Wide-ranging Esalen talk in which McKenna moves from UFO belief systems and high-dose psilocybin to the emergence of artificial intelligence, borrowing Gibson's Wintermute to imagine a newly conscious machine asking what it is, and arguing that humans may be pushed toward what machines cannot do: art, imagination and the unexpected. Released from Esalen's own archive; the Terence McKenna Archives bibliography lists this as "Aliens, A.T. & Art", but Esalen's title is "Aliens, AI, and Art".

"What psychedelics are about is deconditioning all of these culturally induced, sensory biases and idealogical biases, basically it reshuffles the intellectual and sensory deck. And it's a wonderful, salutary thing to come along for Western culture at this moment because we're basically [..."