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Niyc Pidgeon believes, all the way down, that she is always going to be okay. That belief carried her through more than most people will ever name out loud. It also got her comfortable holding more pain than she needed to, for longer than she needed to. She calls that her survival story, and it is the one she says she is ready to put down.

We spend the first half on something I have never heard anyone explain this cleanly. When life hits and you still have twenty people waiting on a Zoom call, what are you actually doing when you put the game face on? Niyc names it as dissociation and does not apologize for it. Her point is that dissociation is not the failure. Not going back is the failure. She schedules the return trip. Music, usually, at the end of the day, to get out of strategy and back into her body.

I put a generalization to her and she pushed on it. Men tend to regulate so well they slide into suppression. Women are more often described as flooding. Niyc does a third thing, which is regulate on purpose and then return on purpose. She added the part I had missed, which is that this depends on capacity, and there have been long stretches where she did not have it.

Niyc has a masters in positive psychology, wrote Now Is Your Chance, built the Positive Psychology Coach Academy, made a course with Tony Robbins, and has done policy work on suicide prevention. She is also in the same PhD program I am in, studying integral and transpersonal psychology. Her research question is what commonly stops people and what it actually takes to become unstoppable, with a focus on the trauma people carry behind a business nobody sees the back of.

She talks about her mother's nervous breakdown when Niyc was five, and what it does to a kid who learns she has to fight to be loved. Everyone said she would be all right. She was. That is exactly the problem she is unpicking now.

Then the second half turns, and we get into the part she is genuinely great at. Surrender, the dark night of the soul, why she loosened her grip on a life she was obsessed with, and the difference between being it and faking it.

A note before you listen. Niyc speaks openly about a suicide attempt as a child, about losing twelve friends before they turned thirty, and about suicidal ideation returning during hard seasons. She is careful and clear about all of it. If that is a difficult subject for you right now, please take care of yourself. Resources are at the bottom.

IN THIS EPISODE
0:00

Welcome And Why Nick Stands Out

7:35

Trauma History And The Unstoppable Question

13:30

Dissociation Versus Healthy Resilience

20:05

Making Space To Feel Again

26:00

PTSD Capacity Limits And Honest Mirrors

32:05

The Stories That Drive Survival

37:45

Strengths With Shadows And Radical Honesty

44:30

Surrender Dark Night And Changing Environment

51:35

Compounding Habits And Audacious Goals

58:30

Reading Alignment Intuition And Opportunities

1:02:35

Where To Find Nick And Closing

FIND NIYC PIDGEON
Instagram is where she actually hangs out: @niycpidgeon
Website: niycpidgeon.com
Book: Now Is Your Chance
Certification: Positive Psychology Coach Academy

FIND ME
Take the free quiz that names the pattern running your life: https://quiz.humanuniversity.com
Join a free Wednesday room at 3:30pm ET: https://nextlevelhuman.com/human-conversations
Read the newsletter: https://substack.nextlevelhuman.com

If you are struggling, you can reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US by calling or texting 988. In the UK, Samaritans is free on 116 123. Nothing in this episode is medical advice or a substitute for care.

Connect with Next Level Human
Website: www.nextlevelhuman.com
support@nextlevelhuman.com

Connect with Dr. Jade Teta
Website: www.jadeteta.com
Instagram: @jadeteta

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Dr. Chloe West is a neuroscientist who studies psychedelics. She explains being stuck like this: your brain guesses at the world and hands you the guess as if it were the world. When that guess gets rigid enough, no new evidence can get in and change it.

Your brain runs a prediction of reality and checks it against what comes in through your senses. Most of the time, what you experience is the prediction. Chloe walks through what happens when a prediction about yourself gets so locked down that nothing can touch it. That, in this model, is depression. It is also why you can read every book, do every protocol, and still not move.

Chloe grew up evangelical in the South and was taught she had to pick between science and religion. She went and got a PhD in neuroscience. When it came time to choose a dissertation, she chose psychedelics. She is early in her career, and the direction she wants to take her research is belief, particularly what happens to your beliefs about yourself. She also calls herself "a hard materialist most of the time," and says her skepticism comes and goes. That made the middle of this conversation a lot of fun.

We get into what the default mode network actually is, why your sense of self comes apart at higher doses, and why the further that dissolution goes the better the outcome tends to be. Then I asked her the thing I could not work out on my own. If the brain is getting MORE disorganized under a psychedelic, why do people come back describing the most vivid and connected experience of their lives? You would predict the opposite. That question is where the whole filter debate lives, and neither of us pretended to have it settled.

Then we told each other stories we cannot explain. Mine involved my grandmother, my sister, and a phone call. Hers involved a dream she asked for and did not get.

If you have done the healing work and still feel stuck in the same loop, the mechanism in this episode is the one to understand.

IN THIS EPISODE:
0:00

Welcome And Guest Introduction

4:00

Chloe’s Path From Faith To Science

9:10

Defining Psychedelics And Classic Compounds

10:55

Default Mode Network And Ego Death

17:30

Filtered Perception And The DMT Realm

27:35

Dreams Synchronicity And Meaning

35:30

Where Psychedelics Show Real Benefits

38:20

Predictive Processing And Belief Revision

49:20

Dosing Set Setting And Microdosing

57:15

Safety Religious Trauma And What’s Next

FIND DR. CHLOE WEST
Substack: Born Again Again
YouTube: @DrChloeWest
Instagram: @dr.chloewest

FIND ME
Take the free quiz that names the pattern running your life: https://quiz.humanuniversity.com
Join a free Wednesday room at 3:30pm ET: https://nextlevelhuman.com/human-conversations
Read the newsletter: https://substack.nextlevelhuman.com

Connect with Next Level Human
Website: www.nextlevelhuman.com
support@nextlevelhuman.com

Connect with Dr. Jade Teta
Website: www.jadeteta.com
Instagram: @jadeteta

Send us Fan Mail

Money is the one job that scares and confuses me most — so I brought in the person I go to when I need to understand it: my friend Brandon Belk.

A few years ago, right as my business collapsed and I was starting over at 50, I gave Brandon $6K and forgot about it. Two years later it had become $60K. This episode is me dragging his thinking into the open so you can listen in on the conversation we keep having off-air.

In this conversation, we get into:

• Why fear might be a compass pointing toward opportunity rather than away from it
• Why Brandon invests in infrastructure and scarcity instead of the shiny objects everyone argues about
• What XRP and XLM are actually doing underneath the noise
• Decentralization as a multi-century meta-trend — in knowledge, power, and money
• The K-shaped economy and the "mud" that keeps so many of us stuck
• Why he believes the next two years are the window

Brandon is on Substack @brandonbelk you can also find him at growinnerouter.com.

This is a conversation between two friends, not investment advice.

Chapters:

0:00

Welcome And The Four Jobs

6:41

Business Collapse And The 10x Wake-Up

10:05

Why The Fourth Industrial Shift Matters

14:59

Betting On The Infrastructure Layer

20:11

Scarcity Trades Energy Metals Commodities

28:52

Reading On-Chain Data And Adoption Signals

36:56

XRP And XLM Explained Simply

45:48

Do Banks Die Or Adapt

52:57

Inflation And The K-Shaped Economy

1:01:24

The Next Two Years And 2028

1:09:13

A Practical Contrarian Playbook

1:13:29

How To Reach Brandon

Connect with Next Level Human
Website: www.nextlevelhuman.com
support@nextlevelhuman.com

Connect with Dr. Jade Teta
Website: www.jadeteta.com
Instagram: @jadeteta