Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Dennis McKenna: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.
I'm pleased to introduce Kevin Reed, founder and president of the Entheogens Stewardship Project, a vital new nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting culturally significant plant and animal species sacred to indigenous communities worldwide.
Kevin brings a remarkable 45 year journey as a student of psychedelic science and culture to this crucial conservation work. His path began in 1984 under the mentorship of legendary researchers Sasha and Ann Shulgin, followed by profound connections with iconic figures including Wavy Gravy, Jack Harrer, Timothy Leary, Rick Strassman and many others who have shaped the modern psychedelic renaissance.
Kevin's hands-on expertise spans an impressive range of fields from teaching cannabis extraction in the mountains of Jamaica in 1985 to to large scale indoor cultivation in the Netherlands to designing and successfully opening a state of the art type 7 cannabis manufacturing facility in California. His diverse interests encompass mycology, conservation biology, indigenous traditions, accelerated learning, transpersonal psychology and ethical wildcrafting principles that now support his conservation philosophy.
The Entheogen Stewardship Project represents the culmination of Kevin's decades long commitment to both psychedelic wisdom, indigenous rights and environmental protection. The organization combats illegal trafficking and exploitation of endangered and theogenic species while fostering respectful collaboration with all indigenous communities whose ancestral knowledge have safeguarded these sacred plant and animal spirits for millennia.
Kevin's work addresses one of the most pressing issues facing our community today.
How do we honor and protect the plant and animal teachers that have guided human consciousness for thousands of years while ensuring their survival for future generations?
Kevin, welcome to the Brainforest Café.
[00:02:48] Kevin Reed: Hello Dennis. Thank you.
[00:02:51] Dennis McKenna: So tell me how you got into this.
You're a polymath, you've done many things in your life. Tell me a bit about your path since 1984 that led you to where you are now because it seems like you started out in the cannabis industry and sort of with a commercial orientation, what led to enthusiast stewardship, whatever that may amount to.
[00:03:20] Kevin Reed: Yeah, I believe that I have to kind of backtrack a little bit further because I was interested in exploring consciousness long before I found my way to substances or plant medicines.
As a child, my parents encouraged me to do magic, magic tricks, magic shows, and this down the rabbit hole of like all the classic prestidigitators.
And I remember reading a book on ad lib when I was about 12 years old that basically cracked the code on advertising.
And so from then I knew that, you know, like that when they told you to buy something, it was a sham. There were, there was something hiding, you know, misdirection And.
But even the magic things led me to.
I remember reading about Pramahan Yogananda when I was young. I remember reading about him stopping his heart and things with yoga. So I was doing breath exercises and having my sister check my pulse and you know, exploring telekinesis and building pyramids.
Like I remember when the Pyramid Power book came out and I was doing experiments with pyramids I built with my old Tinker toys.
And I see. And really seeing effects. Like if I put the banana peel inside of the open air pyramid and right next to it the banana peel turned brown faster.
Something was happening that I wasn't seeing.
And even when I was like 10, 11, we had a seance. A bunch of children had a seance and recorded it on a cassette recorder. And when we played back the tape, it had all these sounds on it that weren't there when we had the seance.
And I like kind of coveted that tape for years. Playing it for anybody that would listen because it was. To me it was like hard physical evidence that paranormal, you know, phenomenon.
And so, you know, I was reading things about the paranormal and then got on to.
In junior high, like we were seeing all the things about drugs, movies about art Linkletter, you know, that his daughter.
[00:05:52] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:05:52] Kevin Reed: All the, you know, Scared Straight movies.
And so I saw a kid in my class one day and he pulled out, I guess, a marijuana cigarette.
And so, so I did this. I did the American thing. And I told on him. Yeah, I was, I was. I was all American.
You know, I was trying to be good, right.
And so nothing happened. Of course.
I went back to class and then I just started to observe this kid. And it didn't fit. The movies, the kid, the situation. So I went to the library.
And in my library I found books that were talking about the most. The earliest discoveries by Wasserman. And you know, the very, very first, like experimentations with mescaline were in my. In my library.
[00:06:56] Dennis McKenna: They've probably both from school libraries by now maybe.
[00:07:00] Kevin Reed: Yeah, they're on now. But they. He talked about mushrooms being part of religion. Yes, that's right. And I went, oh, that's why they don't. That's why there's the prohibition. Now I understand. So now I need to learn. So I just started to digest anything I could get from that library. I went down to the public library and soon I was looking for some cannabis to try.
And after trying it, you know, I turned on. But like I remember, I remember in high school when kids were like getting high. And they were saying how effed up they were. I would say, no, man, you're not effed up. This is medicine. This is a spiritual sacrament. You know, I was like talking that I was. I was saying the M word, like back in high school, because.
Because I'd read that. I'd read that it was. It was a curative. It was all different things that the food. You could get food from the seed. Already I was reading that stuff.
Then I. Then I had the opportunity when I read a high Times magazine. I saw Sasha Shulgin in the in the High Times and picked up a telephone book and not telephone book. I lived in Indiana at the time. That's where I grew up.
But I called directory assistance and, yeah, they gave me his number.
I called him up and answered the phone and just said, hello, who's this?
Yeah, how are you?
How are you? What are you doing?
You know, I just wanted to talk to Sasha, you know, like. And she engaged me completely, you know, on the telephone more than I'd been engaged by anyone on the telephone before.
And, you know, after talking to the two of them for an hour a week later, they sent me. Sasha sent me a envelope stuffed as many pages as could get into it. And they were early pages before Pikal had been published, but it was just, you know, page after page of the pharmacology and effects and the duration.
And I stated to them I was a serious psychonaut because I was only 19 when I called, right? And I was like, I'm a serious psychonaut. I'm being careful, you know, because I knew I was young guy. And. And they were, you know, that's good. You keep doing that. And so I. I went on my path and ended up, like, in a couple years later is when I ended up in Jamaica. And I just arrived there with enough knowledge, you know, that I'd learned from a friend who'd gone to Morocco and done that. And I taught people about cultivation, about making dry. Dry sift. Hashish with. Yeah, so I learned. I taught him how to make dry sift, and then I taught him how to make oil from the hash.
[00:10:01] Dennis McKenna: Okay, so what. Just let me ask you for a minute. What is a type 7 cannabis manufacturing facility?
[00:10:10] Kevin Reed: Yeah, that's with any flammable hydrocarbons. Like, so we use. We used ethanol. A lot of people set up, like butane or propane, you know, for solvent.
[00:10:21] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:10:23] Kevin Reed: So we just used it. It was just a cold ethanol extraction facility.
And it was pretty. It was. It was very Nice. I had the opportunity to help some people that had plenty of money and they gave me full reign and I'd never done that before, but I was able to find some really good tools. I ended up getting a, A alcohol.
I forget the word at the moment. It was like getting the alcohol back. Like my brain's blanking, but that's okay.
[00:10:58] Dennis McKenna: Mine too.
[00:10:59] Kevin Reed: Yeah, so yeah, yeah, it was a beautiful machine that you just like, it would just actually come straight out of the, out of the centrifuge and dump in there and it would take all the oil out the bottom and all the alcohol would go back to the tank.
[00:11:17] Dennis McKenna: Right.
[00:11:17] Kevin Reed: And.
[00:11:18] Dennis McKenna: Okay.
[00:11:19] Kevin Reed: But anyhow, all, all the way through cannabis, I was just taught by mentors in the field.
A lot of the chemistry stuff I taught myself. After doing an apprenticeship, I broke away in about like 1994.
I was on the Grateful Dead tour for quite a while and decided to go off the grid.
And we didn't go too far off grid. We went to Silver City, New Mexico and I ended up finding a man there with a herbology shop. And so I joined him and he, I had an apprenticeship with him for about six months.
And you know, that just sort of like reinforced my knowledge about how to, how to work with plants, how to, how to turn plants into different types of medicines and also the wild crafting that he taught me, he's the one that really taught me about the proper way to harvest plants and also the plants as well. Teach you that.
[00:12:32] Dennis McKenna: So you were in New Mexico at this time. Is that when you met Rick Strassman or.
[00:12:39] Kevin Reed: Actually at the time I met Rick was, yeah, when I was in New Mexico and Rick, I had, I had sort of some. This is kind of another rabbit hole to go down. But yeah, I just came up with some kind of idea about the, the, you know, that the Buddhists talk about the Bardo and It's like a 49 day period after death, right. When, and coincidentally on the 49th day of gestation is when the fetus becomes male or female.
So I thought that was a pretty interesting correlation to that 49 day effect.
And I, I just had this idea also that at that point they say that DMT is released. Also at that point they say, they.
[00:13:41] Dennis McKenna: Say, yeah, it's a plausible theory. Yeah.
[00:13:44] Kevin Reed: But my idea was that that could be a biological trigger because say if, if the, if the fetus is not a male or female yet. Right. And on the 49th day, all of a sudden the DMT arrives. If it does.
And what I've experienced on DMT many times is an expansion of my empathic ability.
Like I can feel, I, you know, how you can feel how somebody feels it. But like say if you were in a room you wouldn't feel how each and every person felt at the same time.
[00:14:21] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
[00:14:22] Kevin Reed: But had something like that with dmt. So my hypothesis was that maybe the baby, male, female could sense do we need males, do we need females?
And it would be a survival mechanism and it would be almost like a sense that's coming from right there within the individual to reach out to the immediate environment so that if there was ever a really strong need, it might sense that and flip the pole, you know, and they say this or that about how it becomes this or that, but we don't know, do we?
[00:15:01] Dennis McKenna: Well, I think that's, that's plausible. I mean it may be that, you know, at that stage of gestation lots of things are going on and certainly, you know, the hormone oxytocin plays a big part of this.
And the DMT and the other trip, the psychedelics, among other things, they trigger oxytocin, they boost oxytocin, which is kind of empathy hormone.
Very important in infant mother bonding and even social network. So that's really interesting. So it seems like mentors have been very important in your life. Sasha, he was important in my life too, a lot of people's lives. I mean he was one of those, an example of one of those, in my mind the ideal scientist because he was driven by curiosity, he wasn't profit driven, he didn't really have an agenda except he was trying to understand these weird molecules and he had the tools to do it, the tools of chemistry.
And you know, we all know what Sasha Shulgin's contributions have been to psychedelics. I mean just a fantastic person and that was the thing. Like not only was he an excellent scientist and you know, but he was an excellent human being and he was the kind of person that, you know, a 19 year old kid could call, cold call and he didn't hang up. He and Anne talked to you for.
[00:16:49] Kevin Reed: A couple hours and, and that, that one conversation was enough to sustain me because as the years went by and I would get idea inkling to go see them or try to go to, I saw how many people were there, you know, and I was, I was still doing, you know, I was, I was on the way somewhere, you know, and so I, I just, you know, felt like whatever dose I got the first time, you know, I integrated it into a lifetime of of inspiration. And I had something really magical happened. I was in.
I was in Ecuador two years ago at Peguche Waterfall by Otavalo.
And I was there because I have a past wife who.
She took me there and.
She proposed to me at Peguche, and she passed away in 2007.
And so when I was up there, I went up there to have a. Like, a ceremony. And I had cut my hair recently, so I had a big lock of hair, and I went over to this place by the falls, and I was going to leave my hair where the birds could use it for nests and things.
And I was having a moment and burning some sage, and all of a sudden, the Sasha Shulgin, like, came into my mind really strongly, you know, and I'm like, whoa.
You know, well, okay. And I was there. I was there actually at the time for some other people who were thinking about opening a different kind of a foundation.
[00:18:34] Dennis McKenna: Oh, sorry.
[00:18:35] Kevin Reed: And things fell apart down there.
[00:18:38] Dennis McKenna: Huh.
[00:18:39] Kevin Reed: And so then, you know, that happened. That was the first little wink. And then I moved over to LA to go help my daughter with a litter of cats. So I'm around la, and there was a psychedelic conference in Los Angeles, and I went there.
And what year would that have been?
[00:19:03] Dennis McKenna: What year would that have been?
[00:19:04] Kevin Reed: So that was just. That was two years ago.
[00:19:06] Dennis McKenna: Oh, that was recently.
[00:19:08] Kevin Reed: Almost exactly two years ago.
[00:19:10] Dennis McKenna: Okay.
[00:19:11] Kevin Reed: And I went to this festival and I took a little medicine, and I had more of an effect than that little medicine.
And I was right in. Like, the mushroom brought me right in. And I started hearing a message to myself. Like, I started hearing a message from within myself, coming from outside.
And that's when this whole, like, ESP and Theogen Stewardship, it has to be done. Nobody's. You know, it would be. Like, I'd be walking around and I'd hear people say that not enough people are doing this to protect this and this. And I was just like, I can do that.
I mean, I should do that. Why shouldn't I do that? And then it kind of started crystallizing. And then, you know, I went a little deeper in the medicine, and all of a sudden I had all this, like, download, like, names, faces, like, things started to come into it.
And so, you know, the ESP thing just seemed like, you know, it made sense in Theogen Stewardship Project. And the reason it's a project is it's not going to really, you know, it won't complete. You know, this is a project, you know, if. If we finish it, we'll change the name. But it's. It's a project that we're going to keep getting more and more people working on, and it's not going to be happening here and there. And a part of this. So it's. But it works perfectly because esp. And then. And then I found out that you were in the. You were in the vision, you. Dennis. And I was like, thank you.
We began to talk. Like I hadn't read. I. I'm guilty of not reading everything that you've done, you know, and then I started to look back and I was. Oh, he published papers called esp.
Right.
You know, and then.
Then I think yesterday I'm.
[00:21:12] Dennis McKenna: Listen, I think you're talking about ESPD, the symposium.
[00:21:15] Kevin Reed: Yeah, espd. Yeah, espd. I just dropped the D. Anyhow, espd.
And then just yesterday, I, like, turned on an old interview of Terence. It must have been from 1980 something, you know, like on TV.
And they're talking about Ayahuasca. And I haven't read this before how. Like, the very first pharmacologist who classified ayahuasca called the.
The substance telepathyne.
[00:21:47] Dennis McKenna: Yes. Harmine. Right, that was.
[00:21:51] Kevin Reed: Yeah, Harmine, Telepathy.
[00:21:53] Dennis McKenna: But that was an early name for Harmine. People kept isolating it from different sources, and at the time, you know, I mean, things were not well documented. So people would isolate this compound, which actually came first from Pegadum harmala. That's where it got its name later in Ayahuasca. And people would isolate this beta carboline, not knowing sort of the chemical history of this compound. And then they. Telepathine or Benisterine or Yahein or all these things.
[00:22:29] Kevin Reed: Right, right.
[00:22:30] Dennis McKenna: The name telepathine, just by its very name, got a lot of attention, you know, and people said, oh, there's this obscure, you know, indigenous hallucinogen. They would call it a hallucinogen in those days. And that lets you be telepathic. Well, that's. Sometimes that's true, you know, but not always.
[00:22:53] Kevin Reed: Maybe you already were and you just calmed down enough to notice that you were.
[00:22:58] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. That you're already telepathic. Yeah, I know exactly where you're coming from in that respect.
So are you aware that you. Your organization has a precursor?
There was, for a while around 2016 or so, there was an organization called the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council. Did you ever hear about that?
[00:23:24] Kevin Reed: No, I did not.
[00:23:26] Dennis McKenna: It didn't go well for them.
I was a good friend of one of the founders, fellow named Josh Wickerham. And. And they set it up and they had the best of intentions in the world. Very much what you're doing with the Entheogen stewardship project.
They called it the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council.
And they set this thing up, and they were immediately attacked from various directions.
And people pounced on them and said, well, you're not indigenous. You have no right. You have no business messing with this. What gives you, a gringo from the States to appoint yourself the stewardship of these sacred medicines? There was a lot of.
And that, of course, well, even back in those days, we know how the media distorts things. That was never their intention.
They were never trying to establish themselves as the.
The owners or in any way the managers. They were like your project. They were educational, but they got a lot of pushback. And various people from different factions really jumped on them and criticized them quite vigorously. So much so that finally Josh just gave up on it. He just said, well, I don't need this shit.
[00:25:05] Kevin Reed: Well, someday I'd actually really like to talk to him. And I think that just kind of like to reflect back is that I kind of. I kind of sensed that already. I've always sensed that. I've never taken peyote because, you know, like, I didn't want to be offensive. I already grew up in Indiana in a place called Elkhart, named after Indians, and there's no Indians there.
So I kind of grew up kind of in a shameful way, you know. So part of what came to me in this is that all we're gonna. We're gonna work very closely with the indigenous tribes. And I've been actually working to connect with the IMC fund for. For some time.
And they are.
The people that we're going. Were going down to Brazil.
[00:25:56] Dennis McKenna: Which fund is that?
[00:25:57] Kevin Reed: The Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund.
[00:26:01] Dennis McKenna: Funny you should bring that up, because I was just about to mention that yes, they are doing work. It sounds like the work they're doing is very similar to what you're doing.
And I know Cody Swift and his wife Miriam, and.
And they're going. Their wonderful work. I mean, they're really.
[00:26:25] Kevin Reed: I think, you know, Claude.
Claude Guisein, Ghislaine.
[00:26:31] Dennis McKenna: Yes. And also David Bronner is part of it. And I forget. But. But it's. It's mainly Cody Swift and.
And Miriam are the ones that I've interfaced most with. And they're doing excellent. They're doing excellent work. And for some reason, I don't know whether they're better public Relations people or something. But nobody has attacked them or attacked the ICM and said, you're colonialists, co opting sacred knowledge. They haven't had those issues.
It doesn't hurt that they have had both financial resources and considerable success in working with the Huichol and other groups that use peyote in setting aside these sacred lands where peyote grows and so on. But they have money, they have funds, which it always helps if you're a nonprofit to have lots of funding, because like it or not, that's how, that's how things get done. So you're.
[00:27:50] Kevin Reed: Yeah.
[00:27:50] Dennis McKenna: Are you in, in touch with them or in, in conversations with those folks?
[00:27:56] Kevin Reed: No, we're not, but we will be. And, and so that is also something that we're, we've already started to do some work on is, is getting geared up for fundraising. We, we've just submitted our information for our 501C3. So we're waiting for the reply from the feds, which could take a minute. But until then, we're still, we're still working.
We've planned this trip, like I said, to, to get, to get back to that.
You know, I really felt when I went to Psychedelic Science in Denver that it was most important for me to meet with some leaders because I'd been trying to get through the website and not having any luck.
And when I, when the opening speech, it was Chief Nishiwaka Yawanawa that gave the opening speech, and I believe that.
[00:28:57] Dennis McKenna: Was who it was, is that the gentleman that wrote is the author of the Falling Sky.
[00:29:05] Kevin Reed: I'm not sure, not sure about if he's written books, but he's from the Yawanawa tribe, and it's a different group.
[00:29:14] Dennis McKenna: It's a different group.
[00:29:16] Kevin Reed: Yeah. I felt like when I heard his words that I had asked specifically to hear this when I went there today, and I went to him right afterwards and he started to speak to me in Portuguese, which I, which I understood, but I don't speak Portuguese. I speak Spanish, you know, somewhat, and I've been around Portuguese, but I, I, it was like I could understand him. We had a short conversation and his, his translator came over and then, you know, learned a little bit about me. And he was like, can you come to Brazil? And that was like, right now? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, well, no, like, not right this minute, you know, and, but have some things to do. And I thought, you know, well, that'd be further down the road, you know. But then as we, as we continued to try to work to establish a relationship. Then like Claude, Claude made the invitation for us to come down just for the.
At first it was like come down for the music study, which is at 11 day, you know, at the, at the village.
So he sent us the information over and we began to look at it and then we saw, well, right after the music study is, is a dieta.
[00:30:37] Dennis McKenna: Uhhuh.
[00:30:37] Kevin Reed: A dieta. Dieta. I think, yeah. And it's like a very special one. I read through it. It's like there's, there's teachers coming there that have never come to the event before.
Maybe it's once in a, you know, never happen again. And I was like, well, this is, we're supposed to be there.
You know, we have. I've never taken ayahuasca, neither has my other friend from the foundation. We're very experienced otherwise. But we've just never chosen to take the ayahuasca because we'd never been with someone from the rainforest to do it properly.
[00:31:16] Dennis McKenna: Well, that's the proper way to do it.
[00:31:20] Kevin Reed: And I know that I'm a big set and setting guy, you know, set and setting is important. It helps you to integrate very much so.
[00:31:28] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, yeah, well, so you're, you're going to do this thing, this, this theater and this music festival and well, that'll, that'll give you plenty to talk about.
[00:31:40] Kevin Reed: And I think also plenty of time for some of the members that the IMC Conservation Fund to get to know me and you know, they are involved with this. Yes.
[00:31:54] Dennis McKenna: Okay. Okay.
[00:31:56] Kevin Reed: Yeah. So it's almost like I feel like that it's the plant medicines initiating me to the work and that's how I'm looking at it. And also there's going to be some great healing, personal healing for both of us on the foundation, which is everything that we need to be able to do the work even better.
And so yeah, it's come about quickly. Like a week ago I thought it was going for 10 days and then two days later I was like, oh, 40 days and 40 nights.
[00:32:33] Dennis McKenna: Well, if you can spare the time, it'll be time well spent. I take it you, you mentioned that you had been to Ecuador. Have you been to Peru or any of the Amazonian parts of Peru?
[00:32:48] Kevin Reed: I haven't yet. You know, and it's, it's interesting because where we go in Brazil is almost all the way over to the Peru to, to Cuenca.
[00:32:58] Dennis McKenna: So it's, it's West Cusco, Brazil.
[00:33:01] Kevin Reed: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but there's really no Way to get there on, you have to take Brazilian air. Air flight.
So we're going to f. Fly into Brasilia, huh?
And then fly into the village where we take off on the boat. We're going to get there a couple days early so that we can unwind from the travel.
[00:33:23] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
[00:33:24] Kevin Reed: And then have a good time. Have the time that we have and have good of it and whatever of it and let it heal us and let the plant medicines guide us.
[00:33:37] Dennis McKenna: Makes sense. Yeah.
That's great. It sounds like you're finding the right way to connect with these communities and your mission.
So I think that's good.
The Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council and Josh and his associates.
I mean, I don't really want to criticize them because they were doing their best, you know, but they were also not. I mean, even though they were accused of being sort of, you know, colonialist, top down, that wasn't really their thing.
But on the other hand, they didn't also have these close relationships with indigenous communities at that time. They.
So the fact that you're going there and you're going to get immersed in this, I think that's.
That's definitely the right approach. And.
[00:34:32] Kevin Reed: Yeah. And then for. For the New year, I believe the next thing that we're going to be doing is getting in touch with the DA nation.
We've already talked to them a bit about peyote, working for peyote. And we just have to do about the same thing. Go spend time.
We've actually started to do some study.
So we're just, you know, the work is amazing. And not only is the work like a very good education and a very good healing for the mind and the heart and direction for how, how to work with these plants and how to. How to, you know, open people's love to remember, you know, how to love these medicines.
It's just good stuff. And I've really seen the, the, the magic of the medicines working without physically being present. Because we started this project and we have had like that spooky action at a distance going on with the participants having these spontaneous healings. Like, Sarah was in this with me and she would have been going down there with me.
And then all of a sudden this epilepsy thing became prevalent that had. She'd had but she'd never known about having.
And so it was almost like they took her out, you know, they were like, okay, you just need to focus. You do this here for. And she's perfect doing what she's doing, you know, and Happy, you know, so it's like we. We are just opening ourselves up. And that's, that's something that I always tell people that I learned when I. When I learned to stop and take the time to speak with the, the plant spirit or the, the fungi or the toad before the journey com. It changed the horizon. It was like you had a roadmap. Now you got atlas, you know, and then just being in gratitude, because if you want to take me somewhere and it's to see my shadow, I asked you to take me what I needed to see, and I'm going to make the best of it.
[00:36:57] Dennis McKenna: And generally they work that way. In general, we often say. I often say about ayahuasca and echoing what many other people have said, you will not necessarily get what you want, but you'll get what you need.
And the wisdom of the plants is something you just have to trust and surrender to and you won't regret it. That's the thing. I mean, it's the resistance where the problem comes in.
[00:37:34] Kevin Reed: In.
[00:37:35] Dennis McKenna: So I've taken. Ayahuasca has probably been the biggest, the most important.
I mean, I don't really want to cite importance. That's not the correct word. But ayahuasca has been a profound plant teacher for me. Along with mushrooms, those are kind of the two sacred medicines that have been most meaningful, important, personally meaningful to me.
And I'm very grateful to have that connection because it is this bridge into nature, effectively the intelligence of nature. And I think one of people learn, of course, many things from their experiences, but I think in this day and age, especially in the indigenous context, one of the most important lessons that we can learn from these plant medicines is to rediscover, reactivate our connection to nature.
Because the sickness of our culture, the sickness of our species at this point, a lot of it is traceable to being estranged from nature, you know, and we have to rethink our relationship to nature.
And that's kind of my soapbox message as well. You know, that's what I absolutely. I talk about symbiosis a lot.
These relationships are symbiotic relationships, you know, close biological associations between different species.
And lately I've been even talking about symbiotic rights.
People have the right to symbiosis, and that's a trope that should be discussed more, in my opinion, to assert a right to symbiosis with any damn organism on the planet that you choose.
[00:39:37] Kevin Reed: Absolutely.
I identify as a mycologist, sometimes I identify as a botanist. And.
And I should Be able to express that. How I express it, you know?
[00:39:51] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.
Have you.
I was recently.
Last month, I was at the. Well, now it's October. In August, I was at the Telluride Mushroom Festival. Have you ever been there?
[00:40:05] Kevin Reed: I have never been to the festival, but that. My. One of my board members lived in telluride for about 10 years, so she knows the whole crew up there. I just talked to Sir Jesse.
Is that right?
[00:40:22] Dennis McKenna: I don't know Sir Jesse. I know art. Good Times is.
[00:40:28] Kevin Reed: Yeah, Art. He knows art. And Sir Jesse is he. He has the house that looks like a water molecule up on the hill.
[00:40:35] Dennis McKenna: It's like three.
[00:40:36] Kevin Reed: Three domes.
And he's like. He's like one of the original.
He's actually the. I think he is one of the original first organizers. He said that.
I think he said that you and Terence came to him. Were you guys like. Did you come with Terence to. To try to sell the idea in Tell your.
[00:41:00] Dennis McKenna: No, I never went with Terence. The first time I went there was 1981. I think it was their second event that.
It was 1981. I went there on my own, and then they didn't invite me back until 2017.
I guess what I said was so appalling that they, you know, they couldn't invite me back. I don't know. Anyway, but back in 2017 and then this last time, and it was great. Glad to see it's still going strong. And it's a wonderful nexus of Michael Fanatics and mushroom people. And we wrote up a remembrance little blog or something about the event, the McKenna Academy. We just dropped our newsletter, so there's a long section in there about the Telluride Mushroom Festival.
And Paul Stamets, he was there.
You must know him, right?
[00:42:09] Kevin Reed: Yeah.
[00:42:10] Dennis McKenna: And he's a good friend. But Paul is fond of saying mushroom people are nice people.
And I think there's some truth to that. You can't work with these mushrooms without some of the nice brushing off.
So it's good in that way.
Very dedicated group of folks.
[00:42:34] Kevin Reed: Yeah. I think that one study said that a single dose of psilocybin improves the personality.
I think that that was a medical study right. At maybe Harvard, and that was this. I thought, well, that was a really cool statement, you know, because, like, it does. And you can't say what it does because it does something different for each person because, you know, everybody has a different part of their personality that. That is really, like, you know, starved for improvement. Most likely is the first one that changes.
But, yeah, it's, it's an amazing organism that certainly I agree with most of what Terence said about it, if not all, and have experienced some stuff that he's written about that people don't believe. You know, I fully experienced and they're.
[00:43:29] Dennis McKenna: Welcome not to believe it. But a lot of, and some of it's true and some of it isn't. I mean, I, yeah, I don't want.
[00:43:37] Kevin Reed: Anybody to have faith.
I want people to have their own experiences.
[00:43:43] Dennis McKenna: Well, that's true. I think it's important that people, you know, do have these experiences under the right, under the right circumstances and in the right context. Because in some sense, well, Timothy Leary once said, yeah, psychedelics are very dangerous because they drive people who have never taken them crazy.
And I think there's a truth to that. I think I'm not really qualified to condemn or praise psychedelics until you've been beyond the chrysanthemum a few times.
Then that expertise, if you've never had it, you don't really have any right to say what it is or condemn it for other people. And that's the nature of these symbiotic relationships. People should have the right to form these alliances.
And it's a gift from nature.
I don't need the FDA or the DEA to tell me what I can do with my body with respect to these things. But we're getting into, maybe we're getting off track here a little bit.
[00:45:01] Kevin Reed: But yeah, I think that it all comes together because I think one of the things that I think about when I think about the intelligence stewardship project making an impact is that I feel that the medicines have great potential for self actualization, for the person to actually find the things they need to change in a, in a fairly quick pace if things are set up right. So it's like if you get medicine in the right way, if you understand what you're taking and the dosage, all those things are important.
And this is something very important because these plant medicines are in a lot of the different substances that people run into, you know. And so I believe that once people tune in, it's like Timothy Leary. It's tuning in to traditional wisdom.
Right. And dropping out of, to turn on and take over.
[00:46:14] Dennis McKenna: That's what they.
[00:46:15] Kevin Reed: Right.
[00:46:16] Dennis McKenna: That's what the agenda needs to be, I think, you know, and the support.
[00:46:20] Kevin Reed: And, and like when, when, when we give the loving support back to the traditional healers and the wisdom holders, that, that, that's gonna, that's going to improve your own healing you know, it's, it's giving back your understanding is, is what you need. You know, it's not like, sorry, you know, it's actually understanding. We need to slow down and breathe and study the medicines and the traditions and then learn how to support the indigenous people who've been protecting them and will be protecting them.
[00:47:02] Dennis McKenna: Yes, I totally agree. I mean, these substances are catalysts. They're catalysts for self improvement, self development, self discovery. But I think on the planet level, they're co evolutionary catalysts.
They give us enhanced appreciation for the planet and the community of intelligent species that makes up the biosphere, that we're at least significant segments of our species, those who seem to have all the money and some kind of crazy vision of some kind of AI future fail to understand.
They're working very assiduously to undermine the relationship that we have to nature and effectively to toxify nature.
And these natural psychedelics are the antidote for that. If enough people will take them and more importantly, if enough people will listen and get the message.
Anyway, you and I are obviously fanatics and we're committed.
And some would say we should be committed. Well, we are committed, but not to asylums.
We're committed to a cause, a belief.
[00:48:25] Kevin Reed: Yeah, I, I want to interject a correction to my own speech. And I just heard you say it and I was like, oh, wait, so substance isn't the right word. Even plant medicine is not the right word. These are plant entities.
These are sacred plant entities. And if we call them that, then it actually puts it in perspective. If you call it a plant medicine.
There's a lot of plant medicines.
[00:48:53] Dennis McKenna: Yes.
[00:48:56] Kevin Reed: They'Re sacred plant entities that we're trying to preserve and see how. I don't know.
I was told when this vision came, I said, I didn't know.
I said, I'm not sure how to do this. But the plant said, don't worry, just ask for help.
You'll get there, it'll happen.
And it's. It is. And the more, the more I remember, the more I know I already knew.
It's the same thing. It's the same love that you have to have for just every little shadow you find in any nook and cranny of your soul. You have to, you have to see doubt as an obstacle, which is a thing that you go around like a tree on a path and it's part of the organism and it's just thriving there. Don't get hung up.
[00:49:53] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I think the term they're known by In a lot of indigenous culture, plant teachers, I think that's very apt.
You know, they are teachers. I mean, we learn from them. Anything you learn from as a teacher, in a certain sense. And yeah, I think that, that, that is a perspective that people need to interiorize. And in my own experience, I think in lots of people's experience, what we learn, at least the message I get from Ayahuasca, very often what you learn is how little we know.
We really only understand a tiny fraction of what reality is. And that's a humbling realization, but it's also a joyous realization because it means that we haven't got it all figured out and neither does anybody else.
And I think that's where we're at.
That realization, then that opens up this portal to curiosity and the willingness to learn. And then we've come full circle. We're back to Sasha Shulgin and the people like him, you know, who are just open to effectively being taught by the universe. They've opened themselves up.
They're willing to learn.
And what I loved about Sasha was he had vast knowledge of chemistry and pharmacology and all of these plants, but he was a very humble person.
[00:51:33] Kevin Reed: Yes. A very good listener, you know, very, very encouraging to where everybody was because he knew that we were all in this together.
[00:51:43] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. Yeah.
Well, Kevin, we're about up to a little over an hour and.
[00:51:50] Kevin Reed: Okay, yeah, cut any of those, like, any of those burps or anything out of there you need to cut out, and I'll. I'll. I'll drop some other stuff over to you in an email in case they want to put anything up, please. And it's been a joy. I. I've been having goosebumps about all. Or, you know, like butterfly. I think they're Amazonian monarchs in my stomach for the last week or so or about a lot of things. But it's all good.
[00:52:20] Dennis McKenna: It's all good. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
[00:52:24] Kevin Reed: It's been a pleasure.
[00:52:26] Dennis McKenna: And, oh, safe journeys in your trip.
[00:52:29] Kevin Reed: I wanted to stay. I wanted to probably say we are. We are putting up a GoFundMe.
We're going to start to gather funds, so we're going to have a GoFundMe up. And yeah, we're also going to. We have. We have social media, so if people go by our website and theogenstuardship.org there's going to be. The social media links are going to start to be populated while we're. We're down there. When we can, or as soon as we get back, we're going to start loading it up with our experiences and pictures and.
[00:53:02] Dennis McKenna: Okay. Well, be sure to share those with us as you go through your journey.
[00:53:08] Kevin Reed: You know, absolutely. Maybe not all of the photos, but.
[00:53:11] Dennis McKenna: You know, graphic journey and your personal journey. And keep us posted. And all the best to you.
[00:53:19] Kevin Reed: Thank you, Dennis.
[00:53:20] Dennis McKenna: All right.
[00:53:21] Kevin Reed: Thanks a lot, Dennis.
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[00:53:47] Dennis McKenna: Thank you for listening to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at McKenna Academy.
