#1294 - Jamie Metzl

Joe Rogan (0:03)

Boom, and we're live. Hello, sir, how are you?

Jamie Metzl (0:05)

I'm great, how are you?

Joe Rogan (0:06)

You look great.

Jamie Metzl (0:07)

Thanks.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

What? You were eating chocolate when you got here, and you told me that you are a cacao shaman, and I said those are strong words.

Jamie Metzl (0:13)

They are.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

What does that mean?

Jamie Metzl (0:15)

So I was in Berlin last year giving a talk at a tech conference, and somebody invited me to a sacred cacao ceremony. Never heard of it, and I thought, wow, that sounds awesome. I love chocolate.

I went, it was so wonderful, and at the end, they were talking about these people, these great cacao shamans. And I thought, what is that? I gotta be one of those. And so I came back, I looked for certification. There wasn't certification, I self-declared.

And then I started doing cacao ceremonies in New York, and I have hundreds of people who come. It's really wonderful, and it's exciting.

Joe Rogan (0:45)

Like if you wanna be a doctor, you gotta go to medical school, right? You wanna be a comedian, you gotta become a professional, you gotta put in your time.

Jamie Metzl (0:51)

Cacao shamans just show up, it's like putting up a shingle. Hey, I'm a cacao shaman. If anybody shows up and they have a good time, then you're real.

Joe Rogan (0:57)

Now, how much do you need to know about cacao, like the nutritional properties of it?

Jamie Metzl (1:02)

Cacao is amazing.

Joe Rogan (1:03)

It's great stuff.

Jamie Metzl (1:04)

It's incredible. And so definitely cacao and people have been using it ceremonially for about 5,000 years.

So it's incredible.

Chocolate makes people happy. It helps your brain function, your circulation. There's all these kinds of incredible things. But in the ceremonies that I do, I have two key messages.

One is you are the drug. I mean, we all take, people take drugs, people take ayahuasca and psilocybin, all these kinds of things. But I also think that we have, for the things that we take drugs for, this kind of release and happiness and joy, we have those things inside of us and we just kind of get out of our way. We can experience them. And the second thing is, I believe that there are no, I say this in my ceremonies, there's no such thing as sacred cacao or sacred plants or sacred mountains or sacred people if we don't treat life with sacredness. But if we recognize that everything is sacred, then we infuse life with sacredness and meaning. And that's, anyway, that's why I do it. It's a lot of fun.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

That's very interesting from a guy who specializes essentially in manipulating life.

Jamie Metzl (2:05)

Well, you know, we have manipulated life as humans for a very, very long time.

Joe Rogan (2:11)

Oh, for sure. But it's interesting. You know, the idea of things being sacred, but your specialty is manipulating genetics, right?

Jamie Metzl (2:18)

Yeah, well, so that is this strange moment that we're in because for about 3.8 billion years, our species has evolved by this set of principles we call Darwinian evolution, random mutation and natural selection, and it's brought us here. We used to be single cell organisms and now look at us.

And there's been a lot of magic in that process and there still is, but we humans are deciphering some of that magic. We are looking under the hood of what it means to be human and we are increasingly going to have the ability to manipulate all of life, including our own.

Joe Rogan (2:51)

Yeah, that is very unnerving to a lot of people. It's uncomfortable and it's scary.

Jamie Metzl (2:58)

Yeah, it is.

Joe Rogan (2:59)

They like things the way they are. Jamie, I'd like to stay the way I am.

Jamie Metzl (3:03)

We always think that.

Joe Rogan (3:04)

Why do we always think that?

Jamie Metzl (3:05)

Because there's a built in conservatism in our brains.

And yet we live these lives that are entirely dependent on these radical changes that our ancestors have created. I mean, we didn't find this building or agriculture or medicine in nature. We built all those things. Then everybody gets a new baseline when you're born. And you think, well, I want organic corn. I want whatever. But all these things are creation. We live in an entirely created world and our ability to manipulate and change that world is always growing. And I think we need to recognize that, but being afraid is okay and being excited is okay and we need to find the right balance between those two emotions.