Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the show where we talk about all things drugs. But any views expressed here do not represent those of my Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, Heed, as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not even represent my own and nothing contained in this show should be used his medical advice or encouragement to use any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. So my guest today is Dr Dennis McKenna. He's the famed ethnobodanist, ethno pharmacologist, anthropologist who has been studying psychedelics and plant medicines for over fifty years. He's authored and co authored dozens, if not hundreds, of articles and a number of books, both on his own and with others, including his famed brother Terrence McKenna. The impetus for doing this interview now is that a book that he wrote some years ago is about to be reissued. It's called The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, and it's a memoir by Dennis that also includes a long account of his relationship with his brother and the respective journeys together and apart. So, Dennis, thank you ever so much for joining me and my listeners on Psychoactive. Well, thank you Ethan for inviting me. It's a pleasure, so thanks, thank you. Well, just let me just start off. You know, in part want to be talking about, right, is your brother Terrence. And I realized on some level it's got to be awfully irritating to have a famous brother and a famous brother in the same field, more or less an intersecting field. Yet who also, you know because of the last names, obviously you've benefited from that familial connection, but obviously there was an intense personal relationship between that. But before we delve into the origins of that, which I really want to get into, because you really get into in the book. You know, when you first wrote this book, I mean, you're fairly modest about like you know, when when what you said, when all, when all comes down to, ultimately, people pay more attention to me because you know, my brother was Terrence. But I wonder over the last ten years, which is when I've only known you over the last ten years, when we crossed paths of various conferences. I mean, it seems to me that your name has become much more prominent as the Psychelics renaissance has kind of blasted off. And so I wonder if you were writing this memoir today, you know, how do you think it would be different in terms of your reflecting on your relationship with Terrence and its impact on your life? Well? Uh, not that different, actually, I mean, I mean it will be different, and the difference will be reflected in this afterwards that I wrote it effectively, and their chapter another about fifty to sixty page chapter kind of looking back the last ten years from the date that it was that it was published, and even back the last twenty years or so since Terence passed on, because the original book basically ends more or less when Terence passed on in two thousands, you know, and you you mentioned that, you know, it must be it must be irritating to you know, be the brother of Terence mckinnick, because he gets all the attention, you know, And uh, in a way that's still true. I mean, Terence is probably got more Twitter followers than I do. Not bad for a guy who has been dead for twenty two years, you know, but I don't really resent it at all, because Terence and I were, you know, we were intensely interested in the same things, but different compliment nary aspects of the same thing. So we didn't really have any kind of rivalry. We were competing for attention, and I mean what fame we had was basically from our books. And and in Terence's case, he was very much on the lecture circuit and I was not so much. And that was really by choice, you know, I preferred to be in the background. I'm I'm inherently you know, by nature, I'm kind of an introvert, and I like to be in the background. You know. One of the things that's interesting is you really part of the thing about your book, The Brotherhood Book of the Screening Abyss, is your your skign of like reflecting and psychoanalyzing about your life and your family and your parents and and Terrence and you know, obviously you know, you're he's four years older. He's born in forty six, You're born in nineteen fifty, but you describe at a young age about him basically being a fairly torturous older brother. I mean, you know, you know tickling you, scaring the hell out of you. What he says, What if that thing never oppose my will? He says to you, and he freaks you out about that. Nobody people. And look, I'm the oldest of four, so I'm probably guilty of some of the stuff that Terence was guilty of. But I don't think I was quite as mean as he was back then. Well, I think that the way, you know, the dynamic was between us back then is not that atypical from little brother to older brother, you know, kind of interactions and dynamics, especially when the gap in ages four years. I mean that's a kind of a critical gap because that means, you know, as we moved into education, like when I was in junior high school, he was in high school. When I was in high school, he'd already left. But I described those things. You know, you write a memoir and you about what you remember, and and in my early time growing up, that's what I remember, you know, when when Terrence and I were together, I also remember a lot of good times. You know, we had great times. He was you know, he was the big brother. He was you know, my parents favorite for years at least, I was convinced so, and they went out of their way to make sure he had anything he wanted in terms of, you know, educational opportunities, support, you know, for his hobbies and so on. I mean that later I got those things, but I was happy to tag alog. But Dennis, look if I digg a little bit here is because obviously all of this you say in the book, and the love between the two of you and his profound influence both on you and more broadly, just comes through clearly. But I mean you say in the book, and other people point this out that it's not just Terrence, but it's the two of you whom I be described as the Johnny Apple seeds the psilocybin. I mean, you guys, when you come back from the Amazon in the seventies and you produced this book, The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, I think inventies six, which is really kind of the first how to guide to how to, you know, use mushroom spores to grow you make your own marijuanat home in a very simple way and thereby essentially and I think I think it might be the most single most important thing that either of the two of you ever did. Um. But just tell us a little bit about that book, which the two of you and I guess with another fellow and Jeremy Bigwood played a role as well. But tell us how that book came about and why and its impact. Yeah, I can't do that. So some people even recently have said, you know, have been at pains to point out that we were at the first ones to do that, you know, And I never really claimed that we were. People were experimenting, they were trying to figure it out. I think what was different was that, uh, we were the first to publish a book that was a simple method that got into many people's hands, and that was the social impact of it, not that other people were doing it at the time. Other people were not publishing books about it or even talking about it. And because it was illegal, it took a certain amount of either foolishness or courage or both to publish that book. And we did, and it had it had a an impact. But I was not taught how to do this. I puzzled it out. I was taking courses at Colorado State University. I had been out to Harvard to see Shalties. I wanted to work with Shalties. This was nine four and Shaltis told me after I did by pilgrimage, he said, you know, go back and take more chemistry and take more taxonomy, because I thought I was going to study higher plants. You know. Well, as it turned out, a friend of mine was the head of the botany greenhouse at at c s U. When I went back to c s U to take these additional courses, even though it already got my degree, I took these additional courses organic chemistry course, which turned out to be a revelation because the teacher of that course was incredible mentor. And anyway, I had access to this laboratory at Teaching Culture Laboratory, so I had all the tools to mess around, and I had the spores and then this paper and Michaelogia surface, which was called by James P. San Antonio. It was a USD researcher that was something like, you know a simple method to grow a Garicus by s boris on substrates of sterilized rye, you know, And basically I tried that with the mushrooms and it worked, you know, so that was the breakthrough. It just worked for this other species. So then once we had that technique, you know, figured out it reliably worked. I shared that with Terence. I shortly after that finished my work at c SU, and I moved to California and we actually set up growing operations there and then published the book. And at some point Terrence had already connected with Jeremy Bigwood, and I'm not sure how he made that connection, but I think it was from through Jonathan Ott, and Jeremy was a part of that whole coterie of psychedelic enthusiasts at Evergreen State College, out of which Paul Stabbits came, but then also Jeremy and Jeremy, so that was the connection. And Terence had had met Jeremy and Berkeley at some point and invited him to be the photographer on the book to photograph the methods. And then Terence's girlfriend and then later his wife, Kat Harrison, was the illustrator, producing these beautiful uh line drawings of the mushrooms, the life cycle and all that. So that those were the four people that generated the book, Terence and myself, Jeremy with the photographs, and Cat as the as the artist. But you published it under pseudonyms, right, well, yes, all pseudonyms, and I thought it was ironic that. You know, in some ways, Jeremy chose the pseudonym uh Eremaus the obscure. I used to kill him, I said, is that a reflection of the terrible photographs that you put in the book, because they weren't really that good. They did the job, but then, uh, you know, they weren't that great. They were they were little and sort of money and so on, but they did show how to do it. But he made up for it with the beautiful color photographs and the color insert for the first edition. You know, those were great. I was really disappointed when they re published it under a different company and they dropped those color photographs because well, de's ly, as you mentioned, you and Terrence starting to grow mushrooms as well. So were you making I mean, imagine the statue limitations has got expired by now. Were you making a lot of money selling mushrooms in those days? Uh? Well, we were making money, you know. I wouldn't say a lot, but we were. We're probably making enough that we didn't have to, you know, have actual jobs a certain way. That's something that Terence continued for for many years. But he decided, you know, maybe that's maybe that's too edgy. Maybe he didn't really want to do that. As his fame grew he decided it was a good idea. It's a step back from that. I mean, you also talk about terrences. You know, time is you know sort of you know, sending hasheesh or cannabis around the world and having to be on the run as a fugitive for a few years. But going going back to the book book again and your and your and your youth and the influences you talk about, I mean, you also talk about growing up as Catholics. That's how you until certain age you're a good Catholic boy. But you also have an encounter with a Catholic priest who does what you know, many Catholic priests have become into the floor. Do just just just tell our list is a little bit about your your Catholic childhood and your encounter to which you seem to respond to feeling like it wasn't all that traumatic. And my encounter with the priest was not all that traumatic because I was so clueless. Basically, I was I think about eight years old, maybe a little older than that, but I didn't realize I was being abused, you know, I mean, I lived close to the rectory. I used to go over and hang out with the priests there. There were other priests there usually, and there were some some of them were pretty cool, you know. I mean they were like Jesuits and they had you know, they were intellectuals. Father I won't say his name. I think I call him father Dad in the book. But he was not like that. But he was also he was interesting. He had been an engineer before he'd been a priest, and you know, and he liked the altar boys. And now now I have a better idea just why he liked the altar boys. And I don't know how many of them he actually molested. But but you know, the way it happened with us is I confided in him that, you know, I was ticklish, and I was very ticklish, still am ticklish, you know, and I confided this, and then but he said, well, well I can help you get over that. So you know, we went into the basement and I disrobed at least mostly, and he kind of touched me all over. He didn't penetrate me, there was no nothing like that. It was just you know, it's kind of a weird massage, you know, And again, I'm working in the assumption that he's helping me get over being ticklish. So I was not alarmed, you know, at all, or didn't really think in terms of abuse and so on what was going on in his that I don't know. I suppose he was getting the charge out of it. But you know, it took me like I didn't even think about it for years, you know, and then suddenly one day it dawned on me. Man, I was being abused, you know, But at the time, I was not traumatized. And Dennis, in all of your thousands of psycholic experience, who is with different types of mushrooms in Ayahuaska and d MT and everything else. I mean, have there been times when processing either you know, terrences tormenting and torturing you or this experience of the priest or other traumatic things of Chilode kind of came up and got processed for you or was that never really because I don't I don't come across references that, I mean when I was reading the book to that sort of processing of these kind of early things. Yeah, they don't really, they haven't come up you know, in my in my psychedelic experience. It's probably because apart from that, you know, and apart from from Terence's abuse and torture, But I didn't really experience those things as trauma. I wasn't. I may have been traumatized by other other factors, but I don't look back on it and think, you know, I'm I'm screwed up because of childhood traumas. Actually, my childhood, I would say our childhood was was remarkably normal and free of that kind of thing. I mean, I think there was always dysfunctionalities and in families, but in general, I mean, my father and mother were not abusive, you know, and they were very loving and supportive. At the same time, Terence and I you know, pushed back against them, Terence particularly on all kinds of fronts. I mean, I'm sure that we, you know, made their lives miserable in many ways, you know. I mean you described Terence at point like I mean, I mean, at one point you say, you know, in some respects, he was unforgiving, you know, when it once you once he decided, you know, you know, he had ridden you off, that was it, and not only empathetic. And he also described at a very young age him cutting off your father like emotionally in a way that's never really recovered, I guess, never really recovered, never really got over that. That's right. And at the age of four, and this is not a teenage thing. This is at the age of four or five or something, right, right, right exactly, there was an incident which I'd rather not describe in graphic detail, but but you know, it led to an estrangement on some emotional level between him and my dad, and I think at at a certain point he crossed the threshold there where he came to the conclusion that, you know, I've got to look out for myself or I am you know, I have to be number one. I mean kind of all I wouldn't say a Trumpian kind of thing, but preoccupation with his own self preservation and all that. You know. Well, I mean you describe also, you know, and Rand as something of you know, one of the influences on Terrence when he's growing up. Yeah, and Rand was one of the one of the books that he was reading as he was growing up. And and everybody, I mean at that age, you know, eighteen sixteen, seventeen eighteen, in that era of the late sixties, everybody was reading a Rand, you know, and and getting the you know that that download that that she that she transmitted. You know. The other popular book was Catcher in the Rye, you know, and everybody. I wasn't reading them because I was four years younger. They were not really part of my universe. But I think Anne Rand and and the or Iron Rand as they call her, and and capt Her there influential books for people of terence, this generation when they were teenagers in the you know, in the late even mid sixties, so he was about four years ahead, so all of these things were coming down. I don't know how much it influenced him. I mean, I Rand is identified with the right now and and so on. I think, you know, I think there's a wider perception that her philosophy is you know, pretty distasteful in some ways, uh not not compassionate, you know, sort of very typical of some of the you know, right wing ideologies that people are. You know, it's it's everyone for themselves, you know, there's a great lack of compassion and empathy. And in this perspective, well, I don't agree with that, you know, I think that we have to I mean, I think if I if psychedelics teach you anything, it is that we are all connected, we're all one, We're all in the same boat. And I think, you know, they're useful for eliciting compassion and empathy. And I think we need more of that, not less of that. I mean, not only for each other, but for nature itself. But as I get older, I get more sort of maybe disillusioned, you could say a little more cynical about it. Uh. I think they have great potential for societal evolution and transformation. But the question is, isn't happening fast enough? And you know, because we are looking as as I say in the book and afterwards, you know, we're looking at a closing window here where we're having we have to make decisions, and our choices are becoming more and more restricted. So can psychedelics turn this around? I think they're part of the process. I don't think psychedelics alone are are gonna do it. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad, you know, Dennis. I mean one of the things that when I when I've seen you speak and really some of your writing, I sometimes you know, on the one hand, you're very much the scientist, and you very much fit within that, you know, the all the other growing the scientists in this in this world of the psychedelic renaissance. But you're also this kind of bridge to the ways of thinking that Terrence epitomized. And so in the book you talk about the influences on both of you growing up, and some of them were common influences, like you talk, for example, about your fascination with cosmology and astronomy, and then especially you talk a lot about science fiction and how that shaped um really you're thinking, and you can sort of see that manifesting not just in you know, some of the stuff, some of the terences recordings, but even in your own speaking and and and obviously Stanley Kubrick two thousand and one, you you come back to that movie frequently. There's another movie called Charlie. You come back to UM. So just talk more about, you know, the impact of of science fiction and cosmology and those movies and the in both you're thinking, and to the extent some extent your brothers as well. Well. Science fiction was a huge influence on this, you know, and I think we can attribut you that to a certain extent. In fact, to a large extent to our father who also read science fiction. And he when he was a child, he had had ramatic fever, so he'd spent quite a lot of time in bed as a child. He couldn't go to school. What did he do? He read? He read all kinds of things. He read a lot of Westerns and things like that, but he also read what science fiction there was of those days, you know, and there wasn't I mean, not like we think of it, but it was like fantasy, Tom Swift's Adventures and this kind of thing. And so when he had a family and all that, he spent a lot of time. His job required him to be on the road five days a week. He was a traveling sales representative for a company in Denver, so he would be gone from Monday through Friday. And he would need things to read on on the road. So he would buy these pulp science fiction magazines that you could buy off the shelf. He would also buy fake magazine, and he brings these things home and Fate Magazine is very interesting magazine. It's it's still published, and it was the sort of popular magazine about the esoteric and the strange, you know, so all about aliens and and paranormal phenomena and UFOs and occasionally drugs. You know, there were articles about mescaline and ayahuaska and things like them. You're talking, you know, the sixties, the fifties and sixties. But he would bring Faate magazine and these science fiction uh you know, uh, pulp magazines like as Abov science fiction or fantasy and science extreudent, these different ones that you could buy, and Terence and I were all over those, you know, and particularly Fate magazine. I mean, he would bring these faith magazines home and we would be all over it. So when so, I think in Terence and me, it cultivated a fascination with the esoteric and the strange, you know, I mean for from our perspective, you know, we were weird and the weirder the better, you know. And so when psychedelics came along, I think that we viewed it not from a context of uh, spirituality or or indigenous practices or anything like that. I mean we discovered that later, but originally the idea was that, hey, we these are other dimensions. Psychedelics can take you to other dimensions, and we thought of that quite literally, you know, that these were tools for actually visiting other realms, you know, hyper spatial dimensions. That was the approach, and that perspective really colored our whole experiment at Lachrera because I just say quickly, you know, Lachrera Um is the place in the Colombian Amazon where Dennis and Terrence in around nineteen seventy one go for a number of weeks and have a really formative experience. Um. They go there looking for a particular you know, psychedelic and land up finding out that maybe mushrooms is the one that they were really needing to learn to know understand better. And where Dennis describes basically having whether it was a psychotic break or a or a spiritual breakthrough or a communication with Eli ends but going what might be seen is largely crazy for a while and a bit unhinged, and and his brother worrying he might not even come back. Um. But it's then it describes almost the pinnacle of their relationship being though is a very traumatic time. Did I did I sum it up fairly? Yeah? I think so, without going into too much detail, I think that was exactly it. You know, I've done various talks of the experiment at luch Are, but at what at the Convention Breaking Convention Conference a few years ago, I did a talk called the Experiment at lucher Era colon psychotic break, shamanic initiation or alien encounter question mark, and it looked at these different modalities that might that could be applied to the experiment at luchur Era, And I was kind of arguing for the idea that yeah, there were elements of an alien encounter in this, along with the shamanic elements and the psychotic elements and so on. And uh, you know Eric Davis who writes very eloquently about this. He in his book High Weirdness. Uh, there's a whole chapter about Terrence and Dennis and our adventures and lace Erera, and he makes the, I think really insightful point in a way that we went to Lacerera thinking that we were doing that we were doing an act of science, you know, which we weren't. What we were doing is we committed an act of science fiction. And I think that's I think that's very apt. I think that's exactly what we were doing because you know, given our limited grasp of science, we were not scientists. We thought we were, we fancied we were, but we weren't. Given our limited grasp of scientific understandings and so on. You know, we were trying to bring all these kind of more or less you know, unrefined, unsophisticated scientific concepts to what we were doing, to the idea that you know, we could actually crack the space time continuum, you know, and step through into this new a temporal rime. So that that goes right back to the sixties, you know, fascination with other dimensions and all that, and the idea that that psychedelics could could be portals to this. We're not alone now, lots of people are talking about this very same thing, you know. I recently attended a private conference in in the UK in October which the uh you know, the theme of the conference was the Sentient Other, and it was all about d MT entities and other kinds of entities that you encounter in psychedelic experiences, you know. And the problem with d MT it's too short. You know, by the time you get there to this place or this dimension or the state, it's already fading away. It's very hard to too spend enough time there to really get a handle on what's going on. So you come back with a sense of astonishment, but not much actual data. It's such a short acting uh experience when you've smoke it. Then it's just to clarify for our listeners. I mean, D and T is one of the essential ingredients in ayahuasca, but it's also something that can be smoked for a shorter experience. Right. And then you have I guess one of the early early books that kind of you go back to the early origins, early twenty one century origins, the cycle like Renaissance. Some of that goes back to Rick Straussman and his research in books and the spirit and molecule, and he were distinguishing that from five and the O D M T, which also people smoke for a short intense experience. These are the two. These are the two two tryptamans that are short acting. Uh. They're not orally active unless you potentiate them with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, right, And that's the basis of ayahwatska. The two plants, one of them contains an M A O inhibitor which inhibits the D m T from breakdown in the gut, and then it's orally active. And instead of fifteen twenty minutes you have six to seven hours, but much less intense than the fifteen to twenty minutes. The other way people take it is so the term is parentally either injected or usually people smoke the free base and then you get this very intense uh fifteen to twenty minute I sometimes refer to it as like a like a trip on a Neon roller coaster. I mean, there is definitely a very visual space, you know, and all sorts of things going on, really like being in a different place. Five athoxy is actually not like that. Fivethoxy is different in that it lacks the the visual dimension for some reason. Fivethoxy is the same as is the same thing as five m O d n T. Yes, five m e O d m T fivethoxy people call it it is you get effectively the the same feeling of dissolution being in this space, and this feeling of acceleration, but there's no visuals, you know, And the things that set d MT apart is it's all about visuals, you know, including the apparent encounter with other intelligences d m T. I mean, I have much more experience with d m T than five thoxy d MT, but my experience with five athoxy is that it is the total ego and really self dissolution drug. I mean, what it does is for me at least, it just dissolves the self. It dissolves the ego. It's like, you know, the cliche with the psychedelics is we are all one, you know, and we we merge with with everything. And five athoxy delivers that experience when you really have very little or almost no sense of the self as a discrete entity. You're just part of the continuum, you know. D m T is not that way. It's not the ego dissolving kind of approach. It. I mean, you're still you, I mean your ego. Maybe you know, the boundaries may be getting a little shaky, but you're still yourself and very often in relationship in this uh you know, relationship with these extra dimensional entities which are presenting as intelligences and you know maybe so, I mean, I'm skeptical and you know that the main question here if you have these encounters with these apparent non human but obviously intelligent entities, the first question is are they real? You know? And then but then that's a loaded question because then you have to say, well, what do you mean by real, you know, and and this is where I get you know, I mean, people look at me and say, well, you you just you just can't accept it. I'm not saying it's not that they don't accept it. I'm trying to figure out is this coming from some part of the self, some part of myself that is presented as something that is not me, or is it really something from elsewhere that is in communication you know, well, you know, I mean ess interestingly, because you describe in the book, you know that you and Terrence returning from La Gurea, you know, fifty years ago, fifty two years ago or so, and and you know, Terence comes back and says, basically, science can't explain any of this stuff, essentially, let's skip it. And you come back saying, well, we can't dismiss science unless we understand science better. And it seems like that's a key place where your trajectory is really golf in different directs. That's where you decide to go and get the degrees and become a scientist. And it seems I mean, I'm more sympathetic to your point viewpoint, which is if we want to try to figure out whether there is something about aliens communicating with us through mushrooms, or these things being exported to Earth from in that way, or how we think about different manifestations of reality. We better know the science a lot better, so we can critically evaluate both its you know, what it has to say, as well as its limitations. Yeah, exactly. I mean you put your figure right on it that at that point, you know, after our return from psychedelics represented a uh you know, a point where our trajectories in some ways diverged, you know, And and Terrence yes, said well, science is never going to explain this, we should just throw science out. My response is, we can't say that because we're not scientists and we don't really understand how to do science, you know, So for to reject science, let's learn how to do it first. Then we can examine these phenomena in the light of sort of the scientific perspective, scientific framework and decide or help us decide what is going on, or give it up and say yes, science can't explain this. In trying to understand nature, I think science is a good place to start, you know, because science, unlike most endeavors of human thought, Uh, it's a way to construct models about the way things are, the way you think things are, and then test the model, you know, tested against what the evidence is, and either reject the model or modify it or whatever. In this way, scientific knowledge advances. This is the scientific method, and it's not often, it's not often practice the way should be. But in its pure form, this is what science is, and it's very powerful, UH way of thinking. We describe in the book doing a very powerful having a very powerful ayahuask experience. I think in the context of the of the UDV Church in Brazil, and and and and and the single sentence that you that you most come away with is this one. You monkeys only think you're running things? Yes, how does that fit into what you were just talking about about science? I think that psychedelics are great counterbalance to science. I think one of the UH pitfalls of science and scientists particularly is a tendency to think that, you know, we have made such advances, we have such sophisticated understanding of the cosmos and the way things are, we pretty much have this thing figured out, you know. And I think psychedelics emphatically illustrate to us we only have a tiny part of reality figured out, you know. There's no excuse for arrogance here. What we should be humble because we should always bear in mind how little we really know, what a small part of the total picture. Science, science furnishes us. For us, it's science tend to be arrogant, you know, there's no room for arrogance. They should be more humble. They should recognize no matter how much we how much science advances, how much we expand our understanding, it's still only going to be a tiny slice of the total picture. And psychedelics are useful for for that making that realization. And that's that's effectively what I meant by you monkeys only think you're ready this show. We are not in control. You know, I'm not sure anyone is in control, but we're we're participating in this, uh, you know, this coevolutionary process with the plants, with everything on the planet. And we're not reading the reading the show at all. Let's take a break here and go to an ad Well. You know, I said, I think in the book, I think one of the indication of the kind of not I shouldn't say two sides as if they're oppositional, but the two aspects Dennis to your way of thinking about this is you know, you talk about you know, in the fifties, um, really Gordon Wasson and his wife's writings in Life magazine and their encounter with Maria Sabina and the book about Mushrooms and Russia really kind of launches the first stage of of really popular awareness about about about psychedelics. And then in the sixties, I mean you're a bit dismissive of Timothy Leary. I mean, I think you're more critical him than not, and in some respects, you know, later on you worry, oh my god, I don't want my brother, you know, Terrence, to become like the new Timothy Leary and do the kind of harms that oftentimes associated with Timothy Leary is kind of going over the top. But which you do credit are two books, which both of which come out I think in the late sixties or early seventies. One is Carlos custand is The Teachings of Don Juan, which you know, I probably sold billions of copies. I remember I had a copy when I was when I was younger as well, which is you know, probably largely fictional, but you say, nonetheless very important. And the other book, though you're surprising someone surprisingly. Quote is a volume that's published by the National in student Meental Health, you know US, you know Health Agency, the proceedings of a conference health in San Francisco seven. To explain why those two books actually play an important role in your revolution. They were very influential for me personally, those two books. The Castidated book, which Terence gave to me for my eighteenth birthday, and yes it probably is largely fictional, but I didn't know that at the time, and it doesn't really matter because what it presented was the ethnographic side, the indigenous origins of these things, the idea that there were you know, uh, indigenous world views and understandings about these substances and these plants and fungi. So that was that was like the Cosmo vision of you know, the indigenous world. And then on the other hand, the ethno pharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs the name of this conference in sixty seven, which was a private conference. The only thing that the taxpayers ever got was the publication that the book itself, which was published, and somehow or other it fell into my hands again at the age of eighteen the year after the conference, and This actually happened some years before my my understandings about science and are the whole conversation about rejecting science and so on. That book really opened up for me that that ethel pharmacology was a real discipline. There was actual science here, There were people working in this, people like you know, icons of still icons like Sualties and shul Gun and even Andy Wild wasn't that conference and and you know, so it was an eye oldener for me in the sense that there's a real discipline here and potentially a discipline that you know, I could follow as a career path. And that was kind of what led me to to that direction to start studying not only ethnography, which I was also interested in, but but botany and chemistry and pharmacology and all that. It was the inspiration. That book was the inspiration for that. You know. You know, it's another thing that pops up in your writing. You keep coming back to more than most people I know, right about psychedelics, and it's the dark side. I mean, you write about the bluejas um, the witches both in Europe and Latin America, and the uses of the toura, and you tell the story of a leading and quite powerful um Iowa Scarrow Pablo Amaringo, who basically you know, stops doing that, stops leading sessions because he's gotten involved in some sort of you know, uh conflict with what he sees a brujas which could use could potentially be a conflict to the death by where either kill or be killed. So say something about that dark side of this. Yeah, well there is a dark side. I mean, I mean, psychedelic are a tool, you know, like any other technology, They're a tool, and they can be used or misused, you know, and because they are, they can put people into very vulnerable states. That's kind of the point of these intense psychedelic therapy sessions is to provide circumstances where you can open up, you know, and but you have you can open up. You can look at your problems, whether they be addiction or depression or you know, whatever your issues are from a different perspective. I think that's really the most important therapeutic aspect of psychedelic therapy is they let you step away from your reference frame temporarily what we now call the default mode network, although there are other terms for it as well, and in traditional cultures like in South America, for example. Uh, not all the Iowa Scarrows are good people, you know. I mean there is a power dynamic there, and if you have a drug or something that will let you get power over people. There are many cure and arrows that are effectively sorcerers. They want power, they want money, sex, they want all of these things that you know, people people year to have. And if they can be used to you know, to effectively render you know, people compliant and willing to give up their their selfhood, then they will employ them that way. I think most of the people traditional practitioners using Ayahuascat really do it from the standpoint of being healers and helping people. Uh Like Pablo ever Ringo, you know, was a good examp apple of that. Like many of the Iowa Scarrols that I was lucky enough to to work with, I had no idea. I mean I learned this over time that not all of these people can be trusted. And we see this now, you know, there's a great deal of maybe overstated. On the other side, there's a great deal of paranoia for people that are doing, you know, want to go to South America and do Ayahwaska retreats, and so I like, you know, people say, well, you must be very careful, you know, uh not to get in with the wrong people because you know, damnaged you in many many ways. And that's true. I think it's a matter of proceeding thoughtfully and sort of not just don't sign up for a retreat at the first website that comes up. You know, do your research, ask around, talk to people that know the ropes down there, and you know, take care to get to the right places. Well, you've talked about sometimes the ayahuasca actually being mixed with a little bit of the tour or something or yes, that that does happen when the ayahuasca is mixed with the toura. Uh. You know, sometimes they put it in because they actually make bad ayahuaska and they if they add in the de toura, that ensures that something will happen, you know, not necessarily what you want to happen, but that pretty much will make it active. And other times they put into tour because they're you know, their motives are more sinister. I mean, detura is a Brent banzi is. It's called the Tree de tours in South America. But the de tours in European uh, you know, European witchcraft and all that. These are deliriums and these are they're not psychedelics, they're deliriums there. They're drugs that create a great deal of confusion, and they also wipe your memory out and to a certain degree, and they also make you very suggestible, you know, so classic example of like a date raped drug, that kind of thing. And actually in in UH Colombia it's used that way. You know, if you take ayahuasca and there is there's the tour in it, there's bergmancy have been added into it. The traditional term for it is to a they call it to a. You can tell if your ayahuasca has been dosed with the tour because you get this classical dry mouth reaction. Those trop pains make you feel very thirsty, and they of course dilate the eyes greatly and so they produce blurred vision and all that. If you're getting those symptoms, that probably means there's a good slack of towai in the brew And for me, that's a red flag, you know, to get the hell out of there, because this person does not have your best interests at heart, you know, in a way. I mean, you've been identified so much with ayahuasca, but also of course mushrooms and not just the growing guide. But and it's interesting the way you talk about them. Right at one point you say, are they alien artifacts? And you've mentioned this already. Then another time you say, well, mushrooms can be tricksters, and someplace else you say bullshitters at times, and they have way of presenting delusions at self evident truths, and in someplace else you go they are mushrooms the perfect psychedelic exclamation point. Well, they are the perfect psychedelic you know, I mean in the sense that there you know, they're non toxic there generally non threatening. They're usually enjoyable, and then they do download information, you know, but like all psychedelics do. But I think it's up to the individual too, you know, not necessarily, uh, lower your your analytical antennas. You know, you get revelations, you get insights from psychedelics, and they seem maybe at the time they seem like true revelations, but you know, you need to look at it the next day in the cold hard light of reality and see if that really stands up, you know, And that's what I mean by by they can be tri trickster to them. And whilst it can be a trickster, although I think it's I think it's less common. But you you know, you have to you know, you have to keep your powder dry in a certain sense, and and not necessarily just take in, uh everything that the mushrooms tell you, or the danger is you're going to get into some delusionary state that's very hard to get out of, you know, if you just accept this. I mean I get emails kind of dismayingly frequently from people, you know, that have had these really powerful experiences and they've come away and they say, oh, yes, you know, I am the Messiah, I am the transcedentdal object at the end of time. I figured all this out. And you know, wait a minute, cowboy, calm down, think about it, think about it, and get that, you know, or hopefully don't get back to me because I don't have time for this ship anyway. Let me actually ask you this, you know. I mean, I mean, obviously some of this stuff that Terrence was coming up with, um, you know, like like the world ending in twelve and a whole lot of stuff just seems off the wall in retrospect. But there's there's at least one thing that not just he but you also have talked about with frequency that's maybe looking a little better over the years, and that's the stoned ape theory. Yes, yeah, so just explained your listeners what that is and why it's looking better. Well, the stone ape theory, it's kind of a pejority of way to describe it, but the idea of basically that we co evolved with mushrooms that you know, the hominid species evolved in Africa, you know, three to two to three million years ago, and they evolved and leading eventually to you know, they're different species, starting with Homo habilists and then uh, you know, Homo erectus, Homo neunderthal, eventually Homo sapiens, although it wasn't quite as linear as that implies. But what we know is now it's it's a very hard theory to prove, but what we do know is that hominid lineages were evolving in northern and actually southern africas well during this period. We know that the climate about two million years ago was much wetter, there were seasonal rainfalls, It was not a dry desert like it is now, and you know, we've got the paleoclimate theological data to support that. We know that there were cows or the precursors of modern cows boasts, uh I forget the species, but there were cow species. The fossils of these cows have been found. They evolved in the same environment that the hominids did. Undoubtedly the hominids hunted them and ate them. Well, the mushrooms grow on the dung of these cows. And if you look at any tropical ecosystem, you know, where there's rainfall pastures and grazing cattle, you're going to find these mushrooms. And you know, philosophy convinces in in most places. The thing that makes it more plausible now is so probably in that environment, obviously the primates were there and they had to be eating the mushrooms if the mushrooms were there, after all, they're hungry, you know, the mushrooms are good to eat, and they're not hard to spot. The two things that make it more plausible now is what we've learned about the effects that psilocybin have on neural connectivity and the you know, neuro genesis and basically the complexification of the brain, you know, could have been triggered by these mushrooms because this is what they this is what they do, and you know, we have the data to support that now. So potentially it could have been a cognity boost for the populations that were eating these mushrooms, leading to language formation and the formation of the brain structures that support cognition, internalization of imagery, you know, synesthesia, all of these kinds of things. And then the other side of this coin is, well, okay, maybe, so what's the heritable mechanism. How is this transmitted from generation to generation? Well, now we can invoke epigenetics, which was not a concept that was talked about when Terrence published this book. In neither that nor this neural plasticity element. We now know that, you know, mushrooms foster neural plasticity, which has to do with adaptation to external stimuli as well as internal and then epigenetics provides a mechanism whereby these traits can be transmitted across generations. So, I mean, you can't ever prove this idea, but I think these two uh notions move the needle from plausible to more than likely, if you want to put it that way. And I think I think it's more than likely that mushrooms did play a role in this evolutionary period where we saw an expansion in the size and complexity of the human brain over a mirror. Two million years well too, million years sounds like a long time, but evolutionarily, it's actually the blink of an eye. So how did this exponential expansion in human neural complexity take place? I submit that mushrooms were the catalyst for this. Well, Dennis, on that fascinating note. I want to thank you for joining me and my listeners on psycho Active for discussion about your book and your brother and your work. Thank you very very much, Thanks so much, it's been a pleasure. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments, and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by no h'm osband and Josh Stain. The acutive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozolla Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from my Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to a Bio s f Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BP. Next week we'll be talking about the global history of drugs with Professor Paul Gudenberg of sunny Stony Brook, perhaps the leading expert in this area. Drugs we're actually quite important in the constitution of modernity as we think of it today. Starting in the sixteenth century, all types of stimulants began to flow together and reach first Europeans and Middle Easterners and Asians and North Americans, and they began to be part of our kind of integral lifestyles, everything from coffee to tobacco and then later things like you know, Coca cola, or opiates. Subscribe to Cycoactive now see it, don't miss it.