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We go into gut flora microbiome wellness we go into meditation we go into resistance training flexibility mobility like it's a it's a great resource. It's absolutely free. Check it out mind pump media dot com. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind there's only one place to go. Might pop might pop with your hosts Salda Stefano Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews. I was so excited to talk to this mofo because you know why when we got into we had Steven Kotler rise of Superman stealing fire author like about a month and a half two months ago. And I asked him about psychedelics. I wanted to get into micro dosing because a lot of these guys like the thing right now it is and they discuss it in the book but he totally took a left turn on me and then we got to meet and hang out with Tom bill you and Tom kind of give me this little head nod. He says yo bro reach out to Jamie wheel. He'll drop some knowledge on you. He's a co author of stealing fire and he we in this episode you're about to listen to. We get pretty deep with the whole psychedelic world at disclaimer right here if you're if you're somebody who just like gets totally offended by that stuff probably not the episode for you probably shouldn't be listening to those you that are actually intrigued by this subject which I'm completely fascinated intrigued by it. This is a phenomenal episode because you get to talk to a brilliant man a smart person that describes it. Absolutely. You can find him on Facebook at Jamie wheel as J. A. M. I. E. W. H. E. A. L. or stealing fire. You can also go to the flow genome project dot com or stealing fire book dot com so without any further ado here we are tripping out with Jamie wheel. We had Stephen on here what maybe what six months ago Doug? No not that long ago. Was it less than that? Yeah. It's got like three months. Yeah. Three months. I tried to get him to talk a little bit about psychedelics and he just took a left on me real fast and I was telling Tom bill you when he was in here. I was like man I was so I just finished Rise of Superman. I was just starting stealing fire and I was so excited to kind of ask him about micro dosing and things like that and he just avoided the question completely so I figure okay obviously I can't talk about this and then I was talking to Tom about it and he's like oh you have to talk to Jamie. Jamie will be more open to talk about that stuff. Okay thank God. I was like you wrote the book bro and I can't talk about that shit with you. Now that you said that we're going to talk about something else. Canasta you know let's do it. Do you do you think that we're like tapping into like this kind of because you you guys talk about it in in stealing fire how these top performers are using some of these substances to improve their creativity and you know the way that they you know their productivity. Do you think that we're kind of just scratching the surface and that the if you go deeper it's it's even it's an even bigger part of that whole that whole thing. Well when you say an even bigger part in what way like what direction you think like when you get into the upper echelon of management you're working that that this is like this is what they do this is part of what like it's going to become like a staple thing for all big companies is that what you're saying. Yeah yeah something like that. Hmm I mean I don't know whether we'll ever go overtly mainstream and kind of organizational psychology and optimization in the sense that it's obviously there's there's state sanctioned penalties imposed in most places that kind of thing but as far as the ubiquity of it and as far as how many different I mean Silicon Valley always becomes the poster child for the stuff but it's happening with like high frequency traders on you know in New York it's happening all you know London Tokyo Europe it's happening in a lot of places whether it just remains kind of the clandestine killer app that that's my sense although I mean we really were legitimately surprised when teams of engineers would come up to us I mean what we described in the book they would come up to us after we're giving talks on neuroscience and they'd be like hey we're all microdosing you know so and you know and that's that major search names you know search giants who shall not be named and you're like okay so this is this is fascinating that you're getting a blend of what used to be like recreational hedonism we do this on our spare time discreetly into this is actually a performance optimization tool and you know I think microdosing is distinct from what like what Tim Ferriss was talking about when we interviewed him of most of the billionaires in Silicon Valley I know use psychedelics on a regular basis that's a different thing that's a deep dive blow out the pipes what kind of super complex post-conventional insights can I gain about wicked problems I'm interested in solving at a global scale that's a very different thing than like biohacking optimization with microdosing so can you can you explain that for our listeners what the the major difference between like a regular dose of psychedelics versus this microdosing I had never heard of microdosing until like maybe three four years ago before that I was just didn't even know what that was so can you explain to our listeners the difference between a microdose and a regular dose of psychedelics yeah I mean if you think about it you can kind of roughly put it into three categories you've got microdosing which means it's a sub perceptual threshold amount of a substance meaning you take it and you don't notice anything is meaningfully different so it would be like drinking a you know non-alcoholic beer would be kind of like that there's still some or decaf coffee there's still a little bit of an action in that but what's happening in the case of microdosing psychedelics is it all interacts with our serotonin system so most people are microdosing with lsd or psilocybin those all interact with our serotonin system which is the same system that prozac and any of the antidepressants interact where they just do it differently so what we're doing is we're literally using sort of almost homeopathic doses right just enough to activate our serotonin system in different ways that impacts brain function mood focus and problem solving at a again sub perceptual threshold level i don't notice it other than maybe a little bit of brightness other than maybe i just find myself after the fact having worked a little longer produced a little more right felt a little better this all very incremental and subtle but james faderman who's been who's been leading most that microdosing research it's well it's consistently beyond placebo it's not just a bunch of people doing and thinking stuff might be better so that's the low-level microdosing the mid-level is what you would kind of used to be called the museum dose or now it's kind of more like the i max dose like what would i max dose right what would meaningfully enhance an experience but you can still maintain more or less you know the kind of classic high school or college kid play and so that's that's functional augmentation of reality and then you have the heroic dose you know that's what terence mckinney used to do he used to ship five grams silent darkness in fact there's you know and those are blowout the pipes you're getting into some very different terrain and and each of them you know conveys different benefits has different risks time requirements etc and definitely who you'd want to travel and do it with well let's talk about that for a second what does first off what is the science say about microdosing and the museum dose and these massive doses do we have studies on them that show you know what they do differently or what they do the same yeah i mean i think we would have to kind of cobble that together from the different research because you know it's only in the last five years or so that you kind of have the psychedelic renaissance of more and more sanctioned research at top tier universities people doing really credible stuff and you know as we talk about in stealing fire i mean the majority of that research all started out with trauma survivors and or terminal patients it was like it was the idea of like just doing these studies on regular folks looking to optimize or augment their life would have sort of been irresponsible so for the most part the majority of the research is either redoing and reconfirming with better measurement tools and you know new tech studies that were run in the fifties and sixties and just going yep there's still definitely a there there you know and then the next step has been dealing with people with problems you know i'm facing terminal cancer or even smoking cessation or something along those lines so can we come up with a problem in the quote-unquote human marketplace can we test these things and validate i don't think there's too many people that are sort of doing comparative stack ranking of dosages and different efficacy because that would just be straight-up advocacy and i think we're a couple of laps in funding and approval cycles and just general as much as anything else academic acceptance of these things for people to do that kind of cross yeah we have to be very careful right because if you do any kind of a study or anything that says hey this is great you can use this then they frown upon that you don't get funding in the past the only funding available was to study addictive properties and negative effects or at least before or after the the drug war started because before that there were some pretty interesting studies done on some of these substances and then they shut them all down and you know made it pretty much impossible to obtain these substances and study them and get funding for them what has changed now why are we seeing more you know why are they opening the doors a little bit well i mean you know in no small part you have to give rick doblin and maps the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies a huge hat tip that they they took it for 30 years through the wilderness of everything you're just describing and with slow steady relentless and disciplined advocacy started just you know chinking down the wall a crack a brick at a time and as they did that and some of the early studies started coming back the data really just started speaking for itself and and the amount the impact of mtma studies on trauma the impact of creativity and problem-solving with psilocybin and you know just it the stuff works and it works so much better i mean if you take for example um i mean to me what's really interesting is not quote-unquote psychedelics or what are cool drugs for people to try it's that oh we are now getting new and additional insights into our neuro chemical systems and the impact of neurochemistry our internal neurochemistry on our consciousness and our performance and back in the 50s and early 60s they sort of there was a simultaneous discovery of you know interactions of the serotonin receptor sites psilocybin and lsd and it was like there's you know momentary little sort of renaissance in that study and then the active ingredient you know the the agent psilocybin and lsd becomes shut down controlled substances no research as you describe and we're left with hmm there's a serotonin system and 20 years later we get this weak sauce version of prozac and ssri's which become blockbuster drugs in sp in spite of the fact of how badly they suck right and what we're getting now is people don't realize that by the way they do they do have a horrible efficacy rate oh yeah and they were based on some incredibly small poorly run studies in in the mid 80s and they just big farmer was just like oh this might fly let's try it so the entire mechanism of interaction that that selective serotonin reuptake and inhibition is the best and singular solution to depression and anxiety is a crock of shit it's just if they sold it and they've pushed it so now we're coming back online and like neuropsychologist molly crocket uh she was she was at UCLA she's now at oxford she's you know she's doing comparative studies on the entire serotonin system and she's done some fascinating research both on um an event like burning man a kind of transformational festival and she's like meditation psychedelics and attending at these events all in impact the serotonin system they all create pro-social bonding and behavior and connections and interestingly she was just at Davos for world economic forum and was talking about the opposite also being true is that when you see folks for instance like really angry mob rule political rallies those kind of things that we've been seeing more of around the world in the last couple of years is also that chronic low line stress especially you know we're talking about how what is it the that white middle class americans are now the number one in deceit like deaths of despair right suicide depression addiction that that's what's killing the white middle class and disproportionate numbers these days and her her research was suggesting that when people are constantly stressed meaning they got a lot of norepinephrine and cortisol in their system like I don't have a job or I don't know what my future is or like I'm unmoored in my story right within the national narrative and the changes in the world kind of thing um that that chronic baseline stress is also depleting people serotonin is leading them to be more irritable more combative right and more prone to needing these movements so when you think about like the recent political movements and elections you're like oh no like the sort of liberal coastal you know folks in media could not understand what was so compelling and persuasive about a Trump rally you're like there's no policy there's no decision what's what what it was was communitas people were being offered a chance to bond together have their narratives validated in the fragmented world we're all stuck behind our flat screens and commuting to work and feel completely isolated from our neighbors like there was a chance to say here's your people you belong you're you have a right you have dignity you have power right and and that element of the conversation with which molly crocket has done a great job mapping is fundamentally like the hidden story behind this last year of populism around the world is that people want to connect and they want to bond and serotonin ironically is at the heart of an awful lot of this it's interesting you say that because it's almost like this uh this double-edged sword it is a very powerful driver for humans to want to belong and connect but we've seen throughout history how that can be uh for good or it can be done for bad you've got you know group flow when people are you know i'm using the terminology that you guys use in your book um which uh both books are absolutely fascinating but uh you've got group flow where you've got people working together for a common good and then you seem to have like mob this mob mentality or when people like you know a game you know a team loses a hockey game and people go out and write and do they have things in common yes yes so the simple thing is is that um and and it's also kind of what's potentially new and exciting about right now but tbd how it all plays out right because in the past if you went like let's say you know just to wind back so you go back to the french enlightenment right we really established then the role of the rational individual you know so Descartes Descartes said cogito ergo so my think therefore i am here is my like i defined my rule you know uh rousseau was talking about the tabula rasa like a man is a blank slate right and we write upon it that you know the arc of our life so that whole idea like i'm me and i can choose what to do and i use my brain and my thinking to you know with my five senses to establish reality and then go interact with it that was actually a pretty novel idea and that was instead of all the sort of superstitious group think tribal magical thinking you know easily swayed sort of peasantry and tribalism of the past before it um when people go beyond that beyond the rational individual you can go one or two places you can either descend into a rational mob right i lose myself in the collective and that's following cults and gurus that's all the kind of stuff that you know parents and teachers and law enforcement things are rightly concerned about like don't do it right maintain your individuality but then there's this other thing that can happen and it's rare but it's happening now more than maybe for the first time ever which is a not just a pre-rational collectivism i lose myself in the mob but a post-rational collectivism meaning i connect with other people but i still have my agency i still have my sovereignty i still have my choice right and so you will see that in an experience like burning man which is that people come together but everybody is like owning their own experience and if anybody does try and hop up and hog the mic they get laughed at it's tone deaf it's like sit the fuck down oh wow take a number sit take a number son right we're all here so they're all bonding because they're all unique versus bonding because they're all the same yeah exactly so rather than giving up my agency and my discernment and my free will to merge with the Borg right the Borg right it's it's we are still completely autonomous and we're choosing to play and blend together and there's actually really cool studies on flow research which says that individual flow let's say gives you kind of five points of juice or reward and parallel play meaning we're doing shit together like we're surfers out in a line up together or that kind of thing gives me like seven points but interrelated flow meaning we're playing jazz or you know literally like my my high is dependent on your interaction and we're creating something together that's the off the charts that's that's the full ten that's like the seal team you guys talk about right but they have to be able to do yeah I mean I mean I always remember hearing like it wasn't Kelly's later but with some of the I think it was some of the the Maui boys they were on the pro surf tour and they started their own band and a couple of them dropped off the pro surf tour to go play music and you're like oh shit those boys like they're getting barreled in the green room that's as good as it gets and they found something better and you feel sorry for their girlfriends you know so yeah so I said interactive collaborative is about as good as it gets that's the next now Jim you've been to quite a few burning man's how many of you been to a total five I think five of them what are some of the what are some of the things that have stuck with you I mean obviously you probably get something great every time but what were some major life changing things that have happened to you or you've been there I mean I think the first time I went the biggest the biggest experience I had it was sunrise on my first day there so like we come in in the daytime and I was like wait seriously this looks like just like a broke ass tailgate pot that's what it sounds like what is up with that like I'm so under post apocalyptic yeah yeah yeah and it was because it's where all the cars are and where all the camps are right and so that's all I saw and then I and I went out with some friends the first night and and I just went to bed I was like okay I'm you know whatever I'm checking this out but I'm not deeply feeling it and then they still raged all night and came back in at like 4 a.m. to kind of re-up and go back out and they're like and I kind of woke up and I'm like and they're like you want to come I'm like yeah sure why the fuck not so hot we we we popped our vitamins and I went on our on our bike ride and the sun was coming up and the man was there and like we rode out to see like this robot hut is a camp that plays way the fuck in the back of beyond and was riding along and I just had this complete like three minute download of information about my entire life my entire relationship with my wife my relationship with my kids exactly where I had blocked them and prevented them from growing fully and exactly what I needed to do when I went home and I was lit up like a Roman candle I survived I subsisted on nothing but coconut water raw almonds and avocados for the rest of the rest of the time barely slept and like and at the end of that transmission was like like transmission over like no more fun for you son for the rest of the week go back and do your work and that was just humbled but like that was that was game changing and I'm still trying to live into like the implications and obligations of that and then sweet Jesus I mean yeah it's just like the raddest shit like most times like if you get into like hippie culture or new age culture people are like oh like I feel really one with the earth and you know like and I really embrace that tree and like I got in touch with my past lives and I think I was in Camelot or like maybe I was going to be a patra like never never I was an anonymous peasant who died an early painful death again it's always something awesome like but that's not what's going on at Burning Man like at Burning Man you're like holy shit we are building like this giant radio antenna to the back of the galaxy people are like what fucking star tribe are you from so so yeah let's needless to say there is plenty of far out information and inspiration now you in the book stealing fire I believe you guys talk about the hedonic calendar am I saying that right now is that something you guys came up with or yes okay so explain that I was actually just talking to a buddy that's into all this stuff and you know what we've got we've now surrounded ourselves with quite a few brilliant minds and the more we meet the the more common this topic is right yeah and so the one thing I do notice I feel like there's two sides right there's either the guy or girl who embraces it utilizes as a tool and then there's the other side who I find feel like they they identify so much with it that it becomes almost like they're chasing it all the time sure you know and and you guys I you guys talk about the hedonic calendar so can you get into that a little bit how did you come up with that the importance of that and is that why because you feel like if you continue to chase it so much it becomes your end all be all is that the purpose of it well I mean like in pursuing and just you know just kind of define tech terms a bit so we talk about ecstasy in the book which is like a big-ass tent which would just include the literal definition is you know as an experience that takes you outside yourself ecstasy to stand beyond oneself so that includes meditation and mystical states smart tech sexually prompted states you know EDM and Don states and psychedelic states as well so so pharmacology contemplation smart tech and flow states so like action sports and those kind of things so for most people their first question is kind of like hunting their white whale like really is that kind of awesome really available in my life nah no way you you're one more snake oil salesman it's like no no no go do it like go go hunt your mother fucking white whale right and find it and most people are actually somewhat surprised that it's actually there and it's actually that easy and then becomes a question of where the hell's the brakes because if you get really good at hacking the most addictive neurochemistry in our bodies you can get really good and then you won't want to do anything else it's like charlotte and sex in the city like when she finds the rabbit vibrator and she's just like what a great analogy you're like let's just keep pressing that fucking button again and again right so so the hedonic calendar is basically like okay so this like back in the day there was you know spiritual paths prosto waking up work sort of considered right hand or left hand the right hand were orthodox paths and that was filled with lowest common denominator thou shouts and thou shout nots because we had to basically base it on what if homer simpson followed these instructions and had no judgment no discipline no will power so we have to make the rules for homer right and that's most conventional religions and then there was always in every single religious tradition there's always a secret crew running the left hand path would say it's all good let's do it right now those paths you know in fact in the western tradition it was like the idea that the left hand path is the fastest route to getting woke with the lowest success rate right so if if you can if you can ride that rocket it'll get you there in record time but the number of people that put in the ditch is just wreckage all the way so the question is okay okay so now we have access to all these techniques these used to be totally locked down by gatekeepers and priests right so we regular folks did not have access to this information did not have access to these tools now we do right so the question is is once you start going down this road we have no checks and balances on what to do with them and so that's where the calendar comes in because now what happens if you know let's say you and your your woman decide okay we're going to practice this we're going to engage in sexuality psychedelics breathwork music dance you know body movement all the stuff that you guys do radical good time all of that once let's do all of it fucking at once sounds like a hell of a weekend right there I call that Wednesday yeah yeah spoiler alert fucking awesome right and so so then like when do you like and then what will happen most people just as you're starting to create those experiences where you're starting to just burn through anything that is not pure like you've turned up the heat and the crucible it's on most people when they experience the twinges of addiction or they experience like dark elements of their personality or relationship coming up will get spooked and they'll be like oh shit let's back off and then it'll trigger all the unprocessed unexamined guilt shame fear and people will back away from the very practice that was actually about to give them a level up so now people will say oh well I can't get high or we can't fuck or we can't do this or we can't do that as often or as much or maybe not at all so then what you've done even though you're playing with left hand practices you've actually just created another right-hand pot you got thou shouts and thou shalt nots so subtly you actually aborted the project right when it was going to get to a place that was going to yeah burn through to the next level so the question is is now how do i play with these tools knowing that 99 of the people who've gone down this road have ended up dead or insane or destitute and do it anyway with those impossible tugging motions that are going to pull me towards addiction compulsion and self-delusion so that's where you set up your checks and balances yeah now how common would you say that is like you know I know you probably don't have the exact number but for someone to go down that path like that like how how important do you find it for people to have those checks and balances or is it one of those things that a lot of people get involved in it's like a runaway train they can't stop I mean I think it's essential yeah so it's kind of like it's like high altitude mountaineering like you don't live long in the big mountains if you don't set and abide by your turnaround times you know like it doesn't matter how close we are to the summit if we're not at if we're not standing on top of it by 1 pm we turn around no matter what and you set that shit up in advance advisors who's you know one of the heroes of Everest and everything else he said you know summiting is optional coming down coming home is mandatory and general of American alpine accidents and incidences think 70% of fatalities occur on the descent so it's like people can handle getting to the summit that's the fun easy pot eyes on the prize of course we want them to shut down and then they jump the shock on the way down the vigilant centers are down they're fatigued or whatever and the same true with this path right you have a lot of people that get into EDM and transformational festivals you have people that get into you know going to burning men and doing something else people get into micro dosing and bio hacking whatever these things are and they set out thinking they are a master of their own course so they don't need to set the parameters up in advance but it's only once you stop and you wonder like am I lost or are we lost wait where'd the trail go and it's too fucking late yeah you know so yeah I would say it's it's non-negotiable I think what I find fascinating about this movement now because it feels like that it feels like it's a movement it has a lot in common with what we saw in the 60s and 70s here in the US but there's a lot of differences too like the reason why I feel personally my personal opinion is that this is going to get more accepted and we're going to start seeing this be utilized in medical practices like I do think that we will see things like psilocybin and LSD be used with therapists today is because today the people using it are the ones that have power and money and influence whereas before it was a counterculture and the ones that have power money and influence were the ones that were saying no whereas today now you see CEOs you see intelligent people talking about these things you see people are like you're saying like they're discussing like this is how you should probably do and it's not just about getting lost and parting it's also there's intent in how you do this I feel like that's going to bring it bring it more to the forefront make it more acceptable at least I'm hoping yeah yeah I mean and you know let's also know our history which is before it went fruity woolly counterculture it was once again intelligentsia educated elite so when LSD was making the rounds in the late 50s early 60s it was psychiatrist it was Kerry Gron and Jack Nicholson it was like it was the intelligentsia of New York LA I mean Roger in Mad Men like that scene where those guys are like dosing in their in their Manhattan apartment like that was quintessential long before it became dirty hippies in the forest so the idea is if anything we're coming where there's a return back to that in the sense that this is now contextualized and it's not just these incredibly powerful tools with no constraints and a sense of nobody can tell me what to do I'm free what is some of the most uh the newest science that's coming out with some of these uh these these states of mind of these substances I saw recently it was on Facebook someone had posted a picture of a brain image of someone on LSD so I don't know how accurate this is but it showed that the whole brain was lit up and more side you know the brain can communicate with other with you know the left can communicate easier with the right and I don't know how accurate that was what is some of the new stuff coming out showing yeah I mean and also you know obviously those static pictures of brains lighting up doing different things you know get you know justifiably pilloried by actual neuroscientists working in the field like okay this is gross simplifications and this is just kind of neuro porn blogosphere so they use that hashtag yeah yeah that killed my computer this is your brain on frappe so so but but I think the the the actual research that I'm guessing that that post was about was Robin Cajot Harris at Imperial College of London and he did he did at function like real-time FMRIs that research with MDMA psilocybin and most recently LSD and what he found with the LSD in particular was that you I mean a couple of things one is is that our sense of self so when people talk about psychedelics or meditation or extreme endurance athletic pursuits or whatever it was creating an experience of ego death part of the reason is there they're like oh your sense of self is not a singular switch or location it's actually kind of a network and when you knock out a couple of the nodes in the network with a pharmacological primer the whole system powers down so it's almost like that you know like the X wings and in Star Wars you know flying over the desktop like shooting out a couple of the radar towers and the whole shield goes down it's kind of like that so you can take down the shield of your ego great energy right and the and the other one is that you know to to the point about the brain scan you saw which is and it tends to prompt lateral connections with the neighbors next door that don't normally talk to each other so neuro transmitter start connecting it's a little bit like sort of like you know the old Italian tenements in Brooklyn or something like shouting out the window to you know like down the street hey Louie you know like so like Louie Louie and Maria are now having a conversation they never would have before and those far-flung connections are creating lateralization new insights new ideas new access to information information and combinations of information that would otherwise not be there interesting do you have a personal experience with any of these substances are you are you okay to talk about that I mean you know we can always just do the someone who isn't me yeah right yeah my friend I was going to say I was just going to start talking to you like that my friend was wondering so there's one time it banked yeah so what experiences do you hear from people when they do these things for the first time goodness gracious for the first time um I mean I think as much as anything I mean all all the old stories the Huxley stuff you know like the the doors of perception being cleansed I mean I think if nothing else people have a for some maybe one of the first times in their life they have a truly incontrovertible sense that ah the world is enchanted there there is actually more than this fucking saran wrap plastic existence right that I've been suffocating in and so I think you know if nothing else man that that experience to understand hey you know the world the world does have magic in it that I can feel like I have a place in the broader experience to me that's that's a sort of birthright experience we used to get it with you know adolescent puberty initiations for young men and women whatever it would be you know go out and suffer in order to have some breakthrough or some you know like true affirmation of what you're here to do you know and we we've lost a lot of that and there's lots of people making comments on that so yeah I mean that the psychedelic experience can serve in the right environments with the right you know right time right place right people right those who's right reasons can serve as a powerful affirmation of who we are and what we're here to do I what you just said in a nutshell is what I've heard so many people say and one of the more common things I'll hear is it's hard to explain you have to experience it which to someone sitting on the other end it's like why can't you explain there's no words like what do you mean there's no words it's almost impossible to understand what does that tell us about I guess human consciousness what does that tell us about the human experience if before somebody experiences one of these experiences which can happen and I want to be clear you know as you guys have explained I mean stealing fire can happen many different ways doesn't have to be pharmacological can be through you know fasting or chanting or years of meditation but what does that tell us about this I guess this this realm that we're maybe stuck in and if we experience something else I mean what's your opinion on that I mean I think any transformative experience including like something as simple as parenting or burying one of your parents right you cannot describe to the person prior to the event what it's going to look and feel like to them after the event you just can't and that's the fundamental nature because you are going to be different okay otherwise it wouldn't be a transformative experience so some of them like Zora Neil Hurston who was like a early 20th century african-american poet and writer she you know she had a great phrase she said you got to go there to know there right so so like that's just straight up so you know the question is is like you can't describe to someone what it feels like to take a you know to do a gainer off a 50-foot rock into the ocean you know while they're standing up to up front contemplating whether they should or they shouldn't or all the possible things that could go wrong you just fucking do it you know like do the prerequisite diligence like make sure you're not make sure there's deep enough water and you can land there's not rocks you can't see great now you just got a sack up and do it did you have any opinions that you changed as you wrote this book did you go in having any preconceived notions and come out completely different or was it what you anticipated hmm I mean writing the present was like trying to wrestle a python I mean it was like trying to I couldn't even imagine that was something we bled for that book for sure and as much as anything else it was trying to get it through the gates of you know a publisher and editor who made it you know living in New York not being a part of the things we're writing about not understanding it trying to steer us into like let's write the power of habit that was a good best 18 months into this fucker you're telling us to write a self-help book now or like tell us more stories about some of the celebrities and awesome people that are doing all this stuff and it's like you have no idea how much we're stretching do they really try and do that to you guys is that what happens like whether oh it was bang your head wow sanity on that front we're like talk about how hard it has to be for a writer yeah what's that like going through that when you have this idea and then you're getting put trying to get pushed in a direction what's that like I mean even when we're even just lining up long lead press and media you know like wall street journal in New York Times how about business review that kind of stuff and you know and and in fact I think it was it was an article for entrepreneur and and they said well look this is we're talking about creativity we're talking about the role of you know hacking all the states to boost creativity here's all the examples here's all the research and they're like yeah but can you make this a little bit more actionable for our readers kidding me so you dumb it down a little bit you know it's literally so I just pulled something out of of our flow training program like our entry level flow training program which people do on app and you know on an app and they kind of have assignments and I was like here's what you do with your morning you wake up you know drink a pie to water you move you don't go to your inbox you defend your first 90 minutes you you know knock out your fuck and they're like this is so amazing I think we could get this in the New York Times how to take control of your first hour of your day and I wrote back to our to our to our editors like are you fucking kidding me we have just written a book saying that the most the the most earth-shattering revolution in human consciousness is happening with a clandestine global cabal of movers and shakers including Richard Branson, Larry Page, Sergey Brant, Elon Musk right and and seal team fucking six and you're gonna tell me that the grand size thing enough this book is the one hour you start your day don't check your email first I'm gonna put a bullet in my own head just for the me know like he's kidding it that's ridiculous that's incredible did you have it any pushback from anybody in this clandestine you know cabal of people you know not not yet and not not that we have had what we have I mean currently it's literally was this like asked for the permission later or what it's sort of on every and it's everywhere in the communities that we write about right now and and I think that the biggest thing we've heard is I can't believe that this movement that we all are actively a part of but we've we just haven't slowed down or had the frameworks to name you guys have put into full context and to read about the shit as it's happening and as we're doing this is game-changing you're defining the whole process for them yeah I mean hopefully like by having a story that serves like that I mean we knew I mean my hope was always that it's this is for Prometheans these are for the folks who are already hacking consciousness and culture and it's for the next group and those folks already know who they are and then there's like the closeted ecstatics the people who they've had yearnings for this they've got different parts of their life where they seek this stuff but they might feel guilty they're not quite sure where they have the need to go to Vegas for a guys weekend one every every year or two and they all score an eight ball and get booby slapped by coat up Russian strippers they don't know what they're doing but they know it's essential to like maintaining their vital life even though they feel terrible about it and it's not super conscious you know all that kind of stuff beckons them right why do I not sell like just give you know give away my guitar to goodwill because like I've got no woman no cry and free bird and I've had that since fucking college you know but like it means something my surfboard like there's a lot of closeted ecstatics who know that those are the moments I felt most alive in my life but now I feel like my whether it's my wife or whether it's my boss or whatever who have moralized to me that that's Peter Pan shit you got to put away childish things you got to grow up you got to get real it's like nah man there's something there oh for sure right I cracked the snowboard out after after reading the book I was like you know what I haven't ridden in years and I was like I have to go I have to ride now to this and it was literally the most awesome ride I've ever had in my life just after reading and taking that all in and then going like going in with that mindset of like just totally being mindful and presentable oh yeah oh that's awesome I can't very yeah very very cool what was interesting to me and I can't remember the term used for it but it was the economy of and I can't remember it was it was like the alter states yeah the altered states economy yeah can you talk about that first because that blew me the fuck away first of all thank you thank you I'm like that is such an atom bomb and barely anybody brings it up well so for me when you as you guys were listing all the things that you had to account for which all made perfect sense I didn't even think of half of them like I when I think of altered states economy I think of the obvious ones alcohol cigarettes coffee you know but there's so many other things that we do to take ourselves out yeah to alter our state in our our consciousness a little bit yeah talk about that for a second how big that is yeah sure so I mean you know this was kind of our due diligence on you know we you know are we actually seeing something really are we seeing a true social movement of historic proportions and if so what's the scale of it so we started with you know okay let's take licit and elicit pharmaceuticals that's easy right and that included obviously street drugs but it also included prozac zoloft included ambient and included any of the anti-anxiety stuff one in four Americans are on psychiatric meds these days wow 25 25 percent of us are taking something on a daily basis yeah yeah yeah and these are mind-altering these are mind-altering substances people don't realize that with powerful side effects I mean ambient the number of folks especially like executives that do the whole first class to Europe or Japan and China do the flatbed I'll pop an ambient I'll wake up the next day like we've got some functional medicine physicians that oversee a lot of CEOs and that kind of stuff and they're like it can take three to six months after even just one business trip fucking up your circadian rooms with ambient and and they can end up with psychosis depression like hard core things and it takes up to half a year to recover from like one two week trip where that's their hack so yeah so that was 2.2 trillion dollars just in licit illicit and gray market stuff then we were like okay well what else are people doing where the primary drivers to shift my state of consciousness not for some other goal or outcome and that included everything from action adventure sports and eco tourism to psychiatry and self-help so everything from Tony Robbins to my local therapist to the entire sort of online you know pop psych self-improvement marketplace that was that was billions you talk about indoor gambling mean we didn't even do online gambling and fantasy football and that kind of stuff she's like look just just take the classic you know Indian reservation or Vegas Reno you know casinos where there's deliberately no outs outside light they pump them full of 100% oxygen there's no clock so you're creating a sense of timelessness you're creating a sense of hyper vitality because you're getting maximum oxygen you're creating free drinks so ethanol and disequilibrium scantily clad women so sexual arousal and priming and peacocking you're creating all of these states and then the dopamine rush so when um Robert Sapolsky at Stanford calls it the magic of maybe but basically when and this explains why like grandpa still likes to golf or fly fish like why do you do these incredibly frustrating things grandpa because because if you know if you do something and you get an expected reward it's a hundred percent of dopamine if you do something and sometimes you get the expected reward and sometimes you don't the next time you hit it's 400% it's 4x the ROI just by being fucked with along the way that's a game programmers exactly so like why I would go and chase the elusive permit you know saltwater fly fishing it's a son of a bitch fish to catch you don't eat them you know why does the guy do that because when he finally lands one it is awesome yeah and the same with a birdie or you know whatever it would be right i mean like that's the that's the ROI so so those those are um those are additional huge tranches um i max online porn and binge watching right are all very specific visual you know we consume visual media that way in every single one of them like we travel we don't just wait to watch it in our house we go to a big screen we pay a premium ticket price for a 40 foot screen that eclipses our peripheral vision in the pitch black where we're kind of loosely connected we hear other people gasping and booing and clapping huge sound systems right that are pumping out the extra and that's a state shift we pay the premium for the state shift and obviously like streaming porn is ridiculously prevalent it's like what seven out of the top 20 is that right online short yeah that's why porn theaters never took off is that right that's why i own a computer yeah yeah yeah it didn't work for pee we yeah but i mean if you think about like evolutionary payoffs and benefits right there is no evolutionary reward for for rubbing one out uh in front of your laptop um you know you don't pass your gene oh man the genes don't get passed along right why do we do it do people are not doing it for companionship they're not doing it even to get laid they're doing it to create a sense of neurochemical saturation in their body why do you get so sad afterwards exactly well i think that that that's the evolutionary bitch slap which is that we are just we are just like evolution's a moral you know and we try and live relationships that have morality and ethics and consist but evolution doesn't give a shit who we get it on with they just care that it happens so i think there's a huge decrease in arousal and all the chemicals they're saying go go go go go go go go done thanks very much and now you face the consequences of your action you know that's heavy hit home so we're already spending all this money trying to get out of our heads yeah yeah and the point there is that you know because people might read the book especially if someone's kind of a little bit more conventional conservative like what are you guys doing are you advocating for all this stuff this is reckless and you know all that kind of stuff you're like well no look we are already spending four trillion bucks completely and most of it is unintentional and destructive and addictive so we're already doing this the question is is can we become more informed about it can we become more skillful about it and right and can we deploy that urge to much better ends and so that that would be our advocacy is like cognitive literacy is the first thing which is understand how our bodies in our brains affect our minds and our hearts like how what's what's the operating system of my system and the other is cognitive liberty which is you know understand who's looking to get mindshare in your head whether without your permission right and actually you know fiercely protect and defend right your civil liberties for what goes on between my years is none of not anybody else's business it shouldn't be yeah it never should be why are we so driven to do this you know that's a great question I mean one is it is it the is it the curse of I guess herming human consciousness and intelligence I mean or do animals also seek altered states of consciousness yeah I mean Ron Siegel at UCLA has written extensively about and goes back as far as saying you know birds do it bees do it right mammals all over the place seek intoxication in spite of the short-term evolutionary risk meaning I'm twisted I could get run over or I could fall out of a tree or whatever you guys address this in the book too don't you about all the different types of plants and stuff that all these animals eat to get the yeah so I mean on pretty much every continent mammals and birds routinely seek state shift and you can make a fairly clear case that it is the seeking of radical novelty right which can then if it works like if I come up with a good idea and I then have an adaptation and you know an evolutionary advantage then that's what propagates and gets rewarded so he called you guys as far as saying it's the fourth evolutionary drive after well food water food and sex is that so it's not even why do humans do it is it our existential issues and do we have to get out of our way although you know clearly we experience that way but it's like it is hard wired into our system it's why little kids love to spin around right hold their breath hyperventilate do the you know knockout game we're like middle school boys like let me hyperventilate and sock me in the chest right you might wait like right I mean kids do it and certainly we do as well and I think that's the biggest thing is that if we say anything about like what's the premise of the book is that we got locked into one channel of consciousness for the last few hundred years and it's killing us and that's the one and four on psychiatric meds that's the rates of suicide escalating that's all that stuff and getting getting locked on one channel is debilitating and it's it's poverty of consciousness and the ability to change the channel and experience different states of being an awareness relationship to our self in the world and in our challenges and what's in front of us to be able to do that a we know even being able to switch it briefly wanting to for a handful of instances massively heals trauma right it lets us set down our load it lets us revisit patterns and stories in our system you know in our psychology and our physiology and release them permanently it increases learning and collaboration so it boosts it you know between three hundred and five hundred percent lets us solve hard problems and it lets us connect and collaborate in highly effective ways you're like okay so if we just get to change that rusted dial from like 21st century normal over to other things from time to time not all the time just from time to time that the benefit to our lives is kind of pretty compelling let's talk about that for a second the enhanced learning that you can learn faster and more effectively by utilizing altered states of consciousness effectively let's talk about the science behind that and some examples yeah sure so i mean there's so many i remember reading i read about the the seals the seals and learning new languages yeah didn't they do the float tank yeah as part of their training they learned new languages in like six weeks instead of six months or something ridiculous like that yeah exactly that and so you know their original use of float tanks which if anybody's not familiar with those are just the pitch black super salty buoyant chambers that you can float in and because it's pitch black and you don't touch the edges you just kind of lose all your visual cues as to where i end in my environment begins so it creates an experience of ecstasy that's literally an experience of selflessness because i've just shut off some of my senses and at first they were just using it to help guys decompress after coming off duty so you've been running night ops you're in constant fight or flight hyper vigilance how the hell do you unwind from that and not become an alcoholic right i'm because again i mean alcoholic when people come home from work and knock back two shots of whiskey or whatever they do they are intuitively feeling for i'm wine i'm wound up i've probably had a caffeine in my system i've had stress i've had all these how do i decompress my system but of course a lot of our choices just because we have so few available tools most of us most of the time we picked bad ones or ones that aren't sustainable so that was their first move for the seals was how do we just help guys unwind in a healthy way then they started adding in well what if we can help steer and guide their bodies and brains to more optimal states of relaxation and arousal and that was eeg feedback hrv feedback some of those kind of things and like oh now once we can get them there is their new data that we can run across their screens and they might be in a more receptive state for plugging it in and that really was i mean that was a you know one fourth as long timing on patterning and integrating new languages and that that happens with meditators that happens with um mechanically inducing a flow state right with transcranial magnetic stimulation so you you know kind of you put a magnetic pulse across the prefrontal cortex the front of your brain and for about 20 to 40 minutes you've got a kind of you know like a maybe you know it's like jumper cables to the brain it's basically like a magnetic lobotomy you know and and for 20 to 40 minutes you're in the zone and like what can you do there with target acquisition or any skill acquisition and those numbers are really high um and you know so and then of course you know the fattiman studies with micro dosing where they did stuff with hulet packet and stanford engineers and they were all working on really complex hard technical problems and they had i think it was 270 percent uh incidences of breakthroughs and you know patentable fundable practical stuff well because you because earlier you had mentioned how you know animals will seek this out and how it from an evolutionary standpoint puts them at risk right they can fall out of a tree they could be out of it and get hunted or killed but it seems like there is an evolutionary potential or a reason for this even existing for us even seeking this and it may be just to spark more creativity maybe to seek out new new things look what's beyond the horizon would you say that that would be yeah i mean i clearly it seems observable you know that novelty i mean the seeking of novelty and combinations that are then useful i think i mean you could make a case that that is pretty much how most cultural innovations have happened across time now i feel like we talk about uh the board for a minute like uh are we should we fully integrate or should we avoid it at all costs like what's your opinion going forward with like artificial do we really want hive mind yeah i you know funnily enough i'm not a wild fan of singularity kind of thinking and all that kind of stuff um i'm i'm a i'm a sort of like nostalgic traditionalist like i want to like these bodies you know this lifetime this planet um and because you know as much as anything else like that's a one percenter play yeah even if elon figures out like colonies to maus and like who the hell gets to go you know not everybody you know so how comfortable is it going to be yeah exactly so so i feel i feel strongly compelling the same with like singularity and uploading consciousness and you know all that kind of stuff you're like and then what right i mean we are only going to it's like it's like you it's like leaving the bathroom you know like a public bathroom with like toilet paper stuck to your shoe you know like the shit travels with you as far as you go and and i feel like any of our efforts are only going to be as good as the consciousness we hold in the relationships we have to those acts as we enact them you know i mean and that's that's you know there's so many cautionary tales and mythology or edgar elon poe or whatever like be careful what you wish for you know and like that one just to me seems super duper that way um the fact that elon is now talking about neural nets and you know like intelligence augmentation for the humans to be able to keep pace against ai um that to me is all super interesting and curious but just who the hell knows um right and i would still say that humans in these meat suits with our lives with our relationships and we were still going to be biologically reproducing we still have children we still have partners we still have you know the desire to choose and make art or or life we still have to figure this stuff out so i think that in or regardless of what kink or turn the technological landscape shows up in the next decades a few decades like we are going to need to upgrade our nervous systems we're going to need to upgrade our consciousness and we're going to be able to be rooted enough in three dimensions that we can comfortably hold and maintain um life experience and information fees from multiple dimensions without losing our tits and so like to me that's where you can all the way full circle into radical and body cognition like let's become quantum acrobats like let's become so dialed so bruce lee so right so on the game that yeah we can hold our center dynamically in a world that is massively more complex feels like we're playing a lot of catch-up with that right we're just getting we're just understanding our body at a deeper level but it's just sort of happening meanwhile like technology is exploding so yeah it just feels like i mean how long do you think till we will we will get into that mindset where like we care just about uh you know hacking the human body as we do about like improving technology yeah i mean you know the the weird thing is it's all happening on the one hand you've got you know 73 percent of american men are obese and something like 34 percent of american children are which is just absurd and tragic especially considering how like food shortages are elsewhere in the world we pay we spend more on diet products for our fucking pets than we invest in third world and you know food relief right so on the one hand we're super crazy disembodied you know and everyone's walking around hunched over looking at their screens and all that kind of stuff and on the other end you have things like cross fit and spotting and tough matter and you have this rise of like you know peak embodiment and you've got more folks that are training harder right in those spaces than wherever i thought as much smarts in there yeah yeah so you know i i think i mean we're just seeing an acceleration and novelty in all those in all those lines you know including tech and and culture well i love when we get a mind like you in the room so we i mean we should be taking vitamins when we talk like this because i like you know i love to speculate on like we're what do you think is going to be like the most mind-blowing direction we go whether it be technology or talking about flow state what do you see in the next 10 to 20 years that i think people are going to trip out on uh i mean like the actual honest answer would be if more people if more people start actually getting into radically non altered states and start perceiving a consistent pattern on the other side of them so if you really like like we are in we are in a sort of ethnocentric backlash right now right there was there was a potential move to like we're all one and everybody's rights are equal including the most you know that the most long-tail minority group right trans gender folks or something this like a fraction of a percent of a population but like their rights became a litmus test right for and and that also became blowback for people say those aren't my people right this has gone too far i want to retrench back into a tribal identity where i feel strong and known and valued right so what gets us beyond an ethnocentric world view how do we get to global centric right which you can make a case is kind of needed right now all the complex problems that don't stop at people's borders anymore right so it doesn't matter how big you build the great wall of china like small goes over it right so so you can make and you can make a developmental case then in order to stabilize a level of cultural awareness like ethnocentric you have to know like i can't define my tribe until i've defined who's not my tribe so i have to go beyond my ethnocentric perspective to define an other in order to reaffirm who we are so how do we get to global centric you'd have to go beyond the identity of the globe so how do we get to how do we glimpse something beyond this planet you got two choices you know you can either hop on a spaceship like all those right all the early astronauts didn't look back at the little blue marble and have that transcendent experience of like holy shit we really are all one right and come back to earth and start an institute of doing speaking circuit right or we all get you know get tickets to virgin galactic right or we can do it with inner exploration so you can have an ecstasy experience that is no we're no longer astronauts we become psychonauts and by moving beyond the globe and i look a cool band yeah exactly that maybe right maybe that could happen and and so you know we shall see what unfolds in the next couple of decades but the move to a truly global centric awareness that we act on and act from based on an understanding that we are not the only game in town could be the next you think fear will stop us from getting there you think what do you think poof i mean i don't know and honestly like i don't know like for instance if the if we like if the universal game is not anthropocentric and isn't geocentric which i'd say any diabolos and high octanes psychedelics would affirm as a hell yes right so it's not all about us right it's not all about this planet exclusively so you're like maybe that maybe that consciousness or sentience or or agency is not the soul property and claim of little headless apes right you're like okay you know like that that is a mind-fuck but once it does we take ourselves and our petty divisions a lot less seriously yeah see i see i have a lot of hope because i look at the world and the world continues to get smaller as more and more people get connected and i think what we see with a lot of these you know tribal type movements is is a backlash but it but you can't stop it you know more people are connected than ever more people are sharing ideas than ever anybody can post a video on youtube and it can go viral anybody for pennies whereas before you needed you know connections and lots of money to share ideas i think it's it's moving in a direction that is good but like any major shift in you know to you know i guess collective human consciousness it's it's going to have we're going to be hitting some bumps i mean the renaissance we all you know look back at the renaissance is this great you know transformative time but it was riddled with murders who and killings and throwing people in jail and burning books and you know uh killing people for you know talking about science and i think we see that every single time but right now it's happening faster and bigger than anything that's ever happened and improved i mean i talk about the internet all the time i mean uh anybody now has access to all the information that they want yeah that's never happened before what is that going to look like moving forward i don't know we you talked about running for president earlier when you were joking you said oh i can't say anything on here because what if i you know run for president in the future but i'm gonna love you know i cannot wait to see presidential elections in 30 years i know like our everyone's gonna have shit on everybody like every you know you're gonna go to elementary school you're a dick yeah it's all recorded instagram posts for since maybe that's well maybe that's when we'll all get along when we can all see each other's porn searches and we can all see all the fucked up everybody this guy's weird like me right all the same seriously dude japanese school girls i mean come on so what is your what is your hope for the future of these these currently illicit substances that you've referenced like psilocybin like surgic acid diethylamide you know ayahuasca a lot of people talk about what is your way saying what is your take before you take them there actually i want i want you actually to explain on a neurological level if you can for me what is really the difference of like you know the like between shrooms mdm and then like lsd like really what's happening different with each one of those i try to explain it to someone i i just fucked it up completely so i couldn't wait to get someone like you on here that could probably explain that a little bit better than me sure i'm happy to do that and then we'll do a little ps a okay so i mean fundamentally psilocybin and lsd are as we talked about interact with the serotonin system predominantly so that's where you get all the interesting effects that come from those substances mdma will create it's an amphetamine base so it's a totally it's not a tryptamine it's an amphetamine so it's a different class of compounds altogether so psilocybin lsd tryptamine based molecules very very similar mdma totally different totally different and so and if you do them all you know you can tell yeah and and honestly i mean and ironically people will say oh go do molly right it's fun it's friendly it's whatever but i mean as a compound it's one of the hottest things to put in your body you know it's an amphetamine bottom line um i've heard the hangover is horrible well i mean okay so interestingly there was a harvest study that finally was able to separate what is the people talk about like suicide wednesdays or whatever after after taking mdma but a most of that's you know impure street versions like vice did a study down in south beach and and sampled molly from the top 10 bumping his clubs and only 17 percent of them contained any mdma at all not even 100 percent just any is that surprising right so so most of what people are taking is in name only but then they also realized oh the funny thing was is they this harvest study found a bunch of Mormon raver kids who didn't do anything else but pop molly so they weren't boozing they weren't getting high they weren't doing any because they were straight edge mormon kids ish doesn't say don't do molly in the bible why don't you use a girl i mean the funny thing mormon tea if you guys have ever been in the desert and seen like that plant and it was called mormon tea because when the settlers came across they would chop it up and brew it it's fucking a fedra it's it is the baseline ingredient for crystal meth and mormon tea was fine because meth not coffee all right do meth tea kids baby jesus said it's all right yeah cool that actually he hasn't put it on the list yet so we're good for a while so so mdma will basically trigger norepinephrine which is not not surprisingly given it's an amphetamine it's a stimulant and it turns me on it it releases some dopamine just get all straight up like this feels good and reward and then the real the real thing it does is it creates a dump of serotonin in your system as well but it's a dump of it it's not interacting with my receptor sites so it's your own natural serotonin just going squirting out here but now here's the thing so most people and that's what the kind of warm ooey gooey sense of safety and trust and i just can't help but want to tell you how much i really appreciate you and this other thing how great you we're great at the dancer you feel you are i sell you all your life i just want to thank you for buying us these tickets to this show because it's just so amazing that we're here right now with together no that that's serotonin and so so many people want to chase the tail of that dragon so come one o'clock at night two o'clock at night they're like hey you want to do more because they like that thing that they just felt and they want to chase it but what happened is like you've just released all the serotonin in your brain that was it taking more of it now you're just into the now you're just into the amphetamine side of it and that's when people start sucking their cheeks and chewing their teeth and all that kind of stuff because too much dopamine will give you jaw lock and it will overclock your processor so the reality is like you know yes you can potentially take five htp and some other precursors of serotonin to boost your serotonin stores ahead of time or in recovery afterwards but the bottom line is like once you've had that spike you're chasing the tail of a train that already left the station interesting yeah that was the psa kids and now lsd and salicybin how are those two different and both i guess chemical and maybe in perceived experience yeah i mean i mean you know because they're very similar when you look at them on paper they're i mean what what separates the two molecules it's like one yeah i mean i mean as far as the true molecular breakdown they are similar a number of people will tell you oh you know acid no way i only had a bad trip on acid but mushrooms are so friendly right every good trips on mushroom and i think they're just full of shit you know it's the same when people talk about i don't like we because it makes me paranoid it's like no no you got some shit to think about you just would rather not you know that's all going on already right unless you have some like crazy high octane sativa where you know don't know whether shit or go blind so like so the reality is is that any of the dosage matters and so mushrooms can be friendly and you can hang out in the trees and go walk on the beach and feel connected to mother earth and everything else or you can take a fuck ton of them and suddenly you're like in the galactic spaceships wondering what the hell you know where you took a left turn in albacakey so like you know in the same with lsd you can do micro dosing which is purely sort of therapeutic to museum dose to heroics so my sense is most people confuse urban legends with their own experiences they project onto the substances they're taking and don't claim responsibility for their own consciousness and they mistake that the wildly differing experiences you can have based on different dosages in those step functions interesting great way yeah that makes that clears up quite a bit because you do hear people say oh i like i like shrooms but i don't do acid or no acid's my favorite and i don't like to do mushrooms that much is there any research on you know somebody that would micro dose on a regular basis like is there side effects to that do you down regularly receptors by doing that on a regular basis or that's all i mean that's those are the great questions that we're literally just now getting enough of sample sizes and longitudinal studies to even begin looking at and answering and that's you know to the credit of neuropsychologists and the other researchers who always get asked about all this stuff because it's just kind of everywhere in the mainstream media in the last few years um they're always like look seems encouraging seems interesting we're not sure and you're clearly i mean anything that's going to give you a powerful benefit is there a rob peter paypall element i mean i know you know tim ferris probably two three years ago was talking about you know tdcs like you know direct current stimulation in his brain and is are there trade-offs you know you might zap your brain get a boost in something but does it come out of something else nearby and are we willing to make those trade-offs i mean i think you know at the end of it all i think biohacking in general is a fool's errand and it's going to implode out of the weight of its own self-obsession um in the next couple of years uh because the only people that are really doing it and propagating to the people selling you overpriced bottles of shit and everything else is like if you take a look at um like that whole thing new tropics and stacking blah blah blah which just everybody's just whacking themselves silly with these days you're like there's a you know placebo effect is between 30 and 40 percent right and prozac so it's just sugar pill right 30 or 40 efficacy and and to put that in in in comparison prozac clocks in the mid 40s so prozac is single digits better than sugar water right and as a multi-billion dollar blockbuster drug with tons of side effects tons of side effects so you could just take a sugar pill get none of the side effects none of the costs and be you know 70 80 percent almost as good so so then you're like okay so now what is meaningfully better than placebo that definitely delivers a result and my sense is that it doesn't you don't even get into the lowest level contenders until you're at something that requires a doctor's prescription or doctor's oversight like provigil right and then from there the things that hand down change your consciousness presumably for the better and useful ways or schedule one or schedule two substances so like between placebo and doctor's script and schedule one schedule two that's the entire bandwidth of the whole biohacking neurotropic oh world and industry and it's all just expensive pee so that so what's what's your take on all this I mean that there is definitely a major you know neutropic kick right now so it's yeah and it's just so goddamn simple it's the whole mycopolyne like eat real food mostly plants not too much like invest in your nutrients like having a balanced nutrient and mineral and electrolyte and amino acids stacking our bodies useful of course and there's no substitute for high quality whole food to get us there period you know and then also I mean just think about biohacking like I mean this is where I have an ethical issue with it which is like how much are people how much are in people's medicine cabinets or kitchen cabinets and how many dollars they consuming every day to optimize or become bulletproof or right or hack their game and you're like how many starving children could you feed every single month and just eat fruits and vegetables and clean lean meats call it good right so like at what point have we optimized ourselves up our own assholes right versus I know enough I am enough I can do enough to like take next steps well either that or the other way my bulletproof MCT yeah well the other thing you see is I feel like it's it's such a small rock and people are missing all the big rocks right you're sleeping like shit you're drinking alcohol you're 40 pounds overweight you're taking new tropics and you've got fucking MCT oil you know I mean I mean we we guide mountaineering courses in Nepal and Tibet like I drank a shit pile of smoky nasty ass yak butter tea I didn't come home and tell and sell that story about a secret the secret to fucking human performance because you know and they like our son we lived in Colorado when our son was born at 10,000 feet he and my wife participate in a high-altitude natal study and they use Tibet and they use Chile as their as their two examples and what they found was like you know this is multi- generational epigenetic adaptation much greater hemoglobin red blood cell oxygenation all these are not the fucking yak butter in the goddamn tea now come on but now why is bulletproof apeshit like those conferences are so fucking funny you get all these like yoked crossfitters and all these silicon titty peroxide blonde girls at their side and they're all so stoked because it's like people gave us permission to like consume insane amounts of caffeine and fat no it's so self-serving wow it's like the one-taste community is like you know like like like all about orgasmic meditation and what do you have you have under sex 30 to 40 something women who now have permission to get laid and not be called slutty and you have like milk toast librarian dudes on the back end of a divorce who had who had no sexual social skills since they were high school and they have a permission to ask a woman to drop their trials and fiddle their clips without getting bitch slapped get it so like that is not a healthy community who can self-police the fuck yeah well like anything beautiful it's like anything we take a little bit of truth and we turn it into this huge market where we're gonna sell you all kinds of shit well that said uh how annoyed or maybe you you know this is like flattering that like flow is like the next buzz term oh it's awful yeah i was gonna say that must be a little bit like ah no no honestly i mean i never used the goddamn word in my own life i noticed that yeah i noticed that yeah you know first rule of flow club you know it's just if we're there you could say that like this is flow i'm gonna get into flow you know playing music i'm gonna get into flow reading this book you know like i have to say that's the most refreshing thing actually to talk to you right now is that's the i think that's the fear when we we interview someone like like yourself is like you know is he gonna be like flow this flow that flow this or the word you haven't even fucking used it one time which i really appreciate that you know it's yeah because it's like bottom line matters if we're in it let's just shut the fuck in a little more and if we're not talking about isn't going to change the game so you know it's beautiful oh my god so tell me how you actually how did you get connected with uh steven how did you guys get connected how did that whole play out yeah it was it was mutual friends and we were both we were both interested in this experience steven was coming kind of from the neuroscience side and i was coming from the practice and application so for me i'd always just gone seeking you know mountains mountains music mushrooms like whatever it was like i was just interested in moments where i felt like fuck yes this is big enough and good enough that i don't have to second guess it or critique it so i was always looking for those experiences that just shut up my inner critic you know and then and then translated that into like leadership development professional training all that kind of stuff so that was the path i'd been following so together it was an interesting like here's an explanatory mechanism of how this stuff works yeah and then here's bad ass experiences that we can go do they get us there without him to talk about it now i've always what this is the first time i've actually had a chance to talk to both authors of a single book what is how does that work what's the dynamic between you guys it's not like you both sit down go i'm gonna write that sentence then you write the sentence i mean like how does that play out cover this chapter yeah yeah yeah i mean my intention because i had helped steven quite a bit with rise of superman and and when we started getting into this book i'm like dude we're okay we're not going to do it that way again so here's the deal let's create and i'm not a like rigid type a planner guy but i was like we need to architect this thing because it's a long complex lot of moving parts you gotta you gotta somebody has to be that guy exactly and and steven was hilarious i mean he would literally like a he refused to work on google doc so we didn't have real time document management so we were mailing yeah we were mailing i mean we have literally thousands of emails of back and forth versions of microsoft word then he would conveniently forget and make changes he was sabotaging he would tell me he's like you know what i mean he he he what i was doing was like deliberately like not following your stuff and deleting stuff just to see and i was like i know you were something that throttled you through the fucking phone so so between having an editor that just did not get it at all to collaborating and seeing what worked what didn't it was it was full contact sparring and we were both deeply dedicated to the book so like the end result ended up being that i think we were both hypersensitive to each other's excesses as a right as writers so we would we were so impatient or intolerant with anything that felt like a flourish or self-indulgent that i hope you know we hopefully we rung most of that out of the book and then by the end it was like okay and we could also give each other a hat tip when we got it right and so that was a really healthy dynamic tension and i think i think the book is probably tighter and more focused and more accessible to more people because we put each other through that ring it takes a lot of humility to do that who takes a lot of humility to do that for sure yeah and last year i mean i was literally i was in the airport on my final connecting flight to burning man sending him the final manuscript and i'm like here you go dude like flag stuff don't fix stuff i'm only gone for three days i will be back out don't fuck with it of course you fucked with it so i came back and it was like this back and forth to the deadline it was comedy oh my god that's fucking awesome makes more dynamic why were you guys so passionate to to write that what was your drive to do that i'll go through all that yeah i mean yeah it was it was absolutely like like bleed and die on this hill regardless like that there was no way this book could not get through so for me it was it was 20 years of living life going to grad school learning like following this threat like came across this kind of world in college and it was everything from you know windsurfing and mountain biking to psychedelics and dead and early fish shows like like what's up in the big wide world of living large and then spent my entire academic career looking for the origins and roots because it felt like what is this lineage like this is a lie this is a thing and it's showing up in this time and place in american culture etc with with all these trails and what what are all the roots of this stuff so that had been 20 years of my life i mean back to you know the ancient greeks and kaikyan and the story of al chibiades like all this stuff like whoa this feels like a hidden crazy lineage that weaves in and out of time in space and jumps continents and all these kind of things but it's alive and who are all who are all the kind of the shoulders of giants that were standing on so i wanted to communicate that story and at the same time communicate the the what feels like a wild uptick and what's going on now because i mean it was kind of bumping along through the 60s and 70s and you know and 80s when it kind of underground and not you know that kind of stuff but like what's happening now feels urgent and it feels like if enough people get this information then we have a shot at the open source revolution we talk about because otherwise it'll just get clipped like it always has why do you think there's an uptick now i mean you know at least the thesis we make in the book is that there's an intersection of psychology technology pharmacology and neuro biology and that each of those disciplines is now accelerated to a point and provided enough open access it's basically like demystifying stuff it's providing data and repeatable experiments it's cutting out the middlemen and it's making it more safer and scalable and as a result of that intersection that's the kind of genie out of the bottle moment and will you know will the gatekeepers will the state will the church right will all those entities in whatever form they take place these days will they show up and try and control modulate shut it down well hell yeah i mean you've got jeff sessions right you know willfully bending all the evidence about the opioid epidemic and saying that you know we need to clamp down on marijuana because it sends a wrong message and you're like in every state where like you've got medical access you've got decrease in car accidents decrease in fatalities decrease in overdoses because people just have at least one more slightly less all or nothing tool to manage pain you know and so you're still getting like 1980s era moralizing right in the face of evidence and so that's a backlash we didn't i mean we pretty much we had finished the book before november so what we're seeing in the last six months is a weird throwback it's on i always think of it it's like it's like when gandalf is like in the minds of moria and he like defeats that nasty ass bow rug huge monster and he done it like you shall not pass or he kicks ass and then as the thing falls down in the last minute that tail whips up right whips up snaps him around the ankle and grabs drags him into the abyss and that kind of feels what the last six months is like is like a sociocultural moment you're like this is the last goss of just frustrated old male twisted patriarchy you know just in the dead heaves and meanwhile there's a there's the party at the end of time and you know everybody else is like showing up for the for the get on yeah i i think the timing is right i think uh good luck there if they try to reverse any of these current laws that we have it's like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube it's not gonna happen and uh the it's like the public opinion is fun it's fundamentally different than it was even when i was a kid which you know wasn't too long ago right i think you know the majority of americans approve of marijuana being legalized recreationally definitely medicinally their attitudes towards drugs in general or at least the war on drugs has changed quite a bit and so you've got you know academia now talking about you know using these substances for what they're good for you've got now the general public saying hey the war on drugs has been an absolute failure and has caused nothing but death and destruction and it's all intersecting and i think i think we're going to see more changes plus we have the internet now let's be honest like uh communication happens so fast that movements that used to take decades happen in a matter of you know five years i mean i remember when uh you know barack obama ran for president in 2008 the first time he ran on a platform at going against gay marriage for example well two years later uh if you were a politician running against gay marriage you couldn't get elected and it's about even today you can't do that marijuana legalization wasn't supported by a majority of people not that long ago now it is it seems to be happening faster and faster and faster what are your uh what are your hopes for how psychedelics can be used you know do you hope it can become legalized maybe like schedule three schedule two used by by physicians and doctors do you hope it's even more unregulated i mean i don't know i honestly don't burn a lot of calories in that direction i'm glad people do um my sense would be at a minimum available in a physician or psychiatrist toolkit instead of a lot of the blunt instruments they get deployed now so for sure i mean if there were uh psychedelic and and pathogenesis and the fda is moving towards that they're moving towards approval of mdma for depression anxiety and i'm presuming following through and greenlighting the trauma practice as well so that would be that's huge um the ability to take things out of like the hopkins study with psilocybin and end-of-life patients and smoking cessation okay smoking cessation well cool um that would be interesting that kills a lot of people um and obviously under life studies for the ability to have you know what was it 30 percent of the people who took three grams of psilocybin and the hopkins study facing terminal cancer reported as the most meaningful experience of their lives and for and and the rest of the group said it was in the top five no question and there's and that perspective persisted for months and years afterwards so you're like wow if you if there's just three grams of a dried substance that can provide you the most the most meaningful experience of your life and you haven't had that then presumably you would want that so the ability i think within controlled licensed supportive context for more of this is true and then also who are we kidding right i mean medical marijuana in california basically just saturated the entire state with all forms of you know gray market access and as would those kinds of situations as well even if it's just easy script writing docs you know you would end up with a very different social structure as far as access and and permission yeah that's uh that's my hope yeah when i looked at because i had a family member who was terminal and who passed away not too long ago and to see someone in that state to actually experience it um it's it from my point of view it's criminal that you don't allow them access to anything that can alleviate some of that that pain and that terror of knowing that they're going to be that they're going to die any moment and when i read that study and saw that it alleviated a lot of the depression and fear that these people had i thought to myself like i can't believe that we've made it almost we've made it difficult to even study let alone somebody who's already going to die why not just let them try it and use it i mean they're already terminal it's a it's i believe it's absolutely uh criminal do you see athletes using these substances to improve physical performance we're talking a lot about mental performance but what about like a fighter or uh you know someone working out you know lifting weights or extreme sports extreme sports yeah i mean there's a huge underground scene in extreme an extreme like mountain culture of psychedelics and rad shit in the mountains i think the people people drawing some kind of incentives yeah some people might say they're just drawn to doing crazy shit but yes but but i mean the ideas i mean you know back in the 80s it would be like let's go bump some lines in a plane and go jump out of you know jump out and go skydiving that was that was like my friend's brother in miami you know i was like you guys are crazy bastards but like the idea of like can we be in big complex gorgeous awe-inspiring natural environments and do we have enough core baseline skills to not be doing something stupid which is key prerequisite and good pattern recognition good habits good systems all those kind of things and now are we going to augment with psychedelics not to the point of like reducing my motor function and decision making but to enhance it um that is a time tested thing from yosemite camp four you know to to maui to tele ride and jackson um and seven shades of fucking awesome so you know i mean like anything you can do right high can do better you know somebody has can we make a shirt can we make that shirt please write that down that's definitely a mind-blowing children's novel actually speaking of children uh jim you have children right yeah uh what are the ages 15 and 17 okay so how do you how do you talk about this stuff to kids because i know we have listeners that are probably very interested in all this and then also have children and then wondering how do i talk about this or communicate this to them and they're probably at good ages to talk about this how do you communicate that yeah i mean our son is i think he's much more um kind of at that stage in phase um our daughter's like you will not take me to burning man i will run away i am not going and our son's like yeah when's it on do i get to miss school bonus um so i mean what we try and say is like you know back to the cognitive literacy thing like understand what makes you tick you know we understand your sexuality understand your moods mood swings and cycles understand what options and choices you have available to you to shift your state um and do it responsibly do it in context do it in service not like out to like slam down forties in the parking lot of a shopping mall you know like like if you're gonna do it um contextualize it um and you know certainly in advocacy would make us sacralize it like make it meaningful you know and make it respectful um and and integrate these things these are part of life like we do need to talk about religion we do need to talk about addiction we do need to talk about depression i was gonna say these like prerequisites that you would go over yeah yeah yeah and first fundamentally just literacy like i mean and we were having him take a wilderness emt course this summer when he turns 18 so like understand the mechanics of like how do our bodies work and how to fix people because you know like you're gonna need this whether you're guiding or whether you're doing what else and like be responsible like be responsible and learn learn the prerequisites i fully agree with that approach is if you when they do studies on binge drinking for example alcohol they find that cultures that incorporate alcohol as part of the meal and where the child uh you know 13 or 14 year olds can have a little sip and it's not a big deal they're not treating it like it's this you know taboo substance binge drinking is far far lower as a percentage in those cultures and in cultures like this one where we demonize we tend to demonize things you know and so you see kids that go try it for the first time and it's like once you cross that line now i'm gonna go crazy um i guess the same way you would talk about sex or anything well especially when you've been told as a kid your whole life that oh this is bad this is bad this is bad and then the first time you try as a kid you're like shit this is not bad my ears didn't fall off yeah right this is actually really fun i didn't grow hair on my palms what are you talking about that's why right that's uh absolutely yourself so what's next on the on the horizon yeah well i mean obviously uh you know following the the wild ride of this book and it and landing in the world and lots of kind of feedback coming back what we're what we're rolling out next is the flagship flow dojo so embodied cognitive training center so series of gd zig domes that are equal parts x games meets suck to slay meets burning one whoa itself hold on a second dude are we in by keep going this is great so so like fundamentally just transformation chambers so like by day it's all just dynamic play and physical training and by night turns like function one sound system like full-on projection mapping like mothership nightclub throw down like hot tub sensory deprivation integration tanks like hyper vitality bar with like omeroma therapy oxygen hookahs and like kava and peppers and chocolate like all things that like stimulates you and then like bungee's foam pits balance board slack lines you know everything for i-hand i-body i-foot coordination just like train up super humans and so that when you have these next peak experiences you're not spilling out of your cup you've upgraded your nervous system you've upgraded your fuses and right and you're wiring so you can you can juice it and then hold it and not blow out the top so like that's amazing and then we you know and then with that um that'll be likely the end of july in in utah we're gonna be doing a pop-up version of that we're also doing an angel raise right now to actually be doing the long-term permanent one and then we do um deep dive expeditions so down in the utah canyons for six days with ultralight packs and you go through a level of human consciousness every every single day so like you make your way up the spiral of human consciousness with like a Harvard psychological assessment or like saltwater fly fishing and kite surfing with pro ski years or pro athletes learning neuroscience learning flow and then going and doing it so it's it's an amazingly cool fun community of people that come to play with this stuff are you looking to make any of these places like permanent instead of the pop-up yes so we actually have some good friends that have just bought 300 acres of land in big set and oh cool that's pretty close yeah we're gonna be building like a completely rad super high end training facility for fortune hundred execs or like helicoptering them in from the valley coming in rocking their world so bad it's in our backyard yeah and summit and summit powder mountain in utah which is where we'd be looking to do like our permanent flagship wow wow what's the way what's the projected date on this to be finished well we're going to do an event so fundamentally a week long pop-up event the end of july beginning of august this year and then we want to be funding and building out the permanent version there and within the you know within the following year yeah that's exciting any more books yeah the next one's going to be called recapture the rapture end of time stellar minds oh yeah that's a very clever hell yeah are you collaborating or by yourself that one's gonna be so low yep excellent the collaboration is really with my wife she's my life partner and where most of this stuff's coming from so which are you would you mind going into a little bit of it or you want to keep it no happy to i mean most people's complaint about stealing fire was i thought this was going to be a how-to like in the last chapter is very much like the beginnings of the how-to yeah getting in the hedonic calendar and things like that all that stuff so it would be unpacking that i mean it would a it would be literally like the original premise of that title is why is it that all the craziest fuckers on the planet are like hogging the mic about how the end of days goes down right like like there's all these good people that are having legit experiences when i help want to solve when i want to do stuff and then you've just got wingnut fundamentalist of every stripe right who have hijacked the notion of they get the last word so like why not have the the stellar minds thing is why not have people who are deliberately cultivating ecstasies in their own lives and in their own communities who have good positive things to say and do let's give them some of the spotlight and oh by the way here's the gorilla tantra here's how you actually blow yourself sky high with like nobody needs to talk about their feelings okay that's that's my urge spool off yeah i can't wait for that one well hey man thanks for going on yeah we're gonna have to have you back for sure after that yeah excellent awesome yeah listen listeners go to mind pump media dot com we're still offering 30 days of coaching for free also check us out on instagram at mind pump radio you can find my page at mind pump sal adam at mind pump adam and justin at mind pump justin thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted rgb super bundle at mind pump media dot com the rgb super 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