The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Create Meaning In World Where So Many Are Lost with Jamie Wheal

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox, FOND Bone Broth, and InsideTracker. I know many of us can relate to feeling disconnected from each other, the natural world, and the things that really matter in life. So how did we lose our way and how can we make better sense of the world? It takes some inner work but also means cultivating truth and connecting with community, in order to reshape our narrative and change the collective conversation and state of the world. Today on The Doctor’s Farmacy, I have a deep conversation on rediscovering meaning with Jamie Wheal, about reclaiming our inner passion, courage, and conviction. Jamie Wheal is the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That's Lost Its Mind and the global bestseller Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work and the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance.    This episode is brought to you by ButcherBox, FOND Bone Broth, and InsideTracker. ButcherBox makes it easy to get humanely raised meat and wild-caught, sustainable seafood by delivering it right to your doorstep. If you sign up at butcherbox.com/farmacy, ButcherBox will give you two pounds of ground beef for one whole year. FOND Bone Broth brews up the best bone broth I've ever tasted. To experience the amazing health benefits for yourself, go to fondbonebroth.com/drhyman and use code HYMAN20 to get 20% off your purchase. InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. Right now they’re offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Here are more details from the episode (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): What does it mean to recapture the rapture? (8:43 / 3:40)  Personal growth vs self-indulgence (10:33 / 7:44)  How the foundations of our understanding of the world are collapsing and transforming (23:39 / 19:35)  Finding meaning and purpose in our modern world (30:00 / 24:30)  The power of healing in community (33:38 / 25:42)  Using breathwork, embodiment, sexuality, substances, and music to help us reconnect to ourselves and each other (37:31 / 33:14)  Applying the tools of Hedonic Engineering to real lives and relationships (57:16 / 53:10)  Research Jamie conducted with real-life couples (1:09:24 / 1:05) Why we need ethical guidelines to steer through our own personal explorations (1:19:16 / 1:15:02)  Ten ethical guidelines that Jamie developed (1:22:22 / 1:16:40) Get a copy of Jamie’s book, Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind, here.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. You don't have to become an athlete. You don't have to become a yogi. There's nothing extreme about it. It's just learning how to adjust the knobs and levers of our bodies and brains for greater health, greater resilience, and overall higher well-being. Hi, this is Lauren, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Just a quick note before we dive into today's episode, that this conversation includes some mature language and topics. Listener discretion is advised.

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And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you're stressed about the world we live in, if you have a sense that we've lost direction, disconnected from each other, from the natural world, from things that actually matter, I think this conversation is going to be an important one for you to listen to with an extraordinary thinker, kind of a futurist in a way, a man named Jamie Wheal, who's the author of Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind, which is a great freaking title. He's also the author of the

global bestseller, Stealing Fire, How Silicon Valley, Navy Seals, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. And he's the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance, which sounds great. And it's very in line with functional medicine. How do we optimize ourselves in the world we live in? He's been featured in New York Times, Financial Times, Wired Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and TED. He's spoken at Stanford, MIT, the Harvard Club, Imperial College, Singularity University,

the US Naval War College, and Special Operations Command, Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, and Bohemian Club, which don't seem to go in the same sentence, and the United Nations. No small feats. And his voice and his message are really important, I think, today in a world that's increasingly lost its way. And the concept of Recapture the Rapture is a very important concept that I think speaks to the loss of our sense of connection with everything. With ourselves, with the natural world of connection with everything, with ourselves,

with the natural world, with each other, with meaning. So Jamie, welcome to the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me, Mark. All right. So we were chatting a little bit earlier over lunch about your post-Burning Man experience with your wife and discovering a doorway to states of being and feeling and meaning that you previously had not accessed in the same way. And it led to work that you've been doing over the last 10 years that finally led to this book. And to talking about some of the existential challenges and crises we're facing globally now. Economic, political, social, environmental, climate. I mean, the list goes on, health. And it can be a very disillusioning time. You know, when the headlines, the news are all pretty depressing, whether it's the war in Ukraine, whether it's climate change, whether it's, you know, increasing the degradation of our health

and the polarization of society, this disconnection from each other. So, you know, we've kind of have a world where it's hard to make sense of what's happening. It's hard to make sense of where we're going and what we're doing. And it leads to what I think you referred to in your talk that you just gave at Harvest Festival. We are in Bodrum in Turkey. Leads to something called micro PTSD, which PTSD, micro PTSD, which I think is a very interesting term talking about the sort of little traumas that we all face that sort of degrade our sense of wellbeing and happiness and health. So how did you sort of come to this concept of Recapture the Rapture and how do we start to sort of make sense of the world and how we lost our way?

Yeah. I mean, funnily enough, I think it was probably, I mean, it was ages ago. It was probably 2015. And I just remember seeing a news clip of some American politician, House of Representatives kind of fellow, maybe from Iowa. It might've been that Steve King fellow or something, stridently holding forth in front of a microphone about women's reproductive rights, which has obviously come back to the fore lately. Fore against them.

No, massively against. And I was like, well, what on earth does this old white do? And I think there's some crazy statistic that members of Congress, only 30% have passports. Wow. And you're like, what? That's staggering. Yeah. So here is this old white guy, evangelical, alt-right leanings holding forth stridently about women's reproductive rights, about which he knows next to nothing, and yet has this strongly, strongly held convicted opinion that is actually going to be shaping legislature, politics, and the actual on-the-ground realities for half of the world, all the women. And I thought, my God, what a crazy situation we're in where the,

this goes back to William Butler Yeats' poem, The Second Coming, the one about slouching towards Bethlehem, that kind of thing. But he has that great line where he says, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. And in that moment, that kind of- Wow. Right? There's just that sense of like-

The best lack all conviction and the worst- Are filled with a passionate intensity. Passionate intensity. Yeah. And that to me was the seed of writing this book, which was, oh my gosh, the crazies have hijacked the mic of our collective conversation on both sides of the political spectrum and the moderate middle, right? That the best of us, the rest of us, need to find a way back to shaping the narrative of where's we come from, what's going on, and what do we do now? And that was really it.

It was the idea that at a high level, you know, rapture ideologies, the idea that there is, you know, the world as we know it is doomed. It could be, you know, spiritual, religious, ethical interpretation because of, you know, moral degradation where sinners and, you know, and- Armageddon. Armageddon to pay. Or it could be a techno-utopian rapture, right? It's systemic overconsumption, collapse, population, whatever it would be. So we need to build underground bunkers or create space colonies, right? Either way, we are being increasingly in the grips of these rapture ideologies and all of them share the same trait, which is they're one percenter solutions. Now, how you slice and

dice who gets to be in the 1%, it could be the religiously observant or pious, it could be the technological best and brightest, it could be meritocratic like that, or it could be simple socioeconomics who has the money and the cash to build a branch in New Zealand. They're all 1% solutions for our collective challenge. And that leaves 99% of us right high and dry so how do we reclaim the story in the narrative around the our collective future and then also kind of a double meaning of the word rapture right so not just a sort of biblical end times or techno utopian you know Kurzweil singularity but also our lowercase rapture.

You know, the idea of our bliss, our healing, our inspiration, our connection, our agency. How do we reclaim that? Because if we can't reclaim that, then we sure as hell can't engage the capital R, rapture conversation. So it's a sort of a dual interpretation of the word. How do we reclaim our inner passion, courage, and conviction so that we can have the bigger conversation about what do we all do now? So in a way, healing of the world starts with us. Yes. And that's a slippery slope for folks that are socialized and conditioned to believe in the kind of personal growth slash

new age spiritual bypass, right? Because often when people of privilege and access to personal development and growth, biohacking, optimization, spiritual seeking, hear that, they get agitated about the state of the world. And then there's that quick, quick, quick movement into a spiritual bypass of, oh, change comes from within. We can't heal the world until we heal ourselves. And that becomes a convenient excuse to go back to my weekend workshop, to seek stillness on my meditation cushion, to do my yoga practices or my psychedelic therapies, my medicine journeys, whatever it might be. And we've effectively bypassed our social responsibility to people who don't have access to those opportunities, people where we absolutely need to be acting on collective behalf of social justice inclusion for the bottom 4 billion people. So there's a lot of well-established critiques on kind of 1950s to now mixed spirituality.

You sort of break it down in ways that make sense to me, which is cultivating our own ability to connect to source or truth or meaning or you call it rapture. But that has to happen within the context of, you call it ecstasis or ecstasy states, right? That has to be connected to community and that has to be connected to the context in which we live and also the healing, the general healing of our larger toxic culture. Absolutely. And then there's also that, I think, a potentially helpful guideline,

which is sort of 80-20 woke to broke. Tell me what you mean by that. Well, the idea that, again, in the kind of commodified personal growth space, there can be an almost preoccupation with the perfectibility of ourselves. And I might have access to- The navel gazing, basically. I'm going to keep seeking peak states and keep seeking them until at some magical future, I am free from all of my worldly constraints and suffering and problems. Versus, hey, because there is that kind of Pareto principle in effect, right? The first 20% of our access to peak states, whether that's meditation, body work, group therapy, psychedelic experiences, music, whatever it might be, the first 20% typically gives us 80% of our hits, of our growth,

of our insight. And then the Pareto ratio shifts. And then the following... And if I didn't know that the 80-20 split was in effect, I might go, oh my gosh, I've just spent 20% of my time. I've had 80% insights. I'm going to keep going. This is the most amazing thing ever, not realizing there's a diminishing return on those things. So then I become quite self-indulged and I spend all my time, all my money, you know, traveling, jumping, seeking, seeking, seeking versus, hey, get, you know, take your proverbial red pill. Realize you were maybe into a socially conditioned world environment series of choices life. And then remember what you forgot. Remember what's yours to do. Mend where you are debilitatingly broken. But after that, get back up.

Yeah. And then report back to the front lines because we're needed. We're all needed. And I thought, I mean, one of my dear friends is a SEAL Team 6 commander. And we got to experience some of their base in Norfolk, what they call their mind gym, which was where they did all of their body-brain training for operators coming off deployment. And I was just thinking of them one day and I was like, oh my gosh, they come to this amazing place with all the biofeedback, the float tanks, all the body work,

all this stuff, but they don't spend the rest of their lives there. They don't decide they're going to quit the teams and go and get their yoga certification or massage therapist accreditation. They're like, patch me up, put me in coach. I have a mission that is greater than myself. I have a commitment to my brothers and I want to get back to the front lines as soon as possible to serve a greater good. And that feels good for all of us. Yeah. It's interesting that you bring that up. But I had a friend who's a Navy SEAL and he was deployed in, I think, Iraq. And one day someone put on the steps of his trailer, How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan.

And he read the book and he came back and explored the psychedelic space and ended up realizing that he, even though he thought he was in an elevated state, he was really kind of a robot in a robotic state. And that changed everything he thought about what he'd done and what he wanted to do and actually ended up ending his career as a navy seal as a result of that those journeys so it's interesting and the other thing you know you sort of speak about just reminded me that you know this is not a new conversation that we're having i studied buddhism in college and there was this sort of framework

of Buddhism that was the sort of original Buddhism, which was what called Theravada Buddhism, also known as Hinayana Buddhism, which means lesser vehicle because it was not named by them as lesser vehicle. It was basically about self-realization, that the highest good was to become awake yourself. But as it evolved, the same problem occurred, which was not just about enlightenment for yourself and salvation for yourself, but about how do we heal our greater society and culture. And that's where the model of Mahayana Buddhism, also known as the greater vehicle, came into play

and the concept of the bodhisattva who reaches the gates of enlightenment, but then turns back to help relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. And so essentially, it's what you're talking about. It's like, okay, you can get yourself straight, but you got to come back in the game. Yeah. I mean, even Japanese Zen has another very similar story of the Zen ox herding parable,

right? There's 10 panels of art, and it starts out with the individual seeking enlightenment that in this story is represented as the ox, right? And first he chases the ox. First he sees it, then he chases it, then he follows it into the forest. Then he mounts it and becomes one with it. And I read that in college and I was like, oh, wow. Everything I thought was the pinnacle of human consciousness or seeking is like panel number four out of ten. And then there's all these esoteric distinctions of like ox forgotten and self alone and there's

just a mountain, there's no ox, there's no dude, there's no nothing. But the final one is, it's beautiful because it says his doors and windows are locked. Even the wisest scholars cannot find him. He is down in the marketplace among the people with helping hands. And that notion of hero's journey 101, like you start out at home, you go away on your adventure, you return home. And the idea of going to sort of ordinary enlightenment and the fact that all the bells and whistles and all the fancy state-seeking and all the pretty lights ultimately should dissolve into complete human ordinariness. You know, in the wisdom traditions, that's often sort of known as the twice-born human, right? Someone, because when we're all firstborn, we all get born into this life, into this world.

Born again. Well, yeah, that one's got more problematic connotations. But they are speaking to something really true and beautiful, which is none of us, unless you have some faith, some preconceived conception of it, none of us chose being born the first time. Our parents got together happily or accidentally. We were conceived and we were in this womb-like amazing state. And then we were birthed into a world, cold, scary, loud, kicking and screaming. And there was that instant fall from grace. Some of us, if we were fortunate, had families of origin that kind of kept that womb-like

container. Many of us didn't. We get booted out early. But all of us at some point are kicked into a cold hard unforgiving world that doesn't really behave as we imagined it should have or might have yeah it's not safe it's not fair right it's not always kind it's not always it's not always predictable and so many people want to get out of this world we seek some some form of escape. We seek states. We get snookered into addictions. It could be surfing the web. It could be pornography. It could be

gambling. It could be substances. It could be food addictions. They're all attempts to get to the right place, but they're all maladaptive. Yes. And they're all attempts to kind of get out of this raw deal of life. And so it feels like it's not until we have the chance to experience a some form of a death practice and they're ubiquitous you know across the traditions but also around the world of things that either literally or figuratively give us a chance to have that choice to come back to this mortal experience with gratitude and without apology or reservation.

And you see it in Jimmy Stewart in A Wonderful Life, right? That's a classic. Ebenezer Scrooge is another. Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. All that idea of I went away, I risked it all only to come back to a profound appreciation that there's no place like home. That is arguably the substructure of almost every esoteric initiatory tradition around the world for thousands of years and once we come back then we say oh my gosh it's not the amazing uh transformational states it's not the esoteric experiences it's not all of that

endless seeking to get out of this life that's the incredible thing. It's this here and now. It's this eight or nine decades. We're blessed to have opposable thumbs and prefrontal cortexes, you know, and we're the existential mayflies of the universe. It's the brevity and the mortality, right? Yeah, I guess we are mayflies in the context of human evolution. I mean, I heard you. I heard you say we look at human evolution, we're like 0.4 seconds before midnight or something in terms of our current state. And you think of all the stories, right? The Greek gods on Olympus are always somehow kind of jealous of humans. And the angels were, and even vampires and the sexy vampire stories, right?

They're always like, what's up with you guys? You guys seem to care so much more than we're able to yeah like the immortals just have ennui they're just like yeah it just all comes and goes nothing matters like how do you guys care so goddamn much and it's because of our mortality yeah so it's just kind of shakespeare is the greek tragedy well it's interesting because you know i'm working my new book about longevity there's scientists talking about longevity escape velocity, which essentially means we never die. Yeah.

If the science advances far and fast enough, we can outpace death. And I don't know about that concept. I don't know if it's possible. I don't even like it. But it changes our humanity in a very material way. Fundamentally,

I think I'm with Elon on this one of just like, you know, that dying is actually an essential part of human progress. And I think was it, it wasn't Feynman. It was, it was. Max Planck.

Yeah. That physics advances one funeral at a time. Exactly. He said, he said, we don't advance science by convincing our opponents and helping them see the light, but because they eventually die and a new generation grows up that's familiar

with it. Exactly. You know? So I feel like live, live fast, live well, and then clear the lane. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. If I've learned one thing during my two decades in functional medicine, it's that we're all unique. No two people are alike, which means we can all benefit from personalized medicine. But for most of the history of medicine, individualized healthcare just was not possible. We couldn't look inside the body and see what was really going on. But now, thanks to advances in technology, that is changing for the better, and it's

doing so in some amazing ways. And I've got a great example of amazing healthcare technology that I'm excited to tell you about. It's called InsideTracker, a wellness tracker that uses science and technology to deliver ultra-personalized healthcare guidance. It can analyze your blood, your DNA, your lifestyle habits, and then give you actionable recommendations to help you meet your health and wellness goals. InsideTracker provides you with the information you need to make powerful health decisions. It gives you a customized dashboard to help you track and reach your goals. And the numbers are

calibrated to your body, as opposed to just listening to the normal ranges that your doctor might tell you. It also helps you understand those numbers and take action on them. If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed in to meet your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now, they're offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. That's insidetracker, I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And you'll see the discount code in your cart. So one of the things that I found very helpful in your book, and I think it's sort of the deconstruction of the sort of stage we're in, in the evolution of humanity. You know, we went from a stage of very organized beliefs,

organized religion, shamanic traditions, things that really were very well-constructed worldviews, whether they were right or wrong, whether they were doing good or bad. They were sort of infrastructures that we all lived within as guideposts to meaning and purpose and why we're here and what we're supposed to do. Those have kind of crumbled in many ways. And there's still sort of the rise of fundamentalism and Islamic traditions, Christian traditions and Judaic traditions. But we've now kind of let go of a lot of that in our Western culture, separation of church and state. America is a great example of that, which is kind of ironic because a lot of our state

is controlled by the church in America and the fundamentalist church, which drives the election process. And it's right now we're facing the challenges to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court because we're in this polarized society, often because of this fundamentalist views. But for most of us, we've sort of gone away from that. I'm Jewish and most of my friends who are Jewish have become more secular Jews and didn't relate to that old sort of stodgy, stifling traditions. And then we sort of adopted a new view, which you call meaning 2.0. That was meaning 1.0. And now, which you call meaning 2.0.

That was meaning 1.0. And now we're moving into meaning 3.0. So can you kind of unpack that a little bit for us? And then I want to get into how we kind of recreate meaning in a new way. Sure. conversation is really about recapturing something that can be very positively viewed and not stifling or constrictive like these old ways, but actually liberating. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, you know, meaning one point, if we just say kind of any faith-based tribal set of beliefs, usually mediated by a sort of shamanic or priest class, you know,

somebody with anointed or appointed authority to interpret divine dictates. That's honestly, that's how we've been for pretty much a hundred thousand years. I mean, now there's even studies on Neanderthals, like that even predates Homo sapiens, some form of ritual and belief and organization. And then, you know, you fast forward to 10,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago, the rise of what we now know as the axial age and religions, right? And all humans everywhere forever were part of kin, clan, tribe, and faith. And that told you who you were, what your role was, how you ought to live. So let's just say 100,000 years up to roughly 1990s. That's how we made sense of the

world. And so when we read things like the Pew Research Foundation studies on the rise of the nuns or the sort of, I don't identify as religious, but I might identify as spiritual, agnostic, atheistic. They call it SBNR, right? Spiritual but not religious? Yeah, exactly. Did you come up with that term? Did I? Yeah. No. I was like, wow, where did that come from? That's how I heard people talking about it. And somebody identified that group of people now as like 30 or 40% of the world's population. Yeah, at least in the US and I think Western Europe also, it's the fastest growing and largest group for the first time in human history. So that's radical. And for most folks, whether it's the Christopher Hitchens or the Sam Harris's of the world, the kind of new atheists, right, there was the cheering of that. There was saying, yeah, down with superstition, religion's the opiate of the masses, that kind of thing. And we're all going to move into evidence-based, you know, atheistic, you know, kind of modernity, right? The real world, science, progress, all these kinds of things. And for a while, that seemed to be holding true. But in the last, take your pick on where you start seeing the wheels come off this, but 2008 is an modern liberalism. The ideas that came out of the European enlightenment, civil rights, democracy, free markets, science,

empiricism, all of these kind of things. We sort of took that as sacrosanct. Which seemed to be the highest goals of humanity. But maybe they're not. Well, it was supposed to be clear, impartial, based in reality, eternal truth, those kind of things. And of course, now the foundations of that have been collapsing and crumbling. And so even international organizations like the WHO, the CDC, the UN, things that used to be, with all their faults, used to still be seen as some form of unbiased truth.

Even BBC News or major American networks, all of that has been critiqued in question. Yeah. And so now we're in religion 1.0, right, or meaning 1.0, offered salvation at the cost of inclusion. So if you believed in our tribe or our people, you were saved. If you didn't, you were a heretic, you were a pagan, you were something, even denied human rights. Yeah, or burned at the stake. Yeah. So offered something also, salvation, but at the expense of inclusion.

Meaning 2.0, aka our modern liberal world, offered inclusion at this expense of salvation. Separation of church and state, God is dead, no one will tell you what to believe. And so the question is, is now in this vacuum, as those two pillars have collapsed, we haven't just had everybody waking up, coming to their senses, right? In that vacuum, we've had a pull to the extremes of fundamentalism, people doubling down on convicted beliefs. And this isn't just religious, right?

You've got cryptocurrency fundamentalists. You've got all sorts of fundamentalist thinking. You've got QAnon as fundamentalist thinking. There is an overarching, hermetically sealed, unassailable view of the world that is always and exclusively true. Fundamentalism. But you also have nihilism. You have people saying there's no meaning, there's no point. I give up. And that's where we see the rise and the spike in diseases of despair, of addiction, depression, suicides, those kinds of things. So that's where we are. And the question is, is how do we put the roof back on and create a shelter under something

new and different that can balance inclusive salvation, meaning for everyone? And so that meaning 3.0 is that framework. Yeah. And how do you describe that to people? How do you conceive of it? What is meaning 3.0? It's not religious, but it's spiritual. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fundamentally,

and some colleagues of ours at Harvard Sacred Design Lab who have been studying this at Harvard Divinity School basically came to their sort of research of what makes religious communities healthy, happy, useful, and sustaining. And it was basically healing, inspiration, and connection. That those were the sort of nutrients that regardless of your particular deities or origin stories or moral codes, those three things help people become well-adjusted, integrated, connected. Vivek Murthy, the U.S US Surgeon General, has written on that.

Yeah. He's been on the podcast. Those ideas that our alienation, isolation, lack of connection to profound sources are all eroding us. So meaning 3.0 is how can we provide access to healing, inspiration, and connection, the core elements that traditional religions used to offer us. And at the same time, do something on the inclusion piece, right? How do we make sure that everyone everywhere has access to that? And so the goals there would be like, okay, how do we make it open source so that this isn't hidden?

This isn't in the tabernacle, right? This is accessible and available to everybody. Scalable, which means it needs to be pretty much cheap or free to meet the bottom 4 billion of the world who have's the anthropology, here's the psychological building blocks. What does the blockchain or WordPress of culture architecture, how do we build healthy institutions? How do we build healthy rituals and habits and customs, not tops down like they were done in the past, but bottoms up so that everyone in the world, their own communities, their own cultures, their own preferences can build with these tools,

skin it how they would like it, right? And then create communities of practice that serve them. Yeah, that's a beautiful vision. And I think it sort of speaks to our need for meaning and purpose and connection and things that I think are the basic fundamental ingredients for health and well-being. part of even a bowling or knitting circle that you're healthier and you live longer, independent of what you're doing with your lifestyle, that if you're socially isolated, disconnected, you live shorter, independent of your lifestyle or smoking. And that there is a sort of deep need for all of us to have meaning and purpose. And then without that, you know, our lives sort of become frayed. And then we see these crises of of of mental illness and depression and anxiety and trauma and you know one of the one of the things you do talk about is this

concept of of micro trauma but also the bigger traumas that we all suffer from and how part of our our cultural framework has been always putting this back on the individual instead of on society. And I think when you look at the context of trauma and suffering, if we don't deal with it in our collective toxic culture, it's very hard for us to deal with it as individuals. So in a sense, we need to reimagine how to live. mean as individuals in community in society and uh and we don't really have a good roadmap for that because all the guideposts and benchmarks have been taken away from us and like you said earlier if you were born into a tribe or culture you had all your rituals and all your ceremonies and all your rites of passage and in the context in which you heal and i and i i had w had Wade Davis on the podcast

and he was talking about how in Lakota traditions, when someone was sick, it was an invitation for the community to heal and for them to do it in community. And I remember being in Nepal when I was a medical student up in the mountains and someone was sick and the shaman didn't just take them

into their little clinic office and do a little ritual. It was the whole community was there. They were all witnessing. They were all part of the ceremony. It was striking that we don't do that anymore. We're in this sort of sterile isolation rooms in medical care, which take us out of the community. And I've actually found that the biggest lever for healing is actually bringing community

into medical practice, which I've done through faith-based wellness programs, which we've done in Cleveland Clinic through shared medical appointments and bringing community into medical practice, which I've done through faith-based wellness programs, which we've done in Cleveland Clinic through shared medical appointments. And bringing people into connection creates far more effectiveness. And we've published data on this, that far more effectiveness in creating healthier outcomes than one-on-one visits with the doctor. And what do the faith-based wellness programs look like? So I did a program called the Daniel Plan. Are you intriguing me? I like this. Okay. I'll answer the question. It's called the Daniel Plan. I created it with Rick Warren. We've talked about it on the podcast before, but essentially it was born out of this idea that

the disease is a social problem, not an individual problem. And that whether it's spiritual disease, mental disease, physical disease, these are things that arise in the context of the world in which we live. And so we can't heal without community. And so basically I worked with Rick Warren and his big mega church in Southern California to create a faith-based wellness program where people healed in community. And they had a curriculum they followed. There was no healthcare providers, just me and a few others that were derived that created some basic lifestyle curriculum. It was based on functional medicine with the intel inside of how to create health.

But they did it together in their small groups, which were already built to help each other live better spiritual lives. But they now could live better physiological lives as well. And the results were astounding. I mean, we had 15,000 people sign up. They lost a quarter of a million pounds in the first year. And they reversed all sorts of chronic illnesses. And I remember this one woman come up to me after the six-week, we had a six-week kind

of recap of our first rally. And we had brought people back after they'd been on it for six weeks. And this woman came up to me and says, I don't understand, Dr. Hyman. I've been depressed my whole life. I've been out of mental hospitals. I've been on every drug you can imagine. My marriage is falling apart. I can't function and work anymore. I just was ready to commit suicide. And three days of doing this, I totally changed everything and I feel completely different and

my depression went away. Is that possible? I'm like, well, yeah, it's possible because it happened to you. And it's because of what you were eating and the things you were doing to your own body. Did you say it's three days? Three days, yeah. I'm just changing her diet. And I see this all the time. I mean, I just did a workshop here in Bodrum at Kaplan Kai at Six Senses on basically how to resurrect your health in a very short time by just taking out the insults

and putting in the right inputs. The body has a capacity very quickly to regenerate and heal and activate old healing systems in the body. And I think that's what your work really does. And I sort of want to jump now into sort of the details of how do we recapture the rapture? How do we as individuals, as communities and society actually start to embed tools and strategies and practices that bring us back without keeping us in the constraints of organized religion or organized structured political parties or frameworks that keep us all separate. And you talk about five drivers that can really help us to actually reconnect with things that

matter, that are based on ancient traditions and ancient wisdoms and technologies that we've sort of discarded, whether it's breath or being in our bodies in different ways, sexuality, the use of various kinds of substances and plants and music and dance. How do we start to think about these things? Can you talk about how you came up with these concepts, why they're important, how people can access them? And then we want to get into some of the research you've done to show how this actually can be played out, because it's very interesting what you found. Sure. I mean, I think the simplest inquiry for me was back to how do we create the Lego building blocks that everyone around the world can make use of? And it occurred to me doing a free diving workshop with Kirk Crack, who's one of the sort of champion coaches for

world champions and record holders. Free diving is when you go dive deep underwater and hold your breath for long periods of time. Without scuba tanks. So you're all self-contained, right? So it's just you holding your breath and going as deep as you can go. And as he was describing, he's like, oh, when most people have this urge to breathe, you would think you're out of oxygen, but you're actually not. You actually just have a buildup of CO2. You probably have 40 to 60% of your usable air, your usable oxygen still in your body. It's just your early warning system. And I thought, well, that's really interesting that we have such a huge built-in buffer, right? Which is basically saying, hey, human diving for oysters or shellfish or lobsters back in the day, don't cut it too close because

if you cut it too close because if you cut it too close, you die. And it just felt like, it was like, wow, that's a brilliant, very strong, biologically encoded driver. If we don't breathe, we die. Basically, four minutes. And at the same time, right? At the same time, if you moderate, if you modulate your breathing in a host of different ways, either by hyperventilating and breathing deeply and quickly or breathing extremely slowly to calm yourself down. You can upregulate yourself. You can create yourself an energized, focused state. You can downregulate yourself. You can become more

calm, less stressed. And if you do varying, more complicated practices, you can even straight up shift your state. So almost kind of gas pedal brakes. And I was like, oh, well, that's really interesting. And mother nature encoded it. So if we can find ways to tweak it or change it, that's a very strong intervention. And it's free. It's free, right? Zero tech. And the same with sexuality, which has all sorts of taboos and sort of strongly held feelings around it. But if you just look again from the evolutionary imperative, if we don't find a way to procreate, none of us would be here. And for the overwhelming majority of human experience, there weren't instruction manuals. No.

Right. And there certainly aren't for anyone, any primate cousins or anywhere else in the animal kingdom. So you're like, okay, so that is purely hormones and incentive structures baked into our mammalian bodies to encourage that behavior. Well, not surprisingly, evolution through the kitchen sink at pair bonding to ensure that we did it. It runs and governs most of our lives on autopilot, often to negative effect. Lots of trauma, lots of grief, lots of unhappiness. But if you can untie the puppet strings of evolutionary imprinting, what can you do with all of the sexual nervous system? And John Lilly, the famous renegade University of Pennsylvania

neuroscientist back in the day, mapped in the early 50s that the entire basically pleasure centers and network of a human nervous system map one-to-one with the sexual arousal system not because there's anything kind of sordid or salacious about it it's just that was mother nature's job one and then all of our other pleasure encoding and sensation seeking is mapped onto that pre-existing circuitry so that's another one yeah and then you get into the body and sexuality is to speak to that it's to that, it's something we really haven't seen as a vehicle for awakening and for connection other than sort of the obvious ways. But this is something that's been in ancient traditions.

There's the Kama Sutra from India with this Tibetan. The Vajrayana. Vajrayana practices of tantric yoga and i remember being in the in uh tibetan monastery up in northern india was was the with the abbot of the bun tradition which was the pre-buddhist indigenous shamanic tradition of tibet and he was very cute he was probably in his mid-80s and he's a monk right and i'm hanging out with him and we're having lunch and he's so excited to show me this book that he has. And this guy is sort of a sensibly enlightened master.

He was a Dalai Lama's meditation teacher. He brought over the Himalayas, the texts of the Bun tradition and single-handedly rebuilt the whole religion. And he had this book that he wanted to show me which was of the Dalai Lama's secret temple. And behind the Patala Palace in Lhasa in Tibet. Yes, yes, yes. Sitting in the island in the lake?

Yes, there's a lake and then there's this island and only the Dalai Lama could go there. And essentially it was this tantric sexual sort of kind of murals sort of explaining how to wake up through sexuality, which I thought was kind of funny to be in a Buddhist monastery, but they're all into that. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

The seventh Dalai Lama was actually like the Lord Byron of the Himalayas. He was a total dissolute dilettante. He spent all of his time on that little island. Yeah, incredible. So that's sort of a different framework than most of us think about with sexuality. And I want to sort of talk about how do we start to activate that? Because most of us haven't even really touched the surface of our body's capacity to feel, to sense, to experience what we can through sexuality. So I want to come back to that.

But go back to the next one, which is embodiment. Yeah. So, I mean, there's all sorts of, I mean, obviously, the more integrated and aligned and balanced we are in our physical bodies, the healthier and happier we tend to be. There's a whole field of embodied cognition kind of supporting that how our bodies and brains are affects our hearts and minds. And that's fairly straightforward sort of have, you know, most folks don't know've ever had, you know, meat from the butcher, and you kind of see that white, almost filmy layer, right? That's the fascia. And typically for most of us, when we get wounded or injured,

it freezes and bombs to prevent injury. But then when the injury is healed, it kind of stays fused. Right? And keeping those sliding surfaces supple and fluid is really, really helpful for all sorts of health or yoga yeah massage yeah i mean even the big trend these days in theraguns and percussive massage and ways to kind of break up those those tissues so that's a beautiful you know way to take metaphors like i'm centered or i'm balanced or i'm flexible in my life or in my relationships

and actually just make it palpable and physical. I mean, it's so interesting, Jamie, because I just, as a doctor, I see so many people disembodied, not living in their body. We are so gifted with this extraordinary organism to feel, to sense, to do, to move, to play, to experience. And so many people are just so disconnected.

And it makes sense given our trauma culture. I mean, one in four people are sexually abused. And then there's all the other kinds of trauma we experience as children. And so in order to survive, we disconnect from our bodies. This is why somehow someone can get from a normal weight as a kid to 600 pounds. It doesn't happen overnight, right? And how does that happen it's because we're so disconnected and i think these practices um again are are

accessible we don't learn them we we're not taught them they're not part of our culture but they are part of other cultures such as tai chi or qigong or yoga or there's kinds of martial arts or dance or movement that have always been in human culture. But we sort of, you know, we go to clubs and party, but that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then even a couple of sort of big metronomes to our entire sort of physiological systems, as you well know, are the endocannabinoid system, which most folks aren't even aware

of. In fact, I think there was a study maybe about 10 years ago, but it said that 90% of US physicians weren't even kind of conversant in it as a system or its impact. But I mean, there's been phenomenal studies in Israel on that since the 1960s. Rafael Machulam is the pioneering physician. He actually did it with NIH grants from the US for that whole time. And it's the system into which cannabis interacts, but it's not because of cannabis. That's just a lucky- No, the body already had that going for it. Yeah, right, right. The body, I mean, sea sponges from 500 million years ago have an

endocannabinoid system. So the fact is, is that it governs everything from bone growth to stem cells to brain health. I mean, the Israeli military studied it for TBIs, right, for traumatic brain injuries and being able to flood the body in all of those things. There's studies at Cornell Medical Center on the impact on mood and fundamentally, anandamide is what they call the bliss molecule, which is endogenous to human brains, and that is what the endocannabinoid system produces. Yeah. We call it endocannabinoid receptors or opioid receptors. They're actually metabolizing and interacting with molecules that our body already has. Absolutely. And in fact, there's an interesting genetic variant where Nigerians

have an unusually higher amount of anandamide. And there's a couple of other cultures around the world that do. And typically, it reflects in less anxiety, greater fear extinction from adverse events, and overall, a generally higher set point. So that's amazing and has all these profound impacts that virtually none of us are aware of, but it governs huge swaths of our physiology and resilience. And then the vagus nerve, which is becoming increasingly more known through Stephen Porges' work and Bessel van der Kolk and others, but it's largely unknown. And it goes from our brainstem all the way down to our root. And again, is this huge metronome

governing all kinds of internal regulation. And you can improve it by goggling, by singing, by humming, by massaging your throat. There's pacemaker interventions. There's more kind of high-tech pharmacological stuff, but just those alone, just fascia, endocannabinoid system, and vagal nerve tone, you don't have to become an athlete. You don't have to become a yogi. There's nothing extreme about it. It's just learning how to adjust the knobs and levers of our bodies and brains for greater health, greater resilience, and overall higher well-being. And the practices that help you do these things are in the book, right? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, and particularly easy ones like respiration. Here's just ways to become more in charge of your respiratory awareness. And I'm sure that many of your listeners are probably familiar with breathwork. They might have heard of folks like Wim Hof or other folks. Yeah, we've had a number of those folks on the podcast. Progressing the conversation, James Nestor wrote that great book, Breathe. Yeah. But I think people often these days still fixate on a specific version of breathing,

often a hyperventilatory state-shifting one, assume that's what breathwork kind of is, versus hey the goal is to be conversant across the entire range of rate, rhythm, and depth for desired outcome, and then we can kind of just be in our own skin. And then in breathwork, you know, I was a yoga teacher before as a doctor, they called pranayama, which is all these different techniques for modulating your breath and changing your biology through breathing yeah I mean and Aleister Crowley right the sort of infamous

western sex magician who wrote dozens of books and never said anything straight it was always hidden in riddles and verses and all this kind of stuff the one thing he says out loud on the page is pranayama pranayama pranay is pranayama, pranayama, pranayama, pranayama alone is everything.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so powerful. So you have breathing, you have being in your body, you have sexuality, and then you have substances and music. Yeah. So you can kind of consider those depending on how you want to make the argument, right? Ron Siegel at UCLA has talked about the urge for animals to seek non-ordinary states or intoxication is not only ubiquitous across human cultures, it's not only ubiquitous across primates or even mammals, it even goes to birds.

Really? Who seek non-ordinary states of consciousness? What do you mean, they're stripping parakeets? Yes, yes. Absolutely. And fundamentally, he was saying that other than air, food, and sex, you can make a case it's our fourth biological drive. Interesting. So you can either see it as an amplifier. Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist, said, say what you will about drugs, but they offer transcendence on demand.

They actually work in a predictable way, which is part of the reason why the psychedelic renaissance is generating so many radical insights into theories of mind and consciousness is because you can predictably give somebody a molecule, a compound, park them in an fMRI machine or whatever other measurement you're going to be doing, and you will get a repeatable result versus getting a Tibetan, you know, Lama to be chanting or meditating or something harder to pin down or more esoteric. So substances and specifically state shifting and, you know, my inquiry in the book tended to focus on those compounds which were both available and accessible. They weren't either strictly controlled or wildly esoteric. So they were available over the counter, off the shelf by prescription, schedule three,

four compounds, those kinds of things. But also from functional, what do they do? Compounds that typically, some of the most interesting compounds to provide that kind of peak state experience, that kind of death rebirth experience, or those that drop your neural EEG down into delta wave states. Yeah. Which is what you get from meditation or... Well, very esoteric meditation. I mean, into the Vajrayana traditions, a lot of meditations are sort of alpha to theta. I mean, AA, there's no singular meditation. They're all very different, produce different things, as you well know.

And their neuroelectric signatures vary comparably. So deep delta, waking, like delta is typically only accessible to most of us in deep and dreamless sleep. Waking delta is a very rare, pretty esoteric state because it's down to damn near brain dead, so four hertz and less. And that has super intriguing correlates with near-death experiences. So Carl Dyseroth at Stanford has done all that work on optogenetics and the ability to source different states via tweaking things, obviously in mice and that kind of stuff. But in human patients, they had epileptic patients, and they gave them the compound ketamine,

which is a dissociative anesthetic, which induces delta wave states. And then correlated that with a sense of egolessness or ego death and correlated that with antidepressive effects and so what they realized is that they isolated the region of the brain it was coming in a right around three Hertz was was the sort of signature that they were picking up when patients were under the influence of ketamine and reporting a sort of selflessness or an out-of-body experience then what was really interesting is that they were then went of ketamine and reporting a sort of selflessness or an out-of-body experience. Then what was really interesting is that they then went back in and electrically stimulated

that same three hertz signal in that same region without the drug, without ketamine, and patients were still reported the same out-of-body experience. And then as a result of that work, another group started researching nitrous oxide for its potential- Wapping gas. Yes. Exactly what folks use at dentists, what doulas and midwives use to ease childbirth, that compound. Because they were like, oh, maybe there is an analog for nitrous oxide as an antidepressant also. And it has actually proven out as well. And then the anesthesiology team at MIT did research on nitrous oxide and were shocked to find that it actually doesn't, not only does it induce delta wave sleep or state for three to 12 minutes after a 50-50 oxygen nitrous oxide gas blend infusion, so wearing a mask and breathing it, but for three

to 12 minutes, you get double the amplitude delta wave oscillations in the brain before the brain then normalizes out. So you get all of these experiences and you realize, oh, delta wave activity is arguably the signature of a sort of quote unquote near death experience, right? AKA what has been, as you were saying in the wisdom traditions, a death rebirth initiation protocol. So you're like, okay, so those are potentially super interesting because always it's not just that, you know, this is like that old movie Flatliners, you know,

with all the med students, right? Go into the basement and like take turns paddling each other. And there's always the cautionary tale of don't play God, right? Right. But we are close to getting to do that in more controlled and more responsible ways now. And the interior content of those experiences are often quite profound and provide as much access to the healing,

to the antidepressive, anti-anxiety effects as the physiological experience itself. And they can help heal traumas? Well, I mean, there's strong evidence to suggest that, and I just don't think we are anywhere near teasing this apart. And you and I talked about this a lunch of like isolating factors. What of even more broadly, all of the research into the psychedelic renaissance, whether that's ayahuasca, MDMA, ibogaine, psilocybin, the compounds that are under a fairly intensive comprehensive study. It's hard at this stage to really separate out what is pure

neurochemistry resulting in decrease in depressive symptoms, anxiety, et cetera, whatever they're studying, versus what is the interior content, the ineffability, the mysterious nature, the profundity, whatever it might be. Once you see God, how can you turn back and not see it, right? Yeah. And I don't know if we'll ever truly unravel which tail is wagging which dog on that. Yeah. So in the service, in the sort of service of this sort of conversation that, you know, there are some subs you talked about that are accessible and legal, whether it's ketamine or nitrous oxide, many states, cannabis, as sort of doorways to help us

access these altered states, which you say are non-ordinary states of consciousness that humans and primates and other animals seek, which is actually interesting to me. And I think we're all looking for that, whether it's we pray or whether we dance or whether we listen to music or whether we take substances or addictions. They're all attempts to change our state, right? Because it's somehow disconnected from something that makes us feel whole and complete. But these are sort of in a way more adaptive and more therapeutic strategies than often we've used. And you've sort of codified them in a way that is very interesting. And you actually created a research project to look at

these things in a more objective way. And I'd love for you to talk about this research project because essentially you took people and put them through a three-month program and measured objective scientific metrics to look at the changes in their state and the change in their biology and the change in their psychology. And you discovered some pretty interesting things. So I'd love you to sort of share about this concept of hedonic engineering, which is sort of what the larger frame of this conversation is. It's not about hedonism. It's about how do you activate these altered states, which help us then be more connected to ourselves, be more connected to our partners, be more connected to the social fabric in which we live. And how did you sort of create these experiences for people? What were the elements of them and what were the findings

of the study? Yeah. I mean, it was really interesting because as I was doing this research, I basically just started just keeping my eyes and ears open for any published research that was indicating any interaction with the body and the brain in the realms of neuroanatomy neuroelectricity neurochemistry so what was going on and where was it going on what parts of the brain was was it being informed by um cardiac state or coherence or condition um endocrine system uh any any sort of just how you know does does any intervention positively inform or help boost the um the metrics of well-being and all the way into non-ordinary states. And if you sort of play that fill in the blank bingo, you end up in kind of

this unavoidable place of sort of sexy biohacking. Because most biohacking is about what pills to take, what headset to wear. It's very kind of geeky, very technological, and often consumer-driven. People advancing the biohacking movement tend to want to sell you the thing that they tell you solves all the bits. So basically, we wanted to see if, as we were putting together this chart or matrix of all the different ways to affect the elements of our body and brain to create healthy outcomes, we sort of ended up in this strange or curious spot, which was sort of sexy biohacking. You're like, well, it seems like if you're really looking to intervene in our bodily systems, the sexual arousal pleasure centers are a sort of helpful to non-negotiable

part of it, which puts this into the realm of consensual couples practices. So it's not that that was in any way unique or specific. It was just evolution through the kitchen sink at pair bonding. And back to John Lilly's original insight, our sexual arousal networks map one-to-one with our pleasure centers. So it just seemed the easiest and simplest way was to have pre-existing couples come in being willing to practice some version of a kind of a sexual fitness protocol. And we were drawing quite heavily on Kinsey Research Institute fellows, Dr. Helen Fisher and Dr. Nicole Prowse's work, because both of them have gone deeply into the neuroscience and

psychology of arousal and then even physical and psychological healing. This is Prousy's work especially via orgasm and via sexual arousal. She's actually doing work on women's orgasm as prescription pharmaceutical effectively, right, to alleviate pain, anxiety, insomnia, you know, inflammation, all sorts of things. So you realize, wow, you know, how interesting, you know, and again, cheap and accessible to everybody. So that's kind of where we were starting. And we also wanted to track not just subjective reports, you know, did I like this? Did it feel, am I happier or sadder?

But actually try and create, you know, use metrics that are available for the entire academic research community, including citizen science. And so we took a couple of metrics that are sort of gold standards in the fields for peak states. If you were conducting a sort of a sexual yoga practice, are you accessing non-dual, non-ordinary transcendent states? If so, how how often how deeply as well as day-to-day kind of flow states and how much is it shifting your ease and and focus and concentration in daily daily life and then also on the trauma on the healing a self-assessed trauma score so how much deep you know how many long-term adverse life events have I had? How deeply did I impact my day-to-day, my emotional resilience, those kinds of things, as well as biometric, because sometimes we're not great self-reporters, especially of traumatic

events. So how do we deal with that micro PTSD? We were talking about earlier, just my nervous system is fragged and fibrillating. So we just used biometric devices. We're both wearing an Oura ring. Oura ring, yeah. Heart rate variability. Right. And measuring overnight heart rate variability is a sign of how well balanced is my nervous system.

And then also connection. Because again, back to evolution, throwing the kitchen sink at pair bonding, it's like that's the one relationship in our lives, that and the children that result. That evolution has strongly, strongly, strongly encoded us to do well. And so if we can't figure it out at that level, it probably just gets harder and weaker downstream, right? With strangers, with anybody else. I was sort of thinking about this, talking to a friend of mine about who's an example of a healthy relationship these days. It's hard to find. Yeah. And it's kind of a raw deal, right, that many couples get into, which is, and this is back

to Helen Fisher's work, right? All the original hormonal imperative to mate, the testosterone and the endoestrogen, and then all of the bells and whistles, the fireworks of early attraction, the dopamine and the norepinephrine and you know in and the drop in serotonin all those things kind of fizzle over time as you then have a child you then get into the grind sleep interruptions the hassle yeah of domestic life so the question there is if you engage in a deliberate sexual fitness protocol not not not something esoteric not even something romantic just saying, this is an

essential part of our nervous systems and physiology. When we cycle it, we are healthier, and we're also signaling to our body, I'm still alive, I still matter, don't start phasing me out yet. Does it improve connectivity? Does it improve intimacy with a partner? And does it improve your overall affect or positivity on life so you do all those things and again you know now we're wading into you know delicate waters there's probably not a more intimate and strongly held sense of like life than my sexuality how good i am at it or not at it how do i you know and and what do we do behind closed doors so we weren't going to be overly prescriptive.

So we just said, here are some basic protocols to do on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis. Here's the thing that we want, the baselines that we just want everybody to engage in how they see fit. And then kind of gave everybody your Lego set, gave everybody a menu and said, here's how you increase nitric oxide. Here's how you boost vagal nerve tone here's how you engage your endocannabinoid system here's how you do all the things that we've been discussing and there's kind of mild medium and spicy you choose and under the advisement of a functional medicine medicine doctor right you guys can engage any of those combinations as you see fit yeah and just report back on that in your subjective logs. So over 12 weeks

then the results were, I mean fundamentally, an increase in connection, a decrease in heart rate or increase in heart rate variability, meaning a decrease in stress, and a boost in mystical states and particularly for women. So women had higher self-reported trauma at the beginning, but they also had the largest delta or positive improvement over time. And a majority of subjects reported that during that practice with their partner, they experienced the highest mystical state or sacred state of the sublime that they'd experienced in their lives wow and then the end results you know outperformed talk therapy and even in you know um sort of isolated psychedelic therapy as well and it would make sense big change it's a huge change since that's the kind of lead candidate right now for addressing our social ills and the beauty of it is that it does it at that level of pair bonded family unit so any benefits that an individual experience goes into their

partner goes into their children if they have them family unit and it can hopefully radiate out from there so it's very much a kind of the most grassroots way of DIY healing and integration that I've seen because Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, I'm sure again, many of your audience are familiar. Rick and I were at an event on a panel and then we were talking in between breaks and I just wanted to kind of catch up. I was like, what's happening with the phase three trials? What's the latest and greatest? And what's happening on the neuroscience? And he said, yeah, basically what we have found in our studies is that the benefits, I mean, a couple of interesting things. One was, is that moderate

dose MDMA, 85 milligrams versus like 150 was actually better for the psychotherapeutic. So it was actually more helpful not to simply just get love bombed and just kind of be in a puddle of goo, just fired up and stoked on the world, but actually kind of a threshold level that allowed people to access traumatic memories, process them with a therapist, rework the memories, and then kind of put them back on the shelves of their mind and then he said yeah that the high prolactin oxytocin vasopressin signature that we're seeing in those patients where they're having such positive results the closest analog we can see is the post-orgasmic state and that's what led me to nicole prowsey's work where she was doing the orgasm as prescription pharmaceutical you're like, why on earth isn't everybody across cultures around the world,

why don't we all have some sexual fitness practice? Yeah. Right? It doesn't- The only time I've ever heard that term sexual fitness, it's a very new idea. Yeah. And what you're doing is you're sort of stacking a lot of things from a lot of different areas of exploration and human therapy and consciousness and neuroscience and sort of putting them all together in a cocktail,

which has never really been done before in an intentional way. I think people have probably played with it on the margins, but, and, you know, what you've discovered was something quite profound. And I think, you know, you're using the doorways that the human body already has for activating these states, whether it's nitric oxide pathways or whether it's vagal nerve, which is your relaxation system or your endorphins and dopamine system, which are your pleasure molecules or oxytocin, which is the molecule that's released when a woman's breastfeeding or when you're making love, testosterone, and adding in all these plant-based or other psychoactive compounds that there's

cannabis or ketamine or GHB or 2CB or MDMA or things that are actually kind of emerging as molecules. They're not necessarily natural molecules. They're kind of man-made molecules, but they can activate some of these states and pathways and various kinds of other psychological therapies. And I'm putting them all together in a set of simple practices that are safe, accessible, scalable for the most part. Not some of these compounds are hard to get, but that help people change the way they think they feel they see themselves they see their place in the world and kind of create meaning in a way where there was a lack of meaning we're in a crisis of meaning and that that's really what recapture the rapture i think is about is about how do we recapture

meaning and how do we capture connection how do we capture intimacy with ourselves and each other and our world so i think it's kind of brilliant. And I'd love you to sort of talk about what you actually had these couples do. Because it's kind of, you know, it's kind of sounds to most people, I think a little odd and strange and weird, but actually it's actually pretty interesting. And some of these practices are ancient practices too. So can you talk about what the instructions were exactly and what these couples actually did? Sure. And obviously for anybody who is a student of Neo-Tantra or from originating in Eastern traditions or Western sex magical schools, this will seem remarkably tame and sort of beginner level. But the intention was to make it accessible to folks. And so we borrowed from Nicole Prowsey's work where she had been studying subjects doing 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation of the female identified patient or practitioner.

That's kind of oming, what's been called oming? It has been. I mean, that's how it was branded and then very problematically kind of captured in that space. But yes, fundamentally, the idea of just simple, no frills, not as foreplay, just as kind of almost a, you know, almost think of it as sort of tactile medication, you know, just stimulation of the high nerve endings and concentrations in a woman's clitoris, and just using that to create the neurochemical cascade on a recurring basis on a daily daily basis and just having that as a baseline practice and then engaging in as we discussed all the body bodily elements so Thai massage which is a very beautiful practice with two partners where you can kind of you basically yard on each other's limbs so you're kind of you know you're pulling and providing

pulling traction and doing all these things to kind of open and expand the joint capsules lengthen ligaments and tendons and musculature it's a very nice kind of grooming practice like partner stretching like yeah good old bonobos you know like grooming each other we've stopped doing that right and yet it's essential so that using foam rollers rollout tools ther percussion, massage, those kinds of things on a daily basis. And then two 60-minute sessions a week, typically Tuesdays, Thursdays, where you would engage in all of that and then leading into 30 to 45 minutes of basically partner erotic play into potentially sexual intercourse. But just doing it, if folks are familiar with like the coital alignment technique, which is a very specific adaptation of the missionary position where the male will be on top and can sort of push forward.

So it's pubic bone on pubic bone. And you just have that experience, but then engaging in focus movement and breath practice. So it's not kind of like wild mayhem. It's just can we create this bodily hookup? Can we stimulate our nervous systems in these ways? And can we breathe in ways that are focused and intentional? And then see what results. So it's not like romantic.

It's not like the end game of just having an orgasm. It's actually... No, it was just truly that sexual fitness practice. And then once a week, ideally a sort of self-identified Sabbath-like experience, just some half a day where you kind of turn off the phones and close the doors and dedicate to reconnecting and potentially including hyperventilatory breathwork. To include breathwork as part of this too.

Yep. Because that goes back to the respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances, music, right? So the whole suite of of interventions and and then um potentially once a month to once depending you know where people's tolerance for intensity and able to stably hold it you could introduce cannabinoids so edible cannabis and or smokable cannabis if that was congruent and or available legally in your area. Yeah. And then potentially breathwork with, and this was functional med doc overseen, which

would have been oxygen and or carbogen and or nitrous oxide. So you could begin breathwork practices with, instead of just breathing the available air, actually specifically choosing to supersaturate your lungs with different gas blends, a little bit how scuba divers will blend different gas blends. And then they were open to choosing that up to and including oxytocin ketamine nasal spray, which would be a sort of a primer to put you in a sort of, ironically at low dosage like that, a sort of embodied embodied disembodied state. So it almost serves as a disinhibitor and kind of a sensorium, as well as the oxytocin potentially increasing feelings of connectivity. There's some question of blood brain barrier crossing and absorption

and bioavailability of that, but that's still to be determined. And then everybody just kind of kept journals over the 12 weeks and reported, I mean, a number of people reported, not surprisingly, if you're doing this with a practice partner and you're intensifying the frequency and the consistency and even the intensity of your sexual fitness practice together, good things and bad things are going to come up. You're both going to have higher highs, like, oh my gosh, we've reclaimed our love and passion. We feel like teenagers again, you know, like you've reanimated the polarity

of the early lust and attraction phases, even in a longer term relationship. But then also running into the rocks of, you know, a little bit like the MAPS research with trauma sufferers, right? That idea of like, oh, I'm now in that safe and secure connected state. So some part of my system is saying, okay,

now's a time that it's okay to bring up a hard thing, a deep thing. And it could be relational issues, past things. It could even be predate the relationship. It could be adolescent traumas, early adult traumas, often sexually relationally coded. And it can even include sort of access to almost transpersonal senses, all women everywhere, or all men. And people start interacting with that. And similar to the MAPS PTSD studies, as partners took those memories

off the shelf, as it were, and explored them, discussed them, in the state of safety, connection, belonging, right? The vasopressin, oxytocin, you know, some of those kind of states, they were able to rework them and release them. Now, there were a couple of couples that actually ejected out of the study. Because? Well, we started with 12 couples. We ended with 10 because they came up

against anything from just life compatibility and fit. They simply weren't able to stick with the program to another couple that it uncorked harder stuff than they were able to deal with themselves. Yeah. And so that's also really important to know that it's not simply a Willy Wonka ticket to the chocolate factory. It is a very intense, I kind of think of it as sort of NC-17 fifth class rock climbing. You know, it's not for kids and the falls can kill you, right? But it doesn't mean that we blame it on the mountain if somebody goes up there unprepared and falls off. You teach it, you train it, you have systems and safety and backup and a traveling partner. And if you do that, then you can stand on top of a beautiful,

beautiful peak at sunrise. Yeah, that's amazing. So basically you've sort of unveiled a way for us to access healing states through sexuality that incorporate multiple modalities from body work to breath work to substances to our own sexual energies actually help us release things that keep us from ourselves and from each other in a way that heals trauma and has the potential to sort of create a greater healing within the culture, it sounds like.

Yeah, and I mean, and if you stay with that practice, it sort of spins up like electromagnets, you know, basically where the rotation of the copper wire on the metal poles creates magnetism. So you can literally learn to make love. You can engage the protocols that create the neurochemical signatures and profiles of everything from lust to attraction to long-term love. And it's literally practice-based.

When you stop the practices, it powers down and the polarity dissolves. Well, it's like fitness, right? Stop exercising and you get unfit, right? 100%. Well, it's like fitness, right? Stop exercising and you get unfit, right? A hundred percent. And that's really one of the biggest unlocks that a lot of the subjects noted in their journals, which was, oh my gosh, like committing to sexual fitness as ironclad practice. I don't wait till my teeth are shining and I'm smiling to floss my teeth. I floss every day because I know. I don't wait till I feel like a million bucks and I can bench press a car to go to the gym,

right? These are long-term incremental practices. And that was one of the biggest insights, I think, that a lot of the subjects had was like, oh my gosh, this is game-changing to commit to this practice whether we want to or not. And then the question is, is now my cup overflows. Yeah, sometimes you don't feel like going to the gym, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to have at your nexus a thriving, stable, love-filled relationship where my nervous system is defragged, where I'm integrated, where I'm connected to my closest quote-unquote stakeholders is a great place to start from. And then the question is,

can we take the dyads or the pairs and turn those into dozens, a group of people that are close and connected? And can those dozens connect with dozens of dozens? And can we actually just one pod at a time expand that kind of care and connection and commitment to each other more broadly through the culture?

Yeah, wouldn't that be interesting? And that would, I think, help us, like you said, rethink God, sex, and death in a world that's lost its mind. Jamie, this is quite amazing and i think uh for those interested in the details of the study and what they did and how they did it the book is a great explanation of those uh which is available everywhere you get your books or you can go to recapturetherapture.com i'd love to talk about lastly before we close something you wrote about in the book called the ethical guidelines that can help us our own personal

explorations and there's a whole bunch of them. Do the obvious, don't do stupid shit, let the mystery stay the mystery. Can you kind of unpack those for us? Yeah. Well, that was actually a subset when we were talking about meaning 3.0, right? And how do we make that available to everybody around the world so that they can build their own? In the same way that like the Harvard Sacred Design Lab was like, hey, healing, inspiration, and connection, make sure you don't miss those. There's also the sense of, well, what were the core elements? What's the toolbox? It allows us to get the healing, inspiration, and connection.

Yeah, for building meaning 3.0. And it sort of felt like you need a metaphysics. You need some way to pass the numinous or the sacred and not get unstuck in woolly or magical thinking. And as we can see these days with everybody from anti-vax conspiracies to QAnon conspiracies to lizard people and various, various things, we're not very good at unpacking non-ordinary states these days. So having a clear and concise metaphysics is essential. But then we also need an ethics, right? We need a way of governing what ought I do. And up till now, organized religion, at least in the Western world, is Abrahamic. Ten commandments.

Ten commandments. Thou shalt and thou shalt not. And those were binary, and they were moral, and they were absolutist. And there was a reason for that, which is if you left it up to the judgment or discernment of the everyman, the everyman was going to bugger it up nearly every time. So they were very, very strict. And they coded for the lowest common denominator. Yeah. common denominator. But an arguable distinction between morality and ethics is morality is absolutist and ethics is, it depends, it's situational, right? It's not the act, it's your relationship to the act that determines its rightness or wrongness, right? And so instead

of the 10 commandments, we just kind of playfully said, well, how about the 10 suggestions, right? Can we have a list have a checklist that's not absent? How many tablets is that? But can we play with this in just sort of here are known issues, here is kind of collective wisdom on going down this path where you're not shunning ecstatic states, you're not outsourcing healing, but you're going to take these under your own advisement, and what are some good ways to proceed? So having a set of ethics feels really important. And then the last two were scriptures. What are the stories that inspire us and provide

us how we ought to live? And then ultimately deities as well, which is like, how do we invoke some living relationship to the deities? And you spoke of the Tibetan traditions, right? They have cultivating wrathful and benevolent deities, right? They have that sense of, I'm going, you know, Marshall McLuhan's, you become what you behold, right? So that idea of meditating on an articulation of the divine, the Catholic tradition has veneration of the saints, right? There's lots of instances where we, and these it's it's the kardashians and you

know and tiktok influences right we have them on our walls or on our screens so the idea is like can we actually create healthy relationships to all five of those things and the and the 10 suggestions was just kind of the the guidelines to try and help people not put it in the ditches for what are they gosh well i mean you do, I mean, you've got the list. Do the obvious. I'll cue you. Do the obvious is basically, you know, sleep well, move often, get outside, eat real foods, mostly plants, not too much, you know, Michael Pollan 101, right? Make love, be grateful.

The entire self-optimization movement is arguably tripping over itself to spend so much time and so many dollars over-investing in the perfectibility and the fine grain, this and that, and the next diet, the paleo, then it's vegan, then it's something, something. Just do the obvious, the things that have always worked for humans, and then you'll be alive and vital and healthy. And every culture's had this stuff. So let's not overthink that, and let's get it online,

and then go back to being helpful. The next one's do stupid shit. Don't do stupid shit, right? Because no matter what, if we're saying we're not under the shackles of traditional meaning 1.0, we're under our own recognizance to play with all of these techniques, which up until now have been highly esoteric, tightly controlled. So if we're open sourcing all this stuff, that comes with the caveat of don't do stupid shit. So don't end up in a body bag, a cult, a mental institution, divorce court, caused by any of those things. I did the latter a bunch of times. Well, yeah, but I mean, obviously these things happen as life events, but don't do it in your pursuit of putting all this stuff together. And the let the mystery stay the mystery is just very much, at least in the transformational scene these days, there's an awful lot of kind of carpetbaggers of catharsis where everybody is telling you their journey.

Everybody is reciting in excruciating detail all of their breakthroughs, their last profound teary session, what it all means, what their star tribe is saying, whatever, whatever. And it's kind of like, look, the numinous or the non-dual is infinite in all directions, and whatever we're just bungee jumping into at this date is just one pinpoint bound by the prison house of language, selfhood, identity. Don't get too wrapped up in your own story and nonsense.

So let the burning bush burn. Yeah. And then let's get back to awe and humility and wonder. And what's 80-20 woken to broken? Well, that's the one we were speaking of earlier, which is just that idea of just have this peak state to remember what you've forgotten, because that's a fairly common subjective experience. And typically, it gives you a punch list of the places you're still broken. Go mend yourself to the point where you're functional and helpful. Yeah. And then instead of devoting all your excess time and money to chasing the imagined long tail of your perfectibility and getting your head above the clouds, turn around and help

someone who's just struggling at their head above the water. Yeah. Yeah. And be helpful because arguably, even if you're selfish, right? Helper's high. head above the clouds, turn around and help someone who's just struggling at their head above the water. Yeah, yeah. And be helpful because arguably, even if you're selfish, right? Helper's high is still one of the best ways to provide life satisfaction. So if you're missing that final bit- I mean, altruism hits the same receptors as cocaine or heroin or dopamine. Absolutely. And there's so many of our brothers and sisters that need help.

So if you're able-bodied, show up joyfully. And what's the one about F your journey? Oh, yeah. I got dragged to a hot yoga class in Austin. And there was this- What's wrong with hot yoga? I love hot yoga. No, it's fine.

It's fine. I would rather, I'm a cold weather athlete. So I prefer to be someplace, I don't have the water in the mountains. But anyway, I was in it and I was feeling a little salty because I was dragged there. And the teacher was like, well, when my journey began three years ago, and this neon sign just popped in my head of like, f*** your journey. Because A, I was captive in a hot yoga class,

but I was also just thinking how much time we spend belaboring the stages and steps of our own process. And if we are fortunate enough to find ourselves in a flow state, in the deep now, in a place of grace, and what the Greeks would have called kairos, that sort of sacred time, then everything that got us there is redeemed in the unfolding. You look back to divorced parents or abusive dad or whatever you look back to the bullies in grade school you're like oh my gosh they were all part of my road to get to this ineffable moment which is dropping me to my knees and gratitude therefore you

know st. Paul said he said love keeps no record of wrong yeah right so if we get to that place then it all comes out in the wash. So shut the up about it. It actually reminds me of the Buddhist parable of crossing the river to get to the other shore of enlightenment. And when you cross the river with a boat, you don't carry the boat on your back for the rest of your journey. So very similar.

And the other one is do the hard thing. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of times when people get initial access to peak states, and that could be something as simple as a performance state like flow states, playing basketball or music or whatever it might be, or more profound breakthrough states, there is a sense of ease. There's a sense of effortlessness there's a sense that everything is unfolding without anybody at the wheel or according to plan and so people can kind of get hooked on oh if I'm not feeling it if it's not easy and effortless then I'm not gonna do it and I think actually what you really want is some version of a sort of stoic Taoism mmm which is

the Taoist part is kind of go with the flow. So wherever you can, don't fight the forces of nature, life, reality. But on the other hand, there are times where you got to dig like a son of a bitch, right? To get through that closeout set of waves. And there's a time for active, aggressive striving in the face of adversity. And the ironic thing, I mean, the Mark Twain things, if you've got to eat two frogs in a day, eat your ugliest one first, right? So there's that sense of this, yeah, I think stoic Taoism really kind of embodies, I guess, where I've come down, which is, you know, go

with the river of life wherever you can and dig like a son of a b**** when you have to. The next of the ethical guidelines you talk about is never lose the one yeah well i mean i think a lot of people are losing the plot right so they have non-dual experiences or or peak state experiences and they will they effectively just go off the reservation they sort of lose contact with last known point of shared reality and consensus opinion or reality, right? So they start espousing all kinds of whack-ass, to put it technically, right? So what I was thinking about is both music and action sports, where a musician,

right, you've got the beat, you've got the chorus, you've got the drummer and the basic bass player and then a break comes and either the guitarist or the percussionist or somebody goes off on a solo right and the more they tease it the more they lose the one right to go off on their rift but then come back and nail the one the more satisfying the solo is right but if they've then just lost it and they don't come back after the whole thing collapses. And the same in action sports. In martial arts, it's your hara or dantian, right? It's the center, sort of two fingers down and two fingers in from your belly button. If you think about surfers,

snowboarders, half pipe skiers, everything we saw in the Winter Olympics and most Red Bull films, it's athletes deliberately flipping, spinning, their center around the one or the pulse in this case in a bodily sense and then they stomp the landing of course if you lose the one upside down in space whatever it is you eat shit and it's not nearly as fun so we all want to tweak what is the beat what is the pulse and the more we tweak it the further afield we can go and land it the more joyful and delightful it is further afield we can go and land it, the more joyful and delightful it is. And the same can be said of our metaphysical explorations. So for me, not now to kind of stack a metaphor. Tie that back to never lose the one metaphysically.

Yeah. Well, for me, it's a little bit like now I think of like mountain guiding using a compass in a whiteout, right? Like you can go anywhere you want beyond the back country access gates at your ski area, you know, into the back country, provided you can navigate back to that gate. If you just go out there and you just start wandering like, woohoo, we're doing it just like in the movies, then you're lost and you're a casualty, right? But if you can say we're going out into dangerous terrain, we're going out into uncertain spaces, but I know how to reverse my tracks and get back to the gate and back to civilization and back to safety and consensus reality, then I have permission to wander further afield and potentially even to

help or guide others. And so that to me is the idea of just, you know, you can go anywhere you want and you can think anything you can think of, provided you never lose the one. Amazing. And the next ethical guideline is it's not that either or either. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, one of the classic terms, and we're seeing piles of it these days, is apophenia, right? Where people get an excess amount of dopamine in their systems. And that could be their own chemical balances or imbalances.

It could be a state experience. It could be whatever's going on. And then start seeing patterns everywhere. And they engage in a sort of false certainty. And it shows up in schizophrenics. And it also shows up in conspiracy theorists in particular. So when people have, outside of wisdom traditions, without a wise teacher smacking them down and saying,

it's not that, go and chop some more wood and do your thing. It's not that either. The idea of people often fixate on the glimpse they have seen and they experience apophenia. They get that false certainty that they have seen the light, the truth, the way. And just to remember that it's not that either. Anytime you mistake a lowercase truth for a capital T truth, you screwed the pooch.

Right? So just that idea of take your insights for what they are, honor them, cherish them, but keep going. Yeah. That sort of reminds me of the Buddhist parable. Again, another, this stuff is not new. Yeah. Don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.

Yeah. So we have a lot of ways to get there, but we often kind of get fixed on the technique or the vehicle or whatever instead of actually the thing itself. Practice resurrection? Yeah, well, that one- That sounds exciting. Well, again, that's Wendell Berry's phrase

from that same poem we were talking about earlier. So that's how it ends. And to me, it was such an evocative phrase. Because again, I mean, here we are. It just seems like we're just giving lots of love to the Tibetans today. But that whole notion of they spend three, four, five, seven decades just trying to prepare for a conscious death. And if at that moment of dying, they can stay awake to it, not get suckered into the bardos, right? Then they can step off the wheel of incarnation. And you're like, okay, that is a shit pile of effort for

one at bat. And if you slip on a banana peel, get hit by the proverbial bus, you might've blown it. So I think Wendell Berry's injunction to practice resurrection, what does it mean to die to my preferences, to die to my stories, to die to my pleasure, die to it mean to die to my preferences, to die to my stories, to die to my pleasure, die to my pain, die to my history, die to my rightness, die to any of it in any given moment? Can I then go from marching along in this chronological life of ours, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain? Can I yield to annihilation in that moment? And that whole, all those practices that we were talking about those death rebirth practices right are not just metaphorical they're literal

you know back to that Delta wave EEG like almost brain death like if I can experience any of those those moments of dying I have a chance in that spaciousness, right, to choose a different pathway and or to potentially bear witness to or, yeah, I would say bear witness to a different, deeper, and richer way of being in the world. Yeah. But it's hard. And the trick with dying, even if it has been simulated in stages, you have it a few times, you're like, oh, I got the hang of this.

And my experience, at least, is it is incredibly hard and it happens out of your white knuckled hands every single time. And if it didn't, it wouldn't actually be dying. So we have to practice it. Yeah. I mean, I think, again, to Ben's, I have a model for this called dream yoga, which is lucid dreaming. And it's a different state of consciousness to where you're awake in your dream and you're able to direct your dream and

access states of knowledge and experience and consciousness you can. And it's their practice for dying, essentially. And the last is above all, be kind, which seems obvious, but unpack that. Well, I mean, that was Aldous Huxley's, you know, among his dying words on his deathbed with his wife, Laura. And in all of the neuroscience and the fancy waistcoats and all of the fascinating, you know, cultural anthropology and the studies of this and all of the excitement and possibilities that we each might experience

as we kind of go down these roads of discovery um i think it's just kind of easy to forget that essential you know if that the the hopi grandmothers would have had a phrase for when the men were kind of getting too big for their britches and talking too much around the fire which would be yes but does it grow corn does it grow corn right is this helpful does this help our people yeah is this life affirming is it life sustaining and the being kind part is again in a world that feels increasingly unkind and there's so much lack of care and concern to remember that um you know and again this is that houston smith the the famous comparative religious scholar he said he said may your passing illuminations become abiding light.

And that just feels like a really good kind of way between Huxley and Smith. to be more loving and more compassionate and potentially more courageous, not just for ourselves, but on behalf of the least of our brothers and sisters in a world that really needs it. It feels like a good place to. It reminds me of that book, everything I learned in kindergarten or something about basic rules for being a human.

Playground rules. Share, be kind, be nice. Yeah. Put things back where you found them, leave it better than you found it. Women and children first, which can sound chauvinistic until you realize it's actually, be kind, be nice. Yeah, put things back where you found them, leave it better than you found it. Women and children first, which can sound chauvinistic until you realize it's actually, you know,

caregivers and their dependents first. If you're a freewheeling, healthy, able-bodied person, you know, these rules work for standing in line at the fire department during a fire evacuation or a drought or an interruption in service. This works in aid camps and refugee camps. These are hardcore, instilled, cross-cultural sets of values and fairness and reciprocity of how we do this thing. We know how to do it. It's just getting back to

the basics. Wow. Well, Jamie, thank you for an incredible conversation, unpacking the ways in which we've lost meaning, how to get back to meaning, how to recapture the rapture through both tools that are easily accessible to all of us and by simple principles for living that I think can take us back to a better world, which we desperately need right now because it's very sort of unsettling to be at the end of the fire hose of the crises that are our global environment right now. And this is sort of a breath of hope and fresh air and possibility. And I invite everybody to take a look. You can go get books wherever you get your books, Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind.

And it's going to be recapturing your mind. So Jamie, thank you for the work you do. I can't wait to see what's next. And it's been great having you on the podcast. Yeah, man. Awesome to chat. And for those of you listening, if you love this conversation and you know people who are struggling with finding meaning and how to recapture that and recapture their connection

to what matters, share this with them. I bet they'd love to hear it. Leave a comment. Have you found your way in this crazy world? We'd love to hear. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite

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