The Future of Microdosing: Legislation, Research, & Science

Podcast Highlights

• An introduction to Paul and Pam, and their work together in researching the benefits of microdosing psilocybin.
• Tracking the history of mushroom wisdom and knowledge, from indigenous traditions to scientific research.
• How the complexity of microdosing demands new research approaches and methodologies.
• Addressing the disconnect between policy and science.
• Paul Stamets’ vision of how psychedelics can be integrated in society, and how MycoMedica is working towards it.
• How new scientific findings on psilocybin and microdosing could influence future legislation.
• Closing remarks: psychedelics, kindness, and community

Show Links

1. MycoMedica Life Sciences, PBC
2. Microdose.me study
3. Paul Stamets’ talk at the 2017 MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference
4. The roots of ‘Two-Eyed Seeing’
5. mushroomreferences.com
6. Quantified Citizen App
7. Paul Stamets’ Website
8. Paul Stamets on Instagram
9. Pamela Kryskow, M.D. on LinkedIn

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Podcast Transcript

0:00:01.1 Paul Stamets: Oh my gosh, who's going to argue about reducing crime and addiction? You know, really? You're more concerned about the effect of Microdosing? I mean, this is really just, it blows my mind that we even have to educate people on this because all of us psychonauts, we already know this. Psilocybin makes nicer people. And that's fundamental to the health of our society and protecting our economies.

0:00:32.9 Paul Austin: Welcome to the Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, audio Mycelium connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors, and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance, and collective transformation.

0:01:03.6 PA: Hey folks, today we have a very special podcast episode for the psychedelic podcast. Today I'll be speaking with Paul Stamets and Pam Kryskow. This is live from the Wonderland conference in Miami. It is a video podcast so we have both Paul and Pam on video. It goes for over an hour and it really is an epic one. So make sure you tune in to the entire episode. We go deep into the topics of Microdosing. Obviously we have Paul on the show, Pam as well as a medical doctor.

0:01:35.9 PA: So we talk about Microdosing through the lens of patient help. We hear a little bit about Quantified Citizen, an app that Paul and Pam have utilized to collect massive amounts of data, naturalistic data on how people are using Microdosing psychedelics, particularly Microdosing mushrooms. We hear from Paul about the importance of combining psilocybin with Lion's Mane and niacin. We hear about MycoMedica Life Sciences, which is a company that Paul and Pam have co-founded. They've raised $60 million for it and they're bringing Microdosing psilocybin, the Stamets stack through clinical trials. And then we talk about martial arts. We talk about colonialism. We talk about kindness and compassion and why mushrooms are so important in terms of this new world that's emerging. I've waited to do this podcast for many, many years and it really was an honor to be able to sit down in person with Paul and also Pam and do a video for this conversation. I think you all will enjoy it. You'll find it to be incredibly enriching as well as stimulating. And there are more than a handful of mic drop moments we could say. And so I'm really looking forward for you to all have access to this full uncut raw version of Paul and Pam.

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0:06:11.4 PA: All right, let's dive into this episode with Paul Stamets and Pam Kryskow. I hope you enjoy this riveting conversation around Microdosing, quantified personalization applications around Taekwondo and around the importance of kindness and compassion when working with psychedelics.

0:06:32.4 PA: Welcome back to the Psychedelic Podcast. So we're coming at you from Wonderland, a conference brought to you by Microdose. And this is our fifth podcast interview. And you may hear some noise. We're in a warehouse. We're doing this a little retro style. So just to preface that and have that as context. And today we have Dr. Pam Kryskow, who is a medical doctor, and Paul Stamets, a world renowned mycologist. And we're going to go into Microdosing and probably mushrooms and probably a lot of things about Microdosing, mushrooms and many other things that come with that. So I profess this in terms of coming into the conversation just to get a sense of how we landed here with you two. What are you collaborators on? How is it that you know each other? Why is it that we're speaking to the both of you here today?

0:07:29.7 Pamela Kryskow: We look at each other. Well, we're both co-founders of MycoMedica Life Sciences. Well Paul's the main founder and one of the co-founders. And we're collaborators on the microdose.me study.

0:07:42.5 PS: Happy to say that we're also co-authors on two papers that have been published in Nature Scientific Reports. Our papers have gotten a lot of traction on Microdosing, basically based on the Quantified Citizens app, which Pam and I collaborated with the co-owners of Quantified Citizen and designing the app. Pam, being a medical doctor, had very salient inputs designing the app. And our second paper in Nature that was published in September 28th, I believe, showed something that was quite surprising. And basically, there was a psychomotor test of finger tapping, how quickly you can tap your two fingers in 10 seconds.

0:08:27.6 PS: And with age-related dementia and new news, when you get older, you suffer from neurodegeneration. So when you're 22, you can tap your fingers a lot faster when you're 82. So the signal that was surprising was with the 55-plus-year-olds with Microdosing, which is, I think, 80% of the people, approximately, it was a tenth of a gram of psilocybin cubensis to a third of a gram, which is 1 to 3 milligrams at 1% potency. 1% potency of 1 gram is 10 milligrams. So this is one tenth of that. And the signal that we saw that was surprising is the finger tap test in 55-plus-year-olds, an older population, which is important to point out because when you have a younger population, you don't have the background of contrast. Older populations, you're seeing a newer degeneration. So the signal that was surprisingly apparent with a p-value of significance of 0.004, which is 1 in 250th chance, that's just random, showed increasing of finger tapping frequency from 48 taps to 68 taps in 10 seconds with a microdose. Of the stack, which is really interesting, wasn't psilocybin in any other form except the combination of niacin, Lion's Mane, and psilocybin.

0:09:54.1 PS: Now why this is so surprising in many ways is that the mushrooms are being sourced from the underground. So variability in supply and potency, variability in the amount of niacin and Lion's Mane, highly recommended protocol, but there's a lot of latitude in that protocol. Yet with all those confounders, it would logically dilute significance. The fact that we have a p-value of 0.004 with those confounders, so those three elements in the Stamets Stack formula that show that significance suggests to me that we're understating what is potentially could be optimized had those variables been controlled. This needs to be approved in clinical studies, but this is why Microdosing has an extremely bright future. And folks, it works. We don't know how it works necessarily. I have some ideas on that now.

0:10:51.5 PA: We can talk about it as well.

0:10:56.3 PS: Yeah, but Dr. Pam is on the ground with people, with patients, and she's been collecting a lot of reports.

0:11:00.3 PA: And so I'd love to just... We know a lot about Paul. He's been in a lot of podcasts. He's done a lot of media. He's a very well-known person in this field. For you, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background in terms of how did you get into the psychedelic space? Why is it that you have chosen Microdosing as a particular point of focus? What is it that brings you to this world of healing?

0:11:20.2 PK: I'm a medical doctor, and I was primarily working in chronic pain. And what I was noticing with my patients is a lot of them, we could only get about 50% better because the other 50% of their chronic pain is really existential distress or depression or trauma. And so the only way that I knew we were going to move them through it is with psychedelic assisted therapy, and at that time, ketamine was really the only thing that was available. And so we're working on bringing ketamine assisted therapy into the chronic pain clinic to help take patients past the trauma so that we could help resolve the chronic pain. And around the same time, actually a little bit even earlier than that, collaborating with Paul, and he was getting... He's not a doctor, but he's getting all these case reports from people that are constantly sending him their stories. And I asked, I said, can I chronicle those? So we started collaborating on that way where when people would send Paul the stories, he'd ask, can I forward your story to this medical doctor in Canada? And so I was collecting all these case reports. And also I had a lot of friends in Silicon Valley that were Microdosing, and I knew that they were Microdosing LSD for their attention.

0:12:27.2 PK: So that's caught my interest. And then it is kind of this confluence of things that came together where there was a couple of people that were extremely suicidal that I knew, and they started Microdosing. They somehow got onto it and it changed, like in a week, they were like, it changed my life. And of course, when you're a doctor and you're curious, you're like, why? So I started really looking into it, collecting the case reports, collating the case reports, starting to get a sense of what things were working with mushrooms in general, but also Microdosing more specifically. And then it really came from that, the Microdosing going, this has a huge potential. Obviously, it's working for a lot of people because they would stop if it wasn't, and it wouldn't be growing. And yeah, I worked with Paul to talk about how can we study this, thinking at that time no one thought psychedelics was going to be legal anytime soon.

0:13:21.5 PA: And this was what, 2017 or 2016 or 2015?

0:13:24.2 PK: 2015, 2016, earlier.

0:13:26.7 PA: So pre-Michael Paul.

0:13:28.5 PK: Oh, yeah, way pre-Michael Paul by far. And of course, Paul's way pre-pre-pre that, four decades of experience. And yeah, so we had some conversations and we said, how can we study this? And then we knew about Quantified Citizen, Caitlin, Ismail, and Caitlin Harvey. And they had, their app was in process already, and they had this one Microdosing study on there for meditation or wellness. And I was like, duh, of course it helps. But what does it help? Like, what I want to know is as a doctor, what does it also help? And so then we started talking about how can we really look at things that matter and use validated tests in this like prospective observational naturalistic setting, like what people are actually doing. And so when we all put our heads together, it was phenomenal. Yeah, we looked at what people were doing, why they were doing it, what doses they were doing, what frequencies they were doing. And then we grabbed every validated, every validated study we could put in an app. So the PHQ-9, depression scale, anxiety scales, PTSD, resiliency, and then also the more like the psychomotor, neuro, and the neurocognitive studies so that we could do like memory and math skills and hearing and visual acuity and reaction time, like the tap test that Paul's already talked about.

0:14:55.9 PS: Yeah. Well, this is a great example of citizen scientists leading medicine. You have a large community of people exponentially validating something that medical science has not yet woken up to. And because the massive affirmation, and of course we have to have clinical studies, we need to prove this to the top levels of scientific disciplines. But this is a real example now that citizen scientists have really led the way and medical science is trying to catch up to this wave. And how big is this wave and how much of it is people have a need and an expectancy versus the real world outcomes? And it's always interesting to me, I'm not a doctor, I don't give any medical advice, but when it comes to depression and anxiety, I often... It's such a complex symptomology and the root cause of this. But if the net benefit is reported by the patients, isn't that the doctor's purpose? Is to have the patient feel better? And so it's always curious to me that people get stuck in the mechanisms of action and they ignore the outcome because they don't understand how it happened. And without understanding how it happened, they won't accept the results.

0:16:25.4 PA: Like a catch 22...

0:16:25.6 PS: And it's kind of this oxymoron in medicine, especially in psychiatry, it's catch 22, but the patient walks out of the office or from this experience from Microdosing, for instance, and they feel much better. They report it to their friends, to their family, to their neighbors, to their community; this is the pebble in the pond of goodness that emanates outwards to society. And wow if you were chronically depressed and then you told your friends and your family, Oh, my gosh, I feel so much better from Microdosing. I mean, that has a net benefit. And Pam, being a medical doctor, she's taught me a lot of physicians actually use expectancy bias to the advantage of making conventional medicines work better. You all have a bias when you go to a doctor wanting to get an antibiotic. Oh, I need an antibiotic. I know it'll help me. The doctor says, yes, it'll help you. And so there's an added positive benefit over the antibacterial action of the antibiotic in this case that enhances the medicine. So I think this is where we have to be careful about trying to disambiguating this down to different coefficient variables, because the variable of true valid effect is enhanced by the coefficient variable effect of expectancy, having a need, going to an expert, the expert validating that you have an expectancy bias for a medicine that you want to be treated.

0:17:57.2 PS: And this is against... I mean, this is where I don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. And this is why I see some of the contrarians in conventional medicine just can't separate these issues well enough.

0:18:11.7 PA: When we were talking about this on the way over, Suresh, who I can't even pronounce his last name, he's a researcher in New Zealand, and he's been doing clinical LSD Microdosing trials. And they found out that the main variable of difference was because we've seen some of these clinical Microdosing trials that have come out, they've supposedly shown no results. There's not much happening. And yet they're all happening in a laboratory. They're not happening where they're taking it home. And what Suresh did is he had people have take home microdoses. And he found that that was actually one of the main differences is that they could take it in their normal everyday life, and that they had all of these benefits as a result of that. So I think it also speaks to this naturalistic setting that you pointed to the importance of having that app that people can use at home, not feeling like they have to be in a doctor's office to do this. And being able to go about their everyday life with this medicine.

0:19:00.9 PK: Yeah. And that's the challenge right now with science, not science, but generally the trials that are out there. Not one yet has actually replicated naturalistic use. What people are actually doing. When we come out of the Microdose.me study is seeing how frequently people are using it at what doses, what intervals. Sometimes they're doing it twice or three times a week, and then maybe the next week they're doing it once. And then they're doing it five times. You don't replicate that in a clinical trial. One of my colleagues now, the new trial that's going through ethics is one dose once a week, but you got to sit for five hours in the doctor's office. And I'm like "You're going to... "

0:19:42.4 PA: This is a microdose?

0:19:42.7 PK: Yeah, a microdose. And so I'm like, "You should get negative results because that sucks. I don't want to sit in the doctor's office for five hours."

0:19:53.3 PS: That's actually very depressing. So your anxiety score goes up and your frustration score and depression goes up.

0:20:02.1 PK: Well, think of the variables of it too. Like, what are you going to sit there on your phone and scroll? And so what are you measuring? Scrolling? Are you measuring sitting? Are you measuring...

0:20:07.8 PA: Good point.

0:20:08.3 PK: So that's what we really need to do. And we really need to work with the regulators to get these trials. We know it's safe. We have that data. So it should be safe to send home. It should be safe to have people do it and really find out.

0:20:22.2 PA: And that's what was so novel about this New Zealand trial is they got approval by the government to let people take acid LSD home with them, which in the United States would never happen.

0:20:31.5 PS: The more I hear about New Zealand...

0:20:33.2 PK: It will happen.

0:20:34.5 PA: At some point.

0:20:34.7 PK: It will happen. It has to happen.

0:20:35.2 PS: The more I hear about New Zealand, the more I want to go visit, right?

0:20:37.7 PA: Yeah.

[chuckle]

0:20:37.9 PK: But the other thing too that you miss in a clinical trial though, like this... Without doing it in the naturalistic setting, like what we mean by that is like at home, in the real world, is that let's say you're Microdosing initially for depression, and so then you're starting and you're starting to feel better. So then maybe you're walking more, maybe you're eating better. And so it amplifies, right? So there's this amplifying effect that maybe we can catch better if we really let people go, that would be the clinical trial I would say, you're going to get a vial of LSD or you're going to get your psilocybin. Take it when you need it.

0:21:11.6 PA: Right. Intuitively.

0:21:12.5 PK: And then do these things and do it more like that. And the reality too is a lot of drugs, like a lot of prescribed drugs, patients actually do that as well. They actually... When you honestly ask them as a doctor, like how often do you actually take this pill? "Oh, I take it when I need it." You know it's an everyday medication. "Yeah, but I just take it when I need it." So yeah.

0:21:32.1 PA: It's already happening.

0:21:34.0 PK: It's already happening.

0:21:35.0 PA: Well, so 2017, Paul gave a talk at the MAP Psychedelic Science Conference. I think it's one of the first times you publicly introduced the Stamets stack, psilocybin, Lion's Mane, and the same conference, James Fadiman presented his results on the initial research study that he had done. Just track us a little bit from that point, April 2017, to now. And talk a little bit about how the work in the space has developed. We talked about Quantified Citizen already, but particularly around MycoMedica. And I know you came out about this three months ago now. How has your learnings, how has research, how has whatever developed from that point in 2017 to now with MycoMedica?

0:22:19.3 PS: I'd like to even go back further. I published my first book on Psilocybin mushrooms, Psilocybe Mushrooms & Their Allies in 1978, 44 years ago.

0:22:28.0 PA: Around the same time that Terrence and Dennis published their...

0:22:34.7 PS: Yeah, it's right. Yeah, they've been in a year before. But where... There was a... The West Coast phenomenon. It was definitely us left coasters that were pushing the envelope. But I was covered by a DEA license at the Evergreen State College. And I published Four New Species of Psilocybin Mushrooms. I went on to write seven books, six of which are in psilocybin, cultivation identification in the context of medicinal mushrooms, by the way. So that was an interesting umbrella that I was able to cover that. So my life has been dedicated to the subject, and it's deeply affected me. So when I talk about the beginnings, I have to give credit to Maria Sabina, Valentina Wasson, R. Gordon Wasson's Russian doctor wife who died, unfortunately, in 1958. Many people don't know Maria Sabina as a shaman. Well, in fact, she was a mycologist.

0:23:38.5 PA: Really?

0:23:38.9 PS: And what I mean by that is, Valentina Wasson knew mushrooms by Latin binomials. Maria Sabina knew it by her native language. But Maria Sabina would go out into the mountains and collect these mushrooms. You have to be skilled at identification to collect these mushrooms. So whether you're trained in indigenous language or Latin binomials, you share in common this skill set that you better know what you're doing, which is really important. So this lineage of knowledge literally goes back thousands of years. But so many threads of knowledge have been cut by war, persecution, domination.

0:24:27.0 PA: Colonialism.

0:24:28.0 PS: Yeah. That colonialism thing, I really want to put this in context for everybody. From a biologist's point of view, from a mycologist's point of view, species colonize new habitats. Humans colonize the Americas. Take your number, 25,000, 200,000 years ago, there were no humans in North and South Central America. Humans colonize the Americas. Most of all the vegetables in your garden are colonized in your garden because the seeds are not native to the ecosystem in which you're growing. So what we're really talking about is colonization is migration of species, all species migrate. The question is whether they then usurp and displace native species or cultures or if there's domination. Is the migration pathological? That's a much better way of phrasing it. So it's a hot button word 'colonization' and I just really want to reframe this whole thing, from a scientific point of view, colonization of species is a migration of species. Humans migrate. Mushrooms migrate. Psilocybe cubensis came from Africa, spread throughout the world. Psilocybe cyanides likely came from England or Europe and now grows in Pacific Northwest. Liberty Caps Psilocybe Semilanceata. A little bit more complicated but associated with grasslands.

0:25:54.6 PS: So as the Spaniards brought in cattle to the Americas, that is thought to be the migration of Psilocybe cubensis to the Americas. Now I'm all contrarian also because there's a great study by this high school student in Georgia.

0:26:12.8 PA: Of all places.

0:26:13.5 PS: Of all places, and what she did with the prevailing winds on the beach of Georgia, this is just a fabulous story. She put mineral oil on a mylar sheet, like a big sail, and she put it up on the... She waited it out offshore, so it was a prevailing breeze, and she caught spores from Africa. Yeah.

0:26:35.3 PA: Whoa.

0:26:37.8 PS: Okay? So spores are traveling. Now moreover, I thought, well, what about drift logs? Well, you have logs with mycelium. What about when the first ships came from Europe? It was well known that many of the settlers dismantled the ships for wood to build a house because they were rotting. Were they rotting with Psilocybin mushrooms? That would be a very good footprint. But anyhow, so what I'm saying is that the panspermia, this idea of the migration of biological spores and species and seeds is what happens, from continental drift. So there's lots of... So when we talk about the progression of these species, any indigenous culture in my mind, and this is very much true, intimately is dependent upon the ecosystem that gives them sustenance, is likely to discover these sacraments.

0:27:39.1 PS: But the cognoscente, the knowledge keepers on mushrooms, they're dealing with something that's very ephemeral. In your view-scape, you have plants and animals for months, years. You have a familiarity and comfort factor. You recognize it from repeated frequent contact. Not so with mushrooms. They come up and they disappear and they're rotten four or five days. Sometimes they may not come up again for a year or two. So what was that then? Well, that takes a very specialized knowledge. So what I'm saying is that the knowledge keepers of plants and animals may be more of a protected knowledge vessel than the fragile subset of those knowledge keepers who knew about psilocybin mushrooms, for instance, because they're ephemeral. But they're so powerful. So it would make sense to me that those knowledge keepers would be a subset within the shamanistic traditions. And because the knowledge was so carried by so few, it was so fragile. So what we are seeing a lot is a lot of indigenous cultures in the Pacific Northwest now are re-indigenizing, they are coming back in a sense to their roots. And they're bringing in the best of science, and of course, cultures, and think of this, because of the pandemics, because of domination, etcetera, yes, these practices have become extinct, but they're then rediscovered.

0:29:06.3 PS: Why wouldn't they be? As our indigenous elder friends have told us is that indigenous knowledge is never static. It's constantly evolving and rediscovering and redefining and building upon new knowledge. Well, that's true, of course, with indigenous people all over the world. So what I love about psilocybin mushrooms is 116 active species known as psilocybin mushrooms across its continents, across its cultures. It builds bridges of knowledge and understanding and compassion. So every indigenous culture has knowledge. In fact, in the United States, we benefit from the multi-ethnicity of people from Africa and from the Russians and from people in Mexico. The Japanese brought us knowledge about Matsutake, the pine mushroom. So this is wonderful that we have this body intellect of knowledge that's informed by multiculturalism, all of which we respect, all of which needs to be acknowledged. But where we are today is at a new time and sharing the best of the knowledge of all cultures and try to build a community of commons that helps everyone.

0:30:19.4 PA: It's this balance between science, the scientific methodology, and all of the benefits that have come from, let's say, a reductionist worldview and industrialism. And then we realize, "Oh, we have lost all this connection with nature as a result of that. We've lost touch with this indigenous knowledge. And so, especially in the psychedelic space, there is an emphasis or an orientation on how do we do both? How do we both have great science and great methodology, but how do we also come back into spirit and respect for the land and indigenous wisdom? And it's not mutually exclusive. It has to be a both and for this to be integrated in a way, for this to be successful.

0:30:56.5 PS: Well the simple answer, anyone who's done high dose of psilocybin, you have the unanimity of being. You're part of one giant consciousness that you share. And it just destroys all these barriers, just lowers them. And you realize you're in commonality with everyone, every plant, every animal, every rock. You're part of this universal consciousness. And it's interesting to me that people who are most vocal about this oftentimes are the people who have not done psilocybin. And they have a very strong opinion. And you can tell. I'm looking in your eyes, and I know immediately that you're psychedelically informed.

0:31:41.6 PA: In many ways.

0:31:42.5 PS: And a lot of people out there can look in other people's eyes and they just know, " Okay, I know this person."

0:31:47.1 PA: You get it.

0:31:47.2 PS: Before even a word is said, they see that sparkle in their eye and they realize, Okay, this person has psychedelic intelligence behind those lenses.

0:31:56.7 PA: It's important. That embodied experience.

0:32:00.2 PK: Yeah. And going back to what you were saying about science and like re-indigenizing, weaving back together, the two-eyed seeing approach of the best of Western with the best of indigenous ways of knowing and finding that collaboration back together and all of us getting back to that. But the challenge with research is we've been taken down this path to say that the gold standard is a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. And that is great for a single molecule, but it's not great when there's complexity. And so the way science... This is the way research was taught to us, is that you should look at what you're trying to study and find the best methodology to study that. And what we're doing now is the opposite. We're saying this is the methodology you must have and now fit it in there. And that's not how it's supposed to happen. So what we need is we need the scientific community to really hive and think on this and go, how can we study this in the right way?

0:33:00.1 PK: Like what is a better way that actually gives us the answers that we need? We can't put people in sterile environments that are not congruent with the way you would have used it or would like to use it or want to use it. You can make an argument that we have to do that for safety and efficacy. Well, we already have safety. We already have efficacy. Now what is optimization and how do we take it forward? So we need smarter people to come forward in science and go, how can we study this level of complexity? How can we make the science study what we actually want to look at? And we're smart enough to do that, we're smart enough to find another way, another paradigm of methodology. We're not done yet. We're always iterating. We didn't have blood tests at some point. We didn't have neuroimaging at some point, now we have it.

0:33:47.1 PA: So we didn't have Oura Ring, then I got this...

0:33:48.4 PK: That's true.

0:33:48.9 PA: A few years ago and now all of a sudden I can see my heart rate and I can see my REM sleep and I can see all these other crazy things, 'cause what you're speaking to is like, how do we go out of an industrial model, which is very linear, very these two things that simplify to some degree. And how do we have a much more complex, even model that's based on interconnectedness. People talk about personalized healthcare. People talk about personalized data and how we can have these different things. And that seems to be the focus of Quantified Citizen in many ways is developing something that allows for, again, the naturalistic setting specific to Microdosing, but other things as well. So there's a more complex set of information that we can actually look at.

0:34:29.7 PK: And people get to see their own dashboards. How cool is that? They get to see how this is what I was before. Here's all the tests I did and how am I doing? How am I doing? Like they own that data. It's theirs.

0:34:41.7 PS: The extraordinary metric about the Microdose.me studies, is in the first study we had over 8500 or something like that people. What most people don't realize that we had more non-microdosers in this study than we had microdosers.

0:34:54.8 PA: Really?

0:34:57.4 PK: Yeah.

0:34:57.8 PS: Several hundred more. I don't know the exact numbers, but like 4300 non-microdosers versus 4100 microdosers. That blew everybody away. That means that citizen scientists wanted to track their baselines before they started experimenting. Well, that's a pretty disciplined group of people that would think far enough ahead to say this is a microdose study. I'm not Microdosing, but I want my baseline before I start. So it's called very well-weighted study. That's why the editors at Nature were so excited to approve our paper. The database was extremely large. The largest Microdosing study in the world now was over 21,000 people in the study. Our second paper had a data set of 14,000.

0:35:48.8 PS: We just parsed it down to 998 or something like that. But the continuing expansion of the Microdose.me gets more citizen scientists. Because Pam's and my dialogue always was going, "Wow, you only have 100 people in a clinical study. What about the outliers?" And when you do statistical analysis, you have to take out the outliers, which unfortunately can marginalize the data if the population participating, that data set is so small. By making it so large, then even though you can exclude the extreme outliers, you're starting to see signal, which we did with the 55-plus-year-olds, that would otherwise not be seen if you only had 40 people in a study. You wouldn't have enough 55-plus-year-olds in a generalized healthy human population to see that signal. So this is the point in case we need these citizen scientists' Microdosing to report. And then this can inform physicians like Dr. Pam in designing clinical studies.

0:36:53.9 PK: Yeah, I was going to say, too, that we were able to... So a version two's out now.

0:36:58.0 PA: Of the?

0:37:00.2 PK: Microdose.me. So we were able to iterate it up into better studies. And again, this speaks back to citizen scientists. So we launched it, and then over the year after, people were saying, "Hey, how come you didn't study us? Do you know this group is doing it? We're doing this, we got a whole Facebook group doing it for this reason? And so over the year after we launched the first version, I was meeting with all these different patient interest groups... Patient groups that were saying, "Why aren't you studying this? It's great." We didn't even think about it. We messed up. Well, how do we put it in? What questions do you want to be asked? What improvements have you seen? And so version two is so much better because there's all these other patient populations that have been Microdosing. And then they can go in with their schedules and what they're doing. So it's really great as a patient to be able to say "What about this?" This is how you should ask me the questions. This is how you should do the test. You didn't ask this. I don't like this question.

0:37:53.2 PA: So there's iterations. And there's listening from the people who are actually using this and then with that listening, we can...

0:38:00.0 PK: Yeah. True patient-oriented.

0:38:00.3 PA: Absolutely.

0:38:02.9 PK: Truly patient-oriented research.

0:38:04.3 PS: So I never fully answered your question about the MAPS conference. It was on July 23, 2016. The day before I made my first presentation I filed a patent. Basically a mental health patent using Psilocybin, and Niacin, and Lion's Mane. And I described all sorts of things. I love smoking cannabis and writing patents. [laughter]

0:38:32.4 PA: That'll be the quote for this podcast.

0:38:35.0 PS: It's my secret to patent writing. First in the morning I drink coffee. I'm very linear and then I just like a random access thinking. You just come up with some really... I mean artists know this. It's about history.

0:38:46.9 PA: This is how marijuana in the 40s, you know with jazz, it became a thing.

0:38:49.3 PS: It can be very inspiring for jazz musicians for artists et cetera. Well, it's true also for just intellectual voyaging into hyperspace to think about the potentials of Psilocybin. So my patents preceded by 16 months I think Compass Pathways patents et cetera and I described Microdosing and I described a very large umbrella of mental health issues. Then what Pam just alluded to is very interesting because mental health is a giant subject. You have so many different things within that massive umbrella of mental health. So in describing these effects and potential benefits I forecasted much of what's in common... That's common knowledge now. And that's what happens. You spread the word you spread the knowledge and then, oh it's obvious. Well it's obvious now.

0:39:49.0 PA: It wasn't before.

0:39:49.3 PS: It wasn't before. It was heretical before even to suggest this. So we have a new public benefit corporation mycomedica.com. We've been in stealth mode for several years.

0:40:01.2 PK: I think that's the website not the name of the company.

0:40:02.0 PS: Yeah. MycoMedica Life Sciences. I'm sorry. I'm so web oriented.

0:40:13.5 PA: Yeah, yeah.

0:40:13.6 PS: I call my company fungi.com and it's not named that also. But it's also a sign of the times right?

0:40:20.7 PA: Invading us. It's colonizing our brain.

0:40:20.8 PK: It's colonizing us.

0:40:36.6 PS: We use urls rather than the names because it's quicker to get to. So I feel this position that we're in is sacred. It's really important that we shepherd this knowledge with respect for sorority, indigenous wisdom. The thing that I have learned because I'm very much... I believe micro-diversity is biosecurity. I believe in the importance of biodiversity of communities. We benefit from our multiculturalism of having all these diverse voices and of course working together because we can orchestrate new solutions by having... Being well informed. I mean do you really want to be just in a tight little bubble and not having the input from... Everyone else is affected. You might shoot yourself in the foot or your descendants and not knowing that you were not informed to make an intelligent decision. So the biodiversity in the ecosystem leads to sustainability and the... If there could be a Nobel prize for indigenous wisdom it's the concept of seven generations. So much of indigenous wisdom has been authenticated by science. And this is where I think science is supporting indigenous wisdom.

0:41:44.7 PS: Indigenous wisdom was way far ahead of science. But now we have the tools, we have new languages we have new ways of analyzing, we could have new data points that we can accumulate and see these different signals. But it's all rooted in the indigenous wisdom experientially. Knowing the importance of protecting the ecosystem for future generations. So I would like to nominate indigenous cultures who came up with the seventh generation concept thinking forward seven generations, what is your impact on the ecosystem? And even in Norway is a... I don't remember the name of the company but there's a Norwegian family that has been logging the forest for I think four or 500 years. And their tradition is their grandfather or their great grandfather goes out with the children to plant the trees for when they are grandparents. And they came up with a sustainable forest practice that was not based on short term gain of cutting the trees in 20 to 40 years but actually progressing this out as far as they can to grandfathers to great grandfathers, great grandmothers, that far an extension.

0:42:56.9 PS: So this to me is sustainable. It is economically survivable and ecologically rational. But I have a lot of experience in the woods products community. Just to make this a little bit more clear, my new metric now is to, because the carbon sequestration is so important for the forest is to retain 10 times more carbon annually than you extract. We need to pay back the ecosystem. It can't be just an even keel...

0:43:31.4 PA: Of reinvestment.

0:43:35.7 PS: We really need to reinvest. Well, this speaks to seven generations. We have lost especially those of us from European capitalistic perspective, we've exploited the economic opportunity for quick gain day trading of course is the extreme example of that. So this is where I think there is a confluence now. And what I'm really excited about is this two-eyed seeing concept which was pioneered by an indigenous elder in British Columbia. And I believe the story goes, and anyone can look this up it's well reported. She was challenged I think, by her mother saying why should I send my indigenous children to a school with Western education? And he was challenged. And he goes because with two eyes, you can see better than with one. Indigenous wisdom with Western knowledge.

0:44:20.2 PS: When I first heard about this at an indigenous elder conference that Pam and I attended. One of the indigenous elders got up and she goes hey the shit would hit the fan if I took my iPhone away from my 12-year-old daughter. He says, I like two-eyed wisdom. But that shows that technologies are adopted by different cultures if they're useful whether it's creating fire, whether it's steel versus the flint knife. These technologies are constantly evolving. If they help your community survive they're adopted. We borrow from cultural knowledge from all of us because there's a better way of doing things, better survival. So the seventh generation concept is what I'm dedicated to see that return on our investment, going back to the seven generations as opposed to just your generation, just your lifetime.

0:45:22.0 PA: One big part of learning to work with psychedelics is it is a new technology for many Westerners and many of us in a global society anyway. So then I have to talk about it's a skill of psychedelics. How do we microdose? How do we take higher doses? What are even the practices around meditation and diet, the lifestyle practices that support working with these medicines because we've been shut off or cut off from them for so many years? I was talking with Andrew Weil a few months ago and he brought up how when alcohol was used in the 19th century, everyone was just getting drunk off their ass. And then finally there was a chance to go, oh, actually we should just do a little bit here and there. And so I think it's a similar thing that's happening now with the technology of psychedelics is how do I work with this? And this is what I love about Microdosing because Microdosing allows someone to actually work with it, have a relationship with it. They don't necessarily need to jump in the deep end right off the bat 'cause not everyone is great for doing 10 grams of Psilocybin immediately. And so that allows for a softening. It allows for just an easier onboarding into ego death and unity consciousness.

0:46:29.1 PS: And yet the great irony with Oregon's initiative 109 with all the initiatives in ballots in 21 states nothing is on Microdosing. Deadly poisonous mushrooms are legal. Psilocybin mushrooms and Microdosing, sub sensorium is said, but I like to use sub intoxication.

0:46:51.4 PA: Sub hallucinogenic yeah.

0:46:51.8 PS: Well, not hallucinogenic but sub intoxication. You're not intoxicated.

0:46:52.2 PA: Right, I like that.

0:46:55.2 PS: And yet all these bills and all these... This push is for decriminalization and therapeutic use but there is no carve out for Microdosing. Well, of course you should do 10 grams of cubensis and don't drive down the interstate. Well, no shit Sherlock I mean. But a microdose where you're not feeling... There's no intoxicating effects will still be illegal in Oregon. Go to a therapist office bored out of your board for four to six hours paying an exorbitant amount of money. And you're sitting there like Pam said, you'll probably be on your device and this is not a good use of your time. This is where the... It's divorce, policy is divorce from science on this.

0:47:48.2 PA: In reality exactly.

0:47:52.2 PS: In reality. And if they're so concerned about enabling the therapy use of Psilocybin, why isn't it across the spectrum where you have in care or therapist assisted practices at higher intoxicating doses but at sub intoxicating doses which is the definition of Microdosing that I like to follow, is illegal. I mean it's... Just boggles the mind that we're still putting the cart in front of the horse here. You would think that Microdosing would lead the legislation as having an exemption for personal use. And then as it scales up for higher doses, then you need to have the therapeutic support that is necessary. And so this is an unfortunate circumstance.

0:48:33.8 PA: And I think a major concern and maybe a leftover trauma from the '60s has been if we just give anyone and everyone access to psychedelics without professional guided therapeutic support then things will go haywire. I'm not saying it's rational. I'm not saying it's right. But I think it's this cultural traumatic remnant where even those in the psychedelic space, the very concept of, Oh, we could just have over the counter supplements with Microdosing where people can take them home and they could work with them is heretical to some degree because it would mean legal adult use access for everyone. And we can't have that.

0:49:14.7 PK: This is where people disconnect from reality in this that in Canada we legalize cannabis federally. And before that those same folks would have been saying, you can't do it. It's going to cause schizophrenia. It's going to be all sorts of stuff well, the reality is the sky didn't fall. People actually use cannabis relatively reasonably and much more reasonably than we use alcohol, much more. And so despite evidence, epidemiological evidence that it didn't go bonkers and despite the fact that by these limitations they essentially just drive it underground. So the underground is flourishing all over North America. And in Vancouver there's seven stores. You can get this or more probably where you can just walk in and buy mushrooms. And if the sky was going to fall if it was going to be terrible, it would have been terrible already.

0:50:13.2 PK: It would have been terrible already. We would have seen that. We would have seen epidemics of emergency uses. And I'm sure we still see that but we see way more of that with alcohol. When I work in a merge shift it's alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. It is not mushrooms. And if it is somebody with mushrooms they're pretty okay. They're not... Yeah. They're not going home and beating somebody up or they're not in there because they got in a fight. So we would have seen this. Like we can just observe this. And with cannabis they said oh we have way more schizophrenia well the data didn't bear that out. We did not see an increase in schizophrenia rates when cannabis was legalized in Canada. So we have to look around and go it is de facto being used everywhere. And we are not seeing this. And I still agree that we still need the science. We still need to understand because it is not for everyone. And not everybody wants it just because it would be... If we led the way with Microdosing and it was legalized it doesn't mean everyone's going to run out and microdose that's just not going to happen.

0:51:13.1 PS: But there is something that's an interesting phenomenon again from citizen scientists being reported, there's numerous meta surveys. I populated a website for physicians and researchers at mushroomreferences.com. It's unbranded. It's just a science. 116 references on Psilocybin for instance. And you can look up these meta studies. But the meta studies that there's about six of them right now. And you put them all together and something really phenomenal is happening. Those people who have an experience with Psilocybin statistically significant reduction of partner-to-partner violence, reduction of opioid use or opioid use disorder. New study came out placebo double blind control showing reduction in alcohol use disorder. So what this means is that you have a reduction... Also the study is showing reduction in burglary, larceny, theft. Well you put that all together. This is reducing crime. This is making citizens better law abiding citizens even though I don't agree with all laws. But for any law enforcement officer for any judge, for any politician if you can reduce addiction, violence, and general crime you alleviate the court systems. You alleviate marginalizing disadvantaged members of society because of racism and poverty etcetera.

0:52:40.8 PS: I mean think about this. This is the best cost saving medicine that our societies has ever seen. You had to overestimate the impact and then benefiting the economies. And it's not only the economies but the ecology of consciousness. If you can cure the population from having committed crimes against their family and their neighbors and burdening the court system and law enforcement, oh my gosh, who's going to argue about reducing crime and addiction? Really? You're more concerned about the effect of Microdosing which then can cause any effect? This is really just... It blows my mind that we even have to educate people on this because all of us psychonauts, we already know this. Psilocybin makes nicer people. And that's fundamental to the health of our society and protecting our economies.

0:53:46.1 PS: So we have more money for social services, more money and law enforcement doesn't have to feel frustrated dealing and having a job that the public has looked upon as the enemy. I had martial arts schools for 30, 40 years.

0:54:08.3 PA: Taekwondo.

0:54:13.6 PS: I got my first black belt in Taekwondo and my second black belt in Hwa Rang Do but I took Shotokan, Shitō-ryū, Gōjū-ryū, and Aikido. But I dealt with a lot of law enforcement officers because they were in my classes. They were my students. It was really funny. I had long hair and hippie and I had the black belt and they had white belts. But they understood hierarchy and discipline. But what the vernacular is perps. Oh, he's a perp. She's a perp. That's short for perpetrator. You're put into a bucket. You're categorized and you're marginalized immediately. There is a bias and a prejudice. My grandson is half black. He wears a hoodie and I had to tell him please don't walk down the street with your hoodie. You fit a stereotype and you will be targeted by law enforcement. And he sees racism like we never see racism. We have no idea of what the embedded racism in our society with law enforcement and just in general.

0:55:17.6 PS: And he said but I have a right to wear a hoodie. I said, I know you have a right. I don't want you to be selected out by law enforcement for something you didn't do because you're a perp. And so a young 19-year-old African-American, my grandson, he unfortunately can easily become a victim. And when you are a victim of a crime that you did not commit you get pissed off at the system. Okay? Now you've created a greater divide between law enforcement protecting society versus law enforcement being abusive. So this is really fundamental. I think Psilocybin is a medicine for the masses. It reduces crime and makes nicer people. It can save hundreds of billions of dollars in our society. And politicians need to wake up.

0:56:05.4 PA: I love it. All of it. I want to talk a little bit about... We've talked about some of the deficiencies of the legislative system. Let's talk a little bit about MycoMedica, kind of your vision strategically for legalizing Microdosing for ensuring Microdosing is more accessible. You're a very influential and charismatic person in the Microdosing space and generally in the mushroom and generally in the psychedelic space. I feel like you have a vision you've had a vision for 50 years now. And so when you look at legislated access to Microdosing what's the ideal situation? How should that be rolled out so the masses can work with this type of medicine?

0:56:45.7 PS: Okay. I have a lot of thoughts on this. But fundamentally in the United States we have a Bill of Rights. Fundamentally our Bill of Rights should be freedom of consciousness. We should all have a freedom of our own consciousness. Unfortunately that sounds good most people would agree. But of course there's many laws that limit your freedom of consciousness I.e. Psilocybin psychedelic drugs. And even though the Bill of Rights in the United States will protect you oftentimes at your threshold of your house, inside your house is your private domain. Well not so with Psychedelics. So it pierces that Bill of Rights. I think we need to have a fundamental Bill of Rights to the freedom of consciousness. You have a right to do what? That always amuse me that committing suicide is illegal. Who are you going to arrest? I don't know. So MycoMedica is wedded in the belief that we should have freedom of consciousness. Wedded in the belief that there should be universal access. Anyone who cannot afford to access these medicines should get it for free. At the same time, how do you do that? You've got to be economically sustainable. Well, you charge people who can afford it. You have a sliding scale or ask for donations, or if the people are affluent enough you charge them.

0:58:11.0 PS: But because this is so beneficial to society, it should be a medicine that's available to everyone. That's number one. In the competitive landscape of capitalism, my mantra is that it has to be ecologically rational. That's also related to the ecology of consciousness. A nod to Ralph Metzner for that phrase by the way. And it has to be economically sustainable 'cause then you can't scale unless you have the money. You can't be generous to do social benefit for low income or anyone who needs it unless you can afford it. The system is not sustainable. So that's why we're a public benefit corporation. And I'm really happy that I'm in the position I am with MycoMedica. I feel like I need to shepherd this in the right way. One of our biggest investors said that if I did not have supermajority control, they would never invest in MycoMedica. So I'm trying to make the best decisions. Pam is trying to make the best decisions based on science, based on social responsibility, based on indigenous wisdom, looking far into the future, having a chorus of voices of diversity to best inform us so we can make the best decisions. So MycoMedica is designing multiple clinical trials with Microdosing.

0:59:44.5 PS: And we're in a very interesting and uniquely powerful position because of my experience in the martial arts and Aikido. I like this Aikido approach. I like the feminine. The martial arts systems that... I've been involved in them, is everything is soft. Everything's based on the female, except at the point of contact. Then it becomes masculine. But if anyone who gets into a fight, and this is a little bit... Take two young men. They're full of Testosterone and they fight. How long does the fight last? Five minutes. So much tension they're exhausted. What I've learned in Aikido and Hwa Rang Do is that feminine is the most powerful. You sap the energy by not attacking but deflecting, being soft. You preserve the energy and the other person exhausts themselves. Now the balance of power dynamic has changed. And some of my best stories in the martial arts is after defeating I had a hell's angel like biker who came in and challenged me and he threw everything but the kitchen sink at me. I just block, block, block. And I looked at my head instructor and he nodded to me so I had to take him out. I took him out and he was just flabbergasted. He was on the ground. I put my hand across his trachea and put my fingers into his eyeballs.

1:01:20.4 PS: I was going to take out his eyeballs and pull his trachea at the same time. Sorry for the graphic here. But then I stopped. And he was terrified. He didn't see what happened. No one wants to lose their eyes. That's the number one thing we want to protect. And then I reached him with my hand out in kindness. And he got up and he was crying. To have the power and not wield it but to show the courage and to set a standard? That's one of the guiding principles of MycoMedica. It's kindness, empowering the feminine, and using feminine energy. If we have to strike, we will. But there's much more bandwidth, much more benefit in communicating our message by having the courage and strength and not exercising it, but showing people a better way. I hope this Aikido approach that I've learned in my life can help steer MycoMedica. Sorry for being so graphic.

1:02:14.8 PK: Yay.

1:02:15.1 PA: Whoops. And from a medical perspective from a clinical or medical perspective when we look at MycoMedica and when we look at the implementation of Microdosing we've talked a lot about it today but legislatively, how do you see that landing in the next three to five to seven years?

1:02:37.8 PK: It's a great question and I don't know the answer. If you had asked me five years ago where we'd be now, I didn't think we'd be this far. We've really accelerated. I think we've come past. I think the stigma is almost done. I think there's more than enough people that have gotten it and have realized that there was a war on drugs. That it wasn't science-based, it wasn't medicine-based, it was just a cultural war on drugs. And I think people are learning that. I think that's good if that learning curve is coming up in the medical profession. It's clearly coming up in society at large. We do have to still undo propaganda. And so I don't know where we're going to be. And I think it's just still a really exciting time because we've had a peek at the data. We know where this is going. We know the case reports. We know. Like we talked about earlier like, oh, there's these studies that says it doesn't work. But then there's so many people doing it and so many people getting better that I think it's just... It's exciting as a medical professional and a researcher. It's just exciting to know that, wow, there's something possibly for all these neurodegenerative conditions.

1:03:36.2 PK: We're all getting older as palsies. We're all getting older. We're getting it slower. We're going to lose our balance. We're going to lose our memory. And to have the potential that we could do something that is so easy and so connected to nature that you can use something from this planet to help us maintain that, I think is really exciting. I think there's a lot more science to be done. I think we're going to find things that we never even imagined. Like I said, the case reports we have are just phenomenal. And I'm really excited. And where will we be? I don't know. I think it's going to move faster. And I just... As Paul says, I just really hope that everyone in this ecosystem that hopefully they've had an experience and they can move forward thinking that way. Like, why did I get called to using psychedelics? How has it benefited me? And how can we extrapolate that out for all so we raise everybody up. So we have a world that is truly, truly wonderful. So I don't know how fast we're going to go or where we're going to be. But I think we're there. I think we're going.

[overlapping conversation]

1:04:36.7 PS: And the science gets better and better. Even though I filed this patent on the Lion's Mane and Niacin and Psilocybin and Psilocybin Tryptamines. And then years and years later the Microdose.me app. Then years later the psychomotor benefit that inspired us. Well, what is the mode of action? So we look at neuroreceptors and what I presented yesterday was showing the entourage effect synergistically of activating what's called MAP kinase. These are proteins which... When they have binding affinities that it stimulates nerve growth factor and BDNF Brain Derived Nerve Factors, neurotrophic factors to be expressed causing neurons to grow. And we found that the combining Niacin is a catalyst. And even though these neuroreceptor tests are not... They're In vitro there's no vascular system, Psilocybin is a Vasoconstrictor. Niacin is a Vasodilator. So I like Niacin because it causes itching and that means that your nerve endings are excited.

1:05:44.0 PS: And I thought, wow, with vasodilation and for the peripheral nervous system, if we can have excitement of those neurons and deliver more of the neurogenic benefits of psilocybin and these other compounds then neurogenesis could be enhanced. But what we found in the in vitro results these well defined, they're called TrkA, B and C and JAK1s, J-A-K1s, we were able to see an entourage effect where there was virtually no stimulus at all of the binding affinities with these proteins. But when we put them together they synergized to create a massive synergistic effect. So this is why I just had a patent issued, a composition of matter patent. And it's based on the gunpowder analogy, which is how can you patent a natural product? That's what people say. Well Psilocybin, no one should have a patent on Psilocybin right? I came up with something that's counterintuitive. Why do you choose these combinations? But the fact that we have three of these compounds that have no activity on these receptors or you combine them, they have massive activity, is like gunpowder, charcoal, sulfur, potassium nitrate.

1:07:00.1 PS: That's a gating issue with a patent office. And this is called a 1A exit. If you show that these three compounds synergistically produce something greater than the additive cumulative effects, 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 3, well, we have 0 plus 0 plus 0 equals 25. So that is unanticipated. Now think of you're a researcher and you use Psilocybin, and you saw no activity at Microdosing like 3 milligrams for instance this is true with these receptors. You wouldn't go to less. You would go to more. Oh, it's below the level of activity. No, we found that if you went to less, and you added Niacin and Lion's Mane, you got a signal that activated these nerves to grow. So this is counterintuitive, and it's synergism. It's unexpected and surprising. And people teach away from your invention. 113 clinical trials on ClinicalTrials.gov, 11 of them use Niacin opposite Psilocybin as a positive control. So you have experts teaching away from your invention.

1:08:17.6 PK: You put all this together, and yeah, I'm getting patents on natural products because I have unexpected surprising results contrary to expert opinion, 11 clinical studies using Niacin opposite and not a single one using Niacin with. And so these were outliers. So this is where in the field as inventors, and there's several inventors out there like if I could kind of speak to the inventors here, you want people to say it won't work. You want people to say, this guy is crazy. This will never work. You want opinions by experts that are diametrically opposed to your idea. That proves an obviousness. Now, every advance in science is from outliers, from the edge runners. It's the minorities in a population that lead evolution not the majority. We need... And this speaks to my belief about diversity of cultures and why multi-ethnicities are so important. It's the outliers in our societies the minorities that are the leading edge of change. Many of them will fail, but we are here today from the success of those minorities. So protecting minorities protects our future. It's as simple as that.

1:09:45.3 PA: That's a phenomenal way to land all of this.

1:09:46.6 PS: I apologize for my martial arts thing.

1:09:53.2 PA: The martial arts is great. You could... We should do a full episode for you just with the martial arts.

1:09:53.9 PS: I wrote an article, Mushrooms and Martial Arts and the Hwa Rang Do. So if you want to see pictures of me when I was a high flyer as we call it also.

1:10:09.3 PA: There's been a lot of... Like BJJ in particular Martial Artists who have been using Microdosing. So it is... Even the Microdosing for the kinesthetic fluency and coordination is becoming more and more prominent in a lot of these martial arts.

1:10:22.6 PS: Yeah, I wonder when the Olympic committees are going to select Microdosing as this qualifying element.

1:10:25.4 PA: That's when we know we've made it. It's like when LeBron James or whoever is doing that.

1:10:35.1 PS: My martial arts background is like the Obi-Wan Kenobi personality with the epitome. Bruce Lee, many people know about Bruce Lee and stuff, but Bruce Lee was a very kind person with an exceptional skill, exceptional power. And he was a fusion martial artist. He borrowed from Kung Fu, and from Taekwondo. He created a Jeet Kune Do, his own style. Well that's an example of being informed by multiple cultures. But he was a peaceful warrior. And I think that what we have now leading this movement is the advantage of the peaceful warrior. And I think this is why Hwa Rang Do literally means the way of the flowering man. When the Japanese invaded Korea, the Hwa Rang Do men would dress up as women. They feminized themselves so they could be under the radar and not be discovered for who they are.

1:11:32.0 PS: And the Hwa Rang Do warriors oftentimes the warrior priests the men and the Mudang were the Korean martial arts women because the Japanese would come in and they would kill all the officials and elders and thought leaders in the village. The culture evolved so the Mudang the women warriors, would be on one side of the valley up on the hills looking down. And the Hwa Rang warrior men would be in the other valley. And when they would come together, they would dress up as gay men. So it's the way of the flowering man this whole idea that the women actually have the power and the orthodox men don't see it, and that's their weakness. So this is why I love Hwa Rang Do because it's the way of the woman with the man. So it's a beautiful history.

1:12:36.3 PA: Coming together. Yeah, that's beautiful. We could do a whole another podcast with that. Well, I want to thank you both for taking the time to talk about Quantified Citizen, MycoMedica, The Medical Invitation, Taekwondo and Martial Arts and just everything. It's been an honor to be here with you, Paul. It's been an honor to be here with you, Pam, to have this conversation. Any final thoughts or places to point people in terms of resources or assets or anything like that?

1:13:08.6 PS: Well, mushroomreferences.com. But I also want to thank you Paul, for having these podcasts and having people in. And I want to thank the whole community. This is a wonderful community. We're struggling to get it right. We need your voices. We need your opinions. We need your criticisms but don't be mean. Don't throw spears. Don't put yourself up on a pedestal. Let's really just try to be decent to each other and to be nice, because these medicines really carry that message forward. We are collaborative. We honor each other's role in life. We honor each other's personal history. Many of us have generational trauma. I think that's a big issue. Reconciliation with indigenous people should be one of our number one priorities. So I just think that the community at large here is leading the way for science. And we need informed communities, citizen scientists, to help researchers construct these clinical trials so many of which are misinformed. And so we need the clinicians to be informed by citizen scientists and real world data to be able to best navigate this into the future.

1:14:28.7 PA: Any final?

1:14:31.7 PK: I don't think anyone can top that. But I will say just Microdose.me is out there number two version if you're interested. And if we missed anything, let us know. And I absolutely agree. Kindness is what we need the most now. And people leaning in and giving options and bringing forward solutions.

1:14:44.6 PA: They say the next Buddha will be a community. And so I think when we talk about the role of Psychedelics and the role of kindness, it is community feeling connected. And that's so much of what mushrooms can teach us is what that feels like.

1:15:06.0 PS: Be courageous. Be strong. Be kind. Thank you.

1:15:08.8 PA: Thank you.

1:15:12.9 PK: Thank you.

1:15:12.9 PA: This was great. Thank you.

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