Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #211

1. 0:00 – 0:33

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Brian Muraresku, 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, Inside Tracker, GiveWell, and I, Indeed, and MasterClass. Their links are in the description. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Brian Muraresku.

2. 0:33 – 16:02

   Who or what is God?

   1. LFLex Fridman0:33

      Who or what do you think God is? How has our conception, maybe put another way, of God changed throughout history?

   2. BMBrian Muraresku0:42

      We're starting with an easy one, Lex.

   3. LFLex Fridman0:43

      Yep.

   4. BMBrian Muraresku0:45

      (laughs)

   5. LFLex Fridman0:45

      (laughs)

   6. BMBrian Muraresku0:46

      So what is God? Well, God is a thought, God is an idea, but it's- it's reference is to that which is beyond thinking, beyond our ability to even conceive, um, beyond the categories of being and non-being. So, how do we talk about that? To talk about it is almost to get it wrong.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:07

      Mm-hmm.

   8. BMBrian Muraresku1:07

      Right? So, uh, Joe Campbell famously said that, you know, 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, um, the infinite life energy of the universe. The- the mystery of transcendence. Boundless life. Unqualified is-ness." 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- with divinity in some way. Um, so not an external force, but that divine sense within.

   9. LFLex Fridman2:04

      So there's some aspect in which God is a part of us? So, one, it's a thing we can't describe. It's- 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.

   10. BMBrian Muraresku2:18

       The ultimate paradox. Lex-

   11. LFLex Fridman2:20

       (laughs)

   12. BMBrian Muraresku2:20

       Mechthild of Magdeburg, 13th century German mystic, maybe the first German mystic, um, says that the- 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. You know, we can- 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, th- th- this notion of, uh, 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.

   13. LFLex Fridman3:09

       There's some sense in which our conception of God, though, is conjured up by our own mind. And so aren't we creating God? Like, aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of God? Like if- if we are... Like when we talk about God, aren't we playing with ideas that are created by our- ou- our mind, and thereby we are the creator, not God? (laughs) This is a very kind of cyclical question, but i- in some sense, I mean that, uh, 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, uh, struggle to comprehend the mystery, and therefore we're creating the God in terms of the God that we- we're talking about in this conversation or in general. If that makes any sense.

   14. BMBrian Muraresku4:13

       (laughs) It makes no sense whatsoever, Lex. (laughs)

   15. LFLex Fridman4:15

       Great. This is wonderful. (laughs)

   16. BMBrian Muraresku4:18

       But this is- this is- uh, this is the eternal mystery. Um, this is why it's so difficult to talk about, and yet it could be the very center of our beings. Um, you know, the Upanishads speak about us as the creators, about us as gods. It's a very different creation myth, but the god of the Upanishads, um, in this great verse talks about, um, 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- to think about this stuff is partly our divine nature. This is what the humanists were talking about and in the Renaissance, by the way. Um, and that it's not so much learning, putting dots together, having arguments with each other over learned books. It's- 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, um, 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- and I mean that quite literally, without being heretical. You can- you can find this in the mystery traditions.

   17. LFLex Fridman5:56

       Can you expand on this? You mean a human being can- can embody God?

   18. BMBrian Muraresku6:03

       That is, um, textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any, any Christian mystic. Um, but you can find it in the mystical tradition of Islam and, and Judaism as well. So, Rumi, for example, um, the great, uh, the great Sufi mystic, talks about, um, 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-

   19. LFLex Fridman6:31

       Mm-hmm.

   20. BMBrian Muraresku6:31

       ... would appear on the perception of your consciousness. Uh, um, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern day contemporary mystic-

   21. LFLex Fridman6:38

       Mm-hmm.

   22. BMBrian Muraresku6:38

       ... talks about, uh, because this stuff does continue. There's a continuity to it.

   23. LFLex Fridman6:42

       The poetry here is b- incredible.

   24. BMBrian Muraresku6:44

       So, well, listen, listen to Rabbi Kushner. Uh, he says that, "The, 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, um, atheists and mystics both essentially believe in nothing, except that the mystics spell it with a capital N, the Divine Nothing.

   25. LFLex Fridman7:10

       Yeah.

   26. BMBrian Muraresku7:10

       And then I'll give you Meister Eckhart, um, uh, another medieval Christian mystic. He says that, um, "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.

   27. LFLex Fridman7:38

       If we look at the universe from a physics perspective or, you know, I'm, I'm a computer science person, so if the universe is a, is a computer, there's some sense that God, the creator of the universe, or just the computer itself, doesn't know what the heck is gonna happen. It just kinda 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, uh, as a tool that the creator uses to understand itself, himself. Do y- do you, uh, do you think that's w- a perspective that, uh, we could or is useful to take on God that, um, is basically the universe created humans to understand itself? He doesn't actually know the full thing.

   28. BMBrian Muraresku8:33

       (laughs)

   29. LFLex Fridman8:34

       He just, he needs the human brains to figure out the puzzle. So that's in contrasting to the unlearning, to the getting outta the way that we've talked about. It's more like, no, we need the humans to figure out this puzzle.

   30. BMBrian Muraresku8:46

       Well, we have no answers to this, which is why philosophers still have jobs, if they have jobs at all. But I mean, there are... You know, so the physicists take a look at this. Um, have you seen the article that came out, I think it was this month in the Journal of Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics, um, uh, Robert Lanza, the biocentrism theory? The idea that the universe comes into being through our observation, right? The whole...
3. 16:02 – 20:44

   Terence McKenna's DMT Trips

   1. BMBrian Muraresku16:02

   2. LFLex Fridman16:02

      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, uh, what is it, self-healing machine elves? Self-

   3. BMBrian Muraresku16:16

      Self-transforming.

   4. LFLex Fridman16:17

      Self-transforming machine elves during his, uh, DMT travels. And, uh, I just talked to Rick Doblin, who also had different travels to this hyperspace, uh (laughs) -

   5. BMBrian Muraresku16:30

      (laughs)

   6. LFLex Fridman16:30

      ... so... But they all seem to be traveling on the- on the same spaceship, just to different locations. And there is a sense in which they seem to be traveling through whatever... I, I don't know if it's through spacetime or something else, to meet something that is more real than real.

   7. BMBrian Muraresku16:45

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman16:46

      Uh, 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?

   9. BMBrian Muraresku16:57

      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. Um, so if you ask Plato the definition of philosophy, he will say that, um, 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. Um, 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. Um, somewhere between 1989 and 1990, Terence sits down, uh, with his friends, uh, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake at Esalen, and they're, they're trying to figure out the meaning of these discarnate entities and these non-human intelligences. And Terence develops a taxonomy for how to analyze this, and he says that number one, they're either, um, semi-physical but kind of elusive. So think of the Bigfoot or the Yeti or things like this. Um, beings that exist somewhere between mythology and zoology, um, which is- isn't really appropriate here. So, so, uh, option number two, he says is the mental-

   10. LFLex Fridman18:17

       (laughs) Sorry.

   11. BMBrian Muraresku18:18

       (laughs)

   12. LFLex Fridman18:19

       You're dropping so many good lines, it's so good. Okay, I apologize. (laughs)

   13. BMBrian Muraresku18:23

       (laughs)

   14. LFLex Fridman18:24

       Somewhere between mythology and zoology.

   15. BMBrian Muraresku18:26

       This, this is all Terence McKenna.

   16. LFLex Fridman18:27

       Okay. All right.

   17. BMBrian Muraresku18:28

       I take no credit for this. Uh, so I-

   18. LFLex Fridman18:29

       But you're combining... You're like, uh, Jimi Hendrix only used the blue scale, but he still, uh, he still created something new in, in the music he played. Anyway, go ahead.

   19. BMBrian Muraresku18:39

       Well, we're going into Mixolydian right now.

   20. LFLex Fridman18:40

       Okay. (laughs)

   21. BMBrian Muraresku18:41

       So, um, uh, so, uh, option number two, and this is, this what, this is what Terence calls sort of the mentalist reductionist approach.Um, and this is, this is pure McKenna poetry. He says that, uh, these beings could be autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the controlling power of the ego. Um, so in Jungian senses, th- these would just be pure projections, um, the projections of schizophrenics in some cases. So they're essentially unreal. And the third option, the most tantalizing, is that they're both nonphysical 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, um, 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 semiautonomous beings may actually guide the species. Now this is high speculation, and, uh, Terrence 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, uh, he came face to face with an angel who said that the conquest of nature is to be achieved, uh, through measure and number. So, so even the hard-minded materialist like, like Descartes is confronting these discarnate entities. John Dee in the 16th century, the high magician of the Elizabethan court, um, he reports decades worth of what we would say is extraterrestrial communication, or interdimensional communication. Um, and you can find instances of this throughout history, including among the pre-Socratics. Um, and Peter Kingsley writes quite a bit about this. But I'll save that until your next question.

4. 20:44 – 31:16

   Psychedelics were the source of collective intelligence

   1. BMBrian Muraresku20:44

   2. LFLex Fridman20:44

      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. Uh, but that we can kind of intuit 'cause that's in the space of chemistry and biology have good theories about the origins of life on Earth. But the origins of intelligent life, that is, 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-

   3. BMBrian Muraresku21:09

      Hmm.

   4. LFLex Fridman21:10

      ... 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, it feels like there could be other things. And I, I think that's at the core of your work is exploring what those things could be. Um, is there ... Is it possible ...

   5. BMBrian Muraresku21:42

      (laughs)

   6. LFLex Fridman21:44

      Talked about Joe Rogan offline. Is it, I mean, is it entirely possible, is it possible that psychedelics have in fact contributed of, of being an important, uh, source of those phase shift throughout human history, of the intellect- basically steering the intellectual development and growth of human civilization?

   7. BMBrian Muraresku22:05

      It's a hypothesis worth investigating. How about that?

   8. LFLex Fridman22:08

      Beautiful. (laughs)

   9. BMBrian Muraresku22:09

      And, and maybe not psychedelics in and of themselves, but I think our whole conversation is kind of wrapped up in these non-ordinary states of awareness. We start by talking about God, which is something unordinary and expansive. And I think that as you, as you trace the intervention of divinity, if that's the case, throughout human history, you have to bump up against the irrational. Um, Mircea Eliade, the great scholar, uh, of, of religions and fellow Romanian said that, "The history of religions essentially constitutes the point of intersection between metaphysics and biology," right? So that we are biological beings who do interact with our planet, with the, with the natural kingdom. And you would think that as, you know, 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, this is another one of McKenna's, um, speculative but very interesting hypotheses, the stoned ape theory.

   10. LFLex Fridman23:13

       Mm-hmm.

   11. BMBrian Muraresku23:13

       Is it, is it possible that psychedelics were involved in one of the several leaps forward? You mentioned the word leap. Um, 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 lo- 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 this, it's the accumulation of psychedelic experience and that it's really difficult to test that hypothesis. But I've been talking with a paleoanthropologist in South Africa, my friend Lee Berger, um, about ways that we might test for this. And so Lee, amongst many things, is this National Geographic explorer. Um, he's the paleoanthropologist's paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand.

   12. LFLex Fridman24:16

       (laughs)

   13. BMBrian Muraresku24:17

       Um, he's famous, amongst other things, for th- the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like Homo naledi. And there's an interesting point. Um, so naledi is this archaic hominin, morphologically archaic, but it dates to about 300,000 years ago-

   14. LFLex Fridman24:37

       Mm-hmm.

   15. BMBrian Muraresku24:37

       ... which is very strange. Um, 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.Um, 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. Um, 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, um, the contemplation of death, just maybe you have pharmacology. And so maybe we can go out and test for this, uh, using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, proteomics, technology that doesn't even exist, but maybe we can actually test the stoned ape theory to figure out once and for all if there's any merit there.

   16. LFLex Fridman26:25

       Can you just linger a little bit on the pharmacology tools? Like how, how would you, how would it be possible to say something about what was being ingested so, so, so long ago?

   17. BMBrian Muraresku26:35

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

   18. LFLex Fridman26:42

       Nice.

   19. BMBrian Muraresku26:43

       ... of archaic hominids-

   20. LFLex Fridman26:44

       Dental calculus. I like that.

   21. BMBrian Muraresku26:46

       (laughs) Evidence of their diet. And you might not believe how old this was, but in, in sediba, Australopithecus sediba, they found evidence of sediba's diet going back two million years. So through things like phytoliths, which are essentially fossilized plant tissue, they found evidence that sediba was eating bark and leaves and grasses and fruits and palm. Um, 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. Um, there was another study out of El Sidron cave in 2012 which found that Neanderthals, again preceding our species 50,000 years ago, um, were ingesting yarrow and chamomile, which had been identified as medicinal. So again, not psychedelic or psychoactive, but...

   22. LFLex Fridman27:44

       (laughs)

   23. BMBrian Muraresku27:45

       We kind of have the beginnings of the technology, and this, that was nine years ago, to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of, of these hominids.

   24. LFLex Fridman27:54

       Presumably there could be a way to figure out, it's not just diet, but which are, have psychoactive elements to them. So whether you're chewing it, whether you're smoking it, whether... I mean, I don't know what, licking it. I don't know if there's any kind of ways through the dental calculus to figure out what exact substances were being consumed. Is it possible to figure out whether psychedelic substances are being consumed by looking at human behavior, like you said, organized burials or cave paintings? No. But so that's a little bit of a stretch to say like where did this leap come from?

   25. BMBrian Muraresku28:29

       But it's not. It's not. So, so, so just last fall, as a matter of fact... So that, 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 i- in many ways like sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2007. And so but even at the time when he was writing that and the years subsequent, it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea. Last fall, um, interestingly enough, uh, the first archochemical data for the ritual consumption of psychedelics associated with cave art was finally published. It's, 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, 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, these bunches of Datura, which contained these very powerful tropane-

   26. LFLex Fridman29:30

       Mm-hmm.

   27. BMBrian Muraresku29:30

       ... alkaloids, in what was believed to be some kind of Chumash initiation site. So we can say that there is initial, you know, archochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics in cave art. And so where else might we find this?

   28. LFLex Fridman29:44

       A- are there a lot of archochemists in the world?

   29. BMBrian Muraresku29:47

       (laughs)

   30. LFLex Fridman29:47

       Like this is, this is fascinating is through chemistry, through biology, through physics, whatever, th- w- through... Like all the disciplines we... Perhaps one day computer science, we, um, apply those tools to study not the data of today but the data of the past.
5. 31:16 – 34:17

   Psychedelics in ancient alcohol

   1. LFLex Fridman31:16

      fascinating. But, uh, also, I just because of, because of your work, I came across and exchanged a few emails with Patrick, uh, McGovern, who's basically, what would you call him? So he has a center, I guess that's, does biomolecular archaeology at UPenn.

   2. BMBrian Muraresku31:32

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman31:32

      And, um, he's the author of a bunch of books. One of which is Ancient Brews. So he's a scholar of beer and wine-

   4. BMBrian Muraresku31:39

      (laughs)

   5. LFLex Fridman31:39

      ... and, and like ancient alcohol, which is fascinating, the influence of even just alcohol. But he has like s- uh, alcohol with, um, hallucinogenic properties as well. But it's fascinating the influen- as a Russian, it's fascinating to, uh, to think about the influence of alcohol on the development of, uh, human civilization throughout hi- its history. Is thi- is there something you can comment on alcohol or in general Patrick's work that, uh, was informative to you, inspiring, or kind of added to your conception of, uh, of human history?

   6. BMBrian Muraresku32:17

      His work was some of the first hard scientific data that I saw for the ritual consumption of these intoxicants. Um, I don't think he's ever found the hard and fast data for, for psychedelics. But what he turned me onto was this idea that alcohol or beer and wine specifically could have been used as vehicles for the administration of psychedelics. That, that's where it all started for me. Um, just, just the notion that ancient beer and ancient wine is very, very different from what we drink today. That typically they, 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, right? There is no hard alcohol even in Russia, um, before maybe the 12th century it was in Europe, um, maybe a bit earlier. Um, but the, the, the concept of distillation just didn't exist. And so, you know, to pack a punch, um, you know, rather than just drink a, a kind of watered-down Budweiser-

   7. LFLex Fridman33:18

      Mm-hmm.

   8. BMBrian Muraresku33:18

      ... these people were interested in fortifying these beverages with whatever they could find in nature. And, and Pat, to his credit, found some of the initial data for these, um, you could say spiked wines and spiked beers. Not with anything overtly psychedelic, but just the fact that in the 16th century BC at, at Grave Circle A in Mycenae, there's this Minoan ritual cocktail of beer mixed with wine, mixed with mead is very interesting. It's even more interesting that you find that across the Aegean, um, in Gordium at King Midas's tomb, right? The same kind of ritual cocktail which Pat and Sam at the Dogfish Head Brewery, uh, resurrected as the Midas touch. So, I mean, the notion that we can go back, find this data resurrected in some cases 2,800 years later, I found pretty exciting 10 years ago.

   9. LFLex Fridman34:08

      (laughs) Yeah. Bring him back for research.

   10. BMBrian Muraresku34:10

       (laughs)

   11. LFLex Fridman34:11

       Um, but that's, that's fascinating that people were playing with these ideas. And we'll return to,

6. 34:17 – 37:03

   The Immortality Key

   1. LFLex Fridman34:17

      we'll return to, uh, ideas of psychedelic-infused wine c- which is pretty fascinating. But c- can we step back and just kind of look at your work with the, the book Immortality Key? What is the story that you tell in this book?

   2. BMBrian Muraresku34:29

      I knew we'd get there eventually, Lex. (laughs)

   3. LFLex Fridman34:32

      (laughs) It's a, it's a nonlinear path.

   4. BMBrian Muraresku34:34

      (laughs)

   5. LFLex Fridman34:36

      Somehow we were talking about simulation-

   6. BMBrian Muraresku34:38

      (laughs)

   7. LFLex Fridman34:38

      ... and the universe is a computer that's creating video games and WOW and, uh, Fortnite. But, we got there. And we'll return always to, to the insane philosophical.

   8. BMBrian Muraresku34:49

      (laughs)

   9. LFLex Fridman34:49

      But, uh, your book, Immortality Key, what, what, what's the stories-

   10. BMBrian Muraresku34:52

       S-

   11. LFLex Fridman34:52

       ... uh, that you tell in this book? Wh- what do you ... Which part of human history are you studying?

   12. BMBrian Muraresku34:56

       Right. So that, that's, that's the way to phrase it. So it's, you know, 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. Uh, so the generations that would give birth to the largest religion the world's ever known, Christianity, today with two and a half billion people. The big question for me is, you know, were psychedelics actually involved? There was a lot written about this in the '60s, John Marco Allegro. Uh, the book that I follow was published in 1978 before I was born, The Road to Eleusis, uh, 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, this all predates us. Um, but what was lacking in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, I think was some of this technology and, and the hard scientific data. Now for years and years, I went out to the archaeo-botanists and the archaeo-chemists 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 Stiecke in Germany, Tania Valamoti in Greece, Assunta Forisano 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, my search for that data and the eventual uncovering of two, what I think are key pieces of data. Uh, one data-Uh, one data point, um, shows the ritual use of a psychedelic beer, um, in classical antiquity in Iberia, what today is Spain. And the other shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii from the first century AD, at the right place, at the right time when the earliest Christians were showing up in Italy.

   13. LFLex Fridman37:01

       Again, these are early steps

7. 37:03 – 49:42

   Jesus and psychedelic wine

   1. LFLex Fridman37:03

      in the search for evidence in this space, but, uh, uh, speaking of early Christians, what role do you think psychedelic-infused wine could have played in the life of the-

   2. BMBrian Muraresku37:21

      (laughs) .

   3. LFLex Fridman37:21

      I, I won't be clever. In the life of Jesus Christ?

   4. BMBrian Muraresku37:25

      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.

   5. LFLex Fridman37:42

      Interesting.

   6. BMBrian Muraresku37:43

      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.

   7. LFLex Fridman37:54

      Mm-hmm.

   8. BMBrian Muraresku37:55

      The way the word sounds, alcool, it comes... It's Semitic. It comes from the Arabic, um, uh, ʾkḥḗl means to enliven or refresh. It probably comes from kohl, K-O-H-L, 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, right? Fermented grapes, the way we think about wine today.

   9. LFLex Fridman38:24

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BMBrian Muraresku38:24

       So Pat McGovern found some of that early organic data for wine being mixed with, uh, with beer and with mead, but if you look at the literature from the first century AD, Dioscorides, for example, he writes this, this massive treatise at the exact same time the gospels are being written.

   11. LFLex Fridman38:42

       Hmm.

   12. BMBrian Muraresku38:42

       And Dioscorides, in just one of his books, talks about 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things like salvia and hellebore and frankincense and myrrh, these spiced perfumes, but also more dangerous things like henbane and mandrake, which he says in Greek can be fatal with just one cupful. And in book 474 of his Materia Medica, he talks about black nightshade producing phantasias ous aedeis, non... not unpleasant visions.

   13. LFLex Fridman39:15

       Hmm.

   14. BMBrian Muraresku39:16

       What today we would say is psychedelic. So just looking at the literature and the kind of literature that even most classicists... I didn't really learn it in undergrad, I came across Dioscorides later, um, 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.

   15. LFLex Fridman39:38

       It's fascinating, by the way, that language affects our conception of the tools we use to understand the world. So, like, w- w- like, y- you can see wine, you can see psychedelics. If they're not called drugs, you s- you can, uh, you can maybe reframe how you see them in terms of their role in, on, uh, uh, us thinking about the world, our understanding of the world. That's really interesting that language has that power. But what language was used to understand wine at the time?

   16. BMBrian Muraresku40:08

       So we're talking about a Greek-speaking world, right?

   17. LFLex Fridman40:10

       Yeah.

   18. BMBrian Muraresku40:10

       So, you know, Jesus, uh, is born and does his public ministry in the Holy Land, but think about the early Church. Think about where the Church takes root. You know, 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, um, or Philippi, a defunct city, uh, just north of the island of Thassos, or he's writing to folks in what today is, is Turkey. Uh, the Colossians, the Galatians. He writes letters to the Romans. Um, these are Greek speakers in these pockets, these Hellenic pockets all around the ancient Mediterranean, and for them, again, ignore Dioscorides, ignore Pat McGovern's work. To them, to think about wine was to think about a mixed, 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 1,000 years before, during, and after the life of Jesus. The word used for wine is pharmakon, which obviously gives us the word pharmacy. It means drug. So in Greek, a Greek speaker would actually use the word drug-

   19. LFLex Fridman41:18

       (laughs) .

   20. BMBrian Muraresku41:18

       ... to refer to wine. Uh, Ruth Scodel, the classicist, talks about this as a, as a ritualistic formula. Um, they understood wine as this compound beverage, a drug against grief, um, a medicinal elixir, uh, that could either harm or heal, or just maybe a sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new.

   21. LFLex Fridman41:41

       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 kinda have very specific conceptions of what things look like, and you kind of, um, use your imagination to stretch beyond the world as we know it. Uh, things that are... try to get in touch with things that are more real than real. What role do these tools, do these, uh, pharmakons have in trying to stimulate the imagery of religion? Like, d- do you have a sense that, um, 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, to religion?

   22. BMBrian Muraresku42:44

       No. I think the wine is absolutely essential. And so if it, 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, just think about wine at the time. Um, I, I think that the ancient Greek audience would have heard that in a very different way, um, from us. And so, they're referring to it maybe as a pharmakon, but the followers of Dionysus, which precedes Jesus, and in some cases, the story of Jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the mysteries of Dionysus. But when you think about Dionysus, um, 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. Um, you know, again, Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. There's no, (laughs) there's no concept of, of fermented grapes. The power of Dionysus and the ability to commune with Dionysus through his blood, and before Christianity, the blood of Dionysus is equated to his wine. The sacramental drinking of the wine was interpreted, and classicists write about this, including Walter Burkert, um, it was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the god. This is where we get-

   23. LFLex Fridman44:00

       Mm-hmm.

   24. BMBrian Muraresku44:00

       ... 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 maenads. And the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption of this sacramental wine. Um, even at the Theater of Dionysus, um, separate from his outdoor churches, there was a wine served there called Tryma, 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. Um, but rather than a hot dog and a beer, what they'd drink at the Theater of Dionysus was this wine called Tryma, 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, uh, play come alive.

   25. LFLex Fridman45:05

       So madness is seen as a positive thing, as like, like a creative journey?

   26. BMBrian Muraresku45:09

       Yeah.

   27. LFLex Fridman45:09

       It's not, it's not, uh, it's, it's the, what is it? The unlearning, getting out of the way kind of thing. Is, is that how it's seen, or is it more like, um, entertaining escape from life that is suffering?

   28. BMBrian Muraresku45:25

       (laughs)

   29. LFLex Fridman45:26

       I gotta, I gotta inject a little modern Dostoevsky into the old...

   30. BMBrian Muraresku45:30

       (laughs) Existential despair. Um, maybe it's a, maybe it's a bit of that. W- we can't say that there wasn't recreational drinking happening.
8. 49:42 – 53:24

   Role of rituals in human society

   1. BMBrian Muraresku49:42

   2. LFLex Fridman49:42

      So what part, you mentioned this idea that's really interesting with, uh, I g- I think you said Paul Stamets, uh, of, m- I guess millions of people over millions of years kind of, uh, consuming, uh, r- really practicing a ritual, or a habit of some sort. The- this idea of rituals is, 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, um, the intellectual growth of particular groups of people or societies?

   3. BMBrian Muraresku50:17

      So again, I w- I would say it is the, the centerpiece of ancient life, not just the mysteries of Dionysus, uh, which we've only talked a bit about, but the mysteries of Eleusis were probably the most famous and longest-lasting of these Greek mystery rites. And I mean, just to put it in simple terms, the best definition for a mystery religion, um, as the name implies, is something secret, right? Muo from the Greek means to, to shut the eyes or, or to shut the mouth, uh, to keep quiet about this stuff. Um, you know, we're, we're always teasing details from the archeological and the, the literary record, and we're kind of just, um, grabbing at these, at these secrets. But Eleusis, which survives for like 2,000 years into the Christian period, from about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD, um, it's kind of this, this centerpiece of Greek life. Cicero, the great Roman statesman, calls what was happening at Eleusis, "The most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced." So not democracy of the arts and sciences or philosophy, but the vision that was encountered at Eleusis, perhaps through the ritual consumption of a potent psychedelic over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands and thousands, if not millions, of initiates, pilgrims who would walk from Athens to Eleusis to encounter this vision. Um, 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 is this passage in the ancient literature that talks about these, you know, in the absence of these mysteries, life becomes unlivable 

   4. LFLex Fridman51:58

      Is there ways you can, I mean, you write about the mysteries of Eleusis, and is there ways you can convert that into words, why those are so important to them, but more, more important than any, any other invention to them? Why is it such a source of meaning to life?

   5. BMBrian Muraresku52:17

      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, um, the, the deliberate disposal of the dead. Um, Plato talks about the, the real practice of philosophy being the, the death and dying process. So in, in some senses you went to Eleusis to die and to experience a, a death before your death.

   6. LFLex Fridman52:46

      Mm-hmm.

   7. BMBrian Muraresku52:47

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

9. 53:24 – 56:01

   Human confrontation with death

   1. BMBrian Muraresku53:24

   2. LFLex Fridman53:24

      Can I ask you a question about this, uh-

   3. BMBrian Muraresku53:26

      (laughs)

   4. LFLex Fridman53:26

      ... human contention with death, this, uh, confrontation of death that seems to be at the core of things? I d- I don't know how deep to the core, but, um, it seems to be a central element of the human condition. What do you think about Ernest Becker and, uh, those guys that put, put death at the, what is it, the warm at the core, which, uh, as the main thing, uh, uh, the main cre- like this confrontation of our own mortality, first of all, being understand that we're mortal, and then confronting the terror of it, the, the fear of it as the creative, like trying to escape the fear of death as the creative force of human society? It's like the reason we do anything is because we're just running away from our death, scared.

   5. BMBrian Muraresku54:18

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LFLex Fridman54:19

      Uh, do you find some of that to be true, first of all, as a, 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 s- spread of human history and all the cool stuff we've created, including the mysteries of Eleusis?

   7. BMBrian Muraresku54:39

      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 re- I really do when it comes to Becker's work and others. Um, 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, when I, when I refer to this key, I'm referring to this notion that's preserved in Greek, an pathanis prion pathanis den pathanis autan pathanis. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. For some reason, the ancients prized that experience, and we talked about the mystics of, of Sufism and Kabbalism and Christian mysticism, where you have this, this same self-nodding, this death before death, the divine nothingness, right?

   8. LFLex Fridman55:32

      Mm-hmm.

   9. BMBrian Muraresku55:33

      For some reason, the mystics, saints, visionaries, and ancient philosophers, they ran to death, and the one message I wanted to try and communicate with this book is how they viewed life, um, that it can only be fully experienced, fully embodied in the wake of a really intense, perhaps terrifying, but utterly transformational encounter with death.

   10. LFLex Fridman55:58

       So, running to death, not running away from death.

10. 56:01 – 1:07:54

    The future of the human experience

    1. LFLex Fridman56:02

       You talk about Aldous Huxley and Mind Changers.

    2. BMBrian Muraresku56:07

       (laughs)

    3. LFLex Fridman56:07

       So, if we look at the history where, um, the ancients were running to death and maybe using some, uh, uh, uh, performance-enhancing pharmacons-

    4. BMBrian Muraresku56:21

       (laughs)

    5. LFLex Fridman56:21

       ... to run more effectively towards death. And now we're using, like, um, tools of modern society, whether they're psychological, sociological, or in ca- pharmaceutical to run away from this conception. So where, uh, what do you see is a hopeful future for human civilization? Like which, um, if all of these kinds of s, uh, societies or ice cream flavors, how do you c- create the perfect ice cream flavor? Like, what is the future of religious experience, of psychedelic experience, of intellectual journeys, of, uh, uh, facing death, running away from death? What do you hope, uh, that looks like and what kind of ideas should we look to?

    6. BMBrian Muraresku57:05

       My next book will be entitled Performance-Enhancing Pharmaka. (laughs)

    7. LFLex Fridman57:10

       (laughs) Great.

    8. BMBrian Muraresku57:10

       You get, you get full copyright.

    9. LFLex Fridman57:12

       (laughs) Uh, yeah, I like it. So-

    10. BMBrian Muraresku57:16

        (laughs)

    11. LFLex Fridman57:16

        (laughs) Uh, so, but that's, that's a historical view. I mean, what's, what, in that book would you suggest, in one of the last chapters, about the, the future of this, um, of this process?

    12. BMBrian Muraresku57:28

        Well, Hux- Huxley has to stop you in, in your, he stopped me in my tracks, Aldous Huxley. So in, in 1958, he, he pens this, this op-ed of sorts, um, and it just, it reads incredibly prescient, um, because I really do think in many ways, as the fog of the war drug is ending and finally lifting, that we, w- we've kind of come f- full circle back to the late 1950s, which might sound strange. Um, it'll make more sense when you hear what Huxley said about psychedelics. And so, he was looking forward to a revival of religion, which is why I subtitled the book The Religion with No Name. Um, and, and to him, to Huxley, this, this, this revival wouldn't come about through, um, televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen, as he says. But he points to the biochemical discoveries, such as we have today, that would allow for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. In other words, that this revival of religion, he says, would be a revolution. And Alan Watts comes along and says that there's, there's nothing more, um, uh, dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism.

    13. LFLex Fridman58:44

        (laughs)

    14. BMBrian Muraresku58:44

        But I think this is what Huxley was pointing to. And he talks about religion in these terms, about being less about symbols and returning to a sense of experience and intuition. And Huxley says that he envisions a religion, um, which gives rise to everyday mysticism, and he talks about something that would undergird everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, and everyday human relationships. In other words, religion has to mean something (laughs) , and these, uh, these altered states of awareness that we seem to be able to produce, um, quite easily inside the lab at Hopkins, NYU, and elsewhere with psilocybin, I, I think this is kind of part of Huxley's prediction about a time when we would have legal access, safe access, efficacious access to this material that would allow for insight in an afternoon. And what do you do when millions of people can become mystics in an afternoon?

    15. LFLex Fridman59:46

        (laughs) So, um, psychedelics, psilocybin might be s- the, 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 the, that's sort of the practice of religion that we should be loo- striving for as opposed to kind of, um, operating in the space of ideas, actually practicing it. Um, you, you mention, and that's the religion with no name, the use of these tools. Is there a simple way to summarize religion per our previous-

    16. BMBrian Muraresku1:00:29

        (laughs)

    17. LFLex Fridman1:00:29

        ... discussion about God, basically discovering the God inside?

    18. BMBrian Muraresku1:00:33

        What if I give you a very complicated definition of religion and then we talk about it more simplified?

    19. LFLex Fridman1:00:39

        Let's do it.

    20. BMBrian Muraresku1:00:40

        So the, the most complicated we can get on this is the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. But I, I think it's worth defining our terms, um, when we're talking about God and, and religion. So religion Ɣ́religiō 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. Um, you know, 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, or sports, or ultimate fighting, or the World Cup, uh, 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, if your epistemological model is weighing facts and figures and you think that's why you're here on this planet, and you find deep meaning, that's okay. Religion is the thing that makes you feel, right? It has the aura of factuality. It just makes you feel like you know the point behind existence. Um, in other words, I think it comes down to experience, like Joe Campbell was talking about, like Aldous Huxley mentions about experience and intuition. I think this is how we connect to God.

    21. LFLex Fridman1:02:32

        Make you feel like you understand the world. I mean, so that's, that's kind of bigger than science. That includes science, but it's bigger. Do you think ... What is real?

    22. BMBrian Muraresku1:02:45

        (laughs)

    23. LFLex Fridman1:02:45

        Like, uh, 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, uh, to, to somehow derive meaning from those realities. And it's ultimately not, like, c- very deeply integrated into what's, like, um, into atoms of space-time?

    24. BMBrian Muraresku1:03:16

        Hmm. Another easy question, Lex. (laughs)

    25. LFLex Fridman1:03:18

        Yeah. 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, uh, it's something that, you know, uh, Ben Shapiro has this saying of "Facts don't care about your feelings." I was always uncomfortable with s- with s- ... I mean, he's just being spiffy or whatever, but, uh-

    26. BMBrian Muraresku1:03:47

        (laughs)

    27. LFLex Fridman1:03:47

        ... uh, I was al- always uncomfortable with somehow, first, that the hubris of thinking that humans can have, l- like, uh, arrive at, uh, 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 ... And, uh, 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, uh, rooting for one football team or the other football team, or countries, and all tho- all those things. That's re- that's real, because we've agreed that it's real. In the same way, a- and gives us meaning. In that same way, religion is a set of ideas that, uh, gives us meaning. But, you know, real ... It, it's, it's really a difficult, for, um, for me as a scientist that finds comfort in the physical understanding of the universe, of physics, you know? I love physics. I love com- com- computer science. It makes me feel like everything is perfectly understandable.

    28. BMBrian Muraresku1:05:10

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    29. LFLex Fridman1:05:10

        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?

    30. BMBrian Muraresku1:05:19

        (laughs)
11. 1:07:54 – 1:13:41

    The role of religion in society

    1. BMBrian Muraresku1:07:54

    2. LFLex Fridman1:07:54

       So speaking of God, you mentioned to me offline you're wearing, uh, the- the most sophisticated clothing choice, um, of the elite intellectuals. Uh, like you mentioned Sam Harris was wearing a hoodie.

    3. BMBrian Muraresku1:08:07

       This is the Sam Harris hoodie. He's starting a trend.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:08:09

       He's starting a trend. (laughs) Um, this is a new religion you could even say, it's a ritual, it's a ritual practice- (laughs)

    5. BMBrian Muraresku1:08:16

       (laughs)

    6. LFLex Fridman1:08:16

       ... of, uh, intellectuals of searching for meaning.

    7. BMBrian Muraresku1:08:20

       (laughs)

    8. LFLex Fridman1:08:20

       Uh, so there's- there's a quite a fascinating debate, he- he was for a time still, um, known as one of the sort of new age atheists.

    9. BMBrian Muraresku1:08:30

       Mm.

    10. LFLex Fridman1:08:30

        So he was kind of trying to explore the role of religion in society, and the role of science. And on the other side, another kind of powerhouse intellectual is Jordan Peterson, who in, um, sometimes for my taste a bit too poetic of ways is exploring ideas of religion, uh, and would add these interesting debates that I think will continue about the role of religion in society. For, uh, uh, 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, uh, basically gets in the way of us fully realizing our human potential which is deeply scientific and rational and, um, sort of, like the... We're surrounded by mystery, calling that mystery God is getting i- in the way of us understanding that mystery. And s- what do you think about this debate about the role of religion in society?

    11. BMBrian Muraresku1:09:50

        We should continue having this debate. I talked to Jordan a couple of weeks ago as a matter of fact.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:09:53

        Excellent.

    13. BMBrian Muraresku1:09:54

        (clears throat) And- and he-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:09:54

        On his podcast in public?

    15. BMBrian Muraresku1:09:55

        Yes.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:09:55

        Excellent.

    17. BMBrian Muraresku1:09:56

        It'll- it'll be out soon. And so, uh, you know, he and I...

    18. LFLex Fridman1:10:00

        How did that go by the way?

    19. BMBrian Muraresku1:10:01

        Um, it was- it was incredible. Uh, Carl Ruck, the professor joined us as a matter of fact, for one of his rare public appearances. So...

    20. LFLex Fridman1:10:08

        Beautiful.

    21. BMBrian Muraresku1:10:08

        We went- we went deep. Um, and Jordan is very well-read obviously on the psychedelic literature. He had just had, um, Roland Griffiths from Hopkins on the podcast, and it's one of Roland's figures that Jordan and I, again, just like the- the language of Aldous Huxley, it's hard to move past the following statistic. Um, over the past 20 years of the modern study of psilocybin, Roland will tell you that about three in four of their volunteers walk away from their single dose of psilocybin, high dose, saying it was among the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, if not the most meaningful. And Jordan says like, (laughs) "How do you, uh, what do you do with that?" Um, uh, how do we, I mean, how do we synthesize that? Um, you know, here we are quantifying the- the qualifiable, the unqualifiable, and- and yet these- these compounds have dramatic effects on peoples' lives, and they walk away feeling like they're more loving, more compassionate. Um, the science of awe talks about, um, 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, uh, 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- I completely understand Sam's position, um, 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, um, creating this aura of factuality that these volunteers never walk away from. Permanently transformed just like the ancient mysteries.

    22. LFLex Fridman1:11:56

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

    23. BMBrian Muraresku1:12:21

        Well, that's how I start my book with one of these volunteers from the NYU psilocybin experiments, this- this woman Dinah, Dinah Baser who's an atheist.

    24. LFLex Fridman1:12:29

        Mm-hmm.

    25. BMBrian Muraresku1:12:29

        And she s- still describes herself as an atheist, and yet as one of these three in four people who walked away from this experiment transformed, she says that her experience of psilocybin was like being bathed in God's love-

    26. LFLex Fridman1:12:42

        (laughs)

    27. BMBrian Muraresku1:12:43

        ... from an atheist.

    28. LFLex Fridman1:12:43

        Yes.

    29. BMBrian Muraresku1:12:44

        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. Um, she's still an atheist, um, but it's the way she describes that as kind of like the way your mother's love must've felt when you were a baby.

    30. LFLex Fridman1:13:05

        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 is 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, uh, represented nicely by memes on Twitter kind of thing. I mean, the- 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 light-hearted and explore.

12. 1:13:41 – 1:16:52

    The future of psychedelics research

    1. LFLex Fridman1:13:41

       Uh, let me ask you about, 'cause you mentioned N- NYU, um, what I find fascinating is how much amazing research there is, speaking of science, right, uh, studying the effects of psilocybin, studying the effects of various psychedelics, MDMA, on the human mind, right now for helping people. But I'm, I'm hoping there'll be studies, uh, 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-

    2. BMBrian Muraresku1:14:15

       Mm-hmm.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:14:15

       ... work through, uh, uh, a problem they're trying to work through, but more like to see, "What can I find if I utilize psychedelics to explore?" Is there something you could say that is exciting to you, that's promising about the future? What currently is going on, but also the future of psychedelics research-

    4. BMBrian Muraresku1:14:34

       Yeah.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:14:34

       ... at Hopkins and elsewhere?

    6. BMBrian Muraresku1:14:35

       The healthy normals. The healthy normals.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:14:37

       The healthy norms.

    8. BMBrian Muraresku1:14:37

       (laughs)

    9. LFLex Fridman1:14:38

       I was looking for the right words 'cause normal doesn't feel... Healthy doesn't f- feel like a good term and normal doesn't feel like a good term-

    10. BMBrian Muraresku1:14:44

        (laughs)

    11. LFLex Fridman1:14:44

        ... 'cause we're all pretty messed up and we're all weird, so.

    12. BMBrian Muraresku1:14:47

        Well, those with ontological angst, in that case.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:14:50

        (laughs) Great.

    14. BMBrian Muraresku1:14:51

        Uh, maybe they'll be a future DSM qualification.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:14:53

        Yeah.

    16. BMBrian Muraresku1:14:54

        Um, there, there's no doubt that, that things like psilocybin, MDMA are u- are useful for things like anxiety, depression, end-of-life distress, PTSD, alcoholism, you name it.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:15:04

        Mm-hmm.

    18. BMBrian Muraresku1:15:04

        Um, 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. Um, but I mean, again, I start the first page of my book with this question, "Why, why do psychedelics work-

    19. LFLex Fridman1:15:20

        Mm-hmm.

    20. BMBrian Muraresku1:15:20

        ... across all these different conditions?" And, uh, the best that I could find is, i- is the meaning, right? Um, Tony Bossis at NYU talks about psilocybin, for example, as meaning-making medicine-

    21. LFLex Fridman1:15:34

        Mm-hmm.

    22. BMBrian Muraresku1:15:34

        ... which is interesting because it puts it somewhere between a therapeutic and again, this, this ontological instigator. Um, what is it about psychedelics that creates these mystical experiences or mystical-like experiences? You can call them emotional breakthroughs. You can call them moments of awe. Um, I, I do think we get locked up in the language, and we're somewhere between science and religion here, um, including legally. So the FDA is one route to this. What excites me about psychedelics is the First Amendment. What is this gonna 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.

    23. LFLex Fridman1:16:11

        Oh, interesting. Yeah.

    24. BMBrian Muraresku1:16:12

        If America is known for anything, it's, it's a refuge for, uh, 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, uh, and discreet use of psychedelics as part of their liturgy? So not replacing the Sunday Eucharist in the case of Christianity, but, um, part of the extra, uh, extra credit dimension of the faith.

    25. LFLex Fridman1:16:45

        Extra credit. And then we can, through practice, figure out how essential it is. It could be a minor thing, it could be a major thing.

13. 1:16:52 – 1:20:31

    Fasting and meditation as religious experiences

    1. LFLex Fridman1:16:52

       Th- that- that's another thing I wanted to kind of ask you, is, um, I recently, despite the fact that I'm eating a huge amount of meat and I'm getting fat-

    2. BMBrian Muraresku1:16:59

       (laughs)

    3. LFLex Fridman1:16:59

       ... I'm loving it. I'm, uh, you know, this is actually, uh, as of two days ago, I started this long road to training for David Goggins, to training back to com- uh, 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 s- ho- hallucinogenic aspect to fasting, 'cause it was, especially 'cause it was a 72-hour fast versus a more common fast that I do, which is 24 hours. You know, uh, and a b- a bunch of people talk about, throughout history, about the value of fasting in, in having these kind of, um, visual, these kind of intellectual experiences.

    4. BMBrian Muraresku1:17:41

       Mm-hmm.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:17:42

       Uh, also there's meditation, Sam Harris with the hoodie. Uh, d- do you have a sense that, um, those other rituals of fasting, of meditation, and maybe other things could, uh, could be as essential or more essential to the religious experience as psychedelics?

    6. BMBrian Muraresku1:18:02

       Uh, yes, if not, and this is gonna sound weird, but maybe not i- if more so.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:18:06

       Right.

    8. BMBrian Muraresku1:18:07

       Um, I look at psychedelics as a catalyst for spiritual investigation, not as the superficial means to an end. Um, I th- I, I think their, their value is in kind of, um, serving as a Google Maps for the Kingdom of Heaven. Um, Ram-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:18:24

       (laughs)

    10. BMBrian Muraresku1:18:24

        (laughs)

    11. LFLex Fridman1:18:25

        All right. (laughs) I like this.

    12. BMBrian Muraresku1:18:27

        Well, so Ram Dass's teacher said that when, when he was-

    13. LFLex Fridman1:18:30

        (laughs)

    14. BMBrian Muraresku1:18:30

        ... was offered psychedelics that, um, "It'll, it'll get you in the room with Jesus, but it won't keep you there."

    15. LFLex Fridman1:18:36

        (laughs) Okay. Yeah.

    16. BMBrian Muraresku1:18:38

        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, 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, we've lost the coordinates to these irrational states, again, that were prized throughout antiquity and that continue to be prized by the mystical communities. Even in big organized religion, it just doesn't filter out that much. And so psychedelics, in my mind, help orient our minds, bodies, and souls towards the irrational, right? We talked about Mckenna's invisible world that seems to have this symbiosis with our own, and perhaps has this higher intent for us. Um, you could very well just, you know, take catalog of your dreams.... right? And that would do it too. But psychedelics seem to be particularly fast-acting, um, particularly potent, and very reliable, especially in the clinical studies. And so I looked at them as, as biochemical discoveries, like, like Huxley did. Maybe it's once in your life, or infrequently, right? Um, but maybe that's the beginning of a genuine introspection, and a life well examined, as the ancients always instructed us.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:19:57

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

    18. BMBrian Muraresku1:20:19

        (laughs)

    19. LFLex Fridman1:20:20

        You still, you still have to do the driving. Uh, it just kind of gives you the, the directions. Uh, so after you come, come down from the trip or whatever, you still have to drive.

14. 1:20:31 – 1:27:28

    Neuralink and BCIs

    1. LFLex Fridman1:20:31

       There's other tools that are kind of interesting. We- we've been talking about this, um, at, at the psychological level, but there's also a neuroscience perspective of it 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, uh, how from those, uh, neurons emerges all the things that we think that make us human. That's a fascinating exploration of the human mind. Now, that's, of course, where the psychedelics have the chemical, the biochemical effects on, on those neurons. T- there's ideas of brain computer interfaces which, you know, if you look at especially what Neuralink is doing with its long-term vision, with Elon Musk and Neuralink, they, um, they hope to expand, (laughs) he calls it a wizard hat.

    2. BMBrian Muraresku1:21:29

       (laughs)

    3. LFLex Fridman1:21:29

       They hope... (laughs) Uh, this is back to the humor on the internet thing.

    4. BMBrian Muraresku1:21:34

       (laughs)

    5. LFLex Fridman1:21:35

       Uh, the, the, the wizard hat that expands the capa- capa- capability is the capacity of the human mind. Do you think there's something there or is, is the human mind so infinitely complex that, um, we're quite a long way away from expanding the capabilities of the human mind, uh, through technology versus something like psychedelics?

    6. BMBrian Muraresku1:22:03

       I wonder how Terence McKenna would answer that question. Um, you know, he looked to shamans as kind of the, the, the scientists, um, the high magicians of the high archaic past and the far-flung future. Um, I'm not gonna discount... You know more about AI than I do, so I'm not gonna discount it. But I do think that AI paired with, um, the sacred recovery, right? Um, the archeology of consciousness, um, and these, and these states, these archaic techniques of ecstasy that were practiced across time, I think that's a winning combination. Um, you know, part of what I do in the book is just I try and lay out the set and setting that's often talked about with psychedelics. I mean, so maybe psychedelics in the right AI environment's gonna work. I think it'd probably work a lot better with that myth and ritual incorporated. So, the reason Eleusis worked for 2,000 years, um, and let's assume the psychedelic hypothesis has some merit to it.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:23:04

       Mm-hmm.

    8. BMBrian Muraresku1:23:04

       Um, 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-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:23:22

       Mm-hmm.

    10. BMBrian Muraresku1:23:22

        ... ritual preparation. Um, in fact, some of the early church fathers made fun of the Greeks for essentially just piquing people's curiosity and revving up the anticipation, which has something to do with the outcome, by the way. But in other words, I think we need to create a new mythology around this. I don't think you, you pop into a laboratory. I don't think you pop into a retreat center, um, 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, uh, I'm, I'm willing to explore it, you know, together with, uh, the computer interface.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:23:59

        (laughs)

    12. BMBrian Muraresku1:24:00

        But I, I, I... But I do think ritual is a, is a gigantic part of this. And even McKenna would, would say that. Um, I'll, I'll paraphrase him by saying that, um, if, if, if you'd met someone who didn't know where they were between the years 1995 and 2005, you would describe them as a fairly damaged person. And yet, who among us knows what was happening in Western civilization between 900 and 1300, let alone 2,500 years ago? So, this is, in many ways, the prophet of the psychedelic renaissance saying that history has lessons. Um, and I don't think they're superficial lessons. I think it cuts to the very core of how and why Western civilization came to be born.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:24:41

        Yeah. But that, that history can be loaded into AI systems, and I do love the idea of whether it's through brain computer interfaces or without intrusive sort of... without direct reading of the neurons and more sort of interactive experience with a robot that you can have an AI system that steers your psychedelic experience-

    14. BMBrian Muraresku1:25:03

        Mm-hmm.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:25:04

        ... that, um, helps you sort of w- when you take a heroic dose of psilocybin, for example, helps steer you, steer your mind, say just the right things. I mean, you could say that kind of thing with, uh... It's, it's, it's a totally open, um, problem, I would say. You, you talk about set and setting. This is the interesting thing about, um...... Johns Hopkins is, you know, you create a comfortable environment, a safe environment-

    16. BMBrian Muraresku1:25:32

        Mm.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:25:32

        ... for e-allowing then if you take a hero-, like, a l-large dose of psilocybin that you could trust that everything will be safe and you can really allow the exploration of your mind. But then you don't know, from a psychotherapy perspective, of, like, during that trip what a human should say to steer that trip. Like, that's a totally open set of problems. And, in some sense, probably throughout history, those rituals, you figured out what are the right things to say to each other.

    18. BMBrian Muraresku1:26:02

        Exactly.

    19. LFLex Fridman1:26:03

        How to collaborate. And maybe if you can turn that into an optimization problem, uh, AI could figure that out much, much quicker.

    20. BMBrian Muraresku1:26:11

        I'm with you. So Eleusis was known for three things, the legomena, the dromena, and the teichnumena, the things said, the things done, the things shown. If you can pack that all into your AI interface, I'm in, Lex Fridman.

    21. LFLex Fridman1:26:24

        I'm gonna write a proposal and, and then try to get it through the IRB at MIT for this.

    22. BMBrian Muraresku1:26:30

        (laughs)

    23. LFLex Fridman1:26:30

        (laughs) I mean, th-the... (laughs) There's a certain sense in which I definitely want to, to, to explore, uh, psychedelics, I mean, uh, in, in my personal life, but also more rigorously as a scientist, and of, uh, to, to push that forward, and especially in the AI space. And it's, it is, um, difficult how to, how to do that dance when there's, uh, gray areas of legality and all those kinds of things. And we're dancing around them, and some of that is language and some of that is, uh, what we socially, uh, conceive of as, as drugs or not. And you, you're right that perhaps we can reframe it as religious experiences, all those kinds of things. I mean, it's fascinating because it feels like there's a bunch of tools before us that were used by the ancients that we're not utilizing for exploring the human mind, uh, that we very well could be in a rigorous, scientific way, in a safe way. And that's

15. 1:27:28 – 1:30:08

    Is LSD a crutch or an aid in creative work

    1. LFLex Fridman1:27:28

       fascinating. There's this interesting period of, um, in the 20th century (laughs) of LSD use that, uh, many of the people doing research on psychedelics now kinda have their roots in that history. I, I mentioned I talked to Rick Doblin. He is one of those people. Uh, and there's this interesting story of a bunch of creatives that, uh, used LSD or other drugs to help them. Wh- what do you make of the idea of somebody like Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in part under the influence of LSD? Like, what do you make of the use of psychedelics to, um, maximize the creative potential of the human mind? Is this, um, is this a, as a crutch or is this actually, um, an effective tool that we should explore?

    2. BMBrian Muraresku1:28:27

       Hmm. One person's crutch might be another's, uh, bungee cord.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:28:32

       (laughs)

    4. BMBrian Muraresku1:28:34

       Um, you know, (laughs) it-

    5. LFLex Fridman1:28:35

       (laughs)

    6. BMBrian Muraresku1:28:35

       ... it depends on that mind. (laughs)

    7. LFLex Fridman1:28:38

       Yeah.

    8. BMBrian Muraresku1:28:38

       Uh, think about Paul McCartney. I mean, we might not have some of the better Beatles music in the absence of LSD. And what did Sir Paul say in 1967 when he was asked about his use of LSD? He said that he recognized the dangers inherent in it, but that, um, he did it with a very specific, very deliberate purpose in mind. Um, he wanted to find the answer to what life is all about.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:29:01

       Mm.

    10. BMBrian Muraresku1:29:02

        And I'm not sure what Sir Paul is doing this week, but he's probably not doing LSD. Speaking back to my theory about these, these substances being catalyzers of spiritual introspection, um, you know, it came along at a time in their life when I think they were ripe for it, especially George Harrison. Um, highly recommend the Martin Scorsese documentary about, uh, about George Harrison. Um, you know, for, for them, I think it was exactly the way we ought to investigate it, which is, uh, well, mind expanders. This is what psychedelics do, right? The, that which makes manifest the contents of the mind. Um, 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, um, it can be in ritual chanting, it can be in a sun dance, but in the absence of that kind of experience at the right time in your life, it may otherwise be very difficult to find entrance to that kingdom of heaven, which I do think is here and now, getting right back to the very beginning. If we are actually to participate in that eternal principle, how and when?

16. 1:30:08 – 1:32:35

    Nietzsche said God is dead

    1. BMBrian Muraresku1:30:09

    2. LFLex Fridman1:30:09

       What do you think Nietzsche meant when he said that God is dead? So there's a sense that religion is fading from society. And, uh, there's a cranky German that kinda wrote about it.

Episode duration: 1:52:27