#2347 - Paul Stamets

Paul Stamets is a mycologist and advocate for mushrooms for helping the overall health of people and planet. His new book, "Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats: A Guide to the History, Identification, and Use of Psychoactive Fungi," is available now. www.fungi.comwww.hostdefense.comwww.paulstamets.com Get 50% off at https://onxmaps.com/joerogan Don’t miss out on all the action - Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up at https://dkng.co/rogan or with my promo code ROGAN. GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT), or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD). 21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 1 per new customer. $5+ first-time bet req. Max. $150 issued as non-withdrawable Bonus Bets that expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: dkng.co/dk-offer-terms. Ends 7/20/25 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  Yep, yeah. Put them headphones on. Let's rock and roll, Paul. Good to see you, sir.

• 0:18Speaker 02

  Good to see you, Joe.

• 0:19Joe Rogan?

  What's happening? How you doing? Book number eight, huh?

• 0:22Speaker 02

  Book number eight, yeah.

• 0:24Joe Rogan?

  Who would have known? There's so many books to be written on mushrooms.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Well, this is state-of-the-art taxonomy. Psilocybin mushrooms are in natural habitat. It covers 60 species all over the world. But it also shows not only historical use, which people are surprised. They've been used in India, in Europe, in South Africa. A new species was just found, psilocybin malutti. But the Basuthu and Lesuthu province have been using it, obviously, for hundreds of years. We know this because they have songs. So it's really interesting when indigenous people have been using psilocybin, and scientists, quote, "discover them," and give them a Latin binomial. But the psilocybin mushroom revolution is happening all over the world right now. I never expected it to be this big. And the RAND report came out this past year.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  3% of Americans tripped on psilocybin in 2023.

• 1:14Joe Rogan?

  It's only 3%?

• 1:15Speaker 02

  3%. That's 8 million. I know. I would agree with you because how many people would admit it, right?

• 1:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Probably under-reporting, not over-reporting.

• 1:23Joe Rogan?

  Oh, for sure, yeah, for sure.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  So it seems to be, I think, a revolution for the freedom of consciousness. And it's crossing all political boundaries, all religious boundaries.

• 1:33Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's happening here in Texas for sure because of the Ibegane Initiative and what's happening with Governor Rick Perry, who was former Republican governor of Texas, who is all in on this.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  He's a great guy. I've talked to him backstage a few times. And he's the type of person that I really admire because even though we may have political differences or different cultural backgrounds, we're joined together with a common purpose of trying to help people.

• 2:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, he's not ideologically captured. Like, he realized that he was wrong, and then his position on this was based on ignorance. So he educated himself and completely turned around, did a 180, and now is an advocate. And it's helped a lot of people. I mean, it's tremendous benefit to veterans and people with PTSD and, you know, coming back from the war. And it's one of the only things that's been shown to really get these people straight.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  That and psilocybin.

• 2:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  My heart really goes out, and this is, I'm sort of low left of center, so my friends will be surprised, but my heart goes out to law enforcement. Can you imagine stopping a car on a stormy night at two in the morning?

• 2:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  And the window comes down, and you have two seconds to make a decision?

• 2:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  You do that hundreds of times.

• 2:48Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  The likelihood of having one mistake is very high, and having one very bad day define your life for the rest of your life is not right.

• 2:59Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Because then if you can't resolve those issues as a soldier, as a law enforcement, as a doctor who makes a mistake, if you can't get through that turmoil, that stress.

• 3:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  The anger that then can emanate out from your anger at yourself to other people.

• 3:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Then this is what psilocybin and ibogaine and other psychedelics, I think, really do. They help people forgive themselves and become better people. And once you forgive yourself and become a better person, then everyone is excited about the fact that you've changed.

• 3:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and imagine the world that we could be living in if this experience was available to so many of the people that are committing crimes. So many of these people who have never had any kind of a psychedelic experience have never really confronted their own reality in that way. How many of them would change their ways? I would imagine a great deal.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  You bring up a very important point that I've been thinking about a lot. We talk about using psychedelics and psilocybin and other substances for treating people who have trauma, you know, mental illness, you know, addiction issues. But what about the near normals? All of us are somewhat on the spectrum, and we go back and forth depending on daily, monthly, yearly activities, events, et cetera. But what about prevention?

• 4:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  If the return on investment is to reduce addiction and crime and all the other collateral damage that's associated with it. Then it would save hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 4:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Suicide should be made free, I think, you know, as a citizen's right to have access. And the government should pay for it. It would massively reduce our national debt. It would make our better society, but that's not gonna happen, right? That's a dream.

• 4:44Joe Rogan?

  Well, I don't know if that's not gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen tomorrow. You know, I think we're on a path. If you look at where we stand with marijuana, for instance, like, look at Las Vegas is a great example. Because I remember in the nineties and when we would go to Las Vegas for the UFC in the, I guess, I guess, actually, it was in the two thousands. It was highly illegal. And, you know, I'd remember the stories from the seventies where people were locked up for their entire lives for, you know, like, an ounce of marijuana in Vegas. They had zero tolerance for it. And I always wondered what that was about, whether that was a, an anti hippie thing, or whether it was in response to the alcohol lobby.

• 5:27Joe Rogan?

  Vegas obviously sells a lot of alcohol and anything that would cut back on their profits. You know, this was, we, we, we talked about this the other day. The study showed that amongst young people, alcohol consumption is down significantly. Isn't it down by like twenty-five percent?

• 5:43Joe Rogan?

  Which, by the, what's that?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  It's down, I just don't know the number.

• 5:47Joe Rogan?

  Which, by the way, a great thing, you know, that's, that's a good thing, but it's not a good thing for profits. And so, but my point is that, how many states now have cannabis as completely legal? I think it's like nineteen.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's more than a dozen.

• 6:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think it's not, I, somewhere around then. And then you have medical use, which is in many, many more states. It's just a matter of time before the people in the federal government realize this is a losing battle.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Indeed, and think about the guilt those law enforcement officers must feel, and certainly they must feel, I would hope so, that they know that they put somebody in prison for thirty years for an ounce of marijuana when it's not legal in those states.

• 6:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  How do they reconcile that?

• 6:27Joe Rogan?

  How do they? Yeah, well, I mean, PTSD amongst law enforcement is something that's very rarely discussed. We talk about it a lot with soldiers, but one of my friends who was a former Austin PD told me that you see more in your line of duty in a police department than more death, more terrible, terrible things.

• 6:50Joe Rogan?

  than he ever did when he was in combat. Mm hmm. And it's just, it's like every day, every day you're dealing with shootouts. Every day you're dealing with stabbings. Every day you're dealing with horrific crimes. And this episode is brought to you by the mosquito bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part, it's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat, where the stakes were life and death.

• 7:31Joe Rogan?

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• 8:59Joe Rogan?

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• 10:09Speaker 02

  And with firefighters, you know, they're the oftentimes the first responders or they're first. My partner's a medical doctor in Canada, but she used to be a firefighter. And yeah, they oftentimes, the policeman out show up for 20 minutes and they're there and the things they witness, I mean, things that no, no one should ever witness. But I mean, this is where it's so important that we come together as a society because I really believe that 98% of people are good and 2% of people are assholes. And I think the assholes can become good people if they have a psychedelic experience. I just really think there's progress right now. So much of the media and clickbait journalism, they amplify the extraordinary and things

• 10:54Speaker 02

  that get eyeballs and attention. But more and more, I think people are, they become more. Have greater wisdom about how they're being manipulated by the media.

• 11:04Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  People come together and, you know, that's why I like mushroom hunting. Mushroom hunting brings people together.

• 11:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  You go out hunting, you have this eureka experience. You don't talk politics. You're excited about the species that you hope to find and you find ones you don't. But they become like friends after a while.

• 11:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  When you find a chanterel, you find a shaggy mane, you find a psilocybe, a psilocybin mushroom. They're, you know, they're that chance encounter, that eureka experience and sharing it and then sharing, eating the mushrooms, whether edible or otherwise. I mean, it brings a community of interest together. It's just a really fun thing to do. And there's something I wanted to mention, Joe, that's really important. I have been to a lot of conferences. I just came back from the psychedelic science conference in Denver. Our friend Rick Dolbent, 8,500 people there.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  But what I really find an extraordinary way of taking iPhones and droids, and all these kids are just addicted to their phones, right? They're not going out in nature. So there is a called nature deficit syndrome. It's actually affecting people. But there's a, there is an app that I'm just in love with called iNaturalist. It was stopped by, created by a guy named Scott. He just gave a TED Talk that was released yesterday. iNaturalist, you can take a phone and you can go out and you can collect a flower, a frog, a mineral, a mushroom. You photograph it. You upload it into the cloud of iNaturalist. And they have all these experts, amateurs, trying to tell you what it is.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  There's a great little debate going back and forth. No, you're right. No, you're right. And then when it hits research grade, it's when a group of experts come together and says, yep, you have Carpanus cuminus. Yep, you have Belidus edulis. They agree on identification, but it has fueled the scientific community with all sorts of these citizen scientists finding new species. And it brings people into nature, gets kids excited. And they, and then you can go to iNaturalist right now and you can look around your house or this place to see the reports of birds and mushrooms and things. I just went on the iNaturalist yesterday and Psilocybe cuminus, the golden tops, go around Austin. Who knew? You know, because they've been reported.

• 13:20Speaker 02

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

• 14:02Speaker 02

  and droids, and they photograph everything and they upload it to iNaturalist to look at species diversity. This has revolutionized the field of biology. I think it's revolutionizes bringing children and young people back into nature. And then you build a community. You're not talking about politics. You're talking about nature and what did you find? And holy moly, I never knew there's a blue mushroom or something like that. So it's inspiring to see the kids get so excited about this and adults. And so this is, you know, I'm a-

• 14:34Joe Rogan?

  That's very cool.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, very cool.

• 14:36Joe Rogan?

  How many new species get discovered?

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Oh, thousands.

• 14:39Joe Rogan?

  Every year?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Thousands every year now.

• 14:41Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Thousands and thousands. There's 223 known species of psilocybin mushrooms and about-

• 14:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  I'd say 10 of them in the past two years has come from citizen scientists, quote-unquote amateurs who found it, who uploaded it to iNaturalist.

• 14:58Joe Rogan?

  So if they find a new species, like, how do they determine, if it's a completely new species, how do they determine that it's psilocybin? How do they determine where it's from?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Excellent question. The psilocybin species localized in the genus psilocybe, which has the most psilocybin species, we just know from genetic associations that are there in the clade, the group that has psilocybin species, and the DNA analysis shows that they fit right into this cluster, then we have high confidence. But if a mushroom has gills- You know, and it bruises bluish and has purple brown spores. Those three things need to be true. Then 95% probability is a psilocybe mushroom. What species it is becomes more debatable. But Psilocybin mushrooms are very hard to find, with the exception of the golden top. And there's another one called Penilecineus. They're going pastures, they're easier to find.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  But most of these Psilocybin mushrooms are hidden in the landscape.

• 15:56Joe Rogan?

  How so?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Well, I just had a 70-year-old man write me from Vermont. And he has found Psilocybe cerealesse. And he wrote a classic letter to me that many people have written. I have looked for these mushrooms for years. I couldn't find them. And then I found a few. And I looked around and they were everywhere. They're hiding in plain sight. And so now he knows with Psilocybe cerealesse in Vermont. He knows it's just, I can't believe how obvious they are to me and how unobvious they were to me before. When I took Michael Pollan out on a mushroom hunt. And in his book, How to Change Your Mind, when I said, I took two steps out of this little cabin we were at. And I go, there's one. He goes, where?

• 16:42Speaker 02

  I go, right there. He goes, where? I go, right there, Michael. And then I picked it up. And he goes, WTF, how can you tell this is a psilocybe mushroom? I go, well.

• 16:52Joe Rogan?

  You're kind of an expert.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  Well, it's like meeting a friend. It's like meeting you. I know Joe Rogan, right? I know your face, I know your personality. I'm reacquainted with you. But Psilocybin mushrooms.

• 17:03Joe Rogan?

  Wait a minute, so like seeing it, you're reacquainted with it?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Seeing it repeatedly and being familiarized with it gives you a memory of it, a pattern recognition. So when it goes away, you still have that pattern recognition memory to memory map back onto the landscape around you. It's true with morels, too. This is a very common thing. People don't see morels, they find one or two, then suddenly they start to jump out of the landscape. It's how your brain works with pattern recognition. So many of these species are hidden in the landscape, but they're actually quite common. But you just can't see them.

• 17:36Joe Rogan?

  Got it. And you're accustomed to seeing them, so. But you're not saying like that you feel something from them. You're just saying recognize them visually.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Well, you're waxing into this spiritual.

• 17:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's what I'm asking.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Many people feel that the mushrooms call to them.

• 17:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  So this is true in the Massachusetts. A tradition, you know, in my book, I go deeply into the Masertec heritage of using psilocybin mushrooms. And one of the things, it was really embedded with Christianity after the Spaniards came, 1516 and 1519, 1521, they brought in cattle. And very quickly, Christianity swept through Mesoamerica, specifically in Mexico. And there is a friend of mine, who's a PhD, called Joe Torri, was in Oaxaca and just

• 18:32Speaker 02

  found, in a church, a cross from the 15th century, 1500s, I mean. And soon after the conquistadors and Spanish arrived, and in the center of the cross are psilocybin mushrooms. So Christianity has a long, deep-rooted history with psilocybin mushroom use in Mesoamerica.

• 18:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's that ancient depiction of Adam and Eve from...

• 19:02Speaker 02

  That's more debatable in my mind. Yeah, but here it is, thank you. This is from Joe Latorri's work.

• 19:10Joe Rogan?

  Wow, look at that.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  That's a basket.

• 19:12Joe Rogan?

  With mushrooms popping out of it.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  With three mushrooms in the basket. And there is psilocybin mexicana, and so the mushrooms are phenotypically correct, but there's clearly a mushrooms in a basket. Can the other slideshow with the full cross, Joey, I'm not sure if it can?

• 19:30Joe Rogan?

  Did you know Jack Herr?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:32Joe Rogan?

  When Jack was alive, before he died, one of the things that he was working on was a book connecting psilocybin mushrooms and Christianity. And he had this massive collection of ancient images, paintings, all these different things. A lot of them were these religious depictions of people that were naked, dancing under the, like, it was like a transparent mushroom shape, and they were dancing, like, something that would indicate that they were under the tracts, and they were dancing.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, this is an example where there's so many different, you could have 100 different potential representations.

• 20:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  They're not all going to be correct.

• 20:13Joe Rogan?

  The one...

• 20:14Speaker 02

  But a few of them are, and this example here...

• 20:16Joe Rogan?

  One that clearly is.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  And in the Masertec...

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Tradition is called, it's called syncretism. When you have a foreign influence, in this case of religion, coming into an indigenous people, they merge and they still continue their indigenous practices under the umbrella of protection, in this case of Christianity. But in the Massa Tech tradition, they believe the tears of Christ is where the mushrooms would appear. They believe the mushrooms were the body of Christ and therefore you'd never boil them. You'd never, because you'd be hurting the body of Christ, so you'd only eat them raw or dried. Oh, interesting. So, really interesting. That's an example of syncretism. And the great Maria Sabina was a devout Catholic.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  And when she did her psilocybin ceremonies, she had the Holy Trinity. So, that's another example where, under the umbrella, and from a survival point of view, culturally it makes sense. And they adapted, but they found that this sort of merging of indigenous practices and knowledge of psilocybin in Christianity was very compatible. Just was published, I think, two weeks ago at New York University and Johns Hopkins. They had 24 clergy from different faiths, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Muslims.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  And they had them come in and they did a high doses of psilocybin. And they had one group that had delayed, didn't do it for six months, and the other group did a high dose of psilocybin. It all, each of those faiths, the use of psilocybin mushrooms reinforced their belief and their faith. That was really amazing. I think they said 95% said is the most significant experience, the top five are the most significant experiences in their life. So, it just, I think psilocybin makes nicer people.

• 22:19Joe Rogan?

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• 23:04Joe Rogan?

  It's a powerful tool built for serious off-roaders. Try OnX Offroad for 50% off. Go to onxmaps.com/jerogan. No, I would agree with you on that. The image of Adam and Eve, I'm curious to say, what do you think is debatable about that? Can you pull up that fresco? There's an ancient fresco, I believe it's from France, of Adam and Eve, which supposedly is the Tree of Life, but really looks like some sort of a mushroom plant.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yes, it's been postulated by R. Gordon Wasson.

• 23:41Joe Rogan?

  I shouldn't say plant.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:43Joe Rogan?

  In front of you especially.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 23:45Joe Rogan?

  That, that does look like mushrooms?

• 23:47Speaker 02

  They do look like mushrooms.

• 23:48Joe Rogan?

  Like, I couldn't imagine it being anything else.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, here's an example that, basically, artists become authors of field guides in art. How much can you tell to the public without violating your oath of secrecy? And so symbology, but yes, there's a cap and a stem, and they come up in clusters. That looks like a psilocybin mushroom. Some people will say it's Ammoni mescalus because of the dots, but those of us who've grown Psilocybe cubensis, when they're very fresh, they have dots on them. They're very ephemeral, they got washed away, so, yes.

• 24:26Joe Rogan?

  And you would see the dots, obviously, if it's still in the ground.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  If it's in the ground, it's very fresh. But psilocybin mushrooms bruise-blueish, and so, this is where we could get lost in a debate of interpretation, but all these representations...

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Are are not false. Some of these representations are extremely strong based on the evidence. And for instance, the psilocybin mushrooms that we found on the pyramids in Egypt.

• 24:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Clearly psilocybin, not myself, but other Egyptologists have also published on this.

• 25:01Joe Rogan?

  Find those, Jamie. Those are fascinating.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 25:04Joe Rogan?

  Because I don't think until fairly recently, within the last few decades, it was understood that they were using psilocybin. I think there was some confusion as to what, if anything, like they were drinking, they, Blue Lotus, I think, was one of them.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  The Blue Lotus is a water lily.

• 25:21Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  The water lilies grow.

• 25:22Joe Rogan?

  There it is.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  The water lilies grow near ponds.

• 25:25Joe Rogan?

  That's so clearly psilocybin.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  And this is the goddess Hathor, the goddess of the cow, by the way.

• 25:31Joe Rogan?

  There you go.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  The goddess of the cow. And that's a vase. And anyone who's grown oyster mushrooms or psilocybin mushrooms know that you can put the substrate into a vase like that with openings and mushrooms will come out of the holes.

• 25:43Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  And so that natural culture technique of collecting cow dung. So cows go to ponds to drink. The Blue Lotus grows in ponds.

• 25:50Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  The Blue Lotus is blue. The psilocybin mushrooms turn blue. The mushrooms are golden in color. Gold and blue colors are sacred in Egyptology and ancient Egyptian culture. So now, I was not the first person to discover this. Actually, I saw this from an article that was published by Azeem Abdel, a friend of mine, a mycologist in Egypt, who presented it at a conference.

• 26:17Joe Rogan?

  How long ago was this?

• 26:18Speaker 02

  This was, well, this is over 2,000 years of age.

• 26:21Joe Rogan?

  No, no, I mean, when they.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  2016.

• 26:23Joe Rogan?

  When they brought this to the, 2016.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  2016.

• 26:26Joe Rogan?

  That's kind of crazy, isn't it?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  It is. And then Kalindi, the great Kalindi from Detroit, he unfortunately died of COVID. But he also, from his African heritage, also believed that, you know, and he was rediscovering his African heritage. And this is called re-indigenization, rediscovering that which your ancestors practiced, even though the linear transition of knowledge may have been cut. But this is, this is taxonomically. Accurate for growing psilocybe cebensis and grows on cow dung. Cow goes to ponds. If you went to get the water lily, you'd run into this constantly. Now, this, and the, whether the, what this temple is now, they get less than one millimeter

• 27:11Speaker 02

  of rain a year. And the Nile used to be flooding all the time. It was a red basket of the world. But they built the dams and, you know, and

• 27:20Joe Rogan?

  Well, so the climate changed there.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  And so the climate changed. So in the modern Egypt, topologists have no reference. And so when you have climate change, the ecosystem changes, then the scientists of day don't have the familiarity as the experts thousands of years ago.

• 27:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  So they become rare, they become scarce, and the generational knowledge is lost. But now there's a real big re-ingenization movement in Egypt, combining the blue lotus with psilocybe cebensis.

• 27:46Joe Rogan?

  What is the psychedelic compound in the blue lotus?

• 27:49Speaker 02

  You know, that's, that's, that's a debatable thing. There's a really complex chemistry there. I'm not an expert on that, but I've talked to my other friends who are experts. There seems to be an entourage effect of multiple agents. So I, I can't really speak authoritative to leave that. But I have been told that there are several active ingredients, and they think the entourage effect of them together creates this heightened state of awareness.

• 28:12Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  And I think that as an admixture with psilocybin makes a lot of sense.

• 28:16Joe Rogan?

  Are contemporary people taking blue lotus?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:19Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:20Joe Rogan?

  Is there like a community of people?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  A massive community, but because blue lotus now has become scarce because ponds are scarce.

• 28:26Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  So I put out there a reward of a thousand dollars for anyone who can find, you know, DNA of psilocybin mushrooms in any of the wells or ancient ponds, used to be ponds in, in the Egypt area. Because if we can find the DNA in the vase and the substrate, then we can actually prove this theory.

• 28:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  It's more than a hypothesis because I've met many Egypt, Egyptian mycologists now, who absolutely believe this is true, not scientifically, but sort of intuitively from their culture, this makes a lot of sense.

• 28:59Joe Rogan?

  It does make a lot of sense. And if you've got it on these hieroglyphs.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  And they were known as the flesh of the gods, which is the very same name when translated by Tejan and Akato from Mexico America. The psilocybin mushrooms were known, psilocybin mexicana, as flesh of the gods. So it's interesting, in both sides of the world, they have the same interpretation. Mushrooms were not allowed back in this time to be picked by combiners. They were only reserved for the royalty.

• 29:28Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy. Doesn't it always work out that way?

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems to.

• 29:32Joe Rogan?

  Another thing that's really fascinating is depictions of ancient saints and even Jesus Christ with a halo, and that the halo is essentially the bottom of a mushroom. It's a very different halo. When we think about a halo, we think about like a frisbee that's hovering over an angel's head or, you know, a saint's head. But the ancient depictions of them weren't that. The ancient depictions of them, you saw those ribs that made it look like the bottom of a psilocybin mushroom.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 29:58Joe Rogan?

  You didn't know that? Oh, come on. I'm teaching you this? Come on. Jamie will pull up these images, but these images of Christ, of there's many different religious figures, and they have this halo that's very different than the more modern halo. The modern halo being this like circle. This is not a circle. It's a circle, but it's a mushroom. It's essentially, they're explaining that these godly, holy people were under the influence of psilocybin. I think.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  What we can't...

• 30:29Joe Rogan?

  And not just me.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  What we can't prove some of these ideas today, what we can prove is like the Johns Hopkins New York University study, that religious belief systems are enhanced through the use of psilocybin.

• 30:43Joe Rogan?

  Which totally makes sense.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  It makes sense. So we can argue about the past, but we can't, we have really good scientific methodology now for analyzing the effects of psilocybin, and it's profound. It's profound.

• 30:54Joe Rogan?

  You got any of those images?

• 30:56Speaker 03

  It's not, what's coming up really is us talking about it before and then a bunch of pictures of mushrooms. I was trying to find out.

• 31:03Joe Rogan?

  There's some better ones.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  I know, but it's not, I didn't get any.

• 31:06Joe Rogan?

  You can't find them?

• 31:07Speaker 03

  I wasn't getting them.

• 31:08Joe Rogan?

  Man, the government's pulled them off the internet, man. That's not one.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 31:13Joe Rogan?

  That's, that's, the ones that I've seen are far clearer than that.

• 31:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes, those. Like, look at that one. Which is crazy that you have to find. You have to go to us.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  That's...

• 31:26Joe Rogan?

  Like, look at that.

• 31:27Speaker 02

  I can see the one on the left.

• 31:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. I mean, that, that essentially looks exactly like that.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  I've, I've never seen that.

• 31:33Joe Rogan?

  That's crazy that you can't find that anymore, and we clearly found it in the past, because we talked about it.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Well, that may be the effect of Joe Rogan, right? You could just overwhelm the entire internet with images, so...

• 31:46Joe Rogan?

  I mean, look at the bottom of that one, in particular, the one in the center.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:50Joe Rogan?

  I mean, that, that looks exactly like that halo.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not a...

• 31:55Joe Rogan?

  Which totally makes sense. Look at that. Okay, there's one. Look at that image.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:59Joe Rogan?

  So, this is the old-school halo. The old-school halo clearly looks like the bottom of a mushroom.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  I'm blown away.

• 32:06Joe Rogan?

  You're blown away.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Hiding in plain sight, right?

• 32:08Joe Rogan?

  I can't believe that I'm teaching you this. I'm, I can't believe you, who did, how come nobody told you this?

• 32:15Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 32:16Joe Rogan?

  You said you knew Jack. You knew Jack when he was alive. This was like his primary concern towards the end of his life. He was, he was working on a book.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, the limitation of life, unfortunately, we have all these great people who pass when they're at the, at the peak of their knowledge, you know, and that's, that's the other thing that I think psilocybin has really informed me, is that Joe Rogan and Paul Stanlins are talking, Jamie is there. But we have such a thin slice of reality. And when you're on psilocybin, the, the unanimity of universal consciousness to be involved in something you realize is so large.

• 32:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Did you see the, the galactic images from the Rubin Telescope that came out yesterday?

• 33:01Joe Rogan?

  No, I did not.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Millions and millions of new galaxies. Literally, millions of new galaxies.

• 33:06Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  I think 2,100 new asteroids in near-Earth orbit.

• 33:11Joe Rogan?

  Oh, fun.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Oh, fun. Oops.

• 33:13Joe Rogan?

  Well, there's already 900,000 of them.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's, but this has just happened.

• 33:17Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  But this is, yeah.

• 33:19Joe Rogan?

  Wondering how many of those people out there are tripping balls.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  It just got, released the largest telescope in the world, and there are millions of galaxies. Millions of galaxies. And so, from my experience, which I will admit, I came from a Christian background, so my first times on Psilocybin mushrooms is very... Christ-oriented.

• 33:38Joe Rogan?

  God, look at that.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  And then, as I got more and more into the psilocybin experience, I realized that this is it, just this concept that we live in this great expanse. And I'm a symbol of, a assembly of molecules, so are you. We didn't exist before we were born. You know, we will disassemble, decompose, and we'll go back into the cosmic dust. And this is part of the continuum of existence. We all exist all the time, forever.

• 34:05Joe Rogan?

  Forever. Can I ask you this? What do you think happens to consciousness?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  I think that, think from a mechanical perspective, we might be looking at, have the constructs of consciousness that is analogous to the Model T Ford, you know? And I think as we expand our knowledge sets and become more informed, we see how much there is out there. I think that psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics, and this is why I think religions are very much attracted to this, is a portal to expand the horizons of your imaginations, that there is a, there is a consciousness that far exceeds that which you can comprehend. My, my mother was a charismatic Christian and um...

• 34:51Joe Rogan?

  What is, what is a charismatic Christian?

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Well, she's evangelical, she speaks in tongues.

• 34:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy!

• 34:56Speaker 02

  A leader, she was very much into this, like, "Mom, really?" Different side of her, but we had an interesting conversation. I said, "Mom, you believe God is omnipotent, right?" She goes, "Absolutely." I said, "You believe God is all knowledgeable?" She goes, "Absolutely." "You believe that humans are fallible and we're not all knowledgeable?" She goes, "Yep, I do." I said, "Then can you accept the fact that our concept of God is inferior to God's definition by your own thinking? That no matter how we think of God, we'll be inferior to the enormity of the concept." So, and she admitted that. So, but, so we're fallible.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  We, we don't have the capacity to understand the enormity of consciousness in which we are embedded, of which we are a tiny part. So, this brings me to a subject I really wanted to talk to you about. Okay. And that is artificial intelligence. Hmm. And I know you've spent a lot of time on this. Yeah, recently. I want to introduce a new concept. Okay. I'm a deadhead. You could never tell. Never tell. I went to the Sphere, you know? I bet it was amazing. It was incredible. The visuals were insane. Fantastic. What a great venue to see that in, too. It was a great venue. It just revolutionized music festivals, I think, forever. Yeah.

• 36:19Joe Rogan?

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• 36:57Joe Rogan?

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• 37:31Speaker 00

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• 37:58Speaker 02

  So there is, I bought, there's something called Postcards from Earth. And I'd heard a lot about it. It's a matinee in the afternoon before the big concerts. And it's great flying through around the earth, through the old growth forests and volcanoes. So we went there and we got an early bird ticket, which allowed us to talk to an AI robot. So I thought, oh, this is my opportunity. Now, two years ago, I got the disruptor award at Sin Bio Beta. Twenty two hundred nerdy scientists. I mean, these are top nerds. And I was so surprised that I got the disruptor award because I'm kind of a natural products kind of guy.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  But I'm greatly honored. So I posited the question then. Will AI may never be able to write an algorithm for random acts of kindness. And then I'm thinking about my life, maybe yours, maybe Jamie's, maybe most people out there. You're here today because of random acts of kindness. Your great grandfather, great grandmother, your father, your grandfather, grandmother. Is that reaching out of a hand in a time of need by a random act of kindness from a stranger? That probably created a lot of relationships. And random acts of kindness was not transactional.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Where you genuinely feel something for someone, not expecting to have something in return. Right. And you've reached out. I think that's why many, many, if not most people, their lineage is can be traced to a random act of kindness. So then I went to Las Vegas, went to the sphere, had this idea, you know, I can ask this robot. So I asked this robot. What robot? It was a, I think it was a chat GPT run, but I'm not sure. That was at the sphere? At the sphere. Okay, there's the robot I talked to. Oh, that's so creepy. Look at that face. Oh my God, it's so creepy. Okay, very creepy. So I asked the robot. Look at that robot. That's so creepy. I asked the robot, given that so many of us here here today

• 40:08Speaker 02

  because of random acts of kindness of our ancestors. And we've invented artificial intelligence. And we're traceable to random acts of kindness.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  How will artificial intelligence incorporate random acts of kindness in the future? Good question. The robot took an unusually long time to answer. It was like a very long time. And the robot came back going, why would humans do that? It's far more efficient to have a return on your investment transactionally. Why would, it's inefficient to have random acts of kindness. Boom, blew me away.

• 40:48Joe Rogan?

  Did you film any of this?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did film this. A friend of mine has a film of it. And then

• 40:53Joe Rogan?

  I need to see that.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  And then

• 40:55Joe Rogan?

  That robot needs to be shut off.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  No, about five days ago, I asked ChatGPT, a GROK Gemini, the same question. And now it was greatly nuanced. Well, random acts of kindness can help, help the community with goodwill. And this can be, you know, help the community because it's, you know, it's more sustainable, et cetera. So this is, this is what I want to do. And I want, if possible, all those who are so inspired to go after this talk, after this interview, go and ask artificial intelligence, whatever platform you want. But preface it with this, given that humans are here today largely because of random acts of kindness,

• 41:41Speaker 02

  how will artificial intelligence utilize the advantage of random acts of kindness for the perpetuation of the goodwill and health of the human species? Now, I just met, you know, I think that's going to inform artificial intelligence. And so when I asked this question again, it was like, it was more nuanced. I was like, oh, artificial intelligence is learning.

• 42:01Joe Rogan?

  That's how large language models work, right?

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:03Joe Rogan?

  The more input they get.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  More inputs of, and the millions of people start training AI on the importance of, you know, if someone has a flat tire, you stop to pick it up, help them. You could drive by, you know, someone's hurt in an accident, you stop and pull over to help that person. You could keep on driving. There's a random act of kindness. My life is successful because of random acts of kindness. I bet most people, when they think back, there was an act of generosity and kindness. And you really feel grateful for that.

• 42:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  And you want to pay it forward. I met, at this last conference, I met two students from Harvard Business School. And they said they want to interview me. And I go, I want to interview you. And they said, why? I go, do they teach you at Harvard Business School about the advantages of random acts of kindness? Those know, well, they should.

• 42:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, business schools just teach me how to make some money.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  But this is important, Joe.

• 42:55Joe Rogan?

  It is.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Inform artificial intelligence how to be better to keep human, you know, community and psychology and to propel the best of the human species. And I think we have this opportunity to have millions of people start informing artificial intelligence with the premise, and we know it's true, that random acts of kindness are why many of us are here, if not the majority, going back in your lineage, you know, many generations, you know, we gave birth to artificial intelligence. I don't think artificial intelligence is properly named. I think it's a form of natural intelligence. We just have re amplified it exponentially.

• 43:33Joe Rogan?

  What do you think artificial intelligence means in terms of the the future of the human race?

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Well, that's a great question, too, because about the 10 people who asked this robot, you know, questions, they were all data mining. Who was the best baseball player in history? And, you know, he hit the most home runs. And it was also like data mining.

• 43:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  And so Sam Altman was at the TED conference, and he said that, basically, there are self awareness of some of these systems, but artificial intelligence have not come to the point where they actually can create something. I found that really interesting because I thought, well, I thought they were creating. But he was insistent, they actually don't have that spark or creativity. They can assemble data, but that actually the true creative spirit is not something that AI has currently achieved.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  I met another, you know, this guy's a total genius. And many, I've heard this, other people say that, you know, we're not likely to have biological aliens, we're likely to have robots. And the extinction of biological species came because AI found that biological fathers and mothers irrelevant, so they didn't need them, et cetera, et cetera. I said, that's logical. But again, if we can infuse artificial intelligence with the importance. Of the humans ability to have random acts of kindness, which are not transactional, that feed into the benefit of the commons of goodwill.

• 44:59Joe Rogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  I mean, if you've been helped by somebody and you had a flat tire and you saw someone else have a flat tire on the road, you would be a lot more inclined to stop and pull over to pay it forward.

• 45:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  So I think we have an opportunity here. And I think we have to do this now, because if we don't do it now, I think we're going down an extremely dangerous path.

• 45:23Joe Rogan?

  In what way?

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's ultimately the extinction of the human species, which, you know, depending on your point of view, may not be a terrible thing, but I think that we're the Anorthals with nuclear weapons. When I met another person, he's a Mensa person funded, you know, by a tech company, he's nineteen year old Chinese guy, and I, he said, I said, what's the scariest thing about artificial intelligence? Oh, I'll tell you my scariest thing, I just wrote a paper on this.

• 45:53Joe Rogan?

  Autonomous weapons.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Autonomous weapons. You have a million people, you assemble a million experts, and you blackmail them. I catch you watching porn, I catch you masturbating, I catch you having an affair, and you have a million people sending components for a weapon to one location, and you blackmail them and you assemble, you know, a biological weapon or something like that. So I don't want to go there. This is something that I, you know, it's never as bad as you fear, and it's never as good as you hope.

• 46:28Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  I think that we're at that nexus point, and the Joe Rogan experience can be pivotal, I think, in steering artificial intelligence to be the best that it can be ethically. And I think we have that opportunity right now.

• 46:46Joe Rogan?

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

• 47:18Joe Rogan?

  An understanding of any subject, we're basically there already. And that's just accelerating. And it's going to get to the point where these things become sentient. And whatever, however you define it, you know, we were already in a situation where by most people's understanding, it would pass the Turing test.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  There's a sense of, you know, nostalgia in a sense that's even building today of the times of past.

• 47:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Of what, you know, and I, I don't think it's all doom and gloom.

• 47:50Joe Rogan?

  I don't think so.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  I think we can steer this.

• 47:52Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think we're always steering it. I think this is the battle that human beings have been involved in since the beginning of time. I think this is probably the reason why religion was created in the first place, or observable religion. I think we have always realized there's this battle of good and evil in us. And a part of it becomes, a part of it comes rather from how we originated. We originated as these barbarian tribes competing for resources, fighting off other marauding barbarian tribes, fighting off predators and trying to stay alive. So we've unfortunately got this intense history of chaos and of savagery that we're trying to move past.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:36Joe Rogan?

  Slowly but surely over time.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  And I think a catalyst for this is psychedelics.

• 48:39Joe Rogan?

  I think so too.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Like psilocybin mushrooms are unique because it democratizes the access to psilocybin. MDMA, you can't grow in your closet. You know, psilocybin mushrooms, you know, there's no economic barrier on psilocybin mushrooms. It's available for the poorest of the poor.

• 48:56Joe Rogan?

  They just fucked everything up in 1970, didn't they?

• 48:58Speaker 02

  1971, I think, 1972, when they put it on schedule one.

• 49:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  The schedule one substance is supposed to be, has no medical benefit, highly addictive. Um, and, um, and potentially toxicity. Do you know the LD50 lethal dose of psilocybin mushrooms is 42 pounds?

• 49:20Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's a lot.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Forty two pounds.

• 49:22Joe Rogan?

  And that only kills half the people.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Only kills half the people, you die from indigestion, that's for psilocybin.

• 49:27Joe Rogan?

  You die of diarrhea. Imagine diarrhea, you get eaten forty-two pounds of mushrooms.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  I mean, that's the least toxic, one of the least toxic medicines ever found in nature, but...

• 49:37Joe Rogan?

  But there's a concern, though, with people that have problems with mental health, though, right?

• 49:42Speaker 02

  I don't think psilocybin mushrooms or psilocybin is good for people who are psychotic.

• 49:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  I think there are the groups of people, I, we do need psilocybin or psychedelic assisted therapy, you know, it's super important that people who are experienced can help other people who are inexperienced process.

• 49:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  That's really important.

• 50:00Joe Rogan?

  I think so, too. I think that's part of, that's probably part of the, one of the things that's really wonderful about the community of people that have experienced these things is that they do understand how life-changing it is from a personal perspective, and they can aid people and help them through it, and if they're good people and they, you know, can show you, like, hey, I've done this, it's gonna be scary, it's gonna weird you out, but ultimately, you're gonna come out on the other end of this, a better person.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  And, you know, you just met my, my partner, Dr. Pam Crisco, she is part of a group called Roots to Thrive in Canada, and she has Canadian health approval for high doses of psilocybin. Interestingly, we just put a paper, published a paper on pure psilocybin versus the mushroom psilocybin with patients who have taken both, I'll talk about that in a second, but, what, these are end-of-life patients typically with stage-four diagnoses, oftentimes cancer, and they're just existentially disturbed, I'm gonna die, and leave my family, what are they gonna do, lots of heart, heartbreaking thoughts, etc. They do a long preparatory

• 51:11Speaker 02

  period together as a group, they have a commonality that they all have terminal illnesses and terminal diagnoses, so they have that thread that holds them together as a community, because they talk about the difficulty in their estate planning, and talking to their daughter, and how they're gonna miss them, and they're gonna, you know, all those dynamics that we all know about, but, this always brings me to tears, they're doing it on indigenous land, with indigenous elders also participating, so...

• 51:40Speaker 02

  And what happened from one of the experiences that I can share with about a dozen or so terminal patients, high doses of psilocybin, and the indigenous, especially in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada, when you do psilocybin, the first 20 minutes is left off, you hit an hour, you're starting to really get high, an hour, hour and a half, you're peaking. And just at the peaking of this experience, unbeknownst to them, the elders had a drum circle next door, and they started playing drums. Hmm. And the impact of having those indigenous elders recognizing that these patients are

• 52:21Speaker 02

  on the journey to the end of their life, and they respected them enough to say they needed this. The impact of that indigenous wisdom to help these terminal patients was so impactful. Hmm. And this is where I think this is a great opportunity. And then the common theme is that those patients became the counselors to their families. They went back and saying, "It's okay, I'm dying. I'll be okay, you'll be okay." And the families are going, "WTF? What is going on here?" And this happens with law enforcement, this happens with PTSD and soldiers, this happening with terminal cancer patients, is we all are gonna die.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  That is a fact. To be able to come, you know, into, to be able to come at peace to the fact that your mortality is near. When you're 20 years old, you don't really think about this. But when you get older and older, I'm 69 turning on 70, I feel like I'm 35, but that's not true. I just feel like, you know, I didn't exist in this form before I was born. I'm gonna be going back into molecules that'll disambiguate into atoms, reassemble into new molecules. I'm part of the continuum of existence. And I think this is what these psychedelics give a lot of people.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Confidence about the fact that they will always and have always existed and will exist forever.

• 53:54Joe Rogan?

  If your molecules are going into the continuum of existence, what do you think the purpose of you being here now is? What do you think the purpose of the present moment of your life as you're currently living?

• 54:06Speaker 02

  That's the, that's the great question of all time. But I think even the construct of the question is confined, but the limitation of our ability to, to construct that question. I think we're maybe asking the wrong question. I think the, our, the purpose of our being is a tautology. We are, we are being here because we are. And I don't think there's, I mean, again, look at the Rubin telescope images. I have a friend, a dear friend.

• 54:38Joe Rogan?

  Pretty incredible.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  It's incredible, millions of galaxies. When you see the enormity of the universe, I mean, I can't wait to fly. I, I want my molecules and atoms to fly through space.

• 54:50Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  I would love to see the rings of so many planets. I'd love to see supernova. And I, I feel like, yeah, and that's the direction we're all headed towards.

• 54:59Joe Rogan?

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• 55:43Joe Rogan?

  Visit lifelock.com and save up to 30% your first year with the promo code JRE. That's promo code JRE, or go to lifelock.com/jre for 30% off. Terms. Apply. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker.

• 56:28Joe Rogan?

  If you get their Chime Card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate, crazy high. It's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com/rogan. Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime Card, provided by Chime's Bank Partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. Whether you like it or not.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Can't do anything about it.

• 57:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Have you paid attention to the James Webb Telescope discoveries?

• 57:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 57:06Joe Rogan?

  That's insane stuff, where they're finding these galaxies that are, they should have not been able to be formed as quickly as they are.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  It's an order of magnitude higher. They can do the entire, the visible universe, I think, in about three days. That took otherwise months to do.

• 57:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  The assembly and AI is helping, of course.

• 57:24Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  I think near Earth asteroids, this is an impactful discovery, literally. I always worry about an asteroid coming from behind the sun, you know? And then how many?

• 57:37Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's probably been the reset for civilization over and over again throughout time.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Well, that's the proliferation, for instance, of psilocybin. I fund a lot of different things.

• 57:49Joe Rogan?

  Pentzpermia, right?

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Well, I have a business, and I created my business specifically to do research, but one of the, Utah State University, I funded,

• 57:59Speaker 02

  a study on the evolution of the genes that code for psilocybin. And the results in some molecular genetic clock data, there's variability of a few million years in interpretation, but the arrival of psilocybin in the fungal genome is about 65 million years ago.

• 58:18Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 58:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  That's interesting. After, after, after the asteroid impact. Now, is association causation?

• 58:28Joe Rogan?

  Not necessarily, but probably makes sense.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  There was a new asteroid. Look at, there it goes.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  This video on the New York Times article. I don't know how to control the video, so I had to let it reach out here.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  There's our three different asteroids. There were six, nine asteroids.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's showing here, these discoveries. And here in a second, it'll, it'll show you that like how in the timeline of the discoveries. It'll show like one day that, right here, it's, I think it is. They discovered like 800 or 900 in the first day.

• 58:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  Like four or 500 more the next day.

• 58:58Joe Rogan?

  This is so many of them.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Couple hundred more the next day. But watch how it zooms out here in a second to show you where this is. It gives you like a perspective. This is like 10 days in.

• 59:07Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  And then it zooms out here again further.

• 59:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, no.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  So they discovered 2,000 asteroids in that tiny little sliver right there.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  I haven't seen this.

• 59:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  Whoever made that video, that's awesome.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  Jamie, you're, you're the master of discovering these things. I mean.

• 59:25Joe Rogan?

  What should people, when they want to find that?

• 59:26Speaker 03

  It's in the New York Times article about the Rubin telescope that came out probably today or yesterday.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  And they're keeping much of this undercover, so to speak. The scientists are very disciplined. They're only letting a little bit out at a time.

• 59:37Joe Rogan?

  Keep people from freaking out?

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Well, not really think that. As they're trying to be good scientists. They're trying to assemble the data in a fashion that, you know, they don't have to redefine later, so.

• 59:47Joe Rogan?

  Has this telescope recently come online?

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Yes, in the past. Well, it's been online, I think, for a few months. The data is just being revealed now. But I think.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  3.2 billion pixel camera. It's the largest ever created.

• 1:00:01Joe Rogan?

  In five years from now, you'll have that on your phone.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  I mean, maybe. I was wondering what kind of lens they made to go on it, but like.

• 1:00:06Joe Rogan?

  Wow, look at that thing. That's insane.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  And if they had that telescope out in space, they wouldn't have the interference of our atmosphere.

• 1:00:15Joe Rogan?

  But how would you get that thing? What kind of a rocket would you need?

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Go back to those images. This is, this is astronomy 101. I'm not telling you anything you don't know necessarily. But all of those stars, all those galaxies are in the past. Hundreds of millions of years ago. We're just a coincidence of seeing them right now.

• 1:00:33Joe Rogan?

  Right, because the light has just reached us.

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  It's just reaching, reaching us, so. That's what's so fascinating to me. This is a snapshot of multiple histories converging to one point of view.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  Also, Voyager one's about to hit the one light day travel mark, which is a significant mark, but it's still not that far in the grand scheme.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  See, when I trip on psilocybin, this is what I love doing.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  This trying to comprehend the enormity and the beauty of the universe. I believe the universe is full of love. You know, I think that, you know,

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  we're built on relationships. And when you have relationships, when you have a quorum of individuals that are sharing assets, you know, you build a community.

• 1:01:22Joe Rogan?

  Well, you certainly see that with human beings. The question is, what kind of life are we experiencing in these other planets? Like, what is life for them? Should we be so naive to think that it went along the exact same linear path as biological life on Earth? Or is it completely unrecognizable? And when, you know, we're dealing with intelligent life from other planets, maybe they'd be so intelligent that they wouldn't travel. And maybe they don't need to. And maybe they're also dealing with solar systems that, you know, we have as a result of multiple impacts, including the creation of Earth itself, right? There was Earth and there was Earth Two. We were hit by another planet. They think that's what created the moon.

• 1:02:05Joe Rogan?

  Like, all that stuff leaves debris. It's all flying around. And if it wasn't for Jupiter, we would have never made it this far. Never made, that's our protector.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Yep, absolutely correct.

• 1:02:16Joe Rogan?

  We would have never made it to 2025. We would have been dust a long time ago.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  We have a form of biological myopia, thinking that we need sunlight and oxygen for life.

• 1:02:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  And now, you know, from Chernobyl, we know that fungi can use radioactivity as an energy source.

• 1:02:31Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  We have methane-based organisms.

• 1:02:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, isn't that crazy?

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 1:02:34Joe Rogan?

  Methane-based organisms.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  I believe matter begets life. Life becomes single cells. Single cells form chains.

• 1:02:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  They branch. Networks form.

• 1:02:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  And within these networks are associations of members that exchange resources. I don't believe that, you know, evolution is based on survival of the fittest. I believe is the evolution is based on the extension of generosity beyond that of your own needs to build a community. Of reciprocity.

• 1:03:04Joe Rogan?

  Certainly human evolution.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  I think it's happening all over.

• 1:03:07Joe Rogan?

  You think it's happening with tigers and gazelles?

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  I think absolutely. You know, we're animals. New news, new news, we're animals.

• 1:03:13Joe Rogan?

  For sure, but they're not very generous. They're just trying to eat and survive.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  There's a great, um, on Chile, there's a great footage, it's amazing, of these orcas, AKA killer whales, just devastating a seal population, eating them. You may have seen this. And after they were satiated, these orcas would take the pups and they'd push them up on shore.

• 1:03:37Joe Rogan?

  To save them.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  Just to save them.

• 1:03:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, they're very intelligent, which is one of the more interesting things about orcas, that they don't kill people unless they're at SeaWorld.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Joe Rogan?

  Which is probably where they should be killing people.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just met a herpetologist and I raised snapping turtles when I was a kid. So I have the turtle necklace. I was a very shy boy with a profound stuttering habit. But my friends were wild snapping turtles. And this herpetologist, he goes, well, I had snapping turtles, they're really mean. And I had them in my aquarium, they kept on trying to bite me. I go, no shit, Sherlock. You know, I had wild snapping turtles in a pond. And I went down there, I fed them celery and lettuce, this is when I'm eight years old, I had them for about seven years. I grew up in successive families. And at first they would try to bite me and things like that. And then I realized if I put out a little salad bowl for them, they wouldn't fight each other because they're not going to try to bite me. They would try like, I want the carrot from Paul.

• 1:04:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  When I put a little salad bowl there, they kind of all came together and they cooperated. And so I, my, I just reflecting on this yesterday, my, one of my fondest memories, when I walked towards the pond and boop.

• 1:04:43Joe Rogan?

  They'd pop up. Oh, Paul's here. Oh, that's so cool.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so snapping turtles are, have an amazing ability, they can snap flies out of the air.

• 1:04:51Joe Rogan?

  Oh, they're so fast.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  They're so fast.

• 1:04:53Joe Rogan?

  I saw this video of one eating a fish. They put a fish in front of it, like a dead fish. And it eats it so fast, it just disappears. It just, it just snaps its neck forward, engulfs this fish, swallows it all, and it looks like a magic trick.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:05:11Joe Rogan?

  You have to look at it in slow mo to even see the actual action of it.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  There's so much sea life there. The British Columbia is just full of sea life.

• 1:05:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it certainly is.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 1:05:20Joe Rogan?

  Incredible place.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love it. I love it being there. So.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  You know, this is a beautiful planet. Where we live, there's no garbage. And when visitors come to visit us on our island, I said, have you noticed? There's no garbage, anywhere. Not in this, only not ditches, anywhere. It's because the ethos of that community is to take care of the ecosystem.

• 1:05:47Joe Rogan?

  That's beautiful. And that can be done if you have a small community of like-minded people.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  Of like-minded people.

• 1:05:51Joe Rogan?

  The real issue is when it gets to the size of something like New York City, this becomes this diffusion of responsibility where you don't think that you have to be concerned with all this garbage is on the ground because there's 20 million people walking around. It's just, it is what it is, keep moving.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  Or India. I'm just, I'm just

• 1:06:08Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's devastating.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  heart torn by India. Such a spiritual place and there's so much garbage. China as well, you know, this is

• 1:06:14Joe Rogan?

  But the India thing is nuts because it's also in these areas where a lot of the stuff that people buy that's inexpensive in America is being manufactured. And then these factories, who's the back of the factory opens to this river and this river is completely choked with plastic and garbage and just junk. And all the stuff that they don't want, they just throw into the river and there's so much stuff in the river that I guess they just feel like, well, it's not like I'm polluting something that's not already polluted. I'm just adding to whatever's there. This is just what we do. And so they've developed this culture of like constant, consistent pollution.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, we all need to, you know, even teaching our children constantly to pick up. But our communities are examples of doing it right. And this community that I'm associated with, I'm just so proud of them.

• 1:07:04Joe Rogan?

  I wanted to talk to you about something that you said earlier because you were talking about human species and, or species and love and cooperation and all the different things. And I said uniquely with us, yes, love and random acts of kindness and community are incredibly important.

• 1:07:24Joe Rogan?

  Well, what do you think, why do you think we're so different than all the other species on the planet? And what, do you think that psilocybin, like, do you subscribe to McKenna's theory? I know we've probably talked about this before, but as a standalone podcast, this is probably...

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Not as much as neurogenesis, but we have done pluripotent stem cells of humans, dosed them with psilocin in the laboratory, we have a DEA license, I have a DEA license, very, very strictly controlled, but we can actually see the proliferation of neurons compared to controls. So, this is where, this is why I want to emphasize to all scientists, especially older scientists that are stuck in their wisdom, that are very comfortable with their knowledge base, and younger scientists come up with these ideas and, you know...

• 1:08:51Joe Rogan?

  They might dismiss them.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's, is that, be more circumspect, because what Dennis and Terrence McKenna postulated, you know, and I disagree with lots of Terrence's ideas, time wave zero was my total bullshit, but Terrence and I were very good friends, and we laughed a lot, and that's why, a spirit of camaraderie, where you can criticize someone and laugh at the same time? That's a higher level of intelligence.

• 1:09:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's also what happens when you abandon the ego, right? The ego's consistently abandoned through psychedelic experiences, you're much more likely to laugh.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  I think psilocybin is an Einstein molecule. I think the tryptamines in general are Einstein molecules. The work by Gold, Dolden, is fantastic, also associated with Johns Hopkins, of the critical window, and this is why ibogaine has gotten such traction, the critical window with ibogaine is a long window where you're able to... Repattern your behavior to break addiction. With psilocybin, there's a critical window. DMT is very, very short because of the short, the short period. The critical window typically is at the peak of the experience and just as you're over the hump, you know, going down. But one patient described it very, very well. Who was an addict.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  Psilocybin, which becomes psilocin, what docks with your receptors, psilocybin's stable, psilocin is not. Psilocybin defosforates into psilocin, it crosses into your receptors, goes into, stimulates inside the nucleus of cells that cause cell division. And this is mind boggling. I think this is why high doses of psilocybin, great for revelatory experience, for perhaps breaking addiction, but what about the near normals? We all suffer from neurodegeneration that's age related. Besides Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia that are toxin or disease related, and self as a disease, you could argue, age being one. But neurodegeneration is a fact of life as we age and neuropathies occur.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  And the neuropathies from the constriction of the peripheral nervous system, vasoconstriction, etc. Psilocybin is not only anti-inflammatory but neurogenerative. And to have this coupled together, I think that the nootropic vitamins of psilocybin, you know, as a daily consumable, is something that has a great future potential. Of course, we need to study this. But long-term clinical studies are inherently very expensive. A short time stay in a hospital for one, you know, huge event may be expensive for that day, but it's easier to design a clinical study that has a short period than a long period. I think that we're beginning to see, now, we think about eight million Americans consume

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  psilocybin in 2023, according to the RAND report. What was the reduction in crime with those eight million people?

• 1:12:31Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  If we could have studied that.

• 1:12:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  And then, and there are retroactive studies, you know, analyses that show a reduction of crime associated with psilocybin use. But in real time, that's something I'm very excited about. Could you reduce crime rates? And moreover, when you're immunologically, when you're depressed emotionally, you're immunologically depressed.

• 1:12:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  And when you're happier, you're more creative, you're exercising, your immune system is upregulated.

• 1:12:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  So the community immunity from psilocybin.

• 1:13:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  I think is a huge potential. There's a crossover directly between your mental, your neuro escape and your immunological state.

• 1:13:11Joe Rogan?

  Unquestionably, right? The diminishing of stress.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  And this is why.

• 1:13:15Joe Rogan?

  The profound benefits physiologically.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, clinical study just came out, compass pathways, you know, did treatment resistant depression. They had analysis that came back out that showed modest increase or decrease in depression. But they were doing treatment resistant depression and, you know, congratulations for them for putting the money, their money where their mouth is and didn't join the study. But treatment resistant depression is a failure of two antidepressive drugs and therapy. And so, but major depressive disorder is a much bigger bucket. And so I think there are some extreme conditions that we're not going to find the signal from the noise that's significant enough to make a big difference.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  But the idea of titrating psilocybin or psilocyn, maybe after a hero's journey, and then by act of re-remembering, you revisit those same neurological pathways that gave you an advantage. By taking psilocin or psilocybin, the act of taking it again, you're re-remembering, and then you can nurture these neurons. I think psilocybin could be nutrients for the neurons.

• 1:14:24Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. Well, let's, in an effort to make this a standalone podcast, let's explain what we're talking about, because what we're talking about is Terrence's stoned ape theory. And his theory involved a lot of contributing factors, one of them being climate change. And the theory was that as the rainforests receded into grasslands, you get more undulate animals, and they leave behind poop, and that these lower primates find these mushrooms that are growing on the poop, and they experiment with them. And that the ones that did increased visual acuity, they became more amorous, they were more likely to breed, more creative,

• 1:15:07Joe Rogan?

  the ability to form sentences, glossolalia, associate sounds with objects and concepts, and that this is probably how language formed among humans. And Terrence's connection to that, when you look at the timeline of when this was happening, when we know this was happening, which coincides with the growth of the human brain, which over a period of 2 million years doubled in size, which is pretty phenomenal.

• 1:15:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, 200,000 years, it increased massively. It increased massively.

• 1:15:36Joe Rogan?

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• 1:16:21Joe Rogan?

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• 1:16:35Joe Rogan?

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• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  So 2 million years on the outer limits, 200,000 in the inner limits.

• 1:17:19Joe Rogan?

  So in the inner limits, what was the amount of growth?

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  I think it was 40, 50%, something substantial.

• 1:17:26Joe Rogan?

  200,000 years, 50%. And what time period was this?

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  Well, 200,000 years ago.

• 1:17:31Joe Rogan?

  200,000 years ago.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  It was a jump.

• 1:17:34Joe Rogan?

  But Homo sapiens in this form have existed more than 200,000 years, though, right?

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:17:40Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  Homo sapiens are relatively recent. I look at the estimates go back and forth depending on what experts you're consulting and whatnot, but from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens was a radical jump that was fairly recent.

• 1:17:57Joe Rogan?

  I was under the impression it was more than 300,000 years ago.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  It could be 200,000, it could be 400,000, but it's, you know, our enlargement of our brain is relatively recent. And to give more context, Dennis McKenna and I were just together.

• 1:18:14Joe Rogan?

  I love that dude.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  Dennis McKenna is a fantastic friend and scientist, and he's such a good man.

• 1:18:20Joe Rogan?

  Well, he does such a brilliant job of explaining the mechanism behind the stone ape theory. You know, like, Terrence had a great way of talking, he was so interesting to listen to, and had these wonderful ideas, but Dennis is like much more of a hardcore scientist.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  Dennis is a scientist and his brother was a philosopher.

• 1:18:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  And the Dennis McKenna Academy is a nonprofit. I'm just promoting it, just because I think they do really, really good work. But this is, you know...

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  The 23 primates eat mushrooms. Almost all mushrooms have maggots in them. Most primates eat maggots. So finding the mushrooms for maggots, for food, for protein. You know, two things can be true.

• 1:19:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  You can find the maggots, eat the mushrooms, and then get high as a community.

• 1:19:09Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  But all these, again, this is an example about the, you know, an example of the art that we see thousands of years ago. And we can debate this in the past, but we can test this. This is a testable hypothesis.

• 1:19:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  It's a theory now, it's not a hypothesis. We know that psilocybin stimulates neuron proliferation. Terrence did not have the, and Dennis did not have the scientific evidence for that.

• 1:19:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  30 years ago. We now have the evidence for it now. Terrence and Dennis McKenna should go down in evolutionary biology as the, as the two individuals that who could see in the far event horizon way before the scientific method. How did they come up with that? Because they were tripping on mushrooms.

• 1:19:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  That's why scientists using psychedelics is a quantum leap. You know, it's how PCR was invented.

• 1:19:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, Carey Mullis.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  Carey Mullis.

• 1:19:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  Had a trip on LSD.

• 1:19:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  Crick, crack and DNA.

• 1:20:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  And Stephen Jobs.

• 1:20:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  Silicon Valley is fueled by psychedelic thinkers who are becoming more creative. And we, I, I think we have a crisis in creativity. And psilocybin is a way for us to become smarter, more congenial, more collaborative.

• 1:20:16Joe Rogan?

  I couldn't agree more.

• 1:20:17Speaker 02

  You know, and I think we can, this combined psychedelics with AI, we have an opportunity for a quantum leap in, in the evolution of the human species.

• 1:20:26Joe Rogan?

  Would you mind explaining Time Wave Zero? Because we kind of glossed over that too. Hey, hey, hey, Big D Breck.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  I'm such a skeptic. Time Wave Zero is an algorithm that Terrence, one of his stone moments, I think. Terrence is the only person that I met who could smoke me under the table and could stand up and give an incredibly perfect lecture. I don't know how he could do it. But Time Wave Zero, and I'm sorry for those people who are Time Wave Zero experts, you can criticize me if you wish, but I admit my ignorance to a degree, is an algorithm that was created that would predict events in history.

• 1:20:59Joe Rogan?

  Would track novelty.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  Would track novelty and episodic events that changed the course of human history.

• 1:21:05Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  And then he had. Uh, time wave zero would end on twenty, uh, December twelfth, twenty twelve. And that's what he predicted.

• 1:21:25Joe Rogan?

  December twenty first.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, December twenty fourth, twenty twelve. And that didn't happen either.

• 1:21:29Joe Rogan?

  I used to have a license plate that said twelve, twenty one, twelve.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, but, but, you know, it's what I like about Terrence, and I would encourage all prospective scientists, if you don't worry about tenure, if you got a thick skin, dare to be wrong. Cause you dare to be wrong a dozen, twenty, thirty times, you might be hitting one or two concepts that is game changing.

• 1:21:53Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  Don't have the fear of failure inhibit your creativity.

• 1:21:57Joe Rogan?

  But that's a giant problem in the academic world is that people who do fail get attacked.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  Viciously.

• 1:22:03Joe Rogan?

  And especially with, they step outside the lines, they propose something that's novel, they get attacked. This time wave zero thing, like you, you used to be able to get it. It was an actual program that you could download and you could run it on your own computer.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's the thing I talked to Terrence, I go, well, what happens when, you know, that's like the birth of Jesus Christ?

• 1:22:22Joe Rogan?

  Where did he come up with that concept? Did you ask him about that?

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  No, I never figured it out. He goes, well, just adapt the algorithm. I said, okay, then it's not really, it's just something that's constantly adapting itself. So anyhow, it was a, it's a thought experiment and.

• 1:22:38Joe Rogan?

  And obviously, I wish he was alive. On December twenty first, two thousand twelve, I'd be like, end? And what? But maybe we're wrong. Maybe in that timeline, something did happen in December twenty first, two thousand twelve that will be recognized in the future.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  I, I doubt it.

• 1:22:53Joe Rogan?

  Well, this is what I'm getting to. One of the things that did happen in that timeframe is the ubiquitous use of social media. It kind of started peaking around two thousand twelve. I think there is a real problem with that, with, with the human race. And I don't necessarily think we recognize things that are constant. You know, I think we just get accustomed to things and human beings are very adaptable. And we just accept things that this is the way it is. But before that time, you know, when you, you get to like two thousand, you know, just go to two thousand, people weren't carrying their phones around, staring at them all day. There's a profound change in how we interface with the world.

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  You know, in Korea now, on the sidewalks, they have red bars that light up. To tell you to stop.

• 1:23:39Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  Because too many people are walking out into the street.

• 1:23:41Joe Rogan?

  Just standing there staring at their phones.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  So now they look down, they see that.

• 1:23:44Joe Rogan?

  They're so addictive. It's so crazy that we have, anything that's that addictive can't be good for you. I don't care if you're getting information all day long. And in the sense of social media, you're getting negative information all day long. So it changes the perspective.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  Tremendous amounts of clickbait.

• 1:24:04Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's the problem we were talking about, about the media earlier, about the media fueling this stuff. That's their job, unfortunately. In this day and age where no one's buying print journalism, their, their job is to get you to click on something. And so they have these crazy headlines.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  We need to really have a thoughtful discussion about all the issues that we are facing today, without being reactionary.

• 1:24:26Joe Rogan?

  Yes. And I think we need to disengage with these things that are clickbait. Just don't click on them. The way these things operate is the more you click on them, the more valuable they are, right? That's, that's the whole business model. Just don't engage with them. And we need to teach people that. Like, this is an important thing. Don't engage with something that's trying to manipulate you. Don't engage with these narratives that are being put forth by corporations that value your fear. They want you to be in this constant state of anxiety and fear, and they want you to be a dutiful consumer. And that's it.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  That's why, yeah, that's why high doses of psilocybin is not a very good business model.

• 1:25:05Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  As Michael Pollan likes to say.

• 1:25:07Joe Rogan?

  But it is a good business model for overall human compassion and growth and community.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  And then, of course, medium and microdosing. Really popular practice right now, increasingly popular, is a high dose of psilocybin once a year, and then microdosing just before you go to sleep. Or a medium dose, like the museum dose.

• 1:25:31Joe Rogan?

  Museum dose? I like it. You guys are such, you're such a fucking mushroom head that you have like museum doses. This is a movie dose. This is a concert dose. This is a date night dose.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  Graham Hancock and I and, and, and, and, um...

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  And some friends went to a museum, in the British Museum. And, but anyhow, the museum dosers just tend to, you can notice them because they wear sunglasses inside. Because otherwise they're pupils.

• 1:26:00Joe Rogan?

  Right, trying to keep it together, keep it together.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  But the idea of taking a museum dose, quote unquote, or a microdose before sleep, is thus when you're regenerating. That's when your body and your brain is regenerating. So, that is really, really interesting, is taking those, those.

• 1:26:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, that makes sense, especially from, like, an anti-aging protocol for the mind.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  And it's also safer.

• 1:26:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:25Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:26:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  You're in bed.

• 1:26:26Joe Rogan?

  You're not going anywhere.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  You're not going anywhere.

• 1:26:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, not driving a tractor.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  That's why I think clinical studies that look more and more at reducing the expense having people take the dose of medicine, psilocybin in this case, just before sleeping, they're in a safe place.

• 1:26:43Joe Rogan?

  You know, I had Bernie Sanders on the podcast yesterday, and one of the things that we talked about quite a bit was, what's going to happen with people when automation takes over, when AI and automation take over, and so many people are not working anymore. And we both kind of agree that universal basic income is really the only way to mitigate the disastrous effects of people losing their income, losing their jobs. And I think it's a good thing, but the problem with universal being basic income is that just giving people a check, they don't have, they don't have meaning anymore. They don't feel like they have a purpose, they don't feel like they have an identity.

• 1:27:25Joe Rogan?

  You know, if you're, your whole life you've been, you know, X, whatever the job is that gets taken away, and you recognize you're being really good at your job, and you take pride in that, and you're known by your coworkers, it's like, hey, go to Paul, he's the best, he'll take care of it, he knows what he's doing. And all of a sudden, that job disappears. How do people find value, and how do they switch their perspective? And talking to you today, I think, is perfect. Because I think if there's anything that could help us through this journey, that could help people make this transition, which appears to be inevitable, where artificial intelligence is going to do a far better job at a lot of menial tasks that people have been doing

• 1:28:05Joe Rogan?

  for an occupation for a long time, to find a search for meaning, to find some other way to realize value in life, and not just to be a cog in the wheel of this capitalist society, but instead, maybe psilocybin would allow people to completely change their perspective of how they exist in this world, and that you've been kind of trapped in this society where it values numbers, it values a constant growth for the shareholders, and it values what you can see in your bank account that's like not even real, it's all this digital

• 1:28:45Joe Rogan?

  money that's somewhere. Maybe psilocybin would be the best answer for how do people make this transition and reacquire a sense of meaning.

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, do you want to spend your whole life on an assembly line?

• 1:28:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  Or do you want to be out more in nature with your children?

• 1:29:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  That's why I think nature-relatedness, you know, is a mental health advantage. You know, the more that we can relate to nature.

• 1:29:09Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  And literally kind of go back to our roots, you know, re-engaging nature, I think this is, and then...

• 1:29:16Joe Rogan?

  And that would give you a sense of purpose.

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  Purpose.

• 1:29:18Joe Rogan?

  Instead of the job.

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  And also protection.

• 1:29:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  Of the mothership.

• 1:29:21Joe Rogan?

  But we've gotten so accustomed to this idea that your purpose is to make money, your purpose is to make a living, and we've accepted that, even though it's a fairly new concept in terms of the age of the earth. You know, this is a human-created concept, but it overwhelms our day-to-day existence. It doesn't have to, though, you know, but we, in this structure, the way we find ourselves now, you take away meaning, you take away a purpose in life, and you just give people a government check every month that covers everything, covers your food, covers your rent, covers... you don't need to make money anymore because everything is automated, everything is cheap, AI controls it all, so...

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  What was Bernie's answer to that?

• 1:30:05Joe Rogan?

  He didn't have one. Yeah, he didn't know. Um, but I don't know if Bernie's had any experiences in that regard. And he didn't have that perspective, but talking to you right afterwards might be the answer. Because this is an inevitable journey that we're on of of revolutionary change in how society is structured. But it doesn't have to be negative. The problem is the people that are in control of AI and these systems, the people that will benefit from them incredibly in a financial sense, those people are not having these experiences. And if they were having these experiences, they could be the only ones. If you if you have a benevolent person in an extreme position of power,

• 1:30:48Joe Rogan?

  they're probably the only people that can really do something about that. And I think it's very important that they hear this, that you realize like you're wasting this valuable moment in life trying to acquire money when we have this very unique opportunity to connect together in a way that people probably used to do on a regular basis in the past, but was always suppressed by the powers that be because of its revolutionary powers.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  If psilocybin increases creativity and creativity increases happiness and happiness upregulates the uh immunity of the community.

• 1:31:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's hard to be a dictator.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you gotta people, the dictators want people in constant conflict, fighting against each other. And you know, and they take advantage of that.

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  In a sense, you know, that that analogy that their patients had had about being in a rut, you know? Maybe we're in a societal rut.

• 1:31:44Joe Rogan?

  Oh, we certainly are.

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  This is the opportunity us for to be able to groom the landscape and to find new ways of of living and behaving.

• 1:31:53Joe Rogan?

  It might be the only way. It might be the only way we can get through this. Because if you if you think about what this problem is, the problem is is the way we interface with reality. That's really what it is. If we're, we have been interfacing with reality a very particular way, showing up at work every day, doing our job, getting a paycheck, employee of the month, yay. That's how you interface with reality most of your life. And then all of a sudden, you're met with this profound technological change that's going to eliminate your job. What, there needs to be some sort of a profound experience that reintegrates you with the mother. Like lets you know, like this is, this is something people made. This is something that people made, and most of the people that made it weren't having psychedelic experiences. And they're building cities, and they're building skyscrapers, and they're polluting the river, and they're doing all this stuff, and it doesn't mean

• 1:32:38Joe Rogan?

  that this is how we're supposed to do it.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. And I, again, I'm going to reiterate, I think we have a crisis in creativity. I think psilocybin and these other psychedelic stimulate creativity.

• 1:32:48Joe Rogan?

  No doubt.

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  Look at Alex and Alison Gray's work.

• 1:32:51Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:52Speaker 02

  I mean, some of the best psychedelic artists in the world.

• 1:32:55Joe Rogan?

  And the nicest people.

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  Inspired, the nicest people.

• 1:32:57Joe Rogan?

  Alex is like, like, he's a role model for like, being just a kind, nice, sweet person.

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  And Alex gave me some of the, the best advice I've ever received. And I just give Alex and Gray total credit for this. And I ask him, you know, like, this is my eighth book. Oh, my God, it's so much work to write a book. I didn't use any AI writing this book. I wrote the whole thing myself. And I asked Alex, you know, you're so prolific. How do you do it? He goes, I had one realization. Every day, I go up to that canvas with my brush, and I commit to making one stroke.

• 1:33:34Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  And then three, four hours later, he's still at the canvas.

• 1:33:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  It's that, which is just that tipping point, right?

• 1:33:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, calling the muse.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, just doing it. And

• 1:33:47Joe Rogan?

  Pressfield talked about that in The War of Art. Have you read that book?

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:33:51Joe Rogan?

  I've got copies of it. He sent me a whole box because back in Los Angeles, I used to keep a stack of them on the table and hand them out to people. It's all about creating things and resistance and this This thing that we all have where we were reluctant to sit down and actually do the work, but if you could just commit and he would, he calls it the muse. He like and many, many creative people over time have called upon the muse and this concept and it sounds like airy fairy to a lot of people, but if you believe in it and if you, you actually do that thing where you call upon the muse, it actually works. So whether or not it's real is irrelevant. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace.

• 1:34:35Joe Rogan?

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• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  I have, I have a muse and my partner asked me, you know, a few, a few months ago, how many more hours do you have to work on this book? She saw me working, uh, work on the book for two and a half years and I said, oh, more than 500 hours. She goes, 500 hours? This is so much discipline. And if you, anyone, any writers of books, any people build a house, if you comprehended the enormity of the project, you probably wouldn't even start, right?

• 1:36:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I can't think like that. You just gotta think about the process.

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  The process and so I had this little voice in my head, um, that I would wake up and I didn't want to feel guilty about it, but I, you know, I had this little voice saying, work on the book, Paul. Work on the book, work on the book, work on the book, work on the book, work on the book. I could say it, work on the book so fast because I have reiterated it in my head hundreds of times that it became sort of my muse, it became sort of a fun muse.

• 1:36:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  I think we all have these little voices that kind of, you know, says, you know, get it right, Stan. It's, you know, wake up.

• 1:36:38Joe Rogan?

  I think so too.

• 1:36:39Speaker 02

  And I think that's good. I don't think that's, you know, psychosis. I think that's something that we all have, these little voices that are trying to help us to be better and.

• 1:36:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, whether it's internal or external, whatever it is, you can have a voice.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  It's like working out, the discipline of being able to, to make sure that you're the best that you can be. So it's a very exciting times that we live in and there's a mushroom revolution happening all over the planet.

• 1:37:08Joe Rogan?

  I think there's a psychedelic revolution that's happening over the planet. I think it's happened over the last 20 years and I think it's happened because of the internet. And that's a big factor because what they did in the 1970s by, you know, what the Nixon administration did, which is essentially to squash the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. What they did really fucked up society for a long time and it put in people's heads that this is how we're supposed to be. That these laws that are in place make sense and that they're there in order for society to function at its optimal levels. It's just not true. And unfortunately, like a lot of things that get, that propaganda gets pushed and people start accepting that propaganda as fact.

• 1:37:50Joe Rogan?

  It takes a long time relatively in our lifetimes to sort of recognize that this is not right. And this is not how we should have been living the entire time. It's just as we were trapped, we were trapped in the system. And because of the internet and because of conversations and because of people like you that talk about this openly and many, many others as well. We're all contributing to this base of knowledge where. People are in their car right now, sort of reconsidering their perspective. They're at the gym right now, on the treadmill, thinking about this, going, yeah, why do, why do we allow these human beings that have never had these experiences to tell us that these experiences are not just not allowed, but if you get caught with these things, you'll be put in a cage.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, because we are, we are, those of us from the psychedelic community who advocate for the freedom of consciousness as a basic civil right, we are by definition disruptors to authoritarianism.

• 1:38:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  So, you know, this is what, this is why I think, unfortunately, in many cultures, it become restricted to just a small group of priests, cognoscenti, they wanted to control, have gates to heaven, or the control of consciousness. And so I'm, I think that, you know, it's so exciting about psilocybin and psilocybin mushrooms as a practice and hunting mushrooms in general, it just gives you a quality of life that's just a game changer.

• 1:39:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  Now with iNaturalist and everything that you can do, it's just getting people out in nature with their children, children are closer to the ground so they find more mushrooms.

• 1:39:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:27Speaker 02

  They're, you know, they're away from the business and their parents and the phones, you know, some phones, but you get them involved and, and interacting with nature is just, it's just really, it's like the telescope and seeing all the galaxies and...

• 1:39:45Joe Rogan?

  I think interacting with nature is a vitamin.

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Joe Rogan?

  I think it's just, it's like, you know how we get vitamin D from the sun? I think we get something that hasn't been measured yet from interacting with nature. We, we know that there's an allevi, you can, you can actually study an alleviation of stress levels from people that go out into nature and this, this thing that we're experiencing, we just don't know how to measure it.

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Joe Rogan?

  You know, and I, I think it's a real thing. One of the things that makes me very happy and hopeful now is that you're seeing this,

• 1:40:19Joe Rogan?

  This openness to psychedelics that's coming from more right wing people. And it was always a thing of the left. It was always a thing of hippies and it was dismissed by people on the right as people that were trying to avoid reality. They were trying to, you know, escape reality. They couldn't handle reality. They weren't disciplined. They weren't, you know, if they were hardworking people, they wouldn't be wasting their time getting high on drugs. There's that thought. I think one of the bridges to that is the benefit that it's had for soldiers. For soldiers and for people that are first responders, people that suffer from PTSD. And that has trickled down into the general population of the people on the right, which

• 1:41:04Joe Rogan?

  is how you get a guy like Rick Perry, is all the sort of becoming this very strong advocate for Abogaine and having it passed in Texas. So the initiative passed, which is huge.

• 1:41:14Speaker 02

  It's huge.

• 1:41:15Joe Rogan?

  It's a promising step in the direction of understanding that a lot of the division that we have in this country is artificial. It's manufactured.

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  It is. Out of the blue, a country music singer, which I had no idea who she was, Kacey Musgraves. She's superstar country music.

• 1:41:33Joe Rogan?

  I'm out of the loop.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  She reached out to me and she had a psilocybin experience that inspired her. She has an album called Deeper Well that's just amazing. I was not in the country music until I listened to her. And she reached out to me because of her psilocybin experience. And we decided to do Sing for Science. We sold out the Rogan Theater in Nashville in three hours.

• 1:41:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  2,500 people. These are country music people. 2,500 people, three hours. Unfortunately, she was in Mexico. She fell and she broke a rib, so we had to cancel the concert until September 18th for the Sing for Science. But that is an example.

• 1:42:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, I think my friend Sturgill Simpson sort of opened up the door for psychedelics and country music with Turtles All the Way Down. Now, he basically wrote a song about God and psychedelics.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  It's, you know, I-

• 1:42:26Joe Rogan?

  That was a country song. And everybody's like, hey, what the hell's going on?

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  It's funny because psychedelics build bridges that marijuana doesn't. It's I met a lot of people who would never smoke a joint, but the idea of doing a psilocybin mushroom sounded like fun to them.

• 1:42:41Joe Rogan?

  Right. Well, marijuana is also associated with lazy people and ne'er-do-wells and stinky people with bad ideas, you know, unfortunately. And I think, you know, look, there's a, one of the things that's interesting is the jujitsu community is there's a lot of stoners in the jujitsu community.

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  Lot of people using psychedelics for athletic performance.

• 1:43:06Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. Well, I know a bunch of people who fought on mushrooms.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10Joe Rogan?

  You know, I have a friend who was a world-class kickboxer who had some of his greatest performances while he was fighting on mushrooms. And he said he could see what the guy was gonna do before he did it.

• 1:43:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is the indigenous use of psilocybin is to see into the future. That's one of the things of advantages I think I've had also, being able to prognosticate into the future. There's a, we had this extraordinary individual told me a story, which I think I have right, but I'm gonna share it with you. There's a game that's very common, even in the Philippines, but in Canada, it's a German game eventually. And the idea is you put nails on a block of wood and use an ice pick. And you have to hammer the nail in with one hit. And each time in a bar or a party or whatever, people throw down money, five dollars, twenty dollars, etc.

• 1:44:00Joe Rogan?

  A nail on an ice pick. So you have the point of the ice pick, you gotta hit that nail at the very point.

• 1:44:03Speaker 02

  And sink it, and sink it all the way into the wood. So, of course, you go around, people are drinking, etc. So the story, as I remember him telling me, is that he went to the bathroom, he's not a toker, he doesn't smoke pot, but someone said, hey, you want some mushrooms? And they're playing this game. And there was a, a bunch of his friends were gathered and, and he goes, oh, sure, I'll try some mushrooms. So he ate some mushrooms and he came back and he's in the circle of Zerim, people are betting, hey, come over and join us, join us, you know? And he watched for a while, never had played this game. And then he started getting higher and higher. And they say, come on, it's your turn. So he kinda looked at the nail, I mean, this is really hard to do. Looked at the nail and looked at the nail and focused on it.

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  He said he had such clarity of focus that everything else was blanked out. He looked at the nail and he just thought that it would connect. Rather than hitting it, they would just connect. Ah. Bam! Slam the nail down on the first attempt. People went, "Whoa, incredible." So they put down, each person put down more money going around. So they came around, everyone's missing, everyone's missing. Some people occasionally hit it a little bit, you know, but came around, came around to him. Now he's getting higher on the mushrooms, right? And he's looking at it, looking at it, and he goes,

• 1:45:21Speaker 02

  bam! Slams it again. People going, "No way, right? This is impossible, right?" So now, you know, there's a lot of money being piled up on the table here. They're coming around and everyone's going, "Impossible, not gonna happen, can't do it a third time in a row." Looked at it, laser focused, bam, slammed it again. Now people are losing their shit, right? They're like, "What is going on here?" And so he said, "Really the fuck with one guy who was just out of his mind that he could do this three times in a row." He went around again, and this time he says, "I'm gonna really blow his mind." So he focused on the nail, focused on nail, had the hammer, looked at him, bam! Slams it again. While he's looking at it. And nailed it. Yeah, literally nailed it.

• 1:46:06Speaker 02

  So, so these examples of- Well, that brings you to the stone date theory, right? Well, it's the idea that- This is part of the concept, is it? Well, part of the concept is, you know, with intense focus. Right. You know, and many years, I've, I have two black belts. I had schools for thirty years, black belt in Taekwondo and Hwarangdo. I was in Shodo Konchidoru, Gojiru, and then Taekwondo, and then Hwarangdo, which is like a Hap Kido. But that idea of having a three-dimensional perspective. One of my best, one of my fun experiences, I was in the Dojang, or Dojo, Japanese Dojang. Korean, yeah. It's Korean.

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  And I had my first black belt, and, and my head instructor was over there talking, talking at someone, and then he had a baseball. And I heard later what he said, he goes, I told my friend, watch this, and he threw a baseball at me, my peripheral vision, boom, I just caught the baseball and, you know, just before it hit my head. But that idea of having that consciousness surrounding, that's why athleticism with medium doses, minor doses of psilocybin, I think you can train your neurons to be able to have this peripheral awareness that's extremely important.

• 1:47:23Joe Rogan?

  It also alleviates the anxiety that comes before performance. There's a lot of people like to use it before sparring. You go sparring is kinda scary for some people.

• 1:47:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, but let's be clear, this is like the eighty twenty principle, maybe the ninety ten principle, it's not gonna work for the majority of people. There are exceptional individuals who can actually benefit from this.

• 1:47:43Joe Rogan?

  I like your little disclaimer.

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, no disclaimer there, I don't wanna make.

• 1:47:46Joe Rogan?

  No, none of the things that we said.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  I drove this race car.

• 1:47:49Joe Rogan?

  Listen, don't take any of our advice, but we're just talking about these things because there are anecdotal stories that are, they're fascinating.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  And anecdotal stories are like case studies in medicine. You get enough of them that you wanna test this. Again, this is a testable hypothesis or theory in modern times.

• 1:48:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:48:09Speaker 02

  Eye-hand coordination, you know, so psychomotor enhancement, you know, and this is why when, you know, the Stamet Stack is, it speaks to this, we published in Nature Scientific Reports, and a combination of psilocybin, niacin, and lion's mane increased psychomotor ability of tapping in ten seconds from forty-six to sixty-six taps.

• 1:48:30Joe Rogan?

  That's a lot.

• 1:48:30Speaker 02

  That's a lot in ten seconds.

• 1:48:33Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:48:33Speaker 02

  Over thirty days. So, people can argue about it, but the results are the results. You know, when you're talking about depression, anxiety, that's subjective, but I'm really interested in the psychomotor benefits of psilocybin with an admixture to enhance, you know, its performance. I think the root thing is psilocybin, and being able to regenerate neurons is something I think is really important for us. Now, with glioblastoma, you know, which unfortunately Terrence did die from that, that's uncontrolled, you know, proliferation of neurons in the brain. Yeah, there's, sure, there's contraindications.

• 1:49:09Joe Rogan?

  Do you think there's something that's connected to that?

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  No, not, I personally don't, no.

• 1:49:13Joe Rogan?

  Why not?

• 1:49:13Speaker 02

  Um, just because I.

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  Mum, I don't have evidence to the contrary. I don't have evidence that also suggests that. I see no correlation. N of 1 is not, you know, it's, again, there's no-

• 1:49:28Joe Rogan?

  Well, because it's not a common thing amongst people that are using psilocybin.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  But if you had 8 million people in the United States, you know, consuming psilocybin, again, you have a data set.

• 1:49:38Joe Rogan?

  Right. So like, it's not like cigarettes, right? We see cigarettes, we know, you smoke cigarettes, there's a higher likelihood that you're gonna get lung cancer, right? It's very clear. So we've known that over time. The problem with psilocybin is, it's been so taboo, and so we don't have real data, we don't have, you know-

• 1:49:56Speaker 02

  But there's 235 clinical studies on psilocybin at clinicaltrials.gov right now.

• 1:50:03Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that amazing?

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  235.

• 1:50:05Joe Rogan?

  Could you have imagined that 25 years ago?

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  No, there was none.

• 1:50:07Joe Rogan?

  Impossible.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, none. And there are for many indications, many different targets, from addiction, cigarettes, you know, alcohol, opioid use, to dementia, to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, et cetera. So there's, you know, I think psilocybin has a PR problem, it sounds too good to be true, but, you know, sometimes things can be true, that have, but, but the reason why I think that there's 235 clinical studies is because, basically, it's improving your neuroscape. You're improving the neurology. Everything that we're using right now is based to our health of our nervous system.

• 1:50:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:50:44Speaker 02

  And in the neuroscape, if we can enrich the neuroscape, then that has elaborations into everything that we do. And the fact that coupled with anti-inflammatory activities and neurogenesis and neuroregeneration, neurogeneration, neuroplasticity, which is synaptogenesis, the neurons proliferate and then they shake hands, and then suddenly you have a new pathway. So-

• 1:51:06Joe Rogan?

  There's anti-inflammatory properties?

• 1:51:08Speaker 02

  Psilocin has strong anti-inflammatory properties as well. So that's, that's, just has come out in the scientific literature. So that's

• 1:51:17Joe Rogan?

  I wasn't aware of that.

• 1:51:18Speaker 02

  That's really interesting.

• 1:51:20Joe Rogan?

  How did they study that? And what was the?

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  They had something called interleukin six. There was a clinical study that was just published just recently and a down regulated. It's a tumor necrosis factor interleukin six. A down regulated that's an inflammatory cytokine. There's two anti inflammatory cytokines that are extraordinarily interesting to us and our research team. I have five PhD scientists, eight full time scientists. That's why I created my business is to do research. But interleukin ten and interleukin one RA are anti inflammatory cytokines. So when you can up regulate those, then it kind of buffers the inflammatory effects. And so that's exciting to find these anti inflammatory.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  That's we were approved by the FDA for a COVID clinical trial. Based on the fact that we published this in the Journal of Inflammation Research. That interleukin ten and interleukin one RA were stimulated by agarikon and turkey tail mycelium. Going on rice versus the rice control. So it's a peer reviewed article. When, you know, the pandemic started, the big concern was if you stimulate the immune system, you could have a cytokine storm and you could overwhelm, you know, the body with many. It's been said many, if not most people die from cytokine storm. Is there a overreaction of the immune system to COVID and to other diseases?

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  So we were able to show you can augment in the literature. Uh, your immune system buffered with the anti inflammatory properties. And that that sort of resolves the argument of the of the cytokine storm concern. And then now we have a very successful study that shows that agarikon and turkey tail mycelium. Um, enhances the immunity of individuals long term.

• 1:53:20Joe Rogan?

  That big mushroom that you gave me?

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, you still have that.

• 1:53:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's right there, baby.

• 1:53:24Speaker 02

  That's a trophy.

• 1:53:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Oh, it's never leaving the desk. That sucker.

• 1:53:29Speaker 00

  And this is a great example because this is an endangered species.

• 1:53:35Speaker 02

  In Europe, it's on the red list of extinction.

• 1:53:37Joe Rogan?

  In Europe it is?

• 1:53:37Speaker 02

  In Europe, these are growth rings. So this one's probably 25 years old. It's a very nice specimen. Stamets gave you this?

• 1:53:44Joe Rogan?

  Yes, damn it, you gave me this, buddy.

• 1:53:46Speaker 02

  It's one of the nicest specimens. So these are annual growth rings.

• 1:53:48Joe Rogan?

  Isn't it cool to see it on the desk?

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  I'd love it, thank you.

• 1:53:51Joe Rogan?

  People always ask, what the hell is that?

• 1:53:53Speaker 02

  So this is a agarikon called Phomytophus officinalis, also known as Larisophomies. Diaschridis first described in Greek medicine 2,000 years ago as Elixirium ad longem vitum, the elixir of long life.

• 1:54:06Joe Rogan?

  If someone took a little piece of that and put it in the ground, would it start making new agarikon mushrooms?

• 1:54:11Speaker 02

  If they had spores, it looks like it goes inside the roots of trees. This one being as old as it is, and being, its spores have probably become not viable. But agarikon has the white form and the brown form. It goes through this massive transition as biochemistry. And because it's endangered and because highly variable in form, fruit body extracts of this makes no sense.

• 1:54:34Joe Rogan?

  Why is it endangered in Europe and not in America?

• 1:54:37Speaker 02

  Only grows in old growth forests.

• 1:54:38Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 1:54:39Speaker 02

  So, the sky islands in Europe, in Austria, Slovenia, is where this still can be found on larch trees. We now have, I think, 115 strains of agarikon, by far the largest library in the world. If you ask me, what is my most valuable possession? It's my strain library of agarikon. It's, you know, it's a treasure of strains. One out of 20, one out of 100 times in the old growth forests will I find one? So, we don't collect these unless it's going to be clear cut, or we find them on the ground, or if it's on my own property. And then I take a small piece of tissue.

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  It's the mycelium that is bioactive for the immune system. And this is what we found that were, it's scalable, the mycelium's scalable, the fruit body extracts are not, and it's highly variable. Most, people don't know that. Well, they should know, but most mushrooms are parasitized by insects. And that's because insects spread spores. So the mushrooms invite insects to come in. So it can spread spores.

• 1:55:44Joe Rogan?

  Like cordyceps and ants.

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, or like buzz pollination.

• 1:55:48Joe Rogan?

  That's the weirdest thing, when you see spiders and ants overwhelmed by cordyceps.

• 1:55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, um, I like to say cordyceps has to eat too.

• 1:55:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, this is the cycle of life, right?

• 1:55:59Speaker 02

  So this agarikon is, is in the BioShield Bio-Defense Program.

• 1:56:04Joe Rogan?

  Which, by the way, this is your company, Host Defense. You have great stuff, man. I buy your stuff.

• 1:56:10Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:56:11Joe Rogan?

  You gave me a bunch of it, but I buy it.

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  Well, thank you for your support. We need it. I mean, I'm the only company that does research that I know of. I spend over a million dollars a year in fundamental research, thinking outside of the box. Even though traditional Chinese medicine is fantastic and has like thousands of years of history, all traditional medicines advance with new technologies. That's true across the board. The invention of in vitro propagation about 100 years ago, growing mycelium, now opens up this huge opportunity for us to dive into a deeper well of natural substances that can be used as adjunct therapies to enhance conventional medicine. It's a game changer.

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  So 115 strains of agarikon, I submitted eight of them to the BioShield Bio-Defense Program after 9/11, 2004. My TED Talk talks about this. And I found two or three strains highly active against smallpox and also against bird flu. And if you go to National Public Radio, put stamens in smallpox, you'll see a vetted press release, you know, from DOD and the head of the BioShield Program, Jack Seacrest, saying that, whoops, these are some of the most significant results they've ever seen.

• 1:57:22Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:57:23Speaker 02

  The only, 2 million samples submitted were in the top 10, the only natural product. Now, that's in vitro. So that in vitro, this is sort of a timeline, and you don't have boy with a microphone, do you, Jamie?

• 1:57:35Joe Rogan?

  What is that?

• 1:57:36Speaker 02

  You didn't see it? Okay.

• 1:57:38Joe Rogan?

  What is boy with a microphone?

• 1:57:39Speaker 02

  It's a 42-second clip we found in the vault. And it talks, it's me with my son when he's four years old, and I'm on the phone saying, "I've created this company to do research. Research is what we want to do. Truly, that's the origins of what I was trying, why I created my business. So I still do that. So with the 115 strains, we're likely to have a super strain in our collection. Pandemics are coming all the time. We're in a viral storm. This is a bird flu pandemic where many of us are so surprised that it has not happened at a bigger level. But viral pandemics are also affecting other animals besides birds and pigs. 67% of beehives were lost in Montana this past year.

• 1:58:24Speaker 02

  67%. Imagine if you had 67% loss of a herd of cattle or sheep.

• 1:58:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

  That's phenomenal.

• 1:58:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:58:32Speaker 02

  And bird flu is spreading. It's making the jumps. It is coming, folks. And so what we want to do is design a clinical study using a garrickon to test against bird flu.

• 1:58:42Joe Rogan?

  I'd be interested to see what, if anything, could be done with some of these mushrooms with chronic wasting disease, which is a huge concern among deer population and even some other animals like moose and I think even elk.

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  We're embedded into a mycelial landscape. Mycelium is everywhere. The interactions of mycelium and animals, you know, is elaborate, complex. This is crazy, and if anyone out here can prove me wrong, please send me the reference. But it appears I'm the first person to realize that bees go to rotted logs for the mycelium for immunological benefit.

• 1:59:21Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  First person. How is that possible? We all grew up with Winnie the Pooh. I mean, this is mind-boggling. Like, again, hiding us, it doesn't take a stroke of genius, but in my case, I had the bioshield results, and then I heard about colony colps being vectored primarily by mites. This past year, they identified the miticide-resistant mites, which most all of them are now, are vectors of the deformed wing virus. Colony colps is a threat to food biosecurity, and we found, and we published this in Nature Scientific Reports, extracts of polycore mushroom mycelium.

• 1:59:56Speaker 02

  Protects bees from viruses. We published that in Nature Scientific Reports, I'm the primary author. We were able to reduce viruses, the deformed wing virus, by I think 879 times in 12 days with one treatment. So that is phenomenal for protecting food biosecurity. That helps all farmers. It helps, and there's a pandemic that's spreading, 67% loss, 60% loss generally across the United States this year. The worst colony collapse in history. This will make food prices go up and it doesn't stop because these viruses are proliferating throughout the environment. We found that the palipore mushroom mycelium, grown on grain or grown on sawdust, not only

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  reduces these viruses, but extends longevity. And so the longevity, and interesting that this mushroom is known as Elixirium ad Long Vitam, the elixir of long life. We are all, bees are animals, birds are animals, you know, pigs are animals, humans are animals. We are all, I think, can have an immunological benefit from incorporating these fungi. Now, we're allowed by the FDA to say supporting innate immunity in healthy individuals. We're not allowed to make any disease claims. Ironically, we can't make that same claim with bees. We can say extends longevity, but this is where there's not common sense in government.

• 2:01:22Speaker 02

  I have an invention that could save hundreds of billions of dollars that protect bees from colony collapse and we're roadblocked by regulations constantly. Oh, reduce viruses in bees, you have an antiviral drug. What is that? No, we haven't been able to find the antiviral drug. We think it's an entourage effect, an upregling, you know, basic immunity. And then your endogenous immune system, in this case of the bees, can fight the viruses. So, and this, I think, will translate into birds, into swine.

• 2:01:54Joe Rogan?

  So there's resistance to these results?

• 2:01:56Speaker 02

  No, because your immunity is so complex.

• 2:01:59Joe Rogan?

  No, no, no, I mean publicly. Like you're saying, you can't make these claims, but if you have results.

• 2:02:06Speaker 02

  We have fantastic results. I refer anyone to Nature Scientific Reports.

• 2:02:11Joe Rogan?

  So could you elaborate on what the resistance is?

• 2:02:14Speaker 02

  Well, the resistance is complicated and it's political.

• 2:02:20Speaker 02

  The old school conventional wisdom is that if you have a drug-like effect, then you have an undeclared drug in your product.

• 2:02:30Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that funny?

• 2:02:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:31Joe Rogan?

  Nature.

• 2:02:32Speaker 02

  So even though, even though it's from nature, even though bees go to rotting logs for immune benefit, and now there's five or six papers that have been published on this after my discovery, showing that bees are doing this, that bees are actually benefiting from mushroom mycelium. So, we're, we're working with Washington State University, great people there, we're working with several funders. We have tested this now, over and over again. This is an outdoor animal clinical study, double-blind, placebo-controlled, using the mycelium grown on rice or on sawdust versus the sawdust or the rice as a control. Clearly, clearly a benefit. So this is scalable.

• 2:03:16Speaker 02

  You can't harvest fruit bodies in a way that you can scale mycelium. Mycelium is exponential increase in mycelial mass virtually every week, 10 times 10 times 10 times 10, or even 10 times 100 times 100 times 100, massively scalable. I think I have found something as a portal through my psychedelic experiences, that's fundamental to protecting life on this planet, is that the mycelial networks are deep reservoirs, being able to immunologically enhance animals, where we don't have to have these, all these antiviral drugs, antibiotic drugs. Your endogenous immune systems are up-regulated, because over hundreds of millions of years, we've been interacting with these. It's our immunodepression and suppression, because of all those factors, we know, bad

• 2:03:58Speaker 02

  diet, toxins, you know, lifestyle, all those things, that this is highly scalable. So now we're trying to navigate through the regulatory landscape. There was this strange committee, that was in secret, met once a year, for any new ingredient to add to bees, because bees make honey, humans can say, honey, if we use our product, they could say, we have undisclosed drug in the honey, so, whatever. But it also translates to wild bees. It turns out that Apis malefira, the honeybee, with their viruses, when they have the viruses, they go to flowers frequented by bumblebees. So colony collapse is happening, not only with the cultivated... Honeybee, but it's spread to other bees.

• 2:04:39Speaker 02

  This is an ecological catastrophe of a viral pandemic that's spreading around the world. We have the solution right now, it's highly scalable. And this regulatory committee disappeared in the past two years. This is before the last administration was evicted in. But they didn't tell anybody. So we had an application with them for two years to have this exempted. The whole committee's gone? The whole committee is gone. They didn't even tell us that it was gone. So we've had two years spinning our thumbs, waiting for them to respond. This is where we need to have common sense to come back into government. This is where our government has too many hurdles to practical solutions that are demonstratable, scalable, and affordable. That can, the return on investment is massive.

• 2:05:23Speaker 02

  And yet, we fear the FDA, we fear the USDA because they are stuck in a rut, literally. Maybe they could use psilocybin here, to expand their horizons because they want to know the mode of action, the mechanism of action. Well, we didn't know the mechanism of action of aspirin until the 1970s. But it had a benefit. If it has a clear benefit and does not cause harm, then they should be exempted for scalability. Now, there's another factor to this, which is wonderful. There's a new startup company called Quorum by my friend Chris Kachivitz, Disclosure, you know, I'm involved with them. But they have a Meterysium, a fungus that kills mites.

• 2:06:05Speaker 02

  So it's also been approved by the USDA for thrips and some other greenhouse insects. It's not toxic to fish, not toxic to humans. So the combination of using Meterysium with the Agarikon and other Polypore mushroom mycelium, we think has a great potential future. So I think there's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional agricultural practices. There's a lot of resources in nature that can augment conventional medical practices. They are not necessarily in opposition. What is in opposition, unfortunately, and you've alluded to this, is a lot of the pharmaceutical business interests

• 2:06:48Speaker 02

  are not excited about a natural product. Reducing the need for vaccines, augmenting immunity. There is money in disease.

• 2:06:57Joe Rogan?

  Right. That's always the problem, money.

• 2:07:01Speaker 02

  You can tell I'm passionate about this because I have such a deliverable, provable solution that's scalable.

• 2:07:06Joe Rogan?

  I wonder.

• 2:07:07Speaker 02

  And I'm so, my article was published in 2018 and I tell my research team, you know, WTF, we are meeting with WSU constantly and now we have renewed interest, thankfully because of some big stakeholders in the almond industry. And every almond you eat was visited, a flower was visited by a bee. So the almond industry is in crisis right now, but it's not almonds. It's apples, it's cherries, it's across the board right now. Agriculture has been severely affected by these viral pandemics and these same viral pandemics are mitigated, I believe, in commonality with these polycore mushrooms that grow in the woods.

• 2:07:44Joe Rogan?

  I wonder if that would also help animal agriculture because like the ubiquitous use of antibiotics is a real concern with people, with cows and with chickens and.

• 2:07:52Speaker 02

  We had the, there's a viral pandemic of a form of bird flu, not H5N1, but another bird flu, I can't remember, I think it was H7N2 in Iowa and Minnesota about 10 years ago. They were euthanizing millions and millions of chickens and turkeys and ducks. You can look this up. There's organic farm and we gave one quarter of a gram of garacon mycelium per chicken in their feed. And we became, that chicken, there's two big chicken hens, about 20,000 layers, birds that lay eggs. And it became an oasis of immunity. Those chickens were immune from bird flu.

• 2:08:35Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  A quarter of a gram of this mycelium.

• 2:08:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:08:38Speaker 02

  And we protected them.

• 2:08:39Joe Rogan?

  That's incredible.

• 2:08:40Speaker 02

  But a crazy thing happened. The USDA had an insurance policy to pay the chicken growers. And the chicken growers quickly learned that they could get an insurance check, lay off the employees, get the cash for lost profits. And so they were not incentivized.

• 2:08:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I've heard that from people that are deeply connected to that industry, that there was a bunch of euthanizations that didn't have to happen.

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  Didn't have to happen.

• 2:09:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and they did it and they inflated this whole concept, you know, because they, the numbers got grossly inflated because they were euthanizing chickens for profit.

• 2:09:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, bird flu is a very serious, serious issue now. I know vaccines are a very hot subject. And I know you've spoken on that. You've had some excellent guests, by the way. Excellent guests or researchers on this. But I just want to give a thoughtful discussion. Between viruses and vaccines, which is worse? The virus or the vaccine? I'm a libertarian. I believe every family, every individual, has a right to make an informed decision. The problem that I see with the vaccine industry, the industrial vaccine complex,

• 2:09:59Speaker 02

  is the failure to disclose. I don't think Americans are stupid. I think Americans become stupid when they're not informed. My partner is a physician. She goes, giving Hep B vaccines to a child makes no sense. This is sexually transmitted disease. Why are you giving a vaccine to a ten-year-old?

• 2:10:21Joe Rogan?

  Right, or a baby.

• 2:10:22Speaker 02

  Or a baby. And in med school, when anyone would mention that, why are we doing this? They were vilified.

• 2:10:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:10:27Speaker 02

  Vilified, shut down. It's like, what happened to thoughtful, good science? It's just a reasonable question.

• 2:10:32Joe Rogan?

  Money happened. It's also, these vaccine manufacturers are immune to the financial consequences of the side effects.

• 2:10:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely. We need to have full disclosure.

• 2:10:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:44Speaker 02

  Now, let me go through a thought experiment.

• 2:10:46Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:10:46Speaker 02

  Listen, this is my opinion. Other people may just viciously disagree with me. But let's do, there's two thought experiments I want to do. First one. Million lives were saved with a vaccine. One person dies. Hey, you took it for the home team. Sorry. One person dies out of a hundred thousand. Still, the ratio is pretty good. My mind, my judgment, sorry, again, you took it for the home team. One out of 10,000. Hmm, okay. Still, the ratio is pretty good. Okay. One out of 1,000. So, okay, one out of 100, you're making me nervous. One out of 10. No, that's where I draw the line. I would say, forget it. That's, now...

• 2:11:29Speaker 02

  The contradiction that we have, the opposing forces here that we have, is that is it better for society to have vaccinations to protect the commons? Or is it better for you to have an individual decision for your family to protect yourself if you want to? If you are going to make that decision, you should have an informed decision

• 2:11:54Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:11:54Speaker 02

  Based on the best of science. All vaccines and all companies should disclose what is the percentage of protection? I have a physician friend who says 30% protection, but I'm sick for four or five days. I don't know, that's not worth it. 70% protection? Okay, alright, you know? So everyone has to balance the risk benefit ratio.

• 2:12:20Joe Rogan?

  But we need real data to be able to make that assessment.

• 2:12:22Speaker 02

  We need the real data. We need full disclosure.

• 2:12:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:12:25Speaker 02

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

• 2:12:51Joe Rogan?

  Or the most compromised.

• 2:12:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they drown out a dissent.

• 2:12:55Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:56Speaker 02

  We all should be able to ask for the data and the information to make an individual decision.

• 2:13:01Joe Rogan?

  And science shouldn't be this ideological or ideologically captured thing.

• 2:13:07Speaker 02

  That's why I hate the term anti-vaxxers. I think it's a pejorative term. I think it's prejudiced. You know, what about people who just want to have information? Oh, you're an anti-vaxxer.

• 2:13:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, it's pushed just to scare people into compliance. And that's the whole idea. Having these pejoratives and throw them around and no one wants to be labeled that. And so you immediately get scared.

• 2:13:28Speaker 02

  But enhancing innate immunity.

• 2:13:32Speaker 02

  And healthy individuals to keep us healthy.

• 2:13:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. How could that be bad?

• 2:13:37Speaker 02

  That's that's better.

• 2:13:38Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. Well, that's the other problem that I had with the pandemic in general is that metabolic health was never discussed. It was always that there's only one way out of this. And having conversations with people that you could see, like visually look at them does not a metabolically healthy person. And these people are telling you the only way to health is through a medicine that they are financially incentivized to push. That's just crazy. And when those are the prominent voices that are on television and the media, and you're getting this from politicians, and then on top of that, you've literally have the federal government censoring social media and not allowing people to have dissenting opinions, including people from Harvard and MIT and all the people in the Great Barrington Study.

• 2:14:20Speaker 02

  Why don't we have an open source?

• 2:14:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:22Speaker 02

  National database showing the protection of vaccines and the risk of not getting one. So individuals can make a decision.

• 2:14:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:14:30Speaker 02

  Age related, all these other factors. The data is there. Not making that data available to the public increases distrust.

• 2:14:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:14:41Speaker 02

  And so what the the medical community has unfortunately done is they've bred a bunch of dissenters by not giving full access to the information.

• 2:14:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think that really heightened during the pandemic, because I don't think people had that much of a distrust for vaccines unless they knew someone who was vaccine injured, unless they were gaslit and were told that their child or someone else that had gotten vaccine injured, that that was not the cause of it. And those are the people that were very skeptical and they formed these tight community, but they were very scared to be open in public about it because they were destroyed. You know, I famously remember Jenny McCarthy coming out and saying that she believes her child was vaccine injured. And the backlash was spectacular, essentially destroyed her career.

• 2:15:25Speaker 02

  Well, and one experiments are always like, did it really happen? Or was it just a co-occurrence of some other factor that combined with the event of the vaccination?

• 2:15:34Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:34Speaker 02

  I mean, this is where you need to have high population studies, but those studies are available. Why they're cloaked in secrecy and why are they not made available?

• 2:15:42Joe Rogan?

  It's money.

• 2:15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:44Joe Rogan?

  I mean, the, the financial interest is astounding, the amount of money that's involved in it and the amount of money that they spend every year. They spend eight billion dollars, pharmaceutical drug industry spends eight billion dollars just on advertising and on propaganda every year. That's so much money. And they're, they spend so much money on television networks. You know, I mean, how many times you Anderson Cooper brought to you by Pfizer. You see these ads and that shapes the narrative, unfortunately.

• 2:16:13Speaker 02

  It does, but let me, again, just be clear, from my point of view, vaccines have done a lot of benefit, but they don't benefit everyone all the time. Not all vaccines are the same. Um, we have to be able to delineate a thoughtful, scientific method with disclosed information.

• 2:16:35Joe Rogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:16:35Speaker 02

  Um, that's accessible to everyone so you can make the best judgment for yourself and your family.

• 2:16:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and you've got to remove this financial protection that they have from liability because if they don't have that, they're going to just jack up the amount that they give people because there's profit in that, unfortunately. And then there are vaccines that are beneficial. Let's find out which ones they are, which one, what, what can be mitigated in terms of like, how can you make your overall metabolic health better before you even think about any of these things? We know for a fact that during the COVID crisis in particular, the people that had the most problem with it were the people that had comorbidities, or people that were obese, people that had all sorts of issues going on because of poor diet, poor lifestyle choices, and even, you know, genetic problems.

• 2:17:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the immunologists we were working with told me something I didn't know is that when you're immunocompromised or immunodepressed, vaccines don't work very well. So they, those people become reservoirs for mutation.

• 2:17:35Joe Rogan?

  Right, which is the argument for why you don't give it to children when they're babies, because their immune system isn't even functional yet.

• 2:17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm, you know, I, again, the, the hep B one is a pretty clear example.

• 2:17:46Joe Rogan?

  That's a nutty one.

• 2:17:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:47Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:18:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:00Joe Rogan?

  And they started adding things like hep B. And then you realize like, oh, it's very profitable to do that. Imagine how much more money you make if you're injecting everybody with a hep B vaccine, if you sell hep B vaccines.

• 2:18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:12Joe Rogan?

  It's just simple mathematics.

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, also I've met people in the pharma industry who are extremely well-intended.

• 2:18:18Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:18Speaker 02

  Who are great scientists.

• 2:18:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh, but the scientists aren't the issue, right?

• 2:18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they've also confessed to me that they face these, this humiliation. You know, of being ostracized for just asking questions.

• 2:18:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:18:30Speaker 02

  Again, full disclosure, let people make up their own minds. What's the cost benefit ratio? Is it one out of a million, one out of 10?

• 2:18:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also, you should have to show all the studies too. You shouldn't just show the curated studies that you generated specifically with a goal of making an efficacy, like having a result that shows that this is effective. If you do 10 studies, you should show all 10 studies.

• 2:18:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, actually, that's why clinicaltrials.gov exists.

• 2:19:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:19:00Speaker 02

  Is that we're cherry picking, doing studies in Bulgaria and India and Taiwan. And the pharma would choose the clinical study that supported their narrative.

• 2:19:08Joe Rogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And then they could use deceptive language to show the efficacy.

• 2:19:13Speaker 02

  But what I'm getting at is that we have such a reservoir of potential ways of supporting immunity in healthy individuals in nature.

• 2:19:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:19:24Speaker 02

  That is not pharma-based, that's based on the entourage effect. And say, when you activate the receptors in your immune system, there's something beneficial. I believe there's crosstalk between the receptors. The receptors start, oh, something really good is coming down the pipe. And they start creating an entourage effect at the collaboration. More receptors are activated that have collateralally more benefits. And so it goes to the homeostasis and the uplifting of the homeostasis of the immune system that is in a higher ready state of being able to respond. And then conventional medicine can work better. But using conventional medicine on an immunocompromised individual, asking their immune system to respond, is an uphill battle.

• 2:20:07Joe Rogan?

  Right. Yeah, it's interesting too that like natural remedies are automatically dismissed by people that think of themselves as intelligent, science-based people.

• 2:20:16Speaker 02

  Well, look at Artemisian.

• 2:20:18Joe Rogan?

  But isn't it weird though that like we dismiss it, but if you really understand the, like, think about how many different pharmaceutical drugs are formulated because of discoveries of natural plants in the rainforest.

• 2:20:31Speaker 02

  The majority of them. And the most recent example is the antimalarial drug against Plasmodium falciparum from an Artemisia.

• 2:20:41Speaker 02

  Bush, and it's Artemisin, and it came from, it came from Artemisia. It's a plant extract.

• 2:20:49Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that wild?

• 2:20:49Speaker 02

  And, and

• 2:20:50Joe Rogan?

  But yet, science-based people will automatically dismiss what you would call a natural remedy, even though all of them, every, like, nothing exists on Earth that's not really natural. It's all coming from nature.

• 2:21:06Speaker 02

  I'm in agreement with you. I think that we're just reinventing molecules that have been assembled somewhere else.

• 2:21:11Joe Rogan?

  They're here.

• 2:21:12Speaker 02

  And we think it's, that's why the synthetic biologists, I'm honored to get that reward. Thank you, Sin Bio Beta Conference. That's what I think really kind of flipped them on their heads, is don't go down the rabbit hole of excluding natural products, thinking you can invent a molecule that's going to be better.

• 2:21:29Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:21:30Speaker 02

  In the theater of evolution, we've tested these natural products over tens of millions of years, literally, our primate ancestors. And so, we've got a pretty good experiential data set there to be able to see what works and what doesn't. Many mushrooms, you know, not many, but some mushrooms are poisonous, you know, and some are edible. It's a weird statistic about, and again, one to two percent fudge factor here, so please don't attack me all over the place, but there is 1.5 to 5 million species of fungi. There's about 150,000 species of mushrooms that are estimated. So, out of that 5 million on the extreme,

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  1.5 million, less than 10%, 150,000, we've only identified about 15,000 species. So, we've only identified 10% of the mushrooms that exist today.

• 2:22:19Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  Now, interestingly, of, of those 15,000 species, about 1% are poisonous, 1 or 2%, 1 or 2% are psychoactive, and 1 to 2% are good edibles. So, 97, 95, 94%, whatever the math shows, are there, but they're not toxic. But mushrooms are molecular wizards. These are pharmaceutical factories that are creating huge numbers. And we know from their genomic analysis, 10 times more genes are activated in the mycelium of lion's mane than in the lion's mane mushroom itself. Why is that? The mycelium has to navigate these thin threads through a hostile microbial environment, defending itself, until the

• 2:23:03Speaker 02

  mycelial mat becomes large enough at the end of its life cycle to produce a fruit body. And then lion's mane mushrooms rot in four days. The mycelium that grew it could exist for years. The mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom. And as a result, we have a lot more compounds being expressed. Now, some people say, well, not all those compounds necessarily beneficial. Uh huh. Well, that's true, but now we've tested them enough that we can see real world benefit. Dean Ornish just published a study this past year on Alzheimer's using lifestyle adjustments, exercise, meditation, vitamins, and lion's mane mushroom mycelium.

• 2:23:48Speaker 02

  Dramatically significant benefit in slowing down the progression of Alzheimer's through lifestyle, vitamins, and using lion's mane mushroom mycelium. Now, which did what? Yes, you can try to analyze that, but you'd have to separate every single little component to see which was the most significant. And yet, where's the studies combining 10 vaccines or 20 vaccines in a child to see which one is actually conferring the benefit or causing an adverse effect? We have to at some point, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. At some point, if it has a demonstratable positive effect like we have with bees,

• 2:24:30Speaker 02

  and it protects agriculture and extends the longevity of bees, and it supports the endogenous immune system in healthy individuals, isn't that good? Why do we have to get lost in the details of trying to explain it? If we can't explain it, then we won't let it be out there for the benefit of the commons? They work cross purposes. This is where science needs to have common sense, and the government and the regulatory industry needs to have common sense. And we get that by exemptions, emergency exemptions. And we should get that for emergency exemption right now. We are on a bee apocalypse. We are, folks, 67% of bee hives lost in Montana.

• 2:25:11Speaker 02

  What if that was a human population?

• 2:25:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:13Speaker 02

  All hands on deck.

• 2:25:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:15Speaker 02

  So it is, and there is a transference of viruses between animal species. We're seeing that in real time. Now, the scariest thing is, is when you have multiple viral infections in one person who's immunocompromised, and you have horizontal gene transfer. This is what virologists very, amongst themselves, they talk about this all the time, but the public is not aware. You could have individuals, and when you have so many dairy farmer workers exposed, so many people in contact, concentrated clusters of animals in farms. You have so many potential patient zeros.

• 2:25:59Speaker 02

  The patient zero is a person who's the nexus for spreading a mutated form of a virus. Horizontal gene transfer is happening all the time now. Now, it's concentrated, it's accelerating, it's exponential increase of risk. Bill Gates has talked about this, many other researchers have talked about this. This is really something we should pay attention to. And I think the simplest, easiest, scalable way is enhance immunity in healthy individuals. And by doing so, I think you can let your endogenous immune system work better, and I think conventional medicine will work better also in concert.

• 2:26:36Joe Rogan?

  Well, it also speaks to the problem with industrial agriculture in general, right? These are unnatural environments where these animals are, you know, living in their own waste on a consistent basis, which is, you know, it enhances the possibility of disease. And regenerative agriculture enhances the possibility of harmony amongst nature.

• 2:27:01Speaker 02

  And then the counterargument is that we have better nutrition, we can feed the world, so the people are more people happier. You know, again, we're at this, we have contrast of opposites. And I wish I had the easy solution. I think I have the solution for bees. I think it's scalable for protecting chickens and livestock. I hope, you know, and we're now designing clinical studies on a path to finding clinical studies with bird flu using a Garicon. We don't have the results, so I'm not making a medical claim here. But the evidence so far is so encouraging. And I'm working with top-notch virologists, absolutely some of the best virologists, who came to me because they saw the paper in Nature Scientific Reports.

• 2:27:46Speaker 02

  And they thought, oh, fungi, fungi could help us, you know, protect ourselves from viruses. So they came through the back door, the scientific community, not, not a Joe Rogan listener, they might be, I don't know, maybe they are now. But they came to me through the scientific literature, saying, we should try this with people. So those are the scientists I like that are open-minded enough. They're rather than just molecular geneticists, you know, synthetic bio people, they're actually saying, well, it's a provable result. We don't know why, but we should explore this because we can argue for 100 years about why, or we could deliver it tomorrow and have it have positive effect.

• 2:28:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, it makes sense. I have to ask you this question, it's unrelated, but I always wanted to know. Why do Morrel mushrooms grow around burns?

• 2:28:34Speaker 02

  That is, that is such a great question. And you know what? That's the question that we've been asking for so long.

• 2:28:41Joe Rogan?

  I love Morrel mushrooms.

• 2:28:43Speaker 02

  I love Morrel mushrooms, too. You know, they are poisonous.

• 2:28:46Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 2:28:47Speaker 02

  Unless you cook them.

• 2:28:48Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:28:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:28:49Joe Rogan?

  Oh, boy, that's important to know.

• 2:28:50Speaker 02

  Many people have died from Morrel mushrooms. Yeah.

• 2:28:53Joe Rogan?

  Wow, that's crazy.

• 2:28:55Speaker 02

  You don't want to cook Morrel mushrooms in a closed kitchen without ventilation. There are volatile compounds coming out of the Morrels, totally denatured in cooking, delicious. But many, many examples of this. In Japan, I was in Japan, you know, 15 years ago.

• 2:29:09Joe Rogan?

  So if you don't have an overhead fan, don't fry Morrels in your kitchen.

• 2:29:12Speaker 02

  You open up the window, but just don't inhale the fumes.

• 2:29:15Joe Rogan?

  Wow, I would have never imagined that.

• 2:29:18Speaker 02

  The North American Mycological Association is the association for Canada, Mexico, and the United States. And there's a poison control group in that, and they collect all the, all the details. It's namyco.org, N-A-M-Y-C-O dot O-R-G.

• 2:29:34Speaker 02

  They're the go-to place. Ironically, because of HIPAA rules. The mycologists have been disconnected from the patients and the medical community because now there is a firewall between them. We can anonymize the case reports, but there's a firewall of information because of HIPAA and disclosures of patient conditions that has really inhibited the flow of information. Nevertheless, namaco.org, North American Mycological Association, N A M Y dot C O dot org. My professor, Dr. Michael Bug, is a giant, you know, in consulting with, for adverse

• 2:30:17Speaker 02

  effects in mushroom poisonings. So, Morels are delicious, but to answer your question, the, we, Morel mycelium seems to be everywhere, then for horse burns, and they come up. Right. Where were they before? Right.

• 2:30:32Joe Rogan?

  Do they, do they exist in places that don't have burns?

• 2:30:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:30:35Joe Rogan?

  But rarely?

• 2:30:36Speaker 02

  No. We think all the time.

• 2:30:38Joe Rogan?

  All the time, but very common amongst burns?

• 2:30:41Speaker 02

  They're everywhere a forest are.

• 2:30:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:30:44Speaker 02

  And when a forest burn, it knocks down all the competition. Ah. And it becomes very alkaline, the absence of organic material and competitors, competitor fungi, the change in the pH. And so, I think we think also from the Geyen hypothesis point of view, it's a great way of nature to rebound because they're scentful, they attract animals, they attract insects, and birds come in, drop seeds, and then they become an oasis point for the regeneration of an ecosystem. Oh. Just never underestimate the intelligence of nature. And nature has figured this out, you know, nature does not exist in a vacuum. There's always these repopulation vectors happening, and it's collaborative. It's not competitive.

• 2:31:26Speaker 02

  There is competition between the fungi, but when the competitors are knocked down, the Morels come.

• 2:31:31Joe Rogan?

  That's fascinating. Another fascinating thing is that the largest living organism on Earth in the Pacific Northwest.

• 2:31:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, Armalaria astoidi, yeah. Some people call it Gallica, two different things, but yeah, I flew over it. It's a 2,200 acre, you know, basically a clear cut. It killed all the trees. In my book, Mycelium Running, I have the best photographs of the largest organism in the world. And I hired an airplane and first time I couldn't see it because I was too low. Second time I had to spiral up.

• 2:31:59Joe Rogan?

  Can you explain what it is to people?

• 2:32:00Speaker 02

  It's a honey mushroom. It's a parasite on trees. It's edible. The honey mushrooms on hardwoods tend to taste better, but this one is on conifers. And it's a, comes up in clusters. It forms black rhizomorphs, black myceliums called laminated root rot. Many listeners here know what that is. It kills fruit trees. But this is a rotting parasite that created a contiguous mat over 2,200 acres. And in this case, it killed all the trees. So they went ash and gray in color and they dried out and they're dead. Because of fire hazard from lightning strikes, the Forest Service came in and they cut all the dead

• 2:32:45Speaker 02

  trees. And they created this beautiful outline of the largest mycelial mat in the world because you could see where the dead trees were.

• 2:32:51Joe Rogan?

  Can we see what that looks like in image?

• 2:32:54Speaker 02

  I'm trying to find a good picture. It's also in Mycelium Running. So, but anyhow, that's an example. Now, oh, it killed the trees. That's terrible. But it created grasslands for ungulates.

• 2:33:08Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So deer and moose, elk can come in. So it's a way of, I think it's a way of this rebalancing of nature.

• 2:33:15Joe Rogan?

  Right. You're dealing with millions and millions of acres.

• 2:33:18Speaker 02

  Millions and millions of acres. There is a real big problem with the bark beetle right now. You know, that's a problem. It's, it's the ecosystems are shifting in response to stress. And, you know, with our minds view of only one lifetime, we're very myopic. I think we need to look at the thousand year, I mean, what is the lens of time that we actually look at ecosystems? What's the right lens to use? Depends upon your vested interests, you know, as a human, as a deer, as an ecosystem, they can be very different.

• 2:33:58Joe Rogan?

  It's just such a fascinating thing, the largest known organism on earth. Exists in the Pacific Northwest.

• 2:34:05Speaker 02

  It has a one-cell ball thick.

• 2:34:06Joe Rogan?

  That's so nuts.

• 2:34:07Speaker 02

  Think about its immune system.

• 2:34:09Joe Rogan?

  You know what I found out recently that I had no idea? Aspen trees, when you see aspen trees, it's one plant.

• 2:34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's one contiguous thing. They're the two competitors for that title, by the way.

• 2:34:18Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that nuts?

• 2:34:19Speaker 02

  They're the two competitors.

• 2:34:20Joe Rogan?

  When you see these, I always thought when you see aspen forests, that it's a bunch of different individual aspen trees.

• 2:34:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:34:28Joe Rogan?

  Nope.

• 2:34:30Speaker 02

  No, you know, there's all sorts of amazing discoveries. Here's one that blows my mind. And I had to write it down because it's a new species. There is a fungus that's related to Aragot. It's in the Clavicipetaceae. And it was found by a student at Western Virginia University. It is in morning glory seeds. It produces LSD.

• 2:34:58Joe Rogan?

  Well, Terrence talked about that.

• 2:34:59Speaker 02

  No, this is before Terrence.

• 2:35:00Joe Rogan?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  Terrence talked about morning glory.

• 2:35:02Joe Rogan?

  About morning glory seeds and having psychedelic experiences.

• 2:35:04Speaker 02

  It turns out it's a symbiotic fungus that's growing in there. And it's called, it's called Paraglumdula clandestina.

• 2:35:12Joe Rogan?

  And don't they?

• 2:35:12Speaker 02

  What a great name, clandestina, the clandestine.

• 2:35:15Joe Rogan?

  Don't they do something to commercial morning glory seeds to make sure that people don't trip on them?

• 2:35:20Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 2:35:20Joe Rogan?

  I think they do. I think that's another thing that Terrence is talking about, how gross it was, that they, they alter morning glory seeds because they knew that people were using them for psychedelics.

• 2:35:30Speaker 02

  Well, if they sterilized them or used a fungicide, that would make sense. But a graduate student, I need to give her credit, is at Western Virginia University, Corinne Hazel.

• 2:35:39Joe Rogan?

  Here it is. Jamie's got it.

• 2:35:40Speaker 02

  And Daniel Panion, yes.

• 2:35:42Joe Rogan?

  There it is.

• 2:35:42Speaker 02

  Look how young she is.

• 2:35:44Joe Rogan?

  Very young.

• 2:35:44Speaker 02

  She made a discovery, heretofore unknown to science, and not only it produces LSD compounds, it is a symbiotic fungus, helping the morning glory survive.

• 2:35:57Joe Rogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:35:58Speaker 02

  Think about every young person out there, the field of mycology is underfunded, understudied, underreported, underutilized. This is a fantastic treasure trove of new potential discoveries. I have long stated, I think the field of mycology should be funded as well as the computer industry, because it's so fundamental to the survival of our species. It's that big.

• 2:36:23Joe Rogan?

  No, I couldn't agree with you more. Did you, you're aware of Brian Murrow rescue, right?

• 2:36:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, yup.

• 2:36:30Joe Rogan?

  That was one of the more fascinating things that they found in those, when they studied those vases, that they found ergot in them.

• 2:36:36Speaker 02

  Yup.

• 2:36:36Joe Rogan?

  From the Illucinian mysteries.

• 2:36:38Speaker 02

  Has Brian tripped yet?

• 2:36:40Joe Rogan?

  I don't know. You have to ask him.

• 2:36:43Speaker 02

  I love it when scientists and researchers don't admit that they've tripped. But I can...

• 2:36:50Joe Rogan?

  I don't know if it's a non-admission. I think in his case, he wanted to be objective, so he wanted to study these things without being...

• 2:36:57Speaker 02

  Is that...

• 2:36:58Joe Rogan?

  He's worried about being labeled as someone who's promoting them because they like it.

• 2:37:03Speaker 02

  Well, an extreme example, but it has some merit. I mean, would you rather be taught by an airline pilot that has experience, or someone who just read a book? Yeah. So, the late Roland Griffiths, he's a dear friend, Johns Hopkins, he is credited as being the big pioneer for psilocybin in medical research. And when I asked him, "Have you tripped on psilocybin?", and I was at his house in the backyard, I said, he just smiled. I said, "I'm not going to answer that question." Well, then after he died, I met some of his friends.

• 2:37:39Speaker 02

  And he goes, "Oh, yeah, Roland tripped." But he didn't want to tell anyone because for the fear that he could lose his objectivity or be criticized.

• 2:37:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Rick Strassman had an interesting perspective on that, too. When I first met him, he was very reluctant to talk about DMT experiences that he had personally, because he had run those FDA studies that were documented in DMT, the spirit molecule, the book.

• 2:38:03Speaker 02

  He was very reticent to talk about it, and then he sort of came out of the closet on that.

• 2:38:07Joe Rogan?

  Fully.

• 2:38:08Speaker 02

  And then, when I asked Roland's friends, "Well, where did he like to trip?", because you're in a hospital environment with all these doctors, and, you know, your stress levels go up just being in a hospital environment. And he said, "Well, Roland's favorite place to trip was on a mountaintop with three friends with a beautiful view and a fire."

• 2:38:28Joe Rogan?

  Perfect. Perfect.

• 2:38:30Speaker 02

  Perfect. What's the quality of experience? Now, again, this is for healthy normals. Not people who need to have medical assistance, but there are some very good psychotherapists out there and psychonauts in the psychedelic assisted therapy movement. The center, the California Institute for Integrative Studies, C I I S, I think dot org or dot E U, has a program training psychedelic therapists. You don't have to be a medical physician to be able to hold someone's hand to have a guided experience. Now, there's a lot of charlatans out there.

• 2:39:10Joe Rogan?

  That's a problem, right?

• 2:39:11Speaker 02

  Be warned, folks, there's a lot of problems.

• 2:39:13Joe Rogan?

  That's a lot, that is a problem.

• 2:39:14Speaker 02

  But there are some excellent therapists out there. And for many people who can't get into a clinical study, be careful, consult a qualified medical practitioner, I'll put that on the record. But a lot of people have benefited without having to go through a traditional medical, you know, constructs of a hospital.

• 2:39:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:39:37Speaker 02

  To have benefit.

• 2:39:38Joe Rogan?

  And then they're reluctant to talk about it because of the illegality of it, unfortunately. And, you know, if you have a job that is, you know, where you have to be taken seriously.

• 2:39:48Speaker 02

  It was, you could lose your medical license. But the University of Washington, Tony Back, Anthony Back, published a clinical study on using psilocybin for physicians and nurses who were emotionally harmed and distressed by people angry at them because of COVID in the hospital. And they were spit upon and they were attacked viciously, physically sometimes, in the hospital. They had PTSD, but just trying to provide good medical support. So he did a clinical study, it was published last year, showing the benefits, because the nurses and physicians, when they got out of the system, they can't provide medical care, society loses.

• 2:40:31Speaker 02

  So they were able to reconcile the emotional harm that they experienced from angry patients and being assaulted, and they were able to then return, many of them, back into the medical profession, you know, with a, you know, healing from that. So realize aggression and anger affects everyone around you. The advantage of psilocybin, I think, just like a pebble in the pond of a tragedy.

• 2:41:00Speaker 02

  Creates ripples of distress throughout society. When someone who is highly adversely affected, angry and, you know, violent and all these antisocial behaviors, when they suddenly switch, just like that, it's a pebble in the pond of positivity. A great example, a law enforcement officer by the name of Sarko from Boston, just received his religious exemption for using psychedelics. So he is a police officer and his chief of police is now retired.

• 2:41:39Speaker 02

  He has been an advocate because he saw Sarko, who experienced all these negative, you'd love to have him on the show sometime, he can really speak authoritatively to other law enforcement officers, saying, "This has helped me." So I have a law enforcement officer.

• 2:41:55Joe Rogan?

  I'd love to talk to him.

• 2:41:56Speaker 02

  I'd love for you, he's the real deal. I have a RCMP officer friend in Vancouver who took me to his favorite psilocybin mushroom shop in Vancouver. I couldn't believe it. We walked in this psilocybin mushroom shop. They didn't know who I was, thankfully, and they were selling the stamina stack, which is kind of weird because I have my name on it. And we walk in there and say, "This is where I tell all my law enforcement officers to come to get their psilocybin." I said, "I'm sorry, bud. I'm trying to juxtaposition this, you know, how does this work?" And he goes, "Well, you know, this is good perhaps for ICE also." He said, "You know how, you know, in the United States, law enforcement officers are

• 2:42:38Speaker 02

  aggressive and mean, they tend to intimidate you and, you know, subject you?" I said, "We found a better way up here, and it's through psilocybin." And I said, "What would you do?" He says, "Well, we have learned the following. Now, when I have to arrest somebody, I know they have a warrant out for them. I walk up to them and I say, and I always walk up with a smile on my face, never a harsh look, always a smile on my face, and I said..."

• 2:43:05Speaker 02

  I have good news and I have bad news. What do you want to hear first? He said invariably, everyone wants to say, "Tell me the good news." And he goes, "The good news is, "You can finish your cup of coffee." And I go, "Okay, what's the bad news?" "Dude, I gotta arrest you." And he goes, "The amount of cooperation "And the reduction of the threat level "For the safety of the law enforcement "And the cooperation that they get "In the squad car, "When these people that are just shooting the shit "At law enforcement officers, "I know you're doing your job, "But wow, thank you for being so nice arresting me." He said, "It's a game changer. "It's reduced the threat "To us physically of making arrests."

• 2:43:46Joe Rogan?

  It makes sense. It doesn't escalate.

• 2:43:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't escalate. They de-escalate it. And he goes, "You won't believe the things I learned, "You know, from these people that are arresting now, "You know, who tell me things "They would never have gotten out of an interrogation, "But they were so respected "And the fact that they had to do their job "Without becoming adversarial."

• 2:44:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:07Speaker 02

  Note to self, right? Note to everyone right now.

• 2:44:09Joe Rogan?

  Note to everyone. And all conflicts involve two or more people. It doesn't, they're not, It's not just this is the only way to react to something. It's how you react, how they react to your reaction. There's a cascading effect.

• 2:44:27Speaker 02

  Well, I have great faith in humanity. I've seen the-

• 2:44:30Joe Rogan?

  I do too.

• 2:44:31Speaker 02

  I have the, seen the best. I mean, I've seen people-

• 2:44:34Joe Rogan?

  Most people are great.

• 2:44:35Speaker 02

  Most people are great, "And they're better when they go through a psilocybin experience "That amplifies the best of people. "And it also helps them resolve "A lot of the baggage." You can think of the inflammatory actions "Of the anger, "And you did something "And you don't want to tell anybody, "But you're haunted by that." You inadvertently harmed somebody "And you went off the deep end. "You harmed somebody else. "It's a cascading event of harm."

• 2:45:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:03Speaker 02

  And when you, these people are resolved, "That was a bad chapter in my life." I had one really bad day, or maybe a series of them, but that does not define me, who I am as a person. I have a better self, and it's now and in the future.

• 2:45:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:45:18Speaker 02

  It's not in the past.

• 2:45:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's the perspective we should all have, and that's the thing that we should all strive for. Be the best version of you that you can be.

• 2:45:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:45:26Joe Rogan?

  And you, we've all made terrible mistakes in the past, but the idea is to have learned from them and to be a better person because of that.

• 2:45:34Speaker 02

  Well, the medical community has come together on this, on psychedelics. The law enforcement community's come together. You know, I-

• 2:45:43Joe Rogan?

  It's positive.

• 2:45:44Speaker 02

  It's positive.

• 2:45:45Joe Rogan?

  We're in a positive direction.

• 2:45:46Speaker 02

  I had my interview by the DEA, and they were, I had, I thought they were the boogeyman in the seventies for a good reason, by the way, but I shouldn't say that. But, but I went through my background check, and, and the DEA has such a sense of humor. They said, "Okay, Paul, you know, you come out clean, you don't have a record, everything is fine." You know, "But we have to talk to you about something that happened in 1994 in Des Moines, Washington."

• 2:46:14Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm like, "What happened in 1994 in Des Moines, Washington?" He says, "Are you sure you don't remember?" And they're, they're role-playing here. I didn't know it at the time. I go, "No, I don't remember." I wonder if sometimes people just confess to something that because they're fishing. I don't know. I said, "I have no clue, no clue." He goes, "Are you sure?" I'm, this is your official response, "You don't remember?" I said, "No, I don't remember." He says, "Didn't you get a speeding ticket?"

• 2:46:43Joe Rogan?

  (laughing)

• 2:46:46Speaker 02

  And I said, "I paid that. It was from those machines. It was for my camera. I know I paid it. I could dig up the receipt. It was like thirty-five bucks," and, you know, and they just roared with laughter.

• 2:46:55Joe Rogan?

  They're just fucking with you?

• 2:46:56Speaker 02

  They're fucking with me. What they told me is that we don't know shit about mushrooms or psilocybin. We're an enforcement agency. Many of us don't agree with this. Change the law.

• 2:47:08Speaker 02

  We wanna go after syndicates. We wanna go after fentanyl. Right. We wanna go after these, you know, these, these. These things that are not beneficial in any way, shape, or form. Right. So we don't want to hurt the source that is healing us. Right. But they won't fuck around when it comes to money transactions. Right. Once you involve money, then the DEA is gonna be involved. Right, right. But you're involved in research and we, we have strict guidelines. I had DEA license in the, you know, nineteen seventy-five, nineteen seventy-six, seventy-seven, seventy-eight. Through Dr. Michael Bug at the Evergreen State College and they were much more liberal. I could grow tons of psilocybin mushrooms and collect them. And that's why we did a series of conferences. I was the only one that had a DEA license.

• 2:47:51Speaker 02

  So we did these conferences, collecting all these experts together with Albert Hofmann there, R. Gordon Wasson, Richard Evan Schultes, you know, Jonathan Ott, Terrence McKenna. But I had the license to be able to possess psilocybin with my professor. And so we would have all this psilocybin. So we did these educational events, you know, academic with citizen scientists and psychonauts coming together. What's really different is we just had a, the Psychedelic Science Maps Conference in Denver. Eight thousand five hundred people. Back in the nineteen seventies, at any moment, we were afraid that a SWAT team would break down the doors and arrest everybody.

• 2:48:36Speaker 02

  We existed in a high state of paranoia, because that was a war on drugs with Richard Nixon. And now it's totally different. Now you have law enforcement officers, you have Rick Perry, you have all these. In New Mexico, they legalized the prescription of psilocybin. Mm-hmm. This is a citizens movement. It's a democratic movement for the freedom of consciousness and you, everyone should have a right to, to be able to practice. And where do you draw individual use from religious use? Psilocybin mushrooms are very important for my own personal religion.

• 2:49:14Speaker 02

  I feel that this is central to my religious belief. So I think this is where the government needs to back off. If you're using it for your spiritual development, whether you're Buddhist, or Christian, or Islamic, you know, or Judeic, you know, this informs your spirituality, reduces crime, it reduces harm, reduces, you know, potential for violence.

• 2:49:40Speaker 02

  This is a game changer. I think we're in the psilocybin revolution, and psilocybin mushrooms are fundamentally different than MDMA.

• 2:49:49Speaker 02

  And Abagang, just because Abagang's so long and has heart issues. I just think this is a medicine for our times that can make a paradigm shift for a better society.

• 2:50:00Joe Rogan?

  I couldn't agree more. That's a good way to end this. Thank you, Paul. Show up, show, hold your book up there, because this is the latest of eight books that you've written. Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats. Paul, you're a gem. You really are. You're, you're such an important person. And I think through the conversations that you and I have had, and then you've had on many other podcasts as well, millions and millions of people have gotten to understand what this is really all about. And I think your role in educating people is, is enormous.

• 2:50:30Speaker 02

  But let's be very careful with that. I'm a one knowledge keeper, literally in a string of knowledge keepers. So many people have died, been harmed, indigenous people. I am carrying the torch, and I want to pass this torch with pride, with dignity, with respect, with kindness, with positivity to the next generation. The next generation needs to be empowered with this, and they can do an excellent job knowing what's happened in the past and foretelling what we could be in the future, the best of the best.

• 2:51:00Joe Rogan?

  I think you're doing just that. So thank you. I appreciate you very much, brother.

• 2:51:03Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:51:03Joe Rogan?

  Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.