[00:00:13] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.

[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Sharon McKenna is the director and producer of the forthcoming feature documentary It’s Going to Get Weirder, the Terence McKenna story.

Sharon is a writer, film director and journalist whose work has appeared in a range of outlets from several alternative weeklies to MSNBC Digital, among others.

Her career spans three plus decades of network news production, investigative reporting, corporate creative work, and screenwriting. Her screenplays have been optioned and won numerous awards, and she has worked as a script reader and consultant for several film production companies.

She is a member of the International Documentary Association, Film Independent, Women in Film, the Electronic Frontier foundation, and several other organizations dedicated to filmmaking, the arts, and freedom of speech.

Sharon has various projects in the work. To learn more about her, visit her Creative Hub, Seanchaistudio.com and you can learn more about the Terence McKenna documentary at GoingToGetWeirder.com. She is also my annoying but cherished and loved younger cousin, Sharon. Welcome to the Brainforest Café.

[00:01:48] Sharon McKenna: Thank you, Dennis. It’s great to be here.

Just real quick, the way you pronounce that Gaelic word, it’s Shanahe, and some people pronounce it Shanakee. It can be Shanahe or Shanake, but it’s the Irish word for storyteller.

[00:02:05] Dennis McKenna: Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, it wasn’t clear. That’s what I get.

[00:02:09] Sharon McKenna: I should have put a phonetic thing in there. But anyway, yeah, it’s great to be here. It’s nice to see you.

[00:02:15] Dennis McKenna: It’s great to see you, too. We last saw each other in Colorado in August at the home of our other cousins, Judy and Ladi, and we were there for various reasons. You were there to interview me for this project, and I was there to visit the family and interview you and see you, obviously, and go to the Telluride Mushroom Conference or Telluride Mushroom Festival, which was also that same week. So we normally don’t see each other for years, but our paths have been crossing fairly frequently. And I’ve been trying to be encouraging about this documentary that you’re working on.

So one of my questions is it seems that Terence McKenna is almost becoming a cottage industry these days.

We’ve got Graham St John’s book, Strange Attractor, the Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, which I’ve been wanting to promote, and we’ve done a couple podcasts with him, and it has a weird title and you have a weird title, and then yours is a documentary. And then there’s actually another book coming out later this spring, which I’ll just mention, by John O’ Connor, which is an interesting book. It’s called “A Short Strange Trip”. So I guess the question is, give me the background of this project and why does the world need another documentary about Terence McKenna?

What do you bring to this project that other people will not be able to.

[00:04:12] Sharon McKenna: Yeah, so. Well, I’ll answer your second part of the question first.

There hasn’t been a feature documentary about Terence, which is kind of surprising, both surprising and not. I think people have circled the idea of doing a film about him for many, many years. And, you know, there’s sort of some DIY documentaries and videos about him all over YouTube, some of which are really interesting and amazing, but a traditional objective feature documentary hasn’t been done about him until this film, so. But the funny thing is, I started it 25 years ago, and, yeah, long as you’ll recall.

So when Terence passed away, I had just finished the screenwriting program at ucla and I was living in la and I was careering on a bunch of short films, and I was reading scripts for Warner Brothers. And I also had two young boys, I think they were only a year old then, and my twins.

And I knew Terry had been sick, you know, through family, and I actually had reached out to him, I think, when. When I first heard about his illness through Aunt Amelia and wanted to connect with him, you know, and not necessarily just for an interview, but obviously I was thinking about him and didn’t hear back. And there’s no surprise in that, just given he was ill, you know, and a lot was going on. So when he passed away, I, you know, I realized that this moment’s not going to come again. Like, there’s going to be a lot of people thinking and feeling a bunch of different things upon his passing. And I wanted to capture that and start a documentary project about him. So that’s what I did. I went up to Esalen, where, you know, you had put together this amazing memorial with all of these great speakers. And, you know, Esalen was like, kind of the perfect place to do that, and did a bunch of interviews there and also went to a few raves in the Bay Area in his honor, you know, a couple of events in Southern California.

Went up to Seattle, Northern Washington, and interviewed his good friend Tom Robbins.

And so I captured a bunch of really great footage.

And, you know, like, I think it was John Lennon that said, life is what happens when you’re making other plans or something. But, you know, life. Life happened.

And I, you know, I was working on a script by a producer had commissioned me to write A script. And, you know, I had boys to raise, I was a single mom. And so I kind of just put the project aside and, you know, revisited every once in a while, would reread his books and your book. And, um, you know, it wasn’t really until about three years ago that I thought, you know, I’m. I’m going to digitize. Because it wasn’t digitized footage, you know, back then you were shooting on little mini DV tapes. Seems so old school now, but so I had them digitized and took a second look at the footage and, you know, it was just really almost very emotional because it had. Had held up so well, like the interviews.

But at the same time, I realized in the, you know, the 20 something plus years of his absence, the world had changed so dramatically in many ways that he had predicted would change. And so I wanted to resurrect the project and re. Interview some of the same people I had interviewed 25 years before and add new perspectives to the story.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last three years, revisiting a lot of the themes and ideas I had then, but fresh, fashioning them up with kind of like where we are today. And also looking at how his popularity and his influence since he’s passed away has actually just grown exponentially.

I think that’s very fascinating.

[00:08:23] Dennis McKenna: It is, yes. So the arc of development of this project is, I think, longer than any other in the sense you bid at this.

25 years. He passed away 25 years ago, and you really started working and thinking about this project at that time. And you have had to set it aside various points in your life because as you said, you’re busy raising your two twin boys and trying to scratch out a living through doing consulting and that sort of thing.

So it’s understandable.

I give you high marks for persistence, Sharon.

You never really lost the goal. You were always looking at the North Star that this would come to fruition.

Now it appears that it will. It’s very close. You’ve done a GoFundMe campaign and you’ve gotten some funding, significant support for it. Never enough. There’s never enough for these projects. And we want to mention to people the GO funding slide, which will be on the podcast episode page, of course. Thank you. And people should, if they’re motivated, feel free to donate to that, because there is never enough funding. Now you need funding for professional editing and all that.

[00:09:53] Sharon McKenna: I mean, there’s still a lot to do. I think what’s been. It’s Been a process of discovery all along, but particularly recently, you know, a lot of people don’t really know that documentary.

The cost to. To make a feature doc, just a feature documentary, let alone a series, is really, really expensive. Like, it used to be sort of the, you know, the poor person’s art outlet was to make a documentary, and you could do it using a grant or just, you know, cobbling together a few grand here and there. And those days are over. I.

I recently learned that the average cost for, you know, for a streaming documentary, but even for some festival documentaries, is $500,000. That’s the average. Many are million, two million dollar budgets, and the floor is like a hundred thousand. And so I’ve been doing it for even less than that.

But, you know, it’s a labor of love. But I think one of the reasons I haven’t let go of the project is, you know, there’s both a. There’s a personal reason I wanted to do this, and then there’s like, the professional storyteller in me that’s wanted to do it.

[00:11:03] Dennis McKenna: So let me speak to that. Yeah, you’re part of our family, so you know who Terence has been, really, since we were all babies. You know, I mean, you are the daughter of my father’s older brother, so that’s where you fit into the family tree.

But have you actually met Terence?

[00:11:26] Sharon McKenna: Yeah, when I was. I was young, so I met.

[00:11:30] Dennis McKenna: Tell me about one of those occasions.

[00:11:32] Sharon McKenna: Well, you don’t remember coming to our house in Northern California. You guys came for.

I think it was a Thanksgiving or it was some visit, and it’s fun. You were. I think you were probably in your early 20s or something. I can’t quite remember, but. But I did interview Aunt Amelia. For your audience, who isn’t familiar, we have this force of nature aunt who is a nun, who was a big feature in our lives and, you know, and I think in Terence’s life.

But when I interviewed her for the documentary, she said, you know, I remember when Terry and Denny came to visit and they met your brothers, and they just had nothing to say to each other. It was like. She said it was like you were coming from different planets. And that’s true. Our families were very different.

And so I remember that visit. And then when Terence was living, I think, in Occidental, it was the Occidental or Sebastopol, my dad and my mom and I went out to visit him and Kat twice.

And I remember I was pretty little, that I was just so Enamored with his library. Like, there were so many books.

And I was a bookworm, you know, I mean, I was this nerdy, sort of black sheep of the family who just. All I did was read.

And so I just was so impressed with that. And I remember we sat on the floor and we had tea, and my dad was like, okay, what the hell is this? Why are we sitting on the floor? You know? But I was just like, this is so cool. Right?

So, yeah, so I. And I also kind of knew about you guys through dad because my dad and your dad, of the four kind of older McKenna’s, were pretty close. They were close when they were young, and they stayed in touch quite a bit. And, you know, Joe would call dad or dad would call Joe. And I remember one time.

I don’t know what was happening in Terry’s life. Maybe this was when.

I don’t know, maybe the thing with the hash and he had to leave. I don’t know, something. Something had gone south. And so dad was talking to your dad on the phone, and I was sitting at the table and, you know, eavesdropping, and.

And dad hangs up the phone, and he turns to me and says, your cousins are a couple of goddamn geniuses, and I want you to stay the hell away from them.

And of course, that was like, okay. Then I was like, okay, I got to.

To understand who these people are.

[00:14:18] Dennis McKenna: When you visited. So that visit to Occidental must have been early 80s probably.

[00:14:25] Sharon McKenna: Yeah.

I thought I was still in high school.

My memory is not great, but I.

[00:14:32] Dennis McKenna: Take it they sat in his living room and drank tea and Ed was suspicious. They probably didn’t tour the mushroom operation, did they?

[00:14:41] Sharon McKenna: Well, you know, it’s funny, I know in your memoir you wrote about my dad a little bit. He had a really interesting respect for you guys, I think, because he was a very, very smart man. Very, very prescient, you know, and he was a great Irish storyteller, and he had a lot of respect for how educated you guys were. Meanwhile, you know, my side of the family was just going sideways and including me, I ended up.

I ended up doing psychedelics, but in a very different.

I came at it from a very different place than you guys. And this is actually something I’m. I’m writing an article about a substack about, because, you know, I was in the Bay area in the 60s and 70s when it was all happening, but we were in suburbs and doing psychedelics and doing any drugs was really a means of escape. It wasn’t you know, I think for you guys, it was more of an intellectual exercise. You were seekers, you were trying to learn from these things, and we were just trying to get fucked up, you know what I mean?

[00:15:51] Dennis McKenna: Trying to have a good time.

[00:15:53] Sharon McKenna: Trying to have a good time. And so my experience of psychedelics has been very different from you and Terence and many of the people who follow him.

[00:16:03] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Well, you like me. I had Terence, the elder brother that led me down various pathways.

The Pribro path story. You had an older sister who was influential in introducing you to some of these things.

Not always in a good way, but she was kind of a trailbreaker. And being a younger sister, you kind of toddled along. So you and I have that in common. You know, whatever the older sibling is doing, I want to be in on it, I want to be part of it. So, you know, we have that in common.

[00:16:44] Sharon McKenna: Yeah. And I think you’re five, four and a half years apart from Terence, or four years.

[00:16:49] Dennis McKenna: Just about exactly four years.

[00:16:51] Sharon McKenna: Yeah. Same. My sister and I are about four and a half years apart from.

[00:16:55] Dennis McKenna: Well, it’s a critical span. At least it was for me, because when the way the school is structured. When Terence was in high school, I was in junior high, and when I was in high school, he was gone. And, you know, we were never in the same school together, but Terence had a wide swath in school. So then, you know, when. And left memories in the, you know, with. With major teachers that then became my teachers. Sometimes not good memories, you know, same with me. So then there was, you know, when I was coming along, I said, oh, you know, it’s Terence’s younger brother. I wonder what kind of wild person this person is, you know, so there was that inbuilt, I guess, prejudice on the part of the teachers. Terry used to come home from sixth grade class and he would talk about Mrs. Campbell, who was the sixth grade teacher, who had.

Who I looked up to. She was a wonderful teacher. And Terence would come home and say, Mrs. Campbell despises me, you know, and probably she did, because he could be such a. So irritating, you know, such a pill, I think same thing.

[00:18:11] Sharon McKenna: I mean, except you just had Terence. I.

I had my sister. I had a brother between us. And then I had my brother Tim, who was really the crazy, you know, I mean, it’s been a sad end for him. He never was able to get away from serious drugs. But I remember my sixth grade science teacher. I think his name was Mr. Cass, and we called him Mr. Ass.

And I remember, I. You know, when he goes. They go through the calling, the roll call, and he’s like, McKenna. He’s like, Are you. Are you one of the McKenna’s?

You know, and it’s like, God, I never recovered, you know, I couldn’t cat with my name.

[00:18:51] Dennis McKenna: It was, yes, I am. I’m guilty.

[00:18:56] Sharon McKenna: Guilty as charged.

But, yeah, so that’s, you know, that’s kind of the story. I’m kind of getting to your answer in a long way around, but.

So that was kind of the personal attachment because. Yeah, I didn’t know him super well. Right. And I didn’t know you super well when I was younger, but I always wanted to. I didn’t feel very at home in my own family just because I was such. I was the youngest.

I was the brat, you know, My oldest brother was 17 years older than me, so there was eight kids in there. And I really felt like, oh, my. These Colorado cousins might be like, you know, kind of a new. A new family for me. And I never really got to spend a ton of time with you guys. So part of doing the film is really learning, actually about who my cousins are. And so that’s been kind of a beautiful thing on the more professional side of things, you know, why am I doing the film? It’s just. It’s a great story, you know, it’s a great story for the ages and for the time that we are in now. It’s got a great character, characters, if you will. And, you know, a lot of interesting things happened, and the impact of, you know, Terence and your work through the years is being felt now more than ever. So I feel like it’s a very important time to finish it while we can still make films, because who knows how long that’s going to go on, the way things are going.

[00:20:30] Dennis McKenna: Yes, that’s right. Well, you’re in a unique position because you are a family member and you know a lot of the background. So is your.

And many people who don’t have that closeness to our family, like Graham St. John, for example, bless his heart, all the work that he’s done to put all of this material together, but he is not part of our family.

So you are maybe in a position to tell part of Terry’s story that is not really well known and that maybe people should know about that. There was actually.

He was more than a cultural icon. He was all those things. And that sometimes I felt, especially when he got more famous, I felt that he felt trapped in a certain way or caged by the role that the fan base and the culture had created for him, you know, and at base, he was actually just, you know, that curious, nerdy kid that would go out hunting for butterflies and fossils around Paonia when we grew up. And that was.

That was his more native kind of impulse.

But because he was so articulate and had such strange ideas, certainly partly fueled by his psychedelic experiences, then he became this spokesman for something.

The counterculture was fascinated with him.

Never really accepted him, though, and he didn’t want to. That kind of.

[00:22:10] Sharon McKenna: Well, I’m glad you brought that up, because it’s a real driving force of the narrative of the story I’m trying to tell. I think, you know, most people have been introduced to Terence through videos on YouTube or back in the old days, through recorded audio cassettes, and. Which is actually kind of a beautiful thing, right? It was a very organic development of following. Like, in fact, I wanted to tell you this story. I got a donation to the crowdfunding today, and it was an anonymous person, and they said, I want to stay anonymous, but I’m just so grateful. This is in honor of the friend who introduced me to Terence’s work. And I think that’s how he spread, you know, his. His message. But that’s kind of the only lens a lot of people have on him. Maybe also his books. But there’s a whole other person there.

You know, there’s a human there, there’s a brother there, there’s a son there. And that is the. The piece, especially the early years. I. You know, I tend to feel like those years are very formative for people, not only, you know, who they’re living with, but where they’re living. I think that has a big impact on how you develop as a person or an intellectual. So I want to tell that piece of it as well.

And I’m so glad I interviewed Aunt Amelia before she passed. I wish I had done more, has spent more time with her, but, you know, she was sort of like the family, like, the knowledge base.

And, you know, in my interview with her, she kept wanting to talk about you.

She’s like. But then Dennis did this, and, you know, she just. She loved you guys. Loved you guys so much. But I think she.

I think she.

I don’t want to say she connected more with you, but she had her issues with Terence. They had their issues with each other.

[00:24:03] Dennis McKenna: Aunt Amelia.

[00:24:04] Sharon McKenna: Yeah.

[00:24:05] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. Well, yes, they certainly did. I mean, Aunt Amelia was among all the siblings in my dad’s family.

She was the intellectual.

And you referred to her as a force of nature. She certainly was. She looked. No bullshit.

And she and Teres were at loggerheads many times because she was one of the few people that could actually call him out.

And she wasn’t afraid to do that. He resented that because he wanted to be seen a different way. And she never hesitated to say, you’re just fos, you know, on so many things. And he was on so many things. So he resented that. But at the same time, I think deep in his heart, he knew also that Amelia cared a great deal about him. And when he had cancer in the final stages of his life, you know, the summer of 1999, he was getting chemotherapy. He was going through hell, basically, because he knew what he was facing. And Amelia came to Hold Hawaii, where he was, and stayed with my. With her younger brother, Austin McKenna, living in Hawaii at that time. So it was convenient for her to stay there. And she hung out with Terence and me and Christy, Terence’s girlfriend at the time, quite a lot. And we were trying to do shamanic therapy with Terence, and he wasn’t really buying it.

He wasn’t with the program. But we were taking, you know, mushrooms and LSD and ayahuasca. We were taking it. He was.

[00:26:00] Sharon McKenna: Well, Aunt Amelia took ayahuasca, but.

[00:26:04] Dennis McKenna: Well, Amelia was curious. She says, what is this? What are you doing? And we explained what it was. And here she is. She’s, like, 85.

[00:26:13] Sharon McKenna: I think she was in her early 80s.

[00:26:16] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I think I need to take this.

And she did. She took ayahuasca with tariffs and me, and then Luis Edwarda Luna, who was there, and she had an absolutely horrific trip. I mean, it was physical, basically just an ordeal for her the whole time, and shitting and vomiting. And Christy had to spend the whole time, take care of her. The next day, after she’d recovered, she said, that was the best thing that ever happened to me.

[00:26:51] Sharon McKenna: Well, that’s funny, because. Well, I should save some of this for the film. But I. When I interviewed, she said, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me.

[00:26:59] Dennis McKenna: Well, it was the best.

[00:27:00] Sharon McKenna: But this is. But this is what’s important. That’s such a great story, right? Because, you know, for the audience, she was a nun, and I think the Sisters of Charity. I’m not sure what order she was.

[00:27:10] Dennis McKenna: In, but she was an atypical nun. She was a nun.

She was a nun, but she wasn’t a good little nun. I mean.

[00:27:20] Sharon McKenna: No, she was a rebel nun. She was a rebel nun. And I Feel like Terence shared that sort of rebel kind of.

[00:27:30] Dennis McKenna: I think what Terence. One reason Terence and Amelia did not get along or often were in conflict was because they were so much alike. And Terence, I mean, she was a disruptor and she was a troublemaker, and so was Terence. You know, they had that in common. But maybe he wanted to stay. Maybe he didn’t want her to be that way. But anyway, so here we are excavating the.

[00:27:57] Sharon McKenna: The family secret. Well, also, just to add, I think they could spar intellectually because she was just so well read. I think she had, like, two PhDs or something. She was a brilliant, brilliant woman.

And, you know, but I do think he really loved her. I. In my research. Well, so when she died, I inherited the Amelia stuff for some reason. I got all of her books and her records and her letters, and I came across a very heartfelt letter in there from Terry to Amelia.

Yeah, I won’t. I won’t share the details of it because it’s private. But just to say that I think in times of duress, he did reach out to her because she was always there for us. She was there every time I got.

[00:28:46] Dennis McKenna: She was always there for this, and especially for Terry. And the attitude was, you know, like, when she came to Hawaii, it was like, I don’t want her here. I don’t want that on at Alex here. It’s, like, tough.

You don’t have a choice. Here I am. Deal with it.

[00:29:03] Sharon McKenna: Exactly.

[00:29:04] Dennis McKenna: And it turned out to be, you know, a very good thing. I mean, he would probably never admit it, but it was very good. And I was certainly happy that she was there. And we had some very good moments. And that was, you know, that was a very difficult summer for everybody because we knew that however much time we could extend Terence’s life through all these experimental therapies and gene therapies, these experimental protocols, we knew that sooner or later that there really wasn’t much time. So it was very sweet to be able to spend time there and with my uncle as well. My uncle often, you know, who I gotten to know much better after he moved to Hawaii, because we were teaching courses in Hawaii regularly, and we’d always see them. So, anyway, this is all very personal, but I guess people. I guess it’s okay to talk.

[00:30:10] Sharon McKenna: Well, you know, the documentary will be. It’s both personal and objective. You know, it’s.

It’s not a documentary if you’re just gonna put somebody up on a pedestal and rehash or re. Repeat everything that’s already been said.

[00:30:27] Dennis McKenna: I think there’s enough of that. There’s plenty of.

[00:30:30] Sharon McKenna: There’s enough of that. There’s plenty of that. There’s going to be more of that, you know, and, you know, I think there’s probably an appetite for a lot of that. But the other thing I’m doing that’s a little different is I’m not using a ton of archival footage of Terence. This is more about me talking to his contemporaries and people who were either friends or were intellectual counterparts and then some family members about what they think his legacy is and how he influenced them.

So to that degree, it’s a bit broader in scope than just, oh, you know, Terence was born here and did this, this and this. It’s. It’s an interpretation of what he. Why he has had such an impact. Right. And it’s been great because each interview has been very, very different. Each person has had a very different lens on Terence, and it’s kind of like he was. He’s this choose your own adventure icon.

People kind of gravitated to him for different reasons. So there’s a lot of variety and a lot of great conversations in there and more to come, more interviews to do.

[00:31:47] Dennis McKenna: So you bring a lot to the story that other people are not going to. So I think this documentary will be a valuable contribution to Terence’s legacy because there are.

Because there are gaps in the more public story that you’ll be able to fill in, and both of us are privileged to be able to tell the story from the inside, so that kind of answers the question about the structure or the style of the thing. Who are you trying to reach? One of your audiences? Who.

Who are you trying to reach and what should they expect from this, from this documentary?

[00:32:32] Sharon McKenna: Well, I mean, first off, I have to say, like, you know, unlike Graham’s book, which is very detailed and so comprehensive and massive in scope, I mean, there’s no other way to put it, and you can do that in a book.

It’s not easy.

And it was a lot of work for him. Right.

[00:32:51] Dennis McKenna: I’m just in awe of the work that he put in.

[00:32:54] Sharon McKenna: Yeah, it’s. I. I’m halfway through it. I’m still reading it. But no, I mean, just, like, the amount of research that goes, and. But that’s one medium. And I think there’s a whole bunch of people out there that have. Might know a little about Terence McKenna. Like, they’ve seen one or two of his videos, or they know a friend who’s really into Terence and that scales up from there, like people that have read your books, his books, and then, you know, people that might be interested in reading Graham’s book. But there’s a whole bunch of people in there who aren’t going to dive into a big long biography, you know, I think. And many people are visual thinkers. And so that’s why having a film that sort of, I’m calling it sort of like not an entry level Terence McKenna story, but sort of like, you know, if you’re kind of in the middle there, you know a little bit about him, but you’re curious about his early life and what influenced him. And why is everybody still talking about Terence McKenna 25 years later? I’m trying to answer that question and if.

[00:33:58] Dennis McKenna: Why do you think that is?

[00:34:01] Sharon McKenna: Well, I think he was at the inner side because he wasn’t a one trick pony. I think because he wasn’t just a psychedelics guy. He wasn’t just, you know, five grams in darkness. You know, he was much more than that. And he, if any, he was a prescient storyteller. And I think that is the reason that today, as you know, the shit show that we’re living through and have been living through, you know, it’s been getting worse and worse and worse.

People look back and they’re like, yeah, he was talking about that, he was telling the story of that, you know, and so I think that’s a big part of the popularity concurrent with that, as you well know, more than anybody, psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, has just, you know, become much more accessible. It’s, it’s okay to be saying, oh, I’m using psychedelics for therapy and there’s drug trials and, you know, it’s getting commercialized, which I have thoughts on. But, you know, so I think the, the industry has caught up with where Terence was.

So I think between the prescience and the storytelling and the psychedelic, you know, the vision of what psychedelics can do for masses of people have converged and they’ve converged at Terence McKenna because he was of both of those schools, right?

[00:35:23] Dennis McKenna: Although the point that Graham makes and others make, he in some ways, he was never accepted.

His views on psychedelics were widespread. But the psychedelic industry or the legitimate psychedelic fan base or industry, if there can be such a thing for something like psychedelics, they didn’t accept him.

I mean, he was a great storyteller, but he never was an academic. For example, I went into academics, I studied psychedelics within the context of scientific research in institutional you know, context. Terence rejected all that. He rejected science from the. From the experiment at La Torera on. He said science could never explain what happened to us. It’s useless. And we used to, you know, argue about that because I was saying, you know, my position is, well, we really aren’t scientists, so we can’t condemn it until we’ve learned how to do science. And that was part of my motivation for, after La Cherreira, going back to school and learning science, or learning actually how to understand science and use it. And in doing so, in light of what had happened to us previously, I was very aware of its limitations, but I was also aware of its potential to answer difficult questions and to investigate the universe in a very systematic way and get answers. So I did not lose my respect for science. I think Terence was quick to dismiss science, and as a result of that, he wasn’t able to put on the mantle of academic respectability. So in some ways, he became marginalized. It’s just this screwball, this guy with crazy ideas out there.

[00:37:27] Sharon McKenna: But he was a screwball that people.

[00:37:30] Dennis McKenna: Loved, but they loved. That’s the difference, because he was incredibly intelligent, incredibly articulate, wonderful storyteller, funny. He was engaging. And I think his community, they thought of themselves. He was somebody that everybody could think of, that they like, knew him personally, both in personal encounters. He was very warm and friendly, even though I know him well enough to know he would have reservations, but that would never surface. He’d appear to be interested and engaged and very friendly with people. And people got the sense that this is a very friendly and interesting and witty guy that I want to hang out with.

And that’s still true 25 years after his death.

[00:38:25] Sharon McKenna: It’s more true than ever.

[00:38:27] Dennis McKenna: Hang out with errors.

[00:38:28] Sharon McKenna: Yeah. Academia and sort of science rejecting him and all of that. I think that belies the point that the people. He gave people, ordinary people, regular people, permission.

[00:38:42] Dennis McKenna: Yeah.

[00:38:43] Sharon McKenna: You know, they needed somebody to say. And this is back then. But even through the recent decades. Right. I mean, you know, it’s. There’s a lot of taboos still around drug use and taking psychedelics. And I think that’s why people have gravitated and feel so they feel loyal to him for that.

[00:39:04] Dennis McKenna: And he kept the up. He kept the conversation alive for. For two or three decades through the 70s and 80s, you couldn’t be out there at public talking about these things in anything other than a negative way. And here’s Terence talking in a very positive way about psychedelics, particularly psilocybin and he kept the conversation going.

So that later in the early 2000s, when people actually began to do clinical research and all this good science started to emerge, it’s because Terence had kept the topic on the table, you know, that other scientists, people who were in the sciences, could look back and say, well, you know, maybe we ought to look into this. And they began to. And then the whole therapeutic thing, you know, developed. And not necessarily.

I mean, anytime you’ve got biomedicine and pharmaceutical development and all that, it becomes a very complicated situation.

Terence was not for that.

No, he would never take psychedelic therapy. He rejected the concept of therapy. For him, the con. You know, you want psychedelic therapy, you take 6 grams in absolute darkness and silence. That’s your therapy.

[00:40:31] Sharon McKenna: I mean, he was kind of binary that way about it. I agree. But you know, when you say that, it’s interesting because I think the world to where we are with psychedelics today, it needed both of you.

It needed Terence rejecting science and you embracing it. And together, you know, it’s helped us get to the place we are today. I think, you know, this is a documentary about Terence, but it’s. It’s also your story. I mean, there’s. There isn’t. There kind of isn’t a Terence McKenna without a Dennis McKenna, you know.

[00:41:03] Dennis McKenna: Thank you.

[00:41:05] Sharon McKenna: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to see. It’s hard to separate the two. It really is. And I think that’s also what makes it a beautiful and unique story.

[00:41:14] Dennis McKenna: Terence was the reflection of what we’re seeing in the so called psychedelic renaissance.

I mean, it’s not a renaissance in a certain way. What I see in the current state of the so called psychedelic revival or renaissance is basically the corporate predators are trying to cash in totally. And they don’t know really what they’re dealing with.

They just see a thing that they could dominate and maybe monetize. In some sense, these people are not taking enough of their own medicine or they might get some insights about it. But anyway, that’s kind of off in the woods here in terms of what we wanted to talk about.

But that’s my rant.

I think that people should have access to psychedelics, not necessarily through clinical context. They should just be able to connect directly to nature and get their psychedelic experience that way. That’s the way indigenous people have always done it for 10,000 years before there was any FDA to tell them that they.

[00:42:28] Sharon McKenna: Yeah, and these companies don’t even talk about that. They don’t even talk about these indigenous roots of all of this. You know, and like AI, I feel like the kind of the co opting of psychedelics and by capitalism, frankly, has happened very quickly. And it’s like the train is left the station and before you know it, you know, they’re controlling access, they are controlling it.

[00:42:57] Dennis McKenna: They, they would like to control it, but the fact is you can’t control something, something like this. That’s the interesting thing, because people can be empowered. And this, what I’ve been talking about in my talks recently, people can be empowered to just go around all that and make a direct connection with nature, particularly now that they’re all one of the things, one of many things. But maybe one of the main things that Terry and I are famous for is we created this very simple technique for growing mushrooms.

We wrote a book about it. It was really more like a pamphlet. It’s like, here’s the instructions, here’s how to do it.

People have continued to work in that context. There are now much even more simple ways to grow mushrooms on large or small scales, and many different, different varieties of mushrooms. So this knowledge is diffused into the culture. And if people want to grow mushrooms, they can do it. And Almost any intelligent 8th grader can figure this out.

This is not rocket science. So those tools give people the ability to just go find the mushrooms, bring them into your kitchen and grow the little critters, you know, and have a direct relationship. And you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission to do that.

So it’s a direct symbiosis with the mushroom teacher. You know, we talked about, Terence, I mean, the metaphor that these things are teachers, and there’s nothing new about that. That’s what indigenous people have always called these psychedelic plants. You know, they’re teachers. And that’s the whole con concept of it. But anyway, so if we look at the McKenna legacy around psychedelics, a big part of the McKenna legacy, and I included myself in this, is the fact that we just wrote this little instruction manual and that made mushrooms available to anybody with a little bit of patience in a spare bedroom or a spare closet or whatever they wanted, they could do it themselves.

[00:45:21] Sharon McKenna: Yeah, I mean, I remember growing up when I was in the Bay Area and I was doing any drug I could get my hands on, and I think I was probably in high school, late high school, when I started taking mushrooms. And I realized that that’s due to you guys. So thank you.

You know, I mean, they weren’t, they weren’t prevalent. And I think what’s interesting is. And that’s another thing I’m highlighting in the film. A lot of people, younger people today, do not understand that you could not get psilocybin mushrooms. They just, they weren’t here.

[00:45:54] Dennis McKenna: No, exactly. They don’t understand it. You know, and I have spoken to so many people who have said things like, you know, my life was a mess until I discovered mushrooms. Mushrooms saved my life.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anybody who said mushrooms ruined my life.

[00:46:15] Sharon McKenna: Life, you know, unless they were like poisonous mushrooms that they tried to eat or something.

[00:46:21] Dennis McKenna: But it’s a rare thing most people find when they discover the mushrooms. Many of them at a time in their lives when they were facing an existential crisis of some one kind or another. Depression, addiction, ptsd, whatever. They found mushrooms. And entirely outside a therapeutic context.

The mushroom saved my life. I get that, that kind of feedback. So many people tell me.

So it’s like, wow, that’s great. I mean, we’re not responsible for it, but I’m happy that we had a role in unleashing this.

[00:47:00] Sharon McKenna: Well, you had a big role. You had a huge role. You brought them back. You brought them.

You brought. Not only. You brought them back.

[00:47:09] Dennis McKenna: Exactly. And lots of people had tried and succeeded, more or less. I guess what made us different is that we wrote a little book about it and it happened to be the first book out there that made it accessible to people.

So anyway, enough blowing my own horn here.

I wanted a couple of questions on your talking points. I wanted to ask you. So what’s. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned or heard through doing this project? That’s an interesting question you put.

[00:47:44] Sharon McKenna: Well, you know, it hasn’t. Well, two things through the trying to fund the film and doing crowdfunding, which I had never done before for any of my projects. I just always self funded or, or, you know, just the people who have donated. I have actually just been floored with the. When they donate, they make a comment. They don’t have to make a comment, but many of them do.

Just the, the, the love and the like, the, the importance of this story. Like, I think there’s been a lot of comments like, thank you for doing this, please finish this film.

This is so important.

I’ve loved Terence for years, you know, just like very, very. It’s very touching. It sounds very corny. But when you’re working on a project by yourself, I mean, my son’s working on it with me and I have some supporters and stuff, but you’re in this silo and you’re heads down and you can connect with people who are supporting your work and they’re sharing their reason for supporting your work like that. It’s just very moving and, you know, and it’s a cross section of people and it’s global. And so that’s been. I mean, I know that he has a lot of people who love him and support him, but to have it connected to this project was very surprising to me.

[00:49:05] Dennis McKenna: You know, he would be supportive of this project, I think.

[00:49:09] Sharon McKenna: Yeah, I hope so. I’m hoping to do him proud.

[00:49:13] Dennis McKenna: And the response you’ve gotten is a reflection. It is.

It’s not corny. I think it’s actually very moving. Because the thing is, Terence was beloved. He was beloved. He is beloved.

That’s what I was alluding to previously when I said people feel like they’re with a friend. He may be talking to a stadium full of people. Every one of them feels that he’s talking directly to them.

So he had a back for that. Just coming across very personable.

So that. That must be a. That must be very gratifying, the response.

[00:49:52] Sharon McKenna: I mean, it is gratifying. It’s, you know, I mean. I mean, don’t want to be negative or anything, but, you know, it is. It’s very difficult financially to do a film like this. And, you know, it’s like, it’s funny because he has millions and millions of followers and fans, yet in terms of the crowdfunding, because crowdfunding’s hard. You’ve done it. You know, I know there hasn’t been sort of the level of donations that I had hoped for and had need and need to finish the film. And the challenge is, you know, documentary grants have been just decimated. I mean, they’ve been. Always been difficult to get, but now it’s almost impossible, you know, and PBS has been destroyed. There’s. There’s no sources of funding. Right.

And so, you know, and I’m not a trust fund baby. I don’t. You know, so I think I’m.

I. I wish. Right. But hey, there was eight kids in our family. There was nothing left, you know, so.

[00:50:51] Dennis McKenna: So coming to the next question that kind of touches on it is getting the support to do this work. It is. It is a tough call. I mean, there are all these people that love Terence. Not all of them are either inclined or in a position to reach for their wallet.

I have to tell you, I’ve been impressed with the response that you’ve gotten with the crowdfunding. I thought Sharon’s gonna put this out there and it’s gonna be very disappointing and she’ll be depressed.

But that has been the case. You’ve actually.

[00:51:26] Sharon McKenna: Well, it’s been, you know, I have to give credit to a great guy who’s come on as, as an executive producer who donated quite a bit. And, and the thing is, little bunches of little donations add up to a lot and people don’t have to give a lot. 10 bucks, 15.

You know what I mean, if, if more people put it in the kitty.

But you know what? I, I’ve, I had to accept the fact that I can’t boil the, the ocean with this film. I can’t have a scope so broad and have it be so long with so many interviews that it’s just unwieldy and, and not cost efficient.

And so I’ve done a lot of things cheaper. You know, I’ve never paid myself a dime for all the time I’ve spent on it. My son’s doing the animations and. Which we haven’t really talked about the angle of animation in the film, which is important, but you were doing it as inexpensively as possible.

[00:52:26] Dennis McKenna: I think your donors appreciate that.

They’re not donating money so you could have luxury vacations.

[00:52:33] Sharon McKenna: Exactly.

[00:52:34] Dennis McKenna: You’re using the money for the project.

They respect it. That’s been my experience with McKenna Academy. People want to support some of our work because they respect the work and they know the money is going to. For that. It’s not going to pay high price.

[00:52:52] Sharon McKenna: Exactly. I just hope people understand, like, when I release the film, if they’re like, well, why didn’t you interview this person? Or why didn’t you cover that topic? It’s not feasible to do it in a film and it’s not feasible to do it on a micro budget. But having said that, I think we’ve had some very quality shoots. We’ve got people who are licensing me footage that is amazing. And they’re doing it for little to no money, which is so wonderful.

So I think, you know, it’ll get done, but I do it. You know, the other thing I’ve been doing, which I think has led to sort of more donations coming in, is I communicate with the community all the time. So if people go to the going to getweirder.com website, you can sign up for newsletter, you don’t have to donate, you can just sign up.

And roughly every three weeks I’m communicating a whole bunch of stuff like, here’s the interview we just did. Here’s some behind the scenes footage. Here’s recommended reading. You know, like Graham’s book I put on on a newsletter.

[00:53:54] Dennis McKenna: You’re going to release a number of these things in the coming weeks, culminating with the release of this podcast on the 29th. Is that how it works?

[00:54:03] Sharon McKenna: Yeah. And I’ll keep communicating with people. I think donors want to know, are you progressing with the project?

How close?

[00:54:12] Dennis McKenna: I think this is perfect, Jared, because you’re not trying to make a feature film. This is not that it’s a.

You’re right to recognize that it has its limitations. It sits in a comfortable place and it will be a valuable contribution.

A couple of questions on the practical level that you’ve. So how much more funding do you think you’ll need to complete this film? Or do you want to say, oh.

[00:54:45] Sharon McKenna: Yeah, I mean you can see on our crowdfunding page that for. We call this the initial raise. Our goal is 35,000 and I think we’re at 13,000 and that will get us through a rough cut edit. If we can get to 35,000 post production and festival applications and all the costs along with that’s probably another 30 to 50,000. So I think, you know, for 100,000 total we can finish this film. And I’ve already put a big chunk of that in myself over the last 25 years and I just got to the point where I couldn’t do that anymore.

As you know, I make my living writing and writing is being just decimated by AI. So I had been self funding off of my writing work and it’s, it’s really getting tough. So anything we get will help. It’ll get done no matter what. I mean that’s the promise.

[00:55:41] Dennis McKenna: And the collective project, you, I mean it’s a community project.

[00:55:45] Sharon McKenna: It’s, it’s a people powered project. It’s, it’s not a, it’s not a commissioned by Netflix project. This is a festival film.

And what I’m hoping to do, Dennis, is also do screenings in various cities for low or no cost admission. So I want as many people as possible to see it without having to pay a lot of money to see it. And I’m trying to build events around those screenings.

So the goal is to be able to do all of that by next fall.

[00:56:17] Dennis McKenna: All.

[00:56:19] Sharon McKenna: And I think we can do it. So if anybody wants to help. And you know, a lot of people have just reached out and like I’m a creative person. I love Terence. What. How can I help you?

And I won’t name them all, but some of them are like, have big podcasts and lots of following and have shared the campaign on Twitter and they’re willing to help. And it. It’s just. It’s so gratifying, I have to say.

[00:56:43] Dennis McKenna: So the best, most direct way for people to support is through the crowdfunding site, which we will post on the podcast episode. But what is the name of the crowdfunding site?

[00:56:58] Sharon McKenna: It’s called Crowdfunder, but it’s not Funder er, it’s Funder R. So it’s Crowdfunder.

[00:57:06] Dennis McKenna: Okay.

[00:57:08] Sharon McKenna: And there’s great. You know, there’s perks, like if you donate at a certain level. Well, your book. We’re almost out of your book.

[00:57:15] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.

[00:57:15] Sharon McKenna: By the way, a lot of people have. Have requested your book. And then there’s a great bag for mushroom hunting that we created. There’s art. So there’s things you can get, or you can just donate and not. Not get any reward. But everybody who donates gets their name in the credits. Every single person will get their name.

So. Yeah. And if you go to the film website, going to getweirder.com you can also donate there and sign up for the newsletter. So there’s two ways to do it, and you can put that in the show notes.

But yeah, and. And any. Just. Even just like a note to say, hey, keep it up, or, you know, my favorite Terence McKenna quote is. Or, you know, it’s just. It’s a. Communicate. I like communicating with the people who are interested.

[00:58:05] Dennis McKenna: And that’s the best kind of way to fund something like this. It’s basically grassroots.

[00:58:12] Sharon McKenna: Totally.

[00:58:13] Dennis McKenna: What is your projected release date?

[00:58:18] Sharon McKenna: Well, there’s a couple of very big documentary festivals that I’m trying to make the late deadline for. So we’re hoping to release it in November of 2026. So about a year from now, it’ll be a certain person’s birthday. Well, we’re going to talk about birthdays in a minute, but next November, as you know, Terence will have been 80.

So I’m trying to build a whole sort of, you know, plan around that.

Have screenings where we maybe have speakers come in, have you come in, have a part B, have an 80th birthday party and release the film that. Yeah, there’s the international documentary festival that we’ll be submitting to Austin. There’s a whole bunch of festivals in that timeframe.

But the deadlines are coming up, so that’s why keep getting the money coming in.

[00:59:16] Dennis McKenna: Well, that sounds like a good target date.

I turn 75 tomorrow.

[00:59:24] Sharon McKenna: Well, that’s what I was going to say. I was going to say happy birthday to you.

[00:59:30] Dennis McKenna: No, no, we don’t have to do that. I’m not saying that.

It’s kind of a big. It’s kind of a milestone that.75.

And Terence, I’m acutely aware that Terence would have been 79 this year. So, you know, 80. 20, 26. He would have been 80 had he made it.

And he’s one of the few people, even though he passed away 25 years ago, he’s still very much part of the cultural conversation.

I sometimes joke. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I say he’s been dead for 25 years, and he has more Twitter followers than I do. What the hell is going on?

[01:00:14] Sharon McKenna: He’s just poking you from the afterlife.

[01:00:18] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, well, he did plenty of poking of me in this, too, but it’s just interesting, the longevity of his ideas and his thought. It’s a testimony to how far ahead of his time was. And he was always oriented toward the future, and he had a vision. I think the future that is emerging is not the one he would have hoped for. But.

[01:00:51] Sharon McKenna: But no, but he did.

[01:00:52] Dennis McKenna: That’s a whole other.

[01:00:53] Sharon McKenna: That’s a whole other thing.

The film does get into that, but, you know, he did. He did say novelty isn’t always good, you know, and that you have to. Might have to go through just an insane, massive transformation to get to something good. It is a very. It’s a very scary time right now. But happy birthday. And do you have any big plans?

[01:01:19] Dennis McKenna: Not really. I’m going to get a chocolate cake out of a deal. My lovely wife Sheila. And I’m happy with that as long as I get that you know our family well enough to know how important chocolate cake is. Yum. In the family dynamics, my father demanded every weekend when he would come home from work, there needed to be a chocolate cake there.

So, of course, Terence and I became total chocolate addicts. And that continues. So, anyway, Sharon, this has been a marvelous conversation.

[01:01:54] Sharon McKenna: Yeah, it’s been really fun. It’s just. And I’m so, you know, thank you for having me on. And I just feel very privileged to be in front of your community. I love what you’ve done with the Academy. I remember when you started it, and it’s, you know, and it’s like. It’s really come a long way. It’s. It’s an amazing resource. And we.

[01:02:15] Dennis McKenna: We keep plugging away, you know, and we’re making progress, I think, on a Few fronts.

And yeah, at. At least it keeps me off the streets, and I think the streets are probably grateful for that. So. So I enjoy being in my office here working on these podcasts and various academy things, you know, I mean, what else am I going to do? I’m an old retired guy.

[01:02:41] Sharon McKenna: Well, I. You do a lot at your. I. I hate to say at your age, but you are very active. Like you. I was shocked when we were in Colorado and you had done the mushroom festival and you were visiting friends and you were visiting family, and I was interviewing you and you were going up to the mountains. I was just like, I don’t know how you do it. You have an amazing.

[01:03:02] Dennis McKenna: I go out on these trips and do all these things, then I come home and collapse for a week. That’s how I do it.

Anyway, is there anything we didn’t say that you want to be sure we say before we close out?

[01:03:15] Sharon McKenna: No, I just want to mention that we are trying because psychedelics are visual, and I think Terence’s story is a very visual story. But what we don’t want to do in the film is have just, you know, archival footage. Somebody comments. Archival footage. Somebody comments. I mean, I think that would be fine, but that’s not as interesting. So we are incorporating stop motion animation contextually, not a ton of it, but we are doing some very innovative paper animations, particularly when it comes to maybe illustrating some of the concepts of Terence’s, whether it’s the Time Wave or Stoned Ape or whatever we decide to go into. So my son is working on those and he’s a brilliant animator. And so just wanted to kind of mention that because I think there is a younger audience who is used to a certain visual style.

[01:04:13] Dennis McKenna: That’s great. That’s an angle that. But yeah, I’m glad you mentioned it because, let’s face it, a lot of Terence’s, the younger demographic, that resonates with Terence, they don’t read books anymore.

[01:04:29] Sharon McKenna: I know.

[01:04:30] Dennis McKenna: Sadly, different universe. They’re not going to read Graham St. John’s book, unfortunately, because they should, but they’re just not book reading.

[01:04:38] Sharon McKenna: Some will, but.

[01:04:38] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, maybe this will help help fill in the gaps. Maybe it’ll motivate him to read the book. But.

[01:04:46] Sharon McKenna: Oh, and people can see on your. I think you’re posting the teaser on your. The teaser video on the website, because I haven’t done the trailer yet, the film trailers in development, but you can see paper animation there that Declan McKenna, my son, did, so you can kind of get an idea for. For what we’re doing.

[01:05:04] Dennis McKenna: Okay. Okay. Well, since you have the trailer, of course, give it to him. We’ll post it.

And good luck.

[01:05:13] Sharon McKenna: Well, thank you, cuz. And, you know, happy, happy birthday. Don’t go anywhere. We need you. Stick around.

[01:05:22] Dennis McKenna: I’m not checking out. I have too much trouble to still stir up, so I’m sticking around. Don’t worry about that.

[01:05:28] Sharon McKenna: Okay.

[01:05:29] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. All right. Merry Christmas, Sharon.

[01:05:31] Sharon McKenna: Okay, thank you.

[01:05:32] Dennis McKenna: Happy holidays to everyone in our audience, and we’ll be in touch. Thanks again. Thank you.

[01:05:39] Sharon McKenna: Thank you.

[01:05:40] Dennis McKenna: Bye. Bye.

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