The Joe Rogan Experience - #298 - Dennis McKenna

Episode Date: December 16, 2012

Joe sits down with Dennis McKenna.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! What's with the craziness? What are you doing with that sound? You son of a bitch. Settle down. Dennis McKenna, first of all, and your friends,

I'm sorry, I forgot your names, because we might have indulged in something that makes you forget things really quickly. You can talk into the mic if you want. It's Keith Cleversley. Keith Cleversley. Close enough. Caitlin McKenna.

Caitlin McKenna. That's legacy right there, ladies and gentlemen. Dennis, first of all, thank you for coming on, and thank you for sending me your book not once, not twice, but three times. Thank you, Joe. I thank you for sending me your book not once, not twice, but three times. Thank you, Joe. I'm happy to be here. I want to be sure you got a copy of the book in your hand. Yeah.

I started reading it in Vegas, which I think is very ironic to be in that – the darkest of places that mankind has created and start to read this book. But as I have known of you for a long, long time, I was turned on to some of your brother's stuff through, it was a song someone played me. Not a song, but a rave that he did where he would talk over the rave and do his end of the world, end of time sort of rant yeah yeah um i think it was the the it was called time wave zero wasn't it like the even the the uh the the piece yeah it

could have been i mean i know he was in several of those things the one i remember is alien dream time yes yes was that the one well alien dream time wasn't that like a movie or was that the one? Well, Alien Dreamtime, wasn't that like a movie? Or was that the sad thing? No, that was an album. Oh, that was it. That was an album. I think Ken Adams, actually, who just recently released a movie called The Terrence McKenna Experience. Oh, really? I don't know if you saw it. Yeah.

I mean, it's an old... It's a documentary? Well, no, not exactly. I mean, it's old clips, you know, from other appearances. Pretty good. Interesting movie. Now, that one clip that I'd listened to really might have started an entirely new chapter of my life. Just because it was so, first of all, it was so freaky.

And you never heard anyone talk that way. First of all, it was so freaky, you know, and it was – you never heard anyone talk that way. And your brother had this really odd inflection that was like – when someone is really smart and they talk with a really odd inflection, you start wondering what's wrong with you. You know, like why am I not talking like this guy? Like maybe he's right. He's on to something. Like how confident he is to talk like that. Well, one of the things that was always sort of charming about Terrence was that it didn't really matter what he said. I mean, I used to get after him and say, what you said 20 minutes ago didn't make any sense. And it directly contradicts what you just said, which also doesn't make any sense.

But the thing is, it doesn't matter because Terry, Terrence, he could have read the phone book and it would have sounded great. And people would be hanging on every word because he just had that gift, you know. He had the voice. He could mesmerize people. obviously super intelligent, widely read, knew all this stuff, you know, as a result of his reading in the Tussman program and before that alchemy and, you know, black magic and Eastern philosophy and all of this stuff. You know, I mean, he was by far a much broader scholar than I'll ever be. I mean, I'm quite narrow, you know, I mean, I know science, that's what I know, you know, not really. He was just incredible. He could draw on so many,

you know, threads of knowledge and people were hungry to hear it. I mean, here was a guy who could say, you know, he loved provocative statements, right? He loved to, you know, antagonize the, you know, make people think and people wanted to be challenged, you know, and that was part of his appeal, I think, a great deal of his appeal. I remember in the early 80s, before anybody really got to know who Terrence was, but he was out a few radio clips and that sort of thing. But back in the early 80s, do you remember Sing Along with Mitch? Sing Along with Mitch? What was that?

You were probably too young for this. Yeah, Sing Along with Mitch. It was like this really cheesy, stupid music show with this guy Mitch. Do you remember what his last name was? I don't know, but it was all about Sing Along with Mitch. And he would present this show and they'd sing all these old songs and he'd get people in the audience watching television to sing, right?

And so Terrence went on one of these programs and the moderator said, you know, you're like Sing Along with Mitch except it's like Think Along with Terrence. Right? And it was like that, you know. He just stimulated people to think about things they never really thought about. So this was the show, Sing Along with Mitch?

This is our good reason for the excitement here tonight. That was the one. Yes, yes, that was the one yes yes that was the one wow wow crazy uh huh

you really can't talk like that on TV anymore people will wonder why you're talking like that no I know I know but I know. But this was so, you know, this was way back. Isn't that interesting, though, that style of talking?

Yeah. There was like this weird fake style of talking on television back then that they just don't do anymore. Mm-hmm. What an interesting show. Yeah, it was very interesting. So that was really, you know, that was a big strength of Terrence. He was so articulate.

Charismatic. He was well-educated. And he could make whatever he was talking about make sense, or sound like it was making sense, even when it didn't. Well, he had so many interesting ideas that opened up so many people to new possibilities. But there were most certainly a few of them that were very, very controversial. Time wave zero, novelty theory being a big one, which I tried to explain this to a friend of mine once. And just trying to explain it, I sounded completely crazy. it i sounded completely crazy i said it's a something he was trying to figure out how to measure time through using the e-ching which is an ancient chinese method of divination that's

somehow based on hexagrams and maybe a map of time and my friend looked at me like i was out of my fucking mind and i'm like well the idea is that time is like an algorithm. Somehow or another you can track it. Right. So are you familiar with the I Ching at all? Yes. Yes. So that was the framework for this idea.

And, you know, the time wave, I mean, that's one area where we had a very different perspective, you know. That's one area where we had a very different perspective, you know, and actually in the book I have a chapter on the time wave and I kind of unpack the time wave. And my own perspective on it was that, you know, he postulated that the time wave is an actual map of time, right? And I think that's where he overstepped the bounds. I think what really happened was he rediscovered an ancient Chinese calendar. You know, because you can use the I Ching as a calendar. There's no doubt. He's demonstrated that.

But if he rediscovered an ancient Chinese calendar based on the I Ching, that would have been remarkable. A few Chinese scholars would have congratulated him, and nobody would have noticed beyond that. But then he sort of postulated this whole crazy notion about time and about how time was a fractal structure and made up of resonances. And anyway, the thing of interest for most people was that he had to postulate an end date. And he postulated several end dates, you know, because the theory said it had to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

He postulated several end dates. But the one he finally settled on was December 21, 2012, you know, which was close enough. I mean he actually postulated an end date that was slightly off that by several weeks. It was November, right? He had a November? Yeah, November, right. And they changed it?

So we're talking about a cycle of billions of years, right? Right, right. So he looked at that and then he found out or already knew about the mayan calendar and thought well they're close enough let's just sync these together but there's no direct connection to the mayan calendar other than that but didn't he say that he arrived at it completely independently of the mind yeah yeah yeah well the time date he said that, is that like sort of fudgery? A little fudgery. He arrived at a date that was close to that.

Right. You know, and then, but also, you know, during the time, there were several times in the past when he postulated end dates that, you know, were, I mean, the time wave wasn't well known and there were, you know, it came and went and nothing happened. And he just viewed that as part of the process of trying to, you know, fit this thing against history. Did anybody go back and re-examine the I Ching for the possibility of it being a really effective ancient Chinese calendar? Has anybody looked at that aspect of it?

Well, no one to my knowledge except Terence. I mean, if you just split that part out. It's like it's out there, though. Well, that it's a calendar? Well, that Terence believed it was. Like, why wouldn't someone follow up on that? I mean, forget about the map of time thing which is like really really hard to follow but just that aspect of it seems like it would be

worth looking into it would be it would be worth looking into from scholarship yeah definitely i mean there's no doubt that it is a perfect 384 day you know 13 month lunar calendar i mean it works very well as works as well as any other calendrical system that we have. You know, they all have inaccuracies. You know, and that alone is remarkable. But he had this whole other theory. And the problem that I had with the time wave theory was that there was no way to quantify it. This idea of novelty, I mean, I believe novelty ingresses into the continuum, but it's hard to put a number on that. I mean, just look around.

Novelty is ingressing into the continuum, and it appears to be accelerating. But maybe that's just our around. Novelty is ingressing into the continuum and it appears to be accelerating. But maybe that's just our impression. But this was his idea. The question is, how do you define a novel event? Right? Are novel events I mean, he had the theory that novel events

suddenly erupt into history and make a change. And those kinds of events are really rare. You know, I mean, asteroid impacts, that kind of thing. Yeah, those are abrupt novel events. But he used to cite, for example, you know, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. You know, I mean, that was, that had a huge impact on history.

Everything after that time was different. You know, it changed our lives. But was it, was that the novel event or was it the testing of the bomb in Alamogordo or was it, you know, Einstein's discovery of the equations that enabled this to be possible? All those things were novel events, which happened very quietly and kind of unnoticed. But if they hadn't happened, this spectacular thing over Hiroshima would not have happened either, right?

So my view of it was that novelty kind of diffuses into history rather than erupt into history. And pretty soon, you know, everything changes. But it changes over time, and we're not even subjectively aware of it that much. What was his motivation to pursue that, like to pursue such a strange and very hard to follow theory? hard to follow theory well to pursue this time wave theory well to to explain that we really have to go back to we should probably explain the time wave too for people who don't know what the hell we're talking about there might be people that are going what the fuck what is the time

wave theory right well the time wave theory is this mathematical construct, you know, based on the I Ching that Terence got basically downloaded to him when we did the, what's been famously known as the experiment at La Charrera, you know, which the book also talks about. And which, again, a lot of people, if you're a Terence McKenna fan, you know what that is. If you're not, you're wondering, what the hell is this? But the experiment at La Charrera was when we, you know, well, how do we explain it? I don't even know if we could go into it on the podcast. But it was something that we attempted to do, you know, when we went to South America looking for exotic hallucinogens, and this was in 1971. And we were motivated. I mean, I'm sort of getting off track here, but I'm trying to bring it back to the issue of the time wave. We were motivated to go in 1971 basically by our interest in and fascination with DMT.

I mean, that was what got us going because we had encountered DMT and the hate in Berkeley in the 60s. It was very rare, you know, extremely not on the streets or anything. It was hard to come by, but we had come by it and had the experience of it and thought, holy Christ, there is nothing else more interesting than this that we've ever encountered. encountered and so you know we were involved in all the political turmoil and the anti-Vietnam war movements and you know free speech and all of that Terrence was at Berkeley I wasn't particularly but we we just thought you know none of that is relevant this is truly the most amazing thing that we've ever encountered and so and so you know our original motivation to go to South America was because the as you know that the smoking of DMT is very short right it's 10 minutes 15 minutes and you come back and you're like what the hell was

that what the fuck was that you know you can't bring back much from it other than just an overwhelming impression of awe and amazement and that you've looked into some other world that's more bizarre than anything you've ever seen, encountered. So we thought if we could find an orally active form of this DMT, that it would last longer. That was a simple rationale. It would last longer and we could kind of get our sea legs there and figure out what was going on. That's a hilarious expression for DMT, get your sea legs. Get your sea legs, right. Wow.

Just spend a little more time. And so we read about this very obscure drug prepared from a species of tree in South America called Varolas. And Schultes, the famous ethnobotanist from Harvard, wrote about – published a paper in 1970 called Varola as an orally active hallucinogen. Now, Varola is normally used as a snuff in South America, right? I mean, the certain tribes, the Yanomamo and other tribes, they extract the sap, they dry it down, and they make a snuff out of it. But there were a couple of tribes that made an oral preparation from it. So that attracted our attention, and we decided to go to South America and look for, you know, this, this Wetoto drug called Ukuhi, or something like that, Ukuhi.

And it happened to be that the ancestral home of the Wetoto was at La Charrera. That's what led us to go to La Charrera originally, right, was the search for this drug that no one ever heard of except us and Ari Schultes. And so we went there looking for that and, well, at the time nobody knew much about ayahuasca. I mean, ayahuasca is also an orally active form of DMT, but we didn't know that at the time, and nobody did. Maybe we can talk about that later. But we went looking for ukuhe, right? When we got to La Charrera,

we found that the mission village that we set up, that we stayed at, the Mission La Charrera, had cleared pastures all around, about a couple hundred acres of pastures. And they brought Cebu cattle into this place, the white humpback cattle. Well, the shit, the dung of this cattle is the preferred substrate for psilocybe cubensis. And it was a particularly rich year that year. I mean, a lot of rain, mist on the pasture and all that. So literally every cow pie had huge clusters of psilocybin mushrooms, you know, growing out of them, right?

And again, this was 1971. A lot of people hadn't had much experience with psilocybin mushrooms, but we knew from our references what this mushroom was. We had never taken it, but we thought, great, psilocybin mushrooms, wonderful. So we were misled, right? We thought that ukuhe was the real mystery that we were after. It turns out psilocybin mushrooms were the real mystery, and psilocybin is in fact the perfect orally active form of DMT, right? The psilocin, the active form of psilocybin, is just one atom different from DMT, and it's perfectly engineered for human metabolism.

It's non-toxic, it's orally active, it's easily excreted, it's ideal. It really is. It's a perfect psychedelic in some ways. But at the time, we thought we were after ukuhe. So we thought, well, okay, so these mushrooms are here. This is great. While we're waiting for the real mystery, well, we can eat these mushrooms. Well, we started eating the mushrooms and pretty soon things got very weird, you know, because we were literally eating them every day and they were, they were – we just started having a lot of very interesting conversations, shall we say.

How many days did you do this for? Oh, you know, I mean, there wasn't that much to eat at L'Achereur. We had brought canned goods and rice and things like that, but we found that it was very easy to just kind of slip a few mushrooms into the soup, you know, they didn't taste bad. So probably for a week or 10 days or so, we were pretty much taking mushrooms constantly. Wow. And it began to suggest this experiment that we could do. You know, it began, it, it, the mushroom, or the intelligence that spoke through the mushroom, you know, it was never quite clear,

but there was definitely, it was like having a very intelligent guest at your party, and, you know, you didn't see it, but you definitely were in touch with it. And it began to suggest this experiment that we could do, I mean this wild experiment, the experiment at La Trere. And we, you know, I don't know how much detail you want to go into on this, but we performed this experiment,

trying to get it back to the I Ching and the time wave thing. We performed this experiment, which was something like creating the philosopher's stone, essentially, out of our own DNA and the DNA of a mushroom and sound and light and singing to the mushroom and coming up, you know, creating these superconducting resonances and, you know, I mean, crazy stuff. You can read about it in the book, you know, but we had this idea that we could essentially, I mean, I guess I should back up and explain it.

We had this idea that the sounds that you could hear on high doses of mushrooms, I don't know if you're experienced with DMT, you hear things, right? You often hear overtonal sounds and the whole aural space is as interesting as the visual space in some ways. Well, on high doses of mushrooms, that's similar as well. And, you know, if you listen to these sounds, you can start to sort of try to imitate them and, you know, you can sing along with them or you can vocalize along with them. And the attempts to vocalize them are generally, you know, not so good. They're hard to imitate, but you reach a certain point where you just

lock onto it and then it just pours out of you in a very powerful way and in a way that's it's like almost being possessed or something. This sound energy just pours forth. So the mushroom suggested to us a lot of ideas about what these sounds were and how they could actually set up molecular resonances in our own brains, our own DNA and the DNA of a mushroom, and that we could essentially, well, in some ways create the ultimate object create the ultimate artifact which would be ourselves our own minds in an externalized form the in a physical from the in a very physical form

that you could actually carry around it would be a binding of space time and it would be i know this is crazy stuff that is the highest you can get i think that's as high as a human can get well if you could have this thing well so we had this theory about how to can how to how to uh you know induce this generate this object, not only generate this, but fix it. Like in alchemy, you fix mercury, you know? I mean, that's the final step of alchemy because this stuff was like mercury. This was like minds. It was the violet psychofluid, we called it.

And this was a shared vision between the both of you. This was, yeah, a shared ideational vision in a certain sense and so how was it coming to you it was the mushroom was uh you know the mushroom or whoever was uh communicating through the mushrooms was just matter-of-factly sort of wrapping this down and and, you know, we were receptive to it, and it was like we're writing furiously, and it's like we developed this experiment, this idea, which had a whole lot of predictions. I mean, crazy predictions that, yeah, you would actually have,

at the end of the day, you would have, or the night, more accurately, you would have a physical object that would be outside the body, but it would be you. And it turns out there's all sorts of precedent for this, right? I mean, the idea of the alchemist's stone, the philosopher's stone, or the time machine, the flying saucer, the alchemist's scrying mirror that you can look into and see the future. I mean this idea haunts the human imagination. That there is a way you can externalize the imagination and still be it.

And this thing that you would have or whatever it was would be responsive to your imagination. And it would be able to do literally whatever you could imagine. That's sort of an alternate theory on UFOs, isn't it, as well? That the imagination actually can conjure up a physical object? Yeah. And that's what we're saying. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

That's what we're saying. And even Jung speculated about that. That's right. So, you know, I mean, I know this sounds crazy. Forty years later, it sounds crazy to me too. But at the time, it's like this is what's going down. Right, right, right. And you both agreed to it.

That's what's even crazier. We both agreed to it and we made predictions about what would happen. When we did this experiment, this is what will happen. And the predictions were such that they couldn't possibly happen because this is absurd. You can't create – you can't externalize the mind in this way. You can't create, you can't externalize the mind in this way. But we made predictions, and when those didn't happen, a bunch of other interesting things happened instead. We literally painted ourselves into a conceptual corner where something had to give.

And so we both went into a prolonged altered state for like 14 days. I was smeared across the cosmos, literally. And, you know, I was, I hearkened back to a recent period when I'd smoked DMT and my entire mind was co-contiguous with the, you know, boundaries of space time. And Terence became extreme, you know boundaries of space-time and Terence became extreme you know he became complementary to that he became extremely hyper vigilant and very focused on our place and being like the anchor like if I was out there in the cosmos he was the beacon that was bringing me home and our companions these poor people thought that we were completely nuts you know and they were not participating these are the locals no no the two people that we'd gone with who were it was like they had stepped back from it

so they were sober earlier oh well yeah oh that must have been so we were like oh it was very strange for them i'm sure it's strange for you too oh strange for us you guys being but we were making sense to each other and there's actually a term in this for psychology in psychology it's called the folia do it's deux. It's the folly of two simultaneous psychosis, essentially. But it wasn't a psychosis. That's the thing. People have to understand. It wasn't a psychosis.

If anything, it was closer to a shamanic initiation. I mean, the motifs of shamanic initiation more than the motifs of psychosis fit what went on. We were transformed, and we were transformed in a complementary way. And we also reintegrated, more or less, so that, I mean, I'm fairly functional now. I don't know that I've ever totally reintegrated, but you know what I mean. It wasn't a shamanic initiation where you go through this metamorphosis and things are done to you and you're torn apart and you're changed, but then you're put back together as the, you know, superconducting, you know, bionic creature with access to all information and all space and time. That didn't happen. You know, and so to try to bring this around to whither the time wave. The time wave came about because Terrence was, you know,

in this hypervigilant state where he didn't sleep for 14 days, you know. He was watching over me, for one thing, because I tended to wander off and, you know, I was completely three sheets to the wind, literally, and off in this cosmic fantasy world. But he was very focused. But he started making charts of time. He was trying to predict. We had done this experiment, and we had predicted that the stone would condense in this physical form. And at the end of the experiment, that didn't happen.

But we were getting the message that we did everything right. It's just your timing that's off. And it will come, right? The stone will condense at some point. But so it became this whole game sort of trying to predict when will the stone condense at some points but so it became this whole game sort of of trying to predict when will the stone condense and so terence began charting our course you know and he he found like he was he counted back 64 days two times 64 days to the to the uh you know from the date of the experiment, and it turns out that was the date of our mother's death,

the previous October, right? And then he started counting forward from that date several cycles of 64, and it turns out that was his birthday in 1971. So that became a sort of focus for predicting when it would condense. That course came and went so over the years he tried to fight I guess fine-tune this prediction fine-tune this and that's what the whole elaborate time wave theory grew out of you know he if if there was an alien artifact that was given to us by this experiment then it was this. It was this mathematical construction

which wasn't given to me. It was given to him. What was given to me were the experience of being smeared over the cosmos and then gradually over 14 days basically condensing myself back into a body. Were you eating? Was I eating? I don't know. I guess somebody was feeding me.

I mean, I wasn't doing those things. It was someone must have fed me. Do you remember going to the bathroom? Do you remember getting up? I don't, but you know what I remember? I remember that I was in hyperspace. I was co-contiguous. I shared topology with everyone.

So if I wanted to take a shit, for example, I would ask my friend to take a shit. Wow. And I could eliminate that way because our topologies were joined. Or if I wanted to smoke a cigarette, I'd ask Vanessa to smoke a cigarette. All those kind of crazy things. Ask me to smoke a cigarette for you, please. Right. Right. I mean, I know this sounds crazy.

I shouldn't even be talking about it in public. Do you subscribe to the idea that these ancient cultures like the Mayans and these people that have these incredible structures, that very likely this was psilocybin-induced or their culture was psilocybin-induced? Well, yeah, I do. I think there's a good chance that it was. I mean, I think that that certainly wasn't the only theogen that the Mayans knew about, but that was an important one.

What else did they know about? Well, they knew about a lot. They knew about all the Central American ones, the Morning Glories, Ololiuki, probably Salvia, probably all of those. But the Mayans definitely knew about mushrooms. And I think it's likely that mushrooms, you know, I mean, if you talk about the stone-dape theory, you know, which you've talked about and Terence has talked about, it's most likely mushrooms, you know, because mushrooms are pan-global. in every climate. You know, if it's tropics, it's psilocybe cubensis. If it's temperate, it's psilocybe semilanciata.

But these things are all over the place. They're potent. They don't require any preparation, right? No technology needed other than the curiosity to bend over, pick it up, and munch it. And once you do that, then the impact had to be profound you know and and and we're talking about omnivorous primates here who are hungry all the time very acutely you know keyed into their environment i mean it's it's not like they're going to overlook this right right so they'll see it and they'll eat it.

And they test things and they're omnivores. Exactly. They're omnivores and they test things. And so they test this and then they get the message. And I think that, you know, I mean, in the stone-dape theory, there are things that are puzzling to me that I totally don't completely understand. It's like, you know, if you look at the archaeological evidence for the critical period when consciousness emerged in our species, except for a couple of indications that go way back like half a million years. But the efflorescence of artistic expression,

which is really the only way you can tell, happened sometime between 100,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago. You look at the cave paintings and some of the oldest ones, the Blombos Cave in South Africa goes 80,000 years. That was clearly, those artifacts were clearly done by conscious beings with an artistic sense, you know. So if that equates to cognition, but then the, you know, then clearly consciousness was happening somewhere after 100,000 years, up until now, presumably. Consciousness was happening. But if you look at the fossil record, the neurologically modern brain was much older than that you know i mean essentially you know at least a hundred thousand

maybe two hundred thousand years older than this emergence of consciousness you know the neurologically modern brain with all the apparatus needed to generate language right and it's all about language and it's about this making this connection between sound image and symbol you know meaningful symbol and and i've argued in uh a lot of lectures and so on i mean my shtick if you will that what this is what this amounts to is synesthesia right synesthesia, right? Synesthesia being the translation of one sensory mode to another. Well, like psychedelics do, right? Psychedelics reliably induce synesthesia where you can hear colors and see sounds. That's the most trivial aspect of it.

Most people can't do that without psychedelics, but some can. Some people are genetically synesthetic, and their experience of meaning and language is very different. It's interesting that synesthesia in genetically synesthetic people is often associated with languages and language and number, you know, so they'll say crazy sounding stuff like, you know, the letter C is hard and chrome colored, you know, and they're thinking they're speaking in the abstract, but this is an actual perception for them, or, you know, the, the, they'll talk about the personality of the number nine whoa now these crazy stuff are they functional these kind of people many of them are brilliant yes they're totally functional so they're seeing all this around them all the time but they can

still manage their way to move through it. So they're essentially walking through a living mushroom trip. Yeah, kind of in a sense. I mean, I think they are aware of their sort of cognitive environment, if you want to put it that way. The same one that we inhabit, but a lot of this stuff goes into the background for us, right? Unless we take a psychedelic or something like that, and of this stuff goes into the background for us right unless we take a psychedelic or something like that and then it comes out into the foreground it goes on in the

background that that's essentially what i'm saying the process of understanding language is a process of synesthesia that we're not even aware of right where we have we live Where we live in a world in which abstractions and symbols are as real as anything in the outside world, right? And we live in a world in which symbols have significance and that is the basis of language, our ability to perceive meaning, and it's based on this sort of unconscious synesthesia, which we do all the time. And mushrooms may, I mean, with respect to the evolution of the primate brain, what I think I'm postulating is that, you know, something like mushrooms were able to trigger these types of synesthetic experiences in people and essentially became training tools for learning cognition,

training tools for learning, you know, how to associate meaning with meaningless sounds and essentially meaningless symbols, meaningless visual cues and aural cues. But it made the essential connection to significance, the feeling of significance. Am I making any sense? Yes, absolutely. So that's the mechanism involved of taking an intelligent thinking lower primate and turning it into a human being. Right, exactly. Do you ever want to take a chimp and give it a lot of mushrooms and see what happens? Well, yes, of course.

My God, that's all I'd want to do. Right. I just feel like there's got to be something to that. Right, but it doesn't happen abruptly. It happens over time. Right, but just have a whole farm. Well, yeah, but again, I mean, there are other things going on. There are, you know, I don't know if it's a…

Climatological factors. Climatological factors, maternal inheritance factors. You know, I mean, this is a whole other area of We didn't even really describe the theory for people who don't know what the higher primate theory is, or excuse me that's my t-shirt here

the stone-daped theory is that psilocybin mushrooms or psychedelic mushrooms were responsible for creating human beings and the one of Terence's assertions was that the the doubling of the human brain size occurred over a period of about two million years and that this correlates to the timeline of these rainforest receding into grasslands and then these monkey you

know apes experimenting with different food sources now does that does that stuff all jive with like core samples and like climate studies and is all that stuff the same time where the human brain size doubled is that all legit well yeah it's pretty much legit i mean we know that there were you know i don't think you could put your finger on any one factor and say this was responsible for the expansion of the human brain. But definitely the, you know, transition from arboreal to plane type existence, existence on the Serengeti, was a time of incredible environmental stress for these primates. And for the whole environment, they had to adapt. And they had to learn a whole new diet, a whole new mode of existence.

And it's not clear the time frame that this took place over. But I think that, and it's not clear how much of it just happened. I mean, it's not clear that this necessarily triggered consciousness, but it certainly triggered adaptations in these primates that, you know, they were forced into, so that perhaps got them ready when the time came. I mean, that's the part that's difficult to predict or nail down. How long, how far back were these mushrooms used? You know, was it a transient thing or did the climate change? You know, was there a point around 100,000 years ago where the climate in that area got much wetter and suddenly these things became more common?

Or were they always there? And, you know, it's just difficult. But I think one of the characteristics that we do know about psychedelics is that they can induce this feeling of what's been called portentousness right the feeling of a feeling that an experience something is significance a feeling of reverence or awe or you know all of those things that we associate with religious sensibilities. It's not that psychedelics, there are religions that have been founded around psychedelics. Obviously the mushroom cults and all of these things. But psychedelics are not a religion, they are in a sense the religion. Or they hit those parts of our brain that are capable of having religious responses in some way.

And so when you get that going, then you have these primates with a sense of being in touch with some transcendent other that is more significant than themselves, that they feel longing for. And I think that's the religious sensibility, and that's also what drives our species forward, is this longing to know the unknown, essentially. You know, I mean, Terence talked about and actually Rudolf Otto talked about that the psychedelics are a mysterium tremendum, right? Rudolf Otto talked about this.

They are a tremendous mystery that is terrifying and fascinating at the same time. And this has been the continuing carrot that's pulled our species forward, you know. In my lectures, I sometimes liken them to the idea of the monolith in 2001. You know, Kubrick tried to concretize that idea and the idea of the monolith, something that's utterly alien, totally incomprehensible, completely terrifying and fascinating,

right? They can't take their eyes off of it, and it inserts itself into history or evolution at critical junctures. It just shows up, you know, and things happen. And I'm saying we don't need to invoke the monolith because that's what the psychedelics in nature are, you know, our own built-in monolith, you know, built into the biosphere. built into the biosphere.

Do you find it frustrating that that's not considered by standard people of science when they discuss theories of evolution? It's really strange to me how they factor it out. It's weird how they... There's obviously a bunch of different factors. Cooking meat, the throwing arm. There's a lot of different factors, cooking meat, the throwing arm. There's a lot of different factors. Right, right.

But why would they not consider that as well? That's always been really confusing to me, and the only thing that makes sense is that they haven't done it. There you go. You just said it right there. And, you know, Graham Hancock talks about this, the person that wrote this very interesting book about the cave paintings. The Mind and the Brain is the name of the book. I forget the author at the moment. South African scholar who wrote a book about how altered states in shamanic rituals carried out in the dark or in the almost total darkness in these caves. That's what the cave paintings were about.

These things were painted by people in highly altered states doing shamanic ceremonies. But even the guy who wrote the book will not take mushrooms. You know, Graham Hancock attempted to get him to. I mean, he wrote about his work with great enthusiasm and admiration and said, you know, if you want to confirm your theory, this is what you do. Why is it that if he did do it, though, if he did do it and did do it publicly, it would hurt him in an academic sense. Well, yeah, that's probably why he didn't do it. But why would it hurt him? I mean, it seems to me it would hurt him

because drugs are verboten. But in fact, that is the honest thing to do as a scientist. And I think if enough of the right people, you know, the people in this field actually would let themselves have this experience, I think the controversy would resolve itself. Because those of us who have experienced it, it just seems obvious. various that it just seems obvious it just seems it's very strange to me that it's not considered even as a factor at all when if you've had the impact you've had the experience personally you know the incredible impact that it has how could that not be considered in in terms of something that affects consciousness if you're talking about someone who has no science, someone who has no books to read, someone who has whatever language existed at the time, having a blowout psychedelic experience would be so staggeringly profound on the shaping of your vision that educate people in this world, whether it's in high school or whether it's in universities or colleges, that they personally are not

aware and or have been educated by this experience because it's not what everybody thinks it is. Everyone has this idea that it's escape from reality. You're running away from things. You're clouding things up with drugs, and that because it's under this one blanket, this one blanket of description, drugs, it's really weird that it's not considered as a factor in the development of the rubric it's put under. I mean, people, it's one of these things that exists in the shadow. You know, it's in the shadow. And the reason it's in the shadow is because it is a true mystery. And true mysteries are freighted with numinosity, right, with the numinous.

And, you know, I mean, despite the lip service that the church pays to all this stuff, I mean, the main mission of the church is to ensure that people do not have genuine religious experiences, right? I mean, that's the most dangerous thing to the church that there could possibly be if someone bypasses all the priests and the whole hierarchical structure and just goes out and talks to God. Well, God's going to give you a different message than the priests are giving you, I tell you. That's dangerous. It's dangerous. What did you think of John Marco Allegro's work, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, his

assertion that, for the folks who don't know this one, just the brief one, he was a scholar who was an ordained minister who became a theologian. As he was studying theology, he became agnostic and reviewed, according to him, the Dead Sea Scrolls and believed at the end of 14 years of studying it that it was essentially the entire Christian religion was about psychedelic mushroom use and fertility cults. And he wrote this book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross and it's his, that's his assertions that Jesus actually was a mushroom. Well, I don't know if, I don't know if Jesus was a mushroom, but I do think that Allegro was a serious scholar and I think he, I think it's a shame that he was vilified the way he was, because he was a philologist, right? He was a specialist in these Aramaic languages. He was one of the people appointed, one of the scholars appointed to the translation of the Dead Sea

Scrolls. And he was incidentally, apparently, according to Andy Redivit and people like that, he was the only one who wasn't a priest on this committee, for one thing. So he was immediately sort of outside the officially approved circles. I think, I'm not a philologist, but I think to the extent that,

I mean, you know, so I'm not really qualified to interpret whether his scholarship was together or not. He was well enough qualified to be appointed to this translation committee, so he must have had something going for himself and when in his his account is he says honestly you know when i reviewed all this stuff and began to put two and two together it seemed that there were all these illusions to fungi and you know to mushrooms and uh i didn't come to this with this agenda that That's what's in here. And he was a straight guy too. He was a straight guy. Yeah, he was a straight guy. So I think that he was a good example of an honest scholar

who honestly reported what he found and who his message was unacceptable. And so the establishment, the powers that be, the higher authorities decided basically he had to be destroyed. And he was. His reputation was thoroughly trashed. Now, is it true? I mean, was Jesus a mushroom? Did they use Amanita muscaria or some other mushrooms? I think it's likely. We know that the Gnostics, which is the pre-Christian or quasi-Christian group that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, out of which Christianity supposedly sprang, they had a lot of very peculiar notions,

and notions that would be considered heresy by Christians now. I mean, the god of the Bible of Genesis was seen in Gnosticism as an evil entity, right? Because it was keeping humanity imprisoned in the world of matter when the soul longed to be liberated into the light and all that. So that was his view of this whole thing. Not Allegro's view,

but that was the view of Gnosticism. That's a pretty psychedelic vision right there. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this group was using either Amanita muscaria and or some kind of psilocybin mushrooms. The craziest quote from the book was that he had translated the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word, which meant a mushroom covered in God's semen. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that's a heavy one.

Yeah. Especially for a guy who's not doing drugs. Yeah. Yes. A straight academic. This is what I got. Right. This is what he had and he had to be

discredited because that wasn't the message but should we be surprised the church has been suppressing stuff for years look at the bible the bible is a very select

compendium of gospels but there's a lot of material that never made the cut, as we know. It's weird that, to me, that with the incredible power that the psychedelic mushrooms must have had on ancient people – we know people have been taking them for a long time. We know for sure they existed. How are they not being used all throughout these religions today? How did all the different intellectual societies of this world lose touch with perhaps the very thing that gave us our initial intellectual curiosity? How did that happen? How could it happen that at the highest levels of learning, which is where we're at in 2012, if you follow a linear timeline, this is as advanced as we've ever been. So if that is the case, how study which shows that it improves your personality. But some legitimate consideration to that it might have been a factor in why we're here. And we're – one of the reasons why we're so fucked up, one of the reasons why our society is so crazy is because we're detached from one of the very things that might have created this human being in the first place.

That seems to me to be something that should be considered. It seems to me like if you look at all the other factors like eating meat and the throwing arm and figuring out complex problems in hunting and all the things that could have happened, how could you not be looking really closely at this one mushroom that makes you see incredible visions explore realms that seem realer than this real this reality that we live in right now the only reason is because either you're you haven't experienced it or you have experienced it and you're terrified and you're trying to keep everyone else from it those are the only two so we're is it possible? I think it's more the latter.

I mean, I think, you know, what we have to understand, the proper venue, if you will, or the proper human institution to kind of be the steward of this mystery, it's a real mystery, right? Even though we understand a lot about the neuroscience, we can talk about neurochemistry and receptors and all that that does not make the connection or cross the bridge between what we experience when we take it we know all about the underlying neurophysiology of it but it still doesn't bridge the gap to what we actually experience so it's important.

So I say it remains a mystery, as does the very conundrum of consciousness. How does the brain-mind generate or experience consciousness? But it is a genuine mystery, and human institution, and properly should be the province of religion. But religions don't serve that anymore. Religions are political institutions, right? I mean, if they have a real mystery, they want to put it in a box and put it over here someplace and keep people from it, you know, because that gets in the way of promulgating the doctrine. And the doctrine is, you know, toe the line, don't ask too many questions, have faith,

right? You must have faith, which generally means, which means essentially you have to believe a lot of stuff we tell you for which there's no evidence. That's another part of the math. You believe it because we tell you to believe it. So have faith, don't ask too many questions, you know, and basically toe the line. So they're political institutions, religions are. They're into bludgeoning people into a certain mode of behavior. And they work in conjunction now in our culture with governments and corporations and to

have people you know taking mushrooms and and having all these funny ideas and questioning the status quo this is not this doesn't serve the agenda you know but how many people who are making the agenda how many people really truly have had the experience? Is it – Few. Very few. So is it that they don't want these people having it and thinking about things and coming up with new solutions and trying to reshape society? Or is it complete ignorance and just trying to suppress it because it's in their best financial interest? Well, that's hard to – that's really hard to know. It's in their best financial interest, isn't it? Well, that's hard to – that's really hard to know.

I mean whether they do it out of ignorance or whether there's a more sinister agenda, which is perhaps some of them have had this experience and realize that for people to be having these types of experiences is a threat to the status quo because exactly as you say, it motivates us to change the way we are, to change the way we relate to the world, you know, and we're no longer good producer consumers, you know, we don't fit into the agenda anymore. I mean, I think it's ironic, you know, just in a way, you know, back in the 60s, DMT used to be called the businessman's trip, right? The idea was you could smoke it on your lunch hour and get back to work after your lunch hour, except that after you smoked DMT, who would even want to go back to your cubicle, you know, subversive in the sense that they encourage people to take personal responsibility for themselves, you know, and think for themselves. Thinking for oneself is a discouraged activity these days. There's also the issue of a lack of guidance in this country, especially when it comes

to these different things, because of the fact that they're illegal. There's a lot of misinformation. Right. There's a lot of misinformation. People don't understand how to use them. They don't understand where they're going to get them from. It would be amazing if we had shamanic institutes where people would go and there would be someone who could literally guide you along. I mean, if we were really an intelligent culture that trusted each other as grown adults with the ability to make choices and have educated choices,

it just seems like we're missing out. Well, give it 20 years. You think? I do. I think that despite all the resistance, that's probably where it's going. And it will happen in a very subtle way and it won't attract a lot of attention. But I think that, you know, until it's a done deal in a sense, I think that what we're witnessing now is that with this psychedelic renaissance, you know, in the 60s and all that, that's all gone. But now a lot of the hysteria has died down.

And now we're in a position to revisit this whole thing and take a second look in a calmer way. And I think a lot of the research that you see happening is going to, I mean, I know the work, the institution I'm affiliated with on that respect is the Hefter Research Institute. People should check that out, hefter.org, because most of the leading researchers in psychedelics are on our board, right, or either on our board or supported by Hefter to some degree. But the work that people like Roland Griffiths are doing, there are other investigators, but he's well known. What he's doing is the way you open the door, right, to the use of these things is two paths, either religious or medicine. If you can find a legitimate medical use for psilocybin, then that changes everything because that means that the FDA can be pressured

to change the scheduling of it. Once the scheduling of it is changed, it's now schedule one, right? And the first criterion of Schedule 1 is a dangerous drug with no possible medical use. Well, if you do good, rigorous science and you do several clinical studies, which is what they're doing with the psilocybin end-of-life kind of approach to it, helping people to come to terms with their impending death and deal with the anxiety and the spiritual crisis around that. That's essentially what they're using. But if you can show legitimately that it has a use in that respect, then you can change the regulatory framework. You can actually get it approved for that use.

Once it's approved for that use, you have to change the scheduling of it from Schedule 1 to probably Schedule 2. But then you open up the possibility of off-label uses, right, as with any drug. And then therapists can start to use it. And I think that you will see in 10 years maybe, you will see exactly that. You will see institutes, places where you can go. I mean, the next step is to say, well, if psilocybin can benefit dying people,

maybe it can benefit well people. Maybe it can help well people, people who are not sick come to terms. PTSD. Another example. But just spiritual evolution, just a discipline, which is what shamanism is. People have to go to South America now to find this stuff. is people have to go to South America now to find this stuff, you know, and they do, and a lot of them go there because they're not finding any spiritual satisfaction in our own institutions.

So what we have to do is create our own institutions that are not copies of South American shamanism, but our own, you know, our own neo-shamanism, in a sense, that borrows from these different traditions, but that works for us, you know, works in our culture. Do you see the lack of changing of the classification of marijuana? It's still Schedule 1, despite all the evidence that there's medical uses for that. Do you find that as, like, discouraging?

And if anybody hears that noise, that's Dennis playing with Velcro. Okay okay don't get mad at us and say there's some static electricity because people will get mad and send like a hundred twitter messages bro fix your shit i'm so sorry you show your fucking static sorry i'm a fiddler what can i say no don't worry about it but the back to the question do you do you see that the classification from marijuana, which still, despite all the evidence to the contrary, even some really interesting stuff about cancer, you know, some – all that Rick Simpson hemp seed oil and – or I guess it's really hash oil. It's because it is psychoactive. That's hash oil. He calls it hemp oil, I guess maybe to make people feel better about it. Right.

Whatever it is there's the work that that guy's done and and all the different studies have shown the what it does for glaucoma patients what it does for wasting syndrome and people have a hard time why is there no change in the classification of that because it seems like there's a good body of work that shows some medical uses for it especially when you consider that cocaine is Schedule II. Right. Cocaine is Schedule II because it has recognized medical use, right? That's hilarious.

Well, yeah. I mean the whole situation in a way is, I think, with respect to cannabis, is somehow different because it's so freighted with political considerations. I mean, that don't really plague the psychedelics to the same extent because even though we're immersed in this world of psychedelics and we think it's important, we're still talking 2%, 3% of the population at most that even gives a shit about psychedelics. Marijuana is like 60% of the population at most that even gives a shit about psychedelics. Marijuana is like 60% of the population. So I just think you're seeing, you know, I mean, I don't know.

I think the pharmaceutical cartel in some ways is lined up against this because medical marijuana is potentially so useful for so many things that they're making money on right now by making drugs to treat them and you know if you look at their research efforts if you look at what's going on in the back room and they're not talking about they're totally into cannabinoid chemistry right i? I mean, they're developing all kinds of pharmaceuticals, but those are patentable compounds that they can own and produce synthetically and charge you a lot of money for. So I think that pot is a threat to the hegemony of the pharmaceutical cartels. That's one thing.

I think the government is kind of deer in the headlights about it, you know, as the Obama administration's reaction to the latest legalization. I mean, finally, they're beginning to get their act together and say the right thing, which is, okay, apparently, we'll just let this social experiment go forward and see where it goes, which is the right thing to do. And I think if they do that, you'll see it evolve. Other states will say, well, Washington, Colorado, legalized pot. They didn't collapse, and they're making a lot of money off taxes. We want some of that.

We'll do that. So I think you'll see it change over time. But I would agree with you. But look what Obama did in the first administration, his first years with the DEA. The DEA busted a lot of pot clubs where he said he wasn't going to do that. I know. I know. He said he wasn't going to do that.

Well, it's even grosser what they do, what they actually do. I know a bunch of people that have been busted. They take all your money. They take all your pot. And then they say your case is pending, and they do nothing. They just rob you. They essentially rob you and stop you from doing business and scare the shit out of you so you don't do it again.

But because you're not violating state law, they don't really pursue you. They just steal from you and shut you down. They just ruin you financially and every other way they can. And physically, because you're going to be freaking out because you're thinking you might have to go to jail. Because federally what happens is when you are not violating state law but you are violating federal law, when you go to trial, they don't even let you use the term medical marijuana. It's not allowed to be used in court. It's inadmissible.

So there is no medical marijuana in the eyes of the federal government. So you can't even defend yourself by telling the people in the jury that you were not in violation of a state law. It's incredible. And it's really a terrible crime on humanity. I mean, that's really what it is. And the government is essentially a criminal cartel in the way that they approach this. Unquestionably, you're putting people in jail that do not not only do they not deserve to be in jail, they haven't done anything wrong. They're providing people with something that they want and they're doing it according to a law. It's a state law and that is a real sickness when people think that they're vindicated or justified in some way for locking those people

in cages, those are the real criminals. That's the real criminals in our society is the people that are locking people in jail for pot. That's a real sickness. And the hypocrisy is just so outstanding in everywhere, in every bar, in every drugstore. Everywhere you go, there's alcohol. And yet you're going to lock these people in a cage for doing something that's not nearly as bad that's insane the here's the thing yes everything you say is true but the thing is the people see through this the fact that you could get this vote in washington colorado is a very hopeful thing if they will let it go forward then over time they'll begin to see the benefits of that

right in the sense that exactly as you say pot smoking is not nearly as harmful as alcohol so you'll see reduced traffic fatalities you know people may be driving stone but they're safer drivers if they're stone than if they're ifoned than if they're intoxicated. You'll see reduced incidences of domestic violence and other kinds of violence. You'll see that actually letting people smoke pot alleviates a lot of societal problems. I mean, it won't eliminate them, but you'll see statistically significant reductions in a lot of the parameters that you know because we know that alcohol it you know fuels violent behavior it fuels it fuels domestic violence traffic accidents all this stuff those things will be reduced if people start smoking pot in place of that you know i guess

i guess i'm just disappointed in the fact that it's taken so long that I've become kind of cynical the way the government approaches it because it just seems so ridiculous at this point well it does seem ridiculous and it's it's like the Emperor has no clothes I mean it's like this policy has so long been in place and there's so much inertia behind it right there's the whole law enforcement infrastructure you know the dea the prison industrial complex the you know i mean so many things depend on it's not just the drug cartels i mean and their profits go away but

the whole governmental infrastructure to support the – Prison guards unions. Yeah, all of those things. They are enormously threatened. They don't want things to change. The last people who want to see pot legal is drug dealers. Their profit margins go out the window. I don't think they really lobby that much though. I don't think they're the issue. No, they don't.

But you know what I mean. And the government has a big yeah investment in the current you know situation I feel if anything the one thing that's going to change everything is the internet it's just the access to information is so complete now that there's really it's it's too hard to maintain ignorance right and for people for the government to maintain that marijuana has no medical application is just absurd. I mean, it's just absurd. Although they do everything they can to discourage research, you know, out of one side of their mouth they say, well, we want people to apply for grants

and we encourage research, but then they make it impossible to get legitimate sources of cannabis to do the research. So which is it, you know? So it is, it's a bad situation. But I would say this, I would say that we have to remember, you know, we have to take a longer term sort of view of this. And we have to remind ourselves that we're witnessing a, what we we're what is really going on here is a co-evolution you know between us and these plants and this has been going on for we don't know how long a hundred thousand years at least cannabis is among those plants right and and so if you take a small slice of historical time and say,

what is our current species relationship with these plants? It doesn't look very good. They're being suppressed and all that. But it's a small slice of time. In the end, the plants win, right? Because this is what's going on. The plants win. You cannot eradicate cannabis from the face of the earth

much as they might want to and they really don't want to you know there's just a small group that are profiting from it being illegal and they would like to continue to do so they would like to continue yeah i always say it will change it will change over time you know i i really think so yeah i guess like i said i think i'm frustrated by the fact that it's taken so long. Yeah. But that's also because – And so many people have had to suffer needlessly, people that are in jail now who don't belong there. There's a terrible case about a guy in Montana who was a grower who was following the state law,

even had state law enforcement authorities on a regular basis come out to his grow houses. And he showed them what he was doing. He was providing for all these different patients in Montana. And this guy is up for 80 years in jail. He's up for more in jail than he would be if he killed somebody. Jail is 25 to life for murder. And this guy is 80 This is a potential sentence. It's insane.

For growing some plants that the state approved – the state made a law. They approved it. He was there. He brought the state people in. They said, yep, everything is good. Brought the state police in. Yep, everything is good. OK, we're good?

OK, we're good. Let's grow some pot. Grows the pot, gives it to all the sick people and now this poor guy is up for an 80-year stretch. Right. It's insane. And then the DEA comes in. Now, as a man of science, and you clearly are, how do you feel when you see CNN and you see Dr. Drew

talking all this craziness on CNN about withdrawal symptoms and withdrawal syndromes, he was saying from from cannabis use and about the cannabis today is so much stronger than it was when we're younger it's incredibly dangerous these words incredibly dangerous it's like i i hear this nonsense and i'm like this is again a man who can't see describing a kaleidoscope this is a person who right doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about a guy who's incredibly straight and he's describing something and it's always negative. Ignore every artist. Ignore every person who tells you it makes food taste better and makes sex feel better.

Ignore all of that. Ignore all these people that are quoting all these positive things and focus on what is most likely bullshit. If you go by personal experience like what we all know, if someone is having psychotic episodes because of marijuana, I have got to think they're going to have psychotic episodes anyway. I got to think marijuana just got them there. They were already fucked. I would have to assume just knowing my own personal experience with the drug. When someone who hasn't had an experience with a drug and they're talking about it,

it's maddening. It's a crazy person talking. It's like, where are your bodies? Where are these numbers? Well, these people are cultural icons who are paid to speak with authority. Not just that, paid by the right not just that paid by the pharmaceutical

companies paid by the pharmaceutical companies the media everybody else to put out a certain meme a certain message and you know so you shouldn't be surprised i mean i mean that's just you know does it drive you crazy though like when you see that if you i don't know if it drives me crazy yeah it does i mean it drives me crazy but i'm so old and cynical and jaded and you know i mean it it's like i it drives it doesn't surprise me at all i mean i think the only solution is i'm not sure what the solution is the solution is to get the right word out to people somehow. And that's what things like your program and other channels try to do. I like to plug Arrowwood.

You probably know about Arrowwood. Wonderful people who are doing a good job of bringing actual facts you know to the table and so we need more resources like that yes and they're not pro or anti-drug they're pro-fact yes which is what i admire about them yes the trip reports are very helpful for very helpful and they will say you know the dangers are this the you know you need to be aware of these possible hazards. And that's the only thing. Education, the only solution to this is just say no. You know, K-N-O-W.

That's the thing, you know. And it's all about education. You're missing out on some money. Yeah. I didn't invent it, believe me. Whose quote is that? Just say K-N-O-W. I think it's Timothy Leary. You're missing out on some money. Yeah. Well, I didn't invent it, believe me. Whose quote is that? Just say KM. I think it's Timothy Leary.

It should be online. Someone should have a Cafe Press shirt ready to go. Yeah. I'll be able to get off on Amazon.com right after this and buy it. But, you know, the thing is it's really all about education. It's about empowering people to make informed decisions about what kind of substances they're going to use, under what circumstances, what their intentions are. There's a protocol. There's a way to use these things in a positive way and a way

to use them destructively. I'm fond of, I mean, I always tell my students, there is fond of, I mean, I always tell my students, there is no such thing as a bad drug or a good drug. They don't have moral qualities. Human beings have moral qualities. There are plenty of opportunities to misuse a drug or use a drug in a bad way. That's not the drug's fault. It simply has the pharmacological chemical properties that it has. Poison isn't evil. It's just poison.

It's all about how people use it, right? It's human behavior is what we need to focus on. And that's what drug education doesn't focus on. It talks about the drugs almost as though they were demons or pathogens or like they had some kind of independent existence and they were an evil virus or something they are not it's the way people use them and what what needs to happen with drug education is you know they don't want to admit this but here's here's the ball of truth on it it's not about telling people, do not use drugs, right? I mean, they say that's got to be the message and that's the only message.

True drug education has got to tell people how to use drugs. That's the difference. How, if you, you know, if you choose to use a psychoactive substance, then here's a way to use it. Here's what you do to maximize the benefit of it and minimize the harm. It's simply that simple.

But drug education doesn't – you can't institutionalize programs that are going to tell people how to use drugs. Isn't that funny though? It's funny. I mean it's stupid. We expect people to learn how to drive a car. We encourage responsible drinking, whatever that is. So in that one instant, we encourage responsible usage. Not that people use it in a responsible way.

Well, I think we're big on people figuring out shit for themselves, which is why we send people out into the world essentially with almost no knowledge whatsoever about sex and love. When you're young, you just sort of have to stumble into it at your most vulnerable and confused time. Same issues apply to sex, right? Sex education and drug education are jokes. I think the way they're currently practiced. That, well, there's, that's a joke. And what's also a joke is just the, the, the, the raising of human beings. I think so many people in this country are being raised by people who are essentially children their entire life. They never really did develop a true understanding of themselves or of their place in

the world or an objective sense of this whole thing and the right the great mystery of it all that's never conveyed and then they raise children the children have to somewhere another wake up and go okay nobody knows what the fuck is really going on here this is we live in a world of madness and momentum and it just continues in the same path even though everyone knows it's crazy. But can you imagine, I mean, how many people can step out of that framework? It's rare. It's not enough time. If you grow up, if you're raised in a religious household, especially a fundamentalist household,

you're not encouraged to think about very much. You're heavily discouraged. Heavily discouraged. You're encouraged to, this is what you need to believe, and all this other stuff is heresy, and you're condemned if you think about that. So I really, I mean, well, I don't know. I mean, we could get off for another 40 minutes on anti-religious rage. Don't just say it.

Just do it. Don't say it. Right. It's ideologies. Any ideology is – the issue is when someone is thinking about what they should do and it's already written for them. Subscribe to this. Well, everybody's situation is different. Everybody's life is different.

Your wants and needs are different. And instead of all these different ideas of what we're supposed to do and not supposed to do and what is evil and what is good, we've lost the ability to figure out what kind of an impact what we're doing has on other people and judging that first and foremost. And that I think is a very, very much a religious and a psychedelic principle. That I, that idea, the idea of looking at everything in his, as how it's affecting the other people around you first. And if you did that, no one would ever impose that kind of restrictions on your children. Because if you were truly looking at the development of the children, the first thing you'd say

is, well, I don't want to fuck this kid up. Right. You know, instead of suppressing this kid and having this unbelievable resistance, which every goddamn human being has ever had ever. When you tell someone not to do something, they want to do it. When you try to control them, they want to break free. When you're a controlling person, they want to pierce their nose and go fucking crazy. Right. It's the same all throughout humanity.

So we should be able to figure that out by now. Well, some have and some do. But do you know, I mean, for you to be able to say that, to have that perception. A million had to have it before me. Well, and you have to be an exceptionally enlightened, open-minded person. Or a comedian. Or a comedian or someone someone yeah exactly who pushes the envelope right who really who makes a profession of out of stepping out of the box

or trying to look at things from you know a broader perspective but if you're a person who you know i mean if you were raised in a strict religious household chances are your children are going to be raised in that household and you never really look, you know, you never take the blinders off because, you know, there's all sorts of bad stuff out there and you just don't want to know about it. And, you know, and that's the problem, you know. Of the ideologies. The problem is the predetermined patterns of thinking.

I mean, one of the things I like to say, I think that psychedelics are extremely valuable with respect to, you know, sometimes I talk about faith. One of the things that's interesting about psychedelics is they don't require faith, right? I mean, religious belief, religious tenets are usually postulated on this idea that here's a whole bunch of things that you should believe, and there's not a shred of evidence for any of this, but you must have faith, my son. Right? That this is,

well, why should you have faith? You know? Chances are it's a lie. I mean, you know, we know that the religions have been scamming us for centuries. Not Scientology. Oh. No, they're legit.

Sure. They're legit, right. I'm trying to join Scientology. It's my latest thing. Who knows? I see. I'm working my way in. But the thing is, with psychedelics, faith is an impediment.

You don't have to have faith. You can just have what you need to have is courage. But what do you say to the people, the cynics, the people who would look at the psychedelic experiences and say, okay, you are glorifying and you're over-exaggerating what's

essentially a hallucination. Your visual cortex is being bombarded with these foreign chemicals. You're seeing things that aren't there. And all this is is just your brain's need to make something profound out of what's essentially a malfunction, a malfunction of your thinking, a malfunction of your visuals. And you've sort of attached all this importance to it after the experience is over. That's the cynical point of view. Yeah, that's the cynical point of view.

But to that I would reply that, you know, what we call ordinary reality, ordinary consciousness, even consensus reality, is essentially a hallucination. I mean, right? The reason drugs work is because we're made of drugs. You know, and whether or not we're on drugs or not, our brains are creating this reality, which we know does not resemble the real world, whatever that is. I mean, the instruments of our physics and so on tell us that the world is a quantum world. It's full of vibration.

It doesn't look anything like this. Net atoms are essentially mostly hollow. vibration. It doesn't look anything like this. Net atoms are essentially mostly hollow. So we, a lot of what our brain does is synthesize a hallucination, essentially, create a model of the world that we proceed to live in, you know? I mean, the world that we, you and I share and everyone shared, this is a model of the world this is a model reality not the real reality the real reality is completely unknowable and will always remain so so for people to say well you've just yeah you've disturbed your brain chemistry in a novel way and you've you've tuned into a different

channel essentially but you're still working with a model whether it's a model of the world experienced through the lens of a drug or whether it's experienced through the lens of, you know, sober conscious perception, it's still a biochemical artifact in a sense. Our brains create this. We live inside of it, you know, and that's, so so so that's what i would say to those people that it's not that you know there is some kind of objective reality which we're immersed in when we're not on drugs it's more that we're on drugs all the time you know our brain is a organ that happens to churn out drugs you know which we call neurotransmitters and hormones and that's what our brains run on so all all you do when

you take an external drug is you tweak one or more of those sets of receptors that the neurons are talking to and you know you get a slightly distorted signal from what we have come to accept as ordinary reality. There is no ordinary reality, or we don't know what it is. It's forever unknowable in terms of our subjective experience. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. There's a very strange desire to discount something that you can't put on a scale. You can't bring it back and show it to someone.

But essentially, most of what you experience in your everyday life is just that. It's just an experience. You're seeing things, you're feeling things, you're traveling, you're taking in information. But we have this real need, a lot of people do, to discount the things that happen, to discount the vision of the psychedelic experience, the hallucinations, the visuals, the profound impact and the sounds. Even though those are experiences that you are taking in as an individual, as a human being, as an entity, you're taking those in, they're dismissed. They're discounted because you can't hit them.

You can't paint them. There's nothing there. You have nothing there. You can't – that experience, although significant to you. Well, yeah, but now, I mean, that's part of the task, I think, is to be able to bring something back from that place. And people do. I mean, I think that's a lot of what psychedelic art does and these sort of creative interfaces. It's not that people go out and take psychedelic drugs and never produce anything.

You know, those experiences influence them profoundly. produce anything you know those experiences influence them profoundly and you may not be able to exactly reproduce them but given the technologies that we have access to you can come pretty darn close you know with multimedia technologies and computer graphics and all this stuff and it may be that you know well mean, I think this technology is only going to get better as we evolve, you know, toward it. Maybe in 10 or 15 years you won't have to take psychedelic drugs because we'll have neurotechnologies that just do the same thing, you know. Or maybe it is that you, you know, you take one psychedelic drug, you take a capsule, and it's a nanomachine that will, on demand, produce any kind of altered state that you want to call up. One of the more scary, but also within the realm of possibility. That's the scary part, is that it's not just science fiction.

possibility that's the scary part is that it's not just science fiction one of my fascinating concepts that terence had was the uh the the concept of the singularity as he saw it you know the the technological singularity a little bit different than the way kurzweil and a lot of these futurists saw he thought it was very likely going to be a time machine or something along those lines something that will be created where there's a new technology where time ceases to be linear. Did you wrap your head around that? Like, how did you feel about that one? Well, yeah, we did. I mean, we love to play with that idea.

And, you know, in fact, we used to, you know, Terry used to speculate that, you know, that 2012, that the singularity will be triggered the moment that time travel is invented. And everyone after that will, of course, want to migrate back to the original moment when time travel was invented. So suddenly there'll be all these time machines condensing out of nowhere. Instantly. Instantly. Everything changes instantly everything changes right right everything changes no one can even wrap their head around that idea that

infinite time and distance into the future would all be able to access the moment the first time machine was invented that's right they would all come back time travel would certainly change everything if you could do that. I don't know. I mean, physics pretty much tells us that time travel is technically possible, but only if you have access to manipulation of energies that are likely to be way beyond us for quite a while. You know, black hole levels of energy and that kind of thing. Hundreds of years. You can do funny things with time, but there's always a possibility that, you know, there

will be a breakthrough. Right. You know, you never know. Well, we're never going to stop. My thought about human ingenuity and our constant desire for innovation is that I don't ever see it stopping. It seems to be a part of what the human animal is and what it does here. So if someone like, I do not remember his name,

the guy out of University of Connecticut, he's the lead time travel expert. He's a really fascinating character. He's like a guy in a Spider-Man book because his father died when he was a young boy. So he became determined to build a time machine to go back and save his father. Oh. Yeah, really fascinating guy.

I cannot remember his name. I will eventually. But his – Ronald Mallett. His idea, I think, was that once he had really thoroughly researched time travel, he realized that you would never be able to go back before the moment a time machine was invented. You're never going to be able to go backwards. Exactly. But you can go back to that moment. Yeah.

Well, Terrence had that idea long before this guy did. And this guy was like, you know, he's a legit peer-reviewed scientist. I mean, he has a peer-reviewed paper on the science behind time travel, and they all agree that, yeah, if you could generate this insane amount of power, you could be able to do it. You could do it. I find it amazing that Terrence had this idea as well. Like, really, long before it was sort of a mainstream thought. Well, you know, you can attribute that to, in a sense,

what we were immersed in when we were kids. I mean, we were both completely sucked into science fiction. We were very much immersed in science fiction. H.G. Wells' novel, The Time Traveler, you know, The Time Machine. I mean, that was a huge influence on me. I probably read that sucker 10 or 15 times. i read that when i was a kid as well i was totally fascinated by by that idea all the versions of the movie as well well at least two versions at least two versions yeah versions i think the first one was possibly a little better. But yeah, so those ideas were out there.

And again, under psychedelics and shamanic states, you can time travel. Have you read Graham Hancock's new novel? No. Very interesting. No. Entangled. Oh, you should read it. I would love to.

Very interesting. I've read his nonfiction stuff. This is his first novel, but it's all about essentially a time bridge between a shamanic person 17,000 years ago and a modern counterpart. And they're communicating across their entangled, literally quantum entangled. And it's quite a fascinating novel he had fun with it i find it amazing that we've able we've been able to for the most part not destroy ourselves with nuclear power because nuclear power in a lot of the ways the big impact the biggest impact it has not just powering cities destroying them. And the fact that we've sort of figured out a way to put a cap on that,

and really, despite all the conflict in the world, we haven't had a nuclear event like that since the 1940s. Right. I wonder how much more evolved we would have to be to be responsible for the actual use of a time machine. I mean, how much more evolved would we have to be before we could have something like that?

It wouldn't be the president has access to the button. It would be the president has access to the whole in the universe. I mean, how do we decide whether or not we're going to do this? How do we decide who we go back in time and save? When events happen in the news, do we have like a congressional meeting? Do we go back in time and save this person? I mean I think that's a misunderstanding of the nature of time, right? I mean if – I mean one of the reasons time travel is impossible supposedly, that kind of time is because you can't do those things. You can't go back and prevent the Kennedy assassination,

you know, because you proliferate another timeline and things to at least one more. But then, you know, physicists tell us, I mean, the current theory is everything you do precipitates, you know,

proliferates multiple timelines. Please explain that because Duncan and I have been trying to wrap our heads around that one. And we've, we've and I have been trying to wrap our heads around that one, and we've brought it up to each other a couple of times. It's sort of an abstract idea in my head, but every decision you make literally brings up, creates a different universe. Creates a different universe. And not only every decision you ever make, if I understand it, it extends to every collapse

If I understand it, it extends to every collapse of a waveform, every collision of atoms, every event, every event, no matter how minuscule or insignificant that we're not even aware of proliferates multiple, multiple time frames. It doesn't make sense. Obviously, we can't wrap our head around this. And it may be that we're, you know, that, I mean, maybe we're not, maybe we're not confined to one of these timelines. Maybe we're living simultaneously an infinite number of timelines. That's so hard to wrap your head around. Yeah, it's hard to wrap your head around. The idea of fractal universes, an infinite amount of fractal universes,

and they're constantly changing and moving like a tide filled with cells, like a tide of cells just washing over the world over and over back and forth, and it never ends. But why not? Why reality? Why this? This is bizarre enough as it is. Exactly.

I've always said to people, like, if you don't want to have a psychedelic experience, you are whether you like it or not. It's called life. Because if you existed in some sort of a logical continuum of real objective thought and reasoning and you had to exist in life in today, in the human world in 2012. Right. And that was my point. That's what we were saying earlier. The brain is a machine that simulates the reality that, and it extrudes it into something comprehensible. So the brain is as much a processor of this data from outside as it, I mean, I don't,

I think the question of whether the brain generates consciousness is one of the, you know, one of the things that neuroscience has to confront. And I think the evidence is that it doesn't. It's more of a detector of consciousness what evidence is this what evidence what evidence is this that the brain detect consciousness well it's not all of the evidence of non-ordinary states you know these other dimensions that for shamanism and for psychedelics they present as real i mean does the brain dream all those up why is why are there commonalities between those states uh you know between people i mean you don't have to be fans of terence and dennis mckenna to take dmt and have similar experiences you know to us so i think i just don't think that we really have a definitive way to say

that all of what we experience arises from the brain it's more that consciousness is built into the structure of space time in a certain way and our brains are detectors and processors much in the way of television is a detector of a signal takes in the signal processes it in a way that's comprehensible and puts it out there on the screen so the the ego and the personality and the lifestyle you choose and what have you as you're making your way through this this dimension is essentially just clothing that you wear to shield you from the great outdoors of reality essentially yeah it's a model that you create it's a model that you create and it helps you get through this it helps you get through it and it maps closely enough close enough to

some external reality out there that you can navigate. You're not stepping off cliffs or walking in front of buses. So it has a definite survival value. And there's enough overlap between what your consensual world is and mine is and ours is that we can talk to each other. We can live in the same space to a certain extent. It's a fascinating concept. It really is.

And that's one of the more profound aspects of the psychedelic experience is the stripping away of that personality and culture and everything and getting to some weird, strange source, getting to this strange thing that exists, this clear thought without all. For a minute, you get to turn the circuit board over. Right. You get to turn it over and see how it's wired. I think that's one of the big, useful, interesting things about psychedelics

and particularly dmt you know dmt just rips the curtain back and you get to see the raw data of experience and how it's all it's everything everything you know memories people you talk to fragments of you know songs just whatever things are are swimming around in your head, you sort of see they're all going into, you know, through this funnel or something, and it's coming out all taped together some way, and that kind of a coherent picture of reality. But DMT strips that back.

You get to step, you get to see it from the other side briefly, how it's working, you know, the reality-generating machine, if you will. That's what you see on DMT. What is your thoughts or what are your thoughts on alien abductions and UFO experiences? experiences and do you think that these are endogenous dumps of dmt that it's most likely what these people are experiencing is some sort of a um overflow or something you know no i don't i mean i think that you know i think that strassman's work on this where high doses of DMT can, in some people, reliably induce these abduction-type encounters. Well, we know they're not standing beside a highway in New Mexico

and watching a UFO land. They're in a hospital bed with an IV installed, but they're having these types of experiences. For those who don't know what you're talking about, it's Rick Strassman's work. It's a book called DMT, The Spirit Molecule. It's all about clinical studies and things he did with DMT. Clinical studies with DMT. And Strassman reported that in many of his subjects who were given high doses of DMT,

of DMT. They had experiences that were similar, if not identical, to the classic alien abduction type experiences. So then you do think that that's what these people were having. They were having endogenous dumps while they're sleeping. It's just something's happening and that's... No, I think that, not necessarily. I think that what DMT does is it lets you poke your head temporarily into another dimension. So when these people are having these UFO abduction experiences, you think that other dimension is poking its head into ours? Yeah, something like that. And whether it's you going there or them going here, but there are interfaces between what we call ordinary reality, which isn't ordinary at all, and these alternate realities.

And occasionally they come together and the membrane stretches and then you get these types of interactions. Isn't it interesting that these interact? membrane stretches and then you get these types of interactions. Isn't it interesting that these interact? But if that's true, I mean, if that's true, that model is – I mean, the usual model of experience is reductionist. It's like the brain is generating all of this. And that's where it's coming from. And everything we think we know about the world is based on that premise. If this other premise is true, then we have to reexamine our most fundamental assumptions about how it is, you know, how the world is.

The issue isn't part of it, though, that all these abduction experiences, a good percentage of them happen at night. They happen, a lot of them, while these people are in bed. They're not happening while people are like Monday morning on the highway, on the way to work. It's happening while you're supposed to be sleeping while your brain is producing DMT in the first place. Do you think that the DMT could possibly, I mean this is complete speculation, but act as a doorway where an actual real true entity can come through. So these people that are having these UFO abduction experiences, even if they are still lying in their bed, they are actually still having this real experience. Yeah, I do. you talk to shamans people that deliberately induce these states for exactly this reason to communicate with these non-human intelligences that give them useful information about all kinds

of things i mean the shamans are just matter of fact about it and they'll just say well yeah that what did you think it was you know this is the way reality is then that's where the cynics always come in and where is this information what are you bringing back could someone please bring back an unsolvable equation that that's Maddox that's a tough one yeah yeah what what do you think like that's if you had a point to anything that's been brought back from the psychedelic experiment you know not the the Francis Crick thing that's disputed right whether or The Francis Crick thing, that's disputed, right? Whether or not Francis Crick actually saw the double helix while he was on LSD. Well, he said that he did.

Finally, they got him. On his deathbed. On his deathbed. There's no recording. You know what I mean? Right, right. How much of that is just a rumor? Cary Mullis, who is totally out front about his LSD experiences, contributed to his insights about this. Right. PCR. do exactly this get this i thou dialogue going with the mushroom and and you know insist that

the mushroom tell him something that he couldn't possibly know you know and the mushroom was always very cagey about it and didn't cough it up well wouldn't you think well if i tell you that you won't need me that sounds like the imagination to me i mean if i was the cynic i, well, that's obviously your imagination then because you can't concoct anything that doesn't exist or something you wouldn't possibly know. It doesn't have the resources because it's coming from your own mind. Well, that would be the criticism. But then out of that comes something like this, the time wave zero. I mean, I would submit that the time wave zero was an artifact from this other dimension. But do we really understand what it was?

I mean, it was a conceptual artifact in a certain sense. It was an idea. It certainly came from left field. And regardless of whether or not it actually is some sort of a map of time it most certainly is a 13 lunar cycle calendar it well certainly is and that came from a psychedelic experience that the knowledge of that essentially yeah essentially so that's that seems to be something that you can at least that aspect of it it seems very unfortunate that it's connected with this idea of a map of time which makes people stick their nose up in the air. Because if they just looked at it for that, just the I Ching being a calendar, a lost calendar, an unknown calendar.

Indisputably, it's a calendar. Or you can use it that way. I mean, the mathematics is clear. As long as you don't begin to postulate that this actually describes the structure of time, that's where I have a problem with it. Because for one thing, time wave zero completely ignores relativity and all the aspects of time that go into that.

And how so? Well, it claims that this map of time describes the structure of time everywhere, you know, in all parts of the universe. But we know from relativity that it all depends on the reference frame, right? So,

you know, so it's not clear. So like a spaceship traveling speed of light, someone aboard it experiences time at a different level than someone on Earth. In a different way. How do you coincide that? How do they coexist? You can't reconcile.

It just doesn't account for it. I mean the problem with the time wave. I'm too stupid for this conversation. I'm trying to wrap my head around it while we're talking about it. The problem with the time wave in my opinion is that it, is that it can't be disproved. Neither can Jesus. And so, right. But science can't disprove anything.

Science can't disprove. Well, yeah, science can disprove things. They can't prove anything. But not unique events, right? That unique events happened. Yeah, but in other words, Terence or whoever created the time wave theory never defined these are the criteria that will invalidate this theory, right? And science depends on – in order to qualify as a theory, you have to say what's going to invalidate it? to invalidate it? What are the criteria that's going to take the foundations out from under this theory that either means you have to chuck the theory completely or you have to modify it

so the model fits the data better, right? And he was never able to, or he never did, and I don't think he was really able to define what would invalidate the theory. So it's an untestable theory. So it's not a theory. It's just an idea. It's an interesting idea, but it isn't a theory. It's not something you can disprove. And so it's useful as an idea, but in some ways it's not.

I mean, you know, if you want it to be scientific, if you want to call this a theory in the scientific sense, you have to define what's going to disprove it. When I meant that science can't disprove things, what I meant is it can't disprove, like, really unique events, like the idea of a UFO actually existing and then disappearing. Like, once it's here and gone, if there's no physical evidence, if there's not – I mean how do you – how can you disprove a unique event like that? But when you –

Well, yeah. You don't. Right. I mean you don't. I mean the – It doesn't mean they don't exist though, right? They do exist. Sure.

Something exists, right? I mean, I always thought that what J. Allen Hynek, the UFO researcher, famous UFO researcher, said about UFOs. He said, I don't know if UFOs are real or not, but I know absolutely 100% that UFO experiences are real. And that's the data. That's the data that you have to investigate. I think that's a very perceptive thing to say. Especially coming from him. Yeah, coming from him. J. Allen Hynek was a guy who actually worked for Operation Project Blue Book.

And he was assigned by the government to go and research different UFO sightings. And somewhere along the line, he decided, listen, I'm going to just do this. And he stopped working for the government and just started spending all of his time researching UFOs. He was absolutely convinced. But he was always clear that what he was investigating were UFO experiences because that was the data that he had to work with. And that's absolutely a hundred percent true ufo experiences do occur whether those are confabulations of of you know the mind or whether they're you know whether they're

extraterrestrial origin extra dimensional origin i don't think we can really say but did you ever have any sort of alien experience did you ever have any sort of alien experience? Did you ever have any sort of extraterrestrial physical contact? No, I can't say I have. Other than being smeared over the entire universe. Yeah, but that was my head. It was extraterrestrial. But Terrence did.

At La Charrera, he did. Of course, there was no one else to witness this. Right. And I write about that in the book. I actually quote at length a section from True Hallucinations in which he describes this. And I have no doubt. I don't doubt that it took place i mean there was all sorts of anomalous things taking place at lotcher and then again it goes

back to the fact that you guys were ingesting the most incredible psilocybin mushrooms every day all day i mean well but but the really interesting stuff didn't start until after we'd stopped that. Well, even after you stopped that, though, how much of that shit was still floating around in your head? I mean, you guys were talking about crazy quantities. Hard to say. Did you ever sober up? Are you still high from that? Well, in some sense, we're still high from it because that experience, you never, you know, you're always integrating it. I mean, it's rather strange to me that, you know, it's like that was 1971.

So that was 40 years ago. And one of the more interesting things that Terrence said about psilocybin, which was a real mind blower, was, first of all, how closely it relates to normal human neurochemistry is that psilocybin is like almost exactly the same as chemicals that our own brain produces and you know very alien in that form that form the form that it exists whatever the molecule structure of psilocybin is it's the only similar with the way it exists it there's not something similar to it or there's not something like it that exists in the organic world other than uh our own brain chemistry well yeah well that's not quite true but i i think what he was trying to say that

psilocybin is is only found in the fungal kingdom right as far as we know it's never been found in the fungal kingdom, right? As far as we know, it's never been found in a higher plant, although lots of tryptamines, DMT, is all over the place, and a lot of its derivatives, but psilocybin and psilocin, do not occur, as far as we know, outside the fungal world, outside the world of mushrooms. Why that should be, hard to say. Maybe it will be discovered in a higher plant tomorrow or next week, but I kind of doubt it. I don't want to get too much into the chemistry, but I do think that this touches on another remarkable aspect of our universe of biological being which is that these tryptamines DMT 5-methoxy DMT bufotenine psilocybin psilocin DMT

itself is two steps from tryptophan right tryptophan is an amino acid that is universal it's part of the 20 that go into proteins. So it's an essential molecule of life, tryptophan is. The enzymes that convert tryptophan to DMT, there are two primary enzymes, amino acid decarboxylase, aromatic amino acid decarboxylase, and methyltransferase is what they're called. I don't know if your audience cares about this, but the point is two trivial steps from tryptophan leads to DMT. And so DMT, the biosphere is saturated with DMT. It's not an uncommon chemical at all. It's found in probably thousands of plants.

It's found in animals. It's found in fungi. It's everywhere. I think it's interesting. I mean, I don't know what it means except, you know, stepping away from science for a minute, strict science, but thinking maybe this is a kind of a subtle message that nature is trying to send to the

monkeys. That's why DMT is everywhere. Yeah. Look guys, just look around the corner, right? It's all waiting for you. It's all there. If I remember what Terrence has said was

what he found first, it was, uh, what he was alluding to was that psilocybin may have come here and uh from an asteroid that it could survive in a vacuum and he i think it was um phosphorus i believe in the four position describing the the molecular structure of psilocybin well psilocybin is phosphorylated in the four position and you said it was the only thing that was like that? It's the only one we've found so far. It's the only phosphorylated indole that we've found.

Well, that and some close derivatives, which also occur in the mushrooms. Does that make any sense then, that that could have possibly come here? We know that what's called pansperia, is that how they describe it? Panspermia? Panspermia is how they believe that amino acids and essential building blocks from life may have traveled here from asteroids. And that may be how life is seeded on this planet. Or, I mean, I suggest in the book, actually, people have to read the book.

Yes, they have to read the book. Because I unpack this. I actually have a section in the book called Reflections on La Torera. And I try to not only unpack it for the reader, but try and look at it myself from the standpoint of four years hence, you know, after the experience and say, what was going on and what makes sense and what might have been going on was was it simply two you know nerdy guys who went to the amazon took too many drugs and and had you know these experiences and that end of story or was there really something else going on and the whole issue touches on what we were talking about about the evolutionary potential evolutionary significance of mushrooms. And it may be that what we are is a million-year,

multi-million-year-long biotechnology experiment, essentially, where if a super-technological civilization, biotechnological civilization with plenty of time on its hands and a certain perspective, if they wanted to take an ecology and see what happened when they seeded these molecules into the ecology and then watched it unfold, perhaps manipulating the way things unfolded. It's almost like they wanted to kind of, I guess, create the conditions where intelligence and consciousness could arise and then see what the effects were in a certain sense. Prometheus style. sense prometheus style prometheus style although prometheus as we all agree was pretty lame but something like that you said it first something something along those lines you know where if you seed the ecology with tryptophan

and the enzymes then this this thing is going to be all over the place. And then, you know, probably predate the appearance of complex nervous systems. But, you know, we know, for example, that the serotonin receptors are evolutionarily the oldest receptors that we know, the oldest neurotransmitter receptors. So, well, I don't know. I mean, it's tempting to speculate on this. It's very hard to. It's sexy.

It's comforting in a certain way to think. There is actually an overlord that's out there seeding intelligence throughout the galaxy i mean what a cool idea but you yourself knowing so much about biology looking at the complex processes that occur on this planet that are completely what i wouldn't say they're orchestrated by nature but like just the parasitic relationships the really complex ones that that parasites have with like the aquatic water worm that gets inside of a grasshopper, grows, then convinces the grasshopper to commit suicide so it can be born into the water. I mean we know about these weird, crazy relationships that exist. Right.

Exactly. Without an overload. So, well, but this is a kind of an example of that on the galactic scale. Exactly. You know, if there are fungi in nature and actually your cordyceps in your supplement is exactly that, you know, it's biology. You know, it grows on caterpillars. There are some species that will grow on ants and you probably heard how they work. They will infect

the ant at a certain point the hostoria they will put these mycelium mycelia will infect the ant's brain and trigger it to go from the base of the leaf of the blade of grass to the tip, then it will kill it and paralyze it. Right, and then it can sporulate, right? It will overgrow the body and release the spores, but it's induced the ant to go from the least optimal place to distribute spores to the most optimal place. It's incredible. So it's controlled it.

So that's a phenomenon. That's an intelligence. That's a kind of intelligence. A spreading intelligence. So why is it so far-fetched to think that there is a galactic super race or maybe it's – that infects complex nervous systems in our ecology that then induces us to invent culture and language and technology and eventually build starships and get off this mud ball. And do what they're doing. And do what they're doing. Continue it.

So that's the most advanced form of forming life in other places. Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe just also it just could be that. I mean, this is getting so far out. We should probably end the interview right here. We went as far down the what-if ladder as you can get. Galactic overlords sending spaceships filled with mushrooms.

Yeah, that's like next stop crazy town. But, you know, you have to remember what, I mean, this is. Well, you have to remember that we exist. You have to remember that we're putting a rover on Mars and taking photographs and possibly contaminating Mars. And how unlikely this whole thing is that we should even be here. I mean, one of Terrence's favorite phrases, and I think it's true, we should always remember what J.B.S. Haldane said. The universe is not only stranger than you suppose, it's stranger than you can

suppose. I love that quote, and I love that he used to say queer, because that's what JBS Haldane said. I was going to say, actually he said queer, but we can't use that term. Isn't that funny? That they took queer. They took queer. But that's what he said. The universe is a queer thing. It doesn't, can it exist in that way as well?

Nope. Anything that attaches to homosexual men. Can't have a gay old time anymore. What do they replace it with? The universe is just a fad? Stranger. They say stranger. No.

Like, you can't say you have a gay old time. The Flintstones had gay old time in their fucking song. You can't have that anymore. You can't have that anymore. We are so sensitive. We're such little babies. Yeah. Yeah. In the middle of all this information information we're trying to chop words away we're trying to take them take them away so you know i think i think that uh yeah i i think that

ultimately you know people say well what can we conclude from all this and what have you learned from taking psychedelics you know for 40 years and all that and the answer is kind of disappointing it will be disappointing to some people which is that exactly this the world is a marvelous place much more marvelous than we can imagine you know and we don't know very much you know i. I mean, our knowledge is so restricted, you know. And I think that's what you learn after all this time. And this is what Ayahuasca, you know, my main plant teacher always insists. You know, remember, you don't know shit.

You know. Don't get arrogant because you don't know shit. Don't get arrogant because you don't know shit. You just don't know very much. And so it's like you could say, well, I don't know shit and I feel really stupid, but it also clears the decks to appreciate things and remind ourselves that we don't know very much. But it clears the decks for learning. It means there's so much left to be understood and marveled about and thought about. If you accept the position.

Yeah. Accept the position that you don't know shit. And then enjoy all the information there is to take in and all the fascination and the wonder. Too many people are trying to control the position and they're trying to control it and pretend that they do no shit. That's the big mistake. That's where the knee-jerk reaction to denying global climate change comes from.

It's just a desire of insecure people to try to rationalize and control things that can't be controlled. And institutions want to do religion, politics, corporations, the whole thing. Like we have a model. We have a corner on the truth.

The way we think about it is the way it is. And anybody who challenges that is a heretic. Now, how long did it take you after La Trera before you jumped back on the horse? It seems like if I got smeared across the entire cosmos for a couple weeks and I don't remember how I shit or smoke cigarettes, I might just fucking quit. Okay? But not you. So how much time did you take off before you jumped back on? Well, I don't know if some would say I never have jumped back on.

Some would say I never have jumped back on, but how much time did it take after that when I could open a can of tuna fish and do normal things to survive? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, how long before you had another psychedelic experience? Oh, another psychedelic, well, it was probably a couple of years. That makes sense. It wasn't that long. It wasn't really that long and then that's a long time yeah yeah did you like before you did it be like what the fuck am i doing am i really want to get spread across the universe well yeah i well yeah i mean i had i had

some some worries about it when i went back to it but But not really because there were so many other circumstances. The psychedelic was just a part of it. A lot of it, the reason it happened was because we set ourselves up into this conceptual or I don't know what you call it, cognitive box. you call it, cognitive box. We set ourselves, we painted ourselves into this corner in terms of our predictions about what was going to happen, you know, because it was all about time, right? A lot of it was about time. And so when we were leading up to doing the experiment, we thought that, well, the reason all this strange stuff is happening is because a few hours up ahead in the future, we've done the experiment and it has succeeded. And so what we're getting is the backwash from the future, like approaching a singularity.

We were getting the backwash from the future and that's why it's warping reality. It literally is warping reality as we approach this thing. So we went into it with the attitude that something had to happen, something physics shattering, and we were trying to overturn literally the laws of physics. We came into it with the idea that something had to happen. And guess what? Something happened. It just wasn't what we predicted would happen you just went cuckoo for a couple we went cuckoo for a couple of weeks yeah exactly and we but it

was more than just cuckoo it was this you know this this coordinated uh experience of Terrence and myself where we were linked and we understood that one person is we were becoming mirror images of each other almost like a photograph and it's negative and one one entity was going forward in time and another was going backward in time and you know a lot of I mean we had a whole framework where it made sense it might not make sense now yeah well it does and it doesn't i mean it does it does but i'm lying it does but i mean i i it does but not that i'm lying i mean i'm i do understand that you're trying to express something that i can't understand. Right. Did you have a lot of experiences or any experiences where you saw ancient motifs,

whether it's hieroglyphs or Egyptian, or I've heard people that say they've seen Aramaic or Arab type writing and what seems to be maybe perhaps the experiences of other people that have taken these same sort of psychedelic drugs and that it's a stored, collected experience. I know that was one of the things that Terrence believed, that when you are taking psilocybin, you're not just taking psilocybin, you're sort of conjoining the experiences of everybody who's ever taken that drug ever. Did you feel that?

You mean that La Charrera? At any point. Oh, yeah. Subsequently, I have had those kinds of impressions. I mean, I think it's interesting that one of the things that when we came back from La Charrera, one of the priorities in our life was to figure out how to grow those mushrooms, right, so that we could re-access. Right.

But, I mean, there was partly a mercenary motive, but there was also the real motive was we want other people to have these experiences to see if they confirm, you know, what we were experiencing. I mean, were we just nuts or do other people have this similar kind of experience? It turns out they do, you know. So that's evidence, again, for the objective reality of some of these dimensions or the reality. I don't know if it's objective, but you know what I'm saying? You don't have to be Terrence or Dennis. You don't have to know what we talk about or believe in what we talk about. You can take mushrooms under the right circumstances.

You know, in the dark, five grams, pay attention, and you will go to the same place. Many people go to the same place. Many people go to the same place. Do you think that that also explains why in the ayahuasca experience there's a lot of jaguars and a lot of snakes and a lot of that type of... Because to them, that's the dimension. That's the dimension that's real for those people. And it's just, you know, it, I mean, it is to us, it seems implausible and unlikely, but to them, it's like, it's a part of their

everyday reality. They just accept it. I mean, it's much more matter of fact. Yes, there are, are these realms, there are these entities. You can get there with ayahuasca. And, you know, if you look at the paintings of Pablo Amarillo, for example, or others, you know, I mean, he had this ability to paint that realm as best he recollected it. But that's a tremendous contribution because he provided a window into that cosmology. You could sort of look into that conceptual place without actually taking ayahuasca. As does Alex Gray. As does Alex Gray, a similar kind of thing, yeah.

All of – in Pablo's iconography, all of these spirits that you see and UFOsally, and plants and animals and all that. They all have names. These are not things that he dreamed up. These are part of that cosmos that he is able to depict. What is his name again? Pablo Amaringo. Pablo Amaringo. I've got to check him out.

I've never heard of this guy before. No? I believe I've seen his art, but I did not know his name. Amaringo. I believe I've seen his art, but I did not know his name. Amoringo. He has a book that he put together with Luis Eduardo Luna, a good friend of mine. Luis wrote the foreword to my book.

Oh, I absolutely have seen this guy before. Yeah, you've seen him. Wow, it's amazing stuff. Wow, so amazing. So he recollects his visions and was able to put them out onto canvas. Wow. Yeah, when a guy can do that, like Alex Gray especially, some of his images, they appear Egyptian. They appear DMT slash Egyptian. And I've always wondered like what is that that you're seeing when you're seeing this sort of ancient motif?

It seems – for whatever reason, it seems like a crazy assertion that you're accessing the experiences of all these people that have ever done this drug. But is it any weirder than cell phones? Is that any weirder than the ability to Google something? No, it's not. That seems pretty goddamn weird. It's inherently not. Is it any weirder than The Hobbit in 3D? I mean, you could say, yeah, you could say, you know,

well, it's a similar experience because these mushrooms activate the same receptors in everybody, and we all have a similar brain architecture and all that, and I think that to a certain extent that's part of it but that's not the that's not the whole story I mean again that comes back to whether you know the brain is generating this stuff or whether it's actually you know sort of just making the membrane thinner so that you can look at it did you have any experience with sensory deprivation tanks? I haven't had very much with that, no. Wow, that's so crazy. That seems like it'd be right up your alley. You'd

think so. Yeah, I haven't experimented with it. Have you been interested at all? Not really. No? I find that the substances seem to reliably do it. But yeah, I should look into it. I'm a big fan. Are you? Oh, yeah. Even just for relaxation, just for the body. You do it in conjunction with psychedelics? Yes.

Yeah. Okay. So in that sense. I like eating. Eating cannabis is my favorite one. Oh. Yeah. Okay. Eating cannabis and getting to the point where you're – like the way I describe it is when you're so high that you feel like the parallel dimension, the neighboring dimension is like a waterfall.

And you've got your nose touching the water and you're right about to push through the other side. That's when you get in the tank. the water and you're right about to push through the other side that's when you get in the tank so right when you just you know that there's a moment when you feel like you've eaten too much like you had a pop around and you're like this is not a comfortable feeling this is a terrible i definitely ate too much that's when you should get in the tank interesting and the complete lack of sensory input from the tank along with that just blows the whole experience out of the water i've had some of the wildest trips of my life um from from doing that the sensory deprivation tank on its own can get put you in some crazy places but but but on its own what it's really good for is relaxation it's amazing for like loosening you up and just you know soothing the body and it's an excellent

source of magnesium too because the salt in the water it's epsom salts oh yeah so it's an excellent source of magnesium, too, because the salt in the water, it's epsom salts. So it's one of the best ways for your body to absorb a good amount of magnesium. But it's one of the things that I've never understood why more people didn't get into it. I know John Lilly was the inventor of it, and he used one on a regular basis. I always wanted to know why that didn't catch on. I never heard Cairns talk about it either.

No, he didn't. He didn't use it as far as I know. I don't know. It's such an amazing resource because he was always in a silent darkness. Yeah, well, exactly.

Taking psilocybin in near total darkness is kind of a sensory deprivation kind of thing. That is true. You're still in your body i mean you still are not in this amniotic place you know have you ever tried mushrooms in an isolation tank no i have not well no i did i have done it once but i have not done a big dose

i haven't i haven't done a lot but but mostly seem to be yeah a good place for it yeah the problem is i have kids and i want to be blasted A good place for it. Yeah. The problem is I have kids. I don't want to be blasted out of my head in that thing and then have something go wrong. And you open the door and reality just hasn't tuned back in yet. Well, you know, you've got to plan your sessions. You need somebody to look after the kids. It's hard. You know, set and setting and all that stuff. One of the things about cannabis, though, is eating cannabis.

If I get too high, I can still deal with shit. Right. My adrenaline rises. I get a phone call. I can call. I I get too high, I can still deal with shit. Right. My adrenaline rises. I get a phone call. I can call. I can talk to people. I can come back out of reality. I can be okay.

Right. And that combined with the sensory depth tank is – it's a pretty profound experience. But I think probably if you were into silent dark – the thing about psilocybin though is it pulls you out so much. You almost don't even need a sensory depth tank. It's almost like unnecessary. That's unnecessary. Yeah. But by itself.

But it would be interesting. It would be interesting. If you're experienced with those things, you go first. I'll follow. Yeah. Well, I have one. I have one in my basement. So I like to use it.

I use it all the time. But even just, like I said, by itself, just for relaxation. But I just never understood why more people didn't want to have that just as a meditation tool, as a tool for completely getting alone with your thoughts and just separating yourself from any of the input of the body. It seems that it would be useful. But Terrence wasn't into that, but he was into pot on a serious, regular basis. Oh, God, yes.

A man had the capacity for cannabis that I've never seen in anyone else. Is that part of the reason why he went on these rambling lectures. He's incredible. I mean, he would wind him up. And some of the great MP3s that are available on the Psychedelic Salon. Are you familiar with the Psychedelic Salon? Oh, yeah. Great podcast. And Lorenzo, the guy who hosts it, has just hour upon hour of Terrence's lectures.

Amazing, amazing stuff but what was incredible is that you just he would just go up there and wind them up put them on the stage put them in front of the microphone and he would just go on for hours right he could just wrap it out and that and yeah it was i mean i'm sure he would high as fuck credit cannabis a lot of that you know his inspiration what he was doing was you know his inspiration what he was doing was essentially what you know what he used to do I mean back before you know anybody knew about him or us or whatever you know back in the Berkeley days in the 60s you know he loved nothing more to get a bunch of people in a room you know Pat pass around hash or some kind of really strong dope something that would render everybody else completely speechless they couldn't

say anything and then he would just regale them for hours you know and and he was and everybody was fascinated and he was totally coherent I mean everyone you know a lot of people they smoke a lot of cannabis, they get quiet, right? I'm one of those. I can't rap on cannabis very well. But he just, he could do it. And then he found not only, you know, if it works for a bedroom full of people on his, you know,

in his hippie crash pad on Telegraph Avenue, it'll work for audiences all over the world. So he turned it into a shtick and a living. And thank God he did, you know, because, you know, we have all that out there. Thank God he did as well, because those recordings and the books and the lectures, those experiences changed the entire direction of a lot of people's lives including mine absolutely mine yeah the first time i did dmt i literally heard him saying something in the dmt trip i heard his voice saying something right it was uh it was just it his impact i think is uh

And his impact, I think, is – it was unbelievably profound, that ability to relay those thoughts in this really compelling way. I mean I can't tell you how many gigs I've gone on where I had to travel or had to drive and I just listened to a psychedelic salon, listened to one of the lectures. It's just so compelling and fascinating and I think that opens up completely new lines of thinking for a lot of people it does and you know it's interesting the the the you know the currency that this has he's still out there he's achieved this weird kind of immortality on the net you know what he said when you think about most of this was early 90s stuff when he was talking about this, but you can put a tape on. And it's just as timely as though it were uttered yesterday. He has this real feeling for the future. And people come up to me, a lot of young people come up to me and said i everything i learned i learned from terrence mckenna you know and it was like before that my life was empty and now i understand and you look

at these people and you say they couldn't have been more than eight or seven or eight when he was at the height of his career you know these people some of them were in diapers when he was you know at the height of his career. So they discovered him later. Yes. Somehow. And he still had this impact. Well, it's because it's so compelling.

It's a completely viral thing. I mean, there's a lot of different people that have a lot of different ideas, but they just, whatever, for whatever reason, it wasn't compelling. I think it's a, one of the great things that you're doing in this book is you're not sugarcoating anything. And the way you describe your brother is obviously with great love and respect and admiration but also great honesty. And I think that's very important. I think it's really, really important for recognizing his true contributions and recognizing that like all of us,'s a human being who is you know experimenting with all these ideas and sometimes they didn't they weren't correct but that's the only way you get to those ideas they have to sort of evolve and form and you have to keep playing with them and in the nature of that in the nature of like full disclosure like what

were the like if there's any glaring errors that he had made that people have either repeated or that they have misinformation because of these glaring errors? Like, what would it be? What glaring errors did he make? Or any errors that, like, deserve mention. Well, I don't know. I'd have to think about it. You know, I mean, it is an effort to depict him honestly.

I hope that people don't, you know, I hope that people see that. You obviously do. You know, I loved him a great deal. I respected him a great deal. And, you know, but we had our rivalries. And like all brothers, you know, we had our sibling rivalries. So I mean I loved him deeply. I hated him deeply.

It was – that kind of dynamic goes on. Well, when you said earlier that he would say something and you said, well, that didn't make any sense and you contradicted what you said earlier, do you have anything specific? Well, he would always respond to that. He didn't like me to go to his seminars so much because I was the only one that would ever challenge him. Everyone else is listening in sort of slack-jawed fascination of his uttering these completely wild ideas. And I was the only one who would really ever get up and say, well, what you said 20 minutes ago doesn't make any sense and it contradicts what you say now. And he would respond with, well,

consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, right? Just totally dismiss, you know. What a great quote. Right. Oh, that's my new message board quote. Right. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. I think he was quoting Walt Whitman when he said that. That's a great quote. But. Consistency is a hobgoblin of small minds. I think he was quoting Walt when he said that.

That's a great quote. But that was the thing. So the thing is, Terrence, he liked to have fun with ideas. Yes. And in some ways, people took him too seriously. I mean, there was a tendency on the part of some of his constituents to view him as a guru or even a cult figure to a certain extent. I think he rejected all that. He didn't want to be a guru.

He didn't see himself as a guru. He wanted to stimulate people to think for themselves. That was the thing. Don't believe me, but okay, here's a whole bunch of really crazy ideas. There's a great video out with a bunch of images and Terrence's words, culture is your enemy. Culture is not your friend. Yes, culture is not your friend. Culture is not your friend.

It's very quick, but it's so powerful even to this day. It's so powerful that you can listen to it and then watch CNN and not be affected. You can reassess, reassess the impact of modern media. Yeah, exactly. And that's a very valuable one because, in fact, culture isn't your friend. And a lot of what Terrence terence's point again think for yourself don't believe what anybody tells you you know and psychedelics are a challenge to that all these people that dismiss the psychedelic experience as you rightly point out they haven't had it you know or if they have they didn't pay attention you know so

so their opinions count for nothing i mean they're like the people you know they're like the dutch lens makers who built telescopes but you know refused to look through the telescopes because that was a blasphemous act right it's the same thing the brotherhood of the screaming abyss it is available right now i have it in my hand it was all funded through kickstarter because people wanted to get this information you you spent a year about we discussed we talked about this about december in 2011 right? This is when we first were in contact through email. Yeah, but I actually – Have you already started?

Well, it took about 18 months to write the book. I started raising Kickstarter money in April of 2011, and it's taken a year and six months to write the book. Please, ladies and gentlemen, go out and buy this book. It's fantastic. It's the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. If you have not subscribed to the Psychedelic Salon on iTunes, go subscribe to that shit and go and get online. And there's millions of Terrence's lectures and I don't say millions,

but at least a hundred. There are a lot available. Yeah. And they're fantastic and they're fascinating as is your book. Thank you very much for coming on here. It's been a real treat and an honor

and a pleasure and I enjoyed every second of our conversation and if you ever want to do it again and we'll push this fucking thing

until they run out of paper. I should mention where it is. The easiest way to get it is Amazon. There's e-books and the soft cover books are on Amazon. You can order them.

Yes. I got one of those Kindles. It's awesome. Just download it. Bang. Well, thank you so much. Please. It's been a pleasure.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. I did too. It's been great fun. Yeah, it really has. I think you blew a lot of people's minds too. I've got to go back and re-listen and Google some shit and think about some things because it was awesome. It was really a lot of fun. Thank you very, very much. Is there any way people can... Do you have a

website? Yes, we have a website, brotherhoodofthescreamingabyss.com without the the and actually we're opening up a new website. It exists but we're completely revamping it so that's

already online. And just the other day, I launched DennisJMcKenna.com. Ah, there we go. You're on Twitter? Are you on Twitter? Resisting. I am, according to my daughter. I can't access it. Oh, you're one of those guys.

One of those guys, ladies and gentlemen. Resisting change. That's right. Resisting change. That change. She'll get me onto it. There's something wrong with the password. I don't know.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Of course, we will be back this week. We'll be back tomorrow with the great Honey Honey Band, who will be appearing at the End of the World show with Doug Stanhope, Joey Diaz, and myself. That's December 21, 2012 at the Wiltron Theater. Like I said, I think as of the start of this podcast, there was about 100 tickets left for that. This Thursday night, the Improv in Hollywood.

They can watch it live on Ustream at ustream.tv. We'll try to do it live. If not, it will be recorded to Vimeo. But we're going to try to do a podcast upstairs and do a comedy show downstairs just like Joey's house. Joey Diaz would be there. Joey Diaz. Most likely me.

Most likely you. I think I'm going to try to get Ari or Duncan. I don't know if Duncan can do it. We'll try to get Doug Stanhope if he's in town. Duncan can do it right now. Duncan can do it. But yeah, I'll get some people together, some quality Death Squatters.

If you want to buy the t-shirts, deathsquad.tv. If you want to... Oh, this is actually a higher primary show that's actually based on the... Based on the... On Terrence's

stoned ape theory. It's a chimp with a mushroom in his mouth and on his left hand is a floating ohm and the right hand is the symbol

for nuclear energy. Oh, that's just lovely. Isn't that dope? Come on, son. With a... And he's also got a third eye with some geometric shit coming out of it. I'll get you one of these. Would you rock it?

Oh, you bet. If we take a picture of you wearing this, we'll sell a fucking thousand of these bitches. Okay. All right, listen, thank you very much. If you ever need anything promoted, please let us know. And again, one more time, folks,

the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. We will be back tomorrow with Honey Honey. We'll be back Tuesday with Joey Coco Diaz. And that's our 300th episode. That's our 300th episode. Oh, shit, bitches. So that's a great way to do it. All right, we love the shit out of you guys. And we'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye. Thank you.