Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
Speaker 1: will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening and enjoy the podcast. Today, it's my great pleasure
Speaker 1: to welcome Jamie Wheel and Stephen Cotler to the show.
Speaker 1: Stephen Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author and
Speaker 1: award winning journalist and the co founder director of research
Speaker 1: for the Full Genome Project. Jamie will is an expert
Speaker 1: on peak performance and leadership, specializing in the neuroscience and
Speaker 1: application of flow states. Together, they have written the awesome
Speaker 1: book Stealing fire House Silicon Valley. The Navy Seals and
Speaker 1: Maverick scientists are revolutionizing the way we live and work.
Speaker 1: Thanks for chatting with me today, guys, Thanks for having us.
Speaker 1: Scott really appreciate it absolutely. Yeah, what a really cool look.
Speaker 1: It like really really flows nicely and is really engrossing.
Speaker 1: Where did you guys meet, Like, how did you guys
Speaker 1: like find each other. I'd love to know that. You know,
Speaker 1: Jamie and I independently had each put in over a
Speaker 1: decade probably more studying flow stags, right, those states of
Speaker 1: optimal performance. When I got convinced by a bunch of
Speaker 1: my academic friends that there was no way to start
Speaker 1: a flow research project inside of academia, that you know,
Speaker 1: the conditions just weren't right yet. When I decided to
Speaker 1: kind of move it outside of academia and had sort
Speaker 1: of like qut to get you know, it, was looking
Speaker 1: for people to build this research project with. One of
Speaker 1: the very first people I was introduced to was Jamie
Speaker 1: and it just started there. We realized we had both
Speaker 1: probably been holding each had a half of this project
Speaker 1: in our head and when you put together, you know,
Speaker 1: it really worked. Yeah, and Jamie, what were you doing
Speaker 1: at the time. I was actually working in management consulting,
Speaker 1: so doing a lot of high performance leadership for sort
Speaker 1: of mid market CEOs, so a lot of kind of
Speaker 1: folks in the YPO and WPO community Young President's Organization.
Speaker 1: SO had spent yeah, five to ten years working on
Speaker 1: how do you try and create long term adult or
Speaker 1: vertical adult development in impact entrepreneurs and leaders, and before
Speaker 1: that had had a background in sort of expeditionary leadership,
Speaker 1: so mountain guiding, surf rescue, wilderness, medicine, all those kinds
Speaker 1: of things. And so between those two worlds it had
Speaker 1: a lot of cycles. Here's the theory, here's how it
Speaker 1: sounds in practice. How do you put it on the
Speaker 1: ground in really challenging and dynamic situations. So it was
Speaker 1: a great combination. Stephen brought a ton of the neuroscience
Speaker 1: and perspective, and I was kind of coming more from
Speaker 1: the sort of performance psychology and execution side. So were
Speaker 1: you like the Steve jobs and he was the laws?
Speaker 1: Who's the jobs and who's the was an ongoing question
Speaker 1: for us. We need to leave to Rochambeau for that one.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, I don't think it's quite a clear cut.
Speaker 1: By the way, let's just be clear, nobody is building
Speaker 1: the Lisa right right, right right exactly. I hope not.
Speaker 1: That didn't do too well that system. So Steve, I
Speaker 1: want to circle back Westling. You said that you've been
Speaker 1: studying the fast Day for ten years. Can you tell
Speaker 1: me what you mean by study it? Now? You don't
Speaker 1: have like a PhD. In cognitive science or something like that.
Speaker 1: I don't have a PhD in anything, right. My background
Speaker 1: is as a writer. But there's been two questions that well,
Speaker 1: one question that has sort of been at the center
Speaker 1: of all my work as a writer as a journalist,
Speaker 1: you know, thirty some years of work, which is how
Speaker 1: do people do the impossible? And it doesn't really matter,
Speaker 1: you know, whether we're talking about athletes pushing the boundaries
Speaker 1: of kinestetic performance to people building the fastest, most powerful
Speaker 1: companies in history. Everywhere you look, whatever domain, and you
Speaker 1: keep coming back to, you know, the same result at
Speaker 1: Abraham Matt that I discovered back in the fifties, which
Speaker 1: is every successful person you find anywhere has found a
Speaker 1: way to alter their consciousness, put themselves into the state
Speaker 1: of flow, and use that state to increase productivity, creativity, performance, innovation,
Speaker 1: you name it. So that was one side. And the
Speaker 1: other thing that happened to me is I got very sick.
Speaker 1: I spent three years in bed with lime disease, and
Speaker 1: through a long, weird series of events, ended up sort
Speaker 1: of surfing my way back to health. And when I
Speaker 1: was sort of dragged at the ocean and put into
Speaker 1: the ocean, at a time I could barely walk and
Speaker 1: got dropped into a flow state on the first wave
Speaker 1: that I sort of caught and felt amazingly better, really
Speaker 1: a lot better, and over the course of kind of
Speaker 1: six to eight months, but the only thing I was
Speaker 1: doing differently in my life besides kind of lying on
Speaker 1: a couch and moaning, was occasionally going to the beach
Speaker 1: and having these very powerful flow experiences. And they started
Speaker 1: to bleed over into the rest of my life. But
Speaker 1: I started to get massively better. And I had an
Speaker 1: autoimmune condition. The first question I had is the hell
Speaker 1: is going on? Right? Like surfing and these strange mystical
Speaker 1: experiences I was having while surfing, I didn't yet know
Speaker 1: they were called flow states. It's not a common cure
Speaker 1: for autoimmune editions. So like my first question was the
Speaker 1: hell is going on with me? And once I started
Speaker 1: to realize what was going on with me and that
Speaker 1: these states of consciousness and a lot of this is
Speaker 1: Herbert Fence's work at Harvard have a really big impact
Speaker 1: on health, and it started to explain what was going on.
Speaker 1: I started to realize that the same state of consciousness
Speaker 1: that was helping me go from kind of seriously subpar
Speaker 1: back to normal was helping all these people who I've
Speaker 1: been kind of studying, who are doing impossible go from
Speaker 1: you know, normal all the way up to Superman. So
Speaker 1: my world sort of collided, and from that point on
Speaker 1: I just dove into the science, and more specifically the neuroscience.
Speaker 1: You know, this was right at a time when we
Speaker 1: started peeking under the hood of the brain for the
Speaker 1: very very first time. So we started, I'm fascinated by mechanism.
Speaker 1: I want to know how do things work? And you know,
Speaker 1: something is a magical and mysterious as flow. I really
Speaker 1: wanted to understand that. And you know, over the past
Speaker 1: fifteen years, we've made tremendous progress in understanding, you know,
Speaker 1: the first bits and pieces about how consciousness and altered
Speaker 1: states of consciousness work in the brain. And so it
Speaker 1: was an incredibly exciting time to dive into that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we sure have. And I think you're right about flow
Speaker 1: being a very understudied topic in science. You know, obviously
Speaker 1: me High chickset. Me High's pioneering work on the topic
Speaker 1: has not really people within science haven't taken up the
Speaker 1: mantle too much. We study other things in positive psychology
Speaker 1: of like optimal states and altered states of conscious but
Speaker 1: flow itself is definitely understudied. So yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: a great thing that you guys have really taken this
Speaker 1: and particularly long into the field being the real world
Speaker 1: and looking to see how flow operates in the real world.
Speaker 1: And now this book though, this latest book, Stealing Fire,
Speaker 1: is not specifically about flow, right, it's about ecstasis. Yeah, yeah, exactly, So,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, who knows. I mean, it's ancient Greek,
Speaker 1: so we've at least chosen to mangle it as extasis.
Speaker 1: But take your pick and the idea there is really
Speaker 1: something that we found in our research was, first of all,
Speaker 1: what's the neurobiology of the flow state? You know, what's
Speaker 1: happened to the near electricity, Where are the brain wasts,
Speaker 1: what's happening neuroanatomically, what parts of the brains are turning
Speaker 1: on or off during these different states, what's happening with
Speaker 1: the endocrine system, what's happening with your cardiac system, How
Speaker 1: coherent are your heart rates, posture, breathing, all whole host
Speaker 1: of correloids that seem to show up and flow. That's
Speaker 1: what we really based what we call the genome a flow.
Speaker 1: That's the name, you know, why we call our organization
Speaker 1: what we have, what are the core building works. And
Speaker 1: once we built that out, based on her Benson's work,
Speaker 1: based on Red Bull's work with doctor Andy Welsh, based
Speaker 1: on lots of different folks contributing both in the theory
Speaker 1: and the practice, we've found ourselves almost with a kind
Speaker 1: of accidental Rosetta stone, which was letting us translate a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of other non ordinary states and realizing, wow, meditations,
Speaker 1: smart tech enabled states, sexually provoked states, actions and adventure sports,
Speaker 1: artistic states, you know, a whole much, much broader spectrum
Speaker 1: of just anything but twenty first century normal all seem
Speaker 1: to share remarkably similar mechanisms under the hood, and each
Speaker 1: of these different subdisciplines never talk to each other, so
Speaker 1: you know, you had meditation was for kind of you know,
Speaker 1: saints and monks, and flow states for artists and athletes,
Speaker 1: and psychedelic states were for sort of hippies and ravers
Speaker 1: and very little cross pollination, both in the communities of
Speaker 1: practice but also in the communities of research. And as
Speaker 1: soon as we pop that open, we realized, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: we need a bigger voat we need a broader category
Speaker 1: of which flows a subset but also includes a host
Speaker 1: of other non ordinary states of consciousness that appear to
Speaker 1: share similar mechanisms. And for us, that's the big story.
Speaker 1: It's not that there's a psychedelic renaissance. It's not that
Speaker 1: mindfulness based stress reduction is a cool new thing you
Speaker 1: know in businesses in Silicon valleys. Is not any of
Speaker 1: those things so much as it is all of those
Speaker 1: things put together. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: You call the altered state's economy, is that right? Yes?
Speaker 1: So when we Fire first started, you know, we were
Speaker 1: running around the country training people up and flow and
Speaker 1: everywhere we met. When people would come up to us
Speaker 1: after the presentation, and as Jamie alluded to, they would say, oh,
Speaker 1: the flow stuff is great, but we're also going to
Speaker 1: silent meditation retreats, or the whole teams of engineers are
Speaker 1: microdosing with psychedelics to anands creative. We kept seeing stumbling
Speaker 1: upon kind of these other things going on, and eventually
Speaker 1: we decided that this felt really big and we wanted
Speaker 1: a way to quantify it. So first we came up
Speaker 1: with the term e stasis, which literally means ex stasis
Speaker 1: to stand outside oneself. And if you go back to
Speaker 1: the Greek, its states of consciousness where we kind of
Speaker 1: change the channel on normal waking consciousness, we get rid
Speaker 1: of the self, the self pends do vanish. Neurobiologically, of course,
Speaker 1: what that really means is the parts of the brain
Speaker 1: that generate our sense of self tend to turn off
Speaker 1: in these states, and we tend to tap into these
Speaker 1: realms of inspiration or information, you know, heightened information processing
Speaker 1: in the brain. So that became that neurobiology and that
Speaker 1: definition sort of became a roadmark, and we said, let's
Speaker 1: just take a look at what we call the altered
Speaker 1: state's economy. How much money do people spend globally trying
Speaker 1: to shut off the self, trying to get out of
Speaker 1: their head, trying to change the normal channel of consciousness
Speaker 1: and mind you you know, with ecstasis, we're really speaking
Speaker 1: about positives, right, good things things that a bet performance
Speaker 1: with the authors did economy, we were you know, we
Speaker 1: went everywhere. It was just anything anybody does to try
Speaker 1: to turn off the waking self. So this, you know,
Speaker 1: ranged from legal and illegal drugs to the whole kind
Speaker 1: of category of self help and psychology all that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff to activities range and from gambling to social
Speaker 1: media to action, sport whatnot. That changed our state of
Speaker 1: consciousness when we were done doing the math in the
Speaker 1: most conservative, conservative conservative way possible, which is to say,
Speaker 1: I think we're probably you could probably double our number
Speaker 1: and be close to the truth. But the reason we
Speaker 1: didn't is because what we came up with was four
Speaker 1: trillion dollars one sixteenth of the global economy, larger than
Speaker 1: the GDP of Britain or India or Russia. I mean,
Speaker 1: a massive, staggering number, twenty five percent of the US
Speaker 1: GDP if you were to just make it a local number,
Speaker 1: and that's insane, and no one's talking about it. So
Speaker 1: not only you know, as Jama pointed out, we're all
Speaker 1: these different disparate groups of people doing the same thing
Speaker 1: and not aware of it. We were all doing it
Speaker 1: to the tune of four trillion dollars a year, this
Speaker 1: incredible amount of energy and time, and nobody is talking
Speaker 1: about it. So that's where the altars did economy came from? Right?
Speaker 1: How did you drive that number? Well, if you go
Speaker 1: to stealing firebook dot com, you can get pd apps
Speaker 1: that that break it down. We break it down entirely. Wow,
Speaker 1: that way, it's a long It was a long category.
Speaker 1: But we literally just took categories how much do we
Speaker 1: spend an illegal pharmaceuticals? How much do you spend on
Speaker 1: illegal pharmaceuticals? And then we looked at you know, we
Speaker 1: were very careful. And when I said, we were very careful.
Speaker 1: For example, you could make the argument right that a
Speaker 1: lot of entertainment, for example, theater films, yeah, is to
Speaker 1: get shut off the self. Turn that off. And we said, okay,
Speaker 1: but people go to the movies for other reasons. But
Speaker 1: let's just take IMAX, where you know, you drive out
Speaker 1: of the way. Theaters spend a lot of money for tickets,
Speaker 1: and why do you do it? So you can have
Speaker 1: the amazing state change experience provided by a huge wide
Speaker 1: screen surround sound. All the tricks that they use for
Speaker 1: IMAX are all about turning off the cell and taking
Speaker 1: you someplace else. When I said conservative, that's what I met,
Speaker 1: we took. We were as cautious as we could. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the real number probably has a lot more of film
Speaker 1: in it than just IMAX, but we wanted to do
Speaker 1: that conservative cool. That sounds like a really neat analysis.
Speaker 1: So what is that paradox of selflessness then that you
Speaker 1: talk about in the book and when you say paradox,
Speaker 1: which specific Well, so you're talking about the fact that
Speaker 1: you have to get out of yourself to find yourself. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's exactly. Yeah, that's a great question, Scott. I know
Speaker 1: it dovetails in with your research. And by the way,
Speaker 1: you pooh pooh academia for not taking up the flow mantle,
Speaker 1: but I just got a pause give you your kudos
Speaker 1: because you really have taken up the plow mantle in
Speaker 1: academia and I love I love what you're contributing to it.
Speaker 1: So first of all, thank you, and you know, don't
Speaker 1: help downplay your own contribution here because it's amazing. And second, well, actually,
Speaker 1: before you jump in back into our stuff, I got
Speaker 1: I've got to pile on Scott as well, because I
Speaker 1: was even just talking with someone this weekend. I mean,
Speaker 1: the biggest contribution from your work that's affected me is
Speaker 1: just your bifurcation of the default mode network and the
Speaker 1: idea that sometimes some people sometimes end up in excess
Speaker 1: rumination neurotic loops, it drags them down, and that correlates
Speaker 1: with all the other work that I'd seen on the
Speaker 1: default mode network, but then you've I feel like, have
Speaker 1: contributed something invaluable, which is for some people super productive, creative,
Speaker 1: generative daydreaming is deeply pleasurable and positive and so and
Speaker 1: that's clearly more much more matches my experience. I'm a
Speaker 1: crap meditator because I've never I've never actually been that
Speaker 1: that driven to empty my mind. I enjoy a lot
Speaker 1: of what goes on in there. So you can be
Speaker 1: permission to own my hyperactive default mode network. So thank
Speaker 1: you for that as well. Thank you. I actually like
Speaker 1: to call it the imagination network when I'm in public,
Speaker 1: because I think it's it's more just it's what's first
Speaker 1: of all, it's about sexier than the default mode network,
Speaker 1: right and easy and yes, so I'm going to I'm
Speaker 1: going to take your nomenclature from here on out. Okay, cool,
Speaker 1: a paradox of self to get back to that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what you know, this is not obviously just to our research.
Speaker 1: This is I think research that goes all the way
Speaker 1: back to William James at the turn of the century.
Speaker 1: But you know, what we consistently find is that when
Speaker 1: you can you know shut off the self through whatever method,
Speaker 1: and you know, as I said earlier, meaning kind of
Speaker 1: deactivate the parts of the prefrontal cortex that you know,
Speaker 1: generate our sense of self. Amazing things happen because when
Speaker 1: your shelf shuts off, the inner critic goes away, right,
Speaker 1: that nagging always on to feed this voice in your
Speaker 1: head is suddenly silent. And as a result, creativity goes up,
Speaker 1: risk taking goes up. And you have and I know
Speaker 1: Jamie hates this term, but I don't have a better one,
Speaker 1: but you have what I've been calling the high perch experience.
Speaker 1: Right with all that clutter out of the way, it
Speaker 1: seems like you have a higher vantage when you can
Speaker 1: see farther in the distance over your life. So you
Speaker 1: have gain massive amounts of perspective into who you are.
Speaker 1: You also gain the ability to hold multiple perspectives at once.
Speaker 1: So it's not a fixed sense of self anymore. Right,
Speaker 1: as Jamie likes to say, you get to unzip the
Speaker 1: monkey suit of our every day lives, right, and you
Speaker 1: get to step into a bigger version of yourself. So
Speaker 1: when you come back, you know, out of this non
Speaker 1: ordinary state of consciousness, whether it's a meditative state, or
Speaker 1: a flow stata or a psychedelic experience, take your pick.
Speaker 1: You're no longer as tightly bounded by who you used
Speaker 1: to be. You are on the path to be coming.
Speaker 1: And this is why. You know, if you look at
Speaker 1: the all the adult development work that's come out of Harvard,
Speaker 1: that kind of Bob Keegan's work and down the line,
Speaker 1: one of the things that shows up is that the
Speaker 1: kind of you still have to do the homework. This
Speaker 1: does not exclude, excuse the really hard work of adult development,
Speaker 1: but you can actually, you know, move yourself up the
Speaker 1: adult development scale, gaining more perspective, more empathy, and all
Speaker 1: really the traits that we now associate with wisdom by
Speaker 1: having more frequent access to non ordinary states of consciousness.
Speaker 1: So when we say you have to lose yourself to
Speaker 1: find yourself, that's really we're talking about. It makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. And you actually have an example in
Speaker 1: there of our mutual friend Jason Silva, who has talked
Speaker 1: about how he kind of needs to get into these
Speaker 1: altered states in order to be seen. Is that right,
Speaker 1: by the way, Jason was amazing and wonderful, and yes,
Speaker 1: but it's not just Jason. I will flat out tell
Speaker 1: you that one of the reasons I'm so committed to
Speaker 1: this work is left to my own devices. It's bad upstairs, right,
Speaker 1: it can get bad upstairs for me as well, right,
Speaker 1: But I mean Jason speaks to it his experience. He
Speaker 1: really essentially coming out of high school, growing up in
Speaker 1: a very turbulent time in Venezuela, with everybody in his
Speaker 1: family being assaulted at gunpoint, including his grandmother and his
Speaker 1: father being kidnapped, and you know, he really developed essentially
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress disorder, and you know, started organizing these
Speaker 1: philosophical salons as sort of a last ditch attempt to
Speaker 1: like he he became a shut inning. He wouldn't leave
Speaker 1: his house, We had no social life. So he was
Speaker 1: trying to bring people to him, and he was trying
Speaker 1: to like rEFInd his sanity. And at these salons he
Speaker 1: would go off on these philosophical rants, the same rants
Speaker 1: that he's famous for now that have made him one
Speaker 1: of the best media artists in the world and the
Speaker 1: host of national geographics and I May Award winning brand
Speaker 1: games and all that other stuff, you know, that emerged
Speaker 1: out of these salons, and at first he couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: He didn't know. A couldn't believe it was feeling so good,
Speaker 1: and B couldn't believe he had access to like you know,
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen Jason, his creativity is wordsmithing, his spontaneity,
Speaker 1: all of it is astounding. It's all imagination network. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all fired it's all fired up for him. And
Speaker 1: that's what these flow states were given him. And so
Speaker 1: they gave him back his life, right Like, over time,
Speaker 1: his fear, his neuroticism, his shut in nature, his PTSD
Speaker 1: diminished significantly and all these positive attributes came on and
Speaker 1: you know, interestingly, of course, and we make this point
Speaker 1: of the book, it's not just Jason Silba who fought
Speaker 1: back PTSD when not in ordinary stitch we've seen it,
Speaker 1: you know, station hacking. The results in research done all
Speaker 1: over the place using meditation, flow and psychedelics to treat
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress disorder with incredible you know proficiency basically
Speaker 1: and being the SSRIs and talk therapy neither of them
Speaker 1: work very well for you know, post traumatic stress disorder.
Speaker 1: Seeing that we have these other tools and the toolkit
Speaker 1: and they really I mean, think about where Jason Silva
Speaker 1: came from and where he went and that seems to
Speaker 1: be you know, he says it in the book. He says,
Speaker 1: every super successful person I've met has learned how to
Speaker 1: do this, and that's what I found, as Maslow found.
Speaker 1: So you know, I think you start to see what
Speaker 1: these states really open up for us. That makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. Yeah, you certainly do. And I like
Speaker 1: this idea that it can help produce anxiety as well,
Speaker 1: kind of get you out of by getting you outside
Speaker 1: of your ordinary consciousness. That's a really cool theme as well.
Speaker 1: So do you mind if I jump into the four
Speaker 1: forces of exocists? Is that cool? Yeah? For sure. So yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do you guys want to like do one each? Sure? Sure,
Speaker 1: So I'll start with psychology. I mean, you know, in
Speaker 1: a nutshell, the whole working concept of the four forces
Speaker 1: of extasis is to say, Okay, if there's this big, giant,
Speaker 1: four trillion dollar underground economy and no one's talking about it,
Speaker 1: why is it happening now? What intersection are we standing at?
Speaker 1: Sort of you know, socio politically, economically, culturally, That makes
Speaker 1: it now and not ten years ago or fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: And so that's where we came up with the idea
Speaker 1: of these four forces, which is that in the last
Speaker 1: half century we have really been unlocking critical elements in
Speaker 1: distinct disciplines that are now sort of reaching a catalyzation point.
Speaker 1: And those four forces are psychology, neurobiology, technology, and pharmacology.
Speaker 1: And I'll just you know, just to give you a
Speaker 1: sense of the first one. With psychology, if you think
Speaker 1: back to kind of post World War Two, you know,
Speaker 1: everybody came into the fifties with a pretty buttoned down
Speaker 1: sense of norms and what was permissible as far as
Speaker 1: a full range of human expression. You sort of had
Speaker 1: Betty Homemaker and you had organization man. And it's leave
Speaker 1: it to be if there are my three sons and
Speaker 1: all those kind of classic cliches now grounded. There were
Speaker 1: tons of people that didn't fit those models. But they
Speaker 1: didn't they didn't have a seat at the table. They
Speaker 1: weren't reinforced as cultural norms. And if you were outside
Speaker 1: of that, if you were gay, if you were depressed,
Speaker 1: if you had a whole range of just alternate behaviors
Speaker 1: or expressions, you either medicated them or repressed them, you know,
Speaker 1: compared to today, So jump forward through the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: jump through escellin and the human potential movement and pillow
Speaker 1: thumping gestalt sessions and getting in touch with your inner dolphin,
Speaker 1: and you know a whole range of much wider experiments
Speaker 1: and explorations to today where you can have a transgendered
Speaker 1: Victoria's secret model walking down a runway to a standing ovation.
Speaker 1: And so the realm for us to see that non
Speaker 1: ordinary states of consciousness, non order, were you less than
Speaker 1: lock buttoned down. Typical ranges of psychological expression are okay
Speaker 1: permitted that there's resources, that there's communities, that there's workshops,
Speaker 1: that there's pop psych books. There's a whole sort of
Speaker 1: permission to be more more along the lines of that
Speaker 1: old Whitman you know quote, whereas that I contradict myself, Yes,
Speaker 1: so what I contradict myself? I'm lodge. I contain multitudes,
Speaker 1: you know, And so those contradictions and those multitudes, we
Speaker 1: just have much more permission these days to explore an
Speaker 1: experiment within them without sort of going off the reservation
Speaker 1: or being left in a pet itself. And I think
Speaker 1: this takes us right to neurobiology very cleanly, which is
Speaker 1: our second force. You know, two things before I dive
Speaker 1: into it and even make that connective tissue. Jamie spoke
Speaker 1: about the why now right, these four forces are emerging
Speaker 1: right now, and that's why it's happening. The I I think
Speaker 1: that's really important to know about these four forces is
Speaker 1: this is, of course not the very first time in
Speaker 1: history people have said, oh wow, non ordinary states and
Speaker 1: consciousness can help performance. Right, this goes all the way,
Speaker 1: as we document in the book, it's a trend that
Speaker 1: goes all the way back into the Greeks and probably
Speaker 1: you know, goes a lot farther into prehistory than that.
Speaker 1: But historically when these things show up, they tend to
Speaker 1: go horribly wrong. Right, there's a dark side, there's a
Speaker 1: downside to all this stuff. And one of the core
Speaker 1: arguments in the book is that with these four forces
Speaker 1: kind of emerging, there's maybe a middle path available between
Speaker 1: kind of the hetonic excess that tends to derail these
Speaker 1: things and the backlash of massive societal control that is
Speaker 1: the result. There's a middle way where we're actually armed
Speaker 1: with a lot more information than we've ever had before,
Speaker 1: and neurobiology is a great example. Psychology has given us
Speaker 1: more permission to explore and then the work you're involved
Speaker 1: in write a better kind of understanding of how to
Speaker 1: make meaning from this journey where we're going all those
Speaker 1: sorts of things. Neurobiology has really pulled back the veil, right,
Speaker 1: What used to be mystical is now neurobiological. And you know,
Speaker 1: the easiest example is back in nineteen ninety seven, both
Speaker 1: our friend and Doug to Andrey Nuberg right, who was
Speaker 1: then at the University of Pennsylvania, use spec scans to
Speaker 1: decode cosmic unity, the feeling of being one with everything,
Speaker 1: which was in every religion or mystical system in history.
Speaker 1: It was sort of the most common mystical experience. And yet,
Speaker 1: like nineteen ninety six, you walk into a doctor's office
Speaker 1: and say, Doc, I feel one with everything. You're going
Speaker 1: to a pad itself, right, Yeah, But Andy comes along
Speaker 1: and you know, suddenly realizes, hey, wait a minute, there's
Speaker 1: a part of the brain that separates self from other.
Speaker 1: This part of the brain turns off in meditation, and
Speaker 1: thus the brain can no longer tell where yourself ends
Speaker 1: and the rest of the world begins. Right, So this
Speaker 1: is nineteen ninety seven. We've decoded the most common mystical
Speaker 1: experience in history and it's amazing. Right. Yeah, jump forward
Speaker 1: to where we are twenty years later exactly, and you know,
Speaker 1: pretty much every mystical experience you can think of, from
Speaker 1: various forms of meditation and chanting, through speaking in tongues,
Speaker 1: out of body experiences, near death experience, and the list
Speaker 1: just goes on and on and on, to the point
Speaker 1: that like my friend Shahar Arzi at Heubrew University in
Speaker 1: Jerusalem has decoded the Doppelganger experience, which is one of
Speaker 1: the rarest mystical experiences in history. As far as I know,
Speaker 1: it only shows up in Kabbalistic Judaism. So this branch
Speaker 1: of Jewish mysticism called ecstatic kabbola, and it shows up
Speaker 1: in the thirteenth century, and you know, in Jewish mstism
Speaker 1: is using this precise technique, you can generate a Doppelganger,
Speaker 1: a second version of yourself that you can literally ask
Speaker 1: questions to about your life and your future and everything
Speaker 1: else and get real answers. So Arsie gets curious about
Speaker 1: this and basically using the same techniques Andy Neuberg help
Speaker 1: pioneer and not only decades where it's coming from. Right,
Speaker 1: So we've gone from the best knownstical experience in history
Speaker 1: to one of the rarest. But then he figures out
Speaker 1: how to build a VR simulation that produces the same effect.
Speaker 1: He basically takes Abraham Abolafia's kabbalistic formula by working back
Speaker 1: from that and says, Okay, you've got these head movements,
Speaker 1: and you've got these breath movements and these visualizations and
Speaker 1: all that stuff programs into a VR simulation. Now anybody
Speaker 1: can have this experience. Yeah years right, Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: massive amount of progress we have literally taken. You know,
Speaker 1: what is the whole history of evolution of mystical experience
Speaker 1: is one hundred and fifty thousand years of human spiritual history.
Speaker 1: And I don't think the mystery is out. I don't
Speaker 1: think we've answered any of the big cosmic questions. I
Speaker 1: don't think this means there is or there isn't a
Speaker 1: God or anything like that. I don't think you can
Speaker 1: make those statements, but you can certainly say that spiritual
Speaker 1: experience is biologically mediated. Rare experiences, right, you had to
Speaker 1: be a punk, you had to be a seeker, a seer,
Speaker 1: a saint, or get lucky to have and now they're
Speaker 1: available to anyone oftentimes with of the neuro hacking technology
Speaker 1: at the flip of a switch. Yeah, DORO like tDSC
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, transcranial stimulation exactly. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: you make a lot of good points, and I really
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought up Andy Nuberg, who is going
Speaker 1: to be on this podcast as well soon. We recorded
Speaker 1: the interview recently and me and him are collaborating on
Speaker 1: looking at the brains of geniuses. We're trying to round up,
Speaker 1: like fifty the most imaginative people on this planet and
Speaker 1: study their brains and see what it looks like. And
Speaker 1: I think he's making some good progress on that project.
Speaker 1: So you're absolutely right that spiritual experience is biologically mediated.
Speaker 1: I don't want us to get too excited about it, though,
Speaker 1: Like I think that everything is biologically mediated. So that
Speaker 1: statement is not as exciting as people would you think. No,
Speaker 1: I totally agree with you, But to me, it's really
Speaker 1: exciting because it suddenly says, you know, I met Andy
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight. Really he first did you know?
Speaker 1: He had to sort of risk his career and sneak
Speaker 1: that experiment in sort of the back end of PEN
Speaker 1: and there was a lot of pushback and blowback and
Speaker 1: all that stuff to where we are now, and there's
Speaker 1: dedicated kind of neurobiology department that study these things explicitly.
Speaker 1: So the neuroscience legitimate, Yes, you're seeing the nerves. Science
Speaker 1: legitimatized an area of investigation that was on the fringes
Speaker 1: of psychology, especially neuroscience. And I would agree with that.
Speaker 1: I totally agree with that, and I think you make
Speaker 1: a really good point with that, But I don't want
Speaker 1: us to get too excited about it, because it was
Speaker 1: to get excited obviously, but not too excited, because these
Speaker 1: brain areas are reflecting. It's like it's holding up a
Speaker 1: mirror to our experiences. It's like reflecting. It's showing us
Speaker 1: what parts of the brain are involved in a psychological process.
Speaker 1: But it'll never tell us what that psychological process is.
Speaker 1: You can't never get that by looking at brain activities.
Speaker 1: That's why I think the work you guys are doing
Speaker 1: as well that goes beyond neuroscience is really important. You'll
Speaker 1: never learn the stuff the kind of stuff you guys
Speaker 1: are learning behaviorally, You'll never get that from a brain scan.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean, of course, And that's I
Speaker 1: mean that's an important point. But right, I mean, for
Speaker 1: most folks out in the world, I mean, we're obviously
Speaker 1: steeped in the kind of the disciplines of this. So
Speaker 1: the idea that inter your psychological experiences are neurobiologically mediated
Speaker 1: makes total obvious sense. But for folks who have mythologized
Speaker 1: quote unquote spiritual or mystical experiences and assume they come
Speaker 1: from a divine power, assume they come via grace or
Speaker 1: some other good works, or assume they come from adherence
Speaker 1: to religious protocols and prescriptions. So then say, actually, hey,
Speaker 1: look here's the actual mechanisms of action. What that does
Speaker 1: is it cuts out the middleman. Yeah, it cuts out
Speaker 1: the priest class. It cuts out those who would presume
Speaker 1: to tell us what it means and how you get
Speaker 1: it or earn it or deserve it. And there's usually
Speaker 1: really convoluted sets of instructions and injunctions, right that you're
Speaker 1: supposed to follow it. Spin around three times, pray to
Speaker 1: Mecca out of the sun, you know, cut the head
Speaker 1: off a chicken, whatever it is. That's what's been assigned
Speaker 1: in order to get you in front of having more
Speaker 1: of these experiences. Where Newberg's work, Arsie's work, all your work,
Speaker 1: all these are saying, hey, this is human birth right,
Speaker 1: this is not act I mean mystical experience, because can
Speaker 1: be demystified and we can actually go and recreate them,
Speaker 1: if not on demand, certainly a hell of a lot
Speaker 1: more often than when we were just bowing and scraping
Speaker 1: our way towards Mecca. Yeah. Look, I love Andy's work,
Speaker 1: and I and Steve, I love that you brought that up.
Speaker 1: It's funny because there's this like there's a difference in
Speaker 1: like personality between like scientists I feel like and journalists
Speaker 1: I feel like scientists like it's our job to be
Speaker 1: critical of our own work. Like I'm criticizing my own
Speaker 1: work when I say that because I study this, I
Speaker 1: study the neuroscience of imagination, and I'm saying I don't
Speaker 1: want to get too excited where I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: promote it. Do you know what I mean, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to be conservative about it. Well, I agree with you,
Speaker 1: but you have to, like so my standard filter for
Speaker 1: truth as a journalist like being trained this way. Right.
Speaker 1: One of the things I learned very very early on
Speaker 1: is if you're interviewing scientists on a topic, you have
Speaker 1: to interview on a particular question at least six people
Speaker 1: because the first five yeah, exact same thing, and the
Speaker 1: sixth person is going to tell you why they're all
Speaker 1: wrong and lead you to five more people. You have
Speaker 1: to talk drive you crazy. As a turtles, I think
Speaker 1: it allows me because I don't have to defend a
Speaker 1: territory to get funded, right, you know, it allows for
Speaker 1: a wider perspective. And the other thing is also you know,
Speaker 1: we have a very the flowaging on project. One of
Speaker 1: our mantras is you know, but does it grow corn?
Speaker 1: And it's this quote from Sunbrriage that I care not
Speaker 1: about a man's religion unless it grows corn. We take
Speaker 1: a very like we want to know enough about the
Speaker 1: neurobiology to start working backwards to mechanism, and then we
Speaker 1: want to test out those ideas. Right. The Floginal project
Speaker 1: is a giant open source research project, so we have
Speaker 1: a huge community to test out these hypotheses in and
Speaker 1: try to get better data. And you know, one of
Speaker 1: the ways you can now you know, also approach the
Speaker 1: subjective experience that makes it much more objective is a
Speaker 1: big data approach. So that's also I think a bleedout
Speaker 1: of these developments. I think that's right, and you guys
Speaker 1: are doing a good service. Absolutely. I read your book
Speaker 1: and I got more excited about my own research than
Speaker 1: I was before I read your book. So look, that
Speaker 1: is I want to be. I want to be give
Speaker 1: you guys a lot of problem. However, I will say
Speaker 1: that there's so much we don't know, and there's so
Speaker 1: much about, like, you know, the neurobiology of I mean,
Speaker 1: we're really at like a starting point, not an end point,
Speaker 1: of our understanding of the neuroscience of mystical experience in creativity,
Speaker 1: and I think that it's like there's so much that
Speaker 1: we would still want to know before we completely like
Speaker 1: get to the point where because you made a statement like, well,
Speaker 1: we're at a stage where now we know we can
Speaker 1: just like press a you know, an area in your
Speaker 1: brain and induce this spiritual experience. But I don't know
Speaker 1: if we're quite there yet. Do you think we're there yet? Well, so,
Speaker 1: I mean that depends on for example, what experience you
Speaker 1: had wearing Michael Persinger's god helmet right, which stimulates the
Speaker 1: right parietal lobe, and you know with a we collectromagnetic current.
Speaker 1: I think two thousand people have worn the device and
Speaker 1: eighty percent have had some kind of out of body
Speaker 1: since presence take your pick experience. Now, a lot of
Speaker 1: other people, Richard Dawkins most famously, have worn the device
Speaker 1: and felt nothing and thought it was all hope. Right.
Speaker 1: So I'm neither here nor there on that device. But
Speaker 1: what I am saying is we are starting to poke
Speaker 1: at that. But you're totally right, man, We are so
Speaker 1: at the front end of this stuff. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know what I like to say is we took one
Speaker 1: hundred year detour. One hundred years ago, William James said, hey,
Speaker 1: there are all these north of happy experiences off flow state,
Speaker 1: psychedelic states, meditative states, but everything possibly imagine that really
Speaker 1: seemed to unlock all kinds of abilities. And Freud came along,
Speaker 1: and he was interested in pathological problems more than psychological possibilities,
Speaker 1: and psias took one hundred year detour, and starting with
Speaker 1: Andy's work, starting with you know, Richard Davidson's work on meditation,
Speaker 1: starting with the positive psychology movement, and you know doctor
Speaker 1: Seligman's contribution to accept me high ast contribution. Suddenly, you know,
Speaker 1: by the late nineteen nineties, we were saying, Oh wait
Speaker 1: a minute, he is nor the happy experiences. They seem
Speaker 1: to have, you know, amazing powers, right, They reduce anxiety
Speaker 1: to heal trauma, they unlock creativity and accelerate learning, Like,
Speaker 1: holy crap, we need to pay attention, and we just
Speaker 1: started paying attention. And I mean, you know, I like,
Speaker 1: I think we are sort of maybe like where quantum
Speaker 1: theory was right like in the thirties or forties, meaning
Speaker 1: we had learned enough to begin to apply it technologically,
Speaker 1: but we had no clue what really was going on,
Speaker 1: hence the arguments that are still going on today on
Speaker 1: you know, nearly on hundred years later, right, I think
Speaker 1: that's where we are with this stuff cooling. And also, Scott,
Speaker 1: I just want to tease it pot your inquiry. There
Speaker 1: are you suggesting, Hey, let's not rush to kind of
Speaker 1: an overtly reductionist materialistic descriptor of the vastness of the
Speaker 1: human experience, Like there's still a long way to go
Speaker 1: to connect all those dots. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh well, when
Speaker 1: we hear the auto, we hear the alternative peop Well yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's the other one. Well, we know what I'm
Speaker 1: picking again, or large amounts of money, spending drugs, and
Speaker 1: a consequence free environment. No, actually, you know or were
Speaker 1: you questioning that the tools that we have available actually
Speaker 1: take you all the way there? That would be? That
Speaker 1: was that was what I was curious as to where
Speaker 1: are your where your your hesitations or queries may be? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it was more reductionistic. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: even Andy is quite careful in not being too reductionistic
Speaker 1: about it. But also we're you know, we're all explorers.
Speaker 1: You guys are explorers. I feel like I'm in this
Speaker 1: journey with you guys. You know, what is it psychoastronauts?
Speaker 1: What's the expression? There's a term for those seconds? I
Speaker 1: mean we're is that what we are in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways? So I love that spirit of it, But
Speaker 1: there's so what's more exciting to me is just how
Speaker 1: many unanswered questions we have than the answered questions. You know,
Speaker 1: I could like start like, you know, like, okay, that's nice.
Speaker 1: We know that the parietal lobe is correlated when you
Speaker 1: have a spiritual experience, but like, how is that personalized?
Speaker 1: You know, how like that you know your own like
Speaker 1: the meaning that you know that your cultural environment when
Speaker 1: you raised with all these, you know, like your death experiences,
Speaker 1: for instance, are very personalized. Even though they have these
Speaker 1: general features, there's still a tinge of what you earned
Speaker 1: in your childhood, about what God is and what the
Speaker 1: afterlife is. And you never will see that in a
Speaker 1: brain scan. Yeah, and I hope that we bracket that
Speaker 1: a bit in the book. You know're saying, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: a Mexican president might see the sort of version of Guadalupiadalgo.
Speaker 1: You know, an Indian farmer might see Ganesh and a
Speaker 1: Rice Patty, right. I mean, the cultural films or layers
Speaker 1: on all this stuff is highly subjective and context bound.
Speaker 1: But you know, I mean you asked how Stephen and
Speaker 1: I first came together the very first phone call we
Speaker 1: ever had when friend mutual friends put us in touch.
Speaker 1: Was where does the information come from? You know, if
Speaker 1: we've got the neurobiology, we understand the mystery and all
Speaker 1: this stuff that's happening, how is it that there appears
Speaker 1: to be such potentially startling coherence to the information and
Speaker 1: connections that we appear to make in these states that
Speaker 1: to me remains a honking great mystery. You don't totally,
Speaker 1: by the way, That's the great question. Of my life.
Speaker 1: I think, I think, you know, to me, that's the ballgame,
Speaker 1: and I don't think we're any We're close. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's fun, right, it's fun like trying to figure that out.
Speaker 1: So tell me about the other two forces then, yeah,
Speaker 1: So where where we were on we'd done psych We've
Speaker 1: just done neurobiology, so then you know, the next one
Speaker 1: would be pharmacology quite possibly. And the interesting thing about
Speaker 1: pharmacology is it's the sort of easiest place to start, obviously.
Speaker 1: I think Oliver Sachs famously said, you know, like you know,
Speaker 1: people can meditate, they might have a mystical experience, but
Speaker 1: say what you will about them. Drugs work. And the
Speaker 1: interesting thing about that is it gives people a non
Speaker 1: ordinary state of consciousness, more or less on demand, so
Speaker 1: they don't have to die wondering. You can get out
Speaker 1: of all that out and incremental. I'm flailing, blindfolded towards
Speaker 1: an indefinite target, and in this kind of era where
Speaker 1: everything's just in time delivery. You know, give me con
Speaker 1: academy and give me a YouTube how to video. Don't
Speaker 1: make me sit through a year long certification. I won't
Speaker 1: bother right, the notion of having access to different states
Speaker 1: of consciousness, different information feeds via pharmacological priming is super
Speaker 1: helpful in sort of democratizing epiphanies, right, And so that's
Speaker 1: one interesting area, and we tell the story of, you know,
Speaker 1: the difference between like Joseph Smith who found in Mormonism,
Speaker 1: you know, supposedly these golden tablets, but then they conveniently disappear.
Speaker 1: Moses comes down with the Ten Commandments but smashes them
Speaker 1: and has to create new copies. Right back in the day,
Speaker 1: there was always a singular epiphany from one charismatic founder
Speaker 1: and all the other Porschemarks just had to take their
Speaker 1: word for it. And these days you have lots of
Speaker 1: people having non ordinary experiences, and you even have sort
Speaker 1: of crowdsourced scripture or wikis on exactly what they're all experiencing.
Speaker 1: And what's happening is you just get the law of
Speaker 1: large numbers. You're having many, many, many more people contribute
Speaker 1: to what they're experiencing in non ordinary states. So in
Speaker 1: that respect, just democratizing the epiphany is one part and
Speaker 1: the other part that's I think equally or even more powerful.
Speaker 1: And you probably know Robin Kart Harris right, Imperial College
Speaker 1: of London. You know, he was interested in studying the subconscious,
Speaker 1: but you know, all they had was after the fact,
Speaker 1: dream reports, kooky sort of subjective interviews. It was kind
Speaker 1: of crummy as far as data collection. And so he
Speaker 1: combined the use of LSD and psilocybin with fMRI scanners
Speaker 1: because obviously, by the time you put somebody in a
Speaker 1: million dollar machine, you want to make damn sure you're
Speaker 1: able to measure the thing you're trying to measure. So
Speaker 1: he combined pharmacology with neurobiology and technology high tech measurement,
Speaker 1: and was able to precipitate non ordinary states on demand
Speaker 1: in the proximity of high end measurement devices, and that
Speaker 1: led to total breakthroughs on the nature of consciousness, the
Speaker 1: nature of unconsciousness, and how our minds actually work. So
Speaker 1: farmer Clery kind of does two things to get more
Speaker 1: experiences of to more people and allows them to be
Speaker 1: kind of a collective intelligence developing around these states. And
Speaker 1: it also allows researchers to specifically fine tune states of
Speaker 1: consciences they want to measure and otherwise unwieldy device recording
Speaker 1: devices and what's the hyperspace lexicon, Well, that is actually
Speaker 1: that is a wiki based on the experience of you know,
Speaker 1: global user community of the compound dimethyl trip to mean
Speaker 1: which is naturally occurring in the brain, hot and lungs,
Speaker 1: but when ingested and you know, exogenously, meaning from outside yourself,
Speaker 1: it seems to as far as Rick Strassman's work at
Speaker 1: the University of New Mexico, you know, some wild and
Speaker 1: hair raising, far out experiences. It's also the active psychoactive
Speaker 1: in ayahuasca, which some people are probably familiar with from
Speaker 1: that GEO and various other press on it. And what's
Speaker 1: been happening there is enough people, you know, tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people are contributing to this thing that anybody
Speaker 1: with their hair on fire coming down the mountain saying
Speaker 1: I've seen the truth in block caps is just getting trolled.
Speaker 1: There are so many other people contributing and saying, hey,
Speaker 1: by the way, you may have an experience that it
Speaker 1: feels like the end of the world. You may have
Speaker 1: an experience you feel like the missade. You know, it
Speaker 1: may not be true at all. And so there's this
Speaker 1: combination what we would sort of call an agnostic gnosticism emerging,
Speaker 1: and a gnosticism is that direct experience of the mystery,
Speaker 1: which more and more people are having. But then it's
Speaker 1: also bracketed with this agnosticism of you know, and who
Speaker 1: the hell am I to judge? Who they am I
Speaker 1: to know? There's seventeenth VA and that I think is
Speaker 1: is a potentially game changing breakthrough in how we create
Speaker 1: spiritually infused culture. Wow, that's so cool. I've never seen
Speaker 1: that discuss before, so that was really interesting for me
Speaker 1: to read about. Do you want to talk about the
Speaker 1: fourth one? Technology? Yeah, I'd love to thank you. So
Speaker 1: technology really, simply put, is bringing these experiences to scale.
Speaker 1: And that's a really big deal. If you just take sound, right,
Speaker 1: and there's you know, great research on this now that
Speaker 1: sound very easily drives us into altered states, which is
Speaker 1: why sound has played so heavily in so many kinds
Speaker 1: of spiritual traditions. But it used to be there's you know,
Speaker 1: only so far the human voice is going to carry
Speaker 1: only so many people you can fit around a campfire, right,
Speaker 1: But now we have tons and tons of amplification equipment
Speaker 1: that is specifically designed to basically all use sound to
Speaker 1: altered consciousness. We have great research on what exactly is
Speaker 1: going on under the hood, and these things are all
Speaker 1: coming together, and suddenly, you know, instead of it being
Speaker 1: thirty people around a campfire who are having a transformative experience,
Speaker 1: you know, it's seventy thousand people at Burning Man or
Speaker 1: a quarter of a million people at some of these
Speaker 1: bigger festivals. That's a very new development. And sound is
Speaker 1: of course only one example. Another one that we talked
Speaker 1: about in the book is flow states right produced by
Speaker 1: action and venture sports were very, very kind of rarefied experience.
Speaker 1: You really had to be if you wanted to have
Speaker 1: a deep flow experience. While powder skiing back in the nineties,
Speaker 1: you had to be an expert skier because the equipment
Speaker 1: demanded it. Now we have huge fat skis that basically
Speaker 1: let anybody who can link two turns together experience that
Speaker 1: mystical floating sensation of a powder skiing, which we know
Speaker 1: from our research is loaded with flow triggers pre conditions
Speaker 1: that lead to more flow. So suddenly something, a state
Speaker 1: of consciousness that was reserved for a select view is
Speaker 1: available to the masses. And this is showing up kind
Speaker 1: of everywhere you look in technology, and you know, I think,
Speaker 1: you know, we're starting to see this, you know, bleed
Speaker 1: into mainstream populations as well, and just to show how
Speaker 1: these all kind of stacked together, Scott, because that's obviously
Speaker 1: the interesting thing. I mean, we've teased these a pot
Speaker 1: as an instructional device saying, hey, there's four forces, but
Speaker 1: obviously they co arise and they intermingle. And what you're
Speaker 1: having happen now is you're having you know, let's just
Speaker 1: take for existance to the presence of kind of the
Speaker 1: consciousness hacking community with MIT media labs alum Mikey Siegel,
Speaker 1: who's a friend of ours, And what you have is
Speaker 1: you have this overlap between psychology and pharmacology. So let's
Speaker 1: just say people are going to burning men and tripping balls,
Speaker 1: smart people, they're coming back and they're building shit, and
Speaker 1: they're coming back and then they're building shit. So the
Speaker 1: very same people that are having these psychological tech pharmacological
Speaker 1: expansive experiences are then coming back and building technology. So
Speaker 1: we're having the de materialization of this process. So back
Speaker 1: in the sixties, it used to be you know, Timlary
Speaker 1: one oh one, right, take a hit of acid and
Speaker 1: see what's what, and maybe somebody at the Grateful Dead
Speaker 1: show with pouring colored oils on the back of a
Speaker 1: light projector you know, and projecting it onto a wall. Right,
Speaker 1: that was as good as it got. Now you've got
Speaker 1: immerssive vau with digital palettes, and your people are being
Speaker 1: you know, and biofeedback loops, and they're mashing all this
Speaker 1: stuff up together. So at some point, I mean, who's
Speaker 1: to say whether pharmacology will ever be irrelevant, But it's
Speaker 1: becoming less relevant because as we migrate, we're sort of
Speaker 1: dematerializing the techniques of ecstasy and we're creating increasingly sort
Speaker 1: of slim, scalable, applicable interactions because the creators have had
Speaker 1: the experience of that full stack. Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 1: The full stack is like a supplement analogy. You put
Speaker 1: the technology the pharmacide. Yeah. I like that. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: the stack. Man, Like, I wish we had another four
Speaker 1: days to talk about this on the podcast. I want
Speaker 1: to be very respectful of your time, but man, there's
Speaker 1: so many things we could discuss. There's one quote that
Speaker 1: I want to discuss. You say, ecstasy wants to be free.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me what that quote means and how
Speaker 1: does that relate to orgasmic meditation. That's okay, I'm going
Speaker 1: to take the first half of it. I'm going to
Speaker 1: leave you the orgasmic meditation and bonut. But the idea
Speaker 1: of ecstasy wants to be free is this is not
Speaker 1: a super quick answer, but essentially, because these states of extasis, right,
Speaker 1: these nor the happy state, fire up all the brains,
Speaker 1: information processing we you know, equipment, We take in more
Speaker 1: information for a second, we find links between that information
Speaker 1: much faster than before. Right we talk about we talk
Speaker 1: about extaca. This is sort of like a big data technology,
Speaker 1: and it's an information technology. And historically doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: information technology has shown up in the world. In the beginning,
Speaker 1: they're all symbols of freedom. Radio shows up and suddenly
Speaker 1: everybody's going to get to talk to each other. We'll all,
Speaker 1: you know, share the airwaves. And one hundred years later
Speaker 1: now it's actually a couple of corporations that own the airwaves.
Speaker 1: So the whatever that And this is Tim Wu's thesis
Speaker 1: of Columbia uh. And you know, essentially, whenever an information
Speaker 1: technology shows up, it starts out free and democratized and
Speaker 1: ends up tightly controlled and scripted. And if you know,
Speaker 1: these non ordinary states of consciousness are an information technology.
Speaker 1: As we argue, then very much the same thing could happen,
Speaker 1: and we're already you know, seeing this that you know,
Speaker 1: the military has been actively kind of pursuing these states
Speaker 1: of consciousness for all kinds of you know, reasons since
Speaker 1: the very first kind of consciousness altering technologies were invented
Speaker 1: back in the fifties, and we documented this in the book.
Speaker 1: These states can also really be you know, applied by marketers,
Speaker 1: like people who want to use these states to sell
Speaker 1: us more stuff, right, that can happen. So in order
Speaker 1: to kind of stay out of the hedonic pitfalls like
Speaker 1: the hedonism that normally develops, and stay out of the
Speaker 1: militarization and commercialization pitfalls that are ongoing, you know, our
Speaker 1: argument in the book is for an open source movement
Speaker 1: around these states of consciousness so it can remain kind
Speaker 1: of in the hands of many, and hopefully we will
Speaker 1: get kind of the law of large numbers, as Jamie
Speaker 1: alluded to, and actually get better data out of it
Speaker 1: as well. So that's what we mean by ecstasy wants
Speaker 1: to be free. I love that phrase, absolutely love that.
Speaker 1: Did you coin that it's a riff on information wants
Speaker 1: to be free? All right? Right? I get it. I
Speaker 1: get it. I get it. Which is Stewart Brand or
Speaker 1: Jaron Lennam Stuart Brand. And by the way, we didn't
Speaker 1: point it. That's a jamieism. I give credit where credit
Speaker 1: is due. That one came out of Jamie's brain. No,
Speaker 1: that's really cool, Jamie. I yeah, And I love that cool.
Speaker 1: And then I know, because times you don't explicitly link
Speaker 1: it to our gasmic meditation. You do talk about our
Speaker 1: gasmic meditation in the book, and I think we'd be
Speaker 1: remiss not to talk about that in this podcast. Sure, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, just fundamentally, just to state the obvious, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, from wine women in song back in the
Speaker 1: old old days to sex drugs rock and roll, we
Speaker 1: felt absolutely obliged to discuss sexuality as a technique of ecstasy.
Speaker 1: It's pretty much one of the originals. So what is interesting,
Speaker 1: You know, as we're seeing all these rising trends due
Speaker 1: to the four forces of extasis that we're seeing within that,
Speaker 1: we are also seeing this massive uptick in curiosity, involvement,
Speaker 1: and engagement around sexuality as a state shifting practice. And
Speaker 1: you know, you need to look no further than fifty
Speaker 1: shades of gray, right, which was an absolutely utterly crap
Speaker 1: work of fiction, but sold more copies than the entire
Speaker 1: seven Harry Potter's combined. So you think, dear God, like,
Speaker 1: what is that an indicator of because clearly it wasn't
Speaker 1: plot driven character development. It was the idea that this
Speaker 1: became a sort of you know, erotic user manual for ekstasis,
Speaker 1: and it sort of took edgy sex, which lots of
Speaker 1: research at you know, at pen Indiana, lots of you know,
Speaker 1: lots of institutions, including from the universities in the Netherlands
Speaker 1: as well, have been determining, wow, kinky sex for instance,
Speaker 1: just to take one subset of a subset is actually
Speaker 1: producing flow states, is producing non ordinary states. And actually,
Speaker 1: you know, congruent with the other research that Stephen was
Speaker 1: just citing on trauma and MDMA therapy or surfing therapy
Speaker 1: or you know, or meditative therapy that people who experienced
Speaker 1: those sexual states have They're better socially adjusted, they have
Speaker 1: less anxiety, they're more actually higher extraversion, all kinds of
Speaker 1: markers of psychological health. So what we're seeing with Sasmik meditation,
Speaker 1: which is a female centric practice, you know, sort of
Speaker 1: phenomenally non sexual but still involving that neck of the
Speaker 1: woods to create states of clear mindedness as well as
Speaker 1: the fifty shades kind of phenomena. We're seeing more and
Speaker 1: more people exploring edgier and more progressive and you know,
Speaker 1: therefore sort of higher impact neuropsychologically techniques of sexual ecstasy,
Speaker 1: and that that is spreading rapidly around the world. We've
Speaker 1: gone from sort of brown paper wrappers and trench coats,
Speaker 1: you know, and peep shows to you know, kindles and minivans,
Speaker 1: and that kind of democratization of broader spectrum of sexuality
Speaker 1: is totally congruent with what we're seeing in all the
Speaker 1: other domains. Yeah, Scott, the coorgasmic meditation, which comes out
Speaker 1: of the One Taste community. One Taste earned you know
Speaker 1: a place where it was last year, I believe, maybe
Speaker 1: two years ago on the Ink magazine's you know Top
Speaker 1: five thousand, Yeah, the Ink five thousand, So you know it,
Speaker 1: like I think, more and more we're seeing that, you know,
Speaker 1: consciousness goes straight to the bottom line, doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: the vehicle in there. Yeah, And so that's a great point,
Speaker 1: and your book does a great job of bringing lots
Speaker 1: of different of these as my colleague David Aida would
Speaker 1: call it self transcendent experiences together. I really am glad
Speaker 1: that you guys came on the show to get to
Speaker 1: talk about this. I hope that my colleague and I,
Speaker 1: you know, like people who are studying the science of fae,
Speaker 1: like Oron Davis and David Yiden and myself and others
Speaker 1: in the field of posychology, can really have closer integration
Speaker 1: with you guys, because you're really out there on the
Speaker 1: front lines and you're giving us insights as well as
Speaker 1: us hopefully giving you insights. So thanks so much for
Speaker 1: the work you're doing and being on the show today.
Speaker 1: Thank you Scott for your work. Scott really appreciated as well.
Speaker 1: Thanks all. Thanks thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast
Speaker 1: with Doctor Scott Barry Kauffman. I hope you found this
Speaker 1: episode just as thought for booking and interesting as I did.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to read the show notes for this
Speaker 1: episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology
Speaker 1: Podcast dot com. So, Jamie, I'm going to interview you
Speaker 1: since Scott has abandoned his post, and why don't you
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about like where stealing fire
Speaker 1: came from. For you, what's the Jamie Wheal version of
Speaker 1: the origin story of this book? And why are you
Speaker 1: so unbelievably passionate about it? Yeah? No, I mean, for
Speaker 1: sure this is not just like a journeyman's you know,
Speaker 1: pulp fiction. When we definitely didn't just sort of crank
Speaker 1: this one out to crank it and move on to
Speaker 1: the next one. For me, there was just this growing sense.
Speaker 1: I mean, my academic background was sort of historical anthropology,
Speaker 1: utopian social movements, all of these kind of things, so
Speaker 1: like I am wired to look for and perceive those
Speaker 1: kind of patterns and trends across culture. And the one
Speaker 1: that has been fascinating me in the last five to
Speaker 1: ten years has just been this kind of rise in
Speaker 1: i mean, for lack of a better term, sort of
Speaker 1: ecstatic culture. And you know, compared to the kind of
Speaker 1: you know, hippie generation, the Baby Boomers, the sixties and seventies,
Speaker 1: all of that kind of stuff, the thing that really
Speaker 1: has been bowling me over recently has just been how
Speaker 1: many people with money, power, influence, access to markets, access
Speaker 1: to communications platforms, you name it, have been dabbling in
Speaker 1: this space. And so as we were again you know,
Speaker 1: as you as you eluded, as we were kind of
Speaker 1: traveling around the country, traveling around the world, having conversations
Speaker 1: about flow and peak performance, we realized, actually we thought
Speaker 1: we were being you know, really edgy kind of smuggling
Speaker 1: you know, states of consciousness and performance into organizational stuff.
Speaker 1: We really felt like we were the ones, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of kind of cloaking, cloaking the transformation and bringing
Speaker 1: it in. And we realized that most of the audiences
Speaker 1: we were speaking with were way further down that field
Speaker 1: than we'd ever dared or dreamed. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: a simple example is just Burning Man, where you have
Speaker 1: an incredible amount of influence. You've got Goldman, Sachs bankers,
Speaker 1: you've got World Economic Forum folks, you've got the usual
Speaker 1: suspects from Silicon Valley, You've got bicoastal folks from New York,
Speaker 1: San Francisco, in LA You've got it showing up in
Speaker 1: Hollywood studio and movie shoots. You've got fashion design, this
Speaker 1: pioneered burning Man showing up in Paris and London and Tokyo.
Speaker 1: You know, there's this crazy thing, and just you know,
Speaker 1: to use that as one test case, what's the news
Speaker 1: coverage the news coverage was either naked hippies in the
Speaker 1: desert doing drugs, you know, the kind of salacious side,
Speaker 1: or the luky lou you know star stuff. Oh look
Speaker 1: there's Katie Perry on a segue or p Diddy or
Speaker 1: you know, a Victoria's Secret model. And so it seemed
Speaker 1: like there was this massive underground, you know, true conspiracy,
Speaker 1: the breathing together right of a bunch of movers and
Speaker 1: shakers around the world that were on this global circuit
Speaker 1: throughout the year. That included Burning Man, but it included Dava,
Speaker 1: It included Ted, It included South Buy and Coachll. It
Speaker 1: included all of these whizbang events where everybody got together
Speaker 1: again and swap notes, had a rocking good time and
Speaker 1: also did billions to trillions of dollars of high leverage deals.
Speaker 1: And so that intersection and then and then, by the way,
Speaker 1: throw in the special operations community right in the military,
Speaker 1: and DAPPA and the high end action sports community and
Speaker 1: Red Bull and the biohacking communities, and you realized, Wow,
Speaker 1: everybody is on this roving circuit and no one is
Speaker 1: talking about her naming. What is what is the connective
Speaker 1: tissue between all those nodes and and and sort of
Speaker 1: you know calendar appointments that where where these folks were
Speaker 1: all interacting. Jamie, that's really cool. I want to jump
Speaker 1: in and add one more thing just to tie it
Speaker 1: all together for people, which is a Molly Crocker Crockett
Speaker 1: who is a neuropsychologist. Is that right, Jamie? Yes, nurse right?
Speaker 1: I mean like she gives us a really good why
Speaker 1: is burning Man? Why? Why is Cochel? Why are these
Speaker 1: things called transformational best because they literally engender transformation? Right?
Speaker 1: Her research shows that you know, going to Burning Man
Speaker 1: produces the same kind of state change that you get
Speaker 1: from action, inventory, sports, meditation, psychedelics, et cetera, et cetera. Now,
Speaker 1: mind you, those things also get woven into Burning Man.
Speaker 1: But seventy five percent of attendees who go to Burning
Speaker 1: Man have a transformative experience, and eighty five percent of
Speaker 1: those people say it lingers in consciousness for weeks and
Speaker 1: months after the event. That's an incredibly high batting average
Speaker 1: for a party in the desert, right, Like, there's something
Speaker 1: much more going on than As Jamie pointed out, you
Speaker 1: know p Didy on a segue and you know he's
Speaker 1: doing drugs in the desert. That's some of the most
Speaker 1: powerful people in the world showing up to have a
Speaker 1: near guaranteed transformative experience that's going to carry into their
Speaker 1: daily lives. That's super interesting. Yeah, I love that example.
Speaker 1: And I'm glad you brought Molly because she's a good
Speaker 1: friend of mine. That's uh, that's really cool.