Mushrooms 101: Everything You Need To Know About The Psilocybin Psychedelics That Are Taking The Health World By Storm.

Ben Greenfield (0:01)

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

William Richards (0:04)

The point I want to stress is that these experiences are, I think, best understood not in the drugs, but as in the human mind. And there are many ways of accessing those experiences.

If you take them with a sense of trust and intention to confront whatever emerges rather than trying to control and escape, then what opens up sometimes is what we call the death of the ego.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition. Voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

All the information you need in one place, right here, right now, on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Ben Greenfield (1:34)

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and you know, you've probably heard me talk about psychedelic compounds before on this show. And I truly believe that psychedelic drugs like MDMA, or aka ecstasy, and LSD, and psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, are very likely going to be the next set of drugs after marijuana to get destigmatized and to be potentially legalized.

And this is not necessarily because people are, say, partying more, but I think it's really due to a lot of research that goes way back to the 50s that have shown that these drugs have a pretty positive effect on people with depression and anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. But there's also a lot of folks, like Silicon Valley executives, who are microdosing with LSD, and people who I know who are doing things like hiking and doing wild plant foraging while microdosing on psilocybin to enhance connectivity with nature. And I will certainly even admit that I myself have experimented quite a bit with many of these compounds and found, in many cases, for them to be something that have utility, something that have benefit when used correctly. And what I mean by when used correctly is not the way that my mom explains a pretty funny story to me, which is the idea that she and her friends back in college were out in a cow field, wandering around, harvesting cow patties for magic mushrooms, getting completely high out of their minds and going on a crazy psychedelic trip. And I believe that how the story goes, they wound up driving back to their home, yes, driving, and walking into their house, and the entire house had been robbed and was completely empty. And so they were all there at their completely empty house, tripping out on mushrooms and totally freaking out.

Hi, mom, by the way, if you're listening.

So for those of you who are interested in mushrooms, don't do what my mom did.

But you may be interested in what my guest on today's show has to say about psychedelics. His name is Dr. William Richards. And Dr. Richards, and we'll call him Bill. I've gotten his permission already. He's a psychologist in the psychiatry department of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine at the Bayview Medical Center. And he researches specifically psilocybin, which is the active molecule in magic mushrooms, or what he would probably call sacred mushrooms, not magic mushrooms. And he's a very, very well-educated man with graduate degrees from the Yale Divinity School, from Andover Newton Theological School, from a PhD from Catholic University, and he's studied all over the world, including Germany, with psychedelic research originating all the way back to the 60s. And he's also published a book, which I will link to in the show notes for today's episode. The book is called Sacred Knowledge, Psychedelics and Religious Experiences. And it is described as the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. So, quite an interesting book, and I've gone through some of it. It is meaty. It's not necessarily a primer on how to get high, as much as there's a primer on all these very cool psychological and physiological things that some of these plant-based compounds, I think many of us are nervous about or scared of, can actually do for us. So, first of all, before we delve into the interview with Bill, you can access the show notes for everything we talk about. If you just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/richards, as in Bill's last name, bengreenfieldfitness.com/richards, and I'll link to his book and everything else that we discuss on today's show. So, Bill, welcome to the show, man.

William Richards (5:26)

And thank you for having me on.

Ben Greenfield (5:29)

Awesome. And by the way, in an act of complete audio podcasting interview blasphemy, I am actually going to open the can of sparkling water here that I had on my desk. So that's what that noise is. Now that we've gotten the serious editing out of the way, got my blackberry-flavored sparkling water, I'm ready to delve in with you, Bill.