In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I talk to Dr. Gary Horschig, a professor at Emory University, about psychedelics, religion, and psychedelics in general. We talk about the history of psychedelic use in the Catholic church, and the growing use of psychedelic drugs in Western culture, including LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelics. We also discuss the rise of the Catholic Church and the use of psychedelics by the nuns, and how they may have a connection to psychedelics and religion. And we talk about what it means to be a Catholic in the 21st century when it comes to psychedelic use, and what it could mean for our understanding of religion and drugs. This is a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it. Joe and I are very excited to be able to share it with the world. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and we'll try to make sure to bring you more episodes like this in the future. Cheers, Joe and Joe! Thanks for listening, and God bless you! -Jonah. -The Joe Rogans Experience. Jonah's Note: This episode was produced and edited by John Rocha. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast, and spread the word to your friends and family about this episode to let them know what you think about it! . Thank you, Jonah, thank you for listening to this episode. --Jonah's Song of the podcast by Night, All Day All Day, by Night All Day by Night all Day by Day, all day by Night by Night! -- -- Jonah Rogan Podcast, by Day by Joe's Note by Night By Day, By Night, by By Day by By Night by Day -- -- by Night -- by Joe, by All Day -- by Jonah and All Day! -- by Joseph Rogan by Joseph's Note, by Joe and Night, all Day. , All Day all Day, All day by Day's Day, by Night's Day by Morning, by Norma, by Jo Rogan, by Evelyn, by Gorms, by Grace, by Sarah, by Grady, by Chacho, by Vicky, by Emily, by Eddy, by Mary, by Kristy,
00:01:32.000When you talk about drugs, you studied all sorts of psychedelic drugs, but also common drugs, like caffeine, like we were talking about before.
00:01:43.000I was telling you before that I make some ridiculous French press coffee with far too much coffee in it, and it's become a bit of a problem lately.
00:02:18.000So I'm interested, yeah, for sure, in psychedelics.
00:02:20.000But also, as you're saying, in the more ordinary psychoactive drugs that bring order to our lives and, you know, allow us to tap into our true identity, maintain some semblance of stability in our lives.
00:02:38.000You know, things that religion often can do.
00:02:42.000The subject of religion and drugs, it's really fascinating to me, but it's something that I never even really considered until 10, 15 years ago.
00:02:52.000And I was introduced to Jack Harer, and he was, do you know who he is?
00:03:02.000Great guy, but was writing a book about the connection between psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, And, um, religion and Christianity.
00:03:13.000And he had this amazing collection of artwork that connected, um, like ancient Christian artwork with, uh, a lot of these dancing naked figures that look like they were in ecstasy shrouded by this translucent mushroom.
00:03:33.000There are a lot of theories out there that connect early Christianity especially to different kinds of hallucinogenic, psychedelic drugs of some form.
00:03:46.000But I think the connections are much more widespread.
00:03:51.000People have been using psychoactive substances for religious ritual, for religious experience, for forms of transcendence and journey, in all kinds of different cultural settings and through history.
00:04:12.000Well, I've been interested in the topic of drugs for a while, but I think what really led me to see this would be quite a fruitful topic to pursue in terms of research I wrote a short little essay on LSD and religion,
00:04:34.000talked about my own experience as a young man, tripping, and talking about the ways in which, when I had that experience in the late 70s, And people more and more were enjoying psychedelics coming out of the decade of the 60s.
00:04:58.000I started to see that they would often use words like spiritual or mystical to describe their experiences and to talk about how their religious views are being reoriented.
00:05:13.000And I saw that in my own experience and wrote about that as a way to talk about what is probably the most significant shift in religion in America, and that's the rise of the nuns, those who don't affiliate with any religion,
00:05:31.000and many who claim to be spiritual but not religious.
00:05:35.000And I want to tie that back to people's experiences with psychedelics.
00:05:41.000There's a lot of people that are in the nuns that don't have any experience with psychedelics.
00:05:47.000They just seem to want to have a deeper meaning to life.
00:05:54.000And they'll say, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.
00:05:58.000And a lot of people get really annoyed when people talk like that.
00:06:04.000And also, you know, I think, as you say, it's very much becoming quite common for people to identify in that way.
00:06:13.000And that's also about a very strong kind of negative understanding of traditional religion, institutional religion, and so on.
00:06:22.000Yeah, I feel like for a lot of these people that don't have psychedelic experiences that are spiritual, that sort of dismiss religion, I never want to tell people to do psychedelics,
00:06:38.000but I feel like if they did it, they would relax a little with this idea that they really have an understanding of what happens when you die.
00:06:47.000I think they would really let that go.
00:07:22.000People's sense of compassion and love really can blossom.
00:07:29.000People's lives are transformed in a lot of these more controlled medical studies with people who are taking psilocybin or MDMA. But the main focus of all that, of course, is the therapeutic benefits.
00:07:46.000But, you know, as we're saying, it's all about spirituality, and those therapeutic benefits can't be separated out from a kind of spiritual sense of that experience.
00:07:58.000It gives me a little bit of hope that in this time of great strife and struggle, and especially in terms of the way human beings are dealing with each other, you know, that this is...
00:08:11.000This is a time where people are also rediscovering psychedelics in record numbers.
00:08:16.000And they're looking for some sort of a way to make sense of this life.
00:08:21.000Because we're obviously in some strange transitional moment in history.
00:08:28.000Where our confidence in systems and government and even education, certainly news and media, is eroding at an unprecedented rate.
00:08:39.000But it's also, at the same time, all drugs are now legal in Oregon.
00:08:44.000These things are happening where people go, you know what?
00:09:01.000You know, because the idea that human beings are somehow or another preventing other human beings from having non-lethal experiences that have proven to be incredibly transcendent.
00:09:13.000Change people's lives for the better, just en masse.
00:09:17.000Like if you see the John Hopkins study, the people that one psilocybin experience, the majority of them listed as the most profound experience of their life.
00:10:00.000In America, that's the future, as well as the past.
00:10:04.000I mean, again, you know, the influence of psychoactive substances in the Americas, you know, pre-Columbus was pervasive and just a part of everyday life.
00:10:18.000For whatever historical reasons and changes that have happened in our society, have lost touch with those resources of spiritual meaning and religious life.
00:10:33.000And as you're saying, and I believe it too, we are in a moment when things are really transforming and drugs will be, I think, quite important in terms of How we come out on the other side.
00:11:03.000I like to be provocative and try to confuse a lot of the categories that we use in thinking about some of these things that are so central in our lives and so potent, especially in terms of our religious lives.
00:11:17.000So, yeah, there's entheogens, psychedelics, and obviously all different kinds of other kinds of, again, substances that we use that have an effect,
00:11:34.000and for me, that In some cases, in many cases, have religious meanings and connections.
00:11:41.000Have you ever experimented with holotropic breathing or any of the non-psychedelic methods of achieving these certain states of consciousness?
00:11:52.000I mean, no, but I think they're important as well.
00:11:56.000People achieving a mystical state through non-psychedelic means is another...
00:12:04.000Avenue in thinking about the importance of those mystical states and how people get there.
00:12:11.000But also I would say, as you said, it's what are the results?
00:12:16.000What kind of transformations are made in people's lives?
00:12:20.000And I think what we're seeing is whether it's a psychedelic induced experience or non-psychedelic, there are lots of similarities.
00:12:29.000Yeah, I mean, a lot of people get there through near-death experience.
00:12:33.000There's a lot of people—well, this is another thing where the mind is capable of producing psychedelic compounds.
00:12:42.000And in near-death experiences, although it's very difficult to measure, right, because you would actually have to open up someone's brain while they're in the middle of a near-death experience, which is probably not the healthiest thing for someone who almost died.
00:13:26.000And as I mentioned, or you may know, I teach a death and dying course as well.
00:13:32.000And so near-death experiences are pretty much an important part of that class.
00:13:37.000And the kinds of research and findings that are beginning to appear in terms of looking at those connections are fascinating.
00:13:46.000And tie into this question of what is our relationship to death?
00:13:52.000How do we understand the reality of death in our lives and what are our thoughts about the afterlife, or if there is one?
00:14:02.000That gets tied into how people respond to this research, how they are engaged with it, and how they're compelled by it.
00:14:11.000There's a lot of folks that apparently can reach some pretty intense states of consciousness through yoga, through different styles of yoga and different styles of breathing.
00:14:24.000There's a really funny quote by Terence McKenna where the Buddha met this monk.
00:14:30.000Who said, I've practiced the city of levitation for the last 20 years, and I've achieved the ability to walk on water.
00:14:40.000And the Buddha says, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel.
00:15:34.000But no, I mean, not directly, and I don't really give a shit.
00:15:40.000You know, I mean, I'm at that stage of my career.
00:15:44.000I'm convinced about, again, the sort of great research possibilities and thinking across the board about the connection between drugs and religion.
00:15:55.000Now, when you're teaching these classes, I'm assuming that for a lot of these kids this is the first time you're exposing them to these ideas.
00:16:07.000Because, yeah, many of them don't know what the study of religion is.
00:16:12.000Well, we have a pretty nice diverse mix of students in terms of their background, but most don't have a religion course other than something they've done if they were in Catholic school or if they studied the Bible in some form, but no, they've never seen anything like me.
00:16:30.000It's funny because that's a heavy responsibility, I would imagine, too, because you're introducing to these kids these ideas that have the potential for a very profound impact on the rest of their life.
00:16:47.000Yeah, and that's been something I've worried about my entire career.
00:16:51.000You know, I actually care quite a bit about how these ideas are transmitted and received.
00:16:59.000And as we said, a lot of them are quite sensitive, the topics that I'm trying to teach.
00:17:07.000But it's an essential part, I think, of being a young adult and Learning how to not just think for yourself, but to sort of reimagine the world and try to understand some of the forces that are at work in your life and what's going to be coming in terms of your future career.
00:17:32.000And I try to make religion relevant in those terms.
00:17:37.000But I also, as I like to say to them, I wouldn't say this before I had tenure, but my goal, I tell them this straight out, is to confuse the hell out of them.
00:17:51.000What they think is religion is not the only game in town.
00:17:56.000And so I'm very upfront about this sort of being an intellectual exercise.
00:18:03.000Why are students taking my death and dying class?
00:18:07.000I want it just to be purely academic, for them to encounter different understandings of death, different death rituals, different cultures, and shake them up, but not necessarily kind of turn them away from what they've been taught.
00:18:26.000The end result may kind of reinforce their own sort of cultural background and outlook.
00:18:34.000But for myself, I'm very gratified in the work that I do, if you could call it work.
00:18:43.000And I get a great response from students and I'm just really pleased that I'm able to be a part of that educational process.
00:18:53.000Because, not to go on, because my classes are often not like their other classes.
00:19:00.000Which are, you know, political science or economics or biology.
00:19:06.000And, you know, I just want them to be able to reflect and think about some of these deep things that sooner or later, you know, are going to bite them in the butt.
00:19:15.000Yeah, I like how you describe it too, that it's not the only game in town.
00:19:19.000The way I try to describe it to people is like, I'm not a religious person, but I'm not opposed to it.
00:19:24.000And I probably was when I was younger, but I think I was just arrogant.
00:19:27.000And I think that the best way to look at religion is, it's not the whole thing.
00:19:46.000And the problem, obviously, is translations.
00:19:50.000Translation's a giant issue when you're taking something from ancient Hebrew and you're translating it to Latin and to Greek and Aramaic and all these different languages.
00:20:00.000A lot is probably lost in terms of the way they express.
00:20:04.000Have you ever read Russian to English?
00:20:07.000There's a lot of Russian people I follow on Twitter, and I get a huge kick out of pressing the translate button to try to break down the way they communicate.
00:20:21.000Now, when you're dealing with super ancient languages that we don't even use anymore, like ancient Hebrew, Like, who knows how accurate and what if the intent is clearly expressed through an English translation.
00:20:41.000Also, these ideas have been passed down through thousands and thousands of years, and I feel like if you could just not be too literal with it, and just listen to what these people were saying, what they were trying to get across, obviously there's some awful shit in the Bible in particular,
00:20:59.000and many religions, in terms of condoning slavery, treating women as second-class citizens, or so on.
00:21:45.000From my point of view, too much literalism, you know, is really counterproductive, if not destructive, as societies change over time.
00:21:56.000So, you know, the act of interpretation is very much obviously a part of...
00:22:02.000Of the study of religion and looking at how religions change and transform.
00:22:08.000For me, I'll say I'm so not interested in Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Islam.
00:22:15.000You know, the conventional containers of what we think are the world's religions You know, very problematic, to say the least.
00:22:25.000But my interest is more in the sort of intersections of religion and culture, where people might not recognize their being religious, even though I would try to make the argument that they are.
00:22:39.000Well, I mean, I've written a book called Sacred Matters that looks at these different kind of arenas where religious life can be found in cultural forms of activity.
00:22:52.000So, like celebrity worship, I would call a religious culture.
00:22:59.000That has systems of meaning, different kinds of rituals, possibilities for discovering your true self, a whole kind of value system that can be tied up.
00:23:13.000Celebrity worship as a form of religion.
00:23:16.000I've always thought of it as just hijacking the human reward system.
00:23:20.000Because if we lived in a tribe of people, a small tribe, and there was one great leader, you know, the battle-scarred leader who's seen it all and can give us the information, and he was the one talking, we would listen.
00:23:34.000That would be a person of great importance, and we all gather around and listen.
00:23:39.000But when you see Brad Pitt in a movie screen...
00:24:21.000Or even someone like Oprah, I mean, who's more clearly, you know, in that sort of strange middle ground between celebrity and spiritual leader of some kind.
00:24:47.000But again, I'd like to talk about other things, you know, as well.
00:24:52.000Whether we're talking about politics or...
00:24:55.000Consumer culture or things around medicine, that there are religious qualities that don't have to do with the Bible or with Muhammad or something.
00:25:46.000Well, and social media, too, will be the future of religion in terms of how it transforms and moves forward is an important kind of site for religious activity and investments and, you know,
00:26:02.000where we're really going to see the action.
00:26:08.000Yeah, so when you say, like, religion, that these things fall into sort of religious behaviors or religious ideas, you're not meaning, like, as handed down from a higher power, you're meaning as in people fall in with the same sort of compliant behavior and patterns and Not necessarily.
00:26:32.000I mean, it's not all just sort of compliance and… Compliance is one aspect.
00:26:40.000It's how we try to live our lives in ways that can carry us on when we have to confront suffering and death as well as issues around health.
00:26:52.000What are the sources that are available to people?
00:26:55.000And, you know, as I've said in my class many times, I think popular culture is much more of an important kind of teacher about religious ideas and values than, you know, the local preacher.
00:27:12.000And because they're more swayed by it, you know, because it has more of an impact and resonance.
00:27:17.000But it's a dangerous way to sway things, coming from someone who's involved in distributing popular culture, because there's so little thought put into the actual impact of what it is, and so much thought putting into just what pops,
00:27:39.000You know, what's more, you know, sacred in our society than making some money?
00:27:44.000And that's a drive, you know, again, so there too, we can talk about other religious qualities to capitalism.
00:27:51.000There have been a number of scholars who've written on that topic and made those connections.
00:27:56.000So again, the action isn't taking place in the church.
00:28:00.000It's taking place in music festivals, Burning Man.
00:28:05.000This is where, again, I'm not trying to kind of overgeneralize, but I think very much for especially younger people, But baby boomers as well.
00:28:43.000Well, the idea is that that's what it used to be all about.
00:28:47.000You know, if you go back to—it's a very controversial book, but John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom in the Cross is all about consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and that he believes that— That was really what the Bible was about,
00:29:03.000was about hiding these stories from the Romans when they were captured.
00:30:09.000Before the pandemic, I was able to get out and do some research around and talk to people who are running these kinds of psychedelic religious communities or sacred plants.
00:30:22.000Different communities that are cropping up.
00:31:17.000To be around late 50s, early 60s, before everything was illegal, when people were just freaking out.
00:31:24.000After Hoffman had synthesized LSD and when basically all of the Schedule I compounds were free and legal, I mean free to consume, you've got to wonder.
00:31:35.000The only thing that was illegal was marijuana, which is kind of hilarious.
00:32:11.000Again, the notion was miracle drug, medicine.
00:32:16.000This is going to help people with their depression and, you know, all of that.
00:32:20.000And again, what we don't know, although we're beginning to see this more and more in some of this research, is what What are the religious implications in a person's life after they trip?
00:32:33.000There's a great book that I've mentioned many times in this podcast because I had the guest on, the author on rather.
00:32:40.000Tom O'Neill wrote a book called Chaos and it's about the Manson family.
00:32:45.000And he was writing a book on the Manson family, excuse me, he was writing an article 20 years ago on the Manson family.
00:32:53.000Just supposed to be a real quick article, writing it.
00:32:55.000And then in the middle of his research, writing the book, he started finding all these problems and weird inconsistencies and weird connections.
00:33:03.00020 years later, he finishes this book, and it's all about the CIA and LSD. And that the Manson family, Charles Manson in particular, was involved with CIA experiments they did with LSD with prisoners.
00:33:19.000And that they were most likely dosing him up when he was in jail and then giving him access to LSD and these psychological techniques that he used on the family when he was released and then also...
00:33:35.000All this evidence that every time they would arrest him, even though he was on parole, they would let him go because the CIA was encouraging his use of LSD, his promoting it to the family, and their committing crimes.
00:33:48.000And the whole idea was to discredit the anti-war movement and to disrupt the civil rights movement.
00:33:55.000There was a lot of shit involved with the CIA and LSD, and they were running a...
00:34:00.000They were running a clinic, a free clinic, in Haight-Ashbury for 50 years, until three months after this book was released.
00:34:08.000And then, mysteriously, our work is done.
00:34:13.000But there's amazing connections that Tom O'Neill makes in this book to Jolly West, who was in the CIA, who was a part of their LSD program.
00:34:53.000And they think of LSD as something that makes you go crazy and want to murder people and kill people.
00:34:58.000And they changed the idea of what a hippie was, right?
00:35:02.000Because of the psychological techniques that he learned when he was in jail and all the mind control experiments that he learned and the way they did it.
00:35:09.000He would pretend to take acid and he would give acid to the family and then he would mindfuck them and then have them go out and commit murder and tell them that they were freeing people and Yeah, well, no doubt.
00:35:25.000And there was a lot of interest, for sure, among the CIA for what the potential would be for LSD. Yeah, he also went over the Operation Midnight Climax, which was a part of MKUltra.
00:35:42.000Operation Midnight Climax, they ran whorehouses.
00:35:45.000They ran brothels in San Francisco and I think a couple other cities.
00:35:49.000And they would have two-way mirrors and they would have the prostitutes dose up these Johns with LSD and their drinks and they had no idea.
00:35:58.000And then they would have sex and they would watch them and observe them and This went on for years.
00:36:17.000Well, they only found this out sort of accidentally through research into these files that had been left behind and some Freedom of Information Act stuff.
00:36:45.000Well, and then that also gets transferred over to cannabis and other drugs as the war on drugs really picks up with Nixon.
00:36:53.000And it does help to demonize certain groups of people.
00:36:59.000Well, the real sad thing, too, is in putting these things in Schedule 1, we've really missed out on research that would be very helpful for people that do have adverse reactions.
00:37:11.000There's a lot of people with adverse reactions to psilocybin, to cannabis, to LSD, and we don't know why.
00:37:19.000Right, particularly people that have schizophrenic breaks.
00:37:34.000It's enough that we really should be concerned, and we don't know what the fuck's going on because they've kept people from doing research.
00:37:43.000It's already starting to change quite dramatically.
00:37:46.000And with the results that are coming out of some of these experiments and research studies that are going on, I think, you know, it's convincing.
00:37:55.000And when you're helping, you know, war veterans with PTSD, you know, I mean, come on.
00:38:02.000MDMA seems to be particularly helpful for that, right?
00:39:18.000The Lakotas had a term for a very important part of their culture, which was someone who mocks all the things that are deemed sacred and important.
00:39:30.000And sort of finds holes in all of these dogmatic ideas.
00:40:24.000And then also, unfortunately or fortunately, people have embedded themselves so deeply into social media that they believe that this...
00:40:33.000Really bizarre way of communicating which forms these echo chambers and these really non-empathetic ways of expressing your disdain or anger or hate or disagreement with people that this is common and standard.
00:41:28.000I think that social media is one of the more powerful forces in the changes that we are seeing.
00:41:37.000And the political divisions clearly are kind of one of the consequences of how embedded these I mean, it hasn't all been planned out,
00:41:53.000but it's almost like it has been in order to really deteriorate our confidence and all these structures and systems.
00:41:59.000If you thought about what would be the perfect way to deteriorate it.
00:42:03.000Well, you have a guy who's clearly unqualified for the job, who is famous for just kind of being an asshole.
00:42:10.000on television firing people and being like a bombastic sort of you know braggadocious rich guy with his name on giant buildings and you're fired fuck you and grab him by the pussy and then you have that be that guy be the president yeah and then have everybody like we got to get him out of here he's the problem he's the problem And then I think they're going to realize once he is out,
00:42:38.000And the problem is the political system is just deeply embedded with corruption, and you're going to realize that with this next guy, who's supposed to be your savior.
00:43:34.000Why aren't they represented when I know they're so common and I know they're so profound and I know they've meant so much to me and my friends?
00:43:51.000And the other side of that would be the notion that we really have lost any sense of powerful authority structures, you know, sort of cultural authorities that really can unite people or kind of help people understand the importance of common cause of some kind.
00:44:14.000And, you know, that's, again, partly to bring it back to religion has to do with The conflicts around the church and Christianity, especially in American politics, that is being diminished.
00:44:31.000I like to write about sort of the de-Christianization, you know, as the dominant sort of religious structure begins to erode and you begin to see, again, spiritual but not religious and other kinds of challenges.
00:44:48.000That are coming from different communities or different kinds of spiritual experiences to the authority structures that are in society.
00:44:59.000That is part of the context of all of this, where a lot of these battles are going on and people don't know where to turn or wondering, where am I represented in all this?
00:45:09.000It's not coming from religion or the church and political leaders, Republicans or Democrats.
00:46:00.000I wish there was a structure that was in place that mimicked the positive aspects of church that didn't contain the dogmatic religious ideas that a lot of people find problematic.
00:46:17.000I think there's something great about the whole community aspect of church.
00:46:23.000My friends that do go to church, I have a lot of friends that are Christian that are really good people.
00:46:51.000They know that they're going to sit there and they're going to submit to this experience and they're going to, you know, read the passages and they're going to hear the sermon and And they're all going to be together.
00:47:26.000That's such a weird way for humans to live.
00:47:30.000And I think people feel particularly lost when they don't have a real sense of community.
00:47:38.000And I can say as a stand-up comedian...
00:47:41.000One of the things that we all have in common, particularly folks that were working out at the Comedy Store, was that there was a family aspect to it.
00:48:00.000And so for a lot of these comics who are single, who live alone, maybe don't know their neighbors, that was the place where they could go to that was church.
00:48:09.000I think that's beautiful and right on because you could see in that community of comedians something sacred, something religious that's meaningful and that is profound in some ways.
00:48:23.000And as we said, the community aspect, but also helping people in terms of their own understanding, self-understanding.
00:50:33.000So in the death class, at the beginning of the semester, I tell students, I want you to be listening...
00:50:40.000You know, just in terms of the music that you listen to day to day, if you can identify the theme of death.
00:50:48.000And of course, when they hear that at first, they think I'm nuts and way, you know, out of my mind, and they soon realize it's everywhere.
00:50:56.000And so, I mean, I know that aspect of my classes can really be powerful because, again, we take music for granted, but it's so central to our lives.
00:51:09.000And, again, I think it can have more of an impact than just, oh, isn't this fun to listen to?
00:54:30.000And so, you know, James Mooney and really trying to dig into, yeah, some of the historical forces that led to this as a potential revitalization form of religious revival that ends tragically,
00:55:20.000And still, you know, as has been the case in Native American history, incredible signs of resilience, of innovation, of, you know, new forms of community that have really...
00:55:33.000They're getting back at us with the casinos.
00:56:13.000Something's going on in the brain too that's going to be, you know, where you're going to be seeing some kinds of activities that, you know, will lead people to continue on in their behavior.
00:56:22.000Yeah, it's for sure a pattern that people fall into.
00:56:26.000Like, my grandmother was addicted to playing the numbers.
00:56:31.000And she was always, like, saying, oh, I was supposed to bet this one and I bet that one.
00:56:36.000Like, that was the whole deal with my grandmother.
00:56:37.000Italian grandmother in New Jersey, you know?
00:56:39.000And the numbers were obviously this mob-run weird...
00:56:43.000Lottery thing for the neighborhood, but it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I started playing pool, that I was around real hardcore gambling addicts that would bet on raindrops running down a window.
00:56:58.000They would bet on anything and everything and their life revolved on getting bets and winning and losing.
00:58:17.000You know, too much shopping or too much sex or drugs are the obvious one, but we really stretch out that term to mean, you know, and apply to all kinds of different...
00:59:35.000I mean, I think that's probably part of just the makeup of what it means to be human, is we can get sidetracked and get so consumed by something that you lose sight of the rest of reality in some way.
00:59:49.000And yeah, I mean, I see that in the things that I study, for sure.
01:00:02.000But how, you know, we think about gambling and how that connects to sort of larger social issues and psychological kind of mental issues is important, you know, to make sure you're not just kind of compartmentalizing the behavior.
01:00:27.000How much of a benefit is there in explaining to people the way we fall into these patterns as much as there is exploring the patterns themselves?
01:00:40.000Like, we have these weird sort of vulnerabilities that are built into our system because we're There's benefits to getting obsessed with certain things because those certain things can lead you to success as a hunter-gatherer,
01:04:05.000A lot of people fall off diets, fall off the wagon with drinking.
01:04:08.000They do it because they're comfortable with the feeling of failure and the uncertainty of the unknown of the future with these new patterns that you're trying to establish.
01:05:29.000So we look at sexuality in Hinduism, in terms of Chinese religions, in terms of African religions.
01:05:38.000So I try to really, for these students, expand their minds as much as possible to see the varieties of ways in which people understand their sexuality.
01:07:15.000There are arguments that after some faculty get tenure, they shut down, or they really aren't doing as much research anymore, and there isn't that drive.
01:08:12.000Again, as a research area, full force, you know, going to go into it.
01:08:18.000Again, because there's a legitimate purpose to a scholarly study of the connections between religion and drugs.
01:08:28.000Luckily, I'm not the only one who's pursuing this, but I believe there are a lot of interesting connections that haven't been made, especially in contemporary American society.
01:08:43.000The other drug that I'm particularly interested in and seems to get a lot of response is that I also include pharmaceuticals and prescription psychoactive drugs as a part of the drugs and religion connection.
01:09:00.000And so looking at the pharmaceutical industry and pills as sort of religious objects and structures and cultures.
01:09:15.000Yeah, I mean that is just a kind of, you know, it's ritualized, so you put it, you know, you've got to make sure, you know, you take it and take it when you're supposed to take it.
01:09:24.000You put faith in this little magic pill that is effective and can bring you to a better place.
01:09:32.000It has importance in terms of community and who you are connected with.
01:09:39.000How the drug allows you to have certain kinds of community.
01:09:44.000So a lot of this is obviously kind of messaged.
01:09:47.000You see the messages in pharmaceutical commercials, which are, for me, dripping with kind of religious sentiments and sensibilities.
01:10:31.000I think most people would like to keep it and think it serves some function in terms of, as you're saying, sort of legitimacy of academic freedom.
01:12:12.000I was a fuck-up and a As I write about in this new book, you know, Don't Think About Death, which is a memoir on mortality, I was directionless and just fucking around at high school and getting high and taking all kinds of drugs.
01:14:51.000I have no idea, but I'll say the memoir starts with me as a young kid, maybe eight or nine, and waking up in the middle of the night with all this commotion in our house,
01:15:07.000the small San Fernando Valley house, three bedrooms and one bath.
01:16:04.000And he must have said some things, but the thing that really stood out and is the title of the book is him saying, don't think about death.
01:16:14.000Just think about the living and trying to help your father cope with his grief.
01:16:20.000And, you know, I mean, when people ask, you know, when did you start, how did you get onto the topic of death?
01:16:27.000This early memory seems to stand out, and I utterly failed in the rabbi's advice.
01:16:33.000And I think at that point, really started thinking a lot about death.
01:16:38.000Well, I don't know if the rabbi's advice was so good.
01:16:41.000I don't think anybody should ever tell you don't think about anything.
01:17:25.000And that death is just integrated in a part of life and thinking about it and trying to figure it out is valuable.
01:17:34.000I think, ultimately, we've been given a bunch of crude tools to deal with an insanely complex issue.
01:17:41.000This finite life form that we find ourselves inhabiting.
01:17:46.000Our consciousness is trapped in this finite thing.
01:17:49.000And we've been given these very crude tools for navigating and for coping and for just the way we interact with each other about these These very complex subjects.
01:18:05.000We get very simplistic, very just empty phrases that don't provide any real comfort.
01:18:14.000And that are, in some sense, traditions.
01:18:18.000They're handed down sort of as part of the lore on how you're supposed to deal with death.
01:18:24.000But for me, and what was clear as I was studying more and more in terms of what you were saying, is that That is what religion is all about.
01:18:33.000I think religion is very much a response to death.
01:18:41.000And religious life is sort of required if you're going to be human to deal with death.
01:18:50.000Now, what are the sources that give you the right tools?
01:18:54.000Again, traditional religion has been the primary resource for people.
01:21:10.000If you're willing to entertain my very broad understanding of religion and religious life, then I would say, yeah.
01:21:19.000Okay, so that's a very broad, because we're not talking about, when you're talking about religion in terms of like taking Xanax, you're not talking about a higher power, really.
01:21:28.000You're not talking about faith in a grand creator that has had some master plan for every single living thing, and they're all interconnected, and the entire universe is all part of his master project.
01:21:39.000Well, I don't think you need the creator to be religious.
01:22:05.000You need to have community in some form.
01:22:09.000So, you know, I'm more anthropological than theological, is one way you might put it.
01:22:17.000So, if you're talking about religion in Native American cultures, where, you know, no doubt, no, there's no word for religion in any of those languages.
01:22:29.000So, when you think about, well, what's religion pre-Columbian?
01:25:51.000Because if you're lusting after this attention and this sexual praise and you want people to lust after you, you also want them to think of you as being someone who is More enlightened than everyone else,
01:26:07.000which is why you're willing to stand in front of them and give these emotional, profound sermons in the first place that resonates with all these lost young people.
01:26:31.000You know, others that, you know, the religious leader becomes a celebrity and those lines get blurred and it all becomes entertainment.
01:26:41.000For celebrities, there's a need for that because they feel very lost and disconnected because they've achieved the thing that they've always desired and they still feel lost.
01:26:51.000Like everyone looks at certain celebrities and go, oh my God, you've made it.
01:26:58.000And they're depressed and all fucked up, and we don't have any sympathy for them.
01:27:02.000There's no one who's going to be sympathetic to Justin Bieber with fucking $300 million in the bank and having sex with anybody who wants to.
01:27:10.000Fuck you for being depressed, you little piece of shit.
01:27:46.000I mean, maybe a few have gotten through it and they're sane, but most of them don't.
01:27:51.000And that's where celebrity preachers come in, where someone can harness...
01:27:59.000Your celebrity, and it boosts them up, and they can also provide you, maybe even if it's disingenuous, but some sort of a structure that makes you feel like there's more that you can cling to something that's going to make sense of this all,
01:28:28.000And that can be exploited, especially in those situations, I think, because of what you're saying, the sort of gap or absence of, you know, oh, God, I got here.
01:30:24.000Someone who tries to make sense of things.
01:30:26.000Who do we look for to put our faith in?
01:30:29.000And there too is a pretty common universal aspect of human life.
01:30:35.000We've got to have something to believe in.
01:30:37.000Those poor gurus, they fall into the trap too because now they can leech off the success of these famous people and become famous themselves.
01:30:44.000And maybe they haven't really immunized themselves, inoculated themselves to the power of celebrity.
01:32:15.000And there's something that people do when they convince other people that they have the answers that it elevates their mood and their perspective.
01:34:48.000Yeah, because that's really, we're living life like it, I mean, this is, right, here's another religion, right, the religion of materialism.
01:35:36.000As a scholar, not judgmental, you know, materialism is a religion and it's, you know, it's got some heft and validity in terms of how people orient themselves in the world.
01:35:49.000But again, isn't it sort of hijacking the same sort of human reward systems in that it's difficult to acquire?
01:35:56.000Like, say if you want a Mercedes, like a new Mercedes Coupe.
01:37:03.000They think they're going to be able to find themselves or at least, you know, kind of attempt to project a certain image of the self that they would like to be.
01:37:13.000And that's, you know, just living by that I think is debilitating in terms of the person's sense of ego, confidence, who they are, you know, in real life.
01:37:31.000A religion, or not a religion, but a framework or a structure that maybe someone could develop in order to successfully, like, classes in the pitfalls of all these things that we're talking about.
01:38:25.000He starts the book off with all of these examples of famine, plague and famine, where the vast majority of cultures have experienced one of those two things, plague or famine,
01:38:40.000or both plague and famine, throughout history.
01:38:43.000And it's talking about how many decades they went on, where people starved to death.
01:41:07.000Going off what you were saying, I'm just sort of wondering how consciousness, how our collective consciousness is going to be dealing with our ideas about death and sort of questions around social responses in the face of this kind of event.
01:41:29.000Yeah, this is an issue that we haven't overcome before.
01:43:57.000And as I was saying, when they start transitioning into adulthood, that's when things really come to the fore and start thinking about who they are and how they are.
01:44:41.000Well, and it sort of goes back to something you said earlier about, you know, how we don't know how to deal with our own struggles, our difficulties.
01:44:49.000You know, we just don't know how to go to the other side.
01:45:10.000Well, that's why I try to preach the religion of physical struggle.
01:45:13.000Because I think the one thing that's helped me through all sorts of things is to make my physical workouts so much more difficult than anything else I'll have to deal with in my life.
01:45:24.000So it's so hard to do and so fucking exhausting and I don't want to do it.
01:45:30.000And then when it's over, other things are just like, whatever.
01:45:33.000Because I make my own bullshit is basically what I do in order to not get spoiled by life.
01:45:40.000And I think there's a real lesson to learn in there, and I've learned it from other people.
01:45:45.000It's not like something I figured out on my own, but I've pieced it together in a way that works for me.
01:45:50.000And I think that whether it's yoga or even mental things, whether it's playing chess or meditation or something, it's more difficult than regular difficulties.
01:46:49.000There was a study they did on chess players, and they were trying to figure out why chess players lose so much weight during these big tournaments.
01:46:56.000And they realized that they're burning thousands and thousands of calories a day playing chess at a very high level.
01:47:02.000And these guys would lose a tremendous amount of weight.
01:47:33.000Your brain is firing up at a million fucking RPMs.
01:47:37.000Robert Sapolsky, who I love, who studies stress in primates at Stanford, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament.
01:47:46.000Three times what an average person consumes in a day.
01:50:40.000Yeah, it's kind of weird, but I've had this aversion to having that really be a topic in my class until recently.
01:50:48.000And I think that had a lot to do with a feeling of I'm not fully prepared or trained to deal with students who were really struggling with suicide.
01:51:02.000And I would feel that would open that up.
01:51:05.000But I've changed in the last couple of years.
01:51:07.000It's like, you know, there are too many suicides.
01:51:19.000Yeah, and it's an underreported suicide.
01:51:22.000I have a buddy that was talking to a sheriff in L.A., and he was saying that they used to get, you know, one suicide a week, and now they're often dealing with five a day.
01:52:27.000When you decided to start talking about it, how much time did you spend sitting down by yourself thinking, okay, how do I do this?
01:52:36.000Quite a bit of time, I think, with that topic and really trying to, again, I want to position myself so I'm not the school counselor and I'm not the rabbi or the preacher and I'm not the parent.
01:52:51.000So it's carving out this intellectual space of what is the history of suicide?
01:52:56.000What are the kind of motivating factors and forces in Patterns of suicide and so on.
01:53:07.000And then I really try to bring in popular culture.
01:53:10.000Songs that express ideas about suicide or thinking about suicides of celebrities.
01:53:22.000Find a way to put those pieces together in a way that's intellectually stimulating, that doesn't just kind of work on the psychological level, if you can think about that as a distinction.
01:56:05.000I like to go after the taboo topics where I know kind of students are already considering and reflecting on them even though they don't have an outlet for really intellectual kind of consideration,
01:56:26.000really Removing themselves from whatever they personally think about suicide or homosexuality or whatever.
01:56:38.000And allow them to kind of, again, learn history, learn about different cultures.
01:56:44.000And I try to provoke them as much as I can to get them to really...
01:56:50.000To think outside the box, but also to sort of dig in to their own abilities to figure some things out.
01:56:59.000When you're teaching a subject like that, the first day, when you've been thinking about doing it for so long but not wanting to trigger people, the first day you did it, that had to be a very unique kind of class for you.
01:57:26.000Part of that setting forces me to think about delivery because it's not going to be so interactive.
01:57:43.000When I really went into the class with that topic, I felt...
01:57:49.000Like I was able to really convey the points I wanted to get across and get them to, which is the most important thing even in a class that size, is to feel like they could chill and kind of relax and talk about the topic without feeling,
01:58:05.000you know, pressures from anyone or feeling anything's taboo and can't be said.
01:58:13.000Do you get questions from students during your lectures on this?
01:59:14.000You know, a professor who doesn't want to get personal, doesn't want to hear about your personal experience, whether it's about drugs or grieving or, you know, sexual experiences.
01:59:25.000Yeah, the sexually experienced one, you were saying also that you have to be very sensitive to the feelings of the people in your class, your students.
01:59:33.000Like, how do you, like, what are the particularly difficult subjects to explore?
02:00:21.000And if you're going to discuss sexuality, if you're particularly prudish or you have a very difficult time discussing the way various people go about it.
02:01:18.000People are becoming much more comfortable with it.
02:01:22.000There's, like, universally, in this country at least, there's very little resistance to gay marriage, very little resistance to gay unions or gay rights.
02:01:39.000When I was a kid, it was, I mean, you were a kid the same time I was a kid, but when we were young, I remember I lived in San Francisco from the time I was 7 until I was 11. So I was around a lot of gay people and my next door neighbors.
02:01:51.000My aunt used to get naked and they would smoke pot and they would play the bongos with this gay couple that lived next door.
02:03:07.000I mean, I try to as a part of it, but for me, sexuality is, you know, it's not just sex, it's gender and family and reproduction and religion.
02:03:18.000So it's a broad gender, it's a broad category.
02:03:22.000But in America especially, when you start – when you move outside of the traditional man and woman having sex in the missionary position – You go to death.
02:07:12.000No, the history of pornography is fascinating.
02:07:15.000And I remember watching this thing on Deep Throat, and then I just remember very clearly Johnny Carson getting interviewed, talking about...
02:07:26.000Do you know what I'm talking about, Jamie?
02:07:27.000I typed in Johnny Carson, and I found an article that says Ed McMahon, his sidekick, was such a fan of the movie, he showed up with six friends and a case of beer.
02:07:43.000Frank Sinatra was one of the early audience members, along with Vice President Spiro Agnew, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, Nora Ephron, I don't know who that is, Bob Woodward, wow, Woodward and Bernstein, and Sammy Davis Jr., who grew so enamored of Linda Lovelace that within the year,
02:08:00.000he and his wife would be having group sex with her and her husband.
02:12:55.000My training is in American religious history, but in these courses I do try to very superficially talk about different religious cultures, and certainly tantric.
02:13:07.000Yeah, that's a weird one when it comes to the orgasm, right?
02:13:09.000Because they're trying to internally orgasm.
02:18:11.000Anyway, so yeah, you know, I try to cover a lot of bases on the varieties of ways that sexuality gets, you know, bound up in religious life.
02:18:56.000This is the same kind of compound that was originally in the news because they had been attacked by the cartel and women and children had been murdered.
02:19:07.000I mean, they're not really expats because they've been there for so many generations that they're now Mexican citizens, but they're living in these compounds, these fortified compounds.
02:20:35.000Polyandry, the form of polygamy in which a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time.
02:20:39.000For example, fraternal polyandry is practiced among the Tibetans in Nepal, parts of China and parts of northern India, in which two or more brothers are married to the same wife, with the wife having equal sexual access to them.