Joe Rogan Experience #1133 - Dennis McKenna

Four, three, two, one. (claps) And we're live. Hello, Dennis.

Hi, Joe.

(laughs)

(laughs)

Great to see you, as always.

It's great to be here, as always. It's great to be here.

So tell me about this, these, these cards that you gave me and what, what this is all about.

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.

Yeah. Okay. There you go.

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.

(laughs)

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-

Ah.

... which you probably heard of.

Yeah.

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.

Explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.

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?