Joe Rogan - Is Stoned Ape Theory BS?

How much did you pay attention to McKenna's theory about the evolution of the human brain, the stone-dape theory that... Yeah, I looked at it. But I found... I didn't find it persuasive. And in fact, if you press Terrence McKenna, he didn't find it entirely persuasive. It's a very... It's an interesting speculation. It's kind of a mind game. I don't see how... I can see how psychedelics would influence the mind and create new ideas, new memes, and might contribute to language. But how does it get into the genes? That's what I... The genes. The genes. Because he said it changed us at the genetic level. I see psychedelics as having had a profound effect at the level of cultural evolution, that there are lots of interesting innovations that people who had psychedelic experience introduced to our culture. We talked about religion earlier. That could be one. I had a wonderful interview with Stuart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. And his insight... He had this profound insight during a psychedelic trip on the roof of his house in North Beach, and he saw the curvature of the earth and the way he had before. And he said, God, if we could have a photo... This is 1966. We had never seen a picture of the earth from space yet. And he said, if we had a picture of the earth from space and we could see it as this round spaceship, that would change everything. Because if you think of the earth as flat, as most of us instinctively do, it's endless. There's endless resources. You don't have to worry about limits in any way. But if we had that image and he realized, I have to start a campaign to get NASA to turn the cameras around. They're on their way to the moon. Show us the earth from space. And he said, I'm going to make a campaign. I know. And he says, this is on LSD. I'll make a button. Very important medium in 1966. I'll make a button. And what should the button say? It should be a little paranoid to get people's attention. Why haven't they shown us an image of the earth from space? Yeah, that's what he would do. And he started a campaign. He started selling these buttons. And the campaign got in the newspapers and it goes viral, as viral as you could get in 1966. And two years later, NASA produced that image. And he put it on the whole earth catalog. And that image galvanized the environmental movement. So it's those kind of memes that psychedelics introduces into culture. And that changes culture. That image changed culture. And I think there are hundreds of them. Steve Jobs talked about his use of LSD is very important, his formative experience. And in fact, there's a whole tradition of computer engineers going back to the 50s using LSD that I wrote about in the book. But I don't see how we were selected genetically because there was an advantage to the people who were taking a lot of psychedelics. That's where he loses me. I don't think that's necessarily his theory. Maybe I'm misrepresenting it. His theory is that it coincides with climate change and these lower hominids experimenting with different food sources. So as the rainforest receded into grasslands, they started experimenting by flipping over cow patties and finding grubs and perhaps even mushrooms that were growing on these cow patties. And his theory was that there's a bunch of different benefits. One, low doses of psilocybin have been shown to increase visual acuity. And it's given to hunting dogs in certain cultures. Yes. Make you a better hunter, make you more in tune with what you're doing. That it would make you more... Central nervous system arousal, including sexual arousal, make you more horny, which would make you... More productive, right. ...procreate more often. And that the very unusual effect that psilocybin has on the mind could have led to language and could have also led to the expansion of neurons. The language could be part of cultural evolution. Sure. Yeah. The doubling of the human brain size though was the particular thing. That it coincided according to McKenna. There's a lot of people that disagree with him. But his brother makes a very compelling case for him. His brother Dennis, who's still alive. Yeah. And he's a brilliant, brilliant guy. He talked about it on this podcast. He talked about his take on the stoned ape theory scientifically, why he believes it's really what happened. But that it does coincide with the change in climate of these ape-like people trying out different things. And that the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years is one of the greatest mysteries in the entire fossil record. Yeah, but there are alternative theories. I mean, I wrote about one of my last book. I don't think they're probably all coincide. They may be. Cooking with fire. Yes. And the other thing is, you get more nutrients and the brain size because you get more nutritional value from cooked food. The throwing arm, the desire to hunt all these different animals and calculating all these different ways to do that and communication. I think there's probably a bunch of coinciding factors. And it may well be that people were eating everything. Our ancestors, it's amazing what they ate. And no doubt, they ate psychedelic mushrooms. And no doubt, I mean, he also believed that language was a form of synesthesia in the way that synesthesia, you can smell a musical note or something like that, that you're taking a sound, a meaningless sound, and you're attaching it to a concept that maybe that happened on psilocybin. But he had a bunch of ideas that never panned out. He was ridiculous ideas. Look, he was an incredibly creative person. And they're all really interesting to think about. Some of them, I think you can probably discredit based on what we understand about genes and evolution, but others are just really provocative. Well, that's where his brother comes in. Yeah. His brother's a scientist. He's a strict scientist. He doesn't tolerate any of the woo woo. And he goes straight to... And he's skeptical of some of his brother's ideas too. Oh yeah, openly. Yeah. I mean, loved his brother, but he was like, hmm, there's a lot of things that weren't really accurate. But also, Terence McKenna too would say, well, you know, he's just putting these ideas out there. Well, the guy was a constant pot user. He was constantly doing psychedelics. Brilliant talker. I mean, he would have a podcast now, right? Oh, for sure. It would be amazing. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'd promote the shit out of it. I would too. Yeah. I mean, he was a fun guy to listen to talk. And there's a podcast called the Psychedelic Salon that my friend Lorenzo hosts that has pretty much every Terence McKenna lecture and speech he's ever done available for free. You can download it. And Lorenzo has taken these and digitally remastered them so the sound is better. It's really awesome that he's got this resource, but the idea that these lower hominids experienced, ancient hominids experienced, experimented rather with psilocybin and this was what advanced culture or advanced language, advanced their understanding of each other. It's a very, very compelling idea. Yeah, it is. And I think, I mean, the way I think about drugs like psychedelics in evolution, in the same way like in genetic evolution, radiation causes mutations and some of those mutations turn out to be really valuable. You know, purely by accident, some great new trait is introduced to the species and it increases fitness in that person or that individual lives on. In the cultural realm, psychedelics are like radiation. They're mutagens. They create change, variation, and that advances cultural evolution. All that variation, all those wild ideas, 99% of them are stupid and useless, I'll bet, but that 1% can change the world. Yeah, absolutely.