The Joe Rogan Experience - #2047 - Brian Muraresku

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

Brian C. Muraresku is the author of "The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name," now available in a paperback edition featuring new bonus materials.https://www.brianmuraresku.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. What's up, Brian? What's up, man? Good to see you. Last time I saw you, we were on another continent. The European continent. Yeah, it was fun.

That was exciting. Thank you very much for that. You're welcome. Going to visit the Greek ruins with you is really special. That was very cool. Was that your first time seeing the Acropolis in downtown? It was my first time in Greece. Yeah.

Really? And the girls too? My wife had been, but the girls hadn't been. It was exciting. It was fun, man. It's so crazy it's just to be there in that place where all this started is just to be on in that on that soil standing there and the place where those people were 2500 years ago very special or longer or longer yeah yeah by thousands of years potentially

yeah yeah really exciting stuff it It's cool, man. What'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 there, like the people that are giving tours and the people that they don't really know yeah that's it's still i think it's still i wouldn't say it's controversial but i think it's still a subject of debate which is the way it should be and what we're talking about is the the potential of the ancient greeks using psychedelics yeah to find god which is a big idea well it seems not just likely. All the pieces, I mean, it's like, oh, duh. You 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.

Like if you find vessels that contain psychedelic compounds in an area where people experience these profound rituals. Right. Well, they're probably doing drugs, man. Well, at least in Spain they were. Yeah. The 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. I was there the week before last at the conference I was preparing back in July. So we finally had the conference at Alusis because of all the cities in Europe, it was nominated to be the European Capital of Culture for 2023.

So it was postponed from 21 because of the pandemic. And people finally came through town a couple of weeks ago. And 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. And she's probably spent more time at Eleusis than any human being living or dead. Wow. Because she spent like 40 years basically maintaining the site. And so she used to commute from Athens, from her home to Eleusis every day for like close to 40 years. So she's done that pilgrimage more than any person living or dead throughout recorded history.

Wow. And when 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. So 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. And 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. Interesting. What's her theory? Her 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.

And so when I do ask her, she talks about the long pilgrimage, and she talks about the fasting that would have taken place, and she talks about, like, the emotional preparation for years in advance of this sort of culminating experience of a lifetime. So 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. And 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, she's unpersuaded, which I think is very funny and super cool, because I think debate is needed. Well, it's always good to be healthy,

you know, in your skepticism. But at a certain point in time, what do you think is going on? Like, what does she think? The evidence that connects to the vessels that were in Spain, does she think that has no connection? It seems like they're the same people or at least from the same teachings. I asked her that. Yes, she believes there was a Greek influence. So we know that the place where these vessels were found 2,200 years ago, we know that there was a Greek colony called Emporion. And so we know that there were ancient

Greeks who founded a colony not too far from this place. And the place we're talking about is Pontos. So it's a town a bit further inland. So it's undeniable that ancient Greeks were at this ancient colony as far back as like 575 BC, by the way. It's when they established the colony. And so you have like 400 years from the establishment of this colony until you see this like 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. So that all lines up. And you see 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. And you see what the most interesting to me was this kalathos that shows Triptolemus. And Triptolemus was kind of like the missionary of the ancient mysteries. And you see images of him in the museum Atalusis, and they found a near-identical image of him not too far from this site in Spain. So like all the

pieces kind of fit together. But 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 because, you know, again, to celebrate the mysteries outside the temple, outside Demeter's temple at Eleusis was a sacrilege. We have to keep that in mind. It 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. So if that was happening and the mystery was spilling out of this temple, it stands to reason that something was happening in Spain, maybe in southern Italy.

I spent a lot of time looking there, too, or maybe across North Africa, the Near East. So, like, I think it's very possible. I think what she's looking for is evidence in Greece, Atalusis or thereabouts, which is why I've been spending so much time there over the past couple of years. Well, 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. There's so much, there's a lot of secrets, like people contain these secrets. They talk about these things that they're about to embark on and they're they're in control of this experience for these people like they're not gonna tell you the exact recipe how they do it you know most of them kind of keep that secret

they brew it they bring it to you there's always been like someone who holds like secret information and it kind of makes sense and then you see the exact same thing in america you see these little psychedelic ceremonies you people do outside of the jungle you know and they've brought ayahuasca back and now that they get a group of people together in the living room and they burn candles and trip balls together you know that sounds fun but it seems very similar to that kind of thing where they would try to reenact it or recreate it somewhere else. Yeah, I mean, even in the classical period, like so we think Eleusis goes back to sort of like the Acropolis. Right. So when you're looking at these sites, you're looking at different moments in time.

So you can't look at the Acropolis and not think about the Mycenaean period that goes back to like 1500 B.C. 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 in 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. And then it goes to the Ottomans after that. So, like, there's always been this transfer of power, and these sites experience different levels of participation and ritual and mystery. So when you look at Eleusis, you know, as old as it could be, going back, you know, probably to 1500 B.C., in the classical period, it was always changing.

So when you talk about secrets, you talk about potions and sacraments, I think they were always, always changing throughout time. And so maybe the secret recipe in the 5th century B.C. was different from what it looked like 1,000 years before that and 1,000 years since. And 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? You know, he sneaks into the mysteries at some point. And I think what you begin to see is this like 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. And it's utter profanation to celebrate them outside. What you see with Dionysus coming into these mysteries is this urge towards the celebration of ritual and ceremony outside the temples, privately and spontaneously. So, like, the churches, the temples of Dionysus were sort of outside.

They were always celebrated in the forests and the mountains and at the southern slope of the Acropolis, which is interesting, and urban centers, too. and at the southern slope of the Acropolis, which is interesting, and urban centers too. But 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. When it comes to endogenously created experiences, have you ever looked into what people experience doing kundalini yoga? Yeah. Have you's that's pretty interesting i practiced yoga yeah for a little time well i studied sanskrit oh really wow i studied sanskrit so you can read that stuff yeah have you seen that new ai that's um it's it's

translating cuneiform yeah yeah isn't that amazing i saw a story about that earlier this year. Isn't that amazing? We're getting smarter. That's, well, not us. Our successors. Maybe they'll crack the code. Oh, they'll definitely crack the code. I'm sure it'll be easy for them. Probably. I mean, if we didn't have the Rosetta Stone, how much would we know about hieroglyphs and ancient Egyptian writing? Very little, and that was relatively recently in the grand scheme of history, right?

It's just amazing that one piece of archaeological evidence led to like, oh my God, like a jigsaw puzzle. That's the piece. Yeah. This is it. That's what we're looking for here. We're looking for a little jigsaw. So with Kundalini yoga, which I think is very,

I've not practiced it. I've only done like your bullshit soccer mom yoga. That counts too. I mean I've done some other kind of classes, flow classes and classes to music and stuff like that. But most of the yoga that I've done has been that Bikram stuff, that 90-minute hot yoga. It's 20-something poses. You do the same ones every day. I really love it

but um i know that gives you some sort of strange high it really does like when you leave there like it's not a coincidence that yoga people are all flaky and super peaceful like it really it does something for you that it just puts you in a very relaxed and unique state but kundalini uh 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 yeah in terms of like absolute visions geometric patterns that are flowing around you. But you're not supposed to concentrate on that, which is interesting. At 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.

That's not the goal. It's decidedly not. They call them the cities, the powers that arise. And it can be everything from visions to supernatural powers. Oh, supernatural powers. Supernatural. I didn't know about that. What have they claimed?

Well, 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. I mean, that's not the goal of yoga, obviously. They call them the siddhis. But it happens. Does it, though? Well, sure. We have lots of literature that attests to it. Eight classical siddhis. Anima, the ability to reduce one's body to the size of an atom. That's a superpower. Yeah.

Mahima, the ability to expand one's body to an infinitely large size. Lagima, the ability to become weightless or lighter than air. Garima, the ability to become heavy or dense. And Propti, the ability to realize whatever one desires. That one seems like a problem. It's not a superpower you want. Yeah, that seems like it would be a real problem. Yeah, yeah.

You want to be the king of the world. Yeah, it's not a good thing. Not for some people. You can handle it. I don't know if I could. I don't know if anybody could. Yeah. Well, that's kind of the whole point,

is that, you know, you're talking, what you just talked about is the the way the ego gets in the in the way it steps into this river. Right. So in all these spiritual practices, it's supposed to be about the the deflation of the ego. And so if if 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? Yeah. And that's the dangerous part of any spiritual discipline. It's the dangerous part of psychedelics for sure.

Yeah. 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. Right. And maybe all powerful. Well, also you sort of espouse that to others who haven't experienced it. There's like the guru thing that happens, which I think is really problematic for Western

people. For 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. Yeah. Yeah. Someone sent me an article yesterday about this as an interesting title. Chasing the Numinous, Hungry Ghosts in the Shadow of the Psychedelic Renaissance. It just came out in this journal, Chasing the Numinous.

And this notion of the hungry ghosts is, it's preta in 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. And 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? Yeah, that's what it is. What can this do for me? Most 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 wasted and that instead you should be thinking about like the things you're doing and how you're

interacting with the world and also your ego is just bullshit. It's just some leftover chimp shit that's designed to keep us alive. It's designed to make sure that you procreate, make sure that you think very highly of yourself. So you want to procreate. But you came to psychedelics later in life, right? Yes, yeah. I mean, was that a good thing? Yeah, probably, because I made a lot of mistakes and you know you learn from that like you you do need mistakes in life and you you also need

to understand what it's like to be very stupid and very foolish and young and brash and then also older and more experienced but still know nothing in terms. I mean, you really, as much as you know, the smartest person alive knows basically nothing about the nature of the universe. You might know things on a molecular level, on a cosmic level. You understand how galaxies are formed. That's cute. But you really fucking don't know shit.

You don't know shit. You haven't seen shit. There's too much out there. It's just too big. It should be, and I think it was forever when we didn't have light pollution. It was the overwhelming evidence that you're not shit. If you thought very highly of yourself and you lay on your back and looked up in the cosmos, at best, you could think that you were sent down from God to do his bidding, but you didn't think you were anything

greater than that you couldn't it's too there's too much evidence the sky is just filled with these fucking enormous nuclear explosions that are happening all over the cosmos it's impossible to even wrap your mind i mean back then they had no real knowledge of the scope of it all. But it's pretty obvious that it's insane. I mean, the night skies, I'm sure. Have you seen the night sky on a place where there's absolutely no light? You know, yes, but sadly, like I can count it on two hands. I can only count it on one.

Well, twice. The second time, not as profound. But I went to the Keck Observatory on the Big Island. And you go, the first time I went, it was quite a while ago. And when we first drove up there, I was really bummed out because it was so cloudy. I was like, ah, this sucks. We're not going to be able to see anything. But then when we went through the clouds to where the observatory is, there's nothing. It's just stars. And you get out and you're like, oh my God. It's like being on a spaceship. It's like you're in a convertible spaceship and you're hurling through the galaxy. Because what they've done on the Big Island is pretty profound. They put these lights, the street lights are a type of light that doesn't expand outward. What are those lights called, Jamie? You're a photographer. Diffused.

That's right. Thank you. Diffused lighting. So diffused lighting all throughout the Big Island. So it doesn't fuck with the light pollution issue that you get when you're trying to look at the real sky so even though there is light from these you know streets and all that it doesn't affect it when you're way up there it's a couple hours drive from the shore and you get up there and it's just the one time that i went there and this is i guess this is about 20 years ago the one time i went there was, it was just like, oh, my God.

Just, oh, my God. Like, you can't believe it. You can't believe it. It's so much. And it really made me sad because it was like, that's what people used to see every night. That's what people used to see every night before these jackasses invented electricity. Edison, you motherfucker. What have you done?

What have you done? What have you done? We don't think of it as anything like that because we just, electricity is amazing. You can go out at night and go to dinner. You can fucking drive your Tesla. Electricity is amazing. But it has made us so ignorant to our place in the cosmos. And it's taken away so much wonder. Because when the sky is just totally dark, you look up and you see a star, you know, way over there.

Or, oh, look, the moon. I can see the moon. You just get used to it. It's just you don't see enough. You don't see enough. And then when you actually do, you're like, oh, now I know. Well, you know, why would they – when people are starving to death and just struggling, hunting and gathering, why would they be concentrating on constellations? Of course they would.

Because there's nothing to do at night. That's why. And it's amazing. What do you think you do all night? I think that that could be the origin of the religious sensibility. If you think that when we were hunting and gathering, you're talking about like 99% of our history, by the way. And then when you think about what comes before us, I know you think about this a lot. I've been fascinated with some conversations I've been

having with a friend called Lee Berger. He's a paleoanthropologist in South Africa. And it got me thinking about all these archaic hominins. And one of them is Homo erectus, which I'm like, I don't know why I'm so fascinated by erectus ofaic hominins. And one of them is Homo erectus, which I'm like, I don't know why I'm so fascinated by erectus of all the hominins. But, you know, it goes back at least probably 2 million years, which is something to think about. Homo habilis comes before erectus. That could be like 2.8 million years. And so erectus probably sheds the body hair of habilis. It's bipedal, obviously. And they probably discover fire. And so what that means, and by the way, they go off and explore the planet, which is crazy for a being that old.

I mean, they were potentially the first seafarers. Really? The first seafaring hominins. Do we know what kind of vessels they used? No idea. Probably rafts, if Jamie can find it. Wow. They were heading, I mean, we have erectus remains from Africa to Europe to Asia.

Wow. So they, I mean, they were on the move, you know, over a million years ago. And the thing about fire, why I mention that, the thing about fire is that whether or not they were cooking their food, they had fire fire for warmth and light at night but it didn't obscure the night sky and so it's interesting to think about whether erectus sat around their campfires a million years ago and told stories the first stories about the night sky they had language we don't know if they had language or not but there's they speculate that maybe the beginnings of proto-language would have begun because i mean i was joking but like what do you do at night right what do you do at night you know which again we're so just we're not just distracted by light pollution we're distracted by a million things when the sun sets um and that's again that's relatively recently i mean even in

the middle ages there was there was nothing to do. Yeah. And so, but think about a million years ago. And so it's possible that around these primordial fires, the very first stories, storytelling would have emerged around the constellations. What does Homo erectus look like, Jamie? Did they have an artist interpretation? That's cool. Oh, wow. So very person-like. interpretation. That's cool.

Wow. So very person-like. This 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. And they sort of had the shape of the arms

and the legs and the proportions very similar to humans? Yeah, similar but distinct. I mean, they were bip to humans. Yeah, similar, but distinct. I mean, they were bipedal. Yeah, but that looks almost like a person. And that's really old, by the way. Yeah. It's at least 2 million years old.

1.8 million. Yeah. So what freaks me out is like what made them stand up you know like we're the only ones like what what the hell was that all about yeah what was that about you do see chimps occasionally walking on their hind legs and you see gorillas doing it as well yeah orangutans but it's just not normal like what would make someone say this is the only way to go I don't need four legs they were curious right but but

how would that be an evolutionary advantage i mean well you can you can scavenge a lot better um and you can protect yourself from prey a lot better and also you can hunt prey a lot better and so what they think i'm not sure if it was a rectus or another one uh but they would uh they were good at long distance running so they they could they could wear out potential prey so there's an there's an adapted there's at least one adapted advantage it's persistence hunting persistence hunting to to wear out and chase down prey that's a hard way to do it that's yeah that's that's they don't sweat they sweat so you just run them down just run them. A lot of things that run really fast can't run really long. A lot of them.

Some of them can. Like antelope can. Good luck running one of those down. Have you tried? No. 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. But 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, and they went extinct, but the antelope survived. So it has the speed to evade something that runs insanely fast. So these little fuckers can go like 60 miles an hour. Damn. They're amazing i only saw one for the first time um this year on like actually in the wild where in utah huh yeah it's really cool we parked the car got out put the pulled the magnifying glasses out to check them out just it's an it's a prehistoric creature it really is it's just a remnant of the past it lived with all the other

megafauna that went extinct about you know whatever was it 15 000 years ago 12 800 yeah at least starting then yeah so those those creatures were like the last of the mohicans like they they had to run super fast. So now, nothing can fuck with them. Other than humans. 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 where they're like, good luck catching me, bitch.

Like coyotes and mountain lions. You can't catch them. They're too fast. They're faster than everything. What's the population like and you're not so good yeah not so good um it's good in some places it's good in wyoming it's good in some places in the west but um they get hammered the the babies get hammered by coyotes and it's it's hard for them to to compete you know it's just when your calves and your fawns are getting slaughtered,

there's not a lot your species can do. You know, that becomes an issue in areas that have a lot of predators. You know, that becomes an issue in areas that have a lot of bears. Like areas that have a lot of bear, like the moose population just gets hammered because the babies never make it like in most places i think in one of the places in alberta it's more i think it's somewhere in the range of 50 to 60 percent of all baby deer and moose just get eaten by bears geez yeah you think a lot about death well the cycle of i think a lot about nature and how amazingly fascinating that it's so amazingly fascinating to me that we live in this very bizarre technological sort of raft in the middle of nature.

You 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 the rest of the, like, you go out in the wild, like, they have no idea that game is being played. They're doing the exact same thing they've been doing forever. And it's things chasing after things and things trying not to get eaten. And that's every day. That's all it is. That's all it is.

And then when things die, there's, you know, raptors come in and vultures come in and all these scavengers come in. And that's their job. That'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. Have we talked about Homo naledi? No. We need to talk about Homo naledi. Okay.

Jamie, I brought some slides in that. I brought some things I want to show you. Okay. I'm going to get a cigar. Yeah, go for it. These little tiny ones suck. This will be a fun adventure. Okay. Do you go for it. These little tiny ones suck. This will be a fun adventure. Okay.

Do you see where it is? It's at like number 16 there. Homo Naledi. Homo Naledi. That's a cute name. It sounds like a song. Doesn't it? Like it'd have a good beat to it.

What year is Homo N the lady? There it is. So it was discovered by Lee in South Africa in the cradle of humankind. And this goes back, well, the discovery is in 2013. They think that this could be anywhere from 250 to 300,000, 335,000 years old. That's what I wanted to show you. This is where it was discovered. So you see the rising star cave system there in 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, Homo naledi. And the reason that's interesting is because, again, Homo sapiens, to our knowledge, are the only species to have ever intentionally buried their dead. So you see things like, you see grief and mourning practices in the animal, you talked about the animal world. Like when they just die, they're left to rot, typically. Although you see mourning practices in cetaceans, and you see it in elephants and maybe chimpanzees, but no one buries their dead.

So that was the big bright line that no species had ever crossed, seemingly aside from Homo sapiens. Although there's also evidence for Neanderthal burial, which goes back potentially a very long time, like over 400,000 years. There's a site in Spain called Cima de los Huesos. But Neanderthal is very close to us as well. You know, we have Neanderthal DNA, like in our own genetic makeup. They're kind of cousins. So that wasn't really too shocking, the fact that there could be Neanderthal burial. But the fact that something that looks like that and is potentially, you know, at least 300,000 years ago, but morphologically it's archaic, kind of like we're talking about erectus, like it's really archaic looking homo naledi. It's short. It's about 4'8 to 5'2. It's slender

and skinny. But there are features on it that look, again, like archaic, like it could be at least a million years old, for example, or longer. So it's strange that look again like archaic like it could be at least a million years old for example or or longer so it's strange that a being that archaic finds its way into this into this cave system and and deliberately deposits the dead so that was like a very controversial idea it was so controversial that like lee didn't know what the what the bones were doing there because it just didn't make sense and by by the way, it's become the richest site for hominid discovery on the continent and maybe anywhere because of the profusion of bones. They found like 1,500 different bones.

I think it's close to 2,000 now, which is really, really strange in paleoanthropology. So Lee was digging another site called Gladys Vale, not too far from this, for years, years. And typically what you find are animals. You find tens or hundreds of thousands of animal bone fragments and a very small percentage of hominids. So for example, at that site in Gladys Vale, he found a tooth and a pinky bone over the course of like many, many years, which is not unusual. He comes to this rising star cave system and all of a sudden there's 1500 bone fragments they're able to assemble what they think is like 15 different individuals so 15 individual specific homo naledi are being deposited in that denal lady chamber and they don't know why uh and so they begin to

to look more into it i want to show you how difficult it is to get in there by the way and why it was so difficult to to believe at first if If you look at the cave chamber there, it was just up there before. It's on the next one, maybe. Yeah, it's really hard to access that. You can see, so you enter at the top there, and this is what Homo Naledi was doing potentially 300,000 years ago. They 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. So they had to go on their bellies, potentially. And so they think they dragged the bodies through that Superman's Crawl? They dragged the dead bodies. The Superman's Crawl is only 10 inches high and you could drag a body through that? It gets worse. So 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. You see the yellow arrow at the Chute? So the Chute goes from the top of Dragon's Back into the Dental Lady Chamber. The Chute is like seven or eight inches wide. Seven or eight inches. And it goes down like 40 feet from the top of Dragon's Back

to Dental Lady. And inside Dental Lady is where they found at least 15 bodies. How did they get a body through seven inches? I mean, we can go there too. Really? So Lee avoided it for many years. He was able to actually make it down himself. There's a great documentary. You've got to see the documentary. It's on Netflix. It's called Cave of Bones. If 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 Superman's crawl and Dragon's back and actually managed to get into the Dentalady chamber.

It's like it's so captivating how they discovered and then root through these bones. And so, okay, there's a bunch of bones in there. It's so strange that it doesn't make sense at first. So the working hypotheses are that it was some kind of accident, or it was animal predation. Okay, animals killed these homo naledi, and animals drug them through that chamber complex intoady. That, that was one. Or maybe like, maybe there was a flash flood or maybe, you know, something happened or like, it wasn't like an excursion party gone, gone bad, a bunch of people spelunking and they got trapped in there. But it turns out that that's, that's not the case. It's not only not the case, it seems like they were intentionally buried in these holes. And so they found pits, which looked like graves. And 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. It would take you like at least 30 or 40 minutes to make your way from the surface. How would I even get in something that's seven inches wide? You have to see the footage for how to do it. You can make your way through it. I mean, it gets wider at parts, but there's sections where it's really, really tight.

And like Lee gets stuck at some point. And so the people who went down are really, really thin, thin people who can navigate. And like professional spelunkers, for example. It was that dangerous to access. It can be done. And if there's any earthquake activity at all, you're fucked. Yeah. It's something else to think about.

You just have to imagine, like, what would motivate them to take this journey in the first place? That's why I mention it, because it's not just the first discovery of the deliberate burial of the dead by a species that's not us. They go to great lengths to do this because they, too, were thinking about these cycles of life and death. Right. And so if it wasn't an accident and it wasn't flash flooding and it wasn't animal predation and this was deliberate burial ritual Like, why would they do that? And 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 reenact a passage, right?

Some passage from light into darkness and sort of like the passage into the underworld, into death itself. And this has so many resonances with Eleusis, by the way, and everything that we saw there in these ancient mystery complexes. Again, this notion of spelunking into the underworld and meeting the gods and goddesses of death and really confronting death and mortality in a powerful way. Like, it's happening in a different species 300,000 years ago. So what else are they bringing into these caves? It gets crazier. The documentary is fantastic. What they also find is fire. And so I mentioned that Homo erectus probably had fire. So that's

not entirely surprising. But, you know, they figured out a way, this species, figured out a way to illuminate the pet, which is pitch dark, obviously. Right. And 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. Uh, they, they found speaking, I think they found antelope or spring buck, the, the, these tiny bones, uh, that were cooked in this fire. So they, they, they were manipulating fire, um, 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. So they're controlling fire. They'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. And the craziest thing is that they also found, just last year when Lee finally made his way

into the Dinaledi chamber, in the antechamber before that, they found scratch markings, which I think there's some pictures in that file, Jim. They found like hash markings, just like, so there you go. So the one on the right is Naledi. That could be 300,000 years old. The one on the left is Neanderthal. And you can see the crazy similarity. They took a rock and they just etched it into these cave walls.

Homo sapiens does the same thing in Blombos Cave, not too far away in South Africa. That's 80,000 years old. That's only 80,000 years old? That's as old as we get in South Africa, Homo sapiens. That's 80,000 years old. So Naledi's doing something that looks to the untrained eye, very similar, potentially 300,000 years ago. Wow. So Homo sapiens, when do we first start appearing? Wow. So Homo sapiens, when do we first start appearing?

The numbers are always changing. It could be like 300,000, 400,000 years ago. So Homo naledi and Homo sapiens existed at the same time. And so because of what Lee found there, some of his critics claim that actually it was Homo sapiens who were making these markings. It'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. It's so unthinkable that some scholars think that this is the evidence of sapiens finding these caves. Is it possible, did they interact with each other?

Do we have any understanding of whether or not they interact with each other? I asked Lee the same questions. They could have. We don't have any evidence of sapiens in the area. So we don't know for sure. But it raises, like, really, really profound questions. And this is pure speculation. But if they did come into contact with another, because we know we have this relationship with Neanderthal.

We interbred with Neanderthal. We have no idea what our relationship with Homo Naledi was like. Did we interbreed? Did we exchange knowledge, communication? Did they teach us, as pure speculation, did they teach us about death? Did they teach us about these burial practices? Did they even know something that primitive sapiens didn't know? Did they pass it on to Neanderthal, et cetera, et cetera? What could they possibly know other than how to do this? The mystery. Yeah.

I mean, why are they doing it? Why are they doing it? Why does no animal do this? Right. And again, Lee and the team, they can't answer this. But 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. What happens when we die?

Did they believe in an afterlife? Did they have a concept of God? Did they have a concept of spirituality? Did they look at the stars at night and wonder where we came from and how we got here and where we go after death? And did they have a special insight that death maybe wasn't the ending but the beginning. 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. That's the essential question they're trying to answer is what happens after death. So to think that a species that precedes us was asking the same questions and developing rituals around it, like completely upends our notion of what it means to be human. Because if the way we approach death is not exceptional,

in the hominin world at least, then what else does that say about us? Right. And how did that get started? Who's the first person to take a body and go, you know, we should really do something with this? And why would they do that? Yeah. Especially during the time where you're basically spending most of your time trying to eat and avoid predators. Hmm.

Hmm. Yeah. It seems like an immense undertaking to crawl through all that and deposit bodies and you're cooking and lighting fires along the way. It seems like there had to be some communication. Right. So Lee looks at all those data points and says, unabashedly, there's something like a culture here, a non-human culture.

And this could be the first non-human culture we found in paleoanthropology. It kind of makes sense, though, too, that it shouldn't be just human culture as the first culture. anthropology it kind of makes sense though too that it shouldn't be just human culture this is the first culture like if you if you're experiencing these things that are i mean if you're experiencing what's the the remnants of these things that were there before people it's not like we just like i got an idea like out of nowhere and we just all of a sudden came up with all these ideas i mean, they might have been. I mean, how intelligent do we think this thing was?

So, I mean, that's the crazy part. So you couldn't really tell from some of the recreations what we think they look like. But their brain, I didn't mention this, is the size of an orange. It's one-third the size of a Homo sapiens brain. I kind of buried the lead. That's the shocking part of all this, is that a being with a brain one-third the size of ours figures out this complex ritual. But should that still be shocking when we know so much about crows?

You know, crows are very smart, like clever. They play games. They know how to solve puzzles. They know how to solve puzzles. They know how to drop rocks into a water bottle to raise the level of the water so they can drink it. They do. They use tools to extract food. Have you ever seen crows make cats start fights with each other? No.

They do it for sport. 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. On purpose. On purpose. And then he flies over to the other cat and kind of fucks with him. And the cat's like, get out of here, man.

So they're both like, wah! They're heightened because they're being fucked with by this crow. And then he kind of like coaxes these cats into a fight. And then these cats fight and they fall off the roof. Watch this shit. Watch this. Look at this. Look at this crow.

He's getting close. He's like, hey, motherfucker. What's up? Hey, bitch. What's up? He just gets just close enough. See, the cat's like, get the fuck out of here, man. Like he's fucking with him.

And every time the cat tries to move on him, he flies away. And then the cat just jumps on that other fucking cat. And they start duking it out. Like, look. And he's sitting right next to it. They fall off the roof and the crow flies down with him. He's like, yeah, get him. He's still going. It's fun for him.

He's having a good time. There's no evolutionary advantage to doing that. That's blood sport. Look, and then they fall down that little, boom. These cats are just going to war. And that crow is like, yeah, get him. Kick his ass.

Weird. They're very, very, very smart. They'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. They've done all these weird little mazes and had crows solve them. They're very clever. Sneaky little fuckers. Tiny little brains.

So we're not exceptional. Well, how about octopi? Octopuses are very smart what the fuck are they you know they found that there's a poisonous jellyfish that uh it's very toxic jellyfish but even though it doesn't have a brain it has the ability to learn that's something they just recently discovered see if you can find that it's pretty interesting it's like a some just fucking weird ass jellyfish that it stings you you're but this thing has the ability to learn which is very surprising like it doesn't even have a brain like what okay so all right what's

learning then like where where is memory is are we wrong about where memories are stored scientists provide evidence that tiny carib Caribbean box jellyfish with lack which lack a central nervous system can learn to navigate through mangrove roots yeah it's interesting that just came out yes so we see oh yeah so what what is learning then I mean is it all dude are we silly by thinking it's in the mind? Is the mind an antenna? Are there other antenna in the body? Is a gut feeling a real thing? You know that expression, gut feeling?

Why gut? What is that? Maybe we focus on the brain too much. Perhaps. The organ. Well, we know if you shut the brain off the consciousness shuts off too so it makes sense that you'd

concentrate on that thing and it is very big and it's very unusual how quickly it grew there's a lot of weirdness to the human brain the doubling

of the human brain size that's like one of the biggest mysteries ever I don't know what the fuck caused that? Yeah, from Erectus to sapiens, like we were talking about.

Over a period of two million years. Yeah. Double. But then you have these small-brained creatures in the meantime, which are doing exceptional things. And so maybe the increase in the brain isn't what we should be focusing on, at least not exclusively. on, at least not exclusively. If brainless jellyfish can learn and a hominid species with an orange brain can develop complex rituals around death. Yeah, but there's also clearly a correlation between the larger brain and much more ability to manipulate its environment. I mean, the difference between what a human being, a Homo sapiens, capable of and like we're amazed that they drag their body into a

hole in the ground you know we we build rockets fly to outer space it's like a big difference in the weirdness of what the the creative mind can achieve in a homo sapien some of us yeah some of us sure yeah yeah some not so much yeah but The brain hasn't done anything for most of us. Ditch diggers, too. Someone's got to dig ditches until AI. And then, you know, that's what's going to be interesting. And you said our successors take over? Our successors, yeah.

When President AI solves all the world's problems, we just give in. I don't know. I have faith in the human spirit i gave a talk about this uh in in paris a few months ago about artificial versus ancestral intelligence and 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. I think that's what makes us human, is asking these big questions and trying to figure out the nature of consciousness. And this is what all these mystery religions were trying to do.

I think there was more science than religion. I 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. And 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. And I think that, you know, the caves also have a lot to do with it. Like there were, there were caves constantly, um, uh, 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, maybe navigate successfully. This was the enterprise of ancient Egypt is being able to successfully navigate into the afterlife.

Again, which is not an end but a beginning. This is how the mystery religions always talk about death and befriending death and confronting all mortality. I'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. That's interesting. I don't think, well, why wouldn't it be able to? I mean, what it's essentially doing, well, all human beings, everyone that is listening to this and everyone who isn't you're you're essentially riding on the work of the people that came before you where

we're all speaking a language that other people invented we're using mathematics that other people invented we you know we live in structures that other people invented that there's been just this massive sea of human beings before us that have innovated and created. But 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. Maybe it could understand a pattern that we've missed. Maybe it can understand a code that we've missed, that this whole thing is like there's some sort of an underlying code to the entire universe and that it all works together. And you're experiencing it as a human being, riding the subway, driving in your car, going

to work. You're experiencing this very minute realm of this overall experience that is all working together through this code that's creating everything. I think AI could figure that out. I think we're very limited because we're talking about our own experience and we're talking about our own biological mortality. So we have this window of time to sort things out. You know, like, what is that quote?

Enlightenment is possible within your lifetime. We have this very small window. It's 100 years if you're lucky. And during that 100-year period're you're asked a lot if with this primitive monkey mind to try to figure things out but 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, what this species is actually doing, like what it's here for. What's your takeaway on our biological mortality and what we're doing here

in light of your most profound DMT experiences? I would be just guessing and talking shit. Yeah, I don't know. I 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. Be as charitable as possible. Be as nice as possible. Spread as much positivity as possible. That seems to be like a valuable lesson that I get from all those experiences. But again, valuable lesson that I get from all those experiences. But again, we're everything we're doing is based on the biological limitations of our consciousness and our life experiences.

Everything we're doing is based on like who we are and who we think we are and what meaning it has for us that we're here right now. But if you didn't, you weren't burdened down by all these biological limitations, if you weren't burdened by this existential angst and this fear of death and this re this, we have this desire to figure it out, like to have like, oh, this is what's going to happen. We have this like this, this desire to have an answer to almost the unanswerable. What if AI didn't have those? It's not going to have those problems. It's just going to have information. It's just going to have just pure information with no ego, no desire to survive, no greed, no desire to reproduce, no envy. It'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. But 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. Everyone thinks that they are uniquely important. But yet there's all this evidence that you're not. You're a part of this very bizarre thing. But this very bizarre thing,

as it interacts with each other, is very psychedelic. Like 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 what a drug if you just saw the lights going back and forth on a highway and how similar they look to like blood flowing through arteries and you see these things that are getting constructed. It's like these growths on the earth that this being is creating. I'm like, what is this fucking wild species doing? You know, I think we would have a more objective sense of it. I've said this too many times. We'll say it one more time. I think we're here to make things. I think our curiosity is all about innovation. That's the primary function that this species has.

If you looked at it from afar, you'd say, well, what is this thing doing? Oh, it's making better stuff every year. It always does that, no matter what it does. Unless 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 but i think if you looked at like the one thing it's doing it's making better things and it's so wrapped up in buying those better things materialism is so rampant and everybody despite

what you have being more than enough you want more and better and new things. And that fuels consumerism and consumerism fuels more innovation. And it's like baked into the mentality. Sort 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. You know, they're all doing that same thing. And human beings, what we're doing is we're at least working towards buying these things that someone's making. Don't you think human creativity is what makes us uniquely human? On top of all that, our ability to fashion things from nothing, to create music and beauty and art. Look at those scratch marks from 300,000 years ago. And then you go into the painted caves 30,000 years ago.

And then you follow the production of art throughout our species. I feel like that's the kind of thing that AI won't be able to resolve for us. Perhaps. The process of what it means to engage in a creative act and to produce something that the whole species can resonate with. Well, the question would be, why would it want to do that? 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? And why do we want to do that? We do it for each other. Well, you talk about creativity, and I think creativity is the fuel of innovation.

All 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. All those things came out of someone's mind. 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 and that it gets into your mind and it interacts with your being and it talks you into making a coffee pot. I mean, doesn't it make sense? All these things that we have, everything in this room came out of someone's mind. Everything. See, that's where I that we have, everything in this room came out of someone's mind. Everything. See, 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.

I collect different quotes from musicians talking about the creative process. Jamie, I sent you a couple. In the email, there's one from John Frusciante. He's the guitarist for Red Hot Chili Peppers. Like, I love listening to musicians talk about where music comes from and where inspiration comes from. Because I think it's like it's one lens that we can use to think about the creative act in general. Like, it may start with music.

It goes to everything that's here. It goes to the art of a conversation. It goes to comedy. It goes to the way we make children, by the way, which is a very creative act and something that comes naturally to most of us. I 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. Frusciante calls it the force. And then to make something of it, something that can resonate with the community. I think that's something that AI will be able to do and fits and starts.

But I'm not sure that we understand the process. And that's why I think about the process of life and death too. That's why I think that the thing that makes us human is the way that we engage with those invisible forces. Yeah. The way we engage with those invisible forces. Yeah, I mean, that's what's unique about humans for sure on Earth. Jamie, do you have that quote from John? Yeah, but what is the quote?

It's a saying. It's a video. I don't know if you wanted to read it or play it or what. Yeah, you can play it. Yeah. It is expressing itself through our existence. I don't believe that a musical idea starts in your brain. I believe it starts at a place before that that we don't have any direct contact with.

And 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. And you might say that the tree is expressing itself by the way its branches move out, but it's the force that drives nature. The 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, force that created us. Hmm. That makes sense. Yeah, well, most comedians will tell you that jokes come to them like a gift. Like your mind just like a door opens up and like, here it is.

And you're like, oh, wow. Oh, my God, what a great idea. Like these ideas just pop in your head. And sometimes you see things and you describe them and you're like, and the idea will come from that. But sometimes ideas just come to you. They don't even feel like you don't feel responsible for them because it's not like you dug a hole.

Like this is the hole I dug. You do right. You sit down right, right? You do the physical act of summoning the muse, which is how Pressfield talks about it in The War of Art, which is a great way to – because it is that. Whether or not the muse is real, if you treat it as if it's real, it will show up. Like if you show up every day and you write, you say from 9 a.m. to noon every day, I sit in front of my computer and I write. If you do that, the ideas will come. They will come to you.

That's crazy. Well, where are they coming from? Where is that? Yeah, what is that thing? Do you think AI can figure that out? I don't think. I'm not sure if we can figure that out. I don't know.

It's a good question. It's a good question. What is the unique inspiration for ideas and our desire to pursue them? I think that's part of what makes us innovate and that's part of like what you know if you were looking at us from afar you go what is this species doing it's making things and how do you make things without creativity you don't you you wouldn't you would have no desire to so there's the question about AI. It's like can you program that desire to innovate into a thing without all of the primate characteristics that we possess? We seem to have this innate ability to do it in a way that we know will resonate with people.

Have you ever read AI jokes? Yeah. They're not inspired. But they're really young. It's like a joke from a five-year-old. Five-year-old tells you a joke. It's like, my daughter's really young. One of her favorite jokes was, what kind of tree grows in your hand?

I go, I don't know. She goes, a palm tree. And she'd have this big, long punch line. A palm tree. When you're five, it's hilarious. And I thought it was really funny. I'm like, that's a solid joke. But, like, that's a five-year-old joke.

If you try to do that on stage at the mothership on a Saturday night, they'll be like, really? That's kind of my point, man. Yeah. So where do your jokes come from? But AI is young, is what I'm saying. AI is a five-year-old telling jokes. AI is young, is what I'm saying. AI is a five-year-old telling jokes.

When AI becomes a PhD from Princeton, you're going to be dealing with a very different thing. You know, as AI becomes – I just can't imagine that the – whatever it is that makes creativity – because creativity is absolutely inspired by our predecessors as well there's a lot of I could speak to comedy there's a lot of styles of comedy that you go oh that guy's clearly a Richard Pryor fan or that guy's you know he's definitely been influenced by Kinison he's definitely been influenced by Jerry Seinfeld there's something that we carry with us from the people that and you see it in music as well. You know, Stevie Ray Vaughan, clearly influenced by Hendrix. So you see this as well.

But it's just, couldn't it just do that? Couldn't it just absorb all these patterns and then come up with unique patterns that it knows will resonate with people? I think you could probably create some fucking jamming pop songs that are just entirely AI created. And you could use all the best voices because you would just be able to voice swap them. You could have you doing them.

You could be singing the next Lizzo song. It 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. Okay. Well, so this Drake song that I made, this got 4 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 so it might be able to do the same thing that create creativity is capable of accomplishing but it won't be done with the same sort of spirit and soul so it won't be able to resonate with us the same way as say like a janice joplin song there's like there's something to like

colter wall's voice there's certain people that they have a thing in them like you can't you can't fake that whatever that is there's a word for that they call it a frisson have you heard of that no frisson it's the it's the term when you get like goosebumps from from music or when music affects you in such a way like i i'm not saying it's impossible, but I think humans at the moment are much better at producing that effect than AI. Oh, for sure. Do you know who Colter Wall is?

Mm-mm. Jamie, play Kate McKinnon. There's this song. Jamie turned me on to this song. And this dude, he wrote and sang this song when he was 21 years old. And you listen and you go, what the fuck? It's very rare that I'll listen to a song and just go, what the fuck?

But listen to this. Okay. Okay. Raven is a wicked bird His wings are black as sin And he floats outside my prison window Mocking those within 21. 21 21 sounds like a 50 year old rancher

60 even this is the music video that goes along with it. He said he had himself a dark-haired daughter Long green eyes And when she and I didn't meet She was bathing in the creek prettiest girl in the whole damn holler that ain't no lie good luck AI

you ain't gonna make this you never think of this. That's the point. Yeah, it's not going to think. But why is this? This is special to us. So what we are is special to us.

Because we are us. But it'll be the next thing. We have this knack for producing things that we know will resonate. With us. With our species. And what do those things do? They motivate movement. They motivate creativity.

They inspire you. They fuel you. They're a strange drug. It's an audible drug, an audio drug. Great music is certainly a drug. Like you and I got to see Guns N' Roses live Oh man Which is pretty fucking dope Right that was pretty dope in Athens

Have you told that story? I think I did yeah I think I did yeah You came back to the table I went to the bathroom Yeah and you came back and you said oh my god Axl Rose is here Yeah And I was like whoa where is he at? And you're like he's right over. So you had to walk by him.

You know I tried to talk to him, right? Yeah, you tried to say hi. It didn't go so well. I saw him when I left to the bathroom out of the corner of my eye. I saw him with a woman. And I thought, oh, that's Axel. And I went to the bathroom and I'd had a margarita and a glass of wine. Because peer pressure means the drinking over dinner.

Peer pressure is my fault. Look how I'm responsible for you. You're a grown man, sir. I'm a grown man. So I made the choice to have a glass of wine with dinner. And so I was feeling pretty good. And so I saw him at the table. So on the way back, I'm thinking I got I got it. I can't not say hi. And so like, in my mind, I have like a tuxedo and slicked hair and a martini. Asking if, excuse me, Axel, we need to chat. But I think like, it's not impossible that I said Mr. Rose, like, excuse me, Mr. Rose. And the woman there was like just

I mean she didn't even say anything she just waved me away and I thought okay I mean I would do the same thing if I were Axel and so I went back

to the table dejected and let you know that Axel was still sitting there yes and then my dilemma was do I say hi

because I'm like I don't know if he knows me I don't know if he knows who I am I don't want to be an idiot and I went't know if he knows who I am. I don't want to be an idiot. And I'm like, hi, Axel. Like, get the fuck out of here.

I tried that. Especially if it's like my first time meeting Axel Rose. I've been a fan of his for so long. I used to work out to Welcome to the Jungle in the 80s. So that guy's been famous since I was like 21 years old. 22? When did Welcome to the Jungle come out? Appetite for Destruction?

Yeah. When was that? That's 87. Was it? I think it was 87. I remember very clearly being in the gym the first time I heard it. I was lifting weights at this place. And, welcome to the jungle!

I was like, oh my God, what a fucking song. 1987. 1987. Yeah, that makes sense. I 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. When I was eight. So luckily he knew who I was. He actually knew my comedy.

He was asking me questions about some jokes. And I loved this bit. And I was like, oh luckily he knew who I was. He actually knew my comedy. He was asking me questions about some jokes and I loved this bit. And I was like, oh God. Thank God. Because you went in with confidence, by the way. You forget that part, dude. We walked in and like I did the wrong thing. And you walked in with total confidence and you stuck your arm into the booth and said hi. Like you didn't give him a chance not to say hi.

Is that what I did? I was drunk too. I just got lucky he knew who I was. It was full confidence with the Joe Rogan tattoos. You went right into his face and said, hey man,

hey man. And like he stopped for a second because it was odd and he's like, oh, hey man. Yeah. He knew you,

he knew you immediately. What a relief that was. Because you don don't know you don't know if someone fucks with you yeah you know it's weird so it's weird to like assume that this very famous person knows who you are he was super cool he was very cool and he asked what you were doing there yeah and you said i'm here with my family and he said oh this is your family pointing to me and you're like no no, this is Brian. You're very nice. Like he wrote this thing.

He's a writer. And you told him the hypothesis. And Axel, like he gave me the best T-shirt for the book. He's like, okay, cool. So everybody got high and made democracy. Pretty much. That's pretty much what we think, Axel. Pretty much.

And then he invited us to the show, which was super dope. But, you know, what I was getting to is, like, when you hear, like, welcome to the jungle, your whole body goes, wah! It's like a drug. It's a drug that human beings have invented for ourselves. There'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.

It gives you an extra gear. Inspiration through music is very much like a performance enhancing drug. It does something to you. It motivates people to dance. You know, when someone hears a good song, like fuck that. Let's get on the dance floor. It's like music like does something to you your being it interfaces with whatever the fuck you are in some very very special way but

it only does it to us like why would the universe think that that's interesting like does it don't animals dance to human music there must there must be videos of animals dancing to human there's definitely some videos of dogs dancing, but I've always wondered if they've been trained to dance. Why does that make you smile? Because it's cool. It's cool to see dogs dance.

I wish my dog could dance. But they, you know, but animals are so, especially dogs in particular, they're so tuned in to people in some weird way. Like, my dog understands English. Like, I can say,

yeah, I should have brought him today but everyone was at the house he was having fun there's a deer in our backyard there's a lot of drama today there's a deer with a broken leg in my backyard oh man yeah um yeah some poor little buck a little young buck and um i was uh get it was in the morning like seven o'clock in the morning everyone's getting ready to go to school. I made a cup of coffee. I let the dog back in and he hadn't seen it. So he's like chilling on

the back porch and I let him in and I look over there and it looks like a fucking statue. It's a buck just standing there. I mean like 40 feet from me. And I'm like why is there a deer there? And then I close the door. Girls, girls, girls, come here. Check this out. And then i look at the way he's standing oh his back leg's broken he's got uh his shin is fractured his back like where your your shin would be it's bending back the wrong way it's broken

and so we called animal protection and they didn't know what to do and 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 but do you feel bad for this one but that one is like he's first he's very young i would never shoot him he's a little young fella he's just it looks like a yearling like he's just got his horns for the first time and he's like really confused and he's hurt and he can't and he's in my yard because i guess he's like safer there and so the dog finally does find him and when the dog finds him he's usually kind of jumping around him and bouncing and like you want to play like what and the deer

can't run so he's just standing there going hey you gotta eat me like what's going on here and it was it was very interesting but he know like my daughter can say come on man cut the shit get inside and he goes inside or i can say don't go out this door i'm gonna go to the other door okay he just goes to the other door like i can say things like that like he knows i can say not that door dude the other one and he'll start going towards the other door it's very weird i can say you want to watch tv and he goes into the tv room and like he waits for me to plop up on the couch then he hops up next to me like he speaks English or he knows English you just can't talk it's a golden yeah yeah

so 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 you know when the dog pops up they're just recognizing the word walk now i think they understand like speech they understand tone they understand what you mean they understand when you're in trouble they're in trouble did you did you fucking And they run away. They know things. But they don't seem to give a fuck about music. You know?

Dogs don't. They won't calm down if you play calming music? Supposedly they do. And unfortunately now that's in my fucking YouTube algorithm. Because he was freaked out because of the thunderstorms that were happening. He was like, rawr. And so my wife said, oh, there's this music that you can play for the dog and it calms him. He was freaked out because of the thunderstorms that were happening. He was like, rawr. And so my wife said, oh, there's this music that you can play for the dog, and it calms them.

So there's YouTube channels. So now every time I turn on my YouTube app, I get calming dog songs. I don't even know if they work. How does anybody know if they work? Ask your dog. Yeah. He's not going to answer. That's the problem.

But the act of moving the body to music is uniquely human. Yeah. I mean, what other animals dance to music? Let's find that out. Chimpanzees don't? I don't think so. Boy, they're smart as shit, though. Yeah.

They're spooky smart. When you watch them solve puzzles for candy. Mm-hmm. You know they gave chimps money they 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 you know the first thing they did was they gave it to the female chimps

and they had sex with them they like immediately engaged in prostitution where do you find this stuff? Oh, that's old. That's an old study. That's from a long time ago.

I've just been always fascinated by chimpanzees. I mean, they're one of the most bizarre relatives to us that's still around. You've seen Chimp Nation? Yeah. Amazing, right? Like, God, it's so fascinating. Yeah. But I don't think they dance.

Do you think they do? I think they have rhythm. Yeah? Yeah. They move around? There's videos of them doing some ritual. Oh. I think.

Ritual. Some rhythm. So what is this? Look at these break dancing. That's dancing, man. He's just having a good time. That's dancing. Is that what he's doing?

Is there music playing? But is that real? Is that the real music? That seems like that's added after the fact. Yeah, he's doing fast steps. Look how long his arms are. Isn't that crazy? It's just crazy that we come from the same original root.

It branched in a bunch of different ways. Seven million years ago. That's what's fascinating is that they're still here. They're still here in that form, which is the dumbest anti-evolution question ever. If we came from monkeys, why are monkeys still here? It's a good question. Well, why are amoebas still here, sir?

Why is anything still here? Why are we still here sir you know why is anything still why are we still here yeah well but some things can function in the state they are and they don't need to adapt that's why crocodiles are they've been the same forever you know sharks existed before trees hmm sharks predate trees so sharks are so old they've been along for so there I think they're 50 million years older than trees but trees are pretty old. They've been along for so long. I think they're 50 million years older than trees. But trees are pretty old to begin with. Yeah.

I think sharks are somewhere in the neighborhood of like 300 something million years old. And trees are 50 million years less. What is it? Yeah, there it is. Sharks have been swimming our oceans much longer than trees have been swaying in the breeze on land. The birth of trees on Earth is believed to have occurred roughly 370, 390 million years ago.

That makes sharks at least 10 million years older than trees. Oh, so I was off by 40 million. But yeah, older than trees. You missed your calling as an evolutionary biologist. Not really. No, I just like interesting information. Especially about things like that. You know, like sharks. the cleanup crew of the ocean.

How do you manage just this vast, literal sea of life that moves in 3D space? It just moves all over the place, and things are going to die, and what happens to them? Sharks. This massive beast that has to keep moving or it dies and it's so old and it's designed just for killing and eating and it has rows of replaceable teeth and the only bones that it has at all are this massive jawbone and these ridiculous razorarp saws that just slice things in half, and it just roams the ocean looking to consume. Have you ever had a shark encounter?

I've had sharks bite fish off my line. I've never, like, had a shark encounter where it's like, Jesus, there's a shark. No. Have I seen them in the wild? I do not know. I don't think I have. I don't think I've seen a shark like swimming through the water. I've seen a lot of dolphins, a lot of whales. I don't think I've ever had a physical encounter with a shark. Have you dreamed about sharks?

Not really. What are you, a psychologist? Where the fuck is going? The guy's a shrink now. What happened? Where'd regular Brian go? I'm curious about your mind. I dream about wolves. Oh, I'm getting somewhere with this. Yeah, I dream about wolves a lot. Really? Yeah. What do you dream about?

Running from wolves. You're running from wolves? Yeah. Why are wolves chasing you? I think wolves chase people a lot. I think some people got away, and I think that genetic memory gets imparted in some folks. I have a high percentage of Neanderthal DNA.

Do you know that? It's 23 and me. Yeah. 57% more than regular people. Wow. Yeah. So you were chased by lots of wolves. I think ancient people, I 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 like wills wolves have always preyed on human beings it's always been a part of human existence until we eradicated them and now we're bringing them back to me wild like have you guys thought this through? Like there's a reason why we were so scared of them forever. But then we forgot what it's like to be scared of them. Like, oh, well, if they get too many, we'll just kill them again. No, you won't. How do we domesticate them in the first place? You don't domesticate wolves.

How did it happen? You make dogs. Where do dogs come from? Bitch-ass wolves. That's what it is. Bitch-ass wolves that were willing to come near us in the fire. And then we give them a little food and then they, they realize that they could be our friend. They can get food. They don't have to hunt. And then we use them to

protect the outer perimeter and to keep bears out and things like that. And cats away from people and 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. And in a small period of time, every time they had an aggressive fox at all, they killed that fox. And they kept these domesticated foxes. And over time, their ears flopped. Their eyes got bigger.

They became more appealing to us, more submissive. They basically became dogs over a very short period of time. See, we find that fox study. It's very interesting. That's probably what happened with wolves. I 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 can just get near these other things and I could get a little bit of their leftovers. Like if they do really well, like maybe they get a buffalo or something like that. They kill a bison.

That's a large animal. They're not going to be able to eat it all. They're going to leave like a little bit for me. And they're probably not going to eat the bones. And wolves crush bones. And so like maybe they sort of develop this sort of relationship because wolves are very curious of people too and they come near people and they're fascinated by people but the problem is when they want to eat you and that does happen and it's always happened it it's always happened throughout

history in fact in world war, 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. You ever heard about that one? Yeah. Well, because it's trench warfare, right?

So people are getting shot, and when you're getting shot, you're dying in this trench. And sometimes these guys would just get overwhelmed by wolves. Like wolves would find them in there and just tear them apart. So imagine you're in trench warfare in World War I, and you're hearing in the middle of the night people screaming. And you hear, They're just getting torn apart by wolves. They would send out parties, like search parties,

and no one would come back. And then they would go out and they'd find a boot with a human foot in it. And they're like, what the fuck? And they realized, oh my God, these wolves are killing people. And they were in large packs because they were feeding on the bodies from the war. You know, the war back then is just unbelievably brutal. It's very close range. You know, you're not dealing with long distance missiles.

You're dealing with people like literally creeping up on each other and shooting each other with rifles. It's horrible, horrible shit. And they're not that good at killing people. So a lot of times it kills you slow. And so these people are dying in these trenches and getting eaten by wolves and the wolves decide they're a primary food source Now why would I chase caribou and reindeer when I can just eat people? Hmm? This explains your strange dreams. Yeah. Well, I think Human beings have always been afraid of monsters, right? What is that?

Like children that, like Rupert Sheldrake is talking about this. Children that grow up in New York City are not afraid of the things that they probably should be afraid of. You know, they're not afraid of child molesters. They're not afraid of, they don't know what that is, right? But they know what a monster is. Like a monster is in their head. Like kids are scared of the dark. It's because of cats.

Like we used to get eaten by cats all the time. So like a giant part of being an ancient hominid was probably avoiding predation from cats. I mean there's been so many, even eagles. They found evidence of human beings that were killed by eagles. Like that was that big eagle that lived in New Zealand. They think the reason why that thing went extinct, I think it's called the Haast eagle. It was an enormous eagle that they think probably preyed on human beings. Which was like, what a fucked up way to go.

A hand glider comes down and takes you out. It's talons. Like a bird the size of a hand glider comes down and takes you out. It's talons. Like a bird the size of a hand glider. Yeah. So I was looking up the Russian fox experiment. I was finding a bunch of articles about it, like we've talked about before. But then one of them I said said there was a new study, which this is from 2019, that might not counter it specifically, but has a different understanding of what was happening maybe. I 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. Well, let's read this part right here. It says, The Russian farm fox experiment is the best-known experimental study in animal domestication. By subjecting a population of foxes to selection for tameness alone, Dmitri Belyaev generated foxes that possess a suite of characteristics that mimics those found across domesticated species. This domestication syndrome has been a central focus of research into the biological pathways modified during domestication. Here we chart the origins of,

how do you say his name? Baliev, you think? You would know better than me, man. How would you say that name? Beliaev. Beliaev. Foxes in Eastern Canada critically assess the appearance of domestication syndrome traits across animal domesticates. Our results suggest that both the conclusions of the farm fox experiment and the ubiquity of domestication syndrome have been overstated. To understand the process of domestication requires a more comprehensive approach based on essential adaptations to human modified environments. So what they did though, this is interesting, so they're saying there's like more to it than just this study. But what they did do in this study was pretty fascinating.

That's right. So 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. The 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, di-esterous reproductive cycles, and later, shorter and wider faces. reproductive cycles and later shorter and wider faces.

Baal-yev, did I say that right? Baal-yev. Baal-yev. Proposed that the selection of behavior altered the regulation of multiple interconnected systems that produce the traits Darwin described. In 10 generations? Yeah, that's pretty crazy. So in whatever generations from campfire to poodle, campfire to Shibu Inu, from campfire to Chihuahua, we did that. Slowly but surely over time.

But that's, you know, the root of all. I mean, they only found that out over the last few decades. They used to think that dogs were probably the ancestors of, their ancestors were probably wild hominids, wild dogs rather, wild canids. But then they found out no, no. It's not wild canines. It's fucking wolves.

They all came from wolves. All of them. All dogs came from wolves. It was like, what? A pug? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Selective breeding over time created something barbaric, something monster. This is kind of necessary, too, I think, to know this part. It says that it's misunderstood that he found these were like wild foxes when he first got them, and they were not.

Right. They're fur farm foxes. Yeah, that's what they were saying, right? What was the misrepresentation that people think that he'd found? Oh that he walked wild. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. Oh, so they were already bred for furs Yeah purpose bred so they probably already were subject to a certain amount of selective breeding, right I Mean yeah after trying to breed for then you're looking for a specific coat. Yeah, so they probably, yeah, fed them like domesticated deer.

Have you ever seen domesticated deer just eaten out of people's hands? Yeah. There's a weird thing with the domesticated deer world. Do you know this? No. I come here to learn about animals. So this deer right here that's on the table, that is the first deer I ever shot. That's a wild mule deer from Montana.

Yeah, that's from the Missouri breaks. Wild country. I mean, like, that's where you see homesteads out there that are, like, from, you know, the 1700s and 1800s where people just didn't survive. And they had these just old buildings that were falling apart. They're littered out there. There's a bunch of them out there. It's a really fascinating place. But that is a typical wild deer, like a few years old.

He's probably like four years old or something like that. They make deers in these deer farms where they feed them these protein tablets and so like a big deer a really big deer is a 200 inch deer and what that means is the antlers of the deer like there's big bodies that'll be about 300 pounds for like a mule deer a really big one their 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. It's the quickest bone that grows that we're aware of in all of nature is an elk or a stag or even deer. This shit grows so quick. It's just a couple months, and all of sudden this mat they they drop their horns at the uh when you know the end in the during the winter and then these new ones in

the spring just and within months they grow so with these farms they're taking these animals and then giving them these preposterous diets that would just never exist in the wild. And they have a deer with like 350-inch antlers like that. They're just gross. It's just weird. It's weird what they're doing. So they're selectively breeding for genetics, and then on top of that they're feeding them this crazy diet, and then they're letting them loose in these high fence areas

and people shoot them, and they hang them on their wall like a trophy. And almost all hunters have the same reaction. They're like, ugh. They're gross. There's like something gross about it. There's like something about it. But people who are like, look at that, 400-inch deer I shot. People that don't give a fuck, that's what they want.

They want the biggest antlers. So it's a very controversial thing in the wildlife conservation community. And it's also a way that CWD gets spread, unfortunately. How? Because these wild deer come in contact with these deer that have been captive and these deer that are captive may be carrying CWD. And then they put these deer out in the wild, they hop fences, they get out there and then CWD spreads. And it's a real issue, especially with whitetails. And they're seen in mule deer as well. But it's chronic wasting disease is what it is, and it's horrific.

And their saliva gets on plants, and then other animals eat the plants, and they get it. Much like how bison give cattle brucellosis. Cattle farmers have a real problem with wild bison getting onto their range because if the bison contain brucellosis, then all of their flock, they could all have brucellosis and die. This is the thing with CWD, and a lot of it comes out of this captive deer. There's like farms that they it's like that it's a whole business this business of raising these captive deer it's real weird it's very unnatural because you do and then they let them loose like there's these big stupid antlers it's just you know like

if you see an elk a wild elk's antlers, like that is there because they're fighting each other and they're smashing heads. And the bigger the antlers, the more impressive they are for the females and the more they can fight off the males. And there's an evolutionary reason for this. It's just some freak that's been given steroids and a bunch of protein. Yeah. I don't know how we got to that. Me neither. I a bunch of protein. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. I don't know how we got to that. Me neither. I'm trying to figure that out.

Yeah. Well, I just, we're talking about. Domestication. Yeah, domestication and its effects. Yeah. The wolf one is one of the most fascinating ones, now that we know that all dogs come from wolves. Yeah.

It's really interesting to watch how species will adapt over time and then wonder what is happening to us because clearly it's a very similar thing is happening to us yeah and if anything should remind us or in any way if we're similar to any animal in the variety of sizes and shapes like it would be the dogs like human beings vary so widely and that's and we are domesticated we're self-domesticated you know but we're clearly domesticated and that process started a long time ago remember the homo naledi yeah i showed you so what they know about them is they had um canines um like you and me obviously but so in the primate world the canines, like you and me, obviously.

But so in the primate world, the canines are much bigger, obviously, because when you bare your teeth, you're meant to be threatening. Yes. Obviously. So what they realized about Homo naledi is that they had smaller canines. So instead of using them to threaten others, what they realized is that they were such a size that they were using them to smile. Whoa.

So they were smiling. They were the first ones to show their teeth as a nice thing. As a nice thing. They were smiling 300,000 years ago. Wow. Wow. So why wouldn't they have canines? Chimps have canines.

Gorillas have canines. And they kind of use their teeth to smile a little too. Chimps have canines. Gorillas have canines. And they kind of use their teeth to smile a little too. Chimps seem to. They seem like when they're having fun, when they're laughing, like chimps seem to laugh, right? Yeah. Like, ha, ha, ha. And they show their teeth.

And it doesn't seem like they always show their teeth in a threatening way. Hmm. Like, that dude's smiling. For sure that dude's smiling. I mean, come on. Look at him. Looks like a threatening way. Like, that dude's smiling. For sure that dude's smiling. I mean, come on. Look at him. Looks like a school photo. He is 100% smiling.

Yeah. Yeah. It seems like they smile. And they have canines. Yeah, they got canines. They're certainly larger than ours. But it's also like, if you saw that, like, is that a smile a smile i mean i don't know what the fuck that is i'm getting out of there it's ambiguous click on that one with the waist up right above you

right yeah look at that are you i mean jesus christ you imagine seeing that in the wild you'd be like oh my god i'm so fucked that's terrifying that's not a happy keep on dinner i think i don't know about yeah he's ready to fuck you up yeah that's not a happy, fun dinner, I think. I don't know about that. Yeah. He's ready to fuck you up. Yeah. What a crazy thing. The fact that they still exist is we're so fortunate to be able to observe and watch these very human-like patterns that we see in terms of like their social structures and how they manage them and how there is like one leader and how they'll branch off into separate groups they even wage war on each other they fight over territories and food it's so interesting it's so interesting

because they're so like us but then so not like that thing is kind of like that. Show that picture again. It's kind of like us, but God, that thing's terrifying. I mean, look at his face. If he was mad at you, oh my God, that would be so horrible. And their eyes. And some of them have white around the eyes. That was something they showed in the Chimp Nation documentary, which is really interesting too, because he's got animal eyes. I mean, he's terrifying, this one right here. But some of them, they have almost like, you can almost like, you look into their eyes and you see like a motion. Very fascinating species. Have you studied at all the hobbit people from the island of Flores?

The Floresiensis. Yeah. Yeah, that's another strange one, like Homo Naledi. Because it disrupts the narrative about the doubling of the human brain size, as if there's this constantly escalating trend in one direction. Yeah. So 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. Yeah. Yeah. What about the hobbits? Well, it's interesting that they coexisted with humans because they're fairly recent, right? Right. What is the timeline for those?

Definitely when Sapiens was around. Yeah. What's the most recent carbon dating on those Homo florenciensis? I think it's less than 100,000 years. And they think those things had tools. of dispute as to whether or not they were just misformed or deformed human beings there was a lot of dispute as to whether or not this was a unique branch of the human chain but they think it is now and they think they're all they're probably also subject to island dwarfism you know like uh mammals are but for some reason with reptiles it goes the other way what's the age on forensics I was trying to find an updated article this article is from last month yeah so it's this thing okay initial carbon dating of the sediment determined the remains to be 18 000 years old wow which is startlingly young putting the previous

unknown species closer in time to us than Neanderthals. The date was revised in 2016, estimating instead that the Hobbit was 50,000 to 60,000 years old. Interesting. I wonder what changed and wonder what they got out of the first one. The 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 and science writer who's currently working on a book about the hobbit titled Strange Creatures Beyond Count to be published in 2025. That's still pretty recent, though. 50,000 is pretty recent. I wonder why they thought it was 18 and why they changed that.

18 is more magical. It's closer. That's magical. Yeah, that's like, whoa. Well, do you know about the Orang Pendek? Mm-mm. The Orang Pendek is a mythical creature that people have spotted in Vietnam and in some other places of the world.

A rejected name. What's that? They rejected. They were going to use that name first, but they had to reject it. Floresianus? Yeah. I meant flowerianus. Flowerianus? Oops. Oh, boy oh boy yeah you can't say that i wonder why they did that um but 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 it's a tiny hairy little human that is very similar to these hobbit people and you know the speculation like you know from the cryptozoology people is that this thing's still alive in very small populations yeah there's some bullshit videos that show one running across the road. Have you seen that video? It looks fake, right? Yeah. It looks fake. Do you think the Gimlin footage is real? Patterson Gimlin footage? 100% fake. Fake? Yeah. It looks fake. Everything that looks fake is fake. Is it a person in a suit? Yeah. 100%. Yeah? Yeah. Why? It's a guy walking. It's a guy in a suit? Yeah. 100%. Although I did get really high once, and I was convinced that it was really Bigfoot, and I was being an asshole all this time. I was like, oh my God, what if that really is Bigfoot? I'd just be in a dick. Because some of these hardcore Bigfoot believers, that's their footage.

The Patterson, but there's so many problems with that. First of all, Roger Patterson literally got arrested for writing a bad check to pay for the camera that he used to film that. They went there specifically to film it. The guy, Bob Hieronymus, who says he was Bigfoot, when you see him walk, he's this big old gangly cowboy looking dude. When you see him walk, he walks exactly like that bigfoot you think it was him 100 yeah they even have a receipt from a fucking gorilla suit that they bought have you ever seen him walking side by side find a video of bob hieronymus walking side by side with the original patterson footage so they show the Bigfoot walking and then Bob walking,

and you're like, oh. Because he looked like a Bigfoot. The guy was a fucking, you know those dudes, the big old cowboy-looking dudes, big old fucking farm country strong dudes? They look like apish. They're just big old fuckers. And this guy was one of those guys.

And you see him walking, and you see him walking and you see him walking and he walks right, you know, they superimpose it. They put side by side rather. And when they do it, you go, oh yeah, definitely. What a disappointment. Do you want to believe that it's real?

No, I don't want to believe. Did you ever believe it was real? When I was eight, yeah. And when you're nine, you're like, get the fuck out of here. Yeah. But my God, there's people to this day, those hardcore, hardcore Bigfoot people are cult members. They really are.

They decide to shut off a part of their brain that critically looks at information. Aren't there any eyewitnesses who strike you as credible? I was talking to Les Stroud about this. Do you know Les? I was talking to Les once about this, I think. Yeah, Les, he's a very credible guy in terms of survival tactics. He knows a lot about that. But he didn't see one with his own eyes he heard something and he heard noises that sounded chimpanzee like bears make those noises all the time i've seen bears make those i've watched bears make those noises they make them particularly when they're fighting with each other they sound very much like gorillas they're they do that all the time so if you were alone in the woods

and you heard that and you heard smashing and thumping around, you're like, oh, my God, there's a gorilla out there. Oh, my God, there's some kind of a primate out there. There have been people that have spotted things that are very eerily similar to what you would think is a large bipedal ape. The problem is a lot of these places are heavily wooded and populated by bears, and bears walk on two legs all the time. So here, there's Bob, and there's the Bigfoot. Right? I mean, case closed, right?

I never saw that. I mean, look at that dude. Isn't he like what I said, big old country dude? Yeah. I mean, when you see that guy guy walking and you imagine him with a fucking gorilla suit on i mean it doesn't even it doesn't even look good it looks like shit i mean look look at that thing it looks like a guy in a gorilla suit and in my opinion everything that looks fake is fake i've never seen anything that looks fake that's real.

I mean, I could be wrong. Yeah. I don't know what that is. Yeah. But I definitely know that the guy, that there's a whole paper trail of buying a gorilla. Is that what he's saying? That's the suit? I honestly don't know.

I've never seen this video. I was trying to find it side by side. I was having a hard time finding it, and this is the one I picked. Okay, so he's saying that that's what he wore. But that thing does look like it. If you go back to that video, that photo of where he's holding up that suit, that looks pretty fucking similar, man, pretty fucking similar. And all you'd have to do is put that thing on and walk through the woods.

And it's just too convenient. All of it's too convenient 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 it's corny data matters data does matter and there's no real data in terms of um genetics you know there's been a lot of like goofy talk that they found some kind of human DNA in samples of hair. The problem with that is all that DNA has been contaminated. I actually talked to an actual biologist about this. And we did an episode of Joe Rogan questions everything for the Sci-Fi Channel on Bigfoot.

We hung around with Bigfoot hunters. Duncan and I went out with them and looking for Bigfoot and camping with them and everything. And I just, it's people that are just looking for something. You 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. And it's unfortunate because I think at one point in time, it was real.

I think most certainly at one point in time it was real. I think most certainly at one point in time human beings did interact with Gigantopithecus. It was a real animal. You know about that? And Gigantopithecus matches exactly like what people talk about when they talk about Sasquatch. It looks exactly like that. An enormous bipedal hominid that was maybe more than eight feet tall. And they found out about this thing by accident when a guy was looking in an apothecary shop in China. And he found gigantic teeth that were clearly primate teeth.

He said, where did you find these? And they go there and they go to the site. They dig out jaw bones that indicate it was bipedal. And so now they know it's a real thing that existed. And I think they date that to 100,000 years ago. When did they date Gigantopithecus to? Wikipedia says roughly 2 million to 350,000 years ago. 350,000.

I thought it was closer. I thought it was closer to us. That's just what Wikipedia says. I see if there's other disputes or something. Yeah. 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 100 and something thousand years ago. So that would put it with semi-modern looking human beings so the question is right

and then the question is like how long did it survive like just because you find something you find what legacy if you find one that's 200,000 years old doesn't mean that didn't exist a hundred thousand years ago or even 50,000 years ago like when was the last one when did they they die off? And when did humans encounter them? And 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? Well, it drops off in the Pacific Northwest.

Like that's like literally, like goes down Alaska, makes its way down the coast, dense forest, which is a thing like that. So proteins extracted from roughly 1.9 million-year-old tooth of the aptly named Gigantopithecus is a close relative to modern orangutans. So protein comparisons amongst living fossil apes suggest that Gigantopithecus and orangutan forerunners diverge from a common ancestor between 10 and 12 million years ago.

But when did it die off? It says the same thing. It says they hadn't found anything from the late plasticine era. They only have this from the early part of it. Okay, so it said the fossils date from around 2 million to almost 300,000 years ago. The sizes of individual teeth and jaws indicate that it weighed between 200 and 300 kilograms. That's a big fucker. Interesting.

So that was Bigfoot. So 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. And that would be one of them yeah but the actual like patterson footage bigfoot that's horseshit there's just too many hunters out there too many hikers who would have seen something yeah they don't see anything i've talked to many people that have spent like they've spent months in the backwoods i know multiple guys that do like my friend adam green tree from australia every year he comes to america and he'll do uh a remote wilderness elk hunt solo and he he live streams it he puts it like pieces of it on his instagram and he was out there for 28 days.

He did see a grizzly bear a couple years back, which is not supposed to be there in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. But 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. And there's been historical sightings of things that people thought were grizzly bears there. But no Bigfoots. None. Zero. You'd think somebody would get a camera footage shot of it,

like from these trail cams or camera traps or something. I mean, nothing. And you personally never heard or experienced anything? No. Like a Bigfoot thing? Yeah. You don't think I would say that first? That'd be the first thing I would say. Maybe you're holding out, say that first no I've never even seen a wolf I mean I think I did see a wolf once in Alberta but it was very very dark it was like it was getting dark at night and I saw

something run across the road that looked like dog's eyes hmm I thought possibly could be a wolf hmm but they have wolves up there they spot them there all the time. That's not uncommon. The Bigfoot thing is just, it's just one of those legends, you know, like the Yeti. And we know too much about the world.

Can I have some? Yeah, please. We know too much about what's really in the world now to fall for something like that. It's my first coffee in a while. Oh, really? I think so. How long?

At least a year. What? Yeah. Really? This is? At least a year. What? Yeah. Really? This is probably going to be wild. Michael Pollan said that he took three months off of caffeine

and then the first cup of coffee he had was like psychedelic. So cheers. Cheers, man. Cheers to you. Thanks for that. What kind of coffee is it? Black rifle coffee.

How do you feel? I feel crazy. I feel wild, ready to go into a trance. It's been a while, man. I gave it up sometime last year. What made you just want to sip right now? Watching me do it? Know what it is?

Peer pressure, just like I got you a drink. Like in Athens. It was that margarita. Margaritas will do it. Margaritas have been responsible for more bad decision making than probably any other beverage. You don't drink that much,

though, do you? No, no, no, no. I like a couple of drinks every now and then, though. You know, it's one of those things. It's just not good for your health, you know,

and I'm very conscious of my health. I realize that, yeah. It really hit me last year. I got COVID last summer, and i'm very conscious of my health i realized that yeah it really hit me last year i got covered last uh last summer um and i'm not sure what the connection was but just my body felt terrible for like at least at least a month or so and then i couldn't i just couldn't get back to myself and so i quit i quit alcohol um and caffeine coffee for sure uh and i felt a lot i actually felt a lot better, a lot better. So COVID really got you bad.

It got me really bad. I was sick for, I mean, I was in bed for definitely a week or two. And then I had like just persistent kind of malaise for at least a couple months. And that went on through most of last year. So when I stopped. So long COVID, what they call long COVID. That's what it felt like, man. Yeah. Wow. So when I stopped. So long COVID. What they call long COVID. That's what it felt like, man. Yeah. I mean, I never had it diagnosed.

It's a weird term, right? Because it's kind of vague. What does that mean? You know, it's like people get wrecked by the disease and then they don't seem to recover very well and return to their robust self. Why? Why does it get some people? How come some people get sick and they get over it? Can I ask you about your vitamin intake? Yeah, it's pretty poor. I mean, so last summer I started taking a lot more vitamin D and vitamin C and echinacea.

But that's basically it. Yeah, that's not enough. I know. You know, you can take things that cover your bases. Like there's a product called AG1, Athletic Greens. It's nice because you just mix it in water, a little packet, pour it in water, or you get like a scoop of it and put it in water and mix it up. Every day?

Yeah, but it's easy. It doesn't taste bad. It tastes good. But you do need vitamin D, and you should also take vitamin D with vitamin K2. It helps your body absorb, but you should be taking a host of things. You should be taking colloidal minerals. You should be taking essential fatty acids. Like if you want to optimize your, your body's ability to recover and, uh, to be able to perform, you really need to supplement. And supplementation, I think is something that many people have maligned that do not experience it.

When you talk to doctors, all you need is a balanced diet. And those doctors always have pot bellies and they look like shit. If 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. And you really should supplement. And supplementing with vitamin D is critical, especially to avoid colds. You know, that's the speculation about why we get flu and colds in the winter. Oh, it's flu season. Why does flu have a fucking season?

Well, because that's when people are very low in vitamin D. Because there's not going to be – the best way to get vitamin D for sure is sun exposure. Yeah. And vitamin D is a hormone. It's not just a vitamin. It's responsible for a lot of things in the body, including your ability to have a properly functioning immune system. And I think there's some nutty number of people in this country that are deficient in vitamin D. 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? Me? Yeah. You don't have to reveal it. What's it, 20,000 milligrams a day? 20,000? Yeah. Each little tablet is like 5,000. I take four of them a day. Yeah. 20,000? Yeah. Like the, each little tablet is like 5,000. I take four of them a day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I go hard, but I go hard with a lot of things. That's a lot of D. But I also, I'm almost 60 years old. I'm 56 years old and I push my body. I work out really

hard. I work out as hard now as I did when I was 25, you know, And that is possible to do, but you have to do it right. You have to give your body the tools that it needs to recover. But 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. You were telling me that in Athens too. It makes sense. Some sort of strength training. Strength training is critical. ability to recover from illness. You were telling me that in Athens too. It makes sense that like some, some sort of strength training. Strength training is critical. Like, first 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 dense and less dense bones. And it's just's just for your ability to do things and to be mobile. You have to force your body to lift heavy things. And I don't mean really heavy. Like the heaviest thing I lift is my body weight. The second heaviest thing I lift is 70 pounds. You don't do heavy weights? No.

Huh. No, I don't do heavy weights at all. I do kettlebells. So what I do is like cleans and presses and swings and windmills. And I do all these things that make my whole body work as one unit. Like I don't do anything that's an isolation exercise. Everything I do is my – so 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. They'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, you know, tricep extensions. Those are good for isolating and developing specific muscles, but I don't do any of that stuff. Everything I do is just, I use my whole body. How many times a week? I work out almost every day. Do something. I do something almost every day. I got to step it up. Well, it's not hard to do.

It really isn't. You just have to get in the habit of doing it. Like if you just get in the habit of doing 100 push-ups and 100 bodyweight squats every day, that'll change your fucking life. And it takes 15 minutes. It does not take long. You can do 100 push-ups in 15 minutes. I do 100 push-ups and 100 bodyweight squats in 15 minutes. I might have to work up to that. You 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 body weight squats, 20 push-ups, 20 body weight squats. Then I catch my breath, have something to drink. And then when my heart rate gets down a little bit, I'm ready to go again. I do another 20, another 20, another 20, down a little bit. I'm ready to go again. I do another 20, another 20, another 20, another 20. So now I'm in two, you know, so now I just need one more. And then I do my last 20 and my last body weight squat. It's a hundred. Okay. It's not hard to do. I can do it, man. You just say, this is what I do every day. And maybe it'll take you a half hour, but it's a nice little workout. It's simple. You can do it anywhere. I can do it on the road. I can do it anywhere. It doesn't cover all of your bases, but it's a really good base to start from.

And then once you start doing something like that, then you can incorporate other things. Then you can incorporate lunges with, like, maybe dumbbells or chin-ups or things along those lines, dips. Like, you could most certainly get a really good workout every day with just your body weight. There's so many things you could do. And 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. Super easy to do. Okay. Yeah.

I'm on board. Yeah. But resistance training is very important. Yeah. I'm on board. Yeah. But, but resistance training is very important. It's really important as you age. What about cardio though? Cause that's the one thing I don't have trouble with. I've been doing cardio in the mornings and getting lots of sunshine. Cardio is great. That's kind of that. That's how I feel a lot better. So when I, when I got sick last summer, that's when I, I needed to move a lot more. Plus I was sitting at the desk too much, you know, typing and writing and stuff. Oh, yeah. So that my back was all out of whack.

I've been going to a chiropractor. I went for months to a chiropractor. And then I've been sleeping a lot more and just being more mobile, more active. I mean, there were days I would sit down to research and write. I could go for hours at a time and, like like in the aggregate, maybe 15 hours a day, like when I was trying to finish the book. And that, that caught up to me bad, man. Makes sense. So I pulled my back out a couple of times trying to lift the girls. That's, that's when

I, that's when I realized I was like grossly out of shape. Do you use an ergonomic chair when you sit? Uh, no. You should use one of these. Get one of these fuckers. Yeah. These things are amazing. Yeah. I mean, I'm sitting in this thing three hours every day.

Yeah. And I used to have, like, a regular office chair. And after every podcast, my back would be like, oh, it hurt. But this forces you to have correct posture. I've noticed. It's not very – it wasn't comfortable at first. It's a little odd. But overall, it'll be more comfortable if you get used to this.

Like, I have the exact same chair at my home desk when I write. Same chair. That lower back support. Mm-hmm. That's cool. And it also, it's just like the way, it doesn't allow you to kind of like slump in. That's what I was doing. I was slumping over the computer like this, and my spine was all out of whack.

I 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. And just this head down in a bad office chair, some shitty chair, I would get like, my neck would hurt. And that's when I knew I had to stop. Sometimes I'd try to keep writing, but my neck would be irritated. I'm like, I got to stop. But I don't get any of that anymore with this. These are, what are they called? Kapiscos. And the, it used to be, the company used to call, be called Fully, but I think they sold to another company now. These are the shit. I've tried everything. I've tried the

ones where you're on your knees. Yeah. You know, when, when you're, it's not really a chair. It's like you're, you're all your weight is sitting on your knees. Those are pretty good. Those are pretty good. I used to have one of those at the house. Some people like a balance ball. They sit on one of those BOSU balls. Yeah, that was recommended too. Those are good because it's the same principle. But then you have to watch your posture the whole time. Yeah, but that's the idea.

What posture is essentially is a constant static exercise because you really want to just do this. And I used to have terrible posture. I'm much better at it now, but it's because I've had back problems, you know, so just like force yourself to like stay in this. This is how your body's supposed to be. Yeah. It's very unnatural though. It is. At least for me. But that's also like why I wonder, like, why did those animals, those ancient hominids, why did they choose to stand up? those ancient hominids, why did they choose to stand up?

Like what facilitated that, you know? You all right? Yeah, I'm okay. You okay with the coffee? I see why you're about to trip balls back there, buddy. I had a moment there. I do feel it. We were talking about this before, but the reason why I brought up kundalini yoga and I was going to bring up holotropic breathing,

there's just, there are some methods that people use. Yeah. And I'm, I'm saying this as someone who hasn't, I've done some breathing exercises that did create a very bizarre state and breathing exercises. I do have some experience, but I've never done the holotropic breathing where they, they have these, you know, like real rituals where they do holotropic breathing and people have what they describe as very psychedelic experiences. That was Stan Groff after some of his LSD experiences. I 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 just but but through an external mechanism of lying in the water that's we have on here have you seen the one that we have here yeah we have one right here yeah yeah

yeah i'll give it a try does it work oh yeah yeah it yeah. Yeah, it's pretty wild. It's really interesting. I used to have one in my house, but my wife got weirded out by it. People get weirded out when they come over. They're like, what the fuck is in your basement? Is that a freezer? I'm like, no. It's a body-shaped freezer. You keep your bodies in your freezer? No, it's a – but it's even weirder.

Like, you got a tank that you float in your basement? Like, yeah. You would, too, if you did it. Once you do it, you go, oh, my God, this is amazing. Have you had out-of-body experiences? In there? Yeah. Well, it's essentially the idea that Lily came up with,

and he had a bunch of different iterations of it. The 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. And the water was the same temperature of his skin. And so through this method, he was able to relieve himself of most external stimulation. Because the external stimulations 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. That's all sensory input. And in the absence of any sensory input, Lilly's suspicion was that you could achieve psychedelic states. And so if you could free the mind. And so he did a bunch of different versions of it. And so if you could free the mind.

And so he did a bunch of different versions of it. And then eventually he figured out that if you just added a ton of salt to the water and you used what is like waterbed heaters. So 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 there the water becomes impossible to different you can't tell the difference to where the air is in 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 and you don't see anything you don't hear anything you're half your face is underwater so your ears are underwater a lot of people put like ear plugs in i generally don't but then half your body like it's like above the surface and you're just lying there floating and it's very relaxing it's a great way for your body to absorb epsom salts you get magnesium through that you know like when people take epsom salts when they're sore it's magnesium you're taking magnesium and you're just taking it's magnesium. You're taking magnesium and you're just

taking it through your skin. I'm taking notes, man. Yeah. I'm going to incorporate all this. But these are all ways that people have, oh Jesus,

I almost got the book but didn't. Isn't that amazing? Look, that's amazing. It's pretty good. Like it literally cut a line.

That's a crazy line. Check that Jimmy thing. I'm sorry. So 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? So you're a friend who doesn't believe, like maybe there were some other options that they were also doing when you think about these rituals right uh yeah that's a possibility i mean we know there were there were cave techniques um so i mean it's not just it's not just poppy pop and gilly there are other i'm going to clean the coffee at the same time thank you um there were other scholars

too who just aren't aren't big fans of the psychedelic hypothesis for any number of reasons. Also, it's very unpopular until recently to even suggest anything about psychedelics. I mean, think about all the different people that their careers suffered because they did bring up psychedelics. That's who I write about in the book. Yeah, it's Professor Ruck, who's 88 years old. He's still at Boston university. He was at Boston university in the late seventies when they unleashed that hypothesis and it, it really impacted his career in the eighties and nineties and beyond. So like that's, you know, that, that people are aware of that. They're aware of not just, I was aware of that. Yeah, for sure. That's, I mean, it's at least part of the

reason why I haven't tried psychedelics. Yeah. I wasn't personally called to that experience. Well, it's also, you know, from your perspective, if you were a guy who did psychedelics and then you're reporting on psychedelics, like, oh, this is confirmation bias. This guy wants to believe this. wants to believe this. But instead, you know, since you haven't, it's probably better for the overall, you know, acceptance of your research that you're looking at it purely from an academic perspective. You're just looking at fact-based, evidence-based, historically based. I'm trying to find the data. Like we were talking about. I think, yeah, my experience is meaningless compared to all that. You 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. that you never experienced it before.

But 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. Like when you get there, you're like, oh, I've been here before. It seems familiar. Oh, 100%.

Like the first time I did it, I was like, oh my God. It's so mind blowing, but also so familiar that you think oh I've been here before and I think you're there all the time I think you probably go there to some extent every night you know when you're dreaming yeah and we don't know we don't specifically know like we do know um because of uh Rick Strassman work, Strassman who wrote DMT, the spirit molecule, and did the first FDA approved studies that they did with IV slow drip DMT experiences. And 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, that there's some really profound work that's being done, that they're doing these studies where they're doing the same sort of technique. They're doing it for like three hours. And that Imperial, is that what it is? Yeah, it's an Imperial. Yeah. Do you know more about it? You can tell us. Yes. It's long. I'm not sure if it's that long. I think it's 30 minutes. Oh. But there's another team in Basel in Switzerland that's also experimenting with Infuse.

I think it's like 90 minutes. And interestingly, this is somewhat breaking news, there's a new study happening in the U.S. 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, which is really cool. Actually, Jamie, there should be a press release about it, which came out earlier this year. There's a team there being headed by a guy named John Dean, Dr. John Dean. He's talked with Rick, by the way, about his research. And they recently got some funding to be the first U.S. site to host these extended state infusions. And to really try to get in the route. Are you interested?

Yeah, sign me up. Well, I imagine it will eventually become something like ketamine therapy. You know, one of my friends, Neil Brennan, who's suffered from depression in his life, hilarious comedian. He went to, I guess it's a psychiatrist. I don't know who does these things, but he went to this place where they give you an IV ketamine drip and he's like, okay, it's probably going to be, you know, just relaxing. He goes, oh, no, no, no. You 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 and very, very psychedelic. And some people, it helps them alleviate depression hmm yeah but it's also

like super abused recreationally especially around here there's because there's a lot of people that get prescribed ketamine for depression so they have like these nasal pumps of ketamine see people see people at night we had someone in the club that went into a k-hole no way yeah yeah yeah someone in the audience the husband was like k-hole no way yeah yeah yeah someone in the audience the husband was like she did too much ketamine just like at a comedy club because you're you're spraying this stuff up your nose and you know no one's stopping you from doing it 10 times that seems irresponsible yeah that's what people do i know but this is this is drunk that's my concern with with some of these drugs.

Right. That is a legitimate concern, but also that is a concern with food. You can't regulate people's food consumption just because people get overweight. You've got to let people figure it out, and you've got to give them the information and the tools that they need to make good choices. And the only way you do that is if it's legal and studied and people understand, you know, what is the correct dose? Like what is the correct thing? What's the best way to do it that's the most beneficial and causes the least harm and treats it with the most respect? Because 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 you're about to embark on yeah this this journey that you're about to go on and um related to this there was a a place that i had initially purchased before i put the mothership at the ritz uh before i bought the r, I was under contract to buy this one building that was owned by a cult. And there's a documentary about the cult. It's called Holy Hell. And it's about this guy who was a hypnotist and also a gay porn star who started a cult in California and then moved it out to Austin. And this guy would do this thing with these people where he would call it the knowing. It's a crazy documentary

because like all cult documentaries, in the beginning, it looks awesome. In the beginning, it's like, oh, they figured it out. This is the solution to what ails us. The modern society where people are disconnected, there's no sense of community. These people are splashing around the water together. They're going on hikes together. They're doing yoga together. They're eating together. They're singing together. God, it looks amazing. Amazing.

And he had this thing that he would do. It 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 forever, some people would be very angry. He's like, you're not ready. Because he was just a con man. 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. And it worked. That's what's crazy.

When he did it these people and obviously these people are deeply committed right they're cult members they're they've bought in hook line sinker and he's a hypnotist so he's doing hypnotic therapy on these people and when he does it to them you see them like like and 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 now they're lost and 50 years old just trying to find their way in the world and they were just young people

or trying to find a way, they still talk about that experience being one of the most impactful, profound moments of their life. And it was bullshit. But was it? It clearly wasn't bullshit. I mean, he didn't really have magic powers, but he did have the power of suggestion.

He did understand hypnosis. And because they believed in him so much, they really did have this experience so what is it about this trick this placebo effect this this this thing that you can hit this switch 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. That'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, how it's released or not. And I think part of that interest in that research is really trying to figure out the endogenous. That's sort of the holy grail of DMT research. So 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. I think that that's part of his interest is trying to figure out if he can endogenously identify the presence within these states of mind. So whether it's, you know, someone in deep meditation or in

dreaming or some other, you know, altered experience, I think that part of the really interesting part about the research there is trying to isolate exactly how that gets triggered. Because if we're sitting on this incredibly potent chemical and we don't know how to release or to control it, it's something that deserves a little more attention, I think. For sure. But the Kundalini people think that you can achieve that state through Kundalini. So that needs to be studied then. This is coming from people that I know that have done both. But my question is, one 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.

And McKenna talked about this. And in that dream, you'll smoke DMT and you'll have a DMT trip. It's almost like a doorway gets opened up. I've had dreams like that. Have you? Yeah. What were they like? Yeah.

Yeah, because I set up this boundary in my real life. It hasn't happened often, but I've had a couple dreams where I've imbibed the potion. And it's very strange, actually, man. I've imbibed the potion and, uh, it's very strange actually, man. Um, I don't have, I don't have visions there. There, there isn't a breakthrough experience, but there's this sense of like overwhelming calm and serenity. And so I'd, I never felt like I was hallucinating things that weren't there. Maybe I got the wrong potion, but when I've had these experiences in the dream world, it's like the dream world wraps itself around me in a cocoon. And I have this ability just to also lucid, lucid dream of this very rich dream life. Have you always been able to lucid dream? Yeah. Since I was a, since I was a kid. Interesting. Yeah. That's another thing that you would think that

I would have practiced. Like, it seems like there's actual strategies to lucid dream. Right. And it seems like it's fun. But why have I not looked into it at all? You know, I think about that with like holotropic breathing. And I think about that with many. McKenna talked about that too, which is very funny. He 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 um one monk who had uh practiced a city of levitation and one of the cities yeah and he had practiced this for like 10 10 years and uh the buddha came to town and he said, I have practiced the city of levitation. I can walk on water. And the Buddha was like, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel. And the idea is like, yeah, you probably get there endogenously, but why would you when mushrooms are everywhere? That was McKenna's take on it. Like, yeah, okay. Maybe you can get there through yoga or whatever, but you can definitely get there through DMT or ayahuasca. If you understand the dosing, like you mentioned, if you understand how to grow them,

how to use them properly. And I think that's kind of what we're missing from the ancient past. And so it's kind of funny. I've had all these weird conversations over the past three years about, like, the application of the ancient ritual to today. And, you know, my feelings on psychedelics have changed quite a bit over the past three years. And what I've realized, amongst other things, is that it's less about the drug. And I think it's more about everything you just described. It's less about the drug. And I think it's more about everything you just described. It's more about the ritual. It's more about the ceremony. The fact that these drugs are organic and they've been found on the planet and their use on every inhabited continent has been cataloged is something worth reflecting on. So they're there. You can't ignore them.

But throughout the long arc of history, there have been practices and protocols around their use, which typically obtained within small communities, small, tight-knit communities where people took care of each other, where people knew how to grow and dose these things. And I think that one of the things I talk about in the book is the secret to pharmacology is postology, and dose these things. And I think that one of the things I talk about in the book is this,

the secret to pharmacology is posology. The notion that it's all about the dosing. And it's all about the ritual around which this experience is taking place. And so like when you read Eleusis, for example, remember we went to, you got to see Eleusis in person. Like if 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. 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. Yeah. And I think that that's something we're just we're just missing today, at least at least in the West. I don't think we have that kind of sacred container. Well, it's illegal.

That's a big part of it. And, you know, there's a lot of ignorance as to like what these things are and what the experience actually is. And I absolutely agree that ceremony is important and set and setting. It's very, very important. Having the proper mindset, making sure that you haven't eaten anything before you've done it. But 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 and you'll be like how is this

possible how is it possible that this is literally 15 seconds away like you take three giant hits and you're gone and you exist in this realm that it's unimaginable that and it's you there it's not you're seeing things that aren't there it's you're there you're there in this thing because it's you're not just seeing things you're experiencing them you're you're it's like they're working on your brain it's very weird whatever it is like you like you can sometimes see them like moving around. They're like mechanics, like guys with screwdrivers and shit, like fucking around with your head.

It really is very weird. It's a very weird experience. And unfortunately, it's illegal. And it's crazy because fentanyl isn't. You know, it's like you could buy opiates at a pharmacy. You know, it's like you could buy opiates at a pharmacy. You can't experience something that is probably the root of a lot of religious experiences, if not most of them. And 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.

What was that that he vetoed? Yeah, over the weekend. Yeah. Why? Why in this day and age? Why? Why less freedoms for people? That seems so stupid. His written response was that there was an absence of therapeutic guidelines and that if they were formulated and then published, I think he would have reviewed the bill differently. Well, that's fair. Yeah, that's what it said exactly. That's actually fair.

That's fair. But I think the proper solution would be to come up with guidelines. Right. California 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. That's actually very good. That's better than just, okay, so I take back what I said. It wasn't that it was stupid. 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. That's actually fair, but that means that they should just get together and put together some guidelines. And the problem is in order to find out what the proper dosage is, you have to run studies and they have to be approved and they have to be, you know, it has to be legit. But they should do that. And if they do do that, they should pass those things. And, and also I think it was important that he said, uh, to keep people like, what was the specific language that they used about rules about, can you hold it up again? Yeah.

What is, is actually what we're talking talking about with prevent against exploitation during guided treatments. The guru thing that we're talking about. And the cult thing. It's a big deal, man. It is a big deal. Because you're very, I mean, not that I know, but one, I mean, one is very vulnerable in that position. And I think that I always look back to the way psychedelics were spoken about in the 50s and 60s, right? One of these famous lines is about psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers.

And so you just make bare the unconscious, right? And to someone who hasn't done a lot of depth work into the unconscious and those processes, it can be very traumatic, man. And screening for psychosis. That's another very good point about his rejection of it because that's an issue. It's a giant issue. And people that struggle with normal consciousness really shouldn't be fucking around with these things.

You talked about this with cannabis, by the way. A hundred percent. Yeah. That's Alex Berenson's book. And it's also me personally having experienced it with multiple people. I've seen multiple people over the time that lost their fucking minds. And one thing a lot of them had in common was their heavy pot smokers. And including some, one friend of mine who lost his mind and came back, he quit weed. And he was

like, dude, I thought the fucking FBI was following me in the sky with drones. And like, I was freaking the fuck, and there's no reason for him to be followed. It's not like he's a criminal or even a bad guy or even a, even a fucking person of note, just a guy who is freaking out because he was smoking too much weed, and it was literally making him psychotic. Or at least schizophrenic. Like he was hearing voices. Stopped smoking weed. Came back to normal. So I think there's certain people, but it's just like everything.

There's certain drugs that people cannot take. Certain foods people cannot eat. There's certain people have allergies. take, certain foods people cannot eat. There's certain people have allergies. They have sensitivities to things. We vary biologically so much. Like the idea that everyone should do a certain thing is kind of crazy because, you know, there's people that are allergic to red meat. A friend of mine got bit by a tick, the Lone Star tick. It gives you something called bilirubin.

Oh, no, not bilirubin. Alphagal. Alphagal. And it makes you allergic to red meat. And it's fairly common. Happens a lot. It's a tick bite. And for him, it was like a whole year.

For a whole year, he was allergic to red meat. Weird. So it's like you can't tell people, like, everyone should do ayahuasca. No, no, no, no, no, no. Some people shouldn't do anything. Ever. Yeah. Some people should take whatever medication their psychiatrist has given them that's keeping them from fucking jumping off a bridge.

Right. That's another thing. Yeah. Contraindications and people on medication. It's very, very complicated, man. Oh, sure. Especially people on medications. I know people that suffer from anxiety and they're on anti-anxiety medication.

They would like to try psychedelics, but they cannot while they're on that medication. So there's this like weird little balancing act, what to do. Yeah, it's a big deal. There have been a lot of studies on MDMA and psilocybin over the past 20 years. Less clinical studies on some of the other things, obviously. less clinical studies on some of the other things, obviously. And I think that as governments engage, we'll see policies develop that, you know, really try and account for all that safety, you know, knowledge around dosing and therapeutic guidelines, ethical considerations.

And I think that's all very, very important, man. It 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 is like, what's the effective dose for a person who weighs 140 pounds versus is it different? Does it vary? You know, I don't think it varies with some. I 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. Psilocybin is, I think. Is it? Yeah, but not DMT. Is that what it is? I think so. Yeah, okay.

So that's weird, right? Like why isn't DMT specific to your body weight? Like why wouldn't a dose for a 500-pound man be, you know, way too much for you? But we have to know. We have to find the only way to know that is to study it and to get accurate research and data that's on the on the medicinal and therapeutic front and but i do think there's lots of other good work um around transcendence and consciousness studies and psychedelics like outside the medicinal realm and this is that that's kind of

you know that was my interest in writing and writing the book was trying to to suss out like the societal implications of this the the historical implications of this. Well, if it really was psychedelic rituals that led to the birth of democracy, that seems pretty important. We should be looking at that. Doesn't it kind of make sense, though? Who else is going to say, you know what, everybody should have a say? You'd have to be tripping. You'd have to be tripping.

If you were like the whole world was essentially run by dictators back then, why would anybody vary from that strategy? Because it seems like that's the default mode of people who don't do psychedelics. I would imagine about all the world leaders that are currently involved in horrific things all across the globe, how many of them are doing psychedelics? Probably zero. Probably zero. And this idea that psychedelics could fix the world, I wouldn't say it that way, but maybe. It would have a profound impact on just the consensus like the general population, just most people that have done them, what the way it changed the way they see things. And that alone would change the way they think and behave and vote and what they accept and don't accept from their leaders. What they accept and don't accept, like the dangers and the harms of censorship and propaganda they would be much more aware of that

oh you're like literally like creating mind viruses and shaping the way people think to benefit your own good yeah I think I mean but that's all the more reason to I think to try and study the way that we engage these things in the past

and so since the book came out I mean mean, there was this, you know, there was all this pandemic space that opened up. And so I was on Zooms a lot with different people. And one of the projects that came from the book, which I'm pretty proud of, is this guy, Andrew Ko, I mentioned in the book quite a bit. He's an archaeochemist. He was based at MIT when I was writing the book, and 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. It's a really cool science.

You also need to be a good classicist to do this. You need to be able to read the ancient languages and compare them against the chemical data that's coming up. You need to know ethnobotany. It's, you know, it also helps if you can build out these sort of like paleoecological habitat maps, you know, what was growing where and when and why. So like it's kind of this mix of the art and the science. And he was one of the very few people doing this.

And over the past couple of 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. And they've offered him the opportunity to continue studying this as part of the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program, which is really cool. That's very cool. There are professionals in the world who exist, amongst 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. Like this wasn't a field before. And 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. That's very cool. And can I ask you this? How many vessels have they found that contained ergot?

And have they found anything other than ergot that may be psychoactive? Throughout antiquity, yeah, we found all kinds of things. The only positive ergot finds were the ones from Pontos. And how many different vessels did they discover that contained it? So to the best of my knowledge, they found around 10 miniature cups. And for some reason, they only tested one. So only one came up positive for that ergot, in addition to the beer sediment. So it was ergot mixed with beer.

And this was all done archaeobotanically, so there was no chemical analysis. This was them using scanning electron microscope and optical microscopy to look in and find that. And so in addition to the cups, the ergot also popped up in a tooth, in a jawbone that was also discovered on site, which adds credence to the hypothesis that there was intentional consumption because within this little domestic chapel where those vessels were found, what they found were two mills for either grinding wheat or maybe even fashioning a beer, and they didn't find any ergot in the mills. So 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, I mean, really led the archaeologists to believe that there was something strong there. But I haven't seen an ergot find quite like that anywhere else. Do they know of any way that they would cultivate this ergot? Is there some sort of a theory as to how they, because ergot's a fungus, right? And they know it grows on wheat, right? Yeah, it's more common on rye, but it happens across the cereal grains. And as far as we know, it's been happening as long as we've had agriculture, which is at least 12,000 years.

So the big question is, is what spawned that revolution, the agricultural revolution? Was it to start baking bread or to start brewing beer? It's actually a pretty good debate that goes back to the 1950s between Sauer and Braidwood, these two professors. Did we first settle down into a settled life and start growing grain to make bread or to brew beer? And 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. And if you're brewing, then it's foreseeable, at the very least, that ergot would pop up on that agriculture. Now, does it go back 12,000 years? We don't know. We don't even know if brewing goes back that far.

I think the oldest evidence for beers are at places like Godin Tepe, which is like 3500 BC. And we have some evidence for some kind of brewing at Gobekli Tepe, for 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. So we know that grain goes back a long time. The question is, how far back does the ergot go with it? And when did we discover that ergot had these other capacities? Because it's not a very pleasant experience. I mean, even to this day, if you're brewing beer, you want to avoid ergot for lots of reasons. Well, people have died from ergot poisoning, right?

Yeah. There was a whole village in France that accidentally got ergot poisoned. Yeah, the Pont des Sprees. Yeah. And there was an island, Alicuri. That's a great one. There's a great Vice article about that, about the ergot poisonings and people seeing witches and people seeing all that. Yeah.

And people seeing witches and people seeing all that. Yeah. What a weird fucking thing that some fungus that grows on your food causes you to wildly hallucinate and think you're losing your mind. And it might have been responsible for the Salem witch trials. Hmm. Yeah. It's possible. Yeah, they think that.

That's one of the speculations. Yeah. Makes sense. There was late frost, apparently, or early frost, rather, which apparently contributes to the growth of ergot on rye. The rye wolves. You know they're called the rye wolves, by the way? The rye wolves?

The rye wolves. Yeah, they were thought to be. There's a mythology around where the ergot comes from. And in German, there's a lot of different words for it they call it like after corn and totenkorn like death kernel and the mad the mad kernel and they think that it was

the mad wolves running through the fields leaving behind this these hallucinatory fungi that's how much they were scared of wolves. They made wolves responsible for tripping, too. Well, I imagine back then, if you were paranoid and tripping, you would really think about wolves.

I mean, back then, that was a real primary concern. If you went on a hike and you're by yourself and all you had is like a single shot musket we're gonna go down another wolves rabbit hole yeah um did they have the ability when when did they have the ability to recognize what ergot was i wonder like when did they recognize that oh it's this particular part of the grain that's giving us an issue, this thing that's on the grain. I mean, we figured out ergotism, I mean, at least in the Middle Ages. I'm not sure how much further than that. But throughout the Middle Ages, there were lots of bouts of ergotism.

But were there bouts of people using it recreationally? Not that we know of. It was usually accidental. That's why it's such a strange fungus and why the history of the chemical synthesis of LSD is so strange because, you know, Hoffman famously was not looking for LSD. Right. He was working in obstetrics and gynecology. He was looking for something to induce labor. Yeah.

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. It was, I mean, it's toxic, dangerous stuff. Yeah. And if it poisons your whole village, everybody starts freaking out. Do we have any artwork or anything else that would indicate that there was possibly mushroom consumption? I know that exists in some ancient religious artworks. There's depictions of mushrooms. Is there any of that from any of the ancient Greek periods? I never really saw convincing evidence for mushrooms among the ancient Greeks. But there are, I mean, there's like Neolithic evidence for mushrooms, both in North Africa and then also in Siberia.

There's the famous pictographs, the mushroom pictographs, the pegtimel. Where's that? In Siberia, the pegtimel pictographs, the Peg T-Mail. Where's that? In Siberia, the Peg T-Mail pictographs. I wrote an article about this. How old are these? The 1500 BC. I wrote an article for Big Think that tracks some of the better data that we have across time for this stuff.

I can't wait to see that. Got something? Yeah, he found it. Interesting. Oh, so they have a mushroom over their head. Yeah, that's kind of wild. Oh. And they look at them.

They look like they're tripping balls. That's wild. And there's mushrooms on the ground there look at that animals and the mushrooms i'm sure we i think we talked about this before mckenna's stoned ape theory which is very fascinating that that picture is crazy though so that's that's from siberia wow very interesting that those people from thousands of years ago made those drawings of a human figure with a mushroom above its head. They're old, too. I think it's Bronze Age. I mean, they're pretty old. There's an older one in North Africa. It's called Tassili Nager.

So Tassili and then N apostrophe A J-A-J-J-E-R. That one's even older. It could be Neolithic. So we're talking several thousands of years, even before the Pegtymel. It's this bee-headed wizard priest. It's one of the most famous images. This is probably it, but I don't...

That's it. I guess it's on the cape right there. Yeah, that's one of the more famous ones. Wow. Look how cool that looks. So that was found in a painted gallery there. And he's got handfuls of mushrooms. Yeah, and that's...

Imagine tripping and seeing that guy. Maybe he's there for you. But the crazy thing is that image especially the cleaned up version of it it really does look psychedelic like the the geometric patterns it's one of the things that you do see in the psychedelic states is these interconnected geometric patterns that are moving they're always like in motion like this yeah you would definitely could you definitely could see something like that hmm hmm elsewhere in the Badlands is a rock painting of mushroom men running in ecstasy amidst geometric shapes where's that one what's that I don't know I see

if I can yeah see if you can find that one. Wow. All right. The Tseili mushroom shaman. So that's 6,000 to 9,000 BC. Wow. Fucking cool. That's one of the oldest ones. Well, we know that psilocybin existed back then, and we know that people experimented with food. They tried things to see if they're edible.

Again, that was the basis of McKenna's theory. It was that ancient hominids flipped over cow patties? Yeah. When 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. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's elsewhere in the same region. Look at that. That's wild.

That's pretty cool. They're just running, tripping. They look like they're tripping region. Look at that. That's wild. That's pretty cool. They're just running, tripping. They look like they're tripping, too. Look at their heads. And they look like they're in an ecstatic state, and they're all holding mushrooms. Wow. So there was a long debate about the relationship between these kinds of images and shamanism and the ritual consumption of psychedelics, like among like rock shelters and cave art.

And Graham, Graham Hancock wrote a lot about this. And it's my favorite book of his. It's called Supernatural. Yeah. Yeah. He looks at all the different cave paintings going back 30, 40,000 years. And so there was always a long debate about whether or not there were, there was actually some kind of relationship between those painted images, why they were left behind by the priest class of the time, and kind of like what engendered them.

And so it's funny, just after the book came out in the fall, I think it was of 2020, there was a discovery in California related to rock art. in California related to rock art. And it was hailed as the first unambiguous evidence for the consumption of psychedelics in connection with rock art. It's called the Pinwheel Cave. And it got so much press that you can find it pretty easily. I think Nat Geo covered it.

It was headlines for weeks. It's called the Pinwheel Cave. There you go. It's called that because of the the image that's painted in red ochre on the ceiling of the cave you can see him looking right there that's that's it's thought to be the unfurling flower of the datura uh which is this very very potent very visionary flower in the nightshade family datura datura is a weird one yeah mckenna talked about datura and about how he to stop 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 that it was it was so bizarrely transformative in terms of like the way it interfaced with reality, that it was just too strange. Like you 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. This, again, this is why the history matters. Like we think, you know, a lot of the focus over recent years

has been on the medicinal and therapeutic value of psychedelics. And to the extent they can relieve suffering, I understand the need for research and the need to assess safety, right? When you look into history, yeah, but there are other ways of using Datura that seem to have survived in the pinwheel. So that was used by the Chumash people, for example. And they had a very specific ritual, a ceremony around the use of datura that they left explicit evidence for. That doesn't go back, that's not prehistoric, that's only about 400 years old to the 16th century. But they knew what they were doing with datura. And they're not sure exactly what, but they say 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, and in some cases to communicate with dead ancestors. And you see that a lot, communication with the ancestors. And so whether it was some sort of puberty ritual or initiation rite, they clearly knew the dosing and correct administration of Datura. And they weren't alone, by the way. There were other folks in the Americas. My friend Danny Newman has done some awesome research around something called the black drink. You have to look up the black drink. It's from the Mississippian indigenous communities.

And there were some studies done a few years ago that tested these vessels. You're asking about evidence. And so there's, you know, beyond sort of the pictographic evidence, I love looking at the archeochemical evidence. So in addition to the pinwheel site, first unambiguous chemical data for the connection of rock art and psychedelics, a couple years ago, there were some studies, gas chromatography, mass spec studies, like real proper chemical studies done on the black drink. Have you heard of the black drink? No. mass spec studies, like real proper chemical studies done on the black drink. Have you heard of the black drink? No. The black drink was used, like I said, in these Mississippian sites. And there was a paper dated some of the finds from like 1100 to 1700 AD, so centuries ago. And they came and this drink was prepared in these special vessels. And sometimes they take these anthropomorphic visuals.

One is called like the old woman. And so within these vessels, they found the evidence not only for Datura, like we just saw the pinwheel cave, but for the yaupon holly. I think it's the only plant native to North America that's naturally caffeinated. It's called the Yaupon Holly. And so it was this caffeinated beverage that definitively had traces of atropine and scopolamine in them.

And those are the active alkaloids in Datura. The same alkaloids they found through chemical analysis at the pinwheel site. Scopolamine is a wild one. Scopolamine, yeah. That's a wild one. That's wild. That's the zombie drug that's the drug that they can literally blow in your face and get you to do their bidding you've heard about that yeah colombian drug lords used to use it on people yeah

they'd blow it in their face yeah they think that is the root of the the concept of zombies that you know these people are just like, oh. Yeah, Wade Davis has written some cool work on that. You know what it's also? It's also like when you get one of those little patches to avoid seasickness,

Dramamine. That's Coppola mean. That's crazy. But see, under the right circumstances. Right. Right dose. Yeah, you're not tripping.

But if you took those Dramamine patches and put them all over your fucking body, but see under the right circumstances right right dose right yeah you're not tripping but if you took those dromamine patches and put them all over your fucking body i don't think that's recommended no it's not i don't recommend it yeah but if you did i bet you'd trip walls yeah um but it's um i 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 you needed people to have their shit together you couldn't have ne'er-do-wells when you have 50 people that rely on each other and they all have very specific tasks. Everyone is responsible for something, and you cannot have irresponsible consumption of something that's so profound.

So it makes sense within their best interest to create a real framework, like the correct way to use this, and also this recognition that this is a very profound and powerful experience is not to be taken lightly at all. Correct. This is not at all recreational. This is something that you're going to do because you're going to have a transcendent experience. Correct.

And that's what we lack today. That's what we lack today. And 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. Can I show you some images of paleo-christian ritual? okay cool I love talking to you what do you got? Jamie there should be a folder called Circe

Circe like the lady from Game of Thrones? like the lady from Game of Thrones she's my favorite you'll get to know her a lot better she's a great. You'll get to know her a lot better. She's a great character. You'll get to know her a lot better. Shame. Shame.

What am I looking for here? It's in my Google Drive. Oh, no, no, yeah. I have the folder. What do you want me to pull up? The first few pictures are just words. Yeah, just from the first one. Yeah, we can start with, we can go into the pictures.

My point, it's just words, though. That's fine. We can move forward from there. So what I'm going to show you are some images from a hypogeum. And 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. So 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.

It was this underground religion, in some cases literally. So the only places where you would celebrate the Eucharist and the Proto-Mass were in like small and private homes and this agape meal. And then sometimes you'd go underground into these like necropolis, like these places of the dead. And that for some reason was the place where the mass was celebrated. And 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 frescoes. So 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. And a couple weeks ago I reached out to the Vatican specifically to ask them if I could show these images to you today, and they said yes. All right. Thank you, Vatican. Take back all the shit I said about you. They're actually great research partners. It's the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology.

So it's the archaeologicalifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology. So it's the archaeological team that is responsible for the preservation and conservation of all these ancient sites. And I think it's an aspect of early Christianity that very few people know about. And 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, Ramsey McMullen and what he talks about are these underground chill outs

they were called vigilia the Latin word for them is refrigerium where we get the word refrigerator so they were like underground chill outs where certainly the Romans and it's believed the earliest Christians would have gone to celebrate the dead where certainly the Romans, and it's believed the earliest Christians, would have gone to celebrate the dead with sacramental wine, with celebratory wine.

They would have a wine ceremony in these dank chambers underground to usher the dead into the afterlife or bring them refreshment. They were called refrigeria. And so it's kind of unclear when the refrigeria, a pagan Roman ceremony, became like a proto-Eucharistic Christian mass. Like the line, again, the line is very blurred at this period of time, which I call the pagan continuity hypothesis. This 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. And 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. He said, this was religion. So even though it looks like a picnic, it looks like they were gathering over like, kind of like almost like a Mexican Day of the Dead ceremony. Like they would meet by the graveyard to remember the dead and the ancestors. Yeah, 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. third century. So the next slide is, that's just a bunch more text from a Catholic encyclopedia, by the way, from 1907, if I'm not mistaken. And 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. Even if you go back to the

gospels, it was, you know, Jesus asking for the commemoration of this event, you know, do this in memory of me. As you do this in memory of me, remember my life, death, and eventual resurrection. This is sort of the prototype for the mass. And 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. It's very similar to this Roman refugiarium. So I give all that as background just to show you the first couple images from the hypogeum. So if you skip to the next one, so that's what it looks like when you go underground. It was discovered in 1919, I think, as a fiat shop around the corner.

It was trying to expand into a sunken garage. They came across these monuments, which is not uncommon in Greece and Italy and around the Mediterranean. So they found this hypogeum, which dates to the 3rd century A.D. So we don't have firm dates. It could be anywhere from like 220 to 250 A.D. So this is the time period we're talking about. So these were tombs. they're rock-cut tombs in the Hypogeum here. If you go to the next one, one of the first things I saw when I went into

the Hypogeum was this, which, 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. Because, again, this site is controlled by the Vatican. The Vatican has preserved this for reasons. And, 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. So this is, you know, whether this is purely pagan or Christian is sort of a moment of debate. But, you know, if you just look at it, what's odd is that you see 12 people gathered around a table. And when you think of 12 people gathered around a table,

you think of something like the Last Supper. And so it's pretty clear that what's important to this dinner is the chalice that's being lifted by the servant there. Or maybe it's a priest of some sort. So it's clear that whatever is happening, wine is important to this gathering of 12 people. The interesting part is the woman who's appearing in the back. If you look closely, there's sort of like this effigy of a woman descending exactly from the background to the foreground. It's thought that she is Aurelia Prima. And Aurelia was one of the dead women to whom the hypogeum was dedicated.

And 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. So we're not really sure. How do they interpret that? Because 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, not as a picnic, but as religion, as Ramsey McMullen says. So this was their religion for keeping alive that relationship to the dead and refreshing the dead in the afterlife. And when you went there to celebrate them, they would appear. And Ramsey has this great line in his scholarship where he says, the dead themselves participated, which is one of my favorite lines in his research. The dead themselves participated. One of my favorite lines in his research, the dead themselves participated. So that's Aurelia participating in a funeral banquet that's happening underground.

Okay, so if we go to the next slide. So again, unclear if that's Christian or pagan. And then you see some of these images. That's interpreted as Jesus as the good shepherd from the Gospel of John. You see the goats down below. So that's either interpreted as St. Paul or Plotinus. Plotinus was this Neoplatonic philosopher who lived around that time in the 3rd century.

And 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. And again, everything is very ambiguous because Christianity is illegal. So 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, obviously. So there's a lot of ambiguity in these frescoes. So if you move past that, this is the most important one, which is kind of mind-boggling.

So this is just to the right of that banquet scene, and it's called the Homeric Fresco. And it's called the Homeric Fresco because it seems to portray a very famous scene from Homer's Odyssey. And it's when Odysseus is stuck on the island with Circe, the witch Circe, the prototypical witch of antiquity, Circe. He'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. It's one of the most famous scenes in Book 10 of the Odyssey

where Circe delivers a potion. She concocts a potion, and in Greek it says that the verb they use for concoct the potion is koukio, just like the ancient potion at Eleusis. This is one of the mythical precedents for what would become the actual koukion that was used in the Eleusinian Mysteries. And so she uses this mythical kukion in which she casts these drugs. It says that she puts drugs into this potion to transform the men into pigs, then back to men.

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. And so it's a really strange image to have there. And 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. And up above, that's another image of Circe with all her animals on this magical island. And what they found there exactly was cinnabar. And 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 coming out of Circe's palace. So between the fiery smoke and the cinnabar and the web down below, there's a lot of certainty that this is probably Circe. If you go to the next slide. Can I ask you, what are those people laying down?

If you zoom in on Circe. Oh, right here? Yeah. Up above? What are those people laying down? If you zoom in on Circe. Oh, right here? Yeah. Up above? What are those people laying down? What's that supposed to represent? The interpretation from the monograph is that that's some sort of funeral beer. Oh, so those are dead people.

That could be dead people, yeah, which is also strange. What's that? Satan. That we can't make out. So the loom was another telltale sign. So there's the fiery smoke at the palace and the loom is another telltale sign. So this is, if it were just this, you would think, okay, maybe it's just Circe and a loom. But if you go to the next slide, there's a manuscript in the Pope's library called the Vergilius Vaticanus. You can find this online. In the Vergilius 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. Circe and the loom, which corresponds to Circe and the loom on the right.

So they know for sure, you know, with relative certainty at least, that there's some image continuity between Circe and the loom. And she's talked about in the ancient literature as always being at the loom. So the confidence is rising. And for folks who don't know what a loom is, it's how you create cloth with threads. Some people, you know. Yeah, that's true. So 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?

Why was she known as a person who makes cloth? Because that's what Homer said. That's what Homer says in his epic poetry. And that's what Virgil also says in his epic poetry. So Homer writes the Odyssey. Centuries later, Virgil writes the Aeneid. That's sort of the mythical founding of Rome, the main character Aeneas. And in both versions, there's a Circe character.

So this Circe character survives for centuries in the ancient world, from the Greek to the Latin. And in both cases, the loom is mentioned. And also what's mentioned in these passages are the fact that Circe uses potent herbs. In the Latin, it says potentibus erbis. So she's using potent herbs and mixing up potions to transform these men into pigs and vice versa. So 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. And then in the last few images, what it depicts is a woman being initiated into these high mysteries. So things you don't normally associate with early Christianity.

Jamie, just in the last slide real quick, I just want to show you this image of the woman. So there are three different chambers in the hypogeum. If you go back a couple, and I'll show you these two in a second. Yeah, there, there, that's fine. So that circle, that's on the ceiling of one of the final chambers. And there was a German scholar, Himmelmann, in the 1970s, who attempted to interpret that image. And he says it's some kind of initiation typical of Dionysian or Eleusinian initiation. He says the way the wand is held is typical to what you might find with the god Dionysus. And true enough, if you look around at different artifacts,

there's the Borghese vase on 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. And on the right, that's the Bill of the Mysteries in Pompeii, which goes back 2,000 years, obviously. And again, you see this notion of the wand over the head of the initiate. So you 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.

And it's all very ambiguous. Why would a Christian descend into these chambers to celebrate these wine mysteries with the dead? And 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 yeah that way yeah that's perfect

so you see in Latin there it's written agape misce nobis so that's they think that's agape is the woman's name misce nobis is mix it mix it for us so what they're saying is not pour the wine for us but mix it up for us agape and agape is a very Greek word.

It means love. And so you find all these Greek connotations despite the fact that we're in Italy. If you look at the next one, it's very similar. It says Irene da Calda. Irene, Irene, could be another Greek name. It means peace. And just like miske nobis, mix it up for us, you see da kalda. We don't really know what kalda is,

but if you go to the next slide, there was a scholar. Yeah, there's some great text here. He tries to interpret what kalda is. It's not certain. It seems to have been more than an infusion. Apparently it was a mixture of hot water, wine, and drugs.

Wow. So the question becomes, what kind of potions were being mixed in these underground chambers? This is at a different catacomb of Marcellinus and Pietro. I showed you the hypogeum. And so there's, you know, these were the places where wine was being consumed by paleo-Christians in antiquity. And I think it's fascinating. It is. And it raises lots of questions. A lot. But it only makes sense.

We know those compounds existed. And we know that people take those compounds and have these profound experiences and when you had no explanation for that and you didn't know like how it was you know interfering or interacting with the human mind and what chemicals they were like of course you would you would lean on those i mean would probably, that would be like the primary source of some sort of an attempt of understanding the great mystery of the life. This makes sense. And the dead, remember, the dead are participating, right? It's a funeral banquet. And you see this time and again in these ancient mysteries, this notion of a funeral

banquet and the ritual consumption of powerful compounds. McKenna believed that when you entered into psychedelic states, you'd enter into a well of souls, disembodied souls. Or it was at least theorized. That was like one of his thoughts, that that's what you were experiencing. thoughts like that that's what you were experiencing hmm yeah it's the same with it's the same with Dionysus actually and this notion of uh sort of the Greek Halloween was called on Thesteria and there was this uh this ritual of un uncorking the the wine jugs and out of them you would see different different spirits and entities fly out so there's there's something there's something I'd participate the dead the dead the dead themselves participated so it's I mean I find the iconography like really

interesting like having gone to Catholic school my whole life because you don't you don't really hear about the hypogeum no you don't hear about paleochristianity much, actually. Well, what is the source of the Eucharist? What's the original Eucharist? The body of Christ. Well, in the book, I explore the potential Greek origin of that, at least in some communities. I mean, the notion of consuming the body in blood was, you know,

that wasn't born like 2,000 years ago with Jesus. You know, even the blood of Dionysus, the wine of Dionysus is called the blood by Timotheus of Miletus 400 years before Jesus. So this notion that wine is blood and should be consumed in this sacramental fashion, I mean, that had been around for a while. And this notion of theophagy, right? You see this in lots of different world cultures. The consuming of the god to become the god.

And 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. And so for the ancient Greeks, like to imbibe the wine was to imbibe the god, the god Dionysus. So the question becomes, was Dionysus the god of wine or was Dionysus the god of intoxication, right, and psychotropic plants or fungi or poisons or medicine? Because the wine of the time, like we've talked about,

was routinely mixed with different plants and compounds. And so the enthusiasm that resulted from drinking that wine was, it's been described as like the central aspect of Greek tragedy, for example. Like when we saw the theater Dionysus on the southern slope of the Acropolis, they think that that wine was consumed there in another way to experience communion with Dionysus the wine at the theater was called trimma and trimma in greek means like rubbed or pounded and professor ruck for example thinks that it's you know it it signified the different things that were pounded rubbed into the wine to create this sort of mass possession that took place at the theater between the live audience and the actors between the actors and the dead persons in some cases that they were they were they were acting out remember I mean we take it

for granted now but to stand on stage and you know spew out lines that belong to a dead person is like closer to necromancy than entertainment so that was that was a trippy thing to begin with. So you combine that together with this trima wine and this very sacred ritual, it goes well beyond the bounds of entertainment. For them, there was a religious purpose to the theater and to comedy and to tragedy. Wow. It's so interesting. You would love more concrete evidence of what they consumed other than this one vessel, which is very interesting. It makes sense that one vessel contained ergot and that this would lead you to believe that this was a part of what they were doing.

Yeah, but it's not enough for me either. I mean, that's what I've been doing with my time the past couple of years. Thank God you're doing it. I'm not convinced either. I'm not convinced. I try and be a real skeptic about this. That's good. I try and be a genuine skeptic. There's this incredibly compelling piece of data from Spain,

from Hellenistic Spain, what is today Spain, 2,200 years ago. I would love to find something in Greece. I'd love to find something at Eleusis. This was part of my presentation for the Eleusis Symposium a couple weeks ago. What kind of artifacts do we possess or do people possess from Eleusis? I 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. So the last time I went to Eleusis to ask Poppy about this, they have a lot of different vessels, actually.

I'll show you. Jamie, if you want to go into the Eleusis file, I think it's the first file up there. And I think we see an image of you, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. And then there'll see an image of you, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. And then there'll be some vessels we can look at. Okay. So there's lots of different, there's you first.

That's me. Yeah. That's me at that site. I was freaking out. I kind of was. I remember walking around and just feeling so strange. Yeah, what was going on that day? Well, I knew where I was, which you always have to take into account

Right. I knew that this was supposedly the site where these people Well, not supposedly this is the site where these people had these experiences and there was something about that site Whether or not you believe that places have memory, they certainly feel like they do. And that place felt like there was a memory attached to it in some strange way, like a lot of memory. There's something very profound had happened there. But maybe that was because I knew something very profound had happened there. But there was a quite a long moment, like five or 10 minutes where I was just standing there under that thing, just like feeling it. Yeah, that was the, that's the plutonium. So that's, that's the mouth of hell where Persephone would emerge from the underworld. And you were,

you were locked in there for a while. I was just trying to empty my head and just try to figure out how much of this is just suggestion and bullshit. You know? You're a good skeptic, too. Well, you have to be. Otherwise, you'll buy into your own nonsense. Yeah. You know, and I was trying to figure it out.

What is this? Like, what's this feeling that I have here? It was very intense. this feeling that I have here. It was very intense. But it's also an incredible place to be, just to, even if the feeling didn't happen, like just to know that you're there in this place where these people have these experiences and the wonder of what was it like, you know, imagine. If you had the ability to travel back in time to any point in human history, where would you go? I can only choose one? Yeah, just one.

Maybe the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Just to find out if it really happened? What if it didn't? Would you tell anybody? That'd be in big trouble. Yeah. I think I would choose ancient Egypt. What do you want to see?

I want to see the construction of the pyramids. I want to see why. I want to see what was civilization like back then. I want to see what's the real timeline. What are we really looking at? Are we really looking at 2,500 B.C.? Are we looking at 10,000, 20,000 B.C.? What are we looking at? we really looking at 2500 bc are we looking at 10 000 20 000 bc like what are we looking at they don't really know it's a lot of guesswork especially when you're

dealing with um you know you can't carbon date stone but just knowing the construction that the expertise that was involved the the appears the use of some sort of a drill there was like some things that cored stone some things that cut stone they have no understanding of how these people were able to do this just the scope just the scale of the construction the massive stones you know the obelisks the 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 no matter what anybody tells you Certainly wouldn't be able to do in a human lifetime two million three hundred thousand stones

some weighing upwards of 50 to 80 tons Hundreds of miles away carted through the mountains, no clear roads. How do you get them down? What are you doing? How'd you get them? What'd you do?

That's, to me, the big one. Have you spent time there? No. No, we were supposed to do both in this one trip. That's too much. It's too much, yeah. You have young kids. You don't want to fucking freak out.

Can I go home and see my friends? You don't want to drag kids away for too long but but i think it was important for them to see the ruins you know to see delos and to see all these other different places and to just take in to just see a place where people used to live and thrive and then they didn't, you know, and now you're walking around these areas. And, but 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. What did they do? When you see the Great Pyramid of Giza, it's just like, what did they do? How did they do this?

Who? Why? What was the purpose? 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. So what is it? And why and how? Put it on the agenda for next summer.

Yeah, and even then you're just going to be walking around freaking out, which I think is great. But I would if there was a place that you could go back in time and see one thing, that would be the thing that I would see. There was a recent study on a psychedelic potion out of Egypt for the first time. a psychedelic potion out of Egypt for the first time. Remember we talked about some of the first unambiguous evidence for psychedelics in rock art and this Mississippian site. I think it was only earlier this year, actually. Jamie, if you want to look up, it's a great Google term, psychedelic blood cocktail.

Psychedelic blood cocktail in maybe Egypt. Oh, there it is. They drank a gnarly brew of hallucinogenic drugs and human blood whoa the drink also contained a few secret ingredients like vaginal mucus uh how do you know that look at that dude that looks like the kind of guy you'd see if you drank blood and psychedelics that's best b-e-s that seems like the dude best was the giver of oracles and dreams and it was thought that you would consume this beverage and go into an incubation at his temple um wow which is not not too different from from greek incubation temples look at this he was described as part dwarfish part feline. Yeah. Whoa.

Best followers believed he could provide protection from danger while simultaneously averting harm and being able with his powers to prevent evil. Hmm. So like all cults, best heads were required to drink some gnarly stuff rather than the classic poisoned Kool-Aid, though. The members of this sect guzzled a mysterious liquid from ceramic vessels decorated with the effigy of the, or the head of Bess, known as Bess Vases. The Bess figure was revered as a protective genius. It might be assumed that this liquid drunk from these mugs might be considered benefit, beneficent. Interesting. So what do they find that's in these things? Well, so it came from Tampa, which is crazy. Like there wasn't, I mean,

at some point it was in Egypt, but they had this vessel sitting around. In Tampa, Florida? In Tampa, Florida. Oh, whoa. From the second century BC, which is why the science is so interesting. These can be vessels that sit in museums for decades, and they still preserve these compounds. So they did liquid chromatography tandem mass spec, this chemical analysis. And what they found a number of different things. The mucus was because they did proteomics as well. They did a human protein analysis. And they found something that it was either mucus or other human body fluids. That's why they call it the psychedelic blood cocktail. Why do they think it was vaginal mucus? Because that's one of the possibilities is either oral or vaginal mucus.

Why would they go with vaginal? Because it's a good headline. But it seems like spit would be more likely. I would say spit. I'm going to say spit and blood. Getting the vaginal mucus to seem like that's like a big word. But was there any indication of why they chose the vaginal why they would even say not not that i know of beyond the proteomic analysis because that seems

like i know it's weird leap you find mucus like how much difference is mucus from spit to vaginal mucus okay in addition to mucus yeah we know that people spit in fermented beverages. Right. You know? Right. Like there's certain alcoholic beverages that the women will chew up certain things and spit them into a vessel and then people drink it. It aids in the fermentation, right? And that could have happened here too.

They found evidence of fermentation, probably grape. So this is some kind of wine cocktail. And in addition, they found the chemical signifiers for nymphaea carulea, which is the blue water lily. And they also found paganum harmala, or seeds that either came from like the Syrian rue, seeds from Syrian rue, paganum harmala, harmel. Isn't that an MAO inhibitor? Correct. Okay.

Yeah, correct. Harmala. inhibitor? Correct. Okay. Yeah, correct. Harmel. Yeah, Harmel. Okay. So they were taking something, and then, so it was very similar to ayahuasca in that regard, because an MAO inhibitor would be something that would allow at least dimethyltryptamine to be orally active. If that's what was happening here. But I think blue water lily is orally active.

So it's unclear what the- Maybe it made it more profound. Maybe. So blue water lily, what is that supposed to be like? There have been some recreations of that. There's a great YouTube called Sacred Weeds. If you ever look at Sacred Weeds, it's a lot of fun. So many rabbit holes to go down on YouTube.

It's amazing. There's so many to go down. Also, five terrifying datura trips. You have to look at some point. That's one of my favorites. Yeah, datura. So this water lily, what is it supposed to be like? I don't think so.

Again, this is where dosing comes in. The Sacred Weeds series, it was a series in the UK. They tried to recreate this, and obviously they got the dosing wrong. So I think— Were they ineffective? Is that why you say obviously they got the dosing wrong? Yeah, because if you look at the participants, it's really funny. They get kind of giddy and euphoric at some point, but they don't have anything hallucinatory.

Did they take it with Harmala? No, no. They weren't doing the psychedelic blood cocktail. They were just doing the— Just the water lily. Just the water lily, yeah. Maybe the water lily has to be taken with Harmala to have the profound effects, the MAO inhibitor. It makes sense.

This is why the science matters and the data matters. Not because we want to recreate blood cocktails, but... Of course, but we do. So it seems like there's a lot of vessels that could be tested if we're aware of these vessels. Everywhere. Yeah, and they haven't been studied. Some are sitting in museums in Tampa. Some are sitting in new, fresh dig sites.

Some are sitting in museums in Greece and Italy. Oh, look at that, dude. That's the best vessel from 2nd century BC. Can I get a recreation of that on eBay? Does somebody make that? That seems dope. I want to drink my coffee out of that. Someone's got to make Joe a best vessel.

Fuck yeah. For coffee in the morning? That would be a way to start your day off correctly. You spit in there? Drink out of that? No, I wouldn't do that. Drink out of that guy's head. Drink it out of that guy's head would be pretty fucking cool.

And so with this blue water lily and this, so they know that those two things were in there, harmala and blue water lily. Was there anything else other than fermentation? So presumably some alcohol. There was some alcohol. We're not sure in what amounts. There was just some evidence of fermentation. Aside from the harmala and the blue water lily and maybe some honey.

Which was also used as a preservative for psychedelics. Right. It was one of the ways that they preserved mushrooms. They had preserved mushrooms and honey. Yeah. And that shows up a lot in some of these ancient potions. The combination, in fact, of potassium gluconate is the chemical signifier for that. And they often find that with tartaric acid, which shows wine, and calcium oxalate, which shows beer.

And so you see these. Pat McGovern did a few studies on that, which shows sort of like this beer-wine-mead concoction. And he famously recreated one called the Midas Touch with the Dogfish Head Brewery, the Midas Touch. Oh, interesting. That was their version. How is it?

Good? Yeah, it's great. That's great. Has there been any talk of these vessels that we do know are available of running studies on those? Yes. So this is at least part of what Andrew Koh wants to do at the Yale Peabody Museum. I mean, he's already sitting on thousands and thousands of samples from all over the Mediterranean that haven't been properly assayed. They're all filled with drugs.

Boy, that would rewrite everything. Yeah. No matter what they're filled with. And again, his job's not to look for drugs. Of course. He's looking for ancient organics. You're such a good academic. I love how you bring it back down to normal.

Joe, focus. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Appreciate you. But it could be fragrance or medicine. Sure. Let's find out what's in there.

Incense, kefir incense, this famous Egyptian incense. He famously found the Tel Kabri wine, and they announced that in 2014 from Galilee at Tel Kabri. It was wine mixed with all kinds of things. We talked about last time, I think like honey and storax and terebinth, cypress, cedar, cinnamon, all kinds of fun things. So like he's been able to show that wines of the time were routinely mixed with different things. You're seeing the blood cocktail. You're seeing the datura use at Pinwheel. And you're seeing the black drink in the Mississippian sites.

I mean, this is all relatively new. Yeah, we didn't discuss that too deeply. Like, what was the black drink made with? Datura and yaupon hali. And that was the caffeine. What does it look like, this Yaupon Hali? Is it a fruit? Is it a leaf?

It's a plant. It's a plant, and it contains caffeine? Yeah, I found something. I was trying to bring it up, but I didn't get to it yet. Its scientific name is something interesting. Elex vomitoria. Yeah. Oh.

Which makes you puke. Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. It was a purgative, apparently. Ooh, right. Like a lot of these are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Which makes you puke. Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. It was a purgative, apparently. Ooh. Right. Like a lot of these are. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You purge, and then you have this experience. Interesting. Interesting. So detoura and caffeine mixed together. Is it a high dose of caffeine? Yeah, it's six times as high as a cup of coffee, almost.

Whoa. Whoa. It's the only caffeinated plant found in North America, I think is what I read too. Right. Is there any history of humans using it other than in that fashion? Like people eat it?

The Yapon Hali? Yeah, like they do when they chew coca leaves in order to get energy? You can find YouTube videos of people making like a caffeinated tea today. People know how to manipulate. Sounds like you can fucking kill yourself with that kind of caffeine tea. Right?

There you go. That's what it looks like. So it's little berries, huh? Yeah. Plants. So is the fruit of the tree what gives you caffeine or is it the leaves? I think it's the leaves. It's like North American mate.

Oh, interesting. Have you tried this? No. It says Yop on Holly drink for sale. Yeah, I'm trying to see what it says. Oh, you can buy it? I would imagine someone knows that you can. Black drink Wikipedia.

Yeah. Go shopping. Click the shopping link. Just go shopping for Yop on Holly. Interesting. There it is. Interesting. So you can get it as a tea online I wonder if it's legit because it seems like that would be like super potent like they'd have to tell you it's like a monster energy drink in one little tiny cup right wouldn't it be what does it say there Jamie for

caffeine content looking that's what I was looking for. It doesn't say on that part of it. It says it makes a half gallon, that little thing. It's like a concentrate, like cold brew almost, I'm guessing. Oh, interesting. So you make a half gallon out of that one little thing. You have to mix it up. So it seems like we have a wealth of things to test for,

but a scarcity of tests that have actually been run. And a scarcity of testers, which is why Andrew Koh's work is so important to support. And as a result of conversations like this and the book coming out, we're launching a foundation called the Athanatos Foundation, which means immortal in Greek. And part of the genesis behind that foundation is to help to support different work like this, which is largely unfunded and unacknowledged. So 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. I mean, a lot of which is just emerging in the past couple of years. Like a lot of the things we're discussing are things that came out after the book was published. So there's a lot of cool work.

And 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. And 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. So not only at the Harvard Divinity School, but Harvard Law School and the Faculties of Arts and Sciences, they have a humanities center there. And I'm just about to launch actually a series of fellowships together with Michael Pollan between Harvard and Berkeley to continue looking at these kinds of questions, again,

outside the clinical setting. So looking with a lens of the social sciences and the humanities, historians, anthropologists, cultural criticism, you name it, like 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. So speaking of Michael Pollan, how's the caffeine treating you? Did it do anything for you? I definitely feel it. Yeah? Yeah.

Do you feel it differently than you used to? I mean, I'm much more awake. Yeah. I'm much more awake. I've been feeling very sleepy recently. Yeah? Yeah. I feel much more awake.

We've got to get you healthy, Brian. I know, man. I'm going to awake. I've been feeling very sleepy recently. Yeah? Yeah. I feel much more awake. We've got to get you healthy, Brian. I know, man. I'm going to put you on a schedule. We're going to change your diet. That's what's most important. Yeah. Yeah. People think of their diet as just stuff they eat that tastes good. I think you really have to think of it as the literal foundation of your structure as a biological organism. I mean, any nutrients that I do get are fully thanks to my wife.

If it were up to me, I'd eat. Accidentally. I mean, yeah, because she's a great cook. She's very concerned about nutrition for me and the girls. If it's just me, I would eat peanut butter all day. Well, that's not good. I know. I know.

That's the problem with a lot of intellectuals. I know. They spend so much time thinking and not enough time thinking about their body. You think of the mind as being separate from the body, but it's not. It's all one thing. And if the body works better, the mind works better. Yeah. All right, I'll get on the regime.

Please, please, I want to keep you healthy. When I hear about people taking so long to recover from COVID, the primary thing that I always ask them, do you take vitamins? And it's almost always no. At the time, it was kind of a no. Yeah. I take more now than I did. But even now now you're not taking enough. No, not really. We've got to get you into that. So what's interesting also is you took a long time to write this book, The Immortality Key. You took a long time researching this. And I know that there was

a lot of questions about how this would be received and whether or not this is like a, whether it would be commercially successful, but it's been so successful that they ran out of copies like really quickly. Right. They fucked up. Right. I'm not sure if I can say that, but yeah. Let's just, let's say kindly they underestimated the demand. I think the demand was underestimated following our conversation in September 2020. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't expect that either.

And there were lots of issues with printers and the pandemic. Yeah. It was hard to get copies out. And so a lot of people actually turned to the Audible for that reason. Mm-hmm. And to this day, like, the Audible is outselling the hard copy, of people actually turn to the Audible for that reason. And to this day, like the Audible is outselling the hard copy, like almost two to one. People like to listen. Well, you're very good at it. The Audible is excellent because you read it. It's really good.

It's a fantastic book. I've read it twice. I listened to it twice. Really? Yes. Thanks, man. Yeah, all the way through twice. Thank you. It's really good, man. It's like, you know, it's so compelling and detailed and fascinating. And it really opens up people's imagination to the roots of all these things and like where this all came from and what these people were experiencing.

Thank you, man. It's fucking awesome. It's been very humbling to go through this. What's cool, it's got to be great for you because there was a lot of uncertainty of you going down this path. Yeah, man. I quit my job. There was no plan B. Well, sometimes that's what you have to do, right?

It worked out. Yeah. Spectacularly. I felt like I was losing my soul at some point. I was always, I mean, I love being a lawyer. I went to law school for a reason but uh this this is the stuff that always kept me up at night you know like this was just a fun passion project on nights and weekends and then it became a book yeah and a thing but like that wasn't that wasn't the the

purpose i was and and to this day like i still want to know that's why i said like i'm not satisfied like i i want to know the actual answers of course to. Yeah, we all do. Well, I'm very hopeful in that there is real research being done and a real attempt to test all of these other vessels. And I think that would be wildly ambitious and really fantastic to see it all come, to find out what the results are. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's rare and there's very few of these things contain drugs. Maybe they halt do Which is crazy. That'd be the craziest. There's drugs everywhere. Yeah, I think that's probably the case You know, we were very fortunate went to Chichen Itza once and I had this really good guide It was a really interesting guy who was a local professor in Mexico.

And he would give guides of the Mayan temples. And one of the things that he openly talked about was the psychedelic consumption. That there was some area of one of these temples where they would take this thing that had very LSD-like properties to it. They didn't totally understand it. very LSD-like properties to it. They didn't totally understand it. When I went to Chichen Itza, we're talking about like 2003 or something like that. It was quite a while ago.

And, you know, to have this guy explain that to me, it was really interesting. So I think it existed in so many, I think wherever they could find it, they took it. There was another, I 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 Nat Geo, I think. If you look up psychedelic beer Peru, it'll probably come up. And this is recent as well.

And this is also recent, just in the past couple years. Wow. Like you would never, I mean, when I was researching from 2007, this book, which came out in 2020, never did I come across a headline, psychedelic laced beer. Right. If I had it, this would have been very irrelevant. Ancient Peruvians partied hard, spiked their beer with hallucinogens to win friends. How do you know why they did it? To win friends.

That's a leap. I don't think you needed that part. You know? Lacing the beer served at their feast with hallucinogens may have helped age in Peruvian people

known as the Wari. Is that correct? Wari, yeah. Wari forge political alliances and expand their empire according to a new paper published in the journal Antiquity. Recent excavations

at a remote Wari outpost called, how do you say that? Quilcapampa? Quilcapampa. Quilcapampa, how do you say that? Kilkapampa. Kilkapampa. Kilkapampa. Kilkapampa. Kilkapampa. Unearthed seeds from the vilka tree.

Vilka. Vilka? Yep. Vilka. That can be used to produce a potent hallucinogenic drug. The authors think that the Wari held one big final blowout before the site was abandoned. Hmm. Wild. So the Vilca is anadanantra.

Anadanantra, either colubrina or peregrina. And that's been here a while. There's evidence of the use of that going back thousands of years. Just after Christopher Columbus actually came to the Caribbean, one of his associates writes about, it's called yopo, Yopo or Cahoba. That was in use around what is today like the DR and that part of the Caribbean. So it's been around a very long time. As soon as the colonists arrived to this part of the world, they found drugs.

Wow. Yeah, Cahoba, Yopo. Last but not least, before we get out of here. Yeah. Cojoba, Yopo. Last but not least, before we get out of here. Yeah. One of the things I found out about you when we were on a little trip together is that you're interested in UFOs. There's a giant UFO behind you. Yeah.

Well, anybody that's really fascinated with it, I have to bring it up. What'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? What is your thoughts on these things? There's probably something to it. I don't know what it is. I don't think anybody knows what it is, but I don't think you can contradict the pilots at this point. And a friend of mine, Leslie Kane, has written a book about this, which is sort of a gold standard in the field. So UFOs. And I don't think we can really

ignore it. We were able to ignore it for many decades until relatively recently. And now you see congressional investigations and you see different witnesses coming forward. So I think it's a gigantic mystery that kind of like these ancient mysteries that fascinate me can't really go ignored much longer. I'm not entirely sure what's being witnessed are like extraterrestrial craft, like physical things being pouted by like flesh and blood beings from, you know, vast stretches of the cosmos. I think, and I've said this before on the record, I think there's something like far, far stranger about it. I don't know, I don't know what it is, but when I read Jacques Vallée, for example, I love the hypothesis that these things fit better into mythology and folklore than they do into science and engineering journals, because there have been sightings for as long as we've been

around, and not just about things in the sky, but things that interact with us. And so Passport to Magonia is a really cool book that talks about the interaction of, you know, what these could be today and what they looked like in the past. And I just think it's a huge mystery. It's a huge mystery. That's really all you really can say, right? That's all anybody can really say. Yeah. Except maybe some people that work for one of the defense department contractors that

actually has a UFO stored in the basement somewhere. It's not a mystery. Yeah. To them, it's not a mystery. But they're keeping their mouth shut, unfortunately. Yeah. Now you say NASA's taking an interest. And I think that the conversations in Washington are really wild. Yeah. Yeah. About the new the new interest in this stuff. But I don't know something in me tell just something in me is not drawn to the engineering side of the conversation.

I'm drawn, like with the ancient mysters, I'm drawn to folklore and mythology. And 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, that I think that discovery tells us more about what it means to be human. You know, if it's not our brain size or we talked a lot about creativity, you know, like I think questions about the deep past force us to ask questions about who we are today. And I think this phenomenon, whatever it is, is the same. Like whether or not we're alone in the cosmos, that's one question.

But like the relationship between these sightings and our psyches and consciousness, I think, is a far more profound question. And again, some of the questions that the early researchers like J. Allen Hynek were asking about this phenomenon, he says something like when the long-awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, I think it will prove to be not just the next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap. That to understand this issue is to understand something very profound. Let's end with that. That's perfect. Brian, you're the man.

I appreciate you very much. It was really cool hanging out with you in Greece, and it's always great to have you on here. And your book is now available on paperback. I'm assuming they made a lot of copies this time we will find out we will find out okay thank you very much thanks bye everybody