this-is-water-

I know this is difficult to answer as it's hard to think of yourself counterfactually, but I'm wondering if you think being a comic brought something to your trip?

In particular, I know psychedelic experiences are capable of inducing seemingly profound insights into the mind, and people who support research or legalization also talk about this aspect of their use. I also imagine that you can use these substances just to be silly and have fun. I guess I don't want to draw too distinct a line between "have fun" and "be profound" because I'm sure they could be connected, but I do feel like there's a distinction between approaching a trip with these different ideas in mind.

Anyway, you've been a comedian for 17 years. You must have some well worn brain grooves of "make this thing a bit." I guess I'm curious if you have any stories about how trips played into that part of your brain and were more just goofy and fun rather than necessarily insightful.

Posting lab results is awesome. Especially since so many products are mislabeled, it's nice to see some commitment to letting consumers know what they're actually getting.

I checked out your website, and I was surprised to see that you can search products by benefit, e.g., stress, upset stomach, sleep, etc., with a note like "The Science Advisory Board of TruPotency has developed a proprietary algorithm measuring interactions between different cannabinoids, terpenes, and other ingredients to curate the products best designed to help reduce stress and help you relax."

I doubt you can divulge too much about a proprietary system, but are we even at a point with the science to be able to reliably generalize in this way about the interaction of cannabinoids and terpenes? I.e., is it really possible to say that a given product is better suited for stress reduction than another one? My understanding was that we still have a ton to learn about CBD and its effects, and I imagine understanding those effects as far as interactions with other cannabinoids etc. is even more complex. Obviously, there will be a lot of individual variation with these things. But I'm curious about how confident you are in this algorithm to meaningfully distinguish any signal about differences in products for specific effects in the way its presented.

I'm curious to hear about how you and other happiness researchers think about the definition of something like happiness? This is the sort of thing that everyone has some subjective understanding of, but that feels like a very slippery sort of thing to operationalize and understand scientifically. How do you measure happiness? Do different sorts of research designs give us insight to different but related outcomes?

Hi! Not OP, but maybe some of this is helpful.

I have not received training in TM. I'm not an advocate for it, but I do know it works great for some people.

You may be interested in knowing about the Natural Stress Relief meditation program. These people I believe were trained in TM and then created this and market it as a less expensive alternative to TM. I also do not practice this — I just want to share so you are aware of your options. I did pay for this but didn't find it particularly compelling — but I have a separate meditation practice that I enjoy more, so I'm not saying it's bad, just that it wasn't my cup of tea. The benefit here is that it's obviously a lot less expensive. Of course, you're also not getting personalized in-person instruction, so you may want to weight that tradeoff.

A lot of meditators on reddit tend to have strong and not particularly positive feelings towards TM. I understand a lot of what they say, but don't want to get into that debate. I mostly just wanted to let you know there is a less expensive alternative out there. I can't compare it to TM since I really only practiced NSR briefly and have no experience in TM. You may be able to find testimonials about both elsewhere on here and use that to guide your decision.