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Paul Stamets is a mycologist and advocate for bioremediation and medicinal fungi. His new book, "Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats: A Guide to the History, Identification, and Use of Psychoactive Fungi," is available now. www.paulstamets.com www.fungi.com
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Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Paul Stamets, Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats: A Guide to the History, Identification, and Use of Psychoactive Fungi
Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
If life wasn't real it'd be the craziest psychedelic trip ever - Joe Rogan
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11 months ago
Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day we up yeah put them headphones on it'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 psilocybe mushrooms are natural habitat 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 a new species was just found so lost to be Maluti but the Bisuthu
and the Suthu and
province have been using and obviously hundreds of years we know this because
they have songs so it's
really interesting when indigenous people have using psilocybe mushrooms and
scientists quote discover
them I 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 three
percent of Americans tripped on psilocybin in 2023 that's only three three
percent as eight million I
know what I would agree with you because how many people would admit it right
right probably under
reporting not 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 Ibogaine initiative and what's
happening with
governor Rick Perry who was former Republican governor of Texas who was all in
on this he's a he's a great
guy I've talked to him backstage a few times and he's the type of person that I
really admire because even
though we may have political differences or different cultural backgrounds
there's we're joined together
with a common purpose of trying to help people yeah well he's not ideologically
ideologically captured like
he realized that he was wrong and then his position on this was based on
ignorance so he educated himself and
completely turned around did a 180 and and now is an advocate and it's helped a
lot of people there's I mean
it's tremendous benefit to veterans and people with PTSD and you know 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 yeah my heart really goes out and this is I'm sort of
low left of 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 two in the morning right and the window the window comes down
and you have two seconds
to make a decision yeah you do that hundreds of times mm-hmm 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 no 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 that's turmoil that stress right the anger that then
can emanate out from your
anger at yourself to other people yeah 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 and 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
excited 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 other
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 your daily
monthly yearly activities
events etc but what about prevention yeah if the return on investment is to
reduce addiction and crime
and all the other collateral damage that's associated with it then it will save
hundreds of billions of
dollars hundreds of billions of dollars yeah psilocybin should be made free I
think you know as a
citizens 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
is a great example
because I remember in the 90s and when we would go to las vegas for the ufc in
the i guess i guess
actually 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 you know like 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 this is we talked about this the
other day the study showed
that amongst young people alcohol consumption is down significantly isn't it
down by like 25 percent
which by the what's that it's down i just don't know the number which by the
way a great thing you
know that's that's a good thing but it's not a good thing for profits and so
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 not 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 and it's
just your brain is just
overrun with this and with firefighters you know they're the oftentimes the
first responders are their first
my partner's a medical doctor in canada but she used to be a firefighter and um
yeah they oftentimes the
police may now show up for 20 minutes and they're there and the things they
witness i mean things that
no 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 two percent 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 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 right
people come together and you know
it's 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 when you find a
chanterelle you find a shaggy mane you find a psilocybin mushroom they're you
know they're that chance
encounter that eureka experience and sharing it then sharing eating the
mushrooms whether edible or
otherwise i mean 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
um but what i really find an extraordinary way of taking the 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's a there is an app that i'm
just in love with called
i naturalist it was stopped by a created by a guy named scott he just gave a
ted talk that was released
yesterday i naturalist 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 i naturalist 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 says yep you have corpranus comedus yep you have belitis edulis 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 it gets kids excited and they and then you can go
to i naturalist right
now and you can look around your house or this place to see the reports of
birds and
mushrooms and things i just wanted our naturalist yesterday and celosia cubensis
the golden tops
grow 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 this whole cyber 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
in mineralogy and ornithology etc they have all these citizen scientists out
there with their phones
and then every year all over the world now there's called uh bio blitzes where
several hundred people
literally come together they'll go into a park they have all their iphones and
droids and they all they
photograph everything and they upload it to i naturalist to look at species
diversity this has
revolutionized the field of biology i think it's revolutionizes bringing
children and young people
back into nature and you then you 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's a blue
mushroom or something like
that so it's um it's inspiring to see the kids get so excited about this and
adults and so this is you
know that's very cool yeah very how many new species get discovered well
thousands every year thousands
every year now really thousands and thousands there's 223 known species of sulciben
mushrooms and about
wow i'd say 10 10 of them in the past two years has come from uh citizen
scientists quote-unquote amateurs
who found it they uploaded it to i naturalist and so if they find a new species
like what how do they
determine what 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 um the psilocybin species
localized in the genus psilocybe which
has has the most psilocybin species we just know from genetic associations of
either 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 written you
know and and it bruises
bluish and has purple brown spores those three things need to be true then 95
probability it's a
psilocybin mushroom what species it is becomes more debatable but psilocybin
mushrooms are very hard
to find with the exception of the golden top and there's number one called pineal
sign essence they're
growing pastures they're easier to find but most of these psilocybin 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
psilocybin seri lippes 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 lots of
psilocybin lippes 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 paulman 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 cell's eye mushroom i go well it's like 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 cell side 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 a common
thing people don't see
morels they find one or two of them suddenly they start to jump out of the
landscape that'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 so but
you you're not saying like that you feel something from them you're 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 mass attack a tradition you
know um in my book i i go
deeply into the mass attack um heritage of using psilocybin mushrooms and um
one of the things it was
really embedded with christianity after the spaniards came 15 16 and 15 19 15
21 they brought in cattle
and um and um and very quickly uh christianity swept through mesoamerica
specifically in mexico and um
there's a a friend of mine um uh who's a who's a phd uh called uh uh joe uh tori
was in oaxaca and just
found a in a church a cross from the 15th century of 1500s i mean and soon
after the conquista with the
conquistadors in spanish arrived and in the center of the cross are psilocybin
mushrooms so 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 here it is thank
you this is uh from um joe latori's uh work look at that that's a basket with
mushrooms with three
mushrooms in the in the basket and there there is philosophy mexicana um and so
the mushrooms are
phenotypically correct but there's clearly a mushrooms in a basket can you can
the other slide
show with the full cross joey i'm not sure did you know jack harer yes when
jack was alive before he
died one of the things that he was working on was a book connecting psilocybin
mushrooms and 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 um this is an example where
there's so many
different you you could have a hundred different potential representations
right they're not all
going to be correct the one but but a few of them are and this example here one
that clearly is and and
and and in the massive uh tradition is called um it's called syncretism when
you have
a foreign influence in this case of 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 massive tech tradition they bled 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 that that that's an example of 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 um and they
adapted but they found that this sort of merging of indigenous uh practices and
knowledge of psilocybin
in christianity was very compatible just was published um i think two weeks ago
at new york
uh university in johns hopkins they had 24 uh clergy from from different faiths
christianity buddhism judaism
and muslims and they had them come in and they did a high doses of psilocybin
and they had one group that had delayed it 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 uh in the top five of the most significant
experiences in their
life so it just i think psilocybin makes nicer people this episode is brought
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off go to on x maps dot com slash joe rogan no i would agree with you on that
the 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 uh by
r gordon wasson shouldn't
say plant yeah in front of you especially thank you very much that that doesn't
look like mushroom
they do look like mushrooms and like i couldn't imagine it being anything else
well i mean here's
an example that basically artists become um authors of field guides and right
you know how much can you
tell to the public without violating your oath of secrecy um and so symbology
but yes there's a cap and
a stem and they come up in clusters um that looks like a psilocybin mushroom
some people will say it's
amnida muscaria because of the dots but those of us who have grown psilocybin
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 um bacillocybin
mushrooms bruised bluish and so this is where we could get lost in a debate of
interpretation but all
these representations are 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 psilocomies not myself but other egyptologists have also published on
this find those jamie
those are fascinating because um 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 they blue lotus i think was one of them the blue lotus is a
water lily the winter
water lilies grow there it is the water lilies grow near ponds that's so really
clearly psilocybin
and this is the uh goddess hathor the goddess of the cow by the way the goddess
of the cow and
that's a vase and anyone who's grown oyster mushrooms or psilocybin mushrooms
know that you can put the
substrate into a vase like that with openings and mushrooms will come out of
the holes and so that natural
culture technique of collecting cow paddy so cows go to ponds to drink the blue
lotus grows in ponds
the blue lotus is blue the cell side mushrooms turn blue the mushrooms are
golden in color gold
and blue colors are sacred in egyptology in 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 uh at a conference and how long ago was
this this was
well this is over 2 000 years of age no no i mean when they 2016 when they
brought this to the 2016.
2016. that's kind of crazy isn't it it is and then um kalindi the great kalindi
from detroit
he unfortunately died of covid um 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 this is taxonomically accurate for growing psilocybe
cubensis and it
grows on cow dung cow goes the ponds if you went to get the water lily you'd
hand it run into this
constantly now this and with the hathor uh uh where 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 a red
basket of the world but they
built the dams and you know and and we shared the flooding and so the climate
change so in 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 uh as the experts
thousands of years ago right
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
psilocybe cubensis what is the psychedelic compound in the blue lotus you know
that's that's 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 agents um so i i can't
really speak authoritative to leave 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 is an admixture with psilocybin makes a lot of sense are
contemporary people taking
blue lotus yes really yes is there like a community of people massive community
but because blue lotus
now has become scarce because ponds are scarce so i put out there a reward of a
thousand dollars for
anyone who could find you know dna of psilocybin mushrooms and 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 right 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 these
hieroglyphs
and they were known as the flesh of the gods which is the very same name and
when translated for tan and
the cattle but from mesoamerica they still have mushrooms were known as lost me
as flesh of the
gods so it's interesting on both sides of the world they have the same
interpretation mushrooms were not
allowed um back in this time to be picked by commoners they're only a reserve
for the royalty oh boy
doesn't it always work out that way yeah it seems to um 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 you know 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 oh come on i'm
teaching you this come
on jamie will pull up these images but these images of christ of uh there's
many different religious
figures um 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
you know i think what
we can't not just me what we can't prove some of these ideas today what we can
prove is like the john
hopkins new york university study that religious belief systems are enhanced
through the use of psilocybin
which totally it makes sense so we we can argue about the past but we can't 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 it's not what's coming up really is us talking
about it before and a bunch
of pictures of mushrooms just trying to find out there's there's some better
ones i know but it's not
i didn't you can't find them i wasn't getting man the government's pulled them
off the internet man
uh that's not one yeah that's that's uh the the ones that i've seen are far
clearer than that um i'll
just show you there yes those like look at that one which is crazy that you
have to well that's
you have to go to us that's see what i google like look at i can see the one on
the left yeah that's
what i'm talking about i mean that that essentially looks exactly like that i've
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 can just overwhelm
the entire internet
with images so i mean look at the bottom of that one in particular the one in
the center yeah i
mean that that looks exactly like that halo yeah that's not it 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 i'm blown away you're blown away hiding in
plain sight right i can't
believe that i'm teaching you this i am i can't believe you who did 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 he was working on a book yeah i mean you
know the limitation of life
unfortunately we have all these great people who pass and when they're at the
at the peak of their
knowledge you know and that's that's the other thing that i think psilocybin
has really informed
me is that joe rogan and paul stamens are talking and jamie is there but we
have such a thin slice of
reality and when you're on psilocybin the the unanimity of universal
consciousness to be involved in
something you realize is so large yeah did you see the the galactic images from
the ruben 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 oh there's
already 900 000 of them yeah so
there's but this has just happened wow but this is yeah wonder how many of
those people out there are
tripping 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 suicide mushrooms is very christ-oriented and then as i
got more and more
into the psilocybin experience i realized that this is it just this concept
that we live in this great
expanse and i'm assemble 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 you think from a mechanical perspective we might be
looking at have the
constructs of consciousness that uh is analogous to the to the model t ford you
know 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
there is a consciousness
that far exceeds that which you can comprehend but my mother was a charismatic
christian and um what is
what is a charismatic well she's evangelical she speaks in tongues she was oh
boy 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 says absolutely you believe that humans are fallible and we're
not all knowledgeable she
and 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
will be inferior to
the enormity of the concept so and she admitted that so but so we're fallible
we we don't have the
capacity to understand the enormity of consciousness in which we are embedded
of which we are a tiny part
of the world we are a tiny part of which we are a tiny part of the world so
this brings me to a subject i
really wanted to talk to you about okay and that is artificial intelligence and
i know you've spent a
lot of time on this but yeah recently i want to introduce a new concept okay
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audio so there is i 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 um 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 sin bio beta
2200 nerdy scientists i mean these are top nerds and i was so surprised that i
got the disruptor award
uh because i'm kind of a natural products kind of guy um but i'm very honored
so i post i posited the
question then will uh ai may never be able to write an algorithm for random
acts of kindness
and i'm thinking back my life maybe yours maybe jamie's maybe most people out
there you're 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 actual kindness was not transactional where you genuinely feel
something for someone not
expecting to have something in return right 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 you know i can ask this robot so i asked this robot
robot it was a i think it
was a chat gpt run but i'm not sure that was atmosphere atmosphere okay there's
a 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 robot
look at that robot that's so creepy i asked the robot given that so many of us
here 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 on 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 had we did film this a
friend of mine has a film
of it and then i need to see that and then that robot needs to be shut off no
about five days ago i asked chat
gpt a grok gemini the same question and now it was greatly nuanced well random
acts of kindness can
help uh help the community with goodwill and this can be you know help the
community because it's you
know it's more sustainable etc so this is the this is what i want to do you
know when 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'll that 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 yeah 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 yeah and you want to pay it
forward i met at this
last conference i met two students from the harvard business school and 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 those no well they should yeah
business school is just
teaching you how to make some money but this is important so we can inform
inform artificial intelligence
how to be better to keep human you know 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
kindness are wired many of us are
here if not the majority going back in your lineage you know many generations
you know we gave birth to
artificial intelligence i don't think artificial intelligence is properly named
i think as a form
of natural intelligence we just have re-amplified it exponentially what do you
think artificial
intelligence means in terms of the the future of the human race well that's a
great question too because
about the 10 people who asked this robot you know questions they were all data
mining who was the best
baseball player in history and you know he hit the most home runs and it was
also like data mining right
so um sam 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 or creativity they can
assemble data but that
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
if 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 um etc etc 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 for sure to pay it forward
yeah for sure so i think we have an opportunity here i and i think we just 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 is ultimately the extinction of the human species which you know
depending on your point of
of view may not be a terrible thing but i 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
he's 19 year old chinese
uh guy and i 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 you know a biological weapon or
something like that so
i don't want to go there this is something that i i you know it's never as bad
as as you fear
and it's never as good as you hope so interesting i 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 will find us
irrelevant and that we're creating a digital life we're essentially assembling
it with every all the
knowledge of the human race all the understanding of how human beings interact
with each other and how
we interface with the world and we're creating something that has when 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 and whatever however you define it you know
we were already in a
situation where by most people's understanding it would pass the turing test
but there's a sense of
you know nostalgia in a sense that's even building today of the times that have
passed yeah of what
you know and i i don't think it's all doom and gloom i do 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
observable religion i think we have always realized there's this battle of good
and evil
in us and a part of it becomes a 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 like 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 uh barrier on psilocybin
mushrooms right it's available for the poorest of the poor they just fucked
everything up in 1970 didn't
they 19 yeah 71 i think 1972 when they put it on schedule one yeah the schedule
one substance is
supposed to be has no medical benefit highly addictive um and um and
potentially a 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 die from indigestion that's for psilocybin
you die of diarrhea
imagine a diarrhea you get eating 42 pounds of mushrooms that's the least toxic
one of the least
toxic medicines ever found in nature but but there's a concern though with
people that have uh problems
with mental health though right i don't think psilocybin mushrooms or psilocybin
is good for people who have
or are psychotic right i i think there are the groups of people i we do need psilocybin
or
psychedelic assisted therapy you know it's super important that people are 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 you know can show you like hey i've done this it's 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
my partner dr pam chrisco she is part of a group called roots to thrive in canada
um and have
canadian health approval for high doses of psilocybin um interestingly we just
put a paper published a
paper on pure psilocybin versus the mushroom the psilocybin with patients who've
taken both i'll talk
about that in a second but um what 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 heart uh heartbreaking um 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 in their estate planning and talking to their daughter and and
how they're going to miss
them and they're going to you know all those dynamics that we all know about
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 can in canada
when you do psilocybin the first 20 minutes is left off you hit an hour you're
starting to 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 those 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
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
to be able to to come at 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 um 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'll 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 that's the that's the great question of all time but i think even
the construct of the question
is confined but the limitation of our ability to to construct uh that question
i think we're maybe asking the wrong question i think the our the purpose of
our being is a tautology
we are we are being here because we are and i don't think there is i mean again
look at the rubin
telescope images i have a friend incredible it's incredible millions of
galaxies right when you see the
enormity of the universe i mean i can't wait to fly i 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 and that's the direction we're all headed towards so
whether you like it or not
can't do anything about it yeah have you paid attention to the james webb
telescope discoveries
yeah some that's some insane stuff where they're finding these galaxies that
are 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 uh the visible universe i think in about three days that took otherwise
months to do yeah so the
assembly and ai is helping of course right so i think near or near earth
asteroids this is an
impactful discovery literally as i always worry about an asteroid coming from
behind the sun you know
and then how many well it's probably been the the reset for civilization over
and over again throughout
time well that's that's that's the proliferation for instance of psilocybin i i
fund a lot of different
things well i have a i have a business and i created my business specifically
to do research but one of the
utah state university i funded uh a study on the evolution of the genes that uh
that code for psilocybin
and the results in some molecular uh 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
wow wow right that's interesting after after after the asteroid impact now is
association causation
not necessarily but probably makes sense there is a new asteroid look at there
it goes this video on
the new york times article i don't know how to control the video so i know
these are three different
asteroids there are six nine asteroids showing here these discoveries and here
in a second it'll show you
that like how and the timeline of the discoveries it'll show like one day that
right here i think it is
they tell us cover like 800 or 900 in the first day oh boy like four or five
hundred more the next day
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
wow wow 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 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 really think
that they're trying to be good scientists they're trying to assemble the data
in a fashion that
you know they don't have to redefine later so has this telescope recently come
online 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 in 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 like
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 would you get that thing so what
kind of a rocket would you
need go back to those images this is 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 it was
just really reaching us so uh that's what's so fascinating to me this is a
snapshot of multiple
histories converging to one point of view also voyager one's 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
soul simon this is what i love doing just comprehend trying to comprehend the
enormity and the beauty of
the universe i believe the universe is full of love you know i think that you
know
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 the question is what kind of life are we experiencing in these other
planets like what what is
life for them should we be so uh 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 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 around and if it wasn't for jupiter we would have never
made it this absolutely
never made that's our absolutely yep absolutely correct we would have never
made it to 2025
we would have been dust a long time ago we have a form of biological myopia
thinking that we need
sunlight and oxygen for life right and now when you know from chernobyl we know
that fungi can use
radioactivity right as an energy source we have methane based organisms yeah
isn't that crazy yeah so
methane based organisms i believe matter begets life life becomes single cells
single cells
form change yeah they branch networks form right and within these networks are
associations
of members that exchange resources i don't believe that you know evolution is
based on survival of the
fittest i believe is the evolution is based on the extension of generosity
beyond that of your own
needs to build a community of recep of reciprocity certainly human evolution i
think it's happening all
all over i think it's happening with tigers and i think absolutely you know we're
animals new news new news
were animals for sure but they're not very generous they just try to they're
just trying to eat and
survive there's a great um 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 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 sea world yeah yeah which is probably where they should be
killing people
yeah i just met a herpetologist and um i raised snapping turtles when i was a
kid so i have the
turtle necklace i was this very shy boy with a profound stuttering habit and
but my friends are wild
snapping turtles and this heretologist he goes well i had snapping turtles they're
really mean
you know 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've fed
them celery and lettuce
this is when i'm eight years old i had them for about seven years um i grew up
with successive families
and at first they would try to bite me 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're not trying to bite
me they would try like
i want the carrot from paul right right when i put a little salad bowl there
they kind of all came
together and they cooperated and so i my one i just reflected on this yesterday
my one of my fondest
memories when i walked towards the pond and they pop up oh 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 uh 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 yeah 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 actually action of it there's so much sea life there the british
columbia is just full
of sea life oh it certainly is amazing incredible place yeah i 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 only not 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 like-minded
people the real issue is
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 i'm
just heart torn by india such a spiritual place and there's so much garbage
china as well you know this
is but the india thing is nuts because uh 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 who's the 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 yeah 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 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 or species and love
and cooperation and all the different things and i said that you 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 what do you think that
psilocybin like do you
subscribe to mckenna's theory i know we've probably talked about this before
but talked about as a
standalone podcast this is probably this is what i'd like and for all your
listeners out there this is
a never-ending story right 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 right
that is incredible it docs of the 5ht 5ht2a receptor is that serotonin uses but
psilocybin
also docs with tract b receptors that lead to proliferation of neurons there's
there's
neurogeneration neuro regeneration neurogenesis and neuroplasticity um those
are four distinct areas and
psilocybin does all of those not as much in neurogenesis but we have done pluripotent
stem cells of humans
dose them with psilocybin 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 um so this is where
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 dismiss them yeah it's is that be more circumspect because
what dennis and and terrence
mckenna postulated you know and i disagree with lots of terrence's ideas time
wave zero was my my total
bullshit um but terrence and i were very good friends and we laughed a lot and
that's a spirit of
camaraderie where you can criticize someone and laugh at the same time yeah
that's a higher level of
intelligence well that's also what happens when you abandon the ego right yeah
ego is consistently
abandoned through psychedelic experiences you're much more likely to laugh i
think psilocybin is an
einstein molecule i think the tryptomines in general are einstein molecules uh
the work by gold dolden uh is
just fantastic also associated with johns hopkins of the critical window um and
this is why ibogaine has
has gotten such traction the critical window with ibogaine there's a long
window where you're able to
re-pattern uh your behavior to break addiction uh with psilocybin there's a
critical window dmt is very
very short because of the short uh the short period the critical window
typically is at tip 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 again stuck in the rut yeah and then after the psilocybin
it's like someone groomed
the landscape the hill and they were free and they were free to of to go
elsewhere yeah and then josh
segal in this past year from uh from washington university published a study
that specifically
showed in real time neurite dendritic branchings of neurons under the influence
of psilocybin in real
time i think psilocybin and which becomes psilocin what docs with your
receptors psilocybin is stable
psilocin is not psilocybin dephosphorylates into psilocin it crosses into your
receptors it goes
into it 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 near normals we all suffer from neurodegeneration
that's age related
besides alzheimer's and other forms of dementia that are toxin or disease
related in a selflessed
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 vaso
constriction etc as psilocin is not only anti-inflammatory but neurogenerative
and to have
this coupled together i think that the nootropic 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
you know 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 eight million
americans consume psilocybin
in 2023 according to the rand report what was the reduction in crime with those
eight million people
if we could have studied that right and then 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
uh when you're depressed emotionally you're immunologically depressed yeah and
when you're
happier you're more creative you're exercising your immune system is upregulated
right so the community
immunity from psilocybin yeah i think is a huge potential there's a crossover
directly between your
mental your neuro escape and your immunological state unquestionably right the
the diminishing of stress
and this is why i found benefits physiologically yeah clinical study just came
out uh compass pathways
you know did treatment resistant depression they had an analysis that came back
out that showed
modest increase or decrease in depression um but they were doing treatment
resistant depression and
and you know congratulations for them for putting the money the money where
their mouth is and didn't
during the study but treatment resistant depression is the failure of two antidepressive
dog or drugs and
therapy and so 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 psilocin maybe
after a hero's journey
and then by active re-remembering you revisit those same neurological pathways
that gave you
an advantage by taking psilocin or psilocybin and 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 uh in 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 um 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 uh lower primates
find these mushrooms uh 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 they were more likely
to breed uh more creative
the ability to form sentences glossolalia associate sounds with objects and and
and concepts and that this
is probably how language formed among 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 at
two yeah 200 000 years it increased massively so two million years on the outer
on the outer limits 200 000 in
the inner inner limits so in the inner limits what was the the amount of growth
it was i think it was
40 50 something something substantial 200 000 years 50 yeah and what time
period was this well 200 000
years ago 200 000 years ago oh so jump and uh but like homo sapiens in this
form have existed more
than 200 000 years though right no no no no i'm gonna say homo sapiens are are
relatively recent you know
i i i look at the the the estimates go back and forth depending on what experts
you're consulting right and
what not but the the well from homo erectus to homo sapiens was it was a
radical jump that was fairly
recent so i was not in the impression was more than 300 000 years ago it could
be it could be 200 000
could be 400 000 but it's it's you know we are our enlargement of our brain is
relatively recent
and to give more context um 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 yeah i mean 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 science as a scientist and breaks it down was a
philosopher yeah um and the
dentist uh uh mckenna academy is a non-profit i'm i'm just promoting it just
because i think they do
really really good work um but this is you know the 23 primates eat mushrooms
uh almost all mushrooms have
maggots in them most primates eat maggots so finding the mushrooms for maggots
for food for protein
you know two things can be true right right you can find the maggots eat the
mushrooms and then get
high as a community right um 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
this is a testable hypothesis right it's a theory now it's not a hypothesis we
know that psilocybin
stimulates neuron proliferation terence did not have the science and dennis did
not have the scientific
evidence for that right uh 30 years ago we now have the evidence for it now terence
and dennis
mckenna should go down in evolutionary biology as the as the two individuals
they 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 how how pcr was invented for yeah carrie mollis carrie mollis yeah had a
trip on lsd yeah
crick dna yeah and steven jobs yeah silicon valley is fueled by psychedelic
thinkers who are becoming
more creative and we 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 you know and i
think we can this combines
psychedelics with a.i we have an opportunity for the quantum leap and and the
evolution of the human
species do would you mind explaining time wave zero because we kind of glossed
over that too hey hey
i'm such a skeptic time wave zero is an algorithm that terence in one of his
stone moments i think
um terence is the only person that i met who could smoke me under the table and
stand up and give it an
incredibly perfect lecture i don't know how he could do it um but time wave
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 change 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
freaking phenomenon it
changed the course of history right and then he had uh time wave zero it would
end on 20 on december
12 2012 and that's what he predicted december 21st yeah december 24th 2012 and
yeah that didn't happen
either i used to have a license plate that said 12 21 12. yeah so but but you
know it's what i like
about terence and i would encourage all prospective scientists if you don't
worry about tenure if you
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 if you 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 if they step outside the lines they propose something that's
novel they get attacked
this time wave zero thing like you 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 only thing i talked
to terrence i go well what happens when you know that's like the birth of jesus
christ where did he 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 was a it's a thought experiment and um
and obviously just i
wish he was alive on december 21st 2012 i'll be like end and 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 i doubt it well this is what i'm getting to one of the things that did happen
in that time frame is
the ubiquitous use of social media it kind of started peaking around 2012. i
think there is a real
problem with that with 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 you get to
like 2009 you know just go to 2000 people weren't carrying their phones around
staring at them all
day there's 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 in
the street just standing there staring at their phones and now they look down
they see that 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 and in the sense of social
media you're getting
negative information all day long so it changes the perspective tremendous
amounts of click bait 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 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 reactionary yes and
i think we need to disengage with these things that are click bait 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 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 you they want you to be a dutiful
consumer and that's it
and that's why yeah that's why high doses of psilocybin is not a very good uh
business model exactly
as michael paulman likes to say but it is a good business model for overall
human compassion and
growth and community and then of course medium and micro dosing um really
popular practice right now
increasingly popular is a high dose of psilocybin once a year and then micro
dosing just before you go to sleep
uh or a medium dose like the museum dose museum dose i like you guys are such
you're such a mushroom
head that you have like museum doses this is a movie dose this is a concert
dose this is a date night
dose uh graham hancock and i and and and and um um and some friends went to a
museum in the british museum
and um and but anyhow the museum dosers just tend to you can notice them
because they wear sunglasses
inside because otherwise they're pupils 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
uh-huh that's when your body and your brain yeah it's regenerating so that is
really really interesting
is taking the those those oh 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 not traveling tractor that's why i think clinical studies
that look more and more
of 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 a bernie sanders on the podcast
yesterday and
one of the things that we talked about quite a bit was um 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 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 being 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 your your whole life you've been you know x
whatever the job is that gets
taken away and you recognize you're being really good at your job and you take
pride in that and
you're known by your co-workers it's 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 have 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 sense of meaning
right i mean do you want
to spend your whole life on an assembly line right you want to be out more in
nature with your children
right that's why i think nature relatedness you know is is a mental health
advantage you know the more
that we can relate to nature yes and um literally kind of go back to our roots
you know re-engaging
nature i think this is and then and that would give you a sense of purpose
instead of the job and
also protection right 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
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 um
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 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 like you're wasting this valuable moment in life trying
to acquire money when we have
this very unique opportunity to connect together in a way that people probably
used to do on a regular
basis in the past but was always suppressed by the powers that be because of
its revolutionary powers
if psilocybin increases creativity and creativity increases happiness and
happiness uprightly it's the
uh immunity of the community yeah it's hard to be a dictator yeah yeah you
gotta people the dictators
want people in constant conflict fighting against each other and you know and
they take advantage in a
sense you know that that analogy that the patients had about being in a rut you
know maybe we're in a
societal rut maybe we certainly are this is the opportunity us for to be able
to groom the landscape
and to find new ways of of living and behaving it might be the only way it
might be the only way we
can get through this because if you if you think about what this problem is the
problem is is uh the
way we interface with reality and that's really what it is if we're 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 reality most of your life and then all of a sudden you're
met with this profound
technological change it's going to eliminate your job what there needs to be
some sort of a profound
experience that reintegrates you with the mother it lets you know like this is
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 again i'm going to reiterate i think we have a crisis in
creativity i think psilocybin
and these other psychedelics stimulate uh creativity no doubt look at alex and
alison gray's work
i mean some of the best psychedelic artists in the world and inspired the
nicest people
is like like he's a role model for like being like being just a kind nice sweet
person and alex gave me
some of the the best advice i've ever received and i just give alex a great
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
how do you do it because 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 you're still at the canvas right it's that yeah
which is just that
that tipping point right yeah calling the muse yeah just doing it and pressfield
talked about
that in the war of art have you read that no no i've got copies of it he sent
me a whole box because
back in los angeles i used to keep a stack of them on the table and hand them
out to people it's all
about creating things and resistance and this this thing that we all have where
we were reluctant to
sit down and actually do the work but if you could just commit and he would he
calls it the muse he
like in 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 you
actually do that thing
where you call upon the muse it actually works so whether or not it's real is
irrelevant
well i have i have a muse and my partner asked me you know a few a few months
ago how many more
hours do you have to work on this book she saw me working on work 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 anyone
any writers of books any people built a house if you comprehended the normative
of the project you
probably wouldn't even start right yeah i can't think like that so you gotta
think about the
process but the process and so i had this little voice in my head um that i
would wake up and i
didn't want to feel guilty about it but i you know 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 work on the book
my i could say it work on the book so fast because i have reiterated it in my
head hundreds of times
that it became sort of my muse it became sort of a fun muse yeah i think we all
have these little voices
that kind of you know says you know get it right stamets 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 and 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 to make
sure that you're the best that you can be so it's uh a very exciting times 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 the internet i think that's a big factor because what they did in the
1970s by you know what
the nixon administration did which is essentially to squash the civil rights
movement and the anti-war
movement what they did really fucked up society for a long time 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 uh
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 it's just as we were trapped
we were trapped in the
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 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 yeah well because we
are 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 yeah so you know this is
what this is why i think
unfortunately in many cultures it become restricted to just a small group of
priests
my cognoscenti they wanted to control right have gates uh to heaven yeah or the
control consciousness and
so i i think that you know it'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 yeah now
with i naturalist 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 yeah
they're you know they're
away from the business and their parents and the phones you know some phones
but you get them
involved and uh and interest interacting with nature it's just uh it's just
really it's like the
telescope and um seeing all the galaxies and i think interacting with nature is
a vitamin yeah 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 we know that there's an
alleviate you can you can
actually study uh an alleviation of stress levels from people that go out into
nature and this this
thing that we're experiencing we just don't know how to measure it yeah 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 um 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 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 hard-working 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 is all the sort and becoming this very strong
advocate for ibogaine
and having it passed in texas so the 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 country music i'm out of the loop i she reached out
to me and she had a
psilocybin experience that inspired her she's has an album called deeper well
that's just amazing i was
not in the country music until i listened to her and she reached out to me
because of her psilocybin experience
um and we rented we decided to do sing for science we sold out the ryman
theater in nashville in three hours
2500 people these are country music people 2500 people three hours
unfortunately she was in mexico
she fell and she broke her ribs so we had to cancel the concert until
september 18th or the sing for science but that's just an example and yeah well
i think my friend
sturgill simpson sort of opened up the door for psychedelics and country music
with turtles all the way down
yep you know he basically wrote a song about god and psychedelics it's um you
know i that was a country
song and everybody's like hey what the hell's going on it's funny because
psychedelics uh build bridges
that marijuana doesn't it's um it's i met a lot of people who would never smoke
a joint but the idea
of doing a slow side mushroom sound 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 uh you
know look there's a one of the things that's interesting is the jujitsu
community is uh there's
a whole lot of stoners in the jujitsu community a lot of people using psychedelics
for oh yeah performance
oh yeah well i know a bunch of people who have fought on mushrooms yeah you
know i have a friend
who was a world-class kickboxer who had some of his greatest performances while
he's 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 soul simon is to see into the future that's one of the thing
of advantages i think
i've had also i'm able to prognosticate um into the future there's a there we
had this extraordinary
individual um told me a story which i think i 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 use an ice pick and you have to
hammer the nail in with
one hit and each time in a bar or party or whatever people throw down money
five dollars twenty dollars
etc a nail on an ice pick so you have the point of the ice pick you got to hit
that nail at the very
sink it and sink it all the way into the wood so of course you go around people
are drinking etc
um 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 a bunch of his friends were gathered and and he goes oh sure i'll
try some
mushrooms so he ate some mushrooms and he came back and he's the the circle was
there and people were
betting hey come over and join us join us you know and he watched for a while
never had played this
game and and then he started getting higher and higher and they say come on it's
your turn so he
kind of looked at the nail i mean this is really hard to do and looked at the
nail and looked at the
nail and focused on 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 would 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 mushrooms 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 and there's
a lot of money being
piled up on the table here they're coming around and everyone's got impossible
not going to happen
can't do it a third time in a row looked at it laser focused god bam slam it
again now people are
losing their right they're like what is going on here and it's that he said
really the
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 focus on nail had the hammer looked at him bam slammed it again while he's
looking and nailed it
yeah literally nailed it so so these examples of well that brings you to the
stone deep theory
well it's the idea of the concept well kind of the concept is you you know with
an intense focus right
you know and many years i i i have two black belts i had schools for 30 years
black ball in taekwondo
and then huarangdo i was in shotokan shiru uh goju-ru uh i and then taekwondo
and then huarangdo which
is like hapikido um but that idea of having a three-dimensional perspective
and one of my best one of my fun experiences i was in the dojang or dojo but
japanese korean yeah
it's korean and uh i had my first black belt and and uh uh my head instructor
was over there talking
talking at someone and then he had a baseball and he and i heard later what he
said he goes i told my
friend watch this he threw a baseball at me my peripheral vision boom i just
caught the baseball and
you know just before it hit my head but that idea of having that consciousness
surrounding that's why
athleticism with the medium doses minor doses of sulcibin i think you can train
uh your neurons
yeah 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 it's 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 i'm not we're not we're not a
disclaimer
yeah no none of the things that we said listen don't take any of our advice no
but we're just talking
about these things because there are anecdotal stories that are 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 yeah this is why when you know the stamina stack is it
speaks to this we
published in nature scientific reports and a combination of sulcibin uh niacin
and lion's mane increased
psychomotor ability of tapping in 10 seconds from 46 to 66 taps that's a lot
that's a lot in in 10 seconds right 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 yeah you know its performance i think
the root thing is psilocybin
um and being able to regenerate neurons is something i think it's really
important uh for us now with
glioblastoma you know which unfortunately terence did die from that that's
uncontrolled you know proliferation of neurons in the brain yeah there's sure
there's contraindications
do you think there's something that's connected to that no not i personally don't
no why not um
just because i mum i i don't have evidence to the contrary i don't have
evidence that also suggests that
i so see no correlation but n of one is not you know it's again is there's no
because it's not a
common thing amongst people that are using yeah psilocybin but if you had eight
million people in
the united states you know um conducting psilocybin again you have a data set
right so like 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 right 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 but 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 there was none impossible yeah yeah and there are
for many indications many
different targets from addiction cigarettes you know alcohol opioid use to
dementia to parkinson's
the alzheimer's etc yeah so there's you know i think psilocybin has a pr
problem it sounds too good
to be true but you know sometimes things can be true that have but but the
reason why i think 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 to our health of our nervous system right
and then 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 neuro regeneration neurogeneration
neuroplasticity
which is synaptogenesis the neurons proliferate and then they shake hands and
then suddenly you have a new
pathway so there's anti-inflammatory properties silocin has strong anti-inflammatory
properties
interesting so that's that's just has come out in the scientific literature so
that i wasn't aware of
that yeah that's really interesting how did they study that and what was the
something called interleukin
six um there was a clinical study that was just published just recently and a
down regulated it's a
tumor necrosis factor interleukin six a down regulated that's an inflammatory
cytokine there's two
anti-inflammatory cytokines that are extraordinarily interesting to us in our
research team i have five
phd scientists eight full-time scientists that's why i created my businesses to
do research but interleukin
10 and interleukin one ra are are anti-inflammatory cytokines so when you can
up regulate those then it
kind of buffers the inflammatory effects and so that's exciting to find uh
these anti-inflammatory that
that's 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 uh interleukin 10 and interleukin
1 ra were stimulated
by agaricon and turkey tail mycelium um grown on rice versus the rice control
so it's a peer-reviewed
article when you know the pandemic started the big concern was if you stimulate
the immune system
you could have a cytokine storm and you could overwhelm you know the body with
many many it's
been said many if not most people die from cytokine storm is there overreaction
of the immune system
to covet and to other diseases so we were able to show you can augment in the
literature uh uh your
immune system buffered with the anti-inflammatory uh properties and that that
sort of resolved the
argument of the cytokine storm concern um and then now we have a very
successful study that shows that
agaricon and turkey tail mycelium um enhances the immunity of individuals long
term six six months
later mushroom that you gave me yeah you still have that yeah that's right
there that's a trophy
yeah oh it's never leaving the desk that sucker and 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 of age this is a very nice
specimen
stamens gave you this yes damn it you gave me this it's 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 agaricon called phomy thopsis officinalis also known as
larissa phomies
dioscorites first described in greek medicine 2000 years ago as elixirium ad
longum vitam the elixir of
long life if someone took a little piece of that and put it in the ground would
it start making new
agaricon if they had spores um it looks like it goes inside the roots of trees
this one being as old
as it is and being as spores are 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 highly variable in form
fruit body extracts of this makes no sense why is it endangered in europe and
not in america only grows in
old growth forest so the sky islands in europe and austria and slovenia um is
where this still can be
found on large trees we now have i think 115 strains of agaricon by far the
largest library in the world
if you ask me what is my most valuable possession is my strain library of agaricon
is that is you know it's a it's a treasure of strains one out of 21 out of 100
times in the old
growth forest where 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 we're it's
scalable the mycelium
scalable the fruit body extracts are not and it's highly variable most people
don't know that well
they should know that most mushrooms are parasitized by insects and that's
because the insects spread
spores so the mushrooms invite insects to come in so they can spread spores it's
like 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 um i like to say cordyceps has to eat too so yeah well i
mean this is the cycle of
life right so this agaricon is is in the bio shield biodefense program we 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 was fantastic and has thousands of
years history
all traditional medicines advance with new technologies that's true across the
board the
invention of individual propagation about a hundred 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 bio shield biodefense program after 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 stamets and smallpox you'll see a vetted
press release you know
from dod and the head of the bio shield program jack secret saying that whoops
these are some of the
most significant results they've ever seen wow the only 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 what is boy with a
microphone that's a 42 second clip we found in the vault um 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 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 uh in our
collection pandemics are
coming all the time we're in a viral storm there's 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 percent 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 right
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 agaricon to test 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 deer population
and and even some other animals like moose and 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 it's like again hiding us it doesn't take a stroke
of genius but in my case
the bio shield results and then i heard about colony collapse 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 collapse
is a threat to food biosecurity and we found and we publish this in nature
scientific reports extracts of
polypore mushroom mycelium protects bees from viruses we published that in the
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 loss 60 loss generally
across the united states
this year the worst colony collapse on 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 polypore mushroom mycelium
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 vitam the elixir of long life
we are all bees are animals birds are animals you know pigs are animals humans
are animals
we are all i think can have an immunological benefit from you know in
incorporating these these fungi now
we're allowed by the fdd fda to say supporting innate immunity and 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 of of dollars that protect bees from colony collapse and we're roadblocked
by regulation
constantly oh reduce the virus in bees you have an antiviral drug what is it no
we haven't been able
to find the antiviral drug we think it's an entourage effect and upregulating
you know basic immunity
and then your endogenous immune system in this case of the bees can fight the
viruses so 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 there is you can't
make these claims but if
you have results we have fantastic results i prefer anyone to scientific uh you
know to nature scientific
reports so could you elaborate on what the resistance is well the resistance is
it's 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 nature even though even
though it's from nature
even though bees go to rotted logs for immune benefit and now there's five or
six papers that have been
published on this after my discovery showing that bees are doing this their
bees are actually benefiting
from mushroom mycelium so we're 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 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 exponential
increase in mycelial mass
virtually every week 10 times 10 times 10 10 10 or even 10 times 100 times 100
times 100 and 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 the mycelial networks are deep reservoirs
for being able to
immunologically enhance animals where we don't have to have these all these antiviral
drugs antibiotic
drugs your endogenous immune systems are up regulated 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 you know lifestyle all those things that this is
highly scalable so now we're
trying to navigate through the regulatory landscape there was a 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 undisclosed drug in the honey so whatever but it also
translates to wild bees
it turns out that apis mellephora the honeybee 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 honeybee 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
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 exempt exempted too many is gone whole
committee is gone and they
didn't even tell us that it was gone so we've had 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 demonstrable scalable and
affordable that can they
return the investment as 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 Ketrovitz 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
some other greenhouse
insects it's not toxic to fish not toxic to humans so the combination of using
metarisium with the agaricon
agaricon and other polypore mushroom mycelium uh we think has a great potential
future so um
i 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 in opposition what is an opposition unfortunately and you've
alluded to this
there's 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 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 and i'm so i 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
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 has been
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
like the ubiquitous use of antibiotics is a real concern with people with with
cows and with chickens and we
had the is a viral pandemic of a form of bird flu not h5 and one uh but another
bird flu i can't remember
i think it was eight seven and two uh in iowa and minnesota about 10 years ago
they were euthanizing
millions and millions of chickens and turkeys and ducks you can look this up
there's organic farm and we
gave one quarter of a gram of garicon mycelium per chicken in their feed and we
became our that chicken
there's two big chicken hens about 20 000 uh layers of birds that lay eggs um
and it became an oasis of
immunity those chickens were immune from bird flu wow a quarter of a gram of
this mycelium wow and we
protected them that's incredible but a crazy thing happened the usda uh had an
insurance policy to pay the
chicken growers and they 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 didn't have to happen yeah and they did it and they
they inflated this whole
concept you know because they then the numbers got grossly inflated because
they were euthanizing
chickens for profit yeah bird flu is is very serious serious issue now i know
vaccines are 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 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 you know complex is the failure to disclose i don't think americans are
stupid i think americans
become stupid when they're not informed my partners 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 or 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
yeah 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
there's two thought experiments i want to do first one million lives were saved
with a vaccine one person
dies hey you took it for the home team sorry one person dies out of a hundred
thousand
still ratio is pretty good my mind my judgment sorry again you took it for the
home team one out of ten
thousand okay still the ratio is pretty good okay one out of a thousand oh okay
one 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 right 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 you know so everyone
has to balance the risk benefit ratio but we need real data we need the real
data we need full disclosure
right 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're getting
this cacophony this echo chamber where the voices that are the loudest tend to
be the stupidest sometimes
and they're the most compromised yeah and they drown out right dissent yes 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 i hate the term anti-vaxxers i
think is 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 and that's the whole
idea
having these pejoratives and 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 could that be bad that's
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
does 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 this from politicians and
then on top of that you've
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 right age related all these other factors
the data is there
not making that data available to the public increases distrust right and so
what the 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 gas lit
and be were told that their child or someone else that had gotten vaccine
injured that that was not the
cause of it and those are the people that were very skeptical and they formed
these tight communities
but they were very scared to be open and public about it because they were
destroyed 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 and one
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 they're cloaked in secrecy and why are they not made
available it's money
yeah i mean the the 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 eight billion dollars
the pharmaceutical drug
industry spends eight billion dollars just on advertising and on propaganda
every year that's so much money
and they're they spend so much money on television networks you know i mean how
many times you anderson
cooper brought to you by pfizer and you see these ads and that shapes the
narrative unfortunately it does
but let me again let's 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
absolutely um that's accessible to everyone so you can make the best judgment
for yourself and your
family 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 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 for people that were obese people that had all sorts of issues
going on because of poor diet
poor lifestyle choices and even you know 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 immunodepressed
vaccines don't work very well so they be those people become reservoirs for
mutation right which is the
argument for why you don't give it to children with their babies because their
immune system isn't even
functional yet yeah i'm i you know i again the 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 regular
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 you can imagine how much more
money you make if you're
injecting everybody with a hep b vaccine if you sell hep b vaccines yeah simple
mathematics yeah i also
have met people in the pharma industry who are extremely well intended sure
great scientists oh the
scientists aren't the issue they've also confessed to me that they face these
this humiliation you know
being ostracized for just asking questions but again full disclosure let people
make up their own minds
what's the the cost benefit ratio is it one out of a million one out of ten
well 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 of like having a result that
shows that this is effective
if you if you do ten studies you should show all ten studies yeah yeah well
actually that's why
clinicaltrials.gov exists right is that we're cherry picking doing studies in
bulgaria and in india and
taiwan the pharma would choose the clinical study that supported their
narrative 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
right 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 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 immunocompromised individual asking
their immune system to respond
it's 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
artemisacin but isn't it weird though that like we 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 rain the majority of them and the most recent example is
the anti-malarial drug against
plasmodium falciparum from an artemisia bush um and it's artemisacin and it
came from it came from
artemisia it's a plant extract isn't that wild and and yet science-based people
will automatically dismiss
what you would call a natural remedy even though all of them every kind look it's
nothing exists
on earth that's not really natural it's all coming from 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 sin bio
beta conference um that's
what i think really kind of flipped them on their heads is don't go down the
rabbit hole of excluding
natural products thinking you can invent a molecule that's going to be better
right in the theater of
evolution we've tested these natural products over tens of millions of years
literally 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 and some are
edible it's a weird statistic about and again one to two percent fudge factor
here so please don't
attack me all over the place but there's um 1.5 to 5 million species of fungi
um it's about 150 000
species of mushrooms that are estimated so out of that five million on the
extreme 1.5 million less than 10
percent 150 000 we've only identified about 15 000 species so we only
identified 10 of the mushrooms
that exist today wow interestingly of of those 15 000 species about one percent
are poisonous one or two
percent one or two percent are psychoactive and uh one to two percent 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
their 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 the mycelium has to navigate what these thin threads through
a hostile microbial
environment defending itself until the mycelium mat becomes large enough at the
end of its life cycle
to produce a fruit body and then lion's mane mushrooms rot in four days the mycelium
that grew
it could 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 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 uh on alzheimer's using lifestyle
uh adjustments uh
exercise meditation vitamins and lion's mane mushroom mycelium dramatically
significant benefit and 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 see which was the most significant and yet where's the studies
combining 10 vaccines or 20
vaccines in our child to see which one is actually conferring the benefit or
causing uh 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 it supports the endogenous immune system and 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 that we won't let it be out there for the benefit of the commons they were
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
exemption 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 the virologist 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 farm
farmer workers exposed so
many people in contact cluster concentrated clusters of animal animals and
farms you have so many potential
patient zeros the 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
there'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 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 you know living in their own waste on a consistent
basis which is
you know it 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 contrast of opposites and um 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 the
line in clinical studies with bird
flu using agaricon 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 and nature scientific reports and
they thought ah
fungi fungi fungi could help us you know protect ourselves looking viruses so
they came through
the back door of the scientific community not not a joe rogan listener they
might be i don't know
maybe they are now um 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 they're
rather than just a
molecular geneticists 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 that is such a
great question and you know what that's the question that we've been asking for
so long
they love morel mushrooms i love morel mushrooms too uh you know they are
poisonous oh unless you
cook them really yeah oh boy that's important many people have died from morel
yeah 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 so if you don't have an overhead fan don't
fry morels oh yes
you open up the window but just don't inhale the fumes wow many the north
american mycological
association is the association for canada mexico the united states and there's
a poison control group in
that and they collect all the all the details it's namico.org n-a-m-y-c-o dot o-r-g
and they're the go-to
place ironically because of hipaa rules the mycologists have been disconnected
from the patients in the
medical community because now there is a firewall between them we can anonymize
the case reports but
there's a firewall of information because of hipaa and disclosure of patient
conditions
that has really inhibited the flow of information nevertheless namico.org north
american mycological
association n-a-m-y dot c-o dot org and my professor dr michael bugue is a
giant you know in consulting
with um for adverse effects and mushroom poisonings uh so morels are delicious
but to answer your
question that we morel mycelium seems to be everywhere but then for horse burns
and they come
up right where were they before right well do they do they exist in places that
don't have burns
yes but rarely no we think all the time all the time but 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 this never
underestimate the intelligence of nature the nation has figured this out you
know 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
that the morels come come up that's fascinating another fascinating thing is
that the largest living
organism on earth in the pacific northwest yeah armillaria astoia yeah some
people call it gallica two
different things but yeah i flew over it it's a 2200 acre you know basically a
clear cut 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 to spiral
up can you explain what it is to people it's a honey mushroom is a parasite on
trees it's edible
the honey mushrooms on hardwoods tend to taste better but this one is on conifers
and it's a comes up in clusters it performs black 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 2200 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 a 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
an image i'm trying to find a good picture it's also in mycelium running um so
um but anyhow that's an
example now oh kill the trees that's terrible but it created glass uh grasslands
for uncle lakes
right yeah so deer and moose elk can come in so it's way of incident i think it's
a way of this
rebalancing of nature right where you deal with millions and millions of acres
millions and millions of
acreage there is a real big problem with um the bark beetle right now you know
that's a problem
is if the ecosystems are shifting in response to stress and you know with our
minds view of only one
lifetime we're very myopic i think we need to look out of the thousand year 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 the largest known organism on earth
exists in the pacific northwest there's 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 right 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 arrogant it's in the clavisipataceae
and it was found by a student at western uh virginia university it is in
morning glory seeds it
produces lsd well terence talked about that no this is before no no no no 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 it's called paraglondula clandestina and don't 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 terence is
talking about how gross it was
that they they alter morning glory seeds because they knew that people were
using them for psychedelics
well if they sterilized them or used a fungicide that would make sense but a
graduate student need
to give her credit is the western uh virginia university kareen hazel and daniel
panion yes there
it is look how young she is very young she made a discovery heretofore unknown
to science and not only
it produces these lsd 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
under reporter under under reported underutilized this is a fantastic treasure
trove of new potential
discoveries um 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 i couldn't agree
with you more did you you're you're aware of brian murray rescue right yes that
was one of the more
fascinating things that they found in those when they studied those vases that
they found ergot in them
yeah 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 yeah is that 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 has experience or someone who just read a book yeah so the late uh roland
griffiths
he's a dear friend johns hopkins he is credited as being the big pioneer for psilocybin
and medical
research when i asked him have you tripped on psilocybin that is 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 was rick
strassman 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 and the and the psychedelic assisted therapy movement the
center the california institute
for integrative studies c-i-i-s i think dot org or dot eu has a program
training psychedelic therapists
you don't have to be a medical a physician to be able to hold someone hands to
have a guided experience
now there's a lot of charlatans out there that's a problem be be warned folks
there's a lot of problems
that's a lot 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 put that on the
record but a lot of people have benefited without having to go through
traditional medical you know
you know constructs of a hospital right to have benefit and then they're
reluctant to talk about
it because the illegality of it unfortunately and you know if you have a job
that is you know where you
have to be taken seriously it was you could be lose your medical license um but
the university of
washington tony back anthony back published a clinical study on using psilocybin
for physicians and nurses
who were emotionally harmed and distressed by people angry at them because of
covid in the hospital
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
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 um 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 you
realize aggression and anger
affects everyone around you the advantage of psilocybin i think just like a pebble
and 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 anti-social
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 sarco 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
sarco who experienced all these negative you 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 him i 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 in the psilocybin mushroom shop they didn't know who i was and
thankfully um and they were
selling the stamina stack which is kind of weird because i have my name on it
um and we walk in there and
say this is this is where i tell all my law enforcement officers to come to
take to get their
psilocybin i said i'm sorry but i i'm trying to juxtaposition this you know how
does this work and
he goes well you know this is good perhaps for ice also he said you know how
you know 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 well what would
you do i 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 him and i say and i always walk up
with a smile on my face
never a harsh look only the smile on my face i said i have good news and 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 they go okay what's the bad news
dude i gotta 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 squad car when
these people that are just
shooting the ship law enforcement officer i know you're doing your job but wow
thank you for being so
nice arresting me you know 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 it doesn't escalate they
de-escalate it and he goes
you won't believe the things i learned you know from these people that are
arresting now you know 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 note to
self right note to everyone
right note to everyone and you know all conflicts involve two or more people it
doesn't they're not
it's not just this is the only way to react to something yeah 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 do
too i have the seen the best i mean i've seen 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 yeah you
inadvertently harmed somebody and you went off the deep end you harmed somebody
else it's a cascading
event of harm yeah and when you these people are resolved like that was a 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 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 yeah and you 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 communities 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 um i
shouldn't say that but um but i
went through my background check and um and the the dea has such a sense of
humor i said okay paul you
know you come out clean you don't have a record everything is fine you know but
we have to talk to
you about something that happened in 1994 in des moines washington really yeah
i'm like what happened
in 1994 in des moines washington he said are you sure you don't remember and
they're 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 that because they're fishing i don't i said i have no clue
no clue because are you
sure i'm this is your official response you don't remember i said no i don't
remember it 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 35 bucks and you know and they
just roared with laughter
they're just with you they're with me what they told me is that we don't know
about
mushrooms or psilocybin we're an enforcement agency many of us don't agree with
us change the law
we want to go after syndicates we want to go after fentanyl right we want to go
after these you
know these these these things that are not beneficial in any way shape or form
said we don't want to
hurt the source that is healing us right but they won't around when it comes to
money transactions
right once you involve money then the dea is going to be involved right but you're
involved in research
and we we have strict guidelines i had dea license in you know 1975 1976 77 78
um through dr michael
buke at the evergreen state college and they were much more liberal i could
grow tons of suicide
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 hofman there or
gordon wasson richard evans schultes you know dartham 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
but it's really different is we just had a 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 legalized the prescription of psilocybin this is a
citizens
movement it's a democratic movement for the freedom of consciousness and you
everyone should have a right
to have to be able to practice and where do you draw individual use 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 means 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
you know 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 and ibogaine just because ibogaine's so
long and those 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 show up hold
your book up there
because this is the the latest of eight books that you've written yeah psilocybin
mushrooms in their
natural habitats paul you're a gem you really are you're you're such an
important person and i think
through the conversations that you and i have had and then you've had on many
other podcasts as well
millions and millions of people have gotten to understand what this is really
all about and i think
your role in educating people is is enormous is 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 us
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 thank you thank you all right bye everybody