Joe Rogan - Dennis McKenna Critiques Michael Pollan

So, you know, I think a lot of people will agree with me, a lot of people who listen to this show will agree with me when I say I've pretty much given up on politics. Politics seems to me irrevocably broken. Many other institutions are dysfunctional if not broken. I mean, science is corrupt and government is corrupt. It's corporate. And corporatism is, you know, these are all flawed systems because they're not, they don't have a base of compassion and recognition of the interrelatedness of all things. And psychedelics are a catalyst for waking up. And so once people have that experience, then their perspective is changed. And if they're influential, they can go out and make change on a global scale. I think it's so important that Michael Pollan put out that book because a guy who's a mainstream straight-laced guy who's written about architecture and agriculture and all these different things where people really respect his opinions and his work, that this guy has not just written this book, but has also gone out on a limb and had a bunch of different psychedelic experiences and controlled settings and talks about them and the profound impact that it had on his, at one point, skeptical mind. He was very skeptical about what these things were. Yeah. Though I love Michael Pollan. I have for a long time. I'm sorry. I don't want any angry tweets. No, I've loved his work for a long time. And I'm really delighted that he's come out and written about this. There are some things about his book. I have to say that I'm a little disappointed, but then I also have to say I'm only about a little over halfway through it. What was disappointing? Well, so far, he hasn't really emphasized or said much about... He sort of writes it from the perspective that all of this started with the discovery of LSD in 1943, and then that was the psychedelic era. They're indigenous traditions, thousands of years old. Yeah. He hasn't really talked about those things. Well, he knows they exist. Did he talk to you at all? He did not. That's ridiculous. Yeah. Which I was also, of course, extremely jealous and angry and upset that he didn't talk to me. I mean, what the hell am I? You know. But banging at the bushes for 60 years now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, come on, man. Seriously, I'm not sure why he did that, if that was a conscious decision, but I'm kind of disappointed because I think I have a perspective that... I have some things to say that so far haven't been said in this book and things that Michael Pollan would completely relate to. He's the one that brought up the idea that with respect to plant domestication and our relationship with our food plants, we think we're growing... We're cultivating plants. Actually, plants are cultivating us. This is plants program for world domination. Right. And the same is true of all these teacher plants. This is why they're out there on the global stage now. Maybe he will get to it. I'm only mildly jealous. I wish he had talked to me. On the other hand, what he has written is going to be important. It's going to be influential. This will be influential to a small number of people. Pollan's book is going to bring it to the attention of millions. Yeah, it's going to open people's eyes and refresh the way people view this whole subject. I think when you look at... When you're talking about ancient cultures and the use of psychedelics going back thousands and thousands of years, and then this dip somewhere around 1970, where it almost seems to have gotten down to a very low hum, but now the drums are beating again. Now it's coming back. Now it's coming back. Yeah. I'm really fascinated and excited about that because I think this is... Me too. I don't think it's the answer to everything, but I think it's the glue. I think it's... There's a thing about the psychedelic experience that forces you to recognize that you have these pre-established ideas of what things are, and that you've put them in these boxes and you've pushed it away and you're like, well, I've defined what a city is, and I'm just going to put that over there. Now I know what that is. I'm not going to think about that anymore. I've defined what a road is. I remember after one of my first DMT experiences, just sitting around looking at roads differently. I was on a road. I was like, this is the craziest shit ever. We've decided that it's normal to lay this hard surface down on the ground so we could roll these fire breathing pieces of metal. Pieces of metal. Yeah. It's so strange. It's crazy, isn't it? But it was before that, it was just a road. It was always a road. But after that, it became this weird symptom of what we're doing by erecting these massive structures and cities and that we need this ground in order for us to use these vehicles on. But in the process of doing that, we've marred the landscape with it everywhere. Yeah. Well, psychedelics do give us the chance to rethink a lot of things. I think we've talked before about Simon Powell's work. He wrote about ... He writes about psilocybin, wrote the psilocybin solution, and that was his first book. I think his latest is The Magic Mushroom Explorer. Something in his work really struck me, which is he pointed out that psychedelics in some sense are, they're scientific instruments. They give you an opportunity to look at phenomena in a way that you've never looked at them before because they have this ... Because they take you out of your reference frame, or they bring the background forward, or there's different ways to describe it. Paulin actually describes it well when he talks about this disruption of the default mode network. It enables you to see patterns in nature that you're programmed not to see. A lot of what our brain does, this whole reducing valve idea, is it filters many things out. It lets in just enough of the external world that you can relate it to prior experiences, that you think you know, and you construct this artificial model of reality. That's what you inhabit. I've said this many times, maybe worse than Paulin, maybe better, but I talk about how we're living in a hallucination, essentially, that's constructed by our brains. In order to just deal with all the information that is available, it has to really restrict it. It has to really choke on it so that what does get in can make sense. That's fine for ordinary consciousness, but you are prone to overlook things about reality that are important. Psychedelics temporarily give you an opportunity to lower those mechanisms, that default network or sometimes called neural gating. If you're in a safe place where you don't have to worry about your safety, there is no saber-toothed tiger we're going to come get you, you know, and so you don't have to worry about your safety, then you can just relax into it and you can appreciate things that are always there. It's not that they're not there. These are not things you imagine, they're just things that you never notice because you're programmed not to. So tremendous learning tools, and many, many scientists have said, you know, their insights have come from their psychedelic experience, from Steve Jobs to Crick to Kerry Mullis. Some of these folks admitted and others deny it, but it's true, you know. So there are many, many things we can learn from psychedelics, that's only one of them, but from a scientist's perspective, that's an important one.