Matt: 99.99% of human history has believed in an animist reality. We have all believed that we are descendant from Gods, and yet in this little slice of Western culture in which we inhabit, we believe we are ascended from apes, Matt Zima,
Dave: Matt Zeman, Matt Zeman.
Matt: We know that if we give a bunch of people with cancer, psilocybin the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, many of them are going to have mystical experiences.
When you take a psychedelic, a part of our brain, the inner narrator piece, the piece that tells you you have to do more, that you're not worthy, it quiets it down.
Psychedelics just don't have addictive mechanisms. Psychedelics are catalysts. So when we take these catalysts, we then have insights and awakenings and awareness, and the practice is everything that happens
Dave: afterwards.
How does psychedelics help people sort out programming versus internal desire? You are listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey,
Matt, Dave. How many drugs
Matt: have you done? I love them a lot. At this point, it's been kind of a, it's been a journey. How do you know you're not an addict? What's lovely about these is they're non-addictive and non non-toxic. And I think we, it's so funny. I mean, you and I grew up probably the exact same period where everybody was saying, just say, no, these are gonna fry your brains.
They're gonna lead to addiction. Mm-hmm. And, uh, I hear it all the time. Like, this is, this is so dangerous. It's a gateway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we know all the research says it's, it's not really true with, actually, the funny, ironic thing is ketamine, the one that people have most access to is probably the most addictive of all of these
Dave: different medicines.
It's also interesting. Ketamine's, not technically a psychedelic, no, it's a dissociative. It's also medically really helpful. That's why we use it at 40 years of Xen for plasticity. But it's the one that has the most addictive risk. When I say the one, the psychedelic space. Mm-hmm. It's very hard to get addicted to these.
And I say this because I was married to a doctor who focused on drug and alcohol addiction, emergency medicine, and we, we talked about a lot of stories from her practice, and it's like, yes, people using other drugs that are addictive like heroin and meth and things like that, some of them would start using psychedelics just to escape from reality.
Mm-hmm. And this is like a mental illness coping thing. For people who are not extremely mentally ill. Psychedelics just don't have addictive mechanisms, right? Correct.
Matt: They don't have addictive mechanisms. And our body builds up a tolerance so quickly. So if we take mushrooms today and we take them again tomorrow, we're not gonna have the same effect.
So our body kind of has a natural governor to it. The
Dave: natural governor pisses me off because, well, can I go to, I go to Burning Man. Okay. Right. And the first couple days are so good, but then by day five it's like, this stuff isn't working anymore. Uhhuh, how would I make it so I have less tolerance to psychedelics so I could enjoy them more?
You know, that's that. I think if you could figure that out, you'd have, you'd have
Matt: a product there, you didn't think gonna go there, did you? I did not know where we were going in this conversation, but I'm glad to go in all these directions
Dave: if there was an arm wrestling Okay. Contest. Mm-hmm. Between the spiritual side of psychedelics mm-hmm.
And the science side of psychedelics. Who would win? Ah, how do you even answer
Matt: such a question? So let, let's do it this way. I'm gonna, uh, I'm gonna actually say spiritual is gonna win, but Yeah. But. It is funny. So when we talk about what is the psychedelic space, well, we really are talking about where is the money in the psychedelic space and the money in the psychedelic space is science, it's pharma, it's, it's what they're trying to do.
But the spiritual side has never stopped thousands of years of practitioners serving medicine and quiet ceremonies at the risk of persecution and prosecution. It's never stopped. So I think spirit continues on while, while money comes and goes as organizations wrapping around, latching to find ways to survive or not survive.
Dave: We've both seen big pharma try to control free access to substances either because they compete or just because if they can get a monopoly, they make more money. Are you worried about big pharma even
Matt: touching the psychedelics based, I'm an abundant mindset kind of person, so I believe this is all an and so we need, if it wasn't for 200 institutions studying psychedelics, we wouldn't have had this cultural shift where people are starting to say, oh, well, maybe what we've been told has been wrong.
So we need science doing what it does. We need the validation of different studies. We need people with white coats to greet some portion of our population. Mm-hmm. Who wants to be diagnosed and wants to go through that process to have that option. And we need religious access and decriminalization access at the same time.
It needs to be a both. Um, in addition to just what's right and what's wrong, spirit is coming up in both situations. We know that if we give a bunch of people with cancer psilocybin, the, the active ingredient and magic mushrooms, as, as you well know, many of them are going to have mystical experiences.
Our science, our medical professions are not equipped to deal with that. Yeah. So they need to be able to invite in spirit without shame. And conversely, spirit, the, the, the, the, the clergy needs to be able to invite in science, um, to, to be able to keep their congregations, their participants at as reduced risk as possible.
You're talking about the church of Pfizer or? Exactly. It could be that, that would be kind of wild.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: Could see the packaging, the commercials. What are those disclaimers? Warning, are you dealing with pesky stigmata? Right. That's so wrong and awesome. Oh my gosh,
Dave: yes. Oh man, that was not in my notes. No.
Matt: So that would be the funniest disclaimers ever though. Warning, taking too much of this may cause you to move to Peru. Me. Oh my gosh. You might leave your job.
Dave: I, I think there's an AI video we're gonna have to make for social about this. Totally. A hundred percent. It's interesting in, in my journey. I was very concerned about psychedelics.
Mm-hmm. Yet I was interested in altered states and you know, just healing whatever was going on. I didn't realize I was sick really, but just like, like I'm anxious and miserable all the time, but I didn't know I was anxious. I just thought everyone was that way. 'cause it was a constant state for me, for a variety of reasons.
Birth PTSD and biochemistry and whatever. I'm around 26 and I fly to Amsterdam. Okay. The first time I've been in Europe and I went to Amsterdam because I could buy pot legally. Mm-hmm. And I went to school where I could get pop and I don't want like pesticides and mold and I've had to just say no programming and all the, you know, this is your brain on drugs and all that stupid stuff.
I had some pot. I was like, wow. Like who would've thought? And then I ate some mushrooms. Mm-hmm. I remember listening to Mariah Carey on some TV thing in my cheap hotel. I'm like, this is the most beautiful music ever. So I come home and I buy a CD back bought. So clearly you're in an altered state. Yeah.
And I listen to you like, this is horrible. Oh my God. I like, I I like threw the CD away. I couldn't listen to it. Sorry, Mariah. Yeah. So I'm like, okay, I'm in an altar state. It was kind of magical, but at least I was safe. 'cause it was, it was legalized there. Mm-hmm. So I knew what I was getting and I said, there's another world there.
And that led me to go to Peru and ask for ayahuasca. Mm-hmm. And this was when they looked at me and they said, you're white. I said, yeah, I know. And they said, well, it's only for locals. You won't like it. It's not for tourists. And I said, well, actually not that kind of tourist. So I, I had an experience and that was my entree into psychedelics.
Mm-hmm. And, and I, I've proceeded very cautiously. Your path has been kind of similar. You were not into psychedelics. Walk me through your intro story. I will, but I love so much
Matt: what you just said. Can we just pause for a moment? I mean, you covered two really important points with, with with, with that. You started saying that.
You just thought you didn't know what to, how to talk about your state of being. Mm-hmm. You knew you were not happy. You knew you were not fulfilled. You knew things were going on and you didn't have the language for it. And I see that all the time. Well, in, in our culture, we have this, this epidemic of loneliness.
We have, we have us, we have people who are, we're providers. We're told we have to go and work and provide and, and, and, and, and with no end in sight. Yeah. Private schools, cars, brutal food. It never, never ends. And that's just the normal society in which we live. It's a normal, un un awake society in which we live.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: And when we pause and we say there has to be something more, there has to be a way to move through this life with purpose. With power that. Is not conditional on the outside world. Yes. That's where I think strength comes from. When we know that everything we need, we're carrying inside, then we are not looking outward for anything, and then we can do what makes us happy.
So we
Dave: just, we switched into Tony Robbins mode for a second here. How do psychedelics give us that? And by the way, I agree with everything you said it does,
Matt: but like, what, what's going on there? Because they don't actually, they don't give us that, and that's kinda the whole point. These are not cures for anything.
Mm-hmm. Psychedelics are catalysts. Psychedelics are, are our medicines are tools that help us put, put us into a state where we can remember who we are. We can remember. Mm-hmm. That we didn't always feel about this. Or our jobs, or our wives, or our partners, or our employees or our friends, the way we felt, feel about them now and we can remember.
That at our core we're enough and that we are loving. And when we remember that we can then move forward and, and, and move forward in a way that is very different than before. That understanding comes to be just enough that that's it. Just enough.
Dave: Like we are enough. Yeah.
Matt: Like, how about you are way more than enough, right?
Or that the reality of you is greater than any of the idea
Dave: of you has ever been There. Go I, yes. I like that better. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, and, uh, I'm blinking right now. There's a book called You Are Enough. And I've had the author on the show and I'm sort of like teasing about that. But, but honestly I've sat in sweat lodges when people go, oh my gosh, I just want to be enough.
And I'm like, seriously? Like, how about you wanna be enough and you want rocket fuel and you want to dance all the time? Like, like why not? Why not? So
Matt: right. What makes people want to be enough, it's, it's not that they want to be enough, it's that they remember that they are enough. Mm. And it's hugely d for different Yeah.
It's the forgetting. It's the forgetting. It's that we get wrapped up in, we have to behave a certain way. We have to perform mm-hmm. For everybody all the time. Yeah. And when we remember that, no, we don't have to perform for anybody. We are who we are. And that is enough, then the whole world opens up.
Dave: Wow.
To your point, before I did this, especially the, the Peru side of what I said, I'd already been in a major national magazine with my picture. I'm like, I tried fame didn't make me happy for more than 15 minutes. Mm. I made $6 million. Didn't make me happy. Lost $6 million. That made me sad. Uh, but like I tried fame and fortune.
I tried getting married early on. Briefly. Mm-hmm. It wasn't successful and I'm like, none of that stuff works. Mm-hmm. And there was a lot of that, what you're saying, you know, not enough. Like no matter what you do, it's not enough. And certainly altered state's work has been profound for me. Mm-hmm. And the reason that I wrote heavily meditated, which is just coming out mm-hmm.
And I see we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 of your books you brought thank you as gifts around psychedelics. I, I put a chapter in there, but I also wrote about the other Altered saves things. Mm-hmm. Like Stan grs, holotropic Breathing. Oh, so beautiful. It was like a father of psychedelic therapy and breath work.
Absolutely. But there's also like tantric sex. Sure. There's other types of breath work. There's meditation, there's neurofeedback, there's light and sound goggles. Mm. How would you, as an experienced, psychedelic traveler, how would you guide people to know which altered states work
Matt: is the right one for them?
I, I think that's the beauty of this. I think once someone decides, I'm gonna try these different paths up the mountain, I'm gonna see what feels right for me, because there, my answer doesn't matter. What feels right for you is the question. And when we find things that feel right and you feel like, oh. I'm coming into myself, I'm remembering who I am.
I'm not becoming anyone else. I'm remembering who I have always been. Mm-hmm. All of these paths work for different people, and there's a scarcity mindset mm-hmm. And culture where people wanna grab on and say, oh, this is the one way that I have the answer, and I'm gonna protect that answer. Mm-hmm. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
If there was one answer, it would be easy, but be, we're all very different beings. We have very different ways of connecting, and all of these answers need to be available to all of us. No adult should tell another adult that they can't explore their consciousness with whatever tool that they want.
Explore, especially with natural growing tools, or breath work or fasting or sleeping, or any of these I items. But if
Dave: no one gives me permission to do it, I, I need to ask my government daddy for permission. Like, what the heck is gonna, I, I fundamentally agree. Thank you. Yeah. Anyone who says you don't have control of your biology at your estate, they are an enemy of humanity.
From my perspective, like, oh, how dare you stop evolution from happening inside my consciousness. That's not gonna end well for you.
Matt: Yes. I couldn't agree with you more. And then that actually takes us back to the second point that you brought up in your story of your journey 99 to Amsterdam. Yeah. What did you want?
I wanted to access, I'm speaking for you now. I wanted to access legal medicines. Mm-hmm. Because I didn't want to take the risk Yeah. Of the things that are laced and contaminated with an underground market. So, once again, how does that apply to today? It seems to me if we had, we had millions of people using psychedelics last year.
Something like 40 some percent said they were doing it for spiritual purposes. Wouldn't it be better if they could, if there was a market where they could buy without fear of contamination, without fear of, of toxicity, like dark web, you're saying like, maybe not the dark web, but there should be a way that they can do this without that.
Because, and, and in addition to the fear of contamination, so we're really, we're talking about here is, is source set and setting sources, like where do the drugs come from? So mm-hmm. How do we know that they're pure, but also how do we know that the people who we're surrounding ourselves with when we take these medicines are gonna keep us safe?
Dude,
Dave: thank you for bringing that up. I've noticed a really disturbing pattern. I work with a lot of high net worth people, celebrities, CEOs people with a lot of influence. And I do that because I have a, you know, $20,000 a week brain upgrade program with or without ketamine. And yeah, they come there for brain upgrades and also because of just who I am.
There are a number of people, some of them medical and a lot of them just, you know, energy worker people who are very clearly targeting wealthy people with psychedelics in a way that I don't think is clean specifically. Ayahuasca is probably the one that they use the most when they're, I would say, installing malware in these people.
Yeah. Are there some ways that you've found to know if the person you're working with is holding space or inserting programming?
Matt: Such an important question. Yeah. And in my mind, the, the journey begins not when you take the medicine. It's when you decide that you would like to do this and 'cause that's when it begins.
Part of that journey is finding your voice and fi and asking questions. Who are you? What is your experience? What do you believe? When we're, I'm going to take this medicine with you, what are you going to tell me? If anything, while I'm in this programming, what are you gonna sing to me? What are the songs?
What are the messages that I'm gonna receive? 'cause highly, highly impressionable, and you're saying ask this, ask these questions. Absolutely. When I come out of this, are there gonna be any requests for money, any requests to sell me anything? Are you selling me a, a coaching course? Are you selling me an upgrade?
Are you selling me product? Or do I have some time to come down from this medicine before deciding if I'm gonna spend any additional mon money with you? So, checking their energy flow, checking what they're, what they believe, and making sure that aligns with what you believe. And I'm not saying. What anyone believes is right or wrong, it's what's right or wrong for you.
Mm-hmm. So there are people who want to go into these altered states and have, again, someone there transcribing everything they say and think, and that's what they, and they want to talk throughout it. Great. That's great for them. There's others who believe this is an interstate journey and they wanna put in an eye mask and they wanna go deep, deep within, and they don't want anyone documenting anything during this process.
And that's beautiful for them. There are some that's gonna say, we believe this is a Buddha Christ, Ganesh, whatever during the process. That's beautiful for them. But what's right for you? Asking those questions and finding out in advance what's gonna happen.
Dave: Love this answer. The questions may vary based on the substance you're using.
Right.
Matt: It could. Sure. Asking I take x, y, z prescriptions or supplements. Am I safe with this medicine? That's kind of a basic, oh yeah. I don't want you to do that. I've had these past experiences mm-hmm. With, with schizophrenia, bipolar depression, anxiety. How is that? Might that impact me? Yeah. I have this support structure at home.
I don't have this support structure at home. What can you provide to help me? And if the answer is nothing, that's okay. I just know I need to then find support somewhere else. And maybe you can help guide me in what I might need following this journey. Am I doing a super deep dive with a large amount of whatever medicine you're gonna serve me?
Or are we really working with smaller amounts and kind of just riding the surface? All of those D help determine what happens afterwards because, and I'll go back to our conversation. These are not cures, these are catalysts. So when we take these catalysts mm-hmm. We then have insights and awakenings and awarenesses and the practice is everything that happens afterwards.
It's how do I bring all of that to this conversation? How do I bring that presence to the next conversation? How do I bring it to my, to my job and to my family and to my friends? And that is the life that we lead after the psychedelic
Dave: it, it's the integration and the state change that's so important.
Yeah.
I've seen a few influencers, I would say almost pushing psychedelics. Mm-hmm. Uh, one guy in particular here in Austin's, like, I've done Ayahuasca 87 times and, and I'm sort of thinking, when are you gonna notice it's not working? So talk to me about the appropriate frequency of
Matt: psychedelic use. Again, this is such a personal question.
All I can talk about is what's what's appropriate for me and, Where I see people kind of getting into trouble with this. So, and trouble meaning mm-hmm. Where they're, they're chasing an experience and they are, Not paying attention to the foundation that surrounds them, to the support that they already have.
Mm-hmm. They're, they're yeah, chasing the experience. So for me, there was a period where the deep dives are really important, where these, these, um, connections, this reminder that, oh my gosh, we are connected to everything and everybody, oh my gosh, the, the air I breathe is the same air that my great-great-great, great-great grandparents breathe.
Oh my gosh. The molecules inside my bones are the same molecules that have been in the, the trees and the grounds and the dinosaurs and the whales, and it's, we're all deeply connected. Love that. And now there's a period where I am more of just trying to connect with sacred and help hold space for others.
And in that practice of being in the same room and helping make sure that. Others feel secure in their surrendering. That's more the role that I'm playing at this point because that works for me. And there are still times when I will choose to, to dive deeply to see what the medicine wants to show me.
Mm. But more often than not, at this point, it's still a practice, but it's, uh, it's not as much medicine and that's what's worked for me at, at again at 52. So
Dave: we'll see what's next. It's, uh, it's funny, every time I ask, you know, what's the best, you're like, it depends on you. And, and it's exactly the right answer.
And in the world of longevity, and I kind of do longevity and consciousness mm-hmm. Is my two big things. Inside the, the wrapping of biohacking in longevity, people tell me what to do. I'm like. We all have different goals and we all have different biology. So I finally with, uh, with upgrade labs my franchise company.
Mm-hmm. Well, let's get 187 million data points a year. Mm-hmm. And let's use your current state and your goals to help identify what's likely to get you where you want to go. And so when I wrote heavily meditated with psychedelics, it, it's like, how can you tell someone you need this one? I, I don't think you can.
You can, however say this would be a gentle entry, and this is pretty heavy duty and these are less likely to create issues and these are more likely to create issues. So I did a stack rank list. Mm-hmm. Not to say you have to in that order, but to help, you know, based on what intuitively is your felt sense.
Like, I want be in the middle. Yeah. Yeah. Versus I want to get my toe wet. So what is an entry level? Like, I'm scared of psychedelics. I've been programmed my whole life that, you know, I, I could go crazy and jump off a building and all this stuff that they would tell you in the sixties, but that wasn't real.
So. What's, how do you get your toe wet and psychedelics
Matt: again, I I keep wanting to back up on your conversation. 'cause you're, you throw so much out with your question, then you're like, oh, this way. But hang on. Five words that you said that I think are really dangerous words and, and for humans, which is tell me what to do.
Well, that's what people are always asking for. Always asking. Yeah. And what that means is, to me, what I hear when someone says that is I don't trust myself. Mm-hmm. And I'm gonna give my agency to someone else. And when we do that, whether that is a doctor or a teacher, or a spouse or a boss, we find ourselves subjugating ourselves to someone else's opinion who may not know who they are.
Upset. So now, amen. We are following someone who. Might be lost. Tell me what to do. Is, is where we get into trouble with gurus and shaman and healers, because now all of a sudden I've traded, tell me what to do, which I, which made me unhappy in my, this life with work and spouse and whatever. And now I've traded for, tell me what to do with a guru or shaman or healer, and I'm gonna find unhappiness there because in either case, I'm not doing what I want to do.
Your autonomy is
Dave: not there. Your autonomy is not there. There's a bigger issue though. Yes. Most people do not know what they want to do. And, and I, I say this after exhaustive work with more than a thousand like super successful people looking at their brainwaves and going into altered states and what they think they want to do is not what they actually want to do.
How does psychedelics help people sort out programming versus internal desire? Because it takes it away from the to
Matt: do. Mm-hmm. It's not what to do, it's what to be, and it's remembering I don't need to do anything. All of this programming, all of our whole lives has been about doing more. Doing much.
Mm-hmm. It's about efficiency and productivity and how do we do more and provide more and slowing down and just taking a moment to say, what if I don't do? And I just be, how is that going to feel? Kind of hungry and cold. I mean, you did fly out here and you bought your ticket. We will also do, but slowing down enough to pay attention to those things.
Yeah. To pay attention to the feelings in our body and to recognize, oh, wait a minute, what are these emotions?
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: Emotions are language without words. The body's trying to tell us something. So, okay, how can I get into a different state?
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: So then backing up, you said, how do we get our toes in the water when it comes to psychedelics?
Okay. So we have lots of different ways depending on who you are. So if you are the type of person who wants to go through a medical system, I believe in diagnosis. I trust doctors. Great. We have ketamine clinics in all 50 states. And the caution I would tell you is that just because it's legal doesn't make it right.
And let me explain. Explain this. Oh yeah. Look at most of the laws, that's for sure. There are ketamine clinics where you're gonna be met by a nurse, anesthesiologist, and they believe it's a biochemical reaction period. So they're gonna stick an IV in your arm or give you a shot. They're gonna, you're gonna have television monitors.
You, you can watch your Fox News while you're getting your Ketamine. And after that experience, they'll let you come down and they're gonna send you home. Totally illegal. It's available in every state and it works for some people and it works for some people. Mm-hmm. And yes. And then there's other ketamine providers that they believe it's a biochemical, psychosocial spiritual process that they're gonna give you an IS and a blankie and some playlist and they're gonna prepare you.
Yeah. And they're gonna integrate afterwards. Also legal. So buyer beware. There are telehealth companies that'll send you ketamine again. Are there challenges with that? Of course there are. And. If I live in rural America or if I don't have the money to afford
Music: Yeah.
Matt: Another ketamine, should I still have access to these medicines?
Of course I should. Yes. And I know because I'm buying it for less and they're providing less services. I need to wrap my own services around it. Mm-hmm. So buy or beware. So if you're the medical, those are your options, except if you're in, in Oregon soon, Colorado and, and hopefully soon in some other states.
But those are your options if you're medical. There.
Dave: There's one
Matt: little
Dave: asterisk I'm gonna add to this. Okay. Do it. I've come across a few companies who are giving people daily doses of ketamine for 30 days plus, and then they just keep sending it to you and they tell you to ramp up on it. I think the word for that is addiction.
Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about that?
Matt: I don't know where the research at all points to this being a good idea. So it's one thing to say. I'm gonna work with psilocybin, with, with, again, something that grows in nature that's been used for thousands of years, where in indigenous cultures tend not to do things that harm their people repeatedly.
So ketamine, we don't have that history. 70 years of history with
Dave: ketamine. Yeah. We don't have the everyday use of ketamine. Well, we, we do. It's called in addicts, and then their bladders blow out and their brains have norepinephrine issues. Like it's really bad. So this. Looks like it is not only not standard of care, it looks like it's actually a malpractice situation from my perspective, but I could be wrong.
Everything I've read would say that's probably not the way to interact with that medicine. Yeah. And so for, for people listening, I've had a couple of good friends reach out. In fact, one of them was at the end of his first week of, because one of the companies hooked him with an ad and he was slowly ramping up his dose.
He was about to go to his 65 milligram trophies every single day. I'm like, that's a meaningful dose. And it, it, everything we know about ketamine says this is not a good move. But the neuroplasticity and doing it for, you know, five days or doing a couple big doses even a week while you're in deep therapy.
Totally different neurochemistry. Totally different. This is why, to your point, science is so important to understand what these do. What would happen to someone who said, I'm gonna do a gram of psilocybin every day, for instance? It would wear, it wouldn't
Matt: work. Yeah. And that's software that's kind of beautiful.
Nature stops. It's that governor we were talking about before. Mm-hmm. I love. So you talked about going to Peru and using ayahuasca.
Dave: Yeah,
Matt: I love multi-day. And Theo, so using psychedelics for spiritual purposes. Mm-hmm. Um, experiences. So going down and using and doing three or five nights of, of Ayahuasca in a week and being able to dive in, come back out, dive in, come back out, dive in again.
Amazing. Doing that with mushrooms. A couple nights and you have to watch the strains and watch the, to, to make that work. It's like, I've gotta start with a golden teacher on day one to move into a PE on day two to even make that work. Private equity you mean, right? Yes, exactly. It's, it's, it's a private equity mushroom strain, but it, you, it just, it wouldn't allow you to do multiple days.
Right. And that's kind of the beauty of nature of saying, ah, we know what we're doing here. We've been doing this for a long time.
Dave: You could, however, if you were in the desert in an RV with lots of music, you could do like l hypothetically on day one and ketamine on day three. Yes, of course, of course. And move through the, the grocery
Matt: store
Dave: of,
Matt: of
Dave: psychedelic products.
There are a number of people listening, uh, especially if you're meaningfully over 50.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: Where like this is in your mind the same thing as heroin or cocaine.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: Or meth or the things that just burn through c suicide or fentanyl. They're just not, like, they're not chemically, they're not spiritually, they're unrelated.
So my invitation would be to, in your mind, in your definition of these things to say, oh, there are addictive drugs that generally cause harm, but may still be useful, like fentanyl. I've had it during surgery. It was very useful. Right. And then there are others that make people see the world differently.
And, and here's my question for you. Mm-hmm. Having a shared reality seems important for societies, and this has been a role of religion and culture forever. Mm-hmm. When people choose to change their reality, whether it's through breath work or you know, joining a cult or becoming a yogi or joining a church, right.
You can do these things and suddenly you shift and you realize, I never knew that God was watching me, but now that I have that, I'm going to. Change things. What is the risk to society? If a bunch of people start, as you say, remembering themselves and start seeing the world very differently, are we just gonna
Matt: dissolve society?
Of course not. And this is what I mean. Terrence McKenna famously talks about how the government's not keeping us away from these because they're trying to be paternal and protect our us from ourselves. They're, they're more concerned around how are we gonna be as productive citizens or not to be productive citizens.
I love, I mean, it's a wild time that we are living in. We, I'm, there's no way but to, to look at this with wild curiosity. Mm-hmm. Like, okay, we, whether manmade or not, we have some things happening with the climate. We have some things happening politically. We have again, wildly interesting times, this awareness of.
The interconnectedness of all the, of our, that we are not separate and apart from nature, but that we are, nature is, I believe what is needed to move us productively into this next phase of living and to be able to recognize, oh my God, we live in the most abundant world ever. Totally. That this is there, this nonsense of scarcity, that there's not enough, we have enough to feed the world.
We have enough to house the world right now. And if people don't believe you, they can just
Dave: ask Chad, GBT. Exactly. It'll tell you, oh wait, you have access to an AI intelligence that knows the sum of human knowledge and it's better than any president or king 20 years ago, had access to Right. And it's free.
Right. Right. That's how abundant we are right now.
Matt: Yes. Right. And we can look at all a, any metric from, from harm to, to uh, to poverty, to to famine. Everything is better than it's ever been and. We are told to be scared. We are told to hoard. We are told that we have to take what's ours and that there's not gonna be enough.
And oh, well this is gonna crash and there's a danger, danger, danger. And it's just not true. It is amazing to just feel, oh wait a minute, if I slow down, just feel the weight of myself on the earth, I'm supported. If I go outside and look at nature, everything is working for me. Mm-hmm. We're we have, we live better than Kings lived a few hundred years ago, and are things gonna be different?
Absolutely. And are people going to have to adjust? Of course. And that's what we do as a species. Mm-hmm. And that's why these aren't existential events we are going to adjust. It's waking up to, wow, what an incredible time. The bazillions of bazillions of accidents that had to happen so that you and I could be here right now.
Mm-hmm. It's, this is it. There is nothing but awe and gratitude to experience in
Dave: this world. If you think about it, there's been 2 billion years of r and d that's happened in order to get us to where we are today. Right. Literally, this worked, this didn't work, this work, this didn't work. Mm-hmm. And it's done a pretty good job.
And it's a continuous process. Yes. And just like the Neanderthals went extinct, humans will inevitably go extinct. How soon do you think that's gonna happen?
Matt: No. That and it doesn't matter. Yes. So this will happen at some point and. We're the, we are made up of these same pieces. Exactly. We are, we are made, the carbon in us is the carbon of the dinosaurs.
Mm-hmm. We're, we're the same
Dave: life as the first primordial bacterial clunk that came out of, was some mud somewhere, if you believe that, or whatever it was. So it's part of this inevitable chain of life and humanity will evolve or, you know, will be replaced by, you know, trash, heating, dinosaurs, slime bombs, whatever.
They'll still be made out of us. Right. I did not have that perspective until, I can't say psychedelics did it. I think it was more breath work and neurofeedback, but psychedelics certainly. Mm-hmm. Where the overwhelming concern about death is, it's just gone for me. Mm-hmm. And along with that, the voices in my head, all that sort of stuff.
And I did this partly with psychedelics, but a lot of it was with all of the different spiritual practices, personal development practices. Lot of the stuff that I, I just, I share in the most recent book, I don't know that I could say what percentage of it was from working within Entheogen or doing shamanic training or what percentage was, you know, I downloaded this on a journey versus introspection.
I love that. Yeah. Because people,
Matt: people think that, like, they say, oh, healing's hard work. It's hard work to, to, to, to, to recover, to find, no, it happens in a second. Mm-hmm. And when that second is, it doesn't matter. The life that you had before, that was a life you had and was needed. Every moment of that was needed to bring you to the point when it clicked.
Okay. And then you move forward. So we can assign percentages and we can play with percentages, and it doesn't matter. It sometimes we, we, we can, we can heal in a moment, and the suffering then becomes optional. Mm. I would like to sit in some pain for a while. All right. Sit in some pain for a while. Great. I would like to experience some more depression.
I'd like to experience some anxiety for a while. Great. Or not, but we have that choice. And I'm not, I know, I know that sounds, um, I know that sounds can be harsh, but we have that choice and, um, all the time
Dave: it's not harsh, it's real. And one of the biggest lessons for, for beginning level healers, whether they're medical or some other kind of healer you don't have the right to take away someone's suffering.
Unless they ask for it.
Matt: Oh. And I'd actually argue that you don't have the ability to take away someone. None of us. I can't heal anybody. I can't make, I can't assign meaning to your experience at all, period. It is up to each individual. And that's where actually, and did you just take away the power from all the people who heal other people?
I kind of did. I think so. Yeah. I don't, I, I, it's in the work that I do. Mm-hmm. We say all the time, we're not gurus, we're not shamans, we're not healers. If we do our work well, we are creating, we are facilitating a space where you can remember who you are. Mm-hmm. And when you do that, then you do that. It's our, our own learning, healing and growing.
We can't assign meaning for somebody else. Period. Full stop. End of story.
Dave: You can't assign meaning if you're holding a psychedelic space and you're doing that kind of work. And I've known people who are healers who are saying, you know what, like you're, you're looking for the way to reconnect that nerve there because something's not working.
Let me just do a little tweak right there, and then suddenly it works. You're like, thanks man. What do you call that?
Matt: Yes. Yes. So yes, so you can, you can repair an arm, you can tweak a nerve, you can do that type of biological mm-hmm. Healing. Absolutely. It can be energetic too. It can be, but I'm not entirely convinced we can do the healing.
Yeah. It's
Dave: you,
Matt: it
Dave: requires the active participation of the person being healed, and sometimes healing happens with a team. Right. A lot of
Matt: times it happens
Dave: with
Matt: the team.
Dave: Yeah,
Matt: yeah, yeah. Because it's the conditions, it's mm-hmm. It's, it's, it's creating the space and, and that is a team, oftentimes a team effort.
And that's the interconnectedness of all of us. We, it's beautiful. We come into these relationships, into these conversations, into these, into these moments of connection.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: Where it's like, okay, you know, Dave, I trust you and I'm willing to take this journey with you and, and mm-hmm. I am responsible for me, but I'm gonna trust that you're gonna create an environment that I'm gonna be able to step in mm-hmm.
And learn whatever it is that you're able to, to offer to me. I love that.
Dave: I know someone who's 80 years old. Mm. And he's terrified of any altered state's work. Mm-hmm. Psychedelics, no feedback, breath work, any of it. Death and of course death. And the, the reason is that I don't wanna look inside 'cause I might not like what I find.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: What would you say to that? That's
Matt: beautiful. That's, that's, that's a level of awareness, so, okay. And you have a choice. The healing's inevitable. You can either choose to do it while you're still here in this state. Yep. Or you can do it in the next state. So what do you, whatever you want is beautiful for you.
Dave: That is the perfect thing. Like, you get to choose. You get to choose. And for anyone listening, I'm reminded of this time I was giving a talk at Google's headquarters. Mm-hmm. And it was a debate between this vegan radical guy and me and a couple others. And one of the guys in the bathroom goes, I wanna be a vegan activist.
What's your advice? And, and I just said, shut up and eat. He, he goes, what do you mean? I said, well, if your way works, be so abundantly healthy that people ask you what you did. Mm-hmm. And now you have the invitation to share, but trying to yell at other people to make them do what you think they should do, whether it's keto or carnivore or whatever, that doesn't work.
Mm-hmm. And yes, I make fun of vegans all the time, guys. It's my love language. And I wasn't vegan vegans, but. It's not a yelling and a criticizing, you have to, it's like, you know, it's okay to point out something that's not working for someone, but it's not okay to force them to do something. And that seems important.
Matt: Super important. Yeah. It's, it's, and it, it goes back to the, I think it's a Buddhist saying of if, or maybe it's from the ting of, uh, he who knows, doesn't speak, he who does not know speaks. It's, it's this idea of, um, all I can do is share my learning, healing and growing with you. And if that resonates, wonderful.
But the moment that I think I know better than you about what's right for you, I've now created judgment. I've now created a wall. I've now created a hierarchy. I've now created an illusion.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: And that's not healthy for me. To have that perspective. And it's not healthy for us in relationship. Mm.
To have that perspective. So my job is to share what's worked for me. Do you have to become Buddhist if you start using psychedelics? Not at all. No. Just tea. But you know, you just sound very Buddhist. No, but I, but I love, again, if we look at the wisdom teachings of, of, so of, we can certainly look at the Abrahamic religions.
Sure. We can look at so many things, but I love that, that we have lagary, which Christians and psychedelics with, with hunt priest run. We have Rabbi Z and, and Shela doing a, a whole group with Jews and psychedelics. We have an Islamic and psychedelics group. Of course we have Buddhists and we have this, for lack of a better language.
We have the new religious movement that's been happening in America where, again, for decades groups have gotten together and, and it's essentially. It's a, um, it's an entheogenic reformation. So what do I mean by that? I mean, 500 years ago we had the Protestant Reformation where Martin Luther said, no more.
We're not just gonna listen. We're gonna read. Okay, great. And now we're saying, I don't wanna read. I wanna feel I have the right as a human to have direct or primary spiritual experiences. And I want to have it so that I'm not believing what someone else has told me. I am knowing what I have felt. Love this.
And this is a, this is, I believe it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a religious reformation where we have been moved away from our religions of origin. And we can then experience this, and then we'd have a choice. Do we wanna go back to rereading? The sacred texts of our people, re-exploring the lands that we come from.
And if the answer's yes, that's beautiful and these groups are coming up to help support that, or do we want to explore a wider range of religion and see again what fits for us and all of it needs to be allowed.
Dave: I totally agree with you. There isn't really a name for that new movement, but it seems like it's all here in Austin, so we'll call it Ostentation.
Ost. You go Keep it weird. Keep it weird. I love it. Uhhuh. Although Santa Cruz is, I get pissed off. Sorry guys. Austin's cooler, better taxes. You said something. Okay. Multiple times. Remember who you are.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: Do you believe in past lives? Of course. Is there anything else to believe in? I love that though.
It's so funny. Like if you asked me 10 years ago, no, I didn't know that UVA was housing. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of, of verifiable stories of, of people who, how else do you explain, oh yeah, we can go down this rabbit hole and, and it's all connected. Mm-hmm. So, as for me, as I've been learning about one thing, I've been experiencing another, which is what you've, you've talked about that multiple times.
Mm-hmm. But of course, how do we explain everything from the telepathy tapes to people who are able to, um, to, to see what's happening in different places to people who have death experiences and can talk about what's happened in the room to people who said, I know this, that, or the other thing that I couldn't possibly have known.
It's so funny. We, we shame people who talk about this, and yet we accept, we accept savants. Oh, wait a minute. This person's four years old and is a composer. This person's five and speaks Hebrew and didn't grow up there. That's understandable to us where we know there's no way they gathered that knowledge using any of the mechanisms that are available to us.
But we make fun of past lives. We make fun of this, this woo woo, new age culture, and it just seems like we have a, we have a, we have a societal disconnect here. How is Mozart? Okay? And telepathy is not
Dave: it. It also seems to require willing blindness to all written like history. You look at the Bfad Gita, it, you look at, at all of the ancient mm-hmm things.
They talk about these things, they happen and so, oh yeah, we're scientific. So everything everyone believed before us is wrong. Uh, or maybe some self-awareness might be appropriate.
Matt: It's so egotistic and we've had what, what 99.99% of human history has believed and, and animist reality. And we've, we have all believed that we are descendant from gods.
And yet in this little slice of Western culture in which we inhabit, we believe we are ascended from apes. Mm-hmm. And that's funny. It's just like, okay, that's, and that's because we have created this divide. In the old days, our healers and the healers are medical healers and they were spiritual healers.
You kind of can't separate them. And we have in our Western culture, and we said, okay, pure science goes to the doctors and pure spirit goes to the clergy.
Dave: Probably the best guy to talk about this on the show is Neil Nathan. Okay. Neil is incredibly experienced hardcore md mm-hmm. Who does all kinds of energy work as well. And he wrote a book called Energy Medicine and he said like, you know, I've been doing this for 30 years or something. And when I started working in the ER, after about a year, a patient would walk in and above their head, like typed on reality was what they had.
And he was like, this is wild. This is wild. And he said, so I finally asked a couple of people and only the doctors with experience had this. And he said one day the writing went away. And I just knew.
Matt: Yeah.
Dave: So this is what a healer is. He's got the medical training, call it the medical lineage. Mm. And the intuitive, energetic connection.
And so many of the best doctors I've had on the show, people who are close friends mm-hmm. They have it. They know and they don't need to take your blood pressure 'cause they know it when they touched you, but they do it anyway because it's required by some insurance company or something. Mm-hmm. And so part of what I'm hoping this episode does is just say, if you're one of those people that's normal, that means you are a master of what you do and there is no separation between the spiritual and the medical.
And if you think there's a separation, it just makes you a worse doctor.
Matt: Well, and, and, and I had an and to this in life, there's no separation between spiritual and secular. Mm-hmm. We're all spiritual all the time and we can choose to inhabit that. Mm-hmm. Or we can choose to pretend it's, oh, this is what I do on Sundays, this is what I do on Fridays, this is what I do at this moment, the times a day.
Mm-hmm. Versus everything is our connection with spirit.
Dave: You, you say that we can choose that.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: I don't think most people are free to choose that. Why there's a part of our, of our body that. Processes reality. Mm-hmm. And chooses to show you something or not show you something. And it's not your brain, it's not your prefrontal cortex.
So choice happens in the prefrontal cortex. Mm-hmm. Programming happens deep down in biology. Sure. So most of the time we've been programmed by society, by parenting, by bullies, by all the things, all to, even if we choose to say, I'm spiritual, nothing happens. What's going on
Matt: with that? So I don't think we're choosing to say I'm spiritual.
I think we're remembering that we are spiritual, and how do we do that? How do we say, okay. I, you brought up bullies. I had, I grew up in inner city Philadelphia. I've had no shortage of share of bullies in my childhood. Yeah. Me either. And I carried that around for a long time until I realized that. What am I carrying that around for?
Dave: Yeah.
Matt: And we can use different tools to help us do that by lessening the shame, the blame, and the guilt that our biological functions to help us, again, remember that this isn't how we've always felt. So we've talked about we can do that with, um, with we're seeing a lot of research with, with doing a bunch with, uh, veterans and heroic hearts project.
Yeah. Well, they're using MDMA. Mm-hmm. We've seen a lot of work with psilocybin on this. But when we can remove the shame, blame, and guilt, when we can quiet down the inner narrator, we can have these realizations and then we can move through them. Not pretending they never happened, but understanding that they were needed to happen to make me who I am today.
And I don't need to carry them around as something bad. Mm-hmm. I just need to recognize that it is what it is and move forward. You ever try the wood chipper meditation on bullies?
Dave: No. What is the wood chipper meditation you said? Visualize the wood chipper and you feed the bullies.
Matt: I love that. Just don't the Fargo methodology.
Yes. That is awesome. Yeah. I just like to, to
Dave: laugh. So, bullies are, bullies are, it's a thing. It, it's a thing. A lot of people become ultra successful because they were bullied. Right. And once you just I said, you release their, your guilt in shame. Mm-hmm. And ultimately all of that is a reflection of fear.
Mm-hmm. And when you turn that off, you're like, okay, some good stuff happens, some bad stuff happened, whatever. But you teach the system to be non-reactive. Mm. And that's what lets you tap into that spiritual state. But if you're trying to tap in and there's this. Part of you that's not your brain. Some people would say it's your ego.
I would say it's a mitochondrial consciousness, whatever. But that part of you is actively blocking mm-hmm. Your access to the divine. And you can go in via any of these mechanisms, including psychedelic. Yeah. The way you just talked about. And you can overcome that. And then you go, oh, that connection was always there.
It just had a block. Yeah. What is your process for identifying your blocks, Ben?
Matt: I love that question. I love that question. Especially as, and I'm, I'm gonna back up because even the definition of success in that sentence is, is challenging. Um, you're so non-dual. Well, we have each of us, I mean, what's successful for me might not be success for you, but so we really, when I think, when I say that, I mean, someone's earned a lot of money or they've, they've climbed a corporate ladder.
They've done something that has gotten recognition in this society construct. I know for me that whenever I hit a different success metric, the goal just moved. It's like, oh, I'm gonna be happy when I have this many employees. I'm be happy when I have a build. I'm gonna happy. Just, and then it was something else, and it was something else, and it was something else because I kept looking for external validation.
And I think at some level, all of it was about pleasing my parents who had been dead for 30 years. So it's yeah, there's no, I think the, again, no ending to that and. When I use, for me, when I use entheogen, when I do breath work as well mm-hmm. I'm able to remind myself that all, like, there wasn't a good experience or a bad experience or experiences that felt harder than others, but I needed all of them to be here today
Dave: when when I'm working on myself or, or with others in that realm.
Mm-hmm. The, the thing that unlocks the door for that is, is you have to experience gratitude before you can let something go. I love that. So teaching people to be grateful for something like being tortured, like actually tortured, usually like, what are you talking about? You know, f you. And it's like, well, hold on a second.
I didn't say that you enjoyed it. Did one good thing happen? For instance, they didn't cut your finger off. They're like, well, yeah. Okay, great. So all of a sudden like that, that flips a switch inside the brain and it, it takes it from this like. Like stuck place, like, oh, maybe I can be a little curious. And that is what allows this reprogramming of the self so that you, I, I believe anyway.
So, so that you are more able to connect to reality without all the self judgment or judgment of others. I
Matt: love that the gratitude from two things are coming forward for me, Dave. One is, one is sometimes with Entheogen we have these kind of death experiences where we
Music: mm-hmm.
Matt: Feel, believe that we have died.
And, and I've had experiences where I, like, I've become like worm food. I'm, I'm becoming I am dissolving into the earth. Like these are DMT or no, these, this can, this psilocybin. Psilocybin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or so I'm, and then at some point in that process, I realized that, wait a minute, there's a breath.
And that breath, that first breath is like, ah, it's like being born again. It's like being born again. It's, oh my God, how lucky am I? Mm-hmm. How grateful am I to get to be here, to get to be here and experience this? So that's coming forward. The other thing that's coming forward, which I don't talk a lot about is, um, so I had a, an experience in, in puberty with a, an exte, an extended family member, 10 years older, mortified.
Mm-hmm. And for decades, I carried this memory around that it was my fault that something I did something wrong and I couldn't talk about it. If I talked about even a little bit, yeah. I'd have this pit in my stomach or my ears would get red. These, these very funny, not funny haha, but biological responses.
Yeah, it was, it was in your tissues. It was in my tissues. And on one session I was back there. And didn't wanna be back there, but I was, and they, they say the best practices of, okay, if you see something scary, if you see something you don't like to explore it with wild curiosity to what does Bill Richard say to if you see a dragon to crawl up its nose and look at its eyes.
So, yep. Okay. So I tried that. Good for you. Thank you. That's dis courage. Thank you. It took some courage and what I was able to do is instead of seeing this experience through my lens, I was actually able to see it through hers. And that was wild. And I was able to understand that, okay, here is a woman dealing with substance use challenges, being rejected from family, feeling very alone in this world.
I don't, I didn't have to condone the behavior at all Wow. To understand the humanity. And when I understood that humanity, I could release and be like, okay, I wasn't the adult in the room. This is not mine to carry. And all I'm doing by carrying it is i'll, is leaving energy. To this thing that's no longer real.
Dave: You you stepped into compassion, which turns off so much of the wasted energy. And it, it's really cool to hear you talk about this because there's so many ways to access this. I would label it as, as forgiveness.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: But when I say forgiveness, most people get triggered by that because your mom told you to forgive someone when you really didn't.
It. It's not condoning something. It's not Oh, that was okay. And it's not telling someone you forgive them, it's turning off that inner shame and guilt or pain or fear or whatever it is. And the reset process that we use for clients at 40 years of Zen, I put it in heavily meditated. So like, guys, everyone should know how to do this.
But it is sort of the step-by-step instructions to, to get there. And you can do it with psychedelics. You can do it just sitting, you know, in your bedroom. Absolutely. But it's exactly the steps you went through. You. You're like, I'm feeling the discomfort and the psychedelics help you tap it. Tap into that and like, Ew.
Some people would say, that's a bad trip. It's not. It's the most gift of a trip you could ever have. Right? I believe that. Yeah. Yeah. It's not an adverse reaction. No, no. Yes. Yeah. Right. So now, okay, now you can feel it. Now the body knows what you're working on. And then you had the wisdom either 'cause of good facilitation or your own development mm-hmm.
To say what would it look like from the other things. So you had curiosity, right? Mm-hmm. And then you look, mm-hmm. Oh look. And when you were done in one session, right now you can talk about it with freedom, right? And so you set it down and, and that's the thing. It's not a grind, it's not years of therapy.
It's one session where you feel it step into gratitude, step into compassion in order, those three things, like that's the recipe. And if we could teach psychedelic therapists how to do that, man, the amount of freedom and just reduction of suffering that can come from that. And just like it looks a great way to do it.
And not the only way. No, they're not the only way. Not the only way. Would you stack psychedelics with certain biohacks? Of course. Which ones?
Matt: All of them. I mean, whatever works for you. It's, it's Where do you again, he, we live in this playground. Yeah. And we have all of these tools available to us. So if, if something comes into your consciousness and you can play with that biohack.
Why not? Mm-hmm. Why not play with it? What I would ask you though is why are you doing this? Mm-hmm. And what do you want from this? So are we gonna give our, again, give our agency over to the biohack? Or are we using this as a tool? Yeah. I wanna live and to be a hundred and I wanna be strong and I wanna be capable as I go on this journey because I love myself so much.
Beautiful. Mm-hmm. And now I'm gonna do things to prolong my, my, that way of living if I'm doing it because I want more people to look at me. Mm-hmm. And I want more attention. So that's a different reason. It's all ego. And that's ego. Yeah. But of course, play with I again, we have what a, what a life, how lucky are we to be alive in this time?
Yes. Vertical farming, autonomous cars, knowledge dropping by the, the cost of knowledge dropping. So many things are happening that are good. And we have some wackadoodle things happening, and that's all. Okay. Kind of like all of human history, actually. All of human history, yes. Except we have less probability of being put on the wall at this stage of human history than we did four or 500 years ago.
That's a good point. And I'm very anti being put on the wall.
Dave: Yeah. It's not my favorite
Matt: experience. It's not my favorite experience.
Dave: Speaking of favorite experiences. Sure. We talked about remembering who you are. Okay. What if you remember who you are with past lives and you were kind of an asshole.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: Or a murderer, or insert whatever people are afraid
Matt: of being, how do you handle that? I think the reminder is, first of all, amazing. You got to experience that. That brought you to who you are today. Okay, fine. But. We're everything that enters our consciousness consciousness, we are so at some level, like we might not like what's happening with this in our government or this, but that's because we, it ref we it at some level.
We know that's part of us. At some level, we can say, okay, these soldiers did bad things over here, and at some level I funded that and I allowed it to happen and I'm as responsible. As they are, pick any piece of life, we are all of it at some level. Mm-hmm. So again, very careful with where, where I'm very careful.
I'm not saying you should do anything, but with, with judgment. The, the, he was without sin cast the first stone. We are all of this. We are all
Dave: of it. You just judged yourself for wanting to tell the people what to. I saw you, man. Come on. Don't try to, I'm,
Matt: I am trying to be aware of my language in this process.
And, um, and it's, and again, that's the practice. It's this is the practice. What we are doing right now is the practice. I'm learning, healing, and growing in this conversation with you and, and vice versa. This is the practice.
Dave: You're very mindful of the way you use words, which is underappreciated in the world of psychedelics or therapy of, I use all the good words all the time.
Yeah. Only the good words. Right. Only the good words.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: Uh, and. I talk about weasel words both at 40 years in and with my, with my team. Don't use the word can't.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: Like the fact that you don't know how to do it and you don't think it's possible is not evidence. You can't do it. It just means you haven't figured it out yet.
Mm-hmm. So let's use truthful words whenever we can. Of course, I'm not perfect by that. I just am working towards that goal of a hundred percent truthfulness all the time. And the reason I do it is there actually studies on this too, it creates more brain energy. Hmm. Because I don't spend any time going, did I tell that truth?
Did I not tell that truth? What did I do? And even the littlest lies, it doesn't make sense. And I found that my spiritual or esoteric practices, including psychedelics and a lot of other stuff neurofeedback breath or all this stuff. It's made me more aware, like I'll feel it in my nervous system if I'm speaking a slight mistruth.
Mm-hmm. Like, well, I can't make it. No, actually I could make it. I'm just not going to, like, I could blow up everything on my schedule and I could make it, so why would I lie? Right. But for that to emerge, maybe I'm having kids in telling 'em that so they could just play it back to me over and over. But I think a lot of it came from attunement to the, to the body or to the nervous system.
Do you find they, you have some sort of inner signal like that? Yeah. I mean, I,
Matt: we all do. Yeah. And it's like, I didn't take any classes in school. I'm paying attention to how I feel. There's not a lot of room for feelings as a latchkey kid. There's not. That's sure. Yeah. I don't think we grew up in that, in that, in that era.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: And we have this wonderful, intelligence in all of our bodies that can help us navigate and help us Yeah. Move with presence in this world. And, and when we don't pay attention, when I don't pay attention, I'm saying we, when I don't pay attention to that, I can find myself yeah. Feeling not satisfied, feeling something is off.
So yeah, I think paying attention to every, every emotion is, is important. Not necessarily believing every emotion and, and not nor believing every thought, but at least being aware that, Hmm, my body is saying something. What is that? Oh, that's fear. What am I afraid of? Why am I afraid of that? Oh, that's silliness.
Or, uh, there's a snake. Okay, let's figure the difference.
Dave: Very, very well said. And, and that just creates a, a state of inner peace, which is the least energy consuming state. So maybe you can do something that's meaningful. I, I love that.
Matt: I have a teacher who talks about all the time, I'm, I'm a beautiful and wonderful man.
I'm a perfect work in progress. Mm. And just acknowledging, I don't know. Everything about everything at all. I'm, and I'm learning all the time, and I'm a work in progress and, and you're, you're, you're cutting yourself off to that. Yeah. I gotta stop there.
Dave: You said you have to remember who you are, therefore you already know everything.
You just haven't tapped into it. So give yourself some credit already. Thank you. I'll take that.
Matt: I'm so messing with you. Keep going. No, no, no. That's it. So that's it. I think that, that acknowledging that I'm, I'm not, I'm going to act without awareness sometimes, and that's the, the, my goal is to do that less and to choose words mm-hmm.
With awareness. And there is times when I'm just being a jackass and that's okay.
Dave: And, and maybe some real time forgiveness Yeah. For yourself, for being a jackass.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: Mm-hmm. That's the mark of someone on, on a good path where, you know, most of the time you do it right and when you screw up, you apologize.
And the ones who won't even be aware that they screwed up and therefore won't apologize, they will blame other people.
Matt: And even when we apologize, it's, it's, how do we apologize? Mm-hmm. I, I think a, a good apology for me is when I say, I did this yesterday or a moment ago, and when I did that, I was not acting in awareness for, for what is true, for truth, for kindness for you.
And I see that now and I will do better in the future versus, I'm sorry, what does, I'm sorry mean. I'm sorry.
Dave: Doesn't do much. No. There's one phrase you might consider adding. Okay. It's, how can I make it right? Mm-hmm. You're absolutely right on that. Like, the most authentic apologies is I screwed up.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: How can I fix it?
Music: Mm-hmm.
Dave: And if, if people would apologize that way
Music: mm-hmm.
Dave: It's very vulnerable mm-hmm. To do it. Because what if the person says, you know, empty your bank account. Mm-hmm. Well, you're allowed to say, well, f off. Right. But, but you can ask. Yeah. Asking. I, I feel like that creates a, a healing bridge that otherwise wouldn't be there.
And the difficulty is if you don't think you screwed up, don't do that. Mm-hmm. Because the other person will know that you don't think you screwed up and it's forced. And that, that doesn't feel good either. No, it's not real. Yeah. Yeah. You've written a bunch of books. What's your favorite book?
Matt: I love this Beginner's Guide to Psychedelics.
And I love the Veteran's Guide, so two different similar book for two different audiences. Okay. What I like about those books is it gives people kind of just the basics. Mm-hmm. How do you think about different ways to access medicines? What are the different medicines? And then if you're going to do it, regardless of which path you choose, I'm gonna go medical, I'm gonna go retreat, I'm gonna go ceremonial, I'm gonna do it at a fish concert.
It gives some exercises to take a moment and reflect. So it's not, this is how you should do it and this is what you should feel and this is what you should think. It's, are you prepared? Mm-hmm. And then what happened? And then how are you integrating that into your life? Okay. And all of that is in this book with, as you talked about earlier, gratitude, a 30 day gratitude journal, because after these experiences, we have some neuroplasticity and we have an opportunity to train our mind on the positive and to set that, that gratitude in motion.
And that's, those 30 day gratitude journals I think are super important.
Dave: Gratitude journaling has been a part of biohacking since 2012. Oh, wow. It, it's, it's, it's something I, I kind of go through phases where I talk about it more in one book versus another. Mm-hmm. And. What you just said though is, is doing it as a part of your psychedelic journey.
It's 10 times more important. And I hadn't really thought of it that way, so thank you for that, that that tidbit. And guys, the two books were psychedelics for Beginner, beginner, beginner's Guide to Psychedelics and the Veterans Guide Psychedelics Guide. And, uh, I love it that you're prolific with your books.
This, this is what the Veterans Guide looks like. Yeah. So if you see it on Amazon or something. Yes. Um, or,
Matt: or Barnes and Noble or all the places. And I do have therapist editions of both those books. So if you're a therapist or you're a coach and you're working with veterans or people entering altered states, this gives you tools to, again, not tell them what to do, but to help create a structure that they can, uh, that they can walk into.
So I think those, those two books, which Ken Winegard was the co-author. He is a PhD, 20 years, the VA of, uh, va. Just a tremendous force in this. Should therapists be required to do psychedelics once during their medical training? I don't think anybody should be required to do
Dave: psychedelics.
Matt: I knew you would say that And, and if you're gonna work in this space, so.
So. Mm-hmm. It's tricky when I say what is the space? The space is, the space is really this space. It's not a psychedelic space. Yeah. We're using psychedelics as a tool. So if you're gonna work with those tools, I think, I think you owe it to yourself to understand how those tools work. And the only way, this is not a Western pill, this is not something that, oh, well, it, it's, it, I, I know it's, it's gonna do X, y, and z No.
To, to experience what does it feel like to believe you've died? Yeah. What does it feel like to have shame, blame and guilt removed? What does it feel like to have the inner narrator quieted down in your head? Yeah. Um, those take not just once, it takes multiple times to really understand the range of experience that can, that can happen with these tools.
So if you're gonna work with the tools, I think you need to know how those tools work. You kind of wanna know the tools to work with them. You do. But it's funny, I speak at mental health conferences a lot. Yeah. And with, I was just actually one where, where therapists like all want to be a psychedelic assist therapist.
Amazing. How many of you tried psychedelics? Not even half. Dude. How does that wild? Well, because, because, yeah. And in no bad anybody, it's, well, it is partially feared and it's partially, our medical system says you can, you can read your way through this.
Music: Yeah.
Matt: And that this is just a biochemical reaction, no different than everybody else.
And you just do your normal therapy thing while they use this medicine and everybody's gonna be happy and they're forgetting the context mm-hmm. On which these medicines stand upon.
Dave: Yeah. Like I read a book on karate, therefore I know karate. Totally. Yeah, totally. Exactly. Doesn't work like that. Okay, final question.
Okay. If you'd only have one psychedelic, what would it be?
Matt: I love this question. For me it's psilocybin. I, and I have, and I do have a very fast answer for me. Yeah, I understand. And I like it for me because I can invite. A wide range of people into a psilocybin experience. You can be on antidepressants and take psilocybin.
Now half it, it can have an have a normal reaction. The next half, next 25% need more, and then there is about 25% to where it doesn't work. You're giving the look, why are you giving the look on this?
Dave: If you are on SSRIs and you have the genetic thing, I know of one case where someone got really bad serotonin syndrome just from.
Psilocybin even not being on antidepressants so it can cause problems.
Matt: So let's talk about that. Okay. So when we, I don't say any of these things are safe. What we talk about is relative risk, so we can look at it. I like that people talk about the, um, the, the Dr. David not Imperial College study all the time.
And they say, oh look, he said alcohol was the worst since the 72 and mushrooms are a six. Great. A lot of harm can happen in that six. We can look at Gable study where he said caffeine and nicotine and heroin, bad tobacco, harder than psilocybin. Great. Yeah. And still a lot of harm can happen. So anyone moving?
I mean, one more acetaminophen over 400 people every year die in America's dangerous from that. So all medicine has risks. These have risks relatively the probability of having that. Not very high, you're correct. But people should be aware of that and decide whether it's right for them or whether they pursue breath work or some other bio
Dave: and have some benzos on hand.
The first time you do it, in case your blood pressure goes through the roof and your heart's beating at 200. 'cause you have a weird thing you didn't know. Like that's just knowing what you're doing with the substances. That's why you work with someone who's trained. Right.
Matt: And that also brings us back to this collaboration between science and spirit.
Yes. Where it is awful that medical professionals are scared to engage in spiritual practice because they're worried about medicine boards taking away their licenses. Mm-hmm. And therefore, clergy can't have the best possible, um. Resources available for people.
Music: Mm-hmm.
Matt: Using these medicines. We need all of this to be above ground and we need this collaboration to happen.
So anyhow, psilocybin, it's open to a wide variety.
Music: Yeah.
Matt: It's very, very malleable. It can be a hard opener. It can be an interconnectedness of all things. Right. I see that.
Dave: One of the things, if I was on a medical board right now that I'd be concerned about would be the physicians taking away your medical board abilities.
Because that's how reality works. Medical boards have no power, physicians have power. So if you're gonna threaten a physician's license, they should be threatening your livelihood, your possession of your home, and your existence in this reality. So if you're a medical board, stop it. You don't get to dictate, and we know what you're doing.
I love that. Thank you. Thank you for doing that and coming all the way out with that. You know, I can do that. I'm an unlicensed biohacker. There we go. Take away that. All right. And by the way, I know that there's a few doctors angry right now and many, many more cheering silently because medical boards and insurance companies have too much power
Matt: and governments and, and, and we give our agency away all the time and mm-hmm.
We've, we need to remember Yeah. That we've given them these, this authority and we can take it away.
Dave: Yep.
Matt: It came from
Dave: us and it's the role of government is to maximize tax revenue and to accumulate power. And it doesn't matter what form of government. I don't care if you're a dictatorship, a king you know, democratic or allegedly democratic oligarchy, whatever, it doesn't matter.
That's what they do over time. Mm-hmm. So every now and then, you just have to like guys. Give it back. Mm-hmm. Right. And you can do it nonviolently and you can just do it energetically and mm-hmm. Sometimes it's messy. So let's not let it be messy 'cause we're too smart and we've done our psychedelic work.
Right.
Matt: There we go. And 'cause we're living in the greatest time of history. There you go of all time. How lucky are we? Love
Dave: that. Matt, your work is fascinating. Thank you for being a major voice in using psychedelics, mindfully, and for the betterment of humans. I genuinely appreciate you.
Matt: I appreciate, thank you for bringing this voice to your audience and thank you for doing all of the different, um, ways to optimize our existence on this planet.
I appreciate you. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.