UNLOCK THE POWER Of Your Mind For PEAK PERFORMANCE Today! | Jamie Wheal & Lewis Howes

this is literally what picks me up off the floor when i am destroyed by staring at the screaming abyss and i feel like there's no point to any of it what is that yeah it is seek novelty make art help out i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome very excited about this you've got an amazing new book out that is gonna transform lives and blow people's minds called recapture the rapture rethinking god sex and death in a world that's lost its mind why have we lost our minds in the first place i mean i i think there's a lot of reasons and they're all happening at once so basically the world has got the world has gone exponential and it is both getting exponentially better so if you think of stephen pinker if you think of inspirational ted talks you can be like hey literacy is up poverty's down war is down health is all these things are trending in the right direction and you can honestly and authentically feel like this is the best of times and then you open the paper and you see wildfires and floods and pandemics and social unrest and protest and you think oh my god this is the worst of times and toggling back and forth between that is crazy-making and because they're because they're both exponential it's damn near impossible to figure out exactly where we reside right and it's almost as if there's sort of two ox to life i mean i experienced this i don't know if you do but but the difference between in fact eb white right the guy who wrote charlotte's web that old kids book he has this beautiful quote where he says i wake up in the morning torn between uh savoring the world and saving it and that can make it hard to plan my days right and and then he says and then i realized in fact that the savoring has to come first the savoring yes the savoring because because if i didn't have a world to savor then there would be nothing worth saving right the challenge the challenges it seems like a lot of people are in this the world is ending although it seems like what the media the world is ending how do i fix everything or save something as opposed to how do i enjoy what i have right now yeah and that's the whole you know i could totally in the power of now people say oh my gosh being in time with causation like what's happened in the past what's happening now what's happening next that's super stressful or we get off knocked off our center so just be here now ramadan too right like and you're like yeah kind of like being present super important but we are um we are time traveling space monkeys right we have the ability to conceptualize past present future and you know at a minimum because we're 17 degrees off the axis of the sun you know unless you're at the equator we have seasons right so that forced us to be thinking there's times of famine and there's times of feast there's times of abundant photons from our nearest star and not so abundant chlorophyll and metabolism so we have to plan right so if you just go cross-eyed and zen about it it's inadequate to deal with linea times arrow right but if then if you forget to be present right then there's nothing to save it so what do we need both yeah i mean no surprises right but but it's not it's not a beige middle right that's unsatisfying it's much more like you know hegel right the german philosopher it's a dialectic it's forever back and forth between the guard rails and how do we dynamically steer based on what on earth is in front of us what are we paying attention to and what needs to get done so like hypothermic people don't make very good poets right so you're like okay i might want to put on a jacket right here right i might want to rub two sticks together and get a fire going now i can have access to greater creativity or expense so you know it feels like to boil all that down there's the sort of coming alive arg right which is what we were all raised on anyone go up to be president or an astronaut and sort of hashtag best life right we all deserve to be healed whole and healthy we deserve to travel the world we deserve to have unique experiences we deserve to have amazing soul mate twin flame relationships a whole bit right and the entire baby boomers gen xers millennials we were all raised on that right and it's beautiful uplifting and inspiring it's always been partial and not everybody's even had access to that promise but it's pretty awesome and that's about expanding you know infinite time frames and expansion of possibility right so if like you were at a picnic at the beach you'd be like okay what do we pack what's gonna be the most amazing lunch ever what blanket do we take where do we lay it out for the nicest view like it's that's becoming a live arc but then there is also and you know again most folks through human history have had to wrestle with this it's just the bubble kid the bubble generations you know after world war ii until lately like say 2008 right so so boomers x's and and millennials who we really grew up in this historical anomaly in the developed west it's never been never been nicer you know all war was externalized massive insane upward upticks of consumerism standards of living education right right cheap debt you name it all that great stuff and and we're experiencing the intersection of like the staying alive and the staying alive arc is the exact opposite it starts high and goes down across the chart and and that's about the diminishing of time frames and resources and options meaning we don't need to work as hard to stay alive well no no no like like like triage like oh so staying alive as you picnic at the beach you're like wait a second all the oceans getting sucked out to sea wait why are all the animals fleeing a higher ground like what's that phone warning going on in my phone oh it's a tsunami now what do we do with our day at the beach so the coming alive ark and the staying alive ark are like intersecting right about now and you can lie in bed i mean i've had this it's interesting i've had this experience like three or four times so the world is ending and the world is the best it could ever be at the same time what do i do with my day how do i plan my day right so i'll be lying in bed and i'll be like oh my gosh that's such a phenomenal you know travel idea i'd like to go we'd like to go do something amazing an adventure to plan an entrepreneurial idea a creative project yeah yeah yeah amazing so inspired and we're in a pandemic i know you're like oh i even get to do we even get to or should we be doing canned goods and should i be researching getting solar panels on our roof for sure we'd be off to costa rica because the wheels are coming off right we've been without power for two weeks that's crazy so so that right it's like chinatown like that jack nicholson thing with you know she's my mother she's my sister she's my mother she's my sister it's that schizophrenic toggling between what is the frame or the lens that explains the data i'm experiencing and gives me clarified direction to act right and so that's a meaning crisis we're lacking meaning well we have lost the the handrails or the the trusted institutions right so we've had a collapse in both benign authority like secular so academic institutions religion corporate well those that's divine authorities so we've got we've got benign authority on the side of like everything from your doctor your friendly white-coated family doctor is the one who got your cousin hooked on oxycontin and has your little son billy pinballing off the walls on high industrial strength amphetamines for his entire life or adderall or something yeah you know and and jordan peterson and maybe you know maybe your nervous spouse who's been pull axe by benzos like klonopin and you're like wait that and that's called iatrogenic illness and the lancet just published a study saying something like 21 million people worldwide suffer from yatrogenic illness which is just fancy for your doctor up wow you didn't admit it so so you're like okay so we can't trust those guys um education yeah academia with like you know the ivy league admissions scandals peer review crisis replication crisis and social sciences so you're like oh that stuff's not so trustworthy what about what about the type the captains of industry mckenzie and goldman you know you listen to the big short you're like oh whoops goldman was like selling credit default swaps out the front door and hedging it in the back door they were totally implicated in the 1mdb singapore scandal right mckinsey was was was fined for partnering with jacob zuma in south africa and siphoning seven in the gupta brothers and siphoning seven billion dollars out of the south african treasury and potentially collapsing mandela's entire post-apartheid project they just got clipped a month ago for for conspiring with purdue farmer to help sell more oxycontin after it was already determined to be completely addictive and underpinning the opioid crisis so you're like wait this is where the best and brightest from all the ivs go to get their internships to get their you know to go play the game yeah and that's hollow they got the political side of things politics who cdc all these things so you you so eat and there's no more even walter cronkite or bbc radio it used to be like oh okay world's crazy out there vietnam war civil rights whatever source seven seven pm we all sit down and and and literally a sane rational voice of reason who's a neutral arbiter of all things good true and beautiful will sit down and tell us what's what that's gone even snubs and fact-checking sites have become politicized you go to the journal's record like the wall street journal the new york times they've become they've got increasingly partisan editors op-eds boards and readers and no one recognizes or respects any information coming from out of this so that's that's always been a a shorthand for what is considered consensus okay so that's just been boom and at the same time we've had right we've had the collapse in in organized religion yeah right so pew research foundation i think it was in 2015 but it hasn't it's only been continuing which was the rise of the nuns so like n-o-n-e-s the none of the aboves fastest growing and now for the first time ever largest religious affiliation in north america so it used to be you would always anchor off you know loosely or tightly some family of faith some family of origin belief system and and authority structure and now it's none is what people are saying no nes right and so now and you know and and you've got the sexual abuse scandals you've got a thousand and one things undermining all of that right so so what we're seeing is as we've seen this collapse of the roof of shed meaning we're in a vacuum and we're getting fundamentalism on one side and we're getting nihilism on the other side nihilism is like i believe in nothing so like tyler doden and fight club yeah yeah right like the middle children of history man you know that you know our our great war is a spiritual war we were taught whatever we were told we were gonna get to grow up to be presidents and rock stars and we we're not and we're pissed so screw it all so screw it make it our own game yeah yeah one in three one in three millennials surveyed within the last couple of years believes that actually military rule would be preferable to democracy right and is that because they're seeking order or structure or some type of leadership well i mean there's a great piece in the atlantic and um and it was basically saying is saying look this generation um they commit fewer crimes they have less premarital sex they they drink less potty less they do all the bad things less they go to college and historic rates they have historic amounts of student debt they've done everything right and they've been handed this steaming bag of society and ecology and he said so no wonder the kids want to say burn it all down so you're like okay so that's that's the lie of the land and and at the same time you know back to the picnic on the beach during the tsunami thing our spidey senses are all a tingle right everybody knows that business as usual and not just the old narratives but the old structures are cracking and as a result on a sort of primal animal level everybody's hopped up and wound up about what do we do now and so the question is is you know you would think or hope like okay and we were talking about this earlier right like in times of great crisis we rally and whether this is fdr and the west the only thing we have to fear is fear itself or you have winston churchill and never ever ever give up and you know keep calm and carry on like and in the beginning of covid right people started trotting those out like is this gonna be another one of those and you're like yeah maybe no oh no oh no so at a time when a you know a meta crisis meaning it's not just one thing it's everything right it's economic it's political it's geopolitical it's ecological health right it's it's it's all of the things all at once intersecting overlapping and catalyzed oh man right it's a lot of trauma that's being built up in every human being around the world it's an awful lot and and and i actually um funnily enough it was it was tim ferriss that inspired this he had put out in one of his newsletters a ted talk that he said made him cry right and i was like oh great let me check it out like it moved the fella i'm curious too um and it was that i think his name is sam bernice he's a he's a little bald-headed kid who had a congenital condition from birth and he basically knew he wasn't long for this world and and he then he gave this totally bad he was all of like 65 pounds soaking wet but he became a boy scout he wanted to play in the matching band he told bad puns and made hip-hop jokes and i mean it's just an awesome just one of those testaments to life through tragedy right and and i watched that like four days before i had to give a talk at a futures conference in austin and i just tore up my speech and i was like okay half and this was right when there had been some of those really you know like the the un reports for 2020 are saying hey we got 10 years folks otherwise this is a wheels off situation right so i really thought long and hard about it and tried to come up with a 15 minute talk to address this right and where's the where's the path for courage where's the path for hope all this stuff gave the talk and it was the opener it was the opening keynote and it went over like a lead balloon it was this was all crypto psychedelic blockchain robbie black future future yeah yeah know going out of space and yeah yeah yeah like like pitching the conference is like this is if ted and bernie man had a baby sure i'm like well okay if ted and me had a baby you're the people that we need to have this conversation right and and and one of the founders came up to me and as soon as i got off stage and he just hissed at me he's like you don't give up what no he did not he absolutely did and they and they stiffed me the suits like which was which was really really funny like i've never had that happen in my life and i spent an entire week building a comp not this wasn't like a pull it off the shelf stump sure sure you know you could give him your and and it was completely from the heart to try and address all this wow so i went home in the fetal position when was this 20 20 yeah oh why so so i was like what did i do wrong like how did i fit this up so badly and and it occurred to me i was like oh i just totally misjudged um three things right why did i get this allergic reaction from an audience that would otherwise should have been primed for this conversation and it was first was cognitive complexity right pretty much what we've just been talking about exponential everything in different directions yeah right because what we're missing is exponential meaning you've got exponential quantum computing you've got exponential current crypto currencies you've got exponential learning with khan academy and distribution exponential transportation with uber copters we've got exponential biology with crispr everything is exponential except how to make sense of it all right so i was like okay so our capacity to hold multiple competing and conflicting ideas simultaneously without crashing our mental browser or shooting the bed right right right so like that's one thing right and basically you know you can you can address that with a sort of fairly tidy thing which is like a triangle of like a post-conventional metaphysics so like how could we all just kind of upload because i mean short answer is get educated right like like good old-fashioned plato and socrates 101 like learn how to learn learn how to think but we don't have time for that right so if you have a little triangle where you're like okay pascal's wager occam's razor and bayesian probability so you're like pascal's wager is basically you know he famously said better to believe in god in case he's real right then to not than to be an atheist and get doomed you know doomed to hell forever if i'm wrong so best you know moral is better at least conceivably inconceivable just in case right so better conceive of the inconceivable is there a global cabal of satanist pedophiles running the world i don't know it seems a long shot but maybe let me at least keep an eye on that um are we possibly at the end of the anthropocene era and this is the extinction of humanoid on this on this on this little earth form maybe might want to keep tabs on that um is this the unraveling of the nation-state perhaps is this the collapse of global economy perhaps there's all sorts of things that it would be better for me to at least keep tabs on be aware of yeah and to be able to be arrogantly dismissive right so that's step one once you've let that in the gate so you've conceived of some of the inconceivables then you've got occam's razor which is the simplest solution is usually the best right so rather than once again global global conspiracies of satanic pedophiles you might just say hey maybe the system is bankrupt and we've been getting lied to and maybe there are systemic structures and maybe there's a bunch of different cabals or small groups conspiring but they always slam into each other cancel each other out do it but the idea of some sinister centralized thing potentially unlikely right or we're all or there's going to be ufo contact or you know and i just did a bunch of psychedelics i'm not convinced that you know um this you know the galactic federation is going to come and land and fix everything like this the occam's razor explanation is i was on drugs that night right so let's hold that one first like before we go leaping to conclusions so occam's razor is always just don't get into excessively baroque or complex or self-indulgent explanations which require connecting 17 dots to sunday let's bust it all down and say the wizzy wig what you see is what you get is always a very high bar to go beyond yeah and then two right that's two and then the foundation is bayesian probability right and bayesian probabilities just to say hey nothing worse than false certainty in a complex situation so map your equation of all the bits and pieces that might be contributing and then basically delay it's a little bit like like tai chi or martial arts where you're like you know you put out a foot but you don't weight it because if you put all your weight on your front foot then your opponent can swing yeah right and take you to the ground so the idea is like i'm going to put my foot there but i can also pick my foot up right so bayesian probability is saying pay attention to all the variables and constantly update them with the latest most trustworthy information you have and delay making binding decisions for as long as possible right get it peer tested you know all that stuff yeah so so that's the first one is is can do we have the cognitive complexity to hold it without overwhelming our emotions our nervous systems and our sense making and fundamental you know and screen of death right in the rainbow wheel of death like just crashing our browser so because if we if it crashes we tend to get bored we get irritated or we just say that's all too much to think about so i'm just going with this one and then we ignore a whole lot of reality and potential impacts the next one is is um how are we willing to kill our sacred cows meaning what so our sacred cows right now goes comes from india but the idea of like you can't touch those ones because they're holy right and so and we just talked about a few right if i believe that you know this is like francis fukuyama like back in 1980 ryan 89 he wrote that book the end of history and the last man because it was basically the fall of the berlin wall and there was that kind of moment from like follow the berlin wall i guess that was 91. i think he might have written this in 89 but like so right around that era we won the cold war yay right mcdonald's in democracy for everyone and free markets and democracy are the pinnacle of human civilizational attainment and they're a steady state like this is it this is the top of the hill right we've got here we've arrived history has literally ended now we're just scaling improvising tweaking perfection and that worked right up until you could say you know even you even have the invasions of iraq the arab spring that idea like we're going to topple all the despots and the bad guys and the dictators and then you know you know citizenship and democracy will arise in their place like whoops oh that didn't quite happen you know and now we have all these ideas of what we took as sacrosanct right is now up for grabs i mean even in this last election cycle there were a number of conservative politicians starting to tweet hey by the way reminder this is not a democracy this is a republic you know like softening the ground for like voting suppression and things like that you're like whoa like like what like and how did something like a global pandemic which was supposed to you know we would naturally expect a globally coordinated response and for sure a national effort not factionalizing states and pitting different political office political governors against each other and like you guys can rot but we're going to look after our people like mind-blowing stuff things that go you know we're a democracy and we're talking about actively suppressing but it's not gerrymandering in the kind of backroom deals that have always happened but like saying the quiet parts out loud and you're like wait a second what's that about or the fact that the earth is forever bountiful we might actually run it out we're at peak sand right big sand peak sand like that whole notion of go pound sand right literally like china has built more in the last three years than the united states concrete has poured more concrete in the last three years than the united states did in the entire 20th century shut up i'm not and oh my gosh and they're having to import sand from saudi arabia because like and they're and they're also mining sand in india to ship to china we are running out of construction sand in the world so so you're like oh wow like so so there's there's so many things and then even just take you know not like this was our father's generation but the whole you know 20 years in a gold watch i pick a company right i put my head down i work my way up the ladder and then i get a retirement and a pension well that got blown up with the privatize everything into your 401k right now you just do your dollar cost averaging and you match your matching funds and you save and you invest in mutual funds because no one can plan the stock market and don't get freaked in ups and downs because it always comes back over time right that whole story and now you've got baby boomers that are just simply bit out of luck and having to work convenience store jobs for the extra spending money and health insurance one in three millennials has a side hustle just to make things you know so like the american dream of home ownership well that's gone we're doing airbnbs now car ownership no we're doing ubers and scooters you know um marriage no we're doing tinder and right right culture like all of these things have been externalized and outsourced right so on the global systemic where there's all sorts of things that we took as sacrosanct our sacred kind of and on the personal like what did i think my life was going to entail right that that we're having to take long hard looks at and it's that whole you know 100 year you're like 100 year thousand year flood 10-year flood kind of thing floods and fires right for a long time you're like oh sweet well we're at the thousand year flood plain we're bulletproof you know except that right we've been having hundred year weather events several times that decade lately so you're like oh okay so you know and churchill said it nicely he said he said plans are worthless but planning is priceless so that notion of having some estimation like our old rulers or yardsticks are kind of getting blown out of the water we're experiencing accelerating change every you know the wood unprecedented gets used so often these days unseasonable unprecedented you know all these things and you're like yep that's that's now enough we have to come up with new adjectives or new yardsticks right but having some sense of what do we think is coming gives us and and based on what has happened in the past right that's what foresters do for fires that's right we don't know what's coming now no but we we can run back to the planning is priceless it's a little bit like like choose your own apocalypse like mad max libs as you choose to give yourself a story to plan and prepare that matches your model of reality interesting and at least then you're not in fibrillation what's your what are you planning for well i mean what's your apocalypse apocalypse well my my personal sense is um [Music] if you run like the cold game theory analysis you know just kind of like almost like like not even homo economicus but like homo machiavelli is like what the happens if everybody's acting out of self-interest and we just kind of do the things we seem to continue doing then there's an awful lot of trend lines that don't pencil out happily right now if we're all competing against each other going after our own trying to take what's ours maintaining getting and getting and you know collapsing into factionalism and tribalism and all of those things um not to just mention the pigs in the python like the things that even if we all had an ebenezer scrooge night tonight we go to sleep and we have our ghosts of christmas past present and future when we wake up you know let like like paul on the road to damascus i've seen the light and we all promise to change and do everything right from here on it's still going to get catastrophically worse before it could get better why well just because there's a lot of inertia in our systems right and it's going to take decades plus to flush through all that so like i said even if we suddenly became some cross between stephen hawking and mother teresa and elon musk tomorrow and throwing the dalai lama while we're at it right we just became that collectively and we did everything right it's we are still going to have a hard landing really yeah yeah yeah so the question is just is it an inferno do we lose the the landing gear right or do we end up you know in a belly slide on the grass and how many people get on right so you're like okay so that my sense is um hard saying not knowing like it is too complex to know for sure and i mean my background's in like mountain guiding and wellness medicine and that kind of stuff so i always just think super literally like if you're if you're in the mountains and you have and you can sleep warm and dry so like you've got a sleeping bag that's that's protected from the elements you can suffer a lot during the day and you can recover if you have adequate food if you have a fuel source clean drinking water clean drinking water navigation so like maps and compass and medical right if you have those things then like the seattle mountaineers have a bumper sticker that says your worst nightmare is my vacation right so you can you can go push it and you can engage you can climb into the pain if you can have the suffer fast and it can actually be really enjoyable and you can even choose high hard objectives that are totally optional like let's go claim climb that wild crazy thing just to see if we can because it looks beautiful and treacherous right you can actually take on additional challenge but lose your water filter you know break your stove right watch your sleeping bag roll down a ravine into a river and disappear and then suddenly you're in cascading triage to like oh we now have to beat a retreat to the trail ahead and get back to civilization right so we just saw this in austin right you know there was this freak snowstorm power you know the entire texas grid overloading was literally four minutes and 35 seconds from a meltdown crash that would have taken like um over a month to rebuild was that close and and at the same time virtually nobody has alternate or backup heat sources it's all electric because they barely ever need it and then that and then all the pipes froze and then we also had a collapse in sanitized water so there was boil water notices there was some people straight up didn't have any the whole the whole thing and you're like oh you know who was it there's a there's a fellow at the unite un that said this beautifully which was where only ever five missed meals from total anarchy right like a day and a half yeah if you don't mean for a day and a half you're like you're not thinking clearly you're freaking out you're stealing you're the freaking and they're doing people the dude neighborly just like i'm gonna go and break in and take some food yeah so wow so my sense is like how did how did texas handle it from your perspective well i mean people coming together and saying some folks did some folks did come stay here yeah i think i think and i think it's important to celebrate and spotlight those things right because we obviously need more of that um and and there was toughness right there's there's the same things that we see in stable systems of imbalance that there's you know always there's there's absolutely the notion of environmental racism which is simply that folks dispossessed disempowered communities are almost always getting the shortest under the stick when it comes to where the trash dump is where where the superfund site is who has you know flint michigan drinking water you name it and then throw in crises and the interruption of services and then the restoration of services and that also gets laid over exactly those same patterns and dynamics so there are folks that you know pissed off to nice locations on private planes or you know or or whatever or whatever right and that happens people with mobility people with disposable income people with advanced in intel or information news all those things help so the question is is how do we how do we rally ourselves together and i think for anybody that considers themselves eve like some form of a leader for your family and your household for your community all these kind of things there's kind of a sliding scale right if i can look after myself and that's you know biohacking peak performance if i can sleep rest nutrition mindset all those things and i've got enough gas in my tank left over then i can be a loving and engaging member of my family but if i don't have those things if i don't if i have a concussion or i have you know diabetic blood sugar crash or i have a depressive episode or some mental health challenge or an addiction then boom i'm decompensated and i'm back to having to deal with me first but let's say i get me sorted then my severe concern can expand to my family let's say my family is more or less thriving and happy then i've got more left over i can stop caring for my community caring for my country caring for the world and that is a sliding scale based on basically stability and access to energy and resources so again i could be a i could be a leader of the world and get hit on the head with a hammer and i'm back to self-care and it also has an expansion of concern and time frame which is i get hit on the head with a hammer it's me now nothing else matters nothing else feeling yeah cracking my skull right um if i'm in a plane crash with my family it's me and mine now right if we are slightly better off than that we're now on the desert island it's me and mine now and next mm-hmm right and you can maybe we'll have a helper an expansion of how many people i care for over what kind of a time frame immediate versus longer term yeah all the way to like bodhisattva everyone everywhere everyone right and then and you're not only just caring for humans now but maybe all sentient beings now you're maybe not even caring for all sentient beings now you're caring for everyone that's ever been and everyone that's ever gonna leaving the place better than you found it well yeah i mean and a lot of ethicists talk about that like the idea between what's an existential crisis for humanity versus just a really really road ahead because their point is what's the difference well and you know it's pretty academic for us because my sense is that the only thing that actually matters as far as human choices is my generation and my kids generation after that it's academic but ethicists will say hey an extinction event of humanity doesn't just mean everybody on earth snuffs it it means that every other human that is yet to be born but was going to be has snuffed it interesting so you get this aggregate constant when you terminate a species line through a keyhole event right right and that's that's you know inconceivably exponentially bigger as far as the loss yeah so so my sense would be is can we first you know first look after ourselves and our families so that right like like put our houses in order so that we can then come back to the front lines how do we helpful how do we do that if we don't have a meaning anymore if we don't trust authorities trust the organized religions or politics or corporations if we don't have if that's all fractured and broken now how do we find meaning of why we're even here yeah i mean you know obviously that that answer is that's unique for everybody right it has to be um and any tops-down answers no matter how good they sound at the beginning almost always devolve into some form of fascism over time right so a question is is like hey if we are if like meaning 1.0 right we can call that like traditional religion offered salvation right here's the story of how you get to heaven right but at the moment but at the price of exclusion right it was it was those who believed were saved those who didn't want so it was kind of a harsh approach but it was fair like it was like we're going to lay our cards on the table exactly how we're going to play this game do this and you're saved don't do this and you're you know you're stuffed you are you are not in the tree of trust right right right and then meaning 2.0 which we could say is sort of like the french enlightenment on the modern liberalism civil rights civil liberties private property markets that whole thing um said that whole salvation game that's problematic that's led to holy wars all inquisitions all of this and superstition and all this bad stuff so we're gonna we're not gonna do that we're gonna do inclusion everybody gets to play this game at least in theory right at the cost of salvation right separation of church and state and nietzsche's sort of god is dead right um and both of them like and they haven't that hasn't worked out too well either right because an awful lot of people have correctly said well because the story was sort of like wait your turn play by the rules and your turn will come we promise right and you're getting a lot of frustration and understandable even rage at the imbalances of that game like we were sold a bill of goods and in fact joseph stieglitz who's uh you know he was um world bank u.n economic advisor all sorts of incredibly high up positions i mean he basically just called the entire shell game he's like he's like it's been 40 years and and the results are in neoliberalism and democracy um are have broken and the benefits have accrued asymmetrically to those at the top and you know in the last year we've seen all sorts of things about what kind of recession are we in because of quarantine is it going to be a u shaped or a v shape or a k shaped right k shape just means that the top one percent are now trillion and gazillion is right and everybody else is host and i mean to get to put this like really uh to put a point on it this blew my mind i had written the first chapter of this book 18 months ago and i had a paragraph and it said when 68 68 people on the planet are richer than hold as much wealth as the bottom half the bottom 4 billion that's crazy right 68 people could all fit on a bus one bus yeah more money than a half yeah than half then half of the world's population and and like then just to note that like that sort of asymmetrical accumulation of resources energy credits like natural resources it occurs in no living system anywhere ever now that was 18 months ago just before we went to press just go back and fact check the number one is enough it's 27. they can fit in a stretch limo oh my gosh 27 have 27 more money and more resources than the bottom four billion four billion people four billion people now that that just should break our hearts does that excite you to share show what possibilities you could create potentially for yourself or does that should that break our hearts i mean well i mean in some respects i mean this is the other thing i think the era of like i think a good thing for us to think of is that is that physics trumps metaphysics all day long so whether you're a died in the world libertarian free markety guy whether you're somebody who's all about particular neo-marxist theories or interpretations whether you're some new age consciousness it's sort of going to be like guys i think it's time like it's it's at the poker table it's a call like it's not lay let's lay your cards down because we're about to see what happens and it won't be talking heads getting to spin their take right there's gonna be a lot of surprised faces going oh okay i guess this happened or this is happening so whether that's climate alarmists or denialists like we're going to see whether that's social with whether it's nationalism is the best thing or globalism like we're going to see whether these markets are stable or inflationary or deflationary or efficient or totally inefficient and there's tons of rent seeking in capture and we're dealing and late stage capitalism is a total sham compared to the ideal of a free market we'll see so there's all sorts of things in the coming few decades we're simply just going to experience physically you know it's the whole sort of physics mike tyson right like everybody's got a plan to get punched in the face yeah right we're about to take some shots we've been taking shots right yeah yeah i mean and i would even say that that you know weirdly because a number of people have sort of approached me over the last six months and like oh dude this is you know this isn't right like you called it this is all happening exactly as you said and i'm like no no actually this was a total surprise in fact i haven't just to my own sanity and not to be a total buzz kill at parties i took i haven't i wasn't even deeply monitoring global pandemic risk i mean you knew kind of there's these you know like favelas in sao paulo and crazy uber slums in africa and lagos and shanghai and that those were going to be hotbed incubators of the next wild pathogen which you didn't think it was going to be globally this soon i mean i can you can only wrap your head around so many wireless things and still be sociable you're like this is going to crumble this is going to crumble the next decade but not this and everything else so this to me was a total flyer but and and and the crazy thing is is that actually has nothing to do with the underlying structural conditions that are still the blaring red alarm right right so this was a this is merely a dress rehearsal mid-level totally manageable thing we're up terribly right right meanwhile everything else is falling apart yeah yeah so so the questions are is do you think this is a good thing that's happened this this soon and not delayed suffering and pain is it good that we're seeing this now the pandemic i mean obviously it's not good when people are dying and suffering and things are happening but in the overall scheme of the world and healing and awareness and reinventing ourselves is this necessary yeah i mean i mean and and those kind of comforting just so narratives right don't worry cupcake it's all going to be okay because here's the bigger plan or story right everything happens for a reason those kind of things i have a hard time sinking my teeth into those um and i because i just i mean how on earth do we know and i think in some respects i guess if i had to kind of define how i might look at things it's a little bit more like a transcendental existentialism right so the existentialism part is life is utterly meaningless right that you know it's camus said it famously in his book the myth of sisyphus he said the only serious question is whether or not to commit suicide right so you actually have to stare into the screaming of this you have to be like okay strip it all out right jack nicholson and a few good men you want the truth you can't handle the truth right you got to actually go stare into the screaming abyss and understand that we are just monkeys with clothes on a little rock next to an irrelevant generic star circling around floating in infinite space ashes to ash's dust to dust it's horrifying right you and there are these moments of sublime grace beauty and potentiality and where little we and we are the existential mayflies of this universe with opposable thumbs and prefrontal cortexes and we're here for like eight or nine decades on a good run like to fight and to grieve and to build and create and destroy and to be alive and like holy we're alive and so and that part like holding and cherishing that part at the same time as holding the profound grief which by the way is the third leg of the stool we talked about two which was complexity sacred cows and then as we do this well this is actually the appropriate point of this conversation which is once we've stared into the screaming abyss and we realize that we're just we've just been whistling past the graveyard right right it's kind of scary so i'm gonna whistle a little song and hopefully that keeps whatever is really big and scary or wait like really like what does that do right it's a little bit like all the true blood movies and all the hip vampire movies where someone invariably like spritzes them with holy water or it makes a crucifix and they're like are you are you kidding me like you believe that old that old wives failed like no no we're way hipper than that yeah right so like our monsters i think are actually far stronger than our superstitious warning yeah you got to get to the heart to kill us yeah yeah right and so and so the questions is it is how do we learn to weep not whimper right we're so like whether it's trigger what's the difference well the difference is like is fibrillation versus like you stress versus distress right so like you know most people think when they see like you know whatever grey's anatomy or things like that right or er or house right the idea of like paddles and everything clear right those things that's to start somebody's heart it's not it's actually to stop someone's heart because what's happening in those situations is ventricular fibrillation which means their heart is in a spasm which will kill them right and so what they're doing is they're zapping it to flatline it so that then the brain impulses and resets and resets right and we are in ventricular fibrillation psychologically socially politically we're all experiencing micro ptsd and you look on twitter you look on social feeds you look at the amount of bad faith inflammation we're just looking for excuses dying for excuses to misread someone's intent take it wildly out of context and just unload rage and it's just because because our nervous systems are fibrillation right so and that's the whimpering that's the whining we're collapsing into these who can who can play the victim the most and there's been an interesting study and i haven't gone back to look at the the actual paper but a friend just told me this yesterday which was there's a correlation between playing victimhood identities like seeking that mindset and dark triad narcissistic machiavellian sociopathic personality types so now you've got bad actors going to help help on being oppressed right simply because it's a highly effective power player right now and then you have legitimately huge populations that are being victimized by conditions in life that absolutely need infinite care compassion and support they're not getting it because we're in this fibrillated state so the the weep don't whimper is open our hearts to the wounds of the world and feel it right because it connects us to ourselves it connects us to each other and it connects us to our courage and our purpose and then get the back up right and let's do our part right we're here for a reason let's figure it out yeah let's figure out what this is what's i mean what should we be having faith in well should we have faith that's such a good question and such a good such a good word um because and is it blind faith is it just well this is what our grandparents told our parents and this is what the book says and this is what our god says or whatever so we just trust it blindly yeah i mean i i think those days are gone right i mean we're just we uh there's such a spike in cynicism and there's a collapse in benign and divine authority so we can't really kind of go back and dust them off and reboot them and prop them back up again we've kind of seen that they're like you know potemkin villages like back in the stalinist days where they would take people driving through moscow and then they would literally do like almost like theater stage sets those recordings you know yeah yeah right to look like they were really robust and thriving so we kind of have seen that a lot institutions that we took to be solid and timeless our potemkin villages right we're seeing see that we're seeing how the sausage is made and everything yeah and it's and it's thoroughly disappointing in fact i mean i think there would be an amazing kumbaya situation if you took alt-right conspiracy theorists and left conspiracy theorists and you said hey guys let's get together and because because the the diagnosis of the problem is 90 aligned it's you can't trust elite institutions we've been being fed a bill of goods all media and messaging is massaged and positioned and we're supposed to just take it there's a sort of dual layer system of politics and power and really you know this is noam chomsky's critique from way back when right but i mean it can it comes from both sides all those things and the and the common man is getting a bill of good you know fill it in i mean i mean bernie in 2016 and trump in 2016. their analysis of what was wrong with america was yeah it was at least 80 identical now their prescription as to what we ought to do who's to blame and what we should do next about it those go very differently right and so getting getting folks together on the shared playing field is i just think it's it's helpful and it also clears away the noise and the clutter because it's like that last ten percent is the whole ball game as to who's to blame and what should we do now right and that's where you have to get that's where you really have to slow the tape and what do we believe in yeah yeah yeah that's where you have to get very very specific because i mean you know an example that i can't get out of my head it just seems to be such a strong one it's like charlie manson like i watched that there was a documentary in like 1973 it was all original footage it wasn't like a cbs like after school special with actors and and you know and it's idyllic it's naked blond-haired hippies like smoking weed by the waterfalls and topanga and like hanging out and doing the whole thing right and you're like oh my gosh and then you hear them interviewed and and again 90 of what they had to say they said hey you come out of the 50s the eisenhower industrial complex you're trying to please your parents you don't even know who you are you need to get clear on what your purpose is what your sexuality is what your joy is what you're like yes yes check check check check check and then up is down down is up you're like kind of interesting they're tripping maybe we'll give it that we'll give him that one and then life is death and death is life wow maybe on a kind of like super zen point of view perhaps and then and then like oh then kill the pigs oh wait that putt right and so we're seeing that with antibacter conspiracies we're seeing that with q anon we're seeing that with new age like we're all going to vibrate up to the next density and leave behind this earth form or all the other the chubby people who don't eat arowanas and whole foods um right that whole thing you're seeing you're like whoa whoa slow the tape right there because like you can have psychedelic fascism you can have ethnonationalism you can have there's all sorts of pathological places these go right and if you're not aware of the philosophical and ethical implications baked into what all sounds reasonable at a hundred thousand feet but you actually start trying to put them on the ground and you're like oh man those don't go to happy places so to your point about faith right um how do we how do we create a meaning 3.0 yes right that that takes the promise of salvation right because because without salvation right people who grew up as nuns people who grow up as atheists people who grew up unchurched right um has come to nome yes no any not habits have had have succumbed to diseases of despair depression anxiety addiction and suicide because they don't have because there isn't a greater promises yeah that that's the staring into the screaming abyss if you've got no rope to pull you back you say disease or despair diseases have despair yeah and no hope yeah and who has shared in the last couple of years more people on this earth kill themselves than die of all wars and natural disasters combined every year no way so think about our news feeds all we see is war and natural disasters now just disappear that all and just say the silent epidemic is people saying i cannot make sense of being alive on this earth so why be here yeah i'm gonna die yeah yeah which is hot and you know one more breaking of our heart but the thing about heartbreak and actually facing our grief is it categorically makes us stronger and connects us to our courage and so like tong len is the tibetan practice of meditation that's specifically about this right and pamela chodron who's a tibetan nun and buddhist uh teacher um lays it out she's like most meditations like think happy thoughts say a mantra try to get to stillness try to get to emptiness something along those gratitude yeah happy things right yeah tong lin's the exact opposite and it's like start with like actually picturing everett the picture of the suck like literally imagine the black todd the smoke that their pain your grief your angst your jealousy your you know your your resentment your neurosis and then inhale it like literally visualize it as tall or smoke inhale it and then exhale like love compassion and then when you can do that for yourself and you actually it this is an imaginal exercise right so it only it works as you cultivate that muscle it's not some misto thing it's a thought experiment that you can you can build those muscles to do better then you can expand it to everyone in your family everyone in your community and everyone in the world so you can actually play with that and then over time that does something you know back to the idea of like steering into the skid racing cars right if you steer away from the skate you spin out if you steer into the skid you have dynamic balance so you're like oh now we take our suffering as raw material for our compassion and like and alice walker the the author of the color of purple and a bunch of other things which has been a friend and student of pema children's and she said she's got this beautiful line in one of her books she says my heart's been broken open so many times now it just swings open wide like a suitcase right and that's what i mean about the the learn to weep not whimper learn to feel yes learn to feel it all and and and don't block it and don't be whimpering yeah yeah yeah i mean i mean martin praktel who's a he's a powerful man shaman poet teacher from the mayan tradition he says grief is praise right we only it is love's way to honor what it misses right and our buddy zack stein who is a harvard trained uh psychologist and educational theorist um he's i mean the number of times i bring this up is obviously has haunted me right but he said we are perhaps entering an era where billions watch while millions die this era right now this time yeah like this 21st century yeah and so you think about that and televised and alive i mean think about george floyd right right that ricocheted around the world in an asymmetrical way right there there'd been all sorts of events like that all over the place all the time something happened and it broke our collective brains and hearts and if you think about even about the languaging like i can't breathe it was so profoundly and vulnerably human and and that and the rage that it prompted was that it was like it was the anguish cry of humanity saying like no like enough is enough and there's infinite complexities and realities and analysis to unpack around that event those protests all those things but just at that core human level right it's it's profound and part of that is it used to just be if something happened you heard about it through scuttlebutt in your neighborhood or your village and that was your that was our world that was the only information we had now it's just you turn on the phone every moment you see another tragedy yeah well i mean and i read something uh probably the most psychoactive thing i've read in the last six months was something in the mit reader and it's this it was this wild timeline of humanity's awareness of our own mortality basically and it was and it was sort of going all the way back to like the greeks and and and ancient hebrews and all this kind of stuff and he was saying look sure there were like end of times mythologies always baked in but that was kind of like literally like lights out like beam up to the mother ship some complete transformation of reality but it wasn't until like literally the 1700s the 1800s like the discovery of haley's comment and then the fact like oh my gosh that's a comet and then like wait a second that could come really close to earth and then like holy are we gonna actually get hit by a comet and then paleontology like wait there's dinosaurs and evolutionary theories like we're not the first ones to be here and these guys aren't here anymore and what's that about and like holy smokes the idea that humans could go away and that life in some other form could continue without us crazy was has we've only had this for like wrapped around wrapped our heads around it briefly for like the last few hundred years and and in fact they're speaking of like that that francis fukuyama but the end of history and the last man there was the first dystopian science fiction novel was written in 1804 by a french guy called the lost man and it was it was a sci-fi story about a future with the extinction of humanity and that poor buster committed suicide oh my gosh right so you're like you're like holy and now you've got greta thunder right you you have you have a generation coming up who are like post 2008 they they weren't raised with like unions and rainbows and they're like student debt and loans and financial crashes and unemployment and ecological catastrophe and they're like you were pissed and how dare you right and so so this awareness like there's a sort of sense it's a little like neo in the matrix you know it's like yes you can learn kung fu and you can fly but you're also in nevada goo and the machines are coming right so so let's give you a hug and a high five welcome home right right you get a weekend to bosque and your newfound identity and possibility and then monday morning show up to work right we need it we're all needed right so how do we get back to this place of when we realize all these things are breaking down around us these beliefs these ideals these foundations what our parents told us was true whatever it might be how do we begin to start to understand what our own faith is what we should believe in what we should hold on to if there's nothing solid yeah yeah i mean i mean the beautiful thing is is that the answers are all around us they really truly are like in fact one of my favorite pieces to write in this book was was talking about because because basically saying look if we're going to rebuild meaning 3.0 how can we take the best of organized religion and the best of the modern liberal experiment and put him in science ancient wisdom yeah everything and inclusion inclusion and salvation and is that even possible right and so clearly a single down version contraindicated we've seen we've seen stalinism maoism fascism we've seen all the hism schisms and they don't work very well they always end up basically whenever the ends of a utopian ideal are heaven on earth or off it then the means are always justified so you always end up with bad things happening right right because because you can always justify it against the ideal so let's not do that let's do decentralized open source let a thousand failures burn and 900 of them will go out in the storm but a hundred will catch and then we'll see and we can pass the light past the torches right and so one of the simplest things is that um a dust off all the wisdom traditions there's thousands of years of accumulated brilliance insight and artistry but even in like the american tradition and if you take america because we seem to be kind of i don't know what we're doing but we're sort of doing it on behalf of humanity right now right like like the the grief the rage the conflicts the discussions everything that is happening here is sort of in some form rippling out through the world or being echoed by similar movements so so race class gender politics nationality ecology all the things right and the american tradition has always been this crazy hodgepodge of international experience you know you've got chinese laborers building the railroads and irish folks coming in and west african folks coming in and western europeans southern europeans all these things and and every you know and and indigenous folks and all this you know and spaniards coming up and like and smashing and crashing into each other and somewhere in that created like gospel jazz blues folk right um into you know hip-hop into all of these things this this living song book and in those songs those redemption songs right is it's always the same story right it's it's i've been down so long right i'm broke open and it seems like up to me all right that was a 1920s blue song drake covered it nancy sinatra and the doors covered it right you're like you're like that sense of going down the road feeling bad right right and i'm singing it and in fact that becomes a triumphant celebration acknowledging it talking about it being aware of it like beyonce i mean like there's the grace cathedral in san francisco has had the church of beyonce on wednesday nights and they literally get together and they use beyonce songs as hymns and liturgy liturgy and it is straight up praise music wow right it's like aretha franklin like dusted off and like beyonce's mom is like creole chinese african-american french like all she's probably got like half a dozen lineages and she grew up in a houston baptist church and then she's singing this stuff and like dolly parton like singing like at the oscars she was singing this it was for that movie transamerica which was all about lgbtq folks right and she was singing the song like we've all been crucified and they nailed jesus to a tree but when i'm born again you're going to see a change in me and you're like okay so like you hear it and like stanley crouch or the lincoln jazz center like the idea that like jazz blues all of these traditions are actually this heretical hermetic mystic spirituality that is unique to america because it was all freaks and misfits who came here and you couldn't you the protestant church and the catholic church they wouldn't have signed off on half the ship in america as these wild terrible experiments and we created this this defiant liturgy right this living hidden scripture in our concerts in our song books right in our protest in our marches of like we're here and life hurts and we rise up singing and and you know you know that like you know it's powerful because those are the songs that people hold up lighters for those are the s like lady gaga right like like born this way these are the testify songs give you chill songs they give you chills and they give you chills like even that chumbawamba like way back when like i get knocked down right but i get okay nothing's gonna keep me down you've got these drunken drunken scots right right right so so that you know that like going down into the mud of our shed suffering that and that's back to the weeping not whimpering right and then and then and then somewhere in that feeling the pulse right feeling the beat like feeling the chorus and then you're like oh we are here and then and then it becomes that sort of i am spartacus moment right where you're like okay we are all dead man walking no one gets out of here alive right right so how do we do this that's the it's the o captain my captain and dead poets right we're gonna get expelled for doing what we're about to do right our love outweighs our fear wow so so that sense of like we all love those moments we love leonidas yeah right you know at the mopili we love we love those those those calls to arms and courage tank man in tenement square some dude wearing like having two shopping bags in his hands he wasn't prepped for that he just ends up being like nah this stands in front of a phalanx of tanks and says enough is enough crazy good you got disappeared we've never heard from him again and he's never been tracked again right there was like four people in matching clothes that came and and so either that was good guys or highly likely it wasn't right but that triggered something and and nancy keen at harvard business school she wrote we shared a stage at mit a year ago and she's a firecracker and she wrote this amazing book called forged in crisis and it just changed how i think of this stuff she it was abraham lincoln dietrich uh von bonhoeffer who was the the poster who tried to assassinate hitler rachel carson who wrote silent spring which kicked off the environmental movement frederick douglass the abolitionist um and one other and the thing that was crazy about their stories including like the emancipation proclamation right every single oh in shackleton the antarctic explorer and the key was that at the moments that are in wikipedia in the moments that we hear about in school they had no idea what they were doing like like the emancipation proclamation was a was a doug flutie like hail mary final huck with at the buzzer he had no it was desperate and he had no no idea that it was going to work or become the tide of history and so you realize you're but she's right she's like when people act from that spot with courage but with with a desperate courage a complete like not no like no certified male saying this all works out sunny but you've got to do it anyway he says it sends shockwaves through the world right so we've talked about we've talked about all the exponential curves doing all the exponential things and how overwhelming that can be and also fundamentally how scary right how how how much uncertainty how much how much fear how much risk there is in the world as we face it but the flip side is it's like nobody promised us a rose god like have you watched game of thrones i mean yes they made that up but life has been cheap for an awfully long time red in tooth and claw and nasty brutish and short has has it ever been thus right so can we step out of being de-conditioned zoo animals can we step back into the bigger arc of history can we sack the up with courage and and and access soul force you know and that's what martin luther king you know he said that in that that i have a dream speech when we can rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force right and and most people that's how they know it that's that was the moment that that concept came up on the stage but he actually had borrowed that twice over so it wasn't even his his words or concepts um it was this fellow this african-american mystic named howard thurman and he was a mentor to the civil rights movement but he was so kind of like in his jaw love group and he didn't actually ever like march with pickets but he advised all those guys wow and and all of them carried his books with him like day to day like literally like in their satchels kind of thing but he went to visit gandhi in 1935 so he was the first interfaith african-american ambassador to go to india ever wow did you think about this i mean 1935 is not that after reconstruction right like i mean you've still got living former slaves used to you know this is crazy fresh times and so he goes there and he meets with gandhi and gandhi shares with him this notion of non-violence which they call it satyagraha and and which basically means alignment with truth right and that that is unbreakable what is the truth well but truth integrity right action humanity dignity gotcha all those things and and so thurman came home and he's like okay satyagraha that's the sanskrit that's a mouthful no one in this country's gonna understand that i'll tell you what let's rebrand this and we'll call it soul force and and because up until then civil disobedience was just a tactic in the civil rights movement they're like let's not get our heads bashed in and let's not needlessly antagonize folks with guns and batons and dogs we stay alive that's what it was right after that civil disobedience became the central philosophical pillar of non-violent protest around the world and that's that's soul force right and and erica chenoweth at harvard's kennedy school of government right she's done this you know study that's been restated a thousand times which is that when she studied from i think like 1950 to maybe 2010 i forgot quite where what her time brackets were but you know basically late 20th century into early 21st century civil rights movements that have been successful that you know eastern europe asia united states everywhere else um that it required about three and a half percent of the population that's it three and a half percent of the population to actually make these phase shifts that then can create this catalytic event which is beautiful and inspiring right and that's certainly where extinction rebellion and a lot of other social and environmental protest movements have taken inspiration there's also kind of a critique of that where you're like hey that you know it's one thing to be like i insist on riding in the front of the bus and the bus has four inflated tires and gas in the tank to get your destination right that's one move right we're saying hey there is this civil experiment we've been locked or blocked out of it and we are politely asking for our opportunity to get on board right but it's another thing to be like hey we are sailing off a cliff in that their bus and you have to transform a chitty chitty bang bang style into a helicopter before you crash like that's kind of that's kind of where we are right right so it's like complex intersecting meta crises and the and the bus itself of like prosperous stable civil society is not necessarily persisting so the erica cena was three and a half percent is that honking great asterisk of like tbd if this holds up but the other thing is is like we're nowhere near three and a half percent right so let's get there and we'll take stock right we'll take stock once we do and and and that that sense so you asked about faith and we've been playing with grief and we've been talking about courage right and and our buddy actually andrew human he's a professor love this guy yeah right love it roxa and and and so curious and then also comes up with ingenious experiments to then validate stuff that you would otherwise just be spitballing right and um and he told me it was fascinating because he told me the story of this research as it was happening and then last year he actually finally published it in the journal nature which was this story on courage in mice and they wanted to see they wanted to see what happens basically when we're terrified and what's going on in our brain right and you know everybody has heard of fight or flight right but just because it rhymes doesn't mean it's correct so it's actually there's there's flight or freeze there's that network and then there's the stand and fight network which so technically it's a salience reducing network meaning like don't look at me right i'm gonna i'm gonna make myself small or get out of dodge or a salience enhancing network which is like you want a piece of me yeah and it's like yelling at the bear or something that's coming at you as opposed to like getting the fetal position yeah so so so and it all goes through the thalamus in in the brain right and what they found was is when they stimulated this very specific region right that it stimulated a salience enhancing response associated with courage so 98 of mice when faced with the shadow of a hulk right which is what they do in the lab they just torment these poor lights oh my gosh here comes shadow yeah and then 98 of them piss off and hide under the nearest right they run and then only two percent actually thump their tails but they do it once they're under shelter so it's kind of a little bit like a chihuahua move right not very ballsy yeah okay so then they stimulate the courage center and then they stand shut up thump their tails and say bring it it's like bruce lee they do this bite you yeah yeah but it gets it gets even better than that right so so andrew being the compassionate duties like he's like man am i just pushing their buttons and sending them to their doom do they have choice do they have choice and so given the choice between food sex and having that stimulated they choose having courage stimulated over food and sex and humans do too so like we will we would rather be brave we would rather feel brave than get laid why because it is essential and and the final the final just like amazing that you can't make this up the name of that center is called the nucleus reunions so in latin that means the seed of our reunion it's how we come together is our courage it's poetry you can't we couldn't have planned that but andrew discovered it so we we want to feel courage over pleasure over looming threat right like the reason that 300 harry potter dead poets thelma louise right being like this right we're going to send it no right the reason those movements even rogue one you could tell like i hadn't watched rogue one yet and it got really strong reviews and people like okay this is kind of money this is a solid solid addition to the star wars franchise you know you're like what's going on here like there's a thing here i don't know what it is but there was some gravitas to it and you're like oh it's because they die at the end right and in fact there's a guy matthew gosh matthew pauly or pollard i think he was basically like tim ferriss before tim was so he was at princeton in the early nineties and he decided to kind of like game his system and he he had grown up watching saturday morning come kung fu movie so he was desperate to go and become a shaolin monk wow so he punched into china long before they were shut up any westerners right so super super early finds his way to the shaolin temple the classic thing in the rain gets shut out has to sit on the porch finally gets invited in that they adopt him blah blah and then he gets a bunch of vhs tapes shipped over with rambo and and schwarzenegger movies so it's like the rickety old tv plug in the vhs and he's like i'm going to show you our hero movies and they watch them all night on saturday night binge watch them and then he finishes like so what'd you think and and they looked at him with funny faces and they're like well matthew man what's the deal because i thought you said these were your hero movie these are and he's like yeah these are action heroes they're absolutely amazing he's like no no they they all they all live they all live no one dies no one dies for the calls in all of our heroes stories right and you have to die really yes right and so that notion of consumerism and rational individualism and all the isms and the stories and the specifics of you know 20th century 21st century western culture have been you can have your cake and eat it you don't have to make trades fairy tale ending the you do deserve your best life there is no ambiguity or complexity of this thing and it's happily ever after always for everyone or at least for the good guys right versus the the notion and and my friend and and business partner uh kurt cronin is a former dev group commander said a modern version of this he said whenever they were going down range into combat they plan to come home in a body bag shut up well of course right it's not surprising anybody said you know i had written my letters oh my god i've established my will i had i had figured out my trust for my children so that they were good through 21 or through their marriages like i had i had it all done prepared for the worst so that and he never lost a man so that i could go out there fully wow so it's the samurai notion of meditate on a thousand ways to die so that you're not distracted on the battlefield yeah right and so so that notion we are we are terrified of death right we punch ourselves full of plastic surgery dyes and fillers right to the point of creating caricatures of youth and beauty in ways that you just you know that that are heartbreaking you're like gosh just allow yourself to be an elder you know allow yourself to to have the dignity and the appreciation and the respect we we ship our grandparents off to nursing homes to be cared for by um anonymous hourly wage workers and pumped full of drugs so they don't make a fuss you know we we we are obsessed with youth and beauty and all of the things but but don't acquaint ourselves with our mortality and it's and it's that contrast that actually gives us back our dignity you know it's sort of like our our humanity feels like it's at the intersection of our mortality and our divinity say it again our humanity lies at the intersection of our mortality and our divinity and when we can balance those two dialectics right then we have a chance to be you know what you could sort of call a homegrown human like i'm no longer trying to get off this ride i'm no longer trying to transcend it i'm not looking for my next sound bath or cacao ceremony or in medicine ceremony i'm not hop-bopping around to catch the next big thing nor am i collapsed in despair i'm i'm it's much more like jimmy stewart in a wonderful life right it's it's that moment of like oh holy i am blessed with the opportunity to live out the rest of my precious life with full agency balls deep completely committed and fearless and to your point about faith right we haven't touched on the the notions of healing trauma peak state cultivation access the kind of things that we have been playfully calling the alchemist cookbook right but the tldr of it is that we have access to more transformative technologies than we've ever had in human history therapeutic modalities experiences and they can be high-tech and expensive like sensory deprivation tanks and transcranial magnetic stimulation and brainwave stimulations and all these things they can be middling like the new trials at imperial college in johns hopkins and nyu and elsewhere with psychedelic therapies they can be super low tech like breath work or lie or trance you know trans edm music all the way to you know at home with a special friend and and psychosexual practices right right 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 and and the protocol is actually consistent and in fact um carl diceroth at uh at stanford one of andrew's um colleagues has kind of has been the godfather of optogenetics so the ability to kind of stimulate light and brains and turn on different genes and that kind of stuff that's not emdr stuff is it no but emdr finally enough i mean if you put a pin in that because i'd be happy to come back too this is part of this integrated theory of like peak states and trauma really got it right so what he what they found was that they they used um epileptic patients who normally have you know such seizures and and tremors and gave them ketamine right so a dissociative anesthetic that also promotes you know depending um very interesting to totally otherworldly interior experiences sort of dissociated like i have sort of have an out-of-body experience it's used in battlefield as a as an anesthetic um and and it's also lately been started to get used in psychotherapy got it more broadly it had been underground for a while and what they found was is that that experience of dissociation did was there were two things subjectively it helped as an antidepressant so stepping out of myself for a moment right allow me to come back into myself with a little bit more equanimity bird's eye view yeah having awareness situation unzip the monkey suit you're not in it yeah you're out of the situation looking in reflecting yeah and and then really interestingly they're like oh and what's going on when someone is under the influence of ketamine and self-reporting but they're having an out-of-body experience that also then is alleviating depression three hertz neuroelectric brain wave fascinating okay so now we've got a signature that's going on and by the way that also happens with five meow dmt and a whole host of other psychedelics even if they are actually interacting with different neural pathways and 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 tryptomine based things 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 hoods 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 breath work techniques can get you into delta waves and and different compounds so nitrous oxide there was there was a study with a kinesiologist at mit and they found that nitrous oxide will put you into delta wave states for three to twelve minutes so not indefinitely like if you're breathing it for a dental surgery you're doing something over a long time three to twelve 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 red-headed stepchild right 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 they're probably in beta if they're trying to follow this uh-huh it's beta and then there's delta then it's theta right yes except that it kind of goes the other way if we're dealing with so so basically beta is the most fast that we typically have access to above that consistently is gamma and that's like the occasional like flash bulb eureka kind of moment 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 like oh i'm not up here 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 which you actually have and you get like gently leg or you're like elbow your partner or something like that right or you have some wax dream where you know 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 um it correlates with a brain stem level reset and and what we're seeing is that it also 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 so if you can be conscious while in delta you sort of have access to the cheat codes the cosmic browser and this is consistent reporting right across experiences like winston churchill was one of the first patients to get exposed to nitrous oxide and he said he said you know he said world upon world of almost alien information reveals itself and he goes like but 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 right so you're like so this is fascinating and you realize that all of those compounds plus neuroelectric stimulation to the cranial nerves right and to our brain stem do that they do a systemic reboot of the brain stem which accompanies delta wave activity which tends to subjectively yield equanimity out-of-body 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 what i'm hearing you say we're getting out of pain and this what's happening in the moment yeah i mean yeah you're long gone yeah from that and you're basically like i said i mean it's basic you know how that uh they have that vomit comet that plane that you pack pete instead of the windows blocked out and it does the roller coaster oct through the sky do it and for that part right everybody's in zero g yeah that's pretty much what it is yeah 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 gain the name of the game is you can't fumble the football in the end zone so so this this is that's that's one step so we have delta wave neuroelectric 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 they were gathering wool so we have pay attention to the things that allow you to do brain stem research resets and that can be transcribing a magnetic stimulation that can be electrical stimulation through the tongue there's an fda phase three clinical trials palms device that i've actually tried i tried it downhill mountain biking in whistler and rode it down the track so put it in crank the juice and and it's because all the headsets like the bio hiking gear don't really work because your skull is really thick and nine volt batteries aren't very strong so you've got to get into the tongue it's connected so the tongue goes into two i think it's ten i think it's ten cranial nerves and it goes straight into the brain stem so there's the pons the medulla oblongata and um and then the other and then and the vagal nerve is awesome wow so you still you wore this thing that was a shock to your tongue yeah and this is shocking like every second and funnily enough i mean well this is 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 barcarita 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 baccarita's lineage okay but the seals were looking they were doing night dives combat night dives no visibility and the age sucks because you kind of see what you're doing and be spatially disorienting right you're literally like just being in a touch over there yeah so imagine those five-day darkness meditation like 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 the blind folks are using like tapping with a cane and learning to see through the field yeah can we do with electrical stimulation with this paddle on our tongue so if it buzzes on the left i swing left if it buzzes on the right if it's on my tip and the tip of my tongue has come down if it's on the back of my tongue i swim up so can we basically joystick our frogmen someone else yeah joysticks watching you and then yeah they're guiding you and wow and again uh cut our buddy from was just saying he's like yeah you get under a big ship and it goes haywire so like you they swim on these paddles they've got their compasses the metal starts spinning you can't have lights there's prop wash there's no noise 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 for 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 in 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 um while experiencing brainstem research resets and then they found and then they've now taken this to phase three clinical trials 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 vaguely 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 eve like anish seth who's a princeton gastroenterologist called puforia like if you've ever had an especially large bowel movement and somehow felt sweaty or palpation 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 into a 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 wow so you're like oh okay so we're just worms 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 brain stem reset vagal nerve optimization increase nitric oxide in your system and that can be everything from eating beets and and and um what are those little seeds yes beets greens or even supplements like neo40 that are concentrates or even ed drugs right viagra boosts nitric interesting right and not only does it and that 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 calls it called 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-covet it's an antiviral that's what i heard from the uh from james nestor talking about this and breathe breathing through the nose and uh how the virus can't survive in this right yeah so high not 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 so you do these things and then you also realize oh at and then engage in spinal and pelvic mobility right and the issues are in our tissues so if you engage in 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 neuro tremor 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 are 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 um your nervous system defragging yeah and rewiring up healthy movement right it's this the whole robert sapolsky at stanford which he had that but why zebras don't get ulcers right like animals don't stress right right because they discharged and and we were actually we had just been we'd just done a an expedition on uh on the north face of everest and 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 is long before this was like before the beach came out i think so it was like super chill and we were climbing this wild volcano grotto in the jungle um at like sunset and it was super sketchy like we see this german couple come down all covered in mud wild eyes like what the hell we're like we're gonna go do this this looks fun and um and then we get to this super crazy slick limestone slab and there's this there's this monkey stuck right and and he's freaking out and he's 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 together and he's just lunges and does this dino and like just this one-handed thing grabs the top pulls himself up looks around frantically beats off and then and then just off into the jungle never to be heard from again and you're like genius wow right so that no no no 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 it's never interesting okay so this is how all animals forever have done it we're walking around stressing 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 mass and then you realize oh back to brain stems 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 backup and be fresh again homeostasis now life is life and i'm going to still face every challenge an 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 right can i come from my best more often and can i metabolize my grief as fast as i'm taking it in so not holding on to it for months and years and suffering yeah experiencing it having your heart open allowing yourself to feel and then moving on yeah and so now throw in vocalists so 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 start 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 cavities are 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 it have an economic driver incentive built a cult around it and it's 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 culture architecture cleanly and we can just share people with the source codes here's the lego what is the source code well the these are the source codes right which is which is dis 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 like and just go through the motions what is a imagine if some space anthropologist came down and was like okay humans here's the user manual you guys are just you guys are just gonna get us up mightily here's how and and and giving us the capacity to to do this skillfully right throw in you emdr is what 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 that's the 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 then there's half method and then it's breathing and there's cold therapy and how do we separate placebo right and and selection bias from is there a legit there and once you put those things together now you can add in like theraguns yep 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 so much drama yeah and like even just having partners right and then engage in like 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 like these things aren't simply uh disconnected physical movement sequences they actually show up in our consciousness register they actually shape and inform our experience and so like the absolute money there is um and all of this is 50 of it because then you can also add in conscious sexuality on top of them 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 um have a physician that is three c's so you know dan savage right the sex advice yeah yeah so he always 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 um 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 that word they mean oh it's all in your head you made it up and that's that's one 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 um having a it's almost as if it's like the monitor of yourself 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 relieves as it leaves your system it's kind of like the body keeps the score mentality or issues are in the tissues body keeps the score etc and if you look at bessel van der kook's work i mean bless his heart right but most of the suggestions he's recommending for the physicality is really straightforward yeah it's like do yoga that's good right like do you know like what's in your body so you're like so great exactly healthy food so so put in special calisthenics right with a k right put in there gun use and then and then for those of you planning along at home with a special friend so there's basically like three levels there's solo practices partner practices and couple practices right that's it and you can 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 in in you know responsible sacramental or therapeutic use and and you could just do sexuality if you combine them all right you end up with a cocktail of well i mean you end up with the notion of like 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 also much and it's and it's a little bit more self-directed so if you said hey i'm going to lock you in a 10-day vapasana 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 were you going to go to peru and go on an ayahuasca journey and you're like 12 hours later like hair on fire like what on earth just happened my world and the reality just unraveled but if you combine things you can well there's actually and for both of those um i'll even throw in one more you could maybe you know we lived up in the mountains in colorado ran you 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 um so you're like okay maybe i go for the runner's high to end all runners high but you're like that was 100 mile race i'm my body is healing for three months right the same thing with long psychedelic experiences which is about 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 it lasts eight to twelve hours in a hospital shift is eight hours so they picked a substance that fits within a professional work which makes sense i mean god bless them you don't have to be like trip sitting somebody for like you know a day and a half but the idea of long 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 possible retreat that's miles 70 to 90 on an ultra run that's hours six five and six on an lsd trip it's not the beginning half it's not the very last part right yeah and the shoulders is body load confusion fatigue random other 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 write off their calendar right so um but everything from cost to access to calendar to intensity to propensity for vulnerability or exposure in those transitional spaces 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 recover yeah right recover and and you can see the opposite side is also true if you take an experience like dmt or 5mu dmt right some of these you know notorious and super trendy high high octane psychedelics that are like 15 minute rocket runs right too much too fast too soon and people you know they they rave about them but for their therapeutic insights they they are i think remarkably lacking because once you are simply white like god consciousness or you're you're or you're unleashed into the galactic carnival now what do i do with that yeah right that doesn't necessarily help or get it's so deep it's so impersonal and so depersonalizing that it disconnects me from showing up with more heart more connectedness compassion toward engagement what are you what are your thoughts on all these uh 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 i mean it's a it's an interesting question and there's there's several different ways to kind of come at it because 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 i do 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 on that space i feel like there's other meditative practices that i've done that that i also feel a lot of peace and out-of-body experiences and i'm floating in space type of mentality so for me i i haven't you know who knows what's actually happening with all these drugs but i know that i can do other things as well without it so yeah and and and i think that the thing that my position is usually not like not having a specific dog in most of those fights it's 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 right 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 so arguably one of the biggest benefits of state shifting techniques or practices broadly how 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 trans whole range of consciousness they considered valid not just oh that's just repressions from your sexual frustrations in your unconscious forget it that's dribble you know or you need to be medicated or you know like there was a full range that was accepted and embraced as legit means of making sense of things we went to descartes kogito ergosome you know empiricism 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 spot and training and crossfit to wim hof and contrast therapy ice bathing saunas right 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 you know who did all suffered who suffered who didn't have climate control didn't have a pantry filled with overstuffed calories at the whim with salty sweetened fat programmed in to make me keep coming back like all 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 so in that respect um i think that the ability to shift state is really valuable and and the use of some form of psychoactive plants or compounds is not just perennial through human history and our buddy brian murrow rescue just recently came out with that book the immortality key where he's made a case of through ancient greece into early christianity there was potentially some continuity there that's one very specific and scholarly kind of take at a time period in specific geography and fascinating but you know ron siegel at ucla has talked about the desire to shift consciousness is not even specific to humans and across time you know across time and culture but also specific to you know like 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 yeah right there's been an evolutionary adaptive advantage to changing the channel from time to time yes 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 psycho technologies from around the world today to your door right and at the same time ripped out of cultural context so so the idea is you know basically led by someone who probably doesn't know what they're doing hucksters and charlatans yeah and some really well-meaning folks too sure those are they're getting increasingly swamped by the by the sociopaths and the connies who are coming into the space because there's so much there there and so so the idea is it's like breaking the sticks off bottle rockets and still hoping they'll go where you point them 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 ock people of papua new guinea and i remember reading this anthropology study it was f from a guy an oxford anthropologist named richard rudgely and it was basically they had let's think how many stages were there 12. there were 12 stages of and 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 but not like the ones that folks are used to today are like gnarly first toxic ones like ones that kill you if you don't do them properly and and it was kind of like a montessori classroom in this like 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 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 awk people so once you were initiated into a level then you had open access for your own discretionary use because you'd been shown how to do it properly but you weren't allowed right to skip levels right or post right right and it was kind of a selected pyramid it was uh fewer and fewer people got invited into the subsidiaries getting your black belt yeah it's like you've got to go through all these different stages first yeah and and and the fascinating thing was is that the final two stages that was only for initiation to 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 science seal delivers every word is you know unquestionably and viably true period and the 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 you know let's just say psychic like renaissance psychic like therapy since that's where most of the media conversation is um 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 diet you know family histories of mental illness existing diagnoses um and if you could screen for this up front dark triad personalities psychopaths narcissist machiavellians um and and 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 um you know you could you don't want to be training sith lords by accident right um 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 um sydney gottlieb i think it is who was the founder of mk ultra the supernally you know government dot doc ops project right that shows up in stranger things and that kind of stuff he dropped i said 200 times and was an utterly amoral son of a and actually dosed whitey bulger the the mafia boss who was up in boston in prison like he was that he was one of his subjects why he was still white right so so to say nothing of aztec sacrifices and you know and yamamoto drinking ayahuasca and still spearing each other you know like humans are humans sure and we're complex and 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 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 right going back to the wishing well more than that and if you think about so let's talk about the 80 like what would what would a road map 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 matanok people like hundreds of traditions around the world of responsible intergenerational use how can we learn what this is the culture architecture part like how can we build things that are missing right that might serve us and others going down 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 up all night right right so you're like okay so and let's 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 inevitability of awe of connection of all these healthy things um and it tends not to be so much that it wigs folks out right it's a couple of clicks back from terence mckenna's like five grams silent darkness and it's not addictive either right no no not at all so the idea is like what if you had a truly grounded initiatory right of passage for a 16 year old or an 18 year old for something in that space and and awakening who i am on this earth in community and then what and then now welcome and now start showing up that way interesting right and you know of course some folks may say that's so widely irresponsible drugging kids bob 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 right and take an anthropological look at this and say what's missing um and 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 open up take marriage right i mean these days it's it's status displays and virtue signaling and it's not an initiation into like high-risk gammas like sacred union right right it it's caterers and instagram shots and photographers and and gift registries at williams and sonoma it's like you know and and people and 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 you know magic like all of it's gone right and you're like okay what if with the wedding party with the selected minister or official with closest friends whatever it would be that was appropriate to do the maps therapeutic dosage of mdma so and again not for the substance right this this is the the fact that vasopressin oxytocin uh prolactin come online and and 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 if once a year or once a decade you know cadence take your pick but if once on our anniversary we came back we rent 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 business 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 blackboard relationships yeah 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 these were faultless tragedies like this this was this wasn't someone hadn't cheated yeah there was no cheating there's no infidelity there's no addiction there was no in fact there was the opposite of financial stresses and and they blew a pot 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 yeah you know you're like oh we've got some skin in this game and in fact uh brian if a vescu i think that's his name um no brian erp i think and julian evanescu uh they wrote a book called love drugs there one's an ethicist at oxford and one's an ethicist at yale and they've basically just said hey look folks um you know family counseling couples therapy ish you know i've never seen it work personally but i mean all power if you you can find a good person that can help you um but hey at this point the era of supplementing relational therapeutic support with pharmacology um has arrived and it's now unconscionable not to and because the question is again like the idea you know crypto-puritanism whether it's what are you doing giving you know substances to adolescents that's that's unethical in fact back in the 50s at ucla they were dosing three to 12 year olds with lsd no no like in 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 goblin and rick donald 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 is suffering from ptsd and you know what three sessions with a therapist with this compound could do for them and you're going to 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 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 vice magazine you know right right like that like that that's not romantic how could i and and that's what they're the case they're making in love drugs is like look we're already doing chem sex we're just doing it really badly right like everybody gets plied with alcohol right right alcohol is a massive dehydration it dehydrates and desensitizes it dulls a woman's orgasm and like dr ruth right the old the emoji sex therapist said you 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 hat that shifts a woman's hormonal profile primes her to be seeking basically um a new age whim a weak chin safe provider for my children non-aggressive sexual low testosterone like like safe guy right then they you know they they caught they do all the things they buy they lease a volvo together and then they get married and she's like okay i'm gonna get off the pill it's time for us to start a family she gets off the pill she's like who's this milk toast wanna be i'm gonna go shaggy 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 kinds of things and also deadens libido and sexual response and then throw in ssris which completely clip eroticism and you know like you're depressed that's what ssris so selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like prozac and so 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 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 and people are attempting to live lives through that lie of the ball and you're like how do how do any of us maintain passion connection right engagement with the deck that stacked courage everything yeah so which goes back to what we're talking about before we started which is step one heal the past it's like yeah step one and then how what's the way to heal yeah what's the what's the modality that you'd use to heal your past or your shame or your trauma what is yeah something so we started building this kind of edifice right which was this notion of what is a global systemic reboot yes what are the pieces that can work and and we sort of said here's the neurophysiology brain stems 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 yeah you could use um what's the what's the word acoustic therapy like sound waves you can use sound baths 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 this is a metaphor but they sort of release or dislodge plaque interesting in our system and you know 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 yeah so have you ever had a physical therapist like make you do something crazy like look in a certain direction and like scratch your things all that stuff yeah right and you're like ah it's like move this and you're like i don't even know how to get that muscle to fire right right and and and then if they tap you or they or they pinch you or they just 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 and 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 and that is you know and in fact nicole prousey i don't know have you ever had her she's a 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 that's naughty and bad but it's actually also even in she's found it with her colleagues where she's 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 um that that's considered a dysfunctional coping mechanism and she's like no it's not it's act and she's been researching to to be able to actually you know for pain relief for emotional relief all these things the neurochemical cascade of orgasm as it happens uh again rick rick doblin at maps he and i were on a panel at the battery club up in san francisco with with jason silva 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 that we're having all these off the hook responses right closest thing we can tell is it's that it is to a post orgasmic state and you're like and it kind of blew my mind because i was like sorry you're like this has been 30 years this has been 40 million dollars this has been navigating the the fda and byzantine clinical trials and it's amazing and critical work you're like how else might we get get get you know people suffering to that exalted state known only as a scientist is post-orgasmic you're like and the reasoning is it's not it's 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 right so it is like outside of eating and breathing and those are two other ones right i mean like take 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 you know 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 you know guest 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 you know violence you know everything and i mean you know 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 immoral evolution doesn't give off about our vows our promises the better nature our relationships all he wants to do is just shake up the snow globe and 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 and you're like okay so yeah i mean even and i don't want to i want to kind of make sure we're tracking the dog legs we're taking yeah because there's a there's an important center center theme to come back to um 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 it is a gauntlet that every a lot of confusion 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 right that decade is asymmetrically the window it's like it's like in it's like in blue planet right in off that 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 yeah right 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 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 right you know so let's do that and that's 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 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 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 substance is music like you you put all this together you're like these are 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 um 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 at 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 is hail mary full of grace the lord is with you right that is a nine second nine hertz shift you into alpha wave entrainment protocol so you can you could make a case obviously no priest would have said this but you could make a case that why oh manipulate the tibetan mantras they've been some fascinating studies on meditation and correlation with eeg waves and respiratory cycles based on whatever thing you're saying so you've got a mala bead you're counting 108 rosaries you're doing whatever you're doing so you've offloaded people you're getting critical state yeah you're getting into a state you're actually trump putting yourself and you're saying kneeling in front of voters with smells and bells and the patron saint and it's not surprising that you might have a religion an experience of all ineffability so as we approach this content um people are going to have an acculturated triggered response that'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 i'm all in man tell me more right give me the cheat codes and the challenge with the hedonist is is that you know what jung said like beware of unknown wisdom like they're just up to their ears in it and their challenge is you know addiction and infidelity because they want to they want to go for everything and taste it all and and finding the breaks is their problem they burn too hot right the con the purest we'll do the purest next the purist is actually the one who's like my body's my temple right i don't need those that's cheating in a shortcut so any more volatile or intensive techniques or practices and they have 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 it about this is the way and 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 and specifically what do medical religious and legal authorities tell me to think right so what is the way well check it out it's kind of nice right so so and for the conformist right i mean they would they think nothing of having their kid on redline 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 they would get divorced and this is true this isn't a hypothetical i've seen this three times in the last couple of years couples getting divorced versus seeking mdma couples therapy which could have could have created some form of they get divorced without at least exploring different because because i don't want to lose control i'm terrified of losing control and or that seems to be on the pale so i'd rather get divorced yeah than an explorer yeah for sure and so for those guys steering getting out of the ruts of consensus opinion is 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 matter out of life right the purist says i value the sanctity of mind and body and the conformist says i value the evidence and the advice of experts right so you're like so so through all of them yes so what if you pull them all together and 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 sanctity of mind and body right so that's the potential right what do you do to heal your traumas yeah personally what does jamie do what do i do um and what was that what was the hardest trauma to overcome well look i mean the okay that's a deeper question and a really interesting one because and i could be off base on this but for me um my sense i mean my sense is is there's micro and macro traumas yes probably for all of us right so we've talked about the mic the little t's the micro ptsd is that can i squeegee out the impacts to my nervous system that accumulate through the day to day and they can some of them can be but i get i can fundamentally stress this that's the boss or whatever yeah but i can metabolize them they are most destructive in the accumulation of them over time on process but yes that this i can take the hits and the body shots yeah right so that i can get rid of via yoga breath work hot cold bathing you know all the things right and that's what you do yeah i mean i'm i'm uh yes i'm also a lazy budget so we should put it in there um but the big traumas the big shames the deep ones there um 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 vaguely knob 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 wretching puking like if you've ever puked into a toilet and then had your like eyes watering 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 or we are also at our most profound and you're like wow and and most of and that's such a scary um like uns the same way like tremor released people like i'm not gonna do that that's a spaz like i'm not spazzed i'm in control like right that idea of like us like spasming shuddering to discharge what's in us right is 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 up 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 if you've have you've had like structure like rolfing or structural like stuff like that yeah and they're like don't go lift any weights for the next couple of days like just go get good night's walks wear some diaper shoes like that kind of thing like and let us come back realign our center yeah and and so that process and again regardless of the methodology but that process of deep brain stem resute reset tremor release and re-pack you know and 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 10 you should never touch the stuff 80 percent we talked about schedules of calendars through life fundamentally all of these practices like if we're gonna hedonically calendar this like how do 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 right so the metronome part is oh i've returned to center and i am now on the on the pulse right and that could be my coherent hot beat that could be my breath that could be the sunrise and the seasons that could be dancing i love her that could be right 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 oh that's the beat okay that's good i remember this then i guess this feels familiar and then there's the tuning fork which is you know we get banged up life 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 too you know and and we and then we and then ping like there's the tuning fork middle c where's yours and you're like oh i oh i thought i was in key so like you know 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 surfers 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 chugs 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 force training was like this is how we begin again and 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 right all works out happily ever after and that's kind of what i meant about like the transcendental existentialism no it 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 but what we do know is that we have the chance like life is equal parts like we know life is tragic like that one's not that hard but can we actually face the fullness of it in a way that it nobles us right occasionally life is magic and we forget that right but when we find it it's like share that of love and remember what we've forgotten and whipsawing back and forth between those two is crazy-making right so so if we didn't have each other right to laugh with like we should we can acknowledge it's comic as well so it's tragic it's magic and it's comic and that maps beautifully right like the trage the tragic how do we address the tragedy through healing through catharsis the magic how do we how do you address that that's through how do we remember that right through peak experiences that's exodus and the comic how do we share the absurdity of this human condition with each other and humor and lightness and that's community that's connection so like that's the flywheel of our lives there's no getting off this thing and and really only our efforts to escape all three we cherry-pick right we're like i'll i'll take i'll take magic and comic for a thousand please alex you're like not so much i mean all three it's all three all the time and sort of we're like we're never fully fixed and we're never totally broken but if we have like but if we have the capacities and that's why you know we mentioned you mentioned earlier like 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 um back to redemption songs we get knocked down we get back up against they're like this thing is a process and and yet it's not simply like suck it up fat kid right you know it's it's not some bitter cynicism right to say that because the magic is magic and and and there is that process of like becoming you know what in the traditions you know so east and west there's some version of like becoming twice born right having a death rebirth experience right and what does that always say it always i mean you know it's i'm not going to pull it joseph campbell here and like just universalize but the idea is like consistently like plato said you know the eleusinian 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 lakota sundance you name it like all around the world is that death rebirth experience and and what i was sharing earlier like an ego death as well you mean identity death uh yeah i mean i mean any and all of those things but that that stack um nitric oxide vague on the delta cranial nerve brain stem reset but 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're like that's the neuro anthropology you're like oh how are they doing this 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 so what do we want to build with the lego blocks and and once you know that then you have the experience to be like oh go see for yourself don't explore 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 right and actually come back a second time by choice 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 um god the universe and everything right imminently searchable these days more so than ever before scratch that edge and when you're done scratching right and hopefully it's sooner than later because you're needed come home come all the way home and and that notion of like anthropos is the greek term it sort of rolls into early christianity as well it's like 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 feminine right and left like integrated human who's here and like in zen they have the ten oxford parables right which is like this metaphor for enlightenment there's like ten different beautiful pen and name drawings and like the dudes 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 tenth 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 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 like like and and you know i'm back to star wars right we are hardwired for that story hardwired i mean kurt vonnegut right catch cradle slaughterhouse five all those things he had 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 there's rags to riches you know you start out terrible and things end up 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 and it starts out terrible and it then goes you know um pumpkins and princes and stroke at 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 we are at the stroke of midnight right the the the bulletin of atomic scientists who has the doomsday clock they've been tracking since like 1947 right how close are we just snuffing it it's the closest it's ever been we're 100 seconds to midnight in our very own cinderella store right so so what comes next and who writes this story for all of us and our children and their children oh my gosh right is on us and like if you think like buckminster fuller said you can we create a future that works for 100 of the people without offense to any right you know in a world that we know is possible and you're like oh okay so this is really it this is this is you know x-wings and death stars right this is mount doom and mordor right these are all the stories we know right and we have not just our mythologies that that that we know in our bones this is how it goes um you know would we want anything less if you had to pick when to show up in history wouldn't you be like i want to be the ones in triple overtime that sync the winning show right right of course right you know and it's going to 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 can't 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 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 know you being a misfit toy yeah from your parents or something or well from everything like like like south african mother english father then moved to america dropped into catholic school like like in 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 in a hole or stop withdrawing and hiding from somebody's you know we're running away from emotional intimacy or something something right and then you can shed those you know and and most well-intentioned mature folks tend to but then there's this kind of like this core it's sort of like who we actually are and then you start getting to that place that'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 light and so now it's pushing me all so it's driving me also yeah and like and and if i got rid of that i would actually be lobotomizing what is my potential interesting 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 leave me you know take it or leave it right i think it's 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 so in fact i can actually this this is an interesting point because this is the sort of um a thought experiment or a model on um 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 we've been together since college wow so we we grew up together and we were kind of going at it like it was about as intense a conversation as we typically have recently when was this yeah this was like a year ago okay pre-covered yes although funny story about that we were talking last week and and we were 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 coffee happened and 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 covet happened and it might have had some impact which was interesting you know um so but a year ago before kobe we were having like there were times in the first few years like teenagers still where i just did some dumb stupid things and and and left scotch issue you know of course we processed them at the time paved over that here we are yeah but nonetheless still in the mix and it's 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 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 yeah on the other hand it's like all you guys 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 also just had these amazing and profound breakthrough experiences where it felt like our life was as complete as we could ever 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'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 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 live experience so we have to honor that like so i was like what was 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 there's those those arcs right and they cross the tail you see buffer stickers you know on minivans and i was like so this is this is like the dna jesus fish you're like it starts at our birth and it and where the tail crosses that's our death physical death or initiatory death we all have our biographic life that's the awk of our life right and it does actually slump downwards like all the happiness studies are like 20 to 40 years you're sucking 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 a suffer fest right so anyway but that's that's beside the point right and along the way we have trauma we get our adverse childhood events and our adverse life effects you can just see those dots along the way if we have a lucky if we're lucky or skillful um mostly just lucky we'll have a peak experience it could be a camp out you see shooting stars or a full moon it could be your first rock concert and everybody is holding up lighters or photos right sink belton out the course yes you know take our picks and you have one okay that's one data point you think that was amazing i look back on it fondly but i'm gonna get more of that there's no pattern recognition but you get back two 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 connect the dots 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 being my 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 you'll be 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 can 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 will get out of time with their partners and this is what was happening with me and julian so i was on our leading edge in mythic life she was anchoring off our bleeding edge on biographic life right and so people will come back from a meditation retreat a personal growth workshop a psychedelic it's amazing i sold it i love you everything's going to be different that's amazing i'm amazing you're amazing i'm sorry and and and what what happens quite often is that the past the people we come home to right yeah you 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 i'll trust you let's see if this sticks and and the person who's just had that peak experience is often quite like this is the new me this is who i always like 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 so right but the person who's been holding the home for it is like until you get down off your high horse and shovel some i'm not willing to trust you and and 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 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 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 being in your you but when are we right when are we and if we and if we can get into the deep present together then beautiful right right right insight truth connection inspiration all sorts intimacy everything yeah everything right and so if over time we can repeat that process via the flywheel of peak states that remind us what we've forgotten 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 an amnesis you're like oh yeah i remember almost drop that stitch how could i have duh that's the whole point but they also give us like a print out of our like homework like it's like an electrician running like juice through your system like you've got a blown fuse a crimp wire go fix this yeah right so we do our homework in catholicism and then we validate it with each other right and because we're outside lineages 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 right so you could be like saul you know 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 a tax collector and i get it that means a ticket but i'm paul baby you know can't you see and she's like yeah no i mean that's a 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 integrate it into the hard work but we're also lifting up our biographically 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 right i am no longer trying to transcend or bypass my life right i'm actually embracing it fully i'm shouldering my yoke right and that i mean this is you know mildly esoteric but it's too beautiful not to share which is you know the biographic life is kronos like greek the greek term for like clock time right past present future in order uh life's a 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 kronos 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 like oh nate 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 so elton trueblood who was a quaker theologian he was a stanford chaplain he was also adviser to dwight eisenhower he was he played a huge role in you know he's one of the few anglos to be advocating against the japanese internment camps all kinds of neat stuff and he said something and he was actually the grandfather of my college roommate and best friend so but um so i've known this quote for 25 odd years um he said faith then is not belief without proof right so it's not a superstition but rather it's trust without reservation right so we get to have that initiatory experience right and it reminds us of what is always deeply and eternally true and and in some respect you know 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 escatasthesia which is a persistent sense of the eschaton or the end of time right 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 every time this all works out 51 to 49 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 synoptic discombobulation and a total illusionary you know hallucinatory state tbd but folks can come back from that experience saying hey i know how it all works out right and we're getting to come back to play out these middle chapters we've seen the end of the movie right right so we can relax a little it's but here's the thing it's not like calvinist predestination you're like oh we're already saved or we're already damned so like close my eyes and hands off the wheel i don't need to try right it's 49.51 which means every single calorie between here and there counts right which means we're still 100 so we're off the hook of like neurotic wonderings about is there something more do i have a place to do it but we're on the cross right right of cairo's and cronus to say i bear witness i bear witness to this full catastrophe and and on behalf of the least of my brothers and sisters right and and and to to pull that around right that that 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 i was interviewing rick doblin from maps the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies and out of nowhere he just blessed 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 they could and then they could not tell the difference between who had had a legitimate you know 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 it's a 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 yeah i was going to write about howard thurman anyway that's amazing let me dig up the audio so and they recorded it wow so there's howard thurman this bada who shaped the entire african-american civil rights movement who coined the term soul force and he tells this story to a bunch of chapel full of tripping mystics he says 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 there's a man on the cross and you're just like right tell everyone we meet right we like it's it's time to stop waiting for the second coming right and 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 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 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 could go for much longer but i think this is a lot for people to take on right now that's a lot right and i'm right back it's 2 30 already that's 130. oh sweet yeah sweet sweet okay that's why i was looking at my clock because i was like and we were in a we're in a flow state uh this is a lot for people to unpack i had a lot more questions and things i wanted to go over but uh i think this is a good place to land the plane uh recapture the rapture rethinking god sex and death in a world that's lost its mind this is gonna 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 um one is called the three truths question i ask everyone at the end hypothetical question like you imagine it's your last day on earth many years away from now you get to live as long as you want nice you get to accomplish everything you want to accomplish okay but for whatever reason you have to take everything with you you 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 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 uh-huh what would you say would be your three truths ah 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 yeah it is seek novelty make art help out okay there you go how about yeah because like so so like c 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 less you're doing the same thing over and over again 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 that everything trends towards entropy and decay over time in a cold heat death of a gun caring universe so they build something beautiful yeah 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 a good truce i want to acknowledge you jamie for 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 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 you to be here so i acknowledge you for for making this art and sharing 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 um 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 recapture the rapture.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 would probably be this that's your main focus cool final question for you what's your definition of greatness oh nice one nice one let's try and come up with something that's original um i mean honestly i i think it is um seeking refuge in the dharma like the thing that's yours and yours alone to do so like in in a like marvel comics it's thor's hammer right it's impossibly heavy for anybody else to touch but yours is the same as excalibur like find your hammer take the sword out of the stone and wield it with courage and compassion and let the chips fall my man jamie thanks man appreciate it powerful if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here and the inadequacy is a pathway that you can travel down what should i do with my life that's a real complicated question oh here's an inadequacy

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, jamie wheal, jamie wheal flow state, jamei wheal interview, unlock your mind, flow state, peak performance, productivity

Id: 1YrpThbWvIY

Length: 169min 57sec (10197 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021