Here's the link for a full-sized version of the video.
Taming our KYHOI proved difficult. This started out as two separate, unrelated projects, one dealing with shamanic tourism and the other dealing with "The Joe Rogan Experience." Initially, I wanted to explore how ancient indigenous traditions become commercialized and fake through Western tourism. While I won't speak for my partner Logan, his initial project seemed to focus more on the spreading of ideas through online communities.
However, once we got together it was challenging to narrow our ideas into a coherent 5-minute video. We've both had transformative experiences with "drugs" in our lives, so we wanted to explore the potential of certain compounds to increase human empathy, as they had so forcefully done for us.
But the psychedelic narrative is long and well-documented. There was no way we could retell that story in a fresh way within a 5-minute time frame. So we compromised on a mash-up of our trailers. This turned out to be how internet communities and ever-progressing technology might help promote the truth about substances that have been riddled with propaganda for at least the last 50 years.
As is true with everyone, I'm sure, we wish we had more time. But after an 8-hour blitz with work only a few hours away, we had to cut it off. I feel good about our message though. I believe the main concepts were clear: humanity's symbiotic relationship with mind-altering plants precedes civilization itself; skewed capitalistic priorities have removed healthy, natural, and mind-opening compounds from the research community; and finally that a return to an ancient framework of understanding these plants might be a step towards fixing our species' social and environmental issues.
Here's a list of sources I referenced throughout the creation of this video:
The Invisible Landscape by Dennis and Terrence McKenna
Food of the Gods by Terrence McKenna
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
From Medicine Men to Day Trippers: Shamanic Tourism in Iquitos, Peru by Evgenia Fotiou
DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman
The Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies
Terrence McKenna Lectures: The Alien Within, Culture is Your Operating System, The Last Word, Psychedelics in the Age of Psychedelic Machines
Documentaries: DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Ayahuasca: Vine of the Soul, Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, The Sacred Vine
...and many others were researched but just didn't have any material make it into the final cut. Hope you enjoyed!
