Jamie Wheal - Rethinking God, Sex and Death for a World That's Lost It's Mind

Full transcript: Jamie Wheal on London Real

3:53 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jamie Wheal, the executive director of the Flow Genome Project and expert in the neurophysiology of human performance over a decade. You’ve advised Fortune 500 companies like Google, Nike, and Red Bull, as well as the US Naval War College on strategy, execution, and leadership. You’re also the co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Stealing Fire, which investigated flow states, and your upcoming book, Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God’s Sex and Death for a World That’s Lost Its Mind, explores the limitations and potentials of biohacking, self-help and psychedelic revolutions.

4:29 Jamie, welcome to London Real. Thanks for having. Great to have you here. First of all, what’s it like when you land in a city like London, have you had a relationship with this place for a long time, or what does it kind of mean to you? Well, I mean, I was born and raised here, so I grew up in the New Forest near Salisbury, and so coming back home is a mixed experience, because on the one hand I have all of these not deeply nostalgic memories of England back in the day.

4:57 You know, back in the 70s and very much kind of BBC, All Creatures Great and Small. You know, cricket on the village green, the church bells, kind of thing, and then coming back to contemporary London in England, it’s obviously so different, and it’s not my home anymore, so it’s, I think, that the sense is just nostalgia, right? You know, a feeling for all of the history and the traditions, and you see, you know, you see in the buildings the etched in stone and the names and the generations before, and on the other hand this hyper-modern cosmopolitan world that’s completely new and foreign to me, so it’s sort of delightfully ambiguous.

5:34 What do you remember about the culture and the vibe and the feelings in like the 70s and 80s like Britain then? You know, I think the closest I can describe that, be a reference point for people, is the sense that that entire generation of kids that came of age reading Harry Potter, and you know, the watching of the first films and the coming to Hogwarts, that sense of coming to Hogwarts, that’s what I kind of grew up with. I grew up with that sense of, you know, lineage and tradition and something ancient.

6:03 So, you know, growing up in the New Forest, we would drive past Beaulieu’s old manor house, and there was the tree in the forest where Prince Rufus, you know, back in the Middle Ages, was shot by his own huntsman, you know, in a sort of assassination attempt that was, you know, written off as an accident. And, you know, my brother went to the Cathedral School in Salisbury and used to run on his cross-country team around Old Sarum Hill and Stonehenge, so that sense of just ancientness, I think, has always been in my bones. And then coming to America, which obviously feels so new.

6:35 Yeah, and so everything’s just immediate. I think it was that sense of both history and just the bones of a place, and the lineage of the people, that really has led to a lot of my curiosity and learning, which was always sort of neuroanthropology. You know, very much like Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus, or, you know, or what’s his book, Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. And that’s it. Who are we?

7:03 Yeah, and where have we come from? So having that history growing up in Britain, you might not have got that growing up in Phoenix. Yeah, maybe not. Absolutely. Yeah, and that’s the…

7:12 I grew up in San Diego, so you know, there really wasn’t much history. I mean, the oldest building is 50, 60 years old, and maybe there’s some monks that came up from the south, but there wasn’t much. So when I walk around England, I just, it’s so steeped in it, so it just feels like part of me now. Yeah, you grew up an interesting family here as well, high-performance mother and father. You know, can you briefly talk about that and how that might have shaped your future?

7:36 Sure. I mean, you know, very much mixed tradition. So my mother was South African, my father’s family moved from London after World War Two to South Africa, that’s where they met, and then he came back and he submitted his applications to Cambridge and to the Royal Naval test school, and the odds, the entry, I think, to Cambridge was something like, you know, 7%, 8%, but the odds to get into the Royal Naval pilot training was, I think, 2%, and yeah, he got into both, and so he was like, okay, I’m gonna go and do the pilot thing, because I want to fly the best planes in the world.

8:15 So he was, when the Concorde was still a military top-secret project, he was testing that, when the Sea Harrier, the vertical takeoff… yeah, Jack, he was the chief test pilot on the carrier take-off and landings, which he described to me once. You know, it was like trying to land in pitch-black night in the North Sea, trying to land a Harrier on an aircraft carrier, and these are the small ones. He’s not the crazy big, you know, US nuclear ones these days.

8:41 I was like, trying to sort of land on a pool table. You know, buy a lighter. So that was my background. It was very much the sort of the Great Santini to Top Gun. You know, it was that world, right?

8:54 And I was kind of getting shunted along to go to Annapolis and go to the U.S. Naval Academy, and at the last minute kind of just didn’t, and thought, okay, if I’m not gonna be a test pilot or a SEAL, because those are really the only two gigs that would have sort of passed muster with him. Yeah, I would have felt like I was best punting if I had at least done. And he was looking toward America. Oh yeah.

9:16 Well, we emigrated there because my mother’s love of South Africa and the landscape of Cape Town and that kind of stuff, they fell in love with the continent of North America, right? And just the outdoors and the sense of adventure, so we grew up waterskiing and snow skiing and these varying things, and that, and they stayed, and so they fell in love with the US, and so absent going the military track, my commitment was, okay, if I’m not going to do that, how do I ring that bell anyway? And so that was where my interest in surf rescue and wilderness medicine and mountain guiding and those kind of things came.

9:51 And I was like, well, if no one’s gonna shoot at you, or something like that, at least can you put yourself in mortal consequences with precision and with teamwork and with that same caliber of leadership, and can I learn there? Plus it always just made more sense. I mean, I think maybe being a stranger in a strange land and never actually feeling a part of any culture, I was just, even as a kid, I was sort of a perpetual anthropologist. Like, what are the strange customs of these humans I’m around?

10:19 You know, so nature made sense, right? And I think that’s always been a refuge for me. Interesting. And in your TED talk, when you’re in Venice, you said that you always felt like that outsider until you had kind of that one windsurfing incident where you probably had your first flow state experience. And I’m sure it was preposterous for your friends to hear that story, or even tell yourself that story at first, that getting on a board with a sail on it could change your life.

10:47 But it did, right? Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, people often ask sort of like, oh, okay, so what makes you tick? You know, what’s your sort of quote unquote lineage, or where did you come from, or how did you get to here? And the simplest description for me is, you know, music, mountains, mushrooms, and marriage. It was really, yeah, you know.

11:08 And then the unlocking moves, whether the mountains, mushrooms, and music, then the marriage, happened to be finding a life partner in college and then continuing this journey together in relationship, and then also with children, with family, which became the grounding element. I think otherwise I would have, you know, shut up to the mound and never come home. So that was always the filter, but the first two was really beautiful, natural emotion where I could go and take all the angst and all the frustration of being an angry young man, you know railing against the world that didn’t seem like it made sense or lived up to my hopes or ideals, thrashing the everliving hell out of myself, getting to a place of physical exhaustion, you know, getting my ya-yas out experiencing beautiful sensations of gravity, you know, whether that was zipping along windsurfing or skiing or mountain biking, something, and then often having the moment of kind of release, like that windsurfing experience, you know, riding along on the setting, the gold, the cold, and pathway of the Setting Sun, and just being like, oh hell yeah, this is pretty good.

12:24 Hmm, you know, that there’s no clutter. There’s no super-ego, you know, so there’s no social voice or chatter. This is just me as a human being alive on this planet, you know, and dynamically engaged. Wow, and so that became a lifeline, and then the combination of that and, you know, gathering wild mushrooms in the back cow field behind every college and trying this for the first time, and I remember sticking my hand into the koi pond on the college campus, and it was like Terminator 2, you know, like where they see he goes through the Quicksilver, and I felt like I was sticking it into a completely different world, and I was like, oh my god, thank heavens this exists, thank heavens, that like the world is as enchanted as I always hoped, because the delta between the Hogwarts early experienced, you roaming through the forest, and feeling like you know, there was literally the land of fairy and Tolkien and everything, and then getting growing up and getting into the social world, and it feeling like it was completely desacralized, that there was nothing worth caring about, having being given back that gift and saying, you know, magic is afoot, you know, and if you just pay attention, if you just know where the doors are.

13:42 Yeah, that saved my life honestly. It gave me something to care about and something to step up to and live into. Okay, and that initial part of that journey was Stealing Fire and writing that book, and then I think you said for the next 18 years, like traveling the world and talking and teaching and working with companies and all sorts of groups around that. I mean, now in retrospect looking back, how would you describe the major points of that experience?

14:13 Well, I mean, I think we were, you know, always just seeking the the purest, cleanest experiences of being we could, and that led us everywhere from, you know, guiding mountaineering trips in Nepal and Tibet and taking the youngest group of American students ever up than to Camp Three on the North Face of Everest, and then spending two days in these medieval caves at base camp, you know, having them do a meditation and fasting solo, you know, looking at Chomolungma, looking at the amazing mountain, or, you know, climbing up to tantric monasteries there at 17,000 feet, and soaking in hot springs that actually had it. It was like Indiana Jones, that we would, we were soaking in these hot springs going, isn’t this the life, you know? Like, we’ve busted us to get here.

15:02 This is fantastic. Here’s this, you know, like the Potala Palace, kind of beautiful monastery, and then suddenly one of our students screams bloody murder. She looks down, and there’s a snake coiled around her ankle, and then we look at all the rocks, and suddenly the entire rocks are just moving and heaving, and there were all these snakes, like sticking their heads out and sweeping around. So it’s 17,000 feet. There was a thermal heat sink in the Himalayas that had supported this colony of state.

15:25 We’re like, dear God. So experience is like that, okay, where you’re out there on the sharp end of life. You don’t know what’s going to come or what’s gonna happen, and it affirms your aliveness, and it gives you a sense of why we’re here. That was the thread. The thread was always, how do we, you know, seek it ourselves and then share it as instructors or educators or trainers, whatever the role would be, so that, you know, in service of helping us all grow up.

16:01 And my sense was, you know, I actually was, what we were with some CEOs, we were at doing an Alpine, like a skiing leadership training, and I had them do the exercise, if you know, what’s your purpose, which is a little bit cornball, but nonetheless we were doing it, and I was as they were sitting writing, I realized I was like, sound of a [expletive]. I’ve never done that. Like, I’ve assigned this exercise. I’ve never actually asked myself what’s mine, and in an instant, you know, it came down to my purpose is to seek truth and share it, and I realized that it was that dialectic, like, if I just saw truth and didn’t connect to others, I would be the sort of mad hermit in a cave.

16:43 Yeah, and if I just shared it, then I would end up being a sort of depleted cardboard cutout of my former self, which I felt like in my management consulting years. I was like, oh, this is getting perilously close to me, just pimping out my old adventuresome life for office stiffs, right? You know, giving the spiel. Yeah, and so I felt like, ah, it’s that, it’s that dynamic between the two. It’s going to the mountaintop, coming back down, saying, hey, here’s some cheat codes, here’s some root beta, like, here’s where we got to, here’s how, here’s where was hard, here’s where you can rest, here’s how to get to the view, and coming back down.

17:21 And it’s that dialogue that, really, I think it is kind of driven my life. Okay, and I mean a lot of Stealing Fire was talking about these flow states and talking about the different levels and the different components of it and getting people to learn how to be in more flow, but at the same time, like, by going down that route, you started coming up with these new ideas you have now, which is, okay, now we have these states, but then what do we do with them? And I’m just wondering, what were some of the new observations you had about Stealing Fire and some of the challenges you had, and then how did that kind of roll up into some of these new ideas?

17:56 Because I think they’re really fascinating. Yeah, I mean, for me, I just look backwards, kind of those the earlier phases of my life I just described briefly to you, which was, well, what makes me tick, you know, and I realized I was basically a pretty lazy and unmotivated bastard except for those experiences that made me come alive. So, you know, I would never want to get up early in the morning, but if it was a powder day, or it was good wind in waves, pow, happening, I could never in my life go to the gym and work out on a Stairmaster or a treadmill.

18:30 It would seem like, you know, stick a fork in my eyeballs, but if it was a matter of climbing a mountain to get to a summit at sunrise and get to ski a beautiful line, you know, on the way down, fantastic. And so I was like, well, what’s that? How do I have a seemingly unlimited motivation in this category and absolutely none based on compliance or alts and shoulds? And I thought, well, I wonder, and probably not alone on that, and what is that? And so that was what kind of led to the study of flow states and peak states and what I had found is, you know, particularly with that combination of, you know, wilderness and those experiences, is the sort of natural sublime, you know, which doesn’t need any more justification that’s Walt Whitman and Emerson and Thoreau and, you know, the whole class of folks that, you know, got their should use from that place.

19:20 Plus the psychedelic experiences, you’re like, okay, there seems like there’s a dynamic there, seems like there’s some relationship between peak states and growing into the best people we can become, and it was sort of that notion of what Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once said. He said, have you know, that the project is, how do we take our altered states and turn them into altered traits? How do we use the peak experiences to actually raise the plateau of our overall being?

19:50 And I realized, accidentally, backdoor lazy bastard, you know, that’s how I was trying to live my life, and I was forever, you know, popping up to the high ground looking around going, ah, you know, way down in the woods where we’re actually on our journey, it makes sense. I see our destination from here. I understand where we’re going, so when we come back down and we shoulder our burdens again, I’m not wandering lost in the woods. I’m not dragging us. And so when are we there yet?

20:19 I know where we’re going, right? And there’s a sense of ability to close that gap, so that’s really I think the mechanics of how peak states can be so profoundly helpful, and where we are today is where your students’ understanding that when you’re teaching that to Navy SEALs and CEOs and all those people, were they getting that same realization, or does it take, do you have to be immersed in flow for a while to start to understand that it can give you kind of the plan for the future or a bigger picture? No, I think that’s actually a sort of, that’s a, that’s an intrinsic feature of peak states, and you know, there’s an old Greek term, but Philip K.

20:58 Dick, you know, the science fiction writer who did Blade Runner and Total Recall, he you know, it’s a hat tip to him, was cuz he familiarized the term, which is anamnesis, is the opposite of amnesia. So it’s literally the forgetting of the forgetting. Right, okay, well, it’s deep. Like, I think about that for a while. Okay, so when you forget that you’ve forgotten, you’ve remembered, and what we typically remember in those states is who we are and what we’re here to do.

21:25 Yeah, that describes quite a few of my psychedelic experience. Right, there’s always that yeah, profound sense of deja vu and a deep remembering, and I always think of that, you know, the Disney film of Sleeping Beauty, where the entire kingdom has fallen asleep under the spell, and then when they wake up they’re sort of in the middle of their conversation. There’s the cook in the kitchen, and he’s chasing somebody, you know, that the whole thing comes back to life, and I feel like peak states so routinely do that, that it’s a known issue, and it’s that remembering of, I have a deeper knowing beyond the day-to-day, beyond the chatter.

22:00 I have a nobler self, and I have a purpose. I have a mission that to me is indescribably valuable. Hmm, and at the same time, it feels like no sooner do we have that than we sort of power up into our fullest, high-fidelity self, that there’s almost always, you know, instead of a body scan, you slur, and here’s the laundry list of the things that are out of whack, out of integrity, not in keeping with that expiry. So it’s like that Suzuki Roshi joke where, you know, you’re perfect exactly as you are and you could use a little work.

22:41 Anybody says that peak states do that? And that’s, you know, if that was all it was, that would still be profoundly useful, but there’s also a sense in this, you know, this dovetails into PTSD and trauma work as well, which is, you know, for instance, like when the MAPS research with MDMA and trauma therapy, what does that do? Right? If you’re just a raver and you pop, you know, you pop Molly, you go off on, you dudes, you don’t necessarily think about it or integrate it, but when it’s in a therapeutic setting, you have that experience of, I feel fantastic, I feel like a million bucks, I have, you know, heightened oxytocin and serotonin and prolactin.

23:19 I feel warm and womb-like, and I can take some of that energy, and I can use it to revisit the places I’m contracted, the places I’m impacted, and because I know I have safety, I’m not contracting and defending and blocking it. I can actually go into and shift that stuff. So that feels to me that there’s a, you know, to your point about what’s, what’s evolving after writing Stealing Fire, which was arguably a love story to the backstory of X tosses. Yeah, right.

23:51 This is where we’ve come from, all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Yeah, you know, in the 60s and the 70s, to know this next book, Recapture the Rapture, is sort of, what’s the relationship between those peak states and our healing and our connections and commitment to each other? So instead of just ecstasis, it’s sort of, it’s a three-legged stool. It’s a triangle, and it’s ecstasis, go up and remember what you’ve forgotten, take some of that energy, come back to catharsis, digest our grief, integrate our trauma, the calm, stand up on our own two feet, and then communitas, connect with our brothers and sisters, do what we’re here to do.

24:31 Like, remember that, men, this go do what we must. Yeah, and that’s really the sort of, feels to me like the flywheel of coming into ourselves, self-initiating call, individually and collectively, into, you know, what you could say, you know, nom, technically would just be homegrown humans, you know, head, ha, heaven, in this masculine feminine, you name it, all balanced and blended to do the thing. The morning, you know, it’s to stay in the Greek nomenclature would be anthropos, you know, which is in the Hermetic tradition, that sense of fully integrated human.

25:07 Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, that idea of absolutely balanced. It’s not, we don’t get to cut corners anymore, you know. It was enough for Pablo Picasso to be a brilliant artist, but it was a misogynistic, womanizing bastard. We can’t do those kind of lopsided things anymore, right? It’s on us these days because we have access to all the tools to say nothing less than balance will be adequate for the challenges of it, and it’s extremely relevant now.

25:36 And you were talking about how you had some of these ideas, you know, 12 months, 24 months ago now, like, it seems more relevant than ever, and I have so many people in that leather chair, and they talk about a lot of what you just talked about, whether it’s Michael Pollan talking about the rise of tribalism and his own experiences with you know, one of those M’s, you know, the mushrooms, you know, all those different aspects you’re talking about, talking about childhood trauma with Dr. Gabor Maté, and yeah, and these types of things. So it’s very interesting that you’re coming to this now. Before we go into that, I’m curious, and I asked even Kyle this as well.

26:10 Do you think everyone has experienced a peak state or a flow state? Because I’m sure maybe there’s people watching or listening that are like Jamie, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yeah, I mean, I’m wondering, do you think everyone has? And if they have, do you think they can reflect back to that and say, yeah, I know what you mean, Jamie, when I was there, I did know where I was going, or I remember things and then I lost it, and now I’m back. And those are my kind of, my questions for you.

26:35 Yeah, so I think, you know, the sort of standard answer is that peak states, you know, flow states, is a subcategory of that broader category, of that broader answer’s domain are accessible to everybody, and most people have, almost everybody has had some micro. There’s a strange micro-to-macro, you know. There’s the macro road-to-Damascus epiphany, life-changing, and then there’s the micro of, I had 15 to 30 seconds on a walk with my dog where the light was coming through the trees just so, and, you know, and I smelt things, and I just felt suddenly extra alive, and suddenly, no clay cells.

27:13 And the thing that’s often confusing for folks about the micro ones is that they’re rarely the photo album flashbulb memories. They’re very rarely your wedding or your prom or your graduation or the, the pomp and circumstance times. They’re their blips, and they happen in the flow of things, of life, and we typically don’t tag them and label them, but when we do, we’ll do an exercise with people of saying, hey, you know, do a life walk, like literally sort of take a step at a time and describe, I’m in childhood, and describe just spontaneously your peak experience there, and then take another step and say, this was my adolescence.

27:52 I’m 12 year 14 years old, and we’re on the soccer pitch or I’m giving a speech or playing music, and that. Here I am as an adult, and the results of just that exercise, just guiding people slightly to remember and let themselves be surprised by what comes up. So no scripting, and they’re rehearsing people often end up weeping. They often end up sharing things with complete strangers in that exercise they haven’t shared with spouses or significant others, and it’s because what happens when we’re in those peak states is that there’s a cascade of neurochemistry.

28:23 So you get norepinephrine and dopamine and anandamide and all these things that actually are memory encoders, so they say, hey, this is salient, right? This matters in some way. Save it for later. Take it from short-term experience and transfer it over to long-term memory. So the memories are incredibly rich, and they’re profound, but we don’t file them there.

28:43 They’re lost in the stack. And when we’re given that experience, it’s often really empowering for folks, because they’re like oh, this isn’t something out there for people, not like me. This is something I have lived and I’ve yearned for, and you know, Csikszentmihalyi, the original godfather of flow research, that, you know, these moments, you almost say that these moments are effectively the driver of all civilization, all music, all beauty, you know, and much else has been asked.

29:11 Seeking these moments that make us come alive. So in that respect, I’d say absolutely. It is a birthright, and it is accessible and does not need to be something mysterious. And at this point, your sense of where are we these days? We’ve never had access to more ecstatic state-shifting technologies than at any point in human history.

29:33 We kind of have the keys to the kingdom, and so in that respect, I would say, don’t die wondering, you know, if you’re curious. Right? There are a dozen ways to shoot them in. There are a dozen ways to go and see for yourself, such as, well, I mean, you can take it from this, you know, the low end, where you could say, go and do a ten-day but possibly retreat, right? And you and that takes a bit of time, right?

29:57 And it’s very safe, and you would say, okay, you can go, and you will, and if you’re willing to invest that chunk of time and be comfortable being uncomfortable, you will have some meaningful, meaningfully different relationship to yourself, your body, and your awareness than you did going in. Nearly, damn it. I mean, a pretty good odds. Yeah, right? If you wanted to up that, you could say, hey, do something where there’s physical exhaustion.

30:20 You did it, you didn’t. An Ironman, right? An ultra run. I mean, we lived in the mountains of Colorado, and there’s that Leadville Hundred, right? And that experience is a rite of passage, you know.

30:30 By 3:00 in the morning, you’ve been running for 18 hours, people are out there, and they’re, you know, they’re emotionally raw and vulnerable. They’re ecstatic. I mean, it’s everything, to loosen ADA. Yeah, right? and you can do it that way, or you could, you know, sign up and register for one of the psychedelic therapy clinics and training, whether that’s ketamine therapy or MDMA therapy.

30:50 You could do something like go into a sensory deprivation float tank. Yeah, you know, there’s, so there’s lots of ways to shift our states. Go to Burning Man. You could indeed. Okay you go to Disneyland.

31:00 Is there a point where it doesn’t necessarily get you there? I mean, Disneyland on acid, it’s a, some, something to get you to a peak state, something to get you to drop, basically, you know, the socially conditioned elements, something to get you to shut off your default mode network, which is kind of your inner mind shatter, something to bring you into as vitalized and aligned, about you can help support, right? And something to give you access to information, right, that that’s with that peak experience of heightened information awareness and processing, those things are, you know, generally speak for themselves after that, right?

31:43 And now we have access to all of that with the internet and with all these services. We can go do those things fairly readily. Yeah, do you think everyone needs to do something like that? Well, I mean, you know, here we are, sort of in the nominal psychedelic Renaissance, like after Stealing Fire, after Michael Pollan’s book, you know, there’s been this massive, I mean, those books didn’t create it. They were simply naming a thing that was already happening.

32:05 Yeah, and maybe extending the awareness of it and helped crystallize it, but I think that we are in a goofy spot, because at the same time that we have more access to more psycho technologies than any humans ever, they’ve also been completely ripped out of cultural context. So in all of your ministry, these things were closely guarded, tightly held secrets, usually passed down through a lineage with the very high standards of vetting of who had access to what, when and why. And now it’s gloves off, and you can pretty much one click on Amazon and blow yourself to the moon.

32:45 And so my sense is that we absolutely need to start articulating cultural parameters for what is appropriate and best use, and it is goofy, because particularly psychedelics but any of these peak state experiences, you could say, you know, deliberate and conscious sexuality is another one, and to your point about, has everybody had these experiences? Jenny Wade is a researcher on sexuality and found that over 15 million Americans have had accidental spontaneous transcendent experiences during sexuality. So that’s not doing some specific protocol, that’s not learning contre or anything like that, just making love with a partner and having some wild non-ordinary experience, and less than half have actually shared it with their partners.

33:30 You don’t say. So you’re like, because they don’t know what to say or do, right? Do you, like, you know, both intriguing inspiring and tragic, you know, depending on which side you’re looking at. And so with these elements, and you know, and there’s a whole, you know, that we’ve got the psychedelic Renaissance on one side, you’ve got kind of open sexuality, polyamory, of relating, Sex at Dawn, you know, that whole kind of movement. Yeah, and there are no governors on what we’re doing, so to bring it back into cultural guidelines as to how might we, are we all, do this?

34:04 My sense is, you know, just from an anthropological point of view, you could make a case that, you know, there’s a bell curve distribution, and you could say, probably, hey, I mean, these are rough numbers, but roughly 10% of people should never touch psychedelics or even any sort of overheating ecstatic, deliberately ecstatic technologies, you know, breathwork, sexualities, sensory deprivation. They’re saying they have a genetic or hereditary history of mental conditions, they have a deliberate and destabilized series of traumas that are maybe not amenable to healing, they might have caused to be personality, so, socio, sociopathy, psychopathy, narcissism, those kind of things that will make those folks worse. So 10% take it off the table, only 10% on the far side should ever do them more than a handful of times in their life, and the middle of the bell curve, that 80% could arguably, you know, what if, for instance, we had a rite of passage in adolescence?

35:07 You know, everybody says rites of passage are essential. We have these extended adolescents, there, stretching into the mid-20s. Some people still haven’t grown up by the time they’re 30. There are still dudes with their Xboxes, smoking weed and joking off to porn and playing first-person shooters at home, at home, you know, at 30, and there’s an entire generation of young women that are like, what the hell, I’ve got a man-child as a boyfriend, you know, when will they ever grow the hell up?

35:31 So definitive rites of passage feels like a really important thing, and you could say, how about, let’s say, you know, three grams of psilocybin? You know, it’s like, it’s like that old book, Alex Haley’s book, Kentucky, you know, like Roots. You know, we’re in the beginning in West Africa, his father, you know, he’s born and his father holds him up, and you know, to the night sky, he says, behold, Kunta Kinte, the only thing in the universe greater than you.

35:55 Like, we need that experience, you know. So that could be a rite of passage, and then marriage, you know, what if, whether it’s your wedding night or some precursor to it, you had structured and supported MDMA couples intimacy? Here’s my deepest love, here’s my deepest wonder ability, here’s my hot truth, can I say it and testify with you, and can we forge that bond that structurally foundational level of our relating? And then potentially end-of-life preparation, you know, and Johns Hopkins has done tons of studies with cancer patients and survivors, but, you know, what about a structured 5-MeO-DMT experience, which many, many people who experience it report as a death rebirth experience of basically the light of source consciousness.

36:43 Neat. So yeah, that’s a test drive right inside that. I haven’t not tried it. Okay, gotcha. So that sense of, you know, preparation for the arguably most important transition this side of birth.

36:57 You know, you imagine just those three experiences, and the thing there is, is to say these days, because it’s so easy, and because it’s so accessible, and because there’s no cultural wrapper or guidelines, people just keep going back to the Wishing Well, so they’ll have a life-changing experience. I mean, I remember going to a live show and one of our buddies was like, oh yeah, I saw Jesus, second set, man. Totally. I’m like, well, if you saw it f***ing Jesus, this is like, why aren’t you like going home, starting a ministry, doing something god knows what?

37:30 But instead he was just gonna hang out, go to the show the next night, do it all over again. And so that sense of like, if you only have three, right? you’re gonna suck the marrow out of the significance, the implications, and the applications. So like, look at how warriors, right, they would do their Vision Quest. They go to the mountain, put a circle of stones, they stay there for four days.

37:50 They would wait for, you know, a dream vision from Great Spirit, and then that would become the lodestone for their life. They didn’t come back the next weekend, the weekend after that, in the year after that. I say this was my one Amen. I stick that in my virtual medicine pouch, right? And I cherish it, and I spend the rest of my life waiting for the good day to die.

38:10 Is this a subtle reminder to the larger psychedelic community that maybe there are people that are using these in a serial way that maybe is not necessary? Yeah. I mean, you know, we’ve all met someone who’s had 65 ayahuasca experiences, and yeah, and they wear it like a badge of honor. I know, and I always find it profoundly suspect. Me too.

38:30 You know, there’s the old Alan Watts, when you get the message, hang up the phone, kind of thing, and I’m not that binary about it. I think, I think there’s profound benefit in returning and recalibrating over time. There’s a sense of, you know, used, I think, effectively, and so we don’t say appropriately, because that’s a better, you know, that’s a fool’s errand to try and set, but used effectively, peak experiences, and you know, we can use psychedelics as a visible, present test case, but it is in no way limited to those.

39:03 Any comparably potent psycho technologies can be used as, in a sort of three-parkway sort of, as metronome, tuning fork and training wheels. So the metronome is back to that analysis, right? I’m, am I on the one? Am I on the pulse of life? And I was think of like the Carter family, you know, the June Carter who married Johnny Cash, right?

39:29 And her whole family, right? They lived in a Tennessee Kentucky farmhouse or something like that, and with a wraparound porch, and before they would play at the Grand Old Opry, you know, three kids playing banjo and fiddle, and something else would go marching off one way around the porch, and then the other half of the band would go marching off the other way, and if they met at the back of the house and they were still on the beat together, they knew they had, they knew they had it licked, and would do a great job that night at the Opry. And I think coming back to ourselves and being like, I think I’m on the one, but I’m not sure.

40:00 Can I come back to source? Can I come back to self? And can I just, I was a half bit ahead, I was galloping, and I was lagging. Geesh, I’m back on. So the metronome feels important, and then the lag time between my last peak state where I’ve powered up into my truest, best self, and now I’ve probably been pulled down by the density and the gravity, and the thousand tiny cuts of life.

40:25 You know, the haters have taken their shots, right? And so I’ve probably, my instrument is probably a little out of key, and so the tuning fork, like, hey, here’s perfect middle C. Where, uh, you know, you shop, are you flat? Can you just tune such that your instrument is back again, and then the training wheels, you know, I now feel in the back to, you know, the PTSD therapy that MAPS is doing with MDMA. I feel safe, I feel whole, I feel loved, I feel enough.

40:58 I’m not contracting, I’m not coming from scarcity, right? And I’m able to live open-heartedly, even courageously and creatively. Can I practice that, and can I actually feel like what it’s like to come from a super saturated state, and can I actually get that into my muscle memory? Okay, so you can take the wheels off, so then I can take the wheels off, and I think that’s actually one of the profound benefits of an event like Burning Man compared to a weekend festival, or compared to kind of a one-and-done experience, is that people go to Burning Man, the environment, the conditions, the sensory overwhelmed, the substance and sexuality, you know, you name it, it’s every ecstatic technology and the world bueng together, but what happens is people crack open, still have a breakthrough experience, and then they’ve got three, four, five days interacting with other people in a shed archetype, will improv of, let’s keep, let’s extend this, Jan, let’s practice what it means to not just be somewhere deep in the desert, you know, communing with the stars, but actually sharing drinks and playing games and building things and dancing together, and so it really becomes more somatically registered and more and more sort of somatically landed.

42:11 So that would be my sense, is that if we sort of create, you know, hedonic engineering, would be what’s the actual rational practical odd of tuning our states in service of our long-term development, growth and outcomes. Right, what do we actually do with it? And if you do that, you can kind of create a flywheel where we’re doing the good things for us every day, you know, that’s the flossing your teeth, the 15 minutes sitting and the physical exercise, and you know, anything that is just raising our foundational practice.

42:44 Hard to overdo most of them unless you’re super Type A and compulsive, and then a sort of once a week Sabbath experience, like reclaim half a day out of seven that lets you reset deeply, once a month, give yourself a full day, clear the decks and actually go big, once a season, a weekend, once a year, a week. And if you have, because what we’ve got right now is access to the atom bombs. Okay, the, I’m gonna go down to Peru and do an ayahuasca retreat, I’m gonna go to Burning Man, I’m gonna do the thing, and it’s blow ourselves apart in a million pieces, but then we’re all trying to reassemble our spaceships in our driveways.

43:25 No one has the instruction manual, and there’s a lot of left missing bolts and pieces, you know, and we go from that we go from our, you know, Lightspeed back to holy s***. This is Monday morning, and I’m wearing this monkey suit, I got this shitty job, and I’m sitting in the traffic, and what the hell, and we don’t have any of the middle of coming back to the metronome, the tuning fork, and the training wheels, and I feel like the mezzo, the micro and the mezzo sacrament is the piece that we’re missing culturally right now. The macro, the atom bomb, we’ve got access to it, but it’s the interstitial stuff that’s really key to helping us integrate and actually make the most of these things.

44:05 Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons. Oh, super excited to talk to you about today, because as you know, we’re about to premiere our fifth documentary feature film, and it started after my Ironman race last year. It was like a month after, and Dennis McKenna was like, Brian, come down to Costa Rica, we’re gonna do these ayahuasca ceremonies, bring your film crew, and let’s go. And I was resisting, because I was just like, I don’t know, I was, this really, we’re gonna make a movie.

44:31 I don’t want to make, I don’t want to make another ayahuasca movie. We’ve all seen too many ayahuasca movies, and I was like, I don’t want to do that. Now, we’ve been talking about psychedelics and plant medicines for seven years, and so, you know, we know these things, but I didn’t go down there just to do it, but we did it anyways, and I ended up having the second most, well, the second ceremony was the most profound experience of my life, something that taught me so much, and also reminded me that for me, ayahuasca is the mother of all psychedelics.

44:59 It’s the one that gives me lessons. It gives me 10 commandments, you know, because this is exactly what you need to do to talk about training wheels and tuning forks. I mean, it was really, this is what you need to do, and towards the end of the ceremony, she said, let’s review what you will not forget tomorrow. Oh no, let’s go back, the book, ten things, and that’s something I always get. I don’t get with psilocybin.

45:17 I definitely don’t get with DMT. So it was profound, and of course I get dropped back in London way too soon, like literally a day after that last ceremony, and dropped into the madness of what we do here, and now it’s time for me to integrate and I’m telling my wife all of our future and her new role in this whole new reality. Of course, that I’ve seen crystal clear, telling my team then as well, and of course it doesn’t work like that the way you just described it, because we have these atom bombs, and now I’m back to the laundry right after the ecstasy.

45:48 So we kind of showed this whole process, and also I’m trying to figure out how the community plays in on this, and this is where you know, your upcoming book plays in. Like, how do we interact with each other? How do we deal with things that feel like they’ve been weaponized, like climate change, where what is going on? I don’t know, something’s going on. It doesn’t feel right.

46:08 What’s, but I don’t know, people are getting angry and they’re divided over it, and so I’m doing all of this, and then of course my childhood traumas come up as well. So you’re seven years old, your parents are divorced, and this always comes up with me and these ceremonies and it’s limiting me, so I end up flying back to San Diego and getting both my parents on camera and asking them about the divorce. So, wow, it’s funny how you show up today with many of the themes that I’m struggling with and this whole concept of quote-unquote integration, which is a word that’s been used a lot lately, I guess, in the psychedelic communities, which is, I guess, trying to make sense of this atom bomb, and then try to find a way to bring those learnings into a new version of your life.

46:47 So I don’t know, based on that, everything I just dumped on you. I’m just curious of some of the things you see there. Also, I’m not expecting the greatest reception from the quote-unquote psychedelic community, because sometimes it’s the panacea, it’s the have this experience and everything’s gonna be okay. Although I’m probably generalizing, but we’re trying to say it’s not about that. It’s another one of these peak states, and if you don’t treat it the right way, it’s gonna come with, you know, struggles, and if you don’t do the work, it’s not necessarily going to be something you can benefit from.

47:19 So that’s what we’ve kind of learned, and we’re trying to put that in 90 minutes, you know. So it’s been a lot of fun, obviously, trying to do that. I don’t know, what do you think of all that, Jamie? Yeah. I mean, you know, you’re not alone there.

47:32 This is the sort of pernicious nut to crack for all of us, and I mean I think about this a lot, because how do we, how do we reconcile what you just described? You went down to Costa Rica and had the most profound experience of your life. You know, oh man, god bless. So, you know, nothing but gratitude for that kind of a thing, that I get to have lived a life that includes that in it. That’s how I felt.

48:01 Yeah, yeah. I mean, at the same time, [expletive] man, where’s the transmission? How do I take like starlight and learn, and learn to grow corn, and that transition is arguably the entire human project, and I think there’s a lot of, because we’ve yanked it out of culture, we’re just having these experiences and jacking into power feeds. I always think of like there’s that far side cartoon of mosquitoes, you know, and one of them is in an arm, and he’s blown up like a balloon.

48:28 It’s like, pull out, how pull out, you hit an artery. Okay, and that’s kind of what we’re doing with secular, like, and and ecstatic technologies, we are jacking in to the main vein, and it’s just literally like blowing our minds, and my sense is that, you know, one of the challenges is that the psychedelic experience is inherently antinomian, meaning it does not bow down to hierarchical authority. The number one thing is, you know, you’re not the boss of me.

48:59 I’m a golden God, right? And so it’s very, very tricky to lay down parameters or guardrails, because everyone is so averse to submitting after the certainty, right, and a sort of almost manic inflation of those states, but nonetheless, I think there are some potentially helpful guidelines, and one of them is the idea, sort of 80/20 woke two broke, you know, the idea that we get typically 80 percent of our return, of our insights, and a laundry list of things we got to do from our first 20% of exposure to non-ordinary ecstatic experiences, and, but because, precise, because they’re so asymmetrically valuable, okay, we then go chasing a long tail of our imagined perfect ability, and we then think 80% of our time, money, resources chasing that last 20%, not realizing it’s a diminishing return.

50:00 Like, if you wanted to be a junkies, far better to have, like, have your second and third shots of heroin and never touch the stuff again. You want to get over the nausea the first time, and you want to have the first, then the next two, which is the absolute best it will ever be. You don’t want to go chasing that right forever, and there’s a sense for us of the sort of the opportunity cost, which is not only do we continue to overexpose the film, so actually we get more and more non-ordinary information, but it actually starts becoming muddier and more blurred and harder to find, but there’s also the opportunity cost of, I’ve been shown what I got to do is hard, it’s scary, it’s gonna require courage and grace and humor and creativity overcome it.

50:43 It’s gonna require the best of me. Why aren’t I going to do that yet? I’m still going back to the wishing well, and for double, triples, you know, quintuple confirmation of the thing I actually already know in my bones. I gotta go do so. In some respects it’s stalling, and the other respect is there’s the opportunity cost, which is I now know enough to remember what I forgotten and what I’m here to do.

51:04 Shouldn’t I be lending my hand to my brothers and sisters behind me that are just struggling, got their heads above water. I’m trying to get the booster pack on the upgrade, you know, but in fact, right, it’s that old Swing Low, Sweet Chariot that, that spiritual, you know, if you get to heaven before I do, coming for to carry me home. Right, open up the window and pull me on through. You notice I had that sense of commitment and reciprocity, so, so my thinking on that is that 80/20, web 2 broke, is enough.

51:35 We don’t actually have to go back and completely iron out our childhood traumas. We don’t have to constantly go back. The idea that there is some state in the future not yet where I will literally float above this mortal coil and all the density and the heartache. I think is fundamentally misguided, and it can become narcissistic and solipsistic. We literally just crawl up around ourselves and get lost in the infinite reflections.

52:04 Okay, and, you know, it’s thinking about like Navy SEAL operators who we’ve had the, you know, the honor to work with, some of those guys, and really get to understand how they work, and I think holy s***, you know, like they come back off deployment and they’re banged up, right? And they go back, and whether it’s the mind gym or the other things that they’re used to, they’re actually powering themselves back up. But the moment they are good enough, they want to be redeployed because they are committed to their mission.

52:31 Yeah, they’re not committed like, now I’m gonna do Pilates, and now I’m gonna do bodywork, and I have, you heard about cupping and what about acupressure? And like, they’re no, they’re like, probably back up so I can go back to do the thing I have pledged to go do. And it feels like in the kind of country culture there is an endless wrist you know, sort of just fascination with the fixing to get ready. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

52:56 How you tried camp Oh, have you tried gone Caterpie, have each, I’ve listened this, and yeah, and so okay, and this is one of the things you’re gonna be talking about, and when you drop this at psychedelic conferences, what what do people think of you, Jamie? What, well, I mean, I think this is, is this, there’s a sort of like a sort of delight that somebody is actually saying it. Okay, and then there’s a hand for the people that get sort of sad or miffed, but there’s also a very strong resonance, like, preach, like, hell yes, thank you, somebody is finally saying that.

53:26 No, I don’t know how long that lasts, because I don’t want to be just the sort of jeremiad, wagging my finger. You know, there’s got to be the call to action that’s positive in valor and my sense is, is that, you know, another juxtaposition is 80/20 work, two broke. Like, get it, be grateful for it, cherish it, move on, and the other is let the mystery stay the mystery, because when people start having these experiences, one of the first things they do is, when you were storytelling monkeys, we cannot resist presuming to describe a name, what that was, and whether that was, and then I was sucked into the belly of their anaconda, and then I met my star beings or my guardian angels or this and the other.

54:10 I have people stop me at live events and say, Brian, I want to tell you about my ayahuasca experience, because I have to say, I don’t want to hear it. That’s your experience. Yes, yes. But the monkeys want to tell the stories. Yeah, we do, and you know, and I probably fifteen years ago I did a sort of informal in-depth study of everybody that looked like they’d been super switched on.

54:29 So that was Philip K. Dick, that was John Lilly, that was Ken Kesey, that was, you know, who were the guys who had really been the Psychonauts in the past, and what were their accounts, and could you do kind of a comparative religion assessment? Like, okay, if they punch through, okay, just choose whatever those domains are, can you compare their findings and their descriptions, and do they match? And the short answer is not really, and so, incontrovertibly, they were all getting someplace.

54:58 They were all unique talents, had linguistic capacities, the ability to map, frame, describe, and say like, they’re all off the charts capacity-wise, and they’re all coming back with the very different descriptions, and you can do the same with lineage traditions as well. You’re like, you know, the reduction, there’s a perennial philosophy, like, it’s all one, or it’s all source, and you’re all love. You’re like, what’s, sort of, you know, if you abstract all the other details of every other tradition, is why Joseph Campbell’s notion of the monomyth, there’s only ever one story that’s been told, really has never been embraced within academia.

55:28 Okay, right? Because it’s, you know, fine-grain stuff, and it’s much more variegated and complex. So my sense is, you know, the old joke of, it’s turtles all the way down, you know, of what is the universe built on? Right? In the back of a turtle, and it’s turtle and a turtle, but it’s not just that.

55:42 It’s, it’s fractal turtles all the way down, all the way up and sideways. So you realize that potential, the whatever that multi-dimensional set of realities might be, it’s infinitely vast, and it’s always and only mediated by our hardware, in our wet, where our meat suit and the prison-house of language, so we can presume to know solely that which we’ve glimpsed, but not conflate that with naming the whole thing. And so when you say let the mystery stay the mystery, you basically allow ourselves to restore some, all, some wonder and some humility, and it buys us back all the time we would have spent bullshitting and cherishing our stories that you just described.

56:30 So it’s like, you know, the next one we always talk about is, you know, hashtag f*** your journey, don’t want to hear about it. You should go, either your journey got you to this present moment, in which case we are here, nothing more needs to be said, either. Your journey got you to grace, in which case everything in your journey is redeemed in that unfolding. Right? I mean, if you find yourself stepping through into what, you know, what scholars would call Kairos, you know, like sacred time, where Chronos is kind of clock time, our day to day.

57:01 Yeah, if you step through into Kairos, if you’re lucky enough to glimpse that then you can’t second-guess any of the bumps and scrapes, any of the twists and turns that got you there. You’re like, thank you abusive father, thank you negligent mother, thank you third grade bully, you made me the one that could get here, and I’ve got nothing but gratitude for every step. So if people said, we have this sense where people, you know, to your point about over-exposing the peak experience, it’s a little bit like doctors over-prescribing antibiotics.

57:33 You know, we end up, you know, and when that happens, you get super flus, you get super viruses, and we’re almost getting super egos, because what’s happening is, you know, the classic thing is like, I took it, I took the ng but I took penicillin for seven days. I feel great, I’m gonna quit, I don’t need it anymore, and of course the virus or the bacteria is still in you when it comes roaring back stronger than ever. And that’s what’s, I think, is happening with a lot of casual, non- ritualized and non-integrated use and abuse of peak states and technologies is that what’s happening is our egos are diminishing I am a golden God, and then ego is coming back in, capturing all of that light, all of that potency, all of that certainty, and instead of us becoming more and more translucent we’re actually becoming more entrenched than ever.

58:22 Hmm. Right? In our new spiritually bypass, post-super ego, and that’s a massive, massive problem. Do you see? How do you see that in individuals or in the behavior of the collective?

58:35 Oh, sweet Jesus. I mean, I mean, the places that I’ve seen it the most lately, and I’ve shed some version of this before. You know, Kurt Vonnegut, right? His Slaughterhouse-Five and catching prey, all right, and in Cat’s Cradle he talks about Ice-9, which is that molecule that’s gonna go around the world and turn all water molecules and freeze them, basically ending life. And my sense is, is that, and this is, I don’t know the answers, Mr. Hood.

59:03 I’m just kind of spooked by it, which is digital narcissism, the ability of Instagram and Facebook and, you know, Twitter less so, but for sure, I mean, especially Instagram because it’s so visual and all these things. Is that our best efforts to get beyond ourselves, and whether that’s Burning Man, whether that’s the top of a mountain, whether that’s Peru right, and an ayahuasca ceremony with indigenous elders, our phones and our socially constructed identities are following us into those places, and so no sooner have we had the initiatory experience that more and more of us are snapping the post, picturing the caption, sending it out, ricocheting it back into the SATs simulated version of ourselves out there, and we aren’t able, and that is actually keeping pace like the Ice-9 crystal ahead of our ability to return to our humanity, and it’s happening in the mountains and surfing.

1:00:10 There was an article in The New Yorker last month. They were talking about how surfers have all become extra star and how they’re surfing because they’re aware that there are the cameras all around, and it’s instantly, you know, and that’s how they keep their sponsors in their likes and everything else, so that the sole arch, which used to be like the Malibu longboard move, which was a true expression of being in the Dow, being in that moment on that wave, and perfection. Now everything is crafted and stylized.

1:00:36 In mountaineering, the geo-tagging has been happening, where beautiful pristine natural wild places are being trampled and overrun, because one Instagrammer took the picture in the pose, and then everyone rushes to go and get that same backdrop, you know, you see. And so we’re seeing it not just in psychedelic experience. Burning Man is obviously, you know, there was a Fast Company article earlier this year about has Instagram ruined Burning Man, you know, even where billionaires hadn’t.

1:01:04 And I think you can make a case where you start seeing, you know, it sort of becomes the next Coachella, you know, and you start seeing it’s not the, and that’s arguably, you know, among the most potent initiatory rituals that humanity has ever experienced, full-stop, especially at that scale, seventy-five thousand people, and that has been captured by digital narcissism. And so that, to me, that’s the one I didn’t see coming. Okay, and that is the one that has metastasized in a way that it feels to me, there’s an increasing bifurcation as we’re leading into whatever is coming, and there’s, it’s, people who have been transformed by those experiences and are fully surrendered to being lived by, for lack of a better word, being lived by love, being lived by that life impulse, being lived by that higher and more expensive intelligence and imperative, versus the false light, hungry ghosts, because there’s, there’s, it’s easy to spot, right?

1:02:09 Light and to recognize it for what it is, but then to seek to capture it for ego, against, for pride, for fame, for virtue signaling, to build an audience, to monetize the following, you name it. And so then that fracture, because you would think, hey, everybody at the party, everybody wearing leather and feathers, everybody liking the right bands were going to the same festivals or consuming the same sacraments. Right, we must all be on the same team.

1:02:36 We’re all mouthing the same words and espousing the same values, but in fact I feel like there’s a schism that’s been happening, and it’s either you’re actually taking that journey to completion, in which case it reformats who you are and what you’re here to do, and it aligns you with what you, what you were born to do, versus those who are skimming the cream, but I’m willing to kind of churn the butter. Hmm, and that digital technology stops you from making that full evolution. It is utterly pernicious.

1:03:07 It reskin, xandrie, encapsulate. So I mean, and that’s a natural process, right? You come out of a peak state, an Imperial College and the silicide and trauma studies, they’ve experienced that, you know, they’ve got all these truly, you know, heartwarming video shots of people coming out of therapy, right, saying I’m healed, unfixed, but then coming back three months later, six months later, some people are in the dark night of the soul, some people like, actually, yes, all those things were true, but my life, as you said, is hard.

1:03:34 There’s complications, contradictions, and bagheera T’s, and six months later I might even actually feel worse, because now I’ve seen the light and I’m, it’s now been taken away from me, so those are those are the real challenges for us. Yeah, there’s a point in the movie where I meet up with a guy named Dorian Yates. It was a six-time Mr. Olympia bodybuilder who’s been on the show and had become very spiritual and he’s had some very difficult ayahuasca experiences recently, and we’re talking together on Hampstead Heath, and he said, Brian, sometimes I think wasn’t ignorant bliss?

1:04:05 You know, six months after that ceremony, I, I say that to folks all the time. I’m like, if you don’t absolutely have to, you know, take the proverbial red pill, not the Reddit, I’ll give, fortune mutation it’s become, but like, you know, literally gnostic initiate yourself into the sort of true nature things. If you don’t absolutely have to, don’t take the blue pill. Imagine the steak. It’s, it’s infinitely preferable, because there’s an old Chinese saying, says it’s It’s a path best never begun, but if begun, must be completed.

1:04:41 Yeah, I’m still glad I began it. Yeah, yeah, you mentioned these terms, waking up, growing up, and showing up, and this whole showing up thing, the collective, what do we, what do we need to keep our eye on with the collective, or the lack of collected, or the divided collective, and what are your thoughts on that, because that’s how funny one to try to process and understand, I guess, cuz we’re in it yeah, we’re almost by definition on a side, even if we think we’re not. Yeah.

1:05:08 I mean, this is now just pure metaphorical conjecture, but, you know, but also, you know, an experience that I have glimpsed in peak stakes myself, so I didn’t like just pull it out of my ass, because I felt like thinking it, which is that we’re sort of entering right now, not the singularity, but more the sort of inter-twinkle-arity, you know, where everybody’s endgame, everybody’s mythologies, they’re all where, as weas, well, down the drainpipe of time and space, they’re all smashing and crashing into each other. So we’ve got people, you know, riffing on The Matrix and saying we’re living in a simulation, and, you know, and unplug and jack in and jack out and red pills and blue pills. We’ve got people discussing Star Wars and talking about the Empire versus the Rebel Alliance.

1:05:51 We’ve got, you know, ISIS animating you know, ancient, you know, the 12th caliphate is coming, and we’re gonna actually get to Jerusalem, and the end end times, we’re going. We’ve got Christian Zion saying the same thing, Book of Revelations. It’s all going down in the Middle East, you know, and that’s where we will, that’s what we will all be redeemed and saved in the second coming. We, and there’s really, you know, structurally there’s no difference between those things.

1:06:14 I mean, if you assign profound value to one and not the other, that’s your prerogative, but arguably they’re all just products of human imagination, whether it’s on celluloid or parchment. All right, and all of these mythologies intertwining, and the noise, the signal-to-noise is getting completely insane, and my sense is that at the end, if there were to be some eschaton, in some inflection point in the future, that the Sorting Hat brain is actually going to be not based on what badges or flags we’re wearing or flying. It’ll be love or fear, and what we will realize is that there are people who are being animated by love across the world, speaking different languages, worshiping different gods, following different agendas, and there will be people that are motivated by fear, and all of those folks, no matter how, no bonus, is the Spanish Inquisition, that’s supposedly a Christian project, right?

1:07:10 And so we’ll see, that will arguably be the great reorganizing: are we coming from love, or are we coming from fear? So that, that wake up and grow up and show up, which I think is originally Ken Wilber’s concept. No, you know, lovingly appropriate. I like it because it rhymes, and it’s to the point, you know, which is the sense of what are we here to do, right? One, you know, and that notion of the peak experience is antinomian, right?

1:07:41 Not subject to top-down centralized control, right? I think that what we, my last best hope, and I don’t know whether this is true or right, but it’s my last best hope is an open source approach to having everybody have that experience, have that Gnostic initiation, remembering what I forgotten, amending where I’m broken, connecting with others to do what I must, and trust human nature, trust that let a thousand fires burn. We need, we need, and it doesn’t matter whether you’ve come to the conclusion that saving the polar bear is the stand you must take, or whether it’s early childhood education, or whether it’s urban farms, right, or whether it’s animal, you know, saving animal cruelty, it, like, it doesn’t matter.

1:08:32 Go where there’s the intersection of your trauma and your talent, go where you have experienced the wound of the world, and go where you have the skills to do something about it. And, you know, there’s that classic story of the Soviet ambassadors coming to the U.S. and going to a supermarket in Houston, all right, and being absolutely blown away by the overflowing abundance of everything, right? And they went, right? They said, they said, we’re done. There’s no way we’re winning this against this.

1:09:00 They said, how did you get all this done? They’re like, well, it’s a thousand micro decisions. This is the free market at work. Is that great, you know, libertarian economics? I, Pencil, you know, that describes the evolution of the pencil and how many people had to touch it and contribute it, and none of them even know each other.

1:09:16 There’s the truck driver, and there’s the graphite, and there’s the cedar, lumberjacks, and all this stuff to make the pencil, and I feel like we need a version of that. We can’t rely on even the smartest individuals, the Bill Gates’s and the Elon Musk’s of the world, the Jeff businesses. They are lopsided and centralized, that’s basically not unlike Stalinist Soviet pops down. We absolutely have to have decentralized, distributed sense-making, where everybody in their own communities, everybody’s seeing the world from where they see, with the tools and resources they have, can nonetheless step up to do the show-up part, and light those thousand fires, and my hope, and, you know, 999 of them will go out in the storm, but there will be those that keep burning, and that’s how we can reorient it, and that’s how we can also honor the serenity of each person, because like, all I’m interested in is what is an open source, sort of like Linux, you know, what is the psycho psycho-spiritual social technology that shoots straight, gets the job done, if it works, use it.

1:10:26 Mm, you know, mutate it, add to it, build on it, distribute it, share it, and propagate and let’s see if we can, if we can help more of us, you know, Wendell Berry has a great phrase. He says, you know, one of his poems, he says, be joyful though you have considered all the facts, hooray. And that is arguably, that’s the list in Eleusinian mysteries from ancient Greece. You know, Plato said not only did that, and there’s like a nine-day psychedelic initiation, death, rebirth, that you can get buried down in the catacombs and he said, not only do the mysteries teach us to die a better death, they teach us how to live a better life.

1:11:03 And that sense of unlocking what, you know, MLK called soul force in fact, and Gandhi before it, I think is actually a Hindu concept. I’m a bugger it up, but it’s like such, organ room, such, it’s something like that. It is, but it’s basically that, no, of human ability and human courage in the face of evil and darkness, right? the classic, the classic Winston Churchill, he were here in London, right? We thought, oh, there was a kid in the London Blitz who talked about hiding under the kitchen table, you know, as the bombs fell, that idea of keep calm and carry on and shells thing, have never, ever, ever give up, like that is a galvanizing hot truth, and we fetish times, right?

1:11:46 People who have gone through that, the mystery of facing death, and they come back with truth, and whether that’s, the again, you know, true, you know, fetishization of seals and stories of their combat experiences, or it’s things like Tuesdays with Morrie and The Last Lecture, you know, and all those kind of things where someone has a terminal diagnosis, and they’re like, oh, they’ve glimpsed the mystery, like they face the reaper in a way we don’t have the balls to look, and they’re coming back to tell us something, something important something vital about this human experience. And so, can we create our own resurrection practices? Can we actually face our mortality?

1:12:28 Can we, you know, when you talked about going to that climate protest, and you know, everybody’s in [expletive] a good line territory right now, we’re completely overwhelmed, and we’re all suffering from it, at the least micro-PTSD, just every day, always on, too much, too much to sort out, too much, his amande schisms, and the idea is, like, look, if we can, if we can face, face the facts, brutally grieve where we must, and then get back up again, courageous, and knowing that our lives are forfeit. No one gets out of here alive. We’ve known that all along.

1:13:05 So, like, in my life, I’m the guy. Okay, well, best case, I got three or four decades, worst case, I’d go, you know, maybe one. Either way, it’s a known outcome. So the question is, how do we, how do we do the immortal thing? That film 300 about Leonidas and the Spartans, right?

1:13:22 Why do we get our rocks off on that today is a good day to die. And I feel like, you know, modern society, we’ve been so caught up, we’re just zoo animals, just turned into consumers. Let’s exploit your pain, feed you an instant quick hit, sugar pill solution, and we’re like that you know, we’ve become that. But if we actually reclaim our agency and reclaim our autonomy and reclaim our courage and our purpose, like, that’s what’s necessary, and we can do it, and back to, you know, the peak states and the healing like, they tend to remind us.

1:13:53 I mean, I don’t know how or why. I don’t presume, but the information we appear to get in those spaces is almost always bang the [expletive] on absolutely custom-tailored to us, and it stitches us back to the tapestry of life, to the bigger question and the bigger undertaking. So this solution is open source, decentralized, incorporate, peak states, some type of integration process, some type of return to love. Yeah, and this is a protocol. Yeah, okay, yeah, basically it’s that, you know, you can call it that that’s sort of the hedonic yoga of becoming.

1:14:31 Okay, and the plan is to get everybody to understand this and practice this and that is the decentralized solution to all of these figure heads and movements and tribes, and it just gets pulled out from underneath it, and we evolved that, you know, made a massive, massive, fingers crossed. Okay, you know, because you basically, you realize, oh hey, you know, respiration, embodiment, sexuality, music, and substances, right? Those are arguably the sort of the raw materials of every ecstatic and transformational practice or culture in various mix-and-match sequences.

1:15:08 You can take any one of them and pursue thoroughly enough, they’ll all get you to the destination. It just requires time, dedication, focus. If you combine them, you actually get further faster and in this instant-on, every-instant gratification age, that could be helpful once you do that, that self-initiation, self-initiatory process gives us back our backbone, gives us back our mandate, gives us back our clarity. Now, that said, you know, I said coming out of Stealing Fire, one of the things I didn’t see coming was the sort of digital Gnosticism and right, the egoic capture, all these transformational states.

1:15:46 Yeah, another thing I didn’t see coming was the rise of cultic tendencies. So basically, anywhere you have access to profound peak experience and the cathartic release, right, in more than, with more than one person involved, you end up with cultic tendencies. And so describe that dynamic. Why do we do that as humans? Well, I mean, I think it’s, you know, that feels awesome when I want more, and somebody’s got access to it, whether it’s the dude holding the eight-ball, right, or leading the breathwork session, or doing the Tony Robbins rah-rah, right?

1:16:23 We orient around that person, and there’s a sort of tribal primate layer to the person who’s holding the light, right? Cuz back in the day that meant survival. Pro meant survival, that even meant transcendence and affirmation and belonging, and a whole lot extra, right? On top of the raw survival. Okay, and then the catharsis, which is, you know, the profound sobbing, racking, weaving, which also drops people’s defenses and leaves them vulnerable, exposed, and malleable.

1:16:51 And so the question is, you know, I think it’s time that we reclaim our awareness, because in the Latin, cultus just means to worship, and so you realize that, you know, back in the day, mystery cults was the right of a loosest. The cult of Kali, the cult of Christ, actually, before it was, Emperor Constantine made at the state, Jan? Right, right. So there’s, so in the ancient terms, a mystery cult was simply, you subjugated or submitted yourself to the lineage in exchange for exposure to the mystery.

1:17:27 Fair enough, right? We ended up with culty cults. We ended up with the Jim Jones’s and the Charles Manson’s, right? And even though, shows and others, yeah, when those guys went rogue and they said, we’re no longer subject to a lineage, we’re actually self-appointed godman or God-women, and you subjugate yourself to me, right? which works spectacularly well until it suddenly and equally spectacularly doesn’t.

1:17:54 And arguably what we need is kind of to come back to our, and actually say, what Arthur Cole cults, what’s needed today that fits our modern sensibilities, the evolution of selfhood, personhood, serenity, and can we say, in fact, no longer submit the self to anyone. Can we actually improve and valorize individual sovereignty? Wow, creating the conditions for collective emergence, right? because communitas, that sense of us coming together, is profoundly powerful, right?

1:18:26 And it can lead to church, all right? It can lead to what the Quakers called a gathered meeting. They literally had a term for it, like, when do we draw, and when do we start presencing things that none of us thought about or were able to express until we were actually together in this collective. So it can create beauty novelty, and all sorts of things. It can also create Nuremberg, and it also is the engine behind Trump rallies.

1:18:49 All right, everybody likes to say, oh, oxytocin is the cuddle drug, or the trust hormone, or the love hormone. Yeah, it is. It’s also the ethnocentric thumping hormone, like the guy who just pepper-sprayed a bunch of protestors coming out of a Trump rally last week, right? guarantee, if you’ve done a quick blood draw, he would have been juiced to the gills on oxytocin. These are my people.

1:19:11 Yes, it’s mother to child and all that sort of beautiful thing, and mate to mate. It’s also us versus them, and those are the things that you know will be critical for us to both understand the liya be like, if we don’t start engineering this stuff consciously, other folks already are. So jihadi training camps do the same thing, right? All right, hate groups do the same thing. They come in through your, they come in through your, either through communitas.

1:19:36 They say, hey, you’re alone, you’re a lone wolf, you felt like a misfit toy, you belong, come in, right? Or they come in through your pain, your catharsis, you’ve got a grievance, you’re gonna broken, huh? We’re going to tell you why. I’m going to tell you who’s to blame. Yeah, political Facebook ads.

1:19:49 Yeah, so it’s all manipulable, right? So either you have pro-social understandings of these mechanics and we stopped laying out opportunities for people to create, choose their own adventure using these tools, or the folks who are deliberately monkey-wrenching civil society right now. We’re already hot at, so you’re gonna lay all this out as in your book as a potential protocol for all this stuff, your pressure, but yeah I’m gonna try. Okay, you know, I mean, the trick is, is obviously you know, the kind of, you know, Malcolm, I think, the era of Malcolm Gladwell writing is coming to an end.

1:20:27 Okay, how would you describe that? Well, it’s the idea of like, hi, we’re gonna go in a little journey, and I had this question along the way. We’re gonna meet so and so and so and so and such and such. We’re going to learn their stories. They’re gonna tell some fascinating thing you get to repeat at the next cocktail conversation, right?

1:20:40 To me, that’s the jam. Yeah, and it’s that. Jamie, I had his hand beaten into the ground at this point, the challenge I have just as a writer is these are just things I think, and I can absolutely, they come from places, but the notion of just advocacy for a roadmap. How do you do that while still having narrative tension, and you’re the humble narrator. You know, you’re not saying we ought to do this or follow me or anything like that.

1:21:10 Like, how to get the tone right in a way that’s engaging, and also fits contemporary attention spans, and also fits, though, what’s in it for me, like the notion of a big thing book although, I mean, I do gain, I gain encouragement from you, Yuval Harari, and others who are telling big sweeping stories. Yeah and people seem to, they do still give a s***. Yeah, and the idea that on the one hand we’ve got 60 second Instagram videos, on the other hand you’ve got three-hour Joe Rogan podcast.

1:21:36 Yeah, you know, yeah, and I had Dr. Jordan Peterson in here, and the night before I was at the O2 stadium, and he was in front of 8,000 people having a debate with Sam Harris, and yeah, and he said, Brian, people aren’t as stupid as we thought they were. Yeah, and he said, probably do the long-form content like Rogan and things like we do. People now can appreciate a nuanced argument yeah, and so I agree, look at what these books are doing, and they have mass appeal.

1:21:58 So, you know, the time is now, yeah, for this. Maybe, maybe 30 years ago, maybe people wouldn’t be ready to spend the time to go into something deep, or maybe they would, but now I feel like brains are primed for that. Yeah, it’s the two parts of the spectrum, like you said, 60 or 60-second Instagram, three-hour yeah, but it is, it exists there. What about you? I mean, if you write this book, Jamie, I mean, will your core corporate gigs dry up, because this is a whole another frontier?

1:22:26 This is very disruptive. This is not Stealing Fire, come in and help us perform? I’m curious. It’s very, it’s a different route for you. Yeah.

1:22:34 I mean, you know, the bottom line is, is even writing Stealing Fire was very much a shuttle run between the peak experiences we were having, and what I then come back and write in the morning what I knew had to be in the mix, and sometimes it was content, and it was an argument or a story, and sometimes there’s literally random, like, and here’s the marketing plan, here’s how this will actually get done, and here’s how you build these connections and relationships between your audience, and I sort of felt like, well, how on earth did we end up stumbling into these magical, mysterious domains, and what on earth are we supposed to do with it? And what kept coming back again and again was, this is the thing, like, this hedonic yoga of becoming. He took this roadmap for articulating, you know, ethical culture, sort of meaning 2.0.

1:23:27 Like, meaning 1.0 was organized religion, and that’s been kind of collapsing, and we’ve got a push to the extremes. You’ve got fundamentalism, right? And you’ve got nihilism, anxiety, depression, suicide. In the middle was the rest of us the nuns, the none of the above, were all just dying. So sharing this content felt like it’s, it felt non-negotiable, and I have a sense I’m like, this might be the last non-fiction book I write.

1:23:54 This might be, is absolutely as far as I can possibly take it, other than around, but it’s just a story, you know, take it or leave it. And on the other, I mean, even writing the book proposal, I mean, I wrote it, and I’m like, what in the everliving f*** am I doing? Like, this is batshit. I’m here to say that here is a protocol, and here’s the research, and here’s how to blow yourself sky-high using common household materials. And on the other hand, I got the Anarchist Cookbook.

1:24:24 Yes, it’s, instead of the Anarchist Cookbook it’s the Alchemist Cookbook. It’s here’s how to reformat your selfhood so that you can step up and do what must be done. And arguably, like, you know, we have lots of friends in the edges, too, risk space, and kind of, you know, mapping where are we and what’s likely in the next few decades, and none of the linear trends pencil out. You know, if you do the statistical, quantitative analysis and take your pick, whether it’s cyber warfare, climactic, geopolitical, macroeconomic, it’s AI, you know, and the only X Factor is, is there some asymmetrical uptick in human courage, human consciousness, and nah, sitting on our fluffy pillows, you know, sipping cacao and pontificating about how consciousness is gonna magically get it done for us, but just actually grown as humans, taken to the streets, reclaiming communities, building resiliency, and hopefully with a little grace and courage and beauty and play and humor.

1:25:31 But that, and so the combination of the stakes and the accident, just the sort of dumb luck slash responsibility of having stumbled into and across some of these things, felt like I kind of just at least have to take a swing at it, and if it’s the last thing I do publicly, so be it, but it’s, I don’t have time to write something else before writing that. Yeah, there’s really what it came down to. Yeah, you mentioned nonfiction book. Have you thought about this being a fiction work?

1:26:04 Cuz, yeah, well, maybe, cuz it could be more effective in that sense. I mean, maybe not. Maybe in years’ time but, you know, a great movie of this, of some future dystopia, if it is actually us, might, might resonate more. Yeah. well, I mean, I know, like, what’s in the shoot for me creatively from the rest of my life is to, is to finish a book that I said novel that I started a while ago, which was, if Stealing Fire was like the love story, you know, of how we got to now, then this fiction book is called The Poem at the End of the World, and it’s actually about a 2,000-year-old bet between Yahweh and Lucifer for free will of humanity, and so so there’s that story to write, which will absolutely be the magical, mystical one.

1:26:48 And then there’s a kid’s story that we wrote for our son, which is basically sort of like a Shel Silverstein meets Dr. Seuss on acid. So basically, I think I could happily end up just going into writing gnostic lis informed children’s stories, and have Julie, my wife who’s an artist, illustrate so maybe you write the fiction book after this, and then disappear into the mountains in a cabin, and I just tell stories, tell stories that delight. It’s not a bad plan for 20 years, you know?

1:27:18 Well, I think this is really interesting and exciting, Jamie, and I’m fortunate enough to get to sit down with about a hundred people a year that are, I think, on the cutting edge of thought in this world, and I mean, a lot of us feel the need for this. You know, I mean, I started broadcasting eight years ago because I just felt like I needed to have these conversations, and I wasn’t being able to watch it on the BBC, and you see a lot of people searching for this and asking questions like, what’s, why is this not working, and what’s going on here, and let’s put these messages out there, and let’s go to. But, you know, no one really can put their finger on what the problem is and how we could solve it.

1:27:57 There’s still a lot of ideas, so I think this is pretty interesting, what you’ve come up with here, and I think a lot of people will be drawn to it, and I think even us having this conversation would be really important, because the to the current world that might not even realize there might be a problem. So yeah, this is exciting. Yeah, well, I mean, I think the boiled down is, you know, if we’re all feeling overwhelmed, you know, it’s the idea of like, weep, don’t whine.

1:28:23 You know, we’re so distracted, and the kind of fibrillating middle layer of, like, did I get enough likes on my post, or do I like my boss or not, or how, like, do I have enough money to pay that for the thing I want to get. You know, it’s like, just get rid of all that. You’re like, if you were to die tomorrow, what would you do today? And let’s all of us live from that. So, like, grieve the real stuff and then come back.

1:28:43 I mean, I, I be white, you know, the Charlotte’s Web writer, you know, has that great line where he says, each morning I get up torn between the desire to save the world and savor it but then I realized that in a way the savoring must come first, as if there was nothing to savor, there would be nothing worth saving in the end. So that’s it. It’s that sense of like, let’s rip the band-aid off, face the facts, face them without hesitation, go through all of that, get back up and dance each other home.

1:29:13 I like that plan. Tell me about you. How do you actually write? What does this process look like for you? Next year, when I guess you’re gonna, I don’t know, do you lock down the hatches?

1:29:23 What do you do? I’ve spoken to writers, and they say it’s the most lonely process in the world. Is that true? Yeah. I mean, I love to write, and it’s not some people write and craft words, and then like speaking or thinking is a very distinct process for them.

1:29:40 For me, it’s all the same so, the thinking, an idea, the sending it out loud, the writing it down, is pretty much just a shared experience they kind of bleed into each other. The challenges is turning off the magical mystery tour that my life has become, particularly over the last few years. I mean, it’s always had lots of interest to it, but definitely posting, like, fire, all the cost of characters, sort of started reaching out and connecting, and you know, conversations like this around the world, and I thought it was gonna be done in three months after a book tour, and then maybe six months, maybe by the end, and just, it hasn’t stopped.

1:30:17 So unplugging from being in the world and communicating and collaborating with folks in order to woodshed and actually put it down. That’s the biggest challenge for me. It’s just trying to block my calendar. Okay, so I’m home enough can you do that? Yeah, I mean, once again, I keep, they always think like the next quarter is somewhat blank, or on my calendar, then invariably things fill in.

1:30:42 But I mean, just this year alone, I’ve turned down three heli-skiing trips, a kite-surfing trip to Baja, a fly-in, fly-out, all-deals-covered trip to Burning Man, a trip to the UN, and a trip to speak at Stanford, and I said no to all those things just to try and create space, and I and I, I mean, I, in retrospect, I should have just f***ing gone and done, because they’re all rad. See, yes, but it’s at that level of triage at this point in my life. Okay, what if I were to ask five of your best friends, and I would ask them, what’s Jamie’s superpower?

1:31:13 How are you able to do all the things you do? What would they tell me, because you obviously get a lot done? I mean, I think what folks often reflect back is the interdisciplinary synthesis, the fact that, you know, born and raised in England, you know, growing up around a table with Shakespeare and, you know, the Romans and the Greeks and that kind of stuff, coming to this country, being chucked into a Catholic school and seeing religion but from one remove, going to graduate school and historical anthropology, and seeing that, then getting pulled into you know, psychedelic mountain culture and the American West, tapped into the Grateful Dead scene, and to Burning Man, into those things, like the ability to articulate where we are right now, with roots that go way, way back into the past, and hopefully some ability to see around the corners of what might be ahead.

1:32:10 I did kind of have that thought. I’m like, wow, I’m rather, they probably aren’t too many other folks that got to go through, you know, English boarding school to this, you know, still, you know, that that’s sort of a closing on one era as we enter this next. So my guess would be something along those lines. It’s that ability to maybe I mean, I said this to a group we were training earlier this year. I was like, you know, the best I can guess, I like, I don’t know what this is.

1:32:39 This is kind of movement or this lineage that we’re trying to describe, but the best I can place is, it sort of feels like a revival of a sort of Pythagorean mystery school, you know. The idea of like, it’s definitely Western, and it has an emphasis on ration, you know, rational thinking, like reason, discernment, logic. So it’s not so gooey, you know, or Eastern and abstracted, but it’s also directly connected to life of the mind, connected to the body, connected to culture.

1:33:13 So I think it would probably be that. Yeah, it would be the spend. Yeah, I think that’s it. What was the best day of your life, and the worst day of your life? Oh goodness gracious, best day of my life.

1:33:31 You know, I mean, we just, there have been so many. There are so many. I mean, my sense is they all, there’s not a ranking, because they’re all entering Kairos. They’re, those moments are like, this is perfect. This is the now.

1:33:42 There is no place else to be. The most recent one, I think, is we, we were just sending our youngest daughter off to Stanford to go to first year and she’s a swimmer, so she is like, gonna be on the Olympic Trials team, and she’s so excited. There’s this amazing thing, and also 20 years of parenting closing that book, and we live on the lake in lost in austen, and we went out on our boat, and we took them to this little old funky 1950s little joint on a dock, you know, that serves burgers, and we were coming back home in our boat, and the sun was setting, and we’d done that trip a hundred times as they grew up, and we had our golden retriever in the front, and our two kids were sitting there, and my wife Julie and I were just looking at them as we were driving down the river, just thinking, my God, you know, like, for the last, our entire lives with them, we’ve been on this drive, and here they are about to go into their life, and so grateful, you know, so grateful to see them as amazing young people, and so grateful.

1:34:40 You know, you don’t know each day as you live it that it’s become the thing, you know, that all the chapters of your life, and to get that experience just before we send them out the door. It was just beautiful. Sounds magical. I feel like I’m on the boat, and we’re, stay. Hmm gosh.

1:35:01 I mean, I mean, the West day, I mean, gosh, I can almost, I think I could, that’s the same thing. Like, the worst is a feeling, and it comes up increasingly, which is being ripped open by the slings and arrows. You know, so something is happening in the world. There’s challenge or conflict. I mean, even in the writing of Stealing Fire, right?

1:35:39 We had, we had an editor who wanted it to be the power of habit and didn’t get the book at all. Had a co-author that at times was wanting to, like, send back the advance and not write the book, and you know, and at the same time was having these peak states where I was like, no, this has to happen. So that sense of sort of being nailed up with no place to hide, with your heart beating fully raw and alive, and saying I chose this. There’s no shirking this.

1:36:09 There’s no bosses. This is a dumb job, I didn’t like this, like that, I chose this, and feeling literally nailed to the cross of your own purpose. I have experienced more and more and more, and it’s simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating, and so I would say that that’s been the flipside of many of these best moments. Is you know, people say, I want to find my purpose, I’m gonna go to a workshop, or I want to do this thing, or, you know, and you’re like, are you sure?

1:36:43 Because once you’ve found it, there’s no place to hide. And I would say that that’s, that’s, you know, that is the, you know, what we playfully have called the sort of the juxtaposition is, it’s the bliss [expletive] crucifixion. You know, you, on the one hand, the ecstatic psychosexual experience of profound white light, orgiastic bliss, never felt more, more beauty and joy in your life, but the other half is, as T.S. Eliot said, costing not less than everything, and staying open to those two, staying open to Kairos, like, here we are in the time, us, now, and Chronos, here we are in these meat suits for these handful of decades to do the thing.

1:37:29 Like, that’s the, that’s the mystic interpretation of Christ consciousness. It’s not that there was a literal dude who did the fading. It’s, can you do that? The, the wrote the Rosicrucians, right? Is the rose across the heart?

1:37:42 Right? There can we be simultaneously holding our divinity and our mortality, that make and define our humanity? Hmm, I’ve never thought about crucifixion symbolically until you just did that now. I just got it. Yeah, and that’s the way you feel a lot.

1:38:04 Well, if you’re out there doing the thing to the fullest capacity, that’s how you should feel, right? Yeah, and interestingly, Eve, letting it all hang, I’d like us be people you know, it’s obviously, it gets the third rail to discuss anything remotely resembling religion and particularly Christianity in that way. But then I thought about, I’m like, well, why is that such a dominant metaphor for me? And then I thought, oh, well, it’s actually worldwide. So like, the Japanese have that concept of wabi-sabi, of, you know, the broken vows, and like, it’s the cracks that make it beautiful.

1:38:34 Leonard Cohen was a Jewish Buddhist, and he wrote, you know, in that poem, The Anthem, there’s a crack in everything. It’s where the light gets in. The Chinese have a concept of Zhang Zi, which is literally, literally joy bathing, the idea that light and beauty is, we can heal through it. Mm-hmm. You know, Pema Chodron, a Tibetan, you know, Buddhist nun, talks about when, you know, like when things fall apart.

1:38:57 So that idea that our redemption lies in and through our brokenness, not up and around it. To me, it feels profoundly grounding and inspiring and durable, because it’s predicated on the human experience. It’s not telling us some just-so story of a quick and easy bypass. Yeah, you know, it’s saying, man, this is, this is Dolly Parton to Beyoncé. You know, it’s been like, I’ve been down so goddamn long it looks like up to me.

1:39:30 You know, it’s the redemption songs, and land to me, like I wouldn’t talk about unlocking soul force, you know, unlocking elective courage. It’s, it’s in those anthems, and you know, it’s in some respects, we don’t need to write a new Bible, you know, we have the scripture, that the living scriptures are in the, the gospel and blues and soul and jazz and folk traditions. Like, we have all the stories. We know those songs, and that the songs are our hymns.

1:39:59 So, so let’s get singing up. Yeah, it’s that, that reverse amnesia word, like you said, like we already know. We just remember. We know it’s all surrounding us. All the lessons are around us, right?

1:40:10 Just chose to ignore them temporarily. What scares you, Jamie? I mean, there are a lot of things that can send me. I’m trying to I’m trying to like see if I can find the thing that scares me, and I think something that scares me is mob mentality. I think that that is, that is, we’re going to be seeing more and more of it, and when people drop from their humanity when they cease to recognize what we share, and there’s the bloodlust, right, of collective vindication that has always terrified me.

1:41:01 I think William Blake has a great line, he says, one law for the lion and the ox is oppression. And so how do we, how do we get as many people through, you know, through the gate to their own becoming without getting dragged down and into the bloodlust of the mountain. You know, you think Rousseau, they kicked off the French enlightenment, liberté, you gathered a fraternity, you know, beautiful ideals, and it descends to Robespierre in the Reign of Terror right, and just bloodlust for the guillotine in the village square, and how can we, how can we assign, how can we live up to what Lincoln was talking about, you know, the better angels of our nature instead of the base devils and the temptation right now is, you know, we’re right here.

1:41:58 Yeah, I think there is more of that coming at least in the short term. And William Blake is buried literally about a half a klick away from here. Oh yeah, I’ll point you in that direction. Yeah. what would we be surprised to learn about you?

1:42:13 Something you do that just maybe would shock us. I don’t know, guilty pleasure or something. Surprised to learn, I mean, this is a minor one, but I think everybody assumes, unlike some biohacker guy, and I don’t give a s*** about any of that stuff. you know, we have boxes and boxes of tools and tricks and nutraceuticals and supplements, and I cannot be bothered in my senses is that any of the things that are truly compellingly real, either schedule one, schedule two, or, you know, life-threatening, and so as I say it back to the music, mountains, mushrooms, and marriage, like, those things I would have made my world go round, not piracetam and some stack or some combination or a 9-volt battery to the forehead, so I’ve actually been super super skeptical of any of that stuff, and even on the neuroscience and the optimal psychology, I find those that is the vernacular of today.

1:43:18 So that’s the language that we are describing things in, and the language that people are hungry to learn more about. Really, this has all been a reverse engineering of having found myself as an accidental mystic, getting launched into places that I had no understanding of, or understanding of what they were coming back and doing the legwork, and the researcher, like, what the hell was that? And then building up the case in the realm of ration, reason, and evidence backwards.

1:43:48 So yeah, I would say I’m a closeted closeted accidental mystic that’s just done a, you know, a relatively plausible job of wrapping this s*** in the, you know, helpful stories of our era. Okay, so you don’t biohack yourself. Do you take care of yourself? yeah, okay, absolutely. But again, I mean, I’m a lazy bastard, so I take care of myself far better doing the things I love, like I’d rather go for a stand-up paddle or mountain bike ride or go skiing or kite surfing than ever done, kind of, rote exercise.

1:44:25 Okay, all right. I just don’t see lazy associated with you, but okay. You think so? Airy, what keeps you awake at night? mmm, I mean, God damn.

1:44:37 I mean, I think what honestly, the few nights that I do find myself ruminating is on the nature of betrayal, and specifically when I that I have opened my heart with good intent, and someone has hurt or harmed me, or things I care about, after that. And, and my sense is this, you know, we’ve talked about, like, practice resurrection, like, be comfortable, like a samurai, right? The samurai would meditate on a thousand different ways they would die, so then, in the battle, they would never be shocked or surprised, you know, or distracted trying to avoid the thing, and my sense is, is that part of us practicing resurrection, part of us stepping into soul force, truly fearless and courageous agency, is also wrapping our heads around the Judas principle, because you know, in Sunday school, Judas just gets the bad rap, you know, but the idea is, actually, you know, arguably the key to understanding the whole Judeo-Christian tradition is understanding Magdalene and understanding Jews.

1:45:46 If you don’t get those two, you don’t really understand the mystic initiatory story, and you think at, to Brutus, right? Caesar and his best mate, Brutus. You know, Obi-Wan and his star pupil, Anakin. All right, it’s baked into our script, and that idea that those closest to us will ultimately betray us, and not to not, to take, not to be surprised or feel bad about it, but to say this too, this too is part of the archetypal unfolding. This is a sacred wounding, and because if we don’t, we just, we can descend into the politics of paranoia.

1:46:26 Mmm right? Because we’re always then looking for who might hummus, and when you have things like deepfake videos, and you have stingray wiretapping on cell phones, and you have the history of things like COINTELPRO, you know, the FBI’s counterintelligence against the civil rights movement, and the American Indian Movement, and the environmental movement, and all these things. Right, so we actually start taking steps now to actually try and change, subvert the dominant paradigm.

1:46:50 We will be subject to all of that as well. Now, that can either break you, and you can get knocked out of love into a politics of suspicion, or you can say this is a feature, not a bug of the script, and I welcome it when it comes. It’s aware. You right now, do you welcome it, or be wary of it? I putt [expletive] god damn it, is the least, this is the, that is the bitterest pill to have to swallow.

1:47:17 I feel like I’m closer for myself than I am for me and everyone I care about. I’m still, there’s an element in my heart and mind that is still bargaining, and I get it, this is a control script. Like, if you really, really stripped this all down, I would say, I’m willing to do the thing I have to do if needs be. However, I want to make sure that my family is absolutely safe and sorted and never experiences a ding or a disruption, right? If I have to go do the thing, right?

1:47:51 And, you know, so if I was down in Costa Rica with you, you know, last year, I could absolutely imagine holding that thought and then saying, what is your ego attached to that idea? You’re not able to keep everyone safe. You’re not able to do all those things, but as a husband, as a father, I have that pang, and I have that commitment, so that I haven’t, I haven’t fully metabolized that. I’m still, I’m still committed to two things in this world versus being completely liberated.

1:48:25 Yeah, it’s good, know thyself. You know, it’s a lot of people wouldn’t even know that about themselves. If you can identify that, that’s, that’s a good start, right? Yeah. Jamie, I always ask a few questions right at the end, and ask you, if you could pick up a super magic phone and ring up the 20-year-old Jamie Wheal and give that young man some advice?

1:48:46 First of all, where are you at that point, and what would you tell him? Powerful way, and this conversation really enjoyed this, gene me a lot, and I’ll be thinking about that, and a lot of this for some time to come. so, look, I was a huge fan of Stealing Fire and everything you brought out then, but I find this new route as exciting, if not more, and I’m gonna be watching, so looking forward to seeing how this book comes out next year, and let us know if we can have you back to talk about it when all that happens.

1:49:38 And yeah, it’s just great to talk to someone about a lot of the ideas that I’ve had and have been unable to kind of complete, and it’s nice to just hear you explain them back to me. So yeah, thanks for doing everything you do, and for fighting the fight and hanging out on the cross. I know it’s rough sometimes up there. And yeah, all the best, man. Thank you.

1:50:01 Cool, man, thanks so much.