#2347 - Paul Stamets

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The Joe Rogan Experience.

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What's rock and roll, Paul?

Good to see you, sir.

Good to see you, Joe.

What's happening?

How you doing?

Book number eight, huh?

Book number eight, yeah.

Who would have known?

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

Well, this is state-of-the-art taxonomy.

Sills mushrooms are natural habitat.

It covers 60 species all over the world.

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

They've been used in India and Europe and South Africa, new species was just found, psilocybin maluti, but the Besuthu and Lesotho province have been using it obviously for hundreds of years.

We know this because they have songs.

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

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

I never expected it to be this big.

And the RAND report came out this past year.

3% of Americans tripped on psilocybin in 2023.

Is that only 3?

3%.

That's 8 million.

I know.

I would agree with you because how many people would admit it, right?

Probably underreporting all of that.

For sure, yeah, for sure.

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

And it's crossing all political boundaries, all religious boundaries.

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.

He's a great guy.

I've talked to him backstage a few times.

He's the type of person that I really admire because even though we may have political differences or different cultural backgrounds,

we're joined together with a common purpose of trying to help people.

Yeah, well, he's not

ideologically captured.

Like, he realized that he was wrong and that his position on this was based on ignorance.

So, he educated himself and completely turned around, did a 180, and now is an advocate.

And it's helped a lot of people.

I mean, it's tremendous benefit to veterans and people with PTSD and

coming back from the war.

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

That and psilocybin, and my heart really goes out, and this is, I'm sort of left or center, so my friends will be surprised, but my heart goes out to law enforcement.

Can you imagine stopping a car on a stormy night at 2 in the morning?

Right.

And

the window comes down, and you have two seconds to make a decision?

You do that hundreds of times.

The likelihood of having one mistake is very high.

And having one very bad day to find your life for the rest of your life is not right.

Because 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.

They help people forgive themselves and become better people.

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

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.

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.

How many of them would change their ways?

I would imagine a great deal.

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

We talk about using psychedelics and psilocybin and other substances substances for treating people who have trauma, you know, mental illness, you know, addiction issues.

But what about the near normals?

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

But what about prevention?

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, hundreds of billions of dollars.

Psilocybin should should be made free, I think,

as a citizen's right to have access, and the government should pay for it.

It would massively reduce our national debt.

It would make our better society.

But that's not going to happen, right?

That's a dream.

Well, I don't know if that's not going to happen.

It's just not going to happen tomorrow.

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

Like, look at Las Vegas.

It's a great example.

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.

It was highly illegal.

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.

They had zero tolerance for it.

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.

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

You know,

we talked about this the other day.

The studies showed that amongst young people, alcohol consumption is down significantly.

Isn't it down by like 25%?

Which, by the way, was that?

It's down.

I just don't know the number.

Which, by the way, a great thing.

That's a good thing.

But it's not a good thing for profits.

But my point is that

how many states now have cannabis as completely legal?

I think it's like 19.

Yeah, it's more than a dozen.

Yeah, I think it's somewhere around then.

And then you have medical use, which is in many, many more states.

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

Indeed, 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.

Right.

How do they reconcile that?

How do they?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, PTSD amongst law enforcement is something that's very rarely discussed.

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.

And it's just, it's like

every day.

Every day you're dealing with shootouts.

Every day you're dealing with stabbings.

Every day you're dealing with horrific crimes.

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It's just your brain is just overrun with this.

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

My partner's a medical doctor

in Canada, but she used to be a firefighter.

And

yeah, they oftentimes, the police may not show up for 20 minutes and they're there.

And the things they witness, I mean, things that no one should ever witness.

But, I mean, this is where it's so important that we come together as a society, because I really believe that 98% of people are good and 2% of people are assholes.

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

I really think there's progress right now.

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

But more and more, I think people are they become more

have greater wisdom about how they're being manipulated by the media.

People come together.

That's why I like mushroom hunting.

Mushroom hunting brings people together.

You go out hunting, you have this eureka experience, you don't talk politics, you're excited about the species that you hope to find, and you find ones you don't.

But they become like friends after a while.

You find a chanterelle, you find a shaggy mane, you find a psilocybin, a psilocybin mushroom.

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.

It's just a really fun thing to do.

And there's something I want to mention, Joe, that's really important.

I

have been to a lot of conferences.

I just came back from the psychedelic science conference in Denver.

Our friend Rick Doblin, 8,500 people there.

What I really find

an extraordinary way of taking

iPhones and droids, and all these kids are just addicted to their phones, right?

They're not going out in nature.

So there is a called nature deficit syndrome.

It's actually affecting people.

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

It was

created by a guy named Scott.

He just gave a TED talk that was released yesterday.

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

You photograph it.

You upload it into the cloud of iNaturalist, and they have all these experts, amateurs, trying to tell you what it is.

It's a great little debate going back and forth.

No, you're right, no, you're right.

And then when it hits research grade, it's when a group of experts come together and say, yep, you have Carpranus comatus.

Yep, you have Belitus edulus.

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

And it brings people into nature, gets kids excited,

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.

I just went to the iNaturalist yesterday and Silasby cubensis, the golden tops go around Austin.

Who knew?

You know, because they've been reported.

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

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.

It can be within two miles, five miles, ten miles, you know.

And that way you can do the report.

But some of them have high specificity with lat longs within a few inches.

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.

And then every year,

all over the world now, there's called

BioBlitzes, where several hundred people literally come together, they'll 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.

This has revolutionized the field of biology.

I think it revolutionizes bringing children and young people back into nature.

And you then build a community.

You're not talking about politics, you're talking about nature.

And what did you find?

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

So

it's inspiring to see the kids get so excited about this and adults.

And so this is, you know, I'm a.

That's very cool.

Yeah, very cool.

How many new species get discovered?

Oh, thousands.

Every year?

Thousands every year now.

Really?

Thousands and thousands.

There's 223 known species of psil-cybin 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.

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?

How do they determine where it's from?

Excellent question.

The psilocybin species localized in the genus Psilocibi, which has the most psilocybin species, we just know from genetic associations that if 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.

But if a mushroom has gills, gills,

and it bruises bluish and has purple-brown spores, those three things need to be true, then 95% probability is a sulcium mushroom.

What species it is becomes more debatable.

But silicide mushrooms are very hard to find, with the exception of the golden top.

And there's another one called pinealous cyanostins.

They go in pastures, they're easier to find.

But most of these silicon mushrooms are hidden in the landscape.

How so?

Well, I just had a 70-year-old man write me from Vermont, and he has found celestial cerelipis, and he wrote a classic letter to me that many people have written.

I have looked for these mushrooms for years.

I couldn't find them.

And then I found a few, and I looked around, and they were everywhere.

They're hiding in plain sight.

And so now he knows with celestial cerealipis in Vermont, he knows it's just, I can't believe how obvious they are to me and how unobvious they were to me before.

When I took Michael Pollen out on a mushroom hunt, and

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.

He goes, where?

I go, right there.

He goes, where?

I go, right there, Michael.

And then I picked it up and he goes, WTF, how can you tell this is a soul-eyed mushroom?

And I go, well, it's like...

I'm kind of an expert.

Well, it's like meeting a friend.

It's like meeting you.

I know Joe Rogan, right?

I know your face.

I know your personality.

I'm reacquainted with you but psilocybus mushrooms wait a minute so like seeing it you're reacquainted with it seeing it repeatedly and being familiarized with it gives you a memory of it a pattern recognition so when it goes away you still have that pattern recognition memory to memory map back onto the landscape around you it's true with morels too this is a very happen common thing people don't see morels they find one or two and then suddenly they start jumping out of the landscape it's how your brain works with pattern recognition So many of these species are hidden in the landscape, but they're actually quite common, but you just can't see them.

Got it.

And you're accustomed to seeing them.

But you're not saying

that you feel something from them.

You're just saying recognize them visually.

Well, you're waxing into this spiritual.

Yeah, that's what I'm asking.

Many people feel that the mushrooms call to them.

Yeah.

So this is true in the Masotec

tradition.

You know,

in my book, I go deeply into the Masotec

heritage of using psilocybin mushrooms.

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

And

very quickly, Christianity swept through Mesoamerica, specifically in Mexico.

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, and soon after the

conquistadors and Spanish arrived, and in the center of the cross are psilocybin mushrooms.

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

Well, there's that ancient depiction of Adam and Eve from that's that's more debatable in my mind.

Yeah, but here it is.

Thank you.

This is from

Joe Lattori's work.

Look at that.

That's a basket.

With mushrooms with three mushrooms in the basket.

And there is siloseby mexicana.

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

Can the other slide show the full cross, Joey?

I'm not sure.

Did you know Jack Herr?

Yes.

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

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

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.

It's like something that would indicate that they were under the trance and they were dancing.

Yeah, this is

an example where there's so many different.

You could have 100 different potential representations.

Right.

They're not all going to be correct.

But a few of them are.

And this example here.

And in the Mazotech

tradition,

it's called syncretism.

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.

But in the Masudech tradition,

they believe the tears of Christ is where the mushrooms would appear.

They believe the mushrooms were the body of Christ, and therefore you'd never boil them.

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

Oh, interesting.

So really interesting.

That's an example

of syncretism.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

It all, each of those faiths, the use of psilocybin mushrooms reinforced their belief in their faith.

That was really amazing.

I think they said 95% said is the most significant experience in their, the top five are the most significant experiences in their life.

So it just, I think psilocybin makes nicer people.

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No, I would agree with you on that.

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

Can you pull up that fresco?

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.

Yes, it's been postulated by R.

Gordon Wasson.

I shouldn't say plant

in front of you, especially.

Thank you very much.

That.

That doesn't look like mushrooms?

They do look like mushrooms.

I couldn't imagine it being anything else.

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

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

And so symbology.

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

That looks like a psilocybin mushroom.

Some people say it's amniomascaria because of the dots.

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

They're very ephemeral.

They got washed away.

So, yes.

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

If it's in the ground, it's very fresh.

Bacillus I mushrooms, bruise bluish.

And so this is where we could get lost in a debate of interpretation.

But all these representations

are not false.

Some of these representations are extremely strong based on the evidence.

And for instance, the psilocybin mushrooms that we found on the pyramids in Egypt, they are clearly psilocybines, not myself, but other Egyptologists have also published on this.

Find those, Jamie.

Those are fascinating.

Because

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

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

Blue lotus, I think, was one of them.

The blue lotus is a water lily.

Where do water lilies grow?

There it is.

The water lilies grow near ponds.

That's so clearly psilocybin.

And this is the goddess Hathor, the goddess of the cow, by the way.

They are the goddess of the cow.

And that's a vase.

And anyone who's grown oyster mushrooms or psilocybin mushrooms knows that you can put the substrate into a vase like that with openings, and mushrooms will come out of the holes.

And so that natural culture technique of collecting cow powder.

So cows go to ponds to drink.

The blue lotus grows in ponds.

The blue lotus is blue.

The psilocybin mushrooms turn blue.

The mushrooms are golden in color.

Gold and blue colors are sacred in Egyptology, and

Asian Egyptian culture.

So, now I was not the first person to discover this.

Actually, I saw this from an article that was published by Azim Abdel, a friend of mine, a mycologist in Egypt, who presented it at a conference.

How long ago was this?

This was, well, this is over 2,000 years of age.

No, no, I mean when they bring

this when they brought this to the 2016.

That's kind of crazy, isn't it?

It is.

And then

Kalindi, the great Kalindi from Detroit, he unfortunately died of COVID.

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

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

But

this is taxonomically

accurate for growing Seloseby cubensis and grows on cow dung.

Cow goes to the ponds.

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

Now

this temple is now, they get less than one millimeter of rain a year.

And the Nile used to be flooding all the time.

It was the breadbasket of the world.

But they built the dams, and you know, and so the clutching.

And so the climate change.

So the modern Egyptologists have no reference.

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.

So, they become rare, they become scarce, and the generational knowledge is lost.

But now there's a real big re-indigenization movement in Egypt combining the blue lotus with slash ecumensis.

What is the psychedelic compound in the blue lotus?

You know,

that's a debatable thing.

There's a really complex chemistry there.

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

There seems to be an entourage effect of multiple multiple agents.

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.

And I think that as an admixture with sulcibin makes a lot of sense.

Are contemporary people taking blue lotus?

Yes.

Really?

Yes.

Is there like a community of people?

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

So I put out there a reward of $1,000 for anyone who could find DNA of sul-civin mushrooms in any of the wells or ancient ponds, used to be ponds, in the Egypt area.

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

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.

This makes a lot of sense.

It does make a lot of sense and if you've got it on the these hieroglyphs

and they were known as the flesh of the gods which is the very same name when translated for tea nanacato

from mesoamerica they salt cyber mushrooms were known salaspe mexicana as flesh of the gods so it's interesting in both sides of the world they had the same interpretation mushrooms were not allowed

back in this time to be picked by commoners.

They were only reserved for the royalty.

Oh, boy.

Doesn't it always work out that way?

Yeah, it seems to.

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.

It's a very different halo.

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.

But the ancient depictions of them weren't that.

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

I didn't know that.

You didn't know that?

No, come on.

I'm teaching you this.

Come on.

Jamie will pull up these images.

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.

The modern halo being this like circle.

This is not a circle.

It's a circle, but it's a mushroom.

It's essentially they're explaining that these godly holy people were under the influence of psilocybin.

I think.

What we can do not just me.

What What we can't prove some of these ideas today.

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

Which totally makes sense.

It makes sense.

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

And it's profound.

It's profound.

You got any of those images?

What's coming up really is us talking talking about it before and a bunch of pictures of mushrooms.

I was trying to find out.

There's some better ones.

I know, but it's not.

I didn't get them.

You can't find them.

I wasn't getting them.

Man, the government's pulled them off the internet, man.

That's not one.

The ones that I've seen are far clearer than that.

I'll just show you there.

Yes.

Those ones are.

Look at that one, which is crazy that you have to find out.

You have to go to us.

That's

I can see the one on the left.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

I mean, that essentially looks exactly like that.

I've never seen that.

That's crazy that you can't find that anymore.

And we clearly found it in the past because we talked about it.

Well, that may be the effect of Joe Rogan, right?

You could just overwhelm the entire internet with images.

I mean, look at the bottom of that one in particular, the one in the center.

I mean, that looks exactly like that halo.

Yeah, that's not an.

Which totally makes sense.

Look at that.

Okay, there's one.

Look at that image.

Yeah.

So this is the old school halo.

The old school halo clearly looks like the bottom of the line.

I'm blown away.

You're blown away.

Hiding in plain sight.

I can't believe that I'm teaching you this.

I can't believe you.

How come nobody told you this?

I don't know.

You said you knew Jack.

You knew Jack when he was alive.

This was like his primary concern towards the end of his life.

He was working on a book.

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, you know, and

that's the other thing that I think psilocybin

has really informed me is that Joe Rogan and Paul Stammons are talking.

Jamie is there.

But we have such a thin slice of reality.

And when you're on psilocybin,

the unanimity of universal consciousness to be involved in something you realize is so large.

Did you see the galactic images from the Rubin telescope that came out yesterday?

No, I did not.

Millions and millions of new galaxies.

Literally, millions of new galaxies.

I think 2,100 new asteroids in near-Earth orbit.

Oh, fun.

Oh, fun.

Well, there's already 900,000 of them.

Yeah.

So there's, but this just happened.

Wow.

But this is.

Yeah.

How many of those

are tripping bulbs?

Just got released the largest telescope in the world, and there are millions of galaxies.

Millions of galaxies.

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.

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.

And I'm

an assembly of molecules, so are you.

We didn't exist before we were born.

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

And this is part of the continuum of existence.

We all exist all the time forever.

Forever.

Can I ask you this?

What do you think happens to consciousness?

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.

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.

My mother was a charismatic Christian.

What is a charismatic Christian?

Well, she's an evangelical.

She speaks in tongues.

She was

a leader.

She was very much into this.

Like, mom, really?

Different side of her.

But we had an interesting conversation.

I said, Mom, you believe God is omnipotent, right?

She goes, absolutely.

I said, you believe God is all-knowledgeable?

She goes, absolutely.

You believe that humans are fallible and we're not all-knowledgeable?

She goes, yep, I do.

I said, Then can you accept the fact that our concept of God is inferior

to God's definition by your own thinking, that no matter how we think of God, we'll be inferior to the enormity of the concept.

So, and she admitted that.

So, we're fallible.

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

So, this brings me to a subject I really want to talk to you about.

Okay.

And that is artificial intelligence.

And I know you've spent a lot of time on this, but

I want to introduce a new concept.

Okay.

I'm a deadhead.

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Never tell.

I went to the sphere.

No?

I bet it was amazing.

It was incredible.

The visuals were insane.

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So there is,

I bought, there's something called Postcards from Earth, and I'd heard a lot about it.

It's in a matinee in the afternoon before the big concerts, and it's great flying through around the Earth through the old growth forests and volcanoes.

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

So I thought, oh, this is my opportunity.

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

I mean, these are top nerds.

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

But I'm greatly honored.

So I posited the question then.

AI may never be able to write an algorithm for random acts of kindness.

And then I'm thinking back, my life, maybe yours, maybe Jamie's, maybe most of these people out there, you are here today because of random acts of kindness.

Your great-grandfather, great-grandmother, your father, your grandfather, grandmother, is 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.

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.

I think that's why many many if not most people their lineages can be traced to a random act of kindness

so then i went to las vegas went to the sphere i had this idea guys you know i can ask this robot so i asked this robot what robot it was a i i think it was a chat gpt run but i'm i'm not sure that was at the sphere at the sphere okay there's the robot i talked to oh that's so creepy look at that face

oh my god it's so creepy okay very creepy so i asked the the robot.

Look at that robot.

That's so creepy.

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?

Good question.

The robot took an unusually long time to answer.

It was like a very long time.

And the robot came back going, why would humans do that?

It's far more efficient to have a return on your investment transactionally.

Why would it's inefficient to have random acts of kindness?

Boom.

Blew me away.

Did you film any of this?

Yeah, we did film this.

A friend of mine has a film of it.

I didn't need to see that.

And then.

That robot needs to be shut off.

No, about five days ago, I asked ChatGPT, a Grok, Gemini, the same question.

And now it was greatly nuanced.

Well, random acts of condus can

help the community with goodwill, and this can

help the community because

it's more sustainable, et cetera.

So this is what I want to do.

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.

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?

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

And so when I asked this question again, it was like, it was more nuanced.

It was like, oh, artificial intelligence.

That's how large language models work, right?

The more input they get.

More inputs of

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.

You could drive by.

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

You could keep on driving.

Those are random acts of kindness.

My life is successful because of random acts of kindness.

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.

I met at this last conference, I met two students from the Harvard Business School.

They said, they want to interview me.

And I go, I want to interview you.

And they said, why?

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

He goes, no.

Well, they should.

Yeah, business school is just teaching you how to make some money.

But isn't this important, Joe?

We can inform artificial intelligence how to be better to keep human

community and psychology and to propel the best of the human species.

And I think we have this opportunity.

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 a wire, many of us are here, if not the majority, going back in your lineage,

many generations.

We gave birth to artificial intelligence.

I don't think artificial intelligence is properly named.

I think it's a form of natural intelligence.

We just have have re-amplified it exponentially.

What do you think artificial intelligence means in terms of the future of the human race?

Well, that's a great question, too, because about the 10 people who asked this robot

questions, they were all data mining.

Who was the best baseball player in history?

And he hit the most home runs.

And it was also like data mining.

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.

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

They actually don't have that spark of creativity.

They can assemble data.

But actually, the true creative spirit is not something that AI has currently achieved.

I met another,

you know, this guy's a total genius.

And many, I've heard this, other people say this, you know, we're not likely to have biological aliens, we're likely to have robots, 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.

So that's logical.

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.

Yeah, for sure.

So I think we have an opportunity here.

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.

In what way?

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.

But

I think that we're Neanderthals with nuclear weapons.

When I met another

person, he's a Mensa person funded, you know, by a tech company, 19-year-old Chinese guy, and he said, I said, what's the scariest thing about artificial intelligence?

Oh, he says, I'll tell you my scariest thing.

I just wrote a paper on this.

Autonomous weapons.

Autonomous weapons.

You have a million people,

you assemble a million experts,

and you blackmail them.

I catch you watching porn, I catch you masturbating, I catch you having an affair, and you have a million people sending components for a weapon to one location, and you blackmail them, and you assemble

a biological weapon or something like that.

So I don't want to go there.

This is something that I,

you know, it's never as bad as you fear, and it's never as good as you hope.

So interesting.

I think that we're at that nexus point

and the Joe Rogan experience can be pivotal, I think, in steering artificial intelligence to be the best that it can be ethically.

And I think we have that opportunity right now.

I think the real fear among people that are cynical about artificial intelligence is that it's going to replace us and it will find us irrelevant, and that we're creating a digital life.

We're essentially assembling it with all the knowledge of the human human race, all the understanding of how human beings interact with each other and how we interface with the world.

And we're creating something that has

when you think about computing intelligence, when you think about acquisition of data, the ability to form

an understanding of any subject, we're basically there already.

And that's just accelerating.

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

You know, we were already in a situation where by most people's understanding,

it would pass the Turing test.

There's a sense of

nostalgia in a sense that's even building today of the times that have passed.

Yeah.

And I don't think it's all doom and gloom.

I don't think so.

I think we can steer this.

Well, I think we're always steering it.

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

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

I think we have always realized there's this battle of good and evil in us, and

part of it comes rather from how we originated.

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

So we've unfortunately got this intense history of chaos and of savagery that we're trying to move past.

Right.

Slowly but surely over time.

And I think a catalyst for this is psychedelics.

I think so too.

I think psilocybin mushrooms are unique because it democratizes the access to psilocybin.

MDMA, you can't grow in your closet.

You know, psilocybin mushrooms, you know, there's no economic

barrier on psilocybin mushrooms.

It's available for the poorest of the poor.

They just fucked everything up in 1970, didn't they?

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.

Did you know the LD50 lethal dose of psilocybin mushrooms is 42 pounds?

Yeah, that's a lot.

42 pounds.

And that only kills half the people.

Only kills half the people.

You diet them indigestion.

That's for psilocybin.

It dies diarrhea.

Imagine a diarrhea you get eating 42 pounds of mushrooms.

That's good.

It's the least toxic, one of the least toxic medicines ever

found in nature.

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

I don't think psilocybin mushrooms or psilocybin is good for people

who are psychotic.

Right.

I think there are the groups of people.

We do need psilocybin or psychological assisted therapy.

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

Yeah.

That's really important.

I think so too.

I think that's part of the that's probably 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.

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.

And you just met my partner, Dr.

Pam Crisco.

She is part of a group called Roots to Thrive in Canada.

And they have Canadian health approval for high doses of psilocybin.

Interestingly, we just

published a paper on pure psilocybin versus the mushroom psilocybin with patients who have taken both.

I'll talk about that in a second.

These are end-of-life patients, typically with stage four diagnoses, oftentimes cancer, and they're just existentially disturbed.

I'm going to die and leave my family.

What are they going to do?

Lots of

heartbreaking

thoughts, etc.

They do a long preparatory period together as a group.

They have a commonality that they all have terminal illnesses and terminal diagnoses.

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

But this always brings me to tears.

They're doing it on Indigenous land with Indigenous elders also participating.

So,

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 has left off, you hit an hour, you thought it would really get high, an hour, hour and a half, you're peaking.

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

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.

The impact of that Indigenous wisdom to help these terminal patients was so impactful.

And this is where I think this is a great opportunity.

And then the common theme is that those patients became the counselors to their families.

They went back and saying, it's okay, I'm dying.

I'll be okay.

You'll be okay.

And the families are going, WTF, what is going on here?

And this happens with law enforcement, this happens with PTSD and soldiers, this happening with terminal cancer patients, is we all are going to die.

That is a fact.

To be able to come,

you know, into

peace to the fact

that your mortality is near.

When you're 20 years old, you don't really think about this.

But when you get older and older, I'm 69 turning on 70.

I feel like I'm 35, but that's not true.

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

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

I'm part of the continuum of existence.

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.

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

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

That's the great question of all time.

But I think even the construct of the question is confined by the limitation of our ability to

construct that question.

I think we're maybe asking the wrong question.

I think

the purpose of our being is a tautology.

We are being here because we are.

And I don't think there is, I mean, again, look at the Ruben telescope images.

I have a friend, a dear friend.

It's incredible.

Millions of galaxies.

When you see the enormity of the universe,

I mean, I can't wait to fly.

I want my molecules and atoms to fly through space.

Oh, boy.

I would love to see the rings of so many planets.

I'd love to see supernova.

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

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Can't do anything about it.

Yeah.

Have you paid attention to the James Webb telescope discoveries?

Yep.

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.

It's an order of magnitude higher.

They can do the entire

visible universe, I think, in about three days.

That took otherwise months to do.

The assembly and AI is helping, of course.

I think

near-Earth asteroids...

This is an impactful discovery, literally.

I always worry about an asteroid coming from behind the sun, you know?

And then how many...

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

That's the proliferation, for instance, of psilocybin.

I fund a lot of different things.

Pensperming.

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.

And the results, instant molecular genetic clock data, there's variability of a few million years in interpretation.

But the arrival of psilocybin in the fungal genome is about 65 million years ago.

Whoa.

Wow.

Right.

That's interesting.

After the asteroid impact.

Now, is association causation?

Not necessarily, but probably makes sense.

There is a new asteroid.

Look at there goes.

This video on the New York Times article.

I don't know how to control the video, so I know.

There are three different asteroids.

There are six, nine asteroids.

It's showing here these discoveries, and here in a second,

it'll show you that, like, how in the timeline of the discoveries, it'll show like one day that right here, I think it is.

They'll discover like 800 or 900 in the first day.

Oh, boy.

Like, four or five hundred more the next day.

A couple hundred more the next day.

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

It gives you like a perspective.

So this is like 10 days in.

Whoa.

And then it zooms out here again further.

Oh, no.

So they discovered 2,000 asteroids in that tiny little sliver right there.

I haven't seen this.

Oh, boy.

Whoever made that video, that's awesome.

Jamie, you're the master of discovering these things.

I mean, what should people, when they want to...

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

And they're keeping much of this undercover, so to speak.

The scientists are very disciplined.

They're only letting a little bit out at a time.

Keep people from freaking out?

Well, not like that.

They're trying to be good scientists.

They're trying to assemble the data in a fashion that

they don't have to redefine later.

So

just in the past.

Well, it's been online, I think, for a few months.

The data is just being revealed now.

Wow.

But I think...

3.2 billion pixel camera.

It's the largest ever created.

And five years from now you'll have that on your phone.

I mean, maybe.

I was wondering what kind of lens they made to go on it, but I couldn't.

Wow.

Look at that thing.

That's insane.

And if they had that telescope out in space, they wouldn't have the interference of our atmosphere.

But how will you get that thing?

What kind of a rocket would you know?

Go back to those images.

This is Astronomy 101.

I'm not telling you anything you don't know necessarily.

But all those stars, all those galaxies are in the past,

hundreds of millions of years ago.

We're just a coincidence of seeing them right now.

Right, because the light has just reached us.

Was it just reaching us?

So

that's what's so fascinating to me.

This is a snapshot of multiple histories converging to one point of view.

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.

See, when I trip on psilocybin, this is what I love doing.

trying to comprehend the enormity and the beauty of the universe.

I believe the universe is full of love.

I think that

we're built on relationships

and when you have relationships, when you have a quorum of individuals that are sharing assets,

you know, you build a community.

Well, you certainly see that with human beings.

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

Like what is life for them?

Should we be

so naive to think that it went along the exact same linear path as biological life on Earth or is it completely unrecognizable and when you know we're dealing with intelligent life from other planets maybe they'd be so intelligent that they wouldn't travel and maybe they don't need to and maybe they're also dealing with solar systems that you know we have

as a result of multiple impacts including the creation of earth itself right there was earth and there was earth too we were hit by another planet they think that's what created the moon like all that stuff leaves debris it's all flying Debris fields.

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

Absolutely.

Never made it.

That's our protector.

Yep, absolutely correct.

We would have never made it to 2025.

We would have been dust a long time ago.

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

Right.

And now from Chernobyl, we know that fungi can use radioactivity

as an energy source.

We have methane-based organisms.

Yeah, isn't that crazy?

Methane-based organisms.

I believe matter begets life.

Life becomes single cells.

Single cells form chains.

They branch.

Networks form.

And within these networks are associations of members that exchange resources.

I don't believe that

evolution is based on the survival of the fittest.

I believe

evolution is based on the extension of generosity beyond that of your own needs to build a community of

reciprocity.

Certainly human evolution.

I think it's happening all over.

It's happening with tigers and gizzards.

I think absolutely.

You know, we're animals.

New news.

New news.

We're animals.

For sure, but they're not very generous.

They're just trying to eat and survive.

There's a great

on Chile, there's a great footage.

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

You may have seen this.

And after they were satiated, these orcas would take the pups.

and they push them up on shore to save them.

Just to save them.

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.

Yeah.

Which is probably where they should be killing people.

Yeah, I just met a herpetologist, and I raised snapping turtles when I was a kid.

So I have the turtle necklace.

I was a very shy boy with a profound stuttering habit.

But my friends are wild snapping turtles.

And this herpetologist, he goes, well, I had snapping turtles.

They're really mean.

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

I go, no shit, Sherlock.

You know, I had wild snapping turtles in a pond, and I went down there.

I fed them celery and lettuces when I'm eight years old.

I had them for about seven years.

I grew up with successive families.

And at first, they would try to bite me and things like that.

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.

They would try like, I want the carrot from Paul.

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

And so

I was just reflecting on this yesterday, one one of my fondest memories when I'd walk towards the pond and boop, they'd pop up.

Oh, Paul's here.

Paul's here.

Oh, that's so cool.

Yeah, so snapping turtles are an amazing ability.

They can snap flies out of the air.

Oh, they're so fast.

They're so fast.

I saw this video of one eating a fish.

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

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

Oh my gosh.

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

There's so much sea life there.

British Columbia is just full of sea life.

Oh it certainly is.

It is amazing.

Incredible place.

Yeah,

I love it.

I love it being there.

So,

you know, this is a beautiful planet.

Where we live, there's no garbage.

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

There's no garbage anywhere.

Not in this along the ditches, anywhere.

It's because the ethos of that community is to take care of the ecosystem.

That's beautiful.

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

Of like-minded people.

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.

It's just, it is what it is, keep moving.

Or India.

I'm just

heart-torn by India.

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

China, as well.

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.

And these factories whose back of the factory opens to this river, and this river is completely choked with plastic and garbage and just junk.

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

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.

I'm just adding to whatever's there.

This is just what we do.

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

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

But there are communities that are examples of doing it right.

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

I wanted to talk to you about something that you said earlier because you were talking about human species and

species and love and cooperation and all the different things.

And I said,

uniquely with us, yes, love and random acts of kindness and community are incredibly important.

But what do you think?

Why do you think we're so different than all the other species on the planet?

And do you think that psilocybin, like, do you subscribe to McKenna's theory?

I know we've probably talked about this before, but

as a standalone podcast, this is probably a lot of people.

This is what I like.

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

It just keeps on getting better.

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

That is incredible.

It docks with a

5-HT2A receptor that serotonin uses, but psilocybin

also docks with Track B receptors that lead to proliferation of neurons.

There's neurogeneration, neuroregeneration, neurogenesis, and neuroplasticity.

Those are four distinct areas, and psilicin does all of those.

Not as much in neurogenesis, but we have done pleuropotent stem cells of humans, dosed them with silicin in the laboratory.

We have a DEA license, I have a DEA license, very, very strictly controlled, but we can actually see the proliferation of neurons compared to controls.

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.

Yeah.

Is that be more circumspect?

Because what Dennis and Terrence McKenna postulated, you know, and I disagree with lots of Terrence's ideas, time wave zero was my

total bullshit.

But Terrence and I were very good friends, and we laughed a lot.

And that's right, that spirit of camaraderie, where you can criticize someone and laugh at the same time,

that's a higher level of intelligence.

Well, that's also what happens when you abandon the ego, right?

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

I think psilocybin is an Einstein molecule.

I think the tryptamines in general are Einstein molecules.

The work by Gold Doldn

is just fantastic, also associated with Johns Hopkins, The critical window.

And this is why ibogaine has gotten such traction.

The critical window with ibogaine is a long window where you're able to

repattern your behavior to break addiction.

With psilocybin, there's a critical window.

DMT is very, very short because of the

short period.

The critical window typically is

at the peak of the experience, and just as you're over the hump, you know, going down.

But one patient described it very, very well,

who was an addict.

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.

Yeah.

And then after the psilocybin, it's like someone groomed the landscape, the hill.

And they're free.

And they were free to

go elsewhere.

And then Josh Siegel this past year

from Washington University published a study that specifically showed in real time neuroite, dendritic branchings of neurons under the influence of psilocybin in real time.

Psilocybin, which becomes psilocin, what docks with your receptors.

Psilocybin is stable.

Psilicin is not.

Psilocybin dephosphorylates into psilocin.

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

And this is mind-boggling.

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

We all suffer from neurodegeneration that's age-related.

Besides Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia that are toxin or disease-related,

self-disease, you could argue, age being one.

But neurodegeneration is a fact of life as we age, and neuropathies occur.

And the neuropathies from the constriction of the peripheral nervous system, vasoconstriction, etc.,

psilocyn is not only anti-inflammatory, but neurogenerative.

And to have this coupled together, I think that the neurotropic vitamins of psilocybin, you know, as a daily consumable, is something that has a great future potential.

Of course, we need to study this.

But long-term clinical studies are inherently very expensive.

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.

I think that we're beginning to see, now we think about 8 million Americans consumed psilocybin in 2023, according to the RAND report.

What was the reduction in crime?

with those 8 million people.

If we could have studied that.

And there are retroactive studies, you know, analyses that show a reduction of crime associated with psilocybin use.

But in real time, that's something I'm excited about.

Could you reduce crime rates?

And moreover, when you're immunologically,

when you're depressed emotionally, you're immunologically depressed.

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

So the community immunity from psilocybin, I think, is a huge potential.

It's a crossover directly between your mental, your neuroescape, and your immunological state.

Unquestionably, right?

The diminishing of stress.

And this is why clinical students.

And

a clinical study just came out, Compass Pathways did treatment-resistant depression.

Later analysis that came back out showed modest increase or decrease in depression.

But they were working on treatment-resistant depression.

And, you know, congratulations for them for putting the money, the money where their mouth is and doing the study.

But treatment-resistant depression is the failure of two antidepressant drugs and therapy.

But major depressive disorder is a much bigger bucket.

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.

But the idea of titrating psilocybin or psilocybin, 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.

In the act of taking it again, you're re-remembering, and then you can nurture these neurons.

I think psilocybin could be nutrients for the neurons.

Well, let's, in an 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.

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

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.

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, and that this is probably how language formed among humans.

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 two million years doubled in size, which is pretty phenomenal.

Yeah, 200,000 years.

It increased massively.

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So 2 million years

on the outer limits, 200,000 in the inner limits.

So in the inner limits, what was the amount of growth?

It wasn't 2,000 years.

I think it was 40,000, 50%,

something substantial.

200,000 years, 50%.

And what time period was this?

Well, 200,000 years ago.

200,000 years ago.

Oh, so the jump.

But like, Homo sapiens in this form have existed more than 200,000 years, though, right?

No.

No.

No.

Homo sapiens are relatively recent.

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

But

from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens was a radical jump that was fairly recent.

So

2% of the impression was more than 300,000 years ago.

It could be 200,000, it could be 400,000.

But it's, you know, we are, our enlargement of our brain is relatively recent.

And to give more context,

Dennis McKenna and I were just together.

I love that, dude.

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

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

You know, like Terence had a great way of talking.

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

Dennis is

a scientist, and his brother

was a philosopher.

And the Dennis

McKenna Academy is a non-profit.

I'm just promoting it just because I think they do really, really good work.

But

this is, you know,

the 23 primates eat mushrooms.

Almost all mushrooms have maggots in them.

Most primates eat maggots.

So finding the mushrooms for maggots, for food, for protein, two things can be true.

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

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

We can debate this in the past, but we can test this.

It's a testable hypothesis.

It's a theory now.

It's not a hypothesis.

We know that psilocybin stimulates neuron proliferation.

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

We now have the evidence for it now.

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.

How did they come up with that?

Because they were tripping on mushrooms.

Yeah.

Exactly.

That's why scientists using psychedelics is a quantum leap.

You know, it's how PCR was invented for

Kerry Mullis had a trip on LSD.

Crick DNA and Stephen Jobs.

Silicon Valley is fueled by psychedelic thinkers who are becoming more creative.

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

I couldn't agree more.

And I think we can

This combines psychedelics with AI.

We have an opportunity for a quantum leap in the evolution of of the human species.

Would you mind explaining Time Wave Zero?

Because we kind of glossed over that, too.

Hey, hey, hey, big thing.

Such a skeptic.

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

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

I don't know how he could do it.

But TimeWave Zero, and I'm sorry for those people who are Time Wave Zero experts.

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.

Would attract novelty.

Would attract novelty and episodic events that changed the course of human history.

Right.

He didn't have the birth of Jesus Christ as a significant event.

He was sort of anti-Christian.

I said, Terrence, I don't care if you're Christian or not.

The birth of Jesus Christ was a huge friggin' phenomenon.

It changed the course of history.

And then he had

Time Wave Zero would end on December 12th, 2012.

And that's what he predicted.

December 21st, 2020.

Yeah, December 21st, 2012.

And that didn't happen either.

He used to have a license plate that said 12, 21, 12.

Yeah.

So, but, you know, what I like about Terrence, 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.

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

Right.

Don't have the fear of failure inhibit your creativity.

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

And

especially with they step outside the lines and they propose something that's novel, they get attacked.

This Time Wave Zero thing, like you used to be able to get it.

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

Yeah, and that's the thing.

I talked to Terrence.

I go, well,

what happens when, you know, that's like the birth agenda.

Why did you come up with that concept?

Did you ask him about that?

No, I never figured it out.

He goes, well, just adapt the algorithm.

I said, okay, then it's not really...

It's just something that's constantly adapting itself.

So anyhow,

it's a thought experiment.

And obviously, I wish he was alive.

On December 21st, 2012, I'd be like, end?

And

what?

But maybe we're wrong.

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

I doubt it about that.

But this is what I'm getting to.

One of the things that did happen in that timeframe is the ubiquitous use of social media.

It kind of started peaking around 2012.

I think there is a real problem with that, with the human race.

And I don't necessarily think we recognize things that are constant.

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.

But before that time, you know, when you get to like 2000,

you know, just go to 2000.

People weren't carrying their phones around, staring at them all day.

This is a profound change in how we interface with the world.

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

Oh, boy.

Because too many people are walking out into the street.

Just standing there staring at them.

They're so addictive.

It's so crazy that we have

anything that's that addictive can't be good for you.

I don't care if you're getting information all day long.

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

So it changes the perspective.

Tremendous amounts of clickbait.

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

That's their job, unfortunately.

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

And so they have these crazy headlines.

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

Yes.

And I think we need to disengage with these things that are clickbait.

Just don't click on them.

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

That's the whole business model.

Just don't engage with them.

And we need to teach people that.

Like, this is an important thing.

Don't engage with something that's trying to manipulate you.

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

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.

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

Exactly.

As Michael Pollen likes to say.

But it is a good business model for overall human compassion and growth in a community.

And then, of course, medium and micro-dosing.

Really

popular practice right now, increasingly popular, is a high dose of psilocybin once a year, and then dosing just before you go to sleep

or a medium dose like the museum dose museum dose I like it

you guys are such here's a jafucker mushroom head that you have like museum doses

this is a movie dose this is a concert dose the museum

dose Graham Hancock and I and and

and and and

and some friends went to a museum in the British Museum and

but anyhow the museum dosers just tend to, you can notice them because they wear sunglasses inside, because otherwise their pupils are.

Right, so they're just trying to keep it together.

Keep it together.

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

That's when your body and your brain is regenerating.

So that is really, really interesting is taking those.

Well, that makes sense.

Especially from like an anti-aging protocol for the mind.

And it's also safer.

Yeah.

Right?

Right.

You're in bed.

You're not going anywhere.

You're not going anywhere.

Yeah.

You're not traveling tractor.

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.

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.

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.

And I think it's a good thing.

But the problem with universal basic income is that

just giving people a check, they don't have they don't have meaning anymore.

They don't feel like they have a purpose.

They don't feel like they have an identity.

You know, if you're your whole life, you've been, you know, X, whatever the job is, that gets taken away and you're recognized for 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.

He's the best.

He'll take care of it.

He knows what he's doing.

Then all of a sudden, that job disappears.

How do people find value and how do they switch their perspective?

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, 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, but instead

maybe psilocybin would allow people to completely change their perspective of how they exist in this world.

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.

It's all this digital money that's somewhere.

Maybe psilocybin would be the best answer for how do people make this transition and reacquire a a sense of meaning?

Right.

I mean, do you want to spend your whole life on an assembly line?

Right.

Do you want to be out more in nature with your children?

Right.

That's why I think nature-relatedness

is a mental health advantage.

You know, the more that we can relate to nature

and literally kind of go back to our roots, you know, re-engaging nature, I think this is.

And then that would give you a sense of purpose.

Purpose.

And also protection

of the mothership.

But we've gotten so accustomed to this idea that your purpose is to make money, your purpose is to make a living.

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's it overwhelms our day-to-day existence.

It doesn't have to, though.

You know, but we 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, covers your food, covers your rent, covers everything.

You don't need to make money anymore because everything is automated, everything is cheap, AI controls it all.

So

what was Bernie's answer to that?

He didn't have one.

Yeah, he didn't know.

But I don't know if Bernie's had any experiences in that regard.

And he didn't have that perspective.

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, but it doesn't have to be negative.

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.

And if they were having these experiences, they could be the only ones.

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.

And I think it's very important that they hear this, that you realize 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.

If psilocybin increases creativity, creativity increases happiness, and happiness upregulates the immunity of the community.

Yeah.

It's hard to be a dictator.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dictators want people in constant conflict fighting against each other and you know and they take advantage of it.

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.

Maybe

this is the opportunity

to be able to groom the landscape and to find new ways of living and behaving.

It might be the only way.

It might be the only way we can get through this.

Because if you think about what this problem is, the problem is

the way we interface with reality.

That's really what it is.

If 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, that's how you interface with reality most of your life.

And then all of a sudden you're met with this profound technological change that's going to eliminate your job.

There needs to be some sort of a profound experience that reintegrates you with the mother.

Let's you know, like,

this is something people made.

This is something that people made, and most of the people that made it weren't having psychedelic experiences.

And they're building cities, and they're building skyscrapers, and they're polluting the river, and they're doing all this stuff.

And it doesn't mean that this is how we're supposed to do it.

Exactly.

And I think, again, I want to reiterate, I think we have a crisis in creativity.

I think psilocybin and these other psychedelics stimulate creativity.

No doubt.

Look at Alex and Allison Gray's work.

I mean, some of the best psychedelic artists in the world.

And the nicest people.

The nicest people.

Alex is like, like, he's a role model for

being just a kind, nice, sweet person.

And Alex gave me some of the best advice I've ever received.

And

give Alex Gray total credit for this.

And I asked him, you know, like, this is my eighth book.

Oh, my God, it's so much work to write a book.

I didn't use any AI writing this book.

I wrote the whole thing myself.

And I asked Alex, you know, you're so prolific.

How do you do it?

He goes, I had one realization.

Every day I go up to that canvas with my brush and I commit to making one stroke.

And then three, four hours later, he's still at the canvas.

It's that,

which is just

that tipping point, right?

Yeah, calling the muse.

Yeah, just doing it.

Pressfield talked about that in the War of Art.

Have you read that book?

No, no.

I've got copies of it.

He sent me a whole box because back in Los Angeles, I used to keep stack of them on the table and hand them out to people.

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.

But if you could just commit, and he calls it the muse.

He like and many, many creative people over time have called upon the muse and this concept.

And it sounds like Airy Fairy to a lot of people.

But if you believe in it and if you

actually do that thing where you call upon the muse, it actually works.

So, whether or not it's real is irrelevant.

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I have 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?

She saw me

working on the book for two and a half years, and I said, oh, more than 500 hours.

She goes, 500 hours?

It's just so much discipline.

And if any writers of books, any

people who built a house, if you comprehended the enormity of the project, you probably wouldn't even start, right?

Yeah, I can't think like that.

So you just got to think about the process.

The process.

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.

But I had this little voice saying, work on the book, Paul.

Work on the book.

Work on the book.

Work on the book.

Work on the book.

Work on the book.

I could say work on the book so fast because I have reiterated it in my head hundreds of times that it became sort of my muse.

It became sort of a fun muse.

I think we all have these little voices that kind of, you know, says, you know, get it right, Stanlets, you know, wake up.

I think so, too.

And I think that's good.

I don't think that's, you know, psychosis.

I think that's something that we all have, these little voices that are trying to help us to be better.

Yeah, whether it's internal or external, whatever it is, you can have a voice.

It's like working out.

The discipline of being able to

make sure that you're the best that you can be.

So

it's a very exciting time that we live in.

There's a mushroom revolution happening all over the planet.

I think there's a psychedelic revolution that's happening all over the planet.

I think it's happened over the last 20 years, and I think it's happened because of the Internet.

I think that's a big factor, because what they did in the 1970s by 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.

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.

It's just not true.

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.

This just is, we were trapped.

We were trapped in this system.

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.

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.

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.

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 to control consciousness.

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.

Now with iNaturalist and everything that you can do, it's just getting people out in nature with their children.

Children are closer to the ground so they find more mushrooms.

They're away from the business and their parents and the phones,

some phones.

But you get them involved and

interacting with nature.

It's like the telescope and seeing all the galaxies.

I think interacting with nature is a vitamin.

I think it's just, it's like, you know how we get vitamin D from the sun?

I think we get something that hasn't been measured yet from interacting with nature.

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.

You know, and I think it's a real thing.

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.

And it was always a thing of the left.

It was always a thing of hippies.

And it was dismissed by people on the right as people that were trying to avoid reality.

They were trying to, you know, escape reality.

They couldn't handle reality.

They weren't disciplined.

They weren't, you know, if they were hardworking people, they wouldn't be wasting their time getting high on drugs.

There's that thought.

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.

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.

So the initiative passed, which is huge.

It's huge.

It's a promising step in the direction of understanding that a lot of the division that we have in this country is artificial.

It's manufactured.

It is.

Out of the blue, a country music singer, which I had no idea who she was, Casey Musgraves.

She's superstar in country music.

I'm out of the loop.

She reached out to me, and she had a psilocybin experience that inspired her.

She has an album called Deeper Well that's just amazing.

I was not into country music until I listened to her and she reached out to me because of her psilocybin experience

and we rented, we decided to do Sing for Science.

We sold out the Ryman Theater in Nashville in three hours.

Oh, wow.

2,500 people.

These are country music people.

2,500 people three hours.

Unfortunately, she was in Mexico.

She fell and she broke a rib, so we had had to cancel the concert until September 18th or the Sing for Science.

But that's just an example.

Yeah, well, I think my friend Sturgil Simpson sort of opened up the door for psychedelics and trench music with turtles all the way down.

Yep.

You know, he basically wrote a song about God and psychedelics.

That was a country song.

And everybody's like, hey, what the hell's going on?

It's funny because psychedelics build bridges that marijuana doesn't.

I met a lot of people who would never smoke a joint, but the idea of doing a slow-side mushroom sounded like fun to them.

Right.

Well, marijuana is also associated with lazy people and ne'er-do-wells and stinky people with bad ideas, you know.

Unfortunately, and I think, you know, look,

there's a...

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.

A lot of people using psychedelics for athletic performance.

Oh yeah, well I know a bunch of people who have fought on mushrooms.

I have a friend who was a world-class kickboxer who had some of his greatest performances while he was fighting on mushrooms.

And he said he could see what the guy was going to do before he did it.

Yeah.

This is the indigenous use of salsa to see into the future.

That's one of the advantages I think I've had also.

Being able to prognosticate into the future.

There's a there We had this extraordinary individual

told me a story, which I think I have have right, but I want to share it with you.

There's a game that's very common, even in the Philippines, but in Canada, it's a German game eventually.

And the idea is you put nails on a block of wood and you use an ice pick.

And you have to hammer the nail in with one hit.

And each time in a bar or a party or whatever, people throw down money, $5, $20, et cetera.

A nail on an ice pick.

So you have the point of the ice pick.

You got to hit that nail at the very point.

Sink it.

And sink it all the way into the wood.

So, of course, you go around, people are drinking, etc.

So, the story, as I remember him telling me, is that he went to the bathroom.

He's not a toker, he doesn't smoke pot, but someone said, Hey, you want some mushrooms?

And they're playing this game, and there was a bunch of his friends were gathered, and he goes, Oh, sure, I'll try some mushrooms.

So, he ate some mushrooms, and he came back and he's the circle of there, and people are betting, hey, come over and join us, join us, you know.

And he watched for a while, never had played this game, and then he started getting higher and higher.

And they said, come on, it's your turn.

So he kind of looked at the nail.

I mean, this is really hard to do.

He looked at the nail and looked at the nail and focused on it.

He said he had such clarity of focus that everything else was blanked out.

He looked at the nail and he just thought they would connect.

Rather than hitting it, they would just connect.

Bam!

Slammed the nail down on the first attempt.

People went, whoa, incredible.

So they put down, each person put down more money going around.

So they came around, everyone's missing, everyone missing.

Some people occasionally hit it a little bit, you know, but came around, came around to him.

Now he's getting higher on the motions, right?

And he's looking at it, looking at it, and he goes,

bam, slams it again.

People going, no way, right?

This is impossible, right?

So now, you know, there's a lot of money being piled up on the table here.

They're coming around, and everyone's going, impossible, not going to happen.

Can't do it a third time in a row looked at it laser focused

bam slammed it again now people are losing their shit right they're like what is going on here i decided he said really to fuck with one guy who was just out of his mind that he could do this three times in a row he went around again and this time he says i'm going to really blow his mind so he focused on the nail focused on the nail had the hammer looked at him bam slammed it again while he's looking at nailed it yeah literally nailed it

So these examples of.

Well, that brings you to the Stone Dape theory.

Well, that's part of the concept.

Well, kind of the concept is with an intense focus.

Right.

You know, and many years

I have two black belts.

I had schools for 30 years, black belt in Taekwondo and Huangdo.

I was in Shotokan Shiru,

Goju-Ryu,

and then Taekwondo and then Huarongdo, which is like Hapikido.

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.

And I had my first black belt, and

my head instructor was over there

talking at someone, and then he had a baseball.

And I heard later what he said.

He goes, I told my friend, watch this.

And he threw a baseball at me.

My peripheral vision, boom.

I just caught the baseball

just before it hit my head.

But that idea of having that consciousness surrounding, that's why athleticism with medium doses, minor doses of sul-cybin, I think you can train your neurons to be able to have this peripheral awareness that's extremely important.

It also alleviates the anxiety that comes before performance.

Because a lot of people like to use it before sparring because sparring is kind of scary for some people.

Yeah, but let's be clear, this is like the 80-20 principle, maybe the 90-10 principle.

It's not going to work for the majority of people.

There are exceptional individuals who can actually benefit from this.

So we're not resting.

I'm not a disclaimer.

Yeah, no, no, no, no, no disclaimer there.

I don't want to make.

No, none of the people.

I drove this race car.

Listen, don't take any of our advice.

No.

But we're just talking about these things because there are anecdotal stories that they're fascinating.

And anecdotal stories are like case studies in medicine.

You get enough of them that you want to test this.

Again, this is a testable hypothesis or theory in modern times.

Right.

Eye-hand coordination.

You know, so psychomotor enhancement.

You know, and this is why when, you know, the stamina stack

speaks to this.

We published in Nature scientific reports and a combination of psilocybin, niacin, and lionzamane increased psychomotor ability of tapping.

in 10 seconds from 46 to 66 taps.

That's a lot.

That's a lot in 10 seconds over 30 days.

So people can argue about it, but the results are the results.

You know, when you're talking about depression and anxiety, that's subjective.

But I'm really interested in the psychomotor benefits of psilocybin with an admixture to enhance

its performance.

I think the root thing is psilocybin.

And being able to regenerate neurons is something I think is really important for us.

Now, with glioblastoma,

which unfortunately Terrence did die from that, that's the uncontrolled proliferation of neurons in the brain.

Yeah, sure, there's contraindications.

Do you think there's something that's connected to that?

No, no, I personally don't.

No.

Why not?

Just because

I don't have evidence to the contrary.

I don't have evidence that also suggests that.

I see no correlation.

N of one is not, you know, it's, again, there's no.

Well, because it's not a common thing amongst people that are using psilocybin.

But if you had 8 million people in the United States, you know, conducing psilocybin, again, you have a data set.

Right.

So it's not like cigarettes, right?

We see cigarettes, we know you smoke cigarettes, there's a higher likelihood that you're going to get lung cancer.

It's very clear.

So we've known that over time.

The problem with psilocybin is it's been so taboo, and so we don't have real data.

We don't have, you know.

There's 235 clinical studies on psilocybin at clinicaltrials.gov right now.

Isn't that amazing?

235.

Could you have imagined that 25 years ago?

No, there was none.

Impossible.

Yeah, none.

And therefore, many indications, many different targets from addiction, cigarettes, alcohol, opioid use, to dementia, to Parkinson's, to Alzheimer's, et cetera.

So there's, you know, I think psilocybin has a PR problem.

It sounds too good to be true.

But

sometimes things can be true that have, but the reason why I think that there's 235 clinical studies is because basically it's improving your neuroscape.

You're improving the neurology.

Everything that we're using right now is based on our health of our nervous system.

And the neuroscape, if we can enrich the neuroscape, then that has elaborations into everything that we do.

And the fact is 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.

There's anti-inflammatory properties.

Silicon has strong anti-inflammatory properties.

That's wrong.

So that just has come out in the scientific literature.

But I wasn't aware of that.

Yeah.

That's really interesting.

How did they study that?

And what was the

something called interleukin-6.

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,

an inflammatory cytokine.

There's two anti-inflammatory cytokines that are extraordinarily interesting to us and our research team.

I have five PhD scientists, eight full-time scientists.

That's why I created my business is to do research.

But interleukin 10 and interleukin-1RA

are anti-inflammatory cytokines.

So when you can upregulate those, then it kind of buffers the inflammatory effects.

And so that's exciting to find these anti-inflammatory.

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.

So as a peer-reviewed article, when

you know, the pandemic started, the big concern was if you stimulate the immune system, you could have a 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 the immune system uh to to COVID and to other diseases.

So we were able to show you can augment in the literature uh

uh uh your immune system buffered with the anti-inflammatory uh properties.

And that that could sort of resolve the argument of the of the cytokine storm concern.

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.

Six months later.

That's mushroom that you gave me.

Yeah, you still have that.

Yeah, it's for sure.

That's a trophy.

Yeah, oh, it's never leaving the desk.

That sucker.

This is a great example because

this is an endangered species in Europe.

It's on the red list of extinction.

In Europe, it is?

In Europe, these are growth rings.

So, this one's probably 25 years age.

This is a very nice specimen.

Stamus gave you this.

Yes, Stamus.

You gave me this.

One of the nicest specimens.

So, these are annual growth rings.

Isn't it cool to see it on the desk?

I love it.

Thank you.

People always ask, what the hell is that?

So, this is a garacon called Fomitopsis officialis, also known as Larissophomies.

Dioscorides first described it in Greek medicine 2,000 years ago as Elixirium adlongum vitam, the elixir of long life.

If someone someone took a little piece of that and put it in the ground, would it start making new agaricones?

If it had spores,

it looks like it goes inside the roots of trees, this one being as old as it is,

its spores have probably become not viable.

But Agaricon has the white form and the brown form.

It goes through this massive transition as biochemistry.

And because it's endangered and because it's highly variable in form, fruit body extracts of this makes no sense.

Why is it endangered in Europe and not in America?

It only grows in old-growth forests.

So, the Sky Islands in Europe, in Austria, Slovenia,

is where this still can be found on larch trees.

We now have, I think, 115 strains of agericon, by far the largest library in the world.

If you ask me what is my most valuable possession, it's my strain library of agaricon.

It's a treasure of strains.

One out of 20, one out of 100 times in the old growth forest will I find one.

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.

And then I take a small piece of tissue.

It's the mycelium that is bioactive for the immune system.

And this is what we found: that it's scalable.

The mycelium is scalable, the fruit body extracts are not, and it's highly variable.

Most people don't know that, well, they shouldn't know, but most mushrooms are parasitized by insects.

And that's because the insects spread spores.

So the mushrooms invite insects to come in, so it can spread spores.

Like cordyceps and ants.

Yeah, or like buzz pollination.

That's the weirdest thing when you see spiders and ants overwhelmed by cordyceps.

Yeah, it's I like to say cordyceps has to eat too.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, this is the cycle of life, right?

So this Agaricon is

in the BioShield Biodefense Program.

Which, by the way, this is your company, Host Defense.

You have great stuff, man.

I buy your stuff.

Thank you.

You gave me a bunch of it, but I buy it.

Well, thank you for your support.

We need it.

I mean, I'm the only company that does research that I know of.

I spend over a million dollars a year in fundamental research, thinking outside of the box.

Even though traditional Chinese medicine is fantastic and has thousands of years of history, all traditional medicines advance with new technologies.

That's true across the board.

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.

This is a game changer.

So 115 strains of agaricon, I submitted eight of them to the Bioshield Biodefense Program after a 9-11, 2004.

My TED talk talks about this.

And I found two or three strains highly active against smallpox and also against bird flu.

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 Secrets, saying that, whoops, these are some of the most significant results they've ever seen.

Wow.

Two million samples submitted were in the top 10, the only natural product.

Now, that's in vitro.

So that in vitro, this is sort of a timeline.

And you don't have Boy with a Microphone, do you, Jamie?

What is that?

You didn't see it?

Okay.

Was it boy with a microphone?

It's a 42-second clip we found in the vault.

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.

Research is what we want to do.

Truly, that's the origins of what I was trying to, why I created my business.

So I still do that.

So with the 115 strains, we're likely to have a super strain in our collection.

Pandemics are coming all the time.

We're in a viral storm.

This is a bird flu pandemic where many of us are so surprised that it has not happened at a bigger level.

But viral pandemics are also affecting other animals besides birds and pigs.

67% of beehives were lost in Montana this past year.

67%.

Imagine if you had 67% loss of a herd of cattle or sheep.

That's phenomenal.

And bird flu is spreading.

It's making the jumps.

It is coming, folks.

And so what we want to do is design a clinical study using a Garacon to test it against bird flu.

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 the deer population.

And even some other animals like moose and ethnicity.

We're embedded into a mycelial landscape.

Mycelium is everywhere.

The interactions of mycelium and animals, you know, is elaborate, complex.

This is crazy, and if anyone out here can prove me wrong, please send me the reference.

But it appears I'm the first person to realize that bees go to rotted logs with mycelium for immunological benefit.

Really?

First person.

How is that possible?

We all grew up with Winnie the Pooh.

I mean, this is mind-boggling.

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 clops being vectored primarily by mites.

This past year, they identified the miticide-resistant mites, which most all of them are now, are vectors of the deformed wing virus.

Colony colops is a threat to food biosecurity, and we found, and we published this in Nature Scientific Reports, extract of polyporum mushroom mycelium protects bees from viruses.

We published that in Nature Scientific Reports.

I'm the primary author.

We were able to reduce viruses, the deformed wing virus, by I think 879 times in 12 days with one treatment.

So that is phenomenal for protecting food biosecurity.

That helps all farmers.

It helps, and there's a pandemic that's spreading, 67% lost, 60% lost generally across the United States this year.

The worst colony collapse in history.

This will make food prices go up, and it doesn't stop because these viruses are proliferating throughout the environment.

We found that the pulpuro mushroom mycelium, grown grown on grain or grown on sawdust, not only reduces these viruses, but extends longevity.

And so the longevity, and interesting, this mushroom is known as Elixirium ad longum vitamin, the elixir of long life.

We are all animals, bees are animals, birds are animals, pigs are animals, humans are animals.

We are all, I think, going to have an immunological benefit from

incorporating these fungi.

Now,

we're allowed by the FDA to say supporting

innate immunity in healthy individuals.

We're not allowed to make any disease claims.

Ironically, we can't make that same claim with bees.

We can say extends longevity, but this is where there's not common sense in government.

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.

Oh, reduce viruses in bees.

You have an antiviral drug.

What is that?

No, we haven't been able to find an antiviral drug.

We think it's an entourage effect, an upreggling

basic immunity.

And then your endogenous immune system, in this case of the bees, can fight the viruses.

And this, I think, will translate into birds, into swine.

So there's resistance to these results?

No.

Because your immunity is so.

No, no, no, I mean publicly.

Like you're saying

you can't make these claims, but if you have results.

We have fantastic results.

I refer anyone to

nature scientific reports.

So could you elaborate on what the resistance is?

Well, the resistance is

complicated and it's political.

The old school conventional wisdom is that if you have a drug-like effect, then you have an undeclared drug in your product.

Isn't that funny?

Yeah.

Even though it's from nature, even though bees go to rotted logs for immune benefit, and now there's five or six papers have been published on this after my discovery, showing that bees are doing this, their bees are actually benefiting from mushroom mycelium.

So

we're working with Washington State University, great people there.

We're working with several funders.

We have tested this now over and over again.

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.

Clearly, clearly a benefit.

So this is scalable.

You can't harvest fruit bodies in a way that you can scale mycelium.

Mycelium is an exponential increase in mycelial mass virtually every week.

It's 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 or even 10 times 100 times 100 times 100.

Massively scalable.

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.

Your endogenous immune systems are upregulated because over hundreds of millions of years, we've been interacting with these.

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.

So now we're trying to navigate through the regulatory landscape.

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, humans can say honey.

If we use our product, they could say we have an undisclosed drug in the honey.

So whatever.

But it also translates to wild bees.

It turns out that Apis melephra, the honey bee, with the viruses, when they have the viruses, they go to flowers frequented by bumblebees.

So colony collapse is happening not only with the cultivated honey bee, but it's spread to other bees.

This is an ecological catastrophe of a viral pandemic that's spreading around the world.

We have the solution right now.

It's highly scalable.

And this regulatory committee disappeared in the past two years.

This is before the last administration was voted in.

But they didn't tell anybody.

So we had an application with them for two years to have this exempted.

The whole committee is gone.

The whole committee is gone.

And they didn't even tell us that it was gone.

So we went two years spinning our thumbs waiting for them to respond.

This is where we need to have common sense to come back into government.

This is where our government has too many hurdles to practical solutions that are demonstratable, scalable, and affordable, that can the return on the investment is massive, and yet we fear the FDA.

We fear the USDA because they are stuck in a rut, literally.

Maybe they could use psilocybin here to expand their horizons because they want to know the mode of action, the mechanism of action.

Well, we didn't know the mechanism of action of aspirin until the 1970s, but it had a benefit.

If it has a clear benefit and does not cause harm, then they should be exempted for scalability.

Now, there's another factor to this, which is wonderful.

There's a new startup company called Quorum by my friend Chris Ketchowitz.

Disclosure, you know, I'm involved with them, but they have a metarisium, a fungus that kills mites.

So it's also been approved by the USDA for thrips and other greenhouse insects.

It's not toxic to fish, not toxic to humans.

So the combination of using metarisium with the

agaricon and other polypore mushroom mycelium, we think has a great potential future.

So

I think there's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional agricultural practices.

There's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional medical practices.

They are not necessarily an opposition.

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.

There is money in disease.

Right.

That's always the problem.

Money.

You can tell I'm passionate about this because I have such a deliverable, provable solution that's scalable.

I wonder if.

And I'm so, my article was published in 2018.

And I tell my research team, you know, WTF, we are meeting with WSU constantly.

And now we have renewed interest, thankfully, because of some big stakeholders in the almond industry.

And every almond you eat was visited, a flower was visited by a bee.

So the almond industry is in crisis right now.

But it's not almonds, it's apples, it's cherries.

It's across the board right now.

Agriculture is being severely affected by these viral pandemics.

And these same viral pandemics are mitigated, I believe, in commonality with these polypore mushrooms that grow in the woods.

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.

We had the

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 about 10 years ago.

They were euthanizing millions and millions of chickens and turkeys and ducks.

You can look this up.

There was an organic farm, and we gave one quarter of a gram of Garrickon mycelium per chicken in their feed.

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.

Those chickens were immune from bird flu.

Wow.

A quarter of a gram of those mycelium.

Wow.

And we protected them.

That's incredible.

But a crazy thing happened.

The USDA had an insurance policy to pay the chicken growers.

And the chicken growers quickly learned that they could get an insurance check, lay off the employees, get the cash for lost profits.

And so they were not incentivized.

Yeah, I've heard that from people that are deeply connected to that industry, that there was a bunch of euthanizations.

It didn't have to happen.

It didn't have to happen.

Yeah, and they did it.

And they inflated this whole concept, you know, because the numbers got grossly inflated because they were euthanizing chickens for profit.

Yeah, bird flu is a very serious,

serious issue.

Now,

I know vaccines are a very hot subject, and I know you've spoken on that.

You've had some excellent guests, by the way.

Excellent guests or researchers on this.

But I just want to give

a thoughtful discussion

between viruses and vaccines,

which is worse, the virus or the vaccine.

I'm a libertarian.

I believe every family, every individual has a right to make an informed decision.

The problem that I see with the vaccine industry, the industrial vaccine

complex, is the failure to disclose.

I don't think Americans are stupid.

I think Americans become stupid stupid when they're not informed.

My partner as a physician, she goes, giving Hep B vaccines to a child makes no sense.

It's a sexually transmitted disease.

Why are you giving a vaccine to a 10-year-old?

Right.

And a baby.

And a baby.

And in med school, when anyone would mention that, why are we doing this?

They were vilified.

Right.

Vilified, shut down.

It's like, what happened to thoughtful, good science?

It's just a reasonable question.

Money happened.

It's also these vaccine manufacturers are immune to the financial consequences of the side effects.

Absolutely.

We need to have full disclosure.

Now, let me go through a thought experiment.

Okay.

Listen, this is my opinion.

Other people may just visually disagree with me, but let's do it.

There's two thought experiments I want to do.

First one.

A million lives were saved with a vaccine.

One person dies.

Hey, you took it for the home teen.

Sorry.

One person dies out of thousand.

Still ratio is pretty good.

My mind, my judgment, sorry, again, you took it for the home team.

One out of ten thousand, hmm, okay.

Still the ratio is pretty good, okay.

One out of a thousand,

okay, one out of hundred, you're making me nervous, one out of ten, no, that's where I draw the line.

I would say, forget it.

That's now

the 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 if you are going to make that decision you should have an informed decision based on the best of science all vaccines and all companies should disclose what is the percentage of protection.

I have a physician friend who says 30% protection, but I'm sick for four or five days.

I don't know, that's not worth it.

70%

protection?

Okay, all right.

So everyone has to balance the risk-benefit ratio.

But we need real data to be able to do that.

We need real data.

We need full disclosure.

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.

What happened with good science?

You have to follow the science.

And this is so important.

And that's why I think we get in this cacophony, this echo chamber, where the voices that are the loudest tend to be the stupidest sometimes.

Or the most compromised.

Yeah, and they drown out a dissent.

We all should be able to ask for the data and the information to make an individual decision.

And science shouldn't be this ideological or ideologically captured thing.

That's why I hate the term anti-vaxxers.

I think it's a pejorative term.

I think it's prejudiced.

You know, what about people who just want to have information?

Oh, you're an anti-vaxxer.

Yeah, well, it's pushed just to scare people into compliance.

That's the whole idea.

Having these pejoratives and you throw them around and no one wants to be labeled that.

And so you immediately get scared.

But enhancing innate immunity and healthy individuals to keep us healthy.

Yeah.

How do about that?

That's better.

Exactly.

Well, that's the other problem that I had with the pandemic in general, is that metabolic health was never discussed.

It was always there's only one way out of this.

And having conversations with people that you could see, like visually look at them as not a metabolically healthy person.

And these people are telling you the only way to health is through a medicine that they are financially incentivized to push.

That's just crazy.

And when those are the prominent voices that are on television and the media, and you're getting getting this from politicians, 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.

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?

Age-related, all these other factors.

The data is there.

Not making that data available to the public increases distrust.

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.

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 that had gotten vaccine injured, that that was not the cause cause of it.

And those are the people that were very skeptical and they'd formed these tight communities, but they were very scared to be open and public about it because they were destroyed.

You know, I famously remember Jenny McCarthy coming out and saying that she believes her child was vaccine injured.

And the backlash was spectacular.

Essentially destroyed her career.

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.

I mean, this is where you need to have high population studies, but those studies are available.

Why are they cloaked in secrecy and why are they not made a lot?

It's money.

Yeah.

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.

They spend $8 billion.

The pharmaceutical drug industry spends $8 billion

just on advertising and on propaganda every year.

That's so much money.

And they spend so much money on television networks.

You know, I mean, how many times is Anderson Cooper brought to you by Pfizer?

You see these ads and that shapes the narrative, unfortunately.

It does.

But

let me

just be clear from my point of view, vaccines have done a lot of benefit, but they don't benefit everyone all the time.

Not all vaccines are the same.

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.

Yeah, 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.

And then there are vaccines that are beneficial.

Let's find out which ones they are.

Which one, 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?

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.

Yeah, one of the immunologists we were working with told me something I didn't know is that when you're immunocompromised or an immunodepressed, vaccines don't work very well.

So

those people become reservoirs for mutation.

Right, which is the the argument for why you don't give it to children when they're babies because their immune system isn't even functional yet.

Yeah, I'm, you know, I, again, the HEP B one is a pretty clear example.

That's a nutty one.

Yeah.

There's a bunch of nutty ones, but the point is the vaccine schedule.

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.

And they start adding things like Hep B.

And then you realize like, oh, it's very profitable to do that.

Imagine how much more money you make if you're injecting everybody with a Hep B vaccine if you sell Hep B vaccines.

Yes.

Just simple mathematics.

I also have met people in the pharma industry who are extremely well-intended.

Sure.

Great scientists.

Oh, but scientists aren't the issue.

They've also confessed to me that they face this humiliation, you know, of being ostracized for just asking questions.

But

again, full disclosure, let people make up their own minds.

What's the cost-benefit ratio?

Is it one out of a million, one out of ten?

Well, you know, it's also,

you should have to show all the studies, too.

You shouldn't just show the curated studies that you generated specifically with a goal of making an efficacy, like having a result that shows that this is effective.

If you do 10 studies, you should show all 10 studies.

Yeah, well, actually, that's why clinicaltrials.gov exists.

Right.

Is that we're cherry-picking, doing studies in Bulgaria and India and Taiwan, and the pharma would choose the clinical study that supported their nervous system.

Exactly, exactly.

And then they could use deceptive language to show the efficacy.

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.

And say when you activate the receptors in your immune system, that's something beneficial, I believe there's crosstalk between the receptors.

The receptors are like, oh, something really good is coming down the pipe, and they start

creating an entourage effect at the collaboration.

More receptors are activated that have collaterally more benefits.

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.

And then conventional medicine can work better.

But using conventional medicine on an immunocompromised individual asking their immune system to respond is an uphill battle.

Right.

Yeah.

It's interesting, too, that like natural remedies are automatically dismissed by people that think of themselves as intelligent, science-based people.

Well, look at artemisicin.

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 rest of the world.

The majority of them.

And the most recent example is the anti-malarial drug against Plasmodium falciparum from an artemisia

bush, and it's artemisicin.

And it came from

Artemisia.

It's a plant extract.

Isn't that wild?

And yet, science-based people will automatically dismiss what you would call a natural remedy, even though all of them.

Every kind of look, nothing exists on Earth that's not really natural.

Ultimately, I'm agreeing with human nature.

I'm in agreement with you.

I think that we're just reinventing molecules that have been assembled somewhere else.

And we think it's, that's why the synthetic biologists, I'm honored to get that reward.

Thank you, Syn BioBeto Conference.

That's what I think really kind of flipped them on their heads.

Don't go down the rabbit hole of excluding natural products, thinking you can invent a molecule that's going to be better.

In the theater of evolution, we've tested these natural products over tens of millions of years, literally, our our primate ancestors.

And so we've got a pretty good experiential data set there to be able to see what works and what doesn't.

Many mushrooms, you know, not many, but some mushrooms are poisonous, you know,

some are edible.

It's a weird statistic about,

and again, 1 to 2% fudge factor here, so please don't attack me all over the place.

But there's 1.5 to 5 million species of fungi.

It's about 150,000 species of mushrooms that are estimated.

So out of that 5 million on the extreme, 1.5 million, less than 10%, 150,000, we've only identified about 15,000 species.

So we've only identified 10% of the mushrooms that exist today.

Wow.

Interestingly,

of those 15,000 species, about 1% are poisonous, 1 or 2%.

1 or 2% are psychoactive, and 1 to 2% are good edibles.

So 97%, 95%, 94%, whatever the math shows, are there, but they're not toxic.

But mushrooms are molecular wizards.

These are pharmaceutical factories that are creating huge numbers.

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.

Why is that?

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 life cycle to produce a fruit body.

And then lions-main mushrooms rot in four days.

The mycelium that grew it could exist for years.

The mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom, and as a result, we have a lot more compounds being expressed.

Now, some people say, well, not all those compounds are necessarily beneficial.

Aha.

Well, that's true, but now we've tested them enough that we can see real world benefit.

Dean Ornish just published a study this past year on Alzheimer's using lifestyle adjustments, exercise, meditation, vitamins, and lion's mane mushroom mycelium.

Dramatically significant benefit in slowing down the progression of Alzheimer's through lifestyle vitamins and using lion's mane mushroom mycelium.

Now, which did what?

Yes, you can try to analyze that, but you'd have to separate every single little component to to see which one's the most significant.

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?

We have to, at some point, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

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?

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?

We're cross-purposes.

This is where science needs to have common sense, and the government and the regulatory industry needs to have common sense.

And we get that by exemptions, emergency exemptions.

And we should get that for emergency exemptions right now.

We are on a bee apocalypse.

We are, folks, 67% of beehives lost in Montana.

What if that was a human population?

Right.

All hands on deck.

Right.

So it is, and there is a transference of viruses between animal species.

We're seeing that in real time.

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.

You could have individuals, and when you have so many dairy farmer workers exposed, so many people on contact,

concentrated clusters of animals in farms, you have so many potential patient zeros.

A patient zero is a person who is the nexus for spreading a mutated form of a virus.

Horizontal gene transfer is happening all the time now.

Now it's concentrated, it's accelerating.

It's an exponential increase of risk.

Bill Gates has talked about this.

Many other researchers have talked about this.

This is really something we should pay attention to.

And I think the simplest, easiest, scalable way is to enhance immunity in healthy individuals.

And by doing so, I think you can let your endogenous immune system work better.

And I think conventional medicine will work better also in concert.

Well, it also speaks to the problem with industrial agriculture in general, right?

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.

And regenerative agriculture enhances the possibility of

harmony amongst nature.

And then the counter argument is that we have better nutrition, we can feed the world, so the people are more people happier.

You know, again, we're at this, we have a contrast of opposites.

And I wish I had the easy solution.

I think I have the solution for bees.

I think it's scalable for protecting chickens and livestock.

I hope, you know, and we're now designing clinical studies on the path to lining clinical studies with bird flu using a Garacon.

We don't have the results, so I'm not making a medical claim here.

But the evidence so far is so encouraging, 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.

They thought, ah, fungi, fungi could help us

protect ourselves against viruses.

So they came through the back door of the scientific community, not a Joe Rogan listener.

They might be, I don't know, maybe they are now.

But they came to me through the scientific literature saying, we should try this with people.

So those are the scientists I like that are open-minded enough that rather than being just a molecular geneticist, you know, synthetic bio people, they're actually saying, well, it's a provable result.

We don't know why, but we should explore this because we can argue for 100 years about why.

Or we could deliver it tomorrow and have a positive effect.

Yeah, it makes sense.

I have to ask you this question.

It's unrelated, but I always wanted to know.

Why do morel mushrooms grow around burns?

That is such a great question.

And you know what?

That's the question that we've been asking for so long.

I love morel mushrooms.

I love morel mushrooms, too.

You know, they are poisonous.

Unless you cook them.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh, boy, that's important.

Many people have died from morel mushrooms.

Wow, that's crazy.

You don't want to cook morel mushrooms in a closed kitchen without ventilation.

There are volatile compounds coming out of the morels, totally denatured in cooking, delicious.

But many, many examples of this.

In Japan, I was in Japan, you know, 15 years ago.

So, if you don't have an overhead fan, don't fry morels in your face.

Oh, yes, you open up the window, but just don't inhale the fumes.

Wow.

The North American Mycological Association is the association for Canada, Mexico, the United States, and there's a poisoning control group in that, and they collect all the details.

It's namico.org, n-a-m-y-c-o.org.

And they're the go-to place.

Ironically, because of HIPAA roles,

the mycologists have been disconnected from the patients in the medical community because now there is a firewall between them.

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.

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.

So morels are delicious.

But to answer your question,

morel mycelium seems to be everywhere.

Then for horse burns, and they come up.

Right.

Where were they before?

Right.

Do they exist in places that don't have burns?

Yes.

But rarely.

No.

We think all the time.

All the time.

We think the most.

They're very common amongst burns.

They're everywhere where forests are.

Right.

And when the forests burn, it knocks down all the competition.

And it becomes very alkaline.

And the absence of organic material and competitors, competitor fungi, the change in the pH.

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 sinful, they attract animals, they attract insects, and birds come in, drop seeds, and then they become an oasis point for the regeneration of an ecosystem.

Never underestimate the intelligence of nature.

And nature has figured this out.

Nature does not exist in a vacuum.

There's always these repopulation vectors happening, and it's collaborative.

It's not competitive.

There is competition between the fungi, but when the competitors are knocked down, the numerals come up.

come up.

That's fascinating.

Another fascinating thing is that the largest living organism on Earth in the Pacific Northwest.

Yeah, Armalaria astoii.

Yeah.

Some people call it Gallica, two different things.

But yeah, I flew over it.

It's a 2,200 acre,

you know, basically a clear cut because it killed all the trees.

In my book, Mycelium Running, I have the best photographs of the largest organism in the world.

And I hired an airplane, and first time I couldn't see it because I was too low.

Second time, I had a spiral up.

Can you explain what it is to people?

It's a honey mushroom.

It's a parasite on trees.

It's edible.

The honey mushrooms on hardwoods tend to taste better, but this one is on conifers.

And it comes up in clusters.

It forms black rhizomorphs, black myceliums called laminated root rot.

Many listeners here know what that is.

It kills fruit trees.

But this is a marauding parasite that created a contiguous mat over 2,200 acres.

And in this case, it killed all the trees so they went ashen gray in color, and they dried out and they're dead.

Because of fire hazard from lightning strikes, the Forest Service came in and they cut all the dead trees.

And they created this beautiful outline of the largest mycelial mat in the world because you could see where the dead trees were.

Can we see what that looks like in the image?

I'm trying to find a good picture.

It's also in mycelium running.

So,

but anyhow, that's an example.

Now,

oh, it killed the trees, that's terrible, but it created

grasslands for ungolates.

Right.

So deer and moose, elk can come in.

So it's a way of,

I think it's a way of this rebalancing of nature.

Right.

You're dealing with millions and millions of acres.

Millions and millions of acres.

There is a real big problem with

the bark beetle right now.

You know, that's a problem.

It's the ecosystems are shifting in response to stress.

And,

you know,

with our mind's view of only one lifetime, we're very myopic.

I think we need to look out of the thousand-year-old.

I mean, what is the lens of time that we actually look at ecosystems?

What's the right lens to use?

Depends upon your vested interests, you know, as a human, as a deer, as an ecosystem.

They could be very different.

Right.

It's just such a fascinating thing that the largest known organism on Earth

exists in the Pacific Northwest.

It has one cell wall thick.

That's so nuts.

Think about its immune system.

You know what I found out recently that I had no idea?

Aspen trees, when you see aspen trees, it's one plant.

Yeah, it's one contiguous thing.

They're the two competitors for that title, by the way.

Isn't that nuts?

Yeah, they're the two competitors.

When you see these, I always thought when you see aspen forests that it's a bunch of different individual aspen trees.

Nope.

No, you know, there's all sorts of amazing discoveries.

Here's one that blows my mind.

And I had to write it down because it's a new species.

There is a fungus that's related to aragon.

It's in the Clavicipataceae.

And it was found by a student at Western Virginia University.

It is in morning glory seeds.

It produces LSD.

Well, Terrence talked about that.

No, this is before Terrence.

Terrence talked about

morning glory seeds and having psychedelic experiences.

It turns out it's a symbiotic fungus that's growing in there.

And

it's called Paraglamdula clandestina.

What a great name, clandestina, the clandestine.

Don't they do something to commercial morning glory seeds to make sure that people don't trip on them?

I don't know.

I think they do.

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.

Well, if they sterilized them and used a fungicide, that would make sense.

But a graduate student, I need to give her credit, is at Western Virginia University, Corine Hazel.

Daniel Pennyon, yes.

There it is.

Look how young she is.

Very young.

She made a discovery heretofore unknown to science, and not only produces these LC compounds, it is a symbiotic fungus helping the morning glory survive.

Amazing.

Think about every young person out there, the field of mycology is underfunded, understudied,

underreported, underutilized.

This is a fantastic treasure trove of new potential discoveries.

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.

It's that big.

No, I couldn't agree with you more.

You're aware of Brian Merarescu, right?

That was one of the more fascinating things that they found in those, when they studied those vases, that they found ergot in them

from uh the illusinian mysteries has brian tripped yet i don't know you have to ask him

i love it when scientists and researchers don't admit that they've tripped

but i can i don't know if it's a non-admission i think in his case he wanted to be objective so he wanted to study these things without um

he's worried about being labeled as someone who's promoting them because they like it well an extreme example but it has some merit I mean, would you rather be taught by an airline pilot that has experience or someone who just read a book?

So the late Roland Griffiths, he's a dear friend, Johns Hopkins.

He is credited as being the big pioneer for psilocybin in medical research.

When I asked him, have you tripped on psilocybin,

when I was at his house in the backyard, I said, he just smiled.

He said, I'm not going to answer that question.

Well, then after he died, I met some of his friends

and he goes oh yeah Roland Roland tripped but he didn't want to tell anyone because for the fear that he could lose his objectivity or be criticized yeah he wasman had a an interesting perspective on that too 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 he was very reticent to talk about it and then he sort of came out of the closet on that.

Fully.

And then when I asked Roland's friends, well, where did he like to trip, Trip?

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.

And he said, well, Roland's favorite place to trip was on a mountaintop with three friends with a beautiful view and a fire.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Perfect.

What's the quality of experience?

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.

The Center, the California Institute for Integrative Studies, CIIS,

I think.org or.eu, has a program training psychedelic therapists.

You don't have to be a medical physician to

be able to hold someone's hands to have a guided experience.

Now, there's a lot of charlatans out there.

Be warned,

be warned, folks.

There's a lot of problems.

That is a problem.

But there are some excellent therapists out there.

And for many people who can't get into a clinical study,

be careful.

Consult a qualified medical practitioner.

I'm going to put that on the record.

But a lot of people.

have benefited without having to go through traditional medical

constructs constructs of a hospital to have benefits.

And then they're reluctant to talk about it because of the illegality of it, unfortunately.

And if you have a job that is where you have to be taken seriously.

You could lose your medical license.

But at 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.

And they were spit upon, and they were attacked viciously, physically sometimes, in the hospital.

They had PTSD, but just trying to provide good medical support.

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.

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.

So,

realize aggression and anger affects everyone around you.

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 you know, violent, and all these antisocial behaviors, when they suddenly switch just like that, it's a pebble in the pond of positivity.

A great example: a law enforcement officer by the name of Sarko from Boston just received his religious exemption for using psychedelics.

So he is a police officer, and his chief of police is now retired.

He has been an advocate because he saw Sarko, who experienced all these negative ⁇ you'd love to have him on the show sometime.

He can really speak authoritatively to other law enforcement officers saying, this has helped me.

So I have a law enforcement officer.

I'd love to talk to you.

I'd love to, for you, he's the real deal.

I have a RCMP officer friend in Vancouver who took me to his favorite psilocybin mushroom shop in Vancouver.

I couldn't believe it.

We walked into a psilocybin mushroom shop.

They didn't know who I was, thankfully, and they were selling the stamina stack, which is kind of weird because I had my name on it.

And we walk in there and say, this is where I tell all my law enforcement officers to come to get their psilocybin.

I go, really?

I said, I'm sorry, but I'm trying to juxtaposition this.

How does this work?

And he goes, well, you know, this is good perhaps for ICE also.

He said, you know how

in the United States, law enforcement officers are aggressive and mean.

They tend to intimidate you and, you know, subjugate you?

I said, we found a better way up here, and it's through psilocybin.

I said,

what would you do?

He says, well, we have learned the following.

Now, when I have to arrest somebody, I know they have a warrant out for them.

I walk up to them and I say, and I always walk up with a smile on my face, never a harsh look, always a smile on my face.

I said,

I have good news, I have bad news.

What do you want to hear first?

He said, invariably, everybody wants to say, tell me the good news.

And he goes, the good news is you can finish your cup of coffee.

And I go, okay, what's the bad news?

Dude, I got to arrest you.

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 with the law enforcement officer, I know you're doing your job, but wow, thank you for being so nice arresting me.

He said, it's a game changer.

It's reduced the threat to us physically of making arrests.

It makes sense.

It doesn't escalate.

Yeah, it doesn't escalate.

They de-escalate it.

And he goes, You won't believe the things I learned

from these people you're arresting now,

who tell me things they've never gotten out of an interrogation, but they were so respected.

And the fact that they had to do their job without becoming adversarial.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Note to self, right?

Note to everyone, right?

Note to everyone.

And

all conflicts involve two or more people.

It's not

just this is the only way to react to something.

It's how you react, how they react to your reaction.

There's a cascading effect.

Well,

I have great faith in humanity.

I've seen that

I have seen the best.

I mean, I've seen people.

Most people are great.

Most people are great, and they're better when they go through a soul.

So, I have an experience that amplifies the best of people, and it also helps them resolve a lot of the baggage.

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.

You inadvertently harmed somebody, and you went off the deep end, you harmed somebody else.

It's a cascading event of harm.

And when these people are resolved, going, that was a bad bad chapter in my life.

I had one really bad day, or maybe a series of them, but that does not define me who I am as a person.

I have a better self, and it's now and in the future.

Right.

And it's not in the past.

Yeah, that's the perspective we should all have.

And that's the thing that we should all strive for.

Be the best version of you that you can be.

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.

Well, the medical community has come together on this, on psychedelics.

The law enforcement community has come together.

You know, I...

It's positive.

It's positive.

We're in a positive direction.

I had my interview by the DEA, and they were, I had, I thought they were the boogeyman in the 70s for a good reason, by the way.

But I shouldn't say that.

But

I went through my background check.

And the DEA has such a sense of humor.

It said, okay, Paul, you come out clean.

You don't have a record, everything is fine,

but we have to talk to you about something that happened in 1994 in Des Moines, Washington.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm going,

what happened in 1994 in Des Moines, Washington?

He says, are you sure you don't remember?

And they're role-playing here.

I didn't know it at the time.

I go, no, I don't remember.

I wonder if sometimes people just confess to something because they're fishing.

I said, I have no clue, no clue.

He goes, Are you sure?

I'm in.

This is your official response.

You don't remember?

I said, No, I don't remember.

He says, Didn't you get a speeding ticket?

And I said, I paid that.

It was from those machines.

It was for my camera.

I know I paid it.

I could dig up the receipt.

It was like for 35 bucks.

And, you know, and they just roared with laughter.

They're just fucking with you.

They're fucking with me.

And what they told me is that we don't know shit about mushrooms or psilocybin.

We're an enforcement agency.

Many of us don't agree with this.

Change the law.

We want to go after syndicates.

We want to go after fentanyl.

We want to go after these, you know, these

things that are not beneficial in any way, shape, or form.

We don't want to hurt the source that is healing us.

Right.

But they won't fuck around when it comes to money transactions.

Once you involve money,

then the DEA is going to be involved.

But you're involved in research, and we have strict guidelines.

I had a DEA license in

1975, 1976, 77, 78

through Dr.

Michael Buke at the Evergreen State College, and they were much more liberal.

I could grow tons of psilocybin mushrooms and collect them.

And that's why we did a series of conferences.

I was the only one that had a DEA license.

So we did these conferences collecting all these experts together with Albert Hofmann there, R.

Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans Schultes, Jonathan Ott, Terence McKenna.

But I had the license to be able to possess psilocybin with my professor, and so

we would have all the psilocybin, so we did these educational events, you know, academic with citizen scientists and psychonauts coming together.

What's really different

is we just had the psychedelic science maps conference in Denver, 8,500 people.

Back in the 1970s, at any moment, We were afraid that a SWAT team would break down the doors and arrest everybody.

We existed in a high state of paranoia because that was a war on drugs with Richard Nixon.

And now it's totally different.

Now you have law enforcement officers, you have Rick Perry, you have all these in New Mexico.

They legalize the prescription of psilocybin.

This is a citizens' movement.

It's a democratic movement for the freedom of consciousness, and everyone should have a right to

be able to practice.

And where do you draw individual

from religious use?

Psilocybin mushrooms are very important for my own personal religion.

I feel that this is central to my religious belief.

So I think this is where the government needs to back off.

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

potential for violence.

This is a game changer.

I think we're in the psilocybin revolution, and psilocybin mushrooms are fundamentally different than MDMA.

And Ibogaine, just because Ibogaine is so long and there's heart issues, I just think this is a medicine for our times that can make a paradigm shift for a better society.

I couldn't agree more.

That's a good way to end this.

Thank you, Paul.

Hold your book up there because this is the latest of eight books that you've written.

Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats.

Paul, you're a gem.

You really are.

You're such an important person.

And I think through the conversations that you and I have had, and then you've had it on many other podcasts as well, millions and millions of people have gotten to understand what this is really all about.

And I think your role in educating people is enormous.

But let's be very careful with that.

I'm a one-knowledge keeper, literally in a string of knowledge keepers.

So many people have died, been harmed, and Indigenous people.

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.

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.

I think you're doing just that.

So, thank you.

I appreciate you very much, brother.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye, everybody.