Psychedelic Science | Dr. Dennis McKenna | EP 299

Yeah, well, I don't think any experiments have been done yet on like family experience, on collective family experience of psychedelic transformation. For example, um, we haven't got that far in the scientific analysis of such things. It's worth attempting to do that because I think that that would, again, be a significant step toward creating this new paradigm around death. You know that, uh, medicine, that's a big deficit of medicine. You know, this idea that uh, death can be, death is inevitable, but death doesn't have to be terrible.

[Music]

Hello everyone, uh, thank you for tuning in and watching and listening. I'm very pleased today to have with me Dr. Dennis McKenna. He's an American ethnopharmacologist, lecturer, and author. He is a founding board member and director of ethnopharmacology at Heftner Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to the use and exploration of psychedelic medicines. Dr. McKenna received his PhD from the University of British Columbia and worked as a postdoc at the National Institute of Mental Health and at Stanford. He is the brother of Terence McKenna, who believed that the human relationship with psychedelic plants played a major role in our cognitive and social evolution. He was a very well-known figure to denizens of the modern psychedelic movement.

Dr. McKenna and I first met some years ago, 2016, in Toronto at a conference hosted by Mind Matters at the University of Toronto, where we shared our views on the significance, the potential significance of altered states of consciousness. It's really good to see you again, Dennis. Thanks very much for agreeing to do this podcast.

Thank you so much, Dr. Peterson. Uh, it's a pleasure to be invited. I'm very happy to be here. It's nice to see you again after eight years. So neither you nor I were famous at that time. Now you're quite famous and I'm a little more well-known, so time passes.

Yeah, well, it's very good to see you. So tell me, tell me what you're up to recently. As you said, we haven't spoken for a number of years. So what are you busy doing now?

Well, basically, uh, I immigrated to Canada in 2019 and I left academia. I left the University of Minnesota, immigrated up here with my wife, and I started a non-profit called the McKenna Academy for Natural Philosophy. And originally it was incorporated here in Canada, but then we dissolved that and incorporated in the States because it made more sense. The McKenna Academy for Natural Philosophy is, uh, basically devoted to education, as you can tell by the name, primarily about psychedelics and plant medicines.

Uh, originally our vision for it was to do retreats and conferences and that sort of thing. But in 2020, COVID came along and kind of put a spike in that. So the last actual physical conference we did before COVID was, uh, was in 2019 in South America. We did a Mystery School retreat with my friend, uh, Alexandra Tanu, who is an ethnomusicologist. There's that ethno term again.

And then we did a lot of online events. We offered a six-week-long ethno-botany course in collaboration with the Organization for Tropical Studies. Uh, in this year, we did our first physical conference since COVID in the UK that was called ESPD 55. Which is, ESPD stands for the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs and, uh, 55 is, it was the 55th anniversary of the original conference, which was, uh, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1967. And I actually did an ESPD 50 in 2017, but that was before the McKenna Academy was formed. So we did these two, and people could look at, uh, espd55.com. It's open access and see what we talked about.

It was very well received. It was at this, uh, beautiful venue in, in Yorkshire, uh, in Horsforth, I guess it was. And it was very well received and we had 37 speakers covering a whole range of topics related to this general topic of the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. So that's, that's what I've been doing, Jordan, basically working through the Academy and doing that sort of thing.

[Music]

Government continues to spend borrowed money. Inflation continues to swell, dragging down our economy, and the stock market has entered bear territory. So what's your plan? Are your assets diversified? I'm Phillip Patrick, precious metal specialist for the Birch Gold Group. For nearly 20 years, we've helped Americans diversify into gold, and we can help you too. Did you know you can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account? We can help you transfer an IRA or 401k tied to stocks into an IRA in gold. If you're skeptical about the trajectory of the economy in the US dollar, then text Jordan to 989898. Birch Gold Group will send you a free info kit on securing your savings with gold. With thousands of satisfied customers, five-star reviews, and an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, we take Precious Metals seriously. Text Jordan to 989898 for your free info kit.

Maybe we could let everybody watching and listening know a little bit more about what ethnobotany is exactly.

Sure, so could you elaborate on that?

Sure. Well, ethnopharmacology is, so I like to term it, so ethnopharmacology has a kind of formal definition if you want to get down in the weeds with it, but I kind of like the informal definition for a couple of reasons. Ethnopharmacology is the interdisciplinary scientific investigation of biologically active substances used or observed by humans in traditional societies. So it's a kind of a, you might say, tortured definition, but there's a reason for that.

For one thing, its study is not confined to plants. It includes fungi and anything that may have biologically active substances. It's not necessarily about medicines. For example, aeropoisons are certainly within the purview of the study of ethnopharmacology, or any kind of biologically active substances like fish poisons, this kind of thing would be subjects for ethnopharmacology. But usually, it's medicinal plants and not necessarily psychoactive.

And, and it also, it's important to note that this is really about indigenous societies, not not, you know, what we call developed societies, developed nations or whatever, because if it was under that definition, everything would be ethnopharmacology. The two terms, ethno is people and pharmacology is pharmacology, the study of drugs and their actions. But so this sort of, uh, you know, elaborate definition kind of ticks all the boxes, if you will. It's interdisciplinary, it's biologically active substances, it's, uh, it's indigenous use of these things, and Indigenous people, as we know, are very ingenious about discovering these things in the biome and utilizing them for medicines or poisons, food, or whatever.

Right, so you're one of a number of researchers who's going out to, um, let's say, pre-scientific locales or peoples and finding out what they know traditionally before their culture is lost so that we can pull that knowledge into the broader scientific domain and associate it with what we already know and also preserve it and hopefully extend it if we're fortunate.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And much of what the McKenna Academy does and that we're about is collecting and preserving this knowledge, you know, this indigenous knowledge that is, uh, in danger of being lost, that's rapidly being lost due to all sorts of factors, you know, the decimation of cultural traditions, their loss of habitat, the loss of species, climate change. All of these things are leading to the disappearance of this knowledge, and yet there is still a lot left to be known.

So the McKenna Academy is trying to make a bridge between traditional knowledge, preserve it, and, uh, and scientific investigation. Science is the nexus that brings these things together. We have, you know, we have done various seminars about this, like ESPD 50. We currently have a big project going in Peru, for which we're seeking support, which is to, uh, the, uh, university in Iquitos, Peru, UNAP. I've worked with the, uh, the scientists there for over 50 years, and there's one person there that I've worked with since we were both graduate students. I first came to Peru in 1981 to do my graduate work. I met this gentleman who was also a student at the time, and we have worked together over 50 years on various projects.

He's now the curator of the herbarium at, uh, at UNAP at this university there. The herbarium is, and we have a project going to digitize this herbarium and put it all online and make that a resource for scientific researchers or anyone with an interest in the Amazonian flora. This will be a tremendous, uh, repository of information about the plants, you know, that have been collected and deposited over, uh, really, uh, for about 40 or 50 years. It really was established around 1970. I didn't get to Peru until 1981. But, uh, that's a big project that we're, that's our main focus now that, uh, ESPD 50 is, or ESPD 55 is more or less behind us. We're working on this other more ambitious project now.

You spent some time, um, studying ayahuasca.

Yes, and that's kind of an interesting story, so maybe you could tell everybody who's watching and listening how ayahuasca is prepared and also how unlikely it was that that preparation method was discovered. And I'd like to know if you have any more insight into how in the world that ever came about.

Yes, yes, yes to both. I, so I did my PhD research, uh, at the University of British Columbia was basically about ayahuasca, about looking at the chemistry, pharmacology, botanical sources, traditional uses of ayahuasca. Another aspect of my thesis research was kind of a comparison of ayahuasca with another much more obscure episodic psychedelic, uh, called ukuhe, uh, which comes from an entirely different botanical source. But like ayahuasca, it is also an orally active form of dimethyltryptamine, and that's the key to this.

DMT is a short-acting psychedelic, but it's not, uh, orally active by itself. If you consume DMT, if you drink a tea that contains DMT or, you know, just eat DMT or whatever, it's not active because there are enzymes in the gut, monoamine oxidases, that will inactivate DMT before it's ever absorbed in the active form. What indigenous people have done when they prepare ayahuasca, they combine it with another plant that contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors, this class of compounds called beta-carbolines, very potent, very selective MAO inhibitors.

So if you make a beverage, a drink, or decoction is really the technical term, with a plant that contains DMT and a plant that contains these beta-carbolines, then it becomes orally active. Instead of a 10 to 20-minute experience, which is what you get when you smoke DMT, or vape DMT, they do that now these days, or inject it even, you get about 20 to 30 minutes of an experience. But in the oral form, it stretches it out to six or seven hours. So it's a very different experience. It's not as intense, but in some way, it's deeper, it's more profound. Because the thing with taking DMT by a parental route, other than through the gut, is it is profound, it's very intense.

It's also so fast that by the time you're, you know, by the time you're just beginning to sort of get to the place, that's already fading, you know, so you come back with not a lot of information, that kind of a sense of astonishment, but not a lot of hard data. So the idea of ayahuasca is you get to spend more time in that place, in that altered state, and there's a chance to learn more.

Now, how did this come about, the question always comes up? How did these indigenous people figure out this combination, one plant containing beta-carbolines and another containing DMT, out of the 80,000 or so species in the Amazon? How did they stumble on this one combination? Was it trial and error?

Or how, if you talk to the people, they will say, well, the plants told us. You know, but to a Western scientist, this doesn't make a lot of sense. You know, the plants, the plants told you? What are you talking about?

You know, actually, I think the real story is a little more prosaic in a sense that in, uh, in our, uh, ESPD 50 conference, we had an anthropologist, Dr. Manolo Torres, who presented on this. And, uh, the fact is that at a certain point, uh, maybe a thousand years ago, possibly a little earlier than that, there were a very active, there were different cultures that were living sort of in proximity to each other in the region where Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru now come together.

These cultures were very, uh, experimentally oriented toward plants. They had shamanic traditions and, uh, they used, uh, they were also very active in making chicha. They were essentially beer producers. They distilled, or they didn't distill, but they had different fermented beverages prepared for fruits and grains and things like that. And they had many different kind of teachers mostly prepared from manioc. And they were also experimentalists. They were like, they were like, uh, craft brewers today, sort of, you know, craft brewers, well, they have their beer, but then they'll just reach for anything on the shelf or an ingredient will come up and they'll say, oh, let's make a, let's make a craft brew with, uh, with cave in it or with some other, some other plant.

Let's make something interesting. Well, the people making the chicha had the same sort of curiosity. And in, in their medicinal pharmacopoeia, they had the snuffs. Right, that's the other way in the Amazon that the DMT is used in the form of snuff. And they had these snuffs, they had these ethnobotanical snuffs, which don't require MAO inhibitors because you take them, you know, as a snuff. They also had that, uh, Banner Stiraopsis, which is the vine that contains the beta carbolines. They use that separately as a medicinal plant for various reasons. And it has some psychoactivity.

Basically, I think they stumbled on this formulation. You know, the plants were in the mix, as it were, and they stumbled on this formulation. But it wasn't entirely trial and error. You know, it was, it was more like an educated guess. Not really from the standpoint of biochemistry. They didn't think in terms of monoamine oxidase inhibition and that sort of thing, but they were familiar with the effects of these different plants. And they thought, well, what happens if we mix them? You know, and they did, and they had a spectacular result designed for anyone to sell anywhere.

Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big businesses. An all-in-one e-commerce platform. Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere. Whether you're selling succulents or stilettos, start selling with Shopify and join the platform simplifying commerce for millions of businesses worldwide. With Shopify, you'll customize your online store to your brand, discover new customers, and build the relationships that will keep them coming back.

Shopify covers all the sales channels to successfully grow your business, from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce platform, even across social media platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Thanks to 24/7 support and free on-demand business courses, Shopify is here to help you succeed every step of the way. It's how every minute new sellers around the world make their first sale with Shopify, and you can too. Go to shopify.com/jbp for a free 14-day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to shopify.com/jbp right now, that's shopify.com/jbp.

I was talking to Brian Murray Rescue I think it's probably, yeah, more than a year ago. He wrote The Immortality Key. And you know, he was, although a lawyer, he was, the book is about ethnopharmacology in many regards. And it sounds to me like the account that you're making of what happened in the Amazon jungle sounds to me very much like what seemed to happen in ancient Greek culture with their formulation of various psychedelic wines.

That's right. So all these different people were just brewing all these different concoctions and experimenting to see what produced the most, uh, remarkable effect. And, and in Greece, they seem to have stumbled across something that was perhaps LSD-based or essentially LSD-based, whereas in the Amazon jungle, they, they came across both DMT and the and the chemical that inhibited its breakdown. And so that's, it's very interesting to see that that is likely the case in both those disparate cultures.

Right, well, shamanism, which is what we're talking about here. Uh, shamans are experimentalists, you know, and, and many of our, even most important medicines, again, we can point to aeropoisons. I mentioned aeropoisons before, and arrow poisons are not regarded as medicines in the context in which they're used. You know, they're, they're used as poisons for hunting. On the other hand, the ingredients in arrow poisons do have medicinal properties that have been recognized in the 20th century, and they're, they're important.

They're important medicines for, uh, for muscular surgery and this sort of thing. They block the neuromuscular junction, and the reason I mention aeropoisons is that that's another example of people do what I like to characterize as mucking around with plants. You know, throw things together and see what happens, you know? And that's true of the psychoactive plants and these different chicha formulations that they have, or the arrow poisons, which are not just one ingredient. They're complex mixtures of many kinds of psychoactive or, you know, more or less toxic plants.

So it was curiosity-driven, you know, the people immersed in this Amazonian biome, this, this chemical ecology, if you will, uh, of, of complex secondary plant products and, and driven by curiosity. You know, what happens if we take plant A and plant B and combine them, or plant A, B, C, and D and mix them all together, and what goes, what happens? So in that sense, their approach is very scientific, you know, because science really, discovery is driven by curiosity.

These folks were curious. They didn't keep notes, they didn't write lab reports. You know what knowledge that they had, they transmitted through the culture, through oral traditions. And as this knowledge became, you know, more widely disseminated, other groups began to also take the core knowledge but then expand on it because they had species, you know, in their biomes that maybe not were originally around.

And that's the way, uh, that's the way I think folk knowledge works. It's a, uh, it's an evolutionary process. It's a process of sharing information and accumulating this knowledge that then is, uh, you know, transmitted through oral traditions and migrations and this sort of thing. So it's, it's not formal science, but sort of the impulse that leads to this is curiosity-driven discovery, and that is at the core of science in my opinion.

So I was, I gotta, I want to tie a couple of things together here. I recently talked with Dr. Carl Friston, who works at University College in London, and he's formulated a theory of cognitive function that's very influential, or elaborated the theory of cognitive function that's very influential. And I want to run it by you because I think it's relevant to, well, it's definitely relevant, perhaps to your interests in, uh, in the effects of psychedelics.

So Friston and other observers have posited that we, we look at the world through a hierarchy of concepts and that this is necessary and that AI systems do exactly do the same thing. Um, and that the nested, the hierarchically nested concepts range from those that are trivial, that you would just use in a throwaway manner, let's say maybe your opinion about what you're going to do in the next 10 minutes might fall into that category, to those that are, uh, that are the profound axioms upon which you predicate your life.

So for example, if you're married, one of your axiomatic conceptions or, or presumptions, or even perceptions might be the faithfulness of your partner and the willingness of that person and you to continue to engage in your long-term relationship. And then you, so then imagine a hierarchy of presumption such that some presumptions are much more fundamental than others or, in other words, upon some presumptions many other presumptions depend.

And then for some other presumptions, there, like I said, they're just the moment, the opinion of the moment and easily replaceable. Now then imagine that there's a gradient of information processing so that some neurological mechanisms process the relatively trivial conceptions and others process the more profound and deeper presumptions. And then imagine that's laid across the hemisphere so that the left hemisphere more or less deals with the particulars and the right hemisphere deals with the more fundamental presumptions.

And then imagine further, and this has been reasonably well documented now, that variants of serotonin affect different levels of that hierarchy of conception, so that the serotonergic systems that are affected by psychedelics in fact deep presumptions and the serotonin mechanisms that are affected by antidepressants stabilize the entire structure.

And what Friston's work, along with Carhart Harris and others working on this as well, indicates is that psychedelics induce entropy into the conceptual hierarchy at the most fundamental level. And so, and maybe that's associated the hemispheric specialization element is something that I added to that net set of presuppositions partly because of Investigations I've done into hemispheric specialization but also because of the work of Ian McGilchrist, who's been positing such things.

And so it looks like the psychedelics affect systems that are naturally affected by high levels of stress because when you're extremely stressed maybe that's a time to revisit some of your fundamental presumptions because something has gone wrong in your life so that you're fundamentally stressed. And so in some sense, what the psychedelics seem to do is mimic the process of revolutionary cognitive adaptation.

Okay, so that's only half the question. But then I have another question though, and that all strikes me as highly plausible except for one thing, and this is a stumbling block for me and maybe you can shed some light on it. I know this is a complicated question, but I read Rick Strassman's book, uh, The Spirit Molecule after meeting you, I believe. And I know Dr. Strassman, who's a pretty, um, let's say mainstream psychiatrist, was quite shocked, to put it mildly, by what his research subjects were reporting as a consequence of being administered DMT.

They would report being shot out of their body and then going to other places and encountering what were essentially alien beings of one form or another. And when Strassman would suggest to such people that this was like a dream or maybe they were encountering something akin to a Jungian archetype, they would say, “No, you don't understand. This was more real than being there than being in reality itself.”

And so, so this is the thing that doesn't fit for me is that, and I know that in the shamanic rituals that are associated with ayahuasca, people often report encounters with entities. And I don't understand how that, if that's true, and I believe it to be true phenomenologically, I don't understand how that fits in with the idea that what the psychedelics are doing are loosening the constraints on our most fundamental presuppositions.

And so, sorry for the tremendously long, uh, build-up to that question, but it's a complicated question, and I'm wondering what you think about, well, first of all, the theory that psychedelics do loosen up our conceptions at the most fundamental level, but then how you square that with the reports that people make continually of meeting entities of one form or another while they're under the influence of these chemicals.

Well, uh, how long have we got here? I mean, it's going to take a while to unpack this. Good, good, but I'm looking forward to it, man. As to the first, uh, the first part of this, the Carhartt Harris notion that, uh, psychedelics, I think one way they put it is that they disable temporarily this so-called default mode network. You know, which is, which is kind of the framework that we construct.

I like to call it the reality hallucination. It's the, it's the modeled, if the brain creates some model reality that we inhabit. You know, we, we don't live, we don't inhabit reality itself because it would be too overwhelming. What we experience is a schematic or a model of reality that is much less information dense than reality itself. And the brain does this so that we can cope with it.

You know, uh, a lot of what the brain does, as you well know, you're a neuroscientist at least to some degree, you know, that what the brain does is filter information out. There are gated mechanisms. A lot of information from the external world through our sensory neural interface never makes it into the brain because it's, it's not, it's, I mean, it's stuff that it's not important, it's just extraneous to our construction of this model of reality that we have to inhabit just in order to navigate, you know, in order to function.

And what psychedelics do is they temporarily disable those gated mechanisms. They just throw the gates wide open, you know, and you get flooded with all this information that normally is not accessible. And that can be a very useful thing from a therapeutic angle because we can get trapped in our default mode network in our reality hallucination, if you will, our reality model.

Uh, it can be dysfunctional, it can be not helpful, you know, and, and then you get things like addiction and PTSD and, and so on. And I think, I think something, I think the, the, the core of the therapeutic use of the therapeutic promise, if you will, of psychedelics is they let you step out of this reference frame temporarily, look at it as though, you know, as though you're separated it, and it helps give you insights as to, you know, your existential situation.

So it enables you to look at trauma or addiction or depression or things like that from a different angle, from a different perspective that normally we can't because we're trapped inside this, this default mode network framework. And I think, I think that's helpful, and I think that that lets you re-engineer it in a certain way.

And, and, and this is actually reflected on the neurological level because we know that psilocybin, things like this can actually, uh, you know, lead to changes in neural architecture and connectivity and all of these things. Neuroplasticity is the overarching term for this, and it's really so you disrupt, you blow up the default mode network, but the brain is resilient. The brain is always going to tend toward equilibrium, right?

So it's going to fall back together, but it's going to fall back together in a more functional way. I think it's very similar. In fact, maybe I think it's quite similar to what happens when you reboot your computer. You get this big reset, essentially, and it comes back together, but it works more efficiently because it's, you purged all the cludge out of it that builds up in, in this system.

And in that sense, it's very much like sort of purging your computer when you reset it. You get rid of all that stuff and it works more efficiently, so that's important. I think for the therapeutic, that's, that's really the therapeutic promise. Almost everything that psychedelics, that, that people are excited about psychedelics from a therapeutic standpoint I think has to do with this, uh, ability to, uh, you know, first of all disable and then reconstruct the default mode network in a way that's more functional.

And, you know, more, more, well, simply in a way that's more functional, less dysfunctional. So I think that's what's going on. Now, when you blow it up, especially with something like DMT, which is where you get more than other places, but ayahuasca, these other things as well, you sometimes have a feeling or you get a definite sense that you are in a place where, as people say, it seems more real than real and there are entities there or what's perceived to be entities and you're in communication with them.

And they are very interested in communicating and transmitting information. Uh, I mean, so a number of questions come up about this, right? People have these experiences, not always, not always on all psychedelics, not every time, but under some circumstances, people have these experiences. I just came from this conference in the UK a couple of weeks ago, so I'm well-primed for this because this was the topic of the conference. It was called The Sentient Other, and everyone was presenting their ideas about the entities.

My, my first, you know, I mean, I don't think you can take psychedelics and not be open-minded. I think that one thing that psychedelics don't do teach us is how little we know. It's a useful reminder of how little we know about the universe, about reality, about the way things are, you know? And in that sense, it can be very useful because science, especially scientists, particularly, tend to be arrogant, you know?

There's a tendency for science to say we pretty much have this thing figured out, you know? And psychedelics are a reminder that no, actually, we have only a very tiny slice of it figured out, and even that is subject to question because that's the nature of science, right? You never prove a theory. All you can do is not disprove it. You know, so we understand in great detail a very small piece of reality, but there's an infinitude of reality beyond that that we know basically nothing.

So we need science. Science and scientists should be humble. They should always keep that in mind, how little we know. That said, though, so with that preamble, I do have to say, uh, you know, reductionism or skepticism or what they sometimes call Occam's Razor approach, the principle of parsimony is a useful tool in science.

It is a statement that the what explains the data, the simplest model that explains the data, let's start there, you know, and then it's shortcomings, its limitations, its deficiencies will come to light as we begin to investigate phenomena. And eventually, we're gonna, but, but science starts with hypotheses about the way things are, what my granddad used to call how the board ate the cabbage, you know?

Uh, it begins with theories about the way a certain aspect of reality is. You create a hypothesis, you test it against the observed data, and if something comes up that the data, you know, can, that your model can't explain, then you say, okay, the model is deficient. We either have to modify the model, maybe we have to blow up the model, maybe it's completely invalid. Usually, that's not the way it works. I mean, you tweak it, you change, you know, a thing here, a thing there, and you make it fit better with what you know, what we presume that we know, right?

When it comes to entities, here’s the thing I know that people say, “Oh no, this is real. This is more real than reality itself.” But, you know, people are not epistemologists. People are not qualified to say what is more real than reality itself, you know? I mean, people may think it's more real. It may seem more real than reality itself. You know, we've all had vivid dreams, right? And we wake up and we think, “Oh my God, you know, that was so real.”

But you know it was a dream, right? Because you woke up and it's not there. And so I think that the judgments made by people who encounter these entities, uh, you know, the, the fact that they have this impression that these things are real and more real than reality itself does not necessarily make it so.

Okay, so, so, let me, okay, so let me ask you this. So, um, obviously when we dream, as you pointed out, we can encounter entities of our imagination. Those are other dream characters. Alright, I had a client once who, who was a lucid dreamer and a very good one, right? And she could actually ask her dream characters what they represented symbolically, and they would tell her, right?

And so, okay, so let me modify the question that I posed to you before and tell me what you think of this. So we know that the psychedelics produce an increment in trait openness, and we know with the site, with the psilocybin in particular, that if people have a mystical experience with psilocybin once or a couple of times, that their level of trait openness, which is the creativity dimension, increases by one standard deviation, and that appears more or less permanent.

So we could say that one of the things the psychedelics do by loosening the strictures on the morph on the more fundamental realms of conception is place people into a state that's analogous to the state of creativity. And so if you're creative, you can shift conceptions, and the downside of that is you shift them when it's not necessary and the upside is now and then you shift them in a direction that's extremely productive.

And so that shifting becomes more possible under the influence of psychedelics. And then we could say that while it's possible that one of the, uh, sources of creativity might be the capacity of the human imagination to generate fictional personalities, we do that in dreams. Obviously, your brain is, we would say, your brain is producing these fictional characters that have many of the attributes of real characters. When you dream, you can see them, you can hear them, you can interact with them. You don't have immediate access to their contents of consciousness.

They seem like autonomous beings. And so we could say, maybe what happens when you're experimenting with psychedelics is that you enter a dreamscape that's populated by creatures of the imagination that have a certain degree of autonomy. And the influx of information that's also characteristic of the psychedelic experience produces that sense of hyperreality that's then attributed to the characters themselves. Does that seem plausible?

I know it's just a hypothesis, obviously, but...

Well, but it does, I mean, obviously, all we're doing is trying to construct hypotheses, you know, that fit the data, that fit what we know so far, always with the caveat that we don't know much and the picture is incomplete and so on. But here's the thing I think, I mean the question perpetually that comes up with these entities is you encounter these entities in the psychedelic state and then the question is, are they real?

But I think you have to step back from that and first of all, you have to say, well, what do you mean by real? You know?

Well, yeah, that's a problem, man.

Yeah, yeah, that's a big problem. I mean, my sort of default position is anything that you experience is real. It's real because it can be experienced. But does it originate within, does it come from the collective unconscious? Does it come from out there in some other dimension? And do these terms even make sense?

I mean, you just get into it an epistemological mess because how can you even posit there is an outside? I mean one thing that psychedelics do is they teach you it's all one. You know, there's no separation between the self and the cosmos at large and all that. So it's like, it's a non-starter. It's a zero-sum game to, you know, to maybe it's more useful to say rather than to say, are they real? You know, because they're real enough that they're experienced.

So in that sense, they're real whether they're inside or outside, originate from the self or some other dimension. Maybe the question we should ask is, is the information that they transmit useful? Can we learn from it? Can they teach us something that we could not otherwise know? You know, and, and that seems to me potentially a more useful question. You know, and my brother was all about this.

He would, he would take, uh, high doses of mushrooms, you know, by himself and, uh, in total darkness. That was his formula, you know, heroic doses and total darkness. And he would have these dialogues, these conversations with these entities, and it was all about how do I know you're real?

How, or more like, can you tell me something that I cannot possibly know? And if you do that, I'll know you're real. And they would say, well, we don't care if you think you're we're real or not, you know? But, but and then again how do you define some, how do you define something that you can't possibly know? You know, and if they say, I mean, you could say, give me, you know, the square root of a large number, and if it comes back and it turns out it's correct as trivial as that is, that would demonstrate that it was real information they're giving to you.

But it still doesn't really know you know?

No, and there are mathematical geniuses who can do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so let me push, let me push on that a little bit. I, everything that you said so far seems to me to be rock solid. Um, so with regards to these entities, again, so, um, I was reminded of two things. I mean, Carl Jung spent years talking to, uh, entities of his imagination, documenting that in books like The Red Book. He made that a visionary practice and had illuminating conversations with specters of his own imagination.

But of course, he also believed that there was a collective element to those. And so you might say that, well, to, to the degree, for example, that we're each inhabited by dark impulses, we might say, well, we're each prey to the same demonic forces. That's one way of thinking about it. And they, they're the same and they're transpersonal, and they exist to some degree cross-culturally, and they spend time.

And so these creatures of imagination can have histories and can inhabit us in some real sense, and they can do that collectively. And then, so, so that complicates things tremendously, but then I would also ask in your investigations, your long-term investigations of multiple ayahuasca experiences across different people, are there any commonalities of entities that strike you as particularly significant?

I know people talk about clown figures, for example, mechanical clowns in the DMT state and health machines and this sort of thing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The health machines. And of course, that's, that's complicated too because once one person starts talking about it, that might increase the probability that other people would experience it. But have you seen commonalities of entity experience that would suggest something, the existence of something that is at least transpersonal, even though it might also still be subjective? Whatever that means in such a context?

Yes, yes, I have. And I think this exists in these, in these, uh, shamanic traditions, uh, and the ayahuascaros are particularly good, uh, good example of that. You know, uh, uh, and, and again, I, I have not seen anything that convinces me. I mean, I'm basically a Jungian, you know, so I believe in the collective unconscious as this, it's a good model, this, this transpersonal realm of shared archetypes and all that.

And then there's the individual unconscious. I haven't seen anything in the reports of the psychonauts that would that would not fit into that model that says, oh, well, this doesn't really fit. This is outside that model. And it, and it, and so that model's not valid. I haven't seen that.

I, I think that it is. I think basically these entities, they are experienced as real, but they come from the collective unconscious. And if you, if you look at the ayahuasca traditions, and there is a, uh, an interesting book here that's very illustrative of this, which many people know about. It's, uh, it's the book that, uh, you're familiar with, the artist Pablo Amaringo, the visionary Peruvian artist.

He and Luis Eduardo Luna wrote a, uh, a book. He painted his visions, right? He remembered all his visions in perfect detail, painted these visions. And Eduardo, and he collaborated on a book called Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. Uh, it's still in print. The book is remarkable because it's its typical coffee table-style format with full-color illustrations of, of the visions on one page.

And then Eduardo's descriptions in English on the facing page, dissecting all the elements of the entities and everything else that you see in these visions as narrated by Pablo. I mean, Pablo, you know, Eduardo Luna was basically just the transcriber, but, uh, Pablo described in great detail, dissected each one of these paintings, and the and they're about, I guess, 20 or so of these paintings in this book.

And it's basically a course in vegetalismo. It's talking about vegetalismo, this practice which is really an amalgam of many indigenous traditions and kind of mushed together into a mestizo tradition. But he describes, uh, these entities, you know, they all have names, they have a particular appearance, and you know the plants, the animals, even, you know, there are UFOs. There are all kinds of things in this, in these visions.

Pablo describes every one of them, and any ayahuascaro in training, working, you know, in my apprentices under, under Pablo, or any of these traditional ayahuascaros, they're gonna see these things. You know, I mean, this is a cultural context. They're going to see these things, and what they see is going to be similar.

You know, so it's sort of like it's sort of like, uh, Terence's, uh, you know, self-transforming elf machines. I mean, Terence says that, you know, he has a huge voice in the meme sphere. Pretty soon everybody's seeing self-transforming elf machines. You know, people, that's what people see.

Well, you can imagine, you know, the, the brain is obviously an organ that can produce personalities because it produces our personalities. And it seems to me that it's highly probable that the way that we, we organize information is in the form of personality. So, I mean, and I certainly got a fair bit of this from thinking about Jung's work.

I mean, if you're inhabited by a rage state, which I think is a good way of thinking about it, you might think, well, what form does the anger take? And the answer is, well, it has a personality. You might act like enraged people that you've seen in movies. You might act like enraged people that you've seen in your life. The rage has a goal, which is the crushing of the opponent, let's say. And it has perceptions, and it has action patterns. It's a personality.

And you could conceptualize the rage spirit as Aries, the God of War, and that would be a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it. And it could be that all of our micro perceptions and all of our macro perceptions for that matter have the intrinsic form of personality and that that's partly what we encounter when we dream.

And so I was thinking too, you know, that as, as the gods, if the gods are aggregates of micro-personalities, that might be one way of thinking about it. They're micro-personalities that are aggregated within societies across time. And then, and then can be apprehended collectively to some degree.

As you move towards a monotheistic vision of the world, what you're moving toward is the ultimate aggregation of all these socially modified micro-personalities into one conceptual scheme. And that would parallel that hierarchy that of cognition and conception that, well, we already discussed that people like Friston are working on.

And so it isn't that surprising, I suppose, if you think about it that way. If the brain is a personality producing machine, so to speak, that there are certain states that you can encounter under the influence of chemical alteration where you encounter those personalities, even those that have some degree of autonomy. I mean, rage has some degree of autonomy, and so does lust, and so does thirst, and so does hunger. They're not, they're not exactly you. They're forces or personalities, which is a more accurate way of thinking about that you can fall prey to.

And so why can't why can't that occur in a more complex manner?

Well, I think it can. I mean, I mean, this totally fits within the Jungian model. You know that within the collective unconscious, there are these, uh, I forget the exact term that he used, but these complexes, almost like, uh, autonomous personalities, you know?

And, and, and multiple personality disorder is a recognized thing. And I guess in some ways, all of us have it in a certain sense in that we have, you know, we do have these multiple personalities, but they, like rage, lust, and, and so on, but they don't take over the controls, you know, most of the time. They're suppressed to a certain degree, but they're always there. They're influencing whoever it is in the cabin at the bridge that's running the thing.

And in pathology, they can't take over, you know, and then you've got a problem.

Well, they do with Tourette's Syndrome, they do with Tourette's.

They do with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and you know, and you can think about the relationship between these motivational states like rage or anxiety, let's say, that are transpersonal in that everyone experiences them.

We know that with the psychedelic experience that set is very important, and that if someone is in a negative emotional state or situation that elicits fear and let's say rage, and then they embark upon a psychedelic experience that that particular state can be magnified beyond belief.

And so that's a good way to have a hellish experience. And so, you know, we, we do have to remember, and I know of course you do, that the psychedelic experiences that we're talking about are ritualized so that a, an absolutely dreadful outcome is less probable.

But you might say if it was just done randomly, it could easily be the magnification of a state of terror or a state of rage as the magnification as a state of enlightenment or bliss, right? So this is the importance of the ritual, the ritual context.

This is exactly that, what these traditions have grown around is the idea that there needs to be an appropriate set and setting. There needs to be an appropriate scent. The most important variable certainly, and I, you know, I sometimes say in my talks, I say ayahuasca is a liquid. Ayahuasca will fill any vessel you create for it, you know, and hopefully the vessel is appropriate to, uh, you know, to foster a positive experience and insights and all that.

But we know that it's not always that way. You know, we know that, you know, again, like with any, uh, spiritual tradition where you're finding where you're dealing with powerful spiritual, uh, forces, uh, they're always bad apples. You know, they're a bad shop, and, and they're, they're bad shamans who don't have your best interests at heart, you know?

And there's a term for it in ayahuasca. It's called ruharia. I mean, basically witches or sorcerers. They, they have this understanding. These people are power freaks, you know? They want control over other people, and they'll often, you know, use ayahuasca that way. They'll often, you know, spike their ayahuasca with datura, with brutmania, which is a drug that, you know, basically renders people both delirious and confused but also very suggestible, you know?

And it's, it's used as a date rape drug and things like that. Some, you know, bad, bad shamans will put that stuff into ayahuasca. Uh, so you want to, you want to be careful. There is no, uh, you know, there, there's no good housekeeping seal for ayahuasca. You want to be careful who you get mixed up with, right?

Well, the same thing applies when you're looking for a psychotherapist. I mean, and, and in, in terms of the importance of set in relationship to positive transformation, I mean Carl Rogers tried to lay out some of the preconditions for successful psychotherapy. And so I'll just run through those because they're very much akin to the manner in which the stage needs to be set for a positive psychedelic experience.

So Rogers essentially, I'm paraphrasing, but, but it's okay. Is so, first of all, the person who's coming to psychotherapy has to want to change. It has to be voluntary, and that's actually something that's been hammered home by now generations of psychotherapeutic practitioners regardless of their theoretical school. That voluntary exposure to information that might have a transformative quality, so that can be threatening.

Voluntary exposure is redemptive. It has to be voluntary. So you have to want to change. And then if you come to psychotherapy for it to work, it has to be embarked on in a spirit of mutual trust. And so there's some courage there, um, on, on both the part of the practitioner and the client.

And then you also have to swear or vow in some sense to engage in truthful exploration and dialogue. And so it has to, you have to admit you have a problem. So there's a certain humility there. You have to be willing to learn and change. You have to engage in truthful exploration and dialogue, and you have to be aiming for improvement.

And if all of those things are there, then, well, in principle, the psychotherapeutic process can begin. And you might say, well, if all those things are there, then learning itself can begin. And it might be that the set that is being established at the beginning of a psychedelic experience is just precisely akin to establishing the preconditions for learning and personality expansion itself.

Because, you know, in this conversation, you and I, look, we're, we're sitting here, we're kind of relaxed. We trust each other for a variety of different reasons. We've met before, but I, I know of your reputation scientifically, and I trust your work, and, and, and so we can embark on a creative, creative dialogue that's hypothetically mutually redemptive.

Because we're both going to learn something, and we can bring everyone else along for the ride. And I don't really see that as any different in some fundamental sense than establishing the proper set for a psychedelic experience or the proper preconditions for any relationship, including a therapeutic relationship.

Right, I, I think you're exactly right. I think those preconditions are an almost exact match for the ideal set and setting. You know, I mean, there's a great deal of, uh, emphasis on the set, the setting, the sept.

And I, I don't limit the set to just, uh, you know, in my mind, it's it's everything you bring to the table. It's not just your mood at the moment or, you know, it's everything you bring to the table. It's you, you're the same, you're always the same, but you're bringing it to this very special situation.

And then the other variables that are sort of in the background, not often mentioned, but very important are the dose and the medicine. You know, because you're, that's part of this four-part dynamic of variables that's going to interact. And the most important thing about a, a therapeutic psychedelic session really, like you say, it applies to any therapeutic session, it's number one, you know, a safe setting, a setting where you feel, uh, you trust the other person, you feel that the situation is safe, not threatening, and you're willing to learn.

You're willing to surrender. You do everything you can to, to make sure everything’s kosher, and then at the critical moment you just have to let go. Because that's an important thing. You have to say, okay, let go. You know, I mean it's kind of like jumping off a cliff or out of a plane. You trust that the parachute is going to open at some point, you know, and you just have to accept that.

Yeah, well, we do that while we're talking, you and I. I mean, because at the beginning of this podcast, neither of us knew what direction the conversation was going to take. But we, what we're doing in some sense is loosening up our cognitive structures. You and I both have some perspectives on what the psychedelic experience might consist of and what psychological transformation means, but we're willing to play with that to some degree.

And so we're willing to open ourselves up to the transformative process that obtains during the course of what should, what we try to make into a genuine dialogue. And so, and I again, I do see that as exactly the essentially exactly the same thing. And I think you can think about it in terms of classical virtue in some sense.

So what you want to do is bring a, an attitude of humility and courageous trust to the situation. And the humility would be, well, you know, good as I am, I probably still have a few things to learn. And the courageous trust is, well, if we undertake the process correctly, then the information that will be generated will actually be of benefit to everyone involved.

But that's a statement of faith in some sense, right, because you don't know that to begin with, but then it's faith in the dialogue essentially. And I don't see that, I don't see that as being particularly different in the psychedelic situation.

No, I don't either. It's exaggerated and intensified.

Exactly, exactly.

What have you made of the research that's been conducted in the labs at, uh, by Roland Griffiths and his crew?

Well, well, I mean, uh, obviously it's groundbreaking, you know, and, uh, Roland and his colleagues are, uh, you know, they have set the bar very high and they're the pioneers for sure. And, uh, you know, everyone else is kind of following along from that. I think that they have, uh, you know, particularly of their work with end-of-life anxiety and this sort of thing.

I mean, I think that's setting new paradigms for medicine, uh, and, and it's addressing a really important deficit in, in medicine, right? Because medicine, the way it's practiced, biomedicine, I sort of distinct make a distinction there from say alternative complementary medicine, but biomedicine is about preventing people from dying, right?

And they will go to great lengths to, uh, keep people alive, maybe to like certain like cancer therapy and this sort of thing maybe going too far to keep people alive. It's like survival at all costs. Medicine needs to face the fact that everybody dies, you know, sooner or later, the therapy is gonna fail no matter what it is.

But to view it as a failure is an incorrect perception. At a certain point, you have to reach a point where you say this patient, this person is not going to live. Rather than focus on keeping them alive at all costs, let's think about giving them a peaceful death, you know, facilitating a beautiful death. That concept that death can be beautiful is something that is missing from medicine as its practice.

And I I think Iowa, I think that psychedelics offer an opportunity to reintroduce that concept, you know?

Right. So just to review for people who, who are listening, so Roland Griffiths, who conducts psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins and is a very solid scientist, to say the least, has produced studies showing that with patients who have a terminal prognosis of cancer that a mystical experience induced by psilocybin can produce a profound reduction in mortality-related anxiety.

And that's a very sterile way of describing what's actually a remarkable event because it sounds, in some sense, like it's reduced to simple Occam's razor chemistry—you give people a dose of psilocybin and they're less anxious. It's like that isn't what's happening. What's happening, and we don't know the details of what's happening, what's happening is that imagine that one of the canonical fears that people bring to life existentially is fear of suffering and mortality.

I mean that in public, uh, humiliation and excommunication are probably the two big classes of fear. So we'll say fear of mortal suffering, and then a mystical experience undertaken under the appropriate circumstances can reduce the fear of mortal suffering itself under the most dire circumstances, and the dire circumstances would be wind directly confronted with the inevitability of mortality and suffering.

And so, but I haven't been able to, uh, gather much information on exactly how the transformation that's induced by the psychedelic substance actually makes itself manifest because that has to be a very fundamental cognitive and perceptual retooling to be much more sanguine in the face of death itself.

Very big things are shifting underneath the surface, and so do you have any sense with, with your vast experience in such domains, do you have any experience or any sense of what it is that shifts?

Yeah, I do. I, I think again, it goes back to this, what we were talking about before about stepping outside your cognitive reference frame, stepping outside your default mode mode framework, whatever that might be, giving you a chance to look at death as you might look at any, any problem that you have anxiety or trauma or whatever, look at it from a different perspective.

And what has impressed me about the reports of people, uh, who have had this end-of-life therapy with psilocybin, what, what seems to be the therapeutic, uh, what is most beneficial for them is they come away from the experience, and they're not preoccupied with death anymore. You know, they're not looking ahead to this moment of dying.

You know, they know it's out there, but their attitude is, “Well, wait a minute, I'm alive now.” You know, I’m alive. Let’s focus on that. Death is there; it will come, but I think that's tremendously, uh, helpful for them and anxiety relieving to say, “Let's just focus day to day on the moment,” you know, being alive in the moment, and that relieves their anxiety greatly.

And it's interesting, you know, that, uh, you know, we don't evaluate like, like many cancer drugs, chemotherapy and that sort of thing, they're evaluated, their effectiveness is based on how much, how long did they prologue life, you know? Did they live longer than would be expected if they didn't take this chemotherapy?

Often many of these things do extend life, but by the time you finally die, you're just, you're a wreck, you know? It destroys the body, you know? And it's interesting that nobody is claiming that psilocybin cures cancer, but it certainly can extend life, you know, beyond expectation. I mean, there's a woman up here that there's a movie out called Dose Two, and she, I’ve been in this movie, part of it called Dose Two, and she started out with, uh, terminal, uh, diagnosis of, uh, I think it was, uh, colon cancer, liver cancer or something; she was told she wouldn't have, she would live about six months.

That was five years ago. You know, she's had two psilocybin sessions. You would never think of this person as being sick. They don't appear to be sick. Her attitude is good, and you know, she knows she's dying, but she doesn't live every moment anticipating that.

She’s more about, she’s living in the moment, and it really, it's beautiful to see, you know? Because her, her family life, her relationship with her husband, her friends and all that, that's what she's enjoying, and she's having a good time. Everybody knows she's gonna die sooner or later. They've stopped predicting, but that—and again, as you said, that's also—that's true of all of us to some degree.

Of course, yeah, and the end can come at any moment. And to be preoccupied with that obviously can produce very counterproductive consequences.

Well, so I just did a, uh, a lecture series on The Sermon on the Mount for this Peterson Academy that we're putting together, an online educational initiative, and I, I want to just run that by you for a second in relationship to what we just described.

So as far as I can tell, the ethos in The Sermon on the Mount is quite straightforward. It's not party like there's there's no tomorrow because, uh, the Lilies of the Field do not toil and do not spin. It's not a hippie ethos at all. It's certainly not tuned in, turn on, and drop out. It's, it's two parts. The first part is it's to love God with all your heart and soul.

And that means to me, technically speaking, psychologically speaking, let's say to do something like orient yourself as much as you possibly can to the highest good that you're capable of conceptualizing. And so, for example, when you're ensconced in a family and facing a mortal challenge, one of the higher goods that you might attend to is to make the most out of every moment that you have with the people that you love.

And so, and then once you're oriented in that direction, then to pay as much attention to the moment as possible. Right? To let the day be sufficient. Let the troubles of the day be sufficient. To, to stay, say that sufficient unto the day are the troubles therein. It's an injunction to focus on the moment, and then you might say, well, there's a tremendous amount of information in the moment, a tremendous amount of redemptive information.

And the more you pay attention to the moment, the more you open yourself up to what's in some sense the infinite complexity of the moment. And so you might say if you orient yourself properly, and that would be a matter of getting the set right at all times, not just when you're preparing for a psychedelic experience.

If you get the set right and you open yourself up to the moment, then you can find all the meaning that you need to immerse yourself in life in that moment, and that's dependent on the intensity of your attention.

Yeah, well, that's okay, so that's very useful, that conceptualization. So your sense is that it turns people's, the insights, the mystical insights turn people away from the precipice of death to the infinite possibility of the moment.

Exactly. That fear of death might be one of those screens in some sense that are blocking or inhibiting the flow of redemptive information. And so the psychedelic experience obliterates that and says, remember what's right in front of you.

Yeah, and the fear of death is, you know, this is what the psychedelic experience helps defuse, you know, by, by refocusing on the moment. I am hopeful. I don't know if it will ever happen, but I, I think the next step in, in psilocybin sort of psychedelic therapy for the end of life, uh, and interesting, uh, threshold could be crossed, if you will, if people would, if, uh, you could arrange this therapy so that the family members could also participate with the dying person. You know, can you imagine the dynamic that that would let, that would engender?

You know, people to share this experience of, you know, the loved one's impending immortality, impending mortality for sure, but just the richness of the relationships, the ability that psychedelics give you some time to honestly relate to your loved ones, you know, in a way that is unfiltered.

And you know how hard it is sometimes for us to really express to someone our love, you know, even though we, we love them. But sometimes the words "I love you," is a hard thing to say, you know? And I, I think it would be very helpful for the family to be able to, uh, not only be present but also be in the altered state with the people, you know?

And because it would be as healing for them as it is for the person who is dying.

Yeah, well, I've noticed that, I've noticed that families who cope well with the impending death of someone that's central to the family often do that in no small part by paying increased attention to the remaining relationships.

And so that as they lose one, they deepen the others. And sometimes, in some sense, as a consequence of that loss, right? And so that might be an analog to, to what you're describing. I guess the trick with a family would be to try to get the set of the entire family match to the circumstance because it is also the case that the stress that impending mortality can place a family within can also bring out the pathologies and divide people further.

And so, but obviously that's a sub-optimal situation. It's worth exploring. It's tricky territory. And again, I think if we look to the indigenous model, you know, as probably something we should look at as a way to approach this because they often do exactly this kind of thing, you know?

And but they're, you know, very much more about the collective and all that. So, so you know, it's just an idea. I mean, it'd be interesting if it could happen, you know?

Yeah, well, I don't think any experiments have been done yet on like family experience of collective family experience of psychedelic transformation, for example. Um, we haven't got that far in the scientific analysis of such things. Hard to get, hard to get FDA approval for that. But it's worth, it's worth attempting to do that because I think that that would, again, be a significant step toward creating this new, this new paradigm around death. You know, that, uh, medicine, you know, that's a big deficit of medicine. You know, this idea that, uh, death can be, death is inevitable, but death doesn't have to be terrible.

You know? And, and so that's, that's the frontier, hopefully, that could be explored.

So let me ask you about your plans for the future. So what looms on the horizon for you and your work at the moment?

Well, right at the moment, my work is, uh, you know, I mean, I'm not really doing research in psychedelics anymore, uh, and never really worked in the therapeutic area. I was always kind of a nuts and bolts guy looking at the plants, the molecules, the pharmacology and so on.

Right now, what's occupying my time is this project in Iquitos, uh, with the herbarium that's going to be, that's gonna be a two to five-year project. Uh, I need, I need to raise somewhere between five and ten million dollars. I should mention that the McKenna Academy is a 501c3. We're happy to accept your money, and, uh, and that's what we're gonna, that's where we're gonna put our resources.

As well as doing additional conferences in the, you know, and retreats, you know, to some degree. But our main focus is going to be this big project, and then we'll probably do another ESPD conference in a few years, but it takes a lot of effort to pull that off.

So it would be fun to come to that.

I wish you could come next time.

For sure.

Yeah, you've been immersed in the psychedelic world for a very long time. Um, what has been the consequences for you personally in terms of the way that you look at the world? And maybe we could say the part, what's positive about what you've experienced? And are there things you regret or cautions that you would put forward as well?

Well, uh, uh, no, there's—I mean, you make choices in life. You know, uh, always you make choices and every choice you make closes off other choices. Sometimes I look at my career, and I wonder, you know, I could have been a better academic. I could have had a more stellar career in academia and so on.

But, you know, what drove my—what drove me was curiosity. We get back to that original idea. What I was interested in, psychedelics emerged early in my life as the most interesting—not just the most interesting drug but the most interesting thing on my radar. And I sort of grabbed onto that and I really have followed that ever since.

What was true 50 or 60 years ago is still true. You know, psychedelics are the most interesting thing on my radar. So, uh, but you know, my era, my phase of doing active research on psychedelics and so on is probably over, and so now I just talk about it.

And, and, uh, as a researcher, I am looking at looking at what I can do to, uh, preserve indigenous knowledge, preserve biodiversity, slow down the devastation of the Amazon—a very small part really of the total thing. But, you know, it's what I'm trying to do. I don't have any real regrets. I have, in fact, psychedelics have been a unalloyed blessing for me in the sense that, uh, I've learned a lot, I feel like from psychedelics and the people I've encountered and, you know, the experiences I've had along the way have all been rich, you know?

And, uh, and really, I cherish them. I mean, I'm getting to the point now, I'll be 72 in December. Hopefully, I have some time left. Uh, I mean, I'm not ready to check out, but you never know, as you get older, you get different health problems crop up and so on, so you never really know how long. But, uh, whatever happens, I'm happy with the journey so far, and it's, it's been marvelous.

And I've been able to meet so many interesting people and go to interesting places and meet people like you, for example, and just have these great conversations. So no regrets.

Well, that's a, that's a lovely place to stop, and we've come to the end of our discussion as well. And so I would like to thank you, Dr. McKenna, for agreeing to talk to me today and for sharing your insights into this remarkable domain of ethnobotanical research and research on the psychopharmacological frontier.

And, uh, I wish you luck with your documentation project and with your upcoming conventions. I think that would be something quite remarkable to attend, and so maybe you can keep me in the loop with regards to the timing of the next conference.

For all of those who are watching and listening, I'm going to spend an extra half an hour, as I always do, with my guests talking to Dr. Dennis McKenna. We'll talk about the particulars of his career, which I think will make for a very interesting discussion. Hello everyone, I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.