The Joe Rogan Experience - #646 - Dr. Dan Engle & Aubrey Marcus

Episode Date: May 11, 2015

Dr. Dan Engle, MD is a practicing psychiatrist, board certified in psychiatry and neurology. Aubrey Marcus is writer, entrepreneur, and adventurer. Some of his writings and experiences can be found on his website, WarriorPoet.us, as well as links to his latest venture, Onnit Labs.

We're live? Like, just like that? Seems like there should be some sort of, like, a chime we ring. Ding! Just a big gong, a five-footer. Not a big gong. Big gongs are obnoxious. It's because you're just going to talk. It'd be a big gong if you're going to have, like, a fucking Cirque du Soleil experience and a bunch of dudes come out flipping with fire and do fucking juggle flames.

Or a kumite. A good kumite. Yes, a good kumite. Boom. Dr. Dan, you got a notebook over there, dude? What are you doing on here? Well, I saw you guys with all these notepads. I just wanted to make sure I'm prepared.

Is that what's going on, man? Well, 27 years of school, I get used to taking notes. Dr. Dan Engel here with Aubrey motherfucking Marcus in the house. And we decided to sit down and talk. Shoot the shit. We just got done doing 200 and some fucking degrees below zero cryotherapy sessions. Your first time ever in the full body one full head immersion yeah it's the real one right real deal yeah you can only get those in

a couple of places right now that's that's ultimately going to be what it is it's going to be the difference being the other ones they pour it's like nitrogen all over your skin like a frozen nitrogen sort of thing but you can't breathe it that's why your head is above but this what they do is they freeze the air instead and you go in there and it's just fucking ungodly insanely cold and you wear a mouth like a surgeon's mask over your face and earmuffs and gloves and those rubber it's the only time we're allowed to wear rubber crocs, those croc clog things and not feel like an asshole. Yeah. But what did you experience with that?

You know, I think for me a key part is getting that upper half of my body in the tank. You know, we haven't won it on it. That's awesome for any kind of inflammation in my legs, my knees, my, you know, my hips is really good. But then getting that like so that cold's getting into your eye sockets and the cold's getting into the temples of your head. I found it really relaxing, actually. A lot of people think it gives a lot of energy. I found it, like, deeply relaxing. After you got out, you were really relaxed.

That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, everybody seems to have a different reaction to it. Robin was talking about that after it was over. He was saying that some people feel like an endorphin crash at the end of the day. Like you have this big rush when you get out of there and at the end of the day you're very tired, which I found really weird because I don't get that at all. I get out of there and I'm like, I feel fucking great. I'm addicted to that thing. Yeah, I bet.

Your first time doing it ever? Have you done the one that they have it on it? Nope. Today was my debut. What'd you guys do? Two and a half minutes like pussies? Is that what happened? I mean, two and a half hours at least. I don't know. It's a long time, I think. Yeah, it's three minutes in, a few minutes out, and then three minutes back in.

It's a great way to start the day. It's very addictive, though. If you had one near your house man you get addicted it's more addictive than the one with your head above it for whatever reason because there's something about like you survive it you know and like there's like this weird like once you get out of there it's like yes i got i'm back to yes yes he did it yes yes yes yes yes yes yes you know you start fucking hot footing around the around the room. Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. You know, it just, you feel like you survived,

and you want to go back and do it again. Yeah, there's a crucible element to it, where it's like, this is something I accomplished, for sure. I feel that. What'd you get out of it, Dan? I watched my system go into the survival mode. Yeah. Like, that last minute.

Well, as a doctor, like, it must have been interesting, knowing the functions of the body intimately. Yeah, I'm always curious about health recovery, the crucible experience, putting ourselves in these really extreme situations. And in that last minute, the first one was pretty much a piece of cake. The second one, I was cold straight off. And in that last minute, the first one was pretty much a piece of cake. The second one, I was cold straight off.

And in that last minute, I went in these involuntary shakes. And I'm watching my body just jump around like a little race car inside. I'm like, whew, maybe I can just work on tuning this down a little bit. And I'm like zinning, dropping, doing whatever. Jimi Hendrix was playing in the background. And nothing was working. And it was just like hyperdrive. So I'm just watching this thing going like trippy. So it was this like significant mind-body separation.

I had no control over that experience. So as far as being put in the crucible, like the survival experience, like when I came out, I definitely felt us like I had crossed some kind of threshold of an experience that I wouldn't had otherwise have you ever done the ice bath you know those those things we climb into the thing that's filled with ice and water those are miserable more miserable right I think they're more miserable yeah because your toes get to another level of frozen as well it's a wet just soaks it really soaks in gets deep into your bones yeah it feels

good though too you pop out of that and you actually feel warmer i think when you come out of that for some real there's like a numbness that happens that makes you feel weirdly warm whereas the cryo you still feel a little cold when Have you ever gone in the Pacific Ocean in, like, January? I used to live out here, yeah. Yeah. We'd go out there. Yeah, that's chilly. But you know that feeling?

Like, you really shouldn't be warm when you get outside because it's only, like, 70 degrees outside. But you're like, ah. Ah. Air. That 70 feels so good. Yeah, totally. 70 feels so good. Yeah, totally.

There's something about, we were discussing this, about forcing the body to react to the sauna. Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who wrote that really fascinating paper on the effects of sauna, and she's a huge proponent of sauna. And the reaction that your body has to this extreme heat of the sauna, so your body compensates in some way for that. And then when it realizes it's just a temporary situation, you get the benefit of that compensation without actually being in some life-threatening position where your body has to fire up all these protection systems. Yeah, all kinds of things going on. You've got creation of heat shock proteins. You've got all of these kinds of things going on. You got creation of heat shock proteins. You got all of these biochemical processes going on, plus just that general thing that the body needs. Body needs resistance. It needs germs when you're a kid. It needs to squeeze through the vaginal canal and

pick up all the goo when you're young to get acclimatized. It needs workouts when you're old and bigger, things to stress the muscles it needs things to stress the system all the way across the board it's just the way humans are built we're not built for a cakewalk yeah we're built to deal with whatever the fuck we have to deal with and if you make your body deal with almost nothing what you get is like a spoiled child right that can't handle any sort of, you know, any negative or any conflict, any problems, anything that's offline or requires character or resolve. Yeah, like you meet those people who grew up in the wilderness and they're like,

they can eat more foods than you can. They don't get sick as often. They're just more resilient, you know, like my friend Bodhi who They're just more resilient. You know, like my friend Bodhi, who grew up in New Hampshire, you know, it's like what he can put his body through from just growing up on a farm with no running water and hardly any electricity and just kind of cruising around from a young age, climbing mountains and skiing down, even when he was freezing. Like he can deal with shit in a different way than someone who's just been put your coat on sweetie make sure your scarf is all tied up you know there's like a different level of savagery that has actually allowed him to train harder for his sport and you know be better because his body

was used to dealing with tough shit from an early age yeah that's uh it's fascinating because people and i'm guilty of it we want to protect our children from adversity. But adversity is what builds character. So it's like, you know, you want your kids to be safe. But the only way to make them safe is to put them in danger. Right. Everybody that I know that'll be fine. They're all dudes who've gone through some horrific shit in their life. You know, I know I'll leave that dude. He'll be fine. They're all dudes who've gone through some horrific shit in their life.

You know, I know I'll leave that dude. He'll be fine. You know? Right. Well, the people that can't handle it, the ones that'll fall apart, they're the ones who their mom wiped their ass until they're 11 years old. Mm-hmm. Fucked.

Fucked. This doesn't work. Humans are just a flawed thing. Well, I mean, we're kind of designed in that sort of weird way. Well, we're designed for this savage world. I mean, this world is not, it's beautiful and I'd love it, but it's not easy and it was never intended to be easy, you know? And so we're designed to have to learn from these and get stronger

because of our environment. We separate ourselves from the environment. The human ceases to be what it was originally designed to be, which is a being that reacts to the pressures of its environment. You isolate it, and then we don't have that resistance anymore, and we turn out like a blob. Well, there was a study that I tweeted yesterday about that, sort of in direct relation to that, about young men today that are addicted to pornography and video games, and they're going through this masculinity crisis. So it's this psychological breakdown of young men in our society today

because they're not going through any real adversity. They're not going through any real rites of passage, pushing themselves physically. No, what they're doing is they're just beating off and playing video games. It's like this weird world that they live in where they're kind of like their symbiotic relationship with a couch and an Xbox controller. Right. Yeah. What do you think's going to happen with that?

What are the downstream effects there, Dr. Dan? Yeah. Have you seen that study? I haven't seen the study you're talking about, but that makes perfect sense. that study? I haven't seen the study you're talking about, but that makes perfect sense. We're having like two divergent populations where some people are really seeking these kinds of experiences where they're able to stress their system, grow their potential, become their best selves. And you have another people that because they don't have a connection to what's happening, they don't have a connection to purpose, passion, drive, inspiration. They're

not mentored. They're not going through these rites of passage. They're not going through any kind of supportive exploration of themselves in the world. They're just finding ways to distract themselves and find some kind of pleasure in the big craziness of it all. So in the midst of that, you're going to have this uh this massive widening between these two divergent populations it's so seductive on the video game though because you think you're improving yourself because you have these characters that are avatars that are you to an actual real population of people who identify you as that character and then the more work you put into that character the more you improve it,

it improves their skills. They get richer, they get bad-ass shit, like the equivalent of rims that spin, you know, on their weapons. And then they get level 40, 50, 60, and then you're really swinging a big dick out there, you know, when you're that big. So it's this seductive thing of, they do feel like they're improving, but they're not actually. Yeah, how do you actualize that in the world? Well, is that the case, or are we in some sort of a transitionary period between a physical, biological, carbon-based cellular life and a digital life? Because if we really do transition to a digital life, which there's a lot of speculation from legitimate scientists

and people that are looking at the curve of learning and the exponential growth of technology and they're like, look, this is inevitable. We're not going to be physical beings for that much longer. It's pretty obvious that we're going to eventually incorporate with machines and to the point where the concept of living in a virtual world, a world where you can just put on these headsets and go into the world of Avatar and live out this intense, unbelievably rich existence inside this artificially created world

is going to be so much more appealing and attractive. And I think that's what we're seeing with these kids. When they're playing Call of Duty or any of these other games, it's so much better than going out and being a regular teenager with no job prospects no skills no nothing unique about you nothing particularly challenging in your life other than you know feeding yourself and getting to bed on time you know know, it's just nothing there. But they can go into this world and this fucking bullets flying overhead and they're all talking

on headsets and trying to set up an ambush to go get the enemy and helicopters are flying overhead. And that's way more exciting. It's way more exciting. And this is just the beginnings of this digital world. I mean, these are artificial realities that they exist in, but they're so clearly artificial that we don't think of them that way. We think of them as a video game. But once it becomes something that's indistinguishable, once it's something that's going on inside your head. I mean, how many years are we really away from

something where you put it on and it has electrodes that react with various areas in your brain, where they can stimulate these areas and reproduce insane visual effects, physical effects, that the feeling of your foot on gravel as you're running down this beach, like you feel it in your feet. I mean, how long before they can do that? It's not that far off. It's way closer than going to another planet. It's way closer than, you know, setting up a colony on the moon.

They're pretty fucking close to doing this. This is a decade away at most. It's a kind of a weird exciting but terrifying thought very terrifying you know i mean you you want to think you want to hold out and think ah the real world will be better i know it they won't get the smells right they'll like they will still screw something up you know but it's very possible that eventually they can create virtual worlds that will be pretty satisfying. But I don't know. I just, like, I want to hold out faith.

Maybe it's just a desire, a romantic desire. I want to hold out faith that doing something for reals, for reals. You know, feeling your real body underneath you. Maybe it's just even the knowledge that it's for reals, for reals. It just seems like that would be better, you know. Yeah, for now. But if it continues to improve and grow, it seems like it's going to be way more satisfying to live in that world. It sounds like you're talking about the Matrix, right?

Exactly. Then it really depends on who's the puppet master and what the agenda is. Like who's creating puppet master and what the agenda is to make who's creating the matrix yeah and for what what outcome for what reason yeah could the matrix be something that the user creates i mean could it be autonomous could that could the user decide what kind of experience and then what you're just going to be the king of the matrix you're just going to be gangas con fucking all these women and cutting everybody's heads off and never lose a war i mean is that what are we going to do alan what alan watts kind of talks about that like when you get total control of something it becomes boring and so then you then you would want to naturally add in elements of risk add in elements of uncertainty

because then it becomes exciting again so actually actually, probably the progression will be, if you listen to that Alan Watts Inception video, the progression will be, you know, you go and you do that. You get to be Genghis Khan. You have sex with 100,000 women. You raid all these places. You win everything. And then all of a sudden, you make it more difficult. So you don't know if you're going to win. And then to make it exciting, you don't know if you're going to get laid again. And then all of a sudden, you reprogram it back and realize, You don't know if you're going to get laid again. And then all of a sudden you reprogram it back and realize, holy shit, life was what I really wanted all along. It has all the uncertainty and challenge that makes this thing really fun.

Otherwise, it's all fucking boring. Or we find out that life itself is actually just a virtual reality and that we've all this time been living in this incredibly realistic simulation. Cool. I'll give the programmer a high five because this shit realistic simulation. Cool. I'll give the programmer a high five because this shit's awesome. It's pretty good. They did a good job. I mean, they set up all the preposterous aspects that make you question its reality. Right.

Like the Chris Christie thing we were talking about today was in the news that he spent some fucking ungodly amount of money. You know, if you don't know who Chris Christie is, he's the governor of New Jersey. He's an enormously, morbidly overweight gentleman who wants to run for president and also wants to make sure that people don't smoke marijuana because marijuana is bad for you, unlike massively overeating, which apparently is not that bad for you.

But this is the... It seems like it's not real when you read this. He spent $82,000 of taxpayer money on food at NFL games. You know how much food costs at NFL games? Not much. It's like $8 for a sausage. You know how much he has to eat? It's insane how much for a sausage. How much he has to eat. It's insane how much money he spent. But this is all taxpayer money.

This is why it's so fucked up, man. God. It's insane. It's hard to believe. You know, one thing that they will never get right in one of these experiences, though, is like the true mystical experience. You know, in this virtual reality world, going to sit and drink ayahuasca virtually is not going to be the same as sitting down, hearing the icaros, the sound of the jungle, and drinking that in reality. Like, that dimension is so different than what I think could ever be programmed.

So at least I think we got that one we can hold out for. Maybe. Well, that was what McKenna believed they were going to be able to... He believed that the DMT experience was going to be accessible to people through virtual reality first. He said that most people are not going to be willing to take the leap of faith that it takes to light the DMT and take it takes to light the the dmt and take it

into your lungs and visit the spirit realm and he really thought that the way they were going to create it was someone was going to figure out how to make a virtual reality version of a dmt experience and that was what and he thought that if you did do that you would actually contact the real dmt realm and you would actually there would be a way that they would enter through that gateway obviously he did wait to me he went too far like I went too far his own brother admits yeah he was amazing he was an amazing bard and he had some incredible ideas because of that but that was one of the big ones well you can duplicate the the visuals but the creativity and the specificity of what the messages that come across i mean it's

not just random it doesn't work for everybody it's not like picking up a you know an astrology book where it's going to work for most people or whatever you know it's this is specific information for you that comes out you know and i and I think that, that true connection with whatever that other place in your brain is, or that other world, you know, the astral world, whatever you want to call it, your vocabulary permits, that, that true access allows this kind of really unique message to come through that's just tailored for you. And that's why it's so effective. Yeah, that is one of the weird and unique aspects of psychedelic experience is it's almost like what you need at that time finds you.

It's almost like there's an assessment of your overall predicament and go, oh, look, why do these things keep going on, Jim? I lost the connection to the HDMI to show you guys the stuff. Show us what? Anything. I can't show you anything. Show us what? The anything. I can't show you anything. Oh, that's okay. Don't worry about it.

Goddamn TriCaster. Shitty fucking machine. But it seems like it finds whatever hole you've got and then fills it in. Like, oh, you just shove this in that hole and now you're going to get a sense of what's wrong and you're going to get a sort of a depiction or a picture of uh what the errors on your operating system are yep that finds it is that what you think it makes psychedelic research so appealing is that it'soring, like dialing in a specific solution for each individual from a psychiatric standpoint? Yeah, I think there are a couple of different opportunities that it presents,

which is bringing up to the surface that very thing that we're ready to receive that we didn't realize was right there. And it also helps to rewrite the neurochemistry and reboot the neuroendocrine system to let you actualize it and move it forward into your life so the the psychedelics right now the whole resurgence of psychedelic research is is showing how well they work for the very aspects that psychiatry is really weak at addiction recovery treatment resistant depression chronic severe PTSD end-of-life transition issues all the areas that psychiatry is really stuck at the psychedelics are very good at and there's a wide breadth of the psychedelics that are available right and then we get really crafty and being able to recognize because of what this

person's going through, what might be the best psychedelic to use for them in the right setting. So in the right set and setting, you get this opportunity to really actualize your best self, to realize what you weren't looking at, to face your shit, to work through that, and then to see the path of becoming even better.

That's a, those are really good points. The drug addiction one is a really good point. The end-of-life transition is another really good point. And PTSD, even traumatic stress, I mean, it could be as horrific as war or as seemingly simple but unbelievably traumatic as a breakup you know there's some people that go through breakups they think their fucking life is over they think it's over i mean they think like i can't go on like this like this loss is too much for my soul to bear and then they do ecstasy and they go i'm be fine. That guy's an asshole. Why was I even living with him in young teenage girls in certain communities, particularly in native cultures.

And there's studies that show that young adolescents, both girls and boys, but particularly with girls, they have a significant resolution of anxiety that's related to how they view themselves going through only one session of ayahuasca. Wow. That's incredible, man. Wow. So that's really, we're talking about like rites of passage, those ceremonies, those experiences really help people mature, self-actualize, be able to recognize who they really are and not have so much that's invested in who they think they need to be and these relationships that when they fall away, like this crazy thing that happens

with internet bullying online and it just really shatters these young people's self-esteem and they end up checking out. That's too much. That just completely collapsed their worldview. these young people self-esteem and they end up like checking out like that's too much that just completely collapsed their worldview and there's no i they cannot imagine themselves going through that in a successful way so it's better to check out they also can't imagine that this bullying is horrible as it is if you get through it and you you perspective, it'll actually help you later in life.

Like you will now have tools to deal with shitty human beings that you may perhaps run into. And counterintuitively, you will greatly appreciate the kind people around you in a way that you might not appreciate them. It's like people in L.A. don't appreciate the sun. Right. Bitches there every day just nagging you. Got to put on your sunglasses. them it's like people in LA don't appreciate the Sun right bitches there every day just nagging you gotta put on your sunglasses you know but go to Seattle or go to go to fucking Columbus Ohio in the winter where every day is cloudy gray that gray sky winter thing the Buffalo winter you ever been to

Buffalo New York I mean if it's the winter and you don't get any clouds you're like what is happening look at the sky it's blue it's supposed to be blue but you just get used to that shit and when you do see the sun it's a magical creature that's come down to give you happiness in the form of vitamin d and warmth warmth feels. Yeah, the way it feels in your skin. We're used to that. Like, oh my God, it's so hot. You know, we're used to that here. We've been so effective at taking away all of the really challenging things and expecting not to have challenging things. But I think it's going to take intention to intentionally put those back through rituals, through rites of passage, through these terrifying, scary ordeals that you have to go through

in order to get used to that paradigm again. I think we're getting to the point now where we're so good at removing the environmental ones, we're going to have to go with intention to put them back. And even back in scary times, they had intentions to do that. You go to some tribes who live in the jungle, which is a hard-ass place to live, and they're still sticking their hands in oven mitts of bullet ants. Right, right. They're still fashioning bungee cords out of vines and moldy ropes and stuff and jumping

off towers to show their fearlessness. And even in our day, we have everything easy, so we have nothing environmental, and we're not doing anything else intentional. Yeah, and this is definitely not to imply that bullying is in any way good no you know it's awful people that are mean i don't i i always wonder what that is when you see like kids that are shitty to other kids you know like you see that like the instinct that they have to be shitty or they see weakness and they poke at it and they push it it's not good but even in bad things the the the counter to those bad things you can somehow or another get benefit from it and that benefit will make you stronger and that's it's really fascinating like what we're talking

about the sauna or what we're talking about going through adversity in life like all these things you seem it seems to be almost a law that the universe has that the ebb and flow of things the push and the pull of things i mean i don't think it's a fucking i don't think it's a coincidence that these bad motherfuckers keep coming out of siberia you know i mean look at all these Ruslan Provodnikov, you know, these boxers that are coming out of the Soviet Union now, and especially Siberia.

Like, they're fucking monsters. You know? Kovalev. These guys are monsters. And they're coming out of Russia. It's cold as shit in Russia. So they develop a different kind of human being.

Because they're surviving all the time. And in surviving, they're growing. One of the traditions there in Siberia is to go swim in the river. In a lot of places, they go swim in the river every morning. Like in military cadet training historically, like the Siberian cadets would have to go in and jump in this freezing-ass water every morning to help toughen them up. I mean, they got that idea there. And that's the healthy way to do it. Obviously, bullying is this really insidious kind of psychological attack that's really hard to see and really hard to look at as a stress like that. But yeah, I mean, building those things in your life, it's going to make it, it's going to be positive. And that's what sports do for us.

Like sports are really, sports in the military are really the only way that we have access to these really readily here. And I kind of think that for bullies, even the act of bullying is extremely damaging just to do it. I mean, it only makes sense that it is right. You are causing all these bad feelings for all these people that don't deserve it. They didn't do anything to you. And you're finding a weakness or finding a deficit in their strength and attacking it. Well, you're doing it to yourself, you know, in the truth, you know, as, as the platinum rule would say, you're really doing it to you living a different life. And that's really difficult for the higher self, you know, the, the conscious self to deal with because you're hurting yourself in a, in a very real way. Yeah. You don't appreciate

yourself. You know, you don't appreciate who you are because you don't respect it because you know, you're kind of a bitch fucking with people that don't deserve it. But you know, it's just, it's weird. It's a weird instinct that children have. Because having children and seeing it on the playground, watching little boys push other little boys for no reason, watching how it goes down, it's very bizarre behavior. And I've been struggling with it recently. Not struggling with it or analyzing it, it's a better sense.

Trying to figure out when I do see it, struggling with it recently not struggling with it or analyzing it it's a better sense trying to figure out when i do see it like what is what's the is there an evolutionary advantage to any of this is there a reason why this exists or is this just from the harsh days of old where you're just trying to find the weak wolf and kick it the fuck out of the clan because if you don't you know the pack won't be strong you got to get rid of all the bitches. Do you cower when I come near you? Are you cowering, you fucking fat? Get the fuck out of here. You kick them out of the goddamn tribe and send them out into the woods to die on their own.

And I think it's awful, but I've got to think that's why wolves do it. When wolves sense some wolf that's going to fall apart under pressure. Like, you fucking pussy. We can't hunt moose with you. You're going to get tired, you bitch. Get the fuck out of here. And that's exactly why humans have had these rituals before. These different rites of passage.

Will this person buckle under pressure? Will they fold when it comes turn? It's like that person you walk up to on a water slide. And wait in line for a goddamn hour with them and then they get to the top of the water slide i can't do it i can't do it let me down you're like you gotta be fucking kidding i waited an hour to go down this thing and i'm not even excited about it yeah you know like that person you got to weed that out early because what if you're on a you know a life and death situation they needed to know that if duncan was here right now, you're talking about me, man. Stop talking about me.

I'm right here. Yeah. I mean, that was the old way. And I think that's what we got to bring back. But we can't do it in these anonymous Facebook bullying, cyber. It's too complicated a stress for the human brain to handle because we're not equipped evolutionarily to handle that kind of stress. I think we should call each other to courage and call each other to face these different things, but not in that way, not in a mean way,

not in a way like, come on, let's go. Let's see what we can do together here. Do it in a different way. Yeah. The other thing about the idea of the cyber world, the idea of virtual worlds, is that the people that are playing, you know, fill in the blank Halo or one of these crazy games, getting really good at it, they're not experiencing the character development that someone would have

if they got really good at, you know, whatever, jiu-jitsu, or, you know, fill in the blank, something incredibly difficult, you know, where you see, like when you meet someone who's really truly great at something, anything where they put in an incredible amount of hard work and out of that hard work has emerged this truly unique talent that's something fascinating to watch. Like there's a quality to those people have that you don't get from cyber game players. And that's weird.

I wonder what that is. Because it's obviously difficult to get really good at playing a video game. It's obviously, there's something rewarding about it. Because they love to do it. They love to kick other people's asses in those video games. But I don't necessarily think it translates into that character development in the real world, like in a personality sense. And in fact, there's like a lot, I mean, when you talk about people that are like cyber game players, when you talk about like people that are like cyber game players one of the big characterizations whether it's fair or not is that they're really awkward dorks right like that's the number one

way you think of like someone who plays video games all day oh jesus christ what's this guy like to hang out with when you know get him outside you know and that's you know you're seeing a different type of player now. Like I know, you know, some people we've worked with, they'll do yoga and they'll like try to focus on that. So you're starting to see a different type of that. But I do agree for sure with your initial point. And I think the idea is that, you know, real consciousness is its home is in the body. You know, people think of like mind and consciousness and body is all separate. is in the body you know people think of like mind and consciousness and body is all separate really when you're truly conscious it's when everything is like sucked into into one entity

it's a true presence of being right where you're physically embodying your consciousness and when you're just using your mind and your thumbs it's almost like a you're separating yourself from a key element of consciousness which is embodied consciousness So you're working on a level of mastery that's really very narrow. That's a good point. That's a really good point. That must be what it is, right? What it must be is like you're neglecting your body because you're sitting on a couch all day

and your fucking back is hunched at the end of the day. I mean, how many video game players have fucking horrible backs? It's got to be a lot, right? If you're playing all day, hunched at the end of the day. I mean how many video game players have fucking horrible backs It's got to be a lot right if you're playing all day It's hunched over a computer you're going blind and your back is turned to shit Going blind from the masturbation because that's that's why I miss that too. That's what I hear Yeah, that's what Kellogg would tell us. Did you ever deal with anybody? I mean, I know you worked with people that have addictions. Have you ever worked with people that have like non I mean, I know you worked with people that have addictions. Have you ever worked with people that have like non-chemical addictions or non-chemical in the traditional sense, like video game addictions or gambling addictions?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm affiliated with an organization called Crossroads. That's an Ibogaine treatment center. And we're also building the first psychedelic research institute there. When people go through Ibogaine, it rewrites the neurochemistry. It reboots that whole pathway. And that pathway is set up for an addictive profile. Doesn't matter what the addiction is. It's the same chemical pathway. And that addiction could be heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine. It could be work, sex, video games, whatever. It's that same chemical pathway that's also associated with what Csikszentmihalyi called flow states. It's that

dopamine neurochemical pathway. So when you channel that focus, that prime directive into a productive way, that can elucidate the flow state and that flow state's essentially like your prime focus on the current experience to the exclusion of everything else that's just like any kind of addiction that the mind can't rewrite it can't move away from so the definition of addiction is essentially like getting stuck in these repetitive loops with something as the focus, even in the midst of detrimental experience, you can't shift. You can't break that cycle. So it's doing something over and over and over, even though you know that there's a bad consequence. So is an addiction essentially almost like a side effect of the process that's involved in us getting good at something.

Because I've always found that in getting anything that I become obsessed with, anything that I really start wanting to get good at, it starts to permeate my life, oftentimes in an uncomfortable way, where it's going on that, like, Eddie Bravo and I used to talk about this all the time with jujitsu that you would have like this underlying operating system that was always doing jujitsu that you you would be if you're in a conversation with somebody and they wanted to talk to you about well what the democrats got to do is you know highlight the fact we've created all these new jobs you just start thinking about choking people. So I just think, like, this is boring as fuck. I'm going to concentrate on positions in my head.

I'm going to nod my head. But what's going on behind the scenes, the operating system, what's always on is jiu-jitsu. And almost everybody I know that is really good at jiu-jitsu thinks like that. They all talk about how jiu-jitsu becomes almost like a metronome in the background, that it's like constantly going on. And one of the benefits of that is that, well, you have this positive, really healthy, rewarding experience that you're obsessed with. So you're addicted, but you're addicted to something that's super beneficial

Hmm so that differential being that there's a positive outcome right versus a negative outcome So you could describe that positive outcome experience Even though it might be an addiction because the mind so focused on it's essentially a flow state You just keep re accessing that flow state that flow state. Just reactivating something that for whatever reason, the way it is engaging with your life and your mind is negative. Like gambling addicts. Like people who are gambling addicts, they just want that action all the time. And that's one of the hardest addictions. Gambling? Gambling, because it's an intermittent reward. You don't know what the outcome is going to be.

Oh. So sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's negative. Looked at from the right perspective, it's all negative because of the net loss. And that's gamification too. Video games, same thing. You don't yet know what the outcome is going to be. So there's so much engagement. Heroin, cocaine, those kinds of substances, you generally know what you're going to get.

So you can avoid those because you've experienced it. You know what it is. You know the negative repercussions of it. You can step back. Well, it keeps people in. There's some physical components of those addictions, too. Right. And that's why heroin is so hard to kick.

And Ibogaine has like a 70% success rate in helping people kick heroin after one treatment. That's pretty amazing. That's pretty fucking amazing. I know a good friend who has, with him was Oxycontin, but essentially the same drug. Right. And he went to Mexico, took Ibogaine, kicked it instantly, and now he runs a treatment center down there for that very reason. Yeah.

And the long-term predictor, just to put that in context, the long-term predictor is ongoing support. So people have, like, recovery coaching. Some people do 12 steps. But the recovery coaching, because Ibogaine itself is an addiction interrupter. What's the actual physical mechanisms that are going on? Well, the psychedelic has a wide variety. With Ibogaine particularly, it has an effect on the serotonin system, the dopamine system, and the opiate system or the opioid system.

It's one of the most complex interactions. Most of the psychedelics operate on the serotonin system solely. This ibogaine acts on multiple systems across multiple fronts. And so one of the reasons it's particularly good for heroin is because it has that unique profile of working on the opiate system. What it seems to do is it goes in and it scrubs the opiate neurons completely clean of the residue. So when you look at the data, people go through no or very little of the withdrawal symptoms. Wow. Right.

And that's the biggest thing for people going through heroin on their own is to kick it because they're just deathly afraid of the withdrawal that's going to come. So they just keep getting stuck in the cycle. So if you can offer them something held in the right set and setting that gives them the opportunity to rewrite it with very little discomfort. Very little discomfort. You're full of shit there, doctor. You're full of shit there. They just compress all of the horror of any kind of come down from that. Just a few hours.

Into your 40-hour Iboga experience. Just a few hours? You guys need to come together and reach a consensus. Is it a few or is it 40? Iboga is 36 hours plus or minus. For me, it was 40 hours both times. Pretty intense. Ibogaine is the

primary alkaloid. There's 12 or so primary alkaloids in Iboga, which is the plant root itself. Ibogaine is the synthesized extracted primary alkaloid that's used. Safer therapeutic window, easier to dose, easier to manage, and it has a shorter half-life. So it's usually about 12 hours. That's all? about 12 hours that's all just 12 hours where it feels like you're in a high voltage shed and you're puking and you're spinning and there's a thousand pound pancake on you and you're just hoping that this misery will end please what do i have to do in my life that i never have to do aboga again but it's also you're examining like every aspect of so for for me going through Iboga, I didn't have a drug addiction.

I was kicking. I wanted to know the psychospiritual implications. And I also was trying it on because clients that I kept interfacing with, I would do a lot of one-on-one work with clients. And I knew Iboga or Ibogaine was the right direction for them. And they would ask me, what's the experience like? And as opposed to me saying, well, I've heard it's like X, Y, and Z, I need to actually go in the lab, try it on for sites so I can speak about it first person perspective. So I did Iboga twice. And then when I came on board with Crossroads, they work with Ibogaine, same kind of thing. I needed to

experience what it was like. For me, actually, Ibogaine was more intense than Iboga. And for most people, it's the other way around. But suffice it to say, when you know that you're, you're, most people going through heroin or some kind of really bad addiction, they're at a crossroads. And so hence the name of the center. They're at a crossroads where they have hit rock bottom. And they know they're at that level of desperation that if they don't make a significant shift then some something really bad is going to happen like they're going to die they're going to completely annihilate their entire family system whatever so they're coming with some motivation so when you when you let them know that yeah the experience can be potentially difficult and at crossroads it's the safest Ibogaine experience that you can have anywhere because it's in a hospital's clinical environment.

It's in Tijuana right next to Angeles Hospital. There's doctors on call right next door. There's nurses on staff in the room. You're wearing a Holter monitor, 24-hour EKG monitor because people do die with iboga and ibogaine and usually it's because they weren't truthful and that they were using something long-acting like suboxone or methadone when they came in and you cannot be on a long-acting opiate when you take iboga bad news you can be on a short-acting and then when that washes out you start the iboga or ibogaine and if everything's

clean on board like they're not taking other drugs not only in their psychiatric medications the only other problem that people typically run into which isn't very common but it has happened maybe one percent of the time people will have an arrhythmia or a heart beat irregularity because it drops your blood pressure and it drops your heart rate. And if you're not wearing a monitor and you're not really paying attention to what happens, then you can get in some trouble there. So if you have a crash cart on site, it's a fairly clinical setting, then all those bases are covered.

So in that set and setting, it's extraordinarily safe, and you offer the people opportunity to come through. So when you're looking at it like from a Western addiction medicine perspective, what are the numbers people go in? What are the numbers of success rate people coming through an average rehabilitation setting like up in Malibu? Those numbers are like maybe 15% plus or minus depending on the setting. 15% versus 60, 65, 70% depending on the setting with versus 60 65 70 depending on the setting with ibogaine that's a 400 fold increase and the difference being many factors the difference

being that there's actually some physiological changes that this drug is doing to your body and then also one inescapable fact of it is that these psychedelic experiences, pretty much all of them, have that insane transcendent moment where you are, whatever the world that you were living in before you took that drug, you were kind of basing your own experiences. Like, here's the range. Here's the spectrum of experiences in life from my dog died to I got laid, you know, the birth of my child. This is the wonderful. This is the awful. And then you part the doors to the psychedelic experience. And it's just like you stepped outside.

Like you thought the roof was the ceiling of the universe. You stepped outside and realized, oh, my God, it's infinite. You know, it's like, whoa. You stepped outside and realized, oh, my God, it's infinite. You know, it's like, whoa. So like the perspective change because the experience is so intense and so broad and so literally all encompassing. So you got those two things going on. You've got the physiological change that something like Ibogaine can do.

And then you've got the actual experience itself, which is so transcendent. And none of those things are available in Malibu. You go to, I'm saying Malibu, but you know, any of these, I was watching, you know what Periscope is? This new thing that the kids are doing, wacky kids. I was watching one yesterday. I was just checking out different people's feeds and it was one from a rehab place, like a house where these guys are all living together in rehabilitation. And I'm like, this is like a weird social support system that they're trying to, and

they were talking about how great it is to not be drinking and, you know, I'm getting my life in order. And I'm like, this is like a very small shift that they're doing. They try to cling on to this small shift and hang on and blow fire, blow smoke on the, blow air on the fire, try to get those embers to become a flame. Or you jump into lava. That's the other option. Yeah, right. The thing about a boga, all these psychedelic experiences, and I've done many of a variety of different durations from very short, a couple minutes to very very long, like aboga. And particularly with the plant medicines, it seems to know how long it has. Like the half-life of the medicine seems to be something that's already calculated in your brain.

And so you get messages depending on how long you have. You know, a lot of times it's like a remarkable fact that I've noticed. But with aboga, you have so much time that aboga just really takes its time in relentlessly showing you all of the steps that you took to lead you to different situations that you're not happy with. I mean, I remember when I did it the last time, it took me like, it spent about five hours showing me the hypothetical possible scenarios that I could go with my life that wouldn't be beneficial, that would be harmful to the world. And it was like five hours of that, whereas like with ayahuasca, you'll get maybe, you know, half an hour of that. And then I'll be like, okay, but that's not reality. This is it. Like a boga has so much time that it just really beats these things to death. So you won't even think about going down that road again.

Or if it's something that's incongruous in your life, like a relationship, you know, you can wrestle with it. I wrestled, you know, in another Aboga experience, I wrestled with a relationship I had for like eight hours. And I'd say, maybe this way. And he'd be like, nope, not this way because of this. And it would show me the reasons why my logic was flawed. And I'd go, and then I'd just come back again, try another way. And he's like, nope, not that way because of this. And it would show me the reasons why my logic was flawed. And I'd go, and then I'd just come back again, try another way. And it's like, nope, not that way because of this. You see, you forgot point A, blah, blah, blah. And it's just such a stern taskmaster when it comes to that. And it has seemingly infinite amount of time to just go through all of your rationalizations, all your justifications. It'd be like bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Is it showing it to you in a visual sense? Iboga is a funny one because it's not as visual as the other ones. Like the DMT experience is particularly visual. Iboga tends to be more thought-based. And when a vision needs to, at least for me, when a vision needed to have a visual explanation, like it needed a visual cue, it would come. But a lot of times it's just directly thought-based almost like

i was talking to a much smarter version of myself you know it was a really interesting way that it interacts because the visions were pretty mild i would think the iboga in a sensory deprivation tank would be the ultimate well that might be that might be a one to work up to. And prior to that, because like oftentimes people ask me the question like, okay, I'm ready to have an experience, where do I start? So step number one is float, and just float by yourself. Because a lot of people haven't even floated yet and really looked at their stuff because, interestingly enough, it starts to promote our own DMT-like experience.

We see what's in the default mode network now comes online. We're able to look at more introspective analysis and see what was just behind the curtain that we didn't notice was there, and now that comes onto the stage. We can wrestle with that. We can be with that, see what comes up, make sure that we're okay with the unknown,

that kind of sense of dissolving back into the void. And then you can start stacking therapies, like doing something in the tank. And so your more entry-level psychedelics would be like MDMA, DMT. Edible weed. Marijuana. As the next kind of entry point.

And then beyond that, then you get into, and psilocybin I would put in that entry-level point. And then beyond that, you get into the second level. And that's more like the peyote, huachuma, san pedro, ayahuasca, iboga. And so it's nice to be able to know where people can start, how to progress them through. That's a lot of the psychedelic research that's happening now is the correct screening to know who the experience is good for, who it's not good for. People with a history of psychosis and mania, not good for. People currently on psychiatric medications, not good for. Because most of the medicines and psychiatric medications don't work

well together and there's an energetic clash and you can have a real bad trip where you could have physiologically dangerous things happen. So when we know, you know, we've got this whole arsenal to work with, and then it becomes alchemy knowing which medicine to use at which person at which time and in which sequence, which order, like what's your, what are your target symptoms? If your target symptoms are anxiety associated with chronic pain, well, great. Then it might be something like iboga is helpful because iboga is really helpful for pain because it's associated with that opiate pathway. And also, let's prep with flotation and let's integrate with flotation because flotation itself

is also very good for pain. Just flotation by itself. You start stacking therapies. And I've seen clients and I've had clients that have done a series of seven to 10 floats and all of a sudden now they're off of all their opiates before with resolution of their underlying symptoms, whether it's PTSD, anxiety, insomnia. And then they do maintenance floats after that.

So two to three a week for like three or four weeks. And then you do booster floats after that. So two to three a week for like three or four weeks. And then you do booster floats, like one a month. And some of the psychedelics are kind of similar. When you go through a big experience, you have a long period of integration. And then maybe you do a booster shot. Now, the whole psychedelic experience here in the States is under a renaissance. There's a lot of energy moving. There's a lot of energy moving.

There's a lot of clinical trials coming up in really reputable centers like the Hopkins study with psilocybin. Massive. That really put psilocybin back on the map in the scientific community because the study was so well designed and the outcomes were so amazing that you couldn't refute it.

94% of people who were psychedelically naive had one of the top five spiritual experiences that it ever had. And that experience lasted 14 months out with no side effects. You're like, holy cow, that's pretty amazing. MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. 83% success rate for curing chronic severe PTSD after only two to three sessions of MDMA supported psychotherapy so it's not just taking a drug and having your trip and all of a sudden now you come out the other side resolved no it's like

actually working with a trauma trained therapist and a really supportive safe environment to work through that because MDMA is so good at the dearmoring that happens when people are traumatized. And the data is just so iboga with addictions and psilocybin even with addictions. There's just a recent pilot study that came out. 80% of people with chronic addiction to tobacco resolved after one-time use of psilocybin. Right? And so what's like the next second best thing that the allopathic medical community has for that? Well, it's like Nicorette gum at like 8% success rate.

So you just went from 8% to 80%. And oh, by the way, you just had a transformative, mystical experience. Yeah, that was the side effect. You talked to spirit guides and saw some awesome shit that you'll never forget that you'll tell people every time you see them. Yeah. You talked to

God's CEO. Yeah, exactly. I just don't understand how it's... We are here in this day and age with the thousands of years that people have been writing books. It's just amazing to me that they've been able to suppress some of the most beautiful aspects of being a human being for so long. And it seems like during our lifetime, all this stuff is emerging like some sort of a strange flower that refused to be stuffed under the dirt. It's just the pop, you know, the buds are just popping through the surface of the ground. No matter how much pressure was put on it, dropping, you know, rocks on it and stacking up shit and trying to hold it down with lies and nonsense and pharmaceutical drugs and lobbyists and all the pressure that they put to keep this stuff down and then

Johns Hopkins study comes out and it's like well You can't really refute I mean these are like some of the best minds in the world when it comes to these subjects and then all the work that maps is done And that's has been amazing and the internet And the Internet itself. The Internet itself. I mean, just the overwhelming amount of positive experiences, anecdotal as they may be, that people describe online. It gives people this community to draw from that doesn't exist in schools. It doesn't exist in most people's neighborhoods.

It doesn't exist where you normally do find information you know look if you if you want to figure out how to fucking frame a house there's there's a hundred guys probably in your city that can show you how to do it you know if you want to figure out how to contact a spirit guide and remove yourself from an addiction that you have to pornography or to gambling. Good luck. Good luck. You're going to talk to some fucking guy who runs a church and maybe does good work.

And he wants 10% of your money. He wants you to sing and talk about Jesus. And it's not going to work. Or you'll end up with an amethyst wand in your ass. That could happen too. Not knowing what's going on the other way. There's lots of people who will take advantage of that of course and yeah you know this is this is a certainly i think they've started something in motion that now can't be stopped what i think

we're going to have to be careful of is you know with everything there's a certain point where medicine becomes poison and that that happens with every single psychedelic you know where it crosses the threshold where it's no longer beneficial and it's dangerous or the setting is wrong or the conflict is wrong. And what's going to happen and what we need to be careful of is that there will be these bad incidents that come out just inevitably. You know, you hear about some of them from these, you know, pretty shady centers down in South America where people die during ayahuasca. you know, pretty shady centers down in South America where people die during ayahuasca. When that happens in, you know, on U.S. soil, which inevitably it will, you know, there's going to be this backlash and they're going to make one final push to try and, you know, to try and stomp this out. And we just have to, you know, really adhere to truth and stay calm and try and put out

as much good science as possible, because that's going to be the last card that they can play. The numbers are just too high. The problem with the numbers of negative scenarios that they're depicting, the numbers of positive are so overwhelming. Nothing is perfect, not a single thing that you do. There's people out there that they can't eat fish. They try to have shellfish, their throat closes up. Not a single thing that you do. There's people out there that they can't eat fish. They try to have shellfish, their throat closes up.

It doesn't make sense, but it just works that way. It doesn't mean we should pull all the shrimp from all the markets. There's going to be negatives because we just have so much biodiversity. There's so much difference in all the aspects that you were talking about that could be problematic people with psychosis history of mental health issues and and drugs that they've been taking for these Mental health issues for long periods of times that have done all sorts of really weird things their brain chemistry that takes a long time to normalize from This is those numbers. I mean as long as we're rational and honest about it the overwhelmingly positive

I mean, as long as we're rational and honest about it, the overwhelmingly positive aspects of these therapies are undeniable. They're just too good. Yeah. The consumer-driven movement has pushed it into the limelight, and you've had people that kept the torch, like Rick Doblin with MAPS. And the next evolution of that now with a few really different key organizations is to come up with a standard of a guideline for best practices. And that's not to say that everybody has to adhere rock solid to these practices, but generally what are the guidelines for practices? You should be screening clients for these issues.

And if anybody has these issues, then they shouldn't go into the experience. This should be the general setting of the the right environment and this should be the ethical altruistic intention that people are coming to that experience and facilitation that have that they're not doing it for profit and they're not doing it as some charlatan that they have a background they have a pedigree so you know it's like the E3 check. What's their energy? What's their experience? This is in the facilitation role.

What's their energy? What's your experience? And do they have the ability to work as a spiritual EMT? Like if the shit goes down, do they know how to pull the ripcord? If somebody is going through the midst, you know, in the midst of some really bad experience, do they know how to talk them down, bring the medicine down, intervene in a way so that the experience doesn't itself become traumatizing? What about food addictions? You know, it's interesting because you were talking about the most difficult addiction to quit being gambling. Well, that's as far as behavioral addictions. But as far as like neurochemical addictions itself, sugar's up there with heroin. And some studies show that sugar is even harder

to kick than heroin. And that's also a little challenging. It's kind of like an addiction to technology. Food addictions are tricky because it's not like you're going to stop eating. Right. That's what I was going to bring up. Right. So there's a whole movement in a variety of addiction circles around moderation, even with alcohol. There's a movement in moderation where like, you know, the sponsor or the person helping coach somebody going through sobriety will go to the bar and they'll have one drink and they'll talk about what it's like to have one drink and then they'll leave together after only having like one or two drinks without really reaching that point of significant detriment and be able to process that whole experience so that you're not you're not trying to make this polarity statement

like you went from this you know crazy addiction to now you can have anything and so if you're defining success as as being completely abstinent, then maybe you're actually not appreciating the benefit of successive steps along the way. Like if somebody has a heroin addiction and they're not taking care of their family and they can't hold a job and they go through some kind of recovery program where now they're using something else as maybe a transition addiction, but they're holding a job now. They're better with their family and wife and kids. There's very significant milestones and markers to where they have improved their life. In my experience, that's success because you're moving towards ongoing improved benefit. I had Dr. Andrew Hill on the podcast who has a similar sort of a treatment approach. And one of the things that he does is they will go to a bar with a patient and have the patient have a drink and talk them through it and make sure that they are only having one drink and that they don't, you know, just completely.

Yeah, because the goal should be normalcy, not this like shaky dam that if it leaks the whole thing floods you know one day at a time yeah and everything just breaks you know you want to be you want to get to the point where you're so not addicted you're like everybody else if someone cracks a really nice bottle of wine at dinner you can say yeah sure you know if you want to not like ah now if i have that wine i'll be into the mini bar and then it'll be like that fucking Denzel Washington movie. But isn't there a physical aspects to addiction that have to be addressed with some people? Totally. Like some people really maybe should avoid alcohol almost entirely. Well, some people have a genetic predisposition towards hypersensitivity to the effects of alcohol.

And you see that with Asian populations, particularly Asian women. You see that in the Native American culture and population. They have a weakness in a particular enzyme that breaks alcohol down, alcohol dehydrogenase, and actually turns alcohol into acetaldehyde, and it becomes this really toxic substance. You have long-stream detriments and ramifications and neurochemical complexity. So you have a physiologic predisposition towards alcohol being really bad for you. And then you have the addiction neurochemistry itself, like we were talking about before. And then you have everything underneath that, which is the psycho-emotional, psycho-spiritual implications.

Like what is empty from that person's life that keeps them addicted to a substance that they're trying to fill a void or numb a pain. There's always these interplay of factors and it's important to look at all of them. And so whether it's alcohol or we were talking before about sugar, sugar is one of the most addictive substances and it's really difficult to get completely away from. You have to be really mindful about all the sugars that are added in fruit juice. Fruit juice seems healthy, yet when you look at the sugar load, it's massive. And my experience going with Ibogaine is that I didn't appreciate that I had this long-standing sugar addiction. And looking back,

I've had that for a long time and even looking back further I know now where it came from because I I just kind of like did this retrospective analysis I was in and out of the hospital for the first two years because I had recurrent pneumonia I was six weeks early and in recurrent ammonia they put you on a lot of steroids and put you on a lot of antibiotics and it completely script screws up your gut flora and it predisposes you to candida long time down the road and candida feeds on sugar so after you know I was I was addicted to alcohol for a while and kick that and then I became addicted to pot for a

while and I kicked that and then I became addicted to work and kind of more monastic practices meditation those sorts of things. And I lived in the jungle and these kind of like extreme experiences, but sugar was always in the background. And then when I went through Ibogaine, I came out and I have like zero charge around sugar now. Zero. Because you recognize what it really is. Because it shifted the neurochemistry so without even knowing going in that there was this addiction there because i just wasn't registering it consciously it did

sugar addiction for somebody with with a weak metabolic load or maybe they're susceptible they have adrenal fatigue or they're susceptible to hold on to weight maybe a sugar addiction is a really bad thing because now you can see that they've got this metabolic syndrome and they're moving into type 2 diabetes or whatever it might be for me it was always kind of in the background but it was always there like i have a sweet tooth that's insatiable if i kick it off i i go rampant right and so on the other side of ibogaine there's no charge on sugar now and i didn't even know that was going to come out the other side of Ibogaine, there's no charge on sugar now. And I didn't even know that was going to come out the other side. I just ended up, everybody was feasting on sugar at this party I

was at like a few days later. And I had this kind of like, I was just, I just kind of looked at it and glanced away and I thought, well, that's different. I remember that there would be this charge before, and now there's nothing. And so there's a whole thing that happens with addictive neurochemistry that might not necessarily be – and that's all physiologic, right? I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, we're all energy. We're like 99.997% energy. This is just space. 99.997 percent energy this is just space so we're actually like these energetic beings and there's all these implications around that depending on your spiritual and philosophical beliefs about what causes that to be the case we're also in this 3d reality we have these monkey suits that

we're wearing and sometimes the cigar is just a cigar so if you have a candida overgrowth it feeds on sugar it's good to get rid of that in order to release the sugar and you have to do that mindfully too because candida buffers heavy metals we were talking about heavy metals before so when people go on these crash no sugar diets oftentimes the candida die off and it releases this massive toxic load on the system and that's why people feel shitty it's not necessarily because the candida is going away it's because of all the things that the candida released. So you have to be mindful about how you detox and stepwise fashions

and it can get a little bit complicated but we can do it well. So that's just a long way to say for me personally and I've seen this with other clients too, say that same thing but until I had the experience myself, I really wasn't putting it in first person perspective and really appreciated the fact that just by itself, you can see this too

with people coming off the streets on heroin, just by itself, there is a neurochemical addictive rewrite, a reboot in that system that helps people. That's why it's an addiction interrupter. There's a really good documentary called Ibogaine Rites of Passage. I think it was maybe eight years ago or so. And it's really well done, kind of like Neurons to Nirvana, which was more recent, also another really good one, that talks about that addictive neurochemical rewrite. Flotation does that too.

It's just not as big, and you have to do a lot of floats. So when that neurochemical rewrite is is happening and that interruption occurs then you do the ongoing supportive work and so like addiction recovery coaching like okay what was underneath that and through the experience through this mystical experience now you're reframing so much of the childhood trauma. Trauma and addiction are extraordinarily interwoven. Trauma, ADHD, and addiction are extraordinarily interwoven. So when we understand the neurological implications, the trauma implications, the transgenerational implications, right? So if people have problems with their genetics, there's a whole now burgeoning

field called nutrigenomics or detoxigenomics, where you do these genetic profiles and it shows you what your ability to detox certain things are. So when we're talking about heavy metals, like where do heavy metals come from? Well, it's like kind of like when people are exposed to the flu, the flu is everywhere, but some people express it because some people's immune system is weakened or they have a predisposition. So heavy metals are everywhere. Environmental toxicity is everywhere. When you look at the fetal cord blood, baby just born,

the average number of toxins in that fetal cord blood, 220 average toxins. Right out the gate, 60 of those are known carcinogens right out the gate you're already like born and we're born into this toxic soup so if we know what our genetics are and Rhonda was talking about this in regards to dr. Rhonda Patrick yeah because that was a great podcast she did with TBI. And she was talking about the predisposition towards Alzheimer's. You know, these ApoE type 4 genetics. Well, if you put that genetic profile on top of a traumatic brain injury, now you just have an increase in your Alzheimer's risk tenfold. Do you think that people are hesitant to look at sugar the same way you're describing it.

Because it doesn't have the... Like, when you say that sugar is more addictive in some studies than heroin, people will go, that's fucking horseshit. But it's because the effect of sugar doesn't have the profound effect on the body that heroin does. The actual effect. But I think people might confuse that with the addictive properties of it because i i know a lot of fucking people that are addicted to sugar and they don't want to admit it and they don't they want to pretend that it's just it's normal but they they take a day off of sugar and they

feel like they did a great thing a day you know i mean i don't know if heroin junkies need it every day if they could take a couple of days off, but I've, I've seen friends that eat candy or drink soda and those motherfuckers, they, they, it calls them. It calls to them. Sometimes after every meal,

after every meal, they have to finish it with something sweet. They have to have a dessert. And I've, I've kind of, I've felt myself go in and out of these modes where it's like, I want a piece of chocolate or something after almost every meal. And then I'll have to be like, whoa, whoa.

What is that? Yeah. Like why am I so compelled to do that? And the more stressed I am and the more I am doing things just kind of in autopilot, the more I just do that without even thinking. Like the more, if I've been in a recent medicine journey, or if I've gone floating, or if I've kept up with my meditation practice well, then I can like stop and reflect and be like, okay, here's this urge welling up inside me. Do I want to satiate it? Or do I want to, you know, deny it? And you have more conscious control of it. And then at that point, you can really make a decision. But when you're just caught up in momentum you know we're such creatures of momentum that that's you have to halt the momentum with what the native americans would call the sacred silence which is anything

that brings you to a point of presence where you can really access free will and just kind of stop all this momentum that's going which is why the tank is so great. The tank, nature, meditation, I mean, all of these things. You know, I'm reading this book right now by Tom Brown called Awakening Spirits, and he gives this really cool little fable that explains it. So I'll tell the fable here. So there's this guy who lives in the woods with a wizard, and this wizard has a demon that can accomplish any task. So the guy wants to capture this wizard and get the has a demon that can accomplish any task so the guy

wants to capture this wizard and get the demon because he wants to accomplish any task so he finds the wizard in meditation down by the stream throws a rope around him cinches it tight and the wizard looks at him and says you've come for my demon haven't you he says yes i've come for the demon give it to me or i won't let you go he says that's fine i'll give you the demon but i have to tell you the demon, but I have to tell you, the demon will do anything you want, but you have to keep it busy. If you don't keep it busy, it will grow angry. It'll grow hostile. It'll seek to destroy you. He says, fine, fine, no matter what, whatever. I'll keep it busy. There's plenty of stuff to do. Wizard says, sure. The demon will

be waiting for you back at your house. So he goes back to his house and there's the demon. It's a nice, humble servant. He says, what can I do for you, master? He says, oh, go fetch me a cup of water. And the demon goes out and comes right back with a cup of water. He says, it is done. He drinks the water. He says, what else would you have me do? He says, ah, go make me a feast. Go hunt some game and make me a feast. So demon goes out and makes him a feast, comes back. It is done. And even before he could finish eating it, the demon starts growing more angry and bigger and says, what will you have me do?

What will you have me do? He says, ah, build me a new house. Okay. So the demon goes off. He gets a moment of rest. The demon comes back, says it is done. The man looks up. Sure enough, there's the house built.

And he runs out of things. He starts to panic. He runs out of things to do. So he's, you know, freaking out. He runs back to where the wizard was. He says, wizard, I can't, I can't stop it. I can't give the demon enough things to do. And the wizard says, you know, with compassion says, pull a hair from your head and tell the demon to straighten the hair. And he says, okay, I guess I'll try that. So he runs back. And at this point, the demon is fully out of control. It's destroying his house. It's destroying all the things that he loves about his house. So he pulls the hair from his head and he says, straighten

this hair. And so the demon gets the hair and says, ah, tries to straighten it. And the hair goes back to curly, tries to straighten it. The hair goes back to curly, tries to straighten it, the hair goes back to curly, tries to straighten it, the hair goes back to curly, and all of a sudden the demon shrinks in size. And so in this fable, the demon is our minds, and our minds are constantly requiring, you know, what will you have me do? What will you have me do? And many of these techniques that we use, they liken to the hair. It's something that allows the mind, gives it a moment of distraction, gives it something to occupy it, puts it to sleep so that we can use the mind as a servant instead of our master. And so all of these things from meditation to floating to psychedelics, you know, they're hairs. Even nature itself is in its way a hair because if you need nature to find that calm that's you know that's the hair you need that walk in the mountains and some hairs are better than others obviously i love the story

up to the hair part i think whoever wrote that story needed to go back for a second draft i like what they're saying i i i catch it but straighten the hair out this fucking thing can build houses it can't straighten the hair out it's a thing can build houses. It can't straighten the hair out. It's a goddamn demon. It has powers. Right. I feel like it should have told it, what I would like you to do is shut the fuck up. How about concentrating on shutting the fuck up and doing nothing?

That's what I'd like you to do. That's your task. Your task is to do nothing. Well, Tom Brown, if you're listening, you need to rewrite your story. Rewrite that shit, son. That's old shit that was written a long time ago. When people had a lot of curly hair.

Well, they wrote dumb shit. They wrote Noah and the Ark, you know? Two of each animal. The fuck out of here. Animals eat animals. What are they doing on that boat? What do they do when they get off the boat? You fucked up.

You guys made bad stories. I like that idea, though, because it is kind of true. Especially ambition. Ambition can get out of control. It's like what we were discussing earlier today about rich people. There's a certain amount of rich people that never feel like, you know what, I've made plenty of money. I don't have to gouge and fuck over all the people that I do business with and try to rip off everyone who is working with me. You could have some sort of a more peaceful relationship with them

if you're less concerned about the money. And you brought up a really interesting point. That's the only thing they're keeping score in. It's the only thing where they have like a number system or a, uh, like you could look up on the board, like, look,

we're making progress. Look at, we have a quantifiable progress report up on the board. And those things become, it becomes a part of who you are as a human being, how you interface with this reality and your self-worth and your, how you, uh, the way you appreciate yourself and the way you feel about yourself, your confidence is oftentimes based entirely on how those numbers are moving.

And when those, when it's all just about business, you know, about selling computers or whatever the fuck you're doing, like, you know, like Steve Jobs jobs i think completely lost the script when you're talking about a guy who got into this idea of creating computers and and and figuring out something to fix the world through psychedelics he got into it through lsd and these lsd experiences that he had he said were some of the most powerful experiences of his life. Well, what did it lead to? It led to a guy who's a fucking nut who's working 20 hours a day just making computers all the time and trying to stop the competition and shut down anyone that would oppose him. Yelling at his employees.

Screaming at them even for not working as hard as he worked. Not recognizing that they're just individuals that are working for him. They're not going to share that same sort of psychotic passion. Yeah. I mean, I think we're all, we're all hungry for more. We're insatiable creatures. We all, we require more air. We require more food. We require more water. We're generally insatiable beings and we require progress. You know, that's one of the things we require puzzles. And the problem is, is that there's a hunger inside ourselves that oftentimes we don't know where the mouth is to feed it. And that's this, you know, this true peace, this alignment and reconciliation with our

consciousness, that whatever higher self that is, call it spirit, call it whatever you want. I prefer to call it your consciousness. And the problem is, is that it's really close to the other stomachs, but it's not it. So people try to feed it with accomplishments with money and they feed it with relationships and status and all of these other things, but they're not actually nourishing what that real hunger is. And that's the hunger to be what we're capable of being on a true consciousness level and a being that can help make the lives of everyone else around us better, you know, improve the quality of life for the earth and everybody around. Yeah, that's, it's so hard to grasp if you're not in that mindset.

It's so hard to, to leave the momentum of your current mindset, whether it's a current mindset that loves to gamble or the current mindset loves to stuff your fat face with cake, whatever it is. Those mindsets, those patterns of behavior are incredibly difficult to escape from. And it's one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you about food addictions because it seems to me that it's got i don't i don't really have a food addiction but i would imagine that they're probably one of the hardest to kick because everybody has to eat totally you have to eat yep so while you're eating you're like yeah this celery is good but fuck it would be awesome if i had some chocolate ice cream right now with some whipped cream and chocolate fudge you know those those uh those whole filling longing lustful sort of intense cravings that some people have towards food i've seen friends

that have food addictions that are that when they do get that food like you know we're maybe driving somewhere maybe we're hungry maybe we just landed and we're on our way from the airport to get food. When they finally get that food, it's like a fucking guy who's been holding his breath at the bottom of the ocean. They can't have this. It's like you just did something. Like you kept yourself from my precious for so long. Then when you finally in the presence of it, you're just engorging it.

You fucking forget to breathe. You're not breathing. I've seen guys eat where they're not breathing. You're not, like, taking a bite. You were fine five minutes ago. You were beating. Your heart was beating. You were breathing.

You were walking your heart was beating you were breathing you were walking your feet but all of a sudden that chicken parm sub comes your way and you're just stuffing it into your fucking maw that's a weird addiction man it's a weird addiction and that imbalance of massive necessity you know that's just it's necessary to get it in me right now even though it's not really yeah yeah food addiction is is one of the trickier ones and not everybody's gonna do a psychedelic, right? So for the vast majority like not everybody's gonna climb Everest and when you climb Everest It's gonna have a map and a team and a guide and all that stuff Don't go there when there's an earthquake here, right? Yeah. Yeah, you want me set and setting right same thing So what are what if most people gonna do? Well when, when you transition off of something that's so ubiquitous, uh, it's

super helpful to have motivation because it's not going to be an easy journey. It's super helpful to have a guide and a plan, and it's super helpful to integrate that plan and stay, you know, stick to it. So sugar, um, there's a JJ Virgin is a really well known author in the whole addiction realm, particularly in regards to sugar. She's got a pretty successful plan. Basically, it entails stepping down, and then transitioning from sugars that are really crappy, to sugars that are better, and then less of those sugars that are better, to eventually you're on an extraordinarily or no-sugar diet. So you gradually step that down. And outside of having a really good motivation, sometimes people won't stay with it.

Like, oh, this is just too hard. But if your motivation is like, wow, I just went to the doctor, and I've got like 90% stenosis on one of my heart arteries, and I'm really close to having another heart attack, or I'm morbidly obese, and I just got that major self-reflection about how my life's just horrible right now, or I'm in this, you know, suicidal depression, or whatever people's motivation is, that crisis point can actually help people motivate them to a new trajectory. So that's why oftentimes you hear with anybody going through an addiction, particularly with alcoholics, they haven't hit rock bottom. And once you've motivated and you've come up with a plan, whatever that plan is, to be able to stick to it is also important.

And to have ongoing support, especially if these are dangerous addictions. Like my sister committed suicide a year and a half ago after she relapsed on alcohol and no one saw it coming and she shot and killed herself. And it was a really big shock. And it really helped remind me of the importance of ongoing support and being consistently interfacing with conscious people in our family and supportive tribe and our brothers and sisters, like really watching out for each other, really checking in, making sure there's not anything going on on a deeper level, having that honest inventory versus just playing on the surface and ignoring

everything that's in the background. And this life is precious. So when we engage it in a good way and we're becoming our best self, then we have the opportunity to really create massive beneficial change in the world. And many people are playing on the surface, and we don't exactly even know how to get in touch with ourselves or what we want to do or what our mission is here in life. And so coming back to that whole addiction rewrite, there's steps. There's very clear steps along the path.

And sugar is one of those that is because it's so ubiquitous or like technology. I used to help run a clinic called Alternative to Meds in Sedona and another place called The Sanctuary in Sedona, two different centers, but oftentimes people will come for addiction recovery. And one of the trickiest ones that we ever saw was this addiction to technology, whether it was pornography or just being on the internet for so long

or whatever kind of addiction profile in the technology arena, because it's like sugar. It's so ubiquitous it's not like you're going to just say no and i'm never going to do that again it's like so at that point it's it's even coming back to that moderation plan it's even more helpful to have an ongoing support system and person in place and recovery coach move you through that process so sugar is one of those that because it's a physiologic addiction the body does get used to it or caffeine it does get used to it so if people are

jacked up on coffee you transition a black tea and you transition a green tea and then you transition to no caffeine really set somebody up for success versus saying well you're on coffee then stop it cold turkey and suffer for you know a week to ten days most people aren't gonna want to do it that way and it doesn't actually have to go that way you can actually come up with a pretty successful plan you just have to be rock solid and committed to it when you're talking about candida and gut bacteria how much of a when when you try to help someone get off that how much emphasis do you put on probiotics massive massive because there's gonna be a die-off and

that die-off and that toxicity that the candida is going to release, or like if you're clearing parasites, same thing. So parasites are another buffer, and we have grown, and we were talking about this before, we've grown over generations in traditional cultures to be symbiotic with over generations in traditional cultures to be symbiotic with parasites in our environment. Like we live together. And you see these traditional cultures that are very untouched by Western food and by Western marketing and by Western influence. And when you look at their microbiome or you look at their gut flora,

they have the most rich and diverse gut flora. And the ones that we usually have in probiotic strains are just a fraction of everybody who's playing. And so you've got these massively complex and extraordinarily sophisticated gut probiotic populations that help us metabolize and even produce a lot of the micronutrients that we need for our most vital living. And when you look at the long-term ramifications of being able to re-infiltrate, and so there's this whole movement now around fecal transplants and being able to identify somebody who's got a really healthy microbiome or healthy gut flora. They have a healthy neurological system. They're just generally

vital as a source for a potential gut fecal transplant. And when you look at people who are kind of the opposite of that, they have longstanding irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's disease or some kind of autoimmune infection, there's a whole science around using parasites as actually a beneficial step. It's called helminthic therapy. We actually receive hookworms into the system, and the hookworms kind of move everything else out and lower the inflammatory load and help to rewrite some of that autoimmune cascade so then once that autoimmune cascade is rewritten then you bring in the healthy probiotics so there's there's the whole

science to the gut body and mind interface that's why there's a really good book I think about getting Gerson called The Second Brain. And it's this whole deep scientific look at the gut-brain connection and how many of the neurotransmitters and what build the neurotransmitters, that actually starts in the gut. Like most of the serotonin system comes from the gut. It doesn't come from the brain. It's produced in the gut and it's transported to the brain for activity. So people that talk about feeling like shit, it's because they're full of shit. Right? So we need to actually start with the gut.

Isn't it amazing how much diet and what you take into your body has an effect on your mind itself? your body has an effect on your mind itself. I mean, it really, really truly is amazing how much what you put into your body has an impact on how your brain functions and the fact that we never get taught that our bodies are essentially a biological ecosphere. I mean, your bodies are essentially not one thing. Your bodies are like a host of untold billions of little tiny microscopic life forms that exist. And if they're in an unhealthy state, you'll be in an unhealthy state. But if they're in a healthy state, you'll feel better. The studies that they've done on probiotic gut content and the effect that it has on depression. Massive. It's insane.

Massive. Anxiety, too. Anxiety, yeah. Right? You have like a healthy rat population, an anxious rat population. You take out their poop and you transplant it. You just turn the healthy rats into anxious rats and the anxious rats into healthy rats. Well, in all fairness, you're fucking with their butt and sticking poop in there and there's a lot going on i get anxious external factors

and like i was fine they stuck a metal rod up my ass man that's nothing to do with the poop you put in there like i'm wondering when the next fucking shoe's gonna drop and we haven't gotten sophisticated yet and being able to like measure like how how rats feel but we have to about that be able to press a button and freeze them in time so they don't know what we're doing to them. You know, it's an interesting thing because there's a study that was done on rats with cocaine. It's a very famous study.

The difference between cocaine and heroin in rats and that if you give these rats cocaine, they'll do cocaine until they die. The problem with that study has been brought up, I forget who it was on the podcast that brought it up, was that you're talking

about rats in a fucking cage. What else is there to do? The cage itself is a part of the study. And the follow-up study to that showed that when they're put

in a rat park and they're still given unlimited supply of cocaine, so in isolation, rats with unlimited supply of cocaine, more than 75% will be heavy users and a lot of lethality. When that same unlimited supply of cocaine is put in the setting of what's called a rat park, where now you're like hanging out with a rat friend. You got rat hookers.

You got rat clubs. The rat ghetto. There's a rat softball game going on. You got all these options. The rat joggers. You got rat clubs. The rat ghetto. There's a rat softball game going on. You got all these options, right? The rat joggers. You got mouse racing. You got all kinds of shit. And when you've got all this great stuff and stimulation around you,

you've just went from over 75 heavy users to less than 25% heavy users. And no lethality. Right? So you, because of the social stimulation. So addiction is about, life is about connection, right? So that ability to connect to like a stimulating environment, the social milieu, significantly drops the drug use, even if you have the same amount. And same thing with Portugal, when they legalized all drugs. Decriminalized, I think, right? Yeah.

Decriminalized. Can't sell them, but yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Good. Yeah. Right. So when decriminalization happened and they shifted all their money from the war on drugs into social infrastructure and started to boost up the social milieu and started to destigmatize

the addiction nomenclature and that label, like something's wrong with you. Like, actually, let's talk about what's going on in your social arena and how we can help that. It was a complete rewrite and drug use went down. Lethality went down. So we're recognizing just more and more in these like we as these like, you know, monkeys walking around these suits. We are built for a connection. And when that's why, you know, the first part of our whole discussion today around people doing, you know, thumb desk jockey and getting really absorbed into that whole gamification arena and the whole

video gaming industry i get concerned about the social developmental ramifications like what what's the potential end result and does the is is that beneficial for our you know for the evolution of our species so so to speak or is it going to end up being like idiocracy, where generations down the road we just get dumber and dumber, and then, you know, the president is a WWF title holder? I think it really just depends on just how much addiction you have, whether it crosses that threshold. Because I played a lot of video games.

They kind of sucked back when I was a kid. But, you know, it was always the balance was, all right, play some video games and then run around outside, play basketball or kick a ball around or do whatever. And but I played I mean, I played a good amount. There was days I'd play six, eight hours of Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy or one of these super old school games. In the grand scheme of things, you were probably doing much more athletics and social. But still, it was just about, you know, about you know about balance and i think again that same message if we demonize video games the kids are gonna be like fuck you because they know that that's inherently not the problem the problem is is

identifying when something good like sex becomes something not good like addiction to sex if that thing is even real i mean i imagine it imagine it is. Totally. Yeah. Okay. Sex addiction is extraordinarily strong. I think this is addiction to washing your hands. People have addictions to everything. There's people that have addictions to they really get physically upset if they step on cracks in the sidewalk. Right. This is more like an OCD,

obsessive compulsive disorder kind of complex. But don't you think that there's some sort of an addiction property to that? Like that you're addicted to having a clean floor? OCD is another really difficult one to rewrite. And interestingly enough, when you look at the studies, the entheogens and the psychedelics, they come in again to help rewrite the neurochemistry. That's a bit more serotonin driven and not so much dopamine driven. There's some cross overlap.

That's a bit more serotonin driven and not so much dopamine driven. There's some cross overlap. But that's more of an anxiety spectrum disorder versus primary addiction disorder because those ritualized behaviors have to be done in order to arrest some underlying compulsion and need for perfection and need to have a corrective experience, some kind of underlying need. And so the energy around it's a little bit different. But at the same time, the intervention for success and recovery from that might be pretty similar. Because everybody's a little bit different. When you look at the data, people that have significant anxiety, this actually came up with floating too. And two years ago, Justin Feinstein talked about float at the float conference, he was talking about the benefits of flotation for anxiety. And people with generalized anxiety disorder after 10 floats had significant reduction in their symptoms, like by the order of like 30%.

And people with obsessive compulsive disorder, significant improvement in symptoms when going through a psychedelic experience like ayahuasca. So you've got these, again, really novel treatments and therapeutics. And honestly, more people are going to float than are going to do psychedelics. But again, it just becomes a really wide array of our tool belt. And knowing how to meet people where they're at, recommend the right approach for them at that time. Oftentimes, floating is a gateway to do other things like clean up the diet, clean up your social environment, get more on track with your purpose and your passion. Because when you're driving your purpose and your passion, all of a sudden there's less bandwidth that even has room to play with other behaviors and other addictions that might not be getting you to that point. Yeah, I've got to think that momentum plays a huge factor in a lot of people's lives and

their decisions, both good and bad. When people are on the bender momentum, they're getting drunk every night and they're fucking up every night. It becomes their life. Whereas the momentum of positivity, that becomes their life. When you start talking about expressions and sayings like one day at a time, the issues that I have with that, I'm talking completely out of ignorance because I'm not an alcoholic and I never have been. But if I was, I would like to think that I could just get rid of it. It doesn't have to be one day at a time.

Like, why is it one day at a time? When I wake up tomorrow, am I going to be, am I going to fuck up? Like, am I putting that out there? That one day at a time means let's just take this one day at a time. I'm sober one day at a time. How about I'm fucking sober? How about this is me? I learned from the past and I'm sober one day at a time. How about I'm fucking sober? How about this is me. I learned from the past and I'm sober now.

But the people that are into that 12 step shit, my only concern is they talk a lot like CrossFitters. They talk like vegans and CrossFitters and people that are like really into being addicted to what they're into. They're addicted to sobriety. Like they start talking about it all the time. They start trying to encourage other people, even people that don't have a problem with alcohol.

I've had friends that got clean, and then they see you have a drink, and they're like, listen, bitch, see this? This is a beer. I like beer. I'm going to have a beer, and then I'm done.

Is that okay? By the way, I'm gonna get up in the morning I'm gonna run you want to run with me pussy You're just gonna sit in bed and and say one day at a time I'm gonna go have my coffee and my cigarettes cuz I'm super healthy. That's the other thing they do They get addicted to something else It becomes an addiction to a new thing coffee and cigarettes is a big one with alcoholics I mean, I know so many fucking alcoholics that you see them every day.

They have a goddamn venti Starbucks in their hand. They can't get off that tit. And it's just they've just substituted whatever it is that they were trying to fill with the booze. They've substituted it now with caffeine or with nicotine or with whatever. It becomes like an identifying part of their story. You know, that's part of their identity. And I think one of the lures and the problems with this is when you have this kind of ascetic principle that's part of your identity, you think you're doing great things, but you're really just focused entirely on yourself. It's like, I'm doing something great. I'm eating vegan. Well,

what is that doing for the world? That's just something you're doing for yourself. It's like, I'm doing something great. I'm eating vegan. Well, what is that doing for the world? That's just something you're doing for yourself. Fine. Good. But they act like it's this great burden that they've bore for the rest of humanity. Well, vegans have a kind of an argument for that because the less carbon footprint, less of an impact on the environment with no factory farming or no vested interest in that. So there's a modicum of actual benefit. But in any kind of ascetic practice, whether it's not drinking or whether it's not eating meat or whether it's not doing something, not engaging in sex,

you can talk to somebody who's celibate and you find these in some yoga communities like, yes, I've not engaged in sex in a month. And they act like they're doing some great service for humanity when really it's a selfish thing that they're doing. Fine, if you want to do that. Any of these things are good. I'm not saying don't do them. But the lure is that because it's a struggle, you feel like you're doing something great when really you're just focused entirely on yourself. Well, there's also a competition going on and there's comparing yourself to others, which is it's a natural human instinct.

It's a natural human instinct to gauge your progress based on how you how you stack up with the people that you surround yourself with. And very, very few people like to do that in the negative sense. Like you don't like to look at that in a negative sense. You know, you like to look at that in a negative sense you don't you like to look at it in a positive sense like if you're if you've turned vegan one of the things that people like to do is they they get really shitty especially online like online like the ability to communicate with people with no social repercussions no cues no interaction no look at each other eye to eye there this this shitty nasty things that people say to each other through that and that this this vegan thing that so many people love to do where they are really fucking angry and nasty and aggressive towards people who aren't vegan and towards people

who enjoy meat or towards people who hunt and they somehow or another feel like they're justified in releasing this anger on you and because you're cruel to animals like i saw something today or someone was talking about there's bears in yellowstone park that were chasing tourists did you see that video it's a pretty crazy video these people people were all on this bridge, and these black bears started chasing these people. It's really kind of fucked because there's quite a few people on this bridge. And they got on a bridge that, unfortunately, a mother and her cubs got on. And the mother's kind of freaking out, and she's chasing people off. And so someone was like, man, fuck those bears.

Somebody wrote that on Twitter. And then some other guy was like, man, fuck those bears. Somebody wrote that on Twitter. And then some other guy was like, no, fuck people. What people do to this world, if you compare what bears do to this world, blah, blah, blah. And it was like this angry scribe about veganism. And it went from bears being around people to I'm better than you because I'm a vegan. And people suck, but bears are awesome. That bear will eat your dick off and not give a shit. being around people to I'm better than you because I'm a vegan yeah and people suck but bears are awesome that bear will eat your dick off and not give a shit you can be screaming it's living in nature and it's trying to keep its

babies alive which by the way if it runs into a male bear the male bears gonna eat the baby so please shut the fuck up with people are worse than bears because it's ridiculous if bears had cars they would never get their oil changed They would fucking drive right over babies. They wouldn't give a fuck. I mean the idea The idea that somehow or another you know you you have transcended You know your your need to consume animal protein, and so this has animal protein and so this has transfer transferred in in your being somehow to this anger towards people that do consume animal protein it's it's really short-sighted and it does more harm than it does good because there's some really good ideas that are attached to living a vegetarian

life really good ideas and what what you're just talking about in regards to both of those groups like you had the guy who was recovering from alcohol. Now he was judging you for drinking a beer. And you've got vegans who are judging you for eating meat. It's the same under both of those is that same projected bias. It's that same judgment that what I'm doing is right and what you're doing is wrong. And when we do that, we polarize the discussion. And it makes some people good and some people bad, as opposed in Western medicine has done that to chiropractic medicine or naturopathic medicine.

Or the Palestinians have done that to the Israelis. I mean, the inherent conflicts that are downstream that cause all the major discourse in the world is all about people judging one another and believing in their bones that their position is right versus coming to the table and saying, let's connect. Let's have a clear conversation. Let me own what is mine. what is mine so if I'm a recovering alcohol and I'm judging you for your alcohol and maybe let me own the fact that I'm actually envious of you because I'd really love to have a beer but for me because of my chemistry or my background or whatever because of who I am and what I'm going through right now I me having a beer is a bad thing. It would lead to a bad outcome. So I'm going to judge you for yours.

It doesn't really matter. You can put the mask on any way you want. But underlying that, it's people's own inherent ability to be real and okay with themselves and judging each other as being bad or wrong. That's the polarizing conflict. Yeah, that's a very good point yeah that's a very good point it's a very good point and i think it speaks to what we were talking about earlier about competition and that this is the only arena where they're keeping score and that some people they're keeping score with their moral they're the the like the moral score like i am a more moral more ethical person of you because i choose to live my life in this way, even though I do all sorts of damage to people's psyche by being believe to be disparaging belief systems or or

people that may be sexist or homophobic or what have you instead of instead of treating these ideas with rational discourse and love they they're aggressive and angry and they try to get people fired and they try to shame people for their ideas that doesn't work You can't human beings don't work like that and you can't communicate like that And what you're doing is essentially the same thing that we're talking about you are now keeping score by shaming or by writing horrible things about these people or by attacking them or organizing groups of

about these people or by attacking them or organizing groups of like-minded fuckheads to go out and attack these people. And instead, you're just creating a competitive sort of antagonistic combative environment. You're not doing any good. You might feel better yourself. Like, yeah, we went out there and got them. But, you know, like. And let's bring that full circle. You were talking about bullying before.

And we can see that start on the playground. You can actually see that wiring in kids. They're keeping score of toughness at that point. And that becomes part of the thing that they're keeping score. But then you look at the real masters, like many of these fighters that we know, and you transcend... At a certain point, the masters transcend the idea of keeping score. And they just are.

The baddest fighters are just tough. They don't have to show it. They don't have to bow up to somebody or bully anybody. Like Cain Velasquez. Exactly. He doesn't bully anybody. You ever seen him even make a mean face? No. He doesn't have to.

He beats the shit out of everybody. No mean face. He's not keeping score on toughness anymore. He's transcended the game. And same with anybody in the morality sphere. If they're attacking people, it's just showing their kind of amateur nature in that game, in this kind of lack of mastery of that. Because the true spiritual masters, those people who really are the most morally impeccable people,

they're not doing that shit. They've transcended keeping score. People with a healthy relationship in business. You see that like Elon Musk giving away all his patents and things. I don't know him personally. I can't vouch that he's perfect, but you start to see principles of, hey, let's just share. There's enough to go around. And they've transcended this score keeping mentality. And that's true mastery when you get to that level rather than this really poor kind of game of That's such a really nice it at that point. Yeah, right you you now like the the internal scorekeeper I don't I'm not looking at you to get my own validation. So I don't need to

Aggressively try and sell my approach. I don't need to prove to you that I'm right and then get your feedback So I feel better about myself you essentially we internalize over time some people have it kind of out the gate because of good parenting or good genetics or a whole host of other things some people develop it over time through own personal master be able to like walk in the world with that self-confidence that you you you're already like you use the word a lot which I appreciate which is impecc you you're already like you use the word a lot which i appreciate which is impeccability we're already walking an impeccable life we're already aligned with

everything that we feel is is important for us to do in the world we've internalized that self-referencing ability to be content whether it's content in the tank or content across the the discussion platform I think you have to have varying disciplines in your life as well I don't think concentrating on one thing for any long period of time although I've done it many times in my life I don't think it's ultimately healthy I think it's it's very good short term to achieve great success in a small amount of time or a relatively small amount of time. But I think that ultimately that is one of the things that can trip you up.

If your whole world, say, you know, back to what we're saying, like a computer company, if you own a computer company, if your whole world is that computer company, I think that's ultimately very unhealthy. But if you have this computer company and then you start getting into jujitsu, like you might, you might relax a little bit about the fucking computer company and realize like, oh, okay. Like there's a lot of different things I can kind of like put this energy towards. And some of them actually enhance my human potential.

They actually develop me as a human being and not getting so caught up in those numbers. Like there's a lot of people that will look at things. This is a really common thing to say. Like you'll see a guy like Bill Gates. Man, if I had his money, I wouldn't fucking work at all. Yeah, that's why you'll never have his money. It's just like the type of guy that becomes a Bill Gates is a fucking obsessed dude. You have to have this insane mindset towards progress and towards continuing to move the number, continuing to move that needle.

And that's the only way you get to develop a company like Microsoft. You have to hire like-minded folks and you have to all compete together as a team to try to achieve world dominance in something as lucrative as the computer market. It's the only way. You don't get there by being some casual dude who likes to take a lot of time off and work on myself. No, you get up Bill Gates' body,

you look all goofy as fuck. That dude doesn't do deadlifts. Look at Bill Gates. Bill Gates has no submission defense. He's like, take his back. He just immediately taps. Why? Because he's put all of his energy

into creating this Microsoft monolithic Empire that's just unstoppable at this point and It's probably really sort of semi-retired now, but I think a lot of that has to do with age, you know and Once you got 90 fucking billion dollars in the bank There also comes to this point where like I don't I can't this. Like, I literally can't spend this. So I think that having varying disciplines, like, I do a lot of different things. And I did in all ways. But in doing a lot of different things, doing martial arts and playing pool and doing meditation and getting in the tank and doing stand up comedy and doing podcasts and fight commentary and all these various things,

none of those things have a lot of weight to me. They're all very significant and important, but if one of them went away, I'd be fine. Like if the UFC called me up today and said, hey, you can't do the UFC anymore, I'd be like, well, I had a great time. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

Take care. And that would be fine with me. Like I have enough other things I do diversified your portfolio, but if it was my whole life It would be devastating, but it's never your whole life your life is your life And sometimes people forget that your life is your life It's this girl man if she leaves me. I can't do it dude You can do it trust me the only people got dumped and moved on what you're the one person who can't do it, dude. You can do it. Trust me. You know how many people got dumped and moved on?

Well, you're the one person who can't do it? Yeah, get the fuck out of here, bitch. Just go to Match.com. I guarantee you, you're gonna get laid in a month. You're gonna be so happy you're free. You know? Get on Tinder. These are bad examples, but swipe right.

But involve yourself in more than one thing diversify your life you can't if your life is completely revolving around one thing but then there's other places where that is a bad advice like fighting i think like i think you should have some few things that you do outside of fighting but if you're going to engage in something like martial arts like the amount of time that you have to do to compete the amount of time that you have to do to compete, the amount of time that you have to dedicate to it, it's almost impossible to have any other sort of life. Well, I think one of the key things is there's the development of skills, which is important to diversify, but you're really developing your

identity. And then if your sole identity is as a fighter, what happens when you break your arm? It's a huge issue. Then all of a sudden you're in this huge depression. But let's say you're a fighter and you're also part of your identity is, you know, maybe you're a family man and you're a good, you know, you have a, you're a good father and that becomes part of your identity and you're a good fighter and you're, you know, you like to write or you like to paint. And then all of a sudden you have multiple things. So if one thing leaves, then you have many other parts that really make your life, give it purpose, give it meaning. And I think the problem can be inherent in any of these things. Like you see parents whose sole life is the parenthood process. Their identity is their kid's success. Their identity is father of so-and-so, mother of so-and-so. And so that

becomes an issue as well. So diversifying your identity to the point where, yeah, all of these are just things, but it's really you yourself that you're, you know, this being on this planet, you know, that doesn't need invulnerability where they can take away any one thing even your own physical like physical ability it's something that's very good to cultivate i'm all about it but if you have your soul identity wrapped up in that and you get in some kind of accident you're gonna have a fucking hell of a time because if all you look at yourself is your physical ability and you haven't cultivated anything else, your spiritual ability or your emotional connection to other people or these other things. It's putting all your eggs in one basket. It's a dangerous place to be because the universe loves to go around and play gotcha on any type of thing that we have too much attachment to. It's crazy how that's such a

catch 22. It's like in order to achieve great success you have to it has to literally become your world you have to be obsessed with it you have to like everything that i've ever done that i got really good at i i became completely obsessed with it where i was i was living it eating it breathing it like i had no identity other than that but that doesn't balance you out as a human being it's almost like almost like you go through these sprints, and then when you get out of the sprint, you're like, let me just stop here for a second. I can't keep doing this anymore.

And then you almost have to get through that in order to realize that there does need to be some sort of diversification in your interests. Miyamoto Musashi wrote about that in the Book of Five Rings. One of the things that he talked about that in the book of five rings. One of the things that he, he talked about that was really important was that a great fighter, a great samurai had to also be a great philosopher, had to also be a great artist, had also like,

there was a balance that had to be achieved where there was never any ridiculous anger. There was no outburst. There was no stupidity. There was no foolhardiness. And this was all balanced. There was this symbiotic relationship that you had to all of your emotions and all of your fears and all of your ideas and all of your expression. And your art was also your killing.

And all those things moved together. And that without that balance, you would miss. Something would go wrong. You would fail to see it in front of you. You would fail to parry. You'd fail to counter and you would die on the battlefield. Yeah. If your identity is too wrapped up in one things, you will crave the success in a way in which you need it because you need that to support you in that. And the second that you need something or crave something, it belies a certain underlying fear that you're not going to get that. And the

minute you have fear that you're not going to get it, you're not going to be performing at your best ability, you know. So, you know, I heard a great poker player who told me that, you know, his mentor who'd won some World Series of Poker said, you know, you'll win the World Series of Poker when it isn't a big deal if you win the World Series of Poker. Like, you've just gotten to the point where you've mastered that art to such a degree that you don't crave that to form your identity. You're not afraid of not getting that. It's just like, yeah, this is what I do. I'm one of the best in the world. And this is what's going to happen. You know, when, when it's, yeah, you can be stoked, but it's not this deep need because

anytime you need something, whether it's a girlfriend, whether it's something in your career, if you really need it to the point where if you don't get it, you think you're going to freak out, you're going to be too afraid to actually get it. And then there's also that very important transition for when you actually do achieve that thing, now what? Right. Like, look at a guy like Mike Tyson in his prime. I mean, he was the epitome of dedication. I mean, he was the epitome of dedication. I remember watching this video of Mike Tyson describing his early morning runs,

that he could wake up later and run, but he got a little bit of an edge knowing that as he was running, his opponent was sleeping, and that he would work out. I mean, he was in impeccable condition. When he was being trained by Custom he was he was living the complete total existence of a man hell-bent on becoming the world champion and then once he became the world champion then he's buying tigers and smacking bitches and punching people in bodegas i mean he's out of his fucking mind right because he'd achieve this unstoppable this this this this status this this peak of existence that he had longed for forever.

But then where are the goals? Now what? Every fight is a 30-second assault. You know, I mean, those 80s fights with Tyson where he would just show up and look at people and they would melt. The Bruce Eldon fights where, you know, he got dropped from a left hook, didn't even connect. Just the ghost. It was even connect. Like, just the ghost. It was like chi, like, ah! And when you, I think there's a lack of a challenge then.

There's a lack of a goal. There's no more mountain. So now it's just chaos and cocaine and women and then eventually the wheels fall off. The lack of balance. Yeah. I mean, that's the, you know, that is the warrior poet concept that we lost somewhere along the way. We started celebrating people in the extremes, you know, and you celebrate that with extreme amount of money too, you know, which is the

allure, like a laser, someone who can be really good at one thing can achieve a lot of financial success, but they're not generally going to achieve happiness. But that's not what's celebrated or measured. But that used to be the norm. I think I've talked about it on here before, like that in ancient Greece, in Rome, in ancient Japan, and this idea of the bushido and this way of cultivating many different skills and talents, calligraphy along with swordsmanship,

philosophy along with holding the shield line, you know, all of these different things that's been kind of lost a little bit along the way. And I think that's a huge part of bringing back an embrace of what it is to be a man and for women, you know, what it is to be a woman holding their own, you know, special magic in whatever field it is, not just attractiveness, not just how good you look, not just how sexy you are, but what other things that you can cultivate, what emotional intelligence, what other skills, maybe it is on the more masculine side, whatever. But rounding out the spectrum of everybody, I think, will really yield much, much more positive results. Because again, going back to these tragedies you see with bullying and all the suicides,

so much is attached to, their identity is attached to attractiveness and social status on these networks. Where if they were a great poet or a great painter or a great basketball player, a great soccer player, you know, there would be one element of truth that they could always rely on, even when the world seemed to take away that. And let's say they were good at multiple things. Let's say they were good at caring for an animal and good at, and good at soccer and good at, you know, writing and they were attractive. All right, well, you take away that one finger of attractiveness. Cool. They still got these multiple areas. So I think that's a key thing. You know, if you look at

developmentally ideas to instill in young people is having multiple things that they can draw steam from when everything looks like it's collapsing and say i can sort it out you know i think counterintuitively also the idea that bullying is just a natural part of of people growing up i think it's a natural part of people growing up that never learn how to fight you know where you see very little bullying or very little tolerance of bullying martial art schools It is very it is looked at as one of the worst Character traits a true martial artist a true master can have you know like one of the easiest things you could do like say if you Want to do jujitsu if you want to roll with a guy like Marcelo Garcia?

You're not to get hurt. You're just not going to, he's not going to hurt you. He'll tap you. You'll be forced into positions where you have to tap out. But that's not hurting you. That's, he's going to beat you at the game of jujitsu. But as far as like harm you, he's not going to harm you. And as far as the way he treats you, he's the kindest, sweetest guy ever.

And one of the reasons why is because he is a true master at killing people with his bare hands without actually harming people. It seems contradictory. I think the best way to stop bullying in school would be to make martial arts available to everyone and to explain to them that this isn't about becoming a tough guy. It's about overcoming your own self overcoming your own insecurities your own ego which is a battle that is constant it's like is that expression about um there's an expression about inspiration is uh that inspiration is like bathing uh it works but it works for short periods of time that's why we recommend it daily you know like you can't just bathe once a year and go what the fuck I did bathe yeah why am i dirty right you know I mean it's the same thing with developing your mind controlling your ego

controlling your fears reassuring your anxieties and assessing the objective view or assessing an objective view of of your life and your perspective on the world. And I think it's very difficult to do without some discipline, without some sort of task-oriented discipline. And in my opinion, one of the best ones is martial arts. And it's one of the best ones for dealing with interpersonal conflict because we want to pretend that no one's going to fight. We want to like, well, we don't want bullying. We don't want fighting. We don't want that in this school.

Well, you have it. Okay, you have it. You know why you have it? One of the reasons why you have it, you're not addressing the underlying problems of what it means to be a person, especially what it means to be a developing man growing up and having all these thousands of years of instincts and DNA ingrained in your your biological system and then you're supposed to just ignore them and you wonder why men gravitate towards toxic masculinity like you know video games and and fucking watching the Avengers

That's not toxic. It's a part of being a human. Like a part of being a human. The reason why we got here in 2015, it's not because everybody did yoga and ate tofu. It's because there were fucking warriors and they fought off other warriors because we used to be rampaging tribes of monkey people. Okay? And we evolved past that over millions of years to get to where we are now. But it's foolish to pretend that we're done. It's fucking foolish. It's foolish to pretend that we're done. It's fucking foolish. It's foolish to be like, why am I so hairy? What is that?

That's monkey DNA, man. I'm still fucking animal. There's animal in us. We're not these aliens with these large gray heads and like frail bodies and we move things around with telepathy. Maybe that's in our future. We're not there yet.

And to pretend that we're there now is ignoring our biological system. And that's ensuring you're going to have these same issues over and over and over again. I think that some of the nicest people I've ever met have been martial artists. And I really believe that if we taught that in school from the time when children were little, so it's not some scary, freaky thing that you have to enter into as an adult, but it's a part of a normal, everyday management of life program, I think we would be a lot better off, a lot better off. You

would alleviate a lot of that anxiety of physical altercation too. It wouldn't be some threat that everybody's holding over everybody's head too. You know, it'd be a much easier existence. I think, I think you make a perfect point there because it's not in, in any time you try to deny these natural instincts that you have, you're going to have a problem. So, and then the other aspect is, okay, let's placate them. All right. Well, that kind of works a little bit, but really what we should do is celebrate them and allow them to channel in positive ways, you know, celebrate that urge to use your body in these strong physical, you know, forms. And martial arts is a great way to channel that. Jiu-jitsu particularly, because with jiu-jitsu you can go 100% against somebody and not typically not hurt them. You

know, it's this real contest. Wrestling was a way that a lot of people did that for thousands of years as well. Developing different wrestling styles. You see it in Africa, the Greco-Roman style, sumo, whatever. It's a way that people can exert force upon each other safely and celebrate the art form of that. Same with sexuality. And I think there's a huge problem with that. People just deny the fact that we're sexual beings. We better not teach sex ed or the kids might have sex. What the fuck are are talking about it. You could say the same thing about the psychedelic experience, like the island, which is a crowd favorite of ours by Aldous Huxley. He talks about the rites of passage ceremonies that includes moksha medicine, which is probably

psilocybin that is done in the group setting for kids as a rites of passage going into their adulthood that's supported and stewarded by those that have already gone through it. So like your dojo master working with people in the early stages of martial arts training or somebody that's medicine positive and experienced working with kids going into psychedelic altered states of consciousness to be able to expand their worldview. states of consciousness to be able to expand their worldview. So all these things where we repress information, sexuality, antiogenics, physical engagement, anytime we were repressing those things, they're going to come out anyway. And they usually come out in these distorted,

destructive ways. Yeah. So set the bar with really good practices in all of these areas, sexuality, physicality, and spirituality. Like really, if you're nurturing somebody young, you got to hit those areas in a really conscious way and not be scared of them. That's just, that is what we are. Like you said, we got fucking hair on our bodies. Like let's enjoy that. It's not going to last forever. It's a cool time. Let's really enjoy this period. Whatever comes next, comes next. But celebrate that in a positive way. You know, teach kids not just this is what to do, always wear a con and blah, blah, blah, all that. But to be like, all right, this is what to do if you think you're about to come and you really should, would rather hold off a little longer.

Like, you know, not just think about baseball, but there's like tantric practices that can help you, like different breathing techniques that can put that, like actionable information. So kids are like, okay, I can calm down a little bit in this situation. Maybe this can be, instead of this short, violent experience that leaves everybody feeling like, ah, what was that? You know, teach them how to make it a positive experience so they don't get all this baggage attached to these sexual encounters because i've i've encountered that a lot people who've had really caustic and damaging sexual encounters with people where it's like so much tension built up so much ignorance around it and then something happens and it's just short and violent and it's terrible it's like ah that was an awful traumatic experience where you could just be like,

look, we're all going to have sex. It's cool. Here's some techniques. This is what's pleasurable. This is what's respectful. This is what's safe. These are some techniques that can help out and celebrate that just the same as you would teach martial arts, just the same as you would steward people through true experiential spirituality, where they get in touch with that other thing, either inside themselves or in the other, you know astral in the in the light world Whatever you want to say, you know steward them in positive ways through those main categories and it's a different fucking world at that point there's also a lot of Confusing and conflicting signals that are out there people expressing themselves in ways that aren't necessarily honest but in instead they're trying

to calm their own anxieties or distort other people's perceptions of reality to match up with the way they identify themselves. You see this all the time with homophobic people who will talk very horribly about gay sex and then you find out that they're actually gay. I mean, this is, it's, it's so common, like this mixed signal, this wire, this confusion going on. People that don't feel sexually attractive, don't feel awkward or feel awkward rather, and don't feel like they're, they want to diffuse or deny or, or demean the idea of the importance of sexual contact.

Like, I read this piece the other day where someone was saying that there is no such thing as the urge for sex. Like, there is no sex drive. They actually said this. They were saying there is no sex drive. There's a drive to eat. There's a drive to sleep. You have drive.

But if you don't have sex, you are fine. Whoa. And I'm like, you're out of your fucking mind. Like, what are you talking about? How do you think there got to be 7 billion people in the world? We all just decided to fuck. We just, well, let's try this. No, there's a goddamn crazy drive.

There's numerous examples through every species of people risking their, of animals risking their life to have sex. Sure. You know, why do these, why do these animals in the wild, why do they fight to the death for like the seventh cow in the harem? Yeah. Like, like you don't do that because you're just trying to survive. It's because there's an instinct to reproduce that's probably as strong as the instinct to survive and in some case superseding it.

How about elk? They grow trees out of their fucking head so they could smash these trees into other elk they stab each other these trees have pointy ends they don't grow blunt they have fucking points on the end and if you ever seen elk fight they have holes all over their chest and their cape all over their neck area where they jam their fucking, these swords that grow every year out of their head when it's time to fuck.

When it's time, their urge is so strong that their body grows swords out of their fucking head. And then when they're done fucking, they drop off. They fall off. I mean, it's insane to think that there's not a sex drive.

It's insane. But this was a whole article by some chubby dummy that has shitty hormone balance, never goes jogging, I'm sure, and just feels completely unattractive sexually. So they're in denial about the urge and the need and whether or not it's a core component of life because it's so weighted. Because you use sex to sell jaguars and lipstick and fucking buildings. And, you know, there's always a woman with her legs and long leg and a man with abs and a fucking Calvin Klein commercial and all this sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. You know, there's people that just feel like I'm out of that game. Like that game does not apply to me. I'm here eating donuts.

My gut looks like a fucking beanbag chair and i'm not that guy or i'm not that girl and so they deny the existence of it and if you uh if you show a picture of yourself looking hot you're fat shaming which is one of my all-time favorite of all the retarded social justice warrior sayings fat shaming like can't shame you if you're not fat how about that well the repression creates these other things like the reason why americans use sex to sell everything is because sex has been so repressed that we and yes we crave it in some crazy weird way if it was just a healthy relationship with it it would be like why is the really hot girl selling a cheeseburger right it'd

be funny and people would laugh at it instead of being like oh paris hilton was sauce dripping down her face it was amazing you know those are way less effective for people to get laid all the time yeah for sure when people are married and their wife is kind of dumpy and they're kind of dumpy and they just no one ever touches them and no one's attracted them and then they see some chick with dark red lipstick on and her breasts are plumped up and she's in some fucking outfit and she's selling burger king or something like that you're like i'll buy a burger from you like it just draws you to it because it's unavailable because it's it's it's just outside of the realm of possibility in your meager existence so they can it's it

becomes currency it becomes currency. It becomes like a huge selling point. You look at the amount of things that we sell with beautiful women. I mean, it's staggering. If you just did a montage of all the different things that we try to sell with beautiful scantily clad women, it's amazing. I mean, it's amazing. It's, it's a really, it's a, it's crazy. Yeah. I mean, in a healthy relationship It's it's a really it's a it's crazy Yeah, I mean in a healthy relationship I suppose it would be like you know you it's not to not celebrate beautiful women beautiful women are inherently going to be Something that people are going to enjoy seeing just like a great beautiful bouquet of flowers

Like you have a beautiful bouquet of flowers on your table, you know, you're gonna look at that and you're gonna say oh man That's beautiful. That's a beautiful part of the world. That's a beautiful part of nature that exists and you can appreciate it, but not using that to manipulate in some weird way and cause a reaction and then use that momentum and steer it and turn it. You know, that's where it gets weird. But I think all the, you know, all too often people forget that other part, which is, is yeah that is a beautiful part of the world it's it's beautiful to look at it be beautiful to smell it'd be beautiful in a variety of different ways we can fully celebrate that but just not manipulate that

urge into something that's not helpful but it's one of those weird things where when things are suppressed they gain so much energy and so much power that they're almost unavoidable i mean this is like this this momentum and energy behind them that it like the catholic priest that is forced into celibacy and now nobody trusts that fuck because he's just this this just barely hanging on clinging just clinging like a piece of cheesecloth holding back the ocean you know just you know you know you know you know it's not natural you know it's not normal and that's why the the image or the depiction of the Catholic priest has been some sex crazed pervert pedophile why it exists it's completely totally

unnatural to repress yourself sexually. It has nothing to do with homosexuality. Like people will say, Catholic priests are all really gay and that's why they go into priesthood. Gay and molesting kids are completely unrelated. That is not what's going on. What's going on is these poor fucking people have

no sexual outlet and that is totally unnatural. It is the epitome of denying your physical existence is exactly what we're talking about earlier. The denial of the, the, the body as a biological organism that has existed for untold thousands of years in the exact same state that you find yourself in today.

And that existence was predicated on the need to breed sexual desire and the fact that your body is making fucking sperm every day of the week okay it's just constantly doing it because it doesn't know that you're a priest you know your body just thinks it's a body you know you you have to exist as a human being under the confines of being a human being when you deny your humanity because it doesn't fit your ideal or your aesthetic or your ridiculous notions of what you should be, well, you're going to run into problems, son. We should all aspire to greater heights.

But in doing so, you've got to address the reality of what the fuck you are. That's again, going back to the definition of consciousness, consciousness is fully embodied. You know, it is not just sitting on a mountain, only accessing your spiritual body. It's fully embodied. It's being a human in your body and bringing that home and bringing the unity of that whole system together. That's, you know, that's what it really boils down to. That's what's going to lead the happiest, most fulfilled life and make you someone who society can lean on like an anchor. That creates these people that are just the pillars, the leaders,

the people who can be there when the shit hits the fan, you know? I mean, that's who everybody should aspire to be, an embodied being of consciousness, not just a consciousness being and not just a body. Bring it all together. And there should be a bunch of us around, so it's normal. I'm not saying us like we've got it nailed, but I mean a bunch of humans that are like that around so that we could all sort of feed off each other and imitate our atmosphere in a very positive way. And I think, you know, there's a lot of people running through life that they don't have anyone around them that is living a life that they would aspire to.

And so it's really hard to dream. It's really hard to picture an ideal existence because your existence is sort of it's modeled out of what you see in your environment. In your environment, there's a lot of misery and bullshit and and just confusion and despair it's like that um who was the who was the the great author that made that quote was it walden i forget thoreau thoreau uh all men leave most men lead lives of silent desperation. And that's the reality. It's like most people, I mean, he's a man, so he wrote about men, but most people, I think, live lives of longing for better, silent desperation,

just like this is it? This is what I'm doing? Will you kids shut the fuck up? You know, like you're in your cubicle and you just want to grab that image, that famous video of a guy who's in his cubicle who just starts punching his keyboard and then just smashes his computer monitor and picks it up and smashes it on the ground. It was all caught by

a security camera. Have you ever seen that video? It embodies cubicle life to me because this guy just hit that point where he's like, fuck you! And he smashes the whole thing. I mean, so many people are like on that brink, just right there. And so they numb themselves.

They numb themselves with alcohol or medications or television or all of these things to dampen these and make it possible instead of just really looking at let's go for what, let's go for the fucking win. Like, what's the win? What situation, even if it's not normal, even if it's a little weird, even if it's on the fringe, like, what's the win for me? Like, fuck what everybody else thinks. You know, I'm going to forge a new way. Maybe that is being some, you know, crazy ice fisher in some desolate place, or maybe it's living in a non-monogamous community or maybe whatever. desolate place or maybe it's living in a non-monogamous community or maybe whatever like what's your win right go for the win like don't just accept yeah okay you know this was

okay this this lifetime we did all right we made it through you know just go for the fucking win yeah it's like hunter s thompson's description of how to end life screeching sideways with the wheels falling off like don't pull in and park at the end of the life. Like, you want your radiator to be overheating, your engine smoking, everything falling apart. You know, I know this woman, Sue Akins. She's on that show Life Below Zero. She's on the podcast. She's just fucking great, great character.

She's in her 50s. She lives 200 miles above the Arctic Circle in a place called Kavok in Alaska and she loves it. That's her. That's her reality. That's reality went for the win She went for the win and it's not my win. It's not your win my win It's not your win, but it's her win man. She fucking loves it when she talks about it She talks about it with like true love like she she is enjoying it She loved that it fits her personality it fits her worldview. She is enjoying it. It fits her personality. It fits her worldview.

She loves it. She's in the midst of ongoing cryotherapy. Yeah. Her majesty's pretty young, too. It's a weak cryotherapy, though. She's not really doing the 250 degrees below zero. She only gets down to like 90. But she does it for way longer so it's different yeah what were some of when you were

treating patients in the you know clinical pathology thing like what were some of the the patterns that you saw that were you know really for some of the real challenges that people face like growing up you know like what were the main themes that were the hardest hardest to deal with and bring into a healthy adult life? Trauma and disconnection. Disconnection from like what Joe was saying in regards to mentorship and having, having a big brother or somebody in that role that they could aspire to be like, that could coach them through challenging situations and going through trauma because trauma is so rampant. And it's also our representation and our internalization of trauma. Some people take

that on as an identity, that they've been traumatized or they've been abused. And because it's not discussed, it's in fact shamed. It's not really dealt with above board, whether it's people being traumatized sexually because the perpetrator, the person actually doing the traumatic event, they didn't have the languaging and the opportunity to connect with somebody that it held and seeded over time. Like if you see animals in the wild, when they get traumatized, like if you were driving a car and you hit a deer, the first thing that deer is going to do when it gets to the side of the road, it's going to shake it out. It's going to just move that somatically out of its body because trauma gets imprinted into the somatic infrastructure like prangi was talking about into like the fascia trauma gets fat gets gets programmed into the body it also gets trauma will change the genetic expression

you actually see the dna genetic code change its expression at the time of trauma see the DNA genetic code change its expression at the time of trauma and that can be recapitulated transgenerationally so from generation to generation to generation I can still hold my parents trauma my grandparents like an epigenetic phenomenon yeah it's a transgenerational epigenetic phenomena right so that's so crazy it's so crazy. So we are and that's what the Native Americans talk about. Like our actions right now do affect seven generations down the line, because it takes that long to bleed it out of the genes, unless you clear it. And so trauma has a big hold that sense of disconnection, because we grew up in these disenfranchised families. Like, you know, mom and dad drive in with little Johnny in the back and they hit the garage door opener.

Drive in, garage door goes down. Like little Johnny's getting his social engagement through computer games and through Twitter and Facebook and texting. You see kids nowadays texting across from each other. It's crazy. As opposed to having this engagement, they're texting. Not just kids grown adults i've i can't tell you how many times i've gone to dinner with friends that are in their 30s and 40s and five people are at a table and everyone's staring at their phone

right right so where's that sense of connection and that gets recapitulated and it build particularly because kids are little sponges and their social milieu is really developing its foundation when they're really young that way. So if it starts so young, then it solidifies over time until there's a massive interjection of some new kind of thing. And so it's important for kids to be absorbed in nature. It's important for them to have like the correct mentorship about not shaming, not blaming, bringing everything up to the surface. And then the whole way that we work with, for example, like the penal system, the whole judicial system is completely backwards. We label the perpetrator and the victim and then the whole legal system is set up against that way. It's like warring. It's not about a cooperative model. It's not about healing the perpetrator. It's about rescuing the victim, just getting vindication, getting revenge. Right. Like I'm going to get paid for being a victim.

And that perpetrator is going to go off somewhere and not get rehabilitated. And people don't typically get better in prison. And when you look at like the whole just downstream effect of that victimhood, there's this really good article by a guy named the Simontons. They were a man and wife couple in the 80s they they had some of the first early mind-body studies that showed the importance of what you think how it affects your body they were he was an oncologist and she was a research psychologist and there were four things that that no matter what level of cancer like stage or what

type of cancer there were consistent measures that showed people getting better and people getting worse and one of those that consistently showed people getting worse was victimhood like they didn't believe that they had any empowerment to change their situation also inability to give and receive love resentment and low self-esteem or self-worth when you had all four of those, you were like, fucked. That's a crazy thing, the connection between the immune system and your perceptions of the environment, your perceptions of the world you live in. Right.

And you just showed me this morning some article in Wellbeing, I think. It was the perception. article in Wellbeing, I think, it was the perception. They did this really interesting study of housekeepers. And housekeepers that were told that the activities that they were engaging with... Just cleaning the hotel rooms. And so they were told whatever they were doing, cleaning, fixing things, dot, dot, dot, dot, they were told that that was healthy. There was a group that was told that that was good exercise and another group that wasn't told anything.

And after a period of weeks, they did biologic, physiologic markers and showed that the women that had the idea that they were exercising more had less weight gain. Actually, their weight started to redistribute. They had better blood pressure and heart rate measures. Their whole physiology shifted because of their belief, not because they changed their activities at all. So when you look at the other side of that

equation, you had certain things that, because of the way you thought made the illness continue to seed, that cancer profile. The two things that consistently helped people get better was their faith, their belief in a reason that this was happening or some level of empowerment that they could utilize this experience for benefit, like the housekeepers and visualization that you could actually visualize yourself becoming better and they've also shown that with kids and kids are extraordinarily good visualizers when you can you know kids that are maybe it's an oncology department at like one

of the pediatric hospitals when you can help them visualize their immune system actually working against the cancer or overcoming something or you can help them visualize their immune system actually working against the cancer or overcoming something. Or you can project yourself into the future healed, happy, well. And you engage with that and you feel into that and you project that into the future. That perspective shifts the physiology. The psycho-neuro-immunological triad shifts towards healing just because of the power of the mind. That is wild. There's a placebo effect involved in being a housekeeper.

Totally. Well, it wasn't just about being a housekeeper. It was about being athletically engaged in what they were doing. Yeah, they said that they told one group of housekeepers that the exercise that they were doing met the Surgeon General's quota for a healthy exercise for an individual. They used like big terms like that, met the Surgeon General's quota. And then they told the other people nothing. And then they watched the difference in the groups between, and they were all cleaning hotel rooms and it was randomized. And the people who felt that they were meeting the Surgeon General's requirement for exercise had all of these

dramatic improvements in weight loss and all these physiological markers. Wow. I mean, it... That's so crazy. Crazy. That's just... Human beings and our minds are so fucking strange. And the power of the mind is so immense.

And it feels like this has only been really discovered over the last hundred years, like even remotely, and more so now than ever before it's like an onion that's continually peeled like no i don't think there's a lot of layers here let's keep going you know peeling back layer and layer and layer and just we're slowly starting to unveil the power and the properties and and subsequently a management system for this incredible engine that we have to construct our environment. Yeah, Joe Dispenza just wrote a book

You're the placebo and he's got all he's got the great scientific back. What is this? It's called you are the placebo Joe Dispenza Yeah, he has a ton of articles in that that was I think I was talking about his name di SP enza and And that was, I think I was talking about in the last... What's the fellow's name? D-I-S-P-E-N-Z-A. And he was the one who cites all of these examples of these placebo surgeries, these sham surgeries, like arthroscopic knee surgeries that they did, where they did a placebo knee surgery and a real knee surgery and found that the outcomes were identical. And in some cases, the people with the placebo knee surgery, where they basically cut the skin and sewed it back up, they had better outcomes than the people who had actual knee surgery.

Like, things that you think should not have a placebo effect, like, if you're going to have knee surgery, it's probably pretty important that you're going to do that. No, you can actually cut the skin, tell somebody, yep, surgery went great, and they'll recover better than the people who actually got the surgery in some cases. Wasn't that dude in that video, What the Bleep Do We Know? Totally.

Unfortunately. And back then, you know, that was kind of like the leading edge, too, of this whole mind-body experience. And it was, you know, showed with kind of the meeting of science and metaphysics. Up until that ramp the lady came on screen. And then you're like, wait a minute. What's your name? Hold on. What's going on here?

You're 1,000 years old? Okay. You're in a 1,000-year-old spirit that is embodied in this woman. And you're talking nonsense. Everybody else seems to be talking science. And you organize this bitch? You organize this whole thing. Okay.

Yeah. What? Right? Wasn't that what the bleep do we know? What the bleep do we know was so goddamn confusing because there was some really interesting stuff in there. There was some really sound science in that. Yeah. And there was also some fucking flaming, rocketing horse shit. Projectile horse shit.

Right. It's like you couldn't get away. Oh, get out of here. That's kind of the nature of our world now though right like the skill of everything is not being able to throw away all apples with worms in them yeah the skill of our world is to be able to cut out worms effectively and then eat the fucking apple and also recognize it in human beings that you maybe like some aspects of them right i was having this conversation with a friend of mine about this guy that we know that is

clearly in some ways a weasel. He's just, he's weasely and he's super ambitious and you can't trust him and he's not, he's just not cool. And he had a bunch of like really bad interactions with other people that I know that came to me independently and said, look, this guy's a fucking fraud. This guy's a piece of shit. But I know him to be also a very good dispenser of interesting information. When I communicate with him, like he, he is really good at dispensing this information.

He gathers it. He's like, he's dedicated to it. And there's a lot of positive qualities in that. And he actually enjoys, he enjoys expressing himself in this way. But then all the other stuff, it makes it so hard. So some people just write him off. And I'm like, I can't write him off. I can't write him off totally.

But unfortunately, he's an exercise. He's an exercise in recognizing how much of these qualities are positive and how much of what he is is just douche. I think I've seen that when I've dealt with different shamans and spiritual teachers, you know, where people tend to want to put them on a pedestal as this being that's this perfect being. And then as soon as they see something a little flawed, they're like, oh, my God, my holy savior is not the holy savior. I think it's like, no, he's just not perfect like everybody else. He's still really good at this and this.

Right. And just accept him for that and watch out for this little shitty part that he's still working on. Like, it's okay. He's still trying to get laid. Yeah, exactly. Like, people, you know, especially in that arena, they demand this level that's just not realistic. Yeah. They demand this this level that's just not realistic you know like they did demand this

intense perfection you know that was uh one of the things that people will bring up the detractors of terence mckenna they always bring up the fact that he had some holes in his science and there were some some of his stuff was bullshit maybe maybe but you you can't listen to his hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of available hours of lectures that he had and not be inspired. Right. If you have any psychedelic curiosity and you listen to this unbelievably free thinker, this guy who's just like really willing to put himself out there and some sort of a, you know, maybe miss the mark occasionally, but he's shooting a lot of fucking arrows. Yeah. You know?

There's even more extreme examples. Like I've just recently found out what a crazy fuck Carlos Castaneda was. Oh, yeah. He was insane. He was yelling at people. He may have even convinced these women who he was dating to at least disappear when he died. I don't know. They might have committed suicide.

Who even knows? There's a lot of speculation because all the women he was dating disappeared when he died. So he was possibly even a bad person, like straight up not a good person. But nonetheless, you know, I'll put a quote from Castaneda out, and, you know, people will just, oh, he was a crazy fuck. It's like, yeah, but this thing makes sense. This little pit of philosophy still makes sense and is still valuable, even if he was a crazy fucking person.

Like, be able to cut out the worm and say admit like yeah that dude was not a fucking good dude but he had some ideas that can be valuable when taken and applied and you you get to that you'll level up way faster because you'll get to keep more gems than than other people who are just discarding everything it's like the Jeet Kune Do of life yeah absorb what is useful. Exactly. Exactly.

Bruce Lee had it nailed. Perfect. Yeah, perfect. And do your shadow work. Yeah. Shadow work? Yeah, which is oftentimes what happens in the psychedelic experience, or even flotation.

What do you mean by shadow work? Like recognize within yourself, ourselves, what's behind the curtain. Like being able to see those aspects of myself that I haven't fully integrated, fully accepted. Because it's only my projection and judgment of somebody else is only a reflection of the shadow material that I haven't integrated myself. And usually it's those things that I project onto others that I'm so emotionally connected to or people that really piss me off in a particular way, that's related to my own shadow work in that other side of the coin

that I haven't looked at yet. Like the person saying there's no such thing as a sex drive. Yeah, look at her shadow work. What's there? What's behind that? Or his. I don't remember if it was a man or a woman,

but either way, no one's fucking her. Or him. Right. No one wants to. It's not happening. You know, I'll tell you who doesn't talk about that. Jennifer Lopez.

That bitch knows there's a sex drive. She's built an empire off of it. Right. Let's end this pitch. This was a lot of fun. Let's do it. Thank you. Thank you.

A lot of fun. Thank you. Great conversation. And so to get in touch with you, your Twitter is? At Dr. Dan Engle. Dr. Dan Engle, E-N-G-L-E, right? Yep. Yeah, D-R-D-A-N-E-N-G-L-E.

And, of course, Aubrey Marcus is Aubrey Marcus on Twitter. And anything else to say? Anything to promote? Anybody? Anything important? No, man. A lot of cool stuff going on. But we'll all follow us on the social channels.

We'll point the finger at the moon. Yeah. Cool shit. And remember to don't concentrate only on the finger. Because then you'll miss, I forget the quote, Bruce Lee. Oh, the heavenly glory that lies beyond dan angle thank you very much sir appreciate it good time see you soon bye