YouSaid · the spoken record

Dennis McKenna

lines on the record: 103
first: 2021-07-21
most recent: 2021-07-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I tend not to go after it outside of a ceremonial context and even for a while I would say, well, I don't even drink it in the States or Canada. I just confine it to South America when I'm down there. But then I can't really stick to that because there are opportunities here. Now I go to a place called Saltera in Costa Rica, which is one of the higher profile ayahuasca retreats. I'm an advisor to Saltera, and I like the way they're doing it. I think they're very ethical about in their approach to all this. So it's a matter of opportunity rather than anything else when it seems appropriate. But to your, what you alluded to before about how it can be”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, just usually the occasion presents itself. It's rare that I would come to one of these places and not drink or just when it seems appropriate is when I decide. And if I'm in a situation where ayahuasca is being drunk, then I would probably drink it.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that may present as something not the self but that knows things has information to transfer, it doesn't really matter what I say is the information good so every time you take it or when you take it there's really a bottomless well of things to still be thought about and assimilated and so on so I kind of don't believe in the hanging up the phone approach My approach would be, I guess, keep listening, keep listening because a lot of what you might hear will be stuff that you've heard before, but there may be new things that come along that make it worth it to stay engaged. And so that's how I relate to it. It's not a waste of time to keep listening.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I sort of think, I disagree with that. I think, in other words, the message is not the same every time. There is no standard message. And this is a dynamic interaction with the plants that you're learning from indigenous people talk about plant teachers. And you can get into the weeds about whether that's a valid concept. Are they really intelligent? Are they not? The point is, it doesn't really matter whether the plants, the ayahuasca opens up some part of yourself.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not every time you take ayahuasca is going to be a peak experience. I mean, there's lots of times when it's disappointing and you just get sick and the brew is bad or whatever. But it has a lot to teach us. There's a lot to learn from ayahuasca. And even though you've taken it multiple times, you still keep getting new insights or new, I mean, the experience seems worthwhile. And so I keep taking it. Maybe I'm thick skulled. Maybe other people have an easier way to assimilate the lesson and say, yeah, I got the message. Okay, I don't need to do this anymore. I've come close to that a couple of times, but I think Ram Das famously said, or maybe it was Alan Watts, I'm not sure who said, once you get the message, hang up the phone.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partly it's because of the context in which I have used ayahuasca and brought other people to South America to have these experiences. I've organized retreats and that sort of thing. So I'm one of those, I'm guilty, if you want to point at the people that have fostered ayahuasca tourism. I've certainly contributed to that. I'm a little conflicted about it. So when I do these retreats, I drink people expect me to drink and I do drink. The other reason is I think every time you take it, maybe this is the more valid reason, every time that you take it, or most times.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They get priced exactly. They get priced out of the local market. There is pressure on the resource base. Ayahuasca and the admixture plants are being over-harvested. And there's not enough effort being made to really make sure the sources are sustainable. But that's changing. The market is adjusting to this. But these changes take place over They take years and there are some very hopeful trends now. People are becoming more aware of some of the issues with over-harvesting and so on.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're seeing go on now with the ayahuasca tourism thing is definitely a complex thing. It's not necessarily a completely bad thing or a completely good thing. It's a mixed bag because many people are helped by this and all the tourists coming down, they bring economic benefits to these communities, but then those are not equitably distributed in a situation where the local ayahuas garrow who used to be just some guy or some gal that was a person in the village who kind of did this work on the side and they had their own livelihood farming, fishing or whatever. Well, now these people are kind of superstars and they get a lot of income. It generates a lot of jealousy within the community where that can happen.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's all changed. The outside influence of the global culture, people are not going to go to South America and spend all this money to sit and watch somebody take ayahuas They are there to have the experience, and that's okay. I think it's just fascinating what”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extram heroes, the ayahuasca tourists or whatever, they want to give their money's worth. And so the nature of the ceremonies changes has changed in response to this. I mean, back in the day, before there was anything like when ayahuasca usage was still kind of a tribal-based tradition, there wasn't all this outside influence. It was the shaman who took ayahuasca, not the people. Rarely would the ayahuasca be given to a person that came to the ceremony unless there was some specific illness or something they wanted specifically to be treated. But it was the ayahuasca who had the visions that downloaded the information about the plants and other kinds of practices they might engage in to help people with healing.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are roujos. There are people who don't really have your best interests at heart. And there are other people, other practitioners who really are amazing healers and they can help a great deal of people. But the thing is that the context of Traditional uses change due to outside cultural influences because like anything else, the people want to give”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is. They appear totally normal except that they're helping load all the furniture into the elevator at 3 in the morning. Yeah, I think it was vice.com. Vice did a good. Is it a good thing? Yeah, so that's the thing. The Tura, the Berkbansia confuses you and makes you extremely suggestible. So you get this stuff inside you and then people say, well, let's go to your apartment and take out all the furniture. Let's go to your ATM and take out all your money. And you say, oh, well, that sounds like a good idea. Let's go do that. So Black Magic Aside, it can definitely just have to be magic. It just puts you in such a state of confusion susceptibility, suggestibility. That's the way it works.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's Gopalamine. So you can tell that if you're taking ayahuasca that's got toe is the traditional word for these things, toe, T-O-E accent. That's a good sign that you're dealing with a Brujo and that's a good sign that you should get the hell out of there. Know, because they do not have your best interests at heart. and or unlikely to. That said, you have to acknowledge that it has a place in this whole ayahuasca complex. There may be people that can practitioners that can use it beneficially. But my own... Experiences with Datura, which you've probably read about in the book, you know, that scared me away. I mean, I have no idea what I was getting into. And we were very lucky. We could have killed ourselves”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disorientation and delirium, essentially. So it's used very badly. It's used as a date rape drug and things like that in Brazil and Colombia. And it's often associated with bruharia in the ayahuasca tradition. In other words, black magic, sorcery. And if you take a brew of ayahuasca that contains Datura or Bergmanzia, you can tell because it causes this dry mouth sensation, which is typical of these anticholinergics like Dutura.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, you're right to be scared. This is a very dangerous plant. It is not only toxic, but it produces a kind of delirium. It's not a psychedelic. I sometimes say in my lectures, it's a true hallucinogen, but not psychedelic. By that I mean psychedelics see hallucinations sometimes behind the eyes or whatever. You usually know that these things are hallucinations. With Bergmanzia, which used to be called the genus is very close to Detera. In fact, they used to be classified as detours. But Detura, the experiences that you have, you see hallucinations and you cannot tell if they're real or not. And so in that sense, it's a true hallucinogen, but it's not psychedelic. And it produces a state of profound”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bruise that might be specific for different types of disorders. You know, maybe some work better for addiction, some work better for trauma, some work better for depression or that sort of thing. All of this is kind of supported by the fork knowledge, but there's been nothing like a controlled study of any of this. It's very hard to get funding to study ayahuasca in a clinical setting because it's not a pure compound. It doesn't lend itself to the same kind of double-blind placebo control protocols, but you can use with something like psilocybin. It's complicated.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These many admixture plants. So there's a whole lot of work left to be done with ayahuasca and looking into more depth than we were able to look at at that time. That's one of the projects that we're trying to get off the ground with the McKenna Academy. We want to do a very extensive phytochemical and ethnobotanical survey of different ayahuasca brews. document their preparation, document the plants that go into them, and then follow that up with bioassays and just get a better handle on the varieties of these different gurus and their uses. Why would we care? Why do we want to do this? Well, it's gathering knowledge. It's gathering information. But the potential practical outcome of this is that you can formulate”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the cultural context, it's a very complex thing. There are many varieties of ayahuasca, the vine. There are then all these admixture plants, some of which contain DMT and varieties of those. And then a whole pharmacopoeia of other admixture plants that are more or less associated with ayahuasca. They're part of the dietas, which is a common practice in the Amazon. You learn about the properties of other medicinal plants by taking them, and then you take ayahuasca, either in combination or after you take them, and you learn about their properties from the visions that ayahuasca give you about there. So ayahuasca is like the pipeline to plant wisdom in a certain way, to tap into this, I don't know what you might call it, Guyan Mine that's represented by...”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I only consumed it a few times. I found it to be a shorter acting. And, you know, in terms of the visionary stage of the experience, and also more intense. So there's something pharmacokinetically going on there with the absorption of it. But people are mistaken.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That showed that this was not a public health menace or danger, and also that it was beneficial or potentially beneficial. So there was definitely a political sub agenda here. But as it turned out, I mean, we just did the science and the science supported that it was beneficial. Almost all of our subjects joined the UDV in a state of life crisis and they felt like the medicine, the tea, as they called it, and the very supportive context of the UDV, they said that's equally necessary, but they felt like that was a vessel for redemption, essentially, and turning their lives around. And it's a complex thing. It's a complicated matter.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was definitely a political aspect to this, that this is a big reason why they wanted this work to be done by outside investigators who presumably would, you know, if it was just UDV and their worst scientists in the UDV, it was a middle to upper class demographic segments, but they wanted people from the outside to be the chief investigators to avoid the perception that the work would be biased. And that's one reason I got invited and Charlie Grobe was the chief principal investigator. I invited him to do that. He became that. So they wanted this regulatory agency called Confin, kind of a combination of the DEA and the FDA. They wanted to present data to Confan.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Much less a drug. They did like the idea that you would study it as a drug. They were totally open to doing this biomedical study. But as far as going the next step and looking into mechanisms and that sort of thing, they were kind of conflicted about that. They could see the value of it, but then they didn't like the idea of godless science delving into their central mystery, sacrament, you know, and I could understand that, but as a result of that, we lost some opportunities to do some interesting things.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes, the UDV does have that. They do have different formulations and so on. And they don't talk about them. I mean, we were not able to get any information. Out of them about that other than the fact that, yes, we do have these different formulations. I mean, we came up against a couple of interesting things about when we were dealing with the UDV, which was that they were very concerned that ayahuasca or ayahuasca, as they called it, be viewed as a sacrament, not as a medicine. And so if you wanted”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I should have explained that. One of the syncretic churches, the group that invited us in to do this biomedical study in the early 90s, that was one of the chief findings.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It required about two weeks of continuous administration to bring it to that level. And that was the cycle that the UDV customarily they took at every couple of weeks. Not that they knew about this effect, but that was just their practice.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of this and figured out how to do it. He had access to brain imaging technology at his laboratory in Finland. He was doing postdocs in Finland. So he tried taking tetrahydrohormine himself and imaging himself and showed, well, sure enough, it did raise the levels of these serotonin transporters on about a two week cycle. And then if you stop taking it, it went back down to baseline.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of behavioral pathologies which happen to be the very pathologies that many of the people in our UDV studied were saying ayahuasca had saved them, usually from alcoholism. That was usually their problem. And if they stayed in the church, in the supportive context and drank ayahuasca regularly, then they stayed on track. And they were on track. behaviorally, psychologically functional people not sick. If they were sick, they were cured and they attributed it to ayahuasca. And then in our in vitro studies and a couple of vile assays, we found that it was really tetrahydroharmine that was having this effect. And the course of action was over about two weeks. And my friend, Jace Callaway, who was one of the investigators.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then when we found this effect, and this is all done, this is all in vitro, we took tissue samples, platelet samples, and so on, and this was all done in the lab, but we found this persistent elevating effect on the serotonin transporters. We thought, what does that mean? wasn't really clear. We were asking a naive question, is there anything biochemical that makes regular ayahuasca drinkers different? Biochemically than normal people or other people. And this was one clear difference. We didn't really know what it meant, but then we looked into the literature and we found out there were a number of pathologies that were associated with abnormal deficits in the serotonin transporters. For example, various kinds of alcoholism, addiction, suicidality, even homicidal behavior, various kinds of”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reuptake inhibitor. So it has SSRI type activity and also some other unexpected things. For one thing, and this came out of our WASCA study in Brazil, it has long-term effects on the levels of the serotonin transporters in the brain. The serotonin transporters are the presynaptic molecules that take serotonin backup out of the synapse and recycles it and re-releases it. Well, like SSRIs, tetrahydroharmine inhibits that, but it also causes a long-term elevation in the levels of these serotonin transporters. And that was a unique finding. We didn't know what to expect, but that came out of the study. And it was kind of surprising.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does do that. It does do that. It's the MAO inhibitor, monoamine oxidase inhibitor. That renders the DMT containing admixture plants active because DMT itself, as you know, is not orally active if you just take it pure or if you make a tea of chakruna, one of these, and then drink it by itself, nothing's going to happen unless you have an MAO inhibitor on board. But it turns out that alkaloids of banisteriopsis, these beta carmelenes, are much more than just MAO inhibitors. For example, one of the primary alkaloids in ayahuasca is harmine. And harmine is a strong MAO inhibitor, but it also stimulates neurogenesis, which is nerve growth. And these are recent findings. Another constituent in ayahuasca is a related alkaloid called tetrahydroharmine, which is an MAO inhibitor, but also a serotonin.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many, many things are that way. So there's always a cultural backstory. That's what I like about ethnopharmacology. It ties those kinds of things together with the nuts and bolts side of it. What are the active ingredients? What's the chemistry? What's the pharmacology, so on.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The whole spectrum really of when you're talking about natural products, especially for things like CMS active natural products and so on, they come out of a cultural context. We know about these things because they have a cultural context. And if you look at even just herbal medicines, herbal remedies, every one of these things that you can buy in the drugstore or the health food store has a story behind it. It has a cultural backstory. And then entrepreneurial forces and commercial forces take that and develop products out of it. For example, Kava Kava is a good example of that. I mean, it's now a supplement and you can buy it in Health Food Store. It's a very useful.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As ethnopharmacology, because it's people doing it, you know, but we're talking about traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge, and that sort of thing. That's the formal definition of ethnopharmacology that I like.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ethanopharmacology, there's various definitions of it. The one I like is kind of tortured. It's kind of long, but I'll explain why I like it. So ethopharmacology is the interdisciplinary, by definition interdisciplinary, scientific investigation of biologically active substances used or observed by humans in traditional societies. And the reason it's so tortured is it's not always about plants. It's not always about medicinal plants. It's not always about things that humans ingest. For example, aryl poisons, totally legitimate kind of subject for ethnopharmacology. And then traditional societies kind of limits the scope. We're talking about not, I mean, in some sense, all of pharmacology.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That there was this ethnographic background and these traditional backgrounds, even though we probably most people agree that Castaneda made a lot of this stuff up didn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. It made it clear that there was a body of traditional knowledge around the use of these things, whether what he described was accurate or not, didn't matter. That was one page, one side of the frame. And then the ethopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs made me aware that a lot of this was about chemistry and plants and pharmacology and molecules and a more hard science biologically oriented aspect to it. So these two things seem to fit together very well. And I thought ethopharmacology is a real thing, you know, at least to the extent. That this book exists, it's a real thing.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the 1967-1968 were like pivotal years for me in terms of my discovery of my professional direction and my professional interests, as well as being psychedelics. These are also very personal things. But that year, 1968 is the year that these two books came across my desk. The teachings of Don Juan, the first edition that my brother gave me for my 18th birthday. And then the ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs, which I had not even sure, I don't even remember where I originally got the first edition, but that had come across my radar a few months earlier. And these two books were very important for me in terms of framing my interests. It made me aware.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like utterly charming, you know, because I expected this swashbuckling, like you say, Indiana Jones, you know, tough guy. And he was all those things, but you got an air conditioner. You may as well hug him. That's what he did. It was very disarming.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, he was obviously a little past his prime at that point. But what I took this bus and got off the bus, it was like a early September, it was a swelter in summer. And I got off the bus and I took my backpack. I must have looked a mess. I mean, I'd been literally on the bus for four days, you know. But I got to his office and I went to the desk downstairs. I said, I'm here to see Dr. Schultz. They said, oh, he's upstairs in his office. So I went upstairs and couldn't see anybody there. There was nobody at the reception desk. And I sort of peered in this dark room with all the blind clothes and wiping the sweat from my brow. I mean, and I could see him back in the back of this office laboratory that he had there. And he was... Hoggy the air conditioner.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very far with it, but it's a very interesting project and wish there was somebody to kind of continue that work, you know. And I practically spit my beer out and I said, hmm, well, Dr. Pet Howard, I've had some interest in this. What do you think about letting me do it? And what do you think about taking me on? And he said, well, yeah, if you're interested, that's the possibility. So we started corresponding. And I was like midway through my master's thesis in Hawaii at that point. And we started corresponding and I got accepted and I got with Dr. Tower's support. I actually got a four-year graduate fellowship and I started working on Salasopy. And the idea that I had developed the technique for growing them.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In his program because he had come to Hawaii while I was a graduate student there and my supervisor in Hawaii was another one of these incredible mentors that I've been blessed with throughout my academic career, Sandy Siegel. And Dr. Siegel, whenever anybody came to visit a visiting professor or dignitary, he would always invite the graduate students up to his house. We'd sit around and have pizza and beer and shoot the breeze with whatever luminary was in town. And Dr. Towers was one of the luminaries in the process of having this conversation. He said, well, I've got this young master student working on the salobe. It's working on the enzyme that converts psilocybin to psilicin, phosphatase. And she's not getting...”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't get accepted, so that opportunity was taken away. But the unexpected benefit of this was that some years later, well, this was 74. So after that, I did my master's at the University of Hawaii not studying psychoactive plants, my plot to study psychoactive plants there was undermined. But I ended up applying to the University of British Columbia and I started there in 1979. And my supervisor there was a man named Neil Towers also kind of a giant in this field, not as gigantic as Sholtes, but very much known in the world of phytochemistry and ethnobotany and so on. And he was quite open to me working on mushrooms. I actually started out.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Encounters, but he basically said if you want to study Amazonian plants, I'm all in, I'd be happy to have you. And as it turned out,”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe the most significant contribution, but that was the method that we developed there. And in the process of growing the mushrooms and then sampling the mushrooms and just getting excited about being able to grow mushrooms, I thought, wow, well, maybe I'll change my focus from varola to psilocybin mushrooms. And I wrote to Shultes about this and I said, what would you think of that? And he wrote back a rather kind of stuffy letter, you know, saying, well, my specialty is higher plants. And I think if you want to work on fungi, you should talk to Dr. Alexander H. Smith at the University of Michigan. But basically saying, I mean, the subtext was you're a trader. How dare you? Yeah. Not really. I mean, there was some.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The greenhouse and brought in some ayahuasca cuttings that we had from California. And also I had access to a sterile culture lab. They were doing tissue culture there, which can also be adapted to doing fungal culture. And I was messing around with ways to try to figure out how to grow the saloosopyensis. And I had access to a university lab to do this work in, which was amazing. And we tried a few things and actually succeeded in growing mushrooms out of these mason jars on sterilized substrates. You're probably familiar with the book psilocybin magic mushroom grower's guide, which Terry and I published under pseudonyms.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's LSD. Here's how you make LSD. Here's how the fungus makes LSD. And he was a brilliant guy and another mentor. And he was saying, well, don't go work for Shultes. Go work for Norman Farnsworth in Chicago. And I said, no, no, you don't understand. Shulties is God. And so Shultes encouraged me to apply, and I was getting these courses that he thought I really needed to have on my transcripts. And I applied and I didn't get in. You know, I did not get accepted into Harvard, which was kind of a crushing blow, but not unexpected. It was a blessing in disguise in some ways because while all this was going on, I was living in Fort Collins, Colorado, going to Colorado State. My friend, Larry, Beasley was an old friend from high school, and he was a horticulturalist. As it turned out, he was running the greenhouse at Colorado State.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went back to Berkeley and I moved back to Colorado where I'm from, even though I had my bachelor's degree. I just enrolled in a couple of courses, advanced organic chemistry and the taxonomy specialty. I chose to look in was grass systematics, which was like torture. Grass systematic classification is the most arcane difficult thing you could do. I must have had something about wanting to punish myself, but I studied graph systematics and organic chemistry. And an interesting, unexpected delight in this was the person that was the chemistry teacher of this organic chemistry course, a man named Frank Sturmitz. Turns out he was quite a well-known alkaloid chemist. He used to illustrate his lectures with, well,”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, ended up being one of the foci of my doctoral work. But that was 10 years in the future. But I was interested in Varola. I was interested in those snuffs. And I said, well, you could go to the Amazon and study Varola and sort out the chemistry of it. So he said, that would be a possibility. I totally appreciate that, endorse that. He said, well, there are two things you need to do before you do that. And I had my degree. I got my undergraduate degree in 1973. But he said, you need more chemistry and you need to take more organic chemistry and you need to take more taxonomy, you know, which you know is plant classification, the classic approach to plant classification. So I said, yes, sir, absolutely. And I got the message. I got back on the bus.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I saw Shultes before I saw the girlfriend. I basically got off the bus and went immediately to the botanical museum. It was an incredible experience for me because I was like total awe of this band. I mean, it was like an audience with the Pope or something, you know. But he wasn't pope-like at all. He was just a very kindly down-to-earth ordinary person and he welcomed me and took me to lunch at the Harvard faculty club. And we talked about what I could work on and what would you like to do was the way the conversation started out. So because Terrence and I had been to Columbia in 1971 and one of the things we were looking for was this orally active virola preparation.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For my own needs, but I didn't have grocery bags of them or anything like that. That was the first place I went was Hammond, Louisiana. And then I just got on the old bus and continued on. I stopped and saw, interestingly, this anthropologist in Maryland who had studied the Yanomame, one of the Amazonian tribes that uses the psychedelic snuffs. And he was a linguist. He was probably one of the few people in the world that actually spoke Yanomame. He had some interesting samples that he collected. I went there basically to pick up those samples and hang on with him. And then I continued up to Boston. And I had an old girlfriend who happened to live in Boston. And we were still on good terms. So I went there. I had a place to stay. And then I went.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I started at Berkeley and I went first down to Louisiana, Hammond, Louisiana, and visited some friends of mine who owned a leather shop, a hippie leather shop, a wonderful bunch of people running a leather shop in this totally rednecked town. Why did I go see them? Well, I went to see them because they lived out in the country where there were pastures and cattle. I went there basically to hunt for mushrooms. And, you know, and my idea in my, this is 1974, my idea was, well, you know, I'll get a bunch of mushrooms and dry them, take them back to California and sell them. Well, it was like the worst season for mushrooms in like five years that they'd live there. So I went down there and I did find some mushrooms, but just a few.”
2021-07-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #523: Dennis McKenna — The Depths of Ayahuasca: 500+ Sessions, Fundamentals, Advanced Topics, Science, Churches, Learnings, Warnings, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT