The following is a conversation with Brian Muralescu, 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, N.I., Indeed, and Masterclass. Their

links are in the description. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here's my conversation

with Brian Muralescu. Who or what do you think God is? How is our conception maybe put another way

of God change 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

nonbeing. 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 the 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. Macteald 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? Aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of God?

If we are, 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 were 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. 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, 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 Eckhardt, 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 going to 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 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. 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, 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 of 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 like they're little humans,

like there's complicated societies that are formed, their goals are striving and so on.

And it's, we're creating a universe within our universe. And for now, it's a kind of,

it's a basic sort of constrained version of our more richer earth like civilization.

But it's conceivable that, you know, that we are this thing on earth is a kind of video game

that somebody else is playing. It's like, 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 for 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 expected. But I think about this a lot from, you know,

because 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 the 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 lila,

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 discarnate 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. 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 means Plato?

Do you mean in the space of ideas, or are we talking about some kind of world that connects

all of consciousness throughout human history?

I think through different techniques, it is, you know, I think Gordon Wasson is the meeting

point of the two. So Gordon Wasson, who I do talk about in the book, was this J.P. Morgan

Banker turned ethnomicologist, 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 when 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, self...

Self transforming.

Self transforming machine. I was during his DMT travels. And I just talked to Rick Doblin,

who also had different travels to this hyperspace. But they all seem to be traveling on the same

spaceship, just the 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 trialogues, 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 nonhuman

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.

Okay. I take no credit for this. But you're combining, you're like, Jimi Hendrix only

used the blue scale, but he still, he still created something new in the music you played.

Anyway, go ahead. 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 sense is that 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 presocratics. 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, because that's 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 there, is it possible?

Talked about Joe Roganoff. Is it in this 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 nonordinary 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. Merset 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, 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 and 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 paleo

anthropologist 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 paleo

anthropologist, paleo anthropologist at the University of Whitwatershwin. 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

Stone and 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, so long ago?

That's what I asked Dr. Berger. So Lee has discovered in the dental calculus

nice of archaic hominids dental calculus. I like this evidence of their diet and

you might not believe how old this was, but in Cediba, Australopithecus Cediba,

they found evidence of Cediba's diet going back two million years. So through things like phytoliths,

which are essentially fossilized plant tissue, they found evidence that Cediba 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 microwear 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 can see that there's

... 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 where did this leap come from.

But it's not. So just last fall, as a matter of fact, 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 sent me down

this rabbit hole back in 2007. But even at the time when he was writing that in the year subsequent,

it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea. Last fall, interestingly enough, the first

archeochemical 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 did they ingest it, these chewed up quids, like these bunches of Datura,

which contain these very powerful tropane alkaloids. And what was believed to be some kind of Chumash

initiation site. So we can say that there is initial archeochemical data for the consumption

of psychedelics and cave art. And so where else might we find this? Are there a lot of

archeochemists in the world? Because 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? 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 archeochemist 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 on his own time, on his own dime,

has been gathering the data for this organic residue analysis. He has what's called the

open archeochem 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 archeochemists looking at this stuff. But 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 archeochemists joining the fight.

Yeah, and Andrew is fascinating. His work is fascinating. But also, 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 archeology 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 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

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. 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. 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 Graves 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's

Tomb, the same kind of ritual cocktail which Pat and Sam at the Dogfish Head Brewery resurrected

as the Midas touch. The notion that we can go back, find this data, resurrect it, in some cases,

2800 years later, I found pretty exciting 10 years ago. Yeah, bringing it back for research.

But that's fascinating that people were playing with these ideas. We'll return to

ideas of psychedelic and fused wine, which is pretty fascinating. But can we step back and

just look at your work with the book Immortality Key? What is the story that you tell in this book?

I knew we'd get there eventually, Alex. It's a nonlinear path. Somehow we were talking about

simulation and the universe is a computer that's creating video games in WoW and Fortnite. But

we got there and we'll return always to the insane philosophical. But your book Immortality Key,

what's the stories 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, we're 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 a Lucis by Gordon Wasson, who we talked about already,

Albert Hofmann, who famously discovers LSD or synthesizes it from Ergot, and Carl 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 Stiecker in Germany, Tania Valamotti in Greece,

Sinta Florinzano 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 1st 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 and fused 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, alcohol, it comes, it's Semitic, it comes from the Arabic. Kahela means to enliven a

refresh, probably comes from coal, 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, et cetera. In the first 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 first century AD, Diascorides, for example, he writes this massive treatise at

the exact same time the Gospels are being written. And Diascorides, 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 Diascorides 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 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 diascorities, 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

pharmacon, 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, all anew. 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 pharmacons 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 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 pharmacon, 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 Berkert,

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 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 Dostoyevsky 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 rights

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 this 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 and drinking the blood of Dionysus, do you think Jesus is an actual

physical person that existed in history or is 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. 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

McDonald, 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 Ellis on the Peloponnese. And in Ellis, 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,

diesteodosia, 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

brado, 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 Elucis were probably the most famous

and longest lasting of these Greek mystery rites. Just to put it in simple terms, the best definition

for a mystery religion, as the name implies, is something secret. 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 Elucis, 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 Elucis 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 Elucis, 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 Elucis 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. Abios. Is there ways you can, I mean, you write about the mysteries of Elucis 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 Elucis to die

and to experience a death before your death. We talked about this with Terence McKenna as well,

and this is 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 Elucis to die. And it was said that only those who had witnessed this vision,

whatever vision was to be witnessed in Demeter Sanctuary, it essentially vouched safety 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 immortal 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. So 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,

two, 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 eluces. 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. When I refer to this key, I'm referring to this notion that's preserved in Greek.

An pethanis, prin pethanis, denta pethanis, otan pethanis. If you die before you die,

you won't die when you die. For some reason, the ancients prized that experience. 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 mystic saints, visionaries,

and ancient philosophers, they ran to death. 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.

Running to death, not running away from death. You talk about Aldous Huxley and mind changers.

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. Now, we're using

tools of modern society, whether they're psychological, sociological, or pharmaceutical,

to run away from this conception. 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. You get a little copyright.

Yeah, I like it. But that's a historical view. 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.

Okay. In 1958, he pens this op ed of sorts. 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 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. He was looking forward

to a revival of religion, which is why I subtitled the book, The Religion with No Name.

To him, Huxley, this revival wouldn't come about through televangelistic mass meetings

or photogenic clergymen, as he says. 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. 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. He talks about religion in these terms, being less about symbols and returning

to a sense of experience and intuition. Huxley says that he envisions a religion

which gives rise to everyday mysticism. 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. 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. 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 partaking 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. 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 Audis 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, what he means, which is what I assume he means by

facts, like things that are uncontrovertible. 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, make up making up random crap and together agreeing

that we'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

in the same way and 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 is missing the, it's not missing, it's only capturing a part of the picture.

And 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 never less 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, you know, there's a way for religion to be observable, testable, repeatable,

falsifiable. When I look at the ancient mystery is that 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 their, 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, 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. 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, there's quite a fascinating debate.

So 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 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 society. For, for Jordan,

there's all these flaws with religion, but there is a lot of value to be discovered amidst the,

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 is 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

and 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. Public? Excellent. It'll be out soon. And so,

you know, he and I, How did that go, by the way? It was, it was incredible. Carl Ruck,

the professor, joined us as a matter of fact for one of his rare public appearances. Beautiful.

We went, 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 and 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, like, how do you, what do you do with that? How do we, I mean,

how do we synthesize that? You know, here we are quantifying the, the qualifiable, the unqualifiable.

And yet these, 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, 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, there's a

reading of religion, particularly the mystical core of, 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, 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. It did, 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, this woman Dynah Dynabaser, 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.

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, you know, 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 have felt when you were a baby. Yeah, there's a, there's a kind

of, 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, 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 or 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 they'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 as promising about the future, what currently is going on,

but also the future of psychedelics research? Yeah. Hopkins and elsewhere.

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 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. Tony Bossis 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 all. I do think we get

locked up in the language and we're somewhere between science and religion here, including

legally. So the FDA's one route to this, what excites me about psychedelics is the First

Amendment. What does 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. 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 ask you is, recently, despite

the fact that I'm eating a huge amount of meat, 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 hose and a genetic aspect of fasting,

because it was 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 and 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 going to 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. Well, so Ram Dass's 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. 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. 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, 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. 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, 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 that if you 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 that's of

course where the psychedelics have the chemical, the biochemical effects on those neurons.

There's ideas of brain computer interfaces, which 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. 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, the archaeology of consciousness

and these states, these archaic techniques of ecstasy that were practiced across time.

I think that's a winning combination. 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. The reason Elusis worked for 2,000 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 peaking 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. 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. Yet, who among us knows what was happening

in Western civilization between 900 and 1300, let alone 2,500 years ago? This is, in many ways,

the prophet of the psychedelic renaissance, saying that history has lessons. 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. I do love the idea of

whether it's to bring computer interfaces or without direct reading of the neurons

and more interactive experience of the robot, that you can have an AI system that steers

your psychedelic experience, that helps you when you take a heroic dose of psilocybin,

for example, help 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 create a comfortable environment,

a safe environment for allowing, then if you take 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 during that trip what a human

should say to steer that trip. That's a totally open set of problems. In some sense, probably

throughout history, those rituals, you figured out what are the right things to say to each other.

Exactly. How to collaborate. Maybe if you can turn that to an optimization problem,

AI could figure that out much, much quicker. I'm with you. Elusis was known for three things,

the legomena, the dromena, 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 going to write a

proposal and then try to get it through the IRB at MIT. There's a certain sense in which I definitely

want to explore psychedelics in my personal life, but also more rigorously as a scientist

and to push that forward, especially in the AI space. It is difficult how to do that dance

when there's gray areas of legality and all those kinds of things. We're dancing around them and

some of that is language. Some of that is what we socially conceive of as drugs or not. You're

right that perhaps we can reframe it as religious experiences, all those kinds of things. It's

fascinating because it feels like there's a bunch of tools before us that were used by the ancients

that were not utilizing for exploring the human mind that we very well could be in a rigorous

scientific way in a safe way. That's fascinating. There's this interesting period of 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. McDowell, and he is one of those people. 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 Keezy who wrote One Flover's The Cuckoo's Nest

in part under the influence of LSD? What do you make of the use of psychedelics to maximize the

creative potential of the human mind? Is this as a crutch or is this actually an effective tool

that we should explore? One person's crutch might be another 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. 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. 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. 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 Sundance, 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 you said that God is dead?

There is 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.

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 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 ubermensch,

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 may be 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 irrationality

of Dionysus having its place in society. If anything, these biochemical discoveries,

I think point us back. They point us back to Dionysus, and they're responsible

in corporation of the irrational into our otherwise society of rational people and our

Khazoo history. I have a sense that there'll be kind of, just kind of as you've implied,

that there'll 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 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, EPs 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 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, the 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, but so that's kind of the almost the the the pragmatic, the

engineering, the 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, that 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 it 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. I'll drop some J. Allen Heineck on you. So Heineck, 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, Homer's epics, they begin by invoking an alien.

They invoke a muse. 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 hints of its existence. Yeah, I mean, I have 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. Like 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 discarnate

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 bolder grinders and the sprites and the jins

and elementals. Every society has them. It seems to be fairly universal,

and they largely exist in folklore, mythology. This is what Jacques Valais 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, you know,

calling free will an illusion. The interesting thing about Sam is it's not just a philosophical

little chat 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 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 for 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 much deeper human, the things that makes us human?

I don't know. I am attracted to Lanz'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, Parmentides, and Pettichlis, other Presocratics. 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, in 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 can help. So, how do you build that? I'm curious.

That's a whole nother 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

building towards building consciousness by trying to fake consciousness.

So, fake it till you make it as an engineering approach, I think we'll work for consciousness.

You seem satisfied with that. I'm satisfied with that, because I know how deeply

unsatisfied others are, but just wait. So, I mean, I don't know what to do.

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.

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. 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.

Other books or movies in your life, long ago or recently, that had a big impact on you.

You've, immortality is exceptionally well researched. The amount of books you read

I cannot even imagine. So, is there something in your travels through the land of language

that's stuck with you that was especially impactful? I mentioned a couple of them, but

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 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

Waterstrend, the same university where Lee Burger 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 buites. It was the first time I'd read any first hand accounts, aside from Jeremy Narby,

any first hand 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 Ellusis and looking through the anthropological literature, reading everything Gordon Wasson

had ever written, that Carl 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 presocratics. 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 Carl Ruck was talking about.

After compiling all this data in the road to Ellusis, 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 them. 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?

Is a three pound jelly able to answer that one?

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 there are constructs that are made

day by day and acquire this aura of factuality, remembering 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. 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

godlike 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 as you should. That's the proving ground for identifying as God rather than

creating a relationship with God. 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, Alex. I love you too, Brian. Thanks for listening to this

conversation with Brian Muralescu, 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 some words from Terence 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.