#523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond

Dennis McKenna - The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond | Brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/tim automated investing, Allform http://allform.com/tim premium, modular furniture, and Tonal http://tonal.com/ smart home gym. More on all three below. 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 in the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. In 2019, in collaboration with colleagues, he incorporated a new non-profit, the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy https://mckenna.academy/. He emigrated to Canada in the spring of 2019 together with his wife Sheila, and now resides in Abbotsford, B. C. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim! Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim pioneered the automated investing movement, sometimes referred to as ‘robo-advising,’ and they currently oversee $20 billion of assets for their clients. It takes about three minutes to sign up, and then Wealthfront will build you a globally diversified portfolio of ETFs based on your risk appetite http://wealthfront.com/Tim and manage it for you at an incredibly low cost. Smart investing should not feel like a rollercoaster ride. Let the professionals do the work for you. Go to Wealthfront.com/Tim http://wealthfront.com/Tim and open a Wealthfront account today, and you’ll get your first $5,000 managed for free, for life http://wealthfront.com/Tim. Wealthfront http://wealthfront.com/Tim will automate your investments for the long term. Get started today at Wealthfront.com/Tim http://wealthfront.com/Tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Allform http://allform.com/tim! If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep mattresses, which I’ve been using since 2017. They just launched a new company called Allform http://allform.com/tim, and they’re making premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door—at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. You can pick your fabric (and they’re all spill, stain, and scratch resistant), the sofa color, the color of the legs, and the sofa size and shape to make sure it’s perfect for you and your home. Allform http://allform.com/tim arrives in just 3–7 days, and you can assemble it yourself in a few minutes—no tools needed. To find your perfect sofa, check out Allform.com/Tim http://allform.com/TIM. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at Allform.com/Tim http://allform.com/TIM. * This episode is also brought to you by Tonal http://tonal.com/! Tonal is the world’s most intelligent home gym and personal trainer. It is precision engineered and designed to be the world’s most advanced strength studio. Tonal http://tonal.com/ uses breakthrough technology—like adaptive digital weights and A. I. learning—together with the best experts in resistance training so you get stronger, faster. Every program is personalized to your body using A. I., and smart features check your form in real time, just like a personal trainer. Try Tonal http://tonal.com/, the world’s smartest home gym, for 30 days in your home, and if you don’t love it, you can return it for a full refund. Visit Tonal.com http://tonal.com/ for $100 off their smart accessories when you use promo code TIM100 at checkout. * If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews! 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Tonal, T-O-N-A-L. Get ready for the smartest home gym you've ever seen. That's a men's health headline about Tonal, folks, and that gives you the gist. If you're wondering about the smart part, Tonal's homepage also features a quote from the New York Times. Quote, "The machine knew my strength better than I did," end quote. More on that in just a minute. "By eliminating traditional metal weights, Tonal can deliver 200 pounds of resistance in a device smaller than a flat-screen TV. Tonal mounts on your wall with no floor space required." I've had a Tonal unit now for six to 12 months, which I got after a number of very close friends recommended Tonal. And it allows me to do things I would normally need a much larger gym for, like cable chop and lift or rotational exercises,

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  things I wrote about in The 4-Hour Body. And it allows me to do these things that are nearly impossible otherwise, like eccentric loading, which I'll mention later. Tonal is precision engineered and designed to be the world's most advanced strength studio and personal trainer. It uses breakthrough technology like adaptive digital weights and AI learning, together with the best experts in resistance training, so you get stronger faster. So what are these adaptive digital weights? Tonal's patented digital weight system makes thousands of calculations a second to deliver you a smooth weightlifting experience using advanced electronic motor technology. Tonal lets you adjust the weight in one-pound increments, something that was never possible with traditional dumbbells. It's easy to dial weights up and down with the touch of a button right in the grip itself. It's pretty cool.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's www.tonal.com, promo code TIM100. Tonal, be your strongest.

• 2:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of traditional stores. So I'm sitting in my living room right now and it's entirely Allform furniture. I've got two chairs, I've got an ottoman, and I have an L-sectional couch. And I'll come back to that. You can pick your fabric. They're all spill, stain, and scratch resistant. The sofa color, the color of the legs, the sofa size,

• 3:08Tim Ferriss?

  the shape to make sure it's perfect for you in your home. Also, Allform arrives in just three to seven days, and you can assemble it all yourself in a few minutes. No tools needed. I was quite astonished by how modular and easy these things fit together, kind of like Lego pieces. They've got armchairs, love seats, all the way up to an eight-seat sectional. So there's something for everyone. You can also start small and kind of build on top of it. If you wanted to get a smaller couch and then build out on it, which is actually, in a way, what I did, because I can turn my L-sectional couch into a normal straight couch and then with a separate ottoman in a matter of about 60 seconds. It's pretty rad. So I mentioned I have all of these different things in this room. I use the natural leg finish, which is their lightest color, and I dig it. I mean, I've been using these things hours and hours and hours every single day.

• 3:53Tim Ferriss?

  So I am using what I am sharing with you guys. And if getting a sofa without trying it in-store sounds risky, you don't need to worry. Allform sofas are delivered directly to your home with fast, free shipping, and you get 100 days to decide if you want to keep it. That's more than three months. And if you don't love it, they'll pick it up for free and give you a full refund. Your sofa frame also has a forever warranty. That's literally forever. So check it out. Take a look. They've got all sorts of cool stuff to choose from. I was skeptical, and it actually worked. It worked much better than I could have imagined, and I'm very, very happy. So to find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com/tim. That's A-L-L-F-O-R-M dot com slash tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com/tim.

• 4:38Tim Ferriss?

  Make sure to use the code TIM at checkout. That's allform.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout.

• 4:46Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  No, we're just sitting in a book, you know.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:09Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, and I want to skip my long, usual preamble because we are going to run out of time before we run out of material. With today's guest, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time, many, many years, in fact, Dennis McKenna. You can find him on Twitter @DennisMcKenna4, and we'll provide many other links. Dennis's research is focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, and we will define a lot of terms in this episode, so don't worry about getting lost in the weeds too quickly. His doctoral research at the University of British Columbia focused on the ethnopharmacology

• 5:50Tim Ferriss?

  of ayahuasca and ucuhe, and we'll double-check the pronunciation, two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the northwest Amazon. He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute, which does exceptional work, and was a key organizer and participant in the Hoasca project, that's H-O-A-S-C-A project, the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca. 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 new nonprofit, the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, which we will discuss. In the spring of 2019, he emigrated to Canada with his wife Sheila and now resides in Abbotsford,

• 6:35Tim Ferriss?

  British Columbia. You can find him on all the socials, Instagram @DennisMcKenna, Twitter @DennisMcKenna4, Facebook @DennisJohnMcKenna, and also McKenna Academy, that's M-C-K-E-N-N-A Academy, on Facebook, on Instagram, and on Twitter. Dennis, welcome to the show.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 6:57Tim Ferriss?

  I thought I would, I would start with a bit of history and pull in some colorful characters while we're at it. Could you please describe your first meeting with Richard Evan Schultes? And that can kind of segue into who Schultes was. But I really enjoyed this story in, in your book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, which we'll talk about. I've, I printed out my Amazon Kindle highlights. I have 189 highlights from that book. We're not going to go through them all. But let's start with your meeting with Schultes, if you wouldn't mind.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Schultes was a professor of Harvard. He's been called the father of Ethnobotany. He certainly was not, because Ethnobotany as a discipline existed before there was Schultes. But he was one of the more high-profile people. He was the director of the Botanical Museum at Harvard University for many years. And he is, he made many contributions to Amazonian botany. But the one he's most notorious for and most well-known for is he was probably the world's expert on what we used to call hallucinogenic plants, psychedelic plants

• 8:16Speaker 01

  used in different parts of the world. But that was what made him so famous. And like many people, I envisioned a career in ethno-pharmacology for myself, which is something that I sort of realized was possible when I was 18. We can go back to this. This is earlier than Schultes. When I got my hands on this amazing book called The Ethno-Pharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. But I digress. We can return to that. So Schultes was a figure, just a towering figure in this field. Like Einstein in physics are of that stature,

• 9:00Speaker 01

  and many, many people with a passion about psychedelic plants and indigenous use of these things, you know, looked up to Schultes and wanted to work with him. And I was one of those. And in 1974, I was living in Berkeley with my brother, or close by my brother, who was living there. And I determined to

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Go see the great man, you know, to make a pilgrimage essentially to Schultes. And in those days, there was a deal, you could buy a bus ticket, sixty dollars for sixty days. And you could get as far as you could go, as long as you kept it within sixty days. So I made this pilgrimage to Harvard, to Cambridge and

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  And where was your starting point?

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Well, I started at Berkeley and I went first down to Louisiana, Hammond, Louisiana, and visited some friends of mine who owned a leather shop, a hippie leather shop. Wonderful bunch of people running a leather shop in this totally redneck town. Why did I go see them? Well, I went to see them because they lived out in the country where there were pastures and cattle. I went there basically to hunt for mushrooms and, you know, and my idea in my, this is nineteen seventy-four, and my idea was, well, you know, I'll get a bunch of mushrooms and dry them, take them back to California and sell them.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Well, it was like the worst season for mushrooms in like five years that they'd lived there. So I went down there and I did find some mushrooms, but just a few, plenty for my own needs. But I didn't have grocery bags of them or anything like that. That was the first place I went was Hammond, Louisiana. And then I just got on the old bus and continued on. I stopped and saw, interestingly, this anthropologist in Maryland, who had studied the Yanomami, one of the Amazonian tribes that uses these psychedelic snuffs. And he was a linguist. He was probably one of the few people in the world that actually spoke Yanomami.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  He had some interesting samples that he'd collected. I went there basically to pick up those samples and hang on with him. And then I continued up to Boston and I had an old girlfriend who happened to live in Boston. So, uh, and we were still on good terms. So, so I went there, I had a place to stay and then I went I mean, I I saw Schultes before I saw the girlfriend. I I basically got off the bus and went immediately to the Botanical Museum. It was an incredible experience for me because I was like in total awe of this man. I mean, it was like it was like an audience with the Pope or something, you know?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  But he wasn't Pope-like at all. He was just a very kindly, down-to-earth, ordinary person, and he welcomed me and took me to lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club and and we talked about what I could work on and what would you like to do was the way the conversation started out. So because Terrence and I had been to Columbia in 1971 and one of the things we were looking for was this ukuhue, this orally-active varola preparation, which eventually ended up being one of the foci of my doctoral work, but that was 10 years in the future.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  But I was interested in varola. I was interested in those snuffs. And he said, "Well, you could go to the Amazon and study varola and sort out the chemistry of it." So he said, "That would be a possibility. I'd totally, you know, appreciate that, endorse that." He said, "Well, there are two things you need to do before you do that." And I had my degree. I got my undergraduate degree in 1973, but he said, "You need more chemistry, and you need to take more organic chemistry, and you need to take more taxonomy." You know, which you know as plant classification, the classic approach to plant classification. So I said, "Yes, sir, absolutely."

• 13:28Speaker 01

  You know, I got the message. I got back on the bus. I went back to Berkeley and I moved back to Colorado, where I'm from. Even though I had my bachelor's degree, I just enrolled in a couple of courses of advanced organic chemistry and the taxonomy specialty I chose to look in was grass systematics. Which was like torture. Grass systematic classification is the most arcane, difficult thing you could do. I must have had something about wanting to punish myself, but I studied grass systematics and organic chemistry. And an interesting, unexpected delight in this was the, the person that was the chemistry

• 14:12Speaker 01

  teacher of this organic chemistry course, a man named Frank Sturmitz. Turns out, he was quite a well-known alkaloid chemist. He used to illustrate his lectures with, well, so here's LSD. Here's how you make LSD. Here's how the fungus makes LSD. And he was a brilliant guy and another mentor. And he was said, well, don't go work for Schultes. Go work for Norman Farnsworth in Chicago. And I said, no, no, you don't understand. Schultes is gone. And so Schultes encouraged me to apply and I was getting these courses that he thought

• 14:55Speaker 01

  I really needed to have on my transcripts. And I applied and I didn't get in. You know, I did not get accepted into Harvard, which was kind of a crushing blow, but not unexpected. It was a blessing in disguise in some ways because while all this was going on, I was living in Fort Collins, Colorado, going to Colorado State. My friend Larry Beasley was an old friend from high school and he was a horticulturalist. And as it turned out, he was running the greenhouse at Colorado State University when I moved there. So I had access to the greenhouse and brought in some ayahuasca cuttings that we had from

• 15:40Speaker 01

  California. And also I had access to a sterile culture lab. They were doing tissue culture there, which can also be adapted to doing fungal culture. And I was messing around with ways to try to figure out how to grow the psilocybe. Cubensis and I had access to a university lab to do this work in, which was amazing and we tried a few things and actually succeeded in growing mushrooms out of these mason jars on sterilized substrates. You're probably familiar with the book, Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, which Terry and I, Bubba Studdard and Suno Man.

• 16:23Tim Ferriss?

  One of your great contributions to humankind.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Maybe the most significant contribution, but that was the method that we developed there. And in the process of growing the mushrooms and then sampling the mushrooms and just getting excited about being able to grow mushrooms, I thought, wow, well, maybe I'll change my focus from Verola to psilocybin mushrooms. And I wrote to Shotez about this and I said, what would you think of that? And he wrote back a rather kind of stuffy letter, you know, saying, well, I, my specialty is higher plants. But I think if you want to work on fungi, you should talk to Dr. Alexander H. Smith at the University

• 17:10Speaker 01

  of Michigan. But basically said, I mean, the subtext was you're a traitor.

• 17:17Tim Ferriss?

  How dare you?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, not really. I mean, he was, there was subsequent encounters, but he, he basically said, if you want to study Amazonian plants, I'm all in. I'd, I'd be happy to have you. And as it turned out, I didn't get accepted. So that opportunity was taken away. But the unexpected benefit of this was that some years later, well, this was 74. So after that, I did my masters at the University of Hawaii, not studying psychoactive plants. My plot to study psychoactive plants there was undermined, but I ended up applying to

• 18:00Speaker 01

  the University of British Columbia. And I started there in 1979 and my supervisor there was a man named Neil Towers, also.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Kind of a giant in this field, not as gigantic as Schultes, but very much known in the world of phytochemistry and ethnobotany and so on. And he was quite open to me working on mushrooms. I actually started out in his program because he had come to Hawaii while I was a graduate student there. And my supervisor in Hawaii was another one of these incredible mentors that I've been blessed with throughout my academic career, Sandy Siegel. And Dr. Siegel, whenever anybody came to visit, a visiting professor or dignitary, he would always invite the graduate students up to his house.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  We'd sit around and have pizza and beer and shoot the breeze with the whatever luminary was in town. And Dr. Towers was one of the luminaries. In the process of having this conversation, he said, well, I've got this young master student working on the psilocybin, it's working on the enzyme that converts psilocybin to psilocin, the phosphatase. And she's not getting very far with it, but it's a very interesting project and wish there was somebody to kind of continue that work, you know? And I practically spit my beer out and I said, hmm, well, Dr. Brett Towers, I've had some interest in this and what do you think about letting me do

• 19:41Speaker 01

  it? And, you know, what do you think about taking me on? And he said, well, yeah, if you're interested, that's a possibility. So we started corresponding and I was like midway through my master's thesis in Hawaii at that point and we started corresponding and I got accepted and I got with Dr. Towers' support. I actually got a four-year graduate fellowship.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  And I started working on psilocybe and the idea and I had developed the technique for growing them.

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  Dennis, may I pause for just one second?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Certainly, I'm getting off on many tangents.

• 20:20Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, I love all the tangents. That is actually kind of the, if there's any theme to this show, it is, it is embracing tangents, but I want to just mention a few things and ask a couple of questions, but I want you to bookmark that. So we're, we're in Canada or headed to Canada at that point, but I just want to mention a few things. So is it true that when you first met Schultes, when you walked in, he was effectively hugging an air conditioner? And the reason I ask is that if you look at photographs of Schultes in his prime, it very much evokes an Indiana Jones, minus the tomb raiding, of course, resilience and durability.

• 21:01Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you see him in native dress, you see him really fully engaged as not just an observer, but as a participant. He spent more than a decade, as I understand it.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  About 15 years.

• 21:12Tim Ferriss?

  15 years in the Amazon, and this is not flying first class.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 21:18Tim Ferriss?

  To, to the Amazon.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 21:22Tim Ferriss?

  So your first exposure to him was him hugging an air conditioner, as I understand it?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, he was obviously a little past his prime at that point, but when I took this bus and got off the bus, it was like a early September, it was a sweltering summer and I got off the bus and I took my backpack. I must've looked a mess. I mean, I'd been literally on the bus for four days, you know? But I got to his office and I went to the desk downstairs. I said, I'm here to see Dr. Schultes. They said, oh, he's upstairs in his office. So I went upstairs and couldn't see anybody there. There was nobody at the reception desk and I sort of peered in this dark room with all

• 22:09Speaker 01

  the blinds closed and wiping the sweat from my brow. I mean, but I could see him back in the back of this office laboratory that he had there and he was hugging the air conditioner.

• 22:25Tim Ferriss?

  You know, when you have an AC, you might as well use it, I suppose.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I figure. And I mean, it was like utterly charming, you know, because I expected this swashbuckling, like you say, Indiana Jones, you know, tough guy. And he was all those things, but you got an air conditioner, you may as well hug it. So that's what he did. Yeah, it was very disarming.

• 22:51Tim Ferriss?

  I love it. I absolutely love it. Let me, let me also pick up on a couple of other points and ask just a couple of definitions for people listening, which we'll get to in a minute. But I would like to read a few things from the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, if you're willing to bear with me, because I think it will hopefully help tie some things together in the minds of those who are not familiar with your background and your work. So Sanford Segal, who you mentioned, so his research interests, among many other things, included exobiology. But I want to read just a paragraph about him from your book and then three sections that I pulled out about science. It's going to take me a minute, but if you could bear with me. So this is from the book.

• 23:34Tim Ferriss?

  And on Sanford Segal, this is where the excerpt begins, quote, "In his NASA-funded work, he was extremely creative in his thinking about stress physiology in extreme environments. For example, he wondered what would happen if he tried to grow a cactus underwater. Turns out, it grows fine as long as you bubble oxygen and carbon dioxide through the water. How well does a tarantula survive under a radiation flux similar to that at a Martian surface? It survives just fine for months. Can you germinate onion seedlings in liquid ammonia as a substitute for water? Yes, ammonia can substitute for water in many biological processes. He had a genius for thinking of these incredibly creative, exciting, and simple experiments. And yet they all had a rationale and a reason behind them. He was an out of the box thinker." And then I'm going to jump to what you said separately in the book about science.

• 24:17Tim Ferriss?

  Quote, "I knew scientific thought had its limits, but before we could reject science, the most powerful set of intellectual tools ever developed by the human mind, we first had to learn how to do science. Then if we still wanted to reject it, we could do so as scientists with full knowledge of what it was we were rejecting." I think these are really, really important to tie together because you have such broad exposure. And as I understand it, there were many influences early on, two of which were, I believe it was The Yaki Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda, even though subsequently, a lot of people, and you're aware of this, came to conclude that a lot of that, if not most of it, was fictionalized. And a book that I have about 20 feet from here, which is the first edition of something

• 25:00Tim Ferriss?

  you already mentioned, The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, ESPD. And that was from 1967. I have the updated, I shouldn't say updated, but a second volume from 2017, which you organized, which was the 50th anniversary. Could you speak to perhaps the appeal of science? Because what I've noticed in the, let's call it the psychedelic ecosystem, is that you have purists in many different silos, if that makes sense. And part of the reason I've been so excited to spend time with you is because you have been a boundary walker of sorts across these different silos.

• 25:45Tim Ferriss?

  What is it that drew you most to science and the scientific method in addition to some of the facets perhaps represented by Castaneda's work in some respect?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  I think the 1967, 1968 were like pivotal years for me in terms of my discovery of my professional direction and my professional interests, as well as being psychedelics. These are also very personal things. But that year, 1968, is the year that these two books came across my desk, The Teachings of Don Juan, the first edition that my brother gave me for my 18th birthday. And then The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, which I am not even sure, I don't even remember where I originally got the first edition, but that had come

• 26:43Speaker 01

  across my radar a few months earlier. And these two books were very important for me in terms of framing my interests. It made me aware. That there was this ethnographic background or these traditional backgrounds, even though we probably, most people agree that Castaneda made a lot of this stuff up. Didn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. It made it clear that there was a body of traditional knowledge around the use of these things, whether what he described was accurate or not, didn't matter. That was one page, one side of the frame. And then the ethnopharmacology

• 27:25Speaker 01

  search for psychoactive drugs made me aware that a lot of this was about chemistry and plants and pharmacology and molecules and, and you know, a more hard science, biologically oriented aspect to it. So these two things seem to fit together very well. And I thought, ethnopharmacology is a real thing, you know, at least to the extent that this book exists, it's a real thing.

• 27:52Tim Ferriss?

  And could you define ethnopharmacology?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Ethnopharmacology, there's various definitions of it. The one I like is kind of tortured. It's kind of long, but I'll explain why I like it. So ethnopharmacology is the interdisciplinary, by definition interdisciplinary, scientific investigation of biologically active substances used or observed by humans in traditional societies. And the reason it's so tortured is it's not always about plants. It's not always about medicinal plants. It's not always about things that humans ingest. For example, arrow poisons, totally legitimate

• 28:39Speaker 01

  kind of subject for ethnopharmacology. And then traditional societies kind of limits the scope. We're talking about not, I mean, in some sense, all of pharmacology is ethnopharmacology because it's people doing it, you know, but we're talking about traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge and that sort of thing. That's the formal definition of ethnopharmacology that I like.

• 29:05Tim Ferriss?

  And I think it's also worth highlighting for folks, and you would have, I'm sure, dozens or hundreds of examples, how many commonly used

• 29:15Tim Ferriss?

  Compounds or drugs have come out of, in some form, ethnopharmacology, whether it be aspirin, or you mentioned dart poisons that, you know, curare, leading then into anesthesia.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 29:30Tim Ferriss?

  And the list just goes on and on and on. There are so many things that we take for granted that have their origins in these places.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  The whole spectrum, really, of, when you're talking about natural products, especially for things like CMS active natural products and so on, they come out of a cultural context. We know about these things because they have a cultural context. And if you look at even just herbal medicines, herbal remedies, every one of these things that you can buy in the drugstore or the health food store has a story behind it, has a cultural backstory. And then entrepreneurial forces and commercial forces take that and develop products out of it. For example, kava kava

• 30:21Speaker 01

  is a good example of that. I mean, it's now a supplement and you can buy it in health food stores, a very useful muscle relaxant and sort of tranquilizer. But it comes out of the context of Polynesia and traditional medicine. Many, many things are that way. So there's always a cultural backstory. That's what I like about ethnopharmacology. It ties those kinds of things together with the nuts and bolts side of it. What are the active ingredients? What's the chemistry? What's the pharmacology? So on.

• 30:58Tim Ferriss?

  If you don't mind, I know this is a bit stochastic, but I would love to jump into this volume.

• 31:05Tim Ferriss?

  The 50th anniversary volume of the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychedelic Drugs. And just as background, and please correct me if I get any of this wrong, but the 1967 gathering was subsidized by the US government. I think it was the, was it the NIMH?

• 31:19Speaker 01

  NIMH, that's right. National Institute of Mental Health.

• 31:23Tim Ferriss?

  And so you had this gathering of titans of sorts to discuss exactly as the title would imply, the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychedelic Drugs, after which a volume was produced, printed and sold by the US government, which included the findings. And suffice to say, shortly thereafter, you have the Nixon administration, the Controlled Substances Act, and game over. And then you organized this 50th anniversary. And just to give people an idea of the contents, and also, I want to tell people, if you're interested in the science, this is published by Synergetic Press. You can find it on the Synergetic Press website, as well as on Amazon. This is a beautifully produced double volume, where

• 32:06Tim Ferriss?

  you have the original 1967, and then the 2017 edition. The contents are just fascinating. And one of them that I'd love to dig into, and doesn't necessarily have to, our discussion doesn't have to be reflective exclusively of the content in this, Broad Spectrum Roles of Harmine and Ayahuasca by Dale Millard. Could you speak to some of the more recent findings related to ayahuasca, which could include this discussion of harming? But I think a lot of folks have assumed that ayahuasca is this psychedelic brew principally containing banisteripsis copy of this vine, and a plant source containing DMT, like chakruana or

• 32:50Tim Ferriss?

  psychotrieveritas, that the vine really just serves to render the DMT orally absorbable or active. But it seems like there's a lot more to the story.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  It does do that. It does do that. It's the MAO inhibitor, bioimmunoxidase inhibitor.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  That renders the DMT containing that mixture plants active because DMT itself, as you know, is not orally active if you just take it pure or if you make a tea of chakruna, one of these and then drink it by itself, nothing's going to happen unless you have an MAO inhibitor onboard. But it turns out that alkaloids of banisteriopsis, these beta carmelines, are much more than just MAO inhibitors. For example, one of the primary alkaloids in ayahuasca is harmine. And harmine is a strong MAO inhibitor, but it also stimulates neurogenesis, which is nerve growth.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And these are recent findings. Another constituent in ayahuasca is a related alkaloid called tetrahydroharmine, which is an MAO inhibitor, but also a serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So it has like SSRI type activity and also some other unexpected things. For one thing, and this was, came out of our waska study in Brazil, it has long-term effects on the levels of the serotonin transporters in the brain. The serotonin transporters are the presynaptic molecules that take serotonin backup out of the synapse and recycles and re-releases it.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Well, like SSRI's, tetrahydroharmine inhibits that, but it also causes a long-term elevation in the levels of these serotonin transporters. And that was a unique finding. We didn't know what to expect, but that came out of the study and it was kind of surprising. But then when we found this effect, you know, this is all done, this is all in vitro. We took tissue samples, platelet samples and so on, and this was all done in the lab, but we found this persistent elevating effect on the serotonin transporters. We thought, what does that mean? Wasn't really clear. We were asking a naive question.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Is there anything biochemical that makes regular ayahuasca drinkers different biochemically than normal people or other people? And this was one clear difference. We didn't really know what it meant, but then we looked into the literature and we found out there were a number of pathologies that were associated with abnormal deficits in the serotonin transporters. For example, various kinds of alcoholism, addiction, suicidality, even homicidal behavior, various kinds of behavioral pathologies, which happened to be the very pathologies

• 36:00Speaker 01

  that many of the people in our U D V studied were saying ayahuasca had saved them, usually from alcoholism. That was usually their problem. And if they stayed in the church in the supportive context and drank ayahuasca regularly, then they stayed on track. And many, they were on track. These were very behaviorally, psychologically functional people, not sick. If they were sick, they were cured and they attributed it to ayahuasca. And then in our in vitro studies and a couple of vial assays, we found that it was really tetrahydrohydramine that was having this effect.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  And the course of action was over about two weeks. And my friend, Jace Callaway, who was one of the investigators on this and figured out how to do it. He had access to brain imaging technology at his laboratory in Finland. He was doing postdocs in Finland. So he tried taking tetrahydrohydramine himself and imaging himself and showed, well, sure enough, it did raise the levels of these serotonin transporters.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  On about a two week cycle and then if you stopped taking it, it went back down to baseline.

• 37:19Tim Ferriss?

  So does that mean on the two week cycle that after one administration, the levels remained elevated for two weeks? Or that it required two weeks of administration to elevate?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  It required about two weeks of continuous administration to bring it to that level. And that's kind of, that was the cycle that the UDV customarily, they took it every couple of weeks. Not that they knew about this effect, but that was just their practice.

• 37:45Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I guess they knew about, in a sense, they indirectly knew about the effect, but not the mechanism.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 37:50Tim Ferriss?

  And and for, for people who don't know, UDV, I'm probably going to mispronounce it, but that's the Uniao do Vegetal, something like that. One of the syncretic churches founded in Brazil.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I should have explained that. One of the syncretic churches, the group that invited us in to do this biomedical study in the early nineties. That was one of the chief findings.

• 38:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 39:01Tim Ferriss?

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• 39:47Tim Ferriss?

  Does the UDV differentiate between different types of brews for different purposes? My understanding is that these, some of the Daimistas or some of the members or perhaps groups within Santo Daimi, another one of the syncretic churches, do have different, I don't want to say admixtures, but concentrations of different things in different brews for different purposes. Are you aware of that existing within the UDV?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. The UDV does have that. They do have different formulations and so on, and they don't talk about them. I mean, we were not able to get any information out of them about that, other than the fact that yes, we do have these different formulations. I mean, we came up against a couple of interesting things about when we were dealing with the UDV, which was that they were very concerned that ayahuasca, or ayahuasca as they call it, be viewed as a sacrament, not as a medicine, you know, and so if you wanted to-

• 40:58Tim Ferriss?

  Much less as a drug, right? That would be a big problem.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Much less a drug. They didn't like the idea that you would study it as a drug. They were totally open to doing this biomedical study, but as far as going the next step and looking into mechanisms and that sort of thing, they were- Kind of conflicted about that. They could see the value of it, but then they didn't like the idea of godless science delving into their central mystery sacrament, you know? And I could understand that, but as a result of that, we we lost some opportunities to do some interesting things.

• 41:36Tim Ferriss?

  Totally. I wonder if that would be different now because my understanding, I think I got this from the book, is that, or maybe it was from different reading that I did of yours, that part of the reason for their cooperation was politically, sort of legally motivated in the sense that they wanted the local slash national government and potential policymakers to view this as beneficial. And so they were open to showing the benefits, but they didn't want reductionist science to, as you put it, remove the mystery by explaining some secular mechanism of action.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was definitely a political aspect to this. This is a big reason why they wanted this work to be done by outside investigators who presumably would, you know, if it was just U D V and there were scientists in the in the U D V, it was a middle to upper class demographic segments, but they wanted people from the outside to be the chief investigators to avoid the perception that the work would be biased. And that's one reason I got invited. And Charlie Grove was the chief principal investigator. I invited him to do that and

• 42:55Speaker 01

  he became that. So they wanted this regulatory agency called CONFIN, kind of a combination of the DEA and the FDA. They wanted to present data to CONFIN that showed that this was not a public health menace or danger.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  And also that it was beneficial or potentially beneficial. So there was definitely a political sub-agenda here. But as it turned out, I mean, we just did the science and the science supported that it was beneficial. Almost all of our subjects had joined the U D V in a state of life crisis and they felt like the medicine, the tea, as they called it, and the very supportive context of the U D V. They said that's equally necessary, but they felt like that was a vessel for redemption essentially and turning their lives around. And it's a complex thing. It's a complicated matter.

• 44:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm endlessly fascinated by the syncretic churches that use ayahuasca as a sacrament. I think there's so much that could be learned when you have these relatively large groups consuming twice per month. I mean, it's just an incredible opportunity. Question for you around ayahuasca, because I think in the, we've already alluded to this, but in the minds of some, ayahuasca is one thing, right? It's like, it's like an old fashioned that's always made the same way. But there are many different cocktails that could be called ayahuasca. And in the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, you talk very briefly about, and I'm not sure if you called this in the book, but Chakrapanga, which is also, I think it's a diplop terrace, kabirana, is that how that's pronounced?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Diplop terrace.

• 44:48Tim Ferriss?

  Diplop terrace. So many words I only read. I never hear them said.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Close enough, close enough.

• 44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Which by some, like the awahun is called yahay, and it's a different plant from the chakrapanga. Did you ever have the opportunity to consume ayahuasca with the chakrapanga?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yeah.

• 45:08Tim Ferriss?

  Experientially, did you find it to be different?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Well, I only consumed it a few times. I found it to be A shorter acting and, you know, in terms of the visionary stage of the experience and also more intense. So there's something pharmacokinetically going on there with the absorption of it. But people are mistaken if they think ayahuasca is one thing. Ayahuasca is a very complex, in the cultural context, it's a very complex thing. There are many varieties of ayahuasca, the vine, there are then all these admixture plants, some of which contain D M T and varieties of those, and then a whole pharmacopeia of other admixture

• 45:53Speaker 01

  plants that are more or less associated with ayahuasca. They're part of the dietis, which is a common practice in the Amazon. You learn about the properties of other medicinal plants by taking them and then you take ayahuasca, either in combination or after you take them, and you learn about their properties from the visions that ayahuasca give you about their. So ayahuasca is like the pipeline to plant wisdom in a certain way, to tap into this, I don't know what you might call it, guy in mind that's represented by these many admixture plants. So there's a whole lot of work left to be done with

• 46:37Speaker 01

  ayahuasca and looking into more depth than we were able to look at at that time. That's one of the projects that we're trying to get off the ground with the McKenna Academy. We want to do a very extensive phytochemical and ethnobotanical survey of, of different ayahuasca brews, document their preparation, document the plants that go into them, and then follow that up with bioassays and, and just get a better handle on the varieties of these different brews and their uses. Why would we care? Why do we want to do this? Well, it's gathering knowledge, it's gathering

• 47:19Speaker 01

  information, but the potential practical outcome of this is that you can formulate brews that might be specific for different types of disorders. You know, maybe some work better for addiction, some work better for trauma, some work better for depression or that sort of thing. All of this is kind of supported by the fork knowledge, but there's been nothing like a controlled study of any of this. It's very hard to get funding to study ayahuasca in a clinical setting because it's not a pure compound. It doesn't lend itself to the same kind of double-blind placebo-controlled protocols that you can use with something like

• 48:02Speaker 01

  suicide, but it's complicated.

• 48:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's very, very, very, it seems very complex. I'd love to ask you about one particular plant, which it's hard to tell them apart sometimes because it depends on the orientation. You know, it could be Datura metal or it could be Brugmannia. I want to ask you about Brugmannia, also called Floripondio toei. Do you think there's a place for that? It scares the hell out of me. And I know it's sometimes used, but what is your position, if any, on Brugmannia?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, you're right to be scared. You know, this is a very dangerous plant. It is not only toxic, but it produces a kind of delirium. It's not a psychedelic. I sometimes say in my lectures, it's a true hallucinogen, but not psychedelic. By that, I mean psychedelics, you see hallucinations sometimes behind the eyes or whatever. You usually know that these things are hallucinations. With Brugmannia, which used to be called the genus is Very close to detour. In fact, they used to be classified as detourists.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  But detour, the experiences that you have, you see hallucinations and you cannot tell if they're real or not. And so in that sense, it's a true hallucinogen, but it's not psychedelic. And it is, it produces a state of profound disorientation and delirium, essentially. So it's used very badly. It's used as a date rape drug and things like that in Brazil and Colombia. And it's often associated with bruheria in the ayahuasca tradition. In other words,

• 49:57Speaker 01

  black magic, sorcery. And if you take a brew of ayahuasca that contains detour or brugmanzia, you can tell because it causes this dry mouth sensation, which is typical of these anticholinergics like, like detour.

• 50:17Tim Ferriss?

  Is that the, like the scopolamine?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's scopolamine. So you can tell. And if you're taking ayahuasca that's got toe is the traditional word for, for these things. Toe, T O E accent. That's a good sign that you're dealing with a brujo and it's a good sign that you should get the hell out of there, you know, because they do not have your best interests at heart and or unlikely to. That said, you have to acknowledge that it has a place in, in this whole ayahuasca complex. And there may be people that can, practitioners that can use it beneficially. But my own experiences with detour, which you probably read about in

• 51:05Speaker 01

  the book, you know, that scared me away. I mean, I had no idea what I was getting into. And I was, we were very lucky. We could have killed ourselves.

• 51:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there are documented, lots of documented fatalities with both of those. And I think it's, and I wanted to mention, to bring that up just because there are risks associated with a lot of these things.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:32Tim Ferriss?

  Documented fatalities with tobacco over ingestion, tobacco juice in the Amazon. You have to be really, really. Careful. And, you know, I want to come back to a second to this kind of hired gun aspect, I think, as you put it in the book, in the world of vegetalismo and in this, let's just call it the medicine world in South America, it's not the case that everyone is focused, it's actually rarely the case, that practitioners are exclusively focused on how we perhaps view these medicines in North America for healing, for the contending

• 52:14Tim Ferriss?

  with and processing of trauma. The cosmo vision and the use case is much, much broader. And I just want to mention one more thing, which is even if you don't believe in black magic or anything like that, you can believe in manipulation and the brugmansia, like you mentioned, in Colombia is one example and elsewhere, although I think that people are kind of hip to this and law enforcement is hip to it, so perhaps the use has declined. But it's very common that crime syndicates would take the brugmansia, extract or somehow purify the scopolamine, then they would have prostitutes or other people blow the powder into the faces of victims. And this is, this is the crazy part that I want to

• 52:59Tim Ferriss?

  highlight for folks, that after which sometimes these victims would be brought to their own home, they would help the perpetrators load everything in their house into a loading van, and they would appear totally normal to, say, the doorman and so on. And 12 hours later have no recollection of what they did. I mean, it's wild. I mean, it brings up kind of these visions of the serpent in the rainbow. Like, these are, it's, it's, it's crazy to think about.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  It is. They appear totally normal, except that they're helping load all the furniture into the elevator at three in the morning.

• 53:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  To be, yeah, I think it was vice.com that

• 53:42Tim Ferriss?

  Vice did a good, a good piece on this.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Did a good thing. Yeah. So, so that's the thing. The, the detura, the brugmansia confuses you and makes you extremely suggestible. So you get this stuff inside you and then people say, well, let's go to your apartment and take out all the furniture. Let's go to your ATM and take out all your money. And you say, oh, well, that sounds like a good idea. Let's go do that.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  So black magic aside, it definitely doesn't have to be magic. It just puts you in such a state of confusion, susceptibility, suggestibility. That's the way it works.

• 54:24Tim Ferriss?

  It really is so fascinating and simultaneously sometimes terrifying to go really deep into the rabbit hole with this. Could you speak to traditional use of plant medicine and ayahuasca? You know, I'm harkening back to the mention of the sort of non-inherent good nature of practitioners or ayahuasca, it was the non-inherently bad nature, sort of this neutral, available for higher aspect in some instances that I think a lot of people are not aware of. Could you sort of speak to, to that a bit?

• 54:59Speaker 01

  There are rujos, there are people who don't really have your best interests at heart and there are other people, other practitioners who really are amazing healers and they can help a great deal of people. But the thing is that the context of traditional use has changed due to outside cultural influences. Because like anything else, the people want to give the extranheros, the ayahuasca tourists or whatever, they want to give their money's worth. And so the nature of the ceremonies changes, has changed in response to this.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  I mean, back in the day, before there was anything like when ayahuasca usage was still kind of a tribal-based tradition, there wasn't all this outside influence. It was the shaman who took ayahuasca, not the people. Rarely would the ayahuasca be given to a person that came to the ceremony unless there was some specific illness or something they wanted specifically to be treated. But it was the ayahuascaro who had the visions that downloaded the information about the plants and other kinds of practices they might engage in to help people with healing. Well, that's all changed.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  The outside influence of the global culture, I mean, people are not going to go to South America and spend all this money to sit and watch somebody take ayahuasca. They are there to have the experience and that's okay. I think it's just fascinating what we're seeing go on now with the ayahuasca tourism thing. It's definitely a complex thing. It's not necessarily a completely bad thing or a completely good thing. It's it's a mixed bag because many people are helped by this and all the tourists coming down, they bring economic benefits to these communities, but then those are not equitably

• 57:07Speaker 01

  distributed. You get a situation where the local ayahuasca girl who used to be just some guy or some gal that was a person in the village who kind of did this work on the side and they had their own livelihood, farming, fishing, or whatever. Well, now these people are kind of superstars and they get a lot of income. It generates a lot of jealousy within the community where that can happen.

• 57:33Tim Ferriss?

  They also get priced out of the local market.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  They get priced, exactly. They get priced out of the local market. There is a pressure on the resource base, ayahuasca and the admixture plants are being over harvested and there's not enough effort being made to really make sure the sources are sustainable. But that's changing. The market is adjusting to this. But these these changes take place over, they take years and there are some very hopeful trends now. People are becoming more aware of some of the issues with over harvesting and so on.

• 58:14Tim Ferriss?

  Let me pull another paragraph here and then I want to ask you a question about some of your personal experiences. And this is related to the science that was brought up earlier. There are many things in heaven and earth that are beyond the ken of science and may remain so forever. Anyone who has taken psychedelics seriously or has had other transcendent experiences is likely to share that conclusion. At the same time, science remains the most effective method for asking questions of nature and getting back answers that can be tested and validated. So you fascinate me on so many different levels. And I've actually read much more of your writing than I have read the writing of your brother. And part of the Venn diagram

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  that makes you such a subject of interest to me is the scientific, let's call it the esoteric, and then the personal. And I've heard in other interviews, you talk about, when prompted, you don't just volunteer this, but when people ask about the number of sessions you have done with, let's say, ayahuasca, it seems to number, even though you don't keep track, in the 500 plus.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  I'd say so.

• 59:23Tim Ferriss?

  Range, something in that range. And as far as I know, you're not a member of one of the syncretic churches.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 59:32Tim Ferriss?

  Where people would drink twice a month. So people can do the math. If someone does that for decades, it adds up.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:37Tim Ferriss?

  I would love for you to speak to, because many people will hear that and they'll say, well, wait a second, you do it once, it changes your life, and then you're kind of done. Why on earth would you ever do it so many times? And I would just love to hear you speak to that.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Partly, it's because of the context in which I have used ayahuasca and brought other people to South America to have these experiences. I've organized retreats and that sort of thing. So I'm one of those, I'm guilty. If you want to point at the people that have fostered ayahuasca tourism, I've certainly contributed to that. I'm a little conflicted about it. So when I do these retreats, then I drink. People expect me to drink, and I do drink. The other reason is, I think every time you take it, maybe this is the more valid reason, every time that you take it, or most times that you take it, not every

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  time you take ayahuasca is going to be a peak experience. I mean, there's lots of times when it's disappointing, and you just get sick, and the brew is bad, or whatever. But it has a lot to teach us. There's a lot to learn from ayahuasca. And even though you've taken it multiple times, you still keep getting new insights, or new...

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  I mean, the experience seems worthwhile, and so I keep taking it. Maybe I'm thick-skulled. Maybe I, maybe other people have an easier way to assimilate the lesson and say, yeah, I got the message. Okay, I don't need to do this anymore. I've come close to that a couple of times, but I think Ram Dass was the, famously said, or maybe it was Alan Watts, I'm not sure, who said, "Once you get the message, hang up the phone."

• 1:01:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  And I sort of think I disagree with that. I think, in other words, the message is not the same every time. There is no standard message. And this is a dynamic interaction with, with the plants that you're learning from. Indigenous people talk about plant teachers. And you can get into the weeds about whether that's a valid concept. Are they really intelligent? Are they not? The point is, it doesn't really matter whether the plants, the ayahuasca, opens up some part of yourself that may present as something

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  not the self, but that knows things, has information to transfer. It doesn't really matter. What I say is the information good. So every time you take it, or when you take it, there's really a bottomless well of things to still be thought about and assimilated and so on. So I kind of don't believe in the hang up the phone approach. My approach would be, I guess, keep listening. Keep listening, because a lot of what you might hear will be stuff that you've heard before, but there may be new things that come along that make

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  it worth it to stay engaged. And so that's how I relate to it. It's not a waste of time to keep listening.

• 1:02:54Tim Ferriss?

  And you've also noted that, and you're not the only person, Luis Eduardo Luna and others have also noted that these habitual consumers of ayahuasca often seem to remain exceptionally sharp and lucid into older age. And as I've thought about this and spoken with people who have a lot of experience like yourself, it seems like there are kind of different Frames through which you can look at this experience. One is almost like the replacement of a malfunctioning hip. So you have a hip replacement. It's one and done. Maybe you need it again 10 years later, but that's, that's it. That's the hang up the phone approach.

• 1:03:35Tim Ferriss?

  And then there, there's this way of looking at it almost like going to the gym. There are all these use cases historically that seem to at least offer other use cases, like the use of ayahuasca for hunting, let's just say.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:52Tim Ferriss?

  And another one that kind of occurred to me as I talked to some of these folks who drink, you know, in South America, that some, some people are drinking four, five, six times a week. And it's almost like you could, let's say, live in New York and go to Japan and study things in Japan in the hopes that you can bring it back to New York and apply it in your life in New York. But you could also go to Japan and just get to know Japan and the culture and how to operate in that space. And I'd love to hear you speak to outside of the groups that you bring down where, where you are expected to drink. How do you decide when to drink?

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Well, just usually the occasion presents itself. It's rare that I would come to one of these places and not drink, or just when it seems appropriate is when I decide. And if I'm in a situation where ayahuasca is being drunk, then I would probably drink it. And I tend not to go after it outside of a ceremonial context. And even for a while I would say, well, I don't even drink it in the States or Canada. I just confine it to South America when I'm down there. But then I can't really stick to that because there are opportunities here.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Now I go to a place called Salterra in Costa Rica, which is one of the higher profile ayahuasca retreats. I'm, I'm an advisor to Salterra and I, I like the way they're doing it. I think they're very ethical about in their approach to all this. And so it's a matter of opportunity rather than anything else when it seems appropriate. But to your, what you alluded to before about how it can be.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  In some ways ayahuasca and a lot of psychedelics can be a big reset. But then there is the maintenance part of it. And the work we did with the U D V and the finding about the modulation of these serotonin transporters is really an eye opener because what that speaks to is that regular use of ayahuasca can actually repair some of these deficits. In fact, it may be the only drug or medicine that can do that. I think peak experiences can be major reset moments. And I think this is part of the therapeutic profile of a lot of psychedelics.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  They basically get you out of your default mode network. They get you out of your personal reference frame. They let you look at situations from a slight remove and you have insights as to your existential situation, whatever it might be. Not all psychedelic experiences, not all ayahuasca experiences are necessarily these peak experiences, you know? And they don't have to be. They can be beneficial and they can help you remember, maybe as more accurate term, some of the insights you had from previous experiences. And then I think there's a physiological aspect too, particularly with ayahuasca, like

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  this modulation of the serotonin transporters and so on. And neurogenesis, you mentioned that a lot of practitioners, ayahuasceros seem to be unusually sharp and lucid, even though they're maybe of advanced age. And I think that is a reflection of ayahuasca. I think that in general, I am kind of a skeptic about this whole microdosing fad. I have my doubts about it. But in the case of ayahuasca, I think microdosing might make sense. Not for the hallucinogenic psychedelic effects, but for the things the beta carvelines do for your nervous system.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  You think of them as kind of a nerve tonic. And keeping the serotonin transporter levels elevated is probably a very good thing.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Guarding against depression and that kind of stuff. So again, just like with the plants and the chemistry, there's lots to be learned about the pharmacology of ayahuasca, too.

• 1:08:13Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to talk about the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy. We're going to spend a good amount of time on that. Before we get there, though, since we're talking about some of the possible benefits of,

• 1:08:26Tim Ferriss?

  in this case, ayahuasca, I want, I would love to discuss perhaps the other side of the coin. And I know that the experiment at La Chorrera does not relate to ayahuasca specifically, but I'd like to, and I know you've described this many, many times. We don't have to spend a ton of airtime on it, but the, I'm going to read a paragraph, actually two paragraphs, and then we can use that as a way of backing into it, if that's okay. Here's the prelude to the chapter that introduces the experiment at La Chorrera, which, again, we don't have to spend too much time on, but just enough to kind of frame this. "In some respects," quote, "in some respects, everything in life before we arrived at La Chorrera was a prelude to the events that engulfed us there.

• 1:09:09Tim Ferriss?

  And everything afterwards has been a reflection of them. Terence chronicled the events in true hallucinations. Though his account may seem unlikely and bizarre, I believe it is largely accurate, even if interpretations vary as to what it all meant. I can't vouch for every detail, if only because," and this is the part that I'm just going to highlight here, "I was lost in hyperspace for much of the time, or overwhelmed by psychosis," again, depending on interpretation. "Anyone with an interest in the facts," in quotation marks, "of our story, if the word even applies, should regard Terence's narrative as required reading." And then we flash forward to much later in the book. Quote, "Terence mentions that on March 20th, we all celebrated at one of Bogota's finer restaurants, and that the others agreed I was totally back," quote unquote. "They weren't aware that, in my mind,

• 1:09:53Tim Ferriss?

  I was in telepathic communications with all the waiters and that our dishes were being wafted to the table by telekinesis. Rather than alarm them, I kept that to myself. But except for a few episodes like that, I was doing all right." Okay, there's, there's lots to discuss here. I have personally experienced many upsides to

• 1:10:13Tim Ferriss?

  Psychedelic use, including ayahuasca, I've also been put into hyperspace, as you put it, on a few occasions, or have become, say, destabilized, if you want to be a little less charitable. And I have friends who have become destabilized, after the atas in some cases, using ayahuasca in other cases, in some cases from LSD, we don't have to go to South America for this, for weeks, months at a time. And I would love to just hear you perhaps expand a little bit on your personal experience, and if you have had more experiences like this, so that people can be aware that this is kind of one of the cards in the deck.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  It is one of the cards in the deck, and people should be aware that this is a possibility, which is one reason why it's important to have a strong ritual environment, a strong ritual context, and a ayahuasca practitioner that kind of knows what they're doing, because they can keep you on track and get you out into hyperspace and get you back. And that's kind of the whole essence of shamanism. I have not since La Chirera had experiences that have kept me three sheets to the wind, if you will, for weeks at a time. It was not particularly pleasant.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  And, you know, I mean, at the time, I was not concerned about getting back. All those concepts have kind of evaporated, you know? But after I did get back, it actually did get more restabilized and truly back in my body and in ordinary reality. On reflection, I realized what a...

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Dangerous place this was to be in. And that potentially it could have gone the opposite way where I never did reintegrate. One of the reasons that I was able to reintegrate, I think, was because because of the circumstances at Lauterera, the process had to play out. There were people in our group who said, this is totally out of control. We need to get these people out of here into a psychiatric facility and under treatment. And Terrence and I both completely resisted that because we understood what was going on. At least we thought we did.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  We were in communication with each other and it was like, no, you just need to let this play out. And, and I think that was the right thing. I mean, it was a, you know, I have a, a lecture I give, a talk I give. It was a psychotic break, was a shamanic initiation, or was it an alien encounter? Probably all three in a certain way, but it was closer to a shamanic initiation in a certain, not that I call myself a shaman, I'm not, but it's the shamanic initiation is where you get to explore these dimensions and then you get back out.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  You get back onto your mundane feet in 3D and ordinary reality and whatever that is. I'm kind of wandering here, but I, I think the point is because of the fact that it was able to play itself out from beginning to end, it was actually a very healing experience. Rather than being disorganized and incoherent for the rest of my life. Maybe some people say I am, but. I don't think so, but it was actually a healing experience and I came back from it stronger. And I feel like I am, even though I've continued to take psychedelics ever since on occasion,

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  I've never gone to that place again, and I'm kind of grateful for that. You know, and I also feel that I'm basically a fairly stable person.

• 1:14:24Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask a couple of follow up questions because there are a few things that struck me in the book in describing this. And people should pick up the book and, and read all of it, including this chronicle.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Only the Kindle version is available, as you know.

• 1:14:39Tim Ferriss?

  Which is perfect for me because then I can take.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  No more.

• 1:14:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hard to come by, so I, I can take notes and then export my notes, which is my favorite thing in the world to do. So I have, you know, I have my 189 highlights and then I went through and I added three asterisks to the things I wanted to follow up on. That's a six page document. So I'm fully nerded out when it comes to my digestion of this book. And please fill in the details or fact check me on this, but one of the things that struck me, and this also seems to be a pattern across people who, and I don't want to characterize your experience this way, but those people who might come unmoored and stay adrift for longer periods of time, is there was a real density of consumption of psilocybe mushrooms when you were there.

• 1:15:24Tim Ferriss?

  And my understanding is you guys had very little in terms of food, maybe some, some instant noodles and rice. And you had this just almost ridiculous abundance of mushrooms due to these sebu cattle who were, who were down there. And so you just, you started spicing up meals and so on, throwing in psychedelic mushrooms. So you had just a, not only a high dose experience, and there's a lot more to it, of course, but you had a really high density of continuous consumption. Is that accurate? Is that fair to say?

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. And so we never really, in this process, we never really did give ourselves a chance to get back to baseline, as you will, and look at, well, what's, what's going on here now that we're unstoned? We were never unstoned. Most of what happened with the experiment of Lauterera, when we actually performed the experiment of Lauterera, was post mushroom. We weren't eating them anymore.

• 1:16:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's right. That was about two weeks.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  But there were plenty of them in our system.

• 1:16:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  So, and then of course on the night that we, that we did the experience, we ate them. But yeah, mushrooms are tricky. Mushrooms are not necessarily to be trusted in a certain way because they can lead you into these delusional spaces. And as a plant teacher, well, they're not plants, but you know, as a psychedelic teacher, they're somewhat less trustworthy than ayahuasca. You know, I mean, you can get into these delusional spaces and it's something to be careful of.

• 1:17:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, certainly not to be trifled with in the sense that you, you should, I think it's a good idea to respect mushrooms.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  None of these things should be trifled with.

• 1:17:16Tim Ferriss?

  To follow up on that, you know, you mentioned letting things play out and how that was beneficial to you and your reintegration. And perhaps if you had been subjected at that point to a psychiatric intervention, that that could have been problematic for you. You know, this presents a dicey situation, I suppose, for people who might experience things in the sense that as a counterweight to that, I know one person, for instance, who, who went to Peru, did a traditional dieta where he was consuming something called chiric sanango and ayahuasca on alternating days. And he did this for quite a long period of time and chiric sanango I've seen in a number of cases now.

• 1:17:58Tim Ferriss?

  People who've had psychotic breaks after sort of continuous administration. Not to say it's bad. I just think that there, this is, this is a. An observed kind of phenomenon. And his family had to go down to South America. He thought he was God and convince him that if he were God, the gift he could give would be getting on this thing that was made up in his mind called an airplane and coming back to the United States. But I suppose there's, there's a plausible argument to be made that he would have been sort of among the lost and maybe would not have come out by himself. So how do you think about when it is appropriate? And again, we're not giving medical advice. Everybody needs to talk to their medical professionals.

• 1:18:40Tim Ferriss?

  But would there not be times when a psychiatric intervention would be called for? How do you think about that?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  There would definitely be times when a psychiatric intervention, I'm not saying that every time, for me, the fact that the experience to play itself out, what was allowed to play out was this process of integration. And integration is really important, as you know, psychedelic experience and this process of getting back to some kind of baseline, but with that changed perspective, with the benefit of having had this experience and changing that perspective and so on. But sometimes, I mean, this is why sentence setting is so important.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  And when you take it in a inappropriate sentence setting, then there's the potential to come up against what we call the real world, you know, society and its conventions and its expectations. I mean, for example, I could share with you, the son of a very good friend of mine in Minnesota at about age 18, went with his, I don't know what his previous psychedelic experience had been, not, not great, but a few low level mushroom experiences and so on. But he decided with some of his friends to take a trip to New York City. This like small town boys in the big city, you know, and just having a great time.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  They took a lot of mushrooms and he sort of descended into this delusional world. His friends said, well, we're going back to Minnesota. And he said, well, I'm staying here. What are you going to do? Live on the streets? Yes. And he had this whole thing. Well, it didn't take very long for him to. Come up against New York's finest. As you might say, because he was acting pretty strange. And he, he got into a tussle with the cops and punched one in the face.

• 1:20:51Tim Ferriss?

  Uh oh.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  That was a big mistake. Next thing you know, he was in jail and being transferred to what is the huge psychiatric hospital there? Bedlam or something like that.

• 1:21:03Tim Ferriss?

  Bedlam Bellevue, maybe?

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Bellevue, Bellevue. The only reason that he was able to resolve it in some ways was that at this point I was getting involved. I was actually in Brazil as an ayahuasca retreat when all this was going on. But my friend called me and said, this has happened. Is there anybody in New York psychiatrist that could help him? And as it turned out, I said, well, yeah, as a matter of fact, Steve Ross might be able to help him. And I called Steve, this is all done by Skype. There was, you know, and I called Steve and I explained the situation and he said, well, as it turns out, I have admission privileges at Bellevue, which I had no idea that he did.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  But he went over there and was able to intervene on this young man's behalf and get him out of there. But the guy never did recover.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  He went back, he was on psychiatric meds and he was fairly functional when he was doing that. But he hated being on psychiatric meds. And it just, it was a tragedy in many ways. He never fully recovered.

• 1:22:19Tim Ferriss?

  How old was he at this time?

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  He was about 18 or 19.

• 1:22:24Tim Ferriss?

  Did he have a family history of schizophrenia or anything like that?

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Potentially, yes. There was schizophrenia in his family. It was a very strange family situation. I mean, his mother was a devout evangelical Christian. And his father was like a psychedelic cowboy. He grew his mushrooms in the basement and brewed his own ayahuasca and so on. And so it was a weird family situation and it was very bad. I, I don't want to disclose too much, but.

• 1:22:57Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, of course. I mean, it's very, very sad.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, very sad outcome. So this is a case of. It's hard to predict, but apparently he had this family history of schizophrenia and he was, and the mushrooms triggered this. So this is why you have to approach it from an informed place and hopefully with a practitioner, whether a therapist or a shaman or whatever, who can hold that space and modulate the outcome. To take it on the streets of New York, probably not a good idea, you know, especially if you're not from New York. I don't know.

• 1:23:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, it also just brings to mind that maybe it should be the four S's, right? You have screening, set, setting, and then support. Like you have a safety, you have a safety net in place before you get on the trapeze.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:23:52Tim Ferriss?

  You have a therapist, somebody who's actually supervising.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  This was just approached by these young men in a very recreational way and they were out to have a good time and it was not good.

• 1:24:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, powerful compounds. And I mean, this applies sort of across the entire pharmacopeia, right? I mean, SSRIs also can produce suicidal ideation in all sorts of states. So you just really, it's a really good idea to have professional assistance and supervision with these things.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's talk about the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy because you bring so many different perspectives and lenses and also toolkits to bear on these discussions. I would just love to hear about this new nonprofit and why you started it.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  The new nonprofit, the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, which is www.mckenna.academy, academy is the suffix of, of the website. And I wanted to create a, originally the idea that was that we would start this academy and that we would have a physical place in South America where we could do retreats, which we had been doing all along, and then conferences and different types of educational activities to explore natural philosophy. And a lot of it was the ideas that would be a modern mystery school modeled after Eleusis, or not modeled after it, but in that spirit, a place where people could

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Come together and share ideas and marvel at the cosmos and marvel at existence and do what natural philosophers do, natural philosophy being the precursor of science, what science used to be before it became so quantitative and reductionist. Natural philosophy is the root of science and it differs from science in that it admits that there are other ways of knowing rather than the reductionist way of knowing. That's valuable, but that's not the whole trick. This is the limitation of science.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  Science can understand segments of reality, but small, in small pieces, but it doesn't fit the whole picture together too well. So the academy is basically, I guess the modern analog would be something like Esala, a place where ideas and brilliant minds can come together and create dialogues. And of course, COVID changed our business model radically because we couldn't do these conferences and so on. So we've had to pivot and go online and that's what we're doing now, just trying to create an online presence and continue our work. It's partly educational, it's partly research.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  We've got a project going on down in Peru right now. We're making a documentary about the current state of traditional medicine in the Amazon around Akitos. And a lot of it is about this botanist that I've worked with for 40 years there, who's the curator of the herbarium at the university in Akitos. He's one of these people about which it's said when a medicine man dies, it's as though a library is burned down. Well, he's not a medicine man in the sense that he's not a healer, but he has tremendous knowledge of the Amazonian flora and the medicine.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Properties of these plants and he knows many, many healers in the community. So we're trying to document his knowledge because even though as a scientist, he doesn't write things down. So we're trying to, through videography, make a documentary about what he knows. And then hopefully that will attract funding. We have big plans for this project. We call it the Knowledge Preservation Project. The first aspect of it is to make a short, relatively short documentary about this gentleman whose name is Juan Ruiz. And then to develop, over the long term, what we want to do is work with the herbarium

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  there and digitize the herbarium and try to make it into a world-class resource for plant research of all kinds that would be centered at the university. So this is all described in our website and that's probably our biggest project right now for which we're seeking support.

• 1:28:42Tim Ferriss?

  Support. And so people can find that McKenna dot academy. I encourage everybody to check it out. There are five key departments. Tell me if this requires updating, but you have therapeutics, education, retreats, R and D, and media. Is that still an accurate reflection or has that been modified?

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  That's an accurate reflection, but then some of those things are kind of dormant at the moment, like the retreats.

• 1:29:06Tim Ferriss?

  Due to COVID.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Due to COVID. I mean, eventually we want to get back to that. Media obviously is an even bigger part of it because the internet is our teaching platform now. Therapeutics, again, not so much because they're usually associated with the retreats, but education for sure and R and D. This project that we're doing with this, with this gentleman at UNAP, the university there, is in the category of R and D.

• 1:29:35Tim Ferriss?

  And the McKenna Academy is, is public charity?

• 1:29:40Tim Ferriss?

  Is that right, that in the sense that it's tax exempt as a 501(c)(3)?

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  It is. It is. It's a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization, chartered in the United States, even though I don't live in the United States anymore. I live close enough. I live in Canada now. But the Academy is incorporated in California as a 501(c)(3).

• 1:30:03Tim Ferriss?

  And who is involved with the Academy besides yourself? Are there any particular people who are acting as advisors or research collaborators?

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely. Yeah, we have a number of people that are associated with it. The woman who is the executive director, Christina Chaya, lives in Peru, and I've worked with her previously on organizing retreats. So she continues to work with me. We have very good people on our board. One gentleman with lots of experience in the financial industry. Another woman is a corporate lawyer, so we have that expertise. And then we have just a fantastic bunch of advisors, one of whom is Alexandre Tanou, who you know very well.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  And Wade Davis is an advisor. Paul Stamets is an advisor. So we have a number of high-profile people.

• 1:31:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, a strong, strong roster.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:31:09Tim Ferriss?

  What types of projects would be on the shortlist of things that you would like to engage with and explore, assuming that you have the resources to do so?

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Well, a couple of things are on the plate. So we've got this kind of long-term project, this knowledge preservation project, which we're beginning to brand it as Bio-Nosis. And that is, the focus right now is on the documentation part. But then the next phase, which will take much longer and cost a lot more money, is to focus on the herbarium there, of which Juan Ruiz is the curator of this herbarium. So that's a long-term project that we want to do. In the shorter term, we're working on developing an Ethobotany course in collaboration with the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  And we're going to be offering that course this fall. And one of the people that is working on that is a guy named Michael Ko, who is an ethnobotanist. And I was on his committee, he got his degree at the University of Hawaii. And he studied cultural keystone species in the Amazon around Pukolpa, which is basically ayahuasca. He is going to be the main instructor in this course, which will be online. And then we're planning to do a virtual symposium, probably in August, on the stone date theory.

• 1:32:47Tim Ferriss?

  Indeed.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  We're going to do that because one of Terrence's books, The Food of the Gods, is being reprinted again. I'm actually doing a online event with Michael Pollan and the publisher. We're doing essentially a podcast together. But then we're going to do a one-day symposium on the stone date theory and have some interesting speakers. I wrote a new foreword for it, which I'll be happy to share with you. And we're going to have this symposium because we're going to revisit this whole idea, which actually, based on new discoveries, is more plausible than it was when Terrence first proposed it.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  And that's what my foreword is about in part, is that we didn't know about the way that these psychedelics can create these hyperconnected neural architectures and neurogenesis and enhancing the connectivity in the neocortex and that sort of thing. And that was not known at the time Terrence wrote the book. What was also not known was anything about epigenetics. And epigenetics provides an evolutionary mechanism by which these changes...

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  In neural architecture could be propagated through generations. And if you look at the environment that we now know from paleoclimatic data and that sort of thing, northern Africa was a wet place a couple of million years ago. And there was seasonal rainfall, there were cattle there, there were the ancestors of the modern cattle, and there were hominids. So the three variables in this environment did exist. What was the long-term impact of that? Well, you know, the food of the gods basically led to the origin of consciousness and the imagination.

• 1:34:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I read a draft of your intro, or maybe the final version, I don't know, but it's really a great exploration, review of more recent findings, but also a great exploration of language, images, imagination, consciousness, and then also the data to support this overlap of hominids with ungulates and coprophilic mushrooms. It seems almost inevitable that our ancestors would have been munching on these and found them very, very interesting and compelling on a lot of levels.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. So, so, yeah, I just think it's worth looking at this in the light of some new discoveries. I mean, you know, these things can never be proven, which actually makes them more fun, because then you can make these wild claims and nobody can disprove them either, you know? So that's where we're at with that. But I think knowing what we know about neural plasticity was the word I was looking for, that psychedelics foster neural plasticity, epigenetics provides a mechanism for inheritance. And so I think that changes the speculation from plausible to maybe more than likely.

• 1:36:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this stuff is honestly fascinating to me. And I want to return for a second to the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, because you, you mentioned something that I just want to underscore. And that is to do these things, that is to further the Knowledge Preservation Project, Bionosis, the Ethnobotany Course, and many other things you are currently looking for support. If you don't mind saying, if you can, is there a specific number that you have determined will allow you to pursue these projects with the resources required to really gain some degree of traction with them?

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, we have, we have a rough idea. We're undertaking a capital campaign, now fundraising campaign. People should feel free to visit the website and donate if it grabs you, but we're looking to raise about 600,000 by the end of the year. And this is to support various projects like this. And then the herbarium digitization project, which is much more ambitious and much more expensive, and it's going to stretch over a couple of years. What we're dealing with is essentially an herbarium, which is

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  a gym, a scientific gym, but it's in a third world developing country university. So there are a lot of deficiencies. For example, at this herbarium, there's like 100,000 specimens, but at least half of them aren't even mounted. So we want to get enough funds to complete the herbarium essentially, and then link it into various online database resources for natural products, pharmacology, genomics, and so on. Just create an open access resource for anyone with an interest in Amazonian flora. You know, it doesn't have to be medicinal

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  or psychedelic or whatever the interest. And that's probably going to be a two to three-year project that'll cost somewhere north of a million dollars, but it will be well worthwhile. It's just, again, I'm a big believer in collections and collecting knowledge. That's the thing. Knowledge collections are important. And like every plant that you can attach a piece of information to. enhances the value of the plant, you know, and provides a reason not to drive it into extinction.

• 1:38:48Tim Ferriss?

  Important. Yeah. Once they're gone, they're gone. You've mentioned a phrase in a number of other interviews I listened to that I'd love for you to define because I don't know the phrase and I would like to. The importance of voucher specimens. I think that was the wording.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:02Tim Ferriss?

  Is that, is that the right word? What is a voucher specimen?

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  Voucher specimen, this is what Schultes used to rave about all the time. He would go on about, oh, they did all this chemical work on, say, banisteriopsis, for example, and there is a whole history of chemical investigations going back to the late 19th century, people looking into the alkaloids, the composition of banisteriopsis. Voucher specimen is simply an herbarium specimen that you make. And if you're collecting plants and you're dragging them back into the lab to tear them apart chemically and see what's in there, you have to be able to reference a reference specimen, essentially.

• 1:39:47Tim Ferriss?

  So keep one that you don't tear apart, in other words.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  Collect pieces of the plant, make an herbarium specimen of the plant, make several in different herbaria around the world, but at least the herbarium of the host country. And then you can always go back to that because taxonomists love to question each other. And so if you have a reference specimen, you can always go back and look at the actual collection. Somebody said, well, this is banisteriopsis copy, you know, that McKenna collected in 1981. But five years later, some other botanist may come through there and say, well, that wasn't banisteriopsis copy. That was banisteriopsis longioletta. You know, and these people are fools. They didn't know what they were doing.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  This is what taxonomists do all the time, you know, they fight with each other. But the point is that the chemical investigations are documented by an herbarium specimen that you can always go back and check. And now, of course, they use DNA profiling and this, this sort of thing, just another tool in the arsenal, kind of. But if you look at the chemical history of ayahuasca, if you look at who did what when they were sorting out what the alkaloids were, the first four or five investigators, I can send you a keynote about this, which you can look at at your leisure. But the first four or five groups of investigators, they didn't take vouchers.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  So their work is not worthless, but in some ways degraded because there are not vouchers to document what they actually worked on. That's the thing with voucher specimens.

• 1:41:33Tim Ferriss?

  And I mean, just to put some more connective tissue around, let's just say the, the Amazon and the flora of the Amazon. How many species would you say we, we currently estimate plant species to exist in the Amazon?

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  In the Amazon?

• 1:41:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  About eighty to ninety thousand.

• 1:41:56Tim Ferriss?

  And how, how many have we, and this is maybe a loaded word, but properly studied and examined in any way, what percentage?

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  Around 10%, if that. Of course, worldwide, they're probably, they're always revising the number. But the total number of plant species, higher plant species in the world is around 240, 240 to 260,000.

• 1:42:24Tim Ferriss?

  And I mean, it's just such a wealth of biological.

• 1:42:29Tim Ferriss?

  Not just knowledge, but practicality. I mean, you have such potential medicinal application.

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  Well, there's, there's great discovery, great potential for drug discovery. Cause we have only looked at about 10% and those are the, the number that, you know, we maybe took a superficial look at. The number that have actually been thoroughly investigated is closer to 1%. So there's tremendous potential to find new compounds. In fact, that's another project that the McKenna Academy is working on or collaborating with a group called Woven Science. A group of entrepreneurs and, and scientists and other types.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  And we're in process of developing a bioprospecting platform at, that will be affiliated with the university in, in Akitos. And then you get into basically a search for new molecules, screen them against a whole variety of possible targets. So this is another long-term project that will probably run into the millions if it's properly done. The McKenna Academy is kind of peripheral to it. We're, we're involved, but we're not, you know, we're nonprofit. So we don't have to make profits, but it's going to be a very interesting project. And it goes into these ethical areas about who owns this knowledge.

• 1:44:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, bio, bio piracy.

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, bio piracy. So we have to be very sensitive to all those issues so that we can say, you know, we're bioprospectors, not bio pirates. We want to share the, the wealth, if there's any return on the investment.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  We are committed to having indigenous people have a big stake in that, have a place at the table and a big say in how this goes forward because really they've been the stewards of this knowledge for millennia, really. And it's always been the case that big pharma, big science comes in, they take what they want, they say, thanks very much, see you later, develop billion dollar drugs off these things. And that's not right. The indigenous people should get some recognition for being the stewards of this knowledge. That's the whole thing. This is what's in danger as the habitats are impacted, the community structures

• 1:45:05Speaker 01

  are impacted and the traditional knowledge. And one of the first things to go is the knowledge of plants.

• 1:45:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Dennis, there are a million things that I can ask you. I didn't even get through 10% of the questions that I-

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  Good, we'll have 10 more of them.

• 1:45:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we have, we have space for many more conversations.

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:25Tim Ferriss?

  I want to say a few things. One is that for those people listening who also want to sort of extend their exploration of these topics, I think Mark Plakken has also done a lot of great work with the Amazon Conservation Team in his thinking about enabling and empowering those groups to participate in, in prospecting and the preservation of, of knowledge. He's done all that. He and his, and his wife and other people in the organization have done really great work. And I know you guys are friends and go back really, really, really, really far. And I also wanted to ask, so just to, just to confirm for people listening, donations to the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy are tax deductible since they are

• 1:46:09Tim Ferriss?

  donations to 501(c)(3). So I will, the target of 600K, I will commit here to kicking that off with 50K of my own USD. And I want to encourage people listening to consider doing the same because at 50K a pop, that would be 12 people, it could be done very easily. This is a early stage bet, albeit in a nonprofit. So I don't expect, of course, I can't get any returns from this in a financial way, but I really view you as a pioneer who also has a high degree of biochemical and sort of ethno-potanical fluency who can-

• 1:46:50Tim Ferriss?

  Participate and reconcile and critically examine multiple spheres. And you have a history of producing really fascinating and I think important work. And I definitely encourage people to also grab the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. They're in a boxed set. If you just search Dennis McKenna on Amazon, it pops right up and you can purchase it on Amazon Prime. It's a beautiful collection and will give you a taste of some of what Dennis has curated. And certainly you can find his writing everywhere else, but I will commit to 50K. I encourage people to, this is not investment advice, it's a nonprofit. But I really view this as worthwhile.

• 1:47:34Tim Ferriss?

  And you're coming into this also as someone who has proven a decades-long dedication to examining and studying various facets of psychedelics and beyond, not just limited to that. Much like I think Schultes was also very, very well versed in orchids and other things.

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  One of the world's experts on orchids, that's right.

• 1:47:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Roland Griffiths also, a lot of people don't realize, even though he's known for the psychedelic work with psilocybin at Hopkins, one of the foremost experts in caffeine and caffeine metabolism. And so you have such a broad spectrum of expertise. I feel like this is worth supporting, so I commit to 50K and I encourage people to take a close look.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  That's incredibly generous of you, Tim. Thank you, thank you for that. And thank you for encouraging your listeners to contribute. If we get a few more donations in that range, we won't have to do a fundraising campaign. Our goals will be pretty much met. And we want to be responsible stewards of these funds, you know? And in that regard, we're also open to people who...

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  They may want to support us financially, but we want more than just finances. We want advice. We want wise people. We're creating a, we call it the symbiotic circle, but a circle of advisors with connections to other supporters, but also ideas like people like yourself, for example. I don't know if you're interested in being, joining our symbiotic circle, but you're certainly welcome to.

• 1:49:14Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. I like the sound, I like the sound of it.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  I'll send you information about all this stuff. I don't know how much time you have to go through all this stuff, but I'm gonna send you.

• 1:49:24Tim Ferriss?

  The one thing in the world that I seem to have time for is this kind of stuff.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, I'll, I'll send you more details about that, that capital campaign and some of the other projects that we have. And yeah, this has just been amazing. We killed two and a half hours.

• 1:49:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it was easy. Yeah, it was easy to do. And we have plenty, I have enough questions we could, we could do a round two in short order. It'd be extremely easy to do. I would encourage people to check out McKenna dot academy. I have a few thoughts on things that could be added to the website that might be helpful for listeners. So we'll chat about that separately. I think it'd be easy to do also, but check out McKenna dot academy. Certainly you can find Dennis on social. Where are you most active, if you're active at all, Dennis, on social media?

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  Well, I have people handling most of the social media for the academy. So I'm not on there. I'm on Facebook and Twitter, but not, not much, you know?

• 1:50:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, that's, that's why you get more done.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I wouldn't say that, but it helps, it helps. But I would love to have more conversations with you, Tim, online and offline.

• 1:50:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would enjoy that.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  This has just been, this has just been incredible. You're a fantastic interviewer. I'm sure I'm not the first that told you that.

• 1:50:48Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you, Dennis.

• 1:50:50Speaker 01

  And you're informed. You really do your homework. So that's, that's a huge thing. I think it couldn't have been gone better. We could talk all afternoon.

• 1:51:03Tim Ferriss?

  Easily and I I'm only thirty forty percent of the way through volume two of ESPD and this is one of those fields, I'm sure it's true with a lot of fields where the deeper you go, the more fascinating and the stranger it all becomes and you know, it's and you spoke to at the very, very, well, maybe it wasn't the beginning, maybe it was in the middle, about some fears around, and this was related to some of these syncretic churches, of science removing the mystery or the wonder. And it makes me think of Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman, famed physicist, who later in life

• 1:51:44Tim Ferriss?

  developed a deep friendship with a painter. And the painter had the same concern about Richard, through his scientific lens, removing the wonder of, say, the beauty of a flower. And Richard's perspective was, actually, you've got it completely backwards. Because I have the aesthetic appreciation, I am acutely aware of how much I don't know, and I can also be dazzled by the scientific findings when you go down to the microscopic level and look at this beautiful thing in front of us. And I'm paraphrasing, of course. But I find it so reassuring in your representation of these multiple facets, that these are not

• 1:52:29Tim Ferriss?

  mutually exclusive silos, even though there's so much goddamn infighting in the psychedelic space. It's kind of comically tragic.

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  We're humans, you know, that's what we do. But I am totally on the same page with you about this. To my mind, science, properly pursued, only deepens the mystery.

• 1:52:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  That's the thing. It doesn't take the mystery away. It shows you how mystery exists profoundly at every level. That's the whole idea of the McKenna Academy, being a mystery school. The mystery is the mystery of existence, which is, which is bottomless, it's endless. And science is one of those tools we have, not to take the mystery away, but to make us appreciate what the mystery is. And I'm thinking of

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Something that, but I had a couple of exchanges. I said, Tim's gonna ask you, what would you put on a billboard, you know? And, well, we didn't get to that, but I was thinking about that. What I would put on the billboard is what I get from ayahuasca and other psychedelics, which is, remember how little you know.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  Remember how little you know, and science often forgets how little it knows.

• 1:53:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  So it can be kind of arrogant at times, but you can't be a true scientist without being a mystic, I think. You know, I mean, that's the thing. The deeper you probe, the more complex, the more beautiful, the more intelligent it all seems.

• 1:54:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 01

  And this is why I think we have to appreciate science, but understand it's not the whole story. It's not the end of the story, just a useful tool.

• 1:54:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we're all holding different parts of the elephant, like that parable.

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:54:32Tim Ferriss?

  And Dennis, this has been wonderful. I will follow up on the donation, which for clarity, I'll make through my foundation, which is explicitly for this type of thing. Could not be more excited. Is there anything else you would like to mention to listeners, any closing comments, anything like that, anything you'd like to direct their attention to before we wrap up for this round one?

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  No, I think we've covered it pretty well. I would say, look at the website. We have resources there. We have events which have been done in the past that you can still register. They're all recorded. Think of it as a place for resources and so on, but also give it touch. We want to be open. We want people to. Bring their talent and their, their wisdom and everything else to the table and their money. But that's not necessarily, that's not necessarily the, the most valuable thing. Money is just the grease that lets the thing run.

• 1:55:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:35Speaker 01

  So there is that, but we're, we're trying to bring together brilliant people and propagate this worldview. This idea that we're out of sync with nature essentially, and that psychedelics is one way to help us realize that and help us get realigned with nature. Cause that's the big challenge that we face right now. And, you know, and then that could spin off into another three hours of discussion. We won't go into it.

• 1:56:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And for those people who want maybe a cliffhanger or a teaser, I wanted to focus on a lot of the science and the biographical stuff in this conversation, but we, we didn't even get into some of the really strange and weird stuff, which we might next time.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  That's another, that's another one. Yeah.

• 1:56:25Tim Ferriss?

  So I'll leave that as a teaser for around two. Well, thank you so much, Dennis. This has been wonderful and so much fun for me. I've been really looking forward to this and have done so much reading and I can't wait to do more. I'm looking forward to it. And to everybody listening, as always, we will have links to everything in the show notes that we've discussed. Of course, we mentioned McKenna dot academy. That is sort of the beacon, the, the main call to action here. Please check it out and until next time, be safe and thanks for tuning in.

• 1:57:03Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend. And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets. And all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:57:45Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Allform. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me talk about Helix Sleep and their mattresses, which I've been using since 2017. I have two of them upstairs from where I'm sitting at this moment. And now Helix has gone beyond the bedroom and started making sofas. They just launched a new company called Allform, A-L-L-F-O-R-M, and they're making premium, customizable sofas and chairs shipped right to your door at a fraction of the cost of

• 1:58:30Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:59:14Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:59:56Tim Ferriss?

  So check it out. Take a look. They've got all sorts of cool stuff to choose from. I was skeptical and it actually worked. It worked much better than I could have imagined and I'm very, very happy. So to find your perfect sofa, check out allform.com/tim. That's A-L-L-F-O-R-M.com/tim. Allform is offering 20% off all orders to you, my dear listeners, at allform.com/tim. Make sure to use the code TIM at checkout. That's allform.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Tonal, T-O-N-A-L. Get ready for the smartest home gym you've ever seen. That's a men's health headline about Tonal, folks, and that gives you the gist. If you're wondering about the smart part, Tonal's homepage also features a quote from the New York

• 2:00:40Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:01:25Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:02:10Tim Ferriss?

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