Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Dennis Mckenna

Episode Date: April 30, 2017

Recorded at the MAPS psychedelic science conference in Oakland. Duncan is joined by Ethnopharmacologist and philosopher DENNIS MCKENNA!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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the smell of love. HelloFresh.com. Go to HelloFresh.com and use offer code Duncan30 and you'll get $30 off your first week. Hello my sweet, beautiful children of the wind. It's me Duncan and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. I'm glowing with joy right now. Glowing with happiness. I just finished three shows I was kind of nervous about.

The last one in LA was at Harmon or Starburn's Castle and the one before it was in San Francisco and then the one before that was at the Maps Comedy Banquet. All of these are important. Every show is important to me. When I do an actual show show where you guys come out and buy tickets, it's serious business to me in the sense that it really freaks me out. So I've been kind of like, as a show shows approach, you kind of like, you go into like preparatory mode, you kind of start like you lock down, you cramp up spiritually and you

start worrying if you're me. That's what I do. And you kind of write all your jokes out and you look at them and you're like, God, this is bullshit. I'm not going to say that up there. Who do I think I am? What am I doing? Why am I doing this?

What's happened to me that I would be doing this strange thing and all these neurotic thoughts go flying through your mind and thank God for Maps. Thank God for this incredible weekend that I spent at the Maps Psychedelic Science Conference because something happened over the course of those few days where just whatever the blockage was that was making me neurotic when it comes to stand up comedy seemed to just get blasted away. And I'm not sure exactly what did it. I'm speculating here.

I really don't know. So I'm just going to say it was the sum total of all the amazing interactions I had with the amazing people at that conference. And the information that they shared with me, which is really exciting. And it's information that's just scientific. The data that's coming in right now is so beautiful. When it comes to the research they're doing on LSD and psilocybin and MDMA, and of course for somebody like me, that's quite vindicating because my entire life I've used psychedelics

and it's mostly been therapeutic for me. In fact, I would say every single time has been therapeutic, even though sometimes it doesn't feel like that when it's happening. So to be around scientists, hardcore empiricists who are delving into these chemicals and understanding why they work, how they work, what the correct dosages are, and to see that there is a possibility that because of the diligent, measured, careful work of these people, we might enter into an era where psychedelics are prescribable. That fills me with a kind of ridiculous joy.

It's something when I was in high school, if I heard that there would be some time in history where psychedelics could be prescribed to you by a doctor, I would have thought it was the funniest, most incredible thing ever. So to see it happening now, wow man, it puts me in a great mood. But it's not just that, it's not just the research that's going on, it's the community around the research that makes me excited. It's all the different people involved in this amazing movement that fills me with joy because there's just an entire spectrum of humanity interested in psychedelic science.

And obviously it's not just scientists and doctors, it's psychonauts, luminaries, visionaries, gurus, comedians. There are a lot of hilarious comedians at the Psychedelic Science Conference and this kind of produces a tapestry of joy and it just, I don't know, I'm not going to go on and on about it but I just feel so happy and, I don't know, excited for life right now. And excited for what's in store over the next few years for all of us, you know. God, you watch the saber-rattling bullshit on the news and you start getting nervous and trump this, trump that, all the paranoid insanity that comes bleeding out of that fissure-encrusted

media anus exploding all over everyone's brains whenever you turn on the TV and it's easy to get depressed and stuck in a prison of perception based on the insane paradigm these reptilian lunatics want us to believe. But anytime you get around a kind of mostly undocumented happening, some of it's impossible to document by the way. I mean, I like that these scientists are attempting to get data on the psychedelic experience but how do you document it? You know, that's one of the beautiful things about it, it's kind of undocumented.

At one point during this conference, I can remember telling someone, I am having a peak experience right now and knowing as I was saying it that the next day I wasn't going to remember exactly what was going on inside of me to make me say such a strange thing. And yet a few days after that experience, the afterglow remains. It's an amazing thing to think that there was some deep realization that I had. I can't remember the specifics of the realization necessarily, but whatever healing comes from a realization continues to grow inside of me and that's one of the beautiful things about psychedelics.

You witness something and you know we hear this, you hear a version of this story which is it takes you there but you've got to leave. Well, so does an ambulance, right? An ambulance takes you to a hospital, they do some work on you and then the ambulance takes you home. You don't necessarily have to remember everything that happened to you in the hospital. You might have been under anesthesia, but if there was healing that happened then the healing is going to happen regardless of whether or not you remember the specifics of what

happened during the healing. And I think that's something that psychedelics does for us and because when you go into a very heightened state of consciousness and you have some incredible realization and then when you come back to base reality and you can't remember it, it doesn't negate that experience. It doesn't negate it and that's something that I've told myself as you get into the kind of hierarchical comparison of psychedelics versus the spiritual path, psychedelics versus meditation, one of the interesting forms of argument that emerges in the psychedelic

and spiritual community. Psychedelics versus meditation, it's a hilarious argument. It's very similar to the hilarious argument of LSD versus mushrooms. Anytime you get into some kind of hierarchical discussion when it comes to pretty different things, it's a mistake probably, but it's fun. But you know the conversation. Meditation is somehow better. Psychedelics are a kind of thing you do as a lead up to a life of sincere meditation.

Boring, boring, really kind of boring, and also it's weird because people can get a little snobby. They're like, you know, I put down my toys of my childhood and I took up the mantle of the meditative life and it's really serious and heavy and kind of dreary, right? As though, as though, yes, yes, you, oh, play with your psychedelics child and when you already come and I will teach you the ways of breathing, that's kind of annoying, right? Like, maybe it's not, maybe, maybe both paths are fantastic and there doesn't have to be a graduation from one to the other and maybe the two kind of work together.

And just because psychedelics produce such heightened states of consciousness that you might not be able to bring all the information that you uncovered or discovered in that state back to waking life in some articulate way, doesn't necessarily negate the experience or indicate that you should try some other methodology. All that matters is how you're feeling a few days later. How you doing? You feeling all right? You feeling good?

And with psychedelics, it can happen that a few days later, it's as though there's a glow inside of you that is continuing to glow and as though whatever was whispered to you in the strange swirling chambers of ketamine or DMT or whatever the psychedelic was that you took was so incredibly wonderful that you don't need to remember it in your waking life because it was something that your atoms needed to hear. It was something that the quantum connection between every system in your body needed to hear and that was all you really needed. And then maybe at some point, whatever was whispered to you in that incredible state

will come to you in a dream or when you're walking in the park or when you're riding in an Uber and you're like, oh, okay, and maybe it won't even seem that exciting because maybe that thing that was whispered to you in that state wasn't really meant for the part of you that you think's you. It was meant for the greater you. Who knows what I'm saying, friends? All I can tell you is I am in a ecstatic mood today. I'm going to the Rhamdas retreat in a few days and I just can't wait.

I'm going to get to spend a week with Rhamdas and Sharon Salzburg and Raghu Marcus and Krishna Das and boy, that fills me with a lot of joy too. So I'm happy right now. Okay, forgive me. I love you guys. We've got a glorious podcast for you today. I've been dying to have a conversation with today's guest, Dennis McKenna, who I'm sure you've heard of and wow, well, you know what?

I won't ruin it for you. We're going to jump right into it, but first, a quick word from our beautiful sponsors. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by hellofresh.com. It's time to stop robbing yourself of the primordial joys of cooking. What are you doing sloughing off to the restaurant to have some lunatic in the back who just drowned his kittens in a bathtub, whip up a meal for you and instill it with all of his dark karmic vibes. You don't have to do that anymore.

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I like chopping garlic, I like roasting cabbage, it plugs into some deeper part of the self. HelloFresh, use promo code Dunkin30. If you like the DTFH, there's lots of ways for you to support this podcast. One of them is to try out the sponsors, another is to use our Amazon link located at DunkinTrussell.com. There's a little Amazon link, you click on that, you get zinged over to Amazon and anything that you end up buying there, they will give us a very small percentage of it. This will save you from the horror of going out to buy toilet paper at a grocery store, wasting all that gas, going through traffic just so that you could buy a reminder of your

deep humanness. Who wants that? Who wants to be an amaze of boxes when you could easily? Just go to Amazon.com and order a thousand toilet papers. You could order enough toilet paper rolls to fill your bomb shelter for the next 30 years. You'll be pooping for the next 30 years and not run out. That's the joy of Amazon.

It's weird to go to the grocery store and buy a ton of toilet paper. People think you're sick, but if you go to Amazon.com, you just zing it in there. The next thing you know, the delivery man will bring you a thousand toilet paper rolls. He might think you're sick, but who cares? It's one guy versus cashiers who will announce to the store, apparently someone with dysentery is buying 600 rolls of toilet paper. Looks like we've got a sick person here and you'll be humiliated and the people will come out of the aisles and they'll stand around you and they'll shake their fingers at you

and they'll say, shame on you, oh foul human, shame on you and you'll cry and they'll probably start kicking you. They'll throw you onto the tiled floor of the grocery store and they'll start stamping on your face and your head, but you'll kind of like it and you'll start sucking on their feet and then you'll all fall together in a blob of weird, passionate, sadomasochistic sex. Sure, maybe that sounds great until one of the weirdos sets the whole pile on fire and now you're a human torch ignited in the middle of a grocery store.

People throwing their toilet paper you are going to buy onto the fire. That's no way to die. This is why you need to go to Amazon.com, zing through the link at DuncanTrustle.com. It's on the lower left-hand corner, it's in the comments section of these episodes. Buy 1,000 toilet papers, send it to your friend. Toilet papers so cheap these days, want to freak out one of your paranoid friends, anonymously send them 100 rolls of toilet paper with a Meister Eckhart quote in there. The part of the soul that burns in hell is the part that clings to life and just see

what happens to them over the next couple of weeks as they try to figure out who would sense something so weird and great but terrifying. Go through our link, won't you? And thanks for those of you who continue to go through the Amazon portal. Coming up, my sweet loves, on May 16th, let me just check to make sure that's right, I'll be doing a live DTFH, that's going to be at the Bell House on May 16th. I hope that you will come out, these are so fun to do, it's a chance for all of us to rub our antennas together, say hello to each other and enjoy a super fun night, they're

very special and I hope that you will join me there on May 16th at the Bell House. All links to my shows are at DuggarTrestle.com, you can see where I'm going to be doing stand-up around New York and also where my live podcasts are going to be. Alright, let's get this show on the road, friends. Today's guest is a gift to you from the universe, Maps and Symposia, because if it wasn't for those three amazing things, I wouldn't have run into him at the Maps Conference in Oakland. He is an ethno-pharmacologist, he's the director of ethno-pharmacology at the Hefter Research Institute, and of course he is the brother of Terrence McKenna.

If you have any interest at all in the stuff that we talk about in this podcast and you want to go deep, you might want to check out ESPD50.com, that's the ethno-pharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs. There's going to be a gathering that is happening in the UK, there's still tickets available for that, I might actually go, but if you don't want to go to the UK, you could actually have a free live stream and watch the whole thing go down. Check it out, it's at ESPD50.com, there's going to be some incredible speakers there, and it's another example of some of the really important and really amazing work that members

of the psychedelic community are doing to spread the data that they're gathering related to psychedelic drugs and to deepen our consciousness and to heal us and to open us up to all the great possibilities that psychedelics offer. Send your radiant love energy into that part of the universe where there is no I and only a we or a one and let it zing over to the one that is temporarily manifesting as the great Dennis McKenna. Dennis, when I watch what's happening here at the psychedelic conference, it's amazing because you are worshipped like a god here, and you deserve it, but it is an incredible

thing to see the swirl of people around you. How's that making you feel to be in this situation of extreme celebrity at this conference? Well, Duncan, it's a mixed bag. Like I told you, it's nice to be loved, and I certainly appreciate that, I appreciate that people respect me, but I also have more understanding of someone like someone mentioned Leonardo DiCaprio, what a real celebrity must go through in their daily lives. It has got to be difficult to just navigate that way. I respect my fans, I don't call them fans, but they respect me, and I try to respond

with the same way. I don't want to be rude, but sometimes it just gets to be too much. Well, just the work that you've done has been so significant and has had such a significant impact on people's lives that when they see you, there is no way that they can avoid coming up to you. And again, I don't want to make this some Dennis McKenna worship session or put you in an awkward position like that, but I wouldn't love to know how often people come up to you and say, you've changed my life, your work has altered me permanently for the better.

Well, often, in conferences like this especially, obviously they don't come up to be on the street and sometimes they do, but at conferences like this, people come to these gigs because psychedelics have been important to them and they have transformed many people's lives for the better and I, including my own, there's not a day goes by that I'm not thankful for being involved with psychedelics. But I don't want to be put on a pedestal, it's not me, I mean, okay, I like it that people respect my work, but they should respect their own work as well, you know, psychedelics are the kind of ultimate do-it-yourself project or extreme makeover project.

It's something the individual does with the help of these medicines to become a better person if they're using it in the right way. So I like it that they respect my work, I mean, it's kind of ironic that they call it work because it doesn't seem like work, you know, but I mean, but it is work, the work that you guys that you have done, you have, you wrote a book with parents about how to grow mushrooms at home, you are the first person to put that information out there correct and so that more or less, yeah, what's the name of that book? It's called psilocybin magic mushroom growers guide.

And before that book, there was no, no one knew how to do it, there was no manual, there was no, they were writing books about it, a few people know how to do it, it's not really rocket science. I mean, there was Bob Harris is another one of our contemporaries that was writing a book about growing psilocybin mushrooms at the same time, but I think the book, which was really no more than a pamphlet, it was hardly a book, it was a very short book with photographs and it explained a simple way to do it. Any seventh grader could figure this out, you know, and I've since talked to many people

who were seventh graders when it came out and they, they just got a little science project going down in the basement and you know, the parents were, oh, I'm so glad Johnny's down in the basement, not out on the street with his friends. If they had any idea, they would have been completely appalled, but, but that's good. It was very simple and, and so many people could do it. Many a poor graduate student put themselves through college because you always, you could usually find enough space for a spare closet or something and many people did, including myself when I was a graduate student, it was great and, you know, in some ways I think

of the Grower's Guide as our most significant work, you know, because it had an impact on society and ironically we couldn't do it under our real names, you know, everyone knows now that Terrence and I wrote Soul, Cyber, and Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, but at the time we used pseudonyms and we weren't just being- Wait, what, what names did you use? Well, O N Eric and O T O's were the authors, O N Eric and O T O's. Why did you pick O T S? I'm Eric, by the way, Terrence was, oh, us, us, well okay, O N Eric.

Unpack that, it means dreams, O N Eric means dreams, O T O's, O T O's means far away or far removed, so essentially dreams from far away and the book had the foreword that Terrence wrote, this beautiful foreword about how the mushrooms came from the stars, you know, as kind of tug and cheek in cheek, but kind of not, you know, and whether it was tug and cheek or not, it was kind of a beautiful poetic vision. I think that grabbed a lot of people because, you know, when you take high doses of mushrooms, it's pure science fiction. It's very science fiction-y, so I would say more than other psychedelics.

It seems to have this quality. Great word for it. You're on another planet, you know, and not in like a sarcastic, man, on another planet, but literally when you see cherry blossoms through mush, while psilocybin is interacting with your neurology, that doesn't look like cherry blossoms. It doesn't look like cherry blossoms, and that's an interesting point, you know, which we can come back to in a minute, but when we developed the method to grow the mushrooms, you know, we, in part, there was a mercenary motive.

But the real motive was that when we had gone to Lacherera and got into whatever we stumbled into at Lacherera, we brought spores back from the Amazon, and we wanted to learn a way to propagate the mushrooms so that other people could confirm or not these dimensions that we were accessing. So we were looking for validation, and we were saying, we've got to get this out of here, out there, because are these experiences just peculiar to us, or is this what people encounter? And if that's what people encounter, it's a whole other ballgame, because it's not

just two deluded brothers, you know, too steeped in science fiction or whatever it was we were steeped in. There is really an apparent dimension of experience. Now, whether it's inside or outside, I don't know, but people have this, it's a very, you know, if you do five grams in the dark, in total darkness, you will be utterly convinced that they've landed, you know, I mean, it's a very alien, you see machines, you see things that appear to be from some super technological place or time, maybe from the future. I must ask you this, because you say you don't know, you still don't know, you still speculate

as to whether this is a thing that's inside or outside? No, I don't speculate I've gone beyond that, because I realize that these are dualistic terms, these are dualisms, and they're not relevant. There really is no inside and outside. These are, you know, that's one of the things you realize when you take psychedelics and have the classic mystical experience. We are all one, there is no separation between us and the rest of the cosmos. So then if you start bandying about these terms, is this real, is this not real, is

this inside me, is it out from out there? This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on, and we are so steeped in the Western tradition, at least, into this dualist thinking, I mean, that's the legacy of Cartesianism, you know, and it's not, what I think psychedelics show is that though that way of understanding the world is completely misguided, you know, there really is no, there's no separation between you and me, and you and us, and everyone else, and the universe at large. But this is-

Just why these experiences are so impactful on people, they have that realization. The realization of the, of the sub-ec, all one, but I think I see the usefulness in creating at least a temporary distinction between these internal and external universes. It's totally useful for the taxonomy. For the taxonomy. For the ordinary reality and for navigating, and, and you know, we live in a culture that's based on dualism, so we have to sort of be able to play that game and talk that talk. It's important also that in the back of our minds, we realize this is not reality, this

is not how it is, you know. We're agreeing to play this game, realizing that that's not really how it is, and in fact, I think one of the things that the psychedelic experience teaches you is, and I say this all the time, that we're living in a hallucination, you know. Everything that we experience, all we have as biological entities is experience. Everything that happens to us is part of experience. But experience is something that the brain synthesizes, it's a hallucination. It takes data in from the outside, it combines it with old memories and associations and

things that we, you know, from the inside, and there's a certain processing that goes on, and then it essentially extrudes it into a model of reality. That's the reality that we live in, not the real world. The real world is unknowable. The real world comes to us through these filters, and a lot of what the brain does is filter things out. If everything came through, we'd just be overwhelmed and confused all the time. I want to really cover this because when I, it's a, I just want to put it out there on

the table. Don't you think that there are disembodied life forms that we have not achieved the technology to take pictures of or to capture or to dissect or to study outside of the psychedelic experience You and Terrence, it seems like you, you both really did believe that, like there was, was there not an attempt that you were making to try to bring an object back from the DMT realm? Yeah, yeah. In some way you could say that, yes, yes, indeed we did believe that.

Do you, do you still believe that? You know, I've come to a point where I don't know what I believe. I mean, that, that's an interesting thing. In a way, a scientist, which fundamentally I am, but at the same time, you can't work in the realm of psychedelics without always being aware of the, of the limitations of science. Science is very useful. Yes.

But it's limited. And it's not, it doesn't give you the whole picture. That's very good at looking at tiny slices of reality in great detail, but how, but fitting together the whole thing, it's not so good at that. That's right. You know, you have to invoke other ways of knowing. So, you know, I, I think it was Alfred North Whitehead, who is a philosopher of science that Terrence and I both admired and read a lot.

Process theology. Process and reality was his main book. And, but he said, you know, the suspended judgment is the supreme scientific stance. The suspended judgment is the ability to say, we don't fully understand this or that phenomenon. We need more data. Right. And by the way, we need more funding, right in this, in this scientific realm of big science, more data usually inquires, you know, entails more expense.

But it's perfectly legitimate to say, we don't know. And the more I use psychedelics, think about psychedelics and all that, the more I find myself saying, we just don't know a lot about what is going on. I think we comprehend a very small fraction of the, of the world and through our limited senses and our limited instruments and even psychedelics, which in some ways are instruments for looking at the world. You remarked earlier about a cherry blossom three seen through the lens of psilocybin is not the same cherry blossom that you look at when you're not altered.

And Simon Powell, who's someone you should have on your talk, he wrote the magic mushroom explorer. He wrote a number of interesting books about mushrooms, but he makes this point that psychedelics are, they are in fact scientific instruments. You can, there are ways of, you see phenomena differently on a psychedelic than you do if you're not, you notice aspects of it that are always there, but we're conditioned to screen them out through this gating system that our brains, you know, our brains protect us from being overwhelmed because they have this sensory gating thing going on.

You know, a good example of a trivial but good is you go into a restaurant, a noisy restaurant, you're trying to focus on what the people across the table are saying from you. You don't, and behind you, there's a cacophony of noise that your brain can learn to filter out, but if somebody at the next table says your name, that gets through over there, said by name, what's going on, you know, in other words, you know, certain things get through our conditioning and psilocybin and other psychedelics temporarily disrupt that. They open you up to, they disable those gating mechanisms temporarily. So much more gets through, but that's why you have to take it under special circumstances

because otherwise you'll just be confused and, in other words, you have to anticipate what's going to happen and prepare for it by making sure you're in the right setting. Right. You know, the freeway at 70 miles an hour is probably not the right setting. You know, Grand Central Station, maybe not the right setting, someplace quiet where you can focus on what the, you know, what the experience is. And then you can, then I think a lot of what psychedelics do is they suppress the foreground. We are conditioned to look at the things in the foreground and ignore the background.

They reverse that equation and you notice things that may always be in the background. They're always there, but you don't notice them. Suddenly those things become important and you notice aspects of nature, of phenomena that you just normally wouldn't even be aware of. Right. You know. Well, this is, I think, I think one of the things I love about your work and I love about that you and Terrence are masters of is the ability to go into that state and come back

with and articulate it in a way that a person who has never even taken psilocybin in some way or another, and I know this because before I had taken mushrooms, I was, one of my friends gave me one of Terrence's books and I don't remember what passage it was, but as I'm reading it, I felt like I was high as a kite just from the articulation of it. When you talk about bringing this technology to the mainstream, how to grow these mushrooms and the shift in subjective consciousness that you both created from this book, what I think is, oh, well, you're a servant of an energetic, I don't know what it is, an intelligence that has made both of you its pawns and is using you and continuing to use

you as a way to like, and again, I don't mean to get into your, I hope this is okay to say, I know that you are a scientist and have a scientific mind, but it seems like you guys are part of the, you know, like on the runway, when you're waving the airplane in, that's what you guys are doing with something. That's what you've done. You're waving a thing in, you're bringing it in to this dimension every time you can clearly talk about it and say, I have seen the cherry blossom in this alternate dimension. That's not a cherry blossom.

Here's what it is. It's not the cherry blossom, you think it is. Right, but these, I want to talk about the, and again, I only, when do you get a chance to talk with Dennis McKenna? So forgive me if I seem a little too excited, but these blueprints, these technologies, these specific geometries that do appear to be more than you're looking at some undulating kaleidoscopic form, you're seeing what appears to be intentional information that it does not necessarily fit into your abilities to understand.

Like in the same way when I was a kid, I would open a book and see language, and I had no idea what it was, but I knew it meant something. You knew it had meaning, and it is, it is a lot like that. I, you know, I mean, I agree with you. I, I tell people sometimes, I just feel like I work for the plants, you know, I don't, I don't feel like I'm being used or I'm not a pawn, I'm actually, I'm really a pawn. I'm a, I mean, let's call it a collaborator, because I feel like it is important to bring awareness of these medicines to people, and also in a responsible way to, you know, urge

them, yes, these are very worthwhile. They have their dangers. If you approach it with a modicum of common sense and caution, you can use them and you can learn a great deal, and I just feel like that's the position I find myself in. If I happen to be somebody that people want to hear talk about this, okay, I feel like that is fulfilling a certain mission, and it's not necessarily the one I chose. It's like I say, the plants have their own agenda, and I really do think, people don't think enough about that, that what we're really talking about here, relationships with these

natural ones, natural medicines anyway, is a kind of symbiosis, and, you know, indigenous people have the idea that they call these things plant teachers, and they are plant teachers. They teach, you learn from them, and in the indigenous worldview, they are intelligent entities, and again, I agree, they are intelligent entities, but their intelligence presents itself in a way that's a little different than you and I are talking to each other, but they don't really speak language. They speak more in gestalt or sort of, you know, revelations, or they speak in a language

of understanding that is not linguistic, that's not verbal, but however they communicate, they do appear to communicate, or they are able to trigger processes in your brain that, you know, present themselves as they come from you, but they present themselves as not you, something different, and the jury's still out, I think, whether, you know, these things really bring out a part of yourself that, you know, appears not to be you, that you can then have a conversation with, or whether there really is a dimension out there of these entities that have a great deal to tell us and want to tell us, you know. Well, I think, just pragmatically, it makes more sense to, like, just get rid of the cognitive

dissonance that comes from trying to understand how in the name of God, the mind that you've grown up with is spitting out this incredible information, because that, you're like, I don't know me, or I don't know me, but I know, and I know I have pretty good dreams, but when I see, when I have seen in the past, when I have followed the five dried gram advice, which I will never do again, oh really, okay, and I've seen that world, it is, I just gave up the inside outside, or I gave up the idea of, like, oh, this must be some projection of some, I guess I must have a tree gnome inside of me, I guess, I guess there must be tree gnomes that live inside of my subconscious that will stand at the edge of trees and glare

at me. No, I don't believe, I don't buy it, I just don't buy that, it didn't feel like me, it wasn't me, it was like looking at a butterfly or something, and so I think it's a, an external for, and again, all one ultimately, but for now, I'm sitting across from you, we live in a dimension where there are others, it is, I think it's an other, and I think that there's a usefulness in overcoming the stigma of saying that out loud, this is an external, this is an entity, it's an intelligence, you can call it an alien, whatever it is, because the moment that we start looking at it through that lens, then you can just do the same thing

that you do with any other external thing, try to talk to it, try to re, try to, and this is what I, this, I apologize for this rant, it's leading me to a question. Don't, do you think that it is a possible, do you think that it's possible that a technology will emerge that allows us to, for the first time, capture these, for the sake, what we call hallucinations right now? Do you think that we will near a, we're close to a point where I can take a person, give them five dried grams, and then capture it in some way? Capture their dream in some way? Yes.

I think we're, I think it's possible, but I think we're probably a few decades away from that. Decades! I mean, the next step is to just upload your entire consciousness into silicon, and I don't know if that's possible, but again, I, I don't know that it's impossible either. I mean, I, but this is not a technology that we can do right now, and it may be that it can't be done. I mean, we're working in an area where, again, we have to be very careful about these terms, you know, that we run, that we, that we unconsciously use without thinking

of them, like consciousness. What is consciousness, like inside, outside, and all those things, it's very hard to think about this stuff in a way that's clear because we have such baggage of preconceptions about it, you know. But what I was saying before is the, the, I mean, the bottom line is there is nothing that we experience that does not come through these filters. Right. And our brain is an active partner in whatever we experience. So we live inside this model that the brain creates for us because it's more comfortable. We live, essentially, in

a hallucination. And, but the hallucination is useful because if we actually saw the world as it really was, it would not look anything like this, and physics tells us this. Right. You know, if we can believe our instruments, and of course we have to remember our instruments also transfer their message through our sensory neural interface, but the instruments say, you know, this is not a solid table. This is not at all what it looks like. This is, this is something that your brain has created to make it possible to navigate in this, in this reality.

Right. But the ultimate nature of that reality we do not understand, you know. It doesn't really matter in a certain way as long as we understand this, you know. We may not be able to ultimately understand, you know, to see reality undistorted. There's always a filter, a lens of some kind. It's like being at an optician's, you know, and they can change the focus. Psychedelics are kind of like that. You know, yeah, you can change the channel. You can change the lens, the color, the focal length and all that. You're looking at things differently, but it's still the same reality. You've just, you've just distorted the filters a little

bit. Right. You know, and that's, and we find that very useful because you understand things about, you encounter aspects about that reality that normally you would overlook. Well, this is, so if you look at the evolutionary process of things, and I, you know, I think about pre eyeball times, you know, no eyes, nothing on planet earth. I don't know for sure, but maybe there was a time when nothing on earth had any way to process photons, to turn photons into color.

Right. And, and so certainly something through some mutation, who knows, starts processing photons somehow. I don't know, you know, you know, these, it's a slow, slow process, millions of years. I don't know, but there must have been a period in time where there were McKenna versions of fish that were saying, listen, we have witnessed a thing outside the planet. Kind of ourselves that appears to be color. It's something we theoretically could imagine might exist, but we're experiencing it. And there might, if fish could talk back then, which I'm pretty sure they could, fish, the other fish would be like, shut the fuck up

hippie. What are you talking about? We're trying to get some sleep over here when you quit raising. Yeah. But it's important to remember that the thing that the process, that the processing photons, in other words, photoreceptors in evolution go happen way before there were animals as such or mammals or anything. I mean, it was, it was, it was plants and the precursors of plants that figured it out. You know, the most primitive photoreceptors are, you know, found, I mean, even plants, they predate plants, but you know, light energy, it's just a form of electromagnetic energy, a certain part of the spectrum, but it permeates the environment.

So naturally, if you're an organism evolving in that environment, it's to your, you know, it's to your advantage to be able to perceive that energy and in some ways even utilize that energy like plants do for photosynthesis. I mean, plants have mastered this process of photosynthesis. Thank God, because one of the, one of the main byproducts of photosynthesis is oxygen. The other is complex organic compounds, which they spin out and they don't have to worry about having enough energy to do organic synthesis because they have a way to harness the energy of the sun and they're unlimited really in what they can do. So they can become very creative chemists and it's just fundamental to, you know, those two processes, sequestering

carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, that's because carbon dioxide is one of the reactants of photosynthesis. Oxygen happens to be the byproduct. Right. Lucky for us. Thank God. Not so lucky for organisms a few billion years ago because they were anaerobic and to them oxygen was a caustic corrosive toxin. That was one of the first, that was one of the great extinctions, right? That was in fact one of the great extinctions and that's why many, that was why they think now in evolution many cells that were organisms essentially anaerobic had to form endosymbiotic relationships with cells that were not sensitive to oxygen so they became mitochondria and cellular organelles and they have their own DNA, they have their

own genetic lineage. So it's good evidence that these were once free living organisms that took refuge in other cells. Wild. You know, so that's, that's what you're looking at there is the evolutionary conscious consequences of when oxygen first started to appear in the atmosphere as a result of photosynthesis. Right. So, well this, to get back to the idea of photoreceptors and the, you know, again, I'm just a podcaster so I do not understand evolutionary biology but I theorized there must have been a point where photoreceptors were quite rudimentary, maybe non-existent. I don't know if the single cell organisms were photoreceptive. Well some were, eventually they were. I mean the first organisms that

developed photoreceptors, you can be sure they were unicellular organisms. It's something that happened very early in evolutionary history. You know, the primitive eye or the photoreceptor is the precursor to the eye essentially and eyes or photoreceptors have arisen from independently in different phylogenetic lines. It's not like there's one precursor to the eye. Right. There are actually multiple precursors. Well the comparison I'm trying to make is, is it possible that psychedelics are the beginning or, it's not beginning, we've been taking psychedelics for theoretically the entire history of our species but is it possible. A long, long time. Yeah. Is it possible that psychedelics are

opening us up to another kind of energetic source that we're only just now learning how to utilize because so, you know, you read Steve Jobs talking about LSD being so monumentally important to his creative process and I'm sure that there are many closeted scientists and innovators who have also had, who have seen the blueprints and in some way or another brought them into the world and made them work in some way or another. So I guess my question for you is, is it possible that this thing that we're all experiencing is another version of photoreceptivity, that we are coming into contact with a new energetic form or an energetic form that as of yet is underutilized by our species?

Well, I don't know. I don't know if it's that. I think that, you know, I think that on the, on the, on the species level, you know, psychedelics interact with the individual. Right. I mean the quintet, the psychedelic experience is quintessentially something that happens to a person. It's an individual experience. But on the species level, it's changing consciousness in terms of our perceptions about what reality is, right. Like, indeed, going back to the, where we started this conversation, the reason we wanted to get mushrooms out to the people, give this technology into many people's hands was essentially to, you know, it led to, essentially to sharing our discovery, sharing what had happened to us at La Churera. But

it created in society a more widespread sort of consensus that, yeah, there is another dimension out there. You know, it's the world is not what it seems. There's another dimension. You can take mushrooms and visit that dimension. You don't have to believe in it. You don't have to believe Terry or Denny. Try it for yourself. Here's the means to do that. Right. It's a full report and report back, you know, because we were trying to validate our own experiences. And the world did. The world took mushrooms and said, yeah, those McKenna boys, that was what was, that was right. That was what was going on. Yes. And I think now, and Steve Jobs and other people that have had insights about, you know, both technology, but also

biology, I think that, you know, removing these filters that let you look at biological phenomena in novel ways leads to insight. And there's a couple of Nobel prizes. You know, Kerry Mullis is one of the more famous ones, guy who invented the PCR polymerase chain reaction, which is a huge discovery and genetics that essentially revolutionized molecular biology. It's a way to take a tiny amount of DNA and amplify it. So you can amplify it and then you can work, you can run whole genome sequences and so on. Does this have something to do with CRISPR? No, this is way before CRISPR. CRISPR is similar to that, but it's new. But it's a very important discovery that basically made genetic engineering possible, you know, that you could

amplify nucleic acids in this way. And Kerry Mullis was completely upfront about the fact that LSD, his experience with LSD, gave him the insight to make this discovery for which he got the Nobel Prize. And he announced at his acceptance that, you know, it was LSD that laid me, and he said, it really had let me get down among the molecules and see what was, how was working. So it wasn't just a hallucination of some guy on LSD who was stoned, you know, because the thing is, the insight, the understanding held up the next day. It was like, oh, that was a bunch of crap, you know, no, actually, this was a real novel understanding of reality that LSD facilitated. And I think that goes on all the time. I saw recently a interesting documentary about

Nikola Tesla. You're probably familiar with him. The thing about Tesla, he did not take psychedelics, as far as I know, but he was a complete visionary. He saw machines in his vision, and he saw these machines and how to build them. That's pretty amazing, you know? And so maybe he had, you know, his own internal psychedelics or whatever, but he was able to do this. And this is a fundamental quality of what sets us as primates as humans apart from other primates, and really is, I think, the crux of the thing. We can visualize something abstract in our heads, a painting, or a piece of music, or a machine, right? Or whatever it might be, a better arrowhead, or a better computer chip, these start out as internal visualizations, ideas, right?

What are ideas if not simply hallucinations? You know, you have an idea of something. I know how to build this thing. You build it. Suddenly it exists in the so-called real knock on the table world, which is no more real than your internal world, but you have an iPhone sitting in front of you that does stuff for you, you know? So this is what we can do. We can take an abstraction and turn it into a reality. The abstraction comes from that part of the brain that, from where creative ideas come from. And I think psychedelics stimulate that part of the brain. And this is where it gets interesting, because at this place, this is where we, so, you know, and this is, again, I've been massively influenced by you and your brother, and this is the, again,

it's like we, in the movies, you know, or even in conspiracy theories with a great conspiracy theory, one of my faves, Roswell Alien, Roswell UFO crashes. We got some kind of technology from that crash. That technology is now, basically, all technology is a fungal growth that came from this Roswell crash. It's spreading all over the planet from Roswell. But really, if the ideas, we have these moments of illumination that create the innovation that brings technology into this dimension. And if psychedelics are opening up your eyes to another dimension, and if you have come up with an idea of some inspiration or even a poem or a book or a guidebook that was inspired in that dimension, then I think what we're dealing with is a true alien technology. I think we are

seeing human beings becoming these outflow conduits that are, from time to time, a lot of the times, I'm certainly the outflow conduit that I am. I'll show you some journal entries about the crap I come up with. Definitely no genetic stuff coming out of this conduit. But some of us, you being one of them, are popping or bringing things into this dimension from another place that is creating true shifts in our society. Yeah, but the thing is, it's coming from some place. It's coming from the imagination is where it's coming from, which is another way of saying the imagination is like this multimedia playroom that everybody has inside their brains where they can come up with ideas. I know the concept that, well, all this technology that we have came from Roswell, or this is really

alien technology in some ways. I don't like that, and I don't like it for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the technology that supposedly came from Roswell was pretty damn primitive. Okay, fiber optics. This is not a big deal. The transistor. This is crude. This is crude stuff, man. You telling me that these spaceships were using transistors? I mean, we can build chips that have a billion transistors in a square nanometer. They were just crappy spaceships. They were just primitive. That's why it crashed. And then the other aspect of it is essentially we're saying we're not capable of thinking of these things. We have to get it from some alien source. I don't agree. I mean, we're perfectly capable of coming up with these ideas. And we do and we did. I mean, maybe there was

Roswell, maybe not. But I think that, you know, we, you know what I'm saying? We're able to come up with amazing ideas and manifest what's reality. Yes, absolutely. Humans are amazing. And I don't mean to denigrate the potential of the human brain or the human innovation. But, you know, earlier in the conversation, you're referring to a collaboration between you and these plant teachers. And so I think as part of... And this collaboration with the plant teachers, you know, it happens at the species level and the individual level. You know, we experience it at the individual level. But I think for the plant teachers, they relate to humans as a species. You know what I'm saying? I think to them it's more of a species

level thing. To us, it's like the, you know, the ayahuasca, the mushroom or whatever is having a conversation with us. It's sort of like, you know, interesting analogy. But you know, the movie Her, that's interesting because the guy formed a relationship with this super sophisticated artificial intelligence, something like Ciri. But like Ciri would be if it actually worked. And then there comes a point where he says, you know, and he begins to feel that she's very special to him. They have a special relationship. And then he asks the question, how many people are you communicating with right now? And there's something like, oh, about 860,000. He's like, totally crushed. You were carried on affairs with 100, you know, 800,000 people.

So we're going to be faced with situations like that, I think, especially as AI gets truly sophisticated. Remember, it's still a projection of us. It's something that came out of these heads, this bunch of mush up here. But you know, I, you know what, I think that what that the okay, it came out of our heads. But sometimes I mean, and again, I love this is so refreshing. I really love what you're saying. And it's it's pro human. And I think it's realistic. But I still think that this that we have been waiting for the spaceship to come from the sky. And the thing is, and this is not me, this comes from you guys is this thing is coming from inside of us. Now where it's origination point is, is it

some quantum, I don't know, some some quantum quark, a neutrino inside of us triggering a chain reaction that results in an epiphanous moment where Tesla sees the alternating current or whatever. I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, it comes from, yeah, the spaceships don't come from the from outside. I agree. And we build the spaceships. And we build them out of ourselves, you know, and that's essentially what we're trying to do at Lacherera, you know, and what what alchemists and other people have been trying to do, build this transcendent object, this ultimate object, which we understand to be something biological, some kind of union of matter and mind. Yes, that's what we were trying to do is to make an object, call it the philosopher's stone, call it the UFO, call it the time machine, all these

things are metaphors for this transcendental object, which is us and is both inside and outside. We were trying to create a, we were trying to build a UFO out of our own DNA, our own nervous system, out of a mushroom, out of sound, out of, and we damn near got there. No, you got there. You got there. Well, no, we didn't. Or at least what we predicted was going to happen didn't happen. But other things didn't match your prediction. But you, if you, and I think you are aware of, okay, and I'm just going to, I'm going to, I just forgive me if I'm the blow will smoke here. But if a UFO was to go zinging through Oakland, or and go, go all the way from Oakland to New York, it zings across the country, everyone sees it, no doubt about it must ship straight out of the book of Ezekiel, this thing's spinning shapes and like, it's an

it's a UFO, right? Yeah. I think within a week of this thing happening, everyone gets it on camera, maybe a month. Yeah, there's that thing that happened that time, we got some tapes of it, people like, well, that's some kind of government thing. I don't know what it is. People forget. Well, this kind of stuff has happened exactly as you describe it. But what I'm, the point I'm getting at here is you had a thing come through you and your brother, right? And it shot through the subjective consciousness and continues to shoot through the subjective consciousness of a fairly large percentage of our species. So that's the difference. That's the difference. So when you say it didn't, I don't know that you, I just don't think it worked the way you

thought it was going to work. And I must ask you, why do you keep saying we, you talk about this in the past tense, as though you have stopped the experiment, as though this is over for you, this bringing this thing into this reality, has it really stopped for you? Well, that's a good question. I haven't stopped thinking about it. I haven't stopped. The thing is, I'm not, I'm not, there is nothing to be gained. In fact, it's not possible to replicate the experiment of Lacherera. And in order to, in order to perform the experiment of Lacherera, the unintended consequence, because what we expected would happen did not happen. What did happen was that we went totally bonkers, you know, for two weeks at least. And some would say for a lot longer than that, some would say we're still bonkers. And I'm not particularly interested in

driving myself insane. I don't think that, you know, in the first place, what we did at Lacherera was not an experiment. We call it the experiment at Lacherera, but experiments have to have controlled variables and, you know, a real experiment if you want to use that word. It was more like the ritual at Lacherera or something. That's what it was. And things happen. But you know, to speak to this, it's interesting. I read recently, maybe you've heard of it, I read a book called, that came out, it was called Supernatural, two words. Supernatural, a new vision of the unexplained. And this was published a couple of years ago, and it was published by, of all people, Whitley Strieber. Okay.

You know who he is, right? The alien abduction proctologist from Betelgeuse, that guy. Was he really a proctologist? Well, anal pro. I think the aliens were the proctologists. The aliens were the proctologists. That's what I mean. But the way that what happened to him is represented in the media is really unfair. He's very much maligned as a screwball and just a nutcase, right? Turns out, he's not a nutcase. Actually, he's very scientific in his approach to these things happen to him. Crazy batshit, crazy stuff happens to him.

He, when you speak to him personally, he says, I don't know what the fuck is going on. I mean, he doesn't say it that way. He's not that kind of, he wouldn't use those terms. Basically, he says, I do not understand it. All I can tell you is these things are going on. It seems to have aspects of alien contact. I'm not saying that's what it is. You know, I'm saying that these things happen to me, and he seems to be a magnet for these just very odd phenomena that sort of coalesce around him. Yes. And the way this came about, I'm going somewhere with this narrative. The way this came about, I was in the camp of people that knew about his stuff, hadn't read his stuff much, but hadn't really read his stuff.

Kind of dismissed his whole shtick as just crazy, alien, contactee, malarkey. And then last year, I was invited to a symposium in Hawaii from actually a podcaster, Jeremy Vaney. Maybe you'll know him. He does a podcast called Perotopia. Cool. I'd been on it, and he invited me to come to this symposium with Whitley Strieber. Jeremy now lives on the Big Island, and I said, well, I don't want to, you know, this guy is a nutball. I don't want to be associated with him. Why would I come, you know? But then I found out, he said, well, you know, did you know about this book?

This book, you know, Supernatural, was written by him and Jeffrey Kreipel. Jeffrey Kreipel is a professor of mythology and comparative religions at Rice University. And I know Jeffrey. I've been to his class. I've given seminars, and I thought, these two have written a book together? Wow. That's interesting, because I know Jeffrey is not in that case. Okay. And so I told Jeremy. I said, if Jeffrey comes to the symposium and Whitley comes, I'll come, you know, because I respect Jeffrey's work. Right. And he got him, and we all three went out to this symposium.

And in the meantime, I read this book, and I read some other things that Whitley had written. And we had an amazing discussion there, because I was sort of the guy bringing up the flag, carrying the flag for psychedelics. Because I was saying, you know, you guys, you're all about this paranormal phenomena. Jeff looks at it as an academic, and in terms of mythology, and so a lot of his work is on superheroes. What their mythical role is in contemporary society, and Whitley just has his stories, right? Right. But they're both terrified of psychedelics, and they've never had any experience with psychedelics. And I say, this is crazy, because this is the third leg of the stool.

Yeah. Psychedelics are models for these experiences. And if you want to really understand what is going on, what's happening to you, you have to take psychedelics. It's almost required if you call yourselves scientific investigators. Yes. This is the elephant in the room that you're not acknowledging, you know. And then, but interestingly, and they still haven't quite heard it, but I'll actually... So in this book, Supernatural, in the latter chapters, they go on to speculate on what is this phenomenon.

What is the physical basis of all this phenomenon? And they are sort of leaning toward the idea that, you know, there is some kind of existence, survival of the soul after death. And it can actually physically intervene and manifest itself in physical ways, like with UFOs. Yeah. But then I came upon a chapter in the book, which was titled, The Soul as a UFO. Wow. And it just dropped my jaw to see this and the way they were discussing it, because I was going to say, you're absolutely right, guys. And guess what?

The mushroom was downloading the blueprints to build this damn thing. Wow. You know, that's exactly what we were talking about. Wow. And so I recommend that book to people that are interested in this. I'll check it out. Keep your prejudices against Whitley in check. I just read it objectively and honestly.

I was impressed with the man's honesty and humility. I mean, he was not, he was just saying, these things have happened to me. They've happened to me all my life. You know, he told me, I wish they didn't, because they've made my life miserable in some way. Right. You know, I'm a public laughing stock. I've been tormented by these entities or demons or phenomena or whatever they are. He has not had a happy life.

Right. You know, he just would wish he could be an ordinary schmuck. And he's not, because he's had these things. We're going to go at this again, actually at this place, before this conference starts at Turingham, they're having a private conference there, second one. They've had a private conference previously about DMT. And the question, the question of the conference was basically, what are the entities on DMT and are those real entities and so on?

I'm sorry, let me stop you there. This time Whitley and Jeffrey are going to be part of the... This, this? Yeah. Wait, okay, so you've handed me... No, that's a different conference. This is the one that will happen immediately after that. Okay, so you're saying Whitley is some, is part of a conference trying to explore what

are these manifestations in DMT? Yeah. He recommended Whitley and Jeffrey's book to Anton Bilton, who owns Turingham Hall, that kind of where these seminars go on. And I said, read this book. He read the book. And he said, yeah, we have to invite these people. Wow.

Can you explain what this is? This looks incredible. Ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs, too. Now, this, this is much more pedestrian, not paranormal, a fairly button down scientific conference, but an interesting one. So, and this is, let me give you the back story on this. In 1967, in San Francisco, there was a conference called Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.

It was organized and paid for by the National Institute of Mental Health. Right. The U.S. Government-sponsored conference, private conference, and all the big guys in the field at the time were there. So, Shulgan was there. Shultes was there. What year was this? 1967, at the height of the summer of love, right?

Yeah, okay. And, but it was a private conference, and they put out this symposium volume from the conference. And that was basically what came out of the conference, but that was a landmark publication. Certainly, it was a landmark publication in my life because I got my hands on a copy, and it was like, it opened up the whole field of ethno-pharmacology to me, and it was like, wow, this is what I want to do, right? Cool. So, very important publication in the literature on psychedelics, psychoactive plants.

The original plan was that there would be a follow-up conference every 10 years to sort of assess the state of the art and what's happening. Yeah. Well, then along came the war on drugs. Right. The government became totally embarrassed that they ever had anything to do with something like this. Nothing happened.

2017 is the 50th anniversary. Cool. So, we're going to do the second ethno-pharmacologic search. Wow. For psychoactive drugs. And it will be a semi-closed conference. It will be at this place in the UK. This is incredible.

What does that mean, semi-closed? It means that there'll be only a small number of people physically attending. Okay, I see. But it will be live-streamed on Facebook. You've got to keep people like me out wandering around. It's the aliens, man! People like you would probably get in. Oh, cool.

Yeah. And we will publish a symposium proceedings from this. Beautiful. In the spirit of the first one. In fact, we're going to publish the first one and the second one together as a collector's edition. Beautiful. Box set.

How cool. And pre-sell those and finance the conference through those sales. So, those are available now. You can order them now, but you don't have to wait until the end of the year because people come, they'll present their thing, and then they have to give a full paper that they submit that will go into the book. This is at ESPD50.com. Yeah.

Ethno ESPD. Ethno Pharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. Wow. That's where the ESPD comes from. This is going to be incredible. This is amazing. I think it's a conference that I've wanted to do ever since the 30th anniversary, but I never came together.

This time it's coming together. What is Buckinghamshire, England like? It's a lovely place. It's English country house, estates, Turingham Hall, which you can look up on Wikipedia actually. It's got an interesting history, but it's Downton Abbey. Everybody knows Downton Abbey. This place, Downton Abbey could have been filmed there. This is amazing.

It's an incredible building, an incredible venue for all of this. We've got some fantastic people coming. Who do you have coming? Well, so if you go on the website, we should have our schedule up. We've got, so far, we've got Dave Nichols. We've got Mark Plotkin, who's well known as an ethno botanist. We've got Ken Alper, probably the world's expert on iboga and ibogaine. We've got Stacey Schaefer, very well known for her work on peyote.

We've got Manolo Torres has done a lot of work on the archaeology of both DMT snuffs and also ayahuasca. So we have quite, you know, we've got me. I'm giving a talk, a couple talks actually. Amazing. So it's going to be a good conference. People can participate by livestream or they can come and pay far too much money to physically attend.

But we're welcome. We're happy to welcome them. I think it'd be worth it. This is June 6th to 8th. This is coming right up. June 6th to 8th. ESPD50.com. The links are going to be at my website, Dennis.

Please do. Yeah. Please go look at it. There's much more detail about sort of the genesis of this conference and the original conference. And so please, you know, look at the website and if you think all you have to do is sign up for the livestream and hopefully by the book, although since Joe Rogan was kind enough to have him, I can mention him on your podcast.

I was on a few days ago and a lot of people are already ordering books. I'm sure. That doesn't mean that people had orders. Millions of people. Well, I don't know about millions. I'd be happy if I got 200 people to buy books because I'd pay for the conference. Go to this. Buy this book.

Be part of this movement that's happening right now. I think that just getting to hang out with you and be around all of these people here at this incredible conference that we're at right now, it makes me feel so excited and hopeful for the world. And man, I know it's a hacky thing to say because you could say this at any time in human history maybe, but what better time to have hope in the world than right now? Well, it's better than despair, you know, and there's so many reasons to despair. But if we give into that, then we really do lose hope.

There really is no hope. I am basically an optimist. I feel we are in a heap of shit in this world. I don't think anyone would disagree with that. But we're very clever beings and I think our cleverness in large ways got us into this mess and it's going to get us out of this mess. Stupidity will not get us out of this mess and that's what dismayed me about the current political climate that willful stupidity is on the ascendant and people who are actually

you know, I mean, they're stupid, but they're also proud of it and that's the dangerous thing. Well, it's the most dangerous combo. It's like God of you, the worst combo. Right. Well, because it's not going to come up with any solutions. This is why it's so dismaying that, you know, like on the environmental front, you know, we're making real progress and to see all these measures rolled back is very dismaying.

You know, the current political set Germany is marching into the future with their eyes firmly fixed on the rearview mirror. It's not going to happen. You cannot go back to the six to the fifties and nor would you want to, you know, but they don't seem to get it. So, you know, and what do we do? Yes. What do we do?

Well, my own feeling is that, you know, these plant medicines are the most powerful tools that we have right now to catalyze global shifts in consciousness. And that's what has to happen if we're going to get out of this mess. First we have to recognize there's a problem and they will bring that into focus. And then we have to recognize that there are solutions and they will bring that into focus because of this figure to ground effect that they have bringing the background forward. The background is that we live in a natural world. We live in nature and we think we're separate from nature, but we're not.

So that's the fundamental perception we have to we have to accept is that we're not in control. Actually, nature is in control. And if we don't get our act straightened out, it's not going to go well for us, you know, or the planet. Although I think the planet is incredibly resilient, but I like that George Carlin joke. The planet's going to be fine. The planet will be fine.

Humans are fucked. Humans are fucked. That's a great Carlin joke. That pretty much says it, yeah, but it does not have to be. You know, we need wisdom and we need compassion and, you know, a lot of the mess that we find ourselves is because our cleverness, our inventiveness is out of sync with our wisdom. You know, so we're very clever at making technologies that are potentially fantastically beneficial and incredibly destructive if they're not used the right way.

We have to have, we have to develop the wisdom to use them and we have to learn how to essentially construct a moral compass around this use because these things can't be used thoughtlessly or destructively because of their destructive power. But what does the individual do here? I mean, I 100% agree with you. And yet I think as the individual, I mean, if I could operate on the collective level and become the mind of my species, great. But how does an individual person hearing this, how to, how to wait, what happens to

my own response? And I think a lot of responses of people in our community is these medicines are the best tools, the best defense and the best, I think of them as, as the bio weapons of the, of the counterculture of the, of the psychedelic movement. Yes. And introducing people to these experiences, bringing people to these plant medicine opportunities, teach them how to grow these plants, prepare them, use them, share them around. It's a quiet revolution.

It's not, you know, they have all the guns, all the money and all that. We've got the plants. Yeah, but you have a plan. You can't lose. Some people listening, they don't. Like I live in New York and I know that there's possibilities of like taking ayahuasca even there. Dennis, what about people who are listening and they, and they hear this and like, I don't

have access to any cut to this, these plant medicines. What, what, what are they to do? Well, that's actually not true, you know, with a little bit of effort, they could get access to it. I mean, in some sense, that's what the mushroom technology, the growing technology was. It was like, you can get the spores, you don't need anything special, you'd go to the grocery store and buy the stuff you need to grow the mushrooms. This is, these things are, you need a little bit of skill, which you can learn by reading

the book and then you grow the mushrooms. Same way, there are lots of places on the internet where you can order seeds and cuttings of psychedelic plants. Technically, they're illegal, but they'll sell them to you and you can grow those and you can trade them with your neighbors and get into gardening and, you know, we've reached a point where growing a garden is one of the most revolutionary things you can do, especially if you have the right plants in them, but, but any plant is the right plant, growing any, every plant that we utilize as a species, it doesn't have to be psychoactive.

It's a symbiote with us in, in some way. We, we cultivate it because it's valuable to us. It's great for the plant that doesn't have to compete in the world of natural selection. It just has to submit to the artificial selection that we will impose on it, but it's got a free ride, you know, as long as it's under our wing until we completely destroy the planet and then we all go down. But for the interim, it's a good deal for the plant and a good deal for us, you know, and we think often we think, well, you know, we are doing the other major, I think, sort

of perception for me and a lot of people who take psychedelics is that, you know, the, the, this whole thing that you monkeys are not running the show. You think you're in control, you're not in control. Nature is in control and a good thing for us because nature is what's keeping the whole thing going. The plants are in control and, you know, you know, Michael Pollan writes very eloquently about that sort of thing, about corn, about how corn has completely taken over the human species and turned us into willing slaves, you know, is corn called, we're cultivating

corn? No, corn is cultivating us and corn has conquered the world as it adapts itself to the industrial petroleum based monocultural technology of industrial agriculture. Holy shit, that is so crazy, man. Oh man. You've, you've read his stuff, right? No. Michael Pollan?

I have not. No, you need to interview Michael Pollan. He's here. Undoubtedly he's here. I haven't run into him, but because now he started to write about psychedelics. He's very interested in psychedelics. I can recommend two articles he wrote. It'd be great.

You can Google it. One is called The Intelligent Plant. Great article, great summary of the, you know, the idea of plant intelligence was dismissed by science five years ago, not so much anymore. Do you think his last name is really Pollan? It is Pollan. It's not spelled like, like plant, it's P-O-L-L-A-N. Most people know his two famous books, The Botany of Desire and the Omnivore's Dilemma.

He was a food writer for the New York Times. I know the Omnivore, I know, I've heard of those two books. Yeah, it's a great book. They're both great books. Now he's writing, he wrote, he's beginning to get interested in psychedelics. He's writing a book. He wrote another article in The New Yorker called The, I think it was, it was about mushrooms. It was called The Trip Treatment or something like that.

Great work. He's so good with words and he's really speaking to these issues. I think that your advice, I think just putting a, you know, I just got a bunch of houseplants and put them around my house and the effect is so profound and it changes everything. By the way, Dennis, we're probably over time. Over time and you wanted to go to... Yeah, what time is it? It's 5.23.

5.20. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm on East Coast time. 2.23. It's been six hours. I got you. Well, the talk I wanted to see is probably over anyway, so that's okay. Sorry. No, don't apologize.

Thank you for letting folks know about this conference. No problem. I think it's going to be significant. But we also have here, and just, I think people are going to want to, this seems incredible. Can I announce this too? Please, absolutely. So we've got Journey of the Soul, an Iowa retreat with Dennis McKenna and Weyra. Weyra.

Weyra. He's the curandero I've been working with for about the last four, since 2012. Oh my God. We were doing these retreats in the Sacred Valley, and on average twice a year. How many people come? Well, usually they have small groups, anywhere between 15 and 20. And for a long time, we were doing it at a lovely place there called Wilcatica, a guest house in the Urabamba. The owner decided that, as she put it, the wild energy of ayahuasca is not compatible with the soft energy of Andean medicines,

which I told her. Well, that's ridiculous. But anyways, she decided not to let us continue at Wilcatica, but we found another venue, and we're going to continue. Because the work that Weyra is, and I, I guess, by facilitating have been able to do has been really rewarding. People, you know, how they talk about, like how Roland described, people come down and they have very meaningful life-changing experiences, and it's what's wonderful to facilitate that. We've got two things. There's a 10-day option where we basically play tourist for the first two or three days. We go to Machu Picchu and other archaeological sites, and then we go to the, we end up at the retreat center, and we have seven days of ceremony,

or people can, you know, three ceremonies within seven days, I should say. Not seven in a row, that's too much. That's too much. We, we believe in integration. You need a day between in order to integrate. So you can sign up for just that, just the seven days, or the ten days. Wow! I urge people, if they've never been to this area, the extra three days are really worth it. For sure. Machu Picchu and these other Inca sites are just incredible.

This seems like the coolest event of all time. How is this not already sold out? Ten years? Well, I've only started to, for a long time we weren't advertising it. You know, we were, it was word with mouth. Now, I'm beginning to advertise it a little bit because we're not working, you know, through the, through the guest house anymore. I think it will probably sell. Of course! Really accepting 15 people. Yeah, this is sold out. This guy's www.symbiolivesciences.com. I'll be visiting that website to check out too. This sounds like heaven.

Yeah. Look at the events page. There should be an events page on www.symbiolivesciences.com. Well, guys, go to this. This is crazy that you're doing, I mean, crazy in the good way that you're doing this. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Dennis. Thank you, Duncan. I've really looked forward for a long time to talking to you. You're kind of a superstar yourself. No way! Yes, you are, brother. This has been an enlightening conversation and I'm very grateful to you for your time. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Wow, cool. That was Dennis McKenna, friends. Everything you need to link up with Dennis McKenna is going to be at DuncanTrustle.com in the comments section of this episode. Check out ESPD50.com. Consider going on one of these ayahuasca retreats. Much thanks to HelloFresh for sponsoring this episode. Don't forget to go to HelloFresh.com. Use Duncan30 to get $30 off of your first week of HelloFresh. And thank you guys so much. All of you came out to the shows in LA, in San Francisco, and I got to hang out with at the MAPS conference in Oakland.

It was truly a joy to see you and I can't wait to see you again soon. Hare Krishna. One in four car batteries is weak and needs to be replaced. Let our professional parts people test your battery for free at O'Reilly Auto Parts.