Paul Stamets

A lot of them were these religious depictions of people that were naked dancing under the –

It was like a transparent mushroom shape and they were dancing.

It's like something that would indicate that they were under the trance and they were dancing.

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No, I would agree with you on that.

The image of Adam and Eve, I'm curious to say, what do you think is debatable about that?

Yeah.

Well, he's not ideologically captured.

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.

I couldn't imagine it being anything else.

Like he realized that he was wrong and then his position on this was based on ignorance.

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

So he educated himself and completely turned around, did a 180 and now is an advocate.

Yeah.

Find those, Jamie.

Those are fascinating 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.

Blue Lotus, I think, was one of them.

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.

How long ago was this?

When they brought us to the – 2016.

Put them headphones on.

2016.

And it's one of the only things that's been shown to really get these people straight.

What is the psychedelic compound in the blue lotus?

It's rock and roll, Paul.

Are contemporary people taking Blue Lotus?

Doesn't it always work out that way?

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.

Good to see you, sir.

When we think about a halo, we think about like a frisbee that's hovering over an angel's head or a saint's head.

But the ancient depictions of them weren't that.

The ancient depictions of them, you saw those ribs that made it look like the bottom of a psilocybin mushroom.

You didn't know that?

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 and not just me.

You got any of those images?

There's some better ones.

I know, but it's not.

You can't find them?

Man, the government's pulled them off the internet, man.

That's not one.

The ones that I've seen are far clearer than that.

Yes.

Those.

Like, look at that one, which is crazy that you have to go to us.

I can see the one on the left.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

I mean, that essentially looks exactly like that.

I've never seen that.

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

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

I mean, that looks exactly like that halo.

Yeah, that's not a... Which totally makes sense.

Look at that.

Okay, there's one.

Look at that image.

So this is the old school halo.

The old school halo clearly looks like the bottom of a mushroom.

I'm blown away.

You're blown away.

Hiding in plain sight, right?

I can't believe that I'm teaching you this.

I can't believe you... How come nobody told you this?

I don't know.

You knew Jack when he was alive.

This was like his primary concern towards the end of his life.

He was...

Who's working on a book?

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

Forever.

Can I ask you this?

What do you think happens to consciousness?

What's happening?

What is a charismatic person?

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Book number eight, huh?

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.

Oh, that's so creepy.

Look at that robot.

That's so creepy.

Oh, I need to see that.

How many of them would change their ways?

I would imagine a great deal.

Yeah, business school is just teaching you how to make some money.

Who would have known?

There's so many books to be written on mushrooms.

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

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 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 in 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.

I think we can steer this.

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

And of savagery that we're trying to move past.

Right.

Slowly but surely over time.

And that only kills half the people.

Imagine a diarrhea.

You get eaten 42 pounds of mushrooms.

I think so, too.

I think that's part of the 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 can show you like, hey, I've done this.

It's going to be scary.

Well, I don't know if that's not going to happen.

It's going to weird you out.

But ultimately, you're going to come out on the other end of this a better person.

It's just not going to 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 90s and when we would go to Las Vegas for the UFC in the – I guess actually it was in the 2000s.

It was highly illegal.

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?

And, you know, I'd remember the stories from the 70s where people were locked up for their entire lives for, you know, like an ounce of marijuana in Vegas.

Whether you like it or not.

Yeah.

Have you paid attention to the James Webb Telescope discoveries?

Yeah.

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

I always worry about an asteroid coming from behind the sun and then how many – Well, it's probably been the reset for civilization over and over again throughout time.

They had zero tolerance for it.

And I always wondered what that was about, whether that was an anti-hippie thing or whether it was in response to the alcohol lobby.

Not necessarily, but probably makes sense.

Vegas obviously sells a lot of alcohol and anything that would cut back on their profits.

Keep people from freaking out?

Has this telescope recently come online?

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

That's insane.

But how would you get that thing?

We talked about this the other day.

The study showed that amongst young people, alcohol consumption is down significantly.

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?

Isn't it down by like 25%?

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 they wouldn't travel.

And maybe they don't need to.

And maybe they're also dealing with solar systems that we have as a result of multiple impacts, including the creation of Earth itself, right?

There was Earth and there was Earth 2.

We were hit by another planet.

They think that's what created the moon.

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.

What's that?

We would have never made it to 2025.

We would have been dust a long time ago.

Right.

Yeah, isn't that crazy?

Which, by the way, great thing.

That's a good thing.

But it's not a good thing for profits.

But they're not very generous.

They're just trying to eat and survive.

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.

But my point is that how many states now have cannabis as completely legal?

Yeah.

Which is probably where they should be killing people.

Oh, Paul's here.

Oh, that's so cool.

Oh, they're so fast.

I think it's like 19.

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.

Yeah, it's more than a dozen for sure.

It just snaps its neck forward, engulfs this fish, swallows it all, and it looks like a magic trick.

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

There's so much sea life there.

Yeah, I think it's somewhere around then.

And then you have medical use, which is in many, many more states.

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

Of like-minded people.

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 that's on the ground because there's 20 million people walking around.

It's just it is what it is.

Keep moving.

Keep moving.

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.

It's just a matter of time before the people in the federal government realize this is a losing battle.

And these factories whose the back of the factory opens to this river and this river is completely choked with plastic and garbage and just junk and all the stuff that they don't want.

They just throw into the river and there's so much stuff in the river that I guess they just feel like, well, it's not like I'm polluting something that's not already polluted.

I'm just adding to whatever is there.

This is just what we do.

And so they've developed this culture of like constant, consistent pollution.

I wanted to talk to you about something that you said earlier because you were talking about human species and – 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.

But what do you think – why do you think we're so different than all the other species on the planet?

Do you think that psilocybin – do you subscribe to McKenna's theory?

I know we've probably talked about this before.

As a standalone podcast, this is probably – Joe, this is what I like.

Right.

How do they reconcile that?

Well, that's also what happens when you abandon the ego, right?

The ego is consistently abandoned through psychedelic experiences.

You're much more likely to laugh at yourself.

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.

Unquestionably, right?

The diminishing of stress.

And this is why clinical benefits physiologically.

than he ever did when he was in combat.

And it's just, it's like every day, every day you're dealing with shootouts.

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 Terence's stoned ape theory.

And his theory involved a lot of contributing factors, one of them being climate change.

And the theory was that as the rainforest receded into grasslands, you get more undulate animals and they leave behind poop.

Every day you're dealing with stabbings.

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.

Every day you're dealing with horrific crimes.

more creative, the ability to form sentences, glossolalia, associate sounds with objects and concepts, and that this is probably how language formed among humans.

And 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.

And it's just, your brain is just overrun with this.

So in the inner limits, what was the amount of growth in 200,000 years?

200,000 years, 50%.

200,000 years ago.

Oh, so.

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

No.

No.

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

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.

Yeah, Carey Mullis.

Would you mind explaining time wave zero because we kind of glossed over that too.

December 21st, 2012.

I used to have a license plate that said 12-21-12.

Yeah.

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

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

Viciously.

And especially if they step outside the lines and they propose something that's novel, they get attacked.

This time wave zero thing, like 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.

Right.

Where did he come up with that concept?

Did you ask him about that?

And obviously – I wish he was alive on December 21, 2012.

I'd be like, and?

And what?

Yeah.

But maybe we're wrong.

Maybe in that timeline something did happen on December 21st, 2012 that will be recognized in the future.

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 2012.

I think there is a real problem with that, with the human race.

And I don't necessarily think we recognize things that are constant.

Right.

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 get to like 2009, you know, just go to 2000.

People weren't carrying their phones around staring at them all day.

This is a profound change in how we interface with the world.

Just standing there staring at their phones.

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 in the sense of –

Social media, you're getting negative information all day long.

So it changes the perspective.

Well, that was 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 job is to get you to click on something.

And so they have these crazy headlines.

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 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.

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

I like it.

You guys are 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.

Especially from like an anti-aging protocol for the mind.

Yeah.

Right?

I had Bernie Sanders on the podcast yesterday, and one of the things that we talked about quite a bit was what's going to happen with people.

when automation takes over, when AI and automation take over and so many people are not working anymore.

And we both kind of agree that universal basic income is really the only way to mitigate the disastrous effects of people losing their income, losing their jobs.

And I think it's a good thing.

But the problem with universal basic income is that just giving people a check, they don't have meaning anymore.

They don't feel like they have a purpose.

They don't feel like they have an identity.

If your whole life you've been X, whatever the job is that gets taken away, and you recognize you're being really good at your job and you take pride in that and you're known by your coworkers, it's like –

Hey, go to Paul.

He's the best.

He'll take care of it.

He knows what he's doing.

Then all of a sudden, that job disappears.

How do people find value and how do they switch their perspective?

And talking to you today I think is perfect because I think if there's anything that could help us through this journey.

that could help people make this transition, which appears to be inevitable, where artificial intelligence is going to do a far better job at a lot of menial tasks that people have been doing for an occupation for a long time, to find a search for meaning, to find some other way to realize value in life.

And not just to be a cog in the wheel of this capitalist society, but instead...

Maybe psilocybin would allow people to completely change their perspective of how they exist in this world.

And that you've been kind of trapped in this society where it values numbers.

It values a constant growth for the shareholders.

And it values what you can see in your bank account that's like not even real.

It's all this digital money that's somewhere real.

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

And also protection of the mothership.

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.

This is a human-created concept, but it overwhelms our day-to-day existence.

It doesn't have to, though.

But in this structure, the way we find ourselves now, you take away meaning.

You take away a purpose in life, and you just give people a government check every month that covers everything.

It covers your food.

It covers your rent.

You don't need to make money anymore because everything is automated.

Everything is cheap.

AI controls it all.

Yeah, he didn't know.

But I don't know if Bernie's had any experiences in that regard.

And he didn't have that perspective.

But talking to you right afterwards might be the answer because this is an inevitable journey that we're on of a revolutionary change in how society is structured.

But it doesn't have to be negative.

The problem is the people that are in control of AI and these systems, the people that will benefit from them incredibly in a financial sense, those people are not having these experiences.

And if they were having these experiences, they could be the only ones.

If you have a benevolent person in an extreme position of power, they're probably the only people that can really do something about that.

And I think it's very important that they hear this, that you realize like you're wasting this valuable moment in life trying to acquire money when we have this very unique opportunity to connect together in a way that people probably used to do on a regular basis in the past.

but was always suppressed by the powers that be because of its revolutionary powers.

It's hard to be a dictator.

Yeah.

Dictators want people in constant conflict fighting against each other, and they take advantage of that.

It might be the only way.

It might be the only way we can get through this.

Because if you think about what this problem is, the problem is the way we interface with reality.

That's really what it is.

We have been interfacing with reality a very particular way, showing up at work every day, doing our job, getting a paycheck, employee of the month, yay.

That's how you interface reality most of your life.

And then all of a sudden you're met with this profound technological change that's going to eliminate your job.

There needs to be some sort of a profound experience that reintegrates you with the mother.

It lets you know this is something people made.

This is something that people made and most of the people that made it weren't having psychedelic experiences.

And they're building cities and they're building skyscrapers and they're polluting the river and they're doing all this stuff and it doesn't mean that this is how we're supposed to do it.

Inspired.

The nicest people.

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

Yeah, just doing it.

Pressfield talked about that in The War of Art.

Have you read that book?

No, no.

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 thing that we all have where we're reluctant to sit down and actually do the work.

But if you could just commit, and he calls it the muse.

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 actually do that thing where you call upon the muse, it actually works.

Yeah.

So whether or not it's real is irrelevant.

Yeah, I can't think like that.

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

I think there's a psychedelic revolution that's happening all over the planet.

I think it's happened over the last 20 years, and I think it's happened because of the Internet.

I think that's a big factor because what they did in the 1970s by, you know, what the Nixon administration did, which is essentially to squash the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, what they did really fucked up society for a long time.

And it put in people's heads that this is how we're supposed to be, that these laws that are in place make sense and that they're there in order for society to function at its optimal levels.

It's just not true.

And unfortunately, like a lot of things that get that propaganda gets pushed and people start accepting that propaganda as fact, it takes a long time relatively in our lifetimes to sort of recognize that this is not right.

And this is not how we should have been living the entire time.

This is 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 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.

I think interacting with nature is a vitamin.

You know how we get vitamin D from the sun?

I think we get something that hasn't been measured yet from interacting with nature.

We know that you can actually study an alleviation of stress levels from people that go out into nature.

And this thing that we're experiencing, we just don't know how to measure it.

And I think it's a real thing.

One of the things that makes me very happy and hopeful now is that you're seeing this...

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 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 is how you get a guy like rick perry

There's all the sort of becoming this very strong advocate for Ibogaine and having it passed in Texas.

So the initiative passed, which is huge.

It's huge.

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.

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.

He basically wrote a song about God and psychedelics.

That was a country song.

And everybody's like, hey, what the hell's going on?

Right.

Well, marijuana is also associated with lazy people and ne'er-do-wells.

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 jiu-jitsu community is there's a whole lot of stoners in the jiu-jitsu community

Oh, yeah.

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

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 going to do before he did it.

A nail on an ice pick.

So you have the point of the ice pick.

You've got to hit that nail at the very point.

That's extremely important.

It also alleviates the anxiety that comes before performance.

There's a lot of people like to use it before sparring because sparring is kind of scary for some people.

No.

I drove this race car.

Listen, don't take any of our advice.

But we're just talking about these things because there are anecdotal stories that are fascinating.

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

No, not.

Why not?

So it's not like cigarettes.

Right.

We see cigarettes.

We know you smoke cigarettes.

There's a higher likelihood that you're going to 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.

Isn't that amazing?

235.

Could you have imagined that 25 years ago?

No, there was none.

Impossible.

How did they study that, and what was the measure?

Yeah.

Oh, it's never leaving the desk.

That sucker.

Yes, Stamets.

This is one of the nicest specimens.

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

People always ask, what the hell is that?

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

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

Which, by the way, this is your company, Host Defense.

You have great stuff, man.

I buy your stuff.

Thank you.

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.

So there's resistance to these results?

I mean publicly.

Like you're saying you can't make these claims, but if you have results.

So could you elaborate on what the resistance is?

How many new species get discovered?

So if they find a new species, how do they determine?

If it's a completely new species, how do they determine that it's psilocybin?

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

How do they determine where it's from?

Excellent question.

Yeah, I've heard that from people that are deeply connected to that industry that there was a bunch of euthanizations.

It didn't have to happen.

It didn't have to happen.

Yeah, and they did it.

And they inflated this whole concept because the numbers got grossly inflated because they were euthanizing chickens for profit.

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

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

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

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.

Yeah.

How could that be bad?

That's better.

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 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 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.

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 and public about it because they were destroyed.

You know, I famously remember Jenny McCarthy coming out and saying that she believes her child was vaccine injured.

And the backlash was spectacular.

It essentially destroyed her career.

I mean, 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 $8 billion.

The pharmaceutical drug industry spends $8 billion just on advertising and on propaganda every year.

That's so much money.

And they spend so much money on television networks.

I mean, how many times has Anderson Cooper brought to you by Pfizer?

You see these ads, and that shapes the narrative, unfortunately.

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 there are.

What can be mitigated in terms of like how can you make your overall metabolic health better before you even think about any of these things?

We know for a fact that during the COVID crisis in particular, the people that had the most problem with it were the people that had comorbidities or people that were obese, people that had all sorts of issues going on because of poor diet, poor lifestyle choices, and even genetic problems.

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.

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.

And they start adding things like Hep B. And then you realize, 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.

You should have to show all the studies too.

You shouldn't just show the curated studies that you generated specifically with the goal of making an efficacy, like having a result that shows that this is effective.

If you do ten studies, you should show all ten studies.

Exactly, exactly.

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

Right.

Yeah.

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

Well, look at artemisicin.

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

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

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.

Yeah, it makes sense.

I have to ask you this question.

It's unrelated, but I always wanted to know.

Why do morel mushrooms grow around burns?

That's crazy.

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

Right.

Right.

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

Yes.

But rarely?

No.

We think all the time.

All the time.

But very common amongst burns.

That's fascinating.

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

Can we see what that looks like in the image?

Got it.

You're dealing with millions and millions of acres.

And you're accustomed to seeing them.

But you're not saying, like, that you feel something from them.

Right.

It's just such a fascinating thing.

The largest known organism on Earth.

exists in the pacific northwest that's one cell wall thick that's so nuts think about its immune system you know what i found out recently that i had no idea aspen trees when you see aspen trees it's one plant yeah it's one contiguous thing they're the two competitors for that title by the way isn't that nuts they're the two competitors when you see these i always thought when you see aspen forests that it's a bunch of different individual aspen trees right nope

You're just saying recognize them visually.

Well, Terrence talked about that.

Terrence talked about morning glory seeds and having psychedelic experiences.

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

I think they do.

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

Amazing.

It's that big.

No, I couldn't agree with you more.

You're aware of Brian Murrow Rescue, right?

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

They found ergot in them from the Eleusinian Mysteries.

I don't know.

You have to ask him.

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

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.

And then they're reluctant to talk about it because of the illegality of it, unfortunately.

And if you have a job that is where you have to be taken seriously –

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

Yeah.

Note to everyone right now.

Note to everyone.

All conflicts involve two or more people.

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.

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.

And 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.

We're in a positive direction.

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

I couldn't agree more.

That's a good way to end this.

Thank you, Paul.

Hold your book up there because this is the latest of eight books that you've written.

Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats.

Paul, you're a gem.

You really are.

You're such an important person.

And I think through the conversations that you and I have had and then you've had on many other podcasts as well, millions and millions of people have said,

gotten to understand what this is really all about.

And I think your role in educating people is enormous.

I think you're doing just that.

So thank you.

I appreciate you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Did you know Jack Harer?

Yes.

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.