High-Performance Shrooms: The Psychedelic Shortcut to Limitless States

99.99% of human history has believed in an animist reality. We have all believed that we are descended from gods. And yet in this little slice of Western culture in which we inhabit, we believe we are ascended from apes. Matt Zeman.

Matt Zeman.

Matt Zeman. We know that if we give a bunch of people with cancer, psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, many of them are going to have mystical experiences. When you take a psychedelic a part of our brain, the inner narrator piece, the piece that tells you you have to do more, that you're not worthy, it quiets it down.

P.S. just don't have addictive mechanisms.

Psychedelics are catalysts. So when we take these catalysts, we then have insights and awakenings and awareness. And the practice is everything that happens afterwards.

How do psychedelics help people sort out programming versus internal desire? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Matt. Dave, how many drugs have you done?

I love them a lot at this point. It's been kind of a. It's been a journey.

How do you know you're not an addict?

What's lovely about these is they're non addictive and non, non toxic. And I think we. It's so funny. I mean, you and I grew up probably the exact same period where everybody was saying, just say, no, these are gonna fry. Your brains are gonna lead to addiction. And I hear it all the time like, this is. This is so dangerous. It's a gateway, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we know all the research says it's not really true with. Actually, the funny, ironic thing is ketamine, the one that people have most access to, is probably the most addictive of all of these different medicines.

It's also interesting. Ketamine's not technically a psychedelic, it's a dissociative. It's also medically really helpful. That's why we use it at 40 years of Zen for plasticity. But it's the one that has the most addictive risk. When I say the one, the psychedelic space, it's very hard to get addicted to these. And I say this because I was married to a doctor who focused on drug and alcohol addiction, emergency medicine, and we talked about a lot of stories from her practice. And it's like, yes, people using other drugs that are addictive, like heroin and meth and things like that, some of them would start using psychedelics just to escape from reality. And this is like a mental illness coping thing for people who are not extremely mentally ill. Psychedelics just don't have addictive mechanisms, right?

Correct. They don't have addictive mechanisms. And our body builds up a tolerance so quickly. So if we took mushrooms today and we take them again tomorrow, we're not going to have the same effect. So our body kind of has a natural governor to it.

The natural governor pisses me off. I go to Burning Man.

Okay.

And the first couple days are so good, but then by day five, it's like, this stuff isn't working anymore. How would I make it so I have less tolerance to psychedelics so I could enjoy them more?

Yeah, that's that. I think if you could figure that out, you'd have. You'd have a product there.

You didn't think we're going to go there, did you?

I did not know where we were going in this conversation, but I'm glad to go in all these directions.

If there was an arm wrestling contest between the spiritual side of psychedelics and the science side of psychedelics, who would win?

How do you even answer such a question? So let's do it this way. I'm gonna actually say spiritual is gonna win, but it is funny. So when we talk about what is the psychedelic space, but we really are talking about where is the money in the psychedelic space. And the money in the psychedelic space is science. It's pharma. It's what they're trying to do. But the spiritual side has never stopped. Thousands of years of practitioners serving medicine and quiet ceremonies at the risk of persecution and prosecution, it's never stopped. So I think spirit use on while. While money comes and goes as organizations wrapping around latching to find ways to survive or not survive.

We've both seen Big Pharma try to control free access to substances, either because they compete or just because if they can get a monopoly, they make more money. Are you worried about Big Pharma even touching the psychedelic space?

I'm an abundant mindset kind of person, so I believe this is all an and so we need. If it wasn't for 200 institutions studying psychedelics, we wouldn't have had this cultural shift where people are starting to say, oh, well, maybe what we've been told has been wrong. So we need science doing what it does. We need the validation of different studies. We need people with white coats to greet some portion of our population who wants to be diagnosed and wants to go through that process to have that option. And we need religious access and decriminalization access at the same time. It needs to be a both in addition to just what's Right. And what's wrong? Spirit is coming up in both situations. We know that if we give a bunch of people with cancer psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, as you well know, many of them are going to have mystical experiences. Our science, our medical professions are not equipped to deal with that. So they need to be able to invite in spirit without shame, and conversely, spirit, the clergy needs to be able to invite in science to be able to keep their congregations, their participants, at as reduced risk as possible.

You're talking about the Church of Pfizer.

Exactly. It could be that. That would be kind of wild. Can see the packaging, the commercials. What are those disclaimers? Warning.

Are you dealing with pesky stigmata?

Right.

That's so wrong and awesome.

Oh, my gosh, yes.

Oh, man. That was not in my notes.

No. So that would be the funniest disclaimers ever, though. Warning, taking too much of this may cause you to move to Peru. Me?

Oh, my gosh.

Leave your job.

I think there's an AI video we're gonna have to make for social about this.

Totally. 100%.

It's interesting. In. In my journey, I was very concerned about psychedelics, yet I was interested in altered states and, you know, just healing whatever was going on. I didn't even realize I was sick early, but just I'm anxious and miserable all the time. But I didn't know I was anxious. I just thought everyone was that way because it was a constant state for me for a variety of reasons. Birth, PTSD and biochemistry and whatever. I'm around 26, and I fly to Amsterdam, Okay. The first time I've been in Europe, and I went to Amsterdam because I could buy pot legally, and I went to school where I could get pot, but I don't want, like, pesticides and mold. And I've had the just say no programming and all the this is your brain on drugs and all that stupid stuff. I had some pot. It was like, wow. Like, who would have thought? And then I ate some mushrooms, and I remember listening to Mariah Carey on some TV thing in my cheap hotel. I'm like, this is the most beautiful music ever. So I come home and I buy a CD back when you bought.

Clearly, you're in an altered state.

Yeah. And I was in the studio, like, this is horrible. Oh, my God. I, like, threw the CD away. I couldn't listen to it. Sorry, Mariah. So I'm like, okay, I'm in an altered state. It was kind of magical. But at least I was safe because it was legalized there. So I knew what I was getting. And I said, there's another world there. And that led me to go to Peru and ask for ayahuasca. And this was when they looked at me and they said, you're white. I said, yeah, I know. And they said, well, it's only for locals. You won't like it. It's not for tourists. I said, well, actually not that kind of tourists. So I had an experience and that was my entree into psychedelics.

And.

And I've proceeded very cautiously. Your path has been kind of similar. You were not into psychedelics. Walk me through your intro story.

I will, but I love so much what you just said. Can we just pause for a moment? I mean, you covered two really important points with, with, with, with that. You started saying that you just thought you didn't know what to. How to talk about your state of being. You knew you were not happy, you knew you were not fulfilled. You knew things were going on and you didn't have the language for it. And I see that all the time in. We have this epidemic of loneliness. We have us, we have people who are providers. We're told we have to go and work and provide, and with no end in sight. Private schools, cars, food. It never, never ends. And that's just the normal society in which we live. It's a normal awake society in which we live. And when we pause and we say, there has to be something more, there has to be a way to move through this life with purpose, with. That is not conditional on the outside world. Yes, that's where I think strength comes from. When we know that everything we need, we're carrying inside, then we are not looking outward for anything. And then we can do what makes us happy.

So we just. We switch into Tony Robbins mode for a second here. How do psychedelics give us that, by the way, I agree with everything you said, but, like, what. What's going on there?

Because they don't actually. They don't give us that. And that's kind of the whole point. These are not cures for anything. Psychedelics are catalysts. Psychedelics, our medicines, are tools that help us put. Put us into a state where we can remember who we are. We can remember that we didn't always feel about this or our jobs or our wives or our partners or our employees or our friends the way we feel about them now. And we can remember that at our core we're enough and that we are loving. And when we remember that, we can then move forward and Move forward in a way that is very different than before. That understanding comes to be just enough.

That's it.

Just enough.

Like, oh, we are enough. Like, how about, you are way more than enough?

Right. Or that the reality of you is greater than any of the idea of you has ever been. Yes.

I like that better.

Yeah. Yeah.

And. And I'm blinking right now. There's a book called you are Enough, and I've had the author on the show, and I'm sort of, like, teasing about that, but. But honestly, I've sat in sweat lodges when people go, oh, my gosh, I just want to be enough. I'm like, seriously, like, how about you want to be enough and you want rocket fuel and you want to dance all the time? Why not?

Why not?

So what makes people want to be enough?

It's not that they want to be enough. It's that they remember that they are enough. And it's huge. Yeah. It's the forgetting. It's the forgetting. It's that we get wrapped up in. We have to behave a certain way. We have to perform for everybody all the time.

Yeah.

And when we remember that, no, we don't have to perform for anybody. We are who we are, and that is enough, then the whole world opens up.

Wow. To your point, before I did this, especially the. The Peru side of what I said, I'd already been in a major national magazine with my picture. I'm like, I tried fame didn't make me happy for more than 15 minutes. I made $6 million. Didn't make me happy. Lost $6 million. That made me sad. But, like, I tried fame and fortune. I tried getting married early on, briefly. It wasn't successful. And I'm like, none of that stuff works. And there was a lot of that, what you're saying, you know, you're not enough. Like, no matter what you do, it's not enough. And certainly Altered States work has been profound for me and the reason that I wrote heavily meditated, which is just coming out. And I see we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 of your books you brought. Thank you. As gifts around psychedelics. I put a chapter in there, but I also read about the other altered sage things like Stan Grof's holotropic breathing.

So beautiful.

It's like a father of psychedelic therapy and breath work.

Absolutely.

But there's also, like, tantric sex.

Sure.

There's other types of breath work. There's meditation, there's neurofeedback, there's light and sound goggles. How Would you, as an experienced psychedelic traveler, how would you guide people to know which altered states work is the right one for them?

I think that's the beauty of this. I think once someone decides, I'm going to try these different paths up the mountain, I'm going to see what feels right for me. Because my answer doesn't matter. What feels right for you is the question. And when we find things that feel right and you feel like, oh, I'm coming into myself, I'm remembering who I am, I'm not becoming anyone else, I'm remembering who I have always been. All of these paths work for different people. And there's a scarcity mindset and culture where people want to grab on and say, oh, this is the one way that I have the answer and I'm going to protect that answer. How? No, no, no, no, no. If there was one answer, it would be easy. But we're all very different beings. We have very different ways of connecting. And all of these answers need to be available to all of us. No adult should tell another adult that they can't explore their consciousness with whatever tool that they want to explore, especially with natural growing tools or breath work or fasting or sleeping or any of these items.

But if no one gives me permission to do it, I need to ask my government daddy for permission. Like, what the heck is going to. I, I fundamentally agree. Thank you. Like anyone who says you don't have control of your biology at your estate, they are an enemy of humanity from my perspective. Like, oh, how dare you stop evolution from happening inside my consciousness? That's not going to end well for you.

Yes. I couldn't agree with you more. And then actually takes us back to the second point that you brought up in your story of your journey 99 to Amsterdam.

Yeah.

What did you want? I wanted to access, I'm speaking for you now. I wanted to access legal medicines because I didn't want to take the risk of the things that are laced and contaminated with the underground market. So once again, how does that apply to today? It seems to me we had, we had millions of people using psychedelics. Last year, something like 40 some percent said they were doing it for spiritual purposes. Wouldn't it be better if they could, if there was a market where they could buy without fear of contamination, without fear of, of toxicity, like dark web, you're saying, like, maybe not the dark web, but there should a way that they can do this without that because, and, and in addition to the fear of contamination. So really we're talking about here is, is source set and setting sources, like where do the drugs come from? So how do we know that they're pure, but also how do we know that the people who we're surrounding ourselves with when we take these medicines are going to keep us safe?

Dude, thank you for bringing that up. I've noticed a really disturbing pattern. I work with a lot of high net worth people, celebrities, CEOs, people with a lot of influence. And I do that because I have a $20,000 a week brain upgrade program with or without ketamine and they come there for brain upgrades. And also because of just who I am. There are a number of people, some of them medical and a lot of them just energy worker people who are very clearly targeting wealthy people with psychedelics in a way that I don't think is clean. Specifically, ayahuasca is probably the one that they use the most when they're, I would say, installing malware in these people. Are there some ways that you found to know if the person you're working with is holding space or inserting programming?

Such an important question. In my mind, the journey begins not when you take the medicine, it's when you decide that you would like to do this. And because that's when it begins, part of that journey is finding your voice and asking questions. Who are you? What is your experience? What do you believe when we're, I'm going to take this medicine with you, what are you going to tell me if anything while I'm in this programming? What are you going to sing to me? What are the songs? What are the messages that I'm going to receive? Because highly, highly impressionable.

And you're saying ask this, ask these questions.

Absolutely. When I come out of this, are there going to be any requests for money? Any requests to sell me anything? Are you selling me a, a coaching course? Are you selling me an upgrade? Are you selling me product? Or do I have some time to come down from this medicine before deciding if I'm going to spend any additional money with you? So checking their energy flow, checking what their, what they believe and making sure that aligns with what you believe. And I'm not saying what anyone believes is right or wrong. It's what's right or wrong for you. So there are people who want to go into these altered states and have again, someone there transcribing everything they say and think and that's what they, and they want to talk throughout it. Great. That's great for them. There's others who believe this is an Interstate journey. And they want to put in an eye mask and they want to go deep, deep within. And they don't want anyone documenting anything during this process. And that's beautiful for them. There are some that's going to say, we believe this is Buddha, Christ, Ganesh, whatever, during the process. That's beautiful for them. But what's right for you asking those questions and finding out in advance what's going to happen?

Love this answer. The questions may vary based on the substance you're using, right?

It could, sure. Asking I take XYZ prescriptions or supplements. Am I safe with this medicine? That's kind of a basic.

Oh, yeah, anyone should do that.

I've had these past experiences with schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, anxiety. How might that impact me? I have this support structure at home. I don't have this support structure at home. What can you provide to help me? And if the answer is nothing, that's okay. I just know I need to then find support somewhere else. And maybe you can help guide me in what I might need following this journey. Am I doing a super deep dive with a large amount of whatever medicine you're going to serve me, or are we really working with smaller amounts and kind of just riding the surface? All of those help determine what happens afterwards. Because I'll go back to our conversation. These are not cures. These are catalysts. So when we take these catalysts, we then have insights and awakenings and awarenesses. And the practice is everything that happens afterwards. It's, how do I bring all of that to this conversation? How do I bring that presence to the next conversation? How do I bring it to my job and to my family and to my friends? And that is the life that we lead after the psychedelics.

It's the integration and the state change that's so important. I've seen a few influencers, I would say, almost pushing psychedelics. One guy in particular here in Austin's, like, I've done ayahuasca 87 times, and I'm sort of thinking, when are you going to notice it's not working? Talk to me about the appropriate frequency of psychedelic use.

Again, this is such a personal question. All I can talk about is what's. What's appropriate for me and where I see people kind of getting into trouble with this. So. And trouble meaning where they're. They're chasing an experience and they are not paying attention to the foundation that surrounds them, to the support that they already have. They are chasing the experience. So for me, there was a period where the deep dives are really important where these connections, this reminder that, oh my gosh, we are connected to everything and everybody. Oh, my gosh, the air I breathe is the same air that my great great, great, great great grandparents breathe. Oh, my gosh, the molecules inside my bones are the same molecules that have been in the trees and the grounds and the dinosaurs and the whales and it' we're all deeply connected. Love that. And now there's a period where I am more of just trying to connect with sacred and help hold space for others. And in that practice of being in the same room and helping make sure that others feel secure in their surrendering, that's more the role that I'm playing at this point because that works for me. And there are still times when I will choose to dive deeply to see what the medicine wants to show me. But more often than not, at this point, it's still a practice, but it's not as much medicine. And that's what's worked for me at again, that 52. So we'll see what's next.

It's funny, every time I ask what's the best, you're like, it depends on you. And it's exactly the right answer. And in the world of longevity, and I kind of do longevity and consciousness, this is my two big things inside the wrapping of biohacking. In longevity, people tell me what to do. I'm like, we all have different goals and we all have different biology. So I finally, with Upgrade Labs, my franchise company, I'm like, well, let's get 187 million data points a year and let's use your current state and your goals to help identify what's likely to get you where you want to go. And so when I wrote heavily meditated with psychedelics, it's like, how can you tell someone you need this one? I don't think you can. You can, however, say, this would be a gentle entry. And this is pretty heavy duty. And these are less likely to create issues, and these are more likely to create issues. So I did a stack rank list, not to say you have to in that order, but to help you know, based on what intuitively is your felt sense. Like, I want to be in the middle.

Yeah, yeah.

Versus I want to get my toe wet. So what is an entry level? Like, I'm scared of psychedelics. I've been programmed my whole life that, you know, I. I could go crazy and jump off a building and all the stuff that they would tell you in the 60s, but that wasn't real. So what's, how do you get your toe wet in psychedelics again?

I keep wanting to back up on your conversation because you're, you throw so much out with your question. Then you're like, oh, this way. But hang on. Five words that you said that I think are really dangerous words and for humans, which is tell me what to do.

That's what people are always asking for.

Always asking. Yeah. And what that means is to me, what I hear when someone says that is, I don't trust myself and I'm going to give my agency to someone else. And when we do that, whether that is a doctor or a teacher or a spouse or a boss, we find ourselves subjugating ourselves to someone else's opinion who may not know who they are. So now, amen, we are following someone who might be lost. Tell me what to do. Is, is where we get into trouble with gurus and shaman and healers because now all of a sudden I've traded tell me what to do, which made me unhappy in my this life with work and spouse and whatever, and now I've traded for Tamil to do with a guru or shaman or healer and I'm going to find unhappiness there because in either case, I'm not doing what I want to do.

Your autonomy is not there.

Your autonomy is not there.

There's a bigger issue though.

Yes.

Most people do not know what they want to do. And, and I, I say this after exhaustive work with more than a thousand like super successful people looking at their brain waves and going into altered states and what they think they want to do is not what they actually want to do. How do psychedelics help people sort out programming versus internal desire?

Because it takes it away from the to do. It's not what to do, it's what to be. And it's remembering. I don't need to do anything. All of this programming, all of our whole lives has been about doing more, doing much. It's about efficiency and productivity and how do we do more and provide more and slowing down and just taking a moment to say, what if I don't do? And I just be, how is that going to feel?

Kind of hungry and cold. I mean, you did fly out here and you bought your ticket.

We will also do, but slowing down enough to pay attention to those things, to pay attention to the feelings in our body and to recognize, oh, wait a minute, what are these emotions? Emotions are language without words. The body's trying to tell us something. So, okay, how can I get into a different state so then backing up, you said, how do we get our toes in the water when it comes to psychedelics? Okay, so we have lots of different ways depending on who you are. So if you are the type of person who wants to go through a medical system, I believe in diagnosis, I trust doctors. Great. We have ketamine clinics in all 50 states. And the caution, I would tell you is that just because it's legal doesn't make it right. And let me explain, explain this.

Yeah. Look at most of the laws, that's for sure.

There are ketamine clinics where you're going to be met by a nurse, anesthesiologist, and they believe it's a biochemical reaction, period. So they're going to stick an IV in your arm or give you a shot. They're going to. You're going to have television monitors. You can watch your Fox News while you're getting your ketamine. And after that experience, they'll let you come down and they're going to send you home. Totally illegal. It's available in every state.

And it works for some people.

And it works for some people. And yes, and then there's other ketamine providers that they believe it's a biochemical, psychosocial, spiritual process, that they're going to give you an eye mask and a blankie and some playlists and they're going to prepare you and they're going to integrate afterwards. Also legal. So buyer beware. Where there are telehealth companies that'll send you ketamine again, are there challenges with that? Of course there are. And if I live in rural America or if I don't have the money to afford another ketamine, should I still have access to these medicines? Of course I should. And I know because I'm buying it for less and they're providing less services. I need to wrap my own services around it. So buyer beware. So if you're the medical, those are your options, except if you're in Oregon, soon, Colorado, and hopefully soon some other states. But those are your options. If you're medical.

There's one little asterisk going to add to this.

Do it.

I've come across a few companies who are giving people daily doses of ketamine for 30 days plus, and then they just keep sending it to you and they tell you to ramp up on it. I think the word for that is addiction. What do you think about that?

I don't know where the research at all points to this being a good idea. So it's One thing to say, I'm going to work with psilocybin with, with again something that grows in nature that's been used for thousands of years, where indigenous cultures tend not to do things that harm their people repeatedly. So ketamine, we don't have that history.

We have 70 years of history with ketamine.

Yeah. We don't have the everyday use of ketamine in this.

Well, we do. It's called in addicts and then their bladders blow out and their brains have norepinephrine in issues like it's really bad. So this looks like it is not only not standard of care, it looks like it's actually a malpractice situation from my perspective. But I could be wrong.

Everything I've read would say that's probably not the way to interact with that medicine.

Yeah. And so for, for people listening, I've had a couple of good friends reach out. In fact, one of them was at the end of his first week of because one of the companies hooked him with an ad and he was slowly ramping up his dose. He was about to go to his 65 milligram troches every single day. That's a meaningful dose. And everything we know about ketamine says this is not a good move. But the neuroplasticity and doing it for five days or doing a couple big doses even a week while you're in deep therapy, totally different neurochemistry, Totally different. This is why to your point, science is so important to understand what these do. What would happen to someone who said I'm going to do a gram of psilocybin every day, for instance.

Instance, it would wear, it wouldn't work. And that's, that's kind of beautiful. Nature stops. It's that governor we were talking about before, I love. So you talked about going to Peru and using ayahuasca. Yeah, I love multi day entheogenic. So using psychedelics for spiritual purposes experiences. So going down and using and doing three or five nights of, of ayahuasca in a week and being able to dive in, come back out, dive in, come back out, dive in again. Amazing. Doing that with mushrooms a couple nights and you have to watch the strains and watch the. To make that work. It's like I've got to start with a golden teacher on day one to move into a PE on day two to even make that work.

Private equity, you mean?

Yes, exactly. It's a private equity mushroom strain. But it wouldn't allow you to do multiple days and that's kind of the beauty of nature of saying, ah, we know what we're doing here. We've been doing this for a long time.

You could, however, if you were in the desert in an RV with lots of music, you could do like LSD on day one and ketamine on day three.

Yes, of course, of course. And move through the, the grocery store of, of psychedelic products.

There are a number of people listening, especially if you're meaningfully over 50, where like this is in your mind the same thing as heroin or cocaine or meth or the things that just burn through society or fentanyl, they're just not like, they're not chemically, they're not spiritually, they're unrelated. So my invitation would be to, in your mind, in your definition of these things, to say, oh, there are addictive drugs that generally cause harm but may still be useful, like fentanyl. I've had it during surgery. It was very useful. Right. And then there are others that make people see the world differently. And here's my question for you. Having a shared reality seems important for societies. And this has been a role of religion and culture forever. When people choose to change their reality, whether it's through breath work or joining a cult or becoming a yogi or joining a church, you can do these things and suddenly you shift and you realize, I never knew that God was watching me, but now that I have that, that I'm going to change things. What is the risk to society if a bunch of people start, as you say, remembering themselves and start seeing the world very differently? Are we just going to dissolve society?

Of course not. And this is, I mean, Terence McKenna famously talks about how the government's not keeping us away from these because they're trying to be paternal and protect our us from ourselves. They're, they're more concerned or how are we going to be as productive citizens or not to be productive citizens? I love, I mean, it's a wild time that we are living in. There's no way but to look at this with wild curiosity, like, okay, whether man made or not, we have some things happening with the climate, we have some things happening politically. We have, again, wildly interesting times. This awareness of the interconnectedness of all, that we are not separate and apart from nature, but that we are nature is, I believe, what is needed to move us productively into this next phase of living and to be able to recognize, oh my God, we live in the most abundant world ever, that this is this nonsense of scarcity, that there's not enough. We have enough to feed the world. We have enough to house the world right now.

And if people don't believe you, they can just ask ChatGPT.

Exactly.

Wait, you have access to an AI intelligence that knows the sum of human knowledge and it's better than any president or king 20 years ago had access to. And it's free, right? That's how abundant we are right now.

Yes. And we can look at all, any metric from, from harm to, to, to poverty, to, to famine. Everything is better than it's ever been. And we are told to be scared. We are told to hoard. We are told that we have to take what's ours and that there's not going to be enough. And oh well, this is going to crash and there's danger, danger, danger. And it's just not true. It is amazing to just feel, oh wait a minute, if I slow down, just feel the weight of myself on the earth, I'm supported if I go outside and look at nature, everything is working for me. We live better than kings lived a few hundred years ago. And are things going to be different? Absolutely. And are people going to have to adjust? Of course. And that's what we do as a species and that's why these aren't existential events. We are going to adjust. It's waking up to, wow, what an incredible time. The bazillions of bazillions of accidents that had to happen so that you and I could be here right now. It's, this is it. There is nothing but awe and gratitude to experience in this world.

If you think about it, there's been 2 billion years of R D that's happened in order to get us to where we are today. Literally. This worked. This didn't work. This worked. This didn't work. And it's done a pretty good job. And it's a continuous process. And just like the Neanderthals went extinct, humans will inevitably go extinct. How soon do you think that's going to happen?

No, that and it doesn't matter. Yes. So this will happen at some point and we're the, we are made up of these same pieces.

Exactly.

We are, we are made. The carbon in us is the carbon of the dinosaurs.

We're the same life as the first primordial bacterial glunk that came out of was some mud somewhere, if you believe that, or whatever it was. So it's part of this inevitable chain of life and humanity will evolve or you know, will be replaced by, you know, trash eating dinosaurs, slime bombs, whatever they'll still be made out of us.

Right.

I did not have that perspective until. I can't say psychedelics did it. I think it was more breath work and neurofeedback. But psychedelics certainly where the overwhelming concern about death, it's just gone for me. And along with that, the voices in my head, all that sort of stuff. And I did this partly with psychedelics, but a lot of it was with all of the different spiritual practices, personal development practices. A lot of the stuff that I. I just. I share in the most recent book, I don't know that I could say what percentage of it was from working with entheogens or doing shamanic training or what percentage was. I downloaded this on a journey versus introspection.

I love that. Because people. People think that, like they say, oh, healing's hard work. It's hard work to. To. To. To recover, to find. No, it happens in a second. And when that second is, it doesn't matter. The life that you had before that was a life you had and was needed. Every moment of that was needed to bring you to the point when it clicked. Okay, and then you move forward. So we can assign percentages and we can play with percentages, and it doesn't matter. It. Sometimes we can heal in a moment and the suffering then becomes optional. I would like to sit in some pain for a while. All right. Sit in some pain for a while. Great. I would like to experience some more depression. I'd like to experience some anxiety for a while. Great. Or not. But we have that choice. And I'm not. I know that sounds. I know that sounds can be harsh, but we have that choice. And all the time. Time.

It's not harsh, it's real. And one of the biggest lessons for beginning level healers, whether they're medical or some other kind of healer, you don't have the right to take away someone's suffering unless they ask for it.

Oh, and I'd actually argue that you don't have the ability to take away someone. None of us. I can't heal anybody. I can't make. I can't assign meaning to your experience at all, Period. It is up to each individual. And that's where actually.

Did you just take away the power from all the people who heal other people?

Kind of did. I think so, yeah. It's in the work that I do. We say all the time, we're not gurus, we're not shamans, we're not healers. If we do our work while we are creating, we are Facilitating a space where you can remember who you are. And when you do that, then you do that. It's all our own learning, healing, and growing. We can't assign meaning for somebody else, period. Full stop. End of story.

You can't assign meaning if you're holding a psychedelic space and you're doing that kind of work. And I've known people who are healers who are saying, you know what, like you're, you're looking for the way to reconnect that nerve there, because something's not working. Let me just do a little tweak right there. And then suddenly it works. You're like, thanks, man.

What do you call that? Yes. Yes. So, yes. So you can. You can repair an arm, you can tweak a nerve, you can do that type of biological healing. Absolutely.

Can be energetic, too.

It can be, but I am not entirely convinced we can do the healing.

It requires the active participation of the person being healed. And sometimes healing happens with a team, right?

A lot of times it happens with a team because it's the conditions, it's creating the space, and that is a team, oftentimes a team effort. And that's the interconnectedness of all of us. We come into these relationships, into these conversations, into these moments of connection where it's like, okay, you know, Dave, I trust you, and I'm willing to take this journey with you, and I'm responsible for me, but I'm going to trust that you're going to create an environment that I'm going to be able to step in and learn whatever it is that you're able to offer to me.

I love that. I know someone who's 80 years old and he's terrified of any altered states. Work, psychedelics, neurofeedback, breath work, any of it.

Death.

And of course, death. And the, the reason is that I don't want to look inside because I might not like what I find. What would you say to that?

It's beautiful. That's. That's, that's a level of awareness. So, okay, and you have a choice. The healing is inevitable. You can either choose to do it while you're still here in this state, or you can do it in the next state. So what do you. Whatever you want is beautiful for you.

That is the perfect thing. Like, you get to choose.

You get to choose.

And, and for anyone listening, I'm reminded of this time I was giving a talk at Google's headquarters, and it was a debate between this vegan radical guy and me and a couple others and one of the guys in the bathroom goes, I want to be a vegan activist. What's your advice? And I just said, shut up and eat. He goes, what do you mean? And one of the guys in the bathroom goes, I want to be a vegan activist. What's your advice? And I just said, said, shut up and eat. He goes, what do you mean? I said, well, if your way works, be so abundantly healthy. If people ask you what you did and now you have the invitation to share, but trying to yell at other people to make.