EP 171: The Future of Psychedelics and Planetary Health: Minds, Microdosing, and Mycelium | Paul Stamets

Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast.

Today I'm really excited to share this episode that we've titled Mimes, microdosing and mycelium. 100% psychedelics from each and every circumstance we put Paul Stamets, the renowned mycologist. We're exploring the parallels between the mycelium and the neural networks of the human brain. The ancient principle, the tried and true principle of as above so below the we see the parallel in just the way consciousness manifests in our world and explore just fascinating possibilities for healing on so many different levels based on our access to the whole realm of fungi and its relationship. Really exploring how humans and fungi have co evolved and in particular the psychedelic fungi psilocybin in all its many varieties. And Paul Stamets has discovered many, many new varieties of psilocybin around the world. The possibilities for healing and how that's emerging in this current psychedelic assisted therapy and psychedelic medicine movement. So fascinating episode with Paul Stamets really one of the most interesting minds alive on the planet today. So really encourage you to check this out. Paul Stamets, speaker, author, my colle, biologist, medical researcher and entrepreneur is considered an intellectual and industry leader in fungi habitat, medicinal use and production. Paul's research is considered a breakthrough by thought leaders for creating a paradigm shift that helps ecosystems worldwide. His philosophy is microdiversity is biosecurity and he sees the ancient old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest as a resource of incalculable value, especially in terms of its fungal genome. A dedicated high current explorer is passionate to preserve and protect as many ancestral strains of mushrooms as possible. Paul's read shows how mushrooms can help the health of people and the planet and he lectures extensively to deepen the understanding and respect for these organisms. He is the author of six books including Mycelium Running How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Paul has discovered and named numerous new species of psilocybin mushrooms and is the founder and owner of of Bungee Perpecti llc, maker of Host Defense Mushroom Supplements of which I'm a daily user. Thank you very much.

And before we start, I want to acknowledge the ancestral unceded territories of the land here in Canada. I'm on a remote island in British Columbia and the Colus peoples have been so gracious and accepting our presence here and with whom we have great respect and good relations. So I want to acknowledge the ancestral people of this property.

Thank you very much Paul. And just really acknowledging that wherever all of our listeners are and where I'm recording this today, I'm in the ancestral lands of the Nipomook people here in the watershed of the Connecticut river in western Massachusetts. So thank you for that. Your research in mycology and the use of fungi is, has really changed the ways we, we think about consciousness and the natural world and our relationship to the natural world. And you know, there's some interesting kind of macro micro parallels to the mycelium and our own neural networks and just the whole. The way nature is structured all together in our relationship to that. So I wonder if you can say a little bit about what drew you into the study of mushrooms and, and you know, was it something about the psychedelic movement that drew you into that first or was it you were drawn into the study of fungi and then that also connected you to the world of psilocybin?

Well, there's this sort of multiple paths that converge that synaptically excited me. Ever since I was a small child, I was amazed. Growing up in Ohio, in the, on Lake Erie, we had a place and a cottage and when the summer rains would come, mushrooms would pop up and they were just like magical. They would just come out of nowhere. So I was just mesmerized by the sudden appearance. In general, when you think about the familiarity factor we have with plants and animals, they're in our viewscape and our event horizon daily, weekly, monthly, you know, but mushrooms come up and disappear in four or five days and they may not come up again for a year. What were they? And so they're mysterious. Plus my family was a little bit microphobic. Even though we cooked button mushrooms, they constantly warned me about wild mushrooms. And so I saw mushrooms as being the forbidden fruit. So you tell a small child, a parent don't go near that and the child oftentimes becomes more curious, you know, what are they not telling me that I need to know. So, and then my brother John, you know, was a great inspiration to me. He went to Yale, he know, studied neurophysiology chemistry and came back from Mexico and South America. These great stories. And I was 13 years of age when he came back from Yale and, and I just adored him. And I grew up in, was a house with a large laboratory in the basement. And he was a serious chemist. I was the, the nuisance. The nuisance. Youngest, you know, child. He parked me in the corner and I listened to coded messages. Behind the Iron Curtain. My father served on the aircraft carrier there. Intrepid. We got the Intrepid aircraft carrier radio. So anyhow, I was immersed into a laboratory environment and mentored by a Great spirit and individual and intellectual giant in his own right, my brother John. And then these combinations of things came together and I.

I did a few heroic trips often with a. Many of you younger people may not know this us, you know, I include, include you fleet.

I'm 68, so I'm not sure how old you are, but we're older. It was a big interest in salt side mushrooms back in the, in the early 70s and the 60s, but you couldn't get them. But the market for them was so large that people would take button mushrooms, spike them with LSD and freeze them. And so you get these bags and they would thaw and there'd be just this soggy mess and, and just because you know there's a higher value in psilocybin than lsd. So it took up quite a while before I actually found the real mushrooms and then took a massive dose. But then I went to.

I was in Ohio. Then I came out to Washington state and I started working in the lumber mills for a summer job. And then that went into a shingle mills and then I started setting chokers. The most dangerous job in the world by many estimates. Indeed, it was one of the best experiences of my life because I have a long haired hippie and I was the only one and they refused to hire me. But I showed up for 22 days in a row at 5 o' clock in the morning knowing that somebody would get drunk the night before and not show up for work will finally happen. But they put me on the most dangerous crew they had because they wanted to break me. I was a stoner hippie and I just thought this is a great exercise. So I just constantly ran and worked really hard and gained the respect of my co workers and I did that for three years and then four of my co workers got killed and, and they want to make me the head of the crew. And I'm going, I'm like 21 or something like this, you know, going on 22. And I, I said this is not a great future. So. But I was immersed into a mushroom. These, these people in the woods, they loved hunting mushrooms. So it was really fun because in the crew bus on Fridays we'd stop and we'd go hunt chanterelles and, and it was, it's. People have a misunderstanding of the wood frogs community and culture. And these blue collar workers, they're very interested in protecting the environment. This is a seemingly an oxymoron. So anyhow, I, I had a lot of friendships that kind of across the cultural Divide to a different group because I was academically oriented and they were not perhaps, but they had wood wisdom, the wisdom of working in the woods and being able, you know, if you needed to have a search and rescue. These people were just perfect. They, they were so skilled. The school of hard knocks, wisdom and knowledge. So then when I went to the Evergreen State College, you know, I'd been self teaching myself psilocybin mushrooms. Going down the University of Washington science library and most all the volumes were razored out and articles are taken out in psilocybin, you couldn't get to them. And So I met Dr. Daniel Stuntz from the University of Washington. He brought me into his live private library that was protected and I started doing taxonomy of psilocybin mushrooms as in the Storefari ace family, the family of three genera including the genus Psilocybi. I started writing taxonomic keys and I go up to the University of Washington, you know, once a week we would have a taxonomic key council meeting. Basically people exploring taxonomy and writing dichotomous keys for identification. And when you, you know, basically the cap flat, the cap pointed, spores brown, spores white, and you have a decision tree, you go down. Well, as you disambiguate this, this, these mushrooms, going through these taxonomic keys you find blanks like it doesn't fit. And so with many of the psilocybin mushrooms I was constructing these taxonomic keys based on the literature and I'd find these mushrooms and they wouldn't fit into any taxonomic.

Ideation. So I realized they were a new species. So I end up getting very excited about that. We got a DEA license at the Emory State College so I could cultivate and possess. I'm happy to say I have a DEA license now today, after all these years, I passed my background checks and I, I say that, you know, with some humor but also sincerity is that I adopted long ago that nature provides. I don't, I don't provide sulc mushrooms to anyone for really strongly held beliefs. Therapy is so much of an important component of the psych experience as you know. So even my father at the end of his life, even Alexander Smith, who is the father of American mycology who wrote a monograph on the genocielosophy. Towards the end of his life he asked me for psilocybin mushrooms. Both of these elders in my life, I turned down. I refused to give my father sulcide mushrooms or Alexander Smith because I was traveling the next day. I realized there'd be a lot of time necessary to process this. And towards the end of their life if they would have this epiphany that their whole foundation of life was not founded on the principles they now knew to be true. Reconciling that sudden change. And then how do they explain it to their wives? I asked them both if they would. If would your wives also go, so we do a threesome together, and both their wives said, no, they wouldn't do that. And I don't want to be a chasm between them. And so for those reasons, I really just felt that. I'm a mycologist, I'm not a psychiatrist. And I think the therapeutic component of psilocybin for treating.

You know, mental challenges, illnesses takes really a skill set that is that honed, you know, over decades of training. And I'm. I'm not that person. So I think this is really important to the whole community. When you give somebody a psilocybin mushrooms, you own that karma of their experience. So you should be there for them or you should make sure somebody else skilled is there for them. But these are powerful medicines. They're not shrooms. Hate that term.

So I just think that, you know, these things had a huge impact on my life. I think they have a massively massive potential. More so than anything anything's been discovered in medicine recently. You know, on the order of discovery of penicillin, I. I think this is going to be a game changer, saving millions and millions of lives.

Well, thank you very much for. That message is really important and runs throughout this summit of really respect these very powerful plant medicines and integrating them appropriately with psychotherapy and with skilled therapeutic interventions is what this summit's all about. So thank you very much for that. I would like to explore with you, Paul, a bit. This idea of microdiversity is biosecurity. And if you could talk a bit about the importance of microdiversity and what you mean by that, that equals biosecurity.

It's one of the fundamental epiphanies of my life. When you have an epiphany that you suddenly you realize you have this oh, my God moment. I know it's true. This is so what it came to me through my psychedelic experiences with psilocybin. But let me just give everyone a history lesson. And some of you know this, because you probably learned it in high school or in college, is a story of Mary Hunt. Now, Mary Hunt was a lab assistant in Illinois. I have to be corrected on that, not Chicago. And even though Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, penicillium molds inhibited staph bacteria.

None of his strains, and he got the Nobel Prize for that. None of his strains in the library could be commercialized until Mary Hunt went to a farmer's market and found a moldy cantaloupe they were throwing away covered with golden mold. And that strand of Penicillium chrysogenum produced 200 times more penicillin than anything else ever heretofore discovered. That allowed for the commercialization of penicillin in about 1943. In that period of time, the Japanese and the Nazis did not have penicillin. The Allied powers did and the Axis powers did not, nor the Japanese. So, so important with the strain of penicillin chrysogenum that laboratory workers in England impregnated the collars of their shirts with the spores of Penicillium chrysogenum. Should that the strain gets the laboratories get bombed, they'd be able to recover the strain. Well, that's an example. One strain of penicillin chrysogenic. There's a great interview on NPR I recommend people listen to. It is one of the deciding factors in winning World War II.

Because you could heal patients, you know, soldiers, you could reduce mortality, reduce the load on the hospitals, prevent cross infections. Right. And so I say this because I've been doing a lot of work in the old growth forest. There's an old growth forest mushroom called Agarikon. We are. And people can see my TED Talk interview with NPR and myself on smallpox and the old growth forest being able should be said as a matter of national defense. I say that with great sincerity. We now have 100 strains, actually 93 strains will have 100 strains of Agarikon. There's a massive mushroom grows exclusively in the old growth forest on the red list of threatened species in Europe, now cannot be legally collected in Europe. We have less than 1% of the old growth forest left. We have found some super strains so far. An analysis against a panel of viruses, including bird flu, swine flu, including Covid, including herpes and smallpox. Now, any virologists out there, they know that that's RNA and DNA viruses. How could it be active against both? That seems to be an oxymoron based on molecular microbiology. But in fact, we can prove this to be true. And then I took this research idea of antivirals from polypore mushrooms. These are wood conchs that I'm talking about, and I applied them for helping bees reduce viruses. We published in Nature. And that article, I think is still the top 0.1% of all articles ever published in the Nature publication ecosystem. Because we were able to reduce B viruses by 45,000 to one with one treatment of a polyporem mushroom mycelium extract. So we were able to demonstrate a natural product is more active than an antiviral. For the first time I think in medical history. This research is continuous because it could help save bees from colony collapse. That's the example. Penicillium, chrysogenum, agar archon, foamy Thompson fish analysis. Just showing that micro diversity is important to have a tool chest of strains that you can draw from that be applicable to different challenges and the more diverse your tool chest is of this library, then we can then apply it for many of the challenges that we face today.

Wow. Again, it kind of points to this symbiotic relationship we have with the mycelium and with fungi and.

Yeah, maybe we could shift a bit in terms of the research.

Around. You know, as we all know, there's clinical trials going on with psilocybin. There's a good chance psilocybin will be rescheduled following the rescheduling of mdma. And I know you've been doing a kind of citizens research, collecting first person reports around microdosing with psilocybin combined with lion's mane and other herbs and so forth. And I wonder if you could talk about that research and the importance, because there's not a lot of.

Certainly not a lot of random clinical trial type research on microdosing yet. There's not a lot of literature, but you've collected a lot. James Fadiman has collected a lot. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you understand about microdosing and the potential of microdosing.

Okay, let's make a definition of microdosing. There are several definitions, but the definition I follow is microdosing is sub intoxication. Some people say sensorium, you sense it, sub sensorium, microdosing, you still feel it, you're happier, colors are brighter. That's sensory enhancement. But you're not intoxicated. Okay. It's not like you slammed a beer, you know, you know, in five minutes you feel a little buzz. You, you don't feel a buzz for microdosing. So there's the microdose, the medium dose, the museum dose, and you know, the therapeutic dose and hero's journey. So four different sort of tiers. A microdose typically is one tenth of sensorium dose. So with 1 gram being a liftoff dose of psilocyb cubensis, 1 gram at 1% is.

10 milligrams of psilocybin.

So 1/10 of psilocybin cubensis gram would be 1 milligram of psilocybin with the assumption that the psilocybin is 1% in the dried mushrooms. So the studies that we did, we worked with quantified Citizen. We have an app that's available for droids and iOS devices. You can download it, there's microdose me, we'll give you some links, you can follow that. We have over 25,000 subscribers that are self reporting now. We have about eight co authors in our paper. We published two papers in Nature and they also in the top 1% of red papers. This is the altmetric thing. All the scientists want to know how much bandwidth our articles get. If you have altmetric score of 1, it's not that great.

These surveys that we did showed very strong statistical association with microdosing associated with reduction of depression and anxiety, mood disorders. Those are all subjective. I had this epiphany in 2016 that I thought psilocybin led to neurogenesis. Back then it was not thought to have. That was speculative. Psilocybin's a vasoconstrictor, niacin's a vasodilator. I thought neuropathies oftentimes present themselves as a deadening of the of the fingertips and the toes due to the collapsible vascular system, the nerves die. So I thought, wow, if you have a vasodilator, you can get the neurogenic benefits of psilocybin to the endpoints of the peripheral nervous system and vascular system. And then because you take niacin, it's the hot flushing form, you itch and all your nerve endings get excited and I go, wow, okay, nerve endings are getting excited. That's another reason to use niacin and psilocybin. You can then help deliver this to the endpoints of the nervous system, peripheral and central. And then lion's mane has really good research on it. Reestablishing myelin on the axons of nerves, which helps signal transmission and is also associated with the removal of amyloid plaques, was a big problem with Alzheimer's, et cetera. And so neuropathies and neurodegeneration, nerves die. So my speculation was not only this would help.

Nerve health, but regenerate nerves. And that's why I hit the big home run. So it was kind of a one of my trippy moments, you know, these epiphanies, just laying myself expanding into the universe. And then I call it random access thinking, you know, just letting my free form thoughts flow. And I said, oh my gosh, these three elements together could create synergy. So that's indeed what we then did the study. I think 8,400 people were in the first study, more than more than half, just over half, 4,500 or so were non microdosers, which was astonishing to us. We announced this as a microdosing study. We had just a little bit more, 100, 200 more non microdosers reporting than microdosers. The editors at Nature love this because the two populations were well weighted and the population numbers are very, very high. I mean, thousands of people are reporting. So now the critics came out of the woodwork saying, of course you, you can show an improvement against oppression because now you have a community of people. You're doing something that's a fad, you know, you're self reflecting. So it's delusional.

So, but then I asked my, one of my co authors, who's a medical doctor, don't we have something that's not subjective? And we have a psychomotor test, it's called the tap test, how many times you can tap your two fingers in 10 seconds? It's a validated test for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, traumatic brain injury, dementia. Sad to say, as we get older, we all suffer from neurodegeneration. You can play guitar a lot faster when they're 22 than when you're 82. Right? That's just basic, you know, pharmacology of neurology.

So when they chose the stomach stackers and I named it after myself because I had so many examples of people taking my ideas, not giving me credit. And after about the tenth time, I said, damn it, I'm just going to name something after myself so they can't steal it from me. And so the stammet stacker is taking niacin, lion's mane and psilocybin versus non psilocybin users versus psilocybin in any form.

When we looked at the after 30 days, the stamen stackers went from 48 tops to 68 tops with a P value of 0.004. That's one chance in 250 that it's just noise and random. This is not subjective, this is a psychomotor benefit. And then if you look into what parts of the nervous system are involved for the TAP test, there's one article that's been published I found that's quite remarkable. Seven different regions of the brain and the nervous system are involved in the top test. So we think we found synergy. And I think niacin is a catalyst. This is ironic because there's over 129 clinical trials@clinicaltrials.gov 11 or 12 of them use niacin as the opposite positive control, exactly opposite of what I'm teaching.

Because. And this is the whole idea of having a placebo with a high dose of psilocybin meds doesn't make any sense in 20 minutes. The purpose of a placebo is the patients cannot distinguish between their taking a placebo or the medicine they're testing against the placebo. Well, in 20 minutes you have liftoff. And in 20 minutes, if you use niacin, you get hot flush, beat red. Everybody knows they had niacin. So it's a misapplied medical model to use placebos with psychedelics at high doses, at microdosing, since a subsensorian, it's a valid test. And then. So that's what we're real excited about now. We're steering towards doing some clinical studies in 2024. Parkinson's is one of our subject study.

Groups. And then we have another group that I'm not at liberty to talk about at this moment. But we are planning to be in phase one clinical studies next year comparing psilocybin, microdosing psilocybin from extracts of mushrooms, synthetic versus natural, and in these combinations. And I'll point out that today.

Out of Israel, an article was just published showing that psilocybin mushroom extracts increase and have a stronger effect on neuroplasticity than psilocybin, the pure molecule with longer residual effects measured by proteins associated with neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. This is in mice, but this is the first biomarkers they found that show that psilocybin mushroom extracts give a larger benefit to neuroplasticity than psilocybin, the molecule. And this is what we've been advocating. These other tryptamines, bayocystin, norba, cysteine, norsilosin, erugenicin, these things also are in that tryptamine pathway we have evolved in a tryptamine universe. Our receptors are tuned in to tryptamines. Tryptophans become tryptamines. They're everywhere. I like to give a challenge to graduate students if you want to do a great paper. You know, I'm looking at a beautiful forest right now, and there's grasses. If you took away all the Lignin, all the cellulose, and you just left tryptamines molecules. That's the only thing you could see. We look out in the horizon, what would you see? You'd see the same thing. All the grasses are full of tryptamines. All of these leaves have tryptamines. Bark has tryptamines, ayahuasca.

Psychotropy of the vine. So it's interesting and it's not to be unexpected when you flood the receptor fields and you dock into one receptor site like 5ht2a. Well, now we know they dock in the track Bs, which I've been talking about for almost 10 years now. And that's what our research shows. Synergy of activation of a receptor called track biology that codes for neurogenesis.

Two articles that came out lately, one last year, showed that antidepressant medicines work because they dock with the track B receptor. And this is what actually has the antidepressant effects. So SSRIs, et cetera. Another article came out this year and Fleet, you may be aware of this. The psilocybin docs with tract B. A thousand times more than these antidepressant medicines. A thousand times more. Psilocybin is the greatest threat to the pharmaceutical industry, to big pharma, of any recently discovered drug, because people can grow these mushrooms, the universality of use. So it's very exciting. So if a macrodose has a thousand times more binding affinity to track bees than SSRIs and antidepressant medicines, where's a microdose? Well, it's going to be more than one, it's going to be less than a thousand, but it's going to be on that slope logically. So this is why we think it's not docking just with track Bs, but track A, track Cs, erk twos, jack ones. You know, I've been deeply involved in this. I've spent over a million dollars of my money just on these receptors and these activities. And we found an entourage effect of these other tryptamines that are in the natural form that synergistically activate more receptors more so than the individual components by themselves. So synergy by definition is not 1 plus 1 equals 2, but 1, 1 equals 10 is greater than the cumulative additive effects. So we think that the natural form still is better than the pure molecule.

That's really interesting in terms of kind of what the emerging pharma industry, not necessarily big pharma, but around psychedelics, wants to do and extracting some of these synthesized one even to get rid of the intoxicating effect and hope that they're still going to have the impact with the molecule. So I'm curious still about this, this world of microdosing and potential supplements. Like eventually there could be supplements that people can take like your stack with niacin, lion's mane and psilocybin. So a lot of people are doing this now. I suppose they're just kind of creating their own. Where are we with the legality of this in supplements? Are there. Does psilocybin have to be present in a certain amount before it's a threshold of being still an illegal substance or any trace of psilocybin makes it an illegal substance. And with the rescheduling of psilocybin, if that happens for therapeutic use, which is kind of a different world with higher doses, how will that impact the potential for supplements that have microdose levels of psilocybin in them?

Great question. And I walk in four worlds. My personal experiences with psilocybin. I have my academic interests and publications. I do publish quite, quite frequently. I'm an advisory member for Washington State for the decriminalization and or legalization of psilocybin for personal use. And I have a DEA license. And I'm also dealing with the federal. So let's go backwards for the federal. Any detectable amounts of psilocybin and substance is illegal, is prohibited by law. If you can detect it, it's illegal. So microdosing still would be illegal in states.

Now in California, 42 to 1 by the Congress, Congressmen and women of California passed us going to Governor Gavin's desk for signature for legal. For legal possession of psilocybin up to 1 ounce of dried mushrooms. That's 28 grams.

So you get this in this strange space of the conflict between state and feds. So Washington state is behind, but Oregon and Colorado very soon California Republicans wanting to protect and help veterans, they're on board for the declaration legalization of psychedelics. More Republicans are in favor of psychedelics than they are in favor of marijuana. Which is like really funny to consider. But there's a therapeutic benefit that's demonstrable. And then these high doses of psilocybin are have immediately positive effects. And so the.

Situation is coming to a head very quickly because California is the sixth largest economy in the world.

Many of these companies, when psilocybin is decriminalized and legalized in California, may set up LLCs that operate solely in California. Do not cross state lines and ostensibly there's no interstate commerce. So the Feds are not involved. Now the dea, from my conversations with my few contacts there, they're really interested in syndicates. They're not interested in individual use. It's a waste of their time. But you could argue a business in California selling psilocybin is a business syndicate. It's got a distribution system. It's, you know, and then the banking issues come involved with, you know, whether the Feds will insure the banks, et cetera. And California, Oregon, Washington state, Colorado, many states of have created exemptions for that so the banks can.

Fund these entrepreneurial businesses. So we're in a really gray area and pushing the envelope. I do know with the Biden administration there is a big effort to reschedule psilocybin and psychedelics in the next year, hopefully to schedule three.

And that will.

Be lessen the priority. You know, there's no, from my knowledge, there's no criminal syndicates on psilocybin. We have a, an application to grow psilocybin for clinical research. And one of the things come back to us. We have to build a Fort Knox, you know, razor wires, you know, massive protection. It's like building a Fort Knox to protect pennies, not gold. Because there's no motivation. I've got security cameras everywhere. You can buy psilocybin from your grandkids, right? From anyone. Why would you want to take the risk to try to get a small amount of psilocybin from a secure laboratory? So there's a lack of common sense in our laws and the lawmakers are struggling to come up the learning curve. But law enforcement follows the laws. Their mandate is to enforce the law. So what I see is a great movement happening right now is ballots, initiatives, 70, 80% of the population United States is voting for declaration and several legislature groups also getting on board with this. But it's the Feds won't do anything unless the laws are changed. They may deprioritize it. And then the other aspect is religious freedom. I use psilocybin mushrooms religiously. They're part of my religion, my spiritual use. I will argue with anyone who opposes that point of view. I can say it looking you directly in the eyes. This is essential for my spiritual well being and for my own personal religion. I think that's the way for most of us. So I think it's important that people realize that these are compounds that are so important. Our dear friend Roland Griffiths, you know, knows this only too well. He's A very spiritual man. And even though he's a great scientist, I don't think it's too far astray to say that psilocybin has affected him also very deeply spiritually, in his own sense of who he is. So I think there's a game changer. It's a revolution from the underground.

It's a civil rights issue. We should have a right to our own consciousness. We should not do any harm to our neighbors, to anyone else. But what you do inside the privacy of your own home with your family should be protected from federal intrusion. Now I sound like a libertarian.

Well, at the recent MAPS conference in Denver, which was a phenomenal experience and some 12, 13,000 people came and just the exhibitor hall was worth the price of admission. It was quite, quite a scene. It was kind of some version of Burning man or something. The. But the science was incredible. And your keynote and Roland Griffith's keynote were both remarkable for me. And I was able to go to the Roland Griffiths dinner. And most people know the Roland Griffiths has been dealing with stage four cancer. And he. I got to meet him personally at the dinner and he was just radiant. I was so impressed. He was just so humble and so radiant and seems like just like, I mean, just whatever model you could have of, of a spiritualized consciousness based, true scientist, a pure scientist, he just has that energy. And I felt it was a great privilege to be able to meet him personally.

And I think this is an example where science and spirituality converge. Now, maybe I shouldn't use the word religion because it's pregnant with so many other meanings, but spirituality is your own practice, your own practice of spirituality. Spirituality I consider to be your own religion, not that I'm following other religious practices. So, yeah, I roll a marlock. Roland's wife said, Roland needs to talk to you at the dinner. And so I came up to Roland and it was really amazing. Roland put his two hands like this, I put my two hands like this. And we talked for about five, five, ten minutes. Just one on one, four inches away from each other's face and tears are welling up in his eyes and mutual gratitude for both of us for our work. And he is a wonderful example of how to act. He's a kind, peaceful man. I believe Soul Simon makes nicer people.

And I, I think that that's what's happening. It's. People have an afterglow effect and they just become fundamentally less trapped, less encumbered. They can shed away some of these, all these monkeys on our backs and all these Sort of fight or flight reactions. And they can see the humanity and reaching out a hand to help someone. This is why I'm very much an advocate of respecting conservatives. The leading edge of innovation comes largely from liberals pushing the envelope to take the risk of failure. And most of them fail. Conservatives then benefit from liberals who pushed the envelope, found something that worked and now is monetized, and now it's secure, it's conventional, and now they understand, okay, I can rely on that. But they don't want to dare disrupt something that's already been proven. Liberals tend to be pushing the envelope left and right. Well, we need both coming together. And this also relates to something that's really important that I think this community understands. And I want to give a credit to an indigenous elder by the name of Albert Marshall, who published a book, Two Eyed Seeing. And when he was challenged by a mother saying why should her child be taught in Western styled schools? His response is, because in this world today, for us to survive and to protect our traditions, we need two eyes. One informed with indigenous wisdom, the other with Western technology. With two eyes we see better than one. And so many indigenous people now are of mixed ancestry. Are they going to deny their heritage? So many people have been oppressed in the world. I'm from Irish background. Those of you who haven't read the history of the millions of Irish who died from famine, from religious persecution, from the Brits, you know, look at the Jewish people in the Holocaust, look at in Africa, in China, there's all this oppression from authoritarian regimes that are trying to suppress your freedom of speech, your freedom of religion, your freedom to be able to access these sacred medicines. And the prisons throughout the world are populated with other psychonauts right now who are doing what we are doing. It's just fundamentally unfair. So I think this concept of building bridges across cultures, creating communities, respecting ancient traditions, insofar as we can ask for forgiveness for what our ancestors did, we should do so. But we need to humble ourselves to indigenous wisdom all over the world. Because with Two Eyed seeing we can navigate to a better future for us all.

I had the privilege of interviewing Albert Marshall for one of our summits. And that was really part of our topic yesterday on the summit was on the summit was.

Integrating these different sort of ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing, Western ways of knowing, even sort of Eastern contemplative, these different waves of knowing, ways of understanding the world and consciousness and developing meaning, so forth. And we really need to integrate these and optimize the synergies at A time when, when the world really needs wisdom so much and so really happy you brought, brought forward his name. And also another Laura Yanawara, who's the wife of the chief of the Yanawara tribe in Acre, Brazil. She's originally from Mexico and of from the Oaxaca region. She has an organization of really bringing together indigenous and non indigenous people to, to bring about the change we need to see in the world. And rather than, you know, putting people up in opposing people and some of the kind, I just understand the anger. All the different movements in our world, there's a lot of anger and it's justified and it's reasonable. But somehow we have to deal with that, acknowledge that and then find ways to work together. And I think any way that we can bring together the western and indigenous and contemplative ways of knowing, that's certainly pointing the way forward. So thank you.

Well, thank you so for highlighting these two, you know, huge leaders. You know, we can't change the past, but we can be informed by the past to be able to go into the future.

With a better modality. And you bring up Oaxaca and the Mazatex because it's so interesting. I'm writing a new book on psilocybin. I'm 208 pages into it. I'm a little bit late with my publisher, Penguin Random House. But it was really interesting.

That a friend of mine went to visit the Mazatecs in Oaxaca recently. And so they use Slosibi as a decorum mexicana. And Slosby.

Gibensis is called San Ysidro. Saint of agriculture is associated with the Spanish who brought in cattle. So Slosby cabensis, you know, colonized with the colonists, you know, all over the world. Slosby gibensis came from Africa. So it's interesting because the Mazatecs now because of the interest and their renewed interest and the finding these sulcide mushrooms in the wild is more and more difficult. Habitat changes, climate change, more pressure on people picking them. And so my friend came back, says you'd be amazed at what they're using.

And I said what?

What do you mean? He says they're using cultivated psilocys.

So the Mazatechs are able to continue their traditions of a psilocybin mushroom that came from Africa or you know, with this, with the Spanish. And they were able to now incorporating it in their traditions to be sustainable for their spiritual practices. Another example of two eyed scene, you know, Salah speaking about this in vitro propagation.

And Mazatect Traditions can continue because to have the traditions without the medicine makes it much less potent then it becomes focal or not practice.

So.

I wonder if you could talk a bit about Paul, the. For both use in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy at higher doses as well as microdosing and everything in between.

You mentioned before, you know, synthesized molecule versus actual natural psilocybin. Is there a distinction between naturally arising mushrooms, cultivated mushrooms, and then the synthesized molecule as well as are the differences in strains of various species of psilocybin mushrooms in terms of their efficacy or ideal efficacy for barest therapeutic uses, or is psilocybin psilocybin?

Well, the first two answers are yes, the second answer is no, or the third answer is no. Psilocybin in its natural form, I think, has a lot of other components to it that are involved in that matrix. That synthesized psilocybin is purely a pure molecule as a crystal, different spectacular, but it's a pure crystal, basically psilocybin. When you extract psilocybin from the mushrooms, you go through sort of a biogated fractionation process of increasing purity, but it's still decorated with all these other associated compounds. So you don't. I don't know of any example yet where they got 100% pure psilocybin from a psilocybin mushroom. I know examples where they've gotten 90%, you know, 95%, but not actually a purified psilocybin. It could be done.

But one of my favorite phrases from Voltaire is don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Because if you try to go to the extreme purification, you might be throwing away all these other compounds that we know are iterative and are causing, causing synergism. But you bring up strains. We're in a very interesting frontier of new discovery. There's so many different strains of psilocybin have in mushroom species that they're going to have different proportionalities. So these tryptamines, and there's probably some trip to means that we have not even discovered. But I want people to just think, you know, and I actually challenged a clinical study group, you know, why would they stick at 25 milligrams? Because they didn't think that microdosing necessarily would work. I said, well, how would you. How do you know that 25 milligrams is not excessive? And you flood the 5ht2a receptor and it's basically occluded from other docking with other triptamines. This overflow is not only hitting 5ht 2a, but we know track B and other receptors. Well, let's carry that forward because if you have a diversity of these tryptamines that have different locking molecular configurations, they could dock with other receptors. And I think the future is going to show is the cross talking of this receptor activated, this receptor activated. And then suddenly you have all these different nexus points, you know, in the neurological network that are excited and they're collaterally communicating, which I think is the way of nature to say, wake up, nervous system. This is a benefit. You should be on the alert and sensitive to this because this will protect the whole organism. So that's what I think, really what's exciting is that it's not a unidirectional, you know, docking of psilocybin just to one receptor. It's going to be the psilocybin family of triptamines that are activating multiple receptors and then they synergistically start cross talking and influencing one another. So we go full circle back to Mary Hunt, you know, with, with the Penicillium chrysogenum. Her strain was 200 times more active. It's not just with one molecule, though. I think we'll find these mixtures and consortiums. We'll eventually have preferred strains, best strains for certain applications.

Maybe a better strain for psychomotor skills, maybe a better strain for depression. We're not there yet. But the genomics that are being applied now to psilocybin, I think is the key in the door for opening up a whole new field of us being able to use customized individualized medicine, being able to have physicians, psychiatrists, even shamans, religious practitioners saying this strain is the most useful for the intention that we have set. And this, by the way, is also very much rooted in indigenous traditions. What is your intention? Why do you want to have this experience? What is your goal? And oftentimes things come out of the woodwork where your stated intention, yes, you reconcile that, but it may be consequential to something else that happened in your life that you come to realize that that's the core root of my problem.

My personal life. I didn't have my father's love.

My father wasn't around. I. I feel like I was a fatherless child. That deeply, deeply wounded me. And. And then I met this amazing man, Bill Webb from Big Sur, California. And I'm 19, 20 years of age. We did a massive dose of Slosby cabensis, and he bonded with me very strongly. And so I've sort of grabbed onto to masculine figures who are heroes of ethics, you know, spirituality, just mannerism, kindness. And so I've adopted sort of this. This mantra which defines my life is that I want to go forward with kindness.

Courage, strength and wisdom.

Those are the four guideposts of my life. And I have found that when you put it, throw a pebble into the pond of kindness, it reverberates out. The return that you get is phenomenal. They don't teach us at Harvard Business School, but it's so true about personal life, about business. Don't take this Machiavellian approach of competition. I'm going to beat somebody out. No, I think evolution is based on extending the surplus of assets you have beyond your needs to another individual or community that needs it. And reciprocally, they will try to help you. And so I think this is a truly a worldwide revolution of a community of people who believe in the basic goodness of humanity. And we need to capitalize, so to speak, in every which way we can to help uplift these leaders. Because I think these are the leaders, like in my life. These are the father and mother figures that we need to lead us into the future.

Wow. Well, that's a really wonderful place to complete our conversation. But I wanted to add one more question. I want to come back to this idea of microdiversity equals biosecurity. So given the incredible potential for human health, mental health, and spiritual evolution, and with psilocybin and the whole world of plant medicines, is a future.

Cultivation because of the dangers of climate change and the dangers of just depending on what occurs naturally in the wild. So it's a future cultivation to be able even to develop the complexity of strains and realizing this strain works better with this intention or for this purpose. And so it's a future decriminalization and then some kind of systemic cultivation of these plant medicines, psilocybin in particular.

Great question. And let me paint the canvas with broad strokes. 95% of the people, they just want to get a psilocybin mushroom. They know it's clean and pure. That will help them, or 5%, which I will now categorize as the new leaders. They walk their talk, they know how to identify salsa, have mushrooms. They go into the forest. In their fields, they practice the walk of discovery and respect and knowledge. They're connected with the earth, the ecosystem. They know how to identify, how to preserve, how to protect, how to cultivate. And these become the cognoscente, the knowledge keepers from which everyone else benefits.

By.

Harvesting a psilocybin mushroom and walking with it spores are left in your, in the trail of your footsteps. So you actually are spreading psilocybin mushrooms. Now if you collect all the adults, obviously that'll have an impact on spores being released, you know, in the ecosystem. But us mushroom hunters have really come sort of to an ad lib understanding. If you collect 10% of the mushrooms that you find and leave 90%, nature can handle that. It has the ability to be able to adapt to that. And moreover, you're spreading spores in new habitats. I am opposed to 100% cultivation, harvesting of every mushroom.

Now when you cultivate, of course you.

Can harvest all that you cultivate. So the bridge here is nature is the library, the natural, well, the resource, the mother of all strains of psilocybin mushrooms. Once we get those mushrooms in the culture, then we can propagate them and preserve them. I mentioned this mushroom, agarikon. We have 93 strains, seem to have 100.

My professor, first time in 40 years he found a garakhan in the old growth forest. He goes out in the old growth forest several dozen times a year. That's how rare it is. Twelve of my strains of agarikhan, the habitats have either burned, have been logged, etc. I saved those strains from extinction. Those phenotypes we know now, some of these strains are super strains. Had I not taken them out of nature and cloned it, medical science would maybe never be able to study or benefit, you know, the world if these strains turn out to be super antivirals against pandemics. So there is a marriage here of both principles. But I would advocate those who just want the treatment. Many of those people see the peak through the door or the window and realize, oh my gosh, this is a lifestyle, this is a way of being, this is a way I can take my family, my children. This cross generational is intergenerational. People ask me oftentimes, where can you get sulcide mushrooms? Like, not for me, but I say, do you have grandkids between the ages of 18 and 25? They probably know where to get them, right? And so this is when we were growing up, besides my father's request, there was a cultural divide of generations. There was a psychonauts and then the others that weren't. This is very different. This is cross generational, cross cultural, you know, intercontinental. And mark my words, in the future, well beyond perhaps our lifespans, this will be intergalactic. So I think we need a peace treaty with psilocybin. And I think this is the, the most peaceful offering that we can convey. And the message of psilocybin is to share it.

Well, that is an ideal point to end this conversation, especially before we go completely intergalactic here. But no, it's a wonderful message and really important message. Thank you so much, Paul, for your incredible work and for everything you shared with us here today.

Just.

Just incredible and inspiring. Thank you.

Well, thank you, and thanks to all the elders and all of our ancestors who carried this torch to this point in time. And it's our responsibility to pass the torch, but we want to pass the choice of those people who are qualified to walk their talk, who we know. Their core is dedicated to help the commons and to help people. You know, we. You know, let me just speak from a practical point of view. You can't take it with you, right? We're all going to be consumed by mycelium, make peace with the fungi now, but we can leave a legacy that can help future generations. How do you want to be remembered? I think that's the ultimate thing that we need to keep focused, is that we're all in this corporeal body where this assembly of atoms and molecules in this form. But we then re. Entry into the micromolecular universe from which we sprung. And I think when we come back, you know, we will be met with joy that we've returned and had our moment. And I think this is our moment now.

Wow.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

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