"[Music] hi i'm jim o'shaughnessy and welcome to infinite loops sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out markets go up and down research is presented..."

"thanks for joining us now please enjoy this episode of infinite loops jim o'shaughnessy is chairman and co-chief investment officer of o'shaughnessy asset management where jamie catherwood is an assoc..."

"having me jim good to see you so i gotta tell you man when i read your book i was like my wife usually tries to shut me off because i'm just going down so many rabbit holes and this time around i star..."

"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 and i left languages behind i left these ancient historical mysteries be..."

"love it i like you became interested in psychedelics actually through a friend of my daughters my daughter went to yale and her friend worked for maps which is probably one of the best known of the or..."

"way i'm including donald trump here i believe richard nixon was the craziest president we've ever had truly crazy and i'm standing by that one because when you dive into him and his history what i mea..."

"things but i want to stay on your book so i'm a big fan of robert anton wilson and i've read everything he's written and i thought of you and your book and his book ishtar rising why the goddess went ..."

"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 t..."

"like what would happen in rome what would happen in constantinople for a long time it was micro churches right it was small communities of people getting together in a place like ephesus in asia minor..."

"again quoting lane pagels i mean she even takes a look at the gospel of john as this competition between the followers of john and the followers of the thomas gospel in which john is actively trying t..."

"made it just regular wine so the placebo effect was very strong but why do you think more people don't know about this the easiest answer i think is the the impending death of the classics i mean that..."

"and there's like a real world debate about this so howard university here in dc just recently closed his classics department and cornell west from harvard wrote this op-ed in the washington post calli..."

"dying and i think as a result there are far fewer people who know what was happening in the first century and it's very specialized classicists it's very specialized theologians and what they know doe..."

"as you study it for years and years you start to realize is that there are sacraments perhaps visionary sacraments that are described in sanskrit in the vedic literature they talk about soma which is ..."

"and by extension the world's biggest religion 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 yeah it still puzzles ..."

"and 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 as wilson says you can convince anybody of anything as long..."

"it's anno domini sometimes we call it the common era now i know domini as i was taught as a kid is the year of our lord dominus is latin for master like a master slave relationship so whether we like ..."

"that ancient pharmacology and so as one little example just a tiny example about why like the ancient greek matters why linguistics matter why maybe this stuff doesn't filter down to the general publi..."

"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 that's the big questio..."

"really confronting their mortality 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 and that of course t..."

"than we moderns do today and the whole idea of the alesis and the experiences there is it the first rule is like fight club you don't talk about the mysteries don't you think that these kind of experi..."

"most meaningful from a single session and again the more you think about that you're heading into kind of mystical territory what is happening to these people under the influence of psilocybin and was..."

"it's all very sober and orderly or do you take that sacrament and do you take it to the outdoor churches to the forests and mountains of greece which are the dionysian mysteries should this belong to ..."

"or the education and willingness to go out and test what is probably there so like in recent years we have been testing different wine jars and we have been finding some incredible things like my coll..."

"has been out there miraculously preserved in the sands of egypt you mentioned the gospel of mary magdalene a couple times that's even older that was discovered in 1896 in ahmedabad also in egypt just ..."

"to the reader i mean there it's very dense material and so i always look to folks like bart ehrman or elaine pagels who write about this scholarship and we do know it's not controversial i think that ..."

"lend themselves well to big organized religion i mean by definition they're secret by definition it's small groups of people if psychedelics are involved they're kind of dangerous you need a lot of ex..."

"was that just because that it was a patriarchal society or was there more there and that's the other side of the coin so the two things that go missing from christianity are women and drugs right and ..."

"are initiating impressionable young men and then in early christianity you do see women i mean you know paul writes about different women leading churches the first convert to christianity on the euro..."

"certain large segment of society that does not like having some of their most cherished faiths question i believe as we pointed out it's 20 21. and we should be doing as much as we can to understand a..."

"like martin luther but breaking off and this religion morphing into something else or is that just you crazed nothing is too crazy in a post-pandemic world or maybe a mid-pandemic world who knows wher..."

"religion this is a catholic monk by the way saying this that concept is way too big for any one religion let alone one ethnicity one race one gender if you take a look at the mystic core of these fait..."

"honorific it doesn't refer to a person it refers as a honorific to wise men and women and so what i find really interesting is that this is all coming together and science is getting there too if you ..."

"you'd describe them as a fairly damaged person jim and yet you asked somebody where western civilization was between 900 and 1300 and nobody knows literally 2500 years ago i mean everything you're tal..."

"what would become christianity but they see these ideas in north africa in sicily all across southern italy where the church the catholic church would eventually take a foothold in rome and part south..."

"gives us a road map to the future of not just medicine as we started the podcast but the future of religion just maybe or the future of like how we organize our society we are very simpatico because t..."

"reread david deutsch's the beginning of infinity and i got so much more out of it the second time but what he goes to great lengths to prove is far from being some horrible scourge of earth we are the..."

"think that we know everything obviously we don't it's so little that we know but i definitely think that the more knowledge the better and we shouldn't be afraid to pursue where it takes us and we don..."

"last question is so can you make a pitch for the classic scholar but there's a kid out here there listening i hope to our conversation and he or she is maybe thinking about majoring if they can in the..."

"listed my languages and my hobbies and there was latin greek sanskrit classical arabic spanish portuguese french and all the rest of it but we talked about sanskrit and we talk about greek and latin i..."

"because they're at the very real risk of disappearing and you know mary beard this great english class says puts it best it's like you know getting rid of the class is like cutting off one of your lim..."

"that's a very good pitch brian i think you might have at least converted one listener and if we can do it one at a time i'm game i'm willing to do it people ask me young people in finance will ask me ..."

"emperor murarescu could offer the world that's fantastic it reminds me of emerson's line man is a god in runes and we don't have to be in ruins i don't think and it's people like you who are going to ..."