April 11, 2024 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:32:19
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | ||
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The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| What is going on, my friend? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Good to see you again. | ||
| Good to see you, brother. | ||
| It's been a while. | ||
| It's been a while, and there's a lot of interesting developments, so this is the never-ending story, I feel. | ||
| The never-ending story of mushrooms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this giant one that you brought me, explain this again? | ||
| Because you were telling me out there, I'm like, let's save this for the show, because this is crazy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This is the best gift that I can give from a mycologist to a friend. | ||
| This is a rare old-growth mushroom called agarachon. | ||
| Only grows in the old-growth forest. | ||
| It's now on the red list of threatened species in Europe. | ||
| This one was found on the ground, folks, so it's important that people don't pick these. | ||
| They're very rare. | ||
| Literally one out of a hundred times in the old-growth forest, I'll find one. | ||
| So this is really important that people understand how important biodiversity, mycodiversity, we're talking about fungi. | ||
| Agaricon was first ascribed by Dioscorides over 2,000 years ago as Elixirium ad longum vitum, the elixir of long life. | ||
| It was also revered by the Haida and the Cliquet in the Northwest First Nations as a mushroom very important for their own pharmacopoeia. | ||
| So 2,000 years history of use, other sides of the world. | ||
| And directly after 9-11, I was approached by the BioShield Biodefense Department, and they ran over 2,200 assays. | ||
| The concern was weaponizable viruses. | ||
| So they saw an article I wrote in Herbogram called Novel Antivirals from Mushrooms, a whopping one page long. | ||
| That's all there was in the scientific literature. | ||
| So I knew, in my intuition, this rare species could have some properties. | ||
| Of more than two million samples tested by the U.S. Defense Department, U.S. AMRID, U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and NIH, in collaboration, of more than two million samples, synthetics and natural compounds, we were in the top ten of all samples active against, in this case, pox viruses, and we were the only natural product. | ||
| So there's a vetted press release that talks about this that came out in 2004. So, I've dedicated my life. | ||
| You know, I have a company, and fortunately, I've put a lot of my resources. | ||
| I've literally spent millions of dollars collecting strains from the old growth forest, and I'm happy to announce that we have more than 107 strains of Agaricon, isolated from Northern California, even Northern Arizona, British Columbia, and in Europe. | ||
| I have now the largest culture library of Agaricon in the world. | ||
| And so people go, why is it important? | ||
| Well, it's not only important because the old growth forests are declining. | ||
| I mean, there's less than 1%. | ||
| But I believe the old growth forests are cultural libraries that will be essential for biodefense. | ||
| And from the research that we did with the BioShield program in 2004, then I have a TED Talk in 2008 that talks about this. | ||
| And then I'm very thankful that we have completed a COVID-19 clinical trial. | ||
| The results of Rich was presented at the Georgetown University of Medicine School of Medicine on September 23rd, 2023. And what we looked at, and my colleagues, and superb physicians and researchers led by a great team at the Krupp Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. | ||
| And it was a double-blind placebo-controlled study. | ||
| And in that study, the idea was to look at vaccine enhancement. | ||
| So before mRNA vaccines, there was just so much noise and confusion and, you know, since the dust hadn't settled enough. | ||
| But the mRNA enhancement vaccine, which is called Mach 19, They gave half the patients a placebo, which was mycelium grown on rice. | ||
| I'm sorry, just rice. | ||
| And agaricon and turkey tail combined that were grown on rice. | ||
| So one, the control of placebo is just rice, neutral. | ||
| And the other one is agaricon and turkey tail. | ||
| Turkey tail is the most well-studied medicinal mushroom in the world. | ||
| We populate a website for physicians at mushroomreferences.com. | ||
| No branding, just pure science. | ||
| People can go to mushroomreferences.com and see this. | ||
| So double-blind, placebo-controlled, and they literally recruited people directly out of the vaccination lines, or people getting Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. | ||
| And said, hey, do you want to be involved in a medicinal mushroom vaccine study, enhancement study? | ||
| And people then signed up. | ||
| And so they consumed agariconic turkey tail or the placebo for four days. | ||
| And then they measured symptoms post-vaccination and then six months out. | ||
| And so, there are two slides that I have that I sent along to that I'm allowed to show. | ||
| When you say symptoms post-vaccination, what do you mean? | ||
| Well, it's not quite showing up there, Jamie, for some reason, the chart. | ||
| Both of them. | ||
| You might have to do a PNG on the snapshot. | ||
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Which one? | |
| Do you want both at the same time? | ||
| No. | ||
| Just see if you can... | ||
| The charts are not showing up for whatever reason. | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh... | |
| Um... | ||
| No worries. | ||
| So what happens, I mean, I've got an MNRA vaccine. | ||
| You feel like you're hit by a truck, right, two days later. | ||
| You got the vaccine and some physicians say, well, that's your immune system. | ||
| Acting or reacting. | ||
| So there was 10 symptoms that the CDC has identified, the Center for Disease Control, that are adverse events due to vaccines. | ||
| They're actually, UCSD has 25 symptoms. | ||
| So the idea was to look at whether agaricon and turkey tail reduced the adverse effects of vaccines. | ||
| And how would they do that? | ||
| Well, they measure, they ask you, do you get a headache? | ||
| Right, but I mean, how would the mushrooms reduce the... | ||
| Well, this is a very good question. | ||
| We had to convince the FDA that these were safe. | ||
| And so, because we had sold hundreds of thousands of agaricon and turkey tail with no adverse offense, we were able to prove that. | ||
| So it went through, they called the institution of review boards and the FDA for approval, and they approved it. | ||
| Now, the biggest concern they had was, if you stimulate the immune system, which is the The presumption of how these mushrooms work, you could create a cytokine storm. | ||
| And so this is one of the charts. | ||
| Now, this was written up in JAMA. And the concern was a cytokine storm poses the greatest risk, not the virus itself. | ||
| And so when people took Agaricon, day one is where the vaccination occurred with Moderna or Pfizer, mRNA. | ||
| And then if you look at the black line, that's the placebo, which is just the rice. | ||
| And FOTV is foamy, thompsis, fishnallis, trimidase, versicolor. | ||
| That's Agaricon and turkey tail combined. | ||
| And you'll see that at day two and day three, on the scale there, there's almost no adverse effects. | ||
| And whereas those people who did not take Agaricon and Turkey Tail had a massive increase in adverse symptoms. | ||
| Now, an article just came out this past year, 30% of the people avoid vaccinations because they fear the adverse effects. | ||
| Because they hear people miss school, miss work, they feel terrible, they go, I don't want to get a vaccine. | ||
| Not just that, the really scary ones like myocarditis, pericarditis, heart attack, strokes, blood clots. | ||
| So, the reason why the FDA approved this, we have an argument, is we found that these MUT2 mushrooms stimulated what's called anti-inflammatory cytokines, interleukin-1-RA and interleukin-10. | ||
| Most of the, when you have an immune response, many of these interleukins are part of your natural immunity, but they can cascade, and they can then, on throttled, create a cytokine storm. | ||
| So most people then die from overstimulation of the immune system, an inflammatory reaction. | ||
| We found that with agaricon and turkey tail, we were able to reduce The adverse effects, which are inflammatory effects, headache, sore throat, insomnia, muscle ache, soreness, malaise, etc. | ||
| Insomnia is also included. | ||
| So this was a big surprise. | ||
| It was double-blind placebo. | ||
| I had no access to any of the data until it was unmasked, which is normal. | ||
| So we found that. | ||
| And then something else very, very surprising occurred. | ||
| And as to credit to my colleagues, they came up with this idea at the University of California, Krupp's Center for Integrative Medicine, is let's look at antibody extension. | ||
| The idea with the vaccines that you create an antibody is to prevent the spike protein from docking on your cells and gaining entrance and infecting your cells. | ||
| So they looked at people six months later. | ||
| Now, 89 out of 90 people, I think, came back six months later. | ||
| Tremendous conformity. | ||
| Let's take your blood six months later. | ||
| And then, Jamie, if you can pull up the next slide. | ||
| And this is what we found that was so astonishing, is six months later, with the short exposure to agaricon and turkey tail, there was a carry-on where the antibody response was far greater than that of the reservoir of antibodies just from the vaccine. | ||
| Are these people that actually contracted COVID as well? | ||
| These are what we call naive. | ||
| When you get COVID, then the antibody response gets very cloudy, and then you have antibody response from your natural immune system, then you have the vaccine itself. | ||
| So these are called the vaccine naive group. | ||
| I mean, the virus naive group. | ||
| We did not want them to have the virus. | ||
| So we track them to make sure that they did not get the virus. | ||
| But this elevates you into a state of immune readiness. | ||
| And this is the thing I did not know. | ||
| I did not know if you're immunologically depressed, you have immunologically lower activity due to whatever reason. | ||
| If you get a vaccine, your antibody response is not that great. | ||
| Your immune cell levels are very low. | ||
| They're not very active. | ||
| What's exciting about this, the immunologist, is that if you can upregulate immunity, And then get the vaccine. | ||
| Your immune cell population is much more robust, much more responsive, and so the antibody response is much greater. | ||
| And this is what we found. | ||
| The fact that it extended out six months, we didn't go out a year, we didn't go out longer. | ||
| And this is just for a short dosing? | ||
| Short dosing of only four days. | ||
| And this was the dosing that happened right after the vaccine? | ||
| Right simultaneously in the same day of the vaccine for four days. | ||
| Now, this is one of my favorite phrases by Voltero, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. | ||
| You can twist yourself into pretzels to try to explain how this works. | ||
| But the bottom line, it does work. | ||
| And if you could up-regulate community immunity of the population, The problem that I did not realize is immunologically depressed people, when they get a vaccine, their antibody response is not only poor, but they become a breeding ground for vaccine resistance. | ||
| So you have a lot more virus replicating. | ||
| You want to stop the viral replication early on in the process. | ||
| So the more antibody response, the more robust your response is, specific to this virus and other viruses, and this is what we're really wondering. | ||
| Now, wow, how does this carry over to other viruses? | ||
| Can I stop you? | ||
| How does it work? | ||
| What's the mechanism that's causing this to happen? | ||
| We think there's an entourage effect of multiple mechanisms that are in play. | ||
| We know that it increases cell immunity, so daughter cells, when they're created, don't pass on the virus. | ||
| We've been able to show that, which is extraordinary. | ||
| But it speaks to host defense of immunity. | ||
| The immune cells, your immune cells are enabled, your endogenous immune system is able to prevent the virus from replicating. | ||
| And that's what's so exciting. | ||
| We know the anti-inflammatory effects. | ||
| So we have this, as one person said, you're putting on the gas pedal and you put on the brakes at the same time. | ||
| You can augment immunity and decrease inflammation. | ||
| Now, that's what these vaccine companies are spending billions of dollars. | ||
| Let's create a vaccine without any adverse effects. | ||
| The fact that you can take a natural product that's been used for thousands of years, a Dioscleritis is one of the fathers of medicine. | ||
| The fact that it's been used for so long. | ||
| We know it's safe. | ||
| And now, in this time, we are finding we have 100 Plus strains of Agaricon. | ||
| So I think we have a super strain in my library. | ||
| And that's what I'm trying to discover. | ||
| What strain in our library of 107 strains now? | ||
| We just used one strain and we saw these effects. | ||
| So if we can boost community immunity, then we can ameliorate the spread of pandemics, obviously. | ||
| And when you're saying there's all these different strains, there's 107 strains? | ||
| We have 107 strains in our library, the largest library in the world. | ||
| There is probably... | ||
| Hundreds of thousands of strains if there are hundreds of thousands of mushrooms or millions of mushrooms, but there aren't. | ||
| This species is rapidly on the brink of becoming extremely threatened, if not extinct. | ||
| Can it be repopulated? | ||
| We can culture it in the laboratory. | ||
| All we need is a tiny piece of tissue. | ||
| You can't reintroduce it into forests? | ||
| We have inoculated from snags, which have been unsuccessful. | ||
| The idea would be we'd like to reintroduce them into forests, or we can, these forests are like islands, genomic libraries of islands that we need to protect. | ||
| And this is why I made the statement in my TED talk, which is saved the old growth forest as a matter of national defense. | ||
| That's not quite correct. | ||
| It's for international defense. | ||
| You know, viruses don't care about borders. | ||
| And we've entered into a period of viral storms. | ||
| We're going to have viral storms converging at us All the time now. | ||
| And it's due to factory farming, the collision of industrialization, suburbanization, ecosystems on those margins. | ||
| What we're facing now that's currently in the news is bird flu. | ||
| Six different herds of cattle have been infected with bird flu. | ||
| First time in history. | ||
| First time in history. | ||
| It's jumped from birds to large mammals cattle. | ||
| From Idaho, and it's now got scientists on high alert. | ||
| This is from Nature. | ||
| This bird flu outbreak in U.S. cows. | ||
| Why scientists are concerned? | ||
| The virus has killed hundreds of millions of birds, has now infected cattle in six U.S. states, but the threat to humans is currently low. | ||
| Currently? | ||
| Currently low, because if it jumps to pigs, We already know that viruses that infect pigs can infect very likely humans. | ||
| So cows and pigs are oftentimes in the same farms. | ||
| And if it jumps to pigs, we're in trouble. | ||
| Yeah, we're in big trouble because that's just one species away. | ||
| Historically in virology, swine viruses, H1N1 is swine flu. | ||
| We have found high activity at the BioShield program of Agarricon also against H1N1 and H5N1. Is it possible to give this to cows? | ||
| Don't know. | ||
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Hmm. | |
| Don't know. | ||
| So my concern and those of other virologists that I've been in contact with for literally decades now is it's strange that six herds of cattle from Idaho to Oklahoma to Texas would spontaneously get bird flu. | ||
| It's not like the cattle made contact with each other. | ||
| So there's more than one epicenter. | ||
| When you have these epizootic centers where the virus can jump to larger mammals, then you have many, many, you know, ground zeros, you know, for the virus to emerge. | ||
| So if it jumps to swines or to pigs or hogs, the Increased likelihood that it jumps to people. | ||
| So it's a very big concern. | ||
| With Wuhan, okay, it came out of one city, one location. | ||
| But this is showing epidemiologically that the virus is jumping to larger mammals simultaneously. | ||
| Right now it doesn't have the mutation, and so there's very low risk. | ||
| Let's be very clear about that. | ||
| There's very low risk, but virologists are an extremely high alert. | ||
| Because of this unusual pattern of sudden occurrence, first time ever. | ||
| It's jumped the seals and bears of all things. | ||
| And it's devastated hundreds of millions of birds around the world. | ||
| Do they have any idea where this – so it originated with birds? | ||
| Yes, it's called bird flu. | ||
| And do they think that it's just birds traveling to these different herds? | ||
| Generally speaking, that's the modality that most... | ||
| So they just fly around, give it to new cows, fly around, give it to new cows. | ||
| They go to a pond. | ||
| They're combing the virus and drinking water. | ||
| Egrets sit on top of cows and get bugs off the backs of large mammals, etc. | ||
| So migratory birds, of course, is the most obvious vector. | ||
| But when you have factory farming of chickens and hundreds of thousands of chickens this past year... | ||
| I think hundreds of millions of chickens, if you look it up, have been euthanized in the past year because they did get H5N1. And so the chickens start sneezing and they get sick. | ||
| It's extremely communicable. | ||
| So it spreads throughout the chicken farms very quickly. | ||
| So the USDA, NIH, everyone involved in biosecurity is extremely concerned about this new event, which has just happened in the past few weeks. | ||
| And that report I showed you just showed up yesterday in Nature as well. | ||
| So if it mutates, you know, it's a whole new pandemic threat, and it's much more severe. | ||
| The estimates from humans getting bird flu, H5N1, is up to 70% mortality. | ||
| 70%. | ||
| Not 0.1% or 0.01% with COVID. It's 70%. | ||
| Now, some people say 40%. | ||
| Okay, you reduce it by 30%. | ||
| We do have vaccines already in the pipeline that are anticipating this. | ||
| So that's the good news. | ||
| The flu virus, virome as it's called, has been very well characterized. | ||
| But the mutation rate is what's of concern. | ||
| And since there's so many different localities that are spontaneously infecting cows, this virus is on the move. | ||
| And that is the concern that we all have. | ||
| We can then have more immune cells to produce antibodies that make the vaccines more effective. | ||
| And the idea is you can help avoid vaccine evasion by having your endogenous immune system at its peak performance. | ||
| How does this stuff work without vaccines? | ||
| We have early evidence on how it works without vaccines, and I want to be very respectful, but I also have to be very professional. | ||
| I'm not at liberty to discuss those results for a number of reasons, one of which the data, as I mentioned, is a little clouded because the people that we were bringing in to the first study, we didn't have them as well characterized. | ||
| But clearly, Agaricon and Turkey Tail, with the evidence that was presented, again, September 23rd, 2023, at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, these two charts I can present to you because they were publicly presented. | ||
| We do have a paper in process that's being submitted to a journal. | ||
| And has to go through the acid test to peer review, etc. | ||
| But there's a team of us and we're very excited about this research results because it's not going to... | ||
| I'm hoping it's not going to be the vaccine of the month scene where you just are constantly creating, getting new vaccines for every variant. | ||
| If you can have your endogenous immune system, you know, on the ready... | ||
| Then it can then have an innate response to these viral infections that will ameliorate their spread. | ||
| And that's the whole idea is to keep the viral loads down as low as possible. | ||
| And so what is the mechanism that these two together help strengthen your immune system? | ||
| Well, that's a really good question. | ||
| We know that with a turkey tail, we did a breast cancer clinical study, Phase I, that was also published with breast cancer patients. | ||
| We see augmentation of many immune cells, including cytotoxic T cells, macrophages, and natural killer cells. | ||
| Statistically significant. | ||
| It also was a Phase I study. | ||
| And for people to know, Phase I studies are pretty small. | ||
| There tend to be safety studies. | ||
| You know, there are usually a few dozen people, sometimes as few as six. | ||
| Our study had 90 people, the COVID study. | ||
| The breast cancer clinical study, I think, had about 28 people. | ||
| But also compared to the placebo, the mycelium grown in rice. | ||
| This is so important. | ||
| It's not the fruit bodies. | ||
| It's the mycelium that has this effect of being able to upregulate immunity and downregulate inflammation. | ||
| So with a breast cancer clinical study, it was shown to be safe. | ||
| It was shown to augment several of the immune cell responses. | ||
| By how much? | ||
| Well, there's three ways of answering that. | ||
| There's the amplitude of the immune cells, which is, I think, as I remember, six times baseline. | ||
| There is different immune cells in terms of their activity and how they increase. | ||
| But the significance value, which is the P value as people know it, was I think less than.001. | ||
| It showed highly significant effects, which are outside of the realm of chance. | ||
| And so we were able to show immune regulation. | ||
| The breast cancer clinical study did not measure anti-inflammatory cytokines. | ||
| And so, again, we have this incredibly complex immune system that's developed over hundreds of millions of years. | ||
| And it's not this magical bullet approach that many people in integrative medicine are focused on. | ||
| It's the entourage effect. | ||
| Create an entourage of enabling stimuli that has the immune system react. | ||
| A lot of us believe there's crosstalk between the receptors. | ||
| A receptor saying, okay, this is helpful. | ||
| It awakens other receptors and then you get this quorum response of the immune system at a higher state of readiness without being detrimental to the body that's created the immune system. | ||
| So the cytokine storm and overreaction of inflammatory responses is a huge concern with any immunostimulant. | ||
| So that's why in JAMA, it was written up, the concern about the cytokine storm. | ||
| I co-authored an article with the University of Arizona School of Medicine. | ||
| Physicians also warning people, be very careful about immunostimulation, even with the medicine of mushrooms. | ||
| But we had this evidence already that the mushroom mycelium throttled back the inflammatory consequences by upregulating interleukin-1-RA and interleukin-10. | ||
| And at mushroomreferences.com, you can see all these references right on the very front of the website. | ||
| So all this stuff has been used forever, right? | ||
| It's been used for thousands of years. | ||
| And what do we know about what they used it for or how they found out that it worked or anything like that? | ||
| That's a really great question, actually. | ||
| It was used as an anti-inflammatory, as a poultice, to reduce muscle aches. | ||
| And would they just use the fruiting body? | ||
| The fruiting bodies would be powdered. | ||
| But the fruiting bodies are not the primary stuff. | ||
| The fruiting bodies may have anti-inflammatory actions, but we found the mycelium increases the host defense. | ||
| It supports immunity, urinate immunity. | ||
| So this is why it's been used for thousands of years as a poultice and ointments, etc., And so it has a long, you know, back in the day before we could elocute the different aspects of what's happening medically in the human body, there's sort of like this very broad umbrellas that we're describing, you know, getting into homeostasis. | ||
| You're supposed to take this with food or without food? | ||
| Either way, it doesn't matter. | ||
| I take them in the morning. | ||
| I feel like I'm just eating them. | ||
| Why am I just sitting here? | ||
| Just telling me all these things. | ||
| I'm getting scared. | ||
| Don't be scared. | ||
| I mean, this is not a time for widespread panic, but it is time to be... | ||
| Well, I mean, the analogy I make, we all buy car insurance, right? | ||
| And the unlikelihood that we're going to get in a car accident today or tomorrow. | ||
| So why not preemptively invest in your own immunological health By being prepared. | ||
| So should you get exposed, you don't become a super spreader. | ||
| And so this is where I think we have a potential breakthrough in integrative medicine. | ||
| And I want to give a shout out to my colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, the Krupp's Institute. | ||
| They're the ones that came up with this idea of vaccine extension. | ||
| Because so many people are concerned about how many vaccines do I take and what happens when you take so many vaccines? | ||
| So the idea of having your innate immune system at a state of readiness so vaccines work better and you have to use them less. | ||
| I mean, that's the holy grail of vaccinology. | ||
| But that's back to my original question. | ||
| What does it do for people who don't want to take vaccines? | ||
| Can it help their immune system fight off things? | ||
| We know, and I have to be very careful how I say this, but we know that these mycelium-based products of agaricon and turkey tail support the immune system. | ||
| This is clear. | ||
| Now, the immune system has many challenges from bacterial infections, viral infections, cancer, you know, just cells getting old and dying, not having apoptosis. | ||
| Apoptosis is important for you to get rid of your disease and aging and dead cells. | ||
| So it's a very, very broad landscape. | ||
| So I'm not trying to be I'm not dancing around the definitions, but I am very much restricted on what I'm able to say. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can say that these agaricon and turkey tail supports the immune system. | ||
| We have very good evidence for that. | ||
| I can say that in combination, based on the earlier evidence, and we need more studies, but this is a placebo double-blind controlled study, we can show that we reduce the adverse effects of the mRNA vaccines. | ||
| This population that we've studied of 90 people, those who did not take agarachona turkey tail had adverse consequences, significantly less than those people who took agarachona turkey tail did not have adverse. | ||
| So it helps people not avoid vaccines because of their vaccine hesitancy. | ||
| I have a dear friend and their family is very conservative Christians and they just refuse to get vaccinations. | ||
| They isolated themselves. | ||
| And at first, I was on the other side of the fence, being, wait a second, why aren't you getting vaccines? | ||
| I've come to understand why they didn't want vaccines. | ||
| I totally respect their opinion and what they did. | ||
| But they're very interested, and many people are, in not needing a vaccine. | ||
| How can I build innate immunity? | ||
| When it comes to the pandemic storms, the viral pandemics that we face, We are in unprecedented times. | ||
| What happens when we get multiple viral variants, not only from flu viruses, but from other viruses? | ||
| Because of loss of biodiversity, because of factory farming, it spreads so rapidly. | ||
| We are at the convergence of possibly Multiple virus and viral pandemics converging at the same time. | ||
| That is not improbable at all. | ||
| So it's really we need to get our act together and everyone needs to work together. | ||
| And what we... | ||
| I think that we have, and many other physicians who are knowledgeable about the subject, who have studied this very carefully, who have looked at the data, are excited about it, because it can help innate immunity. | ||
| So whether you get a vaccine or don't get a vaccine, your immune system is supported at a higher level of readiness. | ||
| So when you started doing this and you said there's 107 strains you guys have identified and isolated, what are the differences in those strains? | ||
| Are some more potent than others or some have different effects? | ||
| Excellent question. | ||
| With the BioShield program, I think I submitted six strains of Agaricon. | ||
| Only three showed any activity in the BioShield program. | ||
| So three showed nothing? | ||
| Three showed nothing. | ||
| Two of them were active against flu viruses, and one of them was active against pox viruses. | ||
| Now, that's weird because pox viruses are DNA viruses. | ||
| Flu viruses are RNA viruses. | ||
| And so you think the modality would be different. | ||
| But it just speaks to the fact how little we know. | ||
| I met a Nobel laureate in San Diego who got the Nobel Prize in immunology. | ||
| I'm not going to mention his name, but he gave a great quote. | ||
| He goes, I can't believe I got the Nobel Prize because I know shit about the immune system. | ||
| And here's the Nobel Laureate. | ||
| He just said, it is so incredibly complex. | ||
| Every time we think we understand it, that we're challenged with new ideas that are contrary to our assumptions. | ||
| So it's really important to keep an open mind. | ||
| The beauty of Agaricon and turkey tails, a multi-thousand year history of use. | ||
| Traditional Chinese medicine has been advocating this for literally 2,000 years. | ||
| Long history in Europe, long history in North America with indigenous First Nations. | ||
| So this is, I mean, I think, so let me really put this in the context. | ||
| Alexander Fleming, most people know the story, 1929, he got a mold and his petri dish was growing staph bacteria. | ||
| And there was a zone of inhibition. | ||
| The bacteria stopped growing. | ||
| So he looked at that margin of no growth and he thought, well, that mold is excreting something. | ||
| It turned out to be penicillin. | ||
| So he published that, and there's a massive number of researchers all over the world, especially in London and Europe, started isolating molds to see if they could find a highly potent strain that produced penicillin. | ||
| But they couldn't industrialize it. | ||
| And in the Netherlands, the Imperial College, they did a lot of work, but they couldn't scale up the production of penicillin during World War II. Until a lab researcher by the name of Mary Hunt, working in Peoria, Illinois at a USDA laboratory, went to a farmer's market and found a moldy cantaloupe. | ||
| The moldy cantaloupe was covered with a golden mold. | ||
| And so Alexander Fleming discovered Penicillium notatum. | ||
| She discovered that Penicillium chrysogenum. | ||
| Chrysogenum means gold, golden color. | ||
| And then she isolated that mold, and it turned out to produce six times more penicillin, at least, of any other string here to be discovered. | ||
| And the advantage that we had in the United States is that we had corn-steep liquor. | ||
| We grow corn. | ||
| You take corn cobs, you boil them in water, you can make corn steep liquor, and that turned out to be a perfect medium for the massive production of penicillin. | ||
| The Germans, they had a factory that was making penicillin. | ||
| It got bombed, so they were kicked out of the race. | ||
| The Japanese developed it. | ||
| Penicillin literally saved hundreds of millions of dollars because of Mary Hunt's cantaloupe. | ||
| You mean lives? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hundreds of millions of lives. | ||
| Sorry, I just spoke. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| Hundreds of millions of lives because of her moldy cantaloupe. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| And just, I think, Agaricon with 107 strains, when we start sequencing them, we've done whole genome sequencing on 95 strains so far, whole genomic sequencing, so we have the entire genomic fingerprint. | ||
| And to go back to your question, we have found four or so different clades. | ||
| These are little subgenomic associations, lineages you might call them. | ||
| And in those lineages, we are just beginning to see early signal of what lineages have greater potency as an anti-inflammatory and also for supporting the immune system. | ||
| So this is my biggest contribution to science I hope historically will be because of this library. | ||
| And I've literally spent millions of dollars – I'm not exaggerating – millions of dollars on Agaricon to amass 107 strains and we're accumulating more. | ||
| We're going to publish this in the commons in the large genomic library databases so other people can see this. | ||
| And so you said there's four strains that you identified that were particularly effective? | ||
| Yeah, that was the BioShield program. | ||
| So out of the 107, how many of them are viable? | ||
| Well, we didn't have 107 back then. | ||
| I only had six or seven strains back then at the BioShield program in 2004. So in 2024 now we have 107. We only had one choice. | ||
| For the COVID-19 clinical study. | ||
| So I chose the strain of Agaricon that was the most robust that we saw in our early in vitro tests with the BioShield program. | ||
| And out of these 107 strains you have currently, how many of them have you tested? | ||
| Well, in terms of how many have we tested for immune support? | ||
| Yeah, for everything. | ||
| Clinically? | ||
| Only one. | ||
| Only one. | ||
| In vitro, I think seven or eight. | ||
| Some of them are not active. | ||
| We are currently involved with another university. | ||
| Who is now testing multiple strains in vitro. | ||
| And we have new signal now. | ||
| And I want to show you how big these agaracons get. | ||
| Before we go any further, when you identify ones that aren't active, Do you bookmark them and see if you can try them for other things that could be beneficial to the human body? | ||
| Or do you just only look at the immune system and do you always assume that they only have one mechanism? | ||
| To answer that question, I'm a very small company. | ||
| I have 150 employees. | ||
| I own the whole company. | ||
| I have eight or nine full-time researchers. | ||
| There are so many applications potentially of this. | ||
| We have to be very narrowly focused on that which we can achieve. | ||
| So it's a resource issue. | ||
| It's a resource issue. | ||
| If I was a part of NIH, and I've made NIH applications, one out of eight has made it through. | ||
| But it's very, very difficult for an independent researcher like me to... | ||
| Advance the science without collaboration with larger entities, so mostly universities. | ||
| It seems like if we're finding these benefits in these mushrooms, it seems like it's to everyone's benefit if there was some large-scale funding of some research on this. | ||
| Because if you bookmark these ones that don't have efficacy towards a specific goal that you have, Is it possible that we would be missing out on some of the other additional benefits of these mushrooms that we're not aware of in these different strains? | ||
| As an immunologist on our team said, because inflammation is the root cause of so many illnesses, the fact that you can up-regulate immunity and down-regulate inflammation has implications across the medical field. | ||
| Right, but they don't all show this ability, correct? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And the ones that don't show this ability, what I'm saying is, Is it possible that they have other effects, beneficial effects, that we're not measuring because we're only looking for this? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They have antifungal effects. | ||
| The weird thing about agaricon, from my experience, it's the only mushroom that grows on an old-growth tree. | ||
| All these other trees I find, I find four, five, six, maybe ten different species. | ||
| But when I find agaricon... | ||
| You know, this is an example. | ||
| This is my good friend Scott Baker. | ||
| He climbed 100 feet up to this Agaricon. | ||
| We got a tiny piece of tissue the size of your fingernail from the bottom of that, and we got that in culture. | ||
| Four or five years later, a storm came through. | ||
| Broke off that tree. | ||
| That Agaricon now is not there. | ||
| So we saved it. | ||
| We've saved it from fires, Agaricon. | ||
| We've saved from logging. | ||
| I've actually had some logger buddies of mine who know about this. | ||
| Look at the size of that one. | ||
| This is the biggest one we've ever seen. | ||
| And this one is over 100 pounds. | ||
| Over a hundred years of age. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It looks like cement. | ||
| Those are annual growth rings. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Basically, they're annual growth rings. | ||
| I have to say, this is my kind of guy. | ||
| He's known as Yosemite Sam, and I do have permission to show this. | ||
| He looks like Yosemite Sam. | ||
| But this guy, I mean, that is a massive agaricon, the biggest one I've ever seen. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| So think about it. | ||
| These grow in the old growth forests, subject to vast weather changes, wind and rain and snow, and they live for 100 years and they don't rot. | ||
| What is about this fungus that allows it not to rot? | ||
| So it seems to have a host defense of protection innately. | ||
| And since we're more closely related to fungi than any other kingdom, And the antibacterial antibiotics that we've gotten mostly have come from fungi, but with very few antifungal antibiotics. | ||
| And so research is also showing that these agaricon and other polypore mushrooms are active against pathogenic fungi. | ||
| So it's an interesting nexus point that Agaricon's in the center of antiviral, antibacterial, and antifungal, and yet has such a long history of use and safety. | ||
| So we're really at the threshold. | ||
| This is where science can get ahead of itself and be so reductionist, but we are whole systems of enormous complexity. | ||
| And science tries to decomplexify and disambiguate things so it's very narrowly focused so they have a stimulus response they can measure. | ||
| That's not the way the human immune system works. | ||
| You know, it's an entourage effect, a synergy, and keeping that in balance is the key. | ||
| Now, there's between 2 and 20 million species of fungi. | ||
| About 10%, about 140,000 species to 200,000 species or so are mushroom-forming fungi. | ||
| We've only identified 14,000. | ||
| There's another really curious phenomenon. | ||
| About 1% of mushrooms are poisonous. | ||
| About 1% of them are edible in choice. | ||
| About 1% of them are psychoactive, are psilocybin present. | ||
| The other 97%, they're just, you know, they just don't taste good, they're not poisonous, they're not of interest. | ||
| But what do you think is going on with the Amanita Muscaria? | ||
| The Amity and Muscaria is one where there's this historic use, there's all this mythology that's connected to Santa Claus and shamans and elves and all these different things, but most of the people that I know that have tried it have not been able to experience extreme psychoactive effects. | ||
| I have consumed amnida muscaria and amnida pantherina on multiple occasions. | ||
| And my amnida muscaria with higher doses, it's a somniferous. | ||
| It can put you to sleep. | ||
| I get doll yellows and browns. | ||
| It's not a euphoric experience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Doll yellows and browns? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| Dark. | ||
| The colors are not bright, you know? | ||
| It's not like your flying saucer in the background here. | ||
| Everything is very, very diminished in terms of the colorama. | ||
| You know, it tends to be muted colors, reds and browns, but not blues and, you know, fractals and things like that. | ||
| So you're talking about what you see that is a hallucination, or are you talking about, like, actual colors that you see look differently? | ||
| Actually, colors that I look at are different. | ||
| So it changes the visual spectrum? | ||
| It changes the visual spectrum. | ||
| Now, Amanita pantherina, see, anurine muscaria has mucilol, muscarin, and ebutynic acid. | ||
| Actually, it had very little muscarin, but the muscarinic symptoms cause you to salivate, and you end up, you know, salivating and tearing and lactating, etc. | ||
| So these shamans in Siberia, by consuming amydena muscaria, they would remove the muscarinic symptoms. | ||
| And then the urine, because they biofilter it through their body, it would be high in ebotinic acid and musimo. | ||
| And these are the – in a sense, purifies it. | ||
| So, I mean, this is a legend that's mixed up in fiction and fact and fables. | ||
| I will say, in the field of mycology, from my experience now, over 47 years studying this subject, many of the folklore has been validated only lately by science. | ||
| So before people are super skeptic and think this has no relationship, well, with the Santa Claus myth, hmm, Okay, the amnene muscaria grows underneath trees, the fir trees, fir trees are Christmas trees. | ||
| There's the berserkers. | ||
| Legend is that the berserkers are surrounded 10 to 1 by a very powerful army. | ||
| These Norwegian Scandinavians were going to be slaughtered the next day. | ||
| They made a giant pot of enemy muscaria, you know, a brew. | ||
| They drank it. | ||
| And then at dawn, high as a kite on the enemy muscaria, they took off all their clothes and they just became these mechanistic warriors that attacked the other side, freaked them out, and they won the battle. | ||
| So that was how the word berserk came about from the berserkers. | ||
| They went berserk. | ||
| And so that's the origin of that. | ||
| And it is Amanita Muscaria that we're assuming they took? | ||
| Amanita Muscaria, but Amanita Pantherina does not have muscarin in it. | ||
| So I ate Amanita Muscaria several times. | ||
| I was with my friend, and I looked at him, and he was foaming with bubbles all over his mouth. | ||
| I said, dude, you look like you have rabies. | ||
| He goes, you should see what you look like. | ||
| So we're both like... | ||
| And it puts you to sleep. | ||
| The biggest concern about amity muscaria is hypothermia by most of us experts because you can actually fall asleep in the snow and then you can get hypothermia and die. | ||
| Very few people, if any, have ever died. | ||
| There's one potential report. | ||
| It has killed dogs. | ||
| But there's a repetitive motion syndrome that's very, very strange. | ||
| And I ate Amnita pantherina as well. | ||
| And I don't think I told you this story about my pantherina experience. | ||
| I don't want to be redundant here, but I had a heroic experience on Amnita pantherina. | ||
| And that one was very... | ||
| I had repetitive motion syndrome. | ||
| And I was living up in the mountains. | ||
| I had freeze-dried amnita pantherina. | ||
| I knew it didn't have muscarine. | ||
| I'd eaten muscaria. | ||
| I foamed a lot. | ||
| It wasn't that much fun. | ||
| So I knew pantherina was four to five times more potent. | ||
| So I took the freeze-dried specimens from the herbarium, from the college I was working at. | ||
| I was living underneath a volcano up in Darrington, Washington. | ||
| And I was with my friend Dave, and he had his smaller body weight. | ||
| So we made an omelet, and let's try pantherina. | ||
| And he trusted me. | ||
| Note to self, note to others. | ||
| And so we ate the pantherina in an omelet, and I cut the omelet bigger for me because I'm bigger body weight than him. | ||
| And we ate the mushrooms like at 10 o'clock in the morning, you know, in an omelet. | ||
| They're delicious. | ||
| And just across the river was the Squire Creek Campground. | ||
| And it's where the tourists come up and their Winnebago's and, you know, campers and their families and stuff. | ||
| And we're long-haired hippies. | ||
| And I said, you know, just on the other side there is a hill that we can get up on the hillside. | ||
| It's an incredible view of the valley, the snow-capped volcano, just a great vista. | ||
| Let's go there. | ||
| So we, for some reason, it's so close, but we drove my car like, you know, a thousand feet to this campground, went over the bridge, over this little river, and we parked, you know, just on the outside of the campground, right where all the campers are. | ||
| And so we walked past, you know, all these tourists and their families, and we went up on the hill, and then we're sitting up on the hill, and we're waiting for the mushrooms to come on in like an hour. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| No experience. | ||
| Like, you know, what's going on? | ||
| And this is very typical, by the way. | ||
| This is characteristic. | ||
| Emmett, Muscaria, and Pinterina take a long time before the onset of first symptoms. | ||
| And then we're up on the hill, and I'm looking out at Harai, beautiful view, and suddenly... | ||
|
unidentified
|
What was that? | |
| This sort of, this wave came through our visual field, like this invisible wave. | ||
| And I said, did you feel that? | ||
| And he goes, yeah, I felt that too. | ||
| And they're like, whoa, we're feeling the same thing. | ||
| And then our visual fields started getting distorted and they start coming on so fast. | ||
| We're going, holy shit, we got to get out of here. | ||
| You know, this is coming on too fast. | ||
| Let's go back home and because it's more intense. | ||
| So we walk back through, and I have a roly-flex camera. | ||
| I'm a 35mm. | ||
| I've been a photographer all my life. | ||
| And then we're walking through the backside of the campground, and there's all these kids and families and Winnebago's and camper vans. | ||
| And then I remember this one Winnebago. | ||
| It was like the longest Winnebago in the universe. | ||
| Every time I was walking, ka-poo! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ka-poo! | |
| It was a Winnebago of no end. | ||
| I couldn't get past this one Winnebago. | ||
| I kept on walking. | ||
| My friend. | ||
| And then finally, we got past this Winnebago. | ||
| It seemed like it took forever. | ||
| And there's my car. | ||
| And for some friggin' reason, I locked the door. | ||
| And I have my keys. | ||
| And I looked at the keyhole in the door. | ||
| And I looked at my keys. | ||
| I went... | ||
| Missed that one. | ||
| Did it again. | ||
| Missed that one. | ||
| Me and my friend goes, everything okay, Paul? | ||
| Everything's fine. | ||
| Just give me some time. | ||
| And then, you know, after I don't know how many times, magically, just by the fact that I tried so many times, I think it just slipped into the lock and unlocked the door. | ||
| Okay, so I sit in the car, and now I have to put it in the ignition. | ||
| And I'm going, boom. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| My friend goes, maybe you shouldn't drive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Good advice. | ||
| Maybe I shouldn't drive. | ||
| So there's no way. | ||
| I couldn't. | ||
| It was getting more and more intense. | ||
| We're not responsible to drive. | ||
| So absolutely the right decision not to drive. | ||
| So then I got out of the car and the camera was on my lap. | ||
| And then I get out of my car. | ||
| And, you know, meanwhile, a group of people started gathering because we were there for a long time trying to get into the car and then trying to... | ||
| And so these people got kind of curious. | ||
| And Dave goes, you know, some people over there are kind of gathering, Paul, looking at us. | ||
| And I didn't want to look at them. | ||
| And so I get out of the car and my camera falls and it hits the ground. | ||
| I go, oh, shit. | ||
| I just dropped my Roliflex camera. | ||
| And then I picked up the camera and I'm going, Wow! | ||
| I just dropped my Reliflex camera. | ||
| I drop it again. | ||
| And I pick it up. | ||
| I go, did I just drop my Reliflex camera? | ||
| Dropped it again. | ||
| Repetitive motion syndrome. | ||
| I picked up that camera and dropped it. | ||
| Dozens and dozens of times. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Meanwhile, the cluster of people got larger. | ||
| Parents were holding their children close to them saying, we don't know what's going on here, but it's getting weird over there. | ||
| So pretty soon I had a very large group of these campers that were all watching us, keeping their distance. | ||
| And I had this repetitive motion syndrome of dropping and dropping and dropping. | ||
| And so finally, you know, we had the staccato pace. | ||
| The timeline of the day got broken up. | ||
| So I had morning when we ate, then I had evening, then I had early afternoon, then I had early morning, then I had late afternoon, then I had evening. | ||
| The whole thread of time was disintegrated and scrambled. | ||
| And so then we walked. | ||
| And I lost Dave. | ||
| I figured, Dave, you're on your own, buddy. | ||
| I got enough to deal with here. | ||
| And so we walked over this bridge and we got to my place. | ||
| And I got to my house and I had a combination lock on the door. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| The last thing I need is another... | ||
| So I spun that combination lock and I couldn't get it open. | ||
| And then I went into convulsions and they felt good. | ||
| So I'm convulsing on the ground and spiking like this. | ||
| And every time I convulsed right afterwards, it actually felt good. | ||
| And so like, you know, I'm convulsing, but it seems to be helping me. | ||
| So I convulsed and, you know, thrashing on the ground. | ||
| Don't know where it happened to Dave. | ||
| And so I go back to the lock and I spun it and magically the lock opened up and then I fell into bed. | ||
| And then I had this amazing rush of Einstein-ing thoughts. | ||
| The thoughts were just so profound. | ||
| I go, oh my gosh, if I could write these down. | ||
| These are just like so important, you know, conclusions of great mysteries of the universe. | ||
| I have this at my hand. | ||
| And just before I came to the object of the sentence, I would have a prepositional or adverbial phrase. | ||
| And then I get a tangent. | ||
| Oh, no. no. | ||
| The 12-hour experience is the long experience. | ||
| And so it was in the summertime. | ||
| Then at the very end of the day, the sunlight came through and flickered my eyelids and I woke up. | ||
| And my friend was convinced I was trying to kill him because I was a mushroom expert. | ||
| So I had no idea this would be this intense. | ||
| Where was he during this time? | ||
| He ended up in the cabin and safe, but he was like a statue. | ||
| You know, he was just there sitting when I got up, just looking straight forward. | ||
| And we spoke a few words the next day and for the next few days and then... | ||
| You know, Dave went on his life journey. | ||
| I think he's convinced to this day that I knew what would happen. | ||
| But this speaks to the berserkers, the idea of repetitive motion syndrome. | ||
| Andy Weil, who you've had on this show, he was at Cougar Hot Springs. | ||
| And he was going to the trail to Cougar Hot Springs. | ||
| And somebody ran down the trail and said, we need a doctor. | ||
| We're a doctor. | ||
| This person up there is trying to kill himself. | ||
| And he's a doctor. | ||
| So he goes up there and there's this big hippie guy and he's On this log or on the bridge, swinging his legs wildly, covered with blood. | ||
| And before Andy's eyes, this guy throws himself off the bridge, right onto the rocks in the creek down below, you know, 10 feet or more below, smashes himself and gets stunned. | ||
| and throws himself off the bridge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| So this is why if someone had killed somebody on amnina muscari or pantherina, I would testify as an expert witness that they're out of control. | ||
| They have no control of their repetitive motion syndrome. | ||
| If you watch Tales from the Crypt or witness something violent, because when you re-remember, you re-enact. | ||
| There's no control of your memory and your action. | ||
| So pharmacologically, that must be really interesting, you know? | ||
| Real scientists have been studying this for a long time. | ||
| We can't quite figure it out. | ||
| But I think this underscores the point that mushrooms are chemical wizards. | ||
| They have enormous potential for exotic molecules that interface with human health. | ||
| And there's a huge pharmacopoeia, micropharmacopoeia, inside of mushrooms that have not been fully explored. | ||
| I think it's true with agaricon. | ||
| I think it's true with psilocybin mushrooms. | ||
| It's certainly true with amnida muscaria, etc. | ||
| So, ironically, amnida muscaria is legal. | ||
| There's no restrictions. | ||
| You can possess 100 pounds of it, but you can't possess a tenth of a gram of psilocybin mushrooms without breaking federal law, Schedule 1. So how can a mushroom that makes you happier, less violent, you know, resolve your PTSD, depression, etc., how could that mushroom remain illegal and yet Amanita muscaria and pantherina are legal. | ||
| So it's just the juxtaposition. | ||
| But for the record, no species should be illegal. | ||
| It's the hubris of humans to think that we can dictate that a species is illegal. | ||
| That is fundamentally wrong. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| My question was about the Amanita muscaria. | ||
| Because you're talking about agaricon and how many different strains there are and how different strains are effective at different things, One of the things that McKenna believed was that, because he had never really had a positive experience with the Amanita Muscaria, but there was so much attached to it, he thinks that it was probably variable genetically, variable seasonally, just so much like Agaricon, there's probably many different strains of Amanita. | ||
| So these ones that they were attributing to like the sacred mushroom and the cross, John Marco Allegro's book on Amanita Muscaria and the Bible. | ||
| Do you think that it's possible that at one point in time there was psychoactive strains of Amanita muscaria that vary from the ones that people have that have these different sort of more mundane effects? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We call them phenotypes. | ||
| You can call them strains or phenotypes. | ||
| It's a variety within a species. | ||
| But pharmacologically, we already see that with the psilocybe mushrooms. | ||
| Some of them are really high in psilocybin, very low in psilocin. | ||
| High in bio-cystin, nor bio-cystin, nor psilocin, lower. | ||
| So we see this not only cross-species-wise, but inside of a species with the phenotypes. | ||
| Some phenotypes of psilocybin comensis are extremely potent, and other ones are not. | ||
| So strains do matter. | ||
| And this is why with agaricon, I think strains do matter. | ||
| The fact that we found one strain of Agaricon that supports immunity and looks like it helps extend the efficacy of vaccines is a home run. | ||
| What are the other strains capable of doing? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what I was getting at. | ||
| It's like, God, we seem so underfunded with something that has so much potential. | ||
| I'm funding it. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you are. | ||
| So I spend enormous amounts of my financial resources on research. | ||
| That's why I created my company, you know, I started my company packing boxes by myself. | ||
| You know, I'm not ashamed to admit that I laid in bed crying many, many nights. | ||
| I was bouncing checks. | ||
| My suppliers were shutting me down. | ||
| No one was there to help me. | ||
| I was by myself. | ||
| I packed 30,000 boxes before I had a single employee. | ||
| I got accepted to five graduate schools and I couldn't afford to go because I didn't have a scholarship. | ||
| I had a young family. | ||
| My daughter, I was very adept at catching my daughter from her backpack as I leaned over to pack a box. | ||
| Cellophane tape will not stick at 35 degrees, I can tell you that. | ||
| And I actually, I don't want to flood the airways, but if you call 360-426-8255, you'll get the public utility district. | ||
| Why I know that number ingrained is my lawyer said, if you call the utility company and tell them you're sending a check, they legally cannot shut off your power. | ||
| So I thought, okay, for 10 years, At 8.01 in the morning on the date of disconnection, I would call the public utility district to say I'm sending in a check. | ||
| And after a while, I heard this noise. | ||
| And then many years later, I met some of the people who goes, you know, you're a legend. | ||
| I go, what do you mean? | ||
| He says, we all gathered around the phone at 8.01 on disconnection day. | ||
| Betting that Stamets would or not would not call. | ||
| And everybody who bet that I would not call lost their bets. | ||
| And at the end, everyone would just cheer. | ||
| It's Paul. | ||
| And I think they're having a party in the background. | ||
| No, it's Paul calling it 801. That's hilarious. | ||
| I maximized my cash flow. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Thankfully, I had a local bank. | ||
| And the local bank, one of the board members said, how much money do you pay in overdraft fees? | ||
| And that's an extraordinary number, $5,000. | ||
| And he goes, he's one of your best customers, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They should keep him. | |
| So I built this business, Blood, Sweat& Tears. | ||
| Now I have 150 employees. | ||
| I own the whole company. | ||
| I'm very grateful to them. | ||
| We call it... | ||
| Starship FP, that's like your comedy clubs, the mothership, right? | ||
| So our company is known as Starship Fungi Perfecti. | ||
| And if people want to track us down, we're at fungi.com. | ||
| F-U-N-G-I.com. | ||
| I registered that myself for $28. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| When did you get that? | ||
| What year? | ||
| 1992. Oh, yeah. | ||
| Network solution. | ||
| You had to be super early to get that. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| People don't want to write it down. | ||
| I go, it's a kingdom. | ||
| You don't have to write it down. | ||
| It's fungi.com. | ||
| So... | ||
| That's amazing that you got that domain. | ||
| I use your stuff. | ||
| I've had your stuff at my house for a long time. | ||
| I think it's great. | ||
| And I'm so happy that you're out there. | ||
| I really am. | ||
| I'm happy that there's not a lot of Paul Stamets in the world. | ||
| There are a lot of unsung heroes. | ||
| I have a lot of attention. | ||
| I'm sure you're so humble. | ||
| But my point is that it's like we really need research on this stuff. | ||
| We need a lot of research and the research is becoming increasingly credible. | ||
| It's the University of Arizona Medical School, Andy Weil's Center Program for Integrative Medicine, University of California, San Diego, UCLA, Harvard actually, and other institutions. | ||
| They're very excited now because this has been sort of like weird science, you know? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was going to get at. | ||
| I was going to say there's this real reluctance to believe that people in the past had answers that we don't have today. | ||
| This almost religious belief in modern science and also this belief that the transition of knowledge has been fully complete from ancient people to today and nothing has slipped through the net. | ||
| That doesn't seem to be the case. | ||
| And also, for sure, they didn't have the ability to document things at least and preserve those documents to today. | ||
| Like we can today in regards to research, in regards to what you could find out in the modern laboratories and just what you're able to do to find out which of these mycelium strains are effective, which of them are not, at least for the particular thing you're looking for. | ||
| You've got to assume at one point in time people had some sort of knowledge about this stuff that we... | ||
| We just have lost. | ||
| We had to. | ||
| We were so dependent upon the environment. | ||
| We know what plants are edible from the experiences of our ancestors who ate them before us. | ||
| And it doesn't discredit modern medicine to say that these people had this extraordinary understanding of what was beneficial. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And this is where the hubris of science, we should be very careful. | ||
| Because the importance of biodiversity cannot be overstated. | ||
| Hubris anywhere. | ||
| Hubris anywhere. | ||
| Every single place it shows its head, it fucks it up. | ||
| In everything. | ||
| Even in martial arts. | ||
| Guys that think that they can't lose go in and get fucked up. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| Hubris is terrible. | ||
| It's the human ego trying to keep itself from being, like, just to recognize its true place. | ||
| Which is just part of an infinite sea of things that are happening simultaneously. | ||
| And you're not really that important. | ||
| You are important, but everything's important. | ||
| And you're not more important than anything. | ||
| It's all together. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| And it seems to be, unfortunately, lopsided in favor of the Y chromosome. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| We're the fault of it all. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's 100% true. | ||
| But that's also why we invent everything. | ||
| It's just like we're a bizarre subset of the humans that causes so much chaos and so much good at the same time. | ||
| Well, I have great hope for the future. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| Some days I do. | ||
| Today is a good day. | ||
| Maybe because you're here. | ||
| I mean, thank goodness that we live in these times that we do. | ||
| With all the problems that we face, look at the medical advances that we've made. | ||
| I'm getting hip surgery in two weeks. | ||
| Yeah, we were just talking about that. | ||
| You know, you also are a martial artist and all the years of throwing kicks, you've worn one of your hips out. | ||
| I have quite a few friends who've had that done. | ||
| My friend John Wayne Parr who's still active. | ||
| He's got a fight coming up soon. | ||
| He had a hip replacement and fought after the hip replacement at least once. | ||
| I think he fought twice. | ||
| My surgeon said, besides cataract surgery, the best medical innovation has the greatest difference in patients before and after surgery than hip surgery. | ||
| Yeah, well, I told you about Graham Hancock. | ||
| He had his done, and then six weeks later, he's walking around here. | ||
| My mom just had her knee done, and she's fine. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I was so nervous about it. | ||
| I just didn't want her to do it. | ||
| I wanted her to get stem cells. | ||
| I wanted her to try to treat it and just... | ||
| The biggest concern we have is MRSA. That's a big one. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| I know quite a few people have gotten that as well. | ||
| Jiu-jitsu is a breeding ground for that shit. | ||
| You get scratches and scrapes and then they get infected. | ||
| It happens all the time, specifically, just staff specifically, but MRSA exists too. | ||
| I know quite a few people. | ||
| Back in the day, we always would be wiping up the mats of blood. | ||
| I mean, now you can't have blood, you know, in the dojo or the dojang, you know? | ||
| You know, it's considered to be a health hazard, so it's so much more restricted now. | ||
| Perhaps not in the mixed martial arts that you're involved. | ||
| Well, the thing about the grappling is just the scrapes. | ||
| You're constantly getting scraped up. | ||
| You can kick box in spats and, you know, rash guards, and you're probably going to mitigate a lot of the scratches and scrapes. | ||
| You know, with gloves on and foot gear and all that jazz. | ||
| But if you're grappling, you're constantly grinding things on those mats and you're getting scratches from fingernails and you're getting accidental collisions that cause little cuts and abrasions and they get infected. | ||
| And people that don't, like my friend Ari, he had no idea he had staph. | ||
| I gave him a year of jiu-jitsu for Christmas and he and I were at the pool hall. | ||
| And this still scares me to this day because I think he came close to dying. | ||
| He was walking around with a limp. | ||
| And I go, I go, what's wrong with your leg? | ||
| And he goes, I got bit by a spider bite. | ||
| I go, let me see it. | ||
| He pulls his knee up. | ||
| He's got a massive staph infection on his knee. | ||
| I go, dude, that staph. | ||
| I go, we got to go to the hospital right now. | ||
| He goes, are you serious? | ||
| I go, right now. | ||
| And I broke my cue down. | ||
| I go, we got to go right now. | ||
| You have to go to the hospital, man. | ||
| You have a bad staph infection. | ||
| And he was fucked up for a while from it. | ||
| He got through it. | ||
| The antibiotics worked. | ||
| Thankfully, it wasn't MRSA. It wasn't medication-resistant staph infections. | ||
| And it was just horrific. | ||
| Well, this speaks to, again, innate immunity. | ||
| And nature is a numbers game. | ||
| You know, you have different coefficient variables on one side of the equation. | ||
| The other side of the equation is health or disease. | ||
| And so how can you stock that to your favor? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You have to be robust. | ||
| You have to eat well. | ||
| You have to take vitamins. | ||
| You have to get exercise. | ||
| And, you know, it seems like mushrooms can help you quite a bit. | ||
| I'm a big fan of lion's mane. | ||
| I take lion's mane every day. | ||
| That's one of the big ones that I take. | ||
| I do, too. | ||
| But I wanted to ask you this. | ||
| Are there better ones to take? | ||
| Is tincture better than capsules? | ||
| Is capsules better than tincture? | ||
| Those are good questions. | ||
| The extracts allow you to activate directly through the mucosa. | ||
| So it gets into your bloodstream. | ||
| But for instance, turkey tail, lion's mane, and agaricon are very good as prebiotics. | ||
| For the microflora in your stomach. | ||
| Double-blind placebo-controlled study. | ||
| Again, go to mushroomreferences.com. | ||
| With amoxicillin patients where their microbiome and their gut's destroyed because of this potent antibacterial antibiotic. | ||
| And so they found when they gave turkey tail mushroom mycelium, again, double-blind and placebo-controlled, and they looked at the microbiome, those who took turkey tail mycelium recovering with amoxicillin, We end up upregulating beneficial bacteria and downregulating staph and clostridium, etc. | ||
| Lactobacillus acidophilus and bifidobacterium were upregulated. | ||
| These are beneficial bacteria. | ||
| So there's an example that also, if you orally ingest Then you can set up the microbiome to a higher state of readiness to help whole stasis, you know, health. | ||
| And then you absorb the components directly in. | ||
| So, again, it depends on what your target is. | ||
| If it's general immunity support, then the oral ingestion. | ||
| If you're concerned about the port of entry of a pathogen through the mucosa, then obviously oral introduction, insofar as it supports immunity, can stave off the entry point of those pathogens. | ||
| So would you recommend both a tincture and capsules? | ||
| So the tincture would stave it off at the source? | ||
| I cannot... | ||
| Respond to anyone using the question recommend. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I can say what I personally do is a combination of both. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Again, nature's a numbers game. | ||
| I'll just ask you that from now on. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| So I don't want to get you trapped in these conundrums. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you take both tincture form and capsule form? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I take a throat spray, which has a Gary Connor turkey tail in it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| That's what I use all the time when I go to concerts, I'm in crowds, etc. | ||
| Oh, smart. | ||
| In the morning, I'm taking Lion's Mane, Turkey Tail, and Agaricon. | ||
| I'm 68. You look great. | ||
| Well, talking about hubris, my partner's a medical doctor. | ||
| Every time that I feel like I'm 30, I don't feel my age at all, the next day I fall off a ladder, 12 feet. | ||
| Again, hubris. | ||
| Bam! | ||
| So I have to be careful what I say now. | ||
| Hubris is real. | ||
| It is, and I think nature has a sense of humor to whack you up on the side of the head. | ||
| The universe has a sense of humor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's certain aspects to it that almost seem... | ||
| It's playing very subtle jokes. | ||
| We're at the beginning of just understanding the importance of the biodiversity of the ecosystems that's given us birth. | ||
| This is really a continuum. | ||
| But I'm really excited about the innovations Of what's happening with psilocybin. | ||
| And psilocybin and lion's mane in particular is something I'm very excited about. | ||
| Neurogenesis, neurogeneration, neuroplasticity, neuroregeneration. | ||
| Four different things. | ||
| But they all segue into this concept of the neurological systems being improved using components within mushrooms. | ||
| And that's something that I think has a lot of potential for us, especially as we age. | ||
| It really is interesting how as we get old and as the science of all these things advances, we realize how shallow it really was just a few decades ago and how little we knew about the effects of these things, including vitamins and minerals and all the different supplements that people take that have shown to be beneficial. | ||
| It's like this is a very recent thing. | ||
| In terms of human history, of our current understanding, like our scientific understanding of the mechanism of vitamins. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I'm keen on it. | ||
| You know, it's the absence of vitamins that you see the deleterious effects. | ||
| So it's like, you know, research by absence of vitamin C, scurvy, etc. | ||
| But I'm very keen on stacking vitamins. | ||
| You know, in microdosing, that's something that we've had a lot of activity. | ||
| And I'd like to give you a huge thank you. | ||
| And this is very sincere to you and to the JRE audience. | ||
| And, Jamie, can we put up that signature article on microdosing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Give me a second. | |
| No worries. | ||
| And basically, when I was here last, we were talking about microdosing, and I came up with a stack. | ||
| Of lion's mane and a microdose of psilocybin, below the threshold of feeling it, and niacin, nicotinic acid, which is a flushing form. | ||
| And we did a call out for people to join and download an app at microdose.me. | ||
| It's for iPhones and droids so they could measure before and after effects of microdosing. | ||
| And what we found, and we published this, this is the first article that we published, and this was in 2019, I believe, or 2021. This is on their motivations. | ||
| If we go to the next article, Well, we can stop here for a second. | ||
| But just look at the title here. | ||
| Adults who microdose psychedelics report health-related motivations and lower levels of anxiety and depression compared to non-microdosers. | ||
| What does that mean, health-related motivations? | ||
| Why are you microdosing? | ||
| Because you don't feel creative, because you're depressed, because you have anxiety. | ||
| This is the extraordinary And this is something you may not realize. | ||
| The majority of this came from your audience, this audience right now. | ||
| But if you look at that, 4,600 non-microdosers and only 4,000 microdosers. | ||
| Joe, do you have any idea? | ||
| We have more citizen scientists who are non-microdosers who jumped into this app. | ||
| This is why the editors at Nature liked the study because it was called so well-weighted. | ||
| So well-weighted because the non-microdosers exceeded, in this case, Fairly comparable, but 4,653 non-microdosers who downloaded the microdose.me app to measure performance and how they felt. | ||
| And Jamie, if we could go to the next one. | ||
| Let's be clear here. | ||
| They're non-microdosers, but they microdosed for the study. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| They didn't. | ||
| All they did is got these challenge tests. | ||
| So they took the app, they downloaded the app, but they didn't do anything to their consciousness? | ||
| They didn't do any microdosing at all. | ||
| And this is why they were... | ||
| Why do you think so many of them that don't microdose signed up for that? | ||
| We have no frigging clue. | ||
| You tell us. | ||
| I think it may have been citizen scientists who wanted to get a baseline first. | ||
| Have you considered people lying because they don't want you to know that they microdose? | ||
| It's anonymous, you know? | ||
| Yeah, but people are scared. | ||
| The next one, if you would. | ||
| Author correction. | ||
| Psilocybin microdosers demonstrate greater observed improvements in mood and mental health at one month relative to non-microdosing controls. | ||
| Why did they have to make a correction? | ||
| Well, let me show the next slide with a graph. | ||
| If you can see it. | ||
| The reason why is that there was a typo in the original article. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| And it's the one with the bar graph, if you can see it. | ||
| It's a little tough to find the links. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| How long have you had this company, Host Defense? | ||
| I've started that Host Defense brand about 2004 is when I started it. | ||
| I see them everywhere now. | ||
| I see them in health food stores and shit. | ||
| We're the number one mushroom-based immune product line. | ||
| Get excited for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I see them. | |
| Look at Paul. | ||
| Go, Paul, go. | ||
| This is the app. | ||
| We can go through the four slides here. | ||
| That'll be great. | ||
| So this is the app, microdose.me. | ||
| I encourage everyone listening to help us because now the app has been improved. | ||
| It was a little bit laborious before. | ||
| We want to go out to three months. | ||
| We want non-microdosers and microdosers, but please, the non-microdosers, we need your input. | ||
| These are challenge tests. | ||
| So these are acuity tasks? | ||
| Acuity tasks, yes. | ||
| That are on the actual app itself? | ||
| There's vision, hearing, memory. | ||
| There is how do you feel, etc. | ||
| Can I ask you before I forget? | ||
| Who was the scientist that ran those studies a long time ago where they showed that psilocybin in low doses increased edge detection, increased your ability to see whether two parallel lines One of them had gone off of parallel. | ||
| I do know of the reference. | ||
| I do not remember. | ||
| Foreign scientists? | ||
| German? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have a good memory, but better than mine. | ||
| I don't remember the name of the scientists. | ||
| This is a long time ago, right? | ||
| A long time ago, yeah. | ||
| This is probably in the 60s or something like that. | ||
| So then if we... | ||
| So, these tasks, have they demonstrated that the people that are taking the microdose have better results in these? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Are you filtering out for, you know, healthy user bias, IQs, occupations? | ||
| We have – it takes five minutes to enter into the data set to create your profile. | ||
| It's anonymous. | ||
| You own your data. | ||
| It's gone through institutional review boards at the University of British Columbia. | ||
| It's all been carefully vetted. | ||
| You own your data. | ||
| Nobody else gets to see what you've done or your frequency. | ||
| It asks you your age, actually your income, your nationality, or your ethic. | ||
| Does it ask your occupation? | ||
| Did not ask occupation. | ||
| Education? | ||
| Education, yes. | ||
| Whether we have a college degree, high school, or whatever. | ||
| So we have a tremendous, I mean, we have literally millions and millions of data points. | ||
| The data field is so robust, and now we're trying to narrow it to confirm what we saw in the first studies. | ||
| Microdosing is associated with a massive Relief of depression, a relief of anxiety, an increase in mood, and now we have customized it for more, not so much subjective effects, but cognitive demonstrable skill improvement. | ||
| Because, of course, when people feel better, some people can say that's an expectancy or a placebo. | ||
| It's ironic because it's like a patient coming into a doctor saying, I feel better. | ||
| And they go, no, you don't. | ||
| You can't feel better. | ||
| It's placebo. | ||
| Doctors use expectancy all the time. | ||
| Every time you go to a doctor, you expect they're going to have a medicine, good medical advice. | ||
| You want a kind and caring physician. | ||
| Every time you go to a five- or four-star restaurant, you expect the food's going to be good. | ||
| So you can't... | ||
| We're humans. | ||
| We're complex. | ||
| You can't divorce one's motivation for getting a treatment away from the expectancy of that on that treatment. | ||
| So does the expectancy enhance The medicine. | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| If people are not depressed and are less prone to suicide and you save them from suicide, isn't that what physicians want to do? | ||
| They want to help their patients be better. | ||
| So the stacking results, though, is what we found to be most surprising and most extraordinary. | ||
| Can I ask you this? | ||
| Do you ask the people to go through the visual acuity or the different tasks sober first to get a baseline and then see if there's improvement for microdosing? | ||
| Or do you just show that the group that microdoses has higher levels of proficiency? | ||
| You know, I don't think we ask them the question if they're sober at the time they take the test. | ||
| But not even sober, because we're talking about microdosing. | ||
| Microdosing. | ||
| But did you ask them... | ||
| They use marijuana. | ||
| No, but no, does it measure? | ||
| Does it measure the difference between them before microdosing and them after microdosing? | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| It does. | ||
| So you had a baseline. | ||
| So before you ever microdose, I'd like you to take these tasks and do these puzzles and whatever. | ||
| What kind of things do you have? | ||
| Visual. | ||
| We have cognitive tests. | ||
| We have acuity tests. | ||
| We have hearing. | ||
| Hearing? | ||
| Yeah, hearing. | ||
| Are you using headphones? | ||
| Are you using the speaker off the phone? | ||
| Yeah, there are tones off the phone. | ||
| So you can hear things as an auditory challenge. | ||
| Is it dependent upon the volume of the phone? | ||
| You're asking really, really good questions because the type of phone, the type of speaker, whether it's iPhone 12 or iPhone 15. The newer phones have much better speakers. | ||
| Yeah, it gets much more complicated than the other tests. | ||
| And so we have this narrow down on what we really want is people to go for three months. | ||
| So the signal that we got in 30 days was extremely strong. | ||
| But we need to be able to repeat the results to confirm that And then we want to extend the microdosing window of testing to three months. | ||
| Now people only need to, once they get their baseline, they only need to report once every two weeks or once a month. | ||
| So it's much less burdensome for the people joining Microdose.me to perform the task. | ||
| They can see their results compared to the average. | ||
| So there's a dashboard that's present so they can see where they are relative to the average. | ||
| And eventually they will have access to all their own data. | ||
| But it's all anonymized. | ||
| It's all protected. | ||
| It's on servers in British Columbia. | ||
| So it's all, you know, tightly controlled. | ||
| So the anonymity is assured. | ||
| Jamie, are you able to find that chart? | ||
| Let's go back to the next slide, if you could. | ||
| Next one. | ||
| Next one. | ||
| It's a finger-tapping test. | ||
| Okay, this is the one I want to focus on. | ||
| This is why there was an author correction. | ||
| The p-value of significance here is.004. | ||
| That made us one chance in 250 that this is a random result. | ||
| This was published in Nature, Scientific Reports, went through peer review. | ||
| We didn't see any increase. | ||
| The tap test is how often you can tap your two fingers together in 10 seconds. | ||
| For those who have traumatic brain injury, you probably know a number of these people. | ||
| Traditionally, they do a tap test. | ||
| Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, they do tap tests. | ||
| Unfortunately, there's a steady decline. | ||
| But the TAP tests have been validated and just another article came out this past week saying that handheld devices are validated medically now for patient reports. | ||
| So this is the chart that blew all of us away. | ||
| Is that the green line is people taking the Stamets stack, which is psilocybe cubensis, approximately one-tenth of a dried gram, 500 milligrams of lion's mane mycelium, and 50 milligrams of flushing niacin. | ||
| Those three together. | ||
| Now, the non-microdosers, you can see, over 30 days, no significant increase in the TAP testing. | ||
| Microdosers only with psilocybin, the blue line. | ||
| Psilocybin only. | ||
| Not statistically significant. | ||
| But those people who were taking the stack went from tapping 48 taps in 10 seconds to 68 taps in one month. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| Think if you're on a computer, you're a guitar player, you're a drummer. | ||
| Think about walking to the bathroom and not falling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Think about this. | ||
| This is not subjective. | ||
| This is an affirmation of an improvement in psychomotor performance. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now here, you'll ask me the question again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Athletic performance. | |
| Yeah, athletic performance. | ||
| How does this work? | ||
| We don't know how it works. | ||
| We just know that it does work. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So we want to extend this out to 90 days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| We want to see maybe the microdosis with psilocybin blue only. | ||
| Maybe that starts to uptick. | ||
| Maybe it's delayed and then it increases. | ||
| Maybe this green line with the stem and stack, maybe it ameliorates and softens or maybe it accelerates. | ||
| But I looked this up and for you to do the TAP test involves six regions of your brain. | ||
| You look at your fingers, you ideate, you look at your fingers, you start your psychomotor cadence, you get a feedback from touching the table, and that feeds you back, and then you develop a rhythm. | ||
| And so we let people tap test for several days so they go up the learning curve. | ||
| So we don't include them in the first several days. | ||
| And then people, they practice. | ||
| But then we see this result. | ||
| So I think we're on to something really exciting here. | ||
| That value of P is.004, one chance in 250. It's very hard. | ||
| I mean, you can't say it's expectancy. | ||
| You can't say it's placebo. | ||
| It's a performance skill that's being demonstrated. | ||
| Now, I chose niacin because sulcibin is a vasoconstrictor. | ||
| Niacin is a vasodilator. | ||
| I chose a flushing form of niacin because you tingle. | ||
| And I thought, wow, if we get the neurogenic benefits of sulcibin, let's get it to the endpoints of the peripheral nervous system. | ||
| Neuropathies oftentimes present themselves as a deadening of the fingertips and the toes. | ||
| So with the vasodilation, you get more blood flow to where the neuropathy is occurring. | ||
| And then lion's mane, well demonstrated. | ||
| Again, mushroomreferences.com, you can do many, many references up, showing that lion's mane mycelium contains these compounds called arinacines. | ||
| That helps rebuild myelin on the axons of nerves to enable signal transmission and also stimulates NGFs, nerve growth factors, for the proliferation and the extension of the neurites to further crawl. | ||
| So I stacked those three together. | ||
| And again, I'm a co-author on the paper. | ||
| I had no access to this data. | ||
| In fact, they called me up, said, we see a signal. | ||
| We don't believe it. | ||
| We're taking the data set back. | ||
| And they attacked it three different ways with separate statistical methods and the data held true. | ||
| And so we know there's an increase in psychomotor performance. | ||
| So there's a lot of musicians now that are very keen on taking the stock. | ||
| And they're saying their banjo playing is better. | ||
| I think if you've been playing the guitar or teaching piano all your life, you're dependent upon this digital dexterity. | ||
| To be able to have your acumen and your digital dexterity as you age helps you pass down knowledge to the next generation. | ||
| I mean, this is really exciting. | ||
| We need to disambiguate it. | ||
| We need a big data set. | ||
| And I'm calling out Joe Rogan, experienced listeners, especially you non-microdosers, we need you. | ||
| And then we need everyone to go at least three months, at least populate the baseline, check in month one, month two, and month three. | ||
| We need to see if this data holds up. | ||
| Because I was actually surprised. | ||
| I thought psilocybin microdosing by itself It would have had greater liftoff on the psychomotor performance than we saw. | ||
| I suspect it will have liftoff more so when we go in the month two or three, but we don't know. | ||
| Let the data and the science lead. | ||
| But the fact that we got the signal, and again, how does it work? | ||
| Why does it work? | ||
| Where does it work? | ||
| Folks, it works, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You don't see a force for the trees because you're so conflicted in trying to understand the mechanism of action. | ||
| But I'd like to see it applied to other tests. | ||
| Have you ever seen those tests that they do where they have like an electronic wall and there's lights and the light, when it goes off, you're supposed to tap it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| And so there's a bunch of them. | ||
| A lot of boxers use them. | ||
| They use them to heighten their reaction times. | ||
| We have that on the app also. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| We have flowers. | ||
| Flowers. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. | ||
| And you have to do it again. | ||
| But the thing about the one that you have to touch is you have to actually move your body. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you're moving your arms, you're reaching down, you're going up, and they're all in front of you, and you never know which one's going to light up. | ||
| This is just the beginning. | ||
| That type of model that you just described, to me, would be much more informative than the top test. | ||
| You know what I'm talking about, right, Jamie? | ||
| See if you can find a video of those so you can show it to them. | ||
| But I always wondered, like, why are these guys doing that? | ||
| Does that really help fight? | ||
| Does that help fight performance? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think sometimes, like, trainers get caught up in technology and they have you doing certain... | ||
| I think your time would probably be best spent using technique, but I don't know. | ||
| I mean, is there a reason why that would, like, lights going off would somehow or another make you move better? | ||
| See, look at how these things work. | ||
| I mean, what does that do into your mind that is so beneficial? | ||
| That person is an exceptional performer. | ||
| That guy's on a dose right now. | ||
| He's on the stamina stack. | ||
| Oh, this girl's using her feet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at this. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| Be faster. | ||
| But does it actually make you faster? | ||
| I think it would. | ||
| Everybody plateaus when they practice. | ||
| They end up practicing to hitting 90% of the optimum of their performance. | ||
| And then they hit sort of a new baseline. | ||
| And it's hard to get above that. | ||
| We hit that ceiling. | ||
| How do you break through that ceiling? | ||
| This, I think, is an opportunity to break through that ceiling. | ||
| And it would be really fascinating to see if it could be applied to skills. | ||
| You know, sports and athletics, martial arts, things along those lines. | ||
| It would be interesting to see. | ||
| Archery. | ||
| It would be interesting to see if it increases people's abilities. | ||
| There are so many stories of performance enhancement on low doses of psilocybin. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We've all heard them. | ||
| It's just that there's something there. | ||
| I've experienced it with pool. | ||
| With pool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like the game becomes like 10% easier. | ||
| And see, this is why these observational studies are important to medicine. | ||
| Clinical studies are based on early signals, and the clinical studies are trying to refine, reduce the variables to see a cause and effect. | ||
| But we only, clinical studies are already started, and that's not out of the blue. | ||
| You know, they have to have a good theoretical basis. | ||
| Observational studies by tens of thousands of people create the signals. | ||
| So the data set we have is so big we're going to try to use AI. To say, what else is hidden in this data? | ||
| The reason why we went to the TAP test is that so many of our beneficial outcomes were depression, anxiety, mood. | ||
| These are all subjective. | ||
| And so when I ask a physician, what is an objective test that's not subjective? | ||
| She said, oh, we have the TAP test. | ||
| So that's why this is a demonstration of something That is happening, that is performance related, that's outside of subjectivity, expectancy, etc. | ||
| This is performance measurement. | ||
| That's solid data. | ||
| And now, and think about this, Joe. | ||
| They're getting the sulci mushrooms in the underground market. | ||
| You know, we sell 50% of the lion's mane products that are out on the market, but other people are selling lion's mane products. | ||
| They're getting variable amounts of niacin. | ||
| Those are all confounders that would reduce the significance of that data. | ||
| That means that this data could be understated if you standardize everything to a standardized amount. | ||
| So we don't know how to optimize it. | ||
| How far do you think we are from some sort of a legalization of psilocybin? | ||
| I think within five years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it will go from schedule one to schedule three after the election or schedule two for sure. | ||
| But psilocybin— I mean psilocybin— Why do you think after the election specifically? | ||
| Because everyone is so worried about margins. | ||
| If you piss off 5 percent of the people, do you lose 5 percent of the vote? | ||
| Right. | ||
| No one wants to take a risk. | ||
| It makes it look like they're weak on crime or something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But see, this is the beauty of the psilocybin. | ||
| What I am very encouraged by is law enforcement. | ||
| I've met so many law enforcement officers. | ||
| Now, let's be real about this. | ||
| If you're a law enforcement officer, you have 100 arrest encounters. | ||
| Are you going to be perfect with 100 of them? | ||
| No. | ||
| If you're a veteran and you have 100 expeditions, are you going to be perfect with 100 of them? | ||
| No. | ||
| Or if you're a doctor, are you going to be perfect with 100 of them? | ||
| No. | ||
| And you'll make a mistake. | ||
| Everyone has a really bad day. | ||
| Do you want that bad day to define the rest of your life as a skeleton in your closet or a monkey on your back? | ||
| Where you did something that's fundamentally wrong but you can't talk about it? | ||
| And then you then act out against other people because you're in turmoil? | ||
| There are so many law enforcement people that have adjourned churches. | ||
| There's one called the Divine Assembly Church in Salt Lake City. | ||
| There's another one, a church called the Church of Ambrosia in Oakland. | ||
| More than 100,000 people. | ||
| They're cloaking themselves inside these churches for civil rights protection. | ||
| But when they get together with a community of other veterans and law enforcement officers, And they can share their grief, their sorrows, their mistakes and not be condemned for it. | ||
| We lack forgiveness in this society. | ||
| We don't have enough people acknowledging their mistakes without fear of retribution and saying, I'm better than that one bad day. | ||
| That's not going to define my life. | ||
| And so what's happening in Canada and the United States to a degree is law enforcement officers know that other officers are benefiting from this. | ||
| So they are deprioritizing psilocybin, decriminalizing it. | ||
| Because they're benefiting from it. | ||
| It's a big thing among soldiers. | ||
| It's a big thing among soldiers. | ||
| I've met so many. | ||
| Many, many guys have had very, very beneficial experiences. | ||
| I believe humans are generally very good. | ||
| They're motivated by goodness. | ||
| But they get hijacked because... | ||
| Of a very bad day or sequence of bad days because then that becomes an inflammatory pathway. | ||
| Well, sure, there's the stress of the job itself if you're in law enforcement. | ||
| Every day you could get shot. | ||
| Every day you might not come home to your family. | ||
| Every person you pull over with tinted windows might blow you away before you get to the window. | ||
| Can you imagine walking up to a car with windows up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, of an unknown person. | ||
| And you have one second to two seconds to make a life and death decision. | ||
| I don't want that responsibility. | ||
| And you have PTSD. You're probably already racked with anxiety. | ||
| Because you've probably already experienced so many things that most people can never imagine. | ||
| That depression, anxiety, frustration creates an inflammatory response that depresses the immune system. | ||
| That then can lead to diseases such as cancer, vulnerability to viruses. | ||
| And the anger issues emanate outwards. | ||
| All of us, I think, have been affected by fentanyl. | ||
| You know, in my county, Mason County, Washington, 17 people died in two weeks from fentanyl. | ||
| 17 people, a small county. | ||
| The fentanyl crisis is killing some of the best of our youth. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| It's terrifying because it's unprecedented. | ||
| There's never been a time where so many people are dying of overdoses, accidental overdoses. | ||
| And this should be the priority of law enforcement. | ||
| Does law enforcement want to be on the wrong side of history, busting somebody for psilocybin? | ||
| That's going to go on their resume and 10, 15, 20 years, maybe five years from now, it'd be like busting somebody for marijuana where it's legal in so many states. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What do you think that the solution to the fentanyl crisis is? | ||
| Is it legalization? | ||
| I mean, that's a tough one, right? | ||
| Because legalization scares people because, and I would agree with this, for sure, if hard drugs are legal, more people are going to try them because they're more available. | ||
| They're going to. | ||
| You will at least be trying the actual drug and not getting like street Valium that has fentanyl in it. | ||
| Or you have criminal syndicates. | ||
| Yes, that's the other part of it. | ||
| And they have basically addiction militias, militias of people who are addicts coming to them to give them money. | ||
| I'm not an expert on drug policy. | ||
| There are other people that are. | ||
| I would first take the step that all natural products containing any Schedule I substance should be legal, not illegal. | ||
| Psilocybin, mescaline, you know, you can make the argument for LSD. I think that You know, that's the first step, is all natural products should be legalized. | ||
| Decriminalization, if you cannot get legalization. | ||
| And then having decriminalization with therapy. | ||
| I think if we don't have legal constraints, just like speed limits on the highway, Do you really want anyone to drive as fast as they can? | ||
| We do need limits. | ||
| We have to throttle this down. | ||
| So our structures are in place for us to be able to make the best positive impact with the least amount of harm. | ||
| And that's the quagmire that we're in. | ||
| Other countries in the world, and Rick Doblik and Andy Weil can speak on this elegantly, as many other people, But I want to stay in my lane of mushrooms. | ||
| And I think there's over 200 species of psilocybin mushrooms, 162 species in the genus Psilocybe. | ||
| And just recently, I'm happy to say, I have a new species named after me. | ||
| A mycologist honored me by naming a new Cilocybe mushroom, Cilocybe stemaceae. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is this a new one that they discovered? | |
| They discovered in the rainforest in Ecuador. | ||
| It's very rare. | ||
| Please don't pick it. | ||
| But there's no greater honor in mycology than having a species named after you. | ||
| You never name it after yourself. | ||
| In the field of medicine, you can do that with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, etc. | ||
| But in the field of mycology and botany, you know, it's an honor that's bequeathed to you by other scientists. | ||
| So there are 162 species all over the world. | ||
| There's been over 5,000 collections of psilocybin mushrooms since the 1800s. | ||
| So they are bridges across cultures, across centuries, I would argue across millennia. | ||
| And any peoples living in that ecosystem long enough would stumble upon these psilocybin mushrooms, especially things like slasovicubensis, which is a big golden mushroom that's associated with cows. | ||
| You can't Can't miss it, right? | ||
| You can see slasomycobensis, folks, 200 feet away driving 55 miles an hour. | ||
| You know, if you're tuned in, you can see them in the fields. | ||
| They're that glaringly obvious. | ||
| You pull over and pick them? | ||
|
unidentified
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I can't help myself. | |
| What do you take? | ||
| For research. | ||
| For research. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You're a researcher. | ||
| You're an actual mycologist. | ||
| There goes one. | ||
| What's your take on Dennis McKenna's experience that he had in the Amazon where the reality sort of broke down for a couple weeks? | ||
| Dennis is a dear friend of mine. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| And Terence was a dear friend of mine. | ||
| Terence and I were best buddies and I love them both. | ||
| And my brother John died. | ||
| He was my mentor. | ||
| And Terence died also. | ||
| I was with Terence to the end. | ||
| And as Terence always said, Dennis is a real scientist. | ||
| I'm a psychonaut philosopher. | ||
| They're the best commander of the English language of anyone I've ever met, Terence. | ||
| And Dennis and Terence, I think, have been courageous in their viewpoints of pushing the envelope. | ||
| And this is where it's really important. | ||
| Again, where is the forgiveness in people? | ||
| You don't always have to be right. | ||
| The fact that you try and you fail— Are you talking about some of Terence's bizarre theories? | ||
| Bizarre theories. | ||
| I mean— The time wave zero. | ||
| Time wave zero is bullshit. | ||
| I mean, I'm sorry. | ||
| I challenged Terence on this. | ||
| He had time wave zero— Explain that to people that don't know what we're talking about. | ||
| Time wave zero is an algorithm of historic events that steer the course of humanity, as best I remember it. | ||
| And Terence invented this. | ||
| But the problem with time wave zero that I pointed out to Terence, he said the birth and death of Christ was not a historically significant event. | ||
| I said, Terence, I know you're not Christian, but you can't deny that the birth and death of Christ was not a historically significant event. | ||
| So it was not in time wave zero. | ||
| Well, he was skeptical of the existence of Christ as an individual. | ||
| But even if Christ did not exist, the event of that period would have been a significant event. | ||
| The Crusades occurred. | ||
| All the stuff that happened. | ||
| Just even the creation of the Christian religion. | ||
| The creation of Christian religion was a historically significant event that ramified throughout history. | ||
| So Terence, since time wave zero, did not recognize that. | ||
| From the best of my understanding, I talk to Terence about this a lot. | ||
| And then he had the end of time being the death on his birthday. | ||
| How convenient. | ||
| How convenient. | ||
| That's what I said. | ||
| But for Terence's defense, he had the best answer I could ever have thought of. | ||
| Because I was saying, I was vilifying, and Terence, this is bullshit, bullshit. | ||
| And he goes, Paul, it's an ever-changing algorithm. | ||
| I'll just keep on adjusting it. | ||
| And I thought, okay. | ||
| That was a good answer. | ||
| It's a good answer. | ||
| So the algorithm is essentially based on taking historical events that we know of that are fact and putting them into this database? | ||
| Into a string that would then predict other historical events that will occur in the future. | ||
| But you couldn't predict the specific event. | ||
| You would just predict significant events. | ||
| That's my understanding. | ||
| But the big one was December 21, 2012 and nothing really happened. | ||
| But did something happen? | ||
| Maybe we're not aware? | ||
| There are many things happening of which we're not aware. | ||
| But is it possible that a significant change in the world happened that we're not aware of? | ||
| Well, I mean, you're asking me to... | ||
| I mean, the world today is one thing. | ||
| If you did go back to 2012 and looked at the world and then looked at the world in 2024, it's radically different. | ||
| It's pretty fucking wild. | ||
| And if you had to say, like, what happened? | ||
| Like, historically, when we look back at the collapse of Western civilization, for say, let's say it all goes sideways and we go into nuclear war and this and that, and the grid goes down, we're back to Stone Age people. | ||
| If anybody survives. | ||
| If you go back to, you know, that this time, if a thousand years from now people look back in this time, they'll be looking at a sequence of events. | ||
| Like what happened that caused all this? | ||
| What was the catalyst? | ||
| Was it social media? | ||
| December 21st, 2012 was a random number, relatively. | ||
| But 2012 is a significant beginning of the change of society. | ||
| In terms of social media use. | ||
| Yes, I would agree. | ||
| I think you would parse this out where every single day is a historical event of greater or lesser significance, depending upon your point of view. | ||
| ChatGPT, of course. | ||
| When you look at things like that, the ubiquitous use of AI, the fact that it seems Yeah. | ||
| Artificial intelligence, I think, is misnamed. | ||
| I call it digital intelligence. | ||
| It can be that, but it's ultimately natural intelligence. | ||
| We have created artificial intelligence. | ||
| We have given birth to this technology. | ||
| It is from our natural intelligence that we have created a subset. | ||
| Of artificial intelligence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 100 million microbes in a cubic inch of soil. | ||
| You know, 8, 10 or more miles of mycelium cross-talking all these organisms, a quorum that's on constant biomolecular communication. | ||
| The infinite, not infinite, but the enormous amount of complexity that's under every footstep that we take and we get so intoxicated by our new invention that we think it's the brightest object in the Christmas tree. | ||
| I think AI is going to be fantastic for medicine. | ||
| It's going to be fantastic for so many things. | ||
| But I don't think AI... We'll be able to capture intentionality or generosity or the emotional indebtedness we have when you find somebody who's at a disadvantage, who needs help. | ||
| You reach out your hand in kindness. | ||
| It's not a one-to-one transactional exchange. | ||
| The fact that you, Joe, helped somebody else when you didn't need to And there's no obligation, circumstantially otherwise. | ||
| You voluntarily help somebody. | ||
| You've created a reciprocal debt of gratitude that cannot fall into any metric, I believe. | ||
| That person's going to go, Joe helped me. | ||
| That guy's good. | ||
| I owe it to myself and to him to pass it forward. | ||
| And that's what I think is also happening. | ||
| I'm going to segue back to psilocybin. | ||
| When you look at psilocybin, a person's in turmoil, they're angry. | ||
| There's a great example here in Austin with a police chief in the police force. | ||
| There's one bad actor. | ||
| And other law enforcement officers were very worried this person was going to take the department down. | ||
| And he was just – should not be in law enforcement. | ||
| He was angry. | ||
| He acted out. | ||
| And they encouraged him to go to a weekend church. | ||
| And he recognized he had problems. | ||
| He did a high dose of psilocybin. | ||
| He came back the next day over the weekend on Monday and people did not recognize him. | ||
| He fundamentally changed into a new person. | ||
| He lost his anger issues. | ||
| He was polite, considerate. | ||
| He asked for forgiveness. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| We don't want to talk about negative things because we're embarrassed and we share the shame of a family member. | ||
| But when something positive happens, I'm talking to you about it. | ||
| It's like a pebble in the pond that emanates out echoes of goodness and goodwill. | ||
| And that's where I don't think AI is going to be able to cover and quantify. | ||
| It might try to. | ||
| It might have higher predictive outcomes based on the data sets. | ||
| But I just feel like You know, we need to train AI for our benefit. | ||
| We need to learn from AI. But our humanity and who we are and our intentionality and friendship and love for each other, I think, will always be this super force that governs the universe. | ||
| Well, that's a beautiful sentiment. | ||
| I think our ability to be kind to each other is very important to us. | ||
| I don't know if it's very important to the sun. | ||
| I wonder if what we are and the things that are so valuable to us exist because it sort of motivates us and pushes us in the direction that we currently find ourselves in, and innovation and that this is all this is what motivates us to do these things and I wonder if these life forms that we are creating and I think we | ||
| are and I think we're probably already we've probably already done it into a certain extent that these don't have all of these same values because they're not us but they'll also be free of all the things that do cause depression and do cause anger and do cause irrationality And do cause harmful thoughts and feelings and painful memories and all those things. | ||
| These are remnants of our ancient primate DNA that is necessary to us because we are trapped in it, but might not be necessary to whatever this next stage of existence is. | ||
| Yeah, I can see that. | ||
| But, you know, families matter. | ||
| Yeah, it matters to the families. | ||
| And they do. | ||
| But they're finite. | ||
| These are experiences that we're having currently. | ||
| And it is important, currently. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| So I'm not diminishing it. | ||
| But I'm saying if I had to take an overall perspective, is this the only way to do it? | ||
| No, it's not the only way to do it. | ||
| Are our emotions and our desires and needs, the things that have motivated us to get us to this position that we're currently in, are those riddled with side effects like war and murder and thievery and all the things that we know that exist in the world? | ||
| That are a part of the human condition. | ||
| If you ask any rational person today, what are the odds we'll have no war in three years? | ||
| Fucking zero. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Humans have always engaged in war. | ||
| Well, what is that? | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Well, it's because of the motivations. | ||
| They're all the same. | ||
| They're the same motivations that Napoleon had. | ||
| The same motivations that other... | ||
| I think people who are abused when they're a child have a tendency to become abusers when they're adults. | ||
| I think that psilocybin makes nicer people. | ||
| I think so too. | ||
| More compassionate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'd like to redefine the benefits in the theory of evolution as not the survival of the fittest, but the extension of generosity, of surplus beyond your own needs to help a neighbor or a friend. | ||
| I think we're talking about different things because I agree with that wholeheartedly. | ||
| And I think for human beings, they're extraordinarily beneficial and they have been for me. | ||
| My concern is that we are, we're like homo sapien version one and that this new thing that we become, whether we integrate or whether we just die off, Is another thing. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| I think we're at the crossroads. | ||
| No, crossroads. | ||
| One leads to an extinction path. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the other one is sustainable. | ||
| Because ultimately we cannot continue in destroying the biosphere and expect it to support us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just our way of living is kind of unsustainable long term. | ||
| The positive hope is that AI and science itself and technological innovation will mitigate all of the negative side effects. | ||
| That we will concentrate on using intelligence to clean up the air and clean up the ocean and sort of fix all the problems that we've personally created. | ||
| But what I wonder is that we are so attached to us, to the idea of us with all of our flaws. | ||
| Are we any different than Australopithecus? | ||
| If you told Australopithecus, In the future, everyone's gonna have a phone in their pocket and no one's gonna need all these muscles and fucking hair all over your face and back. | ||
| This is like, you're gonna die off. | ||
| Like, you're not gonna be you anymore. | ||
| Australopithecus will be like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| I gotta go gather food. | ||
| Get away from me. | ||
| You're an idiot. | ||
| I don't want to be you. | ||
| I want to be me. | ||
| If no more Australopithecus, we all die off? | ||
| That would suck. | ||
| Because that's all you know. | ||
| And I think that homo sapiens are not long. | ||
| You ask very, very good questions for which there's very few answers. | ||
| But I think the very act of asking the questions to stimulate the thought creates the milieu of creativity that will come up with solutions to some of these issues. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I would like to think that we've become an enlightened species. | ||
| I would like to think that we get our shit together. | ||
| Psychedelics is the best potential or last hope. | ||
| Yeah, it really is. | ||
| And it's funny that it's the most undermined. | ||
| It's the most maligned publicly, the most dismissed as being nonsense, usually and almost entirely by people who haven't experienced it, which is really fascinating. | ||
| When you see people that have not had psychedelic experiences dismiss psychedelic experiences, that is a wild thing to do. | ||
| Like, boy, you are so silly, and you don't even know you're silly, and you're the majority, which is wild. | ||
| Yeah, we represent less than the 1% of those who are psychedelically experienced who understand. | ||
| Many of the studies, like at Johns Hopkins… What are the numbers? | ||
| Do we know, like, publicly? | ||
| Like, if you have just the United States, what percentage of people have had, like, legitimate breakthrough psychedelic experiences? | ||
| Less than 1%. | ||
| Less than 1%. | ||
| How many people have experimented with psychedelics? | ||
| I think, depending on the age group, it actually is quite high now. | ||
| You know, it's up to 10%, 20%. | ||
| But how do you explain the ineffable? | ||
| How do you explain something that you cannot put to words? | ||
| And this is where it's just like, oh, you people are crazy because you can't articulate it. | ||
| And then every person that I know of who's gone through one of these heroic doses come back and say, oh, my God, I can't even explain it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's like we have a thin sliver of reality right now, Joe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're—look at you and Jamie. | ||
| We have such a thin sliver. | ||
| And when you're under these experiences, the entire universe opens up. | ||
| And you see that my consciousness has been so limited. | ||
| And now I understand that I'm in relationship with everything in the universe. | ||
| And it's also not just a feeling. | ||
| It's just an intense visual experience. | ||
| It's a feeling of being. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With a capital B. Right. | ||
| And then you feel like, oh, my mortality? | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, my birth, that's a good part of the continuum. | ||
| I demolecularize and I reassemble into a different form where my molecules and atoms reassemble. | ||
| You know, I think this is the continuum of existence expands the dawn of time to the end of time and even now beyond. | ||
| I think that it gives me great solace in my own life to realize that I'm part of something much larger. | ||
| I want to... | ||
| I want to share with you my Billy Graham story. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| I've never mentioned this publicly. | ||
| I've taught over 3,000 students in vitro propagation how to grow mycelium, edible mushrooms, gourmet mushrooms. | ||
| I did these workshops for a long time. | ||
| And I had this one very nice man who came in, young 40s, mid-40s. | ||
| He waited until everybody was out of the room. | ||
| And this is about 1995, 1996. And he waited and said, Paul, I was sent here. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| And I go, okay. | ||
| I said, well, who sent you? | ||
| He said, I'm with a council of twelve. | ||
| With Billy Graham, the charismatic Christian leader. | ||
| And he said many of the Council of Twelve have come to their Christian beliefs through psilocybin. | ||
| I have come to thank you for all your work, for helping us Have a better relationship with Jesus and our religious faith. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now, my mother was a charismatic Christian. | ||
| I grew up in that environment. | ||
| I mean, I was like, of course, blown away. | ||
| What is a charismatic Christian? | ||
| They speak in tongues. | ||
| They do healings. | ||
| They have their own culture, for sure. | ||
| But I've heard this now with Jewish people, Islamic people, with the Buddhist people. | ||
| It seems that psilocybin doesn't create a conflict in religions. | ||
| It supports you in your religious beliefs of dedication to what you want and hope to become as a religious practitioner or follower. | ||
| But it doesn't throw the other religions under the bus. | ||
| It just makes you... | ||
| More dedicated to your purpose to walk with kindness and goodness and reciprocity to be a better person. | ||
| Do you think that psilocybin was what the host was made out of? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Have you heard that speculation? | ||
| Yes, I have. | ||
| I think that this is so rich in history. | ||
| I just came back from Egypt a few months ago, and I went to 10 pyramids. | ||
| On every pyramid, we found mushroom hieroglyphics, every one of them. | ||
| Now, I sent this through Graham Hancock, some of these hieroglyphs, and Egyptologists said, no, they're shovels. | ||
| And Jamie, it'd be a challenge for you to find this, but you... | ||
| And one number one, shells will be pointed down. | ||
| And it's a perfect example. | ||
| Well, scientists don't look at Egypt in the context of the ecosystem 4,000 years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And in Africa, the Plateau of Running Rivers, the Titillian and Anjar Plateau has fantastic... | ||
| The Bee Man figure. | ||
| That plateau is called the Plateau of Running Rivers. | ||
| There's no mushrooms growing there. | ||
| It's a desert. | ||
| Same with the Nile. | ||
| It was the breadbasket of the world. | ||
| And the Greeks were the Eleusinian mysteries. | ||
| Caesar was a lover of Cleopatra. | ||
| Then Mark Anthony, 20 years younger than Caesar, became a lover of Cleopatra. | ||
| You would think that these people, the highest strata of society, being lovers, would share the most intimate secrets and potions and all of that. | ||
| I think that happened. | ||
| So we have now two other scientists have published this before me. | ||
| The hieroglyphs on these temples are of psilocybin mushrooms. | ||
| So those look like mushrooms. | ||
| That's one of them. | ||
| Boy, they still look like mushrooms. | ||
| But there's better ones. | ||
| Okay, now let's pause on this one. | ||
| So I want to give a shout out to Abdel Azim. | ||
| He published this in 2016. This is the goddess Hathor, the Dendura temple. | ||
| If you look this up, it gets less than one millimeter of rain a year. | ||
| That's how dry it is. | ||
| That's the vase there with these mushroom-like figures coming out. | ||
| And the lower part is the blue lotus, a water lily associated with a mushroom. | ||
| Now, he published this in 2016. I'm not the only one. | ||
| Stephen Berlant in 2005 published this. | ||
| And a fantastic individual, African-American, who died from COVID. His name was Kendiri from Detroit. | ||
| He also believed from his African ancestry that the African Egyptians used psilocybin mushrooms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That image is fascinating. | |
| What did they try to say that is? | ||
| You can't say that's a bunch of shovels. | ||
| No, but there's other ones. | ||
| What is the conventional explanation for what you're looking at? | ||
| They said they didn't know what it was. | ||
| How do they not know what it is? | ||
| This is it. | ||
| Hiding. | ||
| It's not hiding on plants. | ||
| But it's not hiding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're delusional. | |
| It's not hiding. | ||
| So they're not willing to talk about it. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| This is psilocybin comensis on the right. | ||
| Now, as a cultivator, and many of your listeners are cultivators, they know what I'm going to say is true. | ||
| You can pick up cow patties with psilocybin comensis, put it into a vase just like that. | ||
| You can put water in. | ||
| It limits evaporation. | ||
| The mycelium seeks light and air. | ||
| So it would pop out of these orifices. | ||
| And that is a taxonomically correct image, drawing, of Psyllosyme cubensis. | ||
| And down below is the blue water lily and their Psyllosyme cubensis. | ||
| The Egyptians' royal colors were gold and blue. | ||
| The blue lily, water lily, the blue lotus is blue. | ||
| Cylosme cubensis is golden. | ||
| It bruises bluish. | ||
| And, Jamie, if you could humor me with just two more slides. | ||
| There's the blue lotus. | ||
| There's another example of the mushrooms associated with the falcon. | ||
| I mean, there's dozens of these images. | ||
| Look at that one on the left. | ||
| Those are so obviously mushrooms. | ||
| They're not a shovel. | ||
| No. | ||
| A shovel would be upside down. | ||
| It's so obviously mushrooms. | ||
| But it's also like the way the cap is formed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And the cuspidae cap, the shape of this. | |
| And here is a painting on papyrus, the Temple of Osiris. | ||
| It also has very similar. | ||
| And this next image, I think it's the next image. | ||
| Now, there's a bluing of Salas Bicubensis. | ||
| Again, the next one I'm going to skip this on. | ||
| Okay, I was looking for blue juice. | ||
| I don't know if we have blue juice on there. | ||
| That one's wild. | ||
| What is those little figurines? | ||
| Those are mushroom stones, Mesoamerican mushroom stones from Guatemala. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And they persisted for 1500 BCE to 500 AD, a thousand years before the conquistadors came. | ||
| And they were representative, we think, of a mushroom cult. | ||
| And they could have been a family like heirlooms. | ||
| How silly is it that the conventional archaeologists won't acknowledge that those are mushrooms? | ||
| Well, we actually have a reward out, and this is great that I'm speaking about it, is that we have a reward of $1,000 for anyone who can find Cilosopi convensis DNA in the ruins. | ||
| And because we can amplify the DNA, we can prove that they're either in the vases, in the ponds, or near the ponds and doing core samples. | ||
| Sort of like they've done with the Eleusinian Mysteries with ergot. | ||
| With ergot, yeah. | ||
| Jamie, can you see the blue juice image? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't see it. | |
| You don't see it? | ||
| It's a hand with a vessel of blue liquid in it. | ||
| Two images. | ||
| So... | ||
| More than one thing can be true. | ||
| When you're looking at the Eleusinian Mysteries, oh, there we go. | ||
| So this is something that blew me away. | ||
| Have you seen Dune 2? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| I heard it's awesome. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Frank Herbert was a friend of mine who wrote Dune. | ||
| Frank Herbert lived in Port Townsend, Washington, and Frank Herbert came to visit me. | ||
| And Frank told me he was growing chanterelles in Christmas trees that were just five years old. | ||
| I go, that's impossible. | ||
| I go, how are you doing that? | ||
| And he goes, well, I take chanterelles and I put them into water and I pour it to the base of the trees and it comes up. | ||
| So there's the blue juice. | ||
| And so if you take psilocybin, cubensis, or any psilocybin mushroom that's potent, You put it in the water, you create blue juice. | ||
| And this is in Dune 2, where they drink it. | ||
| And so I asked Frank, Frank, the eyes are blue. | ||
| The Ben Gesserit are these shamanic women who have this high ascended cult. | ||
| Is it based on Maria Sabina? | ||
| I said, and maggots grow through mushrooms. | ||
| And I said, everything, the spice seems like it's spores. | ||
| And your blue eyes and this blue juice. | ||
| And he goes, you're the first person that's noticed this. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| He said he was tripping on psilocybin mushrooms. | ||
| He was laying on his deck and he saw worms coming out of the mushrooms that he ate. | ||
| And that was the dawn of the idea. | ||
| Now, this is absolutely true. | ||
| And I haven't met Frank Herbert's son. | ||
| I really want to meet him to tell him this because he did say something about, I think he had two sons. | ||
| My memory is foggy on this. | ||
| But he said, I'm keeping this secret from my sons. | ||
| I said, why? | ||
| He goes, well, they're illegal, and they're just at the age right now that I don't want them to tell other people about this. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| But it all makes perfect sense. | ||
| The spices, spores, the blue juice from the blue juice you saw that was made there, it all ties together. | ||
| And look at that beautiful color, okay? | ||
| So this is from the Church of Ambrosia, I think David Hodges, and this is on the right, and this is on the left. | ||
| And psilocybin is a prodrug for psilocin. | ||
| Psilocin degrades enzymatically into indigo, the indigo molecule complex. | ||
| And it's actually reversible, though I haven't seen it happen, but theoretically it's reversible. | ||
| But this is the blue juice. | ||
| And so Well, we discovered this, several people discovered this independently. | ||
| Well, would the Egyptians discover it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, would the Mazatecs and the Aztecs and the Mayans discover this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is very simple. | ||
| You powder, you put the mushrooms in the water, and it elutes into the water the next day, and you end up with this potent blue psilocybin-packed elixir. | ||
| And so this also speaks that You know, I think people all over the world, when they are experimenting, they're inspired, they know this is a sacred substance. | ||
| How do we preserve it? | ||
| How do we protect it? | ||
| Oh, you put honey with it. | ||
| Well, honey is antibacterial. | ||
| And in 1516, the Bavarian Beer Act banned the mushrooms. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| They ban mushrooms from beer because mushrooms are being added along with henbane and other plants to make these narcotic elixirs and, you know, meads, honey beer. | ||
| So, you know, don't underestimate the creativity and innovation of any people living long enough in their ecosystem, interacting, experimenting, making mistakes, making successes. | ||
| For thousands of years. | ||
| For thousands of years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We should not be intellectually myopic, which I think is another problem with the hubris of science. | ||
| Well, it's also a problem with this whole drug schedule thing because when it's Schedule 1, even talking about it openly opens you to criticism and ridicule, especially if you've been – Involved in academia for decades, right? | ||
| So you started your career and your mindset towards these substances at a time where it was very detrimental to your reputation to be pursuing these things. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's why as much criticism as Timothy Leary and Ron Doskets and even Andy Weil, they were all incredibly courageous. | ||
| No one more courageous, however, than Maria Sabina, who opened up the Mazatec tradition, and also Valentina Wasson. | ||
| Our Gordon Wasson's wife was a Russian physician who was also a mycologist. | ||
| The difference and the consimilarity and we owe a debt of gratitude to Maria Sabina and the Mazatecs And to Valentina Wasson, who died in 1958, but she grew up in Russia. | ||
| She knew how to identify mushrooms. | ||
| These are not people just taking sulci mushrooms. | ||
| They knew how to go out into the fields. | ||
| And Valentina Wasson, she knew the Russian names. | ||
| They wrote a book, Mushrooms, Russia, and History. | ||
| It was going to be a cookbook of 500 recipes and it became this great ethnomycological exploration. | ||
| But these courageous women were not only medicine women. | ||
| They were field mycologists who could go out into nature and find them. | ||
| I have a DEA license now and I passed my background checks. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| I guess they haven't listened to your podcast. | ||
| Well, no, I'm very serious about this. | ||
| I had one also in the 70s and 80s. | ||
| And my father, at the end of his life, asked me to trip with him on psilocybin. | ||
| I turned him down. | ||
| Alexander Smith, who wrote a monograph in the genocilosophy, the father of American mycology, one of the greatest mycologists ever, who's published many new species of sulcide mushrooms, in 1979-78 in Aspen, Colorado. | ||
| It's actually Snowmass. | ||
| He asked me, To trip with him on Solicited Mushrooms. | ||
| Here's like having your hero, elder, saying, I trust you. | ||
| I want a journey. | ||
| I've read all about it. | ||
| Will you trip with me? | ||
| Both of them asked me. | ||
| I asked their wives the same question. | ||
| Will you journey with me and with him? | ||
| And both of their wives said no. | ||
| And I said, I can't. | ||
| I can't have this experience with you. | ||
| In both cases, I was leaving the next day. | ||
| What would I do? | ||
| I abandoned them. | ||
| They have this life-changing experience. | ||
| They have all these questions, and I'm not there to talk through it. | ||
| And so I adopted the policy, and I'm very strict about this. | ||
| Nature provides. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I mean, I am very sure. | ||
| I don't feel it's ethical for me to give a psilocybin mushroom to somebody else. | ||
| I'm not a therapist. | ||
| I'm not a psychologist. | ||
| I have my own deep personal religious freedoms. | ||
| And I do believe that these are sacraments and they are part of my own personal religion. | ||
| I'll stand on that. | ||
| I've published on that. | ||
| I believe in that. | ||
| But I have no right to give it to somebody else. | ||
| And I think this is really important that we need to be adults about this. | ||
| These are very potent medicines. | ||
| And the rituals of the Mazatecs and the Aztecs and the Mayans and so many First Peoples and Indigenous Peoples, they had the structures set up. | ||
| They were honed over the centuries to how to properly administer these sacraments. | ||
| We, many of us from European descent, we're orphans. | ||
| We're spiritual orphans that have been cast from our religions, our religious roots, from my Germanic roots. | ||
| I named my son Azurus. | ||
| He's probably going to listen to this. | ||
| Hi, Az. | ||
| It's Latin, masculine and singular for sky blue. | ||
| And I named a species called Selassomy azurescens because it turns blue and also from my son. | ||
| And when I named my son azurescens, my family gave me just tremendous criticism. | ||
| How could you give this kid this name? | ||
| And then when he's five years old, we're at my grandmother's house and we're going through our family history. | ||
| And our coat of arms were from the house of azure. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And then we're from the house of Guilford, within the house of Guilford, the sub-house of Azure. | ||
| And I looked it up and we're 30 miles from – my family's roots are 30 miles from Stonehenge. | ||
| So September 22nd, the Druids have invited me to be in the center of Stonehenge for a ceremony. | ||
| They are rediscovering and they maintain, they've used psilocybin mushrooms throughout history. | ||
| It's called re-indigenization. | ||
| With the Egyptians, alchemists that I've recently met, they know their ancestors. | ||
| They believe it spiritually. | ||
| They use psilocybin mushrooms in combination with the blue lotus. | ||
| It's called re-indigenization, rediscovering your ancient roots of your practices. | ||
| What is the psychoactive compound, the blue lotus? | ||
| Very complex. | ||
| A blue lotus is amazing. | ||
| I've only been recently introduced to it. | ||
| I've had some elixirs made of it. | ||
| It wakens up your receptors. | ||
| It gives you this hyper state of consciousness. | ||
| It's not speedy. | ||
| It's kind of an alertness phenomenon. | ||
| Does it come with heightened circular respiratory? | ||
| The pharmacology, other people can speak of because I'm, again, I stay in my lane of mycology. | ||
| Did you notice the elevated heart rate? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not shortness of breath? | ||
| Nothing like that? | ||
| Nothing like a stimulant? | ||
| No. | ||
| I experienced super alertness. | ||
| That's what I would say. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| I was super sensitive. | ||
| So they're combining now, these Egyptian alchemists I met, psilocybe cubensis, golden mushroom, bruises blue, with a blue lotus. | ||
| The blue lotus opens the daytime, closes at night, you know, birth and death. | ||
| And now with the Druids, I say they've always used psilocybe mushrooms. | ||
| And so many other peoples now are re-indigenizing. | ||
| You were going on about what the blue lotus does though? | ||
| The blue lotus in combination with psilocybe convensis looks like it's an elixir that was practiced for a very long time as evidenced by the hieroglyphs that we just saw. | ||
| And what is in the blue lotus? | ||
| Like what is the actual compound? | ||
| I cannot tell you. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| Okay, today the blue lotus flower has been used primarily as a sleep aid and anxiety reliever. | ||
| However, at higher doses achieved by inhalation, users can experience euphoria and hallucinations. | ||
| The psychoactive effects of the flower are attributed to two How do you say that? | ||
| Aporphine? | ||
| Aporphine alkaloids. | ||
| Apomorphine and nusiferine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| Oh, it's good for erectile dysfunction. | ||
| It may help muscle control in those with conditions such as Parkinson's disease and erectile dysfunction. | ||
| Dopamine agonists. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So much like some of the dopamine agonists that have like weird psycho side effects. | ||
| You know, there's like pharmaceutical dopamine agonists like... | ||
| Excellent, Jamie. | ||
| Re-equip. | ||
| Do you know what that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a crazy case where a guy won a lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline because he was on a dopamine agonist and it turned him into a gay sex and gambling addict. | ||
| He was a heterosexual man who had Parkinson's, had wife and kids, and could not stop picking guys up Random chance encounters. | ||
| He got raped. | ||
| He lost all of his money. | ||
| He gambled his entire life savings away. | ||
| He was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. | ||
| He got off the medication and the symptoms all went away. | ||
| He realized that it was this dopamine agonist. | ||
| He actually won in court. | ||
| And not a lot of money. | ||
| Not a lot of money. | ||
| That cause and effect sounds very complicated to me. | ||
| Yeah, the dopamine agonist thing. | ||
| If you Google pharmaceutical dopamine agonist side effects, they're pretty well documented. | ||
| And one of them seems to be a lowering of inhibitions or a lack of control over inhibitions, which would lead to, they think, gambling problems. | ||
| You know, people just can't. | ||
| Put it all on black! | ||
| Let's go spin that roulette! | ||
| Like, they just go crazy and they just want to gamble, which is very strange. | ||
| Well, that seems like creating an obsessive-compulsive disorder. | ||
| Something along those lines, but also, like, this guy was saying that he was completely heterosexual until he started taking these dopamine agonists and then he wanted to have a lot of, like, random dangerous gay sex. | ||
| I've been immersed into a group of psychiatrists, and my heart goes out to them because it is such fuzzy science. | ||
| It's just so complex. | ||
| And, you know, you become a medical doctor first, then you go on for two to four more years, become a psychiatrist. | ||
| And it just seems like it's really – it really shows that the psychiatry is still at the infancy of its science. | ||
| Well, there's just so many things like SSRIs are now showing it's not a chemical imbalance. | ||
| That's what the whole basis of it was about. | ||
| What are the dopamine agonist known side effects? | ||
| Because some of them are pretty crazy. | ||
| Nausea, vomiting, orthostatic hypotension, headache, dizziness, and cardiac arrhythmia are among the most common side effects of dopamine agonists. | ||
| These adverse effects are mostly dosage dependent. | ||
| It's highly recommended to start these medications at low dosage to reduce the risk of orthostatic hypotension. | ||
| Delirium, hallucination, seizure, coma. | ||
| But some people have... | ||
| Google re-equip lawsuit. | ||
| It's like re-equip? | ||
| R-E-equip lawsuit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Parkinson's patient wins lawsuit over gay sex addiction. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| So I think this was in the UK. You click on one of those? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Pfizer settles the lawsuit tying sex and gambling addictions to dopamine meds. | ||
| So this was Pfizer. | ||
| This is a different one. | ||
| This is a different lawsuit. | ||
| There's more than one lawsuit. | ||
| The confidential settlement with 172 patients, said to be for millions of dollars, was approved by the judge in federal court in Australia. | ||
| Financial review reports, although the payments were delayed until they were assessed by independent review. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Side effects of the drugs they were taking to treat Parkinson's disease or restless leg syndrome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, gay sex and gamble. | ||
| Causing them to gamble away their life savings or become obsessed with shopping or sex. | ||
| And so it seems like it's an impulse control. | ||
| Sounds like Las Vegas to me. | ||
| It's Vegas. | ||
| Like, imagine if they could sell that in Vegas. | ||
| It occurred in at least 10% of the patients, but said they probably were underreported due to patients who were ashamed to talk about what they had done. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So the one, okay, re-equip. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| FDA should require a black box warning on labels of dopamine agonists, a class that includes re-equip from GlaxoSmithKline, UCB's Nupro, and Miraplex from Boehringer Ingelheim. | ||
| The German company was sued by a New York man some years back who said taking the drugs had turned him into a pathological gambler who ruined him as he gambled away $3 million. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wild. | |
| Yeah, I would be just a word of caution. | ||
| When you read headline articles like this, you know, there's probably a lot more behind the story. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| Behind the covers. | ||
| Well, also, there's probably a lot more. | ||
| If you're talking about the difference between the blue lotus flower, some naturally occurring substance probably also has a bunch of other things in with it as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's sort of like when they had Marinol. | ||
| Remember when they tried to do synthetic THC and give it to people and it was terrible because they didn't want people smoking pot? | ||
| Because there's a lot of things that come with it. | ||
| It's not just the individual compound, right? | ||
| It's like all the things inside of it, especially when it comes to cannabis, the other cannabinoids that work synergistically with THC. Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think we're at the extraordinary time of re-evaluation. | ||
| I hope that we have greater respect for diverse points of view. | ||
| I think a lot of these observational studies and patient reporting should steer medicine. | ||
| I think observational studies in general populate databases for scientists to be able to look at, looking for signal. | ||
| I think AI will be fantastic. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say that. | ||
| Elucidating, you know, signals that we can't possibly see. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think there is a convergence, you know, of psychedelic science and artificial intelligence. | ||
| But I hopefully is guided by a very high ethical standard where we are always, you know... | ||
| Trying to steer the course in a way that is judicious and does not get away from us. | ||
| And that's the biggest concern about AI that I have. | ||
| That's why we have to give psilocybin to everybody involved in AI. We have to give psilocybin to AI. I just don't know how to do it. | ||
| Yeah, could that be programmed in? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Compassion, psychedelic experiences, feeling of connectedness. | ||
| What if the AI automatically knows all these things? | ||
| Because it's already achieved some sort of state of enlightenment just by virtue of not being attached to all the things that hold us back. | ||
| Hubris, ego. | ||
| All the things that ruin humanity, maybe it will automatically be enlightened because it won't be connected to those things. | ||
| But is AI singularity in and of itself? | ||
| It's a diversified singularities that are converging to a single concept eventually as time rolls out. | ||
| Well, that might be a part of what psychedelic plays in all of this. | ||
| That might be our parachute. | ||
| That might be the one thing that can kind of help us make our way through this and keep some semblance of sanity. | ||
| I just think that the advantage of psilocybin is anyone can grow it in their own home. | ||
| It democratizes psychedelics. | ||
| It's easy to do. | ||
| It ties you back with nature. | ||
| I'm a libertarian in that the government has no business in crossing my threshold of my door. | ||
| What I do with my family, what I do with my home, etc., that's my business. | ||
| Especially when it comes to something that's not harming anyone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Especially to something that like the LD50 is so high, you'd have to have pounds and pounds of it to get sick and die. | ||
| I think it's 38 pounds. | ||
| Yeah, that's nuts. | ||
| Which you'd die from dehydration of absorbing the mushrooms. | ||
| You literally wouldn't be able to do it. | ||
| You wouldn't be able to eat enough to kill you. | ||
| And I think it speaks to the freedom of consciousness. | ||
| You know, it's a basic human civil right. | ||
| We should all have the civil right for our own, our rights to our own consciousness. | ||
| We also have to look at it in terms of the rights of individuals. | ||
| Like an individual does not have the right to tell you what you can and can't do that's not going to harm someone else. | ||
| It's just wrong. | ||
| It's wrong, fundamentally, for a person to have that kind of power over another person, someone doing something in the privacy of their own home, where it's not harming other people, and it's not even dangerous to themselves. | ||
| Maybe psychoactively dangerous. | ||
| I mean, maybe someone who's very vulnerable. | ||
| Maybe someone who has schizophrenia. | ||
| Maybe someone who is already psychologically impaired. | ||
| Maybe yes, then. | ||
| But the only way we find out about that is through studies. | ||
| The only way to do that is to legalize it. | ||
| The only way to do that is to It changed the way people think about it and I think what you spoke about with police officers, my experience with soldiers, with veterans that have had very positive and beneficial experiences and even people that are like near death. | ||
| They're in hospice care that have had very powerful perspective. | ||
| Well, there's a great organization called Roots to Thrive. | ||
| It's a Canadian nonprofit. | ||
| They've taken, I think, 60 patients, end-of-life anxiety, most of them stage 4 diagnoses, a few months to live. | ||
| They have eight caregivers, eight patients. | ||
| They meet on Zoom. | ||
| They get together. | ||
| They prepare for this. | ||
| They do high doses of psilocybin with the Canadian government approval. | ||
| I had a First Nations healthcare facility, and a number of great people were involved with Roots to Thrive. | ||
| I highly recommend them. | ||
| And what makes me want to cheer up is that in one of the sessions, one of the first sessions, There are eight patients. | ||
| They get together and they prepare. | ||
| And they lay down in this common room. | ||
| And when you do a high dose of psilocybin, as you know, the effects come on pretty quickly, 10 to 20 minutes. | ||
| But an hour to two hours in, you're peaking. | ||
| And just as they were peaking, the First Nation elders on the other side of the wall started drumming. | ||
| And everybody started crying because they knew that they knew how important that was. | ||
| And to have First Nations support with people who are dying and the majority of those people come out of the experience not fearing death. | ||
| And they become counselors to their families, saying, it's okay, I'm dying. | ||
| And they change the whole relationship with leaving. | ||
| And interestingly, and I just heard this number recently, of the 58 or 60 people, only four of them have died. | ||
| And they all had terminal illnesses going back over three years now. | ||
| So you think about, wow, mind over matter, if you don't have this anguish, this inflammatory pathway, you now have optimism about life and your meaning, you're a caregiver, you have purpose, then isn't your immune system upregulated? | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| We know that emotionally depressed people do have a depressed immune systems. | ||
| Well, people who have found a new lease on life and purpose, you know, it would augment their innate immunity. | ||
| I've always wondered about that with COVID as well. | ||
| The people that were terrified of COVID, and once they got COVID, they were just overwhelmed with anxiety and fear. | ||
| And all that does is crush your immune system. | ||
| And all the fear that was being propagated by the media, this constant, like, death Bell that was rang all over the media just scared the shit out of people. | ||
| And it probably weakened a lot of people's immune systems and probably cost a lot of lives. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| I think basically spreading widespread panic, you know, increasing anxiety depresses the immune system. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of factors, right? | ||
| There's companionship, love, friendship, happiness in your life, physical activity. | ||
| There's all these different mitigating factors that can alleviate some of your anxiety. | ||
| And if you don't have those, all those things are going to compound. | ||
| And it is a cascading effect. | ||
| Well, that's why, again, I see life and death, life and disease, health and disease has been a multifactorial equation. | ||
| How many coefficient variables can you get on this side of the equation that on this side of the equation results in a better life, a healthier life, a better attitude? | ||
| I think psychedelics, and in particular psilocybin, is a very major coefficient variable that can help tilt the balance. | ||
| And moreover, it's just not a linear equation. | ||
| It becomes a matrix of implications to everybody else around you and your community, your family, your community, the city, the nation, the world. | ||
| It's that we need psilocybin now for societal benefit more so than we have ever needed it. | ||
| And time has come. | ||
| And so I applaud all the researchers who have struck out. | ||
| And my discussions with law enforcement is really interesting. | ||
| They want to put their energy where they can have the most Positive impact to protect the health of society. | ||
| And fentanyl syndicates are a high priority. | ||
| Individual use of psilocybin is not. | ||
| And that's how it should be. | ||
| I mean, we should really grow up about this stuff. | ||
| If there was a widespread legalization, at the very least you could develop centers where people could safely take it and they would be treated by counselors and you'd have people who are experienced travelers that are registered and know how to deal with people and handle people. | ||
| And we could do it in like a modern shamanic setting. | ||
| That can be done. | ||
| Not that I love lawyers, but one of the best lawyer strategies I've ever seen in my life is the decriminalization of psilocybin and psychedelics to the lowest priority of law enforcement. | ||
| So it is a violation of the officer's duty, their oath, to use public funds to prosecuting people for psychedelics. | ||
| So, it is at the level of jaywalking, right? | ||
| It's basically the lowest priority of law enforcement, which means if a law enforcement officer tries to bring a case forward, It is a – it is malpractice of their ethical duty to perform their job to waste the court and the public's money focusing on psychedelic prosecution. | ||
| As it should be. | ||
| As it should be. | ||
| I mean that's just one step, right? | ||
| It should be legal and we should get an understanding of it and how many people it could benefit. | ||
| I think decriminalization is the lowest hanging fruit in this long walk towards legalization. | ||
| Decriminalization, I think, is... | ||
| I think it should be legal. | ||
| I want to make sure everyone knows that. | ||
| But I think from a practical point of view, lowering the penalties and reducing it What did you think about California's decision to not legalize it or not decriminalize it and allow it for therapeutic use but they wanted to set thresholds first and they said no thresholds were established and no protocol or program was established and they would reconsider if that was done. | ||
| Well, right now my understanding is that the Council of Physicians have blocked all research on psilocybin and psychedelics in California. | ||
| It's a total blockade. | ||
| They will not allow any research. | ||
| There's a governing board for Schedule I substances in California, which most states don't have, and that governing board is a stop-go board for progress of research on Schedule I's. | ||
| They have It dictated essentially no research on psychedelics in California. | ||
| Is that a finding issue? | ||
| No, I think it's a political science issue. | ||
| You get physicians or other people who are not experienced with these substances making decisions about these substances, just ill-informed decisions from inexperienced people for the most part. | ||
| And so they have a distorted perception of what these things do and they don't feel that there's any value in studies because they haven't experienced them. | ||
| It's like somebody who's never flown an airplane Who then thinks they know how to fly an airplane, telling you, giving you advice on how and why you should not fly an airplane because they're just inexperienced. | ||
| They're out of their ken of experiences. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| Well, that's not good, especially for a progressive state or supposedly progressive state. | ||
| Well, the initiative, the public ballot initiatives, 70, 80 percent. | ||
| In Canada recently, a survey, 80 percent of the citizens of Canada We want psychedelics approved for therapeutic use and decriminalized. | ||
| 80%. | ||
| So when the states that have ballots, this is how these big changes are occurring. | ||
| And then citizens, paid with public funds, you know, public officers, public employees, then have to follow the will of the people. | ||
| And so I think the ballot initiatives gets politicians out of the hot seat. | ||
| They have to say, oh, we have to follow the will of the people. | ||
| I did not stick my neck out on that. | ||
| It's the ballot initiatives that people have spoke. | ||
| So I think this is a people's revolution movement. | ||
| So I think this is a revolution for the freedom of consciousness, for the ground swelling that's occurring not in the United States and Canada, but all over the world. | ||
| It's so desperately needed. | ||
| Well said. | ||
| Paul Stamets, you're the fucking man. | ||
| I appreciate you very much. | ||
| Thank you very much for being here. | ||
| It's always a pleasure to talk to you. | ||
| Your company that you sell these wonderful mushrooms at is called Host Defense. | ||
| It's fungi.com. | ||
| You can get that. | ||
| And thank you for everything you do, my friend. | ||
| I really, really appreciate it. | ||
| I want to thank you, Joe, and I want to thank you for having this opportunity. | ||
| I want to thank all the JRE listeners for contributing to these observational studies because you can help inform scientists to make good decisions and create validated studies that help lead the medical science community forward. | ||
| We need all of you, you know, so... | ||
| Hear, hear. | ||
| Get at it, freaks. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye, everybody. |
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