Recapture the Rapture: Alchemist-Like Cookbooks, Carbon Dioxide & Nitric Oxide Inhalation, Sexuality, Music, Mind-Enhancing Substances & More With Jamie Wheal.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, they're like, oh, my gosh, Sex, drugs and rock and roll are going to be the end of civilization. But in fact, sex, drugs and rock and roll were actually the beginnings of civilization. Our people are better off. Never mind the skid marks, let's get there as fast as possible. Is what sets us up for an awful lot of sociopathic solutions and movements, states we've ever had, that often appear to be meaningful and can often guide the way into a more courageous life to live.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. All right, folks, he's back. My guest on today's podcast is Jamie Wheal. Jamie just wrote a new book. It's called Recapture the Rapture. And he actually did a podcast with me last year in which we kind of like previewed the release of this book. We talked about biohacking, sex and tantric breathwork and plant medicines for orgasmic enhancement. And following that particular episode, my wife and I actually went on a hotel retreat and tried out just about everything Jamie and I talked about in that show. I don't recall getting much sleep that night, but it was certainly quite a bonding experience. Jamie. As a matter of fact, at one point in the evening, we were just so high on life that we left the hotel and went walking around town for about two hours and stopped at some random bar and sat out on the patio and enjoyed an amazing meal together, then went back to the hotel room. So it was like an eight hour foray with a restaurant stop and a walk through town, kind of like halfway through, so.

Yeah, dude, exactly. That's actually one of the best things. Everybody does dinner in a movie or whatever they do out on the town as sort of foreplay. But in fact, if you actually do it, if you reverse it and you do it as afterglow, you just go out into the world just happy as clams. It was great stoking out the world. Yeah, it's super fun.

Yeah, it was like afterglow slash foreplay because then we went back to the hotel after and just kind of kept going. So anyways, though, as you listening in might imagine, Jamie covers some pretty wildly stimulating topics in his book. However, he also delves into a lot of. A lot of kind of visionary thinking. He calls himself, I believe, a neuroanthropologist. I'll let him clarify what exactly that is momentarily. But this new book finally came out. It's called Recapture the Rethinking God, sex, and death in a world that's lost its mind. And what Jamie does is he combines this unique flavor of neuroscience and psychology, but then he throws in a bunch of practical stuff like breathwork and movement and sexuality. And this book kind of brings all that together and it has this basic big idea that we're suffering culturally from a collapse in meaning and that fundamentalism and nihilism are filling that vacuum with consequences that are affecting all of us. The book is split into three sections. The first part is about the coming apocalypse, so to speak. The middle part, which is my favorite part, and to be honest with you, probably the part that we'll focus on most today, is called the Alchemist Cookbook. That's the most dog eared section of my copy of Recapture the Rapture. And then the final third is called Ethical Cult Building. Now Jamie also wrote Stealing Fire, which is also a great book. How Silicon Valley Navy Seals and maverick scientists are revolutionizing the way we live and work. He founded the Flow Genome Project and he speaks all over the world. He's in high demand based on his outside the box thinking. And he lives in the Rocky Mountains in some off grid cabin somewhere. I don't know, it's probably something he can't talk about because when not riding he can be found mountain biking and kite surfing and backcountry skiing. And I'm sure he doesn't want anybody to bug him. However, he is being bugged today by me. So welcome to the show, Jamie.

What an intro. And psyched to be back in jamming with you, Ben.

Yeah, word man. Word. Or as, as we say on my show when I'm interviewing you, not jamming. Jamie Ng, right? Or Jamie Ng. Okay, so I have to ask you, what the heck is a neuroanthropologist? Did you just make that up?

Yes, 100%. But it gave me permission to do the thing that I realized I'd been doing all along. So my academic background actually through grad school was in actual sort of historical anthropology. So that was legit amount of training, which is just how do you assess and compare different cultural approaches to the same fundamental human condition across time and space? And Wade Davis, who's a friend and one of my mentors, he's the Harvard entheobotanist and National Geographic explorer in residence and kind of like a real life Indiana Jones. He said something I think really profound in one of his TED talks. He's like, we have to stop thinking of other cultures as deficient attempts to be our culture. You have to Kind of look at them intrinsically in their own milieu and just sort of, and build up from there. So that's anthropology, but for me, neuro anthropology is really taking a look at interesting things that you see around you in the world or that happen in your life and say, okay, that's interesting right now. Who else has done similar stuff across time and space? And then you start seeing patterns. You're like, oh, we're not the first, we're not the last. How else have other folks approached this? And then you start getting a kind of a pattern language of whether that's belief or whether that's breath work, whether that's sexuality or whether that's substance use or whether that's innovation with technology, whatever, like nothing new under the sun. So you go back and you kind of get a case study of like half a dozen examples, a dozen examples and that then you can start kind of extracting what are the commonalities. And then the neuro part, which was really recent, like we've only really even had this capacity for the last few decades is to say, okay, if it's shown up across centuries and you know, and around the world there's probably a there, there, why does it work? The neurobiological part is what's under the hood. What are the actual mechanisms of action? Because most culture comes wrapped in mythologies. We do this thing because our gods gave it to us, or we do thing because we've always done this thing or because your great great great great grandpa did the thing. Right. But very rarely do we do we strip out the mythology and just look at and understand the technology. What was the functional mechanism of action? So neuroanthropology is backwards looking, retrospective. But once you get that and you're like, okay, this is the source code of why the things work, then you can engage in the process of culture architecture, which is forward looking. Now that we understand why things work the way they do, we don't just have to bring them wholesale wrapped in their stories, just bring through the how they work and the why they work to build more effective, more vibrant social and human organization.

Interesting. And it seems like there's also a lot of kind of philosophy woven into your writing and almost like social theory. Was that all things that you covered in college or in university and neuroanthropology studies or is that just something that you kind of sprung into being interested in along the way?

Yeah, I mean, I would think that's probably coming out of most of my academic training. I mean, I was all but done on a PhD. Like, I'd done all my coursework by the age of 22. So I'd kind of gone lickety split through the sort of academic system. And then I just got to the end of it and I realized I was actually hopelessly naive about what being an academic entailed these days. And I had to kind of really look long and hard at it and go, oh, actually, I'd rather go out in the world and do stuff than be down in the basement, you know, assessing tax records and, you know, dusty old, dusty old data. So I kind of came to the conclusion. I was like, oh, I think I actually, I love, love, love reading. Whether it's guns, germs and steel or sapiens or things. I love brilliant people within the disciplines even more than the how the sausage is actually made. Crunching a bunch of really tired and dry stuff myself. So I was like, let's go out and live. Let's go out and build stuff. Those frameworks and structures of how to look at race, class, gender, environment, belief systems, ideologies, you know, all of these things and look at how they intersect and how we got to now. I would say that's kind of been a foundation for all my other curiosities.

Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, like nowadays with SPECT scans and QEEGs and all these methods of quantifying the brain, it would be interesting to say, go back and see what the prefrontal cortex of the Founding Fathers was doing in terms of taking in information and categorizing it and relating it to other pieces of information, and kind of see from an anthropological standpoint how much of American culture, for example, is influenced by the neurology of our Founding Fathers or something like that. It'd be interesting to kind of like, fast forward 100 years now that we do have access to that data, and we'll be able to say, okay, well, here's how Bill Gates and Ray Dalio and Jack Dorsey and Jamie Wheal and Ben Greenfield influenced culture in this day. And I'm totally just throwing our names in there to make us sound like we're amazing cultural influencers.

We'll draft off that list all day long. Yeah, I mean, an example of a very specific example just to kind of ground this for folks, is in the study of this book and the preparation to write the section on respiration I was looking at. Oh, you know, how does prayer work right around the world? And there was a study on Tibetan Om Mani Padme Hum, like that Kind of classic Tibetan incantation, comparing it to the Catholic Hail Mary. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. And there was parallels with them effectively entraining people into alpha wave EEG frequencies because said in a certain way with rose. So you're kneeling, you're staying in front of votive candles. So there's visual stimulation, flickery dim light. There's smells. There's the smells and bells of incense or candles. There's an icon in front of you, whether it's a patron saint or it's a wrathful or benevolent deity in Tibetan Buddhism, whatever it would be. So you've kind of got a bunch of things. You're even in a sort of. What do they call them in interrogation? A forced posture. There's a something posture. I don't know.

I've never been interrogated.

Yeah, exactly. But like, kneeling for an extended period of time, like with it without your butt on the floor and up, you know, is a restriction. It actually changes how you can breathe and all these kind of things. And then you're engaged in a forced respiratory pattern with tactile stimulation. So, like, offload your prefrontal cortex and executive function. You're now just feeling your way along your mala beads, right, 108 times. Or in a Catholic rosary, something else. So you're offloading conscious working memory. And then you're doing a 9 second or 9 hertz repetitive breath pattern, right, which entrains you into 9 hertz. It's alpha wave states. And you're like, oh, okay. So it totally makes sense, given all of those just, again, neurophysiological substrates, to what is a cultural, religious, spiritual practice. That. Yeah, you can totally bet that the odds are. The odds are greater than average that something interesting will happen for those folks when they enact all of those things. But there's a substrate that's shared across culture. And you're like, oh, neat. You know, like, this is how we clever monkeys do stuff. This is how we build the layers of our socially constructed worlds.

That's fascinating. Well, you know, my wife and I were having dinner last night on the porch with the. With the boys, and as we usually do in the evenings, having our family dinner and eating some fish and playing a game. And I mentioned that I was going to be doing a podcast interview this morning, and she said, with who? And I said, with Jamie Will. She's like, well, you know, who is he? I said, well, we wrote this book called Recapture the Rapture. And she said, what's that even mean? I said, what do you mean? And she said, what's that mean? Recapture the Rapture. What's the Rapture mean? I was trying to explain it to her, and I thought, you know what? This would actually be a great question for Jamie in terms of the whole idea of a rapture. The way that I understood, especially the first part of your book, was that we kind of have woven into human culture this idea of an oncoming kind of like cataclysm or rapture type of event. And it seems that the book is kind of centered around that type of event. But can you explain kind of like the title behind the book? Like, what does Recapture the Rapture actually mean? If you're stuck on an elevator with my wife.

Well, I mean, I think the first part is the most succinct description I've heard of. It is Yeats's poem the Second Coming, which is about, like, what misshapen beast? It's our come round at last lurches towards Bethlehem, right? That one, the sort of spooky one he wrote after World War I. In the last four or five years, it's become the most searched poem. The things fall apart, the center cannot hold was like the most searched keyword in 2020, 2016. Like, the Dow Jones Wall Street Journal did a semantic analysis on it. So clearly it's up for us, right? Like, what is happening right now? But buried in the last stanzas of the poem, he says, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. And it really seemed to me in the formulating of this book was like, wow, man. It really does feel like the crazies have hijacked the mice. It feels like there's this huge, moderate middle of really decent, live and let live, hardworking people that just kind of want a shot at pursuing their dreams and having their kids live a better life than they got to. That's kind of the way it's always been as we're entering increasingly intense and consequential times where our collective challenges absolutely mandate collective solutions, that we are being led astray by passionately intense minorities. And the question there. So the recapture of the rapture became kind of a play on words. It was lowercase rapture. Hey, we're all jacked up, stressed out, isolated, lonely, anxious, depressed. All the things that folks are facing and wrestling with these days. So we need to recapture our lowercase rapture. We kind of need to process our grief and our trauma. We need to remember our inspiration and our highest purpose. We need to connect to each other. And hide, you know, high trust, joyful relationships. And we need that as a sort of rocket fuel to face the challenges ahead. But then there's also the capital R Rapture, which is where are we going at the end of days kind of thing. And can we steer this in a way that forges solutions that work for all of us, not just a tiny fraction of us? And can we do that together?

Yeah. For me, growing up Christian, the rapture was always within the branches of American evangelicalism. This end time event, when all the believers who are alive kind of rise into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and the bodies become resurrected. And that's kind of been my own flavor of what exactly a rapture is. But it sounds like one of the things that it seems going through the pages of the book is that culturally or anthropologically, this idea of a rapture is kind of woven into most cultures.

Yeah, it's fascinating actually, and I've shared this because I've been so geeked on it. But there's a fellow John Gray at the London School of Economics who wrote a book called Black Mass Apocalyptic Religions and the Death of Utopia. And he just lays out this thesis which blew my mind. I don't know whether I'm just super nerdy maybe, Ben, you've got equal geek cred, but he was basically. He just kind of made a very convincing argument that in the west, at least in the Judeo Christian west, right, we have a very unique version of time. So for all, you know, for almost all indigenous societies, hunter gatherer societies, and even pre industrial agrarian societies, right, Time was mostly cyclical. It was the seasons and it went around and around, right? It was Uruburus, it was the snake that eats its tail, right? And there was a sense of very little forward motion through history and a whole lot of same as it ever was. What comes around, goes around, right? And the Hebrew tradition that really instantiated that in the beginning was the word and at the end there's an end, right? The Alpha and the Omega that broke the, you know, the circular time and then hammered it into time's arrow. The specific contours of that story are really familiar to us, but so familiar we don't realize that they were actually novel once upon a time, which was there was a time back when all was perfect and that in indigenous traditions, that's when the animal, we could talk to the animals and this and that. Obviously in the Judeo Christian tradition, it's the Garden of Eden, then there is a fall from grace that somehow Starts history. There was a sort of suspended animation in the past and then history begins and there's a fall from grace of some sort. And then there is this moment or inflection point that at the Omega point, the end point where that changes and then we're delivered to a heaven on earth or off it. And John Gray's point was he's like, look, that is such a deep groove in our kind of mytho, poetic narrative structures, the stories we tell, that it even shows up in the atheist movements like socialism and communism in the 20th century, that the communism was effectively that identical story just minus God. You know, there was the idea that we were happy hunter gatherer farmers. Then the fall from grace was the rise of the capitalist owner class and man is everywhere born everywhere in chains. Then there's this redemptive movement of the revolution and a communist utopia that we all live in happily ever after. And that could just be like a sort of nerdy historical sidebar until you look around today and then you realize, oh my gosh, everybody from techno utopians, like we're going to upload our consciousness to computers or Elon's going to give us neuralink and we're all going to be smarter than AI or blockchain is going to take over the world and we're all going to be living in super groovy, you know, super groovy independent city states, you know, and never mind all the countries and all the taxes and this and that, or it's seasteading or it's, you know, more volatile versions like alt right identitarians or ISIS or anything else you realize, holy smokes, you know, or psychedelic new age magical thinkers that we're all going to vibrate out to the fifth density. You know, you've got techno utopian, you've got magical spiritual, you've got fundamentalist traditional, you've got all sorts of versions. And they almost all follow that same pattern. And the part that's so insidious and tricky is that no matter how they slice it, they're all 1 percenter solutions. My 1% might be the moral, it might be the fellow believers. It could be the meritocratic, it could be the smartest, the best and the brightest. It could be economic. You've got a quarter of a million bucks for a ticket to a space colony. Whatever it is, they're thin sliced solutions. As a result, they all kind of share a same four stage framework. And this is what I would sort of classify as like a working new checklist to say Is there a Rapture ideology in play, which is the world as we know it is screwed, and there's no saving it. Like, it's actually more messed up than it is salvageable. There's an inflection point in the near future coming soon, and we can see it from here. We can point at it, we can anticipate it might even put a pin in the calendar. On the other side of the inflection point point, our tribe, our people, we are actually better off, not worse off, no matter how scary the road to get there is. Right? Right. And therefore, let's accelerate to get there as fast as possible, because happy days are ahead for us. And it's that last. The last two. Right. Our people are better off. And never mind the skid marks, let's get there as fast as possible is what sets us up for an awful lot of sociopaths, solutions and movements. And so that's really. That was kind of the hot intention of saying, hey, I just kind of want to ring the bell here. Is anybody else seeing what I'm seeing? And if so, we should all be in this conversation together.

Yeah. And you briefly alluded to the idea of calendar. And that's what I think is funny because I used to walk into the Christian bookstore in Lucent, Idaho, where I'd grow up, and inevitably every year there'd be the new book about when Jesus's return was going to happen or when the Rapture was going to happen. At first it was going to be in 1844, and then like 1981 and then 1988, and then I think the most recent one was based on astrological theories, like 2017. And fortunately for me, I actually am. I grew up a little bit more post millennial and still believe that in terms of the Christian approach to the Rapture, that the entire tribulation foretold in Revelation in the Bible, and all of that was kind of fulfilled during the Jewish Roman War back in kind of like 60 to 70 AD is when Jerusalem was destroyed. And that now the world isn't necessarily going to hell in a handbasket. You know, fast forward into some intense apocalyptic event, but instead everything is getting better and better and better as heaven on earth just kind of gradually comes to life. And, you know, so I kind of fall into the camp of, you know, guys like John Bunyan or Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney when it comes to the way that I view the Rapture or the Apocalypse. So fortunately, I haven't had to worry or pay attention too much to the calendar. Because I really think it's. It's irrelevant. But, you know, in the first part of your book.

So. So wait, just. So I'm tracking you because I've never. I've never heard that perspective. So you feel like that. Yeah, so. So you feel like the moment was the fall. This was the collapse of the Jerusalem Temple. Like the reigning. Of.

Yeah, exactly.

And that. That was the moment that, like, John of Patmos and anybody else was signaling.

Yeah, like Emperor Nero was the Beast. And like, all that. Like, like, basically all of that is in the past, has occurred, has been f. And now we're already living in this new heaven and new Earth that is slowly coming to be. And that, you know, Satan has already been bound. And all those horrific events that we see in Revelation that people kind of equate to like, you know, black Chinese helicopters and all that, all that's bunk. All that was just the foretelling of the destruction of Jerusalem.

Okay. And then. So your assessment of, like, we're already living in the heaven on Earth, it's just that for anybody who's not experiencing love and light right now, anybody who's dealing with real hardship and things that you're just saying it's. Yes, that. But we're on a definite curve. So it's almost like a Stephen Pinkerish twist to millennialism. Right.

The knowledge of the glory of the Lord will be covering the planet as the waters cover the sea. I forget the Bible verse that says that, but I think we're just in the process of that happening. Like people actually becoming closer and closer to God and love and peace and joy, being something that is going to simply continue to take over the planet and that. Yeah, like I said, basically, the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. Things are just getting better and better with some obvious speed bumps along the way. But that we don't have to worry about this massive apocalyptic event.

Well, I mean, you know, like, I think they've done all sorts of studies, right? I mean, I mean, more accurate people are more pessimistic and more depressed and willfully optimistic people, even if it may be sometimes, in the face of the facts, actually tend to do better. You know what I mean? So, like, so like, that to what you've just articulated feels like a very pro social and adaptive worldview. Even if you could go, you know, factoid by factoid and say, is it or isn't it, quote unquote, really happening? The fact that you're enacting it increases its likelihood of happening.

Right, exactly. I mean, you could take something like Covid for example, and look at the majority of the Christian evangelical church kind of like, you know, shrugging and to a certain extent not to, to paint with too broad of a brush. Almost like saying, well, this is the beginning of the end, right? We've got the great reset and the new world order and it's all happening and we're screwed. So we might as well just step back and watch this whole thing crumble. Whereas I say no, this is a chance to cover more people with love and peace and joy and perhaps a lot of, I guess the improvements in everything such as healthcare, to telemedicine, to the ability to be able to work from a home office and be with your family more. All of these are actually positive outcomes of a briefly problematic viral scenario. But when you're able to look at life through that lens, I find it to be incredibly refreshing and almost peace bestowing to be able to have that type of approach versus an apocalyptic approach.

Yeah. In ski mountaineering, one of the things we do is you tend to climb the thing that you're then going to ski and on the climb you're paying attention to everything that can kill you. You know, all the loose rocks, the snow, the depth of the snowpack, what's going on, what's going on. But by the time you're standing on the top a, you look around and you're inspired by the view. That's kind of why you went in the first place. And then you click into your bindings and then on the route down you completely change your perspective and all you're looking for is that ribbon of white that you have to stay on and connect and you completely tune out the rock and everything that can kill you because if you don't and you focus on them, they sure as hell going to kill you. You know, where your head goes, the body follows, right? So to me it's that, it's that dialectic, right? It's like, can we take clear eyed looks at situational assessments and then when it comes to go time, can we absolutely focus on the single path that is success? And let's go. Hit it.

I would love to talk about this first part of the book, the choose your own apocalypse part for a long time. However, like I mentioned, I think that the Alchemist cookbook section is actually going to be incredibly interesting for my audience who are kind of into, you know, all the things you talk about when it comes to like respiration and microdosing and substances and music and I'd love to delve into a little bit of that, but I'd be remiss. Not to mention how. How kind of, like, funny and creative your writing is. Like. Like, during that conversation I was having my wife last night, I said, like, jamie's a really good writer. I'm like, baby, even if. Even if you're not in this book, like, you would appreciate a lot of, you know, like. Like your subtitles, you know, the intertwingularity instead of the singularity or. Or barbecue your sacred cows or lexicon for the eschaton. It's like, as I'm reading through your book, I just chuckle at a lot of the. A lot of the subtitles and a lot of, I guess, the word play that's woven in. And so as an author myself, I'm just curious, like. Like, do you have an actual creative writing process? I mean, are you. Are you, like, using some of the other elements of your book, like LSD and prostate massage and whiffing some CO2 carbon to get you in the mood to write? Or how do you actually spark creativity and get yourself to be such a creative writer?

Oh, well, thanks, man. I mean, I'm super stoked that that landed in the way that was intended, which is just like, hey, even if these are somewhat intense or heavy topics, we can and must still have play, still have fun with it. So, yeah, I would say. I mean, I grew up in a family where my dad did these crazy complex crosswords, and every other dinner time was some Greek illusion or some Shakespeare quotes or this and that. So it was very much kind of steeped a little bit like growing up in England. And our house was built in the 15th century, so there was always ancient around me. There was always layers upon layers. So I've always been like a etymological geek. Like, I don't understand a word until I understand its root and its origin and what's the story behind the thing and that kind of stuff. So that was definitely a baseline on the actual day to day, because most of this book was written during quarantine and it was, you know, our kids had been shunted back from college. We were suddenly four people rattling around in our house again. And I was like, oh, my gosh, how am I going to do this? And it was literally like a set of bows. And I. Oh. And I told my editor at HarperCollins. I was like, well, hey, look, this whole Covid thing happens. We've kind of been on, like, emergency first responder kind of roles for the last Eight weeks. I'm behind on the writing. She's like, oh, no, no, no. We're not postponing this again. This comes out spring 21, and you've got to have this shipped by September. So I had five months to write 400 pages, and I was like, holy smokes. Okay, it's on. And so basically, yeah, I got a $500 pair of Bose headphones because I was like, I absolutely have to go into my tunnel. I did a 16 oz. So a yeti mug full of shade grown, organic, organic high octane coffee and then 2 to 4 milligrams of nicotine gum. Based on our buddy Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who kind of was just touting the benefits of nicotine, which has never been a part of my life. And brain FM audio entrainment. And I would just disappear for three to four hours. And I wrote, literally, I wrote this book off the top of my head because I was like, okay, I've done all my. I can't afford to go down any more research rabbit holes. And I would just put TK where I knew there was a citation from something I'd read at some point and had my research team go back after the fact. And I just wrote off the top of my head and I wrote 400,000 words in that time. So that's the day to day. How did I kind of quote, unquote, biohack it? But to your point, on the inspirational stuff, I would say 80% of this book actually came from. From the place described in the book. This book is actually a recursive hyperobject disclosing how to get to the place where the hyperobject discloses itself, which I know sounds rather abstruse.

Yeah. Explain what you mean by that.

Okay. So my partner and I, eight or nine years ago, found ourselves, through no skill or intent of our own, being led down this rabbit hole of the practices described in this book. And then the practices described in basically the hedonic engineering or the sexual yoga of becoming. Right. However we want to kind of phrase that. And for anybody that's interested in the appendix, there's a study with 10 couples going through this whole experience with lots of their kind of journal reports and all this kind of stuff.

Oh, yeah. Where you took the whole. I guess almost like the whole. Pardon me if I use the wrong term, but almost like the sexual biohacking section of the book. And you actually kind of did like an internal study with a whole bunch of couples using all of the things that hopefully we get A chance to touch on in a little bit here and actually kind of like follow these couples along the course of them experiencing many of the elements of the alchemist cookbook section of the book.

Exactly. And the total mind bending thing that I couldn't write in the book because it would just sound loopy or totally pretentious, was that, like, this was actually quote unquote downloaded to us. Like, we didn't think this shit up, and it kept on coming through and we kept on having these experiences. And in the experiences of getting into like, delta wave eeg, high vagal nerve tone, PR primed endocannabinoid system, and the kind of basically global system reset of our nervous systems as we were learning to play with this thing. That's what's happening on the body brain level. It's literally like pressing the power button on your laptop and powering it down and then powering it up. So it's as close to a death rebirth initiation ritual as you can do in the kind of 21st century Western terms. Right. But at the same time, you're also having the equivalent of an nde. You're having the equivalent of a tunnel of light experience, which is super rich with content. And the content itself was the content of this book. So, like, you know, a few. Few years in, I'm like, holy shit, Jay. I think. I think I actually need to write about this. I think this is the thing. I think the reason we're receiving this thing is to then share the thing and tell everybody how this works. And she was like, you're crazy. Don't tell anybody about this. And I. And then, you know, I'd set it aside for like three months or six months, and it would keep coming back. And I'm like, no, actually, I think I'm. I think I have to. So it was a total ridiculous path to conceiving and ideating a book. And it. And it was literally, we have probably at this point, 30 to 40 hours of two to three minute voice memos where we would come back from that liminal space and make a voice recording of the piece that we had just seen or, you know, had just sort of been disclosed. And then that became the structure to the book. So that's a very. You can't, you know, you can't exactly share that in a bookstore, you know, or a restaurant writer's workshop. But it was so profoundly interesting. It's why that last chapter of the book is, where does the information come from? Because my sense is in the psychedelic renaissance and in Meditative states and all of these things. People are often, they often get really fixated on the method they use to get someplace interesting. But you're kind of like, hey, I think it's the someplace interesting we should be talking about at this point. Like what is the arc of, you know, it's effectively the tetragrammaton. It's the ark of the covenants, the burning bush. Take your pick of analogies. But where is a place of absolutely perfect implicate information that appears limitless in all directions? And if you can tune a primate nervous system to be able to receive that information, it is the seedbed of, you know, the Greeks called the Muses. They literally had a sort of divine entity. You know, there's the grace of God and the Holy Spirit. There's, you know, every society has always had some metaphor or descriptor of massively kick ass information. Quite often that, you know, shapes science or shapes philosophy or shapes civilization, technology that was bigger than the person who, who, you know, who it came through. And they assign it someplace outside themselves. And you're like, well, what is that? And can we actually start advancing the inquiry in ways that give us better understandings and appreciations of, you know, what I would just, you know, in a super generic term, just call the information layer.

Yeah. You know what's interesting, A couple of comments for my audience. First of all, just in case I didn't mention, I'm going to link to all the things that Jamie and I talk about@BenGreenfieldFitness.com recapturerapture that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com recaptururerapture but anyways, first of all, Jamie did mention one thing. I need to clarify. He used the word TK and just for those of you who aren't in printing and journalism, that means two. I don't know why they don't call it tc, but it comes in quite handy when you're writing. And it's an abbreviation that kind of signifies that additional material is going to be added at a later date. It is a huge friend for any author who wants to go deep into writing and not get bugged by say like delving into extra research as you're writing something or you want to write. It's like you're on an airplane, you're not using WI Fi and you know, it's something you might come back to or add additional material to. You just add that TK in there and it's incredibly convenient. And then the other thing is when you describe Jamie how you'll do your big cup of shade grown coffee and a 2 to 4 mig of nicotine gum and some brain FM. You know, if you were an author alive 100 years ago, it would have been like the cup of cowboy coffee and the cigarette and the birds singing outside. But it's just that simple. Writer's way of putting yourself into an altered state. And I swear, like nicotine and caffeine, all other fancy brain stacks and N methyl peptides and cdp, choline and piperine and anhydrous caffeine and everything else aside, when you step back and look at it with simplicity, nicotine and caffeine are two of a writer's best friends. So I'm right on board with that for some of my own writing.

Well, and actually, let me just add one additional things to the writing thing because for anybody that's considering it themselves, et cetera, which was because of the way this information came, you know, sort of into my brain and mind. It was, it was fully formed, including like word, the word plays and the puns and that entire vital respiration protocol, you know, all of them. It was ridiculous. It was just like little packets of complete information. And I'd be like, oh shit, that looks fun, funny, interesting, beautiful, whatever. I should really remember that. And that's really what it was. But trained as an academic, I knew the academic case I wanted to make, but I was also aware. I was like, man, this is a, this is a pretty shaggy dog story. There's all, you know, this is big. And B, these days we're thumb scrolling monkeys, right? It's not enough to simply make a compelling argument. You actually have to have plot tension. You have to have something that causes people to turn the page and keep reading. So I looked to Stephen and I was like, man, the hero's journey is the one that everybody goes to. And at this point it's kind of tired. And it's almost like the sort of invisible structure of TED talks. Everybody's sort of regressed to do the mean. And now even the Ta da moment in a TED talk, you're all expecting the ta da moment and it's just not that, you know, it kind of loses its magic. So I'm like, what is a structure that I can hang, what is a plot structure that I can hang this on? And Steven Pressfield, the fellow who wrote the War of Art and you know, Legend of Bagger Vance and he's kind of a, you know, he's kind of an inspiration in the field of the art of Writing. Right. He and his editor have put together something called the story grid. And they're basically just like, hey, there's only something like 10 or 12 stories. And they all follow so certain beats. They all have obligatory scenes in them. And if you miss the obligatory scenes, then your reader's going to be under satisfied. But if you hit them, then the story has tension, it has climax, it has resolution. It feels like a good story. And so I used his framework for what he called a worldview revelation story, which is the way we used to look at the world, doesn't work. You then have this crisis. You then have to adapt or explore this new worldview. And if you do, then the new worldview will help you and kind of save the day. But there's always an ironic twist at the end, which means it's not even quite like the way you thought it was going to be. And so I had the 17 obligatory scenes and conventions and I laid those against my academic argument and then wrote the story trying to hang the chapters and the plot points on those obligatory scenes. So that was another just kind of, that's a sort of a structure behind the structure that hopefully makes it more accessible and readable for a reader to actually care.

Yeah, yeah. And I was kind of half joking about the prostate massage, but I think I believe you get into that in the book. The idea that men have this erogenous zone that allows for an ejaculation free orgasm that you can just return to over and over again during the act of lovemaking or while you're masturbating or whenever else you might want to orgasm. I'm one of those guys that just try stuff that I read in books. Correct me if I'm wrong. Did you talk about, about that in the book?

I mention it? Yeah, I mean it was, it was called the super Orgasm and it was this online community based around this sort of automatic prostate massage. Yes, muscle contraction. But the thing that was super interesting about that group is it wasn't, you know, it wasn't sort of sexy time. I mean, if anything, it was a sort of a recumbent meditation practice. It was not very rarely even including erection or ejaculation or anything. It was breath, work, work, looping sensations of prostate and vagal nerve into what these, these men were reporting became these overwhelming waves of sort of euphoric sensation that they were sort of saying, is this kind of multi orgasmic, you know, closer to kind of a woman's orgasm or a spiritual, spiritual state? So once again, back to neuroanthropology you're like, huh, what the hell's that about? About, you know, and then getting under the hood of like, well, why might that have been the case? From the physiology.

Yeah. And regarding the latter, that's actually what I wanted to get at. You know, I actually went and I bought one of those, I believe it's called the Aneros A N E R O S Prostate massagers. And I've used it while simply sitting in a meditative position because as you breathe and as you, as you contract and relax the sphincter muscles as you breathe, and that's basically kind of like massaging your process as you do. So it does actually shift you into. I'm actually not sure which zone I'm reaching. It feels like it's a little bit more theta, but it actually seems to enhance a meditative process. And I tried this a few times after reading about this in your book. And I mean, it actually is really simple because you just put it in, you get on your side, put it in, then sit up and sit to meditate as you contract. And it actually does allow you to reach kind of like a deeper elevated state of consciousness. It was very interesting. And obviously some people might be grimacing at the idea of sticking something up their butt, especially men thinking of targeting their prostate for a meditation session. But it actually is, I think, worth a try and kind of an interesting tactic.

Yeah, I mean, obviously it's our disposal with both our core bodily functions, our sexuality, even kind of varying moral judgments on different substances. And of course we don't judge them all. We just judge the ones that are unusual or atypical for our community or country or faith. But we've got strong feelings about all these things, right? But if you just kind of reduce us, if you just kind of lop off our arms and our legs, you know, and you just realize, oh, we're just prefrontal cortexes connected to spinal columns, connected to, you know, an arson genitals. Really, we're just one worms, you know. And our vagal nerve, which starts in our brain stem and goes all the way down to our root, is one of the most potent metronomes that sets the rhythms and functionalities of so much of our vital organs and even awareness. And if you can shift and adjust those things, then you can have profound impacts on your state and well being and, and that typically the closer we get to those basic evolutionary impulses, respiration, our vital organs and viscera, and things like the vagal nerve and the endocannabinoid system, our orgasmic response, all these things which again, we have tons of feelings about, social and cultural taboos about. But really, if you were just a sort of anthropologist from space, you'd be like, hey, humans, here's your user manual, here's how you work, make the most of it. And once you do that, you realize that you can have basically that notion of how do we precipitate that global system reset? Which that's the biology of it. The culture of it would be a death rebirth ritual or practice or initiation. And typically you do that by loading up the system and then pulsing a huge amount of energy through that. And that can be breath work, intensification, that can be pleasure, pain, stimulation. That could be orgasmic response. It could be vibration with sound and music, or even like percussive massage, like theraguns, like load energy through the system, create a peak and then a deep recovery on the other side. And then how do you feel? Who are you and what have you seen or experienced on the other side of that? And you kind of get to come back to homeostasis. You get to come back, back to 0,0 on your grid coordinates on time in tune, in balance, and then just live forwards from there.

Yeah, interesting. Okay, so now that we've got prostate massage out of the way, let's delve into the five big techniques for achieving a peak state. I think that this kind of like set the pace for the Alchemist cookbook section. And you talk about getting into this peak state. There's this state of flow, and obviously, like I mentioned in the introduction of a whole book about that flow state. And Stealing Fire gets into that and Recapture the Rapture does as well. But what are the five big techniques that you write about for actually getting into a peak state?

Yeah, and just 30 seconds of preamble as to the why did we select these? There's obviously infinite numbers of different ways to shift states to achieve access to the numinous, etc. The idea here was saying, hey, if we are trying to recapture the Rapture, if we're trying to, you have a whole bunch of people around the world, everywhere, wake up, grow up and show up. Like, just find ways to seek inspiration and remember what we've forgotten, heal and mend. So we're coming from our most resourced place and engage the world and each other on a good foot. Then you realize, okay, so solutions can't be fancy and high tech if you're trying to get to the bottom. 4 billion humans on the planet. Right. It's got to be cheap or free, and it's got to be open and available to everybody. So then with that setup, you're like, okay, so then it would make sense that if we want to use the longest levers possible to try and move us as humans, and those longest levers are typically as close to evolutionary drivers as possible. Because it makes sense, right? If we are hard coded to do it for survival, there's all sorts of neurochemistry, there's all sorts of rewards and reinforcements to get us to do the things, you know, and other than eating. I mean, breathing is right up there, right? If we stop breathing, it's the first thing that kills us. So we have powerful, powerful physiological incentives to breathe. And when we learn to monkey with that, when we can kind of hack in the back door of that panel on respiration, we can totally change our physiology and our psychology. And you kind of go next down the stack, you're like, okay, and if we don't procreate, if we don't make more humans, then we also die. So that's the next one that is massively, massively encoded. Now, the fact that we have so many hang ups and taboos about it isn't, shouldn't say, oh, then let's not discuss it. That too should also be a blinking neon sign going, hey, there's a there there. The reason every civilization has taboos around sexuality, intoxication, all these things, is because if they didn't, they would run the show. We'd never get anything civilized done, right? But sexuality, you know, as Kinsey Masters and John Johnson, John Lilly, all back in the kind of 50s and early 60s discovered, is that our sexual arousal, because it's so foundational, our sexual arousal circuit is the found, is the bedrock of our entire ecstatic and reward circuitry in our bodies and brains. So if we just live the default version of that, then our sexuality, our sexual impulses, creates tons of trauma, tons of suffering, tons of heartache, and we're just puppets on the string of evolution. Evolution's amoral. It doesn't actually care whose genes pool with whose. In fact, if anything, it flies in the face of monogamy, it flies in the face of commitment and fidelities and all these things because it just wants a robust, mixed up gene pool. You know, we can say version one of human sexuality is us puppets on the string of an indifferent evolution. Version two could be, hey, let's untie the strings, you know, let's do the Pinocchio thing. I want to be A real boy, right? How can we actually use all of those impulses and drivers not for instinctive procreation, but instead for deliberate integration? And if we can do that, that's fantastic. And then we talked about embodiment. We're obviously all in these meat suits of ours and understanding. And I just took a moment to focus on things that not everybody would necessarily always be talking about. So specifically the endocannabinoid system. Pleasure, pain as hotwired circuits. And what is the role and what is the interrelationship between those vagal nerve and the capacities for us to understand? What does embodiment do? What does optimizing our bodies and brains do for our minds and hearts? So you've got respiration, sexuality and embodiment. Those are very kind of obvious evolutionary drivers. But then you kind of throw in two sort of force multipliers, which is music and substances. And interestingly, those might almost seem superficial compared to the other three. But the moment you study your like Ron Siegel at UCLA has a style that intoxication is not just humans. You can't even go back in history to find the point when we first figured it out. It predates us. It goes through the entire primate family. It goes into all many, many mammals, from elephants things all the way to birds, crows and ravens get lit. So you're like, oh, this is ancient. Ancient. The desire to shift state as an evolutionary adaptive advantage. And it's clearly not when you're wobbly and cross eyed and falling out of trees, that's not an adaptive advantage. But the seeking of novelty, the interruption of patterns and ruts and the kind of being able to jump the tracks and come up with your chocolate and my peanut butter. Those are the movements that intoxication. So you're like, okay, that's ancient and essential. Ron Siegel even calls it our fourth evolutionary drive.

Right. That woodchuck wandering around your backyard might have just chewed on some morning glory seeds to fuel with some variant of LS D. His shuffling to and fro in an altered state of consciousness. Or I would say an enhanced state of consciousness. I don't even like that word intoxication, because it brings to mind that you're consuming some toxic drug. I really don't feel as though one must sacrifice sobriety, so to speak, or awareness of one's own where one's body is at in space as a trade off to using these type of substances. I think that these altered states of consciousness can enhance almost like as a microdose might, our productivity or our creativity and you're right. They are kind of like the icing on the cake of respiration or embodiment or sexuality. But I'd never want to give people the impression that in order to achieve a peak state, you need to consume a toxin or you need to be in a state that would not merely or say something close to sobriety. I think that's where a lot of people fear this stuff. They just think, oh, it's a poison that's shifting me into a drunk state, when in fact it can, but it doesn't have to.

Yeah. And I think again, my interest is always kind of popping up a level from the doorways or the keys to the actual. What is the view from the balcony? And in this instance, I think it's fair to say that what is really high healthy is for us to have a full range of neurophysiological and psychological experience. Right. And anthropologists call cultures that have just kind of one channel of consciousness, one that's approved as monophasic, one phase. Right. But most indigenous cultures were polyphasic. They had a bunch of different channels. So, yes, there was waking state, you talking to me, and me talking to you, and us making mouthy sounds. Right. But there was also the dream I had last night. There was possession, there was trance, there was visions, there were all sorts of other quote unquote, non ordinary means of information retrieval, disclosure and sense making. And they were valued and they were integrated. And it wasn't just considered noise or chatter or, you know, or errata. Right? And then post, you know, postmodernism, post French enlightenment and scientific materialism and all these things, our dial kind of got rusted shut. And we're all yearning for more range. And you can see it even in intermittent fasting. We're like, oh, shit, it's probably not a good idea to have 100,000 calories in a big refrigerated box just across the couch from me at all times, juiced with salty sweetened fat. And I can't stop. So we're like intermittent fasting. Probably not a bad idea. That might even be healthy. How about contrast therapy? It's probably not always good to be just living an entire 12 months in 72 degrees. Whether I'm in a box on wheels or in a box called my house. Maybe I should get super hot and super cold from time to time. Right? I mean, you can see it in the, you know, the entire biohacking movement, right? Is we are seeking to reestablish and to sort of expand the range of our physical and emotional experiences because it's, it feels health giving. And I think within that, you know, that's where the, you know, the subset category. And what about deliberate stuff state shifting tools and technologies? Because it can be substances and compounds. Oliver Sacks, the NYU neuroscientist, famously said that. He said drugs offer a shortcut. They promise transcendence on demand. So say what you will about them, but they work and they work within deliberate time windows where you're trying to instantiate the thing. But if anybody has any concerns in any shape or form about exogenous compounds or substances, things that aren't inside me that I ingest, just consider the tried and true fasting, extreme endurance physical activity and or darkness. And if you wanted to really combine them, you can do a nine or ten day vipassana retreat while fasting in silent darkness and things will get massively, massively non ordinary. And there's no special whiz bang tack there other other than the old tried and true. And when ethnologists have gone back to try and figure out like what was the sort of shamanic magic potion of the Greeks or of the Hindus or of an African tribe or wherever they're looking. And quite often when they find the plants that seem the most likely candidates, they're often somewhat underwhelming from a pharmacological point of view. Like I feature in the book, right, this tribe in Papua New guinea that had three plants they worked with, they worked with ginger, tobacco and then mushrooms, but only mushrooms at the higher level, like ginger and tobacco. You're like, really? Seriously, what's the deal with that? But you combine it with a strong and pure and freshly grown and harvested and much higher nicotine content than contemporary tobacco and those kinds of things, but also fasting, extreme privation and exertion. You're priming and all night rituals and all the culture and all the Jews juju surrounding it and you're like, oh, so this was just one element. This wasn't relying solely on the chemical as the depth charge to get the whole project done right.

And for those of you who might think this book's not for you, after hearing Jamie describe a 10 day silent meditation retreat in a cave while fasting. You know, in our previous podcast episode, we talked about this concept that Jamie lays out of hedonic calendaring, meaning that those type of experiences might be, you know, once in a year or once in a decade in the same way that you even describe, I believe in recapture the rapture, Jamie, the idea that, for example, the Type of intense ayahuasca retreats or plant medicine journeys that people seem to be almost overusing these days are something that might be reserved for, say, a rite of passage into adolescence or adulthood and then sharing that space with your spouse on the evening of your wedding and then maybe on your 40th birthday. And it's this idea that these are sprinkled few and far between throughout one's life as these deep immersive experiences. And perhaps some of these other ways to shift into a peak state might be used throughout the week, such as chewing on nicotine gum and drinking shade grown coffee while. Right. Writing. But don't feel if you're listening in, as though this is about continually seeking events that just thrust you deep into these altered states of consciousness. Because there's definitely this concept that Jamie gets into called hedonic calendaring. And Jim, you talked about four techniques. Respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances. And then I interrupted you as you were delving into that fifth way of achieving a peak state.

Yeah, good old fashioned tunes, right? I mean, there's a beautiful Hasidic saying. It says there are nine levels of prayer. Above them all is song. And again, music can seem like a sort of Johnny come lately, especially compared to the others. But Daniel Levitin at McGill University in Canada has written a book called this Is yous Brain on music. And he and other ethnomusicologists have made a fairly convincing case that there's evidence of music. There's bone flutes from, you know, discovered in caves that are dated at 50,000 years that, you know, and clearly flutes were not the first. They probably had gourds and rattles and drums and those kind of things massively predating tonal instruments and that, that predates any for sure, any level of symbolic language and those kind of things. And his case was is that that was probably actually the way we started to come communicate. So pre complex and tactical language, like what we would think of, like sentences with verbs and subjects or objects and that kind of stuff that we were communicating via rhythm, melody and voice, and we were using it for essential social bonding and survival. And whether that was staying awake at night through a campfire to ward off predators, whether it was organizing work or hunts or war or any of these things. And that actually, you know, you kind of get this goofy situation where, you know, frightened parents in the 1950s and 60s when it was kind of like Elvis and, you know, and Woodstock and the Beatles and this kind of stuff, they're like, oh my gosh, sex, drugs and Rock and roll are going to be the end of civilization. You know, it's going to undo it all. But in fact, sex, drugs and rock and roll were actually the beginnings of civilization.

Yeah, I remember you saying that in the book. That really struck a chord with me, this idea that we vilify sex, drugs and rock and roll. And I know there's a whole political movement behind that, everything from reefer madness to the Nixon and Reagan administrations and beyond. But there's this idea that when you think about it, a lot of what you've just described for achieving a peak state, I mean, you mentioned sexuality, you mentioned substances, and you mentioned music, and that's basically sex, drugs and rock and roll. And those have actually been used to build civilization and bring cultures together and kind of weave humankind along this path to, you know, personal growth or cultural growth. And we're kind of like hardwired to experience those. And in many cases, I guess there, there's even this idea that farming and agriculture and the, the emergence of say, you know, grains for fermenting and everything were all just kind of a way to, to figure out how to organize around sex, drugs and rock and roll in a more efficient way.

Yeah, I mean, I mean those, those are the, you know, and even as far as going back back and taking a look at Jared Diamond's research, he's the fellow that wrote Guns, Germs and Steel. He's a UCLA anthropologist that many folks have probably come across. But he wrote a book called why Sex is Fun and actually makes the case that our human sexuality is actually even more weird and of an outlier than our tool making and upright postures. It's the third leg of that stool. Like typically when we think of us going from naked apes to clever humans, right? It's our opposable thumbs, our ability to wield tools, our ability to make language. He's like our completely unique sexual habits and patterns and even physiology, our morphology, what our bodies look like and how they behave and function is so different than the entire rest of the animal kingdom, including our closest primate cousins. He goes, you have to connect. Consider that the neurochemical priming of repeat, frequent, elective, recreational, year round sexuality in humans is one of the things that actually changed us and made us Homo sapiens, not just Homo erectus.

Okay, so we've got these five big techniques for achieving a peak state. Respiration, embodiment, sexuality, substances and music. Respiration. I'll tell you the truth, I flipped to that part of the book first just because I've Got such an interest in breath work and I've been in the, you know, deep in James nestor and Patrick McCown and some of these other folks and going through their books also. So I flipped your breath chapter first. And you began actually by talking about this concept of circular breathing and the use of this didgeridoo musical instrument as a device to learn that. And I'm to just going curious, have you ever. Because I've thought about attempting to learn that maybe using a harmonica or something just so that I'm annoying fewer people with a giant didgeridoo in the living room. But have you ever attempted circular breathing? And also can you explain that to folks?

Yeah, absolutely. And the short answer is yes, we learn to play them. But there's actually, you can go on Amazon and there's little super cool, there may be 12, 14 inches high, little wooden boxes, boxes with two sound chambers in them. So you can learn to play a didgeridoo with this little thing that fits in a laptop bag.

Do you know what it's called?

Gosh, I mean literally do like didgeridoo box or something like that. And if not, I can send you the link. Yeah, yeah, because it's a, I mean a. You know, ultimately humans, we learn best by play, right? And so given any form of something that is engaging, frustrating, satisfying when you get it, and then you, you can tweak it and learn more and keep going kind of thing, that's how we really acquire sustainable skills. One of the things that intrigued me was the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The folks who award the Nobel Prize and that kind of stuff are also cutting edge research institution and probably five years ago they released a paper on nitric oxide production, which is a neurotransmitter that crosses the blood brain barrier and it sweeps away stress and arousal chemicals. And introducing introduces what Herb Benson at Harvard called the bliss molecule, right. It sort of introduces all the groovy things of nice peak states. So it's a very helpful and very effective neurotransmitter. And the Karolinska Institute folks found that when you breathe and vibrate your sinus cavity, so when you breathe out through your nose and vibrate your sinus cavity at the same time. So like that kind of of a thing, you increase nitric oxide production in your brain by 15 times. Which is insane, right? That's this ridiculous, ridiculous performance booster. And and then I was like, that's interesting. So on the one hand you can do your yoga or you can do your sitting meditation and you can be humming while you breathe. Great. So mildly embarrassing, you know, but still decently effective. And I'm like, wait a second. That is exactly what you have to do when you're playing the didgeridoo because it's this long tube, it looks like something out of Dr. Seuss, right? This kind of like wooden trumpet, and you blow on it. But then the way, you know, both trumpet players, like Louis Armstrong, but also indigenous didgeridoo players learned, was if you kind of blow out your cheeks like a bullfrog and you get to the, you know, you blow outward until your lungs are almost empty, but you've got that extra pocket of air in your cheek. And then you can squirt that air through your lips while you're simultaneously sniffing. So you're sort of forever squeezing and sniffing at the same time. And it's this kind of goofy herky jerky motion. But once you get it down, you can effectively keep playing continuously for as long as you want. And then. So that was where I was like, wait a sec. I bet that you take that new Karolinska Institute research on nitric oxide product, which then tends to put you into a trance state. You have the vibration of that wooden trumpet, the didgeridoo, and you have perpetual forced, rhythmic, circular nasal breathing. I bet that does a thing, doesn't it? And then you go and research and you look and you're like, oh, yeah, that's exactly how aboriginal elders would play themselves into Dreamtime. And they would then enter sort of this non ordinary state of information access, et cetera. And as soon as you started, you know, as soon as we started combining all the research, you're like, wow, that is an ancient neurotechnology for trans induction and traveling. And it's as simple as making music with a very specific and unusual breathing pattern.

Interesting. You know, I'm gonna have to get one of those little boxes and give it a go because it's always been on my radar to try this circular breathing, just because I've seen some of the same research on things like, like nitric oxide production that you bring up in the book and that you were just talking about. But it's.

And a simple fun way is just grab a straw, grab a drinking straw and try and blow perpetual bubbles into a glass of water. And you can just do it, and you can just do it by blowing out your cheeks. We actually do these, do these in workshops and stuff to give people progressions on how to become like, what is respiratory mastery? And that's one of the really fun ones that you can do. Simple practice.

My twin sons and I are going to have fun now. Straws are getting broken up tonight. The giant curly straws. Oh yeah. All right. So, so related to that because I want to talk about a few things that, that maybe folks don't know about when it comes to breathing and gas in general. Meduna's mixture. What, what is that? And why'd you write about that?

Yeah, it really was, it was a total accident. Roger Walsh, who's a Maryland PhD at UC Davis and sort of, he was one of the coiners of the term transpersonal psychology. He's been kind of one of the guiding lights of that generation of sort of academics elders. And he's actually responsible for that cueing me onto that monophasic and polyphasic distinction about cultures and their ranges of consciousness. But he actually gave me a copy of his book Higher Wisdom. And it was a series, it was basically like an oral history of the first wave of psychedelic research researchers. So the sort of Stan Graaf and like the 1950s to early 1960s, before even Ken Kesey and things get wacky and weird for sort of the electric Kool Aid era. So like back when it was when Sandoz LSD was a research chemical, when it was at ucla, it was in Manitoba, it was at Stanford, it was all completely rigorous and above board places. And at first I was like, thanks so much, Roger, I deeply appreciate it. But I think I kind of know all these stories. I kind of did my diligence back in my 20s and I kind of sat on my shelf for a while and then I pulled it off and it just flipped open to a chapter of somebody I hadn't heard of. And suddenly they were describing that in the late 50s up in Manitoba, they were using this other thing called Meduna's mixture as a screening tool. They were having people breathe this gas blend and they were using it as a screening tool to check to make sure someone wasn't going to freak out when they actually did the proper LSD sessions. It was from Ladislav Meduna, who was a Hungarian research at the same time that Stan Groff was still over there. So before Stan Groff had even come over to the States and plugged in at Johns Hopkins and Meduna had been using this mixture to try and create basically a sort of respiratory, respiratory induced epileptic seizure, like a grand mal seizure, because he was hoping this is the era of electroconvulsive therapy like jumper cables to the brain and that kind of stuff because everybody realized they were barking up the same tree we're talking about, which is how do you induce a global system reset? And if you can, it seems to help or, you know, resolve or ameliorate a host of different conditions from epilepsy to bipolar to, you name it, right? When we have those moments of coming back to 00, where we often start better than we were. So that's what Meduno was trying to use it for. And that never quite panned out. But the LSD researchers, including Grof, realized, well, weight when you do this. And it is a. Let's think what's the ratios is it's 70% oxygen, 30% CO2. I mean, it ranges. But when people say medunas mix, that's typically the ratio they're referring to. So it's. If atmospheric oxygen air has roughly 20% oxygen, then you're looking at sort of three and a half times the O2 you actually need. So you're massively, massively oxygen oxygenated. But, you know, when we exhale, we have what, roughly 4% CO2, you know, so you're like, you know, and instead you're getting 30% CO2. So way more carbon dioxide than your brain is used to registering it is that it gives you this paradoxical situation where you're safe as houses. You couldn't. You've got more O2 to the brain than you ever would on a month of Sundays, and yet you have this absolutely overwhelming sense that you're dying of suffocation.

That simultaneous increase, though, in carbon dioxide and oxygen is something that's kind of difficult to attain. Most forms of breathwork, you're breathing off CO2, retaining oxygen or vice versa. It's pretty uncommon to be able to retain both high levels of CO2 and oxygen. But this idea of inhaling and there are even devices, if you Google carbogen, you can find, I think it's like a $400 device that comes prepackaged to your house. You can actually wear a mask and breathe this stuff. And that idea of exposing yourself to that shifts what's called the Bohr curve in physiology kind of to the right. You get more oxygen dumped off into tissue. But what's interesting, and I think I talked with James Nestor about this, is training the body to be able to tolerate those higher levels of carbon dioxide. Kind of like cold bath increases stress resilience and the production of both heat shock and cold shock proteins to induce greater cellular resilience, resilience and resilience to stress overall the high levels of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream can do the same thing. And I believe that breathing this type of mixture is actually being used to do things like treat people's anxiety or allow them to deal with anxiety more efficiently.

Yeah. And the thing that had prompted me to go down this rabbit hole in the first place was that the subjective reports of several in one book, I think I came across it three different times in three different chapters, was that patients who'd been breathing the carbogen as a screen for the LSD had then gone back and said, you know, I did both. And I think I actually got more out of the carbogen. Like I had more profound insights. I had more, you know, more non ordinary state experience, et cetera, than from the LSD itself. And that was back in the day, right? I mean this was Sando's finest pharmacological grade and high dosage lsd. So like nothing to sneeze at and it was just CO2 and I oxygen was doing even more. So to me that was a fascinating inquiry because once again there is a little bit I always kind of. It's a goofy analogy, but I think of like professional wrestlers, right, where you know, like, like ww, is it E or F?

I think there might be both.

Well, any event, like right when they're about to go and do a super huge move, they go running into the ropes and stretch them like rubber bands and then use that rubber band stretch to of kind come back and launch a pile driver onto their opponent. Right. My sense is that with all of these protocols there is a degree of heading in the opposite direction of where you're trying to get you load the system. And so if you're trying to get to a really calm integrated reboot, you actually go shoot the moon. You do that. But one of the best ways to do that is by cultivating the most intensive peak experience possible. And you can then sequence these. So the project we're working on right now is to actually sequence this gas assisted protocol. And you can you start with this carbogen and then light and sound that is often, you know, understandably scary, oppressive, you know, dark imagery, sad, discordant music, all of these things while you're breathing carbogen, because that's the one that makes you feel like you're being buried alive to the point where you literally get, get to snapping, can't take it anymore, you dissociate into, you know, I've just died, whatever, I've given up the ghost in some way. And then Seamlessly transitioning into like celestial euphoric. The gas blend then shifts to nitrous and nitrous oxide and oxygen blend.

Nitroxygen, I think you call it in the book. Yes, literally, like the Whippets that we talked about in our other podcast that you can use, you know, for sexual enhancement. Literally. Like, like, I guess that's what they're called, Whippets, where you use the little whipped cream canister cartridges and the balloon. And is that what you guys are using to deliver the nitroxygen?

No, I mean, we'd use medical grade gas splitters. So you can actually.

Oh, you're so professional.

The ratios and those kind of things. I mean, I mean the challenge with. Anytime you're inhaling a pure gas that doesn't have oxygen and is no surprise, hypoxia, I would say it's not advised and certainly not to be misused. But yeah, with a gas splitter you can dial the ratios and the strongest ratio you can do, they have sort of set points on them is 70, 30 nitrous oxide to oxygen. And that's still ensuring 150% oxygenation over anything else you'd be doing.

Okay, so that's basically the vital respiration protocol that you talk about in the book. Combining carbogen and then doing nitroxygen.

Yeah, with static apnea. Right. So then you're doing the full inhalations and maximum breathing breath holds and then seeing how long can you remain in that space without thinking. And what the nitroxygen does is it shunts you for three to 12 minutes into double amplitude delta wave EEG activity, which is a very rare. Usually we only enter delta in deep dreamless sleep. B, double amplitude. This was discovered at MIT by a team of anesthesiologists. They're like, what the hell? We've never seen this. We didn't expect, and this appears to be a thing we were working backwards from, knowing that the experience delivered these transcendent repeat insights. So we're like, we know there's a there there. Now these guys are telling us what the mechanism of action is. Oh, shit. It's double amplitude delta. And interestingly, the brain normalizes and adapts. You can't just go camp out there for hours at a time. Like after that, three to 12 minutes, you go back to baseline and potentially kind of alpha beta and you lose access to that information because it's, it's only disclosed down in Delhi delta and you get back up into conscious waking state prison, house of language territory. And it slips through your fingers, which is what William James and Winston Churchill commented on back in the day. And then you're like, okay, now we've got our, the same way Carbogen was this rabbit hole to go check out. And you're like, oh, fascinating, there's a there, there. The same thing with these delta waves. Because that MIT study did it, right? We knew from Herb Benson's work at Harvard that nitric and nitrous oxide side had this. Some form of interrelationship and some contribution to peak states neuronal signaling. And then Karl Deisseroth at Stanford did something with ketamine, found that that was 3 hertz, which is within the delta band as well, if you think about it, right? 0.1 Hz to 4 Hz is the delta wave. That's the lowest EEG below 0.1, you're effectively brain dead. There is no neuroelectric activity, right? So we are right on the doorstep of a near death experience. And what folks have found with the antidepressant benefits of ketamine, the antidepressant and anxiolytic effects of nitrous oxide, you pretty much anywhere you look, they're like, oh, it appears to intercept the hypothalamus and create a brainstem reset. You know, it affects the brainstem, it stimulates the brainstem. The stimulation of the brainstem seems to correlate with EEG signature of delta wave states. And what Deisseroth at Stanford found was he's like, okay, ketamine seems to benefit people for depression because they have a dissociative or out of body experience and that stepping outside yourself appears to help you when you come back to yourself. Okay? Then he found that it was 3 Hz signature in certain locations in the brain. Then he went back and electrically stimulated 3 hertz without the ketamine. So no drug intervention now, just electrical stimulation of the brain. Now that we know what is it, it did. And the same dissociative experience happened. They had the same out of body state and the same positive benefits to their mood and well being. So now you're like, okay, so that vital respiration protocol and really even all of this hedonic engineering can become, oh, how do we do everything possible to let a person who's tired, wired and stressed, who's, you know, jacked up, messed up, all the things we're carrying, the burdens of life, we get to have an experience that both charges us up, so builds lots and lots of energy in our system, releases it in a Blissful white light culmination and then lets us ride that wave. Double amplitude delta EEG brain stem reset, high vagal nerve tone, right? And full discharge and reboot. And even, even if it was content neutral, even if it was just like white noise static that whole time, you'd wake up feeling like a million bucks like woo, boy oh boy, I just feel like I just had my Jiffy lube oil change, 15 point inspection, I'm ready to go. But it's not neutral. It's usually some of the most profoundly inspired and epiphanic states we've ever had that often appear to be overwhelmingly meaningful and can often guide the way into a more courageous, higher integrity, more creative, more effective life to live.

And by the way, I should caution people, alcohol is one of the best ways to reduce delta wave activity. So you'd never want to combine this, preferably with any form of alcohol. But one thing I do know that actually increases delta wave EEG activity, that I don't think you mentioned in your book, that it would be interesting to kind of toss this into the equation is, is there's an injectable peptide many people use to enhance deep sleep called delta sleep inducing peptide. And literally as the name implies, it induces delta wave EEG activity. And that would be interesting to kind of see how that plays into the nitroxygen carbogen breathwork mix that you just described to see if you could shift it just a little bit more into delta wave state.

Have you checked that out at all? No, tested it again?

I mean I've used the delta way peptide peptide, but I. Or the delta sleep peptide, but I haven't combined it with that. And I've only used it for sleep, not for altered states of consciousness. So it'd be something interesting to try or it'd be something interesting for one of our listeners to try and perhaps just leave, leave comments over in the show notes. You know, one other thing regarding breath that you talk about that I think is it's going to be interesting for people because I'm actually working on an article right now about nootropics and how to kind of blend different nootropics to accelerate or, or break neural activity, such as if you were to say overdose on a microdose of LSA or LSD for productivity, how to combine things like L theanine and creatine and Bacopa Monnieri or black seed oil, some of the things that actually kind of break the excitability or irritability that might occur from Overconsumption of something one might consider to be an upper or an accelerant. You actually get into the same type of concept regarding breath. You kind of lay out acceleration and braking and steering. And I'd love for people to hear a little bit about what that actually means, like how you could use something as simple as breath to accelerate or to brake or to steer one's psyche.

Yeah, I mean, the intent there was that, you know, I think there's a lot of. There's a lot of sort of interest, but also hype and false complexity as people are getting into breath work these days, you know, and just to try and really, really ground it, which is basically saying, hey, you can kind of upregulate how you're doing. You can add more pep or juice to what you do. That would be the acceleration. You can down regulate how your body and brain are feeling. So, you know, you can basically take a little heat off the ball. So if you're feeling stressed, agitated, those kind of things, you can meaningfully slow yourself down to a more. More autonomic, receptive. Right. You know, sort of parasympathetic state. And then you can also kind of transgress what you're doing. And that would be the steering, like, can I go someplace else? Can I see what another way of being alive and receiving information feels like? We, you know, we kind of know just intuitively examples of all that. Right. So that, you know, you can. I mean, a classic one is sort of Tony Robbins bouncing up and down on his mini tramp and huffing and puffing, or, you know, Michael. Michael Phelps, you know, breathing fast and slapping his back before stepping up on the blocks. You're like, okay, I'm getting ready to do a high energy, high output, high consequence thing, you know, or ski racers in the gates where they puff and they bang their. Bang their poles together. I like that. That is an upregulation technique. The opposite could be, you know, or I'm going on that stage and I'm scared out of my mind. So I take a few slow breaths and I'm really trying to see myself down, or I'm a bit, you know, or I'm walking down the aisle or Lamaze breathing. Right. You know, I'm trying to actually dump energy from an aroused and stressed system. And then there's the steering or transgressing states of consciousness. And you alluded to them earlier, Ben. But, you know, hyperventilation in some combinations with breath holds is a very effective way of exploring different states. And it's because it blows off CO2, it pushes our blood into the alkaline ph and that has all sorts of knock on effects to consciousness. Once you realize that, you're like, I'm in charge of my consciousness and I'm in charge of it with my hand on the lever. Which is as simple as it could possibly get. Which is what is the rate, depth and rhythm of how I cycle air through my body and lungs.

Yeah, it's. It's kind of similar to something like using a. Because I actually do this like a WIM HOF process protocol prior to a really cold ice plunge, you know, doing the entire inner fire Pranayama esque breath up, which would be an accelerant. And then once any dizziness has subsided, shifting to the cold tub straight into a box breathing protocol. And that would be an example of like, like an accelerant followed by, you know, box breathing is a little bit of. It's kind of like a combination of braking and steering to a certain extent. Although I consider steering to be something I would use more for like a, like a meditation, meditative or a plant medicine experience where especially for some deeper plant medicine journeys, you can usually use your breath as fuel to actually literally steer you into different places. But this idea of recognizing that breath is not just for relaxation, not just for de stressing, nor is it just for amping ones up. It can be used as both an accelerant and a brake and as a steering mechanism is something that you unpack in the book. And I thought that was super interesting and something that, that a lot of folks probably don't think about. Now I know we're running a little bit short on time, but you've mentioned a couple of times that you do like workshops that you have people come in and try some of these things or learn from you. Is that something that you do out there in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado? Do you travel and put on events or if somebody actually wanted to work with you or with your team. How does that actually work?

Yeah, we're doing one in the mountains near Aspen in Colorado in a few weeks time. That's unfortunately all full up. But then we do other things for groups like ypo and we also do adventure courses in Utah, in Baja. We basically kind of try and follow the hydrologic cycle of the seasons, right? So the snow falls in the mountains and we can do like ski, mountaineering and leadership things. Then the snow melts and it goes into the Aspen groves and we do kind of like hot, you know, midsummer gatherings and then it Flows down into the rivers and the canyons and we go canyoneering and adventuring in the fall and then it pumps out to the Sea of Cortez and we do, you know, kite surfing and free diving and those kinds of things in Baja. And that's our sort of cycle. You know, we just kind of follow the seasons for flow camp this summer, you know, we're also doing pretty much everything written in the book, right? Which is martial arts with an aikido master who actually trained Seal Team 6 as well as Tony Rose Robbins. You know, deep body work, acro, yoga, you know, theragun, massaging all sorts of things for bodily integration. We're doing intellectual in theory, but we're also doing percussion. The band Rising Appalachia is going to be there. We're doing everything from gospel, church, karaoke, you know, like singing the American songbook joyfully together, but also learning group percussion as an, you know, an entrainment and group flow tool. Then culminating in the middle of the week where they, you know, and then doing breath work, static apnea, pulse oximetry, personal scores measurement, et cetera. And then working with Colorado physicians to do a research project, quote unquote, right, where everybody gets to participate in additional layers of breath work. Plus wearable base like sub packs, theragun massage partner spotter cannabinoids, so edible cannabinoids, you know, in the state of Colorado, which is recreational events available into the gas assisted nitroxygen and carbogen, and then potentially on specifically inducted patient doctor prescribed oxytocin and ketamine nasal spray. So now what we can do is you can do the synchronized consumption of prescription pharmaceuticals and over the counter compounds in, combined with stacked protocols, doing all the other stuff, the breath work, the body work, the music, the sound, the lights, to create basically celebratory church. So it's sort of instead of byob, it's byoe, like bring your own entheogens, right? Everybody is doing something that is not underground, is completely sanctioned and above board. Each round gets increasingly intense. But the intention is not to sort of go cross eyed and drooling. The intention is what might a postmodern contemporary, temporary celebratory sacrament look like these days? And can we create one that is using household materials and yet nonetheless gets us to where we're hoping to go, can deliver insight, healing and connection, and can reaffirm our both collective and individual desire to, you know, step up and show up and what's ours to do.

Yeah, well, that's especially cool for those Self experimenters and psychonauts who don't want to mess around with this stuff at home and want to learn it from the experts. Going to a workshop like this would actually be, I think, pretty helpful to be able to gather more information and experience some of the practical aspects within the book and some of your other teachings and writing. We really just really listening in. Jamie and I scratched the surface on some of the stuff that I wanted to get into, but this book is one of the those books that I took a while to get through just because every page has some super interesting, super interesting information and also just big vision thinking in it. So I would recommend that you give it a read. It's called Recapture the Rapture and I'll link to it and everything that we Talked about@BenGreenfieldFitness.com recapturerapture but worth a read. And also link to the other podcast that Jamie and I did about the this whole idea of enhancing sexual experiences using again, a lot of the tactics and the hedonic sex matrices and things like that that he outlines within the book. So, Jamie, you hit it out of the ballpark with this thing and kudos for writing it.

Oh, thanks, man. I mean, you know, it just felt like, yeah, it was a swing for the fence kind of play, but I hope that it can support people because if, you know, the simplest would be, hey, you're not crazy. The world's kind of gone bit a little crazy and giving us a just acknowledging that so that we're not beating ourselves up, you know, next realizing, hey, there are ways to remember, you know, to find that loving feeling that we might think we've lost. And there are ways for us to get back up on our feet and there are ways for us to reconnect with each other. And oh, by the way, you know, if it ever feels like this world's a little overwhelming, if you had a choice of which movie you'd show up in, wouldn't it be Star Wars? Wouldn't it be Harry Potter? You know, like, we're hardwired for those stories of like tiny little bands of rebel Misfits at the 11th hour, saving the universe from unspeakable evil. Right? The Hobbit, all of them, right? We love them. And so like, what if we're born into that period in history where it's go time, where it's guts ball and we've been blessed with the tools to get the job done? So you said read the book, but I'd even encourage folks listen to the book Because I actually got to read it myself during that crazy snowstorm that shut Texas down in the beginning of the year. And feedback has been that that is a much higher bandwidth communication than just the words on the page. So if you have the choice, definitely check out the audible.

Does it come complete with like, like the, like the sirens and the shouting and the mass panic from all the Texans freezing their asses off at 50 degrees?

It was just so quiet in our neighborhood. Nothing happened. It was perfect. Cocoon time.

I love it. All right, so cool. The audiobook's available to everybody, and I'll link to that in the show notes as well. So, Jamie, thanks so much for coming on the show, man. It's as usual, pleasure talking to you.

Always been and really, really psyched on all the overlaps in our life and our inquiries and our community. So I hope this lands for you guys listening as well.

All right, folks, well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Jamie Wheal signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks. Thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every, every week.