Unknown

here's one thing the pharmaceutical industry would never want anyone to hear i don't trust them [Music] i see fungi as the remediators of our planet and i think about the psychedelic mushrooms kind of as the remediators for our spirit in a way [Music] psilocybin mushrooms are not for everyone and to me psilocybin is the fear killer it was like this complete freeing experience there's no research there's nothing that says these combinations have been clinically studied and found to be useful for this condition they're not doing science they're doing art and doctors are not artists [Applause]

[Music] who's [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Laughter] [Music] colorado [Music] be [Music] [Music] nice to meet you welcome and here is where the magic happens yes this is where the baby and here is where the mushroom happens this is yeah magic of the mushroom [Music] so they're packing up sawdust right now with the fungus which produces the mushrooms it actually eats the sawdust we sterilize it and then we inoculate it with kind of a uh a fungal seed it's not exactly a seed but it's like a culture almost like a sourdough starter you know so

and the cool thing about this industry in general and uh specifically the way that we grow the mushrooms is all of the sawdust comes from a local wood shop and they're just throwing all of that stuff away so we actually go there bring the truck load up the truck with the sawdust and then grow and uh bring it here and and produce mushrooms off of it and then the end product is a uh is a compost which all goes to local farms for soy building [Music] this is a really silly question but i'm gonna ask

anyway you guys have this style at least by looking at you guys that's somewhat similar is it more colorado or is it more than a business job requirement um we're all uh it's it's a requirement we have to have long hair black sunglasses otherwise you don't get to work here so if i want a job i need another yeah yeah you need at least one to two years before i would consider hiring you or some extensions [Music] remember that i know nothing about this world i'm fascinated by it but i need to learn like the

very first steps yeah what is a mushroom yeah well okay that's a great question and not everybody really understands so a mushroom is a fruit okay so the mushroom is a fruit of a larger organism which looks more like a mold okay and that organism is called mycelium you can think about the mycelium as the apple tree and then the mushroom is like the apple and so you can have many different varieties of apples there's still apple trees you know what i mean so for example this one is going to produce a pink mushroom this

one is going to produce a white mushroom how abundant is mycelium when i walk into my backyard when i walk out in this forest where is my ceiling mycelium is everywhere mycelium is responsible for so many unseen jobs in nature so for example when you walk into a forest and you have you know thousands of trees all of those trees are connected underground by a network of mycelium the mycelium actually takes nutrients from bigger trees and takes it to the baby trees so it's almost like the mother of the forests [Music] is [Music] your life

was going very well into you had a shift tell me about that moment tell me about what happened i woke up one day wow i i i'm in some of the worst pain i've ever been in in my life and it's right there went to the doctors and it literally went from you know this guy you know he's he's probably overdoing his pain thing you know to the moment they got the images from the mri oh my god you're riddled with spinal tumors today's your last day at work nah i thought what [Music] what went

through your mind at that point what what is that like that's really hard to describe that alone was earth shaking you know so that part was bad enough then so by july 2006 i was seeing the specialists and they told me well here's the situation we can keep you alive another two years you're probably gonna die in 25 months we're we're basically saying that august 2008 you're you're gone that's the best case scenario and that's what really got me at that point i developed post-traumatic stress disorder end of life anxiety and i was in the

blackest depression like you know suicidal the doctors recognized what was happening thank goodness and they said okay you know there is a bill a federal bill in the united states that was passed in 2016 is called the right to try bill that bill allows people that have definitively been diagnosed with a terminal illness to use lsd mdma which is ecstasy and or psilocybin and they said why don't we try psilocybin with you how did the sacred tribe come about so when i graduated from rabbi school i was looking for a kabbalistic community to work with

and i was like you know what like i'm just gonna we're gonna make it up because this this is what i want to be doing i want to be working with people in that heart open space i'm i'm not here to tell people you know dogma i'm not here to tell you know to bash people over the head with you shoulds i don't i don't i hardly ever give it you should i believe there is an aspect of you that must be brave to be working with experiences that are not fully embraced by society quite

yet are you hopeful that things are changing the tide has already turned and you know the certainly the stigma of psychedelics has largely gone away not entirely but largely gone away there have been laws protecting you know psychedelic use in religious spaces you know since nixon since the controlled substances act was passed which essentially you know granted religious freedom to do things as long as there was no outward harm there's a structure that the dea offers for religious exemptions at the federal level that structure exists [Music] 250 milligrams this happens to be a nepalese variety

like what was the first thing that the first moment in which you looked around you're like wait a second this is working definitively occurred two weeks in with regard to not having the absolute terror nightmares at 3 15 every morning you know and then as time went on let's say six months went by of me regularly microdosing i started to realize you know what the pain is still there this medication does not treat pain it's not like an opioid but what it does is it radically changes your attitude and your mindset about the pain you're

in [Music] what happens when you use psychedelics i think the experts all agree on this is for some reason when you use psychedelics your blood goes to areas of your brain that are like side roads it retrains your brain that everything's kind of okay and it's not taking that exact same path all the time which is like oh my god i'm hurt and i'm hurting that's what i've discovered and it somehow at least with me it made my brain say you know what i can definitely feel that my mood is lifted a thousand percent i'm

not just black depression during the day oh my god just let me die let's get it over with that all went away within six months it continues to be that case to this day [Music] many people who regularly macro dose would tell you is they do it to develop compassion to see that they are a part of something that's far far bigger than anything they ever ever imagined i don't know of any other substance aside from hallucinogens that can do that to people and really reset their minds to this is reality and it's not so

bad [Music] [Music] [Music] okay [Music] compressor [Music] felice [Music] when you were born the idea of psychedelics used for medicinal purposes uh it was still taboo incredibly taboo what has changed i think over the course of the past 20 years is really when people have started to kind of gain more awareness and learn more about the potential benefits of psychedelics especially for mental health purposes again coming out of universities like johns hopkins here in the u.s imperial college in london but i think with our campaign in denver we really catalyzed more of a national grassroots

movement [Music] you have to gather a certain number of signatures in order to reach your goal to sort of earn a voice in this battle what do you say to these people in the streets what's your approach mike first of all i say hey are you uh registered to vote in colorado and they say yes well i'm well today i'm out here collecting signatures for the natural medicine health act of 2022 which is going to create an access system to natural medicines like psilocybin mushrooms so that folks like veterans with ptsd can get the treatment

they deserve and find the relief they need go ahead and cross out colorado just with one line and make sure to use uh whichever address where you're registered to go sorry no worries i struggled with major depression for a long time my whole life where i wanted to be a career army officer and serve my country and and i didn't graduate from west point because i was diagnosed with with service-connected major depression there and so for me that was you know one could say an existential crisis in a sense because i was you know focused

so long on the singular objective that really crumbled through my fingertips and so i was facing a loss of a sense of self and identity and purpose and had struggled for a number of years you know dabbled into self-help seeing therapists i had been on medication but it wasn't until one experience with psilocybin right here in denver with a group of friends where we were just out in a park in the evening together and looked up at the sky and i don't know if the clouds actually parted but it felt like the clouds parted and

and i the the intuition of the sense that i got was that kevin you know you no longer have to be a victim to your diagnosis you can make a new choice and you can start making these steps and lifestyle changes every single day to start to get better [Music] if you think about how we lived a century ago no anesthesia no antibiotics why haven't we been able to make nearly as much progress when it comes to mental health you're walking down the street you see someone on crutches or a cane who's having a difficult

time getting into the store generally speaking most people in most cultures can i help you can i open the door for you yeah what do people do when they see a schizophrenic talking to themselves at that same store right in front of the same place that's just blabbering on and incomprehensible and it's noticeable that they have a mental illness most people that i have seen turn around and go the other way because of that stigma it's okay to be physically sick it's not okay at least in western cultures to be mentally ill i have uh

quite a bit of trauma in my history including sexual assault and i had done a lot of work through neuro-linguistic programming timeline therapy cognitive behavioral therapy i'd done a lot to be able to manage it [Music] but when i did the mushrooms during that ceremony a different layer came up and it was that particular journey wasn't the easiest but on the other side of it i woke up the next morning and i took a deep breath and i didn't realize up until that moment that i hadn't been able to properly breathe it was like this

complete freeing experience [Music] and allowed me to face a whole different demon and to me psilocybin is the fear killer it's even been called that so when that ego that that little nasty critical judgmental voice inside of your head quiets down a little bit it's amazing the insights that you can have in which you can learn about yourself and the cause of the real problem [Music] so in in here this is our fruiting tent so we've created a microclimate which is extremely humid and inside of here yeah this is where the mushrooms can grow wow

this is a black pearl mushroom fully colonized you can see you don't even see any of the sawdust anymore so this is called the pinning stage can i smell it yes [Music] almost like a fermented scent right a little yeah yeah it's kind of a fermented scent well it's a bit like fermentation just you know more moldy this block is just uh one day past the other block this is what they're looking like when they're ready to harvest so the caps really open up very very fast they get very large so we can harvest these

mushrooms really yeah right now yes we need to we can't wait any longer because if we let them go past prime they're not really good [Music] this is where the block ends and this is where the mushroom begins so what we want to do is just take the cluster and just pluck it off oh just like that there we go so that's kind of our final cluster of mushrooms right there bouquet of mushrooms no they're happy all right beautiful all right nice have you ever plucked a mushroom before no all right not at all congrats

happy valentine's day you've been initiated funnily enough i came back to god through science and not through religion per se i didn't come back to god through structure and dogma and rule following for years everybody has thought like religion is a thing is a thing as a structure itself that brings people together and it really isn't actually largely you know it creates an eye you versus them yes whether it's a you or you or you so creates a you versus them and i think science has actually come around to the opposite conclusion [Music] and even

growing up in like a small religious community i i don't know that i ever had like a somatic heartfelt experience of god i'm not sure that most people have in that way but the very the very first time i had mushrooms i just i i was in an apartment here in denver with a good friend of mine they're laying in bed and it's like i could just see and feel i could feel all of it and it changed everything i went back to my rabbi school i went to a few conferences and started asking people

have you ever had something like this like no and i'm like let's do it and then a few months later i got into the really into the jewish spiritual side of psychedelics with mushrooms foreign it's full of the the psilocybin psilocybin and other components there you can see how blue it is yep they were they're astonishingly much more potent they're also much more robust and uh alive one of our members working with us she took a half a gram with the other day with me during a trials test she had an astral projection experience out

of her body in a way that doesn't happen with less than four or five grams for her oh wow [Music] how is it for you to like know in your heart what you're doing but have to deal with the challenging aspects of criticism i think the criticisms are not valid because doctors don't take cancer medicines before they treat cancer yeah but right now we've got this condition in the world called polypharmacy and doctors and prescribers add more and more prescriptions and pills because we're addicted to pills and being paid by karma the most important part

of this process is making sure they're all the same size per tray and so they can actually dry correctly in the machine when you start there's no research on polypharmacy there's nothing that says these combinations have been clinically studied to be found to be useful for this condition so at that point they're not doing science they're doing art and doctors are not artists we are supporter who provided these for us she struck a deal to get the pharmaceutical quality software in the production level machines for us so we got the these machines go for 11

000 piece that gives me the confidence that from any level at any court there's no way to convict us i've got the right to try myself of course but from a group perspective we have much more expertise and much more experience and much more ethical approaches to doing this because of this is our own truth this is what we live with on a daily basis i'm not afraid of the outside folks judging this they just don't know [Music] how are you rocky right yeah uh question um i love pilsners light beers what would you recommend

um i would recommend the international waters poster that one's gonna be a little bit more light and crisp but it's local yeah yep right here everything here yeah amazing i'll take that sure please thank you [Music] very much [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] amazing so this is your work of art yep cheers to that cheers if the mushroom thing doesn't work go beer go beer all right [Music] just the simple fact that i can take a waste product from a wood shop and grow such a tasty food off of it which also has

medicinal benefits and will help to benefit the soil afterwards i mean that's a really magical thing to me so i think that really what it is is i have a reference for the mushrooms and basically that makes me feel like i'm doing some work for them and then they're doing some work for me as well and to kind of be a representative for the good things that they can bring to our lives [Music] uh so today i believe these are black king mushrooms the best way is to kind of tear them apart and create bite-size

pieces we'll make a marinade and then we can marinate these pieces and then sear them off and get a good color i love it mushrooms are actually a great food source they're one of my favorites if they're correctly prepared very similar to like duck or scallops as far as meat goes or even like a perfect filet mignon you know you want to get the right kind of sear you want to get the right kind of cooking method used in order to really pull out the flavors ready for some mushroom tacos dig in all right bon

appetit i'm gonna put you to cheers with that yeah why not you can yeah there we go mm-hmm messy and delicious that's how a good taco should be man that's so good i like a pulled pork mm-hmm [Music] every time i every time i experience mushrooms i think that they're they make me feel my passion again i'm grateful to them i am grateful that they they communicate with me and they share their stories and their secrets i'm grateful that they have chosen to to thrive here um i'm delighted by them you know i think you

know we keep learning new things um i feel really blessed to have gotten to this point and i feel very cautiously optimistic that we have hit on something that actually could work to help get us out of the best that we find ourselves in now we need to stop demonizing these medications you know number one they're natural in my opinion anything that is natural like this should never ever ever have been legislated and made illegal in the united states this medication isn't for everybody but the people that it is for and if they are under

a controlled environment you know seeing a psychiatrist which i do i think that makes all the difference in the world i see fungi as the remediators of our planet i think that they can remediate all kinds of toxins out of our waterways they can remediate things out of our soils they can remediate our bodies and i think about the psychedelic mushrooms kind of as as remediators for our spirit in a way especially when you look at the ways that they've been used traditionally in indigenous communities they have been for a purpose of spirituality and spiritual

clarity [Music] feeling as much of the human emotional spectrum as you can and getting rid of any guilt or uh shame or remorse or whatever you may you know carry around that if you if you're gonna feel angry feel it because that's what helps it to pass we're gonna feel grief feel it bitter jealous creative loving curious joy-filled you know again this is not anything you know revolutionary in that way but for me in judaism it was yes [Music] okay time to go to the restaurant i'll follow you [Music] get your jazz oh yeah you

age before beauty [Music] yeah farm to freezer literally just picked and now we're here all right sounds good so now we'll have so [Music] so have you ever gone mushroom foraging before never never there's always a first time for everything yeah if you don't have a dog you have pedro to sniff that's right the richness that's why i brought you i figured you'd be down on the ground sniffing you start singing the mushroom song and then the goggles what is the mushroom song oh i don't know oh depends on the day you know mushrooms little

mushrooms where will i find you so aside from all that you're a composer as well oh you know it's just i yeah a little bit i guess this research has been paused for decades where do you think we would be had we kept it going from the 70s to 80s 90s to now the pharmaceutical industry would not be a multi-billion dollar industry that made a lot of money off of antidepressants and things of that nature i believe you know it would still be a very very very big industry no doubt about it i think that

um people would have gravitated more quickly towards these natural medicines and found out for themselves this is for me or this is not for me historically and i'm talking thousands of years you know psychedelics have been used with extreme reverence and intention and respect um by cultures all over the world psilocybin mushrooms they're not for everyone there can be contraindications there's still more research that needs to be done in terms of you know what are those contraindications after my dalliance with the big pharma industry they're the ones that put me on 450 milligrams of opioids

a day and i don't know if you're familiar with dosages of opioids now in the united states when a patient is dying the most they can get is 120 milligrams on their last two weeks of life if they are able to calculate that i was on 450 milligrams it destroyed me i went through withdrawal for three and a half years and that being said i don't trust them [Music] the point of doing this in a religious context or the point of doing this in a communal context is that you then have some support for years

afterwards if you need it so that's a little bit about what this evening and so that's that's really the gift that i want to offer is a place to just go feel it all poor buggers thanks for the invitation yeah thank you i'm excited thank you [Applause] [Music] we're gonna start everybody going keep your heads back open your mouth up you can put your hands on your lower abdomen breathe in nice and deep as you take a deep breath in you'll feel your hands on the bottom of your abdomen lift up and down that's how

you know you're taking a nice deep breath [Music] nice and deep as you can [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] a [Music] [Music] i was shocked by how in a really simple fast way you can throw your body into the numbness like the feel like your blood pressure is i felt at least really low i tried to get up i was super dizzy my head was throbbing it like it was just all these like really weird feelings piled up i think so the bad emotions help you through the bad times i think the emotion itself is

not necessarily bad because what would you do without that at a horrible time how would you cope yeah right interesting so what's the aftermath we're looking at it we're feeling it okay can you still feel it no yeah for sure my hands are still tingling my extremities and my lips are doing some weird stuff but and i can't stop talking but thank you guys so when we're mushroom hunting in colorado we really follow the water because you know this is pretty dry all out here so we really follow the water to try and locate the

best spot for the mushrooms it's the difference between wanting to take my life to end just this intense pain to a complete flip side of you know what i can still be in this intense pain but i recognize the beauty of things every day much much more than i did in the past i do not want my wife and children to look back after i've passed away and say oh my gosh he was bedridden and you're just in a terrible black place i want them to be able to say you know what even though he

was terminally ill and he had horrible horrible things occurring with him he had a great sense of humor he made things happen he did what he wanted to do and i need to learn from that and take on that that's where i'm coming from i found some what'd you find pedro parole this one likes italian music it was the song i told you it looks like marshmallows oh yeah that's what we're looking for right there holy [Music] uh foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] a [Music] thankfully the narrative is changing and and some folks that i know

who actually work in in washington dc as lobbyists you know they're working on actively working on legislation working with elected officials right now i think in the next five years maybe even sooner we could see natural medicines like psilocybin being decriminalized amazing be what do you think it's good yeah like mushroom sushi yeah it's like mushroom sushi can you talk to your mushrooms i do talk to them i say you know i say nice things and you know make sure that they feel comfortable i'm part of something which is great but i am a tiny

tiny tiny tiny part of this huge multiverse and the definition of insanity is to continue doing the same damn thing over and over and over again and this is something that this culture has not done yet the robot [Music] as i said