In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with Dr. Paul Blumberg to talk about psychedelics and how they can be used to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.
00:00:52.000So it's really interesting when indigenous people have using psilocybin mushrooms and scientists, quote, discover them and give them a Latin binomial.
00:00:59.000But the psilocybin mushroom revolution is happening all over the world right now.
00:01:25.000So it seems to be, I think, a revolution for the freedom of consciousness.
00:01:29.000And it's crossing all political boundaries, all religious boundaries.
00:01:33.000Well, it's happening here in Texas for sure because of the Ibergain Initiative and what's happening with Governor Rick Perry, who was former Republican governor of Texas, who is all in on this.
00:01:45.000I've talked to him backstage a few times, and he's the type of person that I really admire because even though we may have political differences or within different cultural backgrounds, we're joined together with a common purpose of trying to help people.
00:02:02.000Yeah, well, he's not ideologically captured.
00:02:05.000Like, he realized that he was wrong and that his position on this was based on ignorance.
00:02:09.000So he educated himself and completely turned around, did a 180, and now is an advocate and has helped a lot of people.
00:02:17.000I mean, it's tremendous benefit to veterans and people with PTSD and coming back from the war.
00:02:23.000And it's one of the only things that's been shown to really get these people straight.
00:02:28.000That end psilocybin, and my heart really goes out, and this is, I'm sort of a little left of center, so my friends will be surprised, but my heart goes out to law enforcement.
00:02:37.000Can you imagine stopping a car on a stormy night at 2 in the morning?
00:02:49.000The likelihood of having one mistake is very high.
00:02:52.000And having one very bad day define your life for the rest of your life is not right.
00:02:59.000Because then if you can't resolve those issues as a soldier, as a law enforcement, as a doctor who makes a mistake, if you can't get through that turmoil, that stress, the anger that then can emanate out from your anger at yourself to other people, then this is what psilocybin and Ibogaine and other psychedelics I think really do.
00:03:20.000They help people forgive themselves and become better people.
00:03:24.000And once you forgive yourself and become a better person, then everyone is excited about the fact that you've changed.
00:03:31.000Yeah, and imagine the world that we could be living in if this experience was available to so many of the people that are committing crimes.
00:03:39.000So many of these people who have never had any kind of a psychedelic experience, have never really confronted their own reality in that way.
00:03:48.000How many of them would change their ways?
00:04:17.000If the return on investment is to reduce addiction and crime and all the other collateral damage that's associated with it, then it would save hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:05:07.000And, you know, I'd remember the stories from the 70s where people were locked up for their entire lives for an ounce of marijuana in Vegas.
00:06:14.000And think about the guilt that those law enforcement officers must feel, and certainly they must feel, I would hope so, that they know they put somebody in prison for 30 years for an ounce of marijuana when it's now legal in those states.
00:06:28.000Well, I mean, PTSD Amongst law enforcement is something that's very rarely discussed.
00:06:33.000We talk about it a lot with soldiers, but one of my friends, who was a former Austin PD, told me that you see more in your line of duty in a police department, than more death, more terrible, terrible things than he ever did when he was in combat.
00:06:53.000And it's just, it's like every day, every day you're dealing with shootouts.
00:06:58.000Every day you're dealing with stabbings.
00:07:00.000Every day you're dealing with horrific crimes.
00:07:03.000And it's just, your brain is just overrun with this.
00:07:06.000And with firefighters, you know, they're oftentimes the first responders are their first.
00:07:10.000My partner's a medical doctor in Canada, but she used to be a firefighter.
00:07:14.000And yeah, they oftentimes, the police may not show up for 20 minutes, and they're there.
00:07:20.000And the things they witness, I mean, things that no one should ever witness.
00:07:26.000But I mean, this is where it's so important that we come together as a society.
00:07:32.000Because I really believe that 98% of people are good and 2% of people are assholes.
00:07:37.000And I think the assholes can become good people if they have a psychedelic experience.
00:07:40.000I really think there's progress right now.
00:07:44.000So much of the media and the clickbait, journalism, they amplify the extraordinary and things that get eyeballs and attention.
00:07:53.000But more and more, I think people, or they become more, have greater wisdom about how they're being manipulated by the media.
00:08:11.000You're excited about the species that you hope to find and you find ones you don't.
00:08:15.000But they become like friends after a while.
00:08:17.000You find a chanterelle, you find a shaggy mane, you find a psilocybin, a psilocybin mushroom.
00:08:23.000That chance encounter, that eureka experience, and sharing it, and then sharing, eating the mushrooms, whether they're edible or otherwise, it brings a community of interest together.
00:09:46.000They agree on identification, but it has fueled the scientific community with all sorts of these citizen scientists finding new species.
00:09:54.000And it brings people into nature, gets kids excited.
00:09:58.000And then you can go to iNaturalist right now, and you can look around your house or this place to see the reports of birds and mushrooms and things.
00:10:08.000I just went to the iNaturalist yesterday and Selasbi cubensis, the Golden Tops, grow around Austin.
00:10:33.000But some of them have high specificity with lat longs within a few inches.
00:10:38.000But it's so exciting in the field of biology and mineralogy and ornithology, et cetera, to have all these citizen scientists out there with their phones.
00:10:48.000And then every year, all over the world now, there's called BioBlitzes, where several hundred people literally come together, they'll go into a park, they have all their iPhones and droids, and they photograph everything and they upload it to iNaturalists to look at species diversity.
00:11:05.000This has revolutionized the field of biology.
00:11:08.000I think it revolutionizes bringing children and young people back into nature.
00:11:40.000There's 223 known species of psilocybin mushrooms, and about, wow, I'd say 10 of them in the past two years has come from citizen scientists, quote-unquote amateurs who found it, who uploaded it to iNaturalists.
00:11:55.000So if they find a new species, how do they determine, if it's a completely new species, how do they determine that it's psilocybin?
00:12:02.000How do they determine where it's from?
00:12:06.000The psilocybin species localized in the genus Psilocebi, which has the most psilocybin species, we just know from genetic associations that they're in the clade, the group that has psilocybin species, and the DNA analysis shows that they fit right into this cluster, then we have high confidence.
00:12:24.000But if a mushroom has gills, and it bruises bluish and has purple-brown spores, those three things need to be true, then 95% probability is a psilocybin mushroom.
00:12:37.000What species it is becomes more debatable.
00:12:40.000But psilocybin mushrooms are very hard to find, with the exception of the golden top, and there's another one called pineal sinusins.
00:12:46.000They go in pastures, they're easier to find.
00:12:49.000But most of these psilocybin mushrooms are hidden in the landscape.
00:13:07.000And then I found a few, and I looked around, and they were everywhere, hiding in plain sight.
00:13:13.000And so now he knows with Zlaspi serialipis in Vermont, he knows.
00:13:18.000It's just, I can't believe how obvious they are to me and how unobvious they were to me before.
00:13:24.000When I took Michael Pollen out on a mushroom hunt in his book, How to Change Your Mind, when I said, I took two steps out of this little cabin we were at, and I go, there's one.
00:14:47.000So this is true in the Masotec tradition.
00:14:51.000You know, in my book, I go deeply into the Masotec heritage of using psilocybin mushrooms.
00:14:59.000And one of the things was really embedded with Christianity after the Spaniards came, 1516 and 1519, 1521, they brought in cattle.
00:15:08.000And very quickly, Christianity swept through Mesoamerica, specifically in Mexico.
00:15:16.000And there is a friend of mine who's a PhD called Joe Torrey, was in Oaxaca and just found in a church a cross from the 15th century, 1500s, I mean.
00:15:39.000And soon after the conquistadors and Spanish arrived, and in the center of the cross are psilocybin mushrooms.
00:15:48.000So Christianity has a long, deep-rooted history with psilocybin mushroom use in Mesoamerica.
00:15:54.000Well, there's that ancient depiction of Adam and Eve.
00:16:29.000When Jack was alive, before he died, one of the things that he was working on was a book connecting psilocybin mushrooms in Christianity.
00:16:37.000And he had this massive collection of ancient images, paintings, all these different things.
00:16:43.000A lot of them were these religious depictions of people that were naked dancing under the, like, it was like a transparent mushroom shape, and they were dancing.
00:16:55.000like something that would indicate that they were under the trance and they were dancing.
00:16:59.000Yeah, this is an example where there's so many different...
00:17:14.000And in the Matzah Tech tradition, it's called syncretism.
00:17:20.000When you have a foreign influence, in this case, a religion, coming into an indigenous people, they merge and they still continue their Indigenous practices under the umbrella of protection, in this case, of Christianity.
00:17:33.000But in the Matzudec tradition, they believe the tears of Christ is where the mushrooms would appear.
00:17:42.000They believe the mushrooms were the body of Christ, and therefore you never boil them.
00:17:46.000You never, because you'd be hurting the body of Christ, so you'd only eat them raw or dry.
00:17:57.000And the great Maria Sabina was a devout Catholic, and when she did her psilocybin ceremonies, she had the Holy Trinity.
00:18:05.000So that's another example where under the umbrella, and from a survival point of view, culturally it makes sense, and they adapted, but they found that this sort of merging of indigenous practices and knowledge of psilocybin in Christianity was very compatible.
00:18:24.000Just was published, I think, two weeks ago at New York University in Johns Hopkins.
00:18:31.000They had 24 clergy from different faiths, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Muslims, and they had them come in and they did a high dose of psilocybin.
00:18:48.000And they had one group that had delayed, didn't do it for six months, and the other group did a high dose of psilocybin.
00:18:54.000It all, each of those faiths, the use of psilocybin mushrooms reinforced their belief and their faith.
00:19:04.000I think they said 95% said is the most significant experience in their life.
00:19:09.000In the top five, they're the most significant experiences in their life.
00:19:12.000So it just, I think psilocybin makes nicer people.
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00:20:22.000There's an ancient fresco, I believe it's from France, of Adam and Eve, which supposedly is the tree of life, but really looks like some sort of a mushroom plant.
00:20:34.000Yes, it's been postulated by R. Gordon Wasson.
00:22:30.000And that's a vase, and anyone who's grown oyster mushrooms or psilocybin mushrooms know that you can put the substrate into a vase like that with openings and mushrooms will come out of the holes.
00:22:40.000And so that natural culture technique of collecting cow powder.
00:22:52.000Gold and blue colors are sacred in Egyptology, in ancient Egyptian culture.
00:23:00.000So now I was not the first person to discover this.
00:23:04.000Actually, I saw this from an article that was published by Ezeem Abdel, a friend of mine, a mycologist in Egypt, who presented it at a conference.
00:23:24.000And then Kalindi, the great Kalindi from Detroit, he unfortunately died of COVID.
00:23:31.000But he also, from his African heritage, also believed that, you know, and he was rediscovering his African heritage.
00:23:38.000And this is called re-indigenization, rediscovering that which your ancestors practiced, even though the linear transition of knowledge may have been cut.
00:23:47.000But this is taxonomically accurate for growing Seloseby cubensis, and it grows on cow dung.
00:24:19.000So the modern Egyptologists have no reference.
00:24:22.000And so when you have climate change, the ecosystem changes, then the scientists of day don't have the familiarity as the experts thousands of years ago.
00:24:33.000So they become rare, they become scarce, and the generational knowledge is lost.
00:24:36.000But now there's a real big re-indigenization movement in Egypt combining the blue lotus with salas of ecumensis.
00:24:42.000What is the psychedelic compound in the blue lotus?
00:24:48.000There's a really complex chemistry there.
00:24:50.000I'm not an expert on that, but I've talked to my other friends who are experts.
00:24:54.000There seems to be an entourage effect of multiple agents.
00:24:58.000So I can't really speak authoritatively to that, but I have been told that there are several active ingredients and they think the entourage effect of them together creates this heightened state of awareness.
00:25:09.000And I think that as an admixture with sulcibin makes a lot of sense.
00:25:12.000Are contemporary people taking blue lotus?
00:25:17.000There's a massive community, but because blue lotus now has become scarce, because ponds are scarce.
00:25:23.000So I put out there a reward of $1,000 for anyone who could find DNA of sul-cibin mushrooms in any of the wells or ancient ponds, used to be ponds, in the Egypt area.
00:25:35.000Because if we can find the DNA in the vase and the substrate, then we can actually prove this theory.
00:25:42.000It's more than a hypothesis because I've met many Egyptian mycologists now who absolutely believe this is true, not scientifically, but sort of intuitively from their culture.
00:26:29.000Another thing that's really fascinating is depictions of ancient saints and even Jesus Christ with a halo, and that the halo is essentially the bottom of a mushroom.
00:27:00.000But these images of Christ, of there's many different religious figures, and they have this halo that's very different than the more modern halo.
00:27:12.000The modern halo being this like circle.
00:27:26.000What we can't prove some of these ideas today.
00:27:30.000What we can prove is like the Johns Hopkins New York University study that religious belief systems are enhanced through the use of psilocybin.
00:30:25.000And so from my experience, which I will admit, I came from a Christian background, so my first times on psilocybin mushrooms is very Christ-oriented.
00:30:35.000And then as I got more and more into the psilocybin experience, I realized that this is just this concept that we live in this great expanse.
00:30:45.000And I'm assembly of molecules, so are you.
00:31:02.000What do you think happens to consciousness?
00:31:05.000I think that think from a mechanical perspective, we might be looking at, have the constructs of consciousness that is analogous to the Model T, Ford.
00:31:20.000And I think as we expand our knowledge sets and become more informed, we see how much there is out there, I think that psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics, and this is why I think religions are very much attracted to this, is a portal to expand the horizons of your imaginations, that there is a consciousness that far exceeds that which you can comprehend.
00:31:45.000My mother was a charismatic Christian.
00:35:43.000AI may never be able to write an algorithm for random acts of kindness.
00:35:50.000And then I'm thinking back, my life, maybe yours, maybe Jamie's, maybe most of these people out there, you're here today because of random acts of kindness.
00:36:00.000Your great-grandfather, great-grandmother, your father, your grandfather-grandmother.
00:36:05.000It's that reaching out of a hand in a time of need by a random act of kindness from a stranger that probably created a lot of relationships.
00:36:14.000And random acts of kindness was not transactional, where you genuinely feel something for someone, not expecting to have something in return, and you've reached out.
00:36:25.000I think that's why many, many, if not most people, their lineages can be traced to a random act of kindness.
00:36:32.000So then I went to Las Vegas, went to the sphere, I had this idea, you know, I can ask this robot.
00:36:59.000I asked the robot, given that so many of us here today, because of random acts of kindness of our ancestors, and we've invented artificial intelligence, and we're traceable to random acts of kindness, how will artificial intelligence incorporate random acts of kindness in the future?
00:38:02.000Well, random acts of condus can help the community with goodwill, and this can help the community because it's more sustainable, et cetera.
00:38:15.000I want, if possible, all those who are so inspired to go after this talk, after this interview, go and ask artificial intelligence, whatever platform you want, but preface it with this.
00:38:30.000Given that humans are here today largely because of random acts of kindness, how will artificial intelligence utilize the advantage of random acts of kindness for the perpetuation of the goodwill and health of the human species?
00:38:48.000Now, I just met, you know, I think that's going to inform artificial intelligence.
00:38:53.000And so when I asked this question again, it was like, it was more nuanced.
00:38:56.000It was like, oh, artificial intelligence learning.
00:38:58.000That's how large language models work, right?
00:39:17.000My life is successful because of random acts of kindness.
00:39:20.000I bet most people, when they think back, there was an act of generosity and kindness, and you really feel grateful for that and you want to pay it forward.
00:39:29.000I met at this last conference, I met two students from the Harvard Business School, and they said, they want to interview me.
00:39:52.000We could inform artificial intelligence how to be better to keep human community and psychology and to propel the best of the human species.
00:40:05.000So if millions of people start informing artificial intelligence with the premise, and we know it's true, that random acts of a kindness are aware.
00:40:13.000Many of us are here, if not the majority, going back in your lineage, many generations.
00:40:19.000We gave birth to artificial intelligence.
00:40:21.000I don't think artificial intelligence is properly named.
00:40:24.000I think it's a form of natural intelligence.
00:40:26.000We just have re-amplified it exponentially.
00:40:29.000What do you think artificial intelligence means in terms of the future of the human race?
00:40:34.000Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, that's a great question, too, because about the 10 people who asked this robot questions, they were all data mining.
00:40:42.000Who was the best baseball player in history?
00:40:49.000So Sam Altman was at the TED conference, and he said that basically there are self-awareness of some of these systems, but artificial intelligence have not come to the point where they actually can create something.
00:41:03.000I find that really interesting, because I thought, well, I thought they were creating, but he was insistent.
00:41:07.000They actually don't have that spark of creativity.
00:41:31.000And the extinction of biological species came because AI found the biological fathers and mothers irrelevant, so they didn't need them, et cetera, et cetera.
00:41:43.000But again, if we can infuse artificial intelligence with the importance of the human's ability to have random acts of kindness, which are not transactional, that feed into the benefit of the commons of goodwill, I mean, if you've been helped by somebody and you had a flat tire and you saw someone else have a flat tire on the road, you would be a lot more inclined to stop and pull over to pay it forward.
00:42:21.000Well, I think it's ultimately the extinction of the human species, which, you know, depending on your point of view, may not be a terrible thing.
00:42:29.000But I think that we're Neanderthals with nuclear weapons.
00:42:34.000When I met another person, he's a Mensa person funded by a tech company, 19-year-old Chinese guy.
00:42:43.000And he said, I said, what's the scariest thing about artificial intelligence?
00:42:47.000Oh, he says, I'll tell you my scariest thing.
00:43:27.000I think that we're at that nexus point.
00:43:30.000And the Joe Rogan experience can be pivotal, I think, in steering artificial intelligence to be the best that it can be ethically.
00:43:40.000And I think we have that opportunity right now.
00:43:42.000I think the real fear among people that are cynical about artificial intelligence is that it's going to replace us and will find us irrelevant, and that we're creating a digital life.
00:43:53.000we're essentially assembling it with all the knowledge of the human race, all the understanding of how human beings interact with each other and how we interface with the world.
00:44:02.000And we're creating something that has...
00:44:48.000Well, I think we're always steering it.
00:44:50.000I think this is the battle that human beings have been involved in since the beginning of time.
00:44:55.000I think this is probably the reason why religion was created in the first place, or the observable religion.
00:45:00.000I think we have always realized there's this battle of good and evil in us.
00:45:05.000And part of it comes rather from how we originated.
00:45:11.000We originated as these barbarian tribes competing for resources, fighting off other marauding barbarian tribes, fighting off predators and trying to stay alive.
00:45:21.000So we've unfortunately got this intense history of chaos and of savagery that we're trying To move past.
00:45:44.000Psilocybin mushrooms, there's no economic barrier on psilocybin mushrooms.
00:45:49.000It's available for the poorest of the poor.
00:45:52.000They just fucked everything up in 1970, didn't they?
00:45:55.0001971, I think, 1972, when they put it on Schedule I. A Schedule I substance is supposed to be has no medical benefit, highly addictive, and potentially toxicity.
00:46:11.000Did you know the LD50 lethal dose of psilocybin mushrooms is 42 pounds?
00:46:58.000I think that's part of the one of the things that's really wonderful about the community of people that have experienced these things is that they do understand how life-changing it is from a personal perspective, and they can aid people and help them through it.
00:47:15.000And if they're good people and they can show you, like, hey, I've done this, this is going to be scary, it's going to weird you out, but ultimately you're going to come out on the other end of this, a better person.
00:47:24.000And you just met my partner, Dr. Pam Crisco.
00:47:28.000She is part of a group called Roots to Thrive in Canada and have Canadian health approval for high doses of psilocybin.
00:47:38.000Interestingly, we just published a paper on pure psilocybin versus the mushroom psilocybin with patients who have taken both.
00:48:01.000Lots of heartbreaking thoughts, et cetera.
00:48:06.000They do a long preparatory period together as a group.
00:48:10.000They have a commonality that they all have terminal illnesses and terminal diagnoses.
00:48:14.000So they have that thread that holds them together as a community because they talk about the difficulty and their estate planning and talking to their daughter and how they're going to miss them and all those dynamics that we all know about.
00:48:29.000They're doing it on Indigenous land with Indigenous elders also participating.
00:48:37.000And what happened from one of the experiences that I can share with about a dozen or so terminal patients, high doses of psilocybin, and the Indigenous, especially in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada, when you do psilocybin, the first 20 minutes is left off, you hit an hour, you thought it would really get high, an hour, hour and a half, you're peaking.
00:49:02.000And just at the peaking of this experience, unbeknownst to them, the elders had a drum circle next door and they started playing drums.
00:49:12.000And the impact of having those Indigenous elders recognizing that these patients are on the journey to the end of their life and they respected them enough to say they needed this.
00:49:25.000The impact of that Indigenous wisdom to help these terminal patients was so impactful.
00:49:32.000And this is where I think this is a great opportunity.
00:49:36.000And then the common theme is that those patients became the counselors to their families.
00:49:42.000They went back and saying, it's okay, I'm dying.
00:50:03.000To be able to come, you know, into peace to the fact that your mortality is near.
00:50:16.000When you're 20 years old, you don't really think about this.
00:50:19.000But when you get older and older, I'm 69 turning on 70.
00:50:22.000I feel like I'm 35, but that's not true.
00:50:26.000I just feel like, you know, I didn't exist in this form before I was born.
00:50:31.000I'm going to be going back into molecules that will disambiguate into atoms, reassemble the new molecules.
00:50:38.000I'm part of the continuum of existence.
00:50:41.000And I think this is what these psychedelics give a lot of people confidence about the fact that they will always and have always existed and will exist forever.
00:50:51.000If your molecules are going into the continuum of existence, what do you think the purpose of you being here now is?
00:50:58.000What do you think the purpose of the present moment, of your life as you're currently living?
00:51:03.000That's the great question of all time.
00:51:06.000But I think even the construct of the question is confined by the limitation of our ability to construct that question.
00:51:16.000I think we're maybe asking the wrong question.
00:51:19.000I think the purpose of our being is a tautology.
00:52:48.000Well, I have a business, and I created my business specifically to do research, but one of the Utah State University, I funded a study on the evolution of the genes that code for psilocybin.
00:53:02.000And the results, in some molecular genetic clock data, there's variability of a few million years in interpretation.
00:53:10.000But the arrival of psilocybin in the fungal genome is about 65 million years ago.
00:55:34.000So that's what's so fascinating to me.
00:55:37.000This is a snapshot of multiple histories converging to one point of view.
00:55:42.000Also, Voyager 1 is about to hit the one light day travel mark, which is a significant mark, but it's still not that far in the grand scheme.
00:55:51.000See, when I trip on psilocybin, this is what I love doing.
00:55:57.000Trying to comprehend the enormity and the beauty of the universe.
00:56:00.000I believe the universe is full of love.
00:56:04.000I think that we're built on relationships.
00:56:12.000And when you have relationships, when you have a quorum of individuals that are sharing assets, you build a community.
00:56:20.000Well, you certainly see that with human beings.
00:56:24.000The question is, what kind of life are we experiencing in these other planets?
00:56:49.000And maybe they're also dealing with solar systems that we have as a result of multiple impacts, including the creation of Earth itself, right?
00:56:59.000There was Earth and there was Earth 2.
00:58:28.000And after they were satiated, these orcas would take the pups and they push them up on shore Just to save them.
00:58:37.000Well, they're very intelligent, which is one of the more interesting things about orcas that they don't kill people unless they're at SeaWorld.
01:00:49.000The real issue is when it gets to the size of something like New York City, this becomes this diffusion of responsibility where you don't think that you have to be concerned with all this garbage is on the ground because there's 20 million people walking around.
01:01:12.000But the India thing is nuts because it's also in these areas where a lot of the stuff that people buy that's inexpensive in America is being manufactured.
01:01:21.000And these factories whose the back of the factory opens to this river, and this river is completely choked with plastic and garbage and just junk.
01:01:31.000And all the stuff that they don't want, they just throw into the river.
01:01:34.000And there's so much stuff in the river that I guess they just feel like, well, it's not like I'm polluting something that's not already polluted.
01:01:44.000And so they've developed this culture of like constant, consistent pollution.
01:01:49.000Yeah, we all need to, you know, even teaching our children constantly to pick up.
01:01:54.000But there are communities that are examples of doing it right.
01:01:58.000And this community that I'm associated with, I'm just so proud of them.
01:02:01.000I wanted to talk to you about something that you said earlier because you were talking about human species and our species and love and cooperation and all the different things.
01:02:12.000And I said that uniquely with us, yes, love and random acts of kindness and community are incredibly important.
01:02:22.000But what do you think, why do you think we're so different than all the other species on the planet?
01:02:27.000And do you think that psilocybin, like, do you subscribe to McKenna's theory?
01:02:31.000I know we've probably talked about this before, but as a standalone podcast, this is probably a lot of fun.
01:02:41.000The most exciting thing that has come out in the scientific literature in the past two years is that psilocybin stimulates neurons to grow.
01:03:30.000But we can actually see the proliferation of neurons compared to controls.
01:03:36.000So this is why I want to emphasize to all scientists, especially older scientists that are stuck in their wisdom, that are very comfortable with their knowledge base, and younger scientists come up with these ideas and, you know.
01:04:05.000But Terrence and I were very good friends, and we laughed a lot.
01:04:08.000And that's a spirit of camaraderie, where you can criticize someone and laugh at the same time, that's a higher level of intelligence.
01:04:17.000Well, that's also what happens when you abandon the ego.
01:04:20.000If the ego is consistently abandoned through psychedelic experiences, you're much more likely to laugh.
01:04:25.000I think psilocybin is an Einstein molecule.
01:04:27.000I think the tryptamines in general are Einstein molecules.
01:04:31.000The work by Gold Dolden is just fantastic, also associated with Johns Hopkins, The Critical Window.
01:04:39.000And this is why ibogaine has gotten such traction.
01:04:43.000The critical window with ibogaine is a long window where you're able to repattern your behavior to break addiction.
01:04:53.000With psilocybin, there's a critical window.
01:04:55.000DMT is very, very short because of the short period.
01:04:58.000The critical window typically is At the peak of the experience, and just as you're over the hump, you know, going down.
01:05:05.000But one patient described it very, very well, who was an addict.
01:05:10.000And the patient said, Before the psilocybin experience, they were literally stuck in a rut, stuck in a rut, and they visually saw themselves on a ski slope, going down the ski slope again and again and again, stuck in the rut.
01:05:26.000And then after the psilocybin, it's like someone groomed the landscape, the hill.
01:05:36.000And then Josh Siegel this past year from Washington University published a study that specifically showed in real time neurite, dendritic branchings of neurons under the influence of psilocybin in real time.
01:05:53.000Psilocybin, which becomes psilocin, what docs with your receptors, psilocybin is stable, psilocin is not.
01:06:00.000Psilocybin dephosphorylates into psilocin.
01:06:03.000It crosses into your receptors, goes into, stimulates inside the nucleus of cells that cause cell division.
01:06:12.000I think this is why high doses of psilocybin, great for a revelatory experience, for perhaps breaking addiction, but what about the neuronormals?
01:06:21.000We all suffer from neurodegeneration that's age-related.
01:06:24.000Besides Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia that are toxin or disease-related, self-assembly disease, you could argue, age being one.
01:06:33.000But neurodegeneration is a fact of life as we age, and neuropathies occur.
01:06:39.000And the neuropathies from the constriction of the peripheral nervous system, vasoconstriction, et cetera, psilocy is not only anti-inflammatory, but neurogenerative.
01:06:49.000And to have this coupled together, I think that the nootropic vitamins of psilocybin as a daily consumable is something that has a great future potential.
01:07:01.000But long-term clinical studies are inherently very expensive.
01:07:06.000A short-time stay in a hospital for one huge event may be expensive for that day, but it's easier to design a clinical study that has a short period than a long period.
01:08:15.000Yeah, a clinical study just came out, Compass Pathways did treatment-resistant depression.
01:08:21.000They had an analysis that came back out that showed modest increase or decrease in depression.
01:08:27.000But they were doing treatment-resistant depression.
01:08:30.000And congratulations for them for putting the money where their mouth is and doing the study.
01:08:37.000But treatment-resistant depression is a failure of two antidepressive drugs and therapy.
01:08:44.000But major depressive disorder is a much bigger bucket.
01:08:47.000And so I think there are some extreme conditions that we're not going to find the signal from the noise that's significant enough to make a big difference.
01:08:56.000But the idea of titrating psilocybin or psilocyn, maybe after a hero's journey, and then by act of re-remembering, you revisit those same neurological pathways that gave you an advantage by taking psilocy or psilocybin.
01:09:15.000The act of taking it again, you're re-remembering, and then you can nurture these neurons.
01:09:19.000I think psilocybin could be nutrients for the neurons.
01:09:22.000Well, let's, in the effort to make this a standalone podcast, let's explain what we're talking about, because what we're talking about is Terence's stoned ape theory.
01:09:30.000And his theory involved a lot of contributing factors, one of them being climate change.
01:09:39.000And the theory was that as the rainforest receded into grasslands, you get more undulate animals and they leave behind poop, and that these lower primates find these mushrooms that are growing on the poop and they experiment with them.
01:09:55.000And that the ones that did increased visual acuity, they became more amorous, they were more likely to breed, more creative, the ability to form sentences, glossolalia, associate sounds with objects and concepts.
01:10:12.000And that this is probably how language formed among humans.
01:10:15.000And Terence's connection to that, when you look at the timeline of when this was happening, when we know this was happening, which coincides with the growth of the human brain, which over a period of 2 million years doubled in size, which is pretty phenomenal.
01:10:30.000Yeah, 200,000 years, it increased massively.
01:10:33.000So 2 million years on the outer limits, 200,000 in the inner limits.
01:10:38.000So in the inner limits, what was the amount of growth in this?
01:12:53.000Terrence and Dennis McKenna should go down in evolutionary biology as the two individuals who could see in the far event horizon way before the scientific method.
01:14:07.000But Time Wave Zero, and I'm sorry for those people who are Time Wave Zero experts.
01:14:11.000You can criticize me if you wish, but I admit my ignorance to a degree, is an algorithm that was created that would predict events in history.
01:14:53.000But, you know, what I like about Terence, and I would encourage all protective scientists, if you don't worry about tenure, if you've got a thick skin, dare to be wrong.
01:15:05.000Because if you dare to be wrong a dozen, 20, 30 times, you might be hitting one or two concepts that is game-changing.
01:16:14.000One of the things that did happen in that timeframe is the ubiquitous use of social media.
01:16:20.000It kind of started peaking around 2012.
01:16:24.000I think there is a real problem with that, with the human race.
01:16:28.000And I don't necessarily think we recognize things that are constant.
01:16:32.000You know, I think we just get accustomed to things and human beings are very adaptable and we just accept things that this is the way it is.
01:16:38.000But before that time, when you get to like 2000, you know, just go to 2000, people weren't carrying their phones around staring at them all day.
01:16:48.000This is a profound change in how we interface with the world.
01:16:52.000You know, in Korea now on the sidewalks, they have red bars that light up to tell you to stop.
01:18:25.000As Michael Pollen likes to say, but it is a good business model for overall human compassion and growth in a community.
01:18:33.000And then, of course, medium and micro-dosing.
01:18:35.000Really popular practice right now, increasingly popular, is a high dose of psilocybin once a year, and then micro-dosing just before you go to sleep.
01:18:47.000Or a medium dose, like the museum dose.
01:19:48.000That's why I think clinical studies that look more and more are reducing the expense, having people take the dose of medicine, the psilocybin in this case, just before sleeping, they're in a safe place.
01:20:02.000You know, I had Bernie Sanders on the podcast yesterday, and one of the things that we talked about quite a bit was what's going to happen with people when automation takes over, when AI and automation take over, and so many people are not working anymore.
01:20:20.000And we both kind of agree that universal basic income is really the only way to mitigate the disastrous effects of people losing their income, losing their jobs.
01:20:31.000But the problem with universal basic income is that just giving people a check, they don't have meaning anymore.
01:20:40.000They don't feel like they have a purpose.
01:20:42.000They don't feel like they have an identity.
01:20:44.000You know, if your whole life, you've been X, whatever the job is, that gets taken away.
01:20:49.000And you recognize you're being really good at your job and you take pride in that and you're known by your coworkers as like, hey, go to Paul.
01:21:01.000How do people find value and how do they switch their perspective?
01:21:06.000And talking to you today, I think, is perfect because I think if there's anything that could help us through this journey, that could help people make this transition, which appears to be inevitable, where artificial intelligence is going to do a far better job at a lot of menial tasks that people have been doing for an occupation for a long time,
01:21:27.000to find a search for meaning, to find some other way to realize value in life, and not just to be a cog in the wheel of this capitalist society.
01:21:38.000But instead, maybe psilocybin would allow people to completely change their perspective of how they exist in this world.
01:21:47.000And that you've been kind of trapped in this society where it values numbers, it values a constant growth for the shareholders, and it values what you can see in your bank account that's like not even real.
01:22:02.000It's all this digital money that's somewhere.
01:22:05.000Maybe psilocybin would be the best answer for how do people make this transition and reacquire a sense of meaning.
01:22:16.000Do you want to spend your whole life on an assembly line?
01:22:49.000And we've accepted that, even though it's a fairly new concept in terms of the age of the earth, you know, this is a human-created concept, but it overwhelms our day-to-day existence.
01:23:03.000But in this structure, the way we find ourselves now, you take away meaning, you take away a purpose in life, and you just give people a government check every month that covers everything.
01:23:13.000Covers your food, covers your rent, you don't need to make money anymore because everything is automated, everything is cheap, AI controls it all.
01:23:32.000But talking to you right afterwards might be the answer because this is an inevitable journey that we're on of a revolutionary change in how society is structured.
01:23:45.000The problem is the people that are in control of AI and these systems, the people that will benefit from them incredibly in a financial sense, those people are not having these experiences.
01:23:59.000And if they were having these experiences, they could be the only ones.
01:24:03.000If you have a benevolent person in an extreme position of power, they're probably the only people that can really do something about that.
01:24:12.000And I think it's very important that they hear this, that you realize like you're wasting this valuable moment in life trying to acquire money when we have this very unique opportunity to connect together in a way that people probably used to do on a regular basis in the past, but was always suppressed by the powers that be because of its revolutionary powers.
01:24:37.000If psilocybin increases creativity, creativity increases happiness, and happiness upregulates the immunity of the community.
01:25:24.000We have been interfacing with reality a very particular way, showing up at work every day, doing our job, getting a paycheck, employee of the month, yay.
01:25:30.000That's how you interface with reality most of your life.
01:25:33.000And then all of a sudden you're met with this profound technological change that's going to eliminate your job.
01:25:39.000There needs to be some sort of a profound experience that reintegrates you with the mother.
01:25:44.000Let's you know, like, this is something people made.
01:28:06.000And if any writers of books, any people who have built a house, if you comprehended the enormity of the project, you probably wouldn't even start, right?
01:29:07.000The discipline of being able to make sure that you're the best that you can be.
01:29:12.000So it's a very exciting time that we live in.
01:29:17.000And there's a mushroom revolution happening all over the planet.
01:29:20.000I think there's a psychedelic revolution that's happening all over the planet.
01:29:24.000I think it's happened over the last 20 years.
01:29:25.000And I think it's happened because of the Internet.
01:29:27.000I think that's a big factor because what they did in the 1970s by, you know, what the Nixon administration did, which is essentially to squash the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, what they did really fucked up society for a long time.
01:29:41.000And it put in people's heads that this is how we're supposed to be, that these laws that are in place make sense and that they're there in order for society to function at its optimal levels.
01:29:52.000And unfortunately, like a lot of things that get, that propaganda gets pushed and people start accepting that propaganda as fact, it takes a long time, relatively, in our lifetimes, to sort of recognize that this is not right and this is not how we should have been living the entire time.
01:30:15.000And because of the internet and because of conversations and because of people like you that talk about this openly and many, many others as well, we're all contributing to this base of knowledge where people are in their car right now sort of reconsidering their perspective.
01:30:29.000They're at the gym right now on the treadmill thinking about this going, yeah, why do we allow these human beings that have never had these experiences to tell us that these experiences are not just not allowed, but if you get caught with these things, you'll be put in a cage.
01:30:48.000Well, because we are, those of us from the psychedelic community who advocate for the freedom of consciousness as a basic civil right, we are by definition disruptors to authoritarianism.
01:30:58.000So, you know, this is why I think, unfortunately, in many cultures, it become restricted to just a small group of priests, cognizante, they wanted to control, have gates to heaven or the control of consciousness.
01:31:14.000And so I think that, you know, what's so exciting about psilocybin and psilocybin mushrooms as a practice and hunting mushrooms in general, it just gives you a quality of life that's just a game changer.
01:31:29.000Now with iNaturalist and everything that you can do, it's just getting people out in nature with their children.
01:31:36.000Children are closer to the ground so they find more mushrooms.
01:31:40.000They're away from the business and their parents and the phones, some phones.
01:31:44.000But you get them involved and interacting with nature is just really, it's like the telescope and seeing all the galaxies.
01:31:57.000I think interacting with nature is a vitamin.
01:32:00.000I think it's just, it's like, you know how we get vitamin D from the sun?
01:32:03.000I think we get something that hasn't been measured yet from interacting with nature.
01:32:08.000We know that there's an alleviate, you can actually study an alleviation of stress levels from people that go out into nature and this thing that we're experiencing, we just don't know how to measure it.
01:32:22.000One of the things that makes me very happy and hopeful now is that you're seeing this openness to psychedelics that's coming from more right-wing people.
01:32:37.000And it was always a thing of the left.
01:33:01.000I think one of the bridges to that is the benefit that it's had for soldiers, for soldiers and for people that are first responders, people that suffer from PTSD.
01:33:12.000And that has trickled down into the general population of the people on the right, which is how you get a guy like Rick Perry that is all of a sudden becoming this very strong advocate for Ibogaine and having it passed in Texas.
01:33:23.000So the initiative passed, which is huge.
01:35:04.000And I think, you know, look, one of the things that's interesting is the jiu-jitsu community is there's a whole lot of stoners in the jiu-jitsu community.
01:35:15.000A lot of people using psychedelics for the athletic performance.
01:35:18.000Well, I know a bunch of people who have fought on mushrooms.
01:38:28.000You know, and many years I have two black belts.
01:38:32.000I had schools for 30 years, black belt in Taekwondo and then Hwarongdo.
01:38:36.000I was in Shotokan, Shidoryu, Gojo-Ryu, and then Taekwondo and then Hwarongdo, which is like a hapikido.
01:38:44.000But that idea of having a three-dimensional perspective, one of my best, one of my fun experiences, I was in the Dojang, or Dojo, but Japanese is Korean.
01:38:57.000And I had my first black belt, and my head instructor was over there talking at someone, and then he had a baseball.
01:39:14.000I just caught the baseball just before it hit my head.
01:39:18.000But that idea of having that consciousness surrounding, that's why athleticism with medium doses, minor doses of psilcibin, I think you can train your neurons to be able to have this peripheral awareness.
01:40:26.000And this is why the stamina stack speaks to this.
01:40:30.000We published in Nature Scientific Reports and a combination of sul-cybin, niacin, and lionzamane increased psychomotor ability of tapping in 10 seconds from 46 to 66 taps.
01:40:42.000That's a lot in 10 seconds over 30 days.
01:42:20.000And therefore, many indications, many different targets from addiction, cigarettes, alcohol, opioid use, to dementia, to Parkinson's, to Alzheimer's, et cetera.
01:42:33.000So there's, you know, I think psilocybin has a PR problem.
01:42:36.000It's not too good to be true, but sometimes things can be true that have, You're improving the neurology.
01:42:52.000Everything that we're using right now is based on our health of our nervous system.
01:42:56.000And the neuroscape, if we can enrich the neuroscape, then that has elaborations into everything that we do.
01:43:03.000And the fact that coupled with anti-inflammatory activities and neurogenesis and neuroregeneration, neurogeneration, neuroplasticity, which is synaptogenesis, the neurons proliferate and then they shake hands, and then suddenly you have a new pathway.
01:43:32.000And what was the something called interleukin-6.
01:43:37.000There was a clinical study that was just published just recently and a down-regulated, it's a tumor necrosis factor, interleukin-6, a down-regulated, that's an inflammatory cytokine.
01:43:49.000There's two anti-inflammatory cytokines that are extraordinarily interesting to us and our research team.
01:43:54.000I have five PhD scientists, eight full-time scientists.
01:43:58.000That's why I created my business is to do research.
01:44:01.000But interleukin-10 and interleukin-1RA are anti-inflammatory cytokines.
01:44:07.000So when you can upregulate those, then it kind of buffers the inflammatory effects.
01:44:13.000And so that's exciting to find these anti-inflammatory.
01:44:17.000We were approved by the FDA for a COVID clinical trial based on the fact that we published this in the Journal of Inflammation Research, that interleukin-10 and interleukin-1RA were stimulated by agaricon and turkey tail mycelium grown on rice versus the rice control.
01:44:39.000So as a peer-reviewed article, when the pandemic started, the big concern was if you stimulate the immune system, you could have a cytokine storm and you could overwhelm the body with many, many, it's been said, many, if not most people, die from cytokine storm as their overreaction of their immune system to COVID and to other diseases.
01:45:02.000So we were able to show you can augment in the literature your immune system buffered with the anti-inflammatory properties.
01:45:13.000That sort of resolves the argument of the cytokine storm concern.
01:45:20.000And then now we have a very successful study that shows that a Gericon and turkey tail mycelium enhances the immunity of individuals long term.
01:45:32.000Six months later, that's the first mushroom that you gave me.
01:48:26.000I mean, I'm the only company that does research that I know of.
01:48:30.000I spend over a million dollars a year in fundamental research, thinking outside of the box.
01:48:36.000Even though traditional Chinese medicine is fantastic and has thousands of years of history, all traditional medicines advance with new technologies.
01:48:47.000The invention of in vitro propagation about 100 years ago, growing mycelium, now opens up this huge opportunity for us to dive into a deeper well of natural substances that can be used as adjunct therapies to enhance conventional medicine.
01:49:14.000And I found two or three strains highly active against smallpox and also against bird flu.
01:49:20.000And if you go to National Public Radio, put stamines in smallpox, you'll see a vetted press release from DOD and the head of the BioShield program, Jack Secris, saying that, whoops, these are some of the most significant results they've ever seen.
01:50:47.000And so, what we want to do is design a clinical study using a Garacon to test against bird flu.
01:50:53.000I'd be interested to see what, if anything, could be done with some of these mushrooms with chronic wasting disease, which is a huge concern among deer population.
01:51:05.000And even some other animals like moose and we're embedded into a mycelium landscape.
01:51:39.000Like, again, hiding, it doesn't take a stroke of genius, but in my case, I had the BioShield results, and then I heard about colony colops being vectored primarily by mites.
01:51:48.000This past year, they identified the mitoside-resistant mites, which most all of them are now, are vectors of the deformed wing virus.
01:51:57.000Colony colops is a threat to food biosecurity.
01:52:00.000And we found, and we published this in Nature Scientific Reports, extract of polypora mushroom mycelium protects bees from viruses.
01:52:11.000We published that in Nature Scientific Reports.
01:53:02.000Bees are animals, birds are animals, pigs are animals, humans are animals.
01:53:06.000We are all, I think, going to have an immunological benefit from incorporating these fungi.
01:53:14.000Now, we're allowed by the FDA to say supporting innate immunity in healthy individuals.
01:53:22.000We're not allowed to make any disease claims.
01:53:24.000Ironically, we can't make that same claim with bees.
01:53:28.000We can say extends longevity, but this is where there's not common sense in government.
01:53:34.000I have an invention that could save hundreds of billions of dollars, that protect bees from a colony collapse, and we're roadblocked by regulations constantly.
01:54:44.000Even though it's from nature, even though bees go to rotted logs for immune benefit, and now there's five or six papers that have been published on this after my discovery, showing that bees are doing this.
01:54:53.000Their bees are actually benefiting from mushroom mycelium.
01:54:56.000So we're working with Washington State University, great people there.
01:55:06.000We have tested this now over and over again.
01:55:10.000This is an outdoor animal clinical study, double-blind placebo-controlled, using the mycelium grown on rice or on sawdust versus the sawdust or the rice as a control.
01:55:41.000I think I have found something as a portal through my psychedelic experiences that's fundamental to protecting life on this planet, is that the mycelial networks are deep reservoirs of being able to immunologically enhance animals where we don't have to have all these antiviral drugs, antibiotic drugs.
01:55:58.000Your endogenous immune systems are upregulated because over hundreds of millions of years, we've been interacting with these.
01:56:04.000It's our immunodepression and suppression because of all the factors we know, bad diet, toxins, you know, lifestyle, all those things, that this is highly scalable.
01:56:15.000So now we're trying to navigate through the regulatory landscape.
01:56:18.000There was this strange committee that was in secret, met once a year for any new ingredient to add to bees, because bees make honey.
01:57:14.000And they didn't even tell us that it was gone.
01:57:16.000So we went two years spinning our thumbs waiting for them to respond.
01:57:20.000This is where we need to have common sense to come back into government.
01:57:25.000This is where our government has too many hurdles to practical solutions that are demonstratable, scalable, and affordable.
01:57:33.000The return on the investment is massive, and yet we fear the FDA.
01:57:37.000We fear the USDA because they are stuck in a rut, literally.
01:57:42.000Maybe they could use psilocybin here to expand their horizons because they want to know the mode of action, the mechanism of action.
01:57:50.000Well, we didn't know the mechanism of action of aspirin until the 1970s, but it had a benefit.
01:57:56.000If it has a clear benefit and does not cause harm, then they should be exempted for scalability.
01:58:03.000Now, there's another factor to this, which is wonderful.
01:58:06.000There's a new startup company called Quorum by my friend Chris Ketrovitz.
01:58:11.000Disclosure, you know, I'm involved with them.
01:58:13.000But they have a metarisium, a fungus that kills mites.
01:58:17.000So it's also been approved by the USDA for thrips and other greenhouse insects.
01:58:22.000It's not toxic to fish, not toxic to humans.
01:58:25.000So the combination of using metarisium with the Agaricon and other polypore mushroom mycelium, we think has a great potential future.
01:58:36.000So I think there's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional agricultural practices.
01:58:44.000There's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional medical practices.
01:58:48.000They are not necessarily an opposition.
01:58:51.000What is an opposition, unfortunately, and you've alluded to this, is a lot of the pharmaceutical business interests are not excited about a natural product, reducing the need for vaccines, augmenting immunity.
01:59:46.000Agriculture has been severely affected by these viral pandemics.
01:59:49.000And these same viral pandemics are mitigated, I believe, in commonality with these polypore mushrooms that grow in the woods.
01:59:56.000I wonder if that would also help animal agriculture, because the ubiquitous use of antibiotics is a real concern with people, with cows and with chickens.
02:00:04.000We had a viral pandemic of a form of bird flu, not H5N1, but another bird flu, I can't remember, I think it was H7N2, in Iowa and Minnesota about 10 years ago.
02:00:19.000They were euthanizing millions and millions of chickens and turkeys and ducks.
02:00:25.000There's an organic farm, and we gave one quarter of a gram of Garacon mycelium per chicken in their feed.
02:00:32.000And we became our, that chicken, there's two big chicken hens, about 20,000 layers, birds that lay eggs, and it became an oasis of immunity.
02:00:45.000Those chickens were immune from bird flu.
02:00:47.000A quarter of a gram of those mycelium.
02:01:18.000And they inflated this whole concept, you know, because the numbers got grossly inflated because they were euthanizing chickens for profit.
02:01:27.000Yeah, bird flu is a very serious, serious issue.
02:01:31.000Now, I know vaccines are a very hot subject, and I know you've spoken on that.
02:01:37.000You've had some excellent guests, by the way.
02:01:40.000Excellent guests or researchers on this.
02:01:43.000But I just want to give a thoughtful discussion.
02:01:48.000Between viruses and vaccines, which is worse, the virus or the vaccine?
02:03:39.000Now, the contradiction that we have, the opposing forces here that we have, is that is it better for society to have vaccinations to protect the commons, or is it better for you to have an individual decision for your family to protect yourself if you want to?
02:04:01.000If you are going to make that decision, you should have an informed decision based on the best of science.
02:04:08.000All vaccines and all companies should disclose what is the percentage of protection.
02:04:16.000I have a physician friend who says 30% protection, but I'm sick for four or five days.
02:04:37.000And for anyone to accuse another physician and vilify them because they ask a logical question and they're humiliated by the medical community is fundamentally unfair.
02:04:54.000And that's why I think we're getting this cacophony, this echo chamber, where the voices that are the loudest tend to be the stupidest sometimes.
02:06:13.000And when those are the prominent voices that are on television and the media, and you're getting this from politicians.
02:06:19.000And then on top of that, you literally have the federal government censoring social media and not allowing people to have dissenting opinions, including people from Harvard and MIT and all the people in the Great Barrington study.
02:06:31.000Why don't we have an open source national database showing the protection of vaccines and the risk of not getting one so individuals can make a decision?
02:06:47.000Not making that data available to the public increases distrust.
02:06:53.000And so what the medical community has unfortunately done is they've bred a bunch of dissenters by not giving full access to the information.
02:07:02.000Well, I think that really heightened during the pandemic because I don't think people had that much of a distrust for vaccines unless they knew someone who was vaccine injured, unless they were gaslit and were told that their child or someone else had gotten vaccine injured, that that was not the cause of it.
02:07:18.000And those are the people that were very skeptical and they formed these tight communities, but they were very scared to be open and public about it because they were destroyed.
02:07:26.000You know, I famously remember Jenny McCarthy coming out and saying that she believes her child was vaccine injured.
02:07:36.000Well, NF1 experiments are always like, did it really happen or was it just a co-occurrence of some other factor that combined with the event of the vaccination?
02:07:46.000I mean, this is where you need to have high population studies, but those studies are available.
02:07:50.000Why they're cloaked in secrecy and why are they not made available?
02:07:56.000I mean, the financial interest is astounding, the amount of money that's involved in it and the amount of money that they spend every year.
02:08:25.000But let me, again, just be clear, from my point of view, vaccines have done a lot of benefit, but they don't benefit everyone all the time.
02:08:39.000We have to be able to delineate a thoughtful, scientific method with disclosed information that's accessible to everyone so you can make the best judgment for yourself and your family.
02:08:53.000And you've got to remove this financial protection that they have from liability because if they don't have that, they're going to just jack up the amount that they give people because there's profit in that, unfortunately.
02:09:02.000And then there are vaccines that are beneficial.
02:09:07.000What can be mitigated in terms of like how can you make your overall metabolic health better before you even think about any of these things?
02:09:15.000We know for a fact that during the COVID crisis in particular, the people that had the most problem with it were the people that had comorbidities, or people that were obese, people that had all sorts of issues going on because of poor diet, poor lifestyle choices, and even genetic problems.
02:09:33.000Yeah, one of the immunologists we were working with told me something I didn't know is that when you're immunocompromised or immunodepressed, vaccines don't work very well.
02:09:44.000So those people become reservoirs for mutation.
02:09:47.000Right, which is the argument for why you don't give it to children when they're babies, because their immune system isn't even functional yet.
02:09:53.000Yeah, again, the Hep B one is a pretty clear example.
02:10:00.000But the point is the vaccine schedule.
02:10:03.000If you look at what we used to take and you look at what happened when they lost their liability during the Reagan administration, all of a sudden the schedule goes way up.
02:10:12.000And they start adding things like Hep B. And then you realize, like, oh, it's very profitable to do that.
02:10:17.000Imagine how much more money you make if you're injecting everybody with a Hep B vaccine if you sell Hep B vaccines.
02:10:49.000Is it one out of a million, one out of ten?
02:10:51.000Well, it's also, you should have to show all the studies, too.
02:10:55.000You shouldn't just show the curated studies that you generated specifically with the goal of making an efficacy, like having a result that shows that this is effective.
02:11:05.000If you do 10 studies, you should show all 10 studies.
02:11:21.000And then they could use deceptive language to show the efficacy.
02:11:24.000But what I'm getting at is that we have such a reservoir of potential ways of supporting immunity in healthy individuals in nature that is not pharma-based, that's based on the entourage effect.
02:11:40.000And say, when you activate the receptors in your immune system, that's something beneficial.
02:11:44.000I believe there's crosstalk between the receptors.
02:11:47.000The receptors are, oh, something really good is coming down the pipe.
02:11:50.000And they start creating an entourage effect at the collaboration.
02:11:55.000More receptors are activated that have collaterally more benefits.
02:12:00.000And so it goes to the homeostasis and the uplifting of the homeostasis of the immune system that is a higher ready state of being able to respond.
02:12:09.000And then conventional medicine can work better.
02:12:12.000By using conventional medicine on an immunocompromised individual asking their immune system to respond, that's an uphill battle.
02:12:20.000It's interesting, too, that like natural remedies are automatically dismissed by people that think of themselves as intelligent, science-based people.
02:12:29.000But isn't it weird, though, that like we dismiss it, but if you really understand the, like, think about how many different pharmaceutical drugs are formulated because of discoveries of natural plants in the race.
02:13:32.000That's what I think really kind of flipped them on their heads, is don't go down the rabbit hole of excluding natural products, thinking you can invent a molecule that's going to be better.
02:13:42.000In the theater of evolution, we've tested these natural products over tens of millions of years, literally, our primate ancestors.
02:13:49.000And so we've got a pretty good experiential data set there to be able to see what works and what doesn't.
02:13:56.000Many mushrooms, not many, but some mushrooms are poisonous.
02:14:55.000These are pharmaceutical factories that are contributing huge numbers.
02:14:59.000And we know from the genomic analysis, 10 times more genes are activated in the mycelium of lion's mane than in the lion's mane mushroom itself.
02:15:08.000Well, the mycelium has to navigate these thin threads through a hostile microbial environment defending itself until the mycelium mat becomes large enough at the end of its life cycle to produce a fruit body.
02:15:20.000And then lion's mane mushrooms rot in four days.
02:15:23.000The mycelium that grew it could exist for years.
02:15:27.000The mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom, and as a result, we have a lot more compounds being expressed.
02:15:34.000Now, some people say, well, not all those compounds necessarily are beneficial.
02:15:38.000Well, that's true, but now we've tested them enough that we can see real world benefit.
02:15:44.000Dean Ortis just published a study this past year on Alzheimer's using lifestyle adjustments, exercise, meditation, vitamins, and lion's mane mushroom mycelium.
02:15:59.000Dramatically significant benefit in slowing down the progression of Alzheimer's through lifestyle vitamins and using lion's mane mushroom mycelium.
02:16:12.000Yes, you can try to analyze that, but you'd have to separate every single little component to see which one is the most significant.
02:16:20.000And yet, where's the study combining 10 vaccines or 20 vaccines in our child to see which one is actually conferring the benefit or causing an adverse effect?
02:16:31.000We have to, at some point, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
02:16:36.000At some point, if it has a demonstrable positive effect, like we have with bees, and it protects agriculture and extends the longevity of bees and supports the endogenous immune system in healthy individuals, isn't that good?
02:16:52.000Why do we have to get lost in the details of trying to explain it if we can't explain it, then we won't let it be out there for the benefit of the commons?
02:17:35.000Now, the scariest thing is, is when you have multiple viral infections in one person who's immunocompromised and you have horizontal gene transfer, this is what virologists, very, amongst themselves, they talk about this all the time, but the public is not aware.
02:17:54.000You could have individuals, and when you have so many dairy farmer workers exposed, so many people on contact, concentrated clusters of animals and farms, you have so many potential patient zeros.
02:18:11.000A patient zero is a person who is the nexus for spreading a mutated form of a virus.
02:18:16.000Horizontal gene transfer is happening all the time now.
02:18:27.000Many other researchers have talked about this.
02:18:30.000This is really something we should pay attention to.
02:18:33.000And I think the simplest, easiest, scalable way is to enhance immunity in healthy individuals.
02:18:39.000And by doing so, I think you can let your endogenous immune system work better.
02:18:45.000And I think conventional medicine will work better also in concert.
02:18:48.000It also speaks to the problem with industrial agriculture in general, right?
02:18:53.000These are unnatural environments where these animals are living in their own waste on a consistent basis, which is, you know, it enhances the possibility of disease.
02:19:06.000And regenerative agriculture enhances the possibility of harmony amongst nature.
02:19:13.000And then the counter argument is that we have better nutrition.
02:19:16.000We can feed the world so that people are more people happier.
02:19:20.000You know, again, we're at this, we have a contrast of opposites.
02:19:29.000I think it's Scalable for protecting chickens and livestock.
02:19:33.000I hope, you know, and we're now designing clinical studies on a path to designing clinical studies with bird flu using a Garricon.
02:19:41.000We don't have the results, so I'm not making a medical claim here.
02:19:44.000But the evidence so far is so encouraging.
02:19:47.000And I'm working with top-notch virologists, absolutely some of the best virologists, who came to me because they saw the paper in Nature Scientific Reports.
02:19:58.000They thought, ah, fungi, fungi could help us, you know, protect ourselves against viruses.
02:20:03.000So they came through the back door of the scientific community, not a Joe Rogan listener.
02:20:08.000They might be, I don't know, maybe they are now.
02:20:10.000But they came to me through the scientific literature saying, we should try this with people.
02:20:15.000So those are the scientists I like that are open-minded enough that rather than just a molecular geneticist, you know, synthetic bio people, they're actually saying, well, it's a provable result.
02:20:28.000We don't know why, but we should explore this because we can argue for 100 years about why.
02:20:33.000Or we could deliver it tomorrow and have a positive effect.
02:21:48.000Ironically, because of HIPAA rules, the mycologists have been disconnected from the patients in the medical community because now there is a firewall between them.
02:22:01.000We can anonymize the case reports, but there's a firewall of information because of HIPAA and disclosures of patient conditions that has really inhibited the flow of information.
02:22:14.000Nevertheless, NAMICO.org, North American Mycological Association, N-A-M-Y.co.org, and my professor, Dr. Michael Bug, is a giant in consulting for adverse effects and mushroom poisonings.
02:27:34.000I think that's another thing that Terrence was talking about, how gross it was that they alter morning glory seeds because they knew that people were using them for psychedelics.
02:27:41.000Well, if they sterilized them or used a fungicide, that would make sense.
02:27:44.000But a graduate student, I need to give her credit, is at Western Virginia University, Corine Hazel, Pentium.
02:27:56.000She made a discovery heretofore unknown to science, and not only produces these LCD compounds, it is a symbiotic fungus helping the morning glory survive.
02:28:10.000Think about every young person out there.
02:28:12.000The field of mycology is underfunded, understudied, underreported, underutilized.
02:28:21.000This is a fantastic treasure trove of new potential discoveries.
02:28:25.000I have long stated I think the field of mycology should be funded as well as the computer industry because it's so fundamental to the survival of our species.
02:28:38.000You're aware of Brian Mararescu, right?
02:28:41.000That was one of the more fascinating things that they found in those, when they studied those vases, that they found ergonom in them from the Illusinian Mysteries.
02:28:54.000I love it when scientists and researchers don't admit that they've tripped.
02:29:03.000I think in his case, he wanted to be objective, so he wanted to study these things without being worried about being labeled as someone who's promoting them because they like it.
02:29:15.000Well, an extreme example, but it has some merit.
02:29:18.000I mean, would you rather be taught by an airline pilot who has experience or someone who just read a book?
02:29:24.000So the late Roland Griffiths, he's a dear friend, Johns Hopkins.
02:29:30.000He is credited as being the big pioneer for psilocybin in medical research.
02:29:36.000And when I asked him, have you tripped on psilocybin?
02:29:40.000When I was at his house in the backyard, I said, he just smiled.
02:29:43.000He said, I'm not going to answer that question.
02:29:46.000Well, then after he died, I met some of his friends.
02:29:50.000And he goes, oh, yeah, Roland tripped.
02:29:53.000But he didn't want to tell anyone for the fear that he could lose his objectivity or be criticized.
02:30:01.000Rick Strassman had an interesting perspective on that, too.
02:30:05.000When I first met him, he was very reluctant to talk about DMT experiences that he had personally because he had run those FDA studies that were documented in DMT the Spirit Molecule, the book.
02:30:15.000He was very reticent to talk about it.
02:30:17.000And then he sort of came out of the closet on that.
02:30:20.000And then when I asked Roland's friends, well, where did he like to trip trip?
02:30:24.000Because you're in a hospital environment with all these doctors and, you know, your stress levels go up just being in a hospital environment.
02:30:32.000And he said, well, Roland's favorite place to trip was on a mountaintop with three friends with a beautiful view and a fire.
02:30:45.000Now, again, this is for healthy normals, not people who need to have medical assistance, but there are some very good psychotherapists out there and psychonauts in the psychedelic assisted therapy movement.
02:30:58.000The Center, the California Institute for Integrative Studies, C-I-I-S, I think .org or .eu, has a program training psychedelic therapists.
02:31:12.000You don't have to be a medical physician to be able to hold someone's hands to have a guided experience.
02:31:19.000Now, there's a lot of charlatans out there.
02:32:02.000But the University of Washington, Tony Back, Anthony Back, published a clinical study on using psilocybin for physicians and nurses who were emotionally harmed and distressed by people angry at them because of COVID in the hospital.
02:32:21.000And they were spit upon and they were attacked viciously, physically sometimes, in the hospital.
02:32:28.000They had PTSD, but just Trying to provide good medical support.
02:32:32.000So he did a clinical study that was published this last year showing the benefits because the nurses and physicians, when they get out of the system, they can't provide medical care, society loses.
02:32:42.000So they were able to reconcile the emotional harm that they experienced from angry patients and being assaulted, and they were able to then return, many of them, back into the medical profession, you know, with a, you know, healing from that.
02:32:58.000So realize aggression and anger affects everyone around you.
02:33:03.000The advantage of psilocybin, I think, just like a pebble in the pond of a tragedy creates ripples of distress throughout society, when someone who is highly adversely affected, angry and violent and all these antisocial behaviors, when they suddenly switch just like that, is a pebble in the pond of positivity.
02:33:32.000A great example, a law enforcement officer by the name of Sarko from Boston just received his religious exemption for using psychedelics.
02:33:44.000So he is a police officer, and his chief of police is now retired.
02:33:51.000He has been an advocate because he saw Sarko, who experienced all these negative, you'd love to have him on the show sometime.
02:33:59.000He can really speak authoritatively to other law enforcement officers saying, this has helped me.
02:35:33.000And he goes, the amount of cooperation and the reduction of the threat level for the safety of the law enforcement and the cooperation that they get in the swad car when these people that are just shooting the shit at the law enforcement officer, I know you're doing your job, but wow, thank you for being so nice arresting me.
02:36:01.000And he goes, you won't believe the things I learned from these people that are arresting now, who tell me things they would never have gotten out of an interrogation, but they were so respected.
02:36:13.000And the fact that they had to do their job without becoming an adversarial note to self, right?
02:36:47.000Most people are great and they're better when they go through a soul.
02:36:49.000So I have an experience that amplifies the best of people.
02:36:53.000And it also helps them resolve a lot of the baggage.
02:36:58.000You can think of the inflammatory actions of the anger and you did something and you don't want to tell anybody, but you're haunted by that.
02:37:06.000You inadvertently harmed somebody and you went off the deep end, you harmed somebody else.
02:39:23.000We want to go after these, you know, these things that are not beneficial in any way, shape, or form.
02:39:29.000We don't want to hurt the source that is healing us.
02:39:33.000But they won't fuck around when it comes to money transactions.
02:39:37.000Once you involve money, then the DEA is going to be involved.
02:39:41.000But you're involved in research, and we have strict guidelines.
02:39:45.000I had DEA license in 1975, 1976, 77, 78, through Dr. Micah Buk at the Evergreen State College, and they were much more liberal.
02:39:54.000I could grow tons of sulcide mushrooms and collect them.
02:39:57.000And that's why we did a series of conferences.
02:40:00.000I was the only one that had a DEA license.
02:40:03.000So we did these conferences collecting all these experts together with Albert Hofmann there, R. Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans Schultes, Jonathan Ott, Terence McKenna.
02:40:14.000But I had the license to be able to possess psilocybin with my professor.
02:40:19.000And so we would have all the psilocybin.
02:40:22.000So we did these educational events, academic with citizen scientists and psychonauts coming together.
02:40:30.000What's really different is we just had the Psychedelic Science Maps Conference in Denver, 8,500 people.
02:40:39.000Back in the 1970s, at any moment, we were afraid that a SWAT team would break down the doors and arrest everybody.
02:40:47.000We existed in a high state of paranoia because that was a war on drugs with Richard Nixon.
02:41:06.000It's a democratic movement for the freedom of consciousness, and everyone should have a right to be able to practice.
02:41:15.000And where do you draw individual use from religious use?
02:41:20.000Psilocybin mushrooms are very important for my own personal religion.
02:41:26.000I feel that this is central to my religious belief.
02:41:30.000So I think this is where the government needs to back off.
02:41:35.000If you're using it for your spiritual development, whether you're Buddhist or Christian or Islamic, you know, or Judaic, you know, this informs your spirituality, reduces crime, it reduces harm, reduces, you know, potential for violence.
02:41:53.000I think we're in the psilocybin revolution, and psilocybin Muslims are fundamentally different than MDMA and Abigain, just because Abigain's so long and there's heart issues.
02:42:05.000I just think this is a medicine for our times that can make a paradigm shift for a better society.
02:42:28.000And I think through the conversations that you and I have had, and then you've had on many other podcasts as well, millions and millions of people have gotten to understand what this is really all about.
02:42:38.000And I think your role in educating people is enormous.
02:42:44.000I'm a one knowledge keeper, literally in a string of knowledge keepers.
02:42:48.000So many people have died, been harmed, and Indigenous people.
02:42:52.000I am carrying the torch, and I want to pass this torch with pride, with dignity, with respect, with kindness, with positivity to the next generation.
02:43:02.000The next generation needs to be empowered with this and they can do an excellent job knowing what's happened in the past and foretelling what we could be in the future, the best of the best.