The following is a conversation with Brian Murevescu, author of The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, a book that reconstructs the forgotten history of psychedelics in the development of Western civilization. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors, Insight Tracker, GiveWell, NI, Indeed, and Masterclass.

Their links are in the description. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Brian Murevescu. Who or what do you think God is? How has our conception maybe put another way of God changed throughout history? We're starting with an easy one, Lex. Yep. So what is God?

Well, God is a thought. God is an idea, but its reference is to that which is beyond thinking, beyond our ability to even conceive, beyond the categories of being and non-being. So how do we talk about that? To talk about it is almost to get it wrong, right? So Joe Campbell famously said that any God that is not transparent to transcendence is like an idolatry because it's just a mental construct, and it can't possibly speak to the incomprehensible.

So we use poetic language. We say the being of beings, the infinite life energy of the universe, the mystery of transcendence, boundless life, unqualified isness. But it doesn't quite get to the point. I think that if there's any great insight from mysticism, it's that you and I participate with God in a very real way, Lex Friedman, here in Austin, Texas.

That in the here and now, to touch that eternal principle, another way to refer to God, to touch that eternal principle within ourselves is to participate with divinity in some way. So not an external force, but that divine sense within. So there's some aspect in which God is a part of us.

So one, it's a thing we can't describe. It represents all of the mystery around us. It's outside our ability to comprehend. And at the same time, it's somehow the thing that's inside of us also. The ultimate paradox. MacThiel of Magdeburg, 13th century German mystic, maybe the first German mystic, says that the day of her spiritual awakening was the day that she saw and knew that she saw God in all things, and all things in God.

And so we can say this, by the way, without apology or lightweight theology or vapid speculation or even heresy, we can talk about this, including within the Abrahamic faiths. The mystical core of these faiths all talk about the encounter of divinity within. That's what I explore in the immortality key, this notion of techniques, archaic techniques in some cases, of ecstasy that allow that experience of the eternal principle to actually rise up in our consciousness when we're still here as flesh and blood beings.

There's some sense in which our conception of God, though, is conjured up by our own mind. And so aren't we creating God? Like, aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of God? Like, if we are, like when we talk about God, aren't we playing with ideas that are created by our mind, and thereby we are the creator, not God?

This is a very kind of cyclical question, but in some sense I mean that if God is the thing that represents the mystery all around us, contrast that with our conception of God, the way we talk about him, is more a creation of our minds. It's not the mystery, it's our struggle to comprehend the mystery.

And therefore we're creating the God in terms of the God that we're talking about in this conversation or in general, if that makes any sense. - It makes no sense whatsoever. - Great, this is wonderful. - But this is the eternal mystery. This is why it's so difficult to talk about, and yet it could be the very center of our beings.

You know, the Upanishads speak about us as the creators, about us as gods. It's a very different creation myth, but the god of the Upanishads in this great verse talks about pouring themselves into creation. "Indeed, I have become this creation," says God. And there's a great line, "Verily, he or she who knows this becomes in this creation a creator." So yeah, I mean just our ability to engage in mentation, our ability to think about this stuff is partly our divine nature.

This is what the humanists were talking about in the Renaissance, by the way. And that it's not so much learning, putting dots together, having arguments with each other over learned books. It's a process of unlearning, is what some of the mystical traditions talk about. Unlearning all these thoughts, emotions, traumas, and experiences that have gone into the false construction of our false self, that behind all these layers, like peeling back the onion, is a part of us that once you can identify that, begins to look a little bit different.

In other words, it's one thing to foster a relationship with God. It's a very different thing to identify as God. And I mean that quite literally, without being heretical. You can find this in the mystery traditions. - Can you expand on this? You mean a human being can embody God?

- That is textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any Christian mystic. But you can find it in the mystical tradition of Islam and Judaism as well. So Rumi, for example, the great Sufi mystic, talks about if you could get rid of yourself, just get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you.

That the face of the unknown would appear on the perception of your consciousness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern-day contemporary mystic, talks about, because this stuff does continue, there's a continuity to it. - The poetry here is incredible. - So well, listen to Rabbi Kushner. He says that the emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to true reality.

And in Kabbalism, the true reality is what's called the divine nothingness, ayin. And so I like the adage that atheists and mystics both essentially believe in nothing, except that the mystics spell it with a capital N, the divine nothing. And then I'll give you Meister Eckhart, another medieval Christian mystic.

He says that if you could not yourself, right? The same concept, if you could not yourself for just an instant, indeed, I say less than an instant, you would possess all. So again, you're seeing the same thing in Sufism, Kabbalism, Christian mysticism. The way to identify with the divine is to peel back these layers and attempt to discover pure awareness.

- If we look at the universe from a physics perspective, or, you know, I'm a computer science person, so if the universe is a computer, there's some sense that God, the creator of the universe, or just the computer itself, doesn't know what the heck is gonna happen. He just kind of creates some basic rules and runs the thing.

So there is some element in which you can conceive of humans or conscious beings or intelligent beings as a tool that the creator uses to understand itself, himself. Do you think that's a perspective that we could, or is useful to take on God, that is basically the universe created humans to understand itself?

He doesn't actually know the full thing. He needs the human brains to figure out the puzzle. So that's in contrasting to the unlearning, to the getting out of the way that we've talked about. It's more like, no, we need the humans to figure out this puzzle. - Well, we have no answers to this, which is why philosophers still have jobs, if they have jobs at all.

But I mean, so the physicists take a look at this. Have you seen the article that came out, I think it was this month, in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Robert Lanza, the biocentrism theory, the idea that the universe comes into being through our observation, right? The whole, the God equation.

So not just in quantum mechanics, but in general relativity, the idea that we make the universe moment by moment, which is kind of mind-blowing, gets into ideas of simulation. Okay, so that's how the physicists, at least some of them, might look at it. You could also look back to the medieval Christian mystics.

Meister Eckhart, once again, says that the eye with which I see God is the same eye that sees me, right? So one sight, one knowledge, one love. Another mind-blowing concept. But this is why the arts and poetry and music are so important, because although I love astroparticle physics, it's another to kind of hear this, the same message across time.

Yeah, the simulation thing. I was actually looking this morning at video games, just the statistics on video games, and I saw that the two top video games in terms of hours played is Fortnite and World of Warcraft. And I saw that it's 140 billion hours, billion hours have been played at those games.

- That's a lot of video games. - Yeah, but that's very sophisticated worlds being created, especially in the World of Warcraft. It's a massive online role-playing game. So you have these characters that are together, sort of creating a world, but they in themselves are also developing. They have all these items and they're growing, like they're little humans.

Like there's complicated societies that are formed, they have goals, they're striving and so on. And we're creating a universe within our universe. And for now, it's a basic sort of constraint version of our more richer earth-like civilization. But it's conceivable that we are this thing on earth is a kind of video game that somebody else is playing.

You can see sort of video games upon video games being created. And this is something I think a lot about, not from a philosophical perspective, but practically how fun does this video game have to be for us to let go of the silly pursuits in this meat space that we live in and fully just stay in WoW, stay in World of Warcraft, stay in the video game for full time.

So I think about that from an engineering perspective, like is there going to be a time when this video game is actual real life for us? And then the creatures inside the video game, they'll be just borrowing our consciousness sort of to ground themselves, will refer to us as the gods, right?

Like, won't we become the gods? This conversation is not going how I expected, but I think about this a lot from, you know, cause I love video games and I wonder more and more of us, especially in COVID times are living in the digital world. You could think about Twitter and all those kinds of things.

You could think about clubhouse people using just voices to communicate little icons sort of in a digital space. You could see more and more will be moving in the digital space and let go of this physical space. And then the remnants of the ancients that created the video games that nobody centuries from now will even remember, those will be the gods and then there'll be gods upon gods being created.

This is the kind of stuff I think about, but is that any at all useful to you to this thought experiment of a simulation, basically the fabric of our reality, how did it come to be, what is running this thing? Is that useful or is it ultimately the project of understanding God of understanding myth is the project that centers on the human, on the human mind for you?

We seem to be at the center of this divine dance, which sounds awfully anthropocentric, but the ancients thought about this too. I mean, the concept in Sanskrit of Leela, that the point behind existence is this play, right? It's ultimately playful, this divine dance. It gets awfully complicated in the Gnostic and Neoplatonic schools, these chains of being from Godhead down to us, right?

Some invisible, right? And we're going to get into Terence McKenna territory later on, but we can start now by talking about discarded entities and archons and aliens and archetypes. I mean, there is a world where Terence McKenna does meet Plato and Gnosticism quite kindly, and that's in this invisible college, right?

The invisible world with which we seem to have some kind of symbiosis that has a higher intent, maybe even a purpose or a plan in mind for us. So, I mean, these ideas come across when you've had a heroic dose of mushrooms. They also pop up in the ancient philosophical literature, this idea of archons who, you know, the puppet masters controlling us flesh and blood beings.

It's all a cosmic dance, and there are no answers to this. - First, who are the archons? And second, what is this world where Terence McKenna meets Plato? Do you mean in the space of ideas, or are we talking about some kind of world that connects all of consciousness to all of human history?

- I think through different techniques, it is, you know, I think a lot about, I think Gordon Wasson is the meeting point of the two. So, Gordon Wasson, who I do talk about in the book, was this JP Morgan banker turned ethnomycologist, and he's largely credited with the rediscovery of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, which kind of gave rise to the pop psychedelic revolution of the 1960s.

He visited Maria Sabina down in Mexico. In his wake went Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Stones, and everybody else. And the way he describes his psilocybin experience is a bit strange because he thinks of Plato, right? And he says that, you know, whereas our ordinary reality is kind of this imperfect view of things, Gordon Wasson felt that on mushrooms, he was spying the archetypes.

And he talks about Plato, and he writes about the archetypes in this famous article that's released in 1957 in Life magazine. And so, a well-read individual from the mid-20th century has his premier psychedelic experience, and out comes Plato because what he was witnessing was so sharp, so brilliant, so detailed, in some sense more real than real, this noetic sense that William James talks about.

That when you confront something more real than real, these discarnate entities, these images, these visionary motifs, you're tempted to believe that you've tapped into the truest nature and the underlying structure of the cosmos. And that's difficult to escape from, whether you're Plato or Terence McKenna or Gordon Wasson caught in between.

Can we talk about this, being in touch with something that is more real than real? And let's just go straight there to McKenna before we return to the bigger picture. So, he's talked about the, what is it, self-healing machine elves? Self-transforming. Self-transforming machine elves during his DMT travels. And I just talked to Rick Doblin, who also had different travels through this hyperspace.

But they all seem to be traveling on the same spaceship, just to different locations. And there is a sense in which they seem to be traveling through whatever, I don't know if it's through space-time or something else, to meet something that is more real than real. What can you say about this DMT experience, about Terence McKenna, about the poetry he used, but maybe more specifically about this place that they seem to all travel to?

So, the big question is, is it real? Is it really more real than real? The ancient philosophers were asking the same question, and their means of attempting to answer that was by dying. So, if you ask Plato the definition of philosophy, he will say that to practice it in the right way is to practice dying and being dead.

And many people describe the psychedelic experience in sort of near-death experience terms. And the encountering of all this visual imagery tends to be something that is often described as more real than real. So, how does Terence talk about this? So, I was just listening to the trilogues, which folks should look up.

Somewhere between 1989 and 1990, Terence sits down with his friends, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake at Esalen, and they're trying to figure out the meaning of these discarnate entities and these non-human intelligences. And Terence develops a taxonomy for how to analyze this. And he says that number one, they're either semi-physical but kind of elusive.

So, think of the Bigfoot or the Yeti or things like this, beings that exist somewhere between mythology and zoology, which isn't really appropriate here. So, option number two, he says is the mental... You're dropping so many good lines. It's so good. Okay, I apologize. Somewhere between mythology and zoology.

This is all Terence McKenna. I take no credit for this. But you're combining, you're like, Jimi Hendrix only used the blue scale, but he still created something new in the music he played. Anyway, go ahead. Well, we're going into Mixolydian right now. So, option number two, and this is what Terence calls sort of the mentalist reductionist approach.

And this is pure McKenna poetry. He says that these beings could be autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the controlling power of the ego. So, in Jungian senses, these would just be pure projections. The projections of schizophrenics in some cases. So, they're essentially unreal. And the third option, the most tantalizing, is that they're both non-physical, but autonomous.

In other words, they actually exist in some kind of real place, in some kind of real space, and that we can have Congress with them. There is communication. He talks about the whisperings of the demon artificers, and that it's just possible that our meetings with these beings have coaxed the human species into self-expression in a very real way.

That at different times in history, our relationships with these semi-autonomous beings may actually guide the species. Now, this is high speculation, and Terence and Ralph and Rupert wind up talking about the early modern period and the scientific enlightenment, and that even someone like Descartes reports a dream in which he came face to face with an angel who said that the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.

So, even the hard-minded materialist like Descartes is confronting these discarnate entities. John Dee in the 16th century, the high magician of the Elizabethan court, he reports decades worth of what we would say is extraterrestrial communication or interdimensional communication. And you can find instances of this throughout history, including among the pre-Socratics.

And Peter Kingsley writes quite a bit about this, but I'll save that until your next question. - Well, first of all, we don't seem to understand from where intelligence came from. We don't understand from where life came from on Earth, but that we can kind of intuit, 'cause it's in the space of chemistry and biology, you have good theories about the origins of life on Earth, but the origins of intelligent life, that is a giant mystery.

And there's some sense in which, I mean, I don't know if you know the movie "2001 Space Odyssey," but it does seem that there's like important, throughout human history, throughout life on Earth, there's important phase shifts of, it feels like something happened where there's big leaps. It could be something coincidental like fire and learning how to cook meat and all those kinds of things, but it feels like there could be other things.

And I think that's at the core of your work is exploring what those things could be. Is it possible? Talked about Joe Rogan off-line. Is it, I mean, it's entirely possible. Is it possible that psychedelics have in fact contributed of being an important source of those phase shift throughout human history, of the intellect, basically steering the intellectual development and growth of human civilization?

- It's a hypothesis worth investigating. How about that? - Beautiful. - And maybe not psychedelics in and of themselves, but I think our whole conversation is kind of wrapped up in these non-ordinary states of awareness. We start by talking about God, which is something unordinary and expansive. And I think that as you trace the intervention of divinity, if that's the case, throughout human history, you have to bump up against the irrational.

Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of religions and fellow Romanian, said that the history of religions essentially constitutes the point of intersection between metaphysics and biology, right? So that we are biological beings who do interact with our planet, with the natural kingdom. And you would think that as early archaic ecologists, we would have figured out what plants work, which fungi don't, and developed maybe language around that.

And so, this is another one of McKenna's speculative but very interesting hypotheses, the stone ape theory. Is it possible that psychedelics were involved in one of the several leaps forward? You mentioned the word leap. Jared Diamond talks about the great leap forward 60,000 years ago. The species had been around for a couple hundred thousand years.

All of a sudden, the cave painting appears. All of a sudden, there's a phase shift. Did something like that happen millions of years ago? And I love the way Paul Stamets talks about this. It would be the ingestion of perhaps psilocybin-containing fungi millions and millions of times over millions and millions of years.

So, it's not just a one-time event that cascades, but it's the accumulation of psychedelic experience. It's really difficult to test that hypothesis. But I've been talking with a paleoanthropologist in South Africa, my friend Lee Berger, about ways that we might test for this. And so, Lee, amongst many things, is this National Geographic explorer.

He's the paleoanthropologist's paleoanthropologist at the University of Whitwater-Shrind. He's famous amongst other things for the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like Homo naledi. And there's an interesting point. So, naledi is this archaic hominid, morphologically archaic, but it dates to about 300,000 years ago, which is very strange. What's even more strange about Homo naledi at the Rising Star Cave System there in South Africa is that Lee believes he's discovered the first bipedal ape deliberately disposing of its dead.

So, there is a recognition of self-mortality and the practicing of rituals around death. We're talking about burials. And if you have burials, says Lee, in an archaic hominid 300,000 years ago, maybe you have language. And I mention that because Terence McKenna was obsessed with language in the stoned ape theory that the ingestion of psilocybin in addition to enhancing visual acuity, perhaps facilitating sexual arousal, leads to proto-language.

Now, isn't it interesting, this could be entirely a coincidence, that the largest sound inventory of any language is the Khoisan of Botswana and Namibia. They have something like 164 consonants and 44 vowels. English, by comparison, has about 45. So, I don't know what to make of this, but what you find in that part of the world is very, very complex language.

Language that could be an inheritance, language that could be incredibly archaic, together with this recognition of self-mortality. And when I talk to Lee Berger, we say, when you're looking at universals like that, language around all human populations, the recognition of self-mortality, the contemplation of death, just maybe you have pharmacology.

And so, maybe we can go out and test for this using gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, proteomics, technology that doesn't even exist, but maybe we can actually test the stoned ape theory to figure out once and for all if there's any merit there. - Can you just linger a little bit on the pharmacology tools?

How would it be possible to say something about what was being ingested so, so long ago? - That's what I asked Dr. Berger. So, Lee has discovered in the dental calculus of archaic hominids-- - Nice. Dental calculus, I like this. - Evidence of their diet. And you might not believe how old this was, but in Sadiba, Australopithecus Sadiba, they found evidence of Sadiba's diet going back 2 million years.

So, through things like phytoliths, which are essentially fossilized plant tissue, they found evidence that Sadiba was eating bark and leaves and grasses and fruits and palm. So, no psychedelics to speak of, but it just goes to show that through things like dental microware analysis and other techniques that we're still developing, we can actually figure out what the diet was at the time.

I'll fast forward to 50,000 years ago. There was another study out of El Cidron Cave in 2012, which found that Neanderthals, again, preceding our species, 50,000 years ago, were ingesting yarrow and chamomile, which had been identified as medicinal. So, again, not psychedelic or psychoactive, but we kind of have the beginnings of the technology, and that was nine years ago, to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of these hominids.

- Presumably, there could be a way to figure out, it's not just diet, but which have psychoactive elements to them. So, whether you're chewing it, whether you're smoking it, whether, I mean, I don't know what, licking it. I don't know if there's any kind of ways through the dental calculus to figure out what exact substances were being consumed.

Is it possible to figure out whether psychedelic substances are being consumed by looking at human behavior, like you said, organized burials or cave paintings? No, but so that's a little bit of a stretch to say, like, where did this leap come from? - But it's not. It's not. So, just last fall, as a matter of fact, so that notion's been out there for a while, the idea that hallucinogens and the ritual consumption of hallucinogens were somehow related to the Great Leap Forward, were somehow related to the initial cave painting.

Graham Hancock wrote a beautiful book about this called Supernatural, which in many ways, like, sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2007. But even at the time when he was writing that, and the years subsequent, it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea. Last fall, interestingly enough, the first archaeochemical data for the ritual consumption of psychedelics associated with cave art was finally published.

It's not that ancient. It's only about 400 or 500 years ago, but it came from the Pinwheel Cave, a chumash site in California. And what they found were datura quids, like these chewed up, you mentioned how they ingested, these chewed up quids, like these bunches of datura, which contain these very powerful tropane alkaloids, in what was believed to be some kind of chumash initiation site.

So, we can say that there is initial, you know, archaeochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics and cave art. And so, where else might we find this? - Are there a lot of archaeochemists in the world? - Like, 'cause this is fascinating, is through chemistry, through biology, through physics, whatever, like all the disciplines we, perhaps in one day computer science, we apply those tools to study not the data of today, but the data of the past.

Are we talking about dozens here? Like, how hard is this problem relative to how many people are taking it on, just as a side little tangent? - We're probably talking more dozens than hundreds. I spent many years trying to track down an archaeochemist who would talk to me, there were a couple, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania, and then my friend Andrew Koh at MIT, which you might know something about.

Andrew really, you know, on his own time, on his own dime, has been gathering the data for this organic residue analysis. He has what's called the OpenArcheM project, which is this online open source repository for this data. But there's never been a center for this. No university has stood up a dedicated center, a team, really, which is what you need of archaeochemists looking at this stuff.

But, I mean, even despite that, there have been some remarkable discoveries over the past 10, 20 years. It's still a discipline very much in its infancy, maybe it's becoming a toddler, but as the technology gets better and cheaper, I hope you'll see more and more archaeochemists joining the fight.

- Yeah, and Andrew's fascinating, his work is fascinating. But also, I just, because of your work, I came across and exchanged a few emails with Patrick McGovern, who's basically, what would you call him? So he has a center, I guess, that does biomolecular archaeology at UPenn. And he's the author of a bunch of books, one of which is ancient brews.

So he's a scholar of beer and wine, and like ancient alcohol, which is fascinating. The influence, even just alcohol, but he has like alcohol with hallucinogenic properties as well. But it's fascinating, as a Russian, it's fascinating to think about the influence of alcohol on the development of human civilization throughout its history.

Is there something you can comment on alcohol, or in general, Patrick's work that was informative to you, inspiring, or kind of added to your conception of human history? - His work was some of the first hard scientific data that I saw for the ritual consumption of these intoxicants. I don't think he's ever found the hard and fast data for psychedelics, but what he turned me on to was this idea that alcohol, or beer and wine specifically, could have been used as vehicles for the administration of psychedelics.

That's where it all started for me. Just the notion that ancient beer and ancient wine is very, very different from what we drink today, that typically, they were cocktails. They were often fortified and mixed with different fruits, berries, herbs, plants, maybe even fungi over time because this was all in the absence of distilled liquor.

There is no hard alcohol, even in Russia, before maybe the 12th century it was in Europe, maybe a bit earlier. But the concept of distillation just didn't exist. And so, to pack a punch, rather than just drink a kind of watered-down Budweiser, these people were interested in fortifying these beverages with whatever they could find in nature.

And Pat, to his credit, found some of the initial data for these, you could say, spiked wines and spiked beers. Not with anything overtly psychedelic, but just the fact that in the 16th century BC, at Grave Circle A in Mycenae, there's this Minoan ritual cocktail of beer mixed with wine, mixed with mead, is very interesting.

It's even more interesting that you find that across the Aegean in Gordium at King Midas' tomb, right? The same kind of ritual cocktail, which Pat and Sam at the Dogfish Head Brewery resurrected as the Midas touch. So, I mean, the notion that we can go back, find this data, resurrect it, in some cases, 2,800 years later, I found pretty exciting 10 years ago.

- Yeah, bring it back for research. - (laughs) - But that's fascinating that people were playing with these ideas. And we'll return to ideas of psychedelic-confused wine, which is pretty fascinating. But can we step back and just kind of look at your work with the book "Immortality Key"? What is the story that you tell in this book?

- I knew it would get there eventually, Alex. (laughs) - It's a nonlinear path. Somehow, we were talking about simulation and the universe is a computer that's creating video games and wow and Fortnite, but we got there. And we'll return, always, to the insane philosophical. But your book "Immortality Key," what's the story that you tell in this book?

Which part of human history are you studying? - Right, so that's the way to phrase it. So, it's my 12-year search for the hard scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelics in classical antiquity. So, we're talking about amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans and the paleo-Christians. So, the generations that would give birth to the largest religion the world's ever known.

Christianity today was two and a half billion people. The big question for me is, were psychedelics actually involved? There was a lot written about this in the '60s, John Marco Allegro. The book that I follow was published in 1978 before I was born, "The Road to Eleusis" by Gordon Wasson, who we talked about already, Albert Hoffman, who famously discovers LSD or synthesizes it from ergot, and Karl Ruck, who is still a professor of classics at Boston University, the only surviving member of that renegade trio and now 85 years old.

So, this all predates us. But what was lacking in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, I think was some of this technology and the hard scientific data. Now, for years and years, I went out to the archaeobotanists and the archaeochemists around the world, and I asked a very basic question, "Is there any evidence for psychedelics in classical antiquity?" And the answer would almost invariably come back, "No." I'm talking to, in addition to Pat, he put me in touch with Hans-Peter Stieke in Germany, Tania Valamotti in Greece, Assunta Florenzano in Italy.

I went all over the place asking one question and getting the same answer back time and again. And so, the book is essentially my search for that data and the eventual uncovering of two, what I think are key pieces of data. One data point shows the ritual use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity in Iberia, what today is Spain.

And the other shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii from the first century AD, at the right place, at the right time, when the earliest Christians were showing up in Italy. - Again, these are early steps in the search for evidence in the space, but speaking of early Christians, what role do you think psychedelic-infused wine could have played in the life of the...

I won't be clever, in the life of Jesus Christ? - I've been saying recently that, and I hope this doesn't sound obscurantist, but I think it's impossible to understand Jesus and the birth of Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek. And I'll give you a very specific example of why I think that's the case.

- Interesting. - You can read the entire New Testament in ancient Greek, and not once will you ever find a reference to alcohol, because there was no word in ancient Greek for alcohol. The way the word sounds, alkol, it's Semitic, it comes from the Arabic. Kahla means to enliven or refresh, it probably comes from kohl, sort of these powdered metallics that were used in alchemical experiments and cosmetics.

So again, that's much later in time when we're using alchemy, distillation, etc. In the 1st century AD, the power of wine wasn't necessarily tied to alcohol, fermented grapes, the way we think about wine today. So Pat McGovern found some of that early organic data for wine being mixed with beer and with mead.

But if you look at the literature from the 1st century AD, Dioscorides, for example, he writes this massive treatise at the exact same time the Gospels are being written. And Dioscorides, in just one of his books, talks about 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things, like salvia and hellebore and frankincense and myrrh, these spiced perfumes, but also more dangerous things like henbane and mandrake, which he says in Greek can be fatal with just one cupful.

And in Book 474 of his Materia Medica, he talks about black nightshade producing fantasias ou aedes, not unpleasant visions, what today we would say is psychedelic. So just looking at the literature and the kind of literature that even most classicists--I didn't really learn it in undergrad, I came across Dioscorides later--but just a basic look at the literature supports what McGovern has been testing, which is the fact that wine was routinely mixed with different compounds.

- It's fascinating, by the way, that language affects our conception of the tools we use to understand the world. So like, you can see wine, you can see psychedelics, if they're not called drugs, you can maybe reframe how you see them in terms of their role in us thinking about the world, understanding the world.

That's really interesting that language has that power. But what language was used to understand wine at the time? - So we're talking about a Greek-speaking world, right? So Jesus is born and does his public ministry in the Holy Land, but think about the early Church. Think about where the Church takes root.

Paul, the greatest evangelist of the time, writes basically half the New Testament. He's writing letters in Greek to Greek speakers in places like Corinth in Greece, or Philippi, a defunct city just north of the island of Thassos. Or he's writing to folks in what today is Turkey, the Colossians, the Galatians.

He writes letters to the Romans. These are Greek speakers in these pockets, these Hellenic pockets all around the ancient Mediterranean. And for them, again, ignore Dioscorides, ignore Pat McGovern's work. To them, to think about wine was to think about a mixed potion. And so the word oinos in ancient Greek does show up in the New Testament, but there was another word to describe wine.

And it exists for like a thousand years, before, during, and after the life of Jesus. The word used for wine is pharmakon, which obviously gives us the word pharmacy. It means drug. So in Greek, a Greek speaker would actually use the word drug to refer to wine. Ruth Skodal, the classicist, talks about this as a ritualistic formula.

They understood wine as this compound beverage, a drug against grief, a medicinal elixir that could either harm or heal, or just maybe a sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new. - Clearly, religion, and myth, but religion very much so has sort of a, much like dreams, has like an imagery component.

Like, you're kind of going outside the visual constraints of physical space where you kind of have very specific conceptions of what things look like, and you kind of use your imagination to stretch beyond the world as we know it. Things that are, try to get in touch with things that are more real than real.

What role do these tools, do these pharmakons have in trying to stimulate the imagery of religion? Do you have a sense that they have a critical role here, or is this just a bunch of different factors that are utilized, a bunch of different tools that are utilized to construct this imagery?

Or is this not even, or is imagery the wrong terminology? Is it more like a space of ideas that's core to religion? - No, I think the wine is absolutely essential. And so if it's impossible to understand paleo-Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek, I think it's equally difficult in the absence of the sacred pharmacopeia, or wine itself, right?

Just think about wine at the time. I think that the ancient Greek audience would have heard that in a very different way from us. And so they're referring to it maybe as a pharmakon, but the followers of Dionysus, which precedes Jesus. And in some cases, the story of Jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the mysteries of Dionysus.

But when you think about Dionysus, maybe from your high school mythology, you think about him as the god of theater, or the god of wine, which is typically what it is, or the god of ecstasy. Again, Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. There's no concept of fermented grapes.

The power of Dionysus and the ability to commune with Dionysus through his blood, and before Christianity, the blood of Dionysus is equated to his wine. The sacramental drinking of the wine was interpreted, and classicists write about this, including Walter Burkert, it was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the god.

This is where we get the idea of enthusiasm because the language matters, enthusiasm to be filled with the spirit of the god so that you became identified with Dionysus and acquired his divine powers. Now, how does that happen? Again, he's not the god of alcohol. He is the god of wine, but he's really the god of madness and delirium and frenzy.

And his principal followers are women. They're called the minads. And the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption of this sacramental wine. Even at the theater of Dionysus, separate from his outdoor churches, there was a wine served there called drima. And this is the wine that gives birth to Hollywood.

I mean, the ancient Hollywood was there at the theater of Dionysus. This is where comedy and tragedy and poetry and music come from. But rather than a hot dog and a beer, what they drink at the theater of Dionysus was this wine called drima, which means pounded or rubbed.

And Professor Ruck talks about maybe it was the drugs that were rubbed into this theatrical beverage to help the play come alive. So madness is seen as a positive thing, as like a creative journey. It's not, it's not, it's the, what is it, the unlearning, getting out of the way kind of thing.

Is that how it's seen or is it more like entertaining escape from life that is suffering? I gotta inject a little modern Dostoevsky into the old. Existential despair. Maybe it's a bit of that. We can't say that there wasn't recreational drinking happening. The Greeks also had the symposium, right?

And they also were just getting hammered in some cases. But when it comes to the rites of Dionysus, what you see there is the creation of these states of awareness in which again, you identify with the God to become the God. There's theophagy, there's the consumption of divinity in order to become divinity.

Right back to how we started the conversation, right? So if we stop conceiving of God as something exterior to us, but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the mystery of my being, that the way to encounter that is through the sacramental theology, that you drink the actual blood of this Greek God to become that God.

And there was a place for this in ancient Greek society. So drinking the wine is drinking the blood of Dionysus. Do you think Jesus is an actual physical person that existed in history or is he an idea that came to life through the consumption of wine and those kinds of rituals?

So this is where I face my excommunication, depending how I answer this. I mean, you're playing with fire and wine. A good combination, by the way. Yeah. So I shy away from that controversy in the book. I'm perfectly willing to accept Jesus as a historical personage. We have the multiplicity of sources, although it's a generation after his death, but we have the Eucharist being described in the four gospels, we have it being described by Paul in 1 Corinthians.

But when you read John, it does read a bit differently than the other gospels. And in my book, I rely a lot on the scholarship of Dennis MacDonald, who writes a fabulous book called The Dionysian Gospel. And this is, again, why the Greek matters, because once you start to analyze the Greek of John's gospel, it seems to be a presentation of Jesus very much in the guise of Dionysus.

The most obvious example is the wedding at Cana, right? That only occurs in John's gospel, the famous transformation of water into wine. Now, again, to any Greek speaker of the first century, they would have known about the Greek district of Elis on the Peloponnese. And in Elis, around the Epiphany, every January, the priests of Dionysus would deposit these water basins, empty basins, in the temple of Dionysus.

They'd return the next morning and find them magically filled with wine. Now, on the island of Andros, it's even more interesting. Around the same Epiphany date, the God's gift day, Dies Theodosia, the wine would emanate from the temple and run like a river for a week. And you can Google the Bacchanal of the Andrians, a wonderful painting by Titian, which hangs in the Prado, and you'll see a river of wine behind these people having a great time.

This exists for centuries and centuries before the wedding at Cana and before Jesus begins his public ministry with what these scholars call the signature miracle of Dionysus. It would not have been lost on the Greek audience that something very specific is being communicated here. What's being communicated? That you just might find in early Christianity what you hold strong to in these mysteries of Dionysus that you may have inherited from your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents for centuries.

There was a perfectly good religion. There were perfectly good mystery cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. And here comes this new, untested, illegal cult, illegal, of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers that go on to convert the empire in a few hundred years. The answer to that extraordinary growth is not psychedelics, but I do think it's visionary experiences, and I do think it's this continuity from the pagan world into early Christianity.

- So what part, you mentioned this idea, that's really interesting, I think you said Paul Stamets, of, I guess, millions of people over millions of years kind of consuming, really practicing a ritual or a habit of some sort. This idea of rituals is kind of interesting. Again, you mentioned cult.

What's the role of ritual consumption of some of these substances or just ritual practice of anything in the intellectual growth of particular groups of people or societies? - So again, I would say it is the centerpiece of ancient life, not just the mysteries of Dionysus, which we've only talked a bit about, but the mysteries of Eleusis were probably the most famous and longest-lasting of these Greek mystery rites.

And I mean, just to put it in simple terms, the best definition for a mystery religion, as the name implies, is something secret. Right, muo from the Greek means to shut the eyes or to shut the mouth, to keep quiet about this stuff. We're always teasing details from the archaeological and the literary record, and we're kind of just grabbing at these secrets.

But Eleusis, which survives for like 2000 years into the Christian period from about 1500 BC to the 4th century AD, it's kind of this centerpiece of Greek life. Cicero, the great Roman statesman, calls what was happening at Eleusis the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced. So not democracy, the arts and sciences, or philosophy, but the vision that was encountered at Eleusis, perhaps through the ritual consumption of a potent psychedelic over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands and thousands, if not millions of initiates, pilgrims who would walk from Athens to Eleusis to encounter this vision.

It seems to have been not just an important part of Greek life, but the thing that made life livable, such that as these mysteries are about to be exterminated by the newly Christianized Roman Empire, there's this passage in the ancient literature that talks about these, in the absence of these mysteries, life becomes unlivable.

Abiotos. Is there ways you can, I mean, you write about the mysteries of Eleusis, and is there ways you can convert that into words? Why those are so important to them, more important than any other invention to them? Why is it such a source of meaning to life? So from what we can reconstruct, they would make that pilgrimage 13 miles northwest of Athens to confront their mortality.

Remember we were talking about homo naledi, and in South Africa, this recognition of self-mortality, the deliberate disposal of the dead. Plato talks about the real practice of philosophy being the death and dying process. So in some senses, you went to Eleusis to die and to experience a death before your death.

We talked about this with Terence McKenna as well, how the psychedelic state seems to share something in common with the near-death or out-of-body experiences or these ecstatic experiences, whether through wine or beer or otherwise, you went to Eleusis to die. And it was said that only those who had witnessed this vision, whatever vision was to be witnessed in Demeter's sanctuary, it essentially vouchsafed you the afterlife, that only those who went there became immortal.

And Cicero says that at that point, you essentially live with more joy and die with a better hope. Can I ask you a question about this human contention with death, this confrontation of death that seems to be at the core of things. I don't know how deep to the core, but it seems to be a central element of the human condition.

What do you think about Ernest Becker and those guys that put death at the, what is it, the warm of the core, which as the main thing, the main, like this confrontation of our own mortality, first of all, being understand that we're mortal and then confronting the terror of it, the fear of it as the creative, like trying to escape the fear of death as the creative force of human society.

It's like the reason we do anything is because we're just running away from our death scared. Do you find some of that to be true? First of all, as somebody who looks in the mirror, looks at yourself and your own as a human being to just looking at society today and three at this whole big spread of human history and all the cool stuff we've created, including the mysteries of elusives.

I wonder what life would look like in the absence of the fear of our mortality. I wonder how we'd interact with one another if there was relatively little or no fear of death. I really do when it comes to Becker's work and others. If the ancients were known for anything, it was running to death.

It was the opposite. In fact, dying before dying, which is the immortality key, by the way, it's not psychedelics but when I refer to this key, I'm referring to this notion that's preserved in Greek. "An pethanis, brin pethanis, dentha pethanis, ot an pethanis." If you die before you die, you won't die when you die.

For some reason, the ancients prized that experience. And we talked about the mystics of Sufism and Kabbalism and Christian mysticism where you have this same self-nodding, this death before death, the divine nothingness. For some reason, the mystics, saints, visionaries, and ancient philosophers, they ran to death. And the one message I wanted to try and communicate with this book is how they viewed life, that it can only be fully experienced, fully embodied in the wake of a really intense, perhaps terrifying, but utterly transformational encounter with death.

- So running to death, not running away from death. You talk about Aldous Huxley and mind changers. So if we look at the history where the ancients were running to death and maybe using some performance enhancing permacons to run more effectively towards death. And now we're using tools of modern society, whether they're psychological, sociological, or in case pharmaceutical, to run away from this conception.

So what do you see as a hopeful future for human civilization? If all of these kinds of societies are ice cream flavors, how do you create the perfect ice cream flavor? What is the future of religious experience, of psychedelic experience, of intellectual journeys, of facing death, running away from death?

What do you hope that looks like and what kind of idea should we look to? - My next book will be entitled "Performance Enhancing Farmaca." (laughs) You get full copyright. - Yeah, I like it. But that's a historical view. I mean, what in that book would you suggest in one of the last chapters about the future of this process?

- Well, Huxley has to stop you. He stopped me in my tracks, Aldous Huxley. So in 1958, he pens this op-ed of sorts. And it reads incredibly prescient because I really do think in many ways as the fog of the war drug is ending and finally lifting that we've kind of come full circle back to the late 1950s, which might sound strange.

It'll make more sense when you hear what Huxley said about psychedelics. And so he was looking forward to a revival of religion, which is why I subtitled the book "The Religion with No Name." And to him, to Huxley, this revival wouldn't come about through televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen, as he says.

But he points to the biochemical discoveries such as we have today that would allow for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. In other words, that this revival of religion, he says, would be a revolution. And Alan Watts comes along and says that there's nothing more dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism.

But I think this is what Huxley was pointing to. And he talks about religion in these terms, about being less about symbols and returning to a sense of experience and intuition. And Huxley says that he envisions a religion which gives rise to everyday mysticism. And he talks about something that would undergird everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, and everyday human relationships.

In other words, religion has to mean something. And these altered states of awareness that we seem to be able to produce quite easily inside the lab at Hopkins, NYU, and elsewhere with psilocybin, I think this is kind of part of Huxley's prediction about a time when we would have legal access, safe access, efficacious access to this material that would allow for insight in an afternoon.

And what do you do when millions of people can become mystics in an afternoon? - So psychedelics, psilocybin might be the practical way of having these kinds of, maybe could be termed religious experiences. And then many people partake in those experiences and then like evolving this collective intelligence thing we got going on, that's sort of the practice of religion that we should be looking at striving for, as opposed to kind of operating in the space of ideas, actually practicing it.

You mentioned, and that's the religion with no name, the use of these tools. Is there a simple way to summarize religion for our previous discussion about God, basically discovering the God inside? - What if I give you a very complicated definition of religion, and then we talk about a more simplified?

- Let's do it. - So the most complicated we can get on this is the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz. But I think it's worth defining our terms when we're talking about God and religion. So religion, religio from the Latin means to bind back. So to bind us back to some meaningful tradition, to bind us back to the source.

Here's a mouthful from Clifford Geertz. Religion, he defines as a set of symbols, which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions in such an aura of factuality that those moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic, which is complex.

What does that mean? That religion has to make you feel something, these moods and motivations. But it can't just do that in the way that sex does that for us, or sports, or ultimate fighting, or the World Cup, or going to a concert. So we get all that emotion in these experiences like that.

But that emotion has to be concomitant to a deep existential insight that answers this question for you in the morning. I know why I'm here. I know why humans are here. I think I know what the meaning of life is. That's what religion is. And if you find that meaning in science, then that's your religion and that's fine.

But we need to be more honest about that. If your epistemological model is weighing facts and figures and you think that's why you're here on this planet and you find deep meaning, that's okay. Religion is the thing that makes you feel, right? It has the aura of factuality. It just makes you feel like you know the point behind existence.

In other words, I think it comes down to experience like Joe Campbell was talking about, like Aldous Huxley mentions about experience and intuition. I think this is how we connect to God. - Make you feel like you understand the world. I mean, so that's kind of bigger than science.

That includes science, but it's bigger. Do you think, what is real? Like, do you think there's an absolute reality that we're kind of striving towards understanding or is it all just conjured up in our minds? And that's the whole kind of point. We together create these realities and play with them and dance to somehow derive meaning from those realities.

And it's ultimately not like very deeply integrated into what's like into atoms of space-time. - Another easy question, Lex. - Well, I mean, you have to kind of, when you're thinking about emotion and making it concrete into something that feels real, you have to start asking like, what is real?

It's something that, you know, Ben Shapiro has this saying of facts don't care about your feelings. I was always uncomfortable with this. I mean, he's just being spiffy or whatever, but I was always uncomfortable with somehow, first that the hubris of thinking that humans can have like arrive at absolute truth, which is what I assume he means by facts, like things that are controvertible.

And then somehow deriding feelings, like feelings are not important. To me, like the whole thing is reality. The facts don't even like facts is reality, feelings are reality. Like the entirety of human experience is reality. All these consciousnesses somehow interacting together, making up random crap and together agreeing, they're all going to wear the same colors, rooting for one football team or the other football team or countries, all those things, that's real because we've agreed that it's real.

And in the same way, it gives us meaning. In that same way, religion is a set of ideas that gives us meaning. But, you know, real, it's really a difficult, for me as a scientist, that finds comfort in the physical understanding of the universe, of physics. You know, I love physics.

I love computer science. It makes me feel like everything is perfectly understandable. And then I look at humans, they're totally not understandable. It's like a giant mess, but that's part of the beauty. Like what is love? Like what the hell is love? It's certainly not like a weird hack to convince me to procreate because it feels something bigger than that.

So like taking a purely evolutionary biologist perspective, it's missing the, it's not missing, it's only capturing a part of the picture. So it just keeps making me ask, what is real? Because as a human, it's very human centric. It does certainly feel like a part, a big part of what is real is all the fake stuff my mind makes up.

I mean, okay, I guess, is there something you could say from our discussions about the tools of psychedelics, about our discussion about religion, of what is real, of what is reality? These are largely unanswerable questions. But we should nevertheless strive to answer them. That's the whole point of the human experience.

And I think science is one way and religion is another. And I think there's actually a sphere where they intersect. There's a way for religion to be observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable. When I look at the ancient mysteries, that's what I find. I think I find people exploring alternate states of consciousness and arriving at conclusions based on that exploration and deriving deep meaning from that, which yes, are feelings and emotions and very hard to quantify.

But nonetheless, these are the things that govern our lives. I mean, I don't know a parent who isn't motivated by the love of their children. Everything I do at 40 years old now is pretty much inspired by my love for my two daughters. And I can't prove to you that I love them.

I can say it, I can show you behavior, but it's very hard for me to weigh and measure that. So not everything is so reducible to this quantifiable reality. And yet, I also love science. And I love the historical process of weighing this data. I love the chemistry. I love the biology.

And for me, I think this was the message of the ancient Greeks. And I think this is the world in which paleo-Christianity was born. I think there is this meeting ground between science and religion which allow for the, if not the discovery, then at least the near-identification of the ultimate reality, which is another way to describe God, right?

This being of beings, the transcendent mystery. - So speaking of God, you mentioned to me offline you're wearing the most sophisticated clothing choice of the elite intellectuals. Like you mentioned, Sam Harris was wearing a hoodie. - This is the Sam Harris hoodie. He's starting a trend. - He's starting a trend.

(laughs) This is a new religion, you could even say. It's a ritual. It's a ritual practice of intellectuals of searching for meaning. So there's quite a fascinating debate. He was for a time still known as one of the sort of new age atheists. So he was kind of trying to explore the role of religion in society and the role of science.

And then on the other side, another kind of powerhouse intellectual is Jordan Peterson, who in sometimes for my taste, a bit too poetic of ways is exploring the ideas of religion. And they had these interesting debates that I think will continue about the role of religion in society. For Jordan, there's all these flaws with religion, but there is a lot of value to be discovered amidst the rituals, the traditions, the practice, the way we conceive of each other because of the ideas that religion propagates.

And then for Sam, it says that everything about religion basically gets in the way of us fully realizing our human potential, which is deeply scientific and rational and sort of like we're surrounded by mystery. Calling that mystery God is getting in the way of us understanding that mystery. What do you think about this debate about the role of religion in society?

We should continue having this debate. I talked to Jordan a couple of weeks ago, as a matter of fact. Excellent. On his podcast? Yes. Excellent. It'll be out soon. And so, he and I- How did that go, by the way? It was incredible. Karl Ruck, the professor, joined us, as a matter of fact, for one of his rare public appearances.

Beautiful. We went deep. And Jordan is very well-read, obviously, on the psychedelic literature. He had just had Roland Griffiths from Hopkins on the podcast. And it's one of Roland's figures that Jordan and I, again, just like the language of Aldous Huxley, it's hard to move past the following statistic.

Over the past 20 years of the modern study of psilocybin, Roland will tell you that about three in four of their volunteers walk away from their single dose of psilocybin, high dose, saying it was among the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, if not the most meaningful. And Jordan says, "What do you do with that?

How do we synthesize that?" You know, here we are quantifying the qualifiable, the unqualifiable, and yet these compounds have dramatic effects on people's lives, and they walk away feeling like they're more loving, more compassionate. The Science of All talks about the welling up of cooperation and resource sharing and kindness and all these strange things from this single chemical intervention, which seems to reduce us to automata as if enlightenment can be flipped on like a switch.

And yet there it is, there's the data. And I don't see how you walk away from that. I mean, I completely understand Sam's position, but I think there's a reading of religion, particularly the mystical core of the big faiths and especially these ancient mystery cults, which do speak again to those moods and motivations creating this aura of factuality that these volunteers never walk away from, permanently transformed just like the ancient mysteries.

And part of that is perhaps language, that we need to continue to evolve language in how we conceive of these processes. Maybe religion has a bunch of baggage associated with it that is good to let go of, or perhaps not. I don't know. This is connected to our previous part of our conversation is the importance of language in this whole thing.

Well, that's how I start my book with one of these volunteers from the NYU psilocybin experiments, this woman, Dinah Dinah Baser, who's an atheist, and she still describes herself as an atheist. And yet as one of these three and four people who walked away from this experiment transformed, she says that her experience of psilocybin was like being bathed in God's love from an atheist.

Yes. And I asked her why she uses the word God, why not the love of the cosmos or the universe or mother nature? And she says, "Well, frankly, we don't know about any of this stuff and that God makes sense to me." She's still an atheist, but it's the way she describes that as kind of like the way your mother's love must've felt when you were a baby.

Yeah, I like the way Einstein uses God, God doesn't play dice. There's a poetry, there's a humility that you don't know what the hell is going on. There's a humor to it. I'm a huge fan, especially like more and more of just kind of having a big old laugh at the absurdity of this world and this life as represented nicely by memes on Twitter kind of thing.

I mean, there's a sense in which we want to be playing with these words and not take them so seriously and being a little bit lighthearted and explore. Let me ask you about, because you mentioned NYU, what I find fascinating is how much amazing research, speaking of science, right?

Studying the effects of psilocybin, studying the effects of various psychedelics, MDMA on the human mind. Right now for helping people, but I'm hoping there'll be studies soon at Hopkins and elsewhere that allow people that are kind of more quote unquote creatives or regular people that don't have a particular demon they're trying to work through, a problem they're trying to work through, but more like to see what can I find if I utilize psychedelics to explore?

Is there something you could say that is exciting to you, that's promising about the future, what currently is going on, but also the future of psychedelics research at Hopkins and elsewhere? Yeah, the healthy normals, the healthy normals. I was looking for the right words because normal doesn't feel, healthy doesn't feel like a good term and normal doesn't feel like a good term because we're all pretty messed up and we're all weird.

Well, those with ontological angst in that case. Great. Maybe there'll be a future DSM qualification. There's no doubt that things like psilocybin, MDMA are useful for things like anxiety, depression, end of life distress, PTSD, alcoholism, you name it. And it's largely because of the clinical research that MDMA and psilocybin will probably be legal in some FDA regulated way in the next five years.

But I mean, again, I start the first page of my book with this question, why do psychedelics work across all these different conditions? And the best that I could find is the meaning, right? Tony Boss at NYU talks about psilocybin, for example, as meaning making medicine, which is interesting because it puts it somewhere between a therapeutic and again, this ontological instigator.

What is it about psychedelics that creates these mystical experiences or mystical like experiences? You can call them emotional breakthroughs, you can call them moments of awe. I do think we get locked up in the language and we're somewhere between science and religion here, including legally. So the FDA is one route to this.

What excites me about psychedelics is the first amendment. What is this going to mean for religion? The freedom of religion being the first thing that's mentioned in the first amendment before freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. If America is known for anything, it's a refuge for religious pioneers. And so we already have the Native American church, Brazilian spawn churches that are using psychedelics, but what would happen if Judaism or Christianity or Islam were to begin incorporating the very ritual, very sacred and discreet use of psychedelics as part of their liturgy?

So not replacing the Sunday Eucharist in the case of Christianity, but part of the extra credit dimension of the faith. Credit. And then we can, through practice, figure out how essential it is. It could be a minor thing, it could be a major thing. That's another thing I wanted to kind of ask you is I recently, despite the fact that I'm eating a huge amount of meat and I'm getting fat, I'm loving it.

This is actually, as of two days ago, I started this long road to training for David Goggins, to training back to getting back to competing in jiu-jitsu. So the fun is over, but I also partook in fasting and there was a very strong, there's an almost like a hallucinogenic aspect of fasting, especially because it was a 72 hour fast versus a more common fast that I do, which is 24 hours.

And a bunch of people talk about throughout history about the value of fasting in having these kind of visual, these kind of intellectual experiences. Also there's meditation, Sam Harris with the hoodie. Do you have a sense that those other rituals of fasting, of meditation, and maybe other things could be as essential or more essential to the religious experience as psychedelics?

- Yes, if not, and this is gonna sound weird, but maybe not if more so. I look at psychedelics as a catalyst for spiritual investigation, not as the superficial means to an end. I think their value is in kind of serving as a Google Maps for the kingdom of heaven.

- All right, I like this. - Well, so Ram Dass' teacher said that when he was offered psychedelics that it'll get you in the room with Jesus, but it won't keep you there. - Yeah. - And I think that's all well and good, but what if you don't know where the house is in the first place?

What if you've never had a mystical experience? What if religion is anathema to you? What if you hate God? What if all these words mean nothing to you? And they probably do for many, many people, and it's perfectly understandable. I think that we've lost the coordinates to these irrational states, again, that were prized throughout antiquity and that continue to be prized by the mystical communities even in big organized religion.

It just doesn't filter out that much. And so, psychedelics, in my mind, help orient our minds, bodies, and souls towards the irrational, right? We talked about McKenna's invisible world that seems to have this symbiosis with our own and perhaps has this higher intent for us. You could very well just take catalog of your dreams, right?

And that would do it too. But psychedelics seem to be particularly fast-acting, particularly potent, and very reliable, especially in the clinical studies. And so, I looked at them as biochemical discoveries, like Huxley did. Maybe it's once in your life or infrequently, right? But maybe that's the beginning of a genuine introspection and a life well-examined, as the ancients always instructed us.

- Yeah, it does seem in the research that the effectiveness of psychedelics always comes with the integration where you use it, just like you said, as a catalyst for thinking through stuff. It's not going to be... I don't even know if Google Maps... Oh, maybe Google Maps is the right analogy, but it doesn't do the driving for you.

You still have to do the driving. It just kind of gives you the directions. So, after you come down from the trip or whatever, you still have to drive. There's other tools that are kind of interesting. We've been talking about this at the psychological level, but there's also a neuroscience perspective of it.

If we kind of like go past the skull into the brain with the neurons firing, there's ideas of brain-computer interfaces. First of all, there's a whole field of neuroscience that's kind of zooming in and studying the firing of the brain, the firing of the neurons in the brain, of how from those neurons emerges all the things that we think that make us human.

That's a fascinating exploration of the human mind. That's, of course, where the psychedelics have the chemical, the biochemical effects on those neurons. There's ideas of brain-computer interfaces, which, you know, if you look at, especially what Neuralink is doing with this long-term vision with Elon Musk and Neuralink, they hope to expand...

He calls it a wizard hat. This is back to the humor on the internet thing. The wizard hat that expands the capabilities, the capacity of the human mind. Do you think there's something there, or is the human mind so infinitely complex that we're quite a long way away from expanding the capabilities of the human mind through technology versus something like psychedelics?

I wonder how Terence McKenna would answer that question. He looked to shamans as kind of the scientists, the high magicians of the high archaic past and the far-flung future. I'm not going to discount... You know more about AI than I do, so I'm not going to discount it, but I do think that AI paired with the sacred recovery, right?

The archaeology of consciousness and these states, these archaic techniques of ecstasy that were practiced across time, I think that's a winning combination. You know, part of what I do in the book is just I try and lay out the set and setting. That's often talked about with psychedelics. I mean, so maybe psychedelics in the right AI environment is going to work.

I think it'd probably work a lot better with that myth and ritual incorporated. So, the reason elusives worked for 2000 years, and let's assume the psychedelic hypothesis has some merit to it, but I think the reason it worked is because you were born into a mythology. You were born into a story about Demeter and Persephone, and you waited your entire life to meet them in the flesh.

So, you weren't just preparing for a few months. It was a lifetime of expectation, anticipation, ritual preparation. In fact, some of the early church fathers made fun of the Greeks for essentially just piquing people's curiosity and revving up the anticipation, which has something to do with the outcome, by the way.

But in other words, I think we need to create a new mythology around this. I don't think you pop into a laboratory. I don't think you pop into a retreat center from one day to the next. I think that in my own case, I feel like I've been preparing 12 years for psychedelics, and I'm still preparing, including in today's conversation.

I'm learning new things, and I'm willing to explore it together with the computer interface. But I do think ritual is a gigantic part of this, and even McKenna would say that. I'll paraphrase him by saying that if you'd met someone who didn't know where they were between the years 1995 and 2005, you would describe them as a fairly damaged person.

And yet, who among us knows what was happening in Western civilization between 900 and 1300, let alone 2,500 years ago? So, this is, in many ways, the prophet of the psychedelic Renaissance saying that history has lessons. And I don't think they're superficial lessons. I think it cuts to the very core of how and why Western civilization came to be born.

- Yeah, but that history can be loaded into AI systems, and I do love the idea of whether it's to bring computer interfaces or without intrusive, sort of, without direct reading of the neurons and more sort of interactive experience with a robot, that you can have an AI system that steers your psychedelic experience, that helps you sort of, when you take a heroic dose of psilocybin, for example, helps steer you, steer your mind, say just the right things.

I mean, you could say that kind of thing with, it's a totally open problem, I would say. You talk about set and setting. This is the interesting thing about Johns Hopkins is, you know, you create a comfortable environment, a safe environment for allowing, then if you take a heroic, like a large dose of psilocybin, that you could trust that everything would be safe and you can really allow the exploration of your mind, but then you don't know from a psychotherapy perspective of like, during that trip, what a human should say to steer that trip.

Like, that's a totally open set of problems. And in some sense, probably throughout history, those rituals, you've figured out what are the right things to say to each other. - Exactly. - How to collaborate. And maybe if you can turn that into an optimization problem, AI could figure that out much, much quicker.

- I'm with you. So, elusus was known for three things, the legomena, the dromena, and the deignumena, the things said, the things done, the things shown. If you can pack that all into your AI interface, I'm in, Lex Friedman. - I'm gonna write a proposal and then try to get it through the IRB at MIT.

I mean, there's a certain sense in which I definitely wanted to explore psychedelics, I mean, in my personal life, but also more rigorously as a scientist, and to push that forward. And especially in the AI space, and it is difficult how to do that dance when there's gray areas of legality and all those kinds of things.

And we're dancing around them, and some of that is language, and some of that is what we socially conceive of as drugs or not. And you're right that perhaps we can reframe it as religious experiences, all those kinds of things. I mean, it's fascinating because it feels like there's a bunch of tools before us that were used by the ancients that we're not utilizing for exploring the human mind, that we very well could be in a rigorous scientific way, in a safe way.

And that's fascinating. There's this interesting period in the 20th century of LSD use that many of the people doing research on psychedelics now kind of have their roots in that history. I mentioned that Dr. Rick Doblin, he is one of those people. And there's this interesting story of a bunch of creatives that used LSD or other drugs to help them.

What do you make of the idea of somebody like Ken Kesey who wrote "One Flover's the Cuckoo's Nest" in part under the influence of LSD? Like, what do you make of the use of psychedelics to maximize the creative potential of the human mind? Is this a crutch or is this actually an effective tool that we should explore?

- One person's crutch might be another's bungee cord. It depends on that mind. Think about Paul McCartney. I mean, we might not have some of the better Beatles music in the absence of LSD. And what did Sir Paul say in 1967 when he was asked about his use of LSD?

He said that he recognized the dangers inherent in it, but that he did it with a very specific, very deliberate purpose in mind. He wanted to find the answer to what life is all about. And I'm not sure what Sir Paul is doing this week, but he's probably not doing LSD.

Speaking back to my theory about these substances being catalyzers of spiritual introspection, it came along at a time in their life when I think they were ripe for it, especially George Harrison. I highly recommend the Martin Scorsese documentary about George Harrison. For them, I think it was exactly the way we ought to investigate it, which is, well, mind expanders.

This is what psychedelics do, right? That which makes manifest the contents of the mind. In the absence of an experience like that, and it can be in a three-day fast, it can be laying down in a cave, it can be in ritual chanting, it can be in a sun dance, but in the absence of that kind of experience at the right time in your life, it may otherwise be very difficult to find entrance to that kingdom of heaven, which I do think is here and now, getting right back to the very beginning.

If we are actually to participate in that eternal principle, how and when? - What do you think Nietzsche meant when he said that God is dead? So there's a sense that religion is fading from society. And there's a cranky German that kind of wrote about it. What do you think he meant?

- He was a cranky German who knew a lot about Dionysus, by the way, which is why I like him. So certainly there's some truth to the mortality of God. I think Gallup put out a study only a couple of months ago where church membership is now officially in the minority in the United States at 47%, according to the most recent poll.

That number was closer to 70% only 20 years ago. So we're living through something, and we're living through the unchurching of America, and it's the rise of the spiritual but not religious, the inheritor of all traditions but the slave to none. There's a rise in the unaffiliated, the nuns.

I think it was like one-third of millennials, it's probably much higher now, that don't affiliate with any religion. So in that sense, God is absolutely dead, but maybe not the God that we were trying to define at the very beginning. So Nietzsche also looked forward to the Übermensch, which would be a fully realized human being that despite the death of God did not fall into nihilism and amorality, existential despair, all that great German stuff.

And there are some commentators who talk about this eternal recurrence that just maybe by incorporating some of these techniques, not necessarily doctrine and dogma, but I would say the techniques of antiquity. And again, Nietzsche writes a lot about the rationality of Dionysus having its place in society. If anything, these biochemical discoveries, I think, point us back.

They point us back to Dionysus and their responsible incorporation of the irrational into our otherwise society of rational people and our kazooistry. I have a sense that there will be kind of, just kind of as you've implied, that there will be maybe the God of old is dying and there'll be a rebirth of different kind of God and it'll just keep happening throughout history.

I do think there will be a time where AI will be the gods we'll look to, the other, the super intelligent, those kinds of things. There's a little bit of an inkling of religious longing for meaning in the way people conceive of aliens currently. I mean, I talked to a bunch of people about UFOs, EOPs, and aliens.

And so to me, it's very interesting for perhaps different reasons, because I'm just, I look up to the stars and it's incredibly humbling to me to think that there's trillions of intelligent alien civilizations out there, which to me seems likely, or perhaps not intelligent, perhaps just alien life. And actually also that we don't even understand what it means to be intelligent or do we understand what it means to be alive.

The time scale, the spatial scale, which patterns of atoms can form in a way that you can call life, it's just could be way weirder than we can imagine. And certainly way different than human life. Anyway, that to me is humbling. And so it's almost like the simulation, conceiving of the world of simulation, thinking of aliens to me is a useful thought experiment of like, what would aliens look like if they visited?

How would we know? How would we communicate with them? How would we send signals to them if they're already here and we don't see them? How's that possible? That seems to me actually likely that we would just be too self-centered and too dumb to see them if they're already here.

Anyway, so that's kind of the, almost the pragmatic, the engineering, the physics sense of aliens, but there's also kind of a longing to connect with other intelligent beings out there, both the fear and the excitement of that, that has kind of a religious aspect to it. And I find fascinating.

And in the right context, when you remove the skepticism of government from that, it's actually a hopeful longing. Do you have a, do you see this kind of interest in aliens as at all connected to your study of religion? - So you're the first person to ask me about aliens in eight months.

So it looks like I'm going on the record. - Let's go. - I'll drop some J. Allen Hynek on you. So Hynek, involved in Project Blue Book, famously says in 1966, when the long-awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, and we're assuming that UFOs have something to do with aliens, but when the long-awaited solution comes, I believe it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap.

In other words, I do not think that we're dealing with flesh and blood beings in nuts and bolts crafts. I think it's way, way more complicated than that. And if anything, it takes me back to the ancient world. It takes me back to this invisible college of beings of apparent higher intent.

It takes me to the geniuses and the muses. So the first document in Western civilization, Homer's Epics, they begin by invoking an alien. They invoke a muse. (speaking in foreign language) Tell me, oh muse, about the man. So Homer isn't inventing poetry, he's channeling poetry, epic poetry from an alien intelligence.

Maybe that intelligence has felt a little unrecognized in recent years. - Trying to show up in human recognizable forms, the muse is trying to give a little hint of its existence. Yeah, I mean, I have a, I've been saying, I honestly sort of, I don't believe this, but I think about this, whether alien, like muse is a great example, whether aliens could be thoughts.

Ideas we have are the aliens, or consciousness itself is the methods by which aliens communicate with us. I find this very kind of liberating to expand our conception of what intelligent beings are. - You would like Julian Jaynes. Julian Jaynes writes a great book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

It's this theory that the ancient Greek mind was very different from ours, and that when they heard the muses, or the gods and goddesses for that matter, they would hear them as voices in the head, and hear it as an internal god figure offering commands, which they couldn't ignore.

So, were they walking schizophrenics? It might be one way to talk about it before the breakdown of the bicameral mind. But it's a provocative theory, largely untestable. But when you're reading ancient Greek, and Latin for that matter, you can't read it very long without bumping up against these discarded entities.

They're everywhere, and they survived. They persist across time, which is even stranger. Not just in the form of all the things my daughters like, like fairies, and gnomes, and elves, but, and McKenna loves this, the sylphs, and the boulder grinders, and the sprites, and the djins, and elementals. Every society has them.

It seems to be fairly universal. And they largely exist in folklore, mythology. This is what Jacques Vallée writes about so wonderfully. - We've kind of been sneaking around it, but let me ask you, from yours, from everything we've been talking about, how do you think about consciousness? Is it a fun little trick that the human mind does, or is it somehow fundamental to this whole thing?

- So, this three-pound lump of jelly inside our craniums that can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity, that peculiar self-recursive quality that we call self-awareness. So, this is the hard problem, right?

This is the unknowable, the unknown, at least. I don't know. I have no good answer for that. Aside from that-- - Do you think it's somehow deeply fundamental to the human experience, or is it just a trick? So, you have like, I mean, Sam Harris has really been making me think about this.

So, calling free will an illusion, the interesting thing about Sam is it's not just a philosophical little chatted with him about free will. He really says he experiences the lack of free will. Like, he's able to, you know, large parts of the day to feel like he has no free will.

In that same way, now, he thinks that consciousness is not an illusion. It is, you know, it's a real thing, but at the same, I'm more, almost like, I'm almost more of like, consciousness seems to be a little bit of an illusion, in the sense that, like, it feels like maybe this is a robotics AI perspective, but it feels like, in that same way that Sam steps outside of feeling like he has an agency, feeling like he has a free will, I feel like we should be able to step outside of having a consciousness.

So, that, from my perspective, maybe that's a hopeful perspective for trying to engineer consciousness, but do you think consciousness is like, at the core of this, or is it just like, language, or almost like a thing we build on top of a much deeper human, the things that makes us human?

I don't know. I am attracted to Lenz's notion of biocentrism. I mean, it's difficult to walk away from the double-slit experiment not wondering why we seem capable of collapsing that quantum wave function. It's very, very weird, giving rise to even weirder ideas about superposition and spooky action at a distance, and things that MIT guys know a lot better than me.

But it seems to me fundamental. Maybe consciousness is the fundamental thing. I mean, weirdly, some of these ancient incubatory practices--I talked about Peter Kingsley before. So, he's not a proponent of ancient psychedelic use, but is a proponent of these ancient rites of incubation that were practiced by Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Pedocles, other pre-Socratics.

And so, what were they doing? They were trying to get in touch with consciousness. They were entering into suspended states of animation in these cave-like settings. Pythagoras had built one in his basement and would lie down motionless, apparently, for long periods of time. And what I think they were trying to do was tap into and try to answer this question in their own--you could call it a scientific way, actually, less religion than science.

And what they would discover or try to discover was a state of awareness that is somehow beyond life and death, beyond waking and dreaming, where you can be aware of the senses but also in touch with another reality at the exact same time, what Kingsley calls sensation. That, I think, is definitely worth exploring.

Well, and the way I hope to explore is by trying to build it. Everybody uses the tools they have. Well, no, I do also hope psychedelics could help. So how do you build that? I'm curious. That's a whole other discussion. There's a lot of things I could say here, but let me put simply is I believe that you can go a long way towards building consciousness by trying to fake consciousness.

So fake it till you make it, as an engineering approach, I think will work for consciousness. You seem satisfied with that. I'm satisfied with that because I know how deeply unsatisfied others are, but just wait. I mean, I don't know what to--so the topic of consciousness is mostly handled by philosophers currently, and that's great.

And their philosophers are wonderful and good at what they do. I'm not a philosopher. I'm an engineer. And I think the approach there is quite different. I think falling in love is different than trying to have a podcast conversation about what is love. You know, I think the engineering effort is just fundamentally different than the philosophical effort.

And I have a sense that consciousness can be engineered even before it is understood by the philosophers. So I think there's a bunch of things like that in this world that could be engineered before they're understood. I think the intelligence is one such thing. I think we'll be able to engineer super intelligent beings before we're able to understand the human mind.

That's--yeah. I mean, there's less--there's a lot of intuition to unpack there of why that is, but as it stands, that's perhaps my engineering optimism and engineering ethic under which I operate. Consciousness is easy to build, hard to understand. Okay. Are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently that had a big impact on you?

You've--Immortality Key is exceptionally well researched. The amount of books you read is--I cannot even imagine. So is there something in those--in your travels through the land of language that stuck with you that was especially impactful? I mentioned a couple of them, but--so I knew nothing about psychedelics before 2007.

And it was in hearing about some of the first psilocybin experiments at Hopkins. And then shortly thereafter, I went down this rabbit hole. And so, the first set of recommendations all kind of fit in that time period in my life, 2007, 2008. It started with Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge.

It was a total impulse buy at the Barnes and Noble on 6th Avenue in New York, and wound up introducing me to Supernatural by Graham Hancock. That convinced me that there was a long story to psychedelics that he tried to prove in that book, and that we're still trying to prove.

I mentioned the connection between ritual psychedelics and cave art. This is the neuropsychological model that was first proposed by David Lewis Williams at the University of Waterstrand, the same university where Lee Berger is, by the way, in South Africa. So these ideas are old. But what Graham did in that book is just--it's well worth your time.

It's well worth a few reads, actually. Because it was after that that I discovered Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck, and a lot of other books that just kind of blew my mind. What is Breaking Open the Head about? So it's Daniel's romp through contemporary shamanism. And it's his very well-told experiences with everything from psilocybin to iboga being initiated by the Bwitis.

And it was the first time I'd read any firsthand accounts, aside from Jeremy Narby, any firsthand accounts by a New Yorker, by the way, about the potential for these compounds that I'd been ignoring for far too long, obviously. And so, that's when I started revisiting The Road to Eleusis and looking through the anthropological literature, reading everything Gordon Wasson had ever written, that Karl Ruck had written.

And it sent me down a pretty weird rabbit hole until I found Peter Kingsley, which is my second recommendation. So Peter, again, he's not a fan of the psychedelic hypothesis. But what he does is I think expose the value of the irrational to the ancient Greeks, especially the pre-Socratics.

Here we are talking about AI and God and these entangled philosophical questions. The best I can read Kingsley is that Western civilization is a product of a gift from the goddess Persephone. And this is not a hippie, this is a pretty gold standard classicist who went on to write a couple of books.

One is In the Dark Places of Wisdom, and the other is Reality, what better way to title your book, where he talks about these ancient techniques for exploring the irrational. The same thing Karl Ruck was talking about. After compiling all this data in The Road to Eleusis, Ruck says that the biggest challenge is trying to convince his colleagues in the late 1970s that the ancient Greeks and indeed, some of the most famous and intelligent among them could enter so fully into irrationality.

Same thing Nietzsche is talking about in his exploration of Dionysus. And so I think Kingsley just stands apart as one of those books, Reality, that my life was never quite the same after reading that. - We talked about the three pound jelly that is able to conceive of the entirety of the fabric of reality in the universe and everything, and also of its own mortality.

What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? - (laughs) - Is the three pound jelly able to answer that one? - (laughs) No, but I can plagiarize Joseph Campbell, which is good enough. Joe Campbell says that, "I don't think what we're looking for is a meaning of life.

I think what we're looking for is an experience of being alive, so that the experiences we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our innermost being and reality." You talked about the true reality, absolute truth. These are all constructs, and I think they're constructs that are made day by day and acquire this aura of factuality.

Remember in Clifford Geertz's definition of religion, we're all just faking it until we make it. And I think a lot of that has to do with moods and motivations and feelings and emotions, which is not to discredit facts and figures. But I think that meaning, meaning making, is a very subjective process that is not only difficult to talk about, but difficult to quantify.

- And experience is a primary in that versus... So like the actual subjective experience is primary to the meaning making process versus like some kind of rigorous analysis of like having an algorithm that runs and computes and then finally spits out 42. - Well, this is how families are created.

- Tell me more about this. - Well, my wife and I fell in love and made babies. We didn't type up an Excel sheet and figure out the best way to go about this. - That's what I've been doing all these years. That's why I'm single. - Too many Excel sheets.

Well, we say falling in love, right? We say fall in love. What does that mean to fall in love? You are surrendering to an intelligence that is beyond us. You could say a God-like intelligence. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar I mentioned in the Universal Christ, he writes a lot about how the divine for you is often encountered in the other.

In fact, how could it be otherwise? This is bedrock sacramental theology that you find the God in the things in your life as well you should. That's the proving ground for identifying as God rather than creating a relationship with God. So I think that these irrational states play a big role in that.

- Irrational. Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it than on the topic of love. Brian, thank you so much for a brilliant exposition of history and the poetry. I really appreciate you talking with me today. - I love you, Lex. - I love you too, Brian.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Muir-Escu and thank you to Inside Tracker, GiveWell, NI, Indeed, and Masterclass. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Terrence McKenna about psychedelics. Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values.

This is what makes it such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Terrence McKenna - Inside Tracker, GiveWell, NI, Indeed, and Masterclass.