Transcript
Did you know we all have a superpower? The power to make our family and friends feel loved at Christmas by sending them a handwritten card. Send magic with Christmas stamp booklets. You can buy them in app online and at your local post office. Send Christmas love from the heart today. Unpost for your world. See unpussed.comforward/christmas to find out more. T's and c's apply. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altiger Show. Recapture the Rapture by Jamie Wheal, and and I love this subtitle. Rethinking God, sex, and death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. I will say the world really has lost its mind. Like, so many people would rather argue on Twitter about epidemiology. Like, everyone's a closet epidemiologist on Twitter. So many people would rather spend hours arguing about epidemiology or vaccines or or politics or Iran or whatever on Twitter than on doing things that are actually better for them. Jamie gets right into essentially the critical issues of mankind and how the way we think about them and the way we make use of them can improve our lives and even help us get in this flow state. And he talks about sex. He talks about God. He talks about death. Let's hear it from the man himself, Jamie Wheal and recapturing the rapture. Welcome back to the podcast, Jamie Wheal. Last time you were on here was with Steven Kotler. You guys had just written stealing fire about, basically, about the flow state and how to get it and where we're going as a society. But I feel like with recapture your your new book, recapture the rapture, rethinking God, sex, and death in a world that lost its mind. And this is like you lay it all out there in this book. This book, basically you even just said right before we went live on the podcast here that you were able to fit in this, all the things you wanted to put in in, for instance, sealing fire, but the editors maybe wouldn't let it through or whatever. But this book, you you have your full it feels like this is, like, your philosophy, and you're almost you're not quite nervous about what people are gonna think about it, but it's definitely a unique book. And, and it was a fun read, and, it it made me anxious in parts, and it made me hopeful in parts. And, but ultimately hopeful. It was it it's a great book. Oh, thanks, man. And it starts off, though, basically, essentially saying we're doomed. And but there but all hope is not lost. And so with that beginning, lay it out there. What's this book about? Yeah. No doubt. No doubt. So, I mean, I think in a nutshell, it's just to say, hey, folks, you're not going crazy. The world kinda has. And and for us all to just be able to exhale and acknowledge that trying to make sense of what's going on these days and what to do next is this crazy, complex, intertwined, exponential conundrum. And and so, you know, the technical term is s**t or go blind territory, right? And and it's it's in part because we're experiencing an an accelerating rate of exponential change, but it's not just happening in one direction. It's not just that, like Steven Pinker might suggest, things are getting exponentially better, And it's not just that, as like Greta Thunberg might might say that things are getting exponentially worse. They're both happening at the same time, and that's in that that basically overclocks our processes. Right? So, like, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, that sort of famous scholar, put it really nicely. He said we've got paleolithic emotions. You know, we're sort of 50,000 years behind the curve of our inventive monkey stuff. We've got medieval institutions. You know, that's the House of Lords and the House of Commons showing up as the Senate and the House of Representatives, all these kinds of things, but we've got godlike technology. Right? And that makes it incredibly hard. It makes it really difficult to figure out what to do with ourselves, and so we typically look to authority figures. That's a great sort of shorthand for social primates. You know, what does the alphas what do the alphas think? What are they doing, and show and can we follow? And we at the same time that everything has been going exponential, we have we've had a collapse in meaning. So we used to look to organized traditional religions, you could call that kind of meaning 1.0, and that offered the promise of salvation to the people that believed, but at the cost of inclusion. Right? If you weren't one of the believers, you were damned or or not part of the consideration. And, you know, Pew Research Foundation has found that the rise of the nones, the n o n e's, right, the the none of the aboves, is now the largest religious denomination in America, and it's the fastest growing. So fewer and fewer people are seeking refuge or guidance from meaning 1.0. So where do you think meaning exists now? Do people want meaning in you know, it's sort of homegrown. Like, do they want meaning in have a good job, make a lot of money, and essentially, quote, unquote, purchase freedom that way? Whereas before religion say, hey. The path to freedom is is through the the gates of heaven essentially. That I think is kind of the premise of the book is that because what you just described is pretty much the promise of meaning 2.0, which was sort of modern secular liberalism. You know? It comes out of the French enlightenment. You've got civil rights, democracy, voting rights, private property, all of those kind of things. And that was instead of saying we promise salvation, it was the opposite. It was like we promise inclusion. But as Nietzsche said, god is dead, separation of church and state, no one's gonna presume. We've all seen the bloody religious wars of Europe. We're not repeating that. So we kinda had both of these. And for, you know, 1945 until, say, 2008, but, you know, you can kinda pick your point where you you note the beginning of the end. Like, the promise of late stage capitalism and a global kind of democracy and the spread of liberalism kinda started getting a little unraveled. And especially even now in 2020, 2021, where people are starting to talk about k shake recoveries, you know, out of economic dips and the fact that, like I mean, when I was writing this book, right, I first wrote this 12 to 18 months ago. I said when 68 people who could all fit on a bus, not that they'd ever ride 1, own as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity, you know we're in a weird spot. Right? And then last month, just before I submitted the manuscript, my fact checker came back and said, oh, you gotta change that. It went from 68 to 26 people. They can fit in a f**king stretch limo at this point. Right? So so Joseph Stieglitz, who was the you know, he was a White House adviser, he was a Nobel Prize winning economist, right, and and and, you know, official at the World Bank, he's like, yeah, the results are in. It's been 40 years, man. Neoliberalism has been a bum deal. And and the the rewards, the whole notion of trickle down, wait your turn, rising tide lifts all boats, that's turned out to be a racket as well. So we've really seen the collapse of meaning 1.0, organized religion, meaning 2.0, modern liberalism, and into that vacuum, your point about, like, where are people seeking it, where are they finding it these days, they're kinda getting sucked to the extremes of fundamentalism, and not just traditional religious fundamentalism, but any comprehensive hermetically sealed belief system, like Plandemic, like QAnon, like any of those kind of things, conspiracy theories fit in that bucket, or nihilism, just that kind of like Tyler Durden fight club. You know, we're the middle children of history, man, and our great revolution's a spiritual revolution. You know, we were promised all these things, and we didn't get them, and we're pissed. What about also the the role of technology? Because a lot of people sort of believe that meaning can be found in and and this is goes to Peter Diamonta's point that things are getting exponentially better, that technology is gonna is gonna kind of provide the meaning in our lives because we're gonna be able to live longer. We're gonna be able to do more things. We're gonna be able to be more productive. So we're gonna be able to have more opportunities to find meaning in our lives because the world is our oyster now. Whereas 2000 years ago, with meaning 1.0, you know, you had to stay in the same village. Everybody was hungry. You know, work was dreary, and so, you know, god and religion provided not only answers, but hope. And and now technology provides those answers and hope, and and maybe it's real. And I'm just I'm not saying it is. I'm just posing this as as devil's advocate, so to speak. Mhmm. Yeah. And and and this is the thing. Right? It it's a dialectic. You know? We're going between the 2 guardrails of things are getting exponentially better, things are getting exponentially worse at the same time, and it's not just one or the other. And so, typically, we you know, like, Matt Ridley's another one, rational optimism, all those kinds of, you know, all those folks, you you get super bummed out doomscrolling, and you're like, oh my gosh. It really feels like a wheels off situation. I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling scared, depressed. I wanna fight or flight. And then you go and watch Hans Rosling, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, and you're like, wait. There's this underreported but undeniable uptick in possibility progress and and hope. And then, like, which is it? I always think of, like, that Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway scene in Chinatown. Like, she's my mother. She's my sister. She's my mother. She's my sister. You know? Like, which is it? And that kinda schizophrenic tearing, I think is where you know, that's the kind of open wound that the staff infection of of conspiracy conspiratorial thinking and meta conspiracies is really that's where it's coming into our kind of immune systems right now because we are desperate for someone to give us a solid orienting narrative of a way through all this. So so and I and I like your approach, which is forget philosophy for a second. Forget all these writers and theories of meaning. What makes you feel good? So sex or, you know, movement. Music, substances, respiration. Yeah. In some cases, you know, certain drugs that could trigger, spiritual experiences that there's only been, you know, basic research on. And, you know, Tim Ferris has talked a lot about this on on his podcast, for instance. And so you're able to say, look. Forget all these philosophies and and you have this kinds of hedonic engineering. Like, what can we draw? What can we learn from the things that actually give us pleasure? And are they good for us or bad for us? And you sort of pose this question in the book as kind of a question to follow to see if there's there's a meaning 3 point o. Yeah. I mean, it's basically saying, look. You know, the Sue Phillips and some of the other scholars at Harvard Divinity School, stood up an organization called the Sacred Design Lab, and their curiosity was like, hey. In this kind of postmodern age, in this era of post belief with meaning 1.0 having, you know, sort of fading in its traditional power, How do people believe? What do we believe? What do millennials think? What do Gen Yers think? And they came to the conclusion that it was there were 3 core nutrients, right, that belonging to a community of practice or faith offered, and it was basically healing, inspiration, and connection. And you and and what's interesting is that when they've done studies about people who are part of a community of faith versus not, the people who are part of a community, and this was Pew Research as well, which was they're healthier, they're wealthier, and they're happier. So and and that it's that you believe in something, not which or what you believe in that makes the difference. Right. And it's not just belief in something, but belief in something that other people subscribe to, that other people believe in. And so this forms a community and being, and what's actually maybe helping is not belief so much as community. Well, I think it's that 3 legged stool. Right? It's it's access to inspiration, so awe, encountering the numinous, some form of increased pattern recognition, right, creativity, novelty, but it's also ways, and whether this is Lent or Yom Kippur or a Lakota Sundance, right, that there's all sorts of cultural traditions that you know, or or Catholic confessions, some way to wipe the etch a sketch from the daily accretion of suffering, you know, that life is hard and it doesn't always make sense and I feel beaten down by it. So how do we ritually atone and renew? Like that's super important. So so typically, it's the peak experience in combination with the deep healing in context of communion, of be you know, like the whole sort of a problem shared is a problem halved. Right? The idea that we do this together and and we are wired to be social tribal primates. We we wilt, we wither in isolation from each other. I mean, I think depression and anxiety has gone up 400% in the last 12 months, you know, almost exclusively attributed to isolation and quarantine. Those Romanian orphanages, the studies that everyone's probably familiar with, they're, like, little babies who don't get touched. Like, we need each other. Vivek Murthy Vivek Murthy, the the former surgeon general, has just written a book on that. Like, we are quite simply better together, and diseases of despair are directly connect connected to the logistics of isolation. Would you say the first component of hedonic engineering in this attempt to find meaning 3.0 is Mhmm. Sort of find community alongside the things that give us pleasure, but being careful of kind of the extremes? Yeah. I mean, I was I was thinking that that Peter Gabriel lyric. You know, you know, find your brothers and sisters who can hear all the truth in what you say. Right? They can support you when you're on your way. So, like, no question about it, find community. And and really, it sort of doesn't matter which door we come in. Right? Somebody could have could have a peak experience epiphany, and along the way of sort of seeing the light, they're like, oh, and I'm banged up and broke, and I have work to do. I have to amend or atone or fix or repair, and then maybe I'm inspired to then, you know, start a foundation or a movement to share the good news. Or you could be knocked down by life. You could have a divorce or a bankruptcy or an illness or an addiction. Right? And that's catharsis. That's the healing. So I get broke cracked open by that, and then I find a support group, and I'm like, oh, I find my people. And then the combination of I had all this shame, I had all this guilt, and now I found people who share it, and now I don't feel so isolated and alone. Boom. Now I pop up to a peak experience. You know? Or you come in through a sports team or a fraternity or a start up, right, or a military organization, whatever it would be, and I find my my tribe, and then that lets me relax my vigilance and do some healing or or say I've never felt better or more more at home. So it's a flywheel, and the key with the notion of hedonic engineering that I that I think you're asking is just to say, how do we discharge our trauma both day to day, you know, the kind of micro PTSD of just the of life, but also some deep healing for the big hits we've taken along the way. How do we periodically, not always, not just just staring at the sun so long that we go blind, but how periodically can we reconnect with the numinous, reconnect with awe, reconnect with a peak state? Yeah. So how can we do that? Nobody quite knows what is a peak state. You never really know if you've hit the maximum peak state you could hit, and most people go through their daily grind. They don't think about being in a peak state. Like, let's Mhmm. What what is that, and and what's kind of not a shortcut to get there, but what are ways to get there? Mhmm. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the whole notion of, like, if 1 meaning 1.0 and 2.0 are kinda collapsing, and what is meaning 3.0, what might it look like? The key there is to say, hey. Any tops down solution of, like, this is the way is almost certainly gonna be wrong, certainly not gonna fit or apply to everyone around the world, and any efforts to do that is probably gonna result in more trouble than you were fixing. Right? So how do we create an open source toolkit? Right? And that's that sort of notion of, like, what is design thinking to this problem? So you're like, okay. If if we want everybody to have access, we want everybody to sort of have their Lego blocks and they can build things that are right and true for themselves, their community, their values, their realities, then you're like, let's play with evolutionary drivers because evolutionary drivers aren't expensive. Everybody has them in their body. They can they can start right away. Right? And they can and then because evolution has encoded them, they're generally very strong. They just don't always go where we point them. So if we think about lust, right, sexuality, those kind of things, it's created so much grief in the human experience because evolution's amoral. Right? It just wants a robust gene pool, so it's always smashing and crashing humans together to just try and get better genetic material no matter what our marriages, agreements, hopes, fears, customs, norms, and taboos are. So if you basically say, hey, if we want as many people as possible to have access to peak states, healing, and connection, we're gonna we're gonna really zero in and study what are the evolutionary drivers that have the best bang for buck, And, you know, you can start with respiration. Right? If we don't breathe, we die. And so any of the stuff James Nestor's book Breathe has just been, you know, off the charts, like a bestseller for a better part of a year. Wim Hof has kinda blown up as a cultural phenomenon. People are fascinated by breathing, And really what it comes down to is because it's such a core driver, all we have to do is tweak the oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide that we're breathing by varying the rate, rhythm, depth, and even sometimes swapping out gases like nitrogen. The nitrogen family also includes nitric oxide, which Herbert Benson at Harvard called the Bliss molecule. It also includes nitrous oxide, which MIT researchers discovered actually puts people into deep double amplitude delta wave states. William James at Harvard, you know, that is what unlocked his access to launching the entire field of comparative religion. Winston Churchill explored and said this is depth upon depth of almost alien intelligence reveals itself. You know? Right? And you're like, oh, that's fascinating. I I want some. So how do I how do I, get more nitric oxide nitric oxide in my life? Well, I mean, you can do it dietarily. So you can do beets and pumpkin seeds. You can do it in concentrate form. There's a company actually here in Austin called Neo 40 that has kinda created, very strong, high concentrate versions of nitrates that then get metabolized into nitric oxide. And even, I mean, if you have a friendly neighborhood physician, getting ED drugs. Right? So so Viagra actually, what it nitric oxide, it both crosses the blood brain barrier and helps you move into peak states and flow states and even mystical states, but it's also a vasodilator. So that's why Viagra uses it. And interestingly, it's also antiviral and has been proven in in recent studies to be a been a prophylactic or a preventative against COVID. Really? Right. So Viagra well, that's very interesting. And Yeah. So so microdosing Viagra is actually a good thing to to to reduce your exposure. And and what's really funny, I mean another thing to do, and and our buddy, this is actually at the Karolinska Institute, so the folks that are responsible for the Nobel Prize, they did a study 5, 6 years ago, I think, that vibrating your nasal cavity while nose breathing, so, you know, so so so humming, those kind of things, boosts nitric oxide production in your brain and leaves you more susceptible to a groovy peak state up to 15 times. So we did a study actually with aboriginal didgeridoo players, and you're like, holy s**t. So wait. These guys are doing they're playing this vibrating instrument. They're using circular breathing, so they're never stopping breathing. So they're doing a very structured forced breathing pattern that's not normal, and they're getting vibrations all the way through their cheekbones, all the way into their nasal cavity, and that that is a neurophysiological mechanism for them to enter dream time. So they're literally, like, they're hack they're biohacking their way into dream time, changing their changing their brainwave states and changing their neurochemistry together. So, wait, if I don't have the instrument, can I just breathe out and and and get a little bit of that? You for sure can. Typically, we get bored and we stop trying. Right? So so there are actually these cool little you can get them on Amazon. They're like this high, like a foot high boxes that are like didgeridoos in a box. So you can you play them, and they actually create a tremendously good sound, rich without having, like, a 6 foot long tube to lug around. Wait. Hold on. I'm gonna buy I'm gonna buy one right now. What's it called? Golly. I'll have to send you the link, but try didgeridoo box. Let's see what it see what you get. It's a wooden box. Oh, yeah. I saw something here. In musical instruments, a didgeridoo. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's a hand fired, a beeswax mouthpiece. So, basically, you play this. Oh, yeah. Hardwood box didgeridoo compact. Alright. Oh oh, here's one, an s shaped didgeridoo, solid mahogany wood percussion instrument. I think I'm gonna get this. And it's just got, like, one place to blow out. Right? Or Mhmm. Yeah. There's because there's another one. It's like a bunch of them. It's like a flute, or a flute pipe. I I don't know. Alright. I'm gonna get this one. I'm gonna get I mean, the the you know? And and you can, you know, you can layer in different technology. You can have spirometers so you can see what your lung tidal volume is. There's all kinds of cool stuff for, developmentally delayed kids who have respiratory issues and low muscle tone and that kind of stuff. So there's like blow hockey and blow golf and you can play with straws, but like like reclaiming conscious respiratory control allows us to upregulate. So if I'm flat or tired or down, I can actually power myself up, like, you know, Michael Phelps getting on the blocks to go swimming. If I'm stressed, I can down regulate by changing my by doubling the length of my exhales versus my inhales. That signals to my body, like, this is not a scary time, and my vagal nerve tone goes up and I can chill out. You can also transcend. Right? You can you can hyperventilate, and you can blow off a ton of c o two, and you can shift your blood chemistry to alkaline, and you can actually create transcendent states like Stan Groff at Johns Hopkins pioneer. That's inter like, I'm going off of your on page 224 of the book, there's this, table, hedonic engineering. The first thing you talk about is nitric oxide. And for each thing, like, you have nitric oxide all the way you know, then you have respiration. You have psychoactives, testosterone, and oxytocin. There's mild, medium, spicy. And like you mentioned, the drugs for nitric oxide. For the vagal nerve, I don't know how you say it. Mhmm. You mentioned throat massage and vocalization. So does Mhmm. Kind of singing or or help with it? Okay. Yes. Yeah. And so if you've ever been in church or synagogue or temple and you have found yourself kinda tingly singing singing a song, so you're standing there, you've got forced respiratory patterns because of the lyrics, and you're belting it out, so you're changing your diaphragmatic control, that is actually typically going to be a change in your blood pH. Right? Typically to more alkaline. It's going to be an increase in nitric oxide because of all this the singing and the vibration and a raising of vocal tone. And what's interesting about the vagal nerve is it goes tip to tail. It starts in our brainstem, right, like sort of literally at the base of our brains, and it wanders. That's why it's called vagal, means the wandering nerve, and it kind of crisscrosses our body and makes it all the way down to our root. So from mouth action, throat action, all the way to, like, defecation. In fact, Anish Seth is a gastroenterologist in Princeton, and he called it poophoria. Right? That that idea of like a really a really epic dump can actually create you know, lowers your blood pressure. It creates goosebumps. It kinda you might even start sweating or kinda salivating, and you might even experience euphoria. And women who have had cervical or spinal injuries, can actually relearn to orgasm by, you know, basically neuroplastically adapting over to their vagal nerve. And and the vagal nerve is responsible for gagging, puking, s**tting, spasming, or gasming. And you're like, oh, it's all of these things. And then you you kinda think of, like, Robert Sapolsky, like, at Stanford, he wrote that great book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, right, which was basically saying, hey, but we're the only we're the only animals that, like, worry gut s**t. You know, like if I'm a zebra and I'm getting chased by like I'm grazing, everything's chill. I'm getting chased by a lion, I'm running like hell. I either die that day or I didn't. And then 15 minutes later, I'm eating more grass again. Right? So animals have the capacity to discharge stressors almost immediately. In fact, we were climbing in Nepal and Tibet and then went on our honeymoon to Thailand to this, you know, we pretty much like the beach, like that Leonardo DiCaprio space. And we were climbing up this jungle place to get to this secret lagoon, and we see this we see this monkey, and he's stuck on this super slick limestone rock, and he's just gripped. He's f**king terrified, and he's like, and we're like, what is going on? We have to watch and see how this plays out. Right? And then finally he launches, and he makes this dino move and grabs the top of the rock by one hand, pulls himself up to the to the top of the rock, and then looks around, promptly beats off, and then goes scampering off into the jungle. And you're like, genius, genius, right? Like that monkey did not have PTSD. He's good to go. Right. Right? So so the capacity for us to harness these evolutionary drivers, like, basically, we're stuck in a single channel of, like, tired, wired, and stressed, and it beats the hell out of us over time. And what we really wanna be able to do is expand the range of our neurophysiology so that we can hit higher highs and recover with lower lows. Like a way to think of it is that, you know, the Greeks had the term like distress, bad stress, and eustress, healthy stress, and then let's say recovery. And where we are right now is we're just fibrillating messes. We're just stuck in kind of the middle band of constant distress. Eustress is like lifting weights and you, you know, you tear down a muscle, you build it, it comes back stronger. That's healthy. Right? So what we wanna do is we wanna get out of the fibrillation, right, and we wanna have higher, harder things that really stretch us and grow us, and the capacity for a deep systemic reset so that we can fully recover, and then we have an expanded range. So, like, when people see, like, ER and, you know, like doctor movies and that kind of stuff, and they're like, get the paddles clear, goosh, you know, and they do that thing, most people think, oh, their hot stopped. They're using the paddles to stop their hot. They're not. What's actually happened is they're in ventricular fibrillation, so their hot is just spasming, but not healthily pumping. So the paddles is actually to temporarily kill the person. You're electrocuting them so that the heart stops so that it can come back again in its proper healthy rhythm. So that's interesting. So let's let's take that metaphor further. And and you refer to this also later on in the book when you have your kind of 10 you know, and you cross out commandments, your 10 suggestions. And, it's sort of like you I I forget the exact words you use, but you use sort of like a a death every day. And so what what does that look like? So I'm listening to this, and I've been an accountant for 30 years, hypothetically, marketing manager at Procter and Gamble. Nothing wrong with those jobs, but I want a little bit more of this sort of peak experiences or or peak or what my potential is as a human. I'm listening to this. Like, what can I start off doing? How can I how can I die every day? Do I quit my job? Do I leave my family? Like, what what what do you mean? Mhmm. Yeah. Well, I mean, that fundamentally, these terms are all ecstatic practices, but not ecstatic. Like, yay. You know, unicorns and rainbows. Which just means to step outside oneself. Right? And so the simplest and most ubiquitous for all humans is sexual orgasm. Right? The French call that la petite morte, the little death. And there is a moment, particularly if you have taken your time getting to it, right, where there is a neurochemical saturation in a cascade. It's high vasopressin, high serotonin, high oxytocin, generally lowered brainwave state, a feeling of well-being, tranquility, calm, and generally an absence of conscious thinking. And and that can be a little death. Meditation and psychedelics both refer to ego death. So if you sit there and study your thoughts or follow your breath for long enough with enough discipline and practice, you can experience that. Obviously, psychedelics knock out default mode networks, increase, you know, lateral hemispheric integration, do all sorts of things, and that too can do it. There's people that talk about in endurance sports, you know, like ultra marathons in the mountains, right, where, you know, a runner's high kinda gives way to a discombobulated state. There's there's lots of and then, you know, and then throw in action sports athletes who, you know, whether it's wing suit flyers or base jumpers or extreme skiers or big wave surfers, where physical death or, you know, or martial arts. Right? Those are or like I might get knocked out or tapped out. Those are all death practices. And we actually you know, the beautiful paradox is that by cultivating death practices we get to become more fully alive. Let's take, I don't know, any of these things, like, low runner's high or or an experience caused by a psychedelic or sex or whatever. Of course, they feel good at the moment or they feel something. They make you feel something at the moment. What's your experience on how do these experiences, these states last and and have, kind of a lasting effect on our psychology? Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, some research at at Harvard, Teresa Amabile has has has done some studies on peak states and seen their kind of duration or impact, and and even something as relatively mild as a flow state, just kind of where everything clicks and it feels effortless and you're kind of tooling along, that that can last persist for up to 72 hours. You can have increased cognition, increased compassion, empathy, problem solving, that kind of thing. My sense is is that these kinds of peak states and these kinds of brain stem resets because remember, one of our colleagues, doctor Ryan Darcy, he's one of the leading traumatic brain injury specialists and neuroscientists in the world, and he's up in Vancouver. They've been doing studies with electrical stimulation to the tongue that goes straight to the brain stem. And what they've been finding is that even if they're targeting a specific nerve through through the tongue to the brain stem, it actually triggers a global system reset, And it actually works kinda like if you've had your laptop, and I do this all the time. I have, like, 40 tabs open and it's been open for a week and I haven't done anything and it starts getting all glitchy and I can't get audio or something on my YouTube won't play. And what do we do? Right? We power it down, we let it reboot, and we let it come back, and then it typically works a whole lot better. So that's what these experiences can do. So peak states, you know, productively applied, serve 3 functions. They serve as metronomes, tuning forks, and training wheels. So the metronome is I'm either ahead of the beat or I'm behind the beat of life. Right? I'm I'm either depressed and slow to the moment, whether that's meeting people or being present for a conversation or a fun or interesting thing, I'm just I'm literally lagging the pulse of life, or I'm stressed, I'm anxious, and I'm trying to forever force it. Right? I'm always trying to make s**t happen before it's quite ready. So when we get into that kind of deep now, we're like, oh, that's the pulse of life. It can start with our heartbeat. It can be watching a sunrise or a sunset. It can just be the kind of the moment that I'm suddenly not trying to stress, you know, or force. Right? That there's a I remember there's a bumper there's a bumper sticker from, like, Burton Snowboards, and we were, like, driving in a snowstorm, a Reville Pass, and there was this rusty Subaru, and I had it slapped on the back, and it said, feel the force. Don't force the feel. Right? So that's it. Right? We get we get back into the pulse of life. And then the tuning fork is like, well, look, I mean, life sucks, life hurts, we get all sorts of cheap shots and hits along the way, and the instrument of ourself gets banged up and knocked out of tune. So like the tuning fork, like bong, like here's middle c, you're like, oh, I thought I was in tune. I mean, what do musicians do, right? The first thing they do, orchestras or jam band, like like let's get together and make sure we are actually not just in ear tune, but true harmony. So that's how we get the instrument of ourself back in tune. And then the final one is the training wheels, which is and this is exactly what Rick Doblin and MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies, has been doing with their groundbreaking PTSD and MDMA research. They found that when people have this high saturation of this neurochemistry of love, safety, security, belonging, connection, trust, they're able to go back and revisit childhood trauma, war trauma, whatever it might be, without being captured by it. Right? They have it versus it having them, and they're able like like training wheels, they're actually able to practice for 8 hours, for 12 hours, for sessions at a time. What does it feel like to come from enough, to come from a resource state? And then that gets into their somatic memory, their muscle memory, and they begin to trust it, and it's now a familiar landmark instead of just the the amygdala hijack that leads them into a trauma state. So, like, for instance, let's some of these experiments being done on, like, psychedelics, whether it's, LSD or Ketamine or whatever, after repeated sessions by the way, this is still being researched, so we don't really know the end result. But you're saying that it could be that, you know, yes, you feel good during the experience, but after a while, it might you might be able to remember aspects of the experience when when you need to to call up that state, like if you're dealing with something traumatic, for instance. Yeah. Absolutely. It can be a sort of, you know, a trail of bread crumbs, right, to kinda lead us out of the dark forest. But it is important. I mean, you just alluded to psychedelic research, and we're still not there. And and in general, my sense is is that, you know, it's there are no silver bullets. Right? And and no matter what the most exciting new research is showing, and in fact, there's a lot of there's going to be a second wave of psychedelic research and reporting that's actually less rosy, less optimistic, and starting to show all the complications, all the unintended consequences, and all of the halo effects that are true right when somebody's had the experience that don't necessarily persist 6 months and 12 months 18 months later because no matter how I mean, a huge chunk because what's really interesting about all of this amazing psychedelic research and, you know, trauma, growth, addiction, end of life anxiety, all of the all of the subjects under study is, yes, they all seem to work, and they seem to work even though there are different chemicals and compounds that have different mechanisms of action. Right? You've got serotonergic systems like LSD and psilocybin. You've got glutamate receptor sites like ketamine. You've got 5 MeO, DMT, and all these other, and they all seem to kinda do a similar thing even though the neurochemistry and the mechanisms of action are actually all over the map. And and my my strong hunch, and this is, you know, congruent with a lot of the subjective reports, is that it's the experience of more. It's the experience of awe. It's the experience of possibility that is playing a distinct role no matter what the mechanism was that prompted it. And people are like, oh, you mean I don't have to live a life of suburban conformity, or, oh, I might actually be worthy of love? Like, that's game changing. That is an epiphany that feels like, you know, I've been, you know, reborn. And that, you know, and you get those interviews and you get those reports, they're like, oh, f**k. I'm done. I'm I'm saved. I'm solved. But the reality is is that all that more, right, still contains the human condition within it. We still figure out how to eat, what to do for our life's purpose, who to love, how to heal, how to make sense of this big whole crazy thing, and and that that does not go away. And so so my sense is that that healing, inspiration, and connection, right, instead of promising some hockey stick redemption, like, if we can only do the x, y, and z, then everything's everything comes up f**king roses, folks. You know, no more troubles. I think that's that's a children's crusade. The only thing that feels honest and true to me, especially if we're talking about wobbly times, you know, rough seas ahead, is to say, hey. These these things together, healing, inspiration, and connection, is simply a way for us to do this human thing a little better together and allows us to keep on keeping on. And if we pursue that enough, then you actually get to a point of potentially being, you know, what you what in the traditions, different names for it all over the all over the world, but something resembling a twice born human. You know, you could just SimpliSafe a grown a*s person, but, like, you know, there is that sense of what what Goethe said. He said, he who doesn't know the secret, die and become, remains forever a stranger on this earth. And so the death practice, the idea this is true for Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning, this is true for Jimmy Stewart in A Wonderful Life, it's true for Dorothy in A Wizard of Oz, right? It's it's Joseph Campbell 101, right, home, away, home, but you kinda have to go away. You have to die in the belly of the whale, and then you have to come back going, oh my god. There's no place like home. I'm all in. So so so in practice, like, someone who's listening to this today wants to experience some uptick in their human experience. Yeah. They're being introduced to this concept for the first time, and they're like, what do I do now? And you have suggestions in the book, and you have various Yeah. Interesting deals. What what would you do? Like, if you could do 5 things yes and 5 things no, what would they be? Yeah. Absolutely. So so let's do a mild, medium, and spicy. And and mild can be like defrag my micro PTSD. The medium could be, can I get access to something that's maybe deeper in me that's been stuck in there for a while? And then the the the macro could be, like, what's a total shoot the moon? I I now actually am, like, engaged in something I've never conceived of. Right? So baby step 1, in fact, there was a study, it was in the Atlantic just just, last week. We're just talking about, like, the effects of long haul quarantine for everyone, and how it's kinda just addling our brains and all that kind of stuff. And it said the 2 number one things is seek novelty and engage in more embodiment. So you're like, awesome. So what's a really simple thing to do? Go and find your nearest body of water and get there for sunrise or sunset. And our buddy, Andrew Huberman at Stanford, has talked about, like, visual gazes and sight lines and even staring in the sun. It resets our melatonin. It resets our circadian rhythms. It also actually changes our frame of rumination or thinking. So, like, if I'm sitting at my desk staring at my screen, I'm thinking about the here and now. If I see a horizon line, this kinda goes back to hunter gatherer wiring. Right? I start thinking a day or or several days at a time. So literally getting up above stuff and seeing more views, seeing water, deeply profoundly soothing. Doing it at sunrise and sunset and focusing on the sun, profoundly beautiful. Tibetan monks used to always value meditating at sunrise or sunset as, like, 3 times more effective than other times during the day. And then for the embodiment. And Andrew Huberman says we have dopamine receptors on our eyelids. So looking out in the morning sunlight towards the horizon really activates, you know, early on in the day, the the dopamine that gets gives us that energy boost. Yeah. And and and, look, our our circadian rhythms are all jacked up since the since the era of electric lighting and computers. Right? So so, like, just like a solar reset, super helpful. And then for the embodiment piece, like, dealer's choice. Sit there and meditate, stand on your head, do yoga, make love, listen to music, dance, like, take your pick, but do something. Right? And and so that just try that on a of just for 1 week. Just try it, and then just note how you know, score your I mean, if you want to, you could score yourself in the beginning, because this is how tired, white, stressed, happy, you know, creative I'm feeling at the beginning of the week, and then just note, at the end of the week, how did that experiment go? And was this week better or worse than the few weeks before it? So that would be the micro. And then a middling one that's super easy is just pick your most banging playlist, like the apps the songs, your anthems. Right? And get like 60 minutes at least of the ones that you can't help but, like, turn up to 11 and, you know, roll down your windows and sing down the highway or in the shower. Get that playlist, get some headsets, lie down, make yourself comfortable, and of course the caveats are you don't have any preexisting physical or psychological conditions that would make, you know, prompt or trigger an adverse event. But if you're more or less responsible for your own state and well-being and you potentially could have a spotter for you, lie down on a comfortable blanket or pillows and breathe as fast as possible, as deeply as possible, for as long as possible, and see what happens. And what that will do is it will blow off a ton of c o two. Your blood pH will shift. You will begin to have what Stangroft at Hopkins codified into holotropic breathing, which is a specific discipline within this field. And if not enough interesting things are happening, you may feel tingling in your lips and face. You may even feel your hands kinda cramping into sort of accidental monkey's claw kinda mudras. You may have interior experiences. You may have tremor releases in your body. Like, a range of things may or may not happen for you. And if you're if not enough is happening, breathe faster and deeper. If too much is happening, just slow it down. So and and that's actually work we're doing with doctor Matt Johnson at Johns Hopkins right now. We're doing a study on stangroft's holotropic breathwork as a substitute for MDMA and PTSD research so that we can share it we can share it with different populations. Right? So we can share it with the Veterans Administration. We can share it with refugee programs in South America and Africa and India, which have different cultural values and wouldn't and or economic structures, so they couldn't possibly have these clinical trials to millions of dirt poor kids in refugee camps and aid camps, but like breath work can, and here's a profound way to do it. And if you wanted to add something else, you can even do a little bit of the embodiment stuff. So like if you have a foam roller because you're used to kind of rolling out your body, great, play with that. If you don't, just take a towel and roll it up really tightly into a kind of a cigar shape and put it right underneath your shoulder blades so that you're lying on your back. Put the soles of your feet together so your legs are butterflied, and just allow yourself to undulate, right, as you're doing the breath work, and that will help discharge trauma back to the, you know, our funky monkey and the zebras getting ulcers. So that would be the middle one. You want do you wanna go into the spicy one? Of course. So so so then the spicy one, and this is purely a choose your own adventure, but it's basically, you know, at the end of the day, right, we are prefrontal cortexes connected to spinal columns, connected to erogenous zones. So you can do all of the things. You can do the music, the breath work, the embodiment, potentially even substances if you want, and that's about half of the equation. And then the other half is kind of is sexuality. So you can just do sexuality with a consenting high trust partner, or you can just do the others, or if you really kind of look at the stack objectively, like a sort of anthropologist from space, you'd be like, oh, this is how hominids work. Okay. And you kind of end up in one of 2 places. You end up with super sexy bio hacking or deeply nerdy kink. You just kinda do. And and and if you think the thought experiment through. Right? In fact, Jared Diamond, the the UCLA anthropologist and and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel that many folks will probably remember at 1 of Pulitzer, he actually wrote another book called Why Sex is Fun, and he makes the case that actually our sexuality as homo sapiens is so radically different than all the rest of the animal kingdom, including our primate cousins, that it is as important or more important than language and tool making for our move from homo erectus to homo sapiens. So you're like, oh, man. Look. Evolution threw the kitchen sink at pair bonding. And for a 100 of 1000 of years, there was no instruction manual. We somehow figured it out anyway. Well, the reason we keep figuring kept figuring it out is because of all the neurochemical reinforcement to get us to do the thing. So you're like, okay, we're puppets on a string, man. Evolution is just pushing our buttons to get us to procreate and swap genetic material, and that creates a ton of suffering, and it's ultimately really disempowering. But if we can snip those strings and then we can hotwire evolution and use it for transformation and integration, not just blind procreation, then we're onto something. So how do we do that? Yeah. Well, I had you know, there's there's more wires to the bomb. Right? So so that said, you know, find a special friend, a a friend with with medical benefits. You can engage in foreplay and edging practice. I mean I mean, basically, most tantra and sex magic, so tantra is the sort of typically the kind of Eastern tradition, sex magic is often expressed in the Western tradition, they all kind of boil down to, have sex for as long as possible, while delaying male orgasm at least for as long as possible, breathe, you know, make eye contact, see what happens. And and typically, what can happen is all sorts of fascinating things, especially if you combine it with the embodiment, the music, the set and setting, all the other kind of stuff. You actually sort of realize, oh, we as 2 humanoids back to our prefrontal cortexes, spinal columns and erogenous zones, we can actually connect our circuitry. We can we can circulate energy through our systems. We can supersaturate our neurochemistry. We can shut down our executive functioning, and we can and we can drop our brainwave states into alpha to theta to even delta, at which point we are basically it's like the vomit comet. Right? You know, like that that 0 g plane. Right? Where basically we can take turns lobbing each other into the into a nonordinary state of hyper information richness, where you can see anything you want and think anything you want with a 300 IQ for as long as you're in 0 g. And then you just kinda come back down into reality and don't fumble the football, don't go cross eyed. Don't start drooling, and don't forget what you saw. And and that can work with, basically, if you I mean, the the actual straight up protocol, do you want me just to tell you what we did for a study? Because we did a study with 10 couples, and we measured healing, inspiration, and connection. So they had 3 months, so 12 weeks together. And on a daily basis, they all practiced, what what has been branded, but is a is a, you know, an open source project of 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation for the female partner. This is all cisgender heteronormative, so just modify to suit for any of your relational formats and and gender identifications. But 15 minutes of, clitoral stimulation for the woman with no expectation of reciprocity. This isn't foreplay. This isn't a time for the the the stroker partner to, like, bust out their signature moves. It's just it's just neurochemical priming. Then twice a week, set aside 60 to 90 minutes where you you begin with that always, then you transition into, basically, it can be aural stimulation for each other, and potentially, actual intercourse, and you can do the what the Taoist rule of nines, which is balance 9 deep versus shallow thrust. So 9 deep, 1 shallow, 8 deep, 2 shallow, etcetera, and you just kind of constantly toggle between that, and you get a set, and you go back to the beginning and you start that again while focusing on breathing and connection. And then you can engage, if you want to combine it with breath work, you can combine hyperventilation, so you're blowing off CO 2. And this you need for this to be kosher, you need a you need a supportive physician because the supportive physician can prescribe you. If you're in one of 35 states with cannabis, either medical or recreational, you can engage cannabinoids not to kind of get high, but to activate your endocannabinoid system. You can get oxygen. You can get carbon dioxide, and you can get nitrous oxide. You can pre prime, whether it's with ED or Neo40 or something else, the nitric and then you can engage in hyperventilatory breath work, supersaturation of oxygen, so your red blood cells are super stoked. This is what David Blaine did, right, on the Oprah show to actually get his maximum breath hold in the plexiglass box. Right? Oh, I I never knew how he did that. Yeah. So what he did is it it's I mean and I I learned this from Kurt Crek. He was, like, this world champion freehold, breath diving coach. And we were down in the Bahamas, and we were doing all this stuff, and he's like, oh, yeah. And he was telling us the story. Right? He coached Tom Cruise. He coached David Blaine. He's like, oh, yeah. And then there's this thing called gas assisted. And I was like, wait. What's gas assisted? That sounds rad because when I had my face down in the cold water trying to do freeholds, I was like, oh my gosh. This is womb like. Like, I've got no thoughts. Like, I've always sucked at meditation, but this was awesome. And then he's like, yeah. David Blaine hyperventilated then breathed pure oxygen for, like, 11 minutes and then went into the tank and broke the world record and held his breath for, like, 17 minutes and 45 seconds or some crazy thing. So that's a death practice. Right? But freediving, people actually die. So the question is is how do we bring that psychotechnology back to dry land? And you can do it with a partner, and you it does not have to have anything to do with sexuality. But if you wanna combine it, you can. And then when you so you've blown off your co 2, you're supersaturated with oxygen, and now you can engage in a maximum breath hold. If you have your physician support, you can engage in inhaling a blend of nitrous oxide and oxygen. That's what the researchers at MIT tracked and mapped. It sends you into double amplitude delta wave states. It also increases orgasmic, sensation and decreases pain tolerance. So you can also then engage in throat massage, and and typically, right, if you looked at what is it? The guy from INXS, the the guy David Carradine from Kung Fu, what's known as autoerotic strangulation. Right? Like, you're like, why do people keep killing themselves, checking off with us, you know, with a belt around their neck? What the f**k is up with that? Right? Well, what's up with it is that actually it was hyper stimulating their vagal nerve and massively boosts orgasm. So don't do anything that obstructs or constricts airways. Doesn't you know, bad news. Right? And you can pass out before you were able to self rescue. But you can absolutely apply traction, and you can absolutely apply massage. And then, oh, by the way, for women, it's I think it's 4 x pain tolerance towards the edge of orgasm, and this is why high trust impeccable consent, impeccable containers is nonnegotiable. But you can then load our nervous systems with additional pain. So that could that could be anything from smacking to pinching to sensation plate or whatever it is. And basically at right around this, like, 30 second window around climax, pain gets cross fried as pleasure. And there's actually researchers at University of Pennsylvania that that made the case. Like, again, we're the only animals that do this. You cannot force animals in the lab to eat spicy peppers, to engage electroshock unless you withhold food or you do some other enforcement. All other animals, they experience something s**tty. Like, we love roller coasters. We love spicy foods. We love horror movies. We get off on pain, but pain is also a time honored technique to actually create transcendent states. Because in a period of arousal, this is the penitentes in Northern New Mexico, they still reenact the passion of the Christ. They flog themselves with brine whips. They walk. They have crowns of thorns. They do the whole thing during Easter week. The sundown ceremony for the Lakota suspended by pegs in their flesh until they tear loose. The the the priests of Odin and Viking era, the Spartans, like, everybody through human history has has used the neurochemical hack of pleasure pain. And Let let let me ask you this and let's say someone's going through a hard time, whatever reason, whether it's a health reason, a financial reason, a a career reason, a relationship reason. Are you suggesting maybe also there's a way to lean into this painful situation to to try to induce this as well? Yeah. I mean, that that's actually one of the wildest stories I came across in the researching for this book. I was I was at the Harvard Club in New York, and the the Are you are you college dropping? Are you are you name dropping your college? No. No. No. I was a guest. I no. Not at all. I I was a guest to speak there, and and then ended up in this wild a*s conversation at dinner afterwards. And this woman, her husband had been a intelligence operative, and she had worked for the Department of Homeland Security. She was first on the anthrax scare down in DC after 911, and then they got assigned to to study and infiltrate the vampire underground in in New York City. And so they infiltrated the downtown scene, and I think it was, La Justine's and and and, Lucky Nouvelle, something like that. And there were these couple of underground BDSM clubs. And so tourists would go, and there would just be these, like, campy cabaret kind of things going on, you know, with, like, sexy names on the menus and this and that. Right? But there was actually underground tunnels and underground dungeons connecting them all, and and and a lot of the doorman and women were actually vampires. There was a very curious, eccentric, and unique dentist named Father Sebastian who actually gave prosthetic implants of fangs. So these folks would, like, have retractable fangs, and then they'd have real fangs, and then they even had, like, annual ceremonies where their, like, vampire queen would, like, rise out of a bathtub full of plasma, and they would all drink the blood. Like, really kinda interesting stuff. But what they found was, a, these guys weren't a terrorist organization. They weren't a cult group. It was actually a even though it was deeply eccentric, it was actually a surprisingly healthy, kind, and caring bunch of people. But what actually started happening was that 911 first responders, police and firefighters, started showing up to the underground dungeons to receive what they called concerted beatings, and they weren't erotic. There there was no arousal. There was no orgasm. That's actually prohibited in New York City where, you know, establishments serve alcohol. So it was like and, you know, and she said she's like, and they were naked, so you could tell. And these guys were actually overcoming survivor's guilt, right, and actually discharging the incredible amount of trauma they were feeling in their bodies and their hearts from what they saw and experienced and the loss of people they knew and loved via BDSM play. And Brad Sigarin, who who's a social psychologist, then did studies on this. There were studies in the Netherlands, and actually people who experienced BDSM that used to be seen as marginalized. It used to be seen as, like, a deficient or defective, you know, sexual kink. It actually turned out they scored higher on the big five personality traits of ocean, like openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, etcetera. Although actually they weren't they didn't score. They didn't score higher on agreeableness, which kinda makes sense if you've self selected for that. Right? But the idea is that there is something about and this gets back to our vagal nerve and that tremoring and the shuddering and the spasming. It gets back to pain as pleasure. It gets back to zebras and ulcers and discharging. How do we defrag our nervous systems, and how do we mend our hearts and souls, and how do we use pain and pleasure conscientiously together to allow us to come back to 0 and then be ready to begin again? And it doesn't save us the next round of s**tty stuff that might happen, but it sure as hell gets us the metronome, the tuning fork, and the training wheel so we are at least at choice with our response from now. I think even just recognizing that pain and trauma or even, like, low level stress that many people experience, that there could be an upside to that. If you kinda lean into that to the point where you you realize, okay. The solution is to kind of get to the other not to avoid this, but to go through it and get to the other side to to die in this even Yeah. Temporarily, like some meditation or whatever, I think that's a useful thing to to consider. It's unbelievable. And then to take it out of, like you know, because that example itself is maybe a little destabilizing, but, like, Tibetan Tonglen meditation is a spiritual expression of that. And Pema Shojaan is a well known, sort of dharma holder in the west, and she's talked about this. And Alice Walker, the woman who wrote The Color Purple and lots of other beautiful books, learned from Pema. And and the idea of Tonglen is to say instead of meditation where you're trying to visualize white light or get to your happy place or share an affirming mantra, you actually deliberately conjure up all your pain and suffering, and you visualize it as smoke or black tar, and you bring it into yourself with your breath, and then you picture transmuting it into light and love. And then as you can handle your own, you expand to your family and community all the way out to the world, all the way out to everyone, everywhere, everyone, and you're like, oh, wow, that's game changing. So now instead of trying to flee it or see the world as dirty or trying to get away from the haters or the downers, you actually steer into the skid of our collective human condition, and you're like, let me be a vehicle for thy peace kind of thing. You're like, that's actually the raw material, so we know how to conduct alchemy. And that's what I mean about being a homegrown human, where we actually come back and we're like, okay, this is the human experience. There's no wiggling off this thing. Let's show up fully and kinda whistle while we work, which is radically different than hashtag best life, and I'm gonna airbrush and Photoshop everything and try and sort of whistle past the graveyard. Right? Which is I'm gonna pretend that the scary stuff isn't really there and that all of my, you know, social media or whatever is gonna keep the wolves from the door. It's like, no. No. No. Like, open the door. Invite the monsters to the table, and let's do that instead. So so in your suggestions, I I think I think the 10 suggestions in the book towards the end of the book, I think it's, like, the second to last chapter. So it's, you know, it it's interesting because you start off, like, with, you know, do the obvious. Like, sleep well, eat well. You know, don't there's nothing there's no like you said, there's no magic bullet. But then also, leave mystery as mystery. So it's good to always be I I take that to mean, like, it's always good to keep keep being curious. Like, you don't have to find out the answer to everything, and it's not necessarily a good thing to find out the answer to everything. And and, you know, and then, you know, you get more and more into, you know, what what what would you say are the most I mean, all the suggestions are important, but, like, what's what's the and you say also do the obvious. Maybe describe that one a little bit more. So it seems like it seems like folks these days, you know, especially who have the privilege and access to expose themselves and dip into personal growth, transformation, all of that kind of stuff, are doing an awful lot of cycling the bed. Right? So the do the obvious is just to say sleep more, get outside, move often, drink water, eat real food, mostly plants. You know, Michael Pollan 101, make love, be grateful. You know, that kind of stuff. And that just takes the entire biohacking industry offline. Like, should I stack this? Should I do that? What about this? Here's my metrics. Like, f**k it. Just do the obvious. The only people who are making this more complicated are the folks who have something to sell you. Then the opposite is don't do stupid s**t, right, which is we've never had access to all these tools of human transformation without guidelines, structures, and and and and teachers. So if you put them all together and you blow yourself to smithereens, that f**ks it up for everybody. So, like, don't end up in a cult. Don't end up in a body bag. Don't end up in a jail cell. Don't end up in a mental institution. Don't end up in rehab. You know, don't end up in court. Like, so don't do stupid s**t. You know, basically, these techniques of ecstasy is the equivalent of sort of NC 17, 5th class rock climbing, which is definitely not for kids, and the falls can kill you. And if you go clambering up a mountainside without ropes and harness and anchors and training, and you take a digger off the side and you're just splattered in the woods for someone, you know, for a search and rescue team to come fix, that was on you. You had no business being there. So that's the don't do stupid s**t. And then the other two things that seem to suck up an almost infinite amount of bandwidth in the personal growth space is people presuming, I think, way too early that they know what is going on at the fundamental nature of reality. Like, the universe is all just filled with love, or, like, my guardian angels have told me, or this is all unfolding according to plan. It's like, are we sure? I have no idea. And, really, you know, it's the whole there's old, you know, old mountaineers and bold mountaineers, but no old, bold mountaineers. Right? I I I think there's plenty of bold philosophers, but not many old and bold ones, and so just leaving the mystery to be that, like, sometimes it's just let it better to let the burning bush burn. Right? Then how much bandwidth are people, you know, coming back with false certainty about naming the thing? That gets us a whole bunch of time back. And then the other one is kinda like, f**k your journey. Right? People these days are so like, when my journey began and I did this, and like, we're just like carpetbaggers of catharsis, you know? Like people can't wait to, like, open up their their suitcase and pull out all of their most profound breakthroughs and their biggest their biggest healing and their most interesting insights, and you're like, sort of. Right? But we kinda fetishize our stories and our journey versus, like, hey, we're either here now or we're not. So, like, if you were jamming with a with another musician or you're powder skiing or you're doing something amazing, like, in the middle of that powder skiing run or in the middle of the super righteous jam, you're not like, hey, you know, like, 6 weeks ago, I was in another really righteous jam. Let me start talking about that. Or like, this other time that I was powder skiing was even better than this time. You're like, no. Either this is the moment we're in together, in which case, yeehaw and nothing else matters, you know, or we're not. But talking about things from the past doesn't get us you know, doesn't increase our odds of finding And this is sort of similar to your your practice resurrection suggestion, which is kind of die to the old stories. Die to the the pain that you're in now. And this is what I'm fascinated a little by this. Like, how can one can can you how can one mentally do this just hearing us now? How can you practice resurrection? Yeah. Well, that that's actually, MacArthur fellow, and environmentalist poet Wendell Berry's beautiful line. You know? He he's got a poem called the Mad Farmer's Manifesto, and it ends with that line, like practice resurrection. And you think about that, and in fact, Chuck Palahniuk, the the author of Fight Club, has a beautiful line where he says something along the lines of, you know, we have to we have to die to our pain, and we have to die we have to forgive ourselves and each other before we can actually show up for this moment. And so quite often, we are stuck in a story, and we have preferences, and we have pain, and we have pleasure, and we have fears, and we have all these things, and to and we hang on to them. We cling to them, and and and that's all that is between us and showing up fully for this emergent cocreative moment. So if we die to them and we're like, oh, woah. I don't know what's going on right now. I'm at the end of my narrative. I'm at the end of my story. We're just into emergent reality. It's both vulnerable, scary, exhilarating, thrilling, super novel, and and really, arguably, the only place that, like, deep magic can happen. So if we show up in every moment like Tibetan Buddhist, right, they spend 40 years meditating on the impermanence of life so that when they physically die, they may stay self aware, and they believe that if you can do that, then you step off the wheel of incarnation, right, and boom, beam not to the mothership for all sentient beings. Like that's 40 years of practice for one at bat, you know, versus what if we ritualize it? What if every Sunday, once a month, once a season, once a year for sure, we have a death rebirth practice, right, where we get to test drive what does it mean to stay open as it all comes undone, and experience who we are on the other side of that and what's possible from there. Right. So how do we how do you stay open? Well, literally, I think it's practices. I mean, I think you engage in a hedonic engineering, like the act of kind of tuning and tweaking our nervous systems and our biology and psychology, is actually you you hang that all on hedonic calendaring, which is what does the arc of my year and even my whole life look like? So you want daily foundational practices. That was when we were talking about breath work, yoga, meditation, you know, journaling, whatever whatever the good things are that you do that are foundational, like going and sitting by the lake for sunrise or sunset. Right? Those kind of things. Then reinstituting some form of Sabbath. Sabbath's, you know, sabbatical just means once every 7 years for professors. Right? Sabbath is just one day of 7. So take half of a Saturday or a Sunday and create your own deep dive experience. And it could be movement. It can involve nature. It can involve music. It can involve, you know, romantic connection. It can involve any number of those things, and use that as a mini depth charge reset. Once a month, give yourself a day. Once a season, give yourself a weekend. Once a year, give yourself a week. And just schedule those things in, and then you will and then you will have a sort of a flywheel effect where you won't be going from 0 to a 100, and it takes a whole bunch of effort to dislodge your monkey mind and and and defrag your nervous system. You're like, oh, I'm actually building momentum. It's much more like a potter's kick wheel, you know, where they have those big stone wheels, and it takes forever to get them started. But once they're going, you can shape clay. And that's us. The clay is us, and we are the potter. Well, you know, this is so so interesting. Like, I mean, some of these all all of these questions are ones that I've had to deal with on a regular basis just like anybody going through my own traumas and pains and figuring out where you know, what the answers are and what my answers are and, but at the same time, you know, not going crazy with it. And, it's interesting that now it's kind of hitting the realm of research. Like, all of these things are being researched at all these different universities. And but but I I think it's a very beautiful analogy overall, though, to to die to the old and and constantly practice rebirth one way or the other in in everything you do. And I think that's, like, an an overriding theme in the book in addition to the very specific practices that that you recommend. And I I love the final suggestion in your list of 10 suggestions, which is above all, be kind. Because if you're not kind, then that's stressful. Like, if you're if you're not meeting somebody, then that's, like, more taking up more real estate in your head than being kind. And not not that you should only be kind for selfish reasons. It just is a good way to be. Yeah. I mean, it feels like you know? I mean, life is irreducibly tragic. Right? We know that much. And occasionally it can also be magic, and that's that's easy to forget. You know? But when we remember it, it's profound and we feel it in our bones. And then when we come you know, when we whipsaw between those 2, the tragic and the magic, we like you know, it either breaks us, drives us insane, or we learn to laugh at, you know, like what Zorba the Greek called the full catastrophe. Right? And then it's comic. So it's like it's tragic, it's magic, and it's comic, and and if we and that gives us the ability to to weep for the tragic, to worship the magic, and to celebrate the comic together. Like, this is the cosmic joke. It's all around us, and it's on us. Right? But we're also in on it. And for sure, like the Chinese have a phrase called and it means joy bathing. So like the ability for us to take those peak states and use them to digest our grief, using them to reset the Etch A Sketch and flush ourselves clear, and then to come back, right, to our brothers and sisters with a little bit more grace, a little bit more kindness, a little bit more compassion, and hopefully a little bit more play, Right? We're no longer so jacked up and jammed up and wrapped around the act the existential axle, then then we can make beautiful things happen. Well, you know, again, I I I think this is a great book. It's it's definitely wasn't the usual kind of self help personal development group, all that all that BS. It's recapture the rapture, and you really do try to recapture the the rapture here with these methods. Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind by Jamie Wheal, w h e a l. And I highly recommend it. Great book. Lots of interesting questions to explore. And, Jamie, thanks so much for once again coming on the podcast. James, great to see you again, man. Fantastic combo. I'm gonna go to the ocean right now and dip my feet in and look out at the horizon. Beautiful.
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