Dr. Andrew Weil ON: How to Use Foods to Fight Inflammation & Scientific Ways to Spark Your Creativity

You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon. Today, let’s welcome Dr. Andrew Weil, a world renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine. Combining a Harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive medicine, Dr. Weil is the founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he is a clinical professor of medicine and professor of Public Health. A New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Weil is the author of 15 books on health and wellbeing. He is also the founder and partner in the growing family of True Food Kitchen Restaurants. Dr. Weil's current project includes matcha.com, bringing the world's best matcha to the West. Dr. Weil talks about the benefits of integrative medicine to help treat the mind, body, and soul. He also shares his expertise on the common causes of inflammation, how to combat cognitive decline, natural remedies to keep the mind active and relaxed at the same time, and the superfoods that we should incorporate more into our daily diet. What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 03:20 Do you know the first rule of healthy eating? 07:24 Dr. Weil shares some of the superfoods we can incorporate in our daily meals. 11:52 The amazing growth of matcha tea worldwide. 16:52 Let’s talk about the green mediterranean diet. 18:07 Did you know that cooking oils are processed differently? 24:47 Let’s talk about cannabis and its medicinal use. 30:41 This is how cannabis preparation has drastically changed over the years. 36:17 What are psychedelics and how can one have a positive experience with it? 42:02 Minimizing the risks and increasing the potential benefits of psychedelics. 44:36 Dr. Weil on empathogens and the promising results of this type of psychedelic. 48:10 Is there a spiritual potential to psychedelics? 51:16 The most common effects and benefits of psilocybin. 53:44 Another psychedelic variation we can learn more about. 59:05 This is what you should stop drinking alcohol 01:01:21 Let’s talk about the book: Chocolate to Morphine 01:03:33 There is a wide range of mind-body interventions and its possible connection to spirituality. 01:07:18 Born with the fascination of the mind and body wellness Episode Resources Dr. Andrew Weil | Website Dr. Andrew Weil | Twitter Dr. Andrew Weil | Instagram Dr. Andrew Weil | Facebook Dr. Andrew Weil | YouTube Dr. Andrew Weil | Books https://matcha.com/ Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Amtrak. You know that feeling when you're already tired and you haven't even gotten there yet? That's where Amtrak comes in. Leave the driving behind and settle into a comfortable seat with plenty of room to stretch out. Catch up on work with wifi, grab a snack at the cafe car, or just sit back and enjoy your favourite podcast. Choose a cellar or North East Regional and get there without the stress of getting there. Visit amtrak.com to plan your next trip.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 1:00Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1. Are you feeling September reset too? Shorter days, longer to-do lists, earlier alarms, all those routines you promised yourself you'd pick back up, it can feel like your whole life is recalibrating. And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs.

• 1:42Jay Shetty?

  And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements and is clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/OnPurpose. That's drinkag1.com/OnPurpose.

• 2:08Jay Shetty?

  Literally, if you turn any packet around, everything is canola oil, palm oil.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Well, palm oil, aside from all the environmental effects, which are terrible. Although the fatty acid profile is okay, most of the commercially produced canola oil is heavily contaminated with agrochemicals. And it's extracted with heat and solvents, and that denatures the oil and creates carcinogenic products.

• 2:38Jay Shetty?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to become healthier, happier and more healed. And I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eightrulesoflove.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book.

• 3:21Jay Shetty?

  And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, Love Rules. Go to jayshettytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences and more. I can't wait to see you this year. Now, you know that I'm a curious person who wants to learn more and more about our mind, our body, our health, and tools and techniques that can improve that for us. And I like sitting down with individuals who've dedicated their lives and their life's work to understanding what can improve the lives of others. Today's guest is someone I've been really looking forward to having on the show. I know you'll be really excited as well. We're going to be talking about a wide array of subjects, but I'm going to give you really practical,

• 4:05Jay Shetty?

  insightful tips and tools that you can put into your life and day immediately to make an impact. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Wilde, a world-renowned leader and pioneer.

• 4:18Jay Shetty?

  In the field of integrative medicine, combining a Harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive medicine, Dr. Wile is the founder and director of the Andrew Wiles Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he is a clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health. A New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Wile is the author of 15 books on health and well-being. Dr. Wile is also the founder and partner in the growing family of True Food Kitchen Restaurants. Dr. Wile's current project include matcha.com, bringing the world's best matcha to the West. I am so excited to welcome Dr. Andrew Wile. Andrew, thank you for being here.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  I'm delighted to be here.

• 5:05Jay Shetty?

  Very excited to learn from you about a subject matter that has so much, as we were talking about briefly before, has no insight, bad insight. You know, I feel people are underserved in this space. And so, so let's dive straight in. The first thing I wanted to ask you and dive into you with was this, was this thought around, what are the diet and lifestyle habits people need to do every day to live longer, healthier, and prevent cognitive decline?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Well, you know, that's fairly simple. The first rule of healthy eating is to avoid refined processed and manufactured food. You know, that's what's doing us in. And I'm one of the first people to have begun talking about the importance of containing inappropriate inflammation. And I have developed an anti-inflammatory diet based on the Mediterranean diet, but I added Asian influences to that because I've spent a lot of time in Asia and there are things there like mushrooms and turmeric and tea that I find very useful. But we, it really looks, there's more and more evidence that chronic low-level inappropriate inflammation is the root cause of most of the serious diseases that do people in prematurely. So containing inflammation is very important

• 6:22Speaker 02

  and diet has a major influence there. But again, the first step of an anti-inflammatory diet is to try to eliminate refined processed and manufactured foods. In terms of other lifestyle practices,

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Basic ones, maintain physical activity throughout life, get good rest and sleep, learn and practice some methods of neutralizing the harmful effects of stress on the mind and the body, maintaining good relationships, especially spending time with people in whose company you feel more positive. I mean, those are very simple steps. As for cognitive decline, this is of great concern to many people, you know, because we all know people who have experienced cognitive decline and we want to avoid that. So I think two very practical pieces of advice. One is don't get hit in the head, and that may mean, you know, taking precautions if you're doing hazardous activities and being,

• 7:18Speaker 02

  you know, I don't recommend that people play American football, for example. And another is don't smoke, because nicotine constricts blood vessels, reduces blood flow to the brain. So those are two simple steps. I think also I recommend practices like doing word puzzles to keep your mind active, learning another language. You don't have to master the language, just the attempt to learn it is very useful. So those are some pieces of practical information.

• 7:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I think you've given us a beautiful spectrum of things to focus on there. And I think I definitely, in my life, try and tackle one of those areas every year.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Good.

• 7:59Jay Shetty?

  Because I feel that they're so big in and of themselves, and my biggest mistake in the past was when I tried to change.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Everything.

• 8:07Jay Shetty?

  Everything, all at the same time. You're trying to improve your relationship, you're trying to improve your gut, you're trying to improve your workout regime. And so I love what you're saying, that there's all these things. And I would list, everyone who's listening and watching, please try to choose one thing that you're going to try to deeply improve this year, that you feel is the one you're struggling with the most, that may be having the most negative impact on you, because you'll start to see how they all affect each other.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't have, you don't have to wait a year, however. I have a book called Eight Weeks Stop Some Health, which is a program.

• 8:38Jay Shetty?

  There we go.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Each week, you know, you do something, like you start by walking 10 minutes a day, and each week you add, you know, five minutes to that.

• 8:45Jay Shetty?

  There we go.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  But I think you're quite right, that a big mistake that people make is to try to do global change, and then they give up. So I think it's best to take it in small bites.

• 8:55Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, let's dive into some of those because I think they're easier said than done. So what you just spoke about with diet, that's something that I've genuinely been focusing on probably for the past 12 months in terms of not eating any packaged foods and refined sugars and um processed foods. And so I'm eating only natural foods. I'm I'm already plant based in my diet. Uh but making sure that I'm eating vegetables and trying to avoid anything that's out of a packet. It's easier said than done. It took a lot of time for me to kind of move in that direction. I had to find a meal prep service. I have an amazing wife who's an incredible cook and chef. And so that helps, um you know, a million times over. For people that are trying to make simple steps to changing specifically their diet to an anti-inflammatory diet.

• 9:41Jay Shetty?

  What are certain simple steps people can take? The eight week version almost.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I in the in the book, I said, learn how to be friendly with broccoli. Broccoli is a very easy vegetable to cook. But most many people overcook it and it's not very appetizing. And there's a very simple way of cooking it for about two minutes. Uh so it's bright green and crunchy. Put some olive oil on it, garlic if you want. Uh but that's a wonderful powerhouse vegetable with cancer protective effects. Uh add some berries to your diet because they're full of antioxidants. Uh we talked about, I mentioned tea. I think tea is a very healthful beverage. It's one of the main sources of protective antioxidants. Uh I think it's good to learn different types of tea and and how to add that, find which ones you like.

• 10:24Jay Shetty?

  What specific teas have you found to have those benefits?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Well, I'm a big fan of green tea because I've spent a lot of time in Japan and particularly matcha green tea, which I think is, you know, has the highest levels of some of these protective elements in them. Uh but I think all tea is beneficial. When I was doing research on healthy aging, I made a number of trips to Okinawa, which at the time that I was doing it, had the highest concentration of centenarians in the world. And one of the uh things that I observed there was that in very hot weather, people were drinking cold unsweetened turmeric tea.

• 10:57Jay Shetty?

  Mmm.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Delicious. And uh you know, in North America, people are really unfamiliar with turmeric, except as a as it occurs in yellow mustard and and curry. Uh, but this form of turmeric in Okinawa was fermented and which makes it more bioavailable and tastier. It dissolves very quickly in cold water. It's really delicious. So that's one that that I recommend, you know, learning how to get more turmeric into your diet. It's the most powerful anti-inflammatory agent, natural anti-inflammatory agent that we know.

• 11:28Jay Shetty?

  Wow. Yeah. Turmeric is a big part of the Indian diet. So

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Indians eat it.

• 11:32Jay Shetty?

  I was exposed to it since I was a kid.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Indians eat it at every meal.

• 11:34Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  And, you know, one of the interesting correlations, India, I think rural India especially, has the lowest rate of Alzheimer's disease in the world. And many researchers think that's related to the regular consumption of turmeric because Alzheimer's begins as inflammation in the brain. And there's some animal research showing that turmeric can protect rats that are genetically programmed to develop Alzheimer's from developing it. So I think turmeric is a very good thing to become friendly with.

• 12:01Jay Shetty?

  That's, that's a great insight. I love that story of going to Okinawa. I went to Sardinia a few years ago.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Ah, well, that's one of the healthy, healthy Asian places.

• 12:10Jay Shetty?

  Correct. Yeah, one of the blue zones.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And what's interesting, I want to hear what you saw there, but the, you know, if you go to these areas around the world where there are unusual concentrations of very healthy old people, women outnumber men by a long shot. You know, when you get up in the ranges of upper nineties, hundreds, it's almost all women. Sardinia is the one exception, that there, men and women are equally in those ranks of the oldest old, and we don't know why.

• 12:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah. I was really fascinated to see the few things, and it's, and it's all on the spectrum of things you mentioned. But what was really interesting is that their workouts were natural.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 12:47Jay Shetty?

  They were farming, they were walking, they were taking care of the land.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Same in Okinawa. They were hauling fishing nets and gardening. I saw a, I think a hundred and two-year-old woman who was hoeing the garden in front of her house. So they're not going to gyms, they're not working with trainers. It's just daily activity.

• 13:03Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. And then the other thing was that they were eating foods only in season. So everything was picked locally, everything was locally grown or locally found, and they weren't eating things that were just artificially available.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  And what about social connectedness?

• 13:18Jay Shetty?

  I mean, that was a big part of it. I mean, people were living in bigger families or living closer by to families with children. So children weren't just being raised by two people, but by 10 people. And every evening and even during the middle of the day, they would get together and.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  I think that's very important. The MacArthur Foundation some years ago did a study of successful aging. They identified a population of people they considered successful agers. And then they looked to see what were the outstanding commonalities. And the two that stood out, and this dwarfed everything else, whether they took supplements, whether they, you know, dietary patterns. The two were maintenance of physical activity throughout life and maintenance of social intellectual connectedness.

• 14:01Jay Shetty?

  I want to dive into two things that you mentioned earlier, and I want to dive into them deeply because I think, again, they're buzzwords. People know about them, but I'd like people to really understand the benefits. So let's talk about matcha because that's your favorite daily plant.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:13Jay Shetty?

  An ally which you say has this incredible mind body benefit. I think it has already seeped its way into mainstream culture.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Quite amazing.

• 14:20Jay Shetty?

  But, but yeah.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  I went to Japan when I was 17 and lived with families, one family outside of Tokyo. And this was 1959, Japan was a very different place. And the second night that I was there, my host mother, we had no language in common, took me next door to her neighbor who practiced tea ceremony. So the three of us sat around and the neighbor did a tea ceremony and presented me with a bowl of matcha. And two things about it totally caught my attention. One was the color.

• 14:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  You know, this vibrant green and the other was the bamboo whisk that you use to whisk the the matcha tea into a froth. In a bowl of water, it's carved from a single piece of bamboo, just a miracle of Japanese craftsmanship. So I I fell in love with matcha. When I got back to the States, nobody knew anything about it or ever heard of it. Uh, over the years, when I was go to Japan, I'd bring matcha back and I turned people on to it. I tried, starting in the 1980s, I partnered with a Japanese company to try to sell it on my website. There was no market for it. I did that again in the 1990s. Anyway, it's quite amazing now to see this, you know, penetrating our culture. Matcha is prepared in a very unique way.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  The tea plants are heavily shaded for three weeks before harvest. And 90% shade cloth, so it cuts out almost all sunlight. In response to that, the leaves get bigger and thinner and produce more chlorophyll, trying to take advantage of what light is there. And they also produce more antioxidants and flavor compounds and this amino acid L-theanine that has a calming effect and moderates the action of caffeine. So for that reason, matcha, I think, is more healthful than other forms of tea. And also, you consume the whole leaf, not just an infusion of it. So that's one that I'm quite enthusiastic about. And I started a company. We got the URL matcha.com, which was a great tool.

• 16:17Jay Shetty?

  Genius. When did you get that URL? I'm fascinated. Did you have to buy it recently? Or you've had it for like, yes?

• 16:22Speaker 02

  No, it's like six or seven years. We tracked it down. It was owned by a Japanese man who had no idea what he had. He had, if you went to the site, he had pictures of his cats. And my business partner, Andre Fasiola, managed to negotiate with him and we got it at a quite reasonable price. People in Japan can't believe we've got that. Anyway, we import very high-quality matcha. And by the way, if your listeners use a discount code J, we'll give them a very generous discount.

• 16:52Jay Shetty?

  I love that. There you go.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  So I'm a big fan of matcha. I'm delighted to see that getting traction. However, a lot of the matcha here is not very good because it's such a fine powder that unless it's carefully protected, it oxidizes very quickly, loses its brilliant green color, becomes bitter. And many people have tried matcha and say, they don't like it, but they've never tasted good matcha. So, as I said, I think a lot of research has been done on green tea in particular, but all tea has beneficial effects. And frankly, you know, I don't want to bash coffee, but I would love to see more of a tea culture develop here.

• 17:30Jay Shetty?

  Me too, I'm a big tea fan.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  I know. So coffee, you know, the the stimulant effects of coffee and tea are very different. Coffee is much more jangling, it it is much more associated with truly addictive behavior. There's a real crash coming down from coffee. You don't see any of that with tea. And some of it is because of this modifying effect of of L-theanine. But also, I find it interesting that the historically and culturally, the associations with coffee. Coffee was always associated with kind of argumentative behavior, loud, raucous gatherings of people, political activism, whereas tea, the historical associations are much more with contemplation, meditation.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  I think it would be very beneficial to see a greater tea culture develop in North America, you know, that could work its way into some of the coffee culture that's now so dominant.

• 18:25Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, when me and my wife launched our tea company, we said we wanted to make tea as hot as coffee, like that was the goal, because, yeah, we we grew up with tea culture, both from our British and Indian heritage.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 18:37Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I found it so therapeutic. I I, like you, love the color.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:41Jay Shetty?

  Love the scent.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:42Jay Shetty?

  Love the experience of having to drink it slow. You don't really have tea on the go.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 18:47Jay Shetty?

  There's a meditative.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:49Jay Shetty?

  Process within, a healing property to it.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And it's a big change. When I was growing up, tea was what old people and sick people drank in this country. And it's wonderful to see that change now.

• 19:00Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, absolutely. And the other one that I wanted to ask you about was the the green Mediterranean diet.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yes, this is interesting. It's just recently been in the news. You know, we have so much scientific evidence for the benefits of the Mediterranean diet in terms of of longevity, overall lowest risks of disease. And I think most of your listeners are familiar with the Mediterranean diet. You know, it's heavily on fruits and vegetables and whole grains, olive oils, I mean, cooking fat, meat used very occasionally, oily fish, relatively low in sugar, so forth. So recently, a green Mediterranean. Diet is proposed as being even healthier. And this reduces animal products even further. Increases fruits and vegetables, especially sources of a class of compounds called polyphenols.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  And these are antioxidant compounds that are found in plants and fruits, vegetables, especially berries, tea and dark chocolate. So the green Mediterranean diet specifically recommended green tea to add. And they noted chocolate, but they mentioned all tea. So I think this is fascinating, you know, to see. And these are researchers really, you know, not really trying to promote any agenda.

• 20:15Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, has your work led to any of the research that I'm recently seeing around like canola oil, palm oil and the negative harmful effects versus what now I'm only eating in is avocado oil and olive oil.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:28Jay Shetty?

  As my primary.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  There's one other that you should check out is algae oil, if you don't know about that.

• 20:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  This is a new product that's out there. And it's it's made through culture. It's called cultured oil and it's it's microorganisms that have been been altered in to produce oil, which is almost all mono unsaturated fat, is has a very high smoke point, neutral taste, and also has one of the omega three fatty acids in it. So that's another choice, but those are the ones I use also avocado and olive.

• 21:00Jay Shetty?

  And what are some of the harmful effects of the canola palm oil that? Because they're pretty much literally, if you turn any packet around, everything is canola oil, palm oil.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Well, palm oil, aside from all the environmental effects, which are terrible. There are two kinds of palm oils. There's an oil extracted from the fruit of the oil palm, which is red and is used in Africa as a cooking oil and is okay, but we rarely see that. And then there's the oil extracted from the kernel. And that is very high in in unstable unsaturated fatty acids that oxidize quickly. It's also very high in saturated fat. So that's not a good one. Canola oil. Is a, you know, the word means Canadian oil and it was developed by Canadian scientists. Uh, I think in the nineteen twenties or nineteen thirties from a traditional cooking oil that you know in India. Rapeseed oil.

• 21:54Jay Shetty?

  Uh huh. Yes, and that's another.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Right. And rape has a toxic fatty acid in it possibly. The Canadian scientists. Uh, worked with it to develop one that was low in that, in that fatty acid. Uh, problems with canola oil, although the fatty acid profile is okay. Um, most of the commercially produced canola oil is heavily contaminated with agrochemicals. And it's extracted with heat and solvents and that denatures the oil. And creates carcinogenic products. So it's one I would stay away from now. I, I recommended it in the past, but I don't anymore. I'm a big fan of olive oil.

• 22:29Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, everyone cook, cook with olive oil.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  By the way, I've taught, you know, I, I've, I've worked with a number of Indian patients. Um, you know, who were very convinced that ghee can do no harm. You know, and it's pure butter fat and it's probably not healthy and the rates of cardiovascular disease in India are pretty high. And I've taught people to, uh, use ghee as a flavoring, you know, cook with a healthy oil like avocado. And then at the end you can drizzle some ghee over to get the flavor you want.

• 22:58Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  And I've also suggested, I had a, a, a student, a physician from Kerala. Uh, where coconut, you know, are, it's the land of coconuts and they use, uh, uh, coconut oil and coconut. Have full fat coconut milk and I taught her to use cashew milk. Which is very easy to make and it's much healthier fat than, than coconut. It's mono unsaturated, not saturated and the taste is delicious.

• 23:24Jay Shetty?

  Wow, that's good to know about ghee cause yeah, it's, it's one of those things that my mom never wants me to miss.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Right, I know.

• 23:30Jay Shetty?

  Then I always hear this like.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:32Jay Shetty?

  In between, but I like, I like the, uh.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, use it as a flavoring at the end.

• 23:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, I like the happy medium, the happy balance. That makes, she'll be happy to hear about the turmeric.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Good.

• 23:41Jay Shetty?

  That's like, and saffron's the other one. She's like, never telling me to miss.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  And that's a good one.

• 23:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  But the turmeric, you know, our company also sells that ferment of turmeric from Okinawa and we'll send you some to try.

• 23:51Jay Shetty?

  Please, I love that.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Delicious.

• 23:53Jay Shetty?

  That sounds amazing.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Really good.

• 23:55Jay Shetty?

  This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes, life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed, or like you're not showing up the way you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Life can be overwhelming sometimes, and it's easy to feel out of control. But talking to a professional can help you understand what you're currently feeling and how to navigate stressful moments. And if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist,

• 24:37Jay Shetty?

  and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. You really don't need a big reason to go to therapy. In therapy, you can learn coping skills, how to set healthy boundaries, self-empowerment, and how to deal with trauma. And most especially, therapy can help you manage life's challenges and live a fulfilling life. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. To see my top three reasons why you should try online therapy, visit betterhelp.com/jestop3. That's better, H E L P, dot com, forward slash jestop3, and get 10% off your first month of online therapy when you sign up.

• 25:20Jay Shetty?

  These days, job seekers want more. Everything from remote working conditions to an easier application process. Sometimes it can be hard to stand out to job seekers. How can you break through the clutter and attract the most qualified candidates for your business? ZipRecruiter. And right now, you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/onpurpose. There are a bunch of ways ZipRecruiter helps you stand out to the right candidates. ZipRecruiter's technology sends you great candidates for your job, and you can send a personal invite to your top choices to make an impact. ZipRecruiter also makes it easy for candidates to apply to your job. In fact, they can apply with one click. Plus, ZipRecruiter offers attention-grabbing labels

• 26:05Jay Shetty?

  Like urgent, training provided, remote and more that will catch the eye of quality candidates. Hiring has never been easier with ZipRecruiter. With ZipRecruiter, I'm sure that I can find great and qualified candidates simply and quickly. Get your job noticed by the best and brightest candidates with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself, go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free. ZipRecruiter.com/OnPurpose. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com/Onpurpose. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.

• 26:49Jay Shetty?

  It's fascinating. You you mentioned earlier, uh, limiting the smoking of cigarettes and the negative effects of nicotine. What about when it comes to marijuana? I think that, you know, marijuana is such an interesting topic for so many people today. There is, there are so many perspectives, most of them out there are like positive, but I'd love to know from your perspective, how are you seeing marijuana affect the brain? How are you seeing marijuana affect the actual?

• 27:12Speaker 02

  First of all, I'm gonna call, I'm gonna call it cannabis because the word marijuana has negative connotations. So, uh, let's talk about cannabis.

• 27:20Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, sure.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  So I, I, I did the first controlled human experiments with cannabis in nineteen, geez, nineteen sixty-four. Uh, it was the first time anyone had given that to, uh, human subjects in a controlled fashion to see what it did. So it's a plant that I've been involved with for some time. And let me say, you know, this is also a plant very well known in India. It's, you know, native to, uh, the, to Asia.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  The word, uh, it's, the main species cannabis, sativa, the sativa means useful. And cannabis is hemp, it's the same root as canvas because canvas all used to be made from hemp fiber. But it, this is a very useful plant. It provides, uh, an edible seed, an edible oil, a fiber, a medicine and an intoxicant. That's a lot of ways for one plant. You know, to to serve us, and it really only wants to serve us. And I think we have really not been wise in the way we've dealt with that plant. So in terms of the intoxicating properties of cannabis, this is it's a difficult subject to talk about because the chemistry of that plant is so complex.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  There are so many different strains and there's so much variation in individual reaction to it. You know, there are people who can smoke cannabis before bed and have a great night's sleep. Other people smoke it before bed and they can't sleep the entire night. So there's that kind of disparity in reactions to it. First of all, that it is one of the least toxic drugs that we know. You can't kill people with it, and you can't say that about any drug that we use in medicine. And every drug has a lethal dose, and in some cases, the lethal dose is relatively close to the useful dose. You can't calculate a lethal dose for cannabis. So on a physical level, it's extremely safe. I mean, there's concerns about smoking it and whether that's how harmful that may be for lungs.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  You know, that goes back and forth. I don't think it's a great idea to smoke anything. You know, and inhale smoke into the lungs, probably not a good idea.

• 29:21Jay Shetty?

  Okay.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  But certainly not as, I think, not as toxic as tobacco, and it doesn't have anything in it as addictive as nicotine, which is one of the most addictive drugs that we know. Um, I I think the medical usefulness of cannabis, there's a lot of potential there. Um, and I think this is a subject that's open at the moment. You know, there's a lot of research on ways it can reduce muscle spasticity. It can help people with, um, you know, all sorts of of neuromuscular problems, with digestive problems, but again, a lot of individual reaction to it. Uh, we're seeing this plant, you know, being made available to people.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Uh, and it's it's, I think it's about time that it gets out of that restrictive drug schedule and made available for therapeutic use. I was just talking yesterday, um, our center does a podcast and I was interviewing a nurse who was a who was a member of the American Cannabis Nurses Association. I didn't know there was such a thing. But there is a large group of nurses who have now become trained in using cannabis therapeutically.

• 30:28Jay Shetty?

  In what form? Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  They use all different forms and they base that on the individual patient. But I think they're in a much better position to do this than physicians because there's no cannabis preparation out there that most doctors are going to feel comfortable using. And until we have something like that, I don't think doctors are going to go near it. They don't understand it. But it's great that nurses are using, a lot of them are using it for pain control. They're also using it in hospice situations, especially with people with terminal cancer. And they say they find it very useful. So I think it's, you know, I'm happy to see this becoming used. I think there's a lot we don't know about it. And I find it very difficult when people ask my advice about it. I don't know what preparations to recommend to people.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  You know, it's confusing.

• 31:17Jay Shetty?

  What's your take on the more social use of it?

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Well, I was, you know, I was part of that culture in my twenties and thirties. And, you know, it was, it was, it was fun back then, you know, it was a fun, social experience, you know, and then I also found that it was very stimulated my imagination, creativity, helped me write. But at some point that changed and it, my reactions to it changed. I became more introspective, withdrawn, and then eventually it became an unproductive habit that just made me groggy and it was hard for me to separate myself from it.

• 31:52Jay Shetty?

  So what was that? Yeah, what do you think that was? Because I think that's, that's such an interesting arc of a journey with it. I think a lot of people feel that way. That's kind of like an arc. I had a lot of friends who initially started for those reasons and then ended up paranoid or ended up confused or ended up lethargic.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I don't know, maybe, you know, maybe it has something to do with changes as we age, possible. But it was such a striking change in the effects for me. You know, so something that I thought of as an ally that was helping me really ceased being that.

• 32:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. That's, that's really interesting to know because yeah, I feel, I had a lot of friends in the same bucket. I never really, um. I never really dabbled with it deeply, but but in in my brief experiences, it was far very brief experiences, it was far more the creative or the spark, but it I never got deep into it, but my friends who did, they they went on the same arc.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  So that's interesting, and I don't know that I have not seen anyone write about that or talk about that or investigate what the cause of that is.

• 32:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Also, you know, today, the preparations of cannabis that are out there are much, much stronger than those that were available when I was using it way back.

• 32:59Jay Shetty?

  You mean the ones that are available from a leisure perspective?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, from everywhere. Well, I'll tell you a story. A physician colleague of mine in San Francisco sent me three preparations of cannabis that had come from a medical dispensary, and he wanted me to try them. And I was, you know, I'm a little leery about that since I'm, you know, haven't used it in so long. One of them was a kind of oil that was in a tube, a little syringe, and it came with a very professionally printed brochure. And it was recommending it for pain control especially. And it said to start with a a amount the size of a grain of rice and work up from there. So I took a piece half the size of a grain of rice, and my friend said, take it at bedtime. Took it at

• 33:44Speaker 02

  bedtime, went to sleep, woke up about an hour later in full blown delirium with hallucinations as vivid as those I've had from using LSD. I couldn't move. I had no equilibrium, had burning thirst. I couldn't reach for a glass of water. I couldn't call for help. And it kept coming on stronger and stronger. And I had no idea when this was going to end. And I had to use all the tricks that I've learned in meditation and breath control to keep myself centered. And when when it finally subsided about eight hours later, my equilibrium was off for two days. I had very bad balance. And I was really angry. I mean, and this brochure said, work up from there. And I'm thinking there are people out there, you

• 34:25Speaker 02

  know, taking this. I mean, that was like a very, very powerful thing. And I thought fairly dangerous.

• 34:33Jay Shetty?

  What what brought you into this so early on? Because we're at a point in culture, I feel, where these things are now coming to the forefront. I mean, of course, I'm probably sure you're seeing cycles of that. You probably saw it come.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Well, I was, you know, I I'm just starting work on a book about psychedelics and I'm a lot of it. I'm telling my own history because I knew everyone involved in all of that. But my interest goes back to about, I think it was, I can a specific day in nineteen sixty, right before I went to Harvard. And there was an article in the newspaper in Philadelphia about the supposedly the death of a student at a California university who was taking mescaline for inspiration for a creative writing course. And it said mescaline was a vision inducing drug. I'd never heard of it. And and they made the mistake of quoting from his last paper. And I just remember this phrase galaxies of exploding colors. When I read that, I knew

• 35:30Speaker 02

  I wanted mescaline. So I I inquired about it. I came across Aldous Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception, which had been written a few years before. And when I got to Harvard, I had the very good fortune to become associated with Richard Evan Schultes, who was the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum. And he had been one of the great explorers of the Amazon and discovered a lot of hallucinogenic plants down there. So he really, through him, I became very interested in psychedelic plants. At the same time, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary were just starting their work with psilocybin at Harvard. There were, you know, these drugs

• 36:12Speaker 02

  were not controlled substances then. I was able to obtain mescaline from a chemistry chemical company. I took it a number of times, had interesting experience, but I was very disappointed. I didn't have vision. I didn't see galaxies of exploding colors. I was very disappointed. Anyway, so that was before I'd ever tried cannabis. But as a result of of

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Being in that place at that time, I really got to meet and come across all of the people who worked in that field with Albert Hofmann, who was the discoverer of LSD, Gordon Wasson, who rediscovered the mushroom cults in Mexico, Sasha Shulgin, who invented many of the designer drugs. So I had a long period of experimentation with psychedelics and I, you know, have had a lot of benefit from them. I don't, I really don't use them anymore. My first book, The Natural Mind, which was about the importance of altered states of consciousness.

• 37:14Jay Shetty?

  I know, you can carry on, yeah, making sure they see it.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  But Alan Watts wrote a blurb for it and which he said, when you get the message, you hang up the telephone. And so I think I got, I got what I had to learn from psychedelics and I didn't feel the need to continue to use them. But I've learned a lot of things from them and a lot of that has formed my philosophy of integrative medicine, especially the, the very subtle, complex interactions of mind and body. And I have seen very powerfully that you can change external reality by changing internal reality.

• 37:52Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need the most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for, like skills, certifications, or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit

• 38:32Jay Shetty?

  at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one hour workout to build strength, burn fat and build muscle with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/OnPurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage in studio for details.

• 39:16Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them. Whether you're running out of space, moving, or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process. And once something sells, Vinted creates a prepaid shipping label for you. And the best part, there are no seller fees, so you keep what you earn. It's a simple way to clear out your closet, be less wasteful, and maybe make some extra money along the way. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted.

• 39:57Jay Shetty?

  Download the Vinted app for free to start selling with no seller fees, so you keep every dollar you earn. Let's dive into psychedelics because that was also what really intrigued me and drew me to your work because, again, I feel like my generation, generations after me, they're starting to hear these terms in mainstream culture a lot more often. And, you know, I feel like my role is to try and find the deepest experts in this space to help everyone have as much information they can have in order to make better decisions for themselves, their friends, their family, and anyone that's there. And so I'm going to ask questions that may seem really simple and basic, but by design, because I want people to... What are psychedelics for someone who keeps hearing that term from their friends and they

• 40:42Jay Shetty?

  keep nodding along, pretending to know what that is? What does it mean? And what comes under that umbrella?

• 40:47Speaker 02

  You know, the word, if it's a coined word, which means mind manifesting. Previously, people had called these psychotomimetic drugs, meaning they mimic psychosis, which is, you know, a very negative term. They are psychedelics are...

• 41:03Speaker 02

  A large group of compounds, many of which are found in plants. There's one we know from an animal source. Many are synthetic or semi-synthetic drugs. They fall into two chemical families with very distinctive molecular structures. Ketamine is not a psychedelic, even though many people call it that. Cannabis is not a psychedelic, doesn't have any chemical resemblance to that. MDMA is part of that chemical family related to mescaline, but its effects are not typical of psychedelics. It has a unique effect that makes people emotionally open. I think it is a very useful substance. I guess I would call it a psychedelic,

• 41:46Speaker 02

  but it's not a classic psychedelic in terms of the perceptual changes that it causes. One fact about this group of compounds is they are strikingly nontoxic physically, much as with cannabis. You know, that's just not an issue, physical toxicity. The main dangers are psychological, and those are almost entirely results of set-in setting. That is, the expectation of the person taking them and the physical environment in which they're taken. So, you know, to put it in a very crude way, if you take a very high dose of LSD on a New York subway on a day when you're feeling anxious, you're likely to have a bad trip. On the other hand, if you take the right sort of dose in nature, when you are prepared for the experience

• 42:29Speaker 02

  and in the company of people who can guide you in the right direction, the chances are you can have a positive experience. The penetration of psychedelics into mainstream culture at the moment is quite astonishing. You know, before the pandemic, I was traveling a lot and speaking in various places. And no matter what subject I was talking about, whether it was nutrition, healthy aging, integrative medicine, I would get questions about psychedelics. You know, where can we get them? How can we use them? How do you find somebody who can guide you? You know, a few months ago, Vogue magazine had a cover story on psilocybin. Town and Country Magazine of all places had an article titled, "Why is Everybody Smoking Toad Venom?" I mean, this is, it is really going mainstream in a big way.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  And it is absolutely absurd to have these in federal Schedule I, which is defined as drugs that have high potential for abuse and no therapeutic potential. The therapeutic potential of these drugs is enormous. Now, you know, there is currently a lot of research documenting benefits in mental, emotional conditions. Things like MDMA for PTSD and OCD, psilocybin for drug-resistant depression, for example, and treatment of addictions of various kinds. I mean, there's a long, growing list of conditions for which clearly there are good results obtained.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  But beyond that, I think there is a tremendous potential of these to cause spiritual awakening. Some of that has been documented at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelics, which is really good. I mean, a single experience with psilocybin in people who had no sense of a spiritual dimension to life suddenly are aware of that. In my own experimentation with them, I have had very profound realizations that my consciousness extends to everything. You know, that everything out there is conscious, not just animate objects, but rocks and everything.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  And that that same, whatever that is, it's in me, it's in everything, it connects me with everything. I think having that realization is one of the things that guided me in my philosophy of medicine and my methods of treating patients. I think it's also changed my attitude toward nature. And, you know, I really, the title of the book I'm working on, "Psychedelics Can Save the World", and I really believe that, and I think it may be the only thing out there that has that possibility, because, you know, we are clearly headed for disaster. And I think the only thing that can save us is a collective transformation of consciousness. I think that can result from enough individuals having a transformation of consciousness that it catalyzes some general movement.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  I mean, for instance, if you just look at the issue of the climate disaster that we're facing, I think if people realize that they are part of nature, that they're continuous with it. They change their behavior. That's just, that's just one example. And I saw some research recently showing that people who'd had experience with, I think it was psilocybin in particular, become, tend to become involved with the environmental movement. So that is the great hope that I have. So I'm, I'm, you know, I think this could go a million different ways in terms of whether, you know, for-profit businesses get involved, whether people are going to be using these to party. But I think it doesn't matter. I think just having these out there in the, in the general culture and freed from that restrictive way

• 46:01Speaker 02

  that they've been placed, I think that holds great positive potential.

• 46:05Jay Shetty?

  You like the idea of these things becoming more mainstream and accessible and available because they have so many positive benefits. But there's a part of you that understands or is accepting of the dangers that come in with self-diagnosis and self-use, where it isn't being administered in a healthy dose or a healthy way. What are some of the, because like the example you gave of getting on the train, like I look at that and I go, you know, as these things become more available, how do we stop people going off the edge because they don't know how to administer and monitor and actually?

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Well, I would say by training as many people as we can to be guides who, who will behave in an ethical fashion and are experienced and can structure psychedelic experience in a way to minimize any harmful potential and maximize positive potential. So there are a number of groups around the country that have training programs for psychedelic guides. We need a lot more of them. And, you know, my hope is that we'll start to see that.

• 47:06Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, because I do, I do worry that, I, I love the benefits of, of so many incredible sources out there. I do worry that when people are untrained in, in anything that has that much power, it can be, it can be worrying too, because, you know, you could have a whole world of people. Who could be saved and supported, but in the wrong way could, you know, could end up in a much worse place psychologically, as you said. Because there isn't that responsibility around it, if that makes sense. Would you agree?

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So that's my hope is that we'll see, you know, some large numbers of responsibly trained people who can guide people in the right direction.

• 47:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that with you because it's it's kind of how I feel about technology, right? Like if you look at technology, technology is like a drug in one sense, in the in the way the chemicals that are released when we use them, it's it could really be likened to a drug. Obviously, it's not been talked about that way. That's not the language. We're only seeing those experiences now. And we're seeing the challenges with technology addiction. We're seeing the challenges with technology obsession and the things that come from it, whether it's envy, comparison, fear of missing out, anxiety, insecurity. And you think, oh, wait a minute. Well, if we had technology coaches and if people were trained in how to use technology effectively before we were given a phone, chances are we'd be better at handling it and we wouldn't be doing this backwards

• 48:31Jay Shetty?

  job that we're in right now, which is like, oh, gosh, like my kids are all, you know.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we have no idea what this is doing to the kids' brains. You know, I think it obviously is changing them. But I don't think we know the full ramifications of that.

• 48:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  So it's definitely a concern.

• 48:46Jay Shetty?

  And you're saying there's enough insight on the effects of psychedelics on the brain for us to kind of be able to see the right amount of doses.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 48:55Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, right. Let's dive into some of the more popular ones and how they're used because again, we hear these names a lot and I think people are unaware of like, well, what is that used for? How is it administered? Who does it help? So you were mentioning that MDMA. Could you tell us what is MDMA? What? How is it used currently?

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so MDMA is a synthetic psychedelic. And it resembles the structure of mescaline, that family of groups, does not cause many visual changes, like, you know, a lot of the classic psychedelics. It is a stimulant, but it has a very reliable uniform effect in most people, which is to produce a state. Of non-defensiveness, calmness, positive emotional feeling, emotional openness. It's the a name that's been proposed for it is an empathogen, something that creates empathy. Uh, I've used it a lot and actually it was it was invented by my friend Sasha Shulgin.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  And he uh sent me some and I think somewhere around nineteen seventy five and said, what do you think of this? And I said, send more, you know, you know, and I've seen many, many people use it with very, very good results. I think it can be incredibly healing for relationships. Uh, I've seen some remarkable uh physical changes in people with disappearance of allergies and chronic pain. And there's quite a lot of research on its usefulness in dealing with PTSD. You know, sometimes one structured MDMA session can eliminate that after people have tried all sorts of psychotherapy, talk therapy that hasn't produced results.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  So I think it's very like that's gonna be the first one that's gonna be made therapeutically available and probably for the treatment of PTSD.

• 50:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and and that's PTSD obviously is such an extreme experience. And so it it sounds like how how uh I guess what are people experiencing when they do it? So it sounds like they're more vulnerable, they're more they're more empathetic to themselves as well.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  I'd say it's I'd say it is a heart-centered experience, you know, and strong feelings of loving connection with others. Uh, calmness, relaxation, uh, and and and a strikingly uniform effect from person to person. Whereas the others, you know, a lot of the others, the classic psychedelics, there's tremendous variation in in in response depending on set and setting. MDMA is pretty uniform.

• 51:22Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and again, you don't see this as something it sounds like. This is not something you do for the rest of your life. This is a

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:28Jay Shetty?

  A medicinal almost of like, there's a certain thing to treat and work through. You're working with a practitioner.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  You may not have to use it that many times.

• 51:35Jay Shetty?

  Right, right, right.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  But I think that that's one that we really should have access to and use.

• 51:40Jay Shetty?

  I lived as a monk for three years in India. I was in a monastery where we spent hours every day deep in meditation, in reflection, in the study of spiritual texts and literatures and had very strict diets and but we were trained in the development of a lot of these almost like the purification and the detoxing to get to compassionate and empathetic states. And so when you were describing some of your experiences, I was like, I had that experience through meditation of that connectedness with nature and with the universe and with each individual soul, whether it be animate or inanimate. So I remember those through meditation. And so our journey was very slow, very step by step.

• 52:25Jay Shetty?

  A lot of pain and a lot of like, a lot of obstacles to clear the way. I'm intrigued by how does someone feel after the dose has run its course? Are they able to stay compassionate and empathetic with their partner? What happens? I'm intrigued, yeah.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Well, the effect of the drug wears off and because it's a stimulant, you feel there's a period of time when you feel tired and somewhat depleted of energy, but the feelings you remain and you can reconnect with those. And I think I see permanent change in people. By the way, in the early days, when people were talking about the spiritual potential of psychedelics, it really angered a lot of spiritual teachers, you know, who said that this was artificial, that these experiences. And I think they were kind of resentful of people having them without going through the time and work that like you put in. So, you know, I think there are many valid paths to achieve those kinds of feelings.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  But psychedelics are fast and they offer the possibility of giving many more people access to them.

• 53:33Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I've seen in my personal experience with the right people around me and with people I know that have experienced them. I've found them to be great window openers for people or door openers. It's kind of what you described, like this idea that you got to have a glimpse into a new reality that you didn't know existed, but I think I'm always intrigued by how people have that versus it becomes addictive, where you're just constantly wanting to live in that new reality. This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware,

• 54:18Jay Shetty?

  more connected and more engaged with your drive, so you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand. Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the chance to step outside of our routine.

• 55:02Jay Shetty?

  Travel is a way of slowing us down and shifting our perspective, and with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, every journey becomes even more rewarding. Earn four times the points on flights and hotels booked direct, enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges, three times the points on dining, and reserve exclusive tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, N A Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  But I think psychedelics have a kind of self-protective quality to them, which is if you try to take them frequently, the experience disappears.

• 55:41Jay Shetty?

  Right.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Uh, so I think people quickly, there, there's not a lot of motivation to use them with any sort of great frequency.

• 55:48Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, got it.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  And in terms of carryover effects, I, I've told this story a lot and you may have heard it, but just as an example, um, and this is on a, you know, physical level. I had a lifelong allergy to cats. Uh, if a cat got near me, my eyes would itch. If a cat licked me, I'd get hives where it licked me. So I always avoided them. And one day when I was twenty-eight, I was, I was living in the country in Virginia. It was a beautiful spring day. I took LSD with a group of friends outdoors. It was just, I felt wonderful. I mean, I really felt. Just high, connected with nature, terrific. And in the midst of this, a cat jumped into my lap. And I had an immediate defensive reaction. And then I thought, you know, this is silly. And I just relaxed.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  And played with the cat. I had no allergic reaction. And I've never had one since. No instantaneous disappearance of a lifelong allergic pattern.

• 56:39Jay Shetty?

  Is that a common path with that particular, with LSD or no?

• 56:42Speaker 02

  No, I think it's not peculiar to LSD. I think it can happen with any psychedelic.

• 56:46Jay Shetty?

  Right.

• 56:47Speaker 02

  It doesn't happen automatically necessarily.

• 56:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  But I could imagine, you know, Dr. Wiles' allergy clinic, if these become available.

• 56:54Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  You know, where you give people, start with a full dose and expose them to the allergen. And then like once a week, you'd reduce the dose till at some point they were getting just a placebo.

• 57:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  I think you can, allergies can be unlearned, and that's a powerful tool for doing it.

• 57:09Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. What are, what are the other ones that you think are going to become more accessible?

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Well, psilocybin is the one that's being most researched. So this is the main compound found in the magic mushrooms, which traditionally were used by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico and central America. There are many species of them. Some can easily be cultivated. Some grow wild, especially in the Pacific Northwest. It's a very well-known compound now, and it is being intensively studied and used, and especially for mental health conditions, for drug-resistant depression, for obsessive-compulsive disorder, for addictive disorders. It looks quite safe. You know, it is.

• 57:50Jay Shetty?

  What's quite safe?

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Well, again, no physical issues with it at all.

• 57:55Jay Shetty?

  No cognitive?

• 57:55Speaker 02

  No, nothing. And in fact, you know, there've been studies of people who've used these compounds quite frequently over a long lifetime. And there's been studies of their brains and they look perfectly healthy. So I don't think there's any issues there. So this is one that, that I think

• 58:13Speaker 02

  also is going to be made therapeutically available fairly soon.

• 58:16Jay Shetty?

  Specifically for?

• 58:17Speaker 02

  For, for, for mental health conditions first. But I think again, one that has a lot of potential uses in medicine as well. So that, you know, the, a main difference between psilocybin and LSD is duration of action. LSD lasts 10 to 12 hours, which can be inconvenient. And psilocybin is forty six hours, so it's much more, much more manageable.

• 58:38Jay Shetty?

  And some people are using it recreationally too.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Yes, they are. Well, again, I'm not going to be critical of people.

• 58:43Jay Shetty?

  No, no, no, I'm not either. I'm just trying to, yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Frankly, I think I'd rather have people use that than alcohol recreationally.

• 58:50Jay Shetty?

  Because, yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Because it's much safer on a physical level and probably safer on a psychological level as well. When you look at the numbers of homicides, accidental deaths that are related to alcohol, it's tremendous. You don't see anything like that with psilocybin.

• 59:05Jay Shetty?

  Can you drive after?

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Well, I, you can. I wouldn't recommend it probably, but if somebody's familiar with it, certainly you can.

• 59:12Jay Shetty?

  Right, right, right.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  I mean, it doesn't impair coordination on a physical level like alcohol does.

• 59:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah. No, no. And I don't have any side or any, what's the right word? Any, any dog in the fight.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. I hear you.

• 59:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I'm asking from, I'm just being so curious as to like, I know my community would ask these questions and I'm thinking, all right, like, I want, I want them to have such a real, genuine understanding of, of what this is because.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  So let me talk about another compound that is of great interest is DMT.

• 59:41Jay Shetty?

  Yes, of course.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Dimethyltryptamine. So this is a, it's a very simple chemical compound. And it's related to serotonin, the neurotransmitter, and melatonin, the pineal hormone. It's found in many plants, especially in South America, and is used by indigenous people mostly as snuffs. They prepare powdered preparations from plants and inhale it. And often this occurs with another compound called five-methyloxy DMT, which is the one that's found in the toad that has become pop, toad venom. At any rate, DMT is, if you smoke it, it's, it's a very rapid effect.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  You know, within seconds, you are off in another reality and it's extremely visual. You know, incredible visual trips and then you, after several minutes, you come back to ordinary reality. The five-methyloxy version is not visual. People describe it as a rocket ship into the void. Your ego dissolves and when it reconstitutes, it's very pleasant. It is very likely that DMT is our endogenous psychedelic that is made by the pineal gland. And it may explain why. Some people have psychedelic-like experiences, whether it's from meditation or fasting or other things, it may be from release of endogenous DMT. And, and some people think this may also mediate the near-death experience, you know,

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  that so many people report. So, I, I do believe we have an endogenous psychedelic and it's very likely to be, you know, DMT.

• 1:01:15Jay Shetty?

  Wow. Yeah, and, and I, we were talking about this earlier and I, I love hearing about your travels. Have, have you been to the Amazon?

• 1:01:22Speaker 02

  Yes. You know, Schulte sent me down there long ago. I made a number of trips. I was investigating medicinal plants, ayahuasca, mushrooms, and worked, spent time with shamans to learn what tricks I could learn from them. So, yes, so that was, that was in the 1970s, 1980s, I, I made a number of trips down there.

• 1:01:43Jay Shetty?

  Wow. And, and why do the Amazonians have no problems with taking drugs like DMT?

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Well, this is an interesting thing, you know, there, there are so many psychedelic plants and preparations in South America and in, in Mexico and Central America, and there are so few in the Old World. You know, there's one plant in Africa called iboga, the source of a drug called ibogaine, which has been a vet-

• 1:02:06Jay Shetty?

  I had a client who was using that recently.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, for addictive behavior, this, what's, right. There's a possibility of one from, from India, you know, there's been great speculation as to what this preparation soma was that's referred to in the Vedas. So, there's, possibly there was some psychedelic preparation there. And the, the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece involved drinking a potion that almost certainly was made from ergot, and it was a way of detoxifying that fungus and producing an LSD-like drink. But otherwise, you know, you've got this huge abundance of psychedelic preparations in the New World, you know, and it doesn't make botanical sense that there'd be that disparity. So, it must be something about the people.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  You know, in the Old World, in, in Africa and Asia, people I think are as drawn to altered states of consciousness, but they get into them, especially in Africa, through drumming. Uh prolonged wakefulness, dancing, uh rather than taking substances.

• 1:03:03Jay Shetty?

  Hmm hmm. Yeah, yeah. So is that the difference that you see in how we take them and how how they take them?

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Jay Shetty?

  Culturally.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Right. But in if you look at the indigenous peoples in South America, in the Amazon especially, the these they are always used ritually. Uh they're often, you know, under the direction of shamans who are trained.

• 1:03:24Jay Shetty?

  Sacred.

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Trained in their use. Yeah, absolutely. Um and you know, I think they're the potential for abuse in those populations is

• 1:03:33Jay Shetty?

  Very little.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  Minuscule, right?

• 1:03:35Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that that's really fascinating. Yeah, I I feel like, yeah, it was always sacred. It was part of a holy ritual of some kind. It was always used medicinally and understood and it's kind of, yeah, it's.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Ritual is a very powerful tool for containing the harmful potential of substances.

• 1:03:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's why they were created in around those, I guess. Yeah, no, that's and that's always really interesting for me to hear because I feel like, yeah, there's a there's a and and I'm just reflecting on it as an individual. I I look at it and I think I really trust things that can are very focused on the intention in which they're taken, uh administered by someone who understands what the power and effect of this is. And it's in an environment that allows you to have a uh fulfilling, powerful experience with a certain goal or or place to reach to. Uh that all of those things to me feel very coherent uh with how I would do anything, whether it's getting an operation or

• 1:04:31Jay Shetty?

  you know, like I got an operation last year and I wish I did more research on the doctor, you know, like I felt the same way about that. I was like, you know, we blindly trust the doctor you got placed with and someone told you that they were great and I wasn't happy with the doctor I had at all. And so you know, it's it it applies to all parts of our life. I think this idea of like, am I intentional with the doctor I chose, the hospital I chose, the am I am I being thoughtful about these things? And in the same way, I don't think it's different. I think it almost has to be thought about in the same way.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  You know, eve- yeah, even with alcohol, there's some very interesting lessons from history.

• 1:05:04Jay Shetty?

  Please.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  When uh distilled alcohol became available, and it was a sudden invention uh of the Dutch, you know, so it was in the sixteen hundreds. Uh in the wake of that, there was an epidemic of drunkenness. Alcoholism unlike anything that we've ever seen.

• 1:05:20Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  And even in this country, in America, in the early eighteen hundreds, seventeen, eighteen hundreds, every store had a barrel of whiskey and people went in, you just have a ladle of whiskey and people started drinking early in the morning, all day long, drunks were lying in the street. You know, it was, it was an uncontrollable epidemic of alcoholism. And gradually, you know, over several decades, there was a social consensus that grew up that it was unseemly to be drunk. And that rituals grew up around the use of distilled alcohol, one of which is a cocktail party, you know, which is not going to happen at ten in the morning. You know, we're going to do this late in the day. There'll be food present and friends present and for social, as a social lubricant.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  And that kind of conscious use and ritual helped contain the negative possibilities that could result from such a strong drug.

• 1:06:13Jay Shetty?

  Right, right. And, and of course, I mean, with alcohol, there's so many proven negatives.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:06:18Jay Shetty?

  And issues.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Jay Shetty?

  Even now, whether it's gut, brain, et cetera, et cetera. Could you talk about some of those just so that we?

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  Well, alcohol, you know, it is extremely toxic to the nerve, to the brain and to the liver. Uh, and there's, there's arguments go back and forth.

• 1:06:35Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Whether alcohol, moderate consumption alcohol is beneficial. You know, some people say, no, even one or two drinks is harmful for some people. So this goes back and forth. I think many of the, the benefits ascribed to alcohol are benefits of relaxation. And for many people, that is a main method of relaxation.

• 1:06:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  Uh, but I think the fact is that, you know, it is a strong toxin and you have to be very careful about using it. And there's some people, like women, that have genetic risk for breast cancer, probably shouldn't use it at all.

• 1:07:04Jay Shetty?

  Right, yeah. I was, uh, this fascinated me when I was looking at your work. Your book, Chocolate to Morphine, was pivotal and often the most stolen books in colleges in the last forty years. Could you tell us a bit about the book?

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Jay Shetty?

  And Ben about this.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  It's a very good book. It's, it's still in print and the main point of it, which enraged some people. Was that there are no good and bad drugs. There are just good and bad relationships with drugs. And I very firmly believe that. I mean, there's no, there are no drugs that have inherent good or horrible qualities. It's how people use them and how they think of them.

• 1:07:39Jay Shetty?

  Hmm, hmm, yeah.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  Some obviously are more difficult to form good relationships with than others.

• 1:07:44Jay Shetty?

  And some of them naturally like chocolate as, as a victim of chocolate, uh, have addictive traits. Like, you know, it's, it's, I, I was, I've, I've talked about this many, many times, but I was genuinely addicted to chocolate.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:58Jay Shetty?

  Uh, and it took my wife and me like, you know, when I say addicted in the sense of like, I could eat like a full slab in a moment, like a family pack version, like easily on my own, no issues.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  I see.

• 1:08:11Jay Shetty?

  And uh, it, it took a long time for me to take chocolate out of my diet because of the amount of sugar I was taking in too. And so.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Well, I, I put chocolate at the very top of my anti-inflammatory diet pyramid.

• 1:08:21Jay Shetty?

  How?

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Be- because it's a, it is.

• 1:08:24Jay Shetty?

  Oh, taking it out?

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  N- no, I put it back. I, it's there. It's the very top of the anti-inflammatory diet pyramid. So something that I recommend in moderate, moderate consumption. It has very useful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.

• 1:08:36Jay Shetty?

  I might have to change my relationship with.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  Dark chocolate has to be at least seventy percent.

• 1:08:40Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, but a little bit on a regular basis is fine.

• 1:08:44Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. What's a little bit on a regular basis? Not, not a slab a day?

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Not a slab a day.

• 1:08:49Jay Shetty?

  You have this real love for, for this plant medicine that can have such a big benefit on people. And, and it must be hard because so much of it's been demonized or, or talked about in a certain way. And, and I love what you just said now. It's like you're arguing that it's about your relationship with these beings. And that, and that's really fascinating to me because I, I feel like that, it's almost like that's how we would talk about it's our relationship with technology. It's our relationship with money. It's our relationship with fame.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  There is nothing inherently evil about technology. You know, it's, I think that's true of so many things. It's, it's how we relate to it.

• 1:09:22Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and how we use it, what our relationship is with it. Yeah, that's, that's really fascinating. I always wanted to dive into the idea where you mentioned earlier around the spiritual awakening piece. Because I, I definitely am not, I, I'm, I'm, I would say, even though I studied in such a traditional and rigorous way personally.

• 1:09:42Jay Shetty?

  Which has led to so many beautiful spiritual awakenings and realizations. I'm very not, I wouldn't consider myself to be closed minded as to how other people find their paths. I, I find that I have my path and it was beautiful, but I'm, I'm very open to people finding their paths. And some people are at different stages in their journey where they need different things. Could you walk me through what specifically be used, been used in a spiritual way? And what have been some of the results?

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, let me say for me, spirituality means being aware of and acknowledging the non-material aspect of existence.

• 1:10:18Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  Working in the medical field, I am so aware of and frustrated by the power of the materialistic paradigm. You know, that many scientists and many physicians don't believe in anything that's not physical. So when you try to talk about, not, let alone not spirit, but even if you try to talk about the mind and the influence of the mind on the body, they don't believe that. I mean, in the materialistic paradigm, if you observe a change in a physical system, the cause has to be physical. Non-physical causation of physical events is not allowed for in that paradigm. So this is what, you know, there's a whole range of mind-body interventions that we make use of in integrative medicine.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  Hypnosis, guided imagery, visualization therapy. But, and, and these methods are very cost-effective, very effective, and they're totally underutilized because people don't believe in it. And, and that's why we haven't really made sense of the placebo response, you know, all of that. So I would love to see that change, you know, I'd really love to see a paradigm shift. And to me, that's what spiritual awakening is about, you know, it's becoming aware of the non-physical dimension and the reality of the non-physical. And I make a very sharp distinction between spirituality and religion. You know, religion is about institutions and institutions are mostly concerned with perpetuating themselves.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

  You know, spirituality is is this connection with acknowledging the non-physical and its importance in interacting with the physical dimension. I think there's lots of ways you can awaken to that. I I said, you know, for me and for many people, I've seen psychedelic experience be become a very powerful way of doing that.

• 1:12:02Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. And how have those, how have you and others sustained that? Like you were saying yourself, like you you don't take them anymore, but it it's become a way of life for you, it feels like that.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I, you know, I meditate, I do breath work and, you know, I've always been fascinated by the fact that the words breath and the word spirit are the same in most Indo-European languages. And that I think when we, when we focus our attention on our breath, we're looking at the movement of spirit in the body. Uh, so that's, you know, I think that is one very practical, powerful way. And most people ignore it. We have that right under our noses and we don't make use of it.

• 1:12:36Jay Shetty?

  I mean, you know, for for you to have been at Harvard, to have done this research, to have been in this space for so long, it is beautiful to hear you bring science and spirituality together.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Jay Shetty?

  Because I feel for so long they've been seen as opposite.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Opposite, yeah.

• 1:12:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah. And and I've never understood that as as considering myself a spiritual scientist or, you know, it's in that sense of I've always been fascinated by neuroscience, I've always been fascinated by the brain. And at the same time, I consider myself a spiritualist. And so hearing you as like a doctor, doing all of this medical work, but then finding the spiritual part and the functional part of certain parts of medicine. What, did you always have that when you were studying? Because obviously you went off to become a doctor, like, when did that?

• 1:13:19Speaker 02

  I think I, I think I did always have some of that.

• 1:13:21Jay Shetty?

  Where did that come from?

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think I was born with it.

• 1:13:24Jay Shetty?

  Right.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  You know, I can remember always being fascinated by the mind and and how it related to the body. And from as far back as I can remember, and I tried to study. That at Harvard and I was very frustrated that I couldn't, you know, I I started off majoring in psychology, but at that time, psychology at Harvard was completely dominated by the behaviorists. It was running rats through mazes and they weren't interested in consciousness. I wanted to know about consciousness.

• 1:13:50Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  And nobody was interested in doing that. And then also in the scientific and medical world, consciousness is seen as a product of brain chemistry or electrical connections in the brain. And, you know, I came to feel that consciousness is primary. I think consciousness organizes matter, you know, I think it organizes matter into more and more complex forms, you know, including the human brain. But that, you know, that enrages scientists when I try to talk that way.

• 1:14:18Jay Shetty?

  Do you think we'll ever be able to prove the existence of consciousness?

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  Well, this is.

• 1:14:22Jay Shetty?

  In a way that in a language, in a way that.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  I I think this is what I see as part of the psychedelic awakening, because I think that that this really has the potential to to chip away at that materialistic paradigm and the influence it now has on our way of thinking. There is, you know, a name for this idea that consciousness is primary. It's called panpsychism. And that used to be, you know, no scientist would, you know, look at that. And now that's become a respectable movement in philosophy, you know, idea that everything is consciousness down to atoms. And and I I look forward to seeing that grow and have greater and greater influence.

• 1:15:02Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I've I've always considered consciousness to be like the first self.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:07Jay Shetty?

  And and, you know, obviously from a spiritual perspective, but even the excellent explanation behind so many near death experiences or outer body experiences or of of the sort. And when I have read scientific studies or even research or accounts of those experiences, there's a there's a truth that's not been uncovered yet.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And as I said, this may be mediated by release of our own endogenous psychedelic, which could very well be DMT.

• 1:15:33Jay Shetty?

  Right. Right, amazing. What a fascinating, what a fascinating direction. I'm excited for your book and I'm excited for the work. Andrew, is there anything that we haven't touched on that you really wanted to dive into?

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  That was a pretty wide ranging conversation. There's lots more I could talk about, but you know.

• 1:15:47Jay Shetty?

  Well, I'm hoping this is gonna be the first of many.

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  That would be great.

• 1:15:50Jay Shetty?

  I think this is a great conversation for people to, I mean, I'm sure everyone already knows about your work, but for new people to get introduced to your work, for people to really get a sense of who you are and, and you know, your, your journey and parts of your story and your expertise. And I'm hoping that we'll continue to go deeper when the books come out. Because this is, this is honestly been one of those, um, it's been exactly what I wanted. I, I needed the, the dummy's guide. Uh, and, and that's really helpful because I think so often that steps like missed.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:16:18Jay Shetty?

  And then the majority of the world just doesn't know what's going on. And so I try my best to, to stay grounded and rooted with my ear to the ground and be like, well, people are hearing these ideas, but they don't know what to do and where it is.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  Well, you're doing a very good service.

• 1:16:32Jay Shetty?

  Well, thank you. You're very kind. And I hope that everyone goes to matter.com, use the code J. The books that we were referring to in this episode are The Natural Mind, uh, which is right here. And then this other book I have from Dr. Andrew Weil is Spontaneous Happiness, but there is a new book on the way as well. So these are two great starters and look out for Andrew's new book, which I'm sure he'll be back on the show to talk about.

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  I would love it.

• 1:16:59Jay Shetty?

  When it comes together. So Andrew, thank you so much for your time and energy. Thank you for being here. It's actually just wonderful being in your presence too. And I, I love how much, you know, life you've lived. And, and it sounds like you have so many more incredible experiences and stories to share that I look forward to learning.

• 1:17:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:17:18Jay Shetty?

  But thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing your, your journey, your work. Thank you for, for giving us so much of a great education today.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  You're very welcome.

• 1:17:25Jay Shetty?

  Amazing. Everyone who's been listening and watching back at home, make sure you tag Dr. Andrew Weil and I on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok, whatever platform you use. And let us know what you learned from this episode. I hope this gave you an insight into a world that you're probably hearing about, but may not have too much information on. Maybe you are an expert, maybe you knew all of this, but hopefully this will help you introduce it to a friend who may not be as aware as well. Again, thank you so much for listening. Make sure you go and follow Andrew across social media. If you're a fan, go and order some of the books as well. And thank you so much for joining us on On Purpose. I'll see you on the next one. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.