Gary Laderman, Emory professor and death/religion/drugs expert, traces psychedelics’ role in reshaping American spirituality—from 1970s LSD trips to Oregon’s psilocybin therapy—while debunking the "war on drugs" as a failed cultural experiment. He contrasts pharmaceutical salvation narratives with deeper existential tools, like entheogens or near-death experiences, framing religion as meaning-making beyond dogma, yet exposing its hypocrisies through cults (NXIVM, Osho) and celebrity exploitation. Laderman’s provocative teaching—using history, porn stats (35% of downloads), and taboo topics like suicide—reveals how modern crises demand new ways to confront mortality, sexuality, and societal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
But yeah, I mean, my interest in studying the connection between religion and drugs, I'm in a department of religion, At Emory.
It really spans the spectrum.
So I'm interested, yeah, for sure, in psychedelics.
But also, as you're saying, in the more ordinary psychoactive drugs that bring order to our lives and, you know, allow us to tap into our true identity, maintain some semblance of stability in our lives.
The subject of religion and drugs, it's really fascinating to me, but it's something that I never even really considered until 10, 15 years ago.
And I was introduced to Jack Harer, and he was, do you know who he is?
The cannabis advocate, recently deceased.
Not so recently anymore.
Great guy, but was writing a book about the connection between psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, And, um, religion and Christianity.
And he had this amazing collection of artwork that connected, um, like ancient Christian artwork with, uh, a lot of these dancing naked figures that look like they were in ecstasy shrouded by this translucent mushroom.
There are a lot of theories out there that connect early Christianity especially to different kinds of hallucinogenic, psychedelic drugs of some form.
But I think the connections are much more widespread.
People have been using psychoactive substances for religious ritual, for religious experience, for forms of transcendence and journey, in all kinds of different cultural settings and through history.
Well, I've been interested in the topic of drugs for a while, but I think what really led me to see this would be quite a fruitful topic to pursue in terms of research 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 late 70s, And people more and more were enjoying psychedelics coming out of the decade of the 60s.
I started 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.
And I saw that in my own experience 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, and many who claim to be spiritual but not religious.
And I want to tie that back to people's experiences with psychedelics.
Yeah, I feel like for a lot of these people that don't have psychedelic experiences that are spiritual, that sort of dismiss religion, 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.
Well, I think, again, it's not just you 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 really can blossom.
People's lives are transformed in a lot of these more controlled medical studies with people who are taking psilocybin or MDMA. But the main focus of all that, of course, is the therapeutic benefits.
But, you know, as we're saying, it's all about spirituality, and those therapeutic benefits can't be separated out from a kind of spiritual sense of that experience.
It gives me a little bit of hope that in this time of great strife and struggle, and especially in terms of the way 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 we're obviously in some strange transitional moment in history.
Where our confidence in 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.
These things are happening where people go, you know what?
You know, because the idea that human beings are somehow or another preventing other human beings from having non-lethal experiences that have proven to be incredibly transcendent.
Change people's lives for the better, just en masse.
Like if you see the John Hopkins study, the people that one psilocybin experience, the majority of them listed as the most profound experience of their life.
With this book that I'm writing, which is going to make the argument that drugs are really the source of spiritual life in America.
That's the future, as well as the past.
I mean, again, you know, the influence of psychoactive substances in the Americas, you know, pre-Columbus 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, have lost touch with those resources of spiritual meaning and religious life.
And as you're saying, and 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 like to be provocative and try to confuse a lot of the categories that we use in thinking about some of these things that are so central in our lives and so potent, especially in terms of our religious lives.
So, yeah, there's entheogens, psychedelics, and obviously all different kinds of other kinds of, again, substances that we use that have an effect, and for me, that In some cases, in many cases, have religious meanings and connections.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people 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.
There's a lot of folks that apparently can reach some pretty intense states of consciousness through yoga, through different styles of yoga and different styles of breathing.
There's a really funny quote by Terence McKenna where the Buddha met this monk.
Who said, I've practiced the city of levitation for the last 20 years, and I've achieved the ability to walk on water.
And the Buddha says, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel.
Yeah, right.
You can really meditate alone in darkness forever, or you can just take mushrooms.
Because, yeah, many of them don't know what the study of religion is.
Right.
Well, we have a pretty nice diverse mix of students in terms of their background, but most don't have a religion course other than something they've done if they were in Catholic school or if they studied the Bible in some form, but no, they've never seen anything like me.
It's funny because that's a heavy responsibility, I would imagine, too, because you're introducing to these kids these ideas that have 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 as we said, a lot of them are quite sensitive, the topics that I'm trying to teach.
But it's an essential part, I think, of being a young adult 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 in your life and what's going to be coming in terms of your future career.
And I try to make religion relevant in those terms.
But I also, as I like to say to them, I wouldn't say this before I had tenure, but my goal, I tell them this straight out, is to confuse the hell out of them.
What they think is religion is not the only game in town.
And so I'm very upfront about this sort of being an intellectual exercise.
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 shake them up, but not necessarily 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.
But for myself, I'm very gratified in the work that I do, if you could call it work.
And I get a great response from students and I'm just really pleased that I'm able to be a part of that educational process.
Because, not to go on, because my classes are often not like their other classes.
Which are, you know, political science or economics or biology.
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 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 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.
But you shouldn't throw it out.
I think it's a piece.
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 those people...
And the problem, obviously, is translations.
Translation's 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.
Have you ever read Russian to English?
There's a lot of Russian people I follow on Twitter, and I get a huge kick out of pressing the translate button to try to break down the way they communicate.
Now, when you're dealing with super ancient languages that we don't even use anymore, like ancient Hebrew, Like, who knows how accurate and what if the intent is clearly expressed through an English translation.
Also, 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 shit in the Bible in particular, and many religions, in terms of condoning slavery, treating women as second-class citizens, or so on.
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.
From my point of view, too much literalism, you know, is really counterproductive, if not destructive, as societies change over time.
So, 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.
For me, I'll say 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 You know, very problematic, to say the least.
But 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.
Well, I mean, I've written a book called Sacred Matters that looks at these different kind of arenas where religious life can be found 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.
I've always thought of it as just hijacking the human reward system.
Because if we lived in a tribe of people, a small tribe, and there was one 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 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 there's music playing when he talks.
And a team of writers have carefully constructed all of his words in 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.
Or even someone like Oprah, I mean, who's more clearly, you know, in that sort of strange middle ground between celebrity and spiritual leader of some kind.
Yeah.
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.
You know, celebrity's big.
But again, I'd like to talk about other things, you know, as well.
Whether we're talking about politics or...
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.
Well, and social media, too, will be the future of religion in terms of how it transforms and moves forward is an important kind of site for religious activity and investments and, you know, where we're really going to see the action.
Yeah, so when you say, like, religion, that these things fall into sort of religious behaviors or religious ideas, you're not meaning, like, as handed down from a higher power, you're meaning as in people fall in with the same sort of compliant behavior and patterns and Not necessarily.
What are the sources that are available to people?
And, you know, as 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.
But it's 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 what it is, and so much thought putting into just what pops, what gets people to pay attention.
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's The Sacred Mushroom in the Cross is all about consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and that he believes that— That was really what the Bible was about, was about hiding these stories from the Romans when they were captured.
Well, and there are weed churches, too, that are starting to crop up.
So, you know, cannabis and religion also beyond, again, just the psychedelics.
Yeah.
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, where Because I did some research here.
I do my research.
Before the pandemic, I was able to get out and do some research around and talk to people who are running these kinds of psychedelic religious communities or sacred plants.
Different communities that are cropping up.
Washington, D.C., right?
They just also decriminalize psilocybin.
And there, too, is a thriving underground.
So I think we're going to see that underground, these subcultures, really begin to surface.
To be around late 50s, early 60s, before everything was illegal, when people were just freaking out.
After Hoffman had synthesized LSD and when basically all of the Schedule I compounds were free and legal, I mean free to consume, you've got to wonder.
The only thing that was illegal was marijuana, which is kind of hilarious.
So that's a very rich part of the history that 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?
Again, the notion was miracle drug, medicine.
This is going to help people with their depression and, you know, all of that.
And again, what we don't know, although we're beginning to see this more and more in some of this research, is what What are the religious implications in a person's life after they trip?
There's a great book that I've mentioned many times in this podcast because I had the guest on, the author on rather.
Tom O'Neill wrote a book called Chaos and it's about the Manson family.
And 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 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 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 their committing crimes.
And the whole idea was to discredit the anti-war movement and to disrupt the civil rights movement.
There was a lot of shit involved with the CIA and LSD, and they were running a...
They were running a clinic, a free clinic, in Haight-Ashbury for 50 years, until three months after this book was released.
And they think of LSD as something that makes you go crazy and want to murder people and kill people.
And they changed the idea of what a hippie was, 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.
He would pretend to take acid and he would give acid to the family and then he would mindfuck them and then have them go out and commit murder and tell them that they were freeing people and Yeah, well, no doubt.
And there was a lot of interest, for sure, among the CIA for what the potential would be for LSD. Yeah, he also went over the Operation Midnight Climax, which was a part of MKUltra.
Well, they only found this out sort of accidentally through research into these files that had been left behind and some Freedom of Information Act stuff.
Well, the real sad thing, too, is in putting these things in Schedule 1, 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 with adverse reactions to psilocybin, to cannabis, to LSD, and we don't know why.
Right, particularly people that have schizophrenic breaks.
While on cannabis, it's very common.
Not very common, but it might be like, you know, one out of a hundred or something crazy like that.
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 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.
The way people communicate on Twitter is like a bunch of mental patients throwing shit at each other.
And the political divisions clearly are kind of one of the consequences of how embedded these 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 thought about what would be the perfect way to deteriorate it.
Well, you have a guy who's clearly unqualified for the job, who is famous for just kind of being an asshole.
on television firing people and being like a bombastic sort of you know braggadocious rich guy with his name on giant buildings and you're fired fuck you and grab him by the pussy and then you have that be that guy be the president yeah and then have everybody like we got to 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, no, he's not the problem.
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.
And the other side of that would be the notion that we really have lost any sense of powerful authority structures, you know, sort of cultural authorities that really can unite people or kind of help people understand the importance of common cause of some kind.
And, you know, that's, again, partly to bring it back to religion has to do with The conflicts around the church and Christianity, especially in American politics, that is being diminished.
I like to write about sort of the de-Christianization, you know, as the dominant sort of religious structure begins to erode and you begin to see, again, spiritual but not religious and other kinds of challenges.
That are coming from different communities or different kinds of spiritual experiences to the authority structures that are in society.
That is part of the context of all of this, where a lot of these battles are going on and people don't know where to turn or wondering, where am I represented in all this?
It's not coming from religion or the church and political leaders, Republicans or Democrats.
So it all becomes self-focused.
We're all just about self-promotion and self-identity becomes the main force in our lives, I think, for too many people.
I wish there was a structure that was in place that mimicked the positive aspects of church that didn't contain the dogmatic religious ideas that a lot of people find problematic.
I think there's something great about the whole community aspect of church.
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.
Admirable people.
And I think one of the things that's very admirable about their pursuit of Christianity is this community reinforcing aspect of it.
You know, they get there together with the members of the community.
Everybody's real friendly.
They know that they're going to sit there and they're going to submit to this experience and they're going to, you know, read the passages and they're going to hear the sermon and And they're all going to be together.
They're going to dress nice.
They're going to behave well.
And they're going to 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 don't know anybody in their building.
I have a buddy of mine who's telling me he lives in a building with 1,000 people.
He doesn't know any of them.
That's crazy.
That's such 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, particularly folks that were working out at 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 physically embracing.
People see people, they go, 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, that was the place where they could go to that was church.
I think that's beautiful and right on because you could see in that community of comedians something sacred, something religious that's meaningful and that is profound in some ways.
And as we said, the community aspect, but also helping people in terms of their own understanding, self-understanding.
Yeah.
You know, and that's people turn to different kinds of communities, you know, and that's part of the modern world, too, that that community feeling sort of collective togetherness can can be found in a number of different settings and.
And certainly the church and the congregation is one.
That is one of the saddest songs in the history of the world.
Because that's these people that really are at the end...
I mean, there's very few genocides.
I mean, there's a few, right?
But...
There's very few where there's almost nothing left of people that existed in thriving numbers 300 years ago.
But in Native American communities, it's common.
It's like the most common.
They're all gone in terms of the way they used to live versus now.
and that ghost dance was them trying to conjure up the spirit of the past and reignite their culture and bring back the old ways and get rid of the white settlers and get rid of the armies and get rid of all the people that had destroyed their way of life and disease and all the things that had happened to them literally over the course of their life.
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 fuck happened?
When they were born, they lived on the plains and life was as it had been for hundreds if not thousands of years.
And then all of a sudden it was gone.
And so this ghost dance was this attempt at reigniting their old culture.
It's so eerie and sad and it's so rare to have an actual recording of something that was an attempt to stop genocide.
And so, you know, James Mooney and really trying to dig into, yeah, some of the historical forces that led to this as a potential revitalization form of religious revival that ends tragically, you know, as you say.
Yeah.
Something that disconnects people from their past in ways that are difficult to maintain and to keep whole.
And still, you know, as has been the case in Native American history, incredible signs of resilience, of innovation, of, you know, new forms of community that have really...
Something's going on in the brain too that's going to be, you know, where you're going to be seeing some kinds of activities that, you know, will lead people to continue on in their behavior.
Yeah, it's for sure a pattern that people fall into.
Like, my grandmother was addicted to playing the numbers.
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 bets and winning and losing.
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...
I mean, I think that's probably part of just the makeup of what it means to be human, is we can get sidetracked and get so consumed by something that you lose sight of the rest of reality in some way.
And yeah, I mean, I see that in the things that I study, for sure.
But how, you know, we think about gambling and how that connects to sort of larger social issues and psychological kind of mental issues is important, you know, to make sure you're not just kind of compartmentalizing the behavior.
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 have these weird sort of 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.
It's going to help feed your family if your brain can completely lock on to in this tenacious way of succeeding at something.
If you're a hunter-gatherer and your feet hurt and you're like, well, I give up.
I can't do this.
Obviously, hunting's not for me.
You're going to starve to death.
Your children are going to cry.
It's going to be horrible.
So there's this built-in thing, but that could be hijacked by roulette, which is so weird.
That thing of, come on, I've got to get this, I've got to win, I've got to go.
That could be hijacked by games.
It could be hijacked by many things that we find ourselves obsessed with.
Hijacked or also motivated by other kinds of inner dynamics as well.
I mean, whether you want to talk about Freud or some other...
instincts that are at work that, um, yeah, depending on the individual and the particular social setting they're in, you know, and family background can, can lead to these, you know, all or nothing pursuits.
A lot of people fall off diets, fall off the wagon with drinking.
They do it because they're comfortable with the feeling of failure and the uncertainty of the unknown of the future with these new patterns that you're trying to establish.
So we look at sexuality in Hinduism, in terms of Chinese religions, in terms of African religions.
So I try to really, for these students, expand their minds as much as possible to see the varieties of ways in which people understand their sexuality.
There are arguments that after some faculty get tenure, they shut down, or they really aren't doing as much research anymore, and there isn't that drive.
Again, as a research area, full force, you know, going to go into it.
Again, because there's a legitimate purpose to a scholarly study of the connections between religion and drugs.
Luckily, I'm not the only one who's pursuing this, but I believe there are a lot of interesting connections that haven't been made, especially in contemporary American society.
The other drug that I'm particularly interested in and seems to get a lot of response is that I also include pharmaceuticals and prescription psychoactive drugs as a part of the drugs and religion connection.
And so looking at the pharmaceutical industry and pills as sort of religious objects and structures and cultures.
Yeah, I mean that is just a kind of, 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 bring you to a better place.
It has importance in terms of community and who you are connected with.
How the drug allows you to have certain kinds of community.
So a lot of this is obviously kind of messaged.
You see the messages in pharmaceutical commercials, which are, for me, dripping with kind of religious sentiments and sensibilities.
Again, I'm very fortunate, especially being at Emory.
So it's a different kind of professional life.
I've been really fortunate.
It wasn't planned.
I was a fuck-up and a As I write about in this new book, you know, Don't Think About Death, which is a memoir on mortality, I was directionless and just fucking around at high school and getting high and taking all kinds of drugs.
I have no idea, but I'll say the memoir starts with me as a young kid, maybe eight or nine, and 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.
And then looking down the hallway and seeing 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's really vivid as a memory associated with this 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.
I have no idea.
And he must have said some things, but the thing 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, when people ask, you know, when did you start, how did you get onto the topic of death?
This early memory seems to stand out, and I utterly failed in the rabbi's advice.
And I think at that point, really started thinking a lot about death.
I think, ultimately, we've been given a bunch of crude tools to deal with an insanely complex issue.
This finite life form that we find ourselves inhabiting.
Our consciousness is trapped in this finite thing.
And we've been given these very crude tools for navigating and for coping and for just the way we interact with each other about these These very complex subjects.
We get very simplistic, very just empty phrases that don't provide any real comfort.
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.
Well, I don't think you need the creator to be religious.
Or some divine power.
What do you need?
You need some access to transcendence.
You need some way of understanding your own self and identity.
You need to have a system of values that will guide you through your life.
A way of being.
You need to have community in some form.
So, you know, I'm more anthropological than theological, is one way you might put it.
So, if you're talking about religion in Native American cultures, where, you know, no doubt, no, there's no word for religion in any of those languages.
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 how they set up their ritual ceremonies.
It is their relationship to the weather.
It's all kinds of things where it's not necessarily a higher power, but it is about seeing that there's more than just materialism.
Because if you're lusting after 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.
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 looks at certain celebrities and go, oh my God, you've made it.
And they're depressed and all fucked up, and we don't have any sympathy for them.
There's no one who's going to be sympathetic to Justin Bieber with fucking $300 million in the bank and having sex with anybody who wants to.
Fuck you for being depressed, you little piece of shit.
You've been famous your whole life.
But for him, it's probably very confusing because...
First of all, particularly the really young people who became famous while they were young.
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.
And no one survives it.
I mean, maybe a few have gotten through it and they're sane, but most of them don't.
And that's where celebrity preachers come in, where someone can harness...
Your celebrity, and it boosts them up, and they can also provide you, maybe even if it's disingenuous, but some sort of a structure that makes you feel like there's more that you can cling to something that's going to make sense of this all, and that something is Jesus.
And that can be exploited, especially in those situations, I think, because of what you're saying, the sort of gap or absence of, you know, oh, God, I got here.
As a scholar, not judgmental, you know, materialism is a religion and it's, you know, it's got some heft and validity in terms of how people orient themselves in the world.
They think they're going to be able to find themselves or at least, you know, kind of attempt to project a certain image of the self that they would like to be.
And that's, you know, just living by that I think is debilitating in terms of the person's sense of ego, confidence, who they are, you know, in real life.
A religion, or not a religion, but 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.
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 in the middle of, how do you say his name?
Noah Yuval Harati.
How do you say his name?
You know the guy who wrote Sapiens?
Yuval Noah Harari.
Harari.
Homo Deus is this book that I'm in the middle of now.
And it's...
Stunning.
He starts the book off with all of these examples of famine, plague and famine, where 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.
It's, you know, what we think are real problems but are...
Inconveniences or some difficulties and obviously lots of serious problems.
But I mean, I think, you know, we don't have the tools, the intellectual, religious, spiritual, mental tools in terms of dealing with all of these so-called problems that surround us. mental tools in terms of dealing with all of these You know what?
We're not sure what the virus is or how it's going.
But again, you know, in terms of...
Going off what you were saying, I'm just sort of wondering how consciousness, how our collective consciousness is going to be dealing with our ideas about death and sort of questions around social responses in the face of this kind of event.
And as I was saying, when they start transitioning into adulthood, that's when things really come to the fore and start thinking about who they are and how they are.
Well, that's why I try to preach the religion of physical struggle.
Because I think the one thing that's helped me through 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.
So it's so hard to do and so fucking exhausting and I don't want to do it.
And then when it's over, other things are just like, whatever.
Because I make my own bullshit is basically what I do in order to not get spoiled by life.
And I think there's a real lesson to learn in there, 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 whether it's yoga or even mental things, whether it's playing chess or meditation or something, it's more difficult than regular difficulties.
Your brain is firing up at a million fucking RPMs.
Robert Sapolsky, who I love, who studies stress in 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.
I have a buddy that was talking to a sheriff in L.A., 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.
Quite a bit of time, I think, with that topic and really trying to, again, I want to position myself so I'm not the school counselor and I'm not the rabbi or the preacher and I'm not the parent.
So it's carving out this intellectual space of what is the history of suicide?
What are the kind of motivating factors and forces in Patterns of suicide and so on.
And then I really try to bring in popular culture.
Songs that express ideas about suicide or thinking about suicides of celebrities.
So I try to...
Find a way to put those pieces together in a way that's intellectually stimulating, that doesn't just kind of work on the psychological level, if you can think about that as a distinction.
I think I've grown more comfortable with it mostly as an important element of the class.
And I can see students being willing to engage in the topic, I think, in ways that I imagine would not have been similar earlier.
I just...
I like to go after the taboo topics where I know kind of students are already considering and reflecting on them even though they don't have an outlet for really intellectual kind of consideration,
really Removing themselves from whatever they personally think about suicide or homosexuality or whatever.
And allow them to kind of, again, learn history, learn about different cultures.
And I try to provoke them as much as I can to get them to really...
To think outside the box, but also to sort of dig in to their own 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 wanting to trigger people, the first day you did it, that had to be a very unique kind of class for you.
I mean, I think just the hesitancy from before and then bringing it up.
This class has 200 to 300 students, so it's...
It's not like me and 12 people.
Part of that setting forces me to think about delivery because it's not going to be so interactive.
When I really went into the class with that topic, I felt...
Like I was able to really convey the points I wanted to get across and get them to, 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.
I give them the resources where people who are trained can really help them with those kinds of more practical, intimate concerns.
I play the role up of...
You know, a professor who doesn't want to get personal, doesn't want to hear about your 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 the feelings of the people in your class, your students.
Like, how do you, like, what are the particularly difficult subjects to explore?
And if you're going to discuss sexuality, if you're particularly prudish or you have a very difficult time discussing the way various people go about it.
Other than religion, that's probably the most charged subject that you could discuss with people today.
Absolutely.
People have some really steadfast ideas about what's right and what's wrong when it comes to sexuality.
It seems like at least...
One place where we're gaining or 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.
Mm-hmm.
People are becoming much more comfortable with it.
There's, like, universally, in this country at least, there's very little resistance to gay marriage, very little resistance to gay unions or gay rights.
When I was a kid, it was, 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 7 until I was 11. So I was around a lot of gay people and my next door neighbors.
My aunt used to get naked and they would smoke pot and they would play the bongos with this gay couple that lived next door.
It was hilarious.
I was just around it.
It was normal.
And then we moved from there to Gainesville, Florida.
Which is really like the universe throwing me a curveball.
And I had this friend and his dad was really mad that gay people were getting married.
And he threw the newspaper down at the table and was like, I can't fucking believe this.
And I was like, what is he so upset about?
I don't understand it.
And he was mad.
That gay people were going to be allowed to get married.
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 shit?
It didn't make sense to me.
It was normal to me.
But I think those people are really rare now.
People like him, they're much more rare than they were when I was 11. Absolutely.
I mean, I try to as a part of it, but for me, sexuality is, you know, it's not just sex, it's gender and family and reproduction and religion.
So it's a broad gender, it's a broad category.
Absolutely.
But in America especially, when you start – when you move outside of the traditional man and woman having sex in the missionary position – You go to death.
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.
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.
My training is in American religious history, but in these courses I do try to very superficially talk about different religious cultures, and certainly tantric.
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.
They lived in this compound.
This is 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.
I mean, they're not really expats because they've been there for 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 that they could practice polygamy.
Polyandry, 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, in which two or more brothers are married to the same wife, with the wife having equal sexual access to them.