1_15 Jonathan Lu: Fatherhood, Acceptance of Self, and Daoist Ideals and Psychedelics in Ancient Chinese Culture

This is the last episode of season 1 and includes a short reflection of the journey so far. Thank you, the listener, for hopping and staying with us the last 8 months. We're very excited for Season 2.

Jonathan Lu is the co-founder of VCENNA, a drug discovery company that creates mental wellness solutions from psychoactive plants used ceremonially in Ancestral Eastern traditions.  Jonathan is an engineer that has been studying 2000 year old Chinese texts in search of compounds, formulations, and rituals that have been lost to history. His team applies modern neurophysiological and computational tools to understand scientifically what our ancestors discovered millennia ago, and from which they developed the nootropic formulations for Magi Ancestral Supplements.

You can follow Jon Lu at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanalu and https://twitter.com/AncestralMagi.

Transcript

[00:00:43] Raad Seraj: before we get into the interview with the very brilliant and Jon Lu, I wanna share a quick reflection on the journey of creating the first season of this podcast. It's hard to believe that we are at the end of season one. When I started this podcast eight months ago, I had no idea how this experiment would go, whether anybody would tune in, or whether anyone needed yet another podcast crowding the airwaves.

[00:01:07] Raad Seraj: All I knew, however, was that we needed to broaden the narrative landscape and shine the light on other points of views. It is been a humbling experience to connect with such a diverse range of guests who shared their incredible journeys with me, diverse not just in how they grew up and in many cases, how their family settled on foreign lands after a long, arduous journey of leaving their homes, but also diverse in how they navigated their trials and tribulations, pain and joy, as well as success and failures in their careers.

[00:01:33] Raad Seraj: It was cool to be on a train to a destination unknown for 60 minutes and really get to know someone and how they saw the world. We often talk about the set and setting of the psychedelic experience, but it's been inspiring to get the set and setting of many of my guests younger selves. I'm particularly excited about the conversation we had around psychedelics in the backdrop of what feels like a rapidly shifting space, ecosystem, industry, whatever you wanna call it.

[00:01:58] Raad Seraj: We explored the benefits and potential risks of these substances in a thoughtful and nuanced way. It's clear that there's so much more to discover, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to be part of this evolving conversation. 

[00:02:09] Raad Seraj: I created Minority Trip Report to amplify minority perspectives and lived experiences, but these stories are ultimately human. And having a wider lens to perceive and understand the world can only enrich the ever unfolding story that is our global culture. As we gear up for season two, which will be released in June, I'm filled with anticipation and joy. I invite you to please join our email list, provide feedback, and share the podcast with your friends and family.

[00:02:36] Raad Seraj: MTR is completely self-funded and self-produced, so any and all support goes a long way, and I thank you in advance for that. As part of season two launch, we're planning an in-person podcast launch party in Toronto in June, which will be a lot of fun and we would love for you to be a part of it. Please join the email list and we'll share more details as it becomes available.

[00:02:54] Raad Seraj: Lastly, my sincere gratitude, you, the listener, for hopping on and staying on the train over the last eight months. Thanks for indulging my experiment and I hope each guest and each episode helped you grow and see the world differently. I know they did for me.

[00:03:10] Raad Seraj: Jon, welcome. 

[00:03:11] Jon Lu: Thank you, Raad. It's a pleasure to be here and always an honor to spend some time with you. 

[00:03:15] Raad Seraj: Likewise, my friend. You are currently on the Stanford campus for a psychedelic conference, I believe. Is that right? 

[00:03:23] Jon Lu: Yeah, today is the Bay Area psychedelic Science Symposium which I'm very happy to see.

[00:03:28] Jon Lu: Actually, even about a year ago, a group of us got together and we were trying to do monthly dinners just because there was such a strong concentration of those interested in supporting the industry that were around la and you would think that there should be more around the Bay Area, but there was very little formal organization.

[00:03:42] Jon Lu: So this has been a great chance to, while there's some amazing speakers and some amazing presentations, what I'm just most happy about here is just getting to see some friends that I haven't seen in a while, and we get to spend some more quality time together. 

[00:03:53] Raad Seraj: Yeah, definitely. It's interesting you say that there has been a formal organization doing this kind of stuff.

[00:03:58] Raad Seraj: I'm assuming there were many, but they've disappeared or maybe gone underground because the first LSD experiments on creativity were in Menlo Park. So what happened? 

[00:04:11] Jon Lu: That's a very long story. Going back to Ken and his married group of of Pranksters.

[00:04:15] Jon Lu: What I mean by formal, like organizing is much more around the actual event in the media side. It's obviously MAPS is headquartered here, and they have a and they're probably the most dominant one in that really brings together this this whole community. And we have groups like the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative and a number of startups that was here.

[00:04:31] Jon Lu: But just given how much innovation comes from this ecosystem what I was surprised by you is that you have groups like Psychedelics Today, third Wave or Psilocybin Alpha none of them are present around here. They're just in more kind of media concentrated areas.

[00:04:44] Jon Lu: So what we tend to lack is a little bit more of that community and I guess as a macrocosm and a microcosm of the Bay Area here. This is a very business-centric place here. So I'm very happy to see much more of the actual human component in place. 

[00:04:57] Raad Seraj: Yeah, definitely. What kind of people are showing up to these I guess when you first did dinners and what kind of people are you seeing now?

[00:05:04] Jon Lu: Those dinners were really just began as a group of us friends. So we had a group of scientific researchers. We had a group of academics, so we had a group of of business people and a group of different entrepreneurs. It actually began, I think when Mattia, Sarah Brisky and I met in Wonderland and Miami two years ago.

[00:05:20] Jon Lu: We were like, wait a minute. We both live in the Bay Area. We're actually meeting a couple of other people in the Bay Area here. So we both know Gianni Click, and we're both close with people like Imran Khan and Andrea Gomez from uc, Berkeley. So just thought it might be a good idea for us to get together socially, if anything.

[00:05:34] Raad Seraj: And of course, that rolled into something bigger now.

[00:05:36] Jon Lu: Oh, no, that's still just a social gathering. Now this is a much bigger symposium that I think Gianni's organization actually is organizing it. But this has nothing to do with our social, huh. Our group of friends. It's just, it's a good excuse for, your friends to get back together, like how we reconnect and where at Wonderland is, our our busy wives these days those events serve as a good excuse for us to have a professional justification to spend some time with people we care about.

[00:05:59] Raad Seraj: Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more, and I think one of the things that I love about this space so much is that build bonds pretty fast and opportunities come and manifest in different ways. Pretty fast, I have to say. So Jon how we usually start these podcasts is I like to really like to know what made the person who they are, and obviously for good and bad. I think a big part of who we are really starts to develop in the early age as children, right? We'll love to know. How did you grow up? What makes John Lu who he is today? What were your parents like? How did you spend your time growing up? And I think you grew up in the San Francisco Bay area too, right? 

[00:06:39] Jon Lu: No, I didn't. I grew up in Rochester, New York, which is where I'll call home. Oh kind of a Chinese Taiwanese family where I was actually born in Wisconsin back when my my dad had first come to this country... just back it up a little bit it's amazing to think about Taiwan having once been a third world country that people were trying to get out of instead of a relatively prosperous place. And certainly with a significant impact in the microprocessor world today. That wasn't always the case. And my dad, like many others that came from that generation, studied here his PhD and struggled a little bit in the the early days to try and find find some footing and get a visa.

[00:07:10] Jon Lu: I don't actually remember where he was working at the time when I was born in Wisconsin. But ultimately we ended up moving back to Taiwan for a little bit. But I did have the fortune of being blessed with birthplace, which unfortunately has become a defining thing within our world here.

[00:07:22] Jon Lu: So have an American passport. And we eventually came back to the US lived in a couple places around the East coast and Rochester, New York is what I'll call home. It's where I'd lived for the majority of my life before I became an adult. 

[00:07:34] Raad Seraj: This is your family back there still? 

[00:07:36] Jon Lu: No. The the cold got too pressing for them. So my parents actually moved to Nevada when they had retired to the nice low tax area. Nice. And my sister is now living in in LA so I'm happy to have her close by and kind of just cousins and uncles and aunts all around the world. 

[00:07:50] Raad Seraj: Yeah, I think it's interesting what you say about Taiwan. A lot of countries. I mean, you think about Singapore, right? Same story. Malaysia. These countries were pretty, I don't wanna say destitute, but very impoverished for a long time. I myself am from Bangladesh, and I think we're just about to, just starting to recreate or retell our story, our genesis story on our own terms, right? So I think that's a huge area for discussion that hopefully we'll get into later on. 

[00:08:16] Jon Lu: It's funny, it was I met someone else from Southern Taiwan, from Gaoshang a little while ago. And, I kind of endearingly referred to it. She's oh, yeah, I grew up in this little fishing, or lived in this little fishing village.

[00:08:24] Jon Lu: It was like, oh, which one? I lived in, this one year. It was like, oh, actually, I kinda saying that endearingly the same way that I call San Francisco little fishing village, actually, I have very little, wasn't actually a little fishing village, but 

[00:08:33] Raad Seraj: yeah. I, the first time I went to Shenzhen in China, That used to be a actual fishing village.

[00:08:39] Raad Seraj: And then look what it is now. It's kind of nuts. I think there's 33 million people in there right now. It's 

[00:08:43] Jon Lu: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Amazing. And like you look at the list of the largest towers in the world. It's okay. Yeah. Number one of course is the Burj Khalifa and then like number two through 15 are all in China, and like four of them in Shenzen.

[00:08:55] Raad Seraj: It's wild. It's a wild place. Shenzhen is a truly a wild place. I've been a couple of times now, and every time I go back I'm like, this is insane. For many reasons. What what took your parents back to Taiwan the first time? 

[00:09:08] Jon Lu: The first time was just I think I'm probably gonna bastardize this towards my own hero's story there, but if I recall, like my dad just struggled to, to find a job during a time when it was not the greatest US economy.

[00:09:19] Jon Lu: We in light of what happened with svb, we tend to think of there was a time that the US was at double digit interest rates. And, even distinctly in the early eighties I remember this whole thought around Latin America versus, north America. I mean, like thinking back then, it was not immediately obvious that the United States would developed to be as large as it was given all the resources ahead as compared to a place like Argentina, which I'd say was probably at a very similar socioeconomic development level at the that point.

[00:09:43] Jon Lu: No not the point of this podcast here, but for reasons beyond the socioeconomic politics behind it, it's obviously the US is a very different place now than it was then. And we were able to come back and live a good first generation immigrant life. Here. 

[00:09:58] Raad Seraj: So when you guys went back the first time to Taiwan, how long were you there before you moved back to the us?

[00:10:03] Jon Lu: It was about four years. 

[00:10:04] Raad Seraj: Four years. And what was those four years like? How old were you? 

[00:10:06] Jon Lu: I wish I could really remember. I can only really look at it from from photos that I have. All I have are really these kind of just distinct memories that are really one for instance that, that stands out distinctly to me is I remember at like most Chinese families, which ethnically my mother's Han Chinese, my father's from a variety of others.

[00:10:22] Jon Lu: We've come from very matriarchal societies where your grandmother really is the one that dominates and runs the house or runs the entire generation. And my grandmother was an amazing woman. She actually was like qualified to, for the Olympics back in I think like 1922 or so.

[00:10:39] Jon Lu: But then that was the year that Japan invaded China. So she also has a lifelong hatred for the Japanese. But anyways, like she's a, just this very powerful woman that when the Communist revolution occurred in mainland, my grandfather on on on my mother's side. He had escaped and and she brought six children by herself across the border, over to Taiwan.

[00:10:57] Jon Lu: So she's really treated with this level of reverence. And the only distinct memory that I really have from my time in Taiwan, aside from like the frequent typhoons, was one day I was playing, doing something stupid and I broke this vase, which I have no idea how much value there was here.

[00:11:11] Jon Lu: Maybe it's sentimental value. Maybe there really was like a 4,000 year old vase. But I had like uncles and aunts that were like shuttling me around, like I was in secret service to a different location every three hours out of fear. They're like, oh, like she can't find him.

[00:11:22] Jon Lu: The ma the true matriarch, right? Probably loves everybody, but also everybody fears 

[00:11:27] Jon Lu: her. No, quite well. And that is very much the Asian way of giving love, which is three words that I had never heard in my entire life was, I love you. The way that Chinese people give love is very different, is we don't use our words for it.

[00:11:39] Jon Lu: We do it through actions in ways that we may not immediately understand how we're giving love. But, my, my mother or father, taking out the best piece of chicken to give me, that's a way of giving love. And me growing up in a very western environment, let's say, it's not until recent that I, that and certainly me becoming a father that actually came to appreciate it.

[00:11:56] Jon Lu: Those words matter. And the lack of words certainly had an impact upon me for most of my development. 

[00:12:00] Raad Seraj: I totally agree with you. It's the same in South Asian culture. In fact, a lot of Eastern cultures, I think it's acts of service that is the love language, that is dominant love language in the sense, you protect the people you love.

[00:12:11] Raad Seraj: You nurture and nourish the people you love, but not necessarily with words of affirmation, let's say. You don't say, I love you, you've done really well for yourself. It's discipline and it's love in a very let's just say yeah. There's no words around it. I find there's much more balanced than perhaps in the west, but of course there's extremes as well, which is like purely performance, right?

[00:12:30] Raad Seraj: Oh, I love you, but really, won't show up to your birthday parties or I won't actually do anything, or back it up in any way. My own life has been shaped by the lack of, I, I would say, Words of affirmation, but in line, with psychedelics and all, all the healing work that you have to do, you come to see that love actually is a pretty expansive language.

[00:12:49] Raad Seraj: And sometimes you can't change your parents and you can't really change how they actually show up and what they do, right? 

[00:12:56] Jon Lu: Yeah. Yeah. The way that I was raised and the environment in which my parents gave love is from a world where they were literally like they had escaped or their generation had escaped a war prior, they'd lived in in, kind of the true equalizer when everyone first got to Taiwan and all socioeconomic classes just trying to build from nothing.

[00:13:12] Jon Lu: You just come across. And then my parents having done the same thing coming to the United States, they grew up with this extreme scarcity mentality. So love was, I'm gonna prepare you to survive. I'm gonna prepare you to actually live in this world here. And those same strengths that were beneficial towards me for a lot of my life when I had the significant levels of scarcity, I've also come to see they became weaknesses later.

[00:13:33] Raad Seraj: Yeah. I think immigrants are often quite resilient because they can survive, they can go through any kind of adversity, but, being built to survive doesn't mean you're necessarily built to thrive and actually live a joyful life. I'm not saying those two are mutually exclusive, but it's your level of training for different parts of your life.

[00:13:53] Jon Lu: Unquestionably. And that's something that I struggle with as a parent here. Whereas I dramatically overindex on saying, I love you to my children. I'm a very different parent than to my kids, than my parents were to me. And my parents are also a very different grandparent to them than I would've expected.

[00:14:07] Jon Lu: Like the level of joy that they have, which I think part of it is generation. Part of it is the change of the environment in which we live in today. And part of it is also, you don't realize when you're watching your kids grow up because they're also watching you grow up and I've grown up, my parents have grown up. They're very different. People know how they used to be. Yeah. 

[00:14:23] Raad Seraj: And by the time they've become grandparents, they've, they're being parents again in a very different way. Many mistakes and many things to learn in between. 

[00:14:31] Jon Lu: yeah. I don't have to worry about spoiling kids cuz you've, cuz I gotta deal with that.

[00:14:33] Jon Lu: Exactly. Like my daughter I don't know, something happens to her and she's very emotional. She starts crying and she's oh, it's okay. You want some ice cream? I was like, what? I would've got my ass beaten. 

[00:14:41] Raad Seraj: I never had grandparents in that way. So I actually envy that quite a bit. I imagine it's like a super enjoyable time of your life.

[00:14:48] Raad Seraj: So when you guys came back the second time it was a dramatically different time in the US I imagine. What were your first formative memories being in the US and when did you start to feel like if at all a Taiwanese American or just American. 

[00:15:04] Jon Lu: So I had the benefit of growing up in a very diverse environment here.

[00:15:07] Jon Lu: I would say even specifically in Rochester, New York, where you had a lot of people that originally came to the city, I mean our ourselves as well. And then tried to move upstate to find, greater space and peace and certainly a much greater length as the dollar can go.

[00:15:19] Jon Lu: So I grew up in a community that was highly Jewish highly diverse across various different nationalities in addition to the different religions. So for me, kind of like everyone was a, was an outsider and I, I kind of joke with people. I'm proud to be like an honorary member of the Jewish societies here and like a member of the Jewish Ventures like Venture Capital Association here and an investment group.

[00:15:40] Jon Lu: I grew up going to Temple and far more than ever. I'd never even known what quinceanera was or a baptism. And, my wife is Catholic now. But that was just the environment in which I grew up, like everyone was was a part of a, some level of a diaspora population.

[00:15:53] Jon Lu: So it was actually kind of common to me that we didn't just have white people. 

[00:15:57] Raad Seraj: That's really special when everyone's coming from the outside. No one's from the outside. It's a, yeah, it's a really good mix. Did you, how did you identify at the time then? Did it, were you all just American?

[00:16:08] Raad Seraj: Did you just feel American or did you feel like no. 

[00:16:11] Jon Lu: I certainly felt distinctly we Chinese, I would look at a lot of my friends. So one of my, my like some of my closest friends were Indian growing up or Korean, my very best friend from high school was Turkish. But most people spoke English at home.

[00:16:22] Jon Lu: Myself mostly included as well. The part that I could know that I was distinctly Chinese was I did go to Chinese school every weekend and I had a very different weekend versus versus a lot of my friends. And I could certainly see things were different where I'd go to sleepovers with their house and I'm like, wow the way my family behaves is that's what I think grow up, think that was normal.

[00:16:39] Jon Lu: Like maybe we're not very normal here. Like I I have parents here like telling their kids if they love them here and that they're proud of them, and encouraging us to go off and have fun instead of just telling no to everything, like 

[00:16:49] Raad Seraj: So what were your first formative memories or if you, when you look back at that time, what stands out the most?

[00:16:55] Jon Lu: Oh, what stands out the most? I think I look at everything with rose-colored glasses, where, you know, traditionally when we look at memories, it's kind of like this fuel for a fire. It doesn't matter whether they're good memories or bad memories, they're just a fuel we have that we're, we tend to look back upon.

[00:17:10] Jon Lu: So I'll look at my childhood now as being largely positive. Or if you were to have asked me that 20 years ago, it would've been very negative. I would've told you of how much resentment that I'd grown up with for for my parents of how overbearing they were and how much pressure they put on me, and how it was never good enough for anything.

[00:17:25] Jon Lu: But if I actually really look back objectively to the moment, like I had a lot of fun and I had a lot of fun going to, playing football, which I was allowed to do that other other Chinese or Taiwanese kids were not allowed to do. I had a, I don't think I, I have any really distinct individual memory that really stands out as being formative.

[00:17:41] Jon Lu: So much as really just collection of of images within my mind here that have formed something that I would say I would I would I would be envious of anybody that had a similar upbringing to my own. 

[00:17:51] Raad Seraj: You kind of rewrote your own biography, right? There's a saying that I'm a big fan of, I often quote on the podcast, it's the future is fixed. It's the past that's unpredictable. 

[00:18:01] Jon Lu: Huh. I love that. Yeah. 

[00:18:04] Raad Seraj: So what changed? I'm sure psychedelics has some something to do with it and we'll come back to that, but what really allowed you to see the past in such a dramatically different light?

[00:18:15] Jon Lu: Very simply fatherhood. Just raising children and in, in my earlier career, I've been a product developer, product manager and kind of when I was at Stanford, got very inculcated into this whole concept of design thinking. Where you're really trying to understand your consumer, your user, your partner, whoever it is that you're talking to or working to, and see the world from their perspective.

[00:18:34] Jon Lu: And when you see the world of the perspective of a child, actually can look back and think of the times that I was just so angst-ridden in and such a bastard, right? That was the external part that everyone saw. Whereas internally person that was angry with was myself. And that's not the world that I want my children to grow up. And I can, even from the day that my oldest daughter was born, started to see the world of like how actually magical it is. Like the world is psychedelic enough, they even without any psychedelics in it. And if you can put your yourself into the position of being a child again, I actually could go back and start to, to reprocess some of the memories that I had even having done without any psychedelics in mind.

[00:19:10] Jon Lu: And just recognize what is it like to experience something again for the first time, is you can never do that a second time. 

[00:19:16] Raad Seraj: Did this come to you on a particular moment? I don't have children but I do hear the process of the thing leading up to the moment where your child is born.

[00:19:25] Jon Lu: Only similar as you said there when the past had mutated towards my own model that I fit already of the world here. I can think of some very distinct memories that'll look bad, positively on, but even when my oldest daughter was born I remember talking like so because of my own in insecurities, I had never wanted children.

[00:19:42] Jon Lu: I had just planned for the rest of my life to have this independence. And that's something that I value very strongly. And yet a lot of my mentors and a lot of the people that I really admire would tell me that the most impactful thing that you can ever do. And actually just had lunch with this this beautiful soul Ronna Ronna Hashmi, who's now a PhD student here at Stanford.

[00:20:00] Jon Lu: And she's talking about, in these interviews people ask her like, oh, what do you wanted to be in 10 years? And she's look, truthfully, I wanna be a mother. Which I think is an amazing answer cuz there's nothing that will teach you more about life than being a parent. So with this many smart people and wise people that I admire telling me this, like I, I figured there had to be some truth to it that I just couldn't understand until it actually occurred.

[00:20:19] Jon Lu: And it did turn out to be to be true. 

[00:20:21] Jon Lu: What insecurity did you have before that? You said that you didn't want children? I'm sure at that time you didn't feel as insecurity, you're just like, I know I don't want kids. 

[00:20:29] Raad Seraj: Yeah. I knew I didn't want kids cause I didn't have a very cha happy childhood myself, or at least that was the interpretation of my past that I had at that time.

[00:20:36] Raad Seraj: And certainly when I look back at pictures, it looks pretty damn happy. I had great friendships going back from a time I had amazing experiences that I would love to give for my own children. Which I certainly didn't come to realize until after I had already become a parent.

[00:20:49] Raad Seraj: But what I really valued was this independence. So even before I had turned 30, I had visited 60 countries in the world. And what I really loved doing was exploring and finding myself in, primarily third world countries where I would have to just explore and find my way around and. One of the things that I'd loved more than anything was just to go visit a grocery store in another country and just see what the fruits do they sell, like and I really feared losing that independence. 

[00:21:11] Jon Lu: How do you process that now? 

[00:21:13] Jon Lu: Now I have this complete other evaluation of how much I've grown myself and how much I've learned to experience from having been a father that you can't it's like the word quia. It's something that you can't understand until you've you've had it yourself or you've done it yourself.

[00:21:28] Jon Lu: And like I, I told my oldest daughter, whenever she gets frustrated about understanding anything that, these different categories of things you don't understand advanced math, you'll understand this with a little bit more practice how the financial system works here.

[00:21:40] Jon Lu: You'll understand this when you get older. What is it like to care for another being, any living, being which, for me first was a dog. You will, you cannot actually know what that's like until you've experienced it. And to me, parenthood really helped to rewrite a lot of my own past just from having experienced what is it like to care and nurture for another human being who actually loves you dearly.

[00:21:59] Raad Seraj: I really like that. So I recently went back home to Bangladesh where my parents live. It's where I'm from. I haven't been able to visit for three and a half years because of the pandemic. And I spent six weeks there with with my wife. We got married in October last year, and she's never been, she's German Canadian and she came back to Bangladesh with me. And you can tell yourself I've grown, but you don't know how true that is till you meet the people you grew up with and then you realize, did I actually grow up? Cause I'm blowing the fuck up still. So it's hard to tell, right? You can tell all yourself all these things in a vacuum. I haven't been back home in three and a half years. I'm hanging with my parents and I have seen them in between. But of course going back home, I particularly get the sense of, I've always had the sense of inner conflict because I grew up in a couple of different places. I never felt like I belong there. But I never, I didn't feel any sense of conflict this time at all. It's partly due to, because my wife was there and she's my life in Canada, and she came back with me. So it's not like I was living two different lives.

[00:23:00] Raad Seraj: There was a little tension with my father, but I feel like every father and son have some sort of tension. It's kind of like the thing between fathers and sons. I would love to know a little bit about, how that is with your dad now, but eventually I think, this sense of calm that I felt and this love and acceptance.

[00:23:16] Raad Seraj: Of just my life and my story that could have only happened with the experience and the life that I've lived the last three and a half years, and the growth that I've experienced. I don't think it's something you can theorize. You can intellectualize. It's just something that it's embodied in a way.

[00:23:31] Jon Lu: Yeah. And you can actually feel that embodied of the level of anxiety or tension that you don't feel when you're in that en environment. One of the books that I love kind of love for different reasons was the story of Papi Van Winkle Bourbon. I mean, when I was with Proctor and Gamble for for a large part of my career I'd lived for 10 years in Cincinnati, Ohio, and, been a longest place I've ever lived anywhere as an adult in many ways that still feels like home to me now.

[00:23:52] Jon Lu: But being so close to bourbon country, I came to develop this love for bourbon and the story of Papi Van Winkle, like these thousand dollars bottles that. Yeah, this book is in some ways kind of depressing cause you get to realize that it's all just branding. It's just whatever barrels left behind, let's throw another label on it and see what procedure we can attach behind it.

[00:24:09] Jon Lu: But the true story of it of the family that created this here really comes down to the grandfather or the grandson of the, the grandfather, the original guy, Pappy, who created this this amazing bourbon back in oh, 70 years ago or so. And this guy now who's the master distiller, he's trying to, he's been spending his entire life trying to recreate this one flavor that he tried when he was, 14 or 15 that his grandfather gave him.

[00:24:31] Jon Lu: And he's been trying to perfect the bourbon to try and recreate this one flavor. And this term you can't go home again, Yeah I've been hearing this a lot for most of my life. And until I read this book probably two years ago, I don't think I actually really internalized what that meant.

[00:24:43] Jon Lu: I thought that always meant that you can never go back to the place you were because it's changed. And now I've actually come to realize what that it actually means is you can't go back to the place where you were because you've changed. So this guy here has spent his entire life trying to recreate this flavor that he had when he was 14.

[00:24:59] Jon Lu: And for, physiological as well as as kind of, of a psychological reasons, he actually can never recreate that flavor. His taste buds are different. He himself has had a much more profound, he's eaten different foods that he can never have that same flavor himself, let alone the fact that flavor never existed because his home never existed and that flavor never existed.

[00:25:18] Jon Lu: It only existed as a sensation that his own brain had processed. And his brain is different. So he can never actually go home again and remake that same bourbon because it never existed. And the same goes for us and any one of our experiences, we can never go back to it cuz it only was a memory. So this is why what you had said before about how the past is what changes, and it really strikes in my heart. 

[00:25:38] Raad Seraj: Wow. That's fascinating. I've been a nostalgic person for a long time because I think like this sense of oh, I, I don't know where my home is, but I deny wholesale, reject nostalgia now because it's beautiful. But I think it can be too melancholic and you can be too anchored to some moment. Like you said, that never existed, that was always gonna be fleeting. You can never find it. It's always gonna change because the past is being rewritten in every moment. 

[00:26:06] Jon Lu: Yeah. another book I'll recommend that I absolutely love one of my favorite authors ever, Oliver Burkeman. Like his first book, the Antidote that I'm gonna butcher whatever the subtitle was, it's something like, positivity for people that can't set happiness. It's kind of like his take on stoicism. One of my favorite books ever that I recommend to probably the one that I've recommended the most to, to people.

[00:26:24] Jon Lu: But his second book has gotten a lot of of headwinds. He wrote it about 10 years later. It came out last year. It was called 4,000 weeks. 4,000 Weeks, representing approximately the lifespan of a human being. And you can look at it at a very first order level around just how time is limited.

[00:26:38] Jon Lu: But what he really spends his own analysis on is that the fact that time is limited and mortality is what defines us is a beautiful thing. Because these experiences we had, the only reason they have any value is because we've made a choice to move on. If we lived forever, nothing would've any meaning because I would never have to make a sacrifice or a trade off of a choice of how I'm gonna spend my time or who I'm gonna spend it with.

[00:26:58] Jon Lu: But the fact that a memory I had, it's only precious because it is a memory. If I could experience it again tomorrow, it wouldn't be precious. If I could experience again what it's like to play with my one-year-old daughter, which I never can again then that time of her being one years old would not be would not be special.

[00:27:14] Jon Lu: So to me, this kind of bastardized western notion of heaven is kind of like bs like at what age will I be, what will I experience? Maybe these are just things that we can't comprehend and we've been trying to put a lens on it that we humans can experience. But I would never want to be in a place here where I can go and experience anything cuz that would mean that I don't have this choice of what actually is special.

[00:27:33] Raad Seraj: It is such a good point. And I wonder this obsession with living forever, right? Is it because people feel like they haven't or they can never live a fulfilled life? Is every moment not theirs. What is this obsession with that? I want to be immortal. It sounds boring to me, to be honest.

[00:27:53] Raad Seraj: Instead, if you were just, more occupied or thinking more about how do I make the best of this moment and my relationships, and how do I find joy with others and so on. How do I grow and so on? Then you wouldn't have to live forever. It's a really good point that you just made.

[00:28:06] Raad Seraj: I found what is this obsession with longevity? I'm not saying you shouldn't wanna live longer, but this whole thing I think is founded on this yeah, death is bad. Whatever we can do. Don't look old, don't act old, don't be old, you're gonna live forever. It's obsession with youth.

[00:28:22] Jon Lu: Yeah. A absolutely. I would say like the Mexican culture is the one that has really the most healthy relationship with death, where they really celebrate it, not as anything that's bad or to be a avoided. Which I also love because they also come from a very strongly Catholic heritage or recent heritage at least.

[00:28:38] Jon Lu: And the heart of what Christianity and among the religions was were trying to teach us was this wisdom here. And yet we as humans have kind of bastardized it towards our own belief structure of how does it fit me of I should be doing more. I should get more yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:49] Jon Lu: How do I live longer in order to achieve more? Yeah. Whereas what I think they were really trying to teach us from the very beginning was the fact here that life is fleeting and the fact that it is fleeting and temporary makes our choices impactful. And this is what makes it beautiful to be a human.

[00:29:02] Raad Seraj: I love this sort of conversation. Put a pin on that because we're gonna come back to it. From the position of some of the work that you're doing the paper and the book you're writing at this moment. I kind of wanna go back quickly to this comment you made that you had a lot of angst growing up, and you spent a lot of time being mad at your parents because of how much they pushed you. Now, Looking at some of the accomplishment and the crazy background that you have at least academically and all the work that you've done.

[00:29:30] Raad Seraj: I wanna touch on this and maybe perhaps connect it to the comment you just made. Okay. You're accomplished ac academically, you have an impressive track record in mid-market private equity. You're a second time founder you're a frequent speaker and soon to be author. Bsc in, in, in chemical engineering, MBA from Stanford Business School.

[00:29:49] Raad Seraj: Again, you're a second time founder. Doing a startup again is painful enough. You got this crazy pedigree already. How do you connect those two where, you said you spent a lot of time being angry and I imagine that pushed you to also to achieve as much as you can to make your parents proud and so on. How do you relate to those two things? 

[00:30:09] Jon Lu: I'd say inadvertently where I found myself falling into was a level of intrinsic motivation that I came to realize Nothing I could ever do would please the external world, meaning the people that should be most important to me and my parents. So where I came to find satisfaction was by doing things that intrinsically brought my own satisfaction.

[00:30:26] Jon Lu: And and while I think a lot of people are taught that you should always seek intrinsic awards, like they can also be very dangerous if you yourself don't have a healthy balance or someone that can keep you from becoming your own worst enemy. So as an example, my intrinsic motivation is that I wanna live up to the person that I like, I respect or admire, which is someone that fulfills commitments, which is someone who just very simply does what they say and does everything well and does it well for the purpose of actually following the process and executing well, not regardless of the result.

[00:30:54] Jon Lu: What that means is that I will overwork myself simply for my own satisfaction of having completed something to the excellent level that I expect it to be done. Whereas, many people, which I can, I'll say just very generically, can get through the world kind of half-assing things and be much happier and have much more free time.

[00:31:09] Jon Lu: Whereas I can't do that even though the end result of the customer, the person, the partner that I'm trying to do for may not care, but I care. And that has led me to have a lot of unhealthy habits of how hard I'll push myself and how hard I'll overwork myself because to me, I wanna fulfill it for me.

[00:31:24] Raad Seraj: That takes a lot of deep level of self-awareness. How did you discern that? The part where you said, I do it for me and my satisfaction, it's easy to be fooled into saying you're, that overworking to keep the external world happy to do it for approval is also for you. Cuz that kind of logic in inner logic can get pretty twisted.

[00:31:44] Raad Seraj: So how did you discern one from the other? 

[00:31:47] Jon Lu: That I think I, when I left P&G I wrote this really a long email that had nothing to do with my accomplishments of just more of my outlook on life. And one of the things that I had realized coming in the end where people were asking me like, oh, why are you leaving?

[00:31:58] Jon Lu: Where are you going to next? What are you doing? And my point was like, it doesn't actually matter what I'm doing here. I just don't wanna find myself in the same place 10 years from now where, okay, I'm making more money. I've got a more prestigious position. Maybe I'm living somewhere else.

[00:32:09] Jon Lu: That's really cool. But I'm not growing as much as where I would want to be. So the true reason why I was leaving, I would love to say, is so I could bring my family somewhere else, show 'em something new. No, it was very selfish. It was because I wanted to do it for me.

[00:32:20] Raad Seraj: Well said. And there's so much to pick out here, but I'm gonna switch gears a little bit because I think the topics that you write a lot about that you're writing the book about right now, and you have paper that you haven't published yet, but I, I was lucky enough to read it, really deals with a topic that I think doesn't get talked about very often.

[00:32:38] Raad Seraj: So you are now currently a founder of VCENNA and you guys launched recently Magi products, which are inspired by the wisdom of pagan zoroastrian priests of ancient Iran in using psychoactive and hallucinogenic plants, to access a higher state of consciousness and mental wellness in pursuit of the God mind and enlightenment.

[00:33:00] Raad Seraj: There's already quite a lot there. We're gonna talk us obviously like the unknown history of psychedelic or hallucinogenic plants and use of them in ancient China. We are gonna talk a little bit about that, but before that, let's talk about the direct connection to zoroastrian Priest and the history of zoroastrianism and psychedelic use.

[00:33:18] Raad Seraj: What is that? 

[00:33:19] Jon Lu: Yeah. I've even brought, bring it back just as the direct direction to myself here. So my co-founder is Shaheen brilliant guy, also a chemical engineer. Probably one of the world's most leading experts when it comes to mass transfer. And how, this company stemmed from his own innovation for creating a way to extract all these alkaloids or alkaloids from any source, whether it's a plant animal matter.

[00:33:37] Jon Lu: He is of course Persian Iranian which has its original its base from zoroastrianism, the first monotheistic religion that's there. Why he originally named this company, which he started, about two years before I had joined VCENNA came from Avicenna, the Persian polymath, father of of modern medicine, who I admired for most of my life.

[00:33:55] Jon Lu: And interestingly my oldest daughter, or her name is Daniella that's a name that my wife had chosen since she was about 10 years old, that she was one, a boy named Daniel. We had a girl, so it became Daniela. Where I was about to have some influences on her middle name. And her middle name actually is Avicenna.

[00:34:08] Raad Seraj: Oh, really? Wow. 

[00:34:10] Jon Lu: Yeah. So she'll ask me sometimes you name the company after me, and I don't have that heart to tell her. Yeah, of course I did. 

[00:34:14] Jon Lu: Yeah. But, sorry, sorry for that. That aside, many people don't know about they may know or have heard of Zoroaster more from the other translation or pronunciation of the name, which is Zarahustra, which is the title of Nietzche's Magna Opus, Thus Spoke Zarahustra which also is one of the most impactful books that I've ever read. Of course kind of, bastardize and misinterpreted by the Nazis and and Wagner and companies for how they interpreted what the Uber Manish should be.

[00:34:41] Jon Lu: But to me it was really around the power of one to really control his own, his or her own emotions and his, her home, her own life, to be more than just with this outward appearances and how we really have ownership over our own personal leadership. That's a very vague description now that I think about it and probably not so suitable for a podcast... 

[00:34:59] Jon Lu: yeah. But Nietzche chose Zarahustra to be the epimonous hero of his story because he saw him as really the most enlightened one, like the one that you know, understood in, in, in modern time is what is it like to actually be noble and what is it like to actually be virtuous?

[00:35:13] Jon Lu: So Zarahustra the first the founder of Zoroastrianism was the first monotheistic religion one that is recognized as being, worshiping the same God as the Abraham Religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam today. And a lot of the inspiration for him is the first prophet. Then we're kinda transposed into the other prophets that came thereafter.

[00:35:32] Jon Lu: And what he taught was very similar to what every other prophet is taught, was basically how to live a better life, how to overcome your fear of of mortality how to overcome your fear of inadequacy, and do things virtuously just because they're the things to do and. In many ways where I look at him more from Eastern philosophy that I understand much better.

[00:35:52] Jon Lu: I mean, Shaheen would certainly be the right guy for you to talk to about Zoroastrianism. But he's much more parallel to Confucianism and a lot of these same tenants around the four virtues of Confucianism, of, effectively benevolent ritual propriety. These are many of the same ethics that were built in and in, and I find them very much in my own credo, perhaps un unhealthily, so about doing things because they're the right things.

[00:36:11] Jon Lu: They do not because of the results. 

[00:36:13] Raad Seraj: Then let's talk about something that is maybe closer to you since you are writing and thinking a lot about this, and that's Daoist roots of psychedelic use or sort of transcendental practices related to plants in ancient China, and I'm gonna quote a passage from the paper, I think you quote a researcher Fan Pan Li Chen, and there's a passage that I really loved, and I think that will really open up what I'm really getting at regarding this topic. And in one of her papers, she writes " on a world map that illustrates native use of 18 categories of major hallucinogens, China is a conspicuous blank.

[00:36:52] Raad Seraj: Further contemporary Daoist shaman priests are not known to use psychoactive herbs. However, in early medieval China, Daoist adepts searching for personal transcendence and immortality seem to have adopted some of the knowledge accrued by the shamans. Many of the plants they ingested were hallucinogens, including a number of varieties of psychedelic mushrooms. Their knowledge is recorded in Pharmacopia, encyclopedias and biographies of Daoist Transcendence." So tell me, how did the history of psychedelics different kind of psychedelics in Chinese culture, how was it erased and why is it present in contemporary Chinese culture? 

[00:37:30] Jon Lu: Fascinating topic here, which is where it's been so much of the last year researching, and let's begin with the first word that you use here is psychedelic. Psychedelic is not a word that the Chinese would use or within any of lexicography would've ever been used. I think the closest translation that we would have to something like that would be mind altering or mind changing.

[00:37:46] Jon Lu: And in fact, like the word that's most common we use in across Chinese researchers or in any Chinese language is called which means literally like to change your sensation. So I think something a more like mind altering is how they would describe it. Perhaps you could use the word hallucinogen instead of a psychedelic.

[00:38:03] Jon Lu: I mean, there's so many of these words that are used anonymously that all has kind of slightly different in context of what they mean. I'd rather not use the word psychedelic, but use the word more mind altering substances. Binary altering substances have a very prolific use throughout Chinese culture in addition to world's culture.

[00:38:18] Jon Lu: But alone like this can includes things that, Andrew Weil brings up these interesting questions. What is a drug like, would you consider sugar to be a drug as something that's highly mind altering and even physiologically changing and damaging and addictive?

[00:38:30] Jon Lu: And not that all drugs are addictive but the use of mind altering substances had been prolifically used throughout Chinese culture as in every single culture of the world, which is not at all unique. What I would also say not unique either, but the use case for it was in order to reach a level of transcendence or to reach a level of spiritual enlightenment, which is also very similar to the use of mind altering substances in in other cultures. Amazonian to kind early Christian like eleusinian mysteries type of usage to, even Zoroastrian in Iran and kind of early pre-Islamic times, across the world. There has been a very common objective of trying to reach this greater level of spiritual enlightenment.

[00:39:11] Jon Lu: And that always comes with some level of mind alteration, which can even be just from meditation or it can be from sleep. So not at all uncommon and actually very very prolific across early Chinese use of particularly some of the Daoist I'll call them kind of cultural or religious cults.

[00:39:27] Jon Lu: Which, we don't think today about Daoism as really being a religion. We think of it more as a philosophy. That's another deep reason behind that, that has, in my opinion more to do with kind of backwards compatibility when the Jesuits first came to China and we're trying to find a commonality to, to convert people.

[00:39:42] Jon Lu: But Daoism in its original time was actually a religious cults. It sounds even contradictory for me to use these words but there were some like violent militant Daoist cults that were protesting against the government for what they perceived to be slights. Slights not necessarily in terms of of what we would think today as a religious oppression, but there was a competition for resources and there were other religions that were more favored, which, they would consider to be slights.

[00:40:08] Jon Lu: Anyways, long, long story short behind all of that. The point is that was Daoism really is a religion and there are some very esoteric elements of it beyond the spiritual practices that we look very positively upon today. 

[00:40:18] Raad Seraj: What kind of ceremonial use was took place in these Daoist cults or transcendental practices, like you said?

[00:40:27] Jon Lu: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of it's centered around meditation, which is similar to a lot of those Sian use where they would also en embark in group meditation. It, one of the things, I have a friend that has a language training app, and one of the things he teaches, if you're trying to really understand the culture of a of a people is take their take a word and then Google it and what shows up.

[00:40:46] Jon Lu: So if you Google, the word girl in in Google Translate, but the Chinese for it, like New York, like you, you'll find a girl in a school uniform, which is also, there's kind of this culture of education. If you Google like girl in English, in Google images, you'll find like kids playing in a playground, which kind of shows this whimsical, like children should be allowed the room free culture.

[00:41:05] Jon Lu: And if you google like the translation of girl in Russian, you find like hot chicks and bikinis. So there's like this cultural element in place. If you google the word shaman what shows up, a lot of Amazonian me medicine men. Even though the actual origin of the word shaman comes from like a Siberian tribe.

[00:41:21] Jon Lu: But you don't think about the, this Daoist living in a mountain by himself as a hermit, meditating 16 hours per day and like teaching people how to reach transcendence as a shaman. That guy's a shaman. You don't think about the Zoroastrian priest that's like getting a group together to meditate in front of an open flame in order to reach its level of enlightenment, that's also a shaman, like a spiritual guide. You don't think about the guy with the black collar, with his little white tab in place that you go and meet every Sunday to recite passages from the Bible and find wisdom from it. I'm sorry, that guy's also a shaman. 

[00:41:50] Raad Seraj: Totally agree with you, from that perspective, an artist, musician, a performer... you are enthralled by the art, you become separate from your body and experienced music in a certain way. I think these are all shamanistic practices in a way, or can be. To your point about these sort of Daoist priests meditating by themselves. You made a comment about how they were also the first cults. You talked about meditation being I guess for lack of a better word, inner hacking. When did these interventions through other means, whether it's medicines or plants and things like that when did that take over? Because that's kind of like what we're talking about. Meditation hasn't really gone away and we haven't stopped associating, let's say ancient cultures and even ancient Chinese culture with meditations and contemplation, things like that. But in terms of interventions using either hallucinogens, that we don't talk about China very much. So what happened? 

[00:42:42] Jon Lu: Yeah. Yeah. So I wanna just correct one thing so I don't get more people kind of jumping down my throat cause I'm kind of in interfering in an area that a lot of people have studied for a long time. And I've been studying for a very short period of time. I would not, certainly not say that was for the original cult, but there was this one particularly rebellious group that they were known as a celestial master as the tan.

[00:43:00] Jon Lu: And they were actually fairly violent in the response, which came to perhaps I could call it oppression from kind of like post Han era when Daoism was less favored versus, Confucianism, which is also a fairly controversial topic, whether you would consider those two to be, having competed for resources.

[00:43:15] Jon Lu: But anyways to answer your question here, yes, there were d Daoist cult that were using this for transcendence, and there were numerous books written. Some of the earliest texts we have from these Daoist masters, like this guy who wrote a various number of books that were really around, like celebrating other people that had reached transcendence.

[00:43:31] Jon Lu: And what were their recipes of the elixirs that they were taking to get there. The evolution in China, I think is a very good lesson for us in modern day where these practices that were used much more for personal use became eventually medicalized later. And there's, there was some good reasons for why they had become medicalized, and that was largely because a lot of people started to getting poisoned during an era that we didn't have any knowledge of pharmacology.

[00:43:55] Jon Lu: So there was a non plant-based medicine, but one that's based on an over minerals that was called esan which literally means like five five different rocks or five stones that were mixed together. And those stones include things like mercury and arsenic, which are, yeah, I don't know what it's like to take those.

[00:44:09] Jon Lu: I can imagine you'll probably have a pretty mind altering experience, but like a lot of people died and we didn't really know why they died. And of course a lot of these the, these herbs plants, animals minerals that were used throughout antiquity from the earliest pharmacopia they were used for for anesthesia, for treating tooth aches or treating stomach aches.

[00:44:29] Jon Lu: They also had a lot of of spiritual the benefit as well. And as these different material medics had a, had been established over time from, s this legendary vigor who preferably wrote the world's first Pharmacopia, and it was likely an assemblage of many different pharmacopia together.

[00:44:44] Jon Lu: Many of these things had different use and they from their original medical use, or perhaps from their original spiritual use, they became more medicalized when we realized some of the medical utility behind it. Now in, in combination with a number of people actually getting hurt or even dying, including some emperors during a long period of time eventually regulation came and during what's often known as like the golden age of China, the Tong Dynasty, a number of different institutions were set up to really regulate to make sure that drugs were safe.

[00:45:13] Jon Lu: And, it's. I should say that part of of their objective also was like to make sure that it was only used kind of properly, which is something that we see in modern day times today where a lot of the pharmacology that were used tend to only be used by the elite as only the elite had access to medicine.

[00:45:28] Jon Lu: And I don't know exactly what the lessons we are to take away from it here, other than I can say that I've seen history repeating itself in many ways. 

[00:45:35] Raad Seraj: So are you saying that, okay, so there were these obviously like personal contemplative practices. They became a little more formalized, and plants were used to intervene because for medicinal purposes. And then as society became more structured and hierarchical, it became a lot more regulated, for the lack of a better word, as in there were central entities saying, what is a drug and what is a medicine versus not. Is that where the separation started to happen between... 

[00:46:04] Jon Lu: Yeah, exactly. Like at some point. And there's a number of historical reasons for why meditation and transcendence went through these kind of ebbs and flows throughout the, throughout cultural usage, the original usage, whether it was first use for transcendence or first use as as like a treatment for a stomach ache.

[00:46:19] Jon Lu: And then they realized that the other als utility was also beneficial. I don't know which one came first, that it's hard to be able to discern that level difference since so few of these techs still exist. The bottom line is that without question, they were used for the dual purpose of both personal transcendental use as well as for medicinal use.

[00:46:36] Jon Lu: And then over time as more regulation to took place, a lot of that personal transcendental use started to, to diminish and decrease. Partially for very good reason because a lot of people were dying. And partially because more of this kind of regulatory aspect came in place. To the point that after the Tong Dynasty afterwards followed the Song Dynasty that went to about, 1300 ad at that point, Daoism of course still existed but was much closer to the Daoism we see today versus the Daoism of the past.

[00:47:02] Jon Lu: They were still teaching transcendentalism, they're still teaching meditation, they're still teaching a way of achieving greater insight. But they'd evolved a much more of this kind of like inner alchemy of being able to do it yourself instead of using a pharmacology assisted mind altering substance in order to help reach that level.

[00:47:17] Raad Seraj: Ah, interesting. Okay, so one more question about this. So when Li Chen says that many of the plants they ingested were hallucinogens, including a number of varieties of psychedelic mushrooms, you're saying these mushrooms, for example, were being used to heal a disease rather than saying this is a tool to transcend. 

[00:47:37] Jon Lu: Oh, actually the mushrooms very specifically no. Those were almost purely for transcendence. A couple of those did have the, have a physiological medicinal value. But something like like henin or long dong, like that was like a panacea that was used for treating, stomach aches, ulcers, gastrointestinal respiratory issues, like headaches that was used very prolifically like medicinally. And if like these, this case of tropin alkaloids, like these are very strong deliriums. You will have if you take them they, they will give you a very strong psychedelic experience as well. 

[00:48:08] Raad Seraj: Okay. So then let's come to the crux of issue then.

[00:48:10] Raad Seraj: So if mushrooms were being used as tools of transcendence, why don't we talk about the history of using mushrooms as tools of transcendence in China a lot? 

[00:48:21] Jon Lu: Yeah. Yeah. So to be fair we actually do talk about them a lot. I would say less in terms of what we in Western Lexicography would call a psychedelic. And this, because a lot of the translations, like if I were to read a translation to you of a mushroom you can ingest that makes your body feel light, you can find the cloud and speak with your ancestors, like you would think, oh, you must be talking about something like psilocybin or amanita muscaria.

[00:48:43] Jon Lu: No, I'm talking about reishi mushroom. Know it, it's hard to, it can be hard with some of these texts to really discern what was something that was truly I would say pharmacologically psychedelic by how we would des describe it today. And a lot of these mushrooms, it's just very hard to find. Now, I mean, there is the definitive text that do show the use of of strains that we believe are things like psilocybe azurescens or cyanescens of psychedelic compounds.

[00:49:05] Jon Lu: I wouldn't say by any means that they had this really prolific importance to the culture. Not the most kind of important psychoactive compound was tea, camellia sinensis, that is really deeply endemic within Chinese culture. A lot of the psychedelic mushrooms, they were used, but I can't really say they had this critical importance.

[00:49:21] Jon Lu: Something like like ephedra, maun or cannabis, dama. Those are actually were very critical for traditional Chinese medicine usage. But the classic psychedelics, I would say they were used but they weren't as important to the culture as we might consider something like, like ayahuasca to the shipibo people.

[00:49:37] Raad Seraj: Cuz these are cultures also very vast. So there's a range of ceremonies and practices and substances, it's not tied to one thing that the west recognized. Mushrooms. Gordon Wasson met Maria Sabina took it back to the west. But we made, so we found the mushroom and that one kind of mushroom, and then we now talk about it as a psychedelic and built an entire ecosystem and lore around it. But to your point, I think there's a range of practices and it's not tied to one thing, per se, at least in the in the ancient Chinese culture here.

[00:50:10] Raad Seraj: This is super fascinating and I'm sure we can keep talking about it. I wanna bring it back to the personal for a second. What was your most meaningful psychedelic experience, and how does it inform, or how did it inform the person you are both as a, as a Chinese American citizen, but also as a father, a partner, a startup founder, and the work you're doing?

[00:50:31] Jon Lu: Yeah, similar to your question about my childhood memories, I don't know if I can really nail down one, because there's been so many kind of combined elements and common tropes across a lot of my experiences that have overlapped that it's hard for me to say, I know it must have been that one on June, 2018.

[00:50:46] Jon Lu: No. It must have been that one on, March of 2021. It's hard for me to pin down exactly that, that one. But I'll say that some of the common themes that have really stood out to me in, in helping me to understand just who I am, perhaps not necessarily even being able to change, but has come through greater acceptance of, maybe taking what I intellectually know and that I should change about myself and getting to some level of emotional knowledge is, for instance as a Chinese or Taiwanese-American growing up here, there's only three professions I ever possibly could have had. Guess what they are? 

[00:51:13] Raad Seraj: I need you to say them. 

[00:51:14] Jon Lu: Doctor, lawyer, engineer, right? And the lawyer is kind of like a, is because it's highly respected, very not it doesn't have come with the same kind of scientific, reverence that that the doctor engineer has and. It's that, that joke that everyone says, oh, what do you call the Chinese guy with a, with two master's degree?

[00:51:30] Jon Lu: I like, dumbass, you never got a PhD. And in some ways there, I still have that. I never went to go get a PhD either. Perhaps I've disappointed my parents in that way. But besides the that there I came with this great reference for science versus the arts versus communications.

[00:51:44] Jon Lu: And through, throughout my, my way of doing a psychedelic journey tends to be very analytical. And how I came to a lot of my own discoveries here was know my, the first company I founded was around kind of like early childhood development and neuroscience of trying to map brain development.

[00:51:57] Jon Lu: So where I most got interested is, what actually does can we quantify the impact of the psychedelic experience? And map that to the qualitative. So what's actually happening to our physiology? Our brain waves, our heart rates respiratory rate, things that we can measure to try and have some level of mapping.

[00:52:11] Jon Lu: Cuz at heart I'm an engineer and this is what we do is we try and actually quantify things through the, you the psychedelic experiences that I've had. I journal like a theme. Like I usually come away with about 15 pages of notes as a way of not only marking my own scientific observations okay, heart rate has gone up a little bit.

[00:52:29] Jon Lu: Heart rate variability is a little bit higher, respiratory rate is a little bit higher. And I think at least, and does that map actually to, to what the data shows me. I came to realize from a lot of my journaling that I myself am limited in my own ability to describe my psychedelic experience. And I myself am limited my own ability to describe the world.

[00:52:46] Raad Seraj: What a web of meta meaning here. It's like a web of meaning behind. Meaning behind meaning. 

[00:52:50] Jon Lu: Yeah. And I've tried journaling in multiple different languages and I am, I'm just limited in my own lack of tool set for communications or perhaps talent and practice that even for me to describe my own psychedelic or even my own life experience, I'm limited in my ability to communicate it because of my lack of prowess on the the communication side as opposed to my scientific analytical side.

[00:53:11] Jon Lu: I can very easily chart out for you this large neural map between what all the receptors that our compounds do, how they affect your brain waves, and what does that mean physiologically, I have a much harder time trying to describe this objective experience. And I came to understand that my my inability to communicate properly let alone in a business context and first of all context has had impacts on my life.

[00:53:30] Jon Lu: But it's also impacted my own ability to live. I don't know if I can have the same experience of watching a sunset or, skipping rocks on the ocean for my ability to describe that versus someone else. I can describe it differently. And I found myself limited because I had spent so much time obsessing over the science and obsessing over scientific prowess that like this quia, I don't know what it's like to live the life through the eyes or the skin of rod sage.

[00:53:53] Jon Lu: And the best that I can do is to try and understand it through your use of communication in describing it to me. I cannot describe well to anyone else what it's like to live, to be John Lu because I lacked those that skillset and that tool set. And I know that's also impacting my own ability to experience my own life.

[00:54:08] Raad Seraj: Wow, that's deep. How did you then build the tool set? 

[00:54:14] Jon Lu: I wouldn't say that I have it by any means. Continuing the journalist help,

[00:54:17] Raad Seraj: but you've become clearly better at it because you are able to experience joy and express joy. 

[00:54:23] Jon Lu: Yeah. But it's a constant thing that, that we, that you practice.

[00:54:26] Jon Lu: And I know that I'm never gonna be still as good at ex describing life as I am at measuring life. But what I can have is now this much greater appreciation for just how important these these artistic capabilities are. The ability to express through movement, the ability to express, through artistry, the ability to express through video, let on our own words it's a much, much deeper appreciation that I have that I certainly wouldn't force my children just to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer.

[00:54:51] Raad Seraj: I agree with you, but perhaps it's also just maybe something super simple is the ability to say, I love you. 

[00:54:58] Jon Lu: Oh man. Something else that, that clearly I've learned as well is I can for the first time actually say to my mother that I love her. And, this sounds a very simple. My, my mother is one that you know, given how much we emphasize education within our backgrounds, she'd always consider herself to be, kind of stupid.

[00:55:14] Jon Lu: And I would never call her that just out of politeness. But I don't think that's true either. But she doesn't have the same academic pedigree of someone like my father or the PhD or, I have probably more PhDs in my family than non PhDs. And and I also grew up thinking that I was more intellectually intelligent than my mother, which, legitimately, I don't think most people would question that. I, I am. I completely lack the emotional intelligence that she has, and I didn't appreciate that. And I had a lot of resentment there. You're telling me what to do, but I'm so much smarter than you and, this type of a thing. But actually in, in, I don't remember what it was or when it was, but a common theme I've had on a couple of trips was that I came to realize that, wow, my mother is brilliant.

[00:55:49] Jon Lu: Because the one thing that we shared that we both loved when I was growing up is she is, we both love Seinfeld and Yeah. And here's where I can just go totally come from outer space. I came to realize that my mother was brilliant because of Seinfeld and how and I remember thinking, yeah, I remember thinking like as as I watched Seinfeld or even think about some of the just the dumb ass episodes that are out there here, like how freaking brilliant is it like that that they've captured this like idiosyncratic version of life that we can all understand and relate to being George Costanza or being Elaine Venice. You've gotta be totally insane to be able to appreciate this. And the fact that my mother like understood this humor and really could actually understand and relate to it.

[00:56:26] Jon Lu: I'm like, my God, like she must have been brilliant. 

[00:56:29] Raad Seraj: I completely resonated with that in, in sense I think often perhaps in our cultures, the men get to dictate. Who they marry in a lot of ways. So the women tend to be perhaps less educated or less qualified according to society. But my mom, I mean, was the pillar for our family.

[00:56:49] Raad Seraj: And she had to, I mean, tolerate a lot of, let's just say, a lot of arrogance from my stupid ass saying things back to her like, you did, same thing for my sister. She takes shit from my dad all the time. But really, the family is only together because of her, because of her un dying, devotion, unconditional love, and endless patience.

[00:57:07] Raad Seraj: I mean, it wasn't easy for her. It was very painful. And I mean, I thank her for everything, for, just being there despite how shitty I was at times. 

[00:57:16] Jon Lu: Yeah. We it was actually just a preparing a different diagram for someone else around how one of the things we get about communication and feedback is, the iceberg model.

[00:57:24] Jon Lu: We only see the actions of someone else. We have no idea what are the emotions underneath there. And one of the things that I've actually come to understand a little bit more for why I can look at why my mother is brilliant because she appreciates Seinfeld, is I have a better understanding of what's actually in that iceberg now that I don't see from above.

[00:57:38] Jon Lu: Course when I was younger, I was only judging the actions and my mother was not equipped of the tools for how to give feedback properly or how to communicate properly. Like why would she have been here? So she also got frustrated that she only saw my actions without seeing this portion underneath here and I'd like to think that I have a better tool set now. Some of it comes from having taken classes here at the business school. Some of it comes from a extensive professional experience. Some it's just life experience that I can now better do a better job of communicating that's underneath the iceberg. And. Looking out for that, which is underneath the iceberg for others, but it still takes practice. And I would buy no means consider myself to be more than just an amateur at it. 

[00:58:10] Raad Seraj: Beautifully said. So last thing, let's bring it all together. What advice or perspective would you like to give someone who is going through the similar, let's just say, a psychic prison of endless self-improvement or striving for that one thing that seems unattainable, but constantly pushing because of upbringing or whatever cultural story they're inherited.

[00:58:36] Raad Seraj: What perspective do you want to share with them in terms of liberating themselves and doing the thing that they should do or they want to do truly? 

[00:58:44] Jon Lu: Yeah. Deep question, which I still kinda even do that myself so I can give advice that I myself don't even fully follow. But where I think it really starts is what the, what the Greeks wrote at the Temple of Apollo, notan, know yourself.

[00:58:57] Jon Lu: And knowing yourself only comes from having the ability to accept yourself. So when you when you react to anybody else negatively, or when you find fault within somebody else, like you're really looking at your own insecurities that are coming out. And the one only piece of pragmatic advice that I can offer for everybody, which if I just were to end a sentence there, it was just like, learn to meditate.

[00:59:17] Jon Lu: And there, there's so many reasons behind, like, why meditation is beneficial from, the neurochemistry, what happens electrophysiological. But just spending time with yourself. If you can learn to be comfortable just spending time with yourself the, this whole concept of leisure that the Greeks that originally thought was the most divine pursuit because you're doing it for no purpose other than the fact that it has value.

[00:59:36] Jon Lu: You're not doing it because it provides you any result. You just do it because you're spending time with yourself. And that in itself has value to do that requires you to have a comfort and appreciation for yourself. 

[00:59:46] Raad Seraj: I mean, that's the best advice. Meditate. I love that. It's a beautiful way to bring it all together and and bring the podcast to a fold.

[00:59:55] Raad Seraj: Jon, this was fascinating. There's so many more questions I had, unfortunately in a podcast format. We can't capture all of it, but I'm really grateful that we met and there's lots of conversations to be had in the future. Thanks again for spending the time with us.

[01:00:08] Raad Seraj: Really appreciate you being here. 

[01:00:10] Jon Lu: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate the provocative questions and you being able to expose your audience to some of the way that I think. And, nothing helps us better than if we can communicate ourselves. It helps us to understand ourselves better. So your questions really helped me to understand myself better as well. Thank you for that. 

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