Dennis McKenna - The Psychedelic Pioneer: How Plant Medicine Can Save Humanity

Full transcript: Dennis McKenna on London Real

4:28 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dennis McKenna, the MF American ethnopharmacologist, author and psychedelic expert. Across the past four decades you’ve been a pioneer in psychedelic discovery and the use of plant medicines, including psilocybin, DMT and ayahuasca, alongside your late brother Terence McKenna. Earlier this year you founded the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, dedicated to advancing a symbiotic and co-evolutionary partnership with the entire planetary community of sentient species.

4:59 Last year we both traveled to Costa Rica to participate in a series of ayahuasca ceremonies, which became London Real’s latest documentary feature film, Reconnect, which premieres tonight in London. Dennis, welcome back to London Real. Well, thank you, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be here, back in London again. Sitting here, it feels almost like a homecoming.

5:21 I’m so delighted that you invited me. Well, it’s great to have you back. It’s been, I think, four years since your first episode here, something like that. Yeah, that’s right. It’s been a while.

5:32 It’s been a while, and we’ve done a lot since. I want to get into it today. All right. What’s it like for you coming to London? What’s this city like?

5:40 What’s your relationship like with this city? What does it feel like, and how long have you been coming here for? Well, I think it was about four years ago was the first time, and then I’ve been here two or three times since. I love London. It’s so much fun.

5:56 I mean, I’m often here usually for a purpose, but I have had opportunities to see some of the highlights, notably the British Museum and Kew Gardens. It’s a great town. I mean, wonderful for food, and of course it’s sort of like a strange parallel reality in some ways. I mean, it’s just different enough than the States. Everyone speaks the same language but a slightly different language, so it’s just quirky in so many ways that are charming to an American, you know.

6:29 And so yeah, all my experiences in London have been really fun and positive and great people, you know. So it’s great to be back. Well, it’s good to have you back. Like I said, four years ago you were on the show. Then a couple years back you came, and we did a walk through Hampstead Heath, and we had a great conversation.

6:51 That’s right, plants and the future and psychedelics. And then I got a crazy call from you last year. I said, Brian, you gotta come down to Costa Rica. We’re gonna drink some ayahuasca. I told you I was too busy, and then what happened?

7:08 Dennis, well, basically I just persisted. I just said, you’re not that busy, you know, put it aside and come down. It was the gist of the conversation, and you did, and here we are now. You know, you said that, I think you told me, that you had not, it had been six years since you’d had any encounter with ayahuasca. The first one was kind of ambiguous, so I, you know, I suggested come back to the well and drink, and you did, and you claimed that it changed your life, and we developed this, you and Luis and your helpers, you know, created this movie out of it.

7:54 So I think it’s wonderful, you know, wonderful that we did it. And by the way, that’s not the last phone call you’re gonna get. Sorry to break it to you, but that was number one. We have more stuff to do. Oh my god.

8:14 Next time the Amazon. Next time, who knows? Well, I’m super grateful that I got people like you in my life that can pull me out of my reality, much like the plant medicines do as well. Yeah, and shake me up a little and say, Brian, pay attention, or wake up, you monkey. Yeah, and, uh, and so I remember very distinctly sitting in that maloca in Costa Rica, with the shaman on my left and you on my right.

8:41 We had just drunk our first ayahuasca, and we were about to go in to see what was gonna happen, and right I felt really grateful that I can have a wingman like you, Dennis, and so I appreciate you being there. It was it was really important. Yeah, well, I can relate to you, because I’m the same way. I get caught up on my stuff, you know, and we’re all creatures of habit. We create this world for ourselves that we can navigate, but it’s good to step out of that.

9:12 I mean, if that’s the, you know, either by travel, or by use of psychedelics, or all those things, I guess the point is that it’s always good to step out of your reference frame temporarily in a way that’s, yeah, you know, impactful, but not necessarily life-threatening. I want to terrify yourself sometimes. A little terror is useful, but, you know, you don’t want to be paralyzed with fear. But, you know, as you know, when you’re there to take ayahuasca, in any challenging situation, you know, butterflies in the stomach.

9:51 You know, you’re a little nervous about it, and I often tell people, if you don’t have butterflies in the stomach thinking about taking something like ayahuasca, you’re not paying attention. And it will fix that. It will focus your attention once you’re into it, and then you realize the fears were unfounded. But usually the fears are unfounded, but there is that threshold you have to cross. You know, I’m fond of saying, about psychedelics, you don’t need to have faith to take a psychedelic to learn from it.

10:30 In fact, faith is an impediment. Faith is an impediment in many ways to learning. I mean, I’m speaking as a scientist here. I believe in evidence and things like that. Faith is not that, but what you need to you know, to tangle with psychedelics, at least the first few times, you need courage.

10:54 You know, and you need faith in your own ability, in yourself. That’s what you need, is faith in yourself, and courage enough to, you know, lift that glass to your lips, or smoke the pipe, or whatever it is, to just trust the universe enough to surrender to it. Yeah, and when you do that, you find the universe is actually pretty benign. You know, and it’s a beautiful place. And so that’s partly what you learned, I think, from these encounters.

11:31 And so for people that might be watching us or listening to us, that don’t even know what ayahuasca is, that don’t know necessarily what a psychedelic is, or they have a version of it in their brains that you don’t, me, it’s bad or it’s dangerous. How would you start to explain why we would fly down to a country, go to the jungle, and drink this nasty orange liquid that kind of takes over our brain for three hours in a way that gives us trepidation? How do you start to explain to people what’s happening there?

12:06 Well, how much time do we have? We could spare the rest of the podcast on all this, but I think basically, people, you know, it’s built into human nature to seek novelty. I mean, to some human nature, some people never want to go near novelty, and I think their lives are a bit more impoverished because of that. Novelty is where learning happens. The interesting things happen on the edges, right?

12:36 And so, in that metaphor, psychedelic state, you take you right to the edge, and even over the edge, temporarily. This is very useful for sort of reframing your reality. We construct our own reality that we live in. It’s a comfort zone that our brains are programmed to create so that we can simply exist in the world productively, and a lot of it is based on memories, associations, habits, you know, what we anticipate is going to happen, but it’s based on known experience.

13:16 Our experience of the moment is based on our experience of living in the past, in a way, and of course, in a way we’re always living in the past, you know, by a nanosecond or two. The reality we’re experiencing is, you know, there’s a time lag between the sensory input and what the brain does to construct this into a comprehensible experience of being, you know, in the presence. Psychedelics totally burn that down temporarily. They completely disrupt this, what I call the reality hallucination, the artificial movie that we create.

13:58 Explain what reality hallucination means, because well, as people think this is real. I’m sorry. No, it’s a construction that your brain makes from the data of experience, and it takes that and associates that with internal processes to create a comprehensible version of the movie that you’re living, the Brian Rose production. You’re the director, the producer, and the star of your own movie, or narrating your own movie to yourself and everyone else. And that’s what you’re living.

14:41 That’s your life, normal life. The psychedelics put a big monkey wrench in that temporarily, where you lose all that. You lose what Robin Carhart-Harris, who’s probably the leading neuroscientist in this field right now, calls the default mode network. The default mode network is disabled temporarily. That is kind of equivalent to what I call the reality hallucination, this internal construct that enables us to take information in, associate it with memories, habits, previous experience, and kind of extrude this into a comprehensible version of reality, so that, you know, you don’t step in front of buses and stuff.

15:31 You can do basic functions. But now, so the circular hallucination, are you a loose hallucination, or the coffee a hallucination, or do I actually bring my own version of it? All these are difficult questions, right? These are the ultimate questions. Yeah, I’m as real as you are, and I grant that you’re real, but I grant that also this world that we experience doesn’t look, if you believe physics, it doesn’t look anything like this.

16:02 You know, it’s a pulsing field of energy and quantum processes and all this. Well, we can’t navigate a sea like this. We’re biological systems, so we use that capability to construct something that we can, that works well enough. You’ve got your real world out there, the incomprehensible, unknowable real world, and you have your own model of the world that you inhabit. How accurate that is, so hard to say, but it’s accurate enough.

16:37 It works, and as long as you keep in mind that that’s not really the real world most of the time, you never have to think about this. So we just assume that you know this is the real world. Then you take a psychedelic and you realize, no, you know, it evaporates like smoke. You’re temporarily disabling these systems, which is useful. It’s very useful to do that, because the systems accumulate.

17:07 It’s just like a computer hard drive. The systems accumulate sludge, or glug, or whatever you call it. So to disable this system temporarily, and then reboot, and I think that’s literally a lot of what psychedelics are about. You disable it. It’s like a restart button on your computer, because the brain and biological systems in general tend toward equilibrium.

17:35 So you’ve disrupted that equilibrium, but it will reestablish itself. Everything’s gonna fall back together, but you, it may work more efficiently. Maybe some things that were gumming up the system, and to put it in a crude way, have fallen away, so you come back and you feel renewed, refreshed, more cognitively competent, more humbled, certainly, you know, because you have been through an experience where one of the main take-home lessons is reality is not what you think it is, you know, and you’re not who you think you are, and the whole thing is just a lot weirder and stranger than you can even imagine.

18:23 So that’s a humbling experience in a beneficial way, you know. And I think one of the things that ayahuasca, and, you know, encourages psychedelics in general, but it seems especially ayahuasca encourages us is to reflect on how little we know. You know, it’s very easy to be arrogant about what we know. Ayahuasca reminds me you don’t know so much, you know, and that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing, I think.

18:55 I think it’s wonderful to learn. I like learning new things. So a lot of people, or some people, might be depressed if you come to this notion that, well, we really know almost nothing. To me, that’s a joyous thing, because it means there’s everything left to learn. And I think that psychedelics, again, help us recover that perspective, that the world is a marvelous place and we can appreciate it better.

19:28 You know, we get so caught up in our stuff that we forget this, that, you know, we live in a world of wonder. The universe is made of miracles, just existing, you know? I mean, I was recently in a retreat center and taking, and trying to watch him for the first time, which was, we can get into that, but she had all sorts of inspirational signs around this place, and there was one that really stuck with me, which was very simple. I said, you know, when you think about it, life is really pretty amazing, and it is, you know.

20:10 And I think that’s the benefit of psychedelics. People long for meaning in their lives, and we live a life in which meaning is very hard to find, you know, true, personally meaningful experiences. Or, you know, I mean, we’re where we live in a world that is spiritually impoverished. Yeah, and many people turn to religion for that, as they always have, but in this day and age, people turn to relive and religion, and for this fulfillment, and they find no, this is as hollow as the rest of it.

20:55 You know, religion has lost its numinous, its new manasa, in a way. It’s just another institution designed to make you think a certain way, behave in a certain way. That’s not what it should be about. Spiritual experience should be fulfilling. Religionists just, you know, it doesn’t serve its function anymore, and so I’m, and, and so people are turning to, you know, they’re looking for something, and finally they look inside themselves, so That’s like, oh, hold this.

21:35 This is the psychedelic alarm. It goes off when you talk about psychedelics too much. Okay, so we’re talking about religion. I think, well, now you totally threw me off. My but I think basically I think that people look into themselves there, you know, and that’s a good thing.

22:07 People are saying, well, institutions are not giving me what I want, you know, and so finally they say it must be found in my own heart. And I think that is the right perception. And then, having said that, well, then how do I fulfill that desire? And the way you do it is you challenge yourself, and you know all about this much more than I do. I mean, your whole Academy, the things you teach, the people you bring on, it’s all about people who have challenged themselves in major ways, and I think that’s good.

22:46 I think that’s part of what living is. You know, what do you say to people who come back and say, you don’t need psychedelics. You can meditate. You can do hard endurance training. You can go talk to a therapist.

23:01 I’m sure you’ve heard these people that are very anti quote-unquote drug, and we’ll talk about that word in just a second. Right, what do you say to that? I don’t dismiss those other methods. I think that those are all valuable, you know, extreme sports, anything that challenges people. And I guess even meditation would fit into that.

23:25 I think that people have a mistaken notion that, you know, it’s either meditation or psychedelics. It’s not. They complement each other. You can take psychedelics, and your appreciation of them is enhanced by meditation, and meditation and taking psychedelics does not. It’s not in any way incompatible with meditation.

23:53 And there have been, actually, fairly recent studies that have come out that show that experienced meditators, you know, control studies, show that experienced meditators who take psilocybin feel that they benefit from, you know, this encounter, and the meditation helps them maintain this afterglow, if you will, or this learning, more than they would normally. I mean, one of the parameters that they measure for the beneficial outcomes of psychedelics is a feeling of positivity after the experience, whatever that means. The positivity, optimism, you know, kind of the opposite of depression, in a way.

24:45 And one of the reasons things like psilocybin are being accepted now into clinical use is there’s data to show that this positivity is long lived. It’s not you take it, you feel great the next day, and then you’re right back into the old habits, the old depression. It tends to reinforce itself. It tends to be prolonged. So there’s a prolonged effect, and meditation enhances that, and it helps you to maintain that.

25:20 So it’s not either/or, you know. And people say, well, you’re taking drugs, that can’t be good. How can you have a genuine spiritual experience taking a drug? As though the fact that you’ve taken a drug somehow makes it not genuine. I totally disagree with that, you know, because whatever you experience is a reflection of your neurochemical brain state.

25:51 So if you have a mystical experience on the mat, whatever that means, your brain is still responding. You can put yourself into an fMRI machine, if you let, if you’ll allow it, while you’re having that experience. You can see what parts of the brain are activated, and so on. You can do the same thing with a person on suicide, but who’s having a mystical experience, whatever that might be. You’ll see the same parts of the brain are activated.

26:22 They’re very similar. These are not, are not incompatible at all. No, I mean, this goes back to, you know, what I often say: we are made of drugs. Ever, certainly we’re engines that run on neurotransmitters and hormones and this sort of thing. Any, we’re on drugs all the time.

26:43 We are drugs. We are drugs, and that’s okay, you know. That’s the state of biological being, just as a fact. And yet that word has so many weird connotations, and you grew up in the 60s and the 70s. I know, like last year I did this movie, Iron Mind, about my endurance race, and the guy that coached me is John Joseph, and he’s been sober for ten years, and when I’m like, I’m going to drink ayahuasca, he said, no, no, no, I can’t do that.

27:15 That’s a drug, and that could get me off the wagon, and all these hang-ups. And I said, no, for me it’s, I think it’s a medicine that’s gonna help me improve my life. But a lot of people see it as a drug. They remember psychedelics being banned in the sixties, right, treated that way. So how do you get people’s heads around those hang-ups?

27:36 Well, it’s difficult. I think that for one thing, we have to be careful about nomenclature, how we talk about these things. Back in the 60s there was this huge scary category, drugs. Drugs, all drugs are bad, except the ones you happen to like, you know, like alcohol, tobacco. These things are clearly drugs, but somehow they were exempt from the conversation, you know, in a certain way.

28:08 It’s only since then that they’ve been, it’s been recognized. Yeah, these are drugs too. It’s not about the substance. It’s about the way it’s used. I’ve always said, you know, I, there is no such thing as a bad drug.

28:27 This is a problem with the conversation. There’s no such thing as a bad drug. There are dozens of ways to use drugs badly. It’s a behavioral thing. It comes from the human heart.

28:40 That’s where the moral dimension is. Drugs are simply compounds that have certain effects, and a drug that you might think of as, you know, a drug of abuse, let’s take heroin. Freaks, you know, terrible drug, but in a hospital for cancer patients it can be very beneficial. So the good and the bad of using drugs or not using them comes from our behavior, as indeed the moral quality of anything we do comes from our behavior. That’s where we need to find our, you know, our moral and spiritual framework, within essentially.

29:23 Drugs are just a kind of technology, you know, and there are many other technologies that are two-edged swords in a way. They can be used beneficially. They can be used very destructively, and one of the problems we as a species face is that we now control, or think we control, technologies that are so powerful that potentially they are threatening the existence of life on earth. So we have to get wise about this. I’ve, you know, one of my things I always say is, our cleverness has outstripped our wisdom.

30:03 We’re very, very clever. You know, we can make these machines of incredible power, and we have these restless hands with these opposable thumbs. We’re always making something, you know, and we have this imagination that’s thinking up stuff to make, and we have to get a grip on it. We have to, we have to associate wisdom with what we do with this technology. That’s what we’re lacking.

30:34 That’s the big equation, and the wake-up call. You know, wake up, monkeys, and think about how you’re impacting the world and how we can change it, because obviously the way we’re doing it now is not working, and we’re threatening everything, you know, not only our existence but the existence of life. And this all has to do with this disjunction between cleverness and wisdom, and the psychedelics can allow us to connect back to the environment, our surroundings.

31:14 The psychedelics can allow us to connect to that, and again, back to the issue of drugs. You know, there’s no inherent moral superiority or inferiority in the substances. That was the mistake I think was made in the 60s. It was all about the projection. It was onto the drugs, as though this big category, they were either pathogens or demons.

31:41 They are neither. It’s the use we make of them, the choices we make, that determine whether that’s a destructive or beneficial use. Almost any drug can be beneficial. Almost any drug can be harmful. It’s all about how you do it, how you use it.

32:02 Okay, now let me ask you a simple question, and that is this: we went down to Costa Rica, we sat in the maloca, and we drank something called ayahuasca. Yes, a spiritual experience. Why did we not take some MDMA, drink some tequila, do some cocaine, do some heroin, smoke some tobacco? Why did we choose the ayahuasca? Well, do you understand my question?

32:31 Yeah, I think so. I think so. Put it in perspective for people, as in, there’s a lot of things you could do, and a lot of things you could ingest, but why are we going for that thing? Well, because we made a conscious choice, you know, to do something different. Number one, just the very act of going there.

32:49 I mean, the trip began when you left London, you know, in the choice you make to step out of your reference frame, to go to a place far away, to have this experience that you don’t know how it’s gonna turn out. You go with all these questions: will I be the same person when I’m done with this? And the answer, of course, is no. No, you’ll be changed. Yeah, I mean, your experience will change you.

33:18 You’ll still be Rose. He’ll still be the totally functional person, functional person you are, but something in your life will change. You’ll have that experience to reflect on. So you’re making a choice. You’re also, I think, you know, in the case of psychedelics, they talk a lot about set and setting, how you take psychedelics, maybe more than other medicines, other drugs.

33:46 It’s important how you orchestrate the environment in which you’re taking it. So you’re deliberately going to a place where there is a ritual structure. In the case of Costa Rica, it’s a very traditional, shippable practice, and that’s what they like to do there. And then, she’s not, go where the indigenous people of Peru have been doing this. Yes, they brew.

34:14 They bring shamans up from Pucallpa. Pucallpa shamans. Sure. People are an interesting group, because they have managed to actually sort of ride this global wave of globalization of ayahuasca, and yet their traditions are intact, but they’re also very welcoming people. So when it comes to tourism, yeah, come on down, we can help, and by and large they do a good job of it.

34:42 But you’re, you’re choosing to, you know, the important thing about ayahuasca or any psychedelic is to have the right set and setting, and that’s a complex mixture of variables. I mean, the setting, the setting obviously has to be a good setting. There needs to be ritual. Ritual is a good way to structure the experience. You know, it doesn’t have to be a traditional indigenous ritual, but that works as a container for it.

35:17 Why is ritual important for this? Because you can think of it almost as an alchemical alembic, you know. If you’re gonna do an alchemical transformation, you know, you can’t just pour the chemicals out of the table and hope that something will happen. You need a container. The ritual is the container to allow this transformative process to take place, and it’s, you know, it’s necessary to do that if there’s gonna be a good outcome.

35:57 You need some sort of touchstone to reality, or otherwise, you know, there’s, it’s essential to the reintegration process, I guess you could say. But I often say, you know, ayahuasca is a liquid. It will fill any vessel you pour it into. Metaphorically, the ritual, the context, the setting, is the container for the experience. It can be a traditional shamanic experience.

36:26 It can be, you know, a neoshamanic ritual in Marin or New York City. It can be something like, you know, the sound ceremonies that we did recently in Peru. The important thing is not what the container is. There’s no inherent superiority of these different containers. The important thing is that there is a container, and the main thing one of the main benefits you get from the container is the understanding that it’s a safe place to let this happen, because the experience of the ayahuasca, you have to trust it, and you have to trust yourself enough to let go, to just surrender.

37:12 And if you’re reassured, if you could be ensured that you’re being looked after, that the people there care about you, that your safety is not in question, then you can feel, you can let your guard down, which is what it’s all about. Nobody here is going to, you know, plotting to kill me or anything like that, so you can let your guard down and let that, you know, precious unique encounter between you and the medicine, that’s where the important stuff goes on. So the container, as long as it allows that to happen, is something that you need, and then it supports you through the process.

37:59 So you can do it in many different set and setting situations, right? But you want to thoughtfully approach what you want out of the experience. Another aspect of that is, in tension, people say often, you should have an intention about what, why are you taking it, what’s the reason? I think that’s good, and sometimes there are specific things that you want to put your attention to, but it’s also okay to say, well, you know, I just want to be open. I want to learn, when I can, more and more.

38:36 That’s what my intention is. I mean, I just say, I want to learn whatever the medicine has to teach me, you know, or, more accurately, whatever I can learn from the medicine. I think that’s another kind of important issue, is the way you frame this. There is, again, as we talked about, all these projections back in the 60s on drugs, as though the drugs were somehow autonomous, well, you get the same thing in ayahuasca, in ritual use of psychedelics, where there is a tendency to attribute to the medicine Well, you get the same thing in ayahuasca, in ritual use of psychedelics, where there is a tendency to attribute to the medicine properties or qualities that really are your qualities.

39:25 I, people talked about ayahuasca, she, or they, tend to personify these drugs, project of them intelligence and power, like the Mother Ayahuasca. You hear a lot, yeah, Mother Ayahuasca, that sort of thing. These are traditional concepts, and if you’re a traditional person, that maybe that works for you, but we’re not traditional people, and we need to think in a different way about this. You know, I mean, just to be clear, I mean, I’m a believer in plant intelligence and all that.

40:02 I mean, I have no argument with that. We could talk about that later, but they’re not intelligent in the way we are, but what they do is, these plants, the molecules in them, are tools to let us reframe our own understanding, to open a door to an understanding that we may not have had before, you know, a clearer understanding, but it’s coming from us. The tools, the medicines, our learning tools, you know, they let you discover what you always knew, in a certain way.

40:44 They let you discover what you always knew, but you didn’t know you knew it. So, you know, I guess that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there’s no entity per se. It doesn’t have to be an alien. You’re just learning about yourself. You’re learning about yourself.

40:58 I think you’re learning about yourself. The entity that you might encounter, and people certainly do encounter entities, you know, is an aspect of the self, basically. Now, having said that, I’m also willing to entertain a possibility that there really are entities, but it’s very hard to be sure. I mean, you know, again, we shouldn’t be arrogant about what we think we know. But my general understanding is that these encounters you have with apparent intelligences are aspects of yourself that are presented as something that isn’t yourself, just who knows why, so that you can have that dialogue, you can have that interchange.

41:52 You know, I think we all have within us a kind of an inner sage, if you will, you know, which in most day-to-day life we’re not in touch with, but it’s there. This helps you, reckon with that, you know, a wisdom that you didn’t know you have. And the ayahuasca, then, is a psychedelic, and that’s why I was asking the question. We didn’t drink tequila. We didn’t do an MDMA.

42:21 We didn’t do heroin. We did ayahuasca, which is a psychedelic. Right now, what is a psychedelic, then, as opposed to those other drugs, which are maybe barbiturates or opiates, or, well, psychedelics. Psychedelic means mind manifest. That’s what the word means, and it’s deliberately vague in a certain way.

42:42 There are many terms for psychedelics, and, you know, they used to be called hallucinogens. That was the accepted term, meaning they caused hallucinations. Well, not really, you know, or sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. They used to be called psychotomimetics, meaning that they mimic psychosis, and again, not really. I mean, they induce altered states, which in superficial ways may resemble psychosis.

43:14 In superficial ways, in other ways, they may resemble mystical experience. So, you know, there’s a whole list of things. Psychedelic, so you know, the fact that there’s so much nomenclature about psychedelics, none of which is adequate, tells you how slippery this concept is. So I like the term psychedelic, even though it’s now accepted in biomedical literature. I like it, even though it’s got all the sixties baggage associated with it, but it’s the most accurate one, in that it manifests the mind.

43:51 It’s, okay, it’s gonna manifest the mind. How it’s gonna do that is an open question, but so psychedelic is, you know, a good term. A good term, and then, you know, you can get, these are all psychoactive. You can get sticky. You can, sometimes, they say, well, true psychedelics only work on this subset of serotonin receptors called the 5-HT2A receptors.

44:24 You can get kind of narrow, so things like technically, like ibogaine and salvia divinorum, MDMA, these are not psychedelics. I mean, they’re psychotropic, psychoactive, but not psychedelics in this strict pharmacological sense. The true psychedelics are LSD, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, you know, these other trip domains that interact with serotonin. So serotonin 2A receptors seem to be the target that all these psychedelics have in common, right? And so they have a very distinct effect from, say, an MDMA, or an alcohol, or a cocaine, or something.

45:12 It’s a very different effect, whole different pharmacology. MDMA involves serotonin, but cocaine works on dopamine, you know, another neurotransmitter. Nicotine works on acetylcholine. You know, we have about 50 different kinds of neurotransmitter systems in the brain and the body, and, you know, we know of drugs that affect every one of these, and the psychedelics have a certain type of experience profile, and throws to the rest. People have asked me before about these substances, and I’m, what I usually say is that there’s no, it’s a zero-sum game with the substances.

45:56 If there is some type of upside, there’s usually some type of downside, of course. And in our typical Western culture, we’re used to, for example, with alcohol, you drink it, and you have usually some type of a pleasant upside, this effect that it has, and then the next day you end up paying for it. Right, you can kind of argue that with cocaine, sometimes with MDMA, where you just have a really tough day the next day, because you’re, you know, your serotonin’s down.

46:21 But I always say, with ayahuasca, you usually pay upfront. Ordering with the psychedelics, as in, I sometimes have difficult experiences, along, sometimes with really powerful experiences, but in a way it doesn’t necessarily become addictive the way that some of these. Oh, it’s anything but addictive, right? I mean, psychedelics, if for one thing, well, I mean, they’re used to treat addictions. They can help people overcome their dependence on other substances, but psychedelics themselves are not addicting.

46:53 Quite the contrary, you know, because the experiences are so impactful, you have to make a conscious decision to go back to it, to you know, and some people may never go back to it, and that’s okay. People can benefit from a lifetime benefit from a few encounters, one or two encounters with psychedelics, if they’re particularly impactful. So you have, you know, dependence is not the problem. You know, this, I mean, I suppose there are always exceptions. I don’t know anyone who you would call addicted to psychedelics.

47:36 You know, I mean, this micro dosing thing, which is becoming kind of faddish, maybe that’s a form of addiction. But I’m a little skeptical about micro dosing. I can think I can see where there might be benefits, but I think that I mean, it’s okay to micro dose if people perceive benefits. People shouldn’t forget that just around the corner is a world of wonder, and they should peek into that once in a while to remind themselves just exactly what we’re dealing with here.

48:14 This is not like something you take. You know, this is powerful medicine, and in some ways micro dosing doesn’t do it justice. A micro dose is like one tenth or one twentieth, or one fiftieth, of maybe a dose you would have in a ceremony. Laughs. Or else, your brother Chance would say a heroic dose.

48:32 Which, my, that’s right. A nice big glass of ayahuasca, maybe five grams of psilocybin mushrooms, these kinds of things are more of these experience doses. In the micro dosing, it might be a quarter of a gram. It would be a much smaller, and in some ways, if it’s, oh, I mean, that all, it, it, it may have benefits. It may particularly have benefits, you know, after a big psychedelic experience, just like meditation afterwards, or you can microdose following a psychedelic experience.

49:16 I think that will help integrate the lessons that you’ve learned from the psychedelic, but you know, I mean, I think everyone, or many people, advocate micro dosing. I think there needs to be some rigorous studies to see if there is actually a benefit, that won’t necessarily mean people won’t do it, but let’s find out what’s going on there. Yeah, you know, so we drank ayahuasca, but there’s also psilocybin mushrooms. There’s also DMT, right? There’s mescaline.

49:50 Why did we choose ayahuasca? How do you feel about ayahuasca? Why is that something that you tend to ingest, and what are the differences? Well, partly it’s life circumstances. I respect all these things, DMT and psilocybin and ayahuasca and you know, mescaline, although I haven’t had much, much experience from mescaline in a number of decades, but I’ve taken peyote and all that recently.

50:28 I took San Pedro under ideal circumstances and found that quite interesting and quite unexpected, from what I, you know, had been led to think. I’ve been working with ayahuasca lately because I’ve been involved in organizing retreats, and I ayahuasca is kind of emerged, if you think of these things as allies or teachers. Ayahuasca has been my major teacher for a long, long time, and I’m very grateful to what I’ve, for two it, for four. What I’ve learned lately, I’ve actually had some thoughts that maybe I need to step back from ayahuasca for a while, which I know, if I say that in public, this will be heresy, especially stepping away from ayahuasca.

51:22 It’s not that I’ve just been taking it a lot and I am not getting the revelations of the insights I used to have, and I’m just getting this message that maybe I should cut back, and maybe look, maybe reacquaint with mushrooms a little more, because I found my last few mushroom experiences very valuable. And you know, it’s not good, you can get into ruts, even with things like ayahuasca, and if it’s not moving you, then that’s a message. Maybe you need to step away from it for a while.

52:04 I will never abandon any of these things. I expect that I will be, have these relationships as long as I can, as long as I can. They’ve been very useful to me, but, you know, mushrooms and ayahuasca have been the two primary ones, and I’ve been sort of neglecting my fungal friends for a while, so maybe I’ll get back into that. And where does DMT play into all this? How do you feel about it?

52:36 How do you explain it to people, and what’s your relationship? Well, DMT, okay, so from the chemical angle, these are all about DMT in a certain way. Ayahuasca is made from a combination of two plants, one of which contains DMT, right, and the other one, DMT is not orally active. You can make teas out of plants that contain DMT, drink them all day, nothing will happen. The secret sauce is the other plant, that contains compounds called beta-carbolines that inhibit the enzymes in your gut that would break down DMT if taken orally.

53:17 So DMT is not orally active unless you have monoamine oxidase inhibitors to block that degradation, and then you have, that’s the whole basis of the ayahuasca pharmacology. Then you have an extended period, the absorption and elimination of the DMT, which is much longer. If you smoked DMT, or you take it as a snuff, you bypass this oral problem. It’s not going through the gut. It’s going directly to the brain through the lungs, and then you have DMT that elicits an experience that’s maybe 20 minutes, very short.

53:59 It’s like a rapid roller coaster ride through a psychedelic amusement park. It all happens very rapidly, and it’s hallucinogenic, it’s visionary, it’s neon lit, it’s crazy. It’s literally like poking your head through. It’s like there’s an alternate reality, there’s a circus going on just next door. I feel like I’m in it.

54:27 You get to poke your head through and look at what’s going on. I’ve only smoked a few times, but when I do, I feel like I’m in a Donkey Kong video game, and I literally feel like I’m in one of those video games from the 80s, and I’m just like, what is this doing here? Right, and again, it really shows me the reality hallucination is real. Yeah, and I’m there really quick, and then I’m back. You’re there really quick, and the problem with that is all you can do there.

54:55 It’s hard to bring anything back. I mean, in terms of other than just the appreciation that whoa, you know, right next door there’s a circus going on. You get to poke your head and look at the circus, all of these entities and people are saying, you know, where have you been? We’re so happy to see you. All this stuff, you know.

55:16 It’s a crazy, crazy space, and then you come back, and it’s like, well, okay, that’s interesting. I mean, just the experience itself is interesting, but you tend not to. I mean, I suppose you could find therapeutic benefit there, but I think the therapy comes, the therapeutic dimension is more easily accessed if the DMT experience is spread across time. So ayahuasca is, you know, four to six hours. Now you’re not at a top DMT peak during the whole time, but you are during part of it, and then the other parts, the ramp up and the ramp down, is where the integration can go on, and the same as psilocybin.

56:07 Psilocybin has a similar mechanism. Psilocybin is converted to psilocin. So in the body, psilocybin is what pharmacologists call a prodrug. It’s an inactive form of the active form. Psilocybin is converted to psilocin, and psilocin is what’s actually interacting with those receptors, and it’s chemically very, very close to DMT molecularly speaking.

56:39 So it is also an orally active form of DMT. I think of it that way, and at high doses you can be in that DMT space. If you take high doses, you can reach those places. Yeah, I was here before. I was here when I smoked DMT.

56:58 I recognize this, you know, and you can spend more time there, and but Again, it’s usually not as intense as DMT, so you have more of a chance to integrate what’s going on. I mean, this is what led my brother and I to go to South America in 1971. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, I’m not gonna get into details about that, but, long time, it would be too crazy, but long story short, our motivation to go there was we were looking for an orally active form of DMT, and he was started smoking it at Berkeley.

57:39 We were smoking it in Berkeley when, like, nine seven 68, 69, 70. Yeah, and we were both convinced that it was, we didn’t know what it was. All we knew, it was the most interesting thing in our lives, not just the most interesting drug, of which we were sampling many, but the most interesting thing, and we thought this is a whole other order of magnitude of weirdness, and maybe it’s a portal to another dimension. That was actually the, you know, operational premise, which may be true.

58:16 I don’t know. But anyway, that hell is, you guys, we weren’t going after spiritual experiences. We were going after space-time portals, and this kind of thing, you know. And how old were you at the time? I was 20.

58:30 My brother was 24. We were just at that age when, you know, everything, and actually, you know, nothing, you know. So it wasn’t, it was a beautiful time that we had, the, that we were just crazy enough to do this, and we went, and we went looking for LSD, around at the time. LSD was everywhere. Oh yeah, this was the 60s.

58:54 This was Berkeley. It was, LSD was the, the drug du jour. Everybody was on LSD. DMT was hard to find. DMT was very rare back in the day, but my brother was very good at working the matrix, you know, and he found it.

59:11 I can remember an episode, you know, he, he loved to hold salons, essentially, and that became his career, essentially, but back in Berkeley, and in the day, you know, it was just my brother sitting around this bedroom, his house on Telegraph Avenue, passing the hashish pipe, and he was the only one that was not rendered speechless. Everybody else was so stoned they couldn’t say anything, so then he would just rave on. Good practice for what became his career, essentially, the same.

59:51 What does the salon for people that might not understand what that means? A salon, well, the way I use it, it’s a group where people come to talk and rave and exchange ideas. He was the chief raver. But I remember a conversation that took place in one of those gatherings, where he, we were talking about alchemy, and he said, the Philosopher’s Stone. I know what the Philosopher’s Stone is.

1:00:19 It’s over there in the jar. There’s an ounce and a half of it, you know, talking about DMT, you know, and we really felt that that’s what it was. It was the font of wisdom. It may well be the font of wisdom, but anyway, it was a possession with DMT that led us to go to the Amazon. And LSD didn’t impress you that much?

1:00:42 What impressed us, sure, and impressed us. It was, it didn’t rise to the bar that DMT did. Okay, all right, so you go in search of the oral, oral form of DMT. Right? Which you had read some article, and you thought was somewhere down in South America?

1:01:00 That’s right. We went down there looking for this obscure Watoto hallucinogen called kuku. Hey, that Schultes had written about in the Harvard Botanical Museum leaflets, and this was this was before anyone really understood about the pharmacology of DMT at that time, 1970, 1971. The importance of the admixture plants was just sort of beginning to surface in the literature. Schultes had graduate students down there who were looking at him.

1:01:37 We weren’t aware of that, or we would have focused more on ayahuasca, but we thought this is an orally active form of DMT, and our rationale was very practical. We thought, well, if we can make the state last longer, we can understand more about what this state of mind is, which again we were sort of couching in the framework of, it’s really another dimension. Now, that’s probably not true, but that was our working hypothesis. And so that’s what motivated us, and then when we got down there, welcome.

1:02:20 I found were the mushrooms before we found you. Kouhei. Oh, Kouhei proved hard to get and very disappointing when we finally found that, but we got to Lotterer, and there was abundance of these mushrooms. First of all, getting to La Chorrera was no simple, not a simple task at all. Right, here in Colombia, in 1971.

1:02:40 That’s right. You psyche planes and trains and automobiles and canoes, and you guys aren’t exactly trains, and barges and boats, mostly, but yes, we had to go to southern Colombia. We had to go to a really horrible town called Port Oleg Izumo and get passage down the Putas Mile, and then up this other river, then cross this trail, four days from one river. So yeah, it was a classic heart of darkness, you know, crazy seed, which of course I’ve written about in my book, and Terence wrote about, and true hallucinations.

1:03:18 And then finally we made it there, and the fact that we even got that far, you know, is, I don’t know, it’s a testimony to luck, delusion, and how nuts we were. You know, we were driven. We were clearly driven, and we were in the grip of a mythopoetic meme. And in sort of that, I think at that time, I mean, that sounds ego inflated to say that, but that’s really what was going on. And so we got there, and you know, we were in search of Oh Kouhei, so we tended to be dismissive of the mushrooms initially.

1:04:02 We thought, oh well, we know what these are. I mean, we had almost no experience. We encountered them a couple of times on the way in, Portola, Giza, MO, and a couple other stops, had taken one or two, and we sort of had a feel for it, but when we got there, they were everywhere, and we had a very cavalier attitude. Terence, we didn’t take it seriously. We thought of them as a distraction while we were looking for the real secret.

1:04:31 Well, they quickly reprioritized our understanding, that made it clear that they were the real secret, and I think they were the real secret, and they transmitted a lot of information to us about experiments we could do. You know, I wouldn’t call them experiments, but, but they certainly seem to, you know, we talked earlier about how you tend to objectify these drugs. You type people talk about ayahuasca she, and mushrooms are really good at presenting themselves that way.

1:05:12 All right, they’re not feminine, they’re actually asexual, like fungi. You know, they, but they have a personality for sure, and they have a lot, too, that they want to share, and so you can get into these, I thought, exchanges with them, and it’s just like talking to somebody, and in some ways you know, it’s like talking to, kind of, your garrulous, grumpy old uncle, you know, who’s, it’s like, oh, you again. You know, well, as long as you’re here, you may as well stay.

1:05:55 So there are aspects of, the personality of this psilocybin boy, sometimes it’s that, and when did you finally discover that these were the prize? Did you take a larger dose and thought, wait a second, there’s something going on when did we discover that? Yeah, well, we discovered, now Brian, you’re leading me into the primrose path here. I thought I don’t want to get into, but, but we discovered that at high doses, like really high doses, way beyond the heroic dose level, 10, 15 grams, you know, that we could hear the South Seas, internal sounds, like harmonic tones, electrical sounding buzzing kind of sounds, and you smoked DMT, you hear sounds like that, like crumpling cellophane.

1:06:53 When that kind of thing there, and there’s probably your neurons frying. I don’t know, but you hear these sounds, and that’s interesting enough, but if you listen carefully, you can start to imitate those sounds, and you can sing, you can actually try to imitate them. They’re very hard to imitate, but at a certain point your voice can lock on to this, and then it just, have it, just pours out, you know, and long ululation. I’m not going to make the sound.

1:07:27 Come on, give me a little bit. No, I can’t, I can’t. I don’t want to disrupt the space-time continuum, but anyway, we, so this, and, and with this singing goes a feeling of ecstasy, you know, a feeling of like, this power is just pouring out of you, and the hallucinations go crazy, and all that, and then so that was kind of the phenomenon we were experiencing. And then we were, we were trying to make sense of this. Well, what is this, and how can we understand it?

1:08:10 And the mushroom was quite happy to provide a framework, or suggestions about what this was, and the suggestion was that what you’re hearing internally is the electron spin resonance of these molecules intercalating into DMT. Now this is total bunk, right? This is not how it works. We now understand that, but at the time it was matter-of-factly presented to us. This is what’s going on, and it wasn’t for us to question.

1:08:49 Well, of course this is what’s going on. So what can we, you’ll love it? Well, we can use our voice to essentially do a kind of cycle surgery on ourselves to create, you know, to excite our own DNA and to resonate a standing wave form that would be sustained by super conductivity, and that would be essentially an artifact that is made of mind and matter, that is a union of mind and matter, and that would be controllable by thought, and they would have access to all information in the Akashic field, or whatever.

1:09:32 Now, you know, I mean, this, this is this, all made perfect sense in the context of the experiment, you know. And, you were, the more years later I look at this, that these people were seriously deluded, you know, but we took it seriously at the time, and you were the medium, you were the transmitter. Yes, I was the transmitter. Right, I was giving, I was getting the download, and I was writing furiously, almost like automatic writing, trying to work out this protocol, and it, I mean, to call it an experiment at La Chorrera is a misnomer, because experiments have to have controls.

1:10:15 Of this, was about as uncontrolled as it could get. It’s more like the, the ritual at La Chorrera or something, but we did create a vessel in which we postulated that if we made this sound and directed it at a mushroom, that we would get a spectacular result, this activation of DNA both in us and the mushroom at the same time, and you know, I don’t want to go into the details, because the details are murky even today, but that was our expectation, and our expectation was totally unrealistic, because it would have involved the violation of a number of laws of physics, and, you know, physics is very hard to overturn. Those laws, so, so that didn’t work.

1:11:21 We didn’t actually get the result we predicted, but what we did get was kind of a backlash, which was our simultaneous, prolonged dissociation from reality, or from this reality, which was about 14 days. And now people can read about that in True Hallucinations, and in The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, what that was about. So, trying to unpack this, I think you know, looking back on it, the whole premise of making this sound was that at the right frequency, the right resonance, we could flip the molecule through the fourth dimension, such that its trip was on the outside.

1:12:18 Well, if looking back on what we’ve just, the trip is not in the drug. That was the fundamental misunderstanding. The trip is what happens when the drug encounters the nervous system and plays out as the biochemical symphony, if you will, of the experience. Just like a piece of music on paper is not the music. It’s a diagram of the music.

1:12:47 The music doesn’t happen till you play it. Same with the medicine. The medicine has to metabolize through the body, so it is a fourth-dimensional process. It takes place through time, but it doesn’t turn. The trip is not in the drug.

1:13:05 That was a mistake that we made, that a lot of people make. The trip happens when the drug plus nervous system do their dance together, and then it worked, and then you have an experience of time. It’s like a movie. Okay, you would both just recently lost your mother as well. Before that trip, did that change the state you were in, mentally?

1:13:28 Or you have to, yeah, you and Terence have both just lost your mother. She just died before. Yeah, yes, we lost our mother. Did that change this mental state you were in, or did that make you, well, no, I think absolutely it did. I mean, it was six months to the day after our mother died that we did the experiment.

1:13:50 Lara, we were both anguished by this. I mean, I don’t even know how conscious it was, you know, when we did the experiment, but I think she, the sense of this loss was very much, you know, present, even though maybe not articulated, and I think at one level we thought, I think that I think that loss of our mother involved probably a lot of guilt on both of our parts. We hadn’t been the best sons that we might have been. We probably disappointed her in lots of ways, you know.

1:14:31 I mean, hopefully she would be disappointed if she knew how it turned out, but she didn’t, and so I had that, and I think there was an element of that, that was like, you know, we would actually disrupt space-time in order to get her back, you know, and not only get her back but get back a whole bunch of people, you know, young and Einstein. people like that, you know, who we were utterly convinced were gonna be showing up. And so we were lost in a serious delusional state.

1:15:12 There’s no doubt that the loss of my mother, our mother, had a lot to do with that. Okay, you know, so this was a redemption of that in some way. So, healing, I think, and one of the big results of La Chorrera was bringing the psilocybin mushrooms back to America and creating the Growers Guide. And basically you guys, you know, kind of brought psilocybin to the masses. Yes, yes.

1:15:39 And of all the things, big deal, that is. All the things that we projected were gonna happen, the one thing that actually had an impact was that. And there was no, nothing supernatural, no violation of physics. It was simply bringing the spores back, figuring out how to grow these things, and then releasing it to the world. You know, other, it’s not only us.

1:16:05 Other people were doing this, but we were kind of the ones that caught that cultural meme. We put out this little pamphlet, you know, Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Growers Guide, a very simple little manual for growing a few small amounts of mushrooms in mason jars. Any college student, any tenth grader, really could do this, and I think many a tenth grader did that. There were lots of science fair projects that year that came out, you know. And yeah, it’s had an impact on society, and I think generally a positive impact.

1:16:43 It gained, are we wanted to share this, partly too, you know, so that other people can have these experiences, and either convince themselves, either confirm or not, what we had been experiencing. And so many people did them, and you know, confirmed them, more or less. You know, when you take it in these intense states, five grams total darkness. Yeah, you will have encounters with the aliens. You’ll be convinced that they’ve lived it for sure, you know.

1:17:20 Psilocybin has, seems to have, this science fiction-ish cast to it for many people. Of course, we don’t know, because we were already science fiction fanatics, but it has made a difference, and it provided a safe, non-toxic, powerful psychedelic that anyone could make with a few ingredients they buy at the grocery store. So that’s really, in some ways, what kept the psychedelics alive through the ’80s and ’90s. You know, the conversation never really stopped, and of course Terence was out there talking about it a lot, keeping the conversation alive.

1:18:07 And then we crossed into an era where people, you know, researchers began to look at psilocybin seriously, and we’re in that era now. Now we see the results of that. People put the foundation under the experience, and it sort of went from a recreational, like adventure in some other dimension or something, but then they began to find the actual therapeutic benefits for it, and we see what’s happened in the last decade. Now psilocybin is respectable, and the psychedelics are respectable and being accepted, you know, and some are about to get approval for use for depression.

1:18:59 That’s one of the big intractable depressions, and all the other things we know they’re good for: trauma, addictions, and so on. And we have the McKenna brothers to thank for a lot of that, right? I’m gonna thank you, guys. What do you remember about Terence? What do I remember about Terence?

1:19:21 How do you think of him nowadays? Boy, yeah, that’s, well, of course I miss him a lot, you know. I mean, we were very close at least for most of our lives. We had our moments, I think, all all siblings do, you know. And I’m saddened that some of those moments of estrangement, of doubt, came near at the end of his life.

1:19:54 But I feel like I’m not out of touch with him. I feel like we were so close that I can almost, in any situation, think what he would do, or how he would react, or what he would say to something. I mean, I can look down unto the left, and there he is, you know, this alter ego in some ways. Of course it’s not him. It’s my reconstruction of what he would have said, would have been.

1:20:24 Is he, is he your alter ego to a certain extent? Is he your alter ego because you were the younger one, the higher one? Right. Right. At times, I mean, I could channel him when need be, but he’s, he’s not really my alter.

1:20:41 I mean, I have my own identity. I am my own person, but I do miss what he brought to the table, you know. I was a sparkling conversationalist, full of ideas, far vaster, you know, much more widely read than I am, certainly, and that most people are. And so you couldn’t have a better companion to sit with and just discuss, maybe a pipe or two of hashish, or ayahuasca, that process. So I remember, I remember very fondly, and it’s very sad that he left, left his plane so early.

1:21:26 You know, I often wonder, how would it be? There’s no reason why he still shouldn’t be living. You know, he would only be, I’ll be 70 in a year. I’m 69, and about two weeks. So he was only four years older than me.

1:21:43 It’s a shame that he’s not around. I, I’m, you know, he died in 2000, which was the Millennial year, you know. And there was before 9/11, before Iraq, before any of this stuff had happened. I often wonder what he would think if he could assess the situation from the present. I think he would be not very surprised with what’s happened.

1:22:14 I mean, he, you, you can listen to his talks from the, from the ’90s. They’re as timely as if he recorded them yesterday. You know, he had this sense of the future and where we were going, and talked about that. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty dark future, at least for where we’re standing now, but he understood. And so in that sense, I think, I think people are still learning from him.

1:22:48 I mean, I’m always surprised how, you know, students that I’ve had when I was in academics would, you know, they would come up and say, everything I’ve learned I’ve learned from your brother, from the YouTubes and that sort of thing. He’s got this strange virtual existence in YouTube space. People are still listening. Still resonated with his message, and that’s because it doesn’t seem time- bound. It doesn’t seem dated at all.

1:23:23 It’s still very, very contemporary, even more so now. You know, what he talked about back in the ’90s, we’re now living through that era, and we have, we’re faced with a very narrow passage, and I think that, you know, I mean, this has become my preoccupation, pretty much. That’s why I’m starting this Academy and all that, because the idea is, if we’re gonna wake up to what’s happening, we have to have a global shift in consciousness, a reading of where our species stands in respect to the rest of nature.

1:24:09 We have to reinsure. We’ve been poisoned by 2,000 years of this idea that nature just is something there for us to exploit. Nature is done with that. Nature’s sending us a message that no, that’s not the case. You monkeys only think you’re running the show, and here’s the wake-up call, and you’ve got to reframe your whole understanding.

1:24:37 That’s a big part of the message of psychedelics that people are getting. You know, psychedelics are medicines that heal not only individuals, but they heal the collective soul. They heal even nature. This is the transpersonal aspect of psychedelics. So many people go to South America and take ayahuasca, they take mushrooms, whatever, and they come out of it with a renewed or an understanding of this relationship with nature that maybe they never thought about before.

1:25:14 And then they get, like, that the consciousness of the crisis that we’re facing, and how do you resolve, when you look at the news and you see we’re, you know, drilling for more oil, and there’s more plastic in the ocean, and there’s more species dying. You know, how do you sit with that, and also sit with the fact that more people are taking psychedelics and more people are connecting with, you know, their own reality hallucination? I mean, we have these two things that are going in seemingly opposite directions, seemingly opposite directions.

1:25:46 Yeah, and, yeah, I mean, the, the shift in consciousness has taken place, and it’s not just ayahuasca, it’s not just psychedelics, you know. I mean, they are catalysts. They’re catalysts for this change, but a lot of people are waking up, even those that are not into psychedelics. The question is, are we waking up fast enough? These trends seem to be accelerating, at least destructive trends.

1:26:21 So we woke up. We have to do something about it. We have to do something quickly. What do we do? And that’s what people are faced with, and what do we do that’s not going to completely disrupt people’s lives?

1:26:36 I mean, it may be that there is no way to do this. That people are going to have to radically change the way they live, which for people like us in the so-called developed world, that means we’re gonna have to pull our elbows in, because we’re the ones that are doing most of the consumption, most of the environmental destruction. The problem is there’s no leadership here. You know, this is something that governments should be getting together to collaborate on, on a global scale, to do something.

1:27:13 Well, you know, look at how dysfunctional the American government is. There’s no leader there. No leadership, as such. They don’t even accept climate change. There’s a real thing, so these people are not part of the solution, you know, and I’m just not sure.

1:27:34 I mean, I am not sure. I would like to think that there’s some hope, but I think that, you know, I mean, if you say there’s no hope, we may as well just work. We’re screwed, you know. We can’t. The Earth is headed toward breaking all of these parameters that tend to maintain equilibrium on the global scale.

1:28:05 We’re stretching those things to the breaking point, eventually they will break, and it won’t be possible to snap back, you know. Things tend toward equilibrium, but at a certain point, and I think this decade is very critical. I think 2020 to 2030 is really the most critical decade we’ve we’ve experienced as a species, because it will be within this period that we either wake up, begin to make the changes that can start to turn this thing around, and it will take much more than a decade to turn it around.

1:28:46 It’s like turning a battleship. But once you make the changes, slowly, slowly, you can begin to restore the situation. But if we don’t seize this opportunity, if we get to 2030 and look back, we’ll reach a point where I say, actually, we blew it. It’s too late. It’s too late, and then, you know, then I don’t know.

1:29:16 Then everybody we care about, ourselves, and you know, I mean, you have young children. Many of my friends do. You’ve got to wonder what kind of a world they’re gonna grow up in, you know, if we do not make changes, and we have to make them quickly. I don’t see, you know, nobody is stepping up to lead this, so it’s kind of like it’s up to the people. I think the plant medicines are just one of the catalysts that we can draw on to have this wake-up moment.

1:29:53 But it’s kind of like coming to an ayahuasca retreat. You have the retreat, you have the revelations, then the real work begins. The real work begins when you go home. That’s the question: what do we do as we integrate, as a species, these understandings about how we have to change the way we relate to nature? So that’s the whole rationale for, you know, for starting my new venture, the McKenna Academy for Natural Philosophy.

1:30:26 It’s a way to create a forum where we can look at everything from that perspective. We can hopefully attract the most brilliant minds to confront and talk about the issues of the day, and not just talk about them but try to come up with some solutions. So it’s a template in the tradition of the mystery schools. That’s why I call it a modern mystery school. What is the mystery?

1:30:57 The mystery is everything. The mystery is the cosmos. The mystery is trying to understand our place in nature, which, you know, is woefully misunderstood up to this point. Is it a chaotic venture? Probably, but, you know, you gotta do something.

1:31:21 This is what I do. And we are big fans and supporters of you and McKenna Academy, and people go to McKenna dot Academy to find out what’s going on there. There’s gonna be a lot of teaching and retreats and all this stuff. Go have a look at the website. Yeah, yeah, and we’re gonna dot Academy.

1:31:38 Yeah, yeah, and we’re building a website, but the basic idea is there. I, I’m, oh, yes, you can tell I started an academy. Essentially I’m an academic, even though mainstream academia, and I was in it for a while, but I was always on the edge, because I’m a little bit too edgy for them. But I taught you know, ethnopharmacology for 20 years at the University of Minnesota. I like teaching.

1:32:08 I believe in education. I believe that’s the answer to everything, if you can educate enough people in a compelling way, then people will come together, and that’s, you know, I call the Academy a catalytic nexus for the transformation of global consciousness, and catalysis in chemistry is where you drive a reaction, you know, you drive a reaction. It’s kind of like I am alchemical alembic, you know, it’s where the good chemistry takes place, and I want the Academy to be a kind of a cauldron where you can have these events, conferences, whatever, that really change people’s perspective.

1:32:59 And it may not work, but, you know, what can I do? I just, I mean, I sometimes say, you’ve heard me say I feel like I work for the plants, and in some ways the plants work me very hard, but It’s also a good mission, you know, and I’m just really acting on the message as I’ve gotten from the plants. And what can one person do? Not a lot, but collectively we can do a lot, and it seems to me that what we’re beginning to realize is governments are irrelevant.

1:33:39 Politics is irrelevant. None of that’s going to work. You know, these people are not going to, you know. And I just think they’re not going to get the wake-up call. So I think it’s put back on the people, and the changes will happen on a local level, and I think that’s probably how it will happen, as communities, you know, decentralized systems.

1:34:07 Are disabled, then they make their dysfunctional, and at the same time you have communities coming together, villages, or cities, and on that level very positive things are going on. For example, the so-called decriminalization movements that are happening in the States. You know, we’re a city. Denver declared, suicide, and they decriminalized psilocybin mushrooms. Then Oakland came along and decriminalized all the psychedelic plants and ayahuasca, mushrooms, peyote.

1:34:48 All the natural psychedelics are decriminalized now, and they’re allowed, they’re recognized, they’re not a public health threat. They are beneficial to many people. But the fact, but, but the deep, the fact that you can even discuss decriminalization is a measure of the way the conversation is changing, you know, because the very idea that you could criminalize any of these things is absurd, if you think about it. You know, who gives us the authority to declare another species criminal and rationalize potentially its eradication, you know, from the biosphere?

1:35:37 Which is, you know, the goal of many drug control programs, which of course are miserable failures. We should be thankful for that. Even things like coca. I mean, coca is a very beneficial plant, used as a natural medicine. So when you extract cocaine from it and use it that way, that potentially it can be harmful.

1:35:57 But you know, this idea that you can, you know, to yourself or the human species, the right to criminalize any other organism is an example of how out of kilter our perspective is. And I’m trying to push back by asserting that we should think of symbiosis. Any relationship we form with any other organism that’s beneficial, maybe a food plant or medicine or a psychedelic or whatever, is an example of symbiosis. Symbiosis is a close relationship between different species, usually one that has mutual benefit for both species.

1:36:49 An obvious example is insects and plants. You know, insects pollinate plants, they depend on everything to complete their life cycles. That’s a close symbiosis. It’s all mediated by plant chemicals, and these signal transduction processes, chemical exchanges between organisms. Well, essentially, if we adopt a plant as a medicine and consume the molecules that it contains that happen to resemble transmitters, from which we get meaningful information, that’s symbiosis, right?

1:37:28 Cooperation. Cooperation. What they told us, it’s cirrhosis, is a fancy word for cooperation. But what about the survival of the fittest? That’s what they taught us happens in nature.

1:37:38 That’s what they taught us. It turns out, yes, competition still goes on. It’s not like it’s absent from nature, but I think current understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes is symbiosis is much more important than competition and survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, and all that. Species advance by cooperating, by having symbiosis and collaboration. So I’m prepared to declare that symbiosis should be declared a basic human right, you know, and we should have the right to symbiosis with any damn plant or fungus that we want to.

1:38:22 You know, and because it’s not about humans, we should say it’s organismic. Right? Organisms should have the right to form symbiosis, and government should not interfere. It’s a sacrosanct function of being biological, just as much as, say, women’s reproductive rights should be viewed as a biological biological thing, and policy and all this should stay out of that. Well, they should stay out of our right to form symbiosis as well.

1:39:00 So, you know, enter into these relationships with plants and fungi. In some ways it is a revolutionary act, but in some ways it’s just the way we live. I mean, we’re in symbiosis with our food plants. We’re in symbiosis with, you know, any other thing that we get benefit from, and we usually benefit the organism in return. You know, Michael Pollan writes very interestingly, eloquently about this before he was famous for writing about psychedelics.

1:39:36 He wrote about food. He was the food editor for the New York Times, and he would talk about the symbiosis between, you know, humans and crop plants. He loved to talk about corn. Corn was the perfect capitalist plant. It fits the global petroleum- driven monoculture agriculture that we practice, and he would say, are we cultivating corn, or is corn cultivating us?

1:40:06 You know, optimizing its dominance of the world through these monkeys, that it’s, you know, convinced to create this infrastructure to spread corn around the world. You could ask the same question of ayahuasca. Why? Well, I have these plants emerged on the global stage within the last decade or two. All of a sudden ayahuasca is everywhere.

1:40:34 You know, it’s in Hawaii. It spread from Hawaii around the world, and then now we have cannabis suddenly rising up and taking a global presence, and then we have mushrooms. These things have been around forever. Why is it now that they’re coming out, and that everyone’s excited about these things, and they’re getting accepted? And maybe this is a sign of this shift in consciousness.

1:41:02 I mean, I would hope so. And this is maybe plant intelligence that may be, in part, plant intelligence working their long game. Yeah, they play a long game. That’s right. Things they’re gonna be here after we kill ourselves.

1:41:16 Yeah, well, they’re totally, but we’ll be here after we kill ourselves, and whatever we do to the planet, life will survive. I mean, the evolution and the history of the planet has shown us that, you know, at times 98 percent of the species on the planet have gone extinct, and through that narrow passage, that usually leads to proliferation of life, following that, to biodiversity, of all that. But these are processes that play out over hundreds of millions of years.

1:41:56 They’re not short. They are the really long game, you know. Sometimes I say Gaia, you know, the idea of Gaia as the you know, the kind of the biosphere, or was the community of sentient species that maintains life on this planet within tolerable parameters. You know, Gaia is going to survive. Gaia is one tough cookie.

1:42:27 We are not so tough, and if necessary, we will be thrown off like fleas off the dog’s back, so that the rest of life can survive. And it will be, we’ll be in for some rough periods, but the so this is the plant’s last-ditch effort. This is the plant’s last ditch as ambassadors, in some ways, or messengers from Gaia. They’ve come on the global stage. They’ve always been here.

1:42:59 They’ve always been under the stewardship of indigenous people, which are, again, a marginalized part of the population, and that’s not been good enough, so now the plants have stepped down and they’re basically saying hello, you know, we’re here, and we have a message for all of you, all of the species, and you need to listen. You need to wake up before it’s too late. So it’s them waking up the monkeys, catalyst, and we got ten years. We have roughly, we have ten years not to survive.

1:43:33 I mean, we’ll change, but we have ten years. We’ll look back and say, we’ve either turned this around or it’s too late, you know, because the longer we wait, the harder it is to turn it around. You can deal with a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees. You know, that’s a huge warming on a global scale. If you’re looking at three to five degrees centigrade, you’re done, you know.

1:44:03 That’s pretty much, and some climatologists are saying that’s where it’s gonna go, you know. And so the worse the impact is, the more radical the solutions you have to apply as you approach what amounts to this environmental singularity, you know. And then, so then you come into discussions about geoengineering and, you know, transformation of the climate on a massive scale, which may become necessary, you know, but you don’t know what the consequences of that are.

1:44:44 We know what the consequences are of doing nothing, you know. So we have to bring all possible solutions to the table, everything, everything that we might do. And, you know, there are simple things that everyone can do. Will they have an impact, like recycling and that sort of thing, driving less, buying electric cars, all that? And that’s all useful, and maybe if enough people did it, we can have an impact, but I think we’re reaching the point where we need you know, really radical solutions, and they exist.

1:45:26 You know, the technology exists. It’s not that we don’t know what the answers are. We just need a commitment on the level of, you know, multiple Moon projects, essentially, to apply the technologies that we have, and then we need the commitment on the global scale to do this. And people say, well, it, you know, it’s too expensive, and that, you know, people will lose jobs. Well, that’s not really understanding what’s going on in the first place.

1:45:59 If governments would make a real commitment toward developing clean energy, carbon zero technologies, it would not. You wouldn’t lose jobs. You create millions of jobs, because you’ve got to develop these things and deploy them. That’s gonna employ a lot of people to do that. So that argument doesn’t fit.

1:46:22 And I think do you ever try to understand the people that just don’t seem to see this coming? Do you ever try, or does it just frustrate you, by saying, just can’t you see in front of you? Even five years down the road, you know, it’s gonna be your kids as well, and your grandkids. And don’t you see how important this is? Do you get angry?

1:46:44 Do you get frustrated? Or do you know that that’s a result of someone’s reality, they’re a reality hallucination, living in the mind, the ego? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do get angry. I do get frustrated, because it is a refusal to look beyond your reality that you create.

1:47:07 Yeah, I mean, it’s a fear of stepping out of your comfort zone, and denial, but denial only goes so far. Sooner or later, your comfort zone is gonna be seriously disrupted, you know, whether you like it or not. So it’s better to anticipate that and prepare for it, and do what you can to mitigate the impact of it, rather than just deny it. I mean, that is not a solution. And, you know, unfortunately that seems to be the mindset of most politicians and people that actually control the levers of power.

1:47:50 And we’ve seen again and again through history that at a certain point all those structures get swept away, you know, because they’re not part of the solution, and inevitably they’ll be swept away. But now we’re talking, you know, you can look back at specific civilizations where this happened. Now we’re talking about global civilization, so when this begins to break down, it’s, it’s not gonna be pretty, you know. And I don’t know, I don’t know. I mean, I’m old, right?

1:48:28 I’m old relative to many people. I’m only gonna be here another thirty years probably, and, but people like yourself, people that are younger, they’re going to be around for a long time, and those are the people I’m concerned about, you know. It’s a, I really don’t know. I don’t have the answers. I know what I can do as a teacher and a believer in plant medicines.

1:49:02 I can bring people to that experience, and hopefully what they learn will propagate beyond that and have an impact beyond that. Do you see progress, Dennis? Are you hopeful, or is it not enough? I am hopeful, in part because, a, it’s not useful not to be hopeful. You know, I mean, you can give in to despair.

1:49:35 You could say, it’s an oh, my star. Saying we’ve lost, it’s too late, we can’t do anything, we may as well just party on, you know, and let’s just descend into hedonism and every kind of experience that we can have: drugs, sex, rock and roll, and so on, because the party’s gonna be over pretty soon. And I guess maybe that’s an honest reaction to what’s happening. I mean, I’m not particularly, you know, a party animal, but, you know, what I mean. Just say, just experience as much self-centered kind of experience as you can, but that’s not going to work.

1:50:23 I’m hopeful that there’s still a chance. I don’t, I really don’t know. I mean, honestly, I have to say, but I’d rather be hopeful than despairing. I mean, despair leads to depression, and I’m not depressed, you know. Maybe I should be.

1:50:44 Maybe we all should be, but on the other hand, if we’re all depressed, we’re also powerless, you know. Depression is something that paralyzes people, and many, many people are depressed, you know, but I don’t know. Depression, that’s not an answer. Giving up is not an answer. You just, and you can always hope.

1:51:08 I mean, I think, like I say, I think there are solutions. You know, there are solutions. There are technologies. What is needed is a commitment to apply them, to really, really make a serious effort, for example, to move beyond petroleum. I mean, that’s a no-brainer, you know.

1:51:38 We need there needs to be a global declaration that petroleum, fossil fuel, as a source of energy will be obsolete by some given time. By 2030 it will be prohibited, illegal to use any fossil fuel. So that forces you, you know, you, as a species, to develop alternative forms of energy. There are gonna have to be some draconian measures put in place. That’s also something that worries me.

1:52:16 You know, in response to the environmental crisis, there’s a temptation to, you know, approach it using authoritarianism. There may be no way around that, with a certain level, for example. to it using authoritarianism. There may be no way around that, with a certain level, for example. You know, one idea that’s been proposed to help reduce the impact.

1:52:44 I mean, at some level the problem with what’s on the planet, the problem with what’s happening there, are too many people on this planet. I mean, it’s simply true. There are seven billion people of us crawling around this planet, impacting it in the ways that we do. So how do you reduce that population? Many ways to do that, most of them not ways that we would want to go, you know.

1:53:14 But what about, what about, if every woman were to say they would have no more than one child within one generation? You’d begin to see the demographic collapse of the population, right? And it would, it would rapidly deflate. But how do you get people to buy into that? How do you get people to say, well, well, I’ll bide by that?

1:53:40 Well, you have to impose it. China tried this, and it didn’t really work, but, you know, that’s one possible way. I don’t know. I mean, if you know, I’ve been, if I had the answers, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here. I’m not sure.

1:53:59 I’m really not sure. What about you, Dennis? What are you doing five years from now? 2025. What is your life look like if everything goes well?

1:54:07 What are you doing with your time? What’s the Academy doing? Everything five years from now? Yeah, well, hopefully the Academy will be up and running and healthy, and we’re hoping to have a physical location for it eventually. I think that, you know, in South America, I think that, I think the whole world is going to be impacted by climate change, but I think South America may be a little bit less.

1:54:38 The real, the Syria, more serious problems are gonna take place in the Northern Hemisphere, and it’s happening in the south, but not as fast, and because of the tradition of agriculture and so on, there is a, there is a, you know, there’s a better chance of having a sustainable life post-apocalypse, I guess you could say, down there. Anyway, I would like for the Academy to have some kind of a base by that time, and do the things that we do, you know, and be able to respond to the situation, and become an influencer in this global voice through the work that we do with plant medicines, with the conferences, with, you know, courses, even research, and that sort of thing, working with the most brilliant minds that we can attract to the cause. And I guess my role there is, you know, even though it’s the McKenna Academy, I mean, it sounds incredibly egotistical to call it after myself, but a lot of people have said, well, it’s your idea, so step up and own it.

1:55:59 So I’ve owned it. Good. But that said, it’s all about collaboration. It’s all about symbiosis, and that’s symbiosis and co-evolutionary partnership with nature. You know, these are kind of the cardinal tenets of the Academy, and recognizing that arrogance is out of place for our species.

1:56:27 Humility is much more appropriate, and an openness to learning and changing. And the Academy, some people have said, well, you know, you’re gonna go down there and start a cult, aren’t you? You’re gonna start a cult. I actually, I know I’m gonna start an anti-cult, because the Academy is a place where I want people to learn how to think for themselves. That’s the thing.

1:56:55 There’s no dogma. There’s no doctrine. There’s nothing that people have to accept, other than trust in their own god-given ability to think, you know, and to think, and really use their heads. So we don’t exclude ideas. We say, bring them all to the table.

1:57:17 Let’s talk about them, you know, and let’s teach people how to evaluate good stuff from bad stuff. People have abdicated the ability for analytical thinking, you know, so we want to reintroduce that. We want to essentially replicate the well, these nature-based mystery religions, you know, which Eleusis was the kind of the longest-lived, and maybe the prime example, where everyone who was part of Hellenic society made a pilgrimage to Eleusis, and there they had an experience, which was undoubtedly some kind of a psychedelic experience, that they were not allowed to talk about.

1:58:12 They weren’t supposed to. Of course, some did, and there were times in the history of Eleusis when the sacrament was even stolen, you know, and taken to other places and used. The famous heretic Alcibiades did this, and was having essentially acid parties in his house. He stole the sacrament, but hopefully we can avoid that. But the mystery school was where everyone came to get the lesson, to assimilate the lessons of their culture.

1:58:48 We see this a lot in similar things, events in indigenous culture, ancestral initiations, and this sort of thing, such as his practice in with ibogaine in the, in the bwiti. So the, you know, the Academy is a place for the exploration of ideas, good ones, bad ones, whatever. All can be brought, but hopefully the best ones will emerge as what we talk about, so and what we, what we do. And I don’t know. I don’t want to impose.

1:59:33 I have a vision, but I want to let the Academy evolve organically, and let other brilliant people come and bring what they want to do to the table, but I, and it’s basically an educational institution. You know, you know, doing what you do. Similarly, you know, we’re aware of the problem of media, of television, of social media, of all these things as a way to propagate memes and ideas. So I want to take full advantage of that, and you know, I want the Academy to be the nexus where this takes place.

2:00:21 I mean, I can share my, make a little money, megalomaniacal fantasy with you. Maybe I will. Please, this is not enough. This is not megalomaniacal enough. I have a fantasy that we should buy a Zeppelin.

2:00:40 I’ve heard this one. You’ve heard this one. Come on, tell us. Turns out there’s a lot of renewed interest in Zeppelins. There’s, as a partial solution to the global transport problem, they’re low-carbon.

2:00:57 They’re essentially zero carbon. They’re new technologies, some of the new designs for these Zeppelins. They’re designed to spend extended periods in the troposphere, and they’re a solution to global transport, you know, and they’re just so bloody neat, you know. They’d be there. This is every ten-year-old’s fantasy, right?

2:01:22 I want to create a Zeppelin. I want to get a Zeppelin. I don’t know how I’ll raise the money for this, but if people resonate with the idea, the money will come. The idea of the, it could become a floating Academy, a floating campus of the Academy, and it would be basically a center for eco- activism and education. You could deploy it above the Amazon, for example, and actually, with telescopic, you know, long-distance photography and so on, you could show people in real time what is going on.

2:02:03 You could show them the burning rainforests and this sort of thing, broadcast globally, propagated over social media. This is gonna help wake people up. And you have, you can do seminars, or on board you can have people presenting while you watch this happening. I think it would be tremendously powerful as an educational tool. The Mechana blimp, the Mechana Zeppelin.

2:02:32 Yeah, I’m an athlete of them. Maybe, well, let’s start with what, because we’re talking big money here, you know, and we’ll have to figure out how to keep people from shooting it down, but there’s those stealth technologies for that, you know. And let’s start with one. You can even, we can even have global, we could have ayahuasca ceremonies on board the Zeppelin that broadcast that to the world, you know. And I think it could be a tremendously powerful tool, you know, and it would fulfill my boyhood fantasy.

2:03:13 I was a big Tom Swift fan back in the day. Probably most of you don’t even know who Tom Swift is. Vaguely familiar? Huh. Did he have, like, inventions and ideas?

2:03:25 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like this boy inventor, you know, Tom Swift, and his, you know, marvelous airship, and that sort of thing. So it kind of comes back to that. It’s probably a fantasy. Who knows?

2:03:40 Maybe somebody who sees your movie will say, yeah, I like that idea, here’s a hundred million dollars, let’s do this thing. That’s about what it would take. A hundred million dollars, much less than the bomber cost. Dennis, to somebody who’s watching, maybe this, and is hearing about psychedelics for the first time, I just kind of want to close with something they can do. What if someone has hurt us today and thinks that you’re not as crazy as they thought you were, that maybe if a guy can wear a pinstripe suit and drink ayahuasca, maybe it’s not so bad?

2:04:16 How do they start this journey? What’s the best way for them to, I don’t know, maybe explore their consciousness? Yeah, well, I think the first, you do, you educate yourself. You know, you read up about it. An excellent resource that I always like to plug here is Erowid.org.

2:04:37 Erowid is an online database about drugs of all sorts, every psychoactive drug you ever imagined, and a lot you’ve never imagined, they don’t even want to know about. But they have very good resources on psychedelics. They have the ayahuasca vault, the mushroom vault, every psychedelic you might be interested in. That’s a good place to start. You can look at those pages and get a crash course, just a general overview of what these things are, what the chemistry is, what the plants are, and then link out from there to two different articles that you can read about them.

2:05:17 So that’s a place to start. Of course, utilize other resources like Google, but then, you know, Google is for everything. And another, if you’re a science geek, if you want to know more about the scientific side, excellent resource, again, is PubMed, which is put out by the National Library of Medicine in the States, but it’s, it’s global. It’s open to anybody. And if you go to PubMed, if you want to know what the current state of the art is, scientifically, in terms of clinical studies, chemical investigations, even a lot of ethnobotany is on there.

2:06:02 So you go to PubMed, and they have very sophisticated search terms, search ways to structure your search, so you can get a picture, a kind of a snapshot of where the science is, if that’s what you’re interested in. So it’s a matter of education, and then once you’ve become more informed about it, if you’re looking for yourself personally, you know, if you maybe want to go to a retreat or something like that, I think you can, these days, there are, in many cities, psychedelic societies. They’re cropping up all over, kind of like mushrooms.

2:06:52 They’re popping up all over. So in Minneapolis, in San Francisco, LA, New York, New Orleans, Portland, in all of these areas there are psychedelic societies. They have conferences, and they have a community of interest. My brother used to say, find the others. This is a way to find the others.

2:07:19 You will not necessarily collect directly with psychedelics, but you will meet people there who can perhaps give you some guidance. I mean, they’re all about, well, you know, we don’t, they’re not about dispensing drugs. They’re about education, but through the community you can find reliable, you know, practitioners, both undergrad, well, underground, mostly, who can help you find these experiences or help you find an appropriate retreat, and all that.

2:07:53 So you can do everything that you can. Work through the channels, work through trusted networks. You know, don’t ask, ask people that you trust, and eventually you’ll find something that looks like the right fit, and then eventually you might want to come to one of these retreats, or you might find something locally, and so on. It’s just a process of becoming informed about it, and then at some point you may decide, okay, I’m ready, I want to do this, I want to seek it out, and it has a way of seeking you out.

2:08:38 You’ll know when that time comes. I mean, the opportunity will present itself, and you’ll feel like this is right, this feels right, and then go for it, you know. Put your fears aside, just take the risk, do it. Sound advice. Yeah, I took 18 months to go from the first time I heard about ayahuasca on the Joe Rogan experience to London, before I really even went to, until I had my first ceremony, even months of research and looking into it.

2:09:13 There’s no hurry, there’s no deadline. You know, the more you can study and then inform yourself, the better, you know, but at a certain stage you have to say, okay, I think I kind of have a handle on this. So now I’m ready to have the experience, you know. And then you have it, and then you realize, well, you realize it probably wasn’t what you expected anyway, but in some ways, you know, what it’s gonna be like, so you know it’s a it’s a personal choice, you know, and really at the end, that’s the most important thing, is this encounter between you and the medicine, which I gather is a way of saying the encounter between you and whatever the medicine gives you access to.

2:10:04 You know, but psychedelics are unique in this way. I mean, it’s a beautiful thing: nobody can have your psychedelic experience for you. You know, this is not something you can delegate. You know, so you have to do it. You have to take responsibility for your own experience.

2:10:24 There are a few things in life like that. You know, most everything else is delegable. I guess, I mean, certain, you know, you can’t delegate your birth. You can’t delegate your death. You can’t delegate, you know, making love.

2:10:40 It’s, it’s pretty much got to be you participating in that. Well, psychedelics are like that. This is ultimately, it comes down to you and your ability to, you know, push that envelope, Dennis. Very much looking forward to showing you our movie tonight, Reconnect. I very much appreciate your friendship.

2:11:10 I appreciate you coming here four years ago when you were very busy and tired that day, and started getting to know each other. We’ve had great conversations, walking through Hampstead Heath, we went down to Costa Rica together. I laid next to you for two ayahuasca ceremonies. The plants told me to take care of Dennis, I guess, I told me to protect Dennis, but the plants helped me get that right. Right, so that’s my mission.

2:11:37 We can credit the plants, but I’m glad they did. And yeah, I’ve really enjoyed our interactions through the years. Very much. Thank you for inviting me to this, and this is a special occasion, very special for me. Yeah, well, I’m looking forward to showing it to you.

2:11:56 You know, a lot of what we talked about today is talked about in the movie, and inside. In Costa Rica we talked about how we could find a way to get this message out there, and so in a weird way, the movie is that message. And I’d like to think that we have something here that can get out there into the minds of all sorts of people, and get them to just entertain a different conversation, and that’s everybody, not people from the left and people from the psychedelic community, but people from the right and people in the oil and gas community.

2:12:28 I want everybody able to watch this and walk away with just a new perspective. That’s it. Yeah, we’re not really trying to convince anybody other than to say, there is another perspective. There’s another way you can look at this stuff, and you know, this movie is going to be very important, I think, as a way to, I mean, for me certainly, because it’s kind of the global coming out of the Academy, and this whole idea that we’ve been sort of discussing for a while now.

2:13:01 It’s out there, and there is a there. There is a website up, which we’re actively in the hansung, but people can go and look at that, and so for me this is huge, just in terms of making the world aware that this is here, and we’re interested in collaboration and symbiosis. That’s that’s that’s the way we roll. In a way, well, I look forward to our further symbiosis, you know. Uh, people check that out, is McKenna dot Academy.

2:13:33 There’ll be a link below. They can go check that out and learn all about what you’re doing. And yeah, I just want to say thank you so much, Dennis. I want to say I love you very much. I appreciate you.

2:13:43 This was an incredible conversation, and I look forward to having many more in the future. You told me recently that we’re doing another movie at some point. I didn’t know that, but I think, what that we’re doing another movie together, is that true? You and, yes, we’re doing another movie. Yeah, I can’t share that with you.

2:14:00 Yes, yes. You ready, Brian? This one’s gonna rock your song. You and the plants and our director Lewis are conspiring against me, but Reconnect the sequel. No, no, we’re not conspiring against.

2:14:14 Yeah, we’re in Skye conspiring to inspire you. Okay, yeah, yeah. Well, look, and, and, and, and the movie, everyone will see that I needed a little bit of a push from Dennis to get out of my default network, in my reality hallucination. I think we all need that sometimes. It’s great to have people like you that can rip me out of it for a while, and shake me up and wake me up a little bit.

2:14:39 So, um, yeah, to the future, Dennis. Again, thank you so much. I really appreciate you, and let’s do more of these. All right, thank you, Brian. It’s been great.

2:14:48 Thanks, Dennis.