In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the host talks to archaeologist and author Brian Kogan about his trip to the ancient Greek city of Eleusis. They talk about the possibility that the ancient Greeks used psychedelics to find God, and why they don t think it's a good idea. Plus, they talk about what it means to be a Christian in the ancient world, and whether or not psychedelics were ever used in the first place. This episode is brought to you by Native Creative, a podcast produced in partnership with Native Creative and Native Creative Podcasts. Subscribe to Native Creative today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first purchase of a copy of Native Creative's new book, "Native Creative: How to Find God in the Ancient World," out now! It's available on all major podcast directories, including Podcoin, Podcoin.org, and the Native Creative directory, as well as in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and AudioBook format. If you don't have a Kindle device, you can get a free eReader app from Amazon so you can read the book on any good eReader device, and also access all of the amazing resources mentioned in this episode. You can get 20% off of the book. at amazon.co/TheJoeRoganEpicurean and more than 20 other great ebooks, including The Joe Rogans books, too! Subscribe, subscribe, and subscribe to the podcast on amazon, and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and we'll send you a review on your favorite podcast platform! Thanks for listening to the show! It helps spread the word about the word "Joe Rogan's Podcasts Podcasts! and other podcasting! of course, you'll get access to all kinds of awesome things going on the world's best podcourses, including the latest episodes and more! everywhere you get a chance to hear more of his podcasting opportunities, too, including books, tips, reviews, tips and everything else that goes on in the world, including travel and more, like that kind of thing! Joe's new episodes, and more. . Thank you for listening and reviews, Joe's words of wisdom, and so much more. Joe's voice is , and much more! -- by Brian's work, too.
00:00:44.000To be there in that place where all this started, just to be on that soil, standing there in the place where those people were 2,500 years ago, very special.
00:01:05.000What's also interesting, you know, when you're there, how it seems like your work is getting out there, but it seems like the people that are involved in the day-to-day, the people that are giving tours,
00:01:45.000All the pieces, I mean, it's like, oh, duh.
00:01:48.000You know, like, if you found a murder weapon in the house where someone was suspected of being a murderer, you go, oh, that's probably what happened.
00:01:57.000Like, if you find vessels that contain psychedelic compounds in an area where people experience these profound rituals, well, they're probably doing drugs, man.
00:02:13.000The fact that there were no vessels found in Greece, in mainland Greece, and most especially at the sanctuary in Eleusis, I think that leaves healthy room for debate.
00:02:22.000I was there the week before last at the conference I was preparing back in July.
00:02:27.000So we finally had the conference at Eleusis because of all the cities in Europe, it was nominated to be the European capital of culture.
00:02:34.000For 2023. So it was postponed from 21 because of the pandemic.
00:02:37.000And people finally came through town a couple weeks ago.
00:02:40.000And the site archaeologist, her name is Papi Papangeli, who was on site when I first was interviewing her for the book back in 2018. I got to see her again for the first time in five years.
00:02:51.000And she's probably spent more time at Eleusis than any human being living or dead.
00:03:14.000When she finally saw the evidence, so I gave like a PowerPoint of the things that I talked about here a couple years ago, all the evidence from the book about these ritual vessels that were discovered in the 1990s in Spain, and they show pretty clear evidence of ergot inside like a tiny beer chalice,
00:03:30.000so something like an ergotized beer, which was the thing that was hypothesized back in the 1970s as the elusive, you know, mystery to these great mysteries.
00:03:40.000And so I showed her all the evidence, did my PowerPoint, and Poppy was thoroughly unconvinced that psychedelics had anything to do with the mysteries in Eleusis.
00:03:50.000Her theory is that it's a modern interpolation that we think that we can't achieve these states of mind in the absence of drugs.
00:03:58.000And so when I do ask her, she talks about the long pilgrimage.
00:04:02.000And she talks about the fasting that would have taken place.
00:04:05.000And she talks about like the emotional preparation for years in advance of this sort of culminating experience of a lifetime.
00:04:12.000So she points to all kinds of different things, maybe some like endogenous, endogenously produced ecstatic experience, but she's just not a fan of the drug hypothesis.
00:04:21.000And so the fact that You know, this forensic evidence for drugs was found in these vessels 2,200 years ago, you know, at the place, at the time, where it looks like there's a connection to ancient Eleusis.
00:04:33.000She's unpersuaded, which I think is very funny and super cool because I think debate is needed.
00:04:40.000Well, it's always good to be healthy, you know, in your skepticism, but...
00:04:45.000At a certain point in time, what do you think is going on?
00:05:25.000So it's undeniable that ancient Greeks were at this ancient colony as far back as like 575 BC, by the way.
00:05:33.000It's when they established the colony.
00:05:34.000And so you have like 400 years from the establishment of this colony until you see this Hellenistic period where people who were influenced by the Greeks were then reinterpreting what seems to be their idea of the mysteries in honor of Demeter and Persephone, the two goddesses who are worshipped back in Greece at Eleusis.
00:05:56.000And you see, you know, images of what could be like an incense burner that looks like Demeter and Persephone, and you find these vases that look like they belong in Athens, showing Dionysus and this drunken parade.
00:06:07.000And you see what the most interesting to me was this kalathos that shows Tryptolemus.
00:06:12.000And Tryptolemus was kind of like the missionary of the ancient mysteries.
00:06:15.000And you see images of him in the museum at Eleusis, and they found a near identical image of him At this, not too far from this site in Spain.
00:06:25.000So, like, all the pieces kind of fit together.
00:06:27.000But I think that, you know, I can't speak for Poppy, but maybe she sees it as sort of like a renegade group, you know, something that that was.
00:06:35.000Because, you know, again, to celebrate the mysteries outside the temple, outside Demeter's temple at Eleusis was a sacrilege.
00:06:42.000It doesn't mean that people weren't trying to recreate what was happening there, and there's this famous incident in Athens in 414 BC called the Profanation of the Mysteries, where we know that some people at least were trying to recreate what they thought was happening in the temple at home, in private dining rooms.
00:07:21.000Well, it seems like even today, rituals and, you know, these psychedelic ceremonies that people do in other countries when they go to the jungle, there's so much fanfare and there's so much behind it.
00:07:39.000There's so much—there's a lot of secrets.
00:08:06.000You see the exact same thing in America.
00:08:08.000You see these little psychedelic ceremonies that people do outside of the jungle.
00:08:12.000You know, and they've brought ayahuasca back and now they get a group of people together in the living room and they burn candles and trip balls together.
00:08:21.000But it seems very similar to that kind of thing where they would try to reenact it or recreate it somewhere else.
00:08:28.000Yeah, I mean, even in the classical period, like, so we think Eleusis goes back to sort of like the Acropolis, right?
00:08:34.000So when you're looking at these sites, you're looking at different moments in time.
00:08:38.000So you can't look at the Acropolis and not think about the Mycenaean period that goes back to, like, 1500 BC. And you can't think about, like, the classical golden age of Athens in the 5th century BC. And you can't think about what happened to it thereafter because power changes hands, right, to the Romans.
00:08:54.000In 146 BC, and then, you know, it goes into the Byzantine Empire in the 5th century AD, and then it goes to the Ottomans after that.
00:09:02.000So, like, there's always been this transfer of power, and these sites experience different levels of participation and ritual and mystery.
00:09:11.000So when you look at Eleusis, you know, as old as it could be, going back, you know, Probably to 1500 BC. In the classical period, it was always changing.
00:09:20.000So when you talk about secrets, you talk about potions and sacraments, I think they were always, always changing throughout time.
00:09:27.000And so maybe the secret recipe in the fifth century BC was different from what it looked like a thousand years before that.
00:09:35.000And so what we do know is that Dionysus, who's this other god of ritual madness and ecstasy in the theater, remember we went to the theater of Dionysus?
00:09:42.000You know, he sneaks into the mysteries at some point.
00:09:45.000And I think what you begin to see is this urge towards what some scholars call private, spontaneous pagan piety, which means that aside from these centralized temples, like the Temple of Demeter, it sits at Eleusis, and that's where these rites happen.
00:10:01.000And it's an utter profanation to celebrate them outside.
00:10:03.000What you see with Dionysus coming into these mysteries is this urge towards the celebration of ritual and ceremony outside the temples, privately and spontaneously.
00:10:13.000So like the churches, the temples of Dionysus were sort of outside.
00:10:17.000They were always celebrated in the forests and the mountains and at the southern slope of the Acropolis, which is interesting, and urban centers too.
00:10:24.000But I think over time, you begin to see like this thirst to celebrate these mysteries outside the temples, which is why the evidence in Spain makes so much sense to me.
00:10:35.000When it comes to endogenously created experiences, have you ever looked into what people experience doing kundalini yoga?
00:12:12.000When you leave there, it's not a coincidence that yoga people are all flaky and super peaceful.
00:12:20.000It does something for you that just puts you in a very relaxed and unique state.
00:12:26.000But Kundalini, as practiced by several people that I know, I've just never done it, is supposedly you can reach states that are very similar to being on psychedelic drugs in terms of absolute visions,
00:12:43.000geometric patterns that are flowing around you.
00:12:47.000But you're not supposed to concentrate on that, which is interesting.
00:12:51.000At least according to one of my friends who took it, his instructor was saying that you're getting distracted by trying to have these experiences.
00:13:14.000Well, when you're traveling outside time and space, the ability to see into the deep past and the far future, The ability to transport your body, to teleport, all kinds of mental telepathy and things like that.
00:13:28.000I mean, that's not the goal of yoga, obviously.
00:14:24.000What you just talked about is the way the ego steps into this river.
00:14:30.000In all these spiritual practices, it's supposed to be about the deflation of the ego.
00:14:36.000If you're going through these spiritual exercises and these praxis and these disciplines and your ego is still very much intact, Then when the superpowers arise, what do you do with them?
00:14:47.000And that's the dangerous part of any spiritual discipline.
00:14:50.000It's the dangerous part of psychedelics, for sure, because you get this dramatic insight into the nature of yourself and maybe the underlying structure of the cosmos, and all of a sudden you think you're all-knowing and maybe all-powerful.
00:15:04.000Well, also, you sort of espouse that to others who haven't experienced it.
00:15:08.000There's like the guru thing that happens, which I think is really problematic for Western people.
00:15:15.000For whatever reason, there's a lot of, especially men in Western culture, that get involved in those things and then they become leaders and they're semi-cult leaders.
00:15:28.000Someone sent me an article yesterday about this as an interesting title, Chasing the Numinous, Hungry Ghosts in the Shadow of the Psychedelic Renaissance.
00:15:37.000It just came out in this journal, Chasing the Numinous.
00:15:40.000And this notion of the hungry ghosts, it's breta.
00:15:43.000In Sanskrit, speaking of more Sanskrit, so preta are these hungry ghosts who are constantly hungry, constantly thirsty, and no matter how much they feed or try and satiate themselves, it's never enough.
00:15:53.000And so it's sort of this metaphor for the Western mind and consumerism and extraction and, you know, wouldn't it be a shame if we approached psychedelics, yoga, all these spiritual disciplines with that sort of, that broken Western mentality trying to figure out what this can do for me.
00:16:15.000Most psychedelic experiences that I've ever had, one of the key Sort of overwhelming aspects of it is to get out of your own way and that you're in your own way and that you thinking about yourself and you think of yourself and it's just wasted energy.
00:17:44.000It should be, and I think it was forever when we didn't have light pollution.
00:17:50.000It was the overwhelming evidence that you're not shit.
00:17:52.000You know, if you thought very highly of yourself and you lay on your back and looked up in the cosmos, Best you could think that you were sent down from God to do his bidding.
00:18:04.000But you didn't think you were anything greater than that.
00:20:54.000And then when you actually do, you're like, oh, now I know.
00:20:59.000Well, you know, why would they – when people are starving to death and just struggling, hunting and gathering, why would they be concentrating on constellations?
00:22:58.000We don't know if they had language or not, but they speculate that maybe the beginnings of proto-language would have begun because, I mean, I was joking, but what do you do at night?
00:23:26.000And so it's possible that around these primordial fires, the very first stories, storytelling, would have emerged around the constellations.
00:23:35.000What does Homo erectus look like, Jamie?
00:23:38.000Did they have an artist interpretation?
00:23:44.000This article says that if they sailed, they probably also had a lingo for it, a sailing lingo, to describe probably where they were going or what you were going to see.
00:23:53.000And they sort of had the shape of the arms and the legs and the proportions very similar to humans.
00:24:45.000Right, but how would that be an evolutionary advantage?
00:24:50.000I mean, well, you can scavenge a lot better.
00:24:54.000And you can protect yourself from prey a lot better.
00:24:56.000And also you can hunt prey a lot better.
00:24:58.000And so what they think, I'm not sure if it was a rectus or another one, but they were good at long distance running, so they could wear out potential prey.
00:25:07.000So there's at least one adaptive advantage.
00:25:31.000No, but like the ones that we have in America that we call antelope that I think they're I want to say they're maybe even in the goat family because sometimes they call them speed goats.
00:25:42.000But those, the antelope that they have in America, the pronghorn antelope, is actually the reason why it's so fast is because at one point in time there was a cheetah here.
00:25:52.000And they went extinct, but the antelope survived.
00:25:56.000So it has the speed to evade something that runs insanely fast.
00:26:00.000So these little fuckers can go like 60 miles an hour.
00:26:44.000So now, like, nothing can fuck with them other than humans.
00:26:49.000Like, at a certain point in time, when they're young, they're very vulnerable, but at a certain point in time, they get to the point like, good luck catching me, bitch.
00:26:57.000Like, coyotes and mountain lions, like, you can't catch them.
00:27:21.000You know, it's just when your calves and your fawns are getting slaughtered, there's not a lot your species can do.
00:27:29.000You know, that becomes an issue in areas that have a lot of predators.
00:27:35.000You know, that becomes an issue with areas that have a lot of bears.
00:27:39.000Like, areas that have a lot of bear, like the moose population just gets hammered because the babies never make it.
00:27:45.000I think in one of the places in Alberta, I think it's somewhere in the range of 50 to 60% of all baby deer and moose just get eaten by bears.
00:28:00.000Well, I think a lot about nature and how amazingly fascinating that...
00:28:08.000It's so amazingly fascinating to me that we live in this very bizarre technological sort of raft in the middle of nature.
00:28:20.000You know, we live in these cities, these little communities that we have everything set up for the nature of the human animal in 2023. But you go out in the wild, they have no idea that game is being played.
00:28:34.000They're doing the exact same thing they've been doing forever.
00:28:38.000And it's things chasing after things and things trying not to get eaten.
00:28:47.000And then when things die, there's raptors come in and vultures come in and all these scavengers come in and that's their job.
00:28:57.000That's why the way we treat our dead is so, at least we used to think, was so unique to homo sapiens and how we treat the notion of death and burial.
00:29:07.000Have we talked about homo naledi before?
00:30:05.000So you see the rising star cave system there.
00:30:08.000In South Africa, it was found in this cavernous underground labyrinth of networks where Lee found a number of different bodies that had been apparently left there by this species,
00:30:25.000And the reason that's interesting is because, again, Homo sapiens, to our knowledge, are the only species to have ever intentionally buried their dead.
00:30:34.000So you see things like you see grief and mourning practices in the animal.
00:33:11.000Yeah, it's really hard to access that.
00:33:13.000You can see, so you enter at the top there, and this is what Homo Naledi was doing potentially 300,000 years ago.
00:33:20.000They found this cave system, they would descend there on the left, Go down into what's called Superman's crawl, which is just 10 inches high.
00:33:27.000So they had to go on their bellies, potentially.
00:33:29.000And so they think they dragged the bodies through that Superman's claw?
00:33:38.000So they not only drug it through that crawl there, they went up Dragon's back, as you can see there, and then down what's called the chute.
00:33:45.000You see the yellow arrow at the chute?
00:33:47.000So the chute goes from the top of Dragon's back Into the Dentalady Chamber.
00:34:19.000If you look up unknown, unknown colon, cave of bones, you'll find an awesome documentary that charts the discovery and what they call the underground astronauts who managed to get their way through...
00:35:04.000Or maybe there was a flash flood, or maybe something happened, or it was an excursion party gone bad, a bunch of people spelunking, and they got trapped in there.
00:35:14.000But it turns out that that's not the case.
00:35:16.000It's not only not the case, it seems like they were intentionally buried in these holes.
00:35:19.000And so they found pits, which looked like graves.
00:35:23.000And again, against all expectations, because only Sapiens and maybe Neanderthal does this, this archaic being is deliberately disposing of their dead in ritual fashion inside this chamber, which is super difficult to access in the first place.
00:35:37.000It would take you at least 30 or 40 minutes to make your way from the surface.
00:35:42.000How would I even get in something that's seven inches wide?
00:35:46.000You have to see the footage for how to do it.
00:36:44.000And it seems like, and again, now you're speculating, but it seems like they set up this complex, or they used this naturally existing complex to actually Re-enact a passage, right?
00:36:56.000Some passage from light into darkness.
00:37:00.000And sort of like the passage into the underworld, into death itself.
00:37:04.000And this has so many resonances with Eleusis, by the way, and everything that we saw there in these ancient mystery complexes.
00:37:11.000Again, this notion of We're good to go.
00:37:33.000And so I mentioned that Homo erectus probably had fire.
00:37:37.000But, you know, they figured out a way, this species figured out a way to illuminate the pet, which is pitch dark, obviously, right?
00:37:44.000And so they figured out a way to light fires along the way, we think at least for light, but they were also cooking down there.
00:37:51.000They found speaking, I think they found antelope or springbuck, these tiny bones that were cooked in this fire.
00:37:59.000So they were manipulating fire, at least having some sort of like, I don't know if it's a funerary meal or something that could have been related to this ritual complex.
00:38:12.000They're dragging bodies into this pit over different generations potentially, which makes you think about the possibility of language and how this ritual is communicated from one generation to another.
00:38:25.000And the craziest thing is that they also found, just last year when Lee finally made his way into the dinner lady chamber, In the antechamber before that, they found scratch markings, which I think there's some pictures in that file, Jim.
00:39:41.000It's so unbelievable that Naledi is dragging these bodies in there and making these markings and controlling fire and potentially having tools, by the way.
00:39:49.000It's so unthinkable that some scholars think that this is the evidence of sapiens finding these caves.
00:40:59.000And again, Lee and the team, they can't answer this.
00:41:03.000But if you're going to those lengths to bury your dead over successive generations, It raises the big questions that maybe they were asking well before us.
00:41:20.000Did they have a concept of spirituality?
00:41:21.000Did they look at the stars at night and wonder?
00:41:24.000Where we came from, and how we got here, and where we go after death.
00:41:28.000And did they have a special insight that death maybe wasn't the ending, but the beginning of a new journey back to the stars, into this underworld?
00:41:38.000But, you know, we see this mythology pop up In our earliest historical societies, which goes back 5,000 years, think about the Book of the Dead and the Egyptians, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or all these classical mysteries I spend all this time researching.
00:41:52.000That's the essential question they're trying to answer, is what happens after death?
00:41:55.000So to think that a species that precedes us What was asking the same questions and developing rituals around it, like, completely upends our notion of what it means to be human.
00:42:08.000Because if the way we approach death is not exceptional, in the hominin world at least, then what else does that say about us?
00:44:21.000Like one crow will, like two cats are on rival rooftops and the crow will fly over and just be just close enough to the cat that the cat can't get him and he kind of fucks with him and irritates him.
00:45:41.000They've done all these studies where they show that if you give a crow a one-size tool, it will use that tool to extract a larger tool, and it'll use that tool to get the food.
00:45:53.000They've done all these weird little mazes and had crows solve them.
00:46:37.000Are we wrong about where memories are stored?
00:46:41.000Scientists provide evidence that tiny Caribbean box jellyfish, which lack a central nervous system, can learn to navigate through mangrove roots.
00:47:51.000But then you have these small-brained creatures in the meantime, which are doing exceptional things.
00:47:56.000And so maybe the increase in the brain isn't what we should be focusing on, at least not exclusively.
00:48:01.000If brainless jellyfish can learn and...
00:48:04.000A hominid species with an orange brain can develop complex rituals around death.
00:48:10.000Yeah, but there's also clearly a correlation between the larger brain and much more ability to manipulate its environment.
00:48:17.000I mean, the difference between what a human being, a homo sapien, is capable of, and we're amazed that they drag their body into a hole in the ground.
00:48:26.000You know, we build rockets, fly to outer space.
00:48:30.000It's like a big difference in the weirdness of what the creative mind Can achieve in a homo sapien?
00:49:05.000I gave a talk about this in Paris a few months ago about artificial versus ancestral intelligence.
00:49:12.000And I happen to think that what Homo Naledi was doing is among some of the most intelligent activity Our species can get itself busy with, which is investigating this notion of life and death.
00:49:27.000I think that's what makes us human, is asking these big questions and trying to figure out the nature of consciousness.
00:49:33.000And this is what all these mystery religions were trying to do.
00:49:36.000I think there was more science than religion.
00:49:39.000I mean, they're called mystery religions, but this was the process of our ancestors trying to figure out The secrets to the universe in antiquity.
00:49:50.000And for the working hypothesis is that psychedelic drugs and altered states of consciousness had something to do with that ability to probe into these mysteries.
00:50:02.000The caves also have a lot to do with it.
00:50:05.000There were caves constantly being used by, well, predecessor species for sure, but then also ancient societies to enter into these profound states of awareness, going back into the womb of the earth to really figure out that border between life and death and maybe navigate it,
00:50:24.000This was the enterprise of ancient Egypt, is being able to Successfully navigate into the afterlife, again, which is not an end but a beginning.
00:50:34.000This is how the mystery religions always talk about death and befriending death and confronting all mortality.
00:50:39.000I'm not sure if AI will be able to plumb those secrets the way that we've been doing for all these thousands of years.
00:50:56.000I mean, what it's essentially doing, well, all human beings, everyone that is listening to this and everyone who isn't, you're essentially riding on the work of the people that came before you.
00:51:12.000We're all speaking a language that other people invented.
00:51:15.000We're using mathematics that other people invented.
00:51:18.000We live in structures that other people invented.
00:51:21.000There's been just this massive sea of human beings before us that have innovated and created.
00:51:29.000But if AI can have access to everything they've ever learned and everything they've ever done, And have an understanding of biology and of subatomic science at a level that the average human being is just not capable of.
00:51:49.000Maybe it could understand a pattern that we've missed.
00:51:52.000Maybe it can understand a code that we've missed.
00:51:55.000That this whole thing is like there's...
00:51:59.000Some sort of an underlying code to the entire universe.
00:52:06.000And you're experiencing it as a human being, riding the subway, driving in your car, going to work.
00:52:13.000You're experiencing this very minute realm of this overall experience that is all working together through this code that's creating everything.
00:52:45.000And during that 100-year period, you're asked a lot with this primitive monkey mind to try to figure things out.
00:52:54.000But if you didn't have that, if you didn't have that thing looming over you, maybe you'd have a more objective assessment of what's actually going on, or what this species is actually doing, like what it's here for.
00:53:23.000I mean, for us, in our experience, I think the best thing you could do is spread as much positivity as possible in every way you can.
00:53:33.000Be as charitable as possible, be as nice as possible.
00:53:36.000Spread as much positivity as possible.
00:53:38.000That seems to be a valuable lesson that I get from all those experiences.
00:53:43.000But again, everything we're doing is based on the biological limitations of our consciousness and our life experiences.
00:53:51.000Everything we're doing is based on who we are and who we think we are and what meaning it has for us that we're here right now.
00:54:01.000But if you didn't – you weren't burdened down by all these biological limitations.
00:54:06.000If you weren't burdened by this existential angst and this fear of death and this – we have this desire to figure it out, like to have like, oh, this is what's going to happen.
00:54:21.000We have this like – this desire to have an answer to almost the unanswerable.
00:54:27.000What if AI is not going to have those problems?
00:54:31.000It's just going to have pure information with no ego, no desire to survive, no greed, no desire to reproduce, no envy.
00:54:42.000It's going to be a fascinating thing once it does happen because it might be able to quickly figure out a lot of things that we've been burdened by.
00:54:50.000But we're looking at these things through the limitations of our biological experience and through the ego, which tells us that this biological experience is uniquely important.
00:55:01.000Everyone thinks that they are uniquely important.
00:55:04.000But yet there's all this evidence that you're not.
00:55:06.000You're a part of this very bizarre thing.
00:55:09.000But this very bizarre thing as it interacts with each other is very psychedelic.
00:55:14.000Like if you weren't a human and you had no idea what human life is and you were some other kind of consciousness and you took a drug and the drug led you to experience human life in a big city, you'd be like, this is crazy.
00:56:00.000I think our curiosity is all about innovation.
00:56:04.000That's the primary function that this species has.
00:56:08.000If you looked at it from afar, you'd say, what is this thing doing?
00:56:11.000Oh, it's making better stuff every year.
00:56:13.000It always does that, no matter what it does.
00:56:15.000Unless it nukes itself into the Stone Age, which is always a threat because the better stuff that it makes is often weapons, and it often gets better at making money by utilizing those weapons, so it keeps doing that, which is what you're seeing all over the world right now.
00:56:29.000But I think if you looked at, like, the one thing it's doing, it's making better things.
00:56:33.000And it's so wrapped up in buying those better things.
00:56:37.000Materialism is so rampant, and everybody, despite what you have being more than enough, you want more and better and new things.
00:56:44.000And that fuels consumerism, and consumerism fuels more innovation.
00:56:50.000And it's, like, baked into the mentality.
00:56:53.000Sort of like, I don't know if bees know exactly what they're doing when they're making a beehive, but they all make beehives.
00:56:58.000You know, they're all doing that same thing.
00:57:01.000And human beings, what we're doing is we're at least working towards buying these things that someone's making.
00:57:08.000Don't you think human creativity is what makes us uniquely human on top of all that?
00:57:12.000Our ability to fashion things from nothing, to create music and beauty and art.
00:57:19.000Look at those scratch marks from 300,000 years ago.
00:57:23.000And then you go into the painted caves 30,000 years ago, and then you follow the production of art throughout our species, you know?
00:57:30.000I feel like that's the kind of thing that AI won't be able to resolve for us.
00:57:37.000The process of what it means to engage in a creative act and to produce something that the whole species can resonate with.
00:57:46.000Well, the question would be, why would it want to do that?
00:57:49.000You know, if it doesn't have those kind of feelings that you have when you hear a great song or see a great painting, why would it want to do that, right?
00:57:59.000Well, you talk about creativity, and I think creativity is the fuel of innovation.
00:58:06.000All things that we use today, whether it's a cell phone or a laptop or whatever it is, all of those things came out of the imagination.
00:58:15.000All those things came out of someone's mind.
00:58:18.000And I've always wondered, I wonder if ideas are life forms, like a type of life form, like a thing, an energy that manifests itself in the creation of actual physical objects.
00:58:31.000And that it gets into your mind, and it interacts with your being, and it talks you into making a coffee pot.
00:58:45.000See, that's where I think we have the edge on AI. And I think that we don't understand the genius, the divine genius of where that creativity comes from.
00:58:54.000I collect different quotes from, like, musicians.
00:58:57.000I'm talking about the creative process.
00:59:01.000In the email, there's one from John Frusciante.
00:59:04.000He's the guitarist for Red Hot Chili Peppers.
00:59:06.000I love listening to musicians talk about where music comes from and where inspiration comes from because I think it's one lens that we can use to think about the creative act in general.
00:59:26.000By the way, which is a very creative act and something that comes naturally to most of us.
00:59:32.000I think that's what makes us human, is this ability to translate something that extends beyond our physical bodies and then to embody it, whatever that it is.
01:00:27.000It's expressing itself through our existence.
01:00:30.000I don't believe that a musical idea starts in your brain.
01:00:33.000I believe it starts at a place before that that we don't have any direct contact with.
01:00:38.000And I believe that everything that we do, everything that we create, is nature expressing itself the same way that when a flower grows out of the ground or a tree grows out of the ground, it's nature expressing itself.
01:00:47.000And you might say that the tree is expressing itself by the way its branches move out, but it's the force that drives nature.
01:00:54.000The tree is the visible thing that appears to our senses, but I don't at all believe it's the source of why everything is perpetuated all the time, you know?
01:02:17.000What is the unique inspiration for ideas and our desire to pursue them?
01:02:25.000I think that's part of what makes us innovate, and that's part of what, if you were looking at us from afar, you go, what is this species doing?
01:05:00.000You could be singing the next Lizzo song.
01:05:03.000It can do weird things now, and some of those weird things are going to resonate with people and become very successful, and then it'll figure out what those things are.
01:05:11.000Okay, so this Drake song that I made, this got four million listens on Spotify, so now we'll do this, and now we'll make one like that, and now I'll add this, and now I'll do something that people have never figured out before, and do that.
01:05:25.000So it might be able to do the same thing that creativity is capable of accomplishing.
01:05:30.000But it won't be done with the same sort of spirit and soul.
01:05:35.000So it won't be able to resonate with us the same way as, say, like a Janis Joplin song.
01:05:42.000There's something to, like, Coulter Wall's voice.
01:05:45.000There's certain people that they have a thing in them.
01:05:48.000Like, you can't fake that, whatever the fuck that is.
01:11:24.000I was like, oh my god, what up, fucking 1987. Yeah, that makes sense.
01:11:28.000I remember standing on the pool table of my neighbor, Ryan, down the street, and playing with wiffle ball bats and air guitaring Welcome to the Jungle.
01:13:16.000It's a drug that human beings have invented for ourselves.
01:13:19.000There's something about music that, like, music, when you're tired, like, say if you're on a treadmill or something, you're tired and a good song comes on, you're like, fuck, yeah!
01:15:18.000And so we called animal protection and they didn't know what to do.
01:15:22.000And so we're literally trying to find them an animal veterinarian to fix this deer's leg, which is just so crazy because I shoot deers and I eat them.
01:16:32.000So animals, whatever the intelligence that they have, like whatever the fuck they're tuning into, it's a comprehension of language, I think, beyond just like saying words that they respond to like, you want to go for a walk?
01:16:46.000When the dog pops up, they're just recognizing the word walk.
01:16:49.000Now, I think they understand like speech.
01:17:12.000They won't calm down if you play calming music?
01:17:15.000Supposedly they do, and unfortunately now that's in my fucking YouTube algorithm because he was freaked out because of the thunderstorms that were happening.
01:18:01.000When you watch them solve puzzles for candy, you know they gave chimps money?
01:18:06.000They taught them that if they take this money, this thing, these tokens, and give it to this person or put it in this thing, they would give them candy.
01:18:15.000You know the first thing they did was?
01:18:17.000They gave it to the female chimps and they had sex with them.
01:18:21.000They, like, immediately engaged in prostitution.
01:22:39.000I think most ancient people, that's what the big bad wolf and through like Little Red Riding Hood, all those ancient stories of wolves were all because they were killing people.
01:22:50.000Like wolves have always preyed on human beings.
01:22:53.000It's always been a part of human existence until we eradicated them and now we're bringing them back.
01:23:22.000Bitch-ass wolves that were willing to come near us in the fire, and then we give them a little food, and then they realize that they could be our friend, they can get food, they don't have to hunt.
01:23:32.000And then we use them to protect the outer perimeter, and to keep bears out, and things like that, and cats away from people.
01:23:39.000And that if the wolves stayed close, things didn't want to get near the wolves, and so they would avoid us, and as long as we kept that kind of a relationship, You know, they've done these studies with foxes where they've had wild foxes.
01:23:52.000And in a small period of time, every time they had an aggressive fox at all, they killed that fox.
01:23:59.000And they kept these domesticated foxes.
01:24:01.000And over time, their ears flopped, their eyes got bigger, they became more appealing to us, more submissive.
01:24:08.000They basically became dogs over a very short period of time.
01:24:16.000That's probably what happened with the wolves.
01:24:18.000I think the wolves that realize like, hey, you know, it's hard out there, you know, running a pack and being an alpha and getting cast out and like, maybe I could just get near these other things and I could get a little bit of their leftovers.
01:25:00.000It's always happened throughout history.
01:25:02.000In fact, in World War I, there was actually a ceasefire between the Russians and the Germans because so many of them were getting killed by wolves that they decided to stop shooting each other and kill the wolves and then go back to killing each other.
01:25:33.000Like wolves would find them in there and just tear them apart.
01:25:36.000So imagine you're, you know, you're in trench warfare in World War I, and you're hearing in the middle of the night people screaming.
01:25:44.000They're just getting torn apart by wolves.
01:25:47.000They would send out parties, like search parties, and, you know, no one would come back, and then they would go out and they'd find a boot with a human foot in it, and like, what the fuck?
01:25:57.000And they realize, oh my god, these wolves are killing people.
01:25:59.000And they were in large packs because they were feeding on the bodies from the war.
01:26:03.000You know, the war back then is just unbelievably brutal.
01:27:48.000So I was looking up the Russian fox experiment.
01:27:51.000I was finding a bunch of articles about it, like we've talked about before.
01:27:54.000But then one of them I said said there was a new study, which this is from 2019, that might...
01:28:00.000Not counter it specifically, but has a different understanding of what was happening, maybe.
01:28:06.000I was trying to read through it, and it just says that what his final result was might not actually be what was happening with domestication.
01:28:14.000Well, let's read this part right here.
01:28:15.000It says, This domestication syndrome has been a central focus of research into the biological pathways modified during domestication.
01:28:42.000Here we chart the origins of, how do you say his name?
01:28:52.000Foxes in eastern Canada and critically assess the appearance of domestication syndrome traits across animal domesticates.
01:29:00.000Our results suggest that both the conclusions of the FarmFox experiment and the ubiquity of domestication syndrome have been overstated.
01:29:10.000To understand the process of domestication requires a more comprehensive approach based on essential adaptations to human modified environments.
01:29:18.000So what they did though, this is interesting, so they're saying there's like more to it than just this study.
01:29:23.000But what they did do in this study was pretty fascinating.
01:29:29.000So, starting with 30 male and 100 female silver foxes from Soviet fur farms, he selectively bred foxes who responded less fearfully when a hand was inserted into their cage.
01:29:41.000The oft-repeated narrative was that with just 10 generations of selection on wild foxes, he produced foxes who craved human attention and exhibited a range of unconnected phenotypes, including floppy ears, turned-up tails, piebald coats...
01:30:36.000But that's – the root of all – I mean they only found that out over the last few decades.
01:30:42.000They used to think that dogs were probably the ancestors of – their ancestors were probably wild hominids – wild dogs rather, wild canids.
01:30:53.000But then they found out, no, no, it's not wild canids.
01:32:16.000I mean, like, it's where you see homesteads out there that are, like, from, you know, the 1700s and 1800s where people just didn't survive.
01:32:25.000And they had these just old buildings that were falling apart.
01:32:34.000But that is a typical wild deer, like a few years old.
01:32:39.000He's probably like four years old or something like that.
01:32:40.000They make deers in these deer farms where they feed them these protein tablets.
01:32:47.000And so like a big deer, a really big deer, is a 200-inch deer.
01:32:53.000And what that means is the antlers of the deer, like there's big bodies.
01:32:56.000It'll be about 300 pounds for like a mule deer or a really big one.
01:33:00.000Their bodies are big, but then their antlers are this massive fucking structure on their head of bone that grows quicker than anything in the wild.
01:33:12.000Is the quickest bone that grows that we're aware of in all of nature is an elk?
01:34:48.000But it's chronic wasting disease is what it is, and it's horrific.
01:34:52.000And their saliva gets on plants, and then with other animals, eat the plants, and they get it.
01:34:59.000Much like how bison give cattle brucellosis.
01:35:04.000Cattle farmers have a real problem with wild bison getting onto their range because if the bison contain brucellosis, then all of their flock could all have brucellosis and die.
01:35:17.000This is the thing with CWD, and a lot of it comes out of this captive deer.
01:36:51.000We're self-domesticated, but we're clearly domesticated.
01:36:56.000And that process started a long time ago.
01:36:57.000Remember the homo naledi that I showed you?
01:36:59.000So what they know about them is they had canines, like you and me, obviously.
01:37:05.000But so in the primate world, the canines are much bigger, obviously, because when you bare your teeth, you're meant to be threatening, obviously.
01:37:12.000So what they realized about homo naledi is that they had smaller canines.
01:37:15.000So instead of using them to threaten others, what they realized is that they were such a size that they were using them to smile.
01:38:50.000The fact that they still exist, we're so fortunate to be able to observe and watch These very human-like patterns that we see in terms of their social structures and how they manage them and how there is one leader and how they'll branch off into separate groups.
01:39:11.000They even wage war on each other and they fight over territories and food.
01:40:10.000Because it disrupts the narrative about the doubling of the human brain size, as if there's this constantly escalating trend in one direction.
01:40:19.000So you see the Floresiensis and Naledi occupy these strange places, questioning whether or not it's the physical brain or something else that imputes intelligence.
01:41:50.000I wonder what changed and wonder what they got out of the first one.
01:41:53.000The specimen was just wrong in about five different ways and unexpected to the point of people thinking like this can't be possible, said Paige Madison, a historian of paleoanthropology.
01:42:04.000And science writer is currently working on a book about The Hobbit titled Strange Creatures Beyond Count to be published in 2025. That's still pretty recent, though.
01:42:53.000But the Orang Pendek is a very similar creature that has been talked about by indigenous people and people that live in the jungle, and they insist that it's a real thing.
01:43:06.000It's a tiny, hairy, little human that is very similar to these hobbit people.
01:43:12.000And, you know, the speculation, like, you know, from the cryptozoology people is that this thing's still alive.
01:48:03.000All of it's too convenient that the fact that the guy went looking for it and found it and filmed it and, you know, the whole thing's corny.
01:48:41.000Duncan and I went out with them and looking for Bigfoot and camping with them and everything.
01:48:48.000It's people that are just looking for something.
01:48:50.000You know, and some of them have had experiences, some of them have said they've seen things, but it's just, all of it just reeks of horseshit.
01:48:59.000And it's unfortunate because I think at one point in time it was real.
01:49:04.000I think almost certainly at one point in time, human beings did interact with Gigantopithecus.
01:49:22.000An enormous bipedal hominid that was, you know, maybe more than eight feet tall.
01:49:28.000And they found out about this thing by accident when a guy was looking at an apothecary shop in China and he found gigantic teeth that were clearly primate teeth.
01:50:07.000I see if there's other disputes or something.
01:50:09.000Yeah, because I've read that the carbon date that they did on these teeth, I think they said that that was somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and something thousand years ago.
01:50:19.000So that would put it, you know, with semi-modern-looking human beings.
01:50:46.000And if you look at their range, like if they found them in Asia, and then you look at the Bering landmass, and you look at where does it drop off?
01:50:54.000Well, it drops off in the Pacific Northwest.
01:50:56.000That's like literally, it goes down Alaska, makes its way down the coast.
01:51:01.000Dense forest, which is a thing like that.
01:51:04.000So proteins extracted from a roughly 1.9 million year old tooth of the aptly named Gigantopithecus is a close relative to modern orangutans.
01:51:15.000So protein comparisons amongst living fossil apes suggest that gigantopithecus and orangutan forerunners diverged from a common ancestor between 10 and 12 million years ago.
01:51:54.000So if humans did make it to the point where we had language and the ability to communicate ideas, they probably would communicate about all these creatures that they encountered.
01:52:45.000He did see a grizzly bear a couple years back, which is not supposed to be there in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.
01:52:51.000But that's close to Wyoming, and Wyoming is a habitat for grizzlies, and it makes sense that grizzlies would go across the border and make their way in there.
01:52:59.000There's been historical sightings of things that people thought were grizzly bears there, but no Bigfoots.
01:56:51.000You should be taking essential fatty acids.
01:56:54.000If you want to optimize your body's ability to recover and to be able to perform, you really need to supplement.
01:57:02.000And supplementation, I think, is something that many people have maligned that do not experience it.
01:57:08.000When you talk to doctors, all you need is a balanced diet.
01:57:11.000And those doctors always have pot bellies and they look like shit.
01:57:15.000If you talk to someone who's a fit doctor, who's like really healthy, they'll tell you the value of not just good nutrition but also good supplementation.
01:57:49.000It's responsible for a lot of things in the body, including your ability to have a properly functioning immune system.
01:57:57.000And I think there's some nutty number of people in this country that are deficient in vitamin D. And out of the people that were hospitalized with COVID, I think the number was 84% of them had deficient levels of vitamin D. How much do you take by supplement?
01:58:39.000I work out as hard now as I did when I was 25. And it is possible to do, but you have to do it right.
01:58:47.000You have to give your body the tools that it needs to recover.
01:58:50.000But those tools and the food that you eat and the supplements that you take, all those, they help your overall health, which helps your ability to recover from illness.
01:59:01.000You were telling me that in Athens, too.
01:59:08.000First of all, it's critical as you age because you lose bone mass, you lose muscle mass, and there's a lot of people that look similar to the way they looked 10 years ago, but they have more fat and less muscle and less dense bones.
01:59:23.000Just for your ability to do things and to be mobile, you have to force your body to lift heavy things.
01:59:57.000So it's all stuff where my body is forced to balance this weight and press it and then lean over and press it up or Turkish get-ups where you lie on your back and you press it up and then you get up and you stand up on one knee and then you stand all the way up and then you slowly lower yourself back down.
02:00:15.000They're not glamorous exercises, but they're really good for coordination of all of your muscular and all of your entire core and your whole system working together instead of like curls or tricep extensions.
02:00:32.000Those are good for isolating and developing specific muscles, but I don't do any of that stuff.
02:00:37.000Everything I do is just, I use my whole body.
02:01:07.000You just do sets of 20. Just do five sets of 20. So I do two in a row where I do 20 push-ups, 20 bodyweight squats, 20 push-ups, 20 bodyweight squats.
02:01:15.000Then I catch my breath, have some to drink, and then when my heart rate gets down a little bit, I'm ready to go again.
02:01:21.000I do another 20, another 20, another 20, another 20. So now I'm in two.
02:02:06.000And now with YouTube and all the resources that are available, you can just Google body weight routines and bam, you've got so many different options that you could just follow along to some video and people do things like that.
02:03:56.000I was slumping over the computer like this, and my spine was all out of whack.
02:04:00.000I used to get a bad neck pain when I was writing too much on a laptop, because you're sitting there like this the whole time.
02:04:08.000And that, just this, like, head down in a bad office chair, some shitty chair, I would get like, ugh, my neck would hurt, and that's when I knew I had to stop.
02:04:17.000Sometimes I'd try to keep writing, but my neck would be irritated, and I'm like, I gotta stop.
02:04:21.000But this doesn't, I don't get any of that anymore with this.
02:05:38.000We were talking about this before, but the reason why I brought up Kundalini Yoga and I was going to bring up holotropic breathing, there are some methods that people use.
02:06:01.000They have these, you know, like, real rituals where they do holotropic breathing, and people have what they describe as very psychedelic experiences.
02:06:11.000That was Stan Grof after some of his LSD experiences.
02:06:14.000I think he created holotropic breathwork as a way to engage the same process that he discovered through LSD. And then, of course, there's John Lilly, who developed a sensory deprivation tank that also makes you achieve a psychedelic state endogenously,
02:06:32.000but through an external mechanism of lying in the water that's...
02:07:10.000Well, it's essentially the idea that Lilly came up with, and he had a bunch of different iterations of it.
02:07:16.000The initial one, he wore a scuba tank helmet, like a scuba helmet, and he was sort of suspended by straps in the water, and he had this helmet on.
02:07:29.000And the water was the same temperature of his skin, and so through this method, he was able to relieve himself of most external stimulation.
02:07:40.000Because the external stimulation that you have right now are like, obviously, we're sitting at this desk, you see everything, you hear everything, your feet are touching the ground, Your butt's touching the chair, your back's touching.
02:08:01.000And so he did a bunch of different versions of it.
02:08:04.000And then eventually he figured out that if you just added a ton of salt to the water and he used what is like waterbed heaters.
02:08:14.000So waterbed heaters at the bottom you line it with plastic and then you get it to a steady 94 whatever degrees and with that salt in it you'll float and when you do get in there the water becomes impossible to different you can't tell the difference between where the air is and the water is because it's just all the same temperature and so it's the same temperature skin so as long as you don't move you don't even feel the water And it feels like you're just flying through space.
02:09:26.000So my question was, is there any historical evidence or any information that leads you to think that possibly they were engaging in some other kind of thing?
02:09:39.000So your friend who doesn't believe, like maybe there were some other options that they were also doing when you think about these rituals, right?
02:10:51.000From your perspective, if you were a guy who did psychedelics and then you're reporting on psychedelics, like, oh, this is confirmation bias.
02:11:21.000I think, yeah, my experience is meaningless compared to all that.
02:11:26.000You know, I just, I never, I don't know, I managed to avoid it for so many years that when it came time to write the book, it just seemed like It wasn't a priority at all.
02:11:34.000Well, I think you should do it eventually because it's so profound.
02:11:38.000You're not going to be able to believe that you never experienced it before.
02:11:41.000But also one of the most bizarre things about the DMT state in particular, which is something that we know is produced endogenously in the human body, that you've been there before.
02:11:54.000Like when you get there, you're like, oh, I've been here before.
02:12:21.000We do know, because of Rick Strassman's work, Strassman, who wrote DMT, The Spirit Molecule, and did the first FDA-approved studies that they did with IV slow-drip DMT experiences,
02:12:38.000and these people had just wild experiences with entities and realms and Apparently there's some stuff that's going on right now in London and Graham Hancock told me about this.
02:12:50.000There's some really profound work that's being done that they're doing these studies where they're doing the same sort of technique.
02:12:56.000They're doing it for like three hours.
02:13:17.000And interestingly, this is somewhat breaking news, there's a new study happening in the U.S. So the first U.S. research on extended state DMT is happening at UC San Diego.
02:14:25.000You are tripping your balls off in a doctor's office, like hooked up to an IV bag, closing your eyes and experiencing this like full blown ketamine state, which he said is like profoundly weird.
02:15:49.000What's the best way to do it that's the most beneficial and causes the least harm and treats it with the most respect?
02:15:56.000Because one of the things about rituals, I think, and these ritualistic settings, is that there's this heightened state of importance and significance of the thing that you're about to embark on, this journey that you're about to go on.
02:16:14.000Related to this, there was a place that I had initially purchased before I put the mothership at the Ritz, before I bought the Ritz.
02:16:24.000I was under contract to buy this one building that was owned by a cult.
02:16:29.000And there's a documentary about the cult.
02:16:59.000The modern society where people are disconnected, there's no sense of community.
02:17:03.000These people are splashing around the water together, they're going on hikes together, doing yoga together, they're eating together, they're singing together.
02:17:14.000and he had this thing that he would do what was called the knowing and there's videos of him doing it to people and he would when he felt like they were ready and it took fred some people would be very angry he's like you're not ready because he was just a con man but but what he did was convince them That when this thing would happen and he would touch them and give them the knowing that they would have this profound experience where they would connect with God.
02:17:50.000They've bought in hook, line, sinker, and he's a hypnotist.
02:17:53.000So he's doing hypnotic therapy on these people.
02:17:57.000When he does it to them, you see them like...
02:18:02.000And they talked about it like it was the happiest moment in their life and they were talking about it in this documentary in the context of describing how this guy was a con man and about this guy ruined their lives and they followed him for two decades and now they're lost and 50 years old just trying to find their way in the world and they were just young people who were trying to find a way.
02:18:22.000They still talk about that experience being one of the most impactful, profound moments of their life.
02:18:41.000And because they believed in him so much, they really did have this experience.
02:18:47.000So what is it about this trick, this placebo effect, this thing that you can hit, this switch that you can hit, where these endogenous chemicals that we know exist, we can make them Bust out of your brain in some profound way that makes you have this complete transcendent experience.
02:19:10.000That's what interests me about this research at UCSD. I think in addition to the extended state infusions with DMT, they're also setting up these volunteers to FMRIs to really try and figure out how DMT Is interacting with the brain,
02:19:27.000And I think part of that interest in that research is really trying to figure out the endogenous.
02:19:31.000That's sort of the holy grail of DMT research.
02:19:34.000So this guy, John Dean, I think he's founded in rat brains, but we've never actually seen conclusively, never measured the presence of DMT in the human body, in the human brain.
02:19:45.000I think that's part of his interest, is trying to figure out if he can...
02:19:49.000Endogenously identify the presence within these states of mind.
02:19:52.000So whether it's someone in deep meditation or in dreaming or some other altered experience, I think that part of the really interesting part about the research there is trying to isolate exactly how that gets triggered.
02:20:05.000Because if we're sitting on this incredibly potent chemical, And we don't know how to release or to control it.
02:20:12.000It's something that deserves a little more attention, I think.
02:20:28.000One of the things that does happen when you have a profound breakthrough experience, you don't have flashbacks, really, but you can have a dream.
02:21:54.000...polotropic breathing, and I think about that with...
02:21:58.000McKenna talked about that too, which is very funny.
02:22:01.000He said, because people were talking about all these different ways to achieve psychedelic states without psychedelics, and he said, it makes me think of this...
02:22:10.000One monk who had practiced a city of levitation.
02:23:30.000The fact that these drugs are organic and they've been found on the planet and their use on every inhabited continent has been catalogued is something worth reflecting on.
02:23:43.000But throughout the long arc of history, there have been practices and protocols around their use, which typically obtained within small communities.
02:23:53.000Small, tight-knit communities where people took care of each other, where people knew how to grow and dose these things.
02:24:01.000And I think that one of the things I talk about in the book is the secret to pharmacology is posology.
02:24:07.000The notion that it's all about the dosing.
02:24:11.000And it's all about the ritual around which this experience is taking place.
02:24:17.000And so when you were at Eleusis, for example, remember you got to see Eleusis in person.
02:24:23.000If this hypothesis is true, right, about this psychedelic potion, you know, it wasn't consumed in a dining room, like, in haste, with no preparation.
02:24:32.000Like, you would have prepared for at least 18 months, if not longer, to walk that sacred pilgrimage trail, to show up there, and to, over the course of nine days, by the way, to experience this rite of passage, which for many people was the culminating experience Of a lifetime.
02:24:50.000And I think that that's something we're just missing today, at least in the West.
02:24:56.000I don't think we have that kind of sacred container.
02:25:13.000Having the proper mindset, making sure that you haven't eaten anything before you've done it.
02:25:19.000But I don't know if ceremony is more important than the actual experience, because the actual experience you could have with a bunch of your idiot friends sitting on a couch, and if you do DMT, you will fucking 100% go there.
02:25:31.000And you'll be like, how is this possible?
02:25:34.000How is it possible that this is literally 15 seconds away?
02:25:37.000Like you take three giant hits and you're gone.
02:25:41.000And you exist in this realm that is unimaginable.
02:26:17.000And it's crazy because fentanyl isn't.
02:26:20.000It's like you could buy opiates at a pharmacy.
02:26:23.000You can't experience something that is probably the root of a lot of religious experiences, if not most of them.
02:26:31.000And there was just—Cavin Newsom just vetoed something in California that was going to make—was going to decriminalize psilocybin and a bunch of other psychedelics.
02:27:13.000Proper solution would be to Come up with guidelines, right?
02:27:18.000California should immediately begin work to set up regulated treatment guidelines replete with dosing information therapeutic guidelines rules to prevent against exploitation during guided treatments and Medical clearance of no underlying psychosis all those are good.
02:27:32.000That's ever actually very good That's better than just okay.
02:27:35.000So I take back what I said it wasn't that it was stupid like maybe they should have had that before they attempted to decriminalize it Newsom's statement said, unfortunately, this bill would decriminalize possession prior to those guidelines going into place and I cannot sign it.
02:31:14.000There have been a lot of studies on MDMA and psilocybin over the past 20 years.
02:31:20.000Less clinical studies on some of the other things, obviously.
02:31:23.000And I think that as governments engage, We'll see policies develop that really try and account for all that safety, knowledge around dosing and therapeutic guidelines, ethical considerations.
02:31:37.000And I think that's all very, very important, man.
02:31:40.000It is very important, but it really is important for us to get an actual understanding of like, you know, kilograms per body weight, how much body weight, like what's the effective dose for a person who weighs 140 pounds versus is it different?
02:31:59.000I think that's one of the things about DMT is it's not specific, or maybe it's psilocybin, not specific to your body weight, which is interesting.
02:32:23.000The only way to know that is to study it and to get accurate research and data.
02:32:28.000That's on the medicinal and therapeutic front.
02:32:31.000But I do think there's lots of other good work around transcendence and consciousness studies and psychedelics, like outside the medicinal realm.
02:32:38.000And that was my interest in writing the book, was trying to suss out the societal implications of this, the historical implications of this.
02:32:47.000Well, if it really was psychedelic rituals that led to the birth of democracy, that seems pretty important.
02:33:27.000And this idea that psychedelics could fix the world, like, I wouldn't say it that way, but maybe.
02:33:35.000It would have a profound impact on just the consensus of the general population, just most people that have done them, the way it changed the way they see things.
02:34:44.000He was based at MIT when I was writing the book.
02:34:47.000And he's one of the few people who really looks into these ancient containers to try and figure out what organic compounds were left behind.
02:35:07.000It also helps if you can build out these paleoecological habitat maps, what was growing where and when and why.
02:35:15.000It's kind of this mix of the art and the science.
02:35:18.000And he was one of the very few people doing this.
02:35:20.000And over the past couple years, he was invited into Yale to continue doing this work at the Yale Peabody Museum, which is one of the world's most prestigious natural history museums.
02:35:32.000And they've offered him the opportunity to continue studying this as part of the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program, which is really cool.
02:35:40.000There are professionals in the world who exist.
02:35:44.000Amongst other things, who are taking into account these kinds of questions about the ways that these beverages or these compounds impacted the growth of civilization, the birth of religions, etc.
02:36:00.000And I think it's been really cool for me to have conversations with folks like Andrew and his colleagues at Yale and elsewhere who are taking this pretty seriously.
02:37:17.000What they found were two mills for like either grinding wheat or maybe even like fashioning a beer.
02:37:24.000And they didn't find any ergot in the mills.
02:37:26.000So the fact that it was inside this ritual vessel, which is the shape and size of the kind of cup that were used by the devotees of Dionysus in this Hellenistic domestic shrine of sorts, combined with the evidence in the jaw,
02:37:42.000I mean, really led the archaeologists to believe that there was something But I haven't seen an ergot find quite like that anywhere else.
02:37:49.000Do they know of any way that they would cultivate this ergot?
02:37:54.000Is there some sort of a theory as to how they...
02:38:31.000Settled life and start growing grain to make bread or to brew beer.
02:38:35.000And there's good reason to suggest that maybe it was actually the beer and this religion of brewing that brought people together in the first place.
02:38:44.000And if you're brewing, then it's foreseeable at the very least that ergot would pop up on that agriculture.
02:38:56.000We don't even know if brewing goes back that far.
02:38:58.000I think the oldest evidence for beers are places like Godentepe, which is like 3500 BC. And we have some evidence for some kind of brewing at Gobekli Tepe.
02:39:12.000For example, 9th millennium BC. And then we have these mortars, these stone mortars in Israel that were dated to around 13,000 years ago, where at least there's evidence of malting and mashing, if not fermentation.
02:39:25.000So we know that grain goes back a long time.
02:39:28.000The question is, how far back does the ergot go with it?
02:39:31.000And when did we discover that ergot had these other capacities?
02:39:38.000Because it's not a very pleasant experience.
02:39:39.000I mean, even to this day, if you're brewing beer, you want to avoid ergot for lots of reasons.
02:39:44.000Well, people have died from ergot poisoning, right?
02:42:03.000That's why it's such a strange fungus, and why the history of the chemical synthesis of LSD is so strange, because...
02:42:11.000You know, Hoffman famously was not looking for LSD, right?
02:42:15.000He was working in obstetrics and gynecology.
02:42:18.000He was looking for something to induce labor.
02:42:21.000Yeah, so it was kind of an accident and didn't realize until years later what he'd synthesized, until 1943. So before that, I mean, outside that medicinal context, it was typically seen with lots of suspicion.
02:42:57.000Is there any of that from any of the ancient Greek periods?
02:43:03.000I never really saw convincing evidence for mushrooms among the ancient Greeks.
02:43:10.000But there are, I mean, there's like Neolithic evidence for mushrooms both in North Africa and And then also in Siberia, there's the famous pictographs, the mushroom pictographs, the pegtimel.
02:46:15.000Well, we know that psilocybin existed back then and we know that people experimented with food.
02:46:19.000They tried things to see if they're edible.
02:46:22.000Again, that was the basis of McKenna's theory.
02:46:25.000Ancient hominids flipped over cow patties.
02:46:28.000When the rainforest receded into grasslands, they tipped over cow patties looking for grubs and beetles and that these mushrooms had grown these cow patties and surely they would experiment with them.
02:46:50.000They look like they're in an ecstatic state and they're all holding mushrooms.
02:46:56.000So there was a long debate about the relationship between these kinds of images and shamanism and the ritual consumption of psychedelics among rock shelters and cave art.
02:47:08.000And Graham Hancock wrote a lot about this.
02:48:10.000It's thought to be the unfurling flower of the datura, which is this very, very potent, very visionary flower in the nightshade family, datura.
02:48:22.000McKenna talked about Tatora and about how he'd have stopped taking it because it was too weird that he was having a conversation with a man in a market and he realized in the middle of the conversation that the man thought that they were at home in his living room.
02:48:35.000That it was so bizarrely transformative in terms of the way it interfaced with reality that it was just too strange.
02:48:45.000You would be sort of semi-functional but thinking you're in a completely different place than you are and thinking that it's actually happening.
02:48:55.000Again, this is why the history matters.
02:48:58.000A lot of the focus over recent years has been on the medicinal and therapeutic value of psychedelics.
02:49:04.000And to the extent they can relieve suffering, I understand the need for research and the need to assess safety, right?
02:49:12.000When you look into history, yeah, but there are other ways of using Datura that seem to have survived in the pinwheel.
02:49:20.000So that was used by the Chumash people, for example.
02:49:22.000And they had a very specific ritual, a ceremony around the use of Datura that they left explicit evidence for.
02:49:29.000That doesn't go back, that's not prehistoric, that's only about 400 years old to the 16th century.
02:49:35.000But they knew what they were doing with Datura.
02:49:37.000And they're not sure exactly what, but there's these great papers written on the Chumash and Datura saying how they would use it in order to look beyond the surface of things.
02:49:46.000And in some cases to communicate with dead ancestors.
02:49:49.000And you see that a lot, communication with the ancestors.
02:49:52.000And so whether it was some sort of puberty ritual or initiation rite, they clearly knew the dosing and correct administration of Datura.
02:50:27.000In addition to the Pinwheel site, first unambiguous chemical data for the connection of rock art and psychedelics.
02:50:35.000A couple years ago, there were some studies, gas chromatography mass spec studies, like real proper chemical studies done on the black drink.
02:51:09.000And so within these vessels, they found the evidence not only for Datura, like we just saw, the Pinwheel Cave, But for the yaopon holly, I think it's the only plant native to North America that's naturally caffeinated.
02:52:38.000I think if you're thinking about these tribal communities and how life was very difficult in these, especially hunter-gatherer communities living off the land...
02:52:53.000You needed people to have their shit together.
02:52:56.000You couldn't have ne'er-do-wells when you have 50 people that rely on each other and they all have very specific tasks.
02:53:03.000Everyone is responsible for something and you cannot have irresponsible consumption of something that's so profound.
02:53:10.000So it makes sense within their best interest to create a real framework, like the correct way to use this.
02:53:20.000And also this recognition that this is a very profound and powerful experience is not to be taken lightly at all.
02:53:36.000And the more you study the ancient past, whether it's in ancient Greece or a lot of my book focuses on paleo-Christianity, the more you see this kind of ritual.
02:53:45.000Can I show you some images of paleo-Christian ritual?
02:54:29.000So, what I'm going to show you are some images from a hypogeum.
02:54:35.000And I don't think we got around to this last time, but a Hypogeum was this underground chamber, and it was the site where most of the early Christian ritual took place.
02:54:43.000So if you think back to Paleo-Christianity, between the death of Christ and Constantine, which is 300 years later, give or take, you know, Christianity was this illegal cult.
02:54:54.000It was this underground religion, in some cases literally.
02:54:57.000So the only places where you would celebrate the Eucharist and the Proto-Mass We're in like small and private homes in this agape meal.
02:55:06.000And then sometimes you'd go underground into these like necropolis, like these places of the dead.
02:55:13.000And that for some reason was the place where the mass was celebrated.
02:55:16.000And so as part of my research for the book, I went into some of these underground chambers to see What the earliest Christians would have seen and some of the evidence that was left behind in terms of like frescoes.
02:55:29.000So there's no botanical, chemical analysis of what was happening in these places, but we do have images, we have frescoes, and we have the idea of what the early ritual would have looked like.
02:55:40.000And a couple weeks ago I reached out to the Vatican specifically to ask them if I could show these images to you today.
02:56:01.000It's the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology.
02:56:04.000So it's the archaeological team that is responsible for the preservation and conservation of all these ancient sites.
02:56:11.000And I think it's an aspect of early Christianity that very few people know about.
02:56:16.000And so what was happening underground, if you want to go back to the first slide just quickly, there was this Yale professor who sadly died in recent years.
02:56:34.000The Latin word for them is refrigerium, where we get the word refrigerator.
02:56:38.000So they were like underground chill-outs where certainly the Romans And it's believed the earliest Christians would have gone to celebrate the dead with sacramental wine, with celebratory wine.
02:56:51.000They would have a wine ceremony in these dank chambers underground to usher the dead into the afterlife or bring them refreshment.
02:57:01.000And so it's kind of unclear when the refrigeria, a pagan Roman ceremony, became like a proto-Eucharistic Christian mass.
02:57:11.000Again, the line is very blurred at this period of time, which I call the pagan continuity hypothesis.
02:57:17.000This notion that the older wine-drinking consumption by the Romans, the Greeks before them, Somehow influenced, at least in some cases, the earliest celebrations of the Mass.
02:57:29.000And so I just show this quickly to show that, you know, in these wine parties, Ramsey has this great line saying that this was not just picnicking at the bottom there.
02:57:39.000So even though it looks like a picnic, it looks like they were gathering over kind of like almost like a Mexican Day of the Dead ceremony.
02:57:46.000Like they would meet by the graveyard to remember the dead and the ancestors.
02:57:50.000Yeah, there was wine and food, but this was religion to the ancient Romans, and I think to the Romanized Christians who followed them in the first century, second century, third century.
02:58:01.000So the next slide, that's just a bunch more text from a Catholic encyclopedia, by the way, from 1907, if I'm not mistaken.
02:58:11.000And it talks about how the celebration of the dead and this funeral banquet you see right in the middle there, this notion that the funeral banquet is really kind of at the core Of what the early Mass was.
02:58:20.000Even if you go back to the Gospels, it was, you know, Jesus asking for the commemoration of this event.
02:58:27.000As you do this in memory of me, remember my life, death, and eventual resurrection.
02:58:33.000This is sort of the prototype for the Mass.
02:58:35.000And so it's important to remember that the funeral banquet was there to bind those together who remained faithful to the memory of Jesus after his death.
02:58:43.000It's very similar to this Roman refrigerium.
02:58:46.000So I give all that as background just to show you the first couple images from the Hypogeum.
02:59:26.000They're rock-cut tombs in the Hypogeum here.
02:59:29.000If you go to the next one, one of the first things I saw when I went into the Hypogeum was this.
02:59:36.000Which, you know, it's a little strange because, again, you're trying to figure out if this is a Roman pagan refrigerium or if this is a Christian celebration of some sort of Eucharist.
02:59:46.000Because, again, this site is controlled by the Vatican.
02:59:48.000The Vatican has preserved this for reasons.
02:59:54.000And, you know, it's been said by the Pontifical Commission that these are some of the most explicit and concrete evidence for the origins of Christianity.
03:00:01.000So, this is, you know, whether this is purely pagan or Christian is sort of a moment of debate.
03:00:08.000But, you know, if you just look at it, what's odd is that you see 12 people gathered around a table.
03:00:13.000And when you think of 12 people gathered around a table, you think of something like the Last Supper.
03:00:17.000And so, it's pretty clear that what's important to this dinner is the chalice that's being lifted by...
03:00:28.000So it's clear that whatever is happening, wine is important to this gathering of 12 people.
03:00:33.000The interesting part is the woman who's appearing in the back.
03:00:35.000If you look closely, there's sort of like this effigy of a woman descending exactly from the background to the foreground.
03:00:43.000It's thought that she is Aurelia Prima.
03:00:46.000And Aurelia was one of the dead women to whom the hypogeum was dedicated.
03:00:53.000And so what they think, that's her, this is one of the Vatican's interpretations, is that that's her emerging from the world of the dead to take place in this funeral banquet, in this ceremony.
03:01:08.000Because she's not seated at the table, and because what they think this is, is that whenever, especially because of the place that we're in, which is underground, that when wine is being served at a refrigerium, that the Romans would habitually do this in order to commune with the dead.
03:01:24.000Not as a picnic, but as religion, as Ramsey McMullin says.
03:01:27.000So this was their religion for keeping alive that relationship to the dead and refreshing the dead in the afterlife.
03:01:34.000And when you went there to celebrate them, they would appear.
03:01:37.000And Ramsey has this great line in his scholarship where he says, the dead themselves participated.
03:01:42.000One of my favorite lines in his research.
03:02:12.000And that's either interpreted as Saint Paul or Plotinus.
03:02:16.000Plotinus was this Neoplatonic philosopher who lived around that time in the third century.
03:02:23.000And so it's unclear if that's St. Paul or Plotinus or maybe it's Paul using the image of Plotinus to call up the imagery.
03:02:31.000And again, everything is very ambiguous because Christianity is illegal.
03:02:34.000So you don't go down there and paint very explicit images of Jesus or the Last Supper or Christian elements because you could get in trouble for that.
03:02:43.000So there's a lot of ambiguity in these frescoes.
03:02:47.000So if you move past that, this is the most important one, which is kind of mind-boggling.
03:02:54.000So this is just to the right of that banquet scene, and it's called the Homeric Fresco.
03:02:59.000And it's called the Homeric Fresco because it seems to portray a very famous scene from Homer's Odyssey.
03:03:07.000And it's when Odysseus is stuck on the island with Circe, the witch Circe, the prototypical witch of antiquity Circe.
03:03:15.000He's stuck on the island with her, and the three dudes you see there on the bottom to the left have just been transformed from pigs back into men.
03:03:23.000It's one of the most famous scenes in Book 10 of the Odyssey where Circe delivers a potion.
03:03:28.000She concocts a potion, and in Greek it says that the verb that they use for concoct the potion is koukio.
03:03:35.000Just like the ancient potion at Eleusis.
03:03:37.000This is one of the mythical precedents for what would become the actual kukion that was used in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
03:03:46.000And so she uses this mythical kukion in which she casts these drugs.
03:03:54.000Into this potion to transform the men into pigs, then back to men.
03:03:59.000And so it's a very, I mean, like of all the 27,000 and changed lines of the Odyssey and the Iliad, it's a particularly strange image to evoke from Homer because Circe, amongst all the many things she's famous for, is for being a witch and for having this profound knowledge of the botanical world and potions and things that we might call psychedelics today.
03:04:21.000And so it's a really strange image to have there.
03:04:24.000And so the Vatican produced this monograph over a decade ago where one of their scholars, Alexia Latini, goes over this in great detail to demonstrate why exactly this is Circe.
03:04:37.000And up above, That's another image of Circe with all her animals on this magical island.
03:04:42.000And what they found there, exactly, was Cinnabar.
03:04:46.000And during the conservation process, they were able to identify the mercury sulfide that had been used to paint this red image of Cinnabar around the house, which is a very telling detail because there's a line just before this in the Odyssey where it talks about the fiery smoke.
03:06:14.000In the Virgilius Vaticanus manuscript, which is from about 400 to 430 A.D., there's this picture of Circe and the loom, which corresponds to Circe and the loom on the right.
03:06:24.000So they know for sure, with relative certainty at least.
03:06:29.000That there's some image continuity between Circe and the loom.
03:06:34.000And she's talked about in the ancient literature as always being at the loom.
03:06:48.000So with this, if you're just listening to this, what she has is like, if you've ever seen people make cloth in a traditional way with a loom, she's got the, why did they depict her with a loom?
03:07:00.000Why was she known as a person who makes cloth?
03:07:12.000Centuries later, Virgil writes the Aeneid.
03:07:14.000And that's sort of the mythical founding of Rome, the main character Aeneas.
03:07:18.000And in both versions, there's a Circe character.
03:07:20.000So this Circe character survives for centuries.
03:07:23.000In the ancient world, from the Greek to the Latin.
03:07:27.000And in both cases, the loom is mentioned.
03:07:30.000And also, what's mentioned in these passages are the fact that Circe uses potent herbs.
03:07:37.000In the Latin, it says potentibus herbis.
03:07:40.000So she's using potent herbs and mixing up potions to transform these men into pigs and vice versa.
03:07:46.000So it's a very strange idea to have a pagan witch in a fresco that's been preserved in this paleo-Christian monument, combined with this refrigerium, sort of Eucharistic celebration of the dead.
03:08:03.000And then in the last few images, what it depicts is a woman being initiated into these high mysteries.
03:08:12.000So things you don't normally associate with early Christianity.
03:08:15.000Jamie, just in the last slide real quick, I just want to show you this image of the woman.
03:08:22.000So there are three different chambers in the hypogeum.
03:08:37.000So that circle, that's on the ceiling of one of the final chambers.
03:08:42.000And there was a German scholar, Himmelmann, in the 1970s, who attempted to interpret that image.
03:08:49.000And he says it's some kind of initiation typical of Dionysian or Eleusinian initiation.
03:08:56.000He says the way the wand is held is typical to what you might find with the god Dionysus.
03:09:02.000And true enough, if you look around at different artifacts, there's the Borghese vase.
03:09:06.000On the left, which is from about 40 BC, it's now in the Louvre, you see the thyrsus, the wand, Above the head of the initiate, who's dropped his sacramental cup.
03:09:16.000And on the right, that's the Bill of the Mysteries in Pompeii, which goes back 2,000 years, obviously.
03:09:23.000And again, you see this notion of the wand over the head of the initiate.
03:09:27.000You have a female initiate, which is, you know, calling forth images of pagan, Eleusinian, Dionysian initiation, next to an image of Circe, a pagan witch, next to this image of this refrigerian banquet,
03:09:45.000Why would a Christian descend into these chambers to celebrate these wine mysteries with the dead?
03:09:55.000And as you go outside the Hippogium to other catacombs around Rome, I mean, just quickly, in 30 seconds I can show you other images of different women consecrating the wine.
03:11:41.000And we know that people take those compounds and have these profound experiences.
03:11:45.000And when you had no explanation for that, You didn't know how it was interfering or interacting with the human mind and what chemicals they were.
03:12:19.000And you see this time and again in these ancient mysteries, this notion of a funeral banquet and the ritual consumption of powerful compounds.
03:12:27.000McKenna believed that when you entered into psychedelic states, you'd enter into a well of souls, disembodied souls.
03:13:15.000So, I mean, I find the iconography really interesting, like having gone to Catholic school my whole life, because you don't really hear about the Hypogeum.
03:14:09.000You see this in lots of different world cultures.
03:14:11.000The consuming of the god to become the god.
03:14:14.000And in the Greek world, theophagy really takes its place with Dionysus and these mysteries, much more so than the Eleusinian mysteries that we talked about.
03:14:23.000And so for the ancient Greeks, like to imbibe the wine was to imbibe the god.
03:14:29.000So the question becomes, was Dionysus the god of wine or was Dionysus the god of intoxication, right?
03:14:37.000And psychotropic plants or fungi or poisons or medicine?
03:14:41.000Because the wine of the time, like we've talked about, was routinely mixed with different plants and compounds.
03:14:47.000And so the enthusiasm that resulted from drinking that wine was, it's been described as like the central aspect of Greek tragedy, for example.
03:14:56.000Like when we saw the theater of Dionysus, On the southern slope of the Acropolis, they think that that wine was consumed there in another way to experience communion with Dionysus.
03:15:07.000The wine at the theater was called Trima.
03:15:09.000And Trima in Greek means like rubbed or pounded.
03:15:12.000And Professor Ruck, for example, thinks that it signified the different things that were pounded, rubbed into the wine.
03:15:20.000To create this sort of mass possession that took place at the theater.
03:15:24.000Between the live audience and the actors, between the actors and the dead persons, in some cases, that they were acting out.
03:15:35.000I mean, we take it for granted now, but to stand on stage Spew out lines that belong to a dead person is closer to necromancy than entertainment.
03:15:43.000So that was a trippy thing to begin with.
03:15:46.000So you combine that together with this trima wine and this very sacred ritual, it goes well beyond the bounds of entertainment.
03:15:54.000For them, there was a religious purpose to the theater and to comedy and to tragedy.
03:16:47.000For the Eleusis Symposium a couple weeks ago.
03:16:50.000What kind of artifacts do we possess or do people possess from Eleusis?
03:16:53.000I asked this question of the archaeologists on site there, of the government folks, and there's an American School of Classical Studies, too, which has been excavating in the area for decades, obviously.
03:17:08.000So, the last time I went to Eleusis to ask Poppy about this, they have a lot of different vessels, actually.
03:20:08.000It's a lot of guesswork, especially when you're dealing with, you know, you can't carbon date stone.
03:20:15.000But just knowing the construction, the expertise that was involved, it appears the use of some sort of a drill.
03:20:24.000There was like some things that cored stone, some things that cut stone.
03:20:29.000They have no understanding of how these people were able to do this.
03:20:32.000Just the scope, just the scale of the construction, the massive stones, you know, the obelisks, these enormous things that were cut from quarries hundreds of miles away and somehow or another transported and assembled into this thing that we wouldn't be able to do today,
03:21:27.000You don't want to drag kids away for too long.
03:21:30.000But I think it was important for them to see the ruins, to see Delos, and to see all these other different places, and to just see a place where people used to live and thrive, and then they didn't.
03:21:43.000And now you're walking around these areas.
03:21:48.000But to me, Egypt, it's because it's so above and beyond everything else that exists in terms of just the scale of the construction.
03:22:11.000You know, there's been all the speculation that at one point in time there was a burial chamber for a pharaoh, but there's no evidence of that.
03:23:56.000So like all cults, Bess heads were required to drink some gnarly stuff rather than the classic poisoned Kool-Aid, though.
03:24:04.000The members of this sect guzzled a mysterious liquid from ceramic vessels decorated with the effigy or the head of Bess, known as Bess vases.
03:24:15.000The Bess figure was revered as a protective genius.
03:24:18.000It might be assumed that this liquid drunk from these mugs might be considered beneficent.
03:34:04.000And part of the genesis behind that foundation is to help to support different work like this, which is largely unfunded and unacknowledged.
03:34:13.000So there aren't many archaeochemists doing the work that Andrew's doing, which I think is super important for Reconstituting some of this really cool history.
03:34:21.000I mean, a lot of which is just emerging in the past couple years.
03:34:23.000Like, a lot of the things we're discussing are things that came out after the book was published.
03:34:30.000And again, between the sciences and the humanities, you know, people who are textualists and like to compare this, folklorists, anthropologists, there's a lot of disciplines that can converge on these studies.
03:34:42.000And in addition to The work at Yale, there's been a lot of interest at Harvard, too, around psychedelic studies outside the clinical setting, which is really cool.
03:34:52.000So not only at the Harvard Divinity School, but Harvard Law School and the Faculties of Arts and Sciences.
03:35:01.000And I'm just about to launch, actually, a series of fellowships together with Michael Pollan.
03:35:06.000Between Harvard and Berkeley to continue looking at these kinds of questions, again, outside the clinical setting.
03:35:12.000So looking with a lens of the social sciences and the humanities, historians, anthropologists, you know, cultural criticism, you name it.
03:35:20.000Like taking a look at these kinds of studies from very different lenses to see what we can learn about the ways that our ancestors interacted with the natural world.
03:35:29.000So speaking of Michael Pollan, how's the caffeine treating you?
03:36:51.000So what's interesting also is you took a long time to write this book, The Immortality Key.
03:36:59.000You took a long time researching this.
03:37:01.000And I know that there was a lot of questions about how this would be received and whether or not this is like a – Well, it would be commercially successful, but it's been so successful that they ran out of copies, like, really quickly, right?
03:38:02.000It's so compelling and detailed and fascinating and it really opens up people's imagination to the roots of all these things and where this all came from and what these people were experiencing.
03:40:24.000I hate to keep bouncing off all these headlines, but there was another headline from Peru around psychedelic laced beer, which you can see it in CNN, also Netgeo, I think.
03:40:33.000If you look up psychedelic beer Peru, it'll probably come up.
03:42:38.000Anybody that's really fascinated with it, I have to bring it up.
03:42:42.000What's your take on all this UAP disclosure stuff and all these reports and these fighter pilots that are seeing these things that defy our understanding of propulsion systems that are currently available?
03:42:55.000What is your thoughts on these things?
03:43:30.000So I think it's a gigantic mystery that kind of like these ancient mysteries that fascinate me can't really go ignored much longer.
03:43:41.000I'm not entirely sure what's being witnessed are like extraterrestrial craft, like physical things being powered by like flesh and blood beings from, you know, vast stretches of the cosmos.
03:44:16.000Because there have been sightings for as long as we've been around.
03:44:21.000And not just about things in the sky, but things that interact with us.
03:44:24.000And so Passport to Magonia is a really cool book that talks about the interaction of what these could be today and what they looked like in the past.
03:45:11.000Something in me is not drawn to the engineering side of the conversation.
03:45:20.000I'm drawn, like with the ancient misters, I'm drawn to folklore and mythology.
03:45:25.000And I think that, you know, to understand the root of that phenomenon will tell us a lot about ourselves, actually, which is why we talked about homo naledi, you know, this ancient hominin.
03:45:35.000I think that discovery tells us more about what it means to be human.
03:45:39.000If it's not our brain size, or we talked a lot about creativity, I think questions about the deep past force us to ask questions about who we are today.
03:45:49.000And I think this phenomenon, whatever it is, is the same.
03:45:53.000Whether or not we're alone in the cosmos, that's one question.
03:45:56.000But, like, the relationship between these sightings and our psyches and consciousness, I think, is a far more profound question.
03:46:05.000And, again, some of the questions that the early researchers, like J. Allen Hynek, were asking about this phenomenon.
03:46:10.000He said something that, like, when the long-awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, I think it will prove to be not just...
03:46:19.000The next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap.
03:46:26.000That to understand this issue is to understand something very profound.