#1133 - Dennis McKenna

**Joe Rogan** (0:02)
Four, three, two, one, and we're live. Hello, Dennis.

**Dennis McKenna** (0:09)
Hi, Joe.
Great to see you, as always. It's great to be here, as always. It's great to be here.

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
So tell me about this, these cards you gave me, and what this is all about.

**Dennis McKenna** (0:20)
Okay, well, this is an interesting project. This is about the RV Heraclitus, which was associated with the Institute for Eco-Technics, which is...

**Joe Rogan** (0:31)
Try to keep this close to your face.

**Dennis McKenna** (0:34)
Further associated with, how do I explain it? It was actually a theater company called The Theater of All Possibilities.
But the Institute for Eco-Technics was started in the early 70s, and they built this ship, this Chinese junk, essentially, with a ferro-concrete hull. And my connection was they have cruised the world, essentially, since 1973, looking into different things relevant to global ecology. They've done sampling in the Antarctic, and in 1981, they decided to go to the Amazon. And I was doing my graduate work in Nikitos at that time. So that was my connection with the Institute of Eco-Technics.
And, you know, at the time, I thought these people are nuts. I mean, they were kind of nuts, and they were very naive about what they were doing as far as doing ethnobotanical work. Not that I wasn't naive about it at the time, but I had a better handle on it than they did. Anyway, that was the original connection. And the same group, years after I had more or less, you know, kind of severed, I didn't really sever my relationship, but I kind of distanced myself from them. But then that same group went on in the 80s to build Biosphere 2, which you probably heard of. They had financing for Biosphere 2, so they'd gone to a whole other level of ambition and, you know, madness. But, and Biosphere 2 went off track.

**Joe Rogan** (2:16)
Explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.

**Dennis McKenna** (2:18)
Biosphere 2 was the idea of building a terrestrial environment that was completely shut off from everything and that was self-sustaining. And it was a huge complex. It was a big, a series of domes, really. Each dome replicated some earthly biome, like the desert, the rainforest, the ocean, and so on. And the idea was that it was a dry run for building a Mars colony, you know, or some planetary colony. And the idea was Mars, and they put people into this environment for like two years at a time to see if they could make it work, if they could really have a balanced ecosystem. Well, as it turned out, it didn't work so well. But they learned a great deal from this. And they also got a lot of adverse publicity because I think the science establishment in a way became kind of jealous.
And you know, like these people, they don't know anything about what they're doing. They got $600 million to build this? What the hell?
So they got a lot of criticism. But the fact is a lot of good science came out of this. And they're still going.
And the interesting thing is they've had their fingers in many pies. You know, they have a gallery and a hotel in London called the October Gallery. I always stay there if I'm in London. They have a publishing company, the Synergetic Press based in Santa Fe.
That's who published this book, ultimately. So it's kind of like 30 years later, what goes around comes around.

**Joe Rogan** (4:01)
And the book is Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. And it's labeled from 1967 to 2017

**Dennis McKenna** (4:13)
Right.
And the story behind this is just two. But just to complete the Heraclitus story for a minute. So the Heraclitus has been plying the ocean more or less continuously since 1973
And they are now renovating the ship because it needs it. It needs a new hull and all that. So they're trying to raise funds, obviously, for that. But it's just a very interesting story about people that are passionate about the ecology, about the earth, and about science. Don't know a whole lot about any of it. But their passion drove them forward. And their passion, particularly the founder, a guy named John Allen, who's now, I think he's in his eighties. He is in his eighties. But he was the visionary behind it. And without knowing a whole lot, they just went ahead and did it.
So in that spirit, you have to hand it to them. And they have done incredible things over that period of time. And so it's a great story, and it's worth attention. And it's up to you.