Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 488: Jamie Wheal- Stealing Fire Co-Author on Optimizing Human Performance

Episode Date: April 10, 2017

In this episode Sal, Adam & Justin interview Jamie Wheal, Executive Director of Flow Genome Project (flowgenomeproject.com) and Co-Author of Stealing Fire (stealingfirebook.com) and dive into fascinating and controversial subjects including using psychedelics to induce flow states. Jamie is a leading expert on the neuro-physiology of human performance. His work ranges from Fortune 500 companies like Cisco, Google, and Nike, to the U.S. Naval War College and Red Bull. He combines a background in expeditionary leadership, wilderness medicine and surf rescue, with over a decade advising high-growth companies on strategy, execution and leadership. He speaks to diverse and high-performing communities such as Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), Summit Series, and MaiTai Global on the intersection of science and high performance. At the Flow Genome Project, he leads a team of the world’s top scientists, athletes and artists dedicated to mapping the genome of the peak-performance state known as Flow. Get our newest program, Kettlebells 4 Aesthetics (KB4A), which provides full expert workout programming to sculpt and shape your body using kettlebells. Only $7 at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Got a beard? Condition your beard with Big Top Beard Company’s natural oils and organic essential oil blends to make it not only feel great but smell amazing! Get Big Top Beard Company products at bigtopbeardcompany.com, code "mindpump" for 33% off. Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts!  Does Jaime think we are just scratching the surface regarding micro dosing with top athletes/performers? / Explain difference between micro dose and regular dose of psychedelics? (1:18) What does science say on micro dosing, museum dosing and massive dosing? Are there studies showing the differences? (2:40) Mob mentality discussion (13:56) What are the things that have stuck with him from his experiences at Burning Man? (17:50) What is the hedonic calendar? How did he come up with it? (20:31) o   How important that we have checks and balances? What is the newest science out regarding psychedelics?  (28:48) o   What experiences has he heard from people doing for first time? Did any ideas change since writing the book?  o   Any push back from community? Altered states of economy discussion (39:00) o   Antidepressants o   Porn Advanced learning discussion (47:56) o   Navy Seals / Float tanks o   A.I. o   What does he see in the next 25 years that people will trip off on? What is the difference between psychedelics? (1:00:15) o   LSD vs. Psilocybin mushrooms o   Nootropics tribe How did get connected with Steven Kotler? (1:11:30) o   How was it working with him? o   What was their drive to write about this topic? What are his hopes regarding psychedelics and their legal usage?  o   Athletes using them to increase performance? How does Jaime communicate this topic to kids? (1:23:02) What is next for Steven? (1:27:07) o   Pop-up locations o   Recapture the Rapture (next book)

Yes, we've been working on it for the last two years. It's finally complete. We've got our 30 days of coaching that we've put together. This right here, the idea behind this was to give you guys, this is the Ilnana, as you would say. That's right, every day we are dropping knowledge on you. So it's absolutely free.

You go to the website, mindpointmedia.com. You click on the pop up, you fill your name and email out. Every single day you'll get dropped an email of information where also we have all the episodes that we talked specifically about that topic, it timestamped, so you don't got to listen to any of the fluff, you don't got to listen to Justin's stupid jokes or Sal go rambling on topic topic topic topic. That's right. Just low to five million more times. Full of great information. It's absolutely free. Some of the topics we cover are the basics like fat, proteins, carbs, calories. We go into thermogenesis. We go into...

Got flora, microbiome. Uh, wellness. We go into meditation. We go into resistance training, flexibility, mobility. Like, it's a great resource. It's absolutely free. Check it out. MindP media.com. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind, pop, mind, pop with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. I was so excited to talk to this mofo because you know why when we got in, we had Stephen Kotler, Riza Superman, stealing fire, author, like about a month and a half, two months ago,

and I asked him about psychedelics. I wanted to get into microdosing because a lot of these guys... It's like the thing right now. It is, and they discuss it in the book, but he totally took a left turn on me, and then we got to meet and hang out with Tom Billiou, and Tom kind of give me this little head nod.

He says, yo bro, reach out to Jamie Wheel. He'll drop some knowledge on you. He's a co-author of Stealing Fire and we in this episode you're about to listen to, we get pretty deep with the whole psychedelic world. Yeah, disclaimer right here. If you're somebody who just like gets totally offended by that stuff, probably not the episode for you

Probably shouldn't be listening to my toes you that are actually intrigued By this subject which I'm completely fascinated and intrigued by it This is a phenomenal episode because you get to talk to a brilliant man a smart person that describes it absolutely You can find them on Facebook at Jamie wheel as J.A.M. I.E. W.H.E. A L or stealing fire them on Facebook at Jamie Wheel as J-A-M-I-E-W-H-E-A-L or Stealing Fire. You can also go to the FlowGenomeProject.com or StealingFirebook.com. So without any further ado, here we are tripping out with Jamie Wheel.

Woo! We had Stephen on here, what, maybe, what, six months ago, Doug? No, not that long ago. Was it less than that? Yeah, it's got like three months. Yeah, I tried I tried to get him to talk a little about Psychedelics and he just took a left on me real fast And I was telling Tom Bill you and he was in here. I was like man I was so I just finished Riza Superman. I was just starting stealing fire and I was so excited to kind of ask him about Microdosing and things like that. And he just avoided the question completely.

So I figured, okay, obviously I can't talk about this. And then I was talking to Tom about it. And he's like, oh, you have to talk to Jamie. Jamie will be more open to talk about that stuff. I'm like, okay, thank God. I was like, you wrote the fucking book, Ron, I can't talk about that shit with you. So now that you said that,

we're gonna talk about something else. Yeah. Yeah. Connastive, you know, let's do it. Do you think that we're like tapping into like this kind of, because you guys talk about it in stealing fire how these top performers are using some of these substances to improve their creativity and, you know, the way that they, you know, their productivity, do you think that we're kind of just scratching the surface

and that if you go deeper, it's even bigger part of that whole thing? Well, when you say an even bigger pot in what way, like what direction you think? Like when you get into the upper echelon of management and you're working that this is like, this is what they do, this is part of what they do.

Like it's going to become like a staple thing for all big companies, what you're saying? Yeah, yeah, Something like that. I mean, I don't know whether it will ever go overtly mainstream and kind of organizational psychology and optimization. In the sense that is obviously there's there's state sanctioned penalties in most places. That kind of thing. But as far as the ubiquity of it, and as far as how many different, I mean, Silicon Valley always becomes the poster child

for this stuff, but it's happening with like high frequency traders in New York, it's happening, London, Tokyo, Europe, it's happening in a lot of places, whether it just remains kind of the clandestine killer app, that's my sense, although, I mean, we really were legitimately surprised when teams of engineers would come up to us. I mean, what we described in the book, they would come up to us after we're giving talks on neuroscience and they'd be like, haps, we're all microdose.

And you know, and that's that major search names, search giants who shall not be named. And you're like, okay, so this is fascinating that you're getting a blend of what used to be like recreational hedonism. We do this on our spare time discreetly into this is actually a performance optimization tool. And I think microdosing is distinct from what Tim Ferris was talking about when we interviewed him of most of the billionaires in Silicon Valley, I know you psychedelics on a regular basis. That's a different thing. That's a deep dive blow out the pipes, what kind of super complex post-conventional insights can I gain about wicked problems?

I'm interested in solving it a global scale. That's a very different thing than biohacking optimization with microdosing. So can you explain that for our listeners, what the major difference between a regular dose of psychedelics versus this microdose. I had never heard of microdosing until like maybe three, four years ago before that, I just didn't even know what that was. So can you explain to our listeners the difference between a microdose and a regular dose of psychedelics?

Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, you can kind of roughly put it into three categories. You've got microdosing, which means it's a subperceptual threshold amount of a substance, meaning you take it and you don't notice anything is meaningfully different. So it would be like drinking a non-alcoholic beer. It would be kind of like that. There's still some or de-caf coffee. There's still a little bit of an action in that, but what's happening in the case of microdosing psychedelics is it all interacts with our serotonin system. So most people are microdosing with LSD or psilocybin. Those all

interact with our serotonin system, which is the same system thatosing with LSD or psilocybin. Those all interact with our serotonin system, which is the same system that prosack in any of the antidepressants interact where they just do it differently. So what we're doing is we're literally using sort of almost homeopathic doses, right? Just enough to activate our serotonin system in different ways that impacts brain function, mood, focus, and problem solving at a, again, subperceptual threshold level. I don't notice it other than maybe a little bit of brightness other than maybe I just find myself after the fact, having worked a little longer, produced a little more,

felt a little better. There's all very incremental and subtle. But James Fatiman, who's been leading most that microdosing research, it's well, it's consistently beyond placebo. It's not just a bunch of people doing it and thinking stuff might be better. So that's the low level microdosing research, it's well, it's consistently beyond placebo. It's not just a bunch of people doing it and thinking stuff might be better. So that's the low level microdosing.

The mid level is what you would kind of used to be called the museum dose or now it's kind of more like the iMacs dose. It's like, what would iMacs do then? What would meaningfully enhance an experience but you can still maintain more or less, you know, the kind of classic high school or college kid play.

And so that's functional augmentation of reality. And then you have the heroic dose. And that's what Terrence McKenna used to, you know, used to use to shoot five grams silent darkness. In fact, there's a human play. And those are blow out the pipes. You're getting into some very different terrain. And each of them conveys different benefits, has different risks, time requirements,

etc. And definitely who you'd want to travel and do it with. Well, let's talk about that for a second. First off, what does the science say about micro-dosing and the museum dose and these massive doses? Do we have studies on them that show what they do differently or what they do the same? Yeah, I mean, I think we would have to kind of cobble that together from the different research because it's only in the last five years or so that you kind of have the psychedelic renaissance

of more and more sanctioned research at top tier universities people doing really credible stuff. And as we talk about in stealing fire, I mean, the majority of that research all started out with trauma survivors and or terminal patients. It was like, it was the idea of like just doing these studies on regular folks looking to optimize or augment their life would have sort of been irresponsible. So for the most part, the majority of the research is either redoing and reconferring with better measurement tools

and you know new tech studies that were running the 50s and 60s. And just going, yep, there's still definitely there there. And then the next step has been dealing with people with problems. I'm facing terminal cancer or even smoking cessation or something along those lines. So can we come up with a problem in the quote unquote human marketplace? Can we test these things and validate?

I don't think there's too many people that are sort of doing comparative stack ranking of dosages in different efficacy, because that would just be straight up advocacy. Yeah, yeah. Right. And I think we're a couple of laps in funding and approval cycles and just general,

as much as anything else, academic acceptance of these things for people to do that kind of cross. Yeah, we have to be very careful, right? Because if you do any kind of a study or anything that says, hey, this is great, you can use this, then they frown upon that, you don't get funding. In the past, the only funding available was to study addictive properties and negative effects,

or at least before or after the drug war started. Because before that, there were some pretty interesting studies done on some of these substances, and then they shut them all down, and made it pretty much impossible to obtain these substances and study them and get funding for them. What has changed now?

Why are we seeing more, why are they opening the doors a little bit? Well, I mean, in no small pot, you have to give Rick Doblin and maps the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, a huge hat tip. They took it for 30 years through the wilderness of everything you're just describing. And with slow, steady, relentless, and disciplined advocacy, started just, you know, chinking down the wall, a crack, a break at a time.

And as they did that, and some of the early studies study coming back, the data really just started speaking for itself and the impact of MTAMA studies on trauma, the impact of creativity of even problem solving with psilocybin, and just the stuff works, and it works so much better. I mean, if you take, for example, to me, what's really interesting is not, quote, unquote,

psychedelicsics or what are cool drugs for people to try. It's that, oh, we are now getting new and additional insights into our neurochemical systems and the impact of neurochemistry, our internal neurochemistry, on our consciousness and our performance. And back in the 50s and early 60s, there was a simultaneous discovery of interactions of the serotonin receptor sites, psilocybin and lesthe. And it was like there's, you know, momentary little sort of renaissance in that study.

And then the active ingredient, you know, the agent, psilocybin and lesthe, becomes shut down, controlled substances, no researches you describe. And we're left with, hmm, there's the serotonin system. And 20 years later, we get this weak source version of ProZac and SSRIs, which become blockbuster drugs and spider the fact of how badly they suck. Right, and what we're getting now is- People don't realize that by the way, they do.

They do have a horrible efficacy rate. Oh yeah, and they were based on some incredibly small, poorly run studies in the mid 80s, and they just bit big farmers, they're just like, oh, this might fly. Let's try it. So the entire mechanism of interaction that selective serotonin reuptake and inhibition

is the best and singular solution to depression and anxiety. It's a crocker shit. It's just, they sold it and they've pushed it. So now we're coming back online in like neuropsychologist Molly Crockett, she was at UCLA, she's now at Oxford. She's, you know, she's doing comparative studies on the entire serotonin system.

And she's done some fascinating research both on an event like Burning Man, a kind of transformational festival. And she's like meditation, psyched Alex, and attending at these events. All in impact the serotonin system, they all create pro-social bonding and behavior and connections. And interestingly, she was just at Davos for World Economic Forum and was talking about the opposite also being true, because when you see folks for instance like really angry, mob rule, political rallies, those kind of things that we've been seeing more of around the world in the last couple of years, is also that chronic low-line

stress, especially, we're talking about how, what is it, the white middle class Americans are now, the number one, deceit and like deaths of despair, suicide, depression, especially, we're talking about how, what is it, the white middle class Americans are now the number one, and deceit and like deaths of despair, suicide, depression, addiction, that that's what's killing the white middle class and disproportionate numbers these days. And her research was suggesting that when people are constantly stressed, meaning they got a lot of norepinephrine and cortisol in their system, like, I don't have a job or I don't know what my future is or I'm unmoored in my story within the national narrative and the changes in the world kind of thing. That that chronic baseline stress is also depleting people's serotonin is leaving them to be more irritable, more combative, and more prone to needing these movements.

So when you think about the recent political movements and elections, you're like, oh, no, like the sort of liberal coastal, you know, folks in media could not understand what was so compelling and persuasive about a Trump rally. You're like, there's no policy, there's no decision, what's, what it was was communitus. People were being offered a chance to bond together, have their narratives validated in the fragmented world,

we're all stuck behind our flat screens and commuting to work and feel completely isolated from our neighbors. Like, there was a chance to say, here's your people, you belong, you have a right, you have dignity, you have power. Right? And that element of the conversation with which Molly Crockett has done a great job mapping is fundamentally like the hidden story behind this last year of populism around the world is that people want to connect and they want to bond. And Serotonin, ironically, is at the heart of an awful lot of this. It's interesting, you say that because it's almost like this double-edged sword. It is a very powerful

driver for humans to want to belong and connect. But we've seen throughout history how that can be for good or it can be done for bad. You've got group flow when people are, using the terminology that you guys use in your book, which both books are absolutely fascinating. But you've got group flow where you've got people working together for a common good. And then you seem to have this mob mentality or when a team loses a hockey game and people go out and write.

Do they have things in common? Yes, yes. So the simple thing is that, and it's also kind of what's potentially new and exciting about right now, but TBD, how it all plays out, right? Because in the past, if you went, like, let's just to wind back, because you go back to the French enlightenment, right? We really established then the role of the rational individual. So DeCott said, Kogi to Ego, so I think, therefore I am. Here is my, like, I define my rule, you know, Rousseau was talking about the Tabularasa, like, a man is a blank slate, right?

And we write upon it that, you know, the arc of our life, so that whole idea, like, I'm me and I can choose what to do and I use my brain and my thinking to, you know, with my five senses to establish reality and then go interact with it. And that was actually a pretty novel idea. And that was instead of all the sort of superstitious,

group think, tribal, magical thinking, you know, easily swayed sort of peasantry and tribalism of the past before it. When people go beyond that, beyond the rational individual, you can go one or two places. You can either descend into a rational mob, right? I lose myself in the collective. And that's following cults and gurus, that's all the kind of stuff that parents and teachers and law enforcement things are rightly

concerned about. Like, don't do it, right? Maintain your individuality. But then there's this other thing that can happen, and it's rare, but it's happening now more than maybe for the first time ever, which is not just a pre-rational collectivism. I lose myself in the mob, but a post-rational collectivism, meaning I connect with other people, but I still have my agency, I still have my sovereignty, I still have my choice. Right? And so you will see that in an experience like Burning Man, which is that people come together, but everybody is like owning their own experience.

And if anybody does try and hop up and hog the mic, they get laughed at. It's tone deaf. It's like, sit the fuck down. Oh, wow. Take a number. So take a number, son. Right, we're all here.

So they're all bonding because they're all unique. Versus bonding because they're all the same. Yeah, exactly. So rather than giving up my agency and my disownment and my free will to merge with the Borg, right? The Borg, right? It's we are still completely autonomous and we're choosing to play and blend together.

And there's actually really cool studies on flow research, which says that individual flow, let's say gives you kind of five points of juice or reward and parallel play, meaning we're doing shit together, like we're surfers out in a lineup together, or that kind of thing gives me like seven points, but interrelated flow, meaning we're playing jazz, or you know, literally like my, my high is dependent on your interaction and we're creating something together, but that's the off the charts. That's the full ten.

That's like the seal team you guys talk about, right? But they have to be able to do. Yeah, I mean, I always remember hearing, like, it wasn't Kelly's later, but with some of the, I think it was some of the Maui boys that were on the pro surf tour and they started their own band. And a couple of them dropped off the pro surf tour to go play music. And you're like, oh shit, those boys, like, they can get in barrel in the green room, that's as good as it gets, and they found something better.

And you feel sorry for their girlfriends, you know? Good for you. So yeah, so I always say interactive, collaborative is about as good as it gets, that's the next. Now Jim, you've been to quite a few Burning Man's. How many of you been to total? Mm, five, I think. Five of them?

What are some of the things that have stuck with you? I mean, obviously you probably get something great every time, but what were some major life changing things that have happened to you while you've been there? Hmm. I mean, I think the first time I went, the biggest, the biggest experience I had, it was sunrise on my first day there.

So like, we'd come in in the daytime and I was like, wait, seriously, this looks like just like a broke ass tailgate pod. It's like, that's what it sounds like. What is up with that? Like, I'm so under-along. It's like, it's a post-apocalyptic, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was because this were all the cars are in world that came so. And so that's all I saw. And then I went out with some friends the first night. And I just went to bed. I was like, OK, whatever. I'm checking this out, but I'm not deeply feeling it. And then they still raged all night and came back in at like 4am

to kind of re up and go back out. And they're like, and I kind of woke up. And I'm like, and they're like, you want to come? I'm like, yeah, sure, why the fuck not? So we popped our vitamins and I went on and on our bike ride and the sun was coming up and the man was there and like, we rode out to see like this robot hut as a camp that plays way the fuck in the back of beyond. And was riding along and I just had this complete, like, three-minute download of information

about my entire life, my entire relationship with my wife, my relationship with my kids, exactly where I had blocked them and prevented them from growing fully. And exactly what I needed to do when I went home. And I was lit up like a Roman candle. I survived, I subsisted on nothing, but coconut water, raw almonds, and avocados

for the rest of the rest of the time, barely slept. And at the end of that transmission was like, like, transmission over, like no more fun for you, so I'm for the rest of the week, go back and do your work. And that was just humbled, but that was game-changing and I'm still trying to live into the implications and obligations of that. Um, and then, sweet Jesus. I mean, yeah, it's like the raddish shit. Like most times,

like if you get into like hippie culture and new age culture people are like, oh, like I feel really one with the earth and you know, like, and I really embrace that tree and like I couldn't touch my past lives and I think I was in Kamalot or like maybe I was going to be a patria. Like never, never I was an anonymous peasant who died in early painful death again. It's always something awesome. Like but that's not what's going on in Burning Man. Like at Burning Man you're like holy shit we are building like this giant radio antenna to the back of the galaxy. People are like what fucking star tribe are you from? So yeah, let's needless to say, there is plenty of far out information and inspiration.

Now you in the book stealing fire, I believe you guys talk about the hedonic calendar. Am I saying that right? Yeah, yeah. Now is that something you guys came up with or? Yes. Okay, so explain that I was actually just talking to a buddy that's into all this stuff. And you know, we've got, we've now surrounded ourselves with quite a few brilliant

minds and the more we meet, the more common this topic is, right? Right. Yeah. And so the one thing I do notice, I feel like there's two sides, right? There's either the guy or girl who embraces it, utilizes it as a tool.

And then there's the other side who I find feel like they identify so much with it that it becomes almost like they're chasing it all the time You know and and you guys I you guys talk about the hedonic calendar So can you get into that a little bit? Well, how did you come up with that the importance of that? And is that why because you feel like if you continue to chase it so much it becomes your end-all be all is that the purpose of it? Well, I mean like in pursuing in pursuing, and just, you know, just kind of define terms a bit. So we talk about ecstasis in the book, which is like a big ass tent, which would just include

the literal definition, as an experience that takes you outside yourself, ecstasis, to stand beyond oneself. So that includes meditation and mystical states, smart tech, sexually prompted states, you know, EDM and Don states, and psychedelic states as well. So pharmacology, contemplation, smart tech, and flow states, so like, action and sports in those categories.

So for most people, their first question is kind of like hunting their white whale, like really? Is that kind of awesome, really available in my life? Nah, no way, you're one more snake whale salesman. It's like, no, no, no, go do it. Like go hunt your mother fucking white whale, right? And find it. And most people are actually somewhat surprised

that it's actually there, and it's actually that easy. And then becomes a question of where the hell's the brakes? Because if you get really good at hacking the most addictive neurochemistry in bodies, you can get really good. And then you won't want to do anything else. It's like Charlotte and Sex in the City, like when she finds the rabbit vibrator

and she's just like, come to the show. Oh, what a great analogy. You're like, let's just keep pressing that thing. The only thing I've seen in the body again and again, right? So the hedonic calendar is basically like, okay. So this, like back in the day, there was, you know, spiritual paths,

paths to waking up were sort of considered right hand or left hand, a right hand or orthodox paths. And that was filled with lowest common denominator, thou shouts and thou shalt nots. Because we had to basically base it on what? If Homer Simpson followed these instructions and had no judgment, no discipline, no will power, so we have to make the rules for Homer, right? And that's most conventional religions. And then there was always, in every single religious tradition, there's always a secret

crew running the left hand path, which say it's all good. Let's do it. Now, those paths, in fact, in the West interesting, it was like the idea that the left handpath is you there in record time. But the number of people that put in the ditch, it's just wreckage all the way. So the question is, okay, okay, so now we have access to all these techniques. These used to be totally locked down by gatekeepers and priests. Right, so we didn't, regular folks, did not have access to this information. Did not have access to these tools. Now we do, right? So the question is, is once you start going down this road,

we have no checks and balances on what to do with them. And so that's where the calendar income is in, because now what happens if, you know, let's say you and your woman decide, okay, we're going to practice this, we're going to engage in sexuality, psychedelics, breath work, music, dance, you know, body movement, all the stuff that you guys do. Right? Absolutely a good time. Oh, that's one of those. Let's do all of it, I can add one. Yeah, that sounds like hell on the way out there.

I call that Wednesday. Yeah, it's just spoiler-like, looking awesome, right? And so then, and then what will happen, most people, just as you're starting to create those experiences where you're starting to just burn through anything that is not pure. Like you've turned up the heat and the crucible, it's on. Most people, when they experience the twinges of addiction, or they experience like dark

elements of their personality or relationship coming up, will get spooked. And they'll be like, ah shit, let's back off. And they'll trigger all the unprocessed, unexamined guilt, shame, fear. And people will back away from the very practice that was actually about to give them a level up. So now people will say, oh well, I can't get high or we can't fuck or we can't do this or we can't do that as often or as much or maybe not at all. So then what you've done,

even though you're playing with left-hand practices, you've actually just created another right-hand puck. You got thou shouts and thou shouts knots. So suddenly you actually aborted the project right when it was gonna get to a place that was gonna burn through to the next level. So the question is, is now how do I play with these tools, knowing that 99% of the people who have gone down this road

have ended up dead or insane or destitute, right? And do it anyway with those impossible tugging motions that are going to pull me towards addiction, compulsion, and self-delusion. So that's where you set up your checks and balances. Now, how common would you say that is? I know you probably don't have the exact number, but for someone to go down that path like that, how important do you find it for people to have those checks and balances, or is it one of those things that a lot of people get involved in just like a runaway train they can't

stop? I mean, I think it's essential. So it's kind of like it's like high altitude mountaineering. You don't live long in the big mountains if you don't set an abide by your turnaround times. You know, like it doesn't matter how close we are to the summit. If we're not standing on top of it by 1 p.m., we turn around no matter what. And you set that shit up in advance. Ed Vistos, who's one of the heroes of Everest and everything else, he said,

you know, summiting is optional, coming down, coming home is mandatory. And general of American Alpine accidents and instances think 70% of fatalities occur on the descent. So it's like people can handle getting to the summit. That's the fun, easy part, eyes on the prize. Of course we want them to shut down. And then they jump the shark on the way down. Their vigilant centers are down, they're fatigued, they're whatever.

And the same true with this path, right? You have a lot of people that get into EDM and transformational festivals. You have people that get into going to Burning Man and do something else. People get into microdosing and biohacking, whatever these things are. And they set out thinking,

they are a master of their own course, so they don't need to set the parameters up in advance. But it's only once you stop and you wonder, am I lost or are we lost? Wait, where'd the trail go? And it's too fucking late. You know, so yeah, I would say it's non-negotiable. I think what I find fascinating about this movement now,

because it feels like that. It feels like it's a movement. It has a lot in common with what we saw in the 60s and 70s here in the US. But there's a lot of differences, too. The reason why I feel personally, my personal opinion is that this is going to get more accepted, and we're going to start seeing this be utilized in medical practices.

I do think that we will see things like Silo Siben and LSD be used with therapists. Today is because today the people using it are the ones that have power and money and influence, whereas before it was a counterculture. The ones that have power, money and influence were the ones that were saying, no, whereas today, now you see CEOs, you see intelligent people talking about these things, you see people are like you're saying, they're discussing, this is how you should probably do it, it's not just about getting lost in partying, it's also, there's intent on how you do this, I feel like that's going to bring it, bring it more to the forefront, make it more acceptable, at least I'm hoping.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and let's also know our history, which is before it went fruity, woolly counterculture, it was once again, intelligentsia educated elite. So when LSD was making the rounds in the late 50s, early 60s, it was psychiatrist, it was Kerry ground in Jack Nicholson, it was the intelligentsia of New York, LA, I mean, Roger and Madman, that scene where those guys are dozing in their Manhattan apartment.

That was quintessential, long before it became dirty hippies and forest. So the idea is if anything, we're coming, there's a return back to that, in the sense that this is now contextualized, and it's not just these incredibly powerful tools with no constraints, and a sense of nobody can tell me what to do, I'm free. What is some of the most, the newest science that's coming out with some of these,

these states of mind, of these substances? I saw recently, it was on Facebook, someone had posted a picture of a brain image of someone on LSD. So I don't know how accurate this is, but it showed that the whole brain was lit up, and more side, the brain can communicate with other with you know The left can communicate easier with the right and I don't know how accurate that was. What is some of the new stuff coming out showing? Yeah, I mean, and also you know obviously those static pictures of brains lighting up doing different things

You know get you know just defiably Pillaried by actual neuroscientist working. They're like okay This is gross simplifications, and this is just kind of... Neuro porn bloggers. No, no porn. So I use that hashtag. Yeah, yeah. That killed my computer. This is your brain on frapp.

Yeah. So, but I think the actual research that I'm guessing that that post was about was Robin Cahot Harris at Imperial College of London. And he did, he did, at function, like, real-time FMRI research with MDMA, psilocybin, and most recently LSD. And what he found with the LSD in particular was that you, I mean, a couple of things. One is, is that our sense of self. So when people talk about psychedelics or meditation or extreme endurance, athletic pursuits or whatever, it's creating an experience of ego death. Part of the reason is they're like, oh, your sense of self is not a singular switch or

location, it's actually kind of a network. And when you knock out a couple of the nodes in the network with a pharmacological primer, the whole system powers down. So it's almost like the X-wings in Staholors, you're not flying over the Death Stone, like shooting out a couple of the radar towers and the whole shield goes down. It's kind of like that.

So you can take down the shield of your ego. Great analogy. Right? And the other one is that, to the point about the brain scan you saw, which is, and it tends to prompt lateral connections with the neighbor's next door that don't normally talk to each other. So the neurotransmitter's start connecting. It's a little bit like sort of like, you know,

the old Italian tenements in Brooklyn or something like shouting out the window to, you know, like, down this two day, Louis, you know, like so, like Louis and Maria are now having a conversation they never would have before. And those far-flying connections are creating lateralization, UN-sized new ideas, new access to information, information and combinations of information. And what otherwise not be there. Interesting. Do you have a personal experience with any of these substances? Are you okay to talk about that?

I mean, you know, we can always just do the someone who isn't me. Yeah, right, right. My friend, I was going to say I was just going to start talking to you like that. My friend was wondering, so there's one time at Bandcamp. Yeah. Yeah, so what experiences do you hear from people when they do these things for the first time? Goodness gracious, for the first time.

I mean, I think as much as anything, I mean, all the old stories, the Huxley stuff, the doors of perception being cleansed. I mean, I think if nothing else, people have a, for some, maybe one of the first times in their life. They have a truly incontrovertible sense that the world is enchanted. There is actually more than this fucking

saran wrap plastic existence that I've been suffocating in. And so I think, if nothing else, man, that experience to understand, hey, the world, the world does have magic in it, that I can feel like I have a place in the broader experience. To me, that's a sort of birthright experience. We used to get it with adolescent puberty initiations for young men and women, whatever it would be, go out and suffer

in order to have some breakthrough or some true affirmation of what you're here to do. And we've lost a lot of that and lots of people made comments on that. So yeah, I mean, the psychedelic experience can serve in the right environments with the right time, right place, right people, right those who's right reasons,

can serve as a powerful affirmation of who we are and what we're here to do. I, what you just said in a nutshell is what I've heard so many people say. And one of the more common things out here is it's hard to explain, you have to experience it, which to someone sitting on the other end, it's like, why can't you explain those, those no words? Like, what do you mean there's no words?

It's almost impossible to understand. What does that tell us about, I guess, human consciousness? What does that tell us about the human experience? If, before somebody experiences one of these experiences, which can happen, and I want to be clear, you know, as you guys have explained, I mean, stealing fire can happen many different ways. It doesn't have to be pharmacological,

can be through, you know, fasting or chanting or years of meditation. But what does that tell us about this, I guess this realm that we're maybe stuck in, and if we experience something else, I mean, what's your opinion on that? I mean, I think any transformative experience, including like to something as simple as parenting

or burying one of your parents, right? You cannot describe to the person prior to the event what it's gonna look and feel like to them after the event. You just can't and that's the fundamental nature because you are going to be different. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a transformative experience. So some of them like Zora Neal Hurston,

who was like an early 20th century African-American poet and writer, she had a great phrase, she said you gotta go there to know there. All right, so that's just straight up. So the question is, is you can't describe to someone what it feels like to do a gainer of a 50-foot rock into the ocean. You know, while they're standing up front contemplating whether they should or they should or all the possible things that could go wrong, you just fucking do it.

Do the prerequisite diligence. Make sure you're not, make sure there's a deep enough water and you can land as not rocks you can't see. Great. Now, you just got to sack up and do it. Did you have any opinions that you changed as you wrote this book? Did you go in having any preconceived notions and come out completely different? Or was it where you anticipated? I mean, writing the press, it was like trying to wrestle a python. I mean, it was like trying to like... I couldn't even imagine. That was something. We bled for that book for sure.

And as much as anything else, it was trying to get it through the gates of, you know, a publisher and editor who made, you know, living in New York, not being a part of the things we're writing about, and as I understand it, trying to steer us into, like, let's write the power of habit. That was a good best.

You're like, we're 18 months into this fucker. You're telling us to write a self-help book now? You know, we're like, tell us more stories about some of the celebrities and awesome people that are doing all this stuff and it's like, you have no idea how much we're stretching here. Do they really try and do that to you guys? Is that what happens? Like, whether it was bang your head and you had to go out of insanity on that front.

Talk about how hard that has to be for a writer. Yeah, what's that lie going through that? When you have this idea and then you're getting, trying to get pushed in a direction, what's that like? Well, I mean, even when we're even just lining up long lead press and media, you might want to be general and New York Times, Harvard Business Review, that kind of stuff. And in fact, I think it was an article for Entrepreneur.

And they said, well, look, this is, we're talking about creativity, we're talking about the role of hacking all the states to boost creativity. Here's all the examples, here's all the research. They're like, yeah, but can you make this a little bit more actionable for our readers? And you're saying, oh, I'm fucking kidding me.

So, you throw them down a little bit. You know, no, it's literally, so I just pulled something out of our flow training program, like our entry level flow training program, which people do on app, you know, on the app and they kind of have assignments. And I was like, here's what you do with your morning, you wake up, you drink a pint of water, you move, you don't go to your inbox, you defend your first 90 minutes, you knock out your fun.

And they're like, this is so amazing. I think we could get this in the New York Times. How to take control of your first hour of your day. And I wrote back to our editors, like, are you fucking kidding me? We have just written a book saying that the most earth-shattering... Shattered. ...revolution in human consciousness is happening with a clandestine global cabal of movers and shakers including Richard Branson, Larry Page, Sagerbran, Elon Musk, right?

And and seal team fucking sick. And you're going to tell me that the grand is not interesting enough this book. It's the one hour you start your, don't check your email first. I'm going to put a bullet in my own head. Shoot it in the case. Yeah. I don't know. That's ridiculous.

That's incredible. Did you have it? Any pushback from anybody in this clandestine, you know, cabal of people? You know, not yet. And not that we have had what we have. I mean, currently, it's literally. Was this like asked for permission

for people or whatever? It's sort of on everywhere in the communities that we write about right now. And I think that the biggest thing we've heard is, I can't believe that this movement that we all are actively a part of, but we just haven't slowed down or had the frameworks to name.

You guys have put into full context and to read about this shit as it's happening and as we're doing this, is game changing. You're just finding the whole process for them. Yeah, I mean, hopefully, by having a story that serves, I mean, we knew, I mean, my hope was always that this is for permissions. These are for the folks who are already hacking

consciousness and culture, and it's for the next group, and those folks already know who they are. And then there's the closeted ecstatics, the people who they've had yearnings for this, they've got different pots of their life where they seek this stuff, but they might feel guilty. They're not quite sure where they have the need to go to Vegas for a guys weekend when every year or two, and they all score an April

and get boobies left, like, out of Russian strippers. They don't know what they're doing, but they know it's essential to like maintaining their vital life for you. Even though they feel terrible about it, and it's not super conscious, you know, all that kind of stuff. Beckinson. Right. Why do I not sell them, like just give, you know, give away my guitar to goodwill?

Because like, I've got no woman, no cry and free bird. And I've had that since fucking college, you know, but like, like, it means something, my surfboard. Like, there's a lot of closeted ecstatics who know that those are the moments I felt most alive in my life, but now I feel like whether it's my wife or whether it's my boss or whatever who have moralized to me, that that's Peter Pan-Shit, you got to put away childish things, you got to grow up, you got to get real and say, nah man, there's something there. Oh, for sure, right? I cracked the snowboard out after reading the book. I was like, you know what, I haven't written in years.

And I was like, I have to go, I have to ride now. And it was literally the most awesome ride I've ever had in my life. Just after reading and taking that all in and then going like going in with that mindset of like just totally being mindful and presentable. Oh, yeah. Oh, that's awesome. I can't wait to do that.

I'm very, very cool. Well, what was interesting to me, and I can't remember the term used for it, but it was the economy of, and I can't remember it term used for it but it was the economy of and I can't remember it was it was like the art of states. Yeah, the Altar State's economy. Yeah. Can you talk about that first?

Because that blew me the fuck away. Thank you. Thank you. I'm like, that is such an atom bomb and Bailey, anybody brings it up. Well, so for me, as you guys were listing all the things that you had to account for which all made perfect sense, I didn't even think of half of them. Like, when I think of ultra-states economy, I think of the obvious ones, alcohol, cigarettes, coffee,

but there's so many other things that we do to take ourselves out, to alter our state, our consciousness a little bit. Talk about that for a second, how big that is. Yeah, sure. So I mean, this was kind of our due diligence on, we actually seeing something real here are we seeing a true social movement of historic proportions and if so what's the scale of it so we we started with you know okay let's take

illicit and illicit pharmaceuticals that's easy right and and that included obviously street drugs but it also included prozozole of included, and included any of the anti-anxiety stuff. One in four Americans are on psychiatric meds these days. Wow, it's 25%? 25% of us are taking something on a daily weekly basis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And these are mind-altering substances. These are mind-altering substances. People don't realize that. With powerful side effects. I mean, Ambien, the number of folks, especially like business executives,

that do the whole first class to Europe or Japan and China, do the flat bed, I'll pop an Ambien, I'll wake up the next day. Like, we've got some functional medicine physicians that oversee a lot of CEOs and that kind of stuff, and they're like, it can take three to six months after even just one business trip. Fucking up your circadian rhythms with Ambien,

and they can end up with psychosis, depression, like hard core things, and it takes up to half a year to recover from like one, two week trip where that's their hack. So yeah, so that was $2.2 trillion, just in illicit and gray market stuff. Then we were like, okay, well, what else are people doing,

where the primary drivers to shift my state of consciousness, not for some other goal or outcome? And that included everything from action-adventure sports and eco-tourism to psychiatry and self-help. So everything from Tony Robbins to my local therapist to the entire sort of online, you know, Popsike self-improvement marketplace. That was billions.

You talk about indoor gambling. We didn't even do online gambling and fantasy football and that kind of stuff. She's like, look, just take the classic Indian reservation or Vegas Reno casinos where there's deliberately no outside light. They pump them full of 100% oxygen. There's no clock. So you're creating a sense of timelessness.

You're creating a sense of hypervitality because you're getting maximum oxygen. You're creating free drinks. So ethanol and disequilibrium, scantily clad women, so sexual arousal and priming and peacock, and you're creating all of these dates, and then the dopamine rush. So when Robert Sopulski at Stanford calls it the magic of maybe,

but basically when, and this explains why like grandpa still likes to golf or fly fish. Like, why do you do these incredibly frustrating things, grandpa? Because if you do something and you get an expected reward, it's 100% of dopamine. If you do something and sometimes you get the expected reward and sometimes you don't, the next time you hit, it's 400%, it's 4x, the ROI, just by being fucked with along the

way. That's the thing. That's exactly how I would go and chase the elusive permit, saltwater fly fishing. It's a son of a bitch fish to catch this. You don't eat them. Why does the guy do that? Because when he finally lands one, it is awesome. And the same with a birdie or whatever it would be, right?

That's the ROI. Those are additional huge tranches. IMAX, online porn and binge watching, right? Or all very specific visual, you know, we consume visual media that way. And every single one of them, like we travel, we don't just wait to watch it in our house. We go to a big screen, we pay a premium ticket price for a 40-foot screen that eclipses our peripheral vision

in the pitch black where we're kind of loosely connected. We hear other people gossping and booing and clapping, huge sound systems, right? They're pumping out the extra. And that's a state shift. We pay the premium for the state shift. And obviously, like streaming porn is ridiculously prevalent. It's like what, seven out of the top 20.

Is that right, top online short? Yeah. I think you can't porn theaters never to stop. Is that right, top? If I own a computer. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It didn't work for Peewee. Yeah, but I mean, if you think about like

evolutionary payoffs and benefits, right, there is no evolutionary reward for rubbing one out in front of your laptop. You know, you don't pass your gene. The genes don't get pass along. Right. Why do we do it? Do people are not doing it for companionship, they're not doing it even to get lay, they're doing it to create a sense of neurochemical saturation in their body. Why do you get so sad afterwards? That's horrible. Well, I think that that's the evolutionary bitch slap,

which is that we are just, like, evolution's a moral. And we try and live relationships that have morality and ethics and consider, but evolution doesn't give a shit. Who we get it on with. They just care that it happens. So I think there's a huge decrease in arousal and all the chemicals they're saying, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go,

done. Thanks very much. And now you face the consequences of your action. You know. That's how you pay at home. So we're already spending all this money trying to get out of our heads. Yeah, yeah. And the point there is that, you know,

because people might read the book, especially if someone was kind of a little bit more conventional conservative, and be like, what are you guys doing? Are you advocating for all this stuff? This is reckless, and you know, all that kind of stuff, you're like, well no, no, no, no. Look, we're already spending four trillion bucks,

complete, and most of it is unintentional and destructive and addictive. So we're already doing this. The question is, is can we become more informed about it? Can we become more skillful about it? And can we deploy that urge to much better ends? And so that would be our advocacy. It's like cognitive literacy is the first thing, which

is understand how our bodies and our brains affect our minds and our hearts. What's the operating system of my system? And the other is cognitive liberty, which is understand who's looking to get mind share in your head, whether or without your permission. And to actually fiercely protect and defend your civil liberties for what goes on between my years is not of anybody else's business. It shouldn't be.

It never should be. Why are we so driven to do this? You know, that's a great question. I mean, is it the curse of, I guess, herming human consciousness and intelligence? I mean, or do animals also seek altered states of consciousness? Yeah, I mean, Ron Siegel at UCLA has written extensively about it and goes back as far as saying, you know, birds do it, bees do it, right? Mammals all over the place, seek intoxication in spite of the short term evolutionary risk.

Meaning I'm twisted, I could get run over, or I could fall out of a tree, or whatever. You guys address this in the book too, don't you? About all the different types of plants and stuff that all these animals eat to get the... Yeah, so I mean, on pretty much every continent, mammals and birds routinely seek state shift. And you can make a fairly clear case that it is the seeking of radical novelty, right,

which can then, if it works, like, if I come up with a good idea and I then have an adaptation at, you know, an evolutionary advantage, then that's what propagates and gets rewarded. So he calls it as far as saying it's the fourth evolutionary drive after food, water, food, and sex. So it's not even why do humans do it? Is it our existential issues and do we have to get out of our way, although clearly, we experience that way, but it's like it is hard-wired into our system.

It's why little kids love to spin around, right? Hold their breath, hyperventilate, do the knockout game, with like middle school boys, like let me hyperventilate and suck me in the chest, right? You might, wait, like, right, I mean me hyperventilate and suck me in the chest. You might wait, right? I mean, kids do it. And certainly we do as well. And I think that's the biggest thing is that if we say anything

about what's the premise of the book is that we got locked into one channel of consciousness for the last few hundred years and it's killing us. And that's the one in four on psychiatric meds. That's the rates of suicide escalating. That's all that stuff. Getting locked on one channel is debilitating. And it's poverty of consciousness.

And the ability to change the channel and experience different states of being an awareness relationship to ourself in the world and our challenges and what's in front of us to be able to do that. A, we know even being able to switch it briefly into a handful of instances, massively heals trauma. It lets us set down our load, it lets us revisit patterns and stories in our system,

in our psychology, in our physiology, and release them permanently. It increases learning and collaboration, so it boosts it between 300 and 500 percent, it lets us solve all our problems, and it lets us connect and collaborate in a highly effective way. So you're like, okay, so if we just get to change that rusted dial from like 21st century normal over to other things from time to time, not all the time, just from time to time that the benefit to our lives is kind of pretty compelling. Let's talk about that for a second. The enhanced learning that you can learn faster and more effectively by utilizing altered states of consciousness effectively. Let's talk about the science behind that and some examples.

Yeah, sure. So, I mean, there's so many. I remember reading, I read about the SEALs that is learning new languages. Yeah, I didn't do the float tank. Yeah. It's part of their training. They learned new languages in like six weeks instead of six months or something ridiculous like that.

Yeah, exactly that. And so, you know, their original use of float tanks, which if anybody's not familiar with those are just the pitch black, super salty, buoyant chambers that you can float in. And because it's pitch black and you don't touch the edges, you just kind of lose all your visual cues as to where I end and my environment begins. So it creates an experience of ecstasy, literally an experience of self-lessness, because I've just shut off some of my senses. an experience of ecstasy, it's literally an experience of selflessness because I've just shut off some of my senses. And at first they were just using it to help guys decompress after coming off duty.

So you've been running night ops, you're in constant fight or flight, hyper vigilance, how the hell you on wine from that and not become an alcoholic, right? I'm because again, I mean, alcohol, like when people come home from work and knock back two shots of whiskey or whatever they do, they are intuitively feeling for I'm, alcohol, like when people come home from work and knock back two shots at whiskey or whatever they do, they are intuitively feeling for, I'm wound up, I've probably had caffeine in my system, I've had stress, I've had all these, how do I decompress my system?

But of course, a lot of our choices, just because we have so few available tools, most of us most of the time, we pick bad ones or ones that aren't sustainable. So that was their first move for the seals, was how do we just help guys on wind in a healthy way. Then they started adding in, well, what if we can help steer and guide their bodies and brains to more optimal states of relaxation and arousal and that was EEG feedback, HIV feedback, some of those kind of things. And then like,

oh, now once we can get them there, is there new data that we can run across their screens and they might be in a more receptive state for plugging it in. And that really was, I mean, that was a one-fourth as long timing on patterning and integrating your languages. And that happens with meditators, that happens with mechanically inducing a flow state, with transcranial magnetic stimulation.

So you put a magnetic pulse across the prefrontal cortex, the front of your brain, and for about 20 to 40 minutes, you've got a kind of, you know, like a magnet, you know, it makes like jumper cables to the brain. It's basically like a magnetic lobotomy, you know. And for 20 to 40 minutes, you're in the zone.

And like, what can you do there with target acquisition or any skill acquisition? And those numbers are really high. And, you know, so, and then of course, you know, the Fatum and Studies with microdosing, What can you do there with target acquisition or any skill acquisition? And those numbers are really high. And then of course, the Fatemann studies with microdosing, where they did stuff with Hulic Packard and Stanford engineers, and they were all working on really complex, hard, technical problems, and they had, I think it was 270% incidence of breakthroughs and patentable, fundable practice.

Well, because earlier you had mentioned how animals will seek this out and how it, from an evolutionary standpoint, puts them at risk, right? They can fall out of a tree, they can be out of it and get hunted or killed, but it seems like there is an evolutionary potential or reason for this even existing, for us even seeking this, and it may be just to spark more creativity, maybe to seek out new things, look what's beyond the horizon. Would you say that that would be? Yeah, I mean, clearly it seems like.

Observable, you know that? Yeah, novelty. I mean, the seeking of novelty and combinations that are then useful. I think I mean, you could make a case that that is pretty much how most cultural innovations have happened across time. Now, can we talk about the board for a minute?

Like, should we fully integrate or should we avoid it at all costs? Like, what's your opinion going forward with artificial intelligence? Do we really want high-minded? Yeah. You know, funnily enough, I'm not a wild fan of singularity, kind of thinking and all that kind of stuff. I'm a sort of like nostalgic traditionalist. Like I want to, like these bodies, you know, this lifetime, this planet.

And because, you know, as much as anything else, like that's a 1%er play. Yeah. Even if Elon figures out, like, colonies to Mars and like, who the hell gets to go? You know, not everybody, you know? How comfortable is it going to be? Yeah, exactly. So I feel strongly, combined with the same with like singularity and uploading consciousness and all that kind of stuff,

you're like, and then what? I mean, we are only going to, it's like leaving the bathroom, like a public bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe. Like the shit travels with you as far as you go. And I feel like any of our efforts are only going to be as good as the consciousness we hold and feel like any of our efforts are only gonna be as good as the consciousness we hold and the relationships we have to those acts as we enact them.

You know what I mean? And that's, that's, you know, there's so many cautionary tales in mythology or Edgar Allen Poe or whatever, like be careful what you wish for, you know. And like, that one just to me seems super duper that way. The fact that Elon is now talking about neural nets and you know, like intelligence augmentation for the humans to be able to keep pace against AI

That to me is all super interesting and curious, but just who the hell knows And I would still say that humans in these meat suits With our lives with our relationships and we were still going to be biologically reproducing We still have children. We still have partners. We still we still have the desire to choose and make art or life. We still have to figure this stuff out. So I think that regardless of what kink or ton the technological landscape shows up

in the next few decades, like we are going to need to upgrade our nervous systems. We're going to need to upgrade our consciousness and we're going to need to be able to be rooted enough in three dimensions that we can comfortably hold and maintain, life, experience, and information feeds from multiple dimensions without losing our tits. And so, like to me, that's where you can all the way full circle into radical and body cognition. Like, let's become quantum acrobatics.

Like, let's become so dialed, so Bruce Lee, so right? So on the game that, yeah, we can hold our center dynamically in a world that is massively more complex. It feels like we're playing a lot of catch up with that, right? We're just getting, we're just understanding our body at a deeper level, but it's just sort of happening. Meanwhile, like, technology is exploding. So, yeah, it just feels like, I mean, how long do you think, till we will get into that

mindset where like, we care just about, you know, hacking we will get into that mindset where we care just about hacking the human body as we do about improving technology? Yeah, I mean, the weird thing is it's all happening on the one hand. You've got 73% of American men or obese and something like 34% of American children are, which is just absurd and tragic, especially considering how food shortages are elsewhere in the world. We spend more on diet products for our fucking pets than we invest for our crazy, in third world and food relief.

So on the one hand, we're super crazy disembodied. And everyone's walking around and hunched over looking at their screens and all that kind of stuff. And on the other hand, you have things like CrossFit and Spotten and Tough Mudden. You have this rise of peak embodiment. And you've got more folks that are training harder in those spaces than wherever. That's not as much smarts in there, yeah.

Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so I think we're just seeing an acceleration and novelty in all those lines, including tech and culture. Well, I love when we get a mind like you in the room, so we should be taking vitamins while we talk like this, because I love when we get a mind like you in the room, so I mean, we should be taking vitamins when we talk like this, because I love to speculate on like, what do you think is gonna be like the most mind-blowing direction we go, whether it be technology

or talking about flow state? What do you see in the next 10 to 20 years and I think people are gonna trip out on? Uh, I mean, like the actual honest answer would be if more people, if more people start actually getting into radically non-altered states and start perceiving a consistent pattern on the other side of them. So if you really like, like we are in, we are in a sort of ethnocentric like backlash right

now, right? There was a potential move to like, we're all one and everybody's rights are equal, including the most, you know, the most long tail minority group, right? Transgender folks is something that's like a fraction of a percent of a population, but like their rights became a litmus test, right? And they also became blowback,

people say those aren't my people. This has gone too far. I want to retrench back into a tribal identity where I feel strong and known and valued, right? So what gets us beyond an ethnocentric world view? How do we get to global centric, right? Which you can make a case is kind of needed right now. All the complex problems that don't stop it,

people's borders anymore, right? So it doesn't matter how big you build the great wall of China, like small goes over it, right? So you can make a developmental case in order to stabilize a level of cultural awareness, like ethnocentric, you have to know, like I can't define my tribe until I've defined who's not my tribe.

So I have to go beyond my ethnocentric perspective to define another in order to reaffirm who we are. So how do we get to global centric? You'd have to go beyond the identity of the globe. So how do we glimpse something beyond this planet? You got two choices. You can either hop on a spaceship, like all those right, all the early astronauts did,

look back at the little blue marble and have that transcendent experience of like, holy shit, we really are all one. And come back to Earth and start an institute of doing speaking circuit, right? Or we all get tickets to Virgin Galactic, right? Or we can do it with inner exploration. So you can have an ecstasis experience that is where no longer astronauts become psychonauts. And by moving beyond the globe and our hands are like a cool band. Yeah, exactly. That

may be, right? Maybe that could happen. And so, you know, we shall see what unfolds in the next couple of decades, but the move to a truly global centric awareness that we act on and act from based on an understanding that we are not the only game in town could be the next. You think fear will stop us from getting there? You think, what do you think? Foof! I mean, I don't know. And honestly, I don't know. And honestly, I don't know. Like, for instance, if the universal game

is not anthropocentric and isn't geocentric, which I'd say any diabolism high octane psychedelics would have firm as a hell yes. Right? So it's not all about us. It's not all about this planet exclusively. So you're like, maybe that consciousness or sentience or agency is not the sole property and claim of little headless apes.

You're like, okay, that is a mind-fuck, but once it does, we take ourselves and our petty divisions a lot less seriously. Yeah, see, I have a lot of hope because I look at the world and the world continues to get smaller as more and more people get connected. And I think what we see with a lot of these tribal type movements is backlash, but you

can't stop it. More people are connected than ever. More people are sharing ideas than ever. Anybody can post a video on YouTube and it can go viral, anybody. For pennies, whereas before you needed connections and lots of money to share ideas, I think it's moving in a direction that is good, but like any major shift in,

I guess collective human consciousness, it's gonna be hitting some bumps. I mean, the renaissance, we all, you know, look back at the renaissance is this great, you know, transformative time, but it was riddled with murders and killings and throwing people in jail and burning books and, you know, killing people for, you know, talking about science

and I think we see that every single time, but right now it's happening faster and bigger than anything that's ever happened. I mean, I talk about the internet all the time. I mean, anybody now has access to all the information that they want. That's never happened before. What is that gonna look like moving forward?

I don't know. You talked about running for president earlier when you were joking. So I can't say anything on here, because what if I run for president? But I'm gonna love, I cannot wait to see presidential elections in 30 years. Like everyone's gonna have shit on everybody. Like you're gonna have to hold it.

In elementary school, you're a dick. It's all recorded. You can have his Instagram posts first. Maybe that's 12. Maybe that's what we'll all get along when we can all see each other's porn searches. And we can all see all fucked up Everybody else guys weird like me

Seriously do Japanese school girls. I mean come on So what is your what is your hope for the future of these these currently elicit substances that you've referenced like siloocybin, like surgic acid, diethylamide, you know, Ayuahasca, a lot of people talk about. What is your... Wait a second, before you take him there, actually I want you to actually to explain on a neurological level, if you can, for me,

what is really the difference of like, you know, the like between shrooms, MDM, and then like LSD, like really what's happening different with each one of those? I try to explain it to someone I just fucked it up completely So I couldn't wait to get someone like you on here that could probably explain that a little bit better than me Sure, I'm happy to do that and then we'll do a little PSA So I mean fundamentally

Silicide in an LSD or as we talked about interact with the serotonin system predominantly So that's where you get all the interesting effects that come from those substances Sylasybin and LSD are, as we talked about, interact with the serotonin system predominantly. So that's where you get all the interesting effects that come from those substances. MDMA will create, it's an amphetamine base. So it's a totally, it's not a tryptamine, it's an amphetamine. So it's a different class of compounds altogether. So Sylasybin LSD, tryptamine-based molecules, very, very similar. MDMA, totally different.

Totally different. And so much more. And if you do them all, MDMA, totally different. Totally different. And so much more. And if you do them all, you know, you can tell. Yeah. And honestly, I mean, ironically, people will say, oh, go do Molly, right? It's fun. It's friendly.

It's whatever. But I mean, it's a compound. It's one of the hardest things to put in your body. You know, it's an emphetamine, bottom line. I've heard the hangover's horrible. Well, I mean, in case, interestingly, there was a Harvard study that finally was able to separate what is the, because people talk about like suicide Wednesdays or whatever, after taking MDMA, but A, most of that's impure street version.

So like, vice did a study down in South Beach and sampled Molly from the top 10 bumping as clubs, and only 17% of them contained any MDMA. Oh, wow. Oh wow. Not even 100% I'm clear just anything. That's surprising. So most of what people are taking is in name only. But then they also realized, oh, the funny thing was,

is they've, this Harvard study found a bunch of Mormon raiver kids who didn't do anything else, but pop Molly. So they weren't boozing, they weren't getting high, they weren't doing any, because they were straight at Mormon kids' ish. Right. Yes, that counts. It doesn't say don't do Molly in the Bible.

Well, I'm the only girl. I mean, for the funny thing, Mormon tea, if you guys have ever been in the desert and seen like that plant, and it was called Mormon tea, because when the settlers came across, they would chop it up and brew it. It's fucking a fedra.

It's the baseline ingredient for crystal meth. And more minty was fine. Because it's not coffee. Right, yeah, exactly. Do meth tea, kids. Because baby Jesus said it's all right. Do you have some cool, actually. He hasn't put it on the list yet.

So we're good for all. So MDMA will basically trigger Norepinephrine, which is not surprisingly given it's an amphetamine. It's a stimulant, and it turns me on. It releases some dopamine, just good ol' straight up. Like, this feels good and reward. And then the real thing it does is it creates a dump of serotonin in your system as well,

but it's a dump of it. It's not interacting with my receptor sites. So it's your own natural serotonin just going? Yes, squirting it out. No, here's the thing. So most people, and that's what the kind of warm, oegui, sense of safety and trust, and I just can't help but want to tell you how much I really appreciate you and this

other thing. Oh, great. You're a great dancer. You feel you are a solver. I just want to thank you for buying us these tickets to this show because it's just so amazing that we're here right now with together. No, that's Serotonin. And so many people want to chase the tail of that dragon.

So come one o'clock at night, two o'clock at night. They're like, hey, you want to do more? Because they like that thing that they just felt, and they want to go chase it. But what happened is you've just released all the serotonin in your brain. That was it. Taking more of it.

Now you're just into the, now you're just into the amphetamine side of it. And that's when people start sucking their cheeks and chewing their teeth and all that kind of stuff. Because too much dopamine will give you jaw lock and it will overclock your processor So the reality is is like, you know, yes You can potentially take five HTP and some other precursors of serotonin to boost your serotonin stores ahead of time or in recovery Afterwards, but the bottom line is like once you've had that spike you're chasing the tail of a train that already left the station

Hmm, interesting. Yeah, that was the PSA kids a tale of a train that already left the station. Interesting. Yeah, that was the PSA, kids. And now, LSD and Salasayban, how are those two different and both, I guess, chemical and maybe an perceived experience? Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know. Because they're very similar. When you look at them on paper, they're, I mean, what separates the two molecules?

It's like one. Yeah, I mean, I mean, as far as the true molecular breakdown, they are similar. A number of people will tell you, oh, you know, acid, no way. I only had a bad trip on acid, but mushrooms are so friendly. Right, right.

Good trips on mushroom. And I think they're just full of shit. You know, it's the same when people tell them, I don't like, we, because it makes me paranoid. It's like, no, no, you got some shit to think about. You just would rather not. You know? That's all going on already no, no, you got some shit to think about. You just would rather not. You know? That's all going on already.

Right, unless you have some crazy high octane sativa where you don't know where there should have go blind. So the reality is that any of the dosage matters. And so mushrooms can be friendly and you can hang out in the trees and go walk on the beach and feel connected to mother earth and everything else. Or you can take a fuck ton of them

and suddenly you're in galactic spaceships, wondering what the hell, you know, what you took a left-hand and albacaque. So like, you know, in the same way that LSD, you can do microdosing, which is purely sort of therapeutic to museum dose to heroic. So my sense is most people confuse urban legends with their own experiences. They project onto the substances they're taking and don't claim responsibility for their own consciousness. And they mistake that the wildly differing experiences you can have based on different dosages

and those step functions. Interesting, great way to ask that. Yeah, that makes that clear as up quite a bit because you do hear people say, oh, I like shrooms, but I don't do acid or no. Acids my favorite and I don't like to do mushrooms that much. Is there any research on somebody that would microdose on a regular basis? Is there side effects to that?

Do you down regularly receptors by doing that on a regular basis? That's all, those are the great questions that we're literally just down, getting enough of sample sizes and longitudinal studies to even begin looking at and answering. And that's to the credit of neuropsychologists and the other researchers who always get asked about all this stuff, because it's just kind of everywhere in the mainstream media in the last few years. They're always like, look, seems encouraging, seems interesting. We're not sure.

And you're clearly, I mean, anything that's going to give you a powerful benefit, is there a Rob Peter Pay-Paul element? I mean, I know Tim Ferriss probably two, three years ago was talking about TDCS, direct current stimulation in his brain, and is other trade-offs. You might zap your brain, get a boost in something, but does it come out of something else nearby? Are we willing to make those trade-offs? I think at the end of it all, I think biohacking in general is a fool's errand and it's gonna implode out of the weight

of its own self obsession in the next couple of years. Cause the only people that are really doing it and propagating it are the people selling you overpriced bottles of shit to pop. And everything else is like if you take a look at like that whole thing, Neutropics and stacking, blah, blah, blah, which just everybody's just whacking them

so silly with these days, you're like there's a placebo effect is between 30 and 40%. Right? Prozac, so it's just sugar pill, right? 30 or 40% efficacy, and to put that in comparison, Prozac clocks in the mid 40s.

So Prozac is single digits better than sugar water, right? And it has a multi-billion dollar blockbuster drug with tons of side effects. Tons of side effects. So you can just take a sugar pill, get none of the side effects, none of the costs, and be, you know, 70%, 80% almost as good. So then you're like, okay, so now what is meaningfully

better than placebo that definitely delivers a result? And my sense is that you don't even get into the lowest level contenders until you're at something that requires a doctor's prescription or doctor's oversight, like ProVigil, right? And then from there, the things that hands down, change your consciousness, presumably for the better and useful ways, or scudger one or scudger two substances.

So like between placebo and doctor's script and scudger one or scudger two substances. So like between placebo and Dr. Scripp and scudger one scudger two, that's the entire bandwidth of the whole biohacking new or tropic. Oh wow. World in industry and it's all just expensive P. So that so what's what's your take the real there? I mean that there is definitely a major You know new tropropic kick right now. So it's. Yeah, and it's just so goddamn simple.

It's the whole Michael Pollan, like eat real food, mostly plonk, not too much, like invest in your nutrients, like having a balanced nutrient and mineral and electrolyte and amino acids stack in our bodies, useful, of course. And there's no substitute for high quality, whole food to get us there. Period. You know, and then also, I mean, just think about biohacking. I mean, this is where I have an ethical issue with it, which is like how much are people,

how much are in people's medicine cabinets or kitchen cabinets and how many dollars they consuming every day to optimize or become bulletproof or right or hack their game. And you're like, how many starving children could you feed every single month and just eat fruits and vegetables and clean lean meats? Call it good. So like at what point have we optimized ourselves up our own osols, right?

Versus I know enough, I am enough, I can do enough to like take next steps. Well, either that or the other way, my bulletproof MCT. Well, the other thing you see is I feel like it's such a small rock and people are missing all the big rocks, right? You're sleeping like shit, you're drinking alcohol, you're 40 pounds overweight, you're taking new tropics, and you've got fucking MCT oil. I mean, we used to guide mountaineering courses in an appolent Tibet. Like, I drank a shit pile of smoky, nasty ass,

yak butter tea, I didn't come home and tell and sell that story about this secret, the secret to fucking human performance, because, you know, and like our son, we lived in Colorado when our son was born at 10,000 feet, he and my wife were just paid in a high-altitude natal study and they used Tibet and they used Chile as their two examples.

And what they found was like, you know, this is multi-generational, epigenetic adaptation, much greater hemoglobin, red blood cell, oxygenation, all these things, not the fucking yak better in the goddamn tea. Now come on, but now why is bulletproof, ape shit? Like those conferences are so fucking funny. You get all these like yokes crossfitters and all these silicon tittied peroxide blonde girls

that they're side. And they're all so stoked because it's like people gave us permission to like consume insane amounts of caffeine and fat. Oh no. It's so self-serving. Wow. It's like the one-taste community is like,

you know, like all about orgasmic meditation. And what do you have? You have under sex, 30 to 40 something women who now have permission to get laid and not be called slutty. And you have like milk toast librarian dudes on the back end of a divorce who have no sexual social skills since they were high school.

And they have a permission to ask who were gonna drop their trials and fiddle their clits with us. And bitch slap. So like, you're like, go. You're like, that is not a healthy community who can self police. Fuck yeah.

Oh yeah. Well like anything, we're like anything. We take a little bit of truth and we turn it into this huge market, where we're just gonna sell you all kinds of shit. Well, that's it. How annoyed or maybe you know, this is like flattering that like flow

is like the next buzz term. It's awful. Yeah, I was gonna say that. Must be a little bit like, oh no! Honestly, I mean, I never used the goddamn way to my own life. I noticed that, yeah. I noticed that, yeah.

We in a festival of flow club, you know, it's just shit. Yeah. If you could save that, like, this is flow. I'm gonna get into flow, you know, playing music. I'm gonna get into flow, reading this book, you know, like. I have to say that's the most refreshing thing in actually to talk into right now. That's great.

I think that's the fear when we interview someone, like yourself, is like, you know, is he gonna be like, flow this, flow that, flow this, other words, you haven't even fucking used it one time, which I really appreciate that. Yeah, because it's like bottom line, man, it's if we're in it, let's just shut the fuck in, you know, a little more.

And if we're not, talking about it isn't gonna change the game. So, you know, it's gonna be so. Beautiful. Oh my God. So tell me how you actually, how did you get connected with Steven? How did you guys get connected? How did that whole play out?

Yeah, it was mutual friends. And we were both interested in this experience. Stephen was coming kind of from the neuroscience side and I was coming from the practice and application. So for me, I'd always just gone seeking mountains, mountains, music, mushrooms, like whatever it was. Like I was just interested in moments where I felt like, fuck yes, this is big enough and good enough that I don't have to second guess it or critique it. So I was always interested in moments where I felt like, fuck yes, this is big enough and good enough

that I don't have to second guess it or critique it. So I was always looking for those experiences that just shut up my inner critic. And then translated that into leadership development, professional training, all that kind of stuff. So that was the path I'd been following. So together, it was an interesting, like here's an explanatory mechanism of how this stuff works.

And then here's badass experiences that we can go do, they get us there without having to talk about it. Now, I've always, this is the first time I've actually had a chance to talk to both authors of a single book. What is, how does that work? What's the thing? How does it make between you guys? It's not like you both sit down and go, I'm going to write that sentence and you read

the sentence. I mean, how does it play out? You've covered this chapter. Yeah, I mean, my intention, because I had helped Stephen quite a bit with Rise of Superman, and when we started getting into this book, I'm like, dude, we're not gonna do it that way, I guess. So here's the deal, let's create, and I'm not a rigid type A planner guy, but I was like, we need to architect this thing,

because it's a long, complex, lot of moving parts. You gotta have somebody else to be that guy. Exactly, and Steven was hilarious. I mean, he would literally like, hey, hey, he refused to work on Google Docs, so we didn't have real time document management. That's a real scaling school. Yeah, we were mailing,

I mean, we have literally thousands of emails of back and forth versions of Microsoft Word, then he would conveniently forget and make changes. He was sabotaging, he would tell me, he'd go eat him, he'd go eat him, he'd go eat him, he'd go eat him, he'd go eat him, he'd go eat him, he'd go eat him, he'd go me, and he'd go, he's so much, so much guiltily told me, after he's like, hey, you know what?

I mean, he, he, he, what I was doing was like deliberately not following your stuff and deleting stuff just to see, and I was like, I know you were, you saw something, I went to the throttle, you threw the fucking phone. So between having an editor that just did not get it at all, to collaborating and seeing what worked,

what didn't, it was full contact sparring and we were both deeply dedicated to the book. So like the end result ended up being that I think we were both hypersensitive to each other's excesses as a right as writers. So we were so impatient or intolerant with anything that felt like a flourish or self-indulgent that I hope, you know, we, hopefully,

we rung most of that out of the book. And then by the end, it was like, okay, and we could also give each other a hat tip when we got it right. And so that was a really healthy, dynamic tension. And I think, I think the book is probably tighter and more focused and more accessible to more people because we put each other through that ring. It takes a lot of humility to do that. Who? It takes a lot of humility to do that, for sure.

Yeah, and last year, I was literally, I was in the airport takes a lot of humility to do that, for sure. Yeah, and last year I was literally, I was in the airport on my final connecting flight, two burning man sending him the final manuscript. And I'm like, here you go, dude. Like, flag stuff, don't fix stuff. I'm only gone for three days. I will be back out, don't fuck with it. Of course you fucked with it.

So I came back and it was like this back enforced in the deadline, it was comedy. Oh my God, that's fucking awesome. Makes more dynamic. Why were you guys so passionate to the deadline. It was comedy. Oh my God, that's fucking awesome. Makes more dynamic. Why were you guys so passionate to write that? What was your drive to do that? I'll go through all that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was absolutely like bleed and die

on this hill regardless. Like there was no way this book could not get through. So for me, it was 20 years of living life, going to grad school learning, like following this threat, like came across this kind of world in college and it was everything from, you know, windsurfing and mountain biking to psychedelics and dead and early fish shows, like, like what's up in the big wide world of living lodge and then spent my entire academic career looking for the origins and roots because it felt like, what is this lineage? This is a thing and it's showing up in this time and place

in American culture, et cetera, with all these trails and what are all the roots of this stuff. So that had been 20 years of my life. I mean, back to the ancient Greeks and Kaikian and the story of El Chibiotti's like, all this stuff, like, whoa, this feels like a hidden, crazy lineage that weaves in and out of time and space and jumps continents and all these kind of things, but it's alive. And who are all the kind of, the shoulders of giants that we're standing on?

So I wanted to communicate that story. And at the same time, communicate the, the, what feels like a wild uptick. And what's going on now. Because I mean, it was kind of bumping along through the 60s and 70s and 80s, it went to kind of underground and that kind of stuff but like what's happening now feels urgent. And it feels like if enough people get this information, then we have a shot at the open source revolution

we talk about because otherwise it'll just get clipped like it always had. Why do you think there's an uptick now? I mean, at least the thesis we make in the book is that there's an intersection of psychology, technology, pharmacology, and neurobiology, and that each of those disciplines is now accelerated to a point and provided enough open access. It's basically like demystifying stuff. It's providing data and repeatable experiments.

It's cutting out the middlemen and it's making it more safer and scalable. And as a result of that intersection, that's the kind of genie out of the bottle moment. And will the gatekeepers, will the state, will the church, right? Will all those entities in whatever form they take place these days? Will they show up and try and control, modulate, shut it down, or hell, you know, Jeff Sessions, right? You know, willfully bending all the evidence about the opioid epidemic and saying that we need to clamp down on marijuana because it sends a wrong message.

And you're like, in every state where you've got medical access, you've got a decrease in car accidents, decrease in fatalities, decrease in overdoses, because people just have at least one more, slightly less all or nothing tool to manage pain. And so you're still getting like 1980s era moralizing, right, in the face of evidence. And so that's a backlash.

We had finished the book before November. So what we're seeing in the last six months is a weird throwback. It's not, I always think of it. It's like when Gandalf is like in the minds of Moria and he defeats that nasty ass, Bauerog's huge monster, and he done it. Like, you shall not, Posh, or you kick sass,

and then as the thing falls down in the last minute, that tail whips up, right, whips up, snaps him around the ankle and drags him into the abyss, and that kind of feels what the last six months is like, is like a social cultural moment. You're like, this is the lost goss of just frustrated, old male, twisted patriarchy, just in the death heaves.

And meanwhile, there's the party at the end of time and everybody else is showing up for the get on. Yeah, I think the timing is right. I think good luck. If they try to reverse any of these current laws that we have, it's like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, it's not gonna happen. And it's like the public opinion is fundamentally different than it was

even when I was a kid, which wasn't too long ago, right? I think the majority of Americans approve of marijuana being legalized recreationally, definitely, but dissingally their attitudes towards drugs in general, or at least the war on drugs has changed quite a bit. And so you've got academia now talking about using these substances for what they're good for. You've got now the general public saying, hey, the war on drugs has been an absolute failure and has caused nothing but death and destruction. And it's all intersecting. And I think we're going to see more changes. Plus, we have the internet now. Let's be honest, communication happened so fast.

That movement that used to take decades happened in a matter of five years. I mean, I remember when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 the first time, he ran on a platform of going against gay marriage, for example. Well, two years later, if you were a politician running against gay marriage, you couldn't get elected. And even today, you can't do that. Marijuana legalization wasn't supported by a majority of people not that long ago. Now it is. It seems to be happening

faster and faster and faster. What are your hopes for how psychedelics can be used? Do you hope it can be legalized, maybe like schedule three, schedule two, use by physicians and doctors, do you hope it's even more unregulated? I mean, I don't know. I honestly don't burn a lot of calories in that direction. I'm glad people do. My sense would be at a minimum available in a physician or psychiatrist toolkit, instead of a lot of the blunt instruments they get deployed now. So for sure, I mean, if there were psychedelic and empathogenesis, and the FDA is moving towards

that. They're moving towards approval of MDMA for depression, anxiety, and I'm presuming following through and greenlighting the trauma practice as well. So that would be, that's huge. The ability to take things out of like the Hopkins study with psilocybin and end of life patients and smoking cessation, okay, smoking cessation, well cool.

That would be interesting that kills a lot of people. And obviously under life studies for the ability to have, you know, what was it, 30% of the people who took three grams of psilocybin and the Hopkins study facing terminal cancer reported as the most meaningful experience of their lives and the rest of the groupocybin in the Hopkins study, facing terminal cancer reported as the most meaningful experience of their lives and the rest of the group said it was in the top five, no question. And that perspective persisted for months and years afterwards. So you're like, wow, if you, if there's just three grams of a dried substance that can provide you

the most meaningful experience of your life and you haven't had that, then presumably you would want that. So, the ability, I think, within controlled, licensed, supportive context, for more of this is true, and then also who are we kidding? Right? I mean, medical marijuana in California basically just saturated the entire state with all forms of gray market access and as would those kinds of situations as well, even if it's just easy script writing docs. You know,

you would end up with a very different social structure as far as access and permission. Yeah, that's my, when I looked at, I had a family member who was terminal and who passed away not too long ago and to see someone in that state to actually experience it. From my point of view, it's criminal that you don't allow them access to anything that can alleviate some of that pain and that terror of knowing that they're going to die any moment. And when I read that study and saw that it alleviated a lot of the depression and fear that these people had,

I thought to myself, like, I can't believe that we've made it almost, we've made it difficult even study, let alone somebody who's already gonna die, why not just let them try it and use it? I mean, they're already terminal. I believe it's absolutely criminal. Do you see athletes using these substances to improve physical

performance? We're talking a lot about mental performance. What about like a fighter or you know someone working out in a lift and weight or extreme sports? Well I mean there's a huge underground scene and extreme like mountain culture of psychedelics and rad shit in the mountains. So, I think the people drawing some kind of insinivance. Some people might say they're just drawn to doing crazy shit, but. Yes, but I mean, the idea is,

I mean, back in the 80s, it would be like, let's go bump some lines in a plane and jump out of, jump out and go skydiving. That was like my friend's brother in Miami. I was like, you guys are crazy bastards, but like the idea, like, can we be in big, complex, gorgeous, awe-inspiring natural environments, and do we have enough core baseline skills

to not be doing something stupid, which is key prerequisite. And good pattern recognition, good habits, good systems, all those kinds of things, and now are we going to augment with psychedelics, not to the point of like reducing my motor function and decision making, not to the point of reducing my motor function and decision-making, but to enhance it.

That is a time-tested thing from Yosemite Camp 4, to Maui, to Telluride in Jackson, and seven shades of fucking awesome. So, you know, I mean, anything you can do, high can do better. You know? like anything you can do, right? High can do better, you know. You can do better. So many of us. Can we make a shirt? Can we make that shirt? Please write that down, though. It's definitely a mind-puck.

So can you give your children's knowledge? Actually speaking to children, Jim, you have children, right? Yeah. What are the ages? 15 and 17. Okay, so how do you talk about this stuff to kids? Because I know we have listeners that are probably very interested in all this, and then also have children, and then wondering, how do I talk about this stuff to kids? Because I know we have listeners that are probably very interested in all this, and then also have children, and then wondering, how do I talk about this or communicate this

to them? And there are probably good ages to talk about this. How do you communicate that? Yeah, I mean, our son is, I think, he's much more, kind of at that stage in phase. Our daughter's like, you will not take me to Burning Man. I will run away. I am not going. And I'm so like, yeah, when's it on?

Do I get to miss school? But we're just, yeah. So what we try and say is, back to the cognitive literacy thing. Like understand what makes you tick. You know, we understand your sexuality. Understand your mood swings and cycles. Understand what options and choices you have available to you to shift your state, and do it responsibly, do it in context, do it in service, not like out to like slam down

forties in the parking lot of a shopping mall. You know, like if you're going to do it, contextualize it. And you know, certainly in advocacy, we'd make it sacri-ly-ly-sit, like make it meaningful, you know, and make it respectful. And integrate these things. These are part of life. We do need to talk about religion. We do need to talk about addiction. We do need to talk about depression.

I was just going to say, these like prerequisites that you would go over. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And fundamentally just literacy. I mean, we're having him take a wilderness EMT course this summer, when he turns 18. So like, understand the mechanics of like, how do our bodies work and how to fix people? Because, you know, like, you're going to need this, whether you're guiding or whether you're doing what else and like, like, be responsible,

like, be responsible and learn the pre-rex. I fully agree with that approach. Because when they do studies on binge drinking, for example, alcohol, they find that cultures that incorporate alcohol as part of the meal and where the child, 13 or 14-year-olds can have a little sip, and it's not a big deal, they're not treating it like it's this taboo substance. Binge drinking is far, far lower as a percentage in those cultures than in cultures like this one where

we demonize, we tend to demonize things, you know? And so you see kids that go try it for the first time and it's like once you cross that line, now I'm gonna go crazy. I guess the same way you would talk about sex or anything else. Especially when you've been told as a kid your whole life, oh this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. And then the first time you try it as a kid, you're like, shit, this is not bad. My ears didn't fall off. This is actually really fun. I didn't grow up here on my palms. Yeah, that's right, right? That's it.

Absolutely. So what's next on the horizon? Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, following the wild ride of this book and landing in the world and lots of kind of feedback coming back, what we're rolling on next is the flagship flow dojo. So in body cognitive training centers, So series of GDs, egg domes that are equal parts, X games meets Sector, CLA meets Benningman. Whoa! Hold on a second. Dude, are we in Pike?

Keep going. This is great. So like fundamentally just transformation chambers. So like by day, it's all just dynamic play and physical training. And by night, it turns, like, function one sound system, like, full-on projection mapping, like, mothership nightclub throwdown, like hot tub sensory deprivation, integration tanks, like, hypervitality bar with, like, umoruma therapy, oxygen hookers, and, like, cavern, peppers, and chocolate, like, all things that, like, stimulates you, and then, like, bungee's foam pits, balance boards,

slack lines, you know, everything for eyehand, eye body, eyefoot coordination, just, like, train up superhumans. And so, when you have these next peak experiences, you're, everything for eye hand, eye body, eye foot coordination, just like train up super humans. And so that when you have these next peak experiences, you're not spilling out of your cup. You've upgraded your nervous system, you've upgraded your fuses and your wiring so you can juice it and then hold it and not blow it out the top. So that's amazing. And then with that, that'll be likely the end of July in Utah. We're going to be doing a pop-up version of that.

We're also doing an angel raise right now to actually be doing the long term permanent one. And then we do deep dive expeditions. So down in the Utah canyons for six days with ultra light packs. And you go through a level of human consciousness every single day. So you make your way up the spiral of human consciousness

with a Harvard psychological assessment or like Saltwater fly fishing and kite surfing with pro skiers or pro athletes learning neuroscience learning flow and then going and doing it. So it's it's an amazingly cool fun community of people that come to play with this stuff. Are you looking to make any of these places like permanent instead of the popup? Yes, so we actually have some good friends that have just bought 300 acres of land in Big Set. Oh cool. That's pretty close. Yeah, we're going to be building like a completely rad, super high end training facility

for Fortune 100 execs, or like highly-coptering them in from the valley coming in, rocking their world. So bad. It's in our backyard. Yeah, and summit, and summit, Powder Mountain in Utah, which is where we'd be looking to do like our permanent flagship. Wow. Wow.

What's the projected date on this to be finished? Well, we're going to do an event, so fundamentally a week long pop-up event, the end of July beginning of August this year. And then we want to be funding and building out the permanent version there within the following year. Hmm. Yeah.

That's exciting. Any more books? Yeah, the next one's going to be called Recapture the Rapture. End of time. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a great clever.

Hell yeah. Are you collaborating or by yourself? That one's going to be solo. Yep. Excellent. I mean, the collaboration is really with my wife. She's my life partner and where most of the stuff's coming from. Oh.

Would you mind going into a little bit of it or you wanna keep it? No, no, happy to. I mean, most people's complaint about stealing fire was I thought this was gonna be a how-to. Like in the last chapter, it's very much like the beginnings of the how-to. Yeah, getting the hedonic calendar and things like that.

All that stuff. So it would be unpacking that. I mean, it would A, it would be literally like the original premise of that title is, why is it that all the craziest fuckers on the planet are like hogging the mic about how the end of days goes down? Right? Like there's all these good people

that are having legit experiences when I help, when I solve, when I do stuff. And then you've just got wingnut fundamentalists of every stripe, right? Who have hijacked the notion of they get the last word. So like why not have the stellar minds things? Why not have people who are deliberately can cultivating ecststasy and their own lives

and in their own communities who have good, positive things to say and do? Let's give them some of the spotlight and oh by the way, here's the gorilla tantra. Here's how you actually blow yourself sky high with like nobody needs to talk about their feelings. Yes. That's a very good move.

I can't wait for that one. Well, hey man, thank you for coming. Yeah, we're gonna have to have you back for sure after that. Yeah, excellent. Listen, listeners, go to mindpumpmedia.com. We're still offering 30 days of coaching for free. Also, check us out on Instagram at MindPumpRadio. You can find my page at MindPumpSowl.

Add them at MindPumpAdmin Justin at MindPump Justin. Thank you for listening to MindPump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbumble at Mind Pump Media dot com. The RGB Superbumble includes maps on a ballad, maps to performance, and maps to static. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels,

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