EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,043 words- 0:02 – 1:42
The RV Heraclitus: a roaming ecology ship built by “theater people”
- JRJoe Rogan
Four, three, two, one. (claps) And we're live. Hello, Dennis.
- DMDennis McKenna
Hi, Joe.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Great to see you, as always.
- DMDennis McKenna
It's great to be here, as always. It's great to be here.
- JRJoe Rogan
So tell me about this, these, these cards that you gave me and what, what this is all about.
- DMDennis McKenna
Okay. Well, this is an interesting project. This is about the RV Heraclitus, which is a, which was associated with the Institute for Ecotechnics, which is ... Try to keep this, like, close to your face.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Okay. There you go.
- DMDennis McKenna
Further, uh, associated with, uh ... (sighs) You know, how do I explain it? It was actually a theater company called The Theater of All Possibilities. But the Institute for Ecotechnics was started in the early '70s, and they built a ship, this, this, uh, Chinese junk, essentially, with a ferro-concrete hull. And my connection was they have cruised, cruised the world, essentially, since 1973, looking into different things relevant to global ecology. They've done sampling in the Antarctic. And in 1981, they decided to go to the Amazon, and I was doing my graduate work in, in Iquitos at that time. So, that was my connection with the Institute of Ecotechnics. And, uh, you know, (laughs) a- at the time, uh, I thought, "These people are nuts." I mean, they were kind of nuts, and they were very, um, naive about what they were doing, as far as doing ethnobotanical work. Not that I wasn't naive about it at the time, but I had a better handle on it than they did.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- 1:42 – 7:25
Biosphere 2: ambitious closed-ecosystem science and the backlash it drew
- DMDennis McKenna
Anyway, that was the original connection. And the same group, years after I had more or less, uh, you know, kind of severed ... I didn't really sever my relationship, but I kind of distanced myself from them. But then that same group went on in the '80s to build Biosphere 2-
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- DMDennis McKenna
... which you probably heard of.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DMDennis McKenna
And they had financing f- for Biosphere 2, so they'd gone to a whole other level of ambition and, and, you know, madness. But, um ... And Biosphere 2 went off track.
- JRJoe Rogan
Explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.
- DMDennis McKenna
Well, Biosphere 2 was the idea of building a, a terrestrial environment that was completely shut off from everything and that was self-sustaining. And it was a huge complex. It was a big, a series of domes, really. Each dome replicated some earthly biome, like the desert, the rainforest, the ocean, and so on. And the idea was that, uh, it was a, uh, it was a dry run for building a Mars colony, you know, a- or some planetary colony. And the idea was Mars. And they put, uh, people into this environment for, like, two years at a time to see if they could make it work, if they could really have a, a balanced ecosystem. Well, as it turned out, it didn't work so well. (laughs) But they learned a great deal from this, and they also got a lot of adverse publicity because I think the, uh, I think the science establishment, in a way, became kind of jealous. And, you know, like, "These people, they don't know anything about what they're doing. They got $600 million to build this. What the hell?" (laughs) You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- DMDennis McKenna
So they, uh, got a lot of criticism. But the fact is, a lot of good science came out of this, and they're still going. And the interesting thing is they've had their fingers in many pies. You know, they have a gallery and a hotel in London called The Octo- October Gallery. I always stay there if I'm in London. They have a publishing company, The Synergetic Press, based in Santa Fe. That's who published this book-
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- DMDennis McKenna
... ultimately. So it's kind of like 30 years later, what goes around (laughs) comes around.
- JRJoe Rogan
And the book is Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, and it's from, it's labeled from 1967 to 2017.
- DMDennis McKenna
Right. And the, and the story behind this is, um ... Just two. But just to complete the Heraclitus story-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- DMDennis McKenna
... for a minute. So, the Heraclitus has been plying the ocean more or less continuously since 1973. And they are now renovating the ship because, you know, it needs it. It needs a new hull and all that. So they're trying to raise funds, obviously, for that. But it's just a very interesting story about people that are passionate about the ecology, about the Earth, and about science. Don't know a whole lot about any of it, but their passion drove them forward. And, and their passion, particularly the founder, a guy named John Allen, who's now ... I think he's in his 80s. He is in his 80s. But he was the visionary behind it. And without knowing a whole lot, they just went ahead and did it, you know? (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
So in that spirit, you have to hand it to them. And they have, they've done incredible things over that period of time. And so, it's a, it's a great story, and it's worth attention. And, uh, you know, it's up to you. I mean, it's ki- it's up to you if you wanna bring her on or somebody, but it's, it's, it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
It sounds fascinating.
- DMDennis McKenna
... really romantic, you know, this is science in, in the true spirit of discovery, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm. And what are they trying to do?
- DMDennis McKenna
And it's done by amateurs.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. That is cre- fascinating.
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
What are they, what are they trying to do? What kind of research are they tr- are they trying to do in the ocean?
- DMDennis McKenna
All kinds of things. They've been sampling coral reefs. They've been sampling, uh, looking at, uh, you know, uh, global warming in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Uh, they, of course, in '81, they wanted to do ethnobotany in the Amazon. And, and they had Schultes on their board of directors.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
And the director of the expedition was Wade Davis. And th- and I was doing my graduate work at that time. And, uh, we knew they were coming, so as a result of that, I was able to join the expedition. And Wade and I, at the time, he was selected by them as the chief science officer. And when h- uh, by the time I got there, he was getting a little disillusioned with them.... you know, and the, the, the... I guess you could say the personal dynamic was kind of strange. And, like, if you read my book, The Brotherhood of the (laughs) Screaming Abyss, there's a couple of chapter, there's a chapter on this. But over time, even Wade changed his mind and, and I, I now get the larger picture of what they were trying to do. And, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's a real story. I mean, these people didn't recognize boundaries. That's the thing. And they... because they were theater people, they actually understood, which I didn't at the time, that what they were doing and their whole effort was really a performance, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
On a global level, they did all these things kind of realizing that this was the theater of all possibilities, and they had a theater in, uh, Austin, Texas by that name. So I could... It's a wild story.
- JRJoe Rogan
It sounds like a freaky crew. (laughs)
- 7:25 – 10:00
Publishing and the long arc back: Synergetic Press and psychedelic literature
- DMDennis McKenna
It's a freaky crew and that was the point. Well, some of the people that were on that 1981 expedition are now... um, they're still associated with it, so it has some longevity. Others have passed on, others have left in, you know, disgust or, or they, you know, they had enough. But I was able to reconnect with the people that run, you know, they have this ranch in Santa Fe called the Synergia Ranch, and one of the things that's based there is this press, the Synergetic Press. So when I was doing this project with the book, I was casting around for who's gonna publish this after we do it, and they stepped up and... They publish a lot of psychedelic stuff. They have a book called, uh, The Mystic Chemist, about Albert Hoffman. Uh, they republished, uh, The Ayahuasca Reader, which, uh, originally Eduardo Luna and Stephen White had published. Well, they expanded that and they published that as a very beautiful, you know, uh, r- redo, essentially a second edition. Very nice work. Then, uh, Don Latin, uh, who's not that well-known, but he's written several books about the history of psychedelics and the people involved, and he wrote a book that they published called Changing Our Minds, ironically (laughs) about the same time Michael Pollan brought his book out, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- DMDennis McKenna
... Michael Pollan, being who he is, got all the attention. Don's got very little. Still a good book, you know? So they're good people. I've decided that some of my initial judgments not knowing the people and when I just sort of walked into their reality in Iquitos when I got there, uh, w- you know, which they never bothered to, to explain. It's, it's like, you know, they never said, "Oh, well, you know, we're acting funny 'cause we do things differently than you do."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
You know? And I was like, "What?" (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I'm sure they evolved too. I mean, we're talking about 1981, right?
- DMDennis McKenna
They, they have evolved.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DMDennis McKenna
They have evolved and they learned a lot through this Biosphere 2, uh, you know, project, which was a real lesson to everybody. Um, but anyways, so because they still existed and, and really because of the, of the resurrection of The Ayahuasca Reader, that had been my recent contact with them. So when I decided to do this book, I thought they're a good candidate to publish this book, and they, they totally got it. They took
- 10:00 – 13:43
The 1967 NIMH conference: “Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs”
- DMDennis McKenna
it on. They've done an amazing job. And this book, or these, this set as you know, y- you know the genesis of it because you had a lot (laughs) to do with it. When we were... when I was here last year, you know, uh, in... um, the backstory is in 1967, the US government, the National Institute of Mental Health, of all people, put together a conference in San Francisco in '67 called the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. And nobody noticed. It was a private conference. It, it was not open to the public. The only thing the public ever got out of it was the symposium proceedings, which is the first book there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
And, uh, I was very heavily influenced by that book because somehow or other, it came into my hands at age 17. You know, bored teenager living in Paonia, Colorado, wishing that I was with my brother in Berkeley where all the action was at the time.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
And I'm like, "What is this book?" You know? So, uh, I totally... I devoured it. And about the same time, I discovered The Teachings of Don Juan, which my, my brother gave to me for my 18th birthday. And although much in there is probably fiction, those two books gave me a complementary perspective. The Teachings of Don Juan was the ethnographic lens through which you could use... look at the use of psychedelics and, and which I... you know, it kind of filled in those spaces. Then this book came out and it was like... and I knew who Šoltés was. I knew who a few of these people were at the time. Šoltés and Šulgin and Andrew Weil were actually on the original faculty. And, uh, so when the book fell into my hands at age 17, I was very excited and I read the whole thing. And, and this is what really helped me focus my career. It made me aware that maybe I could make a career out of ethnophrarmacology, you know? And, and in my very naive 17-year-old teenage brain, I thought, "Wow, man, I can get paid to get stoned." (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
It was in part that, but, uh, you know, there was more to it, but that's what led me to, to pursue that career. And so this book-... has always loomed large at my sort of pantheon. Originally, there were supposed to be follow-up conferences for this, for the government to have every 10 years. Well, the war on drugs scotched all that. They became embarrassed that they had anything to do with a conference like this.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was the goal of the conference? Is that clear?
- DMDennis McKenna
Of the, of this original conference?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- DMDennis McKenna
Oh, for people to kind of report on their work and, and sort of mark the state of the art in e- in psychoethnopharmacology at the time. So, the first book was really where, uh, things like the snuffs and ayahuasca and, uh, uh, you know, and other things that we don't think of really as psychedelics, like kava and Amanita muscaria, all of those things were important.
- JRJoe Rogan
When you're saying the snuffs, do you mean like some of the more psychedelic snuffs?
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah, the psychedelic snuffs.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, what is it called? The Ecuge? Is that one?
- DMDennis McKenna
Uh, that- that's an orally active form. That- but yeah, virola and then Anandamathera, which is, uh, uh, the, uh, what are they called? Yopo, I think. There were reports-
- JRJoe Rogan
And these are-
- DMDennis McKenna
... on all of these things.
- JRJoe Rogan
... nasally ... th- they, they stuffed them up their nose? Is that the deal? Or there-
- DMDennis McKenna
That's the deal.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 13:43 – 16:23
Pioneers and stories: Stephen Szara, DMT self-experiments, and suppressed papers
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah. And this is the first book, the '67 book was the first one where, you know, there was a collection of the leading experts at the time, most of whom you've never heard of. But there were, there were iconic people like Schultes and Andrew Weil, Shulgin. Another interesting fellow, uh, m- many interesting people, one of the most interesting in the first conference was, uh, a gentleman named Stephen Szara, a Hungarian, uh, chemist and psychiatrist and pharmacologist. And, uh, he or- originally worked in Budapest. And, uh, and eventually he moved to the States and became pretty high up in the National Institutes of Health. He was the director of the, uh, National Institute on Drug Abuse in the late '50s. But the interesting thing is, before that, um, he was just a researcher in- at a hospital in, in Budapest. He applied to Sandoz to get LSD. He wanted to do research with LSD. They refused to give it to him because he was behind the Iron Curtain. So, he, so he synthesized DMT, being a chemist, and he had to determine if it was actually a psychedelic. So, in the grand tradition, he did that by self-injecting himself, you know? Uh, so he's a true pioneer, a- and I invited him to the conference. So, he's the first person to definitively show that DMT was a psychedelic. He's now 95. He's in great shape. I invited him to the conference, but he said, "Well, I'm 95. I don't go anywhere anymore."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
But he submitted a very nice, uh, video introduction to it. And the other interesting thing that he did, after the '67 conference, he, he s- he was thinking, "Well, what's going on?" And, "What, what is it with the hippies and all the psychedelics?" And, and, uh, so his supervisor said, "Well, Steve, why don't you go over to Haight-Ashbury and hang out for a while?" So, he did, and he submitted a paper called The Scientist Among the Hippies.
- JRJoe Rogan
Aha.
- DMDennis McKenna
And they wouldn't let him publish. They said, "You, you can't publish this." So, it sat in his drawer for 50 years. When this book came along, he said, "I have something I'll submit here. I don't care if they, you know, it's- it doesn't matter anymore." So, one of the papers in this second volume is his original '67 paper.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, wow.
- 16:23 – 21:02
The 2017 revival: a 50th-anniversary conference, livestream reach, and the new book set
- DMDennis McKenna
And then, so the second volume is kind of, you know, because the government didn't step up to the plate like they said they would, um, there was no follow-up conferences. And, and I've, for a long time, I wanted to do a follow-up conference. I wanted to do it on the 30th anniversary in '97. It never happened. Time passes. So, 2017 was the 50th anniversary. It all fell together all of a sudden.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DMDennis McKenna
You know, I found a venue in the UK, a beautiful country house that was, uh, called Tyringham Hall that was run by one of our friends who shares, you know, our perspective. He made that available. We put the word out. We got support to produce the conference. So, we brought about 16 people, um, you know, to Tyringham in England, spent three days presenting. And those videos are all up on the web. I'll send you the link. That's open access. And the other thing that we couldn't do in '67 that we did in, you know, 2017, there was no Facebook live streaming. Well, all our videos were Facebook live streamed.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- DMDennis McKenna
We had 60,000 people watching these lectures at some points, you know? I mean, so that's amazing.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's incredible.
- DMDennis McKenna
And that created excitement. And then we basically paid for the book by pre-selling, pre-selling it. And a lot of people stepped up and ordered. A lot of people were very patient because I was, you know, I was ... I thought, "Oh, this will be out by Christmas," right? Well, no, it's a big project, uh, so it took six months longer than I thought. Um, but now it's out there. And, uh, hopefully it'll be a, a landmark in the field like the first one was. And, and what we wanted to do to honor the first one was reprint the first one along with the second one.
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- DMDennis McKenna
So, that's why it's two books. We did a high-resolution, uh, scan of the original book and reprinted that one, uh-... yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Doesn't it make you think, like imagine if Nixon wasn't president back then, what could have been done? Like what if they didn't have that sweeping 1970s psychedelic act where they made everything illegal? Like what if they continued with this stuff? Like who knows-
- DMDennis McKenna
Well-
- JRJoe Rogan
... where we would be today?
- DMDennis McKenna
We, yeah, we could ask that question about a lot of things.
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- DMDennis McKenna
What if that didn't happen? Like the, the psychedelic research that's happening now that's, uh, it's taken 40 years to get-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DMDennis McKenna
... back to it. And basically, the psychedelic research is, is a lot of the same thing was going back, going on back in the even late '50s and '60s. What's going on now is they're repeating a lot of that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DMDennis McKenna
But with more rigorous experimental design, with, with better controls and all that. But it's the same stuff, you know, which is wonderful. I mean, I'm, I'm all for it, um, to see this work done. I, oh, I also have, you know, plenty to say about the limitations of that strictly clinical, uh, you know, um, sort of medical approach. I mean, I think, you know, organizations like MAPS and Heffter have to work within the constraints of what's possible. But I think in some ways, uh, they, uh, you know, they force themselves to, they're forced to put on blinders in a certain way to what else is possible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DMDennis McKenna
You know, for example, the way that, uh, ayahuasca has been sort of marginalized. And there is research going on about it, but there's nothing approved in the States. Uh, and I think it's important to pursue that work, but because you can't synthesize ayahuasca like you can psilocybin or MDMA or these things that are under clinical trials, it's much more difficult to study within the constraints of a phase one-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DMDennis McKenna
... you know, clinical trial. But in fact, ayahuasca is touching, I think, far more lives than say, well, I can't say about mushrooms because mushrooms are a lot out there. But, you know, the potential, the impact that it's having on society is much greater 'cause people are rediscovering this. And people are, I think, reaching out for... They're reaching out for anything that, that will work, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- 21:02 – 31:53
Why psychedelics ‘deliver’: spirituality, faith, nature, and cultural crisis
- DMDennis McKenna
As a society, we are spiritually bereft, and I think there's a pervasive sense of despair and a feeling of, what would you call it? Spiritual impoverishment or something-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DMDennis McKenna
... as we see that all of our institutions are becoming, uh, you know, we're, we're seeing behind the curtain and realizing that they're, they're empty, you know? They don't really have anything to offer on the spiritual level, especially religions. People are rejecting religions as the sort of, you know, shell game that it is, empty promises that don't deliver, and I think that's a lot of why people are reaching out for these plant medicines, you know? And, uh, going to South America or to have ayahuasca or, or finding them in their own community because people crave spiritually meaningful experiences, and, and our culture needs it more than ever.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, the thing about psychedelics, d- that, what you just said is so important, that they deliver. If you-
- DMDennis McKenna
They deliver.
- JRJoe Rogan
If you're skeptical about religion, and you know, there's some people that get a lot out of religion, that's fine. But if you're, you're skeptical about it, it's not going to fulfill your promises. It's not, it's not going to d- it's not gonna give you anything that you can say, "Oh my God, this is irrefutable." Psychedelic experiences are pretty irrefutable that-
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... something's happening that's titanic. It's just-
- DMDennis McKenna
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so immense and bizarre and beyond the normal that it's hard to just dismiss it. And the only people that really do dismiss it are the people that haven't experienced it.
- DMDennis McKenna
Exactly. Exactly. Uh, you know, uh, I mean, I, I sometimes say psychedelics are the antidote to faith. You know, you don't need faith-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DMDennis McKenna
... to take a psychedelic. What you need is courage, you know? Religions offer faith, which is basically saying, "Here's a list of things that you need to believe without question." And if that's your inclination, fine, but most of us are more skeptical. We need something, you know, tangible, something more tangible. So you know, I think faith is, uh, uh, you know, I mean, that's how religions entice you to believe. But uh, I, I think that, uh, in a way, it's deceptive.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DMDennis McKenna
Why do you have to believe when you can, in that intensely personal encounter between you and a plant teacher or you and a plant mole- and a, and a molecule, you can experience for yourself? You don't need faith. You could say, "I know that this-"
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DMDennis McKenna
"... exists and the, the realms that it opens up for you are real because I've experienced it." Um, and you know, I think faith, I think that, uh, we, in a way, you know, at least Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism and, and Islam to a certain extent, have poisoned the Western mind, you know? And, and encouraged our separation from nature, and basically propagated this idea that we're separated from nature and we own it and we, we have every right to dominate it. And we're seeing the consequences of that, you know? We have to rediscover this indigenous perspective that we are part of nature. We're, uh, properly, and properly framed, we should be symbiotic with nature. It's all about symbiosis.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- DMDennis McKenna
It's all about collaborating, uh-... with the global community of species to advance consciousness, not just of our species, but of the whole community of sentient species. This is what the psychedelics can do, and I think this is what the psychedelics are desperately reaching out to our species. And anybody who watches my podcast or listens to me is, this is my rap, "Wake up, you monkeys."
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
You know, you're wrecking this place.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DMDennis McKenna
It's that simple. You're wrecking this place, and that's because you have to re-understand your relationship to nature. Realize that, number one, you monkeys aren't running things. The, the, the plants are running things, basically, 'cause they're sustaining life on Earth. Other things are, you know... That's part of it. And then once you wake up to the fact that, you know, we're, we're in a participatory, collaborative role with the community of species, then we have to change a whole lot of things that we're, that we're (laughs) not doing right now, because we're certainly not, you know, developing sustainable ways to live on a global scale. And, and we're seeing the consequences of this now. What's dismaying, besides the fact that it's happening, is that there is so much denial, so much refusal to recognize this, on the part of the people that supposedly are, are running the show, you know? And they're, they're willfully ignorant, and, and this is a problem. So, you know, um, I think a lot of people will agree with me, a lot of people who listen to this show will agree with me when I, I say I, I've pretty much given up on politics. Politics seems, to me, irrevocably broken. Many other institutions are dysfunctional, if not broken. I mean, science is corrupt and government is corrupt. It's corporate, and corporatism is... You know, these are all flawed systems, because they're not... They don't have a, a, a base of compassion and recognition of the interrelatedness of all things. And, and psychedelics are a catalyst for waking up, and so once people have that experience, then their perspective is changed. And if they're influential, they can go out and make change on a global scale.
- JRJoe Rogan
I think it's so important that Michael Pollan put out that book-
- DMDennis McKenna
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... because a guy who's a mainstream, straight-laced guy, who's written about architecture and agriculture and all these different things where people, like, really respect his opinions and his work.
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That this guy has not just written this book, but has also gone out on a limb and had, uh, a bunch of different psychedelic experiences in controlled settings-
- DMDennis McKenna
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and talks about them, and the profound impact that it had on his, at one point, skeptical mind.
- 31:53 – 52:20
Limits of the clinical model: psychedelics as learning tools, creativity drivers, and ‘natural philosophy’
- DMDennis McKenna
You know, I think we've talked before about, um, uh, Simon Powell's work. He wrote about... He writes about psilocybin, wrote, um, The Psilocybin Solution, and that was-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
... his first book, and I think his latest is The Magic Mushroom Explorer. But something in his work really struck me, which is, he pointed out that you have to look... That psychedelics, in some sense, are... They're scientific instruments. They give you an opportunity to look at phenomena in a way that you've never looked at them before, because they have this... Uh, because they take you out of your reference frame.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
You know, or they bring the background forward, or there's different ways to describe it. And Pollan actually describes it well when he talks about this disruption of the default mode network. It enables you to see patterns in nature that you're programmed not to see, you know. A lot of what our brain does, this whole reducing valve idea, is it filters many things out. It lets in just enough of the external world that you can relate it to prior experiences, what you think you know, and you construct this artificial model of reality, and that's the... That's what you inhabit. And I- I've said this many times, maybe worse than Pollan, maybe better, but I talk about how, you know, we're living in a hallucination, essentially, that's constructed by our brains, and in order to just deal with all the information that is available, i- it has to really restrict it. It has to put a choke on it so that what does get in can make sense. That's fine for ordinary consciousness, but you are prone to overlook things about reality that are important. And psychedelics temporarily give you an opportunity to lower those, lower those mechanisms, that default network, or sometimes called neural gating. If you're in a safe place where you don't have to worry about your, your safety, you know, there is no saber-toothed tiger gonna come get you, you know, and, and so you don't have to worry about your safety, then you can just relax into it and you can appreciate things that are always there. It's not that they're not there. These are not things you imagine. They're just things that you never notice because you're programmed not to. So, tremendous learning tools, and many, many scientists have, have said, you know, their insights have come from their psychedelic experience, from Steve Jobs to Crick to, uh, Kary Mullis. Uh, some of these folks admit it and others deny it, but it's true. You know? So, there are many, many things we can learn from psychedelics. That's only one of them, but from a scientist's perspective, that's an important one. You know, one of the things I want to do is create a system, a situation where you can bring specialists together in different disci- or in, in a discipline, say, mathematics or quantum physics or astronomy or, you know, even whatever art, and have these collective, uh, sessions together and then let people share their insight. Essentially creative solvent, problem-solving or creative sessions. And, uh, you know, uh, a- and that's, that's, that's the other thing I think we're looking for. You know, we need to develop a context in which these things is, can happen. Um, and that's one of the, you know, that's one of the restrictions of, of the strictly clinical approach that I chafe against. You know, uh, because they have to be, you know... You have to have a problem. It has to be to treat something, depression or PTSD or whatever. But we really need to use... You know, that's not the only thing psychedelics are good for. Sure, they can help people with mental problems. And in our society, who doesn't have mental problems?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. (laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
You know, as a society, we're wounded. But it goes beyond that. They are learning tools and teaching tools. And, uh, you know, you, you, you begin to see some of this in the, uh, in the work that Roland Griffiths is doing. You know, he's been able to get approval for people to take psilocybin for spiritual development, which is not exactly an illness for actual spiritual insight, so that's a start.
- JRJoe Rogan
And he's approved to do this?
- DMDennis McKenna
He's approved to do it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DMDennis McKenna
And who, who approved this and how does it? The FDA approved it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- DMDennis McKenna
He's, he's got a, a clinical study going on right now where he's recruiting, uh, religious professionals, people who are pastors, priests, rabbis, imams, other types of religious professionals, and putting them through his protocol.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- DMDennis McKenna
And it's having a tremendous impact on the way they view their profession and the way they view religion, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
That's fantastic.
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's, it really is a shame that we, we need an illness to treat-
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... before you allow someone to have this potentially mind-expanding experience. But it's, it's almost like not allowing people to take vitamins unless they're really sick.
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah, exactly. And like Bob Jesse says very eloquently, we need to find contexts in which we can use psychedelics for the betterment of the well, you know, for the improvement of the well.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. Yeah.
- DMDennis McKenna
And you can't do it right now under the current regulatory restrictions. Now, I think it's improved. I think it gradually will improve. Um, but this sort of ties into, uh, you know, what I'm trying to do now, now that I've got this book off my plate. I mean, this is kind of a, kind of a, you know, bucket list item, something I've wanted to do for a long time, and now it's done. Now, I have to help, help sell it, but that won't be too much of a problem, I think.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's a beautiful book, the, the both of them together.
- DMDennis McKenna
Especially after your talk, after our show, it'll probably ... We only published 1,000 copies of this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, it's gone. It'll be sold out. (laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
It's a, it's a, uh, collector's edition, and that was on purpose. We can always print more, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
It really is beautifully done.
- DMDennis McKenna
You know, it is, it is a beautiful book on every level. And, and the people that contributed to this, to the second volume, I didn't want all the same people that come to, al- always come to these conferences and always say the same things.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- 52:20 – 1:02:10
La Chorrera and Timewave Zero: alien-encounter patterns, novelty, and mushroom spores as the real ‘gift’
- JRJoe Rogan
When you were talking about La Chorera, uh, your experiences, didn't you guys have some sort of a UFO experience when you were there?
- DMDennis McKenna
Yes, we did, or he did.
- JRJoe Rogan
He did.
- DMDennis McKenna
Anyway.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DMDennis McKenna
Yeah, interestingly, um, um, I recently... You know, I've talked about La Chorera probably far too much, and I don't really like to talk about it too much because it's so hard to explain, and with, you know, and to, to discuss it, you get off into these-
- JRJoe Rogan
For, for the uninitiated-
- DMDennis McKenna
For the uninitiated-
- JRJoe Rogan
... let's, let's explain what we're talking about in particular.
- DMDennis McKenna
... you got into these rabbit holes of, of explaining, but I gave a, um, a, um, lecture at, uh, Breaking Convention last year in the UK. In, in, at the end of June, they have Breaking Convention, another big psychedelic conference, and I, my... The title of my talk was, uh, The Experiment at La Chorera: Psychotic Break, Shamanic Initiation, or Alien Encounter?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
Question mark. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Or all the above.
- DMDennis McKenna
Or all of the above. Well, that's the thing. But my, m- sort of the, the theme of this talk was if you look at the, um, what you might call it, the, the, the, the, the topology, the typology of alien encounters, there are certain patterns that come up again and again. And if you tick those off, if you say, you know, for the experiment at La Chorera, they're all present in a certain way. Uh, there has to be, you know, the, the typical a- alien encounter, it's kind of an oxymoron. What's typical about an alien encounter?
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
But there are certain characteristics, and one of the characteristics is there has to be a calling. There has to be a siren call, right? Something compels you. Like in, uh, in, uh, Spielberg's movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it was, you know, the, the Table Mountain, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
And somehow, this guy was compelled to go there. Well, there was a siren call in, in our experience. It was DMT, you know? And we were just students. You know, Terence was at Berkeley. I was in University of Colorado, but we were both fascinated by DMT, and we were compelled to go look for this orally active form of DMT, ucu-hai, which when we finally got it, turned out to be not very exciting, but we, it took us to La Chorera. That's why we went to La Chorera, was in quest of this thing which we called the secret.... when we got to La Chorra, what was really there were mushrooms everywhere in the pasture. That quickly reorganized our priorities, right? And, and it was though we were in the presence of this intelligence, and it presented itself very much. We called it the teacher, and it was downloading all of this information to us. And that was another characteristic of, of alien encounters. Generic alien encounters usually involve the transfer of special information. People are shown a book or they're shown, you know, uh, something that is transmitted from the teacher to the recipient. And we, we got that in spades. We got this encounter. And it had those characteristics. And then another characteristic is there, there is ... So information is given and gifts are given, you know? And the information that was transmitted resulted in a couple of things. Well, the primary thing that, that came out of that was Terrence's idea about the time, about timewave and the I Ching. The genesis of that idea came out of the experiment at La Chorra and then over decades became refined and developed. Now, whether there's any validity to it, I'm not sure, and I've always been very skeptical about it, and you know, it, it failed its major test, which is, yeah, the spacetime collap- uh, uh, continuum did not collapse on December 21st, 2012 as was predicted. But there are interesting things about the, about the timewave. It's just an interesting thing considered, um, you know, in its own context as a strange mathematical construction that, in many ways, is a reflection of Terrence's psyche. He was the only one that could really understand it and interpret it.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a bunch of people listening probably don't know what we're talking about. We're talking about timewave zero.
- DMDennis McKenna
Oh, timewave zero, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- DMDennis McKenna
And we wrote The Invisible Landscape in ... our first book in '75.
- JRJoe Rogan
But for people who have no idea what we're talking about, explain what timewave zero was.
- DMDennis McKenna
Okay, well, it-
- JRJoe Rogan
This algorithm, essentially, that he-
- DMDennis McKenna
Essentially, it was an algorithm, yeah, based on the structure of the I Ching, this Oracle of 64 hexagrams. And he treated it in such a way that he claimed it, it descri- that time had a structure and that this thing w- that this, this timewave described the structure of time, essentially, and thus was a predictive tool among other things. And that it, uh, you know, was a way to look at the ingression of novelty into the continuum. The idea that there really are new things under the sun. New things happen that have never happened before, ever in the history of the universe, and this map was a way to predict the eruption of those things, or the ingression of those things, I think, eh, which is a better term. And Terrence and I used to have, you know, I wouldn't call them arguments. I'd call them heated discussions (laughs) uh, or enthusiastic discussions about how this happened. I do not disagree with the principle that, that there is novelty. I'm not sure the timewave really describes it adequately, but it was, uh, it was an attempt to. And, uh, and whatever it was, it was something that was a gift from this teacher, at least the, the nugget of the, the idea.
- JRJoe Rogan
The idea of it.
- DMDennis McKenna
Right. The other thing that came back, the other gift that came back from La Chorra was nothing supernatural or anything like that. The gift was the spores of the mushroom. We took the spores of the mushroom, and we took them back with us. And then over two or three years, we figured out how to grow them, and we shared that with the rest of the world. And that was really the thing that ... And look at the impact that that's had on society, you know? And Terrence was fond of saying, Terrence did say, "You know, we are in a symbiotic relationship with something that has disguised itself as an alien invasion in order not to alarm us." (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
Right? So ... And that's what it was.
- 1:02:10 – 1:39:39
DMT, entities, and ‘realness’: terrestrial messenger molecule, biology, and measurement problems
- DMDennis McKenna
It's not too... But, you know, another, um, an- another interesting, maybe interesting angle on this was I, um, uh, yeah, I think it was 2015, I was invited to another private conference, actually at Tyringham. And the subject of the conference was DMT entities. And, uh, you know, um, the entities you see on DMT, are they real or not? Tall order, very difficult to really unpack that. For one thing, what do you mean by real?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DMDennis McKenna
(laughs) Let's start there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- DMDennis McKenna
Anything you experience is real.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DMDennis McKenna
You know? So start there. Um, but the, the talk that I presented was called, uh, Is, Is DMT a Messenger Molecule From an Extraterrestrial Civilization? That was the title of my talk, and I actually, in the course of preparing the talk, I had to conclude that probably not, you know, because if you're gonna postulate that, what you really have to talk about is, uh, the origin of tryptophan. Because tryptophan, the amino acid which is found in everything, it's one of the 20 that goes into protein. Tryptophan is the precursor to all these psychedelic tryptophans and, and also including serotonin. You know, DMT is kind of the archetypal psychedelic, but you've got psilocibin, psilocin, 5-methoxy, bufotenine, and even the beta-carbolines. So, so if you look back in phylogeny, um, you know, a billion years, a couple of billion years, eventually you're talking about what they call the trp operon, which is the cluster of genes that give rise to tryptophan. So what we're pretty certain you're not talking about is DMT extraterrestrial in origin. You have to say, well, obviously it's, it, it came from tryptophan. So how'd the trp operon, uh, arise in phylogeny? It was that extraterrestrial? Even though it's one of the most ancient, uh, gene clusters in, in the evolution of life, you can't really make the case that it's extraterrestrial. 'Cause you could say, well, it came from, um, rhodopsin. Actually, the genes that the trp operon originated from originally were the genes that, the same genes that code for rhodopsin, which is the pigment in the eye that responds to light. So (laughs) I ended up, I could make the case that DMT is extraterrestrial and-
- JRJoe Rogan
But is that-
- DMDennis McKenna
But it's a-
- JRJoe Rogan
... even an interesting case, like whether or not it's from another planet? Whatever it is, it's, it doesn't seem like it's here, the experience doesn't.
- DMDennis McKenna
It doesn't seem like it's here, right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DMDennis McKenna
But, but then again, where is here, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DMDennis McKenna
Eventually, I defaulted to say it may not be an extraterrestrial messenger molecule, but it is a messenger molecule, and it is a distinctly terrestrial messenger molecule.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- DMDennis McKenna
It is the messenger molecule that has been adopted by the community of species to talk to the monkeys, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- DMDennis McKenna
And try to, you know, talk to our consciousness and maybe even to trigger consciousness. So, you know, DMT is only two steps from tryptophan enzymatically in cellular metabolism. D- Uh, tryptophan is universal. Not a living thing that we know of that does not contain tryptophan, because it's one of the 20 that go into amino acids. Two steps from tryptophan, decarboxylation and N-methylation, is all it takes to get DMT. And that's like the prototypal tryptophan psychedelic. And the enzymes that catalyze those steps, they may not be universal in organisms, but they're pretty darn near universal because they have all sorts of other cellular housekeeping functions, you know. Decarboxylating amino acids is something that goes on in every cell. Sticking methyl groups on nitrogens is maybe less, less common, but still very common, you know. Enzymes that will move, uh, you know, methyl groups around in cells. So you can make the case that, and we know this, DMT is extremely common in nature. DMT is, I, I say nature is drenched in DMT, you know. From the animal level to the plant level to the fungal level, you find these things everywhere. Um, you know, um-... and people say, "Well, there's about 150 species of plants that contain DMT." That's only because we've only looked at 150 species of plants. (laughs) You know, i- i- if you look at these large genera that are, that are, you know, famous, known for having tryptamines, like acacias and mimosas and these things, uh, we know of a few species that have DMT. But there's hundreds of species, thousands of species. It's just that nobody's looked. Nobody's gonna fund this work. I think you can reasonably say that, you know, there are about 1,400 species of acacia-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
... in the world. Probably 75% of them have DMT. And actually, I would go to the next... I would, I would even claim, without evidence, that's never stopped me before-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- DMDennis McKenna
... (laughs) but, but I think it's reasonable to suppose that because DMT is so close to mainstream metabolism, probably all plants have DMT to some extent. Most don't have large, large levels of it. They don't have useful amounts of DMT. But if you took, with sufficient instruments, if you just started randing- randomly sampling plants and analyzing for DMT with a mass spec, I'll bet it would turn up in almost everything.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is, uh, which ... Is it phalaris grass that's toxic to sheep because of DMT?
- DMDennis McKenna
That's ... Yep, that's the one.
- JRJoe Rogan
So the DMT in it, for whatever reason, the way it interacts with the sheep's digestive system, it becomes poison?
- DMDennis McKenna
E- well, no, not entirely.
- JRJoe Rogan
No?
- DMDennis McKenna
I mean, it's got ... Phalaris grass has DMT. It has 5-methoxy-DMT, o- other tryptamines. It also has something called gramine, which is a ... It's like DMT with only one carbon on the side chain. Gramine is more or less toxic. Gramine shows up in a lot of grass species. That's probably the thing that causes-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
Episode duration: 2:42:17
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode 9OQ6wFocx9M
