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Dennis McKenna: Deceptive Psychedelics, Consciousness
August 7, 2023
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Medicine has always been uncomfortable with the idea of spirit, the idea of the mind. The brain is just a complex machine. I disagree. I think that the traditions and the history of the use of these things, these things are medicines for the spirit. They're medicines for the soul.
Dr. Dennis McKenna is a pioneer in the field of entho-pharmacology and psychoactive substances. He's notable due to his comprehensive research into the indigenous uses and biochemistry of psychoactive plants. Dennis McKenna's work has been instrumental in understanding the connections between neurochemistry and consciousness, particularly through his research on DMT. Dennis, by the way, shares the same last name as Terrence McKenna because he's Terrence McKenna's brother.
In this conversation, we delve into the often ignored deceptive aspects of psychedelics. That is the impact that these substances have on both introspective as well as exrospective processes. The interplay between self-reflection and environmental perception is a crucial theme in Dr. McKenna's work, and it's one that people don't seem to ask him much about, making this a distinctive conversation today.
During this podcast, you'll notice that Dennis and I bond over sharing personal stories that we don't talk about much publicly. It was an honor to speak to Dennis and I hope this isn't the last time I look forward to speaking with him again. Enjoy this conversation today with Dr. Dennis McKenna. Are you someone who wakes up much later in the day? Are you a night owl? I don't wake up later, but I need time to get
What is it that you do in your routine? I do a lot of podcasts. I do email and I do stuff for
You know, so I have this McKenna Academy, this nonprofit, which takes up, I mean, technically, you know, it's a hobby. I mean, it takes up a lot of time. You know, it's almost like a job, except I don't get paid. It's out of passion. But yeah, so that's how it is. I get up, I have breakfast,
Get down here and check my email. And then usually there's a bunch of emails and stuff. And, uh, Oh, you know, not exciting really, but got to push it forward, you know? So no ritualistic micro dosing or heroic dosing on a daily basis. Not so much, not on a regular basis. You know, I mean, I don't micro dose. Uh, I've tried micro dosing. I, uh,
I have done, but I don't do it on a regular basis. I don't see much benefit from it for me personally. Heroic dosing is a special thing. It's fairly rare. You have to find the right circumstances. It's all about setting as we know.
Did you at one point have a regimen for it? For instance, you would say, okay, this is my yearly review or my bi-yearly review. Let me get some advice from another state. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't come up as a regular thing that I've scheduled. It comes up usually in the context of being somewhere that I might want to do it, you know, that a good, a good set and setting for doing it.
But I haven't actually done any psychedelic since before COVID. So, uh, it's been a while. I am overdue. Uh, I am overdue for that. Do you see yourself actually as overdue? Meaning that like, I need to get back to it. I should get back to it. I need, I need to, yeah, I need to go to the well and drink again, you know? Uh, yeah, I mean, I don't need to, but I want to, I feel like it's good to,
What would be the truth behind that you should hang up once you receive the message?
I think Ram Dass or maybe it was Alan Watts. Alan Watts, I think, said that, well, his idea was that, you know, you learn from psychedelics, you get a message, you get like, you know, you learn from the experience. Once you've had the experience, you don't need to keep talking on the phone, you know, you're hanging up because you integrate the message and then you've got it.
But these folks, Alan Watts, people like Houston Smith and other people, they have a different perspective on psychedelics than maybe I do, you know, in the sense that they think that, you know, a lot of these people are dead, so I don't want to put words in their mouth, but they think that, you know, psychedelics,
can let you have a mystical experience, you know, or a profoundly transformative mystical experience, but it's, it doesn't stick. You know, I mean, you have that you see the possibilities, but if you really want to have that, if you want to integrate that spiritual practice into your life, you need
A spiritual practice, you know, you need a religion, you need to practice yoga, you need to practice regular meditation or something like that. And so in some sense, they devalue, in my opinion, they devalue the psychedelic experience, you know, you can pursue psychedelics as a spiritual practice. It's a discipline. It's just as hard as any other discipline as you're, if you're really committed to it.
You know, so my perspective is, well, I sort of share the perspective of indigenous people and many people who say these things are teachers. You learn from your teachers, you know, why would you turn your back on your teacher? Why would you hang up the phone on your teacher? You know, you need to
connect with them occasionally and say, Hey, what's up, man? You know, what else you got to show me? So that's kind of my perspective. I think it's good to check in. I don't think we should presume that once you've had one or two or a few psychedelic experiences, you've learned all there is to learn, you know, that source. I mean, one of the stronger lessons that I take that
From psychedelics that is I'm constantly reminded of every time I take psychedelics is to remember how little we actually know, you know, whatever you might learn from psychedelic experience or any other experience, but from a psychedelic experience, there's always
a lot that remains unknown. I mean, that's just the nature of knowledge, you know, our knowledge is always limited. So to say that, you know, okay, I got the message. I'm going to hang up the phone and not listen anymore. I mean,
It's no different than rejecting a mentor or a teacher or, you know, someone that you might look up to. So my understanding of that isn't to hang up permanently, but to say, okay, let me integrate. Let me now live my life because there's a message, but the message needs to be nurtured as well. Like you get a seed and you need to water it with not being inebriated.
That's how I relate to it. That's right. Some of the examples you gave the indigenous people, they do so, but ensconced in a community in a religion that's like the millennia old and often. Right. Well, there's now this new culture of taking it and taking it once a day for 30 days straight or doing it alone. Do you feel like the lessons that you get are of a different sort in the isolated case than in the communal case?
Well, yes, I do. In these indigenous communities, it's usually done, it's almost always done in a group situation.
The exception being if you're a shaman, if you're a curadero, if you're in training, if you're trying to do dietas and learn how to do it, then you might go into isolation and do it repeatedly over a short period of time. And that is really a discipline. I mean, that is really learning how to use it so that you can then go back and
You know, be the facilitator for, for people in group session. So that's a different thing. Usually in indigenous cultures, it is a group session group kind of thing. And it's not necessarily, I mean, you can't make a, you know, you can't make a rule about this because the way people use it differs. But for example,
It's not necessarily something we do this every Saturday or we do this once a month or sometimes. Usually they do it when there's a need, when the group has a question that needs to be answered or for healing. Okay, there is this person with an illness that needs healing, so they get the group together and then the focus is on that.
And back, you know, in indigenous cultures, it's often the shaman takes the medicine, not necessarily everybody in the group, you know, now with tourism and all that, people are, you know, people go down there with the expectation that they're going to take the medicine. It didn't used to be that way. You know, there would be a group
That would gather there would be perhaps a person or several people that needed some sort of healing. The shaman would take the medicine not everybody there sometimes the person getting the treatment would be given the medicine but the use of the of the medicine it's used for diagnosis basically and for diagnosis and then through the visionary state the shaman
gets information from whatever source it comes from, but they get information about what to do, how to treat the person. And it could be other things too. It could be, okay, where's the game going to be next spring? What are the best hunting spots? All kinds of things, but these are things of concern to the community.
And the other side, the way people might use it, is a much more personal thing. It's about internal self-examination, personal growth, exploration of consciousness, if you will, much more a self-focused kind of activity where the person is using the medicine to connect through an altered state, essentially to connect with another
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Do you feel Dennis that you're yearning to go back to what you have tried pre-COVID?
comes from a need, like there's a question that you're trying to solve, or is it more just, you can get a massage because it's a maintenance massage. You feel like, you know, I'm a bit, yeah, it's more of a check-in, you know, I mean, to check in, I have taken these things many times, various kinds. And, uh, and, but I, I think it's important to maintain the connection, but, and things do come up. That's not like, but it's not like something comes up in
And, you know, I mean, it might be something that I say, yes, I really need to take the psychedelic to reflect on this or that. But for me, it's more of a check in. Can you talk about why you wrote the book Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss? Basically, you know, the book is a personal story and, uh,
You know, I mean, my brother and I have become like almost mythical figures, you know, legendary figures, because he's told his story in true hallucinations, primarily is where he told that personal story. I wanted to tell my story and I wanted to tell the story not just about our
experiment at Lotteria, our trip to Lotteria in 1971, which is what True Hallucinations is basically about, but I wanted to write the story of our lives. So it was an autobiography, you know, it was a personal memoir. And I just wanted to tell my side of it in a sense, not that he didn't represent it well, but I have, I have a different perspective. And so that's why I wrote it.
I just wanted to tell my own story. There's a new edition, you may be aware, 10th anniversary edition or whatever. It's the same book that I published in 2012, but now I have a publisher, Synergetic Press, and I wrote a 50-page additional chapter for it.
So it's not all the old stuff. It's all the old stuff plus some new stuff. That was kind of respective of the last 20 years or so since the book was. Well, the book was published in 2012, but the narrative story ends around 2000 when my brother passed on. So it's useful to read the second edition and then you have to buy it again, of course.
There were a few things I left out. Length wasn't really a concern so much. In a bit it was, but there were a few things I left out because my family, you know, were not happy with some of the things I put in it initially and
And so I left them out. They felt it was too personal. Like you shouldn't reveal that part of our family. That was their, that was their perspective. Yeah. I disagree, but out of respect, it didn't really interfere with the, uh, with the, with the story too much. So out of respect, I did it.
Not that it helped. I mean, they, I made changes that they had insisted on and it didn't make any difference. You know, they still hate me largely. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, at least they got to read it. I don't even know if they did read it. I mean, I think some of they read parts of it. They read the parts they didn't like. I don't know if they've ever read it from cover to cover because I think if they had,
They would see that there's really nothing there. I mean, in no way did I make Terrence look bad or me or any of the family. I mean, the family is almost not mentioned other than they are mentioned, but there's no long narrative about it. I think if they had read the book as I revised it, they wouldn't have so much
Uh, you know, they, they wouldn't feel so negatively about it, but they, they seem to be in a place of, uh, you know, our minds are made up, don't confuse us with facts, you know? So this is kind of a touchy subject. We don't really need to go into this. Painful. It's painful. And, uh, you know, it hurts me and guess it hurts them too. Uh, but you know,
this happens in families. And I think part of the take home lesson is, uh, don't write memoirs. Yeah. Keep them sterile. You're not going to be able to, you know, no family is going to be happy. It's a tricky thing. And I have made efforts to reach out and, uh, you know, but that hasn't been, that hasn't been responded to, uh,
So, so that's why I've said, you know, I told them effectively, I've said, you know, well, if, if bridges have been burned, they're not burned on my side of the river. So, you know, anytime you want to reach out, I'm here. Sorry, if this is personal, I guess I'm asking for personal reasons for myself, but tell us about ESPD 55. Yeah. So if people go to the, uh,
If you go to the website, the link will be on screen and then we'll also show it. If you go to the McKenna Academy and go to ESPD, there's a tab for it actually on the website. You can look at ESPD 55 and ESPD 50 both. All the videos from both symposia are still online and will be hopefully forever. And you can
You can put in your email and you can create an account, essentially an email and a password and then it's completely open. There's no paywall or anything. You can watch all the videos from both of the conferences and there's some good stuff there. So it's a conference. ESPD 55 is a conference. Right.
and ESPD 50 was another conference. It happened five years earlier in 2017 and that was kind of freelance. There was no McKenna Academy. It was just me and some friends and everything fell in place. In 2017, we had a place to do it, a beautiful
country house in the UK. I had a team of people who stepped up and helped organize it. They were both lovely conferences. We published the proceedings for 2017. You can order those from Synergetic Press. We published actually a double volume
We published the Synergetic Press as a box set. So we published the 1967 conference and the 2017 conference. And then this year and last year's conference will be published also as a separate volume. It'll be out either later this year or early in 2024. So that's in the pipeline.
And Synergetic Press is the publisher for both these and also for the Brotherhood, the new edition of the Brotherhood. And I want to kind of plug Synergetic because they're great people and they're really trying to be kind of the publisher for psychedelic literature of all kinds. So they published some wonderful stuff.
Besides this ESPD, they published a book by Alexander Shulgin, which is called The Nature of Drugs, which is fairly recent. And that was actually his lecture notes from his course that he taught at the University of California.
What else have they published? They published another one called The Mind of Plants or something like that. Just have a look at their website, synergeticpress.com. They do good
They publish some really interesting stuff. We'll put the link to the Academy as well as ESPD55.com as well as Synergetics in the description. So if you had an unlimited budget wand for your next conference, what would you include? Well, it would be it would be an extension of and the whole idea of the ESPD, you know, ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs is
There are a lot of things out there that are not well investigated, you know, so sort of one of the thrusts of the of the conference is to explore some of these obscure corners of ethnopharmacology, you know, less investigated psychoactive drugs, even though, you know, in a conference like this, there were a lot of things that we that we presented that are
well-known like ayahuasca and the snuffs and different things, but there's still a lot to be discovered, a lot of exploration, many PhDs worth of exploration on some of these obscure psychoactives that people haven't really investigated. Of course, there's no budget for this to actually, or very little support for this. People who are, you know, I mean,
If you're in an academic context, you've got to find support for this kind of stuff. And you can do it, but there hasn't been, you know, there are not actually departments that really are going to apportion money to graduate students and so on to do this. But much of this is, it's important to do, you know, because you never know
We know what the main psychedelics are. We pretty much know the plants, we know the chemistry, we know what's out there. Once in a while, something pops up that is lesser known, and often there's novel chemistry involved, and when there's novel chemistry involved, there's often novel pharmacology. These discoveries can open the door to new mechanisms, new classes of drugs,
Good example here is Salvia divinorum. You don't hear much about Salvia divinorum, but for a while it was popular and you could buy extracts in head shops. It's not illegal most places. Are you familiar with the plant? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it's like its own built-in
uh you know it has its own built-in safeguards against abuse because for most people once is enough you know it makes her so bizarre that people just can't relate to it you know and and that's fine some people like it but it's rare but the interesting thing is about that molecule it's a whole new class of molecules it's not serotonergic it it interacts with the kappa opiate receptors
And it interacts very selectively with that class of receptors. There are about four types of opiate receptors in the body, and kappa-opiate receptors, one of them. Salvia divinorum is the most selective compound for the kappa receptors that's ever been discovered. Why is that important? Well, because, you know, as a scaffold for, well, for one thing, the states of
My you know the altered states it creates are not pleasant but they may be useful therapeutically and then the molecule itself could be a scaffold for different derivatives that might have different effects. So the person that
So this is a good example of what you might call the value of ethnopharmacology, right? Because the guy who elucidated a lot of the pharmacology of salvia divinorum, a fellow named Brian Roth, who is the head of the NIMH psychoactive drug screening program at the University of North Carolina, he elucidated the pharmacology
The chemistry was already known, but he showed that it was this kappa-opiate receptor. And he told me, you know, if I had set out to design a drug that was selective for the kappa-opiate receptor, you know, using computer-aided drug design and structure activity and all that, it would not look like salvia divinorum. He said, this stuff
looks like cholesterol, you know, it doesn't have nitrogen, it doesn't have any of the characteristics, and yet here it is. So I think what this demonstrates is that nature is got a few surprises for us, you know, nature is clever than chemists. And so we should, we should look at nature for these things. As far as I know, MDMA is a
Well, MDMA is not a natural product, but it's very similar to natural products. It's very similar to mescaline. Many of the compounds that Shulkin developed are mescaline analogues.
And in medicinal chemistry, this is what you do. You know, often you take a natural compound and then you tweak it in various ways and you see how it differs. This is very commonly done. I mean, it's not whether the drug is, you know, a cancer drug or an antiviral, whatever you're looking for. You look at different derivatives. You do what's called structure activity relationships.
What's cool about the psychedelics is there's only one way to investigate the structure activity. You make all these derivatives and then you bioassay them carefully because there's no, you know, animal tests are not going to tell you much. There's only one way to really evaluate their effect. This is why Shulkin was such a pioneer, you know, because he made all these things
But then he took them under very careful conditions. He kept extensive notes. He shared them with a group of Psychonauts who were also experienced, collected that information, you know, and you're probably familiar with the books he has published, T-Call and P-Call. You know those books? No. OK, well, they're out there. T-Call stands for tryptamines I have known and loved.
and PCOL stands for phenethylamines I have known and loved. And those are landmark publications in the world of psychedelic psychopharmacology because, you know, I mean, they're unique. The first half of each book is kind of a lightly fictionalized story about Sasha.
You know, and his experiences, the people he met, the work he did, and so on. So it's a novel, but the second half of each book is a list of all these compounds, their chemistry, how to make them, and the subjective experiences from his own trip notes. So these are also available, I think, through Synergetic Press now, but the PDF versions are on www.arowind.org.
I mean, it's a great resource for best online resource for psychoactive drugs of any kind that exists. Most of them I'm not interested in, many of them I've never even heard of, but there's a vast amount of information on that. So anyway, back to your question. So MDMA is a
pretty close to mescaline and the ring structures of MDMA and a lot of Shulgin's mescaline analogues bear resemblances to essential oils. Phenylpropanoids which have different ring structures and it's the ring structures that are the main component of the
of the structure activity work. So in some sense, they're very closely related to natural products. You can take something like Meristesen, for example, which comes from nutmeg. If you add an ammonia to the right place, to the side chain, you've got a psychoact, you know, you have one of these derivatives. So people can read Picol or they can read some of Shogun's other
other works and see how he did this. Now, is MDMA a psychedelic? Actually, it depends on how you want to define psychedelic. My
definition I like. I like a strict definition. In my mind, a strict definition of a psychedelic is something that is an agonist at the 5-HT 2A receptors. So 5-HT, the serotonin 2A receptors seems to be the target for what you might call the classic psychedelics, LSD, DMT,
Mescaline even, psilocybin, all of these are 5-HT2A receptor agonists. So under this strict sort of definition of what a psychedelic is, which I like for convenience more than anything to kind of define this class of drugs. And in that sense, MDMA is not a psychedelic.
Because it does work on serotonin, but it doesn't work on these 5HT2A receptors. What it actually works on are the serotonin uptake transporters, the same site that SSRIs interact with. You know, MDMA... Globally? Sorry, globally or like selectively for MDMA? Well, selectively. Yeah, it's not that selective. It's kind of all over the brain.
wherever the serotonin receptors are. And one way to think of it, the SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and it blocks the reuptake of serotonin from the synapse, right?
In the synapse, serotonin is released, neurotransmitters released, it goes to the postsynaptic membrane, it binds to the receptors and it creates whatever effect it does. SSRIs block that. It's like they, it's not taken back up. So stays at a higher level in the synapse. And so it has the putative antidepressant effect. MDMA has the opposite effect, right?
MDMA binds to those serotonin transporters, but where SSRIs will essentially jam them closed, MDMA will jam them open. So if SSRIs are a vacuum cleaner that takes it back out of the synapse, MDMA floods the synapse on a global scale with serotonin.
So it is not strictly a psychedelic in that sense, but it is psychoactive. You get the typical effects of MDMA, which often are associated with things like euphoria. You know, it's the feel-good drug, right? Serotonin is the feel-good neurotransmitter, one of a couple of them, like dopamine is the other one. Dopamine is another conversation.
But so in that sense, it's not strictly speaking a psychedelic, but it is psychoactive and it's, uh, it's therapeutically quite useful for trauma and, uh, for, uh, you know, for, for sort of emotional puts you in a very open and receptive emotional place. So it's couples therapy and that kind of thing.
Yeah. And it's also my understanding that there aren't designer drugs of MDMA that are anywhere near as effective as MDMA. Is that true? And if it's true, like why is it much more easy to make a designer version of LSD? I think there was one called 1P LSD or 10P LSD, something like that. But then there's not a version of MDMA. There are many versions of MDMA, you know,
There are lots of analogs of MDMA. Some are better, some are worse. This, again, comes back to structure activity relationship. MDMA just happens to be the one that's been most popular, the one that's known. But there are other drugs that act similarly to MDMA, and they have a similar effect.
Again, reading peak hall, you know, they're all there. You can look on Arrowwood. They're all listed there. Some of Shulkin's compounds are more like classical true psychedelics. I mean, they interact with these 5-HT2A receptors like Mescal does, but some of these are
are more like MDMA. There's a whole alphabet soup, if you will. There's MDA, there's MDMA, there's MMDA, there's DDM. It's a lot of different ones. And it's true of all these other things. There are many analogs of LSD now too that are similar to LSD, but
but are some are short acting and some are, you know, let more, they have more of this intactogenic quality. So there's, you know, if you're a medicinal chemist, this is a great area to, to work in because there's, you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of molecular templates to work from. And you never know when the next MDMA will come along that could
But MDMA, for what it does, it's a pretty good molecule. In other words, it's hard to think how you could improve on that structure. And in terms of the classical psychedelics, I think that, again, with DMT, thymothoxy, DMT, psilocybin, psilocin, there are many derivatives of these things.
You know, and again, tea call is the is the source to look at for this. But I'm kind of amused, you know, in some ways psilocybin and the active form of psilocybin, which is psilocin, right, psilocin, psilocybin is converted to psilocin in the body. It's psilocin that's interacting with the 5HT2A receptors.
It's hard to imagine a molecule that's more suited to human physiology. It's non-toxic. The duration of action makes it easy to use in clinical study, clinical setting. It's very compatible with human metabolism. It's a profound psychedelic
So a lot of these companies that are trying to develop analogs of psilocybin and psilocin, in my opinion, much of it is directed toward, you know, they want to be able to patent something, you know, so they want a derivative that could be patented. Silsom thankfully has been in the public domain for since 1958. Well, so, you know, Shogan Hoffman, when he discovered it, never tried to patent it.
And so these companies are kind of, you know, showing their cards in some ways. Well, we have to come up with something proprietary, you know, some analog of Silicin, but chances are it's not going to be better than Silicin in terms of its action. Now, in terms of the medicinal benefit of certain mushroom supplements, is there a broad difference between mycelium and the fruiting bodies?
There is often more of the compounds in the fruiting bodies. If you're making standardized extracts, you can grow mycelium, the material will be there, the alkaloids will be there, and you can standardize them. But the mushrooms, there's something about that
transition in the life cycle of the mushroom that leads to a synthesis of higher levels of these tryptamines. And this is generally true with other secondary products that mushrooms make, you know, like the beta-glucans, for example, which are the medicinal
part the medicinal components of these immune stimulating mushrooms, these functional medicinal mushrooms, a lot of it comes down to beta glucans. The mushrooms will have higher levels than the mycelium. It's just a fact. Now let's say Dennis, we were to play this visual game where you imagine the ethno pharmacology as a jigsaw puzzle. And of course there are unknown unknowns, but I'm going to ask for known unknowns.
Where's the largest gap in this puzzle in terms of our knowledge right now, in terms of the knowledge or in terms of significance? Well, I mean, you know, it's hard to, it's hard to say what the significance of an of an unknown is, you know, until you look into it. It's kind of like salvia divinorum, you know, until you actually take a close look
You have this weird Mexican mint with very strange psychopharmacological properties. So you've got that. And then when people looked into it, it turns out you've got this very interesting molecule. What's fascinating for me in this field right now, in which we were not able to do it, ESPD-55.
This will have to wait for ESPD-60, I guess. I think there's about 20, 25 species of putatively hallucinogenic or psychoactive fish that we couldn't get anyone to come talk about. There's not a lot of work done on them, but I think that's fascinating. And again, I think
This is, this is a perfect example. So we know these are out there. We don't know. All we have are, uh, anecdotal reports, you know, when people accidentally eat these things, usually they accidentally eat these things. And then they have this experience. They're not planning to trip, but, uh, you know, it ends up that they do some of these produce extremely bizarre.
uh kinds of experiences not that pleasant uh sometimes lasting days but the point is that there's novel chemistry there there has to be novel chemistry there it's worth looking into you know this is something because again the idea is you never know when a new molecule is going to surface that actually has some
potential use, so you've got to look into it. It's tricky with these fish because a lot of them, it seems to be a seasonal thing. You don't get the effect every time you eat them. That's interesting. It's most likely it's a bacteria or it's something else that's in the fish or it's something the fish is eating
that is then sequestered into the flesh. And so it isn't always there. But when it's there, people, you know, and interestingly, for example, one of them is it's called the Salema porgy. I forget the I forget the scientific name of it offhand, but it's from the Mediterranean. And it actually it turns out that the Romans used to use it as a recreational drug.
you know they would take it at these orgies and banquets that they had and people get absolutely plastered and you know some people contemporary people have described the effects of you know they went to some event or something they consumed one of these fish and then they had a profound
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Yeah, it seems like psychedelics have both a neurological benefit. So increases neuroplasticity. Sometimes that's good. Often it's good. And there's always edge cases where it's not and psychologically, where often you have a positive experience. And often they don't know about just as often, but a sizable portion doesn't. Do you think that
There can be a drug that's designed or it could be from plants that can produce the positive effects, either neurologically or psychologically, but without the hallucinogenic effects or somehow that part and parcel of the psychological transformation. Well, this is this is an area of controversy right now. There are a number of companies that are trying to design the psychedelic experience out of the psychedelic. They're trying to create
non psychedelic psychedelics. And this is controversial because? Well, because they say, you know, the psychedelic experience is actually an adverse side effect. We just need to get rid of that so that it can do whatever it does on the neural level, you know, rearranging, uh, synaptic connectivity, stimulating synaptogenesis, all the things that it does.
that we talk about under this sort of rubric of neural toxicity, that you don't really need the psychedelic experience to have this, this corrective effect. I think they're barking up the wrong tree, frankly. I think that it's hard. My feeling is it's hard to separate the psychedelic experience, you know, which has often such a profound
emotional and cognitive impact which of course is reflected on the neural level. If you take that away then you take away the therapeutic effect as I believe. I don't think they're going to succeed in developing a non-psychedelic psychedelic. I think the whole thing is
is a red herring that I think are false. I think it's probably not going to happen. I could be wrong. I could be proven wrong the next day. Unfortunately, I mean, in some ways, this really highlights, I think, one of the
One of the sort of unexamined assumptions in the quest for these compounds, which is this idea of dismissing the psychedelic experience as an undesirable side effect, is kind of missing the point. If you design a psychedelic which lacks the psychedelic experience, it's no longer psychedelic by definition.
You know, psychedelic means mind manifesting. You know, so if you engineer the experience out of the molecule, you may have a useful molecule, but you shouldn't call it a psychedelic. You could call it a, you know, neuro, you know, plasticity stimulator or something. But I think it's also, uh, I think it also highlights something about medicine and drug discovery.
And the way that medicine, even in psycho, you know, psychology, psychopharmacology, medicine has always been uncomfortable with the idea of spirit, you know, the idea of the mind. I mean, the mind is inconvenient, you know, because the perspective is it's reductionist, you know, the brain is just a complex machine.
Humans are just complex machines. There's no spirit involved. There's nothing beyond that involved. So if you can apply the right molecular monkey wrench, if you will, to the system, you can fix it. And it has nothing to do with your mind. The mind doesn't really exist. The spirit doesn't really exist. Well, I disagree. I think that
You know, the traditions and the history of the use of these things, these things are medicines for the spirit and the soul in a certain sense. They're medicines for the soul. I think it's completely misguided and unfortunately greed driven to try to discover these molecules that lack the psychedelic experience has been engineered, has been
has been eliminated. I mean, I could imagine it being beneficial at the neuronal level. So for instance, there's BDNF, I believe it's called, which promotes growth of neurons, right? Right. But it's not psychoactive. And so I could imagine the mending it so that it's no longer a psychedelic by the definition of it may still be a psychedelic by your definition if it binds to 528.
But doesn't produce the psychoactive effects, but not by the traditional root of the word. That's entirely possible. I mean, it may tweak different projects, like different, different components, like the brain derived neurotrophic growth factor and all that. That's fine. And it may have a therapeutic effect. They should not call it a psychedelic. That is misrepresentation.
I imagine they wouldn't because they would want to distance themselves from and be like, look, we got all the benefits without being this. That is bad. The psychedelic is bad or potentially because I know that that's the perception. You have all the benefits except the psychedelic experience, you know, which is not viewed as a benefit. So that's a major benefit for most people, the psychedelic experience. You're taking that away from people.
But it may have applications. I'm not saying that this work is completely useless. It may have applications. There may be people that, for one reason or another, can't take psychedelics or can't deal with psychedelic experiences or should not have psychedelic experiences, and that may be fine for them. So there will be probably
you know, useful therapeutic drugs that come out of this research. I just think it's disingenuous to say, to represent this as a psychedelic, you know, that we've eliminated this undesirable side effect. That's fine.
Don't call it a psychedelic presentation. I don't think you like the philosophy that undergirds the production of this, that they are saying it's something to do with we're trying to help humanity, but there's something that firstly is about money.
There's nothing wrong inherently about a profit motive. It's just that there's something avaricious when it comes to tens of millions and billions. There also seems to be a diminutive attitude that they have toward pre-modern cultures when it comes to medicine, despite them taking inspiration from it. I think so. I think so. You know, but then on the other hand,
I mean, yeah, everything you say is true, and I sort of take a dim view of it, but I'm also a scientist, you know, so I am not against science exploring these things, because you never know until you do it, where I mean, there may be surprises, you know, some useful compounds may come out of this, but
They should be represented honestly. You could say, well, yeah, this, this compound was developed as a result of psychedelic research. It's, you know, a variant of psychedelic molecules, but it's not a psychedelic, you know, and it may have, it may have applications. That's okay. Uh, and you can, you can have a profit motive and you can also want to,
You can have an altruistic motive. I mean, I don't think every effort of drug development, whether it's whatever the therapeutic targets, the people that are doing it are, yes, they're entrepreneurs, they need to have patents, they need to create profitable medicines, but there is possibly an altruistic motive there too. Think
So it's a complicated thing. The ethics around this is very complicated. Me personally, I'm a traditionalist. I prefer the classic psychedelics, even preferably in the natural form. I would rather take mushrooms than psilocybin, even though there's very little difference subjectively between the two.
and you have to really credit Hoffman for discovering, characterizing psilocybin, and then all the people to come after him that have worked on that structure and developed interesting compounds. But yeah, the area of
this area of drug development, drug discovery, developing novel therapeutics and so on. This is very hot in, in the field right now. Did you happen to go to the psychedelic science conference? No. No. You've heard about it, right? Yes. Yeah. It was insane. 13,000 people there. And there was a lot of good papers presented.
Which I have time to see most of them because there were a lot I wanted to see, but there's actual, this is a very active area of research. So, you know, who knows what will come out of it? Who knows what psychedelic science in 2028 or 29 will look like? Hopefully the field will continue to develop and discoveries will continue to be made.
I was watching a clip of you on Rogan and you were talking about, or Rogan was saying that you shouldn't be high all the time. And then you said, yeah, it's important to find your balance, go back to the center, find your baseline. I think that was your phrase and do a reality check that some people fail to do a reality check. Can you expand on that? Well, yeah, I think, I mean, for one thing,
True psychedelics, you can't really be high on them all the time, in the sense that they induce tolerance very quickly. If you take LSD or psilocybin or any of these every day for a few days, you're going to get a much-divinished effect unless you increase the dose substantially. There is that. They kind of have their built-in safeguard against
mid misuse and you know they're not addictive right i mean these things are not addictive they're anti-addictive in a certain sense most people have to you know kind of screw their courage up to go back and and and take them uh uh but i also think that in the state itself
They can tell you a lot of things. Uh, you know, you can get a lot of supposed insights and so on. Uh, but they, they can be delusions, you know, I mean, in some ways they encourage, well, they, they, they stimulate funny ideas, you know,
And that's part of the fun. That's part of the reason we take them is because we like funny ideas. We like, you know, to look into unexplored parts of our consciousness, but you should always keep your skeptical antennas well deployed and well tuned for these experiences. And if something, some revelation comes
Out of the experience, it may be true and it may not be true. Give yourself 48 hours in a sober state to reflect on it from that perspective. Does it really hold up or was this just some wild idea?
I mean, I, I mean, Terrence and me are kind of textbook cases for people that didn't do that, you know, back in the day. And we got down the rabbit hole of, you know, some pretty wild ideas that in the end were not valid, you know? That's extremely interesting. Was that an attitudinal difference between you and your brother? Do you feel like you were more on the side that said, okay,
Let's get some insight and let's give it two days to seven days. I think two days is quite short actually, but let's say. Well, yes and no. I mean, if you read our book, you know, we, we did this together. I was the one that was, uh, you know, sort of lost in a realm of delusion, you know, uh,
But I recovered. Terrace was lost in a realm of delusion. In some ways, he didn't recover in the sense that he stuck with these ideas and developed a career based on these ideas. And in some ways, there was much of his suppositions about the mushrooms, about the whole thing that was
just not true in the end. Because I went further at the beginning, I was more cautious. After the experiment, after whatever happened to us, I was happy to be able to get my feet back on the ground.
And I mean, I didn't give up my interest in psychedelics, so I didn't stop taking psychedelics, but I was more cautious after that. And, you know, I think we just have to be careful. I mean, I get emails occasionally, you know, from people that are, you know, thoroughly lost sort of in webs of delusion.
that they've had experiences with psychedelics and certain, you know, like cognitive or, you know, certain understandings or cognitive frameworks, whatever you want to call it have been revelations, you know, revelations in supposed insights. And, uh,
You know, and they have not reflected on it. You know, does this really make sense? And there's a tendency for, you know, you have to keep your analytical faculties intact. You have to be able to step away from the experience and look at it more objectively in the same way that psychedelics, one of the things they facilitate is
You know one of the i think one of the basis of their therapeutic usefulness is they let you step away from ordinary consciousness and examine that examine your usual so-called default mode network framework psychedelics temporarily disable that that can be very useful but it's going to reassert itself you know
Because let's face it, ordinary consciousness, whatever we mean by that, that's where we are most of the time, you know, and so we need to be able to function. And we need to be able to, you know, sort of evaluate these revelations, these insights in terms of, you know, some in terms of
kind of consensus reality, you know, do they conform with it? Because if you don't, then it, you know, if you get lost in delusion, you're into, you know, you're off into places that psychiatrists would might say is effectively a delusional ideation, you know,
like, I am the Messiah, and I'm here to, you know, save the world, that sort of thing. Psychedelic makes you convince you that, in fact, you are. I can tell you from experience, no, you're not the Messiah. You're not going to save the world.
So the counterpoint would be like, well, look, society can be sick. And then there's a phrase like there's nothing healthy about being sane in a sick society, something like that. I don't buy that. I used to, but I've had my own experiences that I could tell you about some other time. Terrifying, terrifying. I could say that with a small smirk, mainly because of nervousness, but also because I've had some distance from the experience.
but like truly, truly terrifying experiences. Yeah. I don't subscribe to that though. I used to because I was the type of person that's like, Hey, you innovate. That's the whole point is you generate new ideas. It may not conform, but it's new. Yeah. But also sometimes you could generate false ideas and it's so super easy to leave oneself and it sounds, it feels like you've received truths that are so true. It's exactly remarkable. Anyhow,
This is something that isn't talked about much. What I want to know is how is it that you recognize that you're on a deceptive path? So you had to number one recognize that which isn't easy because almost by definition you don't think you're on one. So how did you recognize that? And then what did you do to pull yourself back out of it?
He said something interesting, which is like, put my feet back on the ground. He said something like that. It does feel like you're just in this wispy place where you're not centered. You're swimming in a, I'd like to say it's like you're swimming in this whirlpool. There's a quote by Renee Descartes that said, it feels like I'm swimming interminably in a whirlpool such that I can't touch the ground nor swim to the top. Exactly. So you have to give yourself a chance to get your center again.
after the experience, you know, without any other substances, give yourself the 48 hours, 72 hours, whatever it is, you know, to, to find your center, you can also ask, you know, if you have people around you that know, you know, that you respect, you can also kind of bounce it off them as well and say, well, I'm having this
revelation or these insights, but does that really jive with what you understand how reality is? I mean, it's interesting, you know, after we did the experiment at La Trerera, and we were still more or less caught in this delusional space, you know, a couple months after, you know,
I mean, Terrence was completely convinced that whatever we said we'd done at Lotteria, we'd succeeded. You know, we weren't, it didn't necessarily happen on schedule, but he was convinced and he actually came back from South America to California and went to visit his friends and more or less announced, you know, that we have done this thing.
Sorry, what is it that he was convinced of? He was convinced that you had done something? Yeah, that we had succeeded, that the experiment had succeeded. The experiment of? At La Trerera, we had created this transform, you know, self transforming, fusion of mind and matter and all that. The point is that he went back and talked to his friends who hadn't had this experience and
and more or less announced that, you know, we've done it and history's going to end any day now. They were like, what? Wait a minute. You know, you're seriously divorced from reality. And it turns out they were, they were right. You know, so it's good to, the thing is Terrence always said, and I think it's true. They make you have funny ideas.
You know they make you have interesting ideas they give you that facility but those ideas are sometimes valid sometimes very interesting most of them are probably just delusional but you know you have to look at them from an objective point of view before you can really dismiss them or accept them.
That's interesting. So an analogy I'm making in my head right now is LLMs like chat GPT. They confabulate what they'll create is quite creative. Yes, but then sometimes they'll make up a fact confidently and they don't know that they're making up that fact.
So they need a way of testing with reality and that's coming like their multimodal LLMS. It is. It is very similar to that. I haven't used chat GPT, but I've read about it and I yeah, chat GPT is very similar. It'll come up with this stuff that seems to be so convincing and logical and it makes sense and all that. But if you look, if you look beneath the surface a little bit, it's like it's smoke and mirrors. There's nothing there.
You can ask it, who is Dennis McKenna? And it'll say, he is the brother of Terrence McKenna, an astronaut from the 1950s. It'll say so assertively that you're like, Oh, great. This is absolutely correct. In some sense, you're a psycho not so partially correct. So yeah, we have to be, I mean, ultimately, you know, Kurt, we have to trust our own, our ourselves, you know, I mean, I mean, you can't
You're the final judge of whether these things make sense or not. But that said, you can certainly test it. Science, as an example, comes up with theories and hypotheses, models of phenomena and so on that you test by
asking questions of nature in a very systematic way that can be tested. You create a model of a process or something and then you don't try to prove the theory, you try to disprove the theory.
That's what sets science apart from say religion or dogma or other types of doctrine. You know, everything is provisional. You have to, you come up with an idea, say, okay, does this fit with the data? And what part of the data does it not explain? You know, and that's the scientific process. And you can use that same process pretty much in your own thinking about, uh,
these ideas that you may come up with from psychedelic experiences. Another thing about science is it's imperfect and it's flawed but there's also a community of like-minded people. There's the peer review process as flawed as it is, it's useful because you come up with your hypothesis
You put it out there, you describe it as closely as you can, but you may have overlooked things. So you publish a paper or you get reviewers and they come back and they say, well, you know, here's the problem or here's what it doesn't explain. That is useful. So then you can either, you know, you can just throw the idea out completely. If it's seriously flawed or you can say, well, wait a minute, we have to back up and
tweak it a little bit and change some premises of the hypothesis. And, you know, thank you for identifying the gaps in our ideas and so on. So cognitive functioning is a similar process. I mean, in science, it's formalized, you know, but just in ordinary life, you can approach something that way as well.
You have to keep your antennas tuned. That's a big part of it. Yeah. I talked about this with Karl Friston, actually, this very topic of the dangers, which is not talked about much, the perils of investigations into consciousness. Because people who watch this channel, people like you, people like myself, we're extremely curious people.
Curious about nature, whether our nature and nature, well, what's the relationship between that as well? And these are fun questions, even funny, like you mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. You brought up something that's super interesting, which I never thought about the communal aspect of science. So often we think of the generalization of the East as being much more inclusive and collective and the West is individualistic.
and that the east is naturopathic and the west is allopathic and those are generalizations because the east has developed cancer treatments and the west has developed probiotics so it's not entirely correct right and i've never thought about science as being a community like i think of indigenous tribes and other parts of the world is being extremely communal that's a super super interesting point oh it's very much a community it's very much a community because
You know it's about the development of these models these theoretical models these are everything is a model and so the community is the like the first sort of before you can I mean most of the
world at large is not informed enough to make judgment on a lot of work, a lot of scientific work. It's too complicated and specialized, but people in your field, you know, those are the first people that you have to bounce this stuff up.
because they're educated, they know about it, they're working in the same field. There's a great deal of value in the review process. The review process in a lot of ways is very flawed, but the idea is a good idea. That's why people have conferences and they go and they present their ideas
You know somebody comes up with something somebody else gets up after the lecture and denounces them and say you know you're full of shit here's why or you know it's a brilliant it's a brilliant inside doctor you know whatever that's the way it works.
While we didn't have time to get to these questions in the podcast itself, I asked Dennis over email some fan questions, some audience questions. Number one, are there any gender differences in the experiences of people who take psychedelics? This one comes from a woman fan of yours, Dennis. On the question of whether there are any gender differences
in psychedelic experiences. Of course there are because men's and women's brains are constructed differently. I don't know of any studies on this. Um, the player probably out there, it's just stands to reason that the experience is different would be interesting to explore in more depth. Great. Number two, who should not implement or experiment with the use of psychedelics and why? Well, obviously anyone with a proclivity to psychosis,
should probably avoid it. Perhaps sociopaths and megalomaniacs should stay away from it as well. People who are not prepared should not take it to be approached thoughtfully. OK, great. And now number three. This is a quotation after my experience in the 70s. I found I leaned toward the quote attributed to Kerouac after a trip, which is that walking on water wasn't invented in a day. Does Dennis have any thoughts on that? Sincerely, Bob Fenstermaker.
I'm not sure what to make of the question three about walking on water. I think maybe he is referring to the idea of the psychedelics or a shortcut or something. They are not there just as much of discipline was in the other spiritual disciplines, if approached correctly.
Thanks, Dennis. And now number four, we talk about oneness, though there's a loving aspect to disunity. That is, just as there's a danger to treating everyone as different, there's also a danger to abstracting to the point of undifferentiation. Thus, there's some propitious middle ground, a vice associated with each and a virtue at the middle. Can you talk about some of the salutary aspects of separation?
I don't have much to say about question four. There is something to be said for separation in its appropriate time and place. For example, separation is what defines the self, the individual. And sometimes we want that we can't be unified with the cosmos at all times. We won't get much done that way. So Dennis, it's an absolute pleasure speaking with you. I love the conversation. I love speaking with you like men.
Well, thank you firstly, and what's next for you and work in the audience? Well, I don't know. I've got a conference coming up in Oregon in July, some kind of psilocybin oriented conference. And that's about it. You know, I continue working on McKenna Academy things. We don't have time to go into it, but
People can look at the, uh, at the website and, and look at bio gnosis. This is what we're, you know, this is what we're. Yeah. I also have a term called Abhij gnosis. So we both use that term. Basically what will science develop to? It's like science 2.0. Yeah. Bio gnosis. I think I got it spelled wrong. Sorry. Yes. I asked there's a tab on the website.
This is nothing, this is really not about psychedelics at all, but this is more about ethnobotany and a project we've got going to try to upgrade and develop this herbarium in Peru that I've worked with the people there for almost 50 years. We're trying to make a scientific resource for it that'll bring
traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge together. And we're looking for support, we need support for this. And we are a 501 c three, the McKenna Academy is a 501 c three nonprofits, so we can give people tax deductions for their donations and have a look at the website. And we're starting a new podcast series also, by the way. All right, what's it called?
It's going to be called the brain forest cafe. Okay, that's great. And when so let us know I it should be up any day now. I'm not sure it's holding it up, but probably by the end of July, it will be up. We've got three or four already to go. And we have more in the in the pipeline. So if you enjoyed today's conversation with Dennis, which I imagine you have because you stayed all the way to the end,
Then visit the brain forest cafe. I'll put a link to that in the description as well as bio gnosis. That's a charity. It's a registered charity with the states. And so you can get tax deductions. Thank you so much. I hope I get to speak with you again someday in person. Thank you so much for a live conversation. Had a great time. Yeah, me as well. Thank you. And fellow Canadian, at least right now. Okay, fellow Canadian.
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"text": " Medicine has always been uncomfortable with the idea of spirit, the idea of the mind. The brain is just a complex machine. I disagree. I think that the traditions and the history of the use of these things, these things are medicines for the spirit. They're medicines for the soul."
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"text": " You know, so I have this McKenna Academy, this nonprofit, which takes up, I mean, technically, you know, it's a hobby. I mean, it takes up a lot of time. You know, it's almost like a job, except I don't get paid. It's out of passion. But yeah, so that's how it is. I get up, I have breakfast,"
},
{
"end_time": 298.353,
"index": 12,
"start_time": 272.841,
"text": " Get down here and check my email. And then usually there's a bunch of emails and stuff. And, uh, Oh, you know, not exciting really, but got to push it forward, you know? So no ritualistic micro dosing or heroic dosing on a daily basis. Not so much, not on a regular basis. You know, I mean, I don't micro dose. Uh, I've tried micro dosing. I, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 319.906,
"index": 13,
"start_time": 299.514,
"text": " I have done, but I don't do it on a regular basis. I don't see much benefit from it for me personally. Heroic dosing is a special thing. It's fairly rare. You have to find the right circumstances. It's all about setting as we know."
},
{
"end_time": 346.852,
"index": 14,
"start_time": 320.776,
"text": " Did you at one point have a regimen for it? For instance, you would say, okay, this is my yearly review or my bi-yearly review. Let me get some advice from another state. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't come up as a regular thing that I've scheduled. It comes up usually in the context of being somewhere that I might want to do it, you know, that a good, a good set and setting for doing it."
},
{
"end_time": 376.203,
"index": 15,
"start_time": 347.568,
"text": " But I haven't actually done any psychedelic since before COVID. So, uh, it's been a while. I am overdue. Uh, I am overdue for that. Do you see yourself actually as overdue? Meaning that like, I need to get back to it. I should get back to it. I need, I need to, yeah, I need to go to the well and drink again, you know? Uh, yeah, I mean, I don't need to, but I want to, I feel like it's good to,"
},
{
"end_time": 404.428,
"index": 16,
"start_time": 376.852,
"text": " What would be the truth behind that you should hang up once you receive the message?"
},
{
"end_time": 435.469,
"index": 17,
"start_time": 406.613,
"text": " I think Ram Dass or maybe it was Alan Watts. Alan Watts, I think, said that, well, his idea was that, you know, you learn from psychedelics, you get a message, you get like, you know, you learn from the experience. Once you've had the experience, you don't need to keep talking on the phone, you know, you're hanging up because you integrate the message and then you've got it."
},
{
"end_time": 464.855,
"index": 18,
"start_time": 436.442,
"text": " But these folks, Alan Watts, people like Houston Smith and other people, they have a different perspective on psychedelics than maybe I do, you know, in the sense that they think that, you know, a lot of these people are dead, so I don't want to put words in their mouth, but they think that, you know, psychedelics,"
},
{
"end_time": 492.073,
"index": 19,
"start_time": 466.237,
"text": " can let you have a mystical experience, you know, or a profoundly transformative mystical experience, but it's, it doesn't stick. You know, I mean, you have that you see the possibilities, but if you really want to have that, if you want to integrate that spiritual practice into your life, you need"
},
{
"end_time": 520.742,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 492.688,
"text": " A spiritual practice, you know, you need a religion, you need to practice yoga, you need to practice regular meditation or something like that. And so in some sense, they devalue, in my opinion, they devalue the psychedelic experience, you know, you can pursue psychedelics as a spiritual practice. It's a discipline. It's just as hard as any other discipline as you're, if you're really committed to it."
},
{
"end_time": 544.957,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 521.323,
"text": " You know, so my perspective is, well, I sort of share the perspective of indigenous people and many people who say these things are teachers. You learn from your teachers, you know, why would you turn your back on your teacher? Why would you hang up the phone on your teacher? You know, you need to"
},
{
"end_time": 574.224,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 545.811,
"text": " connect with them occasionally and say, Hey, what's up, man? You know, what else you got to show me? So that's kind of my perspective. I think it's good to check in. I don't think we should presume that once you've had one or two or a few psychedelic experiences, you've learned all there is to learn, you know, that source. I mean, one of the stronger lessons that I take that"
},
{
"end_time": 599.036,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 574.582,
"text": " From psychedelics that is I'm constantly reminded of every time I take psychedelics is to remember how little we actually know, you know, whatever you might learn from psychedelic experience or any other experience, but from a psychedelic experience, there's always"
},
{
"end_time": 616.015,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 599.753,
"text": " a lot that remains unknown. I mean, that's just the nature of knowledge, you know, our knowledge is always limited. So to say that, you know, okay, I got the message. I'm going to hang up the phone and not listen anymore. I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 639.991,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 616.954,
"text": " It's no different than rejecting a mentor or a teacher or, you know, someone that you might look up to. So my understanding of that isn't to hang up permanently, but to say, okay, let me integrate. Let me now live my life because there's a message, but the message needs to be nurtured as well. Like you get a seed and you need to water it with not being inebriated."
},
{
"end_time": 667.09,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 639.991,
"text": " That's how I relate to it. That's right. Some of the examples you gave the indigenous people, they do so, but ensconced in a community in a religion that's like the millennia old and often. Right. Well, there's now this new culture of taking it and taking it once a day for 30 days straight or doing it alone. Do you feel like the lessons that you get are of a different sort in the isolated case than in the communal case?"
},
{
"end_time": 681.015,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 668.695,
"text": " Well, yes, I do. In these indigenous communities, it's usually done, it's almost always done in a group situation."
},
{
"end_time": 711.169,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 682.125,
"text": " The exception being if you're a shaman, if you're a curadero, if you're in training, if you're trying to do dietas and learn how to do it, then you might go into isolation and do it repeatedly over a short period of time. And that is really a discipline. I mean, that is really learning how to use it so that you can then go back and"
},
{
"end_time": 737.517,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 712.244,
"text": " You know, be the facilitator for, for people in group session. So that's a different thing. Usually in indigenous cultures, it is a group session group kind of thing. And it's not necessarily, I mean, you can't make a, you know, you can't make a rule about this because the way people use it differs. But for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 763.336,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 737.944,
"text": " It's not necessarily something we do this every Saturday or we do this once a month or sometimes. Usually they do it when there's a need, when the group has a question that needs to be answered or for healing. Okay, there is this person with an illness that needs healing, so they get the group together and then the focus is on that."
},
{
"end_time": 789.241,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 763.609,
"text": " And back, you know, in indigenous cultures, it's often the shaman takes the medicine, not necessarily everybody in the group, you know, now with tourism and all that, people are, you know, people go down there with the expectation that they're going to take the medicine. It didn't used to be that way. You know, there would be a group"
},
{
"end_time": 819.394,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 789.718,
"text": " That would gather there would be perhaps a person or several people that needed some sort of healing. The shaman would take the medicine not everybody there sometimes the person getting the treatment would be given the medicine but the use of the of the medicine it's used for diagnosis basically and for diagnosis and then through the visionary state the shaman"
},
{
"end_time": 843.558,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 820.128,
"text": " gets information from whatever source it comes from, but they get information about what to do, how to treat the person. And it could be other things too. It could be, okay, where's the game going to be next spring? What are the best hunting spots? All kinds of things, but these are things of concern to the community."
},
{
"end_time": 874.343,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 844.462,
"text": " And the other side, the way people might use it, is a much more personal thing. It's about internal self-examination, personal growth, exploration of consciousness, if you will, much more a self-focused kind of activity where the person is using the medicine to connect through an altered state, essentially to connect with another"
},
{
"end_time": 888.933,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 874.94,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and"
},
{
"end_time": 919.155,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 892.654,
"text": " Do you feel Dennis that you're yearning to go back to what you have tried pre-COVID?"
},
{
"end_time": 947.449,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 919.497,
"text": " comes from a need, like there's a question that you're trying to solve, or is it more just, you can get a massage because it's a maintenance massage. You feel like, you know, I'm a bit, yeah, it's more of a check-in, you know, I mean, to check in, I have taken these things many times, various kinds. And, uh, and, but I, I think it's important to maintain the connection, but, and things do come up. That's not like, but it's not like something comes up in"
},
{
"end_time": 977.09,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 948.387,
"text": " And, you know, I mean, it might be something that I say, yes, I really need to take the psychedelic to reflect on this or that. But for me, it's more of a check in. Can you talk about why you wrote the book Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss? Basically, you know, the book is a personal story and, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 1005.879,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 978.78,
"text": " You know, I mean, my brother and I have become like almost mythical figures, you know, legendary figures, because he's told his story in true hallucinations, primarily is where he told that personal story. I wanted to tell my story and I wanted to tell the story not just about our"
},
{
"end_time": 1036.8,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1007.09,
"text": " experiment at Lotteria, our trip to Lotteria in 1971, which is what True Hallucinations is basically about, but I wanted to write the story of our lives. So it was an autobiography, you know, it was a personal memoir. And I just wanted to tell my side of it in a sense, not that he didn't represent it well, but I have, I have a different perspective. And so that's why I wrote it."
},
{
"end_time": 1062.261,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1037.585,
"text": " I just wanted to tell my own story. There's a new edition, you may be aware, 10th anniversary edition or whatever. It's the same book that I published in 2012, but now I have a publisher, Synergetic Press, and I wrote a 50-page additional chapter for it."
},
{
"end_time": 1090.196,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1062.568,
"text": " So it's not all the old stuff. It's all the old stuff plus some new stuff. That was kind of respective of the last 20 years or so since the book was. Well, the book was published in 2012, but the narrative story ends around 2000 when my brother passed on. So it's useful to read the second edition and then you have to buy it again, of course."
},
{
"end_time": 1121.903,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1092.142,
"text": " There were a few things I left out. Length wasn't really a concern so much. In a bit it was, but there were a few things I left out because my family, you know, were not happy with some of the things I put in it initially and"
},
{
"end_time": 1144.172,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1122.466,
"text": " And so I left them out. They felt it was too personal. Like you shouldn't reveal that part of our family. That was their, that was their perspective. Yeah. I disagree, but out of respect, it didn't really interfere with the, uh, with the, with the story too much. So out of respect, I did it."
},
{
"end_time": 1173.985,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1145.06,
"text": " Not that it helped. I mean, they, I made changes that they had insisted on and it didn't make any difference. You know, they still hate me largely. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, at least they got to read it. I don't even know if they did read it. I mean, I think some of they read parts of it. They read the parts they didn't like. I don't know if they've ever read it from cover to cover because I think if they had,"
},
{
"end_time": 1204.804,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1175.043,
"text": " They would see that there's really nothing there. I mean, in no way did I make Terrence look bad or me or any of the family. I mean, the family is almost not mentioned other than they are mentioned, but there's no long narrative about it. I think if they had read the book as I revised it, they wouldn't have so much"
},
{
"end_time": 1235.486,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1205.572,
"text": " Uh, you know, they, they wouldn't feel so negatively about it, but they, they seem to be in a place of, uh, you know, our minds are made up, don't confuse us with facts, you know? So this is kind of a touchy subject. We don't really need to go into this. Painful. It's painful. And, uh, you know, it hurts me and guess it hurts them too. Uh, but you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 1265.299,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1235.947,
"text": " this happens in families. And I think part of the take home lesson is, uh, don't write memoirs. Yeah. Keep them sterile. You're not going to be able to, you know, no family is going to be happy. It's a tricky thing. And I have made efforts to reach out and, uh, you know, but that hasn't been, that hasn't been responded to, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 1294.343,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1265.64,
"text": " So, so that's why I've said, you know, I told them effectively, I've said, you know, well, if, if bridges have been burned, they're not burned on my side of the river. So, you know, anytime you want to reach out, I'm here. Sorry, if this is personal, I guess I'm asking for personal reasons for myself, but tell us about ESPD 55. Yeah. So if people go to the, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 1324.821,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1295.811,
"text": " If you go to the website, the link will be on screen and then we'll also show it. If you go to the McKenna Academy and go to ESPD, there's a tab for it actually on the website. You can look at ESPD 55 and ESPD 50 both. All the videos from both symposia are still online and will be hopefully forever. And you can"
},
{
"end_time": 1348.217,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1325.623,
"text": " You can put in your email and you can create an account, essentially an email and a password and then it's completely open. There's no paywall or anything. You can watch all the videos from both of the conferences and there's some good stuff there. So it's a conference. ESPD 55 is a conference. Right."
},
{
"end_time": 1372.466,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1348.933,
"text": " and ESPD 50 was another conference. It happened five years earlier in 2017 and that was kind of freelance. There was no McKenna Academy. It was just me and some friends and everything fell in place. In 2017, we had a place to do it, a beautiful"
},
{
"end_time": 1401.493,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1372.892,
"text": " country house in the UK. I had a team of people who stepped up and helped organize it. They were both lovely conferences. We published the proceedings for 2017. You can order those from Synergetic Press. We published actually a double volume"
},
{
"end_time": 1431.152,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1403.08,
"text": " We published the Synergetic Press as a box set. So we published the 1967 conference and the 2017 conference. And then this year and last year's conference will be published also as a separate volume. It'll be out either later this year or early in 2024. So that's in the pipeline."
},
{
"end_time": 1459.616,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1431.544,
"text": " And Synergetic Press is the publisher for both these and also for the Brotherhood, the new edition of the Brotherhood. And I want to kind of plug Synergetic because they're great people and they're really trying to be kind of the publisher for psychedelic literature of all kinds. So they published some wonderful stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 1480.452,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1460.111,
"text": " Besides this ESPD, they published a book by Alexander Shulgin, which is called The Nature of Drugs, which is fairly recent. And that was actually his lecture notes from his course that he taught at the University of California."
},
{
"end_time": 1500.435,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1481.101,
"text": " What else have they published? They published another one called The Mind of Plants or something like that. Just have a look at their website, synergeticpress.com. They do good"
},
{
"end_time": 1528.797,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1500.93,
"text": " They publish some really interesting stuff. We'll put the link to the Academy as well as ESPD55.com as well as Synergetics in the description. So if you had an unlimited budget wand for your next conference, what would you include? Well, it would be it would be an extension of and the whole idea of the ESPD, you know, ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs is"
},
{
"end_time": 1557.551,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1529.224,
"text": " There are a lot of things out there that are not well investigated, you know, so sort of one of the thrusts of the of the conference is to explore some of these obscure corners of ethnopharmacology, you know, less investigated psychoactive drugs, even though, you know, in a conference like this, there were a lot of things that we that we presented that are"
},
{
"end_time": 1586.988,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1558.029,
"text": " well-known like ayahuasca and the snuffs and different things, but there's still a lot to be discovered, a lot of exploration, many PhDs worth of exploration on some of these obscure psychoactives that people haven't really investigated. Of course, there's no budget for this to actually, or very little support for this. People who are, you know, I mean,"
},
{
"end_time": 1614.872,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1587.568,
"text": " If you're in an academic context, you've got to find support for this kind of stuff. And you can do it, but there hasn't been, you know, there are not actually departments that really are going to apportion money to graduate students and so on to do this. But much of this is, it's important to do, you know, because you never know"
},
{
"end_time": 1644.923,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1615.589,
"text": " We know what the main psychedelics are. We pretty much know the plants, we know the chemistry, we know what's out there. Once in a while, something pops up that is lesser known, and often there's novel chemistry involved, and when there's novel chemistry involved, there's often novel pharmacology. These discoveries can open the door to new mechanisms, new classes of drugs,"
},
{
"end_time": 1671.869,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1645.196,
"text": " Good example here is Salvia divinorum. You don't hear much about Salvia divinorum, but for a while it was popular and you could buy extracts in head shops. It's not illegal most places. Are you familiar with the plant? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it's like its own built-in"
},
{
"end_time": 1701.817,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1672.176,
"text": " uh you know it has its own built-in safeguards against abuse because for most people once is enough you know it makes her so bizarre that people just can't relate to it you know and and that's fine some people like it but it's rare but the interesting thing is about that molecule it's a whole new class of molecules it's not serotonergic it it interacts with the kappa opiate receptors"
},
{
"end_time": 1732.432,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1702.551,
"text": " And it interacts very selectively with that class of receptors. There are about four types of opiate receptors in the body, and kappa-opiate receptors, one of them. Salvia divinorum is the most selective compound for the kappa receptors that's ever been discovered. Why is that important? Well, because, you know, as a scaffold for, well, for one thing, the states of"
},
{
"end_time": 1751.203,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1732.892,
"text": " My you know the altered states it creates are not pleasant but they may be useful therapeutically and then the molecule itself could be a scaffold for different derivatives that might have different effects. So the person that"
},
{
"end_time": 1779.906,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1752.5,
"text": " So this is a good example of what you might call the value of ethnopharmacology, right? Because the guy who elucidated a lot of the pharmacology of salvia divinorum, a fellow named Brian Roth, who is the head of the NIMH psychoactive drug screening program at the University of North Carolina, he elucidated the pharmacology"
},
{
"end_time": 1805.845,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1780.162,
"text": " The chemistry was already known, but he showed that it was this kappa-opiate receptor. And he told me, you know, if I had set out to design a drug that was selective for the kappa-opiate receptor, you know, using computer-aided drug design and structure activity and all that, it would not look like salvia divinorum. He said, this stuff"
},
{
"end_time": 1835.043,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1806.186,
"text": " looks like cholesterol, you know, it doesn't have nitrogen, it doesn't have any of the characteristics, and yet here it is. So I think what this demonstrates is that nature is got a few surprises for us, you know, nature is clever than chemists. And so we should, we should look at nature for these things. As far as I know, MDMA is a"
},
{
"end_time": 1864.821,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1835.282,
"text": " Well, MDMA is not a natural product, but it's very similar to natural products. It's very similar to mescaline. Many of the compounds that Shulkin developed are mescaline analogues."
},
{
"end_time": 1889.753,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1865.077,
"text": " And in medicinal chemistry, this is what you do. You know, often you take a natural compound and then you tweak it in various ways and you see how it differs. This is very commonly done. I mean, it's not whether the drug is, you know, a cancer drug or an antiviral, whatever you're looking for. You look at different derivatives. You do what's called structure activity relationships."
},
{
"end_time": 1916.698,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1890.213,
"text": " What's cool about the psychedelics is there's only one way to investigate the structure activity. You make all these derivatives and then you bioassay them carefully because there's no, you know, animal tests are not going to tell you much. There's only one way to really evaluate their effect. This is why Shulkin was such a pioneer, you know, because he made all these things"
},
{
"end_time": 1947.363,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1917.637,
"text": " But then he took them under very careful conditions. He kept extensive notes. He shared them with a group of Psychonauts who were also experienced, collected that information, you know, and you're probably familiar with the books he has published, T-Call and P-Call. You know those books? No. OK, well, they're out there. T-Call stands for tryptamines I have known and loved."
},
{
"end_time": 1975.179,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1948.08,
"text": " and PCOL stands for phenethylamines I have known and loved. And those are landmark publications in the world of psychedelic psychopharmacology because, you know, I mean, they're unique. The first half of each book is kind of a lightly fictionalized story about Sasha."
},
{
"end_time": 2005.452,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1975.572,
"text": " You know, and his experiences, the people he met, the work he did, and so on. So it's a novel, but the second half of each book is a list of all these compounds, their chemistry, how to make them, and the subjective experiences from his own trip notes. So these are also available, I think, through Synergetic Press now, but the PDF versions are on www.arowind.org."
},
{
"end_time": 2035.282,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 2006.084,
"text": " I mean, it's a great resource for best online resource for psychoactive drugs of any kind that exists. Most of them I'm not interested in, many of them I've never even heard of, but there's a vast amount of information on that. So anyway, back to your question. So MDMA is a"
},
{
"end_time": 2063.473,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 2036.049,
"text": " pretty close to mescaline and the ring structures of MDMA and a lot of Shulgin's mescaline analogues bear resemblances to essential oils. Phenylpropanoids which have different ring structures and it's the ring structures that are the main component of the"
},
{
"end_time": 2091.561,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2064.087,
"text": " of the structure activity work. So in some sense, they're very closely related to natural products. You can take something like Meristesen, for example, which comes from nutmeg. If you add an ammonia to the right place, to the side chain, you've got a psychoact, you know, you have one of these derivatives. So people can read Picol or they can read some of Shogun's other"
},
{
"end_time": 2108.439,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 2092.995,
"text": " other works and see how he did this. Now, is MDMA a psychedelic? Actually, it depends on how you want to define psychedelic. My"
},
{
"end_time": 2137.483,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2109.36,
"text": " definition I like. I like a strict definition. In my mind, a strict definition of a psychedelic is something that is an agonist at the 5-HT 2A receptors. So 5-HT, the serotonin 2A receptors seems to be the target for what you might call the classic psychedelics, LSD, DMT,"
},
{
"end_time": 2164.48,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2137.944,
"text": " Mescaline even, psilocybin, all of these are 5-HT2A receptor agonists. So under this strict sort of definition of what a psychedelic is, which I like for convenience more than anything to kind of define this class of drugs. And in that sense, MDMA is not a psychedelic."
},
{
"end_time": 2195.316,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2165.589,
"text": " Because it does work on serotonin, but it doesn't work on these 5HT2A receptors. What it actually works on are the serotonin uptake transporters, the same site that SSRIs interact with. You know, MDMA... Globally? Sorry, globally or like selectively for MDMA? Well, selectively. Yeah, it's not that selective. It's kind of all over the brain."
},
{
"end_time": 2218.643,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2195.52,
"text": " wherever the serotonin receptors are. And one way to think of it, the SSRI stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and it blocks the reuptake of serotonin from the synapse, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2249.189,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2219.411,
"text": " In the synapse, serotonin is released, neurotransmitters released, it goes to the postsynaptic membrane, it binds to the receptors and it creates whatever effect it does. SSRIs block that. It's like they, it's not taken back up. So stays at a higher level in the synapse. And so it has the putative antidepressant effect. MDMA has the opposite effect, right?"
},
{
"end_time": 2274.462,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2249.411,
"text": " MDMA binds to those serotonin transporters, but where SSRIs will essentially jam them closed, MDMA will jam them open. So if SSRIs are a vacuum cleaner that takes it back out of the synapse, MDMA floods the synapse on a global scale with serotonin."
},
{
"end_time": 2303.37,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2275.145,
"text": " So it is not strictly a psychedelic in that sense, but it is psychoactive. You get the typical effects of MDMA, which often are associated with things like euphoria. You know, it's the feel-good drug, right? Serotonin is the feel-good neurotransmitter, one of a couple of them, like dopamine is the other one. Dopamine is another conversation."
},
{
"end_time": 2332.125,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2304.377,
"text": " But so in that sense, it's not strictly speaking a psychedelic, but it is psychoactive and it's, uh, it's therapeutically quite useful for trauma and, uh, for, uh, you know, for, for sort of emotional puts you in a very open and receptive emotional place. So it's couples therapy and that kind of thing."
},
{
"end_time": 2357.534,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2332.398,
"text": " Yeah. And it's also my understanding that there aren't designer drugs of MDMA that are anywhere near as effective as MDMA. Is that true? And if it's true, like why is it much more easy to make a designer version of LSD? I think there was one called 1P LSD or 10P LSD, something like that. But then there's not a version of MDMA. There are many versions of MDMA, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 2386.391,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2358.063,
"text": " There are lots of analogs of MDMA. Some are better, some are worse. This, again, comes back to structure activity relationship. MDMA just happens to be the one that's been most popular, the one that's known. But there are other drugs that act similarly to MDMA, and they have a similar effect."
},
{
"end_time": 2410.691,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2387.346,
"text": " Again, reading peak hall, you know, they're all there. You can look on Arrowwood. They're all listed there. Some of Shulkin's compounds are more like classical true psychedelics. I mean, they interact with these 5-HT2A receptors like Mescal does, but some of these are"
},
{
"end_time": 2439.019,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2411.493,
"text": " are more like MDMA. There's a whole alphabet soup, if you will. There's MDA, there's MDMA, there's MMDA, there's DDM. It's a lot of different ones. And it's true of all these other things. There are many analogs of LSD now too that are similar to LSD, but"
},
{
"end_time": 2468.114,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2439.957,
"text": " but are some are short acting and some are, you know, let more, they have more of this intactogenic quality. So there's, you know, if you're a medicinal chemist, this is a great area to, to work in because there's, you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of molecular templates to work from. And you never know when the next MDMA will come along that could"
},
{
"end_time": 2496.544,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2468.404,
"text": " But MDMA, for what it does, it's a pretty good molecule. In other words, it's hard to think how you could improve on that structure. And in terms of the classical psychedelics, I think that, again, with DMT, thymothoxy, DMT, psilocybin, psilocin, there are many derivatives of these things."
},
{
"end_time": 2523.148,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2497.022,
"text": " You know, and again, tea call is the is the source to look at for this. But I'm kind of amused, you know, in some ways psilocybin and the active form of psilocybin, which is psilocin, right, psilocin, psilocybin is converted to psilocin in the body. It's psilocin that's interacting with the 5HT2A receptors."
},
{
"end_time": 2548.729,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2523.712,
"text": " It's hard to imagine a molecule that's more suited to human physiology. It's non-toxic. The duration of action makes it easy to use in clinical study, clinical setting. It's very compatible with human metabolism. It's a profound psychedelic"
},
{
"end_time": 2577.824,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2549.292,
"text": " So a lot of these companies that are trying to develop analogs of psilocybin and psilocin, in my opinion, much of it is directed toward, you know, they want to be able to patent something, you know, so they want a derivative that could be patented. Silsom thankfully has been in the public domain for since 1958. Well, so, you know, Shogan Hoffman, when he discovered it, never tried to patent it."
},
{
"end_time": 2605.213,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2579.138,
"text": " And so these companies are kind of, you know, showing their cards in some ways. Well, we have to come up with something proprietary, you know, some analog of Silicin, but chances are it's not going to be better than Silicin in terms of its action. Now, in terms of the medicinal benefit of certain mushroom supplements, is there a broad difference between mycelium and the fruiting bodies?"
},
{
"end_time": 2632.056,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2605.503,
"text": " There is often more of the compounds in the fruiting bodies. If you're making standardized extracts, you can grow mycelium, the material will be there, the alkaloids will be there, and you can standardize them. But the mushrooms, there's something about that"
},
{
"end_time": 2657.602,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2633.319,
"text": " transition in the life cycle of the mushroom that leads to a synthesis of higher levels of these tryptamines. And this is generally true with other secondary products that mushrooms make, you know, like the beta-glucans, for example, which are the medicinal"
},
{
"end_time": 2687.841,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2658.695,
"text": " part the medicinal components of these immune stimulating mushrooms, these functional medicinal mushrooms, a lot of it comes down to beta glucans. The mushrooms will have higher levels than the mycelium. It's just a fact. Now let's say Dennis, we were to play this visual game where you imagine the ethno pharmacology as a jigsaw puzzle. And of course there are unknown unknowns, but I'm going to ask for known unknowns."
},
{
"end_time": 2716.698,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2688.097,
"text": " Where's the largest gap in this puzzle in terms of our knowledge right now, in terms of the knowledge or in terms of significance? Well, I mean, you know, it's hard to, it's hard to say what the significance of an of an unknown is, you know, until you look into it. It's kind of like salvia divinorum, you know, until you actually take a close look"
},
{
"end_time": 2742.722,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2717.21,
"text": " You have this weird Mexican mint with very strange psychopharmacological properties. So you've got that. And then when people looked into it, it turns out you've got this very interesting molecule. What's fascinating for me in this field right now, in which we were not able to do it, ESPD-55."
},
{
"end_time": 2769.923,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2743.029,
"text": " This will have to wait for ESPD-60, I guess. I think there's about 20, 25 species of putatively hallucinogenic or psychoactive fish that we couldn't get anyone to come talk about. There's not a lot of work done on them, but I think that's fascinating. And again, I think"
},
{
"end_time": 2797.671,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2770.196,
"text": " This is, this is a perfect example. So we know these are out there. We don't know. All we have are, uh, anecdotal reports, you know, when people accidentally eat these things, usually they accidentally eat these things. And then they have this experience. They're not planning to trip, but, uh, you know, it ends up that they do some of these produce extremely bizarre."
},
{
"end_time": 2824.718,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2798.063,
"text": " uh kinds of experiences not that pleasant uh sometimes lasting days but the point is that there's novel chemistry there there has to be novel chemistry there it's worth looking into you know this is something because again the idea is you never know when a new molecule is going to surface that actually has some"
},
{
"end_time": 2849.599,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2825.401,
"text": " potential use, so you've got to look into it. It's tricky with these fish because a lot of them, it seems to be a seasonal thing. You don't get the effect every time you eat them. That's interesting. It's most likely it's a bacteria or it's something else that's in the fish or it's something the fish is eating"
},
{
"end_time": 2879.923,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2850.196,
"text": " that is then sequestered into the flesh. And so it isn't always there. But when it's there, people, you know, and interestingly, for example, one of them is it's called the Salema porgy. I forget the I forget the scientific name of it offhand, but it's from the Mediterranean. And it actually it turns out that the Romans used to use it as a recreational drug."
},
{
"end_time": 2901.527,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2880.64,
"text": " you know they would take it at these orgies and banquets that they had and people get absolutely plastered and you know some people contemporary people have described the effects of you know they went to some event or something they consumed one of these fish and then they had a profound"
},
{
"end_time": 2931.032,
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"start_time": 2902.227,
"text": " With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early."
},
{
"end_time": 2954.275,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2931.425,
"text": " Which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim. Check out a pop-up art show. Or even try those limited edition donuts. Because, why not? TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes payday unexpectedly human."
},
{
"end_time": 2977.79,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2956.971,
"text": " Yeah, it seems like psychedelics have both a neurological benefit. So increases neuroplasticity. Sometimes that's good. Often it's good. And there's always edge cases where it's not and psychologically, where often you have a positive experience. And often they don't know about just as often, but a sizable portion doesn't. Do you think that"
},
{
"end_time": 3006.749,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2978.473,
"text": " There can be a drug that's designed or it could be from plants that can produce the positive effects, either neurologically or psychologically, but without the hallucinogenic effects or somehow that part and parcel of the psychological transformation. Well, this is this is an area of controversy right now. There are a number of companies that are trying to design the psychedelic experience out of the psychedelic. They're trying to create"
},
{
"end_time": 3033.404,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3007.193,
"text": " non psychedelic psychedelics. And this is controversial because? Well, because they say, you know, the psychedelic experience is actually an adverse side effect. We just need to get rid of that so that it can do whatever it does on the neural level, you know, rearranging, uh, synaptic connectivity, stimulating synaptogenesis, all the things that it does."
},
{
"end_time": 3061.203,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3034.087,
"text": " that we talk about under this sort of rubric of neural toxicity, that you don't really need the psychedelic experience to have this, this corrective effect. I think they're barking up the wrong tree, frankly. I think that it's hard. My feeling is it's hard to separate the psychedelic experience, you know, which has often such a profound"
},
{
"end_time": 3089.241,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3061.63,
"text": " emotional and cognitive impact which of course is reflected on the neural level. If you take that away then you take away the therapeutic effect as I believe. I don't think they're going to succeed in developing a non-psychedelic psychedelic. I think the whole thing is"
},
{
"end_time": 3114.667,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3090.213,
"text": " is a red herring that I think are false. I think it's probably not going to happen. I could be wrong. I could be proven wrong the next day. Unfortunately, I mean, in some ways, this really highlights, I think, one of the"
},
{
"end_time": 3145.589,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3116.493,
"text": " One of the sort of unexamined assumptions in the quest for these compounds, which is this idea of dismissing the psychedelic experience as an undesirable side effect, is kind of missing the point. If you design a psychedelic which lacks the psychedelic experience, it's no longer psychedelic by definition."
},
{
"end_time": 3173.831,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3146.305,
"text": " You know, psychedelic means mind manifesting. You know, so if you engineer the experience out of the molecule, you may have a useful molecule, but you shouldn't call it a psychedelic. You could call it a, you know, neuro, you know, plasticity stimulator or something. But I think it's also, uh, I think it also highlights something about medicine and drug discovery."
},
{
"end_time": 3203.336,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3174.36,
"text": " And the way that medicine, even in psycho, you know, psychology, psychopharmacology, medicine has always been uncomfortable with the idea of spirit, you know, the idea of the mind. I mean, the mind is inconvenient, you know, because the perspective is it's reductionist, you know, the brain is just a complex machine."
},
{
"end_time": 3230.947,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3204.087,
"text": " Humans are just complex machines. There's no spirit involved. There's nothing beyond that involved. So if you can apply the right molecular monkey wrench, if you will, to the system, you can fix it. And it has nothing to do with your mind. The mind doesn't really exist. The spirit doesn't really exist. Well, I disagree. I think that"
},
{
"end_time": 3260.23,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3231.391,
"text": " You know, the traditions and the history of the use of these things, these things are medicines for the spirit and the soul in a certain sense. They're medicines for the soul. I think it's completely misguided and unfortunately greed driven to try to discover these molecules that lack the psychedelic experience has been engineered, has been"
},
{
"end_time": 3283.166,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3260.623,
"text": " has been eliminated. I mean, I could imagine it being beneficial at the neuronal level. So for instance, there's BDNF, I believe it's called, which promotes growth of neurons, right? Right. But it's not psychoactive. And so I could imagine the mending it so that it's no longer a psychedelic by the definition of it may still be a psychedelic by your definition if it binds to 528."
},
{
"end_time": 3308.285,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3283.78,
"text": " But doesn't produce the psychoactive effects, but not by the traditional root of the word. That's entirely possible. I mean, it may tweak different projects, like different, different components, like the brain derived neurotrophic growth factor and all that. That's fine. And it may have a therapeutic effect. They should not call it a psychedelic. That is misrepresentation."
},
{
"end_time": 3332.466,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3308.66,
"text": " I imagine they wouldn't because they would want to distance themselves from and be like, look, we got all the benefits without being this. That is bad. The psychedelic is bad or potentially because I know that that's the perception. You have all the benefits except the psychedelic experience, you know, which is not viewed as a benefit. So that's a major benefit for most people, the psychedelic experience. You're taking that away from people."
},
{
"end_time": 3358.285,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3333.166,
"text": " But it may have applications. I'm not saying that this work is completely useless. It may have applications. There may be people that, for one reason or another, can't take psychedelics or can't deal with psychedelic experiences or should not have psychedelic experiences, and that may be fine for them. So there will be probably"
},
{
"end_time": 3377.483,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3358.933,
"text": " you know, useful therapeutic drugs that come out of this research. I just think it's disingenuous to say, to represent this as a psychedelic, you know, that we've eliminated this undesirable side effect. That's fine."
},
{
"end_time": 3393.08,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3378.131,
"text": " Don't call it a psychedelic presentation. I don't think you like the philosophy that undergirds the production of this, that they are saying it's something to do with we're trying to help humanity, but there's something that firstly is about money."
},
{
"end_time": 3414.002,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3393.507,
"text": " There's nothing wrong inherently about a profit motive. It's just that there's something avaricious when it comes to tens of millions and billions. There also seems to be a diminutive attitude that they have toward pre-modern cultures when it comes to medicine, despite them taking inspiration from it. I think so. I think so. You know, but then on the other hand,"
},
{
"end_time": 3438.507,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3414.377,
"text": " I mean, yeah, everything you say is true, and I sort of take a dim view of it, but I'm also a scientist, you know, so I am not against science exploring these things, because you never know until you do it, where I mean, there may be surprises, you know, some useful compounds may come out of this, but"
},
{
"end_time": 3465.401,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3438.899,
"text": " They should be represented honestly. You could say, well, yeah, this, this compound was developed as a result of psychedelic research. It's, you know, a variant of psychedelic molecules, but it's not a psychedelic, you know, and it may have, it may have applications. That's okay. Uh, and you can, you can have a profit motive and you can also want to,"
},
{
"end_time": 3492.295,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3466.22,
"text": " You can have an altruistic motive. I mean, I don't think every effort of drug development, whether it's whatever the therapeutic targets, the people that are doing it are, yes, they're entrepreneurs, they need to have patents, they need to create profitable medicines, but there is possibly an altruistic motive there too. Think"
},
{
"end_time": 3519.821,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3492.91,
"text": " So it's a complicated thing. The ethics around this is very complicated. Me personally, I'm a traditionalist. I prefer the classic psychedelics, even preferably in the natural form. I would rather take mushrooms than psilocybin, even though there's very little difference subjectively between the two."
},
{
"end_time": 3544.821,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3520.213,
"text": " and you have to really credit Hoffman for discovering, characterizing psilocybin, and then all the people to come after him that have worked on that structure and developed interesting compounds. But yeah, the area of"
},
{
"end_time": 3572.056,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3545.145,
"text": " this area of drug development, drug discovery, developing novel therapeutics and so on. This is very hot in, in the field right now. Did you happen to go to the psychedelic science conference? No. No. You've heard about it, right? Yes. Yeah. It was insane. 13,000 people there. And there was a lot of good papers presented."
},
{
"end_time": 3599.804,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3572.824,
"text": " Which I have time to see most of them because there were a lot I wanted to see, but there's actual, this is a very active area of research. So, you know, who knows what will come out of it? Who knows what psychedelic science in 2028 or 29 will look like? Hopefully the field will continue to develop and discoveries will continue to be made."
},
{
"end_time": 3625.811,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3600.469,
"text": " I was watching a clip of you on Rogan and you were talking about, or Rogan was saying that you shouldn't be high all the time. And then you said, yeah, it's important to find your balance, go back to the center, find your baseline. I think that was your phrase and do a reality check that some people fail to do a reality check. Can you expand on that? Well, yeah, I think, I mean, for one thing,"
},
{
"end_time": 3656.22,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3626.493,
"text": " True psychedelics, you can't really be high on them all the time, in the sense that they induce tolerance very quickly. If you take LSD or psilocybin or any of these every day for a few days, you're going to get a much-divinished effect unless you increase the dose substantially. There is that. They kind of have their built-in safeguard against"
},
{
"end_time": 3680.162,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3657.022,
"text": " mid misuse and you know they're not addictive right i mean these things are not addictive they're anti-addictive in a certain sense most people have to you know kind of screw their courage up to go back and and and take them uh uh but i also think that in the state itself"
},
{
"end_time": 3703.029,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3681.766,
"text": " They can tell you a lot of things. Uh, you know, you can get a lot of supposed insights and so on. Uh, but they, they can be delusions, you know, I mean, in some ways they encourage, well, they, they, they stimulate funny ideas, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3733.49,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3703.916,
"text": " And that's part of the fun. That's part of the reason we take them is because we like funny ideas. We like, you know, to look into unexplored parts of our consciousness, but you should always keep your skeptical antennas well deployed and well tuned for these experiences. And if something, some revelation comes"
},
{
"end_time": 3753.558,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3733.763,
"text": " Out of the experience, it may be true and it may not be true. Give yourself 48 hours in a sober state to reflect on it from that perspective. Does it really hold up or was this just some wild idea?"
},
{
"end_time": 3778.729,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3754.036,
"text": " I mean, I, I mean, Terrence and me are kind of textbook cases for people that didn't do that, you know, back in the day. And we got down the rabbit hole of, you know, some pretty wild ideas that in the end were not valid, you know? That's extremely interesting. Was that an attitudinal difference between you and your brother? Do you feel like you were more on the side that said, okay,"
},
{
"end_time": 3802.227,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3779.104,
"text": " Let's get some insight and let's give it two days to seven days. I think two days is quite short actually, but let's say. Well, yes and no. I mean, if you read our book, you know, we, we did this together. I was the one that was, uh, you know, sort of lost in a realm of delusion, you know, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 3830.299,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3804.189,
"text": " But I recovered. Terrace was lost in a realm of delusion. In some ways, he didn't recover in the sense that he stuck with these ideas and developed a career based on these ideas. And in some ways, there was much of his suppositions about the mushrooms, about the whole thing that was"
},
{
"end_time": 3849.667,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3830.828,
"text": " just not true in the end. Because I went further at the beginning, I was more cautious. After the experiment, after whatever happened to us, I was happy to be able to get my feet back on the ground."
},
{
"end_time": 3877.619,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3849.872,
"text": " And I mean, I didn't give up my interest in psychedelics, so I didn't stop taking psychedelics, but I was more cautious after that. And, you know, I think we just have to be careful. I mean, I get emails occasionally, you know, from people that are, you know, thoroughly lost sort of in webs of delusion."
},
{
"end_time": 3904.087,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3878.166,
"text": " that they've had experiences with psychedelics and certain, you know, like cognitive or, you know, certain understandings or cognitive frameworks, whatever you want to call it have been revelations, you know, revelations in supposed insights. And, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 3934.189,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3904.855,
"text": " You know, and they have not reflected on it. You know, does this really make sense? And there's a tendency for, you know, you have to keep your analytical faculties intact. You have to be able to step away from the experience and look at it more objectively in the same way that psychedelics, one of the things they facilitate is"
},
{
"end_time": 3959.087,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3934.633,
"text": " You know one of the i think one of the basis of their therapeutic usefulness is they let you step away from ordinary consciousness and examine that examine your usual so-called default mode network framework psychedelics temporarily disable that that can be very useful but it's going to reassert itself you know"
},
{
"end_time": 3987.688,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3959.616,
"text": " Because let's face it, ordinary consciousness, whatever we mean by that, that's where we are most of the time, you know, and so we need to be able to function. And we need to be able to, you know, sort of evaluate these revelations, these insights in terms of, you know, some in terms of"
},
{
"end_time": 4017.995,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3989.36,
"text": " kind of consensus reality, you know, do they conform with it? Because if you don't, then it, you know, if you get lost in delusion, you're into, you know, you're off into places that psychiatrists would might say is effectively a delusional ideation, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4036.442,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4018.66,
"text": " like, I am the Messiah, and I'm here to, you know, save the world, that sort of thing. Psychedelic makes you convince you that, in fact, you are. I can tell you from experience, no, you're not the Messiah. You're not going to save the world."
},
{
"end_time": 4060.503,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4037.875,
"text": " So the counterpoint would be like, well, look, society can be sick. And then there's a phrase like there's nothing healthy about being sane in a sick society, something like that. I don't buy that. I used to, but I've had my own experiences that I could tell you about some other time. Terrifying, terrifying. I could say that with a small smirk, mainly because of nervousness, but also because I've had some distance from the experience."
},
{
"end_time": 4088.234,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4060.811,
"text": " but like truly, truly terrifying experiences. Yeah. I don't subscribe to that though. I used to because I was the type of person that's like, Hey, you innovate. That's the whole point is you generate new ideas. It may not conform, but it's new. Yeah. But also sometimes you could generate false ideas and it's so super easy to leave oneself and it sounds, it feels like you've received truths that are so true. It's exactly remarkable. Anyhow,"
},
{
"end_time": 4107.722,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4088.763,
"text": " This is something that isn't talked about much. What I want to know is how is it that you recognize that you're on a deceptive path? So you had to number one recognize that which isn't easy because almost by definition you don't think you're on one. So how did you recognize that? And then what did you do to pull yourself back out of it?"
},
{
"end_time": 4136.8,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4108.268,
"text": " He said something interesting, which is like, put my feet back on the ground. He said something like that. It does feel like you're just in this wispy place where you're not centered. You're swimming in a, I'd like to say it's like you're swimming in this whirlpool. There's a quote by Renee Descartes that said, it feels like I'm swimming interminably in a whirlpool such that I can't touch the ground nor swim to the top. Exactly. So you have to give yourself a chance to get your center again."
},
{
"end_time": 4165.981,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4137.517,
"text": " after the experience, you know, without any other substances, give yourself the 48 hours, 72 hours, whatever it is, you know, to, to find your center, you can also ask, you know, if you have people around you that know, you know, that you respect, you can also kind of bounce it off them as well and say, well, I'm having this"
},
{
"end_time": 4189.326,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4166.783,
"text": " revelation or these insights, but does that really jive with what you understand how reality is? I mean, it's interesting, you know, after we did the experiment at La Trerera, and we were still more or less caught in this delusional space, you know, a couple months after, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4216.715,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4189.889,
"text": " I mean, Terrence was completely convinced that whatever we said we'd done at Lotteria, we'd succeeded. You know, we weren't, it didn't necessarily happen on schedule, but he was convinced and he actually came back from South America to California and went to visit his friends and more or less announced, you know, that we have done this thing."
},
{
"end_time": 4242.807,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4217.142,
"text": " Sorry, what is it that he was convinced of? He was convinced that you had done something? Yeah, that we had succeeded, that the experiment had succeeded. The experiment of? At La Trerera, we had created this transform, you know, self transforming, fusion of mind and matter and all that. The point is that he went back and talked to his friends who hadn't had this experience and"
},
{
"end_time": 4271.186,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4243.234,
"text": " and more or less announced that, you know, we've done it and history's going to end any day now. They were like, what? Wait a minute. You know, you're seriously divorced from reality. And it turns out they were, they were right. You know, so it's good to, the thing is Terrence always said, and I think it's true. They make you have funny ideas."
},
{
"end_time": 4292.688,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4271.544,
"text": " You know they make you have interesting ideas they give you that facility but those ideas are sometimes valid sometimes very interesting most of them are probably just delusional but you know you have to look at them from an objective point of view before you can really dismiss them or accept them."
},
{
"end_time": 4307.483,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4292.858,
"text": " That's interesting. So an analogy I'm making in my head right now is LLMs like chat GPT. They confabulate what they'll create is quite creative. Yes, but then sometimes they'll make up a fact confidently and they don't know that they're making up that fact."
},
{
"end_time": 4336.92,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4307.807,
"text": " So they need a way of testing with reality and that's coming like their multimodal LLMS. It is. It is very similar to that. I haven't used chat GPT, but I've read about it and I yeah, chat GPT is very similar. It'll come up with this stuff that seems to be so convincing and logical and it makes sense and all that. But if you look, if you look beneath the surface a little bit, it's like it's smoke and mirrors. There's nothing there."
},
{
"end_time": 4363.404,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4337.415,
"text": " You can ask it, who is Dennis McKenna? And it'll say, he is the brother of Terrence McKenna, an astronaut from the 1950s. It'll say so assertively that you're like, Oh, great. This is absolutely correct. In some sense, you're a psycho not so partially correct. So yeah, we have to be, I mean, ultimately, you know, Kurt, we have to trust our own, our ourselves, you know, I mean, I mean, you can't"
},
{
"end_time": 4389.718,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4364.462,
"text": " You're the final judge of whether these things make sense or not. But that said, you can certainly test it. Science, as an example, comes up with theories and hypotheses, models of phenomena and so on that you test by"
},
{
"end_time": 4406.715,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4390.333,
"text": " asking questions of nature in a very systematic way that can be tested. You create a model of a process or something and then you don't try to prove the theory, you try to disprove the theory."
},
{
"end_time": 4435.077,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4407.21,
"text": " That's what sets science apart from say religion or dogma or other types of doctrine. You know, everything is provisional. You have to, you come up with an idea, say, okay, does this fit with the data? And what part of the data does it not explain? You know, and that's the scientific process. And you can use that same process pretty much in your own thinking about, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 4464.394,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4436.015,
"text": " these ideas that you may come up with from psychedelic experiences. Another thing about science is it's imperfect and it's flawed but there's also a community of like-minded people. There's the peer review process as flawed as it is, it's useful because you come up with your hypothesis"
},
{
"end_time": 4491.698,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4464.77,
"text": " You put it out there, you describe it as closely as you can, but you may have overlooked things. So you publish a paper or you get reviewers and they come back and they say, well, you know, here's the problem or here's what it doesn't explain. That is useful. So then you can either, you know, you can just throw the idea out completely. If it's seriously flawed or you can say, well, wait a minute, we have to back up and"
},
{
"end_time": 4521.817,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4493.029,
"text": " tweak it a little bit and change some premises of the hypothesis. And, you know, thank you for identifying the gaps in our ideas and so on. So cognitive functioning is a similar process. I mean, in science, it's formalized, you know, but just in ordinary life, you can approach something that way as well."
},
{
"end_time": 4548.899,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4522.159,
"text": " You have to keep your antennas tuned. That's a big part of it. Yeah. I talked about this with Karl Friston, actually, this very topic of the dangers, which is not talked about much, the perils of investigations into consciousness. Because people who watch this channel, people like you, people like myself, we're extremely curious people."
},
{
"end_time": 4572.022,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4549.224,
"text": " Curious about nature, whether our nature and nature, well, what's the relationship between that as well? And these are fun questions, even funny, like you mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. You brought up something that's super interesting, which I never thought about the communal aspect of science. So often we think of the generalization of the East as being much more inclusive and collective and the West is individualistic."
},
{
"end_time": 4599.377,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4572.705,
"text": " and that the east is naturopathic and the west is allopathic and those are generalizations because the east has developed cancer treatments and the west has developed probiotics so it's not entirely correct right and i've never thought about science as being a community like i think of indigenous tribes and other parts of the world is being extremely communal that's a super super interesting point oh it's very much a community it's very much a community because"
},
{
"end_time": 4617.705,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4599.872,
"text": " You know it's about the development of these models these theoretical models these are everything is a model and so the community is the like the first sort of before you can I mean most of the"
},
{
"end_time": 4634.275,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4618.968,
"text": " world at large is not informed enough to make judgment on a lot of work, a lot of scientific work. It's too complicated and specialized, but people in your field, you know, those are the first people that you have to bounce this stuff up."
},
{
"end_time": 4662.705,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4634.889,
"text": " because they're educated, they know about it, they're working in the same field. There's a great deal of value in the review process. The review process in a lot of ways is very flawed, but the idea is a good idea. That's why people have conferences and they go and they present their ideas"
},
{
"end_time": 4681.118,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4663.131,
"text": " You know somebody comes up with something somebody else gets up after the lecture and denounces them and say you know you're full of shit here's why or you know it's a brilliant it's a brilliant inside doctor you know whatever that's the way it works."
},
{
"end_time": 4702.227,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4682.261,
"text": " While we didn't have time to get to these questions in the podcast itself, I asked Dennis over email some fan questions, some audience questions. Number one, are there any gender differences in the experiences of people who take psychedelics? This one comes from a woman fan of yours, Dennis. On the question of whether there are any gender differences"
},
{
"end_time": 4728.677,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4702.619,
"text": " in psychedelic experiences. Of course there are because men's and women's brains are constructed differently. I don't know of any studies on this. Um, the player probably out there, it's just stands to reason that the experience is different would be interesting to explore in more depth. Great. Number two, who should not implement or experiment with the use of psychedelics and why? Well, obviously anyone with a proclivity to psychosis,"
},
{
"end_time": 4755.572,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4728.916,
"text": " should probably avoid it. Perhaps sociopaths and megalomaniacs should stay away from it as well. People who are not prepared should not take it to be approached thoughtfully. OK, great. And now number three. This is a quotation after my experience in the 70s. I found I leaned toward the quote attributed to Kerouac after a trip, which is that walking on water wasn't invented in a day. Does Dennis have any thoughts on that? Sincerely, Bob Fenstermaker."
},
{
"end_time": 4770.879,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4755.947,
"text": " I'm not sure what to make of the question three about walking on water. I think maybe he is referring to the idea of the psychedelics or a shortcut or something. They are not there just as much of discipline was in the other spiritual disciplines, if approached correctly."
},
{
"end_time": 4793.217,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4771.22,
"text": " Thanks, Dennis. And now number four, we talk about oneness, though there's a loving aspect to disunity. That is, just as there's a danger to treating everyone as different, there's also a danger to abstracting to the point of undifferentiation. Thus, there's some propitious middle ground, a vice associated with each and a virtue at the middle. Can you talk about some of the salutary aspects of separation?"
},
{
"end_time": 4818.2,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4793.422,
"text": " I don't have much to say about question four. There is something to be said for separation in its appropriate time and place. For example, separation is what defines the self, the individual. And sometimes we want that we can't be unified with the cosmos at all times. We won't get much done that way. So Dennis, it's an absolute pleasure speaking with you. I love the conversation. I love speaking with you like men."
},
{
"end_time": 4843.183,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4818.66,
"text": " Well, thank you firstly, and what's next for you and work in the audience? Well, I don't know. I've got a conference coming up in Oregon in July, some kind of psilocybin oriented conference. And that's about it. You know, I continue working on McKenna Academy things. We don't have time to go into it, but"
},
{
"end_time": 4869.633,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4843.49,
"text": " People can look at the, uh, at the website and, and look at bio gnosis. This is what we're, you know, this is what we're. Yeah. I also have a term called Abhij gnosis. So we both use that term. Basically what will science develop to? It's like science 2.0. Yeah. Bio gnosis. I think I got it spelled wrong. Sorry. Yes. I asked there's a tab on the website."
},
{
"end_time": 4898.285,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4871.169,
"text": " This is nothing, this is really not about psychedelics at all, but this is more about ethnobotany and a project we've got going to try to upgrade and develop this herbarium in Peru that I've worked with the people there for almost 50 years. We're trying to make a scientific resource for it that'll bring"
},
{
"end_time": 4925.35,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4898.985,
"text": " traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge together. And we're looking for support, we need support for this. And we are a 501 c three, the McKenna Academy is a 501 c three nonprofits, so we can give people tax deductions for their donations and have a look at the website. And we're starting a new podcast series also, by the way. All right, what's it called?"
},
{
"end_time": 4951.271,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4925.776,
"text": " It's going to be called the brain forest cafe. Okay, that's great. And when so let us know I it should be up any day now. I'm not sure it's holding it up, but probably by the end of July, it will be up. We've got three or four already to go. And we have more in the in the pipeline. So if you enjoyed today's conversation with Dennis, which I imagine you have because you stayed all the way to the end,"
},
{
"end_time": 4979.531,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4951.578,
"text": " Then visit the brain forest cafe. I'll put a link to that in the description as well as bio gnosis. That's a charity. It's a registered charity with the states. And so you can get tax deductions. Thank you so much. I hope I get to speak with you again someday in person. Thank you so much for a live conversation. Had a great time. Yeah, me as well. Thank you. And fellow Canadian, at least right now. Okay, fellow Canadian."
},
{
"end_time": 5004.497,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4980.145,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people. You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories and build as a community our own toes."
},
{
"end_time": 5022.551,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 5004.497,
"text": " Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well."
},
{
"end_time": 5037.858,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 5022.551,
"text": " Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms. Just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from rewatching lectures and podcasts and I read that in the comments. Hey,"
},
{
"end_time": 5067.227,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 5037.858,
"text": " Toe listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead re-listening on those platforms? iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use. If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Toe full time. You get early access to ad free audio episodes there as well. For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier."
},
{
"end_time": 5072.602,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5067.227,
"text": " Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough."
}
]
}No transcript available.