's jumped on it. Is it still fringe?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:14:46)
No, no, no, I don't think it's fringe anymore. Okay, the recognition of the importance of, how many bacteria are in our gut and how important it is, and how it communicates with the brain, I mean, there's burgeoning, just amazing, super interesting research that's happening. And then the bandwagon of probiotics rolls into town.

Justin McMillen (00:15:09)
Yeah, gut microbiome, that's, you know, it's a bandwagon itself.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:15:39)
Okay, everything's going to be fixed with the gut microbiome. Okay, and it's all shit. There's, I mean, I think there's a lot of people, everyone's doing parasite cleanses, all this stuff, a billion dollar, multibillion dollar industry that is supplements and, you know, probiotics that you take orally that don't make it even to your gut because they get killed in your stomach. And yeah, I mean, yes, there's a lot of bullshit. So my thing about bandwagons, I used to, when I was young and trying to figure out how to do holistic psychiatry, just out of my residency program, I would hear this thing and, oh, valerian root for anxiety, I'm gonna jump on the bandwagon, and then I'd prescribe it for a bunch of people, or, you know, test the neurotransmitters in your urine, all that makes sense. And then we can give a supplement program to balance your neurotransmitters, let me do that. And I jumped on every frickin bandwagon because they all made sense holistically. And then after a while, you know, let's take probiotics, I filled my refrigerator in my office with a bunch of probiotics, and I know the strains to give to people and whatever. And I sell a bunch of probiotics to people. And then I find out, you know, however many years later, that they're not doing anything to the gut microbiome, they're just, you know, getting burned up in the stomach acid. And I'm like, oh my God, I would feel bad that I sold that much, you know. I wasn't a big supplement seller, but, oh, let me guilt carry a few things, like fish oils and probiotics, and I'm like, wow, I sold a lot of that before we really had long term data.

Justin McMillen (00:17:24)
Yeah, to be fair, fish oil, definitely, there's so much data on it, it's good, I mean, fish oil is amazing.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:17:24)
And then, probiotics, fish oil is not amazing for everything it's being touted for, that's part of the bandwagon thing. And then, probiotics, I don't know about that, but I do know that eating fermented foods seems to do good things for the gut. Yeah, allegedly. But do we have any real double blind, placebo controlled trials about eating kimchi? No, because who's going to pay for that? Okay, so we do a lot based on anecdotal evidence and patient reports, and somebody had an amazing thing, and then everybody's taking it, and then we're taking it for everything. We're taking it for longevity, to improve your immune system. And, you know, it's for your skin, and it's going to improve your marriage too.

Justin McMillen (00:18:13)
Okay, well, come on now, fish oil can't do all of that.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:18:13)
Fish oil, the studies, I'm looking, because Claude helped me with this, it said, you know, it was good for a couple of things, cardiovascular benefit, the whole, fish oil for everything. Real benefits for triglycerides, oversold for cognition and mood.

Justin McMillen (00:18:40)
Well, that's what I prescribed it for, was cognition and mood.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:18:40)
Okay. So I mean, I don't think we need to go into the studies, but I got stuff on antioxidant mega-dosing, that's a bandwagon, fish oils, vitamin D mega-dosing, probiotics as the blanket fix, adrenal fatigue, you know, everyone's got adrenal fatigue, not recognized as a diagnosis but a durable functional medicine bandwagon. Okay, detoxes and cleanses, no organ needs help detoxing that your liver and kidneys aren't already doing.

Justin McMillen (00:19:11)
Oh, do it really? So I don't know, does that mean we shouldn't do detox? I've done a ton of them.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:19:11)
Okay, how about gluten free for everybody and not just people who have celiac disease. And then it went into NAD. And, you know, we could talk about peptide therapies, because there is no frickin human data, as far as I know, on BPC-157, the Wolverine, the, you know, GHK, it's all animal data.

Justin McMillen (00:19:34)
Yeah, it's in human efficacy data. I remember asking my orthopedic surgeon when I blew up my knee skiing this year, I'm like, hey dude, I'm taking the Wolverine. Somebody got it for me, okay, I don't want, I mean, BPC-157 plus TB-500. And I'm like, should I take it? And he's like, well, I mean, very reasonable, orthopedic surgeon who's a cool surfer dude, and he was like, dude, there is no human studies on that whatsoever. I've had some anecdotal data of patients coming in and saying that it's helping them.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:20:24)
I don't really know that it is. You can go ahead and take it, but we don't really know, it could do something harmful. Peptides are a bandwagon. They come out before any long term data is done and everybody's taking it because it makes sense. Oh, it's just peptides, I'm just giving your body basic building blocks. It needs peptides, right? And then all of a sudden everybody's taking it for everything, and somebody's got a business, and the hype and the supplements are way outpacing the data that's being done on them. And is it a big deal? It's gotten worse since the internet, though, because the internet allows it to just go crazy, right? Because people are sharing their stories. And, you know, one though, that I think was valuable is fasting. There's no money in fasting, there's definitely research on fasting. And because of people having anecdotal reports online about the benefits of fasting, that's where intermittent fasting really took, you know, a big launch. But I don't know that that's a bandwagon, because people have been fasting all the way back to ancient India. I don't know the history of fasting. I know that Andrew Weil, the godfather of complementary and alternative medicine, was recommending, back when he did his book Spontaneous Healing, taking a fast, letting your GI system rest one day a week, just have liquids on that day, don't eat any food. I don't know when his book came out, we could google search when Andrew Weil would come up. That is when I started hearing about fasting. Okay, it's the same time when I started hearing about detox and cleanse. We live in a toxic society with all the pollution around, so we should cleanse our body, you know. I used to cleanse every quarter, once a quarter I'd do a juice cleanse, or try to do a three day cleanse, and I was using my body to experiment with cleanses.

Justin McMillen (00:22:23)
How about the one with the lemon juice and the maple syrup? The master cleanse.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:22:23)
Lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, you know, that ten day, I forget what it's called, master cleanse. I mean, I've done that a couple of times, but I was always trying to lose weight, because, you know, let's lose some weight. And is there any data on these cleanses and what they do? Probably not. It's all anecdotal information. And then, you know, Mother's Market or the health food stores got a whole section on detoxes. And do we have any idea whether you're just wasting your money? I can tell you, over my career of trying stuff using my body, I have taken so many supplements, thinking, oh my God, the great next greatest thing, cognitive enhancers, all this stuff. And then I started learning about, you know, it was clear to me that you could test vitamin D in the blood, and you knew if you took vitamin D, your vitamin D level went up. But then there'd be all these other supplements I would take, and I'm like, I have no idea if that makes it past my stomach acid. If somebody had been keeping a tally and told me, hey Gary, I've been watching how much money you spent over the years on supplements, and you probably spent $150,000 on supplements that never made it past your stomach acid, I'd be like, okay, that was dumb. And well, whatever, it's the process of learning. Along the way, we learn, it's true, that when you get hyped up on the bandwagon and it sounds good and it makes sense, but you don't really ask the question, can you take a blood level on it? And did it make it past your stomach acid? Okay, well, I don't know. Can we learn that as a society, just slow the heck down? Well, now the supplement industry has got to get on the bandwagon to see how much frickin money they can make from it. And they push things forward here where, you know, corporate America comes in, and the profit motive, and all of a sudden we don't really care if it harms you. We just want to make some money. Now we're going to put in a bunch of fillers and we're not going to test this crap, we're just going to put it in there. It's unregulated, that's unregulated industry for sure.

Justin McMillen (00:24:24)
So how do we protect ourselves? Do we need to protect ourselves from bandwagons?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:24:44)
I think so, I mean, it depends on your karma. If your karma is that you're going to get hurt by jumping on the bandwagon, well, that's your karma.

Justin McMillen (00:24:44)
Okay, how many bandwagons can I get hurt by?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:24:44)
None, I don't think so, really. I wasted a lot of money on it.

Justin McMillen (00:24:44)
Is wasting money a hurt?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:24:44)
That's a kind of a hurt, financial hurt. But there are, you know, I'm sure there are many horror stories of somebody who took frickin methylene blue or something that's not really been studied and had something bad happen to them.

Justin McMillen (00:25:07)
Methylene blue has been studied. It's used in emergency rooms for cyanosis, right?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:25:07)
I don't know, I just heard about methylene blue, carbon dioxide poisoning. I think because it does allow for the, I mean, I think the methylene blue that people take is mostly not pharmaceutical grade, but there is methylene blue that's used in the ER for people who have carbon monoxide poisoning. Okay, so for the last 13 years I've been going to the Integrative Medicine for Mental Health conference. I went to their first one. Okay, now it's huge, okay. Every year there's this new thing, what's the new bandwagon, well, it's inflammation is the cause of everything, what was that, last year's, mitochondria, it's all about mitochondria.

Justin McMillen (00:25:54)
You see, Gary, how many times have you heard somebody talk about methylene blue at the Integrative Medicine for Mental Health conference?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:26:18)
Zero, I just heard about it for the first time this year. Who do I hear about it from? Well, there was a patient that was referred in that was taking it. I'm the medical director of a naturopathic clinic in the office that I have in Michigan, and she was talking about it, and I'm like, oh, thanks. This methylene blue thing, and one of the cases that came in, you know, somebody we know, the person had taken it and they were bipolar, manic, psychotic, and we had to figure out whether it was methylene blue that caused it, because it was one of the wacky things he was self-medicating with. It can cause it because it causes a change in the reuptake of serotonin. And that's studied. In fact, if you read about it, it says you can't take this with an SSRI, or it can make the effect more, and it can screw people up. You can actually become, what's that poisoning where you can be poisoned by serotonin?

Justin McMillen (00:26:59)
Serotonin syndrome.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:26:59)
Yeah, you can get serotonin syndrome from it. So the combination of methylene blue with SSRIs is messing with people. It's a weird one, because it actually does have a pharmaceutical grade, and it's, I think it's controlled by the FDA in one specific type of use case, but I don't want to detract from that here.

Justin McMillen (00:27:22)
You know, I mean, you're not a holistic psychiatrist or a holistic medical practitioner, and you know more about methylene blue than I do.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:27:42)
Way to go, I'm just, podcast, but no, it's interesting that you know that much about it.

Justin McMillen (00:27:42)
The way I took it. Oh well, there you go, you researched that. Yeah, here's one, cold plunges, an ice bath as a cure-all for inflammation and everything, mental health. I was just looking at, that's right under methylene blue on my list of bandwagons.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:28:06)
That bandwagon got really, well, it was kicked off by a bunch of things. But then there was the head of addiction medicine at Stanford, Anna Lembke, she wrote a book called Dopamine Nation. And in that book she talks about, she refers to a few studies where ice baths, for two minutes, an hour, four minutes, an ice bath increases dopamine levels in the blood by 350%. And what's interesting about it is it doesn't just, it doesn't just shoot up. Cocaine's like 200%, but it's like a spike and then a drop. This is like a slow incline, and then it hangs out, and then it slowly comes down over four hours. So why that's valuable is if you have somebody coming off of, you know, they're detoxing off of, say, an opioid or something. Yeah, the inability to experience pleasure, and the things previously found pleasurable, for the audience, that's called anhedonia, that's a big psych word. But the use case, though, so she refers to a patient she had who was coming off cocaine, and he used ice baths as a way to manage his dopamine as he was doing it. So it's very holistic. Yeah, interesting things is like some holistic stuff will never be studied because there's no money in it, but that doesn't mean this isn't, the bandwagon thing is interesting, never been studied. There's a lot of wacky psychic stuff, and psychic abilities and all this stuff's hard to prove. That's studied by the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I give money too, so it's not that it'll never be studied, some people really believe in it and will give money to study it. The Institute of Noetic Sciences, I think that place was started by Edgar Mitchell, he's one of the people who traveled to the moon for space. Right, so, yeah, there's, I mean, there's validity. I think the point though, is that you've got what pharma is finding, oh, this is a molecule we can make a billion dollars off of, and so they're running down a road. And then there's this whole bunch of other things, it can't be, like peptides is interesting, because hang on one second with what you just said, I'm going to just throw this out. When I was preparing, Eli Lilly just paid 2.5 billion for 5-MeO-DMT, I heard about this.

Justin McMillen (00:30:19)
Okay, but anyway, I just, oh my God, you're talking about, because we should be talking, we should talk about plant medicine a little bit. That is on our list, shamanism and psychedelics, and I did do a little bit on the psychedelic bandwagon. I did ask a lot about that, I don't know, in the midst of all the papers flying around, I may have lost that page.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:30:46)
So the interesting thing is that in order for pharma to make money on drugs, they have to be able to control the intellectual property. So they have to create a molecule, they have to be able to control it. But right now, bioidentical stuff is really hard to patent, so it's all generic, so there's no money in it, so they're not studying it. And then any kind of practices, there's no money in that either. So the thought is, okay, with these practices, is it that maybe nothing outside of pharma works? That's one potential option, that only pharma, only man-made molecules, are effective in helping people. That's a possibility, probably not probable. Another option is that the only things we hear about are man-made molecules by pharma, because they're marketed, and there's a lot of money behind them, but that there are other things that work really well, but because there's no money behind them and no one's pushing to have them available to the public, we don't have awareness of them. So then there's another layer, which is you've got all these influencers and stuff that are pumping out information now, and within that realm, there's people making money off of unregulated substances like supplements and peptides and things that are going to make claims that aren't true. But that doesn't mean that there isn't stuff over on this side that isn't super effective, fasting maybe. Or maybe some peptides, or, I don't know, maybe something big pharma produces, or something like a medicine for diabetes or for cancer. You know, maybe meditation is the most powerful thing we can do, but there's no money in it unless you're teaching meditation. But there's a lot of research happening on meditation, ever since Jon Kabat-Zinn and, you know, his work at that hospital at UMass, where he developed MBSR. And you know that story, that Jon Kabat-Zinn was over in India with all the doses, and whatever, getting all the good spiritual knowledge from the East and bringing it back to the West. And he, who's he like, Jon Kabat-Zinn is the developer of, he's one, doctor of a PhD, he's a PhD. Okay, though the term mindfulness came from him, okay, and he developed MBSR, which stands for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. So he took all the Buddhist Hindu tabs off of meditation, he called it mindfulness, and he stuck it into UMass Hospital in this eight week course called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, as a stress reduction program. And then they started doing research on it. So all the doctors in the hospital, like, I got this really tough patient, go to the stressors, they're just like, I don't know what to do with this person, they threw him into Jon Kabat-Zinn's program, and they taught him mindfulness for eight weeks. You know, body scan and mindfulness of physical sensations, and walking meditation, all the stuff that they learned, they packaged it into an eight week program, and they put out a ton of research about it. And then all of a sudden, the Dalai Lama is like, oh yeah, we should join with Western neuroscientists and start getting brain scans. This whole explosion of research around meditation started happening. And at the same time, neuroscience is having a freaking heyday, it's coming into the world like, oh my God, if we can control the brain, then, you know, we win. Like it's all about the brain.

Justin McMillen (00:34:29)
Wow, I didn't know that, and let's scan the brain, and it's going to tell us everything. You got that book over there.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:34:29)
Yeah, so I didn't, I had no idea. So that's a scenario where there was no money in it, but people decided to study the bandwagon.

Justin McMillen (00:34:48)
What do you think causes people to study it?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:34:48)
And that bandwagon stayed, and it infiltrated itself into many universities and many hospitals that now have MBSR programs. Okay, that's teaching a skill, not prescribing a pill. And you keep that skill with you for the rest of your life, and you're like, oh my God, this is so helpful, now I know how to reduce my own stress. I have a relationship with my breath, I have a relationship with my body because I body scanned it. I mean, not everybody that did an eight week MBSR course sticks with it, but, oh my God, is it great, holistic medicine? Is it a bandwagon? Then when does it, we did, it started as a bandwagon.

Justin McMillen (00:35:16)
Well, what would be a bandwagon versus just a practice?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:35:36)
Or does something have to become evidence-based to not be a bandwagon anymore? Every decade or so, a legitimate finding gets oversimplified, marketed hard, and sold as a cure-all before the nuance catches up, the pattern repeats: promising animal or mechanistic study leads to media amplification, the supplement industry then jumps in, customer testimonials replace data. Eventually the evidence either matures and the thing is found real. MBSR has a narrow use, it's more than just, it doesn't work for everything, or it quietly fades into obscurity. Okay, your value-add is naming the pattern and teaching the listener to spot it in real time.

Justin McMillen (00:36:06)
It's what I should do about this bandwagon thing, so how do we do that? That's, that was literally, so Claude and I are on the same page, as a closet third party in the room, because I was going to ask you, for people listening, how can you identify if something's a bandwagon? It's two parts to this question: how do you identify, hey, something's a bandwagon, and also, should we abandon every bandwagon?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:36:25)
No, you watch it from the roadside, you don't hop on it. Okay, after this, is the nice thing, if I'm now on 30 years of experience as a holistic psychiatrist, and I've learned to not jump on the bandwagon, so I just sit back and I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. Okay, now some of them, I just, I tried the bandwagon of the Wolverine for my knee.

Justin McMillen (00:36:48)
Oh, shall I blow out my knee?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:37:08)
So let's, I don't know, I'll give it a try because I'm an experimenter, I want to see, you know, in my own body, what does a GLP-1, Lipitor, whatever, do. And, you know, can I lose some weight doing it? So, you know, I will try some things, but every bandwagon, I'm not going to hop on and give everybody peptides until I know that they're safe and there's some frickin human data. It's different for experimenting on yourself versus experimenting on patients, draw the line there. Okay.

Justin McMillen (00:37:31)
Do you think there will ever be human trials on peptides?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:37:45)
What's the history of stuff that big pharma can't make money off of? I mean, big pharma is making money off of Ozempic, Zepbound, or Mounjaro. You know what, though, interesting, fun fact, some people may know this, they don't have a patent on the actual molecule, they have a patent on the delivery method. It's the pen itself that injects it, they have the IP on. So all these peptides can be reproduced, and they can't do anything about it, but we may see this push itself back to a Supreme Court type situation. Do you know the history of why peptides can't be done at a compounding pharmacy, or why they can't be patented? So there was a guy who discovered the breast cancer gene, and he wanted to make a test, and only a pharma company or testing company wanted to patent this test and say it was just theirs, we found it, we want to charge people to discover it. And it was challenged, and it was deemed that he couldn't do it, because it was part of the human being, and you can't patent something that's part of the human being. So now that's the case law that people are sort of leaning on with peptides. And so Eli Lilly and all these folks have no idea what to do, especially because, like, for example, GLP-1s, which there is significant research done on because of the delivery method, and there's enough to pass FDA scrutiny. Right, well, maybe I don't know how that got out there so fast, to be honest with you. I hear about thyroid tumors, and I'm like, what's that? And, you know, this is the thing, when the bandwagon comes out, then all of a sudden you're like, oh my God, these people are having these babies with three heads, or whatever. They're having these side effects. Gosh, I wonder.

Justin McMillen (00:39:37)
Gary, that's, and that's why I'm generally, evidence-based medicine in Western medicine, they, and psychiatry doesn't do long term studies. They're not like, well, let's study Prozac and what it does to your neurotransmitter systems ten years out. Oh, now 20 years out, we're like, oh, we're having withdrawal symptoms, oh well, duh.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:40:00)
Why don't you find that out ahead of time by waiting for the long term studies?

Justin McMillen (00:40:00)
How long do you wait for a bandwagon? I've been thinking, what, like ten years, you watch it.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:40:00)
Oh God, what, are you stuck in the mud? Come on, get on board.

Justin McMillen (00:40:00)
Well, 20% of your life is done at that point, like as a physician, you're like, oh shit.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:40:17)
I waited ten years and now. But the way the bandwagons, I think in my experience work is, I'm going to guess one in ten fits the hype, that's my guess. That you spot, and that one stays, the bandwagon is still rolling, okay, it's not a bandwagon anymore, it's infiltrated itself into hospitals, whatever, because it's got staying power. I think calorie restriction is definitely, or fasting, calorie restriction, not just for losing weight, but the idea of a day off a week. We know this, there was, I think 1921, there was a guy who was treating a patient with epilepsy, and she fasted for some reason, it was at Johns Hopkins or some hospital like that, super long time ago. Fasting, she was having seizures every few hours, fasting in a young girl, fasting made the seizures go away. So he created the ketogenic diet, as a way to mimic fasting. And now we have, I was telling someone the other day, we actually have a shitload of research about ketogenic diet, this is a great way science works. Some anecdotal something happens, or like, what the heck just happened over there, let's study it, it's so great. It's awesome. And then in animal studies, not well, maybe in humans too, I don't know, but calorie restriction does elongate animal, rodent life. That's, and we know that, what is the proportion that produces it, which is that your body goes into a state of cleaning up the zombie cells, right, and you go through autophagy, where you start getting rid of all the old bad proteins. They know that's true, but you can actually do a longitudinal study and say, these people did, in fact, live longer, because that won't happen for a long time.

Justin McMillen (00:42:00)
How do, who is this, who is the committee member in you that knows all of this stuff and is interested in this, the science and whatever? Would you give a name to it?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:42:19)
He's curious as hell, yeah, but he's really interested in science and social trends.

Justin McMillen (00:42:19)
Would you call him a social scientist? Would you call him a?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:42:19)
No, I think, committee member, just, can you clarify that term so people understand what you mean, and then we can move into this in a minute? Okay, so, and then I'll get back to your question around the committee member. Over the course of time, it's become clear to me that people have a committee in their head. I often, you know, I call them archetypes, or sometimes actors on the stage of the play of your life. You got 12 people sitting at a boardroom table in your head, and they all got a different vote. There's somebody who's CEO, somebody who's CFO. And these are all primary archetypes that are running the show, running your show. And then there's, you know, I'm trying to figure out, what would Carl Jung call archetypes, and how they're functioning in people's minds. There's a big trend in psychotherapy, IFS, Internal Family Systems. Richard Schwartz is the guy who runs that thing. Back when I was in meditation groups, in my residency program, the great mentor of mine who led those meditation groups for psychiatry residents and medical students, he would bring in these, because he knew all these famous people in the spiritual world, he would bring in these famous people. And, you know, one of the guys developed this technique called Big Mind. And in Big Mind, there was this thing where you're meditating, in your eye, basically communicating with these different parts of yourself. And I started looking at my patients, and at the same time, I had my new age wacko was on the stage too, and he would always look at this other different stuff. And I loved Caroline Myss, your new age wacko, a committee member, I remember, it's the shadow, I think it's the shadow side. All committee members have a shadow side, and that's shadow work, which is really hard to do. I think my new age wacko is the shadow of my seeker archetype, who has guided me down the spiritual path for years. Okay, keep going, Caroline Myss. So she's a psychic who was tied with Norm Shealy, Harvard neurosurgeon, and he brought her into his practice. She's a super interesting woman. But I followed her books when they first started coming out, and I found them super fascinating. She was the first one to make this correlation between the seven Christian sacraments, the Jewish Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the seven chakras, and that they all had these same things associated with, you know, the third chakra and the third sacrament. And I'm like, oh my God, she called that book The Anatomy of the Spirit, and she was sort of suggesting your spirit's got an anatomy. I'm like, oh, that's super cool. Well, she then came into this understanding that we all have a certain archetype, she said we have 12, and that we all have four in common: the child, the victim, the prostitute, the saboteur. Prostitute, not about whether you're going to have sex or money, it's about how you're going to make it through the world. Okay, you got to prostitute yourself to corporate America and spend all your time with them and not with your family, just to make money, and that's the prostitute archetype. When she said we all have these four in common, I started looking at my patients, and I'm like, sure enough, who is on the stage presenting to me? Is the victim, about their childhood trauma or whatever it is, the saboteur is often on the stage, the child is often on the stage, and not always the prostitute, because not everybody's looking for their life purpose, they're just dealing with the trauma. They have three out of four, those are pretty negative, prostitute, victim, saboteur. And the victim is what you do with what's been done to you. Archetype is the one who turns your trauma into gold. Okay, yes, the word victim is negative, and when you're operating out of the shadow victim, it's bad news. God, dude, you're such a victim, get off of it and start doing something with this thing that happened to you, because why would you be a victim to your own karma? Okay, the saboteur, that's really negative. Yeah, the shadow of the saboteur is self-sabotage. In French, the word saboteur means to destroy. So, my theory about breakdowns and breakthroughs and the three circles of transformation, okay, who orchestrates the breakdown? It's the frickin saboteur, let's come in and destroy this old broken paradigm so that we can have a breakthrough and get into the new paradigm. Well, thank you, saboteur, for destroying the old way of being. I often use the analogy: you have a building and it's full of rats and crack dealers, and it's just bad news, it's an eyesore for the neighborhood, and it's creating a lot of crime. And the city comes in and says, we got to do something about it. Well, you bring in the saboteur, there's wrecking balls and dynamite, and you blow up the building so you can build a city center for the kids with the playground and whatever. Well, you're going to cry about the destruction, you can say the saboteur, the wrecking balls, or the dynamite is bad, but now it's just what needs to be done.

Justin McMillen (00:47:43)
But you're right, the term saboteur makes you think of, yeah, it seems negative, just like prostitute.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:47:43)
Yeah, so you learned about that from Caroline Myss. But there's more to it, because that was stuff that was early on in, what's his name's, work. It's not archetypes, or is it archetypes? Carl Jung is the developer of archetypes, of the collective unconscious, these are more spiritual things, more outside of you.

Justin McMillen (00:48:06)
Right, and you're saying they live inside, is there a difference between the way Jung sees it?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:48:32)
Oh Jesus, I don't know, because I can't read Jung, I find his stuff so hard to read. But he says, I believe that in the collective unconscious of humans live these archetypal patterns, the roles that humans have been playing the whole course of time. Let's go back to the beginning of man, the Neanderthals, they had their shaman, the shaman archetype has been present since the beginning of man. Okay, so those archetypes, not everybody's a shaman, not everybody has that, medicine man or woman, not everybody has that archetype. Not everybody is the femme fatale, not everybody's the Don Juan archetype, not everybody's got the monk archetype. But it's interesting to introduce people to the committee in their head, because they often collapse their committee. You're saying all you are is this, you know, person with social anxiety, I'm going to tell you, you got more to you than that, okay? And so I'm always doing this, so I will get to this, my sculpture teacher, when I started sculpture during Covid, she's like, Gary, I'd like you to start with a foot, and I'm like, a foot? Jackie, I am not sculpting a foot. Why not, everybody sculpts a foot. I'm like, can I do a hand? She's like, why? And I'm like, well, I'm always doing this to people, I say, you come in, here's, thinking that this is your mind, it's ego, it creates all your thoughts. And I say, with this kind of crooked smile on my face, I'm sorry to do this to you, but I'm going to be introducing you to the committee in your head. Okay, and so that became the first sculpture. And then she said, well, how are you going to display the hands? So there were hands that were completed, they were up to the wrists like this, and she said, how are you going to display this, what's the stand it goes on? And I'm like, I don't know. They're coming out of the head, it's a committee in your head. And so then I sculpted the skull, and then I put my teeth on it, because I thought, I must have the mixed media sculptor in me, because I like to put stuff on, seashells or turquoise or whatever, onto the sculptures that I do. What you'll notice about this is that the masculine hand has six fingers, and he is basically flipping off the feminine hand. This is the patriarchy that is over the woman, she's only got five fingers, he's got six, he's got the upper hand on her, and she's just starting to flip him off a little bit.

Justin McMillen (00:51:07)
That's, I didn't even notice that.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:51:07)
Yeah, that's the symbolism hidden in there, so my sculpture teacher was like, what is going on over there? I'm like, the man, he's got a leg up, he's actually got an extra finger.

Justin McMillen (00:51:29)
What's cool is that, as an artist, you can see that you're taking a lot of creative expression, stuff going on here, and then you demonstrate your abilities, true, incredible attention to anatomy in the skull, it's good, it's really good. Gary, when you first told me you did this stuff, I was worried when I saw it, I wasn't going to like it. I have opinions about art, and I had to, everyone should try to do it, but a lot of times when people ask me, I have a hard time saying, I don't, because I have a hard time being dishonest. So, but it's incredible that you're able to quickly figure out, yeah, it takes years for people typically to start to capture anatomy like this, you get the zygomatic arch and the occipital bones.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:52:14)
Yeah, I got a lot of help from my teacher, and it was a lot about how to see, the art of seeing, you know, to be able to see it and reproduce it, it's hard. We have this idea, I tell this to my kids, you know, they draw a face, and it's like, this is what a smile looks like, and it's like, that's not the same thing as seeing shapes and tones, and it's a whole different, nothing looks like how we draw when we're children.

Justin McMillen (00:52:43)
But you don't want to tell a kid that.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:53:03)
You just have to show a kid how to see. I was going to bring the piece of wood that is part of the tree spirit I'm sculpting right now. I'm at this eight day sculpture symposium, and I have this really cool piece of wood. I had a patient once who had a psychotic break, and he thought he was seeing faces in nature all over the place. So he's facing that tree, and there's a face over there, and I'm like, dude, I've always seen faces in nature, and I love it. I'll pick up that piece of wood because I'm like, oh my God, there's a face in there. So I have a bunch of pieces of wood that have faces on them. And I had one that I took to my sculpture symposium, and the guy wanted something other than the mock, the thing I did before, going to kind of work on. And so all of a sudden this tree spirit is happening, and I was stuck, I kept avoiding it, I had this really cool looking piece of wood, I can show you what we're talking about, just so you can see what I'm talking about. So I planned to bring it here. And the guy said to me, you're seeing in 2D, you got to see in 3D. And I'm like, I don't know, how do you, I don't know how to, how do you do that? How do you see in 3D? But you see in 3D all day long, but when you're trying to sculpt it, it's a different thing. I'm going to find it right quick. Hold on, there's the tree spirit, and the piece of wood down in the corner, spread in on that, I don't know if people can see it somehow, but do you see that little piece of wood down there that I'm trying to replicate that face?

Justin McMillen (00:54:35)
That, yeah, isn't that cool? Yeah, I don't know if the audience can see that, but see that face?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:55:01)
I do see, when I go in, that thing is teaching me how to see in 3D, and I'm trying to get it into the tree spirit, which is sitting back to back. This is marble here, white marble, the marble from Marble, Colorado, where the sculpture symposium was. They have this town that's got a quarry, and it's got all this white marble, the Lincoln Memorial was built out of marble from Marble, Colorado, white marble. And so was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Yeah, it's a kind of famous marble. So you cut into that with angle grinders, hammers and chisels, and saws, just blocking out sections of it and then refining, different sizes of them. Yeah, gotcha. So I'm doing a three sided thing, because I listened to this podcast on guardianship and protectors, and I'm, well, I'm going to weave in all people doing psychedelics and the psychedelic bandwagon, and I hear this podcast on guardianship and protectors, and this is a super interesting topic, which is what to do about evil spirits. Do they exist? What about entities? Okay, and you're in the addiction field, so, you know, the idea is you do a lot of drugs and your energy field drops, and then you're prone to being infected with an entity, right? Not necessarily the way people see it, but certainly people who have gone into psychosis might see it that way. And so this is the domain of shaman psychiatry, you start talking about, you think about somebody who's psychotic has an entity attachment, and the psychosis is coming from the entity, they're going to probably give you an antipsychotic. But this is the domain of shamanism, and one of my great mentors, who was a psychiatrist and a meditation teacher, he also wrote books about shamanism. So I was introduced to that early on in my residency program. And so I'm listening to this thing about guardianship and protectors, and I'm knowing all these people who are now taking people on psychedelic journeys, and I'm like, are you protecting yourself? Do you know what a shaman knows about how you call in protection, and how you get helpful entities to come in and protect yourself from that difficult stuff? And when I listen to this podcast, I'm like, oh my God, I haven't even been thinking about it from my own office. So I decided I'm going to sculpt a temple guardian. You know what a temple guardian is? The gargoyles that sit at the edge of the Buddhist temples, or, it's a lion or a dragon or whatever. They're designed to keep the riff raff out, keep the bad energy out, and only let the authentic seeker into the temple, where you're going to get the spiritual goods, right. Okay, so I have been looking at cave paintings, pictures of all the stuff that, 200,000 years ago, they painted on the caves, and there are all these pictures of entities, like aliens. And the humans are often human and animal combined.

Justin McMillen (00:58:34)
And Hopi stuff, or are you talking about like ancient, European, like the caves in France?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:58:34)
Caves in France, yes. So the entity that I tried to sculpt, or that I tried to channel, was this, I don't know, freaking alien, I don't know if anybody can, there's a camera right there. You can tell when, see this. Okay, so, oh my God, I could flip you through, and you would see a number of pictures of, really, what does this mean, aliens were visiting, it's so weird. I mean, let's say this is 200,000 years ago, and I have a ton of these pictures, and I was looking at them because I thought, there's this whole thing happening where the movie came out about Disclosure Day, and the government apparently has all this data, and they've decided that they're going to release it. And so I'm like, okay, well, if the entities, oh my God, they've been talking to us, or playing with us, or whatever, since we've been here. So I thought, let me try and channel and talk to them, telepathically, and see if they'll come in and let me sculpt one of them. So I have a three sided thing, a tree spirit, a feminine, animal, winged, finned creature, and an alien, that I decided to sculpt for this eight day sculpture symposium.

Justin McMillen (00:59:53)
So, did you finish it?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (00:59:53)
Oh God, no, but I'll show you the latest, from last week.

Justin McMillen (00:59:53)
Just scroll back, that's the alien, holy crap Gary, that's cool.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:00:24)
And then go back to the next one, you'll see the feminine and the tree spirit. And I'm going to put this outside my office, and I'm hoping it's going to function to keep the bad juju out.

Justin McMillen (01:00:31)
This bad juju really exists?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:00:31)
Well, the more energy you give to it, the more it does. But there's a way, how do you hold this idea, I'm gonna polish this so it's just like shiny.

Justin McMillen (01:00:49)
Oh yes, wow, oh yes, polish, polish, the sanding part, yeah, that's really cool. Did you conjure these entities up, and they told you to do this?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:00:49)
I've tried to channel, so I have been, I don't know, praying, trying to connect with ancient feminine shamanic energy, for quite some time. I think the time that we are in, in the history of humankind, is super dicey. And I think the best way to go is the ancients, who have been around, if there are spirits from them and they're living in a parallel universe, I might as well see if I can tap in, because I need extra help. Have you heard of Chris Bledsoe?

Justin McMillen (01:01:29)
No.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:01:29)
You should, he's trying to talk to you.

Justin McMillen (01:01:51)
You're talking right now.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:01:51)
It's, so the quick and dirty on him, I'll probably screw up some of this, North Carolina, there, Fayetteville, he was going through a very difficult time in his life as a contractor, lost a bunch of money, had some health issues, went fishing with his sons, walked off into the woods because one of his sons went away. He was gone to look for him, ended up encountering this thing, he's a very down to earth, just chill guy, nothing crazy about him. And then he saw this sort of character in the forest, it's like this orb or something. And after that, I don't know if he blacked out, or he woke up, but then all of a sudden he heard people screaming for him. And it turns out he'd been gone for hours, his son was terrified, his son went looking for him, he came back, they're like, you've been gone for hours, he's like, I was gone for like five minutes, they're like, no, you've been gone for hours, your son went looking for you. Long story short, after that, he ended up, he does these things out in North Carolina that you can do with him. He calls in entities, and there's tons of films of them, tons and tons, and allegedly, and I haven't confirmed, I don't know how we confirm this, but he's been on lots of major news stuff, he's being studied, NASA scientists, all this stuff are studying him, because he can make this thing happen over and over where he meditates. And he does this thing, and it's just like what you're talking about, he talks about the divine feminine, and it's a little creepy to hear you talk because he's so similar.

Justin McMillen (01:03:24)
Well, yeah, and we have gone out on a limb, and we should run back to the trunk of the tree here, he's scared, you get it, you go out there and you're going to fall off the cliff of sanity. So let's get back into, like, lifestyle medicine, and the midlife crisis or moment, and talk about this duality that exists with you, because you can run out into this place, but you're still a Western trained doctor and an incredible physician. So the combination of these things is really what you bring to the table, and you go back and forth between saying that it's like kooky stuff, but also believing. Can you explain, before people think you're crazy, and I'm crazy for talking about alien abductions, can you explain how these worlds interact for you?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:04:11)
And I've got a comedy in my head, and I've got a part of me that somehow, you know, when I was in my training, got taken under a wing by a bunch of deep spiritual practitioners who were also psychiatrists, and also worked with sacred plant medicines, and went down to South America and did dietas. And so, if you ask me, are you a shaman, I'd say no, I haven't trained with a shaman, but I've certainly been on the shaman path for 30 frickin years, working with sacred plant medicines and whatever.

Justin McMillen (01:04:47)
And that makes you different than other people, if you're willing to take something that could make you hallucinate.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:05:11)
I've been asking, what is it, why am I attracted to, you know, I have the partier archetype, okay, so I used to love to party, some partiers like alcohol, maybe pot, and some partiers like hallucinogens, I happen to find those super interesting and fascinating. Are they hallucinations, and it's not real, conjured up by the mind, or is your mind actually going into another realm? And is there a spiritual world? So I'll tell you about the first time I did mushrooms. I don't know how old I was, maybe high school or whatever. It was my first Grateful Dead show, on the campus of the University of Michigan, walking to Crisler Arena to see the Grateful Dead, and we had taken mushrooms. I don't know what I was saying, but I did. And as I'm walking down the sidewalk with my friends to the arena, this couple was walking towards me, man on this side, woman on this side. And as she started getting close to me, all of a sudden her forehead split open and snakes poured out of her forehead as I was walking by her. This thing is happening, and I'm like, oh my God, I was sort of horrified, but I was sort of fascinated. And I'm like, well, this is the mushrooms. Having heard many people's bad trip stories, I could see if I was somebody different, if I didn't have whatever shaman archetype or whatever the hell it is. That might have freaked me out, I might have been down the path of mental illness because I saw somebody's head split open and snakes pour out. And I say that because I've heard people tell me about their bad trip, what happened, and how it freaked them out, and some people get flashbacks. I look back on that and I'm like, that's the mark of a psychiatrist right there. Somebody who can deal with funky shit going down and not lose the balance of their mind. Wow.

Justin McMillen (01:07:24)
So, are psychedelics a bandwagon?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:07:37)
Yes, hell yes. They bandwagoned in the 1960s, and they're having a renaissance, psychedelic renaissance is trying to pick up steam. Ecstasy for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder is trying to get it to happen, mushrooms for treatment resistant depression, ketamine is in there. Yeah, it is, you know, as somebody who's been involved in plant medicine to different degrees, in a more traditional or ritual type setting, or something, it pays attention to. Oh yeah, that honors the history and the sacred nature of plant medicine.

Justin McMillen (01:08:18)
To me, you've been at it for years, understanding it, learning about it, practicing it, what is your take on what's going on right now?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:08:18)
It's great, every coin has two sides, and one side of the coin, it's great that everyone's paying attention to these incredibly powerful substances. And on the other side of the coin, it's super dangerous, and there are going to be casualties for sure. People are, some have already died, people have gone psychotic, okay, there's a lot of stuff happening in the underground and the uncontrolled areas of things. And, you know, the California Institute of Integral Studies is trying to get as many people trained so that there is really a good foundation for handling this thing. So we don't lose psychedelics again, like we lost them back in the 60s, where we couldn't use them therapeutically. So people want to hear about this, you should talk about it. I also, although a couple of my mentors are not big fans of astrology, I'm a fan, because I've seen a lot of correlation in my life. Mercury's retrograde right now, okay, Mercury retrograde, oh my God, my phone's not working very well.

Justin McMillen (01:09:47)
Are my computers working? Who, very well? A lot of people kind of have a sense of that, that something's kind of twisted when Mercury's retrograde.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:09:47)
My astrology teacher slash therapist has told me the main teaching of Mercury retrograde is slow down, okay, so.

Justin McMillen (01:10:14)
Okay, God, we need to slow everything down, I slow it down. We need to, bandwagons, slow them down and study them, what is the frickin rush?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:10:14)
The frickin rush is somebody's got to make some money, right? Maybe there's a rush because we have people who are suffering, and we want these things to help them. But if we're going to take a holistic look at culture and society and what's happening right now, maybe in the next podcast or whatever, it's a really important time in human history, and I think there's a significant risk that we could go extinct. And I think that's the most important conversation for us to have. It's not really on our list, but it's the thing that I most want to talk about. Psychedelics are here, and they are mind expanding substances, and so on some level I think, great, fantastic. But everybody and their brother has done ayahuasca once, now wants to be a shaman and start leading people on ayahuasca journeys and what have you. It's wild. We had people in our meditation group, psych residents, who got on the path, and they would be doing ayahuasca every weekend. How do you integrate the power of that medicine teaching, and then have another one the next week, and another one the next week? I mean, I would do the medicine practice if I could, once a quarter, and then take a whole quarter to just kind of live into that wild and profound and powerful experience I've had. And sacred medicines are unbelievable, I would say of all of the great spiritual teachers that I have had, I think ayahuasca and the mushroom spirits are the greatest teachers I've had. They are incredibly wise, incredibly profound, you know, I go in with my intention of what I want to learn or see or improve on or heal, and then all of a sudden something else happens, and afterward I'm like, oh my God, how did you know that? That was exactly what I needed, oh mother ayahuasca. And year after year, after doing this for 30 years, you get a sense that these substances are incredibly intelligent.

Justin McMillen (01:12:33)
How do you contend with the idea, so what you're saying sounds very compelling and interesting, but you're saying that it can also be very dangerous.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:12:58)
In what scenario is it dangerous? When you don't have a stable mind, when you have so much trauma you haven't explored, when you're looking for a magic pill, and the magic pill is a psychedelic, because you've heard that it's so powerful and amazing, and then you go do it, and you do it again, and then you've done it three times in one week, and you've blown out your system. You've taken an extremely powerful medicine, you haven't done it down in the jungle of Peru, with the shaman, with the dieta, and you blow out your system.

Justin McMillen (01:13:20)
It's interesting you say that, because I'm very curious about this, because it's an important subject in my space as well as yours. It's like at our heels, I think you do a good job of dividing this out as something you've done personally, to become, to learn more about yourself and how you understand your spiritual side and the world. And then your separate practice, where you're practicing medicine.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:13:55)
Well, it's always been there with a meditation practice, it's never been just sacred psychedelics or plant medicines, it's always been integrated, it's been a part of my spiritual practice.

Justin McMillen (01:13:55)
Right, but that's you as an individual, separate. I guess what I'm getting at is, you saying that this is interesting doesn't automatically mean that you're checking a box that says everyone should do this for mental health issues.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:14:27)
Exactly right, that's, I just want to be clear on that.

Justin McMillen (01:14:27)
So people listening, same thing, I don't do psychedelics, and I have a lot of stress around this subject, because, well, there's studies being done on psychedelics for mental health issues, which could be the precursor of PTSD, and treatment resistant depression.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:14:47)
It seems like everyone wants to throw psychedelics into one box, and just say it's a cure-all for everything, that's bandwagon, and, and the danger of that is that the nature of addiction, it's usually people who don't understand addiction that feel this way, oh, it should be used for addiction as well, we'll talk about ibogaine in a second. The nature of addiction isn't just chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, it's also the psychology of addiction, being obsessed with controlling your feelings and your emotions. And so this quick, like, I want to be able to flip a switch and get what I want, right, and so I'm doing that psychologically, that mechanism in the psyche of, I should be able to take this thing, put it in my body, and change the way I think and feel, is really kind of the whole mechanism of addiction in itself. It's at least a part of the psychology. And so I think people with a history of drug addiction could easily fall back into that. And then the problem is, it's hard to kill off, or say, ayahuasca, and take it like you're addicted to it, it makes you vomit, it's hard to get. That's where I don't think you could get addicted to ayahuasca, I don't think it's, it's too powerful to do every day. Now, some of the psychedelics, there are people who can take LSD every day, but it's hard to do, it would be hard to function.

Justin McMillen (01:16:17)
Yeah, I don't think, and by the way, I looked up the addict archetype, it was really interesting what Claude said about it, because I was asking Claude to prepare me for a podcast with somebody who owns an addiction treatment facility. So we should talk about the addict archetype, there's some interesting things to say about it.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:16:37)
And it's some of what you were talking about, which is, can an addict co-opt sacred plant medicines and not go wrong? Hell yes. I think it's best, especially as the brain's healing, I've been on the edge of doing things different in addiction treatment the whole time. Yeah, and become known for that. And I have to put my ego aside and say, I don't necessarily know exactly the right way. There's always, that's the humility, that's the humble juice right there. And so even though I have a lot of hesitance around looking at psychedelics, this is the third or fourth conversation that I've had with people, or on podcasts.

Justin McMillen (01:17:27)
Yeah, and I'm always nervous, because I don't want, and I want to be clear about this, I do not want anyone that's listening to this, especially if they are in recovery, coming through treatment, thinking that I am saying this is something you should do. I'm not in any way suggesting that, I'm exploring the topic because I think it's probably going to be very relevant for the future of all mental health.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:17:48)
But like you, I think it's a bandwagon, and I want to hang out on the sidelines and watch what everyone else does.

Justin McMillen (01:17:48)
There you go, make the mistakes before you bring it into your addiction treatment facilities, wait ten years, people's lives, see what happens.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:17:48)
Yeah, absolutely, exactly, so that's where my head is at with it.

Justin McMillen (01:18:06)
But it's a patient approach, the wisdom of experience, the 30 years, you sit back and don't get on all the bandwagons anymore, you don't tell people to buy your probiotics until you know whether they're really doing something. I'm learning from you in this way, this is, and I always learn stuff when I do these.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:18:06)
I bet you do.

Justin McMillen (01:18:26)
I bet you do. And you know, the idea of the bandwagon is really important, and I think you've been at it 30 years, I've been at it for 14, so you've been twice as long working with people in that way, different way, but working with people. And I could learn a ton from you, and this idea that you shouldn't jump on every bandwagon is important. And even understanding bandwagons, being able to identify them, you, also in the beginning of this you talked about intuition, and I think intuition can also play a role in determining whether a bandwagon is something you do want to jump on.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:18:48)
Yes.

Justin McMillen (01:18:48)
How can you tell the difference between your mind, your committee talking to you, and your intuition talking to you?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:19:12)
That is the spiritual quality called discernment, meaning being able to tell which one is which. It is an incredibly important spiritual ability to have, and the only place I hear it talked about is pretty much in the domain of spiritual practice. That's something everybody should have, they should teach discernment in grade school or junior high or something.

Justin McMillen (01:19:42)
What's your theory, can I say theory, because I know you may have a different opinion than others, and I don't know, there can be truth around this, maybe it's true for you, but your mind, your committee, your intuition, so what you said, do all of these exist within the psyche?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:19:42)
Yes, I believe the psyche exists solely within the container, or, you know, there's subtle bodies and energy bodies, and, you've seen Alex Grey's picture, have you seen his picture of the spiritual energy system?

Justin McMillen (01:20:26)
You know, I have.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:20:26)
And let's, that's scientifically proven, that you have an aura, an energy field around you of electromagnetic energy. It's been proven that you have energy centers called chakras in your body. So is it all contained within your body? No, you've got a field around you, just like a magnet. It's got a field around you, so it's not all within the body.

Justin McMillen (01:20:48)
And is your intuition just sitting there, located in your heart center and never goes out, it's not like, back in your subtle body or what have you heard?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:20:48)
I don't know that intuition is like, there's almost like a master library of all the world's knowledge, future, past and now. And that intuition is actually like flipping, like a channel. This is noetic stuff, and some of the work that's been done at the Stanford Institute of Parapsychology, I think it's called, but the idea that you can tap into intuition and that it lives in some sort of other realm, and that you channel it down, and it gives you access to infinite knowledge. Have you heard this? I mean, I believe that, but I believe that it's in you. I was raised Catholic, I like the idea, there's a piece of God inside of you, it's called the Holy Spirit. God consciousness is everywhere, if it's in rocks and trees and the ocean and animals, it's in you too. Oh, the Catholics call that the Holy Spirit, okay, well, where are you going to go look, let's look in the sacred heart center for that. So when I meditate, when I try to get people to get in touch with the source of knowledge that is higher than me, better than me, I'm like, this is your path. And you won't have to do therapy with me for the rest of your life. I'm going to introduce you to your intuition, tell you how to discern the difference between that and your mind and the committee. And then you're going to have this for the rest of your life, the ability to listen to your spirit, soul, or some higher form of intelligence, God consciousness, if that's what it is. Okay, what's my science on this? Well, I've been paying attention to my intuition for years, and I've learned this thing, like, you gotta look for the next breadcrumb on the path, you don't get all the answers right away, you just have to be really present, and you gotta look for what's the next thing, right? We have a case together, we don't know what to do with this case, but just, what's the next breadcrumb that just dropped on the path, oh okay, well now we do this, right?

Justin McMillen (01:22:54)
This is fascinating, I'm super obsessed with intuition and have been for years, and people that know me well know because I talk about it, and I like to listen and learn about different people's interpretation of it.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:23:17)
There's a guy called, I think his name is Thomas Campbell, he wrote a book called My Big TOE, Theory of Everything. This book is like, it's a commitment, it's about three and a half, four inches thick. He spent, allegedly, three decades writing it, My Big TOE. And he was connected to Bob Monroe, who was doing remote viewing and stuff, working with the Monroe Institute, and doing remote viewing. But he thinks that intuition is like changing channels on a television or something, and you just lock into this greater consciousness that's outside of you, and you can extract information from that and pull it into one place. And it sounds kooky, and to some degree, maybe for some people, especially if you're a very hard science person, not you.

Justin McMillen (01:24:17)
But what's interesting about that is I've known some people very well, in fact, one of my dear friends has this insane ability where he's almost like Google, but he doesn't read all the time or anything, but he knows so many things, and he gets on these rants and he doesn't even know where he learned it.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:24:35)
And he's right, and it's almost like he can pull information down and through himself, it's classically called channeling.

Justin McMillen (01:24:35)
Yes, it does seem like that, and I've witnessed it so many times that I can't, I have a part of me that's always been fascinated with this kind of stuff and wanted it for myself.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:24:53)
My seeker was propelled down the spiritual path looking for these abilities, they're called siddhis. I did a lot of spiritual practice over the years trying to, oh, awaken my third eye, awaken my kundalini, get spiritual powers and abilities, because I thought, oh shit, I had a 3.3 GPA in high school, I'm not that smart, and I got to deal with schizophrenia and people wanting to kill themselves. I need extra powers.

Justin McMillen (01:25:18)
Yeah, I'm with you, I've looked at this, I've tried to get it, I've done the psychedelics or whatever, thinking that maybe I might, I just went and did a five day thing at the Monroe Institute, and I'll tell you about that, that's where my whole path began.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:25:39)
Yeah, okay, the sensory deprivation float tanks, okay, in a medical school, let me see, that movie Altered States.

Justin McMillen (01:25:39)
Yeah, of course, for sure. Back in my partier days, I used to see a lot of concerts, and I recently heard from a friend of mine I used to go to a lot of concerts with, she's like, you've never heard of Tedeschi Trucks? And I'm like, no, what the heck is that? I started listening to them, she sent me a couple of songs, I'm like, holy cripes, they're really good. Derek Trucks started playing the guitar at like 17, and everyone was like, oh my God, this guy, it's unbelievable. Gregg Allman saw what he was doing, and so, this band, he met up with this woman who's kind of a bluesy singer, and it's called Tedeschi Trucks. I saw them at the Greek Theater last year, and I thought to myself, oh my God, this might be the best concert I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them, but definitely top three live band, they were so good. They're doing a tour right now, and they're playing in Grand Rapids. And I told everybody, my friends that I used to see concerts with, hey, I'll make sure I get the tickets, and I haven't gotten them yet because I was waiting to find out if two more people were coming, and the tickets are going, so just get them, getting the most expensive ones, there's ones available right down front.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:27:11)
And that's such a cool town too, I love Grand Rapids.

Justin McMillen (01:27:11)
You know, great, I've never been there.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:27:11)
I grew up in Michigan, I've never been to Grand Rapids, it's down by the school, there's all kinds of cool stuff going on, it's just got this feeling to it, it's Michigan, but it's got like a young energy, and there's coffee shops everywhere.

Justin McMillen (01:27:33)
Back to channeling, what are we talking about?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:27:33)
We're talking about developing practices. Oh, my friend, okay, so this idea of intuition, I am fascinated, and I've seen it in different ways. And the way that I've worked for years, and it's interesting, is that I typically have a feeling, like a sense of knowing what to do. And then I had to go out and find the evidence to support that, or find the math to support what I'm doing. And that actually is like the duality of my brother and I working together, he's an engineer, and I may know what the right answer is, like, I can feel exactly what to do next, and he's like, I need the numbers, I need the detail, I need to understand. And so that's trained me to do things over time. But what I learned, this really cool TED Talk, Amaryllis Fox, the earliest known, or the youngest known, CIA non-official cover operative. So what that means is that she was going into countries working for the Central Intelligence Agency under non-official cover, meaning that she's not connected to an embassy. If she gets caught, the government's not going to claim her. She's shown up marrying a Kennedy, she's pretty well known now, she worked on the RFK campaign and whatnot, but she did a TED Talk. Amaryllis Fox, she wrote a book called Life Undercover, that's just amazing, but she did a TED Talk about intuition.

Justin McMillen (01:29:04)
Pause button really quick, I brought four books I was reading, and I was going to ask you what you're reading right now, but obviously, you read this. Amaryllis Fox, Life Undercover, years ago. Anyway, I was thinking, what topic could we talk about, what we're reading.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:29:04)
But she, she's on intuition too, yeah, so she made a TED Talk about intuition. And the way she described it has been really helpful for me to work in business realms, because when you say, my intuition tells me we should do this, you have people just like in medicine, people are like, okay, I need the numbers, give me the spreadsheet. So her interpretation of intuition is that it's the supercomputer that exists in the mind, and that it can calculate things outside of time and space in such a way that it can give you a yes or no answer, that it predates the ability to think logically, and that it communicates through the body. And so it tells you what to do, gut feelings, through the body.

Justin McMillen (01:30:00)
But you always have those when you get an intuition.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:30:00)
Yeah, oh, it's like, I actually have a theory about this, like people who are highly analytical, super, super frontal, just highly logical, mathematical type folks, I think oftentimes they don't pay attention to their intuition. And what happens is, the intuition is still there, and so there becomes a tension between the logical mind and their gut telling them to do one thing, and the logical mind can't make sense of it, and so it creates this tension. And I've seen this typically, again, this is all anecdotal, this isn't science, it's just an observation. I ask people constantly, whether it's, we do personality testing in here, Big Five and whatnot. If I find out somebody is highly conscientious, maybe introverted and conscientious, and if they're alcohol only, you can feel a tightness in them. And then I ask, do you have gut problems, and almost always they say yes, irritable bowel syndrome, all this stuff. And it's almost like they're so locked into the algebra and the arithmetic, the left brain, the intellect can't make sense of what their gut is telling them to do because they have to have the math to prove it. And I've met a few people, you're kind of like this, that know how to pay attention to their intuition even though they have a highly logical brain. And when you have those two together, the best science is produced that way. I've been hanging out with this quantum physicist, and he suggests that intuition is like the key to so many scientific discoveries, because it starts there, and then you go out and start looking at the literature and the research, and then you build the hypothesis. And then you test what you originally came up with intuitively, and it's like, oh man, it makes sense to integrate the heart and the mind.

Justin McMillen (01:31:55)
They won't call it, let's do it all with the mind, all with the left masculine brain.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:31:55)
Yeah, well, haven't we been doing that for centuries. And we still haven't cured world hunger, and we're still at war. Isn't it time for a little integration of masculine, feminine, a little integration of heart and mind? I mean, it's all framing, though.

Justin McMillen (01:32:13)
But do we have to go extinct in order to learn that?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:32:13)
That's what I hope not, it's a really good question. I think what I'm super interested in is, if somebody, a Western trained scientist or doctor, developed these frames, it all comes back to the same way of speaking about a subject. If you're just a spiritual practitioner, sometimes charlatans, you're definitely not that, there's plenty of them out there who just believe every little bandwagon that comes along, they get caught up in it. Those folks have their way of speaking about things. I'm interested in how these things can be the same thing spoken about in different ways, and be the exact same damn thing. Like Amaryllis Fox can say, oh, intuition is the supercomputer, somebody else can say it's this collective consciousness that you can channel, same subject matter, understood in different ways. But at the end of the day, these are words and language and frames, but there still can be truth there. And so a lot of times on this show, I like to talk to people and listen to their different ways of seeing it, and part of why I'm so interested in talking to you, and why I was fascinated with you from day one, is because you play in both of these realms simultaneously.

Justin McMillen (01:33:32)
It's fascinating, you go over here, you just said the sacred feminine, all this stuff, which could sound this way, but then you flip over here and you're talking about evidence based medicine, or bandwagons that are not really doing good science, or looking at long term data.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:33:32)
Yeah, that's the Gemini, I got a part of me that is new age whack job, and can go right down and get a tarot card reading. You know, because I think that's fascinating, divination tools that you can channel some information from, or from ancient beings that have been watching this show the whole time.

Justin McMillen (01:33:56)
Get me if that's true. If that's true, let me see if I can get that, because I need something way beyond my paradigm to help understand some of these incredibly complex people.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:34:20)
What do we do with the fact that all this information, let's go back to the Integrative Medicine for Mental Health conference I went to last September, in San Diego, I was there for four days, and my head was about ready to explode. I'm like, I can't keep on top of all of this stuff, and this is just functional medicine for mental health. But then there's psychotherapy, and there's CBT, and then what about psychedelics, there is so much stuff to pay attention to that I feel like my head is going to explode.

Justin McMillen (01:34:43)
Okay, how do you stay on top of all of it, how do you keep ahead of it all?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:34:43)
I think the best a person can do is land on some sort of foundational truth for yourself. This is what I, my belief system, or the way I understand the world, build off of that, and then slowly add to it, at least for me. I mean, if I was to try to learn every single thing that comes along, I dabble in all of this, I'm super curious, you asked about that archetype, it's like, because I am working on the edge of, I'm innovating in addiction treatment. So there's a student archetype that wants to learn everything, but I think you're talking from a different place. Well, there's another piece to it, which is that I have put myself, my entire future, my purpose, my livelihood in this basket of moving and changing this field, this particular field of medicine, or health and wellness. And to do that, I've had to introduce modalities and different kinds of things that are not traditional. And in order to be taken seriously, I've had to go toe to toe with everybody from insurance companies to academia, everybody. And so maybe it's ego driven too, I don't want to be wrong, so I have to be able to sit down with people and say, this is what we're doing, and this is why it makes sense. And I need to be able to support it, and be able to get in the ring with somebody and actually have enough to where they go, okay, that makes sense. And this guy's being critical enough, he's not just buying his own bullshit, he's saying, well, it may be true, and this is what we're seeing. And some years of that, it started with exercise, we were the first people I know of to really, truly use exercise in a very deliberate, organized way to treat addiction, that's why we're in part friends or whatever, is I have the athlete archetype, I've been a gym rat, going to the gym since I was in high school, because I was short and I thought, well, I need to be strong because I'm short, right? So your exercise thing, I'm like, that totally makes sense, everybody should optimize exercise in addiction treatment, and I'm like, fucking genius, why isn't everybody doing it? After looking at all these, and seeing people, addiction treatment facilities down in Newport Beach and whatever, I'm like, oh my God, these programs are, and people relapse, they just spent all this, whatever, $30,000. And they just relapse the day they got out, like, oh my God, and they're not in any better shape.

Justin McMillen (01:37:31)
I mean, I used to say, when I refer to you, that people come out of your program in the best shape of their life, okay, well, what other program gives you that kind of thing. I mean, you could maybe take that and run with it.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:37:50)
Okay, yeah, how far could you run with it, well, I don't know, you need the family therapy piece, I think, and you need, or the depression piece, but the exercise piece can go a long way.

Justin McMillen (01:37:50)
And you were doing that, do you have the athlete archetype?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:37:50)
Yeah, yeah, okay, sure, not just working out, but you like to play sports, and, I am not particularly competitive in a very traditional sense. So the athlete likes to put his stuff into a game and have it be tested in competition, I do, I test myself, but it's only against myself, it's individual, it's always about where I was before and where I'm at now. And I have, I mean, I swam competitively, I've raced in triathlons, I've done stuff, but I've never, I haven't been particularly obsessed with the idea of being the best in comparison to others, I've never felt like I'm part of, I know that sounds so weird, but I'm not. I don't see myself as part of the team.

Justin McMillen (01:38:53)
What do you mean, part of the human team? But you were in team sports.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:38:53)
No, I did play basketball for years, and yet you have this theory that the community is what heals.

Justin McMillen (01:38:53)
Team is what heals?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:38:53)
Oh, I know it does. That's, by the way, this is the interesting thing about your committee, your athlete slash warrior doesn't really need the game, the competition, the team sport, I need interesting unity, bonding and connection, and I understand the value of that, I can definitely defend it through an evolutionary lens and genetic lens even, but as far as me needing to compare myself in a hierarchy against other people, it's maybe to a fault. I like to compare the organization, I like to say we're the best at what we do, but me, I try to keep me out of it always, people who know me well know that it's not about me, I'm here to serve, that's what I do.

Justin McMillen (01:39:41)
Do you have the loner archetype?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:39:41)
Maybe, I like to go on walks by myself sometimes.

Justin McMillen (01:39:58)
Back by your pad, when you're back, in your mind, or when you're whittling wood and working, are you, do you need to be alone to do that?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:39:58)
Yeah, and I could, if I'm in it, I could be there for days.

Justin McMillen (01:39:58)
So what happened today all of a sudden?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:40:17)
I thought it would be like one o'clock, I look at my, oh it's 2:40, and I got to be over here for the podcast in 20 minutes, and I had sculpture dust all over the place, and I hadn't cleaned up, and the tools were all over the place, I'm like, oh my God, that is absorption.

Justin McMillen (01:40:17)
And what is that hobby?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:40:34)
Creativity, creating, artistic expression, for me, I can't, it changes me completely. And it's been a long time, I just got back from a trip, and I told myself that when I came back, I was going to dive back into that and have a project across, woodworking, to start. I've got a plan, this is just the wood.

Justin McMillen (01:40:55)
Ever speak to you and tell you what you're supposed to do with it?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:40:55)
Yeah, risking sounding super esoteric and weird.

Justin McMillen (01:40:55)
Yes, 100%.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:40:55)
That's the intelligence for me, is, I feel it in my hands, it's not telling you through the sense door of hearing, it's telling you kinesthetically, it's way bigger than that. Physically, when I touch the material, it changes me, I can feel it, even the different kinds of wood have different feelings, like walnut has a very distinct feeling, and I'm not talking about how hard it is, it's got its own thing, and I can never describe it with words. Its own spirit, yeah, it's a tree spirit, this is what I'm trying to sculpt right now. And then even the dust, and the repetitive motion of sanding is like a meditation, I get lost in that, and shapes, I get really bothered when people don't, if I show somebody something I've made and they don't touch it, I'm like, please, put your hands on it. I want them to physically experience it by actually touching it, like I have a dolphin that I carved for my wife at home, and I'm proud of it because it's like damn near perfect, which is one of the hardest things to carve because there's no straight line anywhere, it's just this shape, that's been all through nature and evolution, pulled itself into a certain shape. That's how it feels, and whenever I show it to people and they put it in their hands, I want them to physically feel the crest of the back and the way the spine goes, and experience all of that. And I know they don't experience it the same way, because one of the teachers at the symposium I was at for eight days carving taught me to touch. Yeah, he said, feel your piece. And I'm like, there's another thing which I'm just so into it, another guy, the guy who was right next to me, one of the teachers, I kept seeing him standing back from his thing, looking at it, I'm like, there he is again, out there not sculpting, but he's out there looking at his piece, and I'm like, I never do that. I gotta get away and start getting some perspective and walk around my piece, and what have you. But to touch your piece, I have never felt up my thing I'm sculpting. So what I do, if I work on something for a while, what happens next is I get touchy with people, which is really strange. Like, I'll be hanging out with my wife, and I'm staring at people's faces, looking at their eyebrow ridge, and that's the standing back from it, and I want to physically, that's a terrible one up there, I want to physically, that is an interesting expression, and that unique lip that started out as, from 2000. Oh, I don't know, nine or something, or no, 2006, it was terrible, but it took it too far. The one below that is my daughter, people can't see it, so. But we're talking about, should we have it brought out and set right over here? Maybe, we need to figure out where we're going to go here.

Justin McMillen (01:44:15)
Where are we going, I think we should, okay, let's talk about our list of topics. Plant medicines, you mentioned ibogaine, we talked about bandwagons and the psychedelic bandwagon, we're into the domain of creativity, expansion, sculpture, sculpting, wood sculpting, stone, holistic psychiatry, and has it helped patients, and you had said something about you wanted to hear about a couple of cases of mine, that you've sort of heard about, problems with modern psychiatry, we haven't really talked about. And we don't have to do all of this today, if you have me back again, does psychiatry have to evolve?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:44:49)
No.

Justin McMillen (01:44:49)
Yeah, of course, but the word psychiatry, does that automatically mean psychopharmacological?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:45:05)
Psychiatry, just changing brain chemistry, can it? No, but they're falling into that domain with, we got to prove, and we need biomarkers, and big pharma married to, down to the actual term, when it was created, does it mean that you have to use meds?

Justin McMillen (01:45:05)
Yeah, and psych medications.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:45:33)
Or can I call that, that term means that it's come to mean that. But really, meds started kind of exploding in the 60s, before that was psychoanalysis, and then meds came along and started, you know, the dopamine hypothesis for schizophrenia, and trying to figure out whether we can help people with psych meds, but there was always psychotherapy along with it.

Justin McMillen (01:45:58)
So, I'm curious, because to me, the difference between, in fact, for the sake of your views before the meds, I could be wrong, so correct me if I am, but psychology is mind, psychiatry is the chemistry of the brain that affects the mindset, correct?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:45:58)
That's neuro-biologically reductionistic, and I get that you're doing it, but I don't think it's fair. You called me reductionistic a while back, and obviously you have, I am not, I am holistic, but let's understand the tendency of the mind that wants to reduce it to something that is Occam's razor, simple and understandable, and then we can get the answer and get this thing solved. It sounds bad, just like the saboteur sounds bad, to be reductionistic, because then you're not being holistic. But there's two sides of the coin, sure, and there's a reason to reduce it down to a theory that you can then scientifically prove. I think, okay, I'm going to push back a little bit on this, because I think nature itself can be reduced down to elemental things, you can break things down, chemistry, biology, there's elemental ideas. So being reductionist doesn't necessarily, I think oversimplifying is a problem, or making something complicated, making something simple that really deserves to be treated with respect because of its complexity, for sure. But I think getting to the root of something is really where truth can live, like you keep going and you find the root. And I think that can be reductionistic too. I have one of my favorite sayings, because I listen to people a lot of times, and I think they're just full of shit, in terms of, I'm not saying you, to be clear, but there's a lot of sort of language and dancing around with words and topics. And oftentimes I think it's because people have no idea what they are trying to say, what they believe to be true. Let's be clear, I could have a committee member who is full of shit, yeah, okay, I'm open to seeing that, and the sooner I see it, the better, but keep going. There's a famous quote from Einstein that says, if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. And I use that at work a lot, because people come to me with ideas and they're all over the place, and you have to figure out a way to say this in a simple way. My favorite Einstein quote, you can't solve the problem with the mind that created it.

Justin McMillen (01:48:24)
Yeah, that's a good one, keep going.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:48:40)
Yeah, there's a ton, I love science, brilliant, well, it's true.

Justin McMillen (01:48:40)
But yeah, isn't that interesting, how do you interpret, you're trying to solve all your problems with your own mind, but your mind created the problem.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:48:40)
Oh, here, let's have a psychiatrist come in.

Justin McMillen (01:48:40)
Or he's, well, let's hope he doesn't just give you meds, and knows how to talk to you. Let's hope he doesn't just do a 15 minute med check and not find out who you are, or what you're eating, or how you're sleeping, or what have you.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:48:59)
But go back to what I think. I think that oftentimes we overcomplicate things, and we do it because we really want to give the attention to the idea that we need to. When if you just keep peeling back the onion, you can get to some sort of basic truth. And that's really how my brain works, and so I'm always peeling things back, which absolutely is reductionistic, is a bad, no, I think oversimplifying things that shouldn't discount the nuance is bad, but I tend to not hang out in this upper part, my goal is always to get down to the root. What's the base of it? And then oftentimes when you get to the root, the piece below that is spiritual, which is interesting, like you keep peeling it back, and once you get to a certain point, it moves into a place of philosophy and spirituality. So let's take modern psychiatry, and you got the DSM, and you got these symptom clusters, and you got to put somebody into this symptom cluster box. And in the midst of doing that, you don't really look at the root of it, is this nutritional, is this because you're isolated, is this because you have a thyroid problem, is this because you're grieving? You know, because of it all, you're in a symptom cluster, you fit major depressive disorder because you meet five of nine criteria. And here's your med. And that is oversimplifying something that deserves to be treated in a way where you're using first principles. So to start, the way that my frame works in my brain, person's acting strange, I know that neurochemistry is at play, there's a lot of science that supports that. Neurochemistry causes this behavior. The guy hasn't slept in three days, he has no drugs in his body. Data gather, there's no drugs in his body, hasn't slept in three days. The DSM-5 is not the Bible, but the DSM-5 is made up of a bunch of different studies, considered the Bible of psychiatry. It's really useful to know that when people stay up for three days and don't have substances in their body, there's a lot of people who've done that in the past, and there are ways that have been studied in which to treat them, or to think about them. I first look at that, right, so maybe you give them a mood stabilizer and you bring them down to where you get them to sleep, or whatever the case is, that's maybe with the DSM-5, and you'd have that's diagnostics, and then you would look at how to treat that.

Justin McMillen (01:51:40)
Hang on, slow down, that's why it's in this that. Does it mean that that's the answer?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:51:57)
Now, in this thing, I think is a great example, before I would diagnose them, I would get them to sleep if they hadn't slept for three days. And then I would say, now let's see what you have, because what mental health problem gets better when you don't sleep? None of them. They all get worse. So I would just say, let's sleep first and then let's try and diagnose you.

Justin McMillen (01:52:16)
Yeah, back to what you're saying, diagnose, I'm not a doctor, so I'm just saying how I would think about it, I'm not saying the DSM-5 is correct, I'm just saying that it exists because there's a bunch of people in the past, and I've seen this, which is helpful because now you can have this collective mind of, this is what other people have learned. Let's learn from other people, they're trying to help, for sure. When they said the savior of this person, and the behavior, more than likely, based on evidence, the behavior is going to be neurochemical, you don't just stay awake for four days, it's really difficult to do that.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:52:39)
I've tried to do it, you can't do it without something going haywire in the physiology. Not mind, my mind, this is how I see it, physiology has to change to stay awake and not go to sleep. Does that mean you have to give them psych meds? Not necessarily, not at all.

Justin McMillen (01:53:00)
I mean, no, in fact, you're probably really anti-psych-meds.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:53:00)
So you're looking to, I can't say anti, I have a psychiatrist who works for me. I mean, I'm not anti-psych-meds.

Justin McMillen (01:53:22)
Don't all your people basically get off of psych meds by the time they're done with the program?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:53:22)
Oh, most of them, people come here to get off psych meds, but saying anti means it's like, using, I would never say anti.

Justin McMillen (01:53:22)
I mean, I'm with you.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:53:22)
Yeah, now, okay, so all we know from a first principle standpoint is that this person is experiencing a tremendous amount of stress and unnecessary suffering, maybe necessary, but suffering, because they're awake and they've come to you for help.

Justin McMillen (01:53:57)
They need to go to sleep, so first principles would say the first thing, like you said, getting to where you are, so again, if I was just looking at, I'm not a doctor, it's like the first thing goes, I need to go to sleep, that's the primary problem, how do I get them to sleep?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:53:57)
So okay, so how do you get them to sleep if it's chemical in nature, and there are psychopharmacological interventions to get them to sleep, that might be one way, or there are other ways.

Justin McMillen (01:54:20)
Yes, there are other ways, is that what, what is the best way to do the best job at handling it?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:54:20)
I think the best, quickest way is to find the pill that knocks him down, that shuts the mind off and gets them eight hours of sleep. Here's where I use psychopharm, and you could use the DSM-5 to say it.

Justin McMillen (01:54:37)
Very well, could be bipolar one, because they're awake, and the way they described it, and because we've learned from all these other people experiencing it, does that mean that bipolar one even exists outside of a man-made term?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:54:37)
Well, we know that there are groups of people that experienced the same symptom, and we've labeled it, in the English language. We've called this bipolar one. When people do this, at the end of the day, is it probably neurochemical in nature and not mind, but chemistry, probably chemistry, mind is different, you couldn't divorce mind out of there.

Justin McMillen (01:54:57)
I break, that's, I break them apart, I like to think of it, they exist in the same system, that's like saying there's. You can take biology away from chemistry in the human body, or you can take physiology away from how you're thinking about it. Let me put it to you like this, like a computer, you have hardware, the physical structure of a computer, and you have the programs that run on that hardware, and that's your mind, which is a combination of different algorithms that a consciousness emerges from.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:55:48)
That's not chemistry, it's the result of chemistry. Chemistry creates, along with other things, and the memory in the brain, and perhaps even some sort of collective consciousness, we have this consciousness emerge in the mind. But that's software, you can't touch software, it's the chemistry, which would be part of the hardware, the brain, the tissue, which is what you're putting. This is how I see it, I'm not saying it's true, it's just my way of seeing it. Like, for example, if the hardware is malfunctioning, the computer doesn't work, right, your software's never going to work right on the computer, it's not going to work if you don't have all the systems working, or it won't function. Everyone might have different hardware, you could treat that hardware with chemicals possibly, you could also make it do exercise and beef it up, clean it up. The mind would be like memories and the things, software, right, software can have glitches in it, it can be screwed up, it can have traumas that cause things to reshape how the mind thinks, is that chemistry? I mean, maybe at a molecular level, I think it's so deep at a molecular level, trillions of different mechanisms of action, that trying to reduce it reductionistically down to that is crazy. I think at some point you have to move from the chemicals in the meat into some sort of software idea.

Justin McMillen (01:56:55)
Oh, okay, you think mind and chemistry is the same?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:57:23)
I think the mind has chemistry in it, what is the mind, what is consciousness?

Justin McMillen (01:57:23)
Yeah, good luck.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:57:23)
Good question, good question, you can go through a whole four years of a psychiatry residency and not really understand what the heck the mind is, what are we talking about? I love Dan Siegel and his interpersonal neurobiology, who kind of says this kind of stuff. You learn all the stuff, but nobody tells you what mental health is.

Justin McMillen (01:57:51)
Yeah, and I find that fascinating and true. And what is the mind, it's crazy.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:57:51)
I know, I always say the mind is located in every cell of the body, it might be. So you want to study the mind, why are you looking at the brain? Well, the brain's a conglomerate of nervous system tissue, and so should we put the mind up there? I don't, I put it in the whole body. I think, why do we put it here? Because we want to reduce it to something we can scan, Daniel Amen, study to, find a biomarker, because we're good in our heart. We're trying to fix something. I think why people, I mean, but the mind is in the brain is because you can cut sections of the brain out and people lose parts of their mind. That's probably why they think of it like that. Even Dan Siegel, he came up with nine functions of the prefrontal cortex. The way he did that was by doing case studies of damage to the frontal cortex. And he looked at what functions were being lost, and he started to identify that there were different areas of the brain. First, he had a supposition that the frontal cortex was developed for us to be the best high level connectors we possibly could be, and that's interpersonal neurobiology, so because it's part of the brain, its whole purpose is for us to form attachments to each other. When this piece is gone, we lose impulse control.

Justin McMillen (01:59:08)
How does that relate to attachments to others?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:59:08)
What if you don't have impulse control, we can't have a conversation, or we're going to kill each other in the tribe. Another one is empathy, another one is the ability to think about future actions and make a decision now to decide which direction to go. Right, but he did that by looking at case studies of different parts of the brain that were removed or damaged, and then he came up with his frame. So I don't know, it's silly, because these are words and frames, like, I have a framework, it's like computers, I use computers because it's simple. It's probably not correct, it's just the best I got.

Justin McMillen (01:59:45)
Well, are we trying to understand what the mind is, is that what we're talking about?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (01:59:45)
I think, or maybe we just need to take a hot break, and feel our feet on the floor, and take a few breaths, and figure out where we want to go with.

Justin McMillen (02:00:07)
How much time do we have left, and I think we should close this out and come back. We should have a part two.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (02:00:07)
I'm looking, do you know where I have to go after this?

Justin McMillen (02:00:07)
Yeah, okay.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (02:00:22)
There was a text that just came through about it, why don't we, oh, there's a little crash going on, why don't we close this out for now, I don't want to.

Justin McMillen (02:00:22)
And then we do a part two, this won't release for like a few weeks, maybe even a month, right, there's a queue.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (02:00:22)
Okay.

Justin McMillen (02:00:42)
And then we can schedule a part two, and that'll actually be good, because it gives us a chance to, unless you don't, do you not want to leave what you already told me, but meet again?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (02:00:42)
Oh, heck yes, for sure, we could do a part two. And for sure, this was really valuable to me, to have to prepare for this. With our preconceived, hey, here's some things that we could talk about, and so I thought, oh, what do I want, if I was going to drive the conversation, what would I want to talk about? And then I'd been promising myself I was going to start using AI, and I'm like, oh, let me give you a spin on this, because I've heard some people say it can help you with preparing a lecture or whatever. Gosh, it's unbelievable, so I love looking at all the problems with modern psychiatry, and the anti-psych-meds thing, and chemical imbalance theory. And, you know, Robert Whitaker's book Anatomy of an Epidemic, where he said psych meds are basically causing this epidemic of mental illness, and so I was hearing what I had to say about that. And the chemical imbalance theory, it was fascinating getting ready for this thing, I was pleased I had to do it, had to or got to do it.

Justin McMillen (02:01:53)
Beautiful, let's come back to it, and we'll go off the same page. Do you know why I brought this?

Dr. Gary Dylewski (02:01:53)
No.

Justin McMillen (02:01:53)
I brought that because, why is that? Think about doing a podcast myself. And I thought, because I have a committee member who is a shit stirrer, I call him, okay, he has trouble keeping his mouth shut about stuff that he really could create a shitstorm about. And I have often thought that if I was to really go in and talk about some of the things that I think, I could get killed for, it's why I haven't put out the book that I have, because I think that there is some stuff with how polarized we are as a society that it could be dangerous for me to do, the whistleblower. But, you know, whatever, so I thought, I'm going to bring this. If I get into anything, I'm just going to hide who I am, I hide behind this, this is all medicine, this is a council hat, like when the elders get together. I got this from a Native American medicine woman, and I don't wear it much. It's awesome, but you can kind of, not really, sort of see exactly who the person is, because, and anyway, I thought if I, we get into talking about something where I'm on the edge of saying something, I could throw on the council owl medicine hat, or here, I just have a reminder to me to like, really be a little bit more mindful about what you're saying. Because as you can see, when you and I start talking, it moves, and next thing you know, you're, oh shit, you know, you might.

Dr. Gary Dylewski (02:03:38)
Yeah, oh, I saw that, and somebody taped it.