Mushrooms have been around for thousands of years, and they ve had a profound impact on human history. In this episode, we talk about how they changed our understanding of the world, and the role they played in shaping the way we live and work, and how they can be used to heal you on a spiritual level. We also talk about their use in the past and present, and what they can do in the future. And Paul, the first person to wear a mushroom hat, joins us to talk about the history of mushrooms, and why they re so important to us. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Additional Compositions: Ian Dorsch Producer: Matthew Boll Mixing: Jeff Perla Art Direction: Mike McLennan Music for this episode was done by Haley Shaw Thank you for the intro and outro music: Chacho Vellian and the rest of the music was written and produced by Ian McKirdy Thanks to the Wolfe Brothers for the production of the intro, our theme song and our ad music was produced by Mark Phillips by Jeff Perlan (credited to the beatboxer, , and our beatboxing by the beatboxing_ by Bobby Lord by . by Ian McElton in this episode is is by his beatboxing, and by John McDermott by Matthew McElroy & thanks to was edited by on this episode by Paul Korte - and his music is by , by our beatbox by Mitch Albom by James Rook sojourno edited by James Pizzi . . and our thanks to the ghost to beepers ) and of at this episode by by Kevin McEllewhite thank you are s music is ? by Brian McDart and , our editor is , his music by ) and my music is also by David Friesen
00:02:38.000And so with this thing, this larger piece, they would hollow this out, put an ember in there.
00:02:42.000Would they have to blow on the ember as they hiked?
00:02:45.000Well, you could blow on a little bit and you cap it and then you can put it in your pocket.
00:02:48.000The famous Iceman that was found on the border of Italy and Austria, he had this tethered to his right side, which is a position of significance.
00:02:57.000Need, like your knife, you know, and things that you want to make sure you have if you're right-handed and it's on the right side.
00:03:02.000So this one example is we have a thread of knowledge of use of mushrooms that goes over millennia, and most of those threads have been frayed or broken.
00:03:18.000We were much more dependent upon mushrooms when we were forest people than we are now seemingly in the cities.
00:03:24.000But it's coming full circle very quickly.
00:03:27.000Well, mushrooms are weird in that some of them are incredibly edible and nutritious and other ones.
00:03:33.000They'll kill you, and sometimes they look really similar to each other.
00:03:36.000Well, this is the mystery of mushrooms, and I think it speaks to also mycophobia, the fear of mushrooms.
00:03:43.000R. Gordon Watson first coined that term, but when you think about it, in your visual landscape with animals, You see them for months, years, and plants.
00:03:55.000But mushrooms that come up and disappear in four or five days, some of them can feed you, some can kill you, some can heal you, some can send you on a spiritual journey.
00:04:05.000So to have something so powerful and yet so ephemeral is natural for humans to avoid that which they don't understand out of fear because they don't know the difference.
00:04:16.000Well, you know, 23 primates consume mushrooms, humans being one of them.
00:04:21.000And so that speaks to a long ancestral use of mushrooms going back, you know, in our primate evolutionary tree for a very, very long time.
00:04:29.000How many species of mushrooms are there?
00:04:32.000You know, you asked me that question five years ago, I would have said 1.5 million.
00:04:37.000And now we're up to about 5 million is being estimated.
00:04:42.000Fungi outnumber plants 5 to 10 to 1. And I just, you know, I speak at TED and I've gone to these TED conferences, but it's shocking with the smartest brains in the world, not until just recently did they realize what us mycologists have known for a long time.
00:05:02.000Mass, when you're walking on soil, the 30% of the biological carbon is fungal.
00:05:09.000Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, say that again.
00:06:29.000So this is something that we are now understanding how essential they are for preserving biodiversity.
00:06:36.000For the health of the ecosystems as well as our own personal health.
00:06:39.000So when you say you think they're sentient, to what degree?
00:06:42.000I mean, and you're not talking about just like psilocybin or Amanita muscaria.
00:06:48.000We're kind of intellectually provincial in that we are using language and we've entered terms in order to describe concepts that we're struggling with.
00:07:46.000We separated from fungi, basically, we chose the route to encapsulate our nutrients in a cellular sac, a stomach, digesting our nutrients within.
00:07:53.000The fungal systems digest their nutrients externally.
00:07:57.000They exhale oxygen, inhale carbon dioxide, And their network-like design allows them to respond to catastrophe.
00:08:07.000And what I mean by that is that the mycelial networks, they're so dense in the soil, and they have literally hundreds of billions of tips.
00:08:19.000And as these tips are growing out, They tend to be polynucleate at the tips and it allows them to upregulate new enzymes, acid sequences, etc.
00:08:30.000So if there's a new ecological challenge, a new food source, a new toxin or something, these fungal networks are so...
00:08:38.000A great plasticity and being able to code for new sequences from their DNA. So all you need is one of those hundreds of billions of tips to find a new enzyme to break down a toxin or a new food source.
00:08:51.000And what happens then is that information then is incorporated genetically into the mycelial network and the mycelium then surges because it has new food, logically.
00:09:01.000And so when it surges and it creates a new, what's called a sector of mycelium, we now know there's evidence that the mycelial network then that It benefits from that tip exploration and discovery.
00:09:13.000So these are like massively resilient adaptive organisms that have a network-based design not dissimilar from that of our neural networks, not dissimilar from the computer internet.
00:09:26.000And more and more that I explore this, the more I'm convinced that we will find network-based organisms throughout the cosmos, probably fungal systems.
00:09:36.000And fungal systems ultimately give rise, in our case, animals.
00:09:40.000It's more likely we'll find fungal-animal relationships all throughout the universe.
00:09:44.000Do you think that there's some unknown way that animals are connected in some sort of a similar way as well?
00:10:27.000And it's really interesting that many of the bacterial diseases that infect fungi also infect us.
00:10:33.000Our best antibiotics against bacteria come from fungi, penicillin being the obvious example.
00:10:38.000But we have found now doing next-gen sequencing, and this has never been published before, that the mycelial mats growing in the very same wood chips, in our case, that have been fermented, We had a thousand-fold difference in the relative abundance of genera,
00:10:55.000of bacteria, from the very same wood chips, two different mushroom species planted on those wood chips, and the microbiomes that were created and selected for by the mycelium were vastly different.
00:11:08.000This really strongly supports the concept, this is a hypothesis with quickly becoming a theory, I'll explain the difference in a minute.
00:11:16.000But this really supports the concept that I've long believed and espoused that these mycelial networks are not just happenstance.
00:11:24.000They're creating the habitats and the flora and ultimately the fauna that are resonant within the ecosystem to guarantee the plurality and the biodiversity of the ecosystem by creating the plants that grow up.
00:11:36.000That feed the animals, the insects to create the debris fields and then feed the mycelium for the benefit of the progeny of the mushrooms that will form thereafter.
00:11:43.000So these are deterministic organisms that are setting the stage for ecological evolution.
00:11:46.000And you think that they're doing this in a conscious manner?
00:11:50.000Well, see, again, we're a victim of our consciousness trying to define what is conscious and what is smart.
00:11:56.000And one of the best arguments I've had, my brother Bill is a super genius, is far smarter than myself.
00:12:01.000And he was editing one of my books, Mycelium Running, How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.
00:12:05.000And he goes, Paul, you cannot say that mycelium is intelligent.
00:12:11.000And he said, you can't say nature is intelligent.
00:12:16.000But you didn't realize the hypocrisy of the statement that you're giving me?
00:12:19.000You're telling me nature is not intelligent, and yet you are born of nature, using the mind to conceive the concept to challenge the idea that nature is not intelligent when you are part of nature?
00:12:49.000Language is code, and we haven't elaborated the code yet to elucidate the concepts that we're trying to articulate.
00:12:57.000Just because you can't prove it's true doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
00:13:01.000So as our vocabulary increases, You know, as our lexicon of language increases and becomes more robust, then I think we can better describe, test, and prove that these concepts are true.
00:13:12.000But, you know, we're biologically provincial when we think about how limited we are.
00:13:18.000We're truly Neanderthals with nuclear weapons.
00:13:24.000How important natural ecosystems are, try to replicate them.
00:13:27.000They're very, very difficult to replicate due to their complexity.
00:13:30.000So I think the more that we study nature, most all of us scientists subscribe to the adage that the more we study this subject, the more we realize we didn't know.
00:13:41.000And the hubris of us thinking that these things cannot occur, did not occur, will not occur, really speaks to our provincial attitude towards nature.
00:13:50.000The idea that these fungus, fungi, are creating their environment and almost they're the architects of this environment.
00:14:00.000They're establishing the landscape for all these different creatures and life forms to live is unbelievably fascinating.
00:14:08.000And also that they're connected, right?
00:14:11.000They're connected in some sort of almost like a neural network.
00:14:16.000What is that thing in the Pacific Northwest, the one fungus group that's essentially the largest living organism on the face of the earth?
00:14:23.000Yeah, the largest organism in the world so far discovered is a mycelial mat, 2,200 acres in size, and that's equivalent to about 665 football fields.
00:14:44.000So for those listeners out there, if any soil biologists know this well, if you go out and get some nice rich soil, a gram of it, and you analyze it, there typically is a million, five million microbes per gram in that soil.
00:15:06.000On the other side of that cell wall are hundreds of millions of microbes per gram that are trying to consume it, many of which.
00:15:12.000The mycelium is able to upregulate in constant biomolecular communication with its ecosystem, be able to prevent predators from consuming it, thus allowing it to achieve the largest mass of any organism in the world.
00:15:25.000This is amazing to me because it means that it is constantly in communication with the ecosystem, being challenged, accepting alliances.
00:15:36.000So guilds of microbiomes are being created, selected by the mycelium.
00:15:41.000And these guilds and communities then cooperate in order to prevent We're good to go.
00:16:07.000And reproduction through creating guilds of communities of the microbiome using the mycelial network as the structural foundation of the food web seems to be the name of the game here.
00:16:17.000So this honey mushroom, is that what it's called, that lives in the Pacific Northwest, how is it killing these trees?
00:16:23.000It's a root parasite so it comes in and kills the trees and I spend a lot of time in the old growth forest and a lot of hiking.
00:16:31.000I've always been wondering about meadows in the subalpine regions.
00:16:34.000There's all these subalpine forests and then you come out and there's these giant meadows.
00:16:40.000I suspect that this honey mushroom is a meadow maker.
00:17:17.000And so water lenses are being created.
00:17:19.000Now you have more sunlight, grasses, and flourish.
00:17:22.000And so I suspect that these mushrooms are actually meadow makers, allowing then the elk and the deer and marmots and what not To exist in those grassland environments as a way of rebuilding the nitrogen source in the soil.
00:17:37.000So I think these are over great, huge time scales.
00:17:42.000We have to get away from the concept of our lifespan or even 100, 200 years.
00:17:46.000We need to think in millennial terms, you know, over many, many millennia.
00:17:53.000The idea that they're sort of the architects of their ecosystem.
00:17:57.000They're the architects of our existence.
00:17:59.000This is something that there's some really fantastic research that's come out in the past two years.
00:18:06.000I'm a science ambassador for the AAAS, the American Association of Advanced Science, so I am a little bit out there, but I'm really happy that I have so much scientific support these days.
00:18:16.000A lot of things I've been talking about for 20 years are now well-rooted and been proven.
00:18:20.000One of the things that has been so fascinating to me, and I'm still wrapping my mind around this, but, you know, the universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago from the Big Bang.
00:18:33.000The Earth coalesced out of stardust about 4.5 billion.
00:18:36.000The earliest records of life we have is about 3.8 billion years ago, single-celled organisms, but just recently in lava beds in South Africa.
00:18:50.000They found mycelium infused through the lava 2.4 billion years ago.
00:18:56.000Now, we split from fungi 650 million years ago.
00:19:00.000And then in Brazil this past year, they found a fully intact, apparently a fossilized mushroom published in Nature, which is a very reputable scientific journal.
00:19:10.000And that one is 1.4 billion years old.
00:19:14.000So the oldest multicellular organism in the fossil record today Is this fungus and lava in South Africa 2.4 billion years ago.
00:19:24.000A fully formed mushroom, who had its form, was growing 1.4 billion years ago.
00:19:32.000We separated from fungi 650 million years ago.
00:19:35.000Mushrooms have had their form longer than we've had our form by more than a billion years.
00:19:39.000Here, Jamie just pulled it up on the screen here so we could take a look at it.
00:20:19.000These are really the overlord-underlords of our ecosystem.
00:20:23.000And I suspect, and as these neural networks, they have more neural connections in the mycelial mass than we have in our brain.
00:20:30.000They are actually accumulating not only genetic intelligence, but I think that as time goes on, I hope that we will be able to interface with them.
00:20:38.000Because I think that there is Many benefits of us communicating with mycelium that can give us rapid responses to catastrophia.
00:20:52.000And we're now the biggest walking catastrophe that I know, walking across the planet.
00:20:56.000And we need to engage these fungal allies for the benefits that we need to put into play in order to prevent the loss of biodiversity.
00:21:04.000It seems like a communication gap would be very hard to bridge the communication gap I mean if we really did find a way to communicate in some form with mushrooms like the concept of language like you were talking about just the idea of nature and intelligence and these words that we have that we have these sort of Concrete definitions in our head that don't really apply to some things that are very confusing to us,
00:22:08.000The most fun one is they designed a nutrient, basically a nutrient-like maze, replicating Tokyo in the Japanese subway system.
00:22:22.000And so they started with Tokyo and they put oats, which is a nutritional source.
00:22:28.000They inoculated what is on this basically kind of agri-map With all the major cities, the nodes around Tokyo and each of those nodes had a piece of oat on them.
00:22:46.000They inoculated it and then they let the slime mold then grow.
00:22:52.000And first it grew out randomly, exploratorily, you know, just like you would do if you're a hunter or something, you're hunting on the landscape looking for things.
00:22:59.000And then after about 28 hours, it reorganized itself in the most efficient way possible and reorganized the Japanese subway system in a more efficient manner than it's designed today.
00:23:14.000Thus they said, not me, not Paul Stamets, this is a demonstration of cellular intelligence.
00:23:21.000So this is the tip of the proverbial mycelial iceberg.
00:23:52.000Yeah, Dennis is a great ally, great scientist.
00:23:56.000But you know, Dennis said even if 10% of what Terence said was true, it's friggin' amazing.
00:24:01.000And Terence and Dennis both came up with a stoned ape theory.
00:24:06.000Now it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis.
00:24:08.000A hypothesis is speculative but cannot necessarily be as not yet proven.
00:24:13.000A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and proven with facts.
00:24:17.000So I disagree with them in saying it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis.
00:24:20.000But the hypothesis of the Stone Ape, which I think you've alluded to before, is that with climate change and as the savannahs increase in our primate ancestors, It came out of the forest canopies.
00:25:00.000And then 20 minutes later, you are catapulted in this extraordinary experience.
00:25:06.000Psilocybin substitutes the serotonin, becomes a better neurotransmitter, activates neurogenesis, it causes new neurons to form, new pathways of knowledge.
00:25:16.000So that's the Stone Day hypothesis, and it speaks to a mystery that the human brain Basically, the brain cavity doubled in size in about 2 million years.
00:25:28.000Some people say it's less than 200,000.
00:25:39.000To be scientifically accurate here, I need to show the extreme margins of what's been estimated.
00:25:46.000So if we accept two million years, and it's shown in the fossil record this is true, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils are 300,000 years old now.
00:25:56.000But we have a suddenly doubling of the human brain.
00:26:01.000And with that, our language centers increased our ability to prognosticate, to plan.
00:26:08.000And there's no explanation for this currently.
00:26:13.000Even though we may not be able to prove it, I ask people to suspend their disbelief for a second.
00:26:47.000We know now from neurogenesis and the extension of the fear response that has been clinically proven, psilocybin allows you to reset And have different neurological pathways to respond to fear, overcoming the fear of conditioned response, potentially PTSD, and there's a lot of research on this currently.
00:27:04.000But this wouldn't happen one time with one hominid group.
00:27:30.000And we know that you have the extinction of the fear response.
00:27:33.000So if you're the leader of your clan, you've had this traumatic event, either war or cataclysm from earthquakes, whatever the case may be, or encounter a saber-toothed tiger, whatever.
00:27:45.000If you're the leader of that clan and you can overcome your fear response, you have courage and you have empathy.
00:28:12.000But now we're at a junction and we're ready for the next quantum leap in human consciousness.
00:28:18.000I think psilocybin should be looked upon as a nootropic vitamin.
00:28:22.000And there's a huge amount of interest in this.
00:28:24.000Johns Hopkins University, as you probably well know, New York University, UCLA, elsewhere in Europe, there's major clinical studies that have been conducted in the past two years showing exactly what I'm saying about overcoming fear response, neurogenesis, overcoming PTSD. This is now medically Quite seriously considered and something that I think that we should explore under controlled settings.
00:28:49.000I'm not into partying with psilocybin mushrooms.
00:29:15.000California has it, as I'm sure you're probably aware, it's up for legalization.
00:29:21.000Yeah, I was really quite surprised by that.
00:29:23.000Yeah, all my work, and to put some caveats here, all my work was covered by a Drug Enforcement Administration license.
00:29:30.000I've published now four new species in the genus Psilocybe, including the most potent psilocybin mushroom in the world called Psilocybe azurescens.
00:29:38.000And to be clear, folks, nature provides.
00:31:20.000And it's something that, unfortunately, because it can't be marginalized by the party atmosphere and use as a party drug, there's a really amazing study that just came out about five days ago.
00:31:40.000People, prisoners, were surveyed over 10 years in the Department of Human Health Services data bank, and they found an amazing correlation.
00:31:51.000If you had, in this patient, in those prisoners, one experience with psilocybin in your life, one experience, It reduced, in that population compared to the people who did not take cell-type mushrooms, an 18% reduction in burglary and larceny,
00:32:10.000and up to a 27% reduction in other crimes, including violent crimes.
00:32:23.000Now think of the damage, not only to the victims and the victims' families, the court system, the lawyers, the collateral damage, people being upset because they're being criminalized in prison for something, you know, for merely possessing suicide mushrooms or something like that.
00:32:38.000But think of the return on investment.
00:32:41.000A four to six hour experience creates a lifetime benefit to society, reducing criminal activity, By 18 to 27 percent.
00:33:39.000I'm also a non-serious person on many levels, but I know when it comes to something that is so powerful, that is so important, let's not jeopardize its use medically and for the benefit of society in the future by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
00:33:56.000I agree with you to a certain extent, but I also think that it's got to be incredibly frustrating for a guy like you that has the kind of information that you have bouncing around your head in relationship to the way the rest of the world views it.
00:34:08.000See, to a person like myself, who I don't know nearly as much as you know, but I know quite a bit more than the average person when it comes to psilocybin and mushrooms or Amanita Muscaria or Terence McKenna's ideas, The shroom fest doesn't bother me, but for a serious researcher like yourself,
00:34:24.000it's got to be like, ugh, you're a part of the problem, right?
00:34:37.000There's a movement right now to move psilocybin from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. Schedule 1 means an illegal drug that has no medical benefits.
00:34:43.000Schedule 2 means it's a drug that has medical benefits.
00:34:46.000So there's a serious movement going on right now within the FDA to have it be recategorized because in the words of FDA researchers I know, one arm's length removed is that they've never seen anything with such a strong safety profile that gives so much benefit at so little cost.
00:36:16.000But I could not elocute without stuttering constantly.
00:36:21.000And please people out there, don't finish a stutterer's sentence.
00:36:25.000The type of stutterer category that I have been in is that we would try to trick our brain with a prepositional or adverbial phrase halfway through the sentence that we're stuck on because we're thinking three or four sentences ahead and the only way you can do is trick the brain.
00:36:41.000So I had to come up with a new neurological pathway to trick my brain so I could get out of my stuttering rhythm that was just repetition I couldn't get out of.
00:36:50.000And then one day, before I'd ever had psilocybin mushrooms, I bought some, a bag of them, and I thought, I had no information.
00:37:51.000So I walked and walked, and I came up to the tree, and I was eating the mushrooms, and then I started feeling the effects.
00:37:57.000And so it was great, because I was climbing the tree, and I was getting higher in the tree, and higher in my brain.
00:38:01.000Whoa, that seems like a terrible thing to do.
00:38:04.000And I climbed to the top of the tree, and this beautiful landscape, but in the summertime, there were these boiling black clouds on the horizon.
00:38:13.000And so this big summer storm was coming and the clouds were dark and boiling and they're coming close and I could hear the thunder and then I'm going higher and higher and the winds pick up and the trees started moving and I started to get vertigo because I was like,
00:38:29.000oh my god, I'm getting so freaking high on these mushrooms.
00:38:31.000And so I grabbed the tree and held on the tree and it became my axis mundi into the earth.
00:38:37.000And then the lightning started coming closer and the lightning started starting to come really close and the lightning would hit and I'd go.
00:38:47.000I saw these liquid waves of these multidimensional geometrical patterns everywhere and the sparks of lightning would just create this amazing crescendo of secondary, tertiary fractals all around me.
00:39:00.000And I was like, oh my – it was amazing.
00:39:03.000So the storm came and lightning strikes were all around me and I was washed with rain and I was up there and I felt in touch with Gaia, the universe.
00:40:37.000I said that dozens, hundreds of times over and over and over.
00:40:42.000And fortunately, the storms went past and held onto the tree and soaking wet, I came out of the tree and walked back to where I was living.
00:40:51.000And then the next day, I got up, I didn't see anybody, and I was walking on this path and sidewalk, and there's a lady that I really liked a lot.
00:41:02.000But she was always attracted to the super self-assured jocks and things like that.
00:41:06.000She was actually very kind and sweet, but I didn't want to stare at her in the eyes because I would stutter, and it's humiliating for us.
00:41:15.000So the more humiliating us stutterers feel, the more we stutter.
00:41:20.000And so it's a really slippery slope, and so I would avoid eye contact.
00:41:25.000And so for the first time, she walked towards me.
00:41:41.000And this speaks to now what has been medically proven is that we can reset the neurology of the human brain through neurogenesis.
00:41:48.000I believe that experience allowed me to map new neurological pathways that allows me to elocute in a way that I could not elocute before.
00:41:57.000Now, just to be truthful here, if I drink a lot of alcohol and I'm in a loud bar, Because us stutterers, and you're a martial artist, and I've been a martial artist all my life, and we have peripheral consciousness.
00:42:10.000And so if someone comes through a door, you know, into the bar, and I'm looking at you, I know that they've come through.
00:42:17.000So this hyper alertness that us martial artists have, you know, of knowing things in the circumference around us in the peripheral environment is distracting.
00:42:26.000So if I drink a lot, and there's a loud, a lot of noise, and a lot of people coming in outdoors, I'm hypersensitive to intruders.
00:42:35.000And then that's what I'll start stuttering if a person's talking to me, asking me, how do you grow mushrooms?
00:42:39.000It's like filling a well with a teaspoon.
00:42:41.000Because I'm worried about the guy who just came through the door over there who looks like he may not be a safe person to be in this environment right now.
00:42:48.000So there's a time that I'll only give 10% of my brain to communicating to the person in front of me.
00:42:54.00090% of my brain is hyper aware in the circumstantial environment around me.
00:42:59.000Time for another trip to the tree to cure that last 10%.
00:43:31.000Now this guy was totally straight, looked like he was a super conservative from a super conservative family.
00:43:36.000And we told him this whole story and his eyes were wide open because when you meet other stutterers and you talk to them, they're really desperate for a solution.
00:43:43.000So I never knew what happened to this young busboy, but I think I changed his life forever.
00:43:48.000I had a good friend growing up and his brother was severely stricken with it to the point where he would have to wince, close his eyes and look down when he would talk to you and he just couldn't get over it.
00:44:00.000But he won't stutter to animals and he won't stutter when he sings.
00:44:11.000It could be trauma when you're a child combined with neuropathy.
00:44:15.000I was told by one psychiatrist who was a specialist in this at a conference that there is a theory that in the seventh or eighth month in the womb, your neurons failed to make all the connections that it needed to.
00:44:31.000So that makes sense to me because that's why I would reroute with prepositional or adverbial phrases to try to jump around the little habitual loop that I'm in.
00:44:40.000But I think this speaks to increasing intelligence and we all will suffer from some form of dementia and neuropathy occurs.
00:44:49.000There is a really wonderful safe and legal mushroom to use that leads to neurogenesis and that's called lion's mane.
00:44:57.000And lion's mane is a Cascading white icicle, edible and choice mushroom they sell in the stores.
00:45:30.000Kawagishi discovered this in 1994, a Japanese researcher, and he postulated it as a potential preventative or treatment for Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy, etc.
00:46:33.000This translates from mice experiments to humans.
00:46:36.000We already know that it has aspects of neurogenesis.
00:46:40.000When you go into Alzheimer's, a state of Alzheimer's, which is a big complex, but one of the characteristics is the formation of amyloid plaques.
00:46:55.000Your outer sheath on the neurons is interrupted by amyloid plaques that then prevent neurotransmission.
00:47:03.000So the experiments with the mice, which I think are so interesting, was one experiment was the maze experiment where the mice were put into an arena and they went out a corridor and they went one way in the corridor, they'd find food,
00:47:43.000Upon giving these mice again mushrooms for a few weeks, They nearly re-normalized.
00:47:49.000Upon sacrificing the mice in the first part of the experiment, they saw the amyloid plaques and the demyelination.
00:47:55.000The second part of the experiment, of course, another subset of mice, they found that the myelin regrew and the amyloid plaque had resolved.
00:48:24.000The other experiment which I find is even more fun is, and this was done in Japan, they put like 100 mice in an arena and they put a toy in the middle of the cage.
00:48:53.000Then they introduced this cyclopeptide, this neurotoxin, and the mice then, after a while, were uninterested, didn't have imagination, no curiosity.
00:49:02.000They put in a new toy, they were disinterested.
00:49:06.000Now, even their full-blown dementia-like symptoms gave them lion's mane mushrooms.
00:49:10.000And after a few weeks, when they put in a new toy, they came back to near-normal levels.
00:49:15.000Upon sacrificing the mice, they found that the amyloid plaque cleared to resolve, And myelin had regenerated and neurogenesis had occurred.
00:50:09.000And I think that stacking thing and then combining it with vitamin D3. Now, I suggest vitamin D3, niacin, because those of you who've had a niacin flush, 200 milligrams of niacin or more, You get red, you get itchy, and neuropathy typically is presented at the fingertips,
00:50:28.000at the end of your toes and your fingers and your peripheral nervous system.
00:50:32.000As you have neuropathy, the nerve endings begin to die backwards.
00:50:36.000So my idea here is because there are different receptors being activated By psilocybin then with the arinacines from lion's mane.
00:50:44.000If you stack lion's mane with psilocybin mushrooms, with niacin, the advantage is, and this is hypothetical, but this is something I think is well worth testing, is that niacin can help drive the neurogenic benefits of psilocybin and arinacines To the end of the peripheral nervous system.
00:51:01.000So we actually are planning right now a clinical study in Oregon with lion's mane mushrooms.
00:51:07.000The physicians who've looked at the research, which is robust, are convinced that it's worthy and they have their own funding.
00:51:15.000So we're going to do an end of 30 study, is what we hope to do, 30 patients, and we hope to begin that study in the next year.
00:51:23.000It would be phenomenal to see how that would affect people with CTE. People like football players, boxers, people with brain damage.
00:51:57.000There are so many different examples like this where mushrooms need to be advanced to the front stage of consideration by serious scientists and give up your mycophobia or even your what I call xylophobia, the irrational fear of psilocybin mushrooms,
00:52:12.000and look upon these with new eyes and Drop your prejudices and just look at it as a serious scientific analysis.
00:52:30.000Well, I love my skeptics because unless they're prejudiced against you, and some people are, you can never convince them, but scientists, when they see the data sets and they see there's a dozen or more publications with scientists without commercial interests who've done this independently,
00:52:50.000So the whole medical community right now, You know, I speak at a number of medical conferences, TEDMED, the American Academy of Dermatology.
00:52:58.000I've been keynote speakers at many medical conferences.
00:53:02.000And it's great because I can take people who are totally skeptical and most of them walk out of that room convinced.
00:53:12.000And why shouldn't we think that fungi are sources of medicines?
00:53:16.000I mean, penicillin may have tipped World War II in our favor.
00:53:21.000So the Japanese and Germans did not have penicillin, even though Alexander Fleming discovered it in 1928. In 1941, a lab tech researcher went to a market in Chicago,
00:53:36.000found a moldy cantaloupe, and Alexander Fleming's strain of penicillin was too weak.
00:54:09.000And so there's a great NPR analysis on this, on the history of penicillin, and it is one of the major factors in helping tilt the balance in the favor of the allied powers against the Axis powders.
00:54:23.000So concerned were the researchers in England, they impregnated their clothes with spores of this mold strain.
00:54:29.000So if their laboratories were bombed or they were captured, if one of them escaped, they could regenerate the culture from their clothing.
00:54:59.000Now there's the the frustrating aspects of What is the word that you use fungi phobia?
00:55:06.000So we've used micro phobia micro phobia the frustrating aspects are first of all prohibition right the sweeping psychedelic act of 1970 that made psilocybin mushrooms illegal right and and then on top of it the commercial pharmaceutical industry which Doesn't want to have anything to do with anything that it can't patent and has so many doctors and so many researchers in its pocket.
00:55:36.000You have one issue that people, which is obviously why you don't like the word shroom, people think of mushrooms as a party drug, like being silly, you know, freaking out, doing something stupid, regrettable actions.
00:55:49.000And then afterwards going, wow, we got so crazy.
00:55:52.000Thinking of it as a frivolous sort of thing that you would engage in.
00:55:58.000Whereas what you're trying to do is show the absolute hard science.
00:56:03.000Do you feel that this absolute hard science is...
00:56:08.000I mean, you must feel that it's unfairly inhibited and hindered.
00:56:14.000It has been, but there's been a tidal change in pharmacology of the use of psilocybin and its utility as a therapeutic agent.
00:56:28.000I think now there's over 700 patients have gone through Johns Hopkins clinical trials for things like end-of-life depression, PTSD, There's studies out on treating alcoholics and drug addicts.
00:56:48.000So, and this is important to communicate to people, and John Hopkins' study in particular, Dr. Roland Griffiths, a great, great scientist who's been running and championing these studies, came up with a very interesting series of analyses.
00:57:02.000Some of the take-home points were only 70% of the people Described the psilocybin experience therapeutically under controlled settings at John Hopkins with a very high dose of psilocybin as being beneficial.
00:57:16.00030% of them saying, I didn't like that.
00:57:19.000But in a retrospective study, 14 months to two years later...
00:57:24.000The 70% of the people who said it was a beneficial experience still described it as one of the most significant beneficial experiences of their lifetime.
00:57:33.000And interviewing their friends, their spouses, they saw a Permanent residual effect from the benefits of the experience.
00:58:11.000The memory of the experience kept them optimistic, hopeful, and they felt benefits from just remembering the experience.
00:58:21.000The people who had the negative experience, they just, you know, wouldn't do that again.
00:58:25.000So these mushrooms are obviously not for everyone.
00:58:27.000But for the people who do benefit, they benefit substantially.
00:58:30.000Don't you feel that a lot of the people that have those negative experiences, at least from my understanding, a lot of it are people that have some serious issues that they're not dealing with, and ego problems, and the mushrooms expose that, and they try to wrestle the mushroom.
00:58:58.000We're a big spectrum of complex, you know, personality traits.
00:59:02.000And what happened to somebody when they're two years old, five years old, what trauma they experience.
00:59:08.000You know, it's very complex to be able to make these statements.
00:59:11.000But I think as a group, there are some people who Are on the edge and they may not control their innermost emotions and they're afraid of that in normal state of consciousness.
00:59:24.000So they're afraid they might lose their control.
00:59:52.000So you have to figure out how to just let go and how to just like really let go and trust the mushroom or the DMT or whatever it is that you're on to take you on this ride and you'll be okay when it's over.
01:00:04.000And if you can't do that, that's the bad trip.
01:00:07.000And I've seen a lot of people have bad trips.
01:00:11.000We are the casualty of the fact that we don't have an infrastructure tradition in our societies like First Peoples and Native Americans do.
01:00:43.000And mushrooms and henbane and other plants were used in meads, psychoactive beers, and celebrated by people practicing pagan religions in Europe in the forest.
01:00:58.000And the struggle between, I believe, Christianity, monotheism versus polytheism and nature-based religions, there was a collision course.
01:01:06.000And then under pressure of the church, they banned the addition of these plants that could be your gateway to God because the church wanted to be in between you and God.
01:01:35.000Terence had some pretty interesting ideas about that.
01:01:37.000Terence McKenna did one of the things that he said that he believed that as the climate changed and some mushrooms became less and less available they started preserving them in honey because you can preserve things in honey and that in preserving things in honey you also run into the possibility of fermented honey and then fermented honey becoming mead you go into more of an alcohol culture Than a psychedelic culture,
01:02:01.000which is really like on the opposite end of the spectrum.
01:02:03.000Alcohol culture is loosened inhibitions, wild behavior, less thought of the consequences of your actions, less introspective thinking, much more chaos, right?
01:02:15.000And that he believes that this has probably resulted in some sort of a shift, or he believed, rather, before he passed, that it resulted in some sort of a shift from these More communal, mushroom-worshipping cultures to what you saw in the Inquisition and some of the more chaotic times in history.
01:02:36.000I would respectfully disagree with the second part of that analysis.
01:02:39.000Not what you're saying, but what Terence would have been saying.
01:02:43.000Mushroom being preserved in honey is a way of preventing them from rotting.
01:02:46.000You don't think that had anything to do with mead?
01:02:48.000Well, I think it did have something to do with mead.
01:02:50.000But the amount of alcohol being produced versus the dose that you would get, it seemed to me the psilocybin dose would be so much more powerful than the small amount of alcohol you'd be drinking.
01:03:01.000Am I misrepresenting what he was saying?
01:03:26.000Well, he also had some strange sort of a computer program, and I've tried to follow it many, many times, some of the lectures that he gave on the computer program that represented time wave zero.
01:03:36.000What the idea was, for people interested, he just thought there was going to come a point of ultimate novelty.
01:03:41.000And somehow or another, conveniently, he had that point coinciding with both his birthday and the end of the Mayan calendar, right?
01:04:24.000Which brings me back to the stoned ape theory.
01:04:27.000One of the things that his brother talked about, and maybe you could elaborate on this, was the impact that psilocybin has on the creation of language.
01:04:35.000And he thinks that the very pathways that you were discussing, that psilocybin sort of empowers, that that may very well have been how human beings started elaborating on language.
01:04:47.000Oh, I think he's correct on that because of glossialia.
01:04:51.000And we know that neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus.
01:04:55.000It's the ability to speak in languages and new words, languaging.
01:05:02.000Your ability to language is increased under the experience of psilocybin.
01:05:07.000Speaking of neurogenesis and exactly what we've been talking about is that basically your hippocampus is your center for learning and memory.
01:05:16.000And this is why the mice got better because neurogenesis was occurring in the hippocampus.
01:05:21.000And so they regained their memory and they were able to learn.
01:05:25.000And so, yes, I think the neurogenesis not only occurs in the hippocampus, but I think it can also occur in the peripheral nervous system.
01:05:35.000I have an extraordinarily powerful story that I would like to tell about neurogenesis.
01:05:40.000And it was from a good friend of mine named Bill Webb.
01:06:17.000It was the weirdest—I mean, I haven't told anyone this in 30 years, but I went up to a place called Montana Books in Seattle, and I had my manuscript.
01:06:27.000And I walked into the bookstore because I was told Montana Books was kind of an avant-garde book— Publisher in the early 1970s.
01:06:35.000And so I was told to go up there and I made an appointment and I go in, I'm meeting with a publisher and he goes, listen, this is an interesting little field guide you wrote, but this is not our market.
01:06:44.000You know, you really need a book representative.
01:09:55.000As people are fully, you know, in these sessions, they could be giving them auditory stimulation to see if the auditory nerve is undergoing neurogenesis.
01:10:08.000And so this is something that I think that can be incorporated in the clinical studies to see if this is true.
01:10:20.000So I think this is an end of one study, you know, one individual, but I think this is something that medical researchers should pay attention to.
01:10:28.000What do you think could possibly regenerate Anything that quickly though like how could it happen so quickly that during a four-hour trip because there's like nodes of crossing and there's an interconnectedness that occurs and there's a great graphic which I didn't send you in advance showing this is your brain without psilocybin this is your brain with psilocybin and there's a massive amount of neural connections that are occurring so I think you know Just
01:11:00.000like water chooses the path of least resistance, I think that neurologically, if there is a neurological pathway that can help you as a species, as an individual, survive, should there be a saber-toothed tiger on the horizon, then I think that the economy of energy in nature would...
01:11:21.000Reward the neurological pathways that are most likely to lead to your survival.
01:11:26.000So I think that neurogenesis across the brain occurred, just like me with my stuttering, and it was another neurological pathway.
01:11:33.000But in Bill's case, when he lost his access to those mushrooms, the neuropathy, you know, became more resident and prominent.
01:11:43.000And so we're looking at these images and Jamie's the best.
01:11:47.000We're looking at these images and could you explain to us what these are?
01:11:51.000This is your brain on magic mushrooms.
01:11:53.000Yeah, this is exactly opposite of Nancy Reagan's mantra here.
01:12:14.000Most of the people are just listening rather than viewing.
01:12:16.000Okay, so the one on the left basically shows connections between neuronal nodes that may be on the order of 40 or 50 different nodes of crossing.
01:12:30.000The one on the right with psilocybin is literally in the hundreds.
01:12:34.000And the nodes of crossing not only are more of them, but the thickness of the lines speaks to how robust those nodes of crossing are for carrying neurological signals.
01:12:52.000Now this also influences, I think, and is important for our U.S. military.
01:12:57.000You know, for coders, for people who are trying to solve very complex data sets, the ability of you to have increased cognition and increased intelligence.
01:13:11.000And this is why microdosing is the rage in Silicon Valley.
01:13:15.000The enormous number of coders are microdosing right now.
01:13:18.000And for those who are listening, let's use Celosomy cubensis as a standard species because that's the one that's mostly grown.
01:13:26.000And at a half a gram to a quarter gram, you have liftoff.
01:13:31.000Five grams is the full-blown hero's journey.
01:13:35.000A lot of people will take between two and four grams as a moderately spiritual experience, four grams being And so microdosing is taking a dose so low that if at most you might feel it a little bit giddy the first time you take it the first day,
01:13:55.000but you build up a tolerance immediately the second day.
01:13:58.000So the second, third day you would feel nothing.
01:14:00.000So it's on the order of like a tenth of a gram of Cubensis where people are taking this and then they're taking it repeatedly over time and coders in Silicon Valley from the biggest computer I have a good
01:14:31.000friend who's a world champion kickboxer and one of the best in the world.
01:14:34.000He microdoses daily and he's been doing it over the last like...
01:14:38.000I want to say probably a year or so, and he has achieved phenomenal improvements in his performance because of that.
01:14:45.000He says that when he's sparring, it's almost like he's psychic, like he knows what people are going to do before they do it.
01:14:51.000He said his mood is better, he feels better, he just feels more balanced, and he'll take days off, and when he takes days off, and even though he's completely sober while he's microdosing, because he's really only microdosing, There's something about taking days off where everything just feels kind of shitty.
01:16:18.000Not lucid in the sense that I controlled them, but lucid in the sense that I realized I was dreaming and I was just...
01:16:24.000Like, having incredibly vivid, vibrant dreams, and I would wake up from them and be certain that what I had done was real.
01:16:33.000Like, I had one dream that I fell asleep on the couch, and I did fall asleep on the couch, but while I was asleep, I was like, oh, I'm struggling to get this blanket over me while I'm on the couch.
01:16:43.000And I'm pulling it, but it's stuck under the cushions, and I'm struggling, and I kind of halfway got it over me, and I went to sleep again.
01:16:49.000Well, when I woke up in the morning, there was no blanket.
01:16:51.000There was no blanket anywhere near me.
01:17:21.000And that in taking time off of it, your REM sleep just gets jacked through the roof.
01:17:26.000You know, I've heard this many, many times.
01:17:29.000I've never seen a clinical study on it, but it's the type of thing you hear so many times that you have pretty good confidence that this is true.
01:18:39.000And the almond harvest in California is the biggest market for beekeepers who send their bees to the almond orchards.
01:18:47.000One bee can pollinate a thousand flowers in a day.
01:18:51.000So every flower that bee visits is an almond.
01:18:55.000So it's one of the most bee-dependent crops in the world.
01:18:58.00035% of your food is The other 65%, much of that is indirectly dependent.
01:19:07.000But hay, alfalfa, and clover for cows...
01:19:12.000All of our dairy is dependent upon bee pollination.
01:19:14.000All of our berries, all of our nuts, coffee is.
01:19:19.000Even cannabis and other non-dependent plants benefit from what's called buzz pollination because the bees then can spread the pollen better through the air.
01:19:32.000It is now thought by many of the entomologists that I've been dealing with that we could have full colony collapse across the world within 10 years.
01:19:41.000The cost will be astronomical to our society.
01:19:44.000Prices when food will raise, poverty will increase.
01:19:48.000You could make the argument that increased poverty leads to terrorism because people are poorer.
01:21:24.000And interestingly, it's the number one bridge issue between liberals and conservatives.
01:21:28.000So when you're at Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas or Hanukkah, if you want to avoid talking about Trump and politics and Hillary or Benghazi or whatever the subject dispute is, talk about bees.
01:21:41.000Everyone's on board on protecting the bees.
01:21:50.000I planted a mushroom in my garden called the Garden Giant.
01:21:54.000And one time this summer, I came out to water my mushrooms, and it was covered with bees.
01:21:59.000And the bees moved the wood chips aside, and I could see this white mycelium, and they were sipping on the little droplets oozing from the mycelium.
01:22:07.000I got real excited, and I kept a journal, and for 40 days, from dawn to dusk, there was a continuous convoy of bees to my mushroom bed.
01:22:18.000I published it in the Harrow Smith Magazine, 1988. I put it in one of my books in 1994, and then I forgot about it.
01:22:24.000So I got involved with the U.S. BioShield Biodefense Program directly after 9-11.
01:22:29.000You can Google my name, Stamets, and smallpox.
01:22:31.000There's a vetted press release from the U.S. government.
01:22:35.000They did 2,200-plus analyses of our mushroom extracts, and we found extracts that were highly active against flu viruses, including bird flu, against herpes, and against pox viruses,
01:23:08.000So I had published this research on the antiviral properties of mushrooms, the mycelium.
01:23:14.000And then I heard about the bees, you know, I had raised bees, and then a friend of mine, Louis Schwarzberg, we're doing a movie called Fantastic Fungi that's been making for 10 years.
01:23:24.000And Louis came to me and said, Paul, I have eight patents on fungi that can control termites, ants, mosquitoes.
01:23:33.000You can Google right now, Stamets can take down Monsanto.
01:23:36.000There's probably a thousand websites because my patents are disruptive patents.
01:23:41.000So I can very much control termites and ants from consuming your house for about 20 cents.
01:25:35.000So when bears scratch trees, resin comes out and bees are attracted to the propolis to make propolis from the resins to patch their hides from cracks to prevent invaders coming into a beehive.
01:25:46.000These are all seemingly disparate stories and this is why this waking dream put it all together.
01:25:51.000So I have my garden giant in bed that the bees are coming to.
01:25:55.000I have the BioShield Biodefense program where I found these extracts are highly active against viruses.
01:26:01.000Bear scratched trees introduced polypore mushrooms.
01:26:05.000And then my friend Louis Schwartzberg is saying, you know, how can you help the bees?
01:26:11.000And I highly recommend this to everybody listening, is this lucid dream state.
01:26:16.000At that state, when you're fully asleep and you just go into the ether of wakefulness, stay there.
01:27:01.000So the washingtonstateuniversity.edu for education.
01:27:06.000And you'll see the research that we have there.
01:27:08.000We are now have found that the extracts of Amadou, the one my hat is made from, doubles the lifespans of bees and reduces the deformed wing virus by more than a thousand fold in 10 days.
01:27:32.000But I put these thoughts together that if these mushroom extracts reduce viruses that harm humans, pigs, and birds, what would they do with bees?
01:27:43.000Now, we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh.
01:27:45.000So my U.S. patent issued this past year, and now it's issued in Australia, United States, issuing in Europe, Eurasia, and Canada.
01:27:52.000I plan to open source it for the rest of the world.
01:27:55.000But I was waiting on pins and needles because certainly there would be something called prior art.
01:27:59.000Now patents are issued based on several criteria.
01:28:43.000You're helping my patentability because the more experts that teach away from my invention, the more unconventional my invention is, hence the more patentable it is.
01:30:01.000You take away the wood, the mycelium doesn't have a habitat.
01:30:05.000Because the mycelium is producing these antiviral compounds rotting the wood, the bees were attracted, and because of deforestation now, we're stressing the bees.
01:30:14.000So there's not only the lack of habitat deforestation, there's now neonicotinoids, Bayer and Syngenta, that produces neonics, as they're known, a toxic insecticide, sponsored research in Europe, Because they didn't believe that neonicotinoids harmed the bees.
01:30:32.000The bee researchers then finally published, when they got the results that was contrary to the interests of Syngenta and Bayer, that in fact neonicotinoids harmed the second and third generations.
01:30:42.000Now neonicotinoids are now banned in Europe.
01:30:45.000They are not banned in the United States.
01:30:47.000So you have drift of these neonicotinoids on their adjacent fields.
01:30:51.000So you have loss of wood, deforestation.
01:30:55.000You have glyphosphates that are associated with GMOs because they interfere with the microbiome of the bees and their gut flora, so they can't detoxify.
01:31:02.000It's called the cytochrome P450 pathway.
01:31:06.000So there's a confluence of multiple stressors, but the nail in the coffin by far is a deformed wing virus.
01:31:12.000And we have found now that the extracts of this, one drop per thousand drops, one milliliter in a liter, can reduce the viruses in bees by more than a thousand fold and double the lifespan.
01:31:23.000So it's a friggin' home run because it protects food biosecurity around the world at a time that food ecosystems are collapsing.
01:31:33.000For millions of years, we were forest people.
01:31:35.000We began deforestation when we got into agriculture.
01:31:38.000We began to dismantle the immunological networks of nature, the mycelium that's resident.
01:31:43.000The fact that these same mushrooms reduce viruses in bees, pigs, birds, people, speaks to me of a bigger concept.
01:31:55.000That the mycelium is part of the immunity of the ecosystem.
01:31:59.000And as we lose the debris fields that the mycelium is dependent upon, we begin to dismantle the immunological health of our environment.
01:32:09.000And zoonotic diseases, diseases coming from factory farms, whether they're from pigs or chicken farms, And we have one extraordinary experiment, and this speaks to the Black Hawk helicopter story, is that I was working with the BioShield Biodefense Program directly after 9-11.
01:32:28.000They contacted me because I wrote an article.
01:32:31.000That was a one-page analysis of all the research on the antiviral properties of mushrooms in scientific literature.
01:33:01.000And they funded it with several billion dollars.
01:33:02.000And they contacted me because I knew I had this large library of about 700 strains of mushrooms in our culture library.
01:33:09.000We have a company of 70 Eight great employees.
01:33:14.000And we had this large library so they said we want to test your library based on this article that you've written showing there are antiviral properties in some mushrooms.
01:33:29.000So I started making extracts of mushrooms, the fruit bodies, the mycelium, the little filamentous fuzzy stuff that gives rise to mushrooms.
01:33:36.000And I sent off 100 extracts at a time, all coded with alphanumeric codes.
01:33:42.000So the government didn't know what I was sending them.
01:33:46.000So I get the first reports come back and I'm flipping through them.
01:33:50.000No activity, no activity against pox viruses because by far the concern was smallpox.
01:33:56.000We have no immunological defense against it.
01:34:17.000I looked in my notebook what the codes were, and it was from this mushroom called agaricon that grows exclusively in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.
01:34:26.000This is the longest-living mushroom in North America.
01:34:31.000It looks like a giant beehive, by coincidence, you know, up on a tree.
01:34:34.000Let's see if you can get a picture of that, Jamie.
01:34:37.000And so, A-G-A-R-I-K-O-N, A-G-A-R-I-K-O-N. And so I got real excited, and so I was given a contact person, because he had one point of contact with the U.S. Defense Department, a physician.
01:34:49.000And I called him up saying, these research results are wonderful.
01:37:38.000So how did they find out that just from your patent filing?
01:37:42.000Well, the patent, I filed the patent and it disappeared.
01:37:46.000Most patent applications, when you file them, show up on the U.S. patent homepage within a year or two.
01:37:52.000I filed this patent and four or five years later it still had not been published.
01:37:57.000So I get a hold of my patent attorney who gets a hold of the patent office and the US Department of Defense considered it to be a national security.
01:38:06.000So they quarantined my patent, took it out of the patent office, so it could not be seen by potential terrorists because then they could have an antidote to smallpox.
01:38:18.000So I had to do an intergovernmental agency trace to recall the patent from DOD. They had meetings.
01:38:26.000They allowed it to be released because it was a natural product.
01:38:29.000And so the patent then was put back into the patent application queue and it was approved in 2013. I filed it in 2004. So we have now done work at the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy.
01:38:43.000We've isolated two novel anti-smallpox molecules.
01:38:46.000We also have done work at the Tuberculosis Research Institute with Dr. Scott Franzblau in the University of Illinois at Chicago.
01:38:52.000We've identified a new anti-tuberculosis molecule.
01:38:56.000Agaricon in Dioscorides' time, in Greek culture, was used for treating consumption, later thought to be known as tuberculosis.
01:39:03.000We found that extracts of this mushroom are duly active against bacteria and viruses.
01:39:08.000Most people who die from viral pneumonia actually die from bacterial pneumonia.
01:39:13.000They get a viral infection, their immune system over amps, and its response, lungs get flooded with liquid, bacteria set up, and bacterial pneumonia usually kills people.
01:39:25.000Who actually get a flu virus, they die from bacterial pneumonia.
01:39:28.000So to find a natural product that's duly active against viruses and bacteria is medically significant.
01:39:32.000So there's a good argument for natural products because you have a consortium of protective agents that are living in this soup or this extract that can help protect you.
01:39:42.000So this has now led on to Are discovering molecules active against HPV, the human papillomavirus.
01:39:51.00070% or more of women have HPV. That's a very controversial vaccine, apparently.
01:39:59.000Well, I'm not anti-vaccination, but I'm curious why they don't recommend the vaccine after the age of 24. I can't wrap my mind around that.
01:40:10.000I think they're just trying to prevent infection from sexually active kids.
01:40:13.000Well, you're sexually active after the age of 24, so why wouldn't they?
01:40:16.000Right, but they're sexually active before then.
01:40:18.000But if you didn't have the infection before 24 and you're still active at the age of 24, why wouldn't they recommend the vaccination after the age of 24?
01:40:42.000The ingredients within the mushrooms, we have found five molecules authenticated by NIH virology as being potently active against HPV. Which mushrooms?
01:40:53.000All the polypores that I have been talking about are likely, I can't say de facto all of them, to have varying amounts of these constituents.
01:41:09.000So these mushroom extracts are a huge consortium of antiviral and antibacterial compounds.
01:41:17.000As I mentioned, there's maybe 5 million species of fungi.
01:41:20.000There's about 150,000 species of mushrooms.
01:41:26.000So think just from experiential evidence over thousands of years of human experimentation.
01:41:33.000It'd be like you went into a library and there's 14,000 books in your library, 14,000 species.
01:41:40.000Our ancestors started selecting each of these species and testing them.
01:41:45.000We've narrowed the field down to about 200 species, of which 50 species are superstars that have no adverse effects to human ingestion that have been used for a very long period of time.
01:41:58.000And within that set of 50 species, we're finding these mushrooms which have tremendous potential health benefit.
01:42:08.000This is why I'm so excited in the field of mycology, is we have translational science.
01:42:16.000And I think, based on what we've discovered, we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense.
01:42:27.000Our fungal genomes are essential for our future and present survival.
01:42:31.000The more we eliminate these landscapes of biodiversity, the more we're losing potential agents that can fight disease.
01:42:39.000And so this is something that I think we can build a bridge between conservatives and liberals because Osama Bin Laden didn't have access to an old-growth forest.
01:42:51.000And I think this is really just indicative of many other things that we can discover if we pay attention to the vast genomic resources we have in the biodiversity of the ecosystems that are still intact.
01:43:05.000Now, do you recommend for personal consumption any particular mushrooms?
01:44:47.000So there are beneficial compounds that, in some balance, may outweigh the negative effects of the hydrazines, the agarotines in these mushrooms.
01:44:56.000But that jury is still out, so to speak.
01:44:58.000What are the negative effects of this?
01:45:03.000This is an explosive area of conversation.
01:45:32.000Next, I'm going to have a guy who is the same height as Paul, and he's going to have a mask on, and we're going to have some sort of electric box that distorts his voice.
01:45:46.000There's lots of mushrooms that have tremendous benefit.
01:45:49.000And there are compounds inside of portobello mushrooms that are very beneficial.
01:45:54.000And in fact, there is a positive study with some breast cancer patients, a breast cancer study, showing that button mushrooms can confer benefits.
01:46:05.000We were funded by NIH with a $2.2 million for a breast cancer clinical study on turkey tail mushrooms.
01:46:12.000And turkey tail mushrooms are fantastic as adjuncts to conventional therapy.
01:46:18.000The clinical study that was conducted, funded by NIH and the University of Minnesota Medical School and Bestier Medical College, showed a dose-response curve specifically in supporting the immune system by taking turkey tail mushrooms.
01:46:34.000And the more you took, the more benefit there was.
01:46:39.000That's very popular in front of 800 physicians, where my mother, who was challenged with advanced stage IV breast cancer, who is now almost 93 years of age, She had advanced stage 4 breast cancer when she was 84 years of age,
01:47:18.000But there's scientific articles now that have been published showing that turkey tail mushroom constituents help conventional therapies like chemotherapy with Herceptin and making Herceptin work better.
01:47:30.000So there's a nice blending of integrative medicine with using natural products with conventional medicine.
01:47:37.000I will never be saying that you should not consult a physician.
01:47:42.000I will never say that you should not use conventional medicine.
01:47:45.000It's the state of the art of science is right there.
01:47:48.000But the state of the arts of science is that we can upregulate immunity.
01:47:52.000with these mushrooms and that's your front line of defense and then the other conventional therapies that are being practiced now combine very very nicely according to many physicians and reports showing that the combination of turkey tail mushrooms in combination with conventional therapy can have a significant difference in improving your immunological defense.
01:48:15.000No, I absolutely agree with you that conventional treatments are state-of-the-art.
01:48:21.000And this is state-of-the-art science when you're talking about dealing with cancer, you should deal with oncologists that are at the cutting edge.
01:48:28.000But they're not state-of-the-art when it comes to the preventing of these things.
01:48:32.000And that's a giant issue that a lot of people have when it comes to nutrition, lifestyle, mitigating stress, all the various factors That contribute to a bunch of different health ailments.
01:48:44.000Do you think that mushrooms could also play a factor in that as well?
01:48:52.000There's a great epidemiological study that came out of Japan and Dr. Ikikawa was an epidemiologist that worked for the National Cancer Center in Tokyo.
01:49:04.000And they noticed in surveying people in Japan in the 1960s, early 1970s, there was a dearth, a drop in the overall cancer rate in this one population in Nagano Prefecture in Japan.
01:49:17.000So he was sent there by the National Cancer Center of Tokyo by the government to say, what are these people doing in this one cluster of villages where they have statistically significant less cancer rates?
01:49:28.000We're talking about 30% less than the national average.
01:49:31.000And after an exhaustive study, he found that they were eating enoki mushrooms, a lot of them, because the enoki mushrooms are really thin ones, like really tall stems.
01:50:12.000I think over 220,000 people in this epidemiological survey.
01:50:16.000I've written about 10 articles for the Huffington Post.
01:50:19.000And you can Google Stamets Huffington Post and enoki mushrooms and see all the citations on enoki mushrooms, on lion's mane, on agaricon, all these mushrooms I'm talking about.
01:51:22.000Cordyceps has been split into several different genera.
01:51:25.000Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up.
01:51:27.000The other one is the one that explodes on ants.
01:51:29.000Yeah, there's Cordyceps sinensis, now known as Ophiocordyceps sinensis.
01:51:38.000Cordyceps has about 500 species in it.
01:51:41.000It's been a very complicated taxonomy because when researchers would go in the Himalayas and they find these caterpillars where the cordyceps mushroom is coming out of it, Very good scientists.
01:53:33.000So, I mean, this is very disruptive because, oh, the FDA and the labeling and how do you label this and what do you do and who's right and who's wrong and how do you get the labeling to conform to the current taxonomy based on DNA research.
01:53:47.000The good news is, based on the best of my knowledge, several of these companies that are selling these Cordyceps, the Animorphs, even though they may not be the true Cordyceps sinensis, those also confer benefits.
01:54:01.000So you can argue in a sense about different species.
01:54:05.000The problem with this is there's no less than a thousand peer-reviewed articles on Cordyceps sinensis And no one, or hardly anyone, knows what species they were actually growing.
01:54:41.000Whole genome sequencing is really the only way to go about this, where they sequence the entire genome.
01:54:46.000And so there's a lot of elasticity or plasticity in the expression of DNA. Now, going back to what we've been talking about this whole interview, epigenesis.
01:54:59.000Epigenesis is an environmental stimulus has a selective influence on the genomic expression of the individual, the species, yourself.
01:55:09.000And so you upregulate or turn on genes that are otherwise quote-unquote asleep.
01:55:14.000And so what we're seeing now is that epigenetic influences can cause different DNA expressions.
01:55:24.000And so What was considered to be conformity of a species and DNA types before, like 99%, and that was thought that, oh, they're the same species.
01:55:59.000Anyone who's been to China, I've been to China several times, the amount of massive air pollution there is horrific.
01:56:05.000And the chain of custody, as we call it, where these people are getting their mushrooms, they mixed, oftentimes distributors, mixed suppliers, and it's a form of quote-unquote Russian roulette.
01:56:15.000We've done analyses on Chinese-sourced mushrooms, and they've had up to 2,200 parts per million of lead.
01:56:23.000So why would you take a medicinal mushroom that's contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides if you're trying to improve your immune system at the same time you're sabotaging your immune system?
01:56:32.000So getting mushrooms from clean environments is critically important.
01:56:36.000Unfortunately, because the USDA organic program, they can borrow from the organic programs of China and still say they're certified organic.
01:56:45.000So you really need to buy U.S.-grown, certified organic mushrooms that have a clear chain of custody and hopefully one that is from a reputable supplier or scientist and not somebody who's just trying to make money.
01:56:56.000There's a lot of opportunistic companies right now who are just trying to exploit and ride the bandwagon of the popularity of medicinal mushrooms.
01:57:03.000Without really having done their homework or without fully informing the public that their mushrooms are actually coming from China when they're not.
01:57:11.000What is the strain of Cordyceps mushroom that erupts, that infects ants, kills them, sprouts out of them, and then explodes and infects the ants near them?
01:57:22.000And other ants will drag that ant, knowing that it's infected deep, deep away into the forest to get it away from the colony.
01:57:29.000Just had Cordyceps loidii up on the screen there.
01:58:08.000So Hannibal Lecter, the series, I had all these people write me and say, oh my gosh, you're this evil doctor who overdoses his patients with drugs and then puts them in the backyard and then inoculates them with mushrooms, just like cordyceps, so you could have mushrooms going into the backyard.
01:58:24.000Some of the Star Trek people called me up in August of 2016. I'm talking to them.
01:58:49.000I said, foolishly, or maybe to my benefit, foolishly, I said, turn on your tape recorder, you know, give me the general idea, and let me run with it.
01:59:00.000There's six of them, I guess, on the conference call.
01:59:03.000Foolishly, I said, I'm a Star Trek fan, which is not foolish, but I want no money for these ideas.
01:59:08.000I give you all my intellectual property.
01:59:10.000I want science fiction to predict science fact.
01:59:13.000The great thing about Star Trek is the flip phone and the iPad.
01:59:16.000I mean, those came out in Star Trek and then it became reality.
01:59:19.000I said, so you have a unique opportunity here of forming our future.
01:59:24.000Let's collaborate to create a future that's better for our future generations by inspiring students and young people to get excited about the science so they can help populate the universities to create the inventions that can help save this planet that's in jeopardy.
01:59:42.000And so I ran with a Star Trek theme, and we just saw the last episode last night, and astromycologist Paul Stamets is using the mycelium spore drive.
01:59:52.000It has become, I couldn't believe it, we're watching this thing in the Star Trek, the main theme of Star Trek is based on mycelium and the concepts that I gave them.
02:00:01.000They've elaborated this, I mean, six ways a Sunday, so they've really taken it.
02:00:04.000This is as some sort of a propulsion system?
02:00:07.000It's a propulsion system because in my TED talk, and I've been talking about this a long time, about networks.
02:00:12.000We have the mycelial network, we have the computer internet, we have the neurological network in our brains, and the organization of dark matter conforms to string theory.
02:00:21.000So these are three And the same archetype, the same dimensional structures stacked on top of each other.
02:00:29.000And nature builds upon its prior successes.
02:00:32.000So networks reward themselves by surviving from catastrophe.
02:00:39.000So I said, and I'm still bound by confidentiality, and there's an incredibly strict confidentiality agreement that I can only state which has been publicly displayed.
02:00:48.000But the mycelium spore drive allows through the Internet of nature, you might say, to be able to go into hyperspace immediately by tapping into the mycelial archetype.
02:01:01.000And so astromechologist Stamets now is plugging himself into the mycelial network of the universe, and they can jump rather than using their standard hyperdrives, which you see them streaming across for hours from one part of the universe to the other.
02:01:16.000They can show up immediately and then disappear.
02:01:19.000Is this something that you think could actually be real one day?
02:01:23.000Okay, we're pushing the envelope on this one.
02:01:25.000This is pushing the envelope on this one.
02:01:27.000But if you look at the multiverse, And I've had one or two, in particular, multiverse experiences where time and reality has changed in a way that I cannot explain.
02:01:54.000So I think the psilocybin experience might be one portal, and now I'm going to sound like Terence McKenna, of entering into the multiverse.
02:02:05.000The idea that time can be bent, that there are multiple universes occurring simultaneously in different realities.
02:02:13.000And I've had one experience in particular that is just unfathomable to me.
02:03:59.000After my break is over, I'm going back to college, and this is part of our textbook.
02:04:02.000So I borrowed his book, Alter States of Consciousness, and I'm just fascinated reading it, you know, about all these different ways of expanding your consciousness.
02:04:52.000And I have a shout out to Ryan Snyder's father that because of that event, it stimulated my interest in older states of consciousness even more.
02:05:02.000So John goes to Yale and goes to the University of Washington.
02:06:27.000And the problem is, well, you'll see, and it was the end of Boat Street, and right at the University of Washington, right off of University Avenue, there's Boat Street, and we get there, and right across the street is a police substation.
02:06:42.000So we're there and it was an eruption of this mushroom.
02:06:45.000There had to be 10,000, 30,000 mushrooms, I don't know.
02:06:48.000It was about 50 feet by 30 feet with all been mulched with wood chips.
02:06:52.000There was an eruption that picked up, you know, trash and, you know, debris that picked up six inches with solid mushrooms.
02:06:59.000I've, to this day, never seen so many mushrooms in one concentrated area.
02:07:03.000So we waited until the police cars went away, and we're kind of idling there, and then the police cars would go away, and from the substation, we'd start picking mushrooms, picking mushrooms, and we'd fill up a grocery bag or two, and then the other students are walking by, what are you doing?
02:07:15.000Oh, nothing, you know, and then we eventually go, yeah, there's plenty for everybody, you know, so, and so.
02:07:40.000New as in hadn't been discovered before you guys picked them?
02:07:42.000Had never been described in the scientific literature before.
02:07:44.000So you picked a mushroom that no one knew existed before?
02:07:48.000Well, it hadn't been described scientifically.
02:07:50.000We had known about it for about three years, but this is the largest eruption.
02:07:54.000And from that collection became part of the type collection that anchored the species taxonomically.
02:08:01.000So I think some of the specimens still exist in herbaria around the world because it's the reference standard.
02:08:08.000So we go back to the house and it's like, we've got to dry them.
02:08:14.000So we lay out newspapers, and the whole newspapers were just covered with mushrooms.
02:08:21.000And so that night, there's about four guys from Yale, all neurophysiology, all scientists on the scientist track, and they said, let's eat them.
02:08:31.000And so, I mean, this is not very potent.
02:08:33.000They're one-tenth the potency of Cubensis, so we made smoothies.
02:09:48.000There's a time in the Reagan administration and all that and the tension was really high between the Soviet Union and the United States.
02:09:58.000And they said – and they were joking with me saying, oh, well, OK. When is it going to happen?
02:10:02.000I go, I know I was in Olympia and I needed to rush up to Darrington to stay in my cabin because my books were up there and my manuscript was up there.
02:12:20.000Do you care whether I have taken psilocybin mushrooms, if I can save your farm, your family, your country, or the world billions of dollars in protect biosecurity?