The Joe Rogan Experience - #2347 - Paul Stamets

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Paul Stamets is a mycologist and advocate for mushrooms for helping the overall health of people and planet. His new book, "Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats: A Guide to the History, Identification, and Use of Psychoactive Fungi," is available now.  www.fungi.comwww.hostdefense.comwww.paulstamets.com Get 50% off at https://onxmaps.com/joerogan Don’t miss out on all the action - Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up at https://dkng.co/rogan or with my promo code ROGAN. GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, [phone] or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD). 21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 1 per new customer. $5+ first-time bet req. Max. $150 issued as non-withdrawable Bonus Bets that expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: dkng.co/dk-offer-terms. Ends 7/20/25 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Are we up? Yeah. Put them headphones on. Let'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.

Silicide mushrooms are natural habitat. It covers 60 species all over the world. But it also shows not only historical use, which people are surprised. They've been using India and Europe and South Africa. A new species was just found, Psilocybin malute, but the Basothu and Basothu province have been using it obviously for hundreds of years. We know this because they have songs. So it's really interesting when indigenous people have using psilocybin mushrooms and

scientists quote discover them and give them a Latin binomial. But the psilocybin mushroom revolution is happening all over the world right now. I never expected it to be this big. The RAND report came out this past year. Three percent of Americans tripped on psilocybin in 2023. That's only three? Three percent. That's eight million.

I know. I would agree with you because how many people would admit it, right? Right. Probably underreporting, not overreporting. Oh, 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 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, we're joined together with a common purpose of trying to help people. Yeah, well, he's not ideologically captured. Like he realized that he was wrong and then his position on this was based on ignorance. So he educated himself and completely turned around, did a 180 and

now is an advocate and has helped a lot of people. 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. My heart really goes out, and this is sort of 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. Tinted windows. And the window comes down, and you have two seconds to make a decision? You at two in the morning. Right. Tinted windows. And the window comes down, and you have two seconds to make a decision.

You do that hundreds of times. The likelihood of having one mistake is very high. And having one very bad day to find your life for the rest of your life is not right. 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 turmoil, that stress, the anger that then can emanate out from your anger at yourself to other people, then this is what Silas

Ivan 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 better people. And once you forgive yourself and become a better person, then everyone is excited about the fact that you've changed. Yeah, and imagine the world that we could be living in if this experience was available to so many of the people that are committing crimes. So many of these people who have never had any kind of a psychedelic experience, have never

really confronted their own reality in that way, how many of them would change their ways? I would imagine a great deal. You bring up a very important point that I've been thinking about a lot. We talk about using psychedelics and psilocybin and other substances for treating people who have trauma, you know, mental illness, you know, addiction issues. But what about the near normals? All of us are somewhat on the spectrum, and we go back and forth depending on daily, monthly, yearly activities, events, etc. But what about prevention? If the return on investment is to reduce addiction and crime

and all the other collateral damage that's associated with it, then it would save hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars. Yeah. So, the assignment should be made free, I think, you know, as a citizen's right to have access and the government should pay for it. It would massively reduce our national debt. It would make our better society, but that's not going to happen, right? That's a dream.

Well, I don't know if that's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen tomorrow. You know, I think we're on a path, if you look at where we stand with marijuana, for instance, like look at Las Vegas 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 actually it was in the 2000s, it was highly illegal. And, you know, I'd remember the stories from the 70s where people were locked up for their entire lives for, 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% which Which by the, what's that? It's down, I just don't know the number. Which by the way, great thing, you know, 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 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 not legal in those states. 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. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. When it came time to make a website, there was no question that we would power it with Squarespace.

From the intuitive design intelligence that helps to create a bespoke digital identity to the seamless payment options that can help give your customers more ways to pay, or the fact that you can measure your end-to-end online performance with powerful website and seller analytics. The reasons to power your website with Squarespace are endless.

So if you're looking to build or even upgrade your current website, check out squarespace.com for a free trial or go to squarespace.com slash rogan to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. This episode is brought to you by Dzone. Soccer fans, your summer is about to get a whole lot better. The FIFA Club World Cup is coming to the US with 32 of the best soccer clubs to decide who the undisputed champions of the world are. The world's best players, Messi, Holland, Kane and more are all taking part. And you can catch every moment live on Dazone from the opening match in Miami's Hard Rock

Stadium on June 14th to the finale at MetLife Stadium in New York City on July 13th. And good news for any Canadian listeners out there, it's on Canadian time zones. Don't miss out. Sign up for free at Dazone.com slash FIFA. That's D-A-Z-N dot com slash FIFA. It's just, your brain is just overrun with this. And with firefighters, you know, they're the oftentimes the first responders

or they're first, my partner's a medical doctor in Canada, but she used to be a firefighter. And yeah, they oftentimes the policeman out show 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 2% of people are assholes. And I think the assholes can become good people if they have a psychedelic experience.

I really think there's progress right now. So much of the media and clickbait journalism, they amplify the extraordinary and things that get eyeballs and attention. But more and more, I think people are they become more have greater wisdom about how they're being manipulated by the media. People come together 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 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 psilocybe, a psilocybin mushroom. They're, you know, they're that chance encounter, that Eureka experience and sharing it and 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. But I really find an extraordinary way of taking iPhones and droids and all these kids are just addicted to their phones, right? They're not going out in nature. So there is a called nature deficit syndrome. It's actually affecting people. But there's a there is an app that I'm just in love with called iNaturalist. It was created by a guy named Scott. He just gave a TED Talk that was released yesterday. iNaturalist, you can take a phone and you can go out and you can get a flower, a frog, a mineral, a mushroom. You photograph it. You upload it

into the cloud of iNaturalist. And they have all these experts, amateurs trying to tell you what it is. It's a great little debate going back and forth, no you're right, no you're right. And then when it hits research grade, it's when a group of experts come together and say, yep, you have Carpina schematis, you have Boletus 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, gets kids excited. And then you can go to iNaturalist right now,

and you can look around your house or this place to see the reports of birds and mushrooms and things. I just went on to iNaturalist yesterday, and Solas v. Koubensis, the golden tops, go around Austin. Who knew? Because they've been reported. Now you have zones of privacy, so you don't have to tell them exactly where the mushroom

is. And that's probably not a good thing to do if it's a psilocybin mushroom, but you can make a peripheral zone of anonymity. It can be within two miles, five miles, 10 miles, you know. That way you can do the report. But some of them have high specificity with lat longs within a few inches. But it's so exciting in the field of biology and mineralogy and ornithology, et cetera. They have all these citizen scientists out there with their phones. And then every year, all over the world now, there's called bio blitzes where several hundred people literally come together, they'll go into a park, they have all their iPhones and Droids, and they photograph everything, and

they upload it to iNaturalist to look at species diversity. This has revolutionized the field of biology. I think it's revolutionized bringing children and young people back into nature. And then you build a community. You're not talking about politics. You're talking about nature. What did you find? And holy moly, I never knew there was a blue mushroom or something like that.

So it's inspiring to see the kids get so excited about this and adults. And so this is, you know, I'm a- That's very cool. Yeah, very cool. How many new species get discovered? Oh, thousands. Every year? Thousands every year now get discovered? Oh, thousands. Every year?

Thousands every year now. Really? Thousands and thousands. There's 223 known species of sulciban mushrooms, and about, I'd say 10 of them in the past two years have come from citizen scientists, quote-unquote amateurs who found it, who uploaded it to iNaturalist. So if they find a new species, like, how do they determine, if it's a completely new species, how do they determine that it's psilocybin, how do they determine where it's from? Excellent question. The psilocybin species localized in the genus Psilocybe, which has the most psilocybin species.

We just know from genetic associations that if they're in the clade, the group that has psilocybin species and the DNA analysis shows that they fit right into this cluster, then we have high confidence. But if a mushroom has gills, you know, and it bruises bluish and has purple-brown spores, those three things need to be true, then 95% probability is 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 another one called pineal sinensis.

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 Psilocybe serri 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, hiding in plain sight. And so now he knows, with Psilocybe serriippes, 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 Pollan 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 Silicide Mushroom? I go, well, it's like… You're 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 suicide mushrooms. Wait a minute. So like seeing it you're reacquainted with it See 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 common thing. People don't see morels and they find one or two of them, suddenly they start to jump out of the landscape. It's how your brain works with pattern recognition. So many of these species are hidden in the landscape, but they're actually quite common, but you just can't see them.

Nat Fiskor-Cotton-Reed Got it. And you're accustomed to seeing them. But you're not saying like that you feel't see them. Got it. And you're accustomed to seeing them. But you're not saying like that you feel something from them. You're just saying recognize them. 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 Masiotech tradition. You know, in my book, I go deeply into the Masiotech You know, in my book I go deeply into the Mazatec heritage of using psilocybin mushrooms. One of the things was it really embedded with Christianity after the Spaniards came, 1516 and 1519, 1521, they brought in cattle.

And very quickly Christianity swept through Mesoamerica, specifically in Mexico. And there's a friend of mine who's a PhD called Joe Torre was in Oaxaca and just found in a church a cross from the 15th century, the 1500s, I mean, and soon after the conquistadors in Spanish arrived, and in the center of the cross are psilocybin mushrooms. So Christianity has a long, deep-rooted history with psilocybin mushroom use in Mesoamerica.

Well, there's that ancient depiction of Adam and Eve from... That's more debatable in my mind. Yeah, but here it is. Thank you. This is from Joe Elatori's work. Look at that. That's a basket with three mushrooms in the basket. And there is Psilocybin mexicana, and so the mushrooms are phenotypically correct, but there's clearly a mushrooms in a basket. Can the other slideshow of the full cross, Joey, I'm not sure if we can?

Did you know Jack Herrera? 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 could have a hundred different Potential representations, right? They're not all gonna be correct The one but a few of them are and this example here one that clearly and and and in the Mazda them are. And this example here... One that clearly is. And in the Mazatec tradition, it's called syncretism. When you have a foreign influence, in this case a religion, coming into an indigenous people, they merge and they still continue their indigenous practices under the umbrella of protection, in this case of Christianity. But in the Mazatec tradition, they believe the of Christianity. But in the Mastodetek tradition, they believe

the tears of Christ is where the mushrooms would appear. They believe the mushrooms were the body of Christ, and therefore you'd never boil them. You'd never be hurting the body of Christ, so you'd only eat them raw or dry. Oh, interesting. So really interesting. That's an example of syncretism. And the great Maria Sabina was a devout Catholic, and when she did her psilocybin ceremonies, she had the Holy Trinity. So that's another example where under the umbrella, and from a survival point of view, culturally it makes sense, and they adapted, but they found that this sort of merging of

indigenous practices and knowledge of psilocybin in Christianity was very compatible. Just was published, I think, two weeks ago at New York University in Johns Hopkins. they had 24 clergy from different faiths, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Muslims, and they had them come in and they did a high 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, the top five are the most significant experiences in their life. So it just, I think psilocybin makes nicer people. This episode is brought to you by OnX Offroad. Ever wonder how to reach these epic mountain

lakes? They're tucked away, dispersed campsites. With OnX Offroad, you'll find legal open trails around you and even better guided trails mapped by real off-roaders. Each one includes photos, terrain descriptions, and difficulty ratings so you'll know if your vehicle is capable before you go. Unlike other apps, OnX gives you turn-by-turn directions on the trail and their new dispersed camping layer shows where you can legally set up camp. You also get private land boundaries, public land overlays, and the ability to download maps for offline use so that you're never guessing even when you're get private land boundaries, public land overlays, and the ability to download

maps for offline use so that you're never guessing even when you're off the grid. It's a powerful tool built for serious off-roaders. Try OnX Off-Road for 50% off. Go to onxmaps.com slash Joe Rogan. I know I would agree with you on that. The image of Adam and Eve, I'm curious to say, what do you think is debatable about that? Can you pull up that fresco? There's an ancient fresco, I believe it's from France, of Adam and Eve, which supposedly

is the tree of life, but really looks like some sort of a mushroom plant. Yes, it's been postulated by R. Gordon Wasson. I shouldn't say plant. Yeah. In front of you especially. Thank you very much. That. That doesn't look like mushrooms. They do look like mushrooms. And I couldn't imagine it being anything else. Well, I mean, here's an example that basically artists become authors of field guides in art. How much can you tell the public without violating your oath of secrecy? And so, symbology.

But yes, there's a cap and a stem, and they come up in clusters. That looks like a psilocybin mushroom. Some people will say it's the amni of the 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. Pete Slauson And you would see the dots, obviously, if it's still on the ground. Dr. John Baxter If it's in the ground, it's very fresh. Bacillus

ibermushrooms bruised bluish. And so, this is where we could get lost in a debate of interpretation, but all these representations are not false. Some of these representations are extremely strong based on the evidence. And for instance, the Solacei Mushrooms that we found on the pyramids in Egypt, they are clearly the Solosomies, not myself, but other Egyptologists have also published on this. Find those, Jamie. Those are fascinating because I don't think until fairly recently within the last few decades it was understood that they were using psilocybin. I think there was some confusion as to what, if anything, like they were drinking the blue lotus,

I think was one of them. The blue lotus, I think, was one of them. The blue lotus is a water lily. Where do water lilies grow? There it is. The water lilies grow near ponds. That's so clearly psilocybin. And this is the goddess Hathor, the goddess of the cow, by the way.

There you go. 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's powder. So cows go to ponds to drink, the blue lotus grows in ponds, the blue lotus is blue, the psilocybin mushroom is turned blue, the mushrooms are golden in color, gold in blue colors, or sacred in Egyptology, in ancient Egyptian culture.

So now, I was not the first person to discover this. Actually, I saw this from an article that was published by Azim Abdel, a friend of mine, a mycologist in Egypt, who presented it at a conference. And then... How long ago was this? This was, well, this is over 2000 years of age. No, no, I mean when they... 2016.

When they brought us to the... 2016. 2016. That's kind of crazy, isn't it? It is. And then Kalindi, the great Kalindi from Detroit, he unfortunately died of COVID. But he also, from his African heritage, also believed that, you know, and he was rediscovering his African heritage. And this is called re-indigenization, rediscovering that which your ancestors practiced, even though the linear transition of knowledge may have been cut. But this is taxonomically accurate for growing Pseulosophyum caubensis, and and grows on Kaldung. Kau goes to

ponds. If you went to get the water lily, you'd run into this constantly. Now this and whether the Hathor, 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, you know, and the climate change. So the modern Egyptologists have no reference. And so when you have climate change, the ecosystem changes, then the scientists of day don't have the familiarity as the experts thousands of years ago. So they become rare, they become scarce, and the generational knowledge is lost. But now there's a real big re-initialization

movement in Egypt combining the blue lotus with the philosophy of commensus. What is the psychedelic compound in the blue lotus? You know, that's a debatable thing. There's a really complex chemistry there. I'm not an expert on that, but I've talked to my other friends who are experts. There seems to be an entourage effect of multiple agents. So I can't really speak authoritative to lead that, but I have been told that there are several active ingredients and they think the entourage effect of them together creates this heightened state of awareness.

And I think that as an admixture with psilocybin makes a lot of sense. Are contemporary people taking Blue Lotus? Yes. Really? Yes. Is there like a lot of sense. Are contemporary people taking blue lotus? Yes. Really? Yes. Is there like a community of people? A massive community, but because blue lotus now has become scarce because ponds are scarce. So I put out there a reward of $1,000 for anyone who can find, you know, DNA of sulciban

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 that when translated for Te-Nanukato from Mesoamerica. The Salsaiba mushrooms were known, Salsaiba meccanocana, as flesh of the gods. So it's interesting in both sides of the, they have the same interpretation. Mushrooms were not allowed back in this time to be picked by commoners. They were only reserved for the royalty. Nat Fiskor-Klein Oh, boy. Doesn't it always work out that way? David Hicks Yeah, it seems to. Nat Fiskor-Klein 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 You know saints 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 No, no, come on. I didn't know that. You didn't know that? No, no, I 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 there's many different religious figures, and they have this halo that's very different than the more modern halo. The modern halo being this like circle. This is not a circle. It's a circle, but it's a mushroom. It's essentially they're explaining these godly, holy people were under the influence of psilocybin, I think, and not just me.

What we can't prove some of these ideas today, what we can prove is like the Johns Hopkins New York University study that religious beliefs systems are enhanced through the use of psilocybin. Which totally makes sense. So 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? What's coming up really is us talking about it before and a bunch of pictures of mushrooms trying to find out There's there's some better ones like no, but it's not I didn't you can't find them I wasn't man the government's pulled them off the internet man

That's not one. Yeah, that's that's the ones that I've seen are far clearer than that Yes The ones that I've seen are far clearer than that. I'll just show you there. Yes. Those. Yeah, that's the one before. Like, look at that one, which is crazy that you have to go to us. Well, that's... I see what I Googled. Like, look at that.

I can see the one on the left. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah. I mean, that essentially looks exactly like that. I've never seen that. That's crazy that you can't find that anymore, and we clearly found it in the past because we talked about it. Well, that may be the effect of Joe Rogan, right? You could just overwhelm the entire internet with images. 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 which totally makes sense. Look at that. Okay, there's one look at that image Yeah, so this is the old-school halo the old-school halo clearly looks like the bottom of my blown away You're blown away hiding in plain sight You this I'm 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 working on a book.

Yeah. I mean, the limitation of life, unfortunately, we have all these great people who pass when they're at the peak of their knowledge, you know, and that's the other thing that I think psilocybin has really informed me is that Joe Rogan and Paul Stamets are talking 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 Rubin telescope that came out yesterday? No, I did not. Millions and millions of new galaxies, literally millions of new galaxies. I think 2,100 new asteroids in near-earth orbit. Oh fun. Oh fun. Oops. Well there's already 900,000 of them. Yeah, so there's, but this has just happened. Wow. But this is, yeah. Want to know how many of those people out there are tripping balls? It 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 Soliside Mushrooms is very Christ-oriented. And then as I got more and more into the Solaceib experience, I realized that this is it, just this concept that we live in this great expanse. And I'm assembly of molecules, so are you. We didn't exist before we were born. You know, we will disassemble, decompose, and we'll go back into the cosmic dust, and this is part of the continuum of existence. We all exist all the time, forever.

Forever. Can I ask you this? What do you think happens to consciousness? I think that, think from a mechanical perspective, we might be looking at, have the constructs of consciousness that is analogous to the Model T Ford, 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 consciousness that far exceeds that which you can comprehend. My mother was a charismatic Christian. Nat. What is a charismatic Christian? Well, she's an evangelical. She speaks in tongues.

Nat. Oh, boy. David. 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 goes, Yep, I do. I said, then can you accept the fact that our concept of God is inferior to God's definition by your own thinking? That no matter how we think of God, we'll be inferior to the enormity of the concept. So, and she admitted that, so we're fallible. We don't have the capacity to understand the enormity of consciousness in which we are embedded, of which we are

a tiny part. So, this brings me to a subject I really wanted to talk to you about. Okay. And that is artificial intelligence. And I know you've spent a lot of time on this. Yeah, recently. I want to introduce a new concept. Okay. I'm a deadhead. You can never tell. Never tell. I went to the Sphere. I bet it was amazing. It was incredible. The visuals were insane. Fantastic. What a great venue to see. It was a great venue. It just revolutionized music festivals, I think, forever. Alright folks, this is insane. For the first time ever we got a full-blown all-women's

boxing mega event going down in New York City. Two title fights, same night, let's go. And if you're like me and you love the action, Draft King Sportsbook is where it's at. We're talking Katie Taylor versus Amanda Serrano three the trilogy fight absolute legends Katie's putting her super lightweight belt on the line and you know Serrano's bringing the heat but don't sleep on the co-mate Alicia the bomb bomb gardener Explosive power is taking on the undefeated WBA interim champ Jennifer Miranda This one's gonna be fireworks if you've never bet with DraftKings, it's super simple. Just pick who you think's gonna win.

That's it, it's easy. And check this out, if you're new to DraftKings, throw down five bucks and boom, you get $150 in bonus bets instantly. That is wild. Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app right now and use the promo code ROGIN. That's promo code ROGIN for new customers to get $150 in bonus bets instantly when you bet just five bucks.

Only on DraftKings, see dkng.co.au. So there is, I bought, there's something called Postcards from Earth and I'd heard a lot about it. It's in a matinee in the afternoon before the big concerts and it's great flying through around the earth through the old growth forests and volcanoes. So we went there and we got an early bird ticket which allowed us to talk to an AI robot. So I thought, oh, this is my opportunity. Now two years ago I got the Disruptor Award at SYNBioBeta, 2200 nerdy scientists. I mean these are top nerds and I was so surprised I got the Disruptor Award because I'm kind of a natural products kind of guy.

But I'm greatly honored. So I posited the question then, AI may never be able to write an algorithm for random acts of kindness. And then I'm thinking back, my life, maybe yours, maybe Jamie's, maybe most 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. A random act of kindness was not transactional where you genuinely feel something for someone not expecting to have something in return and you've reached out. I think that's why many many if not most people their lineages can be traced to a random act of kindness. So then I went to Las Vegas, went to the Sphere, I had this idea, you know, I can ask this robot. So I asked this robot. What robot?

It was, I think it was a chat GPT run, but I'm not sure. That was at the Sphere? At the Sphere. Okay, there's the robot I talked to. Oh, that's so creepy. Look at that face. Oh my God, it's so creepy. Okay, very creepy. So I asked the robot, 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 today because of random acts of kindness of our ancestors, and we've invented artificial intelligence, and we're traceable to random acts of kindness, how will artificial intelligence incorporate random acts of kindness in the future? Good question. The robot took an unusually long time to answer.

It was like a very long time. And the robot came back going, why would humans do that? It's far more efficient to have a return on your investment. Transactionally, why would, it's inefficient to have random acts of kindness. Boom, blew me away. Did you film any of this? Yeah, we did film this.

A friend of mine has a film of it. And then- I need to see that. And then- That robot needs to be shut off. No, about five days ago, I asked Jatt GPT, Grock, Gemini the same question. And now it was greatly nuanced. Well, random axel condus can help the community with goodwill, and this can help the community because it's more sustainable, et cetera. So this is what I want to do, 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 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 that's going to inform artificial intelligence. And so when I asked this question again, it was like, it was more nuanced. I was like, oh, artificial intelligence is learning. That's how large language models work, right? More input they get. More inputs. And the 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 can keep on driving. Those are random acts of kindness.

My life is successful because of random acts of kindness. I bet most people, when they think back, there was an act of generosity and kindness, and you really feel grateful for that, and you want to pay it forward. I met, at this last conference, I met two students from Harvard Business School. They said they want to interview me, and I go 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? No, well they should. Yeah, business schools just teach me how to make some money. But this is important, Joe. We can 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 where many of us are here, not the majority going back in your lineage Mm-hmm, 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 future of the human race?

Well, that's a great question too because about about the 10 people who asked this robot questions, they were all data mining. He was the best baseball player in history, and he hit the most home runs. It was all like data mining. So Sam Altman was at a TED conference, and he said that basically there are self-awareness of some of these systems, but artificial intelligence have not come to the point where they actually can create something. I find that really interesting because I thought, well, I thought they were creating, but he

was insistent. They actually don't have that spark of creativity. They can assemble data, but actually the true creative spirit is not something that AI has currently achieved. I met another, you know, this guy's a total genius, and many, I've heard this other people say that, 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, 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 to pay it forward. Yeah for sure. So I think we have an opportunity here and I think we have to do this now because if we don't do it now, I think we're going down an extremely dangerous path. In what way? Well, I think it's ultimately the extinction of the human species, which, you know, depending on your point of view, may not be a terrible thing. But

I think that where Neanderthals with nuclear weapons, when I met another person, he's a Mensa, a person funded, you know, by a tech company, he's a 19 year old Chinese guy, and I, he said, I said, what's the scariest thing about artificial intelligence? Oh, 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 You know, it's never as bad as as you fear and it's never as good as you hope so interesting I think that we're at that Nexus point and the Joe Rogan experience can be pivotal, I think, in steering artificial intelligence to be the best that it can be ethically. And I think we have that opportunity right now.

I think the real fear among people that are cynical about artificial intelligence is that it's going to replace us and it will find us irrelevant and that we're creating a digital life. We're essentially assembling it with all the knowledge of the human race, all the understanding of how human beings interact with each other and how we interface with the world. And we're creating something that has, when you think about computing intelligence, when you think about acquisition of data, the ability to form an understanding of any subject, we're basically there already.

And that's just accelerating. And it's going to get to the point where these things become sentient in 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. There's a sense of, you know, nostalgia, in a sense, that's even building today, of the times of past. Yeah. You know?

Of what, you know, and I don't think it's all doom and gloom. I do think— 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, slowly but surely over time. And I think a catalyst for this of psychedelics I think so today psilocybin mushrooms are unique because

It democratizes the access to psilocybin MDMA. You can't grow in your closet, you know, so side mushrooms, you know, there's no economic Barrier on psilocybin mushrooms is available for the poorest of the poor They just fucked everything up in 1970 didn't they? poorest of the poor. They just fucked everything up in 1970, didn't they? 1971 I think, 1972 when they put it on schedule one. Schedule one substance is supposed to be, has no medical benefit, highly addictive, and potentially toxicity. Do 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 eaten 42 pounds of mushrooms. That's the least toxic, one of the least toxic medicines ever found in nature. But there's a concern though with people that have problems with mental health though, right?

I don't think psilocybin mushrooms or psilocybin is good for people who are psychotic. I think there are the groups of people. We do need psilocybin or psychotropic assisted therapy. It's super important that people who are experienced can help other people who are inexperienced process. That's really important. I think so too. I think that's part of the, that's probably part of the, one of the things that's really

wonderful about the community of people that have experienced these things is that they do understand how life changing it is from a personal perspective and they can aid people and help them through it. And if they're good people and they can show you like, hey, I've done this, 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 partner, Dr. Pam Crisco. She is part of a group called Roots to Thrive in Canada, and she has Canadian health approval

for high doses of psilocybin. Interestingly, we just published a paper on pure psilocybin versus the mushroom psilocybin with patients who have taken both. I'll talk about that in a second. But 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 heartbreaking thoughts, et cetera. 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 how they're going to miss them and they're going to miss, 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. And what happened from one of the experiences that I can share with about a dozen or so terminal patients, high doses of psilocybin in the indigenous, especially in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada, when you do psilocybin, the first 20 minutes is liftoff, you hit an

hour, you start 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 soldiers, this is happening with terminal cancer patients, is we all are gonna die. That is a fact. To be able to come, you know, into, to be able 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, I just feel like you know I didn't exist in this form before I was born. I'm going to be going back into molecules

that will disambiguate into atoms, reassemble the new molecules. I'm going to be going back into molecules that will disambiguate into atoms, reassemble the new molecules. I'm part of the continuum of existence. And I think this is what these psychedelics give a lot of people confidence about the fact that they will always and have always existed and will exist forever. Aaron Powell If your molecules are going into the continuum of existence, what do you think the purpose of you being here now is? What do you think the purpose of the present moment of your life as you're currently living? That's the 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 That question I think we may be asking the wrong question of our ability to construct that question. I think we're maybe asking the wrong question. I think the purpose of our being is a tautology. We are being here because we are. And I don't think there is, I mean,

again, look at the Rubin telescope images. I have a friend, a dear friend. It's incredible incredible millions of galaxies Right when you see the enormity of the universe It 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 Whether you like it or not.

Can't do anything about it. Yeah, have you paid attention to the James Webb telescope discoveries? Yep. That's some insane stuff where they're finding these galaxies that they should have not been able to be formed as quickly as they are. It's an order of magnitude higher. They can do the entire visible universe I think, I think, in about three days. That took otherwise months to do.

The assembly and AI is helping, of course. So I think near-Earth asteroids, this is an impactful discovery, literally. I always worry about an asteroid coming from behind the sun, you know? And then how many... Well, it's probably been the reset for civilization over and over again throughout time. Well, that's the proliferation, for instance, of psilocybin. I fund a lot of different things.

Pence-Burma, right? Well, I have a business, and I created my business specifically to do research. But at Utah State University, I funded a study on the evolution of the genes that code for psilocybin. And the results in some molecular genetic clock data, there's variability of a few million years in interpretation, but the arrival of psilocybin in the fungal genome is about 65 million years ago. Wow.

Right. That's interesting. After the asteroid impact, now is association causation? Not necessarily, but probably makes sense. There is a new asteroid. Look at, there it goes. This video on the New York Times article, I don't know how to control the video So I know there's our three different asteroids. There are six nine

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 did let's go for like 800 or 900 in the first day Oh boy, like four or five hundred more the next day or 900 in the first day. Oh boy. Like four or 500 more the next day. So many of them. A couple hundred more the next day. But watch how it zooms out here in a second

to show you where this is. It gives you like a perspective. So this is like 10 days in. Wow. And then it zooms out here again further. Oh no. So they discovered 2000 asteroids in that tiny little sliver right there.

Oh boy. Whoever made that 2,000 asteroids in that tiny little sliver right there. I haven't seen this. Oh, boy. Whoever made that video, that's awesome. Jamie, you're the master of discovering these things. What should people, when they want to find that... 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. To keep people from freaking out? Well, not really like that. They're trying to be good scientists. They're trying to assemble the data in a fashion that they don't have to redefine later. Has this telescope recently come online? Well, it's been online I think for a few months. The data is just being revealed now. But I think 3.2 billion pixel camera, it's the largest ever created. And five years from now you'll have that on your phone. I mean, I was wondering what kind

of lens they made to go on it. 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 Apple. But how will you get that thing? So what kind of a rocket would you need? Go back to those images. This is astronomy 101. I'm not telling you anything you don't know necessarily, but all those stars, all those galaxies are in the past, hundreds of millions of years ago. We're just a coincidence of seeing them right now. Right, because the light has just reached us. It was just reaching us. So that's what's so fascinating to me. This is a snapshot of multiple histories converging to one point

of view. Also, Voyager 1 is about to hit the one light day travel mark, which is a significant mark but it's still not that far in the grand scheme. See, when I trip on Sol Simon, this is what I love doing. Just trying to comprehend the enormity and the beauty of the universe. I believe the universe is full of love. I think that we're built on relationships. And when you have relationships, when you have a quorum of individuals that are sharing assets, you know, you build a community.

Well, you certainly see that with human beings. The question is, what kind of life are we experiencing in these other planets? Like, what is life for them? Should we be so naive to think that it went along the exact same linear path as biological life on Earth, or is it completely unrecognizable? And when, you know, we're dealing with intelligent life from other planets, maybe they'd be so intelligent that they wouldn't travel, and maybe they don't need to. And maybe they're also dealing with solar systems that, you know, we have as a result of multiple impacts, including

the creation of Earth itself, right? There was Earth and there was Earth 2, 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 far. Never made it. That's our protector. Yep, absolutely correct. We would have never made it to 2025. We would Never made it. That's our protector. Yep, absolutely correct. We would have never made it to 2025. We would have been dust a long time ago.

We have a form of biological myopia thinking that we need sunlight and oxygen for life. And now from Chernobyl, we know that fungi can use radioactivity as an energy source. We have methane-based organisms. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Methane-based organisms. I believe matter begets life. 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 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 reciprocity. Certainly human evolution. I think it's happening all over. It's happening with tigers and gazelles? Absolutely. We're animals. New news, new news, we're animals. For sure, but they're not very generous. They're just trying to eat and survive. There's a great, on Chile, there's a great footage, it's amazing, of these orcas, aka

killer whales, just devastating a seal population, eating them. You may have seen this. And after they were satiated, these orcas would take the pups and they'd push them up on shore to save them. To save them. Well, they're very intelligent Yeah, which is one of the more interesting things so 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 napping turtles when I was a kid. So I have the turtle necklace

I was very shy boy with a profound stuttering habit. But my friends are wild snapping turtles. And this heratologist, he goes, well, I had snapping turtles. They're really mean. They were in my aquarium. They kept on trying to bite me. I go, no shit, Sherlock. You know, I had wild snapping turtles in a pond. And I went down there. I fed them celery and lettuce, this is when I'm eight years old, I had them for about seven years. I grew up with successive families, and at first they would try to bite me and things like that, and then I realized if I put out a little salad bowl

for them, they wouldn't fight each other, because they're not trying to bite me, they would try like, I want the carrot from Paul, right? When I put a little salad bowl there, they kind of all came together and they cooperated. And so I just reflected on this yesterday, one of my fondest memories when I walked towards the pond and boop, boop, boop. They pop up.

Oh, Paul's here. Paul's here. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. So snapping drills have an amazing ability. They can snap flies out of the air. Oh, they're so fast. They're so fast.

I saw this video of one eating a fish. They put a fish in front of it, like a dead fish, and it eats it so fast, it just disappears. It just snaps its neck forward, engulfs this fish, swallows it all, and it looks like a magic trick. Oh my gosh. You have to look at it in slow-mo to even see the actual action of it. There's so much sea life there. British Columbia's just full of sea life.

Oh, it certainly is. It's amazing. Incredible place. Yeah. I love it. I love it being there. So you know, this is a beautiful planet. Where we live, there's no garbage.

And my visitors come to visit us on our island. I said, have you noticed? There's no garbage anywhere. Not in this, not in that ditches, anywhere. It's because the ethos of that community is to take care of the ecosystem. That's beautiful and that can be done if you have a small community of like-minded people. Of like-minded people. The real issue is when it gets to the size of something like New York City, this becomes this diffusion of responsibility where you don't think that you have to be concerned with all this garbage that's on the ground,

because there's 20 million people walking around, and it's just, it is what it is, keep moving. Or India. I'm just heart-torn by India. Such a spiritual place, and there's so much garbage. China as well. But the India thing is nuts, because it's also in these areas where a lot of the stuff that people buy that's inexpensive in America is being manufactured and

these factories whose 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 And I said that uniquely with us, yes, love and random acts of kindness and community are incredibly important. But what do you think, why do you think we're so different than all the other species on the planet? And do you think that psilocybin, like do you subscribe to McKenna's theory? I know we've probably talked about this before, but as a standalone podcast, this is probably...

This is what I'd like, and for all your listeners out there, this is a never-ending story. It just keeps on getting better. The most exciting thing that has come out in the scientific literature in the past two years is that psilocybin stimulates neurons to grow. That is incredible. It docks with a 5-HT2A receptor that serotonin uses, but psilocybin also docks with TracB receptors that lead to proliferation of neurons. There's neurogeneration, neuroregeneration, neurogenesis, and neuroplasticity. Those are four distinct areas, and silicin does all of those.

Not as much in neurogenesis, but we have done pluripotent stem cells of humans, dosed them with silicin in the laboratory. We have a DEA license. I have a DEA license. Very, very strictly controlled. But we can actually see the proliferation of neurons compared to controls. So this is 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... You want to discuss them. Yeah. Is that be more circumspect, 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 but Terrence and I were very good friends and we laughed a lot and That's right by the spirit of camaraderie. We 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? The ego is consistently abandoned through psychedelic experiences. You're much more likely to laugh at yourself. I think psilocybin is an Einstein molecule. I think the tryptamines in general are Einstein molecules. The work by Gold Douldin is just fantastic. They're also associated with Johns Hopkins of the critical window. And this is why Ibogaine has gotten such traction.

The critical window with Ibogaine is a long window where you're able to repattern your behavior to break addiction. With psilocybin, there's a critical window. DMT is very, very short because of the short period. The critical window typically is at the peak of the experience and just as you're over the hump, you know, going down. But one patient described it very, very well, who was an addict. And the patient said before the psilocybin experience, they were literally stuck in a rut.

Stuck in a rut, and they visually saw themselves on a ski slope, going down the ski slope again and again and again, stuck in the rut. And then after the psilocybin, it's like someone groomed the landscape, the hill. And they were free. And they were free to go elsewhere. Yeah. And then Josh Segal, this past year, from Washington University, published a study that specifically showed in real time dendritic branchings of neurons under the influence

of psilocybin in real time. Psilocybin, which becomes psilocin, what talks 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 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, and I don't know if self-disease is a disease you could argue, age being one, but neurodegeneration is a fact of life as we age, and neuropathies occur. And the neuropathies from the constriction of the peripheral nervous system, vasoconstriction, et cetera, 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 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, when we think about 8 million Americans consuming

psilocybin in 2023, according to the RAND report, what was the reduction in crime with those 8 million people? We could have studied that. And there are retroactive studies, you know, analyses that show a reduction of crime associated with psilocybin use. But in real time, that's something I'm excited about. Could you reduce crime rates? And moreover, when you're immunologically, when you're depressed emotionally, you're immunologically depressed. And when you're happier, you're more creative, you're exercising, your immune more creative, you're exercising,

your immune system is upregulated. So the community immunity from psilocybin, I think, is a huge potential. It's a crossover directly between your mental, your neuro escape, and your immunological state. Unquestionably, right? The diminishing of stress. And this is why... The found benefits physiologically. Yeah, clinical study just came out, Compass Pathways, you know, did treatment- resistant depression. They had analysis that came back out that showed modest increase or decrease in depression, but they were doing treatment-resistant

depression. And, you know, congratulations for them for putting the money, the money where their mouth is, and didn't join the study. But treatment of regens and depression is the failure of two antidepressive 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 act of re-remembering, you revisit the same neurological pathways that gave you an advantage

by taking psilocin or psilocybin, the act of taking it again, you're re-remembering, and then you can nurture these neurons. I think psilocybin could be nutrients for the neurons. Well, let's, in an effort to make this a standalone podcast, let's explain what we're talking about, because what we're talking about is Terence's stoned ape theory. And his theory involved a lot of contributing factors, one of them being climate change. And the theory was that as the rainforest

receded into grasslands, you get more ungulate animals and they leave behind poop, and that these lower primates find these mushrooms that are growing on the poop and they experiment with them. And that the ones that did increased visual acuity, they became more amorous, they were more likely to breed, more creative, the ability to form sentences, glossolalia, associate sounds with objects and concepts, and that this is probably how language formed among humans. And Terrence's connection to that, when you look at the timeline of when this was happening,

when we know this was happening, which coincides with the growth of the human brain, which over a period of two million years doubled in size, which is pretty phenomenal. Yeah, 200,000 years, it increased massively. So two million years on the outer limits, 200,000 in the inner limits. So in the inner limits, what was the amount of growth in 200,000 years? I think it was 40, 50%, something substantial. 200,000 years, 50%. And what time period was this?

Well, 200,000 years ago. 200,000 years ago. Oh, so- It was a jump. But like, homo sapiens in this form have existed more than 200,000 years though, right? No. No. Homo sapiens are relatively recent. I look at the... the estimates go back and forth depending on what experts you're consulting and whatnot, but from homo erectus to homo sapiens was a radical jump that was fairly recent.

So I'm understanding the impression was more than 300,000 years ago. It could be 200,000, it could be 400,000, but it's, you know, we are, our enlargement of our brain is relatively recent. And to give more context, Dennis McKenna and I were just together. I love that dude. Dennis McKenna is a fantastic friend and. I love that dude. Dennis McKenna is a fantastic friend and scientist. He's such a good man. Well he does such a brilliant job of explaining the mechanism behind the stone ape theory.

Yeah. You know like Terrence had a great way of talking. He was so interesting to listen to and had these wonderful ideas but Dennis is like much more of a hardcore scientist. Dennis is a scientist, was a philosopher. Yeah. And the Dennis McKenna Academy is a nonprofit. I'm just promoting it just because I think they do really really good work. But this is, you know, the 23 primates eat mushrooms. Almost all mushrooms have maggots in them. Most primates eat maggots. So finding the mushrooms for maggots, for food, for protein, two things can be true, right?

You can find the maggots, eat the mushrooms, and then get high as a community. But all these, again, this is an example about the, you know, an example of the art that we see thousands of years ago. We can debate this in the past, but we can test this as a testable hypothesis. It's a theory now, it's not a hypothesis. We know that psilocybin stimulates neuron proliferation. Terrence and Dennis did not have

the scientific evidence for that 30 years ago. We now have the evidence for it now. Terrence and Dennis McKenna should go down in evolutionary biology as the two individuals that 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 PCR was invented.

Yeah, Kary Mollis. Kary Mollis had a trip on LSD. Yeah, that's a right thing to do. Cr know, how PCR was invented. Yeah, Kerry Mullis. Kerry Mullis had a trip on LSD. Yeah, that's right. Crick DNA. Yeah. And Stephen Jobs. 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. And I think we can, this combines psychedelics with AI, we have an opportunity for a quantum leap in the evolution of the human species. Would you mind explaining time wave zero because we kind of glossed over that too. Hey, hey, hey, big, big breath.

I'm such a skeptic. Time wave zero is an algorithm that Terrence in one of his stone moments, I think, Terrence is the only person that I met who could smoke me under the table and stand up and give an incredibly perfect lecture. I don't know how he could do it. But 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. Pete Slauson Would track novelty. Terence Cuthbert Would track novelty and episodic events that

changed the course of human history. Pete Slauson Right. Terence Cuthbert He didn't have the birth of Jesus Christ as a significant event. He was sort of anti-Christian. I said, Terence, I don't care if you're Christian or not, the birth of Jesus Christ was a huge friggin' phenomenon. It changed the course of history.

And then he had time wave zero would end on December 12, 2012, and that's what he predicted. December 21, 2012. Yeah, December 21, 2012. And that didn't happen either. I used to have a license plate that said 12, 21, 12. So but you know, it's what I like about Terrence 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, twenty, thirty times, you

might be hitting one or two concepts that is game-changing. Right. If you're willing to... 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. Viciously. And especially when they step outside the lines they propose something that's novel they get attacked. This time wave zero thing like you used to be able to get it it was an actual program that you could download and you could run it on your own computer. Yeah and that's the thing I talked to Terrence I go own computer. Yeah, and that's the thing

I talked to Terrence I go well What happens when you know, that's like the birth 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 how to adapt the algorithm. I Said okay, then it's not really it's something that's constantly adapting itself So anyhow, it was a it's a thought experiment And and obviously to say I wish he was alive on December 21st 2012 be like 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 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 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, when you get to like 2009, just go to 2000, people weren't carrying their phones around staring at them all day.

That'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. Too many people are walking out in the street just standing there staring at their phones. So 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 in the sense of social media you you're getting information all day long and in the sense of social media

You're getting negative information all day long. So it changes and perspective tremendous amounts of clickbait Well, that's 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 They're 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 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, they want you to be a dutiful consumer and that's it. And that's why high doses of psilocybin is not a very good business model. Exactly. As Michael Pollan likes to say. But it is a good business model for overall human compassion and growth in a community. And then of course medium and micro dosing. Really popular practice right now, increasingly popular, is a high dose of psilocybin

once a year and then micro dosing just before you go to sleep. Mmm. Or a medium dose, like the museum dose. Museum dose? I like it. You guys are such here's a Javuker mushroom head that you have like museum doses This is a movie dose. This is a concert dose. Let me this is the date night dose gram hancock and I and and and and and and And some friends went to a museum in the British Museum and But I know the museum dozers just tend to... You can notice them

because they wear sunglasses inside, because otherwise they're pupils. Right. So they try to keep it together. Keep it together. But the idea of taking a museum dose, quote unquote, or a microdose before sleep, is that's when you're regenerating. That's when your body and your brain is regenerating. So that is really, really interesting, is taking those... Well, that makes sense, especially from like an anti-aging protocol for the mind. And it's also safer, right? You're in bed. You're not going anywhere.

You're not going anywhere. Yeah, you're not traveling in a tractor. That's why I think clinical studies that look more and more at reducing the expense, having people take the dose of medicine, the psilocybin in this case, just before sleeping, they're in a safe place. You know, I had Bernie Sanders on the podcast yesterday, and one of the things that we talked about quite a bit was what's going to happen with people when automation takes over, when AI and automation take over, and so many people are not working anymore. And we both kind of agree that universal basic income is really the only way to mitigate

the disastrous effects of people losing their income, losing their jobs. And I think it's a good thing. But the problem with universal being basic income is that just giving people a check, 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 whole life you've been, you know, X, whatever the job is, it 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 coworkers as like, hey, go to Paul. He's the best. He'll take care of it. He knows what he's doing. And 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 can help us through this journey, that could help people make this transition, which appears to be inevitable, where artificial intelligence is going to do a far better job at a lot of menial tasks that people have been doing for an occupation for a long time, to find a search for meaning, to find some other way to realize value in life and not just to be a cog in the wheel of this capitalist society but instead maybe psilocybin would allow people to completely change their perspective of how they exist in this world and that you've been kind of trapped in this society where it values numbers it values a constant growth for the shareholders, and it values

what you can see in your bank account that's like not even real, it's all this digital money that's somewhere. Maybe psilocybin would be the best answer for how do people make this transition and reacquire a sense of meaning. Right. I mean, do you want to spend yourquire a sense of meaning? Right. I mean, do you want to spend your whole life on an assembly line? Right. Or do you want to be out more in nature with your children? Right.

That's why I think nature relatedness is a mental health advantage. The more that we can relate to nature and literally kind of go back to our roots, 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 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 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 it. You don't need to make money anymore because everything is automated, everything is cheap, AI controls it all. So what was Bernie's answer to that? He didn't have one. Yeah, he didn't know. But I don't know if Bernie's had any experiences in that regard. And he didn't have that

perspective. But talking to you right afterwards might be the answer. Because this is an inevitable journey that we're on of a revolutionary change in how society is structured, but it doesn't have to be negative. The problem is the people that are in control of AI and these systems, the people that will benefit from them incredibly in a financial sense, those people are not having these experiences. And if they were having these experiences, they could be the only ones. If you have a benevolent person in an extreme position of power, they're probably the only people that can really do something about that. And I think it's very important that they hear this that you

realize 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 up-rightly it's the immunity of the community. Yeah.

Pardon me, a dictator. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to... The dictators want people in constant conflict fighting against each other, and they take advantage of that. 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. Oh we certainly are.

This is the opportunity for us to be able to groom the landscape and 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 think about what this problem is, the problem is the way we interface with reality. And that's really what it is. 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 that'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 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 gonna reiterate I think we have a crisis in creativity I think Sol Simon and these other psychedelic stimulate creativity. No doubt. Look at Alex and Alison Gray's work. I mean some of the best psychedelic artists in the world and then inspire the nicest people like he's a role model For like being like being just a kind nice sweet person and the Alex gave me some of them the best advice I've ever received and I just give it 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 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, he's still at the canvas. Is that which is just that tipping point, right? Yeah, calling the muse. Just doing it. And Pressfield talked about that in the War of Art. Have you read that book? 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 and many many creative people over time have called upon the muse and this concept and it sounds like airy-fairy to a lot of people but if you believe in it and if you 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 the book for two and a half years. And I said, oh, more than 500 hours. She goes, 500 hours? This is so much discipline. And if you have anyone, any writers of books, any people who built a house, if you comprehended the enormity of the project, you probably wouldn't even start. Right? Yeah, I can't think like that. I just gotta think about the process. The process. And so I had this little voice in my head that I would wake up and I didn't want to

feel guilty about it. But I had this little voice saying, work on the book, Paul. Work on the book, work on the book, work on the book, work on the book, work on the book, work on the book. I could say it, work on the book, so fast, book, work on the book, work on the book, work on the book, work on the book. 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. I think we all have these little voices that kind of, you know, get it right, Stamets,

you know. Wake up. And I think that's good. I don't think that's psychosis. I think that's something that we all have, these little voices that are trying to help us to be better. Yeah, whether it's internal or external, whatever it is, you can have a voice.

It's like working out. The discipline of being able to make sure that you're the best that you can be. So it's a very exciting time that we live in and there's a mushroom revolution happening all over the planet. I think there's a psychedelic revolution that's happening over the planet. I think it's happened over the last 20 years and I think it's happened because of the internet. I think that's a big factor because what they did in the 1970s by you know with 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. And it's just not true. And unfortunately, like a lot of things 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, 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. 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. So this is why I think, unfortunately in many cultures, it becomes restricted to just a small group of priests, but cognizante they wanted to control and have gates to heaven, or the control of consciousness. So I think that it's so exciting about psilocybin and psilocybin mushrooms as a practice and

honey mushrooms in general. It just gives you a quality of life that's just a game changer. Now with iNaturalist and everything that you can do, it's just getting people out in nature with their children. Children are closer to their ground so they find more mushrooms. Yeah. You know, they're away from the business

and their parents and the phones, some phones. But you get them involved and interacting with nature is just, it's just really, it's like the telescope and seeing all the galaxies and... I think interacting with nature is a vitamin. I think it's just, it's like, you know how we get vitamin D from the sun? I think we get something that hasn't been measured yet from interacting with nature. We know that there's an alleviation, you can actually study an alleviation of stress levels

from people that go out into nature and this thing that we're experiencing, we just don't know how to measure it. 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 openness to psychedelics that's coming from more right-wing people. And it was always a thing of the left. It was always a thing of hippies, and it was dismissed by people on the right as people that were trying to avoid reality. They were trying to escape reality. They couldn't handle reality, they weren't disciplined, they weren't, you know, if they were hardworking people, they wouldn't be wasting their time getting high on drugs.

There's that thought. I think one of the bridges to that is the benefit that it's had for soldiers. For soldiers and for people that are first responders, people that suffer from PTSD, and that has trickled down into the general population of the people on the right which is how you get a guy like Rick Perry that is all the sort in becoming this very strong advocate for Ibogaine and having it passed in Texas so that 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 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, Kacey Musgraves, she's a superstar in country music. I'm out of the loop. She reached out to me and she had a psilocybin experience that inspired her. She has an album called Deeper Well that's just amazing. I was not in the country music until I listened to her and she reached out to me because of her psilocybin experience and we rented, we decided to do Sing for Science. We sold out the Ryman Theatre in Nashville in three hours. Oh wow. 2,500 people. These are country music people. 2,500 people in three hours. Unfortunately, she was in Mexico.

She fell and she broke a rib, so we had to cancel the concert until September 18th, or the Sing for Science. But that's an example. 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. Now, he basically wrote a song about God and psychedelics. It's, you know, I... That was a country song.

And everybody's like, hey, what the hell's going on? It's funny because psychedelics build bridges that marijuana doesn't. I met a lot of people who would never smoke a joint, but the idea of doing a soul-siving 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, you know, look, there's a – one of the things that's interesting is the Jiu-Jitsu community is there's a whole lot of stoners in the Jiu-Jitsu community. A lot of people using psychedelics for athletic performance. Oh yeah, well I know a bunch of people who have fought on mushrooms. Yeah. You know, I have a friend who was a world-class kickboxer who had some of his greatest performances while he was fighting on mushrooms. And he said he could see what the guy was going to do before he did it.

Yeah, the indigenous use of psilocybin is to see into the future. That's one of the advantages I think I've had also. I've been able to prognosticate into the future. We had this extraordinary individual told me a story, which I think I have right, but I'm going 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 a party or whatever, people

throw down money, $5, $20, et cetera. A nail on an ice pick. So you have the point of the ice pick, you got to hit that nail at the very point. Yeah, and sink it. Sink it all the way into the point of the ice pick, you've got to hit that nail at the very point. Yeah, and sink it. Sink it all the way into the wood. So of course, you go around, people are drinking, etc. So the story, as I remember him telling me, is that he went to the bathroom, he's not a toker, he doesn't smoke pot, but someone said, hey, you want some mushrooms?

And they're playing this game. And there was a bunch of his friends were gathered and he goes, oh sure I'll try some mushrooms. So he ate some mushrooms and he came back and He's the circle of Zaram people were betting. Hey, come over and 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 this your turn. So he kind of looked at the nail I mean, this is really hard to do. And he looked at the nail and looked at the nail

and focused on it. He said he had such clarity of focus that everything else was blanked out. He looked at the nail, and he just thought they would connect. Rather than hitting it, they would just connect. Bam! Slammed the nail down on their first attempt.

People went, whoa! Incredible. So they put down, each person put down more money going around. So they came around, everyone's missing, everyone missing. Some people occasionally hit it a little bit, you know, but came around, came around to him. Now he's getting higher on the 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, and there's a lot of money being piled up

on the table here. They're coming around and everyone's going, impossible. Not gonna 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 shit, right? They're like,

what is going on here? And so he said, really, to fuck with one guy who was just out of his mind that he could do this three times in a row. He went around again, and this time he says, I'm going to really blow his mind. So he focused on the nail, focused on the nail, had the hammer, looked at him, bamAM! slams it again while he's looking at it. Nailed it. Yeah, literally nailed it. So these examples of... Well that brings you to the stone-dape theory. Well, it's part of the concept. Well, part of the concept is, you know, with an intense focus, you know, and many years I have two black belts. I had schools for 30 years, black belt in Taekwondo and then Hwarongdo. I was in Shotokan Shiro-ru, Gojuro-ru,

and then Taekwondo and then Hwarongdo, which is like Hapkido. But that idea of having a three dimensional perspective, one of my best, one of my fun experiences, I was in the Dojang or Dojo, just Japanese, Dojang is Korean, and I had my first black belt and my head instructor was over there talking at someone and then he had a baseball. And I heard later what he said, he goes, I told my friend, watch this, and he threw a

baseball at me. My peripheral vision, boom, I just caught the baseball, just before it hit my head. But that idea of having that consciousness surrounding, that's why athleticism with medium doses, minor doses of psilocybin, I think you can train your neurons to be able to have this peripheral awareness that's extremely important. It also alleviates the anxiety that comes before performance

There's a lot of people like to use it before sparring because sparring is kind of scary for some people Yeah, but let's be clear. This is like the 80 20 principle. Maybe the 90 10 principle It's not gonna work for the majority of people. There are exceptional individuals who can actually benefit from this So I'm not your little disclaimer. Yeah, I'm not a little disclaimer there. I don't want to make... No, I drove this race car. Listen, don't take any of our advice. But we're just talking about these things because there are anecdotal stories that are 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. Eye-hand coordination. So psychomotor enhancement. This is why the Stamina Stack speaks to this. We published in Nature of Scientific Reports a combination of psilocybin, niacin, and limesamine increased psychomotor ability of tapping in 10 seconds from 46 to 66 taps.

That's a lot. That's a lot in 10 seconds. Right. Over 30 days. So people can argue about it, but the results are the results. When you're talking about depression and anxiety, that's subjective. But I'm really interested in the psychomotor benefits of psilocybin with an admixture to enhance its performance. I think the root

thing is psilocybin, and being able to regenerate neurons is something I think is really important for us. Now, with glioblastoma, which unfortunately 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 know. Why not? Um, just because I, I don't have evidence to the contrary. I don't have evidence that also suggests that. I see no correlation.

N of 1 is not, you know, it's again, there's no... Right, because it's not a common thing amongst people that are using psilocybin. But if you had 8 million people in the United States, you know, can do this thing 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 not like cigarettes, right? We see cigarettes, we know, you smoke cigarettes, there's a higher likelihood that you're gonna 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? No, there was none. Impossible. Yeah, there are none. And there are many indications, many different targets, from addiction, cigarettes, alcohol, opioid use, to dementia, to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, et cetera. So 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 the reason why I think that there's 235 clinical studies is because basically it's improving your neuro escape. You're improving the neurology. Everything that we're using right now is based to our health of our nervous system. And then the neuro escape, if we can enrich the neurology, everything that we're using right now is based to our health of our nervous system. Right. And then the neuro-escape, if we can enrich the neuro-escape, then that has elaborations

into everything that we do. And the fact that 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? Silicin has strong anti-inflammatory properties as well. Interesting. So that's that's just has come out in the scientific literature. So that I wasn't aware of that. That's really interesting. How did they study that and what was the they have something called interleukin 6. There was a clinical study that was just

published just recently and a down-regulated tumor necrosis factor interleukin 6, down-regulated, that's an inflammatory cytokine. There's two anti-inflammatory cytokines that are extraordinarily interesting to us and our research team. I have five PhD scientists, eight full-time scientists. That's why I created my business is to do research. But interleukin 10 and interleukin 1RA are anti-inflammatory cytokines. So when you can upregulate those, then it kind of buffers the inflammatory effects. And so that's exciting to find these anti-inflammatory. We were approved by the FDA for a COVID clinical trial based on the fact that we published this in the Journal of Inflammation Research that interleukin-10 and interleukin-1RA were stimulated by agaricon and turkey tail mycelium

grown on rice versus the rice control. So as a peer-reviewed article when you know the pandemic started the big concern was if you stimulate the immune system you have a cytokine storm and you could overwhelm, you know, the body with many many, if not most people, die from cytokineokine storm as their overreaction of the immune system to COVID and to other diseases. So we were able to show you can augment in the literature your immune system buffered with the anti-inflammatory properties that sort of resolved the argument of the cytokine storm concern. And then now we have a very successful study that shows that agaricon and turkey tail mycelium enhances the immunity of individuals long term, six months later.

And that big mushroom that you gave me. Yeah, you still have that. Yeah, it's right there, baby. That's a trophy. Yeah oh it's never leaving the desk. That sucker. And this is a great example because this is a dangerous 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 old. It's a very nice specimen. Stamets gave you this? Yes, Stamets, you gave me this buddy. This is one of the nicest specimens.

So these are annual growth rings. Isn't it cool to see it on the desk? I love it, thank you. People always ask, what the hell is that? So this is a gara con called Fomitopsis aficionalis, also known as Larissa Fomis. Diascoritis first described it in Greek medicine 2000 years ago as elixirium ad longum vitum, 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 mushrooms? If it had spores, it looks like it goes inside the roots of trees, this one being as old as it is, and spores have probably become not viable. But agaricon has the white form and the brown form. It goes through this massive transition as biochemistry. And because it's endangered

and because highly variable in form, fruit party extracts of this makes no sense. Why is it endangered in Europe and not in America? Only grows in old growth forests. Oh. So the sky islands in Europe, in Austria, Slovenia, 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, it's my strain library of agaricon. It's a treasure of strains. One out of 20, one out of 100 times in the old growth forest 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 it's scalable. The mycelium is scalable. The fruit body extracts are not. And it's highly variable. Most people don't know that... Well, they should know, but most mushrooms are parasitized by insects. And that's because the insects spread spores.

So the mushrooms invite insects to come in so they can spread spores. Like cordyceps and ants. Yeah, or like buzz pollination. That's the weirdest thing when you see spiders and ants overwhelmed by cordyceps. Yeah, it's um, I like to say cordyceps has to eat too. Yeah, I mean this is the cycle of life, right? So this agaricon is in the BioShield 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 is fantastic and has thousands of years of history, all traditional medicines advance with new technologies. That's true across the board. The invention of individual propagation about 100 years ago, growing mycelium, now opens up this huge opportunity for us to dive into a deeper well of natural substances that can be used as adjunct therapies to enhance conventional medicine. It's a game changer. So 115 strains of Agarica, and I submitted eight of them to the BioShield 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 from DOD and the head of the BioShield program, Jack Seacrest, saying that, whoops, these are some of the most significant results

they've ever seen. 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. And it talks, it's me with my son when he's four years old and I'm on the phone saying I've created this company to do research. Research is what we want to do. Truly that's the origins of what I was trying to, why I created my business. So I still do that. So with the 115 strains we're likely to have a super strain. In our collection, pandemics are coming all the time. We're in a viral storm. 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% of beehives were lost in Montana this past year.

67%. Imagine if you had 67% loss of a herd of cattle or sheep. That's phenomenal. And bird flu is spreading. It's making the jumps. It is coming, folks. And so what we want to do is design a clinical study using a garrot con 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 even some other animals like moose and I think even elk. 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 against... it doesn't take a stroke of genius, but in my case, the bioshield 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. Colonic collapse is a threat to food biosecurity. And we found, and we published this in Nature Scientific Reports, extracts of polypore mushroom mycelium protects bees from viruses. We published that in Nature Scientific Reports. I'm the primary author. We were able to reduce viruses, the deformed wing virus, by I think 879 times in 12 days with one treatment. So that is phenomenal for protecting food biosecurity. That helps all farmers. It helps, and there's a pandemic that's spreading. 67% loss, 60% loss

generally across the United States this year. The worst colony collapse in history. This will make food prices go up and it doesn't stop because these viruses are proliferating throughout the environment. We found that the polypore mushroom mycelium grown on grain or grown on sawdust not only reduces these viruses but extends longevity. And so the longevity and interesting that this mushroom is known as Elixirium adlongum vitam, the elixir of long life. We are all animals, 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 fungi. Now, we're allowed by the FDA to say supporting innate immunity in healthy individuals. We're not allowed to make any disease claims. Ironically, we can't make that same claim with bees. We can say extends longevity, but this is where there's not common sense in government. I have an invention that could save hundreds of billions of dollars That protect bees from colony collapse and we're roadblocked by regulations 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 up-regulating You know basic immunity.

And then your endogenous immune system, in this case of the bees, can fight the viruses. So this I think will translate into birds and to swine. So there's resistance to these results? No. Because your immunity is so complex. No, I mean publicly. Like you're saying you can't make these claims, but if you have results...

We have fantastic results. I refer anyone to Nature Scientific Reports. So could you elaborate on what the resistance is? Well the resistance is complicated and it's political. The old school conventional wisdom is that if you have a drug like effect, then you have an undeclared drug in your product. Isn't that funny? Yeah. Nature. So even though it's from nature, even though bees go to a lot of 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 working with Washington State University, great people there. We're working with several funders. We have tested this now over and over again. This is an outdoor animal clinical study,

double blind, placebocontrolled, using the mycelium grown on rice or on sawdust versus the sawdust of the rice as a control. Clearly, clearly a benefit. So this is scalable. You can't harvest fruit bodies in a way that you can scale mycelium. Mycelium is an exponential increase in mycelial mass virtually every week. It's 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 or even 10 times 100 times 100 times 100, massively scalable. I think I have found something as a portal through my psychedelic experiences that's

fundamental to protecting life on this planet, is that the mycelial networks are deep reservoirs for being able to immunologically enhance animals, where we don't have to have all these antiviral drugs, antibiotic drugs. Your endogenous immune systems are upregulated because over hundreds of millions of years, we've been interacting with these. It's our immunodepression and suppression because of all the factors we know, bad diet, toxins, 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 can say we have an undisclosed drug in the honey. So whatever. But it also translates to wild bees. It turns out that Apis melephra, the honeybee, 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. It's highly scalable. And this regulatory committee disappeared in the past two years. This is before the last administration was voted in.

But they didn't tell anybody. So we had an application with them for two years to have this exempted. The whole committee is gone. The whole committee is gone. They didn't even tell us that it was gone. So we've had two years spending our thumbs waiting for them to respond. This is where we need to have common sense to come back into government. This is that where our government has too many hurdles to practical solutions that are demonstrable, scalable and affordable that can be retrodden investment as, 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 and 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, I'm involved with them, but they have a metarysium, a fungus, that kills mites. So it's also been approved by the USDA for thrips and other greenhouse insects. It's not toxic to fish, not toxic to humans. So the combination of using metarysium with the agaricot and other polypore mushroom mycelium, we think has a great potential future. So I

think there's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional agricultural practices. There's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional medical practices. They are not necessarily an opposition. What is an opposition, unfortunately, and you've alluded to this, is a lot of the pharmaceutical business interests are not excited about a natural product, reducing the need for vaccines, augmenting immunity. There is money in disease. Right. That's always the problem, money. You can tell I'm passionate about this because I have such a deliverable, provable solution

that's scalable. I wonder if... And I'm so, my article was published in 2018, and I tell my research team, you know, WTF, we are meeting with WSU constantly, and now we have renewed interest, thankfully, because of some big stakeholders in the almond industry, and every almond you eat, a flower was visited by a bee. 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 cows and with chickens. We had the viral pandemic of a former bird flu, not H5N1, but another bird flu, I can't remember, I think it was 8, 7, and 2 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 an organic farm, and we gave one quarter of a gram of garrochon mycelium per chicken in their feed, and we became our, that chicken, there's two big chicken hens, about 20,000 layers, birds

that lay eggs, and it became an oasis of immunity. Those chickens were immune from bird flu. Wow. A quarter of a gram of this mycelium. Wow. And we protected them. That's incredible. But a crazy thing happened.

The USDA had an insurance policy to pay the chicken growers and the chicken growers quickly learned that they could get an insurance check, lay off the employees, get the cash for lost profits, and so they were not incentivized. Yeah, I've heard that from people that are deeply connected to that industry that there was a bunch of euthanizations that didn't have to happen. Didn't have to happen. Yeah, and they did it.

And they inflated this whole concept, you know, because the numbers got grossly inflated because they were euthanizing chickens for profit. Yeah, bird flu is a very serious, serious issue. Now, I know vaccines are a very hot subject, and I know you've spoken on that. You've had some excellent guests, by the way, excellent guests or researchers on this. But I just want to give a thoughtful discussion between viruses and vaccines. Which is worse, the virus or the vaccine? I'm a libertarian. I believe every family, every individual has a right to make an informed decision.

The problem that I see with the vaccine industry, the industrial vaccine complex, is the failure to disclose. I don't think Americans are stupid. I think Americans become stupid when they're not informed. My partner as a physician, she goes giving hep B vaccines to a child makes no sense. This is sexually transmitted disease. Why are you giving a vaccine to a 10-year-old? And a baby. And in med school, when anyone would mention that, why are we doing this, they were vilified. Right.

Vilified. Shut down. It's like, what happened to thoughtful good science? It's just a reasonable question. Money happened. It's also these vaccine manufacturers are immune to the financial consequences of the side effects. Absolutely. We need to have full disclosure. Yeah. Now, let me go through a thought experiment. Okay, 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 are saved with a vaccine one person dies. Hey, you took it for the home team. Sorry

One person dies out Hey, you took it for the home team. Sorry. One person dies out of 100,000. Still ratio is pretty good. My mind, my judgment, sorry. Again, you took it for the home team. One out of 10,000. Okay. Still the ratio is pretty good.

Okay. One out of 1,000. Okay, one out of 100, you're making me nervous. One out of 10, no. That's where I draw the line. I would say, forget it. Now the contradiction that we have, the opposing forces here that we have, is that is it better for society to have vaccinations to protect the commons, or is it better for you to have an individual decision for

your family to protect yourself if you want to? If you are going to make that decision you should have an informed decision based on the best of science. All vaccines and all companies should disclose what is the percentage of protection. I have a physician friend who says 30% protection but I'm sick for four or five days. I don't know that's not worth it. 70% protection. Okay, all right, you know, so everyone has to balance the risk-benefit ratio. But we need real data to be able to make that assessment. We need real data. We need full disclosure. Right. And for anyone to be able to make that assessment. We need real data. We need full disclosure. And for anyone to accuse another physician and vilify them

because they ask a logical question and they're humiliated by the medical community is fundamentally unfair. What happened with good science? You have to follow the science. And this is so important. And that's why I think we're getting this cacophony, this echo chamber, where the voices that are the loudest

tend to be the stupidest sometimes. Or the most compromised. Yeah, and they drown out a dissent. We all should be able to ask for the data and the information to make an individual decision. And science shouldn't be this ideological or ideologically captured thing. That's why I hate the term anti-vaxxers. I think it's a pejorative term.

I think it's prejudiced. You know, what about people who just want to have information? Oh, you're an anti-vaxxer. Yeah, well, it's pushed just to scare people into compliance. 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 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

literally have the federal government censoring social media and not allowing people to have dissenting opinions, including people from Harvard and MIT and all the people in the Great Barrington study. Why don't we have an open source national database showing the protection of vaccines and the risk of not getting one so individuals can make a decision. Age related, all these other factors, the data is there. Not making that data available to the public increases distrust. And so what the medical community has unfortunately done is they've bred a bunch of dissenters by not giving full access to

the information. Well I think that really heightened during the pandemic because I don't think people had that much of a distrust for vaccines unless they knew someone who was vaccine injured. Unless they were gaslit and were told that their child or someone else that had gotten vaccine injured that that was not the cause of it. And those are the people that were very skeptical and they formed these tight community 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? Sure. 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? Well, we both know why? It's money. Yeah. I mean the financial interest is astounding. The amount of money that's involved in it and the amount of money that they spend every

year. They spend 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 spend so much money on television networks. You know, I mean, how many times is 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 that's accessible to everyone so you can make the best judgment for yourself and your family. Yeah, and you've got to remove this financial protection that they have from liability because if they don't have that, they're going to just jack up the amount that they give people because there's profit in that, unfortunately. And then there are vaccines that are beneficial. Let's find out which ones they are. What can be mitigated in terms of like, how can you make your overall metabolic health

better before you even think about any of these things. We know for a fact that during the COVID crisis in particular, the people that had the most problem with it were the people that had comorbidities, or people that were obese, people that had all sorts of issues going on because of poor diet, poor lifestyle choices, and even genetic problems. Yeah, one of the immunologists we were working with told me something I didn't know is that when you're immunocompromised or immunodepressed, vaccines don't work very well.

So those people become reservoirs for mutation. Right, which is the argument for why you don't give it to children when they're babies, because their immune system isn't even functional yet. Yeah, you know, again, the hep B one is a pretty clear example. That's a nut functional yet. Yeah, I'm, you know, I, again, the HEPB one is a pretty clear example. That's a nutty one. Yeah, but I-

There's a bunch of nutty ones, but the point is the vaccine schedule. If you look at what we used to take and you look at what happened when they lost their liability during the Reagan administration, all of a sudden the schedule goes way up and they started adding things like HEPB. And then you realize like,

oh, it's very profitable to do that. Imagine how much more money you make if you're injecting everybody with a hep B vaccine if you sell hep B vaccines. Yeah simple mathematics. Yeah also I've met people in the pharma industry who are extremely well intended. Sure. Great scientists. Oh absolutely. But the scientists aren't the issue right? They've also confessed to me that they face this humiliation, you know, being ostracized for just asking questions. But again, full disclosure, let people make up their own minds. What's the cost-benefit ratio? Is it one out of a million, one out of ten? You know, it's also, you should have to show all the studies, too. You shouldn't just show the curated studies that you generated specifically with the goal

of making an efficacy, like having a result that shows that this is effective. If you do 10 studies, you should show all 10 studies. Yeah. Well, actually, that's why clinicaltrials.gov exists. Is that we're chair picking, doing studies in Bulgaria and in India and Taiwan, and the pharma would choose the clinical study that supported their neuro. Exactly, exactly. And then they could use deceptive language to show the efficacy.

But what I'm getting at is that we have such a reservoir of potential ways of supporting immunity in healthy individuals in nature. That is not Pharma-based, that's based on the entourage effect. And say when you activate the receptors in your immune system, there'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 or the collaboration, more receptors are activated that have collaboratively 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 is an uphill battle. Right. Yeah. It's interesting too that like natural remedies are automatically dismissed by people that think of themselves as intelligent, science-based people. Well, look at Artemisison. But isn't it weird though that like we dismiss it, but if you really understand the like think about how many different pharmaceutical drugs are formulated because of discoveries of natural plants in the majority of them and the most recent example is the

anti-malarial drug against plasma modium falciparum from an artisia bush, and it's Artemisuson. And it came from Artemisia. It's a plant extract. Isn't that wild? But yet, science-based people will automatically dismiss what you would call a natural remedy, even though all of them, every kind, like, 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, Symbiobeta Conference. 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. 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, not many, but some mushrooms are poisonous, some are edible. As a weird statistic about, and again, 1 to 2% fudge factor here, so please don't attack me all over the place, but there's 1.5 to 5 million species of fungi. There's about 150,000 species of mushrooms that are estimated. So out of that 5 million on the extreme, 1.5 million, less than 10%, 150,000. We've only identified about 15,000 species. So we've only identified 10% of the mushrooms that exist today. Wow.

Now, interestingly, of those 15,000 species, about 1% are poisonous, 1 or 2%. 1 or 2% are psychoactive, and 1 to 2% are good edibles. So 97, 95, 94%, whatever the math shows, are there, but they're not toxic. But mushrooms are molecular wizards. These are pharmaceutical factories that are creating huge numbers. And we know from 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 these thin threads through a hostile microbial environment, defending itself, until the mycelial 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 exist for years. The mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom. And as a result, we have a lot more compounds being expressed. Now, some people say, well, not all those compounds are necessarily beneficial. Aha! Well that's true but now we've tested them enough that we can see real world benefit. Dean Ornish just published a study this past year on Alzheimer's

using lifestyle adjustments exercise meditation vitamins and lion's mane mushroom mycelium dramatically significant benefit 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 one's the most significant. And yet, where's the studies combining 10 vaccines

or 20 vaccines in a child to see which one is actually conferring the benefit or causing an adverse effect? We have to, at some point, 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 in healthy individuals, isn't that good? Why do we have to get lost in the details of trying to explain it if we can't explain it 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 virologists

Very amongst themselves. They talk about this all the time, but the public is not aware You could have individuals and when you have so many dairy farmer workers exposed, so many people on contact, concentrated clusters of animals 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. It's an exponential increase of risk.

Bill Gates has talked about this. Many other researchers have talked about this. This is really something we should pay attention to. And I think the simplest, easiest, scalable way is to enhance immunity in healthy individuals. And by doing so, I think you can let your endogenous immune system work better. And I think conventional medicine will work better also in concert. Well, it also speaks to the problem with industrial agriculture in general, right? These are unnatural environments where these animals are

you know living in their own waste on a consistent basis, which is you know it enhances the possibility of disease and regenerative agriculture enhances the possibility of Harmony amongst nature and then the counter argument is that we have better nutrition, we can feed the world so that people are more people happier. You know, again, we're at this, we have contrast of opposites.

And I wish I had the easy solution. I think I have the solution for bees. I think it's scalable for protecting chickens and livestock. I hope, you know, and we're now designing clinical studies on the path to the line of clinical studies with bird flu using a garracon. We don't have the results, so I'm not making a medical claim here. But the evidence so far is so encouraging, and I'm working with top-notch virologists, absolutely some of the best virologists who came to me because they saw the paper in Nature

of Scientific Reports and they thought, oh, fungi, fungi could help us, you know, protect ourselves from viruses. So they came through the back door of the scientific community, not Joe Rogan listener they might be, I don't know, maybe they are now, but they came to me through the scientific literature saying we should try this with people. So those are the scientists I like that are open-minded enough. They're rather than just a molecular geneticist, you know, synthetic bio people. They're actually saying, well, it's a provable result.

We don't know why, but we should explore this because we can argue for 100 years about why. Or we could deliver it tomorrow and have it at positive effect. Yeah, it makes sense. I have to ask you this question, it's unrelated, but I always wanted to know, why do morel mushrooms grow around burns? That is such a great question. And you know what, that's a question

that we've been asking for so long. I love morel mushrooms. I love morel mushrooms too. They are poisonous unless you cook them. Really? Oh boy, that's important to know. Many people have died from morel mushrooms. Wow, that's crazy.

You don't want to cook morel mushrooms in a closed kitchen without ventilation. There are volatile compounds coming out of the morels. Totally denatured in cooking, delicious. But many, many examples of this. In Japan, I was in Japan 15 years ago. So if you don't have an overhead fan, don't fry morels in your kitchen. Oh, yes, you open up the window, but just

don't inhale the fumes. Wow. I would have never imagined that. The North American Mycological Association is the association for Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and there's a poison control group in that, and they collect all the details. It's namico.org, N-A-M-Y-C-O.org. 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 disclosures of patient conditions that has really inhibited the flow of information. Nevertheless, namaco.org, North American Mycological Association, namy.co.org, and my professor, Dr. Michael Bughe, is a giant in consulting for adverse effects

in mushroom poisonings. So, morels are delicious, but to answer your question, the wheat, morel, mycelium seems to be everywhere, but then it for forest burns and they come up. Where were they before? Right. Do they exist in places that don't have burns? Yes. But rarely? No. We think all the time.

All the time, but very common amongst burns. They're everywhere where forests are. And when the forest burn, it knocks down all the competition. Oh. And it becomes very alkaline. 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 scentful, 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 nature 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, the demorales come up. That's fascinating. Another fascinating thing is that the largest living organism on Earth in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, Armillary Asoi. Some people call it Gallica, two different things, but yeah, I flew over it. It's a 2,200 acre, you know, basically a clear cut that 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 the first time I couldn't see it because I was too low. Second time I had a spiral up. Can you explain what it is to people? It's a honey mushroom. It's a parasite on trees is 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 Forms black black rhizomorphs black mycelium is called laminated root rot many listeners here know what that is. It kills fruit trees It's called laminated root rot. Many listeners here know what that is. It kills fruit trees. But this is a marauding parasite that created a contiguous mat over 2,200 acres. And in this case, it killed all the trees. So they went ash and gray in color.

And they dried out, and they're dead. Because of fire hazard from lightning strikes, the Forest Service came in, and they cut all the dead trees. 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. So, but anyhow that's an example.

Now, oh kill the trees, that's terrible, but it created collapse grasslands for unglades, right? Yeah, so deer and moose elk and come in so it's way of I think as a way of this rebalancing of nature right where you deal with millions and millions of acres millions and millions of acres there is a real big problem with millions and millions of acres, there is a real big problem with the bark beetle right now. You know, that's a problem. The ecosystems are shifting in response to stress. And you know, we live with our mind's view of only one lifetime.

We're very myopic. I think we need to look at 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 That could be very different It's just such a fascinating thing the largest known organism on earth Exists in the Pacific Northwest. It is 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? 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 Aragon.

there is a fungus that's related to Aragon. It's in the Clavisipatesii, and it was found by a student at Western Virginia University. It is in morning glory seeds that produces LSD. Well, Terence talked about that. No, this is before Terence, but Terence talked about morning glory. Terence talked about morning glory seeds and having psychedelic experiences. It turns out it's a symbiotic fungus that's growing in there. And it's called, it's called Pera Glamdula clandestina. And don't they... 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 was 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. A graduate student need to give her credit is the Western Virginia University, Kareen Hazel. Look how young she is. Very's got it. 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 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, underreported, underutilized. This is a fantastic treasure trove of new potential discoveries. I have long stated I think the field of mycology should be funded as well as the computer industry because it's so fundamental to the survival of our species. It's that big. Yeah. No, I couldn't agree with you more. Did you, you're aware of Brian Murrow rescue, right?

Yep. 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 the Illucinian 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 being... 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 who has experience or someone who just read a book? So late 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 on his house in the backyard Said he just smiled Well then after he died I met some of his friends And he goes oh, yeah rolling rolling tripped, but he didn't want to tell anyone because for the fear that he could lose his objectivity or be criticized. Yeah. Rick Strassman had 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. It was documented in DMT, the spirit molecule of 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?

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 mountain top 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 psychedelic assisted therapy movement. The Center, the California Institute for Integrative Studies, CIIS, I think.org or.eu, has a program training psychedelic therapists. You don't have to be a medical physician to be able to hold someone's hand

to have a guided experience. Now there's a lot of charlatans out there. Be warned, folks. There's a lot of problems. But there are some excellent therapists out there. 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 constructs of a hospital to have benefited. And then they're reluctant to talk about it because of the illegality of it, unfortunately. And if you know, if you have a job that is where you have to be taken seriously.

You could be lose your medical license. But the University of Washington, 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 are able to reconcile the emotional harm that they experienced from angry patients and being assaulted. And they were able to then return, many of them, back into the medical profession, you know, with a, you know, healing from that.

So, you realize aggression and anger affects everyone around you. The advantage of psilocybin, I think, just like a pebble in the pawn 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

... He used to love to have him on the show sometimes. 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'd love to for you to... 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, thankfully, and they were selling the Stammer stack, which is kind of weird because I have my name on it. And we walk in there and say, this is where I tell all my law enforcement officers to come to get their psilocybin. I said, I'm sorry, I'm trying to juxtaposition this, you know, how does this work? And he goes, well, you know, this is good perhaps for us 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? He said, we found a better

way up here, and it's through psilocybin. I said, well, what do you do? He says, well, we have learned the following. Now when I have to arrest somebody, I know they have a warrant out for them. I walk up to them and I say, and I always walk up with a smile on my face, never a harsh look, always a smile on my face. I said, I have good news 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 I go, okay, what's the bad news?

Dude, I got to arrest you. And he goes, the amount of cooperation and the reduction of the threat level for the safety of the law enforcement and the cooperation that they get in the SWAT car when these people that are just shooting this shit with a law enforcement officer, I know you're doing your job, but wow, thank you for being so nice arresting me.

He said, it's a game changer. It's reduced the threat to us physically of making arrests. It makes sense. It doesn't escalate. Yeah, it'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 deescalate it. And he goes, you won't believe the things I learned from these people who are arresting now, who tell me things that would never have gotten out of interrogation, but they were

so respected in the fact that they had to do their job without becoming adversarial. Pete Slauson Yeah. Pete Slauson Note to self, right? Note to everyone right now. Pete Slauson Note to everyone. And all conflicts involve two or more people. It does, they're not, it's not just this is the only way to react to something. It's how you react, how they react to your reaction. There's a cascading effect. Well, I have great faith in humanity.

I've seen that. I do too. I have seen the best, I mean, I've seen people. Most people are great. Most people are great and they're better when they go through a psilocybin experience that amplifies the best of people. And it also helps them resolve a lot of the baggage. You can think of the inflammatory actions of the anger, and you did something and you

don't want to tell anybody, but you're haunted by that. You inadvertently harm somebody, and you went off the deep end, you harm somebody else. It's a cascading event of harm. When these people are resolved, 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, it's not in the past. Yeah, that's the perspective we should all have, and that's the thing that we should

all strive for. Be the best version of you that you can be. And we've all made terrible mistakes in the past, but the idea is to have learned from them and to be a better person because of that. Well the medical community has come together on this, on psychedelics. The law enforcement community has come together. It's positive. It's positive. We're in a positive direction.

I had my interview by the DEA and they were... I thought they were the boogeyman in the 70s for good reason, by the way. But I shouldn't say that. But I went through my background check and the DEA has such a sense of humor. 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 says, are you sure you don't remember? And they're roleplaying here. I didn't know 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 said, I have no clue. No clue. He goes, are you sure? I mean, this is your official response. You don't remember. I said, no, I don't remember. He says, didn't you get a speeding ticket?

And I said, I paid that. It was from those machines. It was from a camera. I know I paid it. I could dig up the receipt. It was like 35 bucks. And they just roared with laughter. They're just fucking with you. They're fucking with me. And what they told me is that we don't know shit about mushrooms or psilocybin. We're an enforcement agency. Many of us don't agree with this. Change the law. We wanna go after syndicates. We wanna go after fentanyl. We wanna go after these, you know, these, these, these.

Things that are not beneficial in any way, shape, or form. So we don't want to hurt the source that is healing us. But they won't fuck around when it comes to money transactions. Once you involve money, then the DEA is going to be involved. But you're involved in research, and we have strict guidelines. I had DEA license in 1975, 1976, 77, 78, through Dr. Michael Bugge at the African State College, and they were much more liberal. I could grow tons of soul-side Muslims and collect them in. that's why we did a series of conferences.

I was the only one that had a DEA license, so we did these conferences collecting all these experts together with Albert Hofmann there, R. Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans-Schultes, you know, Jonathan Ott, Terence McKenna. But I had the license to be able to possess psilocybin with my professor. And so we would have all the psilocybin. So we did these educational events, you know, academic with citizen scientists and psychonauts coming together. But it's really different.

We just had a Psychological 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 the 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 citizen's movement. It's a democratic movement for the freedom of consciousness and everyone should have a right to be able to practice. And where do you draw individual use from religious use? Everyone should have a right to be able to practice. And where do you draw individual use from religious use?

Cilicide and 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 a 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 is 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. Hold your book up there because because this is the latest of eight books that you've written. Yeah. Silicidin mushrooms in their natural habitats. Paul, you're a gem. You really are. You're such an important person. And I think through the conversations that you and I have had,

and then you've had on many other podcasts as well, millions and millions of people have gotten to understand what this is really all about. I think your role in educating people is enormous. But let's be very careful with that. I'm a one knowledge keeper, literally in a string of knowledge keepers. So many people have died, been harmed, 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.