In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté. Gabor is a renowned physician, speaker, and author best known for his groundbreaking work on trauma, addiction, child development, and the mind-body connection. His books include In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal.

We touch upon topics of:

• Gabor’s personal healing journey (2:00)
• His first Ayahuasca ceremony (5:10)
• The importance of community in healing (7:06)
• How trauma causes the heart to close (9:00)
• The wisdom of trauma and adaptations (12:23)
• Modern society as a root of disconnection (15:00)
• Accumulated trauma and “death by a thousand cuts” (20:31)
• How Ayahuasca helps addiction by addressing pain (23:59)
• The risk of Ayahuasca evangelism (27:11)
• Psychedelics and facing death (28:09)
• Parenting and emotional availability (32:10)
• The role of play in healing (37:15)
• Dealing with criticism and healing from not being seen (40:42)

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com

Find more about Gabor Maté at http://www.drgabormate.com

Transcript

Sam Believ: You’re listening

Dr. Gabor Maté: to ayahuasca podcast.com. Just a bunch of strangers come together for one evening, doesn’t do it because in the traditional arising of the Ayahuasca experience, it was done in community by people that knew each other and the shaman knew them, and it’d be integrated into the communal life wasn’t just like a one-off thing.

So I said let’s at least temporary create a community. So we’d let these retreats where people come together for a week and get to know each other. Talk about their process and set their intentions for the ceremony and the next day talk about and discover or uncover the meaning of their ICA experience and then support each other.

So I began to do that quite vigorously and I did that for quite a few years. I led retreats both in Canada and also in Mexico. So that’s how it all began. Since then, I’ve been to ceremonies where I wasn’t leading anything. I was just a participant. So I’ve had the experience both of guiding these events, but also of participating.

Sam Believ: In this very special episode of Ayahuasca podcast, I had a conversation with Gabor Mate. Gabor is a very special guest. It was always my dream to interview him. Even when I started the podcast, it was always my goal to get to the point where I can interview him. So it is a dream come true for me to have been able to have this conversation.

I really hope you will enjoy it as I, as much as I did. So there are. Hundreds of interviews with Gabor on internet. I’m sure you’ve seen some of them, or you might have seen clips. So I didn’t want to take this episode and go back into talking about his journey and his history. So I will give you. That information here in the intro.

So Gabor was born in 1944 and he grew up in Hungary and lived through Nazi occupation of Hungary. His grandparents died in Auschwitz. Then he was separated from his mother during infancy. I believe he was one month old. So there was this trauma there that later on he analyzed and learned a lot about, and that kind of guided his his journey.

After immigrating to Canada in 1956, he pursued career in medicine, focusing on family practice and palliative care. Gaur knows a lot about people dying, their last regrets addictions. He, his own addiction. So he wrote one book on a DHD which is a Scattered Mind. He wrote a book on addiction in the realm of Hungry Ghosts.

His latest book is Myth, myth of Normal, where he talks about how toxic our society is. I’ve read two of his books personally, and they are, they’re amazing. He’s known for his addiction, trauma, work, and childhood development specifically where he emphasizes on connection between early experiences in health.

He looks for the root cause and that’s what we do in our work with ayahuasca, where we find the root cause root trauma, and we tried to heal it instead of focusing on symptoms. For me personally, Gabbo was a huge influence in my own journey. I listened to his, to podcasts with him.

I read his books and through that I was educated on how to have my own personal journey with PLA medicines, how to use them properly, and also understanding addictions in, for myself and also for other people that come to the Wire and they look for relief from. From the medicine. So I used his phrases over and over again.

So this is a very special episode and I really hope you enjoy it and let me know in the comments. Here are the topics we discuss in this episode, realizing there are unresolved issues and emotional pain, discovery of ayahuasca as a healing tool. How Gabor began his healing in his forties, despite the professional success, emotional heart opening during the ceremony, insights into the root of addiction and trauma.

Importance of community and integration in plant medicine work, addiction as a response to pain, not a choice. I’ll ask his power in revealing suppressed trauma. Importance of post ceremony, integration, trauma and adaptation and survival mechanism, the wisdom of trauma. Child rearing differences in indigenous versus modern societies.

Closing of the heart due to childhood pain, and how to open your heart play as an essential for human development. I ask his ability to restore playfulness, reflection on mortality and ego death. Risk of becoming overly zealous after powerful experiences and the importance of consistency, humility, and embodied practices.

Enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca, retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Lara Connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you Gabbo. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Nice to be with you. Hi son.

Sam Believ: Cover. So you’re mostly known for your books and you’re talking about trauma and childhood development.

Interestingly enough, I learned about you through Ayahuasca because it was my second ever ceremony and I was listening to Tim Ferry’s podcast with you, and I specifically looked for episodes about Ayahuasca. So you were with her, you were with me there in my ears in my very early Ayahuasca days.

So

Dr. Gabor Maté: I hope you didn’t have a brand to it.

Sam Believ: No, I had good experience, good enough, so I dedicated my life pretty much to ayahuasca. So I know it’s not your main, I know it’s not your main thing, but I do appreciate the things that you did say about it. And I know you talk about. Our society being sick and the issues with the society.

But what I do and you mentioned elders as well before. What I do like about you is you are my elder digitally, so a mother and day elder. So gbo you’re 81 years old. And I know your healing journey was long and most of it happened.

Dr. Gabor Maté: No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Wasn’t was long. Is long

Sam Believ: is long. Correct. So can you talk to us about your own healing journey how it progressed and you give people hope that they can do it even later in life.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Look, I was in my mid forties early forties and. Successful as a physician and I had family, three kids, but I was not happy.

I was depressed. I had issues between me and my children, my wife and I. And it’s something that I had to recognize that there’s some stuff to deal with that just carrying on with the external activities. No longer. Guided me to where I needed to be. So that’s when I began to do some self study research, write reading into the child developmental literature, into the mental health literature, psychology.

All this corresponded the m medical practice where I increasingly saw the impact of emotions and psychological states and. Multigenerational histories on people’s functioning their health, their illness, and so on. So it’s, and it, so it’s been a long journey and at some point, fairly late in the game I discovered well discover, I found out about psychedelics including and beginning with Ayahuasca.

And so that’s contributed to my own healing process. It is been a lifetime, what can I say? Half a lifetime’s journey at least, trying to figure things out, trying to heal integrate finding inner peace. It’s an ongoing journey.

Sam Believ: So I know that I know your story about finding Ayahuasca, but can you tell our audience about that story?

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah, sure. So I published my book on addiction, which is my fourth book in 2009, in the realm of Hungry Ghosts, close to contrast with addiction. And in which I pointed out that addiction is not this disease that you inherit, nor is it a by choice that you may put actually, it’s an attempt to, so the pain imposed by Trump.

So it is a book on. My experiences personally as a physician working with a very addicted population, and also what I found out about the source of addiction in life, painful life experience. As I was doing the book tour every once in a while somebody would put their hands up and ask me, what do you know about I was on the healing of addiction.

I say Nothing. And then the next stop somebody else will put their hands up and say, what do you know about the healing? Addiction and I ask, I’d say nothing. And after a while I got tired of the question because I thought frustrated with this for God’s sakes. I just spent three years researching and writing this book, and you asked me about the one thing I don’t know anything about.

Leave me alone. And until finally somebody said you could experience, Hey, I was up here in Vancouver. You don’t have to go to the Amazon for it. Because there was a perian shaman visiting Vancouver, leading a ceremony, so I did participate in the ceremony. I’m always open to trying new things, and about 45 minutes into the experience, I got it because I experienced these tears of love flowing down my cheek and such openheartedness, such as I’d never known before, and I’d realized.

How much I close my heart to protect it because it was vulnerable and hurting when I was small. And I’ve been walking around with a closed heart. Now the fact is I still do walk around with a closed heart sometimes. But I did experience that opening and I recognized why people get addicted because there’s so much pain and they try to soothe the pain and.

How much it hurts to have a heart that’s open and that’s hurt, that’s hurting at the same time, but also how beautiful it is and how if we can keep our hearts open, we don’t have to run away from anything anymore. So I immediately got the potential and I immediately said, I’m gonna start working with this stuff.

And so I did. And, what I thought. Right now, I’m not a shaman. I don’t serve the plant, you know that’s, I got no training that way at all. But I worked with people who are trained that way, and what I decided right away is that just a bunch of strangers come together for one evening, doesn’t do it because in a traditional arising of the Iowa scar.

Experience. It was done in community by people that knew each other and the shaman who knew them, and it’d be integrated into the communal life. It wasn’t just like a one-off thing. So I said let’s at least temporary create a community. So we’d let these retreats where people come together for a week and get to know each other and talk about their process and set their intentions for the ceremony and the next day.

Talk about and discover or uncover the meaning of their Iowa experience and then support each other. So I began to do that quite vigorously and I did that for quite a few years. LED retreats, both in Canada and also in Mexico. So that’s how it all began. And since then I’ve been to ceremonies where I wasn’t leading anything.

I was just a participant. I’ve done that in Columbia with maybe, and also I did in Peru at the Temple of the wave of Light. So I’ve had the experience both of guiding these events, but also participating.

Sam Believ: Thank you for sharing that. I love your story in a way how people described the calling from Ayahuasca and your calling was also very obvious and something similar happened to me.

Eventually something happens in your life for you. You find yourself in this echo chamber where everything can hear around you is just ayahuasca. And then I think that is how Ayahuasca recruits us. And yeah, I forgot about Taito. Juanito. He is actually from the same tribe as the Tata I work with.

So you mentioned that I was gonna show you how it feels to have an open heart. And it’s an interesting thing about the plant medicines that. They show you how it feels, there’s a lot of phrases like love yourself, open your heart, but it’s really hard to understand really what it means.

But but those plans, medicines can show you what it really means. But let’s say for someone who can’t have ayahuasca how does one open their heart? What does it really mean?

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah. I. For some, it’s more difficult than others. We’re basically born openhearted, so nobody has to teach a 1-year-old baby how open their hearts are totally open. And then what happens is when people are hurt, small infants or children are hurt and they can be hurt in many ways. Then.

The closing down the heart is a protective experience. It’s like you make yourself invulnerable so you don’t feel the pain, but when you make yourself invulnerable, so you don’t feel the pain, you also don’t feel the love, you also don’t feel the openness, the possibility, the belonging, the unity.

I wish I had a formula for telling people I open their hearts. There are certain practices, there’s, there’s Buddhist practices of loving kindness.

I’m not disciplined enough to have done them and also for me, they don’t work. For me it’s more recognizing where my heart is closed. And inquiring why? What am I afraid of right now? And what am I committed to? It’s usually a matter of relationship. Do I care about somebody enough to open my heart?

But for me, it’s a matter of noticing when it’s not open and being aware of that. I think that’s the key for me. It’s not, here, I can open my heart. Other people can do it. They can put their hands on their heart and open their hearts. For me, it’s a lot of effort actually.

Sam Believ: Yeah. The I think you also called, call it a dissociation.

I personally had a traumatic life’s traumatic. Childhood, early childhood. My story similar to yours, there was some abandonment involved in, what I normally describe it in the word circles that we do or where the new group comes, is that I tuned my emotional dial to zero and prevented myself from feeling good emotions, but al bad emotions, but also good emotions.

Dr. Gabor Maté: That’s right. There’s no, there’s no discrimination in pushing down. You only push 1 1, 1. You push down one thing, you’re pushing down everything else as well.

Sam Believ: Yeah. And what I’ve learned a lot from your work is that trauma that makes us do this, first of all, that it’s, there’s nothing wrong with us.

It’s a good thing. Can you talk to us about that?

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah. All the all the difficulties, challenges, addictions, afflictions, mental health issues that people are struggling with, they at a beginning somewhere. There’s nothing wrong with the individual as such. Just that they had certain experiences to which they responded in certain ways, like you and I’ve been talking about this emotional shutting down that emotional shutting down was necessary at some point because the pain was too much and you were alone with it.

It pain is not the problem being alone with the pain as a small child, that’s the problem. Life will bring pain. As the BO points out, life is suffering. Life being suffering. There’s birth, death, there’s loss, disappointment, pain is inevitable, but to be alone with the pain for a small child is unbearable.

And so that the shutting down of emotion, which is you and I talk about, is just a defense. It’s a necessary one. It helps you endure. That same defense then later on leaves you flat, depressed, disengaged, whatever it is, so there’s nothing fundamentally wrong and what you think is wrong with you actually began as an adaptation, which actually was beneficial at the time, is no longer beneficial.

But it’s not your fault and it’s not who you are. You don’t have to be identified with it. And that’s the key here. So that when I talk about the wisdom of trauma, I talk about two things. One is the shutting down and pushing down, for example. That was wise. That was what you had to do. That’s what you didn’t do it consciously, but your organism did it.

That was the wisdom of the organism. And then there’s wisdom in trauma, and that once you start to look at that and learn from it, then we can learn from our trauma. There are lots of wisdom that can flow from understanding what happened to you. I’m sure you’ve had that experience, so that trauma has got this wisdom and that both in its initial manifestation, there’s a defense against what happened to you, but also then we can learn from it as we work through it.

Sam Believ: In your book, myth of Normal, you talk about the society at large, being not perfect for our existence right now. Talk to us why there’s so much trauma, especially in the modern day and age.

Dr. Gabor Maté: So you’re on Columbia. As I was telling you, I’m just reading a book about Columbia by the Canadian anthropologist, wonderful writer, Wade Davis.

And this book Magdalena is about the river Magdalena in Columbia. And, but it’s really is an ethno ethnographic geographic botanical historical account of Columbia. And

throughout the world, indigenous people when they were living in small tribes. I’m not talking about the big civilizations early, like the Aztecs or the of the Romans and Atlanta. I’m talking about in our origins, we lived in small groups in tribes, and there was no separation between individual and the community.

There was, sense of unity, sense of belonging. People did have the individuality, but they had a deep sense of belonging and connection and also a deep sense of connection with nature. That’s how we evolved, and the human beings have been on earth for millions of years. Our own species has been there for 200,000 years and until 15,000 years ago, we all lived out in nature in small band groups and that’s our nature.

So that if you wanna study a zebra, you could conclude that a zebra is an animal that sits around the whole day or lies on the whole day. Every once in a while, gets up and eats or whatever, and then lies down again. And you’d be right if you were watching a zebra in a zoo, but you see something totally different if you saw the zebra in its natural habitat.

You saw an animal that ranges over a large area and is active, moves in herds and so on. Human beings are living in the zoo right now. We’re living in totally artificial circumstances, totally different from the environment and the social relationships in which we evolved, in which our nature was foreign.

Modern capitalist society tells us that we’re individualistic, aggressive, competitive, and selfish. And that’s the world that we live in. That goes totally contrary to our nature. It affects how we raise children. It affects everything. And so it’s a toxic culture. It’s like we’re living in a cage and we don’t know it.

It’s a cage of owned construction, but we don’t know that. And therefore we. Behave in disturbed ways. So that’s what I mean by a toxic culture. And our needs are not met. And the needs of children for belonging, for unconditional acceptance. There’s a book called The Continuum Concept. It was an American writer visiting a jungle tribe in Venezuela in the 1980s or seventies.

Boy, they raised children so beautifully, so lovingly, so acceptingly with such freedom. With such security, with such a sense of belonging. It’s a totally different model of being a human being and how to raise our unity. You study it internationally. That’s how indigenous people raise their kids.

Very opposite to the way we raise our kids. So it’s a toxic culture that we live in. We’re living in a zoo.

Sam Believ: Yeah, it might be a golden cage and it looks really nice.

Dr. Gabor Maté: For some wait a minute. For some people it does, but even if you look at the wealthy countries, look at the rising inequality. It’s not such a beautiful cage for a lot of people.

A lot of people are right close to the poverty line or just above it. They may be a month away from financial disaster, this characterizes a lot of people in the prosperous Western world. Nevermind. Third world countries where inequality is amazing and a lot of people live in poverty and they struggle.

And so even the golden cages only golden to a fairly small percentage of the world’s population. And you and I are privileged enough to. To be not stratum, but it’s not universal.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Let’s say an illusion of golden Cage because we feel for some reason, even though most people are not happy, we feel like we’re more advanced and we’re at the next level.

I really love your way of analyzing. Our society from the past, from the tribal society. I do it a lot myself because a lot of times when things don’t make sense today, if you look at it from the point of view of tribal society a hundred thousand years ago, all of a sudden everything makes sense from dating to personal relationships and things like that.

Yeah. What you personally helped me understand is we all, we always look for a big trauma, like some event, but there is, there’s also this slow, gradual death by a thousand cuts, accumulation of trauma that nevertheless is still as traumatic.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah. So trauma as I keep emphasizing, is not what happened to you.

Trauma literally means a wound. So Thomas, what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. But sometimes what happens to you can be dramatic, like in the case of my own infancy, being born into a Jewish family in the Second World War, living on the Nazi occupation some children are abused or hit, they witness violence in their families.

Their parents die, or they live in a home where addiction is right. These are the big T traumatic events. It doesn’t have to be that people can be wounded just when they’re not seen for who they are, when they’re not accepted, when they’re expected to suppress themselves for the sake of belonging and being accepted and when love is conditional and they’re not big events that you can delineate.

But as you say, it’s like a thousand small cuts, but it, they’re even more, they can be just as insidious. More insidious. And some that’s more difficult to deal with ’cause it’s fairly easy to remember bad things that happened. But it’s not so easy to remember all the good things that didn’t happen, but should have.

And a lot of people are hurt. So when I’ve done ICO ceremonies and. This is where the plant can be so powerful because it can guide people in the right context if the holding environment is safe enough. It can guide people to understand how they were hurt and what was missing for them. Sometimes people uncover major traumatic events like abuse and so on, but sometimes they just experience what it felt like to be a lonely child, not seen and not understood, and not helped.

Sam Believ: You have I hear tens and tens of stories like this every month from people just realizing that it was small things that made them who they are now. And then this heal healing that is not easy takes, it takes a very long time. So I’m curious when when you’ve learned about Ayahuasca and then you immediately saw its potential, for working with people with addiction, and I really love this phrase that you say, which is, don’t look for the substance. Look for the pain. I’ve used it hundreds of times.

Dr. Gabor Maté: I say, don’t ask why the addiction? Ask why the pain? Yeah.

Sam Believ: Okay. Don’t ask for addiction. Ask for the pain. Look for the pain.

Yeah, sorry. So it means I was using it wrong, but nevertheless it helps a lot of people that are dealing with addiction. What have you observed in, in the retreats that you help organized in people in the, in their journeys with Plat medicines and addiction specifically?

Dr. Gabor Maté: When I first began to work with Ayahuasca.

I had the enthusiasm of a convert, and converts are very often, very enthusiastic. They think they’ve found the answer, and it’s more complex and subtle than that.

But the reason I always can help addiction is because it helps to heal. The trauma under lies, the addiction. So don’t ask why the addiction has, why the pain people can find their pain. And people can also, that be, that they’ve been running away from through the addiction. People can also find that wholeness in themselves, which teaches them that they don’t have to keep running.

So that’s all true, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Now some people, I’ve seen them give up alcohol or give up cigarettes or whatever You, even after a couple of I experiences,

the problem is. But these lessons, for the most part, have to be integrated. And what happens is people come to an Iowa school retreat, they have these door opening, eye opening transformative visions, but then they go back to their lives and all the same influences and relationships and circumstances, which they knew before.

People do have a tendency to revert back to their habitual way of being. So the plans can open up the door, they can give you the vision of where to go, but you have to go there yourself. And I’ve seen both success and I’ve seen lack of success depending on how much consistency and support and ongoing.

Work that person was willing to and capable of doing. Having said that, is still way more powerful than anything Western Medicine has to offer. But I mean by far, for people that are on opiate addiction I’ve seen people have visions when they were on opiates. Like they’re on methadone, for example, and they understand things, but.

It doesn’t change their habit because they have a deep dependence. Chemically iwco can’t change that. Iboga another psychedelic from Africa that can change the opiate dependence. Iwco can’t.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I’ve heard good things about Ibogaine and very strong addiction specifically. And regarding the zealously phase where.

After your first few experiences, you’re so passionate about it. That I have, I’ve also went through this phase and I warn people when they leave the retreat to, to be careful with it because you don’t wanna lose friends over it. And you definitely need to do work without, ’cause as I like to say, you gotta meet it halfway because it will show you what needs to be done, but you’re the only one that can do, they can do the actual work.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah. And don’t become an evangelist, do your work first and integrate it into your life, and then your friends will wanna know what you did, but don’t come back as an evangelist. And I’ve seen a bit of, too much of ayahuasca evangelism, or psychedelic evangelism. And what I’ve also seen is some people get too hung up on the experience itself rather than the meaning of the experience for their lives.

So that. Like with every, like with any modality, their beauties and possibilities, but there’s also hazards.

Sam Believ: Yeah. You say if you can face death, you can face life. And I wanna talk a little bit about your experiences in palliative care, your own aging, and how you view it. And also.

Taking it to ayahuasca, how does experiencing death, even through psychedelics, can help you experience life better?

Dr. Gabor Maté: Some people have experienced what’s called an ego death through psychedelics, which is like a complete disidentification with the form that you are and with the history that you’ve had, and you just evaporate as a separate identity. I have not had that experience. I think I’ve held on too much.

Like I, I have a very strong stick skull and it’s hard to break through it. In my, in the middle of normal, my book that you mentioned, I do talk about a deep, I always have experience I had, but I wouldn’t say I was an ego death. People have that ego that sometimes through spiritual experiences without psychedelics, mystics.

Sophie is Christian, Jewish, Hindu mystics, Buddhists, they’ve had those direct experiences forever. I haven’t, I’m sure I’d be very terrified of it if it came up. I’m sure it would also be wonderful if I have had the experience, but I haven’t in terms of death, i’m 81 now. If I’m lucky, what have I got left Another 10 years.

If I’m lucky, healthy years, which is by far from guaranteed. I know people my age who are dying or are no longer alive, and I know people all the time who are facing. The end of their existence as we in this form anyway. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Like I can tell myself that I understand it and it’s inevitable it’s gonna happen and it happens to everybody.

And so what? But emotionally, I’ll have to find out. So I don’t know what I don’t know that any belief I have about death right now. It’s actually an accurate representation of where I’m at, because the truth of it is in the deepest emotional level. Can I let go? Am I willing to accept that I won’t exist anymore?

I don’t know. I don’t know about that one. I’ll have to come back after I die and let you know how it went from

Sam Believ: Yeah, that would be a great interview. Finding someone after me.

Dr. Gabor Maté: Yeah. No, that’d be a great interview. You’re right.

Sam Believ: Yeah. If I might say that hopefully I can live to even be 81 if I’m lucky.

And then if I would love to have your mental capacity. ’cause I’ve listened to, in preparation to this episode, I’ve listened to seven different podcasts with you and you’re very sharp and very very ready to answer things.

Dr. Gabor Maté: For a very my age.

Sam Believ: Yeah.

Another thing I noticed is sometimes in, in your interviews you analyze the hosts emotional situation and you give them very valuable advice. So I have few cases for you with myself specifically. One is you talked about, you, yourself not knowing how to play with your kids and you were waiting for them to develop verbally.

And it hit me really hard because that’s exactly my case. So I have three very young children, four and a half, three and seven months, and I realized that I’m waiting for them and I tried to sit down and talk to them like an adult. So any advice there or any, anything I can do.

Dr. Gabor Maté: There’s two things.

One is, if you’re not familiar with this book I helped to write, it’s called Hold On To Your Kids By Parents Sleep Tonight or More Than Peers. It’s not my work, it’s the work of a billion psychologist friend of mine, Gordon Neufeld. But it’s the only panting book you’ll ever left to read. Okay. I, you gotta read that book, I promise you.

And there’s another book I can recommend for you called Parenting From the Inside Out, which is by Dan Siegel, and it tells you what you can learn about yourself through your parenting.

Those are two reads that I think would really help you, but in more specifically when you talk to them like adults, and that’s what I did. You don’t see them, you’re not seeing them. You’re projecting yourself onto them.

What are you afraid of?

I’m asking you a question.

Sam Believ: It’s hard to, it’s hard to understand, but maybe there’s a part of me that, may, maybe there’s a part of me that’s like a little bit jealous that they have they have it better than me. Maybe there’s this anxiety that I feel when everything is okay, because I feel that it’s not gonna be okay if I enjoy it too much.

Dr. Gabor Maté: So first of all, I can tell you. Same thing is true for me. If you don’t know how to play with the kids, it’s ’cause you weren’t played with when you, I don’t know what your situation was, what the emotional state your mother was in, your father was in, but they didn’t know how to play with, babies play, but two months of age peekaboo, they just spontaneously do it.

So the Sunday and new experience that. You weren’t seen, so you have trouble seeing your kids just so here’s my thing, just look at them. Just really look at them and see them. Okay? No agenda. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to make anything happen. Just see them.

Sam Believ: Thank you so much. That’s a great advice.

I will definitely read the books and I will definitely,

Dr. Gabor Maté: But I have more to say,

Sam Believ: okay,

Dr. Gabor Maté: let them teach you. Let them teach you how to play. They know how to play. You don’t have to make it happen. You just have to let it happen. And thirdly those parts of you that you mentioned that might be jealous or anxious, that fear that if things are going well, they’re gonna turn badly.

That’s a memory.

That’s a memory. That’s what happened to you. You had no security. That goodness will sustain itself. When things are good, something would happen to spoil things. Now it’s true, life can bring challenges and vicissitudes, but you don’t have to sit there anticipating. It anxiously the belief that things will always go bad when they’re good.

That’s a memory, so you’re not wrong to believe it, but examine the belief. It’s not reality. Reality is, yeah, anything could happen, but in that kind of belief that you have, there’s a certainty that things will go bad, and that’s your memory. Maybe even pre-verbal memory. You do your kids a huge favor if you didn’t impose that on them.

So that’s my response to your question.

Sam Believ: Thank you, G. That’s that’s very wise and very useful for me. You touched upon the topic of play and in preparation for this podcast, I’ve actually read my first ever child’s book since I was an adult, which was Vinny Depo. Because you mentioned it several times.

So talk to us about play and then why this book specifically? Why do you mention it?

Dr. Gabor Maté: Here’s an original English edition of Juan Depo. Here’s my Hungarian chat with copy of Man Depo and it’s all about play. The whole book is about play now. It’s very interesting. Mel, the author, he wrote this book and his son was called Robin.

They didn’t have a good relationship. But Mel wrote these books about these toys that he bought for his son, the Little Tiger and the bear and the kangaroo and so whatever their actual view of this shit was, the book is all about play. A little boy playing with his animals.

And it’s written so playfully. The language is playful. It’s a, one of the funniest books you’ll ever read, and it’s as much rattles as it is for kids. At the very end of the book, Robin, the boy has to go off to school and they won’t be able to play so much, but he, it says that, but in a magic forest, in the enchanted forest, wherever they go.

A little boy and his bear will always be playing. So there’s a part of us now actually, our brains are wired for play. There’s a circuitry in our brains for play. Nature intends us to play all animals play. That’s essential for human development, for mammalian development. So bear cubs, lion cubs, puppies, kittens, rat babies, they all play.

It’s essential for health development and it’s essential for health that we play.

Our lives. So that’s why that big book means so much to me. And certainly what’s also interesting is that in the aftermath of I experience, I can get very playful, very light, maybe a disclaim experience.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Many times happens to me where I get so playful indeed that I break my own rules, like the rules that are set for the ceremony, and then I feel bad about it.

But it’s definitely, it definitely feels helpful at that moment. I have one more scenario for you that that I want your opinion on. So I run this retreat and. There’s hundred people every month that come to me and say, thank you so much, and you changed my life. And it feels extremely uncomfortable.

But when I get one, so we have 605 star reviews on Google, but I have three one star reviews. And I don’t know most of the five star reviews, but I absolutely remember all the one star reviews. So the bad, the criticism just cuts right through me and hurts me badly. But all the positive things I can’t seem to be able to feel them.

Dr. Gabor Maté: What if you didn’t take any of them personally?

They’re not about you. They’re about the experience of that person. The people with the ones to use. They didn’t have a good experience.

Do you think you can please everybody? I. But if you look at the comments on my YouTube talks, oh, I could listen to him forever. His very voice calms me down. Somebody else will write, he bores me to death. Same they’re looking at the same thing, but they’re experiencing it differently.

Secondly, because critical reviews, maybe there’s something to learn there. Maybe there’s something that you could do differently or you could be more sensitive to, or more be more aware of. Maybe with those per people you weren’t as present or as maybe something and then brought up something in you that you weren’t at your best when you’re working with them.

It’s worthwhile to investigate but not to take it personally. And that doesn’t mean it’s something about you. It’s just something that you could learn. And the final point, and then have tovo is. Your pain is that the goodness in you wasn’t seen and your attack criticized, demean, judged, and that’s where your wound is.

And that’s why when you see a negative review, it triggers that wound. So that’s a wound that can still heal

if you. I felt totally confident that you’re okay, that you’ve done your best. Sometimes you make mistakes, sometimes you don’t succeed. But fundamentally, you’re a good person who is here to do your best and you do your best. It would mean so much to you. So somebody gives you a one star review. Okay, maybe I can learn something here.

Maybe it’s just their personality or whatever it is. But it wouldn’t get to you. The reason it gets to you is ’cause you have a wound or not being seen and not being valued, not being appreciated. So that’s something you can still do some more healing work on.

Sam Believ: Thank you Gabor. This was really great and I appreciate it a lot.

This was very valuable. And yeah, I hope you find find a way to make it here to La Wire and meet you in person. Thank you so much for this interview.

Dr. Gabor Maté: A pleasure to meet you, Sam. Take care. Bye-bye.

Sam Believ: Thank you guys for listening, as always, really the host and believe, and I will see you in the next episode.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic Renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a, like wherever it is you’re listening. Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only.

This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. The WRA Connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Troy Casey, also known as the Certified Health Nut. Troy is a holistic health coach, author of Ripped at 50, and former Versace model who transformed his life through fasting, herbal medicine, breathwork, indigenous healing, and ayahuasca.

We touch upon topics of:

• Troy’s transformation from fashion model to health advocate (01:17–03:50)
• His early ayahuasca experiences in the Amazon and three life-changing visions (06:43–12:50)
• Humanity’s spiritual awakening and vision for a conscious future (16:24–23:20)
• Environmental destruction, geopolitics, and the rainforest (24:25–29:10)
• Rockefeller history, pharma, and the Flexner report (29:36–31:02)
• First principles of health and his 9 Pillars of Wellness (37:02–41:20)
• Views on purpose, fatherhood, and feminine roles in raising children (38:27–40:50)
• Urine therapy, Maori healing, and unconventional yet effective practices (42:19–44:26)
• Ego, balance, emotional processing, and the spiritual journey (45:26–50:14)
• Troy’s powerful definition of Ayahuasca and its healing potential (54:23–57:50)

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats, go to http://www.lawayra.com

Find more about Troy Casey at http://www.certifiedhealthnut.com or follow him on social media @CertifiedHealthNut across platforms.

Transcript

Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.

Troy Casey: Ayahuasca is the most powerful herbal medicine on planet Earth. It penetrates the liver, the gallbladder, the intestines, it cleans the blood, but more importantly, it penetrates the nervous system where we hold our beliefs. So if you were raped as a child, or you were wronged or ripped off, et cetera, ayahuasca has the ability to pull this program out and help you really look at it.

And so Ayahuasca is a tool that has the ability. And sometimes you’re gonna puke it out. Sometimes you’re gonna shit it out. Sometimes a good shaman can smooth it out blow some tobacco on it and help clear the energy. There are only four human needs, food, water, shelter, and fire, and we don’t need chemicals to grow.

Food. Organics outperform GMOs and commercial farming. I think eight to one. The organics outperform, and there’s a huge difference in energetics in the world of biohacking and now peptides. Steroids and all these synthetics that are out there, people are getting caught up on oh, should I do this or should I do that?

And my message has always been for the last 20 years, get back to nature in as many facets as possible.

Sam Believ: Hi guys and welcome to AYA podcast. As always, we do the host. Sam to them having a conversation with Troy Casey, also known as Certified Health Nut. Troy is a holistic health coach, author, and a former Versace model who turned his life around through nature, natural healing, and consciousness practices.

With decades of experience in wellness, he promotes lifestyle, rooted in breath work, nutrition, emotional healing, and earth based wisdom. He’s known for his bold personality, raw authenticity, and viral content on men’s work and personal transformation. He’s booked his book, ripped at 50, explores his journey of healing, masculinity, and purpose.

This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability. Accessibility and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, Casey, welcome to the show.

Troy Casey: Thank you so much for having me, Sam. I’m always delighted to talk about medicine,

Sam Believ: Casey. I’ve first seen your content may be six, seven years ago.

I think I was looking out for like breathing exercises, so I kinda know your face. I was surprised to find out you were actually one of the. OG people that talk about ayahuasca. That was new to me. So it’s I found a video of you like 18 years ago in the jungle, so that’s pretty cool.

Tell us about your story. How did you go from Versace model to being a health knot and what’s the role medicine played in it?

Troy Casey: Yeah I put a lot of this in my book. I started out as a young man just chasing money, not really knowing, where I was going or what I was doing, and the fashion industry and being a high fashion model sounded like a good idea.

I, I didn’t know much about it. Now. 30 something years later, we see the whole Diddy party situation. And a lot of people have been implicated in the Epstein list. There was a guy who owned the agency in Paris called Models One. And then you get the Abercrombie and Fitch and Victoria’s Secret that they were all intertwined with that whole Epstein Diddy party thing.

And that was something that. I ate away at my soul. You could only go so far in that industry and I maneuvered my way into becoming a Versace model. I was at the right place at the right time in Miami when Miami was coming up. And then, and my agent helped Gianni Versace purchase that property on Ocean Drive.

And then had him use, Miami as a backdrop for the South Beach Stories campaign. And and so I was able to really maneuver my way in there. And then, the next year there was a big agent from New York that came down and they were looking through my book and, it came up on all the Versace stuff and he was like, oh, this is so last year.

That was just like, dude, that’s the height of fashion. Versace, Armani, gucci stuff like that is like the hype of, fashion, especially men’s fashion. And for someone to gate keep me and say it was like, so last year it was so soul robbing for me. And so it, it took me a little while to wake up in that scenario.

And, and I partied a lot. Drugs and alcohol were a big part of that scene. And so instead of feeling my emotions at that level of my development, I would just go out and drink and party. And that went on for quite a few years. And then eventually I had to sober up. I was wasting my potential.

And enough people bothered to tell me that, right? So anybody who has alcoholic friends out there, or drug addicted friends, always encourage them to. To live their full potential. Because eventually I listened to that and I started to sober up and it was vipasana meditation that really took me to the next level.

I went to AA and 12 step programs, which, were functional and dysfunctional all in the same. But the one thing that really stuck with me was step 11 sought through prayer and meditation. You found a better way and I always. Notice that the people that would talk about that, they had a certain qua a certain way of being.

And I really respected that. And so I was intrigued about meditation and I inquired and I heard about these meditation retreats, et cetera, and I found out about Vipasana and I, this is before the internet. I put in my application and I got some. I got some literature back and I was reading the literature about the depth of the mental defilements and where the root cause of a lot of our suffering is.

And I was in tears, reading about that. And so I sat many vipasana courses over the span of six years and that helped me awaken. And at the same time I started studying with indigenous Maori healers from New Zealand and got a real taste of. Indigenous wisdom and how powerful shamanic healing was.

They used the body, and they would, stand on the nerve centers of the body and go really deep, really fast. And, used pain or the release of your pain as a catalyst for awakening. Had some very profound experiences. Witnessed many miracles myself during that time. And at the same time, somebody turned me onto an herbal company in the Amazon rainforest.

They had the top 40 plants, dragon’s blood unto cba, Summa. Chanca Piera, really powerful herbal medicine from the Amazon, and I started putting these herbs into my body, and I had started studying herbal medicine as a model because I got into fasting, internal purification, cleaning out my liver, et cetera, and so I had.

An affinity towards herbs for a very long time. And so fast forward 15 years later, somebody introduced me to an herbal company from the Amazon. I started taking these plants and the vibration of the plants and my experience with them was extremely profound. And I started working with that company and building a business with their herbs.

And I want a trip to the Amazon. And the vendors for that company were the Shao Indians. And so I went far up river and met some of our partners researched the plants. A lot of this you can see on my YouTube channel from 2006. This was some of my first work. In YouTube. And and I’ve had a career in front of the camera.

I wanna tie it all together. And so I’ve been in front of the camera for 35 years and it’s been this whole journey of discovery of who I am and what we’re doing on this planet. And ultimately to heal myself. And to, now share that. Information with others. And so I drank the Ayahuasca for the first time with the chappo down there.

And then I stayed there for a few extra weeks. And had profound experiences and profound visions, and I’ve been living those visions ever since. And what on the internet is an expression of those visions.

Sam Believ: So you talk about those three powerful visions that Ayahuasca gave you can you share?

Troy Casey: So the first one was an amalgamation of my on-camera career. I was doing standup comedy at the time in Hollywood, and I’d been studying natural medicine as long as I’ve been in front of the camera. And the certified health nut.

Came to me. It was crystallized in the Amazon and so I laughed out loud right in the middle of ceremony that’s been unfolding for the past almost 20 years. When I got out of the jungle, YouTube was a brand new reality. And mind you, when I first moved to Hollywood, transitioning from a model to an actor, you had to beg for a piece of film from.

A USC student or something like that. And it was very expensive to get film equipment and do filming. And so in a very short amount of time, these iPhones, IMAX editing software, this phone right here is as good as any Panavision camera that came out of a truck that costs $70,000 to rent for one day.

And so this iPhone has that much power in it, right? This is 20 years later. And and then the distribution platforms, YouTube, and now, of course, instagram and other platforms. But the bottom line is when I first moved to Hollywood, the distribution platforms were network, television and films.

And and now I’m my own movie producer. I produce my own materials. In fact, I’m working with a famous director. Producer, he’s a friend of mine and he’s been following my work for a long time. He said 20 years ago when we met, I was gonna take him down to the Amazon to drink Ayahuasca, and he looked at my career and basically what he said is, the technology didn’t catch up to me.

It’s only catching up to me now. He just produced. Directed the film for Chechen Chong, and he won the Academy Award for Sling Blade back in 1996. And he did another movie with Jim Carrey called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And so I was, I just, I did a podcast recently in Los Angeles and he was there and then we went out to dinner and it was interesting to hear his reflection of me because I was enamored with his career.

He’s a big Hollywood producer and, did, many big films. And then he’s very interested in my career and the direction it’s going. And I was grateful, to hear that reflection. So the bottom line is the first vision was Certified Health Nut was born in the Amazon crystallized, and then I came out of the jungle and all this technology was brand new.

The second one was I went down and you just explained how you lived there from Latvia and how, beautiful. The people are down there and sweet and it’s just a different kind of energy. And when I met the children down there, and I don’t have nieces or nephews, so I’ve never been surrounded by children.

And so for me to be surrounded by all these. Children in the rainforest, these little Indian children. It’s, and I was oh my God, the, these children are so beautiful, and there I was 40 and they say, you’re never ready to have children. At that time I was ready. And, but it took that experience of me being down there and during my ayahuasca ceremonies, my initial ceremonies, the spirit of my daughter came to me, a very powerful spirit. And I wasn’t married. I wasn’t in a relationship or anything. And in a very short amount of time, I conceived my first child. And then my daughter was the second child that came.

And she is a very powerful spirit. And so my family has been unfolding ever since then. Certified health nut’s been unfolding ever since then. The final vision I saw is that humanity makes it from the precipice of ecological disaster that we find ourselves in. We all know and have heard about the destruction of the rainforest, and now of course with the chem trails and the expansion of the commercial world here we see that we’re at the precipice of ecological disaster.

And and so I saw that humanity makes it, and so that’s been unfolding ever since and while I share this, and

Sam Believ: cool, Troy, it’s a really cool story. It’s a very strong strong start. And something similar happened to me. I was drinking ayahuasca. I was just in it to heal depression, and it just gave me this entire vision that now.

Led me to starting the retreat and it’s pretty crazy. It, it didn’t talk to me about the family, but my wife was already pregnant, I think when I started drinking the medicine. Actually, no, when I first drank the medicine, she didn’t she wasn’t pregnant yet. But yeah, there’s something with the medicine that a lot of times it, for a lot of people like you and me, just gives you the entire breakdown, the entire direction.

And then years later. Sometimes it takes, sometimes on the years later you realize what was this all about? But it’s something you mentioned that you said, we’re gonna make it from this cataclysm. I personally think the reason we destroy ourself is like lack of consciousness and that people are doing wrong things for the wrong reasons.

And I personally hope that maybe more people do all the. Conscious things. You talk about breathing exercises, blood medicine, maybe focus on their health. Maybe we’ll make it, but in, in your vision how are we making it out of there? Does the what, what needs to happen?

Troy Casey: There weren’t so much specifics as just the end result of, we make it. And I also believe on your point, that we have gone into ignorance to awaken consciousness, right? Because there’s two forces guiding everything. Yin yang, inhalation, exhalation, masculine, feminine, catabolic, anabolic.

There’s always two forces guiding us. And and my mentor likes to say, how can you be Luke Skywalker if you don’t have a DA Darth Vader? And so there’s always, the dark side. And so it’s integrating the both. And I do believe that’s a big part of our dualistic paradox, our dualistic reality that we’re living in.

Can you rephrase that, that, that question? ’cause I want to get into it.

Sam Believ: Personally I think that people need to wake up, conscious consciousness needs to wake up, and I believe like ayahuasca is one of the fastest way to do it. So do you what do you think, what do you think needs to happen for us to wake up and do you even agree do you think it comes from lack of consciousness or just just talking in that direction?

It’s not like a specific question.

Troy Casey: Yeah. We, so we go into darkness or the, in the Vedic scriptures, yoga. Scriptures. It talks about, the Cali Yuga, the Darkness, and it, and we hear this in astrology or the age of Aquarius. We’re going into a different cycle. The Mayan calendar talks about this, the Hopi prophecy, the eagle and the condor prophecy, talk about the dark times.

And I do believe we’re coming out of it. And however you slice it. Even the president of the United States right now talked about, going into a golden era. And and I truly believe this, again, we have two forces, yin and yang, and. Not to get political, but you always have to look at what’s on the horizon as indicators.

And I think it’s interesting that the, the main politician on the global stage is actually talking about the golden era or the golden age, whether it manifests or whether he’s. Full of propaganda. Only time will tell, right? And but we are coming out of darkness. And here’s the other thing, no matter what, man has always sat around the fire and told stories, and we tell stories to, to inspire future generations to make sure that they know that there’s a tiger in the cave, right? Or this area is potentially dangerous, or there’s a sinkhole over here, or a cenote you can fall in, so we would tell stories around the fire. This is the fire right now. This technology is the fire and the story that I’m telling because the world that I choose to create is one of balance and harmony.

I do, I postulate as a man on this planet. With the great responsibility. I’ve been gifted great power and energy and talents, and so I. Postulate that we can live in harmony with nature. There’s a scientific term called biomimicry, which states life creates conditions conducive for life. So a spider at aqueous solutions room temperature can take things from its local environment.

Build something five times the strength of steel. And this has been replicated with coral reefs and other aspects of nature. And if we can align with biomimicry what Tesla talked about, free energy zero point technology, taking abundant wireless. Free energy from the atmosphere instead of oil and destructive industries.

And some of the, oil exploration is one of the main culprits of deforestation and what they did to the schwar in, in Ecuador. Oxy Petroleum and Chevron, et cetera. And so these are destructive industries. So what can we do with constructive? And maybe you’ve seen visions in your ayahuasca ceremonies as well, your psychedelic experiences.

We can go beyond the veil of illusion of, you know this hard and fast ideas of physical material stagnation. And we can go beyond into the material. The beyond the material into the energetics of the world is what create and coalesce energy and sound effects matter. So can we speak it into existence sitting around the proverbial fire on these devices.

Speaking to existence. My vision is clean, air, water, soil, and equitable systems for all of mankind in my lifetime. And so what is an equitable system? Everyone has a fair shake to create, and so instead of this fake fiat currency. Derived world where the bankers fund both sides of the war to see the strife amongst the human beings.

And so can we create systems that are conducive for all life on the planet. And I postulate that we can right dream the impossible dream. As the Wright brothers wanted to fly like an eagle, and and Steve Jobs wanted to put a handheld computer in every man’s hand so that every man had the potential to change the world.

So this is the potential that I see and that I speak into existence using story. Using vision where there is no vision, the people will perish. And so this is the story that I’m speaking into existence. And this is the manifestation principle that I’m utilizing thought word action manifest in the flesh.

And and I like nature and I like the natural rhythms of life. And I also like technology, right? I’m using it. So can we. My question is can we do this in harmony? And I postulate that we can.

Sam Believ: Whatever we can believe we can achieve. And you mentioned so many cool topics that we can delve into.

Just like Steve Jobs put com computers in everyone’s hand. I wanna put Ayahuasca in everyone’s mo mouth. Almost everyone. Not everyone, not if you have schizophrenia. But it’s cool that you talk about, podcasts as being this bonfire where. Digital elders like yourself, you’re close to 60 now, right?

Troy Casey: I’ll be 60 at the end of the year, yes.

Sam Believ: Yeah, so digital elders talk to like 20,000 digital bonfires at the same time. We know while people are driving, but the still, the emotion is the same, right? So using technology for good I think is pretty cool. You mentioned. Trump. And I wanna switch this topic to health.

You’re the health nut Trump make America healthy again. Robert Kennedy Jr. And I know you’re passionate about this topic. Talk to us about that.

Troy Casey: I’ve studied geopolitics ever since I came outta the Amazon. So when I first went down there in 2006, I saw mountains of south of sawdust in iquitos, so mountains of trees, sawdust.

And I saw the two by fours, which were on barges that go up to Home Depot, here in the United States and other industrial world in industrial parts of the world. And I understand that, we are the problem, right? Humanity is the problem, therefore we are the solution. And so I studied geopolitics.

I’m like, okay, all the rainforest is being destroyed. It’s very important for the ecosystem. It’s a critical lynchpin to the rest of the world. And so what is my role as a man? I have a responsibility. That’s the message I came out of the jungle with and witnessing the destruction. And then I started to study industry geopolitics, things that were, causing the destruction down there. And I realized that oil exploration is one of the number one deforestation components. You cut the roads through the jungle exploring for oil deposits, and then if there are, they dig and drill and you can create, waste like Oxy Petroleum did to the schwar, which caused leukemia in those tribes.

And then if there isn’t, then you, after the bulldozers go through, then they pull out all that equipment and then they’ll give a dollar a day and a chainsaw to a local and they’ll start fell the big trees that they bring through the tributaries into the major cities and cut down the rainforest.

So this is, and then they grow the cash crops. The soy, the corn for McDonald’s beef even chocolate bananas, all these, cash crops, et cetera, coca leaves, right? And how can we do this in a sustainable way? First and foremost, don’t cut it down. And I was working with an herbal company.

If you harvest some of the herbs of the fruits or the berries that have very powerful medicinal qualities, they grow back, right? So that is one sustainable model. But the unsustainable models were, what was depicted in a book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which was written by John Perkins and it details the World Bank Giving in the IMF giving loans to these third world countries Ecuador Peru, Panama, Venezuela, and.

Then asking, but then who? Who gets the contracts for that money that is borrowed for those third world countries? Halliburton and Bechtel get those contracts, we did this with Iraq and so then, these American corporations go in and build infrastructure dams, road roadways, grid systems for electricity, and then they ask for the money back, right?

The World Bank ask for the money back and they don’t have the money, right? It’s a third world country. So they say, okay, give us your natural resources and a slave wage to pull it out of the earth. We see this in Africa with the cobalt and the lithium mining, the Sudan crude Iraq. Venezuela was number four.

Producer of oil. Number five. Producer is Ecuador. Number six, producer is Peru. And and number nine producer is Libya. And we saw what happened to Libya. Pipelines are what get the oil into position so it can be exported around the world. And so Afghanistan and Syria, those are both. Platforms for pipelines.

So this is the way of the world. And, I studied that. So when I saw, and I’ve been on the planet for 50 plus years, and then I see this guy Donald Trump, who’s a brash New Yorker, and I spent a lot of time working in the fashion industry in New York. And Donald Trump’s kind of a mild New Yorker.

People think he’s a sexist and a racist and all this. And so I, I see that. I see him as a very mild person, but I see him as an American and speaking up for the American way, and I tend to believe in something better than confessions of an economic hitman. And the whole situation now that he’s in, I realize the gigantic blockades with.

Oil, which is Rockefellers, which is banking, which is pharmaceutical drugs, which is agribusiness. So petrochemical byproducts are in pesticides and herbicides. It’s what helps. The chemicals stick to the plants. Pet petrochemical byproducts are in pharmaceutical drugs. And so you’ve got, Rockefellers were oil men and they created a monopoly and they bought up the railroads, they bought up whatever was distributing the oil, and they’re still doing this.

And then they created the school system here in America as well. It’s designed to dumb people down and make them good factory workers. And then the Flexner report basically got rid of all natural medicine or discredited it and only put credit to state licensed. Accredited universities that were teaching medicine, which was back then, that was considered quackery.

Herbal medicine is what our grandparents and our great grandparents always used. We didn’t have pharmacies, hospitals, doctors, or any of this 200 years ago. So all this stuff is brand new and. If you look at the story of John d Rockefeller and setting up those monopolies, it’s basically we’re living in an oligarchy, a top down situation.

In fact, JP Morgan was funding Nicola Tesla when he was developing free energy and when he discovered it. JP Morgan buried it because he, Tesla didn’t wanna meter it right. He wanted to give it free to the people. And so this is the way of the world that I’ve studied now. Now not bad or good, right?

Again, this is the yin and the yang that we live in this world. I just postulate that we can do things in a more balanced way. Things that aren’t, we don’t have to rape and pillage other lands, push people off of their land for natural resources. And I go big picture and please watch you get home or listening.

Follow along with me, Phil, philosophically. And so there are only four human needs, food, water, shelter, and fire. And we don’t need chemicals to grow. Food. Organics outperform. GMOs and commercial farming. I think eight to one. Done a lot of research in Asia and organic farmland. American military did research.

You could find this on the British Soil association.org website, and the organics outperform and there’s a huge difference in energetics in food. And Hippocrates said, let thy food be thy medicine. But we’ve gotten so far away from that. And back to the herbs. Herbs are food, herbs are medicine.

It was part of who we are, and we’ve gotten so far away from that, and we’ve sold ourselves. This whole top down oligarchy situation with, that’s all traded in the petrodollar and people are controlled with the petrodollar. And so if you look at, there, there was, you’re living outside of Medellin.

Netflix had a big show on Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel. He was the seventh richest man in the world. He was worth billions at a time on the Forbes list. And that was all traded in the petro dollar, in the American dollar. And and this, anytime there’s imbalances that leaves the door open for massive amounts of corruption.

And so what I learned about that Netflix special narcos is it’s not just the narco traffickers. It is also the governments that are controlling all aspects of life oil, pushing indigenous people off of their land, et cetera, raping and pillaging the land. And so the corruption runs deep. It’s not just the illicit drugs, it’s the legal drugs.

Right now we’ve got, everybody is all doped up. I think 70. Percent of Americans are on one medication or more chronic diseases at 50%. So bringing it back to Trump and now RFKI, I believe that somebody wants to do good. I know I do. And so will these men help this planet? I would like to think that yes, they will.

That will, the proof will come out in the, in, in the pudding, but the bottom line is make America healthy again. This is my platform that I’ve been working on for the last 20 years. You scroll back to YouTube in 2006, I’m singing the same song, talking about the GMOs, people all doped up on pharmaceutical drugs, et cetera, talking about oil expiration in the Amazon and plant medicine, et cetera.

And and RFK is not just talking about Make America healthy again and the food supply and the food diet, and the glyphosate, and the GMOs, et cetera. He’s also talking about addiction, recovery and psychedelics, ibogaine and other exploration. To help the fentanyl crisis, right? Which is coming manufactured from China, coming in through the cartels in Mexico.

And so it’s a big mess. And and I truly believe if we’re going to save the planet, then it’s going to happen at a grassroots individual level. Healthy me equals a healthy planet. We’re all voting with our dollars, regardless of the politicians we bring in. And so what are we spending our money on? Pay now, pay later.

Pay the farmer. Pay the doctor. It’s our choice. And so this is the clarion call that I’m putting out there on the internet, whether not everyone is gonna heed the call but everyone gets the call and I hope that ties it in. I know. I tend to talk a little bit a lot and it gets philosophical.

But I postulate that we can create peace and harmony on this planet always and forever.

Sam Believ: Yeah. You do talk a lot, which is a great thing for a podcast guest because I need to ask very few questions that you’re very self-sufficient and it is a scary picture. There’s so many issues.

As you said, once again, you had a vision that we’re gonna make it. There’s a lot of good men around there. I consider myself one of them doing good things making world a better place. And we do have tools and yeah. And then, you’re, you’ve been putting out that message for a long time and I’m sure people listen.

I’m sure that helped RFK win and get to the position where he’s at, because I think people are ready. Everyone knows enough. Thanks to the internet, thanks to YouTube. People know enough that, there’s what’s healthy, what’s unhealthy? People are fed up enough. And speaking of RFK, I’m a big fan of him.

It’s my dream to interview him. And I know one day I will because he does speak about his son drinking ihu with like tears in his eyes and it really helped him and it’s amazing. So let’s switch to the more positive side of things. You’re almost 60 years old. You look amazing. Your health not, you know a lot about health.

Tell us, what did you do to stay fit? What can people do your favorite things to stay healthy apart from Ayahuasca, obviously.

Troy Casey: Yes. I put this in my book, ripped at 50, A Journey to self-love. Because I have so much experience and sometimes it’s overwhelming for people, so I wanted to chunk it down into first principles as they use in.

Physics or science. You can’t have this without that. And so every, we’re made outta water. So hydration’s very important to pay attention to. We’re made of the earth materials. So nutrition’s very important to pay. Pay attention to the. The source of all life on planet earth is the sun. And so we’re electromagnetic beings.

So sunlight and grounding is very important for us. These are axioms. They’re first principles. They’re necessities, they’re non-negotiables every day. And I think in the world of biohacking and now peptides and steroids and all these synthetics that are out there. People are getting caught up on oh, should I do this or should I do that?

And my message has always been, for the last 20 years, get back to nature in as many facets as possible. So I have the nine pillars of health, the seven factors of stress that destroy health and the five detoxification pathways that restore health. And so it’s a good understanding to understand these first principles that the number one.

Pillar that I have is legacy, purpose, or dream where there’s no vision, the people will perish. And so it’s important for man to have purpose. I do postulate that procreation is prime directive. So as I came out of the jungle, very lit up with nature inside my consciousness, my nervous system, et cetera, I came back with a strong desire to start a family.

And so I do believe this is at the cornerstone of being a human being. And you’re gonna need your health to pro, to procreate. And I do believe that women, that’s job number one, to raise the children, nourish and nurture the children. So when I work with men, it’s a good idea to figure out what their effortless genius is.

And, what they’re good at and what the world needs. And that’s the essence of a business to solve a problem and to go into what you’re good at instead of just getting a job. That can be, that can be problematic for a man. And but for women, I think job number one is having children.

Not that a woman can’t go and start a business and do whatever you know, anyone wants to do. I’m not here to stop that. I’m just here to say that is. Probably the most important job is for the future of the species is nourishing and nurturing the children. And I say that as a stay at home father where I chose to be with my children.

Luckily, as an entrepreneur, I had the ability albeit through the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur, but being available for my children the majority of the time. And I think it’s so important. So hopefully your viewers will understand that man needs purpose. And for a woman, I do believe that having children is purpose enough.

And so the nine pillars, nature, hydration, nutrition, sleep. This is non-negotiable. We’re wired to the celestial realm, the moon and the sun. Movement is a necessity, not a luxury. And so walking’s the best exercise. You just understanding these basic principles have as we’ve become domesticated.

Sitting, driving, texting it’s a good idea to understand, all of this, to live an optimal and vital life so that we actually have something to contribute to the greater parts of the world. So I put all this curriculum in my book and then you can download it for free on my.

The nine pillars of health certified health nut.com, you can go down there and it’s a free download for everyone and you can put it up on as a checklist. And so these are, again, axioms, non-negotiables, first principles, foundation principles. You can’t have a great life without having all these, or if you want a great life and you want a big vision, you’re gonna need your health to achieve that.

And so I put that all in my curriculum.

Sam Believ: Yeah, see, I see why you wrote a book. You definitely have the information just exploding out of you. It’s almost hard to contain. So I have an idea. You should come to Lara. It’s a very calm place and you can start writing your new book, which is ripped. At 60 as the time has come, it’s the other stuff is outdated.

Interestingly enough, I realize I’m a stay at home father as well, even though, we all live here at the same property. It’s cool because my kids can come visit me in the office here nearby. Talking about health I want to continue about that a little bit. I remember when I first heard about Ayahuasca, I was like really negative about it.

I was like, what do you mean drinking, taking drugs and puking in the jungle? You must be crazy, right? And I was very skeptical. Then I slowly warmed up to it and now I am. Embracing it and spreading the word. So roles have reversed. But I remember when I was getting ready for this interview, I was like, Troy’s a really cool guy, and he talks about those things, but this urinal therapy and all this stuff is, is a little over yeah, I felt resistance.

So I wanna be proactive this time and not resist stuff that I don’t know. So talk to us about, the craziest, the weirdest things you discovered that actually work.

Troy Casey: Like Ayahuasca, I hear right? I hear. Ooh, power. Woo. What is that? Tell me more. I hear about the Maori healers I talked about earlier.

They use sticks and stones and they stand on you. And people scream bloody murder. Oh, really? Where, how can I sign up? When are they coming? Ayahuasca makes you puke. Visions. Oh, where, let me know. Oh, urine therapy. The yogis did this. It’s a path to enlightenment. It’s a tool in the toolbox.

Oh wow. Let me try, let me see what happens. Pie, a classical Chinese medicine that predates traditional Chinese medicine. Even acupuncture is foreign to a lot of people. Sicking needles in you. I just came from acupuncture, actually. Cupping, bruising the skin, bringing the blood bloodletting, which is also classical Chinese medicine, which you know, is the slapping.

And so all very interesting, heal the human body, heal. Heal my consciousness. This is a tool in the toolbox. I have pain in my body, pain in my consciousness. Trauma. I wrote, I wrote part of my book. I don’t like to stay stuck on, on, on childhood drama or whatever. And it I appreciate my parents.

But, I had my fair tear of challenges and when I did research on natural childbirth, my parents were fist fighting in the womb, and the drugs that they used in the sixties and pulled me outta my mom’s vagina, knocked out cold. So I did some of this research and okay.

Where are my challenges as a being as a man? Here. And so I hear things and I, oh, that sounds interesting. Oh, let me explore that. Oh, that sounds interesting. Let me explore that. Oh, little death, oh, def. Divine. Divine, the, with the ayahuasca, your ego death, okay I hear that.

Let me experience this. This is human exploration and I’m on a healing path to. Understand myself, understand the world, and and also I have my own dark side, my own shortcomings, right? And, as a father, as a man of this earth I choose to be, as peaceful as possible, right?

I got into alcoholism and drug addiction when I was younger because I was trying to kill the pain. And so I choose to deal with the pain, the emotions, whatever it is, and I’m still going through that. At 60 years old, you think you arrive or you think have achieved a certain level?

I think the Zen monks, they say, chop. Would carry water before enlightenment and chop wood carry water after enlightenment. And, you’re still, every, no one here gets out alive. We’re still on this path, but I choose the road less traveled instead of anesthetizing myself with sugar or pornography and entertainment, which I have done my fair share of.

Womanizing, I have done my fair share, but I choose the highest vibrational path because the downside of the upside of, let’s say drugs for example, there’s always a crash. And so how can I walk the middle path? How can I find peace and harmony as much as possible? The vicissitudes of life are always here, the ups and downs of life.

My meditation teacher used to say, things in the life that you want to happen don’t happen. And we have we have aversion to that or things we want in life. We cling and we have craving for, and then things we don’t want, we have aversion towards and clinging and aversion and clinging and addiction and.

And so it’s like we are reacting to our polypeptides, our chemical messengers inside of our own human body. And it’s like the rat race, samsara the yoga traditions call it. And a big part of my goal is to stay as balanced as possible. Stay as balanced as possible and then also offer what I have discovered in human exploration out to another brother and sister that may be going through the same thing as me.

And i’m here to offer the olive branch. Many years ago I had problems with my digestion. Okay? I study fasting, herbal medicine, juicing. I got some really good results on this. And Hey brother, you’re going through some problems. Hey, try this, right? This worked for me and maybe it’ll work for you, maybe it doesn’t.

Okay. Throw it away. Do Bruce Lee take what’s you study with everyone. Take what’s useful, discard the rest. Make it your own. You can learn quickly from someone who’s living a life that you don’t wanna live. You recognize, okay, I learn. All right, compartmentalize that and then take what’s useful and make it y your own.

And so you’re a walking Tai chi, you’re a walking qigong going through this world as we’re. Going through entropy and our tissues are solidifying, right? We call ’em out as a baby. We’re all children of God. We’re all spiritual beings on this journey. And so how much can I learn and how much can I balance through this learning?

And then how much can I share for that my fellow brother and sister, and bring more balanced peace and harmony to the world? And I also postulate Sam that a, maybe this is just my own big little ego trip. And maybe this is life. You’ve gotta deal with a bunch of bullshit. And then life is also beautiful on many other le levels, right?

And this is the life, the vicissitudes and the ups and downs. But I follow all the ancient sages and they say walk the middle path. And this is part of the middle path. Drinking your own urine or practicing some ancient classical Chinese healing methodology. These are just tools in the tools.

Toolbox to discover who you are, just like Ayahuasca is. And ultimately we are all God creators. We are all imbued with the power of the creator. And I think Jesus, that’s the story of Jesus, right? There is no ultimate death, right? He was crucified. And then three days later he comes back ain’t nothing happened to me.

I’m walking free. And and I do believe that there is somewhat of. A revolving door. There is no death. Ultimately, we are going through different dimensional transitions and how aware can your soul, your spirit, how aware can your soul be transitioning from one dimension to the next?

I’ve been to the spirit world with these powerful psychedelics and and I’ve come back and so I like to. I like. Postulate that we’re always there. It just depends on how aware you are in all dimensions, all places at all times. How aware are you? And we’re in the physical realm, right? We’re in this physical body, in this physical realm, so it seems so dense.

The emotions, the energy and motion seems so intense. Neck pain and back pain, which is emotional pain, which is our mental defilement solidified into our body.

Sam Believ: We gotta keep an open mind and not judge too soon. And as you say, Bruce, Lisa take a bit of everything from everywhere and just learn.

You talk about ego as well. I also sometimes think, I’m crazy that I even try. It’s definitely an ego trip, but I think you do need to have a bit of ego to, to to believe in yourself, to sorta strive for bigger things. Just so I think there’s a lot of positive to our ego.

You mentioned digestion.

Troy Casey: I think there’s a lot of spiritual bypassing in the spiritual community that like, you gotta kill your ego, that there’s yin and yang. You need the ego to get outta bed in the morning. And and if you’re a man walking in this earth and you’re like, I feel responsible for the future of this planet and what’s to come.

And and I wanna participate in that. And so you’re gonna need an ego, otherwise you’re just a leaf in the wind.

Sam Believ: Yeah I’m a leaf, I’m a leaf in the wind with a little bit of ego, like trying to combine the two, the best of the both worlds. But yeah, so the, I definitely don’t hate my ego, but I try to limit the negative ex negative parts of it. So you, me, you mentioned digestion.

For me personally I was. Struggling with digestion issues a lot, and then they magically went away when Ayahuasca, when I started drinking ayahuasca, even though it was not the main thing for me because of the purging and all this stuff. And it brings me to last question to you today is I really love your explanation of ayahuasca.

Like I’ve seen one video of you at the beach and you like really passionately for three minutes, describe Ayahuasca. Can you do it for us? Even though, and I’m sure people know by now, but still I just like your version of it.

Troy Casey: And I have to give a big shout out to my mentor, the great gringo shaman down in the Amazon, Scott Peterson.

And I made a lot of videos with him and one of my very first videos on a digital camera, this was before these phones came out. It was a Sony digital camera. And I think he I have it somewhere on the internet, but. And I like to explain it to him almost verbatim because he was such a coherent voice with the medicine and I learned immense amounts of knowledge from him.

So Scott Peterson, like used to like, to explain it like this. Ayahuasca is the most powerful herbal medicine on planet Earth. It penetrates the liver, the gallbladder, the intestines, it cleans the blood, but more importantly, it penetrates the nervous system where we hold our beliefs. It’s like a system dfr.

So if you were raped as a child, or you were wronged or ripped off, et cetera, it’s going to help you look at this. Unconscious program. Maybe it’s running in the background. Maybe you have anger or some type of trauma trigger experience from the, and rightfully right? We’ve been wronged, et cetera. And but Ayahuasca has the ability to pull this program out and help you really look at it like it dissolve the veil of illusions.

That we have in our day-to-day life, and we put on this mask to go to work and we put on this mask to be in our relationship, et cetera. And Ayahuasca has the ability to, to take all those masks off and. Come down to the essence of, who and what we are. And ask ourselves, Hey, this program is running.

It’s taking a lot of your energy. Do you wanna forgive this? Do you wanna let it go? Do you wanna understand it? Do you wanna process it? But it’s sucking your life force out. And so Ayahuasca is a tool that has the ability and sometimes you’re gonna puke it out, sometimes you’re gonna shit it out. Sometimes, a good shaman can smooth it out, right? Blow some tobacco on it and help clear the energy. Maybe some floral water bring in the angels. And it’s a tool in the toolbox. And, that’s the best way I know how to explain the ayahuasca. And and let me tell you, I have roared like a lion puking my guts out and and gratefully right?

And other times I have not puked, but wish I did. And and I’ve always left the jungle, more peaceful, more understanding, more. Powerful. If you go back to my original visions that I am living to this day and preaching exactly my experience I think Ayahuasca is the most powerful herbal medicine, the most powerful.

Definitely one of the most powerful spirits spiritual tools that I have ever encountered.

Sam Believ: Thank you, Troy. Let’s wrap it up on this beautiful note. I definitely hope you come visit us sometime here at LoRa and we can puke together and have good time. Meanwhile, for people listening working day, find more about you. Where can they get your book? What are your handles on socials if they wanna learn more about you?

Troy Casey: Y Yeah. Certified health nut.com. We’ve got plenty of resources over there for everyone. Free downloads. Please get on my newsletter. And so stay up to date with me for live retreats, et cetera. Certified Health Nut branded across the internet. Follow me online on your favorite platform, certified Health Nut.

And then yeah, my YouTube channel. I’ve been there. For 19 years now. And so I’m on YouTube as well. And I appreciate you having me on this call. And together we’re here making the world a better place.

Sam Believ: Beautiful, beautiful guys. You should definitely check out Troy’s videos. They’re really good and really fun. And I recommend that as I was doing this research. I enjoyed it a lot and I’ve seen your videos in the past as well. Thank you guys for listening. As always, we do the hosts and believe, and I will see you in the next episode.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic Renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you’re listening, share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only.

This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Dennis McKenna, PhD—renowned ethnopharmacologist, author, co-founder of the McKenna Academy, and pioneer in psychedelic research for over 40 years. A central figure in the psychedelic renaissance, Dennis has explored the intersection of plant medicine, indigenous wisdom, and science since the 1970s.

We touch upon topics of:

• Dennis’ early trips to Colombia and the origins of the “La Chorrera” experiment (05:10)
• The unexpected role of mushrooms in his spiritual awakening (11:50)
• DMT and the search for orally active psychedelics (15:30)
• Shifts in his scientific path after the La Chorrera experience (22:20)
• Conducting biomedical studies with the UDV in Brazil (31:45)
• Differences between psilocybin and ayahuasca (45:15)
• The ethics and cultural impact of ayahuasca tourism (49:00)
• Sustainable ayahuasca cultivation and community economics (53:30)
• The myth of how indigenous people discovered ayahuasca (59:10)
• The importance of preserving tradition in modern psychedelic use (1:06:40)
• The vision for global symbiosis between North and South through plant medicine (1:13:20)
• Climate change and the message of Gaia through psychedelics (1:17:55)

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com

Find more about Dennis McKenna at https://mckenna.academy or on Instagram @dennismckenna_

Transcript

Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.

Dennis McKenna: Humans have always carried plants wherever they go. People talk about bio piracy and all that, but in a way that’s an exaggerate. That’s tricky thing because that presumes in some ways that indigenous people assert an ownership of the plants and the knowledge.

But my limited experience, the people I’ve talked to, they weren’t all indigenous, but they were traditional healers. They love to share what they know. They’re impressed that you’ve come all this way to learn what they know about plants. They do not see that you’re there to steal their knowledge.

Sam Believ: Amazing. Thank you for doing it because maybe if you didn’t do those studies, it would not popularize. Maybe I would never even learn about ayahuasca and never started my retreat and never started this podcast. So it’s it’s really important. The work that you did earlier.

Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast. As always, we, the whole assembly. Today I have a, an extremely special guest As you can see, Dennis McKenna, we’re coming to you from MAPS conference. Dennis is a PhD and esteemed ethno pharmacologist research scientist and author with over four decades of experience studying plant medicine, psychedelics, and indigenous healing traditions.

He’s a founder of the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, where he continues to explore the frontiers of consciousness, science and ecology. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Lara, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Ra, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, Dennis.

Welcome to the show. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. First of all, I just was at your presentation. It was amazing. I really love the message you’re putting out there and you’re, the things that you’ve done when you were younger that impacted the world of psychedelics and now, like you see this space with thousands of people coming through, none of that would be possible if you didn’t write those books.

So that’s

Dennis McKenna: You to say. I don’t think that’s really true. I can’t take, I can’t take either credit for blame or blame for all of that. I know that Terrence and I were influential, and that’s great. I think we were influential, but, I think. In some ways, this is an expression of this co-evolution I was talking about in the talk.

I really do believe the plants are running things in a certain sense, and we are at a critical juncture in the life of this planet. And I think that if anything, the sentient community of species is trying to send us a message to wake up to what we are doing to the planet before it’s too late.

It’s almost too late. We’re a very fractious species. We don’t listen very much, very well, and we’re in great danger. And so I think the earth even recognizes this, I think they’re influential people like my brother, myself, and many people here, we can’t take much of the blame, much of the credit or blame.

For example, Paul Stats, if you saw his talk, he is the now and very influential, and the movement, or the psychedelic community needs such people. But really this is another man manifestation of the co-evolution with these substances. And we, because we’re at a critical juncture, they’re becoming more visible, they’re becoming more loud, they’re becoming more, their message is becoming more strident, you could say.

It’s like they’re trying to send a message, which is wake up.

And understand what is happening and try to respond appropriately.

Sam Believ: We have many people that come to drink ayahuasca with us in Columbia, and they, some of them receive that message like, oh, the earth is struggling.

And they share it, share button. It’s a very common message because I believe what you’re saying with the plants being able to talk to us and giving a message and with the plants like ayahuasca and fungi like mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms being, being the messengers for Gaia, as you said in your presentation.

I wanted to talk to you about Columbia because you’re one of the very few people that mentioned Ayahuasca in Columbia, Jacque I’ve heard you talk about in different podcasts and a lot of people when they think about Ayahuasca, they think about Peru or Costa Rica, and I was really delighted to find that.

When you traveled in, in your famous, or as you say, infamous lare experiment, right? You decided to go to Columbia. Tell us why did you go to Columbia? And

Dennis McKenna: The reason for that is simple in some ways. So the reason we ended up going to Lara is that we were on a quest to find a particular exotic hallucinogen that we were, and back in those days, they called them hallucinogens.

Even we did, but we were trying to find this exotic hallucinogen, an orally active preparation made for virola, which is a species of tree that the sap contains high levels of tryptamines, and in many parts of the Amazon by the, it’s used as a snuff. The sap is extracted, dried, powdered, and used as a snuff, like the yet ma, for example, do this.

And, but. We were interested in the oral activity. So there was a paper by re Schulte. We were interested in DMT mainly, and we’d experimented with synthetic DMT, but it didn’t last long enough. So our motivation was to find a longer laxing form of DMT so that we could understand that space better.

And then this paper by Richard Schulte, the fil botanist, we stumbled across and it was called Varroa as an orally active hallucinogen. So we were aware of that paper and we decided, we thought maybe this is it. Maybe this is the secret that we’re looking for. We didn’t know about ayahuasca at that time.

1971, we knew about it. Not some people knew about it. Very few people knew that it was also an orally active form of DMT. The role of the admixture plants was not very well understood at that time. Schulte had graduate students and other people that were investigating it, but we didn’t really know the importance of, so we weren’t looking for ayahuasca.

We were looking for this witoto drug preparation, which was called, which they called.

And the reason we went to Lara is because that was the ancestral home of the Witoto people. So there was no particular mystery about going there. We just read in the paper, these are the people that have it and they live here.

It turns out Lara has a lot greater significance of that. But that was why we went to Lara. I was looking for this thing. We weren’t really looking for ayahuasca. We certainly weren’t looking for mushrooms. So when we got to Lara. It turned out that this little tiny mission village, they’d cleared pasture around the village, cleared all the forests, and they had pasture.

So they had all these sebu cattle grazing about 200 acres around the village, and it was a wet, rainy season, and pretty much out of every cow pie was growing. Huge clusters of CMY ensis, so we knew what that was. We had no experience, but we’d done our homework. We knew what it was, and our attitude toward that was very cavalier.

We thought these will be great. We can have fun with these. We looked at it totally as recreational experience while we’re waiting for the U Khe to show up the proper informant or find someone that could tell us about U Khe and the mushrooms. We started eating the mushrooms rather. Excessively and we were very cavalier and casual about it, but soon it got very serious ’cause they made it clear we were having these really intense sessions on pretty much a daily basis.

So we’d incorporated it into our diet and the mushrooms made it clear that they were the secret, they were what we’d really come for. And then, the whole story from that.

Sam Believ: Yeah. So I actually, I don’t think I finished the book, but I started reading the book by your brother about that experience where he mentions you also a lot and it’s interesting that you mentioned Richard Alvin short as well.

’cause you were reading his papers and he was the ethnobotanist that kinda recently in that time. Boosted the popularity of Ayahuasca. And it he was also exploring it in Columbia, but then something happened and probably Narcos happened and Columbia was overlooked for psychedelic tourism for better and for worse.

And, what I’m trying to do now is kind slowly bring more people to Columbia because it deserves to be si seen for this side of it. And rebranded from bad drugs to good drugs, from cocaine to Ayahuasca.

Dennis McKenna: There’s certainly, there’s as much as Peru or Ecuador, Brazil, or other places.

Ayahuasca’s been known and used in Columbia just as much, i, other than my trips to Lara and a couple of other trips I went to Columbia again in 1985 to meet my friend Louis, Eduardo Luna, who is from Columbia. He grew up in Florencia. And I went to visit him because he was, he had organized a conference on Ayahuasca at the world world Congress of what was it?

The world. I forget exactly what it was, but it was an anthropological conference, big one. And he’d ordered, he’d organized a satellite conference on Ayahuasca and invited me, and this was 1985. So I had just recently finished my PhD and published on it. So I went down there and presented my papers, but then we.

We went to Florencia and I visited his family and I, saw where he grew up. But then we continued on to Peru and did some field work there. So that was really my second time in Columbia. And I really haven’t been there since, I know. But I know it’s very, there, there’s a lot going on there and I’ve heard Columbia’s gotten, it’s really changed.

My I don’t have to tell you ’cause you’re from there, but for the better in many ways. Absolutely. My friend Wade Davis, who helped me, I’ve worked with for many years on different projects and he helped me organize this Coca Conference in February and in Peru. But he. Loves Columbia.

He’s even a Colombian citizen.

Sam Believ: They gifted him a citizenship after he wrote his book about Magdalena River. And I spoke to him a couple times. He’s supposed to come visit me and have an interview, but he’s very hard to catch.

Dennis McKenna: He’s hard to get and he travels a lot. Yeah. And, but he wrote a book about Columbia, mag River of Grebes.

Have you read it? I read it, yes. It is a wonderful book.

Sam Believ: It’s a wonderful book. And I learned a lot about history of Columbia. Yeah. From his book. So you talk in the Lare experiment, you started taking large quantities of those mushrooms and you were experimenting with sound, and then it was scientific, but then you, yourself considered there was somewhat s pseudoscientific.

In your presentation today, you talked about how. Many big discoveries were inspired by psychedelics the discovery of the helix of the DNA and and I forgot the first one, but even the modern computer age. A lot of people that created those the math necessary for this equations, they were inspired by LSD.

So what, how does one tell the difference between whether it’s real or not? Or maybe it’s real, but we’re not advanced enough yet to understand it. Just to talk to us about how did you know whether the science you were doing there with the mushrooms, was it real or was it not real? How does one tell a difference?

How did we know it? The sides we were doing with mushrooms. So you were ex lare experiment. You were trying to figure out the vibrations and the sound, and then you were taking mushrooms and then DMT, and you were. You were trying to create science, but then you said that it was not really science.

So

Dennis McKenna: it wasn’t really science, we thought it was, or we were under the delusion that we were doing science. What we were doing, I believe, was probably, we were creating a myth, in a certain, we were livid. We were visualizing a myth while we lived it. And that’s said it wasn’t really science.

And that, that’s one reason after Laira, I went back to school and that’s what led me to go into science, because I came back from LA with a strong feeling that I needed to learn how to do science, what science really was. My brother, his position was science will never explain what happened to us there.

So he just rejected science. He rejected it. Said, science is not up to the task of explaining what happened. And I was saying, wait a minute, we are not scientists. We may think we’re scientists, but we’re not scientists. Until we know how to do science, we should not reject science out of hand. You can’t just say that.

It’ll never explain it. So my own mission when I came back was and went back to school and I was only, I wasn’t even, I was a sophomore in college, second year of college. But I said, I’m gonna, I’m gonna study science, and I shifted my studies from, I was anthropology, comparative religion, sub botany, everything.

But I shifted much more toward the life sciences. I started studying biochemistry and chemistry and botany and all these things ’cause. I wanted to get a handle on something real because what we had been dealing with was very slippery because it wasn’t real. I wanted to get a firm grip on something real, and that was how do these drugs work?

What are the molecules, what’s the pharmacology and all that stuff. Really look at it from that level and not really the spiritual level or anything else. Not that I dismissed that at all, it’s just I wanted to understand the nuts and bolts of these things, and I completed, I didn’t really have opportunity to do that.

I completed my studies at the University of Colorado. I got my degree. And then I went, I took a detour academically. I went to Hawaii and I studied, I got a master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. And and then I got an opportunity to pursue my doctoral research at UBC in Canada. And after I finished in Hawaii in, and when I originally came to UBC, we had agreed that I was gonna study psilocybin in some respect.

I was gonna study mushrooms and study the biosynthesis in the enzymology and all that of psilocybin then. And that’s what I came there for. And I did that for about a year. But it was very frustrating for me. For one thing, I had a bad accident, bicycle accident when I first came. So I was in the hospital for a few weeks.

And and then the courses I was taking, I just transferred from Hawaii and with this accident and being stranger in a strange land, I didn’t know anybody. I was taking these very difficult courses and fungal genetics and mostly that was defeated and advanced organic chemistry and all that.

’cause I wanted to continue those studies and I was flailing a little bit. I was, this was not rewarding to me and I was, flailing and even failing these courses and having had the accident didn’t help either. My supervisor Neil Towers, who was very kind and a very perceptive fellow a real mentor, sense that I was having a difficult time and he said maybe you’d like to go to Peru for a while. I’ve got some extra money in the grant. Maybe I ought to, think about going down to Peru. And I basically said, yeah, my bags are packed. When do I leave? So I shifted my whole study from psilocybin to Ayahuasca at that point.

And my doctoral studies became a comparison between the biochem. So ayahuasca is an orally active DMT based preparation, right? And this virola preparation that we went to Lara in 71 different plants, but similar chemistry and similar mechanisms of action. So by thesis work by doctoral. Project became to compare these two, a comparative ethno pharmacological investigation of ayahuasca.

Its admixture plants and its chemistry compared to, and its plants of its chemistry. So that’s what I ended up doing for my for my graduate work. And and I published and because at Lara we had it, we didn’t really obtain U Coe. It took a long time. Eventually we found some, but when I went to Peru it was easy enough to get it because we went to Peru and we went to a place called PUCO Kio, which was a village on a river that was a tributary of the Amazon, the Rio Ku.

And it was the. Diaspora of the Witoto people in the Laro was their ancestral home, but early in the 20th century, they were forced out of there, and many of them relocated down to the area of Koki. Many of them were killed. There was, it was a horror, it was an atrocity, the trail from Lara to El Canto, which we walked, when we went to Lara, was built on the blood of slaves, Indians that were enslaved to build this road so they could transport rubber out of there for harvesting rubber.

So the Witoto people, culturally and everything else were highly impacted, really devastated, but a lot of them relocated down to the Rio Aku area and, so we knew that and we decided to go there to see if we could get ou. It was not so easy, even when we got to Lara, we had an anthropologist who highly discouraged us from trying to get this stuff.

‘Cause he said it’s their biggest shamonic secret. If you go in talking about it, they’re gonna go nuts. You’re not even supposed to know, you’re not even supposed to say anything. It’s the big secret, so we didn’t get it at Laira until some months later. Actually, Terrence returned to Laira that same year and eventually got it.

But so it was secret knowledge even at Laira and what we expected, and what we found was that when we went to the KU to look for it. It, it was a dying tradition. Manali was disappearing, but we did find people there, both the Witoto and Bora and Ani, their re, their culture related tribes and they all, and a lot of ’em said, yeah, I remember how my grandfather made this stuff, I know how to, I think I know how to do it.

And they were quite willing to make samples for us and, to the best of their ability as they remembered how to do it. It’s not rocket science, if you know the right trees and you know how to prepare it, you can get an active form of this kuey. So out of that, we had maybe four or five informants, people that prepared samples for us and and of course I’d bioassays some of them in the.

In the field, because if you’re an ethno pharmacologist, that’s what you do, right? You gotta a bioassay. That’s the job description. Some of them were active and some of them were active, and some of ’em were completely inactive, but we only had a total of seven or eight samples when I got those samples back to the lab, and I could look at the actual chemical profiles of those.

It all made sense, because unlike ayahuasca, VIRs chemically very, there’s a lot of variation. Even in the same species. You will not, you’ll find different alkaloid profiles. So it’s a more complicated picture, a little bit. But eventually, but I, and I collected on this graduate work, this field work.

Then the other side of my work was looking at ayahuasca. I collected many samples of ayahuasca from different practitioners. And there was one in particular Don Fidel in Alpa, that he was my first informant. Yeah, I spent time with him and he was happy to prepare samples and show us how it was made.

And so I, the idea is to get some samples in models and get ’em back to the laboratory, which I was able to do and publish the thesis. And, but that’s what made so that was my scientific work on Ayahuasca. But in the process, I took Ayahuasca quite a few times and discovered, I guess who might call this spiritual, the personal spiritual relationship with Ayahuasca, which lasted.

It’s not over. I still use Ayahuasca occasionally and respect it and and I think it’s a amazing medicine, and really should be more investigated. I’ve been involved, as you probably know, in this project that we did at Brazil called the wa the Wasco Project with the UDV.

You’re aware of this, you, I’ve heard that they

Sam Believ: did some studies, but I’m not on, yeah.

Dennis McKenna: In 1993, so I got my degree in 1984, and I did postdocs for a long time. Most of the eighties. I did postdocs, different places, not really working on any of this, but in 1993, I was invited to a 1991.

I was invited to a symposium. That was being organized by the UDV, which is the Brazilian church that uses ayahuasca as a sacrament. They call it

Sam Believ: like vegetable union or the name UDV, vegetable Union

Dennis McKenna: Vegetal. Yeah. That, that al And they use ayahuasca as a sacrament and they call Itasca. And which is basically Portuguese Trump’s literation, I think of Ayahuasca. But they invited me and some other investigators, including Ardal Luna, to a symposium a conference that they organized about ayahuasca in 1991.

And people came and presented their results and stuff that there were a lot of researchers. All 12 of us, there weren’t so many. We came and we gave our talks and so on. But, and then they said, and then we found out what they really were interested in was doing a biomedical study of ayahuasca.

And Eduardo and I had talked about this too previously, when we’d been in Peru, we thought in terms of we, context of our conversation was that we thought that Iowa skis were remarkable people, physiologically and mentally because they were, many of them are quite aged, but they were cognitively quite functional and healthy and strong and and they’d take ayahuasca all night and then they’d get up and chop trees all day.

And man, these people are super bad, and we thought this is worth looking into. And that was our naive sort of thing. But then, so we thought we need to do a biomedical study, but then. The logistics of doing a biomedical study in Peru were daunting. How do you get samples and how do you given the shamanic context, the ceremonial context, you can’t really approach these people and say could we have some blood samples?

Can we have some urine? No, because I think you’re a sorcerer. And that it’s tricky. So we said we’d like to do it, but it’s impossible. We don’t have access to refrigeration. Much less funding. We had no funding for it. But but when we went to, when I did the conference at UU, at, in, in Sao Paulo with the UDV.

It turned out that was their agenda. Really. That was their secret agenda. They wanted to get outside investigators to and do a biomedical study of Ayahuasca orca, as they called it, to Devin to find out more about how it worked, and hopefully to show that it was safe, and it was not dangerous.

There was the Brazilian drug Regulatory Agency, which was called, call it confin, like a combination of the DEA and the FDA in our country. There was a lot of discussion about whether ayahuasca is a public health menace and should it be banned and all that. So they wanted out time outside investigators with credentials to come in and investigate it and see if it was a dangerous thing or just get basic measurements.

Their hope was that. That we would be able to show that it wasn’t dangerous and it wasn’t toxic, which of course it’s not, so that part was easy, but we collected a lot of data and published that, and so at this 1991 conference they told us basically that was their agenda.

So we thought great. So we went back and tried to get some funding for it and and were able to get some funding. I was able to secure some funds from one of the Rockefellers among other Lawrence Rockefeller, who had, was actually enthusiastic about visionary plants. So we got enough money. We went back in 1993 and we did the biomedical study.

And then from that we published about eight papers came out over the next decade. Quite a, quite, it was the first. Real biomedical investigation of Ayahuasca. And it sparked the research that, if you look at PubMed now, I mean at that time there were less than a dozen articles about Ayahuasca and Pub Med, which is the National Library of Medicine resource for biomedical research.

If you look at Ayahuasca now on PubMed, there are over 600 studies. So it really triggered the research,

Sam Believ: amazing. Thank you for doing it because maybe if you didn’t, once again, because it’s going so, so much back in the past, maybe if you didn’t do them in those studies, it would not popularize, maybe I would never even learn about ayahuasca and never started my retreat and never started this podcast.

So it’s it’s really important, the work that you did earlier, and we shouldn’t take that.

Dennis McKenna: We know all about it. There’s a lot of work to be done left on ayahuasca. We really barely scratched the surface in some, I, we did this biomedical study, which was medically oriented than they had an agenda.

My orientation and interest really is more as an ethyl botanist. So I’m interested in, I’m interested in the physiology and all that, but I think the ethyl botany is, there’s still

Sam Believ: a lot we don’t know. So you mentioned something that is it’s not a rocket science once you know which are the right plants you mentioned in the, regarding ku or virola mixture.

But it’s a, it’s similar thing with ayahuasca. You talk about it a lot as well. How the hell do you think they figured out where were the right plans to mix it? People ask that question

Dennis McKenna: all the time. It’s not such a mystery as it turns out, it’s not such a mystery there.

One of our presenters at ESPD 50, in 2017, es still botanist, anthropologist named Manuel Torres who’s looked into this pretty extensively and he, I’ll send you the link to his talk. It wasn’t an accidental discovery. Exactly. Obviously trial and error was involved, but there was a certain era, a certain part of the VAs where peru, Columbia and basically Peru, Columbia and Brazil came together. It was a very active

kind of experimental ethyl pharmacology laboratory in some ways, you could say, not in any formal sense, but people were mucking around with plants and there was a lot of brewing going on. Cheecha making cheecha, right? They had snuffs, they had banisteriopsis, not necessarily using it together, but they had these plants.

They were using bear opsis medicinally. They were chewing the vine for dental health and that sort of thing. They had the snuffs containing the DMT. They had the very active chi culture and basically these chicha. The speculation is that these, the people that were making these different varieties, cheecha, it wasn’t one thing.

They dump all kinds of things into the cheecha. Occasionally, we have craft brewers here in Denver that’ll do the same thing. They’re always looking for the next flavor iteration or, the next formulation. These guys were experimental. Eventually they just got the right combination. They put some opposite in, and maybe one of the admixture plants, or maybe it was even virola, but they got, beta.

The basis of ayahuasca of pharmacology is the beta carboline that inhibit oxidase. And then DMT is activated. It’s orally activated. DMT is in lots of plants, so are beta Carlenes. They’re not that rare, and you’re in an environment where people are making this stuff and you’re in the middle of the Amazonian biodiversity.

So it’s not so surprising that they would combine these things. They might be familiar with the effects of snuff, for example. I don’t think there was, I don’t think they were thinking about this with the same mindset that a pharmacologist or a chemist would I, we would think of it in those terms.

You, but in a way, they were chemists, they were experimental pharmacologists. So they were just, let’s dump some of this in there. Let’s some dump something else, drink it, see what happens. Eventually they showed up with the right formula. Yeah. So it’s not such a, it’s not, the cure Deros will tell.

You ask them how do they know? And they will tell you the plants told us, but that’s not an answer really. That’s a myth the plants told us. Sure they told you, but how did they tell you,

Sam Believ: Maybe the same way they told about double Helix and the DNA, maybe there was, but yeah, that, like how do you get a psychedelic revelation without having a psychedelic compounds like the chicken and the eggs are?

Absolutely,

Dennis McKenna: and these were people immersed in the plant world. They were experimental, they were medicine people, and they had all the biodiversity of the Amazon to play around with. And eventually they just stumbled across it. I can tell you a story from bar. From my quest for the, when we went to the Rio Ku it was very remarkable in a way.

So we went there and we connected with these informants and they were saying always remember, don’t really, we don’t do it anymore. We don’t know, but I said, but they said, we know what the plants are. And so we went into the field with some of these guys and we collected plants, barks, and different, mostly bark, but other parts of it.

Then we’d ask them, is this the right species? Is this the one, is this forte? Is this not forte? And they’d say, yeah, this one’s no good. That one’s forte. That’s good. So we had, I don’t know, 15 or 20 different specimens that they’d done this.

Screening in the field with, and and they would look at it, they would taste it. They would smell it, and they’d look at the bark and taste it and they’d say, no forte, or not forte. And and so then when I got, so we had this sort of screening in the field when I got the samples back to the lab and could actually run it all through the gas chromatograph and so on, profile these things a hundred percent match, the samples they said were strong, had the alkaloids at high levels.

The ones they said weren’t strong either, didn’t have ’em at all or very low levels. So that’s a testimony. Testimony to the power of experimental ethyl pharmacology. These guys didn’t have gas chromatographs. They had taste and smell and experience of the organoleptic properties. So they could, they were very astute.

And you know about the doctrine of signatures and all that. Herbalist are very clever at intuiting the probable medicinal qualities of plants. And it’s often based on color is a factor, or, some plant, the leaf resembles a heart, so it’s good for your heart. This doctrine of signatures idea, or again, epileptic clues like tastes and smell.

And that’s how they do it. That’s how they put these formulas together.

Sam Believ: Amazing. Great great way to, to think about it. You wrote your thesis on you started working with mushrooms and then you switched to ayahuasca. So you’re the very right person to ask that question. And it’s the question I get asked all the time, what is the difference?

What is better? What is worse? Both pharmacologically, ethno, botanically. And from your personal experience, do you have a, do you have a

Dennis McKenna: favorite? It yeah. I wrote the paper, I and did the work and the course of doing that took ayahuasca quite a few times. And then when I worked with the UDV, even more ayahuasca has been a major, I guess plant ally, you could say with me.

Although I never formally I didn’t, I was not bailed to become an ayahuasquero. I wasn’t looking at, I was looking at it more from a scientific point of view, but I enjoyed taking ayahuasca and had profound experiences. It’s been a planned ally for forever, since that time.

Sam Believ: Yeah. I believe you’re very passionate about the topic of not separating the plants and medicinal tradition, medicinal plants and psychedelic plants. Not separating them from their tradition as in separating a plant from the roots. And you talk a lot about, the dangers of that, that we should not put them in the pill.

Can you talk to us a little bit about that, about separating the separating ayahuasca from Ayahuasca tradition, for example? I think, yeah,

Dennis McKenna: I think this is.

It is a difficult, it is a difficult thing because in some ways ayahuasca can benefit lots of people, whether they’re indigenous or not. When you start talking about intellectual property and all that, and indigenous knowledge and are we co-opting indigenous knowledge to make ayahuasca? Now ayahuasca is a global phenomenon.

There’s probably more ayahuasca being grown in Hawaii than there is in Peru. I would, I don’t know, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but there’s a lot of it. It’s inevitable. This kind of goes back to what we were talking about before. Plants are running things, the plants like to spread. One of the major agents of spreading are human beings, and that’s true of all plants.

Humans have always carried plants wherever they go. People talk about bio piracy and all that, but in a way that’s an exaggerate. That’s not really, that’s a tricky thing because that presumes in some ways that indigenous people assert and ownership of the plants and the knowledge and they don’t really have that attitude.

Or maybe some do, or maybe they are beginning to, because they’ve been informed by non-indigenous people that you know, you should be more protective of your plants and your knowledge. But they’re my limited experience. The people I’ve talked to who were by no means they weren’t all indigenous, but they were traditional healers, they love to share what they know.

They’re impressed that you’ve come. All this way to learn what they know about plants. They do not see that you’re there to steal their knowledge. They see that you’re there to learn from their knowledge. The problem is, I think Ayahuasca is one of the major, if you saw my talk and it talked about the GAAN ambassadors, I think Ayahuascan and mushrooms are one of the two main GAAN ambassadors that are trying to wake us up as a species.

Psilocybin is, there’s less of an issue because there are hundreds of species and they’re all over the world. Only a fraction have indigenous use. Potentially many more could be used there. You’re not contaminating any one’s tradition or stealing their knowledge because you could go to the forest with a mycologist and collect plants that have.

No indication of traditional use at all. And there you could use those. Ayahuasca has always seemed to be, it really is not used outside of a cultural context, so it’s much more tied up with cultural practices. And I you run an ayahuasca retreat center. I used to organize ayahuasca retreats in Peru.

I did that through most of, from about 2010 until fairly recently. And I’ve come to have mixed feelings about whether that was a good thing. I, the people that came down to my retreats, I saw people. I saw enormous healing. I saw enormous benefits for these people. They came, they were sincere.

They were looking for something. They came, I helped organize the retreats, and they benefited a great deal, and but we didn’t really, I didn’t really think about what, what was going on. On the other side of that was this contaminating the culture. Because these were people who were, by the very fact they were there means that they were privileged people who could afford to fly to Peru and pay, for accommodations and all that at fairly high end tourist locations and so on, and do ayahuasca.

So they were definitely not poor, not rich either. A lot of, some were rich, but they could do it. But the question of what was the impact on. On the culture in the typical village, before there was an ayahuasca tourism phenomenon, ayahuasca was just a person in the village who was the local healer.

He wasn’t, he probably had other means of making a living that sometimes maybe that was his living, but definitely part of the community and not a rich person. And just part of the community and then all these gringo start coming down and they want to drink with, the great shaman, the great iowasca.

So then some of these people get elevated in status and suddenly they’re superstars they can make in a single night what a lot of their villagers maybe they make in a month or a year, so suddenly they’re, they’re elevated in status. That’s gotta generate a lot of resentment to my, in their community.

And you can understand why that would be. This guy’s capitalizing on our traditions and sharing, not sharing the wealth. Maybe some Iowa girls do share the do you know the temple of the way of light in Peru I’ve heard about is, yeah, that is maybe one example of somebody that’s tried to do it, right?

They work with several shabo shaman and a lot of people come, but they say, I don’t know if it’s true, but they say they send a hundred percent of their profits back to their community. If they really do that’s great. That’s an ethical thing to do. There are many who don’t. I don’t know how your practices are.

I don’t, I’m not pointing any fingers at you.

Sam Believ: I can share how we do it and what we try to do, for example, at my retreat center is make it affordable. So it’s actually. You still need to fly and it’s expensive, but anyone, even with the minimal wage, can save up for that experience.

It’s it’s the cheapest one is like $600, so that, that helps. But of course it’s still a lot of money. But if you think about it, that some people, for them it’s a life saving experience then it’s worth it. We have an indigenous shaman and he does earn a lot of money and so he is very happy.

The money does trickle down back to the community because to grow ayahuasca, it requires a lot of labor and it creates a lot of employment. But of course he earns much more than the laborers there is definitely a risk, but I think the offset of it is there will be young children that would otherwise not touch this tradition, because it was almost in, in that society was almost made negative.

Oh, you’re drinking ayahuasca. Like they, they want to be more westernized. If they see that there is a financial incentive in it, they might wanna pursue it and then also become a challenge. And then it kinda, in a way, will preserve the tradition. But I’m the optimist because it’s let’s think about it from Western point of view.

You have a doctor, right? Doctor is a very difficult and very messy job. Yeah. If you would be making a minimum wage for being a doctor, would people become doctors? Maybe some, they’re very driven, but I think at the end of the day, we are financially incentivized. So I think I, and not that I think, I hope that there will be some way that it balances out and yes,

Dennis McKenna: It’s very tricky lately what I’ve been saying is instead of having people go to the medicine, find a way to bring the medicine to the people, to work with these communities to produce the medicine.

In a sustainable way than a way that this, that is sustainable for the plants and the community, that creates economic benefits for the growers as much as the eros, the people involved in this. And then find a legal mechanism to bring that medicine to North America or Europe or wherever they wanna bring it in the global north, and serve it up, and a community health and wellness center, a community center of some kind.

The problem is that this is currently legally risky. It shouldn’t be. It should not, it should also not be that difficult to develop legal mechanisms that would let these folks come with permission. And do this. Bring them, make the medicine, and bring the medicine and the practitioners to North America and let the benefits accrue, let the benefits trickle down, but be not having all these gringos running around, with fat wallets.

And it’s okay if they, and not all green rows are assholes. Mo most people that come to these retreats are pretty respectful. But there is that economic difference and some are not respectful. And so I’m trying to think that with this idea of symbiosis, we should try and articulate that everyone should have access to these medicines, but we should find a way to do it that honors the tradition that benefits the local people and that ensures an a sustainable source because iOS is endangered.

From over harvesting, at least in certain places.

Sam Believ: Absolutely. So when I talk to my shaman, for example, or when the group arrives, he always says the same thing. He says that he is just so happy that people from all over the world come here and they wanna learn from him and get healed by him.

And it’s a, it’s an honor, he says. And then, because in the past he had to travel all over the place and like he couldn’t be with his family. And it’s difficult. And I’ve been to the jungle with them, and they have a plantation of ayahuasca. So they don’t go to the forest to look for it.

They just plant it. So it’s pretty sustainable. So I do believe that a way it can be done well, but of course there’s still a lot that we need to figure out. You, me, you talked to, you mentioned topic of symbiosis again, and your talk was about the symbiosis and going back to nature.

Let’s touch this as a last topic. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about what you said on the talk, and then why we should go back to the nature.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I think I don’t know how long you want this to be. I’m gonna have to go pretty soon but five more minutes, then we’re good.

As I said in the talk, and I think, so what’s happening with this psychedelic renaissance is you’ve got different factions. You, so you’ve got the indigenous people, you’ve got the capitalists, you’ve got the biomedical industrial complex that wants to develop these medicines, and they have good intentions.

They’re also capitalists. They wanna make money that’s just built into the equation. He don’t, it’s not terrible to make money as long as you do it ethically, but it’s, it’s a landmine, right? There are people that want to cash in on it and develop these. Patented products that maybe are probably not natural products, what may be related to natural products that they wanna patent and then they wanna control access and build a whole industry.

That’s the old, that’s the usual model in biomedicine. Now you’re trying to stuff psychedelics into that model and it’s very hard for to make that work, and that’s why I am advocating much more of a grassroots kind of thing. The work will go on, the research will go on, the investors will continue to make their investment and make discoveries and that’s fine.

You can’t stop it. So you may as well not even think about, but the rest of people, I think, should rely on develop liaisons and relationship between community. Resource, basically wisdom centers in the north that could stablish these relationships with similar places in the south and and do it that way.

Do it from a grassroots perspective. So that I, what I would like to see with both psilocybin, them and Ayahuasca and some of these others, is that every community might have a wellness center, or a health alternative health center. A lot of ’em do. They could just put, integrate psychedelics into the menu.

And that’s something you could do. So you could go for a weekend and you could take ayahuasca, bring the kids, hang out, do a little yoga, do some nutritional counseling, integrate it into a general practice of integrated healthy practices. So you you fit it into that and you minimize the harm and then it’s not seen as this kind of alien thing from another culture that you’re inserting.

It’s a more natural thing than it grows into. So that’s what I’d like to see. I think it should be I definitely think it should be available to people and in someplace like, and in some places it is, in a place like Hawaii, there’s a lot of ayahuasca being grown in Hawaii and a lot of people serving ayahuasca and all that.

Sam Believ: So that you or your brother, that brother Ayahuasca from Peru to We did Hawaii.

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, we did. So you see it, it’s there you go. Bio piracy, right? So now, yeah, ayahuasca loves Hawaii. We didn’t intentionally mean to introduce an invasive play. Because Hawaii is very sensitive about that kind of thing.

But if you’re gonna plant, you’re gonna introduce them to VA planet. It may as well be Iowa.

Sam Believ: Yes.

Dennis McKenna: So it’s a tricky thing. Amazing. But we have to recognize this is this is also co-evolution. It really is co-evolution and co-evolution works on timescales that are different than ours.

It’s, we have to look ahead. It’s not about what happens this year, or five years, or 10 years from now. We have to try to envision this situation 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, it could transform the world and it could do it in a good way. Or it could. And, the world’s in trouble.

And, the environmental crisis is quite real. And they have to ask your question, how long is the Earth’s stability going to be maintained? Because, human activity, our thoughtlessness and stupidity is really undermining the symbiotic mechanisms that keep the planet stable. And how, at what point do you reach the tipping point where you say it’s too late, it’s, it cannot be repaired?

I think we’re very close to that. And, the policies of the people that supposedly should be doing the most about it, nothing’s being done. It’s all based on denial. You can’t even talk about climate change, so we’re being, really, we could talk about all the terrible geopolitical things that are happening, all the wars and all this, the rise of fascism and everything, and that’s what we tend to be focused on.

But over all of that, what’s not getting talked about is climate change and the destruction of the symbiotic structures, the feedback loops that keep the composition of the air and the oceans and all this in balance. It’s not even talked about. They’re very resilient. The earth has been through tremendous changes over the course of billions of years, and it will survive.

We not, may not survive, but it will survive. But it will be a changed earth. And that’s the way it works. Yeah.

Sam Believ: Let’s hope before we destroy ourselves we’ll be able to give ayahuasca to world leaders, policy makers, and they understand what the hell they’re doing. And maybe they will. I would act it’s like a, it’s a very optimistic thing, but that’s kinda what I hope for.

Dennis McKenna: That’s what I hope for too. But get them to do it. That’s the problem. I’m working on it. I would to I’d like nothing more than to force feed Ayahuasca to Donald Trump, yeah, absolutely. It’s never gonna happen, and it’s not gonna work. In a way, let’s never say never Donald, if you’re listening your time is come.

I had a at Ayahuasquero that I worked with in Peru who said there are two kinds of people I won’t give Ayahuasca because it won’t help them. One is schizophrenics. And I’m not so sure he is right about that. But the other is sociopaths. He said, I won’t give ayahuasca to sociopaths because it won’t help them.

Because they will next day they’ll say they’re a

Sam Believ: shaman. Yeah. Exactly. Then say, I don’t wanna take more of your time. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Great conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for your contribution. ’cause once again you did so many small things, arguably small from then.

It’s like you see the result of not Hawaii being full of ayahuasca and people growing their own mushrooms. So you’re a legend and it’s been a pleasure. It’s been a

Dennis McKenna: pleasure for me too. Thank you. Thank you. If you ever find yourself in Canada, you. Let me know and if you

Sam Believ: ever want to visit Columbia again, I would love to show you my, I would love to.

Where are you based? We’re based one hour south of Meine, south of Medi Mein, Columbia. Yeah, it’s very beautiful. I’ll, it’ll probably happen. Absolutely. Let’s do it. Yeah. Guys, you’ve been listening to, I Ask a podcast. As always, we the host, Sam, and I’ll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

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