← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
If You Struggle With Anxiety & Depression, This New Treatment Might Save Your Life? | Dr. Dan Engle
02:17:19
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- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
What up everybody? I'm so excited for this episode because today we're joined by the brilliant Dr. Dan Engel, founder of Full Spectrum Medicine, a psychedelic integration and educational platform. Dan's holistic concussion recovery program is just the tip of an iceberg of really interesting insights. He's dedicated his life to helping people achieve peak performance and facilitate self healing through the power of psychedelic therapies. In this episode, we explore how to find the gift in suffering, what can be revealed through psychedelics, and the importance of community in the healing process. Plus, Dan shares his insights on how plant medicines can be used to treat addiction, PTSD and anxiety. Do not miss out on this extremely interesting conversation. And if you guys like this episode, be sure to follow the podcast. Share this with somebody that you think might get value out of this. It's the best way to help support other people on their journey to becoming legendary. All right everybody, I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory.
- [01:59]
Dr. Dan Engel
Iboga's a fascinating medicine because you can have people addicted to heroin decades long go through one treatment.
- [02:09]
Tom Bilyeu
You lived in an ashram for two years, the jungle for a year. You've done a lot of drugs. Now I want to know, what did you learn from all of that that you would bring back if you had a chance. So your sister Unfortun committed suicide. If you could take what you learned in that time, what would you tell her to try to save her?
- [02:33]
Dr. Dan Engel
Good question. I think it's the title of the book, the Dose of Hope. You know, there's always hope. There's Always opportunity for growth, relief, reconnection, what.
- [02:48]
Tom Bilyeu
So what? Given the way that. So talking about psychedelics, the way that you come at that work seems to be that people get. Well, let me ask, are they coming from they're stuck in a neurochemical pattern or are they stuck in a frame of reference problem where it's not even neurochemical, it's just the way that they think about things.
- [03:09]
Dr. Dan Engel
I think it's both. I think the experiential side drives the neurochemical side. It's like the software experience drives the hardware experience. And suffering is really individual, but it's also ubiquitous. It's kind of our dance with life, so to speak. It's part of the contract. When we come in, life's going to include suffering. And it happens individually and collectively. And we are going through a massive opportunity for growth and acceleration and major transformation on a global scale. So no one's immune to that level of discomfort.
- [03:47]
Tom Bilyeu
But if you only had three minutes with your sister, would it just be, hey, there's hope? Because I have a feeling that that will feel like rhetoric to somebody in that space. How do you punch through? Like, is what I want to be true may be different than what is true. What I want to be true is that there's. To your point about suffering is ubiquitous, but I think there's probably also elements that are universally understandable, even if it's not the exact same thing that we're going through. And that I want there to be wisdom that's being ascertained by the plant medicine that can be passed on. Do you think that there is an amount of it that can be metabolized by one person and shared with another? Or is this only you have to experience it again?
- [04:38]
Dr. Dan Engel
I think it's both. The experiential side's necessary, otherwise it's just information.
- [04:45]
Tom Bilyeu
So what would you tell her that you think would make her give it a shot?
- [04:48]
Dr. Dan Engel
I think first and foremost we have to connect anybody that's going through that level of suffering. And I've been significantly depressed, I've been suicidally depressed. So I understand the contemplation of cashing in the golden ticket. And that generates a degree of empathy and kind of like I can have a sense of where you're at. I mean, everybody's experience is individual. So I can never know exactly what that person is feeling. But if I can have some degree of understanding and empathy and connection, then now we've got some commonality, now we can have a relational experience. And so for me, it's not so much imparting information, although that's part of my dharma, so to speak. That's part of what why I came back from the jungle is to be able to be in the position of education and advocacy of the right place for medicine work. Not everybody's ready for medicine work, and it's not a panacea. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I don't even think medicine work is here to fix anything. It's just here to reveal truth and ideally to be able to show more clearly what is our relationship with suffering? What's our relationship with the events that lead to a particular experience of suffering? How can we understand it? And in order to understand it and gain some more wisdom around it, oftentimes we need a little bit of space. Space from it. And that's sometimes what the medicines help
- [06:14]
Tom Bilyeu
us do, is to create space from the trauma.
- [06:18]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, Like MDMA does that. All the medicines to a certain degree will offer both a bit of the witness perspective as well as with that separation for just long enough. Because they're neuroplastic agents and they're ego plastic agents. So they allow the ego to relax a little bit from the experience of suffering in order to get that witness perspective, understand it a little bit. And then through that understanding, then to be able to, if facilitated, well, go into it and through it to the other side so that there's healing and then there's integration. So it's not a bypass. Like the medicine work is not here to kind of bypass trauma and just get straight to healing and everything's fine. I think there's so much opportunity for the growth of that person's kind of evolutionary development, so to speak, to be able to understand what created the suffering in the first place. And then how those really intense experiences are actually potential catalysts for growth. Right. Most of our best teachers are our most uncomfortable experiences. And if we can, why do you think that's true? The uncomfortable experiences, they have a way of slowing us down and helping us get present. And in such a fast paced culture today, it's hard for people to get present. Beauty can do that. Ecstasy can do that for sure. Like suffering isn't the only way for learning. It's not the only way for slowing down and getting in touch with who we are. Asking the deeper questions about life, what is most important? If I think about near death experiences, there are consistent themes on those kind of processes that people will go through. We could even talk about potentially that medicine work is depending on the medicine, a bit of Like a small, controlled near death experience. It helps people slow down, understand the most important priorities of life.
- [08:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Does it do that though, in the same mechanism? Is it a sense of terror, dissolution of the ego in a way that is death like? Or is it just that it slows you down and gives you a witness perspective?
- [08:41]
Dr. Dan Engel
Again, I think it's both. It really depends on the medicine.
- [08:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Let's talk about the terror aspect. So I have a hypothesis. So if I had three minutes with your sister, I've never done psychedelics, I've microdosed and we'll talk about that later. But I think it's so wildly different than a macro dose. My gut instinct is to be different animals. But if I had three minutes with your sister, I've had people come to me and ask, like, hey, I'm in a really dark place, or I know somebody that's in a really dark place, what should I do? And even though I've not done psychedelics, given what I've learned from Maps, I will tell people, hey, if you haven't tried psychedelics, you certainly haven't tried everything. And so you at least need to give it a shot. My outside observer just regurgitating what I've heard headline reading assessment is that what it's doing is disrupting your frame of reference so violently that you have nothing to anchor onto during the experience. And because you become completely unmoored, you, you're now seeing things from a radically different perspective. In fact, there's the Sam Harris quote, which you I'm sure know, but I find this, this quote more than anything makes me want to try macrodosing psychedelics. So this was Sam Harris did a podcast after doing the heroic dose of mushrooms. So it was 5 grams if I remember right. And he said the fact that there are landscapes of mind this vast lurking on the other side of a mushroom is simply preposterous. It's as though we in a universe where if you just reached into your right pocket with your left hand, rather than pulling out your wallet, you pull out the Andromeda galaxy. And that to me is, is exactly like that feels like the right description for what's happening. It just batters you out of the way that you see the world. And as somebody who wants everyone to understand that frame of reference is everything that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. And so somebody who's on the precipice. Yes, there really is a neurological problem. It probably has to do with marinating in negative thoughts a lot, having a frame of reference that makes you feel like you will never experience joy again. There will never be anything uplifting or hopeful again. That's all wrong. That's just a frame of reference. And the reason that mdma, psilocybin, lsd, whatever, pick your psychedelic of choice, the reason it works is for a brief moment, 15 minutes if it's DMT, six hours if it's psilocybin, whatever, longer. I know in some cases you are just battered out of that frame of reference. It just doesn't exist anymore. And so you're, you are forced to realize, oh my God, I was trapped inside of a bubble that I didn't realize was finite. I thought it simply was the truth. And once you're walloped out of that again, I'm using words not as somebody who's ever used it, but once you're pulled out of that, you now have experienced that there are other perspectives with which to view life. That's my gut. And see, that would be my speech to your sister or anybody else that's like on that. So it's like, hey, before you do any of that, all you have to do is take this little thing and effectively be teleported to something else. Might be worse, but it'll show you that there's difference.
- [12:05]
Dr. Dan Engel
So let me respond on a few different levels of what you mentioned. If I had three minutes with my sister or anybody standing on the ledge. Ideally, first and foremost we make connection, right? Empathic.
- [12:17]
Tom Bilyeu
So they trust you.
- [12:18]
Dr. Dan Engel
Right. Because otherwise they're not maybe going to trust any recommendation that I have moving forward. So connection then to offer what you're describing, a potential solution to alleviating momentarily that degree of intensity so that they can understand it, heal it, integrate it, and become more whole on the other side. So that's part of the framing around it. In regards to neurology and psychology, maybe we could call that hardware and software. They're bi directional. But in regards to trauma, the, the psychological trauma, because you can have neurological trauma as well. Head injuries will drive psychology. So that's a neurology, driving psychology, kind of directional. But what we're talking about here is on the psychological and emotional trauma side where the psychology drives the neurology to what you're describing. Frames of mind that are driven by neurochemical cascades and kind of like entrenched beliefs. So there's this bi directionality where if we're offered a momentary pause, that egoplastic, neuroplastic kind of space, that that gap widens a little bit and we can talk specifically about MDMA and how it does that. And many of the other medicines work very similar. It doesn't have to be a violent reframe, it can be a softer reframe, it can be an easier reframe, depending again on the medicines. Ayahuasca tends to be both beautiful for many people and a little confronting for many people.
- [14:09]
Tom Bilyeu
What are people confronted with?
- [14:11]
Dr. Dan Engel
Usually it's like whatever was just behind that veil of knowing. So like Sam describes, and I haven't heard that quote, actually it's kind of genius. Instead of pulling out my wallet, now I see the Andromeda Galaxy. Whatever was right behind the veil of awareness, oftentimes it's subconscious material that I didn't have access to. Maybe I was too well defended to access that trauma. Maybe it was too early for me to create a narrative like in that kind of. In those formative years, in the three to five kind of year window of life, when we're just really getting solidified with our beliefs about ourselves and the world, the majority of kind of like the psychological imprinting really starting to solidify our blueprint for how we move in the world. A lot of that is pre verbal and therefore it's hard to access even in therapy, because we haven't connected the centers of the brain for language and memory. So in therapy there's usually a gap that people aren't able to access on their own. And oftentimes medicine work is able to reveal that, just like hypnotherapy would be able to reveal that whatever was kind of right behind that veil of awareness. And sometimes that's kind of a confronting process because we've potentially developed these really sophisticated ego strategies to keep ourselves safe. And whatever was really significantly trauma inducing at the time, maybe we conveniently walled that off and protected ourselves against it. So in a loving container, in a therapeutic container. That's why there's a difference between working with medicines in a recreational space versus in a clinical space or a therapeutic space. Because in a therapeutic space, the intention is to go deep, to be able to look and get curious, to see what's behind the veil versus in a recreational space. It's usually to have that ecstasis experience or that that celebration of life. And both are beautiful and important. Are we going for celebration of life? Are we going really to get under the hood and to see how maybe yet we have not become whole with all of our parts, the parts that we would have shamed, guilted, tucked away, the things that we don't want to put on our Instagram or Facebook, kind of, you know, front facing social media page. And when we get to bring all of those parts back, when we get to bring all of the things that maybe we weren't comfortable with or proud of or or didn't even know we were disconnected from, once those become more kind of in front of our awareness, now we can work with it and see, okay, what is that here to teach me? How does that here to grow me? How does that help me become more of a full person with all my shortcomings and misgivings and can I learn to appreciate all of it? Can I actually learn to love all of myself? That's actually possible. And yet in our culture, it's harder than ever because we have these ideas about what success is and who we need to be in order to get the love and adoration that all of us want.
- [17:40]
Tom Bilyeu
So I hear you describing psychedelics and one word comes to mind. Tell me if this is if you were going to sum up the way that psychedelics give you a dose of hope. Is it integration?
- [17:55]
Dr. Dan Engel
I think integration is an excellent term. I think there are other ways that I might describe that process of becoming whole. An integrated person is a whole person. And integration. To your point, using a very sophisticated term, integration is where the medicine work becomes real. It's taking the peak experience and making it like real and implemented in the
- [18:23]
Tom Bilyeu
day to day to try to put a hypothesis to what you're saying. It sounds like, okay, people become fragmented because something happens. Young, old, doesn't matter, but something happens. You create emotional defenses so that you don't have to deal with that. But the way that we do that is by walling it off or closing ourself off from the outside. So I'm going to try. I'm thinking out loud here, so bear with me. But recently I had a breakthrough with my wife where I realized that I had developed a tool that was helping me in business, which is that I could completely kill off emotion and just deal with something like what are the facts and how do we get to the desired outcome? And she kept saying, I don't have my husband. And I could not make sense of that phrase because I was so proud of my ability to do that. So I'm like, this is amazing. This is giving me everything that I want, except I'm getting this weird signal from one part of my life. But she didn't have words I could understand. And so finally I was like, what could she possibly mean? And what I settled on that seemed to click into place for her is that I was no longer. When I would go into that mode, I was no longer broadcasting or receiving love. And so I was like, oh, word. Okay, now I get what you're saying. Like, I'm doing something that's actually really effective on one front. But it becomes a walling off to. To compartmentalize my thinking, to make sure that I'm not confounding the issue of what the business needs. I had learned, don't make this decision based on emotion, make it based on data. Really effective. But it put me in a position where she could just feel me getting harder. It's probably the right way to describe it. So, okay, I put defenses up. That's one way that we then separate ourselves. We become disintegrated in that way. I'm not integrated with my wife or integrated with a part of myself that's broadcasting and receiving love has its function. And by the way, I actually think it's useful to be able to step into that mode. But then there are other ways where we're blocking ourselves from ourself, where it's like, hey, I don't know how to deal with that. And so I'm going to put it in a box, I'm going to lock that box, and I'm going to pretend that that doesn't exist. So it might be distraction, it might be drug use, whatever, but people find ways to never confront that thing. And it's. It's like a little demon in a box that's been closed, but the box is still moving. And so that's disintegration. Now, I honestly don't know if there's more, but listening to you, it feels like that's the problem. You've become disintegrated in some way. And the. The psychedelic is going to help you unlock that trunk whether you want to or not. The thing that you need to deal with is going to pop up. But I want to know what dealing with it is. If it's integration, then I understand. Meaning I have to in some way integrate that into my narrative about who I am and how I move through the world. If it isn't integration or it isn't just integration, then I don't understand.
- [21:30]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, good question. So you're kind of wanting to know what's the value of bringing process?
- [21:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, what is actually like. One of the questions I wrote down that I wanted to ask you is, when somebody is guiding you, what are they doing? What are they? What words are they saying? Are they like you're Going to be okay. Are they like, hey, there's it. There's a dark presence in the room, right? Yes. Go towards it. Like, what's. What does it mean? And those pieces will help me understand what. What is the thing that happens to us that makes psychedelics necessary? And why do psychedelics work?
- [22:07]
Dr. Dan Engel
So facilitation is oftentimes about being a guide and not doing the work for somebody or even trying to rescue them from the work. So it may not be my or the facilitator's job to say, you're going to be okay unless that's necessary, because the person is in such fear that. That they're having a hard time regulating their own system in order to be present to the work that's here. And so if. If somebody's standing on a ledge, it may be time to say, find your breath. Let's just slow things down. Come back into presence. I've got you. This is a safe space. And can we just get to a place of regulation? Just bringing it down a little bit and if that helps to say it's going to be okay. I know it hurts. I know this is hard. It's going into the emergency room with a broken arm that didn't heal well. It's kind of like a spiral fracture and it's deformed a bit and you're going to have to re. Break that. It's like, I know that's going to hurt. I got you. It's a part of the process. It's not always going to be this way. You know, some. Some words of kindness, some words of hope. But there's a fine dance there with not wanting to necessarily rescue the person from their discomfort. Because like one of my teachers said to me a long time ago, rescuing somebody from their suffering may just be robbing them of their greatest teacher.
- [23:46]
Tom Bilyeu
What do they need to learn? Is it integration or is it something different?
- [23:51]
Dr. Dan Engel
I'm hesitant to say it's all about integration because integration is more of like an endpoint in that moment. I think it's more around truth and seeing.
- [24:05]
Tom Bilyeu
What does that mean to you?
- [24:06]
Dr. Dan Engel
Seeing the larger aspect. Because sometimes when we're in trauma, it really narrows our focus. Like suffering can do that, can narrow the focus. It's like being so in the trees, we can't see the forest.
- [24:19]
Tom Bilyeu
And when you say the truth, do you mean to be able to see something from a broader perspective?
- [24:24]
Dr. Dan Engel
From a broader perspective. And again, this is part of what the medicine work can do and other practices too. Medicine work is just one tool in the toolkit. It's not a panacea. And as mentioned, not everybody's ready for medicine work. And part of the alchemy, too, is to understand which medicine to work with, which person, at what stage of their development, in the midst of everything else they're going through. Not everybody will respond equally to a given medicine at a given dose, at a given time. So that's part of the alchemy. And then to frame it as a process of self discovery and self awareness. So to be able to have a little bit of a pause or a little bit of momentary kind of space from the suffering, to be able to see that larger truth perspective or that larger wisdom perspective, sometimes it happens immediately. Oftentimes it does, and sometimes it happens over time. And it may not necessarily be like the truth shows up and kind of gives you your life dharma path and tells you everything that hasn't gotten.
- [25:34]
Tom Bilyeu
People that don't know Dharma. Is that a synonym for fate?
- [25:39]
Dr. Dan Engel
No, it's more like your gift purpose, like what you're here to offer and provide the word, like the gift that you've come in to offer the world. That's only your gift to offer. Sometimes it's just about feeling, feeling what hasn't been felt. And it may have a narrative, and it may not. It may have a story, and it may not. It may just be like we need to have a cathartic process engaged. Sometimes the body's holding the trauma in a pre. Verbal state. And that maybe that was around grief and anguish and sadness and loss or confusion and annihilation. Like mom and dad being are kind of like pedestals and kind of, you know, God figures. Perhaps they weren't able to love us in the most compassionate, caring, safe way because they were dealing with their own things. So that. That can feel really confusing. Or perhaps something happened and there was loss and I wasn't able to not only grieve it, I wasn't able to, you know, rage against it, rage against that thing that happened, ask all the questions, you know, get. Get messy with it. Sometimes it's just about feeling that process. So oftentimes it's not necessarily an intellectual process. It can be, but in my experience, both happen kind of equally important because the tr. The traumas connect it to some kind of energetic. And so if I can understand the truth around it, wonderful, because now I can engage it, now I can learn from it. But if I'm. If I'm only going for the truth, I'm only going for the information. I try and bypass the feeling of it, then I might not be moving it through to a process of resolution. If it's like the. In the energetic or the emotionality of it comes up and it's uncomfortable, and I'm like, I don't want to deal with that. I just want to get to truth, then I'm still fighting against that thing that I walled off in the first place.
- [27:50]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. Is there such a thing as letting go of an emotion, or do you think that we have to embody it to process it and be done with it?
- [28:01]
Dr. Dan Engel
I think it's more of the latter. I think if we try and let it go without processing it again, it's a bypass. It's like, oh, I don't want this thing. I just want to let it go now.
- [28:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Is process another word for go through it?
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Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah. Be present with what's here. Find a way initially. That's why part of the preparation and kind of like the building of a readiness for experience is to help somebody self regulate initially. How do they come back to center in the midst of challenge and stress? Many people don't know how, or we're not really taught that breath work is really helpful. Mindfulness can be helpful, although sometimes mindfulness is kind of just a title for trying to get present with what is. But if you're asking somebody who's stuck in trauma to get present with trauma, then you're just recapitulating the trauma. So it's a way. Okay, can we find a way to help regulate the nervous system, the body in the midst of the psyche, being willing to get intimate with something that was highly uncomfortable?
- [29:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Have you ever had a brutal time on a psychedelic?
- [29:13]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, for sure.
- [29:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, are we talking starting to panic? Kind of brutal time.
- [29:19]
Dr. Dan Engel
There were times when I experienced panic in the midst of medicine.
- [29:23]
Tom Bilyeu
What did you do?
- [29:25]
Dr. Dan Engel
Breathed, just came back.
- [29:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Was that just to find something here and now that takes your mind off of whatever's causing the panic?
- [29:34]
Dr. Dan Engel
No, it's. It's. For me, it's a way to get center in the midst of it. It's like if I'm hitting, you know, a big wave, there's so much. There can be so much energy that's starting to get unlocked. There can be so much kind of like a reclamation of a lot of energetic input that I was walled off from. That can feel like a lot to handle, a lot to be present with. And so if I can. If I can, in the midst of feeling all of that energy, if I can come back to breath, because that's Usually the first thing that gets cut off when we start to get a little freaky or a little challenged and overwhelmed as we cut off our breath. Okay, so can I come back? Can I just, first and foremost be aware that we're starting to redline, come back to breath, and then work on deepening the breath, widening the breath, slowing it down, the breath. Conscious breath practice is the best and most efficient way to regulate the nervous system.
- [30:35]
Tom Bilyeu
And when you're having a moment like this, and I don't know how much you're willing to share, but by all means, give us as many details as you're good with. But, like, is there a jaguar in the room that's about to bite you? Are you literally reliving a trauma where it's like, both psychologically and physically? I feel like I'm back in that moment.
- [30:52]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, good questions. All the above has happened. Reliving trauma that I knew and reliving trauma that I didn't know. I didn't know where it was coming.
- [31:02]
Tom Bilyeu
How does it manifest? Like, if you, if it's something pre verbal, it. Does it come to you in pictures and you're actually seeing the thing, or does it manifest like archetypal. That's not the right word, but it gets us close enough. Like something like, like it shows up as a snake, but it really just represents evil.
- [31:20]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, that all can happen. I haven't had visions of what we might call like spirit helpers, or some people would use the term totems. And that could be like a jaguar, condor, a bat, a raven, the, the. The. The evil quote unquote demon coming at me. I haven't had those kind of visions that are overwhelming and freaky. Mine have been more along the lines of like, the transpersonal collective trauma. And what I mean by that is like, I'll just give you one example, and this is when I was living in the jungle and I was going through deep dietas and a lot of. A lot of work in isolation with ayahuasca, because I was on an apprenticeship path and, and the medicine that I was working with particularly is. Is known for kind of opening up the psychic space and getting in touch with like, the collective. What Peter Russell might call, like the noosphere or the. What sphere, or, sorry, Peter Russell would call the. The global brain. Deschardin would describe it as a noosphere.
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Commercial Narrator
No.
- [32:27]
Tom Bilyeu
O Sphere.
- [32:28]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, the group collective mind, Rupert Sheldrake would call a bit like the morphic field and that all species have a group field. So like just a bit of A pipe side story real quick. So Sonia and I were just down in Thailand recently. Hadn't been there in a long time, had the opportunity to dive, hadn't dove in four years or. No, 20 or 24 years. And so I'm down there with fish and I'm watching, you know, what I've been hearing more and more particularly with Rupert Sheldrake's work on morphic field and morphic resonance, the group field and all these schools of fish are, you know, they're turning instantaneously as a part of a larger kind of group field mind. And so each species has this group field mind. And then to bring it back to the story we're talking about, there was a. There was a time, there was an experience that I had in the midst of ayahuasca in the Maloka, in the kind of the temple space. Powerful experience. Beautiful. The ceremony came to conclusion. I went back to my tombow or my hut, and I'm laying in the hammock. And usually with ayahuasca work for me, I end up staying awake till dawn. So there's usually like this 2am to 6am just window of just silence and meditation, which is really beautiful. I love that kind of quiet space. And I'm in my hammock and somewhere around 3, 4 in the morning, plus or minus, I start feeling this. This really heavy, intense, for lack of a better term, dark black energy coming up my. This surrounding the soles of my feet and then gradually working its way all the way up my body. And over the course of probably four to five minutes, so long enough to get a little freaky with it, like, what the hell? Hell is this? I've never experienced anything like this before. It's like I was slowly being lowered into just the pit of nasty goo. And then it comes up and kind of like, you know, wraps around my head and I'm just, okay, well, this is the ride we're about to go on. Finding breath and finding just. Can I surrender into this while I'm still pretty freaked out? And then as it kind of like, you know, envelops my face and hits my forehead, I just saw. Best as I can describe, the collective pain and human to human suffering that we have imparted on one another. So genocide, rape, torture, child torture, child molestation, just the butchering. It was just all in my visionary space, just like right here. Not only see it, but feel it. Super overwhelming because I'm thinking like. And that went on until dawn. So for, like, I don't know, 90 minutes, two hours or something. Felt like a lifetime. And then with dawn came just slowly washed away. And so in that moment, I'm thinking, like, is this my stuff? I've never even seen this stuff or thought about this stuff. Where's this coming from? And in that moment, in those moments over that, you know, the course of that time, I find myself holding my breath and can I come back to my breath? And can I be present? And as much as I try and wall that away, it's just here. It's like. It's like my eyelids were, you know, glued open and I'm just watching this screen of butchery. And I didn't know what to make of that.
- [36:27]
Tom Bilyeu
So you're actually seeing images of all this horrendous stuff.
- [36:30]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, And I don't know what to make of that. And the next ceremony wasn't for two more days. And so I'm just like, for two days just thinking, like, what the heck was that? I'm not sure I want to go back to ceremony if that's going to happen again. But I was committed to a dieta, this process of in isolation, where you were working with one primary teacher plant. And next ceremony comes and okay, let's see what is here. I mean, with trepidation, let's see what's here. And so same process go into ceremony in the Maloka ayahuasca ceremony concludes, nothing major happened in ceremony. Go back to my hut, in my tombow, in my hammock. And around the same time, probably 3:00am, same process happens, but this time the feeling tone is totally different. Starts at the soles of my feet, works all the way at my body, comes back around my head, hits me in the forehead. The feeling tone is light, it's effervescent. It's like feathers and butterflies and joy. And. And when it hits my forehead, the visionary space opens up and it was the complete compliment. It was like Jesus's ministry. It was like watching healing and grace, sunsets, new dawns, child being birthed into the world, angels singing was like the whole compliment. And it was just so radically kind of confusing, but also exhilarating and curious making. And then about the same time, at dawn, it kind of resolves. So both of those just two days apart were like the complementary experience of what we have the opportunity to be a part of because we have free will, choice. How am I going to use this one precious life? Where do I devote my energy? How do I want to experience my life and how do I want to engage with the rest of my brothers and sisters all having their own shared experience of living. And so we are capable of all of it. Hitler on one side, Jesus on the other. And you could, you know, there's a litany of names on both of those sides. And so I just offer that because we don't necessarily know what's going to happen in the medicine space. And I was deep in AYA work and that was after a couple of hundred ceremonies. And so I offered that that's not going to be. You know, if it took a thousand people through a medicine space, I doubt anything like that would happen, except to maybe one or two. For whatever reason, we don't ever know what's going to happen in the medicine space. But if we can avail ourselves to recognize that we are the complementary totality of human potential on both sides of the equation, then when we go through that process, the veil gets like. Like in the wizard of Oz, the curtain comes back and you see the wizard or you see that thing or whatever those things were from the subconscious that are here for us, that are here to support our evolution, because that's why we come into a body, is to evolve our understanding about ourselves and our understanding about life. All of it's here to support that evolution. And sometimes it's really uncomfortable and sometimes it's really intense. But whatever you went through, there is a way through. And that's the facilitation and the facilitators jobs to be able to hold that container. And sometimes that means intervening. If somebody's standing on the ledge and they really need a lifeline, great, I can be there. Or, you know, the facilitator can be there. It's kind of like the facilitator's job is. One of my teachers would say the facilitator's job is to be the waiter. You know, just serving the main course and saying like, you know, do you need anything else with that? Do you need some extra ketchup or water or a new napkin or sometimes it's being a Sherpa and helping the person up the mountain. And if you have a load that's really hard to carry, then I'll carry that load for you for a little while. But I'm not here to do your work for you or save you from what your work is. My job is to try and create as much safety in the container so that the person can be present with whatever comes up. And then through that kind of process of self discovery, we can stay with it for long enough. And the maps, trials, are also three sessions. So it's not like one session is a one and done.
- [41:13]
Tom Bilyeu
For people that don't know what's maps,
- [41:16]
Dr. Dan Engel
Multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies. Rick Doblin, founder of that organization, nonprofits. They've been around for 35 years, maybe 40 years, principally promoting the legalization of MDMA, supported psychotherapy, and their success rate is phenomenal. MDMA psychotherapy for PTSD, post traumatic stress Disorder. Like veterans coming off of the battlefield and still re experiencing it or anybody going through a really intense process. My sister had PTSD and so many people do have ptsd. That's why there is hope. You know, we're working as best we can towards legalization as rapidly as we can because people are still dying knowing that this therapeutic is available, which is still a travesty that's taking so long, but it's, it's in motion and sort of just bring it back to that one example I mentioned that the MAPS studies are for multiple sessions, not just a one and done. So we don't expect that just one session is going to like fix everything or it's even just going to give the person enough space so that they can go on with their life. Usually it happens that way. Usually the first sessions is enough to kind of like back off the ledge if somebody's on the ledge. And then it's a process. And so we see what's revealed each time. Honor that, work through it, consolidate it, integrate it to your point, in your word, integrate it. Integrate our understanding around it. But the MAPS trials too, it's not just MDMA therapy. It's not just MDMA in isolation. It's MDMA therapy. It's with a psychotherapist, it's with a guide, a facilitator. And when we have a foundation of trust and connection, when we have the understanding and appreciation that we're going to look under the hood, we're going to do our best to bring all of our parts home. We're going to honor whatever comes into the space and we're going to work through it. When all of that is kind of set as the foundation along with self regulation, safety, kind of a cadence of the. The process so a person kind of knows what to expect, then the medicine work is just to catalyze and kind of like accentuate the therapeutic relationship and the therapeutic process. Medicines are just catalysts. So they stimulate the process to be a bit more efficient and a bit more effective. But the medicine doesn't do anything by itself, to quote unquote fix the situation. I think they, they help to clarify the truth of if it's trauma or whatever that kind of uncomfortable thing was or is or how it's still working in our lives or whatever we've been disconnected from. Like catalyze that currency. It's a term I use. Kind of like with this work is we get current with a lot of the stuff that's been unresolved in the back. In the back of our own minds and the subconscious. Bring that forward, work through a process of discovery and then towards healing and then towards integration.
- [44:27]
Tom Bilyeu
I need to begin categorizing this stuff so I can understand it better now. You quoted somebody, I forget their name. I have a feeling you'll remember. This is a paraphrase, but we need experiential spirituality, not intellectual religion.
- [44:44]
Dr. Dan Engel
Nice.
- [44:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, so it's. I understand that I'm sort of dragging you into intellectual religion territory, but it will really help me to, to understand sort of what is breaking and what we're trying to fix. So I, I am very curious. So you refer to it as a plant teacher. But my view on it is that the plants basically have come up with a mechanism they can't run. So they've come up with a mechan, effectively poison the things that try to eat it. As basically as a way of saying fuck off. Do you think that that's happening and we just recontextualize and go, ah, you might be trying to tell me to get lost, but there's actually something really useful here. Or is there really something where you think it has a specific message yet much better way of saying it? A specific intention.
- [45:43]
Dr. Dan Engel
Intention and intelligence. And an intelligence that might be in service to an intention. Yeah. So Stan Grof was the one who offered that kind of wisdom. It's important to not only have an intellectual religion, I think it's helpful to have an intellectual religion. Like to understand like Buddhism is not necessarily a religion, it's more of a spiritual practice. But it's very much about understanding the intellect and the nature of life and suffering and how we work through a process of self discovery with our minds to be able to come into a state of peace, joy and happiness. So there's an intellectual understanding of religious context that can be helpful. But we also have to have an experiential spirituality, an experience of spirit, experience of some kind of divinity, some kind of connection with the source of life. Otherwise what's it all for? Why are we here? And why would we have an inclination towards divinity if divinity didn't Exist.
- [46:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Ooh, well, let's get into that because I have a potential answer for you.
- [46:51]
Dr. Dan Engel
Okay, great. So let me, let me pause because I want to come back to the second part of your last question.
- [46:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
- [46:57]
Dr. Dan Engel
So if I'm talking about plants, I think it's helpful to distinguish between natural medicines and synthetic medicines. Natural medicines, Psilocybin, Cannabis, Ayahuasca, Peyote, San Pedro 5 Meo, DMT from the Sonaran, Desertode, Ebolga and Synthetics. Ketamine, MDMA, LSD and a variety of different analogs similar to each of those. Natural medicines have evolved with an intelligence with some kind of Earth based wisdom. Like the book the Secret Life of Trees. Things that we wouldn't necessarily see because of the way our nervous systems work and the speed of our nervous systems. We might not necessarily see the communication between plants, but it happens or other species. And there's an Earth based intelligence that's built around what we might in. I think there's a Buddhist term, but Joanna Macy kind of coined this and she was one of the like mothers of eco therapy. Is this dependent co arising, like everything evolves in synergy and complementarity to one another over thousands and millions of years we've evolved with this complementarity. All life is important because it's evolved as such. And as such the natural medicines have this earth based intelligence kind of programmed into them just by the nature of being Earth based. That is an imparted intelligence that can become imbued in the medicine state. Not always, but frequently. So if you have somebody going through ayahuasca process or a psilocybin process or cannabis process, oftentimes there's an experience in working with those medicines of a reconnection with nature and an appreciation where we have a really important role on this floating water rock that we all call home to kind of steward it in a good way. We're the most creative creatures with this vast intelligence. Sometimes we use it well and sometimes we don't. We constantly make a lot of decisions against our own survival. So I don't know if that necessarily makes us the smartest one, but we're certainly the most creative and we have these sophisticated levels of resiliency that we can co create in the midst of challenge, new experiences and new solutions just like these amazing problem solving machines. Nature is too, but we have this like special kind of knack for it. So the natural medicines can imbue that with our reconnection with Earth based intelligence. The synthetics don't tend to do that. As frequently they can. Because it's important for us to remember our correlationality, the fact that each of us is sharing this one life just from different lenses and experiences, but because of causes and conditions and kind of how we came in with our own Persona and character. There's never going to be another Tom Bilyeu. There will never be another Dan Ingle before or to come. There's a radical level of uniqueness. It's helpful to recognize that so that we can have a shared appreciation and ideally reverence and respect and responsibility the generations to come, so that this whole thing continues to propagate. Because if it's just about us in this one life, then why keep it going? And so the synthetic medicines, the ones that I mentioned, they can oftentimes imbue that more like downward focus, but it's not built in as directly as the natural medicine. So if I'm talking about a plant medicine, it's also helpful to recognize that if we're talking about medicine work in general, it might be more accurate to just talk about it from my perspective about medicine work in general versus just plant medicine. Because the synthetics have very strong therapeutic potential as well. They tend to be more kind of what would be described as like constructionable or directionable because they don't have that kind of like Earth based intelligence built in. I can construct or kind of preempt an idea about what's going to happen. And oftentimes it does happen. This is oftentimes seen in the LSD trials.
- [51:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Meaning that you can control the trip more?
- [51:53]
Dr. Dan Engel
No, it's more like if somebody is going through an LSD session and they think it's going to be a hard session. Oftentimes it's a hard session. If they think it's going to be a light session and they're going to go meet God, then oftentimes that kind of like expectancy is revealed.
- [52:06]
Tom Bilyeu
And that won't work with ayahuasca or something like that.
- [52:09]
Dr. Dan Engel
It can, but it typically doesn't. Like with ayah. Particularly if you were in thousand ceremonies and you made an intention every single time, what was, what you thought was going to happen might happen a handful of times. Just like trying to predict a dream.
- [52:24]
Tom Bilyeu
So what's the intention? Going back to the idea of it's a plant teacher, that there is intentionality to it. What is the intention? I think it's don't eat me. You think it's.
- [52:35]
Dr. Dan Engel
You think it's don't eat meat, eat me.
- [52:39]
Tom Bilyeu
I think plants are trying to. It's Interesting. So as I was researching you, I thought, okay, every species has. Has to choose on an evolutionary timescale, but they have to choose what path am I going to take?
- [52:51]
Dr. Dan Engel
Right?
- [52:52]
Tom Bilyeu
So your typical animal is going to be mostly, it's imprinted in their DNA, so they're going to do things by instinct. And one horse is going to be like another horse is going to be like another horse. So you come out 20 minutes later, you can do all the things that a horse is going to do. Humans, on the other hand, ride on the back of culture. So depending on when and where you're born, you're going to be able to adapt that. So Steve Jobs, he, in the modern era, makes the iPhone. Steve Jobs, 2000 years ago would not obviously have been dreaming in vain about the iPhone, would have been something completely different. So I was thinking, okay, are the plants, as a strategy, are they saying, oh, I'm going to make a toxin so that people will leave me alone? Or like, so is wheat the most successful plant of all time? Has wheat actually domesticated us versus us domesticating wheat? There's actually a really interesting argument to be made that wheat domesticated us since it's now the most prolific plant on Earth and we have built our houses in a way that we can take care of it and raise it well and get it everything that it needs, work around the clock, on its schedule. It's pretty crazy. So was that wheat's evolutionary strategy was to hook humans not knowingly, but just as an evolutionary strategy. And then is it that psychedelics are like, hey, I'll become meaningful to you? And maybe in the beginning, it started out as a poison, but over time it became, oh, wow, like people are really protecting. I've actually heard you talk about we have to be careful not to let these plants get diminished so that they're no longer in their natural habitat and all that. And so I thought, oh, my God, like, they've convinced you to take care of it. So it's like, was that the evolutionary strategy which were then. And again, I believe, in the blind watchmaker, where it's not like the plant's like, oh, let me think about the best way to manipulate a human. It's just that ends up being the thing that works, and that's why people grow it and cultivate it and all that stuff. But that's the angle I come at it from. Do you come at it from that the plant has a knowing intention? Like, is the plant conscious with a knowing intention or is it just sort of blind Watchmaker, evolution at work?
- [55:04]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, good question. I think it's probably somewhere in the middle. They have consciousness, but it's different consciousness than we have. So it's hard to transpose our direct awareness into that field. But that field is present. So plants will also orient to survival.
- [55:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Do they get bummed out when things don't go their way?
- [55:32]
Dr. Dan Engel
It's a level of consciousness. Right. So rocks. We can make the argument rocks are sentient. They. There's a. There's an intelligence. Like most of our computer chips are made of quartz. There's an intelligence can be imbued. Plants have intelligence, Animals have intelligence. Humans have intelligence. Do dogs get bummed out when their masters don't come home or die? Yep. Different level of sadness, or maybe an expression of sadness than a human might, but still sad. Do plants have that same level of connection to the humans? Good question. I do believe there is a relationality to all species on the planet because we've all co arise together. I do think to your point, that there are defense mechanisms because we're all built for survival, but we're also oriented towards growth and evolution. It's the thing that keeps this whole living ecosystem propagating and moving forward because we do evolve over time and we have these primary needs at times that can be a little disparate or going in different directions. Our need for safety and survival and our need for growth and evolution. And I think all ecosystems share that same base binary differential and kind of inclination. And so if we bring it back to medicine work, that's oftentimes a framing that's helpful, like whatever comes into the space that feels really freaking scary. And maybe we want to hold that down because of survival. Maybe that's actually part of our growth and our evolution is to get current with that, is to bring that close and to learn from it and grow through it so as to become more mature, more whole, and ultimately more in service to a shared ecosystem.
- [57:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you think there's a universal meaning to life?
- [57:49]
Dr. Dan Engel
Well, that's a good question. I like the nature of your questions. I do believe we're here to learn and grow.
- [57:59]
Tom Bilyeu
So that's the purpose.
- [58:02]
Dr. Dan Engel
I think that's the ultimate purpose.
- [58:04]
Tom Bilyeu
And was that put into motion by
- [58:06]
Dr. Dan Engel
a deity, including having the like. If we're just talking about from the human perspective, if we're here to have a human experience, I do believe that growth and evolution is our primary drive because everything in the universe evolves consistently.
- [58:22]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you mean by it? It evolves.
- [58:25]
Dr. Dan Engel
Everything is in the process of like
- [58:28]
Tom Bilyeu
In a Darwinian evolutionary sense,
- [58:33]
Dr. Dan Engel
I wouldn't use just that kind of like singular conception. I think there's truth there, but I don't think that's the whole truth. Now, if we're going to look at it from a transpersonal lens, then we might get into the conversation of soul.
- [58:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I don't want to get too lost. What I'm trying to understand what your organizing principle is so I can sum up my organizing principle in a single word. Physics. Now, I don't know what put the physics in motion. I'm perfectly happy for it to have been a, what would seem like to me a completely disinterested deity.
- [59:06]
Dr. Dan Engel
But isn't that curious to you? Isn't what curious what put this whole thing in motion?
- [59:11]
Tom Bilyeu
It's the most interesting question on earth.
- [59:12]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah. So if you're interested in the physics, is it easier to just focus on the physics? Because the question about what started the physics in the first place is just unknown. Like you can never prove that.
- [59:30]
Tom Bilyeu
I think so what I hope is true is that God is knowable. Now I don't think that God is anything like a person. And in the same way that I, I don't believe in pan consciousness or whatever it's called. I don't think rocks have anything remotely approaching consciousness or intelligence, not in the way that a human would grasp because we're so used to it being interpreted through a nervous system now. But at the same time I'm not the guy that solved the hard problem of consciousness. So there's clearly something I don't know and understand. So I'm just operating from how I organize my thinking. So I want to believe that God as I'm defining it here is knowable. Effectively you can call God the laws of physics or whatever put the laws of physics into motion. But because I cannot conceive of absolute nothing, and I certainly can't conceive of at one point there's absolute nothing and then suddenly laws of physics. There's obviously something I don't get. But it's a wonderful organizing principle if you'll give me the miracle that at one point physics came into being cool. Now from there I feel like everything is knowable. From there when I start playing it out so that I can come up with a frame of reference that is effective. Now one has to define effective. So what's effective? The next sort of miracle that I will ask for is. It's not a miracle, but it, it is an axiom that I can give you. No non subjective reasoning for But I take the axiom that we ought to organize life to minimize the suffering of humans. That's a very human centric approach, but that's the axiom that I operate under. So when I'm looking to understand physics, I'm trying to understand it so that I can have a frame of reference that maximizes the, what I'll call fulfillment of the human experience and minimizes the suffering of the human experience. From that I have come to believe in my non psychedelic using way, that we are an evolutionary creature that was created by a blind process born from the laws of physics. So we start as, you know, single celled amoeba is just trying to stay alive. And to your earlier point, it's really about survival. And you get this ever branching fractal of evolutionary paths of trying to stay alive. And so if we all have one common ancestor, everything that we see, and I agree with you very much that this all happens as a collective. And as you were talking, I thought, oh, he'd never want to go to Mars. Which is interesting and I suppose I should ask rather than just tell you, but I have a feeling that that wouldn't be ideal for you anyway. So it's life, nature, whatever word you want to take is going on these incredible fractal paths of what are all the ways that we can survive against each other? Now would you use the word against? Probably not, but that kind of language really speaks to me. And so this red and tooth and claw sense of laws being put in place and then you just see what happens. And it is the most astonishing, it is the greatest show on Earth. It is the most astonish Earth in, in the known universe. Yeah, Universe says like whatever. That ends up being totally, unbelievably cool to me.
- [63:10]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah.
- [63:10]
Tom Bilyeu
And so all of that is utterly fascinating. But you and I, even though I find you interesting and I'm so intrigued and you've, you've been to a planet psychedelic that I have not been to. And so I sit at your feet as a student trying to learn. But we come at this from really different angles. And so I come at it again as the man standing on the shore who's never been wet. I come at it from the perspective of, oh, this is all a blind process. That is just the fractals of all these different paths of how do you survive in an ever sort of expanding population on a finite water rock traveling through space. I forget how you said it, but that was so cool. And so to me it is not a guided process. There is only the purpose that you assign it. There is no deity. You had said, wow, God. What's the purpose of the impulse to divinity if there's nothing divine or there's no God? That's directionally accurate to what you said. And for me, it's all the things that I've just been saying. There is no person like thing that's like, oh, I want. Good for you. And I've created this plant medicine to help you reverse engineer your trauma and figure out what it is and finally release it. But it's utterly fascinating that there is a plant that you can take that makes you feel like if you reach into your right pocket with your left hand, instead of pulling out your wallet, you pull out the Andromeda Galaxy. Like, that is so interesting to me. So you and I share this deep fascination, and I really have to try it so I can have any credibility in this conversation whatsoever. But it's interesting that we see it from such radically different perspectives, which is why. And I. I feel like maybe you feel like I'm trying to force you into a box, but I still don't understand, like, how you conceptualize, like, to break it down into a really small number of words. What is it that breaks in a human? And what is it that this fixes? If it isn't integration, I'm still lost. Like, what are the other. But you have to categorize it for my. Unfortunately, I'm. I'm on land, and you have to describe what it's like to be wet. But I need to understand, or I'm a colorblind. You have to describe red. Even more impossible. But what is the category of break and what is the category of healing?
- [65:44]
Dr. Dan Engel
Excellent question. And everything you just said in regards to, like, the blind watchmaker could be true. 100%. We. We still pale in potentiality for proving the unknown, proving the Godhead, or like, you know, whatever we describe as the source that created all life, we don't know. We have a lot of really creative, numerous theories and hypotheses on it. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I think your. Your points are really good. One, like. Well, I think it was Henry Ford. Whatever it is that we believe is true.
- [66:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.
- [66:28]
Dr. Dan Engel
Totally. I want to just honor everything that you're just describing. And if I was to give you my kind of worldview and zeitgeist on what gets broken and what gets healed or revealed or integrated, it's going to be a Story that goes on a little bit of journey. If we have a little bit of time.
- [66:48]
Tom Bilyeu
We have time as long as I can track it. Because if it starts to feel mystical, then I'm unmoored again and I don't know how to use it.
- [66:58]
Dr. Dan Engel
Is it hard for you to track the mystical
- [67:02]
Tom Bilyeu
without defining mystical, which I introduced it and didn't define it without defining that I don't know. So here's how I approach the brain. Dear Black Box, I don't know what you're doing, none of us do. But I can give you certain inputs and get certain outputs that are remarkably predictable. Even if I can't say, oh, I'm going to go into this trip and it's going to be positive or whatever, I can. I feel like you've described red to me so well that I can re articulate it in my own words, which just from researching you in this conversation, I feel like psychedelics are. That you are trapped in a frame of reference. It is blinding you to the truth, to use your word, which is you've become so myopic to the pain that you've lost sight of the myriad states that the human mind can produce. And because Henry Ford is right, and if you believe you're in pain, you are in pain, you've become so myopic on the pain, you can't get out of it. And so all a psychedelic is doing, and you use the word veil, all a psychedelic is doing is lifting the veil of your frame of reference so that you can see there's something else. And so now as you get sober again and the veil drops, you know, there's something on the other side of that. And that realization alone, when coupled with therapy, allows you to integrate. Oh, there's something beyond my veil. And it is, I believe I haven't done it, but I have a feeling that this is the exact emotion I go through when I get trapped in a failure. And I'm thinking, I am a failure. And then I remember, no, no, no, you value yourself only for learning. And you can learn today. You can get better. And suddenly it goes from constrictive to expansive. And I feel different in an instant. And I'm like, whoa, just changing my frame of reference. I'm a failure to. No, no, no, I can learn and get better. And. And that thinking this way is not valuable, and thinking this way is valuable.
- [69:09]
Dr. Dan Engel
It.
- [69:10]
Tom Bilyeu
It changes my neurochemistry fucking instantly, man. And the number of times that I do that, I'm just like, this is insane. That just Shifting my perspective changes my physiology 100%. And so I'm like, this is psychedelics is my guess. So even though I'm colorblind, I've experienced this thing called red. Might be using different words, but I can categorize it. Right. So it's like, to me, that moment, even though I don't understand the brain, and you could say that the brain is mystical, I can categorize what's happening even if it's wrong. Like, objectively, nothing that I just said is what's going to come out when you scan my brain or test my blood or whatever. But as a category that allows me to move in a direction, I'm like, word that makes sense. And so I'm here for mystical stuff. If it can be categorized and thusly, it's integratable, which I know I keep forcing that word. And you've been very clear that there's something more than that. But the more than that part is what I'm failing to. I can't figure out what the thread is that I can grab to hold on to, to go, oh, I get that.
- [70:23]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah. And we may be talking and I agree with everything you just said, and I want to bring it back to what we were describing earlier about the differential between an intellectual religion and an experiential spirituality. So it may be hard to grasp that aspect of the mystical or the. The effervescent kind of like, you know, thread that's hard to grab as directly because you haven't had the experience.
- [70:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Can we define mystical as something that comes from a place beyond you with intention? Oh, God. That's my best grasp at what I think you mean by mystical.
- [71:11]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, I think that's a. That's a starting place. I like the kind of beyond the small self into something larger than our egos. Maybe that has an intention, maybe not. I think there's.
- [71:28]
Tom Bilyeu
So that's not an important part to me. That's like the core of it, that there's intention.
- [71:33]
Dr. Dan Engel
I firmly believe that there is.
- [71:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Does it have your best interest at heart or is there dark mysticism?
- [71:41]
Dr. Dan Engel
I think it includes everything, just like I was referencing in those two different experiences that happened two days apart. If I'm only experiencing the hell realm or that deep darkness that we all have the potential to engage and impart on one another. All of the crappy things that we've done to one another and are still doing to one another, complement that to all of the beauty. All of the beauty and. And the love and the generosity and the the, the glory that is our potential. I think it's, it's all of that. And so if I'm going to start pulling on that thread of mysticism, part of what I just want to also kind of re reference with a foundation of data is that the majority of novice psychedelic voyagers going through their first threshold macro dose of psilocybin said they had had a mystical experience. That's Johns Hopkins research.
- [72:52]
Tom Bilyeu
And they define mystical.
- [72:54]
Dr. Dan Engel
Well, there you have scales of mysticism. There are literally scales that look at, okay, tell me about your mystical experience. What kind of flavor did it have? What degree of depth and kind of profundity did it have? There are ways to, to try and make objective the, the, the, the more kind of personal experience of divinity. It's, it's hard to completely measure a totally spiritual and subjective experience. So we try and do that with these subjective measure scales. These. And one of those is the scales of mysticism or a scale of mystical experience. And if we start to pull on that thread of mysticism and like, what are we getting into? What are we starting to talk about? The moment that I started pulling on that thread unexpectedly was in my third year of medical school. I thought I was going to do pediatrics as my profession, and I thought I was going to do pediatric surgery because I wanted to work with kids. But I also wanted to have the, you know, the hands on kind of process that surgery allows. And so I did a rotation in the nicu, the neonatal ICU where you see little ones come into the ICU setting because they're sick or infirmed or injured. They're not having a good day. And oftentimes they're preemies or children that have been abused or in an accident. And I would see these little ones come in and oftentimes die. And it was just the big kind of turning upside down of my apple cart. And I couldn't figure out who was the puppet master in charge of this. And so I started asking the, those kind of questions, like, what is this whole life thing about? And what's the meaning of this little one coming in and having a six month suffering experience and dying? And what's the meaning for their parents? And, and just trying to wrestle and grasp that. I almost quit medicine and.
- [75:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Because you had no good answer.
- [75:24]
Dr. Dan Engel
Because I had no good answer. And it was, it was too overwhelming.
- [75:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Literally. I wrote down, as soon as you started talking about surgery and kids, I was like, what about kids dying? Like, I just couldn't be around that.
- [75:36]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, it was too Heavy, man, it was heavy. And I couldn't understand it. There was no meaning for it. And therefore I took a pause. Didn't end up going into surgery or pediatrics. I ended up going into child psychiatry, interestingly enough, to try and understand like the nature of the mind, but also to still work with kids. And what it did is it sent me down this kind of rabbit hole of trying to understand what's the meaning of a suffering experience. The only thing that makes sense to me is that our souls come into a body through an evolutionary process of learning and growth to continue the. The thread of awareness. So that if the soul line comes into a body and it's a bit
- [76:36]
Tom Bilyeu
of a soul line, why not just soul. What's soul line?
- [76:40]
Dr. Dan Engel
So the soul experience has this arc of recurrence in a human form. It's a bit of a Buddhist orientation to reincarnation. Reincarnation, okay, Talk about past lives, future lives, parallel lives, multi simultaneous existences. We tend to think of things in linear timeline just because it makes more sense kind of how we live our lives. But that might not be the way it is. It may be parallel. Maybe everything's happening simultaneously in multiple ongoing threads. Like, you know, in interstellar when he's journeying down the tesseract and you can find any of these wormholes to any other myriad innumerable parallel experiences. So ultimately, after just trying so many different schools of thought, so many different religious understandings, spiritual understandings, traditional kind of ecosystem understandings, like people that live close to the ground that have noodled around with consciousness, like what are the commonalities? And the commonalities with most traditional cultures is that there is consciousness outside of a body and that consciousness has an evolutionary arc. And so when I say the soul line or the soul thread, it makes the most sense to me that if somebody is coming. Have you seen recent. Do you watch any of the Pixar movies?
- [78:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Of course.
- [78:13]
Dr. Dan Engel
So that movie, soul.
- [78:14]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
- [78:15]
Dr. Dan Engel
Pretty brilliant depiction of a potentiality of the soul level experience.
- [78:22]
Tom Bilyeu
So do you feel like there. Well, let me ask it a different way. What, what evidence did you encounter that made you go, okay, it's probably something like this. I know you're not saying it's exactly like this. It's a potentiality.
- [78:42]
Dr. Dan Engel
I was recommended by one of my. So I had a very wise, maybe an oracle, like attending physician. Those are the like training teacher physicians. And in the midst of my pause and being like, I don't know if I can continue medicine. And I was just wrestling with this existential Crisis. And we started talking about it and really noodling on it. She just happened to be a transpersonal psychologist who was able to see things from multiple perspectives. And she wasn't imparting anything. She gave me a bunch of different books to read and just kind of like other schools of thought and philosophies. One of those books that she recommended, among many others, was Brian Weiss, Many Lives, Many Masters. And this was a psychiatrist, head of the Mount Sinai psychiatry department, fairly reputable position, who was using regressive hypnotherapy predominantly for anxiety. So hypnotherapy where somebody anxious about a particular thing or a phobia or it could be depression too. But I think the predominant clientele he was working with was anxiety. He would put them in a hypnotic state and regress them to the original point of the trauma or the inciting event and then work towards resolution of that in order to heal the anxiety in the present moment. And he had great success. And hypnotherapy has been around a long time. Erickson, Milton Erickson is kind of like the godfather of hypnotherapy. And one client in particular who was having a very suffering experience. He regressed her back to the. The original event. And it just happened to be in a previous life. And he had no concept of divinity or previous lives. And it was really destabilizing to his worldview. But he was, why did he believe it?
- [80:40]
Tom Bilyeu
So a lot of this stuff, my
- [80:41]
Dr. Dan Engel
understanding, because it was helping, that's very
- [80:45]
Tom Bilyeu
different than it being true.
- [80:47]
Dr. Dan Engel
He didn't, he didn't know that it was true.
- [80:49]
Tom Bilyeu
He said it was destabilizing to him.
- [80:51]
Dr. Dan Engel
Well, it was destabilizing because he didn't even have a concept of hypnotherapy. Going into past lives made him believe it.
- [80:57]
Tom Bilyeu
So if I encountered that, I'd be like, this person is making it up. Utterly fascinating. And she believes it. I'm not calling her a liar. And she's saying, right.
- [81:05]
Dr. Dan Engel
So through the serial investigation, gradually started to believe the potentiality of that and then gradually started having more and more clients coming through this process of being
- [81:22]
Tom Bilyeu
regressed back, debating him in abstract. Is this something that you also agree with?
- [81:27]
Dr. Dan Engel
So I.
- [81:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Because I know you've studied hypnotherapy.
- [81:31]
Dr. Dan Engel
Nice, good homework. So I was radically curious about that. Like, oh, wow, that's somebody who's fairly reputable position. Sat on it for a while. I don't think he published that book until like 10 years after the original client. Knowing that he was going to be blackballed by psychiatry and booted from his position. And he was. And he still got people well. So he continued through a process where people were able to. Not being directed by him to go back to. You're going to go now back to past life. It was like, let's go back to the original event. And then consistently that started happening more and more. So Brian Weiss is one of the guys. Michael Newton is one of the guys. His kind of clinical synopsis is in a body of work called Life after life and 40 years of experience, thousands of clients. He researches everything mad, takes copious notes, and started creating this. Clients would spontaneously create this architecture of the soul. So these were the guys that I just started getting really curious about. So I wanted to learn more.
- [82:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Architecture of the soul, the past lives.
- [82:50]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah.
- [82:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay.
- [82:51]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah. We could talk about, like, what happens before and after a body. And so I started getting. Just curious. I wanted to understand, is this. Can we validate this? Can we get under the hood and is there any way to see the. The truth in it, so to speak? And then that led to a variety of other kind of investigations, One of which was the University of Virginia's department on psychology and past life recall with children. They were able to accurately describe previous lives that could be verified with people that they had no contact with and the family had no contact with something like 3200 case reports. And when we start getting into those kind of numbers, then it starts to beg the question, like, okay, is there something here?
- [83:53]
Tom Bilyeu
Begs a different question for me, which is, there's something going on. But what's going on?
- [84:01]
Dr. Dan Engel
Good question. We don't know. There's an. So that's where we're going to continue to kind of create our own worldview, to make sense of something outside of this life.
- [84:14]
Tom Bilyeu
And I was with you until you said outside of this life.
- [84:17]
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- [85:19]
Tom Bilyeu
We are going to construct a worldview. We're going to come up with a story, which is exactly what I think about when you describe that. So they've done real, really amazing tests. The brain will come up with an answer for everything no matter what question you ask. And so if you have somebody whose short term memory is damaged so that they're unable to transfer it to long term memory, you can come in, meet them, leave three minutes later, come back and meet them again and they won't remember meeting you. They did this test and they put a pin on the doctor's hand. The doctor reaches out to shake their hand. They shake it, it stabs them. They're like, yo, what the hell? They leave, they come back in, hi, it's nice to meet you. They stick their hand out, the person won't shake their hand, but they don't remember why. And so then they ask, why won't you shake my hand? And they'll make something up. Oh, I've never shaken the hand of somebody in a white lab coat. Oh, I don't shake hands on Tuesday. Whatever. They come up with some reason and they just make it up. And that's a well documented phenomenon. So if you've got somebody asking you like, no, go back. Like, remember, remember, remember. And they're like, I can't remember. Okay, go earlier, maybe it was before that, before that, before that, that. And I'm, trust me, I am not impugning that they did anything intentionally wrong. But if you get two humans together and they have a worldview, if you have one person, especially if they're good, like, I am really bad at being hypnotized. So if I do like the eye trick and all that, it's like, no, you're not very hypnotizable. And then I'm probably a nightmare because I want to be strong willed. And so I'm sure I'm very combative. So I had somebody try to hypnotize me. He's like, yeah, you're not going to be hypnotized easily anyway. And so, and Huberman's talked a lot about this there. He's hyper hypnotizable. So you've already got people that are very open to suggestion. And so you can use hypnosis on them wonderfully. And it works. And it's. I studied this. I was really interested in hypnosis for a while because I really. I was having trouble sleeping at one point. I wanted to hypnotize myself and all. So I went pretty deep down. The rabbit hole could be an amazing therapeutic tool. I haven't tried it, so again, don't know. But in terms of, like researching it, there's. There is a very easy way to construct a worldview based on research that's been done that these are people that are highly susceptible. It was unintentionally given to them. Like take the kids that are describing something that they couldn't have possibly known. They could know it because it's something known in history, which is how we can validate it. So how did they end up picking it up? Why do they remember it when other kids don't? I don't know. But for me.
- [87:52]
Dr. Dan Engel
But slow that part down. If there was the opportunity to document a previous life connected to. And that could be a handful of years ago, it could be a handful of centuries ago, some time ago, with no connection between that past experience, an incarnation and this little one. Like totally different cultures, Kids that aren't on the Internet and this was also a good portion of this started becoming kind of data tracked and in the database decades ago, before there was even the Internet. How do you rectify that?
- [88:44]
Tom Bilyeu
For me, it's very easy. So Occam's razor, all things being equal, the simplest answer is usually correct. To me, it is far more simple that that kid heard something, that the doctor gave something away in the way that they were framing the question. Kid wanted to please and make them happy. The doctor didn't mean to lead the witness, as it were, but they were. And that the kids then gave them back the information responded to them getting excited about something. So they've documented this both with real fast. They've documented this with horses that can supposedly count. And the second the horse can't see the owner, they can't count anymore. It's because the owner, even though they don't mean to, they leak off like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're going in the right direction. Oh, you should stop there. And so what the horse is really doing is picking up on cues. Same thing with kids in what was the 80s with the devil worshiping, like, oh, God. Where kids are being taken care of. I forget what daycares. And the kids were being hypnotized and were like, yeah, they Were doing all this demonic shit and parents were freaking out, like, oh my God, there's this epidemic come to find out it's not true. These kids are just hyper susceptible to suggestion and positive reinforcement. And so they ended up saying back the things that they wanted them to say. And then one more piece to put on this. You had. Houdini said, I guarantee all these people that are looking into a crystal ball, whatever, like they've either somebody doesn't remember saying something to somebody else about this thing that nobody could possibly know. And so he went and he put for the time it was like an unimaginable amount, like $10 million. And said, I've thought of a word. Only my wife knows it. If anybody gets it right, she'll pay out. Of course, nobody got it right. So it comes down to, I think very. And I am. I want to fully acknowledge I have a worldview. And for anything to come into my world, it has to. Like, my worldview is very stable. And so you can attack it from a thousand different angles. And it's like, oh, that actually makes sense. Boom. And I can adopt that new thing and my worldview stays stable. But when something comes in that for me to take that one thing, my entire worldview would have no anchor. Not even that I'm anxious about it. Just. I wouldn't even know how to reconstruct it. So this feels like it requires somebody to have a worldview of like, either I know nothing about how all of this works. And so it's all mystical. It's like turtles all the way down.
- [91:21]
Dr. Dan Engel
Or.
- [91:21]
Tom Bilyeu
I think that's it. Like, that's the only. I don't see how to incorporate that into certainly my worldview, which is built on a foundation of. There is a point at which I don't understand. I don't know. I need the miracle of. And now physics exist. And so, man, if there's like. If somebody could give me the data layer versus, like the intuition of like. And this is what I'm building this on top of. Like, nothing would be cooler for me than all of that being true. And that we're. This is all mystical and that you can contact the divine. Like, that would be so rad. Like, I want that to be true because it's way cooler than my. Sort of very grounded and that I know that there's a miracle that I'm asking for. So if someone can, like, penetrate that miracle and help me, like, get to it, I'm keenly interested. So I get accused sometimes because whenever I hit Somebody that has the more mystically oriented worldview that people think I'm being walled off, I'm super open. I just have not yet heard something that aligns with all the other elements of my worldview that makes me go, ah, that fits. Yeah, if you've got it, man, I, I am truly all ears.
- [92:39]
Dr. Dan Engel
Well, what I heard you say is that nothing would be more cool, but it also sounds like it might be quite threatening.
- [92:48]
Tom Bilyeu
See, I, I, it's not threatening because
- [92:50]
Dr. Dan Engel
I said, you said your worldview.
- [92:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, but it doesn't make me anxious. I just, I don't know how to reconstruct it with some because remember I'm about efficacy. So my worldview is predicated on that there really is an ultimate good, which is to optimize for human fulfillment, minimize for human suffering, and that I think that laws got put out again, I don't know how that's the miracle I'm asking for. But then after that, if you knew, it's all, that's when I say that God is noble. That's what I mean. If you knew all of the, the exact unifying laws of physics that you would be able to go up, you send that billiard ball. And now I can predict everything. So I feel like, okay, the worldview that I have have accounts for everything that I see and know and all of that. Now I'm aware that I can't, I certainly don't know the unifying law of physics. So something we don't understand for sure,
- [93:47]
Dr. Dan Engel
for sure, for sure.
- [93:48]
Tom Bilyeu
But man, like the way that I view the world takes us down to gps pretty fucking hard to create and requires you to actually know the laws of physics. Whereas kids knowing a past life doesn't predict anything. For me, it doesn't allow me to do anything. So now I'm like, okay, this isn't efficacious. So if I'm going back to, for this worldview to make sense, it has to make predictions. And then I have to be able to test those predictions and I don't yet I'm not able to experience. So again, it's not stressful to me. It's just my worldview makes all these predictions, allows me to do all this shit that's fucking incredible. And I don't see anybody else proffering a worldview that makes predictions that I can leverage to my more fulfillment, less suffering.
- [94:41]
Dr. Dan Engel
What if there was a worldview that incorporated mysticism, but to your degree of productivity.
- [94:47]
Tom Bilyeu
I love it. Fuck yeah. What is it?
- [94:50]
Dr. Dan Engel
That's actually the thing that Makes the most sense for me if I start talking about soul on evolutionary course. Because that means the soul's kind of productivity is to continue to move through learning and growth over time. And say I'm born into horribly traumatized experience that gives me a particular early imprinting versus being born into an incredibly privileged experience, those two being so different. If it's only kind of random chance, then I don't have as much of a foundation to understand my productivity in an evolutionary cycle. Because those two early experiences, a person is going to go through evolution and productivity and they're going to learn and grow over time for sure. But say I'm back in the NICU and that little one. Or you know, we can say like, okay, somebody would say ego doesn't really consolidate until we're, you know, somewhere around like two, three, maybe four years old and we start to myelinate and connect all these different brain centers that give us more of a self identity. So say it's not even a nicu. Say it's just a picu, pediatric icu. Four or five years old, this little being starting to make their own sense of the world and then just smashed and dead and gone. Like my world, you have a hard time grappling with it. So I may. And I'll also just own my potential bias. I may be grasping for something to help me make meaning of that.
- [96:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's interesting, as you were talking, I was like, God, do I even want to be right? So I have thought a lot about this. So okay, I have a worldview that is optimized for efficacy. But the thing that I want to reduce human suffering may actually be helped by your worldview. And so this is where you get now into deep philosophy. The problem of evil. This is what made me turn away from Christian religion. So for when I was probably 13, 14, I was devoutly Christian. So I got to 15, 16, I became devoutly Taoist and really went hardcore down that path. And I would say those two things together, really, they've had way more influence on my frame of reference probably than even I realize. And I realize that it's very deep, but definitely rejected the specific manifestation of the Bible, which to me feels way more like a metaphor that's grappling with the human condition. But the whole God works in mysterious ways is how you hand wave the problem of evil. And while my worldview really forces, the brutality of tragedy will befall you for sure. You're going to lose the people you love. You already have. I've lost people that I love and will continue to lose them all until I die or they die. That is brutal. Now I'm going to assign meaning to it because it is the path forward and I think where you and I just have chosen a different path and in no way, shape or form do I want to invalidate yours, because if it works, man, go for it. But the thing that I have grabbed is I get to assign meaning to it. I get to learn something from it. The most terrifying thing I can imagine is the death of my wife. I am stopping myself from getting emotional in this very second because A, I was thinking about it earlier today for some weird ass reason and then B, like, I just don't want to. I, I'm not even interested in that world. It's. It is a level of human suffering that I don't want to go through, but the death of a child to me is the worst. So going back to the, the nicu, I think you have to assign meaning. I think it is just tragedy and I think it really sucks. And I think somebody who is born into just unimaginable amounts of trauma, that's ruthless. I don't think there's a reason for it. I think you need to assign meaning and purpose or it will consume you. But I don't think that there's any purpose or intention. I think Hitler was evil and I think he killed a lot of people. And I think it was an unimaginable tragedy that I really can't fathom the extent of that. And if you've read Mao the Untold Story, if you've read the Gulag Archipelago, it's just evil shit, man. There's just evil shit. People do evil, evil things. And you and I share a love for Viktor Frankl, but we may be taking different things from it. What I took is that, hey, there's a gap between stimulus and response. And it's your job to put meaning there. God isn't going to do it for you. Past lives aren't going to do it for you. Ayahuasca is not going to do it for you. You have to assign that meaning. And if you fail to do that, you're in real trouble.
- [100:10]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, yeah. The things you mentioned may support developing a meaning, but ultimately it's ours to choose the last of the great human freedoms, the ability to choose one's attitude in any circumstance. And when we do imbue that meaning, I get curious on your side, like how in, in the totality of that potential to experience suffering, loss of your wife, loss of A child, unimaginable suffering that we're born into. How does your worldview make sense of that?
- [100:44]
Tom Bilyeu
It really is as simple as what Viktor Frankl said. You're living life, you have evolved, your brain works this way. And there happens to be a gap between stimulus and response. And based on your value system and your beliefs, you get to assign something to that that will give you energetic. I'm trying to use your words, but like, it will manifest in a very strong physiological response. And so in Viktor Frankl's man's search for meaning, he says you can predict with within 72 hours when someone will die within a concentration camp because you see them give up. And once they give up, 72 hours later, they're dead. And I was like, whoa. So that means like, and we, we've heard countless stories of, okay, I need you guys all to, to let go. So I can let go now and that, but people can fight and fight and fight until they're like, please, like, let me go. I, I need to let go, but I can't if I see you holding on to me and then once you let go, like, they're dead. Like, that's really interesting to me. Now what that says to me is that once you don't have any meaning and you're like, well, this doesn't make any sense anymore, then you just stop and you're able to consciously communicate to your unconscious cells and, and you let go. And that I would co opt your word divine to say I am so enthralled by how the laws of physics play out that even if this is all preordained and even if I couldn't stop myself from saying these questions and having my worldview and that I am literally just an automaton and that you could know ahead of time, my every thought, motion, flake of skin, everything. It doesn't diminish how rad this is. And I am given so much relief in my suffering to know that, that I get to have a value system that feels like it's my choice. Even if I'm an automaton, it feels like it's my choice. I get to choose the things that I believe they feel like my choices. And based on that, I get this really amazing, energetic response just by shifting my thinking and going, oh my God, my wife died. But I can assign meaning to that. And I can now fight in her honor, or I can honor everything that she gave me by loving again, whatever, but I get to now assign that meaning and it will really give me A strong feeling based on that.
- [103:35]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, yeah, it's beautiful. You're describing this, this glorious free will opportunity to create our own worldview, to put meaning around our experience. And without that meaning, there is emptiness. Absolutely. And the. With the growth work that happens through those challenges, life challenges are going to happen, tragedies are going to happen. We continue to iterate our worldview. Your worldview sounds like it shifted from where you're at with a relationship with Christianity than a relationship with Taoism into where you are now in your teens to where you are now. Like our truth changes, our worldviews change over time. And I think that's part of the evolutionary process that happens in just even one lifestream. We get to try on things and see what makes the most sense, see what helps us make sense of the world. And that's a little bit different for everybody. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I get inspired so much by people that have gone through just so much intensity, so much suffering, and been able to find meaning in it. I think that's why Frankl's just such a hero of mine and other people in similar situations that went through unspeakable tragedies that I'll never understand and never know, and found a worldview that made sense, found meaning through that. It's like the triumph of our spirit. It's like the greatest glory that we have to go through such intensity. And some people's intensity is different from mine, and mine's going to be unique to me. But you know, really go through the grinder and come out the other side with something to share and. And the desire to continue to still make the world a more beautiful place.
- [105:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Let's bring it back to psychedelics for a second. So if each of these is a medicine, then to each problem there is the right medicine. Anxiety, depression, those are running rampant.
- [105:58]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah.
- [105:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Is there, is there a particular plant medicine or synthetic that is particularly helpful with those two things?
- [106:07]
Dr. Dan Engel
Kind of depends on the underlying issue because we all have different constitutional expressions. So if you and I went through the same kind of tragedy, you would express it differently than I would. And some people would express a given trauma on the anxiety spectrum, others might experience it on the depression spectrum. And. And many would experience it in kind of both, in a mix of the two. The ex. So the underlying traumatic kind of event, ideally that's investigated over time, and then kind of how that's layered on environmentally and then the symptoms and the style of its expression. So anxiety can express itself in a lot of different ways. It can be phobias, it can be generalized anxiety, it can be ptsd, it can be ocd. There are certain medicines that are researched for each of those. If we bring it back to trauma, we know MDMA is a very good and effective trauma medicine. However, for some people on the depression side who have a sensitive serotonin system, there can be a drop off on the backside because MDMA is such a serotonin surge. It also works on the other receptor profiles too, but particularly with serotonin. And so if I'm just talking about it. So all of that was kind of a prelude to me just answering the question more specifically, or, I'm sorry, more generally. Depression does really well with Ayahuasca and there's a variety of different theories about why that is. It seems to rehabilitate the serotonergic system. It seems to also clear out the metabolic load and toxicity in the GI system, which is where most of the serotonin is made. Most of the serotonin is made in your gut and then it's transported to your brain. So AYA has this.
- [108:10]
Tom Bilyeu
So weird.
- [108:12]
Dr. Dan Engel
It's pretty fascinating.
- [108:13]
Tom Bilyeu
So weird.
- [108:13]
Dr. Dan Engel
Michael Gershon wrote a book called the Second Brain, and it's all about the gut brain axis and that kind of like neurochemical highway. And so I may have a dual effect. It's working physiologically literally to repair the serotonergic system as well as GI systems. That's the hardware. It's also working on the software side, it's working on the trauma side, it's working on the psychology. It's working on like what that underlying inciting event was or the series of events on the anxiety spectrum. If PTSD is technically under an anxiety designation where the system is constantly hitting sympathetic overdrive because it's replaying a traumatic experience, I believe that the system is trying to come to resolution. That's why it's replaying it. Right. So that's just kind of what we do. We, we hit a challenge and we learn from it and we learn through and we grow ideally, kind of along with the incorporation of its lessons. I mean, that's what builds resilience. It's like the ability to adapt to challenge over time. And so if we're taking that kind of more like constitutional designation of anxiety spectrum disorders, you have OCD under there, you have PTSD under there. So if we're looking at medicines that are really good for that anxiety spectrum, mdma, particularly for ptsd, psilocybin is very good for ocd and even some Interesting.
- [109:51]
Tom Bilyeu
So psilocybin is the one that I micro dosed. I think it took a gram. That sound about right?
- [109:57]
Dr. Dan Engel
Probably 100 milligrams.
- [109:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. 0.1 grams, way smaller.
- [110:01]
Dr. Dan Engel
So, okay, a gram will start getting you into a threshold macro experience.
- [110:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, so I felt intoxicated, but I did not have any brightening of colors, no hallucinations, nothing. I literally felt like I was tipsy is the right way to describe it.
- [110:21]
Dr. Dan Engel
Could have been a gram, that was it. But typically micro dosing is sub threshold dosing, so you shouldn't really notice much. As on board.
- [110:29]
Tom Bilyeu
I kept increasing the dosage because I was like, I don't feel anything, I don't feel anything, I don't feel anything.
- [110:33]
Dr. Dan Engel
Okay.
- [110:34]
Tom Bilyeu
And so you don't really want, if
- [110:35]
Dr. Dan Engel
it's a micro protocol, you don't really want to notice that much is on board.
- [110:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. I felt like if there's no difference, like, even so take caffeine. Even though if you're a habituated user, like you at least notice if you don't do it. I noticed nothing. And so I'm a big Thai trader. So I, I got a capsule and was told, take the whole capsule. I was like that. So I took like a quarter capsule, nothing half capsule, nothing full capsule. Then I started to feel like, oh, okay, I feel pleasantly buzzed. But I felt like, well, this because I wanted it to make me more creative because this was during a phase I was writing a lot and so I was like, well, now I just feel like I'm drinking at work and I'm like, it's not making me feel more creative.
- [111:23]
Dr. Dan Engel
So 100 milligrams can make some people feel a little buzzed. The micro dose range for most people is somewhere between 75 milligrams and 200 milligrams.
- [111:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay.
- [111:36]
Dr. Dan Engel
So if you're sensitive and like you're really aware of your neurochemical and cognitive state and you notice that 100 milligrams is kind of like on board. And if it's one capsule, then that's probably 100 milligrams. Depends on the size of the capsule and the strain on psilocybin because they have different strengths. The micro dosing kind of regimen. This is Jim Fadiman's work and also Paul Stamets work. And Paul Stamets has a fascinating kind of history being resolved of his OCD after a heroic dose.
- [112:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Why? Why psilocybin in ocd? Do you know what area of the brain that's disrupting, turning on, turning off? I Don't know which.
- [112:16]
Dr. Dan Engel
That's still being researched kind of as we speak. It seems to be working on multiple different receptor profiles and multiple different areas of the brain. And it seems to also give enough of this kind of neuroplastic and ego plastic reset. Especially going through a threshold experience. He took way more than even a heroic dose, according to his report. Freaked out, crawled up into the top of a tree and kind of waited the night out and was really freaked out, but the next day or like very shortly thereafter, didn't have any stuttering. Interesting, right? Iboga is kind of like that. Ebola is a fascinating medicine because you can have people addicted to heroin decades long go through one treatment and they
- [113:03]
Tom Bilyeu
don't have withdrawal symptoms.
- [113:04]
Dr. Dan Engel
No withdrawal, no craving.
- [113:05]
Tom Bilyeu
So weird.
- [113:06]
Dr. Dan Engel
Fascinating.
- [113:07]
Tom Bilyeu
What possibly could be resetting? What? Yeah, you're gonna say that it's being studied, but I don't understand how you can knock out because people get violently ill.
- [113:16]
Dr. Dan Engel
Totally. It works. We don't know it works on so many different receptor profiles. It's the most complex psychedelic that we know of.
- [113:24]
Tom Bilyeu
What's it made from?
- [113:26]
Dr. Dan Engel
The iboga is the whole plant. Ibogaine is the chief alkaloid of that plant. Kind of like if you took mescaline out of peyote or mescaline out of San Pedro cactus. It's the chief alkaloids, the chief psychedelic alkaloid. And what the benefit of taking ibogaine out of iboga is that you can has a more specific dose range. It doesn't last quite as long and is therefore easier to use in the clinical setting to help somebody with severe addiction go through a detoxification. Iboga by itself can last anywhere from like 18 to 24 hours, even up to 36.
- [114:02]
Tom Bilyeu
When you did iboga, did you literally eat leaf bark?
- [114:06]
Dr. Dan Engel
They call it eating the wood. Yeah.
- [114:09]
Tom Bilyeu
So you masticated bark?
- [114:11]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah.
- [114:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
- [114:13]
Dr. Dan Engel
Okay, well, it's already ground up and you take it dry and shoot it with water. And take it dry and shoot it with water. Take it dry and shoot it with water.
- [114:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. So no wonder that that takes so long to then work through the system.
- [114:26]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, well, it can also take that long if you're taking the concentrated extract and encapsulated. It's the half life of the medicine. Interesting to your point. It does work a little slower when you're trying to when you have to absorb it from just dried bark, but not that much. You're talking about a couple hours over 18 to 36 hour kind of window. So it's a fraction of a increase but not much. Iboga is a long one. It's a long one. It's beautiful. It's an amazing medicine. It's a national treasure and cultural heritage in Gabon. And many of the local peoples, Gabonese people, will work with iboga because it's so well known. Kind of like if in the Amazon river basin, the majority of people working with ayahuasca or the majority of the people in northern Mexico working with peyote and with the huicholes. That was part of what was happening in this, like, what's known as the golden era, this kind of thousand year of peace in the northwest shoulder of South America, when so many people in that entire region were working with San Pedro cactus. So there are times in kind of human history where there might be an organized group of people working with a concentrated medicine culturally and in a community that has effect in that community ecosphere, not just individually, but how does the community work with medicine? And when we understand more of the background of traditional medicine, we realize that all medicine was also done in community, not in isolation. And so it's part of what we're still trying to rehabilitate in our current psychiatric system is to recognize that healing ideally doesn't happen in isolation. We're born to bond, and that the best and greatest healing happens in community. And so what does it look like when we start to bring these psychedelic therapies into community and group experience? It doesn't necessarily mean, like, everybody's healing has to happen in a shared room, but when we're going through a process, when we're experiencing the togetherness of brothers and sisters who are also going through a similar process, then the group field lifts becomes a healing container, like the rising tide lifts all boats. Everybody's going through healing process, and that level of communality and mutuality starts to be also its own therapeutic force.
- [117:09]
Tom Bilyeu
If you had somebody, let's say a world leader who was just hell bent on war, what drug would you want to give them?
- [117:22]
Dr. Dan Engel
First drug.
- [117:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, right out of the gate.
- [117:24]
Dr. Dan Engel
Putin. Yeah, mdma.
- [117:27]
Tom Bilyeu
That's the one.
- [117:28]
Dr. Dan Engel
Safest, Bonding, connection, love, appreciation, gratitude for life, ease, Togetherness. Yeah, just like, let's. Let's kind of round out the edge of that aggression. And usually that's from a place of scarcity or threat. You know, maybe that's stimulated from trauma. Like, let's just lace the space with love and build from there. As long as there's not a major contraindication. And. And there are contraindications to mdma. If somebody has a heart condition, or uncontrolled hypertension. Those are like the two biggest. That's not an exhaustive list at all. As long as the person does have contraindication and they're held in, you know, safe space with really good facilitation, it's kind of hard to screw up. MDMA therapy.
- [118:23]
Tom Bilyeu
It's very interesting. It's something I've long wanted to do with my wife. I think that that would be amazingly enjoyable. Yeah. Something I have to think about. So how do people, assuming that they live in a country like the US where this stuff is still illegal, how do people experience this in a way that doesn't end them in jail?
- [118:45]
Dr. Dan Engel
That's the million dollar question. And part of what we're doing right now in the education advocacy arena, which is just trying to drive public awareness so that we can demand that. It's a travesty that MDMA is languished in Schedule 1 designation. It doesn't belong there at all. Schedule 1 designation means there's no therapeutic potential and is highly addictive. Well, the therapeutic potential is evident. You can make a case that MDMA therapy is addictive. Cancel. You can make a case that MDMA is addictive. The effect can be addictive. Like people want to continue to chase that high. Okay, we'll put it in Schedule 2. At least make it prescriptive. Opiates are scheduled too. I mean, those are phenomenally addictive and killing a lot of people. So it's a travesty that MDMA is not yet available. It's been a 30 plus, 35 year campaign. And saludos. And major props to Rick Doblin and the entire MAPS organization for just holding the candle and vigil now. It's kind of sexy and a lot of people are excited and they're doing
- [119:56]
Tom Bilyeu
it since the 80s. That's crazy.
- [119:58]
Dr. Dan Engel
Crazy like 40 years. His campaign, Jesus and others around him. And now MDMA and psychedelic therapy is the sexiest thing in medicine. Not just psychiatry, but medicine in general. For good reason. Because its data is so good, its promise is, is valid for how it can help rewire and heal people's internal psyche and help us come back to a state of togetherness in our community so we can have more harmony amongst the people. And mdma, I would put in a level one medicine. There's a level two medicines, level three medicines. That's one way to think about it. You have synthetics, you have natural medicines. It's one way to think about it. And you have medicines that can go alongside MDMA therapy as well, and there's going to be more of the alchemy, not just singular medicine agents, but combination medicine agents. Right. Like ketamine and cannabis. Right now those are two legal medicines and some people are using them together already.
- [120:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. I tried ketamine and oxytocin.
- [121:01]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah. So again, that's a great combination.
- [121:06]
Tom Bilyeu
A just made me feel, again, a little bit drunk. So I'm not sure what I was supposed to feel and I certainly wasn't in a clinical setting. But again, it was one of those where it's like, if I'm going to do a drug, there better be like some real advantage.
- [121:20]
Dr. Dan Engel
Well, you have to. That could be a dose thing. If you don't take enough, then you're kind of sitting on the rim, so to speak.
- [121:26]
Tom Bilyeu
I was on the rim for sure.
- [121:27]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah. So if you take enough, you will have a threshold process, particularly with ketamine. You can't fight that one off. I mean, it's a surgical anesthetic. People, you get. You get enough on board, you're going to go to sleep. Now, if you wrap around a therapeutic process to that, and that can be laced with music, somatic therapy, guided visualization, talk therapy, or just you in the. In the process, ideally you have at least really good music because particularly with ketamine, it's a dissociative, so you really don't have your senses about you. And. And without some kind of input, it can just feel like you're just floating in space. And that can not be super helpful for some people, especially if it's their first time. So that's just an example of two medicines that are legal that are starting to be used together. So when MDMA and psilocybin become legal independently and individually, then there's going to be natural alchemy. And when do you work with both of those simultaneously? And when you work with them individually and there you get into the alchemy of kind of what you were describing about before, which is like, okay, you have somebody with depression, which is your go to medicine. And so that's where you get a history of the client's experience, what they're like, what they're going for. You get kind of a sense of which medicine to work with, at which dose. You don't want them sitting on the rim. So what's their metabolic profile, what's their psychic structure, what's their level of guarding? There are medicines that you can shake off, so to speak, particularly if it doesn't feel like a safe environment. But if you give enough Ketamine, you're going to go to sleep. If you give enough five meo, you're going to be out of your body. Some people start with five MEO from the snoring desert toe. That's a level three medicine, at least in my book. You don't start there.
- [123:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, what happens if You Low Dose
- [123:17]
Dr. Dan Engel
5 Mao, you have a pleasant experience. It'll be kind of like effervescent, but it won't be necessarily a crossover. And if you're crossover, there's a reason that 5me was called the God molecule. You tend to cross over and you're back to the source code, whatever that source code is and wherever it came from. But you start seeing that fractal landscape connecting the entire holosphere, multi universe kind of fractality origination. And for some people, that's a really scary experience to have your consciousness just shot out of your body kind of immediately because that's what 5MEO will do when it's smoked. There are other ways to work with 5 Meo that don't come on people.
- [124:03]
Tom Bilyeu
When people are doing 5 Meo, are they yelling and screaming like, what's it take me in the room?
- [124:08]
Dr. Dan Engel
That kind of depends as well. Especially if a person hasn't had any altered state experience and they start with five MEO and they start with a threshold crossover dose of five meo. That's super freaky for the majority of people. You're in your body, you have no experience with altered states and all of a sudden your consciousness is way outside of your body. You don't know where it is. That's pretty freaky. So most people are gonna have a bit of a oh, shit moment.
- [124:35]
Tom Bilyeu
What's interesting to me is that one is very time constrained because it only lasts like 15 minutes. Right?
- [124:39]
Commercial Narrator
Right.
- [124:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. See, that's interesting. It's one of those, like, do I want the intensity of that? But at least if I hate it, it's only 15 minutes long.
- [124:49]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah, but it feels like 15 lifetimes.
- [124:52]
Tom Bilyeu
That's not very helpful because time's so
- [124:55]
Dr. Dan Engel
irrelevant when you're back to the source code, you're out of your body. Like that's a no time space.
- [125:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Is it useful in the ways like other ones give you these keen insights into yourself? Does going back to the source code just seeing sort of fractal visualizations are people coming back with, oh, I understand
- [125:13]
Dr. Dan Engel
myself better now or oftentimes yes, it's helpful even if people don't exactly know why.
- [125:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Have you had experience with it?
- [125:21]
Dr. Dan Engel
Yeah.
- [125:21]
Tom Bilyeu
What was your takeaway?
- [125:24]
Dr. Dan Engel
It was beautiful. I don't like the effect of my consciousness getting so quickly shot out of my body. It feels a little too abrupt, too fast. I've had other five MEO forms that were not the Sonoran Desert Toad, like Vilka.
- [125:41]
Tom Bilyeu
What are you saying? Snort and desert toad.
- [125:43]
Dr. Dan Engel
Sonor. Sorry. Good question. So Noran, Sonoran, like the Sonoran Desert.
- [125:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Got it.
- [125:49]
Dr. Dan Engel
That's where the toad comes from. So it's called the Sonoran Desert Toad, not the Snorting Desert Toad. Got it. Thank you. And that's oftentimes inhaled or vaporized because of the secretion that it expresses. Once dried, you can vaporize that and smoke it. Unfortunately, there have been a number of videos showing how to milk the toad. And now you've just got novice people fucking around with toads and it's horrible. They're sentient being there. There's, it's, it's like just random people going to the peyote fields and picking all the peyote that it grows really slow. It's already endangered. So it's really important to just have class, have respect. Many of these medicines grow really slow. We over harvested the global source of iboga in a very short time. In like a 10 year window, 90% of the iboga was harvested. And it takes like 20 plus years to propagate to like its fullness. And so all that's harvested without replenishing. Ayahuasca grows slow, peyote grows slow, iboga grows slow. And we need to be mindful of the natural medicines. And so because of that there's a, there's a supply issue with the natural medicines. You can make a good case for going to the synthetics because you produce them in a lab. Psilocybin is easy to propagate. Mushrooms just grow pretty readily. But you can make a good case for other than psilocybin. Let's use the synthetics because now you, you solve the supply chain issue with 5MEO because it, it happens so fast, it can be a bit disruptive. But there, there are other forms of, for example, insufflating a seed called vilca or Yopo from South America. They, they have a really similar profile to the fava meal from the toad because you're snorting a powder as opposed to inhaling a vapor. It's a slower onset and a longer experience, like a 45 minute experience. So it comes on slower, has a really similar kind of fractal profile. Historically, the communities working with vilca also worked with San Pedro the cactus. It's a very different medicine. 10 to 12 hours versus Vilca, like 45 minutes. And they would use that to cross the veils and literally, like black panther with the heart medicine or the purple flower medicine, when I forget what they call it, he crosses over and goes to have a conversation with his ancestors, with his dad, literally. That's what they were using vilca for in the catacombs in Chavin. So you have this kind of like cultural usage and historical uses of these different medicines. For me, 5 Meo was beautiful in that it felt like a return to kind of like where we all come from. And that was uplifting. I didn't get any huge messages like I will typically get with something like ayahuasca or iboga. And it's similar to ketamine and how ketamine was first appreciated as a psychotherapeutic agent when ketamine was used in the 70s and 80s as a surgical anesthetic. Many surgeons and their patients with chronic severe depression who went under surgical anesthesia with ketamine oftentimes came out of anesthesia feeling lighter and better.
- [129:31]
Tom Bilyeu
That's really interesting.
- [129:32]
Dr. Dan Engel
Like their depression had kind of lifted a bit or was at least interrupted without any psychotherapy. Without they were asleep and woke up and felt better.
- [129:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I was wondering that with ayahuasca, if there's a cleansing thing that it's doing literal cleansing in the gut or something.
- [129:49]
Dr. Dan Engel
Totally.
- [129:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Would it still be beneficial if you weren't conscious for the intervention? Obviously not as beneficial because you're not going to take away the insights.
- [129:58]
Dr. Dan Engel
That's a really good point, because with ayahuasca, there is benefit to just taking the vine. So ayahuasca is a combination of two plants, the bark and the leaf. The bark of the banisteri abscess capi, the leaf of the charkruna viridis. And so the chakruna is the dmt. The vine is what inhibits the breakdown of the dmt. And so take the dmt, take the trikruna out and work with the vine itself, which is legal. To just work with ayahuasca, just the vine, it is beneficial. There is a cleansing effect that happens in the GI system, but there's also a neurochemical effect because that ayahuasca works as what's called the maoi, monoamine oxidase inhibitor. So it inhibits the breakdown of the catecholamines and their neurotransmitters in the brain. It works exactly like the first generation of antidepressants that came on the market. So you have this physiologic kind of hardware issue at play that is having a neurochemical effect. And to your point, when you change your neurochemistry, you change your feeling tone, you change your worldview, change in neurology, you change your psychology. Well it also works in the other way around. When you change your psychology, you change your neurology. That's what hap you were talking about before is like you just keep coming back to re referencing meaning. That's changing your psychology. That's staying in this kind of free will choice. We get the opportunity to choose our worldview, whatever that worldview is that makes the most sense of us, that makes us have some relevance of understanding this crazy monkey suit experience. We just keep coming back to that, just keep coming back to meaning. And that will change our stress hormones that will affect our neurobiology and our neurochemistry. So we get to play it both ways. And the medicine work often happens simultaneously. That's one of the reasons I'm just so fascinated with medicine work in general is it affects both our neurology hardware and our psychology software simultaneously. And depending on the person, depending on medicine, it may be more neurology. Like you put somebody to sleep with ketamine, they wake up feeling better. You can make a good point that that's really just hardware that's just affecting neurochemistry. And it might be the NMDA receptors, it might be that ketamine works as like a neurologic anti inflammatory. You're kind of decongesting the glymphatic nervous system, which is where kind of like body has a lymphatic system, brain has a glymphatic system. So you oftentimes, particularly after TBI and trauma, traumatic brain injury and trauma, you hold inflammation in the like cerebral structure. Ketamine seems to relieve that. So you, anytime you relieve inflammation, you're going to feel better. That's hardware. And when people feel better now they have a little bit more space, maybe they can actually pick up a new habit and then propagate that new habit. Because they're not just so stuck in like the suffering. Maybe they have more understanding about the pain, but less suffering. 5 Meo is kind of similar, at least in my belief system. You have somebody that goes through a transpersonal experience like straight back to source. Oftentimes they come back. Some people don't even remember what happened. I have had five MEO experiences with the toad. I didn't remember exactly what happened. It just felt like, it was like I could have been there for days, but I came back feeling lighter. My initial kind of like, that's way too fast, kind of like a slingshot, like, here's my consciousness. And then like, you know, as it finally floats back down, I feel better. My 5. I haven't worked or experienced 5 Meo that often because that feels too fast. But for me, if I'm going to understand the different medicines and understand how they work in association with one another and when to use them, like, I was the medical director of an ibogaine center in Mexico for about a year, and we would work with addicts that were addicted to a variety of different substances, but primarily opiates and what like what we were talking about with iboga before. And we'd have people addicted to pain medications or Heroin daily for 10 plus years, come in with one Ibogaine session done, and then four days, three, four days later, we would offer them five Meo from the Toad. So it's interesting how those two work really well together because ibogaine kind of clears the slate of all the addictive neurochemistry and it kind of resets the the system and then you can rebuild a connection to source, whatever we language source to be with 5MEO. I wouldn't recommend that for the average person outside of a controlled setting at all. But it was amazing to see in a controlled setting where it was legal, the efficacy of those two done in a really concerted way, thoughtful way. So then we get into the alchemy again, these different medicines, like we have level one medicines, what I would say, cannabis, ketamine, mdma, lsd, psilocybin, level two medicines, ayahuasca, peyote, San Pedro, level three medicines, five MEO ebolga. And so when we look at these different medicines, that's not an exhaustive list at all. But say, like those are the top 10 or so being researched. How do we know which one to work with, which person at which time? Because that I just gave you an example of person maybe never had a psychedelic experience. And we went to both of the level three medicines straight away. You have to do that carefully. It's kind of like going in the gym and just trying to get another squat rack at £300 without doing stretching or getting your form right, or even be able to do £100. So there's kind of a progression. And so this is where the alchemy and this is where the research and this is where the field's Growing now into that direction is recognizing the power of these medicines. Who's safe and ready to work with them? How do you prepare them really well to get ready for that experience? How do you try and optimize the efficacy of the experience itself? Excellent facilitation, healing environment, understanding the need for self regulation, preparation, work, setting, intentions and then integration on the other side. How do you use it? How do you take that gold, use that clarity, use that experience and make it workable and effective for life moving forward.
- [136:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I love it. Man, this has been so interesting. Where can people follow you?
- [136:46]
Dr. Dan Engel
There's a couple of different websites and things I'm up to, but the thing that kind of is the most apropos to our conversation because it's what we opened with and it's what we just closed with is access to care. Where can people start working with medicines in a legal fashion that are available? Well, we're, we're doing our job as best we can to educate and advocate for people's use of the medicine. And we want to recognize that cost and a person's ability to pay should not be the primary barrier to entry. Like with people dying on the streets, people need the medicines that are available. So ketamine is the one that's available now. MDMA and psilocybin will become available shortly. I would direct people to our nonprofit that's helping to scholarship people that would benefit from medicine work who are cleared to not have contraindications and are ready for treatment. We work with scholarshiping them for therapy towards trained, registered and vetted providers in the country. That organization is called thank you Life and it was essentially kind of the complement to the book Dose of Hope because I looked at the two things that, you know your opening question, if I had three minutes with my sister it'd be like okay, there is hope. There are tools that can support the healing of a severe experience of suffering. And we know that price and cost should not be a barrier to entry. So there are avenues to support people to access those treatments. So I wrote with co author Dose of Hope and wanted to point people to a system and a non profit that's goal is to try and remove that barrier to entry being caused. And that's thank you Life. So thank you life.org is the thing that I'm kind of most championing these days. Otherwise Dr. Dan Ingle and a variety of other things that are in the hopper. Love it.
- [139:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Awesome guys. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.