Joe Rogan - William Von Hippel on Stoned Ape Theory

Have you ever read any Terrence McKenna? I know you're familiar with something called the stoned ape theory. No. Sorry not. McKenna was a he was an ethnobotanist. He was also a psychedelic adventurer and he had a theory and the theory was that the what you're talking about this climate change that also coincided with the doubling of the human brain size. His theory was that one of the things that was in play was that these apes would experiment with different food sources as they moved into the grasslands and there was a lot of undulates in these grasslands and that psilocybin mushrooms which we know existed back then would grow in these grasslands and that these monkeys these apes rather started consuming psilocybin mushrooms and it led them to be more creative and it also led to specific traits like the development of language that eating mushrooms in low doses increases visual acuity which would lead them to be better hunters or more perceptive. It also leads them to be hornier which would most likely involve more breeding more sexual activity and possibly select the the ones that chose the the mushrooms would maybe possibly breed more than the ones that didn't choose the mushrooms because they were more into it and we're more social more sexually active and he has a series of like his brother Dennis who's still alive detailed it on a podcast we did the very first podcast we did in his brother is an actual scientist and detailed it in terms of how psilocybin affects the brain and what areas of the brain it what what what actually takes place when you're under the influence of this and that it could very potentially have led to the development of language and that this all these things in play the throwing arm the you know developing these new social networks where you need to communicate with each other along with the harnessing of fire along with the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms on a regular basis because they were incredibly frequent and very edible that's total trip I've never heard of that for it would be really like that's a really good example of some random thing if it really did play that role how random that is that these frickin things happen to be growing there and that they happen to be attracted to them and ate them we know that animals like to get high elephants will eat these fruit that have well the drunk in this case that have overripe and have become alcoholic we know that animals will do that you've seen jaguars that consume psychedelic plants and they lie on their back and stare at the sky oh it's amazing but you know what ayahuasca is no ayahuasca is a it's a way that these people in the rainforest developed untold thousands of years ago of developing an orally active version of dimethyl tryptamine do you know what dimethyl tryptamine no I'm not okay dimethyl tryptamine is the most potent psychedelic known to man's incredibly potent drug that is just intensely hallucinatory gives you these insane visions and it also is pretty this he's here's a Jaguar it's really crazy and this is in the Amazon these Jaguars eat these plants and these plants are they have the ingredients of ayahuasca and these Jaguars are known to eat these things and then trip their fucking balls off yeah they eat them and there are pupils dilate and they roll over on their back and stare at the sky I mean they're clearly high right so this is something that you're gonna say yeah this is what I'm gonna say so this is what what ayahuasca is is dimethyl tryptamine like look it's kind of cool watching this Jaguar trip balls yeah they just stare they see shit that's not there I mean or it is there maybe they're astral traveling it's amazing so what ayahuasca is is there's dimethyl tryptamine which is this incredibly potent psychedelic drug is produced in the human body it's produced by the liver it's produced by the lungs and they also believe it's produced by the pineal gland which is literally your third eye the pineal gland in certain reptiles actually has a rep retina in a lens I mean it's like an eyeball and they think in the Egyptians called it the seed of the soul and they think that this is one of the reasons why there's they have this obsession with this gland in Eastern mysticism is somehow or another they figured out that this is the gland that produces this incredibly potent psychedelic drug this psychedelic drug dimethyl tryptamine also exists in thousands of different plants the problem is when you consume it orally your body produces something in your gut called monoamine oxidase and monoamine oxidase breaks it down so what these indigenous people figured out is how to combine one plant which contains this psychedelic compound with another plant which contains a natural mao inhibitor called harmine so they brew this all together much like they did the cassava which we have no idea how they figured that out right they brew this stuff up together and they create this psychedelic tea called ayahuasca and ayahuasca now they have all these trips where people go down to Peru and take this stuff and trip their fucking balls off and this this combination of these things leads to this incredibly potent really transformative experience which is impossible to describe and that this this psychedelic drug why did I bring that up what was we're talking about how maybe chimps and are these early ancestors did something similar which pushed them along this path of starting a community right but how did I get to DM to what how did I get the ayahuasca there are a couple of links in that chain it was because of animals that get high that's that's what it was so this is what this that's exactly what it was it was yeah the Jaguar getting high on DMT that's what they think the Jaguar is doing that's just the Jaguar consuming this stuff is it's making him trip on DMT and DMT is I mean it's fun it's really exciting and so that's so Robert Trivers is this wonderful biologist who started a lot of the kinds of work that we're talking about going in the 70s calls these sorts of things a phenotypic indulgence right so evolution gave you these pleasure centers in your brain so that you do what's in your genes best interests and kill the animal or get the girl or whatever and that makes you feel good and so we tend to like the things that are good for us and dislike the things that are bad for us we don't want to eat feces we do want to eat a steak so there's cases like this where it's short-circuit set it goes right to the pleasure center even though what it's doing is kind of irrelevant but this is a case where maybe it wasn't irrelevant maybe it actually caused these animals to then change the way that they behave to become more sociable right it's very possible something like that played a role along the way which is why if you replay the sequence the vanishing rainforest ten times only one time does it maybe lead to anything good and the other nine times at least a bunch of dead chimps hmm yeah well the process is probably incredibly slow right yeah over millions of years of the climate did alter