Name: Joe Rogan Experience #477 - Dennis McKenna & Josh Wickerham
Uploaded: 2014-03-29T00:03:05.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #477 - Dennis McKenna & Josh Wickerham' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-03-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #477 - Dennis McKenna & Josh Wickerham' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2014-03-29. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #477 - Dennis McKenna & Josh Wickerham

and just press the music let's just go right with music we have no uh no
commercials today
i like it oh that's great we're commercial free ladies and gentlemen we're
brought to
you by the universe experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day
ladies and gentlemen a very special episode podcast sponsorship free uh dennis
mckenna
and josh wickerham josh is from the ethno but ethno botanical stewardship
council one of the
you were the founders of that's right and what exactly does that mean for folks
who have no idea
what ethno botanical or stewardship means a lot of people struggle with council
or council
like you're counseling people on ethno botanical stewardship hmm imagine
bringing that up at a
party yeah well the esc is dedicated to transforming lives through assuring the
safety and sustainability
and sustainability of traditional plants so that means uh trans transforming
people's lives
yeah you shouldn't start with like ferns people don't get excited about uh no
it's hard to get eucalyptus
you know people really don't get fired up about that but
ayahuasca anything involving tryptamines for folks who've experienced it it's
something worth saving
exactly do you guys find it odd uh that in this day and age in 2014 the average
person uh who you would
go up to try to discuss these issues with would have no idea what you were
talking about
actually i think over the last few years that's kind of changed uh ayahuasca is
emerging into mass
consciousness and i think that's that's a good thing i would say 10 years ago
15 years ago if you
approached the average person on the street and you said ayahuasca they'd look
at you like you had a
speech impediment yeah but chances are people would recognize it now and not in
necessarily know what
it's about not necessarily have a negative or a positive view of it but the
meme is out there
and i think that's a good thing ultimately uh it's most certainly a good thing
i agree with you the meme
it's it's certainly out there with young folks right but with folks um i'm 46
with folks my age and
older it gets a little sketch yeah it's like wait a minute what what are you
doing folks who already
have mortgages and families those are the ones that's very difficult to get
them to even consider
what you're talking about you'd be surprised um the esc has sent out a call for
experts and we've been
been infiltrated by the mainstream people that do evaluation work for the world
bank and usaid
they're interested in ayahuasca people are going down to south america to have
these transformative
experiences to sit in ceremony there's a lot of underground activity in the u.s
as well and
in europe where it's it's not legal but in south america in peru ayahuasca is
protected as national
patrimony that's awesome yeah that's beautiful do you ever worry that you're
being infiltrated by
government agents who uh who want that exactly right i'm not doing anything
illegal um we're working in
countries where ayahuasca is has been used for hundreds of years traditionally
um and we're looking
at increasing the safety of it so that we're creating a kind of self-regulatory
model so that
we can take that model to places where it's illegal and say this is a totally
safe medicine if you do it
right you know people with certain medical conditions shouldn't take ayahuasca
but uh done with a skilled
curandero or shaman uh in the right setting it can it can be helpful for all
sorts of psychological
issues or ptsd or depression um and just give people a new perspective on their
lives most certainly
i mean i'm completely joking around but what i was saying when i was it's like
you know that hasn't
happened with marijuana marijuana they're still fighting it tooth and nail
despite all the evidence
that it's not just beneficial but probably prevents a lot of cancers and does a
lot of fantastic work
with ptsd and with anxiety and you know all sorts of issues medical issues you
know interocular pressure
for people with glaucoma and you know on and on and on people with aids that
are having a hard time
keeping their appetite up cancer patients i mean it's still they fight it tooth
and claw and ayahuasca
is a completely different barrel of monkeys ayahuasca is coming at this through
the back door
i mean it's interesting that it has gained recognition over time to the extent
that it does and to a certain
extent i would say it's you know josh people like josh and me we say we work
for the plants right and
ayahuasca has got its own agenda interestingly and people go down to south america
and they have
these experiences that are revelatory and self-transforming but often they come
back with
an enhanced ecological consciousness and enhanced awareness of the you know
connection between
humanity and nature the idea that nature is threatened and i think of ayahuasca
as sort of
a messenger from a community of species that's trying to you know tell the the
these monkeys
to wake up you clowns you know it's you know we're coming down to the wire we're
in a crisis here you've
got to re-understand where you fit into nature and do what can be done in the
ever shrinking time that's left
so people come back with this renewed sort of awareness of the interconnectedness
of life
and that we have a role in this you know we primates and we have to re-understand
what our role is
as as stewards of nature rather than exploiters of nature and ayahuasca you
know that's the message it
delivers to many people and unexpectedly they may not be going there to you
know to experience that but
that's what they come away with from your work and from your brother's work uh
uh terence mckenna what
what i got uh that i never considered before was that psychedelics in in
various forms may very well be
responsible for why we are human beings in the first place and our separation
from them might be the whole
reason why we're so haywire why we're missing a crucial ingredient involved in
the creation of
cognitive thought in the first place the creation of this ability to look at
ourselves and communicate
our ideas and really become a human being and then we're separated from the
mother and left to our
own devices and all of our wild animal instincts sort of take over and our
animal instincts sort of
don't coexist peacefully in this weird world that we have created as human
beings and then we create
chaos because of it because we can't see what we're doing right right ayahuasca
allows you to see what
you're doing ayahuasca yes ayahuasca refocuses the whole understanding i think
of the relationship that
we have to that we have to nature and i think that's what you know if you
believe in plant intelligence i mean
there are different ways of looking at plant intelligence but it's it's
interesting how often
people you know they come out with this renewed understanding and i think that's
that's you know
a desperate uh call on the part of the community of species and ayahuasca has
been delegated to be
to kind of lead that conversation it's fascinating that ayahuasca is the one
that's been you know the in the
forefront when mushrooms are so damn easy to grow you could i mean anyone can
essentially get a hold of
some spores and start cooking them in your basement like really quickly whereas
ayahuasca is probably
the most complex combinatory beverage that we know of as far as like psychedelic
brews it's the one that
requires the most knowledge it's the one that requires the most care and
creating and it's easier
to extract dmt than it is to create iowa i mean get all the plants and brew it
together and know someone
who really knows what they're doing how to cook up a good batch it's weird that
that's the one
yeah i it has it's i i think it's because it is so intrinsic you know it it it's
escaped from its home
in the amazon and that's the area on the planet with the greatest biodiversity
and all that but it's got all
those associations you know people regard it i mean mushrooms are also
important but they just don't
seem to carry that same i don't know what it is emotional kick ayahuasca is the
one right now
that's getting all the attention you know and and it's quintessentially a plant
right mushrooms aren't
plants so maybe that's part of the disconnect i'm not sure but you know all of
these things in
indigenous cultures are regarded as plant teachers and and as you mentioned a
lot of it comes down to
tryptamine chemistry and you know our brains for some reason are evolutionarily
primed to react to
tryptamines i mean we have these tryptamine detectors for some reason and i
think it's partly that we can so that we can
receive and interpret what they're trying to tell us and what they're trying to
tell us is there's not much time left and we have to
really re-understand our relationship to nature we have to realize that we're
not separate from nature well
you're trying to overcome at least two thousand years of judeo-christian
history and and you know the those traditions
their tent their whole agenda in a certain sense is to devalue nature you know
nature is something that we
own it's there for us to exploit it's up there for us to rape and and we're
busy doing that because
you know my my problem with those religions is the focus is always on the
afterlife so it tends to make
you devalue this life it makes you uh you know it it it teaches people to devalue
nature to devalue their
bodies to devalue personal experience uh all of these things and it leads to
the very out of balance
situation that we have going and uh you know what's what's disturbing to me is
that we're all
part of this circle of of the converted i mean we we got the memo you know and
and the meme is
spreading the memo is spreading but i'm not sure it's fast enough you know do
you think that it's
possible that the human race is essentially cramming you know how when uh you're
about to do a test and
you put it off to the last minute and then you know the day before you're like
holy i gotta deal with
this right and then you go bananas you take an adderall you file through books
until your head
wants to explode that is a characteristic that's very very common for people
that want to attack a
project especially an important project right it's it's almost like we have
this thing where it has to
be completely overwhelming where it can't be ignored and then we go into it
full throttle right is it
possible that the human race is cramming and that maybe part of our self-destructive
tendencies
are actually us recognizing that we're up and going into it more chaotically
more materialistically
more shallow more nonsense more kim kardashian more american idol more horseshit
just to get you
to the point where you get so sick of it you you puke it up and then move on
yes and yeah and we're in
the middle of an ecological crisis and yes time is running out we certainly are
cramming we're
we're destroying the amazon we're destroying the climate we're destroying the
ocean we're destroying
the air we're destroying everything we get our greasy little hands on and this
is the first time in
the 500 years of european colonization of the americas that there's a kind of
reverse call a reverse
sort of message coming from the amazon people are going there not to convert
but to be converted to
learn to learn the traditions and the indigenous people 95 of their population
was wiped out by
viruses or wars or plagues and and now we have this opportunity to come back
from the brink and work
with ayahuasca that grows in the canopy of the rainforest you can't have ayahuasca
without the trees and
so it's an alternative to mining and oil exploitation and there's money to be
made in it and i think
coming back to cannabis the reason the dialogue is starting to change is
because governments are
realizing there's a lot of money to be made taxation it's a solution to budget
crises um and the same with
ayahuasca tourism i don't like to say tourism because people are legitimately
seeking a spiritual
exper