The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1133 - Dennis McKenna

00:00:01.000 Four, three, two, one.

00:00:06.000 And we're live.

00:00:08.000 Hello, Dennis.

00:00:09.000 Hi, Joe.

00:00:11.000 Great to see you, as always.

00:00:12.000 It's great to be here, as always.

00:00:14.000 It's great to be here.

00:00:15.000 So tell me about this, these cards you gave me, and what this is all about.

00:00:20.000 Okay, well, this is an interesting project.

00:00:22.000 This is about the RV Heraclitus, which was associated with the Institute for Ecotechnics, which is...

00:00:31.000 Try to keep this close to your face.

00:00:33.000 Okay.

00:00:34.000 Further associated with, you know, how do I explain it?

00:00:40.000 It was actually a theater company called the Theater of All Possibilities.

00:00:44.000 But the Institute for Ecotechnics was started in the early 70s.

00:00:49.000 And they built a ship, this Chinese junk, essentially, with a ferro-concrete hull. 1.00

00:00:56.000 And my connection was they have cruised the world essentially since 1973 looking into different things relevant to global ecology.

00:01:07.000 They've done sampling in the Antarctic and in 1981 they decided to go to the Amazon.

00:01:13.000 And I was doing my graduate work in Iquitos at that time.

00:01:17.000 So that was my connection with the Institute of Ecotechnics. 0.94

00:01:21.000 And, you know, at the time, I thought these people are nuts. 0.98

00:01:28.000 I mean, they were kind of nuts and they were very naive about what they were doing as far as doing ethnobotanical work. 0.98

00:01:36.000 Not that I wasn't naive about it at the time, but I had a better handle on it than they did. 0.89

00:01:41.000 Anyway, that was the original connection.

00:01:44.000 And the same group, years after I had more or less kind of severed—I didn't really sever my relationship, but I kind of distanced myself from them— But then that same group went on in the 80s to build Biosphere 2,

00:02:01.000 which you've probably heard of.

00:02:03.000 They had financing for Biosphere 2, so they'd gone to a whole other level of ambition and madness.

00:02:13.000 And Biosphere 2 went off track.

00:02:16.000 Explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.

00:02:18.000 Well, Biosphere 2 was the idea of building a terrestrial environment that was completely shut off from everything and that was self-sustaining.

00:02:27.000 And it was a huge complex.

00:02:29.000 It was a big series of domes, really.

00:02:32.000 Each dome replicated some earthly biome, like the desert, the rainforest, the ocean, and so on.

00:02:41.000 And the idea was that it was a dry run for building a Mars colony, you know, or some planetary colony.

00:02:51.000 And the idea was Mars.

00:02:53.000 And they put people into this environment for like two years at a time.

00:03:00.000 To see if they could make it work, if they could really have a balanced ecosystem.

00:03:05.000 Well, as it turned out, it didn't work so well.

00:03:08.000 But they learned a great deal from this.

00:03:10.000 And they also got a lot of adverse publicity because I think the science establishment in a way became kind of jealous.

00:03:20.000 And, you know, like these people, they don't know anything about what they're doing.

00:03:23.000 They got $600 million to build this?

00:03:26.000 What the hell?

00:03:27.000 Yeah.

00:03:27.000 So I got a lot of criticism, but the fact is a lot of good science came out of this, and they're still going.

00:03:36.000 And the interesting thing is they've had their fingers in many pies.

00:03:41.000 You know, they have a gallery and a hotel in London called the October Gallery.

00:03:46.000 I always stay there if I'm in London.

00:03:48.000 They have a publishing company, the Synergetic Press, based in Santa Fe.

00:03:54.000 That's who published this book, ultimately.

00:03:57.000 So it's kind of like 30 years later, what goes around comes around.

00:04:01.000 And the book is Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.

00:04:07.000 And it's labeled from 1967 to 2017. Right.

00:04:14.000 And the story behind this is, just to complete the Heraclitus story for a minute.

00:04:21.000 So the Heraclitus has been plying the ocean more or less continuously since 1973. And they...

00:04:31.000 We're good to go.

00:04:56.000 Particularly the founder, a guy named John Allen, who's now, I think he's in his 80s.

00:05:02.000 But he was the visionary behind it.

00:05:05.000 And without knowing a whole lot, they just went ahead and did it, you know?

00:05:11.000 So in that spirit, you have to hand it to them.

00:05:14.000 And they have...

00:05:15.000 They've done incredible things over that period of time.

00:05:18.000 And so it's a great story and it's worth attention and, you know, it's up to you.

00:05:25.000 I mean, it's up to you if you want to bring her on or somebody, but it's really romantic.

00:05:32.000 You know, this is science in the true spirit of discovery, you know.

00:05:37.000 And what are they trying to do?

00:05:38.000 Amateurs.

00:05:39.000 Right.

00:05:39.000 That is fascinating.

00:05:41.000 What are they trying to do?

00:05:42.000 What kind of research are they trying to do in the ocean?

00:05:44.000 All kinds of things.

00:05:45.000 They've been sampling coral reefs.

00:05:48.000 They've been sampling, looking at, you know, global warming in both the Arctic and the Antarctic.

00:05:56.000 They, of course, in 81, they wanted to do ethnobotany in the Amazon and And they had Schultes on their board of directors.

00:06:04.000 And the director of the expedition was Wade Davis.

00:06:07.000 And I was doing my graduate work at that time.

00:06:11.000 And we knew they were coming.

00:06:12.000 So as a result of that, I was able to join the expedition.

00:06:17.000 And Wade and I, at the time, he was selected by them as the chief science officer.

00:06:23.000 And by the time I got there, he was getting a little disillusioned with them.

00:06:30.000 And I guess you could say the personal dynamic was kind of strange.

00:06:35.000 And like if you read my book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, there's a couple of chapters.

00:06:40.000 There's a chapter on this.

00:06:41.000 But over time, even Wade changed his mind.

00:06:44.000 And I now get the larger picture of what they were trying to do.

00:06:49.000 And, you know, it's a real story.

00:06:53.000 I mean, these people didn't recognize boundaries.

00:06:55.000 That's the thing.

00:06:57.000 And because they were theater people, they actually understood, which I didn't at the time, that what they were doing and their whole effort was really a performance experience.

00:07:09.000 On a global level, they did all these things kind of realizing that this was the theater of all possibilities.

00:07:16.000 And they had a theater in Austin, Texas by that name.

00:07:21.000 So it's a wild story.

00:07:24.000 It sounds like a freaky crew.

00:07:25.000 It's a freaky crew.

00:07:26.000 And that was the point.

00:07:27.000 Well, some of the people...

00:07:30.000 That were on that 1981 expedition are now – I mean they're still associated with it.

00:07:36.000 So it has some longevity.

00:07:37.000 Others have passed on.

00:07:39.000 Others have left in disgust or they had enough.

00:07:44.000 But I was able to reconnect with people that run – they have this ranch in Santa Fe called the Synergia Ranch.

00:07:56.000 I think?

00:08:13.000 They republished The Ayahuasca Reader, which originally Eduardo Luna and Stephen White had published.

00:08:21.000 Well, they expanded that and they published that as a very beautiful, you know, redo, essentially a second edition.

00:08:31.000 Very nice work.

00:08:32.000 Then Don Lattin, who's not that well known, but he's written...

00:08:37.000 Several books about the history of psychedelics and the people involved.

00:08:42.000 And he wrote a book that they published called Changing Our Minds, ironically, about the same time Michael Pollan brought his book out.

00:08:51.000 So Michael Pollan, being who he is, got all the attention.

00:08:55.000 Don's got very little.

00:08:57.000 Still a good book, you know.

00:08:59.000 So they're good people.

00:09:01.000 I've decided that some of my...

00:09:04.000 Yeah.

00:09:14.000 Which they never bothered to explain.

00:09:17.000 It's like they never said, oh, well, we're acting funny because we do things differently than you do.

00:09:23.000 And I was like, what?

00:09:25.000 Well, I'm sure they evolved, too.

00:09:27.000 I mean, we're talking about 1981, right?

00:09:29.000 They have evolved.

00:09:31.000 And they learned a lot through this Biosphere 2 project, which was a real lesson to everybody.

00:09:40.000 But anyway...

00:09:42.000 So because they still existed, and really because of the resurrection of the ayahuasca reader, that had been my recent contact with them.

00:09:52.000 So when I decided to do this book, I thought, they're a good candidate to publish this book.

00:09:57.000 And they totally got it.

00:09:59.000 They took it on.

00:10:01.000 They've done an amazing job.

00:10:03.000 And this book, or this set, as you know, You know the genesis of it because you had a lot to do with it.

00:10:11.000 When I was here last year, the back story is in 1967, the US government, the National Institute of Mental Health, of all people, put together a conference in San Francisco in 1967 called the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.

00:10:32.000 And nobody noticed.

00:10:34.000 It was a private conference.

00:10:36.000 It was not open to the public.

00:10:38.000 The only thing the public ever got out of it was the symposium proceedings, which is the first book there.

00:10:45.000 And I was very heavily influenced by that book because somehow or other it came into my hands at age 17. You know, bored teenager living in Paonia, Colorado, wishing that I was with my brother in Berkeley,

00:11:01.000 where all the action was at the time.

00:11:04.000 And I'm like, what is this book, you know?

00:11:07.000 So I totally, I devoured it.

00:11:10.000 And about the same time, I discovered the teachings of Don Juan, which my brother gave to me for my 18th birthday.

00:11:18.000 And although much in there is probably fiction, Those two books gave me a complementary perspective.

00:11:28.000 The teachings of Don Juan was the ethnographic lens through which you could look at the use of psychedelics and which I kind of filled in those spaces.

00:11:40.000 Then this book came out and it was like – and I knew who Schultes was.

00:11:45.000 I knew who a few of these people were at the time.

00:11:47.000 Schultes and Schulgen and Andrew Weil were actually on the original faculty.

00:11:53.000 And so when the book fell into my hands at age 17, I was very excited and I read the whole thing.

00:12:01.000 And this is what really helped me focus my career.

00:12:05.000 It made me aware of That maybe I could make a career out of ethnopharmacology.

00:12:11.000 And in my very naive 17-year-old teenage brain, I thought, wow, man, I can get paid to get stoned.

00:12:21.000 It was in part that, but there was more to it.

00:12:25.000 But that's what led me to pursue that career.

00:12:28.000 And so this book...

00:12:32.000 Well, the war on drugs scotched all that.

00:12:43.000 They became embarrassed that they had anything to do with a conference like this.

00:12:48.000 What was the goal of the conference?

00:12:50.000 Is that clear?

00:12:51.000 Of this original conference?

00:12:54.000 Oh, for people to kind of report on their work and sort of mark the state of the art in psychoethnopharmacology at the time.

00:13:03.000 So the first book was really where things like The Snuffs...

00:13:18.000 When you're saying the schnapps, do you mean like some of the more psychedelic schnapps?

00:13:22.000 Yeah, the psychedelic schnapps.

00:13:25.000 Is that one?

00:13:26.000 That's an orally active form.

00:13:27.000 But yeah, varrola and then anadonanthera, which is the, what are they called?

00:13:34.000 Yopo, I think.

00:13:36.000 There were reports on all of these things.

00:13:39.000 They stuffed them up their nose? 0.78

00:13:41.000 Is that the deal?

00:13:42.000 That's the deal.

00:13:43.000 Yeah.

00:13:44.000 And this is the first book, the 67 book was the first one where there was a collection of the leading experts at the time.

00:13:53.000 Well, I think.

00:14:12.000 A Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist and pharmacologist.

00:14:18.000 And he originally worked in Budapest and eventually he moved to the States and became pretty high up in the National Institutes of Health.

00:14:30.000 He was the director.

00:14:32.000 Of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the late 50s.

00:14:37.000 But the interesting thing is before that, he was just a researcher at a hospital in Budapest.

00:14:45.000 He applied to Sandoz to get LSD. He wanted to do research with LSD. They refused to give it to him because he was behind the Iron Curtain.

00:14:55.000 So he synthesized DMT, being a chemist, and he had to determine if it was actually a psychedelic.

00:15:05.000 So in the grand tradition, he did that by self-injecting himself.

00:15:11.000 So he's a true pioneer and I invited him to the conference.

00:15:16.000 So he's the first person to definitively show that DMT was a psychedelic.

00:15:21.000 He's now 95. He's in great shape.

00:15:25.000 I invited him to the conference but he said, well, I'm 95. I don't go anywhere anymore.

00:15:31.000 But he submitted a very nice video introduction to it.

00:15:36.000 And the other interesting thing that he did, after the 67 conference, he was thinking, well, what's going on?

00:15:43.000 And what is it with the hippies and all the psychedelics?

00:15:47.000 And so his supervisor said, well, Steve, why don't you go over to Haight-Ashbury and hang out for a while?

00:15:53.000 So he did and he submitted a paper called The Scientist Among the Hippies.

00:16:00.000 And they wouldn't let him publish.

00:16:02.000 They said, you can't publish this.

00:16:05.000 So it sat in his drawer for 50 years.

00:16:08.000 When this book came along, he said, I have something I'll submit here.

00:16:12.000 I don't care if they – it doesn't matter anymore.

00:16:15.000 So one of the papers in this second volume is his original 67 paper.

00:16:22.000 So the second volume is kind of – because the government didn't step up to the plate like they said they would – There was no follow-up conferences and for a long time I wanted to do a follow-up conference.

00:16:38.000 I wanted to do it on the 30th anniversary in 97. It never happened.

00:16:43.000 Time passes.

00:16:45.000 So 2017 was the 50th anniversary.

00:16:48.000 It all fell together all of a sudden.

00:16:51.000 I found a venue in the UK, a beautiful country house that was called Tiringham Hall that was run by One of our friends who shares our perspective, he made that available.

00:17:05.000 We put the word out.

00:17:07.000 We got support to produce the conference.

00:17:10.000 So we brought about 16 people to Tiringham in England, spent three days presenting.

00:17:19.000 And those videos are all up on the web.

00:17:22.000 I'll send you the link.

00:17:23.000 That's open access.

00:17:25.000 The other thing that we couldn't do in 67 that we did in, you know, 2017, there was no Facebook live streaming.

00:17:32.000 Well, all our videos were Facebook live streamed.

00:17:36.000 We had 60,000 people watching these lectures at some points, you know.

00:17:41.000 I mean, so that's amazing.

00:17:44.000 That's incredible.

00:17:44.000 And that created excitement.

00:17:46.000 And then we basically...

00:17:48.000 Paid for the book by pre-selling, pre-selling it, and a lot of people stepped up and ordered.

00:17:56.000 A lot of people were very patient because I was, you know, I thought, oh, this will be out by Christmas, right?

00:18:03.000 Well, no, it's a big project.

00:18:05.000 So it took six months longer than I thought, but now it's out there, and hopefully it'll be a A landmark in the field like the first one was.

00:18:18.000 And what we wanted to do to honor the first one was reprint the first one along with the second one.

00:18:24.000 So that's why it's two books.

00:18:26.000 We did a high resolution scan of the original book and reprinted that one.

00:18:34.000 Doesn't it make you think, imagine if Nixon wasn't president back then, what could have been done?

00:18:39.000 What if they didn't have that sweeping 1970 psychedelic act where they made everything illegal?

00:18:47.000 What if they continued with this stuff?

00:18:49.000 Who knows where we would be today?

00:18:51.000 Yeah, we can ask that question about a lot of things.

00:18:53.000 What if that didn't happen?

00:18:55.000 Like the psychedelic research that's happening now, it's taken 40 years to get back to it.

00:19:04.000 Basically, the psychedelic research is a lot of the same thing was going on back in the even late 50s and 60s.

00:19:14.000 What's going on now is they're repeating a lot of that, but with more rigorous experimental design, with better controls and all that.

00:19:22.000 But it's the same stuff.

00:19:24.000 You know, which is wonderful.

00:19:26.000 I mean, I'm all for it to see this work done.

00:19:30.000 I also have, you know, plenty to say about the limitations of that strictly clinical, you know, sort of medical approach.

00:19:43.000 You know, organizations like MAPS and HEFTER have to work within the constraints of what's possible.

00:19:51.000 But I think in some ways they, you know, they force themselves to, they're forced to put on blinders in a certain way to what else is possible.

00:20:02.000 You know, for example, the way that ayahuasca I think it's important to pursue that work,

00:20:18.000 but because you can't synthesize ayahuasca like you can psilocybin or MDMA or These things that under clinical trials, it's much more difficult to study within the constraints of a phase one, you know, clinical trial.

00:20:33.000 But in fact, ayahuasca is touching, I think, far more lives than, say...

00:20:40.000 Well, I can't say about mushrooms because mushrooms are a lot out there.

00:20:45.000 But, you know, the potential, the impact that it's having on society is much greater because people are rediscovering this.

00:20:54.000 And people are, I think, reaching out for...

00:20:59.000 They're reaching out for anything that will work.

00:21:02.000 As a society, we are spiritually bereft and I think there's a pervasive sense of despair and a feeling of, what would you call it, spiritual impoverishment or something as we see that all of our institutions are becoming,

00:21:20.000 you know, we're seeing behind the curtain and realizing that they're empty.

00:21:27.000 They don't really have anything to offer on the spiritual level, especially religions. 0.92

00:21:32.000 People are rejecting religions as the sort of shell game that it is.

00:21:38.000 Empty promises that don't deliver.

00:21:40.000 And I think that's a lot of why people are reaching out for these plant medicines.

00:21:46.000 And going to South America to have ayahuasca or finding them in their own community because people crave...

00:22:00.000 Well, the thing about psychedelics, what you just said is so important that they deliver.

00:22:06.000 They deliver.

00:22:07.000 If you're skeptical about religion, and, you know, there's some people that get a lot out of religion, that's fine.

00:22:13.000 But if you're skeptical about it, it's not going to fulfill your promises.

00:22:18.000 It's not going to give you anything that you can say, oh, my God, this is irrefutable.

00:22:24.000 Psychedelic experiences are pretty irrefutable that something's happening that's titanic.

00:22:29.000 It's so immense and bizarre and beyond the normal that it's hard to just dismiss it.

00:22:36.000 And the only people that really do dismiss it are the people that haven't experienced it.

00:22:39.000 Exactly.

00:22:40.000 Exactly.

00:22:42.000 I mean, I sometimes say psychedelics are the antidote to faith.

00:22:47.000 You don't need faith to take a psychedelic.

00:22:52.000 What you need is courage.

00:22:54.000 Religions offer faith, which is basically saying, here's a list of things that you need to believe without question.

00:23:01.000 And if that's your inclination, fine.

00:23:04.000 But most of us are more skeptical.

00:23:06.000 We need something tangible, something more tangible.

00:23:10.000 So I think faith is – I mean that's how religions entice you to believe.

00:23:19.000 But I think that in a way it's deceptive.

00:23:23.000 Why do you have to believe when you can – In that intensely personal encounter between you and a plant teacher or you and a molecule, you can experience for yourself.

00:23:36.000 You don't need faith.

00:23:37.000 You can say, I know that this exists and the realms that it opens up for you are real because I've experienced it.

00:23:48.000 And I think faith, I think that we, in a way, At least the Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism and Islam, to a certain extent, have poisoned the Western mind and encouraged our separation from nature and basically propagated this idea that we're separated from nature and we own it and we have every right to dominate it. 0.98

00:24:16.000 And we're seeing the consequences of that.

00:24:19.000 We have to rediscover this indigenous perspective that we are part of nature.

00:24:26.000 We're properly framed.

00:24:30.000 We should be symbiotic with nature.

00:24:32.000 It's all about symbiosis.

00:24:34.000 It's all about collaborating together.

00:24:36.000 with the global community of species to advance consciousness not just of our species but of the whole community of sentient species.

00:24:46.000 This is what the psychedelics can do and I think this is what the psychedelics are desperately reaching out to our species And anybody who watches my podcast or listens to me is, this is my rap. 0.80

00:25:01.000 Wake up, you monkeys. 0.96

00:25:04.000 You're wrecking this place. 0.99

00:25:05.000 It's that simple.

00:25:06.000 You're wrecking this place.

00:25:07.000 And that's because you have to re-understand your relationship to nature. 0.90

00:25:12.000 Realize that, number one, you monkeys aren't running things.

00:25:16.000 The plants are running things, basically, because they're sustaining life on Earth.

00:25:21.000 Other things are...

00:25:22.000 You know, that's part of it.

00:25:24.000 And then once you wake up to the fact that, you know, we're in a participatory, collaborative role with the community of species, then we have to change a whole lot of things that we're not doing right now because we're certainly not,

00:25:41.000 you know, developing sustainable ways to live on a global scale.

00:25:46.000 And we're seeing the consequences of this now. 0.93

00:25:50.000 What's dismaying, besides the fact that it's happening, is that there is so much denial, so much refusal to recognize this on the part of the people that supposedly are running the show, and they're willfully ignorant, 0.93

00:26:06.000 and this is a problem. 0.80

00:26:08.000 So, you know, I think a lot of people...

00:26:14.000 Will agree with me.

00:26:15.000 A lot of people who listen to this show will agree with me when I say, I've pretty much given up on politics.

00:26:22.000 Politics seems to me irrevocably broken.

00:26:26.000 Many other institutions are dysfunctional, if not broken.

00:26:30.000 I mean, science is corrupt and government is corrupt.

00:26:35.000 Corporatism is, you know, these are all flawed systems because they're not...

00:26:43.000 They don't have a base of compassion and recognition of the interrelatedness of all things.

00:26:51.000 And psychedelics are a catalyst for waking up.

00:26:55.000 And so once people have that experience, then their perspective is changed.

00:27:01.000 And if they're influential, they can go out and make change on a global scale.

00:27:07.000 I think it's so important that Michael Pollan put out that book because the guy who's a mainstream straight-laced guy who's written about architecture and agriculture and all these different things where people really respect his opinions and his work, that this guy has not just written this book but has also gone out on a limb and had a bunch of different psychedelic experiences in controlled settings and talks about them and the profound impact that it had on his,

00:27:34.000 at one point, skeptical mind.

00:27:35.000 He was very skeptical about What these things were.

00:27:39.000 Yeah.

00:27:40.000 Though I love Michael Pollan.

00:27:42.000 I have for a long time.

00:27:44.000 I'm sorry.

00:27:46.000 Okay.

00:27:47.000 I don't want any angry tweets.

00:27:49.000 No, I've loved his work for a long time.

00:27:52.000 And I'm really delighted that he's come out and written about this.

00:27:56.000 There are some things about his book, I have to say, that...

00:28:00.000 I'm a little disappointed, but then I also have to say I'm only about a little over halfway through it.

00:28:06.000 What was disappointing?

00:28:07.000 Well, so far he hasn't really emphasized or said much about—he sort of writes it from the perspective that all of this started with the discovery of LSD in 1943, and then that was the psychedelic era.

00:28:23.000 They're indigenous traditions, thousands of years old.

00:28:26.000 Yeah, he should have talked to you.

00:28:27.000 He hasn't really talked about those things.

00:28:29.000 Well, he knows they exist.

00:28:30.000 Did he talk to you at all?

00:28:32.000 He did not, actually. 0.97

00:28:33.000 That's ridiculous. 0.74

00:28:34.000 Yeah. 0.84

00:28:34.000 Which I was also, of course, extremely jealous and angry and upset that he didn't talk to me. 0.84

00:28:39.000 I mean, what the hell am I, you know?

00:28:42.000 But you've been banging at the bushes for 60 years now?

00:28:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:46.000 Well, come on, man.

00:28:47.000 Seriously, I'm not sure why he did that, if that was a conscious decision, but I'm kind of disappointed because I think I have a perspective that, you know, I have some things to say that so far haven't been said in this book and things that Michael Pollan would completely relate to.

00:29:08.000 You know, he's the one that brought up the idea that, you know, with respect to like plant domestication and our relationship with our food plants, you know, we think we're growing, we're cultivating plants.

00:29:20.000 Actually, plants are cultivating us.

00:29:22.000 You know, this is plants program for world domination. 1.00

00:29:26.000 And the same is true of all these teacher plants.

00:29:29.000 This is why they're out there, you know, on the global stage now.

00:29:35.000 And he didn't Maybe he will get to it.

00:29:41.000 Only mildly.

00:29:42.000 Jealous.

00:29:43.000 I wish he had talked to me.

00:29:45.000 On the other hand, what he has written is going to be important.

00:29:50.000 It's going to be influential.

00:29:51.000 I mean, this will be influential to a small number of people.

00:29:55.000 Pollan's book is going to bring it to the attention of millions.

00:29:59.000 Yeah, it's going to open people's eyes and refresh the way people view this whole subject.

00:30:06.000 I think when you look at, when you're talking about Ancient cultures and the use of psychedelics going back thousands and thousands of years and then this dip somewhere around 1970 where it almost seems to have gotten down to a very low hum,

00:30:21.000 but now the drums are beating again.

00:30:23.000 Now it's coming back.

00:30:25.000 Now it's coming back.

00:30:26.000 I'm really fascinated and excited by that because I think this is...

00:30:31.000 Me too.

00:30:31.000 I don't think it's the answer to everything, but I think it's the glue.

00:30:35.000 I think there's a thing about the psychedelic experience that forces you to recognize that you have these pre-established ideas of what things are, and that you've kind of put them in these boxes, and you've sort of pushed it away,

00:30:52.000 and you're like, well, I've defined what a city is, and I'm just going to put that over there, and now I know what that is.

00:30:57.000 I'm not going to think about that anymore.

00:30:59.000 I've defined what a road is.

00:31:01.000 I've defined...

00:31:02.000 I remember after one of my first DMT experiences, just sitting around looking at roads differently.

00:31:09.000 Like, I was on a road. 0.99

00:31:11.000 I was like, this is the craziest shit ever. 0.98

00:31:12.000 We've decided that it's normal to lay this hard surface down on the ground so we could roll these... 0.99

00:31:19.000 Fire-breathing pieces of metal.

00:31:22.000 Yeah, it's so strange, isn't it?

00:31:25.000 But it was before that it was just a road.

00:31:27.000 It was always a road.

00:31:28.000 But after that it became this weird symptom of what we're doing by erecting these massive structures and cities and that We need this ground in order for us to use these vehicles on.

00:31:42.000 But in the process of doing that, we've sort of marred the landscape with it everywhere.

00:31:48.000 Well, psychedelics do give us the chance to rethink a lot of things.

00:31:53.000 I think we've talked before about Simon Powell's work.

00:31:59.000 He writes about psilocybin, wrote The Psilocybin Solution, and that was his first book and I think his latest book.

00:32:06.000 It's the magic mushroom explorer.

00:32:36.000 I think?

00:32:55.000 It lets in just enough of the external world that you can relate it to prior experiences, what you think you know, and you construct this artificial model of reality.

00:33:07.000 And that's what you inhabit.

00:33:09.000 And I've said this many times, maybe worse than pollen, maybe better, but I talk about how we're living in a hallucination, essentially, that's constructed by our brains.

00:33:21.000 And in order to just deal with all the information that is available, it has to really restrict it.

00:33:29.000 It has to put a choke on it so that what does get in can make sense.

00:33:34.000 That's fine for ordinary consciousness, but you are prone to overlook things about reality that are important.

00:33:43.000 And psychedelics temporarily give you an opportunity to lower those, lower those mechanisms, that default network or sometimes called neural gating.

00:33:54.000 If you're in a safe place where you don't have to worry about your safety, you know, there is no saber-toothed tiger who are going to come get you, you know, and so you don't have to worry about your safety, then you can just relax into it and you can appreciate that.

00:34:09.000 I think?

00:34:32.000 Some of these folks admit it and others deny it, but it's true. 1.00

00:34:37.000 So there are many, many things we can learn from psychedelics.

00:34:41.000 That's only one of them, but from a scientist's perspective, that's an important one.

00:34:46.000 One of the things I want to do is create a system, a situation where you can bring specialists together in a discipline and Say, mathematics, or quantum physics, or astronomy, or, you know, even whatever art,

00:35:03.000 and have these collective sessions together, and then let people share their insight.

00:35:12.000 Essentially, creative solving, problem solving, or creative sessions.

00:35:18.000 You know, and that's the other thing I think we're looking for, you know, we need to develop a context in which these things can happen.

00:35:29.000 And that's one of the, you know, that's one of the restrictions of the strictly clinical approach that I chafe against, you know, because they have to be I think?

00:36:06.000 But it goes beyond that.

00:36:07.000 They are learning tools and teaching tools.

00:36:11.000 And, you know, you begin to see some of this in the work that Roland Griffith is doing.

00:36:19.000 You know, he's been able to get approval for people to take psilocybin for spiritual development, which is not exactly an illness for actual spiritual insight.

00:36:31.000 So that's a start.

00:36:32.000 And he's approved to do this?

00:36:33.000 He's approved to do it.

00:36:34.000 And who approved this and how is it?

00:36:36.000 The FDA approved it.

00:36:37.000 He's got a clinical study going on right now where he's recruiting religious professionals, people who are pastors, priests, rabbis, imams, other types of religious professionals,

00:36:52.000 and putting them through his protocol.

00:36:55.000 And it's having a tremendous impact on the way they view their profession and the way they view religion.

00:37:03.000 That's fantastic.

00:37:04.000 Yeah.

00:37:05.000 It really is a shame that we need an illness to treat before you allow someone to have this potentially mind-expanding experience.

00:37:12.000 But it's almost like not allowing people to take vitamins unless they're really sick.

00:37:17.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:37:18.000 And like Bob Jesse says very eloquently, we need to find contexts in which we can use Yeah.

00:37:42.000 Yeah.

00:38:02.000 It's a beautiful book.

00:38:04.000 Especially after your talk, after our show, we only published a thousand copies of this.

00:38:10.000 Oh, it's gone.

00:38:11.000 It'll be sold out.

00:38:12.000 It's a collector's edition, and that was on purpose.

00:38:15.000 We can always print more.

00:38:18.000 It really is beautifully done.

00:38:19.000 It is a beautiful book on every level, and the people that contributed to the second volume.

00:38:27.000 I didn't want all the same people that always come to these conferences and always say the same things.

00:38:34.000 So some of the people in there are not that well-known, you know, but they were known to me, and I felt that they had important things to say.

00:38:44.000 So, you know, some of them are known within the community, and others are pretty obscure.

00:38:50.000 But, you know, there's always this, you know, this passionate amateur-type person who maybe they don't have credentials, but they have...

00:39:00.000 Incredible knowledge up in their head, and they're completely obsessed with this stuff.

00:39:06.000 And there's a few of those people in there, too.

00:39:09.000 So it was really satisfying to be able to do it and make it worth people's time.

00:39:18.000 I was able to pay for, well, me and my supporters.

00:39:23.000 A lot of it came through the Institute of Ecotechnics, actually.

00:39:26.000 That Turned out to be a good nonprofit channel through which we could get donations, grants essentially.

00:39:34.000 We didn't want it to go through Hefter because it might look like a conflict of interest, silly notion.

00:39:40.000 But because of that, we were able to pull this off.

00:39:46.000 We produced the book.

00:39:47.000 We even gave everybody a modest honorarium.

00:39:50.000 So that's the way conferences are supposed to be.

00:39:53.000 But what's happening for me now, and actually predates this and has been for a long time, is I've been doing a lot of work in Peru.

00:40:06.000 Really, I've been hosting retreats for ayahuasca since about 2012. And that's been very gratifying work.

00:40:16.000 I've seen transformations in people.

00:40:19.000 I see what a difference it makes to create the right environment and get people able to come in a safe place.

00:40:30.000 And my whole approach, and the people I work with, our whole approach is, we're not here to tell you what's supposed to happen.

00:40:38.000 We're here to create an optimum condition and you work it out.

00:40:43.000 This is a dialogue between you and the plant teacher.

00:40:48.000 It's not the shaman.

00:40:49.000 The shaman, if he's a good shaman, facilitates that process but does not try to control it.

00:40:56.000 He's there for support.

00:40:58.000 He or she is there for support.

00:41:01.000 What really happens is the interaction between – I mean, the medicines are the real teachers.

00:41:08.000 And we're here to facilitate that and also to tell people if they need help integrating it or figuring it out, that's fine.

00:41:18.000 But that's different than saying, well, this means that and you're supposed to think this about it.

00:41:23.000 You're supposed to think that.

00:41:26.000 I mean you're supposed to learn to use your own mind to think for yourself.

00:41:32.000 So the extension of this is that I'm in the process of, I guess, manifesting this idea.

00:41:45.000 And what I'm working on now is I want to create an academy in the Sacred Valley, which is an academy of natural philosophy.

00:41:58.000 And so I have a name for it because a lot of people have told me that, you know, your name has got to be in this.

00:42:08.000 And I'm a kind of a selfie-facing guy, but I recognize that I have a certain iconic recognition.

00:42:15.000 So okay, if that's what it takes, I'll do it.

00:42:19.000 So what we're going to call it is the McKenna Academy for Natural Philosophy.

00:42:26.000 By academy, you're saying you have a physical structure?

00:42:29.000 We will have a physical structure, yeah, and maybe more than one.

00:42:33.000 But we have identified an initial place that will be the physical location for it.

00:42:40.000 And it's a kind of school.

00:42:42.000 It is, in fact, the first psychedelic university, if you will, since Eleusis was sacked and burned by the Goths in 396 AD. It's the first... 0.90

00:42:55.000 Psychedelic University in the Western tradition since then.

00:42:59.000 So you're going to have structured courses?

00:43:01.000 You're going to have degrees?

00:43:03.000 All of that.

00:43:03.000 We're going to have courses.

00:43:06.000 It's going to be much more than a retreat center.

00:43:09.000 We're going to have retreats.

00:43:10.000 We're going to have therapeutic programs for people to get treatment and programs for people to...

00:43:18.000 You know, learn to use psychedelics for therapists to learn to use them, but that is not the whole program.

00:43:25.000 The idea that we're going to have conferences, global impact conferences, along the model of this, this conference was what made me realize this is possible.

00:43:37.000 We're going to have impactful conferences that will really have a global reach, and through You know, webinars.

00:43:47.000 Through the web, we can share this with thousands of people.

00:43:51.000 And it will be a place for, you know, the second part of the title is, so it's the Mechanic Academy of Natural Philosophy.

00:44:03.000 What's natural philosophy?

00:44:05.000 Natural philosophy is what science used to be called before it became corrupted, before it became preoccupied with quantitation, before it became reductionist, all of the things that have constricted the scope of science.

00:44:24.000 This is going to be a more open thing that doesn't depend on corporate funding and that sort of thing, where First of all, we recognize that scientific knowledge is valuable and we embrace that, but we also recognize that it has inherent limitations just by the nature of the beast.

00:44:44.000 It has inherent limitations on certain things Are difficult to investigate within that rigid framework.

00:44:54.000 But that doesn't mean they're not worthy of investigation, you know?

00:44:58.000 You mean psychedelic experiences?

00:45:00.000 Very difficult to investigate.

00:45:02.000 Many other things.

00:45:03.000 Paranormal, you know, all of these things that people, you know, stigmatize as woo-woo and crazy.

00:45:12.000 You know, and we're not going to...

00:45:15.000 The idea is to bring rigor to these things, to say, yes, there are a lot of phenomena that we don't understand.

00:45:22.000 What paranormal phenomena fascinates you?

00:45:25.000 Well, you name it.

00:45:26.000 I mean, UFOs is a good example.

00:45:30.000 You know, nobody really knows what's going on with UFOs.

00:45:34.000 All we know is that people have these experiences.

00:45:37.000 And what are they?

00:45:40.000 What are those experiences?

00:45:41.000 Are they extraterrestrial encounters?

00:45:43.000 We don't know.

00:45:44.000 A lot of them don't really fit that mold.

00:45:46.000 Are they hallucinations or altered states?

00:45:50.000 Or is there really something...

00:45:54.000 In the continuum that only manifests under certain circumstances.

00:46:02.000 And the idea is that science...

00:46:08.000 Peter Robinson, Jr.: Especially in this era, tends to transform itself into dogma.

00:46:14.000 And then it becomes dismissive of aspects of the world that are worthy of studying, but they don't fit into the scientific pattern, and so we dismiss them.

00:46:26.000 I mean, a good example of this is Graham Hancock's work.

00:46:30.000 For example, that he talks about and many other people.

00:46:33.000 Mainstream archaeology is not open to this idea.

00:46:37.000 They're becoming more open to it by force.

00:46:39.000 They have to because more and more evidence is showing.

00:46:42.000 But look at how long it's taken him to, you know, knocking on the doors, beating these people over the head practically.

00:46:51.000 Look at this evidence.

00:46:53.000 It's very nice though to see him finally get...

00:46:55.000 It is.

00:46:56.000 Well, the battle is far from over.

00:46:58.000 But he's definitely gaining ground now.

00:47:00.000 He's definitely gaining ground.

00:47:02.000 And can you imagine how that would change our view of humanity, our evolution, this whole thing?

00:47:10.000 So archaeology is a good example.

00:47:13.000 Psychedelics are another good example.

00:47:15.000 It's opening up.

00:47:17.000 But for years...

00:47:19.000 After the initial excitement about psychedelics in the 50s and 60s, the whole thing was suppressed for 40 years.

00:47:27.000 Michael Pollan talks about this.

00:47:29.000 What we're doing now is rediscovering.

00:47:31.000 You were a psychiatrist in training in the 80s or the 70s or the 80s.

00:47:37.000 You wanted to talk about psychedelics.

00:47:40.000 That was the end of your career.

00:47:41.000 You could not even bring this up, you know?

00:47:45.000 And who knows?

00:47:48.000 So it's one of these situations where...

00:47:50.000 It's kind of stunning when you think about the fact that in the 60s, it probably was possible.

00:47:56.000 It was before it was made completely illegal.

00:47:59.000 It was something to discuss.

00:48:00.000 And this conference was performed by the government in 1967. Right, right.

00:48:05.000 Yeah.

00:48:06.000 And then the laws changed.

00:48:07.000 And laws about these sorts of things should never be made by politicians because they always have...

00:48:14.000 I think we're good to go.

00:48:23.000 I think we're good to go.

00:48:42.000 That psychedelics were going to change the youth and change society.

00:48:47.000 And you know what?

00:48:48.000 They were right.

00:48:49.000 They were absolutely right. 0.94

00:48:51.000 They were not stupid in that sense. 0.94

00:48:54.000 It did bring out these changes. 0.98

00:48:56.000 But now we're past that.

00:48:58.000 So science is again slowly opening up to psychedelics.

00:49:04.000 And I think that's a good thing.

00:49:07.000 I think people are appreciative of it now that we know that we have gone through that dip where it was outlawed and stigmatized and people were never talking about it.

00:49:16.000 Like, you know, just a few years ago, I mean, I want to say early 2000s, you talk about mushrooms or any sort of psychedelics and people would look at you like you were crazy.

00:49:26.000 Well, Joe, I mean, to Terrence's credit, he was one who continued to talk about it all through the 70s, the 80s, the 90s.

00:49:37.000 I mean, and I give him tremendous credit for that because he was dismissed and he was out there.

00:49:43.000 He was a pioneer.

00:49:44.000 And I think he really had a lot to do with keeping this conversation alive.

00:49:50.000 That, along with the fact that, you know, largely through our efforts back in the 70s, but other people contributed, like Stamets and other people.

00:50:01.000 But we published this little pamphlet, the Psilocybin Mushroom Magic Growers Guide, which put in the hands of, you know, every nerdy 10th grader, essentially, the tools to grow psilocybin mushrooms.

00:50:16.000 And that's how it got out to the world.

00:50:19.000 And our motivation when we did that, it was partly mercenaries.

00:50:24.000 Yeah, we can grow mushrooms, make a lot of money.

00:50:26.000 Well, we grew mushrooms, we made some money.

00:50:29.000 But the real motivation is we wanted people to be able to verify our own experiences.

00:50:35.000 The stuff that we experienced at La Charrera was like so nuts that we thought either we're completely deluded or there's something going on here.

00:50:44.000 So we needed affirmation from a wider community. 0.99

00:50:48.000 That, hey, there is really weird shit going on here. 0.85

00:50:52.000 And we put it out, and it's now, you know, mushrooms are probably, I'd say for most people, they're the first psychedelic that they encounter. 0.97

00:51:04.000 You know, maybe LSD. But chances are, these days, it's mushrooms.

00:51:08.000 Well, your brother was such a compelling speaker.

00:51:10.000 I mean, Ted's...

00:51:11.000 Terence was so interesting.

00:51:13.000 His speech pattern was fascinating.

00:51:16.000 I mean, it was part of the thing.

00:51:18.000 It was the theater of his speeches and lectures.

00:51:21.000 They were so interesting.

00:51:23.000 And he also was...

00:51:26.000 He was so obviously engrossed in these subjects to the point where he was very attached to them.

00:51:34.000 It was a deep connection. 0.95

00:51:37.000 And, you know, when you would hear him talk, you'd be like, shit, I've got to get some of this stuff. 0.98

00:51:41.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.97

00:51:41.000 No, he was a compelling speaker. 0.97

00:51:43.000 I mean, I don't rise to that level, sorry.

00:51:47.000 I'm just not...

00:51:49.000 Although occasionally, you know, I can kind of channel him, but I have stuff to say.

00:51:54.000 I don't say it as well as he does, but we were so much on the same wavelength about this.

00:52:00.000 So he was the bard of psychedelics throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and I refuse to, you know, when no one else was talking about it, he was talking about it.

00:52:14.000 So I give him a lot of credit for having the courage.

00:52:17.000 He kept the embers hot.

00:52:18.000 Yeah.

00:52:19.000 To do that.

00:52:20.000 When you were talking about La Torreira, your experiences, didn't you guys have some sort of a UFO experience when you were there?

00:52:25.000 Yes, we did.

00:52:27.000 Or he did.

00:52:28.000 He did.

00:52:28.000 Anyway.

00:52:29.000 Yeah.

00:52:30.000 Interestingly, I recently, you know, I've talked about La Terrera probably far too much.

00:52:39.000 And I don't really like to talk about it too much because it's so hard to explain.

00:52:44.000 And with, you know, and to discuss it, you get off into these.

00:52:48.000 For the uninitiated.

00:52:49.000 Yeah.

00:52:50.000 Let's explain what we're talking about in particular.

00:53:07.000 Another big psychedelic conference, and the title of my talk was The Experiment at La Chorera, Psychotic Break, Shamanic Initiation, or Alien Encounter?

00:53:22.000 Or all of the above.

00:53:24.000 Or all of the above.

00:53:25.000 Well, that's the thing.

00:53:26.000 But my – sort of the theme of this talk was if you look at the – What you might call it the topology, the typology of alien encounters,

00:53:42.000 there are certain patterns that come up again and again.

00:53:46.000 And if you tick those off, if you say, you know, for the experiment at La Charrera, they're all present in a certain way.

00:53:55.000 There has to be, you know, the typical alien encounter, it's kind of an oxymoron.

00:54:00.000 What's typical about an alien encounter?

00:54:03.000 But there are certain characteristics, and one of the characteristics is there has to be a calling.

00:54:09.000 There has to be a siren call, right?

00:54:12.000 Something compels you, like in Spielberg's movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

00:54:19.000 It was, you know, the table mountain, you know, and somehow this guy was compelled to go there.

00:54:26.000 Well, there was a siren call in our experience.

00:54:29.000 It was DMT, you know, and we were just students.

00:54:34.000 You know, Terrence was at Berkeley.

00:54:36.000 I was in University of Colorado, but we were both fascinated by DMT. And we were compelled to go look for this orally active form of DMT, ukuhei, Which, when we finally got it, turned out to be not very exciting,

00:54:53.000 but it took us to La Charrera.

00:54:55.000 That's why we went to La Charrera, was in quest of this thing, which we called the secret.

00:55:00.000 When we got to La Charrera, what was really there were mushrooms everywhere in the pasture.

00:55:06.000 That quickly reorganized our priorities, right?

00:55:10.000 And it was though we were in the presence of this intelligence, and it presented itself very much, we called it, The teacher.

00:55:18.000 And it was downloading all of this information to us.

00:55:22.000 And that was another characteristic of alien encounters.

00:55:28.000 Generic alien encounters usually involve the transfer of special information.

00:55:33.000 People are shown a book or they're shown something that is transmitted from the teacher to the recipient.

00:55:41.000 And we got that in spades.

00:55:43.000 We got this encounter.

00:55:46.000 And it had those characteristics.

00:55:49.000 And then another characteristic is there is – so information is given and gifts are given, you know, and the information that was transmitted – I think?

00:56:20.000 And develop.

00:56:21.000 Now, whether there's any validity to it, I'm not sure.

00:56:25.000 And I've always been very skeptical about it.

00:56:28.000 And, you know, it failed its major test, which is, yeah, the space-time continuum did not collapse on December 21, 2012, as was predicted.

00:56:39.000 But there are interesting things about the time wave.

00:56:43.000 It's just an interesting thing considered...

00:56:49.000 You know, in its own context as a strange mathematical construction that in many ways is a reflection of Terence's psyche.

00:56:59.000 He was the only one that could really understand it and interpret it.

00:57:04.000 There's a bunch of people listening that probably don't know what we're talking about.

00:57:06.000 We're talking about time wave zero.

00:57:07.000 Time wave zero, right.

00:57:09.000 And we wrote The Invisible Landscape in – But for people who have no idea what we're talking about, explain what time wave zero was.

00:57:16.000 Is this an algorithm essentially?

00:57:18.000 Essentially it was an algorithm, yeah, based on the structure of the I Ching, this oracle of 64 hexagrams.

00:57:27.000 And he treated it in such a way that he claimed that time had a structure and that this time wave described the structure of time.

00:57:44.000 I think?

00:58:04.000 ever in the history of the universe and this map was a way to predict the eruption of those things or the ingression of those things, I think, which is a better term.

00:58:15.000 And Terence and I used to have, you know, I wouldn't call them arguments.

00:58:20.000 I'd call them heated discussions or enthusiastic discussions about how this happened.

00:58:25.000 I do not disagree with the principle that there is novelty.

00:58:29.000 I'm not sure the time wave really describes it adequately, but it was an attempt to.

00:58:36.000 And whatever it was, it was something that was a gift from this teacher, at least the nugget of the idea.

00:58:47.000 The idea of it.

00:58:53.000 It was nothing supernatural or anything like that.

00:58:58.000 The gift was the spores of the mushroom.

00:59:01.000 We took the spores of the mushroom and we took them back with us and then over two or three years we figured out how to grow them and we shared that with the rest of the world.

00:59:12.000 And that was really the thing that, and look at the impact that that's had on society.

00:59:19.000 And Terence was fond of saying, Terence did say, you know, we are in a symbiotic relationship with something that has disguised itself as an alien invasion in order not to alarm us.

00:59:34.000 Right?

00:59:35.000 So, and that's what it was.

00:59:37.000 And before you know it, every nerdy 10-year-old in basements across the country, you know, were growing mushrooms and able to do it because the technique was very simple.

00:59:50.000 So it's all about, what's Johnny doing down in the basement, honey?

00:59:54.000 Oh, I don't know.

00:59:55.000 Some science project, something about growing mushrooms, you know.

00:59:59.000 So effectively, the alien invasion was a complete success.

01:00:03.000 Yeah.

01:00:04.000 And not a shot was fired, you know?

01:00:07.000 And now here we are and no one's even realized that it's an alien invasion.

01:00:11.000 Trevor Burrus Do you subscribe to the idea that mushrooms came here perhaps on asteroids, that it was a panspermia sort of a situation?

01:00:18.000 No, I don't.

01:00:18.000 Trevor Burrus No?

01:00:19.000 I don't subscribe to that idea.

01:00:21.000 Trevor Burrus Whose idea was that?

01:00:22.000 Well, Terence's idea, you know, and the idea of panspermia, I don't necessarily disagree with that.

01:00:30.000 I think that may well have happened, you know, that life came from on an asteroid.

01:00:38.000 At least the building blocks?

01:00:39.000 The building blocks of it.

01:00:41.000 But mushrooms as such, we know too much about the phylogeny of mushrooms.

01:00:46.000 We know where they fit into the phylogeny of life on Earth.

01:00:51.000 And you can't really make the case that they were extraterrestrial because there were mushrooms, you know, they're mushrooms and they're part of, you know, they have a position in the well-defined phylogeny of fungi,

01:01:06.000 which are some of the most ancient organisms.

01:01:09.000 I mean, some of the most earliest macro species.

01:01:16.000 I mean, there were big fungi in terrestrial environments before there was much of anything else.

01:01:25.000 But they weren't psilocybin mushrooms, presumably.

01:01:28.000 Have you paid attention to this most recent theory that perhaps the ancestors of octopus might have somehow or another gotten here from an asteroid?

01:01:38.000 That there's something about their unique ability to alter their RNA, which is unique in the animal kingdom?

01:01:45.000 I have heard about that.

01:01:48.000 It's from legit sources, apparently, right?

01:01:50.000 It's not many people.

01:01:51.000 Yeah, legit sources.

01:01:53.000 Honestly, I haven't read far enough into that to decide.

01:01:58.000 But anything looks like an alien.

01:02:00.000 Yeah, well, they certainly look like our idea of an alien.

01:02:04.000 Yeah, really?

01:02:05.000 But then we probably look like aliens to octopus.

01:02:08.000 Oh, sure.

01:02:10.000 But, you know, another...

01:02:13.000 Another interesting, maybe interesting angle on this was, I think it was 2015, I was invited to another private conference actually at Tiringham, and the subject of the conference was DMT entities.

01:02:31.000 And, you know, the entities you see on DMT, are they real or not?

01:02:39.000 It's a tall order, very difficult to really unpack that.

01:02:44.000 For one thing, what do you mean by real?

01:02:46.000 Let's start there.

01:02:47.000 Anything you experience is real, you know?

01:02:51.000 So start there.

01:02:53.000 But the talk that I presented was called, is DMT a messenger molecule from an extraterrestrial civilization?

01:03:03.000 That was the title of my talk, and I actually, in the course of preparing the talk, I had to conclude that probably not, you know, because if you're going to postulate that, what you really have to talk about is...

01:03:19.000 The origin of tryptophan, because tryptophan, the amino acid, which is found in everything, it's one of the 20 that goes into protein, tryptophan is the precursor to all these psychedelic tryptamines, and also including serotonin.

01:03:35.000 DMT is kind of the archetypal psychedelic, but you've got psilocybin, psilicin, 5-methoxy, bufotanine, and even the beta-carbolines.

01:03:45.000 So if you...

01:03:48.000 Look back in phylogeny, you know, a billion years, a couple of billion years, eventually you're talking about what they call the tripoperon, which is the cluster of genes that give rise to tryptophan.

01:04:08.000 So pretty soon you're not talking about is DMT, It's extraterrestrial in origin.

01:04:13.000 You have to say, well, obviously it came from tryptophan.

01:04:16.000 So how did the trypoperon arise in phylogeny?

01:04:21.000 It was that extraterrestrial?

01:04:24.000 Even though it's one of the most ancient gene clusters in the evolution of life, you can't really make the case that it's extraterrestrial.

01:04:33.000 Because you could say, well, it came from rhodopsin.

01:04:38.000 Actually, the genes that the trip operon originated from originally were the genes that – the same genes that code for rhodopsin, which is the pigment in the eye that responds to light.

01:04:52.000 So I ended up – I could make the case that DMT is extraterrestrial.

01:04:58.000 And – But is that even an interesting case, like whether or not it's from another planet?

01:05:03.000 Whatever it is, it doesn't seem like it's here.

01:05:07.000 The experience doesn't.

01:05:09.000 It doesn't seem like it's here.

01:05:10.000 Right.

01:05:11.000 Right.

01:05:11.000 But...

01:05:12.000 Right.

01:05:31.000 That has been adopted by the community of species to talk to the monkeys and try to talk to our consciousness and maybe even to trigger consciousness.

01:05:44.000 So DMT is only two steps from tryptophan, enzymatically and cellular metabolism.

01:05:52.000 Tryptophan is universal.

01:05:54.000 Not a living thing that we know of that does not contain tryptophan because it's one of the 20 that go into amino acids.

01:06:03.000 Two steps from tryptophan, decarboxylation and N-methylation, is all it takes to get DMT. And that's like the prototypal tryptamine psychedelic.

01:06:15.000 I think?

01:06:36.000 Sticking methyl groups on nitrogens is maybe less common, but still very common, you know, enzymes that will move, you know, methyl groups around in cells.

01:06:47.000 So you can make the case that, and we know this, DMT is extremely common in nature.

01:06:55.000 DMT is, I say nature is drenched in DMT, you know.

01:06:59.000 From the animal level to the plant level to the fungal level, you find these things everywhere.

01:07:07.000 And people say, well, there's about 150 species of plants that contain DMT. That's only because we've only looked at 150 species of plants.

01:07:18.000 If you look at these large genera that are famous, known for having tryptamines, like acacias and mimosas and these things, We know of a few species that have DMT, but there's hundreds of species, thousands of species.

01:07:35.000 It's just that nobody's looked.

01:07:36.000 Nobody's going to fund this work.

01:07:38.000 I think you can reasonably say that, you know, there are about 1400 species of acacia in the world.

01:07:46.000 Probably 75% of them have DMT. And actually, I would go to the next – I would even claim without evidence.

01:07:56.000 That's never stopped me before.

01:07:58.000 But I think it's reasonable to suppose that because DMT is so close to mainstream metabolism, Probably all plants have DMT to some extent.

01:08:10.000 Most don't have large levels of them.

01:08:13.000 They don't have useful amounts of DMT. But if you took, with sufficient instruments, if you just started randomly sampling plants and analyzing for DMT with a mass spec, I'll bet it would turn up in almost everything.

01:08:28.000 Is it phalaris grass that's toxic to sheep because of DMT? Yep, that's the one.

01:08:35.000 So the DMT in it, for whatever reason, the way it interacts with the sheep's digestive system, it becomes poison?

01:08:42.000 Well, no, not entirely.

01:08:44.000 I mean, phalaris grass has DMT. It has 5-methoxy DMT. Other tryptamines, it also has something called gramine, which is like DMT with only one carbon on the side chain.

01:08:59.000 Gramine is more or less toxic.

01:09:01.000 Gramine shows up in a lot of grass species.

01:09:04.000 That's probably the thing that causes what's called phalaris staggers.

01:09:09.000 So if you just fed DMT synthesized to sheep, it wouldn't be toxic.

01:09:17.000 Hard to say.

01:09:18.000 Do they produce monoamine oxidase?

01:09:19.000 Nobody's done it.

01:09:20.000 Do sheep?

01:09:21.000 Yeah.

01:09:21.000 Of course.

01:09:22.000 So do leopards or jaguars.

01:09:24.000 All mammals.

01:09:25.000 So when you see those jaguars eating the leaves and then tripping their balls off, rolling around on their back, what do you think is happening there?

01:09:33.000 I mean, you've seen those videos, I'm sure.

01:09:35.000 Yeah, I've seen those videos.

01:09:36.000 Well, for one thing, they're eating banisteriopsis, right, which is the source of the MAO inhibitors.

01:09:44.000 Oh, okay, right.

01:09:45.000 And I don't know what to make of that.

01:09:47.000 It certainly does seem like some kind of a catnip for them, you know, causes an altered state for sure.

01:09:53.000 MAO inhibitors in and of themselves, they produce some sort of a psychedelic experience?

01:09:59.000 They can.

01:10:02.000 Not just from the MAO inhibition, but they often have other effects that are psychoactive.

01:10:08.000 Like harming.

01:10:09.000 Harming is a good example. 0.99

01:10:11.000 You know, we used to think that harming was basically it's the MAO inhibitor in ayahuasca and it doesn't do a whole lot beyond that.

01:10:19.000 Well, it turns out now harming is getting a second look.

01:10:24.000 It's interesting that harming...

01:10:27.000 You know, was discovered in Paganum harmola about maybe 10 years before ayahuasca was ever reported to science.

01:10:36.000 So harming is one of these hoary old alkaloids, I like to call it.

01:10:40.000 You know, it's been known forever.

01:10:43.000 And now we're just finding out it has all sorts of interesting pharmacologies.

01:10:48.000 It's an MAO inhibitor for sure.

01:10:50.000 More importantly, it appears that it stimulates neurogenesis, and that's relevant to Alzheimer's and brain development and even Down syndrome.

01:11:00.000 It is an inhibitor of this kinase, this regulatory protein called DYRK1, which has got its fingers in lots of different cellular pies.

01:11:11.000 You could call it...

01:11:13.000 Many different regulatory functions.

01:11:17.000 And harming is a very potent, very selector inhibitor of this kinase.

01:11:21.000 So that relates to this.

01:11:24.000 It actually stimulates nerve growth in the hippocampus.

01:11:31.000 And we're finding out that there are a number of other receptors that it interacts with, including serotonin, dopamine transporters, Even one called the imagilene receptors that are, you know, of undefined functions.

01:11:48.000 So, like most natural molecules, it's not a one-trick pony.

01:11:53.000 You know, harming has a number of effects, you know, and that's why taking ayahuasca...

01:12:02.000 Is a different, you know, that's why it's not a pure DMT experience, because you've got a whole mixture of alkaloids that are contributing to that effect.

01:12:13.000 Who were the researchers that, when they discovered harmine, they didn't know what it was, and they tried to label it telepathine, until they realized that it was harmine?

01:12:22.000 Right, right.

01:12:23.000 Well, yeah.

01:12:25.000 This is part of the...

01:12:29.000 What you may call the sad and sordid history of ayahuasca in a certain way because in the early days, in the 20s when people are looking at it, A number of independent groups were working on it,

01:12:48.000 and they were isolated molecules.

01:12:51.000 They weren't aware of other people's work, and so they misnamed these things.

01:12:56.000 You know, I mean, I can't tell you exactly.

01:12:59.000 I think initially it was Lewis Lewin who discovered harmine, and he called it benisterine.

01:13:08.000 Then it turned out, well, another group, years before, had isolated the same molecule from beganum harmilla.

01:13:15.000 And telepathine was one of these misnomers, you know, that came out.

01:13:20.000 The problem with this was that back in the day, people didn't collect voucher specimens.

01:13:26.000 So a lot of this chemical work was done without the benefit of herbarium specimens, which now everybody that wants to do phytochemical work hopefully has the I think?

01:13:59.000 The beta-carmiline chemistry of Bansteriopsis didn't really get well-defined until some Chinese scientists, or at least they had a Chinese name, worked on them and discovered harmine, tetrahydroharmine,

01:14:15.000 and harmiline as the main alkaloids.

01:14:18.000 They could reference that to botanical voucher specimens, so they really should get the credit for discovering it.

01:14:25.000 And then once that was done, then it was known.

01:14:29.000 You know, other scientists had to acknowledge that.

01:14:33.000 Why did they describe it as telepathy?

01:14:35.000 There was supposedly some sort of a story about some group telepathic experience.

01:14:40.000 Yeah.

01:14:40.000 This was just romantic.

01:14:41.000 This was just some story, you know, out of the literature.

01:14:48.000 Yeah.

01:14:49.000 I mean, it was rumored to be able to cause telepathy.

01:14:52.000 But this wasn't ayahuasca.

01:14:54.000 They were only taking harmilla?

01:14:57.000 It's not clear.

01:15:00.000 I mean, they may have been taking it, but whether they were getting telepathy, I kind of doubt it.

01:15:07.000 But we know we could get telepathy on ayahuasca.

01:15:10.000 It's not so uncommon.

01:15:11.000 It happens all the time.

01:15:13.000 People have group hallucinations, group visions.

01:15:17.000 Has anybody ever bothered to independently sequester people, put them into different rooms, have them do ayahuasca, and then have them describe a very similar experience or almost identical experience to prove that these telepathic experiences exist?

01:15:34.000 Or at least to...

01:15:36.000 As far as I know, that hasn't been done.

01:15:39.000 Yeah, because everybody wants to talk afterwards, like, oh my god, did you see the dragon?

01:15:43.000 Right.

01:15:44.000 I don't think that's been done.

01:15:46.000 That seems like a worthy study, because I've heard from more than one person.

01:15:52.000 In fact, my friend Kyle Kingsbury and his wife had an ayahuasca experience where they both had a visualization of their child, and then when they got back, she was pregnant, and they wound up having this child from their visualization.

01:16:08.000 From this experience.

01:16:12.000 Obviously, they're very close, and they were together, and they probably communicated quite a bit.

01:16:16.000 I would just think it would be a really interesting experiment.

01:16:20.000 It would be very interesting.

01:16:22.000 I mean...

01:16:22.000 And that sort of points out there is, you know, a realm of experience, a realm of knowing that these things give access to that's normally closed to us.

01:16:34.000 I mean, that's kind of a trivial statement, of course.

01:16:38.000 But then you get down to questions of how verifiable is that?

01:16:42.000 How real is that?

01:16:43.000 How, you know, and people get...

01:16:49.000 I don't know if the term is hung up, but they can get baffled when you start talking about the reality of, say, the entities you encounter on DMT. Some people I know are obsessed with trying to verify the reality of the entities that you find on DMT. And again,

01:17:12.000 it comes down to if you experience them, they're real.

01:17:15.000 If anything you experience is real, because you've experienced it, does it have a corresponding...

01:17:25.000 Well, you know, what's external?

01:17:29.000 What's internal?

01:17:30.000 You know, we throw around these terms, these epistemological, metaphysical terms, quite carelessly, you know, without really thinking about it.

01:17:40.000 What does it mean when you say, I'm in here and you're out there, you know, and then you take a psychedelic and you realize that's an artificial boundary, right?

01:17:50.000 You know, we're all one.

01:17:52.000 There is no separation.

01:17:53.000 It's separated in normal consciousness, though.

01:17:55.000 It's separated in normal consciousness.

01:17:57.000 But then what is normal consciousness if not a reflection of your neurochemical brain state?

01:18:03.000 I mean, everything you experience is an altered state because it's filtered into this brain, processed by the brain.

01:18:12.000 And, you know, the brain is a biochemical engine that, you know, as I say often, we're made out of drugs.

01:18:19.000 But it seems that our normal consciousness is the best state to propagate biological life and to keep whatever we've created in terms of our community structures and relationships and friendships and the ability to build structures and houses and things like that.

01:18:37.000 All these things are done best when you're here and present, whereas when you're in a psychedelic state, I agree with you.

01:18:45.000 Well, the way I've always described it is if you had a meeting with God and you went and God gave you all the answers to the world and you experienced undeniable beauty in the most extreme form possible where you couldn't have imagined it and then you came back.

01:19:02.000 Whether you hallucinated it or not, it's the exact same experience.

01:19:07.000 Exactly.

01:19:07.000 You can't put it on a scale.

01:19:08.000 You can't weigh it.

01:19:10.000 Like, we've stretched the tape measure around and God is 47 inches across.

01:19:14.000 Like, just because, you know what I'm saying?

01:19:16.000 Just because you can't measure it with what we term our metrics for reality.

01:19:25.000 Right.

01:19:25.000 And that is exactly the thing.

01:19:29.000 Don't worry about whether it's real in the way we would define real.

01:19:33.000 Is it good information or is it bad?

01:19:35.000 Or is it not?

01:19:36.000 That's the thing.

01:19:37.000 It doesn't matter where it comes from.

01:19:39.000 If it's good information, then it has its own internal validity.

01:19:44.000 And whether it came from some part of yourself that is normally obscure to you or it came from the plant teacher or the aliens transmitting it through, it doesn't really matter.

01:19:57.000 But we are obsessed with that.

01:19:59.000 We're obsessed with reality.

01:20:01.000 Yeah, we are obsessed with it.

01:20:01.000 Because we think we're being fooled a lot, right?

01:20:03.000 And this goes back to Terrence's La Charrera psychedelic experience where he had a UFO encounter. 0.96

01:20:10.000 You know, the easily dismissing amongst us would go, well, he's tripping his balls off on mushrooms.

01:20:15.000 Of course he saw UFOs. 0.73

01:20:17.000 Was there a leprechaun driving the UFO? Like, all that's nonsense.

01:20:20.000 Right, right.

01:20:21.000 Right.

01:20:22.000 Easy to dismiss.

01:20:24.000 And in fact, that is the nature of these phenomena.

01:20:28.000 That's what's really interesting.

01:20:29.000 Easy to dismiss.

01:20:31.000 That was another aspect of the experiment of Latoura I left out when I was talking about my lecture.

01:20:38.000 But there's almost always an element of absurdity in these experiences and in paranormal experiences and UFO encounters.

01:20:49.000 It's like...

01:20:49.000 Little green man?

01:20:51.000 Come on, are you kidding? 1.00

01:20:52.000 But what the fuck? 1.00

01:20:54.000 There are little green men, you know, and little blue men. 1.00

01:20:58.000 You know, a guy you should have on this show, maybe you have already, is Whitley Streeper. 0.98

01:21:05.000 No, I haven't had him on, but he's so out to lunch.

01:21:08.000 I have massive reservations.

01:21:10.000 There's a video of him looking at a fly...

01:21:14.000 Clearly a fly flies in front of a camera and he's describing it as, is this a man in a suit?

01:21:21.000 Like there's something wrong with him.

01:21:25.000 Well, I missed that.

01:21:26.000 I missed that part.

01:21:27.000 I think...

01:21:28.000 What's interesting about Whitley, and I agree, I totally dismissed him, you know, for a long time. 0.93

01:21:34.000 I thought, you know, he is really a nutcase.

01:21:37.000 He's from the communion books for people who don't know. 0.86

01:21:40.000 Exactly.

01:21:40.000 He wrote a series of books about being abducted and...

01:21:43.000 Yeah.

01:21:44.000 But I sort of had to change my opinion somewhat because he and Jeffrey Kripal...

01:21:54.000 Who I do know is...

01:21:57.000 Jeffrey Kripel is a professor of comparative religion and mythology at Rice University.

01:22:03.000 And his focus initially is sort of on the superhero as in contemporary mythology as a mythical figure and that sort of thing.

01:22:17.000 He and...

01:22:19.000 I was invited to a workshop that Whitley was going to be at.

01:22:26.000 This was a couple of years ago in Hawaii.

01:22:29.000 Well, I'm always interested in a free trip to Hawaii, right? 0.93

01:22:32.000 So I said, you know, I'd like to come to this thing, but this guy is a nutcase.

01:22:37.000 I'm not sure I want to appear on the same stage with this guy. 0.98

01:22:39.000 And if it's me saying that, you know he's a nutcase.

01:22:46.000 And, you know, and the guy who was hosting it said, well, you know, did you know that he and Jeffrey Kripal wrote a book together?

01:22:54.000 And I said, oh, I don't.

01:22:55.000 I said, I know Jeffrey Kripal.

01:22:57.000 I know that he's not in that case, and that's interesting.

01:23:00.000 And then I found out about the book, and I said, I told the guy, if you invite Jeffrey and Whitley, then I'll come and we'll participate.

01:23:11.000 The name of the book is...

01:23:14.000 Supernatural, two words, supernatural, a new vision of the unexplained.

01:23:20.000 And it's really very interesting.

01:23:24.000 The book is basically, you know, alternating chapters.

01:23:30.000 Whitley tells his stories about what happened to him, what has happened to him, what continues to happen to him.

01:23:36.000 He lives in some kind of alternate reality.

01:23:38.000 I get that.

01:23:40.000 I mean, I don't know if I accept it, but I get it.

01:23:42.000 And then in alternating chapters, Geoffrey comes along and kind of unpacks this and explains where does this fit into sort of the phenomenology of mythology and reasonable explanations.

01:23:58.000 And it's a fascinating book.

01:24:01.000 If you just suspend disbelief for a minute and think about – Assume that Whitley is sincere.

01:24:10.000 I don't think he's lying.

01:24:11.000 I think that these things really happen to him, or he thinks they do.

01:24:16.000 And some of the most craziest things, these are not, you know, the media has made...

01:24:23.000 Like everything, they dumb it down, you know, and they put it into the box of alien encounters, guys and nutball, you know, and they dismiss it.

01:24:33.000 But if you take a closer look, one thing, to Whitley's credit, is he doesn't claim to understand what's happening.

01:24:40.000 He doesn't call it an alien encounter.

01:24:42.000 He doesn't claim anything.

01:24:44.000 He just says, this is happening.

01:24:45.000 I have no...

01:24:48.000 Friggin' idea what this is.

01:24:51.000 So that's honest.

01:24:53.000 You know, that's an honest scientific stance.

01:24:55.000 I do not understand this phenomenon.

01:24:57.000 So I give him credit for that.

01:24:59.000 And then he and Jeffrey wrote this book.

01:25:03.000 There was a very interesting, you know, later on...

01:25:08.000 So I read all this.

01:25:09.000 Later on in the book, there's a chapter where they...

01:25:12.000 What is the possible physical explanation of what's going on here, if there is a physical explanation?

01:25:20.000 And one of the headings in the chapter was labeled, The Soul as a UFO. I think?

01:25:34.000 I think?

01:25:54.000 I think we're good to go.

01:26:14.000 I think?

01:26:40.000 Some people experience.

01:26:43.000 And whether they are actual encounters or dreams or somewhere in between, I'm not sure.

01:26:54.000 But it would be good.

01:26:57.000 I mean, yeah, I don't know.

01:26:59.000 When you meet Whitley...

01:27:03.000 Have you ever met him?

01:27:04.000 No.

01:27:05.000 He is like the most drab person you can imagine. 0.97

01:27:10.000 I mean, he's like an accountant or something.

01:27:12.000 He's probably worn out from telling all these stories.

01:27:14.000 Probably worn out.

01:27:15.000 Yeah, could be.

01:27:16.000 Could be.

01:27:16.000 But he was a fiction writer.

01:27:19.000 He was a fiction writer.

01:27:20.000 Yeah, and then he comes out with this incredible real-world story that reads like fiction.

01:27:26.000 Right.

01:27:27.000 And there's obviously something off.

01:27:30.000 When you talk to him or you hear him, I've never talked to him personally, but when you see him in interviews and conversations, there's something off.

01:27:38.000 Now, what is that something off?

01:27:40.000 Is it a psychotic break?

01:27:41.000 Is it something that drifts in and out?

01:27:43.000 Is he having problems with normal consciousness?

01:27:47.000 I mean, I don't know what it is, but...

01:27:49.000 I'm really not sure.

01:27:51.000 See if you can find that video of him talking about the fly.

01:27:54.000 Did you find it?

01:27:55.000 I looked... 1.00

01:27:56.000 He thinks he flies a man in a fucking space suit. 0.99

01:27:58.000 He's like, is that a man in a suit? 1.00

01:28:00.000 What is that?

01:28:01.000 And I'm like, oh, Jesus.

01:28:02.000 This guy's out to lunch.

01:28:04.000 Call the men with nets, right?

01:28:06.000 There's quite a few of those.

01:28:07.000 There's quite a few really bizarre videos of him.

01:28:10.000 I see.

01:28:11.000 He's having a hard time with normal reality, which would make sense during the dream state, because all these things are happening at night, right?

01:28:19.000 Right, right.

01:28:20.000 And this is the big thing that I've always...

01:28:24.000 The big problem I've always had about these UFO abduction experiences, first of all, they all take place when someone is either at night, it's either they're on a dark robe where there's no one around, and they're sleepy, or they're at home in their bed.

01:28:38.000 The vast majority of them take place at night or while someone's lying in bed, which is exactly when you're dreaming.

01:28:45.000 Now, we don't totally understand the dream state, but there's a connection, at least, an implied connection between psychedelic chemicals that your brain produces endogenously that could be released during the dream state and in different levels with different humans.

01:29:01.000 I mean, obviously, some people have problems with producing serotonin and dopamine, and then other people have no problems with it.

01:29:07.000 The biology of the human brain varies, right?

01:29:10.000 Right.

01:29:11.000 So, it's not without...

01:29:14.000 It's not without possibility that there's someone who has a real issue with these chemicals just busting through and flooding their system.

01:29:24.000 We know there are.

01:29:25.000 We know there are people.

01:29:27.000 We call it mental illness. 0.92

01:29:29.000 But then does this contradict what we've already said about psychedelic experiences?

01:29:33.000 Like, why would we diminish his endogenous psychedelic experience if that's what he's having?

01:29:38.000 I mean, it is entirely possible that you're dealing with someone who maybe perhaps does have some sort of psychotic breaks, but also is experiencing psychedelic experiences due to some endogenous DMT dump or dump of whatever.

01:29:51.000 And all these things are taking place at the same time.

01:29:54.000 In the dream state during heavy REM sleep, and he's coming back with these uniform stories of alien abduction.

01:30:01.000 Yeah.

01:30:01.000 No, I agree.

01:30:03.000 I mean, it's hard to parse it out.

01:30:07.000 And I'm not saying I accept it all.

01:30:11.000 It's easy to dismiss, but maybe you shouldn't, right?

01:30:13.000 Well, there maybe is something there.

01:30:16.000 We should approach it in the spirit of, here's a phenomenon.

01:30:22.000 We don't understand it.

01:30:23.000 We shouldn't dismiss it.

01:30:25.000 There's something to be understood here.

01:30:27.000 Not necessarily his understanding of it, but something to be looked at there.

01:30:32.000 And I thought this book was interesting for its balance, you know.

01:30:36.000 I would not have Whitley Strieber on your show without Jeffrey Kripal on your show.

01:30:41.000 That would be fun.

01:30:42.000 Because it would be fun.

01:30:44.000 And maybe it's, you know, maybe it's a bridge too far.

01:30:49.000 I'm not sure.

01:30:50.000 Maybe not.

01:30:50.000 Yeah, maybe not.

01:30:51.000 Maybe we get to the bottom of this thing.

01:30:53.000 Yeah.

01:30:53.000 Well, is there something to be got to the bottom of it?

01:30:57.000 That's the question.

01:30:58.000 Is there a bottom at all?

01:30:58.000 Is it just one man's delusion, or is there really something at the base of it?

01:31:03.000 And this is kind of the point that we were talking about earlier.

01:31:10.000 A while back in this conversation about natural philosophy.

01:31:13.000 Natural philosophy, you know, it has a wider scope for understanding.

01:31:21.000 And you can say, well, meaning natural philosophy will accept every cockamamie, woo-woo idea that ever came along.

01:31:29.000 Not properly.

01:31:31.000 I mean, natural philosophy, properly approached, should be a way to evaluate these things rigorously, not abandon rigorous thought, but not be so dismissive of it as to say, it doesn't fit into our paradigm,

01:31:47.000 it doesn't fit into what we think we know, so we're not going to talk about it.

01:31:51.000 That's dishonest.

01:31:53.000 That's intellectual dishonesty, and we have too much of that, you know.

01:31:59.000 Science is a very timid kind of activity sometimes, because in its current incarnation, it's corrupted in a certain way.

01:32:14.000 You can't just be the curious monkey who's trying to apply...

01:32:20.000 You know, clear thinking, rigorous thought to understanding nature, we don't have that luxury.

01:32:27.000 Scientists don't have that luxury.

01:32:28.000 If they're practicing scientists, you have to be getting grants.

01:32:31.000 You have to play the science game.

01:32:34.000 So that's when you keep saying science is corrupted, that's what you mean by it, that they have to get grants?

01:32:39.000 Not that they have to—that's part of it.

01:32:41.000 They have to get grants, and they have to be dishonest, right?

01:32:45.000 I mean, with themselves, with what they know, like the example of the archaeologists or the psychedelic researchers back in the 80s.

01:32:53.000 If you wanted to kill your career, tell your supervisor you wanted to work on psychedelics.

01:32:59.000 You were pretty much done.

01:33:00.000 Or if you were an archaeologist and you said, but— You know, look, there's all this evidence for, you know, ancient civilizations.

01:33:08.000 It's like, you want to be in this department, kid?

01:33:10.000 You're out of here if you start talking about that.

01:33:13.000 So science is dogma in a lot of ways.

01:33:17.000 Not always.

01:33:18.000 But it's unfortunate that, you know...

01:33:24.000 In order to save people's careers, in order to have a career in science, you have to make this sacrifice.

01:33:31.000 You have to keep to yourself things you know to be true, you know, that you can't really talk about because your colleagues will look askance at you.

01:33:42.000 And science is a very medieval institution in that respect.

01:33:46.000 It's a lot like religion, you know.

01:33:49.000 When you look at the DMT experience and you look at its effect on the human mind, how much of you subscribes to the idea that we're looking at some sort of a chemical gateway?

01:34:01.000 Chemical gateway to...

01:34:03.000 To what?

01:34:03.000 Whatever it is.

01:34:05.000 To whatever that DMT experience is.

01:34:07.000 That this is something that your brain has the ability to travel to.

01:34:10.000 But, I mean, since we know that the body does produce this, and we know that it's possible for people to...

01:34:20.000 I mean, I've never done it, but I know that people who do Kundalini Yoga have apparently reported...

01:34:26.000 Trip-like experiences that are very similar to a real DMT flash.

01:34:30.000 So the mind has this ability to do this on its own.

01:34:34.000 Is that something worth considering?

01:34:37.000 That this is some sort of a pathway to a nearby dimension or to something that's around us all the time but we just don't have access to with normal neurochemistry?

01:34:49.000 Is there too many what-ifs or who knows?

01:34:51.000 No, I mean, there's so much in what you said where you have to go back and unpack all of these things.

01:35:00.000 When we got excited about DMT, Terrence and me, in the late 60s, what led us to go to La Torreira was that it seemed like a completely different order of magnitude than any of the other psychedelics.

01:35:18.000 And we came to it really from a childhood that was steeped in science fiction.

01:35:22.000 So we carried with us the idea, this really is another dimension.

01:35:28.000 And it may be a portal to another dimension.

01:35:32.000 And as science fiction nuts, we were totally okay with that.

01:35:37.000 And we thought maybe DMT was.

01:35:39.000 And maybe it is.

01:35:41.000 Or it somehow...

01:35:49.000 We're good to go.

01:36:10.000 I think it's hard to know.

01:36:12.000 I mean, I think maybe experimentally we could begin to approach this.

01:36:17.000 And I think we really know.

01:36:20.000 I think that's another thing about natural philosophy that's important that science is overlooking.

01:36:29.000 Natural philosophy always remembers the limits of what is known.

01:36:35.000 And science is a bit arrogant about what they think is known.

01:36:40.000 Science only understands a small fraction of all there is to know.

01:36:45.000 And Ayahuasca, another psychedelic, always remind me of this.

01:36:49.000 When I take it, remember the limitations of your knowledge. 1.00

01:36:53.000 Or sometimes it more or less kindly says it, you don't know shit. 1.00

01:36:59.000 And it's true. 0.99

01:37:00.000 We don't know shit, you know, and scientists can forget that, you know. 0.95

01:37:04.000 But as far as this DMT thing, you know, this is actually – there's controversy about this because – You know, a lot of people who have worked in this area say it's pretty well established that endogenous DMT can produce these states, 0.93

01:37:25.000 that the pineal can secrete DMT under certain circumstances or under stress.

01:37:33.000 The lungs can produce large amounts of DMT that are translocated to the brain.

01:37:40.000 But it's not so clear that that goes on.

01:37:43.000 I mean, it's clear that it can be produced.

01:37:46.000 But David Nichols, who knows a thing or two about pharmacology, founder of the Hefter Institute, world's highest authority when it comes to the chemistry and pharmacology of psychedelics.

01:38:06.000 He's taken a reductionist argument on this that's kind of hard to knock down, which is that DMT is produced endogenously, but it's chopped up so quickly that it never reaches the site of action and it never reaches the levels I think I'm going to go.

01:38:47.000 But we haven't really measured the levels produced endogenously during, especially these extreme states.

01:38:53.000 And that's part of the problem.

01:38:54.000 That's part of the problem.

01:38:55.000 How do you do that?

01:38:56.000 Have you done it?

01:38:57.000 How do you do that?

01:38:58.000 Have you done Kundalini and tried to recreate...

01:39:02.000 No, I haven't.

01:39:03.000 Me neither.

01:39:03.000 You know, Terence had that fantastic joke.

01:39:07.000 It was a talk about that this monk had practiced the city of levitation.

01:39:13.000 Do you remember this one?

01:39:14.000 And that the Buddha came to town and he said, for the last 20 years, I've practiced the city of levitation and I can now walk on water.

01:39:22.000 And the Buddha said, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel.

01:39:26.000 Right.

01:39:28.000 So it's like, do you want to practice Kundalini for 10 years and bang your head towards the east or just smoke DMT 30 seconds later in the center of the universe?

01:39:38.000 But I think the last time I was on your show, we talked about this other thing, this Ajna light we discussed.

01:39:45.000 Yes.

01:39:46.000 And I don't know if you've interviewed.

01:39:48.000 Yeah, we have to buy you one.

01:39:49.000 I said we've totally dropped the ball on that.

01:39:52.000 You don't have to buy one.

01:39:53.000 No, we do have to buy you one.

01:39:55.000 Buy yourself one.

01:39:56.000 I'm going to buy myself one and you one.

01:39:57.000 This time we're going to do it.

01:39:58.000 We say we're going to...

01:39:59.000 I do too many podcasts.

01:40:00.000 I forget everything.

01:40:01.000 Yeah, I know.

01:40:02.000 I've never...

01:40:03.000 But the actual line is interesting because, you know, I mean, he claims, and that was the conversation we had.

01:40:12.000 He claims, yes, this stimulates endogenous synthesis of DMT. I'm writing this down right now.

01:40:17.000 Spell it out for me.

01:40:19.000 A-J-N-A... Ajna Light.

01:40:25.000 And his website is just ajnalight.com.

01:40:30.000 And there's some good PDFs on there that'll explain what this is about.

01:40:34.000 Get on that, Jamie.

01:40:35.000 Yeah.

01:40:36.000 Jamie's ordering two right now.

01:40:37.000 Jamie's ordering two right now.

01:40:38.000 Because I just mentioned this on your show.

01:40:41.000 Get it together.

01:40:42.000 Right.

01:40:42.000 But anyway...

01:40:44.000 So this light can produce some sort of psychedelic experience.

01:40:48.000 He claims it stimulates DMT synthesis in the pineal.

01:40:51.000 When you lie underneath it...

01:40:54.000 It's just a bunch of, it looks like a floor lamp, you know, with a rectangular mount, a bunch of LEDs underneath it, which he programs with an iPad in different patterns.

01:41:05.000 You lie under it, and it stimulates hypnagogic hallucinations that are a lot like...

01:41:12.000 That guy looks like an old school freak.

01:41:14.000 Look at him.

01:41:15.000 He's a Zen monk.

01:41:17.000 I bet he is.

01:41:18.000 Yeah.

01:41:18.000 Amongst other things.

01:41:19.000 He used to be an Apple engineer.

01:41:21.000 He was Steve Jobs' right-hand man.

01:41:23.000 Wow.

01:41:24.000 He went the right way.

01:41:25.000 He went the right way.

01:41:27.000 So he's got this thing.

01:41:28.000 Is that cord going down to her head? 1.00

01:41:30.000 I'm having a hard time seeing what's happening.

01:41:32.000 Something's wrapped around her head.

01:41:33.000 That better not be a crystal. 0.99

01:41:35.000 I'll fucking run out of this room. 0.98

01:41:37.000 No, I think it's a deceptive thing. 0.98

01:41:39.000 He didn't attach anything to me when I was on it.

01:41:42.000 Oh, it's a perspective issue?

01:41:42.000 I think it's the cord going behind her.

01:41:44.000 Oh, I see.

01:41:44.000 So you lie under this thing, and the first time I lied under it, I got all these colors, I got all these hypnagogic effects, you know, and nice patterns and all that, like a sub-threshold DMT experience.

01:41:59.000 And I said, well, you know, the LEDs are all changing color, right?

01:42:05.000 And that's how I see it.

01:42:06.000 He says, no, they're white.

01:42:07.000 The colors are coming from you.

01:42:09.000 You're supplying the colors.

01:42:10.000 Whoa.

01:42:11.000 So, okay.

01:42:12.000 So, it was interesting, and then we got into the conversation, how do you know this is stimulating DMT? How do you know that's the effect?

01:42:21.000 Turns out it's not so easy to nail that down.

01:42:26.000 Because DMT is so ephemeral in the system, you can't take urine samples or cerebral spinal fluid or anything.

01:42:35.000 It would be gone by the time you did it.

01:42:38.000 So the only way, well, maybe not the only way, but one way you could do it is you could do something called...

01:42:48.000 Essentially, you couldn't do this to a human because you couldn't get an FDA approval for it, but you could put a microcapillary tube right next to the pineal that will absorb things as they're released, and then you could recover that and say,

01:43:05.000 you know, levels of DMT are higher.

01:43:07.000 Why couldn't you do that to a voluntary participant?

01:43:10.000 Voluntary or not, you'd be...

01:43:13.000 Screwing their brain up?

01:43:14.000 Well, no, not necessarily, but you'd have a hard time getting permission.

01:43:18.000 There might be. 0.99

01:43:19.000 You could do it to a rat, though. 0.99

01:43:20.000 You could do it to a rat. 0.96

01:43:21.000 Well, that's what Cottonwood Research Foundation's done, right? 0.72

01:43:24.000 They've done that.

01:43:25.000 That's how they discovered DMT in the pineal?

01:43:29.000 Did they do that to a live rat?

01:43:30.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:43:31.000 That's how they discovered it.

01:43:33.000 That was the first proof, right?

01:43:35.000 Yeah.

01:43:35.000 That was the first proof.

01:43:37.000 Nick Cozy, who's a pharmacologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was really the first one to show that DMT is endogenously produced.

01:43:49.000 It's a sigma-1 agonist as well as a serotonin agonist, which is another...

01:43:54.000 Another receptor.

01:43:58.000 It's definitely that, but it's not clear what the function is.

01:44:03.000 It's a complicated issue.

01:44:07.000 To figure this out, I'll send you a paper that Nichols wrote, or I'll link you to a video where he discusses this.

01:44:14.000 And it's like, you know, he gave that at the Breaking Convention conference last summer that I was at, and it was like, you know, he was like the big downer of the conference, right?

01:44:26.000 Because everybody has this romantic idea, and he comes along and just squashes it, you know?

01:44:33.000 And it's like, man, you know, you've disappointed a lot of people today.

01:44:38.000 But on the other hand, reality is good.

01:44:41.000 Facts are good.

01:44:43.000 What a guy did do that sort of made me think maybe there is something to it.

01:44:53.000 He's tried pre-dosing with an MAO inhibitor.

01:44:58.000 Just take banisteriopsis T without the admixture about 30 minutes before going under the light.

01:45:05.000 And then it's much more intense and it's much more prolonged.

01:45:09.000 You've done this?

01:45:10.000 I haven't done it.

01:45:11.000 But he claims that and other people say that it definitely enhances this.

01:45:16.000 So that would indicate that the breakdown of DMT is being inhibited.

01:45:22.000 Is he claiming that you could reach actual DMT states with this device upon practice?

01:45:29.000 Yeah.

01:45:29.000 What about in the tank?

01:45:32.000 That thing seems designed for the tank.

01:45:35.000 But how do you put the light in the tank?

01:45:38.000 You just suspend it.

01:45:40.000 Suspend it from the ceiling and put a switch on the wall.

01:45:42.000 You climb in, hit the switch, and lay down.

01:45:45.000 You could try it.

01:45:46.000 I'm going to try it.

01:45:47.000 You could try it.

01:45:48.000 That seems like the way to...

01:45:49.000 I'm going to get a hold of Crash from the float lab.

01:45:51.000 Because Crash was trying to put...

01:45:53.000 He's the mad scientist behind the float lab, which is the most advanced...

01:45:59.000 I mean, you saw that contraption that we have back there.

01:46:01.000 That is as state-of-the-art as it gets in the world of tanks.

01:46:04.000 And he had a concept for developing learning films.

01:46:12.000 Films where you would lie down, and in the absence of any physical input, right, or very minimal...

01:46:18.000 Meaning that you're floating in that environment.

01:46:20.000 He was going to suspend an LCD screen at the lowest possible light emission, so you would not be able to see the edges of the screen, you would just be able to see the images on the screen.

01:46:29.000 And they would play instructional videos and things, and you would learn them with the minimal amount of distractions.

01:46:35.000 And he think you could achieve, his thought was, you could achieve accelerated learning.

01:46:40.000 Yeah, like perhaps you could work on your golf swing or something like that or something that you could get in there or maybe musical instruments that you'd be able to pick up concepts and things with minimal distraction.

01:46:52.000 Well, that's very interesting.

01:46:53.000 Do you have a lot of experience with the tank?

01:46:55.000 Almost none.

01:46:56.000 Oh, it's so great.

01:46:57.000 You would love it.

01:46:59.000 And it's really great for working on ideas.

01:47:01.000 It's like one of the best environments in the world for working on a thought because there's no input.

01:47:08.000 You're not thinking about anything else.

01:47:10.000 You're just in total silence, total darkness.

01:47:12.000 It's very relaxing.

01:47:12.000 You're floating.

01:47:13.000 And in the absence of this input, your brain has more resources.

01:47:19.000 Right.

01:47:19.000 Is it similar to a psychedelic experience?

01:47:22.000 Yes, yes.

01:47:23.000 You can try it.

01:47:24.000 It's here.

01:47:26.000 I mean, you got some time?

01:47:27.000 Is it actually not today?

01:47:29.000 I have to go to another interview.

01:47:31.000 But I don't know.

01:47:34.000 Is it kosher to ask you?

01:47:35.000 Have you taken psychedelics and gone into the tank?

01:47:38.000 Or, of course, you never take psychedelics.

01:47:40.000 This stuff's the best for it.

01:47:42.000 Okay.

01:47:43.000 Well, this stuff's the same thing.

01:47:44.000 That is legal.

01:47:45.000 That stuff's good.

01:47:46.000 That's legal.

01:47:47.000 This one's not legal.

01:47:48.000 Oh, that one's not legal.

01:47:50.000 Sorry.

01:47:51.000 This one's...

01:47:53.000 Not legal.

01:47:54.000 This one's legal.

01:47:55.000 Okay.

01:47:56.000 Depends on who you're asking.

01:47:58.000 Right.

01:47:58.000 But what the key is, I think, to get a good baseline of sobriety doing it, doing it sober.

01:48:07.000 But my favorite is actually edible marijuana.

01:48:11.000 I think edible marijuana, especially high doses, especially in that complete darkness environment, profound visuals.

01:48:19.000 Like really bizarre, strange, strange visuals.

01:48:24.000 And they kind of dance for you in there.

01:48:26.000 It's really, really wild.

01:48:28.000 I think it's the best environment ever for edible marijuana.

01:48:33.000 Well...

01:48:34.000 Dennis, it's an open invitation.

01:48:37.000 You can buy me an immersion tank.

01:48:38.000 Forget the Agilite.

01:48:39.000 Ship the immersion tank.

01:48:41.000 Would you do it if we got you one?

01:48:43.000 Do you have room for it?

01:48:44.000 I don't have room for it. 1.00

01:48:45.000 Damn. 0.99

01:48:46.000 Where are you living these days? 1.00

01:48:48.000 I am living in St. Paul, Minnesota.

01:48:50.000 You're still in Minnesota, right?

01:48:51.000 But I am moving to Canada.

01:48:53.000 I'm immigrating to Canada. 0.99

01:48:55.000 Damn, this Donald Trump stuff got you down, huh? 0.99

01:48:58.000 Got me down. 1.00

01:48:59.000 I'm not participating anymore.

01:49:02.000 Now that my wife has got her little five-year pension, she's able to retire.

01:49:09.000 She's Canadian, so she's my ticket out of here. 1.00

01:49:12.000 Nice.

01:49:13.000 So that's why you're moving up there?

01:49:14.000 I am moving to British Columbia, yeah.

01:49:16.000 You were teaching in Minnesota?

01:49:19.000 A part of the time I was teaching at the University of Minnesota and then I stepped back from that for a couple of years ago because I just didn't have time and it was an adjunct professor position so the equation between the amount of work and the amount of compensation just didn't make sense after a while.

01:49:37.000 I mean I enjoyed it a lot but I I've lived in BC a lot I'm almost three-quarters I mean you know I got my PhD at UBC and My daughter's got dual citizenship, and she's up there now.

01:49:51.000 I love it up there.

01:49:52.000 We're going to move.

01:49:53.000 That's fantastic.

01:49:54.000 Yeah, I'm excited.

01:49:55.000 I applied for my permanent residence, and there's no reason why I wouldn't get it.

01:50:02.000 It's a pretty simple thing, so that will happen next spring.

01:50:07.000 We've got to wait for our house to We've got to wait for the prime time to sell our house, which will be like next February.

01:50:17.000 Minnesota, the prime time is the winter?

01:50:20.000 End of the winter.

01:50:21.000 I would think no one's going anywhere in Minnesota.

01:50:23.000 People start looking at the end of February, so it's a hot time because it's a seller's market right now.

01:50:31.000 Oh, that's great.

01:50:32.000 We're going to go up there.

01:50:34.000 What part of B.C.? Well, around Vancouver, we probably won't be able to afford to live in Vancouver.

01:50:41.000 The housing market is utterly nuts, but somewhere close by, White Rock, Abbotsford.

01:50:48.000 Have you looked at Vancouver Island?

01:50:51.000 Yeah, we've looked at Vancouver, and it's not that much less expensive there.

01:50:55.000 But it's so pretty.

01:50:57.000 It's nice, but logistically, it's a problem.

01:51:00.000 Yeah, I kind of like that.

01:51:01.000 If you want to go anywhere, you have to take a ferry.

01:51:04.000 That's what I'm looking forward to.

01:51:05.000 All the work, all the travel I do need to be close to the airports.

01:51:10.000 But I am excited.

01:51:11.000 I mean, for one thing, you know, my colleague Wade Davis is up there.

01:51:16.000 You know him.

01:51:17.000 He's the person that wrote One River.

01:51:20.000 He was a graduate student of Schulte's.

01:51:25.000 He's one of the editors on this and very well known as an ethnobotanist and for years he was the explorer in residence for the National Geographic.

01:51:38.000 He's the guy that worked out the zombie poison mystery back in the day, you know, in Haiti.

01:51:44.000 Oh! 0.60

01:51:45.000 He's that guy, but he's written a lot of excellent books, and now he's... 0.87

01:51:51.000 Is that that Colombian devil's dust or whatever the hell that is? 1.00

01:51:54.000 No, no, that's brogmanzia. 0.92

01:51:57.000 That's toway.

01:51:58.000 No, this is the zombie medicine is tetrodotoxin, which is a toxin from pufferfish as well as other marine sources.

01:52:12.000 It's a tetrodotoxin.

01:52:17.000 Yeah.

01:52:39.000 Then they would bury them.

01:52:40.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:52:41.000 And if they were lucky, they would – and then they would exhum them like 48 hours later.

01:52:47.000 And of course a lot of them did die, but if they were alive, then they would be zombies.

01:52:53.000 They'd also give them a mixture of detour and other bad things that would destroy their memory and completely – Discombobulate them and then they would send them off and they would spend their life as, you know, sort of wandering around completely,

01:53:09.000 you know, shells of their former self.

01:53:13.000 Wow.

01:53:13.000 Did Torah have permanent effects like that?

01:53:15.000 It can.

01:53:16.000 Yeah, it can.

01:53:18.000 And after this traumatic experience, you can imagine, you know, what.

01:53:22.000 So Wade worked all that out.

01:53:24.000 His first book was called The Serpent and the Rainbow.

01:53:27.000 Oh, right.

01:53:27.000 That was made into a film.

01:53:29.000 Terrible film, but good book.

01:53:33.000 But later he wrote many books.

01:53:36.000 His most memorable one is basically a biography of Schulte's called One River Adventures in the Amazon or something like that.

01:53:48.000 He'd be a great guy to bring on your show.

01:53:50.000 That sounds awesome.

01:53:50.000 Very articulate man.

01:53:52.000 And, you know, we worked actually this Heraclitus expedition I was telling you on.

01:53:58.000 Wade was on that expedition.

01:54:00.000 And I've gotten to know him.

01:54:02.000 I consider him a good friend.

01:54:03.000 But he's now...

01:54:06.000 He's an endowed professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, which sounds real stuffy, and it is, but he's not a stuffy guy.

01:54:17.000 He's got wonderful tales to tell.

01:54:19.000 Well, I can guarantee you that there's float tank centers in Vancouver.

01:54:23.000 There are float tank centers in Vancouver.

01:54:25.000 We'll get you connected and hook you up.

01:54:26.000 You need this in your life.

01:54:28.000 I'd love to.

01:54:29.000 I'd love to get into it.

01:54:31.000 It's great physically, too.

01:54:32.000 You feel very relaxed when you get out of there.

01:54:35.000 My issue always, Joe, is I just never feel like I have time.

01:54:39.000 That's my issue as well.

01:54:40.000 I have to change my attitude about that and realize that I need to take time out to care for my mind and body.

01:54:48.000 I don't do enough of that, you know.

01:54:59.000 Yeah.

01:55:05.000 That will bring a lot of people.

01:55:07.000 I mean, he's high profile and really a good guy.

01:55:10.000 That's fantastic.

01:55:11.000 So do you have a timeline for this thing in Peru?

01:55:16.000 Yeah, well, it's happening faster than I had dared to hope, actually.

01:55:22.000 I think...

01:55:23.000 I mean, you know, I hate to predict and then not be able to, you know, but my guess is that a year from now, we'll be on the way.

01:55:33.000 I mean, it is all happening.

01:55:35.000 This is the formative year.

01:55:37.000 We know where we want to go.

01:55:40.000 We're talking to investors who are seriously interested.

01:55:44.000 They want to get involved, and they have Thank you.

01:56:06.000 You know, and for me personally, what I want to do, part of my problem is I'm running around the world all the time, and I'm going to these conferences, I'm propagating the message, and I can't stop myself.

01:56:20.000 I have yes-a-holism, and it takes a lot out of me, and it keeps me distracted.

01:56:28.000 So what I want to do If possible, is pull my elbows in a little bit and say, rather than go to your conference in Prague or your conference in, you know, wherever, create this place and make that a place where people can come and have really rich experiences,

01:56:48.000 whether or not they involve psychedelics.

01:56:51.000 They can have rich learning experiences.

01:56:53.000 I mean, it's a perfect location.

01:56:55.000 Want to learn about the Incas, Machu Picchu is right there, it's all there.

01:57:01.000 And there's just, I've always liked the idea of platforms, you know, and I want to create a platform, well, a catalytic nexus for global consciousness transformation.

01:57:13.000 That's the idea.

01:57:14.000 And do therapeutic programs, retreats, impactful conferences like Michael Pollan-level, Graham Hancock-level, Joe Rogan-level conferences, if I could ever convince you to come down, which maybe will happen.

01:57:29.000 Maybe will.

01:57:30.000 Someday.

01:57:31.000 And just use it as a platform for...

01:57:37.000 I like the academic idea.

01:57:39.000 Use it as a place where we can try to understand ourselves and our place in nature better, you know, and through plant medicines and clear thinking and creative people and just make it that.

01:57:55.000 And then I can be like...

01:57:59.000 I can be more in residence there and I don't have to keep running around the world.

01:58:03.000 I don't want to say I'm the guru in residence because my first thing is I'm no guru.

01:58:08.000 I'm just a learner like everybody else.

01:58:12.000 We're all just curious monkeys, right?

01:58:16.000 Yeah.

01:58:17.000 Well, it seems to me that with psychedelics, the interest and the desire far exceeds the access.

01:58:24.000 Yeah.

01:58:25.000 Especially in this country.

01:58:26.000 There's so many people that really have no idea where to start.

01:58:29.000 I can't tell you how many people have asked me, hey, how do I get mushrooms?

01:58:32.000 Or how do I get...

01:58:33.000 Right.

01:58:33.000 It's just even amongst people that you would think would know someone who would have something.

01:58:39.000 But it's one of those things where we're going to have to wait until things get more legal, until the environment changes.

01:58:47.000 And it seems to be moving in that way.

01:58:49.000 I think it is.

01:58:50.000 You know, John Hopkins...

01:58:52.000 Doing research and there's all these different studies that are being made through MAPS in particular and various other organizations are trying to push this idea of, especially in the beginning, working with soldiers, people with PTSD, and showing these massive results.

01:59:10.000 And to open up people's minds that there's a bunch of different things, MDMA being one of them, psilocybin being another, and then hopefully, eventually, we'll work our way to DMT. Well, this is one of the attractions of creating this platform in the Sacred Valley,

01:59:26.000 or in Peru, because the whole regulatory framework is different.

01:59:33.000 Peru has declared ayahuasca national patrimony.

01:59:37.000 That's amazing.

01:59:38.000 There's no restriction on the use of ayahuasca.

01:59:40.000 And all these other plant medicines are part of the tradition.

01:59:44.000 You know, San Pedro, called Huachuma, you know, the snuffs, Vilca snuff.

01:59:52.000 I mean, I think.

02:00:09.000 And that's the idea is to not restrict it to ayahuasca, be able to look at all of these plant medicines in a very intelligent way and also bring science and shamanism together.

02:00:22.000 You know, work with smart shamans who also want to work with clinicians to develop a really new paradigm.

02:00:31.000 That combines the best of both.

02:00:34.000 And Michael Pollan refers to this a little bit, but he kind of glosses over it.

02:00:38.000 But I think that's where the therapeutic revolution is going to come, when you fuse shamanism and the clinical approach.

02:00:48.000 And you can do all that there and develop models that can be used other places.

02:00:54.000 And you don't have to be secretive about it.

02:00:57.000 You know, you don't have to be ashamed or we're not doing anything illegal or covert.

02:01:02.000 And so again, we can, you know, rather than being sort of, you know, well, we can shout it from the rooftops there if we want to.

02:01:12.000 Not that we necessarily would do that, but we can be open about what we're doing.

02:01:16.000 Yeah.

02:01:17.000 There are also a lot of good, there are a lot of smart people in Peru, you know, and smart doctors and so on, smart clinicians.

02:01:25.000 So we want to involve local communities, local people as much as possible, and then expand that to all the other things that this relates to, like sustainable agriculture.

02:01:39.000 It's a perfect place to look at You know, new paradigms for food production and so on.

02:01:45.000 The Sacred Valley is one of the five areas in the world where agriculture originated.

02:01:50.000 You know, most of our important food plants came from there originally.

02:01:55.000 They have 6,000 varieties of potatoes.

02:01:58.000 4,000 varieties of tomatoes.

02:02:00.000 I mean, incredible food biodiversity.

02:02:04.000 And the foods that have gone global, how many varieties of potatoes do you see in the grocery store?

02:02:11.000 Maybe four or five at most.

02:02:13.000 So there is an incredible genetic repository of these things that have never really been developed on a global scale, and a lot of them are part of the solution to the food crisis that we face.

02:02:29.000 And also, what the Incas knew about agriculture was pretty revolutionary.

02:02:34.000 So the spectrum was broad.

02:02:38.000 Are you going to have a standardized ingredients list when it comes to ayahuasca, in terms of the dosage?

02:02:45.000 That's work that we want to do.

02:02:47.000 Yeah.

02:02:48.000 Not necessarily to impose it on other people, but I think it could benefit from a bit of analytical work.

02:02:56.000 I'd like to do that.

02:02:57.000 I'm also interested in the sort of the pharmacopoeia of other plants that are associated with ayahuasca.

02:03:06.000 They're not put into ayahuasca all the time, but sometimes they're used for the dietas.

02:03:12.000 There's a whole pharmacopoeia plants, not very well investigated, that I'd like to look more deeply into and maybe even develop formulations of ayahuasca with some of these other plants that could be used.

02:03:29.000 For more specific therapeutic purposes.

02:03:32.000 So you might have one that's good for, say, PTSD and one that's better for depression.

02:03:38.000 And, you know, you could actually tailor these things.

02:03:41.000 Bring a little science into it because, you know...

02:03:45.000 And you don't have to have...

02:03:48.000 You know, you don't have to have gleaming laboratories for this.

02:03:51.000 You can do it with a very simple setup, a simple natural products laboratory.

02:03:56.000 Most importantly is the people that you have in there, not the equipment that you have.

02:04:01.000 And you could do a lot of stuff.

02:04:03.000 And partly this is what this book is about, too.

02:04:06.000 The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.

02:04:11.000 You know...

02:04:14.000 I mean, you know, a lot of what's in this book is talking about the ayahuasca and peyote and things that we know about, but talking about it in ways that we've never looked at it before.

02:04:29.000 And then there is a whole bunch of things out there that really, I mean, there's a great future for discovery of things we've never heard of.

02:04:39.000 And that's what ethnopharmacology is about.

02:04:41.000 And specifically, it's the ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs.

02:04:47.000 So there's a lot still to be discovered.

02:04:50.000 Now, Canada has just recently legalized marijuana.

02:04:53.000 As of today, I think.

02:04:55.000 Yes.

02:04:57.000 Do they have any plans or do you know of considering the legality of other substances?

02:05:02.000 As a matter of fact, they do.

02:05:07.000 I can't really talk about it.

02:05:09.000 And actually, I shouldn't talk about it because I don't have that much information.

02:05:14.000 But there is a gentleman...

02:05:18.000 I'm sure.

02:05:46.000 MDMA-assisted psychotherapy trials to begin final phase in Vancouver.

02:05:49.000 Well, there you go.

02:05:51.000 But that's MAPS, right?

02:05:52.000 That's the catalyst behind that.

02:05:54.000 He wants to change policy.

02:05:56.000 And the thing is, the Canadians are reasonable people.

02:06:00.000 That's the big difference from Americans. 0.98

02:06:02.000 You know, you can propose this kind of thing.

02:06:05.000 They won't dismiss it out of hand.

02:06:07.000 Well, you know, what's your evidence?

02:06:09.000 Why should we do this?

02:06:11.000 Justin's a very young guy.

02:06:12.000 He's young.

02:06:13.000 I imagine he's been beyond the chrysanthemum a time or two.

02:06:17.000 You think so?

02:06:17.000 I do.

02:06:18.000 Really?

02:06:19.000 Sure.

02:06:20.000 I think so.

02:06:21.000 Wow.

02:06:22.000 What makes you say that?

02:06:23.000 Has he spoken about it?

02:06:25.000 I'm sure he wouldn't speak about it.

02:06:26.000 I guess.

02:06:28.000 Just a guess.

02:06:28.000 He's the right age.

02:06:33.000 Well, I can't say.

02:06:35.000 It's just pure speculation.

02:06:36.000 Let's put it this way.

02:06:38.000 I wouldn't be surprised.

02:06:39.000 For people who don't know what we're talking about, beyond the chrysanthemum means there's this thing that you see when you break through, when you do DMT, this very bizarre geometric pattern that resembles a chrysanthemum.

02:06:50.000 Right, right.

02:06:52.000 You know, the Canadians, I mean, for instance, to get approval for these MDMA trials was a lot more straightforward in Canada, you know.

02:07:02.000 And now, and they've done some clinical studies with ayahuasca, and they're on board with that.

02:07:10.000 They've done some studies with indigenous people in Canada.

02:07:15.000 They call them First Nations.

02:07:17.000 But they have done that, and it's been straightforward to get that work done.

02:07:24.000 They don't have the drug hysteria that we have.

02:07:27.000 So I think it's a good place to pursue this research.

02:07:33.000 Well, in many ways, they were victims of our drug hysteria.

02:07:35.000 I mean, they sort of adopted our ideas.

02:07:38.000 Right.

02:07:39.000 I'll be interested to see our response to the legalization of cannabis.

02:07:44.000 That's going to piss them off.

02:07:46.000 Well, it'll piss off that little elf, Sessions. 0.99

02:07:50.000 Right.

02:07:51.000 Which is great. 0.70

02:07:53.000 He needs to be pissed off. 1.00

02:07:54.000 Yeah, he's such a fool, that guy. 1.00

02:07:57.000 This statement, good people don't smoke marijuana, that is one of the dumbest fucking things anyone has ever said ever. 1.00

02:08:05.000 It's such a crazy thing to say. 1.00

02:08:06.000 That is one of the dumbest generalizations. 1.00

02:08:09.000 That's like saying all white people are evil. 1.00

02:08:13.000 It's just so stupid. 1.00

02:08:14.000 It's such a stupid thing to say. 1.00

02:08:16.000 Just a stupid thing to say. 1.00

02:08:17.000 This idea that we could go right across the border to Vancouver and experience You know, the host of the psychedelic experiences would be, I mean, that would be fantastic. 0.99

02:08:30.000 And I think you'll see that very soon.

02:08:35.000 That would be amazing.

02:08:37.000 And I just hope it would have a positive effect on, you know, our country.

02:08:41.000 It doesn't make any sense when you think about how many troops come back over from overseas with these traumatic experiences and PTSD and real issues psychologically and that the number one tool for handling this is not psychotherapy.

02:08:58.000 The number one tool is psychedelics.

02:09:00.000 It's the best in terms of efficacy, in terms of proven results.

02:09:04.000 There's nothing that's even remotely close.

02:09:07.000 That's true.

02:09:07.000 Whether it's MDMA or psilocybin or any of these psychedelic therapies, they have profound effects.

02:09:12.000 When it comes to the ability to disconnect from addictive behaviors, particularly drugs, opiates, there's nothing better than these psychedelic experiences, particularly Ibogaine.

02:09:23.000 And, you know, you've got to go to Mexico to use Ibogaine.

02:09:26.000 Yeah.

02:09:27.000 I think within five years you're going to see...

02:09:32.000 And maybe even centers, you know, along the lines of what we're talking about, you know, doing in the Sacred Valley.

02:09:39.000 I mean, once you've done something like this, then you can replicate it in different countries where the regulatory environment is friendly.

02:09:47.000 So you could have...

02:09:48.000 We have the McKenna Academy in Peru, but if they meet the standards, then we can essentially license out that brand or whatever.

02:10:01.000 And you could potentially do one in Vancouver.

02:10:02.000 Of course.

02:10:03.000 Why not?

02:10:04.000 That would be sensational.

02:10:06.000 Dude, I'll help.

02:10:07.000 I swear to God.

02:10:07.000 I'll go over there.

02:10:09.000 I love Vancouver.

02:10:10.000 I go there every chance I can.

02:10:11.000 Well, that's good.

02:10:13.000 So maybe I'll see you more often when you get up there.

02:10:15.000 Yes, yes.

02:10:16.000 For sure.

02:10:17.000 I still have to drag you to South America.

02:10:19.000 I know.

02:10:20.000 I'll get you.

02:10:21.000 I'll get you one of these days.

02:10:22.000 It's hard, man.

02:10:23.000 I have young kids, and I'm always busy, and I travel too much as it is.

02:10:27.000 It's a grind to get me out of the country.

02:10:29.000 I have the answer to that.

02:10:30.000 What is that?

02:10:30.000 Bring your wife and kids.

02:10:32.000 To Peru?

02:10:33.000 To Peru.

02:10:33.000 Okay.

02:10:34.000 Tripping balls around a bunch of hippies? 0.97

02:10:36.000 No, we have a perfect place.

02:10:38.000 You know, we can take care of the kids.

02:10:40.000 There's a Quechua family that runs one of the centers, and they would love to take care of your kids.

02:10:46.000 Your wife can do yoga or whatever she wants to do. 1.00

02:10:49.000 I like how you say the wife can do yoga. 1.00

02:10:51.000 She's not going to trip, too?

02:10:52.000 Of course.

02:10:53.000 Did she get mad?

02:10:54.000 No, she wants to trip.

02:10:55.000 Absolutely.

02:10:57.000 Of course you couldn't do it.

02:10:58.000 Somebody's got to watch the kids, though.

02:11:00.000 You've got to take turns.

02:11:01.000 Well, that's what I say.

02:11:02.000 There are people who love kids, and they'll be happy to babysit them.

02:11:06.000 But it'll happen when the time is right.

02:11:09.000 Well, the positive benefits are so overwhelming, and the evidence is so clear, and so many people have these incredibly powerful experiences that they're relaying to other people.

02:11:20.000 And oftentimes, it's people that are...

02:11:24.000 Like the people with the closed minds, maybe their loved ones have had these experiences and maybe their loved ones were really far gone and have come back and they can see these results and recognize that, especially when it comes to, in my opinion, veterans.

02:11:38.000 We have an overwhelming responsibility to take care of those people that we don't meet.

02:11:42.000 We don't meet it medically.

02:11:43.000 We don't meet it psychologically.

02:11:44.000 We don't meet it with therapy.

02:11:45.000 We just don't give them enough.

02:11:47.000 We don't meet it financially.

02:11:49.000 And this could be a way to heal them, to help them reconcile their experience.

02:11:56.000 And help them, you know, achieve balance back here, you know, stateside.

02:12:01.000 And it's not just veterans that are traumatized.

02:12:05.000 All kinds of people are traumatized.

02:12:08.000 In fact, everybody is traumatized to a certain extent.

02:12:11.000 Yeah.

02:12:12.000 Just by living in this society.

02:12:14.000 I mean, we are a wounded society.

02:12:16.000 Yes.

02:12:18.000 That's the thing.

02:12:19.000 I think these psychedelics are medicines for the soul, in a sense, and medicines for our species, in a certain sense.

02:12:30.000 I mean, that's why they're global, you know.

02:12:32.000 We're a wounded society and its dysfunctionality is now becoming apparent, you know, through the political situations.

02:12:41.000 I mean, I am just baffled by, you know, a government, a president who basically likes to hurt people.

02:12:50.000 I mean, that seems to be it.

02:12:52.000 It's this culture of cruelty that has been created.

02:12:58.000 Well, particularly if he feels slighted.

02:13:02.000 You know, he wants to come back at you extra hard.

02:13:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:13:05.000 And it's a reflection probably of his childhood trauma.

02:13:09.000 I mean, I think his father was very abusive.

02:13:11.000 Now it's his chance to get revenge, you know.

02:13:16.000 Wouldn't you love to take him?

02:13:18.000 What's that?

02:13:18.000 Wouldn't you love to take him for a trip?

02:13:22.000 You know, I don't think it would do any good.

02:13:24.000 Really?

02:13:24.000 I don't think it would do any good.

02:13:26.000 Why not?

02:13:53.000 He's never had a reflective moment in his life.

02:13:56.000 That's what concerns me.

02:13:58.000 It's all external.

02:14:00.000 He's like pure id.

02:14:03.000 He is a six-year-old, an angry six-year-old.

02:14:09.000 If we met him at 16, would you have hope for his future?

02:14:14.000 I mean, when is a person beyond reproach or beyond help?

02:14:17.000 Like, what is the year?

02:14:19.000 See, we have this idea in our minds that when a certain age is reached that a person is just firmly established and there's no more growth. 1.00

02:14:27.000 You know, you see someone who's a 60-year-old fool, that's a dying fool. 1.00

02:14:30.000 He's going to be a fool until his last day on this planet. 1.00

02:14:33.000 Why is that, though? 1.00

02:14:34.000 Why do we just assume that someone lives a certain life, has a certain amount of time here that they're not going to learn?

02:14:41.000 Is it just because of our own past experiences with these types of people?

02:14:45.000 Or are we imposing a limitation on their growth?

02:14:48.000 I'm very curious about that because we do do that.

02:14:52.000 We assume that if someone fucks up when they're 20, well, they'll get better.

02:14:55.000 They're going to evolve. 1.00

02:14:56.000 But if they fuck up when they're 70, we're like, that guy's a goner. 0.98

02:15:01.000 Well, we make that assumption, you know, and it may not be true. 0.98

02:15:04.000 It's not fair, I don't think.

02:15:05.000 In a way, it's not fair.

02:15:08.000 I mean, especially now what we're learning, and the other thing that psychedelics do that is kind of a new thing that we're learning is neuroplasticity.

02:15:18.000 It actually reorganizes connections in the brain.

02:15:22.000 You know, psilocybin does this, and presumably the others do too.

02:15:27.000 Some of the phenethylamines do it.

02:15:31.000 So that's a new thing.

02:15:33.000 You know, you can actually change the connectivity of these systems.

02:15:38.000 It's probably not fair to say – I mean, my friend who came with me, he made a point when we were discussing this.

02:15:45.000 He says, you know, you shouldn't hate Trump.

02:15:49.000 You know, he's used to that.

02:15:51.000 You should love Trump.

02:15:53.000 Yeah.

02:15:53.000 I said, it's real hard for me to love Trump.

02:15:57.000 But I think the point that he's making is that he is – Trump is not the cause of it in some way.

02:16:04.000 He's the symptom of what's happening and he's the disruptor.

02:16:10.000 But the disruption is happening anyway.

02:16:12.000 And so in some ways, maybe we should be grateful to Trump because he's making it so in everybody's face that people are questioning everything.

02:16:24.000 And that's a good thing because this system, it can't last.

02:16:30.000 So there's going to be a transition that's going to be pretty rough.

02:16:36.000 Trump is just part of that, not in any conscious way.

02:16:39.000 He's as much the victim of the times as anybody else.

02:16:43.000 Right, and of expectations.

02:16:45.000 He just happened to be president and has his finger on the nuclear button and a few other inconvenient things.

02:16:51.000 Otherwise, he would just be dismissed, you know, as an old cranky old guy railing at the television.

02:16:58.000 He was fun before this.

02:17:00.000 I guess.

02:17:01.000 Yeah.

02:17:01.000 I mean, before this, he was, you're fired.

02:17:04.000 He was the rich guy with his name on the big buildings.

02:17:07.000 He was a caricature.

02:17:10.000 He wasn't what he is now.

02:17:12.000 What he is now is he's exploited this vulnerability in the political system that we essentially have popularity contests to choose our rulers.

02:17:22.000 And the idea of that at first was to pick the best one based on public perception.

02:17:27.000 But that's not what it is anymore.

02:17:29.000 Now it's like we are so jaded as to how well this system works and as to what's significant and important about it.

02:17:37.000 And we just want...

02:17:39.000 Our guy to win now it's our guy and Hillary Hillary Represented the bureaucrats she represented the red tape and the career politicians the one the proven liars the ones who are starting these Clinton foundations and making hundreds of millions of dollars and giving these speeches and making hundreds of thousands of dollars talking to bankers but won't release any of the transcripts and enough we got to drain a swamp and this guy was our guy to drain the swamp for the people who voted for him and And then he

02:18:09.000 came on and it turns out he is the swamp.

02:18:12.000 The swamp is inescapable.

02:18:13.000 So the system is completely broken.

02:18:15.000 I mean, I certainly don't think if we elected Hillary, it would all be good. 0.85

02:18:20.000 It would still be a mess.

02:18:22.000 But the problem with Trump is...

02:18:25.000 You know, he's immune to facts, for one thing. 0.96

02:18:29.000 I mean, the man is obviously deluded, possibly demented, certainly a sociopath, I mean, and very impulsive.

02:18:40.000 And this is not – you need, you know – I think?

02:19:01.000 That intervenes.

02:19:02.000 Well, he's often said that about his business deals.

02:19:04.000 He doesn't plan things.

02:19:05.000 He just goes on his instincts.

02:19:06.000 Yeah, he's not that great a businessman if you look back on.

02:19:08.000 If you look at his business deals, that's the same with this Korea thing. 0.75

02:19:12.000 I mean, if he can pull that off, more power to him.

02:19:16.000 But I'll bet you it's not going to go anywhere.

02:19:19.000 Because, you know, Kim Jong-un and the Chinese who are behind it, they are very smart. 1.00

02:19:25.000 And they... 0.87

02:19:27.000 They basically realize this guy is a buffoon, and they will be able to make a show on the World's Day, but they won't give up anything. 0.95

02:19:36.000 And people are already saying this. 0.80

02:19:37.000 What did he actually come away with?

02:19:39.000 Nothing.

02:19:40.000 Some vague mumblings about denuclearization.

02:19:43.000 We've had that before.

02:19:45.000 Well, it was unprecedented to see the leader of North Korea and South Korea meet at the DMZ and shake hands and travel back and forth.

02:19:52.000 That was unprecedented.

02:19:53.000 That was pretty fascinating.

02:19:54.000 That was pretty fascinating.

02:19:55.000 I think that's progress in some way.

02:19:57.000 And maybe his lunacy leads to inadvertent progress.

02:20:01.000 Or, I mean, maybe it's some sort of a...

02:20:04.000 I mean, people are many things. 0.99

02:20:08.000 He can't be entirely foolish. 0.97

02:20:10.000 There's probably a method to his math. 0.98

02:20:12.000 He never lost all of his money.

02:20:14.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:20:14.000 I mean, he really has been at least marginally successful.

02:20:18.000 I mean, he has gone bankrupt a few times.

02:20:21.000 But the point is that...

02:20:23.000 This is a guy that he's probably pretty complex.

02:20:27.000 As much as he is crazy, he's probably also pretty complex.

02:20:31.000 Some of that might benefit us. 1.00

02:20:33.000 Because we have this fucked up system that's undeniably fucked up. 0.99

02:20:36.000 It's just a terrible idea. 0.99

02:20:38.000 And it was an idea that was constructed in 1776 when it made sense back then.

02:20:44.000 It was a great solution to the problems of the times.

02:20:48.000 But we don't live in those times.

02:20:50.000 No, we don't live in those times.

02:20:51.000 We live in extremely complicated times.

02:20:53.000 Yeah.

02:20:53.000 And also, we didn't have the media situation that we have now.

02:20:59.000 I mean, this is also part of the problem, you know, with the social media and everything.

02:21:04.000 It's true.

02:21:05.000 There's tons of fake news out there being produced on both.

02:21:09.000 You cannot tell.

02:21:10.000 So you've got the Trump, you know, reality distortion field, right?

02:21:16.000 Which is reinforced by his...

02:21:19.000 Really, no pretense about ignoring what's real, you know, like this whole controversy about the immigration and splitting up families and say, well, we're just enforcing the law.

02:21:32.000 But in fact, you know, at the stroke of a pen, he could change that.

02:21:36.000 And we didn't enforce that way before.

02:21:39.000 Well, he's changed that.

02:21:41.000 He just caved in and now he's detaining all the families together.

02:21:46.000 Supposedly.

02:21:47.000 But it's nice at least that he's doing that.

02:21:50.000 He's listening to public opinion and the outcry has reached him and he's reacted.

02:21:54.000 Yeah.

02:21:56.000 But this is PR. It's not that he cares about these children or how many people has he already traumatized as a result of this.

02:22:05.000 But I'm glad he changed it.

02:22:07.000 But I'm sure that was a cynical decision.

02:22:10.000 His advisor said, look, Donald, you're about to go to a rally in Duluth.

02:22:16.000 I honestly think it's coming from his wife.

02:22:18.000 Those folks are not going to like this.

02:22:20.000 I think it's coming from his wife.

02:22:22.000 This is going around today.

02:22:23.000 This is a jacket she wore to...

02:22:26.000 Oh, what she's saying?

02:22:28.000 It says, I really don't care, do you?

02:22:30.000 Yeah, and this was to a meeting of the, like, immigration kids.

02:22:34.000 She was meeting the kids, yeah.

02:22:36.000 What is that?

02:22:36.000 But is that some fashion jacket?

02:22:39.000 That she wore to that event, yeah. 1.00

02:22:40.000 What a stupid fucking thing to wear. 1.00

02:22:42.000 I really don't care, do you? 1.00

02:22:45.000 Yeah, I care.

02:22:46.000 Yeah, I do care.

02:22:47.000 But what are we talking about?

02:22:49.000 What a bizarre, open-ended question.

02:22:52.000 I really don't care about what.

02:22:53.000 This is the tone-deafedness of these people.

02:22:56.000 They have no sensitivity to how it looks.

02:22:58.000 Well, she's an open critic, though, of separating children from their families.

02:23:02.000 And she actually made a surprise visit to the Mexican border today to check in on it.

02:23:07.000 Yeah, to see what's going on.

02:23:09.000 Good for her.

02:23:09.000 Yeah.

02:23:10.000 Well, she's an immigrant. 1.00

02:23:11.000 I mean, this is the irony of the whole thing.

02:23:13.000 She barely speaks English.

02:23:14.000 The whole thing is so bizarre. 1.00

02:23:16.000 Is that his own wife is a fucking immigrant. 1.00

02:23:19.000 I mean, clearly. 1.00

02:23:21.000 The whole thing's crazy.

02:23:22.000 It's really strange.

02:23:23.000 But that jacket.

02:23:25.000 This is the sign of the simulation.

02:23:27.000 Have you considered the simulation theory?

02:23:30.000 Yes.

02:23:31.000 It might be real.

02:23:32.000 It might be real.

02:23:34.000 Well, sometimes I do wonder. 0.99

02:23:37.000 I mean, it's like reality, whatever we choose to call it, is becoming so weird that I often ask myself, who is writing this shit? 1.00

02:23:48.000 And can't they get a better writer? 0.99

02:23:51.000 You know, I mean, the plot is so... 1.00

02:23:55.000 I began actively considering it when Congressman Wiener kept pulling his dick out. 1.00

02:24:00.000 I was like, this is just crazy. 1.00

02:24:04.000 That guy.

02:24:05.000 I'm like, this is just too much.

02:24:07.000 And then when Trump won, I just was sitting down going, imagine if we one day someone shuts it off and the lights dim and then they turn back on and you realize, well, the game's over.

02:24:19.000 How did you like it?

02:24:20.000 And you're like, what?

02:24:21.000 That was fake, yeah.

02:24:23.000 It only took an hour.

02:24:25.000 How long did it seem?

02:24:26.000 Like 50 years.

02:24:29.000 You're in a simulation with artificial memories implanted into your mind.

02:24:34.000 Well, the one day that the idea is that there's going to be an artificial reality or a virtual reality that's so good that it's indistinguishable.

02:24:42.000 I mean, this is almost inevitable.

02:24:44.000 If technology increases at the same rate that it's increasing now, whether it's 50 years from now or 100 years from now, we're going to reach some point in time.

02:24:51.000 So the real question is, when we do reach that, how will we know?

02:24:56.000 Well, what if we're already there?

02:24:57.000 Yes.

02:24:58.000 But if it is a simulation, how would we know?

02:25:00.000 And how do we test it?

02:25:02.000 Yeah, how do we test it?

02:25:04.000 But another aspect of this is...

02:25:07.000 Do we really want this?

02:25:09.000 I mean, do we want to be immersed in a virtual reality, even if we could produce one so sophisticated we couldn't tell it from whatever this is?

02:25:21.000 Let's assume for the moment that this is reality.

02:25:24.000 Do we want to migrate into a virtual reality?

02:25:28.000 My concern, my real concern, is that we are the last wave of the biological human.

02:25:33.000 I really do believe this.

02:25:35.000 I'm concerned about that too, and I'm not sure I think that that's a good thing.

02:25:40.000 I don't necessarily think it's a good thing for the biological human, but I feel like if you separate yourself from the idea of good and bad, the inevitability of innovation and progress, If human beings continue to make more and more complex electronics with higher and higher capabilities,

02:25:56.000 it's inevitable that we become symbiotic with these things.

02:26:00.000 That we ingrain them into our...

02:26:02.000 They're going to become a part of your body.

02:26:04.000 We're going to replace body parts with more efficient body parts.

02:26:08.000 Right.

02:26:08.000 And we're one day going to create some sort of artificial life.

02:26:12.000 Now, whether we become a part of that artificial life, we merge with it, or it just assumes the role of the leader of the earth.

02:26:22.000 One of those things is likely to happen within the next 500 years.

02:26:26.000 And that's a really generous time frame.

02:26:29.000 I think that's a generous time frame.

02:26:31.000 Well, you know, this...

02:26:33.000 I mean, in some ways, this is sort of...

02:26:38.000 You know, this raises the issue about, you know, one of the things that psychedelics put in front of us, front and center, is the fact that we are getting estranged from nature.

02:26:47.000 You know, that's the main lesson.

02:26:50.000 We're getting estranged from nature.

02:26:52.000 We have to re-understand our relationship and, you know, become a partner in the symbiosis with nature.

02:27:01.000 And this projection is the exact opposite of that.

02:27:05.000 So is that, you know, so maybe, you know, this raises also one issue that we haven't really touched on, but, you know, technology, which is what this virtual reality stuff is,

02:27:21.000 and what any artifact is, psychedelics are technology, molecular biology is technology, cybernetics is technology.

02:27:30.000 Technology inherently has no moral dimension.

02:27:33.000 These are not good or bad things.

02:27:37.000 The way that they are used by humans, the decisions that humans make in the way that they're going to exploit or deploy these technologies, that's where the moral dimension comes in.

02:27:50.000 Morality comes out of the human heart, you know, and we are – one of our problems I feel as a species, we're extremely clever, but we're not wise.

02:28:01.000 That's what it is.

02:28:02.000 We're not wise about what we do.

02:28:05.000 We're not – I think?

02:28:31.000 We are scientists, right?

02:28:33.000 We can do it, so let's do it.

02:28:35.000 We can do the Hadron experiment and maybe it'll collapse the space-time continuum, but a very small probability, so let's do it, right?

02:28:46.000 And this is something we have to learn.

02:28:49.000 I think also the psychedelics are important in that regard.

02:28:52.000 They are ways that we can bring our cleverness and our wisdom into sync so that we have the wisdom Not to do something, even though we might be able to.

02:29:06.000 We shouldn't do it just because we can do it.

02:29:08.000 We really have to, as a species, ask ourselves, is this a good idea?

02:29:13.000 And I think, again, the psychedelics are teaching tools for learning this and really propagating the message from the community of species.

02:29:25.000 That's for sure going to be a meme with a photo of your face that we are very clever but we're not wise.

02:29:31.000 That's for sure going to be a meme.

02:29:33.000 Some dude or gal is working on that right now.

02:29:36.000 Well, I've been talking about this for a year, so it's about time.

02:29:41.000 It's so striking.

02:29:43.000 My real concern with this stuff is that this is inevitable.

02:29:47.000 This is just like the single-celled organism became the multi-celled organism, and that the thinking, curious monkey who strives for material possessions is designed to create artificial life.

02:29:58.000 And this is just what we've said here.

02:30:01.000 I've described it as that we are the technological Butterfly that will emerge from the cocoon and right now we're creating this cocoon that we are this caterpillar, this technological caterpillar and we don't know why we're making this cocoon and that we are going to give birth to this artificial life,

02:30:19.000 this next stage.

02:30:21.000 And that may be true.

02:30:23.000 That may be true, too.

02:30:24.000 I mean, what you say is true.

02:30:27.000 You know, on some level, anything that can be done is going to be done.

02:30:33.000 Somebody's going to do it.

02:30:34.000 But, so, you know...

02:30:38.000 Trevor Burrus Is it good?

02:30:39.000 Trevor Burrus Is it good for the collective?

02:30:43.000 I mean, you know, there are always megalomaniacs who will say, well, I can do it.

02:30:48.000 I can start a nuclear war. 0.56

02:30:49.000 So why don't we do this?

02:30:50.000 You know, that's the tricky part.

02:30:54.000 Again, I think, you know, psychedelics are important in giving us a moral compass.

02:31:00.000 I mean, wisdom, not a set of You know, rules that come out of the religious perception, a set of rules that come out of the biological perception.

02:31:12.000 What is most compatible?

02:31:14.000 What is most nourishing for living things?

02:31:18.000 Presumably, we don't want to trash this planet.

02:31:21.000 You know, we now have the ability to do that.

02:31:24.000 You know, the forces that we can manipulate for the first time in history pose a real possibility that we could end life on Earth.

02:31:35.000 I think it's hard, but I think we may be able to do it.

02:31:39.000 And I, for one, don't want to see that happen.

02:31:42.000 I had a bit a few years back in my comedy act about the origins of the universe and that what happens is people get so smart that they develop a big bang machine.

02:31:52.000 And that someone's sitting around and some guy who's on the autism spectrum is filled up with SSRIs and antidepressants and drinking Red Bull all day. 0.99

02:32:01.000 He just goes, fuck it, I'll press it. 0.99

02:32:03.000 And he hits the button and boom, we start from scratch. 0.99

02:32:06.000 And then every, you know, 14 plus billion years, someone develops the Big Bang machine and hits it.

02:32:13.000 And that's the restart of the universe over and over again.

02:32:16.000 You're really obsessed with this idea that the universe is a simulation, aren't you?

02:32:19.000 I am.

02:32:19.000 Yeah.

02:32:20.000 I am in some ways.

02:32:21.000 It's possible.

02:32:22.000 I mean, it's possible.

02:32:23.000 Well, it's inevitable that there will be simulated worlds.

02:32:28.000 Right.

02:32:28.000 I'm not necessarily completely obsessed with the idea that we're living in a simulation, but I am completely obsessed that we are a relic.

02:32:37.000 And that we are on our way out.

02:32:39.000 I really am.

02:32:40.000 I really do think that maybe that's one of the reasons why we're so crazy and so haywire.

02:32:43.000 It just shows there's no logical progression for our culture, that as advanced as we are, as much access to information as we have, we're also as crazy as we've ever been, if not crazier.

02:32:54.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:32:56.000 So the age of the curious monkey is coming to a close.

02:32:59.000 I wonder how much of a limitation our biology is too.

02:33:02.000 I mean, you think about what it took to get to here and all the battles we had to fight and the animals we had to run from and all these human reward systems that are ingrained into our DNA and that now here we are in a place where we hardly need them and yet we still have them just...

02:33:18.000 Blowing up and exploding and vomiting all over the place in these weird ways and you have them sort of Manifesting themselves very strange behaviors that aren't aren't good for anybody and this constant need to acquire material possessions and conquer and and And,

02:33:35.000 you know, obtain things.

02:33:38.000 This is not tenable.

02:33:40.000 This is not something that makes sense in the long haul, but yet we still go down this illogical road.

02:33:45.000 And that this is really just because this is the best way to fuel innovation.

02:33:50.000 Our extreme desire for material possessions is the best way to ensure that they're going to keep coming up with newer, better things every year, which will eventually give birth to the electronic butterfly.

02:34:03.000 Well, I don't know what to say about that.

02:34:05.000 I mean, it may be.

02:34:06.000 That may be where we're headed.

02:34:10.000 And it may be that...

02:34:16.000 This is a necessary step.

02:34:17.000 I mean, if our destiny is to actually leave the Earth at some point, if the Earth is an incubator for life and we're destined to leave it and spread out into the galaxy,

02:34:34.000 And beyond, who knows?

02:34:35.000 I mean, then maybe this is inevitable that we have to do that, if that's what's happening.

02:34:42.000 But the question is, what kind of being will we be when we do that?

02:34:47.000 You know, we won't be human.

02:34:49.000 We'll be something different than human.

02:34:51.000 That's what I've always wondered about the alien archetype, that big-headed thing with the no genitals and no mouth.

02:34:58.000 That may be what we think of as being the ultimate form that the human animal takes.

02:35:05.000 Right.

02:35:05.000 If we do symbiotically merge with technology and electronics, that that might be the form that we take.

02:35:11.000 It's just so strange that that one accepted form—and I've heard— I've heard the idea that this image is something when young eyes from a newborn baby sees a doctor and sees a doctor with a mask and the face.

02:35:28.000 This is what they see and that this is imprinted in our mind, this traumatic experience of the birth and the bright lights and the operating table.

02:35:36.000 This is why so many of these alien abduction experiences do take place in these very That's interesting.

02:35:54.000 That's interesting.

02:36:02.000 Ancient hominids, you go from Australopithecus, and then you go to a modern computer programmer who does an exercise. 0.96

02:36:10.000 And you look at their body, this sort of like doughy, thin body that doesn't move very well.

02:36:18.000 And then you go back to this muscular ape-like creature that's covered in hair.

02:36:23.000 They've lost all the hair.

02:36:25.000 They've lost all the muscle.

02:36:26.000 They've become thin.

02:36:27.000 And then where is that going?

02:36:28.000 Well, it's obviously going in that same direction.

02:36:31.000 People are not going to get more muscular and harder and hairier as time goes on unless something radical changes and we need to adapt.

02:36:38.000 Right.

02:36:38.000 So that would be the normal – I mean the path would – that would be the natural progression that we would eventually have bigger heads because we have bigger heads than Australopithecus and certainly bigger heads than chimps or bonobos.

02:36:51.000 It just keeps going in that same direction.

02:36:52.000 Mm-hmm.

02:36:55.000 Oh, possibly.

02:36:56.000 Yeah.

02:36:56.000 Or maybe we just leave the biological shell behind, you know, but then we're really not human.

02:37:03.000 I mean, we are transhuman and we, you know, I'm not sure I want to go there.

02:37:11.000 I don't think I want to go there.

02:37:12.000 But what I'm thinking is, what is it that's making me cling to these ideas?

02:37:17.000 Is it that I love emotions?

02:37:18.000 I love illogical behavior?

02:37:20.000 Do I love art?

02:37:21.000 Yeah, I love all those things.

02:37:22.000 I love music and food and all the things that—cooking and all the things that make a person a person.

02:37:29.000 But what are those things?

02:37:31.000 Aren't those chemical reactions we have with other beings and natural reward systems that are built in to sort of enhance community and camaraderie so that we stay together so the species survives?

02:37:41.000 Like, what if there's something that supplants that?

02:37:43.000 What if there's something that far surpasses that in terms of pleasure and connectivity and we realize that emotions are just these These ancient systems that were put into place when there wasn't a better option.

02:37:56.000 With these better options, it's much better to get your food from a supermarket than it is to chase down a gazelle for two days until it dies of heat stroke.

02:38:07.000 Systems improve over time.

02:38:09.000 You know, this animal that we are now is very different than the animal we used to be.

02:38:14.000 Do we want to stay in this imperfect state? 0.99

02:38:16.000 That seems even more ridiculous. 0.96

02:38:18.000 Would we like to stay humans forever? 1.00

02:38:20.000 Humans are so flawed. 0.56

02:38:21.000 I mean, there's a reason why we have all this nonsense in the world and our society is sick and we are twisted and confused.

02:38:29.000 A part of it, at least, has to be that the human animal itself is very flawed.

02:38:35.000 Because there's no perfect culture.

02:38:36.000 You can't just chalk it up to culture. 0.99

02:38:38.000 Because if you did chalk it up to culture, you would say, well, this culture sucks.

02:38:42.000 But if you go to this culture, it's amazing. 0.72

02:38:44.000 There's no crime.

02:38:45.000 Everyone loves everyone.

02:38:46.000 It's completely open.

02:38:47.000 There's no need to worry about money because everybody's generous.

02:38:50.000 And they're really brilliant.

02:38:53.000 And they get along.

02:38:54.000 And they create new architecture.

02:38:55.000 And everything's fantastic.

02:38:57.000 It's the perfect society.

02:38:58.000 That doesn't exist.

02:38:59.000 But isn't that the culture that we can create with the help of psychedelics?

02:39:04.000 Ah, now we're talking.

02:39:05.000 Isn't that what we're shooting for?

02:39:07.000 Now we're talking.

02:39:08.000 A truly humanistic culture where love...

02:39:13.000 Is what's happening, where it's driven by love and not by hatred and rivalry and scarcity and fear.

02:39:20.000 You know, and that's the whole thing.

02:39:23.000 The psychedelics can be the catalyst that teaches us how to love ourselves, how to love each other, how to love the earth.

02:39:31.000 I mean, I know that sounds cliche and trivial, but that is in fact...

02:39:38.000 What the promise that they hold for us.

02:39:41.000 That's why they're teachers.

02:39:42.000 They're teaching learning tools.

02:39:44.000 They can teach us to be the human beings that we would like to be.

02:39:52.000 And that's the thing.

02:39:54.000 That's the alternative to this hyper-technological process.

02:40:01.000 I mean, I'm all for technology.

02:40:04.000 I'm not against technology.

02:40:05.000 But again, I think we have to...

02:40:12.000 We have to bring wisdom to it.

02:40:14.000 We have to make a situation where, you know, it is not controlling us.

02:40:19.000 We are controlling it.

02:40:21.000 And we're thinking clearly about we have, you know, this enormous panoply of technologies that can do so many things.

02:40:28.000 We have to think about how do we deploy those in such a way to maximize human potential or, you know, our humanity.

02:40:37.000 So that's really, I think, what the promise that psychedelics hold out.

02:40:42.000 And that's, you know, that's what we're hoping to create, you know, as a kernel.

02:40:47.000 And we're not the only ones, obviously.

02:40:49.000 A lot of people have this idea, and it's happening.

02:40:52.000 But that's the idea, is to create a place where people can learn this.

02:40:59.000 And, you know, and that's my hope for the future of humanity.

02:41:05.000 Well, it's a great hope for the future of the people that are alive today, and I think that's the most important.

02:41:10.000 We don't know what's coming, but we do know what's here, and I think that's a great hope for what's here.

02:41:15.000 And if we don't do it pretty soon, there won't be anybody alive to worry about it.

02:41:20.000 I mean, this is the problem.

02:41:22.000 This is the best way to end this, I think, possible.

02:41:25.000 I totally agree.

02:41:26.000 It's been a great talk.

02:41:27.000 Thank you.

02:41:28.000 I always appreciate you coming here, man.

02:41:31.000 Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.

02:41:34.000 Two volumes, 1967 and volume 2, 2017. 50 years available.

02:41:40.000 Where can people get it?

02:41:41.000 Can you get it on Amazon?

02:41:42.000 Synergetic Press.

02:41:44.000 You can get it on Amazon, but Synergetic Press.

02:41:47.000 Synergetic Press.

02:41:48.000 And anything else to tell people about that you've got going on?

02:41:53.000 I think we pretty well covered it, you know.

02:41:55.000 I will send you the links to the videos which are open access to all these lectures so folks can watch them.

02:42:03.000 Fantastic.

02:42:03.000 If they want.

02:42:04.000 Beautiful.

02:42:05.000 You can, yeah.

02:42:06.000 All right.

02:42:07.000 Always a pleasure, Joe.

02:42:08.000 Always a pleasure, Dennis.

02:42:09.000 Always a pleasure.

02:42:09.000 Thank you so much.

02:42:10.000 Thank you.

02:42:10.000 All right.

02:42:10.000 Thank you.

02:42:11.000 Dennis McKenna, ladies and gentlemen.

02:42:12.000 Thank you.

02:42:15.000 That was great.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 21, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1133 - Dennis McKenna

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