Dennis McKenna - The Screaming Abyss

Full transcript: Dennis McKenna on London Real

8:21 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dennis McKenna, who has studied psychedelics for over 40 years, with his research focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. You are the brother of well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna, and are a founding board member and the director of ethnopharmacology at the Heffter Research Institute. Your book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, chronicles your lifelong relationship with your older brother Terence.

8:49 Dennis, it’s a real honor. Welcome to London Real. Thank you, Graeme. It’s a pleasure to be here. You know, the picture of the two of you on your book of these two boys with these 50s haircuts, it just, I had to ask you about that.

9:03 You know, you can see a picture of it there and I’m sure you chose that one. You know, I, it makes me just want to ask, and first I want to say how you started the book with a passage. You said, “Reality is a hallucination concocted by our brains. Memory is a fragmented tapestry patched with confabulation.” I was wondering, did you ever imagine that these two brothers with the 50s haircuts from an Irish family in Colorado were about to go on this incredible adventure?

9:30 No, never imagined it. And I’ve never imagined it. I mean, that, that pat, that passage, that thing I put in the book, is almost a disclaimer. You know, it’s a way of wiggling out of what, or undoubtedly there are inaccuracies in the book because much of it depends on recollection, and as I was writing the book I was appalled at some points in the gaps in memory. But you know, you remember what’s important, what you feel is important.

10:03 Whether you remember it accurately is another, you know, is another matter. But, uh, I mean, to the degree I could, I made it accurate, but that was my excuse to say, well, not everything in here is going to be absolutely correct, but to the extent that I could, I made it, I made it accurate. And I don’t, and you know, I’m Irish, right? And so as my brother was, and you, you are as well, so you know, so we, and we Irish men understand: don’t let facts stand in the way of a good story, right?

10:40 To the gab. Yeah, yeah, but to a certain degree I tried to make my book accurate within my recollection. I found that I was regretting not keeping better notes at certain junctures of life, but at other junctures I did keep good notes, and so that, that helped. Um, but yeah, so was this a book you always knew you were going to write at some point, or was this something that you just kind of woke up one day and just decided it was about time to do it? No, more like that.

11:10 I didn’t really think I was going to write this personal memoir, but it seemed that, you know, after Terence died, you know, it was very difficult for me. When he died I grieved very much, and still do for him. We were so close and it seemed like such a, such a loss, and, and it was almost as though a part, a deep part of me was just ripped out of me, so I was wounded. And it took me, you know, that long to come to the conclusion that, well, I, you know, as Terence was famous for being a good story, a storyteller, I feel like I had a side to the story.

11:55 I had an aspect of our shared experiences that I wanted to share with the world, and so it was a confluence of this desire to do that and, and the opportunity. You know, but it was ten years after Terence died that I really came to that conclusion, and at the time I thought, well, I have to get an agent and I have to find somebody that’s interested in this story and so on, and I don’t really know if I can do that, but I, I talked to Dan Levy, who was Terence’s agent, uh, at the time, and I knew Dan pretty well, and I asked him, and he said, well, um, you know, there’s this new thing going, and this was 2011, and maybe 2010, I guess it was the end of 2010, this new thing called Kickstarter is, is going and people are funding their own projects through this Kickstarter, and I, I said, well gee, that sounds good, you know, I’ll look into that.

12:57 And I did, and I decided to go for it, you know, and do a Kickstarter campaign, because I figured that if anybody had an existing fan base that might support this kind of thing, certainly it would be Terence, and there’s a community out there that really loves Terence, as I discovered. So I decided to put a Kickstarter campaign out there, and as it turned out it was a right judgment, because I raised more money for a book than had ever been raised on Kickstarter before. So I raised ninety thousand 000, which, you know, nobody was more amazed than I was.

13:37 That gave me the, the resources to take time off and write the book, pay for its publishing, pay for its, some degree, its advertisement. So, so I did it and it’s turned out to be, it was a good idea, it’s turned out to be a mixed bag in some ways because when you publish your own book, you know, you don’t have a publishing company behind you, you don’t even have, you know, I mean, I, I am the promoter, I’m the, I’m the warehouse foreman, I do the shipping, I do it all. You know, although I have a lot of them on Amazon.

14:15 But all in all, I do not regret writing the book at all. It’s, it’s opened a lot of doors for me, and, uh, I’ve been many interesting places as a result of, a result of having written it, I think, and, and it’s been also personally very good. It’s been a chance for me to really in some ways integrate, and you know, some of that grieving and some of what I, what I had been feeling. You know, the book was a very cathartic experience for me. It was not easy to write some passages of it.

14:55 I have no regrets, I’m glad I wrote it. I wrote a, I read a blog that you wrote when you were at your kitchen table when you got your funding, and you were like, uh-oh, now I have to write this thing, right? And that was the first reaction: oh man, what have I done? Now I’m in deep trouble, I have to do it. But, but I got over that and managed to, you know, over the 18 months or so it took to write it, I managed to get a good workflow doing, and finally settled down into it, and, uh, you know, and wrote it, and it’s been well received, you know, by, in, in most quarters.

15:38 Um, you know, and of course after you finish and after it’s actually in print, then I think every author thinks of different passages, different ways it could have been better, and only the author knows all the, you know, the flaws in the book, of which there are many, but why, and not, not inaccuracies and such, just things I either left out that I meant to put in or, you know, but that’s okay. I mean, it may not be the only book I ever write, hopefully it won’t, but, uh, it’s beautifully written. It is what it is.

16:17 It’s beautiful to read, and it’s, thank you. It’s very personal. It is very personal. I was curious when you first started writing, were you thinking, okay, I’m just going to start out with the facts and then tell a few stories, or did you know right away that you needed to go in and get vulnerable about a lot of your emotions over the years? I, uh, yeah, I didn’t want to just write a dry narrative.

16:41 You know, I knew that this was going to be a personal story, and that was part of the, the reason to write it, was, as I say, for my own kind of healing and emotional, uh, you know, integration of all these things, so I wanted it to be a personal story, and, uh, you know, I, uh, sort of based on the feedback from the Kickstarter, uh, audience. Of course many other people besides them have now bought it, but based on that I felt that I’m not writing to a hostile audience. I’m writing to a hostile, an audience that really cares about the Terry and Danny story, if you will, and understands, and they’re not looking for, uh, you know, to pick it apart, and people haven’t, and, and there’s been plenty of opportunity to.

17:35 I have, most of the response that I’m aware of has been really supportive, and, and as you say, congratulations, and, and good for you for writing an honest tale. So I did, so I feel like it accomplished what I wanted it to. Um, yeah, and I was wondering, were you, were you close with Terence when he died in 2000, or had you kind of, I know you kind of gone your separate ways, kind of when you came back from La Chorrera, and you know, one kind of the bard way, one the research way, and I want to hear more about that, but you know, in 2000, were you close at that time?

18:14 Oh yes, we were very, we were close when he died. I mean, when he died, you know, uh, or when he got sick, we, you know, we were never that far apart, you know, we were, we went our separate ways, but it wasn’t really separate. We had lots of interaction and, and we remained close for most of our life, but we’d gone through a period where we were somewhat at loggerheads about certain issues, you know, and, uh, uh, you know, and I think the last decade of Terence’s life was very difficult for him.

18:55 I think he was conflicted in lots of ways about many things, his divorce and his career and, you know, his investment in the Timewave theory, which he was beginning to seriously doubt, and you know, he was, he was suffering in some ways, and, uh, and you know, looking back I’m actually kind of ashamed that I didn’t, that I wasn’t more aware, more supportive of him in some ways. I was maybe, uh, you know, honestly I was maybe, uh, part of what was, uh, what was bugging him at the time, and I should have been more in, supportive during that period. But, but we were friendly and I, I think he always knew.

19:47 I mean, we were sort of getting through this, right? And I think he always knew that I loved him. I don’t think there was ever any question about that. And, uh, and even though we may have drifted apart and we had our little, uh, tiffs, you know, and, and, and that sort of thing, you know, but when he got sick I just basically dropped everything and I was there for him, you know. And the day I heard he was sick, that he had been, had this episode where he had had these seizures on the Big Island, been airlifted to Honolulu, and all that, that came to me like 24 hours after the event, and it came in the form of voicemail left on, on my office phone by Dan Levy, by this editor who was very close to him.

20:40 He, you know, left this message and says, something’s going on out there, I’m headed out to Hawaii. You know, and so I, when I got the message, immediately I called Dan and said, okay, I’m, I’m on the plane, I’m there. So I went out immediately, and, you know, Terence was by then in the hospital in Honolulu, and, uh, and pretty much I just put my whole life on hold uh, for the next year, uh, and, uh, it was just, okay, I’m there for you, whatever, whatever needs to happen, I’m here for you.

21:22 Uh, it was, it was easy, it was difficult to do that, but, but career-wise it was okay, it was easy to do that because I didn’t have anything like a real job at the time, you know. I was a consultant working for different companies in the natural products world, that’s what I’d done for the last few years, so I controlled my own schedule, you know, and I was just able to put all that aside and that, so then my, um, you know, my preoccupation for the next year was to, uh, you know, whatever difference Terence’s, I had had at that time, just put all that aside, you know, and it was just, I’m there for my brother. And, uh, what was it like, that last year?

22:11 Was he, uh, was he optimistic? No, it was hard. It was diagnosis, pretty much this diagnosis is a death sentence for most people. It’s 98 mortality. It’s the most virulent kind of brain cancer that there is, and when he got the diagnosis in Honolulu, you know, excellent neuro-oncologist and all that, but he knows, you know, I was there by then at the hospital, as well as Terence’s son and Dan and other people, other significant people, um, but when we, when we, when Dr., when the neuro-oncologist came to the hospital to discuss the diagnosis, he was very blunt.

23:04 He just said, you know, my advice, we’ll do everything we can, but you know, my advice to you is, you know, put your affairs in order. Which is a pretty, uh, telling thing, you don’t want to hear that, you know, but he was honest, and he said, you know, and you know, he said, and he had operated on many people, worked with many people with this, with this disease, the doctor had never, s, never had been able to save a single patient. And I told him, you know, you must be one of the most depressed physicians possible, and why do you keep doing this?

23:49 He said, well, maybe one day, you know. And he was very, uh, very good, very open to alternative therapies and all that, so we went into it with our eyes open, pretty much, that we knew, or we, Terence and his loved ones, knew that the time was short. That being said, we decided to do, you know, as they say, everything we can, and, uh, and my job in a way, and that way in that time, became, at least as I saw it, and I think as Terence, on, is it to be the kind of the expert, because I’m the only one with any background in medicine or pharmacology and all that.

24:38 So, so we went ahead with the treatments that the doctor recommended. They said it was not operable, that they couldn’t, uh, get this tumor out without really damaging his brain, so the first thing they recommended was this thing called the Gamma Knife, which is basically you fire a high-energy beam of gamma rays into the tumor and try to stun it and, and slow it down, and maybe kill it even, or kill big parts of it, um, and that, that’s good, that’s the first thing you do, it’s non-invasive, you know, but it’s a, it’s a pretty radical treatment, so they did that, and then they followed up with radiation treatments, with standard and, they did that and it slowed it down for a while, but then as time went on began to come back again, and that’s pretty much what they said it would do.

25:35 They checked him out and they, they said, you know, not only is it not working, it appears to be spreading now into his spinal cord and all that, which was a very unexpected result because these, these, uh, central nervous system tumors, they rarely spread. This one was actually spreading, so at that point it was like, that was the point in which the doctor said, there’s nothing we can do. Okay, you know, okay, threw up their hands and said there’s nothing we can do, and that was like mid-January, and he was in, he was in San Francisco, and, uh, he had some very close friends, this is where your real friends really come to the, you know, come up, step up to the plate, who said they would basically make his, their home in San Rafael available to him as a hospice site, and, and he went and, and there he was until he died, and we tried, uh, all sorts of alternative therapy at that point, I mean, and had been all through, without really putting much faith that it would work.

26:56 We tried a lot of different things, but you know, the upshot, as well as, was that none of it worked. He was really in a state of rapid decline, and he died on the third of April, so, so he died about a month shy of a year of his diagnosis. So, so the gene therapy did really nothing to prolong his life. What was the reaction with the, to the community when he died, to the community? Well, of course the people were devastated, you know.

27:30 I mean, there was an outpouring of, uh, sympathy for everybody, for the family and everything, um. There was a group at the time called the Novelty Group, uh, which was about, you know, it was a discussion group about the Timewave and all that, beautiful people. They got together, uh, a CD, uh, called Journey Through the Spheres that was just put together and donated to the family, all sold just to provide some money for the family and so on. It was, I don’t think it ever sold a lot, but the gesture was nice, you know, and just, what do you do in this situation, you know, it’s just horrible, it’s just, there’s nothing good to be said about it.

28:22 But I certainly, uh, you know, throughout all this whole process I really was very moved by how many folk, you know, people feel a personal involvement, I think, in our story and our adventure and so on, so so when the ships are down, these people were there, and I really appreciate that, and I still do, and, you know, and that continues in some ways, that’s why 10 years later I can put up a Kickstarter and that fan base is still out there. Is Terence more famous now than he was in 2000? You know, he may be.

29:03 It’s interesting what’s happened to, you know, to him, which is that he has never really gone away, you know. He’s present on the YouTube and, and the internet, mostly YouTube, his talks are all over the place, and so he’s become this kind of strange ghost, you know, that haunts the internet, and there’s, his thoughts and ideas are out there, and interestingly they’re as timely as they, as ever, as they were in the early 90s and mid 90s when he was articulating all this stuff. I have so many students, I teach at the University of Minnesota, so I, and I, you know, I interact with a lot of young people, you know, 20-somethings, and they so often tell me, you know, your brother is, was such an influence in my life, everything I’ve learned I’ve learned from him.

30:04 And just, it just surprises me because these people were diapers when Terence was at the height of his, of his career, or they weren’t even born yet, yet somehow they, they discover him and they listen and it really resonates with him, which is just a testimony to how, how timely and timeless his ideas were. The man was ahead of his time, no doubt about it. I’ve listened to probably a hundred of his lectures. I, I listen to him on iTunes on the, the Psychedelic Salon.

30:39 There you go. And sometimes I have to remind myself that he’s saying this stuff in 1992 and ’81 and ’93, you know, pre, you know, pre-internet and pre so many things that have changed, all those things, right? Right, so much of it is so relevant, it’s so true. You know, you know, yeah, it’s, it’s a phenomenon for sure, and I think, you know, I, I think Terence would be amused. I think he would be happy about that, you know, because at a certain stage in what he was talking about he was talking about how the internet was going to transform everything, and, and, and it is, as we’ve seen, it has, so yeah, I’m happy that his ideas are so, so alive still and stimulating thought and all that.

31:29 So, you know, and in the 15 years since he’s died we’ve seen this whole psychedelic thing just explode, you know, and, uh, you know, uh, the awareness of ayahuasca, the, the, uh, you know, the, the awareness that, you know, these, these stigmatized, condemned, prohibited, marginalized substances are suddenly almost respectable again, you know, as the research accumulates and we begin to see, well, actually, these do have great value for, in medicine and so on, potentially. So we’re seeing that happening, happen. Terence has got to have a lot of credit for that.

32:19 Both of you, both of you. Well, both of us, yes. Okay, I’ll take some credit. Are you surprised when you look at it from 2000 to 2015, where we are today when it comes to be the awareness of plant medicines, are you surprised how quickly that happened? I am, I am very surprised how quickly that happened, um.

32:40 Yeah, I mean, to Terence’s credit, that the neat thing, the good thing about Terence is that back in the day, in the 80s and the 90s, when it was not cool to talk about this stuff in public, he was talking about it, right? He never stopped talking about it, and, and so it kept it on the table for conversation, so that then, you know, and I was, I was in it too, I was working in it, but I deliberately, I didn’t want a lot of attention. I just wanted to do my science, and I was in the background of all this, and, you know, but during the 90s we started this Heffter Research Institute, which is, you know, now thriving.

33:22 I mean, at the time people said, you’re nuts, even though we had very qualified people starting it, but people, nobody’s going to support this, you’re crazy. Well, now we’re, Heffter’s alive and well and thriving, and most of the leading scientists in research are either on the board or being supported by us, are closely affiliated with us. I, I don’t want to take away from MAPS, MAPS doing good work too, but we’re sort of the nerdy ones in the background, you know.

33:54 We’re smaller, we’re less well funded, but we are now getting significant funding, and, uh, you know, because as you ramp up these clinical trials you need more and more funding. We just got a pledge for three quarters of a million dollars, you know, from a donor that I can’t mention, but that’s encouraging. And just the way it’s fallen out, not really deliberately, but the way it’s sort of gone is that MAPS, um, has kind of staked out MDMA, for their, they’ve hooked their flag, their wagon, to MDMA, and they’re, they’re focusing very much on treating PTSD using that compound, which is great.

34:40 MDMA, through kind of a nice, a nice way in through firefighters and soldiers. Yeah, right, exactly. And there’s, there’s great need for this, so that’s wonderful, and they want to make a prescription drug out of MDMA, and I do believe they’ll probably succeed. And just, we’ve sort of hung our hopes on psilocybin because that’s the other one you could study in a, in a, you know, in a clinical situation, it’s very compatible with human metabolism, it’s not toxic, you can use it in hospice situations, for example, and give it to people who are fairly ill, and, and it just is the perfect clinical psychedelic.

35:25 And of course it’s not the same as MDMA, but so we, we’re sort of working on psilocybin, and not that we’re limited to that, but that’s just the way it’s worked out. And then ayahuasca sort of remains in the, in the wings in some ways because being a plant, um, it’s more difficult to study under an FDA-approved protocol. Okay, and getting approval for psychedelic research is bad enough, but, but then one of them happens to be a plant, so it makes it, got another.

36:01 Yeah, well, the psilocybin is synthetic, we work with the synthetic, it’s a natural product but it’s synthetic, but ayahuasca is harder to, if you’re going to study ayahuasca you pretty much have to study the botanical preparation because there are properties it has that any synthetic analog is not going to have, because it’s two compounds at least and a whole bunch of other things. So ayahuasca is, uh, more difficult, you know, but it, and at Heffter I’ve become a big, uh, sort of advocate of, uh, yes, we need to, you know, be looking into ayahuasca, and why do we have to play this silly FDA game, you know, let’s just go to Peru and do this work, you know. You can do good science in Peru and ayahuasca is accepted, it’s a natural national patrimony there, it’s literally been declared to be a national patrimony, so let’s do some of that work down there.

37:06 Right, right, and I want to talk about Peru because you went down over there for the first time in 1970, you know, with Terence, is that right? Well, we went to Colombia, Colombia, 1971. Right, but before we get to that, I just wanted to say, you know, you talk about like the 80s and 90s, um, how it was, it was really rare for people to talk openly about these psychedelic experiences, and some of those recorded conversations for Terence, says people aren’t using their real names, they don’t want to be recorded because for them it’s dangerous, or they feel the danger to talk about that, and I guess this was kind of the Reagan “Say No to Drugs” time, you know.

37:46 Right, you know, my, our experiences on London Real, where in 2012 we had a before and after ayahuasca episode, and I was hesitant because I thought I could never go back to banking, now you know this is 20, 25 years later and I did a before and after DMT episode, and I’ll be honest, Dennis, I was worried about my daughter and the parents and the principals and what they would think, and if a social worker would come and, you know, we went ahead and did it anyways, and it was both, it was okay in the end, both of those times, but I can’t imagine what it was like to talk about that stuff in the 80s and the 90s. Well, yeah, it was, it was, I mean, he was doing a lot of the talking, I wasn’t doing much talking, you know, when we were, but, uh, yeah, but I don’t know, he, uh, he was doing it because he was passionate about it and could not not talk about it.

38:37 Right, that’s what he had to talk about, that was his obsession, so he talked about it, and it turned out he was saying, he was speaking to a certain audience where they felt like they couldn’t, like they were, but they say, boy, I’m glad somebody’s talking about this, somebody’s keeping it, you know, the conversation open, and, and he did, and, and then we see, you know, I don’t know what’s going on, Brian, there’s something going on, uh, in terms of, you know, a social and, uh, and maybe even an evolutionary transformation around, around these plants, because the way that ayahuasca has literally exploded onto the world scene in about 10 years or so, um, is just, uh, mind-boggling to me. I mean, 10 years, 15 years ago you walk up to the average person on the street and say ayahuasca, you know, they won’t know what you’re talking about, you know, or if they do they probably think you’re some nut case and they’ll be edging away from you.

39:50 Now you talk to people about ayahuasca and chances are they know what it is and they associate it with a positive, you know, they has a positive association for them, and, uh, you know, I don’t know, I mean, I’m, yeah, I verge on sounding like a bit of a fanatic, I guess. I am, but I, you know, I, I think that, uh, I think that ayahuasca, like many of these psychedelics, indigenous people regard them as teachers, it’s all about the plant teachers, and I think that ayahuasca has been marginalized in, in the rain forest for years, and the indigenous people sort of have been the stewards of that, but now it’s getting a little concerned as we basically, uh, you know, our efforts to wreck the planet, uh, accelerate, ayahuasca is coming on to the world stage and saying, you know, wake up, you monkeys, you know, the first thing you have to do is wake up and realize what’s going on, and, and, and then, then change, change your, your behavior, your approach to it.

41:11 And you know, I think, I think the, the main lesson of ayahuasca, and, and I would say for myself even more than Terence, ayahuasca has become my, my own personal teacher as well as my professional preoccupation. But ayahuasca is, many, many people are getting the message that, you know, ayahuasca is giving us a message about our [expletive], I guess I can’t say that. Yes, you can, on a podcast, our screwed up relationship with nature, and the, re, what we have to understand is number one that we’re not separate from nature, you know, which has been a, a misperception that’s plagued Western society since at least the inception of Judeo-Christianity, and in fact I, I think Judeo-Christianity is largely to blame for that.

42:09 We have to understand that we’re not part of nature, nor are we running nature, we’re not in charge of this. You know, the plants, if anything, are running nature, and, and they do, if you look at the dynamics of the biosphere, that, and I think, you know, I think ayahuasca is trying to send us the message that we need to wake up. Many people are coming away from their sessions, especially if they go to South America, with this renewed commitment to, you know, environmental, environmental issues, and, uh, and the interesting thing is, you know, I mean, you speak about, you were concerned about taking ayahuasca, you know, in with banker because you were a banker and so on.

42:57 Well, now chances are the guy sitting across from you is a banker in the ayahuasca session, or a CEO or whatever, so I think that’s very interesting, and that’s important because, you know, I mean, people can go to Peru and drink ayahuasca, all kinds of people can do that, it’s a, it but what needs to happen is that influential people can have these experiences, because they’re the ones that can implement real change. You know, if they have these experiences and come back, they can make a difference. Not that all of the rest of us can’t make a difference, but you know what I mean, people in influential positions of power can, can really change things, and that wasn’t happening.

43:46 That’s important. And in the 70s, when you and parents had this amazing discovery of, you know, the cubensis and you came back, I mean, in the 70s, you know, psychedelics were associated with the non-CEO types, right? It was this counterculture, it was dangerous, it was the anti-government movement, and LSD is still tainted by a lot of those society. Yeah, yeah, was definitely not a mainstream at that time, you know, and it’s interesting that we, you know, we, uh, we went to La Chorrera, um, you know, really with no idea what we were doing.

44:27 What were two boys doing in 1970 going down to Colombia? This wasn’t exactly a tourism destination. It was not a tourism destination. We did not know what the f*** we were doing. We were, we were all, we knew was that I was 20, Terence was 24.

44:44 All we knew was that, you know, we discovered DMT in Berkeley in, in the Haight, in, in the Bay Area. At that time there was very little of DMT around. Okay, but Terence had somehow manifested it out of the matrix. So just a few of you were small, just a few of us were smoking it, and we were all, at least our group, was convinced that not only was it the most amazing drug we’d encountered, it was the most amazing thing we’d encountered in our entire lives, and we thought we, you can’t ignore this, this is like, you know, the discovery of atomic energy or something.

45:27 This is, this cannot be ignored, we’ve got to investigate this, and so we decided to go to South America because one of the, you know, this is kind of the way, again like I say, we’re not running things, but, but we’re, you know, we’re, we’re playing a script out in some ways, we’re bringing you down, the plants were bringing us down there. We thought, well, DMT is totally amazing, totally transcendent, but it’s so short in action when you smoke it that you can’t bring much back from it other than the sense of astonishment and, oh my god, what was that, right? You know, and so we thought, well, we’ll stay around in Berkeley at the time.

46:08 Oh, LSD was, right, LSD is what everybody else was. Okay, but you know, you and Terence noticed a distinct difference between the LSD and the DMT. LSD was a drug, DMT was possibly a message from the future. We had no idea, we just, we have no idea, it just seemed more, more, uh, like something almost like something masquerading as a psychedelic drug, you know, something much weirder than that. We didn’t know, but we thought, you know, the thing is, we thought, well, if we go to South America maybe we can find a form of DMT that will last longer, so that we can actually take something back from it other than this, uh, you know, sense of astonishment.

46:56 Uh, and so we went, we went ostensibly to look for that. And at the time, did you not respect LSD because it’s synthetic? Is that something you always thought, that’s created by man and that’s no? No, no, no, we respected LSD, we respect it, I respect it still. I mean, it’s LSD, is amazing molecule, a wonderful molecule.

47:19 It was just that DMT seemed like another order of magnitude to it, and, and so we, we didn’t know anything at that time, and little was known at that time, that, that ayahuasca is in fact an orally activated form of DMT. The role of the admixture plants in ayahuasca wasn’t really out, well understood, uh, carcinocyben is also an orally active form of DMT, if you think about it, possibly the best engineered form of orally active DMT. We didn’t think in those terms.

47:58 We ran across a paper by Schultes, Ari Schultes, is the famous ethnobotanist from Harvard, and the title of the paper was Virola as an Orally Active Hallucination. That was the title of the paper, Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets. What we knew about Virola, which is a tree, the sap of which contains DMT and a lot of other tryptopias, it’s used as a snuff widely in the Amazon Basin by the Yanomami tribes and others. So that’s fine, it’s a snuff, and like, like DMT itself, the stuffs are short-acting, but this oral activity caught our attention, and it turned out that there was a few groups, notably the Witoto, that used it in an orally active form, and we thought, ah, this is it, this is interesting now, you know, let’s go for that one.

48:55 That sounded like the one to go for, so that’s what led us to go to, to South America, to La Chorrera, La Chorrera, only because it was the, uh, ancestral home of the Witoto. So that’s where Schultes made his collection, so we thought, well, go there, you know, and try and find this thing. So that’s what led us to go to South America and La Chorrera. We just gave up everything. I was in school at the time, and Terence was, you know, at the time on the lam from Interpol, hiding out in Indonesia after this hash bust that happened in 1969.

49:38 Okay, so you know he was running from Interpol because of a hash bust. Yeah, well, he wasn’t exactly running from them, they weren’t even exactly looking for him, but he didn’t want to risk coming back to the States, so he’d been in Indonesia for a while, in Tokyo teaching English for a while, and then ended up in Victoria, Canada, for a while, but never could come back. And then, you know, when our mom died, our mother died in October of 1970, so it was kind of like, and he’d been in Victoria at that time, and so it was like that was a major, you know, transition for us, and, and, you know, also a shock in some, although we knew she was not going to last long, but it was kind of, she died in October, 1970, and I think we both took it as a kind of signal that, okay, well now we can go, you know, we don’t have to feel guilty about not being around for our mom, and so we, we did, we went down there and, uh, and we went to luxuria.

50:48 Just the two of you? No, no, we had no, the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, right? There were at that time we were formally constituted as the Brotherhood of the Screaming of bishops. Came up with that name, well, Terence, of course, you know, and this, and it was, it was Terence and I and three of his associates from Berkeley, mostly, I mean, that was, that was who it was, to his girlfriend at the time, who he had met in Colombia, and, uh, she joined us, and, and then two of his friends from the, uh, from the, uh, um, from the Tasman program that Terence had been involved in Berkeley, so that was kind of the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, and which was really a totally, really tongue-in-cheek name, obviously, uh, you know, that’s the Irish part coming out, but you know, we, but we really, I mean, it was a humorous name, but we were all so serious that, yeah, this is really an important thing that we’re going after, but you know, let’s not, let’s not lose our sense of humor about it, right?

52:03 And so we went down there and, uh, you know, and we, have you read the book? Uh, yeah, I’ve read a lot of passages, a lot of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of them. Went, we went to La Chorrera, uh, expecting to find this, this, uh, Witoto drug, which was called ukuhei in Witoto, this preparation, and, uh, when we, well, when we finally got to launcher, or when we got to, before on the way into La Chorrera, we met this anthropologist who we knew was going to be in the, in the adjacent village, or the village on the way in, because we checked for him in Bogota and it was like, yeah, he’s out with his people, right?

52:50 So you find Dr., Dr. Guzman, that was the name Terence used in the book, you know, at El Encanto, so he went to El Encanto first, and we found him, and, uh, and he was, he was utterly appalled that we showed up, and, you know, because we were not, uh, you know, we, we looked like we stepped right out of Haight-Ashbury. I mean, we were far more colorful than the Witoto people, you know, beards down to here and bells and beads, and, you know, just madness, you know, we were a colorful bunch, um, so that, that, that appalled him, and then when we walked in, when we got there and, and started talking about a kooky, that we’d come to find dukuhe, we was extremely upset, because, how did you find out about that? How do you even know the name of this thing?

53:45 And it was, well, you know, Schultes published a paper on it, so here we are, Doc, you know, show us the way. And this is pre-internet, so probably only a few hundred people in the world would have read that paper, would have read that paper. Right, and, and Guzman had been one of the, one of the informants that talked to Schultes as well. Yeah, we, we know. So as he said, well, you know, you can’t walk in there and start talking about ukuhei because they’ll kill you.

54:16 You know, this is a big secret, even the shamans know about it, even the rest of the Witoto people, they don’t know about this, you can’t go in there. Well, as it turned out, he was being a little bit, you know, paranoid himself and a little bit protective, but we, but we said, okay, so there may be some issues around this, fine, Doc, we’ll, we’ll be cool, don’t worry, you know, we’re not, you know, we’re not gonna breach any protocols here, you know, but, but we, you know, we said, well, continue on to La Chorrera, and, uh, which involved going over this overland shortcut from one river to another, uh, which took four days and was quite an ordeal, and, uh, but we did that, we arrived at La Chorrera, and how were your spirits at the time? Were you ever, did you ever turn to Terence and be like, what are we doing, we got to go home?

55:13 Or was it just this mighty adventure and everyone was in? That’s pretty much, everyone was in, you know, we were obsessed. I don’t think, I mean, at times there were moments when we wished it was not so rough and maybe a little more comfortable and all that, but we knew we were on a quest. We were looking for the secret, and formally called it the secret, not even knowing what it was, thinking it was this drug, right? Well, so we got to La Chorrera, and, uh, and you know, we, we were true to our word to Dr. Guzman, we didn’t immediately start talking about him.

55:56 What we found at La Chorrera was, it was a mission village, that a Capuchin mission, and the pasture had been cleared around the mission for several, a couple hundred acres, I guess, a pasture, so it wasn’t in the forest. The forest surrounded it, uh, but, uh, in the pasture they put in these Zebu cattle, you know, which are the perser, preferred substrate, the dog of the cattle is what strawfury, or salazabi cubensis grozod at the time called Stropharia cubensis. So we got to La Chorrera and we settled in, we were welcomed there only because they could give us a house that was well away from all the decent people, you know, and we settled in and, and we, we knew what these mushrooms were because we’d encountered them a couple times on the way in, and we’d also done our homework, you know, we had references on them, so on, so we thought, had you had mushrooms at Berkeley before?

57:00 No, no, there was no such thing like that in Berkeley, there was no psilocybin, no real psilocybin at the time in Berkeley, but we had encountered them a couple of times, at once in Florencia and once in portula gizmo on our way in, but there weren’t much, so we’d had like one or two carpet fours, one or two mushrooms, and had a light dose, you know, which a light dose is a light dose and it’s quite enjoyable, it’s quite giggly, it’s, it’s no big deal, you know. Uh, because let’s talk about, so, so we, so we got, well, just to complete it, so we got to La, and these carpal fours, these mushrooms, big clusters are growing out of practically every cow pie right there, so the bottom, the top of them, they grow, well, they grow out of the top, right? You know, they grow cow play and they grow out of the top, and we thought, well, wow, this is great, um, this will be fun, you know, we can have fun with these while we, uh, while we wait for the ukuhay to manifest and after we find, you know, while we’re waiting for the real mystery.

58:10 And you know, as you heard the other night and as I explained in the book, we were so clueless that today it boggles my mind, but we started eating these mushrooms purely as a recreational thing, and pretty soon it became clear that, you know, in some ways that, that was the real, that was the real mystery, uh, because it started, uh, you know, downloading, uh, you know, a lot of funny ideas to us, what Terence liked to call funny ideas. And, uh, you know, how much brush, how many mushrooms were you consuming at the time? Well, we were consuming a lot and pretty regularly, not so much in quantity so much all the time, but we kind of incorporated them into our diet because we didn’t have a lot to eat, we didn’t bring enough food, and so we would kind of put them into the rice or the, you know, the omelet or whatever.

59:16 We didn’t have a great deal of food and they taste not bad, you know, in the fresh form, so we were eating them quite regularly. Okay, and they were stimulating a great deal of conversation and speculation and funny ideas and all that that we, uh, you know, we came up, up with this idea for the, you know, what turned out to be the experiment at La Chorrera, which we, you know, which was that, you know, the protocol for the experiment, if you want to put it that way, was, uh, downloaded to us by the mushroom, you know, who present, which presented itself pretty much as an intelligent entity of some kind, not necessarily the mushroom, but maybe something was communicating to us through the mushroom, uh, that was, um, you know, that was telepathic and that was suggesting all these ideas for an experiment that we could do that would, that would do something, and, uh, uh, you know, um, and so we were more or less taking our marching orders from, from that source and not really questioning it, and you know, it’s hard to talk about it, it’s hard to explain the state we were in at the time, which is why I rarely discuss this in, in public, you know, the details of the experiment in La Chorrera, because it’s hard to explain.

1:00:56 I just say, read the book, it’s all there, it’s all dissected in the book. But anyway, the, the mushroom came up with a lot of funny ideas that we thought we could actually, kind of act on and do this, this biophysical experiment involving singing to mushrooms and singing to our own DNA and using sound to create some kind of a material that was, you know, partly mined and partly matter, and, uh, that would, uh, you know, be in some ways the ultimate artifact in a certain way, and, you know, so even the, this even at this time it, it, it, you know, it’s, it’s strange to, to try and explain all this. Right, in the, in the book you said, you know, the experiment at La Chorrera, or Chorrera, uh, you later wrote, was building a hyper-dimensional vehicle out of the 4D transformation of my own DNA interlaced with the DNA of a mushroom.

1:02:05 That’s probably doesn’t even begin to explain it very well. Yeah, well, that was the basic idea, that’s what conducted these experiments while you were there. We did the experiments while we were there, the mushroom egginess on to do these things, days, over the course of days and days these ideas took form, and then we actually performed the experiment one night, March 4th, 1971, and what we had predicted would happen did not happen, because it could not happen, it would have violated all kinds of physical laws.

1:02:44 You know, well, at that point we didn’t have any use for physical laws, we totally expected that, but the universe had different ideas, it did not happen. So, but we painted ourselves into a, epistemological corner in some way, so that what we predicted did not happen, but something had to happen because we had convinced ourselves that we were getting feedback from the future, from the future moment of this performance of the experiment that confirmed that what we, that up in the future a few hours, in the future, we’d perform the experiment and it had succeeded. So we knew before we did it it was going to work, and then when we did it, it didn’t work, but something else happened, and what happened was that we went on this, you know, I guess, uh, we got, uh, you know, I mean, I mean, it depends on if you’re looking at it from the inside or the outside, you know, we went on, we, a shared experience in which I basically became psychotic for two weeks, uh, and was cruising hyperspace, and Terence became psychotic in a complementary way in which he was completely focused on this reality and kind of being an anchor for me, and, you know, um, and it was like our companions by that time were not in this, in this loop, and some of them were quite appalled uh, at what was happening and thought, this is really spiraling out of control, and we, you know, we need to get these two crazy people back into some kind of psychiatric intervention, and we were saying, no, no, it’s fine, you know, we perfectly understand each other and this is, this is how it’s

1:04:55 Supposed to unfold, so relax, and, and fortunately that, that’s what happened, because there was no way we could get to a hospital, we were in the middle of the jungle, so the process was able to play itself out. And were you consuming mushrooms for this entire time, for the two weeks? No, no, we done with that, we, this, we were finished with that. We weren’t continuing to eat mushrooms, but whatever biochemical processes we’d triggered continued, and it took about two weeks for everything to settle down and get back to normal, you know, or more or less to baseline.

1:05:35 I don’t know that they ever got back to normal, they may still not be back to normal, but, but the thing is, uh, yeah. So did you record all this at the time, like written down? Oh yeah, yeah, we were writing furiously, you know. And the rest of the Brotherhood was doubting you, taking their own notes, trying to talk you out of this, trying to get you to leave? They weren’t so much taking their own notes, they were certainly doubting us.

1:06:01 I mean, they were, they were definitely alarmed, you know, by what was happening, and like, you know, these guys are just out of control, you know, and, but we were like, just chill, you know, I mean, we were just saying everything’s fine, this is unfolding exactly as it needs to, and we, Terence and I, were comfortable in this conceptual structure that we’ve created, in this theoretical structure, we had a framework for what was going on, which was based partly on alchemy. We were both into alchemy and we viewed this as now chemical process, and, uh, the idea was to condense this thing, whatever it was, this, this mind-matter amalgam, which we call trans-linguistic matter, uh, you know, in a situa, in a form that was visible, so it would be a visible artifact that we’d created out of mushrooms and, and sound and our own DNA, that we could actually, you could see it and be it at the same time, and it would be like, uh, you know, in that sense it would be the ultimate artifact because it would do anything.

1:07:23 Your imagination told it to do, and, uh, you know, so crazy stuff, right? But you weren’t, you weren’t able to create that artifact. We were not able to, no, we wouldn’t even be here, right, if that had been the case. So, but the experience of trying to do that brought you to another, drove us both crazy during, now that’s why you were there. Now how did you know it was when, when to leave?

1:07:49 And was that like the, a pivotal moment in your life and the, the time where you and Terence were kind of woven together? Yeah, yeah, I’d say so. I mean, I’ve wrote in the book, and I think it’s true, I think that, uh, you know, our lives were defined really by, you know, pre-La Chorrera and post-La Chorrera, and we’ve, you know, and, and most of our lives were lived post-La Chorrera. You know, this happened early on, we were young, so uh, you know, we’ve lived in the, in the shadow of that experience ever since, or the, or the light of that experience, uh, uh, you know, um.

1:08:33 It was pivotal, definitely, um, it was important for us personally. Um, you know, I mean, I don’t regret it for a minute. I feel like for me personally, I was the one that got to go, I was the one that was cruising hyperspace for two weeks. Terence was focused very much in this world, trying to, for one thing, be a beacon for me, watch over his little brother, I think with a certain degree of guilt associated with that, because it was all about, well, you know, you’ve been trying to drive your little brother crazy for as long as we’ve been together, you’ve finally succeeded, right?

1:09:15 So are you happy now? You know, I could hear my mother say this, and, so, because, because he used to, to tickle you, and he used to, he tormented me constantly when we were younger. Sure, like siblings will do. And so, but he took care of you at La Chorrera. He took care of me, a lucha, in a really loving way, because he felt that he was the only one that could understand what, what I was going through, what he was going through at the same time.

1:09:43 He was trying to figure out the, the mechanics of this, uh, of this condensation process, process of this alchemist stone or whatever, whatever the thing was, the, that we were trying to, uh, make. And so a lot of his pre-op, since it did not appear instantly when we did the experiment in a cloud of, you know, crystals as it dropped into superconductivity and all that, didn’t happen, so, but part of the exercise was to, was to figure out, well, okay, we’ve succeeded, we think, when will it condense, when will it actually manifest? And a lot of what Terence was doing at the time was trying to work out cycles and figure out when is the thing going to manifest, and that was the, that was the genesis really of the Timewave theory.

1:10:42 Okay, interesting. You know, I mean, the crude cycles that he was talking about, and then he got onto the I Ching, and in some ways you could say, you know, we came back from La Chorrera, I had this acute experience when it was over, I was pretty much back to baseline and I was pretty much done at the time, I’m like, look, I just want to go home, I want to get back into school, I want to keep my feet on the ground, this is, this is more than I bargained for. No more taking psilocybin, no more smoking DMT.

1:11:19 You were done for a while? Well, for a while, I said, you know, I’m, I’m, I want to get back into normal reality, and in some ways Terence never recovered in a certain way, or it took years, because he came back from it convinced that in some sense we had succeeded and that we, the only mistake we’ve made was predicting when it was going to happen. So he came back with this idea about the Timewave, right, and the Timewave became more and more elaborate as he did, and he came back to, uh, to Berkeley.

1:11:58 I went home sooner, I went back to Boulder, but then a few minutes later he came back to Berkeley and I went out there, and, uh, he came back, you know, with ev, with his girlfriend who stuck with him throughout all this, and, uh, you know, and talking to his friends and it’s like, well, you know, we’ve succeeded and pretty soon it will be apparent that we’ve succeeded, and they’re like, no, you know, you’re just nuts, you know. Not getting a lot of support from these people, and, and you know, and, and so he over the years elaborated this Timewave, and in some ways the, the, the, you know, the idea of the eschaton, that he came up with, this collapse of the space-time continuum, was really what was supposed to happen at La Chorrera, and it didn’t, so the question is, when is it gonna happen?

1:13:01 And that the prediction for when it was going to happen got pushed further and further back until it was comfortably in the future, namely December 21st, 2012, which was the date he’d settled on for a whole bunch of reasons, and not just because it was the Mayan calendar, you know, and, but that certainly didn’t hurt. I mean, the fact that that synchronicity was recognized was, to his mind, of further validation of it. Well, by that time, you know, and I was always a skeptic about the Timewave, I never bought into the Timewave, I couldn’t, I mean, I had an open mind, but it, as time went on it became clear that, uh, the Timewave was, you know, it was a beautiful mathematical idea, and he had figured out a way to use the I Ching as a calendar, and I think that in itself was a kind of an interesting discovery, and had he been a sinologist and a, and, uh, you know, um, scholar of the I Ching and come forth with this, people would have had to say, well, that’s a real, that’s something about the I Ching we’ve never thought of before, it’s the calendar and you can use it this way.

1:14:21 But he wasn’t satisfied, and you know, that would have been recognized and he would have gotten praised for that, but he wasn’t satisfied with that. I mean, the I Ching was this, this Timewave was nothing less than something that, that described the structure of time for him, and, uh, that could predict the, uh, the end of time, and so it got fairly obsessional, and it was frustrating. You said him in the 90s, but you know, before he got his diagnosis, you’re saying that it was upsetting him, the, the Timewave, and him trying to get his head around it, or the rest?

1:14:56 It was upsetting him because he was beginning, I think, to have a lot of doubts about it at the time, and, and I had been critical of it, and you know, and that was part of his, you know, resentment against me because I was not buying it, and then other people piled on, and there was a episode at one of the Botanical Preservation Corps meetings where there was this mathematician who showed up whose name was Watkins, and, and he was not a particularly pleasant person, but he was a real smart person and he understood the Timewave and the mathematics behind it probably better than Terence did, and he came to the, one of, I think it was ’92 or somewhere about, around about then, and stood up and said, well, this is wrong, there’s a mistake in the Timewave, and here’s the mistake, and he was able to say what the mistake was.

1:16:03 He wasn’t dismissing it completely, he just said, you made a mistake in the, in the construction of it, here’s what you should have done. Right, and Terence was, what, couldn’t deal with that, that was very upsetting to him, and, uh, and, and I think it fed on his existing doubts, you know, and, and it really, uh, along with a lot of other things that were going on at that time, including his divorce and all this, it really put him into a funk after that, and he had a lot of doubts, and I think that was the start of a, a decade that was, that was hard for him. The, Terence was known for being very anti-dogmatic.

1:16:48 He was known for kind of throwing theories out, and sometimes in half joking and sometimes, yeah, just to see if people would test him, so it’s always strange that he was so invested in this theory. Yeah, I mean, but it was his pride and joy, it was his baby, he, and you know, I mean, a few things, you know, he was, he was very invested in it, um, he was talking about it a lot, um, it was paying the bills, you know, along with all the other shtick that he was doing, but this was a big part of paying the bills. He really wanted to believe it too, you know, he wanted to believe it, uh, and that combination of things made it hard to, uh, to give it up.

1:17:37 Right, you know, you didn’t like your schtick sometimes, right? I thought, I remember hearing you say one time on a program, maybe it was the Rogan first one, where you were like, Terence, you’re just talking nonsense, all you do is get people so high and talk all this nonsense. Was that accurate of how you felt about his stick in the 80s and 90s? It’s not that I, it’s, no, I, I like to stick, I, it’s not that I dislike this stick, I, it was, I was, I was, you know, but he didn’t like me in a way to come to a lot of his talks at Esalen and other places.

1:18:08 He didn’t like me because I was the only one that would ever stand up and object or say, you know, things like, well, you know, you just said this, it didn’t make any sense, it directly contradicts what you said 20 minutes ago, that didn’t make any sense, so this is nonsense, you know, these are beautiful words but they don’t mean anything. You know, and he would say, well, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. You know, and, and just, just sail on, you know.

1:18:41 But it was more, I mean, I mean, people did look at him and his words were so beautiful and so articulate. He, he could say the craziest things and it seemed to make sense, and people were just slack-jawed. No one would ever object, or you know, I mean, occasionally the objections would come up, but later, but no one would ever really get up and, and say, you know, we have some conceptual, you know, problems here. And I would say those things and he didn’t like that, and, uh, I mean, then we talked about it privately and, and that was, we was much more receptive, but he didn’t like to be challenged in, in public so much.

1:19:23 And he’s so revered, why would people just listen and not challenge him? Because, I don’t know, I really, I really don’t know. I think, I think part of it is, it’s almost like his speaking was hypnotic in some way, he would put people into this state of receptivity, and then I realized it’s not about what he’s saying, it’s about the way he’s saying it. He was a poet, he was a shaman, a true sermon, though he never would have thought of himself that, but he was a poet in the way that he articulated things, and I used to say, look, you could get up there and read the phone book and people would be absolutely fascinated because it’s the voice.

1:20:15 It’s the voice of Terence, that’s what it was. You know, and, and even like, like later on, like, like in the, you know, later on in the latter 90s, you know, he was talking about glossolalia a lot and stuff like that, and how the mushrooms cause glossolalia, and he would, and he would actually give lectures where he would imitate this glossolalia for a long time and, and speak this gibberish, you know, and people would be fascinated because of the rhythm and the flow and the way it works, and I told him, well, at least you admit now that you’re talking nonsense. I haven’t heard those things.

1:21:05 You haven’t heard them? Yeah, well, he, he did that, so you know, so, and was he always like that as a boy or did he develop that over time? What, of the gift of God, yeah, gab, and the poor way of speaking, is that something he worked on or does that? Well, I think it was, I think, I think being Irish, I think he had a real feel for the rhythm and the tone of language. I don’t know if as a boy, but certainly, uh, as a, as a young student, like in high school and college, that’s exactly what he did.

1:21:40 His, you know, his work was, you know, he was learning, he was practicing for this career of being a bard or being a poet and a shaman in a sense, not in any conscious sense, but you know, in Berkeley he was, you know, uh, he lived in this big hippie house on Telegraph Avenue with a bunch of other crazy people, this was ’67, ’68, ’69, under madness reigns, you know, and, and he liked nothing better than to get a bunch of people stuffed into his bedroom and he would get them so loaded on hash that nobody could speak or move or anything, you know, and then they just sit there because they couldn’t move, they couldn’t say anything, and he had it, had the opposite effect on him and he would just wrap it out for hours, and he’d go on and on, and you would listen to him as well.

1:22:38 I listened to him as well, sure. Okay, sure. And I, I loved listening to him, you know, and, and still do. I mean, I don’t listen to his, to his YouTube tapes and so on all the time like some people do, but I, I do listen occasionally. He had this amazing ability to suggest, to, to say just the craziest things in a way that made it seem quite rational, and that certainly people would not, you know, they wouldn’t think that, you know, this is just a, a crazy person raving.

1:23:15 He could make it sound really plausible. Every time I listen to him I always wonder, where is the modern-day equivalent of Terence and would they exist, because when Terence was saying these things it’s like he’s not selling something and there’s no podcast and there’s no this and, right, right, there, there are views that most people wouldn’t even stand up and talk about, but there’s never been anything like him, there’s never been anything like him ever, and unless maybe some of the, uh, you know, some of the inspired prophets of religions and so on who had that same ability to just download the maddest things and yet they had this incredible charisma and ability to deliver stuff, and so people took it seriously. But what’s cool about Terence in that respect, and what’s, what’s interesting about him, and you know, for which I admire very much, was, you know, that he, he had this rap, but he was not a guru.

1:24:19 He never thought of himself as a guru, he didn’t ask people to believe, he didn’t ask much of anybody other than think for yourself, uh, you know, here’s a bunch of interesting ideas, I think they’re cool, take that, do with them what you will, you know, but don’t believe me, you know, I’m not here to, I’m not here to create a following, uh, I’m just here to put these ideas out, and, uh, he was, uh, he was, uh, you know, ethically right on in that respect, because you know you get in a situation like that where you are a spokesman, you are articulating uh, a thoughts that a lot of people wish they could say, so there’s a, you know, for every person like that there are a hundred people that want to follow them. Yeah, and that’s the problem with, with, uh, with, uh, you know, with gurus and with, with faith and with religion in general, you know, I mean, the, the religious leaders are too often ready to say, uh, yes, come follow me, you can stop thinking now, we’ll tell you what to think from here on out, just, you know, accept that and it’ll all be comfortable and, and you’ll be good, you know.

1:25:42 And Terence wouldn’t accept that role. Yeah, he was never selling anything and that’s, I think he picked least of all himself. Yeah, right, you pick that up in the first few minutes. Yeah, of any one of his talks you just feel like the tone of his voice is that he’s not selling anything, he’s not selling himself, if anything he says don’t trust anything you’ve heard, trust the psychedelic experience more than anything. Exactly, that’s the direct message, right, that’s what he would say, right?

1:26:06 And that was, uh, that was the correct thing to say, so I admire him for that. You know, he never really got into it, and, and another thing, he could have had thousands and thousands of followers, he could have had Rolls-Royces, I mean, he had that much charisma, he could have had all those things, but then I think he would have been false, would have felt that he was a false, uh, prophet, and he would have been right. I mean, he wasn’t, didn’t want to be a prophet, he was very much invested in the idea that people have their own minds and their brains and they can use their own analytical capabilities to, you know, evaluate these things, and that, that’s what he encouraged, so that’s, that’s great.

1:26:54 And the other aspect is, you know, he, uh, he, I mean, I think he believed in what he was saying, but he never took it too seriously, you know, there was always room for humor and that sort of Irish twinkle that he brought to it, and that was great, you know, because you know you don’t see that much in these situations. I mean, the gurus, the prophets, the people that say, anybody that tells you that they know what they’re talking about and they have the answer and all that, number one, they don’t, you know, the very fact that they can say that is, is a red flag to run the other direction, and the other thing is they lose their sense of humor, you know, it’s like, oh, this is serious stuff, we all have to be serious, and no, we don’t. And even about his Timewave he wasn’t that serious, so that was the one thing he was a little serious about, he was a little serious about it, he even got less serious about that in time as the time went on.

1:28:01 Yeah, but, but he, uh, yeah, I mean, I mean, and that’s, uh, he was not, um, ever, um, you know, so, uh, serious or so humorous about any of it as to become tiresome, and that’s the thing, and it’s very easy to become tiresome, you know, in this thing, and so in that sense I hope I’ve lived up to him, you know, because I mean, I don’t take it, I take everything seriously and yet I take nothing seriously, you know, and my sort of operating, uh, you know, uh, you know, my sort of perception really is that nobody, nobody knows what is going on, you know, there’s lots of stuff going on that we don’t understand. Now that’s, you know, that’s a reason to be depressed in some ways, but for me it’s a reason to be happy because it means that there’s so much more that we, that we have to learn, you know, and the world is much more, uh, marvelous than we can imagine, you know.

1:29:17 Terence was, uh, very fond of J.B.S. Haldane’s quote, which is, the world is not only queer than you imagine, it’s queerer than you can imagine, and it’s using, you know, the word queer in a way we don’t use it anymore, but just weirder, stranger, more miraculous, more interesting than we can possibly imagine, and that actually is reason to be optimistic and hopeful in my mind, but then also, uh, I think humble, you know, to realize that we probably never really will have a clear picture of what, of everything that’s going on, but that’s no reason not to, to just give up there. Let’s continue to try to understand it and make sense of it, and we’ll learn more, and, uh, and you know, when an ayahuasca and cam, ayahuasca is a good teacher, and it’s a good teacher for many people, and partly because, you know, for me, I mean, people say, well, you’ve been taking ayahuasca for 30, 40 years, you, you know, what have you learned?

1:30:36 What I’ve learned is that I don’t know s***, you know, and ayahuasca always reminds me of that when I take it, remember how little you know, so don’t get a big head about this, you know, you’re just a curious monkey after all, and, and that’s an important thing to bear in mind, I think, for myself and everyone, that’s really all we are, we’re curious monkeys, you know, or some of us have lost our curiosity and that’s a shame. That’s, that’s what keeps it, that’s what keeps it interesting to me, you know. How often do you have ayahuasca ceremonies?

1:31:17 Ah, about as often as I can. Monthly? Monthly, no, no, it’s, it’s not a regular cycle like that, um. The way it’s worked for me in, uh, in the last few years is I, I tend to do mostly ayahuasca in South America, so I, I’ve been organizing, I’ve been working off and on in South America ever since I, I did my graduate work. I went, I went down to the Iquitos in 1981 to do my graduate work and I’ve kept that connection ever since and gone down regularly.

1:31:54 Lately I’ve been organizing ayahuasca retreats in the Sacred Valley, so the way it works is I go there once or twice a year and I do a retreat and we do ayahuasca several times, and then might be six months or more before I do it again, you know. I do them in the state, I do it in the States, but not on a regular basis. Is it not the same? It’s the same. Okay, so you don’t have to be in the jungle?

1:32:23 You don’t have to be in the jungle, no, no, not at all. Is there a statue in Iquitos of the McKenna brothers, because you created the, the ayahuasca tourism business in Iquitos? No, but it probably wouldn’t exist in its form if it weren’t. There is no statue, thank God, nor is there a statue in Paonia, Colorado, too, although somebody contacted me recently and suggested that. I said, what’s in Paonia?

1:32:50 Yeah, the town where we grew up, but don’t, don’t need no friggin’ statue. But the popularity of ayahuasca is, can be very much attributed to, to you brothers, right? In part, in part, yeah, I think so, in part, um, and mushrooms as well, I mean, I mean, we, you know, like that was what I was going to say several stages back in this conversation, one of the things that we were at lecturer, that we were very invested in a way of bringing back, we wanted to create this technological artifact that would, you know, mark the end of history and all that, and would be really disruptive, really essentially seriously disrupted.

1:33:38 We didn’t do that, but what we did bring back over time was the, we brought back spores of philosophy and we figured out how to grow them, and we were the publishers of one of the first books, if not the first book, on growing the psilocybin mushrooms, so we grew, we published Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide in 1975, six, five, I think it was 1975. And that was an art, that was a simple technology that gave everyone with a modicum of, of skill at about the level of a seventh-grade science project, where you know, in a spare closet, the ability to grow these mushrooms. And at the time, uh, you know, I mean, there were, there were economic benefits of that, there was a mercenary, uh, you know, element to it, but that wasn’t our real motive for growing mushrooms, the fact that you could sell them, that was obvious, but our motive for growing the mushrooms was that we wanted confirmation of these places that we’d been accessing, and we thought if we get this out, other people will go to these dimensions and experience it, and either they’ll see what we’re seeing or they won’t, but we’ll have some, you know, we’ll spread it out, you know, and, and see, let the world in and let them decide, and it turns out what we were seeing and the thoughts we were having and all that, not so crazy, at least many, if they were crazy, many people experienced the same delusion.

1:35:25 So we brought, it was like, and so the mushrooms, I’m proud of that in some ways. We couldn’t cop to it, we, we, you know, published it under, under pseudonyms at the time, but in terms of having an impact on society, I think it was huge, and it, it kept it on the table, and it over time it had, um, you know, this effect because a lot of people grew mushrooms, and mushrooms became something that everybody who wanted psychedelics, they could get a hold of them pretty easy. So then a few years on up, when our focus kind of shifted to ayahuasca, you know, I was bringing plants back from Peru and getting them into Hawaii and all that, and we were probably the first ones to bring ayahuasca into Hawaii, and now Hawaii is an epicenter for its spread around the world.

1:36:28 We had no, no agenda here, we had no idea this was gonna happen, that was just the way it happened, uh, but I think that, uh, one of the things that really affected kind of ayahuasca’s, uh, you know, coming into the world, world’s attention was in 1998, what, it was in 1991, I think, Luis Eduardo Luna, who was a longtime friend of Terence and mine, he was present, you know, from the beg, he was one of the people that Terence encountered on his way back from his second trip to La Chorrera. Then I met Eduardo 10 years later and, and we became close friends and we worked in South America together, and I introduced Eduardo in 1985 to Pablo Amaringo, who was the visionary painter of ayahuasca visions, and in fact it was on this visit of Eduardo and mine when I introduced him to it, to Eduardo, that the idea of doing visionary paintings came up, he’d never thought to paint visionary paintings before.

1:37:52 Eduardo and I suggested it, I’d met him in ’81 before, on my way out after my graduate work, and we had a nice conversation. He showed me some of his paintings, which were realistic and totally boring, not particularly interesting. Then we went back in ’85, I introduced Eduardo to him, and Eduardo, of course, speaks perfect Spanish, which I did not, and, uh, and the idea came up, well, have you ever thought about painting these visions? Because it came out in our conversation that he had been an iowa scarole at Paolo and Ringo, which I didn’t know in ’81, came out in the conversation, and Eduardo suggested, have you ever, and he said, well, yeah, I used to be, and I stopped because I got into battles with different shamans, different brujos, and it was clear that one of us was going to die if I didn’t step out of this world of sorcery and witchcraft, so I just stepped out, and but he said, I remember my, my experiences, and that Eduardo suggested, why don’t you try and paint one or two and see how that works out?

1:39:06 And so that started him painting these things, which was kind of, that triggered this outpouring of creativity which went on for years, and then eventually he and Eduardo published this book called, uh, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman, and the book was a beautiful coffee table book with these paintings, right, and on the opposite page in English was this detailed description of every element in the painting, and what the plants were, the animals were, the spirits, what all that meant in terms of the cosmology of, of what we understand as vegetalismo. That was the tradition, it’s not that he just made up these images, these came out of a certain, you know, symbol set, a certain cosmological, uh, world that he inhabited.

1:40:08 But then that, that book got into a lot of people’s hands, you know, and, uh, I really virus, again the virus thing, and I think that was what really brought ayahuasca to the attention of a lot of people. Okay, this book, and then that spread out and that really started phase two, if you will, uh, you know, of the ayahuasca tourism phenomena that made people aware of it. Do you think that the introduction of psilocybin in the way that you did with the, uh, not the cookbook, I guess that’s the wrong way to say, the growers guide, do you think that kind of facilitated the second wave of ayahuasca, you know, people that were already open to?

1:40:45 Definitely, definitely, I think it was a, yeah, I think it was a two of the second wave, if, if you will, it was a two-way thing, and, uh, you know, and this is where you be, you know, sometimes I say I’m not doing this, I just work for the plants, right? And so in that sense you could say, well, the plants are doing this, this is part of the co-evolutionary, uh, you know, sort of pact we’ve made with them or something. I really am not, I don’t have a agenda for world domination in most cases, usually, um, it’s just, ah, it’s just the way it’s been, you know, I mean, it’s just how it’s worked, and, you know, and so I’m just, I’m just doing what I’m doing, but I think of myself as working for the plants, and, and that’s kind of a, a reasonable model, I guess, I mean, at least it’s not, it’s not, not, I’m not controlling this, and now it’s taken on a life of its own.

1:41:54 Terence used to say that, um, about growing mushrooms, he said that once you’ve learned how to grow a mushroom, it is only by that time that you’re ready to take one, and you said something about the patience it takes to cultivate one, or the knowledge, or the connection you take, you make, and then that gives you kind of the right to consume them. Did you believe that? No, no, I mean, I think it’s good, I think ideally, yes, you grow your mushrooms, and you, by the act of growing them, that’s, it’s all about symbiosis, right?

1:42:29 Symbiosis is what these plants are, are pushing. That’s what ayahuasca wants, that’s what mushrooms want, that’s what really any plant that we might domesticate and find useful. If you’re familiar with the work of Michael Pollan, you know, he’s very good at articulating this. He used to be the food writer for the New York Times, and he’s still, now he’s interested in psychedelics and actually he’s got a book, uh, in the works on that, but he was, he would talk about, he wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire and a few things like that.

1:43:05 He makes the point about how domesticated plants like corn, for example, are we domesticating corn or is corn domesticating us? And I think that’s true of these psychedelic plants as well. They have an agenda, which is basically, as I said, trying to get us to wake up before we blow up the place, so they, they say, we want symbiosis, we want symbiosis with you, the human species, easily the most problematic species in the history of evolution, easily the most dangerous thing that nature’s come up with, but also the most hopeful thing, you know.

1:43:52 I mean, it, nate, I think the biosphere, Gaia, whatever you want to put it, has put a lot of its eggs in the basket of us, and it’s either these, these crazy monkeys are either gonna save the show or they’re going to completely kick everything to pieces. You know, but, but times are getting danger, getting, you know, times getting short and, and we’re getting kind of desperate here, so I think that that’s what’s going on, that’s, that’s what you’re seeing is, uh, you know, and so to your question, to grow the mushroom is to, is to initiate that symbiotic technology very much, and same with ayahuasca or any of these things, you, you, you realize how, what a symbiotic relationship is, you know, and, but, but you know, um, you don’t have to, you don’t have to grow the mushrooms to, uh, you know, to appreciate the experience, a lot of people don’t know how, they don’t have time and so on, so I don’t agree that you have to do that, ideally you would do that because it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s quite a edifying experience to, uh, you know, it’s just a fun hobby in some ways to do it and to watch this organism, you know, and mushrooms are interesting because they, they don’t grow like plants, you know, they’re not plants, they’re more like animals, you know, phylogenetically, and in terms of their behavior they’re a lot like animals, you know.

1:45:33 They grow quickly, and they, when the mushrooms are flushing, when you have a big crop of mushrooms and they’re coming on day after day, you really do feel like you, you know, you’re, you have a beast in the way that, that you have to tame, you have to harvest them regularly and look after them, they, they go through their changes quickly. Plants are much slower as a rule, so can I ask you about dosage, uh, parents used to talk about the heroic dose? Yeah, at some points he would say that people that talked about psychedelics, his quote-unquote peers, had never taken any large doses and they were all taking small doses.

1:46:16 I’m guessing down at La Chorrera, you, since the supply was there, you probably had the opportunity to take large doses. We had large doses, um, we have ridiculous doses. Thanks to, you know, thanks to you and your brother, I had my first psilocybin experience here in this loft, and, and thanks to Terence, uh, the, the number five grams was in my, in my years and I didn’t know what to do, and I think I was on arrowwood and checking out dosages, and when I went out to pile out what five grams looked like I was, uh, I was terrified because it was a large quantity, and yet, you know, Terence was of the, of thought of, uh, large doses very infrequently to him.

1:47:00 In your house, alone, in the dark, total darkness, five grams. Right, so I did something close to that, I didn’t get, I couldn’t get to five, I think it was four point two or three. Yeah, and, uh, and so close enough, thanks to you brothers, uh, that we have probably accelerated that with the, the, the going down there, to La Chorrera, the, um, the growers guide. Yeah, that was all accelerated, um, so thank you for that. How do you feel about dosages and what were your thoughts?

1:47:28 Well, I think one of the things about, about the, the dose question, and one of the, one of the sort of misconceptions that people have about the mushrooms, that they’re, they’re light somewhere, they’re, they’re more recreational, they’re easy compared to ayahuasca, ayahuasca is the real medicine, you know, this is where you get very deep. That’s a misunderstanding, but I think that because the mushrooms are easy to use recreationally and you can take a gram, gram and a half, go to a party, have a good time, it’s all very nice, you know, and I think a lot of people do that, and more power to them. I don’t, I don’t think you have to plunge into the abyss every time you take a psychedelic, you can take it, you can have a good time, certainly better than drinking alcohol and all that, but they can do that a lot and they can take those, those light doses, you know, pretty frequently, never suspecting that just around the corner, you know, the abyss will open up if you push it a little bit, and then, and then it all becomes clear.

1:48:43 There’s nothing, uh, you know, easy or less profound about mushrooms than ayahuasca, in some ways they’re even more outrageous, you know, but I mean the, the, you know, the walls will melt, the, you know, creatures start coming out of the, out of the matrix and it’s, it’s heavy stuff, you know, and it’s a real shamanic transforming experience, and, and, uh, but I think that, that, uh, you know, there is this cultural, uh, sort of notion because so many people do take just light doses that mushrooms are, are, you know, for fun, and they can be used for fun. I don’t think anyone would say ayahuasca is for fun because, you know, ayahuasca is, most people’s idea of fun is not throwing up, you know, and that’s something ayahuasca does, but but it’s a misconception, the mushrooms are just as profound and just as, you know, strong, and, and you know, can produce even more profound insights, and, and really should be respected like ayahuasca, they should be approached with great respect, maybe a little fear.

1:49:58 Would not be out of place. Very much so. For me, I had my ayahuasca experiences first, and so I was in a ceremony with a shaman and there was so much respect, and, yeah, around it then, that, that’s how I treat my psilocybin experiences, with the same type of, you know, there’s an occasion, it’s planned, that it’s dark, right, I’m alone, it’s big, it’s going to be something that’s very, I am scared, and so, so that’s how I, I’ve been conditioned to approach it, and I quite like it that way.

1:50:27 Yeah, and that, that’s the, that’s the other thing that, uh, Terence talked about, and everybody’s talked about, and I talk about a lot, that the importance of set and setting, you know. People say, how can we use these things safely and, and still get a lot out of it? Well, pay attention to sentence setting, those are the, the two big variables, you know. Plan for it, have an intention, and, you know, and, and arrange your settings so that, you know, number one, you’re safe, and that’s assured, so maybe not on the freeway, maybe not even at a rock concert or whatever, do it in a place where no one is going to bother you, no one at least that you don’t want to bother you, not the neighbors, not the local constabulary, maybe your, your most significant other or something like that could be close by or share it, but setting is important, um, an intention, you know, and that’s part of the whole respect thing, why am I doing this, what do I expect to get out of it, what, what are we doing this for?

1:51:38 You know, and then the setting, the set, the set is really, uh, everything you bring to it, who you are, what your expectation is, what, you know, it’s, it’s everything, it’s you, it’s your mindset, everybody’s mindset is different. Terence told me once when we were young, before I’d ever taken LSD, he said, don’t take LSD until you’ve read Psychology and Alchemy by Jung, right, and we were reading Jung at that time. He said, don’t take LSD, you’ll get much more out of it if you do that.

1:52:19 Well, I hadn’t read Psychology and Alchemy when I, when I took them the first time, but later I did and I realized what he meant. I mean, a lot of the things that came up, Psychology and Alchemy is a kind of a good map for a lot of the sort of gestalts and ideas that come up during the psychedelic experience. So, so setting is one thing and set is the other variable, which you, it, which is much trickier, but they’re both important, right? You know, I find with ayahuasca I get a distinct, finite set of lessons, like one, two, three, this is what we need to go do, sometimes it’s very related to plant symbiosis, sometimes it’s related to some relationship things I need to do, very much usually those, I used to write people, you usually not being confronted with your IPO on an ayahuasca experience.

1:53:15 It’s very deep, but with psilocybin, sometimes I don’t know any specific lessons afterwards, the day or two afterwards, I, I don’t have in my mind that I need to go do this, this, and this. Is that something you hear a lot, is that something that’s typical to have the kind of different experiences? Yeah, I’d say so. Okay, I mean, I, I iwask is often much more of a counselor in some ways, or it does give you ideas about what you should be doing, or, you know, like you say, your relationships, or insights into this whole, uh, you know, mission that we’re engaged in, which is to save the planet ultimately, but you know that the plant-human symbiosis thing, uh, it’s much more about that, um.

1:54:05 Mushrooms are not that way so much. Mushrooms, yeah, they don’t really lay out an agenda, they sort of just, uh, lay down a rap more or less and it’s like, you know, they just download information like they did at La Chorrera and they say, well, this is what it is, this is what’s going on here, and you say, well, but that’s crazy, you know, this, sorry, that’s what it is, you know, deal with it. Would Terence call it having a conversation with the leprechaun, or having a conversation, and yeah, you want to engage in the conversation and they’re not answering your questions?

1:54:50 Well, they’re, they’re, they’re dodgy, they’re, they’re very tricky, you know, they’re elfin, they’re mischievous, I mean, this is the whole thing, you know, and this, this comes up again with, uh, discussions of also DMT, and, and mushrooms are really a form of DMT, they’re really the, uh, orally active form of DMT, if you understand the chemistry, right? Psilocin is one molecule away from DMT, it’s 4-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine, so that hydroxy group is just different enough that it’s orally active without an MAO inhibitor, right? So it really is DMT, and at the higher doses you, you get into those areas, you see, yes, this is, this is this, is a tryptamine land, this is the tryptamine space, and mushrooms, ayahuasca, and DMT all get you into that place, right?

1:55:48 And, uh, um, so, um, I forgot what, what my thread was. Yeah, I was trying to remember too, so, uh, well, we talked about the psilocybin and the DMT’s, was I, I, I, I got so in, entrance, I didn’t know what we were talking about. Yeah, but, but so they’re all, they’re all, uh, DMT, uh, of that space, but they’re all like a little different, I mean, it’s, it’s sort of you’re looking into the same, on the, through the same thing, at the same thing, but through slightly different portals, if you will.

1:56:26 Yes, versus the lessons, versus the information, and then, right, right, it more downloads stuff, and, uh, uh, you know, and you can, you can take away from any of that what you will, you know, I mean it can be in the form of a lesson, but usually with ayahuasca it’s, I don’t know exactly, it’s, it’s like you come away with a sense often that, you know, you really have to do something, you have to change something, you have to change your diet, or you know, talk to your loved one and get something straightened out or stuff like that. And the mushroom is not necessarily, there’s not a plan for action, this is, this is what is the lesson for the day, or this is what you, this is what you come away with, but there’s not necessarily anything to do about it other than, uh, appreciate it, I guess.

1:57:27 Right. Did parents, did Terence, uh, stop taking psychedelics toward the ends of his life or was he still, you know, taking big doses? He did, he stopped taking psychedelics, or stopped taking them regularly and at high doses for, at a certain period in his life, like the early 90s, and this was part of the, of the crisis of his life, I think, that he was in at that time. He was having existential anxiety in a certain way and he was beginning to question a lot of things, and I think, and, he would, plus he was having personal issues and he was questioning his whole career and the Timewave and everything, his marriage, his public role and all that, and I think that it was, that it was hard on him, and, uh, you know, I think, I think, I mean, I used to say, and I think that’s true to a certain extent, I used to say that, you know, he’s, he stopped taking psychedelics regularly when it, when it stopped really being about the alien and the other and it was, became more about himself and looking at himself through that mirror, and that was uncomfortable.

1:59:00 When he, he stepped back from it for a while, he continued to take psychedelics but not in great quantities, and, and this was actually one of the things that, uh, you know, that was part of our, I wouldn’t say conflict, but part of the thing that, you know, when we were not seeing eye to eye during that period, uh, you know, I was, critical of that, I was saying, well, look, you’re the main spokesman for psychedelics in the world, that’s how you’re presenting yourself, you’re not taking psychedelics, so what’s going on, you know, you need to be walking your talk if you’re gonna do this. You’re a tough brother to have, aren’t you? Well, I am, but I felt that, true, I didn’t say that, I felt it, I said it out of love, I think, and concern, and, uh, he, uh, he resented it, and, uh, yeah, he resented it, but I, I was honest, and, uh, and he resented because he knew there was some truth to it, and, uh, you know, I, um, I did, I, I, I said those things, and, uh, yeah, he wasn’t, uh, he wasn’t too happy about that, you know, um, but then on the other hand, you know, maybe had, maybe he had a point.

2:00:33 I mean, he certainly, uh, had taken his share of psychedelics, and at high doses, and, and you know, you don’t really have to apologize for somebody, I mean, Terence McKenna does not need to apologize to anybody, even his brother, about the, his use of psychedelics, he’s been there, he understands it. You know, we used to have, and we have an argument sometimes because Terence would say, well, you know, he would quote Ram Dass, I think it was, or maybe it was Alan Watts, who said once, well, about psychedelics, once you get the message, hang up the phone. Right, Terence would say that as a kind of excuse for not taking psychedelics, and that used to make me quite irritated because I would say, it’s not an answering machine, it’s a teacher, you have an online, ongoing dialogue with this thing, it’s not like it’s one big download, you get the message and you hang up the phone, you continue the conversation because you have, you still have a lot to learn.

2:01:43 That was my approach to it, and I, it still is, you know, that’s why, that’s why I suppose I still take psychedelics, I’ve taken, all the time, and I don’t feel I’ve learned anything, I mean, I feel I’ve learned stuff, but I don’t feel I’ve learned everything there is to know, they’re still teaching me, I still have them as a mentor, and that’s an ongoing conversation, and, you know, so that’s my approach to it, you know. People say, why do you keep taking this after 40 years? Because I’m still learning from it, plus the, plus I also enjoy it, you know, I mean, I learn from it, enjoy it, say, well, you know, I’ve been eating chocolate for 40 years too and I have no intention of stopping, why would I?

2:02:33 Another plant symbiosis, right? Another plant should be, uh, that’s right. I think I had the author Graham Hancock in here about three years ago, and Graham was, you know, always very open about, you know, psychedelics, and told me that in his ayahuasca ceremonies in Brazil, I believe, of Peru, that kind of after the initial three hours he would be around, and it’s kind of in a ceremony or a kind of an exit kind of ceremony, and they would put Terence on, kind of the old lectures, and he was just listening to that, and so, uh, it’s a ritual that I kind of took up and doing the same thing as well, and so now when I can’t sleep at the end of an ayahuasca serum, when I have a hard time sleeping the night, I just, that’s the hardest part for me after a session, or just in general.

2:03:17 Well, after a session, like kind of from three hours to six hours after drinking, that’s the time the visions are usually over, but now you’re in this time where you’re trying to process, but it’s easy the next day, and yeah, that’s the time when I usually allow myself to listen to a bit of Terence, yeah, and it seems to help me make sense of things. What did Graham say to you that, that’s what they would do, right? Yeah, Graham is fantastic. You know, I wish that he and Terence had gotten to know each other better.

2:03:48 I have gotten to know him better, he and I went, we’ve been together at Wasiwaska down in Brazil, Eduardo Luna’s place, we did a tour of Australia in 2012 together with Mitch Schultz, and I just saw him, he’s here and his new book came out and he was at this private conference I was at, so I just saw him days ago. I admire that guy a lot, he’s got balls, he is, out there, but in a way that he’s willing to say really outrageous things, but he’s a good scholar and he’s not a nut case, you know, he has support for this stuff that he’s coming out with, and, uh, and, uh, you know, his new book which I’m just into a few, maybe 30 pages or so. You know about this book, right?

2:04:49 Yeah, Magicians of the Gods, it’s just come out, it’s blowing my mind. He’s a great, he’s great, I, I like him personally, I like both he and Santha very much, we have fun hanging out, uh, but as a scholar and as a person of courage I have to admire Graham, you know, he’s very open and he, you know, all the psychedelic stuff he’s open about, he’s open about his personal experiences with those things, and on the, uh, in terms of the ideas he’s promulgating through Magicians of the Gods, you know, which is a, the sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods, well, now there’s a whole lot more data that, uh, is available that shows that what he asserted in Fingerprints of the Gods is, is essentially correct, you know, and now there’s more data and his new book, you know, is bringing that out, and, uh, you know, the guy is, the guy is fearless you know, to say it, but he’s not, he’s not just asserting crazy stuff, there’s reason to believe, based on what he’s bringing out, that he was correct, and, and you know, that actually there was a, a complex, relatively complex, not, not, you know, levitation technology or anything like that, but a, a sophisticated world-traveling, you know, maritime situation back 22 to 24,000 years ago, and, uh, you know, and they spread all over the world, and these megalithic sites that where they were familiar with are actually recent, fairly recent to what was there, and some of the oldest one, like this one in Turkey that everyone is, agrees is at least seven, eleven thousand six hundred years old, Gobekli Tepe,

2:07:06 Is, uh, the most recent instantiation of a much older civilization, and, uh, there’s no reason why that can’t be, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s, and there’s evidence that in fact it was so, and there was a global cataclysm around, uh, eleven thousand, well, between twelve thousand eight hundred years ago and eleven thousand six hundred years ago that just devastated the world, and there were floods and volcanoes and earthquakes and, and all of this stuff that shows up in the myths of these cultures. Every culture has a myth about a big flood and about volcanism and earthquakes and a period of time when things were pretty wild and woolly and, and difficult on the planet, and it turns out that it has to do with this cometary encounter that took place in what, what the geologists called the Younger Dryas.

2:08:14 There was a fairly big comet that came through and it either closely grazed the Earth or it actually pieces of it impacted the Earth. This is not controversial in geology, you know, the geologists are now accepting this and saying there’s plenty of evidence this took place. The archaeologists don’t know what to say, I mean, they’re just saying, no, no, you know, we’re in denial, we don’t want to hear any of this, this is, yeah, they’ve never known what to say with a lot of crimes, and archaeology is not a science, you know, unfortunately, this is what comes out, it’s not a science because they ignore evidence.

2:08:55 Yeah, we were super fortunate to have Graham on the show very early, I think it was three years ago, and, uh, it was actually on his first London Real appearance that he was really open about his, um, experiences with marijuana and how he had smoked for so many years and had stopped after an ayahuasca ceremony, and how it really, the, you know, the plant ally ayahuasca had taught him something about his other ally, and it was time to take a break, and, yeah, really open about it, and in the beginning of one of his books he talks about his a boca experience and trying to reconnect with his father that it died, and you know, Graham has that credibility of a scholar, but most scholars aren’t willing to talk about their psychedelic experiences because, you know, right, they’re not, but he’s, well, he’s, he’s honest that way, honestly.

2:09:40 He writes his fictional books to go in with, uh, his, uh, knowledge of ayahuasca and the, the ones in Mexico, they’re, they’re fantastic, and Graham’s a huge asset for us in the UK, probably one of the best, uh, proponents. Well, I hope you have a lot of show. Oh yeah, we’ve had it on twice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, since his book has come out. No, but I almost interviewed him on stage for Magicians of the Gods, but we had a scheduling conflict, so I was going to do something, get him on the show.

2:10:04 Yeah, we’ll get him back. Well, I’m sure Graham’s listening to this, so we’ll have to get him back. Shoot him on this show, absolutely. He’s, he’s coming to the States too to promote his book, it won’t, it won’t even be out in the States until mid-November, but he’s coming, and, uh, you know, usually it’s a West Coast, East Coast thing, I, I live in flyover land in Minnesota, but I’m gonna arrange at least two gigs for him just because, uh, I admire his work so much and I can do it, you know.

2:10:36 I think a lot of people come out to hear him. Yeah, another, another, another pioneer, a very courageous man indeed. Very much so. Tell you about your success and, and how over the years you managed, you know, published books like this and, uh, you know, still be, be so relevant and be such a figurehead for this movement, were there, were there any things that you changed about your routines or, or the way that you conducted your life that had a big, big change in how you were able to be successful?

2:11:28 Now back to the rest of the show. Do you think this ayahuasca resurgence is correlated with our need to embrace the plants? That’s totally correlated with, that’s exactly what, what is happening, I think. The plants engineered this episode so more people could talk about this. Well, plant, yeah, you can be sure they engineered this episode as well as everything else, but yes, I think that’s exactly what’s happening.

2:11:55 I mean, you know, people say, well, plants, you know, don’t think, don’t act like that, you’re projecting all this anthropomorphic qualities onto the plants, you know, and imagining that, but in fact, um, true, I’m using all these metaphors which are kind of inaccurate, but in fact we are learning now that, um, plants are intelligent and they do behave and they do all those things, they plan and they’re pretty clever and they don’t have brains as we understand it, but they do have intelligence, and a few years ago to talk about plant intelligence, then people say, this guy’s really, actually not so much, not so much, there is now. Well, Michael Pollan, among other people, have written about that, he has a wonderful article which I urge you to, to Google and read it, it’s called, it’s called The Intelligent Plant, and talking about a lot of this stuff that’s coming out about, about plant, and plant behavior, strategizing, planning for the future, forming alliances with us and other plants, and, and behavior really that is hard to, uh, characterize any other way than intelligent behavior, but it works on a different time scale than we do, so it, you know, it’s like, you know, when I was a graduate student, when I started graduate, my graduate work at UBC in 1980, went there to study, uh, you know, initially psilocybin, but in the botany department, which I was in, there were maybe 40 graduate students, and there were, like, in the zoology department there was, maybe a couple hundred graduate students in the zoology department.

2:13:54 I said, so why so many graduate students in zoology, what’s wrong with botany? What they said, well, plants don’t do anything, they just kind of sit there. Well, they do sit there, but they, they do a lot, and, and that’s the thing, the plants, you know, they, they mediate the, their environment, they mediate their relationship with the environment through, through chemistry, and all, that’s why plants are such great chemists, and that’s what these things are, I mean, from psychedelics to everything else, these secondary compounds, these are, these are messenger molecules and they regulate a plant’s relationship with the whole ecosystem, essentially by chemistry.

2:14:46 There was a famous botanist who said, plants substitute biosynthesis for behavior. We react to the environment through running away or staying and fighting or doing all those behavioral responses, plants do it through chemistry because they’re stuck in one place, but it’s no less complex than our responses. Super important message, uh, Dennis. I always ask everyone here a couple questions at the end, I’m gonna ask you, and it’s very, very poignant with you, if you could make a call to the 20- year-old Dennis McKenna and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him that happens to coincide with you being it?

2:15:30 If I could speak to my younger self, yes, what would you tell him? Don’t do what I did. No, I’d probably say, get, spend more time, you know, getting your academic chops together, spend more time building your foundation, you know, if you’re gonna work in this area, uh, you know, get a degree in medicinal chemistry or pharmacology or something really specialized, maybe an MD even, and that will give you more credibility and that will open doors to you that, that I don’t have.

2:16:16 Uh, I might say that, okay, but then on the other hand I would say, beware of, you know, keep your, uh, keep your own personal counts, beware that this is a, this is a trap in some way because you get so deeply in, into medicine or something, it’s institutionalized, and the idea is to take any curiosity that you might have away and to kind of numb you and make you a part of the cog of the machine, and I’ve never been a cog in the machine, so it’s a fine line, you know. On that same note, what’s the, what’s the best advice you’ve ever received in your life, business, personal, academic, would it have come from Terence or not, uh, did he ever give you advice? Sounds like you were there giving him a lot of advice.

2:17:10 I gave him advice, yeah, yeah, well, I’ve had good, I’ve had good pieces of advice from Terence and other people. I think one thing I took to heart, what he told me, which is, which is true, which is worth keeping in mind, is that, you know, everything passes, everything passes, so you can’t hang on to it, you know. I think this, this came up when, uh, you know, when we were down together in, in Iquitos in 1981, when I was doing my graduate work, and, you know, Terence came down and joined me for part of that time, and at that time I had left a girlfriend back in, in Vancouver, you know, regretted, regretted leaving her, but I had to go, right, and, and she was back there, and I, you know, she wrote me and said, just can’t be separate from you, you know, I, I take it up with this other guy, and I was, I was quite shattered by that, I was quite depressed by that.

2:18:22 And I shared that with Terence, you know, and I got that letter in Iquitos and he said, well, everything passes, you know, and I thought that was good advice. As it turned out, I went back to Vancouver and that, that woman is my wife now, so it was a good outcome, but I nev, I kept that in mind, everything passes. And, and then the other piece of advice is, don’t believe anything anyone tells you, you know, just trust yourself, and, and, uh, you know, keep an open mind about things, but don’t be so open-minded that you completely abandon your critical faculties.

2:19:10 I mean, I think it was Whitehead that said, and, and that Terence and I both took to heart, you know, the essence of the scientific attitude is the suspended judgment, you know, and it’s okay to say we don’t know. It’s okay to say that the picture is incomplete because the picture will always be incomplete, so you know, that’s the beauty of science in a way, you never prove anything in science. You only say that you can’t disprove something, and you know, as far as we know, given the data that we have, a thing, a phenomenon, whatever, is this way, but there’s always the chance that new data will come on that will totally overturn that, so that’s a beautiful thing about science, you know.

2:20:05 And, and I, I, I, that’s, that’s a personal thing too, be skeptical. Arthur C. Clarke said, or I, I guess it was a Carl Sagan who said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think that’s true too, I think, you know, when you, these reports come of things on Mars or UFOs or all this, all this stuff, okay, what’s the evidence, and is that, you really, you’re making an extraordinary claim, so you better have extraordinary evidence to back it up, and ordinary claims require evidence too, you know, evidence is a good thing.

2:20:46 I’m, uh, you know, I’m, I tend to rail against faith a lot. Faith, in my book, is, uh, you know, faith is believing something for which you have no evidence, for which some, somebody says you should believe this because you should believe this because we tell you to believe this, uh, why should I believe it? I don’t care that you tell me if there’s no evidence for it, I’m not sure I want to buy into it, and this, of course, the whole religious thing, right?

2:21:23 And another, that’s another thing that’s beautiful about psychedelics, you don’t have to have faith to take psychedelics, you know, you do not have to have faith, all you have to do is have the courage to sit down and drink the cup or smoke the pipe or whatever it is and evaluate for yourself what it means. You know, you don’t have to accept anyone’s interpretation of it, unlike, uh, religion, where they’re very invested in getting you to accept their interpretation of it, and so that, that to me is, uh, you know, that, that is, uh, repulsive to me, I want to run away from that, um. So, uh, it’s like psychedelics are the cure for faith in a certain way, or you come by, you know what I’m saying, faith, uh, informs you of nothing, it’s just a set of prepositions that you’re supposed to accept without any question.

2:22:22 Well, the essence of, of science is to ask questions, and, uh, and so that’s an approach I, I try to take, you know, and, and accept those things and, and just, just, just approach everything with an open mind, but not so open that I’m ready to believe any damn thing anybody wants to tell me. Last question, if, uh, if Terence were to walk in here and sit down here in this chair and you had five minutes with him, what would you tell him? What would I tell him?

2:23:02 Well, um, oh gosh, I don’t know, I would, I would tell him that, you know, I would tell him that I wish he’d stuck around, you know, to help with this project, with this, whatever it is we’re doing, because I feel lonely sometimes. I do feel lonely, I feel like I’m just soldiering on and it’s not a voluntary thing. I wish that he was still, you know, still there, but then I look at the cultural phenomenon of his presence on the net and all that and they were like, well, he never really went away, he’s, he’s still influential, but I wish he was here, you know, and I wish we could still interact in real time and, and hash out some of these ideas that we, we’ve both been preoccupied with, and, and maybe reconcile some of our differences, you know, and just, just in good discussions, you know, because he was always up for a good argument, always up for a good conversation, and I miss that a lot, you know.

2:24:16 Not that I don’t hang out with brilliant people, but he just brought something that they’ll just never be another like him, you know. They broke the mold when they made him, so, um, you know, I guess that’s what I’d say. I think you summarized it right there, that I just don’t think there will be another one like him. There will never be another one, which is, it’s, it’s, it, and that’s, that in itself is an unscientific thing to say because, you know, statistically there should be, but every time I listen to him I think there’s just not going to be another one like him, not another one like him, and, you know, and, I’m certainly not like him, you know, and, and or nor am I trying to be, I would never try to be.

2:25:01 I have my own ideas and, and we shared a lot of ideas, but I’m not the, the successor to Terence McKenna, you know, and people in the, in this area, this, this, uh, you know, this, this realm of discussion, I think some imagine that they’re the precursor or they’re the successor to Terence McKenna, but I think they’re quite deluded. Yeah, I don’t know how they could even aspire to that. Yeah, and I know you’re not trying to be, I mean, in the book, you know, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, it’s beautifully written, it’s a fantastic story, and I’m so glad you told it because you could have easily not, and, and you know, and gone on with all the other work that you’re doing, and so it’s, it’s a treasure that you, that you’ve done this, and I just want to say, I’ve had the pleasure of being able to speak to hundreds of people over the last four years and I think it’s probably fair enough to say that you and Terence had probably the most direct material effect on my life than anyone I’ve sat down with, um, because for me, you know, the psychedelic experience is something that I only experienced in the last 10 of my life, and before that I marginalized it like so many people do in this world as something that those people do, or something that those, right, other people do, what those crazy people do, or those hypnosis, right, you know, and, and for me, you know, it was just not, never something I considered, and, you know, by, by starting to broadcast and starting to talk to people, for some reason I was drawn towards ayahuasca,

2:26:36 And, uh, you know what it’s like when you, when you’re drawn towards it, you hear it everywhere and you start noticing and people talking about it, and it was actually on the Joe Rogan Experience, one of his guests, Aubrey Marcus, he first spoke about it, and it was 18 months, it took me until I finally had my first ceremony, and, you know, that changed my life, and listening to Terence, and, you know, experience with psilocybin mushrooms and DMT, which I think probably all would have happened maybe 30, 40 years later if it wasn’t for the two of you, and so I just want to say thank you very much, it’s had such a huge effect on my life and the way I interact with society and I think the way I see so many people, say this, you know, so thank you. Thank you for saying that, then, you know, it’s like, yeah, it, that’s an affirmation that it’s not a waste of time, that it’s touching people, and you’re obviously an influential person, you’re a voice for the culture, and you’re having an impact, so thank you for that.

2:27:36 And, uh, don’t thank me, thank the plants, I mean, this is all part of the plan. It is, and, you know, you had told me five years ago, I would have been talking about plant consciousness, I would have said the same thing you said earlier, they don’t move, they don’t have an intelligence, but as I look at my actions, then the plants are making me do things and talk about things and open up conversations that are having a direct impact on those said plants, so, um, symbiosis, symbiosis, right? Right, yeah, right.

2:28:06 Dennis, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. I know you took time, you’re the busiest man in London right now, uh, going to so many different conferences, so many people want your time and want to listen to you, so thanks so much for this time. I think we got such a great snapshot of who you are and, in the past, and I think people are just going to love this. So great, thank you for inviting me, I’m glad we pulled this together, look forward to the next time.

2:28:31 Yeah, please come see us again in London. I certainly will. All right, we, uh, we say it’s about the journey on London Real, so I wish you well in yours. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.