209 Jamie Wheal: The Altered States Economy

The thing that has prompted me to think so deeply and heavily about this is like, that's it, guys. We're out of bullets. If ayahuasca and if conscious sexuality and if deep embodiment and if personal growth and if speech acts and language and all this shit we've all been spending so much time and effort doing is not enough to turn us into servants of God, then we dropped a stitch someplace.

That's Jamie Wheal, co author of the.

Bestselling book Stealing Fire.

And this is episode 209 of Wellness Force Radio. What's up, my friend? It's your host, Josh Trent. And welcome back to another episode for your weekly access to global experts in all things wellness as we discover the physical and emotional intelligence we need to live life well.

What's up, everyone?

This episode is Fire. Stealing Fire, that is. I got to meet Jamie Wheal, the co author of the bestselling book Stealing Fire, at his house in Austin, Texas, to talk about one of the biggest revolutions that you've never heard of that's actually hiding in plain sight. Over the past decade, some of the highest performers in the world have been harnessing rare and controversial states of consciousness to solve critical challenges and outperform the competition. We're going deep on this one today. What it means to be in flow state, how to actually steal fire, what that means, and so much more. Now, before we get into the show, I want to thank Intelliskin for sponsoring these physical intelligence shows every Friday. They're a huge part of why you and I get to spend time together. And they make some pretty incredible postural smart compression products, including the posture Q this smart compression top that pulls your shoulders back so you can perform better, men or women, throughout the day or at work, if you haven't tried this smart compression that pulls those shoulders back. If you feel like neck pain throughout the day or you slump with your posture, give this a test. Drive this tactile response over@intelliskin.net and actually use code WF20. They gave our entire audience 20% off the entire cart. So that's code WF20@intelliskin.net today. Now make sure you're buckled up for this podcast. Jamie's mind is a synaptic fury, to say the least, of intelligence around all things body, mind, and spirit, which is perfect, where we dive deep into the physical and emotional intelligence we need to live life well. Yet for many people, myself included, the journey is always filled with moments where with as much as we know, sometimes we can tend to feel like we don't know that much. Which begs a question. After practicing meditation, doing yoga, exercising and eating the right foods, doing all the tactical things in your life that elicit personal growth, including the potential of plant medicines or psychedelics to achieve flow state, do you ever feel like something is still missing from within? We're talking about this on the podcast today, how to unlock greater states of flow. Jamie's take on decades of research in flow states. Working with Fortune 50 companies and elite military fighters. And not just the what when it comes to the tools for achieving higher performance and greater states of flow, but one of the most important pieces of the how and the why that most people miss. And that's the integration process. We're exploring this integration process, what Jamie's learned by achieving these altered states of consciousness or higher states of consciousness through holotropic breathing, specific exercise, even plants, or anything else, when altering your mental state, Jamie has actually created a hedonic calendaring system that allows form to follow function. And when we look at living a life of greater freedom and flow now, as you'll catch on pretty quick, Jamie unfolds concepts fast with his linguistics, so don't even try to take notes. We've taken them for you over@wellnessforce.com 209 to get all the links and resources mentioned in today's show. Now, coming up, we're unpacking the history of this altered state's economy, what that actually is, why it's so important, and how it goes back to almost the beginning of our species, what a Promethean is, and how you can become a stronger one. How we can use certain flow state tools to overcome the constant stimulation that's always plaguing our attention, why attending ayahuasca ceremonies will not give you some kind of golden ticket in its own right. How it takes the integration and the deeper work comes. After these ceremonies, we'll also talk about an interesting concept that Jamie describes as 8020 woke to broke for sustainable levels of exploration towards higher consciousness. And a controversial stance from Jamie that may rub you the wrong way or may resonate deeply depending on who you are and what your background is. Jamie actually sees himself as a servant of God, to be a good father, a good husband, and a strong leader in the flow genome organization.

Now, when I say God, I don't.

Mean a bearded man that lives in the sky, but a higher intelligence that is guiding all of us. If we're willing to listen. And as you listen to this podcast today, remind yourself to take deep breaths, visualize how Jamie's experiences working with top performers across the world to achieve these flow states will also apply to your world, the one you live inside your mind and the one that you live outside your body to the people that you care about. All right, let's go down for the deep dive in Austin, Texas, with Jamie Wheal.

The fascinating thing to me is Walmart is now carrying Stealing Fire, which is. It blows my mind because I'm thinking, isn't Walmart part of the system that doesn't like the Grateful Dead, that doesn't enjoy these media around altered states of consciousness? How did that make you feel, man?

Well, I mean, it's that whole sort of dress straight and infiltrate, you know? I mean, my thought is, a, you know, like, yee haw. Isn't that funny? And B, they have no idea what they've got on their shelves.

So you've planted a seed of deeper consciousness within one of the biggest media places in the world.

Yeah. Which was, you know, arguably. As Stephen and I sat down to write it, we had to ask ourselves, well, what is our narrative voice gonna be like? What position are we going to take in this story? Are we going to be Promethean advocates? Are we going to say, hell yeah, guys, this is coming. It's rad. It's awesome. Come on in. Or are we going to be dispassionate reporters? Are we going to be kind of academic? Where do we sit in this story? Because it's going to make a big difference on the tone we take and how we position everything. And so we really felt like there's just no way you can come across as an advocate, because you will lose everybody in the middle. They'll be like, those fuckers drank the cool little while back. They are not reliable witnesses.

Yeah.

So we ended up creating a story and even sequencing the story. I mean, the way the fact that we very deliberately led with the Navy seals, that's heartland steak and potato shit. You can't say no to that. We followed with Google. Everybody knows Google, but you've slipped in and seeded Burning man, but you balance it with $4 trillion in a market economy. So you're like, holy shit. Then you go into the personal why would I care? With the Jason Silver stories. And then chapter three was like, and here's why you might have missed it. Here's the pails. Here's this has happened outside the pales. Here's church, state, and the body. But then we even end it with, oh, and by the way, those pales are needed you don't want to get lost. That's dangerous terrain. So we were constantly engaging in kind of like rhetorical judo, such that no one ever felt they had to pull against us. But what we realized in the end was, like, it was the ultimate Promethean trick of all. Because Prometheus was a trickster.

Yes. And Prometheus is actually who stole the fire and gave back to the people. How has that played a role in your storytelling? When did you actually find. Find out about Prometheus? Why does that inspire you so much?

Well, I mean, just to finish this thread, which was. You realized it was the ultimate Promethean trickster move of all to pretend that we were 100% neutral journalistic reporters just wandering through this terrain. We weren't at all. Of course we were fine.

Sneaky bastards. Yeah.

And I was like, okay, now, that's when I felt good. I was like, yes, this is congruent. Let's be super sly. So that. And one of the most consistent responses we had was people giving it to skeptical family members, often parents, you know, from more conservative generations. And being like this finally let them get a sense of who I was or what I cared about. And so as far as like, that, to me, felt like mission accomplished is that we were extending and validating permission to consider these things.

It's almost as if you've literally planted seeds over the enemy wall and they're growing now, and there's nothing they can really do about it. This is the true kind of undercurrent of being a Promethean.

For sure. For sure. It was definitely on the down low and bundled. I mean, I would say if there's been any consistent theme in my life, it is creating classical arguments for radical conclusions. And so that's why, you know, and that Alcibiades conversation about him stealing Kykeon, like, I remember coming across that 20 years ago, and it's literally like there's just snippets of it in the actual court reporting from Athens. And you're like, wait a second, Wait a second. Some motherfucker stole the secret ingredients to the most persistent ecstatic ritual ever known in history and had a house party. Like, literally. That, to me, was just the opening salvo in architecting the whole story.

And how lucky are we that it was recorded? I mean, a lot of this work, too. So for people that don't know this Promethean history, who was that, when was that, and why is it so damn important?

Well, I mean, you know, the original OG Story is, you know, Zeus was battling the Titans. He defeats the Titans, all except for two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus means forethought. Epimetheus means afterthought. Those guys then get tasked with building mankind. Epimetheus is a bit add and spastic. He starts building out all the animals made of clay and he gives them all the gifts that Zeus had allotted them. You know, so they're fast, they're sharp, they're. What are they? Furry, whatever they are. And Prometheus takes his time molding man in the of the gods. But by the time he's done, his brother has given away all the superpowers. So he's like, well, these guys are fucked, man. They don't have any. They don't have a chance. So he goes to Zeus and he's like, look, dude, these guys need fire. I'm going to be able to take fire from Olympus and give them to them because otherwise they're going to be cold, naked, slow, dumb, and they won't last long. And Zeus says, no way in hell, man. That is divine fire. And what most people know is Prometheus steals that fire, he gives it to mankind. And it's not just literally heat or combustion. It's civilization, technology, medicine, culture and language. So it's literally in some respects, consciousness, divine consciousness.

But the fire was really the spark that lit everything.

Yeah, absolutely. Both, both literally and metaphorically. And of course, Zeus then punishes him. He gets chained to a rock, he has his insides torn out by eagles every day for eternity until he later, in the sort of mythologies, gets freed. And the idea there is like, okay, so what is that Promethean impulse? What is that desire to bring that which has been set aside, that which has been render taboo or out of reach, bringing it down to mankind. And it feels like that impulse, you could make a case, is also the entrepreneurial impulse. Right? I mean, at its root, entrepreneur means to bring forth. And so I think that there's interesting parallels between those two things. And there's also, there's a fascinating kind of like sort of Hellenic tradition, so the kind of ancient Greeks against the Hebraic and the Judeo Christians. So like in the Greek stuff you have Prometheus, who is a very much a stand in for the Christ concept, like the martyr who brings the boon or the gift of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, brings the boon to mankind and then pays the price forever on our behalf. And then the Greeks have Icarus, who is the hubris, pride he flies too close to the sun. He aspires to be like the gods. And then his melting wax and feathers brown and off down he go. And that's like Lucifer. So you have Christ, Lucifer in the Judeo Christian tradition. You have Prometheus, Icarus in the Greek traditions. And you're like, holy shit. That I need to do a Jordan Peterson. Like, therefore those archetypes are eternal. Right? And I think that that is a fascinating inquiry, which is what is the balance in these static techniques and technologies? And that brings us back to our original inquiry, which is why are they so fucking unstable?

Yes.

And why do they always go pear shaped so consistently? And that to me is literally. And of course not just two point fingers or two tut tut and moralize. Because everybody feels good when Icarus crashes and burns. And in fact, even Elon Musk right now, right? I mean, look at the backlash on Musk and how much schadenfreude is locked into that. Like, yay, Tony Stark, he's gonna save the world. Fuck you, Elon. You pulled a trump and now you shat the bed, right? And people pile on and we sort of reenact this. I mean, even, you know, and Jordan Peterson is showing some stress cracks of carrying this load.

Or Even Conor McGregor, right, with his recent debacle, people praised him. And now those very same people are probably turning the sword to the other side.

Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, you're like, okay, so we love it when people stand so close to the light that they become translucent. We pay anything, we mob them, and we absolutely fetishize them. And yet we are merciless when the light starts to consume them.

Being a Promethean in this modern age, this tech focused age, not so easy. I think that one of the ways that we can be a stronger Promethean would be through altered states. There's an altered states economy. Four billion. Four trillion.

Four trillion.

Four trillion dollars. What is the altered states economy for people that don't know, man.

Yeah. So we just try to figure out, okay, how much of it there, there is there in this contemporary revolution. And we basically thought, okay, look, this of ecstasis, meaning just peak states that take you outside yourself, that help you shift from waking normal into something else, you know, presumably preferable. And so we, we looked at it from the kind of the neuroscience level, you know, shift in neuroelectric, what are your brain waves doing? A shift in what parts of your brain are turning on and off, shift in hormonal profiles, cardiac states, all that kind of stuff. So we kind of had a relatively objective set of criteria. And then we looked at said, okay, what industries or how do we spend our time and money and which of these industries credibly live in that category? Like, that's the primary reason we do it, the main reason we go to a rock concert or the main reason we gamble. Gambling is not a wealth strategy. You know, gambling is because I want the hit, I want that feeling. And almost everybody ends up losing the money they come with and they keep coming back and doing it again and again. Why do we watch online pornography? Right? It's not to get laid, it's not to pass on our genes. Right. Is to shift our state of consciousness. So everything from gambling to pornography to self help and personal development and therapy to obviously all the licit and illicit drugs, anything we do to shift states, we counted as part of that economy. And it's a quarter of the US's national GDP.

The thing that blows me away, and I'm really excited to dig in with you about pornography because we're seeing this really not just from Gary Wilson's work with your brain on porn, but this seeking of novelty, how it's baked and built into this hedonism that I think is kind of naturally wired within us. But yet one thing I'm fascinated to talk to you about is the calendaring of this. And we'll dig into that a little bit later. But one of the things that I loved in your book, Man Stealing Fire, by periodically losing our minds, we stand a better chance of finding ourselves. I mean, just take that for exactly what it is. It's such a window into why we're actually here. And most people don't want to go within. So this going within through the ecstasis, how did you even find this line of going within through ecstasis? When did this start for you? Like, if you looked back on the timeline, I would say probably age 18.

I mean, it was in college. I was the classic angry young man looking for something more enduring and true than what I was seeing around me and culture, teachers, peers. And yeah, I mean, I had a guy on my hall, it was a biology major and his professor was probably a, you know, barely reconstructed hippie and mycologist. And back in the farm fields behind our dorms after a rainy spring day, we're growing some mushrooms and he swore to us blind that these were actually safe, we weren't going to die, all these kind of things. So we nibbled on some and that was. And I was like, oh, wow, not unlike William James's experience. Holy shit. Separated by the flimsiest of veils, lie realms of consciousness heretofore unknown. I was like, oh, this feels real. This feels like what I had been actually hoping, dying for life to be. And then I spent the rest of my high school career having those experiences at night and then translating them into scholarship and research by day. So I was sort of articulated, trying to ground out, what the hell is this? What is this lineage? What is this tradition? Where did this all come from? Where did it start? And it felt like. And that was just became the most amazing adventure story to try and trace and track and literally trying to piece together this sort of serpentine lineage across time and space and cultures. And it really does feel that way. It disappears, it pops up, it skips continents, it shows up, but it's persistent through human history. And so that, I think has just stealing fire from me, was just trying to get down the last quarter century of my own learning as to where the hell did this stuff all come from.

So when did you and Steven Kotler actually link up and kind of co create the idea for the book?

Well, it's interesting because I had helped Stephen a lot with his prior book, Rise of Superman, which was all about flow and action sports. And he was getting ready to kind of want to start writing his next one. I'm like, dude, I'm not doing that again. I'm not going to be the Cyrano de Bergerac.

Cyrano de Bergerac.

So he was the one who whispers to. He's got its giant nose and he whispers poetry and love songs to his friend who then falls in love with the woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think. I mean, I think Steve Martin did a version of it with Gerard Depardieu, but that, you know, but in any of it, I wasn't going to be the sort of ecstasis whisperer behind this. I was like, if we're going to do this, let's do it together and we'll fucking lay this out. So that's what we did. And really, to Stephen's eternal credit, he really let me steer and drive this because, I mean, that story, the historical, anthropological, kind of mystery, tradition story, was very much one that had been alive for me. Stephen was mostly focused on the neuroscience side of things. But together, I think the book ended up being stronger for both of those perspectives. We beat the shit out of each other.

Right? They both bring such a unique vantage point of the world with your academia versus his. I think that's when true co creation exists, when people come from these huge industries, yet they so blend together. And I look at the way that ecstasis is explained, I think it's really your narrative. I believe that Stealing Fire has recreated the narrative of ecstasis in our modern world. And for a lot of people that don't know this, it could be meditation, it could be breath work, binaural beats.

Lucia light float tank.

I made a big list. Pharmacological specific exercise, psychedelics, transcranial direct stimulation, which is fascinating, like the halo device and also wellness technologies. But is there one that you're actually leaning into now for these practices, these tools for achieving a different state?

Yeah. Interesting. I mean that's going to be the whole subject of my next book, Recapture the Rapture, which is basically, I mean, interestingly, I'm actually going to be coming out as a voice for conservatism pretty surely. So I think that the whole, I mean. Yeah, well that's. We'll come back to that in a bit. But basically I would say that the most potent and antifragile, you know, the ones that are least susceptible to corruption and, or repression would be respiration, embodied cognition and sexuality.

Talk to us about embodied cognition.

Well, just the idea that. Well, I mean, if you want to really like the things I'm super interested in right now, which I think are the untapped arenas of focus that I just have not seen broadly in the research, but I'm super twigged onto them and just always tracking will be delta wave brain activity. I think that the redheaded stepchild of the EEG scene, everybody's fixated on alpha and theta, but waking delta is something that virtually nobody's studying. And since we know via nitrous oxide that that is what's happening in that state and we know that is creating all kinds of RA experiences. Fascinating. I mean you can literally, if you stack these, you can create a 5 Meo DMT experience in 15 minutes at home with yourself and kitchen materials via what tools we can get into that. But so delta wave activity, vagal nerve tone and myofascia. And if you play with those three things. So the vagal nerve goes from your brain to your heart to your root and it is basically the metronome of your entire nervous system and autonomic responses. Inflammation, well, being all kinds of things. And fascia in the sense that it's the sort of sliding surfaces and connective tissue of our musculature and ligaments. And my sense is that it forms a function I mean, there are some of the more sophisticated body workers I'm aware of are spending more and more time on fascia and thinking of it a little bit like mycelial networks in forests. So, like the way that the mushroom network connects between the roots of all the trees and it transmits information and nutrients and all kinds of cool stuff, it kind of feels like fascia in our bodily system serves in a similar way. And it is massively neglected, not understood. And that by coordinating and aligning and optimizing our sliding surfaces and as they communicate and connect, that. That is a huge, huge level up in embodied awareness. So embodied cognition just means our bodies and brains affect our hearts and minds, and that thinking doesn't just happen above the neck.

Oh, you're talking to the right people, man. Because this phys and emotional connection we've explored so much. I was at the Hurley event with Michael Gervais, which is on the board for Flow Genome. Such an integral part of what you guys have created.

And there were so many people from.

Rocktape who do the myofascial release. And they talked about this here. And I'm thinking back to a Paul Stamets episode that I heard on Joe Rogan, and he was like, yeah, the biggest organism in the world is actually the mycelium. So if what your research is showing that the mycelium and this network of the fascia in our body, is it really the same thing?

Well, I mean, it's an analogy, but I think it's a fairly strong one. So, like, in the same way that the roots could be our ligaments and the trunks and branches are our bones, skeletal structures and those kind of things, I think it's a fascinating analog. And in that respect, yeah, I mean, the bottom line is that, in fact, there's Gil Headley, I think is the fellow's name who wrote a kind of underground, or he shot a video on YouTube. It's kind of an underground classic called the Fuzz Speech. And he's an anatomist, but he has got a cadaver, human cadaver, in front of him, and he's pulling, cutting open the muscles and showing these things like fuzz is tie. So he talks about fuzz being where fascia gets bound whenever we have an injury, and then it basically inhibits the sliding surfaces while we're trying to mend that area. But then, obviously, the sad part is it doesn't. Unless you bust it up, it stays. So we end up literally, he's like, fuzz is time. And fuzz is also Trauma. And so if we can, if we can bring our bodies back into the present moment, like very few of us, our bodies are even present. We're limping, we're imbalanced, we're out of whack, our kinetic chains have been broken and fucked up from years of imbalances and compensation. So our bodies aren't even actually in the present moment. But if you treat fuzz as time and you're like, oh, let me just bring me up to the present, let me release the trauma stored in those systems, I have a greater chance of being emotionally and relationally present as well.

This is why people cry in yoga. This is why I myself have had a bioenergetic session where I was like, why is there tears coming out of my eyes? What does this actually mean? Yeah, absolutely.

That's related to this system in the body 100%. And when you boost energy through your system via any of the ecstatic means, via breath work, via movement, via myofascial release, via sexual orgasm and combination via psychedelics, via whatever it would be, you have more juice going through your circuits and it tends to disclose more information about where you're impeded. So my. The position we would advance about ecstasis is it does consistently two things and it shows you your sort of highest potential, like the way the world ought to be, the way I could be, those kind of things. And it also shows us where we're broken. It's like an electrician running juice through a circuit and being like, oh yeah, right there, there's impedance, or you've got a blown fuse or what? And it's not, it is not woo in the slightest to say, hey, a physical impedance at the level of your muscular or just your neurophysiology also contains emotional content, also contains just metabolic content and on up. And if you can release it at a more foundational level, that you may not have to process it nearly as much. At the psychological level.

Do you feel like Stan Grof's work in breathing, holotropic breathing, my first session was five years ago. I've done it many times since. Do you feel like this could be the same thing where through that somatic awareness, whether someone, somebody's being touched or doing a deep dive holotropic breathing session, that the same healing result could actually exist?

I mean, yes. And, and this is where I was, you know, talking about sort of ending up a little bit more on the conservative side of things these days is just, I mean, necessary but not sufficient. So I do think that like boosting our overall vitality. And I do think that using those, those experiences to reset our nervous system so we're not experiencing chronic fibrillating micro ptsd, which feels like how most of us are these days, especially with our phones and social media and all this kind of stuff. Our systems are just constantly overwhelmed in ways we're not designed to. Like no humans ever have ever had this amount, this bit stream.

It's almost like a constant drip of stress. Like we have an IV and there's a constant drip, one drip at a time, 100%.

Which is why everybody's so reactive and why there's so many culture wars going on right now. People are just locked and loaded to lose their shit and they just need the tiniest excuse to venture. So if we, instead of doing that, which is a very dysfunctional way of trying to regulate our nervous systems, if instead you have a peak experience. So most ecstatic experiences are death practices in some way that you're dying to the moment, you're dying to your self sense. You know, psychedelics is ego, death and sexuality. It's la petite mort, the little death. You know, there's all sorts of these, these experiences. Holotropic breathing does the same thing. You know, it's like, like turning on and then powering back on your laptop when you've had it open.

It usually fixes most things.

Yeah, it usually fixes most things. Now the key is that when you were saying, hey, does holotropic breathing do this or do any of these ecstatic practices kind of. Do they solve it for us? No, we still have to do the work on our laptop. It's just going to not be as buggy as it was. So I think there's a real peril these days, and it seems like it's been pretty consistent, is that when people tap in to peak states, they just want to keep tapping in. And that bliss junkie state seeking element is almost overwhelming. And we almost always get sidetracked by going back and having more of that awesome than holding it really efficiently and realizing, okay, that gave me some clarity. Now I'm going to work with that clarity for weeks, for months, for a year, whatever it would be, and absolutely suck the marrow out of it versus, hey, let's do it again next weekend. And that to me. So then you see that with Wim Hof, his respiration is kind of obviously the holotropic craze of today and how many people are truly using, I mean, I think people are using it positively There are people who are responding to like, hey, I just feel more alive, I feel more vital, I'm juiced. That's all great. And how many additional people are just like, I just want to feel, I just want to feel high. I just want to feel something.

I just want to feel alive.

I just want to feel. And there's not necessarily a point or an outcome. Yes.

I'm so glad we're talking about this because I've explored with psychedelics. I've done breath work, I've done the 20x that we talked about before we recorded. So I love going to these spaces where I can go within and I can see what's real. Because in this environment we're so clouded by this constant stimulation that's around us. Like you mentioned, how do we be even begin to use these tools when we look at psychedelics? I know that psychedelics is something that you said you're going to be more conservative moving forward for a little bit.

But are you still going to.

I think I've always been. I mean, that's maybe not what folks would take from. Well, I mean, I think we were cautionary in stealing fire. There were a number of places we let the air out of the balloon for sure on purpose.

So I look at the way that people can even begin the exploration and it brings up the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. He defined this psychedelic renaissance as mind manifesting compounds that help the mind manifest its deep, deepest qualities. Which I think is really a clear lens to see this. It's like, what's in there is in there, whether you explore it or not. So why don't we just explore it?

Yeah, I mean, if I had to sort of write a prescription for culture, like, how ought we, or might we. I think it would be a bell curve and it would be, look, folks, sorry to rain on the parade. However, there's probably a relatively predictable distribution of how we should integrate psychedelics. Just take that as an example. Because of Pollan's book and the kind of current emphasis on it, 10% of the population should never touch the fucking things. Only 10% of the population should ever do them more than once or twice. And a massive curve in the middle should engage with them at specific, highly structured and restricted points in their lives. An adolescent coming of age, a marriage and union, a death, and that's it. And if you think about any indigenous use ever, they were always tightly circumscribed and controlled in those ways, and no one just had open and free access. The Eleusinian Mysteries was once a goddamn year. And doing what Alcibiades did was punishable and pain of death. And that's how that thing persisted for 2,000 years. So in our egalitarian, libertarian, nobody tells me what to do. Everybody's spiritual, but not religious, and everybody gets to follow their bliss and see what happens. I think is madly contraindicated with the tools that we now have access. And I think we're running up against value systems because there is that. I mean, same with polyamory and all the kind of open relating and all these kind of things in the relational sexual space as well, which is on the one hand, from a secular humanist point of view. The less shame, the less guilt, the less repression, the more choice, the more freedom, the more access we have in general, we value in the secular humanist framework as an expanding good. You can make the same case for access to psychedelics and all these things. This is liberating and libertarian. But what's happening is that we are in fact playing with fire. We are playing with tools and techniques that actually enter the realm of tantra in the case of sexual experimentation, in the realm of shamanism, in the case of psychedelic experimentation. And those have very different rule sets and very different norms and very different cautions. So if you're just out seeking experience and you want to be engaged in consensual, ethical, you know, banging, lots of people have at it, sure. But if on the other hand, you're actually accidentally opening up up states and stages of consciousness that you wouldn't otherwise normally have access to, but you're doing it with like a yay, woohoo, it's all good, it's not all good. And you need to be way the hell more careful. And the same thing with the ayahuasca backlash, right? I mean, you've got ayahuasca tourism, you've got all kinds of folks going down to Peru. I mean you've got people because, largely because of Joe Rogan, you've got a bunch of like CrossFit MMA boys just like banging down DMT vaporizers, no idea what they're going towards, no idea what they're going down. And let's just assume, for the sake of argument, just an if. If any of these practices do actually open up non ordinary states of reality, then this is fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. And we now have way the hell more people entering and opening up realms of existence and reality and consequence that they have no fucking understanding of. This is like kooks showing up at Jaws to, to Insert. Because their buddy's got a jet ski and they're on vacation on Maui.

It also reminds me like, you know, the Ark of the Covenant, where in the Indiana Jones film, when the light shined out of it. I mean, it was similar to that dude.

I used the Ark of the Covenant as an image all the time. Because in John Lilly, the classic psychonaut, he said, cosmic love is ruthless and utterly indifferent. It teaches you its lessons whether you want them or not. And. And when people talk about jar love and cosmic love and the universe is nothing but love, you're like, yeah, maybe, maybe, but be careful of what kind of love. This is not like fluffy bunnies and Valentine's hearts. This is Ark of the Covenant, burning bush kind of love. And it is ruthless and utterly indifferent.

So then why do 32 million Americans, as you wrote about your book, use psychedelics? It's one in ten people.

Yeah, that's a pile. I mean, I think, as the study that we cited said it was for introspection, for transcendence, and for increased insight meaning. Which that to me seems great and that is super encouraging. But a question that I've, you know, Rick Doblin and I have gone back and forth on several times is help me understand the seeming wild ass drop off from the one to three therapeutically assisted psychedelic sessions that appears to be doing such great things for people suffering from trauma. And the 33 or the 303 sessions of ravers and burners and everybody else, where you're like, you know, or people who proudly say they've had 60 ayahuasca sessions, and you're like, why? What have you got? It is no longer linear. It's definitely not exponential. And in fact, you've just gone asymptotic. You're never getting any closer to the thing you were seeking in the first place. And you're way upside down on the Pareto split.

It's really about the integration then. I mean, because if these people have done 60 ceremonies, then there's no way they've integrated unless they're going down the route of being a shaman themselves.

Yeah. Which is an easy cop out. And also when that intersects with the info marketing space, you get some real estate, you get some full money changes in the temple kind of shit where you get people who really have no business presume claiming authority on any of this stuff, turning around and selling it to the greater fools behind them. And that, to me is criminal. And that. Yeah, that.

But isn't there still a part of you that's happy that there's a bigger lens on psychedelics, on this ecstasis, on exploring these states, because at least it's bringing up the conversation.

I think that intellectually we are ill prepared for the states we're disclosing. So it feels like the level of social discourse these days and the level of lineage understandings, the level of cross cultural analysis and a lot of just good old fashioned homework is simply not being done. When you hear people being like, oh yeah, I'm deeply experienced in ayahuasca. I've been studying it for years. I mean, it was that 2011 National Geographic article I remember, that was by. Are you fucking kidding me? That was the first time you came across it. And you're positioning yourself as an elder. It's ludicrous. So to me, coming from mountaineering and guiding and surf rescue and those kind of things, I always just think of in the outdoor industry, you do not position yourself as a high altitude Himalayan guide until you've put up some serious ascents yourself, until you've apprenticed with other people, until you have your avalanche training and your wilderness medicine training, you know, your shop. And then, and only then is there a very reality tested progression up the ranks to guide. And in the spaces of sexuality, in the spaces of psychedelics, in the spaces of personal growth, you have everybody and their fucking mother basically being like, hey man, if I'm. This is like the teacher who's like, you don't have to know everything, you just have to be one night ahead in the reading from your students. It's kind of that. And there's no validation or falsification of people's cred. And so we end up with an awful lot of pretenders showing up as spokespeople. And that doesn't end well. That never ends well. So one model that gives me some kind of hope. So back to the notion of the bell curve and who should have access. There is a tribe in New guinea who has a nine level initiatory stack and it's based on three substances. Is it's ginger, tobacco and mushrooms. Which is weird. You wouldn't be like, ginger.

What the hell is ginger? It sounds like an interesting tea.

It is, but. So there's like three levels of ginger initiation and basically it's like Montessori classroom. Like you can use anything you want, provided you've already been introduced to it formally. So you go through three levels of ginger, three levels of tobacco, and then varying degrees of intensely psychedelic mushrooms. But it's a pyramid. So that the ninth level is the equivalent of being invited into your PhD. So fewer and fewer people get initiated into the highest levels. You have to kind of learn your way in. But what I found equally. So that's super cool. I mean, the other fascinating thing is that the people who are initiated into the ninth level, their realizations, like their quote unquote downloads, are considered living scripture and they get added to their sacred texts. So in contrast to Christianity, let's say, where if you know St. John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila or any of these mystics had their breakthroughs, they get burned at the fucking stake as heretics like the old. Like there's a door that goes slamming shut after the formation of these religions. And then anybody else who claims to have direct access to God gets whacked by the priests. And instead there's this sense of, hey, there's a ratcheting progression. You can, you can, you are then initiated into responsible use of the ones you've been. You've been brought into. Beyond that, you don't get to play unless you're invited up. But then at the top levels, those who are, who are initiated in those levels get to be co author, authoring the community structure.

I'm so glad you're bringing this up because there are people even in the Encinitas community, they're like, oh, I'm called by the medicine to pour. And I'm like, no, you're not.

Yeah, open up a big old can and shut the fuck up.

Yeah. You've only been two years exploring this, right? So I think we're still, you know, we're half beast, half spirit, Jamie. We're trying to figure out like, okay, our ego is in one part of it. Our spiritual exploration and figuring out why the hell we're on this spinning rock is in another. And so we are fighting and sometimes dancing with the ego massively.

And it feels to me like there's an element. It's a little bit like, you probably seen the news pieces on the increase in super viruses that have been, that are just happening. Right. Medically. Because for several decades, doctors have just been overprescribing antibiotics. Yes. Because basically they realize that if I don't prescribe, even if, like, I know you've got something viral, I know an antibiotic doesn't work for it. I'm going to prescribe it for you anyway because you're happy and you go home and you give me good ratings on my health insurance. It's a game that the doctors play. If I actually try to educate you, you're going to be pissed off, you're going to go home and you're going to slam you. So here's the script. And as a result, we have actually been training and growing extra, you know, extra antibiotic resistant viruses. We create super viruses. And it feels like something similar is happening in the psychedelic community where we are creating superegos. The very medicine that is supposed to get rid of our egos is never, we're never quite finishing our courses of medicine. We're stopping at 10 days when we had to go to 14 we haven't obliterated. And they come back stronger and more resistant than ever. And so the Encinitas community, the Marin San Francisco community, the Boulder community, the New York City robot hot community, all these places right where they are sense of like, we are the leather and feather beautiful fucking people. We fuck when we want, we trip when we want, we throw the baddest ass parties. And aren't we just goddamn amazing on Instagram? And that has created, I think, something that is potentially like a, a terminal cul de sac in the growth of these communities. Because on the one hand they are closest to the garden gate. They are without a doubt they have had access to the most powerful, potent and integrated blended techniques of ecstasy that humans have ever had anywhere, period. And yet how many fuckers do you know that are like, oh yeah, I've done five meo like three, five times. Or like we're doing another medicine journey, blah blah, blah, blah. And they haven't changed their personality, typography, whatever, is exactly the same as five years ago. It might even be a little bit more smug and insufferable.

Absolutely.

And you're like, sweet Jesus, that's it. I mean, and I shared this at a conference last week, but like the thing that has prompted me to think so deeply and heavily about this is like, that's it guys, we're out of bullets. Like if 5 Meo and if Ayahuasca and if conscious sexuality and if deep embodiment and if personal growth and if speech acts and language and all this shit we've all been spending so much time and effort doing is not enough to turn us into servants of God, then we dropped a stitch someplace.

This is so powerful, man. I feel like you dropped a universal mic right now. And everyone listening. Because this exploration, I don't think there's any more powerful tools for whether you want to call it ecstasis altered states than ayahuasca. I've had the most healing in my life and I'm Committed. And I've talked about this on the podcast to the integration process. It's the integration where people are missing integration and service.

And I mean, once again, there's nothing new under the sun. I mean, yoga is an eight limbed path. It's not just Lululemon butts. And it's about right lively, right living. I feel like karma yoga service to the least of my brothers. The whole 80, 20 woke to broke is something I've been kind of playing with, which is the idea that you get 80% of your bang for your buck on aesthetic technologies with the first 20% of your involvement. But because that first 20% feels so outsizedly rewarding, most people just continue going and then they start investing 80% of their time and money to go chasing the tail of the 20%, which is asymptotic. It's forever, just kind of like you're never going to get there. You can chase it forever. And that's fine if you're just a trust funder living on an island, but it becomes the opportunity cost to a society where so many are suffering becomes selfish to the point of unconscionable. And so the idea of if we just say, Hey, 80% woke is good enough. And in fact that might be all we ever get to presume. 20% broke is the human experience. Let's be open to it, let's grieve fully. Let us be fully awake to that. And not chasing one more journey, one more peak experience, one more bauble or blinky shiny thing that we tell ourselves is going to give us all the money we want, all the love we want, all the caring concern we want. If we can only get there, then life is forever effortless and easy. Life isn't. We are 3D creatures. For eight decades.

I'm thinking about Willy Wonka. There's the golden ticket. And I think some people approach Jamie, these psychedelics as the golden ticket. It's like the ultimate golden ticket. It's not true though. The golden ticket is actually the integration. That's what I've found.

Integration and service.

How do you do this in the hedonic calendaring? Talk to us about that. It's in Stealing Fire.

Yeah, it was just the idea of like, okay, there's a, you know, the downside because none of us are so, well, few of us are so unself aware that as we engage in the bliss junkie stuff, we're not like, hey, might be getting a little overcooked here. Hey, might need to tend to some of the details of life, hey, am I doing too much? Those kind. And so most people pinball between indulgence and guilt ridden abstinence. I'm not going to smoke weed for six months. And someone does that, but then they're like, okay at some part of their system. It's like, but wait, I received insight, I received lack of drop of stress. There was something positive. So they go binge purge, binge purge. And it tends to be not that conscious actually. We tend to load up a lot of crypto puritan guilt and judgment and assessment. It's kind of why we wrote this section on the pale of the body, Am I cheating? Is this not right? Et cetera. So you have people with a lot of times an unintegrated relationship to their ecstatic practices. And it often gets a lot of cultural baggage and programming in there. So the idea of hedonic calendaring is just to say, hey, rather than should I or shouldn't I? Kind of an implicit moral judgment. Just consider it as more often or less often. And you have daily practices which are mostly positive. Foundational yoga, meditation, clean eating, that kind of stuff. Weekly practices like a Sabbath practice, which is, do I get a little micro blip of my reset? Do I get a peak experience that lets me feel warm, love, peace, calm, et cetera. Once a month, deeper dive, half a day, once a quarter, probably a full day, once a year, maybe an entire week, whereby I now I have indulgence plus abstinence built in. And then ideally you can then it's a little bit like trusting your ropes and anchors when you're climbing because you've got the systems in place. You can go and tackle harder terrain and feel that there's a way to come back safely. And then the key with hedonic calendaring is to stay, say one month a year of abstinence. Go cold turkey and watch every single one of your favorite habits or practices and just watch how twitchy you get. And watch how Ram Dass always said, if you're still thinking about getting high, when you're not getting high, you might as well still be getting high. You're not actually off it.

Wisdom hasn't been integrated.

Yeah. So if you've still got the urge or the tug, notice it. And then you just might say, oh, that practice should go into the left. Just move it to the right. Write on your calendar. If I was doing it once a week, maybe that was a little too much. Try it once a month. So you basically have a way to calibrate your integration Periods. And you have a way and ideally service which is, does it grow corn? Am I doing something of meaning in this 3D world for myself and the people around me?

How do you see yourself? I think you described it being a child or a servant of God. How do you see yourself as that now?

Christ, I mean, trying. I mean, I am so, so retarded on those fronts that I am literally just trying to be a good husband and father and to try and be a good leader in our organization. And that is like hands full. I mean, and that's the thing, like, particularly with folks who are into polyamory, let's say, right? Where there's potential ethical and deeply intimate connections and responsibilities and obligations to lots of people. I'm like, sweet Jesus, people, how do you guys pull these that off? I get it. If that for some reason is your true dharma, that's what you've decided is your work in the world is to evolve relational formats. But if you've got any other work in the world and or children, how on earth are you pulling that off?

I don't think it respects the beast and spirit corollary. I think the pendulum swings so hard to the novelty. People get addicted to this polyamorous state. Literally. It's an addiction. Do you feel like I know you have some work in sexuality that I haven't explored? There's not a lot of it in the book. Is that going to be in the new book?

For sure.

What aspects can you share with us about that?

Well, basically just gorilla tantra. Like, what is the sexual yoga of becoming? So how do you basically use respiration, movement and sexuality as a combinatory stack to create in dedicated relationships? So true. Dyad. How do you use that as the source material for radical accelerated growth and becoming and integration? And it's super bad ass and has the checks and balances of dyadic relationship. Like, if you're not connecting to your partner, you do not pass go. You don't get to keep playing. So for me, the notion of like, forget monogamy or polyamory. Because there's a lot of straw man arguments of polyamorous. Folks take the piss out of old bed death stale monogamy and say, don't need that. Of course, no one's advocating for that. And then moralistic monogamists say, oh, polyamory is lewd and crude and immoral. He's like, forget all that. The quote, the question is hieroscamos. Let's talk about hierogamy, the sacred marriage. It doesn't matter what your relational formats are, you can be banging one person forever. You can bang serial monogamy, you can be having loving, conscious relations with lots of people. That's. Go for it. Knock yourselves out. The question is, how far through the garden gate are we getting to me? So the question of hierogamy is way more interesting than quibbling over who's got the perfect relational format. None of us do. All that of of us do. It's all about the execution. So the question is, are we using communion as a route to transcendence or not?

So the fascinating thing for me, and we'll kind of end the show with this question, is this intersection of the physical and the emotional.

You explored this, gosh, since you were.

18, since you had that first experience. How would you define wellness? How would you actually define wellness of the physical, the emotional and the spiritual in our modern world?

Yeah, I mean, I would just say the simplest is balance, but I mean like integration between all three. And I think the simplest would be like the Vitruvian man, you know, Leonardo's notion, that image, you know, with his arms out and his legs out and fitting within the square, within the triangle, within the circle. The idea of we've got to do all of it. And that does feel somewhat new. The balancing of the Apollonian, the Dionysian, you know, the idea of logic and reason and responsibility versus peak experience. And there's kind of things we no longer just get to pursue extremes. It is on us to be integrating masculine, feminine, integrating heaven and earth, integrating agency and communion, integrating all of these things, immanence and transcendence, like they're all. We have to do that now. And the good news is we've never had more tools and more access. And the bad news is we're on the fucking hook for it. We have no excuse. And that to me feels like that's the walk on part in the war versus the lead role in the cage. Right now there's a lot of blinky, shiny gilded cages we're building for ourselves. And the real, you know, the key to the cage is the key to the kingdom. And we can unlock ourselves from our own self imprisonment and we can also, we can also absolutely stand, stand on Olympus. But it's a hell of a responsibility.

Well, thank you for being a narrator about this responsibility, man. This has been incredible to come to your home. Thanks for having me. And where can people support you? Obviously Flow Genome Project is the web website, but where are you the most active? I mean, on social. Where do you operate the most.

We do sort of weekly, weekly lives on Facebook on Friday. So Friday afternoons you can check us out flow genome on Facebook that page and then we kind of have a vibrant community there as well. So I would say there and there and Instagram are probably the easiest places and yeah. And we do, we do live events through the year as well.

Awesome. Thanks so much for sure man.

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