 Good day, May 40 here, so I'm just thinking for everyone I know who's become more religious, who's moved from secular to religious, I seem to know about 10 people who've moved from religious to less religious or secular or atheist. So thinking about the 7th Adventist kids I went to school with, I grew up at 7th Adventist colleges, Avondale College and Suffolk Union College. I went to 7th Adventist schools through the end of 8th grade. And out of those 7th Adventist kids I grew up with, it seems to me that 90% of them are no longer practicing Adventists. And other Orthodox Jews I know, most of the kids that they went to Yeshiva with are no longer Orthodox Jews. So there seem to be certain inevitable consequences from modernity. That as societies become more modern, they become less religious. And that means that less and less of life is explained or dealt with most effectively by religion. So for example, employers used to need religion to keep people moral, keep people in line. And then technology came along and so employers now have a pretty good way of keeping a handle on how productive you are. And so they don't need religion to keep an eye on you because when you're at work, when you're getting paid, there's technology that monitors your performance. So it used to be that employers looked to religion to whip people into moral shape, but now technology is doing that. It used to be that people's primary identity was their religion. But now for many people their primary identity is their hobby, sailboat racing. Or it's their profession, their surgeon or their personal injury attorney or their marriage and family therapist. The modern world is increasingly divided into specialist occupations and specialist hobbies. And people are increasingly separating themselves off to be with those who share their specialties. So many of the things that people used to turn to religion for, they now get their needs met more effectively elsewhere. So it used to be that people turn to religion for a feeling of comfort. Life is painful. Life is hard. And so we need to feel good. Much the reason that we do things is feelings. And there's nothing superior about thoughts compared to feelings. Thoughts cause feelings and feelings cause thoughts. And body tension or the lack thereof or bodily pain causes feelings and thoughts. And feelings and thoughts cause bodily tension and bodily pain. So they're all interacting with each other. Brave call by Elliot Blatt, I think the Kansas City cheese won the Super Bowl. So it used to be that people got excitement from religion. They'd go to church and it'd be a spectacular building with lots of gold and dead man hanging on the cross. And it'd be done in some mysterious language like Latin. And there'd be the sacred rites and it'd be the flesh and blood of Christ. Now people get much of their excitement from watching sports, from going to the movies. People used to turn to religion for a sense of meaning. Now people get meaning from the Lord of the Rings or from yoga or from a podcast or from the New York Times or from their book club. So people used to turn to religion for relief from suffering. Now people turn to a good therapist or to psychedelics or to 12 step programs or to music. There are all these other ways that people satiate their pain. And they find these other ways much more effective than religion. So how will religion sustain itself? So I don't believe that religion is going to disappear in advanced industrialized nations. But I think it's going to change form and effectively people will become less religious. But people will turn to religion for things that they can't get outside of religion. For example, I did Kundalini yoga for a couple of years and I had some amazing transcendental experiences in Kundalini yoga that just absolutely blew my mind. So people go to Kundalini yoga and they get their mind blown. They get a sense of the divine or a sense of the transcendent. So I think people will turn to a religion that provides them with spiritual highs. So for example, Pentecostals are doing really well. People go to a Pentecostal church and they have a genuine emotional experience at that church that shakes them up and it's an experience that they can't get elsewhere. That you can't get at the pub and you can't get at a sports stadium and you can't get watching TV or listening to music. That the Pentecostals have got something bottled up, their celebration style of Christian worship that is increasingly gaining adherence and sucking people away from mainstream Protestantism and mainstream. Catholicism because in the Pentecostal religion you get an experience and I think that's what people will turn to religion for going forward for experiences that they can't get elsewhere. So it's no longer socially acceptable to racially, religiously, ethnically discriminate. But you can join a particular religious group and your religious group and the community it forms will do the discrimination for you. Religion is cool, discrimination is not cool but if you allow your religion to do the discrimination for you then that's cool with everyone. So as a secular person it's really bad to be racist and ethnocentric and bigoted and homophobic and Islamophobic. But you can go join a traditional form of Christianity or a traditional form of Judaism. Then you can be as bigoted and discriminatory as you like but you can just couch it in religious terms. Oh we're just trying to create a sacred community here guys. So in the process of creating these sacred communities you get to do all the discrimination that as a secular person would be considered quite unacceptable. Also I suspect that there will become religious opportunities for psychedelics and other drugs and transcendental experiences and practices that are otherwise socially unacceptable. So racial discrimination, religious discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination are illegal in this country. But if you practice them in the context of your religion you can usually get away with it. You just have to be careful how you phrase things. So it's unacceptable to be a bigger and a racist and Islamophobic but if you do it in the course of your religion then usually you can get away with that. So I think many people will turn to religion to provide the solace and the closeness that traditional rural community provided. So you want that small country town feeling where everybody's neighborly. Well you can get that at church. You can get that at synagogue and for all I know you can get that at mosque and some other religious facilities. So I think experiential highs, maybe psychedelic highs, maybe other types of drug highs, experiential highs, you know, touching the transcendent and getting to create a holy community. What religious people would call a holy community, more pragmatic people will simply call a community that licenses discrimination. So are there shrooms in the synagogue? Well I think we're in the midst of some kind of psychedelic revolution and it increasingly looks like psychedelics will be approved for treatment of depression and other mental illnesses. Eventually MDMA and other psychedelics are going to be approved. Ketamine is approved to knock people out for surgery but there are off-label uses for depression and so if a drug is permitted for one thing it can increasingly be used for those off-label uses. So yeah I think there are a lot of Jews in the shroom revolution, in the psychedelic revolution and I think religion will be a way to practice all sorts of things that are otherwise socially unacceptable. So people will turn to religion when religion is providing them something that they can't get elsewhere such as close-knit community. That feeling of rural, good naveliness, folksiness, recapture, 18th century values, you can get that in religion. You can get transcendental experiences that you can't really get anywhere else. You can have a charismatic leader who you feel like connects you to God and you can find that probably much more likely in a religious setting than in a secular one. So why will people be religious in the decades and centuries ahead to get things that they can't get elsewhere? And so what can possibly religion provide that you can't get elsewhere? And it's permission to do all sorts of things that you really want to do but if you give a secular explanation for what you're doing would be socially unacceptable. And if you can dress them up in religious language, religious concepts or within religious community, then it's cool. So for example, Jews have often benefited from the high trust among Jews so it made it easier to do financial transactions and diamond transactions and special gems and gold and other sort of deals across country lines because Jews had a high trust. So where can you go where people trust each other? You probably find more of those high trust communities in religion. In America, there's a steady progression to less and less social trust, less and less of a sense that we share a moral universe, less and less coherence. So in a society that is splintering where we feel less in common with each other, where we have less trust in each other, we will probably have more incentive to go join a group that restores coherence and social trust and probably the most effective way to develop and sustain these groups, particularly over generations, will be within the context of religion. Luke, if you thought mushrooms would take you to the next level, would you try them? I'd be open to it. So my natural inclination is very anti-drug including anti-psychedelics but there's so much research coming out about the positive effects of psychedelics that even though it goes against my natural inclinations, maybe there'd be something there. So I would not try something that had a significant downside. I would not try something that had high risks of frying your brain, doing permanent damage, developing a nasty habit, destroying your work ethic, such as marijuana often seems to do. Josh says America is in a super-hot, reputational civil war. Well, the more difficult times get, the more likely people will turn to religion. So let's say global warming is catastrophic and is going to happen in the next 10 years. The world as we know it will be washed away because of climate change. Well, in that kind of high pressure, dour, dire environment, people will understandably turn to religion. So if we have more wars, more environmental catastrophes, more economic dislocation, as life becomes harder, people are more likely to turn to religion. So in Australia, from my two months in Australia, life seems really, really easygoing and quite pleasant. The most common Australian sayings are, she'll be right mate, no worries mate, no walking furries, no effing worries mate. That's alright, she'll be right. It's a language of easygoing. I don't think I heard one angry word. I don't think I heard one blaring car horn when I was in Australia. Now I walk around in Beverly Hills and I'm hearing car horns and anger. Luke, if you were to try mushrooms, would you do so alone or as part of a group? I would do a lot, a lot, a lot of research and I talk to a lot of people and most likely I would do it as part of a group. So I think you would have more beneficial healing experiences when you do them as a group rather than as alone. Because when you do things as a group and you're all on the same page, you get tremendous emotional energy from it and you get connection to each other and out of connection always comes an ethic. So you do things as a group, you get energised, you get connected and out of it comes an ethic where you're going to be much more likely to look after each other. So if you do an event with other people, it's much more likely to be powerful and to have a deeper impression on you as opposed to just doing it alone. Just as I would take a very low dose of Psylocybein, that's a mushroom. So yeah, I'm nowhere close to doing mushrooms, we're just talking theoretically here. So the world is a much more complicated place than I know and so I've got these very needy, very strong anti-drug reactions that have been kind of hammered into me from my Seventh-day Adventist upbringing but I increasingly see news articles about this coming psychedelic revolution or psychedelic revolution that's already here and so if the evidence shows the various forms of psychedelics are doing a tremendous amount of good with a very low downside, then I have to accept truth from any source.