#592: Dennis McKenna — An Ethnopharmacologist on Hallucinogens, Sex-Crazed Cicadas, The Mushrooms of Language, BioGnosis, and Illuminating Obscure Corners

Brought to you by Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and Shopify http://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business. Dennis McKenna (@DennisMcKenna4 https://twitter.com/DennisMcKenna4) has spent more than 40 years researching the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon. His doctoral research at the University of British Columbia focused on the ethnopharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute https://www.heffter.org/ and was a key organizer and participant in the Hoasca Project, the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca used by the UDV, a Brazilian religious group. He is the younger brother of Terence McKenna. From 2000 to 2017, he taught courses on ethnopharmacology as well as Plants in Human Affairs at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. In 2019, in collaboration with colleagues, he incorporated a nonprofit, the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy https://mckenna.academy/. Currently, the Academy has several projects underway, with the most immediate being preparations for an upcoming conference in the UK May 23rd–26th, ESPD55 http://espd55.com/, which will cover a wide range of topics related to psycho-ethnopharmacology and feature an exclusive, pre-release screening of the McKenna Academy’s first short documentary, BioGnosis, Bridges to Ancestral Wisdom https://espd55.com/program-old/biognosis/. Dennis emigrated to Canada in the spring of 2019 with his wife Sheila and now resides in Abbotsford, British Columbia. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Shopify http://shopify.com/tim! Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is one of my favorite platforms and one of my favorite companies. Shopify http://shopify.com/tim is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. In no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day and drive sales. No coding or design experience required. More than a store, Shopify grows with you, and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to Shopify.com/Tim for a FREE 14-day trial and get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features http://shopify.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim or use code TIM at checkout. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * How Dennis and his brother Terence tuned in to “vegetable television” with the addition of an ayahuasca ingredient to their regular consumption of mushrooms and cannabis, and why even the components of tried-and-true ayahuasca are in constant flux depending on who’s making it. [07:39] Why is it that psychoactive drugs don’t always work — even in people who usually feel their effects — and what keeps us from finding out through controlled studies? [13:51] As much as Dennis has experimented with adding and subtracting ingredients to various psychoactive admixtures, he’s come to believe it’s best to avoid combinations if possible. There are often alternative ways to dial the effects of these substances up or down as desired. [21:43] Why would we have cannabinoid, opiate, and other molecular receptors in our brains unless we’re designed to consume these substances from external sources? [29:45] Tales of terror from the world of psilocybin cicadas, cordyceps zombies, and toxoplasmic rodents. [36:34] Dennis shares his thoughts on psychedelics as a potential treatment for dyslexia and other language-based disorders. [42:20] What happened to Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell after having his savikalpa samadhi experience — a mystic glimpse beyond the self into the true nature of things? Does Dennis believe current psychedelic pioneers are misguided in downplaying the mystical experiences certain compounds bring out in people? [50:18] For anyone curious about Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD, Dennis recommends the graphic novel Bicycle Day by Brian Blomerth. [53:48] My recommended resources for learning more about the perceptual phenomenon of synesthesia. [54:58] What ESPD 55 entails: its history, its itinerary, and how you can participate even if you can’t physically make it to the conference in the UK from May 23rd to the 26th. [56:51] How does Dennis relate to mortality and the inevitability of death? [1:08:54] What is BioGnosis? [1:11:56] How does Dennis feel about synthetic substitutes for psychedelic compounds that have been traditionally harvested from natural — and often endangered — sources? What adaptations might groups who see these plants as sacred have to make to ensure that some of them don’t go extinct? [1:14:16] Most communities of any size eventually have to deal with in-fighting and power grabs from a certain element, and the psychedelic community is no exception. Can Dennis imagine any solutions to this unfortunate reality? [1:25:31] What would Dennis choose if he could only partake of three psychoactive substances for the rest of his life? [1:35:02] The pros and cons of cannabis consumption and its methods of delivery, and how modern strains can induce experiences akin to psychedelics. [1:36:38] What we can expect from an upcoming second edition of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, The BioGnosis Project (and its first associated documentary (to be screened at ESPD 55), virtualizing the Herbarium in Iquitos, and other parting thoughts. [1:42:46] * IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: The plants and compounds mentioned in this episode are illegal in many countries, and even possession can carry severe criminal penalties. This episode does not constitute medical advice and should not be construed as a recommendation to use psychedelics. There are serious legal, psychological, and physical risks. Psychedelics are not for everyone—they can exacerbate certain emotional problems, and there have been, in very rare cases, fatalities. For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys, you can get $250 off of the Pod Pro Cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eightsleep.com/tim or use code TIM. That's eight, all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/tim, or use coupon code TIM, T-I-M. Eightsleep.com/tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything, anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life. And you can have the tools to manage your day to day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third party apps from on demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine.

• 2:56Tim Ferriss?

  They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I first met the founder, Toby, in 2008 when I became an advisor and it's been spectacular. I've loved watching Shopify go from roughly 10 to 15 employees at the time to 7,000 plus today, serving customers in 175 countries with total sales on the platform exceeding $400 billion. But what does that really mean? That means every 28 seconds, more or less, a small business owner makes their first sale on Shopify. More people in more places of all ages every single day.

• 3:38Tim Ferriss?

  They power millions of entrepreneurs from their first sale all the way to full scale. And you would recognize a lot of large companies that also use them who started small. So get started by building and customizing your online store, again, with no coding or design experience required. Access powerful tools to help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day to day. Gain knowledge and confidence with extensive resources to help you succeed. And I've actually been involved with some of that way back in the day, which was awesome. The Build a Business competition and other things. Plus with 24/7 support, you're never alone. And let's face it, being an entrepreneur can be lonely, but you have support, you have resources, you don't need to

• 4:19Tim Ferriss?

  Feel alone in this case. More than a store Shopify grows with you and they never stop innovating, providing more and more tools to make your business better and your life easier. Go to Shopify.com slash Tim. That's S H O P I F Y dot com slash Tim. All lowercase for a free 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to Shopify.com slash Tim right now and check it out. They have a lot to offer. Shopify.com slash Tim.

• 4:56Tim Ferriss?

  Hada hada, a quick disclaimer before we get into the interview. The plants and compounds mentioned in this episode are illegal in many countries and even possession can carry severe criminal penalties. This episode does not constitute medical advice nor legal advice and should not be construed as a recommendation to use psychedelics. There are serious legal, psychological and physical risks. Fatalities have been recorded. So psychedelics are not for everyone. They can exacerbate certain emotional problems, certain diagnoses, and there have been, as mentioned, in very rare cases, fatalities. So thanks for being safe, everybody.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:56Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is a fan favorite Dennis McKenna. You can find him on Twitter at Dennis McKenna four. Dennis has spent more than 40 years researching the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian and Brazilian Amazon. His doctoral research at the University of British Columbia focused on the ethnopharmacology of ayahuasca and ucuhe, two tryptamine based hallucinogens used by Indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. He is a founding board member of the Hefter Research Institute, which has helped fund and directly funded a lot of very good

• 6:38Tim Ferriss?

  science and was a key organizer and participant in the Waska Project, the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca used by the U D V, a Brazilian religious group. He is the younger brother of Terence McKenna. From 2000 to 2017, he taught courses on ethnopharmacology as well as plants and human affairs at the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. In 2019, in collaboration with colleagues, he incorporated a nonprofit, the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy. Currently, the academy has several projects underway with the most immediate being preparations for an upcoming conference in the UK, May 23rd to 26th, that's 2022, ESPD 55. We're going to talk a lot about this, which will cover

• 7:21Tim Ferriss?

  a wide range of topics related to psychoethnopharmacology. Dennis emigrated to Canada in the spring of 2019 with his wife Sheila and now resides in Abbotsford, British Columbia. The website for the event that I just mentioned is ESPD55.com. Dennis, welcome back to the show. It's so nice to see you again.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Thanks, Tim. It's really great to be here. Thank you for welcoming me back.

• 7:47Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And I want to mention to folks right up front that the first episode covered a lot of ground. I'm going to try not to duplicate too much. The title of the last episode, for people who want to check it out, is Dennis McKenna, The Depths of Ayahuasca, 500-plus Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond. So you get the idea. If you want to do a deep dive on not just ayahuasca, but certainly a lot of your biographical details and more, listen to the first episode. I'm going to try to deliver on the promise that I made at the end of the first episode, which was a teaser to a second conversation, which now we are in the very beginning of,

• 8:30Tim Ferriss?

  during which I said we might get into, quote, "the really strange and weird stuff," end quote. So I'm going to make an attempt to incorporate some strange and weird stuff. I don't think it'll be very hard. And I thought we could start with a number of excerpts, highlights that I grabbed from the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, which chronicles many of your life experiences, adventures and misadventures alongside your brother and the many other people in your life. And I'm just going to pull out a section here and you can feel free to revise or update or now refute anything that I bring up. But here's the line. "They were an excellent complement to the cannabis," we don't have to get into all the context before

• 9:13Tim Ferriss?

  this, "which we smoked constantly, along with the occasional hit derived from the shavings taken from our fresh supply of banisteriopsis copy, the vine added to ayahuasca as a source of the MAO inhibiting compounds, that's monoamine oxidase inhibiting compounds." Here's the part I wanted to hear you expand on a bit. "We found that smoking the bark while on mushrooms synergized the closed eye hallucinations in a most pleasant and intriguing way. We dubbed this serendipitous discovery vegetable television." So could you speak a bit more, please, about the effect of adding the smoking of the bark to mushrooms and what that experience was or is like?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  It was pretty much an accidental discovery, you know, as so many of these things are. This is a good example of what happens, I guess, basically when you start mucking around with plants, you know, and doing stuff that maybe not be, maybe not entirely safe, but you had to experiment. It was just, it was just, we stumbled on it. We were taking a lot of mushrooms, and that's a whole nother story that we may or may not get into, but we were in a situation in the Amazon when we were doing mushrooms pretty much constantly. And when you're doing them constantly, you get a certain tolerance built up, and then you have to do larger doses to get

• 10:34Speaker 03

  any effect. And we were, as, as it says there, we were smoking cannabis pretty much constantly through this too. So we decided to just, well, what would happen if we smoked some banisteriopsis shavings on the mushrooms? And it had this amazing effect, you know, which anybody could replicate. And I don't think it's particularly dangerous, but we found that we could take a hit. And then we would get this efflorescence of visions that would just gently rise and last two or three minutes and then just kind of fade away. And then you could take another hit and you could repeat that.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  It was kind of like going up and down in a balloon, you know, you could lose some ballast and go a little higher or you could come down. It was very pleasant, actually. It was very nice. And if you look at the whole history of ethopharmacology, for example, the ayahuasca, we think of ayahuasca as being essentially a mixture of two plants. But that's very much a simplification of what ayahuasca is. You know, there's a whole pharmacopeia of plants that sort of, this galaxy of plants that that is associated with ayahuasca. Not always taken with it, sometimes taken as admixture, sometimes taken as components

• 12:01Speaker 03

  of this dieta, which is very important in the sort of ayahuasca tradition, the training of the curanderos and so on. And a lot of these plants are not very well investigated from a scientific point of view. It's an empirical science. And I guess the point is, in some ways, these practitioners, shamans, curanderos, they're really scientists in a certain sense. They're experimental about it. And they don't hesitate to say, well, what if I take this and mix it with that? What's going to happen? How is that going to change the effect? Sometimes they really regret.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Those that survive this process, you know, make discoveries, but there is the potential to take the wrong things. People may think that ayahuasca has been pretty much figured out in terms of its botany, chemistry, pharmacology and so on, but that's not the case. There's a lot more to be learned about ayahuasca. There's numerous PhDs left to be done. And particularly, these admixture plants are interesting because some of them are psychedelic by themselves or regarded to be, but they may be used with ayahuasca. So this accumulated knowledge that exists in this sort of...

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Folk traditions, if you will, is not explored, certainly not codified, and it's ever-changing. That's why there is no such thing as a standardized mixture of ayahuasca, because each preparation is as different as the practitioners that prepare it. It has their sort of idiosyncratic stamp on it.

• 13:51Tim Ferriss?

  I want to underscore a few things that you said and then raise some additional questions. So first, I just want to reinforce how trial and error over hundreds or thousands of years can produce some very refined approaches to solving different problems. And I think that this is well represented in areas that are perhaps a little more objectively accessible by most markers than, say psychedelics. If you look at poisons used in the Amazon, and I've certainly learned a lot about this from our mutual friend Mark Plotkin, who is an impressive fellow in his own right and has spent a lot of time in Suriname and other

• 14:34Tim Ferriss?

  places. If you look at curari, for a very long time, for instance, Western scientists who later would take that and use it as the basis for a lot of modern anesthesia, saw that various species of pepper, wild pepper, were being added as admixtures to this poison, and they, after failing to do any type of assay that produced meaningful results, concluded that it was just primitive superstition. And that was the conclusion for a long time, until it was identified that, I believe, it's bioperine. In these constituent sort of molecules found in pepper can actually increase the bioavailability of these poisons, such that they're faster acting. And if you're shooting a monkey in the canopy, the last

• 15:19Tim Ferriss?

  thing you want is for that tail to wrap around a branch when it dies, so that it doesn't fall to the floor. And so, lo and behold, it turned out that, yes, there is a very practical purpose for the inclusion of this admixture. And I'm sure there are some false leads, and there are things that kind of remain that won't be proven out in that same way. But I do think there's an argument to be made that As you said, a lot of PhDs are yet to be earned looking at these ad mixtures. And just to provide a bit of context on the dieta, and please feel free to to jump in and add or refute anything that I say.

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  The dieta in many different tribes and many different contexts is the ingestion, in some cases, the application of plants that an individual is attempting to better understand or adopt and integrate as an ally. And the ayahuasca is viewed as a master plant or a teacher plant, effectively, in some capacity, a vehicle for getting to understand and know these plants. So over a period of time, and sometimes it's done in a fasting context, other times it's a very bland diet. These plants may be not ingested at the same time as ayahuasca, but alternated, say, one

• 16:40Tim Ferriss?

  day on, one day off, or otherwise. And then in certain cases, as you were mentioning, there are these psychedelics like toai that are brewed with ayahuasca, which can be pretty dicey in some cases. I want to ask you about another paragraph, and that'll lead into my question. Here's the paragraph. "In the next two or three sessions at Don Fidel's, I experienced the same sub-threshold effects. It couldn't have been poor-quality brew. Others in the group, including Don, were clearly affected. It was something wrong with me. For some reason, I wasn't getting it," in quotation marks. "Reflecting on those first experiences, I think that ayahuasca is, in ways, a learned experience. If you don't know what to expect, nothing may happen.

• 17:25Tim Ferriss?

  Also, my appetite hypervigilance may have prevented me from relaxing enough to allow the experience to manifest." Okay, so this paragraph highlights one brand of sort of a null experience that I find most mystifying about psychedelics, because I have also had experiences, and many others have, where they will, one out of 10, one out of 15, one out of every 20 sessions, have absolutely no effect, even from... Mega doses of ayahuasca and presumably your serotonin type 2A receptors aren't just out to lunch for that period of time and it begets all sorts of questions. So could

• 18:07Tim Ferriss?

  you speak to ayahuasca as a learned experience and also comment on if you have any thoughts, these zero effect experiences? Because in each case, I can come up with a plausible explanation for why, if it were possible for my psyche to negate an experience, it would have negated those experiences in those settings. But it's hard for me to make heads or tails out of.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  It's very hard to do any kind of controlled study on this. You can't, you can't do that. I think what this speaks to is that ayahuasca, or any psychoactive drug, not just psychedelics, but it happens in psychedelics, is the experience is a combination of pharmacology, pharmacogenetics, the way that your unique body, we're all biochemically unique, the way your body handles the absorption and the elimination of the substance and the circumstances, set and setting.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  This dynamic of the environment that we harp on constantly is as the importance of set and setting. I forget who it was, but some, I think maybe it was Andy Weil, who once made the observation psychedelics are a kind of placebo in a certain way. And if you take them under the wrong circumstances or inappropriate circumstances, you're not gonna get any effect because it doesn't sync with the expectations that you may have or other things and it just won't happen. You have to surrender to it. You literally have to surrender to it to let it happen. But I think that this whole area of

• 19:58Speaker 03

  How the pharmacology and the expectations interact? It's a dynamic process that involves the medicine, your expectations, the dose, and your biochemical individuality and all that. I mean, it's interesting. For example, there are some people, most of us, for example, smoke DMT and we're blown away. Right? I mean, DMT is hard to ignore if you smoke it. It's profound, very quick, but very intense experience. There are people who experience nothing, which is rather strange. So what's that about?

• 20:43Speaker 03

  And without looking into, well, okay, so what's unique about their serotonin pharmacology? Maybe these people are like genetic knockouts, natural genetic knockouts. Maybe they don't have high levels of 5-HT2A receptors, or maybe their MAO is super active or super high. But you know, the problem, Tim, with studying this stuff is it all comes down to, these are case studies. So you can't do a controlled experiment, really. You can't do a group and really study this effectively. It's all about, well, there's this one individual that no matter how much he takes, he or she

• 21:26Speaker 03

  takes DMT, he's insensitive to it. I heard a case of someone who, for example, was insensitive to DMT, but very sensitive to five-methoxy DMT. Why would this be? It's just a mystery.

• 21:43Tim Ferriss?

  What also, just it produces more questions than answers, certainly for me, is when you look longitudinally at the experience of a single person. So like their pharmacogenetics should be reasonably stable, you would think. And let's just say, in my case, where I'm extremely sensitive to ayahuasca, generally speaking, and then in a handful of cases have, you know, two or three cups and absolutely zero discernible effect. And I have my own subjective explanation for why that plausibly could have happened, but biochemically, I don't know how that is possible because my expectation was that I would feel the effect.

• 22:25Tim Ferriss?

  And similarly, there are cases where even if we remove the expectancy effect, there are certainly cases of people being dosed, let's just say, with LSD and any number of incarnations and they end up tripping their faces off even though they hadn't planned on spending the rest of their evening in the 17th dimension, right? So I should also add just a quick note related to the smoking of the banisteriopsis copy bark with mushrooms. I've never experienced that. I find that actually incredibly, I'm not recommending it. For all of the drug disclaimers and everything else, please revisit episode one, but I will

• 23:06Tim Ferriss?

  say, everything we're discussing, or a lot of what we're discussing can go terribly sideways, even if you are highly experienced. So we're not recommending you do any of these things. Talk to your medical professional, et cetera, et cetera. However, all of that having been said, I find what you did more interesting than say what someone did who I may or may not know, which is ingesting harmine or harmelene or tetrahydroharmine orally in combination with ground psilocybe mushrooms, where you, you hit the tennis ball or you hit the golf ball more accurately and you can't unhit it. And in that case, just for people wondering, the multiplier effect on the subjective experience

• 23:49Tim Ferriss?

  of mushrooms is about a three to four X. So if you were to take 1.5 grams of mushrooms and combine it with the MAO inhibitors in this way, the sort of subjective feeling is the intensity of 4.5, let's just say, grams. You want to be aware of that. But the smoking is super interesting because you can titrate that additive effect up or down, which is the same reason why I found my experiences, some of my experiences with intravenous ketamine very interesting versus intramuscular, for instance, because in real time, you can dial up or down the intensity, assuming you haven't pushed yourself through the looking glass with a huge bolus in the very beginning.

• 24:34Tim Ferriss?

  In that case, forget about it, all bets are off. But if you're starting at a dose and a drip on a per kind of milligrams per kilogram basis over 60 minutes. That you can manage a conversation with, then you can kind of dial it up and down, which is extremely, extremely interesting because you're able to better observe the effects at least.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Like you say, all the caveats, you know, about being careful with anything like this, anything you're doing, I think that one should be careful. One thing about the mushroom smoke anastereopsis thing is that it does seem very gentle, very easy to control. Again, your results may vary, you know, your milages may vary. Everybody's different if you're super sensitive. I've always been a little puzzled why people would want to combine beta carbolanes with mushrooms, you know, because they don't require it. They're orally active. That's what sets them aside. That's what sets psilocybin aside apart from DMT.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  It does not require activation by a monoamino oxidase inhibitor. And I'm a person that tends to think, avoid combinations if possible, because every drug you add into the mix complicates the pharmacokinetic picture and everything else potentially makes it a little more hazardous. So I, to the people that say, well, I could take a gram and a half of mushrooms and potentiate it with peganum harmala and get a much higher effect. My question is, well, why not take four grams of mushrooms and let it go with that? You know, because you're get-

• 26:23Tim Ferriss?

  That is a much more straightforward approach.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'll get to the same place. But this idea about titrating dose is interesting. You know, that's another approach to DMT that you can take that's interesting, which I haven't worked with it that much. But vaping DMT in a volcano vaporizer, I've had some of the most profound experiences with DMT that way, because you don't have to mess around with a pipe. You just get the bag full of smoke and then you can deal with it. If you put under your tongue sublingually-

• 27:01Speaker 03

  A little bit of banisteriopsis tincture like 10 minutes before you do this. Then you can smoke the vapor in DMT and again, you get this ability to just gently rise up into the place and you can kind of maintain that for a while. And then you can sort of drift back down and then you can take another hit and you can go back up there. But you feel this sense of it's, it's very much less threatening. You don't feel this sense of being out of control and you just take three huge hits of DMT. It's, it's kind of like, you know, okay, we're jumping off a cliff here.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Open the umbrella, hope for the best, but this is a much more controllable way to approach it. And if it gets scary, well, you just let yourself down gently and come in for a gentle landing. And if not, you can go to 28,000 feet or 50,000 feet or all the way into orbit if you want, if you, you know, so I guess if there's a point to this rap, route and dosage and the way that you approach that is gonna, that's part of the dynamic, you know, of this set setting. Drug, individual setting and dose, and that includes route of administration.

• 28:24Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi mineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. You get the idea. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one

• 29:08Tim Ferriss?

  formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement. And five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 29:45Tim Ferriss?

  I have, not surprisingly, a whole slew of questions that I'd like to ask, and I'm trying to sequence them so we can, in some rational way, because I think some could engender just a whole new branch of the conversation. Let me start with one that I've heard you discuss on some capacity before, but I can't remember the answer, and I'd just love your help. We're probably going to get into like phylogenetic trees and all sorts of stuff. But I heard someone talking not too long ago, and they said something along the lines of, "Well, if you look at the fact that we have cannabinoid receptors in our brain, why else would we have those if it weren't for the fact that we were designed to consume cannabis?" It is something

• 30:29Tim Ferriss?

  along those lines. I think the logic was was something like that. How would you explain the prevalence or existence of receptors for these various types of molecules? I mean, we could use, is it cannabinoids? Is that how you say that correctly?

• 30:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:43Tim Ferriss?

  Not even sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly. What would your response to that be? Or if you're sitting at a dinner table and someone brought that up, where would you take it?

• 30:50Speaker 03

  I think it's not that complicated, actually. The fact is, so we have cannabinoid receptors in our brains, and we have, we actually have cannabinoids in our brains. We have these, these prostaglandin-like compounds called anandamines and other types of things. These are effectively there are brains' own cannabinoids. Similarly, you see this with opiates, you know?

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Opiate receptors in our brain bind to these opiate peptides like endorphin and dynorphin and and those sorts of things. And they just happen to bind to the alkaloids from opium and have that effect. Similarly with serotonin receptors or dopamine receptors. All of these have their own endogenous, the term is endogenous ligands. Obviously for serotonin receptors, serotonin is the endogenous ligand. But interesting new findings, Tim, show formerly there was a lot of, there was excitement, there still is excitement about endogenous DMT.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  You know, and it's all related to the pineal gland and that sort of thing. Not so much. The current understanding is that the pineal is not so important. But DMT occurs in the brain, in certain parts of the brain, in rather high amounts in the frontal cortex. And this hasn't really been discussed or studied as much as it should. My friend John Chavez has gotten into this and rather deeply. So DMT is an endogenous ligand. A DMT is a very simple molecule. It's only two steps from tryptophan, which is in everything.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Which is one reason why you find DMT in plants, animals, fungi. I sometimes in my lectures say nature is drenched in DMT. It's not uncommon at all. Oh, how did this come about? Well, it came about because these neurotransmitter-like compounds found in the brain are also found in plants and fungi, and they have similar evolutionary origins, basically. At some point, the fungi, the animals and the plants split off from each other. There's this concept of the LUCA, you know, the last universal common ancestor, which was, nobody knows what it was, but we know that it had to have existed.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  And probably it already had the genetic machinery to make these neurotransmitter-like compounds. And just like neurotransmitters in the brain, what they do is they facilitate signaling, they're signal transduction molecules. But plants and fungi and everything else use very similar molecules, sometimes the same molecules, for signal transduction processes in the ecosystem. Plants modulate their relationship with other organisms in the environment through signal transduction. And these messenger molecules, the plants make these sort of, they're called secondary compounds.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  And that implies that they're not important, they're absolutely important. Plants substitute biosynthesis for behavior. Plants modulate, optimize their relationship with everything in the environment because they can't respond, they can't run away, right? They're stuck in one place. So they do it through chemistry. And sometimes, this is like my usual rap, but sometimes the message is very simple. Stay away. Get away from me, I'm poisonous, you don't want to muck with me, you know? Other times, the message is, come closer, let's symbios, let's form relationships.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  All of this is mediated by these signal transduction processes, which is a special kind of signaling process in organisms that involves a receptor and a molecule that comes from somewhere outside or some other part of the brain, and actually binds into that receptor. So it's a physical molecular interaction, that's what I mean by signal transduction, as opposed to, say, electrical nervous transmission, which also takes place. That's the mist, it's not really a mystery, it's, we evolved from the same origins, not surprising that our brains have neurotransmitter-like compounds that resemble those we find in

• 35:40Speaker 03

  nature. And the interesting thing is, something like psilocybin is a good example. Psilocybin has, phylogenetically, we're pretty sure that psilocybin's been around for

• 35:53Speaker 03

  At least seventy five million years. The higher mushrooms, the Basidiomycetes, are very old, long before there were animal nervous systems for them to interact with. But then animals did evolve and they, turns out they have interesting effects with psilocybin. What was psilocybin doing in nature before then? Well, probably insects. It had to do with insects that it was either an attractant or repellent, more likely an attractant. And there are some interest, we could go down that rabbit hole.

• 36:29Tim Ferriss?

  It's like going to the, going to the bar for the local insects.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Right, yes, effectively, yes. I mean, you've heard of the psilocybin cicada story, right?

• 36:39Tim Ferriss?

  No, I have not.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Oh, well.

• 36:42Tim Ferriss?

  How did I miss the psilocybin cicada story? Sounds like a punk band.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  It does, really. Well, I don't know. Do you want to go into it?

• 36:52Tim Ferriss?

  I do. Yeah, of course I do. You're kidding?

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Very interesting study came out a few years ago. You know, so cicadas are those things that spend like seventeen years underground and then they come out every seventeen years or different species come out at different times and so on. Well, it turns out, I should be able to quote more detail, but if you Google this, it'll all come up. So cicada, there's a fungus, which is not a psilocybe. It's called Massospora is the fungus, but it makes psilocybin. And it makes cathinone, which is a stimulant compound that's found in cotton. It's found, it's the stimulant found in cotton. Well, Massospora

• 37:40Speaker 03

  infects these cicadas while they're in the ground and they take it over and when they emerge out of the ground. Essentially, their abdomen has been replaced by fungal sporangia. This is kind of a grisly tale, you know? They emerge out of the ground and instead of having a butt, basically, their tail is replaced by these massive spore masses. And they're hypersexual. They try to mate with anything that moves or even that doesn't move. And they're waving around their butts and spreading spores everywhere, infecting more cicadas.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  And this is how the fungus, effectively, the fungus has taken over the cicada and enslaved it into a, turned them into sex crazed zombies, if you want to put it that way.

• 38:36Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  And facilitate.

• 38:38Tim Ferriss?

  Also a good punk rock band.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Sex crazed zombie, yes, also.

• 38:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is, this is actually known in mycology. There's another group of fungi called the cordyceps. You've heard of cordyceps?

• 38:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, cordyceps.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Same thing.

• 38:53Tim Ferriss?

  I have.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, they don't use psilocybin, but they infect something like an ant or a caterpillar or many, many kinds of insects, many kinds of species of cordyceps. And they effectively will take over the insect's brain and direct its behavior. For example, in ants, there are certain kinds of ants. The fungus will infect the ant, doesn't kill it, but it causes it to climb up a blade of grass to the optimal position for spore dispersal. Then it kills it. Then it will explode out of its head with sporangia

• 39:35Speaker 03

  and the spores will spread, fall to the ground, infect more ants. So effectively, these cordyceps are taking over the behavior of the ants. Maybe psilocybin is doing something like that to us, except they don't have to infect our brain. We happen to like it, so we consume it.

• 39:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  We're serving the psilocybe's evil agenda, which isn't so evil. It basically wants to reproduce and spread.

• 40:05Tim Ferriss?

  Nature has some crazy shows, sideshows out there. I mean, I pull a crazy shit. I pulled up, I just searched cicada, psilocybin, and the first thing that pops up is an article and the headline is, "These fungi drug cicadas with psilocybin or amphetamine to make them mate nonstop. The insects keep at it even if chunks of their abdomens fall off." And the fungus is apparently Massosporus cicadina, I think it is. I'm probably mispronouncing that. But there are also cases, you know, mammalian cases. I can't recall the exact disease. I should actually be able to recall this, but it causes rodents to become suicidal in the sense that they become aggressive towards cats and

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 40:50Tim Ferriss?

  effectively bait them. And then the cats eat the rats or the mice and they contract this disease, which then has effects on cats. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So nature's got a lot going on.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  It's got a lot going on. And from a standpoint of like human ethics, this seems bizarre and crazy and actually evil, but it's not. It's just, this is nature, nature in action and things try to optimize their survival strategies. And for fungi, spreading and sporulating and all that, that's all they really want to do. That's what they want to do. If you want to attribute a desire to them, they're optimized for reproduction and they'll do anything. They don't care if they have to take over primates and control. Look at how psilocybin's symbiosis, psilocybe symbiosis with humans

• 41:48Speaker 03

  has been beneficial for us, for them and for the mushrooms, because everybody's growing them. They're growing them all over the place. And that's true of many plants and fungi. If you domesticate something generally, if humans domesticate a plant or a fungus, that's like going on easy street for the organism because we're here to take care of it until we blow up the planet completely entirely. But until then, they have a pretty good free ride about it.

• 42:21Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you a question about a comment that you made in the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss about LSD as a potential treatment for dyslexia. Now, I don't have all of the context, but I pulled this out, and this is going to lead to a broader question about perhaps unusual or unexpected applications or indications for psychedelics. But this section here reads, "It did lead me to speculate about the use of LSD as a potential treatment for dyslexia. We have a limited understanding of neuroplasticity to say nothing of how psychedelics might affect it. That man's anecdote," so of course I've omitted an anecdote, "hints at the curious link between psychedelics and language, as do the more prevalent accounts of synesthesia I've discussed earlier." And then I'll actually read one more sentence. "Psychedelics have some fundamental relationship

• 43:06Tim Ferriss?

  to the way our brains create meaning and understanding out of sounds and images. Convinced that further investigations into this phenomenon would yield new insights." Could you expand on that? Because I would agree certainly with the assertion of this fundamental relationship. Any thoughts on LSD specifically as perhaps a tool for addressing dyslexia or psychedelics for any other indications that people might not guess?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  The connection to LSD and language, and I think even more so with mushrooms, because you're probably familiar with an essay, I think by Henry Munn, that was published in a book called, I think it was by Peter First, called "Hallucinations and Culture." This was around 1970. There's a wonderful chapter in there called "The Mushrooms of Language." It's by Henry Munn, and it makes the point, and again, like I talk about this in the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, it makes the point that in this be-mushroom state, the poetry, the language becomes much more fluid. It just sort of flows out of you.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  And that's why these people can chant for hours, and they're actually instantiating the mushroom as speaking through them. You know, this gnosis, literally, this, the logos is the word. The true, the pure logos actually flows through them. And then there's the phenomenon of synesthesia, which psychedelics, especially mushrooms, can reliably do. And you know, I've, the association with meaningful images with, with sound.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Some people are naturally genetically synesthetic. It's very interesting how their synesthetic experiences often have to do with words and numbers and things like that. And they'll say things like, well, the number thirteen is chrome shaped and spiky, shiny and spiky. What? But for them, that's a reality. And I think, you know, I've argued that mushrooms, well, I have, Terrence have, lots of people have, that mushrooms were important in the origin of consciousness. And I think that it is this connection to language that, you know, consciousness, what

• 45:31Speaker 03

  we understand as true consciousness depends on this construction of this worldview essentially. And that's built on language. This artificial reality that we construct for us, for ourselves, that's a combination of sensory input that is filtered and processed in a certain way and linked to associations, memories, all of that kind of thing. So we build this, what the neuroscientists now call the default mode network, which is kind of ordinary consciousness, our ordinary state of consciousness. Long before I heard of the default mode network, I was calling it the reality hallucination. Effectively, we live in a hallucination.

• 46:15Speaker 03

  We live in an artificial world, reality that our brains construct. And it must reflect whatever's out there because we're not wandering around stepping in front of buses and things like that. So it does map to reality in some ways, but it's a, it's actually an impoverished version of reality. What the, a lot of what the brain does is filter things out, you know, and Huxley had this insight. He talked about the reducing valve, that, you know, to make the world comprehensible, you have to selectively filter what gets in. You inhabit this filtered, I almost used the word curated, version of reality.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Otherwise, it would just be a blooming, buzzing confusion. You wouldn't be able to navigate. And then you can take a psychedelic, you can disable those mechanisms. You can disable this default mode mechanism, open the gates of the reducing valve. And that can be very beneficial in terms of helping you get outside of your reference frame. And that's very useful. I think that that's what psychedelics, I think that's where the therapeutic effect really, for many of the things it's indicated for, it's this ability to step outside your reference frame temporarily and look at your situation from a different perspective.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  But you wouldn't want to be there all the time, right? Because you wouldn't be functional. That's again, why you have to be very selective about your sentence setting. It's a complex topic because I think it does relate to the way that we link images, essentially internal images, to sounds and meaning. Because I'm here rapping to you and I'm making effectively small mouth noises, which are inherently meaningless, except that we happen to share a language. And so when I make these small mouth noises, chances are your brain is reflecting it in terms of images.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  I say chair, you see a chair. I say star, you see a star. I mean, it's more complex than that, but I think that's the basis of cognition, really. And if you look at culture, if you look, if you look at consciousness, it's all based on this relationship between sound, image and, and meaning, or what they sometimes call portentousness.

• 48:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and ascribed meaning, right? It's a learned association that is not automatic, right? I think about this a lot with, say, infants and language. And I'm sure there's someone who could comment on this much more intelligently than I can. But when an infant, let's say before they develop full depth perception and so on, if they were to look at what's in front of me, they wouldn't see laptop webcam. Microphone, wood table, et cetera, pile of papers as discreet objects until they have likely, at least not to that level of fidelity, until they have labels for those things, right?

• 49:35Tim Ferriss?

  It might just be a flattened sort of two dimensional sheet of colors and shapes and shadows. I think about that quite a bit also, as you mentioned in the last episode, that you've done who knows how many sessions with ayahuasca, you know, 500 plus. And it does seem that people develop, or some people develop an ability to discern and see in those spaces in the same way that an infinite sort of develops the ability to discern between these discrete things that we have labels for as adults, if that makes any sense at all. I'm not sure if that resonates at all, but I do think about that a lot.

• 50:18Tim Ferriss?

  And I wanted to come back to something you said, which was, you know, adopting a new reference point and how that can be applied to many different, say, conditions or issues. And in some ways, you know, a lot of the outcomes that we see, or even the case studies that we might see in the case of this person with dyslexia, or Andy Weil with his allergies, right? Sort of defy conventional mechanistic explanations for how that could happen, right? Like, as far as I know, LSD is not an antihistamine, right? Right. So it raises all sorts of questions. And I wanted to read, this is going to be the last section that I wanted to read to you, and I realize that The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss was written quite a while ago.

• 51:02Tim Ferriss?

  So if this goes to a dead end, I'll take the blame for it. But I pulled this out, which was a segment on Apollo 14. It says, this is another example of reference point changes. So Apollo 14 is mostly remembered for the two golf balls that Alan Shepard hit with a makeshift club he'd brought with him. It was also the mission on which, and this is the part that I bolded, Astrid Edgar Mitchell, I'm guessing that's how that's said, had his famous savikalpa samadhi experience, or mystical glimpse beyond the self into the true nature of things. Mitchell subsequently became interested in consciousness research, paranormal phenomena such as ESP, and went on to become a founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, or Ions. What happened to Edgar? I don't actually know this story.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  I think he had a mystical experience, basically.

• 51:51Tim Ferriss?

  And this was in space while he was in orbit?

• 51:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, or on the moon, whatever. But I think, you know, we know these things happen spontaneously. I think basically he, he got so far out of his reference frame. You know, and who wouldn't be out of their reference frame if they're on the moon or in space, right? And so he had a spontaneous mystical experience, you know? We are all one with the cosmos and all that. And now if he'd been on psychedelics at the same time, he might have really. But I, I think that's what happens, you know? And so that speaks to the, the idea that this ability to step literally outside your box, outside of this

• 52:37Speaker 03

  default mode network is probably at the center of the psychedelic experience, at least in terms of its therapeutic effect and its profundity, if you will, the, the mystical experience or however you want to describe that, you know? I mean, I mean Roland Griffithson is people, even though they're the pioneers in looking at psilocybin and mystical experiences, but they really toned it down because they don't want to alarm people, you know? And they, they don't talk about mystical experiences anymore. They talk about personally meaningful experiences. Well,

• 53:20Speaker 03

  that's nice, but they're, they're mystical experiences, damn it. I mean, they are, they are experiences of transcendence. And it's important, I think, to acknowledge that.

• 53:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I agree. I mean, they did also develop, you know, the, I'm probably getting the terminology wrong, but the sort of mystical experience questionnaire, which had

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:42Tim Ferriss?

  like the parameters and characteristics, which include ineffability and so on.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Right. And some people just get this naturally. I mean, for example, Albert Hofmann. Albert Hofmann had Numerous what you might call quasi or actual mystical experiences in nature long before he took LSD.

• 54:05Tim Ferriss?

  I did not know that.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  He was a person who was able to do this and it was very meaningful for him.

• 54:11Tim Ferriss?

  So for people who don't have any context, Albert Hofmann, the first to synthesize, I guess LSD 25, was that?

• 54:18Speaker 03

  That was the one that got him off, yes.

• 54:21Tim Ferriss?

  That was the one that he was called to take before he went on his bike ride?

• 54:24Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. Yeah. There's a wonderful book I should mention, you know, I like to plug books, I guess others who've written, you've probably read it called Bicycle Day by Brian Blomerth.

• 54:39Tim Ferriss?

  I've heard of it. I haven't read it.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  It's a graphic novel. It's a graphic comic novel about his discovery of LSD. I wrote the foreword.

• 54:49Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, amazing.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  But it's a great book. People should get it.

• 54:53Tim Ferriss?

  Bicycle Day?

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:54Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So Bicycle Day, well, we'll link to that in the, in the show notes. I also wanted to mention a book that is related to a word and a concept and an experience, a phenomena or phenomenon, I guess, that it's really a set of phenomena, synesthesia. So there are two resources I want to recommend. The first is a book that I first bought in, I want to say late high school, called The Mind of a Neimanist. So the mind of, as in mnemonic device, the mind of a Neimanist, a little book about a vast memory and it's written by A.R. Luria, or maybe it's with a foreword by Jerome S. Brunner, written by A.R. Luria, but it's effectively a case study of a Rain Man like figure who experiences,

• 55:39Tim Ferriss?

  regularly experiences synesthesia. So this intermingling of the senses. So as you mentioned, identifying numbers as shapes or smelling colors.

• 55:51Tim Ferriss?

  Having tastes associated with musical notes or sounds, things like this, which can be either, and in some cases, both, an enormous blessing or the most difficult curse.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 56:05Tim Ferriss?

  If it is something that you can't turn off. That's one. There's also, I want to say documentary, or may have been a TV series called Brain Man. A young Brit, at least at the time was young, who experiences or claims to experience synesthesia, as I understand it, also fairly controversial. Daniel Tamet is the figure in this one, but still makes for a fascinating watch. And I think it's Kim Peek, the actual basis for Rain Man, who is also featured in that book, who, believe it or not, can read two pages at the same time, one with each eye. So try that at home and see how far you get.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:48Tim Ferriss?

  But those are two points on synesthesia. What I'd love to ask you about now is ESPD 55. So we should probably also provide some context. Maybe you can do this. What ESPD stands for and just a bit of the history for those who don't have it and didn't hear the first conversation. And then I would love to hear you describe some of what is going to be discussed, the why to do it, et cetera.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 57:16Tim Ferriss?

  Because, as you know, I have a collection of these sort of historical anthologies already.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  ESPD stands for Ethno-pharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. And in 1967, the National Institute of Mental Health sponsored a conference in San Francisco by that name. And it was a closed conference. The only thing the taxpayers ever got out of it was this book that they published, the proceedings of the conference. Well, somehow or other, that came onto my radar at the age of 18. And, you know, the next year, the year after the conference was done, it was somehow I got it. And it opened up the world for me of ethno-pharmacology.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Well, the government staged this conference, published this book. They were supposed to have follow-up events every ten years or so to keep abreast of what was going on in the field. Well, that never happened. The war on drugs came along, they were embarrassed, basically, they'd never done anything, even though you could order it from the US government printing office for many years. So I always wanted to stage a follow-up. And fifty years went by. Circumstances never allowed that to happen, but in 2017, everything came together. I had funding, I had a place, I had people to help me organize it.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  And, you know, I want to give a shout-out to them because it wasn't me that did it. I had a lot of help. And so we did this, this conference in 2017. We did ESPD 50, this commemorative 50th anniversary conference. And we published the original 67 volume, together with the 2017 volume, as a box set. We put the videos on, the videos are still up there, people can watch them. And so now, it's been five years. So we decided to do a five-year follow-up. God knows if I'll be here in ten years. So, you know, we decided to do a five-year follow-up, and that's what ESPD 55 is.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  The five-year from the 2017 conference, or the 55th year of the first conference. And that's the origin, that's the whole idea of it. The 2017 conference was pretty much focused on ethopharmacology and sort of the unexplored

• 59:51Speaker 03

  dark corners or, you know, fringes of ethopharmacology. In other words, the ideas that search for psychoactive drugs. It's, it's a quest. We're doing that this year. We have some really interesting topics. We have, for example, one person that's presenting on psychedelics found in sponges, and, you know, marine sponges and that sort of thing. But we've also got a couple forums, we have three forums that don't really fit into this pattern. One of them is a forum on coca.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  And they need to de-stigmatize coca. So we've got, coca is a wonderful medicine. As coca, not as cocaine is horrible. Cocaine is a horrible drug, but coca is beneficial. And coca is just at the center of Andean traditions and medicine and all that. And potentially could be as a nutraceutical, as an herbal medicine, it could be very beneficial. And, you know, there are all sorts of aspects because it gives the people who grow it, who formerly were basically just told by the cartels, okay, you work for us now. If you don't produce it, we'll just kill you.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  But give those families mostly economic benefits and bring coca back as a, as a respected medicine. So we've got Wade Davis participated in this. We've got Andy Wild. They're both of them longtime advocates of coca as a medicine and a food, actually, which it also is. It's very nutritionally beneficial.

• 1:01:32Tim Ferriss?

  I want to take a second just to get into some of the logistics of ESPD 55. As a sidebar, I'll just say the box set of books for ESPD 50 you can find online. You can find them on Amazon. They're beautifully done. I have them on my bookshelf. Absolutely a joy to read. For ESPD 55, people can find that at ESPD55.com. I'll put that in the show notes. And people can either attend in person in the UK, May 23rd to 26th, this is 2022, or they can attend online. Are those the two primary options that are available for folks?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. And less and less in person because it's rapidly filling up, basically, the in-person. But we tend to livestream it. And when we did ESPD 50, we had, at times, we had 75,000 people participating. We hope to meet or exceed that benchmark this time. There will be another book. There'll be another, there'll be a book that comes out of it. Only one this time, but it'll be. Also high quality and it will match the design and everything to the previous ones. So it'll look good on your shelf.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  And the person that just that provided the art, that amazing lovely watercolors that were incorporated into the design. She is, there's a link to her website. She's selling prints, essentially print sets of about, I think, about a hundred of her illustrations that people could order.

• 1:03:10Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  If they wish, and they're beautiful.

• 1:03:13Tim Ferriss?

  So Dennis, one thing I'd like to do to sell this event, if it's okay with you, and we can cut this out if it ends up being more than you'd like to reveal, but I just want to give some teasers for folks. I'm not going to give away too much or I won't give a lot of the specifics, but let me just give some other samples of sessions. Is that okay with you, Dennis?

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:03:33Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so there's a, there's a session on kratom. A lot of people have questions about kratom. Mitragana speciosa, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, Mitragine, fascinating, fascinating plant. I'm going to put this in a little gingerbread trail, so I'm not going to fill in all the gaps, but a roadmap for sustainable development of ayahuasca production in the Amazon lowlands. Great interest to me.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  Psychedelic fauna, so to be distinguished from flora. I'll leave that alone. I won't go into that too much. Here's another, a history of psychoactive plants and fungi in Chinese medicine, something you do not hear in at least much that I have at all in mainstream conversations. You mentioned marine sponges, yield enhancing lessons from psilocin, which is what psilocybin is quickly metabolized into in the human body. I guess that's probably what maybe first pass metabolism through the liver. We've got hunting medicines among the matsugenka, the harpy's gift to the jaguar's curse. Great title. Wachuma phytochemical profiling of wachuma.

• 1:04:35Tim Ferriss?

  Some people might know that as San Pedro cactus, also very interesting to me personally from a conservation and sustainability perspective, because it grows so much faster than, say, peyote, which is.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Which is endangered.

• 1:04:49Tim Ferriss?

  Severely endangered, very, very endangered. Added an anthro, we don't, so I'm going to leave that alone. But if people have never heard that word, A, it's a lot of syllables. B, fascinating history. I mean, there is contemporary use, but that's kind of beyond the scope of what we're talking about right this second. Uh, establishing collections of sacred psychoactive medicinal plants. At Wasi Waska, that's in Floripa. You have some amazing speakers. I can just say, not as, as the leading expert in this field, but as someone who is certainly an avid consumer and spectator slash tourist. Do read a lot. You have an outstanding roster of speakers. Here's one you don't see every day. Chemically induced other worldly experiences of Zoroastrians in Iran.

• 1:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, yes, please, would love to be part of that. Incredible. I mean, where else are you going to find that? Answer is probably nowhere. And it just goes on and on and on. So I'll leave it at that. I didn't even cover 50% of it. So there's, there's a lot here. There are many documentaries. You have people who are very well known. We didn't get into his resume at all, but Wade Davis, certainly who's known for his books.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  Paul Stamets is.

• 1:06:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Paul Stamets.

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  I mean, the whole idea, you know, of the ESPD conferences is that they're out of the box in a certain way. It's not just the same stuff. I mean, I'm happy that there are all these virtual meetings about the therapeutic uses of psilocybin and in PTSD and addiction. I mean, that's important stuff, but there's a lot of duplication in some of these things. We want to kind of stake out an area, look into the obscure corners, but still important. And kind of highlight the work that remains to be done. For example, the Watchuma project is very interesting.

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  And I can claim a little bit of credit for it. The person that's going to present there primarily is a student of Wade Davis's actually in, at UBC. She's in the PhD program. And then her partner and colleague, a Peruvian gentleman.

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  Yosef, I forget his last name, sorry, but they've collaborated on this. And when I was asked to be on Laurel, Laurel Sugden is her name, asked to be on her committee, I asked them if they, I asked her if she was interested in, in the chemistry side of this, the ethno-pharmacology side of it, not just the ethnography. And she indicated that she was, that this was interesting to her. So we hooked up with a investigator at the Albany College of Pharmacy, who's developed an innovative way, non-invasive way to sample plants and do like phytochemical fingerprints,

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  essentially. A quick way to look at the variation in the different varieties and species of this cactus. And then using mass spectrometry and other fancy tools, actually do a, like a phytochemical fingerprint of these different varieties and so on. So it's going to be a very interesting presentation that combines ethnography, chemistry, and pharmacology. Yeah, and there's others like that. Michael is going to talk about his work with the cultural key soil species, Michael Ko. And then, as you mentioned, the people from ICERS, we've got two people from ICERS that

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  are talking about the whole issues related to the unintended consequences of ayahuasca tourism, basically, and the depletion of the species and all of that. And how do we address that? So I think it's going to be a stimulating conference. It's going to be long.

• 1:08:53Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you, this, this might seem like a strange turn, but I want to ask you about life and death for a second, because you cracked a joke earlier. I'm not sure if it was totally in jest or serious, but you said, I don't know if I'll be around here in 10 years, so we're going to do the fifth year new edition. If you're open to talking about it, I mean, how do you relate to death and mortality? How do you, how do you think about that, relate to it in, in any way you'd like to take a stab at that?

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I relate to it in the sense that everybody has to die sooner or later. Everybody crosses that threshold sooner or later. And a lot of religious traditions and philosophical traditions and everything have to do with the focus on what happens after you die, or when you die. But, you know, from a scientific perspective, I think the only answer, the only honest answer is nobody knows what happens when you die, when you really die. There's lots of studies about the near-death experience and all the changes that happens

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  during the near-death experience. The fact is, that's not death. So that is maybe a reflection of the stuff that happens to your brain while you're in the process of dying, but it is not, in fact, dying. Is there anything that persists after death? The honest answer, I feel, is I just don't know. I'm open to the possibility. I hope there is, but maybe not. It's a case of be careful what you wish for, right? I mean, like Shakespeare said, "In that sleep of death, what dreams may come." Hopefully, they'll be pleasant if there is something, or hopefully, if there is something

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  after death, hopefully, there will be something worthwhile experiencing and not just terrible. Or if there's nothing after death, if there's just oblivion, well, I won't be around to worry about it. So, either way, I'm okay. I don't plan to check out soon, I hope not. I want to be around for ESPD 60 and 65 and 70, but let's face it, I'm no spring chicken. I'm getting up there. I'm 71, I'll be 72 later this year, so not real old, but not real young, neither. So what I do is, I think that I kind of take a leaf from the people, for example, that

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  get psilocybin for end-of-life therapy, you know? Very often, the insight that they get from that is, "Well, yes, I'm dying, but I'm alive now." That's where I'm at. I mean, we're all dying, Tim. Slowly, fast, whatever. Important thing is, we're alive now. Make the most of it. That's what I think.

• 1:11:57Tim Ferriss?

  So you certainly seem to be making the most of it. What are you most excited about right now? While you are alive, which you are, like, what is giving you the most joy and aliveness these days? Could be anything.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  I think a lot of us are really concerned with things that are happening and the future looks pretty grim in a lot of ways. But you do what you can. I think that giving into despair is not a solution for anything. And it's tempting. I mean, you could just say things are so bad that there is no hope. But then, if you come to that point, then there really isn't any hope. So you just keep plugging. To the degree that I can, I keep plugging. And I've got many people who feel the same way. Does any of it make any difference? I don't know. But like, the Bio-Nosis Project is a good example.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  If we can slow down this disappearance of knowledge and the disappearance of the habitats and the loss of species and all that, just a little bit, I mean, compared to what other groups and organizations are doing, probably Bio-Nosis is a small thing. But it's our thing. It's what we're doing. And I think maybe it'll make a little difference.

• 1:13:21Tim Ferriss?

  So let me spell that for people. So Bio-Nosis, just so we all have the spelling. It's B-I-O-G-N-O-S-I-S, which-

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  A made-up word. Biology, bio-life, andosis, knowledge, you know? A coined word, really. But that's the idea, you know?

• 1:13:41Tim Ferriss?

  And the people can find more about BioGnosis: Bridges to Incestral Wisdom at bionosis.mckenna.academy. And we'll link to that in the show notes as well. Let me come back to a second for kind of slowing the degradation and depletion of our natural habitat, this sort of greenish-blue marble that is spinning through space with a bunch of monkeys on it, who are making a whole mess of things. Busy destroying it. Busy making a whole mess of it. What is your current perspective on, say,

• 1:14:19Tim Ferriss?

  synthetic options for psychedelic compounds in the sense that I found in an older interview where you were interviewed by Nailed Magazine, and there was a bit of a discussion about synthetic/freeze-dried ayahuasca. And you mentioned how, and feel free to revise this, but how you felt that it may be a psychedelic, but it's not ayahuasca because the ayahuasca experience begins when you taste it, and the purging is potentially a feature and not a bug. And I'd just be curious to know, let's say, in the case of ayahuasca, what do you think some of the most viable solutions might be to avoiding overharvesting and endangering

• 1:15:04Tim Ferriss?

  these various plant species? Is the synthetic route, creating farm ayahuasca alternatives, viable, attractive, unappealing, ill-fated?

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  No, I think we have to look at all viable solutions. For example, psilocybin, psilocybin mushrooms don't really have that issue. I mean, they're not endangered. They can be grown by megaton. So we're not going to run out of psilocybin. And maybe if we want to go with natural psychedelics, maybe we should emphasize those. There is a lot of global interest in psilocybin.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  And ayahuasca is endangered and peyote certainly is endangered and things like iboga are endangered.

• 1:15:51Tim Ferriss?

  On the verge of extinction.

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  On the verge of extinction. And I think part of the solution is, number one, I think the community, the psychedelic community, to the degree that there is one, really has to step up and be responsible. And I, I think that the community should seek consensus. For example, peyote is a good example. The community, like these decrim movements that are happening across the country and in other countries and so on. In general, I'm in favor of them, but the indigenous people have asked, "Don't decriminalize peyote. Let it be our thing." Well, I disagree with not

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  decriminalizing it because fundamentally, I think no plant, no organism should be criminalized. I think the very idea is, is, you know, repulsive to me. But, that said, the community can say, "Let's not criminalize it, but let's protect it and let's develop a community consensus that, okay, we'll just put peyote behind a fence. We'll say, it's the indigenous people's thing. We will not encourage on that. No, we're not, we'll respect that and we'll avoid using peyote." Some of these other things, wachuma, for example. Wachuma is a good source.

• 1:17:17Speaker 03

  It's not endangered yet. It's much more abundant. It's easier to grow. That's a good alternative. We're at a point with wachuma where we can use it responsibly. If we don't, then it too may become endangered eventually. Ayahuasca is a very tricky one. I think that farmowaska is fine, but it's not ayahuasca. It may have uses and that's, it's a different drug. It's, it's completely different. And I have nothing against synthetics, you know. I think synthetics have their place. And I like to tell people, synthetics are, they're made by all natural organic chemists, right? So they come from nature ultimately.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  But what I would like to see happen, if, if it could, is developing a...

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Over time, developing relationships with indigenous communities to produce medicines like ayahuasca, but not encourage people to go to South America to take ayahuasca. Encourage these communities to produce them and take the medicine to the people, rather the people to the medicine. Develop ways that are legal to export them to North America, Europe, and so on. And through de-Crim, establish centers where people can come and have these psychedelic experiences that are legal and safe and well structured and all that.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  And give benefits back to the people who produce it, who grow it economically, but kind of avoid the disruption of the culture that happens when all these rich gringos come down there to take ayahuasca. And I mean, I'm guilty, I've organized lots of ayahuasca retreats. I'm not sure that, I mean, I've seen tremendous benefits for people that come to those retreats. But I've kind of evolved in my view of it, whether that is actually a good thing. It is and it isn't. And that's why de-Crim is important.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  But I think de-Crim has got to be very thoughtful, you know, and, and clear in, in its approach to this. And say, well, you know, we're not going to encroach on things like iboga and ayahuasca, or do it in this way, bring the medicines north rather than the people south. And that would transform communities as well, both, in both places. So that's kind of, this is not something that's going to happen next week or next year. This will take a decade or more, and it depends on how the laws can be, can be changed.

• 1:20:07Tim Ferriss?

  There's nothing simple. There's nothing simple. And I want to ask you a number of questions about the psychedelic community, as it were, with community in quotation marks, perhaps. But before I get to that, I want to take, not exactly a counterpoint, but just to add my perspective on peyote for a moment, which is, you know, I believe that it's effectively inevitable that peyote is going to go extinct, even with current demand by members of the Native American Church and very constrained production and distribution, and also a lot of poaching.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43Tim Ferriss?

  There are really only a handful of licensed peyoteros who can distribute, and there are abuses of the system even within these various kind of distribution channels. I really do feel strongly that this is one of the last shreds of, let's just call it cultural, although it's not true that peyote was widely distributed prior to Quanah Parker and other figures and initiatives. But it is so important to so many North American indigenous people. And also, I'm guilty in the sense that like I have had experiences with peyote. I've been invited by the people who are traveling through the proper channels

• 1:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  and nonetheless, spending time with, a little bit of time, not a ton, but a little bit of time with the board of the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative. It's a sad picture when you really look at it and you consider that, you know, these indigenous groups generally are not going to want to consume peyote that is cultivated in greenhouses. They're almost certainly not going to be open to synthetic mescaline or San Pedro. And just let them have it, is my feeling. And if a way to hedge against sort of bad or chaotic communal behavior is by leaving that one regulated in the way that it's regulated,

• 1:22:10Tim Ferriss?

  I'm okay with that, just because there are alternatives for people who are seeking some type of mescaline or mescaline.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  But that said, Tim, I agree with all that. What is really wrong with cultivated peyote? You know, why can't they see that as a viable part of the solution, not the whole solution? It doesn't have to be wild. You know, I mean, the, the reasons that they're prejudiced against it, or that they don't want to use it is their spiritual reasons. They're not scientific or cultural reasons. They could adapt. They could adapt to cultivated greenhouse, even tissue culture, these kinds of things. They could adapt to it.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  But there has to be a little bit of give on both sides for this solution.

• 1:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  I hear you. I guess I'll just, and again, certainly I wish we had some sort of indigenous representation here to hear their perspective. It is, as you, as, as far as I understand, largely a

• 1:23:16Tim Ferriss?

  spiritual matter, a sort of a cosm vision.

• 1:23:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Tim Ferriss?

  Facet of the belief system. And if it's not coming out of the ground, there are ramifications and that peyote derived from the greenhouse is not the same, et cetera. But I guess my perspective is there are so many battles to be fought. This one's a pretty easy give. Just let them have it. Just let them have it. Like if you live in Venice and you do like, you're like into the yoga waska scene and you have your green juice and you want to experience mescaline, don't do peyote, just use something else.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  Let them have it. I'm all for it. But even if you let them have it.

• 1:23:56Tim Ferriss?

  It's still on the way out.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  They'll still have the problem of the poachers.

• 1:24:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, they do. It's a mess.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's really a mess. And it's a shame because it doesn't have to happen.

• 1:24:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I've spent time with a few, I don't know if they'd be considered botanists, but certainly scientists. God, I wish I could remember one. He was a fascinating character, uh, lives in Alpine, Texas. He spent decades studying La Pho Phra Williamsey, I guess it is, and knows just the ins and outs of, of cultivation also. But even if you were to have greenhouses, right? How long does it take to cultivate? Even if you have the most advanced hydroponics or whatever you might use to accelerate the growth process? What are we talking? 10 years to grow a mature button? I mean, and in some cases 15, 20? I mean, so even with greenhouses. You're facing incredible constraints on volume. So there is that. So let's, let's talk about

• 1:24:51Tim Ferriss?

  this if you're open to it. If you want to add something, please jump in.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  It's tough. I mean, there's, there's just no optimal solution for peyote. And we're very impatient. We're a very impatient species. I mean, would the indigenous people have the insight or the patience to say, let's just stop for 10 years and work on developing the wild populations? I mean, and who's going to administer that? And who's going to make those decisions? You know, it's just one of those things where it's hard to find consensus. Everybody's got a different idea and we have a hard time listening to each other.

• 1:25:31Tim Ferriss?

  So I wanted to, I mean, this is maybe a better conversation for like a few glasses of wine or a few bottles of wine, but let me throw this out there. So the psychedelic community, and I put it in quotation marks earlier, maybe I'm just cantankerous and didn't get enough sleep last night, but the psychedelic community or many components of it drive me absolutely fucking bananas. And I feel like it should be called the psychedelic infighting Olympics because if you want proof that psychedelics do not automatically create a kumbaya world peace, world of collaboration, like you need not look very far. You just look at all of the infighting

• 1:26:12Tim Ferriss?

  and kind of mutual crippling in this space. And it is astonishing. It is, it is just astonishing to see. And part of the reason this comes up for me, A, because I'm kind of immersed in it as, as, as many people are, as you are. And it's so bad that I'm thinking about taking a little hiatus myself because it's so demoralizing for me to see the just absolute lack. And this is not across the board. There are many great people. There are many people who are clear, ethical, effective, but then they're surrounded for every one of those. I feel like they're just 10 idiots running around like chickens with their heads cut off, swinging machetes at everybody.

• 1:26:55Tim Ferriss?

  This relates to a section in the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. So let me read something and maybe we can, I'll let you grab the baton. So here it goes. "In many ways, the Diggers tried to actualize the best ideals of hippiedom. Like most utopian communities, however, they found it difficult to make reality fit with the ideal. Inevitably, they seemed to founder on the recalcitrance of human nature. For every idealist who is ready to pitch in and work for the common good, there is an opportunist who wants something for nothing, or worse, to grab power and bend it to his or her own ends." And then, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. "Trying to run an egalitarian community in a dense city is a challenge under the best of circumstances." And here's the part I highlighted for myself.

• 1:27:37Tim Ferriss?

  "And every community that aspires to be spontaneous, to thrive without leaders or hierarchies, must confront the vacuum it creates for the power crazed."

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Tim Ferriss?

  I think that describes where we are today in so many different micro-communities within the psychedelic, larger quotation mark, community and quotation. Maybe you can just talk me off the ledge.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  I think that, you know, we're monkeys, Tim. Ultimately, we're monkeys, and monkeys squabble, and monkeys look for opportunities. And you could look at any spiritual practice, or any church, eastern religion, astrams, all of that. You know, I think anytime you're dealing with a spiritually powerful technology, which psychedelics are, or other religious practices are, communion in the Catholic Church, meditation and yoga in eastern traditions, you know, these can also be used to control people, to control people's behavior.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  And in that context, there's always some power-mad person, almost always a male, who sees an opportunity, to seize the levers of power to their own good. And it's usually the motivations are... I mean, so boring and so disappointing, but basically they're usually the same thing. It's usually about the chicks and the money. I mean, I'm sorry, but that's what it's about, right? And people are motivated by those things. And this idea that, you know, psychedelics will

• 1:29:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's very Scarface.

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, effectively, yeah. That, you know, psychedelics are gonna dissolve the ego and turn us all into bodhisattvas and we'll all be kind and harmonious to each other. It's just not gonna happen, you know? I mean, it could, but we have to evolve into it, it seems like. And you have to be sincere about it. There are always people who are looking for an opportunity to exercise power of one sort or another, financial, social or otherwise. And psychedelics are not immune to this. You and I know, I know lots of people who take lots of psychedelics. They're still assholes. And it doesn't, it's not a cure for that.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  It can help you, again, step out of your reference frame and look at your situation. You may have a revelation and say, oh, God, I really am an asshole. I need to change my, my whole, you know, behavior. Many people are not interested in changing. So frankly, I don't know what to, what to say, what the solutions are. It all has to do with where the moral compass comes from. You have to have some kind of an ethical framework that you work out of. And it has to involve empathy, I think, is a big factor. And just respect for other humans. And it can be, it's rare.

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  I mean, and I think psychedelics can be effective tools for learning this. If you're a sociopath, it's probably not gonna help you. I mean, Shaman, I respected very much. I asked him, who would he not give ayahuasca to? And he said, well, that basically there are two kinds of people that I would never give it to. One is schizophrenics, because it's not gonna help them. And the other is sociopaths, because it's not gonna help them either.

• 1:31:18Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I would go so far as to say you could probably make both of those worse, right?

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:31:23Tim Ferriss?

  Certainly, like throw them again, dash them up on the rocks of chaos. And then the sociopath might just come back and say, I just need to do 10 times more than what of what I'm currently doing.

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  Or they come back with some messianic delusion, you know.

• 1:31:39Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  I have to save, I have to save the world, you know. I alone can fix it. Something we have to evolve beyond. I think that psychedelics are our co-evolutionary partners. I think that they help us become better people. But you have to work at it, right? Like any kind of spiritual, moral, ethical development. You're not going to make it unless you actually try and believe in it. And nobody succeeds 100%. I mean, there are plenty of bad things about me, that's for sure. That I don't share with everybody, but I know what they are, you know? It's just tough.

• 1:32:24Speaker 03

  It's just tough to be a kind and gentle and insightful and wise person. That's kind of what we're here for, though, I think.

• 1:32:34Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, yeah, what a world.

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  Discouraging, right?

• 1:32:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's discouraging. I mean, a part of me wonders because I'm still, all things considered, even though I've been very involved for the last whatever 68 years, kind of publicly, new to the scene. And I wonder, you know, of the, of the more senior guard, if you're looking at everything that's happening and you're optimistic, if you're like, if you look at it and you're saying, well, yeah, a lot of shitty stuff is happening, but like, we've seen this before. It'll shake out and hopefully we won't have the executive order to put everything back on schedule one and shut everything down, which is not an impossibility, right?

• 1:33:15Speaker 03

  And nor is it a solution. You know, that's not a solution.

• 1:33:20Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  You know, so I think, yeah, I think that.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  You know, we get caught up in the dynamics of the moment, too. I think we have to step away, take the 30,000-foot level perspective and realize that these things are really co-evolutionary partners. And we've been co-evolving with them, well, pick your time, maybe for a couple million years, you know, if we believe the stone date theory, which I do, basically. I think it's credible. I mean, we don't need to get into that. But for a long, long time, we have co-evolved effectively in symbiosis with these plants. And they've been sort of nudging us along on this very difficult path.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  We're midway between the apes and the angels right now. We haven't reached, haven't reached the angelhood yet. We're still suspended. But the thing is, these, these dynamics, these are really biological processes and they, they play themselves out over millennia of time. So, you know, what's going to happen in the next 10 years, the next 50 years? That's a very small slice of time. I feel that we're always going to have the relationship with these plants, you know, as long as, number one, we don't drive them into extinction, number two, we don't drive ourselves into extinction, all of these caveats, you know?

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  But hopefully, they will be around for us to learn from. And boy, do we have to learn. We have a lot to learn still. It's a slow process.

• 1:35:02Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you just a few more questions, Dennis, and then we can, we can also cover anything you'd like to cover that I haven't brought up. But let me ask you, because I don't think I asked you last time. If you could only have two, and this may not be the right adjective, so we can change the question, but if you could only have two psychoactive plants slash substances for the rest of your life, what would you choose? And I'm going to make a few allowances here. So number one, you can have caffeine. Caffeine's a freebie.

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:35:32Tim Ferriss?

  You get that.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  All right. Good.

• 1:35:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:37Tim Ferriss?

  So yeah, so you don't have to pick that. And then for the sake of simplicity, we'll consider common cocktails, let's just say like ayahuasca, we'll consider that a single plant. So if you end this, this can include synthetics, it could certainly include things from the natural kingdoms. Which, which two would you choose?

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  So I only get to choose two?

• 1:36:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. We could start with three if that's easier and then we will pare it down to two. I like to enjoy asking people this question.

• 1:36:07Speaker 03

  Mushrooms would definitely be one, one of those. I think cannabis would be one, which I don't use as much now as I used to, but I do use it. I think of it as a beneficial plant ally. And just in terms of my current state of health and all, I think those two, ayahuasca would, I'd like to also have access to ayahuasca. You know, so.

• 1:36:38Tim Ferriss?

  What do you find the benefits of cannabis to be for you? Or what are the, the ways in which you use it?

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  I think it just reduces stress. It helps me relax. It helps me sleep and calm down and, and it's good for insight. I think it's good for writing, for example, just a general balm to the spirit in a sense, B A L A and that kind of thing. A nurturing, my brother used to call cannabis Sister Mary Redemptress. And it's kind of like.

• 1:37:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's great.

• 1:37:13Speaker 03

  It's kind of like that. This benevolent, loving feminine medicine.

• 1:37:20Tim Ferriss?

  Do you typically smoke? Is that your preferred means of consumption?

• 1:37:24Speaker 03

  It has been, yeah. Yeah. I have tried vaping. I've tried edibles. Neither one of those works for me. But my cardiologist, I now have heart conditions that I have to worry about. So my cardiologist said, "Don't smoke whatever you do, no matter how much, no matter what you're smoking." So I tried that for a while and finally I decided, I tried vaping and that was actually harder on my heart than it was smoking. So what I do is I smoke tiny amounts in one of those cigarette looking things and seems to work. I mean, it's sort of like I told my cardiologist, I said, "Well, yeah, I can avoid all these things, but you know, I have to live, right? I mean,

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  if I die smoking cannabis, okay, so be it, you know."

• 1:38:18Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any preferred, I'm no cannabis expert, but are you a preferred strain, anything along those lines?

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  No, not really. I'm from an era long before any of that made sense. If it's cannabis, if it works, I'm fine with it.

• 1:38:35Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I will say that I've only in the last few years really had proper exposure to cannabis, which take a while to unpack what the hell I mean by that. But I have a few novice takeaways are, number one, I'm actually really glad I discovered it very

• 1:38:53Speaker 03

  Late.

• 1:38:53Tim Ferriss?

  Relatively late in life because it could have been a real problem for me, I can tell. And number two, the two aspects, no, three aspects that have most impressed me are number one, the effects on sleep. Although it seems like you need to be careful so that you're not eliminating your REM cycles entirely. So it seems like you can certainly overdo it. But just in terms of turning down the, the volume and speed of mental chatter.

• 1:39:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:39:25Tim Ferriss?

  So that I can sleep, it's, it's quite remarkable. The second is how

• 1:39:32Tim Ferriss?

  Intensely, it seems to improve again. Who knows? If someone were observing it, they might have a different perspective, but how intensely it affects and sensitizes my perception of music and production of music, say with percussion, unlike anything else. Of course, the dose makes the poison, but at reasonable doses, without the distortion that might accompany even moderate, say, psilocybin use. And the third is how fucking strong cannabis is now.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, compared to like the few puffs I had in high school. I had two puffs with a friend recently and I laid down on my bed, thought I was gonna have to skip dinner and had full-blown visuals for a good hour. I mean, it was, I could not believe how psychedelic the experience was compared to many things that get lumped in under the umbrella of psychedelics, like MDMA, which I don't consider a psychedelic. But my experience with really strong cannabis certainly, I would say, I'd be curious to hear your perspective, would line up nicely with some of the descriptions of psychedelic experience. How do you think about that?

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  I think that, I don't think of cannabis as a psychedelic either, really. For one thing pharmacologically, it certainly isn't, but I think with all these super-strong strains that are available, you can get there more than before. I mean, I've had it before, before they had strong cannabis, there was hashish, which was always a favorite. And you can get some pretty psychedelic places, especially if you eat hash. Now people are having cannabis ceremonies and they're effectively psychedelic ceremonies. They're like ayahuasca sessions. And I haven't been to any, actually, but, but people do it. And that's kind of interesting

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  because here is a legal, pretty much legal medicine that people can use that way. And I'm in favor of it. I think it's beneficial and there's no legal risk and these strains are out there, thanks to modern genetics, mostly.

• 1:41:48Tim Ferriss?

  So I saw just a couple of things. So on the legal side, definitely check your local jurisdiction with listeners around the world. So check your, your local restrictions or laws around these things. And I will also just add, because we're talking about a lot of compounds, a lot of different uses, that I haven't touched anything in at least three months. So it's not like I'm walking around with a fanny pack full of drugs all day, hitting something every two to three hours. I haven't touched anything except for a few glasses of wine in the last three months. So you should also, I would say, as a, not to be too like pedantic and yes, dad, thanks for

• 1:42:32Tim Ferriss?

  the advice, but I think it is important and helpful to abstain for periods of time for at least the purpose of proving to yourself that you can do it. I mean, that's my perspective. But Dennis, is there anything else you'd like to mention, like to comment on or add before we begin to wind down this conversation?

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  A couple of things. I mean, we have pretty well covered the basis, Tim. This has been great. You're very kind to spend so much time on this. But one thing I'd like to mention, you've quoted a number of times from the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. People may be interested to know that there'll be a second edition coming out toward the end of the year.

• 1:43:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no kidding. I had no idea.

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gonna reprint it. I've written a new chapter, so it'll be the old one, but I've written a new foreword and a new chapter for it. And sort of, in that sense, tried to bring it up to date because the book itself, what it actually described, ended in more or less with my brother's death in 2000. And then the book itself was published in 2012. Well, a lot has happened in the last 22 years. So it's coming out. Synergetic is gonna reprint it and it'll have this amended chapter to it. So that's one thing. The other thing that we didn't really get into, and maybe

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  it, when we talked about biognosis, I don't know if people understand exactly what we're doing, but in a nutshell, what we're trying to do with this biognosis project. Which is a long-term project and is actually gonna cost considerable money if we do it right. Basically, two aspects to it in terms of this knowledge recovery, knowledge preservation and connection into science. One is doing this series of documentaries on Amazonian traditional medicine. The first documentary, we have a short, there'll be short documentaries.

• 1:44:41Speaker 03

  The first one will be showing that ESPD 55 and making a big pitch basically for support to complete the series. We conceive this as five to seven, thirty to forty minute documentaries that kind of is a snapshot of traditional medicine as it exists today in the 21st century in the Amazon. And that's one aspect to it. But then linked to that is this much bigger long-term project has to do with the herbarium in Iquitos, at the university in Iquitos. And digitizing the herbarium, it's got a hundred thousand specimens.

• 1:45:25Speaker 03

  Only half those have actually been mounted. But what we wanna do is make high-resolution scans of those specimens, put them online in an accessible database that anyone can access. And we actually have an idea for creating a VR, using VR and AI technology to build what we're calling the visionary rainforest, which would be basically these collections distributed through this virtual space just as a way of representing. So people, if they can't go to the Amazon, they can immerse themselves in the visionary rainforest. It would actually have information, each of the collections.

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  From the Aribarium would be assigned to a place because they were collected someplace, right? So you go into this virtual environment and there'll be nodes that represent each collection. You can click on a node and that will open up a whole link to many forms of information. Maybe information about traditional uses, about chemistry, about genomics, about all kinds of things. So make this a dynamic, experienceable environment, but make it have scientific validity as well. So this is a grand vision and hopefully, again, it will be a resource for anyone, for

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  scientists especially, but really anyone that wants to experience the... I mean, the Aribarium in Iquitos is kind of a rundown, gradually eroding situation, but it's a gem. It's an important resource. All these plants are there.

• 1:47:11Tim Ferriss?

  What, 160,000 plus specimens, something?

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, about 100,000 specimens altogether. So we want to make that a real thing and turn it into a world-class resource. And the whole idea of this is, I think it was Ralph Waldo Emerson is the one who said, "A weed is a plant whose virtues haven't yet been discovered." In that sense, every plant is valuable and to the extent that we can link information about these collections to them, that gives them a value. They don't need value from us to be valuable, but it gives them a value that we recognize.

• 1:47:55Speaker 03

  So we're gonna talk about this project and it's going to involve working very closely with the university there and they're all on board for it. It's probably gonna cost several million dollars to do this, but I think we can get the money. I think that people will see the value of it and step up and do it. And this is just, in the overall scheme of things, it's just one little thing we can do to try to slow down what's happening in the Amazon because the Amazon is on fire along with the rest of the world and... It's gonna go away. It will be lost forever if we don't do something about it in the next

• 1:48:38Speaker 03

  decade or so. And by we, I mean humanity. We're just, our little academy and our little project is a small part of it, but maybe enough of a part of it to be a catalyst in this. That pretty much summarizes it, that this BioGnosis thing in terms of the nuts and bolts are these two components. One is using videography to document and preserve this knowledge and make it compelling for people. We want to do a Netflix series or National Geographic, whoever will take a look at it, and we want it to be something that people want to watch. And then this other project is obviously not separate from it, but is a longer term

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  and more ambitious thing of creating this visionary rainforest that will live on the web and be accessible to people and benefit people in the Amazon and people worldwide that are interested in these Amazonian plants. That's the basic idea.

• 1:49:43Tim Ferriss?

  And people can find more on BioGnosis. I will include this link along with links to everything else in the show notes for folks. BioGnosis, B-I-O-G-N-O-S-I-S dot McKenna, M-C-K-E-N-N-A dot academy. And I'm sure if you just search BioGnosis McKenna on Google, that it'll pop right up. And I encourage people also to check out espd55.com, another link that I'll include. If the last two volumes are any indication, and if the schedule is any indication, this should be a fantastic event and cover a lot of ground that I haven't even touched before.

• 1:50:26Tim Ferriss?

  And as a devout nerd in the space, I'm both ashamed and excited that that is true. That's happening in the UK, May 23rd to 26th, and you can also attend the live streaming online.

• 1:50:40Speaker 03

  What I should mention, Tim, is one thing, we will be, we're talking to Synergetic next week, so you'll be able to preorder. The Symposium volume for ESPD 55, and you can still order the old one as well. They still, they still have that. So you can preorder that there. And the videos from ESPD 50 are still online and they're open access. And I'll send you that link and you can post that as well. So people could go back and watch those videos. I think we've pretty well covered just about everything. You've been incredibly generous with your time.

• 1:51:20Tim Ferriss?

  Life feels short sometimes, but it's also pretty long.

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:24Tim Ferriss?

  If I'm not going to spend time having conversations like this, what am I, I know, no rush to do. Go fold my socks. This is much more fun. People can find you on Twitter @dennismckenna, the number four. We will link to that in the show notes as well. The website for your academy is mckenna.academy. And the links to everything will be in the show notes. tim.blog/podcast. If you just search my name and Dennis McKenna, no doubt you'll find both of our episodes. And that will be very, very easy to source at tim.blog/podcast. Dennis, it is so nice to see you again.

• 1:52:01Speaker 03

  Such a pleasure.

• 1:52:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's always fun.

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  This has been great fun. We've just had an amazing rant here. This is lovely.

• 1:52:10Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing rant. We have a number of punk rock band names. We have a partial book title for your, one of your next books, The Obscure Corners, which I like a lot. I took a note on that, which was drawn from something you said earlier. And all in all, just another extremely thought provoking, very, very enjoyable conversation. So thank you, Dennis.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:52:32Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, as always, thank you for tuning in. And until next time, be just a little kinder than is necessary. Take care of yourselves, be safe and take care.

• 1:52:47Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends,

• 1:53:28Tim Ferriss?

  including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there, one of my favorite platforms ever. And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything, anywhere, giving entrepreneurs

• 1:54:10Tim Ferriss?

  the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great-looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life, and you can have the tools to manage your day-to-day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third-party apps, from on-demand printing to accounting to advanced chatbots, anything you can imagine. They probably have a way to plug and play and make it happen. Shopify is what I wish I had had when I was venturing into e-commerce way back in the early 2000s. What they've done is pretty remarkable. I

• 1:54:51Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:55:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:56:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:57:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:57:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:58:30Tim Ferriss?

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