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[Laughter] [Music] hello gary hey how you doing what's up man thanks for coming appreciate it i'm happy to be here want to tell everybody what you do well um for work yeah i um i teach at emory university so i'm a professor i've been i've been there for about 25 years and i i also write write some some books and um teach a variety of classes but you study like um what i've read of your study is uh some of it is on death and some of it is on drugs that is correct those are two very heavy subjects maybe the heaviest uh yeah well the other course i teach is religion and sexuality so i mean that that's another really heavy one yeah you look like a guy who would study both death and drugs so it fits well this is the pandemic here i mean really i'm usually i'm a much more you know well i'm not really have you ever one of my students told me i should do it yeah before i came in here i'm telling man once once you do it it's so freeing not having to go to a barber shop or a hairdresser well what's weird is i feel really free with all this hair yeah well again the hair fits the subjects that you study um how did you get involved in what when you talk about drugs like you you studied all sorts of psychedelic drugs but also common drugs like like caffeine like we were talking about before i was telling you before that i make some ridiculous french press coffee with far too much coffee in it and it's become a bit of a problem lately well uh but it's probably keeping you healthy and keeping you going i don't know if it is i don't know at the end of the day i'm really tired and i'm not usually really tired and i think it's because i've been on speed all day it can tire you out uh that's for sure yeah um but yeah i mean my interest in in in
studying the connection between religion and drugs i'm in a department of religion at emory um uh really spans the spectrum so i'm interested yeah for sure in psychedelics but also as you're saying in the more ordinary uh psychoactive drugs that bring order to our lives and um you know allow us to tap into our true identity maintain um some semblance of stability in our lives you know things that you know religion often can do it's uh the subject of religion and drugs is uh it's really fascinating to me but it's something that i never even really considered until you know 10 15 years ago and um i was introduced to jack herrer and he was uh do you know who he is the cannabis advocate recently deceased not not so recently anymore um great guy but wrote was writing a book about the connection between uh psychedelics particularly psilocybin and um religion and christianity and he had this amazing collection of artwork that connected um like ancient christian artwork with a lot of these dancing naked figures it looked like they were in ecstasy shrouded by this translucent mushroom yeah though that's not uncommon there are a lot of theories out there that connect um uh early christianity especially to different kinds of uh you know hallucinogenic psycho psychedelic drugs of some form but i think the the connections are much more widespread [Music] people have been using psychoactive substances for religious ritual for religious experience for forms of transcendence and and journey um in all kinds of different cultural settings and and through history what got you into the subject well um i've been interested in in the topic of drugs for for a while um but i think what really you know
led me to see this would be quite a fruitful topic to pursue in terms of research was i wrote a short little essay on lsd and religion talked about my own experience as a young man tripping and talking about the ways in which when i had that experience in the um late 70s and people more and more were you know enjoying psychedelics coming out of the decade of the 60s um i started to to see that they would often use words like spiritual or mystical to describe their experiences and to talk about how their religious views are being reoriented um and i saw that in my own experience and and wrote about that as a way to talk about what is probably the most significant shift in religion in america and that's the rise of the nuns those who don't affiliate with any religion um and who many who claim to be spiritual but not religious and and i want to tie that back to people's experiences with psychedelics there's a lot of people that are in the nuns that don't have any experience with psychedelic they're just psychedelics they just seem to want to have like a a deeper meaning to life you know and they'll they'll say i'm not religious but i'm spiritual right and a lot of people get really annoyed when people talk like that yeah well it can be annoying um and um also uh you know i think as you say is very much becoming quite common for people to identify in that way and that's also about a very strong kind of negative um understanding of traditional religion institutional religion and so on yeah i feel like for a lot of these people that don't have uh psychedelic experiences that uh are spiritual that sort of dismiss religion i i i i never want to tell people to do psychedelics but i feel like if they did it they would relax a little
with this idea that they really have an understanding of what happens when you die i think they would really let that go most people would right you'd go well i didn't know this was real and this is around and this has been around for thousands of years psychedelics and then you have these experiences that are so profound and you're like okay maybe i'm just full of [ __ ] and i've been posing this whole time right yeah right well i think again that's um it's not just uh you who who have these views what we're seeing is a lot of medical research around psychedelics also we're pointing to the same thing a decrease in fear of death people's sense of compassion and love you know really can blossom uh people's lives are transformed in a lot of these more controlled medical studies with you know with people who are taking um psilocybin or mdma yeah but but the main focus of all that of course is is the therapeutic benefits but you know as we're saying it's also it's all about spirituality and and those therapeutic benefits can't be separated out from a kind of spiritual sense of of that experience it gives me a little bit of hope that in this time of of great strife and struggle and especially uh in terms of the way uh human beings are dealing with each other you know that this is this is a time where people are also rediscovering psychedelics in record numbers and they're looking for some sort of a way to make sense of this life because you know we're obviously in some strange transitional moment in history where our confidence and systems and government and even education certainly news and media is eroding at an unprecedented rate but it's also at the same time all drugs are now legal in oregon right
you know like these things are happening where people go you know what come on colorado's like mushrooms go ahead do mushrooms right and uh you know god bless texas they [ __ ] need all that [ __ ] right here and georgia too yeah all these places ever the whole world needs it well they need the option right you know because the uh the idea that human beings are somehow another preventing other human beings from having non-lethal experiences that have proven to be incredibly transcendent and change people's lives for the better just on mass like if you see the john hopkins study the people that won psilocybin experience the the the majority of them listed as the most profound experience of their lives right right and non-addictive yes i mean and non-lethal i mean the ld50 is like what you have to eat like two pounds of it or something crazy right and and we know that the stories of addiction and a lot of the dangers are so overblown yeah but um i think again this is just a moment as you're saying yeah that's why i feel i'm i'm on to something i think this book that i'm writing um which is you know gonna make the argument that drugs are gonna are really the sort of source of spiritual life in in america that's that's the future as well as the past and yeah again you know um the the influence of psychoactive substances in the americas you know pre-columbus um was pervasive and just a part of everyday life and as you say we've for whatever historical reasons and changes that have happened in our society um have lost touch with those resources of spiritual meaning yeah and religious life and um as you're saying um i i i believe it too we are in a moment when things are really transforming and drugs will be i think quite important in terms of how we come out on the other side i hate
the word drugs it's just a blanket word it's so unfortunate that you know like heroin and opiates and meth is lumped in with psilocybin all under one blanket well yeah you're not alone i mean i i'm intentional with drugs i like to be provocative and um try to con confuse a lot of the categories that we use and thinking about some of these things that are so central um in our lives and so potent especially in terms of our religious lives so um yeah there's entheogens psychedelics and and you know obviously all different kinds of um uh other kinds of against substances that we use that um um have an effect and for me that in some cases in many cases have religious meanings and connections have you ever experimented with holotropic breathing or any of the non-psychedelic methods of achieving these certain states of consciousness no no i mean no but i think they're important as well yeah people is achieving a mystical state through non-psychedelic means is is another uh avenue um in thinking about the importance of those mystical states um and and how people get there but also i would say as you said it's what are the results what kind of transformations are made in people's lives and i think what we're seeing is whether it's a psychedelic induced experience or or non-psychedelic it's there are lots of similarities yeah i mean a lot of people get it get there through near-death experience there's a lot of people well this is another thing where the mind is capable of producing psychedelic compounds and in near-death experiences although it's very difficult to measure right because you would actually have to open up someone's brain while they're in the middle of a near-death experience which is probably not the healthiest thing for someone who almost died yeah but that's
as far as we know that's the best way to measure it now but these people who experience these near-death moments have these incredible profound visions and many people think that what's happening is some sort of endogenous dump of psychedelic chemicals we know the brain is capable of making the most potent one psychedelics uh in terms of like you know what happens and how they do it it's still a bit of a mystery they're trying to solve but yeah that connection's fascinating yeah and and um as i've mentioned or um you may know i teach a death and dying course as well and so near-death experiences are are pretty much an important part of that class and the kinds of research and findings that are beginning to appear in terms of looking at those connections are fascinating um and tie into this question of of what is our relationship to death how do we understand you know the reality of death in our lives and and you know what you know what are our thoughts about the afterlife or if there is one um that gets tied into a lot you know how people respond to this research you know how they um are engaged with it and how they're compelled by it there's a lot of folks that apparently can reach like some pretty intense states of consciousness through yoga through different styles of yoga and different styles of breathing but it's with this really funny quote by terence mckenna where the buddha met this monk who uh who said uh i've practiced the city of levitation for the last 20 years and uh i've achieved the ability to walk on water and uh the buddha says yeah but the fairy's only a nickel yeah right you can you can really meditate alone in darkness forever or you can just take mushrooms you get there in an hour right well yeah uh i think for many of us we take the the quicker route
yeah but uh again there are like with the the monk or people who meditate you know all kinds of important well set in setting um thinking about you know what is the context in which this is taking place and and that's critical do you ever get pushback about the uh the connection between uh psychedelics and religion has anybody ever like challenged you on this or debated you on it oh i mean uh i teach i mean my students don't sometimes they challenge but uh no i mean i not directly and i don't really give a [ __ ] you know i mean i'm at that stage of my career i'm i'm i'm convinced about the again the sort of great research possibilities and thinking across the board uh on about the connection between drugs and religion now when you're you're teaching these classes uh and i i'm assuming that for a lot of these kids is the first time you're exposing them to these ideas absolutely because yeah they many of them don't know what the study of religion is right and well we have a pretty nice uh diverse mix of of students in terms of their background but most don't have a religion course other than something they've done and they were in catholic school or if they studied you know the bible in some form but no they've never seen anything like me it's funny because that's i mean that's a heavy responsibility i would imagine too because you're introducing to these kids this these ideas that uh have a really the potential for a very profound impact on the rest of their life yeah and that's been something i've worried about my entire career you know i actually care quite a bit about how these ideas are transmitted and received and [Music] as we said a lot of them are quite um sensitive the topics that i'm trying to teach but
um it's an essential part i think of of of being a young adult and and learning how to not just think for yourself but to sort of reimagine the world and try to understand some of the forces that are at work um in in in your life and what's going to be coming in in terms of your future career and i try to make religion relevant you know in in those terms but i also as i like to say to them you know i mean my i i wouldn't say this before i had tenure but you know my my goal i tell them the straight out is to confuse the hell out of them you know what they think is religion is not the only game in town and so um i'm i'm very upfront about this sort of being an intellectual exercise you know you know why are students taking my death and dying class well i don't want to know i want it just to be purely academic for them to encounter different understandings of death different death rituals different cultures and then shake them up but not necessarily you know kind of turn them away from what they've been taught the end result may kind of reinforce their own sort of cultural background and outlook um but but i'm i'm for myself i'm very gratified in the work that i do if you could call it work um and you know i get a great response from students and and i'm just you know really pleased that i'm able to be a part of that educational process because not to go on that yeah i mean because my classes are often not like their other classes which are you know political science or economics um or biology and and you know i just want them to be able to reflect and think about some of these deep things that sooner or later you know are going to bite them in the butt yeah i i like how you describe it too that it's not the only game in town the way i try to describe it to people
is like i'm not not a religious person but i'm not opposed to it and i probably was when i was younger but i think i was just arrogant and i think that the best way to look at religion is it's not the whole thing you should but you shouldn't throw it out i think it's a piece yeah i think it's a piece of something that's a giant puzzle and the idea of throwing it out i don't think that's the way to do it i think i think those people in the problem obviously is translations translations a giant issue when you're taking something from ancient hebrew and you're translating it to latin and to greek and aramaic and all these different languages it's like a lot is probably lost in terms of the way they express like have you ever read uh russian to english there's a lot of like russian uh people that i follow on twitter and i get a huge kick out or excuse me on instagram and i get a huge kick out of pressing the translate button oh yeah cause i like to try to break down the way they communicate to now when you're dealing with like super ancient languages that we don't even use anymore like ancient hebrew like who knows how accurate and what if the the intent is clearly expressed through an english translation right probably not well a lot gets lost yeah a lot gets invented also it's just these ideas have been passed down through thousands and thousands of years and i feel like if you could just not be too literal with it and just listen to what these people were saying what they were trying to get across obviously there's some awful [ __ ] in the bible in particular and many religions in terms of condoning slavery treating women as second-class citizens there's there's a lot that's probably just some cultural artifact of the time where they've embedded their own beliefs on how human beings should act with each other and
then and then attributed that to god right right but if you can get past that and just not take it you know no pun intended as gospel right and and just these people were trying to lay down their experiences and the the the lessons that they've learned in in some sort of a way to live your life book right right and uh and and yeah i mean from i agree with you from my point of view um too much literalism you know is really uh counterproductive if not destructive yeah as societies change over time so um you know the act of interpretation is very much obviously a part of of the study of religion and looking at how religions change and transform um for me i'll just i'll say i'm i'm so not interested in christianity or judaism or buddhism or islam you know the conventional containers of what we think are the world's religions are you know very um problematic to say the least but my my interested my interest is more in the sort of intersections of religion and culture where people might not recognize their being religious even though i would try to make the argument that they are how so well i mean i i i've written a book called sacred matters that looks at these different um kind of arenas uh where where religious life um can be found in in cultural forms of activity so like celebrity worship i would call a religious culture that has systems of meaning different kinds of rituals possibilities for discovering your true self a whole kind of value system that can be tied up that's interesting celebrity worship as a form of religion i've always thought of as just hijacking the human reward system because uh if we lived in a tribe of people a small tribe and there was one uh great
leader you know the battle scarred leader who's seen it all and can give us the information and he was the one talking we would listen that would be a a person of great importance and we all gather around and listen but when you see brad pitt in a movie screen and his face is 30 feet high and this music playing when he talks and a team of writers have carefully constructed all of his words and this perfect sentence and you know it's just like it's so moving and inspiring and then we see him in real life oh my god it's really you but meanwhile he hasn't really done anything other than pretend right you know i mean he's been protected being a great entertainer but given us some wonderful distractions but it's not that he's led us through battle right it's not that he's he's figured out how to find the food in the water you know this is not what it is but in our our hijacked human reward system we treat him as though he is the great leader yeah or or even someone like oprah i mean who's more clearly you know in that sort of um strange uh middle ground between celebrity and spiritual um leader of some kind so you know obviously it's going to vary depending on what celebrity you're talking about but you know just in terms of projections our imagination where we invest you know our energies yeah you know celebrities big but again i'm i'd like to talk about uh other things uh you know as well that what we're talking about politics or um consumer culture or things around medicine that there are religious qualities that don't have to do with the bible or with muhammad or something right there's religious qualities in that there's these very rigid ideologies that are treated like religions that you have to follow and there's also um signs that people will hold up that they're
complying and they're along with this ideology one of them that i talk about a lot is people taking photos with masks on on twitter for their their profile picture right like i know what you're doing right right we all know what we're doing yeah well i mean you know that's again messaging and thinking about you know values you know yeah it's it's bizarre when you see these patterns sort of repeated over and over again right well in social media too will be the future of of religion and and in terms of how it um transforms and moves forward is an important kind of site for religious activity and investments and um you know where we're really going to see the action what's happening on instagram twitter and so on yeah so when you say like religion that these things fall into sort of religious behaviors or religious ideas um you're not meaning like as handed down from a higher power your meaning as in people fall in with the same sort of compliant behavior and patterns and not necessarily i mean it's not it's not all just sort of compliance and compliance one aspect right or conformity or something it's it's just meaning making it's how we try to live our lives in ways that um can carry us uh on when we have to confront suffering and death and and as well as um you know issues around health and what are the sources that are available to people and you know as i've i've said in my class many times i think popular culture is much more of an important kind of teacher about religious ideas and values than you know the local preacher how so because people pay more attention to it absolutely yeah and because they're more swayed by it you know because it has more of an impact and resonance but it's so it's so does a dangerous way to sway things coming from someone who's involved in distributing popular culture because there's so little thought put
into the actual impact of of what it is and so much thought putting into just what pops yeah like what gets people to pay attention right well and money talks and money is sacred you know what's more you know sacred in our society than making some money yeah and that's a drive you know again so there too we can talk about other religious qualities to capitalism well you know there have been a number of uh scholars who've written on that topic and and made those connections so um again you know the action isn't taking place in the church it's taken place in you know music festivals burning man yeah you know it's this is where again i'm not making it i'm not trying to kind of over generalize but i think very much for um especially younger people um but baby boomers as well you know where where are the you know where does where do i get my spiritual juices you know there are churches now that are incorporating psilocybin into their rituals um i think one particular in oregon see if you can find that there's a church in oregon that is doing um what am i a oregon spokesperson today well it's a big you know that's big news and big changes for sure yeah we're all going to be watching that well the idea is that that's what it used to be all about you know if you go back to it's a very controversial book but john marco allegro is the sacred mushroom in the cross is all about uh consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and that he believes that that was really what uh the bible was about was about hiding these stories from the romans when they were captured yeah lots of theories that yeah even with um judaism too with moses you know there's just all kinds of ways people have tried to um make the connection oh yeah they're legally offering psilocybin mushroom therapy through ceremony but look there's that that's what is the
name of this place sacred heart medicine right dot us is that the name of the church no yeah oregon state nonprofit domestic you gotta go non-profit if you want to sell mushrooms and not get locked up well right that's right donated all the charity kids well stay out of the pokey well and there are weed churches too that are starting to crush sure so yeah cannabis and religion also beyond again just the psychedelics yeah um and and and that's just sort of the surface my sense is there's a big underground and i know there's one here in austin because i did some research here but um i do my research yeah i made before the pandemic i was able to get out and do some research around and talk to people who are who are you know running these kinds of um you know psychedelic religious communities or you know sacred plants yeah different communities that are cropping up washington dc right they just also um decriminalize psilocybin yeah and there too is a thriving underground so these are i think we're going to see that underground these subcultures really begin to surface and i think so too and with the war on drugs now basically almost over how are we going to think about drugs how are we going to respond to them the war on drugs almost over what a crazy war and drugs won well well yeah i mean i've been saying this a lot lately but like my whole life has been lived under the war on drugs yeah you know i mean yeah 60s 58 yeah 53 yeah yeah so it's um i missed out yeah it's like all of a sudden changing and like um what is the society gonna be like to be around late 50s early 60s before everything was illegal when people were just freaking out when you know after hoffman had synthesized lsd and when
you know basically all of the schedule one compounds were free and legal i mean free to consume you uh you got to wonder the only thing that was illegal was marijuana yeah which is kind of hilarious yeah it boggles the mind yeah it's full of hypocrisy but yeah that was a crazy time i don't know if you saw that great um documentary wormwood no by errol morris i've heard of it though yeah it's crazy about again the sort of 50s and psychedelics and lsd and the cia and all that yeah so that's a very rich part of the history that um pre timothy leary that you know rock hudson was on the psychiatrist's couch taking lsd and experimenting with that and you know what was that doing it again the notion was um miracle drug medicine this is going to help people with their depression and you know all of that and um and again what we don't know uh although we're beginning to see this more and more in some of this research is what are the religious implications in a person's life after they trip yeah um there's a great book that uh i've mentioned many times in this podcast because i have the guest on the author on rather tom o'neill wrote a book called chaos and it's about the manson family and uh he was writing a book on the manson family excuse me he was writing an article 20 years ago on the manson family just supposed to be a real quick article writing it and then in the middle of his research writing writing the book he started finding all these problems and weird inconsistencies and weird connections 20 years later he finishes this book and it's all about the cia and lsd and that the manson family charles manson in particular was involved with cia experiments they did with lsd on pr on lsd with prisoners and that they were most likely dosing him up when he was in jail and then giving him access to lsd and these psychological techniques that he used on the family when he was
released and then also all this evidence that every time they would arrest him even though he was on parole they would let him go because the cia was encouraging his use of lsd his promoting it to the family and then they're committing crimes and the whole idea was to discredit the uh anti-war movement and to disrupt the civil rights movement there was a lot of [ __ ] involved with the cia and lsd and they were running a they were running a clinic a free clinic in haiti ashbury until for 50 years right until three months after this book is released and then uh mysteriously our work is done yeah it's over they closed it down right but there's amazing connections that tom o'neil makes in this book to jolly west who was in the cia who was a part of their lsd uh program to jack ruby um i've heard some of this yeah oh my god it's it's amazing he's tom is great and his book is i can't recommend it enough no i'll check it out it's a mind blower yeah because as you get into the book you're like what the [ __ ] because meticulously researched over 20 years i mean it was this man's life right and they succeeded right yeah oh yeah yeah that was the end of it or you know a lot of people kind of mark that as being sure yeah yeah and they think of lsd as something that makes you go crazy and want to murder people and kill people and they change the idea of what a hippie was right right right because of the psychological techniques that he learned when he was in jail and all the mind control experiments that he learned and the way they did it like he would pretend to take acid and he would give it acid to the family and then he would mind [ __ ] them right and then have them go out and commit murder and tell them that they were freeing people and yeah well wild [ __ ] no no doubt i mean wild times yeah absolutely and um there was a lot of interest for sure um among the cia for you know what the
potential would be for lsd yeah he also went over the operation midnight climax which is a part of mkultra do you know about that operation midnight climax they ran [ __ ] houses they ran brothels in san francisco and i think a couple other cities and they would have two-way mirrors and they would uh have the prostitutes dose up these johns with lsd and their drinks they had no idea and then they would have sex and they would watch them and observe them and this went on for years yeah yeah yeah where they're just giving people lsd like american citizens yeah right right right this is a law enforcement agency i mean really bizarre well you know i mean what don't we know yeah exactly what don't we know right well well they only found this out sort of accidentally through uh research into uh these files that had been left behind and some freedom of information accidents right right right well that's how people are being able to get access to some of that yeah some of that information but the problem is for so long people have had this idea as lsd equals lose your mind go crazy jump off buildings right you know well and then that also gets transferred over to cannabis and other drugs as the war on drugs really picks up with nixon and and it does um help to demonize certain groups of people well the real sad thing too is in putting these things in schedule one we've really missed out on research that would be very helpful for people that do have adverse reactions there's a lot of people diverse reactions to psilocybin to cannabis to lsd and we don't know why right particularly uh people that have schizophrenic breaks while on uh cannabis it's very common right not very common but it might be like you know one out of a hundred or something crazy like that right right right it's not huge but it's enough that we really should be
concerned and we don't know what the [ __ ] is going on because they've kept people from doing research right right well uh who knows if that is gonna change yeah it's already starting to change quite dramatically and with the results that are coming out of some of these um experiments and research studies that are going on i think you know it's convincing yeah and when you're helping you know uh war veterans yeah ptsd you know i mean i mean come on mdma seems to be particularly helpful for that right well that's right and i know they're doing some some of those studies at emory but in a lot of places and again this is um what is being referred to as the mainstreaming of psychedelics it's just you know they're going to be more and more a part of our resources yeah um in terms of where to go yeah a mild dose of mdma for the whole world might fix everything yeah well just a real mild dope where everybody together three two one go we'd all just like i'm sorry man let's love each other what are we doing here it would be amazing yeah i've only done it once um but it was uh incredibly profound and but the next day i couldn't read you're pretty fogged out or something i was so dumb and then i had to go on stage i was terrible i did stand up the next night and i was i just couldn't get it together my brain was so worn out right i was going to ask you i i think i saw that your tour was called sacred clown yeah so i'm you know sacred is uh my i like to kind of go after that but as i like that title and so i was curious how you came up with that or what it's a lakota term of hayoka is a sacred clown okay the lakotas had a term for a very important part of their culture which was someone who mocks all the things that are deemed sacred and important right and sort of uh
finds holes in all of the these dogmatic ideas yeah yeah yeah yeah um well that's uh i mean again that's what religion can do yeah i would have called it the sake notions of the sacred can really you know help you to see what's really going on in the world i would have called it heyoka but it seems like that would have caused more problems than well first of all people like what the [ __ ] does that mean and then second of all people are like you're culturally appropriating which is careful do you really i'm not sure you do i'm not sure i like to get better off yeah i mean it certainly yeah in terms of um it's more avoiding yeah yeah but yeah but i get you yeah so that's what i'm going to call it once i could tour again right i'm sorry and it'll be even more important now after the pandemic you really need to make fun of [ __ ] absolutely because people are more on edge and then also unfortunately or fortunately people have embedded themselves so deeply into social media that they believe that this really bizarre way of communicating which forms these echo chambers and these uh really non-empathetic ways of expressing your disdain or anger or hate or disagreement with people that this is common and standard it's the most non-psychedelic thing right the way people communicate on twitter is like a bunch of mental patients throwing [ __ ] at each other yes understand yeah and uh you've gotten off of twitter off social media well i'm on twitter but i don't use it right right i'll read other people's stuff sometimes just to go what is going on but if someone's trying to get my attention good luck good luck i don't read anything about me yeah but i don't read anything about me in general yeah yeah just yeah because instagram is basically just a just giant distraction for me right i just find it fun to a lot of good images and things
but i i agree you know i think that the social media is one of the more powerful forces and and the changes that we are seeing yeah and the political divisions clearly are kind of one of the consequences of of how embedded um you know these platforms have become in our lives it's almost like like it's all been i mean it hasn't all been planned out but it's almost like it has been in order to really deteriorate our confidence and all these structures and systems if you if you thought about what what would be the perfect way to deteriorate it well you have a guy who's clearly unqualified for the job who is uh famous for just kind of being an [ __ ] on television firing people and being like a bombastic sort of uh you know braggadocious rich guy with his name on giant buildings and you're fired [ __ ] you and grab them by the [ __ ] and then you have that be that guy be the president yeah right and then have everybody like we gotta get him out of here he's the problem he's the problem and then i think they're going to realize once he is out no no he's not the problem he's he's just a problem right the problem is human beings right and the problem is the political system is just deeply embedded with corruption and you're going to realize that with this next guy who's supposed to be your savior it's not going to work out well to bring it back to your earlier point i think we all could use some mdma yes everybody everybody should microdose on mushrooms for sure okay well look where we're going i think we're heading in that direction i think we are too you know i i believe in the young people you know yeah i do too i do too well that's why this podcast works you know because i think uh you can't have the systems that are in place that are bullshitting people and then they're out on the streets talking to their friends and
communicating in a totally different way than they're seeing in the media and they're like what this doesn't represent me right this is not how i think and feel and my experiences with life and with particularly if they've had any psychedelic experiences these aren't represented right why aren't they represented right when i know they're so common and i know they're so profound i know they've meant so much to me and my friends why why why don't i see this right so then they find things like this on the internet and they go okay this i'm not crazy right there's other people out there so right and then the other side of that um would be the notion that that we really have lost any sense of of um powerful authority structures you know sort of cultural authorities that really can unite people or kind of help people understand um the importance of common cause of some kind and yeah um and you know that's uh again partly to bring it back to religion has to do with the the conflicts around um the church and christianity especially in american politics um that is being diminished i like to write about sort of the de-christianization you know as as the dominant sort of religious structure begins to erode and you begin to see again spiritual but not religious and other kinds of um challenges that are coming from different communities or different kinds of spiritual experiences to you know um the the authority structures that are in society you know that is part of the the context of all of this yeah where a lot of these battles are going on and people don't know where to turn or you know wondering where am i represented in all this and it's not coming from religion or the church and political leaders republicans or democrats so it all becomes self-focused you know we're all just
about self-promotion and yeah you know identity becomes the main you know force in our lives i think for too many people yeah and hence the celebrity and then the chasing celebrity yeah right this becomes the ultimate you know level of uh this this stupid game we're all playing right well again for me as a someone who studies this i try not to be judgmental but i see again it's it's it's a religious system there's a religious culture and it's you know it's uh um just as uh interesting and legitimate in my mind as christianity i don't i i i wish there was a structure that was in place that um mimicked the positive aspects of church that didn't um contain the dogmatic religious ideas that a lot of people find problematic you know like i think there's something great about the whole uh community aspect of church you know my friends that do go to church i have a lot of friends that are christian that are really good people they're really good people like admirable people and i think one of the things um that's very admirable about their pursuit of christianity is this community uh reinforcing aspect of it right you know they get there together with the members of the community everybody's real friendly they know that they're gonna sit there and they're gonna submit to this experience and they're gonna you know read the passages and they're gonna hear the sermon and they're gonna they're all gonna be together they're gonna dress nice they're gonna behave well right and they're gonna feel good about the people that they live near and they're surrounded by and i think we're missing that there's so many people that i'm friends with that live in cities that don't know the person who lives in the apartment next door to them they've been
there for 10 years and they they don't know anybody in their building i have a buddy of mine who's telling me he lives in a building with a thousand people he doesn't know any of them that's crazy well that's such a weird modern humans it's a weird way for humans to live and i think people feel particularly lost when they don't have a real sense of community and i can say as a stand-up comedian one of the things that we all have in common um particularly folks that were working out of the comedy store was that there was a family aspect to it there was a real community there and we were very supportive of each other and embracing physically embracing like people see people that they hey what's up everybody hugs and so for a lot of these comics who are single who live alone maybe don't know their neighbors like that was the place where they could go to that was church yeah right that's what i i mean i think that's beautiful yeah and right on because you could see in that community of comedians something sacred yeah something religious yeah that's meaningful and that um that is profound in some ways and and uh as we said the community aspect but also um you know helping people in terms of their own understanding self-understanding yeah you know um and that's people turn to different kinds of communities you know uh and that's part of the modern world too that that community feeling um this sort of collective togetherness can can be found in a number of different settings and certainly the church and the congregation is one but rock concerts or you know the comedy clubs grateful dead the grateful dead i mean the grateful dead the whole thing was acid right well it was music
right and acid we're going to turn to that next uh next week oh are you oh yeah we we end the course with psychedelics and creativity oh fish too right yeah that's their deal too right so a lot of people drop acid and listen to that sort of jam music and well my friends have done yes and certainly meaningful yeah yeah my friends who have gone to a lot of dead shows say you don't even really know the dead until you listen to them on acid right right right like it's music designed for acid yeah well that's um i that that's uh something you can find in a other musical acts as well that connection i mean that's the thing about uh dimethyltryptamine in the icaros have you ever listened to uh south american icarus those when you hear those songs on psychedelics the the images dance to those songs like they're they work together like a hand in a glove perfectly it's amazing yeah well i like i like that connection between music and drugs and religion so you can also you know look at the peyote church and and listen to some of um the music that comes from those ceremonies yeah very much a central part of the experience and how people absorb receive it and make sense of it i think we're way too comfortable with music we we think of it as like no big deal exactly yeah and that's that's what i do in my all my classes i bring in music so in the death class at the beginning of the semester i tell students i want you to be listening you know just in terms of the music that you listen to day to day uh if if you can identify the theme of death and of course they when they hear that at first they think of nuts and weight you know out of my mind and they soon realize it's everywhere right and so yeah i mean i know that um aspect of my classes it can really be powerful
because again we don't we take music for granted but it's so central to our lives and um again i think can have more of an impact than just oh isn't this fun to listen to yeah and shape our consciousness and our communities and so so i do that in the sex sexuality class i'm doing it in the drugs class um and it's great for students to to be able to see that as data what do you open up with what song do you open up with when you for which one for death the oyster cult yeah if you're the reaper they wear the same yeah they love it even though they've never heard of it they've never heard a blue oyster called these [ __ ] kids yeah the kids today how do you not hear of that song well i mean again their parents may have listened to it uh sometimes i get that but oh man there's just a lot of things that can can play be played um across different um genres you know so it's not just rock there's a few uh recordings that are still available of the lakotas doing the ghost dance yep yeah yeah yeah yeah i teach american religious history and then there too music is the main thread where we learn about religious communities that is one of the saddest songs in the history of the world because that that's these people that really are at the end i mean there's very few genocides there's i mean there's a few right but there's very few where there's almost nothing left of people that existed in in thriving numbers 300 years ago but in native american communities it's common it's like the most common they like they're all gone right in terms of like what the way they used to live versus now and that ghost dance yes was them trying to conjure up the spirit of the past and and reignite their culture and bring back the old
ways and get rid of the the white settlers and get rid of the armies and get rid of uh all the people that have destroyed their way of life and disease and all the things that had happened to them literally over the course of their life from you know there's people that were born in 1850 that were 50 years old at the turn of the 20th century that were like what the [ __ ] happened when they were born they were they lived on the plains and life was as it had been for hundreds if not thousands of years right and then all sudden it was gone and so this ghost dance was this attempt at reigniting their old culture it's it's it's so eerie and sad and it's it's it's so rare to have an actual recording of something yeah that was an attempt to stop genocide right right and from that period too um is is really you know valuable to have as again that's it's beyond data it's like yeah you know you this is about our memory and as you said it's very evocative yeah um when people listen to it and um it does become an important remnant of that of that movement and that experience but um yeah the music and those ceremonies are incredible do you play that for your classes as well yeah yeah no no and the the the book i use there's a whole chapter on the ghost dance wow you know james mooney and and really um trying to dig into um yeah some of the historical uh forces that led to this as as a potential uh revitalization um form of of of religious revival that it's tragically you know yeah as a um something that uh disconnects a people from their past in ways that are difficult to maintain and and um and to um keep whole and people are still suffering from the momentum of that disconnection today in 2020 there's uh massive amounts of strife and and huge problems in native
american reservations because of that but still today absolutely it's crazy and still you know as as has been the case in native american history incredible signs of resilience of innovation of com you know new forms of community that that have have really they're getting back at us with the casinos well i've heard that before but it's not us i should say clearly i'm i'm a child of immigrants well i mean you know this is a development yeah that's you know kind of ironic in some ways hey no it is it is it's it's bizarre that they're getting wealthy off of uh this weird vice oh well another addiction yeah another gambling attack is it do you think well you know it's like i we had a great class on addiction have you ever been around gambling addicts like real handling no i mean i've been around a bunch of them well it's a drug it's a drug that's what i'm wondering oh my god something's going on in the brain too that's gonna be you know where you're going to be seeing some some kinds of activities that you know will lead people to continue on in the behavior yeah it's um for sure a pattern that people fall into like my grandmother was addicted to playing the numbers yeah um i remember she was always losing and she was always like saying oh i was supposed to bet this one and i bet that one like that was the whole deal with my grandmother italian grandmother in new jersey you know and the numbers were obviously this mob run weird lottery thing for the neighborhood but it wasn't until i was in my 20s that i started playing pool that i was around real hardcore gambling addicts that would bet on raindrops running down a window they would bet on anything and everything and their life revolved on getting like on getting bets and winning and losing it was it was their whole their there was their juice for their life
right was all gambling right a life source or some something but also destructive in its way it was overbearing but it's hard to say it was destruct well it was definitely destructive in terms of their financial stability they were always broke but boy they were they were engaged and they would call it action right that's what they would call it like trying to get some action like it was all about this thrill of possibly winning and possibly losing right and you could say that people are doing that when they're playing the stock market they're just doing a nice slow version of it or if you're gambling on sports you're certainly participating in it right you know right and and there are a lot of different kinds of addictions that people have i mean talking about religion i mean about drugs well i think religion may be an addiction too in some in some ways but i think so yeah and so i do for some people yeah you just again life force life juice is what you got to keep giving yourself if you're going to make it um but yeah i mean i'm i'm it's curious to think about what what are the addictions in our society right you know too much shopping or too much sex or drugs are the obvious one but we really stretch out that term to mean you know and apply to all kinds of different or social media well i think that's a brand new addiction right that's and that was in that netflix documentary research yes yes tristan harris was actually here a couple of weeks ago oh we talked about it and it's um i mean it's i'm hoping that people recognize that that is not much different than all those other ones whether it's gambling or masturbation or whatever it is that you're addicted to it's the same kind of patterns right it's just this one is particularly compelling because it's with you all the
time right you know it's like gambling you have to have someone to gamble with someone you have to go to the casino or there has to be some way that you could like that goddamn phone is with you 24 7. no doubt yeah well it becomes all-consuming as you say and yeah then yeah that can lead to all kinds of um you know ruin we're finding a pattern in all this right it's it's in humans like humans have weird sort of pitfalls that we slip into we have weird weird behavior patterns that we can fall prey to absolutely i mean i think that's probably part of just uh the makeup of what it means to be human yeah as we can get sidetracked and get so consumed by something that you lose sight of the rest of reality in some way and um yeah i mean i i see that in the things that i study for sure people obsessed about death or sexuality or drugs um or anything or anything at all yeah but um but how you know we think about gambling and and how that connects to sort of larger social issues and psychological kind of mental issues um is important you know to make sure you're not just uh kind of compartmentalizing the behavior yeah as part of a you know there's part of a larger context and pattern that that's that are worth studying worth looking at how much how much of a benefit is there in explaining to people the way we fall into these patterns as much as there is exploring the patterns themselves like we we have these weird sort of um vulnerabilities that are built into our system because we're there's benefits to getting obsessed with certain things because those certain things can lead you to success as a hunter gatherer as a fisherman and some it's going to help feed your family if your your brain can completely lock on to in this like tenacious way of succeeding at something right if
you're a hunter-gatherer and you know your feet hurt you're like well i give up i can't do this obviously hunting is not for me you're going to starve to death your children are going to cry it's going to be horrible right so there's this built-in thing but that could be hijacked by roulette right well which is so weird yeah that thing of come on i gotta get this i gotta win i gotta go that could be hijacked by games right it could be hijacked by by many things that we find ourselves obsessed right hijacked or also motivated by uh other kinds of inner dynamics as well i mean whether you want to talk about freud or some other primal instincts that are at work that um yeah depending on the individual and the particular social setting they're in you know family background can can lead to these you know all or nothing pursuits but psychedelics sort of illuminates that for you psychedelics are one of the only things that i've ever found that goes hey stupid look at what you're doing look what that is look what the cause of this is you're like oh yeah like why didn't i notice that why didn't i see that well you don't see it until you the psychedelics sort of turn the light on for you yeah right and when it does it's often the case that you don't need to go back right you know it's like or at least i've read that people you know it's not addictive but also you know once twice you know you get you get it you certainly don't need to do it every day right i mean if you want to have like i think people feel like a little refresher course every year or so it's not a bad thing to just sort of get like oh yeah well yeah oh that's right i almost forgot right yeah recalibration and kind of yeah resetting the system the wave i i've described uh really profound psychedelic experiences like pressing ctrl alt delete for your brain and for people don't know what that means if you only use a mac
that's uh how you reboot a windows computer when it crashes control alt delete your computer reboots and you have a fresh desktop with one folder and that folder is just labeled my old [ __ ] and then you have a choice right the choice is do i open up my old [ __ ] start going through try to figure out life again through my old memories or do i try to form a new view and resist my old [ __ ] resist opening it up and that's where it gets tricky sure because your ego will try to convince you like listen man how about one cigarette it's not bad right you know huh you know if i can relax buddy right you know let's let's go play some bets there's nothing wrong with that i'm like hey come on man let's go do this let's go do that and then next thing you know you fall right back into the traps that you were avoiding right well the ego can be tricky in that way and leading you astray or making you think it's real or making you feel comfortable with these old patterns that you're right really familiar with even if those all patterns are failure right like a lot of people like fall off diets fall off the wagon with drinking they do it because they're comfortable with the feeling of failure and this the uncertainty of the unknown of the future with these new patterns that you're trying to establish is very confusing it's very scary no doubt and it's religious yeah is that how you would describe it yeah i mean in a way yeah for lack of a better term yeah and what it does you know and just that that whole metaphor is like being born again or mm-hmm something like that and the shamanic journey you know you're not the same you come back um and you've got something to teach you know and that's it's not just i i would say not necessarily just for the consumer
yeah the psychedelic or whatever the substance is but it's it's also you know about connections um i think and and um sharing the knowledge yeah getting it out there what what are you teaching in your sexuality classes that's different than what uh people would uh normally expect uh well i'm one thing i i try to do is um be as cross-cultural as i can be so we look at sexuality and hinduism um in terms of chinese religions in terms of african religions so i try to really for these students um expand their minds as much as possible to see the varieties of ways in which people understand their sexuality um and and and so now that's that's where i start the class how long have you been teaching this for this class yeah um there's another one that's uh post-tenure uh but it's um probably been about seven or eight years how much this is a really important question like as a professor what is it like pre-tenure and post-tenure because it seems to be a night and day difference in terms of freedom and right i i overplay that a bit but but everyone is it's not you everyone i guess yeah it's a strange uh whole um uh organization you know and logic higher education i'm opposed to tenure i think it's [ __ ] yeah um but do you think it protects intellectual freedom no in any way i mean i think there was a time in which we might make that argument but um you know i don't know who else has tenure um what other uh professions that's a good question it's it's not insane no no it's like not the real world and so you think it's in some ways um not good because then the almost like you the the intellectual version of being
born wealthy like you uh you're you're you have no worries and so you you almost become spoiled well okay no well yes absolutely i mean you know there there are arguments that after um some faculty get tenure they shut down or they really aren't doing as much research anymore and there isn't that drive right i mean it's a whole tiered system so you move you get tenure when you move from assistant to associate professor and then you know what you want to get to is full professor right right and again that's the sort of that just a different um place in the hierarchy yeah but again it's all the papers you write the books you publish i mean yeah my humanities it's getting a couple books out there um but but yeah i mean i i can't uh deny that i felt uh much freer after i got after i uh got tenure to explore um topics that i would be more hesitant to explore which topics in particular drugs drugs for sure drugs yeah um as again as a as a as a research area full full force you know going to go into it again because there's a legitimate purpose to a scholarly study of of the connections between religion and drugs it's uh luckily i'm not the only one who was pursuing this but um but it's it's uh i believe um there are a lot of interesting connections that haven't been made especially in in contemporary american society the other the other drug that i'm particularly uh interested in and seems to um get a lot of response is i also include pharmaceuticals and prescription psychoactive drugs as a part of the drugs and religion connection and um so looking at the pharmaceutical industry and and pills as um sort of religious objects and
and structures and cultures really uh how so well um like anti-anxiety medication or yeah i mean that is just a kind you know it's ritualized so you put it you know you've got to make sure you know you take it and take it when you're supposed to take it you put faith in this little magic pill that is effective and can um bring you to a better place um it has importance in terms of community and who you are connected with and how the drug allows you to to have certain kinds of community so a lot of this is obviously kind of messaged you see the messages in in pharmaceutical commercials which are for me dripping with kind of religious sentiments and sensibilities you can be saved you know where are you saved well you're saved with a pill so this is a subject in particular that like pre-tenure would be you'd have to be walking on eggshells um again drugs more generally i would be i would i well yeah i would not be necessarily going there but yeah you know i mean i'm i'm not sure do other professors share your perspective on tenure that that's kind of nonsense um or [ __ ] i should say i would say um yeah there are some but most people must enjoy it though i think most people would like to keep it and think it serves some function in terms of as you're saying sort of um legitimacy of academic freedom some people are internally motivated some people are motivated just by um whatever drives them but whatever intellectual curiosity their their goals whatever it is it has nothing to do with um financial stability or job stability but not not not most yeah most people if you give them 100 job security they're going to get fat yeah i'm afraid i uh i would agree absolutely
it's weird and and you're right some people are just um you know just motivated they want to succeed and pursue um their interests sort of no matter what um and and there are certainly a number of of scholars who are like that sure they make their way to the top the path is what interests them right the the the destination is not real right exactly i think that's exactly right and um you know but as i sort of joked earlier i i joke that i you know this is called work and i don't feel i really work right i have a great great job i just i love what i do well you nailed it right you figured out what actually interests you and for some people that it what you do would be work but not for you no well right exactly i mean again i'm very fortunate especially being at emory um so it's it's a different kind of um professional life that i you know it's just i've been really fortunate and it wasn't planned you know i was a [ __ ] up and as i write about in this new book you know don't think about death which is a memoir on mortality um i was directionless and just [ __ ] around at high school and getting high and taking all kinds of drugs how dare you yeah can you believe that in the san fernando valley that's weird you're doing that in san fernando valley no one does that out there no you must have been a rebel yeah all right talk about conformity but oh my god what part of the valley did you live in van nuys oh okay our old studio was in woodland hills right and and and one of your guys grew up in the valley so i got to talk to him yeah it was fun i used to work out in van nuys that's where the benny the jets jet center was oh yeah right right you know what that was funny world famous kickboxing job oh yeah one of the first places i came to when i came to california couldn't wait to go to the jet center because you had heard about it oh my god it was legendary
benny arkita is like a legendary kickboxer uh in the early days of kickboxing and he came out of los angeles yeah it's so funny how many people have come out of san fernando valley or connected i mean but yeah that's not that funny well a lot of people out there yeah well but in any case i was uh i was on a different path and luckily came around yeah for sure so what what led you out of the fog of adolescent craziness and [ __ ] up hurry uh a woman ah a beautiful story yeah okay no my my my current wife yeah liz really helped to bring me um into another direction although you know not i wouldn't say only her uh but you know it was just all of a sudden i started really liking to learn and i really you know i went i dropped out of college a couple times and and meeting her settling down all of a sudden [Music] thinking um more critically and and more kind of more deeply and taking classes more seriously so i moved from usually i was sitting in the back of the room to you know the front as i became a junior and senior in in college so it was essentially just a natural course of progression you just became naturally more interested in things naturally more curious naturally more dedicated to learning absolutely but but for some strange reason i was back then very interested in death so i that was the subject as i was doing my undergraduate work you know why death well that that's the memoir i have no idea but i'll say the memoir starts with uh me as a young kid maybe eight or nine um and um waking up in the middle of the night with all this commotion in our house the small san fernando valley house three bedrooms and one bath um and then looking down the hallway and seeing you know what seemed to be like 50 firemen
but there couldn't have been 50 firemen so i'm sure there were only a few who were rushing into our bathroom where my grandfather was and when he was going into the bath he had a heart attack and died and i kind of witnessed that and they took him out of the bathroom and that was that but what really um the what's really vivid um as a memory associated with this uh was after the death the family rabbi came to our house and i just remember very vividly being in the backyard with him and he asked me do you know what the meaning of death is it's like again eight or nine like what i have no idea and and you know he must have said some things but the thing that that really stood out and is the title of the book is him saying don't think about death just think about the living and trying to help your father cope with his grief and you know i mean i when people ask you know when did you start how did you get onto the topic of death um this early memory seems to stand out and and i utterly failed in the rabbi's advice and i think at that point really started thinking a lot about death well i don't know if the rabbi's advice was so good well i don't think anybody should ever tell you don't think about anything uh absolutely i mean don't think about the elephant in the room yeah don't think about the elephant you know but it's i just don't think it's ever good advice well i've come around yeah yeah again i i i had a lovely rabbi you know a lovely uh experience in the temple even though after my bar mitzvah i never looked back how old were you when your grandfather died i was about eight or so yeah well that's something you would say to an eight-year-old but again it's just it's not how people um how people's brains work well and it's not you know being fair to the to the reality where we're all going to have to fight right
for sure my death is just integrated and a part of life and i think thinking about it and trying to figure it out is valuable i think um ultimately uh we've been given a bunch of crude tools to deal with an insanely complex issue this finite life form that we uh find ourselves inhabiting our consciousness is trapped in this finite thing and uh and we've been given these very crude tools for uh navigating right and for coping and for just this the way we interact with each other about these these very complex subjects we've get very simplistic very um just empty phrases that don't provide any real comfort right and that right and that are um in some sense traditions they're handed down sort of as part of the lore on how you're supposed to deal with death yeah um but for me and what was clearer as i was studying more and more in terms of what you were saying is that that is what religion is all about you know rel i i think you know religion is very much a um a response to death yeah you know and religious life is um sort of required um if you're going to be human to deal with death now what are the sources um that give you the right tools again traditional religion has been the primary resource you know um for people and that's fading and now people are have all kinds of ideas about death and what happens after death and again um don't necessarily follow the so-called or traditional authorities yeah who want to teach us about death i had richard dawkins on the podcast once there was a real weird moment where uh we were talking about death and he was saying that he thinks that when it's over there's nothing and then he sort of like semi-aggressively said like
you don't think that yeah like what do you think i'm like i don't know right i'm like i don't know but i know that i've tripped balls and you haven't you're the one who's scared to do an acid you've already had strokes and stuff buddy like when are you gonna when are you gonna dive into the pool right and i think he's brilliant and i i've loved a lot of his uh takes on religion and i think um in many ways he's been aggressive because of the pushback of you know his perspective as an atheist but i think that i think people that have had profound psychedelic experiences are not that they're not that uh confident because you didn't know that that could exist until you you had it and then once you've had it you're like well i don't know what this is all about i think anybody who says i know what this is all about when you die it's blank it's dark and that's it you shut off and it's over i'm like maybe right or maybe you come with me and i'll take you to a place and we're going to do some stuff and you're going to meet all kinds of gods right and it doesn't last that long like you got a couple hours yeah like we could we could change everything for you in a couple hours yeah right it'll completely disrupt and challenge all of your assumptions that you hold so evaporate them yeah well well i think um that you know that's what gets me in trouble more than anything but why does that get you in trouble well i mean when when when we talk about atheism because i i take this approach again much more to be provocative that there are no atheists we're all religious again if you're if if if you're willing to entertain my very broad understanding of religion and religious life then i would say yeah okay so that's a very broad because we're not talking about when you're talking about religion in terms of like taking xanax you're not talking about a higher power really you're not talking about faith in
a grand creator that has had some master plan for every single living thing and they're all interconnected and the entire universe is all part of his master project that's well i don't think you need the creator to be religious right or some divine power i mean you need some access to transcendence you need some um way of understanding your own self and identity um you need to have a system of values that will guide you in through your life yeah a way of being you need to have community in some form um so you know i'm um i'm more anthropological than theological is one one way you might put it so if you're talking about religion in native american cultures where you know and no doubt no and there's no word for religion in any of those languages yeah so when you think about well what's religion pre-columbian you know native cultures well it's what they do with the crops you know it's um you know how they um set up their sort of um uh ritual ceremonies it is their relationship to the weather it's you know it's the price of things and then where it's not necessarily a higher power but you know it is about seeing that there's more than just materialism yeah or something like that is the problem the word because the word religion like we have like a very narrow definition for it it fits into our our society and our culture like religion oh yeah i know what that is that's that's you're a buddhist you're a muslim you're a christian you're uh that's a religion dude you got to take my class oh maybe you should come in i don't have the time i want to zoom can i zoom you in can i zoom in for a guest lecture that would be so what am i going to say well come in on the psychedelics we'll do it this week but um but yeah no i mean i i mean again i just i think that the word sucks
yeah you know the religion as i like to say is is an invention it's a word that we have invented to label a lot of different kinds of behaviors it's a very clunky word in a lot of ways absolutely just like you say oh he's religious like oh got it you know right yeah all of a sudden you think you know there was a guy that we've made fun of a bunch on the show who was a a pastor to a lot of famous people he was like the hip young pastor we just got busted yeah i just got busted banging some chick yep and we made fun of him because uh i'm like look these guys there's no way this guy's religious this is what i was saying well because he was wearing these shorts that showed what i called his dick root like he wears these shorts that go way low which you just don't wear your shorts like that unless you want someone to think about your penis right like that's that's why you wear your shorts like that or maybe in the 70s it would be but i don't know there's no reason to right guys who wear their shorts that low right there they're they're being overtly sexual to people that they don't even necessarily know right you you're trying to and you want everyone to look at your chiseled body you know like this is none of the there's a reason why monks dress in these like very modest clothes that cover everything they don't even want to think about their body right and that is a part of the religion of both celebrity and social media right that this guy has got these traditional christian ideas fused in with the religion of celebrity in with the religion of social media and then you're seeing that it doesn't really work because you know like what's the reward for those those behaviors the reward is he wants to [ __ ] like that guy wants people to that's that guy wants people to lust after him and uh it wound up sabotaging him absolutely ultimately
absolutely um i think yeah that's a now a morality story of some kind yeah all of them yeah you know this is uh a kind of um [Music] celebrity fame yeah kind of pursuing that goes wrong it's a trap because if you achieve like what do you what if you're you're lusting after this uh this attention and this sexual praise and you want people to lust after you you also want them to think of you as being someone who is more enlightened than everyone else which is why you're willing to stand in front of them and give these emotional profound sermons in the first place that resonates with all these lost young people right well right and historically there's um a lot of overlap between sort of celebrity and um religious preaching people like billy sunday or sure you know others that you know the the celeb the the religious leader becomes a celebrity and those lines get blurred and also it all becomes entertainment which yep for celebrities there's a need for that because they feel very lost and disconnected because they've achieved the thing that they've always desired and they still feel lost like everyone's looks at certain celebrities and go oh my god you've made it your life must be heaven and they're depressed and all [ __ ] up and we don't have any sympathy for them there's no one one's going to be sympathy sympathetic to justin bieber with you know [ __ ] 300 million dollars in the bank and having sex with anybody who wants to like right [ __ ] you for being depressed you little piece of [ __ ] been famous your whole life but for him it's probably very confusing because first of all particularly like the really young people who became famous while they were young like i had
miley cyrus on who i think is incredibly talented brilliant brilliantly talented her voice is fantastic i mean so soulful but she got famous when she was 12. i have a 12 year old man i can't even imagine i can't imagine being the boss and filling arenas when you're 12. it's madness right and no one survives it they don't i mean maybe a few have gotten through it and they're saying right but most of them don't and that's where celebrity preachers come in where someone can harness your your celebrity and it boosts them up and they can also provide you maybe even a maybe if it's disingenuous but some sort of a structure that makes you feel like there's more that you that you can you can cling to something that's going to make sense of this all and that something is jesus right or muhammad or whatever it is whatever it is that you you cling to whatever structure that you cling to right buddha whatever it is right and they can and that can be exploited yeah especially in those situations i think because of what you're saying a gap or absence of you know oh god i got here yep and it's you know is this all there is i think with the children in particular because it's not oh god i got there so i've never been normal yeah well that especially it's like having cement but you've never added water right like it's never there's something missing yeah well you didn't grow up right and many of them don't they don't survive they don't survive and and you know obviously drugs can be uh one way too it's the most common way to to deal yeah you know try to try to deal yeah i'm i'm well aware of a lot of people uh in in the whole hollywood show business world that grew up famous and almost none of them survived yeah yeah rob lowe did though rob lowe got famous real young he's super normal
he might be like one of the only ones i've ever met and i've hung out with him right and i've hung out also more importantly with him and his son who's also really normal really well adjusted but he also got clean and sober right early on right right right yeah so yeah i mean he made it he made it but but he's very few he's also very beautiful yeah it's probably easy to be robbed low right and he's got to be what he's 40 30. no he's older than that yes he's believe he's older than me i'm 53. i believe rob's 45. yeah okay well anyway there you go he's one of the few that got famous very young and has navigated it through with grace but i think the ones that are children that grow up child stars the you know the ones on the mickey mouse show and that kind of [ __ ] yeah good luck no i mean that's so they refined these celebrity preachers this is often what happens they find gurus they find celebrity preachers right right yeah someone tries to make sense of things so who do we look for to put our faith in you know and and that's that there too is a pretty common universal um aspect of human life and the problem i have something to believe in those poor gurus they fall into the trap too because now they can leech off the success of these famous people and become famous themselves right and maybe they haven't really immunized themselves inoculated themselves to the the power of celebrity sure it's a very intoxicating drug like you got to understand how to how to avoid it right and avoid the pitfalls of it it's not easy yeah well again that's that's the life that everyone wants i mean that's that that's part of the pressure i assume um for a lot of people is just you know the american public the global uh
audience is uh can be transfixed on on you and also you know want what you have but i think we could really learn from those those preachers those preachers that only go after the like really like not not only go after but uh attract celebrities like there's something to that weird sort of parasitic genre of you know of preacher right no i agree i think um it's right for study yeah sure there's been any kinds of they should well i'm certainly i mean maybe you should write a book we've seen that well i'm sticking with drugs man for now celebrities a drug intoxication yeah this is yeah sort of what we're after in some form celebrity i think there's a drug in so there there's several drugs that are mixed together in sort of a concoction there's a drug of celebrity which uh you know for sure is a drug and then there's also a drug being the person who has the answers definitely and there's something that people do when they convince other people that they have the answers that it elevates their mood and their perspective there's like some weird guru drug yeah so there's the guru drug and then there's a celebrity drug where they were identifying a whole nexus and with that guy it was the sex drugs he's a beautiful man he's a handsome tall ripped shredded preacher guy right right right a lot of drugs going on there well and i wonder how extensive it all was extensive well in terms of his you know whatever kinds of activities he was engaged in the god of all this trouble and i think with people like this is where it's i'm gonna give a simplistic perspective i think he could have uh benefited from real drugs so i think a person who's involved in those three weird drugs could have been they've really really could have benefited from psychedelics because psychedelics would have let you say hey hey hey do you see what you're
doing because i see what you're doing right the psychedelics would have said i know what you're doing you're pretending you're pretending to be profound you're pretending to be pious you're pretending to be enlightened you're pretending to be above it all but you're not yeah yeah yeah you're just one of us right and that can be uh pretty destabilizing you know for someone like that but also transformative that's where the there's real benefit in those destabilizing i think so too well i tell people i like getting paranoid from pot it's one of my favorite parts because when it's over i feel good it's like a near-death experience that you always survive it didn't happen it didn't happen you're okay but also there's a lesson in it that fear comes with a lesson and that that insecurity comes with a lesson and i think part of the lesson is appreciate the moment of life appreciate life appreciate this you know and when you're all [ __ ] up on on pot and you're like oh everything's crazy like when it's over you can like right you relax and you can appreciate things in a different way right well and that's um having that new awareness is yeah um you know is is can be rejuvenating it's also a hypersensitivity right yeah you mean an appreciation yeah for you know how things are or you know well in the sense of security of some kind the paranoia itself is a hypersensitivity of the reality of your finite existence yeah because that's that's really we we we're living life like it i mean this is right the here's another religion right the religion of materialism yes it's the most ridiculous one and this is like the bible telling you not to worship false idols like part of that is this worship of a thing of a of an object of of things you're trying to acquire that are difficult to acquire but then once you get them you just want to acquire the next one
right well that's there's no obvious consumerism right right there's no object or where you're like if i just get this one purse i'm gonna be all settled in it's gonna be i'm gonna feel so good i'm going to be calm and normal right no need more yeah well yeah i'm uh you know there too as a scholar not judgmental you know materialism is a religion and it's you know it's got some heft and and and um validity in terms of how people orient themselves in the world but again isn't it sort of uh hijacking the same sort of human reward systems in that it's difficult to acquire like uh say if you want a mercedes like a new mercedes coupe they're hard to get like you gotta have a lot of money to get one of them amg mercedes coupes those are beautiful and engineered they come from germany and they sound great and god you have to have a lot of money to get that so you gotta you have it's hard you see one drive down the street oh that guy got one where'd he get it right right how did he get that i want to be like that i want to be that guy he's gonna make my life it's gonna make my life better it's got a cold watch too oh i'm not gonna watch it why are we striving yeah all these things i mean that's where it can get philosophical and that's highlighted by social media as well right because people will pose in front of their beautiful mercedes with their gold watch like look at me right look at me balling out of control over here that's oh no don't you wish you were like me yeah right you know the hell yeah projection yeah that's all image and it's really responsible for a lot of depression too exactly yeah no absolutely that's what that's what they're finding um you know in terms of how people more engaged and immersed in their social media just lose themselves especially i think they find them you know they think they're going to be able to find themselves or at least um you know kind of attempt
to project a certain image of the self that they would like to be right and that's you know that's just living by that i think is is um debilitating in terms of person sense of ego confidence who they are you know in real life do you think that there's a religion or not not a religion but um a framework or a structure that maybe someone could develop in order to successfully like classes in the pitfalls of all these things that we're talking about materialism social media that there's maybe a religion that can be developed to deal with the modern time the modern times pitfalls of the problems and trials and tribulations that we're dealing with today they're not worse than famine i mean i'm uh in the middle of uh um how do you say his name noah yuval haradi how do you say his name you know the guy who wrote sapiens um homo dias is uh this book that i'm in the middle of now and um it's stunning he starts the book off with all of these examples of famine plague and famine where the the pers the vast majority of cultures have experienced one of those two things plague or famine or both plague and famine throughout history and it's talking about how many decades they went on where people starved to death and how many how many times in history people lost 30 percent of the population 20 of the population to starvation i mean it's madness yes the things that people had to deal with today so in terms of like what we have to our trials and tribulations our biology survives far easier today but maybe our consciousness is just as vulnerable now as it's ever been before if not more right but the problems aren't as big but we think they are because of the only problems we know
right right well and consciousness is just trying to you know understand its surrounding in some way um and the surroundings are pretty complex you know it's not just a matter of food for survival or something or shelter they're weird problems yeah it's yeah it's you know what we think are real problems but our inconveniences or some difficulties and some obviously lots of serious problems but i mean i think you know um we don't have the tools the intellectual religious spiritual mental tools in in terms of dealing with all of all of these so-called problems that surround us you know what yeah please well i was just thinking but yeah we're in the middle of this pandemic and whatever getting close to 300 000 dead um and that has the feel i mean you know of some kind of mass death event as well and how how that will affect our consciousness as the deaths continue will be interesting have more people died from cigarettes during this pandemic than have died from kovid that i don't know well don't like a half million people die every year from cigarettes and aren't we at about eight months in we're about eight months in yeah so wouldn't that mean we're probably neck and neck with cigarettes well i mean there are a lot of different causes of death yeah sure you can point to with this this seems to be again above a of a different kind of order for certainly because it's non-voluntary right right it's not of your own decision to smoke something that has been clearly labeled a carcinogen right and it's mysterious yeah and we're not sure what the virus is or how it's wrong but again i'm you know i in terms of going off what you were saying i i'm just sort of wondering how consciousness how our collective consciousness is going to be um you know dealing with our ideas about death
um and sort of questions around um sort of social you know social responses yeah in the face of this kind of event yeah well we this is a an issue that we haven't overcome before it's a new thing it's novel one of the weird things about people is they it doesn't help to tell people that well compared to other times and other generations we have it easy because as hard as you have it today the worst that happens to you today is still the worst that happens to you and that's all that we understand right we don't really understand like i'm telling people about famine like when i was explaining the harare book no one does that's not go no one is going oh my god now i get it now i'm gonna not think about social media and i'm gonna be happy that i could just go to in and out and get a burger right they're not going to think that way no that's not that has worked on zero people from me saying that to these people hearing it no one right has had a light bulb go off like of course there's no famine now i feel much better right thank you no it doesn't work that way right it doesn't work people only understand what's the worst thing to happen to them right that's why spoiled people scream and yell over nothing like oh my god you're so spoiled but we're looking at the wrong way that's just the worst thing that's ever happened to them right you know and that's what the only thing they know and yes how do you break people out of that very insular understanding of the difficulties of life and the two do you have children yeah you know what it's like when kids are young and they think it's the end of the world like one of my daughters is 10 the other one's 12. the 12 year old ate a couple of pieces of the 10 year old's halloween candy
and oh my god was there chaos in my house yesterday yeah chaos and screaming my 10 year old she doesn't take any [ __ ] she gets mad and she starts screaming i'm like jesus christ it's candy it's just this is not you and it takes a while and i don't think they really ever understand how good they have it it's it's hard for people if that's the worst thing that's happening they think it's the worst thing they think it's like a real bad thing right the perspective is so difficult to achieve like to achieve like and like to lift above and look at it from yeah yeah exactly and a parent isn't necessarily going to help barely i mean maybe in the long run that can that can turn out but you could talk to them and then let them blow off steam but that's look that's kids yeah right and and as i was saying you know when they start transitioning into adulthood you know that's when things really come to the fore and and you start thinking about uh who they are and how how they are yeah and you know the difficulties get greater and weirder and and then with time those seem minuscule like i remember when i was uh 18 my girlfriend broke up with me i thought it was the end of the world i couldn't believe it oh my god i've never been so sad so depressed right you know and then like a couple years later i'm like thank god she's so crazy like what was i thinking like right i was in the middle of this terrible relationship and i didn't even understand it right well and it sort of goes back to something you said earlier about you know how we don't know how to deal with um our own struggles our difficulties yes you know we just don't we can't until we get to the other side right and even then you know it's um where do you turn for community or for sort of buffering yeah of support and um and that's uh i think hard for i think especially a lot of younger
people yes and people coming of age into adulthood well that's why i try to preach the religion of physical struggle because i think the one thing that's helped me through uh all sorts of things is to make my physical workouts so much more difficult than anything else i'll have to deal with in my life okay so it's so hard to do and so [ __ ] exhausting and i don't want to do it and then when it's over other things are just like whatever yeah because i make my own [ __ ] it's basically what i do right to in order to not get spoiled by life and i think there's some there's a real there's a real lesson to learn and i've learned it from other people it's not like something i figured out on my own but i've pieced it together in a way that works for me and i think that uh whether it's yoga or even um mental things whether it's playing chess or meditation or something it's more difficult than regular difficulties right um right uh i was gonna follow up you said you know i talked about the you know the religion of the exercising working out and um for me i would say my religion is learning you know and and knowledge and just trying you know to um intellectually kind of absorb as much as i can and that's that's not like working out but it's more on the mental stuff that you're talking about where it's but it's even the darkest of times you know i it's just i i've got to sort of go back to the books and try to try to learn as much as i can on on whatever topic we're talking about but again it's a it's you're doing something difficult and i think like there's uh there was a study they did on chess players and they were trying to figure out why chess players lose so much weight during these big tournaments and they realize that they're burning
thousands and thousands of calories a day playing chess at a very high level right and like these guys would lose tremendous amount of weight yeah i think i wonder how that works yeah a crazy number of calories i forget what the exact number was um maybe jamie could find the study but they were trying to figure out what was happening to these chess players and then they realized like oh when they're playing at this incredible high level world championship caliber their their brains are flying here 6 000 calories robert sapolsky who's brilliant so you're just sitting there but you're not your brain is firing up at a million [ __ ] rpms robert sapolsky who i i love uh who studies stress and primates at stanford says a chess player can burn up to 6 000 calories a day while playing in a tournament three times what an average person consumes in a day that's amazing that's amazing that's amazing yeah but it makes sense right when the brain is going oh my god when you're thinking when yeah when you're so focused well they're playing at multiple levels they're playing several different games right because they're not just playing what's in front of them they're playing right if i do this he does that so but if i do this he does this if i do that this happens and then that happens then this happens or that happens if that happens this happens and they're so their their brain is going and then yeah and there are tolerances in yeah and how the body is functioning well that's a weird thing about um doing podcasts it's like sometimes at the end of the day i'm [ __ ] exhausted i'm like i haven't done anything i've just been sitting talking so goddamn easy like what's wrong with me there's coal miners out there busting their ass working really hard that's that's what i remind myself too sitting teaching or reading a book and working but i think these intellectual pursuit pursuits yeah i
think there's more struggle than we think yeah i mean i'm not gonna argue has to be otherwise everybody would do it uh i think there are lots of factors in terms of why people go on um into graduate school and continue in the life of learning yeah but it's it's a it's a weird um feeling like that i've joked but also been serious that that's my religion what religion are you well learning you know that's where i get my my religious meaning is it feels like um teaching sexuality over the last 10 years would have gotten increasingly more minefield-like definitely definitely yeah and a lot of topics have i would say over the last 10 years sexuality for sure um uh but i i i do i mean i get off getting uh into the topic and especially in this kind of um with this kind of purpose you know how how can i how can i blow students minds um around the topic and and uh and i'm you know you have to be fully aware of the various sensitivities that might be um out there with students and i'm how do you i always thought well i mean it's just you know i'm gonna be covering some very touchy topics and if you aren't able to deal with that you shouldn't be in the class like what seems to be the most touchy or what's an example of a particularly touchy subject um well in the depth for sure the death class would be suicide you know that's just one that i've really tiptoed around um until recently tiptoed also because i don't want to talk about suicide that's uh really yeah it's kind of weird but i've had this um aversion to having that really be a topic in my class until until recently and that's um i think that had a lot to you know to do with a feeling of um i'm not uh fully um prepared or trained to deal with students who were really struggling with suicide
and i would feel that would open that up um so but i've changed in the last couple years it's like you know there are too many suicides the numbers have gone up and you know i mean i'm i think it's an important topic that's one thing that's ramped up in a huge way during this pandemic i just read that yeah it's terrifying yeah and it's an underreported there's something yeah i have a buddy that was talking to a sheriff in la and he was saying that they used to get you know one suicide a week and now they're often dealing with five a day that's crazy it's crazy i mean yeah something yeah and it's not something that people point to as being a side effect of of the pandemic i mean they maybe give it a cursory right sort of they talk about it very very rarely but it's i think it's a huge issue right right despair and also this feeling that a lot of people have there's no way out of this i think that's getting you know financially yeah losing their businesses losing their homes losing their you know their ability to feed themselves yeah no i mean this is unprecedented for so many people yeah where they find the strength you know to carry on and deal with it is not so easy so how did you prepare differently for a subject that you've had such a difficulty in in describing and and teaching before it was suicide what do you mean did you develop when you decided to start talking about it how much time did you spend sitting down by yourself thinking okay how do i do this um quite a bit of time i think with that topic and and really trying to um again i want to position myself so i'm not the school counselor and i'm not the rabbi or the you know preacher and i'm not the parent so you know it's carving out this intellectual space of you know what is the history of suicide what are the you know kind of um um motivating factors and forces
and and patterns of suicide and so on um and then i really try to bring in popular culture you know songs that or express ideas about suicide or thinking about suicides of celebrities um so you know i try to find a way to put those pieces together um in in [Music] a way that's intellectually stimulating that doesn't just kind of work on um the psychological level if you can think about that as a distinction the psychological level has sent me so many different reasons right yeah i mean silly as it sounds i mean my my goal is to sort of de-personalize i i try to keep personal experiences and feelings out of the class that doesn't sound silly at all well it's hard to do obviously um and and it's they do creep in and find expression but still it's with these topics that's that's the game plan yeah um how long have you been doing the suicide discussions well it's really past few years as i've seen these and as i've heard from students who um i mean this is really uh a key reason um it's just the number of students who came into my office telling me about someone they knew committed suicide i mean it was just again like three or four years ago when i would have more and more students you know just talking about it and again the death class opens up that space where i can you know they can feel they can come in and and and want to talk about it were you worried about not doing it justice were you worried about pushback like what what what was the fear of not discussing this previously that there were students who might be suicidal and then you might somehow or another trigger it wow well i mean again it may be an overblown fear but it's a responsible fear thank you being very responsible thinking that way
it's just you know for so long i just i knew it was the topic i i intentionally were like there and um uh but but as i said it's changed just because the dynamics have changed with i think young people and suicide yeah um how has that evolved over the few years that you've been teaching it um i think i've grown more comfortable with it most mostly as as a important element of the class and i i i can see students being willing to engage in the topic i think in ways that i i imagine would not have been um similar earlier i just i like to go after the taboo topics where i know kind of students um are already considering and reflecting on them even though they don't have an outlet for really um intellectual kind of consideration um really removing themselves from whatever they you know personally think about suicide or homosexuality or whatever and allow them to kind of again learn history learn about different cultures and and then you know and i try to provoke them as much as i can to get them to get them to really uh think outside the box but also to sort of dig in to to their own um abilities to figure some things out when you're teaching a subject like that the first day when you've been thinking about doing it for so long but not want to trigger people the first day you did it that had to be a very unique kind of class for you uh well it was i mean i i i think just the hesitancy from before and then bringing it up my this class has two to three hundred students so it's it's not like me and uh and 12 people right you know it's it's it's a very the part of that um setting um forces me to kind of think about what uh oops okay uh it forces me to think about um delivery you know because it's not going to be so interactive and and so that you know when i really went in to the class with that topic i i felt um like i was able to really
convey um the points i wanted to get across and get them to um which is the most important thing even in a class that size is to feel like they could chill and kind of relax and talk about the topic without feeling you know pressures from anyone or feeling anything's taboo and can't be said do you get questions from students during during your lectures on this um well generally yeah i mean you open it up too absolutely what a what's a a common question that they have when it comes to suicide oh i don't know there aren't um you know a lot of common questions i think you know students have asked a variety of different things that um often have to do with what's christianity say about suicide what does you know what do the religions say about suicide i guess what i'm getting at is do they turn to you for help no what can i do what should someone do if someone knows a friend who's suicidal i give them the resources where people who are trained can really help them with those kinds of more practical um intimate concerns um i you know i i play the role up of uh you know professor who who doesn't want to get personal doesn't want to hear about my personal experience whether it's about drugs or grieving or you know sexual experiences yeah the sexually experienced one you were saying also that you have to be very sensitive to uh the feelings of the people in your class your students like how do you like what what are the particularly um difficult subjects to explore when it comes to well like sexuality and popular culture and music where you know all kinds of graphic uh language is used like that w.a.p song yeah do you teach that no i haven't you should teach that well maybe i'm teaching this class in the fall i'll play that song and teach it hey i
go i try to go there but again some students are like you know going to be less insulting or this is terrible or you know i mean again i prudish or you have a very difficult time uh discussing yes the way various people go about it right yeah or the varieties of what they were talking about polygamy right yeah whatever you know it's it's out there and and um you know all kinds of things well there's other than religion that's probably the most uh charged subject that you could discuss with people today i mean people have some really uh steadfast ideas about what's right and what's wrong and when it comes to sexual well it's it's it seems like at least one place where we're gaining or we're we're showing some evolution or showing progress is with the acceptance of homosexuality homosexuality seems to be way less taboo now than any other time in my life like people are becoming much more comfortable with it there's uh anything like universally in in this country at least there's um very little resistance to gay marriage very little resistance to gay unions or gay rights that's all changed yeah it's all changed when i was a kid it was a i mean you were a kid the same time i was a kid but when we were young i remember i lived in san francisco from the time i was seven until i was 11. yeah so i was around a lot of gay people and my next-door neighbors my aunt used to get naked they would smoke pot they would play the bongos with this gay couple that lived next door was hilarious i was just surrounded it was normal yeah and then we moved from there to gainesville florida which is really like the universe throwing me a curveball and uh i had this friend and his dad was really mad that gay people were getting married and uh he threw the newspaper down on the tables i can't [ __ ] believe this
and i was like what is like what is he so upset about i don't understand it he was mad that gay people were going to be allowed to get married yeah and i remember thinking wow what a dummy and i was 11. i was like who's this grown man 30 years old freaking out about some stupid [ __ ] right like well i didn't underst it didn't make sense to me like it was normal to me but i think those people are really rare now people like him they're they're much more rare than they were when i was little absolutely yeah no there's been a big huge sea change in attitudes yeah um and that's you know led to a lot of conflict and and sure uh aspects of the culture wars but still i would agree you know absolutely most people have come around on that do you discuss that kind of stuff like this the the evolution of our ideas about sexuality sure yeah definitely i mean i i try to as a part of it but for me sexuality is you know it's not just sex it's about gender and religion and reproduction yeah and religion so it's it's a broad gender it's a broad category um absolutely but in america especially when you start when you move outside of um you know the traditional man and woman having sex in the missionary position you go to death for reproduction you're going to hell no go straight to hell right so uh so you know that is the dominant um uh ideal as you know um has has gone by the ways wayside i mean it is certainly the ideal for many but sexuality in america today is fast and furious right but if you think that that's the ideal then you're a freak all of a sudden right wow well i mean surely that's part of yeah these shifts and attitudes that's what's interesting to me who's the authority to tell us yeah what is right or wrong for sure and then also the hypocrites like you there's so many people that we have looked at as these
religious leaders and it turns out oh these guys are freaks they're perverted yeah yeah oh yeah well and where i've i've read i don't know where the study is but you know um viewing pornography is kind of you know the highest in the bible oh yeah you know so again it's like make sense well what's you know yeah again that that discrepancy is like well what's really sacred to you right you know jesus and on sunday or you know what you're doing or gangbanging yeah right i mean whatever yeah job you're going to yeah so you know people like to project and say who they are and they have other yes they like to project yeah that's a good way of putting it they do like to project they like to pretend make believe um do you discuss the type of pornography that people view and how that has sort of changed um well i mean i write about pornography in that book sacred matters i have a chapter on sexuality and i write about um deep throat um and did you just swallow yeah that's like constant sound effects am i really gonna say that deep throat um oh yeah and linda loveless yeah harry reams and their story is again a morality tale we want to talk about sexuality um we're going to talk about religion didn't harry reams become a politician afterwards um well as i remember it was he became a realtor he might have oh that's right and became very successful as a realtor right right yeah in los angeles right yeah well um you know so uh i i mean i do you know obviously want to uh include you have to include that you know well non-reproductive forms of pleasure and sexual activity um is not um disconnected from religious pursuits deep throat was a movie that played in movie theaters for people that don't know and people went to see that movie and they waited in line like couples would go
dressed normal not wearing raincoats like regular people in fact johnny carson was in line uh waiting to see deep throw and they interviewed him and talked to him about it because it was it was a movie that was a movie it was it was wasn't just a stag film and the whole idea was that back then pornography in terms of like st that's what they would call them stag films they'd be these films they would play because people didn't have access to uh a movie projector for the most part it's a very rare thing to have in your home so for people like to play those things they'd have to get together with a bunch of guys at a party like when a guy was about to get married look at this this is what you're gonna do we're gonna watch people [ __ ] right and those films if you've ever seen them they're really weird like their films from the beginning of the 20th century yeah very strange no the history of pornography is fascinating and there's uh i remember watching this thing on deep throat and then i just remember very clearly johnny carson getting interviewed talking about remember that yeah do you know what i'm talking about jamie i typed in johnny carson and i found an article that says ed mcmahon his sidekick was such a fan of the movie he showed up with six friends and a case of beer that's not fake news that's real news i am sure i'm sure that's true i'm sure that's true frank sinatra was one of the early audience members along with vice president spiro agnew warren beatty truman capote shirley maclaine nora ephron i don't know who that is bob woodward wow woodward and bernstein and sammy davis jr who grew so enamored of linda lovelace that within the year he and his wife would be having group sex with her and her husband holy [ __ ] sammy i didn't mention sammy got crazy he was very wow it was the was the longest 62 minutes that millions of
people would ever sit through in retrospect the most inspired decision damiano i guess the person who made it made was to rename the movie deep throat nothing else could possibly explain its success wow what was the original name for it lovelace was interviewed by johnny carson on the tonight show wow further stoke in the interest of socialite students swingers and the curious see that's what's interesting it's like crazy people didn't think of pornography as being something that was awful that you should hide right it seems to me that it's discussed far less now that it's much more accessible it's like people almost don't want to talk about it in terms of like average data conversation yeah right because it's so perva is everywhere yeah it's well it's not just pervasive it's also it's too accessible yes you don't it's it's still you just yeah yeah it's not taboo like it what's what right it's weird it's it's and i've done research and one of the things i've noticed is there's a lot of stepmother porn lately that's basically all you get what what is that about i don't know man but if you go to uniporn like a lot of it's stepmom stuff okay it's like my hot step mom you know dad's out of town that kind of stuff weird well i will say i hope my colleague doesn't mind me calling her out but uh at university don't say her name okay university california santa barbara um in the film studies department they have a class on pornography or they did about stepmoms well not that i don't know if that topic made it in but as a genre of film you know you can teach about it yeah well it's kind of it should be a genre of study because it is a part of human life it's a weird part of human life yeah that is not very discussed right now people get super nervous well and and and people love it i mean billions
of dollars and you know not really anymore i don't think they make much money well i don't know weird i don't know the economics but in terms of the impact though or in terms of the prevalence of it it's incredibly prevalent i think there's something bananas like 20 plus percent of all internet traffic is pornography which is an insanity it's an insane it's insanely high number right yet the amount it's discussed in polite company is like less than one percent right it's very very rarely discussed if not dismissed as a joke right right and there's something that in itself speaks volumes yeah you know that's the weird part about it here it goes 35 of all internet downloads are related to pornography how can i mean that is amazing is that the highest percentage of any topic i wonder i don't know it must be i would have yeah it must be listen this is what's hilarious about 200 000 americans are classified as porn addicts here we go there's probably another 100 million that are full of [ __ ] [Laughter] that's right 200 000 get the [ __ ] out of here that's such a low number this is a very low number also 37 pornographic videos are created in the en every day uh every month or hour they've never been to the san fernando valley where you grew up yeah that was the uh the center of it all well they uh passed some sort of wacky rule a few years back where they had to wear condoms in in the porn in california yeah and then people like well we're moving out of california right and they start doing it in other places right nobody wants to watch we'll be in safe [ __ ] out here being safe i want you to have sex with your stepmoms i don't want to do anything safe i want the dad to be pulling into the driveway when you climax
that's what everybody wants they want naughtiness yes but that's um it's weird that when it's so prevalent it's also so rarely discussed and just as a topic of a class like that would be a very interesting thing to discuss just in terms of human nature and psychology sure and history yeah i'm thinking about that yeah um yeah the other thing if we're really going to be talking about this the other understudy topic that's starting to get more study is the orgasm right and thinking about mystical experiences or sure certain kinds of um ego dissolving uh aspects of of human life it's um it's in there and i teach about that as well you know and in both the death class and the sexuality class right do you uh discuss tantric well some you know my my training is an american religious history but in these courses i do try to very superficially you know talk about different religious cultures and certainly tantric yeah because that's a weird one when it comes to the orgasm right because they're like trying to internally orgasm yes is that real well i don't know i have no idea it seems like but some guru [ __ ] to me yeah well um and and even in american history there have been interesting attempts at different kinds of sexual cultures you know the united community oh yeah john humphrey noise you know wanted didn't want anyone to orgasm you know that was you want to hold it in but you have sex with that's whatever you wanted no marriage that never lasts those guys all fall apart like how about this community did fall apart this uh sex cult the next how do you say it nexium yes i have not been following you i haven't either in there and i haven't either but i i i keep making a mental note to eventually there's a documentary apparently as a documentary series or something on it a hulu thing or something but it's apparently pretty
fascinating yeah because it was it involved like legitimate celebrities right like people on television shows and stuff getting branded or something you were right it's like a documentary show on stars stars four or five episodes yeah um that's a weird one right right well i mean most sex cults are you know or that that kind of um focus on sex as a part of religious trust and religious what is the draw against that like how are they arresting people like what do the people do that they're do you know jamie like people are going to jail for this the sex cult right uh i don't i've only the thing that sticks out in my head is i know people are getting branded right i know that was like the next the next thing there's also another show called the val that has some it's i think it's the same topic that's on hbo i don't know if that's a direct documentary or like uh i'd like to find out what they're doing i'm in jail for i'll look i'll look it up because people are going to jail yeah well that's right right right right wonder what they did where they said all right this is this is where you cross the line right you can't just did you see wild wild country that is that the documentary that's the documentary the people that lived in oregon going back to oregon not right [ __ ] crazy oregon sex trafficking we're all going to oregon conspiracy conspiracy to commit forced labor forced labor uh who knows what you know it sounds like they didn't have good enough release forms yeah well i'll see about putting it on the syllabus yeah i'm interested but some things yeah you don't need to go but wild wild country oops whoops almost felt lonkies got it bottle this bottle does not want to stay up um wild wild country is the documentary on uh osho that uh the guru that the uh indian guy that had the cult up in right with the girl
sheila poisoned a bunch of people right that is an amazing netflix documentary yeah yeah i've seen some of it oh my god yeah but it's one that i always hear about and you know again it's so really well done but also revealing what is now or seeing a fairly common story it's so funny because my friend todd saw the first episode and uh he's like it looks like so much fun like at the beginning it looks so great he's right in the beginning it did look so great but it combined both these things we're talking about combined sexuality and religion it's like this their religion was of love and of peacefulness and sex and and harmony and it it all went terribly wrong like they always do like like they often do right always what what has nailed it what cult has uh never gone wrong figured out all the traps and pitfalls and and made it to the finish line yeah none none zero well that's um i think that i would agree with that statement uh as a general statement yeah it seems weird though that they can't someone can't do it right yeah well um i think that's maybe built into religion you know it's just no way to perfect it well at least religion has figured out a way to achieve tax-exempt status and a long sure illustrious history of success right yeah well that's uh the beauty of the country yeah right freedom of religion yeah supposedly yeah yeah yeah yeah but once you get to a point where you're doing the wild wild country type stuff right it's not um yeah it's no longer yeah so do you discuss those kind of things in your classes sex cults some you know uh that are a part of um the longer history so it was mormonism um you know as an early cult you know kind of marginalized community had a very different understanding of uh sexuality and marriage well it was started by a wacky 14 year old
i was completely full of [ __ ] i i won't exactly characterize him well i'll do that he was a little con man anyway so yeah you know i try to cover a lot of bases on the varieties of ways that sexuality gets you know bound up in religious life yeah mormonism is particularly unusual right and that their uh their interest in polygamy led them to leave the country yeah at the time yeah they were heading west well they're still there well no in mexico oh that yeah yeah the continuing that yes well that's you know that whole mit romney's family story yeah yeah they're all down there still that yeah mitt romney's dad was actually born in mexico that's why he couldn't be president of the united states mitt romney's dad could not be president of the united states because he was born in mexico right right yeah they they lived in this compound this is the compound the the same kind of compound that was originally in the news because they had been attacked by the cartel and women and children had been murdered okay yes those were i mean they're not really expats because they've been there so many generations that they're now mexican citizens but they're living in these compounds these fortified compounds in mexico and they originally went there so they could practice politically yeah right when it was out i mean outlawed here of course well not only that when there was no difference really between living in the united states and mexico you know 1812 the difference between the united states and mexico was not that big a deal well right take your horse you go over there right yeah yeah yeah and you bring your eight wives right yeah exactly yeah right there's a way out uh and a way in we'll talk about a subject that's filled with pitfalls like that subject's probably particularly difficult the subject of polygamy yes is a particularly touchy one in almost
always is a lot of wives very rarely is one woman who gets the pleasure of 10 husbands right right right there are some uh you know i think examples of that but yeah the political well i mean polygamy is for you know um husbands with multiple wives right have you ever heard about the other way well no i mean not in polygamy but there i believe there's another term i bet there's a few gals that could pull that off jennifer lopez yeah right um uh but uh yeah i mean so it's it's um it's part of the the story and it is a little here it is yeah injury the form of polygamy in which a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time for example fraternal polyandry is practiced among the tibetans in nepal parts of china and parts of northern india which two or more brothers married the same wife with the wife having equal sexual access to them interest so five places where women have more than one husband all right there you go so i mean yeah mm-hmm look at that look at that photo though go to that photo look the woman's looking straight ahead like um and both guys looking off the side like [ __ ] right i can't believe they're taking my picture here but she's got her hand on both of their knees she's like i own these two [ __ ] but they're all looking off in the distance like oh okay it's just one lady with four husbands hey hey hey look at that that lady's balling out of control where is she she's dead that's an old ass picture that's a picture from the 1800s look at that picture that was like one of them uh where was that stand still you know and who was one of those pictures look at that whoa what is that that's like from some garment rockwell [ __ ] yester ladies okay yeah yeah well no pun intended yeah google goes deep uh-oh anyway listen man i've really enjoyed talking to you it's a fascinating series of subjects we brought up here
and um you so you're in the middle of writing a book right now yes what is the book it's on religion and drugs do you have a title before oh yeah no i'm playing around with some things but but if people want to read your past work what what can they read uh well um they can read any of the books they can go to my website garylatterman.com you see the books one i mentioned um a couple times called sacred matters and then this new book is on death and it's called um as i said don't think about death a memoir on mortality um you can look me up there'll be other things um that i've written that are on the web but do you have social media yeah what do you have well i'm playing around on facebook and twitter and um do you have an instagram instagram yeah okay what is it gary letterman and same as twitter gary letterman on twitter as well okay all right on facebook and uh yeah i'm around well thank you gary i really i really enjoyed talking to you man thank you so much joe it's really fun yeah i had a great time i appreciate it beautiful all right thanks bye everybody [Music] you