All Episodes
Previous Next
June 21, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:42:13
Joe Rogan Experience #1133 - Dennis McKenna
Participants
Main voices
j
joe rogan
02:39:37
Appearances
Clips
j
jamie vernon
00:03
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Four, three, two, one.
And we're live.
Hello, Dennis.
Hi, Joe.
Great to see you, as always.
It's great to be here, as always.
It's great to be here.
So tell me about this, these cards you gave me, and what this is all about.
Okay, well, this is an interesting project.
This is about the RV Heraclitus, which was associated with the Institute for Ecotechnics, which is...
Try to keep this close to your face.
Okay.
Further associated with, you know, how do I explain it?
It was actually a theater company called the Theater of All Possibilities.
But the Institute for Ecotechnics was started in the early 70s.
And they built a ship, this Chinese junk, essentially, with a ferro-concrete hull.
And my connection was they have cruised the world essentially since 1973 looking into different things relevant to global ecology.
They've done sampling in the Antarctic and in 1981 they decided to go to the Amazon.
And I was doing my graduate work in Iquitos at that time.
So that was my connection with the Institute of Ecotechnics.
And, you know, at the time, I thought these people are nuts.
I mean, they were kind of nuts and they were very naive about what they were doing as far as doing ethnobotanical work.
Not that I wasn't naive about it at the time, but I had a better handle on it than they did.
Anyway, that was the original connection.
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, which you've probably heard of.
They had financing for Biosphere 2, so they'd gone to a whole other level of ambition and madness.
And Biosphere 2 went off track.
Explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.
Well, Biosphere 2 was the idea of building a terrestrial environment that was completely shut off from everything and that was self-sustaining.
And it was a huge complex.
It was a big series of domes, really.
Each dome replicated some earthly biome, like the desert, the rainforest, the ocean, and so on.
And the idea was that it was a dry run for building a Mars colony, you know, or some planetary colony.
And the idea was Mars.
And they put people into this environment for like two years at a time.
To see if they could make it work, if they could really have a balanced ecosystem.
Well, as it turned out, it didn't work so well.
But they learned a great deal from this.
And they also got a lot of adverse publicity because I think the science establishment in a way became kind of jealous.
And, you know, like these people, they don't know anything about what they're doing.
They got $600 million to build this?
What the hell?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
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.
And the interesting thing is they've had their fingers in many pies.
You know, they have a gallery and a hotel in London called the October Gallery.
I always stay there if I'm in London.
They have a publishing company, the Synergetic Press, based in Santa Fe.
That's who published this book, ultimately.
So it's kind of like 30 years later, what goes around comes around.
And the book is Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
And it's labeled from 1967 to 2017. Right.
And the story behind this is, just to complete the Heraclitus story for a minute.
So the Heraclitus has been plying the ocean more or less continuously since 1973.
And they are now renovating the ship because, you know, it needs it.
It needs a new hull and all that.
So they're trying to raise funds, obviously, for that.
But it's just a very interesting story about people that are passionate about the ecology, about the earth and about science, don't know a whole lot about any of it, but their passion drove them forward.
And their passion, particularly the founder, a guy named John Allen, who's now, I think he's in his 80s, But he was the visionary behind it.
And without knowing a whole lot, they just went ahead and did it, you know?
So in that spirit, you have to hand it to them.
And they have...
They've done incredible things over that period of time.
And so it's a great story and it's worth attention and, you know, it's up to you.
I mean, it's up to you if you want to bring her on or somebody, but it's really romantic.
You know, this is science in the true spirit of discovery, you know.
And what are they trying to do?
Amateurs.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That is fascinating.
What are they trying to do?
What kind of research are they trying to do in the ocean?
All kinds of things.
They've been sampling coral reefs.
They've been sampling, looking at, you know, global warming in both the Arctic and the Antarctic.
They, of course, in 81, they wanted to do ethnobotany in the Amazon and And they had Schultes on their board of directors.
And the director of the expedition was Wade Davis.
And I was doing my graduate work at that time.
And we knew they were coming.
So as a result of that, I was able to join the expedition.
And Wade and I, at the time, he was selected by them as the chief science officer.
And by the time I got there, he was getting a little disillusioned with them.
And I guess you could say the personal dynamic was kind of strange.
And like if you read my book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, there's a couple of chapters.
There's a chapter on this.
But over time, even Wade changed his mind.
And I now get the larger picture of what they were trying to do.
And, you know, it's a real story.
I mean, these people didn't recognize boundaries.
That's the thing.
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.
On a global level, they did all these things kind of realizing that this was the theater of all possibilities.
And they had a theater in Austin, Texas by that name.
So it's a wild story.
It sounds like a freaky crew.
It's a freaky crew.
And that was the point.
Well, some of the people...
That were on that 1981 expedition are now – I mean they're still associated with it.
So it has some longevity.
Others have passed on.
Others have left in disgust or they had enough.
But I was able to reconnect with people that run – they have this ranch in Santa Fe called the Synergia Ranch.
And one of the things that's based there is this press, the Synergetic Press.
So when I was doing this project with the book, I was casting around for who's going to publish this after we do it.
And they stepped up and they publish a lot of psychedelic stuff.
They have a book called The Mystic Chemist about Albert Hoffman.
They republished The Ayahuasca Reader, which originally Eduardo Luna and Stephen White had published – Well, they expanded that and they published that as a very beautiful, you know, redo, essentially a second edition.
Very nice work.
Then Don Lattin, who's not that well known, but he's written...
Several books about the history of psychedelics and the people involved.
And he wrote a book that they published called Changing Our Minds, ironically, about the same time Michael Pollan brought his book out.
So Michael Pollan, being who he is, got all the attention.
Don's got very little.
Still a good book, you know.
So they're good people.
I've decided that some of my...
initial judgments not knowing the people and when I just sort of walked into their reality in Iquitos when I got there, you know, which they never bothered to explain.
It's like they never said, oh, well, we're acting funny because we do things differently than you do.
And I was like, what?
Well, I'm sure they evolved, too.
I mean, we're talking about 1981, right?
They have evolved.
And they learned a lot through this Biosphere 2 project, which was a real lesson to everybody.
But anyway...
So because they still existed, and really because of the resurrection of the ayahuasca reader, that had been my recent contact with them.
So when I decided to do this book, I thought, they're a good candidate to publish this book.
And they totally got it.
They took it on.
They've done an amazing job.
And this book, or this set, as you know, You know the genesis of it because you had a lot to do with it.
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.
And nobody noticed.
It was a private conference.
It was not open to the public.
The only thing the public ever got out of it was the symposium proceedings, which is the first book there.
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, where all the action was at the time.
And I'm like, what is this book, you know?
So I totally, I devoured it.
And about the same time, I discovered the teachings of Don Juan, which my brother gave to me for my 18th birthday.
And although much in there is probably fiction, Those two books gave me a complementary perspective.
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.
Then this book came out and it was like – and I knew who Schultes was.
I knew who a few of these people were at the time.
Schultes and Schulgen and Andrew Weil were actually on the original faculty.
And so when the book fell into my hands at age 17, I was very excited and I read the whole thing.
And this is what really helped me focus my career.
It made me aware of That maybe I could make a career out of ethnopharmacology.
And in my very naive 17-year-old teenage brain, I thought, wow, man, I can get paid to get stoned.
It was in part that, but there was more to it.
But that's what led me to pursue that career.
And so this book...
Well, the war on drugs scotched all that.
They became embarrassed that they had anything to do with a conference like this.
What was the goal of the conference?
Is that clear?
Of this original conference?
Oh, for people to kind of report on their work and sort of mark the state of the art in psychoethnopharmacology at the time.
So the first book was really where things like the snuffs and ayahuasca and other things that we don't think of really as psychedelics like kava and aminata muscaria, all of those things.
When you're saying the snuffs, do you mean like some of the more psychedelic snuffs?
Yeah, the psychedelic schnapps.
Is that one?
That's an orally active form.
But yeah, varrola and then anadonanthera, which is the, what are they called?
Yopo, I think.
There were reports on all of these things.
They stuffed them up their nose?
Is that the deal?
That's the deal.
Yeah.
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.
most of whom you've never heard of, but there were iconic people like Schultes, Andrew Weil, Schulgen, another interesting fellow, many interesting people.
One of the most interesting in the first conference was a gentleman named Steven Zara, a Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist and pharmacologist.
And he originally worked in Budapest and eventually he moved to the States and became pretty high up in the National Institutes of Health.
He was the director.
Of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the late 50s.
But the interesting thing is before that, he was just a researcher at a hospital in Budapest.
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.
So he synthesized DMT, being a chemist, and he had to determine if it was actually a psychedelic.
So in the grand tradition, he did that by self-injecting himself.
So he's a true pioneer and I invited him to the conference.
So he's the first person to definitively show that DMT was a psychedelic.
He's now 95. He's in great shape.
I invited him to the conference but he said, well, I'm 95. I don't go anywhere anymore.
But he submitted a very nice video introduction to it.
And the other interesting thing that he did, after the 67 conference, he was thinking, well, what's going on?
And what is it with the hippies and all the psychedelics?
And so his supervisor said, well, Steve, why don't you go over to Haight-Ashbury and hang out for a while?
So he did and he submitted a paper called The Scientist Among the Hippies.
And they wouldn't let him publish.
They said, you can't publish this.
So it sat in his drawer for 50 years.
When this book came along, he said, I have something I'll submit here.
I don't care if they – it doesn't matter anymore.
So one of the papers in this second volume is his original 67 paper.
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.
I wanted to do it on the 30th anniversary in 97. It never happened.
Time passes.
So 2017 was the 50th anniversary.
It all fell together all of a sudden.
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.
We put the word out.
We got support to produce the conference.
So we brought about 16 people to Tiringham in England, spent three days presenting.
And those videos are all up on the web.
I'll send you the link.
That's open access.
The other thing that we couldn't do in 67 that we did in, you know, 2017, there was no Facebook live streaming.
Well, all our videos were Facebook live streamed.
We had 60,000 people watching these lectures at some points, you know.
I mean, so that's amazing.
That's incredible.
And that created excitement.
And then we basically...
Paid for the book by pre-selling, pre-selling it, and a lot of people stepped up and ordered.
A lot of people were very patient because I was, you know, I thought, oh, this will be out by Christmas, right?
Well, no, it's a big project.
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.
And what we wanted to do to honor the first one was reprint the first one along with the second one.
So that's why it's two books.
We did a high resolution scan of the original book and reprinted that one.
Doesn't it make you think, imagine if Nixon wasn't president back then, what could have been done?
What if they didn't have that sweeping 1970 psychedelic act where they made everything illegal?
What if they continued with this stuff?
Who knows where we would be today?
Yeah, we can ask that question about a lot of things.
What if that didn't happen?
Like the psychedelic research that's happening now, it's taken 40 years to get back to it.
Basically, the psychedelic research is a lot of the same thing was going on back in the even late 50s and 60s.
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.
But it's the same stuff.
You know, which is wonderful.
I mean, I'm all for it to see this work done.
I also have, you know, plenty to say about the limitations of that strictly clinical, you know, sort of medical approach.
You know, organizations like MAPS and HEFTER have to work within the constraints of what's possible.
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.
You know, for example, the way that ayahuasca I think it's important to pursue that work,
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.
But in fact, ayahuasca is touching, I think, far more lives than, say...
Well, I can't say about mushrooms because mushrooms are a lot out there.
But, you know, the potential, the impact that it's having on society is much greater because people are rediscovering this.
And people are, I think, reaching out for...
They're reaching out for anything that will work.
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, you know, we're seeing behind the curtain and realizing that they're empty.
They don't really have anything to offer on the spiritual level, especially religions.
People are rejecting religions as the sort of shell game that it is.
Empty promises that don't deliver.
And I think that's a lot of why people are reaching out for these plant medicines.
And going to South America or to have ayahuasca or finding them in their own community because people crave spiritually meaningful experiences and our culture needs it more than ever.
Well, the thing about psychedelics, what you just said is so important that they deliver.
They deliver.
If you're skeptical about religion, and, you know, there's some people that get a lot out of religion, that's fine.
But if you're skeptical about it, it's not going to fulfill your promises.
It's not going to give you anything that you can say, oh, my God, this is irrefutable.
Psychedelic experiences are pretty irrefutable that something's happening that's titanic.
It's so immense and bizarre and beyond the normal that it's hard to just dismiss it.
And the only people that really do dismiss it are the people that haven't experienced it.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, I sometimes say psychedelics are the antidote to faith.
You don't need faith to take a psychedelic.
What you need is courage.
Religions offer faith, which is basically saying, here's a list of things that you need to believe without question.
And if that's your inclination, fine.
But most of us are more skeptical.
We need something tangible, something more tangible.
So I think faith is – I mean that's how religions entice you to believe.
But I think that in a way it's deceptive.
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.
You don't need faith.
You can say, I know that this exists and the realms that it opens up for you are real because I've experienced it.
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.
And we're seeing the consequences of that.
We have to rediscover this indigenous perspective that we are part of nature.
We're properly framed.
We should be symbiotic with nature.
It's all about symbiosis.
It's all about collaborating together.
with the global community of species to advance consciousness not just of our species but of the whole community of sentient species.
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.
Wake up, you monkeys.
You're wrecking this place.
It's that simple.
You're wrecking this place.
And that's because you have to re-understand your relationship to nature.
Realize that, number one, you monkeys aren't running things.
The plants are running things, basically, because they're sustaining life on Earth.
Other things are...
You know, that's part of it.
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, you know, developing sustainable ways to live on a global scale.
And we're seeing the consequences of this now.
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, and this is a problem.
So, you know, I think a lot of people...
Will agree with me.
A lot of people who listen to this show will agree with me when I say, I've pretty much given up on politics.
Politics seems to me irrevocably broken.
Many other institutions are dysfunctional, if not broken.
I mean, science is corrupt and government is corrupt.
Corporatism is, you know, these are all flawed systems because they're not...
They don't have a base of compassion and recognition of the interrelatedness of all things.
And psychedelics are a catalyst for waking up.
And so once people have that experience, then their perspective is changed.
And if they're influential, they can go out and make change on a global scale.
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, at one point, skeptical mind.
He was very skeptical about What these things were.
Yeah.
Though I love Michael Pollan.
I have for a long time.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
I don't want any angry tweets.
No, I've loved his work for a long time.
And I'm really delighted that he's come out and written about this.
There are some things about his book, I have to say, that...
I'm a little disappointed, but then I also have to say I'm only about a little over halfway through it.
What was disappointing?
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.
They're indigenous traditions, thousands of years old.
Yeah, he should have talked to you.
He hasn't really talked about those things.
Well, he knows they exist.
Did he talk to you at all?
He did not, actually.
That's ridiculous.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Which I was also, of course, extremely jealous and angry and upset that he didn't talk to me.
I mean, what the hell am I, you know?
But you've been banging at the bushes for 60 years now?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, come on, man.
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.
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.
Actually, plants are cultivating us.
You know, this is plants program for world domination.
And the same is true of all these teacher plants.
This is why they're out there, you know, on the global stage now.
And he didn't Maybe he will get to it.
Only mildly.
Jealous.
I wish he had talked to me.
On the other hand, what he has written is going to be important.
It's going to be influential.
I mean, this will be influential to a small number of people.
Pollan's book is going to bring it to the attention of millions.
Yeah, it's going to open people's eyes and refresh the way people view this whole subject.
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, but now the drums are beating again.
Now it's coming back.
Now it's coming back.
I'm really fascinated and excited by that because I think this is...
Me too.
I don't think it's the answer to everything, but I think it's the glue.
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, 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.
I'm not going to think about that anymore.
I've defined what a road is.
I've defined...
I remember after one of my first DMT experiences, just sitting around looking at roads differently.
Like, I was on a road.
I was like, this is the craziest shit ever.
We've decided that it's normal to lay this hard surface down on the ground so we could roll these...
Fire-breathing pieces of metal.
Yeah, it's so strange, isn't it?
But it was before that it was just a road.
It was always a road.
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.
But in the process of doing that, we've sort of marred the landscape with it everywhere.
Well, psychedelics do give us the chance to rethink a lot of things.
I think we've talked before about Simon Powell's work.
He writes about psilocybin, wrote The Psilocybin Solution, and that was his first book and I think his latest book.
is the magic mushroom explorer.
But something in his work really struck me, which is he pointed out that you have to look, that psychedelics in some sense are, they're scientific instruments.
They give you an opportunity to look at phenomena in a way that you've never looked at them before because they have this, because they take you out of your reference frame, or they bring the background forward, or there's different ways to describe it.
And Paulin actually describes it well when he talks about this disruption of the default mode network.
It enables you to see patterns in nature that you're programmed not to see.
You know, a lot of what our brain does, this whole reducing valve idea, is it filters many things out.
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.
And that's what you inhabit.
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.
And in order to just deal with all the information that is available, it has to really restrict it.
It has to put a choke on it so that what does get in can make sense.
That's fine for ordinary consciousness, but you are prone to overlook things about reality that are important.
And psychedelics temporarily give you an opportunity to lower those, lower those mechanisms, that default network or sometimes called neural gating.
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 things that are always there.
It's not that they're not there.
These are not things you imagine.
They're just things that you never notice because you're programmed not to.
So tremendous learning tools.
And many, many scientists have said, you know, their insights have come from their psychedelic experience, from Steve Jobs to Crick to Kerry Mullis.
Some of these folks admit it and others deny it, but it's true.
So there are many, many things we can learn from psychedelics.
That's only one of them, but from a scientist's perspective, that's an important one.
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, and have these collective sessions together, and then let people share their insight.
Essentially, creative solving, problem solving, or creative sessions.
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.
And that's one of the restrictions of the strictly clinical approach that I chafe against, you know, because they have to be, you know, you have to have a problem.
It has to be to treat something, depression or PTSD or whatever.
But we really need to use, you know, that's not the only thing psychedelics are good for.
Sure, they can help people with mental problems.
And in our society, who doesn't have mental problems, you know, as a society, we're wounded.
But it goes beyond that.
They are learning tools and teaching tools.
And, you know, you begin to see some of this in the work that Roland Griffith is doing.
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.
So that's a start.
And he's approved to do this?
He's approved to do it.
And who approved this and how is it?
The FDA approved it.
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, and putting them through his protocol.
And it's having a tremendous impact on the way they view their profession and the way they view religion.
That's fantastic.
Yeah.
It really is a shame that we need an illness to treat before you allow someone to have this potentially mind-expanding experience.
But it's almost like not allowing people to take vitamins unless they're really sick.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
And like Bob Jesse says very eloquently, we need to find contexts in which we can use psychedelics for the betterment of the well, you know, for the improvement of the well.
Yeah.
And you can't do it right now under the current regulatory restrictions.
Now, I think it's improved.
I think it gradually will improve.
But this sort of ties into, you know, what I'm trying to do now, now that I've got this book off my plate.
I mean, this is kind of a, you know, bucket list item, something I've wanted to do for a long time.
And now it's done.
Now I have to help sell it.
But that won't be too much of a problem, I think.
It's a beautiful book.
Especially after your talk, after our show, we only published a thousand copies of this.
unidentified
Oh, it's gone.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It'll be sold out.
It's a collector's edition, and that was on purpose.
We can always print more.
It really is beautifully done.
It is a beautiful book on every level, and the people that contributed to the second volume.
I didn't want all the same people that always come to these conferences and always say the same things.
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.
So, you know, some of them are known within the community, and others are pretty obscure.
But, you know, there's always this, you know, this passionate amateur-type person who maybe they don't have credentials, but they have...
Incredible knowledge up in their head, and they're completely obsessed with this stuff.
And there's a few of those people in there, too.
So it was really satisfying to be able to do it and make it worth people's time.
I was able to pay for, well, me and my supporters.
A lot of it came through the Institute of Ecotechnics, actually.
That Turned out to be a good nonprofit channel through which we could get donations, grants essentially.
We didn't want it to go through Hefter because it might look like a conflict of interest, silly notion.
But because of that, we were able to pull this off.
We produced the book.
We even gave everybody a modest honorarium.
So that's the way conferences are supposed to be.
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.
Really, I've been hosting retreats for ayahuasca since about 2012. And that's been very gratifying work.
I've seen transformations in people.
I see what a difference it makes to create the right environment and get people able to come in a safe place.
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.
We're here to create an optimum condition and you work it out.
This is a dialogue between you and the plant teacher.
It's not the shaman.
The shaman, if he's a good shaman, facilitates that process but does not try to control it.
He's there for support.
He or she is there for support.
What really happens is the interaction between – I mean, the medicines are the real teachers.
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.
But that's different than saying, well, this means that and you're supposed to think this about it.
You're supposed to think that.
I mean you're supposed to learn to use your own mind to think for yourself.
So the extension of this is that I'm in the process of, I guess, manifesting this idea.
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.
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.
And I'm a kind of a selfie-facing guy, but I recognize that I have a certain iconic recognition.
So okay, if that's what it takes, I'll do it.
So what we're going to call it is the McKenna Academy for Natural Philosophy.
By academy, you're saying you have a physical structure?
We will have a physical structure, yeah, and maybe more than one.
But we have identified an initial place that will be the physical location for it.
And it's a kind of school.
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...
Psychedelic University in the Western tradition since then.
So you're going to have structured courses?
You're going to have degrees?
All of that.
We're going to have courses.
It's going to be much more than a retreat center.
We're going to have retreats.
We're going to have therapeutic programs for people to get treatment and programs for people to...
You know, learn to use psychedelics for therapists to learn to use them, but that is not the whole program.
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.
We're going to have impactful conferences that will really have a global reach, and through You know, webinars.
Through the web, we can share this with thousands of people.
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.
What's natural philosophy?
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.
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.
It has inherent limitations on certain things Are difficult to investigate within that rigid framework.
But that doesn't mean they're not worthy of investigation, you know?
You mean psychedelic experiences?
Very difficult to investigate.
Many other things.
Paranormal, you know, all of these things that people, you know, stigmatize as woo-woo and crazy.
You know, and we're not going to...
The idea is to bring rigor to these things, to say, yes, there are a lot of phenomena that we don't understand.
What paranormal phenomena fascinates you?
Well, you name it.
I mean, UFOs is a good example.
You know, nobody really knows what's going on with UFOs.
All we know is that people have these experiences.
And what are they?
What are those experiences?
Are they extraterrestrial encounters?
We don't know.
A lot of them don't really fit that mold.
Are they hallucinations or altered states?
Or is there really something...
In the continuum that only manifests under certain circumstances.
And the idea is that science...
Peter Robinson, Jr.: Especially in this era, tends to transform itself into dogma.
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.
I mean, a good example of this is Graham Hancock's work.
For example, that he talks about and many other people.
Mainstream archaeology is not open to this idea.
They're becoming more open to it by force.
They have to because more and more evidence is showing.
But look at how long it's taken him to, you know, knocking on the doors, beating these people over the head practically.
Look at this evidence.
It's very nice though to see him finally get...
It is.
Well, the battle is far from over.
But he's definitely gaining ground now.
He's definitely gaining ground.
And can you imagine how that would change our view of humanity, our evolution, this whole thing?
So archaeology is a good example.
Psychedelics are another good example.
It's opening up.
But for years...
After the initial excitement about psychedelics in the 50s and 60s, the whole thing was suppressed for 40 years.
Michael Pollan talks about this.
What we're doing now is rediscovering.
You were a psychiatrist in training in the 80s or the 70s or the 80s.
You wanted to talk about psychedelics.
That was the end of your career.
You could not even bring this up, you know?
And who knows?
So it's one of these situations where...
It's kind of stunning when you think about the fact that in the 60s, it probably was possible.
It was before it was made completely illegal.
It was something to discuss.
And this conference was performed by the government in 1967. Right, right.
Yeah.
And then the laws changed.
And laws about these sorts of things should never be made by politicians because they always have...
I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
That psychedelics were going to change the youth and change society.
And you know what?
They were right.
They were absolutely right.
They were not stupid in that sense.
It did bring out these changes.
But now we're past that.
So science is again slowly opening up to psychedelics.
And I think that's a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, and I give him tremendous credit for that because he was dismissed and he was out there.
He was a pioneer.
And I think he really had a lot to do with keeping this conversation alive.
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.
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.
And that's how it got out to the world.
And our motivation when we did that, it was partly mercenaries.
Yeah, we can grow mushrooms, make a lot of money.
Well, we grew mushrooms, we made some money.
But the real motivation is we wanted people to be able to verify our own experiences.
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.
So we needed affirmation from a wider community.
That, hey, there is really weird shit going on here.
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.
You know, maybe LSD. But chances are, these days, it's mushrooms.
Well, your brother was such a compelling speaker.
I mean, Ted's...
Terence was so interesting.
His speech pattern was fascinating.
I mean, it was part of the thing.
It was the theater of his speeches and lectures.
They were so interesting.
And he also was...
He was so obviously engrossed in these subjects to the point where he was very attached to them.
It was a deep connection.
And, you know, when you would hear him talk, you'd be like, shit, I've got to get some of this stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
No, he was a compelling speaker.
I mean, I don't rise to that level, sorry.
I'm just not...
Although occasionally, you know, I can kind of channel him, but I have stuff to say.
I don't say it as well as he does, but we were so much on the same wavelength about this.
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.
So I give him a lot of credit for having the courage.
He kept the embers hot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To do that.
When you were talking about La Torreira, your experiences, didn't you guys have some sort of a UFO experience when you were there?
Yes, we did.
Or he did.
He did.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interestingly, I recently, you know, I've talked about La Terrera probably far too much.
And I don't really like to talk about it too much because it's so hard to explain.
And with, you know, and to discuss it, you get off into these.
For the uninitiated.
For the uninitiated, you got into these rabbit holes of explaining.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But I gave a lecture at a breaking convention last year in the UK.
And at the end of June, they have breaking convention, another big psychedelic conference.
And the title of my talk was The Experiment at La Charrera, Psychotic Break, Shamanic Initiation, or Alien Encounter?
Question mark.
Or all of the above.
Or all of the above.
Well, that's the thing.
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, there are certain patterns that come up again and again.
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.
There has to be, you know, the typical alien encounter, it's kind of an oxymoron.
What's typical about an alien encounter?
But there are certain characteristics, and one of the characteristics is there has to be a calling.
There has to be a siren call, right?
Something compels you, like in Spielberg's movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It was, you know, the table mountain, you know, and somehow this guy was compelled to go there.
Well, there was a siren call in our experience.
It was DMT, you know, and we were just students.
You know, Terrence was at Berkeley.
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, but it took us to La Charrera.
That's why we went to La Charrera, was in quest of this thing, which we called the secret.
When we got to La Charrera, what was really there were mushrooms everywhere in the pasture.
That quickly reorganized our priorities, right?
And it was though we were in the presence of this intelligence, and it presented itself very much, we called it, The teacher.
And it was downloading all of this information to us.
And that was another characteristic of alien encounters.
Generic alien encounters usually involve the transfer of special information.
People are shown a book or they're shown something that is transmitted from the teacher to the recipient.
And we got that in spades.
We got this encounter.
And it had those characteristics.
And then another characteristic is there is – so information is given and gifts are given, you know.
And the information that was transmitted resulted in a couple of things.
Well, the primary thing that came out of that was Terence's idea about the time, about time wave and the I Ching.
The genesis of that idea came out of the experiment at La Chirera and then over decades became refined and developed.
Now, whether there's any validity to it, I'm not sure.
And I've always been very skeptical about it.
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.
But there are interesting things about the time wave.
It's just an interesting thing considered...
You know, in its own context as a strange mathematical construction that in many ways is a reflection of Terence's psyche.
He was the only one that could really understand it and interpret it.
There's a bunch of people listening that probably don't know what we're talking about.
We're talking about time wave zero.
Time wave zero, right.
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.
Is this an algorithm essentially?
Essentially it was an algorithm, yeah, based on the structure of the I Ching, this oracle of 64 hexagrams.
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, essentially, and thus was a predictive tool, among essentially, and thus was a predictive tool, among other things.
And that it was a way to look at the ingression of novelty into the continuum, the idea that there really are new things under the sun, new things happen that have never happened before ever in the history of the new things happen that have never happened before ever in the 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.
And Terence and I used to have, you know, I wouldn't call them arguments.
I'd call them heated discussions or enthusiastic discussions about how this happened.
I do not disagree with the principle that there is novelty.
I'm not sure the time wave really describes it adequately, but it was an attempt to.
And whatever it was, it was something that was a gift from this teacher, at least the nugget of the idea.
The idea of it.
It was nothing supernatural or anything like that.
The gift was the spores of the mushroom.
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.
And that was really the thing that, and look at the impact that that's had on society.
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.
Right?
So, and that's what it was.
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.
So it's all about, what's Johnny doing down in the basement, honey?
Oh, I don't know.
Some science project, something about growing mushrooms, you know.
So effectively, the alien invasion was a complete success.
Yeah.
And not a shot was fired, you know?
And now here we are and no one's even realized that it's an alien invasion.
Trevor Burrus Do you subscribe to the idea that mushrooms came here perhaps on asteroids, that it was a panspermia sort of a situation?
No, I don't.
unidentified
Trevor Burrus No?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I don't subscribe to that idea.
Trevor Burrus Whose idea was that?
Well, Terence's idea, you know, and the idea of panspermia, I don't necessarily disagree with that.
I think that may well have happened, you know, that life came from on an asteroid.
At least the building blocks?
The building blocks of it.
But mushrooms as such, we know too much about the phylogeny of mushrooms.
We know where they fit into the phylogeny of life on Earth.
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, which are some of the most ancient organisms.
I mean, some of the most earliest macro species.
I mean, there were big fungi in terrestrial environments before there was much of anything else.
But they weren't psilocybin mushrooms, presumably.
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?
That there's something about their unique ability to alter their RNA, which is unique in the animal kingdom?
I have heard about that.
It's from legit sources, apparently, right?
It's not many people.
Yeah, legit sources.
Honestly, I haven't read far enough into that to decide.
But anything looks like an alien.
Yeah, well, they certainly look like our idea of an alien.
unidentified
Yeah, really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But then we probably look like aliens to octopus.
Oh, sure.
But, you know, another...
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.
And, you know, the entities you see on DMT, are they real or not?
It's a tall order, very difficult to really unpack that.
For one thing, what do you mean by real?
Let's start there.
Anything you experience is real, you know?
So start there.
But the talk that I presented was called, is DMT a messenger molecule from an extraterrestrial civilization?
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...
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.
DMT is kind of the archetypal psychedelic, but you've got psilocybin, psilicin, 5-methoxy, bufotanine, and even the beta-carbolines.
So if you...
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.
So pretty soon you're not talking about is DMT, It's extraterrestrial in origin.
You have to say, well, obviously it came from tryptophan.
So how did the trypoperon arise in phylogeny?
It was that extraterrestrial?
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.
Because you could say, well, it came from rhodopsin.
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.
So I ended up – I could make the case that DMT is extraterrestrial.
And – But is that even an interesting case, like whether or not it's from another planet?
Whatever it is, it doesn't seem like it's here.
The experience doesn't.
It doesn't seem like it's here.
Right.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But...
But then again, where is here?
Right.
You know, eventually I defaulted to say it may not be an extraterrestrial messenger molecule, but it is a messenger molecule and it is a distinctly terrestrial messenger molecule.
It is the messenger molecule that has been adopted by the community of species to talk to the monkeys, you know, and try to, you know, talk to our consciousness and maybe even to trigger consciousness.
So DMT is only two steps from tryptophan, enzymatically and cellular metabolism.
Tryptophan is universal.
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.
Two steps from tryptophan, decarboxylation and N-methylation, is all it takes to get DMT.
And that's like the prototypal tryptamine psychedelic.
And the enzymes that catalyze those steps, they may not be universal in organisms, but they're pretty darn near universal because they have all sorts of other cellular housekeeping functions.
You know, decarboxylating amino acids is something that goes on in every cell.
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.
So you can make the case that, and we know this, DMT is extremely common in nature.
DMT is, I say nature is drenched in DMT, you know.
From the animal level to the plant level to the fungal level, you find these things everywhere.
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.
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.
It's just that nobody's looked.
Nobody's going to fund this work.
I think you can reasonably say that, you know, there are about 1400 species of acacia in the world.
Probably 75% of them have DMT. And actually, I would go to the next – I would even claim without evidence.
That's never stopped me before.
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.
Most don't have large levels of them.
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.
Is it phalaris grass that's toxic to sheep because of DMT? Yep, that's the one.
So the DMT in it, for whatever reason, the way it interacts with the sheep's digestive system, it becomes poison?
Well, no, not entirely.
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.
Gramine is more or less toxic.
Gramine shows up in a lot of grass species.
That's probably the thing that causes what's called phalaris staggers.
So if you just fed DMT synthesized to sheep, it wouldn't be toxic.
Hard to say.
Do they produce monoamine oxidase?
Nobody's done it.
Do sheep?
Yeah.
Of course.
So do leopards or jaguars.
All mammals.
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?
I mean, you've seen those videos, I'm sure.
Yeah, I've seen those videos.
Well, for one thing, they're eating banisteriopsis, right, which is the source of the MAO inhibitors.
Oh, okay, right.
And I don't know what to make of that.
It certainly does seem like some kind of a catnip for them, you know, causes an altered state for sure.
MAO inhibitors in and of themselves, they produce some sort of a psychedelic experience?
They can.
Not just from the MAO inhibition, but they often have other effects that are psychoactive.
Like harming.
Harming is a good example.
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.
Well, it turns out now harming is getting a second look.
It's interesting that harming...
You know, was discovered in Paganum harmola about maybe 10 years before ayahuasca was ever reported to science.
So harming is one of these hoary old alkaloids, I like to call it.
You know, it's been known forever.
And now we're just finding out it has all sorts of interesting pharmacologies.
It's an MAO inhibitor for sure.
More importantly, it appears that it stimulates neurogenesis, and that's relevant to Alzheimer's and brain development and even Down syndrome.
It is an inhibitor of this kinase, this regulatory protein called DYRK1, which has got its fingers in lots of different cellular pies.
You could call it...
Many different regulatory functions.
And harming is a very potent, very selector inhibitor of this kinase.
So that relates to this.
It actually stimulates nerve growth in the hippocampus.
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.
So, like most natural molecules, it's not a one-trick pony.
You know, harming has a number of effects, you know, and that's why taking ayahuasca...
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.
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?
Right, right.
Well, yeah.
This is part of the...
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, and they were isolated molecules.
They weren't aware of other people's work, and so they misnamed these things.
You know, I mean, I can't tell you exactly.
I think initially it was Lewis Lewin who discovered harmine, and he called it benisterine.
Then it turned out, well, another group, years before, had isolated the same molecule from beganum harmilla.
And telepathine was one of these misnomers, you know, that came out.
The problem with this was that back in the day, people didn't collect voucher specimens.
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 good sense to collect specimens of the original plant so that people can go back and look which now everybody that wants to do phytochemical work hopefully has the A lot of this early work was reported and there was no voucher specimens to document the collection.
So a lot of it had to be dismissed.
You know, the beta-carbillene 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. worked on them and discovered harmine, tetrahydroharmine.
and harmiline as the main alkaloids.
They could reference that to botanical voucher specimens, so they really should get the credit for discovering it.
And then once that was done, then it was known.
You know, other scientists had to acknowledge that.
Why did they describe it as telepathy?
There was supposedly some sort of a story about some group telepathic experience.
Yeah.
This was just romantic.
This was just some story, you know, out of the literature.
Yeah.
I mean, it was rumored to be able to cause telepathy.
But this wasn't ayahuasca.
They were only taking harmilla?
It's not clear.
I mean, they may have been taking it, but whether they were getting telepathy, I kind of doubt it.
But we know we could get telepathy on ayahuasca.
It's not so uncommon.
It happens all the time.
People have group hallucinations, group visions.
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?
Or at least to...
As far as I know, that hasn't been done.
Yeah, because everybody wants to talk afterwards, like, oh my god, did you see the dragon?
Right.
I don't think that's been done.
That seems like a worthy study, because I've heard from more than one person.
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.
From this experience.
Obviously, they're very close, and they were together, and they probably communicated quite a bit.
I would just think it would be a really interesting experiment.
It would be very interesting.
I mean...
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.
I mean, that's kind of a trivial statement, of course.
But then you get down to questions of how verifiable is that?
How real is that?
How, you know, and people get...
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, it comes down to if you experience them, they're real.
If anything you experience is real, because you've experienced it, does it have a corresponding...
Well, you know, what's external?
What's internal?
You know, we throw around these terms, these epistemological, metaphysical terms, quite carelessly, you know, without really thinking about it.
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?
You know, we're all one.
There is no separation.
It's separated in normal consciousness, though.
It's separated in normal consciousness.
But then what is normal consciousness if not a reflection of your neurochemical brain state?
I mean, everything you experience is an altered state because it's filtered into this brain, processed by the brain.
And, you know, the brain is a biochemical engine that, you know, as I say often, we're made out of drugs.
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.
All these things are done best when you're here and present, whereas when you're in a psychedelic state, I agree with you.
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.
Whether you hallucinated it or not, it's the exact same experience.
Exactly.
You can't put it on a scale.
You can't weigh it.
Like, we've stretched the tape measure around and God is 47 inches across.
Like, just because, you know what I'm saying?
Just because you can't measure it with what we term our metrics for reality.
Right.
And that is exactly the thing.
Don't worry about whether it's real in the way we would define real.
Is it good information or is it bad?
Or is it not?
That's the thing.
It doesn't matter where it comes from.
If it's good information, then it has its own internal validity.
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.
But we are obsessed with that.
We're obsessed with reality.
Yeah, we are obsessed with it.
Because we think we're being fooled a lot, right?
And this goes back to Terrence's La Charrera psychedelic experience where he had a UFO encounter.
You know, the easily dismissing amongst us would go, well, he's tripping his balls off on mushrooms.
Of course he saw UFOs.
Was there a leprechaun driving the UFO? Like, all that's nonsense.
Right, right.
Right.
Easy to dismiss.
And in fact, that is the nature of these phenomena.
That's what's really interesting.
Easy to dismiss.
That was another aspect of the experiment of Latoura I left out when I was talking about my lecture.
But there's almost always an element of absurdity in these experiences and in paranormal experiences and UFO encounters.
It's like...
Little green man?
Come on, are you kidding?
But what the fuck?
There are little green men, you know, and little blue men.
You know, a guy you should have on this show, maybe you have already, is Whitley Streeper.
No, I haven't had him on, but he's so out to lunch.
I have massive reservations.
There's a video of him looking at a fly...
Clearly a fly flies in front of a camera and he's describing it as, is this a man in a suit?
Like there's something wrong with him.
Well, I missed that.
I missed that part.
I think...
What's interesting about Whitley, and I agree, I totally dismissed him, you know, for a long time.
I thought, you know, he is really a nutcase.
He's from the communion books for people who don't know.
Exactly.
He wrote a series of books about being abducted and...
Yeah.
But I sort of had to change my opinion somewhat because he and Jeffrey Kripal...
Who I do know is...
Jeffrey Kripel is a professor of comparative religion and mythology at Rice University.
And his focus initially is sort of on the superhero as in contemporary mythology as a mythical figure and that sort of thing.
He and...
I was invited to a workshop that Whitley was going to be at.
This was a couple of years ago in Hawaii.
Well, I'm always interested in a free trip to Hawaii, right?
So I said, you know, I'd like to come to this thing, but this guy is a nutcase.
I'm not sure I want to appear on the same stage with this guy.
unidentified
And if it's me saying that, you know he's a nutcase.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
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?
And I said, oh, I don't.
I said, I know Jeffrey Kripal.
I know that he's not in that case, and that's interesting.
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.
The name of the book is...
Supernatural, two words, supernatural, a new vision of the unexplained.
And it's really very interesting.
The book is basically, you know, alternating chapters.
Whitley tells his stories about what happened to him, what has happened to him, what continues to happen to him.
He lives in some kind of alternate reality.
I get that.
I mean, I don't know if I accept it, but I get it.
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.
And it's a fascinating book.
If you just suspend disbelief for a minute and think about – Assume that Whitley is sincere.
I don't think he's lying.
I think that these things really happen to him, or he thinks they do.
And some of the most craziest things, these are not, you know, the media has made...
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.
But if you take a closer look, one thing, to Whitley's credit, is he doesn't claim to understand what's happening.
He doesn't call it an alien encounter.
He doesn't claim anything.
He just says, this is happening.
I have no...
Friggin' idea what this is.
So that's honest.
You know, that's an honest scientific stance.
I do not understand this phenomenon.
So I give him credit for that.
And then he and Jeffrey wrote this book.
There was a very interesting, you know, later on...
So I read all this.
Later on in the book, there's a chapter where they...
What is the possible physical explanation of what's going on here, if there is a physical explanation?
And one of the headings, I think the chapter, one of the headings in the chapter was labeled, The Soul as a UFO.
And that kind of blew my mind.
That got my attention because, you know, when I did this workshop with them, I was kind of bringing the flag of psychedelics, right?
And I was saying, if you don't address psychedelics, you've only got part of the picture here.
And they were talking about how the soul, how this could be some sort of a physical plasmoid type of thing.
They were invoking, you know, scientific terminology.
I don't know if it was legitimate or not, but just the idea, the soul of a UFO.
And I was able to respond to that and say, well, you know, the experiment at La Chirera was essentially the blueprints of how to build one of these things that you're talking about.
You know, which it was really, this transformation.
And so that was, that impressed me.
I don't know what to make of it, but I think there is, and they don't really know, nobody knows what to make of it.
But I think there are just odd things going on, but that some people experience.
And whether they are actual encounters or dreams or somewhere in between, I'm not sure.
But it would be good.
I mean, yeah, I don't know.
When you meet Whitley...
Have you ever met him?
No.
He is like the most drab person you can imagine.
I mean, he's like an accountant or something.
He's probably worn out from telling all these stories.
Probably worn out.
Yeah, could be.
Could be.
But he was a fiction writer.
He was a fiction writer.
Yeah, and then he comes out with this incredible real-world story that reads like fiction.
Right.
And there's obviously something off.
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.
Now, what is that something off?
Is it a psychotic break?
Is it something that drifts in and out?
Is he having problems with normal consciousness?
I mean, I don't know what it is, but...
I'm really not sure.
See if you can find that video of him talking about the fly.
Did you find it?
I looked...
He thinks he flies a man in a fucking space suit.
He's like, is that a man in a suit?
unidentified
What is that?
And I'm like, oh, Jesus.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
This guy's out to lunch.
Call the men with nets, right?
There's quite a few of those.
There's quite a few really bizarre videos of him.
I see.
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?
Right, right.
And this is the big thing that I've always...
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.
The vast majority of them take place at night or while someone's lying in bed, which is exactly when you're dreaming.
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.
I mean, obviously, some people have problems with producing serotonin and dopamine, and then other people have no problems with it.
The biology of the human brain varies, right?
Right.
So, it's not without...
It's not without possibility that there's someone who has a real issue with these chemicals just busting through and flooding their system.
unidentified
We know there are.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
We know there are people.
We call it mental illness.
But then does this contradict what we've already said about psychedelic experiences?
Like, why would we diminish his endogenous psychedelic experience if that's what he's having?
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.
And all these things are taking place at the same time.
In the dream state during heavy REM sleep, and he's coming back with these uniform stories of alien abduction.
Yeah.
No, I agree.
I mean, it's hard to parse it out.
And I'm not saying I accept it all.
It's easy to dismiss, but maybe you shouldn't, right?
Well, there maybe is something there.
We should approach it in the spirit of, here's a phenomenon.
We don't understand it.
We shouldn't dismiss it.
There's something to be understood here.
Not necessarily his understanding of it, but something to be looked at there.
And I thought this book was interesting for its balance, you know.
I would not have Whitley Strieber on your show without Jeffrey Kripal on your show.
That would be fun.
Because it would be fun.
And maybe it's, you know, maybe it's a bridge too far.
I'm not sure.
unidentified
Maybe not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, maybe not.
Maybe we get to the bottom of this thing.
Yeah.
Well, is there something to be got to the bottom of it?
That's the question.
unidentified
Is there a bottom at all?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Is it just one man's delusion, or is there really something at the base of it?
And this is kind of the point that we were talking about earlier.
A while back in this conversation about natural philosophy.
Natural philosophy, you know, it has a wider scope for understanding.
And you can say, well, meaning natural philosophy will accept every cockamamie, woo-woo idea that ever came along.
Not properly.
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, it doesn't fit into what we think we know, so we're not going to talk about it.
That's dishonest.
That's intellectual dishonesty, and we have too much of that, you know.
Science is a very timid kind of activity sometimes, because in its current incarnation, it's corrupted in a certain way.
You can't just be the curious monkey who's trying to apply...
You know, clear thinking, rigorous thought to understanding nature, we don't have that luxury.
Scientists don't have that luxury.
If they're practicing scientists, you have to be getting grants.
You have to play the science game.
So that's when you keep saying science is corrupted, that's what you mean by it, that they have to get grants?
Not that they have to—that's part of it.
They have to get grants, and they have to be dishonest, right?
I mean, with themselves, with what they know, like the example of the archaeologists or the psychedelic researchers back in the 80s.
If you wanted to kill your career, tell your supervisor you wanted to work on psychedelics.
You were pretty much done.
Or if you were an archaeologist and you said, but— You know, look, there's all this evidence for, you know, ancient civilizations.
It's like, you want to be in this department, kid?
You're out of here if you start talking about that.
So science is dogma in a lot of ways.
Not always.
But it's unfortunate that, you know...
In order to save people's careers, in order to have a career in science, you have to make this sacrifice.
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.
And science is a very medieval institution in that respect.
It's a lot like religion, you know.
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?
Chemical gateway to...
unidentified
To what?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Whatever it is.
To whatever that DMT experience is.
That this is something that your brain has the ability to travel to.
But, I mean, since we know that the body does produce this, and we know that it's possible for people to...
I mean, I've never done it, but I know that people who do Kundalini Yoga have apparently reported...
Trip-like experiences that are very similar to a real DMT flash.
So the mind has this ability to do this on its own.
Is that something worth considering?
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?
Is there too many what-ifs or who knows?
No, I mean, there's so much in what you said where you have to go back and unpack all of these things.
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.
And we came to it really from a childhood that was steeped in science fiction.
So we carried with us the idea, this really is another dimension.
And it may be a portal to another dimension.
And as science fiction nuts, we were totally okay with that.
And we thought maybe DMT was.
And maybe it is.
Or it somehow pulls the curtain back on something that's around us all the time that we don't see.
But again, in thinking about these things, is it something that is entirely within the brain that it originates?
Or is it something that, is it like a lens that, you know, our eyes are covered with filters and DMT temporarily removes those filters?
I think it's hard to know.
I mean, I think maybe experimentally we could begin to approach this.
Have you...
And I think we really know.
I think that's another thing about natural philosophy that's important that science is overlooking.
Natural philosophy always remembers the limits of what is known.
And science is a bit arrogant about what they think is known.
Science only understands a small fraction of all there is to know.
And Ayahuasca, another psychedelic, always remind me of this.
When I take it, remember the limitations of your knowledge.
Or sometimes it more or less kindly says it, you don't know shit.
And it's true.
We don't know shit, you know, and scientists can forget that, you know.
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, that the pineal can secrete DMT under certain circumstances or under stress.
The lungs can produce large amounts of DMT that are translocated to the brain.
But it's not so clear that that goes on.
I mean, it's clear that it can be produced.
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.
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 but it's chopped up so quickly that it never reaches the site of action and it never reaches the levels at the neuron that Even when consumed?
Are you saying endogenously produced DMT?
Endogenously.
It does when you consume it.
Obviously, you flood the system and you get much higher levels than it's ever produced endogenously.
But we haven't really measured the levels produced endogenously during especially these extreme states.
And that's part of the problem.
That's part of the problem.
How do you do that?
Have you done it?
How do you do that?
unidentified
Have you done Kundalini and tried to recreate...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
No, I haven't.
Me neither.
You know, Terence had that fantastic joke.
It was a talk about that this monk had practiced the city of levitation.
Do you remember this one?
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.
And the Buddha said, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel.
Right.
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?
But I think the last time I was on your show, we talked about this other thing, this Ajna light we discussed.
Yes.
And I don't know if you've interviewed.
Yeah, we have to buy you one.
I said we've totally dropped the ball on that.
You don't have to buy one.
No, we do have to buy you one.
Buy yourself one.
I'm going to buy myself one and you one.
This time we're going to do it.
We say we're going to...
I do too many podcasts.
I forget everything.
Yeah, I know.
I've never...
But the actual line is interesting because, you know, I mean, he claims, and that was the conversation we had.
He claims, yes, this stimulates endogenous synthesis of DMT. I'm writing this down right now.
Spell it out for me.
A-J-N-A... Ajna Light.
And his website is just ajnalight.com.
And there's some good PDFs on there that'll explain what this is about.
Get on that, Jamie.
Yeah.
Jamie's ordering two right now.
Jamie's ordering two right now.
Because I just mentioned this on your show.
unidentified
Get it together.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right.
But anyway...
So this light can produce some sort of psychedelic experience.
He claims it stimulates DMT synthesis in the pineal.
When you lie underneath it...
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.
You lie under it, and it stimulates hypnagogic hallucinations that are a lot like...
That guy looks like an old school freak.
Look at him.
He's a Zen monk.
I bet he is.
Yeah.
unidentified
Amongst other things.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
He used to be an Apple engineer.
He was Steve Jobs' right-hand man.
Wow.
He went the right way.
He went the right way.
So he's got this thing.
Is that cord going down to her head?
I'm having a hard time seeing what's happening.
Something's wrapped around her head.
That better not be a crystal.
I'll fucking run out of this room.
No, I think it's a deceptive thing.
He didn't attach anything to me when I was on it.
Oh, it's a perspective issue?
I think it's the cord going behind her.
Oh, I see.
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.
And I said, well, you know, the LEDs are all changing color, right?
And that's how I see it.
He says, no, they're white.
The colors are coming from you.
You're supplying the colors.
unidentified
Whoa.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So, okay.
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?
Turns out it's not so easy to nail that down.
Because DMT is so ephemeral in the system, you can't take urine samples or cerebral spinal fluid or anything.
It would be gone by the time you did it.
So the only way, well, maybe not the only way, but one way you could do it is you could do something called...
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, you know, levels of DMT are higher.
Why couldn't you do that to a voluntary participant?
Voluntary or not, you'd be...
Screwing their brain up?
Well, no, not necessarily, but you'd have a hard time getting permission.
There might be.
You could do it to a rat, though.
You could do it to a rat.
Well, that's what Cottonwood Research Foundation's done, right?
They've done that.
That's how they discovered DMT in the pineal?
Did they do that to a live rat?
Yeah, yeah.
That's how they discovered it.
That was the first proof, right?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That was the first proof.
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.
It's a sigma-1 agonist as well as a serotonin agonist, which is another...
Another receptor.
It's definitely that, but it's not clear what the function is.
It's a complicated issue.
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.
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?
Because everybody has this romantic idea, and he comes along and just squashes it, you know?
And it's like, man, you know, you've disappointed a lot of people today.
But on the other hand, reality is good.
Facts are good.
What a guy did do that sort of made me think maybe there is something to it.
He's tried pre-dosing with an MAO inhibitor.
Just take banisteriopsis T without the admixture about 30 minutes before going under the light.
And then it's much more intense and it's much more prolonged.
You've done this?
I haven't done it.
But he claims that and other people say that it definitely enhances this.
So that would indicate that the breakdown of DMT is being inhibited.
Is he claiming that you could reach actual DMT states with this device upon practice?
Yeah.
What about in the tank?
That thing seems designed for the tank.
But how do you put the light in the tank?
You just suspend it.
Suspend it from the ceiling and put a switch on the wall.
You climb in, hit the switch, and lay down.
You could try it.
I'm going to try it.
You could try it.
That seems like the way to...
I'm going to get a hold of Crash from the float lab.
Because Crash was trying to put...
He's the mad scientist behind the float lab, which is the most advanced...
I mean, you saw that contraption that we have back there.
That is as state-of-the-art as it gets in the world of tanks.
And he had a concept for developing learning films.
Films where you would lie down, and in the absence of any physical input, right, or very minimal...
Meaning that you're floating in that environment.
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.
And they would play instructional videos and things, and you would learn them with the minimal amount of distractions.
And he think you could achieve, his thought was, you could achieve accelerated learning.
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.
Well, that's very interesting.
Do you have a lot of experience with the tank?
Almost none.
Oh, it's so great.
You would love it.
And it's really great for working on ideas.
It's like one of the best environments in the world for working on a thought because there's no input.
You're not thinking about anything else.
You're just in total silence, total darkness.
It's very relaxing.
You're floating.
And in the absence of this input, your brain has more resources.
Right.
Is it similar to a psychedelic experience?
Yes, yes.
You can try it.
It's here.
I mean, you got some time?
Is it actually not today?
I have to go to another interview.
But I don't know.
Is it kosher to ask you?
Have you taken psychedelics and gone into the tank?
Or, of course, you never take psychedelics.
This stuff's the best for it.
Okay.
Well, this stuff's the same thing.
That is legal.
That stuff's good.
That's legal.
This one's not legal.
Oh, that one's not legal.
Sorry.
This one's...
Not legal.
This one's legal.
Okay.
Depends on who you're asking.
Right.
But what the key is, I think, to get a good baseline of sobriety doing it, doing it sober.
But my favorite is actually edible marijuana.
I think edible marijuana, especially high doses, especially in that complete darkness environment, profound visuals.
Like really bizarre, strange, strange visuals.
And they kind of dance for you in there.
It's really, really wild.
I think it's the best environment ever for edible marijuana.
Well...
Dennis, it's an open invitation.
You can buy me an immersion tank.
Forget the Agilite.
Ship the immersion tank.
Would you do it if we got you one?
Do you have room for it?
I don't have room for it.
unidentified
Damn.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Where are you living these days?
I am living in St. Paul, Minnesota.
You're still in Minnesota, right?
But I am moving to Canada.
I'm immigrating to Canada.
Damn, this Donald Trump stuff got you down, huh?
Got me down.
I'm not participating anymore.
Now that my wife has got her little five-year pension, she's able to retire.
She's Canadian, so she's my ticket out of here.
Nice.
So that's why you're moving up there?
I am moving to British Columbia, yeah.
You were teaching in Minnesota?
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.
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.
I love it up there.
We're going to move.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, I'm excited.
I applied for my permanent residence, and there's no reason why I wouldn't get it.
It's a pretty simple thing, so that will happen next spring.
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.
Minnesota, the prime time is the winter?
End of the winter.
I would think no one's going anywhere in Minnesota.
People start looking at the end of February, so it's a hot time because it's a seller's market right now.
Oh, that's great.
We're going to go up there.
What part of B.C.? Well, around Vancouver, we probably won't be able to afford to live in Vancouver.
The housing market is utterly nuts, but somewhere close by, White Rock, Abbotsford.
Have you looked at Vancouver Island?
Yeah, we've looked at Vancouver, and it's not that much less expensive there.
But it's so pretty.
It's nice, but logistically, it's a problem.
Yeah, I kind of like that.
If you want to go anywhere, you have to take a ferry.
That's what I'm looking forward to.
All the work, all the travel I do need to be close to the airports.
But I am excited.
I mean, for one thing, you know, my colleague Wade Davis is up there.
You know him.
He's the person that wrote One River.
He was a graduate student of Schulte's.
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.
He's the guy that worked out the zombie poison mystery back in the day, you know, in Haiti.
unidentified
Oh!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
He's that guy, but he's written a lot of excellent books, and now he's...
Is that that Colombian devil's dust or whatever the hell that is?
No, no, that's brogmanzia.
That's toway.
No, this is the zombie medicine is tetrodotoxin, which is a toxin from pufferfish as well as other marine sources.
It's a tetrodotoxin.
Neurolytic neurotoxin that utterly paralyzes you for about 48 hours.
unidentified
Whoa.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But you're completely conscious.
You can hear everything.
You can't move a muscle.
And so in the zombie context, they would contrive to give this to people if they want to put the whammy on them.
Then they would bury them.
Oh, Jesus.
And if they were lucky, they would – and then they would exhum them like 48 hours later.
And of course a lot of them did die, but if they were alive, then they would be zombies.
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, you know, shells of their former self.
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Did Torah have permanent effects like that?
It can.
Yeah, it can.
And after this traumatic experience, you can imagine, you know, what.
So Wade worked all that out.
His first book was called The Serpent and the Rainbow.
Oh, right.
That was made into a film.
Terrible film, but good book.
But later he wrote many books.
His most memorable one is basically a biography of Schulte's called One River Adventures in the Amazon or something like that.
He'd be a great guy to bring on your show.
That sounds awesome.
Very articulate man.
And, you know, we worked actually this Heraclitus expedition I was telling you on.
Wade was on that expedition.
And I've gotten to know him.
I consider him a good friend.
But he's now...
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.
He's got wonderful tales to tell.
Well, I can guarantee you that there's float tank centers in Vancouver.
There are float tank centers in Vancouver.
We'll get you connected and hook you up.
You need this in your life.
I'd love to.
I'd love to get into it.
It's great physically, too.
You feel very relaxed when you get out of there.
My issue always, Joe, is I just never feel like I have time.
That's my issue as well.
I have to change my attitude about that and realize that I need to take time out to care for my mind and body.
I don't do enough of that, you know.
But I'm hoping that when I move up to BC, Wade and I can do some work together and maybe even teach, you know, work on this thing in South America, get some courses going down there.
Because with him, you know, as one of the faculty… That will bring a lot of people.
I mean, he's high profile and really a good guy.
That's fantastic.
So do you have a timeline for this thing in Peru?
Yeah, well, it's happening faster than I had dared to hope, actually.
I think...
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.
I mean, it is all happening.
This is the formative year.
We know where we want to go.
We're talking to investors who are seriously interested.
They want to get involved and they have money.
And it's not just about money.
They also have, you know, they've listened to the medicine and it's all about the medicine.
As we know, changes people's hearts and minds.
So these folks, they have the resources, but they realize there is a larger vision.
And so, 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.
I have yes-a-holism, and it takes a lot out of me, and it keeps me distracted.
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, whether or not they involve psychedelics.
They can have rich learning experiences.
I mean, it's a perfect location.
Want to learn about the Incas, Machu Picchu is right there, it's all there.
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.
That's the idea.
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.
Maybe will.
Someday.
And just use it as a platform for...
I like the academic idea.
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.
And then I can be like...
I can be more in residence there and I don't have to keep running around the world.
I don't want to say I'm the guru in residence because my first thing is I'm no guru.
I'm just a learner like everybody else.
We're all just curious monkeys, right?
Yeah.
Well, it seems to me that with psychedelics, the interest and the desire far exceeds the access.
Yeah.
Especially in this country.
There's so many people that really have no idea where to start.
I can't tell you how many people have asked me, hey, how do I get mushrooms?
Or how do I get...
Right.
It's just even amongst people that you would think would know someone who would have something.
But it's one of those things where we're going to have to wait until things get more legal, until the environment changes.
And it seems to be moving in that way.
I think it is.
You know, John Hopkins...
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.
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, or in Peru, because the whole regulatory framework is different.
Peru has declared ayahuasca national patrimony.
That's amazing.
There's no restriction on the use of ayahuasca.
And all these other plant medicines are part of the tradition.
You know, San Pedro, called Huachuma, you know, the snuffs, Vilca snuff.
Now, I don't know about the status of mushrooms, but I think with a little bit of transparency, we could also get permission.
I mean, you could probably use them at this place and nobody would say a word, but if we wanted to, we could get permission to use them.
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 here.
You know, work with smart shamans who also want to work with clinicians to develop a really new paradigm.
That combines the best of both.
And Michael Pollan refers to this a little bit, but he kind of glosses over it.
But I think that's where the therapeutic revolution is going to come, when you fuse shamanism and the clinical approach.
And you can do all that there and develop models that can be used other places.
And you don't have to be secretive about it.
You know, you don't have to be ashamed or we're not doing anything illegal or covert.
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.
Not that we necessarily would do that, but we can be open about what we're doing.
Yeah.
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.
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.
It's a perfect place to look at You know, new paradigms for food production and so on.
The Sacred Valley is one of the five areas in the world where agriculture originated.
You know, most of our important food plants came from there originally.
They have 6,000 varieties of potatoes.
4,000 varieties of tomatoes.
I mean, incredible food biodiversity.
And the foods that have gone global, how many varieties of potatoes do you see in the grocery store?
Maybe four or five at most.
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.
And also, what the Incas knew about agriculture was pretty revolutionary.
So the spectrum was broad.
Are you going to have a standardized ingredients list when it comes to ayahuasca, in terms of the dosage?
That's work that we want to do.
Yeah.
Not necessarily to impose it on other people, but I think it could benefit from a bit of analytical work.
I'd like to do that.
I'm also interested in the sort of the pharmacopoeia of other plants that are associated with ayahuasca.
They're not put into ayahuasca all the time, but sometimes they're used for the dietas.
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.
For more specific therapeutic purposes.
So you might have one that's good for, say, PTSD and one that's better for depression.
And, you know, you could actually tailor these things.
Bring a little science into it because, you know...
And you don't have to have...
You know, you don't have to have gleaming laboratories for this.
You can do it with a very simple setup, a simple natural products laboratory.
Most importantly is the people that you have in there, not the equipment that you have.
And you could do a lot of stuff.
And partly this is what this book is about, too.
The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
You know...
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.
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.
And that's what ethnopharmacology is about.
And specifically, it's the ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs.
So there's a lot still to be discovered.
Now, Canada has just recently legalized marijuana.
As of today, I think.
Yes.
Do they have any plans or do you know of considering the legality of other substances?
As a matter of fact, they do.
I can't really talk about it.
And actually, I shouldn't talk about it because I don't have that much information.
But there is a gentleman...
I meet the most interesting people at these retreats.
You wouldn't believe it.
This guy is an aspiring young politician, Canadian politician from Ottawa.
He's talking to Justin about legalizing psychedelics for therapeutic uses.
And he's working with some lawyers and so on and putting together a proposal to do this.
MDMA assisted psychotherapy trials to begin final phase in Vancouver.
Well, there you go.
But that's MAPS, right?
That's the catalyst behind that.
He wants to change policy.
And the thing is, the Canadians are reasonable people.
That's the big difference from Americans.
You know, you can propose this kind of thing.
They won't dismiss it out of hand.
Well, you know, what's your evidence?
Why should we do this?
Justin's a very young guy.
He's young.
I imagine he's been beyond the chrysanthemum a time or two.
You think so?
I do.
Really?
Sure.
I think so.
Wow.
unidentified
What makes you say that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Has he spoken about it?
I'm sure he wouldn't speak about it.
I guess.
Just a guess.
He's the right age.
Well, I can't say.
It's just pure speculation.
Let's put it this way.
I wouldn't be surprised.
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.
Right, right.
You know, the Canadians, I mean, for instance, to get approval for these MDMA trials was a lot more straightforward in Canada, you know.
And now, and they've done some clinical studies with ayahuasca, and they're on board with that.
They've done some studies with indigenous people in Canada.
They call them First Nations.
But they have done that, and it's been straightforward to get that work done.
They don't have the drug hysteria that we have.
So I think it's a good place to pursue this research.
Well, in many ways, they were victims of our drug hysteria.
I mean, they sort of adopted our ideas.
Right.
I'll be interested to see our response to the legalization of cannabis.
That's going to piss them off.
Well, it'll piss off that little elf, Sessions.
Right.
Which is great.
He needs to be pissed off.
Yeah, he's such a fool, that guy.
This statement, good people don't smoke marijuana, that is one of the dumbest fucking things anyone has ever said ever.
It's such a crazy thing to say.
That is one of the dumbest generalizations.
That's like saying all white people are evil.
It's just so stupid.
It's such a stupid thing to say.
Just a stupid thing to say.
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.
And I think you'll see that very soon.
That would be amazing.
And I just hope it would have a positive effect on, you know, our country.
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.
The number one tool is psychedelics.
It's the best in terms of efficacy, in terms of proven results.
There's nothing that's even remotely close.
That's true.
Whether it's MDMA or psilocybin or any of these psychedelic therapies, they have profound effects.
When it comes to the ability to disconnect from addictive behaviors, particularly drugs, opiates, there's nothing better than these psychedelic experiences, particularly Ibogaine.
And, you know, you've got to go to Mexico to use Ibogaine.
Yeah.
I think within five years you're going to see...
And maybe even centers, you know, along the lines of what we're talking about, you know, doing in the Sacred Valley.
I mean, once you've done something like this, then you can replicate it in different countries where the regulatory environment is friendly.
So you could have...
We have the McKenna Academy in Peru, but if they meet the standards, then we can essentially license out that brand or whatever.
And you could potentially do one in Vancouver.
Of course.
Why not?
That would be sensational.
Dude, I'll help.
I swear to God.
unidentified
I'll go over there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I love Vancouver.
I go there every chance I can.
Well, that's good.
So maybe I'll see you more often when you get up there.
Yes, yes.
For sure.
I still have to drag you to South America.
I know.
I'll get you.
I'll get you one of these days.
It's hard, man.
I have young kids, and I'm always busy, and I travel too much as it is.
It's a grind to get me out of the country.
I have the answer to that.
What is that?
Bring your wife and kids.
To Peru?
To Peru.
Okay.
Tripping balls around a bunch of hippies?
No, we have a perfect place.
You know, we can take care of the kids.
There's a Quechua family that runs one of the centers, and they would love to take care of your kids.
Your wife can do yoga or whatever she wants to do.
I like how you say the wife can do yoga.
She's not going to trip, too?
Of course.
Did she get mad?
No, she wants to trip.
unidentified
Absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Of course you couldn't do it.
Somebody's got to watch the kids, though.
You've got to take turns.
Well, that's what I say.
There are people who love kids, and they'll be happy to babysit them.
But it'll happen when the time is right.
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.
And oftentimes, it's people that are...
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.
We have an overwhelming responsibility to take care of those people that we don't meet.
We don't meet it medically.
We don't meet it psychologically.
We don't meet it with therapy.
We just don't give them enough.
We don't meet it financially.
And this could be a way to heal them, to help them reconcile their experience.
And help them, you know, achieve balance back here, you know, stateside.
And it's not just veterans that are traumatized.
All kinds of people are traumatized.
In fact, everybody is traumatized to a certain extent.
Yeah.
Just by living in this society.
I mean, we are a wounded society.
Yes.
That's the thing.
I think these psychedelics are medicines for the soul, in a sense, and medicines for our species, in a certain sense.
I mean, that's why they're global, you know.
We're a wounded society and its dysfunctionality is now becoming apparent, you know, through the political situations.
I mean, I am just baffled by, you know, a government, a president who basically likes to hurt people.
I mean, that seems to be it.
It's this culture of cruelty that has been created.
Well, particularly if he feels slighted.
You know, he wants to come back at you extra hard.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's a reflection probably of his childhood trauma.
I mean, I think his father was very abusive.
Now it's his chance to get revenge, you know.
Wouldn't you love to take him?
What's that?
Wouldn't you love to take him for a trip?
You know, I don't think it would do any good.
unidentified
Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I don't think it would do any good.
unidentified
Why not?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Because I don't think there's a moral – I don't think there's a core there.
You know, my – I mean, I would certainly – I don't think it would help him.
The curandero I've worked most with said – told me, you know, there are two kinds of people I will not give ayahuasca to.
One is sociopaths and the other is schizophrenics.
Trump is a sociopath.
You know, he has no interior.
He's never had a reflective moment in his life.
That's what concerns me.
It's all external.
He's like pure id.
He is a six-year-old, an angry six-year-old.
If we met him at 16, would you have hope for his future?
I mean, when is a person beyond reproach or beyond help?
Like, what is the year?
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.
You know, you see someone who's a 60-year-old fool, that's a dying fool.
He's going to be a fool until his last day on this planet.
Why is that, though?
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?
Is it just because of our own past experiences with these types of people?
Or are we imposing a limitation on their growth?
I'm very curious about that because we do do that.
We assume that if someone fucks up when they're 20, well, they'll get better.
They're going to evolve.
But if they fuck up when they're 70, we're like, that guy's a goner.
Well, we make that assumption, you know, and it may not be true.
It's not fair, I don't think.
In a way, it's not fair.
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.
It actually reorganizes connections in the brain.
You know, psilocybin does this, and presumably the others do too.
Some of the phenethylamines do it.
So that's a new thing.
You know, you can actually change the connectivity of these systems.
It's probably not fair to say – I mean, my friend who came with me, he made a point when we were discussing this.
He says, you know, you shouldn't hate Trump.
You know, he's used to that.
You should love Trump.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I said, it's real hard for me to love Trump.
But I think the point that he's making is that he is – Trump is not the cause of it in some way.
He's the symptom of what's happening and he's the disruptor.
But the disruption is happening anyway.
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.
And that's a good thing because this system, it can't last.
So there's going to be a transition that's going to be pretty rough.
Trump is just part of that, not in any conscious way.
He's as much the victim of the times as anybody else.
Right, and of expectations.
He just happened to be president and has his finger on the nuclear button and a few other inconvenient things.
Otherwise, he would just be dismissed, you know, as an old cranky old guy railing at the television.
He was fun before this.
I guess.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I mean, before this, he was, you're fired.
He was the rich guy with his name on the big buildings.
He was a caricature.
He wasn't what he is now.
What he is now is he's exploited this vulnerability in the political system that we essentially have popularity contests to choose our rulers.
And the idea of that at first was to pick the best one based on public perception.
But that's not what it is anymore.
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.
And we just want...
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
came on and it turns out he is the swamp.
The swamp is inescapable.
So the system is completely broken.
I mean, I certainly don't think if we elected Hillary, it would all be good.
It would still be a mess.
But the problem with Trump is...
You know, he's immune to facts, for one thing.
I mean, the man is obviously deluded, possibly demented, certainly a sociopath, I mean, and very impulsive.
And this is not the person you need to be leading the Western world because he's not reflective.
It's all response.
This is the petulant six-year-old aspect of it.
He sees something and he reacts immediately.
There's no thought that intervenes in that way.
Well, he's often said that about his business deals.
He doesn't plan things.
He just goes on his instincts.
Yeah, he's not that great a businessman if you look back on.
If you look at his business deals, that's the same with this Korea thing.
I mean, if he can pull that off, more power to him.
But I'll bet you it's not going to go anywhere.
Because, you know, Kim Jong-un and the Chinese who are behind it, they are very smart.
And they...
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.
And people are already saying this.
What did he actually come away with?
Nothing.
Some vague mumblings about denuclearization.
We've had that before.
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.
That was unprecedented.
That was pretty fascinating.
That was pretty fascinating.
I think that's progress in some way.
And maybe his lunacy leads to inadvertent progress.
Or, I mean, maybe it's some sort of a...
I mean, people are many things.
He can't be entirely foolish.
There's probably a method to his math.
He never lost all of his money.
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, he really has been at least marginally successful.
I mean, he has gone bankrupt a few times.
But the point is that...
This is a guy that he's probably pretty complex.
As much as he is crazy, he's probably also pretty complex.
Some of that might benefit us.
Because we have this fucked up system that's undeniably fucked up.
It's just a terrible idea.
And it was an idea that was constructed in 1776 when it made sense back then.
It was a great solution to the problems of the times.
But we don't live in those times.
No, we don't live in those times.
We live in extremely complicated times.
Yeah.
And also, we didn't have the media situation that we have now.
I mean, this is also part of the problem, you know, with the social media and everything.
It's true.
There's tons of fake news out there being produced on both.
You cannot tell.
So you've got the Trump, you know, reality distortion field, right?
Which is reinforced by his...
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.
But in fact, you know, at the stroke of a pen, he could change that.
And we didn't enforce that way before.
Well, he's changed that.
He just caved in and now he's detaining all the families together.
Supposedly.
But it's nice at least that he's doing that.
He's listening to public opinion and the outcry has reached him and he's reacted.
Yeah.
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.
But I'm glad he changed it.
But I'm sure that was a cynical decision.
His advisor said, look, Donald, you're about to go to a rally in Duluth.
I honestly think it's coming from his wife.
Those folks are not going to like this.
I think it's coming from his wife.
unidentified
This is going around today.
This is a jacket she wore to...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Oh, what she's saying?
It says, I really don't care, do you?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, and this was to a meeting of the, like, immigration kids.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
She was meeting the kids, yeah.
What is that?
But is that some fashion jacket?
unidentified
That she wore to that event, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What a stupid fucking thing to wear.
I really don't care, do you?
Yeah, I care.
Yeah, I do care.
But what are we talking about?
What a bizarre, open-ended question.
I really don't care about what.
This is the tone-deafedness of these people.
They have no sensitivity to how it looks.
Well, she's an open critic, though, of separating children from their families.
And she actually made a surprise visit to the Mexican border today to check in on it.
Yeah, to see what's going on.
Good for her.
Yeah.
Well, she's an immigrant.
I mean, this is the irony of the whole thing.
She barely speaks English.
The whole thing is so bizarre.
Is that his own wife is a fucking immigrant.
I mean, clearly.
The whole thing's crazy.
It's really strange.
But that jacket.
This is the sign of the simulation.
Have you considered the simulation theory?
Yes.
unidentified
It might be real.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It might be real.
Well, sometimes I do wonder.
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?
And can't they get a better writer?
You know, I mean, the plot is so...
I began actively considering it when Congressman Wiener kept pulling his dick out.
unidentified
I was like, this is just crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That guy.
I'm like, this is just too much.
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.
How did you like it?
And you're like, what?
That was fake, yeah.
It only took an hour.
How long did it seem?
Like 50 years.
You're in a simulation with artificial memories implanted into your mind.
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.
I mean, this is almost inevitable.
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.
So the real question is, when we do reach that, how will we know?
Well, what if we're already there?
Yes.
But if it is a simulation, how would we know?
And how do we test it?
Yeah, how do we test it?
But another aspect of this is...
Do we really want this?
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?
Let's assume for the moment that this is reality.
Do we want to migrate into a virtual reality?
My concern, my real concern, is that we are the last wave of the biological human.
I really do believe this.
I'm concerned about that too, and I'm not sure I think that that's a good thing.
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, it's inevitable that we become symbiotic with these things.
That we ingrain them into our...
They're going to become a part of your body.
We're going to replace body parts with more efficient body parts.
Right.
And we're one day going to create some sort of artificial life.
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.
One of those things is likely to happen within the next 500 years.
And that's a really generous time frame.
I think that's a generous time frame.
Well, you know, this...
I mean, in some ways, this is sort of...
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.
You know, that's the main lesson.
We're getting estranged from nature.
We have to re-understand our relationship and, you know, become a partner in the symbiosis with nature.
And this projection is the exact opposite of that.
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, and what any artifact is, psychedelics are technology, molecular biology is technology, cybernetics is technology.
Technology inherently has no moral dimension.
These are not good or bad things.
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.
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.
That's what it is.
We're not wise about what we do.
We're not able to step back and say, "Well, yeah, we can produce, we can download the brain into cybernetics, or we can produce an artificial body, or we can do all this genetic stuff." Do we ever stop to think about just because we can do something?
Should we do something?
And the arrogance of science, this is also a problem.
The scientists will say, "Well, we are scientists, right?
We can do it, so let's do it.
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?
And this is something we have to learn.
I think also the psychedelics are important in that regard.
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.
We shouldn't do it just because we can do it.
We really have to, as a species, ask ourselves, is this a good idea?
And I think, again, the psychedelics are teaching tools for learning this and really propagating the message from the community of species.
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.
That's for sure going to be a meme.
Some dude or gal is working on that right now.
Well, I've been talking about this for a year, so it's about time.
It's so striking.
My real concern with this stuff is that this is inevitable.
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.
And this is just what we've said here.
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, this next stage.
And that may be true.
That may be true, too.
I mean, what you say is true.
You know, on some level, anything that can be done is going to be done.
Somebody's going to do it.
But, so, you know...
Trevor Burrus Is it good?
Trevor Burrus Is it good for the collective?
I mean, you know, there are always megalomaniacs who will say, well, I can do it.
I can start a nuclear war.
So why don't we do this?
You know, that's the tricky part.
Again, I think, you know, psychedelics are important in giving us a moral compass.
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.
What is most compatible?
What is most nourishing for living things?
Presumably, we don't want to trash this planet.
You know, we now have the ability to do that.
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.
I think it's hard, but I think we may be able to do it.
And I, for one, don't want to see that happen.
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.
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.
He just goes, fuck it, I'll press it.
And he hits the button and boom, we start from scratch.
And then every, you know, 14 plus billion years, someone develops the Big Bang machine and hits it.
And that's the restart of the universe over and over again.
You're really obsessed with this idea that the universe is a simulation, aren't you?
I am.
Yeah.
I am in some ways.
It's possible.
I mean, it's possible.
Well, it's inevitable that there will be simulated worlds.
Right.
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.
And that we are on our way out.
I really am.
I really do think that maybe that's one of the reasons why we're so crazy and so haywire.
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.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the age of the curious monkey is coming to a close.
I wonder how much of a limitation our biology is too.
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...
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, you know, obtain things.
This is not tenable.
This is not something that makes sense in the long haul, but yet we still go down this illogical road.
And that this is really just because this is the best way to fuel innovation.
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.
Well, I don't know what to say about that.
I mean, it may be.
That may be where we're headed.
And it may be that...
This is a necessary step.
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, And beyond, who knows?
I mean, then maybe this is inevitable that we have to do that, if that's what's happening.
But the question is, what kind of being will we be when we do that?
You know, we won't be human.
We'll be something different than human.
That's what I've always wondered about the alien archetype, that big-headed thing with the no genitals and no mouth.
That may be what we think of as being the ultimate form that the human animal takes.
Right.
If we do symbiotically merge with technology and electronics, that that might be the form that we take.
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.
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.
This is why so many of these alien abduction experiences do take place in these very That's interesting.
But it also just strikes me that these things are – if you go from ancient hominids, you go from Australopithecus, and then you go to a modern computer programmer who does an exercise.
And you look at their body, this sort of like doughy, thin body that doesn't move very well.
And then you go back to this muscular ape-like creature that's covered in hair.
They've lost all the hair.
They've lost all the muscle.
They've become thin.
And then where is that going?
Well, it's obviously going in that same direction.
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.
Right.
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.
It just keeps going in that same direction.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, possibly.
Yeah.
Or maybe we just leave the biological shell behind, you know, but then we're really not human.
I mean, we are transhuman and we, you know, I'm not sure I want to go there.
I don't think I want to go there.
But what I'm thinking is, what is it that's making me cling to these ideas?
Is it that I love emotions?
I love illogical behavior?
unidentified
Do I love art?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I love all those things.
I love music and food and all the things that—cooking and all the things that make a person a person.
But what are those things?
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?
Like, what if there's something that supplants that?
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.
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.
Systems improve over time.
You know, this animal that we are now is very different than the animal we used to be.
Do we want to stay in this imperfect state?
That seems even more ridiculous.
Would we like to stay humans forever?
Humans are so flawed.
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.
A part of it, at least, has to be that the human animal itself is very flawed.
Because there's no perfect culture.
You can't just chalk it up to culture.
Because if you did chalk it up to culture, you would say, well, this culture sucks.
But if you go to this culture, it's amazing.
There's no crime.
Everyone loves everyone.
It's completely open.
There's no need to worry about money because everybody's generous.
And they're really brilliant.
And they get along.
And they create new architecture.
And everything's fantastic.
It's the perfect society.
That doesn't exist.
But isn't that the culture that we can create with the help of psychedelics?
unidentified
Ah, now we're talking.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Isn't that what we're shooting for?
unidentified
Now we're talking.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
A truly humanistic culture where love...
Is what's happening, where it's driven by love and not by hatred and rivalry and scarcity and fear.
You know, and that's the whole thing.
The psychedelics can be the catalyst that teaches us how to love ourselves, how to love each other, how to love the earth.
I mean, I know that sounds cliche and trivial, but that is in fact...
What the promise that they hold for us.
That's why they're teachers.
They're teaching learning tools.
They can teach us to be the human beings that we would like to be.
And that's the thing.
That's the alternative to this hyper-technological process.
I mean, I'm all for technology.
I'm not against technology.
But again, I think we have to...
We have to bring wisdom to it.
We have to make a situation where, you know, it is not controlling us.
We are controlling it.
And we're thinking clearly about we have, you know, this enormous panoply of technologies that can do so many things.
We have to think about how do we deploy those in such a way to maximize human potential or, you know, our humanity.
So that's really, I think, what the promise that psychedelics hold out.
And that's, you know, that's what we're hoping to create, you know, as a kernel.
And we're not the only ones, obviously.
A lot of people have this idea, and it's happening.
But that's the idea, is to create a place where people can learn this.
And, you know, and that's my hope for the future of humanity.
Well, it's a great hope for the future of the people that are alive today, and I think that's the most important.
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.
And if we don't do it pretty soon, there won't be anybody alive to worry about it.
I mean, this is the problem.
This is the best way to end this, I think, possible.
I totally agree.
It's been a great talk.
Thank you.
I always appreciate you coming here, man.
Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
Two volumes, 1967 and volume 2, 2017. 50 years available.
Where can people get it?
Can you get it on Amazon?
Synergetic Press.
You can get it on Amazon, but Synergetic Press.
Synergetic Press.
And anything else to tell people about that you've got going on?
I think we pretty well covered it, you know.
I will send you the links to the videos which are open access to all these lectures so folks can watch them.
Fantastic.
If they want.
Beautiful.
You can, yeah.
All right.
unidentified
All right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Always a pleasure, Joe.
Always a pleasure, Dennis.
Always a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you.
Dennis McKenna, ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you.
▲
Export Selection