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- [00:01]
Grainger Maintenance Engineer
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- [00:30]
Grainger Procurement Manager
Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, Filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, Filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [01:36]
Mishchke (Host)
Coming to you from the bleak, barren tarmac of University Avenue and straddling the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, my name's Mishchke. Got a good show for you today. I have a guest. I hope you enjoy him as well as the topic. You may or may not know of the life of Terence McKenna. The name may ring a bell, it may not ring a bell, but he was a classic child of the 60s who went all in on the culture that that era presented. When he died at the far too young age of 53, the New York Times described Terence McKenna as having lived on the wild side of an already wild generation. That gives you a little indication of just how wild his world was. That same New York Times obit described Terence McKenna as having a leprechaun's wit as well as a poet's sensibility. Terence and his brother Dennis McKenna are more responsible than anyone for bringing magic mushrooms to America and teaching Americans how to grow them and the wonders of Them, these two brothers get credit for being one of the dominant voices out there, pushing the idea that psychedelic drugs like LSD or ayahuasca or magic mushrooms have much to teach, much to offer. That they enhance one's life and ought to be legal and ought to be taken, that they're there to serve us. I just read a book on the McKenna brothers, and I wouldn't normally have the author on if it weren't for the fact that these wild boys did their part over the years to gradually usher in an astoundingly accepting era when it comes to psychedelic drugs. The era we are in today, where these drugs are being studied by scientists and are being found to help people in many different ways. Not everyone, obviously. Little in this world ever seems to work for everyone. But I dare say in the studies I've read about, and I've read many studies, the effects are positive in the vast majority of cases. Who thought we'd arrive at this moment in time back when Richard Nixon was declaring war on drugs and psychedelics were being called a scourge? John o' Connor teaches journalism at Boston College. His essays and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Men's Journal, the Financial Times and the Boston Globe. His new book is titled A Short, Strange Trip. An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness and A Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. It's the story of the McKenna brothers, Dennis and Terence, and their almost evangelical push for psychedelic plants to be embraced in this culture, not just for the wonder and enjoyment of them, but because they can help humankind. Something that would have been perhaps laughable in most circles many years ago, but far less of a laughing matter these days as science and medicine catch up with these boys. They were wild as young men, a bit nuts, frankly, and they didn't always have their head on straight. But when they did, they had much to say, much to offer, and many in this country and around the world listened. The book title again A Short, Strange Trip. Welcome to the show, John o'. Connor.
- [06:08]
John O'Connor (Author)
Thank you, man. Thanks for having me.
- [06:10]
Mishchke (Host)
When you dig into the book A Short, Strange Trip, you go back in time in some way to a time when. Well, I remember it, certainly. I remember when all of a sudden psychedelic drugs were being talked about in circles all around me, discussions that would not have been had 10 years earlier. And then I remember it kind of going away. Something happened. I don't know what. Maybe it's the war on drugs that Nixon declared in the 70s, but psychedelics as a topic just Sort of went away. And then in recent years, it's come storming back powerfully. We had the birth of them, as far as our culture goes, in the 60s, turning against them for a time. And then we move into a period where there's this medicinal research with them, new talk about them as actually being AIDS to one's life, a way to enhance an existence. Looking at it today, where are we with psychedelics?
- [07:19]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah, I think we're in a much better place than we were in the kind of bad old days, certainly of the War on Drugs. It's interesting to think of a time in the 60s when psychedelics were legal and being used not just personally, you know, for fun and recreation, but in a clinical setting. There was a lot of good research being done, especially with LSD to treat addiction. And then all of a sudden that got back burnered by Nixon's War on Drugs, which started in 1971. And we haven't really seen, unless you're connected to the psychedelic underground, haven't seen hide nor hair of them for the better part of half a century. And we are in a much better place and not altogether sane, but a much better place than we were 50 years ago. Of course, they've always been there, but more presently because of very good clinical research into their therapeutic use, namely psilocybin, but also lsd, mdma, ibogaine, which is a West African root that has been shown in several trials to have a therapeutic efficacy to treat ptsd, especially in our walking wounded, our military veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.
- [08:30]
Mishchke (Host)
I'm speaking to you just a few miles away from where Dennis McKenna lived. You have, as the key protagonist in your story, his brother, Terrence McKenna. But Dennis is also all over this book. I find myself wondering if I wandered about in circles where people were relatively educated in this country, how often Terence McKenna would be a name they recognize. I've known about him for years and years, and to me he's as well known a figure as a Timothy Leary would have been. And Timothy Leary is certainly someone you could bring up in all sorts of circles with people of any education, and they'd know about him. But I get the feeling maybe Terence is not that well known.
- [09:19]
John O'Connor (Author)
Unfortunately not. And that's an oversight that I hope my book corrects. I think he deserves to be better known. Even people in the kind of quote unquote movement, they know his name. But very few people have read his works or really know much about him beyond that. Hopefully, he's becoming better known, I think. You know, I try in the, in the book to draw a line between him and his thinking and our current psychedelic moment, so called psychedelic renaissance we're in. So I think as a key and pivotal figure who's gone kind of sadly unacknowledged, you know, he was a bit of an iconoclast and an oddball. So some of the blame is, is on him. I think he, he at times seemed to work deliberately to be misunderstood. So he wasn't always the greatest articulator of his ideas. But yeah, he's an important figure in this movement and so is Dennis, you know, and I hope Dennis gets almost his equal shift in my, my book. You know, one of the claims that I, that I make is that he and his brother were the first to figure out how to cultivate magic mushrooms at home. It's kind of weird to think about. In their current ubiquity, magic mushrooms seem to be everywhere. But in the psychedelic 60s and 70s, they were really a novelty item. LSD, you could get MDMA, synthetic DMT, but magic mushrooms were really hard to come by. You had to go to Mexico to get them. So it was Terrence and Dennis in the early to mid-70s that figured out through trial and labor how to cultivate them at home. And, and they were, you know, by the middle of the decade growing an awful lot of magic mushrooms and selling them and giving them away to friends. And so they sparked this seismic shift in the psychedelic underground that not a lot of people know about.
- [10:55]
Mishchke (Host)
It's a funny thing today to realize that you can conduct an interview like this and know that the author isn't just speaking in the abstract, someone having no connection whatsoever to psychedelics. But you're quite comfortable and relaxed and saying, oh yeah, I've tried psychedelics, sure, 40 years ago, interviewing an author, that would be quite rare. You can see Joe Rogan any day of the week interviewing all sorts of people about psychedelic drug use. One of my favorite cultural intellectuals, Sam Harris, quite open about, you know, he's a scientist and quite open about, oh yeah, did it. A whole bunch tried them a lot. Really thought they were a benefit to me. And then as we speak, there are people who are being healed or at least getting much, much better from PTSD symptoms due to combat experience. There are people who are terribly anxiety ridden in hospice, looking at a death in a few months and riddled with anxiety, who are taking a single dose of magic mushroom psilocybin and that anxiety is disappearing. And they're having these wonderful relaxed months before passing away. This is a Strange time. We recently saw our president. I mean, we just mentioned Nixon declaring war on drugs. We just saw our president sign a bill opening up more research into the use of psychedelics, talking about how beneficial these can be. Are the McKenna brothers playing a role at all in this shift? I know Terrence has been gone a long time.
- [12:44]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah, he died tragically young at 53 in the year 2000, just shy of 54. I claim in the book, Terrence and Dennis, in a, at times supporting role and other times a leading role, helped us kind of usher us towards a more open and accepting attitude towards psychedelic drugs. You know, Terrence spent the better part of 30 years evangelizing on their behalf, proselytizing about how everybody needed to get with this sort of planetary program and start taking hallucinogens that they were a path towards, in Terrence's case, not healing or wellness, but towards sort of a better understanding of our current predicament, environmental calamity and political catastrophes. He thought psychedelics could really help in that respect. And Dennis, too. Dennis is also there kind of in the shadows. They did have much different professional paths. Dennis got a PhD in ethnobotany, became a very successful and lauded academic who did research on varolas, which are flowering shrubs, DMT containing flowery shrubs. And then Terrence, who really, as far as I can tell, held no job for. For almost his entire life, aside from informal speaking and writing and that sort of thing.
- [13:56]
Mishchke (Host)
There is something that happens when you live in a culture where 77 million baby boomers now are the age of the people declaring the war on drugs years and years ago. And they've all done them, or most of them have. There is a funny thing that happens in the culture when the old barber down the street did acid and went to Woodstock.
- [14:18]
John O'Connor (Author)
Absolutely. I mean, there's a weird cognitive dissonance that we have. Trump, who's in many respects the most Nixonian of our president since Nixon, but simultaneously doing the most to advance the psychedelic research than any other administration. And also I write about in the book, my own father, who is now an octogenarian and grew up as a lawyer, very hard bitten law and order type in the 50s and 60s, never touched drugs. He was alcoholic, a hardcore functioning alcoholic. But when I was a kid, would have thought of these drugs as representing everything that was wrong with America. And then the last few years, my dad has done two kinds of psychedelic therapy to treat his alcohol addiction. First ketamine and then psilocybin with a guided therapist. So, yeah, we've come. We've come a long way, I think. Not all of it good, but most of it good and at least pointing us in the right direction, as is
- [15:06]
Mishchke (Host)
always going to be the case with any of this stuff. The broad brush never works for any of this stuff, ever. A war on drugs. First of all, what a ridiculous statement. There are people being saved by drugs. At the time they were saying a war on drugs, I mean, there were pharmaceutical companies, there were people who were happily enjoying glass after glass of alcohol, which was a drug. I mean, the whole thing is kind of absurd on its face to say a war on drugs. Clearly we need to parse out what's good and what isn't. When we talk about psychedelics, you know, we're not talking about crack cocaine, we're not talking about heroin.
- [15:44]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah.
- [15:44]
Mishchke (Host)
We're not talking about angel dust. Sure, there were tons of drugs that were horrible and still are, and there were devastating, devastating effects. We're talking about understanding, just as you would with food, what's helpful and what's harmful. And it is a wonderful realization to learn that psychedelics can help people, that some people out there with certain afflictions can be helped. Some people simply can have their eyes opened up to new ways of thinking that they find appealing and that somewhat shift how they think about life. They may never do it again. They may never even pursue the ingesting of any psychedelic again. But something happened. To this day, you can find people who talk about a psychedelic they took 50 years ago and how it changed their life. They never did it again, but it had effect A, B, C or D. I want to get into the McKenna brothers themselves because that's the joy, in a lot of ways of this book is seeing this world through these personalities who represent everything I just talked about. And by that I mean the good, the bad and the ugly. Their beautiful aspects with these guys and what experiences they have and their ugly ones. Where do you begin with these guys? Colorado. They're growing up years.
- [17:09]
John O'Connor (Author)
I do begin in a small town called Peonia, Colorado, which is near if anyone knows this area. It's kind of the flatlands, but surrounded by mountains and gorges. It's kind of over the Kebler Pass from Crested Butte. And Terence didn't last long there. You know, he was, owing to his intellect and his just kind of outsized ego. He, at 16, when he was still in high school, convinced his parents to let him move to California, where he lived with an aunt and uncle and finished high school and then entered Berkeley the next year. Then Terrence went on the road for a while. He really lived for much of his adult life, a kind of peripatetic existence, bouncing around from one exotic destination to the Next. And in 1971, he and Dennis, and this concerns most of the middle part of the book, is the trip to La Chorrera, Colombia, which is a small village in the Putumayo area of southern Colombia. The Putumayo river is a tributary of the Amazon, creates the border between Colombia and Peru. And Terence and Dennis went there in 1971 looking for an obscure indigenous hallucinogen called ukuhay, which they had read about in a pamphlet written by a famous ethnobotanist named Richard Evans Schultes. And they didn't find it. They were told, I think wrongly, kind of given a bump steer, as I understand it, that it was taboo even to ask the local indigenous people about it. And they found instead, they found psilocybin mushrooms growing everywhere. And that is because the Jesuit missionaries, which had been in La Chorrera for the better part of a century, kept cattle and psilocybin mushroom, as your listeners may know, do exceptionally well in the dung of cattle, especially domestic cattle. They arrived in the spring and March and found a huge flush of psilocybin mushrooms, and over the course of the next several weeks, took an awful lot of mushrooms to the point where they were mixing them in their scramble eggs in the morning and taking ayahuasca. They were smoking a lot of weed. And things got very trippy, to say the least, for both Dennis and Terence.
- [19:14]
Mishchke (Host)
It's fascinating to me that the Jesuits are connected to this. Here they are trying to play the role of missionary, and they're inadvertently giving birth to something that may fly in the face of much of what they're teaching.
- [19:30]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah, totally. I mean, it's a weird double irony here is that Jesuits spent, like, you know, hundreds of years in South America trying to suppress indigenous religions. They were sort of inadvertently causing the magic mushrooms to be grown basically everywhere.
- [19:43]
Mishchke (Host)
In a short, strange trip, we learn that once Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna experienced these mushrooms and they really come to believe that this is something the world should know about. This isn't something to be enjoyed in this one little corner of the continent, but something that the world needs to know about because it's something that could change the way we operate in the world. The very fact that it altered their mind and their thinking in ways that they thought were positive. They thought, what if everyone was doing this now, this was this pie in the sky notion that Often happens in anything where something improves your life a little bit in some way. And you wonder, well, wouldn't it be great if it could improve everybody's life? And of course, A, everybody's different. Your experience is not going to be someone else's. B, you can get a little heady with this stuff and start getting these grandiose thoughts that go beyond what is realistic. But it was not uncommon, we all know, in the late 60s, early 70s, for there to be this view that the world could be completely different than it is right now, if only. ABC. Well, in the McKenna Brothers case, one of those letters was mushrooms.
- [21:08]
Michael Pollan
Psilocybin can be contrasted to any compound. It's different from all other compounds and should be studied more deeply because it does things that are quite miraculous. Without doubt, the most unique feature of psilocybin is that it speaks. It speaks in your native tongue. And that is absolutely confined, confounding to the rational mind. I mean, that's what makes a believer out of most skeptics. Because, you know, drugs, of course, you can imagine that a drug would mess with your mind and you would see strange things. That doesn't seem too over the top, but that you could take a drug that would drop a heavy hand on your shoulder and say, my friend, there are a few things you need to understand. It's wiser than you could have possibly imagined, and it knows you better than you know yourself. And it's not wasting time. It's cutting to the chase. This is astonishing to me. Who's in there? Who's in there? I don't know what it means. I don't believe in drawing conclusions, but I do believe that life is a staggering opportunity for adventure. I mean, people who are complaining that things are too dull haven't the faintest notion of how weird it can get in a hurry.
- [22:45]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yep. Yeah. And it's very insightful thing to point out, too. There was a strong vein of kind of hippie dippy, proselytizing here. You know, I mean, one of the things with the psychedelic experience, it can be so powerful and profound that sometimes the only thing left standing really is your own subjective takeaway from it. It can be life altering. And so then I think a lot of times the next logical step for folks is to go out and to sort of evangelize on their behalf, you know, and expect everyone to have the same experience or a similar experience and to apply psychedelics to the world at large. Terrence wanted to do that. I think that's a mistake. I think psychedelics can, can be a lot of things that can be helpful, they can be therapeutic, they can lead to one's, you know, sense of equanimity. They can be just plain fun. But they can be the opposite too. You could, you know, there's of course, the inverse side of that, which is the bad trip. One thing I think Terence got wrong is I don't think psychedelics are the basis for a worldview or the basis for a politics. I think Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and Ginsburg and all those guys had to prove that to us in the 60s and 70s is that there's a mistake sometimes and expecting too much from
- [23:55]
Mishchke (Host)
these drugs, he, much like them, has this great instinct, this direction, this feel for the way things could be. And he has novel ideas and interesting insights that a lot of great minds have. Not every insight or idea you have has to be proven to be the right way to go. It's just he played in the world of ideas and some of his ideas were fascinating, wonderfully insightful, and some were crazy. But that may be the case with a lot of great minds. He does come across as a fascinating intellect. No, dummy.
- [24:32]
John O'Connor (Author)
Oh no. He was a brilliant guy, no doubt about it. I mean, he would, you know, Terence, for much of his later years made a living on the lecture circuit. He could just get up and talk literally for two or three hours without notes. And he was so widely read and really he did have a. He did eventually go back to Berkeley and get a degree, but he was really almost entirely kind of self taught polymath. He was, in a sense, as you hinted at, kind of in that vein of the Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary's, but he was a writer and he created this entire cosmology, entire epistemology of psychedelics, what they should be used for, who should be using them and to what ends. Terence was a little nostalgic for this idea of an exalted past that like probably really never existed. But he, he imagined that psychedelics were the vehicle to help kind of get us back there. And, and I understand that as like, I think we probably all harbor some nostalgia for some lost world, you know, whether it's our own childhood or whatever. I'm extremely nostalgic for New York city in the 1990s, you know, before cell phones, before the Internet, or at least before the Internet as we know it now. But all that starts to kind of wash out at its edges when you kind of unpack it a little bit. And same with Terrence. And I would just point your listeners towards his greatest book, I think far and away his best and most readable work, which is True Hallucinations, which is an account of this. This drug induced, kind of euphoric moment he and Dennis had in la Troira in 1971. There's a lot of good stuff in there. There's a lot of craziness, but there's a lot there to be admired. Also, Terence did not believe in therapy, which is ironic. He probably needed therapy. He was a very troubled guy in a lot of ways, but he did not believe in the therapeutic use of psychedelics. He thought that that was the wrong use for them. He thought psychedelics were to be taken to further us along on the continuum of evolution, of human evolution, that they were necessary to get us to the next step of being a superhuman type of organism.
- [26:30]
Mishchke (Host)
To say he wasn't into it as a treatment, I mean, he wanted to treat the earth with it. He wanted to treat all humankind with it. He wanted it to be our grand treatment.
- [26:40]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah, yeah, I suppose. Yeah, that's if you kind of casting a wide net there. He definitely had human flourishing in mind, you know, and human well being. Terrence's mission, his main thing was really to increase human wellness and human well being and flourishing. And that was. I don't know if he would have put it that way, but that's what I think he was headed. One place where I part ways with him is, you know, he always talked about, you got to break through the space time continuum. And I think the best way is like through love and compassion and togetherness, you know, and not all this other stuff that Taryn spent so many years unpacking.
- [27:18]
Mishchke (Host)
Plenty of people have the experience on psychedelics of enhanced sensations of love, their own sense of it, expressing it and feeling it coming toward them. That was not typical of his experience.
- [27:34]
John O'Connor (Author)
It's hard to really say without having bit of fly on the wall there. But Terrence wasn't great at love. Terrence was. Was great at a lot of things, but he wasn't. He was an absentee dad, he was an absentee husband. You know, by all accounts, or by many accounts, he was also a lovely guy to be around, a great guy to sit on the veranda and have a martini with, you know, but he was a difficult. He made family life very difficult. I think one thing that Terrence had a really hard time with was love. So, no, I don't think that he is a good guy in that respect either.
- [28:03]
Mishchke (Host)
What about Dennis?
- [28:04]
John O'Connor (Author)
Dennis is the opposite. Happily married, you know, I Think he is kind of a different, different animal from his brother. Dennis has a lot to say in that respect with psychedelics. Not just psychedelics, but just with life in general. I think he would be better guide and better model.
- [28:20]
Mishchke (Host)
I found myself looking at a lot of videos after reading your book of Dennis talking. In recent years he's interviewed all over the place. Rogan has had him on more than once again with the topic of psychedelics. He's a very self effacing guy, very pleasant guy to hear talk. Doesn't seem to have any arrogance in him at all. Seems like a lovely human being. Is he still teaching at the University of Minnesota?
- [28:47]
John O'Connor (Author)
I don't think so, no. He's, I think retired.
- [28:49]
Mishchke (Host)
The intriguing thing to me about Dennis is there's sort of this vibe that he might have been better at times not to be around his brother, but he seemed to have this powerful, maybe not necessarily 100% healthy attachment to his brother.
- [29:05]
John O'Connor (Author)
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think he was at times happy to be away. So he's Dennis's four years Terrence's junior. When Terrence left at 16 to go to California, Dennis was very happy to see him go. But kind of speaking to what you were saying, Dennis also then followed him eventually up to California. And yeah, he is, you know, he's the younger brother. He loves his brother. They had a kind of a fraught relationship at times. And especially in La Troira where Dennis, Dennis really, I think would say the same thing, really lost his mind. I mean, he took such a. Such big doses of psilocybin and ayahuasca that he really disappeared for a while. And it was Terence that encouraged him on that path. It was also Terence that helped him come back. But yeah, there was a bit of, I think, as there maybe are in many sibling relationships, passive aggressiveness and a love hate thing going on. But Dennis certainly loved his brother to death. You know, as many family relationships are. It was a complicated one.
- [30:06]
Mishchke (Host)
Terrence dies at 53 of a brain tumor. What year was that?
- [30:12]
John O'Connor (Author)
2000, 2000.
- [30:14]
Mishchke (Host)
He said something before he died, Terrence did. He said, if psychedelics doesn't prepare you for death, I don't know what does. He might have been against their use therapeutically, but that interestingly is one of the ways they're finding psychedelics can be used. I think it was a Yale study I originally read about that talked about a single psilocybin dose being enough to take away a dying person's anxiety. Weeks, months later, they were still feeling this sense of equanimity just a sense of being at peace. So when Terrence says that if psychedelics don't prepare you for death, I don't know what does. Sounds like he got the therapeutic use out of it, whether he wanted to or not. Yeah.
- [31:03]
John O'Connor (Author)
There are a number of studies at Yale, the most notable one at Johns Hopkins under the late great Roland Griffiths, who really got us kind of started down this path. Michael Pollan writes a lot about in his book, but also at nyu, looking at the efficacy of various kinds of psychedelics to treat end of life anxiety for like, yeah, terminal cancer patients and so on. And I don't know about takes away the anxiety, but. But alleviates it. Use the word equanimity. Like, I think that that's, that's a word that comes up again and again. And I, I do think that there is something undeniable that is. That is providing people at the end of their lives with some, Some sense of relief, maybe even a huge sense of relief. Yeah, there's. There's stories about Terence reaching such a point of equanimity in his. In his dying days. And it's a more kind of satisfying ending. I don't know if it's a true ending, but it is a more satisfying ending to Terence's life. You mentioned Sam Harris. Sam always says, or often says in connection to, like, psychedelics, but also the meditation practice, that there is a there, there. There's something there that may not be verifiable scientifically, but there is something, Something more that we maybe even need at the end of our lives to kind of hold on, to kind of get us through our last moments. And psychedelics seem to put us in touch with that.
- [32:27]
Mishchke (Host)
I sat down recently with a member of the Smith family. They own Minneapolis St. Paul plumbing, heating, air and electric. We talked for three hours, and I'll be honest with you, I came away from that conversation genuinely moved and impressed with this family. They've been doing this, and I'm not joking. MSP, Minneapolis St. Paul Plumbing, heating, air and electric since World War I. And there's no end in sight to this family being in this business, taking care of people in this community. That kind of staying power doesn't happen by accident. Let me give you a practical reason to give them a call. All those repairs you've been putting off, the ac, that's been a little off the drain, that's been slow, the flickering light you keep meaning to call somebody about Minneapolis St. Paul plumbing, heating, air and electric will take $50 off any of those Repairs any of them, but only through the month of June. Tell em where you heard about em. Msp. I'll tell you something about myself. I've always preferred the more personal experience over the corporate experience. I've always preferred the neighborhood place over the national chain. I've always preferred the people who know you over the people who just process you or wait on you. That's why I do ads for North American Banking Company. Mike Bilski runs it. His dad was a community banker. Yep, neighborhood bank. His granddaddy ran a neighborhood bank. His great grandfather, community banker. Always the same idea. You bank where people know you. You bank where your loan isn't just a file moving through the system somewhere. You bank where someone looks you in the eye and understands your life and understands your business and understands your neighborhood and understands you. That's not how most big banks operate now. Those days are gone. The big national banks have made sure of that. But that's exactly how North American Banking Company operates. And they have six locations in the Twin Cities. So there's one near you. Real people. The kind of banking that used to be the norm and is now almost impossible to find. If that sounds like your kind of place, like it is mine. Find North American Banking Company near you. Make it your bank member, fdic. Equal housing Lender.
- [34:46]
Terence McKenna
I look for the invention of artificial life, the cloning of human beings, possible contact with extraterrestrials, and at the same time appalling acts of brutality, genocide, race baiting, homophobia, famine, starvation. It's only going to get weirder. The level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly, even beyond the excruciating present levels of contradiction. I think it's just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. Eventually people are going to say, what the hell is going on? It's just too nuts. Because the systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed. The rise of the Internet. These are changes so immense, nobody could imagine them ever happening. And now that they have happened, nobody even bothers to mention what a big deal it is. The good news is that as primates, we're incredibly adaptable. Put us in a desert, we survive. Put us in the jungle, we survive. Under Hitler, we survive, we can put up with about anything. And it's a good thing because we're going to be tested to the limits.
- [36:27]
Mishchke (Host)
A fellow he interviewed out in the California desert years ago, talked about his experience. His was in South America as well. It was a different psychedelic than the ones we've been talking about. But I remember him saying to me, what I learned is there is a force out there that cares about me and I'm going to be just fine. And I remember thinking about that and thinking, what a lovely thing to experience. You mentioned Harrison meditation, and I'm glad you did because it reminded me of this. Many years ago, I interviewed a man who at the time, I believe was one of our most respected theologians in the world. He was a contemporary of Joseph Campbell. Huston Smith, of course.
- [37:17]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah.
- [37:18]
Mishchke (Host)
And I was interviewing him very, very late in his life because he had done something at the end with a piece of writing that got a lot of people in his circles to turn on him and really wonder what changed with this guy, what's going on? Because I believe he had been at times in his life a missionary and he wrote a book at the end. I'm going off memory here, cleansing the doors of perception. And what he said to me in the interview, he said, I have been in meditation daily for decades and never had the powerful spiritual experience that I've heard other people talk about. And after a while he said, I came to believe that that's not something that's available to everybody. Certain people have that kind of a makeup. David lynch, the great director, now gone, the very first time he ever did meditation, it just opened up this whole world to him. And he never, never wanted to do anything else the rest of his life. I mean, that was what he was going to do every single day, twice a day. And it was, it was wonderful and everybody should know about it. And sure enough, he went around more or less preaching about this meditation. But Huston Smith said, yeah, not me. He said, I came to changing my mind about botanicals or what he would call entheogens, sacred plants, plants intended to give you experiences that were of a spiritual nature. Now, I don't know if we've used that term at all here, but there is a feeling with some of these plants that what is happening is something on a spiritual level.
- [38:58]
John O'Connor (Author)
You know, I write about in the book about my meditation practice and I've been meditating for several years. I'm not a great meditator. I've never experienced the kind of thing that David lynch or Sam Harris talks about. I've just never been able to get there, nor have I ever, on various psychedelics, ever had a totally mind blowing mystical experience. That people talk about. I've had a lot of fun, a lot of good times. I've had some bad times also, but mostly they were just mind expanding larks. It's funny, as Harris would probably say too is there's this sense of the noetic experience, like what William James, the famous American psychologist, would have called the noetic truth, meaning that it's true to you, sort of the subjective truth. It might not be objectively true or scientifically proven, or maybe it will always be unfalsifiable, but it's true to you and therefore therein lies its efficacy. Who cares what anyone else thinks that I'm totally sympathetic with. I mean, especially if you're finding psychedelics helpful and therapeutic, there's no sane reason to deny them to people. In my book, I hope the sort of subtext of it is that Terence, is a kind of lesson in having a more kind of a sane and open and honest conversation about these drugs and their uses.
- [40:17]
Mishchke (Host)
In some ways, I think about all the damage done by alcohol and yet the government was perfectly okay with that being available to adults all over. And we wouldn't even come close to that kind of damage with mushrooms.
- [40:33]
John O'Connor (Author)
No, not even close. I mean, there's no. For psilocybin, first of all, there's no toxic dose. I mean, you could have a bad trip, but you're not going to die. Same with lsd, as I understand. MDA is a little bit different, but yeah, that's one of the crazy ironies of the war on drugs is that. And even today, like just emergency room admissions for alcohol and tobacco far outstrip admissions for all the harder drugs combined. Crack cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine.
- [41:00]
Michael Pollan
Right, yeah.
- [41:00]
John O'Connor (Author)
And as Michael Pollan points out, you know, the far and away biggest public health catastrophe during the war on drugs has been legal drugs, opioids, which have killed almost a million Americans.
- [41:12]
Mishchke (Host)
Michael Pollan, his book was this Is yous Mind on Plants. Was that it?
- [41:17]
John O'Connor (Author)
The more recent follow up was this Is this Is yous Mind on Plants. And the first one, I'm blanking on, but it'll come to me. How to Change youe Mind. Okay, this Is yous Mind on Plants was 2021. How to Change youe Mind was 2018. That blew open the doors on a lot of this. Michael was really the first, one of, the first to really report all of this research being done by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere on the therapeutic uses, end of life uses for psychedelics at that point. Mostly psilocybin, but also LSD in some places.
- [41:49]
Mishchke (Host)
Now, Michael Pollan, I believe, had the kind of experience that I would describe as more in the spiritual realm, in that his was that shrinking or diminishing of the ego. And the more that became smaller, the more the larger picture of everything being interconnected, the more that grew. There was that experience of a powerful universal love. I thought with his experience.
- [42:17]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah, yeah. And that is an experience that many clinical subjects report.
- [42:23]
Mishchke (Host)
And for Huston Smith, when I was talking to him, what he thought was going on there, and you know, I'm talking to a theologian, not a scientist, but he's telling me he thought that the windows of perception were being cleansed and he was able in his mind to see things more as they are than he is without any of these, as he called them, entheogens. And Dennis McKenna talks about all of us are having a hallucination every single day. That is the experience of life. Our brain is a biochemical engine. It's filtering everything and presenting something that science knows is not accurate. It's just our presentation of the world and one that works very well for us all to just agree on. I know Dennis McKenna was saying at one point, what matters is, is the view or the insight you're getting helpful or harmful? Not is it right or wrong? Is it helping you in some way? And for Huston Smith, it helped him. He settled down into a sense of thank you, God, that's what I needed to see. And that was his take. And again, he tried it a different way for years and it just didn't do it for him. But I think all of these things are in a way going to become more important to people because we're finding it more and more difficult to find things to hang on to culturally right now. And of course, Terrence has that quote about things getting weirder and weirder and pretty soon everybody's going to look around and say this is just nuts. And all the old things we counted on and the traditions and the institutions we won't be able to grab onto. And he was years, years, years ahead of his time in that. That's what you could say today. He was saying it in the 90s, but I just think that some of this is appealing to people in that they're not finding much else to feel great about.
- [44:25]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [44:28]
Mishchke (Host)
I think about your nostalgia.
- [44:29]
John O'Connor (Author)
I mean, I agree with you. I think it. We all are sort of fall victim to this. I think this is like a long standing tradition in history. Maybe Western, maybe all history, but particularly Western history. And I Try to place tarots on this continuum of, like, narratives, of, like, a lost time, of this sort of exalted past you could go all the way back to. The people were nostalgic for the fall of Jerusalem, and then they were nostalgic for the fall of Constantinople, and then they were nostalgic for the French Revolution and then the American Civil War and then the Russian Revolution and then the 60s, and then, you know, it's like this very kind of potent vein in the human experience, I think, is to imagine this time when things were so much better. And maybe it's a kind of mix of fact and fantasy, but it's extremely appealing to. To the human psyche, I think, to this idea of civilizational decay, almost to the point of a kind of an apocalyptic sort of history. And Terence was very much. His writing and his thinking was very much in line with that. And I'm not saying he wasn't right, but it definitely has an appeal. And I just read a history, Tom Holland's History of Christendom. There is sort of an emergence of Christianity from pagan Rome, and it was, I mean, insanely brutal time. You know, like public beheadings every day, public castrations and dismember, you know, people crucified, you know, in public squares. And it just gets worse and worse the further back you go in history. So I do think that there is a totally, again, understandable longing for something better than the present. We could always be doing better than we are, but. But mixed in with that is this sort of longing or yearning or angst for old times, for the past.
- [46:16]
Mishchke (Host)
I wonder why, though, we would automatically assume you have the two directions to go forward or backward. We would automatically assume the better way would be backward. It would seem we could live in a time easily. And I have a feeling there were times like this in America where, in fact, the feeling was, where it gets better is forward. Forward is where it gets better. I would argue in the late 40s, that was the feeling. In the mid-50s, that was the feeling. I think there was more of a sense of, you want it better? We're heading that way.
- [46:48]
John O'Connor (Author)
And. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, and there still is a few. My next book is about UFOs and search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And I've interviewed a few astronomers and astrobiologists and physicists, and this is very much this finger on the kind of. On the button of forward progress, technological innovation, reaching for the stars. We've got to colonize the moon, we've got to colonize Mars. We've got to get spacecraft out there. And half of my brain kind of grasps that. And half of my brain is more like a Wendell Berry figure. I don't know if you know the famous essay called why I Am Not Buying a Computer. I at times feel very much like Wendell Berry does. An almost kind of gravitational pull between these two poles of human longing for the past and for the future. Future.
- [47:34]
Mishchke (Host)
A short, strange trip moves into a lot of these areas. The beauty of the book for me is there was the story itself of these brothers, but there are so many side stories and little awakenings and historical accounts, things I was utterly unaware of. I have to tell you, I knew nothing about the rubber industry and the horrors you present in this book associated with that. You mentioned earlier, going back in history, just these times of just ridiculous, horrific violence. Maybe you can help my listeners by giving them some background on this. This rubber industry and how corrupt and horrible the behavior was with this industry.
- [48:20]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah, so this is late 19th, early 20th century South America, Amazon centered in and around the Putumayo region of Colombia, northern Peru and southern Colombia. But it stretched neighboring countries as well. Rubber trees were the only source before synthetic rubber were the only source of rubber in the world. So car manufacturers, tire manufacturers, Goodyear, Firestone, Henry Ford, they needed rubber. And the only place to get it was in South America. And these rubber companies, many of them were British owned, some of them kind of Peruvian, headed by Peruvian companies, but essentially underwritten by board of directors in London. The most notorious of these was Casa Arana, and that was based actually in La Cherero, headquartered in La Choirara, the village where Terrence And Dennis went 50 years later. 60, 70 years later, I guess. And Indians were essentially forced at the point of a gun to collect rubber. They became essentially slaves and could lose an arm, finger, a hand, an earlobe, a nose if they did bring enough rubber in time. Over the course of about 25 years, something like 30 to 40,000Amazonian indigenous people were killed, many others maimed during this time. A lot of Colombians don't even know this history when I talk to them. Yeah, it's like not something that's really. Not only is it not known in the us it's not very well known in South America.
- [49:44]
Mishchke (Host)
I'll tell you the sadism. At times I was feeling like I was reading about the Japanese treatment of the Chinese in the late 30s at Nankin.
- [49:53]
John O'Connor (Author)
Yeah, a crazy slaughter, almost impossible to imagine.
- [49:56]
Mishchke (Host)
That's just one little piece of another thing that I learned reading your book. So there's just so much there, obviously more than we could ever get to in an interview, but I want to let people know the title again. A short, strange An Untold Story of Magic Mushrooms, Madness, and a Search for the Meaning of Life in the Amazon. John o', Connor, the author I want to thank you so much for spending all this time with me. I look forward to your next book as well. That's another topic that intrigues me. So I hope to talk to you again.
- [50:26]
John O'Connor (Author)
Oh, I'd love to. Thanks so much for having me on, man. I really appreciate it. Really great questions roamed farther and wider than most of my interviews, so I really appreciate those great questions.
- [50:34]
Mishchke (Host)
Ah, that's great to hear. Thanks for saying that. All my best to you.
- [50:38]
John O'Connor (Author)
Thank you, Tommy. I appreciate it, man. Take care.
- [50:45]
Mishchke (Host)
You know, I've been doing this personal endorsement advertising long enough now that I can pretty quickly tell whether somebody's the real deal in business or not. Tommy and Jim Leonard are in fact, the real deal. Real deal means the kind of folks you want to do business with. Straight shooters, salt of the earth, honest souls, God good at what they do. That's what you need. You just need people who are solid. Tommy and Jimmy Leonard's dad started Fury Motors in 63, and before that their granddaddy was selling cars going back to the 1920s. There are four Fury Motors dealerships now, Waconia, Forest, Lake, South St. Paul and Stillwater. And you're walking into something there that's been built over three generations by people who actually care how you feel when you leave. People who bought cars from Fury in the 60s, had kids buying their cars there in the 80s, and then their grandkids buying cars there in the 2000s. That doesn't happen by accident. Do yourself a favor, find a Fury Motors near you, or just go to furymotors.com I walked into the Wellshire Memory Care center and I ran into an ice cream shop. I walked into the Wellshire Memory Care center and I ran into a cinema and a library. I walked in and I saw a barber shop. I saw gardens. You could actually walk through sunlit balconies. I came upon live music. I saw a place that was built deliberately, carefully, around the idea that the people living there are indeed living. The Wellshire Memory Care center was created by a family that had watched loved ones go through memory care the hard way, and they decided to build the place they wished had existed. Every hallway, every space designed specifically around how people with dementia and Alzheimer's experience the world. This isn't a nursing home that added a memory care wing. This is only memory care. It's all they do. The staff is the best trained in the field. If you have a parent, a spouse, a grandparent who needs memory care, I know how hard the decision is. I've been there. You can feel good about the well Shire. It's in Medina and it's in Bloomington. Wellshire Memory care, they built it for families like yours.
- [53:17]
Dennis McKenna
The issue that hovers around the psychedelic experience, the issue is surrender. This is something real. Sometimes there are people who are disappointed because they say, well, how often do you do it? The answer is not very often. I mean, if I can get it in a couple or three times a year, I feel like I'm hitting it pretty hard. And the more successful it is, the less often you have to do it. I mean, I know people who say DMT is their most favorite drug and when you say, well, when was the last time you did it? They say, Whoa, 1967.
- [53:54]
Mishchke (Host)
I want to remind you people that you can reach the program in one of two ways. You can call 651-321-8949, 6513-218949 and you can also email mishkebardradio.com that's mishkiubbardradio.com I enjoy hearing from you. People often ask me about this move back and forth between my riffing on life in humorous ways and these more serious interviews. And I always say the same thing. At 104 shows a year, I would go mad doing one thing all the time. Staying in just one lane. I always think of my show as a mix of three different things. These interviews, phone calls with listeners, and my own monologues. I enjoy all those offerings, but I could never stay with just one. Everything gets old. Ultimately, whoever said variety is the spice of life did not have it right. Spice is a nice additive. Variety, in my mind, is critical to an enjoyable life. Many different things should be tried, attempted, explored to keep it all from getting stale. Variety is the key, I think, to a good life, not the spice. Anyway, I want to end this program by encouraging you folks to get in touch with me whenever you feel like it, either through 651-321-8949 or mishkebardradio.com and I also want to thank you for listening to the show and for staying with me over this career of mine. I hope the shows continue to be enjoyable for you and I hope to keep on doing it for a while a long time. My thanks again to John o' Connor for visiting with me about his book, A Short, Strange Trip. Talk to you all again next time.