Healing Your Past & Reaching Your Full Potential w/Jamie Wheal (Part 2) EP 1100

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

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

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

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

• 0:27Lewis Howes?

  Roy T. Bennett said, "No one has ever achieved greatness without dreams." And Helen Keller said, "Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it." My guest today is Jamie Wheel, who is the author of the global bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominated, Stealing Fire. He is the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance. And he's written a new book called Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. This is part two of my conversation with Jamie. So if you haven't heard part one yet, make sure to go to lewishouse.com/1099 and listen to that as well, because

• 1:09Lewis Howes?

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

• 1:54Lewis Howes?

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• 2:36Lewis Howes?

  It's all based on science and specific to you. And my results from InsideTracker came back, and on one of the things that was recommended for me was intermittent fasting, seven days a week. Now, intermittent fasting is something I've tried out before, and it's something I've loved, and it's worked for me. So it was refreshing to know that it's, in fact, the right choice for my body. That's why I'm teaming up with InsideTracker to provide all of you with an exclusive 25% off discount, so you can know what your body needs. Just go to insidetracker.com/schoolofgreatness. Again, that's insidetracker.com/schoolofgreatness for 25% off.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  We have access to more transformative technologies than we have ever had in human history.

• 3:23Lewis Howes?

  Therapeutic modalities, experiences.

• 3:26Speaker 01

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

• 4:06Speaker 01

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

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Sort of dissociative, like I have an out-of-body experience. It's used in battlefield as an anesthetic. And it's also lately been started to get used in psychotherapy. Got it. More broadly, and had been underground for a while. And what they found was is that that experience of dissociation, there were two things. Subjectively, it helped as an antidepressant. So stepping out of myself for a moment, right? Allow me to come back into myself with a little bit more equanimity. Bird's eye view, having awareness of the situation. I got to unzip the monkey suit. You're not in it, you're out of the situation, looking in, reflecting. Yeah. And then really interestingly, they're like, oh, and what's going on

• 5:35Speaker 01

  when someone is under the influence of ketamine and self-reporting that they're having an out-of-body experience that also then is alleviating depression? Ah, 3 Hz neuroelectric brainwave. Fascinating. Okay, so now we've got a signature that's going on. And by the way, that also happens with 5-MeO DMT and a whole host of other psychedelics, even if they are actually interacting with different neural pathways and systems, right? So psilocybin, LSD, other things, Prozac are all in the serotonin system. Ketamine is not, and does things differently, it's not a tryptamine-based thing. But they're all doing this delta wave activity. But then they reverse engineered it, and this is the interesting part. They reverse engineered it and said, okay, now, no drugs, but we're just going to electrically stimulate your brain back to 3 Hz. Now what happens?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And same dissociative experience.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  And same positive impact. So you're like, okay, so we used a compound to be able to reliably get the conditions we want to study. We don't need the drugs. Now we don't need the drugs. And the same thing happens with specific advanced meditative techniques and breathwork techniques can get you into delta waves and the and different compounds. So nitrous oxide, there was a, there was a study with a neseologist at MIT, and they found that nitrous oxide will put you into delta wave states for three to 12 minutes. So not indefinitely, like if you're breathing it for a dental surgery, you're doing something over a long time, three to 12 minutes is all you get. But in that time, you get double the amplitude of when you're asleep, because normally the only time like

• 7:04Speaker 01

  delta waves are a little bit like the redheaded stepchild in the EEG world, right? Because people are interested in beta, because that's where we do our talking. And if folks are listening to us, unless they're like multitasking, they're probably in beta if they're trying to follow this. Uh huh. That's beta, and then there's delta, and then there's theta, right? Yeah, except, except that it kind of goes the other way if we're dealing with so, so basically, beta is the most fast that we typically have access to. Above that consistently is gamma, and that's like the occasional like flashbulb, eureka kind of moment, tends not to be unless you're like a super disciplined meditator, something you hang in. It's usually like a Gestalt integrative flash. But below beta, which is our waking state normal, comes

• 7:46Speaker 01

  alpha, and that's starting to get into more relaxed, more contemplative, a little bit more spacious, a little bit more kind of zen, and then below and potentially flow states, and then into theta, which is often, people often power down and get sleepy in it, actually. Like unless you're trained and you know that that feeling is something to power through. Most people are like, oh, I'm not up here in neurotic hamster wheel, so I'm just going to power down now, right? But it's actually even more expansive. It's typically like the hypnagogic state, like when you're lying in bed and you don't think you're drifting off to sleep, but you actually have, and you get like gimpy leg, or you're like elbow your pot, or something like that, right? Or you have some wackest dream where you're like, wait, whoa, whoa, I guess I'm dreaming. Like, that's right around theta. Below that,

• 8:28Speaker 01

  and barely into consciousness, is delta. And typically, we don't have access to that while awake. Right, so waking EEG researchers, consciousness researchers tend not to spend a lot of time there. And then sleep researchers are almost always focused on REM and dreaming. And delta is deep, dreamless sleep. But what happens is it correlates with a brainstem level reset. And, and what we're seeing is that it also, when you're in it, that is as close to being dead, right, as possible. It's like backdoor lucid dreaming. Yes. But it is not without content.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  So if you can be conscious while in delta, you sort of have access to the cheat codes of the cosmic browser. And this is consistent reporting, right, across experiences, like Winston Churchill, was one of the first patients to get exposed to nitrous oxide. And he said, you know, he said, "World upon world of almost alien information reveals itself." And he goes, "But it slips through your fingers, and I've come to regard it really as mere substitution of mental pain for physical pain." In the sense of like, "Oh, my gosh, I've just seen the light, but I can't remember." Oh, man. So you're like, "So this is fascinating." And you realize that all of those compounds, plus neuroelectric stimulation to the cranial nerves,

• 9:50Speaker 01

  right, and to our brainstem, do that. They do a systemic reboot of the brainstem, which accompanies delta wave activity, which tends to subjectively yield equanimity, out-of-body experience, and access to insane amounts of highly salient, or relevant, or interesting information. And when we get into those states, we get out of suffering states, is that what I'm hearing you say? We're getting out of pain and this, what's happening in the moment? Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're long gone from that. And you're basically, like I said, I mean, it's basic, you know how that, they have that vomit comet? That plane that you pack, you install the windows, block out? I can't do it. And it does the roller coaster arc through the sky? And for that part, right, everybody's in zero G. Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  That's pretty much what it is. So for three to 12 minutes, you can find yourself in zero G hyperspace, where you can think anything you want about, anything you can think of with a 300 IQ. And the only game, the name of the game is you can't fumble the football in the end zone. So, so... This is, that's, that's one step. So we have delta wave neuroelectricity. And basically what we're doing here is we're telling the cheat codes to a do it yourself, death rebirth initiation peak state that discharges trauma and allows you to establish somatic experiential faith that it all works out. So just didn't want to bury the lead or let anyone think that we're gathering wool. So we have pay attention to the things that allow you to do brainstem resets.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And that can be transcranial magnetic stimulation, that can be electrical stimulation through the tongue. There's an FDA phase three clinical trials on a POMS device that I've actually tried. I tried it downhill mountain biking in Whistler and rode it down the track. So put it in, crank the juice. And, and it's because all the headsets, like the biohiking headsets don't really work because your skull's really thick and nine volt batteries aren't very strong. So you gotta get into the tongue, it's connected. So the tongue goes into two, I think it's 10, I think it's 10 cranial nerves. And it goes straight into the brainstem. So there's the POMS, the medulla oblongata, and, and then the other, and then, and the vagal nerve is also there. Wow. So. So you wore this thing that was a shock to your tongue? Yeah. And is it shocking like every second? And it's sending, and funnily enough, I mean, well, this is, this is a fascinating

• 12:05Speaker 01

  tale. And I mean, if people can hold the branches in this conversation, we'll take this quick one. So the reason this device came to be is Paul Baccarita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he's the father of sensory substitution. So if you know David Eagleman's work at Stanford, right, and the sensory vest and all that kind of stuff, David is very much coming out of Paul Baccarita's lineage. Okay. But the SEALs were looking, they were doing night dives, combat night dives, no visibility. And A, it sucks because you can't see what you're doing. And B, spatially disorienting. You're literally, it's like just being in a void. Trying to touch over the air. Yeah. So imagine those five day darkness meditation retreats in a sensory deprivation tank, right? It's crazy town. And eight hours at a time, right? So they would sneak in and then post up and then wait, you know, all this kind of stuff. Crazy.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So they're like, okay, can we do the same techniques that folks are using, that blind folks are using, like tapping with a cane, learning to see through field? Yeah. Can we do with electrical stimulation with this paddle in our tongue? So if it buzzes on the left, I swim left. If it buzzes on the right, it's on my tip. If it's on the back of my tongue, I swim down. If it's on the back of my tongue, I swim up. So can we basically joystick our frogman? Someone else joystick you, watching you and then guiding you. Wow. And again, what our buddy from Debbie was just saying, he's like, yeah, you get under a big ship and it goes haywire. So like they swim on these paddles, they've got their compasses, the metal starts spinning. You can't have lights. You know where you're going. There's prop wash, there's noise. It's a shit show. So they they took these panels and started learning to steer their their swimmers.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  And and then they realized something, which is that when they came out from super long, like six hour, eight hour submersions in zero visibility situations. A lot of folks had basically like spatial vertigo or the bends, right? But the guys who'd been running the paddles didn't. And and so they're like, hmm, that's funny. Why is that? And the electrical stimulation into the brainstem was actually serving as a global system reboot and a calibration. So it was enhancing neuroplasticity and improving vestibular training and action, which is back to the downhill mountain. Sure. Right? So you can actually create peak performance situations by conducting neuromotor pattern repetition. Right? Um, while experiencing brainstem resets. And then they found, and then they've now taken this to phase three clinical trials.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  And it's used for cerebral palsy, it's used for TBI, it's used for MS, and it's also being used for peak performance. So that's just another example of, okay, so now we're hot on the trail. We're like delta waves rock. And and seem to be the signature of heightened access to the information layer. Enhanced pattern recognition, cogitation, inspiration, information. Right? So we're pinning that. Brainstem reset and then, oh, by the way, the vagal nerve starts here, it goes all the way through our bodies. Modulates our heart, our lungs, our digestion, our immune response, and goes all the way through our root. Right? So even like Anish Seth, who's a Princeton gastroenterologist, called it Puforia. Like if you've ever had an exceptionally large bowel movement and somehow felt sweaty or palpations or goosebumps or even really, really good.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Right? He said, he says, to some, it feels like an orgasm, to some like a religious experience and to a lucky few like both. Well, really, all that is is moving the male and that's putting pressure against your vagal nerve, which is actually stimulating your entire spinal column. Wow. So you're like, oh, okay. So we're just worms. Like chop off our legs and arms. Right? And the circuitry of how we work is our spinal columns and our vagal nerves. So you're like, okay, so now we realize delta waves, brainstem reset, vagal nerve optimization, increased nitric oxide in your system, and that can be everything from eating beets and, and, and, um, what are those little seeds?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yes, beets, greens, or even supplements like Neo40 that are concentrates, or even ED drugs, right? Viagra boosts nitric oxide. Right? And not only does it, and that's, and that's, it's a vasodilator, which is why Viagra used it, but actually what nitric oxide does is it crosses the blood-brain barrier and it allows for the transport of stress chemicals and optimal psychologically enhancing neurochemicals. So Herbert Benson at Harvard calls it, called it the bliss molecule. And it's actually the precursor to flow states and peak states. So you're like, okay, so A, vasodilation is generally healthy and happy. And by the way, it's actually an anti-COVID, it's an antiviral.

• 16:20Lewis Howes?

  That's what I heard from the, uh, from, uh, James Nestor.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:23Lewis Howes?

  Talking about this and breathe, breathing through the nose and, uh, how the virus can't survive in this, right?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so high notch, basically the more, I mean, I wouldn't say the more the merrier, period, but in general, we are under and boosting can enhance.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  So, so you do these things and then you also realize, oh, at, and then engage in spinal and pelvic mobility, right? And the issues are in our tissues. So if you engage in it, and this gets to your EMDR point, right? There's kind of a progression where you can be like, okay, there's, there's neuro, neuro tremor release. Have you seen that stuff? Where people do like an isometric hold, like a wall sit or a leg lift, and they wait until their muscles fatigue, and then they start moving, and then they start oscillating. And there's actually like three different levels of frequency. And first, it's disorganized. I think they call it brown, uh, wave, waveforms? I don't quite understand their color coding, but I think that's how they do it. And that's just spazzing. And most people, most people are so uncomfortable and so self-conscious, they won't let it happen, right?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  But if you were with a therapist and you understand the jam, you start doing that. And then it actually settles down and it starts getting organized. And it's literally as if it's your, um, your nervous system. Defragging. Yeah. And rewiring up healthy movement patterns. Right. It's this, the whole Robert Sapolsky at Stanford, we had that, but wise zebras don't get ulcers. Right. Like animals don't stress. Right. Right. Cause they discharge. And, and we were actually, we had just been, we'd just done a, an expedition on, on the north face of Everest in Tibet. We came back to Thailand. We went to the islands. We like, put all of our students on a plane in Bangkok and then took a honeymoon on the islands in Thailand. This is long before, this was like before the beach came out, I think. So it was like super chill.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  And we were climbing this wild volcano grotto in the jungle. Um, at like sunset and it was super sketchy. Like we see this German couple come down all covered in mud, wild eyed, like what the hell we're like.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  And, um, and then we get to this super crazy slick limestone slab and there's this, there's this monkey stuck. Right. And, and he's, and he's freaking out and he's, and it's too slippery and he doesn't know what he's gonna do and he's like, and we're like, oh my God, we can't help him. He's too far out there, but like, what's gonna happen? And then finally he kind of like gets together and he's just lunges and does this dino. And like does this one handed thing, grabs the top, pulls himself up, looks around, frantically beats off. And then, and then just fucks off into the jungle, never to be heard from again. And you're like genius. Wow. Right. So that, no, no, that's a funny story. Was that, so he was stressed for a second, but then releases it. Yes, through, right. Cultivating and then discharging energy through his nervous system. Interesting.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And you're like, okay, so this is how all animals forever have done it. We're walking around stress. Holding on to it. Totally anchored in the past, whether that's I've got a blown shoulder or a bum knee or a bad back and I sit in the same chair the same way all day and it's accumulating trauma. Or it's just micro PTSD and I'm just this fibrillating, disorganized mess. And then you realize, oh, back to brain stems, delta waves. Can I reboot my nervous system? Establish a global systemic reset. And can I do that by pulsing energy, loading and pulsing energy through my nervous system? Such that it discharges me and lets me just like a laptop that's fritzing. Cold reboot, power back up. And be fresh again.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Homeostasis. Now, life is life and I'm going to still face every challenge and opportunity to get knocked off that. But if I can come back to center via means and tools that I have access to, that don't cost an arm and a leg. Right. Can I come from my best more often? And can I metabolize my grief?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  As fast as I'm taking it in.

• 20:04Lewis Howes?

  So not holding on to it for months and years and suffering.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:08Lewis Howes?

  Experiencing it, having your heart open, allowing yourself to feel, and then moving on.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so now throw in vocal, so now let's do that, you know, tremor release. So let's say I'm lying on my back with a high bridge, I've got my ass off the ground and my thighs are vibrating, right? And they start flopping around and I start doing this stuff. And potentially I start doing what James Nestor talked about, that was the Carol Linska Institute study, right? Which was vibrating and humming through my nasal cavity. So now, hmm. So now I'm making sounds and I'm generating increased nitric oxide. Now you talked about EMDR and tapping, all of these things, funnily enough, it's not that this is a new age grab bag. It's not, you have a bunch of intuitives that stumble onto a function that works. They may or may not know why it works. And then they package it, productize it, put a name on it, put a brand on it, have an economic driver and center.

• 20:55Lewis Howes?

  Built a cult around it.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  And it's the bed. But you're like, oh, what's the mechanism of action underneath all this stuff? If we can get to that, then we can engage in cultural architecture cleanly. And we can just share people with the source codes. Here's the Lego.

• 21:07Lewis Howes?

  What is the source code?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Well, these are the source codes, right? Which is cultivating and discharging energy through your nervous system in both allowing chaotic discharge and then enhancing reorganization. So throw in EMDR, like eyes, tongues, movement, like, and just go through the motions. What is a, imagine if some space anthropologist came down and was like, okay, humans, here's the user manual. You guys are just, you guys are just, almighty, here's how. And, and, and giving us the capacity to, to do this skillfully, right? Throw in, EMDR is what? That's the eye movement one. Then there's EFT, I guess is emotional something, something, or maybe there's a.

• 21:50Lewis Howes?

  Is that tapping essentially?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, yeah, emotional freedom technique. So once they get, once they get brands and acronyms, they're stuffed, right? Cause they cease to innovate and they cease to be curious about evidence. But if you're like, hey, there might be a there there.

• 22:01Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. And then this Wim Hof method, and then this breathing, and this cult.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  And how do we separate placebo, right? And, and selection bias from is there a legit there there? And once you put those things together, now you can add in like Theraguns.

• 22:14Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Right? You're like, oh, so now let's take isometric tremor. And now let's increase percussive vibration. Let's do soft tissues. I mean, how many people actually touch their abdomen, for God's sake? I mean, how much shame, how much So much shame and trauma. Yeah, and like even just having partners, right? And then engage in like acro yoga and Thai massage, like actually connecting with another human and applying traction on our joints and opening up the space in our joint capsules and stretching soft tissues and sliding surfaces and full range of motion in our pelvis and spine. Like, these things aren't simply disconnected physical movement sequences. They actually show up in our consciousness register. They actually shape and inform our experience.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  And so like the absolute money there is, and all of this is 50% of it, because then you can also add in conscious sexuality on top of that, right? And then you end up in basically a sexual yoga. So the end to end spectrum, if you take it without apology, is to say psychedelic sex, time traveling psychedelic sex magic, or a hedonic engineering, right? Because the next movement is special calisthenics, basically, like where you basically have a physician that is three Cs. So you know Dan Savage, right? The sex advisor? So he always talks about good giving and game, the three Gs, right? For a partner. Sure.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  So the three Cs for your doctor is courageous, curious, and connected. So they need to be willing to engage in full spectrum health for patients. They need to be connected to the research in the psychedelic therapeutic space and compounding pharmacies. And they need to be curious about what modalities are potentially functional, because hands down, the next wave of psychedelic therapies is going to be special K calisthenics, which is threshold dose ketamine with body work. And you can get in a month of yoga or physical therapy in an hour. And it's completely integrated psychosomatic. So you're like, what I mean by saying it's psychosomatic.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Normally, people just, when they say that word, they mean, oh, it's all in your head. You made it up. And that's, that's one, that's a pejorative of the term. But psychosomatic just means body and brain together. So when you shift and move your tissues, right? You end up having a, it's almost as if it's like the monitor of your self-system is in your mind. And you're like, oh, okay, that was that phone call on Tuesday. Or that was that ski wreck. Or that was, and it discloses itself as it relieves, as it leaves your system. It's kind of like the body keeps the score mentality? Issues in the tissues, body keeps the score, et cetera. And if you look at Basile Van der Kook's work, I mean, bless his heart, right?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  But most of the suggestions he's recommending for the physicality is really straightforward. Yeah. It's like, do yoga, that's good. Right. Like, do you know? Move your body. So you're like, okay, so great. Eat healthy food. So, so, so put in special calisthenics, right? With a K, right? Put in Theragun use. And then, and then for those of you planning along at home with a special friend. So there's basically like three levels. There's seller practices, partner practices, and couple practices. Right? That's it. And you, any of these work. You can just do breath work. You can just do body work. You could just do music and dance. You could just do substances, right? In, in, you know, responsible sacramental or therapeutic use. And, and you could just do sexuality. If you combine them all, right?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  You end up with a- This cocktail of- Well, I mean, you, you end up with the notion of like stacking. So rather than using one atom bomb, you actually have a bunch of different modalities that gives you trim tabs and steer. So you're less likely to get into super duper trouble. It's much easier to back off. And it's also much, and it's, and it's a little bit more self-directed. So if you said, hey, I'm going to lock you in a 10-day Vipassana retreat, good luck. You know, it could be awesome for you. Many people report profound experiences, but it could also be super intense and hairball. Or really uncomfortable or scary, you would want more support. Someone could say, well, you're gonna go to Peru and go on an ayahuasca trip, Jenny. And you know, like 12 hours later, like hair on fire, like what on earth just happened? My world and the reality just unravel.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  But if you combine things, you can, well, there's actually, and for both of those, I'll even throw in one more, you could maybe, you know, we lived up in the mountains in Colorado, ran like mountain bike, the Leadville 100, those kind of ultra marathon races. And they're actually profound. Like the amount of community and support and people get cracked open after running for, you know, 14 hours straight through the night and all these kinds of things. So you're like, okay, maybe I go for the runner's high to end all runner's high. But you're like, that was a 100 mile race, my body is healing for three months, right? The same thing with long psychedelic experiences, which is why, by the way, psilocybin is in all the studies, not LSD. It's not because psilocybin is better, it's because it lasts six to eight hours. And LSD, it lasts eight to 12 hours and a hospital shift is eight hours.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  So they picked a substance that fits within professional work, which makes sense. I mean, God bless them, you don't have to be like trip sitting somebody for like, you know, a day and a half. But the idea of long experiences is that there's typically only, there's a fixed period of time at the peak that's really useful, right? That's like day six and seven in a Vipassana retreat. That's miles, 70 to 90 on an ultra run. That's hours, six, five and six on an LSD trip.

• 27:47Lewis Howes?

  It's not the beginning half, it's not the very last.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  So you get these shoulders, right? And the shoulders is body load, confusion, fatigue, random other shit punching into your experience at that time. So you're like, okay. And not to mention just practical, very few people just have days to write off their calendar.

• 28:06Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 28:06Speaker 01

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

• 28:31Speaker 01

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

• 28:41Lewis Howes?

  Recover, yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Right? Recover. And you can see the opposite side is also true. If you take an experience like DMT or 5M or DMT, right? Some of these, you know, notorious and super trendy, high, high octane psychedelics that are like 15 minute rocket rides.

• 28:56Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Right? Too much, too fast, too soon. And people, you know, they rave about them, but for their therapeutic insights, they are, I think, remarkably lacking. Because once you are simply white light God consciousness, or you're unleashed into the galactic carnival, you're like, now what do I do with that?

• 29:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Right? That doesn't necessarily help or get, it's so deep, it's so impersonal, and so depersonalizing, that it disconnects me from showing up with more heart, more connectedness.

• 29:28Lewis Howes?

  Compassion toward you.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  More engagement.

• 29:30Lewis Howes?

  What are your thoughts on all these medicines and psychedelics and, you know, drugs to help us heal, or therapy drugs, I guess, that people are doing now? What's, do you think it's beneficial to do? Or do you feel like it's a never ending necessity to feel peace, to feel whole, centered, grounded?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's a, it's an interesting question, and there's several different ways to kind of come at it.

• 30:01Lewis Howes?

  Because I've never personally done any of it. I've never been high or drunk in my life. And I just don't have a desire to. Like, I have lots of friends that do it and swear by it. It's amazing, you know, the experiences, the things you learn, the things you see, the things you heal. I'm like, that's cool. I just don't have like a calling to want to try to put my brain in that space. I feel like there's other meditative practices that I've done that I also feel a lot of peace and out of body experiences and I'm floating in space type of mentality. So for me, I I haven't, you know, who knows what's actually happening when you're on these drugs, but I know that I can do other things as well without it. So.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and I think that the thing that, I mean, my position is usually not, like, not having a specific dog in most of those fights. It's kind of, what's a level up from that? What's the mechanisms of action and what do they do that's helpful?

• 30:59Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  And once we understand that, then.

• 31:01Lewis Howes?

  Just do that.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Well, then we can come at it through whatever method or mode is appropriate for us.

• 31:06Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  So, so arguably, one of the biggest benefits of state shifting techniques or practices broadly, whichever ones you wanted to choose, is that they let us shift our state. And that having a range of our neurophysiology, right? And our psychology is generally healthy. So rather than being stuck on one channel, what's called like monophasic. Like every day I wake up, it's the same me in the same head doing the same things, thinking the same thoughts, telling the same stories, right? Being able to change the channel. And indigenous societies always did that. They had dreams, premonitions, possessions, trance, a whole range of consciousness they considered valid. Not just, oh, that's just repressions from your sexual frustrations in your unconscious. Forget it, that's dribble, you know, or you need to be medicated.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Or, you know, like, there was a full range that was accepted and embraced as legit means of making sense of things. We went to Descartes, cogito ergo sum, you know, empiricism 101. If it's not measurable, it doesn't, it's not, doesn't exist. And we got our dials stuck, right? And so we're really one of the only societies ever that's been a monophasic or single channel culture. And that creates lots of stress, dis-ease, all those things. When we expand that range, we gain back health and resilience. We discharge, we gain more information, more perspectives. And so, and I think you can make a case that part of the rise in everything from Spartan training and CrossFit to. Wim Hof and contrast therapy, ice bathing, saunas, right?

• 32:34Speaker 01

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

• 33:18Speaker 01

  And, and the use of some form of psychoactive plants or compounds is not just perennial through human history. And our, and our buddy Brian Morarescu just recently came out with that book, The Immortality Key, where he's made a case of through ancient Greece into early Christianity, there was potentially some continuity there. That's one very specific and scholarly kind of take at a, at a time period and specific geography, fascinating. But, you know, Ron Siegel at UCLA has talked about the desire to shift consciousness is not even specific to humans and across time, you know, across time and culture, but also specific to, you know, like across the animal kingdom, not just primates, all mammals, birds. The idea of creating lateralization, increased pattern recognition and the seeking out of

• 34:01Speaker 01

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

• 34:44Speaker 01

  But those are, they're getting increasingly swamped by the, by the sociopaths and the conies. Who are coming into the space because there's so much there there. And so, so the idea is it's like breaking the sticks off bottle rockets and still hoping they'll go where you point them. You know, and, and really they're just gonna blow up all over the place, which we are seeing because, you know, there, there's actually a fascinating, there's a group, the, the mountain Ok people of Papua New Guinea. And I, I remember reading this anthropology study, it was from a guy, an Oxford anthropologist named Richard Rudgley. And it was basically, they had, let's think, how many stages were there? Twelve. There were 12 stages of plant initiation in their society.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  And the first three were for ginger and then the middle six, is that right? Yeah, the middle six were for tobacco, different forms of tobacco. And then the final three were for different strains of psychedelic mushrooms. But, but not like the ones that folks are used to today, like gnarly ones, toxic ones, like ones that kill you if you don't do them properly. And, and it was kind of like a Montessori classroom. And this, like in a Montessori classroom, but a young kid is allowed to come in and they're allowed to work with any material in this beautifully arranged classroom, provided they've already been shown by the guide how to do it properly. And then, so you're freedom within limits. And you're not allowed to do something you haven't been introduced to or something that's not, you're not yet ready for. And the same thing for the mountain Ok people.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  So, once you were initiated into a level, then you had open access for your own discretionary use because you'd been shown how to do it properly. But you weren't allowed, right, to, to skip levels, right, or poach. Right, right. And it was kind of a selected pyramid. It was fewer and fewer people got invited into the subsequent stages. Kind of like getting your black belt. It's like you've got to go through all these different stages first, yeah. And, and, and the fascinating thing was, is that the final two stages, that was only for initiation into elders. Right? And once they had their visions, then what they saw was then included into the living scripture.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  So rather than being like, here's the Bible, signed, sealed, delivers, every word is unquestionably inviolably true, period, end of story, anything you have to say is heresy and we're gonna burn you at the stake if you try, they're like, oh, no, no, add that, there's another page, add that, there's another page. So you're like, oh, that's neat, that's like this open source, living tradition, freedom within limits, and structure. So if we take psychedelics today, or let's just say psychedelic Renaissance psychedelic therapy, since that's where most of the media conversation is. You can do a bell curve, and you can be like, hey, 10% of the population should probably never try them. And that's people with, you know, family histories of mental illness, existing diagnoses, and, if you could screen for this

• 37:29Speaker 01

  upfront, dark triad personalities, psychopaths, narcissists, Machiavellians. And because you don't want them to be better at who they are. Right. They don't want these powers, yeah. No, you really don't. You don't want to be training Sith Lords by accident, right? And the idea that psychedelics only and always create love and kindness and expansion is actually simply not the case. And in fact, golly, I'm gonna forget his name now, Sidney Gottlieb, I think it is, who was the founder of MKUltra, the super gnarly, you know, government dark ops project, right, that shows up in Stranger Things and that kind of stuff. He dropped acid 200 times, and was an utterly amoral son of a b-- and actually dosed Whitey

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Bulger, the mafia boss who was up in Boston in prison, like, he was one of his subjects. Whitey was still whitey, right? So to say nothing of Aztec sacrifices, and, you know, and Yanomamo drinking ayahuasca and still spearing each other, you know, like, humans are humans. Sure. And we're complex, and adding more just makes us more, it doesn't always make us groovier. So 10% should probably never try it. 80% of the middle of the bell curve should probably only have like, three cultured initiatory experiences through their life. And then only 10% should be sort of test pilots or psychonauts, going back to the wishing well more than And if you think about, so let's talk about the eighty, like, what would a, what would a roadmap possibly look like if we said, oh, we've ripped this out of culture and context?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  That's probably not a great thing. What are examples around the world, like the Matanok people, like, of hundreds of traditions around the world of responsible, intergenerational use? How can we learn? What, this is the culture, architecture part. Like, how can we build things that are missing, right, that might serve us and others going down, down the road? So you're like, okay, well, for sure, adolescence, marriage, and death. Those are major, major rites of passage, and we tend to fuck them up all night. Right, right. So you're like, okay, so, and let's, let's draw and learn from the evidence-based, ethically-committed practices that are happening at Imperial, Hopkins, and elsewhere. So you're like, okay, so Hopkins has kind of found that Goldilocks dosage of psilocybin is three

• 39:38Speaker 01

  grams. That's enough to create an experience of the numinous, of ineffability, of awe, of connection, of all these healthy things. And it tends not to be so much that Wigs folks out, right? It's a couple of clicks back from Terrence McKenna's, like, five gram silent darkness. And it's not addictive either, right? No, no, not at all. So the idea is, like, what if you had a truly grounded initiatory rite of passage for a sixteen-year-old, for an eighteen-year-old, for something in that space? And, and awakening who I am on this earth in community. And then what, and then now welcome, and now start showing up that way. Interesting. Right? And, and, you know, of course, some folks may say that's so wildly irresponsible, drugging kids, Bob. And you're like, well, no, we are already drugging kids. We're putting them on amphetamines, we're putting them on antipsychotics, we're doing all sorts

• 40:22Speaker 01

  of things to them already, turning a blind eye. And initiatory practices like this are as old as humanity. So let's decouple. Right. And take an anthropological look at this and say what's missing. And, and then what happens to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, I don't fit, what's the point? What's the purpose? Could, could we address that openly? Take marriage, right? I mean, these days, it's, it's status displays and virtue signaling, and, but it's not an initiation into, like, Hieros gamos, like sacred union. Right. Right? It, it, it's caterers and Instagram shots and photographers and, and gift registries at Williams and Sonoma. It's like, you know, and, and people, and, and the couple on the other end, they've been sleeping together and cohabitating for the most part before, so it's not even met, it's not even wedding night, you know, magic. Like, all of it's gone. Right.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  And you're like, okay. What if with the wedding party, with the selected minister or officiant, with closest friends, whatever it would be that was appropriate, to do the MAPS therapeutic dosage of MDMA? So, and again, not for the substance, right? This is the fact that vasopressin, oxytocin, prolactin, come online and some serotonin as well, right? I feel safe, I feel secure, I feel connected to my heart, and I am able to give voice to deeper truths and deeper wounds and fears than I might normally be able to. And what if we shared our vows from that space and anchored it? And then if once, if once a year,

• 41:51Speaker 01

  or once a decade, you know, cadence, take your pick, but if once on our anniversary, we came back, we go to a cabin, we go camping, we do whatever we do, and we reconnect, and I mean, there's thousands of couples already doing this, improvisationally, but like, and we reconnected, and we revisited those vows, and we were able to express our frustrations, our sadness, our tiredness, our biddiness, our resentments, our pain, and our love and our hope and our dreams. And we could do that in a way, because I mean, I've had, I guess I'm just in the season of life for this, but I mean, I have had half a dozen dear friends in the last three to four years, all divorced. Divorced. Relationships. And with children, so there's skin in the game.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  And it's almost consistently been because one partner has trauma, unable or unwilling to process it. And in these instances, this was not, these were faultless tragedies. Like this was, this wasn't someone had an. Cheated or yeah, yeah. Yeah, there was no cheating, there was no infidelity, there was no addiction, there was no, in fact, there was the opposite of financial stresses, and they blew apart anyway. And it was just the accretion of grief, resentment and frustration, and the inability to go back. And heal the trauma of the past. Yes, and get it. So you're like, so when you throw kids in the mix. Yeah. You know, you're like, oh, we've got some skin in this game. And in fact, Brian Evescu, I think that's his name. No, Brian, I think, and Julian Evescu,

• 43:17Speaker 01

  they wrote a book called Love Drugs. That one's an ethicist at Oxford and one's an ethicist at Yale. And they've basically just said, hey, look, folks, you know, family counseling, couples therapy. Ish, you know, I've never seen it work personally, but I mean, all power, if you can find a good person that can help you. But hey, at this point, the era of supplementing relational therapeutic support with pharmacology has arrived, and it's now unconscionable not to. And because the question is, again, like the idea, you know, crypto puritanism, whether it's what are you doing, giving, you know, substances to adolescents, that's unethical. In fact, back in the 50s at UCLA, they were dosing three to 12 year olds with LSD.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  No, no, like in the schizophrenia wards. And this wasn't wild. This was a Sandoz pharmaceutical substance. It had promising results, and their results were off the charts. They were having profound responses. Rick Doblin, and Rick Doblin really shifted my thinking on this. He's like, look, we know what we know now about the efficacy of healing trauma. Right? If you've got an 18 year old who's had adverse childhood events and is suffering from PTSD, and you know what three sessions with a therapist with this compound could do for them, and you're going to say no, and say, go ahead and suffer, you may kill yourself, you may do any sorts of things for the next three years until you click over. At what point is standard of care and obligation to treat? Interesting.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Does it kick us into engaging these things? So the notion of like, oh, chemsex is cheating. That's debauched. Right? That's the stuff I read about in Vice magazine, you know, right? Right? Like that, like that, that's not romantic. How could I? And that's what there's the case they're making in love drugs is like, look, we're already doing chemsex. We're just doing it really badly. Like, everybody gets plied with alcohol, right? Alcohol is a massive dehydration. It dehydrates and desensitizes. It dulls a woman's orgasm. And like Dr. Ruth, right? The old, the OG sex therapist said, and it hangs right, right off the end of a man's penis. Right? So alcohol sucks and is the ubiquitous substance of choice. Hormonal birth control completely wrecks sexual response and attractiveness. So like, the classic.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Dirty trick of being on the pill is that when that that shifts a woman's hormonal profile, primes her to be seeking basically a new age wimp. A weak chinned, safe provider for my children.

• 45:48Lewis Howes?

  Non-aggressive sexual.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. Low testosterone, like, safe guy, right? Then, you know, they court, they do all the things, they lease a Volvo together, and then they get married, and she's like, okay, I'm gonna get off the pill. It's time for us to start a family. She gets off the pill, she's like, who's this milquetoast wannabe? I wanna go shag a biker.

• 46:06Lewis Howes?

  I need someone who's like, yeah, wants me.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that happens, and actually, women on the pill have higher marital dissatisfaction, higher propensity to divorce, all these kind of things, and also deadens libido and sexual response. And then throw in SSRIs, which completely clip eroticism, and you're like, you're depressed.

• 46:23Lewis Howes?

  SSRs what?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  SSRIs, so selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zola.

• 46:27Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  So you're like, okay, so why did I get on that stuff in the first place? Because I'm just not feeling connected to life. I'm not feeling, right? I'm feeling down. I'm literally depressed.

• 46:37Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 46:37Speaker 01

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

• 47:02Lewis Howes?

  Courage, everything.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:04Lewis Howes?

  So which goes back to what we were talking about before we started, which is step one, heal the past. It's like, step one, and then what's the way to heal?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:14Lewis Howes?

  What's the modality that you'd use to heal your past, or your shame, or your trauma? What is something you do?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  So we started building this kind of edifice, right? Which was this notion of what is a global systemic reboot?

• 47:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  And what are the pieces that can work? And we sort of said, here's the neurophysiology, brain stems, delta waves, nitric oxide, high vagal nerve tone, right? You can just do all these things, and they're all quite straightforward. If you want, you can even, you know, and then pulse energy through the system. We talked about simple percussive energy with a theragun. Yeah. You could use, um, what's the, what's the word? Acoustic therapy, like sound waves. You can use. Sound baths. Yeah, you can use light waves. You can use pain. You can use magnetism. You can use 12 volt electricity. You can use AC electricity. You can use orgasm. Right? All of those things cultivate energy and release through the nervous system. And as they do, they kind of, and this is a metaphor, but they sort of release or dislodge plaque. Interesting.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  In our system. And you know, you could probably make a technical argument and TBD on which one of these would prove out. But quite possibly, I mean, you're sending out neurological signals, which would have the tendency to, you know, cells that fire together, wire together, boosting neuroplasticity, myelination. So the sheaths and the communication structures kind of get woven in. I don't know if you've ever done any super fine grain, like PT, like rehab kind of stuff. Yeah. Right? So have you ever had a, a physical therapist like make you do something crazy? Like look in a certain direction and like scratch your thing. All that stuff, yeah. Right? And you're like, ah, it's like move this. And you're like, I don't even know how to get that muscle to fire. Right? And, and, and then if they tap you or they, or they pinch you or they do, you're like, oh, that's a signal. Went to my brain.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Now I can maybe send one back and you can kind of. Yeah. Get yourself working again. Right? So that's all we're trying to do. And. So all these things work. They all work and, and they work on a sliding scale. So let's just call this whole category hedonic engineering. Right? So this is the idea of how do we learn to use neurosomatic information to optimize ourself? Uh huh. Right? And on the low end, you could say it's like a squeegee in your shower. Right? Can I just discharge the stress that I accumulated in the last 24 hours? So I'm back to zero. Mm hmm. And, and that is, you know, and in fact, Nicole Prouse, I don't know. Have you ever had her on?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  She's a, she's a former UCLA Kinsey Institute PhD sexuality researcher. And she's actually been researching orgasm as prescription pharmaceutical. And she says even, you know, normally you would think of people who would be against that research as sort of, you know, crypto puritans, right? Like the folks who are like, no, no, that's not even bad. But it's actually also even in, she's found it with her colleagues where they're, she's like, if someone comes home and masturbates to get to sleep or after a hard day of work, this goes back to our monkey in Thailand, right? That that's considered a dysfunctional coping mechanism. And she's like, no, it's not. And she's been researching to be able to actually, you know, for pain relief, for emotional relief, all these things. The neurochemical cascade of orgasm as it happens.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Again, Rick Doblin at MAPS, he and I were on a panel at the Battery Club up in San Francisco with Jason Silva, and we were just talking in between, you know, in between sets. And, and he's like, yeah, you know, the closest we can tell, the prolactin, vasopressin, serotonin, oxytocin, and the openness, safety, security belonging of the MDMA state. We're having all these off the hook responses. The closest thing we can tell is it's to a post-orgasmic state. And you're like, hmm. And it kind of blew my mind because I was like, wait. You're like, this has been 30 years. This has been $40 million. This has been navigating the FDA and Byzantine clinical trials. And it's amazing and critical work. You're like, how else might we get, get, you know, people suffering to that exalted

• 51:06Speaker 01

  state known only to scientists as post-orgasmic? You're like, holy shit. And the reasoning is not, it's not sensational at all. It's that our erotic and ecstatic circuitry are foundational and bedrock to encoding primates to procreate. So our entire pleasure system is built on the substrate of our erotic arousal circuitry. Because if you think about it, for like millions of years, little monkeys figured out how to get busy with no instruction manual.

• 51:35Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  So it is like outside of eating and breathing, and those are two other ones, right? I mean, like, take, take eating out because we're not going to get into that. But breathing, that's why respiration is such a potent psychoactive tool. Because we are hardwired to do it and shifting the ratios of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide in our system radically changes our consciousness. A, we can upregulate it, we can downregulate it, we can transcend it. Sexuality is right there next, which is like, oh. Now, now what's so, you know, tragic, then beautiful, then really intriguing is that because it's such a strong biological encoder, it is responsible, I would guess, I mean, this is purely a, you know, guess, guess, but there's plenty of research to support

• 52:18Speaker 01

  the chunks of it, which is, I would think like 75% of human suffering comes down to our sexual programming, including war, conquest, rape, sexual, you know, violence, you know, everything. And, and I mean, you know, people can contest that, but I would say at least half. And you think about it, you're like, oh my God. That's heartbreaking, but evolution is amoral, categorically amoral. Evolution doesn't give up about our vows, our promises, the better angel of nature, our relationships. All it wants to do is just shake up the snow globe and and create the most diverse genetically viable gene pool. It can get its hands on and it will trick us into heartache, heartbreak, violence and crisis all day long to get it. And and you're like, okay, so, yeah, I mean, even and and I don't want to, I want to kind of make sure we're tracking the dog legs.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  We're taking, there's, there's, there's an important center, center theme to come back to. But even something like adolescence, right? That the fact that a young girl and and the numbers are sliding based on endocrine disruptors in our systems and various other things. But like, you know, let's say a young girl reaches menstruation at 14 and adult cognitive maturity at 24. That is a decade, that is a gauntlet. That every young girl.

• 53:34Lewis Howes?

  A lot of confusion.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Not only a lot of confusion, but but like, you know, by 24, prefrontal cortex is fully online, situational awareness, risk assessment, delayed gratification, all sorts of important things to keep her safe and making good choices, right? That decade is asymmetrically the window. It's like, it's like in, it's like in Blue Planet, right? In off that off the coast of South Africa, where there's all the penguins and they got to swim between the islands. And that's where all the great whites are, right? That decade is asymmetrically the time for sexual abuse and trauma.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  And you're and you're like, oh, that's horrible. And it's not something we would wish for our wives, our mothers, our daughters, our friends, anyone. And and it's not just that, right? I mean, I mean, more and more sexual abuse and stories for young boys and young men is also coming out. So you're like, all of that is just the cold dictates of biological impulse. That is heartbreaking, but you're like, what if instead of being puppets on a string to an amoral evolution? You can take all that stuff and judo it over, have it jump the tracks and use all of that neurological priming to heal our trauma, to access inspiration and peak states and to bond and connect to the people we love and care about

• 54:50Speaker 01

  and are choosing to shoulder the burdens of life with together, you know? So let's do that. And that's profoundly empowering. How do we do that? Well, I mean, what we just talked about with this notion of a sort of a sexual yoga of becoming. And I don't want like people latch on to that. It has, you know, it's curious, it's potentially sort of sensational.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  There's almost always sort of three responses to this content. Cause like, once you take gloves off, and I'm a little bit, you know, I fully confess to being slightly on the spectrum. In the sense of I'm always just like, well, what is the case? And what does the evidence say? And if that's the case, then we should just say it. Right. Or just talk about it. So, but what I've noticed is that people come to this content. Sort of, you know, so respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances, music. Like you, you put all this together, you're like, these are, these have really strong biological drivers. So they're powerful, they're cheap, they're effective, they're consistent, they work. So everybody can use them. So they're starting to fit that case we're talking about with how do we design meaning three point.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  But they're also powerful, volatile, riddled with cultural taboos. But then the thing is, is that if you're like, oh, back away, back away, that's taboo. It should be the opposite. It's like, well, why is it taboo? It's taboo because they work. There's not a civilization with its soul that hasn't had to put a tight lid on access to these things. So, you know, so I mean, respiration, I would say, you know, there's not that many broadly acculturated respiratory practices. There's Kriya yoga, there's a handful of others, singing hymns, things like that. Even the Hail Mary is Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Right? That is a nine second, nine hertz shift you into alpha wave entrainment protocol. So you can, you could make a case, obviously no priest would have said this, but you could make a case that why?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Om mani padme hum, the Tibetan mantras, there've been some fascinating studies on meditation and correlation with EEG waves and respiratory cycles based on whatever thing you're saying. So you've got a Mala bead, you're counting 108 rosaries, you're doing whatever you're doing. So you've offloaded. You're getting into a state, yeah. You're getting into a state, you're actually Trump putting yourself, and you're saying kneeling in front of voters with smells and bells and a patron saint. And it's not surprising that you might have a religion, an experience of awe and inevitability, et cetera. So. As we approach this content, people are going to have an acculturated triggered response. Uh huh. It's gonna fall into one of three categories. You'll be a hedonist, a purist, or a conformist. Those are three, at least these days, typical responses.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  So the hedonist is like, I'm all in, man, tell me more. All right, give me the cheat codes. And the challenge with the hedonist is, is that, you know, what Jung said, like beware of unknown wisdom, like they're just up to their ears in it. And their challenge is, you know, addiction and infidelity. Uh huh. Cause they wanna, they wanna go for everything and taste it all. And, and finding the breaks is their problem. They burn too hot. Uh huh. Right? The, the purist, we'll do the purist next. The purist is actually the one who's like, my body's my temple. Right, I don't need those, that's cheating in a shortcut. So any more volatile or intensive techniques or practices. And they have, they actually have a spiritual materialism or a pride about their self-identity. So I meditate, I do yoga, I don't do those other things.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  I'm pure, you know, that whole thing. And gas to actually accelerate their learning. They might have become self-satisfied. Right, and they've actually stopped searching because they've actually created a fixed mindset around about. This is the way. All the ways they do their things. And then the conformist sort of wouldn't know what to think. They're like, well, what does everybody else think? And, and specifically, what do medical, religious, and legal authorities tell me to think? Right? So what is the way? Well, well, I'll check it out. It's kinda nice, right? So, and for the conformist, right? I mean, they would, they think nothing of having their kid on Redlin. Nothing of putting their spouse on Klonopin or Prozac. Right, and knocking back two or three drinks every night to take the edge off. Right.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  And maybe even smoking cigarettes, cause that's all socially sanctioned or normative. But they would, they would get divorced, and this is true, this isn't a hypothetical, I've seen this three times in the last couple of years. Couples getting divorced versus seeking MDMA couples therapy, which could have, could have created some form of. To get divorced without at least exploring different modalities. Cause I don't wanna lose control. I'm terrified of losing control and/or that seems beyond the pale. So I'd rather get divorced than explore. Yeah, for sure. And so for those guys, steering, getting out of the ruts of consensus opinion is, is their sort of weak link. Right? But each of those folks has a core value. Right? So the hedonist says, I value the fullest range of human experience and sucking the marrow out of life.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Right? The purist says, I value the sanctity of mind and body. And the conformist says, I value evidence and the advice of experts. Right? So you're like, so, so.

• 59:48Lewis Howes?

  Do you roll them?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Yes. So what if you pull them all together and, and stand up as hedonic engineers? Where you're like, okay, can we do all three of those things? Can we seek the full range of human experience with evidence and the advice and oversight of experts? And value and appreciate the sanctity of mind and body?

• 1:00:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  So that's the potential way.

• 1:00:12Lewis Howes?

  What do you do to heal your traumas?

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Lewis Howes?

  Personally, what does Jamie do?

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  What do I do?

• 1:00:18Lewis Howes?

  And what was the, what was the hardest trauma to overcome?

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Well, look, I mean, the, okay, that's a deeper question and a really interesting one because, and I could be off base on this, but for me, my sense, I mean, my senses is there's micro and macro traumas.

• 1:00:36Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Probably for all of us, right? And so we've talked about the.

• 1:00:38Lewis Howes?

  The big T, the little Ts.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  The micro PTSD is the can I squeegee out the impacts to my nervous system that accumulate through the day to day? And they can, some of them can be, but I can, I can fundamentally.

• 1:00:48Lewis Howes?

  Stress, this, the boss, the whatever, yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  But I can metabolize them. They are most destructive in the accumulation of them over time on process. But that I can take the hits and the body shots as they come, right? So that I can get rid of via yoga, breath work, hot, cold bathing, you know, all, all the things, right?

• 1:01:07Lewis Howes?

  And that's what you do?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, uh, yes, I'm also a lazy person, so we should put it in that way.

• 1:01:14Lewis Howes?

  But the big traumas, the big shames, how, how you.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  The deep ones there, um, there's two things. One is that full body brain system reset. So when I was describing that full stack, right? That spasming, I mean, and funnily enough, like the vagal nerve, which is just, you know, that central piece, it is, it's triggered by goggling, by choking, by humming, by vacating our, our bowels, by, by top and bottom. Like it's literally by spasming, retching, puking. Like if you've ever puked into a toilet and then had your like eyes watering, you're like.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Like that, like that's actually highly strong vagal stimulation. And you're like, oh my gosh, like us at our rawest, most revealed, most pathetic. Are we are also at our most profound? And you're like, wow. And most and that's such a scary, like the same way like tremor release, people are like, I'm not gonna do that. That's a spaz. Like, I'm not spaz. I'm in control. Like, right? That idea of like us like spasming, shuddering to discharge what's in us. Right? Is is a potentially highly effective way to practice. I guess, I mean, this will be a mouthful of a word, but neurophysiological psychoarchology.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  And and so that process, and again, regardless of the methodologies, but that process of deep brainstem reset, reset, tremor release and repack, you know, and and return to center.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  A sort of sacramental cadence, like a way for us to put this into our life. We talked about the bell curve, 10%, should never touch the stuff, 80%. We talked about schedules of calendars through life. Fundamentally, all of these practices, like if we're gonna hedonically calendar this, like how do we put this not just into a life, but like into our weeks and our months and our year? Right? Then you can realize that.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  These experiences serve three roles. They serve as metronomes, tuning forks, and training wheels. Right? So the metronome part is, oh, I've returned to center and I am now on the pulse. Right? And that could be my coherent heartbeat, that could be my breath, that could be the sunrise and the seasons, that could be dancing with my lover, that could be, right, speaking my truth, right? I'm on the pulse and I might have been galloping along, razzed out, stressed out, trying to force it and nothing was, I was always kind of like pushing life, or I could have been depressed, lagging, slow and always missing, right? So then I get boom, I'm back on the one and I'm like, ah, that's the beat. Okay, that's good. I remember this

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  now because this feels familiar. And then there's the tuning fork, which is, you know, we get banged up, life, we take hits, we get knocked out of tune and we might not know that we're sharp or flat. We might not know that there's just an edge to everything we're saying right now, but the people who love us do, you know, and then ping, like there's the tuning fork, middle C, where's yours? And you're like, oh, I thought I was in key. So like, you know, Stevie Wonder, like Songs in the Key of Life. So it returns us to that. And then the final part is training wheels, which is like, oh, what does it feel? What does balance feel like? Where I don't have to be afraid of protecting myself and

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  can I actually feel this for a moment and get used to it? And that's what the MAPS work with trauma sufferers has been, right? They experience MDMA as training wheels. And there was a beautiful report from one of the women who was in the study and she's like, you know, I didn't think that I could experience this anymore. I didn't think I deserved it. I didn't think I had it in me. And now I realize it's in me and it's mine and it's not the drugs, right? It's in me. So this reawakened that it was in me, now it's in me? Yeah. And so the metronome tuning fork training wheels, like this is how we begin again. And I think a key piece is that

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  We're almost always sold a bill of goods, a happily ever after hockey stick utopian story. If you take this product, this pill, this workshop, this religion, if you do the things, Right. all works out happily ever after. And that's kind of what I meant about like the transcendental existentialism. No, it fucking doesn't. No one promised us a rose garden and no one's told us how this ends. And we really could be a bunch of lucky monkeys hurtling through the void as time and space. We just don't know. And anybody who pretends to is full of shit. But what we do know is that we have the chance, like, life is equal parts. Like, we know life is tragic. Like, that one's not that hard, but can we actually face the fullness of it in a way that ennobles us, right? Occasionally, life is magic. And we forget that, right?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  But when we find it, it's like share the love and remember what we've forgotten. And whip sawing back and forth between those two is crazy making, right? So, so if we didn't have each other, right, to laugh with, like, we should, we can acknowledge it's comic as well. So it's tragic, it's magic, and it's comic. And that maps beautifully, right? Like, the tragic, how do we address the tragedy? Through healing, through catharsis. The magic, how do we, how do you address that? That's through, how do we remember that, right? Through peak experiences. That's ecstasy. And the comic, how do we share the absurdity of this human condition with each other? And humor and lightness. And that's community. That's connection. So like, that's the flywheel of our lives. There's no getting off this thing.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  And, and really, only our efforts to escape all three. We cherry pick, right? We're like, I'll, I'll, I'll take, I'll take magic and comic for a thousand, please, Alex. You're like, nah, not so much. You mean all three? It's all three, all the time. And sort of, we're like, we're never fully fixed and we're never totally broken. But if we have, like, but if we have the capacities, and that's why, you know, we mentioned, you mentioned earlier, like, friends of ours who are forever going back to the wishing well, looking for the next breakthrough, looking for the next Shazam insight. But they're like up to their ears in those things. Right, that may not be the path, right? It's like Dalai Lama, like there ain't no saint without a past and no sinner without a future. And you're just, you're just, you know, back to redemption songs. We get knocked down, we get back up again.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  So like this thing is a process. And, and yet it's not simply like suck it up fat kid.

• 1:08:29Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's not some bitter cynicism. Right? To, to say that because the magic is magic. And, and, and there is that process of like becoming, you know, what in the traditions, you know, sort of east and west, there's some version of like becoming twice born. Right? Having a death rebirth experience, right? And what does that always say? It always, I mean, you know, it's, I'm not going to pull a Joseph Campbell here and like just universalize, but the idea is like consistently, like Plato said, you know, the hallucine mysteries teach us not only how to die a better death, but how to live a better life. Right? The early Christian Gnostic, same thing, you know, eastern traditions, Lakota, Sundance,

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  you name it, like all around the world is that death rebirth experience. And, and what I was sharing earlier.

• 1:09:18Lewis Howes?

  Is that like an ego death as well? You mean identity death?

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, any and all of those things, but that, that stack, nitric oxide vague on the delta, cranium, the brain stem reset, ba-da-ba-da, all that. That's actually the first time we've actually mapped the neurophysiological ingredients under the hood of all the world's wisdom traditions of death rebirth initiation. So now that we've mapped that, we get, we're like, that's the neuro anthropology. You're like, oh, how are they doing this stuff?

• 1:09:46Lewis Howes?

  Now it's applied.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Now let's look under the hood and understand the science behind it. Now we can do culture architecture. Now we've got the Lego blocks. What do you want to build with the Lego blocks? And, and once you know that, then you have the experience to be like, oh, go see for yourself. Don't, this goes back to faith. So this is your, your seed from way back when, which was how do we experience faith to overcome the grief?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  We can construct practices for ourselves in our own homes, in our own relationships, in our own communities, in our own existing bodies of faith or in new ones, whereby we can have that death rebirth experience, right, and actually come back a second time by choice, fully embracing and accepting the mystery and the responsibility and the possibility, and then choosing to be here fully. So it's like, go hunt your white whale. Like, he's out there. Like, if you really want to find God, the universe and everything, right, imminently searchable these days, more so than ever before.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Scratch that itch. And when you're done scratching, right, and hopefully it's sooner than later because you're needed, come home, come all the way home. And that notion of like Anthropos is the Greek term. It sort of rolls into early Christianity as well. It's like Vitruvian man or Vitruvian human, like fully integrated, fully balanced, heaven and hell, you know, like heaven and hell, head and heart, masculine, feminine, right and left, like integrated human who's here. And like in Zen, they have the ten ox herding parables, right, which is like this metaphor for enlightenment. There's like 10 different beautiful pen and ink drawings. And like the dude's going, you know, looking for enlightenment, finds it, and then there's all these super complicated distinctions, which I never understood.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  I'm like, damn, like panel four was like, I was like, that's it. It's like, no, no, no, there's like a whole bunch more panels and there's a whole bunch more distinctions. But then like the 10th panel is this like fat little Buddha dude with a pot belly and a walking stick. And it says, his doors and windows are locked. Even the wisest sages and scholars cannot find him. He is down in the marketplace among the people with helping hands. Right? And so when enlightenment, when attainment, when anything fancy pants becomes so utterly ordinary, right, that it's no longer extraordinary, like when we can go from like waiting for the second coming to celebrating the umpteenth coming, like we're all in this together.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  No one gets out of here alive and all of us or none of us. You know, like, that feels like the greatest story ever told, like, like, and, and you know, and back to Star Wars, right? We are hardwired for that story. Hardwired. I mean Kurt Vonnegut, right? Catch, Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, all those things. He had this beautiful, he did his grad work at University of Chicago, and he mapped the shapes of stories. And like, stories all have basic shapes. And he kind of laid them out. He's like, there's the up and the down, but there's, there's, there's rags to riches. You know, you start out terrible and things end awesome. You've got boy meets girl, and it starts out meet cute. They break up, oh no, and they get together happily ever after. And then he's like, but the most popular one of all is the Cinderella story. And it, and it starts out terrible, and it's, it then goes, you know, um, pumpkins and princes and stroke of midnight, and then ends up really

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  even worse than ever. Everything's lost, right? And then, you know, the foot fits the shoe, and princes and church bells and happily ever after forever. So it's down, then up, then really, really down, then really, really up. And you could make a case that we are in our own Cinderella story right now. We are at the stroke of midnight, right? The, the, the bulletin of atomic scientists who has the doomsday clock they've been tracking since like nineteen forty-seven, right? How close are we to snuffing it? It's the closest it's ever been. We're one hundred seconds to midnight in our very own Cinderella story. True. Right? So, so what comes next? And who writes this story for all of us and our children and their children? Oh my gosh.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Right? Is on us. And like, if you think of like Buckminster Fuller said, you can we create a future that works for a hundred percent of the people without offense to any? Right? In, in a, in a world that we know is possible. And you're like, oh, okay. So this is really it. This is, this is, you know, X-Wings and Death Stars, right? This is Mount Doom and Mordor, right? These are all the stories we know. Mm-hmm. Right? And we have not just our, our mythologies that, that, that we know in our bones, this is how it goes. Um, you know, would we want anything less? If you had to pick when to show up in history, wouldn't you be like, I want to be the ones in triple overtime that sink the winning shot? Right, right, of course.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Right? You know, and it's going to be at a cost not less than everything. And it requires us at full strength. And it requires that we have to be able to heal. We have to remember what we forgot. We can't, we have to keep our eye on the prize. If we get, you know, if we, if we...

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Only focus on the tragic, then the mundaneness of the world will crush us.

• 1:14:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Speaker 01

  But if we only focus on the magic, then, then, then the burning bush will burn us. Right? And we have to do this together. Like, we, we, we have to walk each other home.

• 1:15:12Lewis Howes?

  So, I'm curious then, what's the biggest trauma you've had to overcome?

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I think being a misfit toy.

• 1:15:27Lewis Howes?

  You being a misfit toy?

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Lewis Howes?

  From your parents or something?

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  From, from everything, like, like, like, like, South African mother, English father, then moved to America, dropped into Catholic school, like, like, like, being like, two years younger than all the kids in my class, just being like, what the hell is this thing? And who are these people? And what are their strange customs? And why don't I fit? Right? And so, my sense is that as we do this growing up thing, right? You can shed, it doesn't take too much support or perspective or insight to be like, oh, I'm doing that, that's totally unconscious. I should clean my room, or do the dishes, or make my bed, or stop being an asshole, or stop withdrawing, and, and hiding from somebody's, you know, and we're running away from emotional intimacy or something, something, right?

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  And, and you can shed those, you know, and, and most well-intentioned, mature folks tend to. But then there's this kind of like, this core, it's sort of like, who we actually are. And then you start getting to that place, it's more like a bee with a stinger, you know, where you're like, oh, okay, so that's a definite drawback. It creates unfortunate things in my life. But if I take it out, I disembowel myself. Like, it is the shadow of actually the rest of my light. And so now-

• 1:16:38Lewis Howes?

  It's pushing me also, it's driving me also.

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And like, and, and if I got rid of that, I would actually be lobotomizing what is my potential gift.

• 1:16:48Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  So now, how do I live with that and also just generally not be an asshole? Like, how do I? Because, because you could say, love me or leave me, you know, take it or leave it, which I think is inadequate.

• 1:16:57Lewis Howes?

  So how do you heal it also and live with it, I guess?

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know-

• 1:17:01Lewis Howes?

  How have you, or what, what has that process been like for you?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, look, first of all, my filter is my family, and they are hard judges. Right? So, so, in fact, I can actually, this, this is an interesting point, because this is the sort of- A thought experiment or a model on how we become twice born or how we become homegrown humans, right? So I was at the kitchen table with my wife Julie and we've been together since college. Wow. So we grew up together and we were kind of going at it, like it was about as intense a conversation as we typically have. Recently and when was this? Yeah, this was just like a year ago. Okay. Pre-COVID?

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

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

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  scotch issue in our relationship. Of course, we had processed them at the time, paved over that, here we are. But nonetheless, still in the mix. Still there. Still, yes, still somehow in the mix, right? I mean, I don't know about you, but I find like, I mean, obviously we were super young and we are each other's relational history for the most part, which in some respects is a blessing. There's no, there's nothing else in the closet, but on the other hand, it's like it's all you guys all the time, right? But she was really still anchored on some of that, just kind of core places I hadn't been fully supporting her, right? And yet, we had also just had these amazing and profound breakthrough experiences where it felt like our life was as complete as we could ever hope, want, or dream.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  And I was like, what are you doing? Like, why are you dragging us back in the past? Like, we've already won. Right, we're here. Like, we got there, like, it worked, right? And, and at first, I was like, oh, like, here's this timeline, our, like, mythic life, you know? And you're stuck down on our biographical life, and you're anchoring off past trauma. And stupid, like, we're up here, we won. Right. Come with me up here. And I was like, ah, that's not quite right, is it? Because that's like a bit of a bypass, and this is our life, we actually live it. Yeah, experienced it. So we have to honor that, like, so I was like, what's the worst that about? And I was like, oh, well, maybe we can, like, meet them, maybe we can braid them. And then I was like, oh, okay, so now I had this kind of thought of, and I even started sketching it, and it looked like a Jesus fish, right? You know, you know, those, those, those arcs, right? And they cross the tail, you see more bumper stickers, you know, on minivans?

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh. So this is, this is like the DNA, Jesus fish. You're like, it started our birth, and it, and where the tail crosses, that's our death. Physical death or initiatory death. Uh huh. We all have our biographical life, that's the arc of our life, right? And it does actually slump downwards, like, all the happiness studies are like, twenty to forty is your suck, your thirty to fifty is your suckiest time. Really? People say, oh, kids are the best thing ever, like, all happiness studies say, folks in your twenties are super stoked, and folks in their fifties are super stoked, and everybody in between is in a sufferfest, right? So anyway, but that's, that's beside the point, right? And, and along the way, we have trauma. We get our adverse childhood events and our adverse life events. So you can just sort of see those dots along the way.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  If we have a lucky, if we're lucky or skillful, mostly just lucky, we'll have a peak experience. It could be a campout, you see shooting stars or a full moon. It could be your first rock concert, and everybody's holding up lighters or phones. Right. Everybody's sinkbelting out the chorus, like, yes, this is it. This is it, big. It could be your first love, take your, you know, take our picks. And you have one, okay, that's one data point, you think, that was amazing, I look back on it fondly, but I'm not. I don't get more of that. There's no pattern recognition, but, but you get back two, two times, then you get back three times. Now, three points make a trend. And there might be three, four, five of those and you're suddenly like, oh, I connected that backwards. I can actually see this arc and it actually starts feeling like a bit of a story and it's my story and it's my mythic story. It's like me at my highest, my best self. A lot of people go way off the reservation on this, like, oh, I've recovered

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  past lives, or, oh, I'm actually a star being, or, oh, I'm something, something, something, right? But it's just because we'd be like, hey, let's just call it, this is your mythic life. This is you at full strength, maximum imaginable possibility. And now I've got a plot there. Now, what happens is people can start exploring this, especially as they get into strong, unstructured, ungrounded access to ecstatic technologies, right? And certainly psychedelics are an easy example of that, but not the only one. They will get out of phase. They will get out of time with their partners. And this is what was happening with me and Julie. So I was on our leading edge in mythic life. She was anchoring off our bleeding edge in biographical life, right? And so people will come back from a meditation retreat, a personal growth workshop, a psychedelic experience.

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Ah, it's amazing. They're like, I found it. I love you. Everything's gonna be different. It's amazing. I'm amazing. You're amazing. I'm sorry. And, and, and what will happen quite often is that the person, the people we come home to, like, yeah, slow your roll, like, not so fast, like, I'm suspicious, or I'm judgmental, or I'm skeptical, or let's see if this sticks. I'll trust you, yeah. Let's see if this sticks. And, and the person who's just had that peak experience is often quite like, this is the new me. This is who I've always had been. This is who I am most truly deeply. This is it. And they often dissociate from all the past places they might have had a hand in, right? The past trauma. So, but the person who's been holding the home for it is like, until you get down off your high horse and shovel some

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  shit, I'm not willing to trust you and, and, and come along for the ride of your life. Like, if you want me to come along for the ride of my life, you actually have to come back and make amends. And so that's, we, we literally are meat suits. We're sitting across a table together, but we're actually unstuck in time from each other and from painful pasts or, or fantastic futures. So the leading edge gets out of phase with our bleeding edge. So we really need like 4D psychology, which is not just, here's me and I'm me and you're you, but when are we? Right? When are we? And if we can get into the deep present together, then beautiful happens consistently.

• 1:23:35Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Right? Insight, truth, connection, inspiration, all sorts of-

• 1:23:39Lewis Howes?

  Intimacy, everything, yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Everything, right? And so if over time, we can repeat that process via the flywheel of peak states that remind us what we've forgotten, right? Deep healing, because they don't just do that. Peak states seem to do two things. They seem to remind us what we forgot.

• 1:23:55Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Right? So we do our homework in catharsis and then we validate it with each other. Right? And because we're outside of lineages, because we're outside of having people tell us what to do or deferring to authority these days, we do still have each other. And that's what keeps us honest and that's what keeps us human. Right? So you could be like Saul, you know, like, like, like, like Paul from the road to Damascus. He's like, oh yeah, that Saul guy, you know, he was a total son of a bitch and attacked the electorate. I get it, I mean, he's a dickhead, but I'm Paul, baby. You know, can't you see? And she's like, yeah, no, I mean, he's a son of a bitch and so let's wait. But if we do it over time, then we braid the mythic life. We bend the mythic life down, it becomes more of our embodied experience because we've integrated it down the hard way. But we're also lifting up our biographical-

• 1:24:55Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  And then you get to that death rebirth experience. And then, and then, and rather than that being the end of our physical lives, right? We get to have it early.

• 1:25:04Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  And then you're like, ah, okay, so now I'm no longer struggling to get off the hook. Right? I am no longer trying to transcend or bypass my life. Right? I'm actually embracing it fully. I'm shouldering my yoke, right? And that, I mean, this is, you know, mildly esoteric, but it's too beautiful not to share, which is, you know, the biographical life is chronos, like Greek, the Greek term for like clock time.

• 1:25:30Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Right? Past, present, future in order. Life's a bitch and then we die. And then sacred time, right? What we experience when we glimpse our mythic lives is called Kairos. And in the esoteric traditions, like- Kairos is the vertical beam, that's sacred time, and Kronos is the cross beam. Right? And we live on that plane, but we can have access to this one. And when we find ourselves at the intersection, that's what the Rosicrucians, right? Called the Rosie Cross, that is Anthropos. That is timeless Christ consciousness. And you're like, oh, neat. So can we bear witness to the tragic, to the magic, to the comic? Right? And then can we live out the remaining chapters of our life?

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  Don't know how.

• 1:27:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's all works out.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  51 to 49, nail biter. But somehow, somehow, right, Jordan pulls the three.

• 1:27:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:54Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Right? So we can relax a little. It's, but here's the thing, it's not like Calvinist predestination. You're not like, oh, we're already saved or we're already damned. So like, close my eyes and hands off the wheel. I don't need to try. Right, it's forty-nine fifty-one, which means every single calorie between here and there counts. Right. Which means we're still one hundred percent. So we're off the hook of like neurotic wonderings about is there something more? Do I have a place? But we're on the cross. Hmm. Right? Of Kairos and Cronus to say, I bear witness. I bear witness to this full catastrophe and on behalf of the least of my brothers and sisters. Right? And to pull that around, right? That we talked about soul force, right?

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  That Martin Luther King phrase and how he got it from Howard Thurman, right? That badass mystic who went to see Gandhi. And this is crazy. I was interviewing Rick Doblin from MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. And out of nowhere, he just blurted this out. He's like, oh, you know that Good Friday experiment? Which was that famous experiment in like nineteen sixty-two or three at Harvard, at Boston Chapel, where they gave a bunch of Harvard Divinity School students psilocybin during a Good Friday service. And everybody knows that story. It's one of the most well-reported ones. It's been replicated at Johns Hopkins. And then they could not tell the difference between who had had a legitimate mystical experience and who'd been on the psilocybin. And actually, none of the folks in the control group went on to become ordained ministers.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  And eight of the nine who had psilocybin did. So very, very interesting study, right? And everybody kind of knows that part of it. And then Rick, just out of nowhere, he's like, oh yeah, by the way, you know who the chaplain was delivering the sermon? Howard Thurman. Hmm. So I was like, what? You're kidding me. I was gonna write about Howard Thurman anyway. That's amazing. Let me dig up the audio. So, and they recorded it. Wow. So there's Howard Thurman, this badass who shaped the entire African-American civil rights movement, who coined the term soul force. And he tells this story to a bunch of, to a chapel full of tripping mystics. He says, I hear a voice crying out in the wilderness, forgiveness. And I go out to see him and I find a man on the cross. And I say, I have to take you down.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  He says, you cannot take me down. You cannot take me down until every man, woman, and child comes to take me down. He says, tell everyone you meet, there's a man on the cross. There's a man on the cross.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  And you're just like, right? Tell everyone we meet, right? We like it's it's time to stop waiting for the second coming. Hmm. Right? And it's time for us to step up. Right? Every man, woman, and child.

• 1:30:43Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:30:45Speaker 01

  And and you know, the beautiful part of it is, is that if if we can learn to weep and not whimper, right? If we can digest our grief, if we can remember our redemption songs, then we don't just get to limp each other home or walk each other home, we get to dance each other home. Right? This gets to be profound celebration. But the longer we delay, the harder the landing.

• 1:31:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  And the sooner we get on this, right? The more joyful and creative what we create next for our Cinderella story can be.

• 1:31:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Wow. I wish we could go for much longer, but I think this is a lot for people to take off right now.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  That's a lot. And and and I'm right at it's 2:30, is it already?

• 1:31:42Lewis Howes?

  That's 1:30.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Oh, sweet.

• 1:31:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I was looking at my clock, because I was like, we were in a we were in a flow state. This is a lot for people to unpack. I had a lot more questions and things I wanted to go over, but I think this is a good place to land the plane. Uh, recapture the rapture, rethinking God, sex, and death in a world that's lost its mind. This is gonna blow your minds in a big way. So make sure you guys get a copy of this. I've got a couple of final questions to wrap things up.

• 1:32:15Lewis Howes?

  One is called the three truths question. I ask everyone at the end, hypothetical question. Like you'd imagine it's your last day on earth, many years away from now. You get to live as long as you want.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:32:25Lewis Howes?

  You get to accomplish everything you want to accomplish.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:28Lewis Howes?

  But for whatever reason, you have to take everything with you, you created to the next place.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:32:33Lewis Howes?

  So all the books, the writing, the videos, it all goes with you wherever you go after.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  King Tut.

• 1:32:39Lewis Howes?

  It all goes with you. Hypothetical. But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world. This is all we would have to remember you by are these three lessons that you've learned from all your experiences. And this is all we could know of you. Or like, I like to call it three truths. What would you say would be your three truths?

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this is, it's even more like three truths. This is literally what picks me up off the floor. When I am destroyed by staring at the screaming abyss and feel like there's no point to any of it.

• 1:33:13Lewis Howes?

  What is that?

• 1:33:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is seek novelty, make art, help out.

• 1:33:23Lewis Howes?

  Okay, there you go. Help out.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause like, so like seek novelty is we're hardwired for dopamine. We're hardwired for newness. And whenever I feel like I'm festering, it's because my novelty meter is way low.

• 1:33:37Lewis Howes?

  You're doing the same thing over and over. Yeah.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  Sunrise is sunsets, new places, new experiences, go seek novelty. Make art is some form of testimony. It's like, can I rail against the second law of thermodynamics and that everything trends towards entropy and decay over time and a cold heat death of an gun carrying universe? So may build something beautiful.

• 1:33:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  And that could be a garden, that could be a poem, that could be a building, but make art. Like say I was here, I made this place a little more good, true and beautiful. And then finally, like, and if I've figured out the first two, share it.

• 1:34:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:12Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. It's good truths. I want to acknowledge you, Jamie, for your constant seeking of wisdom, from science to ancient a philosophy to bringing it all together for something that we can hopefully apply and use for healing trauma, for understanding this earth, for understanding connection, why we're having massive breakdowns in the world, what to do about it for ourselves and how to help others. So I acknowledge you for doing this work. I remember Jason Silva telling me probably four or five years ago about you, and it's been fun to watch your journey and see what you've created with this book, which is going to blow people's minds. So I acknowledge you for doing the hard work,

• 1:34:55Lewis Howes?

  for diving into the misfit that you are and were growing up, and allowing it to be a beautiful piece of art for right now, because I'm sure there was a lot of things that had to happen for you to be here. So I acknowledge you for making this art and sharing it with the world in a beautiful way. My final question, and people can get the book online, they can go to your site. Where can we go and find this, this book and you and?

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you've got a local independent bookstore, share it, share the love, for sure. And then, obviously, Amazon and everything else works just fine. And recapturetherapture.com is a place to find the book, but also find tools, resources. The intention is for this book to seed a revolution, not lead one, and let a thousand fires burn. So we have an open source toolkit for anybody to play with culture, architecture, and help healing, inspiration, and community wherever you are.

• 1:35:49Lewis Howes?

  Recapturetherapture.com. What about on social media? Are you spending a lot of time on anywhere specifically?

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, on Instagram, it's at @flowgenome, and then on Facebook, @flowgenomeproject, I think will probably be this.

• 1:36:02Lewis Howes?

  That's your main focus? Cool. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Oh, nice one. Nice one. Let's try and come up with something that's original. I mean, honestly, I think it is seeking refuge in the Dharma. Like the thing that's yours and yours alone to do. So like in a, like Marvel comics, it's Thor's hammer. Right? It's impossibly heavy for anybody else to touch. But yours, it's the same as Excalibur. Like find your hammer. Take the sword out of the stone and wield it with courage and compassion. And let the chips fall.

• 1:36:45Lewis Howes?

  My man. Jamie.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Powerful.

• 1:36:48Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for being here, for listening to this episode. I hope you found a lot of value from this. I hope it inspired you. I hope it gave you some wisdom, some tools, some strategies. If it did, please pay the greatness forward. Share this with a few friends. Text them right now. Post it on social media. You can use the link lewishouse.com/1100 and post that out. All the full show notes are there with links to the previous part one episode also. So make sure to share those out. Get your friends involved in some inspiration, some strategies, some tools to help them improve the quality of their life. And if you enjoyed this, please leave a review and a rating over on Apple Podcasts and subscribe if you're not subscribed yet. That really helps us spread the message of greatness to more people.

• 1:37:31Lewis Howes?

  So rate, leave a review and click the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts right now to stay up to date. We've got over 1,100 episodes from some of the biggest minds in the world, some of the most inspiring human beings, authors, athletes, activists, you name it. We're trying to get the greatest of all time to help you unlock your greatness in your life. And if you want inspirational text messages sent to your phone every single week from me, then text me the word podcast right now to this number, 614-350-3960. And I want to leave you with this quote from Olympic champion, Wilma Rudolph, who said, "Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion."

• 1:38:14Lewis Howes?

  The potential for greatness lives within each of us. I want to remind you that greatness is not something that comes to people who are favored. You are born with greatness inside of you. But you've got to be willing to unlock it. You've got to be willing to take steps to overcome the insecurities, the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt, the fear that holds you back. This is what you're born for. Your journey is the process of uncovering it. I want to remind you this. Again, if no one's told you lately, you are loved. You are worthy and you matter. And you know what time it is? It's time to go out there and do something great.