Graham St. John: Terence Mckenna's Hallucinatory Life

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Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Graham St John, a cultural anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield in the UK.

Graham has spent decades studying transformational events, psychedelic culture, and electronic dance music scenes. He's written ten books, and his latest is Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, 2025). McKenna was the 20th century's psychedelic renaissance man, a stand-up philosopher who became a sampled voice on rave tracks and a herald of consciousness expansion.

Graham spent years tracking down letters, interviewing over 80 people, and sifting through archives to capture McKenna's life, not to canonize or condemn him, but to understand how this rogue scholar became both hero and controversy in equal measure.

We talk about the challenge of writing a biography when your subject was known for embellishing stories, and why distinguishing fact from fiction in McKenna's "hallucinatory life" matters.

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