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Reclaim Your Nature with Jamie Wheal · Get Real with Jim Weiss

0:00
Speaker 1: Jamie wheel is a powerhouse. Wow, whoa Jamie Man. The concepts,
0:04
Speaker 1: while on paper might seem esoteric, when you talk to him,
0:08
Speaker 1: he makes it real and practical and pretty cool. I'm
0:12
Speaker 1: glad we had the discussion because again, if you just
0:14
Speaker 1: read that online or read a chooser for the book
0:17
Speaker 1: or whatever, you'd be like, oh my god, what the
0:20
Speaker 1: hell is this?
0:21
Speaker 2: Oh it's hetty God, Sex and Death. Recapture the Rapture.
0:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really hetty. Recapture the rap here.
0:28
Speaker 3: Look at that.
0:30
Speaker 1: Yeah it does sound very enticing, But basically, fundamentally, the
0:34
Speaker 1: way to recapture the rapture is get back into nature,
0:37
Speaker 1: get back into basics, get back into prayer, whatever prayer
0:41
Speaker 1: that is for you. Again, I think he made it accessible.
0:44
Speaker 4: We live in the society that's so afraid of the inevitable,
0:47
Speaker 4: which is dying.
0:48
Speaker 2: We all are dying, right. You said about experiencing your
0:52
Speaker 2: wife dying. Is it gave you a new lease on
0:54
Speaker 2: life because you understood that this is finite?
0:57
Speaker 1: It did it? Actually, it brought us, you know, a
1:00
Speaker 1: little bit more together on the concepts, which again you're
1:04
Speaker 1: trying to do that in thirty to forty to fifty minutes.
1:07
Speaker 1: But I think what all of the podcasts we do
1:10
Speaker 1: is just to help people realize that they can do it,
1:14
Speaker 1: they can make it happen. My mantra in developing a
1:17
Speaker 1: business over twenty five years, to the extent that I did,
1:21
Speaker 1: was about making it happen. I think that the general
1:24
Speaker 1: theme is I can help myself. I can help myself
1:28
Speaker 1: have a better life.
1:29
Speaker 2: Do you feel like in turn that has to do
1:31
Speaker 2: with trusting yourself, which is what Jamie talked about, like
1:34
Speaker 2: a lot of the snake oil out there, just ignore
1:36
Speaker 2: it and just go out in nature and trust yourself
1:39
Speaker 2: and listen to yourself.
1:41
Speaker 1: Well, I think you should explore it and then ignore
1:43
Speaker 1: it if you don't dig it. I think it's hard
1:46
Speaker 1: to reject all the things. I mean, people are like
1:50
Speaker 1: take testosterone and hormones and creatine and all these things,
1:55
Speaker 1: and it's like, okay, well what do I do? And
1:58
Speaker 1: a lot of doctors will tell you, you know, there's not
2:00
Speaker 1: enough data, dude, like you can't do all those things.
2:03
Speaker 1: But I do think it's you've got to explore before
2:06
Speaker 1: you ignore. That's my view, and I felt like Jamie
2:09
Speaker 1: was saying that. I don't think he was shaming anyone
2:12
Speaker 1: because they did those things. I think he's pointing out
2:15
Speaker 1: that we have all these substitutes for really just getting real,
2:19
Speaker 1: exactly right, and we just do so many things to
2:22
Speaker 1: avoid getting more real, just launching it and going I'm
2:27
Speaker 1: getting more real every day, and that's hard to imagine.
2:30
Speaker 1: I think it's a really wonderful state of beings. These
2:34
Speaker 1: philosophies can really help people live better lives. Look, I
2:39
Speaker 1: always like to know my guest's origin stories. Let's hear
2:43
Speaker 1: your background on how you end up living in Austin
2:46
Speaker 1: working at the intersection of neuroscience and human performance. Sure.
2:51
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just, you know, like many people's life stories,
2:53
Speaker 3: it's a total accident. Keme to this country from England,
2:56
Speaker 3: had a South African South African parents slash British parents.
3:00
Speaker 3: They kind of had dual nationality. My father was a
3:03
Speaker 3: test pilot in the Royal Navy and then was transferred
3:06
Speaker 3: over here via kind of like a NATO instructor exchange
3:09
Speaker 3: sort of thing to fly those Harrier jump jets and
3:12
Speaker 3: to help the US Marines not kill themselves taking off
3:15
Speaker 3: on those crazy ski jump catapults that they used to do.
3:17
Speaker 3: So that's how that was the sort of accidental exposure
3:20
Speaker 3: to North America. Went to high school and college here.
3:24
Speaker 3: I was the youngest. My brother and sister both went
3:25
Speaker 3: back to England, kind of thinking they might have because
3:27
Speaker 3: they went further into the boarding school public school system,
3:29
Speaker 3: that think that they missed something. And then they both
3:32
Speaker 3: came back to the States. So I was like, all right,
3:33
Speaker 3: I don't need to repeat the experiment. Moved from the
3:36
Speaker 3: East coast to Colorado for grad school in Boulder. Studied
3:41
Speaker 3: basically Native American history, proto contact history, kind of sort
3:45
Speaker 3: of historical anthropology. Really with Vine Laurier Junior, who wrote
3:49
Speaker 3: Custard Died for Your Sins. He was like the Yale
3:51
Speaker 3: trained Lacacal lawyer that defended a letter Peltier back in
3:54
Speaker 3: the day. And I was very much in love with
3:57
Speaker 3: the American landscape and always just a sort of baffled,
4:02
Speaker 3: bemused observer of American culture. So it was kind of
4:06
Speaker 3: like that. While as Stegner, you know, the famous Politry
4:08
Speaker 3: Prize winning author and writer who trained Kinksy, who trained
4:12
Speaker 3: at Abbey, who trained McMurtry, all those guys at Stanford.
4:15
Speaker 3: But he had a book called A Society to match
4:17
Speaker 3: the scenery. So for me it was always that query
4:20
Speaker 3: of what is the society that could match this scenery
4:23
Speaker 3: because it's so beautiful. And my life was always split
4:25
Speaker 3: between kind of academia, loving to study and understand ideas
4:30
Speaker 3: at a deep and rigorous level, but then also a
4:32
Speaker 3: little too antsy and restless to leave it at that,
4:35
Speaker 3: And so got into both surf rescue and beach patrol,
4:38
Speaker 3: ski patrol, outdoor guiding, woman's medicine, mountain bike racing, expeditions
4:43
Speaker 3: to the Himalayas, the Sierras, the Rockies, etc. So just
4:46
Speaker 3: always loved that balance of getting out into big, wild country,
4:51
Speaker 3: but then also understanding the history of human use there,
4:53
Speaker 3: like how have humans done what we've done here? How
4:55
Speaker 3: do people live in these places? What's the story of
4:58
Speaker 3: these places? And that didn't you know by the that
5:00
Speaker 3: was asked backwards. That's how I got into Flow States.
5:03
Speaker 3: And then I realized I was like, well, I'm a
5:04
Speaker 3: lazy bastard. Why is it that I will not go
5:07
Speaker 3: to a gym for all the love and money, but
5:10
Speaker 3: I will bust my ass to get to the top
5:12
Speaker 3: of a mountain for sunrise, you know, and the ride
5:17
Speaker 3: down and what is that And to me that was
5:19
Speaker 3: the secret source. It wasn't that flow states. I mean,
5:22
Speaker 3: in some respects I almost find flow states are incidental
5:26
Speaker 3: to the larger project of human development. But what I
5:29
Speaker 3: really was curious about in my life partner, Julie is
5:31
Speaker 3: a Montessorian, so she's a We built a Montessori school
5:35
Speaker 3: for our children, and we have a deep background in
5:37
Speaker 3: kind of alternative education, ranging from Waldorf to Outward Bound,
5:41
Speaker 3: to Montessori to Reggio a'nelia, et cetera, et cetera. I
5:44
Speaker 3: was just curious. It's like, what's the difference between forcing
5:47
Speaker 3: people to learn and grow, including children, but all the
5:51
Speaker 3: way through adult versus sequencing or creating What the godfather
5:56
Speaker 3: of flow research, me Hi Chik, sent me high called
5:58
Speaker 3: autotallic experience and telos just means it has its own
6:01
Speaker 3: reason for being. You don't have to schedule kids to
6:04
Speaker 3: go sledding, Dolphins don't pre plan their gonno surfing in
6:07
Speaker 3: the waves, you know. Puppies you don't have to put
6:09
Speaker 3: post it notes to remind themselves to play with each other.
6:12
Speaker 3: So what is that? What is that that intrinsic?
6:16
Speaker 1: Well, this guy Simon Senek that talks about the why
6:19
Speaker 1: is it similar to you know his stuff?
6:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, Simon for Ages.
6:24
Speaker 1: It sounds similar to me, but I don't know.
6:27
Speaker 3: Well. I mean also just the sheer stoke, the love
6:29
Speaker 3: of the thing play is very closely linked. And I
6:33
Speaker 3: think that if we can find ways that people, especially
6:36
Speaker 3: in this kind of crazy grindy hustle culturary tips and
6:40
Speaker 3: tricks and hacks, which just becomes so exhausting, that if
6:44
Speaker 3: we can just find what's the intrinsic reason for any
6:48
Speaker 3: of us to do what we do, and if we
6:51
Speaker 3: can harness that for long term development, long term growth,
6:56
Speaker 3: long term creativity, purpose meaning health, balance, whatever you want
7:00
Speaker 3: to put on the other end of that stick. That's
7:02
Speaker 3: much better than grit. That's much better than vanity, that's
7:06
Speaker 3: much better than guilt. So that's really my curiosity. It's
7:10
Speaker 3: just like, how do you hauntess that the stoke of
7:13
Speaker 3: being alive for learning, development, growth and healthy happy people.
7:18
Speaker 1: Tell me about the Flow Genome project, How did it
7:20
Speaker 1: get started and what are you trying to solve for?
7:23
Speaker 1: Is it biohacking meets psychology and neuroscience training leaders to
7:27
Speaker 1: pute performance. You know, I've done my little bits and reading,
7:30
Speaker 1: but tell us what is this?
7:33
Speaker 3: Those are often the default buckets we get put in,
7:36
Speaker 3: but both philosophically dispositionally pedagogically, we are anything but biohackers
7:43
Speaker 3: and anything but Silicon Valley flowbros. You know, our background
7:48
Speaker 3: comes from big mountains, big nature, family, home learning, anthropology, history, culture, philosophy.
7:57
Speaker 3: So really the project is what is it to be
8:01
Speaker 3: a whole, integrated, balanced human And what does it mean
8:05
Speaker 3: to source from back to that autotelic thing, the intrinsic
8:09
Speaker 3: drive for us to seek novelty, make up, be together
8:14
Speaker 3: in community and what does that all look like? And
8:17
Speaker 3: so to me that we're learning and training organization, you
8:21
Speaker 3: could say default that we are to do with optimal
8:24
Speaker 3: psychology and neurophysiology. So how do we tune our bodies
8:28
Speaker 3: and brains to support our hearts and minds? And then
8:32
Speaker 3: invariably there's some elements of kind of leadership slash social responsibility,
8:38
Speaker 3: because if you are a person who has your shit
8:40
Speaker 3: more or less together, invariably there are going to be
8:44
Speaker 3: those around you that are asking for help, support, guidance,
8:47
Speaker 3: and they're probably going to be looking to you. And
8:49
Speaker 3: so how do we lead in dynamic high consequence, uncertain conditions,
8:54
Speaker 3: and of course we take people into the grand canyons
8:57
Speaker 3: of Utah, into the mountains of the Colorado Rock. Wherever
9:00
Speaker 3: we are. What we love to do intensive real world
9:03
Speaker 3: practical training. It's not PowerPoint slides on a windowless conference room.
9:07
Speaker 3: The tools and processes we use are drawn from everything
9:10
Speaker 3: from Paul Petzel and the National Actor Leadership School, which
9:13
Speaker 3: we worked with very strongly in an organization that we
9:16
Speaker 3: found in Colorado years ago, the had Mountain Institute, to
9:19
Speaker 3: Kurt Hahn and I would bound to Maria Montessori, to
9:23
Speaker 3: George Leonard right og back in the day, to Bob
9:26
Speaker 3: Keegan at Harvard so or a lot of the Harvard's
9:27
Speaker 3: Adult Developmental program and a lot of those methodologies center
9:31
Speaker 3: for Creative Leadership. So we kind of stick in that zone,
9:34
Speaker 3: not in the new age self help. And the ironic
9:37
Speaker 3: thing to me, and I'm sure you can track this
9:39
Speaker 3: too with your pedigree, is that you know, extremely online
9:43
Speaker 3: life coach millennials are just recycling all the tiredest Baby
9:46
Speaker 3: boomers shit and repackaging it for the online generation as
9:52
Speaker 3: if it's new. So anything from eye gazing to drawing
9:55
Speaker 3: mondalas to like this, This shit is indistinguishable from like
9:59
Speaker 3: the wildest williast excesses of the late sixties to mid seventies,
10:03
Speaker 3: with no self consciousness that there's even they were even
10:05
Speaker 3: realizing that they're just ripping off their parents blind and
10:08
Speaker 3: repackaging the same old shit. But in between there there's
10:11
Speaker 3: some more rigorous, more academically validated, just more serious and effective,
10:18
Speaker 3: less cringey stuff. And wherever possible, we'd love to default
10:22
Speaker 3: to reality based learning, like let's go climb a mountain
10:26
Speaker 3: together and see what it's like to be actually be
10:27
Speaker 3: on a rope together. Let's not do a lay mass,
10:29
Speaker 3: trustful off a picnic table and then talk about our feelings.
10:33
Speaker 3: So I'd rather like really have people.
10:36
Speaker 1: Well, you also talk about how prayer matches breathing rhythms,
10:39
Speaker 1: which all of their brain states, and we've been praying
10:42
Speaker 1: for millennia. So I was thinking, is that why I
10:45
Speaker 1: like to go to Temple on Friday nights? And is
10:48
Speaker 1: this why I like to walk in the redwoods on
10:50
Speaker 1: over Hill near my house. I get more out of
10:54
Speaker 1: that than almost anything I do. To your point, right,
10:58
Speaker 1: I guess is what you're talking about. But prayer and
11:00
Speaker 1: all of that and the music in temples and all
11:03
Speaker 1: the different places you go to. I think, what's your
11:06
Speaker 1: experience there?
11:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean God. So you're just about sort of
11:10
Speaker 3: organized religiosity and participation in general. In my last book
11:15
Speaker 3: I wrote about that, and this was kind of actually
11:16
Speaker 3: before the more recent religious turn where everybody from Russell
11:19
Speaker 3: Brand to j Evans is getting Jesus and various other things.
11:22
Speaker 3: But it was just saying, hey, look, it's very and
11:25
Speaker 3: I actually talked about like Sam Harris and the New
11:27
Speaker 3: Atheist and Richard Dawkins and that kind of two thousand
11:29
Speaker 3: and eight, like death of Religion. It's over. Religion's the
11:32
Speaker 3: opiate of the masses, et cetera. And it was just
11:35
Speaker 3: thinking that, well, look, it serves a very powerful social
11:40
Speaker 3: and psychological function, and that people who believe and practice
11:45
Speaker 3: whatever their faith is are healthier, wealthier, and happier than
11:49
Speaker 3: people who don't believe. And it doesn't matter what you believe.
11:52
Speaker 3: It could be Buddha, Vishnu, Jesus, you know, the pink elephant.
11:56
Speaker 3: It's that you believe and that you gather in a
11:58
Speaker 3: community or practice to enact that belief. So you're like, okay,
12:02
Speaker 3: that just anthropologically again, is fascinating, like what is that?
12:06
Speaker 3: And in fact we were speaking with is it Habad,
12:09
Speaker 3: that's the Jewish sect that had the kind of Messiah
12:13
Speaker 3: fellow in Brooklyn.
12:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think they wrapped themselves in the feeling and
12:17
Speaker 1: yeah all that.
12:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then they're quite orthodox, right, but it was
12:20
Speaker 3: also a relative. It was a you know, a renewal sect.
12:23
Speaker 3: They were kind of in reinventing a past. Right. Anyway,
12:27
Speaker 3: long story short, is a woman we know who was
12:30
Speaker 3: raised than that community, very very strict, married off to
12:33
Speaker 3: a young rabbi. They get packed off to Jerusalem. They're
12:37
Speaker 3: doing the whole bit full in but he tended out
12:39
Speaker 3: to be abusive, so just as a husband and father,
12:41
Speaker 3: she ends up leaving him crazy prohibitions against divorce and separation,
12:45
Speaker 3: all the obvious stuff. She ends up back in la
12:47
Speaker 3: and she's like, Okay, I saved myself and my children
12:50
Speaker 3: from this dysfunctional, abusive, nuclear family situation, but I also
12:54
Speaker 3: have just ripped out all of the culture, all of
12:56
Speaker 3: the community, all of the connection, all of the song,
12:59
Speaker 3: all of the all the observances, and I feel bereft.
13:03
Speaker 3: And so she created a kind of secular Sabbath, which
13:07
Speaker 3: is again plays incredibly well on Instagram. It's super duper iby,
13:10
Speaker 3: it's non denominational, et cetera, et cetera. But it was
13:12
Speaker 3: her really feeling that, like, wait, I ripped baby in
13:16
Speaker 3: bath water and in leaving something that was toxic for
13:19
Speaker 3: me personally, but I left so much else And I
13:22
Speaker 3: think an awful lot of people are searching these days
13:26
Speaker 3: for that sort of thing, which is what are all
13:28
Speaker 3: the nutrients of traditional village based, town based society, you know,
13:34
Speaker 3: faith based where everybody shared an identity. It was which
13:37
Speaker 3: church do you go? Do not? Do you go to church?
13:40
Speaker 3: And how do we restore some of that in a
13:42
Speaker 3: way that is healthy and doesn't re activate or reanimate
13:48
Speaker 3: some of the traditional biases. I mean, I was just
13:50
Speaker 3: listening this morning because I think Stephen Colbert just did
13:52
Speaker 3: an interview that was banned by CBS, which I thought
13:55
Speaker 3: was fascinating. This was like last night even with a
13:58
Speaker 3: Texas Senator candidate. So I think he's part of the
14:02
Speaker 3: Texas legislature and I think he's now running for national
14:04
Speaker 3: Senate for Texas on behalf of Texas. But he is
14:07
Speaker 3: a left wing Christian. He was also on The Rogan Show.
14:10
Speaker 3: I think about a month or two ago.
14:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, I've heard about this guy.
14:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, James tall Rico, right, so, and he is expressing,
14:17
Speaker 3: you know, fundamentally faith based Christianity, Sermon on the Mount,
14:21
Speaker 3: Loved by neighbor, love by God, that's it, you know,
14:23
Speaker 3: in opposition to Christian nationalism, which we're obviously seeing quite
14:27
Speaker 3: a bit of lately. And then you know, there's another
14:30
Speaker 3: organization that's based in London called Sunday Assembly, and their
14:33
Speaker 3: whole thing was, we were church in England, repressed brit
14:37
Speaker 3: We left it because who the hell, what's sophisticated London night,
14:42
Speaker 3: you know, or anywhere else these days? We believe in
14:44
Speaker 3: such things. But on the other hand, we missed the
14:46
Speaker 3: biscuits and we missed the songs. That's kind of how
14:47
Speaker 3: they said it, and so they reinstantiated it. Now my
14:51
Speaker 3: sense of those guys, and they have branches in Venice Beach,
14:53
Speaker 3: in la all over America and the world. But my
14:57
Speaker 3: sense is is those guys are indexing a little weak,
15:00
Speaker 3: like they'll play journeys, don't stop believing, they'll play the
15:03
Speaker 3: monkeys daydream believer. You know, it's a little too stornball.
15:08
Speaker 3: And what we're seeing instead, and you're seeing a lot
15:10
Speaker 3: of people being like, I don't want a sanitized, secularized
15:15
Speaker 3: version of all this. I want the goods. And so
15:18
Speaker 3: there's also this bifurcation where we're getting a lot of
15:21
Speaker 3: people being drawn to ultra orthodoxies pre Vatican to Latin
15:25
Speaker 3: Mass Eastern orthodoxies, where you're like, oh, that's really interesting.
15:29
Speaker 3: There's almost a sort of existential kink where people are
15:32
Speaker 3: saying like, I want to submit and I want smells
15:35
Speaker 3: and bells, and I want high church or high synagogue.
15:38
Speaker 3: I want the og shit. And there's some reporting tarat
15:42
Speaker 3: Isabella Burton is a friend in college. She wrote a
15:45
Speaker 3: strange rights. She writes for The New York Times quite
15:46
Speaker 3: a bit, but she did a dog work at Oxford.
15:49
Speaker 3: But she's American, and she writes very interestingly about a
15:52
Speaker 3: lot of these emerging things. And some of it is
15:54
Speaker 3: this existential kink that the millennial generation, that me me
15:58
Speaker 3: me generation is just flat fuck exhausted with the soup,
16:03
Speaker 3: the hyperindividualist personal growth. You can be anything you want
16:07
Speaker 3: when you grow up. You can manifest the Airbnb mansion
16:10
Speaker 3: in the Lambeau. You can have it all, you can
16:11
Speaker 3: be it all. You can heal your trauma. You can
16:13
Speaker 3: bend your attachment sile, you can do it. Do it,
16:14
Speaker 3: do it, do it, do it, and then you'll levitate
16:16
Speaker 3: and you'll but they're not levitated either, collapse ins to ground.
16:20
Speaker 3: To us, just stick me in a pew, Just stick
16:23
Speaker 3: me in a pew and tell me what to do
16:24
Speaker 3: is kind of where we are at this one.
16:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that makes so much sense to me. In
16:28
Speaker 1: Recapture the Rapture, you're asking readers to rethink how they
16:32
Speaker 1: give meaning to God's sex and death. Do you think
16:34
Speaker 1: how we view these things will be different in this
16:37
Speaker 1: age of AI that you're talking about. I mean, what's changing?
16:41
Speaker 3: Gosh? I mean, in some respects, nothing's changing. It's still
16:45
Speaker 3: this human experience. We're born and we're dying. We're aware
16:48
Speaker 3: of that fact. This kind of aspecta's denial of death
16:52
Speaker 3: kind of thing, right, And hence all of our philosophy,
16:54
Speaker 3: all of our art is this stiff arming of the reaper.
16:58
Speaker 3: Life's bitch and then we die and figuring out the
17:00
Speaker 3: in between. Is it monumental?
17:02
Speaker 1: But I don't think people know that if they haven't
17:05
Speaker 1: experienced it. I watched my wife last year die in
17:08
Speaker 1: front of my eyes. So I get this now in
17:13
Speaker 1: a really fundamental way. And it's almost like, can we
17:18
Speaker 1: expect anybody to understand that unless they face it, if
17:22
Speaker 1: they've never lost a parent, a child, it's almost like
17:26
Speaker 1: an abstract thing as opposed to, no, this really happens.
17:31
Speaker 1: People actually really die, And there's a way religion deals
17:35
Speaker 1: with that that different religions deal with it differently, But
17:38
Speaker 1: it is part of life and it's part of the cycle.
17:42
Speaker 1: And I think, I don't know if that's what you're
17:45
Speaker 1: trying to do with that book. And I know you've
17:48
Speaker 1: written Stealing Fire and you're also now working with psychedelics.
17:52
Speaker 1: There was some big news today out of the UK.
17:55
Speaker 1: There's a company called Compass Pathways probably going to be
17:57
Speaker 1: the first to prove psychedelic drug U regulated drug for depression.
18:03
Speaker 1: Some good news about their second phase three trial. So
18:06
Speaker 1: we're gonna be in the age of all that. You know,
18:09
Speaker 1: how does psychedelics work into your program?
18:13
Speaker 3: I mean we've been adjacent to and or kind of
18:16
Speaker 3: dipping in and out of a psycholic underground culture for
18:20
Speaker 3: the last three decades.
18:21
Speaker 1: It's emerging from the underground.
18:23
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, I mean that there's so many things, but
18:25
Speaker 3: I mean, the bottom line is old wine and new bottles,
18:27
Speaker 3: and that the new bottles look like venture capital, big farmer,
18:30
Speaker 3: You're probably gonna just fun to take the shape of that.
18:33
Speaker 3: And you know, to me, psychedelics sort of change everything,
18:36
Speaker 3: and they change absolutely fucking nothing. And when ripped out
18:41
Speaker 3: of cultural context like the Lucinian mysteries or Hindu Soma
18:45
Speaker 3: or any ancient traditional or you know, indigenous Iawasco or
18:48
Speaker 3: even Payoti or whatever it might be, you rip it
18:50
Speaker 3: out of any of its traditional languages and cultural context,
18:55
Speaker 3: and you pour it into a hyperindividualist consumer culture filled
18:59
Speaker 3: with digital narcissists. What you're gonna get is even bigger
19:03
Speaker 3: digital narcissists. So the experience I had was actually it
19:07
Speaker 3: was actually outdoor guiding. We had a bunch of students
19:10
Speaker 3: get lost. They were up in the desert, they were
19:12
Speaker 3: hiking for another twelve miles longer than it needed to
19:14
Speaker 3: They got completely depleted of their electrolytes, and even though
19:18
Speaker 3: we got down to water eventually, the whole next day
19:20
Speaker 3: they didn't recover And I was like, oh, their electro
19:22
Speaker 3: lights are shot. Even took out a robbed the spice
19:25
Speaker 3: kit but had everybody stick out their hands and like
19:28
Speaker 3: ground salt, you know, sea salt into their hands and
19:30
Speaker 3: said lick your palm. They did, and their lights came on,
19:33
Speaker 3: and I was like, oh, really good to know. So
19:36
Speaker 3: the subsequent courses we distributed element electrolyte packs. They're like,
19:41
Speaker 3: we're not going to have you guys low on electrolytes again.
19:44
Speaker 3: But then the next two years, at the end of
19:46
Speaker 3: the courses, I couldn't take my wedding ring or my
19:49
Speaker 3: or ring off. People had fat ankles, swollen ankles. We're like,
19:53
Speaker 3: what's going on? And I was like, oh, we have
19:55
Speaker 3: too much sodium. People were using electrol like packets like gatoray.
19:59
Speaker 3: They were using like treat their water and cover up
20:01
Speaker 3: the taste and that kind of thing. So to me,
20:03
Speaker 3: psychedelics are like that, if you're missing all wonder mystery,
20:08
Speaker 3: self awareness, subject to object awareness of me and my
20:12
Speaker 3: stories and the games I play. If you're missing that,
20:15
Speaker 3: then a little pinch, well knock your sock self amazingly helpful,
20:19
Speaker 3: bring your lights back on. But if you're like I
20:22
Speaker 3: want more of that, I want more of that, I'm
20:23
Speaker 3: gonna keep doing it, then then it becomes toxic. You
20:26
Speaker 3: end up with hypertension and edema. And that's what I
20:30
Speaker 3: think we're seeing a lot with psychedelics where microdosing, mesodosing,
20:34
Speaker 3: whatever it is, people are. You're California sober, right. More
20:37
Speaker 3: and more people than ever are doing psychedelics. They're just
20:40
Speaker 3: doing them far too often and not high enough doses,
20:43
Speaker 3: you know. So I would say, do a way bigger dose,
20:46
Speaker 3: way less frequently, like maybe once the three times in
20:51
Speaker 3: your life, not every Friday and Saturday night, in a
20:54
Speaker 3: way that just kind of leaves you ready to dalance
20:56
Speaker 3: or ready to feel the fields. So yeah, I would
20:59
Speaker 3: say the entire current psycholic renaissance is dead on arrival,
21:02
Speaker 3: and we're going to get Prozac Nation two point zero
21:04
Speaker 3: at best. MAPS has kind of thoroughly shot the bet
21:07
Speaker 3: at this point, them and co opted by MAHA right
21:09
Speaker 3: wing philanthropists. It's all going to be part of the
21:12
Speaker 3: brave new world we're in and they're giving it to
21:14
Speaker 3: active duty soldiers slash law enforcement. And we can all
21:20
Speaker 3: connect those dots both overseas and Israel as well as
21:24
Speaker 3: here that you're like, okay, now, wait, moral hazard aka
21:29
Speaker 3: somebody under orders obeying orders to do a thing they
21:32
Speaker 3: realized later is bad Melai and Vietnam, Abu Gray in Iraq,
21:38
Speaker 3: streets of the United States wherever it might be, or
21:40
Speaker 3: you know, or Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. You're like, oh,
21:43
Speaker 3: an individual enacting the will of a militarized state, feeling
21:49
Speaker 3: that they might not be doing something that is aligned
21:51
Speaker 3: with multile orders, humanitarian, general decency, religious belief, whatever it
21:55
Speaker 3: might be. And then they're like, I'm feeling traumatized by this.
21:58
Speaker 3: This is the moral hazard. This is actually Esther Pearl's husband,
22:01
Speaker 3: Jack does a lot of work on this. He and
22:03
Speaker 3: I were at a dinner in the Mediterranean last summer
22:06
Speaker 3: and we were talking about this right as it was
22:07
Speaker 3: all happening, and you're like, okay, so now you can
22:10
Speaker 3: go and you can have an or drone operators who
22:14
Speaker 3: were working out of like double Wives in Vegas and
22:16
Speaker 3: they're like, this is fucking me up because I'm down
22:18
Speaker 3: home to a suburban house and it's like hurt locker,
22:20
Speaker 3: Like the disconductor is so intense that they're experiencing PTSD
22:23
Speaker 3: at similar even higher rates than active duty frontline soldiers.
22:27
Speaker 3: But they're like, okay, mdma et, just sketch clean, wipe
22:31
Speaker 3: it clean. I feel good. Can I report back to duty.
22:34
Speaker 3: Do I go back and do the same thing, because
22:36
Speaker 3: my moral hazard just been just been neutralized and fuzzed
22:40
Speaker 3: out by all the fields. And so you're like, Okay,
22:42
Speaker 3: that is actually quite likely an outcome that is happening
22:47
Speaker 3: on our watch right now. And you're like, did we
22:50
Speaker 3: all sign up for that? Because I'm sure you know
22:52
Speaker 3: yours and Steve Generation, as an example, imagined that peace, love, unity, respect.
22:57
Speaker 3: We were going for one world where everybody experiences and
23:00
Speaker 3: appreciates nature, where everybody loves each other and we're all
23:03
Speaker 3: children of God or light or love or whatever your
23:06
Speaker 3: aspirational you know realization might have been. And can't we
23:10
Speaker 3: all get along? Right? And I think the simple answers
23:13
Speaker 3: were not.
23:14
Speaker 1: I mean, you're obviously writing about all this is writing
23:17
Speaker 1: a daily practice like prayer that brings people in. Are
23:21
Speaker 1: we gonna you know, can you create a movement through this,
23:25
Speaker 1: you know, around your beliefs and what you're doing?
23:28
Speaker 3: Well? I mean, if I or anyone was trying to
23:31
Speaker 3: create a movement around the particular beliefs, I do think that.
23:34
Speaker 3: Nor can you be so fuzzy and so vague that
23:37
Speaker 3: you're like, everybody do your own thing, right? We do
23:39
Speaker 3: have a coordination problem, and I do think that there
23:42
Speaker 3: are certain stakes in the ground, lines in the sand,
23:45
Speaker 3: whatever you want to say, that are really basic. I mean,
23:47
Speaker 3: it's the old Rabbi Hellal thing, the old joke when
23:49
Speaker 3: he has to challenge the rap battle with the Pharisees
23:52
Speaker 3: of like reciting all the scripture on one leg. He says,
23:55
Speaker 3: doing to others as you have them do un to you.
23:57
Speaker 3: The rest is commentary. I think it's not too much
24:01
Speaker 3: of a lift to orient around that sort of general
24:05
Speaker 3: propositional idea. Let's be good to each other, and let's
24:08
Speaker 3: leave things better than we found them, and clean air,
24:11
Speaker 3: clean water, and clean soil should be every wish for
24:13
Speaker 3: all of our grandchildren, regardless of politics. Can we start
24:18
Speaker 3: there and recapture the rapture? I did articulate, what are
24:21
Speaker 3: the lego blocks of building religion, belief, faith, healing, and
24:26
Speaker 3: can you use it in the sort of interchangeable ways
24:29
Speaker 3: such that we could have ten thousand grassroots movements all
24:33
Speaker 3: around the world. Because we don't know. Bill Gates didn't
24:35
Speaker 3: get it right, Elon Mus hasn't got it right. There
24:37
Speaker 3: are no tops down master architects that can possibly fathom
24:44
Speaker 3: and optimize for our messy, competing, inflicting human condition. Isaiah Berlin,
24:50
Speaker 3: the Oxford scholar, was one of the strong strong advocates
24:54
Speaker 3: for this of agonistic liberalism. He's like, look, it's not
24:56
Speaker 3: just why can't we get along? And if we just
24:58
Speaker 3: sit here where a mediator, we'll hash it, we'll come
25:00
Speaker 3: to happy comebaya. He's like, there are mutually opposing and
25:05
Speaker 3: irreconcilable human values and they're never going to equal out,
25:09
Speaker 3: and we're always going to be knocking heads. And if
25:11
Speaker 3: we accept that, then we do less damage. Look at
25:14
Speaker 3: socialism and Marxism, look at these tops down ideologies, and
25:18
Speaker 3: look how much harm they create on their way to
25:20
Speaker 3: suppose the utopia. Thomas Soul, the Black American Harbor now
25:25
Speaker 3: Truer Institute at Stanford, who's kind of the darling of
25:28
Speaker 3: the thinking man's all right these days, is of a
25:31
Speaker 3: similar idea. He's like, be careful of trying to engineer utopia,
25:35
Speaker 3: Be really careful of overly idealistic solutions for all that
25:41
Speaker 3: way almost lies ruined. But what we could do is say,
25:45
Speaker 3: here are the building blocks. What are some of the
25:47
Speaker 3: building blocks you need, or you might need, deities you
25:50
Speaker 3: might need sacraments, you might need scriptures, you might need ethics, right,
25:55
Speaker 3: you might need these things. So if you're going to
25:56
Speaker 3: build one, make sure you're checking those boxes. What you
25:59
Speaker 3: build might be a little bit more like ideas human
26:03
Speaker 3: design centered toolkit that they took around the world for
26:07
Speaker 3: a lot of NGO projects and this and that, But
26:08
Speaker 3: like a bunch of Westerners coming in with solar panels
26:11
Speaker 3: or helping you dig wells, or giving all the women
26:13
Speaker 3: electric washing machines like or the Gates foundations, mosquito nets
26:17
Speaker 3: in like Tanganiko, you know where everyone you ended up
26:19
Speaker 3: using them for fishing, And you're like, Okay, humans are complicated.
26:24
Speaker 3: This culture is hard, and the least worst thing you
26:28
Speaker 3: can do is empower people on the ground where they
26:31
Speaker 3: live to make decisions for themselves with the information they have.
26:34
Speaker 3: And can't we do something similar as we attempt to
26:36
Speaker 3: build up sort of three point zero religion with a
26:40
Speaker 3: bit more of a perspective on it.
26:41
Speaker 1: Love it, O, God, we need to read more of
26:44
Speaker 1: this substack. But I like the homegrown human concept, the
26:48
Speaker 1: notion that look, we always say, are all politics and
26:51
Speaker 1: pr is local. You can't expect how you live in
26:55
Speaker 1: mill Valley, California to be how you're going to live
26:58
Speaker 1: in Akron, Ohio. They're just totally different climates and situations
27:04
Speaker 1: and people who live there. So I'm from a small
27:07
Speaker 1: town in Pennsylvania. I grew up with a very different
27:10
Speaker 1: reality than where I am now. You did too, to
27:13
Speaker 1: some extent. But anyway, we're going to lighten it up.
27:16
Speaker 1: I like to ask three or four questions and kind
27:19
Speaker 1: of end on it that are a little more personal
27:21
Speaker 1: but fun. What's the best most orgasmic meal you've ever had?
27:26
Speaker 3: Who? Well, I mean gosh, I would say, I mean
27:29
Speaker 3: one the obvious was a Michelin sushi chef blown in
27:35
Speaker 3: from Tokyo to a resort where Michael Pond and I
27:40
Speaker 3: and several other people were giving a talk at a
27:42
Speaker 3: gathering for a private sushi dinner straight from the Tokyo
27:47
Speaker 3: fish market on the pier overlooking in the Maldivess. He
27:52
Speaker 3: just served up the most amazing, amazing array of fresh
27:57
Speaker 3: fish and he had, you know, had the wooden clogs
27:59
Speaker 3: in the kimon when it was like full high high ritual.
28:02
Speaker 3: The night of I forget what even was. It was
28:05
Speaker 3: a comet that showed up like two years ago in
28:08
Speaker 3: the low sky. Oh right, And I hadn't been here
28:11
Speaker 3: for like eighty five thousand years and we just happened
28:13
Speaker 3: to luck into it because it was available only after
28:15
Speaker 3: the sun went down, and then it was like around
28:18
Speaker 3: for like another forty five minutes.
28:19
Speaker 1: That's right.
28:20
Speaker 3: I remember that looking at this epic sunset in the
28:23
Speaker 3: malus As that we're like, wait, what's that is that
28:25
Speaker 3: the Oh my god, that's the comet And then we
28:28
Speaker 3: sit there looking out at that. Wow, we have that
28:32
Speaker 3: sushi dinner, So that I would say, that's pretty memorable.
28:34
Speaker 1: Oh that's great, What a good memory. Any city you've
28:37
Speaker 1: ever visited that blew your mind and surprised your expectations?
28:41
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, so many. I would say Amsterdam. We
28:45
Speaker 3: just recently had a wonderful time both visiting friends there,
28:50
Speaker 3: e biking out to the coast as well as through
28:52
Speaker 3: all these ancient little villages, and then coming back to
28:55
Speaker 3: his friend's canal boat. And he had a canal boat
28:57
Speaker 3: that he had custom built. He was like a tech ceo.
28:59
Speaker 3: He'd been in San Francisco, had gone to burning Man
29:02
Speaker 3: et cetera, had gone back to Amsterdam and basically created
29:04
Speaker 3: like a burning Man art car. For the Amsterdam Canals.
29:08
Speaker 3: So it had a great sound system and at Fog Machine,
29:10
Speaker 3: it had lights, it had beers on tap, and it
29:13
Speaker 3: took us through this ridiculous sunset canal cruise on this
29:18
Speaker 3: actolutely outstanding boat. So that was a that was a treat.
29:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, that just happened.
29:23
Speaker 3: Huh yeah.
29:24
Speaker 1: Yeah. What's the album if there was one, that would
29:27
Speaker 1: be the soundtrack of your life?
29:32
Speaker 3: I mean an album, not almost like that compressed. I
29:35
Speaker 3: would almost feel like shows. But yeah, an album, I
29:38
Speaker 3: mean somewhere between.
29:40
Speaker 1: Like a show, like a musical show, or just a
29:42
Speaker 1: show show.
29:43
Speaker 3: You know, like like like a band playing that night.
29:46
Speaker 3: I would probably think somewhere somewhere between Fish's second album, Junta,
29:51
Speaker 3: and It's Everyone would think it would be her, but
29:53
Speaker 3: it was actually named after a vacuum queen our company,
29:55
Speaker 3: so that one just because it was literally how we
29:57
Speaker 3: came up, or probably Sergeant Peers nice.
30:01
Speaker 1: What's something you'd like to get real honest about this year?
30:05
Speaker 3: I would say probably sandbagging sandbagging excellence. I tend to
30:11
Speaker 3: back off giving everything one hundred percent, and it's probably
30:16
Speaker 3: somewhere in the realm of you know, it's what is it?
30:18
Speaker 3: Who is it the Jonah complex? Who I think was
30:20
Speaker 3: Maslow who had that idea, that notion of like what
30:23
Speaker 3: would the neighbors think?
30:25
Speaker 1: And who would I be?
30:27
Speaker 3: Could I keep it up? Or would I like pop?
30:29
Speaker 3: And so I would say probably facing my own expression
30:33
Speaker 3: of that Jonah complex.
30:35
Speaker 1: Wow, that's great love that. Well, we'll end up there.
30:38
Speaker 1: We did that, right, Kate, We got it all in.
30:41
Speaker 1: That was great.
30:42
Speaker 4: That mirrored so much of what Jamie, you and I
30:43
Speaker 4: meant about, which is now months ago. But it really
30:47
Speaker 4: had me thinking too, like the biohacking is really getting
30:50
Speaker 4: ourselves outside and trusting ourselves, not scrolling Instagram for someone.
30:54
Speaker 2: To tell us how to text back your date. Just
30:59
Speaker 2: listen to your heart, all right.
31:00
Speaker 1: It's easy for us to say I didn't grow up
31:02
Speaker 1: with Instagram, and that's not how I was raised as
31:05
Speaker 1: a borderline gen X. I mean he mentioned millennial. I mean,
31:09
Speaker 1: if you've been raised by those things, then I guess
31:13
Speaker 1: now we have to kind of undo some of it
31:16
Speaker 1: and get back to basics, which is I think what
31:18
Speaker 1: I heard a lot from Jamie today.
31:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if I can just take one quickly, because
31:22
Speaker 3: you teased up this notion of dying. You experience. You
31:25
Speaker 3: shared your experience with your wife and kind of and
31:28
Speaker 3: then you were sort of asking about psychedelics as well
31:30
Speaker 3: and kind of like where are we as a society?
31:32
Speaker 3: And I would prefer them, And it's just content for
31:34
Speaker 3: this next book that I'm writing. But my observation is
31:38
Speaker 3: that we are a fanato neurotic culture. Fanatis is just death.
31:43
Speaker 3: So we're neurotic about death and bumming. Yes, And that's
31:46
Speaker 3: everything from shipping our elows off to nursing homes, to
31:50
Speaker 3: botox and dyes, to plastic surgeries, to fact that we
31:52
Speaker 3: don't even apertoires and you know, factory farming, we don't.
31:54
Speaker 3: We stiff on the death and dying pod and no
31:58
Speaker 3: society has ever had that privilege. But it's also making
32:01
Speaker 3: us really sick and neurotic. So can we go from
32:04
Speaker 3: a thanato neurotic society to a thanato erotic society which
32:09
Speaker 3: just simply not erotic is like sexy time just arrows
32:12
Speaker 3: life force. Yeah, And can we reintegrate dying with living
32:18
Speaker 3: and whether that's psychedelic egot earth, that's one way outdoor
32:22
Speaker 3: action and extreme sports facing actual mortality. I just saw
32:25
Speaker 3: a study this week that showed that significant global travel
32:29
Speaker 3: actually has higher impact, positive impacts on health and therapy.
32:32
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so that's actually, in its own way, is
32:35
Speaker 3: a death practice. If I leave my car at the
32:38
Speaker 3: airport and nobody knows that coming these days people keep people.
32:42
Speaker 3: But like my watches, my logos, my signs and signifiers. Right,
32:45
Speaker 3: I'm a big deal back in San Diego. None of
32:47
Speaker 3: that's true. And if you're truly doing like the lonely
32:50
Speaker 3: planet backpacker thing, not the Four Seasons or Sandals resorts,
32:54
Speaker 3: not the little colonial outposts around the world, but like
32:57
Speaker 3: real travel, then the are different. The spices are different,
33:01
Speaker 3: the pathogens are different than night sky is different, the
33:04
Speaker 3: flora and fauna are different, the languages is that you're
33:06
Speaker 3: a nobody and you might experience the kindness as strangers.
33:09
Speaker 3: You might be invited to a meal, you know, like
33:11
Speaker 3: all of that. Right, So that is actually healthier for
33:14
Speaker 3: us than therapy. So how do we become a fanato
33:18
Speaker 3: erotic society? And you know, the idea that we are
33:21
Speaker 3: obsessed with the people who have faced the Reaper? So
33:26
Speaker 3: Tuesdays with Maury, that last lecture from that Carnegie Mellon professor,
33:30
Speaker 3: the movies, the Three hundred spartans, you know, like anybody
33:33
Speaker 3: who's like, I'm a goner, but I'm going out with
33:35
Speaker 3: a fucking bang. Or I've got my death sentence and
33:40
Speaker 3: I've let go of all the petty shit and I'm
33:44
Speaker 3: here to tell you the good news. What is a
33:47
Speaker 3: noble life? What is a fearless life? Those kind of things.
33:50
Speaker 3: So I think, yeah, I think we could go a
33:52
Speaker 3: long way just by cultivating.
33:54
Speaker 1: My wife called cancer a gift wrapped and barbed wire.
33:58
Speaker 1: Oh I saw it. I saw that notion unfold because
34:04
Speaker 1: she I don't think she thought she was gonna die.
34:07
Speaker 1: She never accepted that, but she knew she had. She
34:10
Speaker 1: was in trouble, and she changed completely. I do believe
34:17
Speaker 1: what you're saying. And I don't know. If you don't
34:20
Speaker 1: caregive and you don't go through the experience of death,
34:23
Speaker 1: I think it's all abstract and so that's why everyone's
34:27
Speaker 1: fucking around with all this stuff. But I get it.
34:30
Speaker 1: I get it more now. So having this conversation was
34:34
Speaker 1: more than just a podcast for me. So thanks, yeah, absolutely,
34:40
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, thanks for joining me on the Get Real podcast.
34:43
Speaker 1: You know, I hope you feel a little healthier hanging
34:45
Speaker 1: out with me. You know it's gonna be a lot
34:48
Speaker 1: of fun. Passing this along to others. Please subscribe below,
34:52
Speaker 1: Please share. I'm excited not just to talk about healthcare,
34:57
Speaker 1: but a lot of other fun topics. It's about me
35:00
Speaker 1: making healthy. Talk about health care is not a lecture.
35:04
Speaker 1: This is supposed to be fun and look forward to
35:06
Speaker 1: spending more time with you in the future.