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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another edition of Infinite Loops.
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I am super excited for today's guest. It is Brian Muraresku.
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I had to ask him how to pronounce that because as an O'Shaughnessy, I got used to it.
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He is the author of an incredible book that I'm going to just right upfront tell you to go out and buy, because it is so fascinating and it touches on so many things.
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The title of the book is The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Brian, welcome.
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Brian Muraresku: Thanks for having me, Jim. Good to see you.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I got to tell you, man, when I read your book, I was like ...
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My wife usually tries to shut me off because I'd just go down so many rabbit holes.
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This time around, I started with her and started telling her, especially, we're going to get to the part with women, which she takes very seriously, she actually listened to me.
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Which I was like, "I have to tell Brian that."
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Because you broke through.
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You broke through and many others did not.
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But then of course, I read Joe Rogan saying one of my best podcasts ever, fucking unbelievable, sensational, and suddenly I felt like a pair of brown shoes in a world that was a tuxedo.
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I hope you're going to help me along here.
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I'd like it if you would to give your background, which is incredible.
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Phi Beta Kappa, Brown, degree in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.
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I cannot tell you how much I love seeing that.
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But we're going to get to, you don't get a lot of jobs with a classics degree. You became a lawyer.
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But a little background on yourself and then please set the stage for the book. Brian Muraresku: Sure. Okay.
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You can't really get a job with Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, unless you want to become a priest or a classics professor.
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I was actually eyeing both possibilities back in 2002 and decided to take the LSATs and go to Wall Street instead, where a lot of good work is happening.
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It was an exciting time for a young person in the early 2000s to head off to Wall Street after law school, and that's what I did. I left languages behind.
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I left these ancient historical mysteries behind, and I was a junior associate at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, a block from Wall Street.
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That was my life until 2007 when I started reading about the first experiments coming out of Johns Hopkins with psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms.
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All of a sudden there's very serious scientific investigation of psilocybin.
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I, at that time, and to this day, I had never taken psychedelics.
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But from an academic perspective, I was drawn in because I was reading about people having these transformational experiences in one afternoon on one dose of psilocybin.
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It reminded me of some of the testimony that survives from antiquity about these ancient mystery religions, like the mysteries of Eleusis in ancient Greece, which we can get into.
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But the long and short of it is, out of nowhere, here comes psychedelics to Wall Street.
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For the subsequent 12, 13 years, I'm reading everything I can.
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At some point, I'm traveling to the Mediterranean and tracking down these clues because it wasn't me who said this, but Huston Smith may be one of the greatest religious scholars of all time, he said, "This is the best kept secret in history."
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Wouldn't it be amazing if psychedelics were the answer to the best kept secret in history?
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
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I, like you, became interested in psychedelics actually through a friend of my daughters.
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My daughter went to Yale and her friend worked for MAPS, which is probably one of the best known of the organizations that are advocating for responsible medical research into psychedelics.
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I want to underline that because I'm fully in favor, as you know.
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I know people who've ...
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A woman who works for me, we were talking about it yesterday and she was saying ...
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She told me a story about a friend who was severely depressed, had tried suicide.
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The standard meds she was on were not helping.
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She got into one of these programs, psilocybin.
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One treatment, and Adriana, who I was talking to, was like, "I hadn't seen her for a while and she was literally transformed as a human being."
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Then of course I read Michael Pollan's book and read your book and others.
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I think that this is an incredibly exciting opportunity for us to look into the efficacy of these various psychedelics.
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But again, I want to underline, responsibly, overseen by medical professionals, et cetera, and purity. I'm 61.
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I grew up when Richard Nixon decided to vilify psychedelics.
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A lot of people aren't aware that there was a long history, a good history of their efficacy in treating things as disparate as depression, alcoholism, a variety of end of life care, palliative care.
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We won't get into it because that would be another podcast in itself. Why Nixon?
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Who, by the way, I'm including Donald Trump here, I believe Richard Nixon was the craziest president we've ever had. Truly crazy.
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I'm standing by that one because when you dive into him and his history, what?
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I mean, anyway- Brian Muraresku: Well, he did label Tim Leary the most dangerous man in America at the time when we were apparently fighting the Soviets.
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Tim Leary and his LSD was apparently more dangerous than the Kremlin, which is saying a lot in the 1960s and '70s.
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I mean, these things were vilified for a long time.
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I grew up under the Reagans and the, “Just Say No” campaign.
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I mean, and maybe that still is part of my worldview.
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Just the idea that all drugs are always bad all of the time.
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I mean, the first time I was taught about drugs was by a police officer, literally who came into my fifth grade classroom in Philadelphia as part of the D. A. R. E.
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program to teach me to avoid all drugs all the time.
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As you mentioned, in the '50s and '60s, LSD was being studied in a very serious way until this war on drugs.
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Now that the fog of war is lifting, we're realizing again, largely through folks at Hopkins, NYU, UCLA, et cetera, that these compounds, as unpredictable as they are, tend to have dramatic effects for all kinds of different clinical conditions.
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They will probably be legal in the case of MDMA and psilocybin in three to five years. It's happening. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I completely agree.
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That's, again, maybe I could just have you for five podcasts because we could talk about each one of these things.
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But I want to stay on your book.
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I'm a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson, and I've read everything he's written.
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I thought of you and your book and his book Ishtar Rising: Why the Goddess Went to Hell and What to Expect Now That She's Returning. Very interesting book.
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But one of the things that your books makes very plain is the idea that the early Christian church probably borrowed many sacraments, many rituals, et cetera, from Greek cults and other pagan cults.
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But one of the things that I want to get into as we discuss this is, why they decided to remove women from the hierarchy.
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I come from a family of three older sisters.
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I'm surrounded by women in my life, so I'm very sensitive to the issue.
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It's like I had four mothers when I was growing up.
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But that's going to be something I want to get into.
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But I think that let's not bury the lede.
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The lede is that there is some evidence, and we're going to talk about the fact that you've been challenged on this, that early Greek cults, specifically the Cult of Dionysus, used psychedelics with beer to allow their adherents to talk to God. Which I love.
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What a great marketing line, man. I mean, "Come on in.
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We're going to let you talk to God." Let's talk about that.
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Brian Muraresku: Well, that's kind of the whole point.
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If you're out there talking to God in the ancient Greek world and this new religion comes along, that is illegal ...
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Remember that Christianity is an illegal cult until Constantine for a few centuries.
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If you have this perfectly good religion where you're talking to God and doing other things, communing with Dionysus amongst other gods and goddesses, and here comes this new illegal cult, what is going to drag you from that religion, the religion of your ancestors, to this brand new untested faith unless something very powerful is going on?
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It doesn't mean that psychedelics and drugs are involved every step of the way, but I think it does mean, like Elaine Pagels says at Princeton University, I think it does mean that visionary experiences were involved in the birth and development of the faith.
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I mean, just as one quick example, St.
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Paul, the greatest evangelist of the early church who writes basically half the New Testament, he never met Jesus in the flesh.
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He's thrown off the horse, or whatever happened, by this heaven sent flash of light and experiences kind of these auditory hallucinations of Jesus and goes on to become the greatest prophet of the faith. It wasn't just him.
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It was Peter who's described in Acts as caught up in trance.
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I think when you just peel back the layers, early Christianity was a very funky thing.
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There was no central defining authority like what would happen in Rome, what would happen in Constantinople.
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For a long time, it was microchurches.
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It was small communities of people getting together in a place like Ephesus in Asia Minor or Corinth or even Rome itself.
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What those people were doing may have looked different from church to church.
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One thing that came across in my research was that women were very heavily involved.
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Because before the rise of brick and motor basilicas, again, when Christianity is legalized in the fourth century, before that, if you're celebrating the mass, as I know you did as a boy, as did I, 13 years of Catholic school, the mass at that time was in private homes.
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In dining rooms, literally, or in these underground catacombs.
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That's where Christianity took hold across the Mediterranean.
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Now, when you're talking about celebrating mass in the dining room, you're talking about the domestic sphere, you're talking about a place where women have a great deal of influence over the development of this faith.
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I didn't set out to write a feminist book, but the more you actually look at the evidence, you realize that if Christianity was picking things up from ancient Greece, it was the fact that women played a very leading role in these mystery cults and these rituals. Which we can talk about.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, didn't it go so far as to say that God was mother, and I think it a said [foreign language], if my memory is right. Brian Muraresku: Yeah.
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We call her mother nature to this day.
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But at that she was [foreign language].
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She was a real life goddess that you would go to meet face to face.
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She wasn't a metaphor for them. Yeah.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
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Then they kind of borrowed from that and just changed it to a male hierarchy, God, the father, God, the son.
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Correct me if I'm wrong here, but early Christianity didn't proclaim that Jesus was God.
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They thought that he was a prophet.
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Brian Muraresku: There's a great debate about the divinity of Jesus.
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Again, quoting Elaine Pagels, I mean, she even takes a look at the gospel of John as kind of this competition between the followers of John and the followers of the Thomas gospel.
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In which John is actively trying to make a case for the divinity of Jesus.
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I mean, something that's not concretized for many centuries thereafter, including the Bible itself.
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Which doesn't come together again until the fourth or fifth centuries.
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When you think back to the early church, it's just a very different thing than sits in Rome today.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: One of the things that I was fascinated by was the idea that ...
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Most people take a lot of their faith on face value. It never stuck with me.
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I had various very intelligent priests, just like, "We're never going to get to this guy, I don't know think."
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But the idea that I think is central here was the ceremony itself, the way we experience it today, not back then, is still heavily based on what was practiced back then.
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Except back then, it was blood of Dionysus, not blood of Christ.
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There was a switcheroo that you write about in your book that maybe the early Christians were like, "Wow, the Cult of Dionysus is getting tons of adherence.
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I wonder what's going on over there."
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Realizing that maybe that there was some psychedelics involved and beer.
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Again, women kept the recipes, not men.
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Borrowed that and then basically did a switcheroo and made it just regular wine.
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The placebo effect was very strong.
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But why do you think more people don't know about this?
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Brian Muraresku: I mean, the easiest answer I think, is the impending death of the classics.
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I mean that in a real way.
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I mean, I kind of got lucky when I was ushered into St.
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Joe's Prep in Philadelphia.
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I mean, even in the mid '90s, the study of Latin and Greek was already antiquated.
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I mean, I felt like I was walking into a film, a boys school from the 1950s.
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It just felt so alien even to me.
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Latin was mandatory and I stuck with it.
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Greek was an elective, but for some reason it came easier to me than mathematics.
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Then I realized that it's just not a normal thing.
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A generation ago at that time, I think there were a million bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States. 600 were for classics. That's 0. 06%.
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It's obviously even less today.
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There's a real world debate about this.
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Howard University here in D. C.
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just recently closed its classics department.
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Cornel West from Harvard wrote this this oped in The Washington Post calling this a spiritual catastrophe.
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But if you're going to cut things ...
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I understand why Latin and Greek are going to go the way of the typewriter.
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I mean, how can you get a job, how can we prepare students for real life doing real things, like Jim O'Shaughnessy does, if your head's full of nothing but Latin and Greek, like mine was?
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I was terrible at math and finance until later in life.
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It just doesn't make sense.
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Yet when you look back at history, Latin and Greek were kind of the core curriculum of higher education.
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It was the whole engine behind the Renaissance, which was the rebirth of all this classical Greek thought.
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The Founding Fathers of the United States, I would say almost all of them knew Latin and Greek.
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I mean, this was just part of the curriculum until relatively recently, and now it's dying.
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I think as a result, just there are far fewer people who know what was happening in the first century.
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It's very specialized classicists.
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It's very specialized theologians.
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What they know doesn't always filter down to the pews or to the students on the other hand.
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It's just very rarefied territory. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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Well, I graduated in 1978, but I did take six years of Latin because I started in seventh and eighth grade.
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It was a Catholic school.
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I took a year of Greek, which the Latin held, but not the Greek. Brian Muraresku: Yeah. [inaudible].
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: But Sanskrit, tell me a little bit about that.
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Brian Muraresku: By the time I was a freshman at Brown, I'd had four years of Latin, three years of Greek.
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I was always told that the third member of that triumvirate was Sanskrit.
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Kind of the mother tongue, maybe, of all Indo-European languages.
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This Indo-European family is sometimes described as the most successful family of languages in the history of the world.
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It's natively spoken by half the planet.
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It's everything from Spanish and French and the romance languages, to Russian, to Bengali and Punjabi and languages you'd find today in India and the area.
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It's this incredible family of languages.
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What you learn is that some of those roots in Latin and Greek, you can find them in the Sanskrit.
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Which is really phenomenal.
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One thing as you study it for years and years, you start to realize is that there are sacraments.
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Perhaps visionary sacraments that are described in Sanskrit, in the Vedic literature.
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They talk about Soma, which we don't know what it was, but it's described as this sacrament that opens the eyes of the initiates and gives access to the kingdom of heaven.
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Not unlike, for example some of the potions that were splashing around ancient Greece, or maybe even the Eucharist.
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The concept of these sacraments always being around, you find it in Sanskrit, you find it in the Greek, it goes into the Latin.
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All of this is kind of described as the pagan continuity hypothesis.
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The idea that something from the ancient world made it into Christianity, and by extension, the world's biggest religion.
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But unless you know the languages or unless you're forced to learn the languages, you don't really come across this stuff that often. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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But it still puzzles me because I'm a huge history nerd, and I read, for example, Will and Ariel Durant's entire Story of Civilization.
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Serious academic historians always have a bone to pick with them.
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But they made history accessible and told it more as a story.
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They were pretty good on their sources, et cetera, and that I didn't see even hints of this.
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Now, maybe I'm forgetting because I didn't go back and reread it.
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Just, to me, this is like headline news.
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If we can prove that, a, psychedelics were in fact used in the Cult of Dionysus and other pagan rituals, if we can prove that the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and ... Who the other, Thomas? Were suppressed.
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If the weight of the evidence here, let's look at it that way, I always look at things as probabilities, I'm probably prone to be convinced.
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As Wilson says, you could convince anybody of anything as long as they have a strong desire to believe.
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Brian Muraresku: I like that.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: But you make an excellent case for the fact that this is probably true.
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My question becomes, if it's probably true, more people need to understand and know about that, I think. Then secondly, why?
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I personally go to always follow the money or always follow the power.
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Constantine, didn't he kind of decide who became a Christian?
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Because they did a census and there were more Christians than anyone else, and he's like, "Okay, we're all Christians."
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Brian Muraresku: I mean, you raised big questions.
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Number one, is this true?
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If it's true, basically who the hell cares and why does this matter in 2021?
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Well, just to take that for a second, it's 2021.
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There's lots of different ways to mark time. We mark it by Jesus.
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Whether you're a believer or not, it's [Latin].
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Sometimes we call it the common era now.
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[Latin], as I was taught as a kid is the year of our Lord.
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[Latin] is Latin for master, like a master-slave relationship.
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Whether we like it or not, we kind of mark time, we step in time to Jesus.
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There's a lot of mystery behind that.
20:17
How did a carpenter's son become the most famous human being who ever lived?
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How did this illegal cult of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers in an otherwise neglected part of the empire go on to create the world's biggest religion, convert the entire Roman empire in only a few centuries?
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I'm not saying that drugs or psychedelics or any of this was the cause.
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I'm saying that it's part of the uninvestigated story of Christianity.
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There are no hard and fast answers to this stuff.
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It's why historians have jobs.
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It's why it's fun to read about this stuff.
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But if there's one thing, there has been a bias against drugs.
20:55
There isn't a lot of really good scholarship on ancient pharmacology.
20:55
Let's call it that, ancient pharmacology.
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I mean, as one little example, just a tiny example about why the ancient Greek matters, why linguistics matter, why maybe this stuff doesn't filter down to the general public, just think about wine.
21:10
When you think about the Eucharist, I think about Leonardo's Last Supper, I think about guys sitting around a table with goblets of wine.
21:15
I mean, the minute you start investigating ancient wine, the wine of the first century AD, and you are immediately struck by the proposition that ancient wine had very little in common with the wine coming out of Napa and Sonoma today.
21:31
It's a really important point.
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I like to say this, you can read the entire New Testament in Greek, and you will not find one instance, not one reference to the word alcohol.
21:42
You will never find alcohol in the New Testament.
21:42
You'll see wine and you'll see drunkenness, but the potency of wine in antiquity wasn't revered because of its alcoholic content.
21:47
There's no hard liquor by the way.
21:54
There's no distilled spirits in Europe until the 12th century.
21:54
What made wine so powerful, so alluring, so seductive to the point where ...
21:59
I wouldn't say that Dionysus is the God of wine.
22:05
I would say Dionysus is the God of intoxication, or maybe the God of drugs and just maybe the God of psychedelics.
22:11
Because when you look in the ancient records, you're seeing that wine is being mixed with all kinds of different things.
22:16
Whether it's poisons, whether it's frankincense and myrrh, these spice perfumes, whether it's magical plants, herbs, fungi.
22:25
Wine is routinely mixed with all kinds of different things to the point where one word to describe wine in Greek is pharmakon.
22:31
Which is where we get the word drug.
22:31
It's not the word you see in the New Testament, but it is the word that you find in other Greek literature.
22:41
Wine was almost universally regarded as this vehicle to deliver different experiences.
22:41
Not necessarily the alcoholic experiences, but intoxicating, sometimes euphoric, sometimes sacramental, sometimes ego dissolving experiences where you are communing with the gods. I mean, quite literally.
22:58
This is all before Christianity.
22:58
If we know that about wine, the basic question is this, if the wine at that time really was mind altering, really was drugged, spiked, did some of that make its way into early Christianity?
23:09
That's the big question, and we found some hard scientific data to support that.
23:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree.
23:16
It also makes me think of the phrase that occurs in your book quite a bit, which is the quote, if you die before you die, you won't die when you die.
23:27
Talk about that a little bit. Brian Muraresku: Right.
23:28
Do you mind if I say it in Greek?
23:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Please.
23:30
Brian Muraresku: This comes from Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece, one of the holiest sites of Christian orthodoxy. It's on [Greek].
23:43
If you die before you die, you won't die when you die.
23:43
It's a concept that obviously finds its way into Orthodox Christianity.
23:48
Us, Catholics, maybe haven't heard about it too much, but I do think it goes all the way back to classical antiquity.
23:53
It was this concept of dying before dying.
23:57
Essentially going through a ceremony of death and rebirth.
23:57
If there's one definition I can offer for these ancient mystery cults, both the ones that precede Christianity and maybe the way early Christianity itself was practiced by some of these Greek speaking Christians, I would say that it was a process of death and rebirth.
24:13
I mean, even in the gospels in John's gospel, he will say that unless you are reborn, you cannot see the kingdom of heaven.
24:23
This concept of death and rebirth plays its way out through all these ancient mystery cults, in Dionysus, the mysteries of Eleusis.
24:28
It's believed in some cases that only those who went through these elongated ceremonies and deep preparation, that only they would conquer death.
24:38
Only they would have life after death.
24:38
It was through some kind of ritual process of dying before their physical death.
24:42
Really confronting their mortality.
24:42
In some cases, meeting gods and goddesses, but in almost every case, walking away with the conviction that they are more than their physical bodies.
24:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That of course ties right in ...
24:57
If you're familiar with the writings of Jed McKenna and other so-called spiritual seekers of today, Tony de Mello, who was a Jesuit priest, the whole idea and the main part of their message is this idea of death and rebirth.
25:10
In a different way than the Christians might interpret it, or even those early Greek cults would interpret it, sort of it's an advocacy of non-duality.
25:23
If you've read Lao Tzu, if you've read the Gita, if you've read any of these answered texts, which my guess is you have read them all, that, that is a common message.
25:36
But one of the lines that struck me was the end of illusion is terrifying because it is the end of you.
25:42
This idea of ego and the whole idea that maybe earlier peoples didn't think so much in a Cartesian separation, if you will, but rather understood this far more intuitively than we moderns do today.
26:01
The whole idea of the Eleusis and the experiences there, is it the first rule is, like fight club, you don't talk about the mysteries?
26:10
Don't you think that these kinds of experiences would be incredibly beneficial for a much broader group of people than say, just elites or people who are doctors or God forbid suffering from some horrible thing like post-traumatic stress.
26:29
Because that's where all the research is being done today. Brian Muraresku: Yeah.
26:34
That was my introduction to this material too, was through the modern day clinical studies.
26:36
I mean, clearly this stuff has an impact on people across a range of conditions that don't really make sense.
26:41
I mean, from anxiety, depression, like you mentioned, to alcoholism or end of life distress, how can something like psilocybin address each of these conditions in an afternoon?
26:51
The bigger question to me going back 12, 13 years was, why do three and four people walk away from that experience with psilocybin describing it as one of the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, if not the most meaningful from a single session?
27:07
Again, the more you think about that, you're heading into kind of mystical territory.
27:12
What is happening to these people under the influence of psilocybin, and was it similar to what may have been happening in these mystery rights?
27:16
I mean, today through the Mystical Experience.
27:21
Questionnaire that they use at Hopkins and elsewhere, people report all these fantastical things like transcending time and space, a sense of the sacred, this deeply felt positive mood.
27:32
Again, I mean, just circumstantially, when you're kind of serving what was happening at Eleusis, which survives for 2,000 years in ancient Greece.
27:36
Or when you're talking about communing with Dionysus, becoming Dionysus, drinking wine to become Dionysus.
27:42
The kind of side effects that that brings with people are awfully mystical to the point where, even then they were trying to figure out who should have access to this stuff?
27:52
Do you make this very special pilgrimage to Eleusis, to this sanctuary that is controlled by these hereditary families, and that is supported by the Greek state?
28:02
It's all very sober and orderly.
28:02
Or do you take that sacrament and do you take it to the outdoor churches, to the forest and mountains of Greece, which are the Dionysian mysteries?
28:12
Should this belong to everybody?
28:12
That tension was already happening in ancient Greece.
28:16
Along comes Jesus, who's not just democratizing, like Dionysus was, this access to the mysteries.
28:23
But if you think about it, there is a way to read the invitation from Jesus to celebrate the Eucharist.
28:28
There's a way to read that if you're a first century Greek speaker that kind of reads like a domestication of the mysteries.
28:37
Not just democratizing them, but offering access to immortality to everybody in your dining room.
28:44
It's a really, really provocative reading, I get that.
28:44
But it's not an irrational reading of John's gospel.
28:49
I mean, the whole point is to promise immortality through the consumption of the blood of Jesus.
28:54
Now we have to ask ourselves, what was that?
28:54
If wine at the time is already this alternative product that we're not often taught about, what was drawing people into these dining rooms?
29:05
What was drawing people into these homes to commune with Jesus?
29:05
These are really big questions, Jim.
29:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree completely.
29:11
I wonder, have we advanced in terms of our ability to do an analysis of what these chalices and other vessels for drinking contained? Brian Muraresku: Yeah.
29:23
I mean, that's what drew me in.
29:25
The two things that drew me in back in 2007 was the psychopharmacology.
29:25
I mean, the fact that rigorous scientists are taking a look at what's happening under the influence of psilocybin.
29:30
But the second one was this archeochemistry.
29:35
It's not just the brain scientists and the psychologists, the archeologists and the chemists are teaming up in recent years to do all this organic residue analysis.
29:46
Whatever our ancestors were drinking, if we're lucky, it remains in these ancient chalices, vessels, maybe these grails.
29:53
The evidence is out there.
29:53
We just either haven't had the technology or the education and willingness to go out and test what is probably there.
29:57
In recent years, we have been testing different wine jars and we have been finding some incredible things.
30:03
Like my colleague, Andrew Koh at MIT, he's famous for discovering the world's oldest wine cellar in Galilee an hour north of Nazareth.
30:13
It goes way back to the Canaanites, like 1700 BC, but he essentially found wine spiked with all kinds of different things.
30:22
Not overtly psychedelic, but things like honey and [inaudible], [inaudible] terrible, and cypress, cinnamon on and on and on.
30:28
The point being that we have actual organic chemical data that wine was being spiked.
30:32
When I first read his studies, I thought to myself, there's got to be more data out there that just hasn't come to light.
30:38
We did eventually find something from this pharmacy outside Pompeii dated to the first century AD, so when the earliest Christians would have been there.
30:47
This incredible assemblage of what looks like a very strange wine that was spiked with cannabis and opium and henbane and black nightshade, which can be hallucinogenic, visionary, potentially lethal at the right doses.
30:59
In addition to all that frogs, lizards and toads were in this jar.
31:05
Very like Macbethian, Shakespearian, funky potions did exist, so we can say with a straight face that there is organic data pointing to these sacramental strange wines that just don't exist today.
31:21
The point now is to do more testing to try and figure out this story and kind of connect all these dots in antiquity.
31:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What do you think, just to speculate?
31:28
Let's say we continue to do the research, we continue to do the pharmacology and the analysis of the various elements that were contained and we finally get agreement across everyone who's doing that research.
31:44
That we now have sort of definitively decided or shown that these psychoactive, if we don't want to call them psychedelics, but psychoactive elements or drugs or medicines, if you want to be trained by a MAPS scholar, are contained there within.
31:59
I think that's a huge story.
31:59
I think that we need to take a step back.
32:06
I always remember Winston Churchill's famous line, history shall be kind to me for I shall write it.
32:12
It kind of seems to me that ...
32:12
I've always said, history depends on who's telling the story.
32:18
Part of this story is that after Constantine decided Rome was going to be Christian, the Christian Church went on a bit of a rampage and they raised thousands of pagan temples, shrines, et cetera, the library at Alexandria.
32:32
I mean, but I think people need to know about that. Brian Muraresku: Yeah. It's funny.
32:42
I think again, Pagans and some of these scholars of early Christianity who've studied the Gnostics, a catch all term for these different heretical groups, I think this stuff has been out there but maybe it's not as widely publicized as it could or should be.
32:51
I mean, the discovery of the Nag Hammadi corpus, for example, in 1945 ...
32:56
For those who don't know, there's 52 additional codices that were discovered in Egypt.
33:02
These alternative gospels that never made it in- Jim O'Shaughnessy: What?
33:09
Brian Muraresku: Like the B side of the Bible has been out there.
33:13
Miraculously preserved in the sands of Egypt.
33:13
You mentioned the Gospel of Mary Magdalene a couple of times. That's even older.
33:17
That was discovered in 1896 in Akhmim, also in Egypt.
33:17
Just because Egypt happens to preserve this stuff.
33:22
Who knows what else is out there?
33:22
I mean, who knows what remains to be excavated?
33:28
What we know now and what we've known since 1945 and some of the early translations, I guess it wasn't until the '70s or '80s that scholars started writing and talking about these Gnostic gospels and [crosstalk]- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
33:39
I actually remember that.
33:39
I was a voracious reader and I was still a teenager and that thought hit me.
33:45
Luckily I've kept journals since I was 18.
33:45
I dug that one out and they ... I don't think I was 18.
33:50
I think I might have been 20 or 21.
33:50
So 1980, '81, the whole Gnostic thing was huge back then. Brian Muraresku: Yeah.
33:57
Because they were some of the first translations and the first edited text of Nag Hammadi.
34:01
I think it's still the gold standard, the James Robinson edition.
34:01
If everybody wants to Amazon, the Nag Hammadi corpus.
34:06
I think that's where it starts.
34:06
But again, warning to the reader, I mean, it's very dense material.
34:11
I always look to folks like Bart Ehrman or Elaine Pagels who read about this scholarship.
34:17
We do know it's not controversial, I think, that other forms of Christianity were suppressed. The question is, why?
34:21
What was happening between, let's say 200 and 400 AD?
34:26
Why were these Gnostic texts being suppressed by the mainline church as it was growing?
34:32
I mean, there's a conspiratorial way to talk about it, and there's just the historical way of looking to an all male patriarchal Roman empire that is succeeded by an all male patriarchal church, at a time when there wasn't a big division between church and state.
34:44
In fact, there probably wasn't for many, many centuries thereafter.
34:48
Not until relatively recently.
34:54
If you're telling the story of Western civilization, I think that's the story.
34:58
These mystery cults and potentially the use of psychedelics just did not lend themselves well to big organized religion.
35:04
I mean, by definition, they're secret, by definition, it's small groups of people.
35:09
If psychedelics are involved, they're kind of dangerous.
35:09
You need a lot of experts and technicians to be able to handle it properly.
35:14
You can see this competition for the bureaucratized church, but at the end of the day, I mean, I say in the book too, that I think that these mysteries may have suffered under the weight of their own secrecy.
35:24
They were never meant to be mainstreamed across the Mediterranean.
35:30
They were preserved in folk medicine or oral tradition, maybe even the secret societies of the Renaissance and things like this.
35:35
I think that was the revolution.
35:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that the thing though that we're probably not going to be able to just let lie would be the way I would think about it, is the idea that, why did the Christian Church rid itself of women to the point where the grandmothers who had had the sacred duty of mixing up these brews became witches who got burned at the stake?
36:04
Was that just because that it was a patriarchal society or was there more there?
36:12
Brian Muraresku: That's the other side of the coin.
36:12
The two things that go missing from Christianity are women and drugs.
36:12
Maybe there's a- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I mean, come on.
36:17
If I was in charge of marketing it, I'd put those two right back in.
36:20
Brian Muraresku: Well, we just might see.
36:24
The way we're telling the story of pagan continuity, I mean, women and drugs were a significant part of the ancient Greek mystery cults.
36:31
I mean, Eleusis, which we've talked about, was run by women.
36:35
Originally it was a female right of initiation.
36:41
When you think about the mysteries of Dionysus, I mean, it's the maenads, it's the female devotees responsible for keeping it alive and sending people into ecstasy.
36:46
It's women who are initiating young men in some cases, which wasn't smiled upon by the Roman Senate.
36:51
In 186 BC, they exterminate 6,000 followers of Dionysus, again, because women are initiating impressionable young men.
36:58
Then in early Christianity, you do see women.
37:04
I mean, Paul writes about different women leading churches.
37:09
The first convert to Christianity on the European continent is a woman named Lydia in Philippi.
37:15
Paul addresses many women in Rome in his letters like Mary and Tryphena, and Tryphosa, Persis, et cetera.
37:20
Mary Magdalene for centuries, centuries, is described as the apostle to the apostles.
37:27
She gets a leading role in John's gospel as the first and only witness to Christ's resurrection.
37:32
We can't say that women weren't involved.
37:32
At some point, the bureaucracy takes over, and unfortunately to this day, as you know, the doctrine of the Catholic church is that Jesus was a man, his apostles were men and therefore the right of consecration.
37:42
The authority to handle the holiest material of the church.
37:49
The flesh and blood redounds only to men, and that that's the teaching to this day, 2,000 years strong.
37:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It just boggles my mind because when you really do dive, like you did and I think brilliantly, into this kind of thing, it agitates a certain large segment of society that does not like having some of their most cherished baits to question.
38:11
Whereas I believe as we pointed out, it's 2021 and we should be doing as much as we can to understand.
38:16
I'm not saying to mark or label as bad or good, but to understand this is what happened.
38:24
Then maybe try to understand why did that happen, and what can we learn from it.
38:31
Because as you point out, Christianity went from being in the illegal, 20 member, ill-educated cult into being one of the biggest religions in the world.
38:43
A question I was thinking of for you is, could this be reversed?
38:47
Could people now, with the access to everything at all times with these super computers that we carry around with us, do you see any kind of possibility for a rear guard action, I guess you'd call it of a cult sort of breaking off?
39:02
Not like Martin Luther, but breaking off and this religion morphing into something else.
39:09
Or is that just too crazy?
39:14
Brian Muraresku: Nothing is too crazy in a post-pandemic world, or maybe a mid-pandemic world.
39:16
Who knows where this is going to go?
39:21
We're all trying to figure it out.
39:21
Christianity has been trying to figure itself out for a long time. You would like this.
39:24
Someone I've been reading recently is Richard Rohr.
39:24
Who's this Franciscan friar based in New Mexico. He's now 78 years old.
39:27
He wrote a great book, The Universal Christ, which we should talk about that.
39:33
It's this spelunking into history on the one hand, it's this clarion call to mystics everywhere, I think, to find that mystical core that the religious orders and the monastic orders have always held close to.
39:46
That I think could be a real boon to organized religion today.
39:51
I mean, Richie Rohr, I mean, he mentions a lot of the same things that you just mentioned.
39:55
This idea that if you think about the Christ as separate from Jesus ...
39:58
His opening line is, Christ is not Jesus's last name.
40:08
That the case there, there's more to it than that.
40:08
The [foreign language], the anointed one in Greek, I mean, it's just a gigantic concept.
40:13
It has to do with this notion of that you could never stuff the Christ into one person.
40:18
The notion of an enchanted universe, the notion of incarnational theology, that the divine comes into our field of existence.
40:25
That concept is way too big for any one religion.
40:31
This is a Catholic monk, by the way, saying this.
40:31
That concept is way too big for any one religion, let alone one ethnicity, one race, one gender.
40:35
If you take a look at the mystic core of these phase, Jesus is a person that comes into history, but the Christ that is spoken of, especially in the Greek and John's gospel, it's very metaphysical.
40:47
The concept of [foreign language], et cetera.
40:47
I won't go on, but this notion of the logos precedes Jesus.
40:54
The first incarnation is 14 billion years ago, not 2,000 years ago, and it's an ongoing process.
41:01
Essentially what Richie is advocating is a Christian theology, I guess you could describe as panentheism, the notion that ...
41:08
It's very Franciscan, by the way.
41:14
The notion that divinity is present in all things.
41:14
He quotes this German mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg 13th century.
41:19
She says that the day of my spiritual awakening was the day that I saw and knew that I saw all things in God and God in all things.
41:25
Now, it sounds like total paganism, it sounds like total heresy.
41:32
Yet, if you look at the history of the church, it's always there.
41:37
The reason I wrote this book is because I think it was specifically there in paleo Christianity.
41:43
I think in the first and second centuries AD, you would have found very metaphysical, very deep thinking, philosophical Greeks, who bumped up against this radical call to love, that was Jesus, and combined them into these Christian mysteries. It's a powerful idea. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow.
42:00
It's just so simpatico with what I'm researching right now.
42:04
When I'm listening to you, I think of Hereclitis who was a pre-Socratic philosopher in Greece.
42:08
Basically most of what he wrote is in fragments.
42:16
But when you read it, you're like, "Whoa! Hang on. Wait.
42:16
This sounds very new age to me."
42:23
Because he has quotes like, all are one.
42:23
Then of course you have Erwin Schrödinger of the cat fame, saying the total number of minds in the universe are one. Then you have the Dao.
42:30
Lao Tzu, by the way, like the [foreign language], Lao Tzu is an honorific.
42:36
It doesn't refer to a person.
42:36
It refers as an honorific to wise men and women.
42:42
What I find really interesting is that this is all coming together, and science is getting there too.
42:52
If you read like the most recent mind-bending papers from quantum physics, the most recent one is that we are thinking ourselves into existence and always have been.
43:04
I laughed too, by the way, when I read that. I'm like, "Okay. Okay. Okay."
43:09
But the fact is, these things are all coming around.
43:18
Lao Tzu, the opening line of the Tao Te Ching is, the Dao that can be named is not the true Dao.
43:18
The Dao that can be named is the mother to a million things.
43:24
The true Dao is universal thought. We are all part of it. You and me, that's us.
43:32
Then you go back to the Gita, you go back to some of the texts that you're referring to, and it seems like the Neuralyzer from Men in Black got used on us a lot.
43:46
Because these ideas have been around forever. Brian Muraresku: Yes.
43:50
I'll quote Terence McKenna, or at least paraphrase him.
43:50
You must know Terence McKenna's work, the great psychonaut who was particularly active in the 1990s.
43:55
He says, if you'd met a person who didn't know where they were between 1995 and 2005, you'd describe them as a fairly damaged person, Jim.
44:06
Yet you asked somebody where Western civilization was between 900 and 1300 and nobody knows, let alone 2,500 years ago.
44:12
I mean, everything you're talking about, whether it's the universal thought, The Universal Christ, this concept of oneness, I mean, it was there with the pre-Socratics.
44:21
I mean, before Plato, there were these ideas.
44:25
Even in Plato, just think about the word philosophy.
44:25
Maybe different images come to your mind.
44:29
The way Plato defines philosophy he says, those who engage with it in the right way are practicing nothing else but dying and being dead.
44:35
The idea that you don't arrive at these conclusions through empty speculation or lightweight theology, or just reading books and arguing with your friends.
44:46
That was not The School of Athens.
44:46
I mean, maybe it was at some point, but even before Plato, these pre-Socratics like Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Pericles, I write a lot about in the book in addition to Hereclitis, I mean, think about where they were coming from.
44:59
They were representing this very Ionian tradition.
45:04
I'll tie this to the science too, because Carl Sagan, who I know you know, was also obsessed with the Ionians and what was happening in the Eastern Aegean from about 600 to 400 BC.
45:09
This is the time when we're really discovering the modern scientific method.
45:16
The concept of the lock and key and everything else it's being birthed.
45:22
At the same time, people like Pythagoras are dipping into Eastern traditions.
45:28
Traditions that could have come from shamans in Central Asia, traditions that came across the Royal Road from India, Persia, et cetera, these near Eastern fertility cults.
45:38
It was all landing on these sons and daughters of merchants in Ionia, in the Eastern Aegean.
45:44
These are the Greeks that I look to because these are the Greeks who take all these universal ideas, east, west bouncing back and forth, and they take that into what would become the Roman empire, what would become Christianity.
45:55
But they see these ideas in North Africa, in Sicily, all across Southern Italy, where the Catholic church would eventually take a foothold, in Rome and part south.
46:05
This land was being seated with all these really metaphysical ideas by these pre-Socratics who arrived at their conclusion about the oneness of life through these death and rebirth experiences.
46:16
The conscious cultivation of these altered states of consciousness by simply laying down, dead in a cave for hours or days on end.
46:23
Peter Kingsley, the great scholar, writes a lot about this.
46:28
Again, it's an aspect of history that isn't often taught or talked about.
46:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's one of the great things, coming back to your book, that I think you did a great service to readers.
46:35
In that, first off, I think your book is very accessible even for the non-academic.
46:40
It's just a really fun book to read because it's kind of like an adventure. At least it was for me.
46:48
I often say to people, if you want to tell people the truth, you better be entertaining.
46:54
Brian Muraresku: Thank you, Jim.
46:59
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because you are, and the book is. What's next? What's the next project?
47:04
Brian Muraresku: All kinds of things.
47:06
I mean, I spent 12 years on this book, and I mean this, it really is just proof of concept.
47:10
If you've heard an idea today that strikes you as nonsensical, that's a good thing. I, myself, am a skeptic. A curious skeptic.
47:15
But I am madly on the hunt for this hard organic data. I don't know why.
47:22
But I'm obsessed with this archeochemistry, and I'm convinced that there's more data out there regarding what our ancestors were putting in their bodies and why.
47:28
What that means to the roots of Judeo-Christianity, what it means to the roots of Western civilization.
47:34
I know since the book has come out, I've been having wonderful conversations with different colleagues in Boston.
47:43
All kinds of different projects, I think, are popping up now to create a real sense of urgency in academia to go out and test a lot of things that just haven't been tested before.
47:53
All across the ancient Mediterranean.
47:53
I think only by doing that, it'll take years and years, but again, we can begin to kind of triangulate and put together all these data points and come up with a compelling picture of what was behind us.
48:02
I think that gives us a roadmap to the future of not just medicine, as we started the podcast, but the future of religion, just maybe, or the future of how we organize our society.
48:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We are very simpatico because that's one of my central aims in things I'm working on and philanthropies that I support, et cetera.
48:23
I just think that we are at such a unique place right now.
48:28
Of course everyone thinks they're unique and everyone thinks that these things never happened before.
48:34
When you look, you find that you're not unique and whatnot.
48:34
But we do have opportunities just through technology, through our ability to do these analyses, et cetera, that weren't available to people that went before us. I think it's almost ...
48:47
Not only is it our right and privilege, it's our responsibility, I think, to pursue these things if they can lead to making humanity better and offering better explanations.
49:01
From a scientific point of view, I just reread David Deutsch's, The Beginning of Infinity, and I got so much more out of it the second time.
49:12
But what he goes to great lengths to prove is, far from being some horrible scourge of earth, we are the universal connectors.
49:20
We are the explainers of at least our little section of the universe.
49:24
We can do that because Nullius in verba, take no one's word for it.
49:31
I like the idea that you call yourself a skeptic. I am too.
49:36
I think there's a huge difference between being a skeptic and being a cynic. Yes, be skeptical.
49:42
You should be because you should keep your mind open to why that thesis might be wrong.
49:42
It guided science forever, at least since we adopted the phrase Nullius in verba.
49:49
But I think that just from my vantage point, which I'm in the cheap seats here, and I just think that people like you, Michael Pollan, religious scholars, scientific scholars, I think a great thing to put on would be a huge symposium where we invited people from the various disciplines and just sort of discussed where can we go from here?
50:18
Because I, personally, I'm very optimistic in a rational sort of way.
50:24
But pessimism comes to us much easier because it's easy to say the precautionary principle.
50:31
But Deutsch makes this wonderful point in his book, he's like, "Well, what do you think that this ..."
50:36
We're thinking about the internet and nuclear power in 1900.
50:36
Then he kind of goes, "They worked."
50:42
Because no one had invented it yet.
50:42
We have to constantly remind ourselves that we have no power to prophesize what's going to come in the future.
50:49
It's very arrogant to think that we know everything. Obviously we don't.
50:56
It's so little that we know.
51:01
But I definitely think that the more knowledge, the better.
51:01
I mean, we shouldn't be afraid to pursue where it takes us.
51:07
We don't want to set up things so that we're just out confirming our priors, I think.
51:14
I think that books like yours are definitely pushing us forward.
51:14
Two more questions and then we'll end.
51:21
But did you face any pushback given the fact that you're a classic scholar and you're doing a lot of work and research that maybe an archeologist, maybe a pharmacologist, maybe a scientist might say, "Hey, wait a minute, wrong lane there, Brian." Or no?
51:33
Did you find that they were open to having a dialogue with you? Brian Muraresku: No.
51:42
Shockingly, folks are relatively open to this idea, including at Harvard.
51:42
I had a great exchange with my friend, Charlie Stang in Harvard Divinity School who's a specialist in early Christianity amongst other things and a real scholar of mysticism.
51:50
We had a public event around the book a couple of months back.
51:56
He put me to task, as he should, but he's open to the conversation. It wasn't just him.
51:59
I've talked to colleagues at different universities around the country, around the world, and folks are generally open to this.
52:04
Again, being a skeptic, I try and stick to the evidence.
52:10
I mean, I wrote this kind of Da Vinci Code-esque book, this hunt for clues.
52:14
But I try to be very careful the way I end the book saying, "Okay, here's what we know.
52:18
Here's what we don't know.
52:18
Here's where the science is pointing us, and here's what remains over the next five, 10 years and beyond."
52:26
I'm after the hard scientific data to make heads or tails of this one way or the other.
52:31
I think because of that, I'm approaching this as a curious lawyer who got bored of Wall Street and doing other things and I'm asking open questions.
52:36
If there's one thing a lawyer is trained to do, it's to get all these different counterparties around the table to weigh in, in a very multidisciplinary way on this topic.
52:45
I mean, let's hold that conference, for example, let's do that symposium.
52:50
I mean, that's what I've been doing for years, is trying to get an archeologist on this side of campus to talk to a biochemist on this side, to talk to a linguist on this side and a divinity scholar on that side.
52:58
I mean, psychedelics are one of those rare things that you can have 25 different people from 25 different disciplines weigh in and actually get somewhere.
53:08
It's not just the clinical studies.
53:08
It's this long story of psychedelics that could go back millions of years, predating our species.
53:12
That the better handle we get on this stuff.
53:17
It does raise big questions about the underlying structure of the cosmos.
53:17
We can have physicists weigh in on the psychedelic experience, because what is the quantum world?
53:22
It's a pretty trippy affair.
53:27
I mean, there's just a lot of fruitful conversations, and I do credit Michael Pollan with this, I think we're finally at a time where this can all be discussed in a very rational, very sober way.
53:37
The world's experts can finally start to weigh in on something that could really push us in the right direction as a species. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Bravo.
53:45
I completely agree and would, again, compliment you because you did write the book in a Da Vinci Code kind of style.
53:51
Which honestly is great because you're entertaining your reader.
53:58
Then at the end, you are quite fair about putting, this is what we think we know, this is what we still have to do further research on.
54:04
You were very judicious in your way of approaching it, which I applaud you for.
54:10
Last question is, can you make a pitch for the classic scholar?
54:10
Where there's a kid out there listening, I hope, to our conversation and he or she is maybe thinking about majoring, if they can, in the classics.
54:23
Give me a pitch for why a young student today should seriously pursue the classics.
54:30
Brian Muraresku: Oh my goodness.
54:32
That's a great question by the way, Jim, because I mean, you can probably tell, by the way I wrote the book that I feel awfully indebted to the Jesuits who gave me Latin and Greek.
54:39
I feel awfully indebted to the professors of Brown who took me through this very strange discipline that had zero job prospects.
54:44
I mean, but let's talk about that.
54:44
I'll give you two answers.
54:49
Number one, when I was interviewing at the law firms all across New York City, and I had to give my one-page resume of nothing, because what the hell did I know when I was 24, you know what came up time and again?
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Was that bottom line that listed my languages and my hobbies.
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There was Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, classical Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and all the rest of it.
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But we talked about Sanskrit and we talk about Greek and Latin.
55:11
It's the kind of thing that prepares you for anything.
55:11
I mean, what it teaches you is critical thought.
55:15
You become laser focused on trying to deconstruct and interpret these ancient languages.
55:22
When you're reading Plato, you're reading Homer, I'm not sure if people know this who aren't classicists, I mean, typically your homework at the beginning is a few lines.
55:25
Maybe when you're doing well, it's page or a few pages.
55:30
But you don't sit down and go home and read a book.
55:34
You're reading line by line.
55:34
Then you're going in that line and you're reading syllable by syllable.
55:39
Especially when you're reading poetry, you're deconstructing all the figures of speech that are being used. All these word games.
55:44
It's a puzzle for your mind that, I think, prepares you for anything.
55:48
I could take a total left turn from that and go to law school and practice law, which I didn't anticipate.
55:53
I mean, there is a very practical element to all of this, I think, and it'll help you with your SATs if you're a high schooler.
55:58
But then after that, I mean, come on, the mysteries matter. This stuff matters.
56:02
If it takes psychedelics to illuminate the value of the classics, then fine.
56:08
Because they're at the very real risk of disappearing.
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Mary Beard, this great English classist, puts it best.
56:15
It's like getting rid of the classics is like cutting off one of your limbs and trying to run a marathon.
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I mean, this really is our foundation and it belongs to everybody.
56:22
It's how civilization got started.
56:22
Not a day has gone by in the past 2,000 years where someone has an opened Virgil and read the Aeneid.
56:33
You could say the same about the best selling book of all time, the Bible. That's the point.
56:36
Is that to really appreciate Christianity, this will be my last pitch, or to appreciate this whole worldview, like where we come from, where did this all happen, I really do think you need to know the Greek.
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It was the sacred language of our culture.
56:51
My Jewish friends will send their kids to Hebrew school.
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My Muslim friends may send their kids to learn classical Arabic and read the Quran.
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When did Greek disappear?
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When did it become accessible for us not to learn Greek?
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I don't know how that happened, but it did happen and it's dying.
57:05
I think this is just a great invitation to the true value of the classics, which is a life well lived and a life well examined.
57:10
If you don't start there, where are you going to start?
57:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's a very good pitch, Brian.
57:16
I think you might've at least converted one listener.
57:16
If we can do it one at a time, I'm game. I'm willing to do it.
57:21
People ask me, young people in finance will ask me often, they're in college or going into college, "What should I major in?"
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I say, "Well, if I were you, I would major in evolutionary biology and psychology or philosophy." People are like ...
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I mean, literally I get the dead stare.
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"What are you talking about?
57:41
Why shouldn't I take finance?"
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I'm like, "Well, you're going to learn all that regardless.
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If you want to be in finance, you're going to learn that.
57:51
So why not learn how to think?
57:51
Why not learn about how we evolved as a species?"
57:57
Because really at the end of the day, if you want to be a successful investor, successful human, really, it's going to depend on your temperament and it's going to depend on your ability to understand why certain things are very common. All right.
58:08
Final question which we ask all of our guests is, we're going to wave a magic wand and Brian is the emperor of the world for a day.
58:16
You can't do anything violent to people, so no public executions or re-education camps.
58:25
But you can be a bit of a ...
58:32
I don't know if you're a Douglas Adams fan, but you can be a bit of an earworm and you can incept people.
58:37
They'll wake up the next day after your reign of one day is over and they will think that they have come up with two fantastic things that they're going to change up in the way they live or the way they think, et cetera, and everyone's going to do it.
58:54
What two things are you going to incept in people?
58:54
Brian Muraresku: Interesting.
58:58
No one's ever asked me that question, Jim.
58:58
Well, number one, I would hope that it wouldn't happen that day, but a preparation process would begin to die before we die as a species.
59:11
That preparation process could take a number of different forms, but I would envision at least a couple years.
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This is where all this ancient technology is coming back to service our species today.
59:24
It would be some kind of hybrid of the Eleusinian mysteries that really sustained ancient Greece for centuries.
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It would be hints of the Dionysian mysteries, and just maybe we might be able to spy what was happening in some of these early Paleochristian churches.
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In any event we're preparing for a couple of years for some kind of heroic dose of just the right sacrament that would give us just a taste of dying before dying. That's number one.
59:49
It's a misnomer and it's only a cipher because I think that if anything, at the end of the day, it's not about psychedelics for me.
1:00:00
It's about this dying before dying process.
1:00:00
Maybe the right sacrament under the right set and setting can get us there.
1:00:05
If it's really medically responsible, scientifically rigorous, I would say also authentically sacred, historical.
1:00:09
That if the right number of people could go through an initiation like that on a planet wide case, something interesting might happen.
1:00:21
Then number two, it would be developing the fruits of that experience.
1:00:21
In other words, the value of psychedelics for me is just the insight that can happen in an afternoon. What happens thereafter?
1:00:30
Well, number two is becoming of service.
1:00:30
That's beginning to look at the world through a different lens, through divine eyes even.
1:00:35
Being able to appreciate the divinity in every man, woman, child, around you, protecting this planet, the shining sphere in this ever expanding cosmos.
1:00:45
I think that to become a person of service and to spread love after a moment of insight like that could be just about the best thing Emperor Muraresku could offer the world.
1:00:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's fantastic.
1:00:58
It reminds me of Emerson's line, man is a God in ruins.
1:00:58
We don't have to be in ruins, I don't think.
1:01:04
It's people like you who are going to help us climb out of those ruins, I believe, and make the world a better place.
1:01:09
I love both of those and heartily endorse them.
1:01:15
Well, this has been amazing.
1:01:15
Thank you for taking the time.
1:01:15
I can hardly wait to see what happens.