Taking the Kink Out of Kinky – Jamie Wheal, Part 2 with Dave Asprey : 846

Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. When Jamie Wheal comes on Bulletproof Radio, we always get into some mind bending topics. He's a friend who specializes in neuroanthropology.

What the heck is that?

Means it brings together culture, biology and psychology into a single field. Jamie is a co founder of the international Flow Genome project of which I was the first investor. And they work on training people for the ultimate human performance. He looks at the nitty gritty between science and human potential with a lot of precision. And that's why our interview about hedonic engineering ended up being a multi episode miniseries for you. Because it was more than would fit in one episode or fit in your head all at one time. We pull apart his book Recapture the Rapture, rethinking God's sex and death in a world that's lost its mind. Jamie goes to a lot of places you probably wouldn't think about, all in search of the flow state. Things like the fascinating sex survey he.

Conducted with couples or his views on.

Sexy biohacking and nerdy kink. We've got some deep survival circuits and powerful evolutionary drivers when it comes to sex and death and everything in between. So if you care about neuroscience and psychology, listen to these episodes.

You're going to like what you hear.

Bulletproof Radio A state of high performance.

I like the amount of rigor behind the science you put out in Recapture of the Rapture because you're saying like, well let's look at what all this stuff looks like. And you go into some of the history too and you talk about a dakini. Now for people who don't know that that's not a kind of swimsuit. Tell me about Dakinis.

Yeah, I mean they were fundamentally coming out of the Tibetan and Buddhist traditions and they were, you know, they were sort of, you know, sky dancing Tantrikas. So they were women, you know, women adepts who had attained and accessed God consciousness and, and quite often. And Miranda Shaw, who was trained at Harvard and then has been an independent scholar, has written extensively about women in particularly Tibetan Buddhism which has these strong shamanic and tantric elements. And she's like actually look, the, the secret story is actually they were the ones who switched on first and then all the famous dudes, Milarepa, Pama Samova, all these other guys actually got woken up by their consorts. It was the women, the women were smarter and they are the ones that got there first. And so these Women were basically adepts and initiators of psychosexual realization. And, and that story that you're, you're referencing, Yeshay Sogyal, we were actually, we were guiding on the Tibetan side of Mount Everest, but before we got there, we had visited some crazy tantric monasteries up at like 17,000ft. And the Chinese communists had never got there. There was sort of like, you know, supposed to be really pure. Pure. And that was the place that she had come. She was like an 8th century princess who had skipped town because her parents had tried to arrange her marriage. And she said, fuck that, I'm not doing that. And she went off and basically she had to go through all these trials. She duped it out with a tiger, defeated it and beheaded him. And then she comes back to her home province in Kachin, and seven bandits basically mug her and rape her. But she's such a badass that she allows it to happen. And then at the culmination of that experience, they all experience illumination and they drop to their knees weeping and vow to become her bodyguards for life. And so then she's like, all right, come with me. Hop on my magic flying carpet. And they fly to this, to this monastery where we ended up with these crazy hot springs with snakes in them, which was nuts, and, and, and flew, and took Padma Sambhava, one of the, you know, the founders of Tibetan Buddhism, up to this cave right in the middle of this 3,000 foot granite wall. And that's where they disappeared for a decade to invent Tibetan tantra and even the meditative practice of tonglen, which many of your listeners may be familiar with.

These places actually exist. And people who haven't been to the remote parts of Tibet and Nepal or studied with the masters, some of those experiences which I've had personally, not of being raped and taken to a cave or something like that, but just meeting the people from these lineages and understanding some of the things that are not in the written record, you just go, wow, there's. There's a lot of stuff that's been happening. And how much of that's metaphorical versus literal, I don't really know. We also know you go back to Egypt. There were, you know, there were, we'll call them sex cults or sex temples, you know, manned entirely by women where, like, you'd go there to have a communion with God, right? And that was, that was part of the job. And you, you look at all these things and it seems like it's mostly been lost. And what we have now is we have porn sites, right? And then marriage or dating. But the. But a lot of the spiritual stuff is. Is lost. Are you hopeful that there's going to be a revival of that. That transformative, cathartic, healing sex? Or is this always going to be the realm of, you know, people who are advanced personal development people and seen as pretty much weird people by everyone else? This can become mainstream.

Gosh. I mean, I'm not hopeful about many things, but. But, but in. In my sense is like, history seems to happen orthogonally. You know, like, whatever you're trying to have happen never happens the way you. You're trying to have it happen, and then you give up. But then some weird little, like, bank shot off the corner happens, and you're like, oh, my gosh, that. Like, that worked. So it might not be the people you're trying to reach. It might be people three steps away in a network. It might not be this year. It might be a century or a decade from now. Like, things happen in weird and squishy ways. As far as humans finding our way forward. So do you know, Do I. And would I hope for something better than, you know, pornhub as our sort of baseline for sexuality and inspiration? Absolutely. And is that possible? I think it's hardest to imagine in the US of A. Right. We've got such deep, conflicted puritanical coding overlaid with hypersexuality and commodification that it can be really difficult. But if you go to Europe, where parents will be sitting downstairs having tea with a teenage couple and then give them condoms, and the kids go off upstairs to make love for the first time, and then they come back downstairs and their parents say, well, how was that for you? Was that good? Was that nice? Was that healthy? Was that happy? Like, that would blow the mind of most Americans.

I like being married to a Swede, I'll put it that way.

Yeah, Right. So everything is cultural. And I think that there is. There is a hope. I mean, I guess the simplest my hope would be is that we all get. And, you know, you've obviously been long on this project yourself, but kind of like humans, a user manual. Like, hey, human. Like, well, you're a clever primate. You're a monkey with clothes. You know, like, this is how your body works. This is how your brain works. This is the planet you're on. This is the universe, and this is the system you're in. And this is roughly what's up. And here's a way to find your way forward. And if we just had those as toolkits for resilient and vibrant being, I think we'd probably all be better off. And so that's the kind of thing that I would hope to see more of.

I think we are finally to the point where we're getting enough data. I mean, you mentioned the oura ring. We're getting heart rate from that. I'm going to be getting a lot of data as I get upgrade labs out there as a franchise. So we'll have hundreds of locations where people are rejuvenating themselves, themselves. But at the same time, you know, gathering data so we can say what works, what doesn't work, and what. What is the human condition. And we have all the brainwave stuff that we're gathering from, from 40 years of Zen, and that's just a tiny drop in the bucket compared to all of the different people working all the different projects. So we're. We're getting enough data to be able to say, well, here's an instruction manual that's based on something tangible. Even the study you just did here that says if you do this, most of the time you get this. If you don't get this, it's because you have this weird option on your car. And then you should do this. So when it comes to food, when it comes to sleep, when it comes to all this stuff, I think we're getting there. So I'm hopeful that we'll at least be less stupid about what we do. But I was also intrigued. Being less stupid. You talk about how the study that you did delivered proof that women are smarter and better, possibly more enlightened than men. Talk to me about that.

Yeah, well, a. That was a play on an old Grateful Dead tune. That's right. The women are smarter. Right, so. So that was. That was. That hat tip. But it was, it was also. It was, you know, it was. It was a throwback to the Yese Sogyal because her consort, Padma Sambhava, said. He said, you know, a human body is a beautiful vehicle for enlightenment, like in, you know, deeply embodied waking up, not disembodied. I'm a skinny Saudi wrapped in a, you know, wrapped in a bath towel. So he said, a human body is the perfect vehicle, but if a woman has the inclination, a woman's body is better. So that was the ancient truth claim. And then one of Nicole Prowse's studies which was assessing can even just 15 to 20 minutes of genital stimulation for a woman, can that produce not just, you know, physiological and psychological healing and pain Relief, but can it actually provide access to mystical states? So this was one of the kind of focuses of the study, actually disclosed that for four women. And you know, sadly, it wasn't symmetrical. This was a. There was the, you know, the male identified partner was stimulating the woman. It wasn't reciprocated. But in that study the women had access to peak states again using that Hopkins metric that met and exceeded the highest dose of psilocybin. And so you're like, wow, you know, once again, really much more accessible, cheap, you know, free. Like, this is everybody. All you gotta do is just shut your front door and have, you know, and schedule a play date with a friend with benefits and you can have access to the things that, you know, are getting touted in news cycles kind of incessantly over the last three years as these miracles, cures and break, you know, breakthroughs of psychedelic therapies. So that, that was the sense. And I think it's also just some hope, I think just to kind of playfully but sincerely attempt to rebalance the ledger. Because you were talking about your four Fs, right? And, and for me, I, I always think of like, what are men good for? You know, which is we're, we're really good at fighting stuff, stuff and building stuff. But, but when to fight and who to fuck and what to build we're terrible at, right? So we can really do with a little womanly wisdom. And you know, I always think of like. And I was in grass.

I'm trying to figure out if you said something that would get you canceled or un. Canceled in that last thing. I'm so confused now, but I think.

I think at this point if you say anything, you're at risk of it because someone will fly off the handle. But in grad school I studied like, you know, in like Native American proto context, like right when Europeans and, and indigenous cultures mixed. And one of the most fascinating examples I ever came across was the Iroquois Council of Grandmothers. Because you would think like big chief warrior dude, he was the kickass one and he led the thing. No, no, it wasn't that. He reported hat in hand to the grandmothers. And when the Hurons or some other tribe would come and kill somebody or do something, and he's like, we're going to go on the war part. They're like, all right, son, you know, but if you do, you better not lose a single one of our boys, because if that happens, we'd have to avenge them. And then avenge them. And then avenge them. We've seen this movie, so, you know, cool your hot headed, hot headed testosterone, adult jets home slice, you know, and we're playing the long game for seven generations. And that for sure feels like something that we could reinstitute in meaningful ways. And I think we'd probably all be better for it.

I agree with you. We do need our councils of grandmothers. There's actually a great shortage of elders in general, including our grandfathers, who sometimes get wisdom at a certain point. And maybe if you talk to someone who's 70, he'll tell you who to fuck and who not to fuck just because he's seen it enough times and made the mistakes himself. This is why I cultivate friendships with people way older than me. Because they tell me the things that I probably would do that would be stupid. Even though I like to think I've accumulated some wisdom and always working on it.

Well, yeah, now let me run this past you because my, because I've also seen a number of men, when they get through their power band of their earning and their career and their public, you know, public facing and all that kind of stuff that often they regress into kind of a second childhood, they become more petulant, they become less flexible and rigid. And I see that, I mean these are all this, this is just anecdotal, but I see that less often in older women in, in grandmothers. And I'm wondering if in the instances where, because like motherhood is a non negotiable rite of passage from being self oriented to absolutely no bones about it being other oriented. And a man may learn those things through his life, but he doesn't have to, not nearly in the same way. And I was just. And I'm just wondering whether in the absence of some other profound commitment to something bigger than themselves and that could be military service, that could be running and growing an organization that you're committed to leading, it could be a thousand different things. But if they don't happen, that men by default are more like or more prone to regression than grandmothers are, does that track for you?

I think that tracks and probably has a lot to do with, with hormone decline as it declines differently in andropause for men versus menopause for women. And given that both of those are entirely optional right now. And then like read my books on aging. If, if you're managing your hormones correctly, I think you can maintain that the youthful energy but have the, the wisdom of, of being an elder. But if you go down the path of allowing yourself to be low testosterone as A man or a woman, even if it's normal for your 80 year old age group, like. Yeah, but am I like the movie Grumpy Old Men or am I showing up the way I want to show up? So when we use the biohacking to show up the way we want, I think you actually have a healthier sex life even as you age and you're, you know, menopausal or andropausal, whatever. But it's not about the sex, it's about the brain.

Right.

Even though as you're saying very clearly in your study that sex is affecting and driving the brain. So there's some kind of an answer in there that's mixed up between the two. I, I think.

Yeah, well, I mean, exactly what you just said, right? It's the same with, the same with substances. So it's not about the sex and it's not about the drugs. Everybody wants to make it about those things, but it's actually about what are the mechanisms of action. These are just keys that fit in locks. What does the door open to and what is the view from there? And so one of the pieces, when I, when I said that like, you know, for five years I was just kind of researching this and doing that sort of neuro anthropology thing of like, well, what is this? And where else has it something similar shown up and then what's under the hood? And what we came to was Carl Deisseroth's work at Stanford and also an mit. There was an M, there was an mit, a Harvard and a Stanford studies. And between them I was like, perchow. That felt like the Rosetta stone to this whole thing because Carl Deisseroth actually. And I'll throw in Rick's mdma, PTSD studies, right? So between those four things, I was like, oh, I think I understand how this is working. Which was the MIT study, I'll start with. That one was in 2015. It was a bunch of anesthesiologists there and they were doing research on nitrous oxide, you know, which is, you know, laughing gas for dentists and it's for midwives and it's all those kind of things.

It's a double whippets for Burning Man.

Whippets for Burning Man. It's a WHO essential medicine because it doesn't repress respiratory drive, unlike opioids and those kind of things. So it's considered very safe and efficacious and all that kind of stuff. And actually there's just been a new study that I saw like two weeks ago on people trying to replicate ketamine antidepressant effects with nitrous oxide and finding positive results. So I was like, okay, what is going on in these spaces? And it turns out. And they were shocked by this finding. They're like, oh, three, three to five minutes after ingestion of 50% oxygen, 50% nitrous oxide through a rebreather, the patient's delta wave waking Delta EEGs, which is very, very rare. Right. Esoteric as shit. Meditative states are about all that gets you there while still awake. Otherwise, it's deep, dreamless sleep actually became double amplitude Delta waves for three to 12 minutes, after which they normalize and then go back to baseline. And. And then I was like, whoa, that's fascinating. And who else has done this? And it turns out, you know, William James was famously. That's what prompted his whole birthing of optimal psychology and comparative religion at Harvard back in the 19th century. Winston Churchill was a total gas head. And he's like, he's like, this is, you know, like he, he got hit by a car in New York city in the 30s, then got taken to, like, the only hospital in New York there was pioneering nitrous oxide for anesthesiology and surgery to fix him. And he's like, realm upon realm of alien powers disclose themselves. And I've come to conclude that nitrous oxide, that the gas merely substitute. And. But then I can't remember what it is. And therefore I've come to conclude that the gas merely substitutes, you know, racism, physical pain, and then substituted mental pain. Yeah, you're like, this is crazy.

I did not. I just quoted him yesterday on Instagram saying that if, if the army didn't have beef and they just became nut eaters, that they would all be weak and be killed by the Germans. The vegan people got mad at me for that. But I did not know Churchill used nitrous oxide as an early guy before he did all of his crazy stuff.

Yeah, exactly. So, so that was my first clue on, oh, maybe it's delta waves. And then swing over to Stanford and Carl Deisseroth, who's the founder of optogenetic innovation and all those kind of things. He was doing a study with ketamine to see which is a dissociative anesthetic. Right. And so, and, and seeing its role on antidepressant effects and what he was noticing. He did this fascinating study with both mice and then with epileptic patients. So humans who could talk back and report and basically was check. And they had some little test to understand when a mouse was dissociated. They were probably like flopping around or bumping into the walls in their maze or something. But like you're out of your body, dude. You're in the K hole, right? And the same for the humans. And, and what they did is then, then track that it was. They tracked when both subjects were clearly in a disembodied or dissociative state, they tracked that against the antidepressant effects. And then they measured the EEG and it was 3 hertz, which is, you know, 0.1 hertz to 4 hertz is the delta range. And 3 hertz, you know, comfortably in that sweet spot. And that's interesting. You're like, okay, neat confirmation. Another hit of delta. But the next move was the game changer where he's like, okay, now no drug. Let us go back in neuroelectrically in the humans and optogenetically. So they're actually tweaking the genes in the mice. Let's re stimulate the three hoods. And wouldn't you know it, they're back in that same dissociative state, the same out of body experience, the same awe inspiring information rich experience they were having and comparable antidepressant effects. So you're like, okay. So that felt like a really key piece and sort of one of the, if you know, like Delta waves are sort of the redheaded stepchild of EEG research. I mean oura and other things and Matt Walker and others are really now, you know, in the last 24 months it's been coming more and more as a sleep, health, sleep hygiene element, but not waking.

There's a lot more in Delta. We've had more than a thousand people come through 40 years of Zen looking at basically improving human performance. And there's a certain type of person who comes through with certain frequencies in certain locations that I wouldn't feel comfortable disclosing. But those are people who can do things that other people just can't do. And those states are trainable, but you just don't want to train them. You don't want to train them in people who are. Weren't ready because well, was that Spider man quote? With great responsibility comes great power.

Okay, well, dude, let's talk about that, right? Because Vice just. Vice just published, right, that. The missing page from that crazy document from the 80s with the Holosync folks.

Whoa, I know those guys. The whole thing, guys. I didn't see that on Vice. So there's a missing Page.

There was the missing page. There was like the missing page, which was that whole government report on them doing delta wave entrainment and then creating toroid fields and quantum leaping or what. You know, it was, it was definitely like some conjectural as hell explanations for what, where they were going and, and, and what the mechanisms were. But fundamentally the core mechanism of action, I believe was aligned with delta wave state injection.

There's no doubt that people who are advanced meditators have more control of their delta. And Bill Harris came on the show a couple of times. Who was responsible for CenterPoint, which was in the same vein as Holosync.

I think you're right. I think it's Center.

It was Bill. It was not Holosink.

It's the Virginia outfit. Monroe, Virginia.

Yeah, that's actually Monroe Institute. That was James Monroe. Okay, so guys, where we're getting into now, if you listen to going, what the hell are these guys talking about? In the 80s, there were two, I'm going to call them, preeminent brain hackers out there, using binaural beats. This is slightly shifted sounds to change brain states. And you could go to a facility in Monroe, Virginia, the Monroe Institute, I think it was in Monroe, Virginia, anywhere in Virginia, and they would use EEGs and sounds to put yourself in these incredible states. If you want your brain to work all the time, it has to be able to go to some states with ease and not waste energy in other states. But when you look at these, if you guys want to Google this, you can look at hemisync or holosync, and there's just tons and tons of info out there. You can still go to Centerpoint. I know that they're operating even though Bill's passed and there's great knowledge there. And I think when you look at things like neurofeedback, even home devices, you look at heart rate variability training, all of those are in that same realm of how do we do do this yogic or this meditation stuff faster. But I want to get back to your, your knowledge of delta waves and sex specifically. You're saying that when people are having this kind of transcendent spiritual sex, they're getting those delta waves.

Well, especially if you combine it with breath work involving oxygen and nitrous oxide and, or stacking oxytocin and ketamine.

So.

And then, you know, and again, this is like the notion of like take the kink out of kinky, right. For most people, if you're, if you're in like, you know, Respectful, you know, gender balance, relating, that kind of stuff. Unless you have just access to and an inclination for BDSM or something else like that. Most, you know, most kind of, you know, vanilla folks look at those communities or practices and they're like, whoa, that's a little wiggy. That's not necessarily my thing. I don't necessarily know if I want to sign up to be a naughty school girl or a dirty boy or whatever it is. Like, like whatever the scripts, you know, like it's often off putting. Like that's not my people.

I was going to ask you about that because in the book you say if you're open minded and sincere in your pursuit of the most effective protocols for healing humans, you end up in one of two places. Sexy biohacking or nerdy kink.

Yeah, so which is.

What do you mean?

Well, it's just that, it's just that simple sense of, I mean for starters for women, and I don't know the, the nut the ratio for men, but I would assume it's somewhere in the mix. But for women it's 4.4x pain tolerance. @ the crest, crest of orgasm, you add nitrous oxide or ketamine. Those pain tolerances can go up and you get to a point of arousal. And this goes back to sex in the animal kingdom, right. Life, you know, sex is nasty, brutish and short. So we get tons of endorphins, we get tons of anandamide, we get tons of pleasure enhancing pain reducing neurochemistry. And there is a point, plus or minus, you know, whatever, 90 seconds to 120 seconds on either side of climax, which could be expanded and extended via edging practices where you don't go over the falls where your pain tolerance is through the roof. And then basically pleasure pain gets hotwired and all pain gets experiences as pleasure. So now you're in that zone where you could be like, you know, pinch, pinch, pinch, smack, pout, pow. And you've suddenly loaded up the nervous system and you know, basically we're prefrontal cortexes connected by a spinal column to erogenous zones. And, and if you learn to play that system like a loving and compassionate instrument, you can basically load up a bunch of neurological stimulation, release it and timed with the breath, work with the gas assisted static apnea with oxytocin and ketamine, with driving sonic music with strong bass and hopefully profound lyrics and a kick ass beat, you know, like time it like start your breath work. Protocol 52.1 is the one we settled on which was 50 hyperventilations to decrease CO2, two inhalations of pure oxygen to supersaturate your red blood cells and one shot of either of blended 70, 30 nitrous oxide oxygen and then maximum static apnea. And at that point your partner can then edge you over the top into climax. Although it's sort of irrelevant, but it's kind of a neat one if you can hit it. And then also any loading up of pleasure pain. And so, and then you just max, max, max, max, max. And then you just basically sort of Shavasana the universe.

You just, and then, then you meet God, right?

Well then, then you in. I mean and you know, that's the back end of the book which is where does this information come from? Because like in those delta wave states with high vagal nerve tone and super saturated neurochemistry, right, you tend to defrag your, your, your traumas. And it could include tremor release, right? It can include yoga, it include Thai massage, it can include bodywork and theraguns and percussive massage. Like you. That's what I meant about like a sexual yoga of becoming. It's not rose petals and, and, and John Legend, you know, it, it's hey, how do we work together? And you know, if we were in a more progressive society, you could have sexual surrogates. You could have, you could, this could be therapeutic and professionalized. It's just that, you know, the safest, simplest is with a friend with benefits where you've mutually committed. Like we could just do this with clothes on. You know, in a yoga studio. We can take it half of the distance, we can take it 50% of the way without any erotic element. But if you wanted to do the full stack, that's what I meant about if you don't, you're not squeamish, you end up with sexy biohacking. And it's just simply weaving that additional really, really potent central nervous system circuitry into any and all of your other practices.

What I have found, and what's a part of some of the neuroscience work that I do is that when the body is re experiencing a trauma, but it's coupled with extreme pleasure, they cancel each other out. And that's why some people experience so much catharsis and even permanent healing when they go to these peak states.

Yeah, Post traumatic growth disorder, right?

You said post traumatic growth disorder.

Yeah, well you literally, you find ways to make the most of it. And that was true with Rick. I mean Rick Doblin and I were at The Battery. In San Francisco, we were in a conversation with our friend Jason Silva. And it was in between sets, right? And we were talking and I was like, hey, Rick, how's the research going? What's up? What's new? And he's like, yeah, look. Basically the closest we can a. He said that lower dosages of MDMA were actually more efficacious therapeutically. So, like, rather than somebody rolling their face off and loving everybody, including the couch and the potted plant and their therapist they just met, like, they're like, no, actually just give me enough to get into a supersaturated state of vasopressin, prolactin, serotonin, oxytocin, where I feel safe, secure, and enough. And I can revisit my memories and then I can sort of take them off their shelf. Because memories are plastic, right? They're constantly remade and made again. I can clean them up and then I put them back on the shelf. And I was like, wait a second. He was in. The closest analog we found is the post orgasmic state. So that was another bell. I'm like, wait a second. So this is clinical trials. Tons of people suffering, long waiting list. It's still. No matter how they've been blazing through phase three trials, it's going as fast as it possibly can, but it's going to be a long, long time before that makes its way around the world. Or we could pursue this esoteric state known only to scientists as post orgasmic. You know, and how else could we get people there? So it sort of felt like more like a civic responsibility to share the information.

It is important that we talk about it. And so many people have lots of firewalls built up around shame and trauma and all that stuff around it. But I've always done my best to incorporate that. Guys, there's more to sex than just having a bit of fun here into my work. And I appreciate that you did it in your book as well in a very quantitative, scientific, measurable way. And saying there's a way to do this. What about people who are solo? Can you do this with just masturbation?

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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the only thing that is absent is the thing that it's hard to tickle yourself, right? So like, aside from that, aside from sort of the novelty and input and all the meaningful relational bonding elements that may occur if you're doing it with a partner. Absolutely. We can and should learn these things. It would be, it's sort of like I wouldn't wait to learn how to ski to go on a ski holiday with friends, right? I wouldn't wait to learn how to dance or play music to the moment I show up on stage in a band, you know, so. So the more we can learn the instruments of ourselves and not in the whole sort of tension, release, shame, get it over with as quickly as possible, you know, fast and furious for boys, you know, and perhaps, you know, whatever the experience of kind of seeking and not finding for anorgasmic people, including women, I mean typically women skew more and you know, have more of an incidence of that. It's harder for a woman to find her orgasm than it is for a teenage boy. The ability for us to integrate healthy accumulation and discharge of those energies in our system is, it's. I would see it as analogous to contrast therapies. Like it's healthy to vasodilate and vasoconstrict to be super hot and really cold, right. It's, it's. We want to expand the range of our neurophysiological set points and I think a decent descriptor like some, I think it was, oh, it was one. We were talking to this to the Navy SEALs because I couldn't give them Fluffy, right? I had to give them like a very, I was like, basically, you know, what has been called like a functional definition, a pragmat, a pragmatist Definition of 21st century Western Enlightenment is nothing more nor less than the ability to match state to task, right? So not. We're all going to be cross eyed in Theta, sitting groovily, you know, right. Like Eckhart Tolle Right. It's actually like, it's like, well, wait, if you want to meet God, yes, you want to be, you know, empty and humble on your mountaintop, but if you're jumped in a bar fight, you want to be a fierce warrior protecting the people you're with. If you're trying to calm a colicky child in the middle of the night, you want to be the most, the baddest ass mammal parent you've got in you. Right? And so there is no promised land that we get to that is a fixed state. It's much more like balance on a surfboard. It's like, well, where's balance on a surfboard? It's like, well, it depends. Where are you on the wave? What are you trying to do? Balance is a center, but that center is always in flux and adding in sexuality, where you can create both peak arousal. So the increase of tension followed by deep recovery, the post coital element that expands our window. Not unlike ice baths and saunas, not unlike intermittent fasting, binge purge, all of these kind of things. It's just, all we're doing is just, we're reclaiming the full spectrum of human physiology and psychology. And then, you know, because we're very. No man is an island. No woman is either. And our sociology, us doing all these things together.

I, I love that. And there's, there's so much in the book and just so, so much more that we could go into about sex and transcendence and healing and all that. I, I just love it that you put it out there as a part of it. I want to ask you a few relatively rapid fire questions. One of them from other parts of the book. Three dead giveaways to spot a leader using cult programming to build fans and get rich.

Well, they're doing it on Instagram. That's the first one. No, that's not the first one, but it's a good tell. And if they were into the secret five years ago, that's another one. No, I think it's first of all mythologized origin stories. If you ever hear somebody giving you this perfectly polished tale of early signs of prodigious talent, like they were doing outrageous things when they were children, or they, you know, or, or just precociousness that almost seems predestined. Or the, the alternate is the classic, you know, Paul on the road to Damascus. I was a gang leader, thug, drug dealer. And then, or I was addicted and I had the house and it all, I lost it all. But, you know, then I Hit rock bottom. And I'm now here to you. That's a uniquely American redemption story. So just be super suspicious of anybody's origin stories that seem to grant them special privilege mass like specific use of in groups and out groups. So we are here particularly with a messianic purpose, those kinds of things. Anything along those lines where and even, you know, the harnessing of volunteer labor. And then somebody says, well, I kind of like to get paid or I can't make rent. And how dare, dare you. Don't you believe in this enough? This is really the thing. And then the final absolute tell for me is weaponization of ecstasis and catharsis peak states and healing and the classic passion, you know, and you see this in personal growth stadium events. You've got the cannons going, the fog and the lights and all these things. And everybody's amped and amped and amped. And it's three or four days of this and then it's like. And if you want to sign up for our super special secret platinum double double course, there's people in the back and go sign up now. And it's three easy payments. So like here I am, juice to the gills and I am not sovereign of my own choices at that moment. Or the only way to get high is to come to our satsang is our special sessions. We have the goods and we mediate access to ecstasy. I mean, I was just talking with someone yesterday was about Texas blue laws. And it's just fascinating, right, that the blue laws around the country where you can't buy alcohol on Sundays, but it's like, well, wait, the only place you can can get any alcohol, even though it's a tiny little sip, is at church and communion wine. You're like, right, that's a classic example. But there's tons of other communities that do it. And the notion of catharsis and whether that's encounter groups like EST and Landmark, you know, those kinds of technologies, or whether it's psychosexual, whether it's psychedelic, whatever it would be, your boundaries are dropped. You're feeling the feels. And those are moments where you take signs of attestment, like atonement. I'm so sorry, I was wrong. Payment. I'd like to sign away my trust fund to you because you guys are saving the world. Any of those things where key decisions or personal commitments or personal abasements are negotiated and orchestrated to take place in a place that is not clear and sober with full consent.

That's the issue with any of These practices that really open you up. It's all about finding a safe place, place to do it with. I mean, there are lots of people have hung up a shingle. I'm a shaman because I. Twice. Maybe you need to be careful there. So I, I have concern over all this because I also know some very advanced guru people who can do some amazing stuff, right? And you go to a group with one of them and you're like, wow, did that just happen? I think so. And it's not a manipulative thing. And there are other ones who are complete. I'm going to call them charlatans because they know they're being manipulative. And it's your job to figure out what's real and what's not, which makes all of this a bit more slippery. But when you have it, when, when you've, when you've met a few of the people who are not real, you, best people are real. You can tell the difference. But it's pretty easy to get sucked in. So I, I appreciate the warning there. All right, another fast one for you. That would be, that would be fun. All right, tell me about, from your book, what psychological trait neo Nazis and social justice warriors have in common and why we should be afraid.

Yeah, that was actually a study out of an Australian university last year. And they took three populations. They took sort of centrist progressive Americans. I think the sample size was about 500 folks. And it was a chunk of folks with centrist progressive views, and then a chunk of basically Aryan nation, kind of alt right white identitarians, and then also far left social justice advocates. And they did a study on authoritarianism plus the dark triad, which was Gnosticism, Machiavellianism and sociopathy. So generally not very nice people. Right. And what they found was, is that the folks in the middle who are like, I believe what I believe, but I also reserve the right for others to believe what they believe. Whiffed on all four of those. But both far left and alt right scored substantially off the charts on authoritarianism and dark triad personalities. And so what that means, you know, and one of the. You asked me how I kind of came up with a name for the book and kind of why would I bother leaning in? It was that Yeats poem, the Second Coming, right? You know, where he's talking about the end of the world, right, like slouching towards Bethlehem. But there's a line in there that I've always remembered where he says, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with Passionate, intensity and, you know, and you're just like, oh, shit. That's kind of where we are right now. Especially amplified by Twitter and social media and all these things. You've got, you know, let's say 1 to 3% on either extreme who are dark triad authoritarians who are weaponizing otherwise really important and meaningful folks in the middle. And a lot of folks are getting pulled apart from each other, which is where we need to be, and getting oriented around those folks. And the most compelling historical example is, you know, Maximilian Robespierre in the French Revolution, right? I mean, the French Revolution started out with liberty, equality and brotherhood. It was rad, you know, and then. And all those folks who were like, we're going to do this really well, we're going to kind of communicate with royalty and the courts and all this. And then Robespierre comes in, outflanks them, chops all their heads off, says, if you're going to make an omelette, you got to break a few eggs, right? And then in comes the reign of terror. And so it feels like it's really important that we understand that even if it's profoundly important pro social, pro human ideals that they are not invulnerable to capture by malignant sociopaths and to really constantly steer. Because as they create factions and pull us apart, then the no man's land in between is increasingly scary. And if you're like, oh, I don't know if that's right for me or if that's my truth, but on the other hand, wading through the barbed wire and the tank traps and the landmine seems like a no go either. So we end up huddling next to people that may not be fully trustworthy and may not. They may be actually on a power trip, like a quite literal power trip versus leading the way to a future that works for all of us.

Very, very well said. I'm certainly seeing that. I believe that most people are profoundly in the middle. And you see that 1 to 3% of very loud, like I said, malignant narcissists who are manipulating, screaming and making it appear as if everyone agrees with them or is against them. Whereas most people are sitting in the middle going, is it everyone else who believes, am I all by myself? And what I'm saying is that actually, no, if you're in the middle, you're not all by yourself. You're in the majority. And that's important. You're listening to the show. It's okay to be in the middle on lots of stuff. You don't have to be on a party. You don't have to be either for or against anything. And it's a lot more relaxing that way. Thank you, Jamie, for an intriguing and interesting conversation and most importantly, I'd say, for doing the hard work of the survey of collecting data and talking about the hard stuff that people don't want to necessarily talk about. The Upgrade Collective is all saying, bring you back on for another episode. I'm seeing tons of that. So you up for that in another month or two coming back? Maybe talk about another part of the book?

I'd do that.

Absolutely.

Everyone says, let's do death.

Oh, yeah.

Sounds kind of weird, Deborah, but whatever you're into.

No, it's actually. And this one is not the morbid stuff, actually. It's truly inspiring. It's the whole die and be reborn a second time as a homegrown human. So we can all show up fully. So that's the invitation.

All right, well, we're going to do another episode and I appreciate your time today. And recapturetherapture.com is the website for the book. Most of your work is@flowdeepgenome project.com, which I've been a supporter of and still am a supporter of, and Upgrade Collective members. It was your input on the show that caused me to ask Jamie to come back for another episode. So thank you for the real time live feedback. And if you're listening to this on itunes or wherever you like to listen to podcasts, you could be in the live studio audience as I'm recording these, actually chatting with me, chatting with guests, as well as a community of thousands of people learning really cool stuff. For me personally, I'd love to see you there. Our Upgrade Collective. And as always, if you are a good person and you read Recapture the Rapture, you must leave a review. Because if you don't leave a review, it's like getting coffee and not tipping your barista. And that's bad, too. Have an awesome day and as Jamie's going to tell you, get laid. But get laid really well. Did I quote you right, Jamie?

We didn't come here to pet wombats.

What the hell? That was an awesome ending. Thank you, brother.

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