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what’s up guys Xavier katana here and
this is our episode with Jamie deal of
the flow Genome Project the book is
called stealing fire how Silicon
Valley’s Navy SEALs and maverick
scientists are revolutionizing the way
we live and work and we get into so many
different aspects of just human biology
and how to get into flow State so so
much just information you’re probably
going to want to listen to this more
than once just because Jamie when you
put him on the track you just just runs
with it which I loved
I was just steering the wheel you know
and Jamie did really well and we crossed
this interview so definitely take up a
copy of this book get to human XP slash
members for the members content part we
get into some personal stuff between
Jamie and Steven how how they work
together you’re going to want to hear
that thank you guys so much for
listening the human experiences in
session my guest today is mr. Jamie
wheel Jamie it’s an honor so welcome to
hxp oh thanks for having me so Jamie the
book is called stealing fire and we’ve
had your partner in crime Steven Kotler
on tell us about your background and how
you got into this book and you know more
about you sure well I mean the the book
itself is really about this the kind of
this underground revolution in hacking
states of consciousness and performance
that’s sort of happening all around the
world right now in some of the most
elite and well-known organizations we’ve
all heard of and no one’s really telling
that story and the way that Steven and I
should have stumbled on to this to this
this revolution really was because of
our work as co-founders a flow Genome
Project which is
an organization dedicated to the
recession training of optimum human
performance those moments of flow or
being in the zone where you know sort of
self-awareness drops away we get dropped
into the present moment and typically
our performance and our satisfaction
with head performance just goes off the
charts and we had found ourselves
working with some you know true in a
blood blasted e with some sort of the 1%
of the 1% that was everyone from Special
Operations community military to the US
Naval War College to professional
extreme athletes to folks working 1,400
companies at the executive level
engineering teams have solving hard
problems big five consulting firms
system basically anybody who was looking
to go from A to A plus plus in doing
that we had really taken a fairly deep
dive there had been a lot of work in the
seventies and eighties and even 90s on
the psychology of being in close States
and that was largely pioneered by dr.
Mihai csikszentmihalyi and others but it
was how did he stay to make us feel what
does it feel like when were in them what
does it feel like when we’re not and in
the last decade or so there’s been this
sort of concomitant rise in neurobiology
able to measure what’s happening not
just report how it feels and so really I
would suggest that probably our biggest
contribution to the field has been
integrating those students a
neurobiology under the hood and the
psychology of peak performance and that
sort of leaves us with more tools but
what we didn’t realize we had assembled
was a sort of accidental rosetta stone
that let us translate a whole host of
additional non ordinary experiences and
what what I mean by that is is that when
we will be working with these
organizations and saying hey here’s flow
and here’s peak performance and here’s
how you presumably get more other folks
for coming up to us after those
conversations they reversing upcoming
following up with phone calls or after
dinner or a few beers and say hey by the
way I’m trying this other thing I’m
going on an extended nine-day the
possible retreat or I’m doing you know
wim HOF breathing Mack and luckily
there’s an ice box or I’m zapping my
brain with electrodes or unstacking off
prescription pharmaceuticals or my
engineering team is micro dosing
psychedelics or I have just
come back from this meditation sexuality
retreat is that flow and so we were sort
of torn is we’re like what we totally
get what you’re saying
you are creating a non-ordinary state by
these things you’re doing it appears to
be valuable and useful but we were sort
of in this quandary where like either we
were going to stretch the depth of
working definition of flow so far but
none of the academics you helped develop
the field would ever recognize it or we
had to come up with a big attempt to get
a little bit like Roy Scheider and Joel
like we’re going to need a bigger boat
so the bigger boat we thought if we’re
like okay now what should we call this
because you know bless their hearts the
kind of baby boomer hippie generation
really did kind of run some of this
terminology in these concepts into the
ground so most most of their languaging
would kind of loaded with baggage so
we’re like all right we had a rewind the
clock all the way back to word origins
let’s go back the ancient Greeks and the
best term that we found to kind of
encompass this stuff neutrally with text
assets and and the literal translation
of that is to move out of oneself and we
thought all right since the antecedent
of the word ecstasy and a lot of you
know terms were familiar with and so the
idea of like just kind of getting it
back to that kind of mute value neutral
term those states or experiences that
take us outside of ourselves now we had
a big enough tent now we could look at
all these non-ordinary states of
consciousness and that rosetta stone
piece which was hey here’s the
neurobiology underneath the psychology
let us say wow a lot of these things I
mean think about everything is strange
as a soccer mom who’s got a kundalini
yoga practice and is reading Fifty
Shades of Grey on her lunch break on her
Kindle
okay are you looking to hack through
these acts and there’s tons of research
from you know from the Netherlands and
from elsewhere on the flow state
experiences and the neuro chemical shift
of those practices is right the way to
biohacking CrossFitters you know
drinking bulletproof coffee and and
diving themselves all the way to hedge
fund traders right using magnetic
stimulation to military operations guys
using float tanks right to the engineers
micro dosing obviously we’re like oh you
guys are actually shed your shared
conspirators in an underground rebel
in consciousness and you wouldn’t even
recognize each other walking down the
street in fact so many of you are in
these subcultures that are committed
never the twain shall meet that you guys
would swear blind but you would never
engage in off of the practices or base
or customs of these other sub tribes but
you roll them all together with that
rosetta stone kind of decoder ring with
this is everywhere ya know talking about
it that’s really truly fascinating and
there’s you know there’s there’s so much
of my life where I’m talking about this
with my friends and the people that I
encounter about slow state so you know
let’s define this for the people who are
listening how do we define being in a
flow state well you know I mean it’s
almost like a lot of the kind of ancient
wisdom traditions it can almost be as
helpful to define it by negation by what
it’s not and what and what flow States
and all of these non-ordinary states
that we talked about in the book on is
21st century Western normal and 21st
century Western normal tired wired
stressed right has a really consistent
signature for all of us and it’s
generally speaking our brain is cranking
along in fairly fast-moving beta waves
which are you know generally congruent
with activity in our prefrontal cortex
and our executive functioning self
meaning who I think I am so my biography
who I am behind my eyes that
storytelling meaning making machine
along with my ability to think about my
thinking delay gratification engage in
abstract reasoning long term you know
long term planning all those kind of
things that make us the clever monkeys
we are so that’s going on now the
challenge is that as we’ve evolved that
capacity over the last thousand years
but you know on turbocharged really
since the French enlightenment
you’ve got Rene de cartes and cogito
ergo sum I think therefore I am the era
of the rational individual we’ve really
amped that up to the point of almost to
the breaking point and in fact as you
know there’s some arguments that that
self-awareness has done all sorts of
great things for us I just gave us given
us the Scientific Revolution it’s given
us democratic revolution it’s going to
be of evolution of civil rights and free
market democracy and capitalism also all
sorts of may
using breakthroughs but the one glitch
was that we forgot to build an off
switch and so we’ve become trapped in
this hyper aware self referential
self-consciousness and that experience
is actually incredibly stressful so to
be a monkey right dodging the
saber-toothed tiger right if I’m away
from a threat I’m back to being a monkey
I’m living large but to be a human aware
then on that monkey and then I’m here
for a brief moment and then I die and
the let the universe is vast and devours
my significance in a gulp you know
that’s some bitch you can cooperate and
so typically you know the kinds of
fight-or-flight responses that are baked
into us they’re evolutionarily imprinted
we get norepinephrine we get a shot of
adrenaline we get cortisol which you
know all these things do great stuff for
us in momentary threats right they shunt
blood from the extremities that increase
our heart rate they dilate our pupils
they do us better peripheral vision they
heighten that reaction time they leave
us ready to live in you know survive for
another day but in 21st century Western
normal that’s the conversation I’m
having well stuck in traffic for an hour
and a half
rehashing a conversation with my
pathological boss that’s the
conversation I’m having at 3:00 a.m.
when I can’t sleep and I’m Rena and I’m
going over a fight it was unresolved
with my spouse from the day before
right and that steady drip drip drip of
that fight-or-flight arousal with no
place to put it and no way to turn it
off that’s what’s killing us and so you
know anxiety I mean one in four of us at
least in the United States are on
psychiatric medication that’s 25 percent
of us that are basically saying I am so
out of whack I am going to take a
pharmaceutical that’s expensive as
abundant side effects only works
marginally just to try just as a shot a
roll in the days to change this channel
yeah so so that’s that’s what it isn’t
right is is 21st century normal and most
of us are stuck there we’ve only got one
channel to choose from but these
non-ordinary states of which flow is one
of the most you know easy and ubiquitous
to access all that changes and so
instead of an overactive prefrontal
Gortex with a hyperactive inner critic
you know second-guessing and commenting
on everything our brain tends to quieten
down that part of our brain shuts off
and ceases to be as active our brain
waves that executive function firing
along solving problems slows down into a
more relaxed alpha kind of alert
perceiving but not necessarily thinking
specifically about any one thing all the
way down to theta which is almost more
kind of dreamy quasi hypnotic that kind
of state we get just as we’re drifting
off and asleep our stress chemicals like
nitric oxide is in our bloodstream it’s
a neurotransmitter it flushes away the
stress chemicals our heart rate slows
down we replace stress and
fight-or-flight chemicals with feeling
you feel good and learning and reward
chemicals like like dopamine saying yes
you know this is this is important
attention and orphans which ease pain
and create mild to moderate euphoria
those are the you know basically the
internal equivalent of opioids or
morphine Ananda my bridge the equivalent
of a cannabinoid which again easiest
pain people used to think that runner’s
high was all about endorphins
researchers now think it has as much to
do if not more with Ananda mine so it’s
a pain or bliss producer and prompts
more lateral connections between unusual
subjects and then if you’re doing it in
conjunction with others there’s often an
additional release of oxytocin
pair-bonding trust intimacy as well as
serotonin and the serotonin system is
infinitely complex but in a minimum can
you know can relate to increased
feelings of well-being and and and sort
of satisfaction so that is what happens
remarkably consistently in a whole suite
of these non-ordinary states what we’ve
been calling ex ptosis flow states are
one of them meditation and mystical
States and then finally psychedelic
states those that are pharmacologically
primed and you know there’s obviously
you know if people have been sort of
reading that you can’t really get away
from the recent research on the
psychedelic Renaissance or Johns Hopkins
NYU College in London everywhere else
and so all those bundled together I
think the tons of press coverage about
each of these verticals but the piece
that’s been missing
piece that we really hope to communicate
in this book as oh there’s actually a
bigger thing going on it matters less
which of these doors you step through
than it does the actual state the space
the experience and the benefits of once
you step through that door into this
shed train yeah yeah I loved it when I
was in LA and just kind of just
interviewing various people there it
there was this sort of subculture of
people who were paying attention to this
work that you guys were doing at the
flow Genome Project and I mean what
would you what would you say is the
noticeable kind of similarity between
these people who are high-performance
I don’t know engineers people who are
looking for this kind of thrill and
these Navy SEALs and then these sort of
soccer moms that are reading Fifty
Shades as you said earlier like where do
you see it the similarity between these
people are we inherently looking for
this sort of flow state in ourselves
yeah I mean you know interestingly
enough we were teaching at the Esalen
Institute up in Big Sur a couple of
years ago and there was a woman she was
I mean a sort of soccer mom on steroids
from down in San Diego as she came up
and she was describing how she’d come to
our work and flow in general and she was
also like a CrossFit nut and she stood
have confessed and that was actually one
of the data point that kind of became
the seeds of this book she was
describing like I do CrossFit because
yes I’m you know I was an athlete in
college blah blah blah but she did it to
get her fix she did it because it was
the only way she was able to basically
work herself into exercise-induced flow
and be the absent the pains and
discomforts of an unhappy marriage and I
was like oh wow and she could she was
she was a little concerned bikes like I
feel this is a little addictive I feel
great this is this is baby not the most
balanced way but it’s the best thing
I’ve got right now so bronze eagle a
professor at UCLA has made a case that
you know birds do it bees do it educated
fleas do it right I mean the idea that
the drive to shift consciousness is
pervasive throughout the animal kingdom
and that’s everything from you know
elephants raiding breweries or drinking
from for fermented
mudholes – reindeer eating – reindeer
eating you know I’m Aneta muscaria
mushrooms – baboon’s gut guzzling I
Boger a psychedelic grew from Africa
like basically everything all animals do
it include up to and including primates
and humans and so he makes the case that
the because you would think that like
getting twisted as far as being an
animal is probably not the best
evolutionary strategy now you’re going
to get picked off legs like a sitting
duck right so the question is is why
wasn’t this behavior aberrant and just
edited out of the gene pool really
quickly and so he and psychologist
Edward de Bono and others have advanced
the notion that hey what it says it gets
us out of ruts the ability to shift our
consciousness from waking state again
fight-or-flight routine into something
novel into those Eureka moments those
aha moments that your chocolate or my
peanut butter moments that here’s the
silly putty or the slinky or the post-it
note idea right those lateral leaps of B
patterning introduced novelty into first
our brains and minds and then into our
culture and our artifacts and that that
is a positive thing so Siegel makes the
case hey this desire to shift states of
consciousness is actually arguably our
fourth evolutionary drive you know sort
of behind only food water and sex and so
once you realize that you ask well who
you know what unites all of these folks
these crazy little sub tribes me right I
mean flow has been the domain of artists
and athletes and meditation has been the
domain of kind of Saints and mystics and
psychedelics have been the domain of
hippies and ravers and never never was
never the three shall meet you but what
is what it does unites them is our
shared humanity and that fourth
evolutionary drive that yearning for
something more than twenty first century
normal and and you can you know I mean
fifty Shades of Grey we were kind of
joking about it but it’s actually an
incredibly good test case because you
know and anybody we even read us a
paragraph of that book could realize it
was doggerel verse it was not it was not
within a country mile of a work of
literature and you got that book
sold more copies than the entire
seven-volume series of Harry Potter
combined Wow
so that’s a true what the moment
you’re like seriously like how that
support there’s no correlation between
quality there’s no character development
as a profound message right this is
about this is a poorly written bit of
Halle Quinn romance about II do media
clearly told BDSM from a woman who’s
clearly never experienced any of it and
it was off the charts that’s right so
you think okay so what is it right so
you can make a case that all that all of
that repressed suburban femininity and
women have right women who were clearly
under satisfied in their full erotic
expression we’re reading that looking
going ah yes here just intuitively here
is the past or something more and if you
compare that like that electronic dance
music is another great example where
we’re a DM music these days in fact
Tomorrowland which is a festival in the
Netherlands just went on sale this week
it sold out in I think 50 minutes and it
plays two weekends and it’s hundreds of
thousands of tickets and it sold out in
minutes six months of being offered and
you’re like okay well that’s interesting
because why do most folks go to concerts
well they really have a you know they
have a crush on one of the band members
or they love the story like the Beatles
or Bruce Springsteen they love the songs
and the lyric they all love to be there
with their friends you know on and on
there’s some communal bonding moment
well in EDM there’s some dude in a
hoodie with a laptop you know and he
presses play and then pumps his hand in
the air at the drops that’s kind of it
right I think and you’ve got and so
there’s no music there’s no Lee I mean
there’s no lyrics there’s no band and
personalities there’s you know strip out
70% of everything that people used to go
to see em utilize music for you like
well what is their instead and not
unlike Fifty Shades of Grey what there
is is highly concentrated state shifting
technology you have these high end high
fidelity sound stacks often function1
sound systems that separate highs lows
and middles in a way that like ceases to
be just listening to music it’s
basically like going to a Sonic carwash
and standing in front of it you know
standing in front of acoustic Waterpik
you’re just getting your body rearranged
by sound waves and there’s lasers or the
typical
lot’s of mind-bending substances and
there’s this great crowd entrainment of
a quarter of a million people at a time
losing their mind and dropping into
something else together and that is now
worth 48 percent of the entire ticket
sales on the planet right now you’ve got
private equity guys you go Wall Street
guys they’re all piling money into these
things because they’re realizing oh wow
state changing technologies is what’s up
right now everybody is moving beyond
from experience economy stuff like
Starbucks or Cheesecake Factory
Cabela’s outdoor stores you know into
transformation economy stuff if you can
help me become someone I wasn’t at the
beginning of this experience the margin
I’m willing to pay you is off the charts
yeah it’s it’s so profound I mean I you
know when you’re studying these sort of
spiritual Renaissance a–‘s of you know
these awakening ideas of electronic
dance music and these women who were
kind of obsessed with this book because
this desire that it creates in them or
more you know have you noticed that
because we live in such a connected age
that it made your research easier or
more accessible well I mean one of the
things we noticed is we kept running
into the same people around the world
and and that was kind of another one of
the big sort of like pause and really
just like just gut-check always seeing
what we think we’re seeing so you know
there is and I’ll say this with all
self-awareness this sounds hyperbolic
you know but there is fundamentally an
underground initiate Brotherhood of
techno Matic literati alpha hippies and
they and they go from everything from
Davos and Ted to Coachella and South Bay
and burning men they hang there hanging
out at these high-end gatherings they
are mostly globally mobile you know in
either running companies founding
companies post liquidity events they’re
living they’re living a large life and
and plug into these repeated initiatory
experiences with each other and then go
back and seed culture with it I mean
that was you know I had we were invited
to speak at the TEDx event
burning then a couple of years ago and
then got to participate in kind of this
salon with some of the founders at the
time they were wondering if and how they
were going to purchase a permanent chunk
of land to host Burning Man culture and
events and Larry Page and Sergey Brin
and you know I’m asking lots of on Tony
Hsieh and lots of other people involved
but at this gathering were you know
partners from Goldman Sachs heads of the
World Economic Forum the CEO the largest
ad agency on the planet
you know people you’re like wait a
second this is long this is way past
just Silicon Valley freaks and misfits
trucking out you know for a weekend in
the desert this is a globally connected
bunch of us folks from the Pentagon you
know like major players and they are
literally coming together to share what
you could make a case is a sort of
modern day right of the lusus right a
modern-day initiatory mystery cult and
people are having these experiences they
are impacting their personal lives
deeply but also impacting their
professional lives and and and creating
this kind of just below the water line
network of initiates to sort of know
each other with a nod and a wink in a
secret handshake and they’re moving
money condemned moving capital they’re
moving they’re moving talent than moving
IP they’re creating new companies that
are creating new partnerships and this
is kind of the new way that businesses
gets done I mean it’s like the Masons
and the Elks lodges are done and over
with are pretty much dead on arrival and
what’s emerging now is we’re just seeing
this as I said just this sort of techno
Matic glitterati these folks that are
sharing this experience it creates high
trust high intimacy and a shared degree
of inspiration coming from similar
sources and that arguably is one of the
most driving forces seeding culture
these days and no one’s really talking
about yeah I mean you guys are now right
and yeah I mean it’s it’s really great
because you’re researching inner
creativity consciousness and this is
what I love is talk about I love to just
explore this idea of you know being more
connected to ourselves getting into this
sort of flow state you know it just it
blows me away the research that you guys
have come up with and I’m just I’m
paging through your book
and you know something that you bring up
what is Alexander or sure Glenn I’m not
sure how many of our listeners know who
he is can you can you give us an idea of
how impactful Sasha’s work was for me
not Leica dellux and and our awareness
sure so Sasha just died I suppose a year
ago maybe a year and a half ago so I
just maybe one of the first sort of
monograph treatments slash hat tips to
him
and his legacy and certainly you know
with full appreciation and respect from
from errant on that Sasha was a boy
genius he was admitted to Harvard on a
full scholarship I think at the age of
15 he then dropped out to join the Navy
right after World War two end up being a
young sort of fund akin chemist for Dow
chem within a few years invented one of
the first biodegradable pesticides which
made them good Gillian’s of dollars and
effectively gave him a blank slate to do
whatever the hell he wanted afterwards
and he basically got became fascinated
with the compound masculine which is a
psychoactive it’s prevalent in San Pedro
cactuses which can get it Landscaping
stores or Home Depot’s if you want but I
mean he key it extracted it he’s like
wow this one little tiny molecule
completely change my life this was also
what I was subtly wrote about in the
doors of perception and Sasha was like
hey if that’s possible and obviously had
mad skills in the camera and he’s like
well what if I just tweaked a little
hydrogen bond what if I just tree could
tweak a little carbon chain and he began
modifying these compounds and so just to
give you perspective in the nineteen by
the nineteen fifties I think there were
twenty to thirty known psychedelic
psychoactive kind of compounds ones that
truly had a mind impacting effect and by
the time he had completed his research
there was something something like 250
and and the one that he’s most
well-known for it’s not the discovery of
MDMA or what is commonly known as
ecstasy or Molly but he revived it was
originally developed by Merck and
Germany back in the teens or 20s and he
just he just you know resurfaced it
began experimenting with Andres eyes oh
wow and this is before his called
ecstasy that was at the time was called
empathy and it was available during the
60s because the hippies just weren’t
interested in it which is I think
another kind of interesting thing is
like cultural
I mean that kinda stuff as was dnt which
is another psyckadeli received all sorts
of attention lately but the hippies had
access to all this stuff and they didn’t
pick up which I think again if you
overlay anthropology and culture on to
pharmacology you realize oh there’s a
lot of this that’s been rattling around
but Sasha found it was like hey this
really does increase feeling could
interact with the serotonin system it
tends to increase feelings of safety
security well-being belonging and it can
act as a profound sort of open for
Secretariat process and being a you know
highly credential professional that he
was he turned on some of his psyche
psychiatrist and psychotherapist friends
and said hey you may want to consider
conducting therapy with this compound as
an adjunct which they did and there
became this kind of underground movement
that was you know communica series I’m
considerably not well not unlike the
1950s 60s use of LSD in psychotherapy
where Kari grant and Jack Nicholson and
a lot of folks if anybody saw Mad Men
and saw those those episode that was how
it was right it wasn’t freaks and
misfits you know it would stop they got
the stuff this was high end intelligence
yeah you know sharing the keys to the
kingdom it so Sasha popularized it and
then it kind of leaked out and by the
time everyone else knows the rest of
story by the time the early 80s and
Dallas and elsewhere it became kind of a
club drug and all those kind of things
and then got shut down but Sasha was one
of the ones to to really popularize it
but interestingly he was working for the
DEA the whole time and so he was
actually he won awards for publishing
the best law enforcement chemical
resource book a you know to date to the
DEA was he was constantly serving an
expert witness and testifying and doing
all kinds of stuff he was the subject
matter expert and you know in in the
neighborhood and they’re like hey wait a
second man you know you’re kind of
getting a little out of hand he’s like
okay I need to get this information out
and so he published two books which were
sort of 5050 these chemical love stories
between him and his wife and like their
adventures and exploration discovery
that was really what cemented his place
in counterculture law because he took a
stand for open sourcing ecstasy she said
look these compounds are human birth
rights they shouldn’t be locked down or
patented or owned or or sanctioned
humans have a right for them all the way
to today what we now has 3d printers
with as little as vegetable
and paraffin wax you can punch in the
coating for any compound you want and
spit out on the other side right
whatever molecule you’re interested in
fabricating so we’ve gone from Sasha
doing these you know what bio acid which
is a fancy way of saying do it yourself
and take notes to open-source in the
cookbook to now totally democratize
means of production where anybody
anywhere with a Wi-Fi and a 110 volt
outlet can fabricate whatever molecules
they’re interested in exploring that’s
amazing that’s so profound I find that
that’s I mean we’re in the age of this
new enlightenment era that I don’t think
humanity has ever seen before and you
know it just it blows me away and the
reason you know the reason that I
brought up
Alexander Strickland was because I
wanted to get into these Silicon Valley
architects taking low doses of LSD to
solve complex problems can you can talk
about that a bit please yeah sure
and then I also want to make sure we
kind of get to like the stakes of the
game as well so if we can kind of pin
and not sure I feel like that’s critical
versus just sort of like feel-good
booster is important just in a sense
right and this started with James
Fadiman way back in the 60s if anybody’s
been following the cult the current kind
of micro dosing trend in fact islet
Waldman’s just come out with her book
about her micro dosing and Alice B for a
month so that kind of everywhere in the
New York Times and The New Yorker and
elsewhere but fundamentally there’s been
this idea that there’s sort of the macro
dose again that’s what the
stereotypically the hippies did like
just hook down as much as you possibly
can blast out to the back of beyond
see what happens cross your fingers hope
for the best okay and the opposite of
micro dosing micro dosing has also got
potentially arguably even a more
interesting history which is what
happens when you take some perceptual
threshold amounts of these things the
sub perceptual means the walls don’t
mouth I don’t have any visual
distortions I may not even have any
subjective emotional noticeable
differences but other than just pretty
no greater cognitive acuity and so way
back in the 60s he took a bunch of
engineer’s from HP and Stanford and
elsewhere and said okay that the sole
criteria to enter this experiment is six
months you’ve been working on a hard
engineering a technical problem you
haven’t been able to solve come
we’re going to give you mic reduces of
LSD or muscle in depending the control
group and then see how you do still
going back and trying to solve those
problems and you know they ended up with
something like nine patentable or
fundable breakthroughs and devices
including complex stuff linear get
accelerated since proton that need a
photon measurements of you really
high-end high-tech stuff and most people
reported you know somewhere around a
hundred and eighty to two hundred and
twenty percent increases in your
performance acuity and lateral
problem-solving these since he based
that all went underground it got
completely shut down for four decades he
has been since lately he’s been doing a
crowdsource kind of clandestine approach
where he’s basically saying here’s the
protocol do them if you want right back
in anonymously and we’ll share the
result and I got over four hundred
people having done it today and again
similar result but over you know the
majority of people saying I have better
access to lateral pattern recognition
problem solving you know and the ability
to generate in sets bmu ideas and if you
combine what Fadiman has been doing
which is largely just hey this is a
crowdsource experiment let me just
aggregate the information the feedback
if you know if you take a look at what
robin kaha harris is doing over the
Imperial College in London then you
really see something interesting new
Sutton’s and the mechanism of action
behind it all because what he was doing
is he started his graduate we’re
interested in studying the subconscious
a kind of Union analysis what the hell’s
going on under there that kind of thing
and he was really limited to basically
blunt instrument tools self-reporting
dream analysis slips of the tongue all
the things that would suggest there’s
something else to me than what I’m
trying to manage up front right and he
was really underwhelmed by things like
man’s some clunky as tools to try and
plot the deepest depths of our minds so
that’s when he first got turned on to
hey what if we start using
pharmacological primary specifically
MDMA and LSD and psilocybin
so that we can then put someone in a
measured a complex medical measurement
device like an fMRI which measures blood
flow and magnetic magnetic activity to
the brain and can then and we see what’s
going on in our subconscious a little
bit more a little bit more reliably so
what he found was a that our self is not
simply doesn’t just live in one place
including the prefrontal cortex that we
talk about it it’s not a soul location
how is meat
right rather ourself is this loosely
strung together network of nodes
throughout our greens and that just like
in kind of Star Wars right if you shoot
if you knock down even one or two of
those nodes the whole grid collapses so
that ego disintegration that is often
talked about in meditative experiences
psychedelic experiences flow state is it
kind of it’s a pretty apt metaphor that
our sense of self can literally
disintegrate when a couple of the nodes
are knocked out via whatever mechanism
could be you know hyperventilation and
breathing practices could be psychedelic
etc and he also discovered something
else which is under the influence of
these psychedelics what is happening is
that you are getting disparate and fast
one connections not just oh I’ve
connected you no idea a two idea B but
rather Zone A of my brain is connected
Zone C D and E of my brain and they’re
now talking to each other in ways that
they don’t under normal waking States so
to go to loop this all back together
you’ve got Fadiman way back in the 60s
starting with this micro dosing coming
to now and then being in conjunction
with some of them you know
neurobiological measurements like Harris
is doing in London and really one of the
most interesting things is like a lawful
lot of this has to do with our serotonin
systems and our serotonin receptors so
psilocybin LSD and serotonin we’re all
getting deeply studied in the 50s and
60s right
then came the federal lockdown on all
psychedelic research and in 60s and then
it really and truly in the early
seventies and basically all research on
the serotonin system got crunched down
to SSRIs like the serotonin reuptake
inhibitors prozac Zoloft etc so we got
these weak-ass drugs with tons of side
effects that only work in a handful of
people and pound you with complications
for months and years after and they only
work as long as you’re actively taken ER
and they cost the bundle by the way
they’re patented right so that’s what we
got out of the serotonin system for the
last four decades we got prozac nation
yeah and instead what we’re seeing now
is a resurgence in access to and
information on a bunch of other
substances that interact with our
serotonin system in arguably far higher
impact far lower
side effect you know lower consequence
kind of ways which is the antithesis of
the social story the antithesis of the
PTA mom’s talking about you know you
know stamps getting cost up to kids or
you know some kids somebody thought it
was a banana and ends up in an insane
asylum we’re like oh no notice serotonin
system and it’s super interesting
beneficial and just in time because
there’s a bunch of really depressed
anxious unhappy folks these days yeah
you know and and you mentioned this
earlier you said something about a
psychedelic Renaissance there does seem
to be this this sort of trend happening
with you look at maps and the work
they’re doing and the way they’re moving
into like I think they’re in Phase three
or four trials of MDMA and they’re
aiming to have MDMA legal to where you
can get it prescribed by your doctor
and you’re suffering from PTSD or
depression and you know you go to your
doctor and you ask for this and finally
these doors are kind of opening for us I
feel like our consciousness collectively
has been and held back is that the right
word would you would you use a similar
word yeah I mean I would you know we
talked about in the book the idea of
just there are state sanctioned states
of consciousness and they persist you
know there are certain states and
there’s certain access points to those
states that are reinforced and endorsed
despite the evidence and there are
others that are actively repressed and
suppressed despite the evidence and we
are entering a place of you know an open
social revolution where we have access
not only to the key the keys to our cage
you know but the keys to the kingdom to
the king you have been listening to the
human experience and Mackel is our guest
mr. Janie will you definitely want to
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