What Dr. Oz and Deepak Chopra Have Learned From Each Other
Deepak Chopra is one of the most profound voices in modern medicine. He’s on the front lines of bringing new ideas, different medicine traditions, and novel ways of healing to the masses. In this final episode of season 2, Chopra sits down with Dr. Oz to ask him about the way he views the marriage of spirituality and medicine around the world. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Well, in the Eastern wisdom traditions, awareness never leaves you, even in deep sleep.
The mind goes blank in deep sleep, the activity of the mind, but awareness never leaves you.
And that is a hint as where we are going after death as well.
Hi, I'm Dr. I'm Dr. Oz,
and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. podcast.
So I actually went to undergrad at Harvard, so not far from you.
And then I went to medical school at Penn because at the time, the University of Pennsylvania had a really innovative program where you could study medicine at the med school, but you could also study business at the Wharton Business School, which is its business school.
And I didn't do that to invest in a portfolio.
I didn't have any money anyway.
But I did realize, even at that age, that money drove medicine.
Mm-hmm.
And if you really wanted to invest in programs that could change the way we heal people, you needed to be able to have enough money to do that.
And it has benefited me tremendously to have gone to business school.
First of all, in business school, you don't just learn about money, you learn about management, you learn about marketing.
And you learn about how to organize your ideas.
The concept of triage was really a medical idea.
If you're in a war zone, you only have a certain amount of blood.
Not everyone gets the blood.
There are some people who are just so sick, you know you'll use up a lot of resources to save that one life, but you could use those same resources to save 10 lives.
We don't really practice medicine that way because we're not constrained by our resources.
But business, you do practice that way.
So I learned a little bit about how business people triage ideas, get rid of bad ones, promote good ones.
And so I began to use that technique at the hospital to promote programs that made sense.
For example, the initial mechanical heart devices and heart transplants that we were doing were expensive.
It's not like doing a hernia operation.
You're taking really sick people.
You're putting them through a huge procedure.
Some of them get sicker after the procedure.
They're in the ICU for a long time.
And we would have these knock-down, drag-out debates with people on the finance side of the hospital saying, my goodness, if we didn't do these transplants on these 100 people, we would make this much more money as a hospital.
And I'd have to respond by saying, well, our mission is the following.
But by the way, even though we're losing money Saving lives.
We're making more money because more people are coming to this hospital because we're a better hospital because we're saving lives.
And so those arguments are not ones doctors are usually comfortable making.
So did you get an MD and a degree in business?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
You got an MBA and MD. I got them both.
Now it's becoming a lot more common, as you know.
And a lot of great schools offer the joint degrees.
And I encourage anybody who's aggressively curious to think about it.
Because when you go into one profession, you end up with a very...
I wouldn't say, maybe it's the right word, skewed view of the world.
As a doctor, I know exactly how a doctor should think about the world, but it's not the only way to think about the world.
And it's nice to bend yourself a little bit to think about the world the way a business person or a lawyer or an engineer might think about the world.
Because medicine ultimately impacts every aspect of our existence.
Our health impacts every...
Where did you do your internship?
So this is a fascinating story.
It's a dilemma.
And I'll share with everybody.
I don't talk about it too much.
But I had gone through medical school my first year, relatively unscathed.
And then I met my wife.
Who just captured my heart.
Yeah, of course.
And Lisa, who you know well, and I began dating.
And by the time I'd finished medical school, and I was the guy who everyone said would never get married, because I was always so passionate about what I was learning and what I was going to do.
But Lisa had, in a way, tamed me, but in a way, awakened me to what I should be doing, the bigger ideas that I should be pursuing in my life.
So I was also prepared to go live in Delaware, which is where I had grown up.
And she said, well, she wants to be an actress.
Well, you can't do that outside of a major city.
And New York is an obvious place to do it.
So you go through this process called the match as a medical student.
You write down the residencies you want to go to.
And you list them, one through whatever.
And she took my match list and changed it.
I see.
She erased some of the programs because she couldn't have...
I remember the match list.
Yes, and so she moved up on my match list to New York City programs.
And Columbia University is a great historical program.
Of course.
It's the oldest residency in the country.
I actually went to the...
There's a board examination question on this.
I don't know why, but they asked me the oldest college, the oldest medical school, and the oldest residency in the country.
And I got the question right because I went to all three of them.
Harvard is the oldest college.
Penn is the oldest medical school.
And Columbia is the oldest residency program.
I didn't know that.
So I came to New York.
And while I was here, Lisa, you know, she did acting.
She learned a lot about media.
You know, remember the Visine commercials?
Yeah, of course.
The bloodshot eyes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Those are my wife's eyes.
I see.
Beautiful.
Yeah, but I never, you know, knew anything about media.
I'd never thought about entertainment.
And through Lisa...
Continuous reminding me, I began to appreciate that by stepping out of the safe silos that we live in and the ivory tower that you and I grew up in, and you take some hits because people come after you because they don't like the fact that you're stepping outside the norm, but you can change a lot more lives than you could ever imagine.
People want desperately to hear from professionals who are not hawking stuff, but talking about things that need to be heard.
And so why did you choose cardiology?
Cardiac surgery chose me.
I see.
Tell me about that.
For example, I could not have been an endocrinologist the way you are.
I don't have the personality, the patience.
Endocrinologists are network thinkers, I've always thought.
You can correct me.
But people who understand hormones understand how one chemical can do 60 things and it influences another chemical and together they do 3,600 things and so on and so forth.
Ultimately, trillions of things are happening in the body and every cell.
And you've got to figure that out and diagnose people who are manifesting a few of those, all the options they have.
In heart surgery, it's a lot simpler.
The heart's beating or it's not.
It's pretty binary.
If the patient dies, it did not go well.
And you have numbers that tell you as you're heading towards death or getting better, And so you have a lot of information rapidly coming at you.
And it's not just the signs, not just the squiggly signs everyone thinks of of the heart.
You actually hear in the operating room the patient's heartbeat and respiratory rate.
And you also hear their oxygenation.
So if it's going beep, beep, beep, that's a heart going at a good pace.
If it's boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, that's a low oxygen because it's lower tone at a fast heart rate.
So you have auditory input, visual input.
You can smell what's happening around you a lot of times.
And then there's a lot of people all doing the same thing and yelling things out to you.
So if you like that commotion, that action...
And you like a lot of information coming at you that you have to very quickly discern down to a couple action steps, then heart surgery is a good field for you.
If you don't like that, if you need it to be a bit more toned down, if you need a little more time to figure out, make the right decisions, then definitely do not be a heart surgeon.
But I learned something very important from a colleague of mine who was a mentor as well, and he was having a bad day in the operating room.
And, you know, something got cut the wrong way and it was bleeding and people were running around and everyone's yelling and screaming.
And he looked around and he said, in my time, and everyone, by the way, is offering their two cents about what to do.
Everyone's got an idea.
And he looked up and he said, in my time of need, I do not want to be surrounded by intellectuals.
I want to be surrounded by people of action.
You know, what are you actually going to do?
And that's very much a heart surgeon's, actually any surgeon's mentality.
Because ultimately, your biggest enemy is indecision.
And that's a pretty good metaphor for life.
Because when you're not deciding, you just decided.
And it's very dramatic.
Whatever you do, the patient comes in acutely distressed, you act fast, and then the results are dramatic.
It's a slap in the face when it doesn't go well.
You can't hide from the pain.
You have to go tell the family exactly what went down.
Obviously, it didn't go the way you planned it or you wouldn't be having that conversation.
Thankfully, it's been remarkable to see the advances in the field.
But especially early in my career, you were doing operations when there was a 25% mortality rate.
I mean, think about that.
One in four people would not survive a lot of these operations.
That's hard as a person to take home with you.
And I thought that was difficult.
And then I was talking to a guy named C. Walton Lilly High.
I don't know if you remember that name.
I do.
Iconic heart surgeon at the dawn of the field.
And he was doing heart surgery in Minneapolis, which is where a lot of this started.
Only because the inventors were sitting in their cold garages because they couldn't go outside because it was so cold, inventing things.
And so these guys built an incredibly advanced mechanism of taking care of people, kids in particular who had congenital heart defects.
And C. Walt and Lily High would hook mothers up to their children.
And the mother would become the heart-lung machine.
The mother's blood and her heart pumping would once again pump blood through the child's vessel so they could stop the kid's heart and then rapidly fix the hole in the heart or whatever the condition was that was causing the child to be blue or the many pathologies.
In any case, I was telling him and lamenting to him the fact that I was doing heart transplants and mechanical hearts and they were high-risk cases.
And he said, I was the only person who did an operation where there was a 200% mortality.
Because I could actually lose the child and the mother.
Oh my God.
The same operation.
I thought to myself, that's really heavy.
And then he said, in reality, the biggest challenge he ever faced in his life.
And just think about this.
This is in the mid-50s.
You're doing things that people don't think are possible.
Sometimes they don't think they should be done.
And you're operating on a child who's going to die from a heart defect.
And you fail.
And it's 12 noon.
And you just pronounce the kid dead.
And he said you'd have to go out and talk to that mother and deal with her emotions and the pain that she'd never see her child again.
And then you'd walk right next door and take a child out of another mother's hands, a mother handing her child to you so you could save that child's life.
And you'd have to go back into the operating room and do it again, knowing what had just happened that morning.
He said it took remarkable, unbelievable emotional resilience just to be able to believe you could do it.
And that actually is what separated those giants.
It wasn't that they were brave enough to go forward.
It's that they were strong enough to keep going forward.
There's lots more when we come back.
So you're still a practicing cardiac surgeon, right?
I operated yesterday, actually, and a friend of mine.
How many days do you operate?
One day a week, I go to the operating room.
And all kinds of cardiac surgery?
I do all the different cases.
My specialty is valves, actually.
I invented the devices that we use to fix the mitral valve from the groin.
And there's a technology that we commercialize that does the same thing for the aortic valve, the heart valve that regulates blood coming out of the heart.
And those two technologies now have been proven to save lives.
The one that I invented actually reduces not just the chance of dying by 50% in some conditions, but it cuts the cost in half as well.
So that's a unique combination.
So valvular heart surgery is your specialty, but you also do transplants, right?
Transplants are a young man's game.
I don't do those as much anymore.
When I was young, I did all of them.
I loved it because you didn't come in at three.
Think about it.
I mean, heart transplant, the most important thing you need is a donor.
You're waiting for somebody to die.
Yeah.
I mean, literally people on the heart transplant list, when the weather gets rainy and icy, they're happy.
Yeah.
Because they're praying someone gets in a bad accident.
I read a book about that once, about somebody who was on a waiting list for heart transplants, and he would watch construction workers and hope that one of them would have an accident.
When I was starting in practice, and this is the 90s, there were 2,000 homicides a year in New York City.
Now there are 400. And homicides usually are young, healthy people who are shot in the head.
So their body is completely normal.
So you could take their hearts and their kidneys and livers and everything else, but their hearts in particular you needed, and save people's lives.
But because of that, people get shot at crazy hours, and you have to get your heart out quickly.
So it's a middle-of-the-night case.
The bypass operation is sort of the bread and butter of most heart surgeons, and that's a problem...
That more than any other drove me into television.
I have a question to ask you since I have this opportunity right now.
You do valvular, heart surgery, you've done transplants.
Are you doing bypasses also?
Coronary bypasses?
I do coronary bypasses.
I don't do stents.
Stents are done generally by cardiologists.
I see.
So if the cardiologist can't open the vessel, then we do surgery.
But this is a big issue here, Deepak, because most of the bypass operations we do, I believe, could be avoided through lifestyle changes.
I'm going to come to that in a moment, but...
It is still coronary artery disease, still the number one killer of our culture right now.
Number one, by far.
It's the number one operation that's done by heart surgeons.
Number one, cardiac procedure.
It's a massive, massive problem.
So here's a question that I ask cardiologists and sometimes cardiac surgeons, and they sometimes don't like to answer this question.
You just brought it up.
But from what I've read, if a person has stable angina, Then a bypass, coronary artery bypass, or a stent, at most, improves mortality by, say, 2%.
Some people say 1%, if you have stable angina.
On the other hand, if you have unstable angina, it could save your life.
But from what, again, I've read, and that's why I'm asking you this question, Most of the bypasses done in this country, which could add up to a few hundred billion dollars, a couple of hundred billion dollars a year, are actually done for stable angina, which doesn't really change the mortality.
Is that true?
It's not true the way you said it, but I think I know what you're getting at.
Stable angina is not the real issue, because pain is not the key issue.
It's what's causing the pain.
So if your pain is caused...
By a blockage of a major blood vessel that if it were to close, you would die.
Then stable angina is a God bless process because it's a blessing that's warning you that you have a life-threatening problem, so get it fixed.
Most people with stable angina don't have that.
They just have...
50-60% blockages of blood vessels that through lifestyle and medical therapy could probably be managed without a more aggressive treatment.
And that's the reason that a lot of people say we overdo procedures because if you, Deepak Chopra, had a 60% blockage of your major artery, You probably wouldn't want to have an operation until you tried, really tried, a plant-based lifestyle, physical activity of the nature that you'd be prescribed, the appropriate medications if you're a candidate for them.
And most of the time you'd be okay because we can't prove there's a mortality benefit of operating on you.
It's not even 1 or 2%.
There's just no mortality benefit.
There's a quality of life benefit maybe.
If the pain is bad and it's hindering your ability to have sexual relations with the woman you love and be able to go out and play with your friends and family, there's some quality issues there, but you don't actually live longer in those settings.
The key is whether or not the arteries that are at risk are life-threatening or not.
And here's a thing that might shock the listeners.
Probably half the people who have heart blockages don't really have chest pain, the typical chest pain that we talk about.
And yet, a lot of them end up with bypass.
Yeah, but there are also many who die who never had a symptom until they actually had their massive heart attack, which is why it's very hard to test to safety.
You need to live to safety.
The kinds of things that you've espoused and others have gotten behind, and I talk about in the show all the time, are things you ought to do anyway, because they're better for all the parts of your body.
But there's a side benefit, which is your heart is at less risk, and your brain as well, of having an issue.
If you're a diabetic, the number one risk of death is your heart.
That's what diabetics die from.
And unfortunately, diabetics often don't feel their hearts.
The kind of buckets they have and the nature of the nerves of the heart in a diabetic means they don't feel the pain as much.
So they're going through life thinking they're okay until they drop dead.
And so...
It's true that there's probably operations done for conditions that don't require it, but then there's also the nihilism that I think many in the medical community have about the real desire of people to take action.
That's what shocked me the most when I started the show.
It's my 11th season now, so I've been doing this while I did the Oprah show for six, seven years before that, so it's quite a long time that I've witnessed the transition.
I remember doing my first shows This is back in 2009. And using the word quinoa.
And no one could spell it.
Right?
So we take it for granted.
Kale.
No one ate kale.
Now, Greek yogurt, I'm positive that it was probably 2% of the market when I started.
And we've talked about it a lot because I love Greek yogurt.
It's Turkish yogurt, really, by the way.
Kidding.
But these become issues that people are, they didn't know what they didn't know.
And that was the big misperception that I think afflicted America in the second half of the 20th century.
Because we didn't know what we didn't know, and medicine didn't give it to us, you know, we didn't get the message.
More questions after the break.
So, you know, when I was a resident, it was the same time that Dean Ornish was at Harvard.
He was beginning to talk about reversal of heart disease.
It wasn't kind of a meme then.
I personally now through the years have seen people with significant coronary artery disease who have actually reversed some of it.
not only have the symptoms gone away, but the angiogram shows that the arteries are not as clogged as they were before.
So do you buy into the reversal of heart disease?
Oh, absolutely.
And Dean Ornish's program, which is a Medicare-supported program, they pay for it, actually.
That's how concrete the data is.
It's remarkable.
I mean, I don't understand why everybody who is at risk for heart disease is not taking his program.
It reduces the chance of going back to the hospital if you've had a problem, If you had a stentral bypass, you don't have to go as often.
You don't have more complications.
You have less challenges to living a normal life.
You avoid problems with other parts of your body.
And it's not rocket science.
It's, again, a primarily plant-based diet.
He's very careful about some of the fats and the sources of those fats.
Coming to grips with the emotional issues that often are around you.
And that was the thing that always used to strike me when I was doing heart transplants.
People actually...
When your heart rejects you, when your heart fails you, you feel abandoned.
And Dean was one of the first people to really pick up on that and say, we got to deal with those issues as well.
Whatever anger, hostility is driving you, because it's not being mad at someone that causes the problem.
It's wishing they would die.
It's the hostility that's the problem.
Not feeling like you're a raindrop falling into the ocean of humanity is a really big issue that if you only treat that with a medication for cholesterol, you're missing the boat.
So I want our listeners to take note of what you just said.
It's hostility.
Hostility is a risk factor for coronary artery disease.
Independent risk factor.
And for premature death as well, from what I read.
It's not anger, it's hostility.
Anger could be the release of energy or an emotion, but hostility is this desire to get even for vengeance.
And that eats your heart up.
And anger is actually, as you mentioned, cathartic for a lot of folks, which is why when someone says, you know, calm down to an angry person, it's the worst thing to say.
But you want to act.
That's why we take this very simplistic perspective on our emotions.
So depressed people.
Mm-hmm.
Not that you want to be depressed, but people who are depressed who have depression for a good reason because their life's not good, and then they change their life because they don't want to be depressed about it anymore, well, that's a good thing.
Some of the most creative people argue they do their best work when they're depressed.
Correct.
Because they want to alter that reality.
Now, of course, if you have a chemical cause for it, that's a whole different ballgame.
But there are a lot of people in that category who would benefit from just changing the world because it needs to be changed for them.
If you're angry about something, deal with it.
This season on the show, one big theme that I'm going to focus on is the power of one.
It's the 11th season I mentioned.
I was born on the 11th.
But I just focus on number one, which is a number that I've always adjured just looking at.
And it's not just a selfish desire to be number one.
We all aspire to that number in a way, but we realize it's just a path, right?
We want to be...
We want to be part of a community, but yet we want to be special.
And those two feelings go opposite to each other.
Because to be with the community, you want to be like everybody else.
But to be yourself, you want to be a little unique.
Well, I think you need to do both.
You have an obligation and responsibility to use the power you're given, to be the person you can be, so that you can make the community work better.
And I think part of the debate that we're seeing happening in America, especially in politics, Is a result of people not believing they do have that power.
They have much more control over the world around them than they would ever imagine.
And if they don't use that power, things begin to fall apart.
And the best way to use your power is tell the truth.
Tell the truth about things that are happening to you.
Tell yourself the truth first, because that's the biggest person you lie to is yourself.
And then start telling the truth to people around you.
And that's what's always allowed our species to thrive.
We have the unique ability to completely disagree with each other, but articulate it in a way that you respect the view.
And then once in a while, not usually, but once in a while you change your mind, which is the way it's supposed to be.
Since I was trained during that whole period, now I've realized that, and I'm asking you this question, the risk factors for coronary artery disease or stroke are also the risk factors for diabetes, type 2, risk factors ultimately even for cancer and autoimmune illness, propensity to infection.
It seems like they're all connected to inflammation in the body at some level.
And again, from what I've read, there's a low-grade anxiety, depression, inflammation in all these conditions that precedes even Alzheimer's.
It's actually, we might be...
By focusing on different illnesses, this is cancer, this is autoimmune illness, then doing this whole diagnostic thing that we were trained in, we forget actually that you might have predisposition to certain diseases, but epigenetically, the disease that you get It actually has the same common risk factors.
Exactly the same common risk factors.
Is that true?
Powerful insight.
And I think it's beautifully stated by you.
It's easier to teach medical students a codified system where you break everything down into its silo and you teach them nephrology and then neurology and cardiology and whatever ology you want to learn.
A real artisan pulls it all together.
It's like teaching an artist how to use individual colors.
But you've got to put the colors together at some point.
You can't make a painting.
You can't take care of people the way they need to be taken care of.
And the people that I respect the most in medicine were the generalists who could do just that.
And you articulated beautifully what these journalists would begin to find, and I think we've proven now, which is the fundamental role of inflammation, which we want in a way, right?
We want inflammation to protect ourselves.
Of course, acute inflammation saves your life.
It saves your life.
So, like most things, there's a great book written by a friend called Survival of the Sickest.
It's a great story of humans and how we evolved to have certain illnesses that were tolerated because the side benefits were good.
I mean, everyone knows about sickle cell anemia, which we had the first cured patient of, by the way.
They used CRISPR. That's right.
I just saw that.
They were able to re-engineer red cells so they go back the way they are in utero.
It's a different kind of red cell that allows you not just to jump past the sickle cell problem.
But there's other problems that many folks know about that actually have survival benefits.
Including sickle cell, malaria resistance, right?
Sickle cell is a classic one.
But hemochromatosis, which is the iron storage disease, well, it's a weird problem to have.
You store iron in your liver, and when you get older, it sometimes can cause liver failure.
But if you have that problem of storing iron in your white cells in particular, you cannot get the plague.
The bubonic plague couldn't affect you, which means when a quarter of Europe was being slaughtered by the black plague, your family couldn't get it.
That means you survived and they didn't.
So there's much more of you now, you know, 300, 400, 500 years later.
It's an evolutionary advantage.
Both of us have a reasonable amount of hair in our arms.
My friends always joke that I've got hair in my blood.
I'm Turkish.
Now, why do I have hair on my arms?
Why do some people have hair and others don't?
Well, we think it's because people with hair grew up around mosquitoes.
And where there's mosquitoes, there's malaria.
And my dad who had malaria could test how miserable it was to have malaria, but mosquitoes don't like hair.
And we can sense mosquitoes when they touch our hair before they sting us.
So it makes people with hair a bit more resilient.
So if you've got a lot of hair in your family, you probably were near a river basin or a body of water that had a lot of mosquitoes on it.
Eskimos don't have a lot of hair because in the Arctic Circle, you're not going to be stung that often.
They can't get through whatever tide you're wearing.
But people who grew up in the Eastern Mediterranean almost for sure had mosquitoes in their lives.
So that's just an example.
That's a great example.
Actually, I want to share a story since you mentioned Mediterranean areas.
You know, when I was an intern in New Jersey at a community hospital, 1970, married, my wife was pregnant and my chief of medicine called me one day and he said, your wife has thalassemia.
And I said, if she had thalassemia, she shouldn't be alive and she's pregnant and she's, you know, I'd seen a lot of thalassemia in India in kids and so on.
He said, come, look at the red cells.
So, you know, I went to his lab, and sure enough, the cells didn't look normal.
So at that time, there was no Google, nothing.
I came to the New York library.
I spent the whole weekend in the library looking for thalassemia trait.
And, you know, now, of course, we do hemoglobin You know, it's easy to diagnose, but then it was not so easy to diagnose.
Even then, there was hemoglobin electrophoresis.
But this is what I found out, which is amazing.
What I found was that there was thalassemia trait along the exact route that The armies of Alexander the Great took in 323 BC from Macedonia all through Greece, all through Afghanistan to the exact village in Multan, which is now part of Pakistan.
Where my wife's ancestors come from, her parents come from Multan, along the exact route.
So I said to my wife, some ancestor was screwing around.
Either it was a rape, which is...
Frequently what conquerors do, or it was a one-night stand or whatever, but we have evidence right here.
And, you know, my kids have thalassemia trait too now, but, you know, your genes are actually the history of humankind.
Everything from what happened as an epidemic and malaria and bicycle cell came, what is the protective value of, as you just said, you know, You know, iron storage.
And you can now look at genes and track the history of our culture and of our civilization.
One thing I love about what's happening in the world now is we're getting a newfound, among scientists especially, newfound appreciation of our legacy, of our history.
I was in a place called Göbekli Tepe, which means Potbelly Hill in Turkish.
It's the oldest civilization we know of, 12,000 years old.
They had temples there, these big tea temples about 17, 18 feet tall.
They were worshipping ancestors probably.
Mm-hmm.
But here's why this is important.
This is three times older than the pyramids, four times older than Stonehenge.
I mean, it's a long time ago.
And just to make the intrigue deeper, this civilization fell apart at some time for reasons we don't know, but Abraham met Sarah there.
Same place.
And Haran.
It's in the Bible.
So this place somehow kept coming back.
Something is in the water there that caught everyone's attention.
But here's why it's critical.
We always thought, I always thought, most of the guys, people listening now probably feel the same way, that the reason we started having religion was because we were able to domesticate animals and get agricultural crops going, and then we had a little free time.
And with free time, well, you know, a couple people can take some extra effort and study religion in the stars and create stories.
Yeah, always in the desert.
Same, right?
However, in Quebecetepe, they had a religion that But they didn't have any free time because they were not agricultural.
These people were hunters.
And what happened is that they began to worship their ancestors or gods.
And they began to realize that if they could talk to the deities, they could begin to control the world around them.
And they could begin to hunt in packs.
And they could begin to take those animals, not kill them, but domesticate them.
And take some of those wild wheat crops, the Einhorn wheat, the oldest wheat we know of is in that area, and begin to domesticate it.
And so it wasn't that they started their religions because they were agricultural and had free time.
They became agricultural and got free time because of their religion.
And so the role of believing in something beyond yourself, the role of consciousness comes in the question.
And they were probably, I don't know this for sure, but the archaeologists that I have been working with there, some of them believed that they were probably doing peyote or other types of hallucinogens, the shamans, in order to transcend what they could see and get a vision of what could be.
And that's pretty cool that it's that process that allowed us to become agricultural and prosper in the way we have, which means you can't throw it away so easily.
So when people ignore the learned behaviors, the learned behaviors that they've appreciated from watching other humans for 12,000 years, there's a risk to that.
You know, you mentioned Abraham right now, and you mentioned religion, and of course today when we look at the world, religion is quarrelsome, divisive.
Genetics here could help us a little bit, because if you examine the genes right now of somebody like an Osama bin Laden and Abraham, the father of both the Jews and the Arabs, You probably won't be able to tell the difference between the genes.
They're both Semites, right?
Exactly.
And yet, we're fighting over which version of transcendence is ideologically accurate or not.
Because all religious experience is just that.
Transcendence, the emergence of...
Platonic truth, love, compassion, joy, equanimity, and the loss of the fear of death because the transcendent is not in time.
The rest is all theory.
You know, it's all ideology and philosophy and theology.
The religious experience is common to every religion and every gene expression of every human that has ever lived.
So let me, if I can, ask you some advice and thoughts that might be valuable for a If that common platonic blissful experience that seems to transcend all religions is there, and yet people still feel the need to have a codification of that, a series of rules.
And rules, again, are essentially watching people who seem to succeed in life and writing it down.
You know, that guy finished school, got a job, got married, took care of his family, lived long, and seemed to be happy.
I want to do that.
Which, by the way, is what we know statistically seems to result in people living longer, doing better, feeling that they did the right thing.
And that's in a lot of different religions expressed in very different ways because those rules are different in different tribes in different parts of the world.
Sometimes how you carry out your social...
They're relevant for the culture and the period and the age of that.
But we become intolerant of other people's rules because our rules work better in our culture.
Yeah, but they're still based on the same experience, the rules.
And, you know, self-righteous morality ultimately ends up being jealousy with a halo.
But morality is a byproduct of the experience.
It's not a codified set of rules like the Ten Commandments.
You know, how many people follow the Ten Commandments?
Or how many people say turn the other cheek?
But, you know, that comes only from the experience.
It cannot come from a codified set of rules.
Yeah.
What happens is the person, whether it's Jesus or Muhammad or whoever, or Abraham or Moses, has an experience and tries to explain it to the people who haven't had the experience and instead of wanting the experience, they buy into...
The rules and regulations which are a by-product of the experience.
And that creates problems ultimately because it's not easy to follow those rules just because you want to follow the rules.
