Mastering Your Mindset for Decades of Longevity | Ep.332

Out of nowhere, you called me in the middle of the day just to say, hey Eli, I'm, I'm thinking about you. How are you doing? How are you feeling? No other doctor has ever interrupted their day just to ask how I was feeling.

Hi, Dr. Gladden here. On today's podcast, we're going to be interviewing a client of mine, Eli, and he's going to be walking us through his health journey with Gladden Longevity. I think you're going to find it really fascinating to see the kind of nuances that go on in his care and his progress and where he's come to. Very, very fun and exciting stuff to see. So Enjoy this.

He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Well, it's great to see, uh, Mukti Devi back on the podcast and Eli Israel, who's a client of ours. And it's wonderful to have him come on here and share some things about his journey with Gladden Longevity and some of the conversations he's had with Mukti Devi. So Eli, welcome. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Doctor. Wonderful to be here. Very excited.

Yeah, great. So tell the audience a little bit about, and maybe with us as well, you know, how you got interested in this whole space of longevity and optimization.

This has been actually a long-term fascination of mine. Even when I was much younger, in my 20s, I was following the science of what it would take to now enable people to live a really long time. And always somebody who cared about it, always somebody who tried to do a few things about it, but honestly started to despair that the design, the science was going to catch up with what our desires were. And then along the way, I came to find your practice and learned that there was more to it than I, than I thought there would be.

Okay. So that's an interesting thing, right? I mean, I think all of humanity for really eons has had this. I mean, you go back to the Romans, the Greeks, Egyptians, you know, Mesopotamians, all these people had elixirs for, you know, maintaining youth. Right? And the idea of immortality and all this sort of thing, right? So it's really been a lifelong, not a lifelong, it's been a, you know, almost a species-long kind of aspiration to have a long, healthy life or a longer life and healthy life. So yeah, I get that. And it's interesting too that the science, you know, the aspiration was there before the science, but I really feel like the science made vast steps forward and I really believe it'll will crack the code here in the not too distant future. I think people on the podcast have heard me say that probably sometime in the next couple years, really, I think, with quantum computing and AI and everything. So, so anyway, so you found our practice and all of a sudden it was like, oh, well, maybe there's more to be done here than I realized. And so, yeah, is that kind of how it went?

Absolutely. Well, actually, it wasn't even me first that we needed to get into the program. My, my, my wife was experiencing all kinds of issues. She's had chronic conditions for a long time that were holding her back. And we really needed to find an answer that wasn't the traditional medical establishment answer. And that was what kind of set me on the path of like, okay, I need to find somebody who will treat the science as science. And, you know, is, yeah, still an MD, but an MD who's not tied to the current, you know, insurance-based medical practice system.

Right, right, right.

And that's how I found you. And so we got her to the program first, and then I got to go in a year after her.

Okay. Yeah. And she's, she's made tremendous progress actually.

Yeah. Yes, she has.

Yeah. Which is really, really fun. So tell us about your own journey. So you knew about some things about yourself before you joined us and then—

I did. Yeah. So I have been a patient with Crohn's disease for at least 35 years, probably a bit longer. And I certainly have had not the worst case that anybody ever had, but it certainly was enough to kind of slow me down. It caused all kinds of inflammation. It caused all kinds of disruption in eating and in just living. And it gets in the way when you're a person with some ambitions to, you know, create and do things in the world, to not be able to kind of give it your all. And that's what Crohn's was doing to me. So it was not great. And so I've known I've had that for a long time now. And it was definitely something that was progressively making me go a bit slower. And as a person who loves to do things and loves to go places and, you know, think big thoughts, it was a big spiritual drag, honestly.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I think living with a chronic condition, especially one that's has a progressive nature to it, it's a weight to carry, right? I mean, it's a psychological burden as well as an energetic, energetically draining kind of scenario too, which is another part of the burden. You have the psychological burden of it and then you've got the sort of physiological burden of it. Yeah. So that was a big deal. So when you came in, we, we did some testing around that inflammation levels and things like that. And found some things. And I think one of the other things that sort of surprised us both was that we know that Crohn's can be associated with colon cancer.

And yes.

And so we did some testing to get a feel for what was happening from that perspective. And do you want to walk us through a little bit of that?

Yeah. So yeah, even, you know, in that first year, year and a half, we were doing a lot of work to kind of not just control inflammation and it did help. It actually was very additive to the kind of the biologics and other things that I was using. But, but also, you know, we did a lot of stuff as preventatives for the advancement of cancers because yes, living with Crohn's disease means I had an elevated risk of colon cancer much more than, you know, the normal population would. So that was always kind of a specter in the back of my mind. So I was glad we were doing something about that.

Yeah. So that was part of the psychological burden. Right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, you wonder what's going to take you out. Well, I had one item on the list already.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm trying to remember the sequence exactly, but I think you went for a colonoscopy and a biopsy and some things like that.

I did. So, you know, when you're a Crohn's disease patient, it's generally a good idea to do a colonoscopy about once a year to make sure that there isn't advancement of disease that's out of control. And about 2 years ago, I had my annual and the doctor said, listen, I need you to come to the office right away. It's my gastroenterologist. He said, come into the office right away because we found a spot we don't like. And, you know, at the time it looked like a high-grade dysplasia. Come to find out later, it actually was a T1 tumor. So it was about a year and a half ago now, coming up on 2 years soon, that I actually had to go in and have basically everything from the sigmoid to the rectum removed, and now I live with a colostomy, and that was a big, big change for me. And as you know, a very frightening episode. It was not what we expected, and yet there we were.

Yeah. And we had done some testing for you early on and kind of sequentially screening you for cancer cells, circulating tumor cells, and we weren't really seeing much there, which we know that when it comes to diagnosing cancer, it's a difficult thing, right? So if you're listening to this, the idea of doing imaging only to detect cancer, is a little bit foolhardy because you can, there are now biochemical markers, cellular markers that can certainly augment that. And then if you're only using some of the cellular imaging, not using some, or cellular detection methods and not doing imaging to give you another view at it, another look at it, you can also be fooled, right? So I think in your case, we had tested several years in a row, really from '22 on, and I'm just pulling up the labs now as we speak even, and we never once were able to identify actual tumor cells in the blood. So that was actually a good sign. So when you came to us with this report that, hey, I think, I think surgery may be indicated, one of the things that was weighing on your mind was the idea of having a colostomy potentially.

Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty shocking thing to have to face up front. And I honestly did not want to face it as, as diseased as that those tissues were and as much difficulty as they were putting me through, I didn't want to have to go through that revision. And I went, I went to see a bunch of other gastroenterologists and surgeons to see like what else can be done. I went as far as the Mayo Clinic in Rochester because they are reportedly the number one hospital for this sort of thing. But you know, eventually when all the doctors tell you the same answer, you have to go like, okay, well then that they must be right. There's no other better answer than that. So let's do that.

And as much as we would like to keep people from having to go under the knife, we were in complete agreement with that recommendation that surgery was the best way to go. And so then it became a question of, well, how do we get you to go through the surgery and recover as quickly as possible? Right. And that's where using some of the peptides and things like that postoperatively, whatever.

Those were, those were tremendous. But, you know, I actually want to call out something that you did before we got to that point, and that was something that no doctor had ever done for me. And I tell everyone about this. As I was sitting there in fear and despair and not knowing what to do, out of nowhere, you called me in the middle of the day just to say, hey, Eli, I'm thinking about you. How are you doing?

How are you feeling?

And that made a tremendous impact on me. I will never forget it. No other doctor has ever interrupted their day just to ask how I was feeling. And it made, I made a huge impact.

Yeah. I love that. I love that. Yeah. I mean, we, we really do care about our clients. We really do. The cardiology practice, I, I named it Advanced Heart Care because it was about caring. Right. And so I think that's why you get into medicine, or at least hopefully why people get into medicine. But yeah, we care deeply, as you know.

But the peptides were actually a tremendous help. So you started me on a program. First of all, first time I had ever done keto in my life. I'd done sort of Atkins-like stuff years before, but first time I've ever done keto. And we explained, you explained the reasons why, because it retards the growth of cancer cells. So we're giving ourselves another edge, right? Didn't hurt that I lost 10 or 12 pounds that couple of months doing that. But we also started on peptides for, you know, cellular repair and mitochondrial repair, I think, if I remember correctly at that time. The result was tremendous. I actually, like, I was up and walking the day of surgery. I was out of the hospital on day 3, I think it was. The nursing team, by the way, nursing team at UC Southwestern, wonderful people. They did a great job with me. They said, we've never seen anybody get up and out faster.

Right.

So, it made a huge difference in how I was able to recover and get back to life.

Yeah, huge difference. So we see this over and over again. And I think what's important is to actually start the peptides prior to. So when you start them prior to, you kind of prime the system. And there's a whole peptide conversation to be had, but this is not that conversation. So anyway, but starting them before and then as quickly afterwards as possible is really what we found to be the most effective way to utilize them for healing. So you made it through the surgery and you, you did have a colostomy. And you've kind of had some realizations around that. Maybe walk us through that.

I have, and you touched on them earlier. Like, it wasn't really until those tissues had been removed that I fully felt the energy and the spiritual drain that had gone into holding them. Just the level of disease and the level of inflammation activity that was there, I didn't really fully appreciate how much it was holding me back until I didn't have to.

Mm-hmm.

Until I didn't have to hold that.

Yeah. So that sounds like both on the psychological front and then was it also physical kind of?

Absolutely. Absolutely physical. And every kind of medical intervention that I've gone through in life, it, it eventually sort of becomes a superpower. You learn a little bit more about yourself and you become a little less afraid of what might happen because you've seen some things. That's kind of how the colostomy has turned out to be for me. It's like fewer things frighten me because Hey man, I've seen some stuff.

Yeah, yeah, there it is. And I think you've even told me that you like the regularity of being able to just, you know, like do your flush once a day or whatever. I do.

I'm, I'm lucky in that regard. Not everyone is a candidate for this, but one of the things that I can do is I can use irrigation to empty the bowels daily, and then I don't have to wear a full-size bag, and I'm not disrupted by that. I actually have kind of a, a freer day than most normal people because I don't have to like take a break in the middle of the day to go to the bathroom.

Exactly.

So it's, it's almost a superpower.

Yeah, no, that's great. Well, this is, this is such a beautiful lesson right here that if we take the things that we're most afraid of and we, we actually go into that fray and we meet that challenge, we, there's a superpower hidden in there. I think for each of us, quite honestly, it's a question of being able to find it.

So it is. And, you know, I've learned more and more, like when we let go of our preconceptions, we think we know what's going to happen because we're smart and we're experienced. And we work hard, but the truth is we don't really know what's going to happen next. And if we kind of lean into that understanding, then miraculous things can happen that we didn't expect because we knew what was going to happen.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, that's really, it's really an amazing thing. And now, you know, when I see you, you're, you know, you're sexually active, you're fit, you're doing all kinds of stuff, right?

I am. And, you know, that was, you know, one of my biggest fears about the surgery was a potential loss of sexual function. That was one of the things that I, made the surgeons walk me through. And it does happen to some people. Again, I'm a lucky person in that I didn't have any of the markers that would cause it to happen. I didn't need chemo. I didn't need radiation therapy. I'm not overweight. So I had my, I had the best chance there and that's, that's how it turned out for me. So I'm very happy about that. But yeah, libido has been a big part of my health journey since coming to Gladden Longevity. Yeah.

Well, let's, let's get Mukti's take on, we'll, we'll circle back to that here in a minute. Let's get Mukti's take on kind of the psychological challenges that you went through with some of that. I don't know if you have any comments or thoughts about that.

Yeah, thanks for calling me in. I appreciate that. And it's so great to hear your story, Eli, in continuity. I think that one of the superpowers you were just relating is around this, and it can be cultivated for all of us, is the superpower of making friends with uncertainty and with not knowing and I know, Jeff, you speak frequently about ambiguity and the thing that can really knock us off our center is dealing with the unknown. And to your point, Eli, it's actually all unknown. So much of it, of what we're doing is unknown and the outcomes and things like this and making friends with uncertainty is a great ally for each of us in our journey and our walk, no matter where we are on that spectrum of our longevity journey, doing what we can with the knowns and also making space for that which we cannot yet know.

Yeah, I think that's really well said. You know, I just finished a podcast prior to this one with a guy who is quite interesting in his own way, and a guy named Kyle Anthony Trautman, and he's basically leveraging Kotler's Flow State book. I don't know, Steven Kotler wrote a book on the rise of Superman, and he's using flow state as a way for people to actually be able to go in and access old traumas and then heal them and rewrite the script, which is really pretty interesting. But the point is, to Mukti's point about ambiguity, when we're in a flow state, it actually gives us the best opportunity to deal with the ambiguity, right? So for me, meditation is a flow state. That's a static sort of flow state. When I'm on a mountain bike or a snowboard or going for a run and you get into a flow state, that's like meditation in motion. But the beauty about any of those states is that you are fully present to the moment. There's no past weighing in, there's no future that you're fully in the moment. And in that moment, we have the greatest latitude to deal with uncertainty, right? It's when we're kind of pulled into the anxiety of the future or the regret of the past, right? That we handicap ourselves in terms of being able to deal with the present. So one of the analogies I'm using now is that kind of an optimally primed nervous system that can go into flow looks like a skier. A really good skier, right? Where their upper body's completely still while the lower end is doing all this, right? They go through the moguls, right? And so cultivating this ability to not be the novice skier that's getting thrown around all the time, right? By the things that come at us, but having that really still in the present meditative flow state. And from there, we have the best ability to deal with uncertainty. That's what I've experienced in my own life anyway. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. So much of it comes to mindset and just the, yeah, go, going into things with this feeling that like, I will be able to take whatever comes. And it's not always easy to be in that state, but you know, that's, you know, that's the place where honestly the medicine works until you're in that spot. All the interventions in the world give you, I think, at least less benefit than they could.

I agree with that. Yeah. The placebo effect is real, right? So, yeah.

And then I was thinking about—

I know it's not going to work. If you tell yourself it's not going to work, then it won't work.

That's right. That's right. No, that's exactly right. So it sounds like when you went into the surgery that you had a good mindset.

It took me some months to get there. But yeah, eventually, I, you know, I had asked all my questions. Like I said, I traveled around the country to talk to as many experts as I could. And I found, and I want to do another quick call out with the surgeon that I had at UT Southwestern. I did not realize this when I first met him, but world-class surgeon for this kind of surgery. So I was very lucky to be able to have him on my team. So yeah, it just all, by the time I was there at the surgery, I had answered all my questions and said, okay, every day of life is a roll of the dice. This is another one, but this is the best roll we can give.

Yeah. Well, you've taken control of everything you could control. Right. And so then it's just like, you just put it out there. It's like, well, this is, you know, we're going to go into it with a positive attitude. Yeah. So let's, let's switch gears for a second and talk about one of our favorite topics. Which is libido and sexual—

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That's been part of the, the Gladden longevity journey for me. Absolutely. Because, you know, as I started the program, I think what I was maybe 5, 6 months in and my, my weight started to normalize and my inflammation started to normalize and, you know, insulin resistance and all that stuff. And we had done some hormone replacement. I started to feel again, you know, with the, the, the libido and the ambition of a much younger man. And this is why I say that I'm 30 years old, because that's kind of where it stuck, right? And, you know, suddenly I had all of those same desires of a young man. And I guess I wasn't confident that I knew how to behave myself anymore, you know, because it had been some time, right? And that's actually when I started to seek out other coaches. And I, I found Caitlin V. Neal, whom you've had on on your podcast, just a tremendous coach in, in sex and relationships. And she's been a tremendous help for me. And it's a night and day difference between, you know, having desires and having feelings, and then knowing how to express them and enjoy them and share them with others in a way that's net positive and not disruptive.

Yeah, exactly. And I think, I think one of the things that happened for you as you were starting to feel let's just call it feeling really good and youthful again, was that there was some asymmetry between you and, and your wife Eve, who had started the program a little sooner, but she had, we're not talking here to talk about her per se, but she had some of her own challenges that she came in with.

I mean, this is a, you know, a very common challenge in couples is, you know, desire asymmetry. And I think we were perfectly normal and continue to be perfectly normal in that regard. And, you know, it was, it was through things like both of our continuing improving health and our ability to have more capacity for each other to explore ideas, to ask questions, to give answers that helped us along. And also, you know, again, the stuff that I learned from Caitlin about how to carry myself again about mindset, about how to share of yourself without it being a burden to others or without it being an imposition to others. That's been a multi-year journey to get us to a better place. And I will say like, yeah, we had some asymmetry. We have far less now. We're much better communicators.

Okay.

So it's been a great journey.

Yeah, that's wonderful. You know, I think it's interesting to hear about communication really kind of being the key to this, right? I mean, you were feeling better. So you're like all of a sudden feeling more robust and youthful.

Sexually, you know, I want to do all these things that were still on my list that I hadn't gotten to yet. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, there it is. Right. And yet creating asymmetry, it can lead to a lot of strife. It can actually be, uh, asymmetry of any sort can actually lead to a destruction in a relationship. I think one of the really key things is the idea that you guys were able to have to, or had the ability to have these conversations about that. Was there a structure that you used for that, or how did that go about?

There are a number of different, I'm going to say, tricks and techniques. But most of them, they really boil down to having the courage to say, hey, I have this thought, or I have this desire, or I have this question. And would you talk to me about it, and would it be okay?

Yeah.

And a lot of what I had to learn was honestly about myself, was honestly about being afraid to ask some of those questions or being afraid to make some of those statements because I didn't want to upset others around me. Most certainly not my life partner, right? He's the person you least want to have upset with you. But it took me a while to understand this. I was not doing either of us any favors by holding back information that we could have used. So, by fits and starts, I've learned to do that just to say, look, I had this idea. It doesn't necessarily have to mean anything, but here's my idea.

Yeah. No, it's really fascinating, right? The things that we, this is the idea of courageous conversations that Mukti and I have in our own relationship have really thrown ourselves into. And it's been life-changing for each of us, I think, and for the relationship. But to me, I just, if you're listening to this, a courageous conversation, like what Eli's talking about is that conversation. You correct me if I'm wrong, Eli, but for me, it's this kind of conversation where when I'm about to bring something up, I'm kind of standing outside myself, looking at myself saying, are you really going to say this? And then it's like, right? Yeah, I'm really going to say it. So I kind of bring it up, right? And if it's a good time to chat about it, let's chat.

Yeah.

But that's kind of the, become the definition of courageous, right?

It's like, I'm going to go back to what you said about the skier though, because it works best when you have that kind of a flow state when you're not tied to an answer like, oh gosh, I'm going to be brokenhearted if she doesn't say yes to this request, right? Where you go like, okay, I just need to make the request and see what the response is. And then we're going to find out what we do about it after.

Yeah. What are your thoughts?

I love this conversation. Thanks. A couple of things. I mean, the way that I know I need to have a brave conversation with you or with anyone is that it feels scary before I even start. That I feel my, I notice my somatic sensations. I notice my heart rate lift a little bit. Maybe there's a little energy in my stomach and I'm aware that what I'm about to bring forward feels scary or big or revealing in some way. And that's when I work with clients, it's that there's such an emphasis on reconnecting with our body cues because it's giving us all of the clues and cues that we need to know where we are in any given moment. And, and it's not to back away from that moment. It's to, it's to better equip us with the, the strategies and resources that I need to be able to move into that moment more fully. And I also hear you speaking about being pleasure positive. This part of the conversation started with the word libido, but I hear that as being pleasure positive. And something that my mentor says frequently, which I say frequently now, is that it feels good to feel good. And we back away from feeling good so much in our culture because somewhere along the line we were taught that we must suffer for our, for our goods at the end of the day. It has to be strenuous to get there. And there's value in working hard, of course, but it feels good to feel good and it's okay to be pleasure positive and look for glimmers throughout the day. When I give people homework assignments or playful at-home assignments, some of them are around tracking. For example, I have one client and his assignment is to track his worries. But next to that list is a place for him to track his glimmers. And these are the things that you find ways to be positive about in your days. And so it's easy to become negatively biased. We can train ourselves because of neuroplasticity to be positively biased, to look for pleasure, to look for what feels good in our relationships and all of them. And, and to move bravely in toward asking for what we need, which is what I heard you asking with Eve is, is being able to show up courageously and ask for what you need and not be attached to the outcome. The answer might be yes and it might be no, but the real growth moment is in you asking for what you need.

Yeah. Yeah. And just being able to do that is enough because a lot of times the things we think we need, you know, they come and they go. I might not have the same desire a month from now, a week from now, a year from now. Who knows? Right. But the ability to say it out loud and have somebody who's there with you as a partner to say, okay, let's think about that. Let's explore that. That almost is like more valuable than whatever the desire might have been, like whatever that particular activity might have been. It's like, yeah, I just want to feel seen. Like I have this thought and I want to share it.

It's the medicine of being witnessed.

Yeah, this idea, you know, I think both of you heard me talk about, I think one of the deepest desires any of us have is to know and be known and to love and be loved, right? To know and be known and to love and be loved. And it takes courage. To actually be vulnerable enough to be known. And then it also takes that calm, reflective nervous system to be able to hear somebody else's, you know, scary thing. That's what's scary for them, to be able to receive that and not judge it, right? I think in these courageous conversations or brave conversations, one of the keys is not judging. It's being able to listen and explore with the other person. That's really the substrate and the framework, I think, in which these conversations have their best outcomes. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, I mean, you know, working with you has, first of all, unlocked the ability and the desire to go chase after these ideas, right? And then having the good luck to, to meet up with Caitlin, who taught me some of the things that we're talking about right now, and, you know, taught me how to understand that stuff, that unlocked the ability to really feel them and really express them and do it in a way that was positive for me and for my wife. So, you know, it's been a tremendous 3 and change years now.

Yeah. No, I love that. I love that so much. Yeah, I really do. So bring us to the next point that you're interested to chat about.

So, I mean, I guess, and this is why it's great that Mukti is here because she is my guide in this. You know, the thing that I'm exploring next is is can we have experiences guided by medicine, guided by talk and spirituality, whatever, the full combination, to kind of see past the things that hold us back? And so this is why I've become interested in psychedelics. And this is a topic that a lot of people are looking at now, and it's not easy to find a guide for. Again, why I'm so grateful to have Mukti on my side for this. And, you know, just not easy to do safely and carefully and in the right frame of mind. But this is something that, that we have coming up that I'm looking forward to being able to like use these ceremonies to, I guess, look beyond the self for a minute and get a bigger picture, get a bigger perspective.

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm going to let Mutti jump in on this for sure. I'm just going to say that I think it's interesting that, you know, there's the things that we know about ourselves and then there are the things that kind of live in the shadows, right? A little bit of Carl Jung's work that we don't we don't even fully acknowledge are there but are kind of pulling the strings behind the curtain, right? And this idea of actually really getting to know ourselves, we were just talking about having courageous conversations with another. And there's the idea of having a courageous conversation with ourselves where we actually, and this is what I think you're talking about doing with Mukti, is a courageous conversation with yourself to see what is behind the curtain, what will be revealed, who am I really, you know, what's, you know, what's the nature of the universe? What's the nature of consciousness and, you know, spirit and spirituality and all these things. So I really applaud you for, you know, having these conversations, right? This is what you're talking about here is another conversation with both you, Mukti, and the universe, so to speak, and the medicine itself. Yeah, very cool.

Thank you. Yeah, I know I'm excited about it because the ability to kind of to put your biggest blockers, those shadow personas that want to take the wheel once in a while when we wish they wouldn't, to create a space where we can address them and maybe incorporate them, maybe embrace them, maybe find a place for them. That's the thing I'm excited about because the older that I get and the more exciting things that I get to try and do and get to try and achieve, the more I realize the biggest thing holding me back is me. There's really nothing out there in the universe that stops me as much as me.

100%.

I'd like to get a handle on that.

What a wonderful insight. Yeah. It reminds me of the children's movie Inside Out, and you can see the constellation of selves within her mind, all the different parts that make the little girl Riley who she is. And those are all the aspects and versions of us that either get in our own way or step out of the way. And I think that approaching plant medicine and psychedelic medicine is an excellent opportunity for that. Of course, we get to start by— I'll circle all the way back to the beginning of this conversation when you talked about making friends with uncertainty and not being able to know. And that's certainly one of the first items of agenda we have to address when someone comes to work with psychedelic medicine is metering someone's expectation. What do you expect? What do you think? What do you think ultimately will happen here? And inviting a person into really the ultimate existential space of not knowing and being okay to release any outcome of what might happen in that space, surrendering to a greater intelligence that might know more than we, which is the wisdom of these, these plant medicines and animal medicines. And yeah, really stepping out of the way for all parts of ourselves to be revealed and ultimately integrated. Which is what I hear you speaking about. And I'm so delighted to work with you in a few weeks, especially when people come into the space, recognizing that this work is about integrating all aspects of ourselves. It's not about fixing or relieving any aspects of ourselves to go on their way, but everything gets integrated and spiraled up into the highest version of ourself, if that makes sense. So it really makes me excited to sit with you in a couple of weeks. And take that question into the cosmic.

Yeah, I'm super excited about it. And the friends that I've told about it are all super excited. I've got a surprisingly long list of folks who want to try it.

Okay, excellent.

So it's going to be a great way to connect with friends as well. It's very exciting. I'm sorry, Jeff, go on.

No, I was just thinking about the ambiguity of going into these experiences and then this idea of integration, right? So for me, integration was always somewhat of an abstraction, right? Like you would hear people talk about integrating the shadow self or integrating, you know, different things. Well, okay, well, what does that actually mean? And it wasn't until for myself anyway, that I realized that once something is integrated, it actually is empowering, right? So you actually feel more powerful and more in control. You become a better skier right? Because you've brought this thing out of the shadow, whatever it is, and integrated it into your life. It actually is very empowering. And it makes you feel more of a complete self, more of a complete human being at the same time that when you use these medicines, yourself sort of dissolves on some level, which is also cool or whatever. But it's a really, ultimately all of this has led, and I think the audience has heard me say that I've done numerous things here, with regards to psychedelics. But the point is it's made me a much better skier, a much better skier, more perspective, more wisdom, more insight, more empathy, more love, both for myself and everybody else in my field on the planet. And so the planet itself, a greater sense of belonging and connection to, you know, not only the people that I know, the people that I sort of know, but even beyond that, there's a major sense of belonging and Yeah, there's been so many very, very cool insights. I will say one of the other things that can happen here is that you can have an experience and you can have insights, and then those insights will continue for, you know, some days, weeks, whatever, even months later. So the medicines work over a period of time. It's not just during the, you know, the hours that you're technically under, you know, the influence.

And I'm going to guess you've seen this, but I was recently passed a study by another one of my friends who is his experience with this sort of thing, where he said, yeah, it says after the ceremony, there is something like a 2-week period where you're reintegrating. It's not just like, you know, the drug comes out and then you move on. There's scientifically shown, there's like a 2-week period of reintegration and re-imagination of how things are.

You can access these states 2 to 3 weeks after, not to the same intensity necessarily, but you can certainly access the field, you're— what you're doing, I mean, from a physics perspective, is you're harmonizing your system to the field. And so when you're in this shared frequency, it's of course much easier to turn the volume up and hear the radio when you're on the right station, so to speak. And so that is certainly very common to hear a month later. I just returned from Peru a month ago, and people in that group still sharing insights they had as of yesterday. You know, so the medicines, these organic medicines are so wise. They start working the moment you say yes, which could be weeks in advance or months in advance when you place your deposit. From the moment that you say yes, they're already orchestrating on your behalf and for weeks to months to a year later working and unfolding for you. And so you are really— talk about getting out of the way is what you said a few moments ago. Learned how to get yourself— you're the only one holding you back and how you get in your way. I mean, this is the ultimate co-collaboration with, with the universe, is to invite the universe in the form of this medicine into you and then to have it continue changing you for such a long time after. And of course, the research is so robust, what it does for the brain, for the default mode network, for the increasing gray matter, for the dumping of brain-derived neurotrophic factor. We have all these research outcomes that show us that when we take the, this this medicine from the universe in, we become the universe. And, and that unfurling has to take time to keep coming forward. How many billions of years has our own universe been unfurling itself? And it's still growing, right? Of course, it makes sense that when I take this little universe of my body, which to me is vast, and I, and I take in universal medicine, that it's going to keep growing. This universe and ecosystem is going to growing and expanding and unfurling in ways that I don't even have enough imagination for.

Yeah. Yep. No, I love the point about like the when you say yes, and you told me a fascinating story about the fellow. There was a fellow who went to a ceremony and explained that he'd experienced nothing, felt nothing, wasn't at all changed until like just afterwards. Maybe that's when he decided to say yes. And then it all came to him.

Right.

Sometimes people leave and It was, I did share this with you and it was on the last day of the last ceremony, the closing circle. And this gentleman says, well, I don't think anything's happened to me. And a week later in our first, you know, integration call, he says, well, I'll be damned. I'm just, I'm less pissed off than I was. I don't know what to attribute it to, but I'm less pissed off than he started by, I'll be damned. I'm less angry. I'm less reactive. I don't know what's happening to me, but something keeps changing. And this is really kind of common is like, oh, I'll be darned, something does keep changing. And if we can get out of the way of ourselves and the things that we think we know, and we can embrace ambiguity and uncertainty and release it to a higher order, whatever that higher order is, we don't have to give it a name. If we can release it to a higher order than mine, there's my will and there's thy will, right? When I can go to thy will, I step aside for the miraculous to happen.

Right. I mean, the ego is a wonderful and powerful thing. And it, you know, it climbs mountains and it builds buildings and it designs computers and does all these great things that we all benefit from. It also is in some sense a falsehood. That's right. It's just, it's not as real as it thinks it is.

In the therapy world, we say we just, we want it on the bus. We just don't want it driving the bus. It's of course welcome on the bus. It has a place and a seat there. We just don't want it driving the bus. It's a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.

That's it. A wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Yeah, this, this idea of separation is really, uh, one that kind of gets retooled, you know, that we're individual, that we're separate from. You end up having the experience of actually being connected to, right, everything. And that's such a beautiful experience really to realize that you are actually connected in the quantum field. If you go to physics, right? And I've been following, I don't know if you have as well, but I've been following all the stuff from the JWST and CERN and all the quantum computing stuff going on. It's like, oh my gosh, right? Like source code of the universe is being discovered, right? All these corrective codes and everything else going on, but underneath it all, It's a quantum wave field and everything is connected. We're kind of like nodes on the quantum wave field, but we're all connected through that, right? This idea of separation is such an anomaly.

I love it when people approach science as if it brings certainty and as if it brings truth. It does not. It tells us what's repeatable. It doesn't necessarily tell us what's true. And if you go to the physicists that you were referring to and if you ask them, what's really happening underneath our understanding, their answer is basically, it's magic. We don't know. That's right. And that's a truthful answer.

It's magic.

We don't know. I think the more I thought about this, the more an idea that I had years ago seems more and more true to me. And you and I have discussed this as well. And that is like, it seems like we come from a place of perfect union and perfect knowledge. We come here to experience the ups and downs, to experience separation and reunion. And then we go back to that place of perfect knowledge and we carry back the lessons that we've learned. That's what, that's what I think the physics is starting to try and tell us.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I think that's, I think that's spot on. I think the interesting thing also to your point about science, I've been a, I've been spiritual my entire life and I've been, loving science my entire life, among other things. I love the arts and many other things as well. But it's always interesting when somebody tells me that they believe in science. It's like, I don't believe any of that. I just believe in science. Like, really, really tell me about that. Right. Because science is just a construct. It's just a man-made construct to try to explain what happened, what is, and try to predict the future. That's all it is. It's not reality. It's just a construct.

Yeah.

So you look at the way that Einstein's construct doesn't explain everything. You look at the way quantum mechanics doesn't explain everything. And now they think they actually just put the two together. I don't know if you saw this, this explosion of this micro black hole. It was a primordial black hole. Anyways, I won't go down that rabbit hole, but, but the point is, it's all getting very interesting on the physics level. And, and yet, even if you have a construct that can predict everything, there's still always the question of what's behind it, right? What's behind it? We get started. What's behind it? And that's always going to be a very spiritual thing. And when you look at the quantum connectivity of everything, it becomes very spiritual also.

Right, right. No, the scientific method is a wonderful tool, and there's no bigger fan of it than me because it creates that repeatability that allows us to predict and allows us to design and allows us to grow. But if you start to behave as if the things that we can't yet explain in science must not be true, then you've confused the map with the territory.

That's right.

Science is just the map. It's not the territory. There are things that we can't put in it yet. Maybe we will one day. But assuming that everything that science is, is all of the world, is like flying over the Pacific Ocean and expecting to see the word Pacific printed on it. That's right. It's just not how it works.

Eli, I so appreciate you saying that. It's one of my favorite expressions. The map is not the territory. I say this all the time. And I think just to name here that at the end, you know, especially with the psychedelic work, that it is, it lends itself and the explorations that Jeff is talking about with the quantum AI, we're talking about finding our ultimate connection to all that is in these spaces. They're pointing an arrow toward a territory that says everything is connected and everything belongs. And there is nothing that has ever belonged, ever existed, or will exist that doesn't belong. It belongs because it exists, even if we perceive it and project onto it that it's horrible or terrible. Everything that is in this multiverse belongs here. And, and when we have the ability to be in connection with the fullness of the field, wow, that's, that's an interesting place to to stand.

I try to see the world without time. That's one of the things I try to do. Don't do it every day. But when you can, you start to realize, like, we live in this linear expression of time, but time is not linear. Is, was, will be are all in the same place.

That's right.

Everything you dream of is already true. We're just navigating the path.

That's right. No, that's a really cool insight too. That's a quantum insight as well. There's actual retrocausality now also, where the present can rewrite the past. And that's a really interesting thing to think about because we all have suffered traumas in our past and to be able to go from the present and rewrite the past, right? It's like, oh, what a liberating idea that is. I will just say one thing about the territory and the map is that right now you're looking at a map of a psychedelic experience.

Yeah. Yeah. I haven't yet seen the territory. I'm looking forward to that part.

Sorry. It's the difference between looking at a map of Montana and going to Montana, right? So Montana is pretty amazing. Yeah. So cool stuff.

I'm pretty good at understanding things from an intellectual level that I haven't yet experienced. And the experience is always better.

Yeah, that's right. Well, guys, this has been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much. It's been great to talk with you both.

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