The Human Upgrade
Biohacking host Dave Asprey and Matt trade ideas at a fast clip, starting with whether the scientific or the spiritual side of psychedelics would win an arm-wrestling match. Matt makes a both/and case for medical, decriminalized, and religious access coexisting.
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Episode summary
On The Human Upgrade, biohacking host Dave Asprey and Matt trade ideas at a fast clip, opening with whether the scientific or the spiritual side of psychedelics would win an arm-wrestling match. Matt gives the nod to spirit, noting that the money sits with science and pharma while quiet ceremonial practice has continued for thousands of years through persecution. His larger point is a both/and, that the wave of university research has shifted the culture and that medical, decriminalized, and religious access all need to coexist. Asked whether he worries about Big Pharma moving in, he keeps an abundance frame, wanting science, spirit, and personal choice to sit side by side rather than compete.
A good stretch concerns discernment. When Dave describes people targeting wealthy clients and, as he puts it, installing programming, Matt offers a way to tell a guide who holds space from one who inserts an agenda, asking who they are, what they believe, what they will say or play during a session, and whether there will be a sales pitch on the other side. He flags the phrase tell me what to do as a quiet surrender of agency, warning that handing your judgment to a guru or healer can leave you as lost as before. In his own work, he says, the language is deliberate, that facilitators are not gurus or healers and cannot assign meaning for anyone, since the learning belongs to the person.
Because Dave works across many altered-state tools, the two land on pluralism, the idea that breathwork, neurofeedback, fasting, and the medicines are different paths up the same mountain, and that the right one is whatever feels true to the person. Matt keeps returning to remembering rather than becoming, the sense that these experiences help a person recall who they already are. He frames the present moment as a kind of entheogenic reformation, comparing it to Martin Luther's shift from being told to reading, and now to a wish to feel directly, to know something firsthand instead of believing what one has been told.
On the practical side, Matt and Dave are pointed about ketamine, agreeing that daily dosing ramped up over weeks looks less like care and more like a path to addiction, with real physical harm. Matt notes that nature has a built-in governor, since tolerance builds so fast that a daily dose of psilocybin would simply stop working. Asked to pick one medicine, he chooses psilocybin for how widely it can meet people, while being candid about the caveats, that it can be taken alongside antidepressants but not always, and that serotonin syndrome is a real if uncommon risk. He frames the goal throughout as reducing risk, while refusing to call anything safe, points to the harm comparisons from David Nutt and others, and argues that anyone working with these tools owes it to their clients to understand firsthand what they actually do.