Recapture the Rapture: Biohacking Sex, Tantric Breathwork, Plant Medicines For Orgasmic Enhancement & Much More!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. And you can trip yourself out so it's almost sort of like gas. Brakes and steering can all be controlled by varying the rate, volume, depth and even content of our breathing. We are needed at full strength, and we can't be at full strength if we're limping and crimped and collapsed and contracted around our trauma, health, performance, nutrition.

Longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield.

Welcome to the show. Well, well, well. Today's episode is interesting, slash, probably not safe for work because we talk about the existence of the practice of making babies and how to dramatically upgrade the pleasure that one might derive from said practice. As a matter of fact, after recording this pretty fun episode, actually with my friend Jamie Wheal, I got a hotel room a couple weekends later with my wife and we proceeded to have an amazing seven or eight hours digging into just about everything that you hear described on this podcast from different Nitric oxide and breathwork and tantric protocols. Yes, including the use of whippets. It's been quite some time since I have since I have purchased whipped cream canisters, balloons and crackers on Amazon and done a little nos, so to speak, to some of the microdosed plant medicine protocols that we discuss to yes, even nipple clamps. And I believe that's the first time I have ever said nipple clamps in a podcast introduction. We had a great time though, and honestly, you know, I love to explore all sectors of human physiology and biology. We're all adults, I think we can talk about this stuff. I believe most people, last I checked, like to orgasm. Some people like to do it multiple times in one period of time. And you're going to learn all that stuff on today's show. So hopefully I've given you enough of a of a teaser pun intended, I suppose, in this case for you to sit back and listen to the rest of this episode. Well, folks, it's been a little while since I've had today's podcast guest on the show. He joined me years ago when he was talking about this book called Stealing Fire How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs and maverick scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. And whenever I talk to this cat, I always ask myself, why haven't I had him on the podcast more recently or more frequently? Because he is a wealth of knowledge on both the psychological and the practical aspects when it comes to kind of physiological tweaking of optimizing performance and flow states. He has just written a really great new book that I have seen bits and pieces and previews of and that I'm waiting with bated breath to get my hands on the full copy of. It's called Recapture the Rapture. Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World that's Lost Its Mind. So aside from having kind of a shitty title, I think it could be a pretty good book. It's actually a great title, Recapture the Rapture. My guest, in case you didn't guess his name yet, is Jamie Will. And Jamie is a peak performance expert. This is, this is what he does. He engineers people to achieve a flow state. And this book is really about kind of engineering many so called hedonic experiences, you know, including sex. And just so you guys know, the thing that first kind of made me want to get Jamie on the podcast was hearing him talk about some of the more advanced ways that he hacks the, the flow experience during sex. And so I want to dive into that in today's show, which means if you're driving in a minivan with your five children, this might not be the best one to listen to right now, at least. But I also want to get into some of the other aspects of his book because he works with professional athletes. He works for the NFL, the NBA, the mlb, Google, Goldman Sachs, Cisco, ypo, US Naval War College, Special Operations Command. I mean, this, this guy is really in demand. So we' we are extremely privileged to have him on the show. Jamie, welcome man.

Oh, thanks for having me, Ben.

Yeah, for sure. So this book, Recapture the Rapture, what exactly? You know, if you were, if you're hanging out with somebody on an elevator for a disproportionately long period of time, how would you describe this book?

Yeah, well, I mean, the simplest is it's kind of the, what turned out to be the sort of required sequel to Stealing Fire. So if Stealing Fire was, you know, obviously conceived about five years ago, written about three years ago, was saying, hey, it really feels like there's this groundswell of people tinkering with consciousness for all sorts of positive outcomes. And then of course, you know, after that we had Michael Pollan, we've had sort of the psychedelic renaissance, Tim Ferriss and everybody else. You know, it's become sort of very much more visible that those kinds of state seeking experiences are becoming more normalized. But then in the three years since the book has come out, it's very much seemed like, like a children's crusade, like a bunch of People are just breaking the sticks off bottle rockets and still hoping they'll go where we point them. So this book, Recapture the Rapture, is basically trying to answer the question of what happens once we steal a fire. You know, how do we not burn down the house?

Yeah. Well, what would be an example of that? Of somebody. How do you describe it? The analogy of the bottle rocket.

Oh, just breaking the sticks off them and then still hoping that they can hit their tongue.

What would be an example of that going on right now that you think is occurring there'? So called breaking the sticks off bottle rockets.

Well, I mean, you know, it's, it's an easy target at this point. It's gone a little dormant in the last four or five months of quarantine and this and that, but basically the entire west coast psychedelic Conchi, Burning Man, Neo Tantra, cow ceremony, sound bath culture, which just thoroughly shat the bed.

Yeah.

You know, and crawled up its own asshole in a sort of, you know, in a paroxysm of Instagram narcissism.

Yeah.

And, you know, versus holy shit. We have been granted access to or simply hijacked the keys to the kingdom. You know, the kinds of initiatory experiences and. Yeah. And non ordinary states, revelatory states that used to be the domain of monks, martial artists and mystics. And now we just have people with no learning, no dedication, no commitment sourcing from those places and then promptly putting it in the ditch. And not just in the ditch where like a Tibetan lama would have cautioned you or a Zen lineage teacher would have said, hey, watch out for this, you know, not, not even the kind of nuanced and subtle ones, literally like smack dab back into the same ditch that their baby boomer parents put it in 40 years ago.

Yeah.

You know, cultic tendencies, magical thinking, addictive obsessive behaviors, disconnection from practical realities.

Yeah. Cavalier approach, often in my opinion, bastardized use of plant medicine just because it is considered a noble and laudable thing that people are using as an excuse in many cases to get high and say that they're finding themselves on the weekend, you know, in their, whatever, New York condo with a shaman. But yeah, I, I agree, it, it's, it did. At least until Covet got pretty out of control.

I had to laugh at one of our mutual friends who has a very well known podcast of his own, and he was just casually describing a 30th birthday for his girlfriend down in Cabo where they were engaging in quote unquote party medicines. Okay. I think I Think we. I was like, you mean, you mean ketamine and ecstasy? You know, but like there's no, there's not actually a category called party medicines there, right?

And neither should the two phrases or two words, party and medicine necessarily go hand in hand that often. I'm always going to raise an eyebrow at that. But, but when we talk about these plant medicines, obviously in the book Stealing Fire and in my last interview with you, you did talk about, as you've just alluded to, how they can be used to hack the flow state to a certain extent, as can many of the other things that you talked about in Stealing Fire, for example, such as tweaking, respiration and breath work, or for example, paying attention to things like vagal, nerve tone adventures, especially extreme adventures, et cetera. But when it comes to what the flow state has to do with sex and with partner connectivity, can you explain what the science behind that is or why that's even important to think about?

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, if you'll indulge me for a sec, let's just do sort of five minutes of setup as to why these things might matter. Because in writing Stealing Fire, my initial thought was saying, hey, exdosis, like peak states, no matter how we get there, could be meditation, breathwork, psychedelics, sexuality, you know, music, extremes, extreme endurance sports, you name it. They take us literally. Ecstasis, outside of ourselves, outside of our waking conscious, ego based identity. And that when we do that, that's generally supremely enjoyable, but often quite profound and productive and helpful. And what I realized is that as I was writing that book, it was nominally about ecstasis, but every time I would cite an example, I would always be pointing to, hey, those peak states actually help us heal, and those peak states actually help us connect and collaborate with each other. And so then I realized it wasn't simply just, you know, an advocacy that we should go to the mountaintop. It was actually much more like a full triangle, a full pyramid. And that while ecstasis is at the top of the pyramid, catharsis, deep healing and communitas, like profound connection with other people are the basis of that pyramid. And it feels like that is the sort of, that is the geometry of our life. You know, if you put those three things into motion, they become a spinning flywheel and we're forever seeing the highest heights, remembering what we forgot, using that inspiration and information to come back down into our mortal, fallible lives and bodies, fix where we're broken, and do it in relationship, in connection to each other. So that really felt like that's the sort of flywheel of becoming. We're always cycling through one of those three places. And if we get to pursue it sincerely enough over a long enough period, with enough dedication to kind of doing our homework, to acting on the things, we're shown that ideally at some point we become, you know, twice born humans. We become homegrown humans, like, and, you know, the Greeks would call it anthropos. You know, the most obvious visual images is Leonardo's Vitruvian man. You know, someone balanced head and heart, balanced masculine and feminine, you know, balance left and right and up and down. We're integrated and we're poised to be at our full expression.

Yeah, be at our full expression and be fully, fully present. I think that was a part of Stealing Fire that you talked about when you talked about the, the ecstasis, that sense of being, you know, an individual and an I, you know, gets replaced with that feeling of being a collective we. And the communitas that you described is almost that ecstatic state of unity. But, you know, from, from what I understood from your previous book, Stealing Fire, you only get that when you're also completely and fully 100% present. So we're talking about kind of the, kind of the, the. The combination of ecstasy, being in a flow state and extreme presence, allowing for some type of a communitas relationship between, you know, in this case, for example, two individuals who might be making love, for example.

Well, exactly. And I mean, and you figure if there's a test case for can we get along with another human, you know, the first one is the dyad, the pair or the partnership, and specifically a romantic or sexual partnership. And because if we can't pull that one off, because evolution effectively through the kitchen sink at that one, you know, like, whether we want to or not, whether we know how to or not, evolution has primed us to procreate. And when we do, there is a cascade of neurochemistry that creates pair bonding. We literally sort of learn to make love, you know, not the actual act of coupling, but literally act of synthesizing the neurophysiological profile of affection and attraction and connection. So that does feel. I mean, a. It's a good test case. Like, if we can't figure out how to love the ones we're with, we're pretty much fucked as far as, like trying to figure out world peace. And there's also this notion of all the evolutionary imprinting just to kind of finish the tee up, like the title, recapture the rapture is twofold. You know, one is because, you know, there's Yates, the poet, right, wrote that famous poem the Second Coming, you know, and in that, in it, which was by the way like the most Googled poem of 2016, like Things Fall apart, the center cannot hold.

Like it really well.

Oh yeah, like the Wall Street Journal did a semantic analysis and uncovered that. But there's another line in there that has haunted me for years which was the best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity. And if you look around our world these days, whether it's conspiracy theories to fuck nut politicians, to whomever, the worst are filled with passionate intensity and they have hijacked the mic of our collective future. So my inquiry was really well, huh, how do the best of us, the rest of us, recapture our rapture, our lowercase rapture, our healing, our inspiration, our connection, so that we can take back the wheel from the nut hatches that are actually driving us towards literally the fulfillment of rapture ideologies. And rapture ideologies is not just fundamentalist religious beliefs like ISIS or Christian Zionists who want a Middle Eastern war to kick off Armageddon. It's techno singularians. It's people who are saying we're going to upload our consciousness to computers or we're going to piss off to Mars. It's any ideology that shares the structure of saying the world as it is is fucked. But there's an inflection point coming and we can see it from here. And when we get to that inflection point, me and mine, like my crew, my tribe, we come up roses on the other side of that inflection point. Like things are demonstrably better for us over there. Therefore number four, pin it never, you know, and go off the cliff with no skid marks and never mind the collateral damage.

Yeah.

And so like that's the kind of state of the world right now. And right now the worst, the most passionately intense worst are calling the shots. So for us collectively to recapture our lowercase rapture, our inspiration, our healing and our connection, we have to have some form of technology that is open source, that is scalable and that's anti fragile. So open source, meaning it's kind of like the WordPress of reality. Like here, here's a, here's a, here's an engine that you can use to build your own. But you know, there's different cultures, there's different customs, there's different, you know, communities and identities. Like there is no singular one size fits all solution. And any, any attempt to do that, no matter how well intentioned, ends in fascism. So let's not even go there. What's the sort of psycho spiritual equ Equivalent of the blockchain? Right. That's configurable. So scalable, it has to be cheap or free, otherwise most people, the bottom several billion, will never have a chance to experience it. And it has to be antifragile, meaning that when things get worse, it gets better. So for me that's kind of like, okay, now we're now into that situation of like, how do you heal the world via tools that everyone can pick up for themselves and make their own? And how can we sort of bring a design centered approach to it? Literally, like, what would ideo, the design company do? Not what would Jesus do? Wwid, what would IDEO do? And if you've seen like, you know, I think in 2015 they came out with their human centered design toolkit because they're like, hey, we design office chairs and we design cool, you know, kitchen implements and snazzy clocks and this and that. But the reality is the way we go about creatively thinking about designing stuff is probably helpful all around the world. World for a Kenyan village or an Indian city or any of these, just humans trying to solve the human stuff. So if you figure that out, you're like, okay, if we want it to be open source and scalable, then we should for sure. And we're trying to heal, inspire and connect, then we should act as close to evolutionary drivers as possible. Because basically evolution has encoded us to do these certain things very, very strongly. So if you think about it, respiration is a strong one. Right? I mean, even just that. Right. Even the idea that it's something I.

Feel compelled to do every now and again.

Exactly. We feel compelled to do it. And you know, for anybody that's played with any form of breath work, whether it's Wim HOF or holotropic breath work or whatever, you realize, you know, your first crack at static apnea, how long can I hold my breath? Right. What always happens, involuntary breath movements, Right.

Diaphragmatic contraction.

Yeah. They're running out of oxygen. They're not. And it's a buildup of CO2. But you're like, holy shit. So the first time I feel compelled to breathe, I've actually got, you know, more or less like 40 to 50% more gas in the tank. You're like, that's, that's interesting. Kind of weird. But you're like, oh, evolution did it that way because if we cut it any closer, we would likely have snuffed it by accident more often than what's sustainable. Right. So it built in this huge buffer as well as very, very strong incentives to get it right. Don't forget to breathe. Right next in that list, sexuality. Like if we forget to procreate, then we cease to exist.

Right.

So that, so, so literally kitchen sink, amount of incentive to ensure that. And you know, with the exception of things like the Kama Sutra, you know, which has a few pages on how or Japanese medieval pillow books, you know, or the occasionally sort of bawdy medieval sonnet, like I mean most of, for sure all primates and all animals. And then, you know, millions of years of hominid evolution, we figured out how to do that with no instruction manual. You're like, okay, there's a there there now so we've got respiration sexuality and then just a general category of embodiment, which just means how, how we tune and shape living in these skins of ours in these meat suits directly affects bodies and brains, shape, hearts and minds. So there's all sorts of long levers there and vagal tone and other endocannabinoid system and other key, big metronomes in our bodies are keys there. And then you can think of amplifiers like substances and music. And if you take a look at those, what we would normally call the kind of big five, you're like, okay. Respiration sexuality, embodiment with the force multipliers of substances and music are literally the building blocks of all most transformative practices and even underpin most religious and cultural programming we've ever had. Not always all at once, but in a kind of a mix and match toolkit.

Yeah. And one of the things that you had sent over to me that I took a look at was almost like a matrices for, for connecting a lot of these components specifically during the experience of sex to enhance. I mean we, we already know that there's, there's kind of, it's almost like this neurophysiological response to orgasm that, that puts one into, into a flow like trance like state that often begins to occur, you know, due to the oxytocin and the vasopressin release and everything else, even, even before an orgasm. But there are, there are certain ways that we can actually enhance that flow state or increase the ability to enter that kind of trance like state that we might only normally experience during say like an orgasmic threshold or post orgasm in many cases. And I found that absolutely intriguing when you Started to show me and talk to me about some of these aspects of this so called, what do you call it? The hedonic yoga matrices of becoming.

Yeah, I mean, basically. So, yeah, I mean just to kind of. Now we can connect the dots here, which is that if we have those five tools and because my assumption is that the psychedelic renaissance is doomed basically is that it's going to be commodified by venture capital and big pharma, it will become, you know, there will be a regression to the mean that many of the most idealistic promises of that, of those experiences won't turn out to be the case. And even if it did start to work, meaning a whole lot of people powering up into goodness, truth, beauty and taking courageous stands for human dignity, it would get shut down at the stroke of a pen. So it's highly fragile. It's highly susceptible to both state and corporate capture. So if we want something that's more versatile, we kind of need to build the. Not the Anarchist Cookbook, like that famous book that was the most stolen book from libraries that I don't think you can get anymore. Yeah, maybe not, but like how to build bombs with, you know, the stuff under your kitchen sink instead. Instead it's more like the Alchemist Cookbook. Like what is a toolkit that anybody anywhere can use with minimal, minimally exotic materials or practices that can actually get the job done of inspiration, healing and connection. So if you take a look at one of them, you know, there's several threads into this investigation for me, but one of them was Rick Doblin, the founder of Maps, and I were sharing a stage with Jason Silva actually in San Francisco last year. And we were just kind of chatting in between sessions and Rick was like, oh yeah, you know, our most recent research is showing that the closest analog to the mdma, PTSD therapy. So when they were taking veterans and they were taking survivors of, you know, childhood and domestic trauma and putting them under the influence of the, you know, the compound mdma. And then they were testing them, they were finding high amounts of oxytocin, prolactin and vasopressin. And then. And Rick said, yeah, you know, and that the closest analog we found is the post orgasmic state. And you sort of think about that for a second and you're like, wow, you know, this is a 30 year, tens to hundreds of millions of dollar project trying to get a schedule one substance through FDA approval. And it's going. It's further than it's ever been. It has profound impacts on the people who are fortun enough to get to be a part of that sanctioned experience. But it's complicated and it's fragile and it's not accessible to everybody. And you're like, well, wait, so there's that option. Or how on earth could we get as many people as possible to that exalted state known as post orgasmic? So you're like, okay, so that's interesting. That's really, really interesting. And there's a book called Love and Other Drugs by, I think, a Yale and Oxford duo. And they've basically been making that case. They've been saying, hey, psychopharmacology and even psychosocial sexual pharmacology, specifically, they, they spend time on mdma, oxytocin, and a couple of other compounds can literally be a profound and powerful adjunct to couples therapy, to closeness to all of those kinds of things. And I don't know if you have you. Do you know Nicole Prowse? Have you. Have you guys, have you come across her work?

Doesn't even sound familiar, actually. So now make me, make me feel bad about what I'm missing out on here.

Well, no, she, she's awesome. And you should for sure have her on your show. She's a Kinsey Institute, you know, former professor there. She was at ucla, and then she ended up peeling out and starting her own independent research think tank because all she, she studies sexuality. And she was actually the one, if you, you probably saw the headlines, I don't know, when five years ago, when there were sort of some. It was, it was in that era of TED Talks talking about, like, the addictive nature of pornography.

Okay.

And she and her lab had come out with actually a counter study saying actually, it doesn't seem like sexual addiction is actually a thing. And they'd been actually measuring the physiology, measuring the responses. And she caught a ton of shit for that one. And then there was another one she did where they literally 3D printed a bunch of dildos and had women select versus just guessing or estimating from rulers on a page what was their preferred penis size. But they actually did. What did they call it? They said haptic preference, which basically meant rummaging around in a box of dicks and pick one you like the best. And what it turned out was that women tended to prefer penises that were slightly smaller for their longtime partner, slightly bigger for one night stands, that kind of thing. So needless to say, she has been in. Which was, you know, nominally correlated with higher testosterone, et cetera. So that's the whole, like, you know, Lululemon yoga chick, you know, sneaking off from her retreat at Esalen to go bang a biker in Carmel. So needless to say, she's steered into potentially controversial sexual subjects. But she's done it from the place of a clinician. And one of her most interesting studies, at least as far as kind of what I was tracking, was she's been researching the use of women's orgasm as pharmaceutical prescription. So she's literally gone. She's kind of reversed what Rick and Maps have been doing, which is can you simulate love via exogenous compounds? And can you actually instead make love via internal physiological response? And they're exploring its use for depression, for physical pain alleviation, for all of these kind of things. And she's like, okay, wow, that's really neat. I mean, there's a ton of taboos. There's a ton of kind of titillation and controversy around this, which is crazy.

It's kind of come full circle because female hysteria was once a medical diagnosis that I think included, among other things, sexual desire and female orgasm. And it was something associated with being absolutely batshit crazy and having hysteria. And now you're saying that the ability for a female to be able to regularly orgasm could actually be something that could be diagnosed or could be prescribed for psychological health.

Yeah, exactly. I think even Aristotle went so far as saying woman's orgasm can prevent her from conceiving children. So, yes, there's a long and storied fear of that right up to cardi b and wet ass pussy. So, but the point here is simply that, oh, wow. Our natural physiological sexual responses can play a role in healing.

Neat.

You know, here's the neurochemical profile, and if you can get to it via a true DIY methodology like sexuality and orgasm versus a highly controlled, rare, questionable purity, questionably neurotoxic compound like mdma, which would you choose? Yeah, you know, and if in doubt, you know, I would say always go with the endogenous versus the exogenous. If there's a way to tune or tweak our own systems, our own bodies and brains, to create more of a substance, hormone, chemical, whatever it would be that is beneficial, healthful, or desirable, that's almost always a safer bet than ingesting or absorbing something from the outside. Because our body is mediating it, it's tuning it, it's dialing it. Optimally for us. It's like peptides versus steroids.

Right, Right, exactly, exactly. That's a good analogy. Because peptides are simply acting a Lot of times on the cell surface receptor to induce an endogenous release of, let's say, something like growth hormone versus just injecting growth hormone. So you're looking at more of an enhancement of the endogenous response. Laying all that down as kind of like a groundwork, a framing for this idea of enhancing sexual flow or kind of like hacking into this sexual experience using some of these techniques that you outline. On the hedonic sex matrices, one of the things that you tackle first is nitric oxide. And by the way, for those of you who are listening in, I'll link to all this if you just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comRecapture that's BenGreenfieldFitness.comReCapture I'll link to all the stuff that Jamie and I talk about, including an image of this yoga matrices. But the first thing that you discuss is nitric oxide for you when it comes to using that on a practical level. I've talked before about using, let's say beetroot, pumpkin seed, beet juice, watermelon, extra virgin olive oil. The old school hack I used to do when I was bodybuilding backstage, where you'd have a little red wine and dark chocolate for enhancing vasodilation. When it comes to the nitric oxide component, what are some of your favorite tactics there?

Yeah, well, I mean, and again, since we teed up respiration just to give people the super high end, which is that oxygen gets all the love, but there's really oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Right. And it's that blend of atmospheric air that we are dealing with. Nitrogen is fundamentally inert. And so we're mostly just sort of metabolizing oxygen and spitting out a little bit more CO2. Right. But by playing with the blending and ratios of those, you can meaningfully shift consciousness. You can upregulate yourself if you're feeling flat or down or lethargic. You can down regulate yourself if you're feeling stressed or anxious, you know, and you can trip yourself out. So it's almost sort of like gas. Brakes and steering can all be controlled by varying the rate, volume, depth and even content of our breathing. And so one of the things you can do is gas assisted breath work. And two of the most interesting ones is Matt is either radically depleting CO2 via hyperventilation, right. Which creates alkalosis, alkaline blood. It creates the tingles, the tetany, all of the things that people have experienced. If you've done anything resembling, you know, holotropic or intensive Hyperventilatory breath work that can then lead to shifts in states of consciousness, including visionary state. Stan Groff, who was at Johns Hopkins, who was one of the early LSD researchers who were actually partnering with on a new breathwork project at Hopkins, you know, famously substituted breathwork for LSD when LSD was, was scheduled and got as much or deeper experiences from people just doing that. Just massively blowing off CO2 into a, into a hypocapnic state.

Oh yeah, it's actually we'll do that a lot as we. I have a very weird family. My wife and I will do either WIM HOF or holotropic sometimes. And we actually had an hour long session last week in which prior to us sitting, eye gazing, talking face to face, completing some journaling together, being in a space together, we did an hour of holotropic breathwork just laid out flat in our back. We also do eye gazing with our boys and we have a 20 to 40 minute routine we do in the sauna where we'll do the breath work. And it puts you into this state where you are indeed blowing off a lot of CO2 and then you kind of feel as though you shift slowly into this deep parasympathetic state afterwards. And it's wonderful for connectivity, for eye gazing. And when it comes to nitric oxide, are you actually increasing nitric oxide production via like the holotropic or the WIM HOF in addition to blowing off the CO2?

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. I don't know that specific question. I do know that I am. What am I? What am I? I mean, dumber than a bag of hammers and, and basically slow to impress. So basically, like if there's, if there's a way to do something, I always want to pin it to 11 to see what the fuck it actually is.

Well, you produce nitric oxide in your nasal passages, in your sinuses. So I would imagine if you are indeed taking the breath in through your nose and out through your mouth, you would see a pretty big increase in nitric oxide. And then the other thing is that we know that one of the best ways to get rid of something like sinusitis is humming, like breathing through the nose and then humming because your nose. I learned this when I interviewed James Nestor who wrote this really good book called Breath. Your nose is one of the few tissues that contains the, the same tissue in it as the clitoris and the penis. It can, or it can, it can have an erection and so when you breathe in through your nose, you increase the air circulation and the vibrations of that increase the production of nitric oxide in the nose and the sinuses, you get this little miniature nose erection. So if you are breathing in through your nose and then audibly like, oh, oh, oh, theoretically you're, you're creating a lot of nitric oxide.

Yeah, I think that was like that 2007 study from the Karolinsk Institute in Sweden which was talking about. It's actually a 15 times boost in nitric oxide with vibration of the nasal cavity, which actually leads to a fascinating hypothetical which I've written about. And I had to really tread carefully because you don't want to, you know, you just don't want to get out of your skis on this kind of thing. But the idea of aboriginal didgeridoo playing and the use of circular breathing, so a huge amount of very, very specific both cheek and nasal control to continue to create a continuous vibratory drone through the didgeridoo instrument via, you know, is almost certainly doing that thing right. You're doing circular nose breathing for ages. You're creating an acoustic drone which is also trance inducing. And your mass and you've got the vibratory wood right up against your skull and cheekbones and sinus cavity. And so the likelihood that the physiological mechanism of that is actually what was shifting musicians into dreamtime is really solid. And once you see that, you realize the Tibetan Om mane padme homage. Like there's the Kabbalistic iao, there's a ton of basically psycho magical practices around the world that all involve some short vibratory loop or mantra. And most of them again are those sort of vowel sounds which are able to extend and vibrate. And even the Hail Mary in Catholicism is basically an 8 to 10 second, 8 to 10 Hertz breath chord. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women blessed, the fruit of the womb, Jesus. Right? And if you just picture someone in the Middle Ages or you know, anybody anywhere at any time, kneeling in a dark church lit with lit votive candles in front of one of the saint, the, you know, the saints that you're venerating and not surprised that people could have visionary or state experiences is because of that heightened both breath control mechanism coupled with boosted nitric oxide production and then some form of psychological and cultural state, you know, mediated state experience. I've seen a deity, I've been visited by a saint, I've had an insight from the ancestors, whatever it would be is Endlessly fascinating to me. You're like, oh shit, this is like the cheat codes to like neuro anthropology. Yeah, we kind of like understand how we've always been doing this human thing together. Right, right.

So, so are you saying that, that prior to sex, as part of foreplay, what you could do as a couple is just sit face to face and do like, you know, three to five minutes of Wim Hof breathing through the nose with some kind of a hum or a chant on the exhale to increase nitric oxide, dump a bunch of CO2 and kind of accelerate the passage into that first flow state during the lovemaking that would occur afterwards.

Yeah, you continue dragging me back to the how tos. And yes, we will 100%, we will 100% cover them, but I think, you know, this is, I do feel there's both a sort of academic and an ethical responsibility to contextualize both. You know, here are the mechanisms of action so that people are actually empowered and have consent and choice. They understand what they're doing and how it works. And then also also the human factor, because without aggrandizing this too much, these are the cheat codes to the universe. And these have been the most closely kept secrets of adepts for thousands of years, usually shareable only by pain of death. And virtually no one ever got to use them. So the fact that we're geeking out on it, it's like, oh, here's because neuroscience, because MRIs, because oxytocin doesn't diminish the impact, the potency, et cetera, you can lose your physical mind and you can wreck your life playing with these hacks. They are literally, you're basically hotwiring the ecstatic circuitry of a primate nervous system. And the question is, for good or ill is entirely dependent on how we hold stuff.

Right?

So to finish the gases, we got three gases. We got oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide. Oxygen gets all the love. But the other two are actually really quite interesting. You can massively decrease carbon dioxide by hyperventilating what we've just been describing, but you can also super boost it. And carbogen is an actual. It's a gas blend where you actually run 70% oxygen. Let's think, how does it work? 70% CO2 with 30% oxygen. So this is a little bit like scuba divers who will substitute helium or hydrogen. They will substitute other gases for nitrogen so that when you're diving deep underwater, you, you don't get nitrogen narcosis. So they'll swap out a different inert gas so that doesn't happen. You don't get intoxicated down low. And they'll often boost oxygen in their scuba tanks so that you can ascend more rapidly. You don't get the bends. Right. So imagine we're just playing with that neck of the woods, and scuba divers have been way down that road longer than we have. But you can play with Carbogen, and what Carbogen will do is the exact opposite. So with 30% CO2, that's basically one and a half times what actually. Sorry, with 70% CO2, that is massively more CO2 in your system than you would ever normally have. You've got 30% oxygen, which is one and a half times atmosphere. So you're actually, you've got more of the red, rich red blood cells than you would ever know what to do with. But at the same time, your internal alarm system is screaming, mayday, mayday, mayday. You're suffocating alive.

Yeah, but in my opinion, like buying a car. Carbon generators, Those are like 700 bucks or so, right? To actually purchase a CO2 generator that would allow you to inhale carbon dioxide to that extent. I would question if you might be able to attain something similar with breathwork, but I don't know.

Yeah. And. Well, the thing that, I mean, I didn't even know about Carbogen until last year when Dr. Roger Walsh gave me his book. And it was based, it's called Higher Wisdom. And it was. It's an oral history of the First Psychedelic Renaissance 2.0. If you say, well, Renaissance begs the question, but if you say indigenous use for thousands of years was 1.0, and then the 1950s and 60s was 2.0. And we're now living into the 3.0. Going back and seeing what those researchers In Manitoba, at UCLA, at Hopkins were doing in the late 50s to early 60s is mind boggling. They were so ballsy and so creative and I mean, like Stan Grof back in Hungary was shooting people with like 250 to 500 mics of Sandoz LSD, putting strobe lights in their face, connecting them to EEGs and galvanic skin response and blasting people. The UCLA folks were using it for schizophrenic children ages 3 to 12. They were using it for oncology pain relief. In fact, the oncology center had such profound results with pain relief via, via LSD 25 at the time that the director of the hospital basically buried the evidence, buried the papers, because it was going to fuck their entire business model of pain management. And so in those stories I just stumbled across these, like, three different examples of the use of carbogen as a precursor to LSD therapy. And what they were doing was. And it was actually, it was a Hungarian colleague meduna of Stan Grofs, and he had been using it to basically create, to prompt epileptic seizures. Because that was kind of. That was the era of electroconvulsive therapy and sort of seizure therapy. Like the idea of like a cold reboot to the nervous system, then letting people power back up into some form of like homeostatic equilibrium, basically. Like, it's like when your computer's glitching and you just turn it off and you turn it back on and things work again. So that's what he was using it for. And it turned out not to pay out. But then the psychedelic therapist adopted it and they used it as a screen, a precursor to LSD therapy. So they'd put somebody under carbon respiration and see if they lost their shit, basically. And if they really, really lost their shit, then they wouldn't get to go through. For the LSD therapy, it was testing ab reaction, right? Or could they trigger a trauma reaction? And the thing that caught my eye was that several patients reported that they had more profound insights and breakthroughs on the carbogen than they did on the subsequent LSD therapy. And you're like, wait a second, that's super interesting. So that's carbon dioxide and tweaking it high and low. We know about supersaturating oxygen, that's fairly straightforward. The final one is nitrogen. And this gets to your question of nitric oxide. So nitrogen itself is in a. Not wildly interesting. Right. But two of its derivatives, nitric oxide, which is the neurotransmitter in our brains, which crosses the blood brain barrier. Herb Benson at Harvard called the Bliss molecule. It's responsible for deregulating stress responses, inducing lots of pleasurable neurochemistry and interior experience sometimes. He called it the spirit model. Cool. I know there's a movie about DMT of the same name, but Benson was there first. Then there's also nitrous oxide, what people would normally think of as laughing gas, right?

Like a, Like a. Like a whippet.

Yeah. Both of those are metabolic derivatives of the nitrogen family. And interestingly, nitrous oxide also breaks down into nitric oxide once it's in the body. So. So now we're into breath, right? And now we're into breath as a. You know, the bottom line is any one of those five things, respiration, Sexuality, embodiment, substances and music are all royal roads, they all lead to a destination just by themselves. The idea here that we're talking about broadly is the notion of stacking or combinatory practice, which is that if you layer these things on each other you can get further, faster, more easily. Right. And so. And so, so that's the jam. And, and so basically you can super saturate nitric oxide and you know, Neo40 is something I'm sure you're aware of. It's a super beat concentrate lozenge.

Basically you can buy it on Amazon. It's kind of going to give you a similar effect to Viagra in terms of the nitric oxide production.

Yes. And then obviously all the ed drugs. Right. Are, are you know there anything with.

With sildenafil in it?

Yeah, they're vasodilatory effects, AKA the boner, is actually coming from pumping nitric oxide. Interestingly, there's also been several studies showing that heightened nitric oxide is, is, has antiviral and antibacterial elements and can also be indicative, you know, a good protectant from COVID Yeah. So just interesting stuff. And you know, both health giving and. What's the right word? Not enervating. I mean engorging is the extreme version, but yes, fundamentally vasodilatory, preventative and then also mood enhancing and supporting.

Yeah. And any pre workout that has like arginine or citrulline in it or something like that, it's not going to be as effective as like Neo40 or sildenafil, you know, such as Viagra or Cialis. But in a pinch that or beetroot powder or beet juice are also pretty effective in terms of vasodilation.

Exactly. So if we played with carbon as this gas hybrid, there's also this notion of nitroxygen, you know, which would be nitrous oxide and oxygen in a 70, 30 blend. And what's interesting there is that anesthesiologist at MIT, I think this was back in 2015, but they've been continuing the research since, did some research on nitrous oxide and found something incredibly unusual. In fact the lead on the paper said there is literally no other molecule that interacts with the, the human nervous system in this way. And they found that after breathing a 70, 30 gas blend of nitrous oxide that subjects EEGs went into for 3 to 12 minutes approximately and then after that it normalized, but for three to 12 minutes went into double amplitude delta wave neuroelectric activity. And to put that in context. So in the same way that like we could playfully say that like carbon dioxide and nitrogen are the sort of forgotten gases of breathwork, you can say that delta waves are the sort of redheaded stepchild of neuroelectric research. Everybody pays attention to beta waves because that's where we are most of the time, is what you and I are doing as we talk to each other and everyone listening. Alpha waves get a ton of love with the sort of meditation on loving kindness and flow states. Theta waves are sort of that hypnagogic drift off to sleep, slash super deep meditation if you're disciplined enough not to nod off and fall asleep when you get that relaxed. Gamma waves are those kind of spiky high frequency bursts of sort of gestalt understanding, the kind of classic eureka moments and others, a number of again, super disciplined meditators can spend surprising amounts of time there. But Delta is usually only found in deep and dreamless sleep. And most sleep researchers are really geeked on REM sleep, right? So. So delta just kind of gets swept under the rug. But once you start, and had I not experienced it directly, I wouldn't have known to keep looking, you know, I just would never have come across it. But what actually delta ends up is in certain really esoteric meditative traditions like Zog Shen and certain other ones, people are actually spending time there. And there's also some of the early kind of men who stare at goats, you know, mind hacking, brain hacking stuff that was taking place with the US Special forces was also harnessing data for remote viewing and telekinesis and other things. Now obviously you know what came of those studies, who the fuck knows. But there is a there, there. And so if you go into nitroxygen, that 7030 blend and you find yourself do preparatory breath work. So now we can just kind of, I'll give the breath work protocol and then we can couple it to the sexual practice. Right? So if you really wanted to do this, you would obviously make it as fun and enjoyable as possible. Set up a space, ideally a bed or a padded floor or something where you are recumbent and no shell objects and it's comfortable. Set up some form of aesthetic focal points, dim lighting, whether that's candles or other forms of low intensity, high quality light. Set up some forms of almost sort of Pythagorean geometric altar, showman focal point. Whatever matters for you, don't overbuild it. I think most people's altars these days are usually just like grab bags of shit. They found on the beach or someone gave them at a festival, you know, you don't need, you know, they could literally like a stone, a candle, a thing, right, that it does what it needs to and then engage in that, you know. Now this is basically a free dive protocol just brought to dry land. And it was actually, I was, I was doing some free dive training with Kirk Krach, who, you know, was the world champion trainer. He trained, he trained, you know, David Blaine and Tom Cruise and Tiger woods and a bunch of other people too. But he was giving us these breath protocols. And then just at the end of a session, he's like, oh, yeah. And then of course, if you do gas assisted, you know, you can hold your breath for 15 to 17 minutes. And I was like, wait, wait, what? Gas assisted fucking breath work? Are you kidding me? Like that, like that was a light bulb. So you do the free dive prep, which is basically, you know, you do vagal breathing. So that idea of super slow exhales, like 10 second exhales, 2 second holds, 4 second inhales. And the intention there is at least that you're supposed to be slowing your heart rate down so you burn less oxygen.

Your exhales are longer than your inhales.

Yeah. And that's signaling to your, you know, your nervous system and your sympathetic response, like, hey, nothing to see here. Chill out, right? And then engage in 50 hyperventilations, like truly trying to sort of blow out birthday candles and that. The intention of that is to radically lower your CO2, which should extend the amount of time you can hold your breath without having that CO2 build up too far and then give you that insistent urge to breathe. And then you can take, if you really want to go, depending on how you do this, either do the 70, 30 nitroxygen blend or if you don't have the capacity with a splitter, you know, and medical oversight, whatever. And again, huge caveat mtors here. Everyone's on their own recognizance, don't do stupid shit. But it would be. You could inhale two lungfuls of pure oxygen, so you supersaturate your red blood cells. So now you've got max red blood cells, decreased CO2, and basically the capacity to hold your breath for a lot longer than you normally could. And then down the middle of that, you shoot the torpedo of nitrous oxide and then hold that in your lungs for as long as you possibly can. And if you want to add a, you know, meditative, contemplative, you know, thought Experiment, whatever. You can play the game of, you know, inhale that nitro, that nitroxygen as if it's your first breath on this earth, like literally as an infant to the world and like fully taking it in like it is the stuff of life. Hold it for as long as you possibly can until you literally think you're going to die and exhale it as if it's your last breath on this earth. And in the meantime crank the tunes and have your special friend jerk you off.

Wow. Wow. And, and so when, when you're talking about the nitroxygen, you could theoretically use something like a, like a nitrous, nitrous oxide canister for something like that. You know, the old crack it balloon nitric so oxide canister type of trick.

I mean if you wanted to kind of do the, the, the Amazon cheat.

Yeah.

Then it's good with it approach. It would be like boost, boost oxygen canisters. Although I've never, I've never seen, I've never been really persuaded by those.

Yeah, they sell them for, out for, for athletes who are exercising at altitude. But you know, it sounds to me like really, really big picture what we're looking at here is you're trying to increase oxygen. Oxygen. You're trying to at the same time increase CO2 and increase nitric oxide all simultaneously.

Yeah, exactly. And basically so, so that because nothing interesting happens before the 45 second mark and then the universe unfolds in front of you from 45 seconds to, you know, two minutes plus.

Yeah.

And, and so at that point you realize, okay, so now we're in a super saturated place. I'm in double amplitude delta wave neural electric activity and all I've done so far. Well, let's just, you know, if we're following this descriptor, we have done preparatory breath work. We've done gas blended static apnea, we've done, you know, esthetic room and space. Although you're not going to be in it, you're just going to be coming back to it. And music selection, and music selection is essential. Like really, you know, without the tunes, you're just kind of wandering around in the cosmos with.

It'd be like doing ketamine and just staring off into space in the silence. Like you get much out of it.

It's the carrier wave to your epiphany. And so then you're like, okay, so we have that stack done and you can optimize it and it's amazing. And you can also do anything resembling pre post body work. Fascia release, spinal mobility, pelvic tilt, you know, those kind of normal good things. And then you're like, okay, so now what can we do with the erotic stimulation? So this goes, you know, brings us back to Nicole Prowse and all that, you know, all of that work, and you're basically like, okay, so our ecstatic nervous system circuitry maps one to one with our sexual arousal network. We understand that sexuality has created just, you know, a majority of human suffering and trauma forever. And it's both tragic in that sense, but also potentially magic. So if we say, hey, evolution is amoral, doesn't give a fuck what we love or care about, it just simply wants a robust gene pool. But we can reclaim our agency from that, we can literally untie our puppet strings and we can use all that incentive, all that encoding as actually rocket fuel for our own accelerated transformation. Then you're in a very different place right now. You're into the realm of alchemy and you're like, okay, neat. Now how do I cultivate sexual arousal and time it with those breathwork launches? And so basically you create fundamentally what amounts to a partner yoga. And you can do it platonically, you can do it clothes on, and you can do all of this stuff, and it's awesome. And if you simply want to basically roughly double the impact, then have a special friend who you can engage in the intimate practices with as well. And there's a few things that you can that are especially helpful to play with. I mean, one is obviously genital stimulation. Clitoris headed penis, right? That's just sensation that gets looped through our nervous systems as we're doing our breath holds. Another is vagal, vagal tone. And the simplest ways to engage vagal tone is basically throat massage and traction, goggling and gagging, as well as basically rectal stimulation via, like for men, like in a narrows prostate massager. For a woman, a plug, anything along those lines, it engages the pelvic floor, which engages the pelvic nerve. It also stimulates the vagal nerve at its root. And for a man, depending on the implement can actually trigger prostatic stimulation. For a woman, it can increase G spot pressure as well. So you're like, okay, so you have those things online. And again, doesn't need to be like mucky, messy, embarrassing. Just like engage and implement. You can put your underpants back on.

Doesn't matter, by the way, not to put you in a spot where you sound like you're shamelessly plugging. But you, I think, had told me you were trying to put together almost like a, like a little online store or link to be able to purchase some of the things that specifically would act on vagal nerve tone or endorphin and dopamine release in the, in the sex toy department in this area. Have you put anything like that together?

Well, I mean, and to be clear, we don't have a commercial interest in this at all. It was literally going to Good Vibrations, right?

Good, good vibration. Just like the online sex website.

Yeah, it's a, it's a sex positive women's cooperative based in Santa. And they just happen to have good, clean, healthy access to positive tools. So you just figure, everyone look around your kitchen, look at your granite countertops and your stainless steel stove and this and that, and you're like, how often do we eat takeout or microwave? And look how many thousands of dollars we've spent on cooking. And then you look in your goody, your goody drawer beside your bed and you look at the ratty ass plastic shit stuck in the bottom and you're like, how much do we spend on the tools we spend for fucking? So I would at a minimum recommend that folks consider investing, you know, anywhere from a 500 to a couple of thousand dollars on high quality, premium, beautiful tools for better psychosexual stimulation and arousal. So that, that said, as you get close to orgasm, and, and this is true for women, I think women's pain threshold goes up four times on, on a normal orgasmic arc with something on board like nitrous oxide, it can go up eight times or higher. Something not dissimilar happens for men. So there is a point where pain and pleasure can get hotwired close to arousal. Right? So you're like, okay, so there's this, let's say plus or minus 60 second, 90 second window where my brain cannot differentiate pain signal from pleasure signal. It's all coded as pleasure. So now you're like, okay, very interesting. So you take something simple. I mean, this is easy to make fun of, but also just whatever, it just works. Which is something like nipple clamps. Because nipple clamps do a couple of things. You're basically like, oh, now we're just playing like build a Buzz bingo, right?

They're a little bit painful. Like if you and I were to be both wearing clamps right now, we'd notice.

Well, you'd notice. And of course nipple stimulation boosts oxytocin. So you're like, okay, neat. And then it also, especially when you take them off and all the blood rushes back excruciating and creates a flood of endorphins. So if you now have high vagal nerve tone going on and you have done your breathwork and you're doing your gas assist and you could you put on a banging fucking tune that absolutely drops, you know, into the funkiest, you know, most ripping part of the tune right as you're peaking. And then your lover pops nipple clamps, engages in any form of, you know, sensation or contact play basically. But the intensity can be increased if you want. You can even reach behind your lover's neck, put your thumb and forefinger on the base their occipital lobes at the base of their skull, you know, and you can provide throat traction and massage. And this is not choking. We do not we anything that compromises airways, we just say categorically don't fuck with it. But you can get basically the combinations of traction and vagal nerve stimulation with loving throat massage stimulation and then positive vertical traction and massage of the occipital lobes. And you're like, oh my God, this is just super. This is literally what we call the sexual yoga.

And you're doing, you're doing that leading up to orgasm.

Yeah. And you know, and you can time it. I mean if you happen to figure. And it's a, it's a slightly slippery target because the, you know, fundamentally nitroxygen and something like ketamine are both dissociative anesthetics in higher doses or amounts or durations. So there is a sweet spot where your sensations are amplified and you're still feeling all the feels versus where you are zooted and into a very non ordinary, you know, imaginal state. But you're not necessarily as tuned into your body. So physical orgasm can come or go. Right. It doesn't necessarily have to all happen. But if it does happen at the same time, like if you just absolutely get cherries across the slot machine, you can end up. And I didn't know this was possible until I experienced it, but you can end up literally with orgasms backed up in the queue that your nervous system hasn't yet had a chance to process. So it's normally have three or four convulsions or whatever your sort of, you know, your typical physiological response could, can be you can have like six or seven and they're just kind of waiting until you get through the ones ahead of and you're like, oh my God, I didn't even know my body could do that. So there is, you know, there's novelty profundity intimacy to be had by sharing these experiences with a dedicated partner and using. I mean, back to Rick Doblin and the PTSD work with mdma, then using that supersaturated state, you know, which we usually come back filled with information and inspiration. You're like, oh, my God, I had no idea. I've never thought of that. I hadn't seen this that way. I didn't understand that about myself or us or the world or you. And then staying with that Mm. And being in that incredibly tender space together, sort of almost like newborns.

Yeah.

Just holding each other in the awe and the mystery and the wonder of it all. And using this as a. Again, as a diy. This is the Alchemist Cookbook as a method by which we can defrag our nervous systems. We can gain insight into our traumas, we can get insight into our relationships. We can get an insight into our purpose and work in the world, and that we can use those experiences as. Again, back to the flywheel, right? Of ecstasis, catharsis, communitas of the. The inspiration, the healing and the connection. We can use this as the flywheel that moves us forward through life. And, you know, my experience is when you do that works like if you. Let's say you set this practice up, and once a week, you know, a nominal Sabbath practice, you unplug your wi fi router, you know, and you block out three hours to spend with a partner.

Yeah.

And you actually do this in a way that's intentional and grounded in your life. It functions a little bit like an electromagnet. You know, how, like, the idea of, like, wrapped coil and, you know, like copper wire wrapped in a coil and spin it, and it creates magnetism, and. And it can be an incredibly strong magnet. And that's the polarity with your partner. Stop spinning it, stop doing that practice, and the polarity dissipates, and you're suddenly just going through life as roommates. Again, do the practice and spin it up, and it gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And it's literally learning to make love. It's like, it's not mysterious, and it's not an. It's not an emotion. And if I'm not feeling it right now, I shouldn't get mad at you or tell stories or, you know, hold grievances or grudges. It's like, we should go make more love, and we know how. And then. And whatever issues we have, we still have, but we now have juice, you know, we now have energy to move through it and It's a little bit like the sort of rising tide lifts all boats half the time. If you engage in the psychosexual practice, if you do the sort of yoga of becoming, like your grievances just aren't there anymore. And if all we've got is the blunt instrument of talking at each other or hiring a fucking therapist, you know, to trade pity stories and see who, you know, who gets the advantage, like, that's a dead end versus learning to literally work it out.

Yeah, yeah. Now, you would, of course, if you're listening in, you would want to take the time. This is more than just setting aside. Let's say you're like me, a parent with children, and my wife and I will often, in the morning, calendar, making love that night. But then we'll also, you know, on a monthly basis, calendar a more intensive retreat to, say, a hotel, you know, with a good suite that's, you know, relatively soundproofed, often a quiet area of the hotel where we can engage in practices that are a little bit more like this, like. Like what we're describing. And so, yeah, a lot of this stuff does take intention. It takes planning, obviously, you know, just the few things that Jamie and I have discussed thus far, you know, like nitrous oxide or breath work or nipple clamps or anything else like that, you have to plan ahead and actually have all this stuff with you when you go. And then there are other things that we didn't really touch on too much. Jamie, for example, my wife and I will occasionally use like a testosterone cream or a nitroglycerin cream on the penis or the clitoris, which we found really enhances his orgasm. For both me and her, we've used intranasal oxytocin compounded with ketamine, which is great for sex, but of course, ketamine can give you a little bit of droopy dick. So a lot of times you got to throw a little bit of sildenafil or any of these kind of nitric oxide precursors into the mix for you. As far as any type of gels, creams, topicals, lotions, or even plant medicines or synthetics. Are there any that you think as part of this whole hedonic matrices for sexual. Any that you think are particularly big wins or that. That you think people would benefit from quite a bit when used responsibly?

Yeah, I mean, and so now we're, you know, we're out if that was the PG13, now we're into the kind of the NC17, which is basically I would just say don't do anything that is against your moral, moral, legal, ethical, cultural or religious guidelines or dictates. Right. So 100% agency and full consent, as well as an understanding, again, that any one of these works by themselves. So if the full stack is a lot, you're like, whoa, who, who, who does that? Like, what kind of person can, like, throws that kind of a kitchen sink at this? And really the only things you can look around is like, you know, bachelor and bachelorette parties in Vegas, you know, and debauch Eyes Wide Shut kind of blowouts. And you're like, oh, well, I'm not that type of person. We're not that type of a couple. Thank you, but no thank you. So there is a question of, like, bringing, you know, white light, bringing intention and dignity and mutual respect and all of these things to terrain that for all intents and purposes, been sort of abandoned to more extreme hedonists and sensation seekers. But now, that said, I think you know Dan Savage, the sex columnist, I think he's at the Seattle Times or something, but he has that famous phrase of a romantic partner. You want someone who's the three GS, like good giving and game. And ideally, that's the stuff of a good lifelong relationship. And I think something else you could say is you want a physician, a functional medical doctor on your team who is three Cs, which is curious, courageous and connected. And if you have that, if you have the ability to work with someone who is willing to write you prescriptions and oversee you at your own recognizance, then you can explore things like carbogen and nitroxygen. You can get a prescription for cidafinil. Is that right? Pronunciation?

Sildenafil.

Yeah, for Cialis or. Yeah, for Cialis or Viagra. You can get prescriptions for oxytocin and ketamine. If you're in a state where medical or recreational cannabinoids are allowed, then certainly, certainly those things. So at the basic basics, you could say nitric oxide supplementation, you know, ranging from the beets and the pumpkin seeds all the way to Viagra. So that's a, that's a precursor. You can also, if it works for you and works in your body and your mind, cannabinoids, you know, optimizing the endocannabinoid system, are well known aphrodisiac and. Or sensorial enhancers. I mean, the ancient Greek midwives, I.

Would imagine, just like a good sativa, for example.

Yeah, I don't think you'd want to be in a full bore couch, lock hero on a situation, you know, you'd want to be engaged and invigorated in a positive way. And then obviously there's a difference between anything that you would inhale, whether that's vaporized or smoked, versus what you would ingest via edibles. There's the whole liver, kidney thing and you know, and CBT2 receptors that you know, kick in in edible. So I would say that's kind of a higher level. That's a slightly more intense, intensive body load and ride, but potentially meaningful for you. And then oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, as far as the gas assisted breath work and that actually right there. Cannabinoids plus the gas assisted breath work plus the psychosexual and music is more than enough. More than enough.

I was gonna say you've given me plenty to talk with my wife about for our next little hotel getaway already.

And then if once a month or once a quarter or once a year, you would like to go deeper and you want to actually, because I mean, here's the other thing is like once you figure this stuff out, you're like, oh fuck, there's nothing else is worth doing. It's not worth drinking wine and ending up with a lazy hangover. It's not worth smoking weed in a casual way. It's barely worth, you know, tripping or engaging in psychedelics that, that don't involve some period of time where you're, you're putting it all together so that you know a result. You can go two ways on this. You can either go straight decadent hedonist and you never pick yourself up of the floor, you've just hacked your, your own addictions, you know, or you become actually like white light, girl scout, boy scout and you, and you're just super clean and all you do is bodywork and eat clean food and pure water and juices. And then you put them all together for these, these state experiences because you know exactly how effective they are. Right, so, so then, so yeah, so now let's add the next level on visionary or non ordinary states to engage in this space. And, and there's a huge, huge caveat here, especially for women, but for everyone, which is trust is non negotiable consent, clear boundaries, clear understandings. Because if the value of these things is that you are deliberately and ideally skillfully and gracefully looking to lose yourself. And what that means is the equivalent is someone is your partner, isn't your fuck buddy, they're literally like you're a rock climbing belayer, they're the person at the bottom of that cliff with your rope and your life in their hands. And there is a sacrosanct protocol that you never break no matter what. And that is that we are on this rope together until we untie and say off belay. So there's no wandering off in the middle of it. There's no, you know, breaking the container or your agreements as a couple. Like it's not on. It's not on us or me to prescribe who gets to do this stuff. But it is fair to say that the notion of climber belayer is a non negotiable. It's not. It's like how long you're in relationship with the person is your own sovereign choices. We're all 21st century grown ups. But that you are engaged in impeccable agreements is essential. So that said, yeah, oxytocin, ketamine nasal spray can be super rad if you have a physician that can connect you with that experience. The same. And then if you want, you know, MDMA is, you know, it's. It got rebranded as ecstasy in the 80s when it became more of a club drug. But really it was prior it was called Adam. Like it was, you know, like literally you're in the garden or Empathy because it's actually far less sexy name. So. And you know, and again, serotonergic system tends to. Tends to accompany Olympic for many guys that has then, you know, prompted sex to see which is often guys going clubbing in Ibiza and Barcelona and other places with you know, Viagra plus MDMA that is contraindicated and rough on the cardiac system. So like, you know, don't do those things or if you do those things, know exactly what you're getting into.

Yep.

So MDMA can be a super sensual experience. You could even potentially offer that to a female partner and then the male partner rides a slightly different cocktail so that you can be more responsive and there sexually. Ann and Sasha Shulgin, who were the kind of, you know, fairy godfathers and godmothers of all things psychedelic, you know, basically tested pretty much all psychedelics that they developed in their laboratory with each other as lovers. And 2 CB was their hands down all time favorite.

Really?

Yeah, hands down. And to me, 2 CB actually lives up to the hype, the sort of urban legends of what MDMA was supposed to be sexually.

Interesting. Okay. Yeah. That was the book Pacal, right?

Yeah. Pekal and T. Coll are the two. The two books.

I have Pell I've made it like a quarter of the way through that book and still have yet to finish it. I keep starting it and then it doesn't stick.

Yeah, you know, I mean, it's dense, you know, and it is what it is. But like those guys were basically psychedelic tantricas. Like they were, that's who they were and what they did and then that part of their story because they were sort of old and white haired by the time most people became really familiar with them, sort of. No one could wrap their head around what they'd actually done for 20 to 30 years together. But they covered some ground and you know, and then you can go into the sort of IMAX museum dosages of psilocybin and LSD and yeah, I would say that's, that's a decent, I mean the obvious, you know, the sort of hedonistic ones like coke and methamphetamine. What if you, you know, if you read something in Vice, you know, about chemsex, you know, in the gay community or something like that. It's, it's often things along those lines. I would just say there's a, there's a contraindicated and not on that program as far as increasing insight, healing and connection. Those are often like lizard brain dopaminergic, just fucking mainlines. And obviously any of the opioids are, you know, decidedly asexual and you know, contraindicated for all the other health reasons as well. But it's not like you're missing anything.

Right? You've mentioned music a couple times by the way. Are there any particular soundtracks that you really like or any Spotify list that you really like?

Yes, 100%. Basically what we have is a playlist called Womp, like W H O M P and it's, it's on YouTube. If you just do Jamie Wheel and Want, it's there. But I think unless you have like YouTube Red, which I don't know anybody on the planet that actually ever signed up for that thing, I think it gets fucked with commercials. But those are all the songs. And then some. Somebody in our community did actually transcribe it to a Spotify playlist. So we'll put that in the link. But basically just heads up, you'll find because of that double amplitude delta wave thing and the coming unstuck in time. I mean, I mean, let's just actually describe the phenomenology too because that's very much all we've been talking about is tactics. None of these tactics matter a damn and none of Them are worth the trouble, the effort, the complexity, if it weren't for where they deliver you and where it appears to deliver you. And again, I mean, I say this all provisionally. This is all just thought experiment and metaphor, but it appears to deliver like, it's like, you know, that vomit comet, you know, the big plane that goes in, big roller coaster, loops through the sky, and then get like 15 seconds.

Of zero G. The Vomit Comet. Yep.

And they pretend to be space. You know, they pretend to be astronauts. Right. It's basically the psychological equivalent of the vomit comet, except that what you're doing to your partner, you kind of take turns because it's. It's a. You know, it can be quite a disembodied experience. You want to be recumbent, lying down, safely sorted. You know, all those kind of things is the more you load up your partner's nervous system and the higher the. The combined ecstatic orgasmic release with the breath hold with everything is the longer they spend in zero G, basically floating through, you know, what you could just loosely call the information layer. And it appears to be a state of hypercognition, extreme pattern recognition, and profound inspiration where you can think anything you want about anything you can think of with a 300 IQ for as long as you're there. And it is so gobsmacking. William James founded the entire field of optimal psychology and comparative religion at Harvard via his experiences with nitrous oxide. Joseph Priestley was one of the earlier discoverers of it. William Colt, the guy who came up with the Colt 45, actually raised the venture capital because his dad wouldn't fund him. He raised the venture Capital throwing 19th century Wild west nitrous parties. And Winston Churchill actually used it all the time to gain his insights. Now, the challenge with that experience is that most of those guys, Churchill and James in particular, stopped using it because they're like, fuck, man, I cannot remember what I see. And Churchill actually used it because he got in a car accident in New York. He forgot to look the other way crossing the street and got clipped by a taxi and ended up in the one hospital in New York that it was starting to use nitrous oxide as an anesthetic. And he's like, what the fuck is this stuff? But he said, he said, it's hard. He goes, I have a hard time telling which is more painful, basically getting over my broken bones and aches or having these profound insights slip through my fingers and elude me. And so the idea. And I thought about that a lot because I'm like, well, is it a dead end? Right? Because you have to be super careful of these kind. This neck of the woods, right? This is the left hand path. This has always been the forbidden fruit. And there's a reason that it has ended badly for most people who go down this road. But I think that James, he quit because he couldn't always remember what he was seeing. And he was concerned that he would sort of earn the ridicule or the ostracization of his Harvard colleagues. And I think that there's several things. One is he was a Victorian disembodied intellectual. So everything you share with your listeners, everything you embody as a person is extremely more attuned and embodied than those guys were. They were heads on sticks, right? So we have a lot more of our nervous system and our physiology integrated and able as a vessel to hold, store and retrieve information better. The next is James gave us what James didn't have himself, which is a language and a vocabulary for non ordinary states and the peak heights of human experience. So now we have vocabulary. And the final piece is something as simple as our fucking phones, which is you can lean over, blissed out, halfway back from heaven and mumble it into a voice recorder and capture it versus taking a quill pen and dipping it into trying to write voice recorders.

I've. I've used them many a time in that state. Absolutely.

Exactly. Exactly. So we have a better. We have better language and vocabulary, we have higher embodiment, and we have better capture mechanisms.

Yeah, yeah.

And, and, and that allows you to literally bring back quicksilver.

Yeah, yeah, I like that phrase, bring back quicksilver. You know, we probably scratched the surface of everything that I want to talk to you about. But you lay out a lot of this in the book too, right? In Recapture the Rapture.

Dude, it's running so long. I'm literally writing the final chapter right now. And I'm writing about what is essentially a postmodern update to a global Christed consciousness, open source religion that expresses all of this in a mythopoetic form at the intersection of Kairos and Kronos. Sense is that when we get lobbed outside of time in these states, there is the chance for us to sort of become like it is a death rebirth, initiatory practice, and it's no longer metaphorical. Right. You're literally like ketamine, nitrous oxide, all of these things, the delta wave activity, they all have this, the vagal nerve tone coming out of the cranial nerves. They all actually deal with a deep brain stem reset. Like that's half of the magic of what all these things do. And you're like, wait a second. So now we have a biological address, IP address for what was always a metaphysical death rebirth experience. And we can now connect the dots end to end from literally. Like we are neocortexes connected to spinal columns connected to erogenous zones. You know, we're naked apes to we're twice born humans becoming anthropos to take a stand, right? I mean, ideally, like, it's because it's no longer. This kind of brings us back full circle to my critique of like west coast psychedelic conchiculture, right? Who are fixated on transcendence and fixated on avoiding doing the hard things and fetishizing some hockey stick redemption where we're all off the hook for digging fucking ditches and taking stands. And I think to be a homegrown human, to be fully initiated as anthropos is to actually gain, like McKenna said, like, don't give in to astonishment. Like spend enough time in the numinous, in those magical realms so that you've scratched your itch, you've hunted your white whale. You know, there's nothing remarkable about the insight that we are just starlight dressed up as matters. In fact, you take that as table stakes and you're like, holy fuck. What's actually remarkable is this seven or eight or nine decades I'm here in this form with opposable thumbs and a prefrontal cortex and work to do and that we actually come fully home like Dorothy and the wizard of Oz. Like, truly, like, I had to leave Kansas. I had to go chase the mirage of that, you know, that big dude behind the curtain who wasn't all that to come back to Kansas and say, fuck yes, there is no place like hum. And here I take my stand, you know, joyfully and courageously with my brothers and sisters. And so that's the, that's the true, like recapture the rapture because we are at the eschaton, you know, we are for sure at the end of a chapter. Who knows whether it's the whole book. But like, we are needed at full strength and we can't be at full strength if we're limping and crimped and collapsed and contracted around our trauma. And we can't if we're blasted off and goggle eyed at the back of beyond either, you know, and, and like blending those two things is, is the bliss. Fuck crucifixion, you know, you're like, holy shit, I can. I mean, I can light my nervous system up and I can experience neck snapping, white light orgasm that melts my circuits. Yes, you can. And the, the burden and the blessing of that knowledge is all the wounding of the world.

Yeah. Yeah.

And can and can I hold them both without flinching?

Yeah. It'll be interesting for me to, to read the book, especially for me, coming at things from a Christian perspective, which is always interesting when I'm. When I'm reading your materials and you know, coming at it from, from a different standpoint. Yet I always find it absolutely intriguing. And you know, for those of you listening in, I know that you have your own thoughts and comments and feedback on a lot of this stuff. So a. When's the book come out, Jamie?

It's coming out. It launches in April. And I'm literally in like final crunch right now.

Okay. And I know exactly what it feels like. Okay. So Recapture the Rapture. Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World that's Lost Its Mind comes out in April. I'm gonna be reading it hopefully sooner than that. If I get my hands on a review copy, I'll let you guys know and I will do a review of it. And then if you guys have your own questions and comments and feedback in the meantime to add, because we covered a lot of stuff we haven't really talked about before on the show, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com recapture that's BenGridfeldFitness.com recapture and that's where we'll have shownotes to everything that Jamie and I talked about. I'll also link to his book on Amazon if you want to pre order it. I love what he's doing and it would be enormously supportive for him. If you want to get on and pre order the book. And it's definitely going to be one that I'm reading cover to cover. Jamie. Dude, that was a lot. I think that gives people quite a bit to work with.

Awesome, man. Well, dude, I think aren't we like scheduled for you to come on Homegrown Humans on Friday?

Yeah. You have a podcast. Yes. Or an online audio learning platform, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, I'll be on there, I think, later on this week.

Perfect. Well, you know, I would love actually to talk about that with you. You know, like your, like your faith and how it all intersects with everything that you do.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

In the personal space and optimization stuff.

Absolutely. I would love to discuss that. So there's your preview, folks. If you. If you hear me on Jamie's show, that's probably part of what we'll be discussing, so stay tuned for that, too. All right, dude. Well, sounds good. So I guess I'll talk to you in a few days. And again, for those of you listening in, in the meantime, you can go to BenGreenfulFitness.com recapture for the show notes for this episode. And Jamie, thanks so much for coming on, man.

For sure, man. Great chat.

All right, folks, until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with author and performance expert Jamie Wheal, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

Well, 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 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 week.