Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics

Brian Muraresku (03:15.680)

our own mind. And so, aren't we creating God? Aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of

Brian Muraresku (03:26.240)

God? When we talk about God, aren't we playing with ideas that are created by our mind and

Brian Muraresku (03:36.320)

thereby we are the creator, not God? This is a very kind of cyclical question, but in some sense,

Brian Muraresku (03:46.320)

I mean that if God is the thing that represents the mystery all around us, contrast that with

Brian Muraresku (03:55.840)

our conception of God, the way we talk about him, is more a creation of our minds. It's not the

Brian Muraresku (04:01.520)

mystery. It's our struggle to comprehend the mystery. And therefore, we're creating the God

Brian Muraresku (04:07.280)

in terms of the God that we're talking about in this conversation or in general, if that makes any

Brian Muraresku (04:12.720)

sense. It makes no sense whatsoever. Great. This is wonderful. But this is the eternal mystery.

Brian Muraresku (04:21.840)

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

Brian Muraresku (04:27.120)

The Upanishads speak about us as the creators, about us as gods. It's a very different creation

Brian Muraresku (04:33.120)

myth, but the God of the Upanishads in this great verse talks about pouring themselves into

Brian Muraresku (04:41.200)

creation. Indeed, I have become this creation, says God. And there's a great line, verily he or

Brian Muraresku (04:48.160)

she who knows this becomes in this creation a creator. So, yeah, I mean, just our ability to

Brian Muraresku (04:56.640)

engage in mentation, our ability to think about this stuff is partly our divine nature. This is

Lex Fridman (05:02.480)

what the humanists were talking about in the Renaissance, by the way. And that it's not so much

Brian Muraresku (05:08.560)

learning, putting dots together, having arguments with each other over learned books. It's a

Brian Muraresku (05:15.680)

process of unlearning, is what some of the mystical traditions talk about. Unlearning all these

Brian Muraresku (05:21.680)

thoughts, emotions, traumas, and experiences that have gone into the false construction of our false

Brian Muraresku (05:27.040)

self, that behind all these layers, like peeling back the onion, is a part of us that once you can

Brian Muraresku (05:34.720)

identify that, begins to look a little bit different. In other words, it's one thing to

Brian Muraresku (05:40.160)

foster a relationship with God. It's a very different thing to identify as God. And I mean

Brian Muraresku (05:47.360)

that quite literally, without being heretical. You can find this in the mystery traditions.

Lex Fridman (05:52.960)

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

Brian Muraresku (06:00.000)

That is textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any Christian mysticism.

Lex Fridman (06:07.040)

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

Brian Muraresku (06:14.800)

the great Sufi mystic talks about, if you could get rid of yourself, just get rid of yourself just

Brian Muraresku (06:22.000)

once, the secret of secrets would open to you. That the face of the unknown would appear on the

Brian Muraresku (06:28.240)

perception of your consciousness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern day Christian,

Brian Muraresku (06:33.520)

of your consciousness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern day contemporary mystic,

Brian Muraresku (06:38.880)

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

Lex Fridman (06:42.080)

The poetry here is incredible.

Brian Muraresku (06:44.080)

So, well, listen to Rabbi Kushner. He says that the emptying of selfhood

Brian Muraresku (06:50.080)

allows the soul to attach to true reality. And in Kabbalism, the true reality is what's called

Brian Muraresku (06:56.480)

the divine nothingness, ayin. And so, I like the adage that atheists and mystics both essentially

Brian Muraresku (07:03.680)

believe in nothing, except that the mystics spell it with a capital N, the divine nothing.

Lex Fridman (07:10.240)

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

Brian Muraresku (07:16.800)

if you could not yourself, the same concept, if you could not yourself for just an instant,

Brian Muraresku (07:22.400)

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

Brian Muraresku (07:27.440)

thing in Sufism, Kabbalism, Christian mysticism. The way to identify with the divine is to peel

Brian Muraresku (07:33.600)

back these layers and attempt to discover pure awareness.

Brian Muraresku (07:38.080)

If we look at the universe from a physics perspective, or, you know, I'm a computer

Brian Muraresku (07:41.920)

science person, so if the universe is a computer, there's some sense that God, the creator of the

Brian Muraresku (07:53.280)

universe, or just the computer itself, doesn't know what the heck is going to happen. He just

Brian Muraresku (07:58.960)

kind of creates some basic rules and runs the thing. So, there is some element in which you

Brian Muraresku (08:05.680)

can conceive of humans or conscious beings or intelligent beings as a tool that the creator

Brian Muraresku (08:13.600)

uses to understand himself. Do you think that's a perspective that we could or is useful to take on

Brian Muraresku (08:24.240)

God that is basically the universe created humans to understand itself? He doesn't actually know

Brian Muraresku (08:33.040)

the full thing. He needs the human brains to figure out the puzzle. So, that's in contrasting

Brian Muraresku (08:39.200)

to the unlearning to getting out of the way that we've talked about. It's more like, no,

Brian Muraresku (08:43.840)

we need the humans to figure out this puzzle. Well, we have no answers to this, which is why

Brian Muraresku (08:48.880)

philosophers still have jobs, if they have jobs at all. But, I mean, so the physicists take a look

Brian Muraresku (08:53.840)

at this. Have you seen the article that came out, I think it was this month, in the Journal of

Brian Muraresku (08:58.480)

Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Robert Lanza, the biocentrism theory, the idea that the universe

Brian Muraresku (09:04.960)

comes into being through our observation, right, the whole, the God equation. So, not just in

Brian Muraresku (09:10.080)

quantum mechanics, but in general relativity, the idea that we make the universe moment by moment,

Brian Muraresku (09:15.680)

which is kind of mind blowing, gets into ideas of simulation. Okay, so that's how the physicists,

Brian Muraresku (09:21.600)

at least some of them might look at it. You could also look back to the medieval Christian mystics,

Brian Muraresku (09:26.080)

Meister Eckhart, once again, says that the eye with which I see God is the same eye that sees me,

Brian Muraresku (09:34.400)

right? So, one sight, one knowledge, one love, another mind blowing concept. But this is why

Brian Muraresku (09:42.320)

the arts and poetry and music are so important, because although I love astroparticle physics,

Lex Fridman (09:47.280)

it's another to kind of hear this, the same message across time.

Brian Muraresku (09:51.840)

Yeah, the simulation thing. I was actually looking this morning at video games, just the statistics

Brian Muraresku (09:58.720)

on video games. And I saw that the two top video games in terms of hours played is Fortnite and

Brian Muraresku (10:05.920)

World of Warcraft. And I saw that it's 140 billion hours, billion hours have been played of those

Brian Muraresku (10:13.600)

games. That's a lot of video games. Yeah, but that's very sophisticated worlds being created,

Brian Muraresku (10:22.320)

especially in the World of Warcraft. It's a massive online role playing game. So you have

Brian Muraresku (10:27.360)

these characters that are together sort of creating a world, but they in themselves are also

Brian Muraresku (10:33.120)

developing, they have all these items, and they're like, they're little humans. Like there's

Brian Muraresku (10:37.280)

complicated societies that are formed, they have goals, they're striving and so on. And it's,

Brian Muraresku (10:41.760)

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

Brian Muraresku (10:48.640)

of constraint version of our more richer earth like civilization. But it's conceivable that,

Brian Muraresku (10:55.760)

you know, that we are this thing on earth is a kind of video game that somebody else is playing.

Lex Fridman (11:02.080)

It's like you can see sort of video games upon video games being created.

Brian Muraresku (11:05.600)

That, and this is something I think a lot about, not from philosophical perspective, but practically,

Lex Fridman (11:12.080)

how fun does this video game have to be for us to let go of the silly pursuits in this meat space

Brian Muraresku (11:19.920)

that we live in and fully just stay in wow, stay in World of Warcraft, stay in the video game for

Brian Muraresku (11:27.280)

full time. So I think about that from an engineering perspective. Like is there going to be a time

Brian Muraresku (11:32.160)

when this video game is actual real life for us, and then the creatures inside the video game,

Brian Muraresku (11:40.160)

they'll be just borrowing our consciousness, sort of to ground themselves will refer to us as the

Brian Muraresku (11:46.800)

gods. Right? Like, won't we become the gods? This conversation is not going how I expected.

Lex Fridman (11:55.440)

But I think about this a lot from, you know, because I love video games, and I wonder more

Lex Fridman (12:00.720)

and more of us, especially in COVID times, are living in the digital world. You could think about

Brian Muraresku (12:06.000)

Twitter and all those kinds of things. You could think about clubhouse people using just voices to

Brian Muraresku (12:10.560)

communicate with little icons, sort of in the digital space, you could see more and more will

Brian Muraresku (12:15.200)

be moving in the digital space and let go of this physical space. And then the remnants of the

Brian Muraresku (12:23.280)

ancients that created the video games, that nobody centuries from now will even remember,

Brian Muraresku (12:29.200)

those will be the gods. And then there'll be gods upon gods being created. This is the kind of stuff

Lex Fridman (12:34.560)

I think about. But is that any at all useful to you to this thought experiment of a simulation?

Brian Muraresku (12:40.880)

Basically, the fabric of our reality, how did it come to be? What is running this thing? Is that

Brian Muraresku (12:46.000)

useful? Or is it ultimately the project of understanding God, of understanding myth,

Lex Fridman (12:52.880)

is the project that centers on the human, on the human mind, for you?

Brian Muraresku (12:58.800)

Hmm. We seem to be at the center of this divine dance, which sounds awfully anthropocentric.

Lex Fridman (13:05.440)

But the ancients thought about this too. I mean, the concept in Sanskrit of lila, that the point

Brian Muraresku (13:11.680)

behind existence is this play, right? It's ultimately playful, this divine dance. It gets

Brian Muraresku (13:17.680)

awfully complicated in the Gnostic and Neoplatonic schools, these chains of being from God head down

Brian Muraresku (13:25.280)

to us, right? Some invisible, right? And we're gonna get into Terence McKenna territory later

Brian Muraresku (13:31.920)

on, but we can start now by talking about discarnate entities and archons and aliens

Lex Fridman (13:37.200)

and archetypes. I mean, there is a world where Terence McKenna does meet Plato and Gnosticism

Brian Muraresku (13:43.040)

quite kindly, and that's in this invisible college, right? The invisible world with which we seem to

Brian Muraresku (13:51.840)

have some kind of symbiosis that has a higher intent, maybe even a purpose or a plan in mind

Brian Muraresku (13:58.480)

for us. So, I mean, these ideas come across when you've had a heroic dose of mushrooms.

Brian Muraresku (14:03.680)

They also pop up in the ancient philosophical literature, this idea of archons who, you know,

Brian Muraresku (14:08.000)

the puppet masters controlling us flesh and blood beings. It's all a cosmic dance, and there are no

Brian Muraresku (14:16.080)

answers to this. First, who are the archons? And second, what is this world where Terence McKenna

Brian Muraresku (14:20.480)

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

Brian Muraresku (14:25.600)

connects all of consciousness throughout human history? I think through different techniques,

Brian Muraresku (14:29.760)

it is, you know, I think a lot about, I think Gordon Wasson is the meeting point of the two.

Brian Muraresku (14:33.600)

So, Gordon Wasson, who I do talk about in the book, was this J.P. Morgan banker turned

Brian Muraresku (14:39.920)

ethnomycologist, and he's largely credited with the rediscovery of psilocybin containing mushrooms,

Brian Muraresku (14:46.640)

which kind of gave rise to the pop psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. He visited Maria Sabina

Brian Muraresku (14:52.720)

down in Mexico. In his wake went Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, and everybody else.

Lex Fridman (14:58.400)

And the way he describes his psilocybin experience is a bit strange because he thinks of

Brian Muraresku (15:03.280)

Plato, right? And he says that, you know, whereas our ordinary reality is kind of this imperfect

Brian Muraresku (15:09.840)

view of things, Gordon Wasson felt that on mushrooms, he was spying the archetypes.

Lex Fridman (15:15.440)

And he talks about Plato, and he writes about the archetypes in this famous article that's

Brian Muraresku (15:19.680)

released in 1957 in Life magazine. And so, a well read individual from the mid 20th century has his

Brian Muraresku (15:26.880)

his premier psychedelic experience, and out comes Plato because what he was witnessing was so sharp,

Lex Fridman (15:33.760)

so brilliant, so detailed, in some sense, more real than real, this noetic sense that William

Brian Muraresku (15:40.000)

James talks about, that when you confront something more real than real, these discarnate

Brian Muraresku (15:45.360)

entities, these images, these visionary motifs, you're tempted to believe that you've tapped into

Brian Muraresku (15:52.480)

the truest nature and the underlying structure of the cosmos. And that's difficult to escape from,

Brian Muraresku (15:57.920)

whether you're Plato or Terence McKenna or Gordon Wasson caught in between.

Lex Fridman (16:02.160)

Can we talk about this being in touch with something that is more real than real?

Lex Fridman (16:07.440)

And let's just go straight there to McKenna before we return to the bigger picture.

Lex Fridman (16:11.520)

So he's talked about the, what is it, self healing machine elves?

Brian Muraresku (16:16.080)

Self transforming.

Brian Muraresku (16:17.120)

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

Brian Muraresku (16:25.200)

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

Brian Muraresku (16:32.800)

spaceship, just the different locations. And there is a sense in which they seem to be traveling

Brian Muraresku (16:38.640)

through whatever, I don't know if it's through space time or something else,

Brian Muraresku (16:42.640)

to meet something that is more real than real. What can you say about this DMT experience,

Brian Muraresku (16:48.640)

about Terence McKenna, about the poetry he used, but maybe more specifically about

Lex Fridman (16:54.080)

this place that they seem to all travel to?

Lex Fridman (16:57.120)

So the big question is, is it real? Is it really more real than real? The ancient philosophers

Brian Muraresku (17:01.840)

were asking the same question and their means of attempting to answer that was by dying.

Lex Fridman (17:06.960)

And so if you ask Plato the definition of philosophy, he will say that to practice it

Brian Muraresku (17:12.640)

in the right way is to practice dying and being dead. And many people describe the psychedelic

Brian Muraresku (17:19.520)

experience in sort of near death experience terms. And the encountering of all this visual

Brian Muraresku (17:25.280)

imagery tends to be something that is often described as more real than real. So how does

Brian Muraresku (17:30.320)

Terence talk about this? So I was just listening to the triologues, which folks should look up

Brian Muraresku (17:35.680)

somewhere between 1989 and 1990. Terence sits down with his friends, Ralph Abraham and

Brian Muraresku (17:42.400)

Rupert Sheldrake at Esalen. And they're trying to figure out the meaning of these

Brian Muraresku (17:48.080)

discarnate entities and these nonhuman intelligences. And Terence develops a taxonomy

Brian Muraresku (17:54.000)

for how to analyze this. And he says that number one, they're either semi physical,

Lex Fridman (18:01.040)

but kind of elusive. So think of the Bigfoot or the Yeti or things like this. Beings that exist

Brian Muraresku (18:07.280)

somewhere between mythology and zoology, which isn't really appropriate here. So option number

Brian Muraresku (18:14.480)

two, he says, is the mental. You're dropping so many good lines. It's so good. I apologize.

Brian Muraresku (18:23.600)

Somewhere between mythology and zoology. This is all Terence McKenna. I take no credit for this.

Lex Fridman (18:28.560)

But you're combining, you're like, Jimi Hendrix only used the blues scale,

Lex Fridman (18:34.320)

but he still created something new in the music he played. Anyway, go ahead.

Brian Muraresku (18:39.200)

We're going into Mixolydian right now. So option number two, and this is what Terence calls sort

Brian Muraresku (18:48.240)

of the mentalist reductionist approach. And this is pure McKenna poetry. He says that these beings

Brian Muraresku (18:55.360)

could be autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the controlling

Brian Muraresku (19:02.640)

power of the ego. So in Jungian senses, these would just be pure projections, the projections

Brian Muraresku (19:09.360)

of schizophrenics in some cases. So they're essentially unreal. And the third option,

Brian Muraresku (19:13.840)

the most tantalizing, is that they're both nonphysical, but autonomous. In other words,

Brian Muraresku (19:19.440)

they actually exist in some kind of real place, in some kind of real space, and that we can have

Brian Muraresku (19:25.680)

Congress with them. There is communication. He talks about the whisperings of the demon artificers,

Lex Fridman (19:32.160)

and that it's just possible that our meetings with these beings have coaxed the human species

Brian Muraresku (19:38.560)

into self expression in a very real way, that at different times in history, our relationships with

Brian Muraresku (19:44.960)

these semi autonomous beings may actually guide the species. Now, this is high speculation,

Lex Fridman (19:52.240)

and Terence and Ralph and Rupert wind up talking about the early modern period and the scientific

Brian Muraresku (19:59.520)

enlightenment, and that even someone like Descartes reports a dream in which he came face

Lex Fridman (1:00:01.360)

and then like evolving this collective intelligence thing we've got going on,

Brian Muraresku (1:00:06.160)

that's sort of the practice of religion that we should be striving for as opposed to kind of

Brian Muraresku (1:00:10.880)

operating in the space of ideas, actually practicing it. You mentioned, and that's the

Brian Muraresku (1:00:19.280)

religion with no name, the use of these tools. Is there a simple way to summarize religion for our

Brian Muraresku (1:00:27.280)

previous discussion about God, basically discovering the God inside? What if I give you a very

Brian Muraresku (1:00:33.440)

complicated definition of religion and then we talk about a more simplified? Let's do it. So

Brian Muraresku (1:00:39.440)

the most complicated we can get on this is the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. But I think it's

Brian Muraresku (1:00:44.160)

worth defining our terms when we're talking about God and religion. So religion religio from the

Brian Muraresku (1:00:49.920)

Latin means to bind back. So to bind us back to some meaningful tradition, to bind us back to the

Brian Muraresku (1:00:55.040)

source. Here's a mouthful from Clifford Geertz. Religion, he defines as a set of symbols which

Brian Muraresku (1:01:03.040)

acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long lasting moods and motivations by formulating

Brian Muraresku (1:01:09.440)

conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions in such an aura of

Brian Muraresku (1:01:14.400)

factuality that those moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic, which is complex. What does

Brian Muraresku (1:01:23.200)

that mean? That religion has to make you feel something, these moods and motivations. But it

Brian Muraresku (1:01:29.280)

can't just do that in the way that sex does that for us or sports or ultimate fighting or the World

Brian Muraresku (1:01:35.040)

Cup or going to a concert. So we get all that emotion in these experiences like that. But that

Brian Muraresku (1:01:41.760)

emotion has to be concomitant to a deep existential insight that answers this question for you in the

Brian Muraresku (1:01:47.680)

morning. I know why I'm here. I know why humans are here. I think I know what the meaning of life

Brian Muraresku (1:01:53.200)

is. That's what religion is. And if you find that meaning in science, then that's your religion and

Brian Muraresku (1:01:59.280)

that's fine. But we need to be more honest about that. If your epistemological model is weighing

Brian Muraresku (1:02:05.920)

facts and figures and you think that's why you're here on this planet and you find deep meaning,

Brian Muraresku (1:02:10.080)

that's okay. Religion is the thing that makes you feel, right? It has the aura of factuality. It

Brian Muraresku (1:02:15.920)

just makes you feel like you know the point behind existence. In other words, I think it can be

Brian Muraresku (1:02:22.160)

in other words, I think it comes down to experience. Like Joe Campbell was talking about,

Brian Muraresku (1:02:25.680)

like Aldous Huxley mentions about experience and intuition. I think this is how we connect to God.

Brian Muraresku (1:02:32.240)

Make you feel like you understand the world. I mean, so that's kind of bigger than science.

Brian Muraresku (1:02:38.800)

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

Brian Muraresku (1:02:47.120)

an absolute reality that we're kind of striving towards understanding or is it all just conjured

Brian Muraresku (1:02:53.360)

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

Brian Muraresku (1:03:00.400)

play with them and dance to somehow derive meaning from those realities. And it's ultimately not like

Brian Muraresku (1:03:08.960)

like very deeply integrated into what's like into atoms of space time. Another easy question, Lex.

Lex Fridman (1:03:20.240)

Well, I mean, you have to kind of, when you're thinking about

Brian Muraresku (1:03:25.280)

emotion and making it concrete into something that feels real, you have to start asking,

Brian Muraresku (1:03:32.240)

like, what is real? It's something that Ben Shapiro has this saying of facts don't care

Brian Muraresku (1:03:40.240)

about your feelings. I was always uncomfortable with this. I mean, he's just being spiffy or

Brian Muraresku (1:03:46.240)

whatever, but I was always uncomfortable with somehow first that the hubris of thinking that

Brian Muraresku (1:03:53.360)

humans can have, like arrive at absolute truth, which is what I assume he means by facts,

Brian Muraresku (1:04:03.120)

like things that are uncontrovertible. And then somehow deriding feelings, like feelings are not

Brian Muraresku (1:04:09.280)

important. To me, like the whole thing is reality. The facts don't even, like facts is reality,

Brian Muraresku (1:04:18.400)

feelings are reality, like the entirety of human experience is reality. All these

Brian Muraresku (1:04:24.240)

consciousnesses somehow interacting together, making up random crap and together agreeing

Brian Muraresku (1:04:29.680)

they're all going to wear the same colors, rooting for one football team or the other football team

Brian Muraresku (1:04:34.640)

or countries, all those things, that's real because we've agreed that it's real.

Lex Fridman (1:04:40.800)

And in the same way, it gives us meaning in that same way religion is a set of ideas that

Brian Muraresku (1:04:45.760)

gives us meaning, but real, it's really difficult for me as a scientist that finds comfort in the

Brian Muraresku (1:04:58.400)

physical understanding of the universe of physics. I love physics. I love computer science.

Brian Muraresku (1:05:05.200)

It makes me feel like everything is perfectly understandable. And then I look at humans,

Brian Muraresku (1:05:11.680)

humans, they're totally not understandable. It's like a giant mess, but that's part of the beauty.

Brian Muraresku (1:05:17.760)

Like what is love? Like what the hell is love? It's certainly not like a weird hack to convince me

Brian Muraresku (1:05:26.880)

to procreate because it feels something bigger than that. So like taking a purely evolutionary

Brian Muraresku (1:05:32.000)

biologist perspective, it's missing the, it's not missing, it's only capturing a part of the picture.

Lex Fridman (1:05:37.520)

And so it just keeps making me ask, what is real? Because as a human, it's very human centric.

Brian Muraresku (1:05:44.400)

It does certainly feel like a part, a big part of what is real is all the fake stuff my mind makes up.

Lex Fridman (1:05:57.120)

I mean, okay, I guess, is there something you could say

Brian Muraresku (1:06:01.280)

from our discussions about the tools of psychedelics, about our discussion about

Lex Fridman (1:06:06.320)

religion, of what is real, of what is reality?

Brian Muraresku (1:06:11.920)

These are largely unanswerable questions.

Lex Fridman (1:06:15.680)

But we should nevertheless strive to answer them. That's the whole point of the human experience.

Lex Fridman (1:06:19.920)

And I think science is one way and religion is another. And I think there's actually a sphere

Brian Muraresku (1:06:24.240)

where they intersect, you know, there's a way for religion to be a big part of the world.

Brian Muraresku (1:06:30.000)

Religion to be observable, testable, repeatable, falsifiable. When I look at the ancient mysteries,

Brian Muraresku (1:06:35.440)

that's what I find. I find people exploring alternate states of consciousness and arriving

Brian Muraresku (1:06:41.600)

at conclusions based on that exploration and deriving deep meaning from that, which yes,

Brian Muraresku (1:06:46.880)

are feelings and emotions and very hard to quantify. But nonetheless, these are the things

Brian Muraresku (1:06:51.200)

that govern our lives. I mean, I don't know a parent who isn't motivated by the love of their

Brian Muraresku (1:06:56.640)

children. Everything I do at 40 years old now is pretty much inspired by my love for my two

Brian Muraresku (1:07:03.360)

daughters. And I can't prove to you that I love them. I can say it, I can show you behavior,

Lex Fridman (1:07:08.560)

but it's very hard for me to weigh and measure that. So not everything is so reducible to this

Brian Muraresku (1:07:15.520)

quantifiable reality. And yet, I also love science. And I love the historical process of weighing this

Brian Muraresku (1:07:23.200)

data. I love the chemistry. I love the biology. And for me, I think this was the message of the

Brian Muraresku (1:07:29.440)

ancient Greeks. And I think this is the world in which paleo Christianity was born. I think there

Brian Muraresku (1:07:34.880)

is this meeting ground between science and religion, which allow for the, if not the discovery,

Brian Muraresku (1:07:43.520)

then at least the near identification of the ultimate reality, which is another way to describe

Brian Muraresku (1:07:50.240)

God, right? This being of being is the transcendent mystery. So speaking of God,

Brian Muraresku (1:07:56.240)

you mentioned to me offline, you're wearing the most sophisticated clothing choice of the elite

Brian Muraresku (1:08:03.680)

intellectuals. Like you mentioned, Sam Harris was wearing a hoodie. This is the Sam Harris hoodie.

Brian Muraresku (1:08:08.400)

He's starting a trend. He's starting a trend. This is a new religion, you could even say. It's

Brian Muraresku (1:08:14.240)

a ritual. It's a ritual practice of intellectuals of searching for meaning. So there's quite a

Brian Muraresku (1:08:22.320)

fascinating debate. So he was for a time still known as one of the sort of new age atheists.

Lex Fridman (1:08:30.400)

So he was kind of trying to explore the role of religion in society and the role of science.

Lex Fridman (1:08:35.520)

And then on the other side, another kind of powerhouse intellectual is Jordan Peterson,

Brian Muraresku (1:08:40.800)

who in sometimes, for my taste, a bit too poetic of ways is exploring the ideas of religion.

Lex Fridman (1:08:49.680)

And they had these interesting debates that I think will continue about the role of religion

Brian Muraresku (1:08:54.640)

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

Brian Muraresku (1:09:05.920)

discovered amidst the rituals, the traditions, the practice, the way we conceive of each other

Brian Muraresku (1:09:12.880)

because of the ideas that religion propagates. And then for Sam, it says that everything about

Brian Muraresku (1:09:20.080)

religion basically gets in the way of us fully realizing our human potential, which is deeply

Brian Muraresku (1:09:29.360)

scientific and rational and sort of like we're surrounded by mystery. Calling that mystery God

Brian Muraresku (1:09:39.760)

is getting in the way of us understanding that mystery. What do you think about this debate

Lex Fridman (1:09:45.200)

about the role of religion in society?

Brian Muraresku (1:09:48.240)

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

Lex Fridman (1:09:52.560)

Excellent. On his podcast? Public? Excellent.

Brian Muraresku (1:09:55.120)

Yes. It'll be out soon. And so, he and I...

Lex Fridman (1:10:00.160)

How did that go, by the way?

Brian Muraresku (1:10:02.320)

It was incredible. Carl Ruck, the professor, joined us, as a matter of fact, for one of his

Brian Muraresku (1:10:06.400)

rare public appearances. We went deep. And Jordan is very well read, obviously, on the psychedelic

Brian Muraresku (1:10:13.360)

literature. He had just had Roland Griffiths from Hopkins on the podcast. And it's one of

Brian Muraresku (1:10:18.640)

Roland's figures that Jordan and I, again, just like the language of Aldous Huxley, it's hard to

Brian Muraresku (1:10:23.920)

move past the following statistic. Over the past 20 years of the modern study of psilocybin, Roland

Brian Muraresku (1:10:30.800)

will tell you that about three in four of their volunteers walk away from their single dose of

Brian Muraresku (1:10:36.800)

psilocybin, high dose, saying it was among the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives,

Lex Fridman (1:10:43.040)

if not the most meaningful. And Jordan says, what do you do with that? How do we synthesize that?

Brian Muraresku (1:10:55.280)

Here we are quantifying the qualifiable, the unqualifiable. And yet, these compounds have

Brian Muraresku (1:11:02.640)

dramatic effects on people's lives, and they walk away feeling like they're more loving,

Brian Muraresku (1:11:08.880)

more compassionate. The science of all talks about the welling up of cooperation and resource sharing

Lex Fridman (1:11:16.720)

and kindness and all these strange things from this single chemical intervention, which seems to

Brian Muraresku (1:11:22.000)

reduce us to automata, as if enlightenment can be flipped on like a switch. And yet, there it is,

Brian Muraresku (1:11:28.800)

there's the data. And I don't see how you walk away from that. I mean, I completely understand

Brian Muraresku (1:11:33.120)

Sam's position. But I think there's a reading of religion, particularly the mystical core

Brian Muraresku (1:11:40.320)

of the big faiths, and especially these ancient mystery cults, which do speak, again, to those

Brian Muraresku (1:11:45.040)

moods and motivations, creating this aura of factuality that these volunteers never walk away

Brian Muraresku (1:11:52.640)

from, permanently transformed, just like the ancient mysteries. And part of that is perhaps

Brian Muraresku (1:11:57.600)

language, that we need to continue to evolve language in how we conceive of these processes.

Brian Muraresku (1:12:06.640)

Maybe religion has a bunch of baggage associated with it that is good to let go of,

Brian Muraresku (1:12:14.160)

or perhaps not. I don't know. This is connected to our previous part of our conversation is the

Brian Muraresku (1:12:20.000)

importance of language in this whole thing. Well, that's how I start my book with one of

Brian Muraresku (1:12:23.360)

these volunteers from the NYU psilocybin experiments, this woman, Dina Dina Baser,

Brian Muraresku (1:12:27.920)

who's an atheist. And she still describes herself as an atheist. And yet, as one of these three and

Brian Muraresku (1:12:34.080)

four people who walked away from this experiment transformed, she says that her experience of

Brian Muraresku (1:12:39.760)

psilocybin was like being bathed in God's love from an atheist. And I asked her why she uses

Brian Muraresku (1:12:45.360)

the word God, why not the love of the cosmos or the universe or mother nature? And she says,

Brian Muraresku (1:12:51.360)

well, frankly, we don't know about any of this stuff and that God makes sense to me. She's still

Brian Muraresku (1:12:56.880)

an atheist, but it's the way she describes that as kind of like the way your mother's love must

Brian Muraresku (1:13:03.680)

have felt when you were a baby. Yeah. There's a kind of, I like the way Einstein uses God. God

Brian Muraresku (1:13:08.880)

doesn't play dice. There's a poetry. There's a humility that you don't know what the hell is

Brian Muraresku (1:13:13.360)

going on. There's a humor to it. I'm a huge fan, especially like more and more of just kind of

Brian Muraresku (1:13:19.680)

having a big old laugh at the absurdity of this world and this life as represented nicely by memes

Brian Muraresku (1:13:27.680)

on Twitter kind of thing. I mean, there's a sense in which we want to be playing with these words

Lex Fridman (1:13:34.240)

and not take them so seriously and being a little bit lighthearted and explore. Let me ask you about,

Brian Muraresku (1:13:41.600)

because you mentioned NYU, what I find fascinating is how much amazing research, speaking of science,

Brian Muraresku (1:13:50.880)

right? Studying the effects of psilocybin, studying the effects of various psychedelics, MDMA,

Brian Muraresku (1:13:58.240)

on the human mind right now for helping people. But I'm hoping there'll be studies soon at Hopkins

Lex Fridman (1:14:05.600)

and elsewhere that allow people that are kind of more quote unquote creatives or regular people

Brian Muraresku (1:14:12.400)

that don't have a particular demon they're trying to work through, a problem they're trying to work

Brian Muraresku (1:14:18.160)

through, but more like to see what can I find if I utilize psychedelics to explore? Is there something

Brian Muraresku (1:14:25.760)

you could say that is exciting to you, that's promising about the future? What currently is

Brian Muraresku (1:14:31.760)

going on but also the future of psychedelics research at Hopkins and elsewhere? The healthy normals.

Brian Muraresku (1:14:38.000)

I was looking for the right words because healthy doesn't feel like a good term and

Brian Muraresku (1:14:43.040)

normal doesn't feel like a good term because we're all pretty messed up and we're all weird.

Brian Muraresku (1:14:47.440)

Well, those with ontological angst in that case. Maybe there'll be a future DSM qualification.

Brian Muraresku (1:14:54.800)

There's no doubt that things like psilocybin, MDMA are useful for things like anxiety,

Brian Muraresku (1:15:00.400)

depression, end of life distress, PTSD, alcoholism, you name it. And it's largely because of the

Brian Muraresku (1:15:06.720)

clinical research that MDMA and psilocybin will probably be legal in some FDA regulated way in

Brian Muraresku (1:15:13.120)

the next five years. But again, I start the first page of my book with this question, why do

Brian Muraresku (1:15:19.040)

psychedelics work across all these different conditions? And the best that I could find is

Brian Muraresku (1:15:25.680)

is the meaning, right? Tony Bosse at NYU talks about psilocybin, for example, as meaning making

Brian Muraresku (1:15:32.800)

medicine, which is interesting because it puts it somewhere between a therapeutic and again,

Brian Muraresku (1:15:38.000)

this ontological instigator. What is it about psychedelics that creates these mystical

Brian Muraresku (1:15:45.120)

experiences or mystical like experiences? You can call them emotional breakthroughs,

Brian Muraresku (1:15:50.080)

you can call them moments of awe. I do think we get locked up in the language and we're

Brian Muraresku (1:15:54.640)

somewhere between science and religion here, including legally. So the FDA is one route to

Brian Muraresku (1:16:00.640)

this. What excites me about psychedelics is the first amendment. What is this going to mean for

Brian Muraresku (1:16:04.800)

religion? The freedom of religion being the first thing that's mentioned in the first amendment

Brian Muraresku (1:16:09.600)

before freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. If America is known for anything, it's a refuge

Brian Muraresku (1:16:15.520)

for religious pioneers. And so we already have the native American church, Brazilian spawn churches

Brian Muraresku (1:16:21.280)

that are using psychedelics. But what would happen if Judaism or Christianity or Islam were to begin

Brian Muraresku (1:16:28.080)

incorporating the very ritual, very sacred and discreet use of psychedelics as part of their

Brian Muraresku (1:16:35.680)

liturgy? So not replacing the Sunday Eucharist in the case of Christianity, but part of the extra

Brian Muraresku (1:16:42.640)

credit dimension of the faith. And then we can, through practice, figure out how essential it is.

Brian Muraresku (1:16:49.040)

It could be a minor thing. It could be a major thing. That's another thing I wanted to kind of

Brian Muraresku (1:16:53.040)

ask you is, I recently, despite the fact that I'm eating a huge amount of meat, I'm getting fat.

Brian Muraresku (1:16:58.640)

I'm loving it. This is actually, as of two days ago, I started this long road to training for David

Brian Muraresku (1:17:07.200)

Goggins, to training back, to getting back to competing in jiu jitsu. So the fun is over. But

Brian Muraresku (1:17:13.680)

I also partook in fasting and there was a very strong, there's an almost like a hallucinogenic

Brian Muraresku (1:17:21.600)

aspect of fasting, because it was, especially because it was a 72 hour fast versus a more common

Brian Muraresku (1:17:27.280)

fast that I do, which is 24 hours. And a bunch of people talk about throughout history about the

Brian Muraresku (1:17:34.640)

value of fasting in having these kind of visual, these kind of intellectual experiences. Also,

Brian Muraresku (1:17:42.240)

there's meditation, Sam Harris with the hoodie. Do you have a sense that those other rituals of

Brian Muraresku (1:17:51.200)

fasting, of meditation, and maybe other things could be as essential or more essential to the

Brian Muraresku (1:17:59.040)

religious experience as psychedelics? Yes, if not, and this is going to sound weird, but maybe not

Brian Muraresku (1:18:05.360)

if more so. I look at psychedelics as a catalyst for spiritual investigation, not as the superficial

Brian Muraresku (1:18:13.200)

means to an end. I think their value is in kind of serving as a Google Maps for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Brian Muraresku (1:18:21.840)

All right, I like this. Well, so Ram Dass's teacher said that when he was offered psychedelics that

Brian Muraresku (1:18:31.280)

it'll get you in the room with Jesus, but it won't keep you there. And I think that's all well and

Brian Muraresku (1:18:37.920)

good, but what if you don't know where the house is in the first place? What if you've never had

Brian Muraresku (1:18:41.520)

a mystical experience? What if religion is anathema to you? What if you hate God? What if all

Brian Muraresku (1:18:47.680)

these words mean nothing to you? And they probably do for many, many people, and it's perfectly

Brian Muraresku (1:18:51.920)

understandable. I think that we've lost the coordinates to these irrational states, again,

Brian Muraresku (1:18:57.200)

that were prized throughout antiquity and that continue to be prized by the mystical communities,

Brian Muraresku (1:19:03.120)

even in big organized religion, it just doesn't filter out that much. And so psychedelics, in my

Brian Muraresku (1:19:08.560)

mind, help orient our minds, bodies, and souls towards the irrational, right? We talked about

Brian Muraresku (1:19:16.720)

McKenna's invisible world that seems to have this symbiosis with our own and perhaps has this higher

Brian Muraresku (1:19:23.520)

intent for us. You could very well just, you know, take catalog of your dreams, right? And that would

Brian Muraresku (1:19:30.240)

do it too. But psychedelics seem to be particularly fast acting, particularly potent, and very

Brian Muraresku (1:19:37.120)

reliable, especially in the clinical studies. And so I looked at them as biochemical discoveries,

Brian Muraresku (1:19:42.880)

like Huxley did. Maybe it's once in your life or infrequently, right? But maybe that's the beginning

Brian Muraresku (1:19:49.920)

of a genuine introspection and a life well examined, as the ancients always instructed us.

Brian Muraresku (1:19:55.600)

Yeah, it does seem like in the research, the effectiveness of psychedelics always comes with

Brian Muraresku (1:20:00.960)

the integration, where you use it, just like you said, as a catalyst for thinking through stuff.

Brian Muraresku (1:20:07.920)

It's not going to be, I don't even know if Google Maps, maybe Google Maps is the right analogy,

Lex Fridman (1:20:15.920)

but it doesn't do the driving for you. You still have to do the driving. It just kind of gives you

Brian Muraresku (1:20:22.240)

the directions. So after you come down from the trip, or whatever, you still have to drive.

Brian Muraresku (1:20:29.360)

There's other tools that are kind of interesting. We've been talking about this at the psychological

Brian Muraresku (1:20:34.480)

level, but there's also a neuroscience perspective of it. If you kind of like go past the skull into

Brian Muraresku (1:20:39.440)

the brain with the neurons firing, there's ideas of brain computer interfaces,

Brian Muraresku (1:20:43.760)

there's ideas of brain computer interfaces. First of all, there's a whole field of neuroscience

Brian Muraresku (1:20:48.160)

that's kind of zooming in and studying the firing of the brain, the firing of the neurons in the

Brian Muraresku (1:20:52.160)

brain, of how from those neurons emerges all the things that we think that makes us human. That's a

Brian Muraresku (1:21:00.240)

fascinating exploration of the human mind. That's of course where the psychedelics have the chemical,

Brian Muraresku (1:21:06.080)

the biochemical effects on those neurons. There's ideas of brain computer interfaces,

Brian Muraresku (1:21:13.280)

which if you look at, especially what Neuralink is doing with this long term vision,

Lex Fridman (1:21:18.880)

with Elon Musk and Neuralink, they hope to expand, he calls it a wizard hat.

Brian Muraresku (1:21:32.160)

This is back to the humor on the internet thing. The wizard hat that expands the

Brian Muraresku (1:21:38.080)

capabilities, the capacity of the human mind. Do you think there's something there or

Brian Muraresku (1:21:47.840)

is the human mind so infinitely complex that we're quite a long way away from

Lex Fridman (1:21:55.360)

expanding the capabilities of the human mind through technology versus something like psychedelics?

Brian Muraresku (1:22:02.160)

I wonder how Terence McKenna would answer that question. He looked to shamans as kind of the

Brian Muraresku (1:22:10.000)

scientists, the high magicians of the high archaic past and the far flung future.

Brian Muraresku (1:22:17.680)

You know more about AI than I do, so I'm not going to discount it. But

Brian Muraresku (1:22:21.120)

I do think that AI paired with the sacred recovery, the archaeology of consciousness

Lex Fridman (1:22:31.840)

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

Brian Muraresku (1:22:37.600)

that's a winning combination. Part of what I do in the book is just I try and lay out the set

Lex Fridman (1:22:44.400)

and setting. That's often talked about with psychedelics. So maybe psychedelics in the

Brian Muraresku (1:22:48.640)

right AI environment is going to work. I think it'd probably work a lot better with that myth

Lex Fridman (1:22:53.840)

and ritual incorporated. So the reason Eleusis worked for 2000 years and let's assume the

Brian Muraresku (1:23:00.560)

psychedelic hypothesis has some merit to it. But I think the reason it worked is because you were

Brian Muraresku (1:23:05.600)

born into a mythology. You were born into a story about Demeter and Persephone and you waited your

Brian Muraresku (1:23:11.680)

entire life to meet them in the flesh. So you weren't just preparing for a few months. It was

Brian Muraresku (1:23:17.360)

a lifetime of expectation, anticipation, ritual preparation. In fact, some of the early church

Brian Muraresku (1:23:24.560)

fathers made fun of the Greeks for essentially just piquing people's curiosity and revving up

Brian Muraresku (1:23:30.080)

the anticipation, which has something to do with the outcome, by the way. But in other words,

Brian Muraresku (1:23:34.240)

I think we need to create a new mythology around this. I don't think you pop into a laboratory.

Brian Muraresku (1:23:39.840)

I don't think you pop into a retreat center from one day to the next. I think that in my own case,

Brian Muraresku (1:23:45.200)

I think that in my own case, I feel like I've been preparing 12 years for psychedelics and I'm still

Brian Muraresku (1:23:50.240)

preparing, including in today's conversation. I'm learning new things and I'm willing to explore it

Brian Muraresku (1:23:57.120)

together with the computer interface. But I do think ritual is a gigantic part of this. And even

Brian Muraresku (1:24:04.960)

McKenna would say that. I'll paraphrase him by saying that if you'd met someone who didn't know

Brian Muraresku (1:24:11.040)

where they were between the years 1995 and 2005, you would describe them as a fairly damaged person.

Lex Fridman (1:24:18.480)

And yet who among us knows what was happening in Western civilization between 900 and 1300,

Brian Muraresku (1:24:23.600)

let alone 2,500 years ago. So this is in many ways the prophet of the psychedelic renaissance saying

Brian Muraresku (1:24:28.960)

that history has lessons. And I don't think they're superficial lessons. I think it cuts to

Brian Muraresku (1:24:34.400)

the very core of how and why Western civilization came to be born. Yeah, but that history can be

Brian Muraresku (1:24:42.960)

loaded into AI systems. And I do love the idea of whether it's to bring computer interfaces or without

Brian Muraresku (1:24:52.240)

intrusive, sort of without direct reading of the neurons and more sort of interactive experience

Brian Muraresku (1:24:57.840)

with the robot that you can have an AI system that steers your psychedelic experience.

Lex Fridman (1:25:03.280)

That helps you sort of, when you take a heroic dose of psilocybin, for example,

Brian Muraresku (1:25:11.200)

helps steer you, steer your mind, say just the right things. I mean, you could say that kind

Brian Muraresku (1:25:16.880)

of thing with, it's a totally open problem, I would say. You talk about set and setting.

Brian Muraresku (1:25:25.200)

This is the interesting thing about Johns Hopkins is you create a comfortable environment,

Brian Muraresku (1:25:31.200)

a safe environment for allowing, then if you take a heroic, like a large dose of psilocybin,

Brian Muraresku (1:25:38.480)

that you could trust that everything would be safe and you can really allow the exploration

Brian Muraresku (1:25:43.520)

of your mind. But then you don't know from a psychotherapy perspective of like during that trip,

Lex Fridman (1:25:50.320)

what a human should say to steer that trip. Like that's a totally open set of problems.

Lex Fridman (1:25:55.440)

And in some sense, probably throughout history, those rituals, you figured out what are the

Brian Muraresku (1:26:00.960)

right things to say to each other, how to collaborate. And maybe if you can turn that

Lex Fridman (1:26:05.680)

into an optimization problem, AI could figure that out much, much quicker.

Brian Muraresku (1:26:11.120)

I'm with you. So, Eleusis was known for three things, the legomena, the dromena,

Brian Muraresku (1:26:15.200)

the decnumena, the things said, the things done, the things shown. If you can pack that

Brian Muraresku (1:26:21.040)

all into your AI interface, I'm in, Lex Friedman. I'm going to write a proposal and then try to

Brian Muraresku (1:26:26.320)

get it through the IRB at MIT. I mean, there is a certain sense in which I definitely wanted

Brian Muraresku (1:26:34.640)

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

Lex Fridman (1:26:42.320)

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

Brian Muraresku (1:26:52.000)

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

Lex Fridman (1:26:58.000)

And some of that is language and some of that is what we socially conceive of as drugs or not.

Lex Fridman (1:27:05.840)

And you're right that perhaps we can reframe it as religious experiences, all those kinds of things.

Brian Muraresku (1:27:11.680)

I mean, it's fascinating because it feels like there's a bunch of tools before us that were

Brian Muraresku (1:27:16.240)

used by the ancients that we're not utilizing for exploring the human mind, that we very well could

Brian Muraresku (1:27:23.600)

be in a rigorous scientific way, in a safe way. And that's fascinating. There's this interesting

Brian Muraresku (1:27:29.600)

period in the 20th century of LSD use that many of the people doing research on psychedelics now

Brian Muraresku (1:27:40.640)

kind of have their roots in that history. I mentioned that Dr. Rick Doblin, he is one of those people.

Lex Fridman (1:27:48.160)

And there's this interesting story of a bunch of creatives that used LSD or other drugs to help them.

Lex Fridman (1:27:56.320)

What do you make of the idea of somebody like Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Brian Muraresku (1:28:00.880)

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

Brian Muraresku (1:28:13.600)

maximize the creative potential of the human mind? Is this a crutch or is this actually

Brian Muraresku (1:28:22.560)

an effective tool that we should explore? One person's crutch might be another's

Lex Fridman (1:28:31.120)

bungee cord. It depends on that mind. Think about Paul McCartney. I mean,

Brian Muraresku (1:28:40.400)

we might not have some of the better Beatles music in the absence of LSD.

Lex Fridman (1:28:44.560)

And what did Sir Paul say in 1967 when he was asked about his use of LSD? He said that he

Brian Muraresku (1:28:50.400)

recognized the dangers inherent in it, but that he did it with a very specific, very deliberate

Brian Muraresku (1:28:57.040)

purpose in mind. He wanted to find the answer to what life is all about. And I'm not sure what Sir

Brian Muraresku (1:29:03.760)

Paul is doing this week, but he's probably not doing LSD. Speaking back to my theory about these

Brian Muraresku (1:29:10.400)

substances being catalyzers of spiritual introspection, it came along at a time in

Brian Muraresku (1:29:16.960)

their life when I think they were ripe for it, especially George Harrison. I highly recommend

Brian Muraresku (1:29:22.080)

the Martin Scorsese documentary about George Harrison. For them, I think it was exactly

Brian Muraresku (1:29:30.240)

the way we ought to investigate it, which is, well, mind expanders. This is what psychedelics

Brian Muraresku (1:29:36.320)

do, right? That which makes manifest the contents of the mind. In the absence of an experience like

Brian Muraresku (1:29:42.720)

that, and it can be in a three day fast, it can be laying down in a cave, it can be in ritual

Brian Muraresku (1:29:48.640)

chanting, it can be in a sun dance, but in the absence of that kind of experience at the right

Brian Muraresku (1:29:52.960)

time in your life, it may otherwise be very difficult to find entrance to that kingdom of

Brian Muraresku (1:29:58.640)

heaven, which I do think is here and now, getting right back to the very beginning. If we are

Brian Muraresku (1:30:03.360)

actually to participate in that eternal principle, how and when? What do you think Nietzsche meant

Brian Muraresku (1:30:10.160)

when he said that God is dead? So, there's a sense that religion is fading from society,

Lex Fridman (1:30:17.760)

and there's a cranky German that kind of wrote about it. What do you think he meant?

Brian Muraresku (1:30:23.920)

He was a cranky German who knew a lot about Dionysus, by the way, which is why I like him.

Brian Muraresku (1:30:30.480)

So, certainly there's some truth to the mortality of God. I think Gallup put out a study only a

Brian Muraresku (1:30:38.000)

couple of months ago where church membership is now officially in the minority in the United States

Brian Muraresku (1:30:43.040)

at 47%, according to the most recent poll. That number was closer to 70% only 20 years ago.

Lex Fridman (1:30:49.920)

Wow.

Brian Muraresku (1:30:50.320)

So, we're living through something, and we're living through the unchurching

Lex Fridman (1:30:54.000)

of America, and it's the rise of the spiritual but not religious,

Brian Muraresku (1:30:59.120)

the inheritor of all traditions but the slave to none. There's a rise in the unaffiliated,

Brian Muraresku (1:31:03.760)

the nones. I think it was like one third of millennials. It's probably much higher now

Brian Muraresku (1:31:08.400)

that don't affiliate with any religion. So, in that sense, God is absolutely dead,

Lex Fridman (1:31:14.320)

but maybe not the God that we were trying to define at the very beginning. So, Nietzsche

Brian Muraresku (1:31:19.200)

also looked forward to the Übermensch, which would be a fully realized human being that,

Brian Muraresku (1:31:24.720)

despite the death of God, did not fall into nihilism and amorality, existential despair,

Brian Muraresku (1:31:32.800)

all that great German stuff. And there are some commentators who talk about this eternal

Brian Muraresku (1:31:38.160)

recurrence that just maybe by incorporating some of these techniques, not necessarily doctrine and

Brian Muraresku (1:31:44.240)

dogma, but I would say the techniques of antiquity. And again, Nietzsche writes a lot about the

Brian Muraresku (1:31:49.120)

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

Brian Muraresku (1:31:56.000)

I think, point us back. They point us back to Dionysus and their responsible incorporation of

Brian Muraresku (1:32:02.880)

the irrational into our otherwise society of rational people and our kazoo history.

Brian Muraresku (1:32:11.440)

I have a sense that there will be kind of, just kind of as you've implied, that there will be

Brian Muraresku (1:32:19.040)

maybe the God of old is dying and there'll be a rebirth of different kind of God and it'll just

Brian Muraresku (1:32:24.160)

keep happening throughout history. I do think there will be a time where AI will be the gods

Brian Muraresku (1:32:29.840)

we look to, the other, the super intelligent, those kinds of things. There's a little bit of an

Brian Muraresku (1:32:36.480)

inkling of religious longing for meaning in the way people conceive of aliens currently.

Brian Muraresku (1:32:46.320)

I mean, I talked to a bunch of people about UFOs, the EPs and aliens. And so to me,

Brian Muraresku (1:32:51.280)

it's very interesting for perhaps different reasons, because I'm just, I look up to the stars

Lex Fridman (1:32:56.080)

and it's incredibly humbling to me to think that there's trillions of intelligent alien civilizations

Brian Muraresku (1:33:02.960)

out there, which to me seems likely, or perhaps not intelligent, perhaps just alien life. And

Brian Muraresku (1:33:09.600)

actually, also that we don't even understand what it means to be intelligent, or do we understand

Lex Fridman (1:33:14.800)

what it means to be alive? The time scale, the spatial scale, which patterns of atoms can form

Brian Muraresku (1:33:23.520)

in a way that you can call life, it just could be way weirder than we can imagine. And certainly

Brian Muraresku (1:33:31.920)

way different than human life. Anyway, that to me is humbling. And so it's almost like the

Brian Muraresku (1:33:38.480)

simulation, conceiving of the world as simulation, thinking of aliens to me is a useful thought experiment

Brian Muraresku (1:33:44.960)

of like, what would aliens look like if they visited? How would we know? How would we communicate

Brian Muraresku (1:33:50.000)

with them? How would we send signals to them? If they're already here and we don't see them,

Brian Muraresku (1:33:58.320)

how's that possible? That seems to me actually likely that we would just be too self centered

Lex Fridman (1:34:03.440)

and too dumb to see them if they're already here. Anyway, so that's kind of the almost the

Brian Muraresku (1:34:11.440)

pragmatic, the engineering, the physics sense of aliens. But there's also kind of a longing

Brian Muraresku (1:34:18.960)

to connect with other intelligent beings out there, both the fear and the excitement of that,

Brian Muraresku (1:34:24.240)

that has kind of a religious aspect to it that I find fascinating. And in the right context,

Brian Muraresku (1:34:30.560)

when you remove the skepticism of government from that, it's actually a hopeful longing.

Lex Fridman (1:34:36.560)

Do you see this kind of interest in aliens as at all connected to your study of religion?

Lex Fridman (1:34:44.240)

So you're the first person to ask me about aliens in eight months. So it looks like I'm going on the

Brian Muraresku (1:34:48.560)

record. Let's go. I'll drop some J. Allen Hynek on you. So Hynek involved in Project Blue Book

Brian Muraresku (1:34:59.840)

famously says in 1966, when the long awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, and we're

Brian Muraresku (1:35:06.160)

assuming that UFOs have something to do with aliens, but when the long awaited solution comes,

Brian Muraresku (1:35:12.400)

I believe it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science,

Lex Fridman (1:35:17.680)

but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap. In other words, I do not think that we're dealing with

Brian Muraresku (1:35:24.080)

flesh and blood beings in nuts and bolts crafts. I think it's way, way more complicated than that.

Lex Fridman (1:35:30.800)

And if anything, it takes me back to the ancient world. It takes me back to this invisible college

Brian Muraresku (1:35:36.160)

of beings of apparent higher intent. It takes me to the geniuses and the muses. So the first

Brian Muraresku (1:35:42.880)

document in Western civilization, Homer's epics, they begin by invoking an alien. They invoke a

Brian Muraresku (1:35:49.920)

muse. Tell me O muse about the man. So Homer isn't inventing poetry. He's channeling poetry, epic

Brian Muraresku (1:36:01.360)

poetry from an alien intelligence. Maybe that intelligence has felt a little unrecognized in

Brian Muraresku (1:36:09.600)

recent years. Trying to show up in human recognizable forms. The muse is trying to give

Brian Muraresku (1:36:16.160)

a little hints of its existence. Yeah. I mean, I have a, I've been saying, I honestly sort of,

Brian Muraresku (1:36:22.960)

I don't believe this, but I think about this, whether alien, like muse is a great example,

Brian Muraresku (1:36:30.560)

whether aliens could be thoughts. Ideas we have are the aliens or consciousness itself

Brian Muraresku (1:36:39.600)

is the methods by which aliens communicate with us. Like I find this very kind of liberating to

Brian Muraresku (1:36:47.120)

expand our conception of what intelligent beings are. You would like Julian Jaynes. Julian Jaynes

Brian Muraresku (1:36:54.160)

writes a great book, the origins of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. It's this

Brian Muraresku (1:37:00.480)

theory that the ancient Greek mind was very different from ours. And that when they heard

Brian Muraresku (1:37:06.320)

the muses, they heard, or the gods and goddesses for that matter, they would hear them as voices

Brian Muraresku (1:37:10.560)

in the head and hear it as an internal God figure offering commands, which they couldn't ignore. So

Brian Muraresku (1:37:18.560)

were they walking schizophrenics? It might be one way to talk about it before the breakdown of the

Brian Muraresku (1:37:22.800)

bicameral mind, but it's a provocative theory, largely untestable. But when you're reading

Brian Muraresku (1:37:28.560)

ancient Greek and Latin for that matter, you can't read it very long without bumping up against these

Brian Muraresku (1:37:33.680)

discarnate entities. They're everywhere. And they survived. They persist across time, which is even

Brian Muraresku (1:37:40.800)

stranger, not just in the form of all the things my daughters like, like fairies and gnomes and

Brian Muraresku (1:37:45.760)

elves. And McKenna loves this, the sylphs and the boulder grinders and the sprites and the gins and

Brian Muraresku (1:37:52.320)

elementals, every society has them. It seems to be fairly universal. And they largely exist in

Brian Muraresku (1:37:58.560)

folklore, mythology. This is what Jacques Vallée writes about so wonderfully. We've kind of been

Brian Muraresku (1:38:04.640)

sneaking around it, but let me ask you from everything we've been talking about, how do you

Brian Muraresku (1:38:11.200)

think about consciousness? Is it a fun little trick that the human mind does or is it somehow

Brian Muraresku (1:38:19.520)

fundamental to this whole thing? So this three pound lump of jelly inside our craniums,

Brian Muraresku (1:38:27.120)

that can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space, it can contemplate the meaning of infinity,

Lex Fridman (1:38:34.800)

and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity, that peculiar self

Brian Muraresku (1:38:40.960)

recursive quality that we call self awareness. So this is the hard problem, right? This is the

Lex Fridman (1:38:47.040)

unknowable, the unknown at least. I don't know. I have no good answer for that.

Brian Muraresku (1:38:53.040)

Did you think it's somehow deeply fundamental to the human experience or is it just a trick? So

Brian Muraresku (1:38:58.160)

you have like, I mean, Sam Harris has really been making me think about this. So, you know,

Brian Muraresku (1:39:05.040)

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

Brian Muraresku (1:39:13.280)

it's not just a philosophical little chat with him about free will. He really says he experiences

Brian Muraresku (1:39:23.280)

the lack of free will. Like he's able to, you know, large parts of the day to feel like he

Brian Muraresku (1:39:29.600)

has no free will. In that same way, now he thinks that consciousness is not an illusion. It is,

Brian Muraresku (1:39:40.480)

you know, it's a real thing. But at the same, I'm more almost like, I'm almost more of like

Brian Muraresku (1:39:46.560)

consciousness seems to be a little bit of an illusion in the sense that like, it feels like

Brian Muraresku (1:39:51.520)

maybe this is a robotics AI perspective, but it feels like in that same way that Sam steps outside

Brian Muraresku (1:39:57.440)

of feeling like he has an agency, feeling like he has a free will, I feel like we should be able to

Brian Muraresku (1:40:04.160)

step outside of having a consciousness. So that, from my perspective, maybe that's a hopeful

Brian Muraresku (1:40:12.720)

perspective for trying to engineer consciousness. But do you think consciousness is like at the core

Brian Muraresku (1:40:17.760)

of this? Or is it just like language? Or almost like a thing we build on top of much deeper human,

Brian Muraresku (1:40:28.480)

the things that makes us human? I don't know. I am attracted to Lanz's notion of biocentrism.

Brian Muraresku (1:40:33.600)

I mean, it's difficult to walk away from the double slit experiment, not wondering

Lex Fridman (1:40:38.320)

why we seem capable of collapsing that quantum wave function. It's very, very weird, giving rise

Brian Muraresku (1:40:45.920)

to even weirder ideas about superposition and spooky action at a distance and things that MIT

Brian Muraresku (1:40:51.280)

guys know a lot better than me. But it seems to me fundamental. I mean, maybe consciousness is

Brian Muraresku (1:40:56.880)

the fundamental thing. I mean, weirdly, some of these ancient incubatory practices, I talked about

Brian Muraresku (1:41:02.800)

Peter Kingsley before. So he's not a proponent of ancient psychedelic use, but is a proponent of

Brian Muraresku (1:41:08.240)

these ancient rites of incubation that were practiced by Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles,

Brian Muraresku (1:41:14.880)

other Presocratics. And so what were they doing? They were trying to get in touch with consciousness.

Brian Muraresku (1:41:18.960)

They were entering into suspended states of animation in these cave like settings. Pythagoras

Brian Muraresku (1:41:25.360)

had built one in his basement and would lie down motionless, apparently, for long periods of time.

Lex Fridman (1:41:30.720)

And what I think they were trying to do was tap into and trying to answer this question in their

Brian Muraresku (1:41:36.720)

own, you could call it a scientific way, actually, less religion than science. And what they would

Brian Muraresku (1:41:42.480)

discover or try to discover was a state of awareness that is somehow beyond life and death,

Brian Muraresku (1:41:47.520)

beyond waking and dreaming, where you can be aware of the senses, but also in touch with another

Brian Muraresku (1:41:53.360)

reality at the exact same time, what Kingsley calls sensation. That, I think, is definitely

Brian Muraresku (1:42:00.800)

worth exploring. Well, and the way I hope to explore is by trying to build it. Everybody uses

Lex Fridman (1:42:08.960)

the tools they have. Well, no, I do also hope psychedelics can help. So how do you build that?

Brian Muraresku (1:42:13.280)

I'm curious. That's a whole other discussion. There's a lot of things I could say here, but

Brian Muraresku (1:42:19.280)

let me put simply is I believe that you can go a long way towards building consciousness

Brian Muraresku (1:42:32.800)

by trying to fake consciousness. So fake it till you make it. As an engineering approach,

Brian Muraresku (1:42:40.560)

I think will work for consciousness. You seem satisfied with that.

Brian Muraresku (1:42:46.800)

I'm satisfied with that because I know how deeply unsatisfied others are, but just wait.

Brian Muraresku (1:42:55.280)

So, I mean, I don't know what to. So the topic of consciousness is mostly handled by

Brian Muraresku (1:43:04.160)

philosophers currently. And that's great. And their philosophers are wonderful and good at

Lex Fridman (1:43:12.560)

what they do. I'm not a philosopher. I'm an engineer. And I think the approach there is

Brian Muraresku (1:43:18.240)

quite different. I think falling in love is different than trying to have a podcast conversation

Brian Muraresku (1:43:29.520)

about what is love. I think the engineering effort is just fundamentally different than

Brian Muraresku (1:43:38.800)

the philosophical effort. And I have a sense that consciousness can be engineered even before it is

Brian Muraresku (1:43:45.360)

understood by the philosophers. So I think there's a bunch of things like that in this world that

Brian Muraresku (1:43:50.480)

could be engineered before they're understood. I think the intelligence is one such thing.

Brian Muraresku (1:43:55.520)

I think we'll be able to engineer super intelligent beings before we're able to understand

Lex Fridman (1:44:01.680)

the human mind. There's a lot of intuition to unpack there of why that is. But

Brian Muraresku (1:44:12.880)

as it stands, that's perhaps my engineering optimism and engineering ethic under which I operate.

Lex Fridman (1:44:21.440)

Consciousness is easy to build, hard to understand.

Lex Fridman (1:44:23.920)

Okay. Are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently that had a big impact on you?

Brian Muraresku (1:44:37.360)

Immortality Key is exceptionally well researched. The amount of books you read is I cannot even

Brian Muraresku (1:44:44.560)

imagine. So is there something in your travels through the land of language that stuck with

Brian Muraresku (1:44:53.120)

you that was especially impactful? I mentioned a couple of them. So I knew nothing about

Brian Muraresku (1:44:59.680)

psychedelics before 2007. And it was in hearing about some of the first psilocybin experiments

Brian Muraresku (1:45:06.160)

at Hopkins. And then shortly thereafter, I went down this rabbit hole. And so the first set of

Brian Muraresku (1:45:11.840)

recommendations all kind of fit in that time period of my life, 2007, 2008. It started with

Brian Muraresku (1:45:17.680)

Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. It was a total impulse buy

Brian Muraresku (1:45:25.440)

at the Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue in New York and wound up introducing me to Supernatural

Brian Muraresku (1:45:31.840)

by Graham Hancock. That convinced me that there was a long story to psychedelics that

Brian Muraresku (1:45:40.400)

he tried to prove in that book and that we're still trying to prove. I mentioned

Brian Muraresku (1:45:44.560)

the connection between ritual psychedelics and cave art. This is the neuropsychological model

Brian Muraresku (1:45:51.840)

that was first proposed by David Lewis Williams at the University of Waterstrand, the same university

Brian Muraresku (1:45:57.040)

where Lee Berger is, by the way, in South Africa. So these ideas are old. But what Graham did in

Brian Muraresku (1:46:02.720)

that book is just it's well worth your time. It's well worth a few reads actually. Because it was

Brian Muraresku (1:46:08.320)

after that that I discovered Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchback and a lot of other books

Brian Muraresku (1:46:15.520)

that just kind of blew my mind. What is Breaking Open the Head about? So it's Daniel's romp through

Brian Muraresku (1:46:23.120)

contemporary shamanism. And it's his very well told experiences with everything from psilocybin

Brian Muraresku (1:46:30.960)

to iboga being initiated by the Buites. And it was the first time I'd read any firsthand accounts,

Brian Muraresku (1:46:38.960)

aside from Jeremy Narby, any firsthand accounts by a New Yorker, by the way, about the potential

Brian Muraresku (1:46:45.040)

for these compounds that I'd been ignoring for far too long, obviously. And so that's when I

Brian Muraresku (1:46:51.520)

started revisiting the Road to Eleusis and looking through the anthropological literature, reading

Brian Muraresku (1:46:57.040)

everything Gordon Wasson had ever written, that Carl Ruck had written. And it sent me down a

Brian Muraresku (1:47:02.240)

pretty weird rabbit hole until I found Peter Kingsley, which is my second recommendation.

Lex Fridman (1:47:06.960)

So Peter, again, he's not a fan of the psychedelic hypothesis. But what he does is I think expose

Brian Muraresku (1:47:14.720)

the value of the irrational to the ancient Greeks, especially the pre Socratic. Here we are talking

Brian Muraresku (1:47:20.000)

about AI and God and these entangled philosophical questions. The best I can read Kingsley is that

Brian Muraresku (1:47:30.080)

Western civilization is a product of a gift from the goddess Persephone. And this is not a hippie.

Brian Muraresku (1:47:36.160)

This is a pretty gold standard classicist who went on to write a couple of books. One is In

Lex Fridman (1:47:43.040)

the Dark Places of Wisdom, and the other is Reality. What better way to title your book?

Brian Muraresku (1:47:48.240)

Where he talks about these ancient techniques for exploring the irrational. The same thing Carl Ruck

Brian Muraresku (1:47:54.320)

was talking about. After compiling all this data in the Road to Eleusis, Ruck says that the biggest

Brian Muraresku (1:47:59.840)

challenge is trying to convince his colleagues in the late 1970s that the ancient Greeks,

Lex Fridman (1:48:05.280)

and indeed some of the most famous and intelligent among them, could enter so fully into irrationality.

Brian Muraresku (1:48:12.480)

Same thing Nietzsche is talking about in his exploration of Dionysus. And so I think

Brian Muraresku (1:48:16.720)

Kingsley just stands apart as one of those books, Reality, that my life was never quite the same

Brian Muraresku (1:48:24.080)

after reading that. We talked about the three pound

Brian Muraresku (1:48:31.360)

jelly that is able to conceive of the entirety of the fabric of reality in the universe

Lex Fridman (1:48:40.480)

and everything, and also of its own mortality. What do you think is the meaning of it all?

Lex Fridman (1:48:50.880)

What's the meaning of life? Is a three pound jelly able to answer that one?

Brian Muraresku (1:48:59.680)

No, but I can plagiarize Joseph Campbell, which is good enough. Joe Campbell says that I don't

Brian Muraresku (1:49:06.640)

think what we're looking for is a meaning of life. I think what we're looking for is an experience

Brian Muraresku (1:49:12.480)

of being alive so that the experiences we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances

Brian Muraresku (1:49:19.120)

within that are those of our innermost being and reality. You talked about the true reality,

Brian Muraresku (1:49:23.840)

absolute truth. These are all constructs. And I think they're constructs that are made day by day

Lex Fridman (1:49:31.360)

and acquire this aura of factuality, remembering Clifford Geertz's definition of religion. We're

Brian Muraresku (1:49:37.200)

all just faking it until we make it. And I think a lot of that has to do with moods and motivations

Lex Fridman (1:49:42.880)

and feelings and emotions, which is not to discredit facts and figures. But I think that

Brian Muraresku (1:49:48.640)

meaning, meaning making is a very subjective process that is not only difficult to talk about,

Lex Fridman (1:49:56.000)

but difficult to quantify. And experience is a primary in that versus, so like the actual

Brian Muraresku (1:50:02.160)

subjective experience is primary to the meaning making process versus like some kind of rigorous

Brian Muraresku (1:50:09.520)

analysis of like having an algorithm that runs and computes and then finally spits out 42.

Brian Muraresku (1:50:18.960)

Well, this is how families are created. Tell me more about this. Well, my wife and I fell in love

Lex Fridman (1:50:24.320)

and made babies. We didn't type up an Excel sheet and figure out the best way to go about this.

Brian Muraresku (1:50:29.360)

That's what I've been doing all these years. That's why I'm single.

Brian Muraresku (1:50:36.320)

Too many Excel sheets. Well, we say falling in love, right? We say fall in love. What does that

Brian Muraresku (1:50:41.920)

mean to fall in love? You are surrendering to an intelligence that is beyond us. You could say a

Brian Muraresku (1:50:50.080)

Godlike intelligence. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar I mentioned, in the Universal Christ,

Brian Muraresku (1:50:54.880)

he writes a lot about how the divine for you is often encountered in the other. In fact,

Lex Fridman (1:51:02.000)

how could it be otherwise? This is bedrock sacramental theology that you find the God in

Brian Muraresku (1:51:07.760)

the things in your life as well you should. That's the proving ground for identifying as God rather

Brian Muraresku (1:51:14.800)

than creating a relationship with God. And so I think that these irrational states play a big role

Brian Muraresku (1:51:19.600)

in that. Irrational. Well, I don't think there's a better way to end it than on the topic of love.

Lex Fridman (1:51:24.960)

Brian, thank you so much for a brilliant exposition of history and the poetry.

Brian Muraresku (1:51:32.320)

I really appreciate you talking with me today. I love you, Lex. I love you too, Brian.

Brian Muraresku (1:51:39.120)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Muirrescu. And thank you to Inside Tracker,

Brian Muraresku (1:51:44.320)

GiveWell, Ni, Indeed, and Masterclass. Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

Lex Fridman (1:51:52.000)

And now, let me leave you with some words from Terrence McKenna about psychedelics.

Brian Muraresku (1:51:57.760)

Part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it

Brian Muraresku (1:52:04.080)

such a political hot potato. Since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy

Brian Muraresku (1:52:09.440)

you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game.

Lex Fridman (1:52:14.800)

Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Brian Muraresku (20:04.960)

to face with an angel who said that the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and

Brian Muraresku (20:11.840)

number. So even the hard minded materialist like Descartes is confronting these discarnate entities.

Brian Muraresku (20:19.120)

John Dee in the 16th century, the high magician of the Elizabethan court,

Brian Muraresku (20:25.120)

he reports decades worth of what we would say is extraterrestrial communication,

Brian Muraresku (20:30.480)

or interdimensional communication. And you can find instances of this throughout history,

Brian Muraresku (20:37.040)

including among the pre Socratics. And Peter Kingsley writes quite a bit about this, but I'll

Brian Muraresku (20:42.240)

save that until your next question. Well, first of all, we don't seem to understand from where

Brian Muraresku (20:47.520)

intelligence came from. We don't understand from where life came from on Earth. But that we can

Brian Muraresku (20:53.360)

kind of intuit because it's the space of chemistry and biology have good theories about the origins

Brian Muraresku (20:57.360)

of life on Earth. But the origins of intelligent life, that is a giant mystery. And there's some

Brian Muraresku (21:05.120)

sense in which, I mean, I don't know if you know the movie 2001 Space Odyssey. But it does seem

Brian Muraresku (21:11.680)

that there's like important throughout human history, throughout life on Earth, there's

Brian Muraresku (21:17.120)

important phase shifts of it feels like something happened, where there's big leaps. It could be

Brian Muraresku (21:26.080)

something coincidental, like fire and learning how to cook meat and all those kinds of things.

Lex Fridman (21:31.120)

But it feels like there could be other things. And I think that's at the core of your work is

Brian Muraresku (21:36.960)

exploring what those things could be. Is there, is it possible? Talked about Joe Rogan off line.

Brian Muraresku (21:44.960)

Is it entirely possible? Is it possible that psychedelics have in fact contributed of being

Brian Muraresku (21:52.800)

an important source of those phase shift throughout human history of the intellect, basically steering

Brian Muraresku (21:59.520)

the intellectual development and growth of human civilization. It's a hypothesis worth

Brian Muraresku (22:06.400)

investigating. How about that? Beautiful. And maybe not psychedelics in and of themselves,

Lex Fridman (22:11.280)

but I think our whole conversation is kind of wrapped up in these non ordinary states of

Brian Muraresku (22:17.040)

awareness. We start by talking about God, which is something unordinary and expansive. And I think

Brian Muraresku (22:23.680)

that as you trace the intervention of divinity, if that's the case, throughout human history,

Brian Muraresku (22:31.840)

you have to bump up against the irrational. And Mursi Eliade, the great scholar of religions and

Brian Muraresku (22:38.560)

fellow Romanian said that the history of religions essentially constitutes the point of intersection

Brian Muraresku (22:44.320)

between metaphysics and biology. So that we are biological beings who do interact with our planet,

Brian Muraresku (22:51.840)

with the natural kingdom. And you would think that as, you know, early archaic ecologists,

Brian Muraresku (22:57.840)

we would have figured out what plants work, which fungi don't and developed maybe language around

Brian Muraresku (23:04.240)

that. And so this is another one of McKenna's speculative, but very interesting hypotheses,

Brian Muraresku (23:11.360)

the stone and ape theory. Is it possible that psychedelics were involved in one of the several

Brian Muraresku (23:17.920)

leaps forward? You mentioned the word leap. Jared Diamond talks about the great leap forward 60,000

Brian Muraresku (23:23.760)

years ago. The species had been around for a couple hundred thousand years. All of a sudden,

Brian Muraresku (23:28.560)

the cave painting appears. All of a sudden there's a phase shift. Did something like that happen

Brian Muraresku (23:34.000)

millions of years ago? And I love the way Paul Stamets talks about this. It would be the ingestion

Brian Muraresku (23:39.280)

of perhaps psilocybin containing fungi millions and millions of times over millions and millions

Brian Muraresku (23:47.040)

of years. So it's not just a one time event that cascades, but it's the accumulation

Brian Muraresku (23:52.960)

of psychedelic experience. It's really difficult to test that hypothesis. But I've been talking

Brian Muraresku (23:59.920)

with a paleoanthropologist in South Africa, my friend Lee Berger, about ways that we might test

Brian Muraresku (24:06.160)

for this. And so Lee, amongst many things, is this national geographic explorer. He's the

Brian Muraresku (24:12.400)

paleoanthropologist's paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand. He's famous,

Brian Muraresku (24:18.000)

amongst other things, for the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like Homo

Brian Muraresku (24:22.720)

naledi. And there's an interesting point. So naledi is this archaic hominid, morphologically

Brian Muraresku (24:33.280)

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

Brian Muraresku (24:39.920)

strange about Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system there in South Africa is that Lee

Brian Muraresku (24:44.800)

believes he's discovered the first bipedal ape deliberately disposing of its dead.

Lex Fridman (24:51.680)

So there is a recognition of self mortality and the practicing of rituals around death. We're

Brian Muraresku (24:58.400)

talking about burials. And if you have burials, says Lee, in an archaic hominid 300,000 years ago,

Brian Muraresku (25:05.840)

maybe you have language. And I mentioned that because Terence McKenna was obsessed

Brian Muraresku (25:10.320)

with language in the stoned ape theory, that the ingestion of psilocybin in addition to enhancing

Lex Fridman (25:16.720)

visual acuity, perhaps facilitating sexual arousal, leads to proto language.

Brian Muraresku (25:23.280)

Now, isn't it interesting, this could be entirely a coincidence, that the largest sound inventory

Brian Muraresku (25:30.240)

of any language is the Khoisan of Botswana and Namibia. They have something like 164 consonants

Lex Fridman (25:37.680)

and 44 vowels. English, by comparison, has about 45. So I don't know what to make of this, but what

Brian Muraresku (25:43.280)

you find in that part of the world is very, very complex language. Language that could be an

Brian Muraresku (25:50.480)

inheritance, language that could be incredibly archaic, together with this recognition of self

Brian Muraresku (25:56.480)

mortality. And when I talk to Lee Berger, we say, when you're looking at universals like that,

Brian Muraresku (26:01.440)

language around all human populations, the recognition of self mortality, the contemplation

Brian Muraresku (26:07.440)

of death, just maybe you have pharmacology. And so maybe we can go out and test for this

Brian Muraresku (26:13.200)

using gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, proteomics, technology that doesn't even exist,

Lex Fridman (26:18.560)

but maybe we can actually test the stoned ape theory to figure out once and for all,

Lex Fridman (26:23.600)

if there's any merit there. Can you just linger a little bit on the pharmacology tools?

Lex Fridman (26:27.680)

Like how would it be possible to say something about what was being ingested so, so long ago?

Brian Muraresku (26:34.800)

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

Brian Muraresku (26:43.680)

hominids. Dental calculus. I like this. Evidence of their diet. And you might not believe how old

Brian Muraresku (26:50.800)

this was, but in sedeba, Australopithecus sedeba, they found evidence of sedeba's diet going back

Brian Muraresku (26:57.760)

two million years. So through things like phytoliths, which are essentially fossilized

Brian Muraresku (27:04.480)

plant tissue, they found evidence that sedeba was eating bark and leaves and grasses and fruits and

Brian Muraresku (27:12.240)

palm. So no psychedelics to speak of, but it just goes to show that through things like dental

Brian Muraresku (27:18.080)

microwear analysis and other techniques that we're still developing, we can actually figure out what

Brian Muraresku (27:23.040)

the diet was at the time. I'll fast forward to 50,000 years ago. There was another study out of

Brian Muraresku (27:29.040)

El Cidrón Cave in 2012, which found that Neanderthals, again, preceding our species

Brian Muraresku (27:34.800)

50,000 years ago, were ingesting yarrow and chamomile, which had been identified as medicinal.

Lex Fridman (27:41.760)

So again, not psychedelic or psychoactive, but we kind of have the beginnings of the technology,

Lex Fridman (27:47.360)

and that was nine years ago, to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of these hominids.

Brian Muraresku (27:53.840)

Presumably there could be a way to figure out, it's not just diet, but which have psychoactive

Brian Muraresku (27:59.120)

elements to them. So whether you're chewing it, whether you're smoking it, whether, I mean, I don't

Brian Muraresku (28:03.200)

know, licking it. I don't know if there's any kind of ways through the dental calculus to figure out

Lex Fridman (28:09.440)

what exact substances were being consumed. Is it possible to figure out whether psychedelic

Brian Muraresku (28:15.200)

substances are being consumed by looking at human behavior, like you said, organized burials

Brian Muraresku (28:22.640)

or cave paintings? No, but so that's a little bit of a stretch to say, like, where did this

Brian Muraresku (28:28.240)

leap come from? But it's not. It's not. So just last fall, as a matter of fact, so that notion

Brian Muraresku (28:34.160)

has been out there for a while, the idea that hallucinogens and the ritual consumption of

Brian Muraresku (28:38.160)

hallucinogens were somehow related to the great leap forward, were somehow related to the initial

Brian Muraresku (28:43.760)

cave painting. Graham Hancock wrote a beautiful book about this called Supernatural, which in

Brian Muraresku (28:48.080)

many ways like sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2007. But even at the time when he was writing

Brian Muraresku (28:53.840)

that and the year subsequent, it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea. Last fall, interestingly

Brian Muraresku (29:01.440)

enough, the first archeochemical data for the ritual consumption of psychedelics associated with

Brian Muraresku (29:08.720)

cave art was finally published. It's not that ancient. It's only about 400 or 500 years ago,

Lex Fridman (29:13.920)

but it came from the Pinwheel Cave, a Chumash site in California. And what they found were

Brian Muraresku (29:19.680)

datura quids, like these chewed up, you mentioned, how did they ingest it? These chewed up quids,

Brian Muraresku (29:24.720)

like these bunches of datura, which contain these very powerful tropane alkaloids and what was

Brian Muraresku (29:31.280)

believed to be some kind of Chumash initiation site. So we can say that there is initial

Brian Muraresku (29:37.200)

archeochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics and cave art. And so where else

Brian Muraresku (29:42.160)

might we find this? Are there a lot of archeochemists in the world? Is this fascinating? Is through

Brian Muraresku (29:50.000)

chemistry, through biology, through physics, whatever, like all the disciplines, perhaps one

Brian Muraresku (29:56.320)

day computer science, we apply those tools to study not the data of today, but the data of the past.

Lex Fridman (30:04.320)

But are we talking about dozens here? Like how hard is this problem relative to how many people

Brian Muraresku (30:09.040)

are taking it on just as a side little tangent? We're probably talking more dozens than hundreds.

Brian Muraresku (30:16.080)

I spent many years trying to track down an archeochemist who would talk to me. There were

Brian Muraresku (30:21.040)

a couple, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania, and then my friend Andrew Ko at MIT,

Brian Muraresku (30:27.520)

which you might know something about. Andrew really, you know, on his own time, on his own

Brian Muraresku (30:33.200)

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

Brian Muraresku (30:41.440)

Archem Project, which is this online open source repository for this data. But there's never been

Brian Muraresku (30:46.880)

a center for this. No university has stood up a dedicated center, a team really, which is what you

Brian Muraresku (30:52.960)

need of archeochemists looking at this stuff. But I mean, even despite that, there have been some

Brian Muraresku (30:57.520)

remarkable discoveries over the past 10, 20 years. It's still a discipline very much in

Brian Muraresku (31:02.320)

its infancy. Maybe it's becoming a toddler. But as the technology gets better and cheaper, I hope

Lex Fridman (31:09.440)

you'll see more and more archeochemists joining the fight.

Brian Muraresku (31:12.480)

Yeah. And Andrew is fascinating. His work is fascinating. But also, just because of your work,

Brian Muraresku (31:18.960)

I came across and exchanged a few emails with Patrick McGovern, who's basically, what would

Brian Muraresku (31:24.880)

you call him? So, he has a center, I guess, that does biomolecular archeology at UPenn.

Lex Fridman (31:30.880)

And he's the author of a bunch of books, one of which is Ancient Brews. So, he's a scholar of beer

Lex Fridman (31:36.800)

and wine and like ancient alcohol, which is fascinating. They influence, even just alcohol,

Lex Fridman (31:42.560)

but he has like alcohol with hallucinogenic properties as well. But as a Russian, it's

Brian Muraresku (31:50.720)

fascinating to think about the influence of alcohol on the development of human civilization

Brian Muraresku (31:58.640)

throughout its history. Is there something you can comment on alcohol or in general,

Brian Muraresku (32:07.120)

Patrick's work that was informative to you, inspiring, or kind of added to your conception

Lex Fridman (32:13.680)

of human history?

Brian Muraresku (32:15.280)

His work was some of the first hard scientific data that I saw for the ritual consumption

Brian Muraresku (32:20.880)

of these intoxicants. I don't think he's ever found the hard and fast data for psychedelics.

Lex Fridman (32:27.440)

But what he turned me on to was this idea that alcohol or beer and wine specifically

Brian Muraresku (32:33.520)

could have been used as vehicles for the administration of psychedelics. That's where

Brian Muraresku (32:37.520)

it all started for me. Just the notion that ancient beer and ancient wine is very, very

Brian Muraresku (32:43.280)

different from what we drink today, that typically they were cocktails. They were often fortified

Lex Fridman (32:48.880)

and mixed with different fruits, berries, herbs, plants, maybe even fungi over time,

Brian Muraresku (32:55.280)

because this was all in the absence of distilled liquor. There is no hard alcohol, even in

Brian Muraresku (33:00.800)

Russia, before maybe the 12th century it was in Europe, maybe a bit earlier. But the concept

Brian Muraresku (33:08.000)

of distillation just didn't exist. And so, to pack a punch, rather than just drink a

Brian Muraresku (33:15.040)

kind of watered down Budweiser, these people were interested in fortifying these beverages

Brian Muraresku (33:20.640)

with whatever they could find in nature. And Pat, to his credit, found some of the initial

Brian Muraresku (33:25.920)

data for these, you could say, spiked wines and spiked beers. Not with anything overtly

Brian Muraresku (33:31.200)

psychedelic, but just the fact that in the 16th century BC, at grave circle A in Mycenae,

Brian Muraresku (33:38.080)

there's this Minoan ritual cocktail of beer mixed with wine, mixed with mead, is very

Brian Muraresku (33:43.040)

interesting. It's even more interesting that you find that across the Aegean, in Gordium,

Brian Muraresku (33:48.320)

at King Midas's tomb, right? The same kind of ritual cocktail, which Pat and Sam at the

Brian Muraresku (33:54.560)

Dogfish Head Brewery resurrected as the Midas touch. So, I mean, the notion that we can

Brian Muraresku (33:59.040)

go back, find this data, resurrect it, in some cases, 2800 years later, I found pretty

Brian Muraresku (34:05.280)

exciting 10 years ago. Yeah, bring it back for research. But that's fascinating that

Brian Muraresku (34:11.520)

people are playing with these ideas. And we'll return to, we'll return to our

Brian Muraresku (34:16.880)

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

Brian Muraresku (34:22.080)

just kind of look at your work with the book Immortality Key? What is the story that you

Brian Muraresku (34:27.440)

tell in this book? I knew we'd get there eventually, Lex. It's a nonlinear path. Somehow

Brian Muraresku (34:35.440)

we were talking about simulation and the universe is a computer that's creating video games

Lex Fridman (34:40.400)

and WoW and Fortnite. But we got there and we'll return, always, to the insane philosophical.

Lex Fridman (34:48.080)

But your book Immortality Key, what's the story that you tell in this book? Which part

Brian Muraresku (34:53.680)

of human history are you studying? Right. So that's the way to phrase it. So it's, you

Brian Muraresku (34:57.840)

know, it's my 12 year search for the hard scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelics

Brian Muraresku (35:04.480)

in classical antiquity. So we're talking about amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Lex Fridman (35:09.120)

And the paleo Christians. So the generations that would give birth to the largest religion

Brian Muraresku (35:15.680)

the world's ever known. Christianity today was two and a half billion people. The big

Brian Muraresku (35:20.000)

question for me is, you know, were psychedelics actually involved? There was a lot written

Brian Muraresku (35:23.920)

about this in the sixties, John Marco Allegro. The book that I follow was published in 1978

Brian Muraresku (35:29.840)

before I was born. The Road to Eleusis by Gordon Wasson, who we talked about already,

Brian Muraresku (35:35.040)

Albert Hofmann, who famously discovers LSD or synthesizes it from ergot, and Carl Ruck,

Brian Muraresku (35:41.680)

who is still a professor of classics at Boston University, the only surviving member of that

Brian Muraresku (35:48.000)

renegade trio and now 85 years old. So this all predates us. But what was lacking in the 60s,

Brian Muraresku (35:55.200)

70s, 80s, 90s, I think was some of this technology and the hard scientific data.

Brian Muraresku (36:01.040)

Now, for years and years, I went out to the archaeobotanists and the archaeochemists around

Brian Muraresku (36:05.760)

the world and I asked a very basic question. Is there any evidence for psychedelics in classical

Brian Muraresku (36:11.520)

antiquity? And the answer would almost invariably come back no. I'm talking to, in addition to Pat,

Brian Muraresku (36:17.040)

he put me in touch with Hans Peter Sticke in Germany, Tania Valamotti in Greece,

Brian Muraresku (36:22.000)

Assunta Florenzano in Italy. I went all over the place asking one question and getting the same

Brian Muraresku (36:26.880)

answer back time and again. And so the book is essentially my search for that data and

Brian Muraresku (36:32.960)

the eventual uncovering of two what I think are key pieces of data. One data point shows the ritual

Brian Muraresku (36:41.760)

use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity in Iberia, what today is Spain. And the other

Brian Muraresku (36:48.640)

shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii from the first century AD,

Brian Muraresku (36:55.440)

at the right place at the right time when the earliest Christians were showing up in Italy.

Lex Fridman (37:01.520)

Again, these are early steps in the search for evidence in the space. But

Brian Muraresku (37:07.840)

speaking of early Christians, what role do you think psychedelic infused wine could have played

Brian Muraresku (37:15.360)

in the life of Jesus Christ? I've been saying recently that, and I hope this doesn't sound

Brian Muraresku (37:28.160)

obscurantist, but I think it's impossible to understand Jesus and the birth of Christianity

Brian Muraresku (37:36.000)

in the absence of ancient Greek. And I'll give you a very specific example of why I think that's the

Brian Muraresku (37:40.720)

case. You can read the entire New Testament in ancient Greek and not once will you ever find

Brian Muraresku (37:49.280)

a reference to alcohol because there was no word in ancient Greek for alcohol. The way the word

Brian Muraresku (37:55.120)

sounds alcohol, it's Semitic, it comes from the Arabic. Kehela means to enliven or refresh. It

Brian Muraresku (38:01.840)

probably comes from kohl, K O H L, sort of these powdered metallics that were used in alchemical

Brian Muraresku (38:07.760)

experiments and cosmetics. So again, that's much later in time when we're using alchemy,

Brian Muraresku (38:13.520)

distillation, et cetera. In the first century AD, the power of wine wasn't necessarily tied to

Brian Muraresku (38:21.280)

alcohol, fermented grapes, the way we think about wine today. So Pat McGovern found some of that

Brian Muraresku (38:26.720)

early organic data for wine being mixed with beer and with mead. But if you look at the literature

Brian Muraresku (38:34.720)

from the first century AD, Dioscorides, for example, he writes this massive treatise at the

Brian Muraresku (38:39.440)

exact same time the gospels are being written. And Dioscorides in just one of his books talks about

Brian Muraresku (38:45.600)

56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things like salvia and hellebore and

Brian Muraresku (38:53.520)

frankincense and myrrh, these spice perfumes, but also more dangerous things like henbane

Lex Fridman (38:58.880)

and mandrake, which he says in Greek can be fatal with just one cupful. And in book 474 of his

Brian Muraresku (39:05.360)

Materia Medica, he talks about black nightshade producing fantasias u aedais, not unpleasant

Brian Muraresku (39:14.560)

visions, what today we would say is psychedelic. So just looking at the literature and the kind of

Brian Muraresku (39:20.560)

literature that even most classicists, I didn't really learn it in undergrad, I came across

Brian Muraresku (39:25.040)

Dioscorides later, but just a basic look at the literature supports what McGovern has been testing,

Brian Muraresku (39:32.880)

which is the fact that wine was routinely mixed with different compounds. It's fascinating,

Brian Muraresku (39:38.560)

by the way, that language affects our conception of the tools we use to understand the world. So

Brian Muraresku (39:44.800)

like you can see wine, you can see psychedelics, if they're not called drugs, you can maybe reframe

Lex Fridman (39:57.840)

how you see them in terms of their role in us thinking about the world, understanding the

Brian Muraresku (40:02.240)

world. That's really interesting that language has that power, but what language was used to

Brian Muraresku (40:06.320)

understand wine at the time? So we're talking about a Greek speaking world, right? So Jesus

Brian Muraresku (40:11.840)

is born and does his public ministry in the Holy Land, but think about the early church,

Brian Muraresku (40:16.880)

think about where the church takes root. Paul, the greatest evangelist of the time, writes basically

Brian Muraresku (40:22.160)

half the New Testament, he's writing letters in Greek to Greek speakers in places like Corinth

Brian Muraresku (40:28.480)

in Greece, or Philippi, a defunct city just north of the island of Thassos, or he's writing to folks

Brian Muraresku (40:35.520)

in what today is Turkey, the Colossians, the Galatians, he writes letters to the Romans.

Brian Muraresku (40:40.560)

These are Greek speakers in these pockets, these Hellenic pockets all around the ancient

Brian Muraresku (40:46.000)

Mediterranean. And for them, again, ignore Dioscorides, ignore Pat McGovern's work,

Brian Muraresku (40:51.680)

to them to think about wine was to think about a mixed potion. And so the word oinos in ancient

Brian Muraresku (40:58.240)

Greek does show up in the New Testament, but there was another word to describe wine,

Lex Fridman (41:02.880)

and it exists for like a thousand years before, during, and after the life of Jesus. The word

Brian Muraresku (41:08.880)

used for wine is pharmakon, which obviously gives us the word pharmacy, it means drug.

Lex Fridman (41:14.400)

So in Greek, a Greek speaker would actually use the word drug to refer to wine. Ruth Skodel,

Brian Muraresku (41:20.400)

the classicist, talks about this as a ritualistic formula. They understood wine as this compound

Brian Muraresku (41:27.920)

beverage, a drug against grief, a medicinal elixir that could either harm or heal, or just maybe a

Brian Muraresku (41:35.920)

sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new. Clearly, religion and myth, but religion

Brian Muraresku (41:45.840)

very much so has sort of a, much like dreams, has like an imagery component. Like you're kind of

Brian Muraresku (41:55.840)

going outside the visual constraints of physical space where you kind of have very specific

Brian Muraresku (42:04.160)

conceptions of what things look like, and you kind of use your imagination to stretch beyond

Brian Muraresku (42:11.120)

the world as we know it. Things that are trying to get in touch with things that are more real

Brian Muraresku (42:16.240)

than real. What role do these tools, do these pharmakons have in trying to stimulate the imagery

Brian Muraresku (42:26.320)

of religion? Do you have a sense that they have a critical role here, or is it just a bunch of

Brian Muraresku (42:32.160)

different factors that are utilized, a bunch of different tools that are utilized to construct

Brian Muraresku (42:36.800)

this imagery? Or is this not even, or is imagery the wrong terminology? Is it more like space of

Brian Muraresku (42:41.600)

ideas that's core to religion? No, I think the wine is absolutely essential. And so, if it's

Brian Muraresku (42:48.480)

impossible to understand paleo Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek, I think it's equally

Brian Muraresku (42:53.600)

difficult in the absence of the sacred pharmacopeia or wine itself, right? Just think about wine

Brian Muraresku (43:00.640)

at the time. I think that the ancient Greek audience would have heard that in a very different

Brian Muraresku (43:05.680)

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

Brian Muraresku (43:11.840)

which precedes Jesus. And in some cases, the story of Jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the

Brian Muraresku (43:18.240)

mysteries of Dionysus. But when you think about Dionysus, maybe from your high school mythology,

Brian Muraresku (43:23.520)

you think about him as the god of theater, or the god of wine, which is typically what it is,

Brian Muraresku (43:28.400)

or the god of ecstasy. Again, Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. There's no concept of fermented

Brian Muraresku (43:38.000)

grapes. The power of Dionysus and the ability to commune with Dionysus through his blood.

Lex Fridman (43:43.200)

And before Christianity, the blood of Dionysus is equated to his wine. The sacramental drinking of

Brian Muraresku (43:49.440)

the wine was interpreted, and classicists write about this, including Walter Burkert. It was

Brian Muraresku (43:55.040)

it was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the god. This is where we

Brian Muraresku (44:00.720)

get the idea of enthusiasm, because the language matters. Enthusiasm to be filled with the spirit

Brian Muraresku (44:06.400)

of the god, so that you became identified with Dionysus and acquired his divine powers.

Brian Muraresku (44:11.680)

Now, how does that happen? Again, he's not the god of alcohol. He is the god of wine,

Lex Fridman (44:16.240)

but he's really the god of madness, and delirium, and frenzy. And his principal followers are women.

Brian Muraresku (44:22.880)

They're called the minads. And the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption

Brian Muraresku (44:27.520)

of this sacramental wine. Even at the theater of Dionysus, separate from his outdoor churches,

Brian Muraresku (44:34.880)

there was a wine served there called drima. And this is the wine that gives birth to Hollywood.

Brian Muraresku (44:40.400)

I mean, the ancient Hollywood was there at the theater of Dionysus. This is where

Brian Muraresku (44:44.160)

comedy, and tragedy, and poetry, and music come from. But rather than a hot dog and a beer,

Lex Fridman (44:48.960)

what they drink at the theater of Dionysus was this wine called drima, which means

Lex Fridman (44:53.760)

pounded or rubbed. And Professor Ruck talks about maybe it was the drugs

Brian Muraresku (44:58.560)

that were rubbed into this theatrical beverage to help the play come alive.

Lex Fridman (45:04.880)

So madness is seen as a positive thing, as like a creative journey. It's not, what is it,

Brian Muraresku (45:13.280)

the unlearning, getting out of the way kind of thing. Is that how it's seen? Or is it more like

Brian Muraresku (45:20.560)

entertaining escape from life that is suffering? I gotta inject a little modern Dostoevsky into the old.

Brian Muraresku (45:31.840)

Existential despair. Maybe it's a bit of that. We can't say that there wasn't

Brian Muraresku (45:39.200)

recreational drinking happening. The Greeks also had the symposium. And they also were just

Brian Muraresku (45:46.080)

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

Brian Muraresku (45:54.480)

the creation of these states of awareness in which, again, you identify with the God to become

Brian Muraresku (46:00.960)

the God. There's theophagy. There's the consumption of divinity in order to become divinity. Right

Brian Muraresku (46:06.640)

back to how we started the conversation, right? So if we stop conceiving of God as something

Brian Muraresku (46:12.480)

exterior to us, but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the

Brian Muraresku (46:18.480)

mystery of my being, that the way to encounter that is through the sacramental theology, that

Brian Muraresku (46:24.640)

you drink the actual blood of this Greek God to become that God. And there was a place for this

Brian Muraresku (46:31.520)

in ancient Greek society. So drinking the wine and drinking the blood of Dionysus, do you think Jesus

Brian Muraresku (46:38.480)

is an actual physical person that existed in history? Or is he an idea

Lex Fridman (46:47.040)

that came to life through the consumption of wine and those kinds of rituals?

Lex Fridman (46:54.000)

So this is where I face my excommunication, depending how I answer this.

Lex Fridman (46:57.360)

I mean, you're playing with fire and wine.

Brian Muraresku (47:03.200)

A good combination, by the way.

Lex Fridman (47:08.000)

So I shy away from that controversy in the book. I'm perfectly willing to accept Jesus

Brian Muraresku (47:14.400)

as a historical personage. We have the multiplicity of sources, although it's a

Brian Muraresku (47:19.440)

generation after his death. But we have the Eucharist being described in the four gospels.

Brian Muraresku (47:25.280)

We have it being described by Paul in 1 Corinthians. But when you read John,

Brian Muraresku (47:31.040)

it does read a bit differently than the other gospels. And in my book, I rely a lot on the

Brian Muraresku (47:35.280)

scholarship of Dennis McDonald, who writes a fabulous book called The Dionysian Gospel.

Lex Fridman (47:40.560)

And this is, again, why the Greek matters, because once you start to analyze the Greek of John's

Brian Muraresku (47:45.120)

gospel, it seems to be a presentation of Jesus very much in the guise of Dionysus. The most

Brian Muraresku (47:51.520)

obvious example is the wedding at Cana, right? That only occurs in John's gospel, the famous

Brian Muraresku (47:57.280)

transformation of water into wine. Now, again, to any Greek speaker of the first century,

Brian Muraresku (48:02.000)

they would have known about the Greek district of Elis on the Peloponnese. And in Elis,

Brian Muraresku (48:07.600)

around the epiphany, every January, the priests of Dionysus would deposit these water basins,

Brian Muraresku (48:14.080)

empty basins in the temple of Dionysus. They'd return the next morning and find them magically

Brian Muraresku (48:19.760)

filled with wine. Now, on the island of Andros, it's even more interesting. Around the same

Brian Muraresku (48:25.360)

epiphany date, the God's gift day, Dies Theodosia, the wine would emanate from the temple and run

Brian Muraresku (48:31.760)

like a river for a week. And you can Google the Bacchanal of the Andrians, a wonderful painting

Brian Muraresku (48:37.440)

by Titian, which hangs in the Prado, and you'll see a river of wine behind these people having

Brian Muraresku (48:42.080)

a great time. This exists for centuries and centuries before the wedding at Cana and before

Brian Muraresku (48:47.520)

Jesus begins his public ministry with what these scholars call the signature miracle of Dionysus.

Brian Muraresku (48:55.040)

It would not have been lost on the Greek audience that something very specific is being communicated

Brian Muraresku (49:00.880)

here. What's being communicated? That you just might find in early Christianity what you hold

Brian Muraresku (49:07.120)

strong to in these mysteries of Dionysus that you may have inherited from your parents, your

Brian Muraresku (49:11.760)

grandparents, your great grandparents for centuries. There was a perfectly good religion.

Brian Muraresku (49:16.480)

There were perfectly good mystery cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

Lex Fridman (49:20.400)

And here comes this new, untested, illegal cult, illegal, of a dozen or so illiterate

Brian Muraresku (49:27.040)

day laborers that go on to convert the empire in a few hundred years. The answer to that

Brian Muraresku (49:33.440)

extraordinary growth is not psychedelics, but I do think it's visionary experiences,

Lex Fridman (49:38.320)

and I do think it's this continuity from the pagan world into early Christianity.

Lex Fridman (49:42.800)

So what part, you mentioned this idea that's really interesting with, I think you said Paul

Brian Muraresku (49:47.200)

Stamets, of I guess millions of people over millions of years kind of consuming, really

Brian Muraresku (49:56.800)

practicing a ritual or a habit of some sort. This idea of rituals is kind of interesting.

Brian Muraresku (50:02.800)

Again, you mentioned cult. What's the role of ritual consumption of some of these substances

Brian Muraresku (50:08.640)

or just ritual practice of anything in the intellectual growth of particular groups of

Brian Muraresku (50:15.760)

people or societies? So again, I would say it is the centerpiece of ancient life, not just the

Brian Muraresku (50:22.160)

mysteries of Dionysus, which we've only talked a bit about, but the mysteries of Eleusis were

Brian Muraresku (50:27.040)

probably the most famous and longest lasting of these Greek mystery rites. And I mean, just to

Brian Muraresku (50:32.240)

put it in simple terms, the best definition for a mystery religion, as the name implies,

Brian Muraresku (50:37.040)

is something secret, right? Muo from the Greek means to shut the eyes or to shut the mouth,

Brian Muraresku (50:42.880)

to keep quiet about this stuff. We're always teasing details from the archaeological and the

Brian Muraresku (50:49.840)

literary record, and we're kind of just grabbing at these secrets. But Eleusis, which survives for

Brian Muraresku (50:56.240)

like 2,000 years into the Christian period from about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD,

Brian Muraresku (51:02.480)

it's kind of this centerpiece of Greek life. Cicero, the great Roman statesman, calls what was

Brian Muraresku (51:08.160)

happening at Eleusis the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced. So not

Brian Muraresku (51:15.120)

democracy, the arts and sciences, or philosophy, but the vision that was encountered at Eleusis,

Brian Muraresku (51:21.200)

perhaps through the ritual consumption of a potent psychedelic over hundreds and hundreds of years,

Brian Muraresku (51:27.680)

hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands and thousands, if not millions of initiates, pilgrims,

Brian Muraresku (51:32.960)

who would walk from Athens to Eleusis to encounter this vision. It seems to have been

Brian Muraresku (51:39.120)

not just an important part of Greek life, but the thing that made life livable,

Brian Muraresku (51:43.680)

such that as these mysteries are about to be exterminated by the newly Christianized

Brian Muraresku (51:49.040)

Roman Empire, there's this passage in the ancient literature that talks about these,

Lex Fridman (51:53.920)

you know, in the absence of these mysteries, life becomes unlivable. Abiotos.

Brian Muraresku (51:58.720)

Is there ways you can, I mean, you write about the mysteries of Eleusis, and is there ways you

Brian Muraresku (52:03.440)

can convert that into words? Why those are so important to them, more important than any other

Brian Muraresku (52:11.520)

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

Brian Muraresku (52:19.520)

they would make that pilgrimage 13 miles northwest of Athens to confront their mortality. Remember,

Brian Muraresku (52:25.120)

we were talking about Homo Naledi, and in South Africa, this recognition of self mortality,

Brian Muraresku (52:31.280)

the deliberate disposal of the dead. Plato talks about the real practice of philosophy being the

Brian Muraresku (52:38.080)

death and dying process. So in some senses, you went to Eleusis to die and to experience a death

Brian Muraresku (52:45.200)

before your death. We talked about this with Terence McKenna as well, on this, how the

Brian Muraresku (52:50.080)

psychedelic state seems to share something in common with the near death or out of body experiences

Brian Muraresku (52:55.840)

or these ecstatic experiences, whether through wine or beer or otherwise, you went to Eleusis

Brian Muraresku (53:01.120)

to die. And it was said that only those who had witnessed this vision, whatever vision was to be

Brian Muraresku (53:07.360)

witnessed in Demeter Sanctuary, it essentially vouchsafed you the afterlife, that only those who

Brian Muraresku (53:14.080)

went there became immortal. And Cicero says that at that point, you essentially live with more joy

Lex Fridman (53:21.280)

and die with a better hope. Can I ask you a question about this human contention with death,

Brian Muraresku (53:27.520)

this confrontation of death that seems to be at the core of things? I don't know how deep to the

Brian Muraresku (53:34.000)

core, but it seems to be a central element of the human condition. What do you think about Ernest

Brian Muraresku (53:41.920)

Becker and those guys that put death at the, what is it, the warm of the core, which as the main

Brian Muraresku (53:51.840)

thing, the main, like this confrontation of our own mortality, first of all, being understanding

Brian Muraresku (53:58.640)

that we're mortal and then confronting the terror of it, the fear of it as the creative, like trying

Brian Muraresku (54:06.400)

to escape the fear of death as the creative force of human society. It's like the reason we do

Brian Muraresku (54:13.200)

anything is because we're just running away from our death, scared. Do you find some of that to be

Brian Muraresku (54:21.760)

true, first of all, as somebody who looks in the mirror, looks at yourself and your own as a human

Brian Muraresku (54:27.200)

being, two, just looking at society today, and three, at this whole big spread of human history

Lex Fridman (54:34.080)

and all the cool stuff we've created, including the mysteries of Eleusis? I wonder what life would

Brian Muraresku (54:39.920)

look like in the absence of the fear of our mortality. I wonder how we'd interact with one

Brian Muraresku (54:46.880)

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

Brian Muraresku (54:52.400)

work and others. If the ancients were known for anything, it was running to death. It was the

Brian Muraresku (54:58.480)

opposite. In fact, dying before dying, which is the immortality key, by the way, it's not

Brian Muraresku (55:02.640)

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

Brian Muraresku (55:07.280)

Greek, anpethanis, prinpethanis, denthapethanis, otanpethanis. If you die before you die, you won't

Brian Muraresku (55:15.120)

die when you die. For some reason, the ancients prized that experience. And we talked about the

Brian Muraresku (55:22.480)

mystics of Sufism and Kabbalism and Christian mysticism, where you have this same self nodding,

Brian Muraresku (55:29.520)

this death before death, the divine nothingness, right? For some reason, the mystic saints,

Brian Muraresku (55:34.640)

visionaries, and ancient philosophers, they ran to death. And the one message I wanted to try and

Brian Muraresku (55:40.160)

communicate with this book is how they viewed life, that it can only be fully experienced,

Brian Muraresku (55:46.400)

fully embodied in the wake of a really intense, perhaps terrifying, but utterly transformational

Brian Muraresku (55:55.120)

encounter with death. So running to death, not running away from death. You talk about Aldous

Brian Muraresku (56:02.720)

Huxley and mind changers. So if we look at the history where the ancients were running to death

Lex Fridman (56:13.600)

and maybe using some performance enhancing permacons to run more effectively towards death,

Lex Fridman (56:23.200)

and now we're using tools of modern society, whether they're psychological, sociological,

Brian Muraresku (56:31.680)

or in case pharmaceutical to run away from this conception. So what do you see as a hopeful future

Brian Muraresku (56:39.600)

for human civilization? If all of these kinds of societies are ice cream flavors,

Lex Fridman (56:48.000)

how do you create the perfect ice cream flavor? What is the future of religious experience,

Lex Fridman (56:53.520)

of psychedelic experience, of intellectual journeys, of facing death, running away from death?

Lex Fridman (57:00.240)

What do you hope that looks like and what kind of ideas should we look to?

Brian Muraresku (57:05.600)

My next book will be entitled Performance Enhancing Pharmacon. You get full copyright.

Brian Muraresku (57:11.920)

Yeah, I like it. But that's a historical view. What in that book would you suggest

Lex Fridman (57:22.160)

in one of the last chapters about the future of this process?

Brian Muraresku (57:27.920)

Well, Huxley has to stop you. He stopped me in my tracks, Aldous Huxley. So in 1958,

Brian Muraresku (57:34.640)

he pens this op ed of sorts, and it reads incredibly prescient because I really do think

Brian Muraresku (57:43.440)

in many ways as the fog of the war drug is ending and finally lifting that we've kind of come full

Brian Muraresku (57:51.040)

circle back to the late 1950s, which might sound strange. It'll make more sense when you hear what

Brian Muraresku (57:57.120)

Huxley said about psychedelics. And so he was looking forward to a revival of religion, which

Brian Muraresku (58:02.880)

is why I subtitled the book, The Religion with No Name. And to him, to Huxley, this revival wouldn't

Brian Muraresku (58:12.000)

come about through televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen, as he says, but he points

Brian Muraresku (58:18.880)

to the biochemical discoveries such as we have today that would allow for large numbers of men

Lex Fridman (58:25.520)

and women to achieve a radical self transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things.

Brian Muraresku (58:31.600)

In other words, that this revival of religion, he says, would be a revolution. Alan Watts comes

Brian Muraresku (58:36.560)

along and says that there's nothing more dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism.

Lex Fridman (58:44.240)

But I think this is what Huxley was pointing to. And he talks about religion in these terms about

Brian Muraresku (58:50.240)

being less about symbols and returning to a sense of experience and intuition. And Huxley says that

Brian Muraresku (58:57.280)

he envisions a religion which gives rise to everyday mysticism. And he talks about something

Brian Muraresku (59:04.400)

that would undergird everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, and everyday human

Brian Muraresku (59:11.120)

relationships. In other words, religion has to mean something. And these altered states of

Brian Muraresku (59:17.440)

awareness that we seem to be able to produce quite easily inside the lab at Hopkins, NYU,

Lex Fridman (59:23.520)

and elsewhere with psilocybin. I think this is kind of part of Huxley's prediction about a time

Brian Muraresku (59:31.200)

when we would have legal access, safe access, efficacious access to this material that would

Brian Muraresku (59:37.520)

allow for insight in an afternoon. And what do you do when millions of people can become mystics in

Brian Muraresku (59:44.640)

an afternoon? So psychedelics, psilocybin might be sort of the practical way of having these kinds of

Brian Muraresku (59:55.760)

maybe could be termed religious experiences. And then many people partaking in those experiences