Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Matt Gutman: My Rituals Primed Me for Panic

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

Matt Gutman (ABC News’s chief national correspondent, author of No Time to Panic) opens up about the panic attack he had while reporting on the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash, which led him to pursue every remedy under the sun to treat his panic disorder. He breaks down the difference between panic and anxiety attacks, their biological purpose, why they present so uniquely in each individual, and how they physically manifest for him. Matt explains the shame that comes with panic disorder, how his \"safety behaviors\" actually primed him for panic, and shares alarming statistics about panic disorders. He discusses the impact of losing his father at an early age, his family’s intergenerational trauma, his fears of imperfection and social rejection, and how his own trauma aids his journalistic career. Mayim opens up about her own personal experiences with panic attacks and she and Matt unpack all of the traditional and unconventional remedies he has explored, from traditional talk therapy to holotropic breathwork, reiki, and even toad venom. He discusses his immunity to ayahuasca, why crying needs a cultural rebrand, and how his recovery journey has made him a better father. Matt Gutman's new book, No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety And Conquered A Lifetime Of Panic Attacks: https://a.co/d/feAfPmW BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I said something that was inaccurate. It was during our coverage of Kobe Bryant's helicopter crash. And I mixed up to totally different sources of information during a panic attack because I did not, I was not in my right mind, essentially. My dad and Kobe were almost exactly the same age when they were killed in aircraft crashes. I was the same age as Gianna. And so there are a lot of similarities and parallels here happening. And there's this whole question of, you know, how many lanes of traffic?

How much can the human brain handle at once? So you're having a panic attack which kills your long-term memory, which is anything longer than 30 seconds. You're dealing with all the subterranean stuff, all the subconscious stuff that I've done so well burying, you know, for so many years, I'd covered it up and like just put it back. And then it just all kind of imploded. Like normally I was able to go and get through my panic attacks. on air without a problem, right?

I had had thousands and thousands of them without any mishaps. But this one may have just been too much for my brain banned. I had felt like I had hoped that panic was something that could be stubbed out like a cigarette. You know, like it's out. There's nothing, no smokes coming out of it. You don't see any embers.

The thing is dead. But it's not the case, right? like I am my genetic code. I am the product of my upbringing. I'm the product of epigenetics, you know, that we talked about earlier, and generational trauma. And that stuff doesn't really go away. And I'm going to be dealing with it for the rest of my life.

So I'm not fully healed. And I'm not cured of panic. It made me think about going to the beach and you dig a pit in the beach and you bail out the water and then eventually the water seeps back in. And the water's always going to see. feet back in, but if you're really good at bailing it out, you can keep that pit pretty clear. And so that's what it is, but it requires regular maintenance. Yep.

You know, one of the things that you, that one gets out of any sort of altered state, again, from breathwork to ayahuasca to whatever, is you get to keep those nuggets, right? The thing that you saw that was meaningful, you get to keep that. When I meditate and when when I do mindfulness, I'm able to be there and see those things that I saw, and I'm able to access them in a way that I'm not in my day-to-day. In ketamine, my avatar or me, whatever, was flying over this sort of Amazonian forest. And one of the things that you experience in psychedelics is what they call realer than real. It's like, you know, we have our 4K TV, but what you're seeing when you're in the psychedelic

or altered state is like 100K with smell of vision and everything thrown in. It's so real. And so I'm flying over this Amazon and I'm soaring. And it's like whenever you fly, it feels great. So I'm flying. And then I take this perch on this cliff and I'm surveying everything below and everything is quiet and as it should be. And then, you know, doing as I do, I do something that could be, you know,

catastrophic and self-destructive, which is I start to, I jump off the cliff and take a nose dive onto the, onto the forest floor. And I'm like, you know, going at terminal velocity towards the earth plummeting. And suddenly the earth rises up to meet me. And instead of me smashing my head in and dying in, you know, this crazy trustfall, the earth rose up to meet me. And when I came to when the ketamine started wearing off, this was actually my third journey on ketamine.

I was like, I got it. That's the message. And I've been trying to find the message. something that I could keep, something that could put in my back pocket that could give me strength when I needed it. It's Myambialy's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break.

Hi, I'm Myambiallic. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. Today we are going to break down panic attacks in a major way with the, the help of Matt Gutman, who wrote a book called No Time to Panic, How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks, which is available starting September 12th.

And this is the way you want to break down panic attacks, because this is a man who had a panic attack at a really important time in his career, like on camera reporting about the Kobe Bryant helicopter. crash. What happened during that panic attack ended up leading him to a sabbatical of sorts. And during that sabbatical, he has essentially decided to pursue every single treatment there is for panic attacks to find out what works. Jonathan, does that feel like an accurate assessment of how we're going to break down panic attacks today? That was a great introduction. I'm really succinct, catchy, punchy. I'm excited for the episode to find out.

I know what happens. Well, Matt Gutman, you may recognize because he is a pretty well-known newscaster. Like, you're going to see this guy's face and be like, oh, my gosh, that's who they're talking to. He's ABC News's chief national correspondent. He is a multi-award-winning reporter. He contributes regularly to World News Tonight, 2020, Good Morning America. You've probably seen him on Nightline. He is reported from 50 countries in his career. He lives in Los Angeles. He's also written The Boys in the Cave deep inside the Impossible Rescue in Thailand. He's literally been at some of the most famous news stories of the last 10, 15 years. He's a really, really cool guy. And this book is a vulnerable, brutally honest exploration into everything from ayahuasca to

to toeed venom, to shrooms, to holotropic breathing. A lot of body fluids discussed in this book. And it's really a pleasure to welcome to The Breakdown in person with me and with Jonathan virtually, Matt Gutman. Break it down. Thank you, Maya. The book, No Time to Panic, How I Curb My anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks. I highly recommend this book. not just because you tell a beautiful story. And as a journalist, you really do. You tell a beautiful story. But it really is a reference for kind of all of the things. I read, I think, every blessed word, possibly twice.

Because as a scientist, I really appreciated your scientific approach to all of these different modalities, but also as a person who has experienced panics and not anxiety attacks, but panic attacks to kind of the level that you describe, I really appreciated your articulation. And so I think I think that's a place to start. You know, I've been that annoying person on this podcast who has, you know, tried to explain to people many, many misunderstandings about wellness and mental health in particular. And a lot of times people say, I had a panic attack or I'm having a panic attack. And it's not about pulling rank, but from a clinical diagnostic perspective, I tried to communicate to the best of my ability, the difference between anxiety and panic

in terms of anxiety attacks versus panic attacks. So I really feel bad making you describe it, but I think that based on this book, you have enough experience under your belt that me asking you to describe it will not lead to a panic attack. I used to start having panic attacks when I spoke about panic attacks when I was in the real belly of my panic disorder. But I'm going to go ahead and trust that you're a big boy and you can handle it. Can you describe what an average panic attack for you felt like? First, I'm just sorry that you've had to experience that because it really is just not pleasant.

No. And it gets in your head. and if anybody's had panic disorder knows, you almost can't stop thinking about it. No, it's this cosmic background radiation thought that's always lurking in the back of your head. So, like, my heart goes out to anybody who's experienced this. Thank you.

One of the ways I like in it is to, you know, if an orgasm is the sum of all pleasure, a panic attack is the sum of all anxiety, right? An orgasm is this explosion of pleasure that you feel with every fiber of your being that makes you sometimes blurt out embarrassing or regrettable things. It makes you like jolt in weird ways with your hands

and scream out loud. So a panic attack is basically that, but all of it is internalized in your head. It is the maximal expression of anxiety. And it manifests in different ways for different people and it's unique as a fingerprint. But I mean, I'll give you mine and you can share yours later.

And yes, I've become pretty used to it. Like, this is like, I don't talk about it. A party is. Talk about exposure therapy. Because everybody's like, oh, yeah, I have panic attacks too. All right. So typically it starts with rapid heart. You still fill that.

Thumb, thump, thump. You kind of have a hard time breathing sometimes. So it feels like you're sipping air through one of those like stir-stick straws. I get serious tunnel vision. I get foggy brain. I begin to sweat uncontrollably, which is inconvenience.

sometimes when you're on air. It's like Albert Brooks and network, like the flop sweat. And trembling, shaking. I hold myself so erect that my back gets really stiff afterwards. And one of the things that your brain starts to do is it's thinking about, like, the immediate present. It is assessing threat. And so it's concerned only about the next 15 to 30 seconds, which is why long-term memory,

which is anything longer than 30 seconds gets thrown out the window. So you may know neuroscience, like the back of your hand. You know how the brain is made and constructed and everything in it. But even you, you'll forget it because you're in a panic and your brain doesn't have the bandwidth for that. It's just got to get you away from the line that's about to bite you. And I think also one of the components that typically distinguishes, and while panic attacks are, as you said, unique as a thing,

one of the things that distinguishes anxiety attacks from panic attacks is a looming dread of death or hospitalization. And a second thing that distinguishes anxiety attacks from panic attacks is that panic attacks or panic disorder is characterized by the fear that you will have more panic attacks, which can bring on panic attacks. Anxiety attacks typically do not have that perseveration. And I'm not saying that people with anxiety attacks, don't feel, oh my gosh, I'm going to have one again. But the notion of having panic attacks carries with it in this disorder a crippling fear that the next one's going to come, which sort of keeps you in a certain state of vigilance.

Can you talk about some of those kind of deeper feelings of like, is this a heart attack? You know, am I going to the hospital? Because I almost go to the hospital is sort of, that was my, my, my, Did you know what happened the first time it hit you? No. Yeah. When was that? I started having a panic attack.

I was a late teenager. I had no idea what was happening. I thought I was dying, is what it feels like. When did it happen? I was with other people, which seemed to be a trigger after that, because I thought that's what did it. Yeah, I lost time. I lost a certain amount of time and really thought that we needed to go to the hospital.

hospital. Yeah. It's pretty bad. Okay, but it's your turn to talk. No, I mean, I'm, this is like, I am now a collector of people's experiences of panic. And so many of them are so similar. Lots of people, 3.2 million a year typically check themselves into a hospital thinking that they're having a heart attack instead of a panic attack. That's an enormous statistic. Yeah, 8 million people typically check in, go to the ER thinking that they're suffering some sort of cardiac mass of distress that warrants going to the hospital and being checked out. 40% of them, according to a study that didn't come out early enough for this book, but just came out, 40% of people going to the hospital thinking they're having a heart attack or actually having a panic attack,

only one to two percent of those people are actually treated on site. Most of them are told that it's not a heart attack and released. And they feel stupid and ridiculous. And why did I come here? And then you talked about panic disorder. This only begets more panic disorder because then you go home, you're like, okay, it's not my heart, but maybe it's something else. Maybe I have an aneurism.

Or like, it's cancer. Are you thinking of something else that could be causing this horrific werewolf to descend on your body and molt and like transform you from the inside out? And you mentioned death. It is really one of the few mental disorders that so commonly induces that sense of death.

And it is physical, right? We know it starts in the brain, but it really does manifest in the body. And it is your brain telling you that unless you sort out whatever is going on right now, you are going to die. And so the sad part is that most of these people are treated to the hospital. They're told they're not having a heart attack, but they're not told what it is, that they are suffering from either anxiety, but as commonly a panic attack. So they go home to Stoosa Moore.

You mentioned what panic disorder is. right? According to Mike Telchoo is the head of the anxiety lab at the University of Texas Austin, he's told me, he's like, you don't have to have a panic attack in a decade. But if you have that persistent fear of having a panic attack,

the fear alone constitutes panic disorder. It gets you the diagnosis. You don't even need to have one. Right. So yeah, it's massively pervasive. And we talk about like, okay, lots of people say it had panic attacks. Well, what percentage of the population

in the United States really has. We don't know exactly. We do know that lots of people lie on these surveys, but they do, because especially panickers. Like, I was so ashamed of it that I lied to my, when I wrote about panic in my journal, I did it in shorthand that I could not decipher. I hid it from myself when I'm writing a journal entry about it.

Okay, so I want you to take us... That's demented. Well, I want you to take us back. You had a significant trauma. You had a significant loss. you lost your father when you were young and you, you know, you're very eloquent, you described very eloquently, you know, what it felt like to be this child receiving all this attention and kind of having to navigate, you know, all these things that children,

you know, I mean, most adults don't know how to navigate, you know, that kind of grief and that kind of immediacy. But can you talk a little bit about, you know, looking back now, when did it start? It started. So this is like the book and the work that I did on the book has sent me on this journey. Sorry, terrible cliche, but it is true over the past couple of years. And I keep thinking about it more and more.

And I was like a super high achieving kid, especially after my dad died. Like I was captain of the football team. I played, I wrestled. I was captain of lacrosse, school council president, APs, like massively obsessively. high achieving. And it all came crashing to a halt

my senior year. I completely imploded. But as school council president, I'd go up and have to speak in front of the school. And I didn't know what it was and even took me years to fully realize it,

but those were many panics. And then my first real, like, full blown, full blown, wetting my pants, not peeing, but sweating so profusely that I didn't know what happened. I was lacquered with sweat

because I was also wearing this really cool. It was my senior year. year, spring, I'd written this 200-page thesis on Turkish-Israeli relations. And I thought it was really smart. I spent a lot of time on it. And there was this final gathering for all the political science students in which we would present our thesis. And as my name was called to go stand and talk at the podium, I started having a full-on panic. And it was so powerful and so eviscerating. I don't even know how I got through it. I don't know how I stood. I felt like I was

falling through the floor. I felt like I had to white knuckle the podium just to not go through it. I, like, I literally don't remember anything except that everybody must have thought I was a complete idiot. And it felt like feral cats were clawing at my neck because I was wearing this, this turtleneck stupidly because I thought it was academic. Anyway, and so those were the first panic attacks. But that one in college was an obvious panic attack, but still 25 years ago, we knew about depression, right? Like people who were educated and went to elite colleges

and like I had every privilege possible. I knew about depression. I sort of thought I knew about anxiety, but not really, nobody really talked about it, but certainly nobody talked about panic. And it was another 12, 13 years until I actually understood that what I had gone through in college

in the spring of 2000 was a panic attack. My Ambialx breakdown is supported by, superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine, drink more water. There's no real data. There's no game plan. This has happened to me many, many times, especially on the perimenopause journey. That's why we're fascinated by what superpower is doing. They send a licensed professional to your home or you can visit a nearby lab. One simple blood draw with over 100 biomarkers. That's way more than you usually get. It unlocks a true understanding.

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Make sure to mention Miami-Biotics Breakdown to help support the show. You have this at your, you know, wearing your turtleneck. And you say it was years before you understood what was going on. What did you think happened to you in that moment? And, you know, did it create a vigilance of, oh, my gosh, like, I don't know what's going to happen again? or were you able to push it out of your mind and keep going? You know, it's a good question. And it shows how even the people who had done therapy,

and I'd been in therapy for almost a decade by then because my dad was killed in that plane crash when I was 12. And so I'd done a lot of therapy, and, you know, I thought I was pretty self-aware. I didn't really pay it much mind. I was like, oh, it's just nerves. That was an aberration. I didn't know, and I was too scared to find out, to be honest.

Did you stop wearing kind of life? Yes. I hadn't wore tartar. It was really they just came back like a couple years ago when people started wearing them again. And I did not wear a turtle. I also like, I went to school in northwestern Massachusetts in the winter of 99, 2000. And that was the last northern winter I ever did. So I spent the next, you know, basically eight years in the Middle East and then in Miami and then in LA. So I spent 25 years away from the cold. So I'm not really, so we'll move on from the turtlenex. But no, I mean, and also part of the people who are trauma survivors, and I've never actually used that phrase to describe myself,

but I went through some stuff and it was painful. Like, we're really good at lying to ourselves and covering our tracks, like a cat who just pooped in the litter. You know, like I'm really good at just, like, putting the sand over it, and then moving on, because moving on is my forte, right? Like, that's what I'm good at. Who taught you that? Covering up the cat litter.

Yeah, like, where do you? think you got that? I don't know. You know, and this is, this is the... How far back is the Holocaust, Matt? Exactly. Well, I mean, literally. I'm asking, yeah.

Like, do you have generational trauma in your family? So early, she's going to make me cry or have some sort of episode. I don't know. Okay. Some sort of episode I have that effect on men. So my grandfather was born in Hamburg, Germany. and he escaped in 1938 after siblings of his were beat up. His father was a relatively successful textile merchant,

and my grandfather's entire family was wiped out, cousins and all in Treblinka. So they were in the Warsaw ghetto and then sent to Treblinka, where they were gassed. My mother was born in 1949. and she was born to a family that had lost so much. And she is definitely, I love you, Mama, by the way. But she's definitely a victim of secondary trauma from the Holocaust. There's no doubt my sister and I are constantly talking about this now.

Again, we're really good at covering up the tracks. Yeah. But it comes out later. I'm asking because a lot of those coping mechanisms that we have, which can cover things, are often because we're being given other people's trauma. And, you know, these are all the things that families do to keep going, you know. And a lot of times, especially for children or for grandchildren, you know, there's things that we're not told to do.

It just becomes, like, we, you keep going or you achieve or, you know, you kind of hit that, you know, that next level of success. So, yeah. But not to hype the, the next. of this podcast, although, but the breakdown comes. And the breakdown had come in our family. There is a lot of mental illness. There is a lot of addiction in the second generation and the third generation.

And so, yeah, I mean, a lot. That's the interesting part of continuing to step and move forward and move forward is that the breakdown comes or it catches up with us and we're left with these series of conditions that we don't 100% know where they came from or why we're experiencing it. If you look at your track, you're like very successful and overachieving and having all of these amazing opportunities and then they're carrying around with you, this legacy that's showing up in ways that you're not, you know, you're like, I don't know what it is.

Let's just keep moving forward. And so that sometimes stops working. And we talk a lot on this podcast about family systems. Internal Family Systems, IFS. IFS or the work of Bert Hellinger where we're like, we've adopted these patterns not just from our direct relatives, but from their relatives and the relatives that have come before them. Well, and I think that does lead nicely into what I was going to ask next.

You know, you had a very public career and a very exciting, stressful, but exciting career. And, you know, you've gotten to be on the front lines of, some of the most prominent stories, you know, in our lifetime. And this is actually the part of your story that I find the most fascinating, you know, is how much you were constantly confronted with legitimate reasons to have anxiety, to be scared, like literally situations where your life was literally threatened and kind of comorbid with this. You know, you had this, this thing that, you know, you said yourself, like you didn't even name it as such, which I thought was fascinating. Can you talk about one of my favorite revelations you had was, and it's pretty

late in the book? I can't remember which doctor it was who basically told you that all of your, like, rituals that you thought you were doing to stave off a panic attack was actually just an elaborate way of priming your brain to have a panic attack. Yeah. Can you talk, first of all, I have lucky undies too. So I was like, oh, I totally do. I totally do. Anyway, we have. But can you talk about... Do you have multiple pairs, though? Of course. You know, there's many lucky things everywhere, all things.

Can you talk about some of the things that, you know, you did, even without kind of naming, like, I have panic disorder or these are panic attacks, the things you tried to do. Tell us, I want all the things. List us the things that you tried to do to keep it at bay. I just want to go back to Jonathan for one sec. I love that. But I, because I, we left this hanging. And what you led me to...

is that all the covering up of the trauma and the ability to move on, it's like journalism is the perfect thing for that. So what I'm doing is like drive-bys of other people's trauma, and I'm living life at the closest possible margin to where it's most exciting, which is that like razor-thin area between life and death. And that makes me feel good, and it makes me feel okay. It makes me feel like I'm doing something important, but I'm running away from my own stuff.

But I'm living in that margin where people are suffering. And I'm able to be vulnerable with them and bring it out of them because we speak that mutual language of loss and grief. But for years, I wasn't dealing with my own stuff. I was working with other people's stuff, which is one of the reasons I had so many panic attacks

because there was all this grief that was just subterranean and untouched, which is why, to segue back, I had all of these what are called safety behaviors. So Mike Teltry, the University of Austin areas again, name dropping, a good friend of mine. I went to go see him, and he's one of the, really the foremost practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy

in America today. And he's cited in like 12,000 articles about panic and anxiety. And I sit with him, and I started telling them about my, you know, pregame routines. You know, I do some mild stretching before, okay, actually, before I even get to the live shot, if I'm feeling anxious, this was years ago, but not that many years ago, I would, like, sneak a cigarette at the rental car. So none of my colleagues would see me because it was like, who smokes these days?

It's embarrassing, but it's a vestige of my old days reporting in the Middle East where everybody's smoked. And it's also a currency of communication in certain cultures. Yeah. But also there's something about the ritual that was pleasing to me or that comforted me. So I'd smoke a couple cigarettes, like behind the school gym, basically. And I would wear pairs of lucky underwear. There were times where, like, I was prescribed Xanax because I went through a pharmaceutical phase where I'm like, okay, let me help. Let me try to get through panic with pharma.

And I didn't want any producer that I worked with to know. so I'd like stealthily unzip a secret compartment in my backpack. Oh, I didn't bring it up. You spent a lot of energy trying to figure out how to secretly take your Xanax. Yeah. Open the pill box. Break it and have, take it like, oh, mask it in a cough and swallow it dry to take the Xanax. When normally they'd be like, oh, okay, just take the Xanax.

I did mild stretching. I would show up super late to the live shots. I wouldn't have to wait there in front of the camera while everybody would. was like looking at you. And all of the stuff was to avoid the social anxiety of not being perfect. Right? Because God forbid, I wasn't perfect. And so the basic tenet of cognitive behavioral therapy is that the stuff you fear isn't

that fearsome. It's not that scary. It's not really going to happen. Except I disprove that, right? Like Mike Telt spent years working with people that convinced them that flying in an airplane is actually far safer than almost anything else you're going to do. But my fear, you know, people have the fear of death when they have a panic attack. Other people fear loss of control.

And that's what I felt. So I would fear that I would just say something that was totally like, what if I'm like, you know, like start speaking in tongues in the middle of the live and like I completely lost control. And then it happened. I said something that was inaccurate. It was during our coverage of Kobe Bryant's helicopter crash. and I mixed up to totally different sources of information

during a panic attack because I did not, I was not in my right mind essentially. You know, like I couldn't separate the wheat from the chaff, which was my biggest fear. So like the biggest fear, the plane crash, it happened. Happened. And so like that's something that I've been working on as well. And that's also a way that I'm telling myself, okay, like it happened.

You dealt with it. And this is obviously a motif in the book, the whole airplane thing. And, you know, it was obviously in my head that my dad and Kobe were almost exactly the same age when they were killed in aircraft crashes. I was the same age as Gianna. And so there are a lot of similarities and parallels here happening. And there's this whole question of, you know, how many lanes of traffic? How much can the human brain handle at once? So you're having a panic attack which kills your long-term memory, which is anything longer than 30. seconds. You're dealing with all the subterranean stuff, all the subconscious stuff that I've done

so well burying, you know, for so many years, I'd covered it up and, like, just put it back. And then it just all kind of imploded. Like normally I was able to go and get through my panic attacks on air without a problem, right? I had had thousands and thousands of them without any mishaps. But this one may have just been too much for my brain to handle. This incident led to the exploration that this book then kind of takes us on with you. And what you essentially did, you know, when I was talking to my kids about your book, I mean, it's fascinating. As a journalist would, you did the research for each of these things.

And, you know, you mentioned kind of traditional, you know, pharmacological. treatments. You know, I was given Xanax. That was just the solution. You know, and back in, you know, the, gosh, early 90s, late 80s, early 90s, like, that was just it. It's just what they did. And, you know, another thing that is often given, and again, this is before our real understanding of some of the underlying issues that you get into later in the book, often people are given SSRIs. Like, an antidepressant will just, it'll help everything. It'll just raise all. It'll just raise all the neurotransmitters or let's just get your serotonin up and you won't feel so like er. You kind of, you went down the path of kind of like all the diagnoses until you got to sort

of the root diagnosis. And that you discovered, I'm just going to give an example of some of the things. So, you know, you talk about meditation and not just sort of like fluffy, like, you should meditate. Like you talk about the purpose specifically and breath work. involved in meditation. You do holotropic breathwork. That's one of the things you do. Iowaska, fascinating, which I'd like you to talk about in particular,

ayahuasca psilocybin, which is mushrooms, as it were, ketamine, ketamine therapy, and possibly the most fascinating toad venom. And in addition, you also had an experience with Reiki, which is a kind of energy and body work. So you basically, you tried it all over a course of,

how long would you say from the time that the incident happened with your work and you then took a step back from work, how long was that journey when you tried all of these kind of different modalities? About three years. And it still happened. Right. Right. Like this, it hasn't ended for me. Right. You know, I don't know if I have panic beat because I don't have my own stuff beat, right? Like, I'm still working on and I probably will be the rest of my life. So, like, I don't want anybody to think that I have the answers.

No, but I just wanted to give people an idea of how closely together. Oh, it was like a no-joke journey. Right. I didn't want people to think like, oh, he did ayahuasca one day and ketamine the next. Yeah. Over the course of a handful of years, you, you kind of committed to trying to get different answers and also different questions, I think, eventually came up. So you were going through your panic in the 80s and 90s? Yeah. Yes. Okay. So how did you feel? Not good. Not good, right? Like, you kind of wanted to do anything to avoid whatever that was. Like, you were willing to change stuff. Sure. So I had been talking about it for years with my wife. And after this reckoning with the Kobe,

catastrophe and horrific error that I made. I felt horrific about really, really guilty. I determined, like, I am going to leave this business. I cannot stand feeling that misery and the anticipatory anxiety and the fear of the fear and the fear of panic anymore. I got to figure this out or I'm leaving TV news. Maybe I can still do journalism, but I can't do this TV thing anymore. My wife was fully supportive.

You know, it obviously changed our life. style because print reporters don't get paid as much as TV reporters. So this was a thing. We talked about it. And so I committed to basically Matt Gutmanning my way out, right? Because I call myself a courageous coward. I will physically do almost any challenge. There was almost nothing that I physically will not try. I mean, really. But I'm such a coward when it comes to like fear of social rejection or judgment, I melt. Well, those are all the emotional places. And I think that's the beauty of this journey that you went on.

And I think that's a really, you're also, you're a very fit person, you know, and like, you talk about the importance also of exercise and you were kind of doing all those things. But I think the thread that I found the most touching was that in every one of these, you know, what people would call like alternative or like new age. which in many cases, it's just thousands of years of tradition that we're finally sort of incorporating. What you started getting, I mean, I just got emotional. What you started getting in touch with

was the actual feelings. And I think that it was in your holotropic breathwork session, and holotropic breathwork is pranayama breathing, is what many people might know it as if you're a fan of kind of understanding Eastern breathing. it's essentially a sort of regulated hyperventilation, which allows you to access parts of your consciousness that are not normally accessed with other kinds of breathing. And it's not just like, oh, you're hyperventilating and you start thinking crazy. It transports you to a different portal.

And this is one of the first times in the book where you started weeping. Can you talk about what you sort of remember from doing this breathwork and what that, what that awakening was? So one of the ways I'm a coward, right? Like I'm afraid to get to that deep emotional space. Because for a year, for 20, 32 years, I'm scared to go there because I'm afraid that I will get stuck in this well of grief. And I will not be able to claw my way out. Because that's how deep it feels. Yeah. And so like, it's terrifying.

So the only way that I can do it is by literally throwing myself in. And it requires the physical part of me that is, that I excel at to get into the emotional. So this type of breath work, a holotropic. But it's like a hybridized version, but whatever. You're breathing and you have a coach. You have a coach. My old friend from high school. I love that story.

Elaine Jaffe, who lives in L. You guys can go see him in Remedy. Yeah, no, you should go. He's really fun. We've been to Remedy. Oh, have you? We've been to the West Hollywood one. Yeah, yeah, that's where he does.

What? Yeah. Sorry. It's great. So I'm doing it with my friend Lane after the suspension. We sort of reconnected and, you know, I had some time on my hands now that I've suspended.

And he's like, just try it. I'm like, whatever. You know, I had no idea what to expect. I thought it was like some sort of meditation where I feel like fruffy and nice afterwards. But, you know, I do it hard. So he tells me to breathe and I breathe. So it's, you know, it's this cadence.

It's two in, one out. Really, you do it through the belly. And so after a few minutes, like, I'm looking around the room, kind of like peeking around. I'm like, is anybody's mouth as dry as mine? I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so dry. This is horrible. And I keep breathing.

I'm so lightheaded. And then I keep doing it. And I'm not quitting because Lane Jaffe says breathe and I'm breathing. So I'm going deeper and deeper. And it's many minutes. I mean, it's usually a 45 session. Yeah, it's a 45-minute session. Yeah.

So, like, you're deep into it. You lose track of time. Suddenly my hands, you feel numbness and tingling. Then my hands start to curl in, like, sort of, like you are in as a fetus, lobster claw. My toes are pointed. And then I go into an altered, like, I start laughing, but getting emotional. And then I go to, like, a far away altered state. And you're not on drug.

I'm 100% sober. It's like a Tuesday morning the first time. And I don't even notice his cadence anymore. And I'm in a different realm where I just start to release. And I'm going to get emotional because it was so emotional that first time. And every time, but really that first time. And I just started sobbing. But not like, it's more like, ah, ha, ha, ha.

Deep. Yeah. And like for minutes. And this Elaine comes. grounded me by just holding my feet and just pressing down on sort of my shin, my shins and legs just to let it, not to comfort me, but just to let me know that he's there. And then I'm not alone. And I just let it out, man.

And it was so, so utterly amazing. The fact that you can get to that place being completely sober just by changing the frequency at which you breathe, it was amazing. And it was so, such a relief, like a relief I hadn't had in so many years. The next thing I want you to talk about, and I'm going a little bit out of order because, you know, my sort of narrative is really linking together these kind of emotional moments. I'd like you to talk a bit about the Reiki session you had, which was another case that reminded me of the holotropic one in that you were like, what is this? Like, what am I doing? Why are you touching me? But what came from it was very, very deep. So talk a little bit about that session.

So I was in Peru and at an ayahuasca retreat. And they have all sorts of excursions, not that many, but a few excursions that you get to do and also some treatments. And one of them was Reiki. And I'd had some very painful ayahuasca experiences, like literally gut-wrenching. I'm, yeah, I'm basically immune. It's a thing. Well, we can actually talk about that now. So there are some people for whom the physiological things that ayahuasca does to your body

happen. And you love talking about body fluids. I really don't, but you had the physiological experience that usually precipitates a profound, deep, transcendental experience. But you are one of those people, and I'm sure there's genetic and interesting reasons that we could, you know, find out. You did not have a transcendental transformative experience, but you did some of the other treatments that they had to offer at this place. I mean, unless, unless, unless, you know, catastrophic diarrhea is a transformational experience. I mean, which there is science to prove that the purgative effect. Yeah, that there's some purging, but that's not what you paid for. I could have gotten that at home. Could have gotten a colonoscopy. That's true.

Okay, but so, so you had this, you had this sort of lack of ayahuasca experience, which you do describe beautifully both in its specificity and also like the, you said it was comical, how like everybody's like thinking like, oh, he's just not in touch. And you're like, no, I really am like, I'm just throwing up and having a bad time. There are two major components of ayahuasca. One is called DMT. And that's the stuff that makes you hallucinate and, you know, travel to other universes. And the other is Harmin, which is in one of the vines. And that's what gets you, that's a purgative. And you need to purge in order to feel the psychedelic part. And for some reason, it wasn't happening. And there appears to be a subset of the population, about 5% who are relatively immune to it.

And so at the end, I was taking five times the dose of other people who are literally talking to God, having intergalactic soul sex with their wives, you know, suffering the pain of all of humanity, communing with their parents who had died decades before. And you were just annoying everyone because you were so sick. And I'm just like, oh, oh, yeah. So yeah, so that was my experience. And they had one dose, I had five. And I'm like, what about me?

I'm still like on Terra Firma here and they're on Mars. So, yeah, that wasn't happening. So I felt defeated. And then I did Reiki and it was free, so why not? And I don't believe in it. Like, I am not someone who goes to energy healers. I don't believe in psychics, which I also did for this book too and didn't write about. I just don't.

I'm a skeptic. That is my job as a journalist. is to be skeptical of things that people tell me. So I go there and I'm thinking at the very least, I'm going to be with this woman, Gloria, she's going to be great and I'll have a little massage therapy and it'll be nice. So I go into her hut where she practices

and I lie down and I'm on my back and she takes my wrist and she starts with my hand. I'm like, ah, that's not bad. That's nice. And then a few seconds later, she starts like going down my wrist. I guess it's these tendons, like on the inside where you're like wrist watch buckle would be.

And suddenly I'm like, oh, what is you? I'm looking at my, I'm looking at my hand. I'm looking at what she's doing. I thought, I didn't know what was happening. I felt unbelievable stabbing pain. And I'm like, and I started weeping. This is a motif through the book as well. There's a lot of crying.

A lot of crying. It's a body fluid. If it's a body fluid, Matt's going to. to talk about it. So I'm like, well, I had no idea. It was the agony and emotion. And she's like, this is the part of your body that symbolizes your father. I'm like, okay, come on.

Enough with on the nose. And then she does more and does the other hand. And it's the mother, which is also agony. She flips me over. And I swear, it felt like she was stabbing my back with a fountain pen. And I really did think I was bleeding. And I'm hysterically crying, snobbing. is dripping through the face hole in the massage table onto the floor. I am like a complete mess.

And I don't know what's happening to me and I'm completely sober, right? I'm not on any drug or any medicine. And this woman is just touching me with her hands and making me undergo this cathartic experience I'd never thought possible. So finally it's over. The agony and the motion starts bubbling out even more. She has me sit up on the bed and she just holds me. It's like, Dolos bien, Madel, doleu, Sbian in like the most comforting way. And I still don't know if I believe in Reiki, but I believe in Gloria. I don't know. How do you describe that? Like, I have no, no basis for understanding what happened or how someone could do what they did just by manipulating parts of my body. I think it's fascinating what the body holds.

and how it comes up. I don't know that that person was doing anything profound. And I don't know that someone else who would have maybe touched a different part of your body in that moment may have gotten you to that same place. I don't know that it's in the wrist per se versus you were in a time and place where you are ready to process something and you happen to connect with her and she was able to hold the space for you to bring that up. and we're all carrying a multitude of memory and pain that we're not aware of.

And we both try to trap it and suppress it in ways. And then when it's ready to come out, we just need those opportunities. Beautifully said, I think. Yeah. The next. I mean, you did all the things. You did all the things. And I think it was you asked, I think it was Farah, your psilocybin coach.

You know, you asked her what works. And she said everything. And it's kind of like the Yiddish is like abyssal and abyssal, you know, like a little and a little makes a whole pot. I'd like you to talk about toad venom because it's another fluid that you wanted to talk about. And like, you know, you touch on it sort of like it's a real, it's a real important kind of teaser, you know, at the top. And then you sort of return to it. And the toad venom, you know, was another one of those experiences you had. that really it tapped into something so much deeper, you know,

than all of the sort of practical things that you had been doing to manage, you know, for like decades and decades. Can you talk a little bit about that Toad Venom experience? So, you know, the first Toad Venom experience in the book is not Toad Venom. Oh, that was the tree frog, giant tree frog. So I was at that point, towards the end of this. Confusing my frogs and toads. Multi-year journey.

Right. I was so into just causing myself pain that will make me cry and feel this, you know, deep grief come out. That's right. That's right. But I was trying like pretty much all this weird stuff because I like I kept wanting, instead of fearing the, the well of grief, I kept wanting to try to find ways to get back there. The, it's called Combo, the giant monkey frog. Right. Well, it didn't work so great.

It was. Right. It was pretty miserable. But the Sonoran. Desert Toad, which is people know as 5MEO DMT or sometimes just DMT. That's the one where they say you die. That's where you die. Yeah.

So you smoke it. And it's kind of like a syrupy smoke. And again, it was Gloria who was doing it. So she brought this beaker and she lights the butane underneath and there's the powder in the beaker. It lights it up. It turns in smoke. And it's literally from a toad. Yeah, they basically pop the toad's pimples.

There's another fluid. Yeah. But they dry it. So then it's a powder. And it's an extract that is presumably something that other people have used. You're not the first one. You mean in history? Yes, like historically.

We don't actually know if it's been used by ancient civilizations. Like I tried to do the research, and I think it's new-ish. God knows who decided to start milking the secretions of the Sonoran Desert Toad. But, you know, thank you. So you smoke the stuff, and it's, Gloria, and she said, you know, Tomalo, Toma, drink, drink. And I'm trying to, like, finish it. And then you basically, like...

You have to drink it fast, too, right? Yeah, because you pass out. Yeah. So she's, like, trying to get you to do it before you, like, go out and she woke me up to do it again. And, like, I basically had this death space, and, like, there was a brown, shimmery screen that went over my eyes. And then, like, I was gone.

I basically ceased to exist for an instant. But then I snapped back. And that's when I had this, I snapped into, I don't know what it was, just like, wailing and screaming that I felt no shame about for like 45 minutes. Wow. It was just like psychotic. Was there any cognition to it? Yes, it was, I have this stuff inside me, these screams, and they need to be expelled.

They need to be expectorated right now, and I'm not ashamed for the first time in my life. I'm not ashamed of letting this out. and it's not just like, it was fucking massive screams that needed to be purged from my system in the ugliest, nastiest way in which I'm sobbing on this poor French male ballerina who was my facilitator,

who's like tenting over me. I'm like thrashing on the floor because I'd fallen off the mat. And I'm just like totally out of control. And he's just holding me and comforting me and telling me it's okay. And I'm like, again, this's not. I just everywhere.

But the idea is there is no shame. And I felt no shame. And so I let it out, even though one of the guys next to me at some point is like, can I curse here? He's like, Matt, please shut the fuck up already. Because I'm just like, ah! It's funny, but it's also really sad that, you know, a 40-something-year-old man has whatever that is inside of them and needs to get it out. But I did. And then it was just, it was wonderful.

And then after every, I finished screaming a long time later, all the people who are in the room who were in the same therapy, getting that same 5MEO, DMT, we just piled on top of each other and this giant hug. And it was amazing. It was just like the most wonderful brotherhood. It was all men at the room. Yeah, I guess.

It was just wonderful, yeah. From the sort of blackout or, or unconscious space, you just transitioned immediately into screaming? Was there like... No, there was no middle ground. I literally...

Well, not that I know of. And we didn't record it. I later recorded some other stuff like with the cabin. But this, I was out and then I woke up on the floor screaming. Like birth.

I mean, you just described... Like a floppy octopus. I mean, he just described birth. Yes. I actually, I think I'm... Yes, it was being reborn into the world. Yes.

coming out screaming and I needed to be slapped in the ass. It was that kind of, no, but it was, yes, very much so. Or maybe you were hungry. Because I'm not a scientist, I get to make sweeping generalizations on this show that my shakes their head about. But what's fascinating is that the drug allowed you to not have the mental judgment or restriction about accessing whatever it was that needed to come out. And so my generalization is like thinking about all the people out there who have been conditioned

to shove it down to not express that we have such ego guards up constantly monitoring is what I'm about to say going to offend someone. And the fact that you're in that space and someone next to you is actually like, come on, shut up. And all that's going on for you is like, no, whatever's going on on the inside needs to come out and you're going to have the right to take up as much space, no matter what it means to anyone else. And you're just going to be cathartic in that moment and allow yourself to do whatever it is is so powerful. And it just makes me like really wonder the anxiety we feel, the sadness, the depression, all the stuff that we're labeling. it's how much of that is really a result of we never able to get into that raw, unfiltered space

enough as human beings to just like scream our faces off because we've all experienced some form of pain of anger, of injustice, of seeming injustice. Like you don't make it through childhood without looking at the adults around you and being like, I want to go do something that you're not letting me do and it can be small, but those things compound. And we've totally, most of us have lost touch. It's just these layers upon layers of stuff that we have. And we're almost all on this path of finding that safe space to let it out

and let our guard down enough to let us let it out. And you were talking about the modalities, my earlier. You know, I've done a lot of therapy. I'm back in it now after taking talk therapy. Talk therapy. You've done a lot of kinds of therapy here. Talk therapy, conventional talk therapy. I was away for many years.

Now there's something specific I wanted to work on. So I'm not a huge fan of talk therapy anymore. Right? There's like, one thing I'm working on. Why not? Say why. Well, I think Jonathan just hit the nail on the head. You can sit for years and talk stuff out, but you don't actually heal.

You know, there is something about the catharsis that actually helps us heal. And I need more of it. I just don't, I need to find the time to be able to do that stuff again. And these modalities aren't really working for people. It's very hard to fit that level of like emotional access into a little chunk of time on your lunch break. You know, we are proponents of therapy as a way to help process and to have an externalization. But also, you know, the way to get what you're talking about is through the body and through the somatic experience. And people have to be able to sort of explore lots of different avenues.

Well, yeah, and I'd like to, you know, chime in because we are very enthusiastic in encouraging people to, first of all, know what it is. And, you know, there's many, many ways that, you know, in particular trauma specialists talk about this. Like, you have to know what it is to know how to fix it. So I think I also want to say that, you know, most people do not have the resources to access many of these kinds, you know, if therapies and many are struggling. just to even be able to afford, you know, talk therapy. So I do just want to say that, you know, for many people, you know, what we talk about, you know, Freud identified, like people somehow feel different when they say it out loud. So I think for a lot of people, it's important to remember that talk therapy may be many people's first opportunity to even, like, know that, oh, I'm supposed to like even tell someone, like, what happened, what it feels like, what's going on. You know, we're still as sick as our secrets.

But I think that that leads to the next question I was going to ask you. and I know you don't have to be an expert on this, but I'm curious your personal opinion, like, do we all need this? Do you think in some way? Or do you think, because I know people might be like, well, his dad died. So like, that's his thing. Or like, you know, that person grew up with an alcoholic parent or this person was hit or, you know, but I wonder, like, is your sort of understanding, and especially, you know, you also, I mean, ketamine you talk about is sort of that that gateway, it's a kind of a synthetic version of things like psilocybin. You know, and ketamine in particular, had you open your heart, like in a sense to like both self-compassion, but compassion

for sort of like humanity's experience. I wonder, do you feel like this is something that we're all lacking? Or is it just for special cases? Just talking about psilocybin mushrooms for a sec. you know, it's one of the oldest medicines period that exists, right? It had been used for many hundreds of generations. And when people were sick in ancient cultures and modern ones too, that's what they would give them. You know, they didn't have the antidote to that specific illness. And so it was just doled out, you know, take this, work through your stuff and come back.

Transcendental deep experience. Right. for all sorts of maladies. And yeah, I think, like, that is an answer for a lot of people, but it's not super accessible. And, you know, I don't want to encourage anybody to do anything. It's decriminalized in a lot of places, including here in California and in Oregon, it's legal.

If you do it, you know, for therapeutic uses, you can buy it in pretty much any bodega in New York right now. But, you know, I wouldn't want to encourage anybody to do it illegally. But yeah, like, I think these medicines are ancient and many of them are extremely helpful. And we should as a society take greater advantage of them. I do agree with you. And I'm so glad that you put that in context about therapy. Like, yeah, I've had the great privilege of having years of therapy.

So I know the issues. I just couldn't treat them, right? I couldn't deal with them. I knew what they were. I knew what my trauma was. but I couldn't heal myself. And these things helped. I also want to go back to the whole self-conscious thing, for one thing.

Because one of the things that really helped me in the book is learning about evolutionary psychology. There is a reason we don't want to be the annoying guy who's flopping on the floor in the temple when other people are trying to have their wonderful trips and going to space, and he's screaming bloody murder and ruining everybody else's experience

because we are a species that evolved to cooperate. And we lived in groups, and the group was everything. If we did something that was taboo and were excommunicated from our group, we were out on the savannah, a lion would kill us, a rock would fall on us, we would starve to death. It was as bad as death and as scary as death, which is why we register social rejection physically in our brains. MRIs are shown we register it physically, and it is as scary as death. It's a violation of a social code. Right. Yeah.

And if you violate that social code and the violation is big enough, you're out, which means you're almost dead. Right. So, yeah, it puts the fear of God in us. So it does make sense, which is why we need places to be able to grieve in this way and scream and shout and do whatever we need to do. And I wanted to also, you know, and this is not me like being a mom about it. But, you know, one of the things that any good ketamine practitioner, any good psilocybin practitioner, likely any of these kind of things that you experimented with and used, you know, any good practitioner would say that the notion of doing street drugs as a way to heal, you know, deep psychological or traumatic wounds is not recommended as a clinically appropriate method. Meaning some people, you know, and there are many people with these incredible stories who, you know, do shrooms at different times of their life, and it can be very cathartic. And those are people for whom that can be contained. But generally speaking, as we talk about and, you know, when I talk to anyone who's like not from L.A., they're like, are you people nuts to talk about this? And it's like, no, it's actually a thing. But when we talk about this, you know, these environments that you placed yourself in were monitored. And I don't just mean like,

the dosage. I mean, you had someone who had experience, biosocial experience with understanding how to ground someone, how to hold space for them, how not to freak out themselves, because if you are in a situation and it's your dude, Pete, you know, it's like your buddy, if they get triggered by what you're doing, both people can actually do a certain amount of harm. And I'm not just saying, like, don't have a bad trip. You know, we're talking about this. for people who do have trauma, and especially like at the level that you're talking about, this is a, it's a delicate science that you really did approach in a way that is not only accessible to you because you're a journalist, but that's why we're seeing these things pop up more and more.

It is not just a trend. It's not just an LA thing. And of course there are going to be people who are trying to make money off it. Big Pharma has set a really good example for how to exploit, you know, medicines and how to take people. in a place of vulnerability and need and exploit that. But I think that's an important part of it is that you had to force yourself to engage in a community setting, even if it was with one other person, to kind of be able to shed some of that shame

so that you could even get to the deeper levels of emotion that you had been so afraid to face. Yes. You know, this is not fear and loathing in Las Vegas, right? You know, I'm not slaloming around Las Vegas in a convertible Chevy. I was like in a couch, on a couch the whole time. It was like eyeshades on, not allowed to move.

And yeah, you're like literally in a lot of these, you're doing a lot of these psychedelics with professional facilitators. And I did it with literally psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical psychologist, all sorts of people where there was medical assistants nearby. And I'm privileged again. Like not everybody can do that.

Yeah, you're not allowed. They keep you on the ground like on a couch or on the floor or on a mat. so you don't do stupid stuff. You know, one of the other really kind of, one of the parts of the book that I found personally the most kind of healing just for me as a reader, and I don't think this is only true of people

who have experienced panic. You know, I kept thinking like, oh, he's going to be like, here's what you should do. Here's the formula. Like, here's the thing. And I found it really comforting that you're super honest about the ups and downs that you kind of continued to experience, it really helped me to know what worked.

And what seemed to work for you was deeper, more, more emotion, like getting it out. But I really love that, you know, you basically have a different lens now on not only your life, but your panic. Can you talk a little bit about sort of like, yes, you're on an ongoing journey, but can you talk a bit about, like, have you had panic attacks? I mean, I read the book, so I know. But can you tell people a little bit about also how your expectations changed as you went on this journey? Yeah, I mean, I felt like I had hoped that panic was something that could be stubbed out like a cigarette.

No, like it's out. There's nothing, no smokes coming out of it. You don't see any embers. The thing is dead. But it's not the case, right? like I am my genetic code. I am the product of my upbringing. I'm the product of epigenetics, you know,

that we talked about earlier and generational trauma. And that stuff doesn't really go away. And I'm going to be dealing with it for the rest of my life. So I'm not fully healed. And I'm not cured of panic. I would say, you know, and Mike Teltramutte, one of the people I worked with so closely, said, you know, you went from severe panic disorder.

to mild panic disorder, which is not nothing, but, you know, it's a lot better than living with severe. And more than anything, I just sort of, and I have anxiety. Like, I had this, the few, so once we announced the publication of the book, which was in May, people and, like, producers would start coming up to me

and be like, you know, right in my face, oh, my God, I didn't know you had panic, it actually had panic, a text. You can have one right now. We're about to go on air. Are you going to have one right now? Is that going to be bad? Do I have to do anything?

Do you have to do anything? It was like, right in my face. Well, you chose to be vulnerable. I know. And so I'm like, oh my God, I'm being so scrutinized right now even more than before. This is terrifying. So it completely ratcheted up my anxiety. So for the past several months, I've been dealing with that, which I didn't anticipate.

And so now I'm starting to work with that again and being like, okay, if it happens, it happens. You're going to be okay. You always get through. Always get through. You're going to forgive yourself. This is, you've reached this truce with your brain. This is okay. You got this.

And if it happens, it happens. So, like, I'm trying to, like, still practice all of that and be more forgiving of myself and understand why it happens. And if it does happen, I'm going to be okay with it. But, yeah, maybe I should tell the producers to stop being like, it's going to happen now? How about now? No, but what I hear, you know, is also that, and I think this is sort of the point of hope, I think for people listening is that there is not an amount of infinite pain that any of us are experiencing.

What all of us have in some degree or another is a pit of shame, trauma, hurt, neglect, abuse, whatever it is. but there are ways to purge it in different modalities, right? So my guess, and this is completely like taking off my scientist hat, but from what you've said and from what I read in this book, which again, no time to panic, highly recommend it, what it sounds like is when you've shed enough layers of whatever it is, right, that is ailing you, that for you led to panic attacks, for other might lead to other things, right? When you've shed enough layers of it, the bar gets raised, meaning the place that you get

tipped into a panic attack is not the same place it was. So the example that we talk about is, you know, a glass of water. You know, if it's very, very full, one drop will make the whole thing tip over, right? But the more we can siphon some. out, right? And you siphon it out with therapy, with exercise, like, whatever it is, the one drop will not tip the whole thing over, right? So that's like what I hear is that it's not impossible for you to have a panic attack. Like you may have another panic attack, I may have another panic attack, but all these things that you did, and especially you took heavy doses of emotional, you know, culling. You went really, really deep, really intensely. And yeah, that's what those

medicines are for, and people have used them for thousands and thousands of years. But that's what I sort of saw. Like, it can't touch him the same way anymore, you know, because you cleaned a lot of it out. You know, I love that analogy of the pit. You know, and I like the glass of water, too, but it made me think about going to the beach and you dig a pit in the beach and you bail out the water and then eventually the water seeps back in. And the water's always going to seep back in. But if you're really good at bailing it out, You can keep that pit pretty clear. And so that's what it is, but it requires regular maintenance. And that's like the condition of life, right?

Like we require maintenance. There is no one single fix. And I know so many wellness books out there that offer the fix. I do not have the fix, ladies and gentlemen. I don't know what the answer is. I know that I'm constantly working on it. I'm sure we all are. But that work is the fix and the self-forgiveness.

Like you can't beat up on yourself too much. Matt, what do you want to do next? What modality, what exploration, haven't you tried that you're like, you want to do? Or you want to revisit that you've done. And you're like, oh, there's more there for you to explore. What I know, Jonathan, that I need to do is more maintenance. And it's been so busy that I haven't had time to bail the water out of that pit recently. And I need to.

And that's the thing, you know, if it's more breathwork, if it's more something else, I need to get back on it and give a little time to myself, which I have not been doing in the past few months. And I'm feeling it. How have you changed as a partner, a dad? What's changed about you? What an excellent question. You might have to ask the kids. I'm definitely more present.

Why? Just to circle back, I'm more mindful. It sounds cheesy. And everybody uses mindfulness as like this throwaway word. But I'm literally mindful. I think about it. And there's a lot of mindfulness in Judaism, by the way. But I think about like being with the kids and like spending the time with them and observing the passage of what we are doing.

I'm going to push you here. Why? Is it because you've tasted death? it because like life's too short? Like what is it? I have your answer if you don't, but I'll let you answer for me. Please. I want to hear your answer for me. The amount of bandwidth, and that's really the only description that we manage when we're holding on to all of that stuff, when I was describing sort of the need to let it out and the energy it takes to keep it in takes up bandwidth and that prevents presence.

And so as that clears, sort of the static in the system clears, the amount of presence we have increases and the amount of being able to observe the kids without that vigilance in the background, that script running constantly, that's like, I got to control something. And that control leads to us being twitchier and less focused and more like I need to do something.

And I'm speaking totally from my own experience here. That, as that frees up, as we have more outlets to let that out, you know, the result is more presence. I love that. I'm going to take that as my answer. I'm here to provide answers for all the guests. And, you know, one of the things that one gets out of any sort of altered state, again,

from breathwork to ayahuasca to whatever, is you get to keep those nuggets, right? The thing that you saw that was meaningful, you get to keep that. And I have this treasure trove of them. and I do a lot of sort of breathing, like when I tuck my son in, he's nine, so my daughter's 15, I don't tuck her in anymore. She goes to sleep like three hours after I do. But, you know, I will meditate and he will hear my breathing and he will fall asleep. And I will access those images, which gave me strength during those moments.

You mean from your journeys? Yeah. So like I'm able, when I meditate and when I do mindfulness, I'm able to be the, you know, there and see those things that I saw and I'm able to access them in a way that I'm not in my day to day. Tell us when. It's funny. So like when I do it with my son, I breathe extra heavily because I'm not a loud breather. So I want him to hear the breaths to like mimic the Medit's stomach. But anyway, so one of them is in ketamine. My avatar or me, whatever, was flying over this sort of Amazonian forest. And one of the things that you experience in psychedelics is what they call

realer than real. It's like, you know, we have our 4K TV, but what you're seeing when you're in the psychedelic or altered state is like 100K with smell of vision and everything thrown in. It's so real. And so I'm flying over this Amazon and I'm soaring. And it's like whenever you fly, it feels great. So I'm flying. And then I take this perch on this cliff and I'm surveying everything below and everything is quiet and as it should be. And then, you know, doing as I do, I do something that could be, you know, catastrophic and self-destructive, which is I start to, I jump off the cliff and then take a nose dive onto the, onto the far's floor. And I'm like, you know, going at terminal velocity towards the earth plummeting. And suddenly the earth rises up to meet me. And instead of me

smashing my head in and dying in, you know, this crazy trustfall, the earth rose up to meet me. And when I came to when the ketamine started wearing off, this was actually my third journey on ketamine. I was like, I got it. That's the message. And I'd been trying to find the message, something that I could keep, something that I could put in my back pocket that could give me strength when I needed it. And that was the image. It was so obvious that I told that the the psychiatrist who was there with me. I'm like, I got it. That's it.

And so that's something that I often go back to. So what was it? How do you sum that up? It's in the trust fall of life, I'm going to be caught. I don't have to worry that I'm going to have some sort of catastrophe again, that the plane is going to crash out of thin air for no reason on a bluebird day, that something cataclysmic is going to happen.

in the trust fall of life, I'm going to be caught and it's going to be okay. It also means that we're not immune from being human. We're still part of the human experience. Bad things are still going to happen. There will be tragedy. But that notion, and I mean, I took it to, you know, also, you know, this sort of, there's a lot of nature imagery when you talk about these transcendental experiences and the psychedelic experience, the notion also that the,

that the earth, which is a mother, there's a reason that she's referred to as a feminine aspect, that Mother Earth is there to rise to meet you, you know, and to support you. So that's, yeah, so that's also, you know, we're not superhuman, and that's the thing. A lot of these experiences you describe, you get to feel like this ubermensch, you know, you're like a Superman. But the human experience, like we are also still, you know,

heroic. Yeah. So you made me a little weepy just now. It's just going to be tough to get through podcasts, but I mean, maybe not everybody's as well read. She actually read the book, like I really read the book.

So I don't know if everybody else is going to be as prepared and be able to like really push my buttons this way. But there is something, yes, this is like the human condition. And one of the things that we do forget going back to the bodily fluids is that, you know, one of my favorite people, Dr. Ellen Vora, who writes about anxiety and is a holistic psychiatrist, talks about crying and weeping needing a cultural rebrand. Like we are so, what do doctors do? You go to a shrink and you start crying,

they hand you the tissue box. Yeah. You know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You begin apologizing. No, we need a rebrand. Try being female, Matt. You know. And so, and so we need a cultural rebrand of all of this being human stuff. Especially for men. And especially for men. And we forget about it. And it's free therapy.

And I also, I want to say, before we let you go, I want to say, you know, for many of us, you know, who have dabbled either in Fear and Lolling in Las Vegas or, you know, I was raised on Carlos Castaneda, you know, as some of like the formative reading that, you know, I was given as a teenager by my father of blessed memory. You know, to hear someone like you talk about this, it's really, powerful because I think many of us are used to like, are trippy friends talking about this, or, you know, they're used to like, the hippies. And I'm putting that in quotes for those of you who are listening and not watching, like, the hippies talking about it, or like those

new age people. But you are, you know, a, you know, you're wearing a collared shirt. Like, you've got really great hair and, like, nice skin. And like, like, you're like the guy that I would see at synagogue and be like, somebody got to marry that cutie, you know? Like, you're. And, you're No, but like to hear someone, you know, like you who is an upstanding member of society, because for many of us, we weren't allowed to listen to people talk like this because it was, it was too out there or they were going to end up druggies on the street, you know? Like what you're talking about, it's important that you're speaking about it from, you know, a researched, journalistic perspective, but also like you allowed yourself to crack open.

and you then put it in words for people to learn from and to really, I consider this book really like a reference point, you know. So we're very, very grateful for your time. And really, it is so, it is such a vulnerable thing for you to have experienced something so public, you know, that led to a shift in your career and your lifestyle. And for you to then continue that vulnerability, it's really, it's a testament to, you know, it's a testament to, that courage that you talked about. And I just really, I recommend it so highly. Matt Gutman, no time to panic. Thank you so much

for being here. It's really been a pleasure to talk to you. Jonathan. It's my and biolix breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break down and break it down.