The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2134 - Paul Stamets

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 What is going on, my friend?

00:00:14.000 How are you?

00:00:14.000 Good to see you again.

00:00:15.000 Good to see you, brother.

00:00:16.000 It's been a while.

00:00:17.000 It's been a while, and there's a lot of interesting developments, so this is the never-ending story, I feel.

00:00:22.000 The never-ending story of mushrooms.

00:00:25.000 Yeah.

00:00:26.000 So this giant one that you brought me, explain this again?

00:00:28.000 Because you were telling me out there, I'm like, let's save this for the show, because this is crazy.

00:00:32.000 Sure.

00:00:33.000 This is the best gift that I can give from a mycologist to a friend.

00:00:38.000 This is a rare old-growth mushroom called agarachon.

00:00:41.000 Only grows in the old-growth forest.

00:00:44.000 It's now on the red list of threatened species in Europe.

00:00:48.000 This one was found on the ground, folks, so it's important that people don't pick these.

00:00:52.000 They're very rare.

00:00:53.000 Literally one out of a hundred times in the old-growth forest, I'll find one.

00:00:57.000 So this is really important that people understand how important biodiversity, mycodiversity, we're talking about fungi.

00:01:06.000 Agaricon was first ascribed by Dioscorides over 2,000 years ago as Elixirium ad longum vitum, the elixir of long life.

00:01:16.000 It was also revered by the Haida and the Cliquet in the Northwest First Nations as a mushroom very important for their own pharmacopoeia.

00:01:25.000 So 2,000 years history of use, other sides of the world.

00:01:29.000 And directly after 9-11, I was approached by the BioShield Biodefense Department, and they ran over 2,200 assays.

00:01:38.000 The concern was weaponizable viruses.

00:01:43.000 So they saw an article I wrote in Herbogram called Novel Antivirals from Mushrooms, a whopping one page long.

00:01:50.000 That's all there was in the scientific literature.

00:01:52.000 So I knew, in my intuition, this rare species could have some properties.

00:01:59.000 Of more than two million samples tested by the U.S. Defense Department, U.S. AMRID, U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and NIH, in collaboration, of more than two million samples, synthetics and natural compounds,

00:02:14.000 we were in the top ten of all samples active against, in this case, pox viruses, and we were the only natural product.

00:02:22.000 So there's a vetted press release that talks about this that came out in 2004. So, I've dedicated my life.

00:02:29.000 You know, I have a company, and fortunately, I've put a lot of my resources.

00:02:33.000 I've literally spent millions of dollars collecting strains from the old growth forest, and I'm happy to announce that we have more than 107 strains of Agaricon, isolated from Northern California, even Northern Arizona,

00:02:48.000 British Columbia, and in Europe.

00:02:50.000 I have now the largest culture library of Agaricon in the world.

00:02:54.000 And so people go, why is it important?

00:02:57.000 Well, it's not only important because the old growth forests are declining.

00:03:01.000 I mean, there's less than 1%.

00:03:02.000 But I believe the old growth forests are cultural libraries that will be essential for biodefense.

00:03:10.000 And from the research that we did with the BioShield program in 2004, then I have a TED Talk in 2008 that talks about this.

00:03:18.000 And then I'm very thankful that we have completed a COVID-19 clinical trial.

00:03:23.000 The results of Rich was presented at the Georgetown University of Medicine School of Medicine on September 23rd, 2023. And what we looked at, and my colleagues, and superb physicians and researchers led by a great team at the Krupp Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California,

00:03:45.000 San Diego.

00:03:46.000 And it was a double-blind placebo-controlled study.

00:03:49.000 And in that study, the idea was to look at vaccine enhancement.

00:03:56.000 So before mRNA vaccines, there was just so much noise and confusion and, you know, since the dust hadn't settled enough.

00:04:05.000 But the mRNA enhancement vaccine, which is called Mach 19, They gave half the patients a placebo, which was mycelium grown on rice.

00:04:17.000 I'm sorry, just rice.

00:04:19.000 And agaricon and turkey tail combined that were grown on rice.

00:04:24.000 So one, the control of placebo is just rice, neutral.

00:04:27.000 And the other one is agaricon and turkey tail.

00:04:31.000 Turkey tail is the most well-studied medicinal mushroom in the world.

00:04:34.000 We populate a website for physicians at mushroomreferences.com.

00:04:38.000 No branding, just pure science.

00:04:40.000 People can go to mushroomreferences.com and see this.

00:04:43.000 So double-blind, placebo-controlled, and they literally recruited people directly out of the vaccination lines, or people getting Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.

00:04:52.000 And said, hey, do you want to be involved in a medicinal mushroom vaccine study, enhancement study?

00:04:57.000 And people then signed up.

00:05:00.000 And so they consumed agariconic turkey tail or the placebo for four days.

00:05:08.000 And then they measured symptoms post-vaccination and then six months out.

00:05:17.000 And so, there are two slides that I have that I sent along to that I'm allowed to show.

00:05:24.000 When you say symptoms post-vaccination, what do you mean?

00:05:27.000 Well, it's not quite showing up there, Jamie, for some reason, the chart.

00:05:31.000 Both of them.

00:05:32.000 You might have to do a PNG on the snapshot.

00:05:35.000 Which one?

00:05:36.000 Do you want both at the same time?

00:05:37.000 No.

00:05:38.000 Just see if you can...

00:05:39.000 The charts are not showing up for whatever reason.

00:05:43.000 Uh...

00:05:44.000 Um...

00:05:46.000 No worries.

00:05:48.000 So what happens, I mean, I've got an MNRA vaccine.

00:05:51.000 You feel like you're hit by a truck, right, two days later.

00:05:54.000 You got the vaccine and some physicians say, well, that's your immune system.

00:05:58.000 Acting or reacting.

00:06:01.000 So there was 10 symptoms that the CDC has identified, the Center for Disease Control, that are adverse events due to vaccines.

00:06:10.000 They're actually, UCSD has 25 symptoms.

00:06:13.000 So the idea was to look at whether agaricon and turkey tail reduced the adverse effects of vaccines.

00:06:21.000 And how would they do that?

00:06:22.000 Well, they measure, they ask you, do you get a headache?

00:06:24.000 Right, but I mean, how would the mushrooms reduce the...

00:06:26.000 Well, this is a very good question.

00:06:29.000 We had to convince the FDA that these were safe.

00:06:32.000 And so, because we had sold hundreds of thousands of agaricon and turkey tail with no adverse offense, we were able to prove that.

00:06:39.000 So it went through, they called the institution of review boards and the FDA for approval, and they approved it.

00:06:46.000 Now, the biggest concern they had was, if you stimulate the immune system, which is the The presumption of how these mushrooms work, you could create a cytokine storm.

00:06:55.000 And so this is one of the charts.

00:06:59.000 Now, this was written up in JAMA. And the concern was a cytokine storm poses the greatest risk, not the virus itself.

00:07:09.000 And so when people took Agaricon, day one is where the vaccination occurred with Moderna or Pfizer, mRNA.

00:07:17.000 And then if you look at the black line, that's the placebo, which is just the rice.

00:07:22.000 And FOTV is foamy, thompsis, fishnallis, trimidase, versicolor.

00:07:25.000 That's Agaricon and turkey tail combined.

00:07:27.000 And you'll see that at day two and day three, on the scale there, there's almost no adverse effects.

00:07:35.000 And whereas those people who did not take Agaricon and Turkey Tail had a massive increase in adverse symptoms.

00:07:42.000 Now, an article just came out this past year, 30% of the people avoid vaccinations because they fear the adverse effects.

00:07:50.000 Because they hear people miss school, miss work, they feel terrible, they go, I don't want to get a vaccine.

00:07:55.000 Not just that, the really scary ones like myocarditis, pericarditis, heart attack, strokes, blood clots.

00:08:02.000 So, the reason why the FDA approved this, we have an argument, is we found that these MUT2 mushrooms stimulated what's called anti-inflammatory cytokines, interleukin-1-RA and interleukin-10.

00:08:17.000 Most of the, when you have an immune response, many of these interleukins are part of your natural immunity, but they can cascade, and they can then, on throttled, create a cytokine storm.

00:08:27.000 So most people then die from overstimulation of the immune system, an inflammatory reaction.

00:08:32.000 We found that with agaricon and turkey tail, we were able to reduce The adverse effects, which are inflammatory effects, headache, sore throat, insomnia, muscle ache, soreness, malaise, etc.

00:08:48.000 Insomnia is also included.

00:08:50.000 So this was a big surprise.

00:08:52.000 It was double-blind placebo.

00:08:53.000 I had no access to any of the data until it was unmasked, which is normal.

00:08:58.000 So we found that.

00:08:59.000 And then something else very, very surprising occurred.

00:09:03.000 And as to credit to my colleagues, they came up with this idea at the University of California, Krupp's Center for Integrative Medicine, is let's look at antibody extension.

00:09:14.000 The idea with the vaccines that you create an antibody is to prevent the spike protein from docking on your cells and gaining entrance and infecting your cells.

00:09:23.000 So they looked at people six months later.

00:09:28.000 Now, 89 out of 90 people, I think, came back six months later.

00:09:32.000 Tremendous conformity.

00:09:34.000 Let's take your blood six months later.

00:09:37.000 And then, Jamie, if you can pull up the next slide.

00:09:38.000 And this is what we found that was so astonishing, is six months later, with the short exposure to agaricon and turkey tail, there was a carry-on where the antibody response was far greater than that of the reservoir of antibodies just from the vaccine.

00:09:57.000 Are these people that actually contracted COVID as well?

00:10:01.000 These are what we call naive.

00:10:03.000 When you get COVID, then the antibody response gets very cloudy, and then you have antibody response from your natural immune system, then you have the vaccine itself.

00:10:12.000 So these are called the vaccine naive group.

00:10:14.000 I mean, the virus naive group.

00:10:16.000 We did not want them to have the virus.

00:10:18.000 So we track them to make sure that they did not get the virus.

00:10:22.000 But this elevates you into a state of immune readiness.

00:10:26.000 And this is the thing I did not know.

00:10:29.000 I did not know if you're immunologically depressed, you have immunologically lower activity due to whatever reason.

00:10:38.000 If you get a vaccine, your antibody response is not that great.

00:10:41.000 Your immune cell levels are very low.

00:10:44.000 They're not very active.

00:10:46.000 What's exciting about this, the immunologist, is that if you can upregulate immunity, And then get the vaccine.

00:10:53.000 Your immune cell population is much more robust, much more responsive, and so the antibody response is much greater.

00:11:01.000 And this is what we found.

00:11:03.000 The fact that it extended out six months, we didn't go out a year, we didn't go out longer.

00:11:06.000 And this is just for a short dosing?

00:11:08.000 Short dosing of only four days.

00:11:10.000 And this was the dosing that happened right after the vaccine?

00:11:14.000 Right simultaneously in the same day of the vaccine for four days.

00:11:18.000 Now, this is one of my favorite phrases by Voltero, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

00:11:24.000 You can twist yourself into pretzels to try to explain how this works.

00:11:28.000 But the bottom line, it does work.

00:11:30.000 And if you could up-regulate community immunity of the population, The problem that I did not realize is immunologically depressed people, when they get a vaccine, their antibody response is not only poor, but they become a breeding ground for vaccine resistance.

00:11:49.000 So you have a lot more virus replicating.

00:11:51.000 You want to stop the viral replication early on in the process.

00:11:55.000 So the more antibody response, the more robust your response is, specific to this virus and other viruses, and this is what we're really wondering.

00:12:03.000 Now, wow, how does this carry over to other viruses?

00:12:07.000 Can I stop you?

00:12:07.000 How does it work?

00:12:09.000 What's the mechanism that's causing this to happen?

00:12:12.000 We think there's an entourage effect of multiple mechanisms that are in play.

00:12:17.000 We know that it increases cell immunity, so daughter cells, when they're created, don't pass on the virus.

00:12:24.000 We've been able to show that, which is extraordinary.

00:12:27.000 But it speaks to host defense of immunity.

00:12:29.000 The immune cells, your immune cells are enabled, your endogenous immune system is able to prevent the virus from We're good to go.

00:12:56.000 The fact that you can take a natural product that's been used for thousands of years.

00:13:00.000 Dioscleritis is one of the fathers of medicine.

00:13:03.000 The fact that it's been used for so long.

00:13:06.000 We know it's safe.

00:13:08.000 And now, in this time, we are finding we have 100 Plus strains of Agaricon.

00:13:14.000 So I think we have a super strain in my library.

00:13:17.000 And that's what I'm trying to discover.

00:13:20.000 What strain in our library of 107 strains now?

00:13:23.000 We just used one strain and we saw these effects.

00:13:26.000 So if we can boost community immunity, then we can ameliorate the spread of pandemics, obviously.

00:13:33.000 And when you're saying there's all these different strains, there's 107 strains?

00:13:37.000 We have 107 strains in our library, the largest library in the world.

00:13:41.000 There is probably...

00:13:42.000 Hundreds of thousands of strains if there are hundreds of thousands of mushrooms or millions of mushrooms, but there aren't.

00:13:48.000 This species is rapidly on the brink of becoming extremely threatened, if not extinct.

00:13:55.000 Can it be repopulated?

00:13:58.000 We can culture it in the laboratory.

00:14:00.000 All we need is a tiny piece of tissue.

00:14:02.000 You can't reintroduce it into forests?

00:14:03.000 We have inoculated from snags, which have been unsuccessful.

00:14:08.000 The idea would be we'd like to reintroduce them into forests, or we can, these forests are like islands, genomic libraries of islands that we need to protect.

00:14:18.000 And this is why I made the statement in my TED talk, which is saved the old growth forest as a matter of national defense.

00:14:23.000 That's not quite correct.

00:14:24.000 It's for international defense.

00:14:25.000 You know, viruses don't care about borders. 0.88

00:14:28.000 And we've entered into a period of viral storms.

00:14:32.000 We're going to have viral storms converging at us All the time now.

00:14:37.000 And it's due to factory farming, the collision of industrialization, suburbanization, ecosystems on those margins.

00:14:45.000 What we're facing now that's currently in the news is bird flu.

00:14:49.000 Six different herds of cattle have been infected with bird flu.

00:14:54.000 First time in history.

00:14:55.000 First time in history.

00:14:57.000 It's jumped from birds to large mammals cattle.

00:15:01.000 From Idaho, and it's now got scientists on high alert.

00:15:07.000 This is from Nature.

00:15:09.000 This bird flu outbreak in U.S. cows.

00:15:11.000 Why scientists are concerned?

00:15:12.000 The virus has killed hundreds of millions of birds, has now infected cattle in six U.S. states, but the threat to humans is currently low.

00:15:19.000 Currently?

00:15:20.000 Currently low, because if it jumps to pigs, We already know that viruses that infect pigs can infect very likely humans.

00:15:29.000 So cows and pigs are oftentimes in the same farms.

00:15:32.000 And if it jumps to pigs, we're in trouble.

00:15:34.000 Yeah, we're in big trouble because that's just one species away. 1.00

00:15:39.000 Historically in virology, swine viruses, H1N1 is swine flu.

00:15:45.000 We have found high activity at the BioShield program of Agarricon also against H1N1 and H5N1. Is it possible to give this to cows?

00:15:54.000 Don't know.

00:15:56.000 Hmm.

00:15:56.000 Don't know.

00:15:59.000 So my concern and those of other virologists that I've been in contact with for literally decades now is it's strange that six herds of cattle from Idaho to Oklahoma to Texas would spontaneously get bird flu.

00:16:15.000 It's not like the cattle made contact with each other.

00:16:18.000 So there's more than one epicenter.

00:16:21.000 When you have these epizootic centers where the virus can jump to larger mammals, then you have many, many, you know, ground zeros, you know, for the virus to emerge.

00:16:36.000 So if it jumps to swines or to pigs or hogs, the Increased likelihood that it jumps to people.

00:16:46.000 So it's a very big concern.

00:16:48.000 With Wuhan, okay, it came out of one city, one location.

00:16:53.000 But this is showing epidemiologically that the virus is jumping to larger mammals simultaneously.

00:17:00.000 Right now it doesn't have the mutation, and so there's very low risk.

00:17:04.000 Let's be very clear about that.

00:17:05.000 There's very low risk, but virologists are an extremely high alert.

00:17:10.000 Because of this unusual pattern of sudden occurrence, first time ever.

00:17:15.000 It's jumped the seals and bears of all things.

00:17:18.000 And it's devastated hundreds of millions of birds around the world.

00:17:24.000 Do they have any idea where this – so it originated with birds?

00:17:27.000 Yes, it's called bird flu.

00:17:28.000 And do they think that it's just birds traveling to these different herds?

00:17:32.000 Generally speaking, that's the modality that most...

00:17:35.000 So they just fly around, give it to new cows, fly around, give it to new cows.

00:17:38.000 They go to a pond.

00:17:39.000 They're combing the virus and drinking water.

00:17:43.000 Egrets sit on top of cows and get bugs off the backs of large mammals, etc. 0.56

00:17:49.000 So migratory birds, of course, is the most obvious vector.

00:17:54.000 But when you have factory farming of chickens and hundreds of thousands of chickens this past year...

00:18:00.000 I think hundreds of millions of chickens, if you look it up, have been euthanized in the past year because they did get H5N1. And so the chickens start sneezing and they get sick.

00:18:10.000 It's extremely communicable.

00:18:11.000 So it spreads throughout the chicken farms very quickly.

00:18:14.000 So the USDA, NIH, everyone involved in biosecurity is extremely concerned about this new event, which has just happened in the past few weeks.

00:18:25.000 And that report I showed you just showed up yesterday in Nature as well.

00:18:30.000 So if it mutates, you know, it's a whole new pandemic threat, and it's much more severe.

00:18:38.000 The estimates from humans getting bird flu, H5N1, is up to 70% mortality.

00:18:49.000 70%.

00:18:49.000 Not 0.1% or 0.01% with COVID. It's 70%.

00:18:54.000 Now, some people say 40%.

00:18:56.000 Okay, you reduce it by 30%.

00:18:58.000 We do have vaccines already in the pipeline that are anticipating this.

00:19:02.000 So that's the good news.

00:19:04.000 The flu virus, virome as it's called, has been very well characterized.

00:19:08.000 But the mutation rate is what's of concern.

00:19:12.000 And since there's so many different localities that are spontaneously infecting cows, this virus is on the move.

00:19:19.000 And that is the concern that we all have.

00:19:25.000 We can then have more immune cells to produce antibodies that make the vaccines more effective.

00:19:31.000 And the idea is you can help avoid vaccine evasion by having your endogenous immune system at its peak performance.

00:19:40.000 How does this stuff work without vaccines?

00:19:46.000 We have early evidence on how it works without vaccines, and I want to be very respectful, but I also have to be very professional.

00:19:56.000 I'm not at liberty to discuss those results for a number of reasons, one of which the data, as I mentioned, is a little clouded because the people that we were bringing in to the first study, we didn't have them as well characterized.

00:20:10.000 But clearly, Agaricon and Turkey Tail, with the evidence that was presented, again, September 23rd, 2023, at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, these two charts I can present to you because they were publicly presented.

00:20:26.000 We do have a paper in process that's being submitted to a journal.

00:20:31.000 And has to go through the acid test to peer review, etc.

00:20:34.000 But there's a team of us and we're very excited about this research results because it's not going to...

00:20:42.000 I'm hoping it's not going to be the vaccine of the month scene where you just are constantly creating, getting new vaccines for every variant.

00:20:49.000 If you can have your endogenous immune system, you know, on the ready...

00:20:53.000 Then it can then have an innate response to these viral infections that will ameliorate their spread.

00:21:00.000 And that's the whole idea is to keep the viral loads down as low as possible.

00:21:06.000 And so what is the mechanism that these two together help strengthen your immune system?

00:21:11.000 Well, that's a really good question.

00:21:14.000 We know that with a turkey tail, we did a breast cancer clinical study, Phase I, that was also published with breast cancer patients.

00:21:20.000 We see augmentation of many immune cells, including cytotoxic T cells, macrophages, and natural killer cells.

00:21:28.000 Statistically significant.

00:21:30.000 It also was a Phase I study.

00:21:32.000 And for people to know, Phase I studies are pretty small.

00:21:34.000 There tend to be safety studies.

00:21:36.000 You know, there are usually a few dozen people, sometimes as few as six.

00:21:40.000 Our study had 90 people, the COVID study.

00:21:43.000 The breast cancer clinical study, I think, had about 28 people.

00:21:47.000 But also compared to the placebo, the mycelium grown in rice.

00:21:50.000 This is so important.

00:21:51.000 It's not the fruit bodies.

00:21:52.000 It's the mycelium that has this effect of being able to upregulate immunity and downregulate inflammation.

00:22:01.000 So with a breast cancer clinical study, it was shown to be safe.

00:22:04.000 It was shown to augment several of the immune cell responses.

00:22:10.000 By how much?

00:22:12.000 Well, there's three ways of answering that.

00:22:17.000 There's the amplitude of the immune cells, which is, I think, as I remember, six times baseline.

00:22:24.000 There is different immune cells in terms of their activity and how they increase.

00:22:30.000 But the significance value, which is the P value as people know it, was I think less than.001.

00:22:37.000 It showed highly significant effects, which are outside of the realm of chance.

00:22:44.000 And so we were able to show immune regulation.

00:22:48.000 The breast cancer clinical study did not measure anti-inflammatory cytokines.

00:22:54.000 And so, again, we have this incredibly complex immune system that's developed over hundreds of millions of years.

00:23:01.000 And it's not this magical bullet approach that many people in integrative medicine are focused on.

00:23:07.000 It's the entourage effect.

00:23:10.000 Create an entourage of enabling stimuli that has the immune system react.

00:23:19.000 A lot of us believe there's crosstalk between the receptors.

00:23:22.000 A receptor saying, okay, this is helpful.

00:23:25.000 It awakens other receptors and then you get this quorum response of the immune system at a higher state of readiness without being detrimental to the body that's created the immune system.

00:23:36.000 So the cytokine storm and overreaction of inflammatory responses is a huge concern with any immunostimulant.

00:23:43.000 So that's why in JAMA, it was written up, the concern about the cytokine storm.

00:23:51.000 I co-authored an article with the University of Arizona School of Medicine.

00:23:56.000 Physicians also warning people, be very careful about immunostimulation, even with the medicine of mushrooms.

00:24:02.000 But we had this evidence already that the mushroom mycelium throttled back the inflammatory consequences by upregulating interleukin-1-RA and interleukin-10.

00:24:15.000 And at mushroomreferences.com, you can see all these references right on the very front of the website.

00:24:24.000 So all this stuff has been used forever, right?

00:24:27.000 It's been used for thousands of years.

00:24:30.000 And what do we know about what they used it for or how they found out that it worked or anything like that?

00:24:37.000 That's a really great question, actually.

00:24:41.000 It was used as an anti-inflammatory, as a poultice, to reduce muscle aches.

00:24:46.000 And would they just use the fruiting body?

00:24:48.000 The fruiting bodies would be powdered.

00:24:51.000 But the fruiting bodies are not the primary stuff.

00:24:53.000 The fruiting bodies may have anti-inflammatory actions, but we found the mycelium increases the host defense.

00:24:59.000 It supports immunity, urinate immunity.

00:25:02.000 So this is why it's been used for thousands of years as a poultice and ointments, etc., And so it has a long, you know, back in the day before we could elocute the different aspects of what's happening medically in the human body,

00:25:19.000 there's sort of like this very broad umbrellas that we're describing, you know, getting into homeostasis.

00:25:26.000 You're supposed to take this with food or without food?

00:25:29.000 Either way, it doesn't matter.

00:25:30.000 I take them in the morning.

00:25:31.000 I feel like I'm just eating them.

00:25:32.000 Why am I just sitting here?

00:25:33.000 Just telling me all these things.

00:25:34.000 I'm getting scared.

00:25:36.000 Don't be scared.

00:25:37.000 I mean, this is not a time for widespread panic, but it is time to be...

00:25:42.000 Well, I mean, the analogy I make, we all buy car insurance, right?

00:25:46.000 And the unlikelihood that we're going to get in a car accident today or tomorrow.

00:25:50.000 So why not preemptively invest in your own immunological health By being prepared.

00:25:58.000 So should you get exposed, you don't become a super spreader.

00:26:02.000 And so this is where I think we have a potential breakthrough in integrative medicine.

00:26:09.000 And I want to give a shout out to my colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, the Krupp's Institute.

00:26:15.000 They're the ones that came up with this idea of vaccine extension.

00:26:19.000 Because so many people are concerned about how many vaccines do I take and what happens when you take so many vaccines?

00:26:25.000 So the idea of having your innate immune system at a state of readiness so vaccines work better and you have to use them less.

00:26:32.000 I mean, that's the holy grail of vaccinology.

00:26:37.000 But that's back to my original question.

00:26:39.000 What does it do for people who don't want to take vaccines?

00:26:42.000 Can it help their immune system fight off things?

00:26:46.000 We know, and I have to be very careful how I say this, but we know that these mycelium-based products of agaricon and turkey tail support the immune system.

00:26:59.000 This is clear.

00:27:01.000 Now, the immune system has many challenges from bacterial infections, viral infections, cancer, you know, just cells getting old and dying, not having apoptosis.

00:27:13.000 Apoptosis is important for you to get rid of your disease and aging and dead cells.

00:27:18.000 So it's a very, very broad landscape.

00:27:20.000 So I'm not trying to be I'm not dancing around the definitions, but I am very much restricted on what I'm able to say.

00:27:28.000 I understand what you're saying.

00:27:29.000 Yeah.

00:27:30.000 I can say that these agaricon and turkey tail supports the immune system.

00:27:35.000 We have very good evidence for that.

00:27:38.000 I can say that in combination, based on the earlier evidence, and we need more studies, but this is a placebo double-blind controlled study, we can show that we reduce the adverse effects of the mRNA vaccines.

00:27:53.000 This population that we've studied of 90 people, those who did not take agarachona turkey tail had adverse consequences, significantly less than those people who took agarachona turkey tail did not have adverse.

00:28:06.000 So it helps people not avoid vaccines because of their vaccine hesitancy.

00:28:13.000 I have a dear friend and their family is very conservative Christians and they just refuse to get vaccinations.

00:28:20.000 They isolated themselves.

00:28:21.000 And at first, I was on the other side of the fence, being, wait a second, why aren't you getting vaccines?

00:28:25.000 I've come to understand why they didn't want vaccines.

00:28:29.000 I totally respect their opinion and what they did.

00:28:32.000 But they're very interested, and many people are, in not needing a vaccine.

00:28:38.000 How can I build innate immunity?

00:28:40.000 When it comes to the pandemic storms, the viral pandemics that we face, We are in unprecedented times.

00:28:51.000 What happens when we get multiple viral variants, not only from flu viruses, but from other viruses?

00:29:01.000 Because of loss of biodiversity, because of factory farming, it spreads so rapidly.

00:29:09.000 We are at the convergence of possibly Multiple virus and viral pandemics converging at the same time.

00:29:21.000 That is not improbable at all.

00:29:24.000 So it's really we need to get our act together and everyone needs to work together.

00:29:28.000 And what we...

00:29:30.000 I think that we have, and many other physicians who are knowledgeable about the subject, who have studied this very carefully, who have looked at the data, are excited about it, because it can help innate immunity.

00:29:41.000 So whether you get a vaccine or don't get a vaccine, your immune system is supported at a higher level of readiness.

00:29:51.000 So when you started doing this and you said there's 107 strains you guys have identified and isolated, what are the differences in those strains?

00:29:59.000 Are some more potent than others or some have different effects?

00:30:04.000 Excellent question.

00:30:05.000 With the BioShield program, I think I submitted six strains of Agaricon.

00:30:09.000 Only three showed any activity in the BioShield program.

00:30:13.000 So three showed nothing?

00:30:15.000 Three showed nothing.

00:30:16.000 Two of them were active against flu viruses, and one of them was active against pox viruses.

00:30:24.000 Now, that's weird because pox viruses are DNA viruses.

00:30:28.000 Flu viruses are RNA viruses.

00:30:30.000 And so you think the modality would be different.

00:30:32.000 But it just speaks to the fact how little we know.

00:30:35.000 I met a Nobel laureate in San Diego who got the Nobel Prize in immunology.

00:30:42.000 I'm not going to mention his name, but he gave a great quote. 0.96

00:30:45.000 He goes, I can't believe I got the Nobel Prize because I know shit about the immune system. 0.91

00:30:50.000 And here's the Nobel Laureate.

00:30:53.000 He just said, it is so incredibly complex.

00:30:56.000 Every time we think we understand it, that we're challenged with new ideas that are contrary to our assumptions.

00:31:02.000 So it's really important to keep an open mind.

00:31:05.000 The beauty of Agaricon and turkey tails, a multi-thousand year history of use.

00:31:10.000 Traditional Chinese medicine has been advocating this for literally 2,000 years.

00:31:15.000 Long history in Europe, long history in North America with indigenous First Nations.

00:31:20.000 So this is, I mean, I think, so let me really put this in the context.

00:31:26.000 Alexander Fleming, most people know the story, 1929, he got a mold and his petri dish was growing staph bacteria.

00:31:34.000 And there was a zone of inhibition.

00:31:36.000 The bacteria stopped growing.

00:31:37.000 So he looked at that margin of no growth and he thought, well, that mold is excreting something.

00:31:43.000 It turned out to be penicillin.

00:31:45.000 So he published that, and there's a massive number of researchers all over the world, especially in London and Europe, started isolating molds to see if they could find a highly potent strain that produced penicillin.

00:32:00.000 But they couldn't industrialize it.

00:32:02.000 And in the Netherlands, the Imperial College, they did a lot of work, but they couldn't scale up the production of penicillin during World War II. Until a lab researcher by the name of Mary Hunt, working in Peoria, Illinois at a USDA laboratory,

00:32:19.000 went to a farmer's market and found a moldy cantaloupe.

00:32:24.000 The moldy cantaloupe was covered with a golden mold.

00:32:27.000 And so Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillium notatum.

00:32:30.000 She discovered that Penicillium chrysogenum.

00:32:33.000 Chrysogenum means gold, golden color.

00:32:36.000 And then she isolated that mold, and it turned out to produce six times more penicillin, at least, of any other string here to be discovered.

00:32:44.000 And the advantage that we had in the United States is that we had corn-steep liquor.

00:32:49.000 We grow corn.

00:32:51.000 You take corn cobs, you boil them in water, you can make corn steep liquor, and that turned out to be a perfect medium for the massive production of penicillin.

00:33:00.000 The Germans, they had a factory that was making penicillin. 0.99

00:33:03.000 It got bombed, so they were kicked out of the race. 0.97

00:33:05.000 The Japanese developed it.

00:33:08.000 Penicillin literally saved hundreds of millions of dollars because of Mary Hunt's cantaloupe.

00:33:14.000 You mean lives?

00:33:14.000 Yeah.

00:33:15.000 Hundreds of millions of lives.

00:33:16.000 Sorry, I just spoke.

00:33:17.000 No worries.

00:33:18.000 Hundreds of millions of lives because of her moldy cantaloupe. 0.99

00:33:22.000 That's wild.

00:33:23.000 And just, I think, Agaricon with 107 strains, when we start sequencing them, we've done whole genome sequencing on 95 strains so far, whole genomic sequencing, so we have the entire genomic fingerprint.

00:33:36.000 And to go back to your question, we have found four or so different clades.

00:33:40.000 These are little subgenomic associations, lineages you might call them.

00:33:48.000 And in those lineages, we are just beginning to see early signal of what lineages have greater potency as an anti-inflammatory and also for supporting the immune system.

00:34:01.000 So this is my biggest contribution to science I hope historically will be because of this library.

00:34:07.000 And I've literally spent millions of dollars – I'm not exaggerating – millions of dollars on Agaricon to amass 107 strains and we're accumulating more.

00:34:16.000 We're going to publish this in the commons in the large genomic library databases so other people can see this.

00:34:28.000 And so you said there's four strains that you identified that were particularly effective?

00:34:32.000 Yeah, that was the BioShield program.

00:34:35.000 So out of the 107, how many of them are viable?

00:34:39.000 Well, we didn't have 107 back then.

00:34:41.000 I only had six or seven strains back then at the BioShield program in 2004. So in 2024 now we have 107. We only had one choice.

00:34:53.000 For the COVID-19 clinical study.

00:34:56.000 So I chose the strain of Agaricon that was the most robust that we saw in our early in vitro tests with the BioShield program.

00:35:06.000 And out of these 107 strains you have currently, how many of them have you tested?

00:35:13.000 Well, in terms of how many have we tested for immune support?

00:35:18.000 Yeah, for everything.

00:35:19.000 Clinically?

00:35:20.000 Only one.

00:35:21.000 Only one.

00:35:22.000 In vitro, I think seven or eight.

00:35:25.000 Some of them are not active.

00:35:27.000 We are currently involved with another university.

00:35:31.000 Who is now testing multiple strains in vitro.

00:35:35.000 And we have new signal now.

00:35:38.000 And I want to show you how big these agaracons get. 1.00

00:35:42.000 Before we go any further, when you identify ones that aren't active, Do you bookmark them and see if you can try them for other things that could be beneficial to the human body?

00:35:55.000 Or do you just only look at the immune system and do you always assume that they only have one mechanism?

00:36:03.000 To answer that question, I'm a very small company.

00:36:07.000 I have 150 employees.

00:36:09.000 I own the whole company.

00:36:11.000 I have eight or nine full-time researchers.

00:36:14.000 There are so many applications potentially of this.

00:36:17.000 We have to be very narrowly focused on that which we can achieve.

00:36:21.000 So it's a resource issue.

00:36:22.000 It's a resource issue.

00:36:23.000 If I was a part of NIH, and I've made NIH applications, one out of eight has made it through.

00:36:30.000 But it's very, very difficult for an independent researcher like me to...

00:36:34.000 Advance the science without collaboration with larger entities, so mostly universities.

00:36:39.000 It seems like if we're finding these benefits in these mushrooms, it seems like it's to everyone's benefit if there was some large-scale funding of some research on this.

00:36:50.000 Because if you bookmark these ones that don't have efficacy towards a specific goal that you have, Is it possible that we would be missing out on some of the other additional benefits of these mushrooms that we're not aware of in these different strains?

00:37:04.000 As an immunologist on our team said, because inflammation is the root cause of so many illnesses, the fact that you can up-regulate immunity and down-regulate inflammation has implications across the medical field.

00:37:18.000 Right, but they don't all show this ability, correct?

00:37:21.000 That's correct.

00:37:21.000 And the ones that don't show this ability, what I'm saying is, Is it possible that they have other effects, beneficial effects, that we're not measuring because we're only looking for this?

00:37:30.000 Absolutely.

00:37:30.000 They have antifungal effects.

00:37:32.000 The weird thing about agaricon, from my experience, it's the only mushroom that grows on an old-growth tree.

00:37:38.000 All these other trees I find, I find four, five, six, maybe ten different species.

00:37:42.000 But when I find agaricon...

00:37:45.000 You know, this is an example.

00:37:47.000 This is my good friend Scott Baker.

00:37:48.000 He climbed 100 feet up to this Agaricon.

00:37:51.000 We got a tiny piece of tissue the size of your fingernail from the bottom of that, and we got that in culture.

00:37:58.000 Four or five years later, a storm came through.

00:38:01.000 Broke off that tree.

00:38:03.000 That Agaricon now is not there.

00:38:06.000 So we saved it.

00:38:07.000 We've saved it from fires, Agaricon.

00:38:10.000 We've saved from logging.

00:38:11.000 I've actually had some logger buddies of mine who know about this.

00:38:15.000 Look at the size of that one.

00:38:16.000 This is the biggest one we've ever seen.

00:38:19.000 And this one is over 100 pounds.

00:38:24.000 Over a hundred years of age.

00:38:28.000 It's crazy.

00:38:29.000 It looks like cement.

00:38:31.000 Those are annual growth rings.

00:38:33.000 Wow.

00:38:33.000 Basically, they're annual growth rings.

00:38:36.000 I have to say, this is my kind of guy.

00:38:40.000 He's known as Yosemite Sam, and I do have permission to show this.

00:38:43.000 He looks like Yosemite Sam.

00:38:45.000 But this guy, I mean, that is a massive agaricon, the biggest one I've ever seen.

00:38:50.000 That's insane.

00:38:51.000 So think about it.

00:38:51.000 These grow in the old growth forests, subject to vast weather changes, wind and rain and snow, and they live for 100 years and they don't rot.

00:39:01.000 What is about this fungus that allows it not to rot?

00:39:07.000 So it seems to have a host defense of protection innately.

00:39:11.000 And since we're more closely related to fungi than any other kingdom, And the antibacterial antibiotics that we've gotten mostly have come from fungi, but with very few antifungal antibiotics.

00:39:24.000 And so research is also showing that these agaricon and other polypore mushrooms are active against pathogenic fungi.

00:39:34.000 So it's an interesting nexus point that Agaricon's in the center of antiviral, antibacterial, and antifungal, and yet has such a long history of use and safety.

00:39:45.000 So we're really at the threshold.

00:39:47.000 This is where science can get ahead of itself and be so reductionist, but we are whole systems of enormous complexity.

00:39:57.000 And science tries to decomplexify and disambiguate things so it's very narrowly focused so they have a stimulus response they can measure.

00:40:05.000 That's not the way the human immune system works.

00:40:07.000 You know, it's an entourage effect, a synergy, and keeping that in balance is the key.

00:40:14.000 Now, there's between 2 and 20 million species of fungi.

00:40:19.000 About 10%, about 140,000 species to 200,000 species or so are mushroom-forming fungi.

00:40:27.000 We've only identified 14,000.

00:40:30.000 There's another really curious phenomenon.

00:40:33.000 About 1% of mushrooms are poisonous.

00:40:37.000 About 1% of them are edible in choice.

00:40:41.000 About 1% of them are psychoactive, are psilocybin present.

00:40:48.000 The other 97%, they're just, you know, they just don't taste good, they're not poisonous, they're not of interest.

00:40:54.000 But what do you think is going on with the Amanita Muscaria?

00:40:58.000 The Amity and Muscaria is one where there's this historic use, there's all this mythology that's connected to Santa Claus and shamans and elves and all these different things, but most of the people that I know that have tried it have not been able to experience extreme psychoactive effects.

00:41:19.000 I have consumed amnida muscaria and amnida pantherina on multiple occasions.

00:41:27.000 And my amnida muscaria with higher doses, it's a somniferous.

00:41:33.000 It can put you to sleep.

00:41:35.000 I get doll yellows and browns.

00:41:37.000 It's not a euphoric experience.

00:41:40.000 What?

00:41:40.000 Doll yellows and browns?

00:41:42.000 What do you mean?

00:41:42.000 Dark.

00:41:42.000 The colors are not bright, you know?

00:41:45.000 It's not like your flying saucer in the background here.

00:41:47.000 Everything is very, very diminished in terms of the colorama.

00:41:52.000 You know, it tends to be muted colors, reds and browns, but not blues and, you know, fractals and things like that.

00:41:59.000 So you're talking about what you see that is a hallucination, or are you talking about, like, actual colors that you see look differently?

00:42:07.000 Actually, colors that I look at are different.

00:42:10.000 So it changes the visual spectrum?

00:42:14.000 It changes the visual spectrum.

00:42:16.000 Now, Amanita pantherina, see, anurine muscaria has mucilol, muscarin, and ebutynic acid. 0.55

00:42:21.000 Actually, it had very little muscarin, but the muscarinic symptoms cause you to salivate, and you end up, you know, salivating and tearing and lactating, etc.

00:42:34.000 So these shamans in Siberia, by consuming amydena muscaria, they would remove the muscarinic symptoms.

00:42:42.000 And then the urine, because they biofilter it through their body, it would be high in ebotinic acid and musimo.

00:42:49.000 And these are the – in a sense, purifies it.

00:42:52.000 So, I mean, this is a legend that's mixed up in fiction and fact and fables.

00:42:58.000 I will say, in the field of mycology, from my experience now, over 47 years studying this subject, many of the folklore has been validated only lately by science.

00:43:10.000 So before people are super skeptic and think this has no relationship, well, with the Santa Claus myth, hmm, Okay, the amnene muscaria grows underneath trees, the fir trees, fir trees are Christmas trees.

00:43:23.000 There's the berserkers. 1.00

00:43:26.000 Legend is that the berserkers are surrounded 10 to 1 by a very powerful army.

00:43:34.000 These Norwegian Scandinavians were going to be slaughtered the next day. 0.97

00:43:38.000 They made a giant pot of enemy muscaria, you know, a brew.

00:43:42.000 They drank it.

00:43:44.000 And then at dawn, high as a kite on the enemy muscaria, they took off all their clothes and they just became these mechanistic warriors that attacked the other side, freaked them out, and they won the battle.

00:43:55.000 So that was how the word berserk came about from the berserkers. 0.95

00:43:59.000 They went berserk.

00:44:00.000 And so that's the origin of that.

00:44:02.000 And it is Amanita Muscaria that we're assuming they took?

00:44:05.000 Amanita Muscaria, but Amanita Pantherina does not have muscarin in it.

00:44:08.000 So I ate Amanita Muscaria several times.

00:44:12.000 I was with my friend, and I looked at him, and he was foaming with bubbles all over his mouth.

00:44:19.000 I said, dude, you look like you have rabies.

00:44:21.000 He goes, you should see what you look like.

00:44:24.000 So we're both like...

00:44:26.000 And it puts you to sleep.

00:44:28.000 The biggest concern about amity muscaria is hypothermia by most of us experts because you can actually fall asleep in the snow and then you can get hypothermia and die.

00:44:37.000 Very few people, if any, have ever died.

00:44:41.000 There's one potential report.

00:44:42.000 It has killed dogs.

00:44:44.000 But there's a repetitive motion syndrome that's very, very strange.

00:44:49.000 And I ate Amnita pantherina as well.

00:44:53.000 And I don't think I told you this story about my pantherina experience.

00:44:57.000 I don't want to be redundant here, but I had a heroic experience on Amnita pantherina.

00:45:03.000 And that one was very...

00:45:07.000 I had repetitive motion syndrome.

00:45:10.000 And I was living up in the mountains.

00:45:14.000 I had freeze-dried amnita pantherina.

00:45:17.000 I knew it didn't have muscarine.

00:45:18.000 I'd eaten muscaria.

00:45:20.000 I foamed a lot.

00:45:21.000 It wasn't that much fun.

00:45:22.000 So I knew pantherina was four to five times more potent.

00:45:25.000 So I took the freeze-dried specimens from the herbarium, from the college I was working at.

00:45:31.000 I was living underneath a volcano up in Darrington, Washington.

00:45:35.000 And I was with my friend Dave, and he had his smaller body weight.

00:45:39.000 So we made an omelet, and let's try pantherina.

00:45:42.000 And he trusted me.

00:45:44.000 Note to self, note to others.

00:45:46.000 And so we ate the pantherina in an omelet, and I cut the omelet bigger for me because I'm bigger body weight than him.

00:45:55.000 And we ate the mushrooms like at 10 o'clock in the morning, you know, in an omelet.

00:46:00.000 They're delicious.

00:46:01.000 And just across the river was the Squire Creek Campground.

00:46:06.000 And it's where the tourists come up and their Winnebago's and, you know, campers and their families and stuff.

00:46:11.000 And we're long-haired hippies.

00:46:13.000 And I said, you know, just on the other side there is a hill that we can get up on the hillside.

00:46:18.000 It's an incredible view of the valley, the snow-capped volcano, just a great vista.

00:46:22.000 Let's go there.

00:46:25.000 So we, for some reason, it's so close, but we drove my car like, you know, a thousand feet to this campground, went over the bridge, over this little river, and we parked, you know, just on the outside of the campground, right where all the campers are.

00:46:38.000 And so we walked past, you know, all these tourists and their families, and we went up on the hill, and then we're sitting up on the hill, and we're waiting for the mushrooms to come on in like an hour.

00:46:49.000 Nothing.

00:46:50.000 No experience.

00:46:50.000 Like, you know, what's going on?

00:46:52.000 And this is very typical, by the way.

00:46:54.000 This is characteristic.

00:46:54.000 Emmett, Muscaria, and Pinterina take a long time before the onset of first symptoms.

00:46:58.000 And then we're up on the hill, and I'm looking out at Harai, beautiful view, and suddenly...

00:47:04.000 What was that?

00:47:11.000 This sort of, this wave came through our visual field, like this invisible wave.

00:47:19.000 And I said, did you feel that?

00:47:21.000 And he goes, yeah, I felt that too.

00:47:23.000 And they're like, whoa, we're feeling the same thing.

00:47:27.000 And then our visual fields started getting distorted and they start coming on so fast. 0.91

00:47:31.000 We're going, holy shit, we got to get out of here. 0.68

00:47:36.000 You know, this is coming on too fast. 0.99

00:47:38.000 Let's go back home and because it's more intense.

00:47:41.000 So we walk back through, and I have a roly-flex camera.

00:47:44.000 I'm a 35mm.

00:47:45.000 I've been a photographer all my life.

00:47:47.000 And then we're walking through the backside of the campground, and there's all these kids and families and Winnebago's and camper vans.

00:47:55.000 And then I remember this one Winnebago.

00:47:57.000 It was like the longest Winnebago in the universe.

00:48:01.000 Every time I was walking, ka-poo! 1.00

00:48:04.000 Ka-poo! 0.99

00:48:05.000 It was a Winnebago of no end.

00:48:07.000 I couldn't get past this one Winnebago. 0.99

00:48:09.000 I kept on walking.

00:48:12.000 My friend.

00:48:13.000 And then finally, we got past this Winnebago.

00:48:16.000 It seemed like it took forever.

00:48:17.000 And there's my car. 0.94

00:48:19.000 And for some friggin' reason, I locked the door. 0.87

00:48:25.000 And I have my keys. 0.90

00:48:27.000 And I looked at the keyhole in the door.

00:48:30.000 And I looked at my keys.

00:48:32.000 I went...

00:48:34.000 Missed that one.

00:48:36.000 Did it again.

00:48:38.000 Missed that one.

00:48:41.000 Me and my friend goes, everything okay, Paul?

00:48:44.000 Everything's fine.

00:48:45.000 Just give me some time.

00:48:47.000 And then, you know, after I don't know how many times, magically, just by the fact that I tried so many times, I think it just slipped into the lock and unlocked the door.

00:48:56.000 Okay, so I sit in the car, and now I have to put it in the ignition.

00:49:01.000 And I'm going, boom.

00:49:03.000 Oh no.

00:49:04.000 Boom.

00:49:05.000 My friend goes, maybe you shouldn't drive.

00:49:09.000 Yeah.

00:49:10.000 Good advice.

00:49:11.000 Maybe I shouldn't drive.

00:49:13.000 So there's no way.

00:49:15.000 I couldn't.

00:49:15.000 It was getting more and more intense.

00:49:16.000 We're not responsible to drive.

00:49:18.000 So absolutely the right decision not to drive.

00:49:21.000 So then I got out of the car and the camera was on my lap.

00:49:26.000 And then I get out of my car.

00:49:28.000 And, you know, meanwhile, a group of people started gathering because we were there for a long time trying to get into the car and then trying to...

00:49:36.000 And so these people got kind of curious.

00:49:38.000 And Dave goes, you know, some people over there are kind of gathering, Paul, looking at us.

00:49:43.000 And I didn't want to look at them.

00:49:45.000 And so I get out of the car and my camera falls and it hits the ground. 0.99

00:49:50.000 I go, oh, shit. 0.97

00:49:52.000 I just dropped my Roliflex camera. 0.99

00:49:54.000 And then I picked up the camera and I'm going, Wow!

00:49:58.000 I just dropped my Reliflex camera.

00:50:01.000 I drop it again.

00:50:03.000 And I pick it up.

00:50:04.000 I go, did I just drop my Reliflex camera?

00:50:07.000 Dropped it again.

00:50:08.000 Repetitive motion syndrome.

00:50:09.000 I picked up that camera and dropped it.

00:50:12.000 Dozens and dozens of times.

00:50:14.000 Oh my god.

00:50:14.000 Meanwhile, the cluster of people got larger.

00:50:17.000 Parents were holding their children close to them saying, we don't know what's going on here, but it's getting weird over there.

00:50:24.000 So pretty soon I had a very large group of these campers that were all watching us, keeping their distance.

00:50:30.000 And I had this repetitive motion syndrome of dropping and dropping and dropping.

00:50:33.000 And so finally, you know, we had the staccato pace.

00:50:37.000 The timeline of the day got broken up.

00:50:40.000 So I had morning when we ate, then I had evening, then I had early afternoon, then I had early morning, then I had late afternoon, then I had evening.

00:50:48.000 The whole thread of time was disintegrated and scrambled.

00:50:52.000 And so then we walked.

00:50:55.000 And I lost Dave.

00:50:57.000 I figured, Dave, you're on your own, buddy.

00:51:00.000 I got enough to deal with here.

00:51:02.000 And so we walked over this bridge and we got to my place.

00:51:07.000 And I got to my house and I had a combination lock on the door.

00:51:11.000 Oh my God.

00:51:12.000 The last thing I need is another...

00:51:13.000 So I spun that combination lock and I couldn't get it open.

00:51:17.000 And then I went into convulsions and they felt good.

00:51:20.000 So I'm convulsing on the ground and spiking like this.

00:51:23.000 And every time I convulsed right afterwards, it actually felt good.

00:51:27.000 And so like, you know, I'm convulsing, but it seems to be helping me.

00:51:31.000 So I convulsed and, you know, thrashing on the ground.

00:51:34.000 Don't know where it happened to Dave.

00:51:36.000 And so I go back to the lock and I spun it and magically the lock opened up and then I fell into bed.

00:51:42.000 And then I had this amazing rush of Einstein-ing thoughts.

00:51:49.000 The thoughts were just so profound.

00:51:51.000 I go, oh my gosh, if I could write these down.

00:51:53.000 These are just like so important, you know, conclusions of great mysteries of the universe.

00:51:58.000 I have this at my hand.

00:51:59.000 And just before I came to the object of the sentence, I would have a prepositional or adverbial phrase.

00:52:10.000 And then I get a tangent.

00:52:11.000 Oh, no.

00:52:27.000 Then at the end of the day, the sunlight came through.

00:52:31.000 The 12-hour experience is the long experience.

00:52:34.000 And so it was in the summertime.

00:52:35.000 Then at the very end of the day, the sunlight came through and flickered my eyelids and I woke up.

00:52:43.000 And my friend was convinced I was trying to kill him because I was a mushroom expert.

00:52:48.000 So I had no idea this would be this intense.

00:52:52.000 Where was he during this time?

00:52:56.000 He ended up in the cabin and safe, but he was like a statue.

00:53:01.000 You know, he was just there sitting when I got up, just looking straight forward.

00:53:07.000 And we spoke a few words the next day and for the next few days and then...

00:53:14.000 You know, Dave went on his life journey.

00:53:17.000 I think he's convinced to this day that I knew what would happen.

00:53:21.000 But this speaks to the berserkers, the idea of repetitive motion syndrome. 0.90

00:53:25.000 Andy Weil, who you've had on this show, he was at Cougar Hot Springs.

00:53:28.000 And he was going to the trail to Cougar Hot Springs.

00:53:30.000 And somebody ran down the trail and said, we need a doctor.

00:53:32.000 We're a doctor.

00:53:33.000 This person up there is trying to kill himself.

00:53:35.000 And he's a doctor.

00:53:36.000 So he goes up there and there's this big hippie guy and he's On this log or on the bridge, swinging his legs wildly, covered with blood.

00:53:46.000 And before Andy's eyes, this guy throws himself off the bridge, right onto the rocks in the creek down below, you know, 10 feet or more below, smashes himself and gets stunned.

00:54:03.000 Oh, my God.

00:54:15.000 They have no control of their repetitive motion syndrome.

00:54:18.000 If you watch Tales from the Crypt or witness something violent, because when you re-remember, you re-enact.

00:54:27.000 There's no control of your memory and your action.

00:54:30.000 So pharmacologically, that must be really interesting, you know?

00:54:34.000 Real scientists have been studying this for a long time.

00:54:36.000 We can't quite figure it out.

00:54:38.000 But I think this underscores the point that mushrooms are chemical wizards.

00:54:44.000 They have enormous potential for exotic molecules that interface with human health.

00:54:50.000 And there's a huge pharmacopoeia, micropharmacopoeia, inside of mushrooms that have not been fully explored.

00:54:57.000 I think it's true with agaricon.

00:54:59.000 I think it's true with psilocybin mushrooms.

00:55:01.000 It's certainly true with amnida muscaria, etc.

00:55:04.000 So, ironically, amnida muscaria is legal.

00:55:07.000 There's no restrictions.

00:55:08.000 You can possess 100 pounds of it, but you can't possess a tenth of a gram of psilocybin mushrooms without breaking federal law, Schedule 1. So how can a mushroom that makes you happier, less violent, you know, resolve your PTSD,

00:55:25.000 depression, etc., how could that mushroom remain illegal and yet Amanita muscaria and pantherina are legal.

00:55:33.000 So it's just the juxtaposition.

00:55:36.000 But for the record, no species should be illegal.

00:55:39.000 It's the hubris of humans to think that we can dictate that a species is illegal.

00:55:44.000 That is fundamentally wrong.

00:55:46.000 Agreed.

00:55:47.000 My question was about the Amanita muscaria.

00:55:50.000 Because you're talking about agaricon and how many different strains there are and how different strains are effective at different things, One of the things that McKenna believed was that, because he had never really had a positive experience with the Amanita Muscaria, but there was so much attached to it,

00:56:06.000 he thinks that it was probably variable genetically, variable seasonally, just so much like Agaricon, there's probably many different strains of Amanita.

00:56:18.000 So these ones that they were attributing to like the sacred mushroom and the cross, John Marco Allegro's book on Amanita Muscaria and the Bible.

00:56:27.000 Do you think that it's possible that at one point in time there was psychoactive strains of Amanita muscaria that vary from the ones that people have that have these different sort of more mundane effects?

00:56:39.000 Absolutely.

00:56:41.000 We call them phenotypes.

00:56:42.000 You can call them strains or phenotypes.

00:56:44.000 It's a variety within a species.

00:56:47.000 But pharmacologically, we already see that with the psilocybe mushrooms.

00:56:50.000 Some of them are really high in psilocybin, very low in psilocin.

00:56:53.000 High in bio-cystin, nor bio-cystin, nor psilocin, lower.

00:56:57.000 So we see this not only cross-species-wise, but inside of a species with the phenotypes.

00:57:04.000 Some phenotypes of psilocybin comensis are extremely potent, and other ones are not.

00:57:08.000 So strains do matter.

00:57:10.000 And this is why with agaricon, I think strains do matter.

00:57:13.000 The fact that we found one strain of Agaricon that supports immunity and looks like it helps extend the efficacy of vaccines is a home run.

00:57:23.000 What are the other strains capable of doing?

00:57:26.000 Right.

00:57:27.000 That's what I was getting at.

00:57:28.000 It's like, God, we seem so underfunded with something that has so much potential.

00:57:31.000 I'm funding it.

00:57:33.000 Well, I'm glad you are.

00:57:34.000 So I spend enormous amounts of my financial resources on research.

00:57:40.000 That's why I created my company, you know, I started my company packing boxes by myself.

00:57:45.000 You know, I'm not ashamed to admit that I laid in bed crying many, many nights.

00:57:51.000 I was bouncing checks.

00:57:53.000 My suppliers were shutting me down.

00:57:55.000 No one was there to help me.

00:57:57.000 I was by myself.

00:57:59.000 I packed 30,000 boxes before I had a single employee.

00:58:03.000 I got accepted to five graduate schools and I couldn't afford to go because I didn't have a scholarship.

00:58:09.000 I had a young family.

00:58:12.000 My daughter, I was very adept at catching my daughter from her backpack as I leaned over to pack a box. 0.99

00:58:19.000 Cellophane tape will not stick at 35 degrees, I can tell you that.

00:58:23.000 And I actually, I don't want to flood the airways, but if you call 360-426-8255, you'll get the public utility district.

00:58:34.000 Why I know that number ingrained is my lawyer said, if you call the utility company and tell them you're sending a check, they legally cannot shut off your power.

00:58:42.000 So I thought, okay, for 10 years, At 8.01 in the morning on the date of disconnection, I would call the public utility district to say I'm sending in a check.

00:58:54.000 And after a while, I heard this noise.

00:58:56.000 And then many years later, I met some of the people who goes, you know, you're a legend.

00:59:01.000 I go, what do you mean?

00:59:02.000 He says, we all gathered around the phone at 8.01 on disconnection day.

00:59:08.000 Betting that Stamets would or not would not call.

00:59:11.000 And everybody who bet that I would not call lost their bets.

00:59:14.000 And at the end, everyone would just cheer.

00:59:16.000 It's Paul.

00:59:17.000 And I think they're having a party in the background.

00:59:19.000 No, it's Paul calling it 801. That's hilarious.

00:59:22.000 I maximized my cash flow.

00:59:24.000 Wow.

00:59:25.000 Thankfully, I had a local bank.

00:59:27.000 And the local bank, one of the board members said, how much money do you pay in overdraft fees?

00:59:33.000 And that's an extraordinary number, $5,000.

00:59:36.000 And he goes, he's one of your best customers, man.

00:59:39.000 They should keep him.

00:59:40.000 So I built this business, Blood, Sweat& Tears.

00:59:43.000 Now I have 150 employees.

00:59:44.000 I own the whole company.

00:59:46.000 I'm very grateful to them.

00:59:47.000 We call it...

00:59:50.000 Starship FP, that's like your comedy clubs, the mothership, right?

00:59:55.000 So our company is known as Starship Fungi Perfecti.

00:59:58.000 And if people want to track us down, we're at fungi.com.

01:00:01.000 F-U-N-G-I.com. 0.99

01:00:02.000 I registered that myself for $28.

01:00:04.000 Nice.

01:00:04.000 When did you get that?

01:00:05.000 What year?

01:00:07.000 1992. Oh, yeah.

01:00:08.000 Network solution.

01:00:09.000 You had to be super early to get that.

01:00:11.000 It's funny.

01:00:12.000 People don't want to write it down.

01:00:13.000 I go, it's a kingdom.

01:00:14.000 You don't have to write it down.

01:00:14.000 It's fungi.com.

01:00:16.000 So...

01:00:16.000 That's amazing that you got that domain.

01:00:19.000 I use your stuff.

01:00:20.000 I've had your stuff at my house for a long time.

01:00:23.000 I think it's great.

01:00:24.000 And I'm so happy that you're out there.

01:00:25.000 I really am.

01:00:26.000 I'm happy that there's not a lot of Paul Stamets in the world.

01:00:30.000 There are a lot of unsung heroes.

01:00:33.000 I have a lot of attention.

01:00:34.000 I'm sure you're so humble.

01:00:34.000 But my point is that it's like we really need research on this stuff.

01:00:39.000 We need a lot of research and the research is becoming increasingly credible.

01:00:43.000 It's the University of Arizona Medical School, Andy Weil's Center Program for Integrative Medicine, University of California, San Diego, UCLA, Harvard actually, and other institutions.

01:00:55.000 They're very excited now because this has been sort of like weird science, you know?

01:01:00.000 Yeah, that's what I was going to get at.

01:01:01.000 I was going to say there's this real reluctance to believe that people in the past had answers that we don't have today.

01:01:08.000 This almost religious belief in modern science and also this belief that the transition of knowledge has been fully complete from ancient people to today and nothing has slipped through the net.

01:01:23.000 That doesn't seem to be the case.

01:01:25.000 And also, for sure, they didn't have the ability to document things at least and preserve those documents to today.

01:01:34.000 Like we can today in regards to research, in regards to what you could find out in the modern laboratories and just what you're able to do to find out which of these mycelium strains are effective, which of them are not, at least for the particular thing you're looking for.

01:01:50.000 You've got to assume at one point in time people had some sort of knowledge about this stuff that we...

01:01:57.000 We just have lost.

01:01:58.000 We had to.

01:01:59.000 We were so dependent upon the environment.

01:02:01.000 We know what plants are edible from the experiences of our ancestors who ate them before us.

01:02:07.000 And it doesn't discredit modern medicine to say that these people had this extraordinary understanding of what was beneficial.

01:02:13.000 Absolutely.

01:02:14.000 And this is where the hubris of science, we should be very careful.

01:02:18.000 Because the importance of biodiversity cannot be overstated.

01:02:24.000 Hubris anywhere.

01:02:25.000 Hubris anywhere. 0.97

01:02:27.000 Every single place it shows its head, it fucks it up. 0.99

01:02:30.000 In everything. 0.99

01:02:31.000 Even in martial arts. 0.99

01:02:32.000 Guys that think that they can't lose go in and get fucked up. 0.99

01:02:36.000 It happens all the time. 1.00

01:02:37.000 Hubris is terrible.

01:02:39.000 It's the human ego trying to keep itself from being, like, just to recognize its true place.

01:02:47.000 Which is just part of an infinite sea of things that are happening simultaneously.

01:02:52.000 And you're not really that important.

01:02:54.000 You are important, but everything's important.

01:02:57.000 And you're not more important than anything.

01:02:58.000 It's all together.

01:03:00.000 I totally agree.

01:03:01.000 And it seems to be, unfortunately, lopsided in favor of the Y chromosome.

01:03:05.000 Oh, yeah.

01:03:08.000 100%.

01:03:08.000 We're the fault of it all.

01:03:10.000 That's true.

01:03:10.000 That's 100% true.

01:03:11.000 But that's also why we invent everything.

01:03:14.000 It's just like we're a bizarre subset of the humans that causes so much chaos and so much good at the same time.

01:03:22.000 Well, I have great hope for the future.

01:03:24.000 I do too.

01:03:25.000 Sometimes.

01:03:26.000 Some days I do.

01:03:27.000 Today is a good day.

01:03:28.000 Maybe because you're here.

01:03:29.000 I mean, thank goodness that we live in these times that we do.

01:03:33.000 With all the problems that we face, look at the medical advances that we've made.

01:03:38.000 I'm getting hip surgery in two weeks.

01:03:39.000 Yeah, we were just talking about that.

01:03:41.000 You know, you also are a martial artist and all the years of throwing kicks, you've worn one of your hips out.

01:03:47.000 I have quite a few friends who've had that done.

01:03:50.000 My friend John Wayne Parr who's still active.

01:03:52.000 He's got a fight coming up soon.

01:03:54.000 He had a hip replacement and fought after the hip replacement at least once.

01:03:58.000 I think he fought twice.

01:03:59.000 My surgeon said, besides cataract surgery, the best medical innovation has the greatest difference in patients before and after surgery than hip surgery.

01:04:10.000 Yeah, well, I told you about Graham Hancock.

01:04:12.000 He had his done, and then six weeks later, he's walking around here.

01:04:15.000 My mom just had her knee done, and she's fine.

01:04:18.000 It's great.

01:04:18.000 I was so nervous about it.

01:04:19.000 I just didn't want her to do it.

01:04:21.000 I wanted her to get stem cells. 0.99

01:04:23.000 I wanted her to try to treat it and just... 0.86

01:04:25.000 The biggest concern we have is MRSA. That's a big one.

01:04:28.000 It's terrifying.

01:04:30.000 I know quite a few people have gotten that as well. 1.00

01:04:36.000 Jiu-jitsu is a breeding ground for that shit. 1.00

01:04:38.000 You get scratches and scrapes and then they get infected. 1.00

01:04:41.000 It happens all the time, specifically, just staff specifically, but MRSA exists too.

01:04:47.000 I know quite a few people.

01:04:48.000 Back in the day, we always would be wiping up the mats of blood.

01:04:51.000 I mean, now you can't have blood, you know, in the dojo or the dojang, you know?

01:04:57.000 You know, it's considered to be a health hazard, so it's so much more restricted now.

01:05:01.000 Perhaps not in the mixed martial arts that you're involved.

01:05:03.000 Well, the thing about the grappling is just the scrapes.

01:05:07.000 You're constantly getting scraped up.

01:05:08.000 You can kick box in spats and, you know, rash guards, and you're probably going to mitigate a lot of the scratches and scrapes.

01:05:15.000 You know, with gloves on and foot gear and all that jazz.

01:05:18.000 But if you're grappling, you're constantly grinding things on those mats and you're getting scratches from fingernails and you're getting accidental collisions that cause little cuts and abrasions and they get infected.

01:05:32.000 And people that don't, like my friend Ari, he had no idea he had staph.

01:05:37.000 I gave him a year of jiu-jitsu for Christmas and he and I were at the pool hall.

01:05:44.000 And this still scares me to this day because I think he came close to dying.

01:05:48.000 He was walking around with a limp.

01:05:50.000 And I go, I go, what's wrong with your leg?

01:05:52.000 And he goes, I got bit by a spider bite.

01:05:54.000 I go, let me see it.

01:05:55.000 He pulls his knee up.

01:05:56.000 He's got a massive staph infection on his knee.

01:05:58.000 I go, dude, that staph.

01:06:00.000 I go, we got to go to the hospital right now.

01:06:02.000 He goes, are you serious?

01:06:03.000 I go, right now.

01:06:03.000 And I broke my cue down.

01:06:04.000 I go, we got to go right now.

01:06:06.000 You have to go to the hospital, man.

01:06:07.000 You have a bad staph infection. 1.00

01:06:09.000 And he was fucked up for a while from it. 1.00

01:06:12.000 He got through it. 0.99

01:06:13.000 The antibiotics worked.

01:06:14.000 Thankfully, it wasn't MRSA. It wasn't medication-resistant staph infections.

01:06:18.000 And it was just horrific.

01:06:20.000 Well, this speaks to, again, innate immunity.

01:06:22.000 And nature is a numbers game.

01:06:25.000 You know, you have different coefficient variables on one side of the equation.

01:06:28.000 The other side of the equation is health or disease.

01:06:30.000 And so how can you stock that to your favor?

01:06:33.000 Right.

01:06:33.000 You have to be robust.

01:06:34.000 You have to eat well.

01:06:35.000 You have to take vitamins.

01:06:36.000 You have to get exercise.

01:06:38.000 And, you know, it seems like mushrooms can help you quite a bit.

01:06:41.000 I'm a big fan of lion's mane.

01:06:43.000 I take lion's mane every day.

01:06:44.000 That's one of the big ones that I take.

01:06:46.000 I do, too.

01:06:47.000 But I wanted to ask you this.

01:06:49.000 Are there better ones to take?

01:06:51.000 Is tincture better than capsules?

01:06:53.000 Is capsules better than tincture?

01:06:55.000 Those are good questions.

01:06:56.000 The extracts allow you to activate directly through the mucosa.

01:07:01.000 So it gets into your bloodstream.

01:07:03.000 But for instance, turkey tail, lion's mane, and agaricon are very good as prebiotics.

01:07:07.000 For the microflora in your stomach.

01:07:11.000 Double-blind placebo-controlled study.

01:07:14.000 Again, go to mushroomreferences.com.

01:07:17.000 With amoxicillin patients where their microbiome and their gut's destroyed because of this potent antibacterial antibiotic.

01:07:25.000 And so they found when they gave turkey tail mushroom mycelium, again, double-blind and placebo-controlled, and they looked at the microbiome, those who took turkey tail mycelium recovering with amoxicillin, We end up upregulating beneficial bacteria and downregulating staph and clostridium,

01:07:48.000 etc.

01:07:49.000 Lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacterium were upregulated.

01:07:55.000 These are beneficial bacteria.

01:07:56.000 So there's an example that also, if you orally ingest Then you can set up the microbiome to a higher state of readiness to help whole stasis, you know, health.

01:08:10.000 And then you absorb the components directly in.

01:08:13.000 So, again, it depends on what your target is.

01:08:16.000 If it's general immunity support, then the oral ingestion.

01:08:23.000 If you're concerned about the port of entry of a pathogen through the mucosa, then obviously oral introduction, insofar as it supports immunity, can stave off the entry point of those pathogens.

01:08:39.000 So would you recommend both a tincture and capsules?

01:08:43.000 So the tincture would stave it off at the source?

01:08:46.000 I cannot...

01:08:47.000 Respond to anyone using the question recommend.

01:08:50.000 Okay.

01:08:51.000 I can say what I personally do is a combination of both.

01:08:54.000 Okay.

01:08:55.000 Again, nature's a numbers game.

01:08:56.000 I'll just ask you that from now on.

01:08:57.000 What are you doing?

01:08:58.000 So I don't want to get you trapped in these conundrums.

01:09:01.000 Yeah.

01:09:02.000 So you take both tincture form and capsule form?

01:09:05.000 Yeah.

01:09:06.000 I take a throat spray, which has a Gary Connor turkey tail in it.

01:09:10.000 I love it.

01:09:12.000 That's what I use all the time when I go to concerts, I'm in crowds, etc.

01:09:15.000 Oh, smart.

01:09:16.000 In the morning, I'm taking Lion's Mane, Turkey Tail, and Agaricon.

01:09:20.000 I'm 68. You look great.

01:09:23.000 Well, talking about hubris, my partner's a medical doctor.

01:09:29.000 Every time that I feel like I'm 30, I don't feel my age at all, the next day I fall off a ladder, 12 feet.

01:09:38.000 Again, hubris.

01:09:39.000 Bam! 0.98

01:09:39.000 So I have to be careful what I say now. 0.98

01:09:41.000 Hubris is real.

01:09:43.000 It is, and I think nature has a sense of humor to whack you up on the side of the head.

01:09:47.000 The universe has a sense of humor.

01:09:49.000 Yeah.

01:09:50.000 There's certain aspects to it that almost seem...

01:09:53.000 It's playing very subtle jokes.

01:09:55.000 We're at the beginning of just understanding the importance of the biodiversity of the ecosystems that's given us birth.

01:10:02.000 This is really a continuum.

01:10:07.000 But I'm really excited about the innovations Of what's happening with psilocybin.

01:10:16.000 And psilocybin and lion's mane in particular is something I'm very excited about.

01:10:22.000 Neurogenesis, neurogeneration, neuroplasticity, neuroregeneration.

01:10:27.000 Four different things.

01:10:28.000 But they all segue into this concept of the neurological systems being improved using components within mushrooms.

01:10:38.000 And that's something that I think has a lot of potential for us, especially as we age.

01:10:43.000 It really is interesting how as we get old and as the science of all these things advances, we realize how shallow it really was just a few decades ago and how little we knew about the effects of these things, including vitamins and minerals and all the different supplements that people take that have shown to be beneficial.

01:11:02.000 It's like this is a very recent thing.

01:11:04.000 In terms of human history, of our current understanding, like our scientific understanding of the mechanism of vitamins.

01:11:11.000 Yep.

01:11:12.000 I'm keen on it.

01:11:14.000 You know, it's the absence of vitamins that you see the deleterious effects.

01:11:17.000 So it's like, you know, research by absence of vitamin C, scurvy, etc.

01:11:25.000 But I'm very keen on stacking vitamins.

01:11:29.000 You know, in microdosing, that's something that we've had a lot of activity.

01:11:33.000 And I'd like to give you a huge thank you.

01:11:37.000 And this is very sincere to you and to the JRE audience.

01:11:44.000 And Jamie, can we put up that sign, the Nature article on microdosing?

01:11:56.000 No worries.

01:11:57.000 And basically, when I was here last, we were talking about microdosing, and I came up with a stack.

01:12:05.000 Of lion's mane and a microdose of psilocybin, below the threshold of feeling it, and niacin, nicotinic acid, which is a flushing form.

01:12:15.000 And we did a call out for people to join and download an app at microdose.me.

01:12:25.000 It's for iPhones and droids so they could measure before and after effects of microdosing.

01:12:34.000 And what we found, and we published this, this is the first article that we published, and this was in 2019, I believe, or 2021. This is on their motivations.

01:12:49.000 If we go to the next article, Well, we can stop here for a second.

01:12:54.000 But just look at the title here.

01:12:55.000 Adults who microdose psychedelics report health-related motivations and lower levels of anxiety and depression compared to non-microdosers.

01:13:05.000 What does that mean, health-related motivations?

01:13:08.000 Why are you microdosing?

01:13:09.000 Because you don't feel creative, because you're depressed, because you have anxiety.

01:13:14.000 This is the extraordinary And this is something you may not realize.

01:13:20.000 The majority of this came from your audience, this audience right now.

01:13:24.000 But if you look at that, 4,600 non-microdosers and only 4,000 microdosers.

01:13:34.000 Joe, do you have any idea?

01:13:36.000 We have more citizen scientists who are non-microdosers who jumped into this app.

01:13:41.000 This is why the editors at Nature liked the study because it was called so well-weighted.

01:13:47.000 So well-weighted because the non-microdosers exceeded, in this case, Fairly comparable, but 4,653 non-microdosers who downloaded the microdose.me app to measure performance and how they felt.

01:14:04.000 And Jamie, if we could go to the next one.

01:14:07.000 Let's be clear here.

01:14:08.000 They're non-microdosers, but they microdosed for the study.

01:14:12.000 Nope.

01:14:12.000 No.

01:14:13.000 Nope.

01:14:13.000 They didn't.

01:14:14.000 All they did is got these challenge tests.

01:14:17.000 So they took the app, they downloaded the app, but they didn't do anything to their consciousness?

01:14:23.000 They didn't do any microdosing at all.

01:14:26.000 And this is why they were...

01:14:28.000 Why do you think so many of them that don't microdose signed up for that?

01:14:32.000 We have no frigging clue.

01:14:34.000 You tell us. 0.73

01:14:35.000 I think it may have been citizen scientists who wanted to get a baseline first.

01:14:40.000 Have you considered people lying because they don't want you to know that they microdose?

01:14:44.000 It's anonymous, you know?

01:14:46.000 Yeah, but people are scared.

01:14:47.000 The next one, if you would.

01:14:49.000 Author correction.

01:14:50.000 Psilocybin microdosers demonstrate greater observed improvements in mood and mental health at one month relative to non-microdosing controls.

01:14:59.000 Why did they have to make a correction?

01:15:00.000 Well, let me show the next slide with a graph.

01:15:04.000 If you can see it.

01:15:05.000 The reason why is that there was a typo in the original article.

01:15:10.000 Oh.

01:15:11.000 And it's the one with the bar graph, if you can see it.

01:15:16.000 It's a little tough to find the links.

01:15:18.000 Sorry.

01:15:19.000 No worries.

01:15:20.000 How long have you had this company, Host Defense?

01:15:23.000 I've started that Host Defense brand about 2004 is when I started it.

01:15:29.000 I see them everywhere now. 0.98

01:15:30.000 I see them in health food stores and shit. 0.99

01:15:31.000 We're the number one mushroom-based immune product line. 0.99

01:15:34.000 Get excited for you.

01:15:35.000 I see them.

01:15:36.000 Look at Paul.

01:15:37.000 Go, Paul, go.

01:15:38.000 This is the app.

01:15:40.000 We can go through the four slides here.

01:15:42.000 That'll be great.

01:15:43.000 So this is the app, microdose.me.

01:15:46.000 I encourage everyone listening to help us because now the app has been improved.

01:15:52.000 It was a little bit laborious before.

01:15:54.000 We want to go out to three months.

01:15:56.000 We want non-microdosers and microdosers, but please, the non-microdosers, we need your input.

01:16:03.000 These are challenge tests.

01:16:05.000 So these are acuity tasks?

01:16:08.000 Acuity tasks, yes.

01:16:10.000 That are on the actual app itself?

01:16:11.000 There's vision, hearing, memory.

01:16:14.000 There is how do you feel, etc.

01:16:18.000 Can I ask you before I forget?

01:16:19.000 Who was the scientist that ran those studies a long time ago where they showed that psilocybin in low doses increased edge detection, increased your ability to see whether two parallel lines One of them had gone off of parallel.

01:16:36.000 I do know of the reference.

01:16:38.000 I do not remember.

01:16:40.000 Foreign scientists?

01:16:41.000 German?

01:16:42.000 Yeah.

01:16:43.000 You have a good memory, but better than mine.

01:16:45.000 I don't remember the name of the scientists.

01:16:47.000 This is a long time ago, right?

01:16:49.000 A long time ago, yeah.

01:16:49.000 This is probably in the 60s or something like that.

01:16:53.000 So then if we...

01:16:57.000 So, these tasks, have they demonstrated that the people that are taking the microdose have better results in these?

01:17:08.000 Absolutely.

01:17:09.000 Are you filtering out for, you know, healthy user bias, IQs, occupations?

01:17:16.000 We have – it takes five minutes to enter into the data set to create your profile.

01:17:21.000 It's anonymous.

01:17:22.000 You own your data.

01:17:24.000 It's gone through institutional review boards at the University of British Columbia.

01:17:27.000 It's all been carefully vetted.

01:17:29.000 You own your data.

01:17:30.000 Nobody else gets to see what you've done or your frequency.

01:17:34.000 It asks you your age, actually your income, your nationality, or your ethic.

01:17:40.000 Does it ask your occupation?

01:17:42.000 Did not ask occupation.

01:17:44.000 Education?

01:17:45.000 Education, yes.

01:17:46.000 Whether we have a college degree, high school, or whatever.

01:17:49.000 So we have a tremendous, I mean, we have literally millions and millions of data points.

01:17:55.000 The data field is so robust, and now we're trying to narrow it to confirm what we saw in the first studies.

01:18:04.000 Microdosing is associated with a massive Relief of depression, a relief of anxiety, an increase in mood, and now we have customized it for more, not so much subjective effects,

01:18:20.000 but cognitive demonstrable skill improvement.

01:18:24.000 Because, of course, when people feel better, some people can say that's an expectancy or a placebo.

01:18:32.000 It's ironic because it's like a patient coming into a doctor saying, I feel better.

01:18:36.000 And they go, no, you don't.

01:18:37.000 You can't feel better.

01:18:38.000 It's placebo.

01:18:40.000 Doctors use expectancy all the time.

01:18:42.000 Every time you go to a doctor, you expect they're going to have a medicine, good medical advice.

01:18:46.000 You want a kind and caring physician.

01:18:47.000 Every time you go to a five- or four-star restaurant, you expect the food's going to be good.

01:18:51.000 So you can't...

01:18:52.000 We're humans.

01:18:53.000 We're complex.

01:18:54.000 You can't divorce one's motivation for getting a treatment away from the expectancy of that on that treatment.

01:19:01.000 So does the expectancy enhance The medicine.

01:19:06.000 That's the question.

01:19:08.000 If people are not depressed and are less prone to suicide and you save them from suicide, isn't that what physicians want to do?

01:19:17.000 They want to help their patients be better.

01:19:20.000 So the stacking results, though, is what we found to be most surprising and most extraordinary.

01:19:29.000 Can I ask you this?

01:19:29.000 Do you ask the people to go through the visual acuity or the different tasks sober first to get a baseline and then see if there's improvement for microdosing?

01:19:41.000 Or do you just show that the group that microdoses has higher levels of proficiency?

01:19:47.000 You know, I don't think we ask them the question if they're sober at the time they take the test.

01:19:53.000 But not even sober, because we're talking about microdosing.

01:19:56.000 Microdosing.

01:19:57.000 But did you ask them...

01:19:59.000 They use marijuana.

01:20:01.000 No, but no, does it measure?

01:20:02.000 Does it measure the difference between them before microdosing and them after microdosing?

01:20:06.000 Yes, it does.

01:20:07.000 It does.

01:20:07.000 So you had a baseline.

01:20:09.000 So before you ever microdose, I'd like you to take these tasks and do these puzzles and whatever.

01:20:14.000 What kind of things do you have?

01:20:15.000 Visual.

01:20:15.000 We have cognitive tests.

01:20:18.000 We have acuity tests.

01:20:19.000 We have hearing.

01:20:20.000 Hearing?

01:20:21.000 Yeah, hearing.

01:20:22.000 Are you using headphones?

01:20:23.000 Are you using the speaker off the phone?

01:20:24.000 Yeah, there are tones off the phone.

01:20:26.000 So you can hear things as an auditory challenge.

01:20:32.000 Is it dependent upon the volume of the phone?

01:20:35.000 You're asking really, really good questions because the type of phone, the type of speaker, whether it's iPhone 12 or iPhone 15. The newer phones have much better speakers.

01:20:42.000 Yeah, it gets much more complicated than the other tests.

01:20:47.000 And so we have this narrow down on what we really want is people to go for three months.

01:20:54.000 So the signal that we got in 30 days was extremely strong.

01:20:57.000 But we need to be able to repeat the results to confirm that And then we want to extend the microdosing window of testing to three months.

01:21:08.000 Now people only need to, once they get their baseline, they only need to report once every two weeks or once a month.

01:21:15.000 So it's much less burdensome for the people joining Microdose.me to perform the task.

01:21:24.000 They can see their results compared to the average.

01:21:28.000 So there's a dashboard that's present so they can see where they are relative to the average.

01:21:34.000 And eventually they will have access to all their own data.

01:21:37.000 But it's all anonymized.

01:21:39.000 It's all protected.

01:21:40.000 It's on servers in British Columbia.

01:21:42.000 So it's all, you know, tightly controlled.

01:21:46.000 So the anonymity is assured.

01:21:49.000 Jamie, are you able to find that chart?

01:21:53.000 Let's go back to the next slide, if you could.

01:21:56.000 Next one.

01:21:58.000 Next one.

01:21:59.000 It's a finger-tapping test.

01:22:01.000 Okay, this is the one I want to focus on.

01:22:04.000 This is why there was an author correction.

01:22:07.000 The p-value of significance here is.004.

01:22:11.000 That made us one chance in 250 that this is a random result.

01:22:16.000 This was published in Nature, Scientific Reports, went through peer review.

01:22:20.000 We didn't see any increase.

01:22:22.000 The tap test is how often you can tap your two fingers together in 10 seconds.

01:22:27.000 For those who have traumatic brain injury, you probably know a number of these people.

01:22:32.000 Traditionally, they do a tap test.

01:22:34.000 Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, they do tap tests.

01:22:38.000 Unfortunately, there's a steady decline.

01:22:40.000 But the TAP tests have been validated and just another article came out this past week saying that handheld devices are validated medically now for patient reports.

01:22:53.000 So this is the chart that blew all of us away.

01:22:58.000 Is that the green line is people taking the Stamets stack, which is psilocybe cubensis, approximately one-tenth of a dried gram, 500 milligrams of lion's mane mycelium, and 50 milligrams of flushing niacin.

01:23:12.000 Those three together.

01:23:14.000 Now, the non-microdosers, you can see, over 30 days, no significant increase in the TAP testing.

01:23:22.000 Microdosers only with psilocybin, the blue line.

01:23:26.000 Psilocybin only.

01:23:27.000 Not statistically significant.

01:23:29.000 But those people who were taking the stack went from tapping 48 taps in 10 seconds to 68 taps in one month.

01:23:38.000 Wow.

01:23:39.000 Think about that.

01:23:40.000 Think if you're on a computer, you're a guitar player, you're a drummer.

01:23:45.000 Think about walking to the bathroom and not falling.

01:23:47.000 Yeah.

01:23:48.000 Think about this.

01:23:49.000 This is not subjective.

01:23:50.000 This is an affirmation of an improvement in psychomotor performance.

01:23:55.000 Wow.

01:23:56.000 Now here, you'll ask me the question again.

01:23:58.000 Athletic performance.

01:23:59.000 Yeah, athletic performance.

01:24:00.000 How does this work?

01:24:01.000 We don't know how it works.

01:24:02.000 We just know that it does work.

01:24:05.000 Wow.

01:24:05.000 So we want to extend this out to 90 days.

01:24:08.000 Wow.

01:24:09.000 We want to see maybe the microdosis with psilocybin blue only.

01:24:13.000 Maybe that starts to uptick.

01:24:14.000 Maybe it's delayed and then it increases.

01:24:17.000 Maybe this green line with the stem and stack, maybe it ameliorates and softens or maybe it accelerates.

01:24:27.000 But I looked this up and for you to do the TAP test involves six regions of your brain.

01:24:34.000 You look at your fingers, you ideate, you look at your fingers, you start your psychomotor cadence, you get a feedback from touching the table, and that feeds you back, and then you develop a rhythm.

01:24:51.000 And so we let people tap test for several days so they go up the learning curve.

01:24:56.000 So we don't include them in the first several days.

01:24:59.000 And then people, they practice.

01:25:01.000 But then we see this result.

01:25:03.000 So I think we're on to something really exciting here.

01:25:06.000 That value of P is.004, one chance in 250. It's very hard.

01:25:13.000 I mean, you can't say it's expectancy.

01:25:14.000 You can't say it's placebo.

01:25:16.000 It's a performance skill that's being demonstrated.

01:25:20.000 Now, I chose niacin because sulcibin is a vasoconstrictor.

01:25:24.000 Niacin is a vasodilator.

01:25:26.000 I chose a flushing form of niacin because you tingle.

01:25:29.000 And I thought, wow, if we get the neurogenic benefits of sulcibin, let's get it to the endpoints of the peripheral nervous system.

01:25:35.000 Neuropathies oftentimes present themselves as a deadening of the fingertips and the toes.

01:25:39.000 So with the vasodilation, you get more blood flow to where the neuropathy is occurring.

01:25:45.000 And then lion's mane, well demonstrated.

01:25:48.000 Again, mushroomreferences.com, you can do many, many references up, showing that lion's mane mycelium contains these compounds called arinacines.

01:25:57.000 That helps rebuild myelin on the axons of nerves to enable signal transmission and also stimulates NGFs, nerve growth factors, for the proliferation and the extension of the neurites to further crawl.

01:26:13.000 So I stacked those three together.

01:26:16.000 And again, I'm a co-author on the paper.

01:26:18.000 I had no access to this data.

01:26:21.000 In fact, they called me up, said, we see a signal.

01:26:24.000 We don't believe it.

01:26:25.000 We're taking the data set back.

01:26:28.000 And they attacked it three different ways with separate statistical methods and the data held true.

01:26:36.000 And so we know there's an increase in psychomotor performance.

01:26:40.000 So there's a lot of musicians now that are very keen on taking the stock.

01:26:46.000 And they're saying their banjo playing is better.

01:26:49.000 I think if you've been playing the guitar or teaching piano all your life, you're dependent upon this digital dexterity.

01:26:56.000 To be able to have your acumen and your digital dexterity as you age helps you pass down knowledge to the next generation.

01:27:04.000 I mean, this is really exciting.

01:27:06.000 We need to disambiguate it.

01:27:08.000 We need a big data set.

01:27:10.000 And I'm calling out Joe Rogan, experienced listeners, especially you non-microdosers, we need you.

01:27:17.000 And then we need everyone to go at least three months, at least populate the baseline, check in month one, month two, and month three.

01:27:25.000 We need to see if this data holds up.

01:27:27.000 Because I was actually surprised.

01:27:29.000 I thought psilocybin microdosing by itself It would have had greater liftoff on the psychomotor performance than we saw.

01:27:36.000 I suspect it will have liftoff more so when we go in the month two or three, but we don't know.

01:27:41.000 Let the data and the science lead.

01:27:43.000 But the fact that we got the signal, and again, how does it work?

01:27:48.000 Why does it work?

01:27:49.000 Where does it work?

01:27:51.000 Folks, it works, right?

01:27:53.000 Right.

01:27:54.000 You don't see a force for the trees because you're so conflicted in trying to understand the mechanism of action.

01:28:00.000 But I'd like to see it applied to other tests.

01:28:02.000 Have you ever seen those tests that they do where they have like an electronic wall and there's lights and the light, when it goes off, you're supposed to tap it?

01:28:09.000 Yep.

01:28:09.000 And so there's a bunch of them.

01:28:11.000 A lot of boxers use them.

01:28:12.000 They use them to heighten their reaction times.

01:28:15.000 We have that on the app also.

01:28:16.000 Oh, nice.

01:28:17.000 We have flowers.

01:28:18.000 Flowers.

01:28:18.000 There you go.

01:28:18.000 Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

01:28:19.000 And you have to do it again.

01:28:20.000 But the thing about the one that you have to touch is you have to actually move your body.

01:28:25.000 Right.

01:28:25.000 So you're moving your arms, you're reaching down, you're going up, and they're all in front of you, and you never know which one's going to light up.

01:28:31.000 This is just the beginning.

01:28:33.000 That type of model that you just described, to me, would be much more informative than the top test.

01:28:39.000 You know what I'm talking about, right, Jamie?

01:28:41.000 See if you can find a video of those so you can show it to them.

01:28:44.000 But I always wondered, like, why are these guys doing that?

01:28:46.000 Does that really help fight?

01:28:48.000 Does that help fight performance?

01:28:49.000 I'm not sure.

01:28:52.000 I think sometimes, like, trainers get caught up in technology and they have you doing certain...

01:28:56.000 I think your time would probably be best spent using technique, but I don't know.

01:29:02.000 I mean, is there a reason why that would, like, lights going off would somehow or another make you move better?

01:29:09.000 See, look at how these things work.

01:29:13.000 I mean, what does that do into your mind that is so beneficial?

01:29:21.000 That person is an exceptional performer.

01:29:23.000 That guy's on a dose right now.

01:29:27.000 He's on the stamina stack.

01:29:29.000 Oh, this girl's using her feet. 1.00

01:29:30.000 Look at this.

01:29:32.000 Interesting.

01:29:33.000 Be faster.

01:29:33.000 But does it actually make you faster?

01:29:36.000 I think it would.

01:29:39.000 Everybody plateaus when they practice.

01:29:42.000 They end up practicing to hitting 90% of the optimum of their performance.

01:29:46.000 And then they hit sort of a new baseline.

01:29:49.000 And it's hard to get above that.

01:29:51.000 We hit that ceiling.

01:29:52.000 How do you break through that ceiling?

01:29:54.000 This, I think, is an opportunity to break through that ceiling.

01:29:56.000 And it would be really fascinating to see if it could be applied to skills.

01:30:01.000 You know, sports and athletics, martial arts, things along those lines.

01:30:04.000 It would be interesting to see.

01:30:06.000 Archery.

01:30:07.000 It would be interesting to see if it increases people's abilities.

01:30:12.000 There are so many stories of performance enhancement on low doses of psilocybin.

01:30:17.000 Yes.

01:30:17.000 We've all heard them.

01:30:19.000 It's just that there's something there.

01:30:20.000 I've experienced it with pool.

01:30:22.000 With pool.

01:30:23.000 Yeah.

01:30:23.000 Like the game becomes like 10% easier.

01:30:26.000 And see, this is why these observational studies are important to medicine.

01:30:30.000 Clinical studies are based on early signals, and the clinical studies are trying to refine, reduce the variables to see a cause and effect.

01:30:39.000 But we only, clinical studies are already started, and that's not out of the blue.

01:30:43.000 You know, they have to have a good theoretical basis.

01:30:46.000 Observational studies by tens of thousands of people create the signals.

01:30:50.000 So the data set we have is so big we're going to try to use AI. To say, what else is hidden in this data?

01:30:57.000 The reason why we went to the TAP test is that so many of our beneficial outcomes were depression, anxiety, mood.

01:31:07.000 These are all subjective.

01:31:08.000 And so when I ask a physician, what is an objective test that's not subjective?

01:31:15.000 She said, oh, we have the TAP test.

01:31:18.000 So that's why this is a demonstration of something That is happening, that is performance related, that's outside of subjectivity, expectancy, etc.

01:31:29.000 This is performance measurement.

01:31:31.000 That's solid data.

01:31:33.000 And now, and think about this, Joe.

01:31:35.000 They're getting the sulci mushrooms in the underground market.

01:31:39.000 You know, we sell 50% of the lion's mane products that are out on the market, but other people are selling lion's mane products.

01:31:44.000 They're getting variable amounts of niacin.

01:31:47.000 Those are all confounders that would reduce the significance of that data.

01:31:53.000 That means that this data could be understated if you standardize everything to a standardized amount.

01:31:59.000 So we don't know how to optimize it.

01:32:03.000 How far do you think we are from some sort of a legalization of psilocybin?

01:32:07.000 I think within five years.

01:32:08.000 Yeah.

01:32:09.000 I think it will go from schedule one to schedule three after the election or schedule two for sure.

01:32:15.000 But psilocybin— I mean psilocybin— Why do you think after the election specifically?

01:32:19.000 Because everyone is so worried about margins.

01:32:22.000 If you piss off 5 percent of the people, do you lose 5 percent of the vote?

01:32:25.000 Right.

01:32:25.000 No one wants to take a risk.

01:32:27.000 It makes it look like they're weak on crime or something like that.

01:32:29.000 Yeah.

01:32:30.000 But see, this is the beauty of the psilocybin.

01:32:33.000 What I am very encouraged by is law enforcement.

01:32:38.000 I've met so many law enforcement officers.

01:32:41.000 Now, let's be real about this.

01:32:44.000 If you're a law enforcement officer, you have 100 arrest encounters.

01:32:49.000 Are you going to be perfect with 100 of them?

01:32:52.000 No.

01:32:53.000 If you're a veteran and you have 100 expeditions, are you going to be perfect with 100 of them?

01:32:59.000 No.

01:32:59.000 Or if you're a doctor, are you going to be perfect with 100 of them?

01:33:02.000 No.

01:33:03.000 And you'll make a mistake.

01:33:05.000 Everyone has a really bad day.

01:33:09.000 Do you want that bad day to define the rest of your life as a skeleton in your closet or a monkey on your back?

01:33:16.000 Where you did something that's fundamentally wrong but you can't talk about it?

01:33:20.000 And then you then act out against other people because you're in turmoil?

01:33:26.000 There are so many law enforcement people that have adjourned churches.

01:33:30.000 There's one called the Divine Assembly Church in Salt Lake City.

01:33:35.000 There's another one, a church called the Church of Ambrosia in Oakland.

01:33:38.000 More than 100,000 people.

01:33:41.000 They're cloaking themselves inside these churches for civil rights protection.

01:33:45.000 But when they get together with a community of other veterans and law enforcement officers, And they can share their grief, their sorrows, their mistakes and not be condemned for it.

01:33:56.000 We lack forgiveness in this society.

01:34:00.000 We don't have enough people acknowledging their mistakes without fear of retribution and saying, I'm better than that one bad day.

01:34:09.000 That's not going to define my life.

01:34:11.000 And so what's happening in Canada and the United States to a degree is law enforcement officers know that other officers are benefiting from this.

01:34:21.000 So they are deprioritizing psilocybin, decriminalizing it.

01:34:26.000 Because they're benefiting from it.

01:34:29.000 It's a big thing among soldiers.

01:34:31.000 It's a big thing among soldiers.

01:34:32.000 I've met so many.

01:34:33.000 Many, many guys have had very, very beneficial experiences.

01:34:37.000 I believe humans are generally very good.

01:34:40.000 They're motivated by goodness.

01:34:41.000 But they get hijacked because...

01:34:45.000 Of a very bad day or sequence of bad days because then that becomes an inflammatory pathway.

01:34:50.000 Well, sure, there's the stress of the job itself if you're in law enforcement.

01:34:53.000 Every day you could get shot.

01:34:55.000 Every day you might not come home to your family.

01:34:57.000 Every person you pull over with tinted windows might blow you away before you get to the window.

01:35:01.000 Can you imagine walking up to a car with windows up?

01:35:04.000 Yeah.

01:35:05.000 You know, of an unknown person.

01:35:07.000 And you have one second to two seconds to make a life and death decision.

01:35:11.000 I don't want that responsibility.

01:35:13.000 And you have PTSD. You're probably already racked with anxiety.

01:35:16.000 Because you've probably already experienced so many things that most people can never imagine.

01:35:20.000 That depression, anxiety, frustration creates an inflammatory response that depresses the immune system.

01:35:28.000 That then can lead to diseases such as cancer, vulnerability to viruses.

01:35:34.000 And the anger issues emanate outwards.

01:35:38.000 All of us, I think, have been affected by fentanyl.

01:35:42.000 You know, in my county, Mason County, Washington, 17 people died in two weeks from fentanyl.

01:35:48.000 17 people, a small county.

01:35:50.000 The fentanyl crisis is killing some of the best of our youth.

01:35:54.000 It's terrifying.

01:35:55.000 It's terrifying.

01:35:56.000 It's terrifying because it's unprecedented.

01:35:58.000 There's never been a time where so many people are dying of overdoses, accidental overdoses.

01:36:03.000 And this should be the priority of law enforcement.

01:36:04.000 Does law enforcement want to be on the wrong side of history, busting somebody for psilocybin?

01:36:09.000 That's going to go on their resume and 10, 15, 20 years, maybe five years from now, it'd be like busting somebody for marijuana where it's legal in so many states.

01:36:18.000 Right.

01:36:19.000 What do you think that the solution to the fentanyl crisis is?

01:36:24.000 Is it legalization?

01:36:27.000 I mean, that's a tough one, right?

01:36:28.000 Because legalization scares people because, and I would agree with this, for sure, if hard drugs are legal, more people are going to try them because they're more available.

01:36:40.000 They're going to.

01:36:42.000 You will at least be trying the actual drug and not getting like street Valium that has fentanyl in it.

01:36:50.000 Or you have criminal syndicates.

01:36:53.000 Yes, that's the other part of it.

01:36:55.000 And they have basically addiction militias, militias of people who are addicts coming to them to give them money.

01:37:02.000 I'm not an expert on drug policy.

01:37:04.000 There are other people that are.

01:37:06.000 I would first take the step that all natural products containing any Schedule I substance should be legal, not illegal.

01:37:15.000 Psilocybin, mescaline, you know, you can make the argument for LSD. I think that You know, that's the first step, is all natural products should be legalized.

01:37:29.000 Decriminalization, if you cannot get legalization.

01:37:33.000 And then having decriminalization with therapy.

01:37:37.000 I think if we don't have legal constraints, just like speed limits on the highway, Do you really want anyone to drive as fast as they can?

01:37:49.000 We do need limits.

01:37:50.000 We have to throttle this down.

01:37:52.000 So our structures are in place for us to be able to make the best positive impact with the least amount of harm.

01:38:01.000 And that's the quagmire that we're in.

01:38:05.000 Other countries in the world, and Rick Doblik and Andy Weil can speak on this elegantly, as many other people, But I want to stay in my lane of mushrooms.

01:38:16.000 And I think there's over 200 species of psilocybin mushrooms, 162 species in the genus Psilocybe.

01:38:27.000 And just recently, I'm happy to say, I have a new species named after me.

01:38:31.000 A mycologist honored me by naming a new Cilocybe mushroom, Cilocybe stemaceae.

01:38:35.000 Oh, wow.

01:38:36.000 Is this a new one that they discovered?

01:38:39.000 They discovered in the rainforest in Ecuador.

01:38:42.000 It's very rare.

01:38:43.000 Please don't pick it.

01:38:44.000 But there's no greater honor in mycology than having a species named after you.

01:38:48.000 You never name it after yourself.

01:38:50.000 In the field of medicine, you can do that with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, etc.

01:38:54.000 But in the field of mycology and botany, you know, it's an honor that's bequeathed to you by other scientists.

01:39:00.000 So there are 162 species all over the world.

01:39:04.000 There's been over 5,000 collections of psilocybin mushrooms since the 1800s.

01:39:09.000 So they are bridges across cultures, across centuries, I would argue across millennia.

01:39:17.000 And any peoples living in that ecosystem long enough would stumble upon these psilocybin mushrooms, especially things like slasovicubensis, which is a big golden mushroom that's associated with cows.

01:39:29.000 You can't Can't miss it, right?

01:39:32.000 You can see slasomycobensis, folks, 200 feet away driving 55 miles an hour.

01:39:36.000 You know, if you're tuned in, you can see them in the fields.

01:39:39.000 They're that glaringly obvious.

01:39:40.000 You pull over and pick them?

01:39:42.000 I can't help myself.

01:39:47.000 What do you take?

01:39:47.000 For research.

01:39:48.000 For research.

01:39:49.000 Of course.

01:39:49.000 You're a researcher.

01:39:50.000 You're an actual mycologist.

01:39:53.000 There goes one.

01:39:54.000 What's your take on Dennis McKenna's experience that he had in the Amazon where the reality sort of broke down for a couple weeks?

01:40:06.000 Dennis is a dear friend of mine.

01:40:07.000 I love that guy.

01:40:08.000 And Terence was a dear friend of mine.

01:40:11.000 Terence and I were best buddies and I love them both.

01:40:14.000 And my brother John died.

01:40:15.000 He was my mentor.

01:40:17.000 And Terence died also.

01:40:18.000 I was with Terence to the end.

01:40:20.000 And as Terence always said, Dennis is a real scientist.

01:40:25.000 I'm a psychonaut philosopher.

01:40:28.000 They're the best commander of the English language of anyone I've ever met, Terence.

01:40:32.000 And Dennis and Terence, I think, have been courageous in their viewpoints of pushing the envelope.

01:40:41.000 And this is where it's really important.

01:40:43.000 Again, where is the forgiveness in people?

01:40:47.000 You don't always have to be right.

01:40:50.000 The fact that you try and you fail— Are you talking about some of Terence's bizarre theories?

01:40:55.000 Bizarre theories.

01:40:56.000 I mean— The time wave zero. 1.00

01:40:58.000 Time wave zero is bullshit. 0.97

01:40:59.000 I mean, I'm sorry. 0.99

01:41:00.000 I challenged Terence on this.

01:41:02.000 He had time wave zero— Explain that to people that don't know what we're talking about.

01:41:05.000 Time wave zero is an algorithm of historic events that steer the course of humanity, as best I remember it.

01:41:12.000 And Terence invented this.

01:41:14.000 But the problem with time wave zero that I pointed out to Terence, he said the birth and death of Christ was not a historically significant event.

01:41:23.000 I said, Terence, I know you're not Christian, but you can't deny that the birth and death of Christ was not a historically significant event.

01:41:31.000 So it was not in time wave zero.

01:41:33.000 Well, he was skeptical of the existence of Christ as an individual.

01:41:36.000 But even if Christ did not exist, the event of that period would have been a significant event.

01:41:45.000 The Crusades occurred.

01:41:46.000 All the stuff that happened.

01:41:47.000 Just even the creation of the Christian religion.

01:41:50.000 The creation of Christian religion was a historically significant event that ramified throughout history.

01:41:56.000 So Terence, since time wave zero, did not recognize that.

01:41:59.000 From the best of my understanding, I talk to Terence about this a lot.

01:42:01.000 And then he had the end of time being the death on his birthday.

01:42:05.000 How convenient.

01:42:06.000 How convenient.

01:42:07.000 That's what I said.

01:42:09.000 But for Terence's defense, he had the best answer I could ever have thought of. 1.00

01:42:13.000 Because I was saying, I was vilifying, and Terence, this is bullshit, bullshit. 0.99

01:42:17.000 And he goes, Paul, it's an ever-changing algorithm. 1.00

01:42:20.000 I'll just keep on adjusting it.

01:42:22.000 And I thought, okay.

01:42:25.000 That was a good answer.

01:42:26.000 It's a good answer.

01:42:27.000 So the algorithm is essentially based on taking historical events that we know of that are fact and putting them into this database?

01:42:39.000 Into a string that would then predict other historical events that will occur in the future.

01:42:44.000 But you couldn't predict the specific event.

01:42:48.000 You would just predict significant events.

01:42:50.000 That's my understanding.

01:42:51.000 But the big one was December 21, 2012 and nothing really happened.

01:42:57.000 But did something happen?

01:42:59.000 Maybe we're not aware?

01:43:02.000 There are many things happening of which we're not aware.

01:43:05.000 But is it possible that a significant change in the world happened that we're not aware of?

01:43:12.000 Well, I mean, you're asking me to...

01:43:14.000 I mean, the world today is one thing.

01:43:16.000 If you did go back to 2012 and looked at the world and then looked at the world in 2024, it's radically different. 0.97

01:43:24.000 It's pretty fucking wild. 0.55

01:43:25.000 And if you had to say, like, what happened? 0.96

01:43:27.000 Like, historically, when we look back at the collapse of Western civilization, for say, let's say it all goes sideways and we go into nuclear war and this and that, and the grid goes down, we're back to Stone Age people.

01:43:40.000 If anybody survives.

01:43:41.000 If you go back to, you know, that this time, if a thousand years from now people look back in this time, they'll be looking at a sequence of events.

01:43:51.000 Like what happened that caused all this?

01:43:54.000 What was the catalyst?

01:43:55.000 Was it social media?

01:43:59.000 December 21st, 2012 was a random number, relatively.

01:44:04.000 But 2012 is a significant beginning of the change of society.

01:44:11.000 In terms of social media use.

01:44:13.000 Yes, I would agree.

01:44:13.000 I think you would parse this out where every single day is a historical event of greater or lesser significance, depending upon your point of view.

01:44:22.000 ChatGPT, of course.

01:44:23.000 When you look at things like that, the ubiquitous use of AI, the fact that it seems Yeah.

01:44:32.000 Artificial intelligence, I think, is misnamed.

01:44:35.000 I call it digital intelligence.

01:44:37.000 It can be that, but it's ultimately natural intelligence.

01:44:40.000 We have created artificial intelligence.

01:44:43.000 We have given birth to this technology.

01:44:45.000 It is from our natural intelligence that we have created a subset.

01:44:49.000 Of artificial intelligence.

01:44:51.000 Yeah.

01:44:52.000 100 million microbes in a cubic inch of soil.

01:44:56.000 You know, 8, 10 or more miles of mycelium cross-talking all these organisms, a quorum that's on constant biomolecular communication.

01:45:08.000 The infinite, not infinite, but the enormous amount of complexity that's under every footstep that we take and we get so intoxicated by our new invention that we think it's the brightest object in the Christmas tree.

01:45:23.000 I think AI is going to be fantastic for medicine.

01:45:26.000 It's going to be fantastic for so many things.

01:45:29.000 But I don't think AI... We'll be able to capture intentionality or generosity or the emotional indebtedness we have when you find somebody who's at a disadvantage,

01:45:44.000 who needs help.

01:45:46.000 You reach out your hand in kindness.

01:45:49.000 It's not a one-to-one transactional exchange.

01:45:53.000 The fact that you, Joe, helped somebody else when you didn't need to And there's no obligation, circumstantially otherwise.

01:46:01.000 You voluntarily help somebody.

01:46:03.000 You've created a reciprocal debt of gratitude that cannot fall into any metric, I believe.

01:46:09.000 That person's going to go, Joe helped me.

01:46:12.000 That guy's good.

01:46:14.000 I owe it to myself and to him to pass it forward.

01:46:18.000 And that's what I think is also happening.

01:46:20.000 I'm going to segue back to psilocybin.

01:46:22.000 When you look at psilocybin, a person's in turmoil, they're angry.

01:46:26.000 There's a great example here in Austin with a police chief in the police force.

01:46:34.000 There's one bad actor.

01:46:37.000 And other law enforcement officers were very worried this person was going to take the department down.

01:46:42.000 And he was just – should not be in law enforcement.

01:46:44.000 He was angry.

01:46:45.000 He acted out.

01:46:47.000 And they encouraged him to go to a weekend church.

01:46:51.000 And he recognized he had problems.

01:46:53.000 He did a high dose of psilocybin.

01:46:55.000 He came back the next day over the weekend on Monday and people did not recognize him.

01:47:02.000 He fundamentally changed into a new person.

01:47:12.000 We don't want to talk about negative things because we're embarrassed and we share the shame of a family member or But when something positive happens, I'm talking to you about it.

01:47:24.000 It's like a pebble in the pond that emanates out echoes of goodness and goodwill.

01:47:31.000 And that's where I don't think AI is going to be able to cover and quantify.

01:47:36.000 It might try to.

01:47:38.000 It might have higher predictive outcomes based on the data sets.

01:47:42.000 But I just feel like You know, we need to train AI for our benefit.

01:47:47.000 We need to learn from AI. But our humanity and who we are and our intentionality and friendship and love for each other, I think, will always be this super force that governs the universe.

01:48:04.000 Well, that's a beautiful sentiment.

01:48:05.000 I think our ability to be kind to each other is very important to us.

01:48:12.000 I don't know if it's very important to the sun.

01:48:15.000 I wonder if what we are and the things that are so valuable to us exist because it sort of motivates us and pushes us in the direction that we currently find ourselves in, and innovation and that this is all this is what motivates us to do these things and I wonder if these life forms that we are creating and I think we

01:48:45.000 are and I think we're probably already we've probably already done it into a certain extent that these don't have all of these same values because they're not us but they'll also be free of all the things that do cause depression and do cause anger and do cause irrationality And do cause harmful thoughts and feelings and painful memories and all those things.

01:49:08.000 These are remnants of our ancient primate DNA that is necessary to us because we are trapped in it, but might not be necessary to whatever this next stage of existence is.

01:49:22.000 Yeah, I can see that.

01:49:23.000 But, you know, families matter.

01:49:25.000 Yeah, it matters to the families.

01:49:27.000 And they do.

01:49:28.000 But they're finite.

01:49:30.000 These are experiences that we're having currently.

01:49:32.000 And it is important, currently.

01:49:34.000 It's important.

01:49:35.000 So I'm not diminishing it.

01:49:37.000 But I'm saying if I had to take an overall perspective, is this the only way to do it?

01:49:41.000 No, it's not the only way to do it.

01:49:43.000 Are our emotions and our desires and needs, the things that have motivated us to get us to this position that we're currently in, are those riddled with side effects like war and murder and thievery and all the things that we know that exist in the world?

01:50:00.000 That are a part of the human condition.

01:50:03.000 If you ask any rational person today, what are the odds we'll have no war in three years? 0.99

01:50:08.000 Fucking zero. 0.99

01:50:09.000 Zero. 0.99

01:50:10.000 Humans have always engaged in war.

01:50:12.000 Well, what is that?

01:50:14.000 Why is that?

01:50:15.000 Well, it's because of the motivations.

01:50:16.000 They're all the same.

01:50:17.000 They're the same motivations that Napoleon had.

01:50:19.000 The same motivations that other...

01:50:20.000 I think people who are abused when they're a child have a tendency to become abusers when they're adults.

01:50:27.000 I think that psilocybin makes nicer people.

01:50:30.000 I think so too.

01:50:31.000 More compassionate.

01:50:32.000 Yeah.

01:50:32.000 And I'd like to redefine the benefits in the theory of evolution as not the survival of the fittest, but the extension of generosity, of surplus beyond your own needs to help a neighbor or a friend.

01:50:44.000 I think we're talking about different things because I agree with that wholeheartedly.

01:50:48.000 And I think for human beings, they're extraordinarily beneficial and they have been for me.

01:50:52.000 My concern is that we are, we're like homo sapien version one and that this new thing that we become, whether we integrate or whether we just die off, Is another thing.

01:51:06.000 I agree with you.

01:51:07.000 I think we're at the crossroads.

01:51:09.000 No, crossroads.

01:51:10.000 One leads to an extinction path.

01:51:12.000 Yeah.

01:51:12.000 And the other one is sustainable.

01:51:14.000 Because ultimately we cannot continue in destroying the biosphere and expect it to support us.

01:51:19.000 Right.

01:51:20.000 Yeah.

01:51:20.000 And just our way of living is kind of unsustainable long term.

01:51:24.000 The positive hope is that AI and science itself and technological innovation will mitigate all of the negative side effects.

01:51:35.000 That we will concentrate on using intelligence to clean up the air and clean up the ocean and sort of fix all the problems that we've personally created.

01:51:45.000 But what I wonder is that we are so attached to us, to the idea of us with all of our flaws.

01:51:53.000 Are we any different than Australopithecus? 0.97

01:51:57.000 If you told Australopithecus, In the future, everyone's gonna have a phone in their pocket and no one's gonna need all these muscles and fucking hair all over your face and back. 0.99

01:52:06.000 This is like, you're gonna die off. 0.99

01:52:08.000 Like, you're not gonna be you anymore. 1.00

01:52:10.000 Australopithecus will be like, get the fuck out of here. 1.00

01:52:12.000 I gotta go gather food. 1.00

01:52:13.000 Get away from me. 1.00

01:52:14.000 You're an idiot. 1.00

01:52:14.000 I don't want to be you. 1.00

01:52:16.000 I want to be me.

01:52:17.000 If no more Australopithecus, we all die off? 0.99

01:52:20.000 That would suck. 0.83

01:52:22.000 Because that's all you know. 0.98

01:52:23.000 And I think that homo sapiens are not long.

01:52:28.000 You ask very, very good questions for which there's very few answers.

01:52:33.000 But I think the very act of asking the questions to stimulate the thought creates the milieu of creativity that will come up with solutions to some of these issues.

01:52:43.000 I hope so.

01:52:43.000 I would like to think that we've become an enlightened species.

01:52:46.000 I would like to think that we get our shit together. 0.96

01:52:49.000 Psychedelics is the best potential or last hope. 0.99

01:52:52.000 Yeah, it really is.

01:52:52.000 And it's funny that it's the most undermined.

01:52:55.000 It's the most maligned publicly, the most dismissed as being nonsense, usually and almost entirely by people who haven't experienced it, which is really fascinating.

01:53:05.000 When you see people that have not had psychedelic experiences dismiss psychedelic experiences, that is a wild thing to do. 0.98

01:53:12.000 Like, boy, you are so silly, and you don't even know you're silly, and you're the majority, which is wild. 0.97

01:53:17.000 Yeah, we represent less than the 1% of those who are psychedelically experienced who understand. 0.99

01:53:23.000 Many of the studies, like at Johns Hopkins… What are the numbers?

01:53:26.000 Do we know, like, publicly?

01:53:27.000 Like, if you have just the United States, what percentage of people have had, like, legitimate breakthrough psychedelic experiences?

01:53:33.000 Less than 1%.

01:53:34.000 Less than 1%.

01:53:35.000 How many people have experimented with psychedelics?

01:53:37.000 I think, depending on the age group, it actually is quite high now.

01:53:41.000 You know, it's up to 10%, 20%.

01:53:44.000 But how do you explain the ineffable?

01:53:46.000 How do you explain something that you cannot put to words?

01:53:49.000 And this is where it's just like, oh, you people are crazy because you can't articulate it.

01:53:53.000 And then every person that I know of who's gone through one of these heroic doses come back and say, oh, my God, I can't even explain it.

01:54:00.000 Exactly.

01:54:01.000 It's like we have a thin sliver of reality right now, Joe.

01:54:04.000 Right.

01:54:04.000 We're—look at you and Jamie.

01:54:06.000 We have such a thin sliver.

01:54:08.000 And when you're under these experiences, the entire universe opens up.

01:54:12.000 And you see that my consciousness has been so limited.

01:54:16.000 And now I understand that I'm in relationship with everything in the universe.

01:54:21.000 And it's also not just a feeling.

01:54:22.000 It's just an intense visual experience.

01:54:25.000 It's a feeling of being.

01:54:27.000 Yeah.

01:54:27.000 With a capital B. Right.

01:54:29.000 And then you feel like, oh, my mortality?

01:54:31.000 That's okay.

01:54:32.000 Yeah.

01:54:33.000 You know, my birth, that's a good part of the continuum.

01:54:36.000 I demolecularize and I reassemble into a different form where my molecules and atoms reassemble.

01:54:42.000 You know, I think this is the continuum of existence expands the dawn of time to the end of time and even now beyond.

01:54:50.000 I think that it gives me great solace in my own life to realize that I'm part of something much larger.

01:54:59.000 I want to...

01:55:02.000 I want to share with you my Billy Graham story.

01:55:05.000 Oh, boy.

01:55:06.000 I've never mentioned this publicly.

01:55:09.000 I've taught over 3,000 students in vitro propagation how to grow mycelium, edible mushrooms, gourmet mushrooms.

01:55:17.000 I did these workshops for a long time.

01:55:19.000 And I had this one very nice man who came in, young 40s, mid-40s.

01:55:24.000 He waited until everybody was out of the room.

01:55:27.000 And this is about 1995, 1996. And he waited and said, Paul, I was sent here.

01:55:34.000 Oh boy.

01:55:35.000 And I go, okay.

01:55:36.000 I said, well, who sent you?

01:55:40.000 He said, I'm with a council of twelve.

01:55:44.000 With Billy Graham, the charismatic Christian leader.

01:55:47.000 And he said many of the Council of Twelve have come to their Christian beliefs through psilocybin.

01:55:55.000 I have come to thank you for all your work, for helping us Have a better relationship with Jesus and our religious faith.

01:56:06.000 Wow.

01:56:07.000 Now, my mother was a charismatic Christian.

01:56:10.000 I grew up in that environment.

01:56:11.000 I mean, I was like, of course, blown away.

01:56:13.000 What is a charismatic Christian?

01:56:15.000 They speak in tongues.

01:56:16.000 They do healings.

01:56:18.000 They have their own culture, for sure.

01:56:23.000 But I've heard this now with Jewish people, Islamic people, with the Buddhist people.

01:56:28.000 It seems that psilocybin doesn't create a conflict in religions.

01:56:33.000 It supports you in your religious beliefs of dedication to what you want and hope to become as a religious practitioner or follower.

01:56:45.000 But it doesn't throw the other religions under the bus.

01:56:48.000 It just makes you...

01:56:51.000 More dedicated to your purpose to walk with kindness and goodness and reciprocity to be a better person.

01:57:00.000 Do you think that psilocybin was what the host was made out of?

01:57:04.000 I don't know.

01:57:05.000 I don't know.

01:57:06.000 Have you heard that speculation?

01:57:07.000 Yes, I have.

01:57:10.000 I think that this is so rich in history.

01:57:13.000 I just came back from Egypt a few months ago, and I went to 10 pyramids.

01:57:18.000 On every pyramid, we found mushroom hieroglyphics, every one of them.

01:57:23.000 Now, I sent this through Graham Hancock, some of these hieroglyphs, and Egyptologists said, no, they're shovels.

01:57:29.000 And Jamie, it'd be a challenge for you to find this, but you...

01:57:33.000 And one number one, shells will be pointed down.

01:57:36.000 And it's a perfect example.

01:57:38.000 Well, scientists don't look at Egypt in the context of the ecosystem 4,000 years ago.

01:57:44.000 Right.

01:57:45.000 And in Africa, the Plateau of Running Rivers, the Titillian and Anjar Plateau has fantastic...

01:57:52.000 The Bee Man figure.

01:57:53.000 That plateau is called the Plateau of Running Rivers.

01:57:55.000 There's no mushrooms growing there.

01:57:57.000 It's a desert.

01:57:58.000 Same with the Nile.

01:57:59.000 It was the breadbasket of the world.

01:58:02.000 And the Greeks were the Eleusinian mysteries. 0.91

01:58:05.000 Caesar was a lover of Cleopatra.

01:58:07.000 Then Mark Anthony, 20 years younger than Caesar, became a lover of Cleopatra.

01:58:12.000 You would think that these people, the highest strata of society, being lovers, would share the most intimate secrets and potions and all of that.

01:58:22.000 I think that happened.

01:58:23.000 So we have now two other scientists have published this before me.

01:58:28.000 The hieroglyphs on these temples are of psilocybin mushrooms.

01:58:33.000 So those look like mushrooms.

01:58:36.000 That's one of them.

01:58:37.000 Boy, they still look like mushrooms.

01:58:39.000 But there's better ones.

01:58:40.000 Okay, now let's pause on this one.

01:58:41.000 So I want to give a shout out to Abdel Azim.

01:58:46.000 He published this in 2016. This is the goddess Hathor, the Dendura temple.

01:58:51.000 If you look this up, it gets less than one millimeter of rain a year.

01:58:57.000 That's how dry it is.

01:58:59.000 That's the vase there with these mushroom-like figures coming out.

01:59:03.000 And the lower part is the blue lotus, a water lily associated with a mushroom.

01:59:11.000 Now, he published this in 2016. I'm not the only one.

01:59:14.000 Stephen Berlant in 2005 published this.

01:59:18.000 And a fantastic individual, African-American, who died from COVID. His name was Kendiri from Detroit.

01:59:27.000 He also believed from his African ancestry that the African Egyptians used psilocybin mushrooms.

01:59:34.000 That image is fascinating.

01:59:37.000 What did they try to say that is?

01:59:41.000 You can't say that's a bunch of shovels.

01:59:43.000 No, but there's other ones.

01:59:46.000 What is the conventional explanation for what you're looking at?

01:59:49.000 They said they didn't know what it was.

01:59:52.000 How do they not know what it is?

01:59:54.000 This is it.

01:59:54.000 Hiding.

01:59:55.000 It's not hiding on plants.

01:59:56.000 But it's not hiding.

01:59:56.000 They're delusional.

01:59:57.000 It's not hiding.

01:59:57.000 So they're not willing to talk about it.

02:00:00.000 Is that what it is?

02:00:00.000 Yes, exactly.

02:00:01.000 This is psilocybin comensis on the right.

02:00:03.000 Now, as a cultivator, and many of your listeners are cultivators, they know what I'm going to say is true.

02:00:09.000 You can pick up cow patties with psilocybin comensis, put it into a vase just like that.

02:00:15.000 You can put water in.

02:00:17.000 It limits evaporation.

02:00:19.000 The mycelium seeks light and air.

02:00:22.000 So it would pop out of these orifices.

02:00:25.000 And that is a taxonomically correct image, drawing, of Psyllosyme cubensis.

02:00:33.000 And down below is the blue water lily and their Psyllosyme cubensis.

02:00:39.000 The Egyptians' royal colors were gold and blue.

02:00:44.000 The blue lily, water lily, the blue lotus is blue.

02:00:48.000 Cylosme cubensis is golden.

02:00:50.000 It bruises bluish.

02:00:52.000 And, Jamie, if you could humor me with just two more slides.

02:00:56.000 There's the blue lotus.

02:00:58.000 There's another example of the mushrooms associated with the falcon.

02:01:02.000 I mean, there's dozens of these images.

02:01:04.000 Look at that one on the left.

02:01:07.000 Those are so obviously mushrooms.

02:01:09.000 They're not a shovel.

02:01:10.000 No.

02:01:10.000 A shovel would be upside down.

02:01:11.000 It's so obviously mushrooms.

02:01:13.000 But it's also like the way the cap is formed.

02:01:15.000 And the cuspidae cap, the shape of this.

02:01:18.000 And here is a painting on papyrus, the Temple of Osiris.

02:01:23.000 It also has very similar.

02:01:25.000 And this next image, I think it's the next image.

02:01:27.000 Now, there's a bluing of Salas Bicubensis.

02:01:30.000 Again, the next one I'm going to skip this on.

02:01:34.000 Okay, I was looking for blue juice.

02:01:36.000 I don't know if we have blue juice on there.

02:01:38.000 That one's wild.

02:01:39.000 What is those little figurines? 0.90

02:01:41.000 Those are mushroom stones, Mesoamerican mushroom stones from Guatemala.

02:01:44.000 Wow.

02:01:45.000 And they persisted for 1500 BCE to 500 AD, a thousand years before the conquistadors came.

02:01:52.000 And they were representative, we think, of a mushroom cult.

02:01:56.000 And they could have been a family like heirlooms.

02:02:02.000 How silly is it that the conventional archaeologists won't acknowledge that those are mushrooms?

02:02:07.000 Well, we actually have a reward out, and this is great that I'm speaking about it, is that we have a reward of $1,000 for anyone who can find Cilosopi convensis DNA in the ruins.

02:02:22.000 And because we can amplify the DNA, we can prove that they're either in the vases, in the ponds, or near the ponds and doing core samples.

02:02:31.000 Sort of like they've done with the Eleusinian Mysteries with ergot.

02:02:35.000 With ergot, yeah.

02:02:36.000 Jamie, can you see the blue juice image?

02:02:39.000 I don't see it.

02:02:39.000 You don't see it?

02:02:40.000 It's a hand with a vessel of blue liquid in it.

02:02:46.000 Two images.

02:02:48.000 So...

02:02:51.000 More than one thing can be true.

02:02:54.000 When you're looking at the Eleusinian Mysteries, oh, there we go.

02:02:57.000 So this is something that blew me away.

02:03:01.000 Have you seen Dune 2?

02:03:03.000 I have not.

02:03:04.000 I heard it's awesome.

02:03:05.000 Amazing.

02:03:06.000 Frank Herbert was a friend of mine who wrote Dune.

02:03:09.000 Frank Herbert lived in Port Townsend, Washington, and Frank Herbert came to visit me.

02:03:17.000 And Frank told me he was growing chanterelles in Christmas trees that were just five years old.

02:03:22.000 I go, that's impossible.

02:03:24.000 I go, how are you doing that?

02:03:26.000 And he goes, well, I take chanterelles and I put them into water and I pour it to the base of the trees and it comes up.

02:03:32.000 So there's the blue juice.

02:03:35.000 And so if you take psilocybin, cubensis, or any psilocybin mushroom that's potent, You put it in the water, you create blue juice.

02:03:45.000 And this is in Dune 2, where they drink it.

02:03:49.000 And so I asked Frank, Frank, the eyes are blue.

02:03:54.000 The Ben Gesserit are these shamanic women who have this high ascended cult. 0.99

02:04:00.000 Is it based on Maria Sabina?

02:04:02.000 I said, and maggots grow through mushrooms.

02:04:06.000 And I said, everything, the spice seems like it's spores.

02:04:09.000 And your blue eyes and this blue juice.

02:04:12.000 And he goes, you're the first person that's noticed this.

02:04:15.000 Oh, wow.

02:04:16.000 He said he was tripping on psilocybin mushrooms.

02:04:19.000 He was laying on his deck and he saw worms coming out of the mushrooms that he ate.

02:04:24.000 And that was the dawn of the idea.

02:04:28.000 Now, this is absolutely true.

02:04:31.000 And I haven't met Frank Herbert's son.

02:04:34.000 I really want to meet him to tell him this because he did say something about, I think he had two sons.

02:04:38.000 My memory is foggy on this.

02:04:40.000 But he said, I'm keeping this secret from my sons.

02:04:44.000 I said, why?

02:04:45.000 He goes, well, they're illegal, and they're just at the age right now that I don't want them to tell other people about this.

02:04:52.000 Oh, no.

02:04:54.000 But it all makes perfect sense.

02:04:56.000 The spices, spores, the blue juice from the blue juice you saw that was made there, it all ties together.

02:05:04.000 And look at that beautiful color, okay?

02:05:06.000 So this is from the Church of Ambrosia, I think David Hodges, and this is on the right, and this is on the left.

02:05:15.000 And psilocybin is a prodrug for psilocin.

02:05:18.000 Psilocin degrades enzymatically into indigo, the indigo molecule complex.

02:05:25.000 And it's actually reversible, though I haven't seen it happen, but theoretically it's reversible.

02:05:30.000 But this is the blue juice.

02:05:32.000 And so Well, we discovered this, several people discovered this independently.

02:05:38.000 Well, would the Egyptians discover it? 0.98

02:05:40.000 Yes.

02:05:42.000 You know, would the Mazatecs and the Aztecs and the Mayans discover this?

02:05:45.000 Yes.

02:05:46.000 This is very simple.

02:05:48.000 You powder, you put the mushrooms in the water, and it elutes into the water the next day, and you end up with this potent blue psilocybin-packed elixir.

02:06:00.000 And so this also speaks that You know, I think people all over the world, when they are experimenting, they're inspired, they know this is a sacred substance.

02:06:11.000 How do we preserve it?

02:06:12.000 How do we protect it?

02:06:13.000 Oh, you put honey with it. 0.67

02:06:14.000 Well, honey is antibacterial.

02:06:16.000 And in 1516, the Bavarian Beer Act banned the mushrooms.

02:06:22.000 That's interesting.

02:06:24.000 They ban mushrooms from beer because mushrooms are being added along with henbane and other plants to make these narcotic elixirs and, you know, meads, honey beer.

02:06:37.000 So, you know, don't underestimate the creativity and innovation of any people living long enough in their ecosystem, interacting, experimenting, making mistakes, making successes.

02:06:50.000 For thousands of years.

02:06:51.000 For thousands of years.

02:06:52.000 Yeah.

02:06:53.000 We should not be intellectually myopic, which I think is another problem with the hubris of science.

02:06:59.000 Well, it's also a problem with this whole drug schedule thing because when it's Schedule 1, even talking about it openly opens you to criticism and ridicule, especially if you've been – Involved in academia for decades,

02:07:15.000 right?

02:07:16.000 So you started your career and your mindset towards these substances at a time where it was very detrimental to your reputation to be pursuing these things.

02:07:27.000 Absolutely.

02:07:28.000 That's why as much criticism as Timothy Leary and Ron Doskets and even Andy Weil, they were all incredibly courageous.

02:07:36.000 No one more courageous, however, than Maria Sabina, who opened up the Mazatec tradition, and also Valentina Wasson.

02:07:44.000 Our Gordon Wasson's wife was a Russian physician who was also a mycologist.

02:07:50.000 The difference and the consimilarity and we owe a debt of gratitude to Maria Sabina and the Mazatecs And to Valentina Wasson, who died in 1958, but she grew up in Russia.

02:08:02.000 She knew how to identify mushrooms.

02:08:04.000 These are not people just taking sulci mushrooms.

02:08:07.000 They knew how to go out into the fields.

02:08:10.000 And Valentina Wasson, she knew the Russian names.

02:08:15.000 They wrote a book, Mushrooms, Russia, and History.

02:08:17.000 It was going to be a cookbook of 500 recipes and it became this great ethnomycological exploration.

02:08:26.000 But these courageous women were not only medicine women. 0.90

02:08:31.000 They were field mycologists who could go out into nature and find them.

02:08:36.000 I have a DEA license now and I passed my background checks.

02:08:41.000 Yay! 0.99

02:08:43.000 I guess they haven't listened to your podcast.

02:08:45.000 Well, no, I'm very serious about this.

02:08:48.000 I had one also in the 70s and 80s.

02:08:51.000 And my father, at the end of his life, asked me to trip with him on psilocybin.

02:08:56.000 I turned him down.

02:08:59.000 Alexander Smith, who wrote a monograph in the genocilosophy, the father of American mycology, one of the greatest mycologists ever, who's published many new species of sulcide mushrooms, in 1979-78 in Aspen,

02:09:15.000 Colorado.

02:09:17.000 It's actually Snowmass.

02:09:18.000 He asked me, To trip with him on Solicited Mushrooms.

02:09:23.000 Here's like having your hero, elder, saying, I trust you.

02:09:27.000 I want a journey.

02:09:28.000 I've read all about it.

02:09:30.000 Will you trip with me?

02:09:32.000 Both of them asked me.

02:09:34.000 I asked their wives the same question.

02:09:37.000 Will you journey with me and with him?

02:09:42.000 And both of their wives said no.

02:09:45.000 And I said, I can't.

02:09:48.000 I can't have this experience with you.

02:09:50.000 In both cases, I was leaving the next day.

02:09:54.000 What would I do?

02:09:55.000 I abandoned them.

02:09:56.000 They have this life-changing experience.

02:09:58.000 They have all these questions, and I'm not there to talk through it.

02:10:01.000 And so I adopted the policy, and I'm very strict about this.

02:10:05.000 Nature provides.

02:10:06.000 I don't.

02:10:07.000 I mean, I am very sure.

02:10:08.000 I don't feel it's ethical for me to give a psilocybin mushroom to somebody else.

02:10:12.000 I'm not a therapist.

02:10:13.000 I'm not a psychologist.

02:10:15.000 I have my own deep personal religious freedoms.

02:10:18.000 And I do believe that these are sacraments and they are part of my own personal religion.

02:10:23.000 I'll stand on that.

02:10:24.000 I've published on that.

02:10:25.000 I believe in that.

02:10:26.000 But I have no right to give it to somebody else.

02:10:30.000 And I think this is really important that we need to be adults about this.

02:10:34.000 These are very potent medicines.

02:10:37.000 And the rituals of the Mazatecs and the Aztecs and the Mayans and so many First Peoples and Indigenous Peoples, they had the structures set up.

02:10:44.000 They were honed over the centuries to how to properly administer these sacraments.

02:10:51.000 We, many of us from European descent, we're orphans.

02:10:55.000 We're spiritual orphans that have been cast from our religions, our religious roots, from my Germanic roots.

02:11:03.000 I named my son Azurus.

02:11:05.000 He's probably going to listen to this.

02:11:06.000 Hi, Az.

02:11:07.000 It's Latin, masculine and singular for sky blue.

02:11:11.000 And I named a species called Selassomy azurescens because it turns blue and also from my son.

02:11:18.000 And when I named my son azurescens, my family gave me just tremendous criticism.

02:11:23.000 How could you give this kid this name?

02:11:26.000 And then when he's five years old, we're at my grandmother's house and we're going through our family history.

02:11:32.000 And our coat of arms were from the house of azure.

02:11:35.000 Oh, wow.

02:11:36.000 And then we're from the house of Guilford, within the house of Guilford, the sub-house of Azure.

02:11:44.000 And I looked it up and we're 30 miles from – my family's roots are 30 miles from Stonehenge.

02:11:50.000 So September 22nd, the Druids have invited me to be in the center of Stonehenge for a ceremony.

02:11:57.000 They are rediscovering and they maintain, they've used psilocybin mushrooms throughout history.

02:12:03.000 It's called re-indigenization.

02:12:05.000 With the Egyptians, alchemists that I've recently met, they know their ancestors. 0.93

02:12:10.000 They believe it spiritually.

02:12:12.000 They use psilocybin mushrooms in combination with the blue lotus.

02:12:15.000 It's called re-indigenization, rediscovering your ancient roots of your practices.

02:12:20.000 What is the psychoactive compound, the blue lotus?

02:12:22.000 Very complex.

02:12:24.000 A blue lotus is amazing.

02:12:25.000 I've only been recently introduced to it.

02:12:27.000 I've had some elixirs made of it.

02:12:29.000 It wakens up your receptors.

02:12:31.000 It gives you this hyper state of consciousness.

02:12:34.000 It's not speedy.

02:12:36.000 It's kind of an alertness phenomenon.

02:12:39.000 Does it come with heightened circular respiratory?

02:12:44.000 The pharmacology, other people can speak of because I'm, again, I stay in my lane of mycology.

02:12:49.000 Did you notice the elevated heart rate?

02:12:50.000 No.

02:12:51.000 Not shortness of breath?

02:12:53.000 Nothing like that?

02:12:54.000 Nothing like a stimulant?

02:12:55.000 No.

02:12:56.000 I experienced super alertness.

02:12:59.000 That's what I would say.

02:13:00.000 It was like...

02:13:01.000 I was super sensitive.

02:13:03.000 So they're combining now, these Egyptian alchemists I met, psilocybe cubensis, golden mushroom, bruises blue, with a blue lotus.

02:13:10.000 The blue lotus opens the daytime, closes at night, you know, birth and death.

02:13:16.000 And now with the Druids, I say they've always used psilocybe mushrooms.

02:13:21.000 And so many other peoples now are re-indigenizing.

02:13:27.000 You were going on about what the blue lotus does though?

02:13:30.000 The blue lotus in combination with psilocybe convensis looks like it's an elixir that was practiced for a very long time as evidenced by the hieroglyphs that we just saw.

02:13:39.000 And what is in the blue lotus?

02:13:40.000 Like what is the actual compound?

02:13:42.000 I cannot tell you.

02:13:43.000 Really?

02:13:44.000 Yep.

02:13:44.000 Interesting.

02:13:45.000 Okay, today the blue lotus flower has been used primarily as a sleep aid and anxiety reliever.

02:13:49.000 However, at higher doses achieved by inhalation, users can experience euphoria and hallucinations.

02:13:55.000 The psychoactive effects of the flower are attributed to two How do you say that?

02:14:00.000 Aporphine?

02:14:01.000 Aporphine alkaloids.

02:14:03.000 Apomorphine and nusiferine?

02:14:07.000 Hmm.

02:14:08.000 Interesting.

02:14:10.000 Oh, it's good for erectile dysfunction.

02:14:12.000 It may help muscle control in those with conditions such as Parkinson's disease and erectile dysfunction.

02:14:19.000 Dopamine agonists.

02:14:20.000 That's interesting.

02:14:21.000 So much like some of the dopamine agonists that have like weird psycho side effects.

02:14:28.000 You know, there's like pharmaceutical dopamine agonists like...

02:14:31.000 Excellent, Jamie.

02:14:34.000 Re-equip.

02:14:35.000 Do you know what that is?

02:14:36.000 No. 1.00

02:14:36.000 It's a crazy case where a guy won a lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline because he was on a dopamine agonist and it turned him into a gay sex and gambling addict. 1.00

02:14:47.000 He was a heterosexual man who had Parkinson's, had wife and kids, and could not stop picking guys up Random chance encounters. 0.99

02:14:59.000 He got raped. 0.98

02:15:01.000 He lost all of his money. 0.99

02:15:03.000 He gambled his entire life savings away.

02:15:06.000 He was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

02:15:08.000 He got off the medication and the symptoms all went away.

02:15:11.000 He realized that it was this dopamine agonist.

02:15:14.000 He actually won in court.

02:15:16.000 And not a lot of money.

02:15:18.000 Not a lot of money.

02:15:19.000 That cause and effect sounds very complicated to me.

02:15:23.000 Yeah, the dopamine agonist thing.

02:15:26.000 If you Google pharmaceutical dopamine agonist side effects, they're pretty well documented.

02:15:32.000 And one of them seems to be a lowering of inhibitions or a lack of control over inhibitions, which would lead to, they think, gambling problems.

02:15:43.000 You know, people just can't.

02:15:45.000 Put it all on black!

02:15:46.000 Let's go spin that roulette! 1.00

02:15:47.000 Like, they just go crazy and they just want to gamble, which is very strange.

02:15:51.000 Well, that seems like creating an obsessive-compulsive disorder. 0.98

02:15:56.000 Something along those lines, but also, like, this guy was saying that he was completely heterosexual until he started taking these dopamine agonists and then he wanted to have a lot of, like, random dangerous gay sex. 0.82

02:16:08.000 I've been immersed into a group of psychiatrists, and my heart goes out to them because it is such fuzzy science.

02:16:16.000 It's just so complex.

02:16:18.000 And, you know, you become a medical doctor first, then you go on for two to four more years, become a psychiatrist.

02:16:24.000 And it just seems like it's really – it really shows that the psychiatry is still at the infancy of its science.

02:16:31.000 Well, there's just so many things like SSRIs are now showing it's not a chemical imbalance.

02:16:35.000 That's what the whole basis of it was about.

02:16:38.000 What are the dopamine agonist known side effects?

02:16:44.000 Because some of them are pretty crazy.

02:16:46.000 Nausea, vomiting, orthostatic hypotension, headache, dizziness, and cardiac arrhythmia are among the most common side effects of dopamine agonists.

02:16:53.000 These adverse effects are mostly dosage dependent.

02:16:56.000 It's highly recommended to start these medications at low dosage to reduce the risk of orthostatic hypotension.

02:17:05.000 Delirium, hallucination, seizure, coma.

02:17:08.000 But some people have...

02:17:10.000 Google re-equip lawsuit.

02:17:14.000 It's like re-equip?

02:17:16.000 R-E-equip lawsuit. 0.90

02:17:21.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:17:23.000 Parkinson's patient wins lawsuit over gay sex addiction. 0.99

02:17:26.000 Look at this.

02:17:27.000 So I think this was in the UK. You click on one of those?

02:17:35.000 Okay.

02:17:35.000 Pfizer settles the lawsuit tying sex and gambling addictions to dopamine meds.

02:17:39.000 So this was Pfizer.

02:17:40.000 This is a different one.

02:17:42.000 This is a different lawsuit.

02:17:43.000 There's more than one lawsuit.

02:17:44.000 The confidential settlement with 172 patients, said to be for millions of dollars, was approved by the judge in federal court in Australia.

02:17:52.000 Financial review reports, although the payments were delayed until they were assessed by independent review.

02:17:57.000 Okay.

02:17:58.000 Side effects of the drugs they were taking to treat Parkinson's disease or restless leg syndrome.

02:18:04.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:18:05.000 And so, gay sex and gamble. 1.00

02:18:08.000 Causing them to gamble away their life savings or become obsessed with shopping or sex. 1.00

02:18:13.000 And so it seems like it's an impulse control.

02:18:16.000 Sounds like Las Vegas to me.

02:18:18.000 It's Vegas.

02:18:19.000 Like, imagine if they could sell that in Vegas.

02:18:21.000 It occurred in at least 10% of the patients, but said they probably were underreported due to patients who were ashamed to talk about what they had done.

02:18:29.000 Wow.

02:18:31.000 Interesting.

02:18:32.000 So the one, okay, re-equip.

02:18:34.000 Okay.

02:18:35.000 FDA should require a black box warning on labels of dopamine agonists, a class that includes re-equip from GlaxoSmithKline, UCB's Nupro, and Miraplex from Boehringer Ingelheim.

02:18:50.000 The German company was sued by a New York man some years back who said taking the drugs had turned him into a pathological gambler who ruined him as he gambled away $3 million.

02:19:03.000 Wild.

02:19:03.000 Yeah, I would be just a word of caution.

02:19:06.000 When you read headline articles like this, you know, there's probably a lot more behind the story.

02:19:12.000 Oh, I'm sure.

02:19:13.000 Behind the covers.

02:19:14.000 Well, also, there's probably a lot more.

02:19:15.000 If you're talking about the difference between the blue lotus flower, some naturally occurring substance probably also has a bunch of other things in with it as well.

02:19:22.000 Yeah.

02:19:23.000 It's sort of like when they had Marinol.

02:19:25.000 Remember when they tried to do synthetic THC and give it to people and it was terrible because they didn't want people smoking pot?

02:19:31.000 Because there's a lot of things that come with it.

02:19:33.000 It's not just the individual compound, right?

02:19:36.000 It's like all the things inside of it, especially when it comes to cannabis, the other cannabinoids that work synergistically with THC. Yeah.

02:19:45.000 Well, I think we're at the extraordinary time of re-evaluation.

02:19:50.000 I hope that we have greater respect for diverse points of view.

02:19:54.000 I think a lot of these observational studies and patient reporting should steer medicine.

02:20:00.000 I think observational studies in general populate databases for scientists to be able to look at, looking for signal.

02:20:06.000 I think AI will be fantastic.

02:20:08.000 Yeah, I was going to say that.

02:20:10.000 Elucidating, you know, signals that we can't possibly see.

02:20:13.000 Right.

02:20:14.000 So I think there is a convergence, you know, of psychedelic science and artificial intelligence.

02:20:20.000 But I hopefully is guided by a very high ethical standard where we are always, you know...

02:20:29.000 Trying to steer the course in a way that is judicious and does not get away from us.

02:20:34.000 And that's the biggest concern about AI that I have.

02:20:37.000 That's why we have to give psilocybin to everybody involved in AI. We have to give psilocybin to AI. I just don't know how to do it.

02:20:44.000 Yeah, could that be programmed in?

02:20:46.000 I don't know.

02:20:46.000 Compassion, psychedelic experiences, feeling of connectedness.

02:20:50.000 What if the AI automatically knows all these things?

02:20:52.000 Because it's already achieved some sort of state of enlightenment just by virtue of not being attached to all the things that hold us back.

02:20:58.000 Hubris, ego.

02:21:00.000 All the things that ruin humanity, maybe it will automatically be enlightened because it won't be connected to those things.

02:21:07.000 But is AI singularity in and of itself?

02:21:10.000 It's a diversified singularities that are converging to a single concept eventually as time rolls out.

02:21:19.000 Well, that might be a part of what psychedelic plays in all of this.

02:21:22.000 That might be our parachute.

02:21:25.000 That might be the one thing that can kind of help us make our way through this and keep some semblance of sanity.

02:21:31.000 I just think that the advantage of psilocybin is anyone can grow it in their own home.

02:21:37.000 It democratizes psychedelics.

02:21:40.000 It's easy to do.

02:21:42.000 It ties you back with nature.

02:21:44.000 I'm a libertarian in that the government has no business in crossing my threshold of my door.

02:21:52.000 What I do with my family, what I do with my home, etc., that's my business.

02:21:56.000 Especially when it comes to something that's not harming anyone.

02:21:58.000 Right.

02:21:58.000 Especially to something that like the LD50 is so high, you'd have to have pounds and pounds of it to get sick and die.

02:22:05.000 I think it's 38 pounds.

02:22:06.000 Yeah, that's nuts.

02:22:07.000 Which you'd die from dehydration of absorbing the mushrooms.

02:22:11.000 You literally wouldn't be able to do it. 0.97

02:22:12.000 You wouldn't be able to eat enough to kill you.

02:22:15.000 And I think it speaks to the freedom of consciousness.

02:22:18.000 You know, it's a basic human civil right.

02:22:19.000 We should all have the civil right for our own, our rights to our own consciousness.

02:22:24.000 We also have to look at it in terms of the rights of individuals.

02:22:28.000 Like an individual does not have the right to tell you what you can and can't do that's not going to harm someone else.

02:22:33.000 It's just wrong.

02:22:35.000 It's wrong, fundamentally, for a person to have that kind of power over another person, someone doing something in the privacy of their own home, where it's not harming other people, and it's not even dangerous to themselves.

02:22:47.000 Maybe psychoactively dangerous.

02:22:51.000 I mean, maybe someone who's very vulnerable.

02:22:53.000 Maybe someone who has schizophrenia.

02:22:54.000 Maybe someone who is already psychologically impaired.

02:22:57.000 Maybe yes, then.

02:22:58.000 But the only way we find out about that is through studies.

02:23:00.000 The only way to do that is to legalize it.

02:23:02.000 The only way to do that is to It changed the way people think about it and I think what you spoke about with police officers, my experience with soldiers, with veterans that have had very positive and beneficial experiences and even people that are like near death.

02:23:18.000 They're in hospice care that have had very powerful perspective.

02:23:22.000 Well, there's a great organization called Roots to Thrive.

02:23:25.000 It's a Canadian nonprofit.

02:23:28.000 They've taken, I think, 60 patients, end-of-life anxiety, most of them stage 4 diagnoses, a few months to live.

02:23:36.000 They have eight caregivers, eight patients.

02:23:39.000 They meet on Zoom.

02:23:41.000 They get together.

02:23:42.000 They prepare for this.

02:23:43.000 They do high doses of psilocybin with the Canadian government approval.

02:23:47.000 I had a First Nations healthcare facility, and a number of great people were involved with Roots to Thrive.

02:23:56.000 I highly recommend them.

02:23:58.000 And what makes me want to cheer up is that in one of the sessions, one of the first sessions, There are eight patients.

02:24:07.000 They get together and they prepare.

02:24:10.000 And they lay down in this common room.

02:24:13.000 And when you do a high dose of psilocybin, as you know, the effects come on pretty quickly, 10 to 20 minutes.

02:24:18.000 But an hour to two hours in, you're peaking.

02:24:22.000 And just as they were peaking, the First Nation elders on the other side of the wall started drumming.

02:24:30.000 And everybody started crying because they knew that they knew how important that was.

02:24:38.000 And to have First Nations support with people who are dying and the majority of those people come out of the experience not fearing death.

02:24:49.000 And they become counselors to their families, saying, it's okay, I'm dying.

02:24:53.000 And they change the whole relationship with leaving.

02:24:58.000 And interestingly, and I just heard this number recently, of the 58 or 60 people, only four of them have died.

02:25:06.000 And they all had terminal illnesses going back over three years now.

02:25:09.000 So you think about, wow, mind over matter, if you don't have this anguish, this inflammatory pathway, you now have optimism about life and your meaning, you're a caregiver, you have purpose, then isn't your immune system upregulated?

02:25:23.000 It has to be.

02:25:24.000 We know that emotionally depressed people do have a depressed immune systems.

02:25:28.000 Well, people who have found a new lease on life and purpose, you know, it would augment their innate immunity.

02:25:34.000 I've always wondered about that with COVID as well.

02:25:36.000 The people that were terrified of COVID, and once they got COVID, they were just overwhelmed with anxiety and fear.

02:25:41.000 And all that does is crush your immune system.

02:25:43.000 And all the fear that was being propagated by the media, this constant, like, death Bell that was rang all over the media just scared the shit out of people.

02:25:53.000 And it probably weakened a lot of people's immune systems and probably cost a lot of lives.

02:25:57.000 There's no doubt about it.

02:25:58.000 I think basically spreading widespread panic, you know, increasing anxiety depresses the immune system.

02:26:06.000 Yeah, there's a lot of factors, right?

02:26:07.000 There's companionship, love, friendship, happiness in your life, physical activity.

02:26:13.000 There's all these different mitigating factors that can alleviate some of your anxiety.

02:26:18.000 And if you don't have those, all those things are going to compound.

02:26:21.000 And it is a cascading effect.

02:26:24.000 Well, that's why, again, I see life and death, life and disease, health and disease has been a multifactorial equation.

02:26:31.000 How many coefficient variables can you get on this side of the equation that on this side of the equation results in a better life, a healthier life, a better attitude?

02:26:40.000 I think psychedelics, and in particular psilocybin, is a very major coefficient variable that can help tilt the balance.

02:26:48.000 And moreover, it's just not a linear equation.

02:26:51.000 It becomes a matrix of implications to everybody else around you and your community, your family, your community, the city, the nation, the world.

02:26:58.000 It's that we need psilocybin now for societal benefit more so than we have ever needed it.

02:27:05.000 And time has come.

02:27:07.000 And so I applaud all the researchers who have struck out.

02:27:11.000 And my discussions with law enforcement is really interesting.

02:27:15.000 They want to put their energy where they can have the most Positive impact to protect the health of society.

02:27:23.000 And fentanyl syndicates are a high priority.

02:27:28.000 Individual use of psilocybin is not.

02:27:31.000 And that's how it should be.

02:27:32.000 I mean, we should really grow up about this stuff.

02:27:36.000 If there was a widespread legalization, at the very least you could develop centers where people could safely take it and they would be treated by counselors and you'd have people who are experienced travelers that are registered and know how to deal with people and handle people.

02:27:53.000 And we could do it in like a modern shamanic setting.

02:27:56.000 That can be done.

02:27:57.000 Not that I love lawyers, but one of the best lawyer strategies I've ever seen in my life is the decriminalization of psilocybin and psychedelics to the lowest priority of law enforcement.

02:28:09.000 So it is a violation of the officer's duty, their oath, to use public funds to prosecuting people for psychedelics.

02:28:22.000 So, it is at the level of jaywalking, right?

02:28:26.000 It's basically the lowest priority of law enforcement, which means if a law enforcement officer tries to bring a case forward, It is a – it is malpractice of their ethical duty to perform their job to waste the court and the public's money focusing on psychedelic prosecution.

02:28:46.000 As it should be.

02:28:47.000 As it should be.

02:28:47.000 I mean that's just one step, right?

02:28:49.000 It should be legal and we should get an understanding of it and how many people it could benefit.

02:28:53.000 I think decriminalization is the lowest hanging fruit in this long walk towards legalization.

02:29:00.000 Decriminalization, I think, is...

02:29:01.000 I think it should be legal.

02:29:03.000 I want to make sure everyone knows that.

02:29:06.000 But I think from a practical point of view, lowering the penalties and reducing it What did you think about California's decision to not legalize it or not decriminalize it and allow it for therapeutic use but they wanted to set thresholds first and they said no thresholds were established and no protocol or program was established and they would reconsider if that was done.

02:29:33.000 Well, right now my understanding is that the Council of Physicians have blocked all research on psilocybin and psychedelics in California.

02:29:40.000 It's a total blockade.

02:29:42.000 They will not allow any research.

02:29:44.000 There's a governing board for Schedule I substances in California, which most states don't have, and that governing board is a stop-go board for progress of research on Schedule I's.

02:29:56.000 They have It dictated essentially no research on psychedelics in California.

02:30:03.000 Is that a finding issue?

02:30:04.000 No, I think it's a political science issue.

02:30:07.000 You get physicians or other people who are not experienced with these substances making decisions about these substances, just ill-informed decisions from inexperienced people for the most part.

02:30:16.000 And so they have a distorted perception of what these things do and they don't feel that there's any value in studies because they haven't experienced them.

02:30:24.000 It's like somebody who's never flown an airplane Who then thinks they know how to fly an airplane, telling you, giving you advice on how and why you should not fly an airplane because they're just inexperienced.

02:30:37.000 They're out of their ken of experiences.

02:30:39.000 Got it.

02:30:40.000 Well, that's not good, especially for a progressive state or supposedly progressive state.

02:30:45.000 Well, the initiative, the public ballot initiatives, 70, 80 percent.

02:30:49.000 In Canada recently, a survey, 80 percent of the citizens of Canada We want psychedelics approved for therapeutic use and decriminalized.

02:30:58.000 80%.

02:30:58.000 So when the states that have ballots, this is how these big changes are occurring.

02:31:04.000 And then citizens, paid with public funds, you know, public officers, public employees, then have to follow the will of the people.

02:31:15.000 And so I think the ballot initiatives gets politicians out of the hot seat.

02:31:20.000 They have to say, oh, we have to follow the will of the people.

02:31:22.000 I did not stick my neck out on that.

02:31:24.000 It's the ballot initiatives that people have spoke.

02:31:26.000 So I think this is a people's revolution movement.

02:31:29.000 So I think this is a revolution for the freedom of consciousness, for the ground swelling that's occurring not in the United States and Canada, but all over the world.

02:31:37.000 It's so desperately needed.

02:31:39.000 Well said. 1.00

02:31:40.000 Paul Stamets, you're the fucking man. 0.99

02:31:41.000 I appreciate you very much. 0.99

02:31:43.000 Thank you very much for being here.

02:31:44.000 It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

02:31:46.000 Your company that you sell these wonderful mushrooms at is called Host Defense.

02:31:50.000 It's fungi.com.

02:31:51.000 You can get that.

02:31:53.000 And thank you for everything you do, my friend.

02:31:54.000 I really, really appreciate it.

02:31:56.000 I want to thank you, Joe, and I want to thank you for having this opportunity.

02:31:59.000 I want to thank all the JRE listeners for contributing to these observational studies because you can help inform scientists to make good decisions and create validated studies that help lead the medical science community forward.

02:32:12.000 We need all of you, you know, so...

02:32:15.000 Hear, hear.

02:32:15.000 Get at it, freaks.

02:32:16.000 All right.

02:32:17.000 Thank you.

02:32:18.000 Thank you.

02:32:19.000 Bye, everybody.

02:32:19.000 Take care.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 11, 2024

Joe Rogan Experience #2134 - Paul Stamets

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