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

This episode is brought to you by GiveWell. Donating money to help other people is a wonderful act. But how can you be confident? How can you know that your donations are actually improving or saving lives effectively. It's hard to do. You could do weeks of research to find the charities that are out there, what programs they run. what their administrative overhead is, how effective those programs are, and on and on and on. It would be a full time job. It could take forever.

I know this from experience because I tried to do it that way manually. It is a ton of work. Give well. Spends more than thirty thousand hours each year researching charitable organizations. Then They direct funding.

to a few of the highest impact evidence backed opportunities they've found. They do the work for you. More than one hundred thousand donors have used GiveWell to donate more than one billion dollars, which includes Six hundred and seventy eight thousand donated by you, my dear listeners. So it makes a difference. Rigorous evidence indicates that these donations will save more than 150,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more.

That's why Givewell does what they do. And using Givewell's research. It's free. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high impact giving. So they publish all of their research and recommendations on their site for free. No sign up.

Required. They allocate your tax deductible donation. Without taking a cut. If you've ever donated to GiveWell's recommended charities before,

You can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year. That's twenty twenty two. So one more time. If you've never donated to Give All's recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched. Up to one hundred dollars before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. Go to givewell dot org. give giv dot org givewall.org and when you get to check out pick podcast and enter Tim Farrish Show It's that simple.

Make sure they know that you heard about Give Well on the Tim First show to get your donation matched. One more time, that's givewell dot org. And when you get to check out, pick podcast. And enter Tim Ferrisshow. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday. My very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, but

Books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers have asked me for something short and action packed for a very long time, because after all the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always gonna be free, and you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably twenty five percent of them because they first subscribe to Fible Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out. Tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot, and you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime.

So easy peasy. Again, that's Tim dot blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves ya. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So then also you put some questions. No, we're just seeing it.

I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscover. Me S Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job usually. To deconstruct world class performers to tease out their routines, habits,

Thought process belief. Lessons learned, and so on, that you can apply to your own life. This time around we have a very special edition. And this is a Tag Team Edition, in a sense, I'm tagging in Dr. Mark Plotkin, who's in conversation with Brian C. Murescu. Mark takes over my duties as host and interviews Brian for an episode of the Plants of the Gods podcast, and you are getting exclusive.

First listening. Opportunities for this, you, my dear lesseners, are hearing the audio before anyone else. So this is a Tim Ferris show exclusive. I've previously featured some of my favorite episodes. From the Plants of the Gods podcast, which is exceptional at Tim.blog slash Plants of the Gods. So if you want to check those out. Take a look. First off, who is Dr. Mark Plotkin?

Mark is an ethnobotanist who serves as president of the Amazon conservation team, which has partnered with roughly eighty tribes to map and improve management and protection of roughly one hundred million acres of ancestral rainforests. It is one of the most I would say capital efficient. Surgical effective nonprofits I have ever come across. He is best known to the general public as the author of the book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, one of the most popular books ever written about the rainforest. His most recent book is The Amazon What everyone needs to know. You can find my interview with Mark. That is he and I talking one on one at Tim.blog slash MarkPlotkin. That goes into a lot of his history as a protege of Richard Evan Schulte's and much, much more. So I encourage everybody to check that out. The guest today who's in conversation with Mark

Is Brian C. Murarescu. So who is Brian? Brian graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, is Brian's debut book in 2020. It became a New York Times bestseller, and Audible named it Best of Twenty Twenty in the history category. His website is Brianmurescu.com, last name spelled M-U-R A R E S K U. You can also find him on Instagram at Brian underscore Murescu. And on Twitter at BrianMoresco. We will link to all these things in the show notes at Tim Dotblog slash. Podcast so you can find this.

You don't need to remember it. This is a tightly packed fifty five minute interview. Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis. Early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong Overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us. the importance of tikkun olam, or repairing and improving the world as we go, and much, much more.

I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Welcome back to Plans for the Gods. Today we have a very special guest, a man I'm honored to call a friend and a colleague, and that's Brian Morarescu, who wrote the classic book, The Immortality Key, which I regard as the most important book in the field of ethnobotany, perhaps since the original Plants for the Gods. Let me start out by quoting a reviewer wrote of the book once it appeared.

Reading Brian's wonderful book, The Immortality Key, reminded me, oddly enough, of the Back to the Future movie trilogy of the late 1980s, and I mean that in the most positive sense possible. The back to the future films were genre benders, which started out to be a simple quickly morphed into science fiction, action adventure, Western rom com with a brilliant nod to high school musicals and a sustained swipe at a certain American president. Yeah.

The immortality key unfolds in a similar way. What appears to be a straightforward investigation into the origins of Christianity becomes a detective story searching for an explanation into the famed Elusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, as well as the writing of an academic wrong, a coming of age story, a roots like search for the author's cultural origins, All told within the framework. And I say Odyssey.

with a capital O The author is an unlikely protagonist, an American lawyer who has never sampled antheogenic plants or fungi. However, he is a Greek American, fluent in ancient Greek and Latin, and and Sanskrit. Off limits. to mere mortals like the rest of us. Brian, welcome to Plants of the Gods. That's the best intro ever, man. Thank you, Dr. Plotkin.

Now Houston Smith, who is the greatest uh historian uh and analyst, I think, of religions in the twentieth century, said, and I quote, If we take the world's enduring religions at their best We discover the distilled wisdom of the human race. And so much of your work, Brian, and the immortality key, is distilling what is at the root of Western religions and maybe world religions. So perhaps you can share with our listeners a bit about the Elusinian mysteries and the role in the development of where we stand today. Sure. So for for those who don't know, uh Elusis uh still exists in one form or another. It's called Elefsina.

Um, in uh in today's world. And actually next year, twenty twenty three, L F Cina Of all the places in Europe has been nominated to be the European Capital of Culture. So this might all seem like weird anecdotes and footnotes that belong um in an unread book, but Elf Cena is back on the world map for one reason or another. Um in antiquity, Eleusis I've I've described as kind of like the Vatican. of the ancient world. It's a few miles northwest of Athens. So during the classical period, so think, you know, two thousand three hundred, twenty five hundred years ago and more, um, for about two thousand years, this was the place that people went. Men

Women, sometimes children, slaves. Um, people were invited to Eleusis if you could afford it and you had the time to make this pilgrimage. uh to become immortal. That was the promise of Eleusis. He went to this place, amongst other things to drink a potion. called the cookie on this magical potion, the recipe of which was secret, and you would go there, um have uh this experience that has since been described as the culminating experience of a lifetime. And Karl Ruck uh one of the professors who researched this at Boston University described

the experience as somehow making all previous seeing seem like blindness. So you went there to have a visionary encounter with goddesses, with with uh with strange beings. They called them Demeter and Persephone, the lady of the green and the goddess of death, the goddess of the underworld. Um and it was claimed that only those who went to Eleusis again drank this potion, participated in the pilgrimage, would in fact achieve immortality. It was only they who would survive death. And we don't know what that means, because it was all kept secret, but we do know that the best and brightest of both Greece and Rome visited Eleusis for about two thousand years, and they went there, we think, to die and be reborn. Well I can't think of any other book I've read on the history of religion which had parts that were laugh out loud funny.

But that is one of the special parts of the immortality key. And I really, really, really loved your discussion of the analysis of these classical scholars, the brightest people of their day, supposedly trying to figure out what the hell went on in Aleusus. And at one point, uh, I think it was a fellow from Oxford or Cambridge said, Well it was giant puppets. And you said, Yeah, ancient Muppets.

So this was uh this was the the type of humor which is often missing in these types of clinical and historical analysis, but it's what makes the books so special. Now, one of the sad aspects of the story originally was this was brought to the Western world essentially in the nineteen seventies, spearheaded by a man named Carl Rock who's still alive, a classic scholar, along with my uh old friend Gordon Wasson, and some other people. And the the whole story of how Ruck was ridiculed and almost exiled because of this radical theory

Um w is very shameful and I wanna ask you to get into that. But I I I think it it's important to point out that well these classical scholars were torturing themselves trying to figure out what the hell went on in Elusis, uh all of us hippies at the time were reading these accounts of these uh classical leaders like Pindar and and Sophocles and going, dude, they were tripping. It was obvious to us, even it wasn't obvious to the scholars. So In talking about death and rebirth frame that in in Karl Ruck's personal story since I think your book really brought him back to the fore. Oh that's good. Wow.

Good question. Yeah, so he went through his own death and rebirth as a kind of microcosm of this of this scholarship, which is interesting. So yeah, the the idea that that dude they were on psychedelics was not a popular theory. in the late nineteen seventies. So you mentioned uh Carl and Gordon and Albert Hoffman was the was the co author, the you know, the famed discoverer of LSD back in the nineteen thirties. And together they wrote this book called The Road to Eleusis. Unveiling the secret of the mysteries. in nineteen seventy eight. It was not well received by the academic establishment and least of all by the then president of Boston University, a guy named John Silber. Um and Ruck was excoriated for for daring to suggest that the the the founders of rationality, right, of of Western skepticism, that they could have entered so fully such a an irrational state of mind. Um and least of all through psychedelic drugs, which were also not popular in the late nineteen seventies, just a few years into the war on drugs under Richard Nixon.

Uh so you know throughout the eighties and nineties, Carl Um and beyond. He was he was uh relegated to the periphery of classical scholarship. I I think in the book I call him the Black Sheep. of the classic six estate. Um a place you know you don't want to occupy. But he was tenured at Boston University. So they couldn't fire him. They couldn't get rid of him. Um and instead of just quietly going about his his way, he basically spent another thirty, forty years just continuing to pound away at this hypothesis. He wrote about other things, and he's a fantastic scholar, by the way, trained at Yale and Harvard, uh, but he really went after this idea Of the ancient Greeks.

um the Romans and potentially the earliest Christians using these kinds of drugs uh to to um instantiate these spiritual experiences. And you know, slowly but surely the culture came back around to where it was in the nineteen fifties, when this was all the realm of gentlemen's discourse. And so Carl went through his own rebirth. um only in in in recent years as some of the technology came on, the archaeobotany I write about in the book, The Archaeochemistry, to really, really prove that well There's actual organic data.

to uh to test this hypothesis one way or the other. And so some uh pretty interesting data came to light. uh shows this is a discipline worth visiting and and I think in in coordination with some of the clinical work. at places like Johns Hopkins and NYU and now it's all over the place, at Harvard and Yale and uh U CLA, et cetera, um, even in Texas. Uh, I think that that the the culture changed a lot in the past five, ten years, uh, with respect to psychedelics. And so fortunately Carl, who's now eighty seven, is experiencing yet another rebirth.

Yeah. Well, Plants of the Gods has as a subtitle, Hallucinogens History, Culture and Conservation. And I think your work, Brian, ties all four of those together. But my question to you is, why now? We have rock. And Hoffman.

uh coming out with this book decades ago. John Allegro's The Marshroom and the Cross, which postulated some similar things. And and they were laughed at, derided, disregarded, ignored, and And now, thanks to your book and and other efforts, uh this is part of the commonly accepted wisdom. Why are we accepting it now and why didn't we accept it then? I have no idea is the is the honest answer. My yeah, my my life has taken a a a weird course the past two years. I think uh I I mean I alluded to it before. I I think it's a lot of dumb luck to be honest. I mean I'm sitting across from somebody who spent a lot of his life

researching this in in in earnest. Um and you yourself standing on the shoulders of people like Richard Ebon Shultes, um, great ethnobotanist the of the twentieth century, who I know has been mentioned on this podcast before, deservedly so. Um And then I don't I don't know. I just I think the the culture war really got in the way, not just of the clinical work, but also the the arts and humanities and some of this the scholarship that was not controversial. In the days of William James.

At Harvard, by the way, you know, more than a hundred years ago. Uh this this was a respectable avenue of of pursuit. Until the nineteen seventies. And uh things things have changed, I think, for a lot of different reasons, largely because of that cl that that clinical work. that I mentioned, which is now twenty years in, in the case of psilocybin at the very least. Um and also with MDMA, the work of of Rick Doblin at MAPS, he's been chugging away. Um

uh at that as well. And so I I just think that um our biases, our prejudices are are slowly melting away. Um, and certainly the work of Michael Pollen, the journalist, uh d d did a great job with his book How to Change Your Mind and his his new his new book, This Is Your Mind on Plants. I think the cultural conversation around psychedelics has changed dramatically in the past five years, and a lot of it is just dumb luck. Well you mentioned William James, and there's two important aspects to James's career which is overlooked in almost all the biographies that I've read. The first is that his formative experience was in the Amazon. He went to the Amazon with the biologist Louis Agassiz in eighteen sixty five, and I think that certainly expanded his consciousness of of human nature because he was working side by side

with Afro Brazilians, Portuguese military, Rainforest Indians, and there's no indication that ever took ayahuasca or any other mind altering substances there. But a rich white kid whose idea of diversity was hang out with other rich white kids certainly had his world rocked by what he saw in the Amazon. The other thing about William James that's often overlooked is that William James actually took peyote. So Peyote did not begin at Harvard but Schulte, it began with William James uh fifty years earlier. But I have to point out that William James didn't like peyote, it didn't agree with him, made him very sick. He much preferred nitrous oxide. Right laughing gas. That's what he writes about in the varieties, right? In fact, William James wrote that it wasn't until I took nitrous oxide that I began to understand Hagel. Well. Well, I did plenty of nitrous oxide in college and I still don't understand Hagel.

So William James definitely had the jump on me there. But I I do agree with your your timing, Brian, that it that the the the planets are in a line or or shamanic magic happening that people are realizing. And that's why I like and use and chose to use that back to the future reference uh in reference to your book. Because we're rediscovering what the ancients knew and what indigenous peoples have been doing. All along. the Comanche Ward Chief Quan Na Parker that I covered in the episode on Peyote.

Said that Uh the the real the reason that these indigenous religions and these syncretic religions, which combine things like Catholicism and and indigenous belief systems, uh has a grip Uh is that the the white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus But the Indian

takes peyote and goes into his church house and talks to Jesus. Yeah. And this brings us back to the Elocinian mysteries. And I want to ask you to address There's there's uh thesis, this concept of your of the pagan continuity uh idea that, you know, we we we tend to believe that

Well, the Greeks invented Western civilization and then the Romans kinda took it over and then they kinda made a mess of it and cooked Christian rolled in and and squished it. But in the immortality key you make the point that those that Greek religious system, the Greek belief system, as personified by Lucis, uh, may in fact indeed live on in in Christianity and may indeed be the basis of of all the so called major religions. So

Please address that for us. So Yeah, I emphasize I mean the whole a lot of the book is about psychedelics. Okay, let's be let's be clear. But it's it's not that's not the key that I'm talking about in the immortality key. I think I think the key that I'm talking about and the thing that unites these pagan religions with early Christianity is the notion of experience, right? The direct experience of the divine. There were whole movements Dedicated to this, several different sects.

um within the Gnostic circles of early Christianity that were dedicated to the proposition that you have a spark of the divine Inside you. And that Jesus came not to be worshipped. But to uh to instruct All of us, men, women and children.

how to identify that spark, how to how to fulfill Our mission on earth. And how to embody that divinity, which is to say that we're all divine, okay? And and this is the proposition of the mysteries that belong to the pagan world too, whether it's the mysteries of Eleusis that we talked about, the mysteries of Dionysus, which I think have far more in common with early Christianity, and we can talk about that later. Uh but this this this notion of encountering the divine within through experience. So how did Aristotle uh define this the this notion of the Eleusinian vision? So he said that you went to Eleusis not to

Not to um learn something. You didn't go there to mathematically learn something, like doctrine, dogma, the way we think of religion today. You went there to experience something, pathane. You went there to suffer, pathos. You went there to actually experience something. Well, this shows up in early Christianity too. And the other thing that shows up in early Christianity are secrets. So just look at Mark four eleven. You know, Jesus talks in parables and tells these weird stories because there was an exoteric form to the faith and an esoteric version. Like the there's no controversy among Christian scholars that Christianity is born with secrets. You have a church father like Tertullian. In the second century, who basically accuses the Gnostic Christians of imitating the pagan mysteries. There's this five-year preparation process. They're trying to get these folks all excited about this great initiation. They're rising the anxiety anticipation. He's basically making fun of them for, in fact, imitating the pagan mysteries. Um and if you want to Google

Dr. Martin Luther King, you can Google uh the influence of the mystery religions on Christianity, an essay that even Dr. Martin Luther King himself wrote in nineteen fifty about this notion of the continuity from that pagan pre Christian world to what would become early Christianity in the decades and centuries. After Jesus, before it became this big institution in the fourth century. So, you know, the thing that unites them is experience, this notion of secrets, magical practices, folks getting together to consume divine flesh and blood. Um, there's a there's a lot of parallels there. Yeah. You know, the great Israeli ethnobotanist Benny Shannon said he Did not understand how a man could talk to a burning bush until he went to Peru and took ayahuasca.

Since then. Ayahuasca have been found in the Sinai Desert. Okay. And in fact at ESPD fifty five, a couple of months back, organized by Dennis McKenna.

Uh a wonderful Iranian Persian scholar by the name of Shaheen talked about Hauma as the basis of Zoroastrianism, which of course is the original Persian religion. So I think Further research is beginning to reveal to us that these mystical experiences which seem to lie at the basis of essentially all religions, not just Christianity or or or Judaism or Islam, but some of these tribal religions are the people I've been working with. And this experience of the ineffable uh could be part of everybody's experience and may in part explain what's missing from modern religion in the sense that the big question is why are people turning away from organized religion. So what are your thoughts about the Eucharist that you cover in your book about How this may actually have been a a mind altering uh drink at the outset.

Okay, so you have to think about ancient wine. Okay, so w without without being heretical or speculative about it, uh, ancient wine is very, very different from the wine we drink today. Um in fact a a common word used in ancient Greek, the language that was used to draft the gospels, the language that was used by Saint Paul, the greatest missionary Christianity ever knew when he was preaching and converting to the this this Hellenic universe around the Mediterranean, writing letters in Greek to Greek speakers. The word they use for wine is pharmacos, right? So the word they use is is is drug. So wine was routinely referred to as a drug from like the time of Homer to the fall of the Roman Empire. So over a thousand years go by. And of course there's a word for wine, oinos, and you see that in the in the New Testament. But this word uh pharmacos pops up uh as as a ritual formula again.

And again, and the reason that is, is because wine at the time, and you see this in the ancient literature. uh is uh it's it's described as you know, unusually intoxicating seriously mind altering, occasionally hallucinogenic, that's true, and potentially lethal. Okay? So very, very different wine from the one of today. And in fact you can look at Dioscorides, right? The the great the great physician who writes at in the second half of the first century at the exact same time. the gospels are being written, and you can read recipe after recipe of what to add to wine to produce any number of different effects, whether it's adding spices like frankincense and myrrh, whether it's adding poisons, how did Socrates die in the end, with wine spiked with hemlock.

Um things like Aconite and then and then funky things like like Mandrake or Henbane or Black Nightshade, which Dioscorides says can produce not unpleasant visions. Okay, so we have actual literature that points to something like a psychedelic vision in the first century AD at the time of the earliest Christians. So you know classic classicists know this. Like people who study Greek and Latin know this. Um and what's weird is that the people who study the pagan world are often very different from uh the priests and the pastors who study the New Testament from a very different angle. And this was pointed out by classicists. in the early twentieth century. And they go on to say things like, you know, how strange it it is that like a a very big part of the literature and civilization of the ancient world is very much neglected by the very ones best able to investigate it.

which is to say uh the Greek speakers and the and the scholars Um and so w just using that as as like a big lens, um, you can then go in and and find actual organic data, like you know, physical proof that people were mixing things into wine. And I mentioned a few examples. in the book, including from the first century at this Ville Vesuvio site outside Pompeii. They found actual traces of wine that seems to have been mixed with things like opium. And cannabis. and henbane and black nightshade, in addition to toads, frogs, and lizards. So some very funky wine actually did exist.

One of the shortcomings of the ethnobotanical literature is, in my opinion, the failure to consider beer and wine not only as mind altering substances, but as vehicles for making Other mind altering substances. More mind altering. In other words, they call them spirits for a reason. So this interplay of beer and wine, few people realize that wine is not just good because it's wine, but it's certainly in the ancient world it was the number one antibiotic uh and also it was used as a menstruum, a word not common in everyday parlance, but it's used for d for dissolving these compounds. There's a an episode in Plants of the Gods called Exing Herbs, Hexing Herbs, which focuses on these

tropine alkaloids rich pro uh plants like henbane that were used for uh mind altering and religious and uh witches sabbaths and all sorts of other interesting stuff like that. Well Explain to us your take on their role in the invention of civilization, uh beer and wine, which are I think are complimentary. You know, it's been said that the first brewery May have been the first bakery, may have been the first temple all at the same time. So elaborate on this beer theory for us. Without getting into too much detail, you're talking about Gobekli Tepe. which as far as we know goes back about twelve thousand years from where we are now, although some of these ritual elements that show up at this big megalithic site, six thousand years by the way, before Stonehenge, seven thousand years before the high civilizations that we know, like Egypt and

the Indus Valley in Sumeria, uh there's this place called Beklitepe, these giant um megalithic T shaped pillars that the the the uh German archaeological folks at the very least think uh were meant to represent some kind of deities. Um and in this this big site in in south eastern Turkey, um you know, at at the upper register of the Fertile Crescent. uh tenth millennium, ninth millennium BC, they're finding these these big limestone vats. Six of them. And they could accommodate some of them forty two gallons of liquid. Okay, forty two gallons of what? It wasn't water. Uh it wasn't safe to drink water all the time, by the way. So they weren't necessarily looking to get intoxicated, but there's a great paper that came out, I think it was in twenty twelve, um, about the ritual feasting.

If you Google ritual feasting, go backlitepe, German, and some some combination thereof, you'll find a great paper on um the feasting that that they think took place there. Um this this ecstatic communion, these work parties that would bring people to this site where they they weren't living there. They would come there, they think, for for ritual purposes to commune with the dead. Uh potentially over something like a graveyard beer. So have we definitively found beer there? No, but uh interesting traces um of calcium oxalate beer stone, which do point to fermentation. And so it raises this big question. Uh uh did the agricultural revolution start with beer? In other words, did we did we first start growing crops like like wheat and barley uh to bake bread, or did we really start growing them? to to drink them, uh to to brew maybe one of these early ritual beers. The you know the jury's still out. It's a debate that goes back to the nineteen fifties, but it does inform what would later happen at Ilusis and those

many millennia in between. This notion of a graveyard beer, ecstatic communion, ritual events, there's some hint. of a Lucis there, going all the way back. Which is kinda weird. Well the question remains, was bread invented to make beer or was beer invented to make bread? And in either case it shows that beer was one of the building blocks of civilization. Yeah.

But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about our mutual colleague Pat m Patrick McGovern, whose work is really fundamental to sort of teasing this out. Yeah, at the University of of Pennsylvania. I consulted him when I was writing the book and he put me in touch with a guy named Martin Zarnkal. Uh, who did the testing for Beer Stone, by the way, at Cobekli Tepe, and has done some some follow-up experiments there, which are which are really intriguing. Um Pat McGovern. is known, uh, amongst other things, for for resurrecting some of these ancient potions and these ancient brews. Um and he pointed me to like um

Well the Midas touch, for example, which which he he recreated. So that that was based on a Phrygian potion, um, eighth century BC um in Gordium. So this this this could be theoretically hearing back uh to King Midas. But what what they found in the burial chamber there was the remnants of a of a funerary feast. And this is another theme. That pops up again. And and again, especially in the Roman times into early Christianity, this notion of um of a funeral banquet. Uh and there's even a word in Latin for this, uh refrigerum.

Uh which uh means just like it sounds. It's a chill out, it's refrigerator. Uh so you see hints of that at this funeral banquet. um in uh uh with King Midas and some of these these uh these vessels contain the remnants of what McGovern identified as uh calcium oxalate pointing to beer, tartaric acid pointing to wine, and potassium gluconate, pointing to something like uh like honey or mead. So some sort of weird, you know, beer, wine Mead concoction. Uh that was used, as he says, to to royally usher

the king into the afterlife and maybe those attending uh this this funeral banquet. So Um, again, there there is actual, you know, organic chemical data pointing to the existence of these potions, these compounds, for centuries and centuries before Christianity. Well this brings up two interesting complimentary or competitive theories, depending on your perspective. One is the stoned ape theory.

Which is that uh these monkeys were going down to the ground or these protosimians, whatever they were, and eating ripe fruit, because the the fruit that had f fallen was the ripest and they're the sweet, but it also start to ferment. So they were uh catching a buzz from that. And the other is that it was the drunk monkey. theory that it was uh

A similar mind altering that that got them started and and uh the late Terrence McKenna that you and I both discussed in our writings had this idea that it was this alter alteration of consciousness which gave birth to the human uh brain expansion, ultimately humans, human culture and everything else. So do you see those as as as as different there is or complimentary? Is it really one or the other? Or is it really all of these different mind altering aspects Throughout the course of not only human evolution, but pre-human evolution got us to where we are today. I think they're very complimentary. The the the same with these potions that uh that you rightly suggest. I got that idea from Terrence McKenna. He mentions it in one page of Food of the Gods. And it was this notion of these these archaic um matriarchal psychedelic loving societies versus the later patriarchal alcohol lovers. And uh uh he mentions the th this notion that, you know, alcohol could have been

uh this intermediary. That that really united the two. Um so spiked beer, spiked wine. So I think, you know, the the the drunken monkey isn't that controversial. The stoned ape is far more controversial. For reasons you can imagine. But it's worth looking into. This morning, as a matter of fact, I won't mention details, but I was talking to my friend Lee Berger, who is a paleoanthropologist in South Africa. And together we're taking like a very serious look uh at at being able to scientifically test some of these stoned ape ideas.

There's a really interesting aspect to wine and beer that is often overlooked in these ongoing analyses, and that is that Wine makes itself. But beer must be made. In other words. Grapes that fall from a tree.

Will ferment. And create alcohol. Your It was not made by wheat by itself. It has to be made. So this shows that the the path to these two um drin are are fundamentally very different. And I think it just creates a different aspect to what's enta entailed not only in creating it But in utilizing it. But that's a a more detailed discussion for next time.

Yeah. So I'm I'm curious, Brian, you've been incredibly successful at getting the church be a collaborative if not cooperative in the course of the research. And I'm I'm I'd like your take as to where the church is now, why why they didn't burn you at the stake. Uh and and what the future looks like in in terms of Christianity, in terms of Catholicism, in terms of all organized religions as these substances becore become more widely used in in medicine, uh religion, recreation, what have you. Yeah, you know, I to be honest, I was more concerned about being burn at the stake of classical wisdom. I was I was really concerned about the reaction from uh Uh some folks at Harvard.

Um and Greg Naj in particular, who I reached out to around the corner here many years ago, the the former director of Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies. And I mean, in answer to your question, like from the the very first conversation I had with Greg, sort of like the the classicist of classicists, he was he was not shocked. By this by this line of investigation. And he encouraged me. from our our very first meeting. And I mention I mentioned that because, you know, I talked about this dichotomy between the the classical pre Christian scholars and then you know what what happens in the seminary today. You know, you're learning the same Greek

Why is why there are two different approaches to this? Why is there a classical department and why is there a par a department of theology? I think Вот уніцов сказав тоді. is this this notion of a of a truth proposition, the value of truth. And so

I mean the Catholic church that I know and I grew up Catholic, I went to Catholic school for for twelve years, and I was trained by the Jesuits. in Latin and Greek, so I only learned Latin and Greek through the Jesuits. Like I was always taught To ask questions. Um and from the very beginning You know, when I was bouncing from an office in Boston

To places at the Vatican, I would get the same response. So I talk to the archivists, I would talk to the archaeologists. The Vatican has an archaeological team, for those who don't know, uh the Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology, uh which is a super cool title. Uh and and they're out there uh to to preserve the remnants of paleo Christianity to ask the same questions I think that I'm asking and to arrive at this at this truth proposition. You know, what what happened? What motivated people to convert From

Uh the time honored religion. of their family, their ancestors, all these pagan cults, like what would motivate somebody to convert from that to Christianity, um, at the end of the first century into the second and third centuries, like before Constantine. You know, this was an illegal thing. Right, Christianity was illegal. It was literally underground, celebrated in in house churches or necropolis. So b graveyards. This is a graveyard religion. Um and and today it still is, the interaction of the living and the dead that we celebrate at communion. Um and so I think that, you know As as long as you're diplomatic and you be honest with the data, I think this is a conversation worth having. And I've never felt anything um but but welcome by the Vatican. So what changed?

Which is we're uh killed in Salem for Presumably taking Urgant. So why is everybody cool with us now? Is this something that happened twenty years ago or has this been a a a gradual evolution? I don't know. I don't know. It's uh you asked about like the the death and rebirth of Karl Ruck. Yeah, so his career certainly changed from the late seventies to where it is today. And I wonder, you know, the Vatican had its moment with Vatican Two.

for the Catholics who are listening in the nineteen sixties. Um And it's, you know, it's it's a it's a a big institution, maybe slow to change in certain respects. Um But there there there's always always been pockets in the church and uh I look to a lot of these brotherhoods, sisterhoods like the Jesuits and the Dominicans and the Benedictines and the Franciscans, you know, um

the educated folks who have big questions same as same as you and me. And I I think I think the best of them, you know, engage with the lay public. That's that's the mission. That's the ministry. Engage with universities, engage with scholarship, um, engage with divinity schools. So I don't know, it it's it's hard to say. I'm I'm not gonna say that psychedelics are their favorite topic, uh, but it's it it's at it's at least worthy of conversation. Well, when I was sitting in Richard Schulte's class on the botany and chemistry of hallucinogens in nineteen seventy seven, I remember him putting up a diagram of mescaline. the mesculin molecule on the board. And he said, now right behind this classroom is the Harvard Divinity School.

They worship divinities. Uh here is divinity worship by some of my indigenous colleagues and teachers. But the divinity school has never asked me to come over there and put one of these divinities on the blackboard. Yeah. Now Harvard seems to be redis rediscovering what they actually discovered through William James well over a century ago.

Uh what's happening there now? You've been spending a lot of time there at the Divinity School, the medical school. It all seems to be coming together. So share your perspective on on what's going on. I'll share what I can. Yeah, there's there's there's lots of interest and not just on that campus, but but elsewhere. So I've had like the funnest part for me has been having these really cool conversations about Um like the the meaning of of psychedelic studies, right? across all these campuses. Um and in popular discourse. Again, things are very different from where they were even at Hopkins, you know, twenty years ago when a lot of this clinical work began. So I've had like the funnest conversations at Harvard and Yale and Hopkins.

Um, and certainly on on the West Coast. Uh, so we've I've mentioned a few of those psychedelic centers already. Um and where a lot of the focus has been on clinical work. Interestingly, at least for me. over the past couple of years as as a humanist.

Um I'm I'm seeing I'm seeing interest in things like divinity studies and ethnobotany. that you and I both love, um, and and the social sciences and the things that William James was talking about, at this weird intersection between philosophy, psychology, comparative religion, um, you know, from James to the 1950s, again, when this was all fair game. Uh I I think that I've I sense kind of a a return to the big questions, um you know, in addition to the relief of suffering, uh what what do psychedelics really mean for people today, why do people find meaning? You know, even if even if all you think about psychedelics um are are agents of of relieving suffering for PTSD, okay, uh if if you've ever talked to and I've talked to several of of the these special forces, Navy SEALs who undergo these dramatic experiences with psychedelics, things like Ibogain and Five MEO DMT.

I mean the things they talk about. you know, not not in every case, but some of them have very weird transpersonal mystical experiences. Again, not across the board, but things that seem to tap into um a collective understanding of of the of the variety, like James, the variety of of spiritual experiences that can sometimes happen. under the right circumstances. And so, you know, like divinity schools are great places to host those conversations, English departments, um maybe even in in the arts. I th I think just uh I I sense a a real welcoming and an opening um to uh w what's really possible in in the next chapter of the psychedelic conversation, which I think is that, uh our deep history and this this this unwritten future.

Well, I regard the leading academic institution these days is the institute of Johns Hopkins which was set up in part by my friend uh Tim Ferris and is helmed uh in large part by Roland Griffiths. And Griffiths famously has said that seventy five percent of the people that go through some of his trials say it's the most ineffable, indescribable Unforgettable experience. On it's very common in

psychedelic experiences or reading about psychedelic experiences where people say that this was just A sensory overload. uh spiritually, physically, mentally. But in a recent conversation with Karen Armstrong, she talked about how many religions seek to empty us of everything. And that

uh they want to know how to get away from thinking about anything. I mean this is the point of meditation. You want to get to the point where you've emptied your mind, your body, your spirit, so it can be refilled. So how do you reconcile these two things for on the one hand you want to fill yourselves up with uh sensations from the ninth dimension. On the other hand, you want to empty your soul at the same time. These would seem to be two completely opposite uh goals to have. And they are. That's why it's called a paradox. And I see you were you were citing my recent conversation with Karen.

Um you can find it on YouTube called the the God Paradox. Um, I think paradox is a very good thing because I think that's again, not ever having experienced them myself. It's one of the things that that that seems to occur in those who experience um altered states of awareness under the influence of psychedelics. The so um uh you know uh distortions of time and space, okay, that that that's one thing.

You mentioned ineffability. That that's another um But you know. Okay, so being part of yourself and also part of someone you're looking at or something you're looking at. So being here but also there simultaneously, now you're getting some pretty quantum mind bending stuff. Um these these are paradoxes. And I think you know, like like a Zen Cohen, they're there to remind us that uh life isn't easily reducible. And I was getting my phone out because I did want to quote

um Roland Griffiths himself, who I think is going on the record about this now. Um, you know, the one of the researchers who's largely responsible for the medicalization. uh at least of of psilocybin and you know rigorous clinical research into these drugs. Um he said last week um in uh in a video address to the Horizons conference at New York, he said that I've come to believe that this line of non therapeutic research, what we're discussing, this non therapeutic research is incredibly important and may ultimately prove to be crucial to the very survival of our species. So you don't want to be grandiose about this stuff, but

Karen Armstrong said the same thing. And she wasn't talking about psychedelics. She was talking about these practices, these archaic Ancient practices, um techniques of ecstasy in some cases, that Eliade talks about that just kind of You know, bring us back down to the the the notion of our true self. So you can call it ego dissolution and boundary dissolving, but it's essentially like entering into meditation or contemplative practice or yoga, you know, doing this stuff with the intention of losing the self.

the false self of the ego, in order to find something that's maybe more genuine. So that, and here's the the big the the whole point and the big kicker is so that you can reinvest that sense of self into everyone you meet and everything you see. And so to to be a a beacon of love and compassion through these practices. Um, that was kind of the whole point. Well I wanna underscore something you said there, which is the importance of other uh modes of of reaching these altered states. It ain't all about hallucinogens.

In a conversation you had with Jordan Peterson, he said he'd come to believe that all of these religious experience were based on psychedelics. I completely disagree. I think it's fasting. I think it may be mental illness in some cases. Uh i it could be meditation. So all of these roads lead towards a similar place, but as as much as I appreciate the value of hallucinogens and entheogens and psychedelics, I don't think they have all the answers. In fact I worry a bit that in in in some cases they're being loved to death. and uh sold literally in some cases as the cure all for everything, the panacea for all of the world's ills. In fact somebody sent me a horrifying link to something on the web called Lucy in the Sky with Nazis that some of the alt right were taking these things to reinforce their beliefs as noxious as they were. So that we have to be careful that these things are kept in in perspective. Now in your conversation with Karen Armstrong, uh you both quoted this wonderful uh line from Saint Augustine, if you think you've understood God, that ain't God. But it brought to mind the line of George Carlins when he would used to mess with the nuns in religious school on Sunday and would say

If God is all powerful, can he make a rock so big that even he can't lift it? The the point here being is that I think we need to find comfort and paradox at the same by the same token. We can't just dismiss all the stuff as ineffable and you can't know it and whatever. Because it's part of human nature to want the answer, or at least to seek the answer. It's an aspirational goal to learn and know, uh, even if you don't reach the point where you know God or or or or know the unknowable. And maybe that's where psychedelics come in, right? Um, and you're reminding me of a conversation I had with Glen Shepherd. I'd love to talk about. Um so your the uh Augustine said uh si comprehendis non es deus. Like if if your rational mind

can fix in on it, you're probably not right about God. And I mentioned this Jesuit Carl Rahner who said that we shouldn't even use the word God. Um the the it's it's all aspirational. The rational mind has a tough time attaching to this. But yes, psychedelics as No, in the right way, these are not for everybody. I'm also super concerned about the public discourse and the this notion of a panacea or a god pill. Um I think that Uh under the right.

setting um for you know otherwise consenting adults. I don't know when that is. Maybe it begins at thirty five or later because life is psychedelic enough. Um, you know, the the infrequent occasional use of of some of these compounds. with people who know what the hell they're doing. uh could be an aid to a a spiritual discipline that then transcends

Uh or at least sublimates. psychedelics into um a life dedicated to uh contemplative practice and action, like acting on that practice to actually do something in the world, something something of of benefit. I mentioned uh Glenn Shepard'cause he and I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago. Um just j just shows you like how differently people think about psychedelics. And his estimate was that something like fifty percent

of Amazonian shamanism, at least with respect to ayahuasca, is not dedicated to health and wellness, um, the way we think about it. Uh, but he said it's they're hunting rituals, which I thought was fascinating. And he was talking about his work with the the the mashiginka. Mashigenga. Mashiginga. um and all these hunting w and why and how they use ayahuasca and other plants, other magical plants in these hunting rituals. And so I just think we have to remember that um the this medicalization that has captured the imagination over the past twenty years is just one very small aspect of um of what these things represent, how archaic they really are, stoned apes or not. Uh these these things, I'm talking about these plants and fungi, have been evolving for millions of years. Um, and I think we always need to keep that in mind. Well, my late friend Peter Gorman, who was formerly editor of High Times magazine. You see, ethnobotanists have friends and all sorts of strange culture. Not just the rainforest. Was the second white man that I know of to take the magic frog, the green monkey frog or the Amazon. And he said that they were using this for

Hunting magic. And that he took it and he saw a crossing in the river with a big juicy taper crossing in in his vision. And the next day as he was hiking through the jungle with his indigenous guides, he recognized the crossing and just as he recognized that was the crossing, a big juicy taper came walking across. So this is part of the ineffable. You can explain this through the prism of Western science. But in one of your conversations with Carl Rock, he quotes. Carl Jung as saying

You can't uh reject something just because you can't understand it. And I think that's the attitude we should have towards psychedelics, uh, towards religion and in some ways towards life itself. But uh c can I ask you a question? Because I mean talking about life itself. So like I mean I I I look at you as a a as a hero, as as a groundbreaker Um in a very real sense around the the this discipline and this topic.

You know, as a disciple of Shultes amongst amongst other other accolades we we could list. I think that The some of the most impressive stuff you've done. Is uh Like like transforming

the insights you've had on psychedelics or not, I don't know. Or maybe it's through your scholarship or your study. Into You know, uh a desire to actually preserve These traditions and what that means in some cases is preserving Uh the plants themselves.

Sometimes it means preserving the people. A lot of it has to do with very boring legal work, which is which is conserving land in places that's not always very easy. And if you wouldn't mind, like I I I think that that you're an example of of doing good in the world based on ineffable mystical, otherworldly type encounters. Would you mind uh Would you mind expounding on that?

Well, thank you for your kind words, first of all. I thought I was the one asking the questions here. But there's a Jewish concept called Tikkun Olam, which is about repairing the world. And I think that all of us live a better life. and trying to do something a little better, helping somebody less fortunate. And and it's not always possible. But if everybody sort of pitched in and try and make things a little better, I think we'd all be better off.

And I call this the spiritual boomerang. You know. I I there's a a a small element of selfishness in the work I've been doing with my indigenous colleagues because it helps me. I sleep better when I see these forests on fire, when I see these people chased out of their traditional lands, knowing that I've at least tried to make a difference to help them and their forests and their frogs and their plants and their fungi. I feel like I'm trying I used to say I'm trying to make the world a better place. I got too many dents in my fender now. Now I say I'm trying to make the world a less bad place. And I think that's a a more worthy cause that hopefully everybody would would would try and do. But I I've I've got to tell you that, you know, I set out to do this and and and work on this and protect this, but on a few occasions when I've been sick

They've healed me. Mm. And that's the that's the spiritual boomerang. You throw it away and it comes back to you. And if all of us can try and live our life trying to see where we can try and make a difference

W what's the downside to that? So what is A C T, for those who don't know? ACT is the Amazon conservation team. I'm the co-founder with my wife, Liliana Madrigal, a Costa Rica protected area specialist, and we were long concerned that rainforest protection was overlooking indigenous peoples and indigenous lands. When we started this almost thirty years ago There were groups like the World Wildlife Fund where I work that focused on protecting endangered species. There were groups like Cultural Survival focused on helping indigenous peoples. But they didn't work together.

So we got together with an approach we call biocultural conservation. to work in partnership with the indigenous peoples to help them, to empower them, to train them. to better protect their land and their culture. They're in the driver's seat, not us. But we have access to tools, technology, training, legal

um expertise that can make a real difference. Stuff they couldn't do on their own. But as an ethnobotanist, you know the indigenous peoples know a lot more stuff than you do about rainforest issues. But they need a helping hand. And Schulte's often told me, he said, These naked people may not have

a last name may not have clothes and may not be able to write their name. but they know a hell lot more about this stuff than we ever will. And that was a very humbling uh comment on him and I heard it many times. So it's not about us playing Tarzan and saving the Indians of the jungle, but it's also not making a similar mistake, which is Um oh they can do it all, they know better than we do. Let's leave them alone. A similar dichotomy is where people say

Well we shouldn't give them iPads because that's gonna ruin their culture. The other saying that let's give myPads and iPhones and computers because that's gonna save their culture. Neither is true. And turn on they say, To every complex question there is an answer which is both simple And wrong. So I wanna uh wind up here with with uh a bit of a loaded question, which uh Goes back to something we touched on, and that is the history of hallucinogens at Harvard, which is something which has been fascinating me for 40 years. Many people think

That hallucinions And their study began with Lyrian Alpert, God forbid, uh in the sixties. Uh more of us in the know like to think it began with Schulte's in the thirties and forties. Uh those of us who've really dug deeper, like you and I have, know it began with William James uh prior to the turn of the century. But I'd like to know your perspective, having spent so much time at my old uh alma mater, as the contributions and the mistakes made by Leary and Alpert, which very few people address these days, where people continue to lionize them without calling attention to the uh pitfalls that they did fall into. Hm. That is a loaded question.

Yeah, it's um I haven't talked about this publicly. Yeah, but uh Leary is still a bit of a four letter word. on on campus. And you know I just in generality has been having all I mentioned these these conversations with folks from the divinity school to the law school to the medical school, um, to the faculty of arts and sciences. Just that there's a lot of genuine organic interest in this

In this topic. And I noticed over the past couple of years that you know the the the specter of Leary, the shadow of Leary kind of kind of hangs in the corner. um, you know, the Pied Piper of of psychedelic enlightenment. Uh Mr Mr. Leary, uh uh gets a lot of flack for what happened uh at Harvard in the early nineteen sixties.

And you know, when he and and Dick Alpert, who became Ram Das were kicked off campus Um, that was the beginning of a long hiatus. in these studies. So we're talking about this is about sixty years. Um, so from nineteen sixty two until where we sit today, it's been a full sixty years since some of this uh controversy erupted.

Um But like we talked about at the very beginning. Despite that psychic load. I think that Uh the clinical work.

Certainly made an impact. Um the fact that a guy named Michael Pollan uh teaches English at Harvard In the fall. Um makes a difference, informs the conversation. And I think that people are reapproaching this topic now. I don't know why it's taken sixty years, but reapproaching it with with a real sober lens. Um and uh it's been yeah, it's been really interesting to witness.

Well let me highlight the the two things that I think live on in a positive way, and that's the work of uh hallucinions with prisoners and with religious leaders, which, as you know, has been resuscitated and done in a much more rigorous and scientific way. So in that sense, that was a very positive contribution. But just like the Catholic Church that we discussed, uh some mistakes were made along the way. And now, hopefully, in the age of the immortality key, we're We're living in an age where we can learn from our past mistakes and not repeat them and look for a brighter future uh using hallucinations in a careful, culturally sensitive, scientifically rigorous, uh, and shamanic way. Uh for the benefit of all.

But first and foremost we have to benefit the people that taught us these compounds, the plants, the fungi, the animals, uh, and make sure that benefits flow both ways. It can't be just about celebrating uh the use of ayahuasca while the original ayahuasca s uh vines are being put to the torch, as is the case in much of the Northwest Amazon. So we live in a time where the candles burning both ends. On the one hand we have burning rainforests, we have indigenous peoples that continue to be forcibly missionized, On the other hand, we have the institutions of greater learning like Harvard Yale and Imperial College in London and UCLA and Johns Hopkins celebrating This back to the future.

where these lessons of the ancients, these chemicals created three billion years ago, can revolutionize and improve The way We live our lives and our culture. And so I thank you. Brian, for your friendship, for your scholarship. Uh and for being with us today. Dr. Plotkin, you are a hero and a humanitarian. Thank you.

Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading. albums perhaps gadgets gizmas all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim dot blog slash. Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one.

Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by GiveWell. Donating money to help other people is a wonderful act. But how can you be confident? How can you know that your donations are actually improving or saving lives effectively? It's hard to do. You could do weeks of research to find the charities that are out there, what programs they run, what their administrative overhead is, how effective those programs are, and on and on and on. It would be a full time job. Take forever. I know this from experience because I tried to do it that way manually. It is a ton of work.

GiveWell spends more than 30,000 hours each year researching charitable organizations. Then They direct funding to a few of the highest impact evidence-backed opportunities they've found. They do the work for you. More than 100,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than$1 billion, which includes$678,000 donated by you, my dear listeners. So it makes a difference. Rigorous evidence indicates that these donations will save more than 150,000 lives and improve the lives of millions more. That's why GiveWell does what they do. and using GiveWell's research is free.

Givewell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high impact giving. So they publish all of their research and recommendations on their site for free, no sign up required. They allocate your tax deductible donation. to the charity or fund you choose without taking a cut. If you've ever donated to GiveWell's recommended charities before, You can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year. That's 2022. So one more time. If you've never donated to Give All's recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match,

Go to givewell.org. give, g-e-w-e-l-l.org, givewall.org, and when you get to check out, pick podcast and enter Tim Ferriss Show. It's that simple. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell on the Tim First show to get your donation matched. One more time, that's givewell.org. And when you get to checkout, pick podcast. and enter Tim Ferrisshow.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 3 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.