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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. 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, cause you were telling me out there, I'm like, let's save this for the show cause 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 a garikon. 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 myco diversity when talking about fungi. Agaricon was first described by Dioscorides over 2000 years ago as elixirium ad longam. Vitamin, the elixir of long life, is also revered by the Haida and the clicket in the northwest. First nations as a mushroom, very important for their own pharmacopeia. So, so 2000 years history of use, other sides of the world. And directly after 911, I was approached by the Bioshield bio defense Department and they ran over 2200 assays. The concern was weaponizable viruses. So they saw an article I wrote in Herbalgram 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 2 million samples tested by the US Defense Department, US amrit uM Army Research Institute, infectious diseases and NIH, in collaboration of more than 2 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 have 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 agaric hunt in the world. And so people go, why is this 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 that. 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 23, 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, 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 since the dust hadn't settled enough, but the mRNA enhancement vaccine, which is called mock 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 a garrickon on turkey tail. That turkey tail is the most well studied medicinal mushroom in the world. We populate a website for physicians@mushroomreferences.com. Dot.

No branding, just pure science. People can go to mushroomreferences.com and see this. So double lined, placebo controlled, and they literally recruited people directly out of vaccination lines for 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 got, they consumed a garlic on turkey tail or the placebo for four days and then they measured symptoms post vaccination and then six months out. And so I, there are two slides that I have that I sent along to you 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. Do you want both at the same time? No, just see if you can. The charts are not showing up for whatever reason. So what happens? I mean, I've got MRI 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 ten symptoms that the CDC has identified. Center for Disease Control, there are adverse events due to vaccines. They're actually, UCSD has 25 symptoms. So the idea was to look at whether a gariconnel turkey tail reduce 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 very, 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 agarican and turkey tail with no adverse events, we were able to prove that. So it went through, 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 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 agaric on 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 the fotv is foamy. Thompson Fishinalis trimmedias versicolor, that's a garicon and turkey tail combined. And you'll see that day two and day three on the scale there, there's almost no adverse effects. And whereas those people who did not take a garrick on turkey tail had a massive increase in adverse symptoms, now article just came out.

This past year, 30% of people avoid vaccinations because they fear of 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.

So the reason why the FDA approved this, we make the argument is we found that these matu mushrooms stimulated what's called anti inflammatory cytokines, interleukin one, ra and interleukin ten. Now most of the, when you have an immune response, many of these interleukins is part of your natural immunity, but they can cascade and they can then, unthrottled, create a cytokine storm. So most people then die from overstimulation of the immune system, inflammatory reaction. We found that with a Garrick on turkey tail, we were able to reduce the adverse effects, which are inflammatory effects, headache, sore throat, insomnia, muscle ache, soreness, malaise, et cetera. 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 center for Integrative Medicine is, let's look at antibody extension. The idea with the vaccines is you create an antibodies to prevent the spike protein from docking on your cells and gaining interest 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 a garikonin 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 had actually contracted COVID as well?

These are what we call naive. We want them. 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 tracked 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 immunologists, 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, the vaccine for four days. Now this is where, this is one of my favorite phrases by Volterra is don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You can twist yourselves into pretzels to try to explain how this works. But the bottom line, it does work. And if you could upregulate 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? 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 defensive 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. Dioscleroidase 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 agaricant. 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 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 into forests.

We have inoculated from snags, which have been unsuccessful. The idea would be we'd like to reintroduce it 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. We save the old growth forest as a matter of national defense. That's not quite correct. It's for international defense. Viruses don't care about borders. And Joe, 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 us cows. Why scientists are concerned. The virus has killed hundreds of millions of birds, has now infected cattle in six us 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, h one n one is swine flu. We have found high activity at the Bao shield program of Agarican, also against h one, n one, and h five, n one.

Is it possible to give this to cows?

Don't know.

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 zoonotic centers where the virus can jump to larger mammals, then you have many, many ground zeros 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 to seals and bears, of all things, and it's devastated hundreds of millions of birds around the world.

Did 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, they go to a pond, they're co mingling the virus and drinking water. You know, egrets sit on top of cows and get bugs off the backs of large mammals, etcetera. 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 h five n one. And so the chickens start sneezing and they get sick, and 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 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 h five n one is up to 70%. Mortality. 70%, not 0.1% or 0.01% with COVID is 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 virom, 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. And so by boosting community immunity, 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.

Now, 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 am 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 agaric on turkey tail, with the evidence that was presented again September 23, 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, a peer review, etcetera. 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 key idea, is to keep the viral loads down as low as possible.

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 turkey till we did a breast cancer clinical study, phase one, 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 one study. And for people to know, phase one 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 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 down regulate 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 two ways of three ways of answering that. There's the amplitude of the immune cells, which is, I think, as I remember, six times, you know, 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 0.001. 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, integrative medicine are focused on. It's the entourage effect. And so when you create an entourage of enabling stimuli that has the immune system react, a lot of us believe there's cross talk between the receptors, a receptor saying, okay, this is helpful, it awakens other receptors, and then you get this. So 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 over reaction 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 medicinal mushrooms. But we had this evidence already that the mushroom mycelium throttled back the inflammatory consequences by up regulating interleukin one ra and interleukin ten@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 produce muscle aches.

And would they just use the fruiting bodies?

The fruiting bodies would be powdered, but.

The fruiting bodies are not.

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, you know, it's been used for thousands of years as a poultice, you know, and ointments, you know, etcetera. 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 these very broad umbrellas that were describing, you know, getting into homeostasis. This is typical.

Take this with food or without food.

Either way, it doesn't matter. I take them in the morning.

Why am I sitting here? He's 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 for it to be. Well, I mean, the analogy I make, we all buy car insurance, right? And the unlikely hood that we're going to get on 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.

Right?

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 Krupps Institute. They are 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 that vaccinology.

And what is this? But that's back to my original question. What does it do for people that 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 agaricin 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 diseased 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 agaricutin, 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 studied of 90 people, those who did not take egg arachnid, turkey tail had adverse consequences, significantly less than those people who took agar, cotton and 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 families, 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 think that we have, and many other physicians who are knowledgeable about the subject, who studied this very carefully, who have looked at the data, are excited about it because it can help innate immunity. So whether we 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, 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. He got the Nobel Prize in immunology, and 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 or contrary to our assumptions. So it's really important to keep an open mind. The beauty of agarican and turkey tales, a multi thousand year history of use. Traditional chinese medicine has been advocating this for literally 2000 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 into context. Alexander Fleming, most people know the story.

In 1929, he got a mold and his petri dish was growing staph bacteria, and there was a zone of inhibition and 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. So, but they couldn't industrialize it. And in the Netherlands and the imperial college, they did a lot of work, but they couldn't scale up the production of penicillin during World War two, 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 crisogenum means gold in color. And then she isolated that mold and it turned out to produce six times more penicillin, at least of any other strain hereto we discovered. And the advantage that we had in the United States is that we had corn steep liquor, we grow corn, and of course they 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 making penicillin, it got bombed, so they were kicked out of the race. The Japanese never 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 misspoke. No worries. Hundreds of millions of lives because of her moldy cantaloupe.

That's wild.

And just, I think a garrickon with 107 strains. When we start sequencing them, we see 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 subgenera, sub genomic 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 a Garakon to amass 107 strains. And we're accumulating more. We're going to publish this in the, 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.

Yeah, that was with the bioshield program.

And so out of the 107, how many of them were 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 a Garakon that was the most robust that we saw in our early in vitro tests with a bioshield program.

And out of these 107 strains, you have currently.

Yes.

How many of them have you tested?

Well, in terms of how many have we tested for immune support?

Yeah, for everything.

Clinically? 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 agaricans get. So, Jamie, 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?

The answer to that question is, I'm a very small company. I have 150 employees, 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. If I was a part, that'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, 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 and these different strains?

As an immunologist, our team said, because inflammation is the root cause of so many illnesses, the fact that you can upregulate immunity and downregulate 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? Cause we're only looking for this.

Absolutely, of antifungal effects. The weird thing about Agarikon, 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 Agarikon, you know, this is an example. This is my good friend Scott Baker. He climbed 100ft 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 Agarikon now is not there. So we saved it. We've saved it from fires. Agarikon we've saved from logging. I've actually had some logger buddies of mine who know about this.

Look at the size of that.

This is the biggest one we've ever seen. And this one is over 100 pounds, over 100 years of age. And it is.

It's crazy. It looks like cement.

Those are annual growth rings, basically. 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 agaric on the biggest one I've ever seen. So think about the growth in the old growth forest, 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, defensive 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 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 a garrickon is 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, you know, 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 and synergy, and keeping that in balance is the key. Now there's between two 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 or 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? Because the amanita 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, like, extreme psychoactive effects.

I have consumed Amna miscarria and Amino pantherina on multiple occasions and my amnida miscarria. But higher doses, it's a somniferous, it can put you to sleep. I get dull yellows and browns. It's not a euphoric experience, dog.

Yellows and browns? What do you mean dark?

The colors are not bright. You know, it's not like you're 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.

So you're talking about what you see that is hallucination, or are you talking about like actual colors that you see look differently?

Actually, colors I look at are different.

So it changes the visual spectrum.

It changes the visual spectrum. Now, amanita pantherina, see, amena muscari has muciol, muscarin, and acid. Actually had very little muscarine, but the muscarinic symptoms cause you to salivate, and as you send up, you know, salivating and tearing and lactating, etcetera. So it's a. So these shamans in Siberia, by consuming ambitomyscaria, they would remove the muscarinic symptoms and then the urine, because they biofiltered it through her body, it would be high in butinic acid, in mucimol, and these are the condense 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. Okay, the amnium muscaria grows underneath, you know, trees, the fir trees. Fir trees are Christmas trees. There's the berserkers. Legend is that the berserkers are surrounded, ten to one by a very powerful army. These norwegian Scandinavians were going to be slaughtered the next day. They made a giant pot of muscaria 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 Amanina Muscaria that we're assuming Amanina Muscaria.

But Amania Pantherina does not have muscarine in it. So I ate Amna 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 so. And it puts you to sleep. The biggest concern about immunomyscaria is hypothermia by most of us experts, because you can actually fall asleep in the snow, and then you could get hypothermia and die. Very people, few people, if any, have ever died. There's one potential report, has killed dogs, but there's a repetitive motion syndrome that's very, very strange. And I ate Amnida 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 the amnida pantherina, and that one was very. I had repetitive motion syndrome, and I was living up in the mountains. I had freeze dried amnida pantherina. I knew it didn't have muscarin. 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. 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 10:00 in the morning, you know, in an omelet. They were delicious. And just across the river was a squire creek campground, and it's where the tourists come up, and there are winnebagos 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 this hill that we can get up on the hillside. There's an incredible view of the valley, the snow capped volcano, just a great vista. Let's go there. So we, for some reason, is so close. But we drove my car, like, you know, a thousand feet to this campground, went over the bridge over this little river.

We parked, you know, 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 our families, and we went up on the hill, and then we're sitting up on the hill and 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. Endometrium iscarium Pantherina. Take a long time before the onset of first symptoms. And then we're up on the hill, and I'm looking out in the horizontal, beautiful view, and suddenly, what was that? 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 like, whoa, we're feeling the same thing. And then our visual fields are getting distorted, and they start coming on so fast. We're going, holy shit, we gotta 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 rolling flex camera, 35 millimeter.

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 winnebagos and camper vans and. And then I remember this one Winnebago. It was like the longest Winnebago in the universe. Every time I was walking, 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 key hole, the door, and I looked at my keys, I went, missed that one. Did it again. Missed that one. Just me and my friend goes, everything okay, Paul? Everything's fine. Just give me some time. And, 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. I said, 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, and 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 I got 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, oh, God, 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 rolleiflex camera. And I picked up the camera, and I go, wow. I just dropped my roller flex camera. I drop it again, and I pick it up. I go, did I just drop my roll 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 became their distance. And there's 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. And then I had early morning, then I had late afternoon, then I had evening. The whole threat of time was disintegrated, like and scrambled. And so then we walked and I lost Dave. You know, Dave. I figured, Dave, you're on your own, buddy. I got enough to work deal with here. And so we walked over and 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, spiking like this. And every time I convulse 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 today. And so I go back to the lock and I spun it and it's magically the lock opened up and then I fell into bed. And then I had this amazing rush of einsteinying 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 prepossessional or adverbial phrase. And then I get a tangent.

Oh, no.

And I saw death then as being perpetual tangents. That never gave you the satisfaction of having completed thought. So I went down this rabbit hole of constantly forks in my thinking and then I blacked out. And then at the end of the day, the sunlight came through the twelve hour experience. This is a long experience and so there's no summertime. Then at the very end of the day, the sunlight came through and flickered on 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 was this intense.

Where was he during this time?

He ended up in the cabin and safe. But he was like a statue. 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 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, said, we need a doctor, we need a doctor. This person out 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 and the creek down below, you know, 10ft or more below, smashes himself and gets stunned and looks around and walks back up and gets on the bridge again and throws himself off the bridge.

So this is why. If someone had killed somebody on Amna muscaria or pantherina, I would testify as an expert witness. They're out of control. They have no control of their repetitive motions. If you watched tales from the crypt or some witnessed something violent, because when you re remember, you reenact, there's no control of your memory and your action. So pharmacologically, that must be really interesting. You know, neuro 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 pharmacopeia, mycopharmacopeia inside of mushrooms that have not been fully explored. I think it's true with the garikon, I think it's true with the psilocybin mushrooms, certainly true with amnida muscaria, etcetera. So, ironically, Amnida muscaria is legal. There's no restrictions. You can possess 100 pounds of it, but you can't possess a 10th of a gram of psilocybin. Mushrooms without breaking federal law, schedule one. So how can a mushroom that makes you happier, less violent, you know, resolve your PTSD, depression, et cetera? How could that mushroom remain illegal?

And yet Amna 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 miscaria, because you're talking about Agarikon 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 amity to miscarriage, but there was so much attached to it, he thinks that it was probably variable, genetically variable, seasonally variable, so much like Agarikon, 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 strange 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 bayocystin, norbiocystin, nor psilocin lower. So we see this not only cross species wise, but inside of a species were the phenotypes. Some phenotypes of psilocybin cabensis are extremely potent, and other ones are not. So strains do matter. And this is why, with agaric on, 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, you know, 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, you know.

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. 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. And 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 ten years, at 08:01 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 08:01 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, is Paul? And I'd hear that. I think they're having a party in the background. No, it's Paul calling it. 08:01.

That's hilarious.

I maximize my cash flow. And thankfully, I had a local bank and the local bank, one of the board of members said, how much money do you pay in overdraft fees? And there's an extraordinary number of $5,000. And he goes, he's one of your best customers, man. They should keep him. So I built this business blood, sweat and tears. Now I have 150 employees. I own the whole company. I'm very grateful to them. We called Starship FP. That's like your comedy clubs, the mothership, right? So our company is known as Starship Fungi Perfecti. And people want to track us down. We're at fungi.com. Fungi.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 funny.

People don't 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, but 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.

I'm sure you're so. But my point is that it's like, we really need research in this stuff.

We need a lot of research. And the research is becoming increasingly credible. At the University of Arizona Medical School, Andy Weil's center for a 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. The transition of knowledge has been fully complete from ancient people to today. And there's 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. Like all this, you've got to assume at one point in time people had some sort of knowledge about this stuff that 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. This is where the hubris of science, we should be very careful, right. Because the importance of biodiversity cannot be overstated by diversity anywhere.

Yeah, 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 just, it's. It's the. 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 is 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, so hubris and the Y chromosome.

Oh, yeah. 100% fault of it all. That's true. That's 100% true. But that's also why we invent everything. It's just like we are 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.

I think that sometimes, some days, I do.

Today is a good day. Today 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. And look at the medical advances that we've made. I'm getting hip surgery in two weeks.

I can barely just talk 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. Yeah, I've 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, this is the. 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 to get stem cells. I wanted her to try to treat it, and just.

The biggest concern we have is mRSA.

You know, that's a big one. It's not fun. That's terrifying. Yes. But I know quite a few people have gotten that as well.

Yeah.

So jiu jitsu is a breeding ground for that shit. You get scratches and scrapes, and then they get infected. It happens all the time. Specific to staff specifically. But MRSA exists, too. I know quite a few people.

Back in the day, we always would. We wiping up the mats of blood.

Mm hmm.

I mean, now. Now you can't. You can't have blood, you know, in the dojo or the dojang, you know? Yeah, 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 kickbox in spats and rash guards, and you're probably going to mitigate a lot of the scratches and scrapes 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 staff. I gave him a year of jujitsu 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, 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's staph. I go, we gotta go to the hospital right now. He goes, are you serious? I go, right now. And I broke my cue down.

I go, we gotta 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. You know, if you're. And nature's 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 stack 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. Yeah, that's one of the big ones that I take. But I wanted to ask you this, like, 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 agarican 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 guts 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 end up upregulating beneficial bacteria and downregulating staph and clostridium, etcetera, lactobacillus acidophilus and ambifidobacterium were up regulated. These are beneficial bacteria. So there's an example that also if you orally ingest, then you could 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 it, 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, you know, like of a pathogen through the mucosa, then obviously, you know, 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. Again, nature's a number of scans.

I'll just ask you that from now on.

What do you do?

So, you know, I don't want to get you trapped in these conundrums.

Yeah, it's.

So you take both tincture form and capsule form.

Yeah, I take a throat spray which has a garrick on turkey tail in it. I love it. That's what I use all the time when I go to concerts and in crowds, etcetera. In the morning, I'm taking lion's mane, turkey tail and a garrickon. I'm 68. I know.

You look great.

Well, the talking about a hubris. My partner's a medical doctor and every time that I feel like, I feel like I'm 30, I don't feel my age at all. The next day I fall off a ladder 12ft again, hubris. Bam. So I have to be careful what I say. Now.

Hubris is real.

It is. I think nature has a sense of humor to whack you up on the side of the head to teach.

The universe has a sense of humor. Yeah. There's certain aspects to it that almost seem like it's playing like 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. It's 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, neuro regeneration, four different things, but they all segue into this concept of their 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, 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 and just various, just 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 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, vitamin C, scurvy, etcetera. But I'm very keen on stacking 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 junior and Jamie. Can we put up that signed the nature article on microdosing? 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 George, 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 2021. This is on their motivations. If we go to the next article. Well, we can stop here for a second.

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 metric. And this is something you may not realize. This majority of this came from your audience, this audience right now. But if you look at that, 4600 non microdosers and only 4000 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 4653 non microdosers who downloaded the microdose me app to measure performance and how they felt. And Jamie, if we could go to.

The next, let's be clear here. They're non microdosers, but they microdosed for the study.

Nope.

Nope, they didn't.

All they did is got these challenge tests, memory 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. So. And this is why they were. And then why do you think so.

Many of them that don't microdose signed up for that?

We have no friggin clue. You tell us.

Wow.

I think it may have been citizen scientists who wanted to get a baseline first.

And then you consider people lying because they don't want you to know that they microdose.

It's anonymous, you know.

Yeah, 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?

Let me show you the next slide with a graph if you can see it. The reason why is that there was a typo in the original article and it's the one with a bar graph, if you can see. 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 ran about 2004 is when I started.

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 your Paul. Go, Paul, go.

Okay, this is. Yeah, we'll just go. This is the, this is the app. We 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.

And so these are acuity tasks.

Yes.

They're actual app itself.

There's vision, hearing, memory, there is. How do you feel, etcetera.

Can I ask you, before I forget, yep. Who was the scientist that ran those studies a long time ago where they showed that psilocybin in low doses increased edge detection, it increased your ability to see whether two parallel lines, one of them had gone off a 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, but this is a long time ago. Long time ago, yeah. This is probably in the sixties 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 healthy user bias iqs?

Occupations 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.

Right.

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 occupation. Did not ask.

Occupation, education.

Yes. Whether you 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, increase in mood. And now we have customized it for more. Not so much subjective effects, but cognitive, demonstrative, skill improvement. Because, of course, people, when people feel better, if they feel better, some people can say that's the 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. But 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 is 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 effect on that treatment.

So does the expectancy enhance the medicine? That's the question. If people are not depressed and not 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 can I ask the question?

Do you measure, 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 from 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, micro dosing. But did you ask them, they use.

Marijuana, but no, doesn't 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 things you have. Visual.

Visual. We have cognitive tests. We have acuity tests. We have hearing.

Hearing.

Yeah. Hearing.

Using headphones or using display.

Yeah. There are tones off the phone, so you'll be able. You can hear things. As an auditory challenge, is it dependent.

Upon the volume of the phone you're asking?

Really, really good question. Because the type of phone, the type of speaker, whether it's iPhone twelve or iPhone 15, the newer phones are much better, much more complicated than the other tests. And so we have this narrowed 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. 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 relatively 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. That chart? I don't know.

I'll be honest. Let's go back to the next slide, if you could. Next one. Next one. That's the finger tapping test. Let me just. Okay. This is the one I want us to focus on. This is why there was an author correction. The p value of significance here is 0.004. That means there's 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. And 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 test has 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 stamen stack, which is psilocybin cabensis, approximately one 10th 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 of you're on a computer, you're a guitar player, you're a drummer. Think about walking to the bathroom and not falling. Think about. This is not subjective. This is an affirmation of an improvement in psychomotor performance.

Wow.

Now, here, you'll ask me the question again. 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. We want to see maybe microdoses with psilocybin blue only. Maybe that just starts to uptick. Maybe it's delayed and then it increases. Maybe this green line with the stem on stock, 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 of 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 that practice, but then we see this result. So I think we're onto something really exciting here. That value of p is 0041 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. So now I chose niacin because psilocybin 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 psilocybin, let's get it to the end points of the peripheral nervous system. Neuropathies oftentimes present themselves the deadening of the fingertips and the toes. So with vasodilation, you get more blood flow to where the neuropathy is occurring. And then lion's mane, well demonstrated again. Mushroomreferences.com. You can many, many references up showing that lion's mane mycelium contains these compounds called arena cenes, that helps rebuild myelin on the accents of nerves to enable signal transmission and also stimulates ngfs, nerve growth factors for the proliferation and the extension of the neurohydes to further crawl. So I stacked those three together, and again, I'm a co author in the paper, I had no access to this data. In fact, they called me up, says, we see a signal, we don't believe it. We're taking, we're not going to take, 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.

They're saying their banjo playing is better. Think if you're, 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. This is really exciting. We need to disambiguate it. We need a big data set. And I'm calling out to 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 and 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 would have had greater liftoff on the psychomotor performance than we saw. I suspect it will have lift off, more so when we go into 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? 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. And so there's a bunch of them. A lot of boxers use them. They use them to heighten their reaction time.

We have that on the app also. Flowers.

Flowers.

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, reaching down, you're going up, and they're all in front of you, and you never know which one's gonna light up.

This is just the beginning. That type of model that you just described would, to me, would be much more informative than the top.

Toast, have you seen that? You know what I'm talking about, right? Jamie, see if we 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 mean, I think sometimes, like, trainers get caught up in technology and they have you doing certain things. I think. I think your time would probably 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? Well, see, look how these things work. I mean, what does that do into your mind that is so beneficial?

That person is an exceptional wizard. Former. That's an exceptional.

That guy's on a dose right now. He's on the stamit stack. Oh, this girl's using her feet. Leave this. Interesting. Be faster. But does it actually make you faster?

I think it would. You know, I think to the point, you know, every plateaus when they practice. You know, 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.

Right.

We hit that ceiling. How do you break. Break through that ceiling?

Right.

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. Like, it would be interesting to see archery, 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. Assistant. There's something there.

I've experienced it with pool.

With pool?

Yeah. 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.

Right.

But we only clinical studies already started, and it'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, etcetera. This is performance measurement. That's solid data. And now, and think about this, Joe. They're getting the psalze mushrooms in their underground market. You know, we sell 50% of the lion's mane products are out there 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 where the 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 I'll go from schedule one to schedule three out for the election, or schedule two for sure. But psilocybin, I mean, suicide.

Why do you think after the election specific?

Because everyone's so worried about margins. If you piss off 5% of the people, do you lose 5% of the vote? Right. No one wants to take a risk.

It makes it look like they're weak on crime or something.

Yeah, it's something like. But see, this is the beauty of the psilocybin. What I am very encouraged by is law enforcement. I have met so many law enforcement officers. Now, just 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. If you're a doctor, are you going to be perfect 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 monkey on your back? Well, you do 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's so many law enforcement people that have joined 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. They are deprioritizing psilocybin, decriminalizing it, because they're benefiting from it.

So it's a big thing among soldiers.

It's a big thing among soldiers. I've met so many.

Yeah, many, many guys have had very, very beneficial experiences.

I believe humans are generally very good. 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, you know, of an unknown person, and you have 1 second to 2 seconds to make a life into that decision. I don't want that risk.

And you have PTSD. You're probably already wracked with anxiety because you probably already experienced so many things that most people could 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, you know, 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 from things.

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? Well, that's going to go on their resume. And 1015, 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 illegal, more people are going to try them because they're more available. They're going to. But you will at least be trying the actual drug and not getting like street valium that has fentanyl in it, or.

Or you have criminal syndicates, you know.

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 one substance should be legal, not illegal. Psilocybin, mescaline, you know, you can make the argument for LSD, I think that 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 now Rick Dalbik 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. Mycologist honored me by naming a new psilocybin mushroom. Psilocybe stem Cei.

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 to have a species named after you. You never name it after yourself. The field of medicine, you can do that with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, etcetera. But 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 5000 collections of psilocybin mushrooms since the 18 hundreds. 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 slosophy cabensis, which is a big golden mushroom thats associated with cows. You cant miss it, right? You can see slosophic abensis, folks 200ft away, driving 55 miles an hour. If youre tuned in, you can see them in the fields. Theyre that glaringly obvious, you pull over and pick them up. I can't help myself.

What do you for? Research.

For research, of course, your research.

Your 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 Terrence was a dear friend of mine. Terrence and I were best buddies and I love them both. And my brother John died. He was my mentor. And Terrence dying also was with Terrence to the end. And as Terrence always said, dennis is a real scientist. You know, I'm a psychonaut philosopher. You know, the best command of the english language of anyone I've ever met. You know, Terence and Dennis and Terence, you know, I think, have made. 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.

You're talking about some of Terence's Terrence bizarre theories.

I mean, the time wave zero. Time wave zero is bullshit. I mean, I'm sorry I challenged Terrence 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 steered 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 the creation of the christian religion.

The creation of christian religion was a historically significant event that ramified throughout history. So, Terence, it's time wave zero. Did not recognize that. From the best of my understanding, I talked to Terence about this a lot, and then he had the end of time being the death on his birthday.

How convenient.

And so. But then, for Terrence's defense, he had the best answer I could ever have thought of, because I was saying I was vilifying 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, but. So the algorithm is essentially based on taking historical events, you know, that. 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. You couldn't predict the specific event. You would just predict significant events.

That's my understanding, but I'm.

This is 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 are 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 what was the catalyst? Was it social media? Was it the I mean, December 21, 2012 is 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 us out where every single day as a historical, of greater or lesser significance, depending upon your point of view.

Chat GPT of course, when you look at things like that, the ubiquitous use of AI and the fact that it seems to be getting far more powerful, far quicker than we could predict, yeah.

Artificial intelligence, I think, is misnamed.

I call it digital intelligence.

It can be that, but it's ultimately natural intelligence. You know, we have created artificial intelligence. You know, we have given birth to this technology. It is from our natural intelligence that we have created a subset of artificial intelligence. 100 million microbes in a cubic inch of soil, you know, 810 or more miles of mycelium, cross talking all these organisms, a quorum that's in 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. So many things. But I don't think AI will be able to capture intentionality or generosity or the emotional indebtedness we have. When you find and 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 here in Austin with a police chief and 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 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 or. 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.

Yes.

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, where we're in a constant state of technological evolution 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 to 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. 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 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 know, 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.

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 is 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. Well, 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 now. Crossroads. One leads to an extinction path and the other one is sustainable because ultimately we cannot continue in destroying the biosphere. Unexpectedly, to support us, right?

Yeah. And just our way of living is kind of unsustainable long term. It's. The positive hope is that AI and science itself and technological innovation will mitigate all the negative side effects, that we will concentrate on using intelligence to clean up the air and clean up the ocean and do all the. 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 Australia Pithecus? If you told Australia Pithecus, hey, buddy, 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. Australia pithecus, 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 Australia Pithecus, we all die off. That would suck because that's all you know. And I think that homo sapiens are not long.

You asked 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 become an enlightened species.

I think.

I would like to think that we get our shit together.

Psychedelics is the best potential 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, if you have just the United States, what percentage of people have had, like, legitimate breakthrough psychedelic experience?

Less than 1%. Less than 1%. How many people experimented with psychedelics? I think depending on the age group, it actually is quite high now. You know, it's up to 1020 percent. 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 have gone through one of these heroic doses, come back and say, oh my God, I can't even explain it.

Exactly.

You know, 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 with a capital b. And then you feel like, oh, my mortality, that's okay. You know, my birth, that's a good part of the continuum. I demolecularize and I reassemble into a different form or 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, you might share with you my Billy Graham story. Oh boy. I've never mentioned this publicly. I've taught over 3000 students in vitro propagation, how to grow mycelium, edible mushrooms, gourmet mushrooms. I did these workshops for a long time and I just, one very nice man came in young, forties, mid forties. He waited till everybody was out of the room. And this is about 1990, 519, 96. And he waited and said, paul, I was sent here.

Oh boy.

I thought, okay. I said, well, who sent you? 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, I was, my mother was a charismatic Christian. I grew up in that environment. I mean, I was like, of course, blown away.

He's 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's not. 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 there's just. This is so rich in history. I just came back from Egypt a few months ago and I went to ten 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 shovels will be pointed down. And if it's a perfect example, well, scientists don't look at Egypt in the context of the ecosystem 4000 years ago and in Africa, the plateau of running rivers. The Tatelianjar 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 a Nile. It was the bread basket of the world. And the Greeks were the elusionian 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 at the highest strata of society would 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 that hieroglyphs on these temples are of psilocybin mushrooms.

So those look like mushrooms.

That's one of them.

Boy, they so 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 1 rain a year. That's how dry it is. Those, 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 and from Detroit. He also believe from his african ancestry that the african Egyptians use psilocybin. Mushrooms. So because the next one, you can.

What are they, what did they try to say? That is. You can't say, that's a bunch of shovels.

They know, but there's other ones.

So what is the conventional explanation for what you're looking?

They. They said they didn't know what it was. Now, how do they not know what it is? This is it hiding? It's not hiding, but it's not hiding.

They're delicious.

It's not hiding. So they're not.

They're not willing to talk about. Is that what it is?

Exactly. This is lossy commences 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 slosophy cabensis, put it into a vase just like that. It collects it. You can put water in it. It limits evaporation. The mycelium seeks light, air. So it would pop out of these orifices. And that is a taxonomically correct image drawing of salacombi cabensis. And down below is the blue water lily, and there's philosophic avensis. The Egyptians royal colors were gold and blue. The blue lily, water lily. The blue lotus is. Blue 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.

That's so obviously mushrooms.

Not a shovel. No, a shovel would be upside down.

It's so obviously mushrooms, but it's also like the way the capsule is formed.

And that the cuspidate cap the shape of this. And yet. And here is a painting on papyrus, the temple of Osiris. It also has very similar. And this next image, I think is the next image. Now there's blue wing of Schloss, Mika Bensus. Again, the next one would have skipped us on. And. 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?

These are mushroom stones, mesoamerican mushroom stones from Guatemala. 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 archeologists 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 psilocybi cavensis DNA in the ruins. And because we can amplify the DNA, we can prove that they are 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 the ergot, yeah. Jamie, can you see the blue juice image? You don't see it. It's just a. It's a hand with a vessel of blue liquid in it. Two. 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 two?

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. How are you doing that? He goes, well, I take chanterelles and I put them into water, and I pour it at the base of the trees, and it comes up. So there's the blue juice. And so if you take psilocybe cubensis or any psilocybin mushroom that's potent, you put it in the water, you create blue juice. And this is in dune two, 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 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 psilocybin mushrooms. And that was the dawn of the idea. Wow. Now, this is absolutely true. And I haven't met, you know, 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's foggy on this, but he said, I'm keeping this secret from my sons. And 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.

So. 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 psilocybe cabensis on the right. And this is slosopy, azure essence, on the left. And psilocybin is a pro drug 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. Wow, we discovered this. Several people discovered this independently. Well, would the Egyptians discover it?

Yes.

You know, with the Mazatecs and the Aztecs, 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 the 1516, the Bavarian Beer act banned mushrooms. That's interesting. They banned 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.

You know, 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 one, 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 Rob Dosquetz 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 dedicated to Maria Sabina and the Mazatucks and to Valentina wasn't who died in 1958, but she grew up in Russia. She knew how to identify mushrooms. These are not people just taking psilocybin mushrooms. They knew how to go out into the fields. And Valentina Watson, she knew the russian names. They wrote a book, mushrooms russian 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 have a listen to your podcast.

Well, no, I'm very serious about this. I had one also in the seventies and eighties, 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 on the genocilocopy, the father of american mycology, one of the greatest mycologists ever, who's published many new species of psilocybin mushrooms in 19, 79, 78 in Aspen, Colorado. It's actually snow mouse. He asked me to trip with him on psilocybin 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, and 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, leaving the next day. What would I. I might abandon them. Would they have this life changing experience? I have all these questions, and I'm out 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 strict. 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 psychiatrist. I'm a mycologist. 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 people, indigenous peoples, they had the structures set up that were honed over the centuries to how to properly administer these sacraments. We, many of us from european descent, were orphans. We're spiritual orphans have been cast from our religions, our religious roots. From my germanic roots, I named my son Azras. He's probably going to listen to this. Hi. As in mis Latin, masculine, singular for sky blue. And I named a species called slosophy. Azurescens because it turns blue. And also from my son.

And when I named my son Ashurus, 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 22. 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. Is 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 of 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.

And so does it come with heightened circular respiratory.

I know the pharmacology other people can speak of because I'm, you know, again, I'm staying in my lane of mycology.

Did you notice the elevated heart rate?

No, no, but they are.

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 slosomy cabensis golden mushroom bruises blue. With a blue lotus, the blue lotus opens the daytime, closes at night, birth and death. And now with the druids, I say they've always used philosophy. 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 psilocybin cavensis, 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?

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? Apophine.

Aporphine. Alkaloids.

Apomorphine and nuciferin. Hmm. Interesting. Oh, it's good for erectile dysfunction. May help muscle control in those with conditions such as Parkinson's disease and erectile dysfunction. Dopamine agonist. 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 boy reacquip. Do you know what that is?

No.

It's a. It's a crazy case where a guy won a lawsuit against Galaxo Smith Klein because he was on a dopamine agonist, and it turned him into a gay sex and gambling addiction. He was a heterosexual man who had Parkinson's, had wife and kids, and could not stop, like, picking guys up and random, like, chance encounters. And he got raped. He lost all of his money, like, gambled his entire life savings away was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and got off the medication, and the symptoms all went away, and he realized that it was this dopamine agonist that he actually won in court. And not a lot of money. Not a lot of money.

That cause an effect? Sounds very complicated. Yeah.

The dopamine agonist thing there have, like, if you google pharmaceutical dopamine agonists 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, like, they think gambling problems, you know, just people did. Just can't put it all on black. Let's go spend that roulette. Like, they just go crazy and they just want to gamble which is very strange.

Well, that seems like creating obsessive compulsive disorder.

You know, so 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 him because it is such fuzzy science. It's just so complex. And 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 really shows that the psychiatry is still at the infancy of its science.

Well, there's so many things like SSRI's and now showing it's not a chemical imbalance, 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, arthrostatic hypotension, headache, dizziness, and cardiac arrhythmia, 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 their Google reequip lawsuit. It's like, requip. Re. Quip lawsuit. Yeah. Parkinson's patient wins lawsuit over gay sex addiction. Look at this. So I think this was in the UK. Click on one of those.

Okay.

Pfizer settles 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 100 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. Pfizer. 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 impulse control.

Sounds like Las Vegas to me.

It's Vegas like. Imagine they could sell that in Vegas. That 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, we equip from Galaxo, SmithKline, UCB's new pro, and Miraplex from Boeinger Engelheim. The german company was sued by a New York man some years back who said taking the drugs and turned him into a pathological gamble gambler who ruined him as he gambled away $3 million. Wild.

Yeah. I would be just a word of caution. When you read headline articles like this, there's probably a lot more behind the story.

Well, it's 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. It's sort of like when they had Marinol. Remember when they tried to do like synthetic THC and give it to people? It was terrible, you know, because they didn't want people smoking pot. Because there's a lot of things that come with it.

Right.

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.

Yeah.

Well, I think we're at the extraordinary time of reevaluation. 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 the 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 elucidating signals that we can't possibly see. So I think there is a convergence of psychedelic science and artificial intelligence. But I hopefully is guided by a very high ethical standard where we are always 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, you know, all the things that ruin humanity. Maybe it will automatically be enlightened because won't be connected to those things.

But is AI singularity in and of itself, the 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 this. That might be. That. That might be our parachute. That might be the one thing that can kind of help us make our way through this and. And keep some semblance of sanity.

I just think that the advantage of psilocybin is anyone who can grow it in their own home, it democratizes psychedelics. It's easy to do. It ties you back with nature. You know, I'm a libertarian. And that the government has no business. You know, when it. When it began crossing my threshold of my door, what I do with my family, what I do with my home.

Et cetera, that's especially when it comes to something that's not harmful anyway, right? Especially to something that, like, the LD 50 is so high, you'd have to have pounds and pounds of it to get sick and die.

I think it was 38 pounds.

Yeah, that's not.

Which. You 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 this 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. 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 psychological, 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 change 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, you know, they're in hospice care that have had very powerful.

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 four 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 at First nations healthcare facility. And a number of great people are involved with roots to thrive. I highly recommend them. And this 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. Ten to 20 minutes, but an hour to 2 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 that experience not fearing death, and they become counselors to their families saying, it's okay, I'm dying.

And they changed 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, 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 system and probably cost a.

Lot of lives, there's no doubt about it. I think basically spreading widespread panic, you know, increasing anxiety, depression, 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 is 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 does not.

And that's how it should be. I mean, we should, we really grow up about this stuff. And if there were, 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 be 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, it's the lowest priority of law enforcement, which means if a law enforcement officer tries to bring a case forward, it is malpractice of their ETH, of their ethical duty to perform their job, to waste the court and the public's money. Focusing on psychedelic, as it should be.

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 mean, I want to make sure everyone knows that, but I think from a practical point of view, lowering the penalties and reducing it as the lowest priority of law enforcement makes a lot of sense.

What did you think about California's decision to not legalize it or not decriminalize it and allow it for. They wanted to 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 if they would, 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 one substances in California, which most states don't have, and that governing board is a stop go board for progress of research on schedule one's. And they have dictated essentially no research on psychedelics in.

Is that a funding 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 as 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. 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. Out of their ken of experiences.

So that's not good, especially for a progressive state or supposedly progressive state.

Well, the initiative. The public ballot initiatives, 70. 80% in Canada. Recently, a survey, 80% of the citizens of Canada 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, 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 initiative that people have spoke. So I think this is people's revolution movement. So I think this is a revolution for the freedom of consciousness, for the groundswelling that's occurring not in the United States and Canada, but all over the world. It's so desperately needed.

Well said. Paul Stammets. 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 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 you're here.

Get at it, freaks.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Bye.