Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Brian Murevescu, author of The Immortality Key,

00:00:05.520 | The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, a book that reconstructs the forgotten

00:00:10.400 | history of psychedelics in the development of Western civilization. To support this podcast,

00:00:16.400 | please check out our sponsors, Insight Tracker, GiveWell, NI, Indeed, and Masterclass. Their

00:00:24.160 | links are in the description. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation

00:00:30.480 | with Brian Murevescu. Who or what do you think God is? How has our conception maybe put another

00:00:39.440 | way of God changed throughout history? We're starting with an easy one, Lex. Yep.

00:00:46.720 | So what is God? Well, God is a thought. God is an idea, but its reference is to that which is

00:00:55.120 | beyond thinking, beyond our ability to even conceive, beyond the categories of being and

00:01:02.320 | non-being. So how do we talk about that? To talk about it is almost to get it wrong, right? So

00:01:07.760 | Joe Campbell famously said that any God that is not transparent to transcendence is like an

00:01:14.160 | idolatry because it's just a mental construct, and it can't possibly speak to the incomprehensible.

00:01:20.320 | So we use poetic language. We say the being of beings, the infinite life energy of the universe,

00:01:28.240 | the mystery of transcendence, boundless life, unqualified isness. But it doesn't quite get

00:01:34.960 | to the point. I think that if there's any great insight from mysticism, it's that you and I

00:01:41.520 | participate with God in a very real way, Lex Friedman, here in Austin, Texas. That in the here

00:01:48.240 | and now, to touch that eternal principle, another way to refer to God, to touch that eternal principle

00:01:54.160 | within ourselves is to participate with divinity in some way. So not an external force, but that

00:02:02.400 | divine sense within. So there's some aspect in which God is a part of us. So one, it's a thing

00:02:07.600 | we can't describe. It represents all of the mystery around us. It's outside our ability

00:02:13.440 | to comprehend. And at the same time, it's somehow the thing that's inside of us also.

00:02:18.640 | The ultimate paradox. MacThiel of Magdeburg, 13th century German mystic, maybe the first German

00:02:24.000 | mystic, says that the day of her spiritual awakening was the day that she saw and knew

00:02:30.960 | that she saw God in all things, and all things in God. And so we can say this, by the way,

00:02:36.160 | without apology or lightweight theology or vapid speculation or even heresy, we can talk about this,

00:02:45.040 | including within the Abrahamic faiths. The mystical core of these faiths all talk about

00:02:49.520 | the encounter of divinity within. That's what I explore in the immortality key, this notion

00:02:55.840 | of techniques, archaic techniques in some cases, of ecstasy that allow that experience of the

00:03:03.200 | eternal principle to actually rise up in our consciousness when we're still here as flesh

00:03:08.080 | and blood beings. There's some sense in which our conception of God, though, is conjured up by

00:03:16.640 | our own mind. And so aren't we creating God? Like, aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of

00:03:26.880 | God? Like, if we are, like when we talk about God, aren't we playing with ideas that are created by

00:03:34.880 | our mind, and thereby we are the creator, not God? This is a very kind of cyclical question, but

00:03:44.880 | in some sense I mean that if God is the thing that represents the mystery all around us,

00:03:54.720 | contrast that with our conception of God, the way we talk about him, is more a creation of our

00:04:00.960 | minds. It's not the mystery, it's our struggle to comprehend the mystery. And therefore we're

00:04:06.800 | creating the God in terms of the God that we're talking about in this conversation or in general,

00:04:11.600 | if that makes any sense. - It makes no sense whatsoever.

00:04:14.880 | - Great, this is wonderful. - But this is the eternal mystery.

00:04:22.400 | This is why it's so difficult to talk about, and yet it could be the very center of our beings.

00:04:27.600 | You know, the Upanishads speak about us as the creators, about us as gods. It's a very

00:04:34.960 | different creation myth, but the god of the Upanishads in this great verse talks about

00:04:40.160 | pouring themselves into creation. "Indeed, I have become this creation," says God. And there's a

00:04:48.400 | great line, "Verily, he or she who knows this becomes in this creation a creator." So yeah,

00:04:57.040 | I mean just our ability to engage in mentation, our ability to think about this stuff is partly

00:05:03.760 | our divine nature. This is what the humanists were talking about in the Renaissance, by the way.

00:05:08.480 | And that it's not so much learning, putting dots together, having arguments with each other over

00:05:16.320 | learned books. It's a process of unlearning, is what some of the mystical traditions talk about.

00:05:21.680 | Unlearning all these thoughts, emotions, traumas, and experiences that have gone into the false

00:05:28.000 | construction of our false self, that behind all these layers, like peeling back the onion,

00:05:32.800 | is a part of us that once you can identify that, begins to look a little bit different.

00:05:40.800 | In other words, it's one thing to foster a relationship with God. It's a very different

00:05:46.880 | thing to identify as God. And I mean that quite literally, without being heretical. You can find

00:05:53.920 | this in the mystery traditions. - Can you expand on this? You mean a human being can embody God?

00:06:01.760 | - That is textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any Christian mystic.

00:06:11.120 | But you can find it in the mystical tradition of Islam and Judaism as well. So Rumi, for example,

00:06:18.000 | the great Sufi mystic, talks about if you could get rid of yourself, just get rid of yourself just

00:06:26.400 | once, the secret of secrets would open to you. That the face of the unknown would appear on the

00:06:32.480 | perception of your consciousness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern-day contemporary mystic,

00:06:38.800 | talks about, because this stuff does continue, there's a continuity to it. - The poetry here

00:06:42.800 | is incredible. - So well, listen to Rabbi Kushner. He says that the emptying of selfhood

00:06:49.120 | allows the soul to attach to true reality. And in Kabbalism, the true reality is what's called

00:06:56.400 | the divine nothingness, ayin. And so I like the adage that atheists and mystics both essentially

00:07:03.680 | believe in nothing, except that the mystics spell it with a capital N, the divine nothing.

00:07:10.240 | And then I'll give you Meister Eckhart, another medieval Christian mystic. He says that

00:07:15.760 | if you could not yourself, right? The same concept, if you could not yourself for just an instant,

00:07:22.400 | indeed, I say less than an instant, you would possess all. So again, you're seeing the same

00:07:27.440 | thing in Sufism, Kabbalism, Christian mysticism. The way to identify with the divine is to peel

00:07:33.600 | back these layers and attempt to discover pure awareness. - If we look at the universe from a

00:07:39.600 | physics perspective, or, you know, I'm a computer science person, so if the universe is a computer,

00:07:46.800 | there's some sense that God, the creator of the universe, or just the computer itself,

00:07:55.600 | doesn't know what the heck is gonna happen. He just kind of creates some basic rules and runs

00:08:01.120 | the thing. So there is some element in which you can conceive of humans or conscious beings or

00:08:08.400 | intelligent beings as a tool that the creator uses to understand itself, himself. Do you think that's

00:08:19.360 | a perspective that we could, or is useful to take on God, that is basically the universe created

00:08:28.960 | humans to understand itself? He doesn't actually know the full thing. He needs the human brains

00:08:36.160 | to figure out the puzzle. So that's in contrasting to the unlearning, to the getting out of the way

00:08:41.360 | that we've talked about. It's more like, no, we need the humans to figure out this puzzle.

00:08:45.760 | - Well, we have no answers to this, which is why philosophers still have jobs,

00:08:50.560 | if they have jobs at all. But I mean, so the physicists take a look at this.

00:08:54.960 | Have you seen the article that came out, I think it was this month, in the Journal of Cosmology and

00:08:59.280 | Astroparticle Physics, Robert Lanza, the biocentrism theory, the idea that the universe comes

00:09:05.440 | into being through our observation, right? The whole, the God equation. So not just in quantum

00:09:10.480 | mechanics, but in general relativity, the idea that we make the universe moment by moment, which

00:09:15.920 | is kind of mind-blowing, gets into ideas of simulation. Okay, so that's how the physicists,

00:09:21.600 | at least some of them, might look at it. You could also look back to the medieval Christian mystics.

00:09:26.080 | Meister Eckhart, once again, says that the eye with which I see God is the same eye that sees me,

00:09:34.400 | right? So one sight, one knowledge, one love. Another mind-blowing concept. But this is why

00:09:42.320 | the arts and poetry and music are so important, because although I love astroparticle physics,

00:09:47.280 | it's another to kind of hear this, the same message across time.

00:09:51.840 | Yeah, the simulation thing. I was actually looking this morning at video games, just the statistics

00:09:58.800 | on video games, and I saw that the two top video games in terms of hours played is Fortnite and

00:10:05.920 | World of Warcraft. And I saw that it's 140 billion hours, billion hours have been played at those

00:10:13.600 | games. - That's a lot of video games.

00:10:17.760 | - Yeah, but that's very sophisticated worlds being created, especially in the World of Warcraft.

00:10:24.080 | It's a massive online role-playing game. So you have these characters that are together,

00:10:29.600 | sort of creating a world, but they in themselves are also developing. They have all these items

00:10:34.640 | and they're growing, like they're little humans. Like there's complicated societies that are

00:10:38.560 | formed, they have goals, they're striving and so on. And we're creating a universe within our

00:10:43.520 | universe. And for now, it's a basic sort of constraint version of our more richer earth-like

00:10:52.320 | civilization. But it's conceivable that we are this thing on earth is a kind of video game that

00:11:00.880 | somebody else is playing. You can see sort of video games upon video games being created.

00:11:07.920 | And this is something I think a lot about, not from a philosophical perspective, but practically

00:11:13.040 | how fun does this video game have to be for us to let go of the silly pursuits in this

00:11:20.080 | meat space that we live in and fully just stay in WoW, stay in World of Warcraft,

00:11:26.240 | stay in the video game for full time. So I think about that from an engineering perspective,

00:11:31.440 | like is there going to be a time when this video game is actual real life for us? And then the

00:11:38.800 | creatures inside the video game, they'll be just borrowing our consciousness sort of to ground

00:11:45.440 | themselves, will refer to us as the gods, right? Like, won't we become the gods? This conversation

00:11:54.880 | is not going how I expected, but I think about this a lot from, you know, cause I love video games

00:12:00.400 | and I wonder more and more of us, especially in COVID times are living in the digital world.

00:12:05.280 | You could think about Twitter and all those kinds of things. You could think about clubhouse people

00:12:09.520 | using just voices to communicate little icons sort of in a digital space. You could see more and more

00:12:15.040 | will be moving in the digital space and let go of this physical space. And then the remnants

00:12:21.840 | of the ancients that created the video games that nobody centuries from now will even remember,

00:12:29.200 | those will be the gods and then there'll be gods upon gods being created. This is the kind of stuff

00:12:34.560 | I think about, but is that any at all useful to you to this thought experiment of a simulation,

00:12:40.880 | basically the fabric of our reality, how did it come to be, what is running this thing? Is that

00:12:46.000 | useful or is it ultimately the project of understanding God of understanding myth is

00:12:53.760 | the project that centers on the human, on the human mind for you? We seem to be at the center

00:13:01.520 | of this divine dance, which sounds awfully anthropocentric, but the ancients thought

00:13:07.200 | about this too. I mean, the concept in Sanskrit of Leela, that the point behind existence is this

00:13:13.200 | play, right? It's ultimately playful, this divine dance. It gets awfully complicated in the Gnostic

00:13:19.920 | and Neoplatonic schools, these chains of being from Godhead down to us, right? Some invisible,

00:13:28.320 | right? And we're going to get into Terence McKenna territory later on, but we can start now

00:13:33.440 | by talking about discarded entities and archons and aliens and archetypes. I mean,

00:13:38.560 | there is a world where Terence McKenna does meet Plato and Gnosticism quite kindly, and that's in

00:13:46.080 | this invisible college, right? The invisible world with which we seem to have some kind of symbiosis

00:13:53.360 | that has a higher intent, maybe even a purpose or a plan in mind for us. So, I mean, these ideas

00:14:00.640 | come across when you've had a heroic dose of mushrooms. They also pop up in the ancient

00:14:05.120 | philosophical literature, this idea of archons who, you know, the puppet masters controlling

00:14:10.880 | us flesh and blood beings. It's all a cosmic dance, and there are no answers to this.

00:14:17.200 | - First, who are the archons? And second, what is this world where Terence McKenna meets Plato?

00:14:21.440 | Do you mean in the space of ideas, or are we talking about some kind of world that connects

00:14:26.400 | all of consciousness to all of human history? - I think through different techniques, it is,

00:14:30.560 | you know, I think a lot about, I think Gordon Wasson is the meeting point of the two. So,

00:14:34.400 | Gordon Wasson, who I do talk about in the book, was this JP Morgan banker turned ethnomycologist,

00:14:41.120 | and he's largely credited with the rediscovery of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, which kind

00:14:47.120 | of gave rise to the pop psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. He visited Maria Sabina down in Mexico.

00:14:53.920 | In his wake went Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Stones, and everybody else.

00:14:57.440 | And the way he describes his psilocybin experience is a bit strange because he thinks of Plato,

00:15:03.920 | right? And he says that, you know, whereas our ordinary reality is kind of this imperfect

00:15:09.840 | view of things, Gordon Wasson felt that on mushrooms, he was spying the archetypes.

00:15:15.440 | And he talks about Plato, and he writes about the archetypes in this famous article that's

00:15:19.680 | released in 1957 in Life magazine. And so, a well-read individual from the mid-20th century

00:15:26.400 | has his premier psychedelic experience, and out comes Plato because what he was witnessing was

00:15:32.640 | so sharp, so brilliant, so detailed, in some sense more real than real, this noetic sense

00:15:39.440 | that William James talks about. That when you confront something more real than real,

00:15:44.400 | these discarnate entities, these images, these visionary motifs, you're tempted to believe that

00:15:51.520 | you've tapped into the truest nature and the underlying structure of the cosmos. And that's

00:15:56.720 | difficult to escape from, whether you're Plato or Terence McKenna or Gordon Wasson caught in between.

00:16:02.160 | Can we talk about this, being in touch with something that is more real than real?

00:16:06.720 | And let's just go straight there to McKenna before we return to the bigger picture.

00:16:11.520 | So, he's talked about the, what is it, self-healing machine elves?

00:16:15.520 | Self-transforming.

00:16:17.120 | Self-transforming machine elves during his DMT travels. And I just talked to Rick Doblin,

00:16:25.120 | who also had different travels through this hyperspace.

00:16:30.560 | But they all seem to be traveling on the same spaceship, just to different locations.

00:16:34.880 | And there is a sense in which they seem to be traveling through whatever, I don't know if it's

00:16:40.720 | through space-time or something else, to meet something that is more real than real.

00:16:45.600 | What can you say about this DMT experience, about Terence McKenna, about the poetry he used,

00:16:51.680 | but maybe more specifically about this place that they seem to all travel to?

00:16:57.040 | So, the big question is, is it real? Is it really more real than real? The ancient philosophers

00:17:01.760 | were asking the same question, and their means of attempting to answer that was by dying.

00:17:06.960 | So, if you ask Plato the definition of philosophy, he will say that

00:17:10.960 | to practice it in the right way is to practice dying and being dead. And many people describe

00:17:18.720 | the psychedelic experience in sort of near-death experience terms. And the encountering of all

00:17:24.240 | this visual imagery tends to be something that is often described as more real than real.

00:17:29.920 | So, how does Terence talk about this? So, I was just listening to the trilogues, which folks

00:17:34.640 | should look up. Somewhere between 1989 and 1990, Terence sits down with his friends,

00:17:41.440 | Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake at Esalen, and they're trying to figure out the meaning of these

00:17:48.080 | discarnate entities and these non-human intelligences. And Terence develops a taxonomy

00:17:53.920 | for how to analyze this. And he says that number one, they're either

00:17:58.240 | semi-physical but kind of elusive. So, think of the Bigfoot or the Yeti or things like this,

00:18:05.760 | beings that exist somewhere between mythology and zoology, which isn't really appropriate here.

00:18:13.120 | So, option number two, he says is the mental... You're dropping so many good lines. It's so good.

00:18:21.040 | Okay, I apologize. Somewhere between mythology and zoology.

00:18:26.000 | This is all Terence McKenna. I take no credit for this.

00:18:28.960 | But you're combining, you're like, Jimi Hendrix only used the blue scale, but he still created

00:18:36.320 | something new in the music he played. Anyway, go ahead.

00:18:39.200 | Well, we're going into Mixolydian right now. So, option number two, and this is what Terence calls

00:18:48.080 | sort of the mentalist reductionist approach. And this is pure McKenna poetry. He says that

00:18:54.480 | these beings could be autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped

00:19:01.760 | the controlling power of the ego. So, in Jungian senses, these would just be pure projections.

00:19:08.720 | The projections of schizophrenics in some cases. So, they're essentially unreal.

00:19:12.720 | And the third option, the most tantalizing, is that they're both non-physical, but autonomous.

00:19:18.960 | In other words, they actually exist in some kind of real place, in some kind of real space,

00:19:24.800 | and that we can have Congress with them. There is communication. He talks about the whisperings of

00:19:30.320 | the demon artificers, and that it's just possible that our meetings with these beings have coaxed

00:19:36.960 | the human species into self-expression in a very real way. That at different times in history,

00:19:43.520 | our relationships with these semi-autonomous beings may actually guide the species.

00:19:49.360 | Now, this is high speculation, and Terence and Ralph and Rupert wind up talking about the early

00:19:57.360 | modern period and the scientific enlightenment, and that even someone like Descartes reports a

00:20:02.800 | dream in which he came face to face with an angel who said that the conquest of nature

00:20:08.160 | is to be achieved through measure and number. So, even the hard-minded materialist like Descartes

00:20:16.560 | is confronting these discarnate entities. John Dee in the 16th century, the high magician

00:20:22.320 | of the Elizabethan court, he reports decades worth of what we would say is extraterrestrial

00:20:29.440 | communication or interdimensional communication. And you can find instances of this throughout

00:20:36.400 | history, including among the pre-Socratics. And Peter Kingsley writes quite a bit about this,

00:20:41.680 | but I'll save that until your next question. - Well, first of all, we don't seem to understand

00:20:46.880 | from where intelligence came from. We don't understand from where life came from on Earth,

00:20:51.520 | but that we can kind of intuit, 'cause it's in the space of chemistry and biology,

00:20:55.840 | you have good theories about the origins of life on Earth, but the origins of intelligent life,

00:21:00.240 | that is a giant mystery. And there's some sense in which, I mean, I don't know if you know the

00:21:07.680 | movie "2001 Space Odyssey," but it does seem that there's like important, throughout human history,

00:21:15.680 | throughout life on Earth, there's important phase shifts of, it feels like something happened

00:21:23.200 | where there's big leaps. It could be something coincidental like fire and learning how to cook

00:21:29.760 | meat and all those kinds of things, but it feels like there could be other things. And I think

00:21:35.520 | that's at the core of your work is exploring what those things could be. Is it possible?

00:21:41.600 | Talked about Joe Rogan off-line. Is it, I mean, it's entirely possible. Is it possible that

00:21:49.120 | psychedelics have in fact contributed of being an important source of those phase shift throughout

00:21:56.560 | human history, of the intellect, basically steering the intellectual development and growth

00:22:02.640 | of human civilization? - It's a hypothesis worth

00:22:06.880 | investigating. How about that? - Beautiful.

00:22:08.480 | - And maybe not psychedelics in and of themselves, but I think our whole conversation is kind of

00:22:13.840 | wrapped up in these non-ordinary states of awareness. We start by talking about God,

00:22:19.840 | which is something unordinary and expansive. And I think that as you trace the intervention

00:22:29.040 | of divinity, if that's the case, throughout human history, you have to bump up against the irrational.

00:22:34.080 | Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of religions and fellow Romanian, said that the history of

00:22:41.760 | religions essentially constitutes the point of intersection between metaphysics and biology,

00:22:46.640 | right? So that we are biological beings who do interact with our planet, with the natural kingdom.

00:22:53.760 | And you would think that as early archaic ecologists, we would have figured out what

00:22:59.840 | plants work, which fungi don't, and developed maybe language around that. And so, this is another one

00:23:06.480 | of McKenna's speculative but very interesting hypotheses, the stone ape theory. Is it possible

00:23:14.640 | that psychedelics were involved in one of the several leaps forward? You mentioned the word

00:23:19.920 | leap. Jared Diamond talks about the great leap forward 60,000 years ago. The species had been

00:23:25.760 | around for a couple hundred thousand years. All of a sudden, the cave painting appears.

00:23:29.760 | All of a sudden, there's a phase shift. Did something like that happen millions of years ago?

00:23:35.360 | And I love the way Paul Stamets talks about this. It would be the ingestion

00:23:38.640 | of perhaps psilocybin-containing fungi millions and millions of times over millions and millions

00:23:47.040 | of years. So, it's not just a one-time event that cascades, but it's the accumulation

00:23:52.400 | of psychedelic experience. It's really difficult to test that hypothesis. But I've been talking

00:23:59.920 | with a paleoanthropologist in South Africa, my friend Lee Berger, about ways that we might test

00:24:06.160 | for this. And so, Lee, amongst many things, is this National Geographic explorer. He's the

00:24:12.400 | paleoanthropologist's paleoanthropologist at the University of Whitwater-Shrind. He's famous amongst

00:24:18.400 | other things for the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like Homo naledi.

00:24:24.240 | And there's an interesting point. So, naledi is this archaic hominid, morphologically

00:24:33.280 | archaic, but it dates to about 300,000 years ago, which is very strange. What's even more

00:24:39.920 | strange about Homo naledi at the Rising Star Cave System there in South Africa is that Lee

00:24:44.800 | believes he's discovered the first bipedal ape deliberately disposing of its dead. So,

00:24:51.920 | there is a recognition of self-mortality and the practicing of rituals around death. We're

00:24:58.400 | talking about burials. And if you have burials, says Lee, in an archaic hominid 300,000 years ago,

00:25:05.840 | maybe you have language. And I mention that because Terence McKenna was obsessed

00:25:10.320 | with language in the stoned ape theory that the ingestion of psilocybin in addition to enhancing

00:25:16.720 | visual acuity, perhaps facilitating sexual arousal, leads to proto-language. Now, isn't it

00:25:24.240 | interesting, this could be entirely a coincidence, that the largest sound inventory of any language

00:25:31.280 | is the Khoisan of Botswana and Namibia. They have something like 164 consonants and 44 vowels.

00:25:38.880 | English, by comparison, has about 45. So, I don't know what to make of this, but what you find in

00:25:44.000 | that part of the world is very, very complex language. Language that could be an inheritance,

00:25:51.040 | language that could be incredibly archaic, together with this recognition of self-mortality.

00:25:57.520 | And when I talk to Lee Berger, we say, when you're looking at universals like that,

00:26:01.440 | language around all human populations, the recognition of self-mortality, the contemplation

00:26:07.440 | of death, just maybe you have pharmacology. And so, maybe we can go out and test for this

00:26:13.120 | using gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, proteomics, technology that doesn't even exist,

00:26:18.560 | but maybe we can actually test the stoned ape theory to figure out once and for all

00:26:23.600 | if there's any merit there. - Can you just linger a little bit

00:26:26.240 | on the pharmacology tools? How would it be possible to say something about what was being ingested

00:26:33.200 | so, so long ago? - That's what I asked Dr. Berger.

00:26:37.680 | So, Lee has discovered in the dental calculus of archaic hominids--

00:26:44.320 | - Nice. Dental calculus, I like this.

00:26:46.160 | - Evidence of their diet. And you might not believe how old this was, but in Sadiba,

00:26:52.800 | Australopithecus Sadiba, they found evidence of Sadiba's diet going back 2 million years.

00:26:59.520 | So, through things like phytoliths, which are essentially fossilized plant tissue,

00:27:06.000 | they found evidence that Sadiba was eating bark and leaves and grasses and fruits and palm.

00:27:12.560 | So, no psychedelics to speak of, but it just goes to show that through things like

00:27:17.680 | dental microware analysis and other techniques that we're still developing,

00:27:21.680 | we can actually figure out what the diet was at the time. I'll fast forward to 50,000 years ago.

00:27:26.880 | There was another study out of El Cidron Cave in 2012, which found that Neanderthals,

00:27:33.040 | again, preceding our species, 50,000 years ago, were ingesting yarrow and chamomile,

00:27:40.080 | which had been identified as medicinal. So, again, not psychedelic or psychoactive, but

00:27:45.040 | we kind of have the beginnings of the technology, and that was nine years ago,

00:27:49.280 | to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of these hominids.

00:27:53.360 | - Presumably, there could be a way to figure out, it's not just diet, but which have

00:27:58.480 | psychoactive elements to them. So, whether you're chewing it, whether you're smoking it,

00:28:02.560 | whether, I mean, I don't know what, licking it. I don't know if there's any kind of ways

00:28:06.960 | through the dental calculus to figure out what exact substances were being consumed.

00:28:11.840 | Is it possible to figure out whether psychedelic substances are being

00:28:16.160 | consumed by looking at human behavior, like you said, organized burials or cave paintings?

00:28:24.160 | No, but so that's a little bit of a stretch to say, like, where did this leap come from?

00:28:28.880 | - But it's not. It's not. So, just last fall, as a matter of fact, so that notion's been out

00:28:34.480 | there for a while, the idea that hallucinogens and the ritual consumption of hallucinogens

00:28:39.440 | were somehow related to the Great Leap Forward, were somehow related to the initial cave painting.

00:28:44.160 | Graham Hancock wrote a beautiful book about this called Supernatural, which in many ways, like,

00:28:48.720 | sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2007. But even at the time when he was writing that,

00:28:54.000 | and the years subsequent, it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea. Last fall,

00:28:59.360 | interestingly enough, the first archaeochemical data for the ritual consumption of psychedelics

00:29:07.920 | associated with cave art was finally published. It's not that ancient. It's only about 400 or

00:29:12.960 | 500 years ago, but it came from the Pinwheel Cave, a chumash site in California. And what they found

00:29:19.440 | were datura quids, like these chewed up, you mentioned how they ingested, these chewed up quids,

00:29:24.720 | like these bunches of datura, which contain these very powerful tropane

00:29:30.240 | alkaloids, in what was believed to be some kind of chumash initiation site. So, we can say that

00:29:35.840 | there is initial, you know, archaeochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics and cave art.

00:29:41.280 | And so, where else might we find this? - Are there a lot of archaeochemists in the world?

00:29:47.120 | - Like, 'cause this is fascinating, is through chemistry, through biology, through physics,

00:29:53.040 | whatever, like all the disciplines we, perhaps in one day computer science, we apply those tools

00:30:01.120 | to study not the data of today, but the data of the past. Are we talking about dozens here?

00:30:07.040 | Like, how hard is this problem relative to how many people are taking it on,

00:30:10.880 | just as a side little tangent? - We're probably talking

00:30:14.720 | more dozens than hundreds. I spent many years trying to track down an archaeochemist who would

00:30:21.280 | talk to me, there were a couple, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania, and then my friend

00:30:27.360 | Andrew Koh at MIT, which you might know something about. Andrew really, you know, on his own time,

00:30:33.680 | on his own dime, has been gathering the data for this organic residue analysis. He has what's

00:30:41.680 | called the OpenArcheM project, which is this online open source repository for this data.

00:30:47.120 | But there's never been a center for this. No university has stood up a dedicated center,

00:30:52.320 | a team, really, which is what you need of archaeochemists looking at this stuff. But,

00:30:56.800 | I mean, even despite that, there have been some remarkable discoveries over the past 10,

00:31:00.960 | 20 years. It's still a discipline very much in its infancy, maybe it's becoming a toddler, but

00:31:05.760 | as the technology gets better and cheaper, I hope you'll see more and more archaeochemists

00:31:12.000 | joining the fight. - Yeah, and Andrew's fascinating,

00:31:15.440 | his work is fascinating. But also, I just, because of your work, I came across and exchanged a few

00:31:21.920 | emails with Patrick McGovern, who's basically, what would you call him? So he has a center,

00:31:27.280 | I guess, that does biomolecular archaeology at UPenn. And he's the author of a bunch of books,

00:31:34.720 | one of which is ancient brews. So he's a scholar of beer and wine, and like ancient alcohol,

00:31:41.200 | which is fascinating. The influence, even just alcohol, but he has like alcohol with

00:31:46.080 | hallucinogenic properties as well. But it's fascinating, as a Russian, it's fascinating

00:31:52.800 | to think about the influence of alcohol on the development of human civilization throughout

00:32:00.720 | its history. Is there something you can comment on alcohol, or in general,

00:32:06.560 | Patrick's work that was informative to you, inspiring, or kind of added to your conception

00:32:15.120 | of human history? - His work was some of the first

00:32:18.480 | hard scientific data that I saw for the ritual consumption of these intoxicants. I don't think

00:32:24.880 | he's ever found the hard and fast data for psychedelics, but what he turned me on to was

00:32:30.000 | this idea that alcohol, or beer and wine specifically, could have been used as vehicles

00:32:36.480 | for the administration of psychedelics. That's where it all started for me. Just the notion that

00:32:42.080 | ancient beer and ancient wine is very, very different from what we drink today, that typically,

00:32:47.520 | they were cocktails. They were often fortified and mixed with different fruits, berries, herbs,

00:32:54.160 | plants, maybe even fungi over time because this was all in the absence of distilled liquor. There

00:32:59.760 | is no hard alcohol, even in Russia, before maybe the 12th century it was in Europe,

00:33:06.240 | maybe a bit earlier. But the concept of distillation just didn't exist. And so,

00:33:11.520 | to pack a punch, rather than just drink a kind of watered-down Budweiser, these people were

00:33:19.280 | interested in fortifying these beverages with whatever they could find in nature. And Pat,

00:33:24.960 | to his credit, found some of the initial data for these, you could say, spiked wines and spiked

00:33:30.720 | beers. Not with anything overtly psychedelic, but just the fact that in the 16th century BC,

00:33:36.560 | at Grave Circle A in Mycenae, there's this Minoan ritual cocktail of beer mixed with wine,

00:33:42.880 | mixed with mead, is very interesting. It's even more interesting that you find that

00:33:47.040 | across the Aegean in Gordium at King Midas' tomb, right? The same kind of ritual cocktail, which

00:33:54.640 | Pat and Sam at the Dogfish Head Brewery resurrected as the Midas touch. So, I mean,

00:33:59.680 | the notion that we can go back, find this data, resurrect it, in some cases, 2,800 years later,

00:34:06.160 | I found pretty exciting 10 years ago. - Yeah, bring it back for research.

00:34:10.480 | - (laughs) - But that's fascinating that

00:34:12.960 | people were playing with these ideas. And we'll return to ideas of psychedelic-confused wine,

00:34:20.240 | which is pretty fascinating. But can we step back and just kind of look at your work with

00:34:24.560 | the book "Immortality Key"? What is the story that you tell in this book?

00:34:28.880 | - I knew it would get there eventually, Alex. (laughs)

00:34:31.720 | - It's a nonlinear path. Somehow, we were talking about simulation and the universe is a computer

00:34:39.760 | that's creating video games and wow and Fortnite, but we got there. And we'll return, always,

00:34:46.640 | to the insane philosophical. But your book "Immortality Key," what's the story that you

00:34:52.400 | tell in this book? Which part of human history are you studying?

00:34:55.680 | - Right, so that's the way to phrase it. So, it's my 12-year search for the hard scientific data

00:35:02.800 | for the ritual use of psychedelics in classical antiquity. So, we're talking about amongst the

00:35:08.240 | ancient Greeks and Romans and the paleo-Christians. So, the generations that would give birth to the

00:35:14.800 | largest religion the world's ever known. Christianity today was two and a half billion

00:35:18.800 | people. The big question for me is, were psychedelics actually involved? There was a

00:35:23.440 | lot written about this in the '60s, John Marco Allegro. The book that I follow was published

00:35:28.480 | in 1978 before I was born, "The Road to Eleusis" by Gordon Wasson, who we talked about already,

00:35:34.960 | Albert Hoffman, who famously discovers LSD or synthesizes it from ergot, and Karl Ruck,

00:35:40.880 | who is still a professor of classics at Boston University, the only surviving member of that

00:35:47.920 | renegade trio and now 85 years old. So, this all predates us. But what was lacking in the '60s,

00:35:55.120 | '70s, '80s, '90s, I think was some of this technology and the hard scientific data.

00:36:00.960 | Now, for years and years, I went out to the archaeobotanists and the archaeochemists around

00:36:05.760 | the world, and I asked a very basic question, "Is there any evidence for psychedelics in

00:36:11.040 | classical antiquity?" And the answer would almost invariably come back, "No." I'm talking to,

00:36:16.160 | in addition to Pat, he put me in touch with Hans-Peter Stieke in Germany, Tania Valamotti

00:36:21.280 | in Greece, Assunta Florenzano in Italy. I went all over the place asking one question and getting

00:36:26.480 | the same answer back time and again. And so, the book is essentially my search for that data and

00:36:32.960 | the eventual uncovering of two, what I think are key pieces of data. One data point shows the

00:36:41.280 | ritual use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity in Iberia, what today is Spain.

00:36:48.080 | And the other shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii from the

00:36:53.680 | first century AD, at the right place, at the right time, when the earliest Christians were

00:36:59.360 | showing up in Italy. - Again, these are early steps in the search for evidence in the space,

00:37:05.600 | but speaking of early Christians, what role do you think psychedelic-infused wine could have played

00:37:16.320 | in the life of the... I won't be clever, in the life of Jesus Christ?

00:37:24.400 | - I've been saying recently that, and I hope this doesn't sound obscurantist, but I think it's

00:37:31.840 | impossible to understand Jesus and the birth of Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek.

00:37:38.240 | And I'll give you a very specific example of why I think that's the case.

00:37:41.760 | - Interesting. - You can read the entire New Testament

00:37:46.160 | in ancient Greek, and not once will you ever find a reference to alcohol, because there was no word

00:37:53.360 | in ancient Greek for alcohol. The way the word sounds, alkol, it's Semitic, it comes from the

00:37:58.400 | Arabic. Kahla means to enliven or refresh, it probably comes from kohl, sort of these powdered

00:38:06.000 | metallics that were used in alchemical experiments and cosmetics. So again, that's much later in time

00:38:12.320 | when we're using alchemy, distillation, etc. In the 1st century AD, the power of wine wasn't

00:38:19.440 | necessarily tied to alcohol, fermented grapes, the way we think about wine today. So Pat McGovern

00:38:26.000 | found some of that early organic data for wine being mixed with beer and with mead. But if you

00:38:33.360 | look at the literature from the 1st century AD, Dioscorides, for example, he writes this massive

00:38:38.720 | treatise at the exact same time the Gospels are being written. And Dioscorides, in just one of

00:38:44.480 | his books, talks about 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things, like

00:38:51.600 | salvia and hellebore and frankincense and myrrh, these spiced perfumes, but also more dangerous

00:38:56.960 | things like henbane and mandrake, which he says in Greek can be fatal with just one cupful.

00:39:03.360 | And in Book 474 of his Materia Medica, he talks about black nightshade producing fantasias

00:39:10.960 | ou aedes, not unpleasant visions, what today we would say is psychedelic. So just looking at the

00:39:18.880 | literature and the kind of literature that even most classicists--I didn't really learn it in

00:39:23.920 | undergrad, I came across Dioscorides later--but just a basic look at the literature supports

00:39:31.120 | what McGovern has been testing, which is the fact that wine was routinely mixed

00:39:36.160 | with different compounds. - It's fascinating, by the way,

00:39:38.880 | that language affects our conception of the tools we use to understand the world. So like,

00:39:44.960 | you can see wine, you can see psychedelics, if they're not called drugs, you can maybe reframe

00:39:57.840 | how you see them in terms of their role in us thinking about the world, understanding the world.

00:40:02.400 | That's really interesting that language has that power. But what language was used to understand

00:40:06.800 | wine at the time? - So we're talking about a Greek-speaking world, right? So Jesus is born

00:40:13.680 | and does his public ministry in the Holy Land, but think about the early Church. Think about where

00:40:17.520 | the Church takes root. Paul, the greatest evangelist of the time, writes basically half

00:40:22.320 | the New Testament. He's writing letters in Greek to Greek speakers in places like Corinth in Greece,

00:40:29.040 | or Philippi, a defunct city just north of the island of Thassos. Or he's writing to

00:40:35.120 | folks in what today is Turkey, the Colossians, the Galatians. He writes letters to the Romans.

00:40:40.560 | These are Greek speakers in these pockets, these Hellenic pockets all around the ancient

00:40:46.000 | Mediterranean. And for them, again, ignore Dioscorides, ignore Pat McGovern's work.

00:40:51.680 | To them, to think about wine was to think about a mixed potion. And so the word oinos in ancient

00:40:58.240 | Greek does show up in the New Testament, but there was another word to describe wine. And it exists

00:41:03.520 | for like a thousand years, before, during, and after the life of Jesus. The word used for wine

00:41:09.840 | is pharmakon, which obviously gives us the word pharmacy. It means drug. So in Greek, a Greek

00:41:15.680 | speaker would actually use the word drug to refer to wine. Ruth Skodal, the classicist, talks about

00:41:21.680 | this as a ritualistic formula. They understood wine as this compound beverage, a drug against

00:41:29.680 | grief, a medicinal elixir that could either harm or heal, or just maybe a sacrament to put you in

00:41:37.520 | touch with wine gods old and new. - Clearly, religion, and myth, but religion very much so has

00:41:46.720 | sort of a, much like dreams, has like an imagery component. Like, you're kind of going outside the

00:41:57.680 | visual constraints of physical space where you kind of have very specific conceptions of what

00:42:05.680 | things look like, and you kind of use your imagination to stretch beyond the world as

00:42:11.680 | we know it. Things that are, try to get in touch with things that are more real than real.

00:42:16.720 | What role do these tools, do these pharmakons have in trying to stimulate the imagery of religion?

00:42:27.040 | Do you have a sense that they have a critical role here, or is this just a bunch of different

00:42:32.480 | factors that are utilized, a bunch of different tools that are utilized to construct this imagery?

00:42:37.440 | Or is this not even, or is imagery the wrong terminology? Is it more like a space of ideas

00:42:42.560 | that's core to religion? - No, I think the wine is absolutely essential. And so if it's impossible

00:42:48.960 | to understand paleo-Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek, I think it's equally difficult

00:42:54.480 | in the absence of the sacred pharmacopeia, or wine itself, right? Just think about wine

00:43:01.200 | at the time. I think that the ancient Greek audience would have heard that in a very different

00:43:06.160 | way from us. And so they're referring to it maybe as a pharmakon, but the followers of Dionysus,

00:43:12.320 | which precedes Jesus. And in some cases, the story of Jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the

00:43:18.640 | mysteries of Dionysus. But when you think about Dionysus, maybe from your high school mythology,

00:43:24.000 | you think about him as the god of theater, or the god of wine, which is typically what it is,

00:43:28.880 | or the god of ecstasy. Again, Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. There's no concept

00:43:36.400 | of fermented grapes. The power of Dionysus and the ability to commune with Dionysus through his blood,

00:43:42.880 | and before Christianity, the blood of Dionysus is equated to his wine. The sacramental drinking of

00:43:49.920 | the wine was interpreted, and classicists write about this, including Walter Burkert,

00:43:55.120 | it was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the god. This is where

00:44:00.640 | we get the idea of enthusiasm because the language matters, enthusiasm to be filled

00:44:05.680 | with the spirit of the god so that you became identified with Dionysus and acquired his divine

00:44:11.360 | powers. Now, how does that happen? Again, he's not the god of alcohol. He is the god of wine,

00:44:16.240 | but he's really the god of madness and delirium and frenzy. And his principal followers are women.

00:44:22.960 | They're called the minads. And the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption of

00:44:27.680 | this sacramental wine. Even at the theater of Dionysus, separate from his outdoor churches,

00:44:34.960 | there was a wine served there called drima. And this is the wine that gives birth to Hollywood.

00:44:40.480 | I mean, the ancient Hollywood was there at the theater of Dionysus. This is where comedy and

00:44:44.800 | tragedy and poetry and music come from. But rather than a hot dog and a beer, what they drink at the

00:44:49.840 | theater of Dionysus was this wine called drima, which means pounded or rubbed. And Professor Ruck

00:44:56.400 | talks about maybe it was the drugs that were rubbed into this theatrical beverage to help the

00:45:02.960 | play come alive. So madness is seen as a positive thing, as like a creative journey.

00:45:08.400 | It's not, it's not, it's the, what is it, the unlearning, getting out of the way kind of thing.

00:45:16.320 | Is that how it's seen or is it more like

00:45:18.480 | entertaining escape from life that is suffering?

00:45:24.640 | I gotta inject a little modern Dostoevsky into the old.

00:45:30.000 | Existential despair. Maybe it's a bit of that. We can't say that there wasn't

00:45:38.240 | recreational drinking happening. The Greeks also had the symposium, right? And they also were just

00:45:46.080 | getting hammered in some cases. But when it comes to the rites of Dionysus, what you see there is

00:45:53.280 | the creation of these states of awareness in which again, you identify with the God to become the

00:46:01.120 | God. There's theophagy, there's the consumption of divinity in order to become divinity. Right back

00:46:06.800 | to how we started the conversation, right? So if we stop conceiving of God as something exterior to

00:46:13.280 | us, but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the mystery of my being,

00:46:19.600 | that the way to encounter that is through the sacramental theology, that you drink the actual

00:46:26.480 | blood of this Greek God to become that God. And there was a place for this in ancient Greek society.

00:46:32.800 | So drinking the wine is drinking the blood of Dionysus. Do you think Jesus is

00:46:40.640 | an actual physical person that existed in history or is he an idea that came to life

00:46:50.400 | through the consumption of wine and those kinds of rituals?

00:46:54.000 | So this is where I face my excommunication, depending how I answer this.

00:46:57.360 | I mean, you're playing with fire and wine.

00:47:03.200 | A good combination, by the way.

00:47:06.240 | Yeah. So I shy away from that controversy in the book. I'm perfectly willing to accept Jesus

00:47:14.400 | as a historical personage. We have the multiplicity of sources, although it's a

00:47:19.440 | generation after his death, but we have the Eucharist being described in the four gospels,

00:47:25.280 | we have it being described by Paul in 1 Corinthians. But when you read John, it does

00:47:31.520 | read a bit differently than the other gospels. And in my book, I rely a lot on the scholarship

00:47:35.840 | of Dennis MacDonald, who writes a fabulous book called The Dionysian Gospel. And this is, again,

00:47:41.520 | why the Greek matters, because once you start to analyze the Greek of John's gospel,

00:47:45.680 | it seems to be a presentation of Jesus very much in the guise of Dionysus. The most obvious example

00:47:52.480 | is the wedding at Cana, right? That only occurs in John's gospel, the famous transformation of

00:47:58.160 | water into wine. Now, again, to any Greek speaker of the first century, they would have known about

00:48:03.280 | the Greek district of Elis on the Peloponnese. And in Elis, around the Epiphany, every January,

00:48:10.320 | the priests of Dionysus would deposit these water basins, empty basins, in the temple of Dionysus.

00:48:16.720 | They'd return the next morning and find them magically filled with wine. Now, on the island

00:48:22.400 | of Andros, it's even more interesting. Around the same Epiphany date, the God's gift day,

00:48:27.840 | Dies Theodosia, the wine would emanate from the temple and run like a river for a week. And you

00:48:33.840 | can Google the Bacchanal of the Andrians, a wonderful painting by Titian, which hangs in

00:48:39.040 | the Prado, and you'll see a river of wine behind these people having a great time. This exists for

00:48:43.920 | centuries and centuries before the wedding at Cana and before Jesus begins his public ministry

00:48:50.560 | with what these scholars call the signature miracle of Dionysus. It would not have been lost

00:48:56.800 | on the Greek audience that something very specific is being communicated here.

00:49:01.040 | What's being communicated? That you just might find in early Christianity what you hold strong

00:49:07.520 | to in these mysteries of Dionysus that you may have inherited from your parents, your grandparents,

00:49:12.400 | your great-grandparents for centuries. There was a perfectly good religion. There were perfectly

00:49:17.280 | good mystery cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. And here comes this new, untested,

00:49:22.960 | illegal cult, illegal, of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers that go on to convert the empire

00:49:29.680 | in a few hundred years. The answer to that extraordinary growth is not psychedelics,

00:49:36.160 | but I do think it's visionary experiences, and I do think it's this continuity from the pagan

00:49:40.720 | world into early Christianity. - So what part, you mentioned this idea,

00:49:44.640 | that's really interesting, I think you said Paul Stamets, of, I guess, millions of people over

00:49:51.760 | millions of years kind of consuming, really practicing a ritual or a habit of some sort.

00:49:59.680 | This idea of rituals is kind of interesting. Again, you mentioned cult. What's the role of

00:50:05.280 | ritual consumption of some of these substances or just ritual practice of anything in the

00:50:12.640 | intellectual growth of particular groups of people or societies?

00:50:16.800 | - So again, I would say it is the centerpiece of ancient life, not just the mysteries of Dionysus,

00:50:23.360 | which we've only talked a bit about, but the mysteries of Eleusis were probably the most

00:50:27.760 | famous and longest-lasting of these Greek mystery rites. And I mean, just to put it in simple terms,

00:50:33.200 | the best definition for a mystery religion, as the name implies, is something secret. Right,

00:50:38.880 | muo from the Greek means to shut the eyes or to shut the mouth, to keep quiet about this stuff.

00:50:45.360 | We're always teasing details from the archaeological and the literary record,

00:50:50.640 | and we're kind of just grabbing at these secrets. But Eleusis, which survives for like 2000 years

00:50:57.600 | into the Christian period from about 1500 BC to the 4th century AD, it's kind of this centerpiece

00:51:05.840 | of Greek life. Cicero, the great Roman statesman, calls what was happening at Eleusis the most

00:51:11.440 | exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced. So not democracy, the arts and sciences,

00:51:17.920 | or philosophy, but the vision that was encountered at Eleusis, perhaps through the ritual consumption

00:51:25.200 | of a potent psychedelic over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands and thousands,

00:51:30.480 | if not millions of initiates, pilgrims who would walk from Athens to Eleusis to encounter this

00:51:35.680 | vision. It seems to have been not just an important part of Greek life, but the thing that

00:51:42.080 | made life livable, such that as these mysteries are about to be exterminated by the newly

00:51:48.480 | Christianized Roman Empire, there's this passage in the ancient literature that talks about these,

00:51:54.080 | in the absence of these mysteries, life becomes unlivable. Abiotos.

00:51:58.000 | Is there ways you can, I mean, you write about the mysteries of Eleusis, and is there ways you

00:52:03.440 | can convert that into words? Why those are so important to them, more important than any other

00:52:11.520 | invention to them? Why is it such a source of meaning to life? So from what we can reconstruct,

00:52:19.520 | they would make that pilgrimage 13 miles northwest of Athens to confront their mortality.

00:52:25.280 | Remember we were talking about homo naledi, and in South Africa, this recognition of self-mortality,

00:52:31.760 | the deliberate disposal of the dead. Plato talks about the real practice of philosophy being the

00:52:38.640 | death and dying process. So in some senses, you went to Eleusis to die and to experience a death

00:52:45.760 | before your death. We talked about this with Terence McKenna as well, how the psychedelic state

00:52:51.520 | seems to share something in common with the near-death or out-of-body experiences or these

00:52:56.640 | ecstatic experiences, whether through wine or beer or otherwise, you went to Eleusis to die.

00:53:02.160 | And it was said that only those who had witnessed this vision, whatever vision was to be witnessed

00:53:08.320 | in Demeter's sanctuary, it essentially vouchsafed you the afterlife, that only those who went there

00:53:15.040 | became immortal. And Cicero says that at that point, you essentially live with more joy and

00:53:21.920 | die with a better hope. Can I ask you a question about this human contention with death, this

00:53:28.320 | confrontation of death that seems to be at the core of things. I don't know how deep to the core,

00:53:34.800 | but it seems to be a central element of the human condition. What do you think about Ernest Becker

00:53:43.840 | and those guys that put death at the, what is it, the warm of the core, which as the main thing,

00:53:52.560 | the main, like this confrontation of our own mortality, first of all, being understand that

00:53:59.040 | we're mortal and then confronting the terror of it, the fear of it as the creative, like trying

00:54:06.800 | to escape the fear of death as the creative force of human society. It's like the reason we do

00:54:13.760 | anything is because we're just running away from our death scared. Do you find some of that to be

00:54:22.240 | true? First of all, as somebody who looks in the mirror, looks at yourself and your own as a human

00:54:27.680 | being to just looking at society today and three at this whole big spread of human history and all

00:54:34.800 | the cool stuff we've created, including the mysteries of elusives. I wonder what life would

00:54:40.320 | look like in the absence of the fear of our mortality. I wonder how we'd interact with one

00:54:47.280 | another if there was relatively little or no fear of death. I really do when it comes to Becker's

00:54:52.800 | work and others. If the ancients were known for anything, it was running to death. It was the

00:54:58.880 | opposite. In fact, dying before dying, which is the immortality key, by the way, it's not psychedelics

00:55:03.600 | but when I refer to this key, I'm referring to this notion that's preserved in Greek.

00:55:08.160 | "An pethanis, brin pethanis, dentha pethanis, ot an pethanis." If you die before you die,

00:55:14.560 | you won't die when you die. For some reason, the ancients prized that experience. And we talked

00:55:22.560 | about the mystics of Sufism and Kabbalism and Christian mysticism where you have this same

00:55:29.200 | self-nodding, this death before death, the divine nothingness. For some reason, the mystics, saints,

00:55:35.200 | visionaries, and ancient philosophers, they ran to death. And the one message I wanted to try

00:55:40.560 | and communicate with this book is how they viewed life, that it can only be fully experienced,

00:55:46.960 | fully embodied in the wake of a really intense, perhaps terrifying, but utterly transformational

00:55:55.680 | encounter with death. - So running to death, not running away from death. You talk about Aldous

00:56:03.200 | Huxley and mind changers. So if we look at the history where the ancients were running to death

00:56:14.080 | and maybe using some performance enhancing permacons to run more effectively towards death.

00:56:23.760 | And now we're using tools of modern society, whether they're psychological, sociological,

00:56:31.680 | or in case pharmaceutical, to run away from this conception. So what do you see as a hopeful future

00:56:39.600 | for human civilization? If all of these kinds of societies are ice cream flavors, how do you

00:56:48.800 | create the perfect ice cream flavor? What is the future of religious experience, of psychedelic

00:56:54.400 | experience, of intellectual journeys, of facing death, running away from death? What do you hope

00:57:01.200 | that looks like and what kind of idea should we look to? - My next book will be entitled

00:57:07.040 | "Performance Enhancing Farmaca." (laughs) You get full copyright. - Yeah, I like it.

00:57:17.520 | But that's a historical view. I mean, what in that book would you suggest in one of the last

00:57:23.120 | chapters about the future of this process? - Well, Huxley has to stop you. He stopped me

00:57:30.880 | in my tracks, Aldous Huxley. So in 1958, he pens this op-ed of sorts. And it reads incredibly

00:57:40.880 | prescient because I really do think in many ways as the fog of the war drug is ending

00:57:46.640 | and finally lifting that we've kind of come full circle back to the late 1950s,

00:57:54.000 | which might sound strange. It'll make more sense when you hear what Huxley said about psychedelics.

00:57:58.560 | And so he was looking forward to a revival of religion, which is why I subtitled the book

00:58:04.640 | "The Religion with No Name." And to him, to Huxley, this revival wouldn't come about through

00:58:12.720 | televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen, as he says. But he points to the

00:58:19.280 | biochemical discoveries such as we have today that would allow for large numbers of men and women to

00:58:26.080 | achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. In other

00:58:32.000 | words, that this revival of religion, he says, would be a revolution. And Alan Watts comes along

00:58:36.880 | and says that there's nothing more dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism.

00:58:44.320 | But I think this is what Huxley was pointing to. And he talks about religion in these terms,

00:58:49.760 | about being less about symbols and returning to a sense of experience and intuition. And Huxley

00:58:56.560 | says that he envisions a religion which gives rise to everyday mysticism. And he talks about

00:59:04.160 | something that would undergird everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties,

00:59:09.360 | and everyday human relationships. In other words, religion has to mean something. And these altered

00:59:17.040 | states of awareness that we seem to be able to produce quite easily inside the lab at Hopkins,

00:59:23.040 | NYU, and elsewhere with psilocybin, I think this is kind of part of Huxley's prediction about a

00:59:30.240 | time when we would have legal access, safe access, efficacious access to this material that would

00:59:37.520 | allow for insight in an afternoon. And what do you do when millions of people can become mystics

00:59:44.560 | in an afternoon? - So psychedelics, psilocybin

00:59:51.040 | might be the practical way of having these kinds of, maybe could be termed religious experiences.

00:59:57.920 | And then many people partake in those experiences and then like evolving this collective

01:00:03.840 | intelligence thing we got going on, that's sort of the practice of religion that we should be

01:00:09.280 | looking at striving for, as opposed to kind of operating in the space of ideas, actually

01:00:15.040 | practicing it. You mentioned, and that's the religion with no name, the use of these tools.

01:00:24.560 | Is there a simple way to summarize religion for our previous discussion about God, basically

01:00:31.360 | discovering the God inside? - What if I give you a very complicated

01:00:35.200 | definition of religion, and then we talk about a more simplified?

01:00:37.840 | - Let's do it. - So the most complicated we can get on this

01:00:42.880 | is the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz. But I think it's worth defining our terms

01:00:46.720 | when we're talking about God and religion. So religion, religio from the Latin means to bind

01:00:52.560 | back. So to bind us back to some meaningful tradition, to bind us back to the source.

01:00:56.880 | Here's a mouthful from Clifford Geertz. Religion, he defines as a set of symbols,

01:01:03.520 | which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations

01:01:09.920 | by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions in such

01:01:14.960 | an aura of factuality that those moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic, which is

01:01:22.880 | complex. What does that mean? That religion has to make you feel something, these moods and

01:01:28.800 | motivations. But it can't just do that in the way that sex does that for us, or sports, or ultimate

01:01:35.040 | fighting, or the World Cup, or going to a concert. So we get all that emotion in these experiences

01:01:42.000 | like that. But that emotion has to be concomitant to a deep existential insight that answers this

01:01:48.240 | question for you in the morning. I know why I'm here. I know why humans are here. I think I know

01:01:53.760 | what the meaning of life is. That's what religion is. And if you find that meaning in science,

01:01:59.600 | then that's your religion and that's fine. But we need to be more honest about that.

01:02:04.000 | If your epistemological model is weighing facts and figures and you think that's why you're here

01:02:09.840 | on this planet and you find deep meaning, that's okay. Religion is the thing that makes you feel,

01:02:14.880 | right? It has the aura of factuality. It just makes you feel like you know the point behind

01:02:20.880 | existence. In other words, I think it comes down to experience like Joe Campbell was talking about,

01:02:25.680 | like Aldous Huxley mentions about experience and intuition. I think this is how we connect to God.

01:02:30.480 | - Make you feel like you understand the world. I mean, so that's kind of bigger than science.

01:02:38.800 | That includes science, but it's bigger. Do you think, what is real? Like, do you think there's

01:02:47.040 | an absolute reality that we're kind of striving towards understanding or is it all just conjured

01:02:53.360 | up in our minds? And that's the whole kind of point. We together create these realities and

01:03:00.400 | play with them and dance to somehow derive meaning from those realities. And it's ultimately not

01:03:07.840 | like very deeply integrated into what's like into atoms of space-time.

01:03:15.520 | - Another easy question, Lex.

01:03:18.320 | - Well, I mean, you have to kind of, when you're thinking about emotion and making it concrete

01:03:27.920 | into something that feels real, you have to start asking like, what is real? It's something that,

01:03:36.080 | you know, Ben Shapiro has this saying of facts don't care about your feelings.

01:03:41.040 | I was always uncomfortable with this. I mean, he's just being spiffy or whatever, but

01:03:47.680 | I was always uncomfortable with somehow, first that the hubris of thinking that humans can

01:03:54.080 | have like arrive at absolute truth, which is what I assume he means by facts,

01:04:02.480 | like things that are controvertible. And then somehow deriding feelings, like feelings are

01:04:09.040 | not important. To me, like the whole thing is reality. The facts don't even like facts is reality,

01:04:18.400 | feelings are reality. Like the entirety of human experience is reality. All these consciousnesses

01:04:25.040 | somehow interacting together, making up random crap and together agreeing, they're all going

01:04:30.240 | to wear the same colors, rooting for one football team or the other football team or countries,

01:04:35.680 | all those things, that's real because we've agreed that it's real. And in the same way,

01:04:41.520 | it gives us meaning. In that same way, religion is a set of ideas that gives us meaning. But,

01:04:48.000 | you know, real, it's really a difficult, for me as a scientist, that finds comfort

01:04:57.680 | in the physical understanding of the universe, of physics. You know, I love physics. I love

01:05:04.240 | computer science. It makes me feel like everything is perfectly understandable.

01:05:09.760 | And then I look at humans, they're totally not understandable. It's like a giant mess,

01:05:16.320 | but that's part of the beauty. Like what is love? Like what the hell is love? It's certainly not

01:05:22.560 | like a weird hack to convince me to procreate because it feels something bigger than that.

01:05:30.160 | So like taking a purely evolutionary biologist perspective, it's missing the, it's not missing,

01:05:35.600 | it's only capturing a part of the picture. So it just keeps making me ask, what is real? Because

01:05:42.240 | as a human, it's very human centric. It does certainly feel like

01:05:46.320 | a part, a big part of what is real is all the fake stuff my mind makes up.

01:05:58.320 | I mean, okay, I guess, is there something you could say

01:06:01.760 | from our discussions about the tools of psychedelics, about our discussion about religion,

01:06:09.680 | of what is real, of what is reality?

01:06:13.600 | These are largely unanswerable questions.

01:06:17.600 | But we should nevertheless strive to answer them. That's the whole point of the human experience.

01:06:22.720 | And I think science is one way and religion is another. And I think there's actually a sphere

01:06:26.880 | where they intersect. There's a way for religion to be observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable.

01:06:33.920 | When I look at the ancient mysteries, that's what I find. I think I find people exploring alternate

01:06:39.840 | states of consciousness and arriving at conclusions based on that exploration and deriving

01:06:45.360 | deep meaning from that, which yes, are feelings and emotions and very hard to quantify. But

01:06:50.080 | nonetheless, these are the things that govern our lives. I mean, I don't know a parent who isn't

01:06:54.400 | motivated by the love of their children. Everything I do at 40 years old now is pretty much inspired

01:07:02.240 | by my love for my two daughters. And I can't prove to you that I love them. I can say it,

01:07:07.200 | I can show you behavior, but it's very hard for me to weigh and measure that. So not everything

01:07:12.640 | is so reducible to this quantifiable reality. And yet, I also love science. And I love the

01:07:21.280 | historical process of weighing this data. I love the chemistry. I love the biology.

01:07:25.440 | And for me, I think this was the message of the ancient Greeks. And I think this is the world in

01:07:32.080 | which paleo-Christianity was born. I think there is this meeting ground between science and religion

01:07:37.600 | which allow for the, if not the discovery, then at least the near-identification of the

01:07:47.600 | ultimate reality, which is another way to describe God, right? This being of beings,

01:07:52.400 | the transcendent mystery. - So speaking of God,

01:07:55.280 | you mentioned to me offline you're wearing the most sophisticated clothing choice

01:08:01.280 | of the elite intellectuals. Like you mentioned, Sam Harris was wearing a hoodie.

01:08:06.960 | - This is the Sam Harris hoodie. He's starting a trend.

01:08:09.200 | - He's starting a trend. (laughs) This is a new religion, you could even say. It's a ritual.

01:08:14.640 | It's a ritual practice of intellectuals of searching for meaning. So there's quite a

01:08:22.320 | fascinating debate. He was for a time still known as one of the sort of new age atheists.

01:08:29.760 | So he was kind of trying to explore the role of religion in society and the role of science.

01:08:35.520 | And then on the other side, another kind of powerhouse intellectual is Jordan Peterson,

01:08:41.680 | who in sometimes for my taste, a bit too poetic of ways is exploring the ideas of religion.

01:08:49.200 | And they had these interesting debates that I think will continue about the role of religion

01:08:55.440 | in society. For Jordan, there's all these flaws with religion, but there is a lot of value to be

01:09:06.880 | discovered amidst the rituals, the traditions, the practice, the way we conceive of each other

01:09:13.920 | because of the ideas that religion propagates. And then for Sam, it says that everything about

01:09:21.120 | religion basically gets in the way of us fully realizing our human potential, which is deeply

01:09:30.320 | scientific and rational and sort of like we're surrounded by mystery. Calling that mystery God

01:09:40.800 | is getting in the way of us understanding that mystery. What do you think about this debate

01:09:46.400 | about the role of religion in society? We should continue having this debate. I talked to Jordan

01:09:52.240 | a couple of weeks ago, as a matter of fact. Excellent. On his podcast? Yes. Excellent.

01:09:56.240 | It'll be out soon. And so, he and I- How did that go, by the way?

01:10:01.120 | It was incredible. Karl Ruck, the professor, joined us, as a matter of fact, for one of his

01:10:06.320 | rare public appearances. Beautiful.

01:10:08.400 | We went deep. And Jordan is very well-read, obviously, on the psychedelic literature. He

01:10:13.840 | had just had Roland Griffiths from Hopkins on the podcast. And it's one of Roland's figures

01:10:19.360 | that Jordan and I, again, just like the language of Aldous Huxley, it's hard to move past the

01:10:24.880 | following statistic. Over the past 20 years of the modern study of psilocybin, Roland will tell

01:10:31.120 | you that about three in four of their volunteers walk away from their single dose of psilocybin,

01:10:37.520 | high dose, saying it was among the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives,

01:10:43.040 | if not the most meaningful. And Jordan says, "What do you do with that? How do we synthesize that?"

01:10:54.240 | You know, here we are quantifying the qualifiable, the unqualifiable, and yet these compounds have

01:11:02.640 | dramatic effects on people's lives, and they walk away feeling like they're more loving,

01:11:08.880 | more compassionate. The Science of All talks about the welling up of cooperation and resource

01:11:16.320 | sharing and kindness and all these strange things from this single chemical intervention,

01:11:21.360 | which seems to reduce us to automata as if enlightenment can be flipped on like a switch.

01:11:28.080 | And yet there it is, there's the data. And I don't see how you walk away from that. I mean,

01:11:31.520 | I completely understand Sam's position, but I think there's a reading of religion,

01:11:37.920 | particularly the mystical core of the big faiths and especially these ancient mystery cults,

01:11:43.440 | which do speak again to those moods and motivations creating this aura of factuality

01:11:50.240 | that these volunteers never walk away from, permanently transformed just like the ancient

01:11:55.600 | mysteries. And part of that is perhaps language, that we need to continue to evolve language in

01:12:01.200 | how we conceive of these processes. Maybe religion has a bunch of baggage associated with it that

01:12:11.040 | is good to let go of, or perhaps not. I don't know. This is connected to our previous

01:12:18.560 | part of our conversation is the importance of language in this whole thing.

01:12:21.680 | Well, that's how I start my book with one of these volunteers from the NYU psilocybin experiments,

01:12:26.320 | this woman, Dinah Dinah Baser, who's an atheist, and she still describes herself as an atheist.

01:12:32.480 | And yet as one of these three and four people who walked away from this experiment transformed,

01:12:38.080 | she says that her experience of psilocybin was like being bathed in God's love from an atheist.

01:12:43.520 | Yes.

01:12:44.080 | And I asked her why she uses the word God, why not the love of the cosmos or the universe or

01:12:49.840 | mother nature? And she says, "Well, frankly, we don't know about any of this stuff and that

01:12:54.560 | God makes sense to me." She's still an atheist, but it's the way she describes that as kind of like

01:13:01.120 | the way your mother's love must've felt when you were a baby.

01:13:05.040 | Yeah, I like the way Einstein uses God, God doesn't play dice. There's a poetry,

01:13:10.720 | there's a humility that you don't know what the hell is going on. There's a humor to it.

01:13:15.600 | I'm a huge fan, especially like more and more of just kind of having a big old laugh at the

01:13:21.840 | absurdity of this world and this life as represented nicely by memes on Twitter kind of thing.

01:13:29.360 | I mean, there's a sense in which we want to be playing with these words and not take them so

01:13:36.720 | seriously and being a little bit lighthearted and explore. Let me ask you about, because you

01:13:42.560 | mentioned NYU, what I find fascinating is how much amazing research, speaking of science, right?

01:13:51.120 | Studying the effects of psilocybin, studying the effects of various psychedelics, MDMA

01:13:58.240 | on the human mind. Right now for helping people, but I'm hoping there'll be studies soon at Hopkins

01:14:05.600 | and elsewhere that allow people that are kind of more quote unquote creatives or regular people

01:14:12.400 | that don't have a particular demon they're trying to work through, a problem they're trying to work

01:14:18.160 | through, but more like to see what can I find if I utilize psychedelics to explore? Is there something

01:14:25.760 | you could say that is exciting to you, that's promising about the future, what currently is

01:14:31.760 | going on, but also the future of psychedelics research at Hopkins and elsewhere? Yeah, the

01:14:35.760 | healthy normals, the healthy normals. I was looking for the right words because normal doesn't feel,

01:14:41.120 | healthy doesn't feel like a good term and normal doesn't feel like a good term because we're all

01:14:45.280 | pretty messed up and we're all weird. Well, those with ontological angst in that case.

01:14:50.240 | Great. Maybe there'll be a future DSM qualification. There's no doubt that things

01:14:56.000 | like psilocybin, MDMA are useful for things like anxiety, depression, end of life distress, PTSD,

01:15:02.800 | alcoholism, you name it. And it's largely because of the clinical research that MDMA and psilocybin

01:15:09.280 | will probably be legal in some FDA regulated way in the next five years. But I mean, again,

01:15:15.520 | I start the first page of my book with this question, why do psychedelics work across all

01:15:21.280 | these different conditions? And the best that I could find is the meaning, right? Tony Boss at NYU

01:15:29.520 | talks about psilocybin, for example, as meaning making medicine, which is interesting because

01:15:35.040 | it puts it somewhere between a therapeutic and again, this ontological instigator. What is it

01:15:42.080 | about psychedelics that creates these mystical experiences or mystical like experiences? You

01:15:48.000 | can call them emotional breakthroughs, you can call them moments of awe. I do think we get locked

01:15:53.680 | up in the language and we're somewhere between science and religion here, including legally.

01:15:58.640 | So the FDA is one route to this. What excites me about psychedelics is the first amendment.

01:16:03.920 | What is this going to mean for religion? The freedom of religion being the first thing that's

01:16:08.080 | mentioned in the first amendment before freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. If America is known

01:16:13.440 | for anything, it's a refuge for religious pioneers. And so we already have the Native American church,

01:16:19.920 | Brazilian spawn churches that are using psychedelics, but what would happen if Judaism

01:16:25.520 | or Christianity or Islam were to begin incorporating the very ritual, very sacred

01:16:32.480 | and discreet use of psychedelics as part of their liturgy? So not replacing the Sunday Eucharist in

01:16:39.120 | the case of Christianity, but part of the extra credit dimension of the faith.

01:16:45.520 | Credit. And then we can, through practice, figure out how essential it is. It could be a minor

01:16:50.400 | thing, it could be a major thing. That's another thing I wanted to kind of ask you is I recently,

01:16:55.680 | despite the fact that I'm eating a huge amount of meat and I'm getting fat, I'm loving it.

01:17:00.000 | This is actually, as of two days ago, I started this long road to training for David Goggins,

01:17:08.160 | to training back to getting back to competing in jiu-jitsu. So the fun is over, but I also

01:17:14.560 | partook in fasting and there was a very strong, there's an almost like a hallucinogenic aspect

01:17:22.400 | of fasting, especially because it was a 72 hour fast versus a more common fast that I do,

01:17:28.320 | which is 24 hours. And a bunch of people talk about throughout history about the value of fasting

01:17:36.240 | in having these kind of visual, these kind of intellectual experiences. Also there's meditation,

01:17:43.760 | Sam Harris with the hoodie. Do you have a sense that those other rituals of fasting, of meditation,

01:17:54.000 | and maybe other things could be as essential or more essential to the religious experience

01:18:00.800 | as psychedelics? - Yes, if not, and this is gonna sound weird, but maybe not if more so.

01:18:06.560 | I look at psychedelics as a catalyst for spiritual investigation, not as the superficial means to an

01:18:14.480 | end. I think their value is in kind of serving as a Google Maps for the kingdom of heaven.

01:18:23.360 | - All right, I like this. - Well, so Ram Dass' teacher said that when he was offered psychedelics

01:18:31.600 | that it'll get you in the room with Jesus, but it won't keep you there.

01:18:36.000 | - Yeah. - And I think that's all well and good,

01:18:39.600 | but what if you don't know where the house is in the first place? What if you've never had

01:18:43.120 | a mystical experience? What if religion is anathema to you? What if you hate God? What

01:18:48.960 | if all these words mean nothing to you? And they probably do for many, many people,

01:18:52.720 | and it's perfectly understandable. I think that we've lost the coordinates to these irrational

01:18:58.160 | states, again, that were prized throughout antiquity and that continue to be prized by

01:19:03.440 | the mystical communities even in big organized religion. It just doesn't filter out that much.

01:19:08.240 | And so, psychedelics, in my mind, help orient our minds, bodies, and souls towards the irrational,

01:19:17.440 | right? We talked about McKenna's invisible world that seems to have this symbiosis with our own

01:19:23.920 | and perhaps has this higher intent for us. You could very well just take catalog of your dreams,

01:19:31.120 | right? And that would do it too. But psychedelics seem to be particularly fast-acting,

01:19:35.920 | particularly potent, and very reliable, especially in the clinical studies. And so,

01:19:41.920 | I looked at them as biochemical discoveries, like Huxley did. Maybe it's once in your life

01:19:47.760 | or infrequently, right? But maybe that's the beginning of a genuine introspection

01:19:53.680 | and a life well-examined, as the ancients always instructed us.

01:19:57.360 | - Yeah, it does seem in the research that the effectiveness of psychedelics always comes with

01:20:02.640 | the integration where you use it, just like you said, as a catalyst for thinking through stuff.

01:20:10.480 | It's not going to be... I don't even know if Google Maps... Oh, maybe Google Maps is the right

01:20:17.120 | analogy, but it doesn't do the driving for you. You still have to do the driving. It just kind of

01:20:23.600 | gives you the directions. So, after you come down from the trip or whatever, you still have to drive.

01:20:30.320 | There's other tools that are kind of interesting. We've been talking about this

01:20:34.160 | at the psychological level, but there's also a neuroscience perspective of it. If we kind of like

01:20:40.160 | go past the skull into the brain with the neurons firing, there's ideas of brain-computer interfaces.

01:20:46.160 | First of all, there's a whole field of neuroscience that's kind of zooming in and

01:20:49.280 | studying the firing of the brain, the firing of the neurons in the brain, of how from those

01:20:54.960 | neurons emerges all the things that we think that make us human. That's a fascinating exploration

01:21:01.280 | of the human mind. That's, of course, where the psychedelics have the chemical, the biochemical

01:21:07.040 | effects on those neurons. There's ideas of brain-computer interfaces, which,

01:21:13.520 | you know, if you look at, especially what Neuralink is doing with this long-term vision

01:21:18.240 | with Elon Musk and Neuralink, they hope to expand... He calls it a wizard hat.

01:21:32.160 | This is back to the humor on the internet thing. The wizard hat that expands the

01:21:38.080 | capabilities, the capacity of the human mind. Do you think there's something there, or

01:21:44.880 | is the human mind so infinitely complex that we're quite a long way away from

01:21:55.360 | expanding the capabilities of the human mind through technology versus something like psychedelics?

01:22:02.240 | I wonder how Terence McKenna would answer that question. He looked to shamans as kind of the

01:22:08.720 | scientists, the high magicians of the high archaic past and the far-flung future.

01:22:15.280 | I'm not going to discount... You know more about AI than I do, so I'm not going to discount it,

01:22:20.960 | but I do think that AI paired with the sacred recovery, right? The archaeology of consciousness

01:22:32.880 | and these states, these archaic techniques of ecstasy that were practiced across time,

01:22:38.400 | I think that's a winning combination. You know, part of what I do in the book is just

01:22:43.520 | I try and lay out the set and setting. That's often talked about with psychedelics. I mean,

01:22:47.920 | so maybe psychedelics in the right AI environment is going to work. I think it'd probably work a lot

01:22:53.360 | better with that myth and ritual incorporated. So, the reason elusives worked for 2000 years,

01:22:59.760 | and let's assume the psychedelic hypothesis has some merit to it, but I think the reason it worked

01:23:06.160 | is because you were born into a mythology. You were born into a story about Demeter and Persephone,

01:23:12.160 | and you waited your entire life to meet them in the flesh. So, you weren't just preparing

01:23:17.680 | for a few months. It was a lifetime of expectation, anticipation, ritual preparation.

01:23:23.840 | In fact, some of the early church fathers made fun of the Greeks for essentially just piquing

01:23:29.360 | people's curiosity and revving up the anticipation, which has something to do with the outcome,

01:23:34.080 | by the way. But in other words, I think we need to create a new mythology around this. I don't

01:23:38.640 | think you pop into a laboratory. I don't think you pop into a retreat center from one day to

01:23:44.720 | the next. I think that in my own case, I feel like I've been preparing 12 years for psychedelics,

01:23:49.680 | and I'm still preparing, including in today's conversation. I'm learning new things,

01:23:53.680 | and I'm willing to explore it together with the computer interface. But I do think ritual

01:24:02.000 | is a gigantic part of this, and even McKenna would say that. I'll paraphrase him by saying that

01:24:08.880 | if you'd met someone who didn't know where they were between the years 1995 and 2005,

01:24:14.960 | you would describe them as a fairly damaged person. And yet, who among us knows what was

01:24:20.080 | happening in Western civilization between 900 and 1300, let alone 2,500 years ago? So, this is,

01:24:26.160 | in many ways, the prophet of the psychedelic Renaissance saying that history has lessons.

01:24:31.120 | And I don't think they're superficial lessons. I think it cuts to the very core of how and why

01:24:37.280 | Western civilization came to be born. - Yeah, but that history can be loaded

01:24:43.280 | into AI systems, and I do love the idea of whether it's to bring computer interfaces or without

01:24:50.560 | intrusive, sort of, without direct reading of the neurons and more sort of interactive

01:24:57.360 | experience with a robot, that you can have an AI system that steers your psychedelic experience,

01:25:04.160 | that helps you sort of, when you take a heroic dose of psilocybin, for example,

01:25:11.200 | helps steer you, steer your mind, say just the right things. I mean, you could say that kind

01:25:16.880 | of thing with, it's a totally open problem, I would say. You talk about set and setting.

01:25:25.200 | This is the interesting thing about Johns Hopkins is, you know, you create a comfortable environment,

01:25:31.200 | a safe environment for allowing, then if you take a heroic, like a large dose of psilocybin,

01:25:38.480 | that you could trust that everything would be safe and you can really allow the exploration

01:25:43.520 | of your mind, but then you don't know from a psychotherapy perspective of like, during that trip,

01:25:50.320 | what a human should say to steer that trip. Like, that's a totally open set of problems.

01:25:55.440 | And in some sense, probably throughout history, those rituals, you've figured out what are the

01:26:00.960 | right things to say to each other. - Exactly.

01:26:02.720 | - How to collaborate. And maybe if you can turn that into an optimization problem,

01:26:07.200 | AI could figure that out much, much quicker. - I'm with you. So, elusus was known for three

01:26:13.200 | things, the legomena, the dromena, and the deignumena, the things said, the things done,

01:26:18.880 | the things shown. If you can pack that all into your AI interface, I'm in, Lex Friedman.

01:26:23.600 | - I'm gonna write a proposal and then try to get it through the IRB at MIT.

01:26:30.240 | I mean, there's a certain sense in which I definitely wanted to explore psychedelics,

01:26:37.600 | I mean, in my personal life, but also more rigorously as a scientist,

01:26:41.600 | and to push that forward. And especially in the AI space, and it is difficult how to do that dance

01:26:52.080 | when there's gray areas of legality and all those kinds of things. And we're dancing around them,

01:26:58.560 | and some of that is language, and some of that is what we socially conceive of as drugs or not. And

01:27:06.640 | you're right that perhaps we can reframe it as religious experiences, all those kinds of things.

01:27:12.320 | I mean, it's fascinating because it feels like there's a bunch of tools before us that were

01:27:16.880 | used by the ancients that we're not utilizing for exploring the human mind, that we very well could

01:27:24.080 | be in a rigorous scientific way, in a safe way. And that's fascinating. There's this interesting

01:27:30.240 | period in the 20th century of LSD use that many of the people doing research on psychedelics now

01:27:41.200 | kind of have their roots in that history. I mentioned that Dr. Rick Doblin, he is one of

01:27:47.200 | those people. And there's this interesting story of a bunch of creatives that used LSD or other

01:27:54.000 | drugs to help them. What do you make of the idea of somebody like Ken Kesey who wrote "One

01:28:00.080 | Flover's the Cuckoo's Nest" in part under the influence of LSD? Like, what do you make of the

01:28:08.960 | use of psychedelics to maximize the creative potential of the human mind? Is this a crutch

01:28:21.600 | or is this actually an effective tool that we should explore? - One person's crutch might be

01:28:30.400 | another's bungee cord. It depends on that mind. Think about Paul McCartney. I mean, we might not

01:28:40.960 | have some of the better Beatles music in the absence of LSD. And what did Sir Paul say in 1967

01:28:47.520 | when he was asked about his use of LSD? He said that he recognized the dangers inherent in it,

01:28:53.360 | but that he did it with a very specific, very deliberate purpose in mind. He wanted to find

01:28:59.280 | the answer to what life is all about. And I'm not sure what Sir Paul is doing this week, but he's

01:29:05.440 | probably not doing LSD. Speaking back to my theory about these substances being catalyzers of

01:29:12.720 | spiritual introspection, it came along at a time in their life when I think they were ripe for it,

01:29:19.280 | especially George Harrison. I highly recommend the Martin Scorsese documentary about George

01:29:26.000 | Harrison. For them, I think it was exactly the way we ought to investigate it, which is,

01:29:32.640 | well, mind expanders. This is what psychedelics do, right? That which makes manifest the contents

01:29:39.040 | of the mind. In the absence of an experience like that, and it can be in a three-day fast,

01:29:44.560 | it can be laying down in a cave, it can be in ritual chanting, it can be in a sun dance,

01:29:50.560 | but in the absence of that kind of experience at the right time in your life, it may otherwise be

01:29:55.360 | very difficult to find entrance to that kingdom of heaven, which I do think is here and now,

01:30:00.720 | getting right back to the very beginning. If we are actually to participate in that

01:30:05.280 | eternal principle, how and when? - What do you think Nietzsche meant when he said that God is

01:30:11.440 | dead? So there's a sense that religion is fading from society. And there's a cranky German that

01:30:21.040 | kind of wrote about it. What do you think he meant? - He was a cranky German who knew a lot

01:30:25.920 | about Dionysus, by the way, which is why I like him. So certainly there's some truth

01:30:32.000 | to the mortality of God. I think Gallup put out a study only a couple of months ago where church

01:30:39.360 | membership is now officially in the minority in the United States at 47%, according to the most

01:30:45.760 | recent poll. That number was closer to 70% only 20 years ago. So we're living through something,

01:30:52.000 | and we're living through the unchurching of America, and it's the rise of the spiritual

01:30:56.320 | but not religious, the inheritor of all traditions but the slave to none. There's a rise in the

01:31:03.040 | unaffiliated, the nuns. I think it was like one-third of millennials, it's probably much

01:31:07.600 | higher now, that don't affiliate with any religion. So in that sense, God is absolutely dead,

01:31:14.240 | but maybe not the God that we were trying to define at the very beginning. So Nietzsche also

01:31:19.360 | looked forward to the Übermensch, which would be a fully realized human being that despite the death

01:31:25.600 | of God did not fall into nihilism and amorality, existential despair, all that great German stuff.

01:31:34.000 | And there are some commentators who talk about this eternal recurrence that just maybe by

01:31:40.160 | incorporating some of these techniques, not necessarily doctrine and dogma, but I would say

01:31:45.200 | the techniques of antiquity. And again, Nietzsche writes a lot about the rationality of Dionysus

01:31:51.520 | having its place in society. If anything, these biochemical discoveries, I think, point us back.

01:31:57.200 | They point us back to Dionysus and their responsible incorporation of the irrational

01:32:04.080 | into our otherwise society of rational people and our kazooistry.

01:32:10.960 | I have a sense that there will be kind of, just kind of as you've implied, that there will be

01:32:17.600 | maybe the God of old is dying and there'll be a rebirth of different kind of God and it'll just

01:32:24.160 | keep happening throughout history. I do think there will be a time where AI will be the gods

01:32:29.840 | we'll look to, the other, the super intelligent, those kinds of things. There's a little bit of an

01:32:36.480 | inkling of religious longing for meaning in the way people conceive of aliens currently.

01:32:44.640 | I mean, I talked to a bunch of people about UFOs, EOPs, and aliens. And so to me, it's very

01:32:51.600 | interesting for perhaps different reasons, because I'm just, I look up to the stars and

01:32:56.640 | it's incredibly humbling to me to think that there's trillions of intelligent alien civilizations

01:33:02.960 | out there, which to me seems likely, or perhaps not intelligent, perhaps just alien life. And

01:33:09.600 | actually also that we don't even understand what it means to be intelligent or do we understand

01:33:14.800 | what it means to be alive. The time scale, the spatial scale, which patterns of atoms can form

01:33:23.520 | in a way that you can call life, it's just could be way weirder than we can imagine. And certainly

01:33:31.920 | way different than human life. Anyway, that to me is humbling. And so it's almost like the

01:33:38.480 | simulation, conceiving of the world of simulation, thinking of aliens to me is a useful thought

01:33:44.400 | experiment of like, what would aliens look like if they visited? How would we know? How would we

01:33:49.440 | communicate with them? How would we send signals to them if they're already here and we don't see

01:33:57.520 | them? How's that possible? That seems to me actually likely that we would just be too self-centered

01:34:03.440 | and too dumb to see them if they're already here. Anyway, so that's kind of the, almost the

01:34:11.440 | pragmatic, the engineering, the physics sense of aliens, but there's also kind of a longing

01:34:18.160 | to connect with other intelligent beings out there, both the fear and the excitement of that,

01:34:24.240 | that has kind of a religious aspect to it. And I find fascinating. And in the right context,

01:34:30.560 | when you remove the skepticism of government from that, it's actually a hopeful longing.

01:34:36.560 | Do you have a, do you see this kind of interest in aliens as at all connected to your study of

01:34:43.600 | religion? - So you're the first person to ask me about aliens in eight months. So it looks like

01:34:48.080 | I'm going on the record. - Let's go.

01:34:49.920 | - I'll drop some J. Allen Hynek on you. So Hynek, involved in Project Blue Book, famously says in

01:35:00.640 | 1966, when the long-awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, and we're assuming that UFOs have

01:35:07.280 | something to do with aliens, but when the long-awaited solution comes, I believe it will

01:35:13.280 | prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and unexpected

01:35:19.520 | quantum leap. In other words, I do not think that we're dealing with flesh and blood beings

01:35:26.560 | in nuts and bolts crafts. I think it's way, way more complicated than that. And if anything,

01:35:32.800 | it takes me back to the ancient world. It takes me back to this invisible college of beings of

01:35:38.080 | apparent higher intent. It takes me to the geniuses and the muses. So the first document

01:35:44.080 | in Western civilization, Homer's Epics, they begin by invoking an alien. They invoke a muse.

01:35:51.040 | (speaking in foreign language)

01:35:54.400 | Tell me, oh muse, about the man. So Homer isn't inventing poetry, he's channeling poetry,

01:36:02.000 | epic poetry from an alien intelligence. Maybe that intelligence has felt a little

01:36:08.240 | unrecognized in recent years. - Trying to show up in human

01:36:14.480 | recognizable forms, the muse is trying to give a little hint of its existence. Yeah, I mean,

01:36:20.640 | I have a, I've been saying, I honestly sort of, I don't believe this, but I think about this,

01:36:28.000 | whether alien, like muse is a great example, whether aliens could be thoughts.

01:36:34.720 | Ideas we have are the aliens, or consciousness itself is the methods by which aliens communicate

01:36:43.520 | with us. I find this very kind of liberating to expand our conception of what intelligent

01:36:51.360 | beings are. - You would like Julian Jaynes.

01:36:54.960 | Julian Jaynes writes a great book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral

01:37:00.400 | Mind. It's this theory that the ancient Greek mind was very different from ours, and that when

01:37:07.520 | they heard the muses, or the gods and goddesses for that matter, they would hear them as voices

01:37:12.240 | in the head, and hear it as an internal god figure offering commands, which they couldn't ignore. So,

01:37:20.160 | were they walking schizophrenics? It might be one way to talk about it before the breakdown

01:37:24.320 | of the bicameral mind. But it's a provocative theory, largely untestable. But when you're

01:37:29.920 | reading ancient Greek, and Latin for that matter, you can't read it very long without bumping up

01:37:34.720 | against these discarded entities. They're everywhere, and they survived. They persist

01:37:41.120 | across time, which is even stranger. Not just in the form of all the things my daughters like,

01:37:45.680 | like fairies, and gnomes, and elves, but, and McKenna loves this, the sylphs, and the boulder

01:37:51.360 | grinders, and the sprites, and the djins, and elementals. Every society has them. It seems to

01:37:56.320 | be fairly universal. And they largely exist in folklore, mythology. This is what Jacques Vallée

01:38:02.240 | writes about so wonderfully. - We've kind of been sneaking around it,

01:38:07.120 | but let me ask you, from yours, from everything we've been talking about, how do you think about

01:38:13.040 | consciousness? Is it a fun little trick that the human mind does, or is it somehow fundamental to

01:38:21.760 | this whole thing? - So, this three-pound lump of jelly

01:38:26.640 | inside our craniums that can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate

01:38:34.960 | the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity,

01:38:41.120 | that peculiar self-recursive quality that we call self-awareness. So, this is the hard problem,

01:38:46.880 | right? This is the unknowable, the unknown, at least. I don't know. I have no good answer for

01:38:54.080 | that. Aside from that-- - Do you think it's somehow

01:38:56.480 | deeply fundamental to the human experience, or is it just a trick? So, you have like,

01:39:02.880 | I mean, Sam Harris has really been making me think about this. So, calling free will an illusion,

01:39:08.720 | the interesting thing about Sam is it's not just a philosophical little chatted with him about

01:39:17.520 | free will. He really says he experiences the lack of free will. Like, he's able to, you know,

01:39:27.520 | large parts of the day to feel like he has no free will. In that same way, now, he thinks that

01:39:35.040 | consciousness is not an illusion. It is, you know, it's a real thing, but at the same, I'm more,

01:39:43.760 | almost like, I'm almost more of like, consciousness seems to be a little bit of an illusion,

01:39:49.040 | in the sense that, like, it feels like maybe this is a robotics AI perspective, but it feels like,

01:39:54.880 | in that same way that Sam steps outside of feeling like he has an agency, feeling like he has a free

01:40:02.240 | will, I feel like we should be able to step outside of having a consciousness. So, that,

01:40:10.400 | from my perspective, maybe that's a hopeful perspective for trying to engineer consciousness,

01:40:14.960 | but do you think consciousness is like, at the core of this, or is it just like, language,

01:40:21.760 | or almost like a thing we build on top of a much deeper human, the things that makes us human?

01:40:30.000 | I don't know. I am attracted to Lenz's notion of biocentrism. I mean, it's difficult to walk

01:40:35.040 | away from the double-slit experiment not wondering why we seem capable of collapsing

01:40:41.280 | that quantum wave function. It's very, very weird, giving rise to even weirder ideas about

01:40:47.360 | superposition and spooky action at a distance, and things that MIT guys know a lot better than me.

01:40:52.400 | But it seems to me fundamental. Maybe consciousness is the fundamental thing. I mean, weirdly,

01:40:59.600 | some of these ancient incubatory practices--I talked about Peter Kingsley before. So, he's not

01:41:04.880 | a proponent of ancient psychedelic use, but is a proponent of these ancient rites of incubation

01:41:10.000 | that were practiced by Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Pedocles, other pre-Socratics. And so,

01:41:16.080 | what were they doing? They were trying to get in touch with consciousness. They were

01:41:19.840 | entering into suspended states of animation in these cave-like settings. Pythagoras had built

01:41:25.680 | one in his basement and would lie down motionless, apparently, for long periods of time. And what I

01:41:31.120 | think they were trying to do was tap into and try to answer this question in their own--you

01:41:37.360 | could call it a scientific way, actually, less religion than science. And what they would

01:41:42.400 | discover or try to discover was a state of awareness that is somehow beyond life and death,

01:41:47.520 | beyond waking and dreaming, where you can be aware of the senses but also in touch

01:41:52.480 | with another reality at the exact same time, what Kingsley calls sensation.

01:41:56.960 | That, I think, is definitely worth exploring.

01:42:01.600 | Well, and the way I hope to explore is by trying to build it. Everybody uses the tools they have.

01:42:09.680 | Well, no, I do also hope psychedelics could help.

01:42:12.320 | So how do you build that? I'm curious.

01:42:14.240 | That's a whole other discussion. There's a lot of things I could say here, but let me put simply

01:42:20.560 | is I believe that you can go a long way towards building consciousness by trying to fake

01:42:34.560 | consciousness. So fake it till you make it, as an engineering approach, I think will work

01:42:41.360 | for consciousness.

01:42:42.160 | You seem satisfied with that.

01:42:46.560 | I'm satisfied with that because I know how deeply unsatisfied others are, but just wait.

01:42:53.040 | I mean, I don't know what to--so the topic of consciousness is mostly handled by

01:43:04.160 | philosophers currently, and that's great.

01:43:08.160 | And their philosophers are wonderful and good at what they do.

01:43:13.520 | I'm not a philosopher. I'm an engineer.

01:43:16.560 | And I think the approach there is quite different.

01:43:18.960 | I think falling in love is different than trying to have a podcast conversation about what is love.

01:43:32.720 | You know, I think the engineering effort is just fundamentally different than the philosophical

01:43:39.600 | effort.

01:43:40.400 | And I have a sense that consciousness can be engineered even before it is understood by

01:43:46.080 | the philosophers.

01:43:47.120 | So I think there's a bunch of things like that in this world that could be engineered before

01:43:51.520 | they're understood.

01:43:52.640 | I think the intelligence is one such thing.

01:43:55.440 | I think we'll be able to engineer super intelligent beings before we're able to understand

01:44:01.680 | the human mind.

01:44:02.480 | That's--yeah.

01:44:04.000 | I mean, there's less--there's a lot of intuition to unpack there of why that is, but as it

01:44:13.200 | stands, that's perhaps my engineering optimism and engineering ethic under which I operate.

01:44:19.680 | Consciousness is easy to build, hard to understand.

01:44:23.920 | Okay.

01:44:27.600 | Are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently that had a big impact on you?

01:44:34.240 | You've--Immortality Key is exceptionally well researched.

01:44:39.680 | The amount of books you read is--I cannot even imagine.

01:44:45.120 | So is there something in those--in your travels through the land of language that stuck with

01:44:53.200 | you that was especially impactful?

01:44:55.040 | I mentioned a couple of them, but--so I knew nothing about psychedelics before 2007.

01:45:01.520 | And it was in hearing about some of the first psilocybin experiments at Hopkins.

01:45:06.720 | And then shortly thereafter, I went down this rabbit hole.

01:45:10.480 | And so, the first set of recommendations all kind of fit in that time period in my life,

01:45:14.560 | 2007, 2008.

01:45:16.960 | It started with Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge.

01:45:22.960 | It was a total impulse buy at the Barnes and Noble on 6th Avenue in New York,

01:45:27.680 | and wound up introducing me to Supernatural by Graham Hancock.

01:45:32.720 | That convinced me that there was a long story to psychedelics that he tried to prove in that book,

01:45:42.320 | and that we're still trying to prove.

01:45:43.520 | I mentioned the connection between ritual psychedelics and cave art.

01:45:49.680 | This is the neuropsychological model that was first proposed by David Lewis Williams

01:45:54.400 | at the University of Waterstrand, the same university where Lee Berger is, by the way,

01:45:58.720 | in South Africa.

01:45:59.520 | So these ideas are old.

01:46:00.640 | But what Graham did in that book is just--it's well worth your time.

01:46:05.680 | It's well worth a few reads, actually.

01:46:07.200 | Because it was after that that I discovered Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck,

01:46:12.400 | and a lot of other books that just kind of blew my mind.

01:46:18.320 | What is Breaking Open the Head about?

01:46:19.840 | So it's Daniel's romp through contemporary shamanism.

01:46:24.480 | And it's his very well-told experiences with everything from psilocybin to iboga

01:46:32.160 | being initiated by the Bwitis.

01:46:33.920 | And it was the first time I'd read any firsthand accounts,

01:46:38.880 | aside from Jeremy Narby, any firsthand accounts by a New Yorker, by the way,

01:46:43.840 | about the potential for these compounds that I'd been ignoring for far too long, obviously.

01:46:49.280 | And so, that's when I started revisiting The Road to Eleusis and looking through the

01:46:55.280 | anthropological literature, reading everything Gordon Wasson had ever written, that Karl Ruck

01:46:59.440 | had written.

01:46:59.920 | And it sent me down a pretty weird rabbit hole until I found Peter Kingsley,

01:47:04.480 | which is my second recommendation.

01:47:06.960 | So Peter, again, he's not a fan of the psychedelic hypothesis.

01:47:11.520 | But what he does is I think expose the value of the irrational to the ancient Greeks,

01:47:18.000 | especially the pre-Socratics.

01:47:19.200 | Here we are talking about AI and God and these entangled philosophical questions.

01:47:26.000 | The best I can read Kingsley is that Western civilization is a product of a gift from the

01:47:32.960 | goddess Persephone.

01:47:33.920 | And this is not a hippie, this is a pretty gold standard classicist who went on to write

01:47:41.280 | a couple of books.

01:47:42.560 | One is In the Dark Places of Wisdom, and the other is Reality, what better way to title

01:47:47.840 | your book, where he talks about these ancient techniques for exploring the irrational.

01:47:53.440 | The same thing Karl Ruck was talking about.

01:47:55.040 | After compiling all this data in The Road to Eleusis, Ruck says that the biggest challenge

01:48:00.800 | is trying to convince his colleagues in the late 1970s that the ancient Greeks and indeed,

01:48:05.840 | some of the most famous and intelligent among them could enter so fully into irrationality.

01:48:12.480 | Same thing Nietzsche is talking about in his exploration of Dionysus.

01:48:16.160 | And so I think Kingsley just stands apart as one of those books, Reality, that my life

01:48:22.640 | was never quite the same after reading that.

01:48:24.880 | - We talked about the three pound jelly that is able to conceive of the entirety of the

01:48:38.720 | fabric of reality in the universe and everything, and also of its own mortality.

01:48:44.480 | What do you think is the meaning of it all?

01:48:49.280 | What's the meaning of life?

01:48:52.640 | - (laughs)

01:48:55.280 | - Is the three pound jelly able to answer that one?

01:48:58.160 | - (laughs) No, but I can plagiarize Joseph Campbell, which is good enough.

01:49:03.120 | Joe Campbell says that, "I don't think what we're looking for is a meaning of life.

01:49:08.800 | I think what we're looking for is an experience of being alive, so that the experiences we have

01:49:15.840 | on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our innermost being

01:49:21.600 | and reality."

01:49:22.400 | You talked about the true reality, absolute truth.

01:49:24.640 | These are all constructs, and I think they're constructs that are made day by day and acquire

01:49:32.000 | this aura of factuality.

01:49:33.760 | Remember in Clifford Geertz's definition of religion, we're all just faking it until we

01:49:38.960 | make it.

01:49:39.680 | And I think a lot of that has to do with moods and motivations and feelings and emotions,

01:49:44.400 | which is not to discredit facts and figures.

01:49:47.840 | But I think that meaning, meaning making, is a very subjective process that is not only

01:49:55.040 | difficult to talk about, but difficult to quantify.

01:49:57.200 | - And experience is a primary in that versus...

01:49:59.840 | So like the actual subjective experience is primary to the meaning making process versus

01:50:07.520 | like some kind of rigorous analysis of like having an algorithm that runs and computes

01:50:15.200 | and then finally spits out 42.

01:50:17.840 | - Well, this is how families are created.

01:50:21.280 | - Tell me more about this.

01:50:22.880 | - Well, my wife and I fell in love and made babies.

01:50:25.040 | We didn't type up an Excel sheet and figure out the best way to go about this.

01:50:29.120 | - That's what I've been doing all these years.

01:50:31.200 | That's why I'm single.

01:50:32.800 | - Too many Excel sheets.

01:50:37.440 | Well, we say falling in love, right?

01:50:40.240 | We say fall in love.

01:50:41.360 | What does that mean to fall in love?

01:50:43.280 | You are surrendering to an intelligence that is beyond us.

01:50:49.440 | You could say a God-like intelligence.

01:50:51.200 | Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar I mentioned in the Universal Christ, he writes a lot about

01:50:56.000 | how the divine for you is often encountered in the other.

01:51:01.600 | In fact, how could it be otherwise?

01:51:03.120 | This is bedrock sacramental theology that you find the God in the things in your life

01:51:08.960 | as well you should.

01:51:10.080 | That's the proving ground for identifying as God rather than creating a relationship

01:51:16.160 | with God.

01:51:16.720 | So I think that these irrational states play a big role in that.

01:51:19.920 | - Irrational.

01:51:21.440 | Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it than on the topic of love.

01:51:24.960 | Brian, thank you so much for a brilliant exposition of history and the poetry.

01:51:31.600 | I really appreciate you talking with me today.

01:51:34.880 | - I love you, Lex.

01:51:35.760 | - I love you too, Brian.

01:51:39.120 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Muir-Escu and thank you to Inside

01:51:43.520 | Tracker, GiveWell, NI, Indeed, and Masterclass.

01:51:48.480 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

01:51:51.120 | And now let me leave you with some words from Terrence McKenna about psychedelics.

01:51:56.480 | Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values.

01:52:02.320 | This is what makes it such a political hot potato.

01:52:05.840 | Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one

01:52:11.280 | which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.

01:52:14.800 | Thank you for listening.

01:52:16.880 | I hope to see you next time.

01:52:18.960 | [END]

01:52:20.000 | Terrence McKenna - Inside Tracker, GiveWell, NI, Indeed, and Masterclass.

01:52:23.200 | [END]

01:52:23.280 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #211

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