Danny Jones Podcast
#280 - Psychonaut Scientist Reveals The ANCIENT Beings Hiding in DMT Hyperspace | Dennis McKenna | Dennis Mckenna
Wed, 15 Jan 2025
Sign up for the Coca Summit in Peru - https://bit.ly/40uRj6s Dennis McKenna is an ethnopharmacologist, author, and brother to well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna. Dennis currently runs the @mckenna.academy YouTube channel. SPONSORS https://hims.com/danny - Start your FREE online visit today. https://pick6.draftkings.com - Download the DraftKings Pick 6 app and use code DANNYJONES. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS Wisdom of the Leaf Coca Summit - https://bit.ly/40uRj6s Dennis' YouTube channel - @mckenna.academy Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss book: https://a.co/d/3u81TJP https://mckenna.academy FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - The brotherhood of the screaming abyss 11:56 - Discovering Ayahuasca 23:35 - Psilocybin mushrooms in La Chorrera 32:20 - The transcendental object at the end of time 46:34 - Timewave Zero 01:00:45 - Dennis' disagreement w/ Terence 01:16:25 - Terence McKenna was a complex person 01:28:25 - Mushrooms are the ideal psychedelic 01:46:26 - Set & setting 01:57:06 - The reality hallucination 02:05:34 - We're made of drugs 02:12:40 - Stoned ape theory 02:21:38 - The Extratempestrial Model 02:29:43 - Galen & ancient drugs 02:32:59 - Extracting drugs from plants 02:43:44 - Psychedelics as medicine 02:48:07 - Cocaine 03:03:59 - New coca leaf study 03:10:53 - The biognosis project 03:23:40 - Extended state DMT studies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Wisdom of the Leaf Coca Summit?
The McKenna Academy is hosting the Wisdom of the Leaf COCA Summit in 2025 from February 3rd through the 7th at the Wilka Tika Retreat Center in the Sacred Valley of Peru. With dozens of biologists, doctors, and professionals coming together alongside Dennis McKenna. And now you can join the summit too. Just go to McKenna.academy to find more information on the COCA Summit.
And you can email Annette at McKenna.academy for pricing and details. Be a part of the change and now enjoy this fantastic conversation with Dennis McKenna. All right, Dennis. Thanks for coming, man.
Thank you for having me. Of course. I'm very excited to chat with you. It's a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this ever since you contacted me.
So have I. So have I. Your book is absolutely fascinating. The way it just walks people through you and your brother's childhood and growing up and essentially how you guys were incubated into this world of psychedelics and You know, the whole like 60s counterculture movements.
And, you know, I thought it was really cool how it was a very grounded backstory of how you guys came to be and how you guys are also so different, but also so similar.
Mm hmm.
Yes, we were very similar. Of course, my brother was four years older than I was, and he was interested in all kinds of things. And being the older sibling, he got all the attention, right? And I was sort of in the background. But he was such an interesting person. I wanted to be involved in everything that he was doing. And I'm just the pesky little brother, sort of tagging along.
But sometimes it synced. And we had, since you've read the book, and by the way, I should mention with the book, the copy I sent you is the original edition, 2012 edition. There's a new edition available now.
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. My Life with Terrence McKenna.
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Chapter 2: How did Dennis McKenna and his brother become involved with psychedelics?
place that our minds were teleported to or something like that. We thought if we could find another form that was orally active, it would absorb most slowly and go away more slowly. So that's what led us to look for an orally active form of DMT in South America. This was all around 1968, 1969. Okay. And we didn't know about ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is an orally active form of DMT, but no one understood that pharmacology at that time. What we did find was a paper by Schultes, the famous ethnobotanist from Harvard that was major influence on all of these psychedelically inclined ethnobotanists. A paper in his own house publication called the Harvard Botanical Museum Leaflets.
And he published many, many things on South American psychedelics. He was the pioneer in those days. They called them hallucinogens. But he published a paper in that journal called Verola as an Orally Active Hallucinogen. That was the title. And we stumbled on this paper and we thought – This is it, man. This is what we're looking for. It was this Watoto drug that they use.
Varroa is a genus of trees in the nutmeg family. And in many tribes in the Amazon, they make snuff out of it, the sap of Varroa. is loaded with DMT and 5-methoxy-DMT and related tryptamines. And various tribes, they extract the sap and they powder it and they mix it with ashes and they make a snuff out of it. So effectively, it's DMT. And it's short-acting.
But this one tribe, the Wetoto, had an orally active preparation. They made, instead of a snuff... They made a powder out of it. And they made a paste. They made a little – they didn't dry it down completely. They made a sticky paste. They rolled that in ashes and then they ate it orally.
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Chapter 3: What are the key experiences from La Chorrera?
And we had looked, we knew our, we had done our homework, we knew what the mushrooms were, but experience-wise, we were very naive. And we thought, well, That's great. We could enjoy these. We were completely casual about it. We were completely cavalier.
We'll have a good time with these while we're waiting for this ukuhe to show up, waiting for the secret to surface, you know, from some informant. So we began eating these mushrooms. And we began eating them rather frequently and rather high doses. For one thing, they became part of our diet, you know, because there wasn't a whole lot to eat. And the mushrooms quickly.
So you were just eating these for like breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Well, not breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but daily or every other day and quite substantial doses, you know, and like 10, 15 mushrooms at a time. And these things are potent, you know, in that environment. They are extremely potent. But we loved this. I mean, it was a fantastic thing. But the mushrooms quickly made it clear that they were the real secret.
They were what we had come for, not knowing it. wasn't the real secret as it turned out. And later we did access Ukuhe and Ukuhe turned out to be fairly disappointing in terms of its effects. But the mushrooms were like, this is the most fantastic psychedelic we've ever experienced, you know? And, uh, You have no experience with psychedelics.
I have no experience with psychedelics other than DMT, which I did for the first time recently.
Well, you know DMT and psilocybin is very, very close chemically.
I've heard, yeah. My only experience is cannabis and DMT.
Right. Well, DMT is dimethyltryptamine. Cannabis is 4-phosphoryl dimethyltryptamine. So it's the perfect genetically engineered orally active form of DMT. It's easily absorbed. It's orally active. It doesn't require monoamine oxidase inhibitors to be active. It's non-toxic and it's a kick-ass psychedelic, you know, and it puts you in about a six to seven hour
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Chapter 4: How do psychedelics affect perception and consciousness?
And so I did that. And I kind of deliberately stayed in the background. And I pursued these other pathways, you know, which I continue to pursue. And I don't have to... I don't have to tie myself or my ideas to a concept that basically you can't prove. So I just said, okay, not that I don't, I mean, it's complicated to talk about, Danny. It's not that I dismiss what went on.
In some ways, I was 20 when we went to La Charrera. Terrence was 24. Most of our lives have been lived in the shadow of the events that happened at that time, you know. But I'm 74 now. So a lot of years have gone by since then. And I've lived a life and I've made a career such that it is. And I've, you know, made contributions to the field of ethnobotany. Yeah. You know, mostly that.
I mean, some neuroscience, but that was kind of a detour when I did my postdocs. But always with... mean psychedelics have been the continuing carrot for me and terence for all of our lives i mean that's what got us fascinated and we each pursued it in our own way you know and i continue to pursue it but i'm uh you know i'm i'm uh You know, it's not my obsession. I'm not fanatical about it.
I just think they're very valuable. You know, people say, for example, one of the, you know, so you did all these things. You didn't disrupt the space-time continuum. You didn't do any of this. None of this stuff happened. What happened? What was important about that? I'll tell you what was important as I view it. We brought back the spores of the mushrooms from La Charrera.
And we played around with those for a couple of years, trying to figure out how to grow them. Finally, almost by accident, I figured out how to grow them. You know, and the initial very simple technique, growing these things out of mason jars and all that. Very simple.
I basically tried – there was a mycologist who worked for the USDA who published this paper in Mycologia, how you could grow small amounts of agaricus bisporus on sterilized substrates in mason jars for genetic research and that sort of thing. And I had the spores. I had the mycelium and I decided, well, give it a shot. Let's see if it works. And what do you know? It worked very well.
So suddenly mushrooms were back in our lives again. We had access to mushrooms and we were very happy about that. And we decided to publish this book, Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. which is still available, and we published it, and it got a lot of notice. And now, of course, there are lots of simpler, better ways to grow mushrooms.
But it was a simple technique that almost anybody could do. And we published this book and it got a lot of notice. So people say, what was the real impact of our trip to La Charrera? That was the impact. This had a tangible effect on society because it brought mushrooms basically within the reach of anyone.
Anyone with a bit of patience and a spare room could grow lots of mushrooms if they wanted to. And we did. And those mushrooms got out there. The book got out there. So that was – that had a social impact. Nothing supernatural about it. or anything. We sort of stumbled on this method and we shared that method.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the 'Transcendental Object at the End of Time'?
This is like the brain filter hypothesis.
It's exactly the brain filter hypothesis. The information comes to us through our sensory neural interfaces. Kind of gets all mixed together inside, you know, and extrudes a model of reality, which is what we experience as ordinary consciousness. And then you can introduce another pharmacology or something else into it, a drug, meditation, another practice. You can change that model of reality.
But you're always trapped in that model of reality. We can't even say that much about what's outside that model because –
you take psychedelics and you realize the concept of inside and outside don't make sense you know you're not really separated yeah you know you know we are all one right that is the uh that's the the psychedelic cliche but it's true you know we're not separated this is like young's idea of the archipelago of consciousness exactly exactly
Where we're all connected under the water, but above we're all little individual islands.
Right. We appear to be separate. And I'm a serious Jungian, and so is Terence. Jung was a deep influence, and I think that's exactly what's going on. So this reality hallucination... You know, we can be grateful that we have it because it makes us functional, but it could also go off track. I mean, it could be dysfunctional.
Well, it's millions of years of our brains evolving to survive, right? And to evolve and to push our species into the future.
And when it does get disrupted, it's a problem. But then we come along and we say, well, you can say, well, my reality hallucination is turning into a bummer. It's not fun anymore. And then you can take a psychedelic and you can disrupt it. You can reprogram it. And you don't have to worry because the brain and physiological systems in general, they'll tend toward equilibrium.
It's going to fall back together. It's going to fall back together in most cases. I mean, some people don't, but very rarely do people not recover from psychedelics. And even if there's a prolonged- What do you mean recover?
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Chapter 6: How do set and setting influence psychedelic experiences?
And they said, well, It wasn't a well-controlled study because you didn't have the right placebos. You didn't design it correctly. And so we don't accept these results. And as a result, we don't approve MDMA. And the psychiatric community is saying, but wait a minute, this showed profound effectiveness for treating PTSD. You can't just dismiss this.
And the FDA is saying, well, actually, we can dismiss it. And we hold the keys. And you guys didn't meet the criteria for design of the study that we insist on because it wasn't a placebo-controlled study. And so nobody knows where that's going. I mean, they said basically design a better study or a different study. But I mean, it's created a big problem.
And I don't know where it's going to go in terms of the advancement of psychedelic therapies in biomedicine. But, you know, I mean, it may be that psychedelics will not go anywhere because of this, because of this insistence, because the whole... pharmaceutical-industrial complex is so rigid in the way that they regard this. So we'll see. Anyway, to bring it back to coca again, what I wanted to...
The point I want to make when I deliver my talk is that coca is a good example of, you know, cocaine was isolated from coca. And it's one of these pure compounds that has many of the properties but not all of the properties of coca. But that's been the fixation. And it's caused so much damage, you know, on the – geopolitically, socially, everything else.
I mean, not only is it a toxic, harmful drug, but the political impact it's had has been tremendous. Tremendously negative. The drug cartels who control the production and distribution of cocaine, basically these indigenous families or families of farmers that...
cultivate coca they just go and they just say well you know you're working for us now you know they don't want to work for them but they just say we're working you're working for us and if you don't work for us we'll kill you you know and then they deal kill a few of them to keep to set an example and then the whole cartel thing controls the production of cocaine if cocaine were legalized
it would be worthless. Cocaine is not an expensive compound. You can make it for pennies. You can extract it if it were not a controlled substance. It would not be a valuable compound. I mean, if caffeine were declared illegal tomorrow, you'd see many of the same things go
Well, not only that, but it wouldn't be it wouldn't be killing people because it would be have to be regulated and made safely. Exactly. You wouldn't have all these people dying from cocaine laced with other things like fentanyl. And it would be a much safer. It would be much safer.
And you could go to a pharmacy and you could buy it. If you wanted to use cocaine, you could just buy it. People could use it. It wouldn't have the glamour. It wouldn't be the romantic thing that it is, but it wouldn't have the glamour and these people would just be... you know, sort of viewed as kind of, well, pathetic drug addicts.
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Chapter 7: What are the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics?
Yes.
uh but then you know you know in science uh and again science is You know, it doesn't have all the answers, but the scientific stance or the sort of scientific attitude is the application of Occam's razor is a good thing. You know, Occam's razor basically said, what is the... The easiest explanation. What explains the data? What is the most likely explanation that explains the data?
You know, so it's a leap to go from these people's experiences and say, oh, that proves the world that... You know, the world's a simulation, which means we have to dump into the dumpster everything we thought we knew about the world, and people are reluctant to do that. I'm not sure exactly.
I think it may have to do with what we were talking about before about the collective unconscious and the fact that we're all connected. by this bedrock of the collective unconscious. I think the Jungian notion of these archetypes in some realm, and we're just islands sticking up out of this ocean, but at the bedrock we're all connected.
That may be where these things reside, and that's where... It's not unlike the Platonic ideas about Plato's notion of the... I mean, I think his idea for that was the ideas, the shadows in the cave, that whole thing, that what we're seeing is shadows in the cave. Yes, yes. I like the Jungian notion. It makes sense. So maybe there is some place where –
the universal determinants of language, cognition, understanding, all of these things are shared commonly not through cultural filters. What we see is always comes through a cultural filter. Maybe there's something behind that that's more fundamental. And DMT lets you look into that space temporarily.
Into that ancient brain.
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I mean, it's just a speculation. Again, the question is how do you prove that? How do you prove that's where it's coming from? One thing I've always been a little sort of uncomfortable with or – I belong to a chat group called Sentient Others, and we've had several conferences, and that's a group in the UK mainly, and we've talked about…
It's basically about these entities that you encounter in these altered states, particularly DMT. These alien-like entities that appear to be separate, that want to communicate with you. And one thing that bothers me a little bit about those things you see is They look like humans. I mean they look basically like humans. They don't – there's a book that's been published recently.
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