The Competitive Edge

Altered states of consciousness are going mainstream. This episode is a deep dive on the startup ecosystem with my friend Greg Kubin who an investor a Psymed Ventures. We recorded this conversation as a followup to a longer post covering the startup ecosystem related to expanding human consciousness. Startups will play a key role in enabling and expanding access to altered states of consciousness. The types of companies come in many flavors – hardware, software, and community. Technology could even result in accessing completely new states of consciousness. But first… how do we define consciousness? Most humans live in a state of normal waking consciousness – i.e. being aware of your thoughts, feelings, and physical surroundings. For most people, this is seemingly all there is to reality, maybe  except for dreams. In contrast, altered (or “alternative”) states of consciousness enable us to experience additional levels of awareness, perceptions, memories, thinking, emotions, sense of time, place, and self-cont