The Tim Ferriss Show - #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin — The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More

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Starting point is 00:04:07 Now would seem the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job, usually, to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out their routines, habits, thought processes, beliefs, lessons learned, and so on that you can apply to your own life. This time around, we have a very special edition, and this is a tag team edition in a sense. I'm

Starting point is 00:04:46 tagging in Dr. Mark Plotkin, who's in conversation with Brian C. Murerescu. Mark takes over my duties as host and interviews Brian for an episode of the Plants of the Gods podcast, and you are getting exclusive first listening opportunities for this. You, my dear listeners, are hearing the audio before anyone else. So this is a Tim Ferriss Show exclusive. I've previously featured some of my favorite episodes from the Plants of the Gods podcast, which is exceptional, at tim.blog slash plantsofthegods. So if you want to check those out, take a look. First off, who is Dr. Mark Plotkin? Mark is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon Conservation Team, which has partnered with roughly 80 tribes to map and improve management and protection

Starting point is 00:05:31 of roughly 100 million acres of ancestral rainforests. It is one of the most, I would say, capital-efficient, surgical, effective nonprofits I have ever come across. He is best known to the general public as the author of the book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, one of the most popular books ever written about the rainforest. His most recent book is the Amazon, What Everyone Needs to Know. You can find my interview with Mark, that is he and I talking one-on-one at tim.blog slash markplotkin. That goes into a lot of his history as a protege of Richard Evans Schultes and much, much more. So I encourage everybody to check that out. The guest today who's in conversation with Mark is Brian C. Murerescu. So who is Brian? Brian graduated Phi Beta Kappa

Starting point is 00:06:17 from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. The Immortality Key, the secret history of the religion with with No Name is Brian's debut book. In 2020, it became a New York Times bestseller and Audible named it best of 2020 in the history category. His website is brianmurarescu.com, last name spelled M-U-R-A-R-E-S-K-U. You can also find him on Instagram at Brian underscore Murerescu and on Twitter at Brian Murerescu. We will link to all of these things in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. So you can find this. You don't need to remember it. This is a tightly packed 55 minute interview. Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity,

Starting point is 00:07:02 lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of tikkun olam, or repairing and improving the world as we go, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. Welcome back to Plants of the Gods. Today we have a very special guest, a man I'm honored to call a friend and a colleague, and that's Brian Mororescu, who wrote the classic book, The Immortality Key,

Starting point is 00:07:39 which I regard as the most important book in the field of ethnobotany, perhaps since the original Plants of the Gods. Let me start out by quoting a reviewer wrote of the book once it appeared. Reading Brian's wonderful book, The Immortality Key, reminded me, oddly enough, of the Back to the Future movie trilogy of the late 1980s, and I mean that in the most positive sense possible. The Back to the Future films were genre benders, which started out to be a simple teen coming-of-age comedy, quickly morphed into science fiction, action-adventure, western rom-com,

Starting point is 00:08:11 with a brilliant nod to high school musicals and a sustained swipe at a certain American president. The Immortality Key unfolds in a similar way. What appears to be a straightforward investigation into the origins of Christianity becomes a detective story searching for an explanation into the famed Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, as well as the writing of an academic wrong, a coming-of-age story, a roots-like search for the author's cultural origins, all told within the framework of a personal odyssey. And I say odyssey with a capital O. The author is an unlikely protagonist, an American lawyer who has never sampled entheogenic plants or fungi. However, he is a Greek-American, fluent in ancient Greek and Latin

Starting point is 00:08:59 and Sanskrit, with an incisive and inquisitive mind and the gift for quickly earning people's trust, which gains him access to archives and catacombs off-limits to mere mortals like the rest of us. Brian, welcome to Plants of the Gods. That's the best intro ever, man. Thank you, Dr. Plotkin. Now, Houston Smith, who is the greatest historian and analyst, I think, of religions in the 20th century, said, and I quote, if we take the world's enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race. And so much of your work, Brian, in The Immortality Key, is distilling what is at the root of

Starting point is 00:09:43 Western religions and maybe world religions. So perhaps you can share with our listeners a bit about the Eleusinian mysteries and the role in the development of where we stand today. Sure. So for those who don't know, Eleusis still exists in one form or another. It's called Eleusina in today's world. And actually, next year, 2023, Elefsina, of all the places in Europe, has been nominated to be the European Capital of Culture. So, this might

Starting point is 00:10:12 all seem like weird anecdotes and footnotes that belong in an unread book, but Elefsina is back on the world map for one reason or another. In antiquity, Eleusis, I've described as kind of like the Vatican of the ancient world. It's a few miles northwest of Athens. So during the classical period, so think 2,300, 2,500 years ago and more, for you could afford it and you had the time to make this pilgrimage, to become immortal. That was the promise of Eleusis. You went to this place, amongst other things, to drink a potion called the koukion, this magical potion, the recipe of which was secret. And you would go there, have this experience that has since been described as the culminating experience of a lifetime. And Karl Ruck, one of the professors who researched this at Boston University, described the experience as somehow making all previous seeing seem like blindness.

Starting point is 00:11:15 So you went there to have a visionary encounter with goddesses, with strange beings. They called them Demeter and Persephone, the Lady of the grain and the goddess of death, the goddess of the underworld. And it was claimed that only those who went to Eleusis, again, drank this potion, participated in the pilgrimage, would in fact achieve immortality. It was only they who would survive death. And we don't know what that means because it was all kept secret, but we do know that the best and brightest of both Greece and Rome visited Eleusis for about 2,000 years, and they went there, we think, to die and be reborn. Well, I can't think of any other book I've read on the history of religion which had parts that were laugh-out-loud funny, but that is one of the special parts of the immortality key.

Starting point is 00:12:02 And I really, really, really loved your discussion of the analysis of these classical scholars, the brightest people of their day, supposedly, trying to figure out what the hell went on in Eleusis. And at one point, I think it was a fellow from Oxford or Cambridge said, well, it was giant puppets. And you said, yeah, ancient Muppets. So this was the type of humor which is often missing in these types of clinical and historical analysis. But it's what makes the books so special. Now, one of the sad aspects of the story originally was this is brought to the Western world essentially in the 1970s, spearheaded by a man named Karl Ruck, who's still alive, a classic scholar,

Starting point is 00:12:49 along with my old friend Gordon Wasson and some other people. And the whole story of how Ruck was ridiculed and almost exiled because of this radical theory is very shameful, and I want to ask you to get into that. But I think it's important to point out that while these classical scholars were torturing themselves trying to figure out what the hell went on in Eleusis, all of us hippies at the time were reading these accounts of these classical leaders like Pindar and Sophocles and going, dude, they were tripping. It was obvious to us, even it wasn't obvious to the scholars. So, in talking about death and rebirth, frame that in Karl Ruck's personal story, since I think your book really brought

Starting point is 00:13:37 him back to the fore. Oh, that's good. Wow. Good question. Yeah, so he went through his own death and rebirth as a kind of microcosm of this scholarship, which is interesting. So, yeah, the idea that dude, they were all in psychedelics was not a popular theory in the late 1970s. So, you mentioned Carl and Gordon, and Albert Hoffman was the co-author, the famed discoverer of LSD back in the 1930s. And together they wrote this book called The Road to Eleusis, Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries in 1978. It was not well received by the academic establishment and least of all by the then president of Boston University, a guy named John Silber. And Ruck was excoriated for daring to suggest that the founders of rationality, right, of Western skepticism, that they could have entered so fully into such an irrational state of mind, and least of all through psychedelic drugs, which were also not popular in the latey of classical scholarship. I think in the book, I call him the black sheep of the classics estate, a place you don't want to occupy.

Starting point is 00:14:51 But he was tenured at Boston University, so they couldn't fire him. They couldn't get rid of him. And instead of just quietly going about his way, he basically spent another 30, 40 years just continuing to pound away at this hypothesis. He wrote about other things, and he's a fantastic scholar, by the way, trained at Yale and Harvard. But he really went after this idea of the ancient Greeks, the Romans, and potentially the earliest Christians using these kinds of drugs to instantiate these spiritual experiences. And slowly but surely, the culture came back around to where it was in the 1950s, when this was all the realm of gentleman's discourse. And so, Carl went through his own rebirth, only in recent years, as some of the technology came on, the archaeobotany I write about in the book, the archaeochemistry, to really,

Starting point is 00:15:41 really prove that, well, there's actual organic data to test this hypothesis one way or the other. And so some pretty interesting data came to light, shows this is a discipline worth visiting. And I think in coordination with some of the clinical work at places like Johns Hopkins and NYU, and now it's all over the place at Harvard and Yale and UCLA, et cetera, even in Texas. I think that the culture changed a lot in the past five, 10 years with respect to psychedelics. And so, fortunately, Carl, who's now 87, is experiencing yet another rebirth. Well, Plants of the Gods has as a subtitle, Hallucinogens, History, Culture, and Conservation. And I think your work, Brian, ties all four of those together.

Starting point is 00:16:28 But my question to you is, why now? We have Ruck and Hoffman coming out with this book decades ago. John Allegro's The Mushroom and the Cross, which postulated some similar things. And they were laughed at, derided, disregarded, ignored. And now, thanks to your book and other efforts, this is part of the commonly accepted wisdom. Why are we accepting it now, and why didn't we accept it then? I have no idea is the honest answer. Yeah, my life has taken a weird course the past two years. I think, I mean, I alluded to it before. I think it's a lot of dumb luck, to be honest. I mean, I'm sitting across from somebody who spent a lot of his life researching this in earnest. And you yourself standing on the shoulders of people like Richard Evan Schultes, great ethnobotanist of the 20th century, in the way, not just of the clinical work, but also the arts and humanities and some of this scholarship that was not controversial in the days of William James at Harvard changed, I think, for a lot of different reasons,

Starting point is 00:17:47 largely because of that clinical work that I mentioned, which is now 20 years in, in the case of psilocybin at the very least. And also with MDMA, the work of Rick Doblin at MAPS, he's been chugging away at that as well. And so I just think that our biases, our prejudices are slowly melting away. And certainly the work of Michael Pollan, the journalist, did a great job with his book, How to Change Your Mind, and his new book, This is Your Mind on Plants. I think the cultural conversation around psychedelics has changed dramatically in the past five years. And a lot of it is just dumb luck. Well, you mentioned William James, and there's two important aspects to James's career which is overlooked in almost all the biographies that I've read. The first is that his formative experience was in the Amazon. He went to the

Starting point is 00:18:34 Amazon with the biologist Louis Agassiz in 1865, and I think that certainly expanded his consciousness of human nature because he was working side by side with Afro-Brazilians, Portuguese military, rainforest Indians, and there's no indication that he ever took ayahuasca or any other mind-altering substances there. But a rich white kid whose idea of diversity was hanging out with other rich white kids certainly had his world rocked by what he saw on the Amazon.

Starting point is 00:19:01 The other thing about William James that's often overlooked is that William James actually took peyote. So peyote did not begin at Harvard, but Schultes began with William James 50 years earlier. But I have to point out that William James didn't like peyote. He didn't agree with it.

Starting point is 00:19:15 It made him very sick. He much preferred nitrous oxide, laughing gas. That's what he writes about in Varieties, right? In fact, William James wrote that it wasn't until I took nitrous oxide that I began to understand Hegel. Why? Well, I did plenty of nitrous oxide in college, and I still don't understand Hegel. So William James definitely had the jump on me there.

Starting point is 00:19:36 But I agree with your timing, Brian, that the planets are in a line or shamanic magic happening that people are realizing. And that's why I like and chose to use that back to the future reference in reference to your book. Because we're rediscovering what the ancients knew and what indigenous peoples have been doing all along. I covered in the episode on peyote, said that the reason that these indigenous religions and these syncretic religions, which combine things like Catholicism and indigenous belief systems, has a grip is that the white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus, but the Indian takes peyote and goes into his church house and talks to Jesus. And this brings us back to the Eleusinian mysteries. And I want to ask you to address this thesis, this concept of your—of the pagan continuity idea, that, you know, we tend to believe that, well, the Greeks invented Western civilization,

Starting point is 00:20:42 and then the Romans kind of took it over, and then they kind of made a mess of it, and Christianity rolled in and squished it. But in the immortality key, you make the point that that Greek religious system, the Greek belief system, as personified by Eleusis, may in fact indeed live on in Christianity. And may indeed be the basis of all the so-called major religions. So, please address that for us. So, yeah, I emphasize, I mean, a lot of the book is about psychedelics. Okay, let's be clear. But that's not the key that I'm talking about in the immortality key. I think the key that I'm talking about and the thing that unites these pagan religions with early Christianity is the notion of experience, right? The direct experience of

Starting point is 00:21:25 the divine. There were whole movements dedicated to this, several different sects within the Gnostic circles of early Christianity that were dedicated to the proposition that you have a spark of the divine inside you, and that Jesus came not to be worshipped but to instruct all of us, men, women, and children, how to identify that spark, how to fulfill our mission on earth, and how to embody that divinity, which is to say that we're all divine, okay? And this is the proposition of the mysteries that belong to the pagan world too, whether it's the mysteries of Eleusis that we talked about, the mysteries of Dionysus, which I think have far more in common with early Christianity, and we can talk about that later. But this notion of encountering the divine within through experience. So, how did Aristotle define this notion of the Eleusinian vision? So, he said that you went to Eleusis not to learn something, this is the Greek word mathene, like mathematics. You didn't go there to mathematically learn something, like doctrine, dogma, the way we think of religion today.

Starting point is 00:22:29 You went there to experience something, pathēn. You went there to suffer, pathos. You went there to actually experience something. Well, this shows up in early Christianity too. And the other thing that shows up in early Christianity are secrets. So just look at Mark 4.11. You know, Jesus talks in

Starting point is 00:22:45 parables and tells these weird stories because there was an exoteric form to the faith and an esoteric version. Like, there's no controversy among Christian scholars that Christianity is born with secrets. You have a church father like Tertullian in the second century who basically accuses the Gnostic Christians of imitating the pagan mysteries. There's this five-year preparation process. They're trying to get these folks all excited about this great initiation. They're rising the anxiety, anticipation. He's basically making fun of them for, in fact, imitating the pagan mysteries. And if you want to Google Dr. Martin Luther King,

Starting point is 00:23:21 you can Google the influence of the mystery religions on Christianity, an essay that even Dr. Martin Luther King, you can Google the influence of the mystery religions on Christianity, an essay that even Dr. Martin Luther King himself wrote in 1950 about this notion of the continuity from that pagan pre-Christian world to what would become early Christianity in the decades and centuries after Jesus, before it became this big institution in the fourth century. So, you know, the thing that unites them is experience, this notion of secrets, magical practices, folks getting together to consume divine flesh and blood. There's a lot of parallels there. You know, the great Israeli ethnobotanist Benny Shannon said he did not understand how a man could talk to a burning bush until he went to Peru and took ayahuasca. Since then, ayahuasca alkaloids have been found in the Sinai Desert. And in fact, at ESPD 55, a couple of months back,

Starting point is 00:24:14 organized by Dennis McKenna, a wonderful Iranian, a Persian scholar by the name of Shaheen, talked about Haoma as the basis of Zoroastrianism, which of course is the original Persian religion. So, I think further research is beginning to reveal to us that these mystical experiences which seem to lie at the basis of essentially all religions, not just Christianity or Judaism or Islam, but some of these tribal religions are the people I've been working with. And this experience of the ineffable could be part of everybody's experience and may in part explain what's missing from modern religion in the sense that the big question is why are people turning away from organized religion? So, what are your thoughts about the Eucharist that you cover in your book about how this

Starting point is 00:25:04 may actually have been a mind-altering drink at the outset? Okay, so you have to think about ancient wine, okay? So, without being heretical or speculative about it, ancient wine is very, ancient Greek, the language that was used to draft the Gospels, the language that was used by St. Paul, the greatest missionary Christianity ever knew when he was preaching and converting to this Hellenic universe around the Mediterranean, writing letters in Greek to Greek speakers. The word they use for wine is pharmakos, right? So the word they use is drug. So wine was routinely referred to as a drug from like the time of Homer to the fall of the Roman Empire. So, over a thousand years go by. And of course, there's a word for wine, oinos, and you see that in the New Testament. But this

Starting point is 00:25:56 word pharmakos pops up as a ritual formula again and again. And the reason that is, is because wine at the time, and you see this in the ancient literature, it's described as, you know, unusually intoxicating, seriously mind-altering, occasionally hallucinogenic, that's true, and potentially lethal. Okay? So, very, very different physician who writes in the second half of the first century at the exact same time the Gospels are being written. And you can read recipe after recipe of what to add to wine to produce any number of different effects, whether it's adding spices like frankincense and myrrh, whether it's adding poisons. How did Socrates die in the end? With wine spiked with hemlock. Things like aconite. And then funky things like mandrake or henbane or black nightshade, which Dioscorides says can produce not unpleasant visions. Okay, so we have actual literature that points to something like a psychedelic vision in the first century AD at the time of the earliest Christians. So, you know, classicists know this. Like people who study Greek and Latin know this. And what's weird is that the people who study the pagan world are often very different

Starting point is 00:27:11 from the priests and the pastors who study the New Testament from a very different angle. And this was pointed out by classicists in the early 20th century. And they go on to say things like, you know, how strange it is that like a very big part of the literature and civilization of the ancient world is very much neglected by the very ones best able to investigate it, which is to say the Greek speakers and the scholars. And so just

Starting point is 00:27:37 using that as like a big lens, you can then go in and find actual organic data, like, you know, physical proof that people were mixing things into wine. And I mentioned a few examples in the book, including from the first century at this Villa Vesuvio site outside Pompeii. They found actual traces of wine that seems to have been mixed with things like opium and cannabis and henbane and black nightshade, in addition to toads, frogs, and lizards. So some very funky wine actually did exist. One of the shortcomings of the ethnobotanical literature is, in my opinion, the failure to consider beer and wine not only as mind-altering substances,

Starting point is 00:28:17 but as vehicles for making other mind-altering substances more mind-altering. In other words, they call them spirits for a reason. So this interplay of beer and wine, few people realize that wine is not just good because it's wine, but certainly in the ancient world it was the number one antibiotic. And also it was used as a menstruum, a word not common in everyday parlance, but it's used for dissolving these compounds.

Starting point is 00:28:44 There's an episode in Plants of the Gods called Hexing Herbs, which focuses on these tropene alkaloids-rich plants like henbane that were used for mind-altering and religious, and witch's sabbaths and all sorts of other interesting stuff like that. But explain to us your take on their role in the invention of civilization, beer and wine, which I think are complementary. You know, it's been said that the first brewery

Starting point is 00:29:15 may have been the first bakery, may have been the first temple, all at the same time. So elaborate on this beer theory for us. Without getting into too much detail, you're talking about Gobekli Tepe, which as far as we know, goes back about 12,000 years

Starting point is 00:29:27 from where we are now. Although some of these ritual elements that show up at this big megalithic site, 6,000 years, by the way, before Stonehenge, 7,000 years before the high civilizations that we know, like Egypt and the Indus Valley and Sumeria, there's this place, Gobekli Tepe,

Starting point is 00:29:44 these giant megalithic T-shaped pillars that the German archaeological folks, at the very least, think were meant to represent some kind of deities. And in this big site in southeastern Turkey, you know, at the upper register of the Fertile Crescent, 10th millennium, 9th millennium BC, they're finding these big limestone vats, six of them. And they could accommodate, some of them, 42 gallons of liquid. Okay, 42 gallons of what? It wasn't water. It wasn't safe to drink water all the time, by the way. So, they weren't necessarily looking to get intoxicated. But there's a great paper that came out, I think it was in 2012, about the ritual feasting. If you Google ritual feasting,

Starting point is 00:30:24 Gobekli Tepe, German, and some combination thereof, you'll find a great paper on the feasting that they think took place there. This ecstatic communion, these work parties that would bring people to this site where they weren't living there. They would come there, they think,

Starting point is 00:30:39 for ritual purposes to commune with the dead, potentially over something like a graveyard beer. So have we definitively found beer there? No, but interesting traces of calcium oxalate beer stone, which do point to fermentation. And so it raises this big question, did the agricultural revolution start with beer? In other words, did we first start growing crops

Starting point is 00:31:01 like wheat and barley to bake bread? Or did we really start growing them to drink them, to brew maybe one of these early ritual beers? The jury's still out. It's a debate that goes back to the 1950s, but it does inform what would later happen at Eleusis and those many millennia in between. This notion of a graveyard beer, ecstatic communion, ritual events. There's some hint of Eleusis there going all the way back to essentially the upper Paleolithic, which is kind of weird. Well, the question remains, was bread invented to make beer or was beer invented to make bread? And in either case, it shows that beer was one of the building blocks of civilization. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about our mutual colleague, Patrick McGovern,

Starting point is 00:31:48 whose work is really fundamental to sort of teasing this out. Yeah, at the University of Pennsylvania. I consulted him when I was writing the book, and he put me in touch with a guy named Martin Zarnkow, who did the testing for beer stone, by the way, at Cobeckley Tepe, and has done some follow-up experiments there, which are really intriguing. Pat McGovern is known, amongst other things, for resurrecting some of these ancient potions and these ancient brews. And he pointed me to like, well, the Midas touch, for example, which he recreated. So, that was based on a Phrygian potion, 8th century BC, in Gordium.

Starting point is 00:32:23 So, this could be theoretically hearkening back to King Midas. What they found in the burial chamber there was the remnants of a funerary feast. And this is another theme that pops up again and again, especially in the Roman times into early Christianity. This notion of a funeral banquet, and there's even a word in Latin for this, refrigerium, which means just like it sounds. It's a chill out. It's a refrigerator. So you see hints of that at this funeral banquet with King Midas. And some of these vessels contain the remnants of what McGovern identified as calcium oxalate pointing to beer, tartaric acid pointing to wine, and potassium gluconate pointing to something like honey or mead. So some sort of weird beer, wine, mead concoction that was used, as he says, to royally usher the king into the afterlife and maybe those attending this funeral banquet. So, again, there's actual, you know, organic chemical

Starting point is 00:33:26 data pointing to the existence of these potions, these compounds for centuries and centuries before Christianity. Well, this brings up two interesting complementary or competitive theories, depending on your perspective. One is the stoned ape theory, which is that these monkeys were going down to the ground or these proto-Semians, whatever they were, and eating ripe fruit because the fruit that had fallen was the ripest and they're the sweetest, but it would also start to ferment. So they were catching a buzz from that. And the other is that it was the drunk monkey theory, that it was a similar mind-altering that got them started. And the late Terence McKenna, that you and I both discussed in our writings, had this idea that it was this alteration of consciousness which gave birth to the human brain expansion, ultimately humans, human culture, and everything else. So, do you see those as different theories or complementary? Is it really one or the other?

Starting point is 00:34:28 Or is it really all of these different mind-altering aspects throughout the course of not only human evolution, but pre-human evolution got us to where we are today? I think they're very complementary. The same with these potions that you rightly suggest. The idea of alcohol as a vehicle for these other compounds. I got that idea from Terence McKenna. He mentions it in one page of Food of the Gods, and it was this notion of these archaic, matriarchal, psychedelic-loving societies versus the later patriarchal alcohol lovers. And he mentions this notion that, you know, alcohol could have been this intermediary that really united the two.

Starting point is 00:35:08 So spiked beer, spiked wine. So I think, you know, the drunken monkey isn't that controversial. The stoned ape is far more controversial for reasons you can imagine. But it's worth looking into. This morning, as a matter of fact, I won't mention details, but I was talking to my friend Lee Berger, who is a paleoanthropologist in South Africa. And together, we're taking like a very serious look at being able to scientifically test some of these stoned ape ideas. There's a really interesting aspect to wine and beer that is often overlooked in these ongoing analyses. And that is that wine makes itself, but beer must be made. In other words, grapes that fall from a tree will ferment and create alcohol.

Starting point is 00:35:47 Beer is not made by wheat by itself. It has to be made. So this shows that the path to these two drinks are fundamentally very different. And I think it just creates a different aspect to what's entailed not only in creating it but in utilizing it. But that's a more detailed discussion for next time. So, I'm curious, Brian, you've been incredibly successful at getting the church to be a collaborative, if not cooperative, in the course of the research. And I'd like your take as to where the church is now, why they didn't burn you at the stake, and what the future looks like in terms of

Starting point is 00:36:28 Christianity, in terms of Catholicism, in terms of all organized religions as these substances become more widely used in medicine, religion, recreation, what have you. Yeah, you know, to be honest, I was more concerned about being burned at the stake of classical wisdom. I was really concerned about the reaction from some folks at Harvard, and Greg Nagy in particular, who I reached out to around the corner here many years had with Greg, sort of like the classicist of classicists, he was not shocked by this line of investigation. And he encouraged me from our very first meeting. And I mentioned that because, you know, I talked about this dichotomy between the classical pre-Christian scholars and then, you know, what happens in the seminary today. You know, you're learning the same Greek. Why are there two different approaches to this? Why is there a classical department and why is there a department of theology? I think what unites those scholars today is this notion of a truth proposition,

Starting point is 00:37:34 the value of truth. And so, I mean, the Catholic church that I know, and I grew up Catholic, I went to Catholic school for 12 years, and I was trained by the Jesuits in Latin and Greek. So, I only learned Latin and Greek through the Jesuits. Like I was always taught to ask questions. And from the very beginning, you know, when I was bouncing from an office in Boston to places at the Vatican, I would get the same response. So I talked to the archivists, I would talk to the archeologists. The Vatican has an archeological team, for those who don't know, the Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archeology, which is a super cool title. And they're out there to preserve the remnants of paleo-Christianity, to ask the same questions, I think, that I'm asking, and to arrive at this truth proposition.

Starting point is 00:38:18 You know, what happened? What motivated people to convert from the time-honored religion of their family, their ancestors, all these pagan cults, like what would motivate somebody to convert from that to Christianity at the end of the first century into the second and third centuries, like before Constantine? This was an illegal thing, right? Christianity was illegal. It was literally underground, celebrated in house churches or necropolis, so graveyards. This is a graveyard religion. And today it still is, the interaction of the living and the dead that we celebrate at communion. And so I think that, you know, as long as you're diplomatic and you be honest with

Starting point is 00:38:56 the data, I think this is a conversation worth having, and I've never felt anything but welcome by the Vatican. So, what changed? Witches were killed in Salem for presumably taking ergot. So, why is everybody cool with this now? Is this something that happened 20 years ago, or has this been a gradual evolution? I don't know. I don't know. You asked about the death and rebirth of Karl Ruck. So, his career certainly changed from the late 70s to where it is today. And I wonder, the Vatican had its moment with Vatican II for the Catholics who are listening in the 1960s. And it's, you know, it's a big institution, maybe slow to pockets in the church. And I look to a lot of these brotherhoods, sisterhoods, like the Jesuits and the Dominicans and the Benedictines and the Franciscans, you know, educated folks who have big questions, same as you and me. And I think the best of them, you know, engage with the lay public. That's the mission. That's the ministry. Engage with universities, engage with scholarship, engage with divinity schools. So, I don't know. It's hard to say.

Starting point is 00:40:06 I'm not going to say that psychedelics are their favorite topic, but it's at least worthy of conversation. Well, when I was sitting in Richard Schulte's class on the botany and chemistry of hallucinogens in 1977, I remember him putting up a diagram of mescaline, the mescaline molecule on the board. And he said, now right behind this classroom is the Harvard Divinity School. They worship divinities. Here is divinity worship by some of my indigenous colleagues and teachers. But the Divinity School has never asked me to come over there and put one of these divinities on the blackboard. Now Harvard seems to be rediscovering what they actually discovered through William James

Starting point is 00:40:50 well over a century ago. What's happening there now? You've been spending a lot of time there at the divinity school, the medical school. It all seems to be coming together. So share your perspective on what's going on. I'll share what I can. Yeah, there's lots of interest interest and not just on that campus, but elsewhere.

Starting point is 00:41:06 So I've had, like the funnest part for me has been having these really cool conversations about like the meaning of psychedelic studies, right? Writ large across all these campuses and in popular discourse.

Starting point is 00:41:18 Again, things are very different from where they were even at Hopkins, you know, 20 years ago when a lot of this clinical work began. So I've had like the funnest conversations at Harvard and Yale and Hopkins and certainly on the West Coast. So I've mentioned a few of those psychedelic centers already and where a lot of the focus has been on clinical work. Interestingly, at least for me over the past couple of years

Starting point is 00:41:39 as a humanist, I'm seeing interest in things like divinity studies and ethnobotany that you and I both love, and the social sciences and the things that William James was talking about at this weird intersection between game, I think that I sense kind of a return to the big questions. You know, in addition to the relief of suffering, what do psychedelics really mean for people today? Why do people find meaning? You know, even if all you think about psychedelics, things like ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT, I mean, the things they talk about, you know collective understanding of the variety, like James, the variety of spiritual experiences that can sometimes happen under the right circumstances. And so, you know, like divinity schools are great places to host those conversations, English departments, maybe even in the arts. I think just I sense a real welcoming and an opening to what's really possible in the next chapter of the psychedelic conversation, which I think is that, our deep history and this unwritten future.

Starting point is 00:43:14 Well, I regard the leading academic institution these days is the Institute of Johns Hopkins, which was set up in part by my friend Tim Ferriss and is helmed in large part by Roland Griffiths. And Griffiths famously has said that 75% of the people that go through some of his trials say it's the most ineffable, indescribable, unforgettable experience of their lives. It's very common in psychedelic experiences or reading about psychedelic experiences where people say that this was just a sensory overload, spiritually, physically, mentally. But in a recent conversation with Karen Armstrong, she talked about how many religions seek to empty us of everything and that they want to know how to get away from thinking about anything. I mean, this is the point of meditation. You want to get to the point where you've emptied your mind,

Starting point is 00:44:11 your body, your spirit, so it can be refilled. So, how do you reconcile these two things where on the one hand, you want to fill yourselves up with sensations from the ninth dimension. On the other hand, you want to empty your soul at the same time. These would seem to be two completely opposite goals to have. Right. And they are. That's why it's called a paradox. And I see you were citing my recent conversation

Starting point is 00:44:36 with Karen. You can find it on YouTube called the God Paradox. I think paradox is a very good thing because I think that's again, not ever having experienced them myself, It's one of the things that seems to occur in those's another. But, you know, okay, so being part of yourself and also part of someone you're looking at or something you're looking at. So being here but also there simultaneously. Now you're getting some pretty quantum mind-bending stuff. These are paradoxes.

Starting point is 00:45:17 And I think, you know, like a Zen koan, they're there to remind us that life isn't easily reducible. And I was getting my phone out because I did want to quote Roland Griffiths himself, who I think is going on the record about this now. You know, one of the researchers who's largely responsible for the medicalization, at least of psilocybin, and, you know, rigorous clinical research into these drugs. He said last week in a video addressed to the Horizons Conference at New York, he said that, I've come to believe that this line of non-therapeutic research, what we're discussing, this non-therapeutic research is incredibly important and may ultimately prove to be crucial to the very survival of our species. So you don't want to be grandiose about this stuff, but Karen Armstrong said the same thing. And she wasn't talking about psychedelics. She was talking about these practices, these archaic ancient practices, techniques of ecstasy, in some cases that Eliade talks about, that just kind of bring us back down to the notion of our

Starting point is 00:46:17 true self. So you can call it ego dissolution and boundary dissolving, but it's essentially like entering into meditation or contemplative practice or yoga, you know, doing this stuff with the intention of losing the self, the false self of the ego, in order to find something that's maybe more genuine. So that, and here's the big, the whole point and the big kicker, is so that you can reinvest that sense of self into everyone you meet and everything you see. And so to be a beacon of love and compassion through these practices, that was kind of the whole point. Well, I want to underscore something you said there, which is the importance of other modes of reaching these altered states. It ain't all about hallucinogens.

Starting point is 00:47:01 In a conversation you had with Jordan Peterson, he said he'd come to believe that all of these religious experiences were based on psychedelics. I completely disagree. I think it's fasting. I think it may be mental illness in some cases. It could be meditation. So, all of these roads lead towards a similar place. But as much as I appreciate the value of hallucinogens and entheogens and psychedelics, I don't think they have all the answers. In fact, I worry a bit that in some cases are being loved to death and sold literally in some cases as the cure-all for everything, the with Nazis, that some of the alt-right were taking these things to reinforce their beliefs, as noxious as they were, so that we have to be careful that these things are kept in perspective. Now, in your conversation with Karen Armstrong,

Starting point is 00:47:57 you both quoted this wonderful line from St. Augustine, if you think you've understood God, that ain't God. But it brought to mind the line of George Carlin's when he used to mess with the nuns in religious school on Sunday and would say, if God is all powerful, can he make a rock so big that even he can't lift it? The point here being is that I think we need to find comfort and paradox by the same token. We can't just dismiss all the stuff as ineffable and you can't know it and whatever because it's part of human nature to want the answer, at least to seek the answer. It's an aspirational goal to learn and know,

Starting point is 00:48:37 even if you don't reach the point where you know God or know the unknowable. And maybe that's where psychedelics come in, right? And you're reminding me of a conversation I had with Glenn Shepard, who I'd love to talk about. So, Augustine said, si comprehendis non est Deus. Like, if your rational mind can fix in on it, you're probably not right about God. And I mentioned this Jesuit Karl Rahner who said that we shouldn't even use the word God. It's all aspirational. The rational mind has a tough time attaching to this. But yes, psychedelics as in the right way, these are not for everybody. I'm also super concerned about the public discourse and this notion of a panacea or a God pill.

Starting point is 00:49:18 I think that under the right setting for otherwise consenting adults, I don't know when that is. Maybe it begins at 35 or later because life is psychedelic enough. The infrequent occasional use of some of these compounds with people who know what the hell they're doing could be an aid to a spiritual discipline that then transcends or at least sublimates psychedelics into a life dedicated to contemplative practice and action, like acting on that practice to actually do something in the world, something of benefit. I mentioned Glenn Shepard because he and I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago, just shows you how differently people think about psychedelics.

Starting point is 00:50:05 And his estimate was that something like 50% of Amazonian shamanism, at least with respect to ayahuasca, is not dedicated to health and wellness, the way we think about it. But he said they're hunting rituals, which I thought was fascinating. And he was talking about his work with the machiginga. Machiginga. Machiginga. And all these hunting, and why and how they use ayahuasca and other plants, other magical plants in these hunting rituals. And so I just think we have to remember that this medicalization that has captured the imagination over the past 20 years is just one very small aspect of what these things represent, how archaic they really are, stoned apes or not.

Starting point is 00:50:48 These things, I'm talking about these plants and fungi, have been evolving for millions of years. And I think we always need to keep that in mind. Well, my late friend Peter Gorman, who was formerly editor of High Times Magazine, you see ethnobotanists have friends in all sorts of strange cultures, not just the rainforest, was the second white man that I know of to take the magic frog, the green monkey frog of the Amazon. And he said that they were using this for hunting magic and that he took it and he saw a crossing in the river with a big juicy taper crossing it in his vision.

Starting point is 00:51:23 And the next day, as he was hiking through the jungle with his indigenous guides, he recognized the crossing. And just as he recognized that was the crossing, a big juicy taper came walking across. So this is part of the ineffable. You can explain this through the prism of Western science. But in one of your conversations with Carl Ruck, he quotes Carl Jung as saying, you can't reject something just because you can't understand it. And I think that's the attitude we should have towards psychedelics, towards religion, and in some ways towards life itself. But can I ask you a question? Fire away.

Starting point is 00:51:58 Because, I mean, I look at you as a hero, as a groundbreaker in a very real sense around this discipline and this topic. You know, as a disciple of Schultes, amongst other accolades we could list. I think that some of the most impressive stuff you've done is like transforming the insights you've had on psychedelics or not, I don't know, or maybe it's through your scholarship or your study, into a desire to actually preserve these traditions. And what that means in some cases is preserving the plants themselves. Sometimes it means preserving the people. A lot of it has to do with very boring legal work, which is conserving land in places that's not always very easy. And if you wouldn't mind, I think that you're an example of doing good in the world based on ineffable, mystical, otherworldly type encounters.

Starting point is 00:52:55 Would you mind expounding on that? Well, thank you for your kind words, first of all. I thought I was the one asking the questions here. But there's a Jewish concept called Tikkunkun olam which is about repairing the world and i think that all of us live a better life in trying to do something a little better helping somebody less fortunate and and it's not always possible but if everybody's sort of pitched in and try and make things a little better i think we'd all be better off and i call this the spiritual boomerang. There's a small element of selfishness in the work I've been doing with my indigenous colleagues

Starting point is 00:53:31 because it helps me. I sleep better when I see these forests on fire, when I see these people chased out of their traditional lands, knowing that I've at least tried to make a difference to help them and their forests and their frogs and their plants and their fungi. I feel like I'm trying. I used to say I'm trying to make the world a better place. I got too many dents in my fender now. Now I say I'm trying to make the world a less bad place. And I think that's a more worthy cause that hopefully everybody would try and do. But I've

Starting point is 00:53:59 got to tell you that, you know, I set out to do this and work on this and protect this. But on a few occasions when I've been sick, they've healed me. And that's the spiritual boomerang. You throw it away and it comes back to you. And if all of us can try and live our life trying to see where we can try and make a difference, what's the downside to that? So what is ACT for those who don't know? ACT is the Amazon Conservation Team. I'm the co-founder with my wife, Liliana Madrigal, a Costa Rica protected area specialist. And we were long concerned that rainforest protection was overlooking indigenous peoples and indigenous lands. When we started this almost 30 years ago, there were groups like the World Wildlife Fund where I worked that focused on protecting endangered species. There were groups like Cultural Survival focused on helping indigenous peoples, but they didn't work together. So we got together with an approach we call

Starting point is 00:54:53 biocultural conservation to work in partnership with the indigenous peoples to help them, to empower them, to train them to better protect their land and their culture. They're in the driver's seat, not us. But we have access to tools, technology, training, legal expertise that can make a real difference. Stuff they couldn't do on their own. But as an ethnobotanist, you know the indigenous peoples know a lot more stuff than you do about rainforest issues. But they need a helping hand. And Schultes often told me, he said, these naked people may not have a last name, may not have clothes, and may not be able to write their name, but they know a hell of a lot more about this stuff than we ever will. And that was a very humbling comment on him.

Starting point is 00:55:38 And I heard it many times. So it's not about us playing Tarzan and saving the Indians of the jungle, but it's also not making a similar mistake, which is, oh, they can do it all. They know better than we do. Let's leave them alone. A similar dichotomy is where people say, well, we shouldn't give them iPads because that's going to ruin their culture. The other saying that let's give them iPads and iPhones and computers because that's going to save their culture. Neither is true. In Suriname, they say, to every complex question, there is an answer which is both simple and wrong.

Starting point is 00:56:10 So, I want to wind up here with a bit of a loaded question, which goes back to something we touched on, and that is the history of hallucinogens at Harvard, which is something which has been fascinating me for 40 years. Many people think that hallucinogens and their study began with Lurie and Alpert, God forbid, in the 60s. More of us in the know like to think it began with Schultes in the 30s and 40s. Those of us who've really dug deeper, like you and I have, know it began with William James prior to the turn of the century. But I'd like to know your perspective, having spent so much time at my old alma mater, as the contributions and the mistakes

Starting point is 00:56:50 made by Leary and Alpert, which very few people address these days, where people continue to lionize them without calling attention to the pitfalls that they did fall into. Hmm. That is a loaded question. Yeah, I haven't talked about this publicly. Yeah, but leery is still a bit of a four-letter word on campus. And just in generality, I mentioned these conversations with folks from the Divinity School to the law school to the medical school to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. There's a lot of genuine organic interest in this topic. And I noticed over the past couple of years that the specter

Starting point is 00:57:32 of Leary, the shadow of Leary kind of hangs in the corner of every conversation. Because for those who don't know, the Pied Piper of psychedelic enlightenment, Mr. Leary, gets a lot of flack for what happened at Harvard in the early 1960s. And when he and Dick Alpert, who became Ram Dass, were kicked off campus, that was the beginning of a long hiatus in these studies. So we're talking about, this is about 60 years. So from 1962 until where we sit today, it's been a full 60 years since some of this controversy erupted. But like we talked about at the very beginning, despite that psychic load, I think that the clinical work certainly made an impact. The fact that a guy named Michael Pollan

Starting point is 00:58:18 teaches English at Harvard in the fall makes a difference, informs the conversation. And I think that people are re-approaching this topic now. I don't know why it's taken 60 years, but re-approaching it with a real sober lens. And it's been, yeah, it's been really interesting to witness. Well, let me highlight the two things that I think live on in a positive way, and that's the work of hallucinogens with prisoners and with religious leaders, which, as you know, has been resuscitated and done in a much more rigorous and scientific way. So in that sense, that was a very positive contribution. But just like the Catholic Church that we discussed, some mistakes were made along the way. of the immortality key, we're living in an age where we can learn from our past mistakes and not repeat them and look for a brighter future using hallucinogens in a careful, culturally

Starting point is 00:59:11 sensitive, scientifically rigorous and shamanic way for the benefit of all. But first and foremost, we have to benefit the people that taught us these compounds, the plants, the fungi, the animals, and make sure that benefits flow both ways. It can't be just about celebrating the use of ayahuasca while the original ayahuasca vines are being put to the torch, as is the case in much of the Northwest Amazon. So we live in a time where the candle's burning both ends. On the one hand, we have burning rainforest.

Starting point is 00:59:43 We have indigenous peoples that continue to be forcibly missionized. On the other hand, we have the institutions of greater learning like Harvard, Yale, and Imperial College in London and UCLA and Johns Hopkins celebrating this back to the future where these lessons of the ancients, these chemicals created 3 billion years ago can revolutionize and improve the way we live our lives and our culture. And so I thank you, Brian, for your friendship, for your scholarship, and for being with us today. Dr. Plotkin, you are a hero and a humanitarian. Thank you. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy

Starting point is 01:00:25 getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them

Starting point is 01:01:06 and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by GiveWell. Donating money to help other people is a wonderful act, but how can you be confident? How can you know that your donations are actually improving or saving lives effectively? It's hard to do. You could do weeks of research to find the charities that are out there, what programs they run, what their administrative overhead is, how effective those programs are,

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin — The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More

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