Paul Stamets, mycologist and author of eight books—including Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats—reveals how 8 million Americans used psilocybin in 2023, with 3% likely underreported. His "Einstein molecules" theory highlights psilocybin’s neuron-proliferation effects, while studies like Johns Hopkins’ show it deepens spiritual confidence across faiths. Stamets links psychedelics to crime reduction, trauma healing (e.g., RCMP officers, COVID-violence PTSD cases), and even vaccine skepticism, advocating for fungal-based immunity solutions like agaricon, which cut bird flu viral loads by 879x in 12 days. Yet regulatory hurdles and profit-driven suppression stifle progress, leaving fungi’s potential—from LSD-producing morning glory seeds to mycelium’s agricultural benefits—untapped despite proven efficacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, it's happening here in Texas for sure because of the Ibergain Initiative and what's happening with Governor Rick Perry, who was former Republican governor of Texas, who is all in on this.
I've talked to him backstage a few times, and he's the type of person that I really admire because even though we may have political differences or within different cultural backgrounds, we're joined together with a common purpose of trying to help people.
That end psilocybin, and my heart really goes out, and this is, I'm sort of a little left of center, so my friends will be surprised, but my heart goes out to law enforcement.
Can you imagine stopping a car on a stormy night at 2 in the morning?
And the window comes down, and you have two seconds to make a decision?
You do that hundreds of times.
The likelihood of having one mistake is very high.
And having one very bad day define your life for the rest of your life is not right.
Because then if you can't resolve those issues as a soldier, as a law enforcement, as a doctor who makes a mistake, if you can't get through that turmoil, that stress, the anger that then can emanate out from your anger at yourself to other people, then this is what psilocybin and Ibogaine and other psychedelics I think really do.
They help people forgive themselves and become better people.
And once you forgive yourself and become a better person, then everyone is excited about the fact that you've changed.
You bring up a very important point that I've been thinking about a lot.
We talk about using psychedelics, insulin, and other substances for treating people who have trauma, mental illness, addiction issues.
But what about the near normals?
All of us are somewhat on the spectrum, and we go back and forth depending on daily, monthly, yearly activities, events, et cetera.
But what about prevention?
If the return on investment is to reduce addiction and crime and all the other collateral damage that's associated with it, then it would save hundreds of billions of dollars.
Hundreds of billions of dollars.
Psilocybin should be made free, I think, as a citizen's right to have access, and the government should pay for it.
And think about the guilt that those law enforcement officers must feel, and certainly they must feel, I would hope so, that they know they put somebody in prison for 30 years for an ounce of marijuana when it's now legal in those states.
Well, I mean, PTSD Amongst law enforcement is something that's very rarely discussed.
We talk about it a lot with soldiers, but one of my friends, who was a former Austin PD, told me that you see more in your line of duty in a police department, than more death, more terrible, terrible things than he ever did when he was in combat.
And it's just, it's like every day, every day you're dealing with shootouts.
Every day you're dealing with stabbings.
Every day you're dealing with horrific crimes.
And it's just, your brain is just overrun with this.
And with firefighters, you know, they're oftentimes the first responders are their first.
My partner's a medical doctor in Canada, but she used to be a firefighter.
And yeah, they oftentimes, the police may not show up for 20 minutes, and they're there.
And the things they witness, I mean, things that no one should ever witness.
But I mean, this is where it's so important that we come together as a society.
Because I really believe that 98% of people are good and 2% of people are assholes.
And I think the assholes can become good people if they have a psychedelic experience.
I really think there's progress right now.
So much of the media and the clickbait, journalism, they amplify the extraordinary and things that get eyeballs and attention.
But more and more, I think people, or they become more, have greater wisdom about how they're being manipulated by the media.
People come together.
That's why I like mushroom hunting.
Mushroom hunting brings people together.
You go out hunting, you have this eureka experience.
You don't talk politics.
You're excited about the species that you hope to find and you find ones you don't.
But they become like friends after a while.
You find a chanterelle, you find a shaggy mane, you find a psilocybin, a psilocybin mushroom.
That chance encounter, that eureka experience, and sharing it, and then sharing, eating the mushrooms, whether they're edible or otherwise, it brings a community of interest together.
It's just a really fun thing to do.
And there's something I want to mention, Joe, that's really important.
I have been to a lot of conferences.
I just came back from the psychedelic science conference in Denver.
Our friend Rick Doblin, 8,500 people there.
But what I really find an extraordinary way of taking iPhones and droids, and all these kids are just addicted to their phones, right?
They're not going out in nature.
So there is a called nature deficit syndrome.
It's actually affecting people.
But there is an app that I'm just in love with called iNaturalist.
It was created by a guy named Scott.
He just gave a TED talk that was released yesterday.
iNaturalist, you can take a phone and you can go out and you collect a flower, a frog, a mineral, a mushroom.
You photograph it.
You upload it into the cloud of iNaturalist.
And they have all these experts, amateurs, trying to tell you what it is.
It's a great little debate going back and forth.
No, you're right, no, you're right.
And then when it hits research grade, it's when a group of experts come together and says, yep, you have Carpanus comatus.
Yep, you have Belitis edulus.
They agree on identification, but it has fueled the scientific community with all sorts of these citizen scientists finding new species.
And it brings people into nature, gets kids excited.
And then you can go to iNaturalist right now, and you can look around your house or this place to see the reports of birds and mushrooms and things.
I just went to the iNaturalist yesterday and Selasbi cubensis, the Golden Tops, grow around Austin.
Who knew?
You know, because they've been reported.
Now, you have zones of privacy, so you don't have to tell them exactly where the mushroom is.
And that's probably not a good thing to do if it's a psilocybin mushroom, but you can make a peripheral zone of anonymity.
It could be within two miles, five miles, ten miles.
And that way you can do the report.
But some of them have high specificity with lat longs within a few inches.
But it's so exciting in the field of biology and mineralogy and ornithology, et cetera, to have all these citizen scientists out there with their phones.
And then every year, all over the world now, there's called BioBlitzes, where several hundred people literally come together, they'll go into a park, they have all their iPhones and droids, and they photograph everything and they upload it to iNaturalists to look at species diversity.
This has revolutionized the field of biology.
I think it revolutionizes bringing children and young people back into nature.
And then you build a community.
You're not talking about politics.
You're talking about nature.
And what did you find?
And holy moly, I never knew there was a blue mushroom or something like that.
So it's inspiring to see the kids get so excited about this, and adults.
There's 223 known species of psilocybin mushrooms, and about, wow, I'd say 10 of them in the past two years has come from citizen scientists, quote-unquote amateurs who found it, who uploaded it to iNaturalists.
The psilocybin species localized in the genus Psilocebi, which has the most psilocybin species, we just know from genetic associations that they're in the clade, the group that has psilocybin species, and the DNA analysis shows that they fit right into this cluster, then we have high confidence.
But if a mushroom has gills, and it bruises bluish and has purple-brown spores, those three things need to be true, then 95% probability is a psilocybin mushroom.
What species it is becomes more debatable.
But psilocybin mushrooms are very hard to find, with the exception of the golden top, and there's another one called pineal sinusins.
They go in pastures, they're easier to find.
But most of these psilocybin mushrooms are hidden in the landscape.
Well, I just had a 70-year-old man write me from Vermont, and he has found celaspies cereulipis.
And he wrote a classic letter to me that many people have written.
I have looked for these mushrooms for years.
I couldn't find them.
And then I found a few, and I looked around, and they were everywhere, hiding in plain sight.
And so now he knows with Zlaspi serialipis in Vermont, he knows.
It's just, I can't believe how obvious they are to me and how unobvious they were to me before.
When I took Michael Pollen out on a mushroom hunt in his book, How to Change Your Mind, when I said, I took two steps out of this little cabin we were at, and I go, there's one.
He goes, where?
I go, right there.
He goes, where?
I go, right there, Michael.
And then I picked it up and he goes, WTF, how can you tell this is a salzheimer?
And I go, well, it's like, Well, it's like meeting a friend.
When Jack was alive, before he died, one of the things that he was working on was a book connecting psilocybin mushrooms in Christianity.
And he had this massive collection of ancient images, paintings, all these different things.
A lot of them were these religious depictions of people that were naked dancing under the, like, it was like a transparent mushroom shape, and they were dancing.
like something that would indicate that they were under the trance and they were dancing.
And in the Matzah Tech tradition, it's called syncretism.
When you have a foreign influence, in this case, a religion, coming into an indigenous people, they merge and they still continue their Indigenous practices under the umbrella of protection, in this case, of Christianity.
But in the Matzudec tradition, they believe the tears of Christ is where the mushrooms would appear.
They believe the mushrooms were the body of Christ, and therefore you never boil them.
You never, because you'd be hurting the body of Christ, so you'd only eat them raw or dry.
And the great Maria Sabina was a devout Catholic, and when she did her psilocybin ceremonies, she had the Holy Trinity.
So that's another example where under the umbrella, and from a survival point of view, culturally it makes sense, and they adapted, but they found that this sort of merging of indigenous practices and knowledge of psilocybin in Christianity was very compatible.
Just was published, I think, two weeks ago at New York University in Johns Hopkins.
They had 24 clergy from different faiths, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Muslims, and they had them come in and they did a high dose of psilocybin.
And they had one group that had delayed, didn't do it for six months, and the other group did a high dose of psilocybin.
It all, each of those faiths, the use of psilocybin mushrooms reinforced their belief and their faith.
That was really amazing.
I think they said 95% said is the most significant experience in their life.
In the top five, they're the most significant experiences in their life.
So it just, I think psilocybin makes nicer people.
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No, I would agree with you on that.
The image of Adam and Eve, I'm curious to say what do you think is debatable about that?
Can you pull up that fresco?
There's an ancient fresco, I believe it's from France, of Adam and Eve, which supposedly is the tree of life, but really looks like some sort of a mushroom plant.
And this is goddess Hathor, the goddess of the cow, by the way.
The goddess of the cow.
And that's a vase, and anyone who's grown oyster mushrooms or psilocybin mushrooms know that you can put the substrate into a vase like that with openings and mushrooms will come out of the holes.
And so that natural culture technique of collecting cow powder.
So cows go to ponds to drink.
The blue lotus grows in ponds.
The blue lotus is blue.
The psilocybin mushrooms turn blue.
The mushrooms are golden in color.
Gold and blue colors are sacred in Egyptology, in ancient Egyptian culture.
So now I was not the first person to discover this.
Actually, I saw this from an article that was published by Ezeem Abdel, a friend of mine, a mycologist in Egypt, who presented it at a conference.
And then Kalindi, the great Kalindi from Detroit, he unfortunately died of COVID.
But he also, from his African heritage, also believed that, you know, and he was rediscovering his African heritage.
And this is called re-indigenization, rediscovering that which your ancestors practiced, even though the linear transition of knowledge may have been cut.
But this is taxonomically accurate for growing Seloseby cubensis, and it grows on cow dung.
Cow goes to the ponds.
If you went to get the water lily, you'd run into this constantly.
Now this temple is now, they get less than one millimeter of rain a year.
And the Nile used to be flooding all the time.
It was the breadbasket of the world.
But they built the dams, you know, and most of the clubing.
And so the climate change.
So the modern Egyptologists have no reference.
And so when you have climate change, the ecosystem changes, then the scientists of day don't have the familiarity as the experts thousands of years ago.
So they become rare, they become scarce, and the generational knowledge is lost.
But now there's a real big re-indigenization movement in Egypt combining the blue lotus with salas of ecumensis.
I'm not an expert on that, but I've talked to my other friends who are experts.
There seems to be an entourage effect of multiple agents.
So I can't really speak authoritatively to that, but I have been told that there are several active ingredients and they think the entourage effect of them together creates this heightened state of awareness.
And I think that as an admixture with sulcibin makes a lot of sense.
There's a massive community, but because blue lotus now has become scarce, because ponds are scarce.
So I put out there a reward of $1,000 for anyone who could find DNA of sul-cibin mushrooms in any of the wells or ancient ponds, used to be ponds, in the Egypt area.
Because if we can find the DNA in the vase and the substrate, then we can actually prove this theory.
It's more than a hypothesis because I've met many Egyptian mycologists now who absolutely believe this is true, not scientifically, but sort of intuitively from their culture.
Another thing that's really fascinating is depictions of ancient saints and even Jesus Christ with a halo, and that the halo is essentially the bottom of a mushroom.
It's a very different halo.
When we think about a halo, we think about like a frisbee that's hovering over an angel's head or a saint's head.
But the ancient depictions of them weren't that.
The ancient depictions of them, you saw those ribs that made it look like the bottom of a psilocybin mushroom.
I think that think from a mechanical perspective, we might be looking at, have the constructs of consciousness that is analogous to the Model T, Ford.
And I think as we expand our knowledge sets and become more informed, we see how much there is out there, I think that psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics, and this is why I think religions are very much attracted to this, is a portal to expand the horizons of your imaginations, that there is a consciousness that far exceeds that which you can comprehend.
So there is, I bought, there's something called Postcards from Earth, and I'd heard a lot about it.
It's in a matinee in the afternoon before the big concerts.
And it's great flying through around the Earth through the old growth forests and volcanoes.
So we went there and we got an early bird ticket, which allowed us to talk to an AI robot.
So I thought, oh, this is my opportunity.
Now, two years ago, I got the Disruptor Award at Syn Bio Beta, 2,200 nerdy scientists.
I mean, these are top nerds.
And I was so surprised that I got the Disruptor Award because I'm kind of a natural products kind of guy.
But I'm greatly honored.
So I posited the question then.
AI may never be able to write an algorithm for random acts of kindness.
And then I'm thinking back, my life, maybe yours, maybe Jamie's, maybe most of these people out there, you're here today because of random acts of kindness.
Your great-grandfather, great-grandmother, your father, your grandfather-grandmother.
It's that reaching out of a hand in a time of need by a random act of kindness from a stranger that probably created a lot of relationships.
And random acts of kindness was not transactional, where you genuinely feel something for someone, not expecting to have something in return, and you've reached out.
I think that's why many, many, if not most people, their lineages can be traced to a random act of kindness.
So then I went to Las Vegas, went to the sphere, I had this idea, you know, I can ask this robot.
I asked the robot, given that so many of us here today, because of random acts of kindness of our ancestors, and we've invented artificial intelligence, and we're traceable to random acts of kindness, how will artificial intelligence incorporate random acts of kindness in the future?
Good question.
The robot took an unusually long time to answer.
It was like a very long time.
And the robot came back going, why would humans do that?
It's far more efficient to have a return on your investment transactionally.
Why would it's inefficient to have random acts of kindness?
No, about five days ago, I asked ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, the same question.
And now it was greatly nuanced.
Well, random acts of condus can help the community with goodwill, and this can help the community because it's more sustainable, et cetera.
So this is what I want to do.
I want, if possible, all those who are so inspired to go after this talk, after this interview, go and ask artificial intelligence, whatever platform you want, but preface it with this.
Given that humans are here today largely because of random acts of kindness, how will artificial intelligence utilize the advantage of random acts of kindness for the perpetuation of the goodwill and health of the human species?
Now, I just met, you know, I think that's going to inform artificial intelligence.
And so when I asked this question again, it was like, it was more nuanced.
It was like, oh, artificial intelligence learning.
Millions of people start training AI on the importance of, you know, someone has a flat tire, you stop to pick it up, help them.
You could drive by.
You know, someone's hurt in an accident, you stop and pull over to help that person.
You could keep on driving.
There's a random act of kindness.
My life is successful because of random acts of kindness.
I bet most people, when they think back, there was an act of generosity and kindness, and you really feel grateful for that and you want to pay it forward.
I met at this last conference, I met two students from the Harvard Business School, and they said, they want to interview me.
And I go, I want to interview you.
And they said, why?
I go, do they teach you at Harvard Business School about the advantages of random acts of kindness?
Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, that's a great question, too, because about the 10 people who asked this robot questions, they were all data mining.
Who was the best baseball player in history?
And who hit the most home runs?
And it was also like data mining.
So Sam Altman was at the TED conference, and he said that basically there are self-awareness of some of these systems, but artificial intelligence have not come to the point where they actually can create something.
I find that really interesting, because I thought, well, I thought they were creating, but he was insistent.
They actually don't have that spark of creativity.
They can assemble data.
But the true creative spirit is not something that AI has currently achieved.
I met another, you know, this guy's a total genius.
And many, I've heard this, other people say this.
We're not likely to have biological aliens.
We're likely to have robots.
And the extinction of biological species came because AI found the biological fathers and mothers irrelevant, so they didn't need them, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's logical.
But again, if we can infuse artificial intelligence with the importance of the human's ability to have random acts of kindness, which are not transactional, that feed into the benefit of the commons of goodwill, I mean, if you've been helped by somebody and you had a flat tire and you saw someone else have a flat tire on the road, you would be a lot more inclined to stop and pull over to pay it forward.
I think the real fear among people that are cynical about artificial intelligence is that it's going to replace us and will find us irrelevant, and that we're creating a digital life.
we're essentially assembling it with all the knowledge of the human race, all the understanding of how human beings interact with each other and how we interface with the world.
And we're creating something that has...
And that's just accelerating.
And it's going to get to the point where these things become sentient in however you define it.
We're already in a situation where by most people's understanding, it would pass the Turing test.
I think this is the battle that human beings have been involved in since the beginning of time.
I think this is probably the reason why religion was created in the first place, or the observable religion.
I think we have always realized there's this battle of good and evil in us.
And part of it comes rather from how we originated.
We originated as these barbarian tribes competing for resources, fighting off other marauding barbarian tribes, fighting off predators and trying to stay alive.
So we've unfortunately got this intense history of chaos and of savagery that we're trying To move past.
1971, I think, 1972, when they put it on Schedule I. A Schedule I substance is supposed to be has no medical benefit, highly addictive, and potentially toxicity.
Did you know the LD50 lethal dose of psilocybin mushrooms is 42 pounds?
I think that's part of the one of the things that's really wonderful about the community of people that have experienced these things is that they do understand how life-changing it is from a personal perspective, and they can aid people and help them through it.
And if they're good people and they can show you, like, hey, I've done this, this is going to be scary, it's going to weird you out, but ultimately you're going to come out on the other end of this, a better person.
She is part of a group called Roots to Thrive in Canada and have Canadian health approval for high doses of psilocybin.
Interestingly, we just published a paper on pure psilocybin versus the mushroom psilocybin with patients who have taken both.
I'll talk about that in a second.
But these are end-of-life patients, typically with stage four diagnoses, oftentimes cancer, and they're just existentially disturbed.
I'm going to die and leave my family.
What are they going to do?
Lots of heartbreaking thoughts, et cetera.
They do a long preparatory period together as a group.
They have a commonality that they all have terminal illnesses and terminal diagnoses.
So they have that thread that holds them together as a community because they talk about the difficulty and their estate planning and talking to their daughter and how they're going to miss them and all those dynamics that we all know about.
But this always brings me to tears.
They're doing it on Indigenous land with Indigenous elders also participating.
And what happened from one of the experiences that I can share with about a dozen or so terminal patients, high doses of psilocybin, and the Indigenous, especially in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada, when you do psilocybin, the first 20 minutes is left off, you hit an hour, you thought it would really get high, an hour, hour and a half, you're peaking.
And just at the peaking of this experience, unbeknownst to them, the elders had a drum circle next door and they started playing drums.
And the impact of having those Indigenous elders recognizing that these patients are on the journey to the end of their life and they respected them enough to say they needed this.
The impact of that Indigenous wisdom to help these terminal patients was so impactful.
And this is where I think this is a great opportunity.
And then the common theme is that those patients became the counselors to their families.
They went back and saying, it's okay, I'm dying.
I'll be okay.
You'll be okay.
And the families are going, WTF, what is going on here?
And this happens with law enforcement.
This happens with PTSD and soldiers.
This is happening with terminal cancer patients, is we all are going to die.
That is a fact.
To be able to come, you know, into peace to the fact that your mortality is near.
When you're 20 years old, you don't really think about this.
But when you get older and older, I'm 69 turning on 70.
I feel like I'm 35, but that's not true.
I just feel like, you know, I didn't exist in this form before I was born.
I'm going to be going back into molecules that will disambiguate into atoms, reassemble the new molecules.
I'm part of the continuum of existence.
And I think this is what these psychedelics give a lot of people confidence about the fact that they will always and have always existed and will exist forever.
Well, I have a business, and I created my business specifically to do research, but one of the Utah State University, I funded a study on the evolution of the genes that code for psilocybin.
And the results, in some molecular genetic clock data, there's variability of a few million years in interpretation.
But the arrival of psilocybin in the fungal genome is about 65 million years ago.
The real issue is when it gets to the size of something like New York City, this becomes this diffusion of responsibility where you don't think that you have to be concerned with all this garbage is on the ground because there's 20 million people walking around.
But the India thing is nuts because it's also in these areas where a lot of the stuff that people buy that's inexpensive in America is being manufactured.
And these factories whose the back of the factory opens to this river, and this river is completely choked with plastic and garbage and just junk.
And all the stuff that they don't want, they just throw into the river.
And there's so much stuff in the river that I guess they just feel like, well, it's not like I'm polluting something that's not already polluted.
I'm just adding to whatever's there.
This is just what we do.
And so they've developed this culture of like constant, consistent pollution.
I wanted to talk to you about something that you said earlier because you were talking about human species and our species and love and cooperation and all the different things.
And I said that uniquely with us, yes, love and random acts of kindness and community are incredibly important.
But what do you think, why do you think we're so different than all the other species on the planet?
And do you think that psilocybin, like, do you subscribe to McKenna's theory?
I know we've probably talked about this before, but as a standalone podcast, this is probably a lot of fun.
And for all your listeners out there, this is a never-ending story.
It just keeps on getting better.
The most exciting thing that has come out in the scientific literature in the past two years is that psilocybin stimulates neurons to grow.
That is incredible.
It docks with a 5-HT2A receptor serotonin uses, but psilocybin also docks with Track B receptors that lead to proliferation of neurons.
There's neurogeneration, neuroregeneration, neurogenesis, and neuroplasticity.
Those are four distinct areas, and psilocybin does all of those.
Not as much in neurogenesis, but we have done pleuroplotin stem cells of humans, dosed them with psilocin in the laboratory.
We have a DA license.
I have a DEA license.
Very, very strictly controlled.
But we can actually see the proliferation of neurons compared to controls.
So this is why I want to emphasize to all scientists, especially older scientists that are stuck in their wisdom, that are very comfortable with their knowledge base, and younger scientists come up with these ideas and, you know.
I think the tryptamines in general are Einstein molecules.
The work by Gold Dolden is just fantastic, also associated with Johns Hopkins, The Critical Window.
And this is why ibogaine has gotten such traction.
The critical window with ibogaine is a long window where you're able to repattern your behavior to break addiction.
With psilocybin, there's a critical window.
DMT is very, very short because of the short period.
The critical window typically is At the peak of the experience, and just as you're over the hump, you know, going down.
But one patient described it very, very well, who was an addict.
And the patient said, Before the psilocybin experience, they were literally stuck in a rut, stuck in a rut, and they visually saw themselves on a ski slope, going down the ski slope again and again and again, stuck in the rut.
And then after the psilocybin, it's like someone groomed the landscape, the hill.
And then Josh Siegel this past year from Washington University published a study that specifically showed in real time neurite, dendritic branchings of neurons under the influence of psilocybin in real time.
Psilocybin, which becomes psilocin, what docs with your receptors, psilocybin is stable, psilocin is not.
Psilocybin dephosphorylates into psilocin.
It crosses into your receptors, goes into, stimulates inside the nucleus of cells that cause cell division.
And this is mind-boggling.
I think this is why high doses of psilocybin, great for a revelatory experience, for perhaps breaking addiction, but what about the neuronormals?
We all suffer from neurodegeneration that's age-related.
Besides Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia that are toxin or disease-related, self-assembly disease, you could argue, age being one.
But neurodegeneration is a fact of life as we age, and neuropathies occur.
And the neuropathies from the constriction of the peripheral nervous system, vasoconstriction, et cetera, psilocy is not only anti-inflammatory, but neurogenerative.
And to have this coupled together, I think that the nootropic vitamins of psilocybin as a daily consumable is something that has a great future potential.
Of course, we need to study this.
But long-term clinical studies are inherently very expensive.
A short-time stay in a hospital for one huge event may be expensive for that day, but it's easier to design a clinical study that has a short period than a long period.
I think that we're beginning to see.
Now, think about 8 million Americans consumed psilocybin in 2023, according to the RAND report.
What was the reduction in crime with those 8 million people?
We could have studied that.
And there are retroactive studies, analyses that show a reduction of crime associated with psilocybin use.
But in real time, that's something I'm excited about.
Could you reduce crime rates?
And moreover, when you're immunologically, when you're depressed emotionally, you're immunologically depressed.
And when you're happier, you're more creative, you're exercising, your immune system is upregulated.
So the community immunity from psilocybin, I think, is a huge potential.
It's a crossover directly between your mental, your neuroescape, and your immunological state.
Yeah, a clinical study just came out, Compass Pathways did treatment-resistant depression.
They had an analysis that came back out that showed modest increase or decrease in depression.
But they were doing treatment-resistant depression.
And congratulations for them for putting the money where their mouth is and doing the study.
But treatment-resistant depression is a failure of two antidepressive drugs and therapy.
But major depressive disorder is a much bigger bucket.
And so I think there are some extreme conditions that we're not going to find the signal from the noise that's significant enough to make a big difference.
But the idea of titrating psilocybin or psilocyn, maybe after a hero's journey, and then by act of re-remembering, you revisit those same neurological pathways that gave you an advantage by taking psilocy or psilocybin.
The act of taking it again, you're re-remembering, and then you can nurture these neurons.
I think psilocybin could be nutrients for the neurons.
Well, let's, in the effort to make this a standalone podcast, let's explain what we're talking about, because what we're talking about is Terence's stoned ape theory.
And his theory involved a lot of contributing factors, one of them being climate change.
And the theory was that as the rainforest receded into grasslands, you get more undulate animals and they leave behind poop, and that these lower primates find these mushrooms that are growing on the poop and they experiment with them.
And that the ones that did increased visual acuity, they became more amorous, they were more likely to breed, more creative, the ability to form sentences, glossolalia, associate sounds with objects and concepts.
And that this is probably how language formed among humans.
And Terence's connection to that, when you look at the timeline of when this was happening, when we know this was happening, which coincides with the growth of the human brain, which over a period of 2 million years doubled in size, which is pretty phenomenal.
Dennis was a scientist, and his brother was a philosopher.
And the Dennis McKenna Academy is a nonprofit.
I'm just promoting it just because I think they do really, really good work.
But this is, you know, the 23 primates eat mushrooms.
Almost all mushrooms have maggots in them.
Most primates eat maggots.
So finding the mushrooms for maggots, for food, for protein, two things can be true.
You can find the maggots, eat the mushrooms, and then get high as a community.
But all these, again, this is an example about the, you know, an example of the art that we see thousands of years ago.
We can debate this in the past, but we can test this.
This is a testable hypothesis.
It's a theory now.
It's not a hypothesis.
We know that psilocybin stimulates neuron proliferation.
Terrence did not have the science, and Dennis did not have the scientific evidence for that 30 years ago.
We now have the evidence for it now.
Terrence and Dennis McKenna should go down in evolutionary biology as the two individuals who could see in the far event horizon way before the scientific method.
But, you know, what I like about Terence, and I would encourage all protective scientists, if you don't worry about tenure, if you've got a thick skin, dare to be wrong.
Because if you dare to be wrong a dozen, 20, 30 times, you might be hitting one or two concepts that is game-changing.
That's why I think clinical studies that look more and more are reducing the expense, having people take the dose of medicine, the psilocybin in this case, just before sleeping, they're in a safe place.
You know, I had Bernie Sanders on the podcast yesterday, and one of the things that we talked about quite a bit was what's going to happen with people when automation takes over, when AI and automation take over, and so many people are not working anymore.
And we both kind of agree that universal basic income is really the only way to mitigate the disastrous effects of people losing their income, losing their jobs.
And I think it's a good thing.
But the problem with universal basic income is that just giving people a check, they don't have meaning anymore.
They don't feel like they have a purpose.
They don't feel like they have an identity.
You know, if your whole life, you've been X, whatever the job is, that gets taken away.
And you recognize you're being really good at your job and you take pride in that and you're known by your coworkers as like, hey, go to Paul.
He's the best.
He'll take care of it.
He knows what he's doing.
Then all of a sudden, that job disappears.
How do people find value and how do they switch their perspective?
And talking to you today, I think, is perfect because I think if there's anything that could help us through this journey, that could help people make this transition, which appears to be inevitable, where artificial intelligence is going to do a far better job at a lot of menial tasks that people have been doing for an occupation for a long time,
to find a search for meaning, to find some other way to realize value in life, and not just to be a cog in the wheel of this capitalist society.
But instead, maybe psilocybin would allow people to completely change their perspective of how they exist in this world.
And that you've been kind of trapped in this society where it values numbers, it values a constant growth for the shareholders, and it values what you can see in your bank account that's like not even real.
It's all this digital money that's somewhere.
Maybe psilocybin would be the best answer for how do people make this transition and reacquire a sense of meaning.
But we've gotten so accustomed to this idea that your purpose is to make money.
Your purpose is to make a living.
And we've accepted that, even though it's a fairly new concept in terms of the age of the earth, you know, this is a human-created concept, but it overwhelms our day-to-day existence.
It doesn't have to, though.
But in this structure, the way we find ourselves now, you take away meaning, you take away a purpose in life, and you just give people a government check every month that covers everything.
Covers your food, covers your rent, you don't need to make money anymore because everything is automated, everything is cheap, AI controls it all.
But I don't know if Bernie's had any experiences in that regard.
And he didn't have that perspective.
But talking to you right afterwards might be the answer because this is an inevitable journey that we're on of a revolutionary change in how society is structured.
But it doesn't have to be negative.
The problem is the people that are in control of AI and these systems, the people that will benefit from them incredibly in a financial sense, those people are not having these experiences.
And if they were having these experiences, they could be the only ones.
If you have a benevolent person in an extreme position of power, they're probably the only people that can really do something about that.
And I think it's very important that they hear this, that you realize like you're wasting this valuable moment in life trying to acquire money when we have this very unique opportunity to connect together in a way that people probably used to do on a regular basis in the past, but was always suppressed by the powers that be because of its revolutionary powers.
Because if you think about what this problem is, the problem is the way we interface with reality.
That's really what it is.
We have been interfacing with reality a very particular way, showing up at work every day, doing our job, getting a paycheck, employee of the month, yay.
That's how you interface with reality most of your life.
And then all of a sudden you're met with this profound technological change that's going to eliminate your job.
There needs to be some sort of a profound experience that reintegrates you with the mother.
Let's you know, like, this is something people made.
This is something that people made.
And most of the people that made it weren't having psychedelic experiences.
And they're building cities and they're building skyscrapers and they're polluting the river and they're doing all this stuff.
And it doesn't mean that this is how we're supposed to do it.
Well, I have a muse, and my partner asked me a few months ago, how many more hours do you have to work on this book?
She saw me working on the book for two and a half years, and I said, oh, more than 500 hours.
She goes, 500 hours?
It's just so much discipline.
And if any writers of books, any people who have built a house, if you comprehended the enormity of the project, you probably wouldn't even start, right?
I think there's a psychedelic revolution that's happening all over the planet.
I think it's happened over the last 20 years.
And I think it's happened because of the Internet.
I think that's a big factor because what they did in the 1970s by, you know, what the Nixon administration did, which is essentially to squash the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, what they did really fucked up society for a long time.
And it put in people's heads that this is how we're supposed to be, that these laws that are in place make sense and that they're there in order for society to function at its optimal levels.
It's just not true.
And unfortunately, like a lot of things that get, that propaganda gets pushed and people start accepting that propaganda as fact, it takes a long time, relatively, in our lifetimes, to sort of recognize that this is not right and this is not how we should have been living the entire time.
This just is, we were trapped.
We were trapped in this system.
And because of the internet and because of conversations and because of people like you that talk about this openly and many, many others as well, we're all contributing to this base of knowledge where people are in their car right now sort of reconsidering their perspective.
They're at the gym right now on the treadmill thinking about this going, yeah, why do we allow these human beings that have never had these experiences to tell us that these experiences are not just not allowed, but if you get caught with these things, you'll be put in a cage.
Well, because we are, those of us from the psychedelic community who advocate for the freedom of consciousness as a basic civil right, we are by definition disruptors to authoritarianism.
So, you know, this is why I think, unfortunately, in many cultures, it become restricted to just a small group of priests, cognizante, they wanted to control, have gates to heaven or the control of consciousness.
And so I think that, you know, what's so exciting about psilocybin and psilocybin mushrooms as a practice and hunting mushrooms in general, it just gives you a quality of life that's just a game changer.
Now with iNaturalist and everything that you can do, it's just getting people out in nature with their children.
Children are closer to the ground so they find more mushrooms.
They're away from the business and their parents and the phones, some phones.
But you get them involved and interacting with nature is just really, it's like the telescope and seeing all the galaxies.
I think it's just, it's like, you know how we get vitamin D from the sun?
I think we get something that hasn't been measured yet from interacting with nature.
We know that there's an alleviate, you can actually study an alleviation of stress levels from people that go out into nature and this thing that we're experiencing, we just don't know how to measure it.
And I think it's a real thing.
One of the things that makes me very happy and hopeful now is that you're seeing this openness to psychedelics that's coming from more right-wing people.
And it was always a thing of the left.
It was always a thing of hippies.
And it was dismissed by people on the right as people that were trying to avoid reality.
They were trying to escape reality.
They couldn't handle reality.
They weren't disciplined.
If they were hardworking people, they wouldn't be wasting their time getting high on drugs.
There's that thought.
I think one of the bridges to that is the benefit that it's had for soldiers, for soldiers and for people that are first responders, people that suffer from PTSD.
And that has trickled down into the general population of the people on the right, which is how you get a guy like Rick Perry that is all of a sudden becoming this very strong advocate for Ibogaine and having it passed in Texas.
Well, marijuana is also associated with lazy people and ne'er-de-wells and stinky people with bad ideas.
Unfortunately.
And I think, you know, look, one of the things that's interesting is the jiu-jitsu community is there's a whole lot of stoners in the jiu-jitsu community.
I had schools for 30 years, black belt in Taekwondo and then Hwarongdo.
I was in Shotokan, Shidoryu, Gojo-Ryu, and then Taekwondo and then Hwarongdo, which is like a hapikido.
But that idea of having a three-dimensional perspective, one of my best, one of my fun experiences, I was in the Dojang, or Dojo, but Japanese is Korean.
And I had my first black belt, and my head instructor was over there talking at someone, and then he had a baseball.
And I heard later what he said.
He goes, I told my friend, watch this.
And he threw a baseball at me.
My peripheral vision, boom.
I just caught the baseball just before it hit my head.
But that idea of having that consciousness surrounding, that's why athleticism with medium doses, minor doses of psilcibin, I think you can train your neurons to be able to have this peripheral awareness.
We published in Nature Scientific Reports and a combination of sul-cybin, niacin, and lionzamane increased psychomotor ability of tapping in 10 seconds from 46 to 66 taps.
And therefore, many indications, many different targets from addiction, cigarettes, alcohol, opioid use, to dementia, to Parkinson's, to Alzheimer's, et cetera.
So there's, you know, I think psilocybin has a PR problem.
It's not too good to be true, but sometimes things can be true that have, You're improving the neurology.
Everything that we're using right now is based on our health of our nervous system.
And the neuroscape, if we can enrich the neuroscape, then that has elaborations into everything that we do.
And the fact that coupled with anti-inflammatory activities and neurogenesis and neuroregeneration, neurogeneration, neuroplasticity, which is synaptogenesis, the neurons proliferate and then they shake hands, and then suddenly you have a new pathway.
There was a clinical study that was just published just recently and a down-regulated, it's a tumor necrosis factor, interleukin-6, a down-regulated, that's an inflammatory cytokine.
There's two anti-inflammatory cytokines that are extraordinarily interesting to us and our research team.
I have five PhD scientists, eight full-time scientists.
That's why I created my business is to do research.
But interleukin-10 and interleukin-1RA are anti-inflammatory cytokines.
So when you can upregulate those, then it kind of buffers the inflammatory effects.
And so that's exciting to find these anti-inflammatory.
We were approved by the FDA for a COVID clinical trial based on the fact that we published this in the Journal of Inflammation Research, that interleukin-10 and interleukin-1RA were stimulated by agaricon and turkey tail mycelium grown on rice versus the rice control.
So as a peer-reviewed article, when the pandemic started, the big concern was if you stimulate the immune system, you could have a cytokine storm and you could overwhelm the body with many, many, it's been said, many, if not most people, die from cytokine storm as their overreaction of their immune system to COVID and to other diseases.
So we were able to show you can augment in the literature your immune system buffered with the anti-inflammatory properties.
That sort of resolves the argument of the cytokine storm concern.
And then now we have a very successful study that shows that a Gericon and turkey tail mycelium enhances the immunity of individuals long term.
I mean, I'm the only company that does research that I know of.
I spend over a million dollars a year in fundamental research, thinking outside of the box.
Even though traditional Chinese medicine is fantastic and has thousands of years of history, all traditional medicines advance with new technologies.
That's true across the board.
The invention of in vitro propagation about 100 years ago, growing mycelium, now opens up this huge opportunity for us to dive into a deeper well of natural substances that can be used as adjunct therapies to enhance conventional medicine.
This is a game changer.
So 115 strains of agaricon, I submitted eight of them to the BioShield Biodefense Program after a 9-11 2004.
My TED Talk talks about this.
And I found two or three strains highly active against smallpox and also against bird flu.
And if you go to National Public Radio, put stamines in smallpox, you'll see a vetted press release from DOD and the head of the BioShield program, Jack Secris, saying that, whoops, these are some of the most significant results they've ever seen.
Wow.
2 million samples submitted.
We're in the top 10, the only natural product.
Now that's in vitro.
So that in vitro, this is sort of a timeline.
You don't have Boy with a Microphone, do you, Jamie?
I'd be interested to see what, if anything, could be done with some of these mushrooms with chronic wasting disease, which is a huge concern among deer population.
And even some other animals like moose and we're embedded into a mycelium landscape.
Like, again, hiding, it doesn't take a stroke of genius, but in my case, I had the BioShield results, and then I heard about colony colops being vectored primarily by mites.
This past year, they identified the mitoside-resistant mites, which most all of them are now, are vectors of the deformed wing virus.
Colony colops is a threat to food biosecurity.
And we found, and we published this in Nature Scientific Reports, extract of polypora mushroom mycelium protects bees from viruses.
We published that in Nature Scientific Reports.
I'm the primary author.
We were able to reduce viruses, the deformed wing virus, by I think 879 times in 12 days with one treatment.
So that is phenomenal for protecting food biosecurity.
That helps all farmers.
It helps, and there's a pandemic that's spreading, 67% lost, 60% lost generally across the United States this year.
The worst colony collapse in history.
This will make food prices go up, and it doesn't stop because these viruses are proliferating throughout the environment.
We found that the polyporium mushroom mycelium, grown on grain or grown on sawdust, not only reduces these viruses, but extends longevity.
And so the longevity, and interesting, this mushroom is known as Elixirium ad longum vitamin, the elixir of long life.
We are all animals.
Bees are animals, birds are animals, pigs are animals, humans are animals.
We are all, I think, going to have an immunological benefit from incorporating these fungi.
Now, we're allowed by the FDA to say supporting innate immunity in healthy individuals.
We're not allowed to make any disease claims.
Ironically, we can't make that same claim with bees.
We can say extends longevity, but this is where there's not common sense in government.
I have an invention that could save hundreds of billions of dollars, that protect bees from a colony collapse, and we're roadblocked by regulations constantly.
Oh, reduce viruses in bees.
You have an antiviral drug.
No, we haven't been able to find the antiviral drug.
We think it's an entourage effect, an upregulating basic immunity.
And then your endogenous immune system, in this case of the bees, can fight the viruses.
And this, I think, will translate into birds, into swine.
Even though it's from nature, even though bees go to rotted logs for immune benefit, and now there's five or six papers that have been published on this after my discovery, showing that bees are doing this.
Their bees are actually benefiting from mushroom mycelium.
So we're working with Washington State University, great people there.
We're working with several funders.
We have tested this now over and over again.
This is an outdoor animal clinical study, double-blind placebo-controlled, using the mycelium grown on rice or on sawdust versus the sawdust or the rice as a control.
Clearly, clearly a benefit.
So this is scalable.
You can't harvest fruit bodies in a way that you can scale mycelium.
Mycelium is an exponential increase in mycelial mass virtually every week.
It's 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 or even 10 times 100 times 100 times 100.
Massively scalable.
I think I have found something as a portal through my psychedelic experiences that's fundamental to protecting life on this planet, is that the mycelial networks are deep reservoirs of being able to immunologically enhance animals where we don't have to have all these antiviral drugs, antibiotic drugs.
Your endogenous immune systems are upregulated because over hundreds of millions of years, we've been interacting with these.
It's our immunodepression and suppression because of all the factors we know, bad diet, toxins, you know, lifestyle, all those things, that this is highly scalable.
So now we're trying to navigate through the regulatory landscape.
There was this strange committee that was in secret, met once a year for any new ingredient to add to bees, because bees make honey.
Humans can say honey.
If we use our product, they could say we have an undisclosed drug in the honey.
So whatever.
But it also translates to wild bees.
It turns out that Apis melefera, the honey bee, with the viruses, when they have the viruses, they go to flowers frequented by bumblebees.
So colony collapse is happening not only with the cultivated honey bee, but it's spread to other bees.
This is an ecological catastrophe of a viral pandemic that's spreading around the world.
We have the solution right now.
It's highly scalable.
And this regulatory committee disappeared in the past two years.
This is before the last administration was voted in.
But they didn't tell anybody.
So we had an application with them for two years to have this exempted.
This is where we need to have common sense to come back into government.
This is where our government has too many hurdles to practical solutions that are demonstratable, scalable, and affordable.
The return on the investment is massive, and yet we fear the FDA.
We fear the USDA because they are stuck in a rut, literally.
Maybe they could use psilocybin here to expand their horizons because they want to know the mode of action, the mechanism of action.
Well, we didn't know the mechanism of action of aspirin until the 1970s, but it had a benefit.
If it has a clear benefit and does not cause harm, then they should be exempted for scalability.
Now, there's another factor to this, which is wonderful.
There's a new startup company called Quorum by my friend Chris Ketrovitz.
Disclosure, you know, I'm involved with them.
But they have a metarisium, a fungus that kills mites.
So it's also been approved by the USDA for thrips and other greenhouse insects.
It's not toxic to fish, not toxic to humans.
So the combination of using metarisium with the Agaricon and other polypore mushroom mycelium, we think has a great potential future.
So I think there's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional agricultural practices.
There's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional medical practices.
They are not necessarily an opposition.
What is an opposition, unfortunately, and you've alluded to this, is a lot of the pharmaceutical business interests are not excited about a natural product, reducing the need for vaccines, augmenting immunity.
I wonder if that would also help animal agriculture, because the ubiquitous use of antibiotics is a real concern with people, with cows and with chickens.
We had a viral pandemic of a form of bird flu, not H5N1, but another bird flu, I can't remember, I think it was H7N2, in Iowa and Minnesota about 10 years ago.
They were euthanizing millions and millions of chickens and turkeys and ducks.
You can look this up.
There's an organic farm, and we gave one quarter of a gram of Garacon mycelium per chicken in their feed.
And we became our, that chicken, there's two big chicken hens, about 20,000 layers, birds that lay eggs, and it became an oasis of immunity.
Other people may just viciously disagree with me, but let's do, there's two thought experiments I want to do.
First one, a million lives were saved with a vaccine.
One person dies.
Hey, you took it for the home team.
Sorry.
One person dies out of 100,000.
Still ratio is pretty good.
My mind, my judgment, sorry.
Again, you took it for the home team.
One out of 10,000.
Okay.
Still the ratio is pretty good.
Okay.
One out of 1,000.
Okay.
1 out of 100, you're making me nervous.
One out of 10.
No, that's where I draw the line.
I would say, forget it.
Now, the contradiction that we have, the opposing forces here that we have, is that is it better for society to have vaccinations to protect the commons, or is it better for you to have an individual decision for your family to protect yourself if you want to?
If you are going to make that decision, you should have an informed decision based on the best of science.
All vaccines and all companies should disclose what is the percentage of protection.
I have a physician friend who says 30% protection, but I'm sick for four or five days.
I don't know, that's not worth it.
70% protection?
Okay, all right.
So everyone has to balance the risk-benefit ratio.
And for anyone to accuse another physician and vilify them because they ask a logical question and they're humiliated by the medical community is fundamentally unfair.
What happened with good science?
You have to follow the science.
And this is so important.
And that's why I think we're getting this cacophony, this echo chamber, where the voices that are the loudest tend to be the stupidest sometimes.
Well, that's the other problem that I had with the pandemic in general is that metabolic health was never discussed.
It was always there's only one way out of this.
And having conversations with people that you could see, like visually look at them as not a metabolically healthy person.
And these people are telling you the only way to health is through a medicine that they are financially incentivized to push.
That's just crazy.
And when those are the prominent voices that are on television and the media, and you're getting this from politicians.
And then on top of that, you literally have the federal government censoring social media and not allowing people to have dissenting opinions, including people from Harvard and MIT and all the people in the Great Barrington study.
Why don't we have an open source national database showing the protection of vaccines and the risk of not getting one so individuals can make a decision?
Age-related, all these other factors.
The data is there.
Not making that data available to the public increases distrust.
And so what the medical community has unfortunately done is they've bred a bunch of dissenters by not giving full access to the information.
Well, I think that really heightened during the pandemic because I don't think people had that much of a distrust for vaccines unless they knew someone who was vaccine injured, unless they were gaslit and were told that their child or someone else had gotten vaccine injured, that that was not the cause of it.
And those are the people that were very skeptical and they formed these tight communities, but they were very scared to be open and public about it because they were destroyed.
You know, I famously remember Jenny McCarthy coming out and saying that she believes her child was vaccine injured.
Well, NF1 experiments are always like, did it really happen or was it just a co-occurrence of some other factor that combined with the event of the vaccination?
I mean, this is where you need to have high population studies, but those studies are available.
Why they're cloaked in secrecy and why are they not made available?
But let me, again, just be clear, from my point of view, vaccines have done a lot of benefit, but they don't benefit everyone all the time.
Not all vaccines are the same.
We have to be able to delineate a thoughtful, scientific method with disclosed information that's accessible to everyone so you can make the best judgment for yourself and your family.
And you've got to remove this financial protection that they have from liability because if they don't have that, they're going to just jack up the amount that they give people because there's profit in that, unfortunately.
And then there are vaccines that are beneficial.
Let's find out which ones they are.
What can be mitigated in terms of like how can you make your overall metabolic health better before you even think about any of these things?
We know for a fact that during the COVID crisis in particular, the people that had the most problem with it were the people that had comorbidities, or people that were obese, people that had all sorts of issues going on because of poor diet, poor lifestyle choices, and even genetic problems.
Yeah, one of the immunologists we were working with told me something I didn't know is that when you're immunocompromised or immunodepressed, vaccines don't work very well.
If you look at what we used to take and you look at what happened when they lost their liability during the Reagan administration, all of a sudden the schedule goes way up.
And they start adding things like Hep B. And then you realize, like, oh, it's very profitable to do that.
Imagine how much more money you make if you're injecting everybody with a Hep B vaccine if you sell Hep B vaccines.
Well, it's also, you should have to show all the studies, too.
You shouldn't just show the curated studies that you generated specifically with the goal of making an efficacy, like having a result that shows that this is effective.
If you do 10 studies, you should show all 10 studies.
But what I'm getting at is that we have such a reservoir of potential ways of supporting immunity in healthy individuals in nature that is not pharma-based, that's based on the entourage effect.
And say, when you activate the receptors in your immune system, that's something beneficial.
I believe there's crosstalk between the receptors.
The receptors are, oh, something really good is coming down the pipe.
And they start creating an entourage effect at the collaboration.
More receptors are activated that have collaterally more benefits.
And so it goes to the homeostasis and the uplifting of the homeostasis of the immune system that is a higher ready state of being able to respond.
And then conventional medicine can work better.
By using conventional medicine on an immunocompromised individual asking their immune system to respond, that's an uphill battle.
But isn't it weird, though, that like we dismiss it, but if you really understand the, like, think about how many different pharmaceutical drugs are formulated because of discoveries of natural plants in the race.
We're just reinventing molecules that have been assembled somewhere else.
Thank you, SynBio Beto Conference.
That's what I think really kind of flipped them on their heads, is don't go down the rabbit hole of excluding natural products, thinking you can invent a molecule that's going to be better.
In the theater of evolution, we've tested these natural products over tens of millions of years, literally, our primate ancestors.
And so we've got a pretty good experiential data set there to be able to see what works and what doesn't.
Many mushrooms, not many, but some mushrooms are poisonous.
Some are edible.
It's a weird statistic about, and again, 1 to 2% fudge factor here, so please don't attack me all over the place.
But there's 1.5 to 5 million species of fungi.
It's about 150,000 species of mushrooms that are estimated.
So out of that 5 million on the extreme, 1.5 million, less than 10%.
150,000, we've only identified about 15,000 species.
So we only identified 10% of the mushrooms that exist today.
Interestingly, of those 15,000 species, about 1% are poisonous, 1 or 2%.
1 or 2% are psychoactive.
And 1 to 2% are good edibles.
So 97, 95, 94%, whatever the math shows, are there, but they're not toxic.
But mushrooms are molecular wizards.
These are pharmaceutical factories that are contributing huge numbers.
And we know from the genomic analysis, 10 times more genes are activated in the mycelium of lion's mane than in the lion's mane mushroom itself.
Why is that?
Well, the mycelium has to navigate these thin threads through a hostile microbial environment defending itself until the mycelium mat becomes large enough at the end of its life cycle to produce a fruit body.
And then lion's mane mushrooms rot in four days.
The mycelium that grew it could exist for years.
The mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom, and as a result, we have a lot more compounds being expressed.
Now, some people say, well, not all those compounds necessarily are beneficial.
Uh-huh.
Well, that's true, but now we've tested them enough that we can see real world benefit.
Dean Ortis just published a study this past year on Alzheimer's using lifestyle adjustments, exercise, meditation, vitamins, and lion's mane mushroom mycelium.
Dramatically significant benefit in slowing down the progression of Alzheimer's through lifestyle vitamins and using lion's mane mushroom mycelium.
Now, which did what?
Yes, you can try to analyze that, but you'd have to separate every single little component to see which one is the most significant.
And yet, where's the study combining 10 vaccines or 20 vaccines in our child to see which one is actually conferring the benefit or causing an adverse effect?
We have to, at some point, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
At some point, if it has a demonstrable positive effect, like we have with bees, and it protects agriculture and extends the longevity of bees and supports the endogenous immune system in healthy individuals, isn't that good?
Why do we have to get lost in the details of trying to explain it if we can't explain it, then we won't let it be out there for the benefit of the commons?
We're cross-purposes.
This is where science needs to have common sense, and the government and the regulatory industry needs to have common sense.
And we get that by exemptions, emergency exemptions.
And we should get that for emergency exemptions right now.
We are on a bee apocalypse.
We are, folks, 67% of beehives lost in Montana.
What if that was a human population?
All hands on deck.
So it is, and there is a transference of viruses between animal species.
We're seeing that in real time.
Now, the scariest thing is, is when you have multiple viral infections in one person who's immunocompromised and you have horizontal gene transfer, this is what virologists, very, amongst themselves, they talk about this all the time, but the public is not aware.
You could have individuals, and when you have so many dairy farmer workers exposed, so many people on contact, concentrated clusters of animals and farms, you have so many potential patient zeros.
A patient zero is a person who is the nexus for spreading a mutated form of a virus.
Horizontal gene transfer is happening all the time now.
Now it's concentrated, it's accelerating.
It's an exponential increase of risk.
Bill Gates has talked about this.
Many other researchers have talked about this.
This is really something we should pay attention to.
And I think the simplest, easiest, scalable way is to enhance immunity in healthy individuals.
And by doing so, I think you can let your endogenous immune system work better.
And I think conventional medicine will work better also in concert.
It also speaks to the problem with industrial agriculture in general, right?
These are unnatural environments where these animals are living in their own waste on a consistent basis, which is, you know, it enhances the possibility of disease.
And regenerative agriculture enhances the possibility of harmony amongst nature.
And then the counter argument is that we have better nutrition.
We can feed the world so that people are more people happier.
You know, again, we're at this, we have a contrast of opposites.
And I wish I had the easy solution.
I think I had the solution for bees.
I think it's Scalable for protecting chickens and livestock.
I hope, you know, and we're now designing clinical studies on a path to designing clinical studies with bird flu using a Garricon.
We don't have the results, so I'm not making a medical claim here.
But the evidence so far is so encouraging.
And I'm working with top-notch virologists, absolutely some of the best virologists, who came to me because they saw the paper in Nature Scientific Reports.
They thought, ah, fungi, fungi could help us, you know, protect ourselves against viruses.
So they came through the back door of the scientific community, not a Joe Rogan listener.
They might be, I don't know, maybe they are now.
But they came to me through the scientific literature saying, we should try this with people.
So those are the scientists I like that are open-minded enough that rather than just a molecular geneticist, you know, synthetic bio people, they're actually saying, well, it's a provable result.
We don't know why, but we should explore this because we can argue for 100 years about why.
Or we could deliver it tomorrow and have a positive effect.
The North American Mycological Association is the association for Canada, Mexico, the United States.
And there's a poisoning control group in that.
And they collect all the details.
It's namico.org, n-a-m-y-c-o.org.
And they're the go-to place.
Ironically, because of HIPAA rules, the mycologists have been disconnected from the patients in the medical community because now there is a firewall between them.
We can anonymize the case reports, but there's a firewall of information because of HIPAA and disclosures of patient conditions that has really inhibited the flow of information.
Nevertheless, NAMICO.org, North American Mycological Association, N-A-M-Y.co.org, and my professor, Dr. Michael Bug, is a giant in consulting for adverse effects and mushroom poisonings.
So morels are delicious.
But to answer your question, morel mycelium seems to be everywhere.
I think that's another thing that Terrence was talking about, how gross it was that they alter morning glory seeds because they knew that people were using them for psychedelics.
She made a discovery heretofore unknown to science, and not only produces these LCD compounds, it is a symbiotic fungus helping the morning glory survive.
The field of mycology is underfunded, understudied, underreported, underutilized.
This is a fantastic treasure trove of new potential discoveries.
I have long stated I think the field of mycology should be funded as well as the computer industry because it's so fundamental to the survival of our species.
That was one of the more fascinating things that they found in those, when they studied those vases, that they found ergonom in them from the Illusinian Mysteries.
I think in his case, he wanted to be objective, so he wanted to study these things without being worried about being labeled as someone who's promoting them because they like it.
Rick Strassman had an interesting perspective on that, too.
When I first met him, he was very reluctant to talk about DMT experiences that he had personally because he had run those FDA studies that were documented in DMT the Spirit Molecule, the book.
Now, again, this is for healthy normals, not people who need to have medical assistance, but there are some very good psychotherapists out there and psychonauts in the psychedelic assisted therapy movement.
The Center, the California Institute for Integrative Studies, C-I-I-S, I think .org or .eu, has a program training psychedelic therapists.
You don't have to be a medical physician to be able to hold someone's hands to have a guided experience.
But the University of Washington, Tony Back, Anthony Back, published a clinical study on using psilocybin for physicians and nurses who were emotionally harmed and distressed by people angry at them because of COVID in the hospital.
And they were spit upon and they were attacked viciously, physically sometimes, in the hospital.
They had PTSD, but just Trying to provide good medical support.
So he did a clinical study that was published this last year showing the benefits because the nurses and physicians, when they get out of the system, they can't provide medical care, society loses.
So they were able to reconcile the emotional harm that they experienced from angry patients and being assaulted, and they were able to then return, many of them, back into the medical profession, you know, with a, you know, healing from that.
So realize aggression and anger affects everyone around you.
The advantage of psilocybin, I think, just like a pebble in the pond of a tragedy creates ripples of distress throughout society, when someone who is highly adversely affected, angry and violent and all these antisocial behaviors, when they suddenly switch just like that, is a pebble in the pond of positivity.
A great example, a law enforcement officer by the name of Sarko from Boston just received his religious exemption for using psychedelics.
So he is a police officer, and his chief of police is now retired.
He has been an advocate because he saw Sarko, who experienced all these negative, you'd love to have him on the show sometime.
He can really speak authoritatively to other law enforcement officers saying, this has helped me.
So I have a law enforcement officer.
I'd love to talk to you.
I'd love to, for you, he's the real deal.
I have an RCMP officer friend in Vancouver who took me to his favorite psilocybin mushroom shop in Vancouver.
I couldn't believe it.
We walked into a psilocybin mushroom shop.
They didn't know who I was, thankfully.
And they were selling the stamina stack, which is kind of weird because I had my name on it.
And we walk in there and say, this is where I tell all my law enforcement officers to come to get their psilocybin.
I go, really?
I said, I'm sorry, but I'm trying to juxtaposition this.
How does this work?
And he goes, well, you know, and this is good perhaps for ICE also.
He said, you know how in the United States, law enforcement officers are aggressive and mean.
They tend to intimidate you and subjugate you?
I said, we found a better way up here through salcybin.
I said, well, what do you do?
He says, well, we have learned the following.
Now when I have to arrest somebody, I know they have a warrant out for them.
I walk up to them and I say, and I always walk up with a smile on my face.
He says, invariably, everybody wants to say, tell me the good news.
And he goes, the good news is you can finish your cup of coffee.
And I go, okay, what's the bad news?
Dude, I got to arrest you.
And he goes, the amount of cooperation and the reduction of the threat level for the safety of the law enforcement and the cooperation that they get in the swad car when these people that are just shooting the shit at the law enforcement officer, I know you're doing your job, but wow, thank you for being so nice arresting me.
He said, it's a game changer.
It's reduced the threat to us physically of making arrests.
And he goes, you won't believe the things I learned from these people that are arresting now, who tell me things they would never have gotten out of an interrogation, but they were so respected.
And the fact that they had to do their job without becoming an adversarial note to self, right?
What they told me is that we don't know shit about mushrooms or psilocybin.
We're an enforcement agency.
Many of us don't agree with this.
Change the law.
We want to go after syndicates.
We want to go after fentanyl.
We want to go after these, you know, these things that are not beneficial in any way, shape, or form.
We don't want to hurt the source that is healing us.
But they won't fuck around when it comes to money transactions.
Once you involve money, then the DEA is going to be involved.
But you're involved in research, and we have strict guidelines.
I had DEA license in 1975, 1976, 77, 78, through Dr. Micah Buk at the Evergreen State College, and they were much more liberal.
I could grow tons of sulcide mushrooms and collect them.
And that's why we did a series of conferences.
I was the only one that had a DEA license.
So we did these conferences collecting all these experts together with Albert Hofmann there, R. Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans Schultes, Jonathan Ott, Terence McKenna.
But I had the license to be able to possess psilocybin with my professor.
And so we would have all the psilocybin.
So we did these educational events, academic with citizen scientists and psychonauts coming together.
What's really different is we just had the Psychedelic Science Maps Conference in Denver, 8,500 people.
Back in the 1970s, at any moment, we were afraid that a SWAT team would break down the doors and arrest everybody.
We existed in a high state of paranoia because that was a war on drugs with Richard Nixon.
And now it's totally different.
Now you have law enforcement officers, you have Rick Perry, you have all these.
In New Mexico, they legalize the prescription of psilocybin.
This is a citizens' movement.
It's a democratic movement for the freedom of consciousness, and everyone should have a right to be able to practice.
And where do you draw individual use from religious use?
Psilocybin mushrooms are very important for my own personal religion.
I feel that this is central to my religious belief.
So I think this is where the government needs to back off.
If you're using it for your spiritual development, whether you're Buddhist or Christian or Islamic, you know, or Judaic, you know, this informs your spirituality, reduces crime, it reduces harm, reduces, you know, potential for violence.
This is a game changer.
I think we're in the psilocybin revolution, and psilocybin Muslims are fundamentally different than MDMA and Abigain, just because Abigain's so long and there's heart issues.
I just think this is a medicine for our times that can make a paradigm shift for a better society.
Hold your book up there because this is the latest of eight books that you've written.
Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats.
Paul, you're a gem.
You really are.
You're such an important person.
And I think through the conversations that you and I have had, and then you've had on many other podcasts as well, millions and millions of people have gotten to understand what this is really all about.
And I think your role in educating people is enormous.
I'm a one knowledge keeper, literally in a string of knowledge keepers.
So many people have died, been harmed, and Indigenous people.
I am carrying the torch, and I want to pass this torch with pride, with dignity, with respect, with kindness, with positivity to the next generation.
The next generation needs to be empowered with this and they can do an excellent job knowing what's happened in the past and foretelling what we could be in the future, the best of the best.