The School of Greatness - Healing Your Past & Reaching Your Full Potential w/Jamie Wheal (Part 2) EP 1100

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

“Seek novelty, make art, help out.”Today's guest is Jamie Wheal, who is the author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominated Stealing Fire. He’s the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance. This is actually Part 2 of my conversation with Jamie, so if you haven’t heard Part 1, make sure to go to www.lewishowes.com/1099In this episode Lewis and Jamie discuss why it’s important to heal your past, the different types of brain states and how to access them, different practices that are being researched to help achieve peak states, why we don’t have a full understanding of our full human experience, and so much more!For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1100Check out Jamie's website: www.flowgenomeproject.comCheck out his new book: Recapture the RaptureThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod

This is episode number 1,100 with Jamie Wheal, part two. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Rory T. Bennett said, no one has ever achieved greatness without dreams. And Helen Keller said, although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. My guest today is Jamie Wheal, who is the author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominated Stealing Fire. He is the founder of the Flow bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-nominated Stealing Fire. He is the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance. And he's written a new book called Recapture the Rapture, Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World that Has Lost Its Mind.

This is part two of my conversation with Jamie. So if you haven't heard part one yet, make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 1099 and listen to that as well, because that will blow your mind as well as this fascinating conversation. Because today we discuss why it's important to heal your past, the different types of brain states and how to access them, the different practices that are being researched to help achieve peak states, and why we don't have full understanding of our full human experience. Again, if you're inspired, if this is your first time here, and you're finding inspiration from this episode, please share it with someone that you think would be inspired as well. Just text a friend, post it on social media. And if it's your first time here, click the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts right now to subscribe to the School of Greatness there on Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. Okay, in just a moment,

the one and only Jamie Wheel. It feels like every day there's a new wellness trend. Eat that, do this, avoid those, and it can be hard to know what advice to listen to. Well, what if I told you the right answer lies within you? It's true. You have to know your body to know what advice to listen to well what if i told you the right answer lies within you it's true you have to know your body to know what's right for you and with the help of inside tracker you can analyze your blood dna lifestyle and fitness trackers to provide you with a personalized science-backed trackable action plan on how to live age and perform better based on what your body needs founded by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometric data from MIT, Tufts, and Harvard, InsideTracker analyzes your body's data and offers you a clearer picture of what's going on inside. It's all based on science and specific to you.

And my results from InsideTracker came back, and on one of the things that was recommended for me was intermittent fasting seven days a week. Now, intermittent fasting is something I've tried out before and it's something I've loved and it's worked for me. So it was refreshing to know that it's in fact the right choice for my body. That's why I'm teaming up with InsideTracker to provide all of you with an exclusive 25% off discount so you can know what your body needs. Just go to InsideTr tracker.com slash school of greatness again that's inside tracker.com slash school of greatness for 25 off we have access to more transformative technologies than we have ever had in human history therapeutic modalities, experiences.

And they can be high-tech and expensive, like sensory deprivation tanks and trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and brainwave stimulations and all these things. They can be middling, like the new trials at Imperial College and Johns Hopkins and NYU and elsewhere with psychedelic therapies. They can be super low tech like breath work or trance EDM music all the way to at home with a special friend and psychosexual practices. So there's a whole kind of stack and access and pick time, money, effort, complexity, and you too can blow yourself sky high. And the protocol is actually consistent. And in fact, Carl Deisseroth

at Stanford, one of Andrew's colleagues, has been the godfather of optogenetics. So the ability to kind of stimulate light in brains and turn on different genes and that kind of stuff. That's not EMDR stuff, is it? No, but EMDR, funnily enough, if you put a pin in that that because I'd be happy to come back to this as part of this integrated theory of peak states and trauma relief. Got it. Right. So what they found was that they used epileptic patients who normally have such seizures and traumas and gave them ketamine, right? So a dissociative anesthetic that also promotes, you know,

depending, very interesting to totally otherworldly interior experiences, sort of dissociative, like I have sort of have an out-of-body experience. It's used in battlefield as an anesthetic. And it's also lately been starting to get used in psychotherapy more broadly and had been underground for a while. And what they found was that experience of dissociation, there were two things. Subjectively, it helped as an antidepressant. So stepping out of myself for a moment,

allow me to come back into myself with a little bit more equanimity. A bird's eye view, having awareness of the situation. I got to unzip the monkey suit. You's eye view. Yeah. Having awareness of the situation. I got to unzip the monkey suit. You're not in it. You're out of the situation looking in, reflecting. Yeah.

And then really interestingly, they're like, oh, and what's going on when someone is under the influence of ketamine and self-reporting that they're having an out-of-body experience that also then is alleviating depression? Ah, three hertz neuroelectric brainwave. Fascinating. Okay, so now we've got a signature that's going on. And by the way, that also happens with 5-MeO-DMT and a whole host of other psychedelics, even if they are actually interacting with different neural pathways and systems, right? So psilocybin, LSD, other things,

Prozac are all in the serotonergic system. Ketamine is not and does things differently. It's not a tryptamine-based thing. But they're all doing this delta wave activity. But then they reverse engineered it. And this is the interesting part. They reverse engineered it and said, okay, now no drugs, but we're just going to electrically stimulate your brain back to three hertz. Now what happens?

And same dissociative experience and same positive impact. So you're like, okay, so we used a compound to be able to reliably get the conditions we want to study. We don't need the drugs. Now we don't need the drugs. And the same thing happens with specific advanced meditative techniques and breathwork techniques can get you into delta waves and different compounds.

So nitrous oxide, there was a study with a neesiologist at MIT, and they found that nitrous oxide will put you into delta wave states for three to 12 minutes, so not indefinitely, like if you're breathing it for a dental surgery or you're doing something over a long time, three to 12 minutes is all you get. But in that time, you get double the amplitude

of when you're asleep, because normally the only time, like delta waves are a little bit like the redheaded stepchild in the EEG world, right? Because people are interested in beta because that's where we do our talking. And if folks are listening to us, unless they're like multitasking, they're probably in beta if they're trying to follow this. That's beta and then there's delta and then there's theta, right?

Yeah, except that it kind of goes the other way if we're dealing with huds. So basically beta is the most fast that we typically have access to. Above that consistently is gamma, and that's like the occasional flashbulb, eureka kind of moment. It tends not to be unless you're like a super disciplined meditator or something you can hang in. It's usually like a gestalt integrative flash. But below beta, which is our waking state normal um comes alpha and that's starting to get into more relaxed more contemplative a little bit more spacious a little bit more kind of zen and then below and potentially flow states and then into theta which is often people often

power down and get sleepy in it actually like unless you're trained and you know that that feeling is something to power through, most people are like, oh, I'm not up here in neurotic hamster wheel, so I'm just going to power down now. Right? But it's actually even more expansive. It's typically like the hypnagogic state, like when you're lying in bed and you don't think you're drifting off to sleep, but you actually have.

And you get like jimmy leg or you like elbow your partner or something like that. Or you have some wack-ass dream where you're like, wait, whoa, whoa, I guess I'm dreaming. Like that's right around theta. Below that and barely into consciousness is delta. And typically we don't have access to that while awake, right? So waking EEG researchers, consciousness researchers tend not to spend a lot of time there. And then sleep researchers are almost always focused on REM and dreaming. And delta is deep dreamless sleep.

But what happens is it correlates with a brainstem level reset. And what we're seeing is that when you're in it, that is as close to being dead, right, as possible. It's like backdoor lucid dreaming. Yes. But it is not without content. as close to being dead as possible. It's like backdoor lucid dreaming, but it is not without content. So if you can be conscious while in Delta,

you sort of have access to the cheat codes of the cosmic browser. And this is consistent reporting across experiences. Like Winston Churchill was one of the first patients to get exposed to nitrous oxide. And he said, world upon world of almost alien information reveals itself, but it slips through your fingers, and I've come to regard it really as mere substitution of mental

pain for physical pain. In the sense of like, oh my gosh, I've just seen the light, but I can't remember. Oh, man. So you're like, this is fascinating. And you realize that all of those compounds plus neuroelectric stimulation to the cranial nerves, experience, and access to insane amounts of highly salient or relevant or interesting information. And when we get into those states, we get out of suffering states. Is that what I'm hearing you say? We're getting out of pain and just what's happening in the moment. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, you're long gone from that. And you're basically, like I said, I mean, it's basic. You know how they have that vomit comet, that plane that you pack, install the windows, blocked out, and it does the roller coaster arc through the sky. And for that part, right, everybody's in zero G. That's pretty much what it is.

So for three to 12 minutes, you can find yourself in zero G hyperspace where you can think anything you want about, anything you can think of with a 300 IQ, and the only game, the name of the game where you can think anything you want about anything you can think of with a 300 IQ for and the only game the name of the game is you can't fumble the football in the end zone mmm so so this is that's that's one step so we have Delta wave near electric and basically what we're doing here is we're telling the cheat codes to a do-it-yourself death-rebirth initiation peak state that discharges trauma and allows you to establish somatic experiential faith

that it all works out. So just didn't want to bury the lead or let anyone think that we're gathering wool. So we have pay attention to the things that allow you to do brainstem resets, and that can be transcranial magnetic stimulation, that can be electrical stimulation through the tongue. There's anda phase three clinical trials on palms device that i've actually tried i tried it downhill mountain biking and whistler and rode it down the track so put it in

crank the juice and and it's because all the headsets like the biohacking headsets don't really work because your skull's really thick and nine volt batteries aren't very strong so you get into the tongue so it's connected so the tongue goes goes into, I think it's 10 cranial nerves and it goes straight into the brainstem. So there's the pons, the medulla oblongata and the vagal nerve is also there. Wow. So you wore this thing that was a shock to your tongue and is it shocking like every second on the way there? And it's sending.

And funnily enough, I mean, well, this is a fascinating tale, and I mean, if people can hold the branches in this conversation, we'll take this quick one. So the reason this device came to be is Paul Baccarita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's the father of sensory substitution. So if you know David Eagleman's work at Stanford, right, and the sensory vest and all that kind of stuff, David is very much coming out of Paul Baccarini's lineage. Okay. But the SEALs were looking,

they were doing night dives, combat night dives, no visibility. And A, it sucks because you can't see what you're doing. And B, spatially disorienting.

You're literally, it's like just being in a void. Trying to touch over the edge. Yeah. So imagine those five-day darkness meditation retreats in a sensory deprivation tank, right?

It's a crazy town. And eight hours at a time, right? So they would sneak in and then post up and then wait, you know, all this crazy. So they're like, okay, can we do the same techniques that folks are using, that blind folks are using, like tapping with a cane and learning to see through the field. Can we do it with electrical stimulation

with this paddle in our tongue? So if it buzzes on the left, I swim left. If it buzzes on the right, if it's on my tip, on the tip of my tongue, I swim down. If it's on the back of my tongue, I swim up. So can we basically joystick our frogmen? Someone else joysticking you, watching you, and then guiding you. Wow.

And again, our buddy from Devry was just saying, he's like, yeah, you get under a big ship and it goes haywire. So they swim on these paddles. They've got their compasses. The metal starts spinning. You can't have lights. You have no idea where you're going going there's prop wash. There's noise I should show so they they took these panels and started learning to steer their their swimmers and And then they realized something which is that when they came out from super long like six hour eight hour

Submersions in zero visibility situations a lot of folks had basically like spatial vertigo or the bends right but the guys who'd been running the paddles didn't and and so they're like that's funny why is that and the electrical stimulation into the brainstem was actually serving as a global system reboot and a calibration so it was enhancing neuroplasticity and improving vestibular training and action which is back to the downhill mountain bike. Sure. Right? So you can actually create peak performance situations by conducting neuromotor pattern repetition, right, while experiencing brainstem resets. And then they've now taken this to phase three clinical trials. Wow.

And it's used for cerebral palsy. It's used for TBI. It's used for MS. And it's also being used for peak performance. So that's just another example of, okay, so now we're hot on the trail. We're like Delta waves rock and seem to be the signature of heightened access to the information layer. Enhanced pattern recognition, cogitation, inspiration, information, right? So we're pinning that. Brainstem reset and then, oh, by the way, the vagal nerve starts here.

It goes all the way through our bodies, modulates our heart, our lungs, our digestion, our immune response, and goes all the way through our root. Right, so like Anish Seth, who's a Princeton gastroenterologist, called it Poo-phoria. Like if you've ever had an especially large bowel movement and somehow felt sweaty or palpations or goosebumps or even really, really good, right? He said, he says, to some it feels like an orgasm,

to some like a religious experience, and to a lucky few, lucky few like both well really all that is is moving the male and that's putting pressure against your vagal nerve which is actually stimulating your entire spinal column so you're like oh okay so we're just worms we're like chop off our legs and arms right and the circuitry of how we work is our spinal columns and our vagal nerves so you're like okay so now we realize delta waves brainstem reset vagal nerve optimization increased nitric oxide in your system and that can be everything from eating beets and and and what are those little seeds yes beets greens or even supplements like Neo40 that are concentrates, or even ED drugs, right? Viagra boosts nitric oxide, right? And not only does it, and that's,

it's a vasodilator, which is why Viagra used it, but actually what nitric oxide does is it crosses the blood-brain barrier, and it allows for the transport of stress chemicals and optimal psychologically enhancing neurochemicals. So Herbert Benson at Harvard called it the bliss molecule. And it's actually the precursor to flow states and peak states. So you're like, okay. So A, vasodilation is generally healthy and happy. And by the way, it's actually an anti-COVID. It's an antiviral. That's what I heard from James Nestor. He was talking about this and breathing through the nose and how the virus can't survive in this, right?

Yeah, so high-notch, basically, the more, I mean, I wouldn't say the more the merrier, period, but in general, we are under and boosting can enhance. So you do these things and then you also realize, oh, and then engage in spinal and pelvic mobility right and the issues are in our tissues so if you engage in it and this gets to your emdr point right there's kind of a progression where you can be like okay there's there's neuro neurotrema release have you seen that stuff where people do like an isometric hold like a wall sit or a leg lift and they wait

until their muscles fatigue and then they start moving and then they start oscillating and there's actually like three different levels of frequency and first it's disorganized i think they call it brown uh wave waveforms i don't quite understand their color coding but i think that's how they do it and that's just spazzing and most people most people are so uncomfortable and so self-conscious they won't let it happen right but if you were with a therapist and you understand the jam you start doing that and then it actually settles down and it starts getting organized. And it's literally as if it's your nervous system defragging and rewiring up healthy movement patterns, right?

It's the whole Robert Sapolsky at Stanford, which he had that book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, right? Like animals don't stress, right? Because they discharge. And we were actually, we had just been, we'd just done an expedition on the north face of Everest in Tibet. We came back to Thailand.

We went to the islands. We like put all of our students on a plane in Bangkok and then took a honeymoon on the islands in Thailand. This was long before, this was like before the beach came out, I think. So it was like super chill. And we were climbing this wild-ass volcano grotto in the jungle at like sunset.

And it was super sketchy. Like we see this German couple come down all covered in mud, wild-eyed, like, what the hell? We're like, we're gonna go do this. We're gonna go do that. It was like fun. And then we get to this super crazy slick limestone slab and there's this monkey stuck, right?

And he's freaking out and it's too slippery and he doesn't know what he's gonna do and he's like, and we're like, oh my god, we can't help him, he's too far out there, but like what's gonna happen? And then finally he kind of like gets it together and he just lunges and does this dino and like does this one-handed thing, grabs the top, pulls himself up, looks around, frantically beats off, and then just f**ks off into the jungle, never to be heard from again. And you're like, genius. Wow.

Right? So that, now that's a funny story. So he was stressed for a second, but then releases it. Yes. Through, right? Wow. Cultivating and then discharging energy through his nervous system. Interesting.

Okay. So this is how all animals forever have done it. We're walking around stress holding on to it totally anchored in the past whether that's i've got a blown shoulder or a bum knee or a bad back and i sit in the same chair the same way all day and it's accumulating trauma or it's just micro ptsd and i'm just this fibrillating disorganized mess and then you realize oh back to brainstems delta waves can i reboot my nervous system establish a global systemic reset and can i do that by pulsing energy loading and pulsing energy

through my nervous system such that it discharges me and lets me just like a laptop that's fritzing cold reboot power back up and be fresh again homeostasisasis. Now, life is life, and I'm going to still face every challenge and opportunity to get knocked off that, but if I can come back to center via means and tools that I have access to that don't cost an arm and a leg, can I come from my best more often? And can I metabolize my grief as fast as I'm taking it in? grief as fast as I'm taking it in. So not holding onto it for months and years and suffering, experiencing it, having your heart open,

allowing yourself to feel and then moving on. Yeah. And then, so now throw in vocalists. So now let's do that, you know, tremor release. So let's say I'm lying on my back with a high bridge. I've got my ass off the ground and my thighs are vibrating. Right. And they start flopping around and I started doing this stuff and potentially i start doing what james nestor talked about that was the karolinska institute study right which was vibrating and humming through my nasal cavity so now so now i'm making sounds and i'm generating increased nitric oxide now you talked about emdr and tapping all of these things funnily enough it's not that this is a new age grab bag it's not you have a bunch of intuitives that stumble onto a function that works.

They may or may not know why it works. And then they package it, productize it, put a name on it, put a brand on it, have an economic driver and center around it. Build a cult around it. And it shits the bed. But you're like, oh, what's the mechanism of action underneath all this stuff? If we can get to that, then we can engage in cultural architecture cleanly. And we can just share people with the source codes. Here's the Lego. What is the source code?

Well, these are the source codes, right? Which is cultivating and discharging energy through your nervous system in both allowing chaotic discharge and then enhancing reorganization. So throw in EMDR, like eyes, tongues, movement, and just go through the motions. Imagine if some space anthropologist came down and was like, okay, humans, here's the username. You guys are just f***ing this up all mightily. Here's how. And giving us the capacity to do this skillfully, right? Throw in EMDR as well. That's the eye movement one. Then there's EFT, I guess.

It's emotional something, something. Or maybe there's a- Is that tapping, essentially? Yeah, emotional freedom technique. So once again, once these get brands and acronyms, they're stuffed, right? Because they cease to innovate and they cease to be curious about evidence.

But if you're like, hey, there might be a there there. Right, right. And there's this Wim Hof method and there's breathing and there's cold therapy. And how do we separate placebo, right? And selection bias from, is there a legit there there? And once you put those things together,

now you can add in like Theraguns, right? You're like, oh, so now let's take isometric tremor and now let's increase percussive vibration. Let's do soft tissues. I mean, how many people actually touch their abdomen, for God's sake? I mean, how much shame, how much vulnerability? So much shame and trauma.

Yeah, and even just having partners, right? And then engage in acro yoga and Thai massage, like actually connecting with another human and applying traction on our joints and opening up the space in our joint capsules and stretching soft tissues and sliding surfaces and full range of motion in our pelvis and spine. These things aren't simply disconnected physical movement sequences.

They actually show up in our consciousness register. They actually shape and inform our experience. And so the absolute money there is, and all of this is 50% of it, because then you can also add in conscious sexuality on top of that right and then you end up in basically a sexual yoga so the end-to-end spectrum if you take it without apology is to say um uh psychedelic sex time traveling psychedelic sex magic or a hedonic engineering right because the the the next movement is special calisthenics basically like which where you basically have a physician that is

three C's so you know Dan Savage right the sex advice yeah yeah so he was talks about good giving and game the three G's right for a partner sure so the three C's for your doctors is courageous, curious, and connected. So they need to be willing to engage in full-spectrum health for patients. They need to be connected to the research in the

psychedelic therapeutic space and compounding pharmacies. And they need to be curious about what modalities are potentially functional, because hands down the next wave of psychedelic therapies is going to be special k calisthenics which is threshold dose ketamine with body work and you can get in a month of yoga or physical therapy in an hour and it's completely integrated psychosomatic so you're like when i'm what i what i mean by saying

it's psychosomatic normally people just when they say what I mean by saying it's psychosomatic, normally people just, when they say that word, they mean, oh, it's all in your head, you made it up. And that's a pejorative of the term, but psychosomatic just means body and brain together. So when you shift and move your tissues, right, you end up having a, it's almost as if it's like the monitor of your self-system is in your mind. And you're like, oh, okay, that was that phone call on Tuesday. Or that was that ski wreck. Or that was, and it discloses itself as it leaves your system. It's kind of like the body keeps the score mentality.

Issues are in the tissues, body keeps the score, et cetera. And if you look at Bessel van der Kolk's work, I mean, bless his heart, right? But most of the suggestions he's recommending for the physicality is really straightforward. It's like, do yoga. That's good. Move your body. Stretch. Exactly.

Eat healthy food. So put in special calisthenics with a K. Put in Theragun use. And then for those of you planning along at home with a special friend. So there's basically like three levels. There's solar practices, partner practices, and couple practices, right? That's it. And any of these work, you can just do breath work. You can just do body work. You could just do music and dance. You could just do substances, right? sacramental, or therapeutic use.

And you could just do sexuality. If you combine them all, you end up with a- This cocktail of- Well, I mean, you end up with the notion of stacking. So rather than using one atom bomb, you actually have a bunch of different modalities that gives you trim tabs and steer. So you're less likely to get into super-duper trouble. It's much easier to back off, and it's a little bit more self-directed. So if you said,

hey, I'm going to lock you in a 10-day Vipassana retreat, good luck. You know, it could be awesome for you. Many people report profound experiences, but it could also be super intense and hairball or really uncomfortable or scary. You would want more support. Someone could say,

well, you're going to go to Peru and go on an ayahuasca journey. And 12 hours later, hair on fire, like what on earth just happened? My world and reality just unraveled. But if you combine things, you can... Well, there's actually... And for both of those,

I'll even throw in one more. You could maybe, you know, we lived up in the mountains in Colorado, ran like mountain bike, the Leadville 100, those kind of ultra marathon races. And they're actually profound. Like the amount of community and support and people get cracked open after running for, you know, 14 hours straight through the night and all these kind of things. So you're like, okay, maybe I go for the runner's high to end all runner's high. But you're like, that was a hundred mile race. My body is healing for three months right the same thing with long psychedelic experiences which is but why by the way psilocybin is in all the studies not lsd it's not because psilocybin is better it's because it lasts six to eight hours and lsd

lasts eight to twelve hours and a hospital shift is eight hours so they picked a substance that fits within professional work which makes sense i mean bless them. You don't have to be like trip sitting somebody for like a day and a half. But the idea of long arc experiences is that there's typically only, there's a fixed period of time at the peak that's really useful, right? That's like day six and seven of a Vipassana retreat. That's miles 70 to 90 on an ultra run. That's hours five and six on an LSD trip. It's not the beginning half. It's not the very last part. So you get these shoulders, right? And the shoulders is body load, confusion, fatigue, random other shit punching into your experience at that time. So you're like, okay. And not to mention just practical, very few people just have days to write off their calendar.

Right. So, but everything from cost to access to calendar to intensity to propensity for vulnerability or exposure in those transitional phases. You're like, okay, now let's do the other thing. Let's go instead of for wavelength, like this big long event, go for amplitude. You're like, okay, now let's do the other thing. Let's go instead of for wavelength, like this big long event, go for amplitude. Stack stuff. Get as high as possible into the information that's useful, right?

And come back down in a way that you can integrate. So like get what's yours. Remember it. Don't be exhausted. Don't be wrung out. Don't need a week to come back to normal. Recover, yeah. Right? Recover.

And you can see the opposite side is also true. If you take an experience like DMT or 5-MeO DMT, some of these notorious and super trendy, high, high-octane psychedelics that are like 15-minute rocket rides. Too much, too fast, too soon. And people, they rave about them, but for their therapeutic insights,

they are, I think, remarkably lacking. Because once you are simply white light God consciousness or you're unleashed into the galactic carnival, you're like, now what do I do with that? Right? That doesn't necessarily help or give. It's so deep. It's so impersonal and so depersonalizing that it disconnects me from showing up with more heart, more connectedness, compassion, more engagement. What are your thoughts on all these medicines and psychedelics and, you know, drugs to help

us heal or therapy drugs, I guess, that people are doing now? What's, do you think it's beneficial to do, or do you feel like it's a never-ending necessity to feel peace, to feel whole, centered, grounded? Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question, and there's several different ways to kind of come at it. I've never personally done any of it. I've never been high or drunk in my life. And I just don't have a desire to.

Like I have lots of friends that do it and swear by it, says it's amazing, you know, the experiences, the things you learn, the things you see, the things you heal. I'm like, that's cool. I just don't have like a calling to want to try to put my brain in that space. I feel like there's other meditative practice that I've done that I also feel a lot of peace and out-of-body experiences and floating in space type of mentality. So for me, who knows what's actually happening when you're on these drugs, but I know that I can do other things as well without it. I can do other things as well without it. Yeah, and I think that the thing that,

I mean, my position is usually not having a specific dog in most of those fights. It's kind of, what's a level up from that? What's the mechanisms of action, and what do they do that's helpful? And once we understand that, then... Just do that. Well, then we can come at it through whatever method or mode is appropriate for us.

So arguably, one of the biggest benefits of state-shifting techniques or practices, broadly, whichever ones you wanted to choose, is that they let us shift our state. And that having a range of our neurophysiology, right, and our psychology is generally healthy. So rather than being stuck on one channel, what's called like monophasic, like every day I wake up, it's the same me in the same head, doing the same things,

thinking the same thoughts, trying different stories, right? Being able to change the channel. And indigenous societies always did that. They had dreams, premonitions, possessions, trance, a whole range of consciousness they considered valid. Not just, oh, that's just repressions from your sexual frustrations and your unconscious. Forget it. That's dribble. Or you need to be medicated. There was a full range that was

accepted and embraced as legit means of making sense of things. We went to Dekat Kogito Ego Sum, Empiricism 101. If it's not measurable, it doesn't exist. And we got our dial stuck. And so we're really one of the only societies ever that's 101 if it's not measurable it doesn't it's not doesn't exist and we got our dial stuck right and so we're really one of the only societies ever that's been a monophasic or single channel culture and that creates lots of stress dis-ease all those things when we expand that range we gain back health and resilience we discharge we gain more information more perspectives and so and i think you can make a case that part of the rise in

everything from Spartan training and CrossFit to Wim Hof and contrast therapy ice bathing saunas right all breath work all these things we're like holy you know intermittent fasting all of it is in some way a high-tech sometimes consumerized attempt be like hey what is it like to be a hunter-gatherer who slept cold, who ran long, who went hungry, who feasted big, who did all of these things. Who suffered, who didn't have climate control, didn't have a pantry filled with overstuffed calories at the whim with salty, sweet, and fat programmed in to make me keep coming back. Like, all that stuff. that stuff. We're trying to break out of that and recreate the conditions that we know create vitality and let us thrive and are just richer and more novel and more alive for us. So in that respect, I think that the ability to shift state is really valuable. And the use of some form of

psychoactive plants or compounds is not just perennial through human history. And our buddy Brian Murorescu just recently came out with that book, The Immortality Key, where he's made a case of through ancient Greece into early Christianity, that there was potentially some continuity there. That's one very specific and scholarly kind of take at a time period in a specific geography, fascinating.

But Ron Siegel at UCLA has talked about the desire to shift consciousness is not even specific to humans and across time and culture, but also specific to across the animal kingdom, not just primates, all mammals, birds. The idea of creating lateralization, increased pattern recognition, and the seeking out of novel information

has apparently outweighed being lit and falling out of your tree. There's been an evolutionary adaptive advantage to changing the channel from time to time. So where we are right now is utterly unprecedented. We've been stuck in this monophasic culture. Everybody's yearning to change the channel. People are piling into psychedelics and anything they can get their mitts on. And this is the first, so they have open access to all psychotechnologies from around the world today to your door, right? And at the same time, ripped out of cultural context. So the idea is, you know, basically- Led by someone who probably doesn't know what they're doing. Hucksters and charlatans and some really well-meaning folks too. But they're getting increasingly swamped by the sociopaths and the colonies

who are coming into the space because there's so much there. And so the idea is it's like breaking the sticks off bottle rockets and still hoping they'll go where you point them. And really, they're just going to blow up all over the place, which we are seeing because there's actually a fascinating, you know and really they're just going to blow up all over the place which we are seeing because

you know there's actually a fascinating there's a group the the mountain occ people of papua new guinea and i remember reading this anthropology study it was from a guy an oxford anthropologist named richard rudgley and it was basically they had let's think how many stages were there 12 there were 12 stages of plant initiation in their society. And the first three were for ginger. And then the middle six, is that right? Yeah, the middle six were for tobacco, different forms of tobaccos. And then the final three were for different strains of psychedelic mushrooms.

Interesting. But not like the ones that folks are used to today, like gnarly ones, toxic ones, like ones that kill you if you don't do them properly. And it was kind of like a Montessori classroom. In a Montessori classroom, a young kid is allowed to come in and they're allowed to work with any material in this beautifully arranged classroom, provided they've already been shown by the guide

how to do it properly. And then, so you're freedom within limits, and you're not allowed to do something you haven't been introduced to or something that's not, you're not yet ready for. And the same thing for the mountain occ people. So once you're initiated into a level, then you had open access for your own discretionary use because

you've been shown how to do it properly. But you weren't allowed, right, to skip levels, right, or poach. And it was kind of a selected pyramid. It was fewer and fewer people got invited into the subsequent stages. It's kind of like getting your black belt. It's like you've got to go through

all these different stages first. And the fascinating thing was is that the final two stages, that was only for initiation into elders, right? And once they had their visions, then what they saw was then included into the living scripture. So rather than being like, here's the Bible, sign, seal, delivers, every word is unquestionably, inviolably true, period, end of story. Anything you have to say is heresy and we're going to burn you at the stake if you try. They're like, oh, no, no, add that.

There's another page. Add that. There's another page. So you're like, oh, that's neat. That's like this open source living tradition, freedom within limits, and structure. So if we take psychedelics today, or let's just say psychedelic renaissance,

psychedelic therapy, since that's where most of the media conversation is, you can do a bell curve, and you can be like, hey, 10% of the population should probably never try them. And that's people with family histories of mental illness, existing diagnoses, and if you could screen for this up front, dark triad personalities. Psychopaths, narcissists, Machiavellians.

And because you don't want them to be better at who they are. Right, they don't want these powers, yeah. No, you really don't. You don't want to be training Sith Lords by accident. And the idea that psychedelics only and always create love and kindness and expansion is actually simply not the case. And in fact, golly, I'm going to forget his name now. Sidney Gottlieb, I think it is, who was the founder of MKUltra, the super gnarly government dark ops project that shows up in Stranger

Things and that kind of stuff. He dropped acid 200 times and was an utterly amoral son of a bitch. And actually dosed Whitey Bulger, the mafia boss who was up in Boston in prison. He was one of his subjects. Whitey was still Whitey. So to say nothing

of Aztec sacrifices and Yanomamo drinking ayahuasca and still spearing each other, you know, like humans are humans. We're complex and adding more just makes us more. It doesn't always make us groovier. So 10% should probably never try it. 80% of the middle of the bell curve should probably only have like three cultured initiatory experiences through their life. And then only 10% should be sort of test pilots or psychonauts, going back to the wishing well more than that. And if you think about, so let's talk about the 80. Like what would a roadmap possibly look like

if we said, oh, we've ripped this out of culture and context. That's probably not a great thing. What are examples around the world, like the Matlock people, like hundreds of traditions around the world of responsible intergenerational use. How can we learn? This is the culture architecture part. Like how can we build things that are missing, right,

that might serve us and others going down the road? So you're like, okay, well, for sure, adolescence, marriage, and death. Those are major, major rites of passage, and we tend to f*** them up all night. Right. Right? So you're like, okay, so, and let's draw and learn from the evidence-based, ethically committed practices that are happening at Imperial, Hopkins, and elsewhere.

So you're like, okay, so Hopkins has kind of found that Goldilocks dosage of psilocybin is three grams. That's enough to create an experience of the numinous of ineffitability, of awe, of connection, of all these healthy things. And it tends not to be so much that it wigs folks out. It's a couple of clicks back from Terrence McKenna's 5 Gram Silent Darkness. And it's not addictive either, right?

No, no, not at all. So the idea is what if you had a truly grounded initiatory rite of passage for a 16-year-old, for an 18-year-old, for something in that space? And awakening who I am on this earth in community. And then now welcome and now start showing up that way. Interesting. And of course, some folks may say, that's so wildly irresponsible, drugging kids, Bob.

And you're like, well, no, we are already drugging kids. We're putting them on amphetamines. We're putting them on antipsychotics. We're doing all sorts of things to them already, turning a blind eye. And initiatory practices like this are as old as humanity. So let's decouple and take an anthropological look at this and say what's missing. And then what happens to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, I don't fit, what's the point, what's the purpose?

Could we address that openly? Take marriage, right? I mean, these days it's status displays and virtue signaling, but it's not an initiation into like, Hieros Gamos, like sacred union. Right. Right? It's caterers and Instagram shots and photographers and gift registries at Williams and Sonoma. It's like, you know, and people,

and the couple on the other end, they've been sleeping together and cohabitating for the most part before, so it's not even, not even wedding night magic. All of it's gone. Right. And you're like, okay, what if with the wedding party, with the selected minister or officiant, with closest friends, whatever it would be that was appropriate to do the MAPS therapeutic

dosage of MDMA? And again, not for the substance, right? This is the fact that vasopressin, oxytocin, prolactin come online, and some serotonin as well, right? I feel safe, I feel secure, I feel connected to my heart, and I am able to give voice to deeper truths and deeper wounds and fears than I might normally be able to. And what if we shared our vows from that space and anchored it? And then if once a year or once a decade, you know, cadence, take your pick, but if once on our anniversary, we came back, we go to a cabin, we go camping, we do whatever we do, and we reconnect. And I mean, there's thousands of couples already doing this improvisationally

but like and we reconnected and we revisited those vows and we were able to express our frustrations our sadness our tiredness our bitterness our resentments our pain and our love and our hope and our dreams and we could do that in a way because I mean I've had I guess I'm just in the season of life for this but I mean I have had half a dozen dear friends in the last three to four years, all blow up relationships. And with children, so there's skin in the game. And it's almost consistently been because one partner has trauma, unable or unwilling to process it. And in these instances, this was not, these were faultless tragedies. Like this was,

this wasn't someone had an infidelity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was no cheating. There was no infidelity. There was no addiction. In fact, there was the opposite

of financial stresses and they blew apart anyway. And it was just the accretion of grief, resentment, and frustration and the inability to go back. And heal the trauma of the past. Yes.

And get it. So you're like, so when you throw kids in the mix, you're like, oh, we've got some skin in this game. And in fact, Brian Efavescu, I think that's his name. No, Brian, I think, and Julian Efavescu, they wrote a book called Love Drugs. One's an ethicist at Oxford and one's an ethicist at Yale. And they've basically just said, hey, look, folks,

you know, family counseling, couples therapy-ish, you know, I've never seen it work personally, but I mean, all power if you can find a good person that can help you. But hey, at this point, the era of supplementing relational therapeutic support with pharmacology has arrived, and it's now unconscionable not to. Because the question is, again, the idea of crypto-puritanism, whether it's, what are you doing giving substances to adolescents? That's unethical. In fact, back in the 50s at UCLA, they were dosing 3 to 12-year-olds with LSD. No, no, like in the schizophrenia awards. And this wasn't wild. This was a Sandoz pharmaceutical substance. It had promising results and their results were off the charts. They were having profound responses. Rick Doblin

really shifted my thinking on this. He's like, look, we know what we know now about the efficacy of healing trauma, right? If you've got an 18 year old who's had adverse childhood events and it's suffering from PTSD and you know what three sessions with a therapist with this compound could do for them and you're gonna say no and say go ahead and suffer you may kill yourself you may do any sorts of things for the next three years until you click over at what point is standard of care and obligation to treat? Right? Interesting. Does it kick us into engaging these things?

So the notion of, like, oh, chem sex is cheating. That's debauched. Right? That's the stuff I read about in Vice magazine. You know? Right? Right? Like, that's not romantic.

How could I? And that's what the case they're making in love drugs is, like, look, we're already doing chem sex. We're just doing it really badly. Like, everybody gets plied with alcohol. alcohol is a massive dehydration it dehydrates and desensitizes it dulls a woman's orgasm and like dr ruth right the old the og sex therapist said and it hangs right right off the end of a man's penis right so alcohol sucks and is the ubiquitous substance of choice hormonal birth control completely wrecks sexual response and attractiveness so like the classic dirty trick of being on the pill is that when that that hat that shifts a woman's hormonal profile primes her to be seeking basically um

a new age wimp you a weak chinned, safe provider for my children. Non-aggressive, sexual. Yes, yes, yes. Low testosterone, like safe guy, right? Then they court, they do all the things. They lease a Volvo together. And then they get married. And she's like, okay, I'm going to get off the pill.

It's time for us to start a family. She gets off the pill. She's like, who's this milquetoast wannabe? I'm going to go shag a biker. I need someone who's like, okay, I'm going to get off the pill. It's time for us to start a family. She gets off the pill. She's like, who's this milquetoast wannabe? I'm going to go shag a biker. I need someone who's like, yeah, wants me. Yeah, and that happens. And actually, women on the pill have higher marital dissatisfaction, higher propensity to divorce, all these kind of things.

And also deadens libido and sexual response. And then throw in SSRIs, which completely clip eroticism. And you're depressed. SS what? SSRIs, so selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like prozac and zola gotcha so you're like okay so why did i get on that stuff in the first place because i'm just not feeling connected to life i'm not feeling right i'm feeling down i'm literally depressed yes so now the very first thing we're going to do for you

is completely take your sexual vitality, your entire biological reason for being, and we're just going to put that in the basement for as long as you're on this stuff. And people are attempting to live lives through that lie of the ball. And you're like, how do any of us maintain passion, connection, right, engagement with the deck that's stacked? Courage, everything.

Yeah. So it goes back to what we were talking about before we started, which is Courage, everything. Yeah. So it goes back to what we were talking about before we started, which is step one, heal the past. It's like, step one, and then what's the way to heal? Yeah. What's the modality that you'd use to heal your past or your shame or your trauma?

What is something you do? So we started building this kind of edifice, right? Which was this notion of what is a global systemic reboot? Yes. And what are the pieces that can work? And we sort of said, here's the neurophysiology, brainstems, delta waves, nitric oxide, high vagal nerve tone, right? You can just do all these things. Yeah. And they're all quite straightforward. If you want, you can even, you know, and then pulse energy through the system. We talked about simple percussive energy with a Theragun. You could use, what's the word? Acoustic therapy, like sound waves. You can use light. Sound baths. Yeah.

You can use light waves. You can use pain. You can use magnetism. You can use 12-volt electricity. You can use AC electricity. You can use orgasm, right? All of those things cultivate energy and release through the nervous system. And as they do, they kind of, and this is a metaphor, but they sort

of release or dislodge plaque in our system. And you could probably make a technical argument and TBD on which one of these would prove out, but quite possibly, I mean, you're sending out neurological signals, which would have the tendency to, you know, cells that fire together, wire together, boosting neuroplasticity, myelination. So the sheaths and the communication structures kind of get woven in. I don't know if you've ever done any super fine grain, like PT, like rehab kind of stuff. Yeah. Right. So have you ever had a physical therapist, like, make you do something crazy, like look in a certain direction and like

scratch your thing. All that stuff. Yeah. Right. And you're like, ah, like move this. And you're like, I don't even know how to get that muscle to fire. Right. And, and, and, and then if they tap you or they, or they pinch you or they do, you're like, oh, that's a signal went to my brain. Now I can maybe send one back and you can kind of get yourself working again. Right. So that's all we're trying to do. So all these things work? They all work and they work on a sliding scale. So let's just call this whole category hedonic engineering, right? So this is the idea of how do we learn to use neurosomatic information to optimize ourselves, right? And on the low end, you could say it's like a squeegee in your shower.

Right. Can I just discharge the stress that I accumulated in the last 24 hours? So I'm back to zero. And that is, you know, and in fact, Nicole Prowsey, I don't know, have you ever had her on? She's a former UCLA Kinsey Institute PhD sexuality researcher. And she's actually been researching orgasm as prescription pharmaceutical. And she says, even, you know, normally you would think of people who would be against that research as sort of, you know, crypto Puritans, right? Like the folks who are like, no, no, no, that's naughty and bad. But it's actually also even in, she's found it with her colleagues, where they're actually like, if someone comes home and masturbates to get to sleep, or after a hard day of work, this goes back to our monkey in Thailand, right?

That that's considered a dysfunctional coping mechanism. And she's like, no it's not. And she's been researching to be able to actually, for pain relief, for emotional relief, all these things, the neurochemical cascade of orgasm, as it happens, again, Rick Doblin at MAPS, he and I were on a panel at the Battery Club up in San Franciscoisco with with jason silva finally and um we were just talking in between you know in between sets and and he's like yeah you know the closest we can tell the prolactin

vasopressin serotonin oxytocin and the openness safety security belonging of the mdma state we're having all these off the hook responses right closest thing we can tell is to a post-orgasmic state. And you're like, hmm. And it kind of blew my mind because I was like, wait. You're like, this has been 30 years. This has been $40 million. This has been navigating the FDA and Byzantine clinical trials. And it's amazing and critical work.

You're like, how else might we get people suffering to that exalted state known only to scientists as post-orgasmic? You're like, holy shit. And the reasoning is not sensational at all.

It's that our erotic and ecstatic circuitry are foundational in bedrock to encoding primates to procreate. So our entire pleasure system is built on the substrate of our erotic arousal circuitry.

Because if you think about it, for like millions of years, little monkeys figured out how to get busy with no instruction manual. So it is like outside of eating and breathing. And those are two other ones, right? I mean, like take eating out because we're not going to get into that.

But breathing, that's why respiration is such a potent psychoactive tool. because we are hardwired to do it and shifting the ratios of oxygen nitrogen and carbon dioxide in our system radically changes our consciousness a we can upregulate we can down regulate and transcend it sexuality is right there next which is like oh now now what's so tragic, then beautiful, then really intriguing is that because it's such a strong biological encoder, it is responsible, I would guess, I mean, this is purely a guess guess,

but there's plenty of research to support the chunks of it, which is, I would think like 75% of human suffering comes down to our sexual programming, including war, conquest, rape, sexual violence, everything. And I mean, people can contest that, but I would say at least half. And you think about it, you're like, oh my God, that's heartbreaking. But evolution is amoral, categorically amoral. Evolution doesn't give a f**k about our vows, our promises, the better engine of our nature, our relationships. All it wants to do is just shake up the snow globe and create the most diverse, genetically

viable gene pool it can get its hands on. And it will trick us into heartache, heartbreak, violence, and crisis all day long to get it. And you're like, okay. So, yeah, I mean, even, and I want to kind of make sure we're tracking the dog legs we're taking because there's an important center theme to come back to. But even something like adolescence, right? That the fact that a young girl, and the numbers are sliding based on endocrine disruptors in our systems and various other things. But like, you know, let's say a young girl reaches menstruation at 14

and adult cognitive maturity at 24 that is a decade that is a gauntlet food that every a lot of fusion not only a lot of confusion but but like you know by 24 prefrontal cortex is fully online situational awareness risk assessment delayed gratification all sorts of important things to keep her safe and making good choices. That decade is asymmetrically the window. It's like in Blue Planet off the coast of South Africa where there's all the penguins and they got to swim between the islands and that's where all the great whites are. That decade is asymmetrically the time for sexual abuse and trauma. And you're like, oh, that's horrible. And it's not something we would wish for our wives, our mothers, our daughters, our friends, anyone.

And it's not just that, right? I mean, more and more sexual abuse and stories for young boys and young men is also coming out. So you're like, all of that is just the cold dictates of biological impulse that is heartbreaking. But you're like, what if instead of being puppets on a string to an amoral evolution, you can take all that stuff and judo it over, have it jump the tracks,

and use all of that neurological priming to heal our trauma, to access inspiration in peak states, and to bond and connect to the people we love and care about and are choosing to shoulder the burdens of life with together. You know? So let's do that. And that's profoundly empowering. How do we do that?

Well, I mean, what we just talked about with this notion of a sort of a sexual yoga of becoming. And I don't want people to latch on to that. what we just talked about with this notion of a sort of a sexual yoga of becoming and and and i don't want like people latch onto that it has you know it's curious it's potentially sort of sensational um there's almost always sort of three responses to this content because like once you take gloves off and i'm a little bit you know i i fully confess to being slightly on the spectrum in the sense of i'm always just like, well, what is the case? And what does the evidence say?

And if that's the case, then we should just say it. Right. Or just talk about it. So, but what I've noticed is that people come to this content, sort of, you know, so respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances, music. Like, you put all this together, you're like, these have really strong biological drivers. So they're powerful, they're cheap, they're effective, they're consistent, they work. So everybody can use them. So they're starting to fit that case we're talking about with how do we design meaning

3.0. But they're also powerful, volatile, riddled with cultural taboos. But then the thing is, is that if you're like, oh, back away, back away, that's taboo. It should be the opposite. You're like, well, why is it taboo? It's taboo because they work. There's not a civilization worth its salt that hasn't had to put a tight lid on access to these things. So, you know, so I mean, respiration, I would say, you know, there's not that many broadly acculturated respiratory practices. There's Kriya Yoga. There's a handful of others singing hymns, things like that. Even the Hail Mary. It's There's Kriya Yoga, there's a handful of others. Singing hymns, things like that.

Even the Hail Mary, it's Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee, right? That is a nine second, nine hertz, shift you into alpha wave entrainment protocol. So you could make a case, obviously no priest would have said this, but you could make a case that why, Om Mane Padme Hum, the Tibetan mantras,

there have been some fascinating studies on meditation in correlation with EEG waves and respiratory cycles based on whatever thing you're saying repetitively. So you've got a mala bead, you're counting 108 rosaries, you're doing whatever you're doing, so you've offloaded prefrontal cortical. You're getting into a state, yeah. You're getting into a state,

and you're actually kneeling in front of voters with smells and bells and a patron saint. And it's not surprising that you might have an experience of awe and affidavitability, et cetera. So, as we approach this content, people are going to have

an acculturated, triggered response. It's going to fall into one of three categories. You'll be a hedonist, a purist, or a conformist. Those are three,

at least these days, typical responses. So the hedonist is like, at least these days, typical responses. So the hedonist is like, I'm all in, man, tell me more. Give me the cheat codes. And the challenge with the hedonist is that, what Jung said, beware of unowned wisdom. They're just up to their ears in it.

And their challenge is addiction and infidelity, because they want to go for everything and taste it all. And finding the breaks is their problem. They burn too hot. Right? The purist, we'll do the purist next. The purist is actually the one who's like, my body is my temple. Right?

I don't need those. That's cheating and a shortcut. So any more volatile or intensive techniques or practices. And they actually have a spiritual materialism or a pride about their self-identity. So I meditate, I do yoga, I don't do those other things, I'm pure, you know, that whole thing. And gas to actually accelerate their learning. They might have become self-satisfied, right? And they've actually stopped searching because they've actually created a fixed mindset around about... This is the way. All the ways they do their things. And then the conformist sort of wouldn't know what to think.

They're like, well, what does everybody else think? And specifically, what do medical, religious, and legal authorities tell me to think? Right? So what is the way of those three? I'll check it out. It's kind of nice, right? So, and for the conformist, right?

I mean, they think nothing of having their kid on Ritalin, nothing of putting their spouse on Klonopin or Prozac, right? And knocking back two or three drinks every night to take the edge off. Right. And maybe even smoking cigarettes, because that's all socially sanctioned or normative. But they would get divorced, and this is true, this is in the hypothetical, I've seen this three times in the last couple of years, couples getting divorced versus seeking MDMA couples therapy, which could have created some form of... To get divorced without at least exploring different modalities. Because I don't want to lose control. I'm terrified of losing control and or that seems beyond the pale.

So I'd rather get divorced than explore. Yeah, for sure. And so for those guys, steering, getting out of the ruts of consensus opinion is their sort of weak link, right? But each of those folks has a core value, right? So the hedonist says, I value the fullest range of human experience and sucking the marrow out of life, right? The purist says, I value the sanctity of mind and body.

And the conformist says, I value evidence and the advice of experts. Right? So you're like, so what if you pull them all together and stand up as hedonic engineers? Where you're like, okay, can we do all three of those things? Can we seek the full range of human experience with evidence and the advice and oversight of experts and value and appreciate the sanct oversight of experts and value and appreciate the sanctity of mind and body right so that's the potential way right what do you do to heal your traumas yeah personally what does jamie do what do i do um and what was the what was the hardest trauma to overcome well look i, okay, that's a deeper question

and a really interesting one because, and I could be off base on this, but for me, my sense, I mean, my sense is there's micro and macro traumas, probably for all of us, right? And so we've talked about the micro- The big T, the little Ts. The micro PTSD is the can I squeegee out the impacts to my nervous system

that accumulate through the day-to-day. And some of them can be sh**, but I can fundamentally. The stress, this, the boss, whatever, yeah. But I can metabolize them. They are most destructive in the accumulation of them over time on process. But I can take the hits and the body shots as they come. Yeah. Right?

So that I can get rid of via yoga, breath work, hot, cold, bathing, all the things. And that's what you do? Yeah. Yes, I'm also a lazy bitch, so we should put a pin in there. But the big traumas, the big shames, how do you... The deep ones there, there's two things. One is that full body brain system reset. So when I was describing that full stack,

right, that spasming, I mean, and funnily enough, like the vagal nerve, which is just, you know, that central piece,

it is, it's triggered by goggling, by choking, by humming, by vacating our bowels, by top and bottom. Like it's literally by spasming, retching,

puking. Like if you've ever puked into a toilet and then had Like it's literally by spasming, retching, puking. Like if you've ever puked into a toilet and then had your like eyes watering and you're like, like that, like that's actually highly strong vagal stimulation. And you're like, oh my gosh, like us at our rawest, most revealed, most pathetic, we are also at our most profound. And you're like, wow.

And that's such a scary, the same way like tremor release, people are like, I'm not gonna do that, that's a spaz. Like I'm not spaz, I'm in control. Right, that idea of us spasming, shuddering, to discharge what's in us, right, is a potentially highly effective way to practice, I guess, I mean, this will be a mouthful of a word, but neurophysiological psychoarchaeology, right?

So using our neurophysiological, using our body and brain to conduct psychoarchaeology, which is to unearth the layers of our nervous system and our memory storage to get down to both root pain and release it with the energy that is coursing through our system, flushing out plaque, right, like the water pick for our soul, right? And then to come back to homeostasis, to come back to balance, and just, you know, like have you ever had like structural, like rolfing or structural, like stuff like that. And they're like, don't go lift any weights for the next couple of days. Like just go for nice walks, wear some perfect shoes, like that

kind of thing. Like, and let us come back to center. And, and so that process, and again, regardless of the methodology, but that process of deep brainstem reset, tremor release, and return to center. A sort of sacramental cadence, like a way for us to put this into our lives. We talked about the bell curve of 10%. You should never touch the stuff, 80%. We talked about schedules

of calendars through life fundamentally all of these practices like if we're gonna hedonically calendar this right we put this not just into a life but like into our weeks and our months and our year right then you can realize that these these experiences serve three roles They serve as metronomes, tuning forks, and training wheels. So the metronome part is, oh, I've returned to center and I am now on the pulse.

And that could be my coherent heartbeat. That could be my breath. That could be the sunrise and the seasons. That could be dancing with my lover. That could be speaking my truth right i'm on the pulse and and i might have been galloping along razzed out stressed out trying to force it and nothing was i was always kind of like pushing life or i could have been depressed lagging slow and always missing right so then i get boom i'm back on the one and i'm like ah that's, that's the beat. Okay, that's good.

I remember this. I guess this feels familiar. And then there's the tuning fork, which is we get banged up. We take hits. We get knocked out of tune. And we might not know that we're sharp or flat. We might not know that there's just an edge to everything we're saying right now, but the people love us do.

And then ping, there's the tuning edge to everything we're saying right now, but the people love us do, you know? And then ping, like there's the tuning fork, middle C, where's yours? And you're like, oh, I thought I was in key. So like Stevie Wonder, like songs in the key of life. So it returns us to that. And then the final part is training wheels, which is like, oh, what does it feel, what does balance feel like? Where I don't have to be afraid of protecting myself and can i actually feel this for a moment and get used to it and that's what the maps work with trauma sufferers has been right they they experience mdma as

training wheels and there was a beautiful report from one of the women who was in the study and she's like you know i i didn't think that i could experience this anymore i didn't think i deserved it i didn't think i had it in me and now i realize it's in me and it's mine and it's not the drugs right it's in me so this reawakened that it was in me now it's in me yeah and so this the metronome tuning fork training wheels like this is how we begin again. And I think a key piece is that we're almost always sold a bill of goods, a happily ever after hockey stick utopian story. If you take this product, this pill, this workshop, this religion, if you do the things, it all works out happily ever after.

And that's kind of what I meant about the transcendental existentialism. No, it fucking doesn't. No one promised us a rose garden and no one's told us how this ends. And we really could be a bunch of lucky monkeys hurtling through the void as time and space. We just don't know. And anybody who pretends to is full of shit. But what we do know is that we have the chance.

Life is equal parts. We know life is tragic. That one's not that hard, but can we actually face the fullness of it in a way that ennobles us right? Occasionally life is magic. We forget that right, but when we find it, it's like that shit the love and remember what we forgot and Whip sawing back and forth between those two is crazy making So so if we didn't have each other to laugh with, we can acknowledge

it's comic as well. So it's tragic, it's magic, and it's comic. And that maps beautifully. The tragic, how do we address the tragedy? Through healing, through catharsis. The magic, how do we address that? That's through, how do we remember that? Through peak experiences. That's ecstasis. And the comic, how do we remember that, right? Through peak experiences. That's extasis. And the comic, how do we share the absurdity of this human condition with each other? And humor and lightness. And that's communitas. That's connection.

So, like, that's the flywheel of our lives. There's no getting off this thing. And really, only our efforts to escape all three. We cherry pick, right? We're like, I'll take magic and comic for a thousand, please, Alex. You're like, no, not so much. You mean all three. We cherry pick. We're like, I'll take magic and comic for a thousand please, Alex. You're like, no, not so much. It's all three all the time. We're never fully fixed and we're never totally broken. But if we have the capacities,

and that's why you mentioned earlier, friends of ours who are forever going back to the wishing well, looking for the next breakthrough, looking for the next shazam insight, but they're like up to their ears in those things, right? That may not be the path, right? It's like Dolly Parton, like there ain't no saint without a past and no sinner without a future. You're just back to redemption songs. We get knocked down and we get back up again. So like this thing is a process. And yet it's not simply like suck it up, fat kid. You know, it's not some bitter cynicism, right, to say that because the magic is magic.

And there is that process of becoming what in the traditions, so East and West, there's some version of becoming twice born, having a death rebirth experience. And what does that always say? I'm not going to pull a Joseph Campbell here and universalize, but the idea is consistently, like Plato said, the Eleusinogen mysteries teach us not only how to die a better death But how to live a better life, right the early Christian Gnostic same thing, you know Eastern tradition of Lakota Sundance you name it like all around the world is that death rebirth experience and and what I was sharing earlier

I feel like an ego death as well. You mean identity death? Yeah, I mean, I mean any and all of those things but that that stack well you mean identity death yeah I mean I mean any and all of those things but that that stack mmm nitric oxide big on the Delta cranial nerve brainstem reset but a bit all that that's actually the first time we've actually mapped the neurophysiological ingredients under the hood of all the world's wisdom traditions of death rebirth initiation so now that we've mapped that we get we're like that's the neuro anthropology you're like oh how are they stuff? Now it's applied. Now let's look under the hood and understand the science behind it. Now we can do cultural architecture. Now we've got the Lego blocks. What do we want to build with the Lego blocks? And once you know that, then you have the experience to be like, oh, go see for yourself. This goes back to faith. So this is your seed from way back when, which was

how do we experience faith to overcome the grief? We can construct practices for ourselves in our own homes, in our own relationships, in our own communities, in our own existing bodies of faith or in new ones, whereby we can have that death-rebirth experience, ones whereby we can have that death rebirth experience right and actually come back a second time by choice mm-hmm fully embracing and accepting the mystery and the responsibility and the possibility and and then choosing to be here fully so it's like go hunt your white whale. Like he's out there. Like if you really want to find God,

the universe and everything, right? Imminently searchable these days, more so than ever before. Scratch that itch. And when you're done scratching it, right? And hopefully it's sooner than later, because you're needed. Come home, come all the way home.

And that notion of like Anthropos is the Greek term, it sort of rolls into early Christianity as well. It's like Vitruvian man or Vitruvian human. Like fully integrated, fully balanced, heaven and heart, you know, like heaven and hell, head and heart, masculine and feminine, right and left, like integrated human who's here. And like in Zen they have the 10 oxherding parables right which

is like this metaphor for enlightenment there's like 10 different beautiful pen and ink drawings and like the dude's going you know looking for looking for enlightenment finds it and then there's all these super complicated distinctions which i never understood i'm like damn i like panel four was like i was like that's it right it's like no no no there's like a whole bunch more panels and there's a whole bunch more distinctions. But then like the 10th panel is this like fat little Buddha dude with a pot belly and a walking stick.

And it says his doors and windows are locked. Even the wisest sages and scholars cannot find him. He is down in the marketplace among the people with helping hands. Right? And so when enlightenment, when attainment, when anything fancy pants

becomes so utterly ordinary, right, that it's no longer extraordinary. Like when we can go from like waiting for the second coming to celebrating the umpteenth coming. Like we're all in this together. No one gets out of here alive

and all of us or none of us, you know, like that feels like the greatest story ever told. And you know, and back to Star Wars, right? We are hardwired for that story. Hardwired. I mean, Kurt Vonnegut, right? Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five,

all those things. He has this beautiful, he did his grad work at University of Chicago and he mapped the shapes of stories. And, like, stories all have basic shapes. And he kind of laid them out. He's like, there's the up and the down, but there's rags to riches. You know, you start out terrible and awesome.

You've got boy meets girl, and it starts out meet cute. They break up, oh, no, and they get together happily ever after. And then he's like, but the most popular one of all is the Cinderella story. And it starts out terrible, and then it goes, you know, pumpkins and princes and stroke of midnight and then ends up really even worse than ever. Everything's lost, right?

And then, you know, the foot fits the shoe and princes and church bells and happily ever after forever. So it's down, then up, then really, really down, then really, really up.

And you could make a case that we are in our own Cinderella story right now. We are at the stroke of midnight, right? The bulletin of atomic scientists who has the doomsday clock they've been tracking since like 1947, right? How close are we to snuffing it?

It's the closest it's ever been. We're at 100 seconds to midnight in our very own Cinderella story. True. Right, so what comes next? And who writes this story for all of us and our children and their children? Oh, gosh. Right?

Is on us. And if you think of Buckminster Fuller said, can we create a future that works for 100% of the people without offense to any? Right? In a world that we know is possible. And you're like, oh, okay. So this is really it. This is X-Wings and Death Stars.

This is Mount Doom and Mordor. These are all the stories we know. And we have not just our mythologies that we know in our bones. This is how it goes. Would we want anything less? If you had to pick when to show up in history, wouldn't you be like, I wanna be the ones

in triple overtime that sink the winning shot? Right, right, of course. Right? And it's gonna be at a cost not less than everything, and it requires us at full strength, and it requires that we have to be able to heal. We have to remember what we forgot. We have to keep our eye on the prize if we get you know if we if we only focus on the tragic then the mundaneness of the world will crush us yeah but if we only focus on the

magic then then then the burning bush will burn us right and we have to do this together like we we have to walk each other home so i'm curious then what's the biggest trauma you've had to overcome I mean, I think being a misfit toy. You being a misfit toy? Yeah. From your parents or something? From everything. Like South African mother, English father, then moved to America, dropped into Catholic school. Like being like two years younger than all the kids in my class.

Just being like, what the hell is this thing? And who are these people? And what are their strange customs? And why don't I fit, right? And so my sense is that as we do this growing up thing, right, you can shed, it doesn't take too much support or perspective or insight to be like, oh, I'm doing that, that's totally unconscious.

I should clean my room or do the dishes or make my bed or stop being an asshole or stop withdrawing and hiding from somebody's, you know, we're running away from emotional intimacy or something, something, right? And you can shed those, you know, and most well-intentioned mature folks tend to, but then there's this kind of like this core, sort of like who we actually are. And then you start getting to that place. It's more like a bee with a stinger, you know, where you're like, oh, okay. So that's a definite drawback. It creates unfortunate things in my life. But if I take it out, I disembowel myself.

Like it is the shadow of actually the rest of my life. And so now. It's pushing me also. It's driving me also. Yeah. And like, and if I got rid of of that i would actually be lobotomizing what is my potential interest gift interesting so now how do i live with that and also just generally not be so like how do i because you could say let me or leave me you know take it

or leave it which i think is inadequate so how do you heal it also and live with it i guess yeah i mean you know how have you or what what has that process been like for you? Well, I mean, look, first of all, my filter is my family, and they are hard judges, right? So, in fact, I can actually, this is an interesting point, because this is the sort of, a thought experiment or a model on how we become twice-born, or how we become homegrown humans, right? So I was at the kitchen table with my wife, Julie,

and we've been together since college. Wow. So we grew up together and we were kind of going at it. It was about as intense a conversation as we typically have. Recently? When was this? Yeah, this was like a year ago.

Okay. Pre-COVID? Yes. Although, although funny story about that we were talking last week and and we were just first time we'd got to really connect heart to heart about our relationship in a while and i was like yeah you know i don't know i mean it felt like we started drifting i don't know was it like six nine months ago sometime in this thing i just felt a little less close to you and then she's like yeah um you know like a year ago kofi happened and then the wheels came off like i was like oh that was it you know like that was i completely forgotten in my relational map that kovat happened and it might have had some impact which was just like you know um so but a year ago before kovat we were having like there were times in The first few years like teenagers to where I just did some stupid things and and and left scar tissue

Of course, we'd process them at the time paved over that here we are Yeah, but nonetheless still in the mix and still there still still somehow in the mix, right? I mean, I don't know about you, but I find like I mean You know, obviously we were super young and we are each other's relational history for the most part which in some respects is a blessing there's no there's nothing else in the closet but on the other hand it's like it's just all the time um but she was really still anchored on some of that just kind of core places i hadn't been fully supporting her. Right.

And yet we'd also just had these amazing and profound breakthrough experiences where it felt like our life was as complete as we could ever hope, want or dream. And I was like, what are you doing? Like, why are you dragging us back in the past? Like here,

we've already won. Right. Like we got there, like it worked. Right. And, and at first I was like, Oh, like here we've already won right like we're here like we got there like it worked right and and at first i was like oh like here's this timeline our like mythic life you know and you're stuck down on our biographical life and you're anchoring off past trauma and stupid like we're up here we won right come with me up here and i was like oh that's not quite right is it because that's like a bit of a bypass and this is our life we actually live it and yeah and lived it we have to honor that like so i was like what's what's that about and i was

like oh well maybe we can like meet them maybe we can braid them and i was like oh okay so now i had this kind of thought of and i even started sketching it and it looked like a jesus fish right you know those those those arcs right and they cross the tail you see bumper stickers you know on minivans and i was like so, so this is like the DNA Jesus fish. You're like, it starts at our birth and where the tail crosses, that's our death.

Physical death or initiatory death. We all have our biographic life. That's the arc of our life, right? And it does actually slump downwards. Like all the happiness studies are like 20 to 40 is your suck. Your 30 to 50 is your suckiest time.

Really? People say, oh, kids are the best thing ever. Like all happiness studies say folks in your 20s are super stoked and folks in their 50s are super stoked and everybody in between is in the suffer fest. Right? So anyway, but that's the point. And along the way, we have trauma.

We get our adverse childhood events and our adverse life events. So you can just sort of see those dots along the way. If we have a lucky, if we're lucky or skillful, mostly just lucky, we'll have a peak experience. It could be a camp out and you see shooting stars or a full moon. It could be your first rock concert and everybody's holding up lighters or phones and everybody's sink belting out the chorus. It could be your first love, take our pics. And you have one. Okay, that's one data point. You think that was amazing. I look back on it you have one. Okay, that's one data point. You think, that was amazing.

I look back on it fondly. I want to get more of that. There's no pattern recognition. But you get back two times. Then you get back three times. Now three points make a trend. And there might be three, four, five of those. And you're suddenly like, oh, I connected us backwards.

I can actually see this arc. And it actually starts feeling like a bit of a story. And it's my story. And it's my mythic story. It's like me at my highest, highest my best self a lot of people go way off the reservation on this like oh i've recovered past lives or oh i'm actually a star being or oh i'm something something something right but it's because we like hey let's just call it this is your mythic life this is you at full strength maximum imaginal possibility and now i've got a plot there now what happens is people start exploring this especially as they get into strong

unstructured Ungrounded access to ecstatic technologies, right and certainly psychedelics are an easy example of that but not the only one They will get out of phase. They'll get out of time with their partners and this is what was happening with me and Julie So I was on our Leading edge in mythic life. She was anchoring off our bleeding edge in biographic life, right? And so people will come back from a meditation retreat, a personal growth workshop, a psychedelic experience. They're like, I figured it out. I sold it. I love you. Everything's going to be different. It's amazing. I'm amazing. You're amazing. I'm sorry. And what happens quite often is that the people we come home to,

like, yeah, slow your roll. Like, not so fast. Like, I'm suspicious or I'm judgmental or I'm skeptical. Or let's see if this sticks. I don't trust you, yeah. Let's see if this sticks. And the person who's just had that peak experience is often quite like, this is the new me.

This is who I always have been. This is who I am most truly, deeply. This is it. And they often dissociate from all the past places they might have had a hand in, right? The past trauma. But the person who's been holding the home for it is like, until you get down off your high horse and shovel some shit, I'm not willing to trust you and come along for the ride of your life. Like, if you want me to come along for the ride of my life, you actually have to come back and make amends.

And so that's, we literally are meat suits. We're sitting across a table together, but we're actually unstuck in time from each other and from painful pasts or fantastic futures. So the leading edge gets out of phase with our bleeding edge. So we really need like 4D psychology, which is not just here's me and I'm me and you're you, but when are we? Right?

When are we? And if we can get into the deep present together, then beautiful happens consistently. Right, right. Right? Insight, truth, connection, inspiration, all sorts of- Intimacy, everything, yeah. Everything, right?

And so if over time we can repeat that process via the flywheel of peak states, remind us what we forgot, right? Deep healing. Because they don't just do that. Peak states seem to do two things. They seem to remind us what we forgot. The technical term is anamnesis.

You're like, oh, yeah, I remember. Almost dropped that stitch. How could I have? Duh. That's the whole point. But they also give us like a printout of our like homework Okay, it's like an electrician running like juice through your system Like you've got a blown fuse a crimp wire go fix this shit. Yeah, right

So we do our homework in catharsis and then we validate it with each other Right and because we're outside linear is because we're outside of having people tell us what to do or deferring to authority these days We do still have each other and that's what keeps us honest and that's what keeps us human of having people tell us what to do or deferring to authority these days we do still have each other and that's what keeps us honest and that's what keeps us human right so you could be like Saul you know like like like like like like Paul from the road to Damascus he's like oh yeah that Saul guy you know he was a total son of a bitch a tax collector and I get it I mean he's a dickhead but I'm Paul baby you know can't you see and she's like yeah no I mean bitch and so

let's wait but if we do it over time then we braid the mythic life we bend the mythic life down it becomes more of our embodied experience because we've integrated and yeah hardwood but we're also lifting up our biographical and then you get to that death rebirth experience and then and then and rather than that being the end of our physical lives right we get to have it early. And then you're like, ah, okay, so now I'm no longer struggling to get off the hook. I am no longer trying to transcend or bypass my life.

I'm actually embracing it fully. I'm shouldering my yoke. And that, I mean, this is mildly esoteric, but it's too beautiful not to share, which is, you know, the biographic life is chronos, like the Greek term for like clock time, right? Past, present, future in order. Life's a bitch and then we die. And then sacred time, right? What we experience when we glimpse our mythic life is called kairos.

And in the esoteric traditions, like kairos is the vertical beam. That's sacred time. And chronos is the cross beam right and we live on that plane but we can have access to this one and when we find ourselves at the intersection that's what the rosicrucians right called the rosy cross that is anthropos that is timeless christ consciousness and you're're like, oh, neat. So can we bear witness to the tragic, to the magic, to the comic, right? And then can we live out the remaining chapters of our life, right, with joy, with grace, with creativity, right? Because we know how it ends.

I mean, this goes, now we'll finish with faith, right? So Elton Trueblood, who was a Quaker theologian, he was a Stanford chaplain, he was also advisor to Dwight Eisenhower, he played a huge role in, you know, he was one of the few Anglos to be advocating against the Japanese in the tournament camps, all kinds of neat stuff. And he said something, and he was actually the grandfather of my college roommate and best friend. So I've known this quote for 25-odd years. He said, faith, then, is not belief without proof. So it's not superstition, but rather it's trust without reservation.

So we get to have that initiatory experience. And it reminds us of what is always deeply and eternally true. And in some respect, from time to time, I wouldn't say this is consistent, but it shows up in the literature of subjective self-reports. There is something known as eschatesthesia, which is a persistent sense of the eschaton or the end of time. And when people seem to glimpse it, there is a kind of curiosity of like it all works out yeah don't know how yeah it's all worse out 51 to 49 nail biter but somehow somehow right

jordan pulls the three yeah right and and whether that's true whether that's fiction whether that's you know synaptic discombobulation and a total hallucinatory state TBD. But folks can come back from that experience saying, hey, I know how it all works out. And we're getting to come back to play out these middle chapters. We've seen the end of the movie. So we can relax a little.

But here's the thing, it's not like Calvinist predestination. You're not like, oh, we're already saved or we're already damned so close my eyes and hands off the wheel. I don't need to try. It's 49-51 which means every single calorie between here and there counts.

Which means we're still 100%. So we're off the hook of neurotic wonderings about is there something more? Do I have a place? Do I put it? But we're on the cross of Kairos and

Kronos to say, I bear witness. I bear witness to this full catastrophe and on behalf of the least of my brothers and sisters, right? And to pull that around, right? We talked about soul force, right? That Martin Luther King phrase and how he got it from Howard Thurman, right, that badass mystic who went to see Gandhi. And this is crazy. I was interviewing Rick Doblin from MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and out of nowhere, he just blurts this out. He's like, oh, you know that Good Friday experiment, which was that famous experiment in like 1962 or three at Harvard, at Boston Chapel, where they gave a bunch of Harvard Divinity School students psilocybin during a Good Friday service. And everybody knows that story. It's one of the most well-reported ones. It's been replicated at Johns Hopkins. And then they could not tell

the difference between who had had a legitimate mystical experience and who'd been on the psilocybin. And actually, none of the folks in the control group went on to become ordained ministers, and eight of the nine who had psilocybin did. So very, very interesting study, right? And everybody kind of knows that part of it. And then Rick, just out of nowhere, he's like, oh yeah, by the way, you know who the chaplain was delivering the sermon? Howard Thurman. So I was like, what? You're kidding me. I was going to write about Howard Thurman anyway. That's amazing. Let me dig up the audio. And they recorded it. So there's Howard Thurman, this badass who shaped the entire African-American civil rights movement, who coined

the term soul force. And he tells this story to a chapel full of tripping mystics. He says, I hear a voice crying out in the wilderness, forgiveness. And I go out to see him and I find a man on the cross and I say, I have to take you down. He says, you cannot take me down. You cannot take me down until every man, woman, and child comes to take me down. He says, tell everyone you meet there's a man on the cross and you're just like mmm right tell everyone we meet right we like it's it's time to stop waiting for the second coming mmm right it's time for us to step up right every man woman and child wow and and you know the beautiful part of it is is that if if we can learn to weep and not whimper right if we can digest our grief if we can remember our redemption songs then we don't just get to limp each other home or walk each other home

we get to dance each other hmm right this gets to be profound celebration but the longer we delay the hotter the landing yeah and the sooner we get on this right the more joyful and creative what we create next for our Cinderella story can be yeah Wow I wish we'd go for much longer but I think this is a lot for people to take on right now that's a lot and I'm right back it's 230 that's 130 I'm sweet yeah that's why I was looking at my clock's 2.30, is it already? That's 1.30. Oh, sweet. Sweet, sweet, sweet. That's why I was looking at my clock, because I was like, we're in a flow state.

This is a lot for people to unpack. I had a lot more questions and things I wanted to go over, but I think this is a good place to land the plane. Recapture, the rapture, rethinking God's sex and death in a world that's lost its mind this is going to blow your mind in a big way so make sure you guys

get a copy of this I've got a couple final questions to wrap things up one is called the three truths question I ask everyone at the end hypothetical question

like you'd imagine it's your last day on earth many years away from now you get to live as long as you want you get to accomplish everything you want to accomplish okay but for whatever reason you have to take everything with you you've created to the next place okay so all the books the writing the videos it all goes with you wherever you go after

king tut it all goes with you all right hypothetical but you get to leave behind three lessons to the world this is all we would have to remember you by are these three lessons that you've learned from all your experiences and this is all we could know of you

or like I like to call it three truths what would you say would be your three truths well I mean this is

it's even more like three truths this is literally what picks me up off the floor when I am destroyed by staring at the screaming abyss and feel like there's no point to any of it. What is that?

It is seek novelty, make art, help out. Okay, there you go. Help out. Yeah. okay there you go how about yeah because like so so like seek seek novelty is we're hardwired for dopamine we're hardwired for newness and whenever i feel like i'm festering it's because my novelty meter is way low you're doing the same thing over and over yeah sunrises sunsets new places new experiences go seek novelty make art is some form of testimony. It's like, can I rail against the second law of thermodynamics and that everything trends towards entropy and decay over time and a cold heat death of an un-caring universe.

So, hey, build something beautiful. And that could be a garden, that could be a poem, that could be a building, but make art. Like, say I was here. I made this place a little more good true and beautiful and then finally like and if i figured out the first two share it yeah that's cool it's good truce i would acknowledge you jamie for uh your constant seeking of wisdom from science to ancient philosophy to bringing it all together for something that we can hopefully apply and use for healing trauma, for understanding this earth, for understanding connection, why we're having massive breakdowns in the world, what to do about it for ourselves and how to help others. So I acknowledge you for doing this work.

I acknowledge you for doing this work. I remember Jason Silva telling me probably four or five years ago about you. And it's been fun to watch your journey and see what you've created with this book, which is going to blow people's minds. So I acknowledge you for doing the hard work, for diving into the misfit that you are and were growing up and allowing it to be a beautiful piece of art for right now. Because I'm sure there was a lot of things that had to happen for it to be a beautiful piece of art for right now, because I'm sure there was a lot of things that had to happen for you to be here. So I acknowledge you for, for making this art and sharing it with the world in a beautiful way. My final question, uh, and people can get the book online. They can go to your site. Where can we go and find this, this book and you and. Yeah. I mean, obviously if you've got a local independent bookstore share share the love for sure and then obviously Amazon and everything else works just fine and recapturetherapture.com

is a place to find the book but also find tools resources the intention is for this book to seed a revolution not lead one and let a thousand fires burn so we have an open source toolkit for anybody to play with culture architecture and help healing, inspiration, and community wherever you are. RecaptureTheRapture.com What about on social media? Are you spending a lot of time on anywhere specifically? Yeah, on Instagram it's

at Flow Genome and then on Facebook Flow Genome Project. I think that would be this. That's your main focus? Cool. Final question for you. What's your definition focus cool final question for you what's your definition of greatness oh nice nice one let's try and come up with something original I mean honestly I think it is seeking refuge in the Dharma like the thing that's yours and yours alone to do so like in you know

And uh like Marvel Comics, it's Thor's hammer. Mm-hmm, right? It's impossibly heavy for anybody else to touch Yours it's the same as Excalibur like find your hammer Take the sword out of the stone and wield it with courage and compassion. Mm-hmm and let the chips fall My man Jamie. Thanks, man. Appreciate it powerful and wield it with courage and compassion and let the chips fall. My man. Jamie, thanks, man. Appreciate it. Powerful.

Thank you so much for being here, for listening to this episode. I hope you found a lot of value from this. I hope it inspired you. I hope it gave you some wisdom, some tools, some strategies. If it did, please pay the greatness forward. Share this with a few friends.

Text them right now. Post it on social media. You can use the link lewishouse.com slash 1100 and post that out. All the full show notes are there with links to the previous part one episode also. So make sure to share those out. Get your friends involved in some inspiration, some strategies, some tools to help them improve the quality of their life. And if you enjoyed this, please leave a review and a rating over on Apple Podcasts and subscribe if you're not subscribed yet. That really helps us spread the message of greatness to more people.

So rate, leave a review, and click the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts right now. To stay up to date, we've got over 1,100 episodes from some of the biggest minds in the world, some of the most inspiring human beings, authors, athletes,

activists, you name it. We're trying to get the greatest of all time to help you unlock your greatness in your life. And if you want inspirational text messages sent to your phone every single week from me, then text me the word podcast right now to this number 614-350-3960. And I want to leave you with this quote From Olympic champion Wilma Rudolph Who said, never underestimate the power of dreams And the influence of the human spirit

We are all the same in this notion The potential for greatness lives within each of us I want to remind you That greatness is not something that comes to people Who are favored You are born with greatness inside of you, but you've got to be willing to unlock it. You've got to be willing to take steps to overcome the insecurities, the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt, the fear that holds you back. This is what

you were born for. Your journey is the process of uncovering it. I want to remind you this. Again, if no one's told you lately you are loved you are worthy and you matter and you know what time it is it's time to go out there and do something great