Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1133 - Dennis McKenna
Uploaded: 2018-06-21T23:16:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1133 - Dennis McKenna' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-06-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1133 - Dennis McKenna' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-06-21. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1133 - Dennis McKenna

four three two one and we're live hello dennis hi joe great to see you it's
great to be here as
always it's great to be here so tell me about this these these cards you gave
me and what what this
is all about okay well this is an interesting project this is about the rv heraclitus
which
is a which was associated with the institute for ecotechnics which is try to
keep this like yeah
close to your face okay there you go further uh associated with uh you know how
do i explain it
it was actually a theater company called the theater of all possibilities but
the institute
for ecotechnics was started in the early 70s and they built a ship this this
chinese junk essentially
with a feral concrete hull and my connection was they have cruised cruised the
world essentially
since 1973 looking into different things relevant to global ecology they've
done sampling in the
antarctic and in 1981 they decided to go to the amazon and i was doing my
graduate work in in
iquitos at that time so that was my connection with the institute of ecotechnics
and uh you know
at the time i thought these people are nuts i mean they were kind of nuts and
they were very um naive
about what they were doing as far as doing ethnobotanical work not that i wasn't
naive about
it at the time but i had a better handle on it than they did anyway that was
the original connection
and the same group years after i had more or less uh you know kind of severed i
didn't really sever my
relationship but i kind of distanced myself from them but then that same group
went on in the 80s to
build biosphere 2 which you probably heard of they had financing for biosphere
2 so they'd gone to a whole
other level of ambition and and you know madness but um and biosphere 2 went
off track explain that to
people who don't know what we're talking about biosphere 2 was the idea of
building a a terrestrial
environment that was completely shut off from everything and that was self-sustaining
and it was a huge
complex it was a big a series of domes really each dome replicated some earthly
biome like the desert the
rainforest the ocean and so on and the idea was that uh it was a uh it was a
dry run for building a mars
colony you know or some planetary colony and the idea was mars and they put uh
people into this environment
for like two years at a time to see if they could make it work if they could
really have a balanced
ecosystem well as it turned out it didn't work so well but they learned a great
deal from this and
they also got a lot of adverse publicity because i think the uh i think the
science establishment in
a way became kind of jealous and you know like these people they don't know
anything about what they're
doing they got 600 million dollars to build this what the hell you know so they've
got a lot of criticism
but the fact is a lot of good science came out of this and they're still going
and the interesting
thing is they've had their fingers in many pies you know they have a gallery
and a hotel in london
called the october gallery i always stay there if i'm in london they have a
publishing company the
synergetic press based in santa fe that's who published this book ultimately so
it's kind of like
30 years later what goes around comes around and the book is ethno pharmacologic
search for psychoactive
drugs and it's from it's labeled from 1967 to 2017 right and the and the story
behind this is um just
two but just to complete the heraclitus story for a minute so the heraclitus
has been plying the ocean
more or less continuously since 1973 and they are now renovating the ship
because you know it needs it
it needs a new haul and all that so they're trying to raise funds obviously for
that but it's just a
very interesting story about people that are passionate about the ecology about
the earth and about science
don't know a whole lot about any of it but their passion drove them forward and
and their passion
particularly the founder a guy named john allen who's now i think he's in his
eight he is in his 80s but
he was the visionary behind it and without knowing a whole lot they just went
ahead and did it you
know so in that spirit you have to hand it to them and they have they've done
incredible things over that
period of time and so it's a it's a great story and it's worth attention and
you know it's up to you
i mean it's kind of it's up to you if you want to bring her on or somebody but
it's it's it sounds
fascinating really romantic you know this is science in in the true spirit of
discovery you know and
what are they trying to do amateurs right that is fascinating yeah what are
they trying to do
what kind of research are they trying to do in the ocean all kinds of things
they've been sampling
coral reefs they've been sampling uh looking at uh you know uh global warming
in both the arctic and
the antarctic uh they of course in 81 they wanted to do ethnobotany in the
amazon and and they had
schulte's on their board of directors and the director of the expedition was wade
davis and and
i was doing my graduate work at that time and we knew they were coming so as a
result of that i was
able to join the expedition and wade and i at the time he was selected by them
as the chief science officer
and when he by the time i got there he was getting a little disillusioned with
them
you know and the the the i guess you could say the personal dynamic was kind of
strange
and like if you read my book the brotherhood of the screaming abyss there's a
couple of chapter
there's a chapter on this but over time even wade changed his mind and and i i
now get the larger
picture of what they were trying to do and you know it's it's uh it's a real
story i mean these people
didn't recognize boundaries that's the thing and they because they were theater
people
they actually understood which i didn't at the time that what they were doing
and their whole effort
was really a performance you know on a global level they did all these things
kind of realizing that
this was the theater of all possibilities and they had a theater in uh austin
texas by that name so
i could it's a wild story it sounds like a freaky crew it's a freaky crew and
that was the point
well some of the people that were on that 1981 expedition are now i mean they're
still associated
with it so it has some longevity others have passed on others have left in you
know disgust or or they
you know they had enough but i was able to reconnect with the people that run
you know they have this
ranch in santa fe called the synergia ranch and one of the things that's based
there is this press the
synergetic press so when i was doing this project with the book i was casting
around for who's going to
publish this after we do it and they stepped up and they publish a lot of
psychedelic stuff they have a book
called the mystic chemist about albert hoffman they republished the ayahuasca
reader which originally
eduardo luna and stephen white had published well they expanded that and they
published that as a very
beautiful you know uh redo essentially a second edition very nice work then uh
don latin uh who's
not that well known but he's written several books about the history of
psychedelics and the people
involved and he wrote a book that they published called changing our minds
ironically about the same
time michael pollan brought his book out so michael pollan being who he is got
all the attention don's
got very little still a good book you know so they're good people i've decided
that some of my
initial judgments not knowing the people and when i just sort of walked into
their reality
in iquitos when i got there you know which they never bothered to to explain it's
it's like you
know they never said oh well you know we're acting funny because we do things
differently than you do
you know and i was like what well i'm sure they evolved too i mean we're
talking about they have
evolved they have evolved and they learned a lot through this biosphere to uh
you know project which
was a real lesson to everybody um but anyway so because they still existed and
really because of the
of the resurrection of the ayahuasca reader that had been my recent contact
with them so when i
decided to do this book i thought they're a good candidate to publish this book
and they they totally got
it they took it on they've done an amazing job and this book or these this set
as you know
you know the genesis of it because you had a lot to do with it when we were
when i was here last
year you know in and the back story is in 1967 the u.s government the national
institute of mental health
of all people put together a conference in san francisco in 67 called the ethno-pharmacologic
search for
psychoactive drugs and nobody noticed it was a private conference it was not
open to the public the only
thing the public ever got out of it was the symposium proceedings which is the
first book there and uh i
was very heavily influenced by that book because somehow or other it came into
my hands at age 17 you know
know bored teenager living in paonia colorado wishing that i was with my
brother in berkeley where all the
action was at the time and i'm like what is this book you know so i totally i
devoured it and about the
the same time i discovered the teachings of don juan which my my brother gave
to me for my 18th birthday
and although much in there is probably fiction those two books gave me a
complementary perspective the
teachings of don juan was the ethnographic lens through which you could use
look at the use of
psychedelics and and which i you know what kind of filled in those spaces then
this book came out and
it was like and i knew who schulte's was i knew who a few of these people were
at the time schulte's
and schulgen and andrew weill were actually on the original faculty and uh so
when the book fell into my
hands at age 17 i was very excited and i read the whole thing and and this is
what really helped me focus
my career it made me aware that maybe i could make a career out of ethno
pharmacology you know and and
in my very naive 17 year old teenage brain i thought wow man i can get paid to
get stoned
it was in part that but uh you know there was more to it but that's what led me
to to pursue that career
and so this book has always loomed large in my sort of pantheon originally
there were supposed to be
follow-up conferences for this for the government to have every 10 years well
the war on drugs scotched
all that they became embarrassed that they had anything to do with a conference
like this what was the goal of
the conference is that clear of the of this original conscious oh for people to
kind of report on their
work and and sort of mark the state of the art in in psychoethnopharmacology at
the time so the first
book was really where uh things like the snuffs and ayahuasca and uh uh you
know and other things that we
don't think of really as psychedelics like kava and nominated muscaria all of
them when you're saying
the snuffs do you mean like some of the more psychedelic stuff like psychedelics
what is it called the
ecuhe uh is that one that's an orally active form that but yeah varrola and
then anatananthera which
is uh uh the uh what are they called yopo i think there were reports on all
these things they they stuff
them up their nose is that the deal or that's the deal yeah yeah and this is
the first book the 67
book was the first one where you know there was a collection of the leading
experts at the time
most of whom you've never heard of but there were there were iconic people like
schultes and
andrew wild schulgen another interesting fellow uh many interesting people one
of the most interesting
in the first conference was uh a gentleman named steven zara a hungarian uh
chemist and psychiatrist and
pharmacologist and uh he originally worked in budapest and uh and eventually he
moved to the states and
became pretty high up in the national institutes of health he was the director
of the national institute
on drug abuse in the l