tom bilyeu: everybody, welcome to impact theory. you are here my friends because you believehuman potential is nearly limitless, but you know that having potential is not the sameas actually doing something with it. so our goal with this show and company isto, introduce you to the people and ideas that are going to help you actually executeon your dreams.
no slam dancing no stage diving no spikes, all right, today's guest is hard to fit inthe box! he is the executive director of the flow genenumproject and has been tapped to help unlock employment performance by fortune 500 companiessuch as, cisco, nike, google and red bull, but he is also well versed in mystical experiencesand burning man.
growing up he took huge risks as an adventureathletic, willing to risk everything for those fleeting moments where he was outside of himselfand free of the monkey mind, but realizing how dangerous and clumsy of an approach itactually is, he and his partner stephen cutler have committed to delivering the elusive stateof flow, from the world of reproduced mystism to the world of hard science, by mapping thegenium flow with scientific rigor by 20:20. this endeavor has already made him the recognizedexpert in the four trillion dollar altered states of consciousness economy, and turnedhim into a much sought after speaker and consultant on the neuro physiology of ultimate humanperformance. his work ranges from advising high growthcompanies and hedge funds to running expeditionary
leadership courses and helping optimize themost elite warriors on the planet. half of the things i came across him i researched,i had to look up to fully understand and every new thing i encountered made me feel likethis guy is the ayahuasca spirit guide for an elevated and optimized daily life. please help me in welcoming the co-authorof the relentlessly intriguing book 'stealing fire, how silicon valley, the navy seals andmaverick scientists are revolutionizing the way we live and work. the midwife of transient hypo frontality himself,jamie wheal. tom bilyeu: welcome!
jamie wheal: thanks for having me and it isgood to see you again. tom bilyeu: dude, good to see you again, verygood to have you on the show. i don't normally start with diving in to termsand defining things, but i have a feeling where we are going to go with the end of thisinterview, is going to get pretty interesting, may be a little esoteric. so why don't we start with what are the statesof altered consciousness? jamie wheal: sure, i mean altered states ofconsciousness means anything other than waking normal. so that can include everything from dreamsto visions to schizophrenic states, its a
whole broad spectrum. in our book 'stealing fire', we actually kindof narrow that down. we focus on what john hopkins psychiatrist,stan grafkow non-ordinary states of consciousness and under that, we zeroed in on three bigcategories, meditation and mystical states. in this case, can classical sitting meditationand the thing that people are familiar with but then also, any of the states that areproduced by dancing, by movement, by sexuality by these days smart tech ... whether its littlethings on your phone or more complex devices, so any of those states. flow states which as we've discussed are thosemoments of in the zone, performance, again
typically found in athletes, and then psychedelicstates and there has been this recent renaissance in sanction research, in chemicals that interactwith our neuro chemistry and produce very pronounced and fairly persistent differentor altered states of consciousness. so those are the three, meditation, flow andpsychedelic states, under which we then had to come up with a bigger name or term, andsince the baby boomers and hippies kinda ran a lot of them into the ground, we can't useany of that language. we have to wind the clock all the way back. so let's go all the way back to what origins,back to the ancient greek and we figured okay 'ectasis' which in the greek is the 'entesy'for the word ectasy, which if you get beyond
the club drug reference sort of literallymeans 'that which moves us beyond ourself'. so non-ordinary states are those that typicallytake us out of everyday waking consciousness or i am self aware and have an inner narrativegoing on, to those states beyond that and then there is a whole host of additional qualitieswe can talk about. tom bilyeu: you've likened the inner narrativeto our inner 'woody allen', that is exactly what it feels like. someone who is essentially heckling you withinyour own life, which is painful to know that it is coming from your own mind ... how muchdo you know about what they have done with severing the corpus callosum in creating literalduality in peoples minds?
jamie wheal: yes, i think that is sam harrisin his book 'waking us' talks about that ... i think it is one of the most fascinating partsof that book and i think it gives us a great, empirical kind of ab testing, on what do wethink of ourselves? and to what extent is our consciousness or conscious waking partthe part that can point a naming and call it out, actually calling the show? and actually,neuro scientist david eagleman, who is a dear friend of ours and on our advisory board andteaches at stanford, in his book 'incognito' and several of his others, he makes that greatcase too. it's like basically, our conscious mind isno more than the headlines on the sunday edition of the new york times.
compared to the entire weeks news. so the fact that what we think of us as ourselvesand what we are actually in real time able to name point and talk about is a percentamost, of all the data we are experiencing, all the sensations and inputs, is fascinatingand/or terrifying, depending on your point of view and potentially liberating. if we can get access to more of that bit streamthen we can integrate it into our choices, our decisions and even our inspiration, wehave access to a lot more bandwidth ... its like going from dial up to fiber optic ina heart beat. tom bilyeu: is that why this has become yourlife's work?
jamie wheal: i mean i think, may be on a cognitivelevel, on an intellectual level, but really its become my life's work because i realizedit is the only thing that makes me tick. it is the only thing that gets me out of bedin the morning ... we have inside joke! first rule of flow club is you never talkabout flow club, "like don't talk about it, just go do it, live it, shut up". so for me i just realized i am a lazy unmotivatedbastard when it comes down to it. tom bilyeu: you and me both. jamie wheal: so i just noticed that and i'mlike wow! and then i noticed everybody else too, whichit felt like we are drowning in information
and we are starving for motivation. so like new ideas about top ten lists abouthow to live better or be more productive and all that kind of stuff. i think there is a false promise there, becausethat's not the weak link. the weak link is do i have enough drive inmyself to do these things. if we can unlock intrinsic motivation, ifwe can unlock the "i can't help do this because it fulfills me", then we can connect thatto long term development, then i think we have something much more potent and potentiallytransformative than post it notes or affirmations. tom bilyeu: talk to me about the four trilliondollar economy that's grown up around people's
desire to mess with their own bearing chemistry? jamie wheal: this is kind of a crazy storyactually, because we had mapped the neuro biology of the flow stake, that is the geniumof the flow, which is part of our organization. so we realized ah, when you are in 21st centurynormal, it has a very consistent signature. it is fast beta brain waves, it's pre-frontalcortical activity, a lot of kind of fighter flight stress hormones, but they are justleft on slow drip ... so [inaudible 00:07:41] cortisol ... are not surprisingly our heartrate variability is all over the place, jagardy look like the stock market, instead of a nicesign wave. our postures are often hunched, our respirationis partial and shallow, poor air exchange,
pulled up c02, brain is not getting fullyoxygenated. there is like a predictable stack, and whenwe feel, like most of us feel most of the time it looks like that under the hood. alternatively, in these non-ordinary states,all that stuff shifts and it shifts to the right on a nominal 2 by 2 chart of it, andit becomes slower brain waves - alpha or theta. it becomes deactivated or hyper activated,brain activity in different regions lighting up and turning off. it requires neuro transmitters that flushout the stress chemicals and replace them with reward and feel good chemicals, dopamineendorphins and those kinds of things, respiration
tends to become more relaxed and belly breathing. you get better air exchange, posture tendsto follow, shoulders relax and fall back, head above shoulders - all these kinds ofthings. you are wow! so that is an interesting signature. what we realized, was this actually appliesnot just to flow states. this applies to meditative states. this applies to other mystically induced states. this applies to psychedelic states and werealize okay, now we've got almost a rosetta
stone ... if you remember back in i thinkit was in napoleon's era, they discovered that tablet that had greek demotic greek andegyptian hieroglyphics all saying the same sentence, all in one place. so they could translate and they could de-codethe grammar of it. that unlocked access to these languages thathad been hidden. well that genome flow became our rosetta stone,and it let us unlock. flow states with a domain of artists and athletesand meditative states with the domains of mystics and meditators or sort of saints youknow pias folk, monks and, then psychedelics were hippies and ravers and none of thosecommunities would ever talk to each other.
they would walk past each other on the streetand not bat an eye, and we were like "wait a second, actually your practice are the doorsyou are going through are all completely different, but the place you are getting to remarkablysimilar". so as soon as we had that insight ... welllet see our we full of it or is this just a hypothesis that doesn't bear out, and wesaid lets actually do a hard economic analysis and lets take a look at how much time andmoney are people spending seeking those states, that profile, that signature. tom bilyeu: rightjamie wheal: and so we backed into it and we took a look at the obvious, lisett andlisett pharmaceuticals.
so everything from alcohol, tobacco, nicotineall the way over to legal and illegal marijuana, all the to on and off prescription pharmaceuticals,oxi content, pain killers, psychiatric meds, that whole neck of the woods. that was over 2.2 trillion dollars! tom bilyeu: jesus! jamie wheal: just alone, then we went intonot just compounds that we could adjust to shift our state, but the entire psycho therapeuticself help space, "help me, coach me, or teach me to get out of my waking state consciousness"... feel happier etc and that was billions more.
then we took a look at emassive media. the idea of emissive media ... we talked aboutimax, we talked about even about binge watching ... netflix has done all their algorithmsand the idea that even that the next show pops up before the last one finishes, is likethey have coded it, and they have even found that comedies aren't good for binge watching... but what is, is serial dramas, so that is why house of cards are ... i'm now hungup on a cliff hanger, i cant wait to have the dopamine hit the reward of the next thing.. i thought i was just going to just watch one and go to bed, six of them later, it is3 am and i am still going to go for that last son of a bitch to get my pay off, right ...so those are all the categories and we realized,
imax - giant 40 foot screens, huge sub woofers... the ability to be in the dark, unlike a sensory deprivation tank, i lose the boundariesof myself, i am connected to other people who are booing and gasping and clapping andcheering, the sound ... george lucas, famously said "movies are 50% audio", and so huge sounds,huge screens. we travel further, we pay more for those tickets,we just stream them at home or got to our local cineplex. so that is a state shifting choice we paya premium for. tom bilyeu: and you said something you werelike, we don't go that far out of our way and pay the additional premium to see bettermovies, we go there to feel something more.
jamie wheal: yes, that's is the premise orpay off of imax. you know you lose yourself more. tom bilyeu: right. jamie wheal: for two or three hours, projectonto the screen, mirror in your arms and all that kind of thing. our brains aren't evolutionary wired, to distinguishbetween what is on the screen and what we are actually perceiving through our own eyes... that those initial silent movies with the train coming and everyone bailed out oftheir seats, right! so, that is the premise of imax.
binge watching we have just talked about,that notion of it gets out of hand. right, i planned one, i ended up watchingeight ... that is a sign of the neuro chem happening. streaming pornography is a great example,because if you think about it, why do we do it? there is no evolutionary pay off. if i succeed at watching porn, i do not propagatethe gene pool one bit. but what i do do, is i create a state of pronouncedphysiological arousal and a state of sated neuro chemistry, that i find appealing andif you think about that one ... there is a
book called salt, sugar, fat by pulitzer prizewinning new york times author, who basically talks about how the food industry has hackedwhat they call the bliss point. tom bilyeu: oh yes. jamie wheal: right, and they literally, theyschemed for it and this is why we have chillies, tj fridays and the cheese cake factory. they basically figured out that salt, sugarand fat, all three, very rare sensations. salt essential mineral you can only get itin salt lakes and certain places, sugar was only available in berry season for two weeks- no refrigerators no shipping but two weeks berry season or honeycomb and that was it,and fat easy to spoil.
so any time it is in our evolutionary historywe had access to that stuff, it was the single was get as much as you can while you can. and now, we can't stop, we can't turn it off. so you get two krispy kremes between a baconcheese burger and that is the thing man, that exists in the world believe it or not, andpeople lose their minds and so 70% of adults, american men are obese, right! tom bilyeu: that's crazy. jamie wheal: so you put sexuality in thatsame category. so food, water, sex - three primary evolutionarydrivers and now we have untapped excess to
perennially sexually available mates withno contest from peers. because we provided access to all this stuff,now in ways that were never ever available. people have no checks and balances any more. so the ability to have massively over shootthe market in pursuing these states is absolutely there and is a clear and present danger. so all things ...tom bilyeu: do you think we need checks and balances? jamie wheal: i mean i think the evidence wouldsuggest that without them, if we just provided unlimited access to things that use to havenatural ebbs and flows, you tend to get access
and you tend to get addiction, destructionand distraction. tom bilyeu: lets talk about drugs? i am soup, i am a total woose about drugs. i don't do drugs. i tried smoking weed, i fucking hated it. i drink but soup but occasionally, i justdon't mess exogenously with my neuro chemistry very often. i am terrified of psychedelics but i am sointrigued by what lies on the other side, like one do you think ... i am going to saya necessary doorway?
is it a massive accelerator? and, why should it or shouldn't it be morereadily used by people? jamie wheal: that is a bunch of questions. so first things first. if there is a premise for our book at all,that i would want people to take away its that the door matters less than the destination. tom bilyeu: okay, but aren't some doors goingto be easier than others? jamie wheal: yeah, we even talk about it inone of the later chapters which is literally the ectasis equation.
people always ask us what is the best way? tom bilyeu: trust me that is on the list ofquestions. jamie wheal: what is the best way? and we say look man, it depends. it depends on your timeframes, your risk tolerances. tom bilyeu: my timeframe how long i have toget into it? jamie wheal: yes, because if you wanted tosay "hey i am risk averse, i have all the time in the world, and i want the safest surestway", i would say dedicate "respiration practice and contemplation, go forth and have fun andsee me in 10 years".
if you are like "i am desperate to have somemeaning" ... lets take for instance a specific case study, iraqi who is suffering from ptsd. tom bilyeu: perfect. jamie wheal: so, you have time, money andaccess and you can choose your path and your risk averse, "go learn to meditate". "i am not sure i can live another day in mymind the way it is", then stronger interventions may be necessary.\in fact, maps (the multidisciplinary association for psychdelic studies), has been doing profoundfederally sanctioned research with trauma sufferers.
so it is war veterans, as well as sufferersof childhood abuse and sexual abuse. so folks who life has happened to them inways that are unfair, unsustainable and the burden of that wounding is literally killingthem. as little as one session with mdma and forthose folks that don't know, the core pharmaceutical ingredient in what folks often know as ectasyor molly. when you ingest it it goes indirect to yourserotonin system and it also releases dopamine and oxytocin. so you have serotonin, dopamine and oxytocincoming into your system and it tends to leave people feeling ... particularly if they havebeen traumatized, they can relax, they can
feel safe, they can feel secure, and theyare basically having the ability to go and re visit those traumatic events in ways thatdon't trigger their nervous system into fighter flight again. in conjunction with skilled therapeutic talktherapy, the ability for that to release them. in fact one ... it has been so successfulit has been screwing up their stats. tom bilyeu: stats? jamie wheal: maps, as they do this research,because the protocol was for three sessions stretched over six months. there has been more than one, one [inaudible00:18:13] is like "i did one session i'm good".
tom bilyeu: wow! jamie wheal: "save my life, i am not comingback". tom bilyeu: mdma? jamie wheal: yes, but in conjunction withtalk therapy, very supervised and very structured ... johns hopkins university is doing studiesand yu is doing studies, ucla is doing studies and maps, the multidisciplinary association... maps.org you can check in on those websites. the good news is that their evidence has beenso overwhelmingly pronounced effective, that the fda has approving it not just for traumabut also for anxiety and depression. jamie wheal: and that is now in stage 3 clinicaltrials i believe.
tom bilyeu: like how does the brain rewirethat fast? jamie wheal: yeah, i think that is a greatquestion and it doesn't just happen. the short answer is i don't know why? or howit does? but i would say that it does and it is notjust pharmaceutical intervention. so the mdma trauma stuff ... actually if youwind that story back it first began in 1990s with willoughby britton at brown university,and she was studying nde survivors (near death experience) folks. and she was like look i am a trauma researcher,when people are traumatized that usually is a bad thing for them, but people who havehad the tunnel of white light breakthrough
an epiphany moment, come back and the thingthat should have traumatized them actually leaves them happier than ever. and she measured that with time it takes toget into rem sleep and this is just an interesting notion. so back to your point of about our consciousmind ... tom bilyeu: this gives me the chills. i didn't realize there was something measurableout of this. jamie wheal: oh my god it is crazy ... solike back to the notion of conscious minds, the top 1 per cent, you can test how longdoes it take me to go and fall into rem sleep
at night and predict with clinical accuracywhether or not i am going to be depressed six months from now. jamie wheal: so i won't even feel depressedyet. six months from now i am going to be in thedumps feeling like the world is at me and i don't like my relationships and my job sucks,but six months early you can tell me that. hey, its taken you ... you are dropping torem sleep too early. so basically less than a 100 minutes, lessthan 60 minutes. if i drop into rem total clinical sign i amgoing to be depressed. tom bilyeu: so not how fast you fall asleep.
jamie wheal: no, no. tom bilyeu: how fast you got into [crosstalk00:20:13] jamie wheal: and the sooner i go into remthat is more of risk factor. tom bilyeu: really. jamie wheal: the longer it takes me to getinto rem. so here is the fact, is that 90 minutes isabout average. nde survivors were clicking it over a 100to 110 to 120 minutes before they dropped in rem and, brain scans were showing theirneurology, their neuro networks were permanently rewired as a result of that singular catharticexperience.
so you are like, what is going on here. obviously the trouble with nde studies isyou can't repeat them in a lab. you can't nearly kill people to see if coolstuff happens. tom bilyeu: can't you? jamie wheal: right, so roland griffiths atjohn hopkins, had a more elegant solution. nde's are accidental roll of a dice and wecan't schedule that and how do we find more people that are truly facing mortality, andcan we recreate this in some way? so he basically took terminal cancer patientsand introduced three grams of siliciden. it was enough that people got to an interestingplace but not so much they had to manage wild
and wooly experiences. four out of ten reported it being the mostmeaningful experience of their lives, period, straight up, most meaningful thing i haveever done and i think 7 or 8 out of 10 said it was top 5 and the results were persistentfor 1 month, 3 month, 6 months. basically as long as they continue to surveythem. tom bilyeu: so then why don't people do more? like steve jobs, for real though, that wouldbe my question. so that is the reason why i don't do it becausemy assumption is that the answer is dangerous. right, there is one of the chapters in yourbook called 'burning down the house'.
so we stole fire from the gods and we didall this amazing stuff, but we can also burn down the house. and so i guess it fascinates me with drugs,because if i knew it was safe, i would do it. so where is that critical threshold, why isn'tanybody ... and i was going to say steve jobs said everyone should do it once, but he didn'tsay everyone should do it weekly or daily. so what is it that makes people back off? jamie wheal: there are several different things. one, we just have to refine our terms.
so drugs is a bit of a clumsy category, right. we are not talking about amphetamines, weare not talking about cocaine, we are not talking about opioids and heroin and any ofthose things. we are talking about a credible specific andrefined subset that psychedelics of which most of the ones we are talking about interactwith the serotonin system specifically. tom bilyeu: okay. jamie wheal: so that specific category isfairly unique in its properties and may have, and has some of the benefits as well as knownissues that you have to be very mindful of, but they are not physically additive, thereis very low ability to overdose any of those
kinds of things are not on the table, butthe specific category. jamie wheal: that said, there are state sanctions,states of consciousness, there always have been. right, and whether its way back in the daysof the catholic church ... in fact, even like neolithic era, if you lookat early cave sites in western europe, you have burned hemp seeds and mortar and pestlefor opium, for poppy seeds, no alcohol. the alcohol complex as anthropologist calla cultural movement began around the mediterranean, so even the old testaments stories like noah,fermented grapes and all that kind of stuff, right ... so alcohol complex began there andfunnily enough fueled a warlike in nomadic
bunch of people that migrated out of the mediterraneanand the alcohol complex took over europe in interesting ways. so, we enforce, even today the smoke break,the coffee break and happy hour. we enforce those even though on consideredrankings of most harmful substances that are broadly used alcohol is number one, it beatsheroin. tom bilyeu: what? jamie wheal: heroin is number 2 ... alcoholdoes social harm ... ethanol other than the fact that it is so deeply inculturated andwe love to raise a glass and there is all these wonderful gillions amounts of film,tv, advertising that reinforces it.
ethanol sucks. tom bilyeu: is anyone looking at the brainwhile they are doing this? jamie wheal: exactly. so robin carhart-harris, imperial collegeof london, has just in the last three years studied using lsd with patients to put themthrough fmris. so now i can precipitate the experience withworld class measurement devices. jamie wheal: and what he found was two things. really interesting. so the first was that our ego ... when peopletalk about ego disintegration, you know like
practitioners ... they were actually right. like our egos, there is not a single spotwhere it lives, it is a network and if you knock out even one or two of those nodes,the whole thing powers down. tom bilyeu: and what are you shutting down,the prefrontal cortex? jamie wheal: it is subtler in more neuronsthan that these day and that is what's so cool. the new tech is advancing and our abilityto put people in interesting states while under the measurement devices, because theseare big giant million dollar machines. the first thing is that the ego is in networkand the destabilizing or knocking out even
a couple of nodes will shut the whole thingdown. you will get that moment of selflessness,woody allen goes away, that stuff ... but the other and this goes back to why fetterman'smicro dozing was so interesting, is that under those conditions, while your brain is metabolizingand neuro transmitting lsd around the circulatory and the serotonin is happening, you are gettingconnections between parts of your brain that normally never talk to each other. tom bilyeu: what creates that connection? so its not going to malanation it happenstoo slowly. so what is the mechanism there?
jamie wheal: in that literal sense, i thinkit is neuro transmitters and it is probably literally the serotonin system ... there areseveral different receptor sides firing and talking to each other and they normally don't. jamie wheal: so its like skip level neighborscalling out the window, right. and those far flung connections ... i meanthat literally is the mind expansion element and its super practical. you see this is the thing, it is not just"oh wow, i have never thought that an oak tree comes from an acorn". mind blown, you know its like "can i workon real hard stuff, that's in my life, that
has practical applications, real world constraintsand can i navigate" ... tom bilyeu: do you know some of the things,the patternable stuff that came out of that? jamie wheal: the linear electron beam acceleratorslike hardcore, super high tech stuff. and of course that the ...tom bilyeu: are those guys still doing it, that's my real obsession? jamie wheal: everyone is doing it ... thebottom line is silicon valley, we go up there and we speak to teams of engineers and weare like, here is the flow states and here is how to manage your day and they are like"hey man our whole engineering team is micro dosing, what do you think about that?"
and i am like "really, can we talk about thisoff campus". so the bottom line is like silicon valleyas just an exemplar or emblem, a lot of the stuff. there is a lot of executives that are usingtranscranial magnetic stimulation, so that ...tom bilyeu: now that doesn't freak me out. jamie wheal: exactly, i recommend tms to everybodythat is interested. it is like okay, if you are risk averse ..tom bilyeu: so tell people what that is? jamie wheal: so transcranial magnetic stimulation,it almost looks like those mirrors, those lights that dentists have in their offices.
you can line it up over the front of yourbrain and it basically sends magnetic pulses through whatever part of your brain you aretalking to. the typical way they do it, is they test itand you just end up with a natural response like "grab your thumb" and they are like "nowit is over the right zone" and they do fifteen to 20 minute sessions on a daily basis andit basically, just defrags your cognitol pod drive. its fda approved for depression, which obviouslythe largest target market, let's go through those hoops and it performs it ... and itis as effective as prozac ... it is basically like a month long protocol.
not many insurers will pay for it, so it isspending, 15k-20k for a batch. so that's prohibitive, but a lot of peopleare using it off label. so, what they are finding is that by basicallypulsing it with magnetic activity and then level setting all of your neuron connections,when they power back up ... it's almost like a hard reboot on your computer that has beenon too long, you end up with cleaner pathways and connections and greater ethicacy. so that is being used off label by a lot ofexecutives. it is also being used by colleagues of ours. tom bilyeu: how do they shutdown?
jamie wheal: it depends but of them is dorsolateralprefrontal cortex, so you can absolutely target that ... and other colleagues of ours diddoppler research, target [inaudible 00:28:24] snipers, archery all these measurable things,how long does it take you learn stuff. they are using it to basically mechanicallyengineer the flow state. so rather than say "hey you've got to rolla dice or spin the tumbler and get lucky", they are saying "hey sit here" ... boosh onesession "you've got 20-40 minutes where you are not going to be your normal self and gocrush it and see how fast you learn stuff". the acceleration and learning in those instanceswas up 490%. tom bilyeu: what was the name of the companythat was doing that?
jamie wheal: advance brain monitoring hasbeen one of them for sure. tom bilyeu: give the stats on how much fasteryou can learn a language ... it goes from like? 6 months to 6 weeks. jamie wheal: 6 months to 6 weeks. tom bilyeu: that's crazy, so what are theydoing in the brain to get into that state and why does it allow you to learn so muchfaster? reading that in the book, i was like jamieand i are going to this place, they are going to zap me and we are going to learn somethingreally really fast.
another thing is i want to advance my greek,so let's go. jamie wheal: the simplest thing that thoseguys have been doing and you can do this a thousand and one different ways, but is straightup - eeg feedback, so electrical activity. can i steer myself without 20 years of meditationpractice! tom bilyeu: with a bio feedback and watchingmy waves ... jamie wheal: can i just use visualizationof my actual real time data to help me learn, to control it faster? yes is the short answer. so can i move out of distracted fast movingdata into something slower and more receptive,
like alpha theta? tom bilyeu: have you seen people get intogamma states? jamie wheal: yes and in fact a seasonal meditatoris tibetan lineage monks have a far higher spike in gamma than almost anybody else. gamma waves for the folks that don't know,that's like your eureka moment of "shazam i got it" ... i read a paper in plus one thejournal, which was three different types of meditation and comparing the incidences ofgamma frequency based on the different meditative style. so they are not like tentatively done, andmeditators can do it ... but now which unique
traditions do it better. so the idea here is, you can either do itthe old school way, decades of practice, flying blind but with lineage instruction or, wean accelerate it now and we can say "hey can i use additional contemporary tools and techand can i accelerate my feedback loops, and can i start doing it faster. once i can do that" ... it's not that i justgain access to information i haven't learned or earned, but it is to say that i can putmyself into the most receptive and accessible state possible to then go and do thattom bilyeu: do you think it is more important that it is learned and earned, versus justbeing able to zap yourself or to take a drug
like ... for me the idea of shaving 30 years,i don't care if people think it is cheating? jamie wheal: yeah, so that's another one,you asked why doesn't everyone do this and the question is about pharmacological supplementation. but these days, it is getting into tech supplementation. it is getting into vr and ar and the questionis, what we talk about is the notion about the skin bag bias, the idea if it's insidemy body and i have earned it that is real and true and, if it comes from outside itis cheating or short cut and not real, and the answer is just "really, your sure aboutthat" ... it is like basically, the moment you slow that down, so where is the edgesof that argument, you realize there are no
edges. it is arbitarium subjective and it is culturallyingrained. the reality are we are clever monkeys makingshit up all the time and we are forever influencing ourselves. i mean, you go to boulder and it's like goddamn like lake wobegon. you look at a montessori class in boulderand all the kids are just perfect and beautiful and than, you see the mother and the fatherand they are like all 5-12 climbers slash pro cyclist slash mountaineer phds and theyhave self-selected. right, we all do this.
we do it casually and informally and thenwe also do it deliberately with what we eat, we are tall now and five hundred years agowe weren't. we are constantly modifying ourselves. tom bilyeu: lets get crazy, have you read'evolving ourselves'? jamie wheal: no. tom bilyeu: ah my friend you have to readit, so a big part of their whole thing is that national selection doesn't exist anymore. it is purely unnatural selection. 50% of the earth's dry land mass is coveredby things that we have decided to let grow,
so whether that's wheat, corn or whatever. we've decided that, we've decided what specieslive and die, we are looking at ways to bring back a wooly mammoth through cloning. it's like literally we have taken over naturalselection ... what we have done to humans with the way that we impact our micro bioeven just caesarian birth and how that impacts a child. jamie wheal: head size. tom bilyeu: having bigger heads, smaller hips. having kids later.
every five years over 35 that a woman pushesback having a child, its a 14% increase in the likelihood that the child will be obese. the heavier the mother is, the more likelythe child is to be obese. so you get this generational stats ... theytalk about how epigenetic factors, the changes we make to our own environment to ourselvesnow can echo for four generations ... which is fucking crazy ... so if you take a rat,zap its feet and then make him smell almonds, then do nothing else ... one rat zapped hisfeet and made him smell almonds, his great grandchildren will still be freaked out bythe smell of almonds. jamie wheal: yeah, yeah.
tom bilyeu: am i the only one freaking outabout that? that is what? that is crazy. so we have completely taken the stuff over... that all triggered in me because this whole notion of whether it is internal orwhether it external - a) i don't think we have grips on now - what is external and external? whether it be height, intelligence whateverthat we are taking control over and breeding in and out, that is a nasty word to say ... butthat is essentially what is happening, but now we are going to be taking over from atechnological perspective from a chemical
perspective and what are we going to be okaywith altering? right, what do you think? - in fact let really get controversial myfriend. what do you think about performance enhancingdrugs? jamie wheal: well the short answer is we havealways been using them. right, you go back to the early revival ofthe olympics, marathoners were having glasses of wine, some of them were taking bumps ofcocaine. tom bilyeu: that would help. jamie wheal: for sure, it is always been happening.
the incas had the highway that ran the stripof andes, that was 11 or 12 hundred miles. they would have their runners use basically... literally freeze dry, leave it out at night and pound it, freeze dry potatoes andother stuff and cocoa leaves and the sons of bitches were like pony express on steroids. they could cover 11 hundred miles in fourdays. jamie wheal: back in the day. what? that's crazy. jamie wheal: so the idea that there was someearlier purer state when none of this happened
and we didn't modify anything is a fiction. even go back to oh we use too much technologyand we've been wounding and hurting the environment, we need to get back to mother earth ... eventhe notion of just the primal overgrowth forest is a fiction. i mean fire has been used since neolithictimes by humans as a technology, it's arguably the most potent technology we've ever invented. so when europeans came here in the 1600s andthey are like "oh my gosh, there is game everywhere and there is park, park like forest we canride our horses through" ... indians have been managing that landscape to promote game,basically game husbandry for millennia, before
you guys showed you. so the idea that there is some earlier pureststate is a pipe dream and a false premise, we have always been modifying our environment,we have always been modifying ourselves. we have always been modifying the plants andfoods we eat. michael palin calls it the boutineer of desire,that we shaped our plants and our plants shape us. they make us feel ... including intoxicatingplants ... they make us feel good therefore we grow them, we help them make sex, we helpthem propagate, so it is us. we are clever monkeys with a opposable thumbsand always have been.
the notion of where is it going next? tom bilyeu: don't you think that it is accelerating. we are doing [crosstalk 00:36:28]jamie wheal: even just take vrs as an example, let alone like ergogenic manipulation andthat kind of pick your child kind of stuff. even just vr, there have been studies nowthat are showing people are getting vr hangovers when they take it off, and it is interferingwith.. tom bilyeu: what does that mean? jamie wheal: so the first thing people noticein vr is like, oh this is weird and there is a lag and they get sea sick.
they are improving latency and it is goingto get better, but that was the first thing, but now enough people are doing it and spendingenough time in it, that what's happening when people are spending a lot of time in it andtaking off the head sets, and there is psychological depression. there is the sense of the world is just flatand grey and i am not like the superstar avatar slinging laser beams. right, so this kinda sucks and i am stuckin traffic and my lunch is late and also neuro biological. so its like my visual system has been attunedto this simulated environment, but i am not
getting the stibula inputs, i am not gettingthe proprioceptive inputs, so its all coming in through my retina and then i take thatoff, and my cerebain is out of whack and people are literally getting hangover affects ... itsa bit like being on a boat too long and you get back on the pier and you have sea legs. people are getting 3d legs when they comeback into waking state reality. so the question is are we going end up justjacking ourselves involuntarily to the matrix, instead of being imprisoned there ourselves. tom bilyeu: so here's my big fear. have you read the comic dmz?
jamie wheal: i don't think so. tom bilyeu: so my mission in life is to getpeople to understand that fucking comic books contain so much cultural wisdom, because youdon't have to actually produce it. you can do a hundred billion dollar budgetmovie and your just the drawing. so whether you are drawing somebody sittingin the ling room or something of a cosmological scale it does not matter. so they explore fascinated ideas and the dmzexplores the notion of the us in the middle of second civil war and, it is so unnervingnow, to read it now. it came out ten years ago, may be a littlebit more and at the time i felt a little insulated
from anything like that, but now it's gettinga little bit crazy. how does what you guys are covering in stealingfire, because i think it does, touch on the deviceness that we see, not just here in theus but broader, like how do we use the technologies to transcend that? jamie wheal: that is a massive fascinatingquestion. the simplest is to say, "these techniquesof ectasy" which is [inaudible 00:38:53] versus chicago way back when ... but the notion oftechnologies or tools we can use to create prompt ectasis, to step outside ourselves. those can be used back to the 1984 brave newworld split, they can be used for the better
angels of our nature. they can help us become more expansive, morecreative. heal trauma, prompt cooperation, collaborationand innovation or they can be used to absolutely hijack our impulses and drives. push all of our pleasure seeking buttons,sell us more shit. it can leave us fat and happy and on the couch. the option is up to us, it is a bit like instar wars, hundred percent force 'yoda' awesome, 80% force 'anakan' scary as hell. so ectasis at 80% can be pretty much whateveryou want it to be.
fully expressed it has these innumerable positivebenefits. so one of the questions, there is like theold yates line from that poem the 'second coming' which speaks a bit like your dmz comic,which is the the best lack old conviction are the worst filled with a passionate intensity. tom bilyeu: that's great. jamie wheal: phewtom bilyeu: that gives me the chills. jamie wheal: what mis-shapen beast, its hourcome round at last, slouches towards bethlehem waiting to be born. jamie wheal: we have the ability through ectasisto literally step beyond ourselves.
to have these experiences of expand and prospective. to have these experiences where we just get out of our own way and we see men we areconnected to each other, men love beauty, truth. worth taking a stand for, basic decency. there should be no reason why we can't reclaimhonor, courage, duty, sacrifice, patriotism, democracy. this is not about left and right, this isabout fear or love. i think if know where we are today, you canmake a case, you don't have to buy into it, but things are accelerating.
a lot of people are experience that. it feels like everybody mythologies are startingto smash and crash into each other. right, one group saviors is another group'santichrist, and its all happening literally like the matria. if you go on youtube and you google matriathe world teacher, the buddhist world teacher, there are christian fundamentalist that areabsolutely convinced that a) it might have been obama, b) the matria is actually theantichrist in drag. your like what is going on? you've got the matrix and you've got starwars, you have [inaudible 00:41:23] and you've
got isis. you've got all these real and imaginable narratives,all getting swirled sucked down the drain of time and space, and they are starting toslam into each other and blend and merge in a way that is overwhelming us. we literally don't know whether to shit orgo blind, and the reality is, what if all of that is just the skin of ... it does notmatter what flag you are flying, it doesn't matter what uniform you wear. the real separation is are you coming froma place of love or coming from a place of fear and control.
these abilities to step outside ourselves,the abilities to see more, feel more and know more, is the chance to give the best someonetheir own conviction. that's where we are ... it's like have thatcourage to say enough, enough with the insanity, enough with the inhumanity, and it is notcan i trip out and it's not can i escape from my life and responsibilities. its can i just set down my butt long enoughto step up to the high ground to step up to the mountain and look around and say "i seewhere we are and i see what needs to be done, and it doesn't matter whether i get the prize. it doesn't matter whether my part is insignificantor pivotal, it is just that i have to play
it". if we all do that, just the tiniest littlethings, it is the smile at the grocery store. nod to a neighbor, its a conversation froma liberal to a conservative we both care about the same things. lets honor democracy, lets honor each other,this isn't complicated. the ability to get beyond falsism into a solutionwhere you can hold more than one perspective. that is what ectasis gives us. it gives us the ability to wake up to whatis possible. to grow up and mend where we are broken andto show up and do that which needs to be done.
tom bilyeu: how do we get that scale? jamie wheal: well, there is a short answerand there is a longer answer. it is fundamentally open sourcing these techniquesof ectasy. we have the keys to our cage these days. we have the ability to get rid of neurotic'woody allen', we really do. that's imminently possible, we don't haveto burn a lot of cycles wondering if we can. the keys to our cage are the keys to the kingdom. its the same thing. so, meditate, all the smart tech, all theneuro science, all these access point is here.
all the information is here. don't die wondering ... go find it and gofind it with the fastest, cleanest, safest method that works for you, but go find it. then, let's go back to being people and let'sgo back to mending this world. tom bilyeu: i have one more question for you,but first where do these guys find you online ?jamie wheal: well the simplest right now is 'stealingfirebook.com' and our goal is toget this information out to everybody that needs it, and really help support an opensource revolution in consciousness and culture. this stuff has always been mediated by middlemen and gatekeepers and that's the most interesting
thing. right now it is not one spartacus, it is notprometheus, we all prometheus now, and by having this information and sharing it ... that'smy biggest hope and we have run all the scenarios and there is a lot of ways this doesn't workand i think the one way i can see it is a small band of dedicated rebels, right, doingthe impossible just in time. tom bilyeu: that's awesome. you've almost certainly touched on it, butplease put a fine point on what's the impact you want to have on the world? jamie wheal: i mean i think it's sharing knowledgethat people can use to wake themselves and
each other up, and live the fullest life possiblewithout apology or compromise. tom bilyeu: i like that a lot. jamie thank you so much for coming on theshow today, man that was incredible. guys you are going to want to dig into thisman's world. when i first encountered him the first thoughti had was, this is the real life most interesting man in the world, the deeper that you go intothe things that he is thinking about exploring, the way that he is explored it, we are goingto have bring him back. i didn't get to ask 10% of the things i wantedto ask him. you've got to hear him talk about relationships,he is unbelievable we will get to that at
some point. guys, that was an incredible message. you are going to want to read the book 'stealingfire' it goes into detail the neuro science, the how's, the why's the where. how you can actually achieve this stuff. the dangers. what awaits on the other side. all of that stuff which warrants further exploration. it is such an intriguing book, i promise withevery page that you turn you are going to
be drawn further into asking a question. you don't necessarily have to agree with answer,but the argument that they are presenting is pretty undeniable. as jamie said, we have the ability to stepoutside of our ego centric universe and really see things fresh and whether that's to beable to have a breakthrough in your own business or, whether that's to be able to see someof the political stuff that we are dealing with in a new light, to be able to see a newway forward. it doesn't matter, those are all the thingsthat are contained with the universe that can be effective, whether its straight upmeditation or whether you are braver than
i and you take the psychedelic route, butit is all there to be explored. so boys and girls if you haven't already,this is a weekly show so be sure to subscribe and until next week my friends you are legendary. speaker 3: hey everybody, thanks so much forjoining us for another episode of impact theory. if this content is adding value to your life,i want to ask that you go to itunes and stitcher and rate review. not only does that help us build this community,which at the end of the day is all we care about, but it also helps us get even moreamazing guests on here to share their knowledge with all of us.
thank you guys so much for being a part ofthis community and until next time be legendary my friends.
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