In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, my friend Dr. Carl Sagan joins me to talk about one of the most important mushrooms in the world, Agarachon. It s a rare Old-Grower mushroom that only grows in the Old Growth Forest, and it s now on the endangered species list in Europe. Dr. Sagan and I talk about the importance of this mushroom and how it can be used to fight against biological and chemical weapons like anthrax and small pox viruses, and why it s so important to have it in your medicine cabinet. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts, and share it with a friend or become a patron! Thanks for listening and Happy Thanksgiving! Joe and I are always open to suggestions for new episodes, and we'll see you next week for the next episode! Cheers, Joe and Rory - The Joe Rogans Experience! See linktr.ee/TheJoeRoganPodcast Logo by Popular Science Music by Ian Dorsch Music by Zapsplat by Jeff Kaale - "Goodbye Outer Space" by Suneaters, "Outer Space Odyssey" by Fountains of Bakersfield, CA - "Coming Soon" by Cairo Brant & Co., "Good Morning America" by John McDade, , and much more, check it out! - "AstroFabulous! (featuring the amazing folks at podcast featuring the amazing and & , "The Good Morning Podcast" by , and , & . we hope you like it! ! Thank you for listening to this podcast! , Thank you so much for listening! -- Thank you, "The Podcast -- Cheers! and Good Morning podcast, Cheers -- ? - Cheers from , Cheers!! Sarah "Your Host, , Sarah & " ~ ( ) - | Thank you! "Josie" :) - Sarah and "The J. Rogans Podcast by Night, All Day, & "Alfie" - "Amberly" - Rachel
00:01:43.000So they saw an article I wrote in Herbogram called Novel Antivirals from Mushrooms, a whopping one page long.
00:01:50.000That's all there was in the scientific literature.
00:01:52.000So I knew, in my intuition, this rare species could have some properties.
00:01:59.000Of 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,
00:02:14.000we were in the top ten of all samples active against, in this case, pox viruses, and we were the only natural product.
00:02:22.000So there's a vetted press release that talks about this that came out in 2004. So, I've dedicated my life.
00:02:29.000You know, I have a company, and fortunately, I've put a lot of my resources.
00:02:33.000I'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,
00:03:02.000But I believe the old growth forests are cultural libraries that will be essential for biodefense.
00:03:10.000And from the research that we did with the BioShield program in 2004, then I have a TED Talk in 2008 that talks about this.
00:03:18.000And then I'm very thankful that we have completed a COVID-19 clinical trial.
00:03:23.000The 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,
00:04:40.000People can go to mushroomreferences.com and see this.
00:04:43.000So double-blind, placebo-controlled, and they literally recruited people directly out of the vaccination lines, or people getting Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
00:04:52.000And said, hey, do you want to be involved in a medicinal mushroom vaccine study, enhancement study?
00:06:29.000We had to convince the FDA that these were safe.
00:06:32.000And so, because we had sold hundreds of thousands of agaricon and turkey tail with no adverse offense, we were able to prove that.
00:06:39.000So it went through, they called the institution of review boards and the FDA for approval, and they approved it.
00:06:46.000Now, 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.
00:06:59.000Now, this was written up in JAMA. And the concern was a cytokine storm poses the greatest risk, not the virus itself.
00:07:09.000And so when people took Agaricon, day one is where the vaccination occurred with Moderna or Pfizer, mRNA.
00:07:17.000And then if you look at the black line, that's the placebo, which is just the rice.
00:07:22.000And FOTV is foamy, thompsis, fishnallis, trimidase, versicolor.
00:07:25.000That's Agaricon and turkey tail combined.
00:07:27.000And you'll see that at day two and day three, on the scale there, there's almost no adverse effects.
00:07:35.000And whereas those people who did not take Agaricon and Turkey Tail had a massive increase in adverse symptoms.
00:07:42.000Now, an article just came out this past year, 30% of the people avoid vaccinations because they fear the adverse effects.
00:07:50.000Because they hear people miss school, miss work, they feel terrible, they go, I don't want to get a vaccine.
00:07:55.000Not just that, the really scary ones like myocarditis, pericarditis, heart attack, strokes, blood clots.
00:08:02.000So, 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.
00:08:17.000Most 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.
00:08:27.000So most people then die from overstimulation of the immune system, an inflammatory reaction.
00:08:32.000We 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.
00:08:59.000And then something else very, very surprising occurred.
00:09:03.000And 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.
00:09:14.000The 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.
00:09:23.000So they looked at people six months later.
00:09:28.000Now, 89 out of 90 people, I think, came back six months later.
00:09:34.000Let's take your blood six months later.
00:09:37.000And then, Jamie, if you can pull up the next slide.
00:09:38.000And 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.
00:09:57.000Are these people that actually contracted COVID as well?
00:10:03.000When 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.
00:10:12.000So these are called the vaccine naive group.
00:11:30.000And 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.
00:11:49.000So you have a lot more virus replicating.
00:11:51.000You want to stop the viral replication early on in the process.
00:11:55.000So 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.
00:12:03.000Now, wow, how does this carry over to other viruses?
00:14:00.000All we need is a tiny piece of tissue.
00:14:02.000You can't reintroduce it into forests?
00:14:03.000We have inoculated from snags, which have been unsuccessful.
00:14:08.000The 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.
00:14:18.000And this is why I made the statement in my TED talk, which is saved the old growth forest as a matter of national defense.
00:15:59.000So 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.
00:16:15.000It's not like the cattle made contact with each other.
00:16:21.000When 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.
00:16:36.000So if it jumps to swines or to pigs or hogs, the Increased likelihood that it jumps to people.
00:17:39.000They're combing the virus and drinking water.
00:17:43.000Egrets sit on top of cows and get bugs off the backs of large mammals, etc.
00:17:49.000So migratory birds, of course, is the most obvious vector.
00:17:54.000But when you have factory farming of chickens and hundreds of thousands of chickens this past year...
00:18:00.000I 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.
00:18:11.000So it spreads throughout the chicken farms very quickly.
00:18:14.000So the USDA, NIH, everyone involved in biosecurity is extremely concerned about this new event, which has just happened in the past few weeks.
00:18:25.000And that report I showed you just showed up yesterday in Nature as well.
00:18:30.000So if it mutates, you know, it's a whole new pandemic threat, and it's much more severe.
00:18:38.000The estimates from humans getting bird flu, H5N1, is up to 70% mortality.
00:19:04.000The flu virus, virome as it's called, has been very well characterized.
00:19:08.000But the mutation rate is what's of concern.
00:19:12.000And since there's so many different localities that are spontaneously infecting cows, this virus is on the move.
00:19:19.000And that is the concern that we all have.
00:19:25.000We can then have more immune cells to produce antibodies that make the vaccines more effective.
00:19:31.000And the idea is you can help avoid vaccine evasion by having your endogenous immune system at its peak performance.
00:19:40.000How does this stuff work without vaccines?
00:19:46.000We have early evidence on how it works without vaccines, and I want to be very respectful, but I also have to be very professional.
00:19:56.000I'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.
00:20:10.000But 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.
00:20:26.000We do have a paper in process that's being submitted to a journal.
00:20:31.000And has to go through the acid test to peer review, etc.
00:20:34.000But there's a team of us and we're very excited about this research results because it's not going to...
00:20:42.000I'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.
00:20:49.000If you can have your endogenous immune system, you know, on the ready...
00:20:53.000Then it can then have an innate response to these viral infections that will ameliorate their spread.
00:21:00.000And that's the whole idea is to keep the viral loads down as low as possible.
00:21:06.000And so what is the mechanism that these two together help strengthen your immune system?
00:23:10.000Create an entourage of enabling stimuli that has the immune system react.
00:23:19.000A lot of us believe there's crosstalk between the receptors.
00:23:22.000A receptor saying, okay, this is helpful.
00:23:25.000It 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.
00:23:36.000So the cytokine storm and overreaction of inflammatory responses is a huge concern with any immunostimulant.
00:23:43.000So that's why in JAMA, it was written up, the concern about the cytokine storm.
00:23:51.000I co-authored an article with the University of Arizona School of Medicine.
00:23:56.000Physicians also warning people, be very careful about immunostimulation, even with the medicine of mushrooms.
00:24:02.000But we had this evidence already that the mushroom mycelium throttled back the inflammatory consequences by upregulating interleukin-1-RA and interleukin-10.
00:24:15.000And at mushroomreferences.com, you can see all these references right on the very front of the website.
00:24:24.000So all this stuff has been used forever, right?
00:24:27.000It's been used for thousands of years.
00:24:30.000And what do we know about what they used it for or how they found out that it worked or anything like that?
00:24:37.000That's a really great question, actually.
00:24:41.000It was used as an anti-inflammatory, as a poultice, to reduce muscle aches.
00:24:46.000And would they just use the fruiting body?
00:24:48.000The fruiting bodies would be powdered.
00:24:51.000But the fruiting bodies are not the primary stuff.
00:24:53.000The fruiting bodies may have anti-inflammatory actions, but we found the mycelium increases the host defense.
00:25:02.000So 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,
00:25:19.000there's sort of like this very broad umbrellas that we're describing, you know, getting into homeostasis.
00:25:26.000You're supposed to take this with food or without food?
00:25:37.000I mean, this is not a time for widespread panic, but it is time to be...
00:25:42.000Well, I mean, the analogy I make, we all buy car insurance, right?
00:25:46.000And the unlikelihood that we're going to get in a car accident today or tomorrow.
00:25:50.000So why not preemptively invest in your own immunological health By being prepared.
00:25:58.000So should you get exposed, you don't become a super spreader.
00:26:02.000And so this is where I think we have a potential breakthrough in integrative medicine.
00:26:09.000And I want to give a shout out to my colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, the Krupp's Institute.
00:26:15.000They're the ones that came up with this idea of vaccine extension.
00:26:19.000Because so many people are concerned about how many vaccines do I take and what happens when you take so many vaccines?
00:26:25.000So the idea of having your innate immune system at a state of readiness so vaccines work better and you have to use them less.
00:26:32.000I mean, that's the holy grail of vaccinology.
00:26:37.000But that's back to my original question.
00:26:39.000What does it do for people who don't want to take vaccines?
00:26:42.000Can it help their immune system fight off things?
00:26:46.000We 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.
00:27:01.000Now, the immune system has many challenges from bacterial infections, viral infections, cancer, you know, just cells getting old and dying, not having apoptosis.
00:27:13.000Apoptosis is important for you to get rid of your disease and aging and dead cells.
00:27:38.000I 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.
00:27:53.000This 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.
00:28:06.000So it helps people not avoid vaccines because of their vaccine hesitancy.
00:28:13.000I have a dear friend and their family is very conservative Christians and they just refuse to get vaccinations.
00:29:30.000I 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.
00:29:41.000So whether you get a vaccine or don't get a vaccine, your immune system is supported at a higher level of readiness.
00:29:51.000So 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?
00:29:59.000Are some more potent than others or some have different effects?
00:31:45.000So 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.
00:32:02.000And 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,
00:32:19.000went to a farmer's market and found a moldy cantaloupe.
00:32:24.000The moldy cantaloupe was covered with a golden mold.
00:32:27.000And so Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillium notatum.
00:32:30.000She discovered that Penicillium chrysogenum.
00:32:36.000And 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.
00:32:44.000And the advantage that we had in the United States is that we had corn-steep liquor.
00:32:51.000You 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.
00:33:00.000The Germans, they had a factory that was making penicillin.
00:33:03.000It got bombed, so they were kicked out of the race.
00:33:23.000And 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.
00:33:36.000And to go back to your question, we have found four or so different clades.
00:33:40.000These are little subgenomic associations, lineages you might call them.
00:33:48.000And 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.
00:34:01.000So this is my biggest contribution to science I hope historically will be because of this library.
00:34:07.000And 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.
00:34:16.000We're going to publish this in the commons in the large genomic library databases so other people can see this.
00:34:28.000And so you said there's four strains that you identified that were particularly effective?
00:35:38.000And I want to show you how big these agaracons get.
00:35:42.000Before 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?
00:35:55.000Or do you just only look at the immune system and do you always assume that they only have one mechanism?
00:36:03.000To answer that question, I'm a very small company.
00:36:23.000If I was a part of NIH, and I've made NIH applications, one out of eight has made it through.
00:36:30.000But it's very, very difficult for an independent researcher like me to...
00:36:34.000Advance the science without collaboration with larger entities, so mostly universities.
00:36:39.000It 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.
00:36:50.000Because 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?
00:37:04.000As 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.
00:37:18.000Right, but they don't all show this ability, correct?
00:37:21.000And 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?
00:38:51.000These 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.
00:39:01.000What is about this fungus that allows it not to rot?
00:39:07.000So it seems to have a host defense of protection innately.
00:39:11.000And 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.
00:39:24.000And so research is also showing that these agaricon and other polypore mushrooms are active against pathogenic fungi.
00:39:34.000So 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.
00:40:37.000About 1% of them are edible in choice.
00:40:41.000About 1% of them are psychoactive, are psilocybin present.
00:40:48.000The other 97%, they're just, you know, they just don't taste good, they're not poisonous, they're not of interest.
00:40:54.000But what do you think is going on with the Amanita Muscaria?
00:40:58.000The 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.
00:41:19.000I have consumed amnida muscaria and amnida pantherina on multiple occasions.
00:41:27.000And my amnida muscaria with higher doses, it's a somniferous.
00:42:16.000Now, Amanita pantherina, see, anurine muscaria has mucilol, muscarin, and ebutynic acid.
00:42:21.000Actually, 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.
00:42:34.000So these shamans in Siberia, by consuming amydena muscaria, they would remove the muscarinic symptoms.
00:42:42.000And then the urine, because they biofilter it through their body, it would be high in ebotinic acid and musimo.
00:42:49.000And these are the – in a sense, purifies it.
00:42:52.000So, I mean, this is a legend that's mixed up in fiction and fact and fables.
00:42:58.000I 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.
00:43:10.000So 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.
00:43:44.000And 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.
00:43:55.000So that was how the word berserk came about from the berserkers.
00:44:28.000The 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.
00:44:37.000Very few people, if any, have ever died.
00:46:25.000So 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.
00:46:38.000And 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.
00:48:47.000And 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.
00:48:56.000Okay, so I sit in the car, and now I have to put it in the ignition.
00:49:28.000And, 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...
00:49:36.000And so these people got kind of curious.
00:49:38.000And Dave goes, you know, some people over there are kind of gathering, Paul, looking at us.
00:50:14.000Meanwhile, the cluster of people got larger.
00:50:17.000Parents were holding their children close to them saying, we don't know what's going on here, but it's getting weird over there.
00:50:24.000So pretty soon I had a very large group of these campers that were all watching us, keeping their distance.
00:50:30.000And I had this repetitive motion syndrome of dropping and dropping and dropping.
00:50:33.000And so finally, you know, we had the staccato pace.
00:50:37.000The timeline of the day got broken up.
00:50:40.000So 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.
00:50:48.000The whole thread of time was disintegrated and scrambled.
00:53:36.000So 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.
00:53:46.000And 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.
00:55:08.000You 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,
00:55:25.000depression, etc., how could that mushroom remain illegal and yet Amanita muscaria and pantherina are legal.
00:55:47.000My question was about the Amanita muscaria.
00:55:50.000Because 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,
00:56:06.000he thinks that it was probably variable genetically, variable seasonally, just so much like Agaricon, there's probably many different strains of Amanita.
00:56:18.000So 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.
00:56:27.000Do 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?
00:57:10.000And this is why with agaricon, I think strains do matter.
00:57:13.000The 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.
00:57:23.000What are the other strains capable of doing?
00:58:12.000My daughter, I was very adept at catching my daughter from her backpack as I leaned over to pack a box.
00:58:19.000Cellophane tape will not stick at 35 degrees, I can tell you that.
00:58:23.000And I actually, I don't want to flood the airways, but if you call 360-426-8255, you'll get the public utility district.
00:58:34.000Why 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.
00:58:42.000So 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.
00:58:54.000And after a while, I heard this noise.
00:58:56.000And then many years later, I met some of the people who goes, you know, you're a legend.
01:00:34.000But my point is that it's like we really need research on this stuff.
01:00:39.000We need a lot of research and the research is becoming increasingly credible.
01:00:43.000It'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.
01:00:55.000They're very excited now because this has been sort of like weird science, you know?
01:01:00.000Yeah, that's what I was going to get at.
01:01:01.000I was going to say there's this real reluctance to believe that people in the past had answers that we don't have today.
01:01:08.000This 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.
01:01:25.000And also, for sure, they didn't have the ability to document things at least and preserve those documents to today.
01:01:34.000Like 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.
01:01:50.000You've got to assume at one point in time people had some sort of knowledge about this stuff that we...
01:03:59.000My surgeon said, besides cataract surgery, the best medical innovation has the greatest difference in patients before and after surgery than hip surgery.
01:04:10.000Yeah, well, I told you about Graham Hancock.
01:04:12.000He had his done, and then six weeks later, he's walking around here.
01:04:15.000My mom just had her knee done, and she's fine.
01:05:08.000You can kick box in spats and, you know, rash guards, and you're probably going to mitigate a lot of the scratches and scrapes.
01:05:15.000You know, with gloves on and foot gear and all that jazz.
01:05:18.000But 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.
01:05:32.000And people that don't, like my friend Ari, he had no idea he had staph.
01:05:37.000I gave him a year of jiu-jitsu for Christmas and he and I were at the pool hall.
01:05:44.000And this still scares me to this day because I think he came close to dying.
01:07:17.000With amoxicillin patients where their microbiome and their gut's destroyed because of this potent antibacterial antibiotic.
01:07:25.000And 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,
01:07:56.000So 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.
01:08:10.000And then you absorb the components directly in.
01:08:13.000So, again, it depends on what your target is.
01:08:16.000If it's general immunity support, then the oral ingestion.
01:08:23.000If 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.
01:08:39.000So would you recommend both a tincture and capsules?
01:08:43.000So the tincture would stave it off at the source?
01:10:28.000But they all segue into this concept of the neurological systems being improved using components within mushrooms.
01:10:38.000And that's something that I think has a lot of potential for us, especially as we age.
01:10:43.000It 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.
01:11:02.000It's like this is a very recent thing.
01:11:04.000In terms of human history, of our current understanding, like our scientific understanding of the mechanism of vitamins.
01:11:57.000And basically, when I was here last, we were talking about microdosing, and I came up with a stack.
01:12:05.000Of lion's mane and a microdose of psilocybin, below the threshold of feeling it, and niacin, nicotinic acid, which is a flushing form.
01:12:15.000And we did a call out for people to join and download an app at microdose.me.
01:12:25.000It's for iPhones and droids so they could measure before and after effects of microdosing.
01:12:34.000And 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.
01:12:49.000If we go to the next article, Well, we can stop here for a second.
01:12:55.000Adults who microdose psychedelics report health-related motivations and lower levels of anxiety and depression compared to non-microdosers.
01:13:05.000What does that mean, health-related motivations?
01:13:36.000We have more citizen scientists who are non-microdosers who jumped into this app.
01:13:41.000This is why the editors at Nature liked the study because it was called so well-weighted.
01:13:47.000So 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.
01:14:04.000And Jamie, if we could go to the next one.
01:14:50.000Psilocybin microdosers demonstrate greater observed improvements in mood and mental health at one month relative to non-microdosing controls.
01:14:59.000Why did they have to make a correction?
01:15:00.000Well, let me show the next slide with a graph.
01:16:19.000Who 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.
01:17:46.000Whether we have a college degree, high school, or whatever.
01:17:49.000So we have a tremendous, I mean, we have literally millions and millions of data points.
01:17:55.000The data field is so robust, and now we're trying to narrow it to confirm what we saw in the first studies.
01:18:04.000Microdosing 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,
01:19:29.000Do 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?
01:19:41.000Or do you just show that the group that microdoses has higher levels of proficiency?
01:19:47.000You know, I don't think we ask them the question if they're sober at the time they take the test.
01:19:53.000But not even sober, because we're talking about microdosing.
01:20:26.000So you can hear things as an auditory challenge.
01:20:32.000Is it dependent upon the volume of the phone?
01:20:35.000You'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.
01:20:42.000Yeah, it gets much more complicated than the other tests.
01:20:47.000And so we have this narrow down on what we really want is people to go for three months.
01:20:54.000So the signal that we got in 30 days was extremely strong.
01:20:57.000But 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.
01:21:08.000Now people only need to, once they get their baseline, they only need to report once every two weeks or once a month.
01:21:15.000So it's much less burdensome for the people joining Microdose.me to perform the task.
01:21:24.000They can see their results compared to the average.
01:21:28.000So there's a dashboard that's present so they can see where they are relative to the average.
01:21:34.000And eventually they will have access to all their own data.
01:22:34.000Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, they do tap tests.
01:22:38.000Unfortunately, there's a steady decline.
01:22:40.000But 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.
01:22:53.000So this is the chart that blew all of us away.
01:22:58.000Is 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.
01:24:14.000Maybe it's delayed and then it increases.
01:24:17.000Maybe this green line with the stem and stack, maybe it ameliorates and softens or maybe it accelerates.
01:24:27.000But I looked this up and for you to do the TAP test involves six regions of your brain.
01:24:34.000You 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.
01:24:51.000And so we let people tap test for several days so they go up the learning curve.
01:24:56.000So we don't include them in the first several days.
01:25:26.000I chose a flushing form of niacin because you tingle.
01:25:29.000And I thought, wow, if we get the neurogenic benefits of sulcibin, let's get it to the endpoints of the peripheral nervous system.
01:25:35.000Neuropathies oftentimes present themselves as a deadening of the fingertips and the toes.
01:25:39.000So with the vasodilation, you get more blood flow to where the neuropathy is occurring.
01:25:45.000And then lion's mane, well demonstrated.
01:25:48.000Again, mushroomreferences.com, you can do many, many references up, showing that lion's mane mycelium contains these compounds called arinacines.
01:25:57.000That 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.
01:27:54.000You don't see a force for the trees because you're so conflicted in trying to understand the mechanism of action.
01:28:00.000But I'd like to see it applied to other tests.
01:28:02.000Have 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?
01:28:25.000So 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.
01:30:23.000Like the game becomes like 10% easier.
01:30:26.000And see, this is why these observational studies are important to medicine.
01:30:30.000Clinical studies are based on early signals, and the clinical studies are trying to refine, reduce the variables to see a cause and effect.
01:30:39.000But we only, clinical studies are already started, and that's not out of the blue.
01:30:43.000You know, they have to have a good theoretical basis.
01:30:46.000Observational studies by tens of thousands of people create the signals.
01:30:50.000So 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?
01:30:57.000The reason why we went to the TAP test is that so many of our beneficial outcomes were depression, anxiety, mood.
01:31:18.000So that's why this is a demonstration of something That is happening, that is performance related, that's outside of subjectivity, expectancy, etc.
01:33:41.000They're cloaking themselves inside these churches for civil rights protection.
01:33:45.000But 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.
01:34:11.000And 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.
01:34:21.000So they are deprioritizing psilocybin, decriminalizing it.
01:35:56.000It's terrifying because it's unprecedented.
01:35:58.000There's never been a time where so many people are dying of overdoses, accidental overdoses.
01:36:03.000And this should be the priority of law enforcement.
01:36:04.000Does law enforcement want to be on the wrong side of history, busting somebody for psilocybin?
01:36:09.000That'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.
01:36:28.000Because 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.
01:37:06.000I would first take the step that all natural products containing any Schedule I substance should be legal, not illegal.
01:37:15.000Psilocybin, 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.
01:37:29.000Decriminalization, if you cannot get legalization.
01:37:33.000And then having decriminalization with therapy.
01:37:37.000I 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?
01:37:52.000So our structures are in place for us to be able to make the best positive impact with the least amount of harm.
01:38:01.000And that's the quagmire that we're in.
01:38:05.000Other 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.
01:38:16.000And I think there's over 200 species of psilocybin mushrooms, 162 species in the genus Psilocybe.
01:38:27.000And just recently, I'm happy to say, I have a new species named after me.
01:38:31.000A mycologist honored me by naming a new Cilocybe mushroom, Cilocybe stemaceae.
01:38:50.000In the field of medicine, you can do that with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, etc.
01:38:54.000But in the field of mycology and botany, you know, it's an honor that's bequeathed to you by other scientists.
01:39:00.000So there are 162 species all over the world.
01:39:04.000There's been over 5,000 collections of psilocybin mushrooms since the 1800s.
01:39:09.000So they are bridges across cultures, across centuries, I would argue across millennia.
01:39:17.000And 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.
01:41:14.000But 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.
01:41:23.000I 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.
01:43:25.000And if you had to say, like, what happened?
01:43:27.000Like, 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.
01:43:41.000If 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.
01:43:51.000Like what happened that caused all this?
01:44:13.000I 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.
01:44:52.000100 million microbes in a cubic inch of soil.
01:44:56.000You know, 8, 10 or more miles of mycelium cross-talking all these organisms, a quorum that's on constant biomolecular communication.
01:45:08.000The 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.
01:45:23.000I think AI is going to be fantastic for medicine.
01:45:26.000It's going to be fantastic for so many things.
01:45:29.000But 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,
01:46:55.000He came back the next day over the weekend on Monday and people did not recognize him.
01:47:02.000He fundamentally changed into a new person.
01:47:12.000We 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.
01:47:24.000It's like a pebble in the pond that emanates out echoes of goodness and goodwill.
01:47:31.000And that's where I don't think AI is going to be able to cover and quantify.
01:47:38.000It might have higher predictive outcomes based on the data sets.
01:47:42.000But I just feel like You know, we need to train AI for our benefit.
01:47:47.000We 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.
01:48:05.000I think our ability to be kind to each other is very important to us.
01:48:12.000I don't know if it's very important to the sun.
01:48:15.000I 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
01:48:45.000are 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.
01:49:08.000These 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.
01:49:43.000Are 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?
01:50:00.000That are a part of the human condition.
01:50:03.000If you ask any rational person today, what are the odds we'll have no war in three years?
01:50:32.000And 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.
01:50:44.000I think we're talking about different things because I agree with that wholeheartedly.
01:50:48.000And I think for human beings, they're extraordinarily beneficial and they have been for me.
01:50:52.000My 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.
01:51:20.000And just our way of living is kind of unsustainable long term.
01:51:24.000The positive hope is that AI and science itself and technological innovation will mitigate all of the negative side effects.
01:51:35.000That 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.
01:51:45.000But what I wonder is that we are so attached to us, to the idea of us with all of our flaws.
01:51:53.000Are we any different than Australopithecus?
01:51:57.000If 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.
01:52:23.000And I think that homo sapiens are not long.
01:52:28.000You ask very, very good questions for which there's very few answers.
01:52:33.000But 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.
01:52:52.000And it's funny that it's the most undermined.
01:52:55.000It'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.
01:53:05.000When you see people that have not had psychedelic experiences dismiss psychedelic experiences, that is a wild thing to do.
01:53:12.000Like, boy, you are so silly, and you don't even know you're silly, and you're the majority, which is wild.
01:53:17.000Yeah, we represent less than the 1% of those who are psychedelically experienced who understand.
01:53:23.000Many of the studies, like at Johns Hopkins… What are the numbers?
01:58:07.000Then Mark Anthony, 20 years younger than Caesar, became a lover of Cleopatra.
01:58:12.000You would think that these people, the highest strata of society, being lovers, would share the most intimate secrets and potions and all of that.
02:01:45.000And they persisted for 1500 BCE to 500 AD, a thousand years before the conquistadors came.
02:01:52.000And they were representative, we think, of a mushroom cult.
02:01:56.000And they could have been a family like heirlooms.
02:02:02.000How silly is it that the conventional archaeologists won't acknowledge that those are mushrooms?
02:02:07.000Well, 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.
02:02:22.000And 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.
02:02:31.000Sort of like they've done with the Eleusinian Mysteries with ergot.
02:05:48.000You 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.
02:06:00.000And 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.
02:06:24.000They 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.
02:06:37.000So, you know, don't underestimate the creativity and innovation of any people living long enough in their ecosystem, interacting, experimenting, making mistakes, making successes.
02:06:53.000We should not be intellectually myopic, which I think is another problem with the hubris of science.
02:06:59.000Well, 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,
02:07:16.000So 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.
02:07:28.000That's why as much criticism as Timothy Leary and Ron Doskets and even Andy Weil, they were all incredibly courageous.
02:07:36.000No one more courageous, however, than Maria Sabina, who opened up the Mazatec tradition, and also Valentina Wasson.
02:07:44.000Our Gordon Wasson's wife was a Russian physician who was also a mycologist.
02:07:50.000The 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.
02:08:59.000Alexander 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,
02:10:37.000And 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.
02:10:44.000They were honed over the centuries to how to properly administer these sacraments.
02:10:51.000We, many of us from European descent, we're orphans.
02:10:55.000We're spiritual orphans that have been cast from our religions, our religious roots, from my Germanic roots.
02:13:03.000So they're combining now, these Egyptian alchemists I met, psilocybe cubensis, golden mushroom, bruises blue, with a blue lotus.
02:13:10.000The blue lotus opens the daytime, closes at night, you know, birth and death.
02:13:16.000And now with the Druids, I say they've always used psilocybe mushrooms.
02:13:21.000And so many other peoples now are re-indigenizing.
02:13:27.000You were going on about what the blue lotus does though?
02:13:30.000The 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.
02:14:36.000It'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.
02:14:47.000He was a heterosexual man who had Parkinson's, had wife and kids, and could not stop picking guys up Random chance encounters.
02:15:26.000If you Google pharmaceutical dopamine agonist side effects, they're pretty well documented.
02:15:32.000And 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.
02:15:47.000Like, they just go crazy and they just want to gamble, which is very strange.
02:15:51.000Well, that seems like creating an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
02:15:56.000Something 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.
02:16:08.000I've been immersed into a group of psychiatrists, and my heart goes out to them because it is such fuzzy science.
02:16:18.000And, you know, you become a medical doctor first, then you go on for two to four more years, become a psychiatrist.
02:16:24.000And it just seems like it's really – it really shows that the psychiatry is still at the infancy of its science.
02:16:31.000Well, there's just so many things like SSRIs are now showing it's not a chemical imbalance.
02:16:35.000That's what the whole basis of it was about.
02:16:38.000What are the dopamine agonist known side effects?
02:16:44.000Because some of them are pretty crazy.
02:16:46.000Nausea, vomiting, orthostatic hypotension, headache, dizziness, and cardiac arrhythmia are among the most common side effects of dopamine agonists.
02:16:53.000These adverse effects are mostly dosage dependent.
02:16:56.000It's highly recommended to start these medications at low dosage to reduce the risk of orthostatic hypotension.
02:17:44.000The confidential settlement with 172 patients, said to be for millions of dollars, was approved by the judge in federal court in Australia.
02:17:52.000Financial review reports, although the payments were delayed until they were assessed by independent review.
02:18:19.000Like, imagine if they could sell that in Vegas.
02:18:21.000It 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.
02:18:35.000FDA 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.
02:18:50.000The 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.
02:19:14.000Well, also, there's probably a lot more.
02:19:15.000If 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.
02:19:23.000It's sort of like when they had Marinol.
02:19:25.000Remember when they tried to do synthetic THC and give it to people and it was terrible because they didn't want people smoking pot?
02:19:31.000Because there's a lot of things that come with it.
02:19:33.000It's not just the individual compound, right?
02:19:36.000It's like all the things inside of it, especially when it comes to cannabis, the other cannabinoids that work synergistically with THC. Yeah.
02:19:45.000Well, I think we're at the extraordinary time of re-evaluation.
02:19:50.000I hope that we have greater respect for diverse points of view.
02:19:54.000I think a lot of these observational studies and patient reporting should steer medicine.
02:20:00.000I think observational studies in general populate databases for scientists to be able to look at, looking for signal.
02:20:46.000Compassion, psychedelic experiences, feeling of connectedness.
02:20:50.000What if the AI automatically knows all these things?
02:20:52.000Because 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.
02:22:35.000It'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.
02:22:58.000But the only way we find out about that is through studies.
02:23:00.000The only way to do that is to legalize it.
02:23:02.000The 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.
02:23:18.000They're in hospice care that have had very powerful perspective.
02:23:22.000Well, there's a great organization called Roots to Thrive.
02:24:10.000And they lay down in this common room.
02:24:13.000And when you do a high dose of psilocybin, as you know, the effects come on pretty quickly, 10 to 20 minutes.
02:24:18.000But an hour to two hours in, you're peaking.
02:24:22.000And just as they were peaking, the First Nation elders on the other side of the wall started drumming.
02:24:30.000And everybody started crying because they knew that they knew how important that was.
02:24:38.000And to have First Nations support with people who are dying and the majority of those people come out of the experience not fearing death.
02:24:49.000And they become counselors to their families, saying, it's okay, I'm dying.
02:24:53.000And they change the whole relationship with leaving.
02:24:58.000And interestingly, and I just heard this number recently, of the 58 or 60 people, only four of them have died.
02:25:06.000And they all had terminal illnesses going back over three years now.
02:25:09.000So 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?
02:25:24.000We know that emotionally depressed people do have a depressed immune systems.
02:25:28.000Well, people who have found a new lease on life and purpose, you know, it would augment their innate immunity.
02:25:34.000I've always wondered about that with COVID as well.
02:25:36.000The people that were terrified of COVID, and once they got COVID, they were just overwhelmed with anxiety and fear.
02:25:41.000And all that does is crush your immune system.
02:25:43.000And 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.
02:25:53.000And it probably weakened a lot of people's immune systems and probably cost a lot of lives.
02:26:24.000Well, that's why, again, I see life and death, life and disease, health and disease has been a multifactorial equation.
02:26:31.000How 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?
02:26:40.000I think psychedelics, and in particular psilocybin, is a very major coefficient variable that can help tilt the balance.
02:26:48.000And moreover, it's just not a linear equation.
02:26:51.000It becomes a matrix of implications to everybody else around you and your community, your family, your community, the city, the nation, the world.
02:26:58.000It's that we need psilocybin now for societal benefit more so than we have ever needed it.
02:27:32.000I mean, we should really grow up about this stuff.
02:27:36.000If 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.
02:27:53.000And we could do it in like a modern shamanic setting.
02:27:57.000Not 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.
02:28:09.000So it is a violation of the officer's duty, their oath, to use public funds to prosecuting people for psychedelics.
02:28:22.000So, it is at the level of jaywalking, right?
02:28:26.000It'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.
02:29:03.000I want to make sure everyone knows that.
02:29:06.000But 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.
02:29:33.000Well, right now my understanding is that the Council of Physicians have blocked all research on psilocybin and psychedelics in California.
02:29:44.000There'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.
02:29:56.000They have It dictated essentially no research on psychedelics in California.
02:30:04.000No, I think it's a political science issue.
02:30:07.000You 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.
02:30:16.000And 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.
02:30:24.000It'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.
02:30:37.000They're out of their ken of experiences.
02:31:24.000It's the ballot initiatives that people have spoke.
02:31:26.000So I think this is a people's revolution movement.
02:31:29.000So 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.
02:31:56.000I want to thank you, Joe, and I want to thank you for having this opportunity.
02:31:59.000I 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.