Dhru Purohit Show - #208: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind with Jamie Wheal

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

If you’re looking for a way to explore the concept of meaning, how it relates to culture, religion, politics, history, sexuality, dissatisfaction, and so much more, this podcast is for you.    We���re currently experiencing a crisis of meaning. People and groups are divided, each convinced their way of thinking and their beliefs are the “right” ones. We have a hard time letting multiple things be true at the same time, when in reality they are but all of our realities are different. We get weighed down by the complexities of information overload and experience grief in the process. Since most of us run from bad feelings or simply don’t know how to address them, we go into denial and look for an escape. We end up with more anxiety, more depression, and poorer relationships.    But this isn’t an unstoppable progression. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Jamie Wheal about why it’s so hard to make sense of the world right now and what we can do to help ourselves expand our understanding. They discuss the five key drivers that give us the tools to wake up, grow up, and show up for ourselves. They also talk about how we move from broken to whole, and how we cure isolation with connection.   Jamie is the author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-nominated Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. Jamie is an expert in peak performance and leadership, specializing in neuroanthropology––the intersection of culture, biology, and psychology—and the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of ultimate human performance.    In this episode, we dive into:  -Why we are in a crisis of meaning (3:12) -The current culture wars (34:35)  -The apocalypse we find ourselves in (1:03:30)  -The three things that help us deal with life better (1:06:20) -How to be inclusive (1:08:59) -Alchemy and personal transformation (1:36:44) -Why sexuality can be a powerful gateway into higher consciousness (1:37:43) -Orgasms as a treatment for depression (2:00:51)  -How music connects us (2:19:52) -How to get out of our own way and create greater connection (2:54:30) Also mentioned in this episode: -The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk - https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/0143127748 -Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships by Brian Earp and Julian Savulescu - https://www.amazon.com/Love-Drugs-Chemical-Future-Relationships/dp/0804798192 -This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel Levitin - https://www.amazon.com/This-Your-Brain-Music-Obsession/dp/0452288525 For more on Jamie Wheal you can follow him on Instagram @flowgenome, on Facebook @jamiewhealpage, on Twitter @flowgenome, and through his website https://www.flowgenomeproject.com/. Get his book, Recapture The Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost its Mind at https://www.recapturetherapture.com/.  This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market and BLUblox. Thrive Market makes it so easy to stay stocked with healthy ingredients. Right now, Thrive is offering all my listeners an amazing deal. When you sign up for a new membership, you will receive a free gift. And, any time you spend more than $49, you’ll get free carbon-neutral shipping from one of their zero-waste warehouses. Go to thrivemarket.com/dhru to sign-up. Right now BLUblox is offering my listeners 20% off, just go to blublox.com/dhru and use code DHRU at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isolation is like our number one challenge. Everybody's just fractured. We don't live near our families of origin. We barely know our neighbors, especially in quarantine. We've been even more isolated than ever. It's now 400% increase in anxiety and depression in the last 12 months. Hi, everyone, Drew Brod here. Today we have a mega interview on the topics of God, sex, death, and meaning with Jamie

Wheel, a Pulitzer Prize nominated New York Times best-selling author and expert in peak performance. If you're a deep thinker who loves digging in to big questions, this interview is for you. Stay tuned. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Thrive Market. Let's talk about one of my favorite resources for getting healthy foods delivered right to my doorstep. It's Thrive Market. When it comes to what I eat, I'm super intentional. It's very important for me to know exactly what I'm buying, so I can always take a deep dive

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So BlueBlocks is B-L-U-B-L-O-X.com slash D-H-R-U with the code Drew, D-H-R-U. I hope you'll check them out so that you can. get better quality sleep to give love and attention to all the things you care about in the day. Now, let's get back to this week's episode. Welcome to the Drew Perot podcast where each week we explore the inner workings of the brain, mind and body with the brightest minds and wellness, mindset, and medicine. My guest today is Jamie Weill, and he is one of those bright minds that many of our past guest look up to.

Jamie Wheel is the author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominated book, Stealing Fire, how Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs, and Maverick scientists are revolutionizing the way we live in work. His latest book, which is what today's conversation is all about, is called Recapture the Rapture, rethinking God, sex, and death in a world that's lost its damn mind. The damn I threw in, but you get the point. A little bit more about Jamie, he's also an expert in peak performance and leadership, specializing in neuroanthropology, the intersection of culture, biology, and psychology. He's, in addition to all that, the founder of the Flow Genome Project,

an international organization dedicated to research and training of ultimate human performance. Jamie additionally is a mountaineer who's guided the north face of Mount Everest, trained in Navy SEALs, Olympians, and Red Bull extreme athletes. He's also advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command to executives at Google, Goldman Sachs, Cisco, and many others. Today's interview with Jamie is broken into two parts that we're putting out into one mega, three-hour interview on today's podcast. The interview is packed with big ideas and practical tips,

and there's so many gems in there, please do not feel pressured to listen to it all and one go. Take your time, I promise it'll be worth it. The first part of the interview takes a look at our current crisis of meaning, which is where we are today, which is why it's so hard for so many people to make sense of the current world and the current climate that we're in. The second part of the interview dives into the topic of sex,

love, connection, and optimal performance by digging into what Jamie calls the Alchemist cookbook. Again, please do not be intimidated by this three-hour time stamp of the interview. I promise if you stay with us, it's going to be well worth it. So let's jump in to my interview with author of Recapture the Rapture, Jamie Weill. Jamie, pleasure to have you on the podcast for the first time. I'm big fan of the first book, and I'm so excited to get the second book and the conversations and the layers featured here on our show.

I'd love for you to set the stage when it comes to recapture the rapture. I'd love to start off with the baseline of meaning and the crisis of meaning that you outline and that you so eloquently have been laying out. I've heard it in sort of little pieces over the years, but that you've eloquently laid out. Why are we in a crisis of meaning? Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first thing is just that, you know, everything is going exponential, you know, and so we are having a very hard time as, as, you know, hominids, right? You are used to like, you know, in fact, E.O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist, I think he summed it up as well as anybody. He said we've got paleolithic emotions, right? We've got medieval institutions and we've got godlike technology. right? And trying to sort that out is impossibly hard, right? Just the frame rate, the complexity. I mean, I think even during quarantine, right? A lot of folks were saying, hey, we're really bad at understanding where things are on different epidemiological curves because they're exponential. You know, and sort of like if it takes 30 days to fill a football stadium full of water on what day is it half full? It's not day 15. It's day 29 of 30, you know, and those kinds of things are happening in both.

directions for us right now. Things are getting exponentially better. So if you've watched like Hans Roslings, TED Talks or Red Stephen Pinker's books, you're like, hey, man, the Enlightenment experiment is going swimmingly, you know, despite all the naysayers, right? War is down, literacy and nutrition is up, more people are living above the poverty line than ever, you know, all those kind of things. You're like, gosh, this is working out. You know, and then you go to your doom scroll news feed and you're like, Holy shit, you know, like fires and icebergs and polar bears and geopolitics and, you know, and populism and nationalism and fascism and racism and all the isms all the time. And those two intersecting curves are like coming alive, like all the cool stuff, all the possibility,

my hashtag best life, you know, where do I want to go, who do I want to see, what do I want to be, my entrepreneurial ideas, my personal and relational, you know, fantasies or, you know, or even just sort of goals for myself, that's the coming alive arc. And then it feels, I think, more and more for more of us, that there's also this staying alive arc. Now, this has been true for almost all humans everywhere, but it's been uniquely less in our face for the privileged and developed West for the last half century or so.

We've been kind of living in a bubble, right? Historians have called that the kind of Paxamericana, the American piece, you know, which was like post-World War two. You know, we had the Cold War and that was kind of tidy, but it was all proxy wars. There wasn't a lot of hot conflict. And we had a rise in consumerism, a rise in education, a rise in all the things. You know, and every generation, we were, you know, really only three generations. Baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials came up taking that as steady state reality.

Like, I'm going to have more education. I'm going to live in a bigger house. I'm going to have a nicer car. I'm going to travel more than my parents before me and their parents before them. Right. And this is just the way it all keeps going. So we had this kind of happy accident of a historical anomaly of peace, prosperity, abundance, and possibility. So that's our kind of coming alive arc.

The staying alive arc is all about triage. It's like, oh, shit. You know, I mean, and so many folks are wrestling with this. You've got aging grandparents that have just missed. a year of their grandchildren's lives. You've got kids going into college that are like, this is my college experience, kind of, this is my college experience, kind of, no, it's not really, this is weird. And we're having a lot of having to let go of dreams, plans, and possibilities against what might be coming down the pike. And so that has made it, you know,

E.B. White, the author of Charlotte's Web, he has a beautiful quote. He says, he says, I wake up each morning and I'm torn between the desire to save the world or savor it, right? And that can make it hard to plan my day. And so that's kind of where we are. We're like, wait, do I, do I go for a leisurely walk? Do I take time with my friends? Do I write a poem or a novel or, you know, or found, you know, found and fund a new entrepreneurial venture?

Or is this like, holy smokes, you know, what's the backup generator I've got for the next storm or fire or do we actually still want to live in a high rise in a city and should we fuck off to the country and buy a bug out place? You know, like, it's those kinds of things. And it makes it hard to plan our days. So the question when somebody's hearing this and starting to open up the book and get into it is, is this unique to our current times? Has this been the plight of humanity or what makes it unique for what we're going through today? Yeah. I mean, I don't know what your experience was watching Game of Thrones, but one of my first experiences was like, holy shit, you know, life is cheap, you know, like this is rough, like really rough and

heartless. And you're like, holy, like arguably, um, without kind of like projecting, like romanticizing on pre-modern times, you know, life was nasty, brutish and short. It was red in tooth and claw, you know, and so that idea and, you know, and if, like I always think of, I mean, something that blew my mind. I think it was not long after 9-11. And I just remember hearing a story of an Afghani doctor who had been a professor in Kabul. And Kabul, by the way, I mean, we only hear about it on CNN and like bomb reports and Taliban stuff. Kabul was this badass, cosmopolitan center. And it had beautiful orchards and tree-line things and universities and medicine and hospitals. And it was a center of culture. And he was one of the...

of the elites of that space and he ends up at the border of Iran with less than 20 bucks in his pocket a dirt poor refugee with his family and you're like holy moly like that that goes quickly through the floorboards right of what of like you know the old talking hands like this is not my beautiful life this is not my large automobile you know how did i get here and and that that path is right there for all of us i mean half my family is south african we have lots of south african friends the transition from apartheid and the various chaos and disruptions in that country. If you've lived that, you have no trouble wrapping your head around. It can happen again.

You know, our buddy Jason Silvers from Venezuela, and he lived that. Anybody who came of age in Eastern Europe and saw the fall of the Iron Curtain. Like, it's really just Western Europe and America that have been in this kind of semi-protected bubble. But I think if you chat with anybody from anyplace else, they're like, yeah, you know, welcome to the jungle. Going back to your previous point, it's like people say, like, is the world getting better or is it getting worse?

And really what you're saying is that it's exponentially happening in both directions, right? There's these components that are there. And when you start paying attention to that, there now becomes the question of who is controlling the narrative on the meaning behind it. So tell us a little bit more about like how meaning has been hijacked. Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, the simplest thing to think about is like, okay, so we're trying to map and model intersecting, amplifying and canceling exponential curves, which is just beyond almost all of us in our everyday cognition, right? We just don't have the complexity to hold all that.

So we look for shortcuts. We look for cheats. They're called heuristics is the fancy word, but it's just really just rules of thumb. That's like, well, wait, I don't have to figure out how to recreate reality from scratch every morning. I anticipate that it's going to be mostly like today. I anticipate that when I open the door, it's going to take the same amount of force as it did yesterday to get it open.

But I also look for others. I look for authority figures. I look for considered opinion, consensus, all these kinds of things. So as we've got this exponential, you know, uptick in everything but meaning, we're at the same time seeing a collapse in our two most familiar sources of guidance. So we can call that kind of like meaning 1.0 and meaning 2.0.

And meaning 1.0 has typically been traditional religion. And so for thousands of years, humans have oriented around the faith and belief of their culture and community. And meaning 1.0 promised salvation, right? Like if you believe in this, this body of knowledge and practice and community of practice, then you will be saved in this life or the next. right so it offered salvation but it was at the price of exclusion right so the believers were saved the non-believers were not right and then you ended up with all the wars of conflict and crisis you get to the french enlightenment and they're like oh man that's a lot of superstitious stuff that creates a ton of bloodshed let's kind of let's go someplace else and let's do a different

thing let's try a different experiment and so that you could say was sort of meaning 2.0 and that's loosely kind of modern liberalism or just modernism, right? That's democracy, civil rights, private property, and separation of church and state, those kinds of things. And everybody, regardless of race, color, or creed, gets to play. Now, whether that was fulfilled, you know, all those kind of things, deep, deep questions to kind of click on, but it instead, it reversed it. So it offered inclusion to everybody at the price of salvation. No one's going to tell you what it means. You know, and you fast forward to 1945, 1950s.

You get the French existentialist Camus and Saut and those guys, and they're like, fuck it, this is the, you know, we're in the wreckage of the Holocaust. We're in the atomic age. There is no meaning beyond us here now, just wizzy wig. You know, there's no, there's no happily ever after. There's no divine plan. There's no hashtag universe. Right.

And so what we've had is we've had a collapse of both of those lately. So like Pew Research Foundation, I think five years ago, determined that the nuns, like I'm spiritual but not religious, I don't orient or identify with any existing community of practice. That's now the fastest and largest growing denomination in the Americas. And you're like, holy smokes, that's never been the case. Never ever. I mean, even if you were just like an Eastern Sunday Christian or whatever high holy day, you know, Jew or Hindu or any other practicing position, almost everybody.

but he still had their kind of membership card. So, no, we've had a collapse in affiliation and identification. And then throw in church scandals, child sexual abuse, all the things that have also been eroding the integrity of the authority. And that's been substantial. But then at the same time, you're like, okay, so, you know, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchin, who were called the new atheists back in the kind of early 2000s, they might have been like, see, told you, long time coming, good riddance, right?

Time to move on, time to grow up, time to get past all that. But you're like, wait, there's actually, like if you just, from an anthropologist's point of view, you look at religion, not as an atheist, not as a skeptic trying to kick down the straw man of old school, traditional, superstitious, faith-based, you just say, well, wait, this is persisted, this mean of religion has persisted for three, four, five thousand years, potentially a hundred thousand years, depending on how you, you know, date and classify religiosity. It has to work. It has to actually do something. And so other researchers have found, hey, believers are healthier, wealthier, and happier than non-believers. And it doesn't matter who you believe in. It could be Jesus, Buddha,

Vishnu doesn't matter. It's that you believe, not what you believe. So participation in these social structures oriented around faith have actually been pro-social and evolutionarily adaptive. So we have the collapse of that. And you're like, oh, no, now what happens? So now we look over at modern liberalism, like meaning 2.0, where it's like, I want the car, I want the vote, I want the smartphone, I want the fridge, the motorbike or hashtag best life, big house, whatever, right? All the things. And I got no meaning. You know, like I've got no salvation. and so we're also seeing the increase in diseases of despair, anxiety, depression, addiction, suicide. And so the WHO has, you know, I think this was three years ago now, you know, said that for the first time ever,

you're back to this Game of Thrones, like how rough is life always been kind of thing. For the first time in history, more people on this planet are choosing to kill themselves, choosing to exit this experience than all wars and all natural disasters combined. And you think, oh my God, that's just gutting. That's gutting. Like this is too much I don't want to be here. So we've got a regression to fundamentalism in the wreckage of meaning one point out. People are becoming pulled to more and more fervent and strident extremes.

And it doesn't just have to be traditional faith fundamentalism. It can be conspiracy theories. It can be anything that just gives me certainty within a hermetically sealed, non-falsifiable thought bubble that explains the universal explainer for everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we've also got in this cracked meaning, well, we got the vacuum over to nihilism. You know, and I was thinking like Tyler Duden and Fight Club, right? You know, because he's kind of like the ultimate nihilist, like just bite it all down, right?

It's like we're the middle children of history, man. You know, we've had no great revolution. Like our revolution is a spiritual revolution. We were raised to believe we could all become rock stars and presidents and gods and we're not. And we're realizing that fact and we're pissed. You know, so fundamentalism on the meaning 1.0 side, nihilism on the meaning 2.0 side and a giant sucking hole in the middle for the rest of us, right?

the best of us because like there's that yates um poem the second coming right which is super famous and it and it had i think it was in 2016 like the dow jones like wall street journal and dow jones did a semantic analysis and it turned out that it was like the most googled phrase which things fall apart the center cannot hold right you know as like brexit at you know the 2016 american elections all these things people like the hell is happening and and you and we realize that you know at the end of his poem, he says, he says something fascinating. He says the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. And so really it feels like in this meaning crisis we're experiencing, the mic is getting hijacked by the worst with passionate

intensities. And both of those groups are susceptible to and or actively pushing rapture ideologies. Right. And, and so, And so, and it's fascinating, you know, like, first again, you think of a rapture ideology, you think of fundamentalist religious believers, you kind of think of I'm either wired up to a suicide vest or I've got like sandwich board on and I'm saying the end is nine, you know, but you realize, oh, wait, they actually share a structure. And the more, and it's four four key things. It's like, this world is screwed.

There's an inflection point coming soon. On the other side of the inflection point, me and mine, like my people, my tribe, the elect, whatever it would be. We come up roses. We're actually better off on the other side of this thing than before. Therefore,

you know, send it full speed, never mind the skidmogs and never mind the collateral damage for everyone else. Yeah, burn it all down because that's what we're waiting for anyway. Because there's a keyhole event coming and we're going to hustle

to get our people through the keyhole before it shuts. And then the moment you see that, you're like, oh, there's techno-utopian raptures, like breakers while uploading consciousness to computer, Like, never mind unjacking from the Matrix. We're going to build it and jack ourselves into the Matrix. Right.

Or we're going to build space colonies or Mars. I mean, you know, Stephen Hawking came to the conclusion. Like, it may be the only solution to save humanity. So you're like, wait a second. Like, that one's really, really easy to miss the implications of it. Because, you know, we were raised on Star Trek and Star Wars and the Jetsons and jetpacks. And we're like, yay, super neat. Old they go where no one's gone before.

We're like, we've already, we've already seen this in our movies and stories. But you're like, wait a second. And I always think of like those iconic journalism pictures of the fall of Saigon at the end of 1975 under the Vietnam War, right, where the final hughies were taking off from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy. And there were people like monkey chained, like hanging onto the skids like, take me, take me, don't leave me behind. It's going to be a bloodbath back there. And you're like, now, wait, how many people exactly can afford to. to buy a ticket or fit on the bus to make it to Mars. And those decisions, right?

Those decisions have massive implications for the 7.999 billion folks left behind. And so you've got traditional religious rapture plays. Those are fairly straightforward, well known, been around for thousands of years. You've got techno-utopian rapture plays. You've got contemporary meta-conspiracy rapture plays. And somewhere in that neck of the woods is a sort of new age spiritualist one. And whether that's psychedelic renaissance or neuralink implants or just getting our vibes high and piecing out to Tulum or Bali, there's a sense of, oh, there's a great inflection point

coming, fill in the blank, Kaliuga, you know, give it whatever, you know, mishmash name, people want to apply to it. And again, on the other side, our people, star tribe, star family, light workers, what fill in the blank, are going to somehow piece out, right? Fibrate to the fifth entity, Celestine prophecy style or whatever it is. We're just going to kind of bypass this whole train wreck. And oh, by the way, there's this really neat little kind of separation of humanity. So we are the elect, we are the awakened ones, we're going to carry this forward into the future. So I don't actually, I'm absolved of the deeply challenging, gut-wrenching responsibility for my fellow humanity, responsibility for the disempowered, responsibility for the bottom four billion humans on this earth,

that don't have agency, don't have safety and security, don't have food and water, don't have a political voice. like, never mind them, we're off to the races and they're the best races ever. And I love that part because what you're doing is you're giving the meaning of the meaning, right? If you hold this meaning that you, there's a future utopia that you're putting on in some pedestal, whichever you are, if you're a fundamentalist in one way or another based on all those examples, then, okay, what does that mean? And it means that you typically almost feel like I'm not a participant in the current aspect of what's going on. and less of its following down the pathway of my specific story that I want to accelerate,

which is the burning down of the house, the acceleration of a war between, you know, Israel and the Middle East or, you know, pandemic or whatever these other examples are that you've given before. It's like, I do not want to participate in the now because I'm actually waiting for some other endpoint to come in. Absolutely. And you can kind of, if you sort of slow down the tape when you're in conversations like that, you can kind of experience, oh, there's a little kind of like glitch in somebody's mind and heart. And it's almost always around the enormity, the complexity, and the stakes. And if you've ever heard somebody trot out, well, I mean, maybe we need to thin, you know,

three quarters of the population, maybe this virus is Mother Gaia, you know, doing what she needs to for us. Or, you know, the classic, you just want to smack someone with is like, you know, maybe it takes a forest fire to cleanse things out. And then there's new flowers that come up in the, you know, in the smoking ruins. And you're like, yeah, but now what you've just done is you've just done a temporal bypass. You've just gone from this generation. Basically, the only thing we're wired to give a shit about is our own lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children. You get one beyond that, and it's all academic. So when people can't quite manage the challenge and the complexity and the scariness and the responsibility of right here, right now, and what's next, they bypass

and they go to a cosmic timeline. And they're like, oh, well, maybe it all works out. Like, yeah, maybe it does, but probably not for us, especially if you're thinking that way. You know, so you can kind of see, like, the challenge of facing this is basically, do we have the complexity? Can we actually hold this many exponential trend lines in our mental browser without crashing it? Can we sort through what's true information, what's disinformation, what's misinformation, and still find a path forward? I mean, hell's bells, man. I mean, most of us can't even figure out if we want a vaccine, if so, which vaccine, who's going to go first, who should go next? Is this going to help us? What about the variants? Is this all

bullshit in the first place? You know, Bill Gates, six, six, six patent filings, you know, like, just it just shorts us out. So complexity is one thing. the things that we have held to be forever true that might not be are kind of sacred cows, right? That's another. Like if I've always thought US of A is this kind of pinnacle of civilization and it's now in a steady state and it can never go away, you know, January 6th kind of gave us a little bit of like a wake up of like, holy moly, that might not be just sacrosanctin forever. Or if I, if I work hard and get a good degree and, you know, put my matching funds in my 401k, then I'm to retire at 55 and we're going to get to go on sandals all-inclusive resorts and carnival

cruises, that might not be happening, you know, like baby boomers who are having to take second or third jobs now for health insurance, millennials who are like, man, like homeownership, marriage, buying a car, like a lot of those things. I'm up to my ears in student loans from a degree I got right before the 2008 recession. I still haven't paid that off. What the fuck? Right. There's all these things or even just modern liberalism, the idea that, hey, everybody gets democracy and McDonald's, and it's all going to work out and trickle down economics. I mean, I know we sell this to you on tax cut time, but trickle down economics really works. And like Nobel Prize winning economist and he was head of the world bank, all kinds of things, Joseph Stieglicks has just been like,

look, it's been 40 years. The date is in. It didn't work. You know, you've got McKinsey getting slammed for like for facilitating Purdue farmers flogging of more. Oxycontent after the opioid crisis was already directly tied to them. They helped the Gupta brothers in South Africa siphon $7 billion out of the South African Treasury and practically bankrupt the country and undo all of Mandela's progress. You've got Goldman Sachs, if you show the big short, you know, like that whole notion of what happened in 2008 and the financial crisis. You've got Goldman shorting their retail customers out the back door to institutional investors. and then they're the ones behind the 1MD scandal in Singapore.

So you're like, wait, every Ivy League type A achiever kid who wanted to get a summer internship at Goldman or McKinsey because they are the bastions, right, of peak finance, peak achievement, you're like, these guys are rotten to the goddamn core. So those kinds of challenges are really critical. Like what sacred cows do we just have to double tap and say, huh, maybe he?

not, maybe not forever, maybe even not soon. And then those two things, how complicated it all is and the things we used to take for granted that may not be forever leads us to a, you know, face our grief. And that, that's the final one, which is that if the grief is too much, we either go to denial, like, nah, that couldn't be really happening. I'm just going to play my video game or netflix. and chill or go get hammered or whatever it is. We deny it. Or we collapse into despair. Just the overwhelm of the loss, the ecological collapse, the loss of social fabric, the loss of possibility and choice and options. It's a lot. It's an awful law. And so if we- Which can have all sorts of other cascany effects when we embody that. We're, as you mentioned earlier,

we're more anxious, we're more depressed. We just feel like there's no sense of hope for the future. don't have any sort of relationship structure around us to keep the fabric of of hope available in the future because it just all feels like it's too much. Yeah. And you know, the simplest frame and a Harvard psychologist who's a dear friend, his name is Zach Stein. And he just shared this with me. And I just feels like the most tidy way to think of it for a whole bunch of

situations right now is that in Jewish Kabbalah, there's a model of that there's the idea of like, as you, it's called insolment. So like how do you grow up as a fully expressed human? And it starts in the pre-tragic phase, goes to the tragic phase, and then goes to the post-tragic phase. And so the pre-tragic is, well, is my oyster. This is the coming alive arc. Like I can grow up to be president or an astronaut, right? And everything is possible. And I'm going to fall in my one true love and, you know, all of that. And then life at some point, and for some of us, it's earlier, it's in childhood. We have adverse childhood events that, like, tear that fabric. For others, it's just the passage of life. You know, it's our first jobs. It's our first divorces or, you know,

setbacks, but we get this or illness, we get the shit kicked out of us. And then we realize, wait, life isn't this golden road to unlimited devotion. There's lumps and bumps and it doesn't always seem fair. A shit pile of it feels utterly random. And I can't make sense of this. And I get dropped to my knees. And that's the tragic phase. Right. And that's the sort of, you know, the shooting of our sacred cows.

That's the experiencing of the grief of it. And then far fewer people, you know, if we make it, right, if we have the support, if we have the wisdom, if we have the inspiration, if we have the ability to digest our grief and not just be choking on it, then we can kind of get back up and we can step in. to the post-tragic phase. And the post-tragic phase is critical. Really, that's the whole premise of this book, is how do we, because most, again,

I'll use America as our kind of example, but like most of American culture, has been very adolescent, right? All of Europe, and really, you know, Japan, for sure, China with the Cultural Revolution, most other countries have been up to their ears in tragedy. right and and and then our the question is is have they made it to post tragedy or not i think you could make a case that most have just stalled but american has never really got there all of

our wars were overseas right everything was kind of we just kind of was like born on third base thinking we hit a triple so there's a lot of adolescent hubris right and naivety and if you see right but the civil rights movement right like montalitha king Howard Thurman, some of those guys, they were coming out of the African-American slave tradition, the Christian spiritual tradition, liberation theology, all of that. And that was undeniably a post-tragic movement. And it connected with Gandhi. They borrowed ideas. The Gandhi's notion of satchagraha, right, the truth force. Howard Thurman went over there in the 30s. He was the first African-American interfaith ambassador. He hooked up with

Gandhi and is like, oh, this is a thing. He came back to America and he's like, well, Satshagra, that's a mouthful. I'm going to call it Soul Force. And then he was the mentor to MLK, shares it with MLK and the rest of the civil rights movement. And they're like, oh, wow, okay. So this whole notion of taking a courageous stand and not fighting fire with fire, that's going to be the central philosophy of what we do now. And before that, it's like, we just take it all for granted, right? Whenever you read history, just kind of assume it's just had to happen that way. But it never did that. It's always people. It's always micro choices. And before that notion of soul force crossed the continents and made it

to the American South, civil disobedient, like nonviolence was a tactic. It was like, we don't want to get our heads bashed in by the racist cops with billy clubs. So don't piss them off. After Howard Thurman brought Gandhi's satchagraha to America, it became the central philosophy. And that was then this, and then that sent shockwaves around the world. Everybody saw the march, you know, to Selma, right? Everybody saw the dogs barking in the face of the boy with his hands down by his side and the water cannons.

And they're like, oh, and it shocked and shamed and inspired humanity to say civil disobedience is a more powerful force than violence and repression, right? and Erica Chenoweth, who's at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, has famously done a study where she's like, hey, it takes 3.5% of a population to tip the balance. She went back and looked at all these civil disobedience events in the sort of in the 20th century across, I think it was like 15 or 16 different countries or episodes. And that was the number, 3 and a half percent. That's all it takes, right? And that nonviolence is twice as effective as violence. So you're like, Okay, so that's like we should put a pin in that, right?

Because if you take a look at our current culture wars, now I'm going to stick my neck out here. This was an excerpt I wrote in detail. They got pulled from the book for space. But if we look at our current culture wars, right? Because you're like, holy shit, folks, like we're in a tight spot. Right. And we need to bond together.

And we need to be thinking as a collective humanity because we have global, metasystemic crises and problems. We can't solve these. They don't respect boundaries. you know, and we have to pull together, but we're not because we're choking on our grief. And the grief we're experiencing is this reluctant transition from pre-tragic to tragic. We're getting dragged into like smack, smack, smack, like time to set aside childish things. And you've got to face this.

And so on the alt-right, right, like Christian nationalism, what is their pre-tragic state? The pre-tragic state was this is for us and by us, and this is our own special little world. then you guys are awesome no matter what. And then they're suddenly being like, wait a second, there's all these different people with different languages and different faiths and different beliefs, and they're all clamoring for the same thing

that we thought was our birthright, and at the same time, collapse in extractive industries, you know, like so logging, mining, ranching, timber, you know, the collapse of Detroit and the Rust Belt, the collapse of Middle America, and suddenly those folks are having lowered social status, right lower economic security against spike in opioids all the things and they're like wait we're pissed

I mean there was a great well I wouldn't say great there was a Twitter quote and I don't remember who originated it but it showed up in early quarantine it's like when you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression right so that's their move they've been lollygagging in the pre-tragic and they're getting dragged into this tragic phase but also on the left it's happening so the social justice movement, right, especially when they're looking back to tear down statues or, you know, baudlerize and excise, everything from children's books to anybody, any time, anywhere in the past that wasn't upholding the current values we believe. And this is, you know, Woodrow Wilson. This is, you know, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, even. I always kind of wonder, because, I mean, my academic background is in history, right? So, I mean, I knew this stuff, you know, like way deep. Like the, like, the,

the legacies of conquest, the legacies of genocide and slavery that make the American experience. You're like, nobody promised us a rose garden. And my sense is that the post-tragic soul force has been abandoned even by most of the current social justice movement. And I couldn't figure out why. I'm like, well, wait, there's this totally badass, world-changing lineage here. what happened to it. And this is the part where I'm sticking my neck out. So please, I offer this as like a, it's not a fully formed thought.

This is my current best swipe at it. You're laying out the land in terms of the sort of modern way that it applies to both sides. Yes. We would say sides because we have to see how they equally have their own, even if they are coming from a best attempt from their own perspective, they have their own failings, which ultimately leads us void. So please do stick your neck out. I think it'd be great for people to hear.

Okay. So my sense is that something happened, especially in the African-American civil rights movement, post-68 in the assassination of King, right? He, you know, and Malcolm X, right, that those guys were bright lights and Fred Hampton, which more people are getting familiar with lately because there was a recent HBO film about him,

or maybe it was Amazon, but it was a recent film that's kind of, you know, a lot of people are getting, you know, Fred Hampton was like Rainbow Coalition. He's like, hey, let's not do, let's not do black nationalism. Let's actually start building coalitions, you know, on class, right, not race. So we have, you know, it's the old Mali tune of like, how long must they kill our profits while we stand aside and look, right? And so by the time you get into the 80s and you get the emergence of kind of bling style hip pop, right, you're You're not hearing soul, blues, funk, power to the people.

You're kind of, you're losing that element of soul force. And you're replacing it. You know, we're in the Beyonce and Barack era, where if you were a person of color coming up in the late 80s through the 90s and into the early 2000s, it almost feels like they got pulled back to the pre-tragic of modern liberalism. We're in a multicultural, egalitarian society. you have a shot at the good life and there became that focus on its maybacks and rims, right?

And sort of a consumer identity around material success that didn't have, I mean, granted, there's sort of woke hip-hop, there's woke folk, there's all kinds of, you know, conscious elements, sub-genres. But in general, right, it was very much the American dream, even within its own unique subcultures. And so when you have social justice folks saying, I don't feel safe, you know, like the idea that like Princeton is not a safe place, you know, to be a person of color,

even though previously they already had statistically, they had over-representation of scholars of color and those kinds of things. And you know, and you kind of get this almost Maoist, like just, just, just reduce it all down to the ground. You're kind of like, oh, you guys are choking on the grief that you were sold a bill of goods, that we lived in an actually a democratic, galitarian society where a biracial man, Barack Obama could be elected president,

and then that meant we'd arrived. And then, whoa, 2016 rolls around, George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, all these things roll around. You know, you've got flat out unapologetic. white nationalists saying all the quiet parts out loud. And there's that sense of, oh, no, we were sold, we were sold the bill of goods. And now we're experiencing this grief as rage. And so, and what is what is really interesting, and this loops back to that Yates, right, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passion and intensity. There was a study six months ago in Australia that took 500 Americans. And so, them across their ideological beliefs, and it broke them into three groups.

There was alt-right white identitarians, and there was radical left social justice folks, and then moderately, like, center-moderate progressives. And they tested them for adherence to authoritarianism and the dark triad personality types, which is narcissism, Machiavellianism, and sociopathy. So generally, not very nice people, right, who will do anything. to get their way. And what they found was that the progressives who were like, I have my beliefs, I hold them dearly, but I also hold the right of others to hold their own, didn't score on any of those four qualities. But both folks on the far left and the far right did. And so you're like,

oh, shit. Okay. So now you're like, now where in history have we seen that movie before? And you think straight back to the, at least I think straight back to the French Revolution. Right. Liberty, equality, fraternity or brotherhood or humanity, right? Those are badass noble ideals, right? They were looking to tear down the monarchy. They were looking to repower to the people. And then Robespierre psychopathic son of a bitch, right? Outflanks, the well-intentioned progressives, puts all their heads on the chopping block

and kicks off the reign of terror. You know, and he famously says, to make an omelet, you've got to break a few eggs. So we're in this really fascinating place where in our grief, moving from pre-tragic to tragic. I mean, you can even talk about like Harry and Megan, right, their recent interview, right? You could make a case that what we just saw in microcosm in that Oprah interview was their effort to move the monarchy

from pre-tragic, right? The queen is infallible, divine right, of kings and queens, stiff upper lip, you know, close your eyes and think of England, like that, to the tragic monarchy of which Diana was the first one. Well, actually, I think is it Edward? I forget who it is. It's the one who abdicated.

I think that's Edward. The one who abdicated for love and then sent the whole thing sideways, right? Arguably. His father, right? I'm sorry, uncle. Uncle. Yeah. Bertie, I think, was his giving name.

So you could make a case that he was the first of it. Charles kind of repressed it all. Diana expressed it and was martyred for it. You then have Megan coming in as the sort of archetypal, wounded feminine, right, in place of Harry's mother. And you have them saying, we hurt, we bleed, we grieve, we dream, feel us, right? Feel us, please. And this is this schizoid movement in the British monarchy. So you can kind of, once you see that pre-tragic and

post-tragic thing, you kind of see it everywhere and you're like, oh, what we cannot do is get stuck in the tragic choking on our grief. Because grief is a vulnerable feeling and we don't want to stay there long, but we're subject to dark triad bad actors on both sides of the political spectrum. We'll say, I'll take your pain and I'll turn it into rage. And I'm going to weaponize it. I'm going to point it at them, the other. And I'm going to harness that power for my own agendas. Just to pause there for a second, just to make sure that I got it, you know, on my end, is that we have, you know, on any sort of place where we see this sort of extreme, you know, people on one side or another side, first of all, they are not putting value on each other's grief, right?

So they independently, grief is real, right? They're experiencing some grief. The source of it, that's up for, you know, debate and, you know, people who study history like yourself have a much better understanding of really the multitude of layers that play into that grief. So you have different sides experiencing grief, discounting each other's grief, and now having a proclivity to individuals or groups. that come in with a sense of, hey, it's not about, yes, my grief is real and your grief is real.

It's no, our grief matters more. Here is a direct path to solve it. Yeah, 100%. And see, here's the weird thing about identity politics and grievance politics, right? If there's only one thing that has to be true for it all to be rendered a really bad idea at a structural level, like never mind what case I want to make, right? Which is if we run the assessment that the coming, take your pick, 10, 20, 50, 100 years is going to include more instability and potential suffering for more of us than the last 10, 20, 50, 500 years, then, you know, it's Ben Franklin 101, right? When he was signing the Declaration of Independence, he said, you know, because they were rebels, right? They were about to just sign their names in blood. They were going to be hung,

drawn and quartered as traitors if they didn't pull it off. Right. So that's another thing we don't always notice. We're like, yay, they won patriots. So he said, he said, gentlemen, we must hang together or we shall assuredly hang separately. And so that sense of mutually assured destruction or salvation is very much here. Now, if I as a person or as an identity group, refuse to play, refuse to collaborate, refuse to recognize the shared humanity with people who don't look like me, smell like me, talk like me, pray like me. And I say, my IOUs, I have to get these cashed. But like, if we add up all those IOUs and they're worth, you know, $10 billion. And we're looking at a world of hurt worth $1 trillion. Right. Then we should tear up

our IOUs and kind of follow, you know, Muhammad's, you know, of like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And not, I mean, this is the second Game of Thrones reference, didn't mean to, but here we go, right, that the whole thing, which they just shot the bet on in season eight, but the whole premise there where they were trying to get together in Kings Landing and they're like, hey, the white walkers are coming. Like, that's a bigger thing that our games of Thrones. We need to bond together, right?

That was it, right? Like, that's the thing that we face right now, which is, which is can we set aside our child as things because here's the thing that's at stake, right? There's, I mean, most people who will make a defense, in fact, I'll tell a story that, again, that I didn't make it into the finish of the book, but it's one of my favorite stories. I was speaking at Sandhurst, which is the Royal Military Academy where Harry and William went, it's where Churchill went, Ian Fleming went there, and, you know, and it's the equivalent of West Point in Britain. And they were taking on, taking us on a tour, through the chapel. And it's this beautiful kind of holy place. And inscribed in all the stone

pillars are the names of all the officers who went to Santos, who were then killed in action. And it goes back to like the 19th century, like, you know, Afghanistan the first time, you know, Crimea, the Boer War, World Wars 1 and 2, you know, Afghanistan, Falklands, Iraq, all of them. And unlike the Vietnam Memorial, which just kind of has those names in black stone in D.C., there was their name, there was their date, and then what was what they were doing, like how they died. So it was like, you know, climbing out of a trench in the sum to rescue a fallen comrade, like taken out by sniper fire, all these kind of things. So it was really, it was really moving and really personal. And I was, and I was torn.

I was like, whoa, you know, like on the one hand that, like these courageous, this kind of legacy, this sort of noble heroism. And on the other hand, like, holy shit, this is just a litany of conquest. This is just projection of brutal, global military force around the world, subjugating hundreds of millions of people, right? At the point of force, you know, British East India Company, extractive capitalism, you know, dependent nations, all that. And I was like, what do we do with this? Like, how do you reconcile those two things?

And my sense is that, you know, flukes of history and or it had to happen this way. I don't mean that had to in like a predestined kind of way, but just complexity. Like this is what it required to emerge is we had the simultaneous emergence of democracy and market capitalism. And throw in Christianity as a kind of orienting philosophical force that kind of gets bent and shaped just to prop up or justify the other to. And as people are experiencing the collapse in the meaning two point out right now, right, especially dispossessed, disenfranchised folks, bi-pop folks, transgender folks, LGBTQ, the whole bit, like anybody who was like, wait, all men, all women, all creative equal, no matter what, fuck you, you guys were lying, right? Like that experience. And then the temptation

to want to burn it all down, I think is actually a critical mistake. Because hidden inside that vehicle, right, of the last three, four, five hundred years is actually this profoundly beautiful, delicate experiment of the infinite game, right? And that's James Koss's terms. He wrote a book, finite and infinite games. The finite games are win-lose, one up, one down. That's sexuality, politics, military, you know, survival of the fittest. And that's how almost all human encounters have been for almost ever. And then the finite games. is to say, actually, this can be omni-considerate. We're thinking of everyone.

It can be win-win, and the purpose isn't to win and end the game. The purpose is to keep playing and expand the game to include as many people as possible. Right. And so you take the American Revolution and you realize, oh, wow, yes, those guys were fat cat, Boston merchants. They were, you know, landed gentry in the plantation south, many of whom, of their own slaves. They took a swing against, you know, the taxation and the yoke of a distant monarch, and they won. So they actually won the last round of the finite game. And they could have actually doubled down and then just run the table themselves. And instead, they're like, wait,

wait, I think we want to do this differently. They had the French philosophers. They had Locke, they had Hobbs. They had, there was this bubbling up of new possibility. Like, wait, a human's right is potentially inalienable and sovereign to them as an individual. not as a tribe, not as a caste, not as a clan, right, but as a person. And they say, we're not just going to call our new guy king so-and-so. We're going to call him Mr. President. We're going to have checks and balances. We're going to have vetoes. We're going to have hard and fast things. We're going to have the ability to amend stuff. We're going to have all these ways to try and constrain power and prevent the collapse from a republic to an empire, as in C.E.

are Caligula Nero. So they were watching all the history and they were reading it deeply. And, you know, Edmund Morgan, who's a, he's dead now, but he was a famous Yale historian, wrote a book called American slavery, American freedom. And he makes the thesis. And I think there's, contested counterarguments in the field, but he makes a thesis, which I think is important to understand what he's like, look, American, it's not that American democracy is a sham. because of slavery. American democracy was only possible because of slavery. That Greece and Rome were the only other two places to ever even try it, and they were

slave states. And that you can't run, you can't attempt this infinite game experiment unless you kind of ahead of time say, well, all men are created equal except this bunch who does the hard work. Now, so that, there's a way to get to the post-tragic here, right? Instead of saying, oh, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and all the rest were hypocrites, and we need to burn this down. You're like, oh, no, that was just one of these awkward get it off the ground moments that allowed us to take a risk and try this bolder, nobler thing. And if you think about what Abe Lincoln does in the Civil War at the Gettys Bigger dress, he's like, hey, we got to re, we got to re go back and recommit to that.

You look at what MLK does in his I have a dream speech. He's like, hey, man, the Negro was cashed a check with insufficient funds, but we refused to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt. Right? And Obama does it at the Charlottesville shootings. George Bush even did it at post-9-11. He's like, okay, we could fingerpoint at Muslims. We could go the way of Japanese internment camps right now.

But we're not going to. Our Muslim citizens are noble, good-hearted people, contributors to society. we have to respect and honor each other. So it's that doubling down each time. And Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher, his argument has basically been, guys, the Enlightenment experiment,

don't put a bullet in that one. It's halfway born. Right. We've got it like in all of our frustration and all of our grief and all of our rage, we cannot burn that down too because we all bled for it. All the injustice.

the stonewall marches, the suffragettes, the unionizers, Cesar Chavez, you know, and the migrant workers, like every single movement that has said, us too, we deserve a seat at this table. Like, that is the most critical thing ever. And that, and the whole premise of it is that I could, like the playing of the infinite game is, I commit to play this game, whether we win or lose,

we still honor the rules, right? versus gut punching the ref, right? Or burning down the stadium. Like we commit to this game for the spirit of the game, to extend it to include all of us as soon as possible. And honestly, I think that's the thing that both concerns me and inspires me the most about reality 2021. Is are we or aren't we going to actually dust that off,

hold it up and say, This is an incomplete and profound and fragile and crucial experiment for us to conduct together. You know, and you mentioned so beautifully and eloquently said, and there's so many layers to it. And I think that this conversation is about the layers, because even with, you know, the impact of Mahatma Gandhi and what he has and what he went through and his inspiration for the civil rights movement, as we go through and we look at any. individual at a time they were doing what they did. You could see the value that he brought both to India, America, the larger world through the message that was there. And you can also look at it and say, this man was doing some things that in our current view, right, I don't know how much of the history you know about, you know, Gandhi, but you could pick apart his sort of upbringing and

some of the experiments that he did, which of course, in today's modern understanding of of, you know, spending time with like women that are underage, even if he said that he wasn't, you know, sexual with them. And anybody that wants to look this up, you can look this up. And we can use that to discount everything that he said. Or we can see that, okay, I'm understanding it from our point of view, from our modern lens, that this is absolutely not something that's okay. And I can also hold that this person was bringing some, like, we can have both. We can have the fair criticisms that we look at it within the context of seeing it that it's our lens right now and understanding that we want to do better, that doubling down component that you mentioned,

and also see the value in what that moment in time or that individual was trying to bring to the table. It's sort of like the advocacy of the word end, right? Because if we only stop at one point, then we end up not learning the lesson that was brought to. those forefathers and mothers who were there in our past. And it's also from a level of, I think about it from, this is what we do with our families that we love. There are people in our families that have moral feelings, that stumble, that fall flat on their face, that go through challenges.

And there's so many layers to, let's say if they're dealing with an addiction, there's so many layers to, where did that addiction start? Did it start in childhood? Who is responsible? Did I have a part to play in it? And do we want to discount them completely? There might be some times in our life where we have to draw hard boundaries in the individual. But it's all to say that it's so easy to feel that in our current lens that we have a perspective

that allows us to write off one whole group or another in the past history or the current modern view of what's going on. And then not see that if we applied that same to our family structure, you'd end up no family and you're living completely alone. And nobody there to support you. Yes. Right. Yes.

And so much of that, right? I mean, that phrase, like, nobody promised us a rose god. Just constantly comes to mind for me. Because it's like, what did you expect? What did we think? Like life on this planet trying to figure out, like, what were we owed that we're not getting other than simply a choice right here? here right now to make it as good as we possibly can. And so that kind of maturation of coming full

circle, like after being knocked down and broken open and overwhelmed to then feel the beat, you know, feel the pulse. Like somebody's kept the groove going like, oh shit. Like I just, I got to rise up singing. Like I can't help. But dance, there's something beautiful here too. is critical. And like Mayan, Mayan elder and poet Martin Prechtel, he's, I mean, he lost his entire family

in the Guatemalan death squads. He was initiated into a Mayan village in Blago Adelan that was like intact from Spanish conquistadors or like wild-ass lineage tradition. And then was chased, you know, by operatives back into the States. And he's written a number of profoundly beautiful books.

But he said something beautiful about grief. He says, grief is praise. It is the way our love honors what it misses. And if what our heart is grieving for is the, you know, as Charles Eisenine says, like, you know, the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible, right, then let's honor that. Let's honor it by rising up singing. Let's honor it by walking each other home. Let's honor it by sacking the fuck up and stop. being whiny adolescents that are mad at mommy and daddy, however we count them, and actually take responsibility. Like the time is now. The choice is ours. You know, Alice Walker says, like, we are

the ones we've been waiting for. So on that note, you know, and I'd really love to propose something if you were open to it and no pressure to answer right now is that I feel like we've given due credit to what's needed for the most important part of the book, which is the opening. And which is getting the sense of meaning and this crisis of meaning that we're in, it's hard to give value to the next conversation without a decent understanding. Whether you agree or whether you disagree, it's hard to look at the conversation with merit without having a good understanding of the framework that is being set up. The laying of the pieces of the puzzle on the table and saying, look, here's everything

that's kind of going around, which in your point of view in this book, Recapture the Rapture is a big reason why we're at this precipice that we're at. I would love to spend a little bit of time on meaning 3.0. And then if you were open, again, no pressure. Maybe since you do have another interview later on, if we can find another time to dive into a little bit of the meat of the book and some of the tools, because as you had mentioned in our pre-conversation, you had a friend that was reading the book and they were like,

man, if you just read this opening, you can feel kind of a little bit depressed because you're getting the lay the land of everything that's kind of not all the things all the things. You're getting all the things, right? You're just getting all the things. But there is the hope. There is the vision. There is the there is a different possibility that is available to us. So I'd love to split the conversation up so we can use a little bit of this time for meaning number three. Are you are you down for that? Totally. Great. That way we're not rushed into concluding or anything else like that. And I'll work with your team to figure out another time. And we can release the episodes back to back so we can take our audience on the on the journey of really the thoughtfulness that you've put into this. So if I can understand correctly that so far in

this conversation that we've had, we've really been talking about, again, laying all the things out there, but that has primarily been on the meaning 1.0, the meaning 2.0. And the reasons that they exist, right? The reasons that the grief might exist, the challenges that they run into, the well-intentioned place that they came through, but ultimately limited place. So I would like to transition from there into meaning 3.0, right? Yeah. Set that up. Yeah, for sure.

So, I mean, yeah, to kind of sum up the sort of choose your own apocalypse stuff, it's like, hey, the hours late, the stakes are high. We've suffered a collapse in familiar reference points. That's making it super confusing. When we're at our best, we should be at our best right now, like bucket brigades and baling, you know, we're at our worst, identity, politics, and culture wars. We have to get together to experience something global, but it can't be a tops down solution because that tends towards fascism and fundamentalism. So like we've seen all those movies. So how do we get to a global

consciousness as fast and skillfully as possible to mend the meaning crisis? So what if we take the best of meaning 1.0, which is the promise of salvation, and we take the best of meaning to which was the promise of inclusion. And can we make a meaning 3.0 that is inclusive salvation? And what would that look like? So the first model that I thought of was the design firm IDEA, which came out of Stanford University. They're very famous in the Silicon Valley space.

They're responsible for having launched all sorts of tech and consumer products. But they did something super cool, which is that they realized, hey, sure, we come up great ideas, but the way we come up with great ideas, right? Their actual design thinking was actually useful well beyond the stuff that clients paid the money for. And in fact, it was useful for people all around the world and developing countries and everything else to kind of come up with their own solutions. And so what they, and so they created this open source human-centered design toolkit. And they used it in Delhi for like microfinance. They used it in Ghana for getting indoor plumbing. They used it in the slums of South Paulo for nutrition and meal plants. They've done all kinds

of really, really cool and inspiring projects. But instead of like clever people from universities or think tanks or NGOs telling people on the ground what they needed, they said, here's the design toolkit. You can use this and you can build your own solutions that are local, that are sovereign, that include all the collective intelligence and wisdom and all the unforeseen potholes and possibilities and you guys build it. And it's been super duper successful in empowering folks all around the world to do more. So if we take that, instead of like WWJD, like those bumper stickers or bracelets, like what would Jesus do? You know, it's like WWID. What would it take, what would it look like if we brought design thinking to the meaning crisis? And so if we take the, you know,

we talked about how believing in faith, like having a religious identification, leaves you healthy or wealthier happy, right? What are the core elements like? Why? And the sacred design lab at Harvard Divinity School actually kind of took a cut at this. And they came up with basically three things, healing, inspiration, and connection. But those are the three things that are really pro-social. That actually helps us deal with life better, right? Because life's a bitch and then we die. We know that. Right. We know we take hits along the way. So having a social program, having a cultural code that allows us to heal and digest our grief, super important. And that could be Yom Kippur, that can be lent, that can be Ramadan, that can be just singing and praise, that can be confession.

There's all sorts of different modes of that where we kind of wipe the etch of sketch. We're like, okay, I was getting a little gunged up. I was getting, you know, I was getting burdened, and I now get to be clear. there's also that sense of, you know, life for many of us can feel a little bit like hamster wheel groundhog day, you know, get up work, try to get ahead, look after everybody you care about, you know, get me exhausted, go to sleep, get up, do it again, like what's the point? Right. So having moments of inspiration, having peak states where we are literally, you know, filled with enthusiasm or this filled with spirit, where we experience quite often a sense of deep,

remembering of like, oh yeah, this is the point. I remember. And the experiences of all, when people experience all, they have lower blood pressure, less disease, more expensiveness, more lateral thinking. There's all kinds of health-giving experiences and reaffirming experiences from access to inspiration. And then finally, connection, right? We've never been more fragmented than we are today. Vivick Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General. right, has just written a book about it. I think it's called together. And he's just, you know, he toured the country and he's like, oh my gosh, isolation is like our number one challenge. Everybody's just, you know, fractured. We don't live near our families of origin. We barely know our neighbors,

especially in quarantine. We've been even more isolated than ever. It's now 400% increase in anxiety and depression in the last 12 months. And that's almost all due to increase ties. We're tribal primates, man. We are wired to hug and to hold and to. bump elbows and shoot the shit, right? And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, it's got to be, right? We're, we're going to be open source, right? We've already described that we don't want to do a tops down solution, no matter how clever, that ends up in tyranny over time, right? So you're like open source. It's also got to be scalable. That's inclusive 101.

And if you want it scalable for the bottom four billion, never mind the bottom one billion, right? If you want it scalable so that everyone has a crack at it, it can't require a fancy week-long retreat. It can't require a million dollar bit of, you know, a bit of medical equipment, right? It can't require health insurance and co-pays or some fancy $1,000 or even a few hundred dollar gadget. It's got to be cheap or free. right and then the final one is it needs to be if we want it to work and especially if we're running the hypothesis that it needs to work across cultures and across conditions it can't rely on an a perfect lie of the ball to work so i can't it doesn't have like if i had to rely on like well you need to

be in a peaceful tranquil monastery with stained glass windows and you need to be able to meditate to get your happy place and that'll do it like that's not going to work in a war torn area that's not going to work in urban slums, right? That's not going to work a whole bunch of places that it especially needs to. So anti-fragility means that if, you know, it gets better as conditions get worse, right? So those are our criteria, right? How do we deliver healing inspiration and connection from religion and make it open source, scalable and anti-fragile from modernism? And if we can put those two together, you're like, okay, so now how do we do that? And one of the simplest things is, and this actually goes back to, you know, James Nestor's work with Breathe and lots of others,

and Wim Hof and anybody else in the kind of current breathing Renaissance, is can we harness evolutionary drivers? If we can actually look at how our bodies and brains affect and shape our hearts and minds, then we have that with that cheap or free and the kind of scalable in the antifragile. We kind of meet those criteria. So like if people, most folks may or may not know this, I might imagine listeners of your podcast probably did.

But that idea if we try and hold our breath, right? And we're like, okay, I hold it for as long as I can and then I have to take a breath in. Why? Because I was out of oxygen. Well, no, you want. Right? You actually probably had like 40% plus excess oxygen,

still in your system. But our body, because respiration is a central evolutionary driver. We've got all these strong overrides. Like breathe, damn it. breathe, damn it, you need extra. We can't let you cut it too close, or you'll blow it sometimes and die, right? So we have this huge buffer to make sure we always breathe.

The same thing with sexuality and reproduction, right? If you think about, I always think of that goofy movie, the Blue Lagoon. It was Brooke Shield, and it was her very first movie, or maybe second movie. She actually won the first RASI for the worst actress award. But it was like this,

it was this young castaways on an eye. and they grow up and like the movie posters like that you know the one the boy grows tall the girl beautiful and then love blossoms right this kind of thing and the whole premise of the movie was that you know with no instruction manual these two humans figure out how to get it on and you're like yeah okay so with the exception of like kama sutra and you know and you porn you know like almost all humans ever including all animals right have figured out how to reproduce with no instruction manual. So you're like, well, where's the instruction manual? Because this works every single time. You're like, oh, it's in our neurochemistry. It's in our endocrine system. And all of these

impulses that guide and drive our lives, you know, for the most part, A, they did get us here, so we can't, you know, second guess it too much. But B, create a ton of our pain, grief, and suffering. Because we're just puppets on the string of evolution and ultimately evolution. is totally amoral. It doesn't care whether I said, till death, do we part, or I do, or I promise. All it wants is the most robust and diverse gene pool possible.

So it's forever slamming humans into each other to see if it can get better genetic material. And that creates an awful lot of our suffering. But at the same time, right, if you're familiar with Terence McKenna, the sort of psychedelic philosopher, you know, he famously had this hypothesis called the Stone Ape Theory,

which is the idea like, how did we go? Like, wait, what's the difference between us, bonobos, guerrillas, chimps? Like, what the hell happened? And his whole premise was that, you know, early hominids came down out of the trees, went to the savannah, picked insects out of dung, mushrooms grew on the dung, they ate the mushrooms and per jam. All sorts of interesting things happen. And that's, you know, it's a tantalizing theory.

Most scholars discounted it in the late, you know, the recent psychedelic renaissance. It's kind of bubbling back up, you know, and maybe people will take another crack at it. But to me, that's a sort of, that's a tenuous theory, and it's impossible to prove. But you can actually make the case, and UCLA's Pulitzer Prize winning anthropologist, Jared Diamond, if anybody's familiar with his book, Guns, Jones, and Steel, that's, it's that guy. He actually makes the case that it's not, it wasn't psychedelics, it was actually sexuality. And that humans are as distinct from all other animals, all of their primates and mammals in

the animal kingdom, that our sexual. is like from 4,000 other species. We are utterly unique in the sense of men's penis size, in the sense of women's full breasts, even when they're not lactating, in the sense of concealed ovulation, female orgasm, a whole host of things that no one else does, elective sexuality, all these things. So you're like, oh, okay, so those evolutionary drivers that actually ensured that we procreate to ensure the propagation of our species are. so strong and so potent that it and also accidentally create a ton of our grief because we're puppets on strings right what if we untie those strings and what if we use those to continue the

experiment right and so not unlike the infinite game right what if we use those to say hey it got us from homo erectus to homo sapiens potentially that was our sexuality the neurochemistry right the pain relief the pair bonding the lateral thinking the peak states that happen from sexual practice, what if we can actually use that to complete the experiment and actually use sexual fitness and hotwire evolution, right, for the project of accelerated development? So respiration is one, right? You can change oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide. You can upregulate your body and brain. You can downregulate it and calm down. You can send it sideways into transcendent peak states. So respiration, sexuality, embodiment.

Right. What's happening inside our core? How do we measure pain and pleasure? How do we metabolize and integrate pain? How do we use our vagus nerve? How do we use our endocanamoid system to actually heal and discharge and defrag? versus lying on a couch with Prozac talking to a therapist about it? Right? Because like you can't always, you can't solve the problems in our mind at our minds level. Bessel van de Kukk, the famous trauma researcher who coined the term PTSD. You know, he is his book that is still at best sell. actually it's called the body keeps the score. You know, that's often known as the issues are in the tissues. So, like, can we use our awareness of our physical systems to both move and approach wholeness, but also to, you know, support healing? And then substances, right?

Substances are another super strong one. And UCLA's Ron Siegel has made a very compelling case that, in fact, the desire to get intoxicated is not only cross-cultural in the sense of it, shows up all around the world. It's cross species and it's not even primates and it's not even mammals. It's in birds. It's in almost any animal, any animal group above super basics. And he makes a case that it's our fourth evolutionary drive is the desire to shift state because it increases lateral pattern recognition. It increases innovation. It increases the, perception and utilization of novelty. So you're like, okay, so we got respiration, sexuality,

embodiment substances and then let's just go ahead and throw in a sort of a force multiplier something that amplifies all the others which would be music and daniel levitin who's a scholar at mcgill university in canada has written a fascinating book called this is your brain on music now he makes the case actually that music is so old it's so central to human consciousness and culture that it actually predates language and it's one of the first ways we learn to coordinate We learn to bond, whether that's for a hunt or that's for dance and ritual and celebration, all these kind of things, and it has profound impacts on our neurochemistry. So if we take those big five, right, you're like, oh, that's the toolkit.

That's the potential toolkit for architecting culture from building meaning 3.0. Oh, by the way, if you want to do a kind of little neuroanthropological like look back, every single civilization has also made use of all these things. not all of them at once, but almost all of them in sequences. So you're like, okay, now we've got our Lego blocks. And now we can understand how to create communities, how to create, how to create inspiration, reliable peak states, how to support healing so we can discharge our trauma and get, you know, and not get burdened by the density and grief of life.

And how can we connect in badass, powerful and trauma. transformative ways together to do the hard things that that must be done. It's a powerful framework for really the ingredients that have been used throughout history to deliver value, deliver results to people that were part of different religious institutions. Now, sometimes people who do come from more traditional upbringing and religious institutions, their sort of look at any kind of new model that might be tossed around is, but what is the glue that ultimately keeps speaking? people inside? What is the glue that keeps people or what is the beliefs? Is there a belief

system that has people say that either drives morality so that there's a God that is in the sky that is dictating, you know, right and wrong. So the belief and the fear of, of the justice and the wrath that be laid upon people keeps them in line or the framework of the, where it is, in and this group is out. So when you look at this meaning 3.0, is the idea of bonding the group and connecting them and having them both participate but be connected to it, how would you compare in contrast to how that's come in the past? And even whether or not it has any meaning. Yeah, well, I mean, that notion, right? I mean, there's, I think it might, Yuval Harari might have even semi-floated this, but I don't think it actually holds up,

which is the idea that sky guards, like authoritarian skyguards, were one of the first, they were a social technology to enforce coded behavior across a whole bunch of people. Like the big guy upstairs is watching them, even if our police force isn't kind of thing, right? And that that was a key to large agrarian and early city states. But I think there's been some additional research suggesting that actually the city states came first. And that kind of complexity, because Yuval's point was something around gossip. Like our capacity to gossip was one of the unlocks, right, for us to move from hunter

gatherers to larger densities of folks. So there's a question there as to the role of a, you know, again, yeah, a sky god, right? You don't know an unimpeachable authority above us that keeps us on our toes or keeps us honest, even when we don't want to be. Nietzsche, Frederick Nietzsche said, you know, the phrase that most folks are familiar with is God is dead. and that gets often used by atheists and others to say, see, that was the end, like the scientific revolution that killed the old gods,

God's dead, but if you read the rest of his paragraph, it says, Thus Spake Zarathustra, he says, yeah, but be super careful when you kill your gods, because it's actually a whole system. So I just do a quick, be super careful when you kill your gods, because it's actually a whole system. And the reality is that when you take your, divinity out of it. You take out the morality and the ethics to your point. And so you can end up in a godless state. And that's kind of where we've been lately. So the question is, is, you know,

can we trust humans ourselves, right, enough that there is an emergent ethic, that there is something that we can do where we will be good even if we're not in fear of punishment. And so one of the things that's interesting about these big five techniques and if you can put them together to create healing inspiration and connection, right, is you can skin it with whatever you want. So if you're a participant or an inherent or a leader of an existing tradition or faith-based community, you can just kind of use this as a checklist. Like, hey, are we actually, are we actually doing all the things we could as well as we might? If you are ultimately looking to innovate something new,

you can create something that feels postmodern that can beg and borrow and do a kind of cultural mashup as cultures have always done. And I think the simplest is that those experiences when you put them together effectively are not just autotelic, which just means it's super fun and has its own reason for doing, like going sliding or surfing.

You're like, hey, I love it, right? But they're also autodidactic, which means they teach, they are self-disclosing. So one of the things is that when you put all these together and you create an effective initiatory death rebirth experience. So like an entire nervous system reboot, power up and kind of shoot them in, which is eminently doable. And we kind of, you know, I share the exact neurobiological protocols step by step.

You know, it's like high nitric oxide, high endorphins and dopamine, high vagal nerve tone. Delta wave brain state, brain stem reset, you know, orgasm, pain, AC, electricity, DC, electricity, magnetism, sound, pulse through your body, all these kind of things will reliably deliver you to the numinus, to the kind of non-dual, what you could call the kind of information layer. You can make any sense of that you want. And if you, so if you're theistic, if you're running a religious-based script, you can commune with the, you know, angels and deities of your pantheon.

If you're running, you know, a materialist aesthetic, you're just like, oh, well, why? This is the fractal symmetries in my mind's eye. This is beautiful. This is just synaptic complexity emerging as my self-awareness of me. Neat, right?

If you want to be agnostic, you could just be like, hey, I glimped all sorts of rad stuff, but I'm not going to spin up a mythology about where it all comes from or what it means. So the answer. there is, you know, believe what you want to believe, right? Just never lose the faith. Right. And in this case, faith is that sense of like, this I remember, because that is

consistently something that peak states seem to deliver, right, is an experience of an amnosis or the forgetting of the forgetting. So this I remember. And today I begin again. and like stay awake, build stuff and help out. And even when as far as like writing like playground rules. Like like we don't like like what's the cross-cultural? Like we don't have to get into specific 10 commandments or different, whether you're punish outs or whatever it would be. Right.

We can just say, hey, how do you know, you know, whether you're in their grocery store or you're in a lift line going skiing or you're in traffic? How do you know if someone's been a douchebag? we all kind of know, right? And so, right, you're like, ah, and what do we do? We kind of look around. We kind of make a funny face like someone farted. We're like, get a load of this guy.

Like, are you serious? And then there's kind of, you know, do we socially shame them or do they get away with it, right? That kind of a thing. And so the playground rules, you know, wait your turn. You know, women and children first. And not in a sexist way. You could update that by saying caregivers and their dependents first. if you're an able-bodied male, wait your fucking turn, right? Because you can fend for yourself.

Don't elbow to the front. I mean, kind of picture like, you know, we've just had a snowstorm in Austin. All the power went out. All the water went out. You know, volunteer fire departments were handing out stuff. Things like, like, how should we behave? We all know this. This is cross-cultural. You know, captain goes down with their ship. No one left behind. You know, put things back where you found him. you know like like those kind of playground rules aren't that complicated and i don't think our ethics needs to be wildly overblown i mean a rabbi hillel he was a an ancient rab you know hebrew philosopher from whom jesus of nazareth took an awful lot of his teachings and he was famously tried to get run out of town get run out of jerusalem by the pharisees and he's like he's like and they're

like um and so he kind of made a deal with them and he's like okay i'll i'll i'll i'll I'll engage you in a theological debate. If I win, I stay. If I lose, I'll vote. And they said, okay, so recite all of scripture while standing on one leg. So he picked up one leg and he said, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The rest is mere commentary. Boom.

Mike Jop. So you're like, okay. So, you know, and so back to Nietzsche, back to God is dead. like if we're in this postmodern world, but we've now unlocked the secrets, we've unlocked the source code, the protocols, at a neurobiological level. We can strip out all the mythologies,

but we can keep the functional technologies. And since they lead us to a place where we can go and see for ourselves, we can let the mystery stay the mystery. We don't actually have to engage in these elaborate, baroque descriptions of what's up. there, out there, or what it all means. We can just periodically visit that experience for ourselves,

discharge our trauma, reaffirm our inspiration and purpose, connect with each other, and then go and do good stuff together. It's really the, it's like that's all possible, but it's also too, if we don't do that, then the people who have hijacked the mic and are driving the bus could take us right off the cliff. Even if they don't intend to, they'll get so close to the edge that we could all slip and fall off the cliff together. It's happened to other civilizations. It could happen to this world if we don't participate in the story of creating another possibility that is all the things that you shared before, anti-fragile, inclusive, scalable and low cost.

that is possible and it's available to all of us is really the message that I'm taking away. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and Kurt Vonnegut, the guy who wrote Cats Cradle, Slaughterhouse, Five, he's kind of one of the legends of 20th century fiction. He was an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, and he figured out that like kind of stories share basic shapes. They all kind of follow certain things. And one is like, you know, down and up, so that's like rags to riches, you know,

then there's up, then down, then up again, like boy meets girl. So like meet cute, then for stupid-ass reasons, they get separated and then they get together, right? But he's like, the most compelling one ever is the Cinderella story, which is down, then up, you know, like that's the magic ball and the bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, then stroke a midnight, oh shit, loses everything, super duper down, and then happiest ever after ever. And we're in that story. Right, like life was nasty, brutish and short. Then we got, you know, modern, we got like a Bulgarian revolutions, industrial revolution, scientific revolutions, yay. Then, oh, shit, we are literally the atomic bulletin of scientists.

They have a doomsday clock, like how close are we to doomsday. We're currently at 90 seconds to midnight. So like pumpkins or princes, you know, disaster or happily ever after is 100% up to what we do next. And then back to, you know, pre-tragic kind of juvenile, like, ah, nobody promised us a rose god. And it's like if you had to be born at any time in human history, wouldn't we all sign up to be the generation that rescues it to be to be the ones that gets to shoot the torpedo down the death star, right, that gets to toss the ring in Mount Doom, right, that gets to battle the machines and free humanity.

Like wouldn't we want that walk on part in the war? wouldn't we want to be a part of the greatest happily ever after ever? So that's kind of I feel like, you know, and just a kind of, you know, the conclusion is we love this shit. You know, like look at that movie 300. Leonidas, you know, they're showering the arrows. So today we fight in the shade, right? Like there's only 300 of us. There's 100,000 Persians, you know, or dead poet society.

Oh, Captain My Captain. You know, or Thelma and Louise or Butch and Sundy. nuts, man. Like, we love those moments where somebody says, okay, like the time for seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is over. I'm going to set aside my childish things, and I'm going to do what must be done and sing my war song, sing my love song, and go out with a bang. So, like, that's the, that's the beautiful possibility. And the weird thing is, is that the sooner we make peace, right, the sooner we have these death rebirth initiatory experiences. You know, once you've died once, right?

Dying again doesn't seem so hard. So we get to practice resurrection so that we can become twice-born humans so that we can actually do the courageous, joyful and playful thing, right, of dancing each other home. It reminds me as we conclude here with this first part, a quote that I'll paraphrase from Eckhart Tolle, he says that it's in the nature of humanity to have had something, but not the awareness or the consciousness to know the preciousness of it,

to then lose it and then to rediscover it at a deeper level such that it can never be truly lost again. Beautiful. Well, in our first part of the conversation, as I shared in our intro, we dove deep into the crisis of meaning. and I share with friends that I've been talking to our interview about in preparation of part two, but also sharing how part one went, I described it as like, we laid out all the cards in the table to get a sense of sort of where we are. Because where we are then puts the precious, allows us to put the precious attention on now where do we want to go? Where do we want to go from here?

Especially when it comes to taking some of the past that work, but building upon it, with the latest in neuroscience and all these incredible studies and modalities that you talk about and the stories inside of your book. So in this conversation, I want to chat a little bit more about the section of the book, which is called The Alchemist Cookbook. And inside of there, you set up the conversation just to give a little bit of a framework. I'd love to share with people your opening story about you talking about the anarchist cookbook and kind of how that was a little bit of sort of, you could say, inspiration. right, by being the opposite of that for these sections that we're about to get into.

Yeah. So, I mean, if you haven't heard of it, the anarchist cookbook is like the most infamous, like it's the most stolen library book of all time. It was written by this English expat kid who hold himself up in New York Public Library in like 1971 and started just researching all this crazy whack-ass stuff. And it was sort of like spy versus. spy manual like Che Guevara, like revolutionary manifesto, but it was like 160 pages or something. And it was everything from here's surveillance techniques to here's how to brew bathtub LSD to how to build, you know, bombs out of, you know, Drano and candlewax, kind of fight club sort of stuff. And and then it instantly got on the radar of all the intelligence agencies.

Jay Edgar Hoover was trying to track it down. The kid got totally freaked and disavowed it. Like, I'm sorry I ever did the thing, but it didn't matter. It went into like six different editions. And it kind of became this infinite, you know, this infamous anarchist, you know, Bible of how to monkey wrench society. And but that idea where his original intention was he was like, hey, I'm sharing these tools for freedom fighters, right, against the forces of tyranny and authoritarianism.

Right. So I was like, oh, well, that's kind of fun. Because when we started doing the research for this book, it was like, oh, this is really interesting. Like once you understand the neuroanthropology, right, of looking back into culture and traditions in the past and not just see what customs and rituals folks did for centuries or thousands of years, but why they worked, what was the biology, what was the science underneath them, then you realize, wow, you can actually learn to blow yourself sky high, not someone else, right? and using just commonly available household materials.

So that was kind of the playful inversion of the anarchist cookbook to the alchemist cookbook. And then, you know, to just kind of explain alchemy, you know, most folks are familiar with that idea of trying to turn a base metal, quite often lead, into a precious metal like gold. And actually Isaac Newton, a lot of the early scientists, early chemistry was actually almost all alchemy. Those guys were mystics. They weren't like white lab coded. scientists like we thought, they were really interested in basically a progression of medieval

magic. And so the sort of esoteric understanding of alchemy is actually a process of inner transformation. They're like, hey, the metal thing is the metal thing. And definitely we got a lot of early scientific insights from people plunking around and having accidental discoveries. But really, it's a metaphor. And that alchemy is the process of turning the lead of our own monkeys with clothes mortal existences into the goal of a realized human adept. So really, this middle section of the book, the Alchemist Cookbook, is just, hey, how would we do that using tools that are available to all of us to accelerate our own process of transformation and integration?

Within these sections, as we were chit-chatting before we started the interview, you asked me, you know, well, take it wherever you want to take it, but think about the things that most interested you and the things that you had sort of questions on. And as you've been opening up and sharing the foundation of kind of us diving into this, I was thinking on that same topic and the mysticism and the magic, why do you think this category of sexuality? You know, you have part one and part two that you go into there and you talk about sexuality and its connection to consciousness and we'll get into a little bit of it. But from your lens and your point of view on our current state of the world, why do you think that topic is both ubiquitously around us,

but devoid of sort of that parallel consciousness component, right? It's both taboo, but exciting to talk about and the rise of pornography and you talk a little bit inside of the other, you know, just the different aspects of it. But we've sort of missed the boat on a little bit of the deeper meaning. How did we end up in that position? Yeah, I mean, that is, you know, that's years of inquiry and wondering. I mean, I think it's just fair to say that, you know, our drive for sexuality is one of the strongest. I mean, you know, right after breathing and food, you know, the urge to procreate is one of our most potent drivers. Therefore, any and we're social primates.

So if you figure, like, we're social, so we have to figure out how to do stuff. together. We depend on and rely on each other. And you've got this volatile wild card that when it's in play, all other bets are off. Right. We're crazy in love. There's lust. There's love. There's passion. There's attraction. So anybody trying to organize primates, in this case, hominids, into some kind of stable social structures had to have rules and regs that were stronger, or tried to be stronger than that evolutionary impulse, which means taboos, norms, and customs, right? And there's been this kind of, you know, mushrooming up of books all about primate sexuality,

are we chimps, are we bonobos, books like Chris Ryan, sex at dawn, lots of others, right? Esther Perel talking about mating in captivity. We're kind of fascinated by our human impulses. And the reality is that it's sort of, it's twofold. So like on the one hand, it's tempting not to grow. grab that third rail. You're like, ooh, sex is controversial. Everybody's got really strong opinions about it. You're going to piss off pretty much anybody in any direction you go with any statement you make. And on the other hand, you're like, well, we should actually take that as a

clue that we're on to something. Because if we go back to our first conversation, we're saying, hey, we're in a meaning crisis. And we have to figure out ways to create a new and unique variations on how do we reclaim our inspiration and our healing and our connection? Because that's kind of broken right now and we're suffering. You've got people getting sucked into fundamentalism, whether that's traditional religious or contemporary conspiracy theories or anything else. And you've got nihilism on the other side. Like just fuck it. I'm just going to go have fun. You know, hashtag best life. Let's just party while roam bones. So how do we rebuild meaning? And you know, and the premise that I, you know, make the case for in the book is that we need to bring

design thinking to it and we need to like the alchemist cookbook use tools that everybody has access to because if it's fancy if it only works for the folks at ted or davos that's just not going to get as far enough fast enough right we need we need tools that work for everybody everywhere consistently and that's kind of what led me to be looking at evolutionary drivers like respiration embodiment sexuality music and substances so you can kind of get a little squeamish you're like oh whoa like that's that's And that's why I had to take two chapters. It's the only topic in the entire book that I had to devote two chapters to because I'm like, man, if I just weighed into this and just like, this is just the facts, this is just the science,

it would just be like, boom, you know, just be hitting all the landmines. So it took two chapters to kind of try and snip all the wires to the bomb so that it hopefully won't go off and people can actually look at this stuff. And once we do, you realize, like if you were sort of an anthropologist from space, you're like, let's just take a look at how humans do this thing without any skin in the game, right? He'd be like, wow, this is fascinating. And Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize winning anthropologist at UCLA, who wrote guns, germs, and steel that folks may still remember from a decade or so ago. He also wrote a book called Why Sex Is Fun.

Deceptive title, his book is not that fun. But he had some great points in it, which was fundamentally, he's like, look, we are the freaks of the animal kingdom. like actually you know and and again a lot of the contemporary you know neo anthropology about human sexuality is like we're just like our bonobo cousins and we're designed to be promiscuous and lusty and women can you know have multiple partners and all these kind of things and you're like yeah and this is somewhat just slicing the emphasis but those arguments are almost saying we should be we should give ourselves permission to revert more back to our natural state as is evidenced and indicated by our primate cousins right jared diamond makes the exact opposite case he's like

actually even compared to apes chimps bonobos gorillas right we are wildly different so women have full breasts even when they're not lactating that's a mating signal it's not it has nothing to do with lactation right men might assume that bigger boobs make for a better mama but actually it's the it's the it's the lactation glands underneath right the fatty tissue is extra and decorative and if you think about it I mean for any large breasted woman who was an athlete a gymnast a dancer or anything and then hit puberty you realize actually large breasts are counterproductive for agility mobility fighting fleeing all those kind of things same with big round butts and curvy hips like none of those things actually convey an adaptive advantage penis size men's penis

sizes you know is three times that of gorillas and gorillas weigh 500 pounds you know you know And what Diamond suggests is he's like, hey, that's actually a mating fitness signal for a man to say, hey, I'm so healthy and thriving that I can afford to pack extra ounces of protoplasm uselessly onto the end of my Johnson, right, instead of sending it to my brain. Right. And even, you know, you carry that forward, the ability to dance, right? To be a good dancer is considered a mating signal because it's like, look, I've got my shit on lock. I'm a good warrior. I'm a good hunter. And I had to be a good dancer. And I had to be a good dancer. And I had to be a good dancer. And I had. time to learn all these silly dawn steps that don't mean shit but look at it's a signaling of extra resources yes it's a signaling of extra resources so you're like this is fascinating right we are actually on his point he's like he's like humans are the anomaly out of 4,000 different species we're the freaks and misfits freak you know sex outside of estrus or the actual period of explicit fertility and mating frequent female orgasm penis thighs breast breasts and hips all these things are radically

unique. And then he makes the case, he's like, hey, you know, Freud would say that our sexuality came out, you know, all of our sexual hangups and the unconscious and all this stuff is because we've got conscious big brains. And Diamond says that's exactly wrong. Actually, we got our big brains because of our sexuality. And then you're like, this is fascinating. So you think about what is the neurochemistry of sexuality, arousal, so lust, attraction, pair bonding, post-orgasmic states, all of these things. You're like, hey, evolution had to make damn sure we did it. So we know we've got really strong drivers.

When we do it, it creates a very, you know, neuroplastic, pair bonding, social cognition-enhancing saturated neurochemical state. Right. Specifically, dopamine, anandamide, endorphins, decreased brain waves into kind of more conscious or relaxed or meditative states. The French call that state after orgasm, La Petit Mort, like the Little Death. Like literally, it's a brainstem reset. We end up with closer social ties.

And I think I, and I shared this with you last time, but the MAPs, multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, their recent work on MDMA and trauma or PTSD studies, that the FDA has now approved as, breakthrough therapy. It's that profound and that effective. Rick Doblin, their founder, had shared with me, he's like, yeah, the closest thing we can find to that state that MDMA, a Schedule 1 tightly controlled substance, right, puts people into so they can then have healing, engaging therapy, is the post-orgasmic state. So the moment you see

all these things, you're like, okay, so lots of taboos, yes, we can move past that. What is unique or different about us, it's how often and how frequently and how consistently and for such a long period of time humans are willing and able to have sexuality, then you're like, oh, this is actually potentially one of our drivers to higher consciousness. So we have this fascinating thing. It's what moved us arguably from Homo erectus, just one more kind of dumb monkey to Homo sapiens, right, the ape who knows, the ape who thinks. And we're just one more kind of dumb monkey to Homo sapiens, right? The ape who things. And we have this paradox. On the one hand, we're instinctively drawn to it. Like, it's this powerful compulsion. Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, right? Literally,

like, love and lust driving to the, you know, the most epic war of the classical era. And on the other hand, you know, and it creates tons of trauma, infidelity, jealousy, pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions, affairs, abuse, you name it, right? Where we're sort of puppets on the strings of an indifferent and amoral evolution that just wants to mix up the gene pool. And at the very same time, it holds the keys to the kingdom. So keys to our cage, how do we unlock our suffering and obsession and all the dysfunctional relationships we have to sexuality?

And also keys to the kingdom, how does it actually deliver us to higher state? of consciousness, where as the maps research shows, we can actually use those states of safety, security, trust, calm, reflection to actually mend some of that trauma. And pointed in the other direction, back to the alchemist cookbook, how can we use it to shoot the moon and get to ecstatic peak experiences that can inspire us and provide us direction on the focus of our lives? And really for anybody who's listening to to zoom out in the context of what you just shared, this section of the book, once you get the baseline of sort of where we're at as a, as,

humanity and a meaning and all the things that we shared earlier, and you're going through these sections, you know, breathing, embodiment, music, sexuality, you know, the rest of them that are there, you are really looking at the combination of them that both speak to you or that you want to explore and putting them together in a way, right? this goes back to your hedonic engineering process, which you set up the book in, to find them at, you have a really beautiful chart in the book, which is like mild, medium, and spicy. Like you can find the intersection of these different tools in each of the category to meet you at where you want to begin to explore.

So let's take that topic of you setting up the framework around sexuality, which, as you mentioned, there's two parts inside the book. as one begins to explore that topic and they're entering into, let's call it, the mild area, what are some modalities that you came across and the people that you came across where now we can see, oh, sexuality actually could be a really powerful gateway into a higher consciousness. And here is a way for people to begin to start. Yeah. I mean, I think the simplest is to think of it as a sliding spectrum, right? And so at a baby step level, all of those practices together, the breathing, the embodiment,

the sexuality, the music, the substances, right? You can use those. And you can use them for healing, inspiration, and connection. And on the mild side of the curve, it can just be used to kind of, you know, a little bit like happy hour on Friday, right? I've had a shitty work week. I need to kind of blow off some steam, reset, you know, so I can have a fun weekend, right, get my yawas out.

So you can use those tools to kind of discharge micro PTSD, just the little bumps and scrapes and stresses, you know, that accumulate day to day week to week, right? In the middle, you can actually use them like, hey, I actually, I have some banged up, hung up wound. I've got scar tissue. There's a deeper something in there I know. I don't always have time to get in there, right? But I know it's in there. And boy, if somebody could help me fix it, that would be. be amazing, right? I wouldn't be carrying that rock in my pack. So you can also use it as concentrated,

more focused trauma work. And then, and it's not in a strict sequence, you know, you can kind of dip in at any, in any of these levels. But then on the far side, it's like, if you get all that working and you turn it up to 11, then you can use it for truly ecstatic, epiphantic peak experience, right, which would, you know, in traditional situations would have been couched in religious terminology in optimal psychology would be like Abraham Maslow, a peak experience or something like that. And you can have those experiences. So the first thing to note, and this is one more of the wires to snow, is that if you look around and you're like, well, wait, who does all that stuff together at once? Who combines all that stuff? You pretty much just see kind of shady hedonism.

you know, you see like the club seat in Miami or Ibiza or Tulum. You kind of think of like underground dungeons and, you know, San Francisco or London. You're sort of like, whoa, I'm not that kind of a bachelor party. It's like that, you know, the hangover, right? You're like, whoa, that's a little too much. And part of that is because we almost all come with a set of goggles as to how we view access to ecstatic technologies. And as we said, they almost always have civilizational taboos, right? I mean, back in the day, the old story of Moses, going up to Mount Sinai,

communes with God, comes back down with the Ten Commandments for 40 days and 40 nights. Meanwhile, right, the Hebrews are throwing a bender down at the bottom of the mountain. Right, they're worshipping the golden cough. They're fully in there. They've got their pagan on. It's like sex drugs, rock and roll. And Moses comes down and he's pissed. But he's like, here's the rules.

Do not deviate from these rules ever again. And we will make you the monotheistic chose. chosen tribe of Yahweh, the same with the Mormons in the 19th century. They were explicitly no rocking and rolling, no fornicating, no getting twisted on caffeine or booze or tobacco, right? And by the way, we got a bunch of ditches to dig in this desert to turn this place into a garden. So control of techniques of ecstasy is a time-honored prerequisite for civilizational

structure because these things are evolutionary. They're at the level of biology. and if we don't put a lid on them, everyone just runs wild. So as a result of that, we typically have one of three pairs of goggles. We're either, and this is not locked in stone, but try it on for size and see which one is most true for you, which is we're either a hedonist. We're like, yeah, bring it on, right? I want to suck the marrow out of life, the more the merrier.

Right? Like, Jaeger shots and blow for me, please. Or you're a purist, which is sort of like, my body is my temple, and I don't need those crutches. That's cheating or shortcuts or depraved. And it could be that I do yoga or I do meditation or I'm vegan or I pray and pray over scripture, whatever the category could be, but I'm a purist. Or you might be a conformist, which is sort of like, I don't know what to think about those things.

I look to legal, moral or religious authorities to tell me what to think about those things. And then quite often those folks might simply because they're legal have no problem with three shots of whiskey, or my kids are on Adderall, or my partners on Clonopin or Prozac, and I'm on the both control pill, or whatever it would be. And those are all fine, and I don't actually question them, even though they may have all kinds of profound impacts and be less health-giving. I mean, I've had probably half a dozen friends in the last five years, you know, all in their late 30s to mid-40s, get divorces, basically. And they've almost all had, and the pattern has been weirdly consistent. I don't know if this is, it can't be true for everybody, but it was for sure true in our life, which was that one partner had pre-existing trauma from something that actually came before the marriage. It wasn't the other person's fault. There was no infidelity.

There wasn't substance use. There were definitely not economic issues. These folks were flush and abundant, and they had kids. But one member of the couple had a lingering trauma, and then they sort of had projected it onto their partner and were dissatisfied with the way their middle years were going and just were ready to blow the whole thing up. And were resistant to things like MDMA couples therapy. Right.

And there's a book called Love Drugs, which was by an Oxford and a Yale. ethicist and they were basically saying hey it's actually unconscionable not to be considering pharmacological interventions to help tune the neurochemistry of love trust attachment because look at all the human wreckage right so that's that's kind of where a conformist might be like I would rather stick to my guns or a purest right I'd rather stick to my guns than then of then risk losing control or risk changing my parameters of my self-identity or moral code to explore more.

Now, the hedonist is the opposite. The hedonist, their problem is breaks. You know, the infidelity, addiction, their kind of thing is not enough. It's often too much. So each of them has a core value that is really worthwhile. The hedonist wants the full range of experience. The conformist wants to value the advice of experts and evidence, right? And the purest wants to honor the sanctity of mind and body.

So you're like, okay, great. you guys are each on to something, can we bring them all together? And can we create a fourth category, which would be that of the hedonic engineer? And that means, hey, can we learn to relate to these things ethically in an informed and grounded way with respect for everybody involved and a commitment not just for sensation seeking, but actually for growth and integration? So to get back to your mild mediums and spices, right, the first possible option is simply to And you and I were talking about this earlier, that famous Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez,

who did El Mariachi Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spy Kids, all sorts of big blockbuster movies. He said once at an Austin chili benefit. He's like, there's two things in life we're going to be doing for the rest of our lives, cooking and fucking. So we might as well get good at him. And you're like, okay, that's totally true. I mean, you think about how many people have $50,000 kitchens and use nothing fancier than their micro, wave and Uber eats, you know, and you're like, okay, yeah, we should probably actually bring

some of these things back online. So step one that's just game changing is consider the category of sexual fitness, right? For most of us, sexuality is erratic, sporadic, sometimes volatile, mostly dissatisfying. And it's either an exclamation point on the end of a really good day, like, hey, I just got a promotion or landed that sale or such or the, or the kids are happy, you know, let's have a romantic date night and get busy, you know, or as often as not, it's a power tool. It's a negotiation to withhold or dispense in order to get something else I want in life or the relationship. And that's a very, those two things are like very narrow little categories. If I only ever agreed to work out when it was 70 degrees in a perfect

blue sky day, because that was what was inspiring me to get outside and put up my running shoes, they would all be, you know, fat, lazy bastards, right? We actually engage in flossing our teeth, in, you know, strength and conditioning, aerobic outfits, you know, yoga, mindfulness. We do those things, you know, at least we try to day and day out, not because any given day is going to knock our socks off, right? But we believe we take it on faith and evidence, you know, that if I do this every day or if I do this on a regular basis,

I benefit from the accumulated impacts. So that's the notion of like, hey, can we even just articulate a category, sexual fitness? And can we understand that all of those evolutionary encoders, right, strongly, strongly indicate and reward us for active sexual arousal cycles? I mean, quite literally in the use it or lose it category, one of the surest signs to signal to ourselves that it's time to fix them to get ready to die and just wind this sucker down, you know, over the next decade or three is an absence of sexuality and sexual arousal, right? So you're like, okay, neat. Let's, how about if we commit, and you can obviously anything that we're talking about, 80% of it can be accomplished completely, happily and profoundly as a solo practitioner. So if you're not in a trusting relationship,

you don't need to be like, oh, you know, stick your fingers in your earmuffs, you know, and like, this isn't for me. It's for any human, right? Including asexual folks. I mean, I was even just reading an interesting article about LGBTQIA, intersex and asexual folks, and an asexual woman was actually saying, hey, it's not that, like, I might still self-pleasure. I just have zero interest in interacting with another human, right, relationally, romantically. I might actually love to be pair bonded. I can have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. It's just I don't feel any urge to do it that way. So you're like, okay, this is just our neurophysiology. And it just so happens that our sexual organs contain the tightest clustering of neurons of anywhere in our body. So if you're looking

to tune up your spinal column, your nervous system, your prefrontal cortex, if you're looking to stimulate your endocrine system and get things cycling in a healthy, vibrant way that discharges stress and reminds the rest of my body that, hey, you're alive. attention, you know, like keep going, right? This is a great way to do it. So one of the simplest things to do, and this is actually drawing from Dr. Nicole Prousey's work at the Kinsey Institute and then UCLA and now into her own independent research thing tank is the notion of, you know, orgasm and in this particular study, women's orgasm,

as a replacement for prescription pharmaceuticals and how just on a, simple daily basis if you just engage and this is kind of in the mild category like just something simple that you can do with a partner or solo which would just be 15 minutes of incredibly light clitoral stimulation for a woman um focusing on embodiment and breath not trying to kind of quote unquote get off not trying to climax or do anything just saying hey i'm actually just going to stimulate these neurons, connect this nervous system circuit from my brain to my spinal column to my erogenous zone, power it with deliberate respiratory patterns, and engage it as a stimulated meditation, a stimulated embodiment meditation. And in Prousie's works,

it's like this works for pain relief, physical pain, it can work for anxiety, it can work for depression. There's even studies that they are, it's actually having comparable effects to antidepressants and other things. And if you think about antidepressants, I mean, if someone is literally saying, I am depressed, like my system is lacking vitality and my system is slowing down. And one of the strongest and most well-known side effects of Prozac and other SSRIs is completely clips your libido. You lose all desire for sexual reality. You're like, but wait, that's a depressed person. You're taking away the core vital life force, taking that off the table.

Like, that's going in the wrong direction of getting them back in the game and feeling like they want to lean into life and existence. So that's a simple one. The next would be, you know, since we're in this category of sexual fitness, and this doesn't mean that life has to stop having romance or spontaneity or, or passion or any of the things that you either had it once upon a time or you still have it and don't want to screw it up. Keep going on all that. That's like saying, you know, because I take up a regular running practice, that doesn't mean I get to play my super fun pickup soccer games or basketball games on the weekend. Like, of course you do. And if anything, your daily running is going to leave you less, you know, less injury prone, greater stamina, more fun, more juice to bring to

your play. So the sexual fitness is just saying, hey, why don't you just kind of kitchen sink it? Like, and back to the hedonist, purest conformist, you know, never mind the conformist, because I think the conformist, like, consensus reality is kind of dull, not very imaginative. And there's a bunch of stuff that people take for granted that's actually bad or wrong. So let's not do that one. But you can almost be a purist, be a purist six days a week. and then a hedonist one day a week, right? So be super clear like green juices and smoothies and breathwork and yoga and pure water and, you know, sunshine and all the good things.

And then one day a week be like, hey, we're going to chuck this all in. We're going to stack this. And it basically, you know, is a fun sexual fitness protocol. And we did this. We did a three-month study with 10 couples to test this. is basically what the participants kind of came up with this name themselves. But this is sort of like a sexual yoga of becoming. And what it looked like was this kind of like mashup of like, you know, couples would go to their bedroom.

They create a nice space. Everything would be tidy and clean. They create some sort of nice aesthetic focal point, you know, with a sound system, candles, meaningful objects, whatever, a sort of, you know, postmodern altar of some sorts. It doesn't need to be woo and it shouldn't be cluttered. but just like a nice focal point. Like that's, that's the mothership. That's where the good stuff's coming from.

And then, you know, bring bodywork tools. Bring like a theragon, you know, like percussive, you know, bodywork device. Have music. Do breathwork. If you're going to use substances to shift state, right, this goes back to the love drugs notion. Excuse me. Consider, you know, using healthy pro-embodyment, pro-consciousness. compounds to supplement and expand your awareness in those states.

Now that's a whole kettle of fish and requires all sorts of ethical boundaries, consent, pharmacological understandings, legality, you name it. Like, don't do stupid shit is another one of our kind of road rules for downstream. But the idea is you're like, wow, this can sort of look like partner yoga meets massage, meets bodywork, meets horizontal dance party, meets occasional sexuality and eroticism. meets heart-to-heart conversation, meets reflection envisioning, meets breath work. And you can put all these things together and it doesn't have to be all day, every day, right? You can have little 15-minute daily practices.

You can set aside an hour or three on a Saturday or a Sunday as you're kind of, you know, again, you're kind of postmodern Sabbath that you can reclaim with a partner. And you can use this to actually kind of generate a flywheel of momentum. where instead of me being tired, wired, and stressed most of the time going through my life, we can use those periods. I mean, back to that French la petite mort, right, the little death. You can use those little deaths of totally arousing your nervous system and then discharging it. And again, that's breathwork, that's sexual orgasm, that's pain, that's music, that's all sorts of ways to do that.

And then you kind of, it's like your laptop, you know, after you've had a whole bunch of windows open and it gets a little glitchy and then suddenly your Zoom camera doesn't work and you don't know why. And all you have to do is like power it off, power it back and everything works again. And that's kind of what a sexual fitness practice can do is it can let us spend more of our life coming from a place of neutral home. And we are more at choice. We're not reactive. We're not stumbling from one thing to the next thing to the next thing. We're actually on our feet, in our hearts, you know, balanced, responsive. And just that alone can completely change how we experience life, you know, much, much for the better.

When you think about your question, again, we were chitch chatting a little bit beforehand, you know, this question that comes up and it's a theme inside the book, which is, when you start asking like really what's the point of all this stuff right like what's the point and you bring that to and really like what's the goal when you bring that to this category which can be challenging across all those different spectrums that you mentioned earlier a topic like sexuality where people have these beliefs this societal conditioning components when you start asking you know what what's the point you start to understand that you start to understand the beauty of all these different practices that can be brought in as a tuning of who we are as human beings, both in the physical realm, but also the conscious side. Like we have our body,

and our body is wired and baked, as you've shared. And then there's also this understanding of how can we use this as a vehicle to achieve flow-like states or a different realm, a different realm of experience or being that what's the point? Not to get lost in the spirituality of it necessarily. It could be very practical to heal, to let go of the past, to realize that we are not awake in certain areas of our lives and we need to have that difficult conversation with somebody or quit that job. It is a tool that people can do both solo and together to unwind so much.

many other aspects of life. And now the taboos start to go away or the skittishness starts to go away little by little because somebody said it's okay to now pursue these just the same way that you would pursue anything like eating healthy or meditation or something else that might be more societally acceptable to talk about. Oh my God, yes. I mean, right? I mean, the very notion that like we've actually now, you just, you know, with those researchers, Dr. Helen Fisher, who was also Akinzie Institute researcher. She's now the chief scientist at match.com. She's a friend and a colleague. She's been doing fascinating research with like millions of data sets out of match and has literally been coming to like the way we fall in love is kind of indexes to specific narrow

chemicals. Like some of us may be more testosterone billed. We're kind of like agentic. Some of us are more estrogen oriented. We're more sort of relational or oxytocin or seroton. And like there's these different ways and it not only shapes how we fall in love, but it kind of shapes a lot of different things. It shakes how we understand politics, is how we understand our careers, all these sort of things. It's like,

how are our personalities actually driven by the foundations of our sexual orientations and wiring? And then you're like, oh, wow, we can literally learn to make love. We understand, like, oh, high prolactin, vasopressin, oxytocin, early stages of lust is testosterone and, you know, estrogen and the various other sexual hormone.

here's pair bonding and you know and that serotonin this and that and the other and you're like wow we instead like most couples right most couples do the hot and heavy honeymoon phase they can't keep their hands off each other you know then they get married or they have a child or something happens and then and then suddenly like three years later i mean 50 percent of divorces are with children under three and you're like oh man that's brutal and why do people say that like we fell out of love we just lost that loving feeling you're like no that was just evolution's calendar it's cold as fuck like all that wanted us to do was fornicate, cregnate, gestate, lactate.

And then it's like, boom, hit the button, eject, go try again, kids. And that creates tons of grief or seven-year itches where people transition into just living together and we're just housemates and just the grind of life and the routine and kids soccer and cleaning the dishes and the laundry and fuck this. This does not seem fun anymore. I want out. So I'm going to go shag the secretary or the pool boy. You know, like these are the default gutter balls.

of our life. And the number of times that people, you know, like the classic is a young guy who's like, oh, I love this woman. She's absolutely amazing. But I'm terrified of settling down and losing all my options. And you're like, dude, like that is such an immature. And I don't mean that in a judgmental sense about the person. I just mean it's just underdeveloped as far as what our relationship can be. Because once we understand the narrow chemistry of this, you can hack it. So it's a, I'm I always think of it, it's like those electromagnetic coils. You know, like if you wrap, you know, copper around a metal pipe and you run electricity through it, then suddenly it becomes a magnet and it's incredibly strong.

And you're basically like, oh, left to our own devices by default, we depolarize. We demagnetized from those early phases of lust and attraction. Most of us just think that's destiny and we typically blame it on the other person. Right. You suck now. I don't like you. I fell out of love with you. You're no longer attractive to me.

But in reality, if we engage in sexual fitness, you can spin those electron magnets right back up again. And you can actually end up with even more powerful connection and attraction. So you can totally just hack evolution. And then, oh, by the way, you might have a friend that you trust deeply, someone you've invested in building life, family, businesses with. You've got all that compatibility. You've got all that relational connection.

You've got all that shared experience and water under the bridge. And now you get to reward each other where you're like, man, life is hard, isn't it? Like this thing is relentless. And no sooner are you raising kids than you're burying parents and you're losing friends. And you're like, what is this all for? And we actually have this incredible way to make each other feel better than we can ever feel almost in any other format. And we can, in a high trust, loving, considerate, compassionate way can connect each other's nervous systems, right, and become time-traveling space monkeys. Because what we haven't talked about, right, is the peak side.

And the peak experience of like what happens when you engage in prolonged sexual stimulation with deeply somatic engagement, profoundly driving music and potentially skillful augmenting of substances, right? that not drunken sloppy sex, right, but connected awake, aware, alert coupling and union, then you can take turns lobbing each other into the stratosphere of inspiration and information. And so you're like, wow, why would I go chasing a drunken hookup at a bar with who knows what baggage and no understanding of how to do this complex salsa dance we've been learning together. Why would I go chase that instead of this amazing vehicle for healing and inspiration that we have grown together? It's a powerful understanding, but it's a powerful understanding.

And with that, you can also see the context of, wow, okay, I get it. Folks who, I mean, there's so many different relationships, there's so many layers to it, There's so many reasons why people do things. But let's say in a classic example where a partner might, you know, start to wary out of the relationship, their own sense of dissatisfaction, all the stuff. You know, Esther Perel, you mentioned her. She has a great podcast, you know, that she did all in this topic. Where should we begin, you know, about infidelity and all the layers of it and where it started and stuff?

You see that the motivation, you know, having listened to that podcast for a lot of folks in that space is that ultimately they're looking to whether they're, they say it or not directly, they're looking for some sense of finding themselves for freedom, right? That's the vehicle that they're sort of in search for. So the place, if we take out any judgment on the situation for a second, there's a drive in, let's say, the classic example of, you know, seven-year itch, partners starting to, you know, strand from each other. And one person goes looking for that sort of emotional connection and really that freedom in somebody else. they're searching for freedom, but ultimately a freedom that in most instances has so many

consequences. And yet, if the couple could create that freedom within themselves, within those boundaries and not the needing of the church to create those boundaries or society to create those boundaries, just infinite. There's infinite potential, right? Yeah, truly infinite. And for any couples that have kind of like been like, hey, we'd like to spice up our life, our love life or we'd like to keep growing it or developing it and you kind of invariably end up looking at like neo-tantra books, you know, and most of them, at least for me, I mean, I'm just kind of a hardcore, skeptic, like, show me the money. Like this thing absolutely has to work. If this kind of is remotely like going to be a placebo effect, fuck it, I'm not going to bother. You know, and I remember

we like read one. I think it was Mago Anand, who was actually one of OSHA students. She was kind of one of the original founders of like the neo-tantra movement of which like Layla Martin and everybody in their mothers like in that space style kind of goop and jade eggs and this and that's right but but they they have so much gobbledy gook magical thinking mythological terminology appropriated stuff from other cultures and you're like really do we really have to do this you know this isn't sexy this feels super self-conscious corny weird whatever i mean i even read a buddy who's a PhD comparative religious scholar. And he was deep, deep, deep into Tibetan contract techniques.

And I was like, oh, those guys knew exactly what was going on. Like they were badass. And I spent all of Christmas break reading his dissertation. And I was looking for the instructions. Right? I was like, surely here's a contemporary Westerner, deep understanding of the linear tradition, he's going to translate this so we understand what they were doing.

And nope, nope, I read 150 pages of super dense academic terminology and you're like, this is all absolutely opaque. It's all wrapped up in complex esoteric terms, concepts, everything is illusion or mystery or infraud or you never really understood. So in studying the neuroscience, I was like, what are the paint by numbers protocols? Like if A, then B, then C, then Z and maybe polka dots. You know, like, let's do that. And then everybody can, you can skin it however you want, right? If you're part of an existing tradition, you're like, oh, okay, this is helping me better

understand my Sufism or my Christianity or my Hinduism or my atheism, whatever it would be, right? And or you can just take them as protocols and just have relational content. you know and to me that's much more empowering it feels like it just kind of fits our present moment these days because everybody's like give me just in time learning don't make me take four years four your degrees i want to go on con academy and learn the thing i need to learn right now right and so it kind of gives the the empowerment back to individuals you don't have to like sign up for 10 years and then swallow this super complicated fish story you know because you want access to the tools that somebody in a tradition or even in their own self-appointed expertise

is insisting all comes bundled and wrapped with it. So it's basically almost like cable unbundling, right? We get to stream the show that we want to watch tonight versus having to pay 100 bucks a month for a package with 67 channels we never watch. In sexuality part one in part two, you know, there's this culmination of a lot of these different components and you chatted about one of them, but that section, which is music, has its own area.

right? And music is so ubiquitous in our lives that we can often easily forget about sort of the real intent and purpose of music, which is music is about connection. And when we're talking about ethical cult building, which we hinted towards in the last conversation, and we talk about sort of repair and bringing people together, I feel like music is both, it's so ubiquitous, but it's easy to sort of look over because it's just all around this. And you open up the music section in the cookbook section of the book. You open it up by talking about Freddie Mercury and that story of the AIDS concert that he was playing at. I'd love you to just share that story here.

If anybody's seen the movie about Freddie Mercury's Life Queen, they're familiar with it. But there's something powerful. There's a powerful lesson inside that story that. that I think is worthwhile for people to hear. Yeah, I mean, that got voted. The most, it was live aid and it was a benefit for the Ethiopian famine. And it was, I think, in the early to mid-80s. And it was a total shit show.

And there was all kinds of technological problems in like Palma Cot. And he was trying to sing, let it be in his microphone conked out. And Zeppelin was their like super anticipated reunion after John Bonham, their drama had died. And Jimmy Page was just drunk. And he was out of tune. and he completely blew his solos. And it was just train wreck after train wreck after train wreck. And then Queen had been like this last minute edition.

Freddie Mercury had been on like a six-month bender in Germany. He'd just been diagnosed with AIDS. It was like wheels off for those guys too. And as everybody who's seen the movie or saw the original or has seen it on YouTube, you know, they just crushed it. And he came out. And one of the things that they did was a really high degree of interactivity. So they have a, it's not really, you can't really call it a song.

It's more like just a thing they do called ao and he would go, hey, oh, and then everyone would sing it back. And it was weird because he's a good singer and he has vocal range and he was nailing like not the most obvious notes. And the entire crowd in Wembley Stadium was like singing it back beautifully. And it reminded me if you've ever seen that Steven Spielberg movie, close encounters of the third kind, right? Dom, dumb, dumb, dumb, you know, like that, that's what the UFO keeps playing, that, that musical tone. And then there's that whole hillside in India of like orange robes and Yasin singing it.

Like bomb, bum, bum, bum, bum. And it was like that. Like Freddie Mercury had the entire audience doing that. And then they kicked into We Will Rock You, like, don't do. Don't shh. Don't. Right. And everybody's singing. And you know, you've got photos of people in pubs and bars. And it was literally 40% of the entire world's population was singing along to that song at the same time. 40% of the world at the same time. And it wouldn't have happened. If anybody's a queen fan, you might know that like the original We Will Rock You was like one and a half times faster and had none of the stomping and the clapping.

But they had been, so they'd been on tour with the song as they originally recorded it. And then there was this crowd, this super rowdy crowd in Birmingham. And they were just literally like, they were so stoked. They were just singing along to everything. And Brian May, the guitars went to bed that night. He's like, wait a second, this is a thing. Like something's happening here. We need to like step up and meet it.

And Brian May was actually a physicist at Imperial College. So he was this super smart mathematical quant guy as well as a whaling guitar god. And so he's like, well, what can we do every time for an audience, for a crowd that, you know, that everybody can pick up on. He's like, well, they can say something simple and they can stomp and they can clap. So the stomp, stomp, clap, stomp, clap, we will, we will rock you, right, became their thing. And they went to this abandoned church in the north of London. And they converted it into a recording studio because it had good acoustics and a super, you know, a super good vibe, whatever.

They were just doing their thing. And he then realized he's like, okay, so they just found a bunch of boards, loose construction. They started assembling them. We're like, let's stamp on them and see what kind of sound that gets. And then they separated them by prime number intervals so that there would be no echo. So that the entire thing just sounds like like really, really powerful and all at once. And so they re-recorded it. So that by the time everybody got to live aid, right, all the queen fans for the last

last three, four years, they've been listening to that version. And when it came time for 40% of the world to sing their part, they all knew how to do it. And the key insight there was like, you know, that was this radical innovation. It seems effortless. It seems easy. It seems super not, like normal as it happened. But like no other band had pulled that off, right? No one really has done it before or since. And it became the greatest rock concert of all time, according to some critics. And Daniel Levitin and a bunch of other musical ethnographers or anthropologists were like, hey, you know what, guys, that's actually the way music was always done.

In fact, one of these ethnologists was in an African community studying their musical folkways. And they're like, come on. You know, like, come along. Like, we're going to have a music, you know, we're having music tonight. Like, come along. And then he was kind of doing the classic white boys academic thing kind of stepping back. like, what are you doing, son? Like, get moving, get singing.

Like, you know, and he's like, what? Me? And he's like, yeah, all of us. Like, we said we were going to be making music tonight. And so the insight there was, we're the zoo animals. We're the weird ones. The idea that we pay a ticket to then file into a stadium or a concert hall or whatever and then take a seat and then up on a stage, literally up above us are these other people. And then they come in and make music.

and if we really, really like it, maybe we clap at the end, or if we lose our fucking minds, we stand up in front of our seats and shake our asses a little bit quietly. You know, that's never been done through all of history, that music was always participatory. And the boundaries between audience and performer were non-existent. And it was a way for us to move, to vocalize, to connect, to entrain ourselves together.

it. And so Levitin, this is your brain on music scholar, basically, you know, not very similar to this sexuality argument. He's like, hey, we often think that language and toolmaking were the keys to accelerate human consciousness and civilization, actually music even predates language. So it's not that we figured out syntax and linguistics and then we started writing poems and songs. He's like, We were actually doing call response. We were vocalizing. We were doing all these things to bond around fires, to stay awake through the night, to share and renew our sense of solidarity to prepare for hunts and wars.

Like music is an entrainer. And Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who some folks will be familiar with, like if you've heard of the Dunbar number, which is like 150 folks, is about the most you can kind of get together and keep coherent before you need to peel off and create additional groups. He did studies of the San Bushman and the Kalahari. And the San Bushman do periodic trance dances. They literally, you know, they'll be around the fire,

they'll do their drumming and they'll do it for an extended enough period that the rhythms, especially complex, funky-ass polyrhythms, will entrain your brain into a non-ordinary state of consciousness. So you will slip into trance, right? And that's true all around the world. The technical term is sonic driving. So using persistent, percussive beats to entrain folks and create a state shift. And what he found was something beautiful.

And this is super relevant for us these days, right? He's like, when times get tough, when things get stressful, when the tribe gets fractured, they had more, not less, transdances. They actually used them as medicine. So instead of like Nelson Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Like how do we get through the grief of apartheid? It's much more like a groove in reconciliation committee. Like let's get our yaya's out.

Like let's shake our bones together. And then if there's some super duper important conflicts for traumas, then yeah, we probably need to still have sit downs that might be needed to be mediated by the grandmothers or the chiefs, whatever. But for the rest of us who were just kind of fucking getting sick of each other and a little bit under each other's skin, like Twitter and like social media these days, let's just flush it and let's let the rhythm carry us away. When you think about all that work and those stories and those incredible researchers that you

came across in the context of the society that we live in today, how do you see that partaking? You know, you have like, let's say your typical sort of dance party or a DJ based, you know, party, which most often that is populated with either, you know, complete strangers, right? Like you don't know anybody in there. It's like a typical bar type of thing, except for the people that you go with. Or it could be in the context of a, you know, a wedding or some sort of ceremonial type of event. How could you see that taking place in terms of, just within your own imagination of in that category of, let's say, conflict or sort of divisiveness? What sorts of things could you see that people are budding at the heads, you know, trolls versus trolls on, on

Twitter or politics, how would you see that taking place? Yeah, I mean, I think the simplest is like batch forgiveness. Like, could we create fun rituals? I mean, you know, this was probably five, 10 years ago, but like flash mobs were a thing for a little while, right? Like, let's all get together and kind of like suddenly, you know, again, coordinated sound and music in a public sphere that was unusual and delightful, right? So as far as like culture jamming, like everybody's in a shopping mall, heads down in their business and then something amazing just happens out in. nowhere that really shouldn't right there's even you know there's certain anthropologists that would have made the case that like that's kind of one of the ways we got one up on willy mammoths and

saber tooth tigers is that you know we're a little scrawny little weak hellless apes but you put us together and we all move together and we make sounds together and we rattle our spears together and that other creature's like holy shit they got their they got their act together right so like coordination becomes empowerment and as far as like How might we do that? I mean, there are, you know, there are examples, right? I mean, if you can, you look at even things like Hillsong Church lately, right? I mean, they've gone down in flames and scandal, but the reason they blew up so big attracted Kanye and the Kardashians and Bieber and the crew is because they were basically, it looked like an EDM concert. They had big lights. They had super

amplified music, smoke machine, stage, high production. Tony Robbins does the same thing, right? It's a personal growth workshop, but it feels like a rock concert. And those things are all incredibly powerful tools of entrainment and state shifting. So then the question is, what are pro-social versions? Right. And you've got certain artists like a Michael Franti or others who are very much in that kind of like, I don't even know what you'd call it, like conscious, not folk, but like, you know, like their message is about humanity, about connecting with each other, those kinds of things.

One super fun example is the Church of Beyonce, right, in Grace Cathedral Church up in San Francisco. And it was these couple of African American women ministers that were at different seminaries in San Francisco. And they were like, well, wait, Beyonce's songs are these beautiful testaments to being a woman of color, a woman of faith, a woman of triumph and tribulation. What if we took over this old Catholic cathedral that barely has anybody good? going to it anymore. On Wednesday nights, let's do church of Beyonce. And then suddenly they had like 800 people pack the place. And instead of, you know, Christian liturgy in hymns, they just sang like, I'm a survivor.

They sang that they had a choir and they were belting it out. And then there was footage of it that went viral. And then suddenly it went all around the world. And then L.A. wanted one and Brooklyn wanted one. And Venice and London and all these other, you know, all these other communities around the world are like, yes. Yes. like we want that we need that and you just see it as this like the most beautiful kind of mashup

you know because bianzzi i mean while she identifies as african-american right and her father was african she grew up singing in a houston gospel church her mother's new orleans i mean her mother is like got like six or eight different ethnicities everything from kaysian to chinese to american indian like like all over so like just in the the person and the artist of bian right like she is representing you know almost as well as anybody you could ever hope the American experience right the American experience of like triumph and tribulation of testifying right of testifying of like I've been broken and I'm rising up singing and and those kind of redemption songs I to me like that's where I put my money you know and and that's the thing that

can potentially bring us together is to realize, like for folks that are, you know, really active in the social justice movement right now and are really just experiencing just pissed offness and rage, right, at the lopsidedness of the American experiment of who's, you know, winner take all, who's been getting cut into the experience versus who's been shut out of the experience, all of that. And there's a temptation to like just burn it all down to say this whole thing's bankrupt, just fuck it, and we're going to start again. And, my sincere hope is that we really honor our ancestors. You know, we honor all the people that came before us over the last 500 years.

Because like the gospel and spiritual tradition that carried the West African slave tradition, the jazz, blues, folk movements that became, you know, that have found their way into aspects of country and hip-hop and other places. Like that is a, that is a world tradition. and it combines all the hope and all the disappointment and all the tragedy and all the triumph, right, of this American experience. And there was an Iranian filmmaker, a really famous one, who was at the Lincoln Center in New York. And he was just debuting a film about this little rural village in northern Iran. And he had scored it with Western classical music.

And somebody in the audience was like, you know, excuse me, sir, like, you're making a, you know, a film about your home. land about a rom, why do you score it with classical music? He said, classical music doesn't just belong to the West. It belongs to the world now. And I think you can make the same, you can make the same case for this American song tradition of redemption songs. Like they're not just American. They're every single country, every single ethnicity, every single belief community that all bungled in here and slammed into each other, right, all trying and hoping for a better way. And like out of that came these incredible songs. So like if we're looking for like meaning 3.0 and we're like, well, wait, organized religions have collapsed and, you know, some people may say good riddance, you know,

that kind of thing. And like modern liberalism is kind of, you know, getting creaky and frayed at the seams. But, you know, we're terrified of somebody telling everyone else what to think. You're like, well, we've already got our scriptures. Right. We've got them in things like the church of Beyonce. We've got them in this American songbook. Like they're all around us. We just need to recognize them and dust them off and then celebrate them together. They're almost like a complete experience. They allow for everything to be felt through them in that. I mean, that's why you see the rise of, we've had so many psychiatrists on the podcast

before who talk about the power of how they've incorporated music therapy into their healing. That music has this way, especially in a group context, to be able to process the layers that go around with the frustration, the pain, the excitement, the hope and the change, but the love and the joy and the wisdom of the past. It's like it all gets encapsulated. And sometimes it's through words, but sometimes it's just through the larger lesson that it stands for in our life. And that's why I really enjoyed that chapter because, again, going back to my opening.

It was one of my favorites for sure. Yeah. It's just too easy to look at it. we all think that we have music ubiquitously, but I think that there's that community component in the experiential and the participation of it together where it's like, oh yeah, that's actually the real purpose behind it. It's the connection.

We have that to ourselves, but we've sort of missed it a little bit in the larger context of the group. So I appreciate you writing about that. Yeah. And just for folks that are kind of listening, just to really double tap the point, like there's bubble gum,

pop. I don't think it does it. What we're talking about here is a very specific genre. It's the redemption songs. And they almost all follow the same arc, which is it starts out as a catalog of woe. It starts out as a litany of here is how I have been living the tragic. I have been knocked on my ass and the jokes in country music or, you know, my dog left me. My trailer blew away. over and ditch me my truck broke down. I mean, that's kind of a comic book version, but it is that sense of like, first, let me tell you, right, how hard it's been. Right.

It's the recognition of the pain that exists. And going down into the mud of that suffering, right? And then, you know, to mix our metaphors, right, you know, like the lotus flower in Buddhism coming out of the swamp mud, then there's a groove, then there's a riff, then there's a beat, right and then and then it starts swelling into this crescendo and then and then whoever the artist is just fucking wailing with it and you're like oh my god like wait that's that same person that all those horrible things have happened to that's the same person who touched my wounds who touched my heart i might have been like snot-nosed and bawling through the first few verses and then there's this

wait you just pulled out of that mud this quick silver strain and here it comes and it's gaining strength and momentum. And now I cannot not stand up, shake my ass and raise my hands to the roof and sing along this anthem with you. Like you look at the, you know, it's what are the songs that you light your lighters for? What are the songs that these days folks are holding up their phones for that I wish they fucking wouldn't, right? Right.

Like those are the anthems. And those ones are as deeply religious in their impact, right? that it gives us a sense of now I understand my place in the scheme of things. Now my suffering has context. Now I no longer feel isolated and alone. I feel seen and connected. And then, you know, by the end, right? And then we're fucking sending it.

And we're actually getting to some place that is revelatory, someplace that I wouldn't trade for all the lumps and bumps and the woe. And that is what music can do. That is what redemption songs offer us. And it's just time to, you know, dust them off and turn them up and invite our friends. There's a non-denominational church here in Los Angeles run by a reverend. His name is Reverend Michael Beckwith. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, if you're familiar with him. And, you know, he came through the, you know, Christian tradition. And he's very famous sort of for quoting that. There's that quote. I forgot who said it originally, but he said, you know, man, sorry, God made man. in his own image and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since. So we tend to make God like a man. Like God is an angry, you know, person in the sky that's jealous and all these things. And it's not that way. We can reclaim this term of God for ourselves and apply it to our deeper

understanding of the world, the universe for whatever it meets you. But every Sunday they have a service. And I used to attend in person and then it kind of shifted into online. It's called Agape, Agape Spiritual Center. And anybody can watch it. They do live. streaming and the most beautiful part about that, sort of in like the, the, the, the, the, the sort of, uh, Harlem, church, tradition, deep history, gospel. They have these own versions of these, uh, some borrowed, some they've written them themselves, him and his former partner. And they have these beautiful redemption songs that you sing and you clap together. You can do it from home, live streaming. And, you.

You can't help but to feel a sense of grace and a sense of compassion and joy for yourself, for the world in the participation of it. So if anybody wants to check that out, that's one example that I feel is widely accessible in addition to this church of Beyonce that you were mentioning. Yeah. I mean, 100% right. And this shit is just not complicated, right?

We all breathe so we can become more aware of our breath. And we can use that to unwind stress. We can use that to increase vitality. we can use that to transcend regular consciousness. We all are sexual creatures. It's how every single last one of us got here. We just do it terribly. So we can make more use of that.

We're all opposable thumbs, 10 fingers and toes. We're in these bodies. We've got hearts and guts. And like we could learn to be connected to them and integrated in them. Music is the stuff of life. So play on. Right. Like these, this is, it's all surprisingly straightforward.

But, you know, and we tend to, and I think most of this is just consumer market driven society, that we sort of look right past what's staring us in the face. And then we geek about the next biohacking gadget or we geek about the next nutraceutical or pharmacological thing. Or we geek, we're just forever chasing shiny objects with price tags. and the part of the price tag is the promise that that one is going to fix everything. And rather than just like, hey, we have everything we need. We've just forgotten some things. And this isn't to say we need to go paleo, we need to go retro romantic and try and go back to

hunter, gather, a life or somebody. It's like, no, no, we are right where we are in time, space, and history. And there are many, many building blocks of healthy, vibrant cultures that we, We've just kind of lost lately. So back to neuroanthropology, now we know why what work did work. We can go back, we can dust them off. We don't have to fetishize them and romanticize them and pretend that we're a thousand years ago or something like that. We can just say, hey, this works.

Let's skin it for ourselves right now. And let's use new fresh versions that meet our needs and goals. And one other thing. So like we've talked about kind of like getting our groove back, right? Like what does it mean to to dance, sing, you know, breathe, make love, be embodied, et cetera. And how does that help us mend and heal? Remember that there's a point or a purpose. But there is the other side, right?

We've talked about that spectrum in the beginning. We said, hey, there's micro PTSD. You can kind of get out your kinks week to week. There's deep trauma work. But there is also epiphany, revelation. And one of the things that I was. most surprised by in the research for this book. And then also kind of like, holy shit, I can't believe I just wrote that is literally like nine steps for, you know, paint by numbers, death rebirth initiatory ritual, which, you know, which you're like, whoa, once you, once you, because I basically, we just tracked.

We're like, well, what, what are all the core under, what's the underpinning science and biology underneath death, rebirth ritual practices across human history. How has it all got done? Now, it's not to say every single one of these boxes gets checked in every single historical instance, but it is to say, if you do all nine of them, you are absolutely positively going to have one of the more profound experiences of your life, and it would live within the descriptive categories of death rebirth initiations. And so it's basically, you know, optimize your body and brain for high, nitric oxide, high dopamine, high endorphins, and high anandamine. Boost your endoc cannabinoid system inside your body, which is responsible for runners high,

which shows up after orgasm, which can be supplemented exogenously via cannabis products. It's just lucky that that five-leaf plant happens to key into our endocanabinoid system, but it's responsible for everything from organ health, the blood pressure to brain injury healing to the erasure of anxious memories, all sorts of healthy, vital things. Increase vagal nerve, tongue. Stimulate your brain stem at a point where you have brain stem reset, so that could either be via electricity, like neuroelectric stimulation.

It could be via molecules like nitrous oxide or ketamine or, 5MEO, DMT, there are plenty of ones that do it, but they basically entrain your brain down into super low delta waves, which is almost brain dead. It's one to four hertz. So it's like zero hertz, you're flatlined in your brain. So one to four hertz, typically we only ever experience when we're in deep, dreamless sleep. So to be awake and in a delta wave state is typically a profound out of body state. That's called Diceroth's work at Stanford, who's done that and realized once you understand that, you just need to get people to one to three, you know, one to four hertz. You don't even need like what mechanism you get in there. They started with ketamine

so they can measure it. Then they did electrical stimulation without the drug and got the same experience. And it boosts lack of depression. And, you know, and then load and charge your nervous system with energy. It could be DC electricity, see electricity. It could be ultrasound. It could be sound sound like a kickass function one sound system. It could be vibration like a therogun. It could be orgasm. It could be pain. Just nervous system stimulation. Pulse it through that system. Stack all those things together. And you're in the neck of the woods of full bore spiritual epiphany slash hack the cheat codes to the quantum browser. And the neat thing about that, you're, you know, so like, go see for yourself. Don't take

anybody's word for it. Like, that's the paint by numbers. Like, go see. And so, like, if we're talking about, like, what would meaning 3.0 look like, you could literally be like, hey, what would a postmodern church that doesn't have any belief system look like? It would be like, believe what you want to believe. Just never lose the faith. Right? So, like, you come out of that. You got your yayas out, you're defragged, you're inspired. Whatever you saw. saw is for, you know, your eyes only, right? No one's going to tell you some big old fish story with all sorts of thou shouts and thou shalt nots about it.

But we are going to say, hey, don't you feel just a little better like this? I remember. And today I begin again. And if we could have folks once a week have that experience together, like you said with Agapé, right? Like be like, okay, I'm standing tall. I've got my groove back. We've engaged in batch forgiveness. I'm here with my brothers and sisters.

I believe in myself and humanity and the point and the purpose. I remember what I've forgotten. And I'm going to go back out and give it my level best. And I will probably get my ass handed to me this week again. And that's okay because I know I'm coming back here seven days from now. Right. That's the best I think we can hope for is just tools and practices where we get to keep on, keeping on and we get to help each other and heal each other and soothe each other so that we can

take on the burdens right because if you spend too much time like if you're just in the mundane day today like the mundane will crush us it just will right camus said it he said the only serious question to ask is whether or not to commit suicide he wasn't wrong you know like you're you're you're like i'm a monkey i just got born i didn't ask to be born what the fuck and for whatever reason I have complex cognition that lets me understand past, present, future, and the eventuality of my eternal demise. That's Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize winning shit. Like, we are both, you know, we can glimpse God, and we also know we're going to blindly rot in the soil and disappear forever and be worm food. Like, that's the human condition.

So we have to have something more than just access to waking state consciousness mundane day to day. but if we spend too much time just gazing at the sacred, gazing at the sublime, it burns us, right? Everybody's got friends who have spent too much time in substance use or abuse or some wacky-ass cult or some conspiracy theory, right? You start trying to grok the burning bush and it'll burn out your retinence.

Right. And so the final leg of the stool is each other. So you've got, you know, catharsis, the need for healing to balance our pain. You've got ecstasus, the requirement for us to stand on the mountaintop from time to time and remember what it's all for and what we forgot. And then we've got communitas, right? Our loved ones, you know, our partners, our children, our parents, our community and the world.

And then like we filter how we're doing on those other two through the third leg, right, each other. And that triangle can become the flywheel of how we make it through this world. And once we trust those, because most of us are super imbalanced in our allocation, we're like long on my personal journey and my healing work, but we forget something bigger or inspirational or we're doing those two, but we're ignoring our relationships and responsibilities, or we're stuck down caring for a bunch of people and feeling nothing but the pain and we don't get our head above the clouds.

So like most of our triangles are out of whack. They're isosceles triangles or they're scalene triangles, but they're not equilateral. And if we can kind of true up the shape of our life so that it's stable and strong and balance between all three, then something beautiful happens where you're like, huh, I no longer am trying to avoid the suffering because I know I've got this car wash from my soul coming up. So I don't mind getting super muddy, super dirty. I'll experience it all. I'll experience the grief, the pain, the frustration, the overwhelm.

It's all good because I know, let's just, you know, we'll keep using Sunday as an example, but like I know every Sunday, man, we go to the car wash. I come out squeaky clean. And in fact, there's actually Dr. Bronner, if you've ever seen that super wacky, groovy soap, right, with the crazy long, long words. So David Brunner is the grandson of Dr. Brunner. And they have a Burning Man camp that is also, that also co-hosts Maps, the psychedelic research community.

So it's a really interesting camp, and they literally have the most rocking thing. They've in the middle of the desert where everybody's filthy and covered with mud and it's hot and it's sweaty and everybody's just festering for a week plus. They have this beautiful Dr. Bronner's Sudsy, Noah's Ark car wash.

So you come in in this big long line of folks, everybody ships down buck naked and you go in there and you're literally, like the whole thing is like this crazy foam bath and all the, like, camp are all in Noah's costumes of like these mythical animals and unicorns and deer and all this kind of stuff.

And then you get spat out squeaky clean as the day you were born into a soul funk day jam dance party with like Alex and Alison Gray like live painting visionary art and like Fort Knox five like spinning like fucking raise the roof dancing. So you have like 200, 300 people buck naked, squeaky clean after Dr. Bronner's phone bath. And you're like, and I remember, I mean, I was embarrassed.

I was awkward. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so, but you know, on the other hand, like, hell yes, definitely, definitely want to feel clean after this week. And then I'm just like looking around and thinking, all right, the simple fact that this is this, that a bunch of people on this earth got together and made and created this little thing is happening out of nothing. Like that alone restores my faith in what's possible, you know, restores my faith. in humanity that hell yes this is about suds and foam and baptism and day john and day parties and

up and community so let's just do more of that beautifully said jamie i feel like when i chat or i listen to you it uh it just feels like you're channeling this shit you know obviously you're so studious and your background and everything like that and just everything you read but uh it feels like the intersection of how you bring everything together feels like a receiving of a sermon, a channeling. So take that as a compliment, but that's just how it translates. And I feel like there's dots that are connected that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that I don't always get in other, you know, you know, you know, resources. It's a combination of a mystical slash, uh, yeah, anyways, I'll leave it at that. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's always a beautiful way that you put things together.

Hmm. Well, thank you. I mean, and actually, um, there's a fellow who's a, he actually worked with the Crips and the Bloods in LA. His name is Orlin Bishop. And he's a Guyanese kind of mystic slash badass. And he and I got to spend a few days together and he shared something with me. He's like, yeah, he said, here's the deal with logos. Because you talked about Agape, right? And that's that Greek term for sort of fraternal human love compared to eros,

you know, sort of erotic, romantic love, right? But there's also that additional concept of logos, right? The word made flesh, right? And he said that, you know, words can just be mouthy sounds. But when it comes down from source and out your mouth, it only becomes logos when it lands in someone else's hub and is recognized as true. And then it blossoms into logos. And so you're like, oh, fuck yeah. Let's do more of that.

Like let's, you know, and the rosters have a term for it. They call it word sound power. and you think, okay, so, you know, let me be an instrument of that piece, right? Like, how do we get out of the way? And how do we express that which is most good, true, and beautiful, two through and for each other? And then let's be steered by that. And, you know, the thing that, like, you know, this book is masquerading as narrative nonfiction, right? It's sort of like if, you know, Alastair Crowley hired Malcolm Gladwell.

as his ghostwriter, like that, maybe they'd write this book, right? But, but the, the actual truth is it was all reverse engineered, right? It was all coming from that space of that, that information layer accessed via that nine-step protocol over five years of voice memo going, holy shit, who'd have thunk it? And then, and then recording it, like, get a load of this before I forget, like dream, like, like, like, like, like, like, dream journaling in the morning before it slips away. and then going back and doing all the research of like, well, what the hell is this about? Where did this stuff come from? And why on earth does it appear to work so consistently and so well?

And my wife was like, I was like, I think this is actually what my next book has to be about. She's like, you're fucking crazy. Don't tell anyone. And I was like, but it would keep coming through, keep coming through. And I'm like, I think I think this is the thing. Like it became really recursive and like pointing at itself like, hey, hey, hey, you actually need to articulate this and write it. And it's really this sense that, and I don't mean, like I don't want this to, I hesitate

to say something that sounds hyperbolic, right? But on the other hand, right, this is kind of the cheat codes for the last 4,000 years of religious spiritual practice turned upside down. So in the past, you know, having a breakthrough state experience, where you had access to non-ordinary information and inspiration was super rare and random, right? So somebody had that experience. They'd come down hair on fire. They'd be like, guys, you'll never guess what.

And in fact, I'm going to start a new religion. Like, take my word for it. And everyone's like, okay, that's on. He's on fire. He's clearly glows in the dark. Like something happened to that motherfucker. Let's follow him. Right.

And even these days, right, you've got Instagram, yogis and shamans. You got all sorts of people fronting the claim. You know, most all of them are like half-baked. and they're grabbing it. They still have ego involved. They're doing it for money, power, success, fame, whatever. So it's a shit show out there. But the really good news, the thing that gives me deep hope,

and the whole point of this book is like, here's the open source tools. Like, here's the Lego blocks. Like build what you're inspired to build is that now we have the cheat codes for Epiphany. So we can, should and must let the mystery stay the mystery. don't presume to say anything about what those non-ordinary states are, how they operate, whether the universe is love, or whether it's light, or everything happens for a reason, or nothing happens for a reason. We don't fucking know, right?

So let's be really, really humble in the face of the vastness of consciousness and experience. And on the other hand, let's go, let's have everybody go see for themselves. because the information that we receive in that space seems to be, and I don't have any, this is kind of at the end of where my sidewalk ends. I don't know why, right? But it appears that the information that a given person receives in those non-ordinary states is often timely, highly personalized, and relevant. And more often than not, I don't know why, has some.

wicked-ass sense of humor. Some like cosmic trickster like joke prod you punk you like by the way this is really funny or this rhymes or that's a pun or whatever and you're like what now what and so that sense can be is that we all become responsible. There's no more middlemen. There's no pre-speaking in Latin and none of the peasants can translate the Bible. There's none of that. It's like go see for ourselves. experience what we forgot, remember it, cherish it, do our best to live from it. And that is a, that's a total inversion, you know, of how most, most of the transcendent realms of human consciousness and culture have been conducted till now. And it's super democratic and it's profoundly open source and really inclusive.

and it gives everybody permission to honor their traditions, their culture, their identities, their communities, and just says, skin it how you want, but cherish what's at the center, right? And then use it to stay awake and build stuff and help out. And that's it, especially the last part, and to help out. That's why we're here. That's a big part of that higher evolution is to take all the tools,

everything that we learn and then reinvesting back in the world to, you know, reduce suffering, to be there for people, whatever it might be, you know, not fleeing, not waiting for the apocalypse as we started off the conversation when talking about meaning, but leaning in and saying, no, I'm here. This is where we live. This is where we are. We're going to make it the best possible place we can. Yeah. Like here I take my stand. Right. And, and, and, and, you know, and with joy and my heart, and with creativity. Because, and again, I mean, this one's a provisional.

So this is, this is just seems to be often enough. It might be worth mentioning that, that there's a phrase called a scatosthesia. And it comes from the root term, the eschaton, which is the end of time. And a scatesthesia is when you have a non-ordinary state experience, a peak experience. And it seems to have some sense of glimpsing or awareness of the impending. Eschaton or end of time, right? And enough times it seems of interest to me. I can't say that this is statistically who knows what, but it does feel that when we get the chance to have a true death rebirth experience, right, like the Licinian mysteries in ancient Greece, like many shamanic

initiations in indigenous cultures, like even Goethe, the philosopher said, he who does not know the secret die and become remains forever a stranger on this earth. So for all humans throughout time and history that have had that experience of dying and becoming, one of the things, the ascathesia that people consistently glimpse is, oh, I saw the end of the movie. And it all works out. We win. Like love, goodness, truth, beauty prevails.

Light wins. Holy shit. This is better than Star Wars and Harry Potter. and the matrix combined. And then we come floating back from that space back into our bodies, you know, and we're like, holy shit. So I've seen the end of the movie and we win. I'm coming back and I get to live out these middle chapters.

But instead of white knuckling it, instead of stressing it, instead of, you know, like forcing the feel, we get to feel the force. We're like, hey, hey, hey, I know how this finishes. So we get to play our part loosely with joy, with creativity, with courage, with kindness. Because I'm not in that last mile syndrome of like protecting mine to make sure I get enough. You're like, I'm going to leave it all in the fucking field. I'm going to make art out of my life. And that to me, like that right there.

So like, this is the counterbalance to the existential risk situational assessment in the beginning, right, of our first conversation. That's why I don't have any qualms about leaning that hard into disabusing all the whistling past the graveyard bullshit, magical thinking that people just can't quite face the consequences. Like, we are in it. The hour is late and the stakes are high. But the end of the story is so bad to the bone epic. and we all have our parts to play. And that Martin Luther King,

like the atom bomb pulse of soul force, right, meeting physical force with soul force. Like when we remember our part to play and we do it with love and courage and creativity, that sets off this EMP around the world of humans doing the amazing together. That is, you know, I mean, it's so ridiculously quix.

hornball to say it this way, but that is the power of love. And it's John Lilly, you mentioned Lily earlier, right? He has that really good definition, which he's like, he's like cosmic love is ruthless and utterly indifferent. It does not care whether we like its lessons or not. So when we talk about the power of love, it's not like fluffy teddy bears and Valentine's chocolates. It's like, it's like, the covenant like lightning bolts. And it's radical. It's revolutionary. And it's potentially the our force multiplier.

Because if people are overwhelmed by the state of the world, you know, and all the graphs showing all the things going off a cliff, like this is our ace in the hole, right? This is the thing, the one thing and the only thing in everything that we actually have agency that we consent to taking a walk-on part in the war and showing up, right, on behalf of ourselves and everyone. Jamie, beautifully said, and I want to thank you for coming back for part two of this conversation with our audience.

Thank you. We really take them on the practical tools, but also this last 20 minutes of the podcast, which was an incredible gift about the context of all of it. wrapping it up all in this beautiful bow tie to help us understand the meaning, or at least our own interpretation of the meaning that we can create to go from, you know, being lost to refining it, remembering it.

And just appreciate your brother. Yeah, man. It's that old Ram Dass thing, but like with a riff, you know, at the end of the day, we are all just dancing each other home. Jamie,

me, the book is out there. We already gave the shout out on part one. For anybody that missed it, recapture the rapture.com, I believe, right? The website, we'll have the link in the show notes. That's there. I already told you the beginning part of this conversation. This book is definitely one of the most profound books that I've come across in the last couple of years. I'm going to buy a couple hundred copies. And I hope that my audience at least buys two, right? If you've loved any of the show and you've gotten value from it in the past over the last two years of doing this, go deeper, really read it. take the time to read it and enjoy it. You can find the link to get the book that's out there and also Jamie's social media.

And Jamie, any final words that you want to send our audience to? I mean, it's the ones we end the book with. You know, stay awake, build stuff, help out. Beautiful. Jamie, thank you again for being so generous with your time and coming back on the podcast. I appreciate you. Awesome to be here, man. Thanks, Jerry.