The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2347 - Paul Stamets

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

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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

00:00:12.000 Yep.

00:00:13.000 Yeah.

00:00:14.000 Put them headphones on.

00:00:15.000 Let's rock and roll, Paul.

00:00:16.000 Good to see you, sir.

00:00:18.000 Good to see you, Joe.

00:00:19.000 What's happening?

00:00:20.000 How you doing?

00:00:21.000 Book number eight, huh?

00:00:22.000 Book number eight, yeah.

00:00:24.000 Who would have known?

00:00:24.000 There's so many books to be written on mushrooms.

00:00:27.000 Well, this is state-of-the-art taxonomy.

00:00:29.000 Psilocide mushrooms are natural habitat.

00:00:31.000 It covers 60 species all over the world.

00:00:33.000 But it also shows not only historical use, which people are surprised.

00:00:38.000 They've been used in India, in Europe, and South Africa.

00:00:42.000 A new species was just found, psilocybin maluti, but the Besuthu and Lesotho province have been using it obviously for hundreds of years.

00:00:50.000 We know this because they have songs.

00:00:52.000 So it's really interesting when indigenous people have using psilocybin mushrooms and scientists, quote, discover them and give them a Latin binomial.

00:00:59.000 But the psilocybin mushroom revolution is happening all over the world right now.

00:01:04.000 I never expected it to be this big.

00:01:06.000 And the RAND report came out this past year.

00:01:09.000 3% of Americans tripped on psilocybin in 2023.

00:01:14.000 That's only 3?

00:01:15.000 3%.

00:01:16.000 That's 8 million.

00:01:16.000 I know.

00:01:18.000 I would agree with you because how many people would admit it, right?

00:01:22.000 Probably underreporting all of that.

00:01:23.000 Oh, for sure.

00:01:24.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:01:25.000 So it seems to be, I think, a revolution for the freedom of consciousness.

00:01:29.000 And it's crossing all political boundaries, all religious boundaries.

00:01:33.000 Well, 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.

00:01:44.000 He's a great guy.

00:01:45.000 I'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.

00:02:02.000 Yeah, well, he's not ideologically captured.

00:02:05.000 Like, he realized that he was wrong and that his position on this was based on ignorance.

00:02:09.000 So he educated himself and completely turned around, did a 180, and now is an advocate and has helped a lot of people.

00:02:17.000 I mean, it's tremendous benefit to veterans and people with PTSD and coming back from the war.

00:02:23.000 And it's one of the only things that's been shown to really get these people straight.

00:02:28.000 That 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.

00:02:37.000 Can you imagine stopping a car on a stormy night at 2 in the morning?

00:02:41.000 Right.

00:02:42.000 And the window comes down, and you have two seconds to make a decision?

00:02:47.000 You do that hundreds of times.

00:02:49.000 The likelihood of having one mistake is very high.

00:02:52.000 And having one very bad day define your life for the rest of your life is not right.

00:02:59.000 Because 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.

00:03:20.000 They help people forgive themselves and become better people.

00:03:24.000 And once you forgive yourself and become a better person, then everyone is excited about the fact that you've changed.

00:03:31.000 Yeah, 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.

00:03:39.000 So many of these people who have never had any kind of a psychedelic experience, have never really confronted their own reality in that way.

00:03:48.000 How many of them would change their ways?

00:03:51.000 I would imagine a great deal.

00:03:53.000 You bring up a very important point that I've been thinking about a lot.

00:03:56.000 We talk about using psychedelics, insulin, and other substances for treating people who have trauma, mental illness, addiction issues.

00:04:05.000 But what about the near normals?

00:04:07.000 All of us are somewhat on the spectrum, and we go back and forth depending on daily, monthly, yearly activities, events, et cetera.

00:04:14.000 But what about prevention?

00:04:17.000 If 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.

00:04:27.000 Hundreds of billions of dollars.

00:04:29.000 Psilocybin should be made free, I think, as a citizen's right to have access, and the government should pay for it.

00:04:37.000 It would massively reduce our national debt.

00:04:40.000 It would make our better society.

00:04:41.000 But that's not going to happen, right?

00:04:43.000 That's a dream.

00:04:44.000 Well, I don't know if that's not going to happen.

00:04:46.000 It's just not going to happen tomorrow.

00:04:48.000 You know, I think we're on a path if you look at where we stand with marijuana, for instance.

00:04:54.000 Like, look at Las Vegas is a great example.

00:04:57.000 Because I remember in the 90s and when we would go to Las Vegas for the UFC in the, I guess actually it was in the 2000s.

00:05:05.000 It was highly illegal.

00:05:07.000 And, 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.

00:05:15.000 They had zero tolerance for it.

00:05:18.000 And I always wondered what that was about, whether that was an anti-hippie thing or whether it was in response to the alcohol lobby.

00:05:27.000 Vegas obviously sells a lot of alcohol and anything that would cut back on their profits.

00:05:33.000 We talked about this the other day.

00:05:34.000 The studies showed that amongst young people, alcohol consumption is down significantly.

00:05:39.000 Isn't it down by like 25%?

00:05:43.000 Which, by the way, was that?

00:05:45.000 It's down.

00:05:46.000 I just don't know the number.

00:05:47.000 Which, by the way, a great thing.

00:05:49.000 But it's not a good thing for profits.

00:05:49.000 That's a good thing.

00:05:52.000 But my point is that how many states now have cannabis as completely legal?

00:05:59.000 I think it's like 19.

00:06:00.000 Yeah, it's more than a dozen.

00:06:02.000 Yeah, I think it's somewhere around then.

00:06:04.000 And then you have medical use, which is in many, many more states.

00:06:07.000 It's just a matter of time before the people in the federal government realize this is a losing battle.

00:06:13.000 Indeed.

00:06:14.000 And 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.

00:06:25.000 Right.

00:06:26.000 How do they reconcile that?

00:06:27.000 How do they?

00:06:28.000 Yeah.

00:06:28.000 Well, I mean, PTSD Amongst law enforcement is something that's very rarely discussed.

00:06:33.000 We 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.

00:06:53.000 And it's just, it's like every day, every day you're dealing with shootouts.

00:06:58.000 Every day you're dealing with stabbings.

00:07:00.000 Every day you're dealing with horrific crimes.

00:07:03.000 And it's just, your brain is just overrun with this.

00:07:06.000 And with firefighters, you know, they're oftentimes the first responders are their first.

00:07:10.000 My partner's a medical doctor in Canada, but she used to be a firefighter.

00:07:14.000 And yeah, they oftentimes, the police may not show up for 20 minutes, and they're there.

00:07:20.000 And the things they witness, I mean, things that no one should ever witness.

00:07:26.000 But I mean, this is where it's so important that we come together as a society.

00:07:32.000 Because I really believe that 98% of people are good and 2% of people are assholes.

00:07:37.000 And I think the assholes can become good people if they have a psychedelic experience.

00:07:40.000 I really think there's progress right now.

00:07:44.000 So much of the media and the clickbait, journalism, they amplify the extraordinary and things that get eyeballs and attention.

00:07:53.000 But more and more, I think people, or they become more, have greater wisdom about how they're being manipulated by the media.

00:08:01.000 People come together.

00:08:03.000 That's why I like mushroom hunting.

00:08:05.000 Mushroom hunting brings people together.

00:08:07.000 You go out hunting, you have this eureka experience.

00:08:10.000 You don't talk politics.

00:08:11.000 You're excited about the species that you hope to find and you find ones you don't.

00:08:15.000 But they become like friends after a while.

00:08:17.000 You find a chanterelle, you find a shaggy mane, you find a psilocybin, a psilocybin mushroom.

00:08:23.000 That 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.

00:08:32.000 It's just a really fun thing to do.

00:08:35.000 And there's something I want to mention, Joe, that's really important.

00:08:39.000 I have been to a lot of conferences.

00:08:42.000 I just came back from the psychedelic science conference in Denver.

00:08:45.000 Our friend Rick Doblin, 8,500 people there.

00:08:49.000 But what I really find an extraordinary way of taking iPhones and droids, and all these kids are just addicted to their phones, right?

00:09:01.000 They're not going out in nature.

00:09:02.000 So there is a called nature deficit syndrome.

00:09:06.000 It's actually affecting people.

00:09:08.000 But there is an app that I'm just in love with called iNaturalist.

00:09:13.000 It was created by a guy named Scott.

00:09:16.000 He just gave a TED talk that was released yesterday.

00:09:19.000 iNaturalist, you can take a phone and you can go out and you collect a flower, a frog, a mineral, a mushroom.

00:09:26.000 You photograph it.

00:09:28.000 You upload it into the cloud of iNaturalist.

00:09:31.000 And they have all these experts, amateurs, trying to tell you what it is.

00:09:34.000 It's a great little debate going back and forth.

00:09:36.000 No, you're right, no, you're right.

00:09:38.000 And then when it hits research grade, it's when a group of experts come together and says, yep, you have Carpanus comatus.

00:09:44.000 Yep, you have Belitis edulus.

00:09:46.000 They agree on identification, but it has fueled the scientific community with all sorts of these citizen scientists finding new species.

00:09:54.000 And it brings people into nature, gets kids excited.

00:09:58.000 And 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.

00:10:08.000 I just went to the iNaturalist yesterday and Selasbi cubensis, the Golden Tops, grow around Austin.

00:10:14.000 Who knew?

00:10:14.000 You know, because they've been reported.

00:10:16.000 Now, you have zones of privacy, so you don't have to tell them exactly where the mushroom is.

00:10:22.000 And that's probably not a good thing to do if it's a psilocybin mushroom, but you can make a peripheral zone of anonymity.

00:10:27.000 It could be within two miles, five miles, ten miles.

00:10:30.000 And that way you can do the report.

00:10:33.000 But some of them have high specificity with lat longs within a few inches.

00:10:38.000 But 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.

00:10:48.000 And 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.

00:11:05.000 This has revolutionized the field of biology.

00:11:08.000 I think it revolutionizes bringing children and young people back into nature.

00:11:14.000 And then you build a community.

00:11:15.000 You're not talking about politics.

00:11:17.000 You're talking about nature.

00:11:18.000 And what did you find?

00:11:19.000 And holy moly, I never knew there was a blue mushroom or something like that.

00:11:23.000 So it's inspiring to see the kids get so excited about this, and adults.

00:11:27.000 And so this is, you know, I'm a...

00:11:31.000 How many new species get discovered?

00:11:31.000 Yeah, very cool.

00:11:34.000 Oh, thousands.

00:11:35.000 Every year?

00:11:36.000 Thousands every year now.

00:11:38.000 Really?

00:11:38.000 Thousands and thousands.

00:11:40.000 There'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.

00:11:55.000 So 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?

00:12:02.000 How do they determine where it's from?

00:12:04.000 Excellent question.

00:12:06.000 The 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.

00:12:24.000 But 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.

00:12:37.000 What species it is becomes more debatable.

00:12:40.000 But psilocybin mushrooms are very hard to find, with the exception of the golden top, and there's another one called pineal sinusins.

00:12:46.000 They go in pastures, they're easier to find.

00:12:49.000 But most of these psilocybin mushrooms are hidden in the landscape.

00:12:52.000 How so?

00:12:53.000 Well, I just had a 70-year-old man write me from Vermont, and he has found celaspies cereulipis.

00:13:00.000 And he wrote a classic letter to me that many people have written.

00:13:03.000 I have looked for these mushrooms for years.

00:13:06.000 I couldn't find them.

00:13:07.000 And then I found a few, and I looked around, and they were everywhere, hiding in plain sight.

00:13:13.000 And so now he knows with Zlaspi serialipis in Vermont, he knows.

00:13:18.000 It's just, I can't believe how obvious they are to me and how unobvious they were to me before.

00:13:24.000 When 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.

00:13:37.000 He goes, where?

00:13:38.000 I go, right there.

00:13:39.000 He goes, where?

00:13:41.000 I go, right there, Michael.

00:13:43.000 And then I picked it up and he goes, WTF, how can you tell this is a salzheimer? 1.00

00:13:47.000 And I go, well, it's like, Well, it's like meeting a friend.

00:13:52.000 It's like meeting you.

00:13:53.000 I know Joe Rogan, right?

00:13:54.000 I know your face.

00:13:55.000 I know your personality.

00:13:57.000 I'm reacquainted with you.

00:13:58.000 But salsa mushrooms.

00:14:00.000 Wait a minute.

00:14:00.000 So like seeing it, you're reacquainted with it?

00:14:03.000 Seeing it repeatedly and being familiarized with it gives you a memory of it, a pattern recognition.

00:14:10.000 So when it goes away, you still have that pattern recognition memory to memory map back onto the landscape around you.

00:14:17.000 It's true with morels, too.

00:14:18.000 This is a very common thing.

00:14:20.000 People don't see morels and they find one or two and then suddenly they start to jump out of the landscape.

00:14:23.000 It's how your brain works with pattern recognition.

00:14:26.000 So many of these species are hidden in the landscape, but they're actually quite common, but you just can't see them.

00:14:32.000 Got it.

00:14:33.000 And you're accustomed to seeing them.

00:14:35.000 But you're not saying like that you feel something from them.

00:14:39.000 You're just saying recognize them visually.

00:14:41.000 Well, you're waxing into this spiritual.

00:14:44.000 Many people feel that the mushrooms call to them.

00:14:47.000 Yeah.

00:14:47.000 So this is true in the Masotec tradition.

00:14:51.000 You know, in my book, I go deeply into the Masotec heritage of using psilocybin mushrooms.

00:14:59.000 And one of the things was really embedded with Christianity after the Spaniards came, 1516 and 1519, 1521, they brought in cattle.

00:15:08.000 And very quickly, Christianity swept through Mesoamerica, specifically in Mexico. 0.59

00:15:16.000 And 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.

00:15:39.000 And soon after the conquistadors and Spanish arrived, and in the center of the cross are psilocybin mushrooms.

00:15:48.000 So Christianity has a long, deep-rooted history with psilocybin mushroom use in Mesoamerica.

00:15:54.000 Well, there's that ancient depiction of Adam and Eve.

00:15:59.000 That's more debatable in my mind.

00:16:01.000 Yeah, but here it is.

00:16:02.000 Thank you.

00:16:02.000 This is from Joe Lattori's work.

00:16:07.000 Look at that.

00:16:08.000 That's a basket.

00:16:09.000 With mushrooms in the middle.

00:16:10.000 With three mushrooms in the basket.

00:16:12.000 And there is psilocybin mexicana.

00:16:17.000 And so the mushrooms are phenotypically correct, but there's clearly a mushroom's in a basket.

00:16:23.000 Can the other slide show the full cross, Joey?

00:16:26.000 I'm not sure.

00:16:26.000 Did you know Jack Hare?

00:16:28.000 Yes.

00:16:29.000 When Jack was alive, before he died, one of the things that he was working on was a book connecting psilocybin mushrooms in Christianity.

00:16:37.000 And he had this massive collection of ancient images, paintings, all these different things.

00:16:43.000 A 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.

00:16:55.000 like something that would indicate that they were under the trance and they were dancing.

00:16:59.000 Yeah, this is an example where there's so many different...

00:17:08.000 They're not all going to be correct.

00:17:10.000 But a few of them are.

00:17:11.000 And this example here.

00:17:12.000 The one that clearly is.

00:17:14.000 And in the Matzah Tech tradition, it's called syncretism.

00:17:20.000 When 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.

00:17:33.000 But in the Matzudec tradition, they believe the tears of Christ is where the mushrooms would appear.

00:17:42.000 They believe the mushrooms were the body of Christ, and therefore you never boil them.

00:17:46.000 You never, because you'd be hurting the body of Christ, so you'd only eat them raw or dry.

00:17:51.000 Oh, interesting.

00:17:52.000 So really interesting.

00:17:54.000 That's an example of syncretism.

00:17:57.000 And the great Maria Sabina was a devout Catholic, and when she did her psilocybin ceremonies, she had the Holy Trinity.

00:18:05.000 So 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.

00:18:24.000 Just was published, I think, two weeks ago at New York University in Johns Hopkins.

00:18:31.000 They 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.

00:18:48.000 And they had one group that had delayed, didn't do it for six months, and the other group did a high dose of psilocybin.

00:18:54.000 It all, each of those faiths, the use of psilocybin mushrooms reinforced their belief and their faith.

00:19:02.000 That was really amazing.

00:19:04.000 I think they said 95% said is the most significant experience in their life.

00:19:09.000 In the top five, they're the most significant experiences in their life.

00:19:12.000 So it just, I think psilocybin makes nicer people.

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00:20:14.000 No, I would agree with you on that.

00:20:16.000 The image of Adam and Eve, I'm curious to say what do you think is debatable about that?

00:20:21.000 Can you pull up that fresco?

00:20:22.000 There'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.

00:20:34.000 Yes, it's been postulated by R. Gordon Wasson.

00:20:37.000 I shouldn't say plant.

00:20:38.000 Yeah.

00:20:39.000 In front of you, especially.

00:20:40.000 Thank you very much.

00:20:41.000 That.

00:20:42.000 That doesn't look like mushrooms?

00:20:44.000 They do look like mushrooms.

00:20:46.000 I couldn't imagine it being anything else.

00:20:48.000 Well, I mean, here's an example that basically artists become authors of field guides and art.

00:20:55.000 You know, how much can you tell to the public without violating your oath of secrecy?

00:21:01.000 And so symbology.

00:21:03.000 But yes, there's a cap and a stem, and they come up in clusters.

00:21:07.000 That looks like a psilocybin mushroom.

00:21:10.000 Some people say it's amnium muscari because of the dots.

00:21:13.000 But those of us who have grown psilocybic cubensis, when they're very fresh, they have dots on them.

00:21:18.000 They're very ephemeral.

00:21:19.000 They got washed away.

00:21:21.000 So, yes.

00:21:22.000 And you would see the dots, obviously, if it's still in the ground.

00:21:25.000 If it's in the ground, it's very fresh.

00:21:27.000 Bacillocybin mushrooms, bruise bluish.

00:21:30.000 And so this is where we could get lost in a debate of interpretation.

00:21:36.000 But all these representations are not false.

00:21:40.000 Some of these representations are extremely strong based on the evidence.

00:21:46.000 And for instance, the psilocybin mushrooms that we found on the pyramids in Egypt, they are clearly psilocybines.

00:21:55.000 Not myself, but other Egyptologists have also published on this.

00:21:58.000 Find those, Jamie.

00:21:59.000 Those are fascinating.

00:22:01.000 Because I don't think until fairly recently, within the last few decades, it was understood that they were using psilocybin.

00:22:09.000 I think there was some confusion as to what, if anything, like they were drinking.

00:22:14.000 Blue lotus, I think, was one of them.

00:22:16.000 The blue lotus is a water lily.

00:22:18.000 Where do water lilies grow?

00:22:19.000 There it is.

00:22:19.000 The water lilies grow near ponds.

00:22:21.000 That's so clearly psilocybin.

00:22:24.000 And this is goddess Hathor, the goddess of the cow, by the way.

00:22:28.000 The goddess of the cow.

00:22:30.000 And 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.

00:22:40.000 And so that natural culture technique of collecting cow powder.

00:22:42.000 So cows go to ponds to drink.

00:22:44.000 The blue lotus grows in ponds.

00:22:47.000 The blue lotus is blue.

00:22:48.000 The psilocybin mushrooms turn blue.

00:22:50.000 The mushrooms are golden in color.

00:22:52.000 Gold and blue colors are sacred in Egyptology, in ancient Egyptian culture.

00:23:00.000 So now I was not the first person to discover this.

00:23:04.000 Actually, 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.

00:23:14.000 How long ago was this?

00:23:15.000 This was, well, this is over 2,000 years of age.

00:23:17.000 No, no, I mean when they bring this to the crazy, isn't it?

00:23:24.000 It is.

00:23:24.000 And then Kalindi, the great Kalindi from Detroit, he unfortunately died of COVID.

00:23:31.000 But he also, from his African heritage, also believed that, you know, and he was rediscovering his African heritage.

00:23:38.000 And this is called re-indigenization, rediscovering that which your ancestors practiced, even though the linear transition of knowledge may have been cut.

00:23:47.000 But this is taxonomically accurate for growing Seloseby cubensis, and it grows on cow dung.

00:23:56.000 Cow goes to the ponds.

00:23:57.000 If you went to get the water lily, you'd run into this constantly.

00:24:00.000 Now this temple is now, they get less than one millimeter of rain a year.

00:24:09.000 And the Nile used to be flooding all the time.

00:24:12.000 It was the breadbasket of the world.

00:24:13.000 But they built the dams, you know, and most of the clubing.

00:24:18.000 And so the climate change.

00:24:19.000 So the modern Egyptologists have no reference.

00:24:22.000 And 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.

00:24:33.000 So they become rare, they become scarce, and the generational knowledge is lost.

00:24:36.000 But now there's a real big re-indigenization movement in Egypt combining the blue lotus with salas of ecumensis.

00:24:42.000 What is the psychedelic compound in the blue lotus?

00:24:45.000 You know, that's a debatable thing.

00:24:48.000 There's a really complex chemistry there.

00:24:50.000 I'm not an expert on that, but I've talked to my other friends who are experts.

00:24:54.000 There seems to be an entourage effect of multiple agents.

00:24:58.000 So 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.

00:25:09.000 And I think that as an admixture with sulcibin makes a lot of sense.

00:25:12.000 Are contemporary people taking blue lotus?

00:25:15.000 Yes.

00:25:15.000 Really?

00:25:16.000 Yes.

00:25:16.000 Is there like a community of people?

00:25:17.000 There's a massive community, but because blue lotus now has become scarce, because ponds are scarce.

00:25:23.000 So 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.

00:25:35.000 Because if we can find the DNA in the vase and the substrate, then we can actually prove this theory.

00:25:42.000 It'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.

00:25:54.000 This makes a lot of sense.

00:25:56.000 It does make a lot of sense.

00:25:57.000 And if you've got it on these hieroglyphs.

00:26:00.000 And they were known as the flesh of the gods, which is the very same name when translated from Teananacato from Mesoamerica.

00:26:09.000 The salt cyber mushrooms were known, salosabe mexicana, as flesh of the gods.

00:26:14.000 So it's interesting, in both sides of the world, they had the same interpretation.

00:26:17.000 Mushrooms were not allowed back in this time to be picked by commoners.

00:26:23.000 They were only reserved for the royalty.

00:26:25.000 Oh, boy.

00:26:27.000 Doesn't it always work out that way?

00:26:28.000 Yeah, it seems to.

00:26:29.000 Another 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.

00:26:38.000 It's a very different halo.

00:26:40.000 When we think about a halo, we think about like a frisbee that's hovering over an angel's head or a saint's head.

00:26:46.000 But the ancient depictions of them weren't that.

00:26:48.000 The ancient depictions of them, you saw those ribs that made it look like the bottom of a psilocybin mushroom.

00:26:54.000 I didn't know that.

00:26:55.000 You didn't know that?

00:26:56.000 No, come on. 0.85

00:26:56.000 I'm teaching you this? 0.85

00:26:58.000 Come on.

00:26:59.000 Jamie will pull up these images.

00:27:00.000 But 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.

00:27:12.000 The modern halo being this like circle.

00:27:14.000 This is not a circle.

00:27:15.000 It's a circle, but it's a mushroom.

00:27:17.000 It's essentially they're explaining that these godly, holy people were under the influence of psilocybin.

00:27:24.000 I think.

00:27:24.000 What we can not just me.

00:27:26.000 What we can't prove some of these ideas today.

00:27:30.000 What we can prove is like the Johns Hopkins New York University study that religious belief systems are enhanced through the use of psilocybin.

00:27:39.000 Which totally makes it.

00:27:40.000 It makes sense.

00:27:41.000 So we can argue about the past, but we have really good scientific methodology now for analyzing the effects of psilocybin.

00:27:49.000 And it's profound.

00:27:50.000 It's profound.

00:27:51.000 You got any of those images?

00:27:55.000 What's coming up really is us talking about it before and a bunch of pictures of mushrooms trying to find out.

00:28:00.000 There's some better ones.

00:28:01.000 I know, but it's not.

00:28:02.000 I didn't get to.

00:28:02.000 You can't find them.

00:28:03.000 I wasn't getting them.

00:28:04.000 Man, the government's pulled them off the internet, man.

00:28:08.000 That's not one.

00:28:10.000 The ones that I've seen are far clearer than that.

00:28:14.000 I'll just show you there.

00:28:15.000 Yes.

00:28:16.000 Those are the same.

00:28:18.000 Look at that one.

00:28:18.000 Which is crazy that you have to go to us.

00:28:22.000 See what I Google.

00:28:23.000 I can see the one on the left.

00:28:24.000 Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

00:28:26.000 I mean, that essentially looks exactly like that.

00:28:29.000 I've never seen that.

00:28:30.000 That's crazy that you can't find that anymore.

00:28:32.000 And we clearly found it in the past because we talked about it.

00:28:35.000 Well, that may be the effect of Joe Rogan, right?

00:28:37.000 You could just overwhelm the entire internet with images.

00:28:43.000 I mean, look at the bottom of that one in particular, the one in the center.

00:28:47.000 I mean, that looks exactly like that halo.

00:28:50.000 Yeah, that's not an awesome.

00:28:52.000 Which totally makes sense.

00:28:53.000 Look at that.

00:28:53.000 Okay, there's one.

00:28:54.000 Look at that image.

00:28:56.000 So this is the old school halo.

00:28:59.000 The old school halo clearly looks like the bottom of the halo.

00:29:02.000 I'm blown away.

00:29:02.000 You're blown away.

00:29:03.000 Hiding in plain sight.

00:29:05.000 I can't believe that I'm teaching you this.

00:29:08.000 I can't believe you.

00:29:10.000 How come nobody told you this?

00:29:11.000 I don't know.

00:29:12.000 You said you knew Jack.

00:29:13.000 You knew Jack when he was alive.

00:29:15.000 This was like his primary concern towards the end of his life.

00:29:18.000 He was working on a book.

00:29:20.000 Yeah, I mean, the limitation of life, unfortunately, we have all these great people who pass when they're at the peak of their knowledge.

00:29:29.000 And that's the other thing that I think psilocybin has really informed me is that Joe Rogan and Paul Stammons are talking.

00:29:39.000 Jamie is there.

00:29:40.000 But we have such a thin slice of reality.

00:29:43.000 And when you're on psilocybin, the unanimity of universal consciousness to be involved in something you realize is so large.

00:29:53.000 Did you see the galactic images from the Rubin telescope that came out yesterday?

00:29:58.000 No, I did not.

00:29:59.000 Millions and millions of new galaxies.

00:30:01.000 Literally, millions of new galaxies.

00:30:03.000 I think 2,100 new asteroids in near-Earth orbit.

00:30:08.000 Oh, fun.

00:30:09.000 Oh, fun.

00:30:09.000 So there's already 900,000 of them.

00:30:11.000 Yeah.

00:30:12.000 So there's, but this has just happened.

00:30:14.000 Wow.

00:30:14.000 But this is a tripping ball.

00:30:18.000 Tesscott released the largest telescope in the world, and there are millions of galaxies.

00:30:23.000 Millions of galaxies.

00:30:25.000 And 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.

00:30:35.000 And 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.

00:30:45.000 And I'm assembly of molecules, so are you.

00:30:47.000 We didn't exist before we were born.

00:30:49.000 You know, we will disassemble, decompose, and we'll go back into the cosmic dust.

00:30:56.000 And this is part of the continuum of existence.

00:30:58.000 We all exist all the time forever.

00:31:01.000 Forever.

00:31:01.000 Can I ask you this?

00:31:02.000 What do you think happens to consciousness?

00:31:05.000 I 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.

00:31:20.000 And 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.

00:31:45.000 My mother was a charismatic Christian.

00:31:48.000 What is a charismatic Christian?

00:31:49.000 Well, she's an evangelical.

00:31:51.000 She speaks in tongues.

00:31:52.000 She was a leader.

00:31:53.000 She was very much into this.

00:31:55.000 Like, mom, really?

00:31:56.000 Different side of her.

00:31:57.000 But we had an interesting conversation.

00:32:00.000 I said, mom, you believe God is omnipotent, right?

00:32:04.000 She goes, absolutely.

00:32:05.000 I said, you believe God is all-knowledgeable?

00:32:08.000 She goes, absolutely.

00:32:10.000 You believe that humans are fallible and we're not all-knowledgeable?

00:32:15.000 She goes, yep, I do.

00:32:16.000 I said, then can you accept the fact that our concept of God is inferior to God's definition, by your own thinking?

00:32:27.000 That no matter how we think of God, we'll be Inferior to the enormity of the concept.

00:32:33.000 And she admitted that.

00:32:34.000 So we're fallible.

00:32:36.000 We don't have the capacity to understand the enormity of consciousness in which we are embedded, of which we are a tiny part.

00:32:45.000 So this brings me to a subject I really want to talk to you about.

00:32:49.000 Okay.

00:32:50.000 And that is artificial intelligence.

00:32:53.000 And I know you've spent a lot of time on this, but I want to introduce a new concept.

00:32:58.000 Okay.

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00:34:58.000 So there is, I bought, there's something called Postcards from Earth, and I'd heard a lot about it.

00:35:04.000 It's in a matinee in the afternoon before the big concerts.

00:35:07.000 And it's great flying through around the Earth through the old growth forests and volcanoes.

00:35:13.000 So we went there and we got an early bird ticket, which allowed us to talk to an AI robot.

00:35:21.000 So I thought, oh, this is my opportunity.

00:35:23.000 Now, two years ago, I got the Disruptor Award at Syn Bio Beta, 2,200 nerdy scientists.

00:35:30.000 I mean, these are top nerds.

00:35:32.000 And I was so surprised that I got the Disruptor Award because I'm kind of a natural products kind of guy.

00:35:38.000 But I'm greatly honored.

00:35:38.000 So I posited the question then.

00:35:43.000 AI may never be able to write an algorithm for random acts of kindness.

00:35:50.000 And 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.

00:36:00.000 Your great-grandfather, great-grandmother, your father, your grandfather-grandmother.

00:36:05.000 It'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.

00:36:14.000 And 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.

00:36:25.000 I think that's why many, many, if not most people, their lineages can be traced to a random act of kindness.

00:36:32.000 So then I went to Las Vegas, went to the sphere, I had this idea, you know, I can ask this robot.

00:36:39.000 So I asked this robot.

00:36:40.000 What robot?

00:36:42.000 I think it was a ChatGPT run, but I'm not sure.

00:36:45.000 That was at the sphere?

00:36:46.000 At the sphere.

00:36:48.000 Okay, there's the robot I talked to.

00:36:50.000 Oh, that's so creepy.

00:36:51.000 Look at that face.

00:36:53.000 Oh, my God.

00:36:54.000 It's so creepy.

00:36:55.000 Okay, very creepy.

00:36:56.000 So I asked the robot.

00:36:57.000 Look at that robot.

00:36:58.000 That's so creepy.

00:36:59.000 I 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?

00:37:22.000 Good question.

00:37:24.000 The robot took an unusually long time to answer.

00:37:28.000 It was like a very long time.

00:37:30.000 And the robot came back going, why would humans do that?

00:37:34.000 It's far more efficient to have a return on your investment transactionally.

00:37:39.000 Why would it's inefficient to have random acts of kindness?

00:37:43.000 Boom.

00:37:44.000 Blew me away.

00:37:45.000 Did you film any of this?

00:37:46.000 Yeah, we did film this.

00:37:47.000 A friend of mine has a film of it.

00:37:49.000 I need to see that.

00:37:53.000 No, about five days ago, I asked ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, the same question.

00:38:01.000 And now it was greatly nuanced.

00:38:02.000 Well, random acts of condus can help the community with goodwill, and this can help the community because it's more sustainable, et cetera.

00:38:13.000 So this is what I want to do.

00:38:15.000 I 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.

00:38:30.000 Given 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?

00:38:48.000 Now, I just met, you know, I think that's going to inform artificial intelligence.

00:38:53.000 And so when I asked this question again, it was like, it was more nuanced.

00:38:56.000 It was like, oh, artificial intelligence learning.

00:38:58.000 That's how large language models work, right?

00:39:00.000 More input they get.

00:39:01.000 More inputs.

00:39:02.000 Millions of people start training AI on the importance of, you know, someone has a flat tire, you stop to pick it up, help them.

00:39:09.000 You could drive by.

00:39:11.000 You know, someone's hurt in an accident, you stop and pull over to help that person.

00:39:14.000 You could keep on driving.

00:39:15.000 There's a random act of kindness.

00:39:17.000 My life is successful because of random acts of kindness.

00:39:20.000 I 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.

00:39:29.000 I met at this last conference, I met two students from the Harvard Business School, and they said, they want to interview me.

00:39:35.000 And I go, I want to interview you.

00:39:37.000 And they said, why?

00:39:38.000 I go, do they teach you at Harvard Business School about the advantages of random acts of kindness?

00:39:44.000 He goes, no.

00:39:46.000 Well, they should.

00:39:48.000 Yeah, business school is just teaching you how to make some money.

00:39:51.000 But this is important, Joe.

00:39:52.000 We could inform artificial intelligence how to be better to keep human community and psychology and to propel the best of the human species.

00:40:04.000 And I think we have this opportunity.

00:40:05.000 So 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.

00:40:13.000 Many of us are here, if not the majority, going back in your lineage, many generations.

00:40:19.000 We gave birth to artificial intelligence.

00:40:21.000 I don't think artificial intelligence is properly named.

00:40:24.000 I think it's a form of natural intelligence.

00:40:26.000 We just have re-amplified it exponentially.

00:40:29.000 What do you think artificial intelligence means in terms of the future of the human race?

00:40:34.000 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, that's a great question, too, because about the 10 people who asked this robot questions, they were all data mining.

00:40:42.000 Who was the best baseball player in history?

00:40:44.000 And who hit the most home runs?

00:40:46.000 And it was also like data mining.

00:40:49.000 So 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.

00:41:03.000 I find that really interesting, because I thought, well, I thought they were creating, but he was insistent.

00:41:07.000 They actually don't have that spark of creativity.

00:41:10.000 They can assemble data.

00:41:12.000 But the true creative spirit is not something that AI has currently achieved.

00:41:20.000 I met another, you know, this guy's a total genius.

00:41:24.000 And many, I've heard this, other people say this.

00:41:27.000 We're not likely to have biological aliens.

00:41:29.000 We're likely to have robots.

00:41:31.000 And 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.

00:41:41.000 So that's logical.

00:41:43.000 But 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.

00:42:08.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:42:09.000 So I think we have an opportunity here.

00:42:12.000 And I think we have to do this now, because if we don't do it now, I think we're going down an extremely dangerous path.

00:42:20.000 In what way?

00:42:21.000 Well, 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.

00:42:29.000 But I think that we're Neanderthals with nuclear weapons.

00:42:34.000 When I met another person, he's a Mensa person funded by a tech company, 19-year-old Chinese guy.

00:42:43.000 And he said, I said, what's the scariest thing about artificial intelligence?

00:42:47.000 Oh, he says, I'll tell you my scariest thing.

00:42:49.000 I just wrote a paper on this.

00:42:51.000 Autonomous weapons.

00:42:52.000 Autonomous weapons.

00:42:53.000 You have a million people.

00:42:56.000 You assemble a million experts and you blackmail them.

00:43:00.000 I catch you watching porn.

00:43:02.000 I catch you masturbating.

00:43:03.000 I catch you having an affair.

00:43:05.000 And you have a million people sending components for a weapon to one location.

00:43:11.000 And you blackmail them and you assemble, you know, a biological weapon or something like that.

00:43:16.000 So I don't want to go there.

00:43:17.000 This is something that it's never as bad as you fear and it's never as good as you hope.

00:43:26.000 Interesting.

00:43:27.000 I think that we're at that nexus point.

00:43:30.000 And the Joe Rogan experience can be pivotal, I think, in steering artificial intelligence to be the best that it can be ethically.

00:43:40.000 And I think we have that opportunity right now.

00:43:42.000 I 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.

00:43:53.000 we'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.

00:44:02.000 And we're creating something that has...

00:44:19.000 And that's just accelerating.

00:44:20.000 And it's going to get to the point where these things become sentient in however you define it.

00:44:26.000 We're already in a situation where by most people's understanding, it would pass the Turing test.

00:44:35.000 There's a sense of nostalgia in a sense that's even building today of the times that have passed.

00:44:41.000 Yeah.

00:44:43.000 And I don't think it's all doom and gloom.

00:44:46.000 I don't think so.

00:44:47.000 I think we can steer this.

00:44:48.000 Well, I think we're always steering it.

00:44:50.000 I think this is the battle that human beings have been involved in since the beginning of time.

00:44:55.000 I think this is probably the reason why religion was created in the first place, or the observable religion.

00:45:00.000 I think we have always realized there's this battle of good and evil in us.

00:45:05.000 And part of it comes rather from how we originated.

00:45:11.000 We originated as these barbarian tribes competing for resources, fighting off other marauding barbarian tribes, fighting off predators and trying to stay alive.

00:45:21.000 So we've unfortunately got this intense history of chaos and of savagery that we're trying To move past.

00:45:32.000 Right, slowly but surely over time.

00:45:33.000 And I think a catalyst for this is psychedelics.

00:45:36.000 I think so, too.

00:45:36.000 I think psilocybin mushrooms are unique because it democratizes the access to psilocybin.

00:45:42.000 MDMA, you can't grow in your closet.

00:45:44.000 Psilocybin mushrooms, there's no economic barrier on psilocybin mushrooms.

00:45:49.000 It's available for the poorest of the poor.

00:45:52.000 They just fucked everything up in 1970, didn't they?

00:45:55.000 1971, 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.

00:46:11.000 Did you know the LD50 lethal dose of psilocybin mushrooms is 42 pounds?

00:46:17.000 Yeah, that's a lot.

00:46:18.000 42 pounds.

00:46:19.000 And that only kills half the people.

00:46:20.000 Only kills half the people.

00:46:21.000 You dive them into digestion.

00:46:22.000 That's for psilocybin.

00:46:23.000 It dies to diarrhea.

00:46:25.000 Imagine a diarrhea, you get eating 42 pounds of mushrooms.

00:46:28.000 It's the least toxic, one of the least toxic medicines ever found in nature.

00:46:33.000 But there's a concern, though, with people that have problems with mental health, though, right?

00:46:38.000 I don't think psilocybin mushrooms or psilocybin is good for people who are psychotic.

00:46:43.000 Right.

00:46:43.000 I think there are the groups of people.

00:46:45.000 We do need psilocybin or psychological assisted therapy.

00:46:49.000 You know, it's super important that people who are experienced can help other people who are inexperienced process.

00:46:55.000 That's really important.

00:46:57.000 I think so, too.

00:46:58.000 I 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.

00:47:15.000 And 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.

00:47:24.000 And you just met my partner, Dr. Pam Crisco.

00:47:28.000 She is part of a group called Roots to Thrive in Canada and have Canadian health approval for high doses of psilocybin.

00:47:38.000 Interestingly, we just published a paper on pure psilocybin versus the mushroom psilocybin with patients who have taken both.

00:47:45.000 I'll talk about that in a second.

00:47:47.000 But these are end-of-life patients, typically with stage four diagnoses, oftentimes cancer, and they're just existentially disturbed.

00:47:58.000 I'm going to die and leave my family.

00:48:00.000 What are they going to do?

00:48:01.000 Lots of heartbreaking thoughts, et cetera.

00:48:06.000 They do a long preparatory period together as a group.

00:48:10.000 They have a commonality that they all have terminal illnesses and terminal diagnoses.

00:48:14.000 So 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.

00:48:27.000 But this always brings me to tears.

00:48:29.000 They're doing it on Indigenous land with Indigenous elders also participating.

00:48:37.000 And 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.

00:49:02.000 And just at the peaking of this experience, unbeknownst to them, the elders had a drum circle next door and they started playing drums.

00:49:12.000 And 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.

00:49:25.000 The impact of that Indigenous wisdom to help these terminal patients was so impactful.

00:49:32.000 And this is where I think this is a great opportunity.

00:49:36.000 And then the common theme is that those patients became the counselors to their families.

00:49:42.000 They went back and saying, it's okay, I'm dying.

00:49:46.000 I'll be okay.

00:49:47.000 You'll be okay.

00:49:48.000 And the families are going, WTF, what is going on here?

00:49:52.000 And this happens with law enforcement.

00:49:53.000 This happens with PTSD and soldiers.

00:49:57.000 This is happening with terminal cancer patients, is we all are going to die.

00:50:02.000 That is a fact.

00:50:03.000 To be able to come, you know, into peace to the fact that your mortality is near.

00:50:16.000 When you're 20 years old, you don't really think about this.

00:50:19.000 But when you get older and older, I'm 69 turning on 70.

00:50:22.000 I feel like I'm 35, but that's not true.

00:50:26.000 I just feel like, you know, I didn't exist in this form before I was born.

00:50:31.000 I'm going to be going back into molecules that will disambiguate into atoms, reassemble the new molecules.

00:50:38.000 I'm part of the continuum of existence.

00:50:41.000 And 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.

00:50:51.000 If your molecules are going into the continuum of existence, what do you think the purpose of you being here now is?

00:50:58.000 What do you think the purpose of the present moment, of your life as you're currently living?

00:51:03.000 That's the great question of all time.

00:51:06.000 But I think even the construct of the question is confined by the limitation of our ability to construct that question.

00:51:16.000 I think we're maybe asking the wrong question.

00:51:19.000 I think the purpose of our being is a tautology.

00:51:25.000 We are being here because we are.

00:51:28.000 And I don't think there is, I mean, again, look at the Rubin telescope images.

00:51:33.000 I have a friend, a dear friend.

00:51:34.000 It's incredible.

00:51:35.000 Millions of galaxies.

00:51:37.000 When you see the enormity of the universe, I mean, I can't wait to fly.

00:51:43.000 I want my molecules and atoms to fly through space.

00:51:46.000 Oh, boy.

00:51:47.000 I would love to see the rings of so many planets.

00:51:50.000 I'd love to see supernova.

00:51:52.000 And I feel like, yeah, that's the direction we're all headed towards.

00:51:57.000 Whether you like it or not.

00:51:59.000 Can't do anything about it.

00:52:00.000 Yeah.

00:52:01.000 Have you paid attention to the James Webb telescope discoveries?

00:52:03.000 Yeah.

00:52:04.000 That's some insane stuff where they're finding these galaxies that they should have not been able to be formed as quickly as they are.

00:52:11.000 It's an order of magnitude higher.

00:52:13.000 They can do the entire visible universe, I think, in about three days.

00:52:18.000 That took otherwise months to do.

00:52:20.000 The assembly and AI is helping, of course.

00:52:23.000 I think near-Earth asteroids, this is an impactful discovery, literally.

00:52:30.000 I always worry about an asteroid coming from behind the sun, you know, and then how many.

00:52:35.000 Well, it's probably been the reset for civilization over and over again throughout time.

00:52:41.000 That's the proliferation, for instance, of psilocybin.

00:52:45.000 I fund a lot of different things.

00:52:47.000 Panspermia.

00:52:48.000 Well, 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.

00:53:02.000 And the results, in some molecular genetic clock data, there's variability of a few million years in interpretation.

00:53:10.000 But the arrival of psilocybin in the fungal genome is about 65 million years ago.

00:53:16.000 Whoa.

00:53:19.000 Wow.

00:53:19.000 Right.

00:53:20.000 That's an interesting time.

00:53:22.000 After the asteroid impact.

00:53:24.000 Now, is association causation?

00:53:26.000 Not necessarily, but probably makes sense.

00:53:30.000 There is a new asteroid.

00:53:31.000 Look at their goes.

00:53:32.000 This video on the New York Times article.

00:53:34.000 I don't know how to control the video, so I just let it read.

00:53:37.000 There are three different asteroids.

00:53:38.000 There are six, nine asteroids.

00:53:40.000 It's showing here these discoveries, and here in a second, it'll show you how in the timeline of the discoveries.

00:53:47.000 It'll show like one day right here, I think it is.

00:53:49.000 They discovered like 800 or 900 in the first day.

00:53:52.000 Oh, boy.

00:53:53.000 Like 400 or 500 more the next day.

00:53:56.000 A couple hundred more the next day.

00:53:57.000 But watch how it zooms out here in a second to show you where this is.

00:54:01.000 It gives you like a perspective.

00:54:03.000 This is like 10 days in.

00:54:05.000 Whoa.

00:54:07.000 And then it zooms out here again further.

00:54:10.000 Oh, no.

00:54:11.000 So they discovered 2,000 asteroids in that tiny little sliver right there.

00:54:16.000 I haven't seen this.

00:54:17.000 Oh, boy.

00:54:18.000 Whoever made that video, that's awesome.

00:54:19.000 Jamie, you're the master of discovering these things.

00:54:23.000 What should people, when they want to know?

00:54:24.000 It's in the New York Times article about the Rubin telescope that came out probably today or yesterday.

00:54:28.000 And they're keeping much of this undercover, so to speak.

00:54:31.000 The scientists are very disciplined.

00:54:32.000 They're only letting a little bit out at a time.

00:54:35.000 Keep people from freaking out?

00:54:36.000 Well, not on the think that.

00:54:37.000 They're trying to be good scientists.

00:54:39.000 They're trying to assemble the data in a fashion that they don't have to redefine later.

00:54:45.000 Has this telescope recently come online?

00:54:47.000 Just in the past.

00:54:48.000 Well, it's been online, I think, for a few months.

00:54:50.000 The data is just being revealed now.

00:54:52.000 But I think It's the largest ever created.

00:54:59.000 And five years from now, you'll have that on your phone.

00:55:01.000 I mean, maybe.

00:55:02.000 I was wondering what kind of lens they made to go on it.

00:55:04.000 Wow, look at that thing. 0.84

00:55:06.000 That's insane.

00:55:07.000 And if they had that telescope out in space, they wouldn't have the interference of our actions.

00:55:12.000 But how will you get that thing?

00:55:16.000 Go back to those images.

00:55:18.000 This is Astronomy 101.

00:55:19.000 I'm not telling you anything you don't know necessarily.

00:55:22.000 But all those stars, all those galaxies are in the past, hundreds of millions of years ago.

00:55:28.000 We're just a coincidence of seeing them right now.

00:55:31.000 Right, because the light has just reached us.

00:55:32.000 With just reaching us.

00:55:34.000 So that's what's so fascinating to me.

00:55:37.000 This is a snapshot of multiple histories converging to one point of view.

00:55:42.000 Also, 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.

00:55:51.000 See, when I trip on psilocybin, this is what I love doing.

00:55:57.000 Trying to comprehend the enormity and the beauty of the universe.

00:56:00.000 I believe the universe is full of love.

00:56:04.000 I think that we're built on relationships.

00:56:12.000 And when you have relationships, when you have a quorum of individuals that are sharing assets, you build a community.

00:56:20.000 Well, you certainly see that with human beings.

00:56:24.000 The question is, what kind of life are we experiencing in these other planets?

00:56:29.000 What is life for them?

00:56:30.000 Should we be so naive to think that it went along the exact same linear path as biological life on Earth?

00:56:39.000 Or is it completely unrecognizable?

00:56:42.000 And when we're dealing with intelligent life from other planets, maybe they'd be so intelligent that they wouldn't travel.

00:56:48.000 And maybe they don't need to.

00:56:49.000 And maybe they're also dealing with solar systems that we have as a result of multiple impacts, including the creation of Earth itself, right?

00:56:59.000 There was Earth and there was Earth 2.

00:57:00.000 We were hit by another planet.

00:57:02.000 They think that's what created the moon.

00:57:04.000 All that stuff leaves debris.

00:57:07.000 It's all flying.

00:57:08.000 And if it wasn't for Jupiter, we would have never made it to 20 years.

00:57:08.000 Debris fields.

00:57:11.000 Absolutely.

00:57:12.000 Never made it.

00:57:12.000 That sort of projector.

00:57:13.000 Yep, absolutely correct.

00:57:14.000 We would have never made it to 2025.

00:57:16.000 We would have been dust a long time ago.

00:57:18.000 And we have a form of biological myopia thinking that we need sunlight and oxygen for life.

00:57:23.000 And now from Chernobyl, we know that fungi can use radioactivity as an energy source.

00:57:29.000 We have methane-based organisms. 0.79

00:57:31.000 Yeah, isn't that crazy?

00:57:32.000 Methane-based organisms.

00:57:34.000 I believe matter begets life.

00:57:36.000 Life becomes single cells.

00:57:38.000 Single cells form chains.

00:57:40.000 They branch.

00:57:41.000 Networks form.

00:57:43.000 And within these networks are associations of members that exchange resources.

00:57:48.000 I don't believe that evolution is based on the survival of the fittest.

00:57:52.000 I believe evolution is based on the extension of generosity beyond that of your own needs to build a community of reciprocity.

00:58:02.000 Certainly human evolution.

00:58:03.000 I think it's happening all over.

00:58:05.000 I think it's happening with tigers and gizzards.

00:58:07.000 I think absolutely.

00:58:08.000 We're animals.

00:58:09.000 New news.

00:58:10.000 New news.

00:58:10.000 We're animals.

00:58:11.000 For sure, but they're not very generous.

00:58:14.000 They're just trying to eat and survive.

00:58:16.000 There's a great on Chile, there's a great footage.

00:58:19.000 It's amazing, of these orcas, aka killer whales, just devastating a seal population, eating them.

00:58:26.000 You may have seen this.

00:58:28.000 And after they were satiated, these orcas would take the pups and they push them up on shore Just to save them.

00:58:37.000 Well, 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.

00:58:43.000 Yeah.

00:58:45.000 Which is probably where they should be killing people.

00:58:47.000 Yeah, I just met a herpetologist, and I raised snapping turtles when I was a kid.

00:58:52.000 So I have the turtle necklace.

00:58:54.000 I was a very shy boy with a profound stuttering habit.

00:58:58.000 But my friends are wild snapping turtles.

00:59:00.000 And this herpetologist, he goes, well, I had snapping turtles.

00:59:03.000 They're really mean.

00:59:04.000 And I had them in my aquarium, and they kept on trying to bite me.

00:59:06.000 I go, no shit, Sherlock.

00:59:08.000 You know, I had wild snapping turtles in a pond.

00:59:11.000 And I went down there.

00:59:12.000 I fed them celery and lettuce.

00:59:14.000 This is when I'm eight years old.

00:59:15.000 I had them for about seven years.

00:59:17.000 I grew up with successive families.

00:59:20.000 And at first, they would try to bite me and things like that.

00:59:22.000 And then I realized if I put out a little salad bowl for them, they wouldn't fight each other because they would not try to bite me.

00:59:28.000 They would try like, I want the carrot from Paul.

00:59:31.000 When I put a little salad bowl there, they kind of all came together and they cooperated.

00:59:34.000 And so I was just reflecting on this yesterday.

00:59:37.000 One of my fondest memories when I'd walk towards the pond and boop.

00:59:41.000 They pop up.

00:59:42.000 Paul's here.

00:59:43.000 Paul's here.

00:59:44.000 Oh, that's so cool.

00:59:45.000 Yeah, so snapping turtles have an amazing ability.

00:59:47.000 They can snap flies out of the air.

00:59:50.000 Oh, they're so fast.

00:59:50.000 They're so fast.

00:59:51.000 I saw this video of one eating a fish.

00:59:54.000 They put a fish in front of it like a dead fish, and it eats it so fast, it just disappears.

01:00:02.000 It just snaps its neck forward, engulfs this fish, swallows it all, and it looks like a magic trick.

01:00:08.000 Oh, my gosh.

01:00:09.000 You have to look at it in slow-mo to even see the actual action of it.

01:00:13.000 There's so much sea life there.

01:00:15.000 British Columbia is just full of sea life.

01:00:17.000 Oh, it certainly is.

01:00:17.000 It is amazing.

01:00:18.000 Incredible place.

01:00:19.000 Yeah, I love it.

01:00:21.000 I love it being there.

01:00:23.000 So, you know, this is a beautiful planet.

01:00:27.000 Where we live, there's no garbage.

01:00:30.000 And when visitors come to visit us on our island, I said, have you noticed?

01:00:34.000 There's no garbage anywhere.

01:00:36.000 Not in this, along ditches, anywhere.

01:00:40.000 It's because the ethos of that community is to take care of the ecosystem.

01:00:45.000 That's beautiful.

01:00:46.000 And that can be done if you have a small community of like-minded people.

01:00:48.000 Of like-minded people.

01:00:49.000 The 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.

01:01:02.000 It's just, it is what it is.

01:01:03.000 Keep moving.

01:01:04.000 Or India.

01:01:05.000 I'm just heart-torn by India. 1.00

01:01:08.000 Such a spiritual place, and there's so much garbage.

01:01:10.000 China as well.

01:01:12.000 But 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.

01:01:21.000 And 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.

01:01:31.000 And all the stuff that they don't want, they just throw into the river.

01:01:34.000 And 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.

01:01:41.000 I'm just adding to whatever's there.

01:01:43.000 This is just what we do.

01:01:44.000 And so they've developed this culture of like constant, consistent pollution.

01:01:49.000 Yeah, we all need to, you know, even teaching our children constantly to pick up.

01:01:54.000 But there are communities that are examples of doing it right.

01:01:58.000 And this community that I'm associated with, I'm just so proud of them.

01:02:01.000 I 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.

01:02:12.000 And I said that uniquely with us, yes, love and random acts of kindness and community are incredibly important.

01:02:22.000 But what do you think, why do you think we're so different than all the other species on the planet?

01:02:27.000 And do you think that psilocybin, like, do you subscribe to McKenna's theory?

01:02:31.000 I know we've probably talked about this before, but as a standalone podcast, this is probably a lot of fun.

01:02:36.000 So this is what I like.

01:02:37.000 And for all your listeners out there, this is a never-ending story.

01:02:40.000 It just keeps on getting better.

01:02:41.000 The most exciting thing that has come out in the scientific literature in the past two years is that psilocybin stimulates neurons to grow.

01:02:50.000 That is incredible.

01:02:52.000 It docks with a 5-HT2A receptor serotonin uses, but psilocybin also docks with Track B receptors that lead to proliferation of neurons.

01:03:06.000 There's neurogeneration, neuroregeneration, neurogenesis, and neuroplasticity.

01:03:12.000 Those are four distinct areas, and psilocybin does all of those.

01:03:17.000 Not as much in neurogenesis, but we have done pleuroplotin stem cells of humans, dosed them with psilocin in the laboratory.

01:03:25.000 We have a DA license.

01:03:26.000 I have a DEA license.

01:03:28.000 Very, very strictly controlled.

01:03:30.000 But we can actually see the proliferation of neurons compared to controls.

01:03:36.000 So 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.

01:03:49.000 I'm going to dismiss them.

01:03:50.000 Yeah.

01:03:51.000 Is that be more circumspect.

01:03:53.000 Because what Dennis and Terrence McKenna postulated, you know, and I disagree with lots of Terrence's ideas.

01:04:01.000 Time Wave Zero was my total bullshit.

01:04:05.000 But Terrence and I were very good friends, and we laughed a lot.

01:04:08.000 And that's a spirit of camaraderie, where you can criticize someone and laugh at the same time, that's a higher level of intelligence.

01:04:17.000 Well, that's also what happens when you abandon the ego.

01:04:20.000 If the ego is consistently abandoned through psychedelic experiences, you're much more likely to laugh.

01:04:25.000 I think psilocybin is an Einstein molecule.

01:04:27.000 I think the tryptamines in general are Einstein molecules.

01:04:31.000 The work by Gold Dolden is just fantastic, also associated with Johns Hopkins, The Critical Window.

01:04:39.000 And this is why ibogaine has gotten such traction.

01:04:43.000 The critical window with ibogaine is a long window where you're able to repattern your behavior to break addiction.

01:04:53.000 With psilocybin, there's a critical window.

01:04:55.000 DMT is very, very short because of the short period.

01:04:58.000 The critical window typically is At the peak of the experience, and just as you're over the hump, you know, going down.

01:05:05.000 But one patient described it very, very well, who was an addict.

01:05:10.000 And 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.

01:05:26.000 And then after the psilocybin, it's like someone groomed the landscape, the hill.

01:05:32.000 And they were free.

01:05:33.000 And they were free to go elsewhere.

01:05:36.000 And 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.

01:05:53.000 Psilocybin, which becomes psilocin, what docs with your receptors, psilocybin is stable, psilocin is not.

01:06:00.000 Psilocybin dephosphorylates into psilocin.

01:06:03.000 It crosses into your receptors, goes into, stimulates inside the nucleus of cells that cause cell division.

01:06:10.000 And this is mind-boggling.

01:06:12.000 I think this is why high doses of psilocybin, great for a revelatory experience, for perhaps breaking addiction, but what about the neuronormals?

01:06:21.000 We all suffer from neurodegeneration that's age-related.

01:06:24.000 Besides Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia that are toxin or disease-related, self-assembly disease, you could argue, age being one.

01:06:33.000 But neurodegeneration is a fact of life as we age, and neuropathies occur.

01:06:39.000 And the neuropathies from the constriction of the peripheral nervous system, vasoconstriction, et cetera, psilocy is not only anti-inflammatory, but neurogenerative.

01:06:49.000 And 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.

01:07:00.000 Of course, we need to study this.

01:07:01.000 But long-term clinical studies are inherently very expensive.

01:07:06.000 A 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.

01:07:16.000 I think that we're beginning to see.

01:07:17.000 Now, think about 8 million Americans consumed psilocybin in 2023, according to the RAND report.

01:07:25.000 What was the reduction in crime with those 8 million people?

01:07:30.000 We could have studied that.

01:07:32.000 And there are retroactive studies, analyses that show a reduction of crime associated with psilocybin use.

01:07:38.000 But in real time, that's something I'm excited about.

01:07:42.000 Could you reduce crime rates?

01:07:44.000 And moreover, when you're immunologically, when you're depressed emotionally, you're immunologically depressed.

01:07:52.000 And when you're happier, you're more creative, you're exercising, your immune system is upregulated.

01:07:58.000 So the community immunity from psilocybin, I think, is a huge potential.

01:08:02.000 It's a crossover directly between your mental, your neuroescape, and your immunological state.

01:08:09.000 Unquestionably, right?

01:08:10.000 The diminishing of stress.

01:08:12.000 And this is why it comes out.

01:08:13.000 Sound benefits physiologically.

01:08:15.000 Yeah, a clinical study just came out, Compass Pathways did treatment-resistant depression.

01:08:21.000 They had an analysis that came back out that showed modest increase or decrease in depression.

01:08:27.000 But they were doing treatment-resistant depression.

01:08:30.000 And congratulations for them for putting the money where their mouth is and doing the study.

01:08:37.000 But treatment-resistant depression is a failure of two antidepressive drugs and therapy.

01:08:44.000 But major depressive disorder is a much bigger bucket.

01:08:47.000 And 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.

01:08:56.000 But 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.

01:09:15.000 The act of taking it again, you're re-remembering, and then you can nurture these neurons.

01:09:19.000 I think psilocybin could be nutrients for the neurons.

01:09:22.000 Well, 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.

01:09:30.000 And his theory involved a lot of contributing factors, one of them being climate change.

01:09:39.000 And 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.

01:09:55.000 And 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.

01:10:12.000 And that this is probably how language formed among humans.

01:10:15.000 And 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.

01:10:30.000 Yeah, 200,000 years, it increased massively.

01:10:33.000 So 2 million years on the outer limits, 200,000 in the inner limits.

01:10:38.000 So in the inner limits, what was the amount of growth in this?

01:10:41.000 It was 100,000 years ago.

01:10:42.000 I think it was 40, 50%, something substantial.

01:10:45.000 200,000 years, 50%.

01:10:46.000 And what time period was this?

01:10:48.000 Well, 200,000 years ago.

01:10:50.000 200,000 years ago.

01:10:51.000 That was a jump.

01:10:53.000 But Homo sapiens in this form have existed more than 200,000 years, though, right?

01:10:59.000 No.

01:11:01.000 Homo sapiens are relatively recent.

01:11:04.000 I look at the estimates go back and forth depending on what experts you're consulting and whatnot.

01:11:10.000 But from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens was a radical jump that was fairly recent.

01:11:17.000 100% of the impression was more than 300,000 years ago.

01:11:20.000 It could be 200,000, could be 400,000.

01:11:22.000 But our enlargement of our brain is relatively recent.

01:11:29.000 And to give more Context, Dennis McKenna and I were just together.

01:11:34.000 I love that dude.

01:11:35.000 Dennis McKenna is a fantastic friend and scientist, and he's such a good man.

01:11:39.000 Well, he does such a brilliant job of explaining the mechanism behind the stone ape theory.

01:11:45.000 You know, like Terrence had a great way of talking.

01:11:48.000 He was so interesting to listen to and had these wonderful ideas, but Dennis is like much more of a hardcore scientist.

01:11:53.000 Dennis was a scientist, and his brother was a philosopher.

01:11:58.000 And the Dennis McKenna Academy is a nonprofit.

01:12:03.000 I'm just promoting it just because I think they do really, really good work.

01:12:07.000 But this is, you know, the 23 primates eat mushrooms.

01:12:15.000 Almost all mushrooms have maggots in them.

01:12:18.000 Most primates eat maggots.

01:12:20.000 So finding the mushrooms for maggots, for food, for protein, two things can be true.

01:12:25.000 You can find the maggots, eat the mushrooms, and then get high as a community.

01:12:29.000 But all these, again, this is an example about the, you know, an example of the art that we see thousands of years ago.

01:12:34.000 We can debate this in the past, but we can test this.

01:12:37.000 This is a testable hypothesis.

01:12:39.000 It's a theory now.

01:12:40.000 It's not a hypothesis.

01:12:41.000 We know that psilocybin stimulates neuron proliferation.

01:12:45.000 Terrence did not have the science, and Dennis did not have the scientific evidence for that 30 years ago.

01:12:51.000 We now have the evidence for it now.

01:12:53.000 Terrence 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.

01:13:04.000 How did they come up with that?

01:13:06.000 Because they were tripping on mushrooms.

01:13:07.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:13:09.000 That's why scientists using psychedelics is a quantum leap.

01:13:12.000 You know, it's how PCR was invented for Kerry Molis had a trip on LSD.

01:13:18.000 Crank DNA.

01:13:20.000 And Stephen Jobs.

01:13:21.000 Silicon Valley is fueled by psychedelic thinkers who are become more creative.

01:13:26.000 And I think we have a crisis in creativity, and psilocybin is a way for us to become smarter, more congenial, more collaborative.

01:13:35.000 I couldn't agree more.

01:13:37.000 And I think we can, this combines psychedelics with AI.

01:13:40.000 We have an opportunity for a quantum leap in the evolution of the human species.

01:13:45.000 Would you mind explaining Time Wave Zero?

01:13:47.000 Because we kind of glossed over that, too.

01:13:49.000 Hey, hey, hey, hey, bigger.

01:13:50.000 I'm such a skeptic.

01:13:52.000 TimeWave Zero is an algorithm that Terrence, in one of his stone moments, I think.

01:13:58.000 Terrence is the only person that I met who could smoke me under the table and stand up and give an incredibly perfect lecture.

01:14:05.000 I don't know how he could do it.

01:14:07.000 But Time Wave Zero, and I'm sorry for those people who are Time Wave Zero experts.

01:14:11.000 You 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.

01:14:18.000 Would attract novelty.

01:14:20.000 Would attract novelty and episodic events that changed the course of human history.

01:14:25.000 He didn't have the birth of Jesus Christ as a significant event.

01:14:28.000 He was sort of anti-Christian.

01:14:29.000 I said, Terence, I don't care if you're Christian or not, the birth of Jesus Christ was a huge friggin' phenomenon.

01:14:36.000 It changed the course of history.

01:14:38.000 And then he had Time Wave Zero would end on December 12, 2012.

01:14:44.000 And that's what he predicted.

01:14:45.000 December 21st?

01:14:46.000 Yeah, December 21st, 2012.

01:14:47.000 And that didn't happen either.

01:14:48.000 He used to have a license plate that said 12, 21, 12.

01:14:51.000 Yeah.

01:14:53.000 But, 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.

01:15:05.000 Because if you dare to be wrong a dozen, 20, 30 times, you might be hitting one or two concepts that is game-changing.

01:15:12.000 Right.

01:15:12.000 Don't have the fear of failure inhibit your creativity.

01:15:16.000 But that's a giant problem in the academic world is that people who do fail get attacked.

01:15:22.000 And especially with they step outside the lines and they propose something that's novel, they get attacked.

01:15:27.000 This Time Wave Zero thing, like you used to be able to get it.

01:15:31.000 It was an actual program that you could download and you could run it on your own computer.

01:15:35.000 Yeah, and that's the thing.

01:15:36.000 I talked to Terrence.

01:15:36.000 I go, well, what happens when, you know, it's like the birth of Jesus.

01:15:41.000 You just came up with that concept.

01:15:42.000 Did you ask him about that?

01:15:43.000 No, I never figured it out.

01:15:45.000 He goes, well, just adapt the algorithm.

01:15:48.000 I said, okay, then it's not really, it's just something that's constantly adapting itself.

01:15:53.000 So anyhow, it's a thought experiment.

01:15:57.000 And obviously, I wish he was alive.

01:15:59.000 On December 21st, 2012, I'd be like, end?

01:16:03.000 And what?

01:16:04.000 But maybe we're wrong.

01:16:05.000 Maybe in that timeline, something did happen on December 21st, 2012 that will be recognized in the future.

01:16:12.000 But this is what I'm getting to.

01:16:12.000 I doubt it.

01:16:14.000 One of the things that did happen in that timeframe is the ubiquitous use of social media.

01:16:20.000 It kind of started peaking around 2012.

01:16:24.000 I think there is a real problem with that, with the human race.

01:16:28.000 And I don't necessarily think we recognize things that are constant.

01:16:32.000 You 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.

01:16:38.000 But 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.

01:16:48.000 This is a profound change in how we interface with the world.

01:16:52.000 You know, in Korea now on the sidewalks, they have red bars that light up to tell you to stop.

01:16:58.000 Oh, boy.

01:16:59.000 Because too many people are walking out into the street.

01:17:00.000 Just standing there staring at them.

01:17:01.000 They stare at their cell phones, and now they look down and they see that.

01:17:04.000 They're so addictive.

01:17:05.000 It's so crazy that we have anything that's that addictive can't be good for you.

01:17:11.000 I don't care if you're getting information all day long.

01:17:13.000 And in the sense of social media, you're getting negative information all day long.

01:17:19.000 So it changes the perspective.

01:17:21.000 Tremendous amounts of clickbait.

01:17:23.000 Well, that is the problem we were talking about about the media earlier, about the media fueling this stuff.

01:17:27.000 That's their job, unfortunately.

01:17:29.000 In this day and age where no one's buying print journalism, their job is to get you to click on something.

01:17:34.000 And so they have these crazy headlines.

01:17:37.000 We need to really have a thoughtful discussion about all the issues that we are facing today without being reactionary.

01:17:45.000 Yes.

01:17:46.000 And I think we need to disengage with these things that are clickbait.

01:17:49.000 Just don't click on them.

01:17:51.000 The way these things operate is the more you click on them, the more valuable they are, right?

01:17:56.000 That's the whole business model.

01:17:58.000 Just don't engage with them.

01:17:59.000 And we need to teach People that like this is an important thing.

01:18:02.000 Don't engage with something that's trying to manipulate you.

01:18:05.000 Don't engage with these narratives that are being put forth by corporations that value your fear.

01:18:12.000 They want you to be in this constant state of anxiety and fear, and they want you to be a dutiful consumer, and that's it.

01:18:20.000 That's why, yeah, that's why high dose of psilocybin is not a very good business model.

01:18:24.000 Exactly.

01:18:25.000 As Michael Pollen likes to say, but it is a good business model for overall human compassion and growth in a community.

01:18:33.000 And then, of course, medium and micro-dosing.

01:18:35.000 Really 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.

01:18:47.000 Or a medium dose, like the museum dose.

01:18:50.000 Museum dose, I like it.

01:18:52.000 You guys are such, here's a Javucker mushroom head that you have like museum dosers. 1.00

01:18:57.000 This is a movie dose.

01:18:58.000 This is a concert dose.

01:18:59.000 The media doses.

01:19:00.000 This is a date night dose.

01:19:02.000 Graham Hancock and I and some friends went to a museum, in the British Museum.

01:19:13.000 But anyhow, the museum dosers just tend to, you can notice them because they wear sunglasses inside.

01:19:18.000 Because otherwise their pupils are.

01:19:19.000 Exactly.

01:19:20.000 Trying to keep it together.

01:19:21.000 Keep it together.

01:19:23.000 But the idea of taking a museum dose, quote unquote, or a micro dose before sleep is that's when you're regenerating.

01:19:30.000 That's when your body and your brain is regenerating.

01:19:33.000 So that is really, really interesting is taking those.

01:19:38.000 Well, that makes sense.

01:19:38.000 And especially from like an anti-aging protocol for the mind.

01:19:42.000 And it's also safer.

01:19:44.000 Yeah.

01:19:44.000 Right.

01:19:44.000 Right?

01:19:45.000 You're not going anywhere.

01:19:45.000 You're in bed.

01:19:46.000 You're not traveling.

01:19:46.000 You're not going anywhere.

01:19:48.000 That'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.

01:20:02.000 You 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.

01:20:20.000 And 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.

01:20:30.000 And I think it's a good thing.

01:20:31.000 But the problem with universal basic income is that just giving people a check, they don't have meaning anymore.

01:20:40.000 They don't feel like they have a purpose.

01:20:42.000 They don't feel like they have an identity.

01:20:44.000 You know, if your whole life, you've been X, whatever the job is, that gets taken away. 0.99

01:20:49.000 And 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.

01:20:56.000 He'll take care of it.

01:20:56.000 He's the best.

01:20:58.000 Then all of a sudden, that job disappears.

01:20:58.000 He knows what he's doing.

01:21:01.000 How do people find value and how do they switch their perspective?

01:21:06.000 And 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,

01:21:27.000 to 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.

01:21:38.000 But instead, maybe psilocybin would allow people to completely change their perspective of how they exist in this world.

01:21:47.000 And 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.

01:22:02.000 It's all this digital money that's somewhere.

01:22:05.000 Maybe psilocybin would be the best answer for how do people make this transition and reacquire a sense of meaning.

01:22:16.000 Do you want to spend your whole life on an assembly line?

01:22:18.000 Right.

01:22:18.000 Or do you want to be out more in nature with your children?

01:22:21.000 That's why I think nature-relatedness, you know, is a mental health advantage.

01:22:26.000 You know, the more that we can relate to nature...

01:22:28.000 Yes.

01:22:29.000 ...and literally kind of go back to our roots, you know, re-engaging nature.

01:22:33.000 I think this is...

01:22:36.000 Instead of the job.

01:22:38.000 And also protection of the mothership.

01:22:41.000 But we've gotten so accustomed to this idea that your purpose is to make money.

01:22:47.000 Your purpose is to make a living.

01:22:49.000 And 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.

01:23:01.000 It doesn't have to, though.

01:23:03.000 But 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.

01:23:13.000 Covers your food, covers your rent, you don't need to make money anymore because everything is automated, everything is cheap, AI controls it all.

01:23:23.000 What was Bernie's answer to that?

01:23:24.000 He didn't have one.

01:23:26.000 Yeah, he didn't know.

01:23:28.000 But I don't know if Bernie's had any experiences in that regard.

01:23:30.000 And he didn't have that perspective.

01:23:32.000 But 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.

01:23:43.000 But it doesn't have to be negative.

01:23:45.000 The 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.

01:23:59.000 And if they were having these experiences, they could be the only ones.

01:24:03.000 If you have a benevolent person in an extreme position of power, they're probably the only people that can really do something about that.

01:24:12.000 And 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.

01:24:37.000 If psilocybin increases creativity, creativity increases happiness, and happiness upregulates the immunity of the community.

01:24:45.000 Yeah.

01:24:46.000 It's hard to be a dictator.

01:24:47.000 Yeah.

01:24:49.000 Dictators want people in constant conflict fighting against each other and they take advantage of it.

01:24:55.000 In a sense, you know, that analogy that the patients had had about being in a rut, you know, maybe we're in a societal rut.

01:25:02.000 Maybe we're not.

01:25:03.000 Oh, we certainly are.

01:25:04.000 This is the opportunity to be able to groom the landscape and to find new ways of living and behaving.

01:25:12.000 It might be the only way.

01:25:13.000 It might be the only way we can get through this.

01:25:15.000 Because if you think about what this problem is, the problem is the way we interface with reality.

01:25:22.000 That's really what it is.

01:25:24.000 We 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.

01:25:30.000 That's how you interface with reality most of your life.

01:25:33.000 And then all of a sudden you're met with this profound technological change that's going to eliminate your job.

01:25:39.000 There needs to be some sort of a profound experience that reintegrates you with the mother.

01:25:44.000 Let's you know, like, this is something people made.

01:25:47.000 This is something that people made.

01:25:48.000 And most of the people that made it weren't having psychedelic experiences.

01:25:51.000 And they're building cities and they're building skyscrapers and they're polluting the river and they're doing all this stuff.

01:25:56.000 And it doesn't mean that this is how we're supposed to do it.

01:25:59.000 Exactly.

01:26:00.000 And again, I want to reiterate, I think we have a crisis in creativity.

01:26:03.000 I think psilocybin and these other psychedelics stimulate creativity.

01:26:07.000 No doubt.

01:26:08.000 Look at Alex and Allison Gray's work.

01:26:11.000 I mean, some of the best psychedelic artists in the world.

01:26:14.000 And the nicest people.

01:26:15.000 Higher.

01:26:15.000 The nicest people.

01:26:16.000 Alex is a role model for being just a kind, nice, sweet person.

01:26:22.000 And Alex gave me some of the best advice I've ever received.

01:26:26.000 And give Alex Gray total credit for this.

01:26:30.000 And I asked him, you know, like, this is my eighth book.

01:26:34.000 Oh, my God.

01:26:35.000 It's so much work to write a book.

01:26:36.000 I didn't use any AI writing this book.

01:26:38.000 I wrote the whole thing myself.

01:26:40.000 And I asked Alex, you know, you're so prolific.

01:26:43.000 How do you do it?

01:26:44.000 He goes, I had one realization.

01:26:47.000 Every day, I go up to that canvas with my brush and I commit to making one stroke.

01:26:55.000 And then three, four hours later, he's still at the canvas.

01:26:59.000 It's that, which is just that tipping point, right?

01:27:03.000 Yeah, calling the muse.

01:27:05.000 Yeah, just doing it.

01:27:06.000 Pressfield talked about that in The War of Art.

01:27:08.000 Have you read that book?

01:27:09.000 No, no.

01:27:10.000 I've got copies of it.

01:27:10.000 He sent me a whole box because back in Los Angeles, I used to keep a stack of them on the table and hand them out to people.

01:27:17.000 It's all about creating things and resistance and this thing that we all have where we're reluctant to sit down and actually do the work.

01:27:25.000 But if you could just commit, and he calls it the muse.

01:27:29.000 And many, many creative people over time have called upon the muse and this concept.

01:27:34.000 And it sounds like Airy Fairy to a lot of people.

01:27:36.000 But if you believe in it and if you actually do that thing where you call upon the muse, it actually works.

01:27:45.000 So whether or not it's real is irrelevant.

01:27:47.000 Well, I have a muse, and my partner asked me a few months ago, how many more hours do you have to work on this book?

01:27:56.000 She saw me working on the book for two and a half years, and I said, oh, more than 500 hours.

01:28:02.000 She goes, 500 hours?

01:28:04.000 It's just so much discipline.

01:28:06.000 And 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?

01:28:15.000 Yeah, I can't think like that.

01:28:16.000 So you just got to think about the process.

01:28:17.000 The process.

01:28:18.000 And so I had this little voice in my head that I would wake up and I didn't want to feel guilty about it.

01:28:25.000 But I had this little voice saying, work on the book, Paul.

01:28:30.000 Work on the book.

01:28:34.000 I could say it work on the book so fast because I have reiterated it in my head hundreds of times that it became sort of my muse.

01:28:42.000 It became sort of a fun muse.

01:28:44.000 I think we all have these little voices that kind of says, get it right, Stanlets, wake up.

01:28:49.000 I think so too.

01:28:50.000 And I think that's good.

01:28:52.000 And I don't think that's psychosis.

01:28:54.000 I think that's something that we all have, these little voices that are trying to help us to be better.

01:28:59.000 Yeah, whether it's internal or external, whatever it is, you can have a voice.

01:29:05.000 It's like working out.

01:29:07.000 The discipline of being able to make sure that you're the best that you can be.

01:29:12.000 So it's a very exciting time that we live in.

01:29:17.000 And there's a mushroom revolution happening all over the planet.

01:29:20.000 I think there's a psychedelic revolution that's happening all over the planet.

01:29:24.000 I think it's happened over the last 20 years.

01:29:25.000 And I think it's happened because of the Internet.

01:29:27.000 I 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.

01:29:41.000 And 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.

01:29:51.000 It's just not true.

01:29:52.000 And 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.

01:30:11.000 This just is, we were trapped.

01:30:13.000 We were trapped in this system.

01:30:15.000 And 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.

01:30:29.000 They'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.

01:30:48.000 Well, 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.

01:30:58.000 So, 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.

01:31:14.000 And 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.

01:31:29.000 Now with iNaturalist and everything that you can do, it's just getting people out in nature with their children.

01:31:36.000 Children are closer to the ground so they find more mushrooms.

01:31:40.000 They're away from the business and their parents and the phones, some phones.

01:31:44.000 But you get them involved and interacting with nature is just really, it's like the telescope and seeing all the galaxies.

01:31:57.000 I think interacting with nature is a vitamin.

01:32:00.000 I think it's just, it's like, you know how we get vitamin D from the sun?

01:32:03.000 I think we get something that hasn't been measured yet from interacting with nature.

01:32:08.000 We 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.

01:32:21.000 And I think it's a real thing.

01:32:22.000 One 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.

01:32:37.000 And it was always a thing of the left.

01:32:40.000 It was always a thing of hippies.

01:32:42.000 And it was dismissed by people on the right as people that were trying to avoid reality.

01:32:48.000 They were trying to escape reality.

01:32:51.000 They couldn't handle reality.

01:32:52.000 They weren't disciplined.

01:32:54.000 If they were hardworking people, they wouldn't be wasting their time getting high on drugs.

01:32:59.000 There's that thought.

01:33:01.000 I 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.

01:33:12.000 And 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.

01:33:23.000 So the initiative passed, which is huge.

01:33:26.000 It's huge.

01:33:27.000 It's a promising step in the direction of understanding that a lot of the division that we have in this country is artificial.

01:33:34.000 It's manufactured.

01:33:35.000 It is.

01:33:36.000 Out of the blue, a country music singer, which I had no idea who she was, Casey Musgraves. 0.93

01:33:42.000 She's a superstar in country music.

01:33:44.000 I'm out of the loop.

01:33:46.000 She reached out to me, and she had a psilocybin experience that inspired her.

01:33:51.000 She has an album called Deeper Well that's just amazing.

01:33:54.000 I was not into country music until I listened to her. 0.76

01:33:58.000 And she reached out to me because of her psilocybin experience.

01:34:02.000 And we decided to do Sing for Science.

01:34:06.000 We sold out the Ryman Theater in Nashville in three hours.

01:34:09.000 2,500 people.

01:34:09.000 Oh, wow.

01:34:11.000 These are country music people.

01:34:13.000 2,500 people, three hours.

01:34:14.000 Unfortunately, she was in Mexico.

01:34:16.000 She fell and she broke a rib, so we had to cancel the concert until September 18th or the Sing for Science.

01:34:22.000 But that's an example.

01:34:24.000 Yeah, well, I think my friend Sturgil Simpson sort of opened up the door for psychedelics and country music with turtles all the way down.

01:34:31.000 Now, he basically wrote a song about God and psychedelics.

01:34:37.000 That was a country song.

01:34:39.000 And everybody's like, hey, what the hell's going on?

01:34:42.000 It's funny because psychedelics build bridges that marijuana doesn't.

01:34:47.000 I met a lot of people who would never smoke a joint, but the idea of doing a psilocybin mushroom sounded like fun to them.

01:34:52.000 Right.

01:34:54.000 Well, marijuana is also associated with lazy people and ne'er-de-wells and stinky people with bad ideas.

01:35:02.000 Unfortunately.

01:35:04.000 And 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.

01:35:15.000 A lot of people using psychedelics for the athletic performance.

01:35:18.000 Well, I know a bunch of people who have fought on mushrooms.

01:35:18.000 Oh, yeah.

01:35:21.000 I have a friend who was a world-class kickboxer who had some of his greatest performances while he was fighting on mushrooms.

01:35:27.000 And he said he could see what the guy was going to do before he did it.

01:35:30.000 Yeah.

01:35:31.000 The indigenous use of salsybones to see into the future.

01:35:34.000 That's one of the advantages I think I've had also.

01:35:37.000 And being able to prognosticate into the future.

01:35:42.000 We had this extraordinary individual told me a story, which I think I have right, but I'm going to share it with you.

01:35:49.000 There's a game that's very common, even in the Philippines, but in Canada.

01:35:52.000 It's a German game eventually.

01:35:55.000 And the idea is you put nails on a block of wood and use an ice pick.

01:36:01.000 And you have to hammer the nail in with one hit.

01:36:04.000 And each time in a bar or party or whatever, people throw down money, $5, $20, et cetera.

01:36:11.000 A nail on an ice pick.

01:36:12.000 So you have the point of the ice pick.

01:36:14.000 You've got to hit that nail at the very point.

01:36:15.000 Sink it.

01:36:16.000 And sink it all the way into the wood. 0.83

01:36:17.000 So, of course, you go around, people are drinking, et cetera.

01:36:21.000 So the story, as I remember him telling me, is that he went to the bathroom.

01:36:25.000 He's not a toker.

01:36:26.000 He doesn't smoke pot.

01:36:28.000 But someone said, hey, you want some mushrooms?

01:36:30.000 And they're playing this game.

01:36:31.000 And a bunch of his friends were gathered.

01:36:34.000 And he goes, oh, sure, I'll try some mushrooms.

01:36:36.000 So he ate some mushrooms, and he came back.

01:36:39.000 And the circle was there.

01:36:41.000 And people are betting, hey, come over and join us.

01:36:44.000 And he watched for a while, never had played this game.

01:36:44.000 Join us.

01:36:48.000 And then he started getting higher and higher.

01:36:50.000 And they say, come on, it's your turn.

01:36:53.000 So he kind of looked at the nail.

01:36:54.000 I mean, this is really hard to do.

01:36:56.000 He looked at the nail and looked at the nail and focused on it.

01:37:00.000 He said he had such clarity of focus that everything else was blanked out.

01:37:05.000 He looked at the nail and he just thought they would connect.

01:37:09.000 Rather than hitting it, they would just connect.

01:37:11.000 Bam! 0.98

01:37:12.000 Slammed the nail down on the first attempt.

01:37:15.000 People went, whoa, incredible.

01:37:17.000 So they put down, each person put down more money going around.

01:37:20.000 So they came around, everyone's missing, everyone missing.

01:37:23.000 Some people occasionally hit it a little bit, you know, but came around, came around to him.

01:37:26.000 Now he's getting higher on the Russians, right? 0.86

01:37:29.000 And he's looking at it, looking at it, and he goes, bam, slams it again.

01:37:35.000 People going, no way, right?

01:37:36.000 This is impossible, right?

01:37:38.000 So now, you know, there's a lot of money being piled up on the table here.

01:37:42.000 They're coming around, and everyone's going, impossible, not going to happen.

01:37:47.000 Can't do it a third time in a row.

01:37:49.000 Looked at it, laser focused, bam, slam it again.

01:37:53.000 Now, people are losing their shit, right?

01:37:55.000 They're like, what is going on here?

01:37:58.000 He said, really, fuck with one guy who was just out of his mind that he could do this three times in a row.

01:38:04.000 He went around again, and this time he says, I'm going to really blow his mind.

01:38:09.000 So he focused on the nail, focused on the nail, had the hammer, looked at him, bam, slammed it again and nailed it.

01:38:16.000 Yeah, literally nailed it.

01:38:17.000 So these examples of Well, it's the part of the concept.

01:38:23.000 Well, part of the concept is with intense focus.

01:38:27.000 Right.

01:38:28.000 You know, and many years I have two black belts.

01:38:32.000 I had schools for 30 years, black belt in Taekwondo and then Hwarongdo.

01:38:36.000 I was in Shotokan, Shidoryu, Gojo-Ryu, and then Taekwondo and then Hwarongdo, which is like a hapikido.

01:38:44.000 But 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.

01:38:57.000 And I had my first black belt, and my head instructor was over there talking at someone, and then he had a baseball.

01:39:07.000 And I heard later what he said.

01:39:09.000 He goes, I told my friend, watch this.

01:39:10.000 And he threw a baseball at me.

01:39:12.000 My peripheral vision, boom.

01:39:14.000 I just caught the baseball just before it hit my head.

01:39:18.000 But 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.

01:39:33.000 That's extremely important.

01:39:35.000 It also alleviates the anxiety that comes before performance.

01:39:39.000 A lot of people like to use it before sparring because sparring is kind of scary for some people.

01:39:45.000 Yeah, but let's be clear.

01:39:46.000 This is like the 80-20 principle, maybe the 90-10 principle.

01:39:49.000 It's not going to work for the majority of people.

01:39:51.000 There are exceptional individuals who can actually benefit from this.

01:39:54.000 So we're not recognizing.

01:39:55.000 No, no, disclaimer.

01:39:56.000 Yeah, a little disclaimer there.

01:39:57.000 I don't want to make...

01:40:00.000 I drove this race car.

01:40:01.000 Listen, don't take any of our advice.

01:40:03.000 But we're just talking about these things because there are anecdotal stories that are fascinating.

01:40:10.000 And anecdotal stories are like case studies in medicine.

01:40:13.000 You get enough of them that you want to test this.

01:40:15.000 Again, this is a testable hypothesis or theory in modern times.

01:40:20.000 Right.

01:40:21.000 Eye-hand coordination.

01:40:23.000 So psychomotor enhancement.

01:40:26.000 And this is why the stamina stack speaks to this.

01:40:30.000 We 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.

01:40:42.000 That's a lot in 10 seconds over 30 days.

01:40:42.000 That's a lot.

01:40:46.000 So people can argue about it, but the results are the results.

01:40:50.000 When you're talking about depression and anxiety, that's subjective.

01:40:53.000 But I'm really interested in the psychomotor benefits of psilocybin with an admixture to enhance its performance.

01:41:02.000 I think the root thing is psilocybin and being able to regenerate neurons is something I think is really important for us.

01:41:10.000 Now, with glioblastoma, which unfortunately Terrence did die from that, that's the uncontrolled proliferation of neurons in the brain.

01:41:19.000 Yeah, there's certain contraindications.

01:41:20.000 Is there something that's connected to that?

01:41:23.000 No, not.

01:41:23.000 I personally don't.

01:41:24.000 No.

01:41:24.000 Why not?

01:41:26.000 Just because I don't have evidence to the contrary.

01:41:32.000 I don't have evidence that also suggests that.

01:41:34.000 I see no correlation.

01:41:36.000 N of 1 is not, you know, it's again, there's no correlation.

01:41:44.000 But if you had 8 million people in the United States, you know, conducing psilocybin, again, you have a data set.

01:41:50.000 Right.

01:41:50.000 So it's not like cigarettes, right?

01:41:53.000 We see cigarettes, we know, you smoke cigarettes, there's a higher likelihood that you're going to get lung cancer.

01:41:58.000 It's very clear.

01:41:59.000 So we've known that over time.

01:42:00.000 The problem with psilocybin is it's been so taboo, and so we don't have real data.

01:42:06.000 We don't have, you know.

01:42:08.000 There's 235 clinical studies on psilocybin at clinicaltrials.gov right now.

01:42:14.000 Isn't that amazing?

01:42:15.000 235.

01:42:16.000 Could you have imagined that 25 years ago?

01:42:18.000 There was none.

01:42:19.000 Impossible.

01:42:20.000 Yeah, none.

01:42:20.000 And therefore, many indications, many different targets from addiction, cigarettes, alcohol, opioid use, to dementia, to Parkinson's, to Alzheimer's, et cetera.

01:42:33.000 So there's, you know, I think psilocybin has a PR problem.

01:42:36.000 It's not too good to be true, but sometimes things can be true that have, You're improving the neurology.

01:42:52.000 Everything that we're using right now is based on our health of our nervous system.

01:42:56.000 And the neuroscape, if we can enrich the neuroscape, then that has elaborations into everything that we do.

01:43:03.000 And 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.

01:43:18.000 There's anti-inflammatory properties.

01:43:20.000 Silicon has strong anti-inflammatory properties.

01:43:23.000 That's wrong.

01:43:24.000 So that just has come out in the scientific literature.

01:43:29.000 But I wasn't aware of that.

01:43:30.000 Yeah.

01:43:30.000 That's really interesting.

01:43:32.000 How did they study that?

01:43:32.000 And what was the something called interleukin-6.

01:43:37.000 There 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.

01:43:49.000 There's two anti-inflammatory cytokines that are extraordinarily interesting to us and our research team.

01:43:54.000 I have five PhD scientists, eight full-time scientists.

01:43:58.000 That's why I created my business is to do research.

01:44:01.000 But interleukin-10 and interleukin-1RA are anti-inflammatory cytokines.

01:44:07.000 So when you can upregulate those, then it kind of buffers the inflammatory effects.

01:44:13.000 And so that's exciting to find these anti-inflammatory.

01:44:17.000 We 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.

01:44:39.000 So 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.

01:45:02.000 So we were able to show you can augment in the literature your immune system buffered with the anti-inflammatory properties.

01:45:13.000 That sort of resolves the argument of the cytokine storm concern.

01:45:20.000 And then now we have a very successful study that shows that a Gericon and turkey tail mycelium enhances the immunity of individuals long term.

01:45:32.000 Six months later, that's the first mushroom that you gave me.

01:45:34.000 Yeah, you still have that.

01:45:35.000 Yeah, it's rather trophy.

01:45:37.000 Yeah, oh, it's never leaving the desk.

01:45:40.000 That sucker. 1.00

01:45:41.000 And this is a great example because this is an endangered species.

01:45:46.000 In Europe, it's on the red list of extinction.

01:45:48.000 In Europe it is?

01:45:49.000 In Europe, these are growth rings.

01:45:51.000 So this one's probably 25 years away.

01:45:53.000 This is a very nice specimen.

01:45:55.000 Staminus gave you this.

01:45:56.000 Yes, Staminus.

01:45:56.000 You gave me this.

01:45:57.000 This is one of the nicest specimens.

01:45:59.000 So these are annual growth rings.

01:46:00.000 Isn't it cool to see it on the desk?

01:46:01.000 I love it.

01:46:02.000 Thank you.

01:46:02.000 People always ask, what the hell is that?

01:46:04.000 So this is a Garacon called Fomitopsis officinalis, also known as Larissophomies. 1.00

01:46:09.000 Dioscorides first described it in Greek medicine 2,000 years ago as Elixirium ad longum vitum, the elixir of long life.

01:46:17.000 If someone took a little piece of that and put it in the ground, would it start making new agaricones?

01:46:23.000 If it had spores, it looks like it goes inside the roots of trees.

01:46:27.000 This one being as old as it is, spores have probably become not viable.

01:46:33.000 But agaricon has the white form and the brown form.

01:46:37.000 It goes through this massive transition as biochemistry.

01:46:40.000 And because it's endangered and because it's highly variable in form, fruit body extracts of this makes no sense.

01:46:46.000 Why is it endangered in Europe and not in America?

01:46:48.000 It only grows in low-growth forests.

01:46:51.000 So the Sky Islands in Europe, in Austria, Slovenia, is where this still can be found on larch trees.

01:46:59.000 We now have, I think, 115 strains of Agaricon, by far the largest library in the world.

01:47:05.000 If you ask me what is my most valuable possession, it's my strain library of Agaricon.

01:47:15.000 It's a treasure of strains.

01:47:17.000 One out of 20, one out of 100 times in the old growth forest will I find one.

01:47:22.000 So we don't collect these unless it's going to be clear-cut or we find them on the ground or if it's on my own property.

01:47:30.000 And then I take a small piece of tissue.

01:47:32.000 It's the mycelium that is bioactive for the immune system.

01:47:37.000 And this is what we found that it's scalable.

01:47:39.000 The mycelium is scalable.

01:47:40.000 The fruit body extracts are not.

01:47:41.000 And it's highly variable.

01:47:44.000 People don't know that, well, they should know, but most mushrooms are parasitized by insects.

01:47:49.000 And that's because the insects spread spores. 0.52

01:47:52.000 So the mushrooms invite insects to come in, so it can spread spores.

01:47:56.000 Like cordyceps and ants.

01:47:58.000 Yeah, or like buzz pollination.

01:48:00.000 That's the weirdest thing when you see spiders and ants overwhelmed by cordyceps.

01:48:04.000 Yeah, it's, I like to say cordyceps has to eat too.

01:48:07.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:48:08.000 Well, I mean, this is the cycle of life, right?

01:48:10.000 So this Agaricon is in the BioShield Biodefense Program.

01:48:16.000 Which, by the way, this is your company, Host Defense.

01:48:19.000 You have great stuff, man.

01:48:21.000 I buy your stuff.

01:48:22.000 Thank you.

01:48:23.000 You gave me a bunch of it, but I buy it.

01:48:24.000 Well, thank you for your support.

01:48:26.000 We need it.

01:48:26.000 I mean, I'm the only company that does research that I know of.

01:48:30.000 I spend over a million dollars a year in fundamental research, thinking outside of the box.

01:48:36.000 Even though traditional Chinese medicine is fantastic and has thousands of years of history, all traditional medicines advance with new technologies.

01:48:45.000 That's true across the board.

01:48:47.000 The 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.

01:49:05.000 This is a game changer.

01:49:06.000 So 115 strains of agaricon, I submitted eight of them to the BioShield Biodefense Program after a 9-11 2004.

01:49:12.000 My TED Talk talks about this.

01:49:14.000 And I found two or three strains highly active against smallpox and also against bird flu.

01:49:20.000 And 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.

01:49:34.000 Wow.

01:49:35.000 2 million samples submitted.

01:49:37.000 We're in the top 10, the only natural product.

01:49:39.000 Now that's in vitro.

01:49:40.000 So that in vitro, this is sort of a timeline.

01:49:44.000 You don't have Boy with a Microphone, do you, Jamie?

01:49:47.000 What is that?

01:49:48.000 You didn't see it?

01:49:48.000 What is Boy with a Microphone?

01:49:48.000 Okay.

01:49:50.000 It's a 42-second clip we found in the vault.

01:49:53.000 And it talks, it's me with my son when he's four years old, and I'm on the phone saying, I've created this company to do research.

01:50:00.000 Research is what we want to do.

01:50:02.000 Truly, that's the origins of what I was trying to, why I created my business.

01:50:07.000 So I still do that.

01:50:08.000 So with the 115 strains, we're likely to have a super strain in our collection.

01:50:14.000 Pandemics are coming all the time.

01:50:16.000 We're in a viral storm.

01:50:18.000 This is a bird flu pandemic where many of us are so surprised that it has not happened at a bigger level.

01:50:25.000 But viral pandemics are also affecting other animals besides birds and pigs.

01:50:30.000 67% of beehives were lost in Montana this past year.

01:50:35.000 67%.

01:50:37.000 Imagine if you had 67% loss of a herd of cattle or sheep.

01:50:41.000 That's phenomenal.

01:50:42.000 And bird flu is spreading.

01:50:44.000 It's making the jumps.

01:50:45.000 It is coming, folks.

01:50:47.000 And so, what we want to do is design a clinical study using a Garacon to test against bird flu.

01:50:53.000 I'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.

01:51:05.000 And even some other animals like moose and we're embedded into a mycelium landscape.

01:51:10.000 Mycelium is everywhere.

01:51:12.000 The interactions of mycelium and animals, you know, is elaborate, complex.

01:51:18.000 This is crazy, and if anyone out here can prove me wrong, please send me the reference.

01:51:22.000 But it appears I'm the first person to realize that bees go to rotted logs with mycelium for immunological benefit.

01:51:33.000 First person.

01:51:33.000 Really?

01:51:34.000 How is that possible?

01:51:35.000 We all grew up with Winnie the Pooh.

01:51:37.000 I mean, this is mind-boggling.

01:51:39.000 Like, 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.

01:51:48.000 This past year, they identified the mitoside-resistant mites, which most all of them are now, are vectors of the deformed wing virus.

01:51:57.000 Colony colops is a threat to food biosecurity.

01:52:00.000 And we found, and we published this in Nature Scientific Reports, extract of polypora mushroom mycelium protects bees from viruses.

01:52:11.000 We published that in Nature Scientific Reports.

01:52:14.000 I'm the primary author.

01:52:15.000 We were able to reduce viruses, the deformed wing virus, by I think 879 times in 12 days with one treatment.

01:52:23.000 So that is phenomenal for protecting food biosecurity.

01:52:27.000 That helps all farmers.

01:52:28.000 It helps, and there's a pandemic that's spreading, 67% lost, 60% lost generally across the United States this year.

01:52:35.000 The worst colony collapse in history.

01:52:39.000 This will make food prices go up, and it doesn't stop because these viruses are proliferating throughout the environment.

01:52:45.000 We found that the polyporium mushroom mycelium, grown on grain or grown on sawdust, not only reduces these viruses, but extends longevity.

01:52:54.000 And so the longevity, and interesting, this mushroom is known as Elixirium ad longum vitamin, the elixir of long life.

01:53:01.000 We are all animals.

01:53:02.000 Bees are animals, birds are animals, pigs are animals, humans are animals.

01:53:06.000 We are all, I think, going to have an immunological benefit from incorporating these fungi.

01:53:14.000 Now, we're allowed by the FDA to say supporting innate immunity in healthy individuals.

01:53:22.000 We're not allowed to make any disease claims.

01:53:24.000 Ironically, we can't make that same claim with bees.

01:53:28.000 We can say extends longevity, but this is where there's not common sense in government.

01:53:34.000 I 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.

01:53:44.000 Oh, reduce viruses in bees.

01:53:45.000 You have an antiviral drug.

01:53:48.000 No, we haven't been able to find the antiviral drug.

01:53:50.000 We think it's an entourage effect, an upregulating basic immunity.

01:53:55.000 And then your endogenous immune system, in this case of the bees, can fight the viruses.

01:54:01.000 And this, I think, will translate into birds, into swine.

01:54:05.000 So there's resistance to these results?

01:54:08.000 No, because your immunity is so-called...

01:54:13.000 Like you're saying you can't make these claims, but if you have results.

01:54:17.000 We have fantastic results.

01:54:19.000 I refer anyone to nature scientific repository.

01:54:23.000 So could you elaborate on what the resistance is Well, the resistance is complicated and it's political.

01:54:32.000 The old school conventional wisdom is that if you have a drug-like effect, then you have an undeclared drug in your product.

01:54:42.000 Isn't that funny?

01:54:43.000 Yeah.

01:54:44.000 Even 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.

01:54:53.000 Their bees are actually benefiting from mushroom mycelium.

01:54:56.000 So we're working with Washington State University, great people there.

01:55:02.000 We're working with several funders.

01:55:06.000 We have tested this now over and over again.

01:55:10.000 This 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.

01:55:22.000 Clearly, clearly a benefit.

01:55:26.000 So this is scalable.

01:55:27.000 You can't harvest fruit bodies in a way that you can scale mycelium.

01:55:31.000 Mycelium is an exponential increase in mycelial mass virtually every week.

01:55:34.000 It's 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 or even 10 times 100 times 100 times 100.

01:55:39.000 Massively scalable.

01:55:41.000 I 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.

01:55:58.000 Your endogenous immune systems are upregulated because over hundreds of millions of years, we've been interacting with these.

01:56:04.000 It'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.

01:56:15.000 So now we're trying to navigate through the regulatory landscape.

01:56:18.000 There was this strange committee that was in secret, met once a year for any new ingredient to add to bees, because bees make honey.

01:56:27.000 Humans can say honey. 0.95

01:56:28.000 If we use our product, they could say we have an undisclosed drug in the honey.

01:56:32.000 So whatever.

01:56:34.000 But it also translates to wild bees.

01:56:36.000 It turns out that Apis melefera, the honey bee, with the viruses, when they have the viruses, they go to flowers frequented by bumblebees.

01:56:44.000 So colony collapse is happening not only with the cultivated honey bee, but it's spread to other bees.

01:56:51.000 This is an ecological catastrophe of a viral pandemic that's spreading around the world.

01:56:56.000 We have the solution right now.

01:56:58.000 It's highly scalable.

01:56:59.000 And this regulatory committee disappeared in the past two years.

01:57:04.000 This is before the last administration was voted in.

01:57:06.000 But they didn't tell anybody.

01:57:08.000 So we had an application with them for two years to have this exempted.

01:57:12.000 The whole committee's gone.

01:57:13.000 The whole committee is gone.

01:57:14.000 And they didn't even tell us that it was gone.

01:57:16.000 So we went two years spinning our thumbs waiting for them to respond.

01:57:20.000 This is where we need to have common sense to come back into government.

01:57:25.000 This is where our government has too many hurdles to practical solutions that are demonstratable, scalable, and affordable.

01:57:33.000 The return on the investment is massive, and yet we fear the FDA.

01:57:37.000 We fear the USDA because they are stuck in a rut, literally.

01:57:42.000 Maybe they could use psilocybin here to expand their horizons because they want to know the mode of action, the mechanism of action.

01:57:50.000 Well, we didn't know the mechanism of action of aspirin until the 1970s, but it had a benefit.

01:57:56.000 If it has a clear benefit and does not cause harm, then they should be exempted for scalability.

01:58:03.000 Now, there's another factor to this, which is wonderful.

01:58:06.000 There's a new startup company called Quorum by my friend Chris Ketrovitz.

01:58:11.000 Disclosure, you know, I'm involved with them.

01:58:13.000 But they have a metarisium, a fungus that kills mites.

01:58:17.000 So it's also been approved by the USDA for thrips and other greenhouse insects.

01:58:22.000 It's not toxic to fish, not toxic to humans.

01:58:25.000 So the combination of using metarisium with the Agaricon and other polypore mushroom mycelium, we think has a great potential future.

01:58:36.000 So I think there's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional agricultural practices.

01:58:44.000 There's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional medical practices.

01:58:48.000 They are not necessarily an opposition.

01:58:51.000 What 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.

01:59:07.000 There is money in disease.

01:59:09.000 Right.

01:59:10.000 That's always the problem.

01:59:12.000 Money.

01:59:12.000 You can tell I'm passionate about this because I have such a deliverable, provable solution that's scalable.

01:59:18.000 I wonder if— And now we have renewed interest, thankfully, because of some big stakeholders in the almond industry.

01:59:34.000 And every almond you eat was visited, a flower was visited by a bee.

01:59:39.000 The almond industry is in crisis right now.

01:59:41.000 But it's not almonds, it's apples, it's cherries.

01:59:43.000 It's across the board right now.

01:59:46.000 Agriculture has been severely affected by these viral pandemics.

01:59:49.000 And these same viral pandemics are mitigated, I believe, in commonality with these polypore mushrooms that grow in the woods.

01:59:56.000 I 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.

02:00:04.000 We 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.

02:00:19.000 They were euthanizing millions and millions of chickens and turkeys and ducks.

02:00:23.000 You can look this up.

02:00:25.000 There's an organic farm, and we gave one quarter of a gram of Garacon mycelium per chicken in their feed.

02:00:32.000 And 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.

02:00:45.000 Those chickens were immune from bird flu.

02:00:47.000 A quarter of a gram of those mycelium.

02:00:47.000 Wow.

02:00:49.000 Wow.

02:00:50.000 And we protected them.

02:00:51.000 That's incredible.

02:00:52.000 But a crazy thing happened.

02:00:54.000 The USDA had an insurance policy to pay the chicken growers.

02:00:59.000 And the chicken growers quickly learned that they could get an insurance check, lay off the employees, get the cash for lost profits.

02:01:07.000 And so they were not incentivized.

02:01:10.000 Yeah, I've heard that from people that are deeply connected to that industry, that there was a bunch of euthanizations.

02:01:15.000 It didn't have to happen.

02:01:16.000 It didn't have to happen.

02:01:17.000 Yeah, and they did it.

02:01:18.000 And they inflated this whole concept, you know, because the numbers got grossly inflated because they were euthanizing chickens for profit.

02:01:27.000 Yeah, bird flu is a very serious, serious issue.

02:01:31.000 Now, I know vaccines are a very hot subject, and I know you've spoken on that.

02:01:37.000 You've had some excellent guests, by the way.

02:01:40.000 Excellent guests or researchers on this.

02:01:43.000 But I just want to give a thoughtful discussion.

02:01:48.000 Between viruses and vaccines, which is worse, the virus or the vaccine?

02:01:55.000 I'm a libertarian.

02:01:58.000 I believe every family, every individual has a right to make an informed decision.

02:02:05.000 The problem that I see with the vaccine industry, the industrial vaccine complex, is the failure to disclose.

02:02:14.000 I don't think Americans are stupid.

02:02:16.000 I think Americans become stupid when they're not informed.

02:02:21.000 My partner as a physician, she goes, giving Hep B vaccines to a child makes no sense.

02:02:27.000 It's a sexually transmitted disease.

02:02:30.000 Why are we giving a vaccine to a 10-year-old?

02:02:33.000 And a baby.

02:02:34.000 And in med school, when anyone would mention that, why are we doing this?

02:02:37.000 They were vilified.

02:02:39.000 Vilified, shut down.

02:02:41.000 It's like, what happened to thoughtful good science?

02:02:43.000 It's just a reasonable question.

02:02:44.000 Money happened.

02:02:46.000 It's also these vaccine manufacturers are immune to the financial consequences of the side effects.

02:02:53.000 Absolutely.

02:02:54.000 We need to have full disclosure.

02:02:56.000 Now, let me go through a thought experiment.

02:02:58.000 Listen, this is my opinion.

02:03:00.000 Other people may just viciously disagree with me, but let's do, there's two thought experiments I want to do.

02:03:06.000 First one, a million lives were saved with a vaccine.

02:03:10.000 One person dies.

02:03:11.000 Hey, you took it for the home team.

02:03:13.000 Sorry.

02:03:15.000 One person dies out of 100,000.

02:03:20.000 Still ratio is pretty good.

02:03:22.000 My mind, my judgment, sorry.

02:03:24.000 Again, you took it for the home team.

02:03:25.000 One out of 10,000.

02:03:27.000 Okay.

02:03:28.000 Still the ratio is pretty good.

02:03:29.000 Okay.

02:03:30.000 One out of 1,000.

02:03:32.000 1 out of 100, you're making me nervous.

02:03:32.000 Okay.

02:03:34.000 One out of 10.

02:03:35.000 No, that's where I draw the line.

02:03:36.000 I would say, forget it.

02:03:39.000 Now, 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?

02:04:01.000 If you are going to make that decision, you should have an informed decision based on the best of science.

02:04:08.000 All vaccines and all companies should disclose what is the percentage of protection.

02:04:16.000 I have a physician friend who says 30% protection, but I'm sick for four or five days.

02:04:22.000 I don't know, that's not worth it.

02:04:24.000 70% protection?

02:04:26.000 Okay, all right.

02:04:28.000 So everyone has to balance the risk-benefit ratio.

02:04:32.000 But we need real data to be able to do that.

02:04:33.000 We need real data.

02:04:35.000 We need full disclosure.

02:04:37.000 And 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.

02:04:48.000 What happened with good science?

02:04:50.000 You have to follow the science.

02:04:52.000 And this is so important.

02:04:54.000 And 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.

02:05:03.000 Or the most compromised.

02:05:04.000 Yeah, and they drown out the dissent.

02:05:07.000 We all should be able to ask for the data and the information to make an individual decision.

02:05:13.000 And science shouldn't be this ideological or ideologically captured thing.

02:05:19.000 That's why I hate the term anti-vaxxers.

02:05:22.000 I think it's a pejorative term.

02:05:23.000 I think it's prejudiced.

02:05:25.000 You know, what about people who just want to have information?

02:05:27.000 Oh, you're an anti-vaxxer.

02:05:29.000 Yeah, well, it's pushed just to scare people into compliance.

02:05:33.000 That's the whole idea.

02:05:34.000 Having these pejoratives and you throw them around, and no one wants to be labeled that.

02:05:38.000 So you immediately get scared.

02:05:40.000 But enhancing innate immunity and healthy individuals to keep us healthy.

02:05:47.000 Yeah.

02:05:48.000 However, that'd be bad.

02:05:49.000 That's better.

02:05:50.000 Well, that's the other problem that I had with the pandemic in general is that metabolic health was never discussed.

02:05:50.000 Exactly.

02:05:55.000 It was always there's only one way out of this.

02:05:58.000 And having conversations with people that you could see, like visually look at them as not a metabolically healthy person.

02:06:05.000 And these people are telling you the only way to health is through a medicine that they are financially incentivized to push.

02:06:12.000 That's just crazy.

02:06:13.000 And when those are the prominent voices that are on television and the media, and you're getting this from politicians.

02:06:19.000 And 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.

02:06:31.000 Why 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?

02:06:42.000 Age-related, all these other factors.

02:06:45.000 The data is there.

02:06:47.000 Not making that data available to the public increases distrust.

02:06:53.000 And so what the medical community has unfortunately done is they've bred a bunch of dissenters by not giving full access to the information.

02:07:02.000 Well, 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.

02:07:18.000 And 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.

02:07:26.000 You know, I famously remember Jenny McCarthy coming out and saying that she believes her child was vaccine injured.

02:07:31.000 And the backlash was spectacular.

02:07:35.000 Essentially destroyed her career.

02:07:36.000 Well, 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?

02:07:46.000 I mean, this is where you need to have high population studies, but those studies are available.

02:07:50.000 Why they're cloaked in secrecy and why are they not made available?

02:07:54.000 It's money.

02:07:56.000 I 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.

02:08:02.000 They spend $8 billion.

02:08:04.000 The pharmaceutical drug industry spends $8 billion just on advertising and on propaganda every year.

02:08:12.000 That's so much money.

02:08:13.000 And they spend so much money on television networks.

02:08:17.000 You know, I mean, how many times is Anderson Cooper brought to you by Pfizer?

02:08:21.000 You see these ads, and that shapes the narrative, unfortunately.

02:08:24.000 It does.

02:08:25.000 But 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.

02:08:36.000 Not all vaccines are the same.

02:08:39.000 We 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.

02:08:53.000 And 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.

02:09:02.000 And then there are vaccines that are beneficial.

02:09:04.000 Let's find out which ones they are.

02:09:07.000 What 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?

02:09:15.000 We 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.

02:09:33.000 Yeah, 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.

02:09:44.000 So those people become reservoirs for mutation.

02:09:47.000 Right, 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.

02:09:53.000 Yeah, again, the Hep B one is a pretty clear example. 1.00

02:09:58.000 That's a nutty one.

02:09:59.000 There's a bunch of Nutty ones.

02:10:00.000 But the point is the vaccine schedule.

02:10:03.000 If 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.

02:10:12.000 And they start adding things like Hep B. And then you realize, like, oh, it's very profitable to do that.

02:10:17.000 Imagine how much more money you make if you're injecting everybody with a Hep B vaccine if you sell Hep B vaccines.

02:10:24.000 It's quite simple mathematics.

02:10:26.000 I also have met people in the pharma industry who are extremely well-intended.

02:10:29.000 Sure.

02:10:30.000 Great scientists.

02:10:31.000 But they scientists aren't the issue.

02:10:34.000 They've also confessed to me that they face this humiliation of being ostracized for just asking questions.

02:10:42.000 Again, full disclosure, let people make up their own minds.

02:10:46.000 What's the cost-benefit ratio?

02:10:49.000 Is it one out of a million, one out of ten?

02:10:51.000 Well, it's also, you should have to show all the studies, too.

02:10:55.000 You 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.

02:11:05.000 If you do 10 studies, you should show all 10 studies.

02:11:07.000 Yeah, well, actually, that's why clinicaltrials.gov exists.

02:11:11.000 Right.

02:11:12.000 Is that we're cherry-picking, doing studies in Bulgaria and in India and Taiwan.

02:11:16.000 And the pharma would choose the clinical study that supported their neuroscience.

02:11:19.000 Exactly, exactly.

02:11:21.000 And then they could use deceptive language to show the efficacy.

02:11:24.000 But 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.

02:11:40.000 And say, when you activate the receptors in your immune system, that's something beneficial.

02:11:44.000 I believe there's crosstalk between the receptors.

02:11:47.000 The receptors are, oh, something really good is coming down the pipe.

02:11:50.000 And they start creating an entourage effect at the collaboration.

02:11:55.000 More receptors are activated that have collaterally more benefits.

02:12:00.000 And 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.

02:12:09.000 And then conventional medicine can work better.

02:12:12.000 By using conventional medicine on an immunocompromised individual asking their immune system to respond, that's an uphill battle.

02:12:19.000 Yeah.

02:12:19.000 Right.

02:12:20.000 It's interesting, too, that like natural remedies are automatically dismissed by people that think of themselves as intelligent, science-based people.

02:12:28.000 Well, look at artemisicin.

02:12:29.000 But 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.

02:12:43.000 The majority of them.

02:12:44.000 And the most recent example is the anti-malarial drug against Plasmodium falciparum from an artemisia bush.

02:12:54.000 And it's artemisicin.

02:12:56.000 And it came from Artemisia.

02:12:59.000 It's a plant extract.

02:13:00.000 Isn't that wild?

02:13:01.000 But yet science-based people will automatically dismiss what you would call a natural remedy, even though all of them, every kind of...

02:13:15.000 It's human nature.

02:13:18.000 I'm in agreement with you.

02:13:19.000 We're just reinventing molecules that have been assembled somewhere else.

02:13:19.000 think that.

02:13:29.000 Thank you, SynBio Beto Conference.

02:13:32.000 That'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.

02:13:42.000 In the theater of evolution, we've tested these natural products over tens of millions of years, literally, our primate ancestors.

02:13:49.000 And so we've got a pretty good experiential data set there to be able to see what works and what doesn't.

02:13:56.000 Many mushrooms, not many, but some mushrooms are poisonous.

02:14:01.000 Some are edible.

02:14:02.000 It's a weird statistic about, and again, 1 to 2% fudge factor here, so please don't attack me all over the place.

02:14:09.000 But there's 1.5 to 5 million species of fungi.

02:14:15.000 It's about 150,000 species of mushrooms that are estimated.

02:14:19.000 So out of that 5 million on the extreme, 1.5 million, less than 10%.

02:14:24.000 150,000, we've only identified about 15,000 species.

02:14:27.000 So we only identified 10% of the mushrooms that exist today.

02:14:31.000 Wow.

02:14:32.000 Interestingly, of those 15,000 species, about 1% are poisonous, 1 or 2%.

02:14:38.000 1 or 2% are psychoactive.

02:14:42.000 And 1 to 2% are good edibles.

02:14:45.000 So 97, 95, 94%, whatever the math shows, are there, but they're not toxic.

02:14:51.000 But mushrooms are molecular wizards.

02:14:55.000 These are pharmaceutical factories that are contributing huge numbers.

02:14:59.000 And 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.

02:15:07.000 Why is that?

02:15:08.000 Well, 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.

02:15:20.000 And then lion's mane mushrooms rot in four days.

02:15:23.000 The mycelium that grew it could exist for years.

02:15:27.000 The mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom, and as a result, we have a lot more compounds being expressed.

02:15:34.000 Now, some people say, well, not all those compounds necessarily are beneficial.

02:15:37.000 Uh-huh.

02:15:38.000 Well, that's true, but now we've tested them enough that we can see real world benefit.

02:15:44.000 Dean Ortis just published a study this past year on Alzheimer's using lifestyle adjustments, exercise, meditation, vitamins, and lion's mane mushroom mycelium.

02:15:59.000 Dramatically significant benefit in slowing down the progression of Alzheimer's through lifestyle vitamins and using lion's mane mushroom mycelium.

02:16:10.000 Now, which did what?

02:16:12.000 Yes, you can try to analyze that, but you'd have to separate every single little component to see which one is the most significant.

02:16:20.000 And 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?

02:16:31.000 We have to, at some point, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

02:16:36.000 At 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?

02:16:52.000 Why 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?

02:17:01.000 We're cross-purposes.

02:17:02.000 This is where science needs to have common sense, and the government and the regulatory industry needs to have common sense.

02:17:09.000 And we get that by exemptions, emergency exemptions.

02:17:12.000 And we should get that for emergency exemptions right now.

02:17:14.000 We are on a bee apocalypse.

02:17:16.000 We are, folks, 67% of beehives lost in Montana.

02:17:22.000 What if that was a human population?

02:17:25.000 All hands on deck.

02:17:27.000 So it is, and there is a transference of viruses between animal species.

02:17:33.000 We're seeing that in real time.

02:17:35.000 Now, 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.

02:17:54.000 You 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.

02:18:11.000 A patient zero is a person who is the nexus for spreading a mutated form of a virus.

02:18:16.000 Horizontal gene transfer is happening all the time now.

02:18:20.000 Now it's concentrated, it's accelerating.

02:18:22.000 It's an exponential increase of risk.

02:18:25.000 Bill Gates has talked about this.

02:18:27.000 Many other researchers have talked about this.

02:18:30.000 This is really something we should pay attention to.

02:18:33.000 And I think the simplest, easiest, scalable way is to enhance immunity in healthy individuals.

02:18:39.000 And by doing so, I think you can let your endogenous immune system work better.

02:18:45.000 And I think conventional medicine will work better also in concert.

02:18:48.000 It also speaks to the problem with industrial agriculture in general, right?

02:18:53.000 These 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.

02:19:06.000 And regenerative agriculture enhances the possibility of harmony amongst nature.

02:19:13.000 And then the counter argument is that we have better nutrition.

02:19:16.000 We can feed the world so that people are more people happier.

02:19:20.000 You know, again, we're at this, we have a contrast of opposites.

02:19:24.000 And I wish I had the easy solution.

02:19:27.000 I think I had the solution for bees.

02:19:29.000 I think it's Scalable for protecting chickens and livestock.

02:19:33.000 I hope, you know, and we're now designing clinical studies on a path to designing clinical studies with bird flu using a Garricon.

02:19:41.000 We don't have the results, so I'm not making a medical claim here.

02:19:44.000 But the evidence so far is so encouraging.

02:19:47.000 And 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.

02:19:58.000 They thought, ah, fungi, fungi could help us, you know, protect ourselves against viruses.

02:20:03.000 So they came through the back door of the scientific community, not a Joe Rogan listener.

02:20:08.000 They might be, I don't know, maybe they are now.

02:20:10.000 But they came to me through the scientific literature saying, we should try this with people.

02:20:15.000 So 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.

02:20:28.000 We don't know why, but we should explore this because we can argue for 100 years about why.

02:20:33.000 Or we could deliver it tomorrow and have a positive effect.

02:20:36.000 Yeah, it makes sense.

02:20:38.000 I have to ask you this question.

02:20:39.000 It's unrelated, but I always wanted to know.

02:20:41.000 Why do morel mushrooms grow around burns?

02:20:46.000 That is such a great question.

02:20:48.000 And you know what?

02:20:49.000 That's the question that we've been asking for so long.

02:20:53.000 I love morel mushrooms.

02:20:54.000 I love morel mushrooms, too.

02:20:56.000 You know, they are poisonous.

02:20:58.000 Unless you cook them.

02:21:00.000 Really?

02:21:00.000 Yeah.

02:21:01.000 Oh, boy, that's important.

02:21:02.000 Many people have died from morel mushrooms.

02:21:05.000 Wow.

02:21:06.000 That's crazy.

02:21:07.000 You don't want to cook morel mushrooms in a closed kitchen without ventilation.

02:21:10.000 There are volatile compounds coming out of the morels.

02:21:14.000 Totally denatured in cooking.

02:21:15.000 Delicious.

02:21:16.000 But many, many examples of this.

02:21:18.000 In Japan, I was in Japan 15 years ago.

02:21:21.000 So if you don't have an overhead fan, don't fry morels in your channel.

02:21:24.000 Oh, yes, you open up the window, but just don't inhale the fumes.

02:21:27.000 Wow.

02:21:30.000 The North American Mycological Association is the association for Canada, Mexico, the United States.

02:21:35.000 And there's a poisoning control group in that.

02:21:38.000 And they collect all the details.

02:21:40.000 It's namico.org, n-a-m-y-c-o.org. 0.68

02:21:45.000 And they're the go-to place.

02:21:48.000 Ironically, because of HIPAA rules, the mycologists have been disconnected from the patients in the medical community because now there is a firewall between them.

02:22:01.000 We 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.

02:22:14.000 Nevertheless, 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.

02:22:31.000 So morels are delicious.

02:22:33.000 But to answer your question, morel mycelium seems to be everywhere.

02:22:38.000 And then for horse burns, and they come up.

02:22:41.000 Where were they before?

02:22:41.000 Right.

02:22:42.000 Right.

02:22:44.000 Do they exist in places that don't have burns?

02:22:46.000 Yes.

02:22:47.000 But rarely.

02:22:48.000 No.

02:22:49.000 We think all the time.

02:22:50.000 All the time.

02:22:51.000 They're very common amongst burns.

02:22:52.000 They're everywhere forests are.

02:22:54.000 Right.

02:22:55.000 And when the forests burn, it knocks down all the competition.

02:22:59.000 And it becomes very alkaline.

02:23:02.000 And the absence of organic material and competitors, competitor fungi, the change in the pH. 0.64

02:23:09.000 And so I think we think also from the Gaian hypothesis point of view, it's a great way of nature to rebound because they're scentful.

02:23:16.000 They attract animals.

02:23:18.000 They attract insects.

02:23:20.000 And birds come in, drop seeds, and then they become an oasis point for the regeneration of an ecosystem.

02:23:27.000 Never underestimate the intelligence of nature.

02:23:29.000 And nature has figured this out.

02:23:31.000 Nature does not exist in a vacuum.

02:23:33.000 There's always these repopulation vectors happening, and it's collaborative.

02:23:36.000 It's not competitive.

02:23:38.000 There is competition between the fungi, but when the competitors are knocked down, the themorels come up.

02:23:43.000 That's fascinating.

02:23:44.000 Another fascinating thing is that the largest living organism on Earth in the Pacific Northwest...

02:23:51.000 Yeah.

02:23:52.000 Some people call it Gallica, two different things.

02:23:54.000 But yeah, I flew over it.

02:23:56.000 It's a 2,200-acre, you know, basically a clear cut because it killed all the trees.

02:24:00.000 In my book, Mycelium Running, I have the best photographs of the largest organism in the world.

02:24:05.000 And I hired an airplane, and first time I couldn't see it because I was too low.

02:24:09.000 Second time I had to spiral up.

02:24:11.000 Can you explain what it is to people?

02:24:12.000 It's a honey mushroom.

02:24:14.000 It's a parasite on trees.

02:24:16.000 It's edible.

02:24:18.000 The honey mushrooms on hardwoods tend to taste better, but this one is on conifers.

02:24:24.000 And it comes up in clusters.

02:24:26.000 It forms black rhizomorphs, black myceliums called laminated root rot.

02:24:32.000 Many listeners here know what that is.

02:24:34.000 It kills fruit trees.

02:24:36.000 But this is a marauding parasite that created a contiguous mat over 2,200 acres.

02:24:43.000 And in this case, it killed all the trees so they went ashen gray in color, and they dried out and they're dead.

02:24:51.000 Because of fire hazard from lightning strikes, the Forest Service came in and they cut all the dead trees.

02:24:57.000 And they created this beautiful outline of the largest mycelium mat in the world because you could see where the dead trees were.

02:25:03.000 Can we see what that looks like in the image?

02:25:06.000 I'm trying to find a good picture.

02:25:07.000 It's also in mycelium running.

02:25:12.000 But anyhow, that's an example.

02:25:14.000 Now, oh, it killed the trees.

02:25:16.000 That's terrible.

02:25:17.000 But it created grasslands for uncle lakes. 1.00

02:25:20.000 Right.

02:25:20.000 So deer and moose, elk can come in.

02:25:23.000 So it's a way of, I think it's a way of this rebalancing of nature.

02:25:27.000 Right.

02:25:28.000 You're dealing with millions and millions of acres.

02:25:30.000 Millions and millions of acres.

02:25:32.000 There is a real big problem with the bark beetle right now.

02:25:37.000 You know, that's a problem.

02:25:39.000 It's the ecosystems are shifting in response to stress.

02:25:44.000 And with our mind's view of only one lifetime, we are very myopic.

02:25:51.000 I think we need to look out of the thousand year.

02:25:54.000 I mean, what is the lens of time that we actually look at ecosystems?

02:25:58.000 What's the right lens to use?

02:26:00.000 Depends upon your vested interests.

02:26:02.000 You know, as a human, as a deer, as an ecosystem, they could be very different.

02:26:07.000 Right.

02:26:10.000 It's just such a fascinating thing that the largest known organism on earth exists in the Pacific Northwest.

02:26:17.000 It has one cell wall thick.

02:26:18.000 That's so nuts.

02:26:19.000 Think about its immune system.

02:26:21.000 You know what I found out recently that I had no idea?

02:26:23.000 Aspen trees, when you see aspen trees, it's one plant.

02:26:26.000 Yeah, it's one contiguous thing.

02:26:28.000 They're the two competitors for that title, by the way.

02:26:30.000 Isn't that nuts?

02:26:31.000 Yeah, they're the two competitors.

02:26:32.000 When you see these, I always thought when you see aspen forests that it's a bunch of different individual aspen trees.

02:26:40.000 Nope.

02:26:41.000 No, you know, there's all sorts of amazing discoveries.

02:26:44.000 Here's one that blows my mind.

02:26:47.000 And I had to write it down because it's a new species.

02:26:51.000 There is a fungus that's related to aragon.

02:26:56.000 It's in the Clevocypitaceae.

02:27:00.000 And it was found by a student at Western Virginia University.

02:27:06.000 It is in morning glory seeds.

02:27:08.000 It produces LSD.

02:27:09.000 Well, Terrence talked about that.

02:27:11.000 No, this is before Terrence.

02:27:12.000 Terrence talked about.

02:27:13.000 He talked about morning glory seeds and having psychedelic experiences.

02:27:16.000 It turns out it's a symbiotic fungus that's growing in there.

02:27:19.000 And it's called Paraglondula clandestina.

02:27:24.000 What a great name, clandestina, the clandestine.

02:27:26.000 Don't they do something to commercial morning glory seeds to make sure that people don't trip on them?

02:27:31.000 I don't know.

02:27:32.000 I think they do.

02:27:34.000 I 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.

02:27:41.000 Well, if they sterilized them or used a fungicide, that would make sense.

02:27:44.000 But a graduate student, I need to give her credit, is at Western Virginia University, Corine Hazel, Pentium.

02:27:53.000 Yes.

02:27:53.000 There it is.

02:27:54.000 Look how young she is. 0.64

02:27:55.000 Very young.

02:27:56.000 She made a discovery heretofore unknown to science, and not only produces these LCD compounds, it is a symbiotic fungus helping the morning glory survive.

02:28:09.000 Amazing.

02:28:10.000 Think about every young person out there.

02:28:12.000 The field of mycology is underfunded, understudied, underreported, underutilized.

02:28:21.000 This is a fantastic treasure trove of new potential discoveries.

02:28:25.000 I 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.

02:28:34.000 It's not big.

02:28:35.000 No, I couldn't agree with you more.

02:28:38.000 You're aware of Brian Mararescu, right?

02:28:41.000 That 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.

02:28:50.000 Has Brian tripped yet?

02:28:51.000 I don't know.

02:28:52.000 You have to ask him.

02:28:54.000 I love it when scientists and researchers don't admit that they've tripped.

02:29:03.000 I 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.

02:29:15.000 Well, an extreme example, but it has some merit.

02:29:18.000 I mean, would you rather be taught by an airline pilot who has experience or someone who just read a book?

02:29:24.000 So the late Roland Griffiths, he's a dear friend, Johns Hopkins.

02:29:30.000 He is credited as being the big pioneer for psilocybin in medical research.

02:29:36.000 And when I asked him, have you tripped on psilocybin?

02:29:40.000 When I was at his house in the backyard, I said, he just smiled.

02:29:43.000 He said, I'm not going to answer that question.

02:29:46.000 Well, then after he died, I met some of his friends.

02:29:50.000 And he goes, oh, yeah, Roland tripped.

02:29:53.000 But he didn't want to tell anyone for the fear that he could lose his objectivity or be criticized.

02:30:00.000 Yeah.

02:30:01.000 Rick Strassman had an interesting perspective on that, too.

02:30:05.000 When 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.

02:30:15.000 He was very reticent to talk about it.

02:30:17.000 And then he sort of came out of the closet on that.

02:30:19.000 Fully.

02:30:20.000 And then when I asked Roland's friends, well, where did he like to trip trip?

02:30:24.000 Because you're in a hospital environment with all these doctors and, you know, your stress levels go up just being in a hospital environment.

02:30:32.000 And he said, well, Roland's favorite place to trip was on a mountaintop with three friends with a beautiful view and a fire.

02:30:40.000 Perfect.

02:30:43.000 What's the quality of experience?

02:30:45.000 Now, 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.

02:30:58.000 The Center, the California Institute for Integrative Studies, C-I-I-S, I think .org or .eu, has a program training psychedelic therapists.

02:31:12.000 You don't have to be a medical physician to be able to hold someone's hands to have a guided experience.

02:31:19.000 Now, there's a lot of charlatans out there.

02:31:21.000 That's a problem.

02:31:22.000 Be warned, folks.

02:31:24.000 There's a lot of problems.

02:31:25.000 That is a problem.

02:31:26.000 But there are some excellent therapists out there.

02:31:30.000 And for many people who can't get into a clinical study, be careful.

02:31:36.000 Consult a qualified medical practitioner.

02:31:38.000 We'll put that on the record.

02:31:40.000 But a lot of people have benefited without having to go through traditional medical constructs of a hospital to have benefits.

02:31:50.000 And then they're reluctant to talk about it because of the illegality of it, unfortunately.

02:31:54.000 And if you have a job that is where you have to be taken seriously.

02:32:00.000 You could lose your medical license.

02:32:02.000 But 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.

02:32:21.000 And they were spit upon and they were attacked viciously, physically sometimes, in the hospital.

02:32:28.000 They had PTSD, but just Trying to provide good medical support.

02:32:32.000 So 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.

02:32:42.000 So 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.

02:32:58.000 So realize aggression and anger affects everyone around you.

02:33:03.000 The 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.

02:33:32.000 A great example, a law enforcement officer by the name of Sarko from Boston just received his religious exemption for using psychedelics.

02:33:44.000 So he is a police officer, and his chief of police is now retired.

02:33:51.000 He has been an advocate because he saw Sarko, who experienced all these negative, you'd love to have him on the show sometime.

02:33:59.000 He can really speak authoritatively to other law enforcement officers saying, this has helped me.

02:34:05.000 So I have a law enforcement officer.

02:34:07.000 I'd love to talk to you.

02:34:08.000 I'd love to, for you, he's the real deal.

02:34:11.000 I have an RCMP officer friend in Vancouver who took me to his favorite psilocybin mushroom shop in Vancouver.

02:34:20.000 I couldn't believe it.

02:34:21.000 We walked into a psilocybin mushroom shop.

02:34:23.000 They didn't know who I was, thankfully.

02:34:25.000 And they were selling the stamina stack, which is kind of weird because I had my name on it.

02:34:30.000 And we walk in there and say, this is where I tell all my law enforcement officers to come to get their psilocybin.

02:34:35.000 I go, really?

02:34:36.000 I said, I'm sorry, but I'm trying to juxtaposition this.

02:34:41.000 How does this work?

02:34:42.000 And he goes, well, you know, and this is good perhaps for ICE also.

02:34:46.000 He said, you know how in the United States, law enforcement officers are aggressive and mean.

02:34:51.000 They tend to intimidate you and subjugate you?

02:34:54.000 I said, we found a better way up here through salcybin.

02:34:58.000 I said, well, what do you do?

02:35:00.000 He says, well, we have learned the following.

02:35:04.000 Now when I have to arrest somebody, I know they have a warrant out for them.

02:35:07.000 I walk up to them and I say, and I always walk up with a smile on my face.

02:35:12.000 Never a harsh look, always a smile on my face.

02:35:15.000 I said, I have good news now.

02:35:18.000 I have bad news.

02:35:19.000 What do you want to hear first?

02:35:20.000 He says, invariably, everybody wants to say, tell me the good news.

02:35:24.000 And he goes, the good news is you can finish your cup of coffee.

02:35:29.000 And I go, okay, what's the bad news?

02:35:31.000 Dude, I got to arrest you.

02:35:33.000 And 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.

02:35:52.000 He said, it's a game changer.

02:35:53.000 It's reduced the threat to us physically of making arrests.

02:35:58.000 It doesn't escalate.

02:35:58.000 It makes sense.

02:35:59.000 Yeah, it doesn't escalate.

02:36:00.000 They de-escalate it.

02:36:01.000 And 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.

02:36:13.000 And the fact that they had to do their job without becoming an adversarial note to self, right?

02:36:20.000 Note to everyone, right?

02:36:21.000 Note to everyone.

02:36:22.000 And all conflicts involve two or more people.

02:36:28.000 It's not just this is the only way to react to something.

02:36:33.000 It's how you react, how they react to your reaction.

02:36:36.000 There's a cascading effect.

02:36:38.000 Well, I have great faith in humanity.

02:36:41.000 I've seen that.

02:36:42.000 I do too.

02:36:42.000 I have seen the best.

02:36:45.000 I mean, I've seen people.

02:36:46.000 Most people are great.

02:36:47.000 Most people are great and they're better when they go through a soul.

02:36:49.000 So I have an experience that amplifies the best of people.

02:36:53.000 And it also helps them resolve a lot of the baggage.

02:36:58.000 You 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.

02:37:06.000 You inadvertently harmed somebody and you went off the deep end, you harmed somebody else.

02:37:11.000 It's a cascading event of harm.

02:37:14.000 And when these people are resolved, going, that was a bad chapter in my life.

02:37:19.000 I had one really bad day, or maybe a series of them, but that does not define me who I am as a person.

02:37:26.000 I have a better self.

02:37:28.000 And it's now and in the future.

02:37:30.000 It's not in the past.

02:37:31.000 Yeah, that's the perspective we should all have.

02:37:33.000 And that's the thing that we should all strive for.

02:37:35.000 Be the best version of you that you can be.

02:37:38.000 And we've all made terrible mistakes in the past, but the idea is to have learned from them and to be a better person because of that.

02:37:46.000 Well, the medical community has come together on this, on psychedelics.

02:37:51.000 The law enforcement community has come together.

02:37:55.000 It's positive.

02:37:56.000 It's positive.

02:37:56.000 We're in a positive direction.

02:37:58.000 I had my interview by the DEA, and I thought they were the boogeyman in the 70s for a good reason, by the way.

02:38:05.000 But I shouldn't say that.

02:38:08.000 But I went through my background check, and the DEA has such a sense of humor.

02:38:14.000 It said, okay, Paul, you come out clean.

02:38:17.000 You don't have a record.

02:38:18.000 Everything is fine.

02:38:20.000 But we have to talk to you about something that happened in 1994 in Des Moines, Washington.

02:38:26.000 Really?

02:38:26.000 Yeah.

02:38:27.000 I'm going, what happened in 1994 in Des Moines, Washington?

02:38:32.000 He says, are you sure you don't remember?

02:38:34.000 And they're role-playing here.

02:38:36.000 I didn't know it at the time.

02:38:38.000 I go, no, I don't remember.

02:38:41.000 I wonder if sometimes people just confess to something because they're fishing.

02:38:45.000 I said, I have no clue, no clue.

02:38:47.000 He goes, are you sure?

02:38:49.000 This is your official response.

02:38:50.000 You don't remember?

02:38:52.000 I said, no, I don't remember.

02:38:53.000 He says, didn't you get a speeding ticket?

02:38:57.000 And I said, I paid that.

02:38:59.000 It was from those machines.

02:39:00.000 It was for my camera.

02:39:01.000 I know I paid it.

02:39:02.000 I could dig up the receipt.

02:39:03.000 It was like for 35 bucks.

02:39:05.000 And they just roared with laughter.

02:39:07.000 They were just fucking with you?

02:39:08.000 They're fucking with me.

02:39:09.000 What they told me is that we don't know shit about mushrooms or psilocybin.

02:39:13.000 We're an enforcement agency.

02:39:15.000 Many of us don't agree with this.

02:39:17.000 Change the law.

02:39:20.000 We want to go after syndicates.

02:39:21.000 We want to go after fentanyl.

02:39:23.000 We want to go after these, you know, these things that are not beneficial in any way, shape, or form.

02:39:29.000 We don't want to hurt the source that is healing us.

02:39:33.000 But they won't fuck around when it comes to money transactions.

02:39:37.000 Once you involve money, then the DEA is going to be involved.

02:39:41.000 But you're involved in research, and we have strict guidelines.

02:39:45.000 I had DEA license in 1975, 1976, 77, 78, through Dr. Micah Buk at the Evergreen State College, and they were much more liberal.

02:39:54.000 I could grow tons of sulcide mushrooms and collect them.

02:39:57.000 And that's why we did a series of conferences.

02:40:00.000 I was the only one that had a DEA license.

02:40:03.000 So we did these conferences collecting all these experts together with Albert Hofmann there, R. Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans Schultes, Jonathan Ott, Terence McKenna.

02:40:14.000 But I had the license to be able to possess psilocybin with my professor.

02:40:19.000 And so we would have all the psilocybin.

02:40:22.000 So we did these educational events, academic with citizen scientists and psychonauts coming together.

02:40:30.000 What's really different is we just had the Psychedelic Science Maps Conference in Denver, 8,500 people.

02:40:39.000 Back in the 1970s, at any moment, we were afraid that a SWAT team would break down the doors and arrest everybody.

02:40:47.000 We existed in a high state of paranoia because that was a war on drugs with Richard Nixon.

02:40:54.000 And now it's totally different.

02:40:55.000 Now you have law enforcement officers, you have Rick Perry, you have all these.

02:40:59.000 In New Mexico, they legalize the prescription of psilocybin.

02:41:04.000 This is a citizens' movement.

02:41:06.000 It's a democratic movement for the freedom of consciousness, and everyone should have a right to be able to practice.

02:41:15.000 And where do you draw individual use from religious use?

02:41:20.000 Psilocybin mushrooms are very important for my own personal religion.

02:41:26.000 I feel that this is central to my religious belief.

02:41:30.000 So I think this is where the government needs to back off.

02:41:35.000 If 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.

02:41:52.000 This is a game changer.

02:41:53.000 I 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. 0.70

02:42:05.000 I just think this is a medicine for our times that can make a paradigm shift for a better society.

02:42:11.000 I couldn't agree more.

02:42:12.000 That's a good way to end this.

02:42:14.000 Thank you, Paul.

02:42:16.000 Hold your book up there because this is the latest of eight books that you've written.

02:42:20.000 Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats.

02:42:23.000 Paul, you're a gem.

02:42:25.000 You really are.

02:42:26.000 You're such an important person.

02:42:28.000 And 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.

02:42:38.000 And I think your role in educating people is enormous.

02:42:42.000 But let's be very careful with that.

02:42:44.000 I'm a one knowledge keeper, literally in a string of knowledge keepers.

02:42:48.000 So many people have died, been harmed, and Indigenous people. 0.62

02:42:52.000 I 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.

02:43:02.000 The 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.

02:43:11.000 I think you're doing just that.

02:43:13.000 So thank you.

02:43:13.000 I appreciate you very much, brother.

02:43:15.000 Thank you.

02:43:16.000 All right.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 09, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2347 - Paul Stamets

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Transcript