Mushroom hats have been around for a long time, and they ve been around in the wild for a longer time. But what are they really made of? And how did they get there? And why are they on the verge of extinction? To find out, we talk to the people who make these hats, and find out how they got there. Plus, we hear about a new invention that could help keep the industry alive: German felt. Guests: Dr. David Lebovitch, an expert on mushroom hat making, and Paul, the man who makes them. Thanks to callers David and Paul. Thanks also to our sponsor, Fomis Fomentarius, for sponsoring this episode of Mythology. And thanks also to David's friend and colleague, Paul, for sending us the photos of the mushroom hats he's making. If you like them, please tell a friend about them and we'll get them on the show. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. We'll be looking out for you in the next week's mailbag. Thank you for listening and supporting Mythology! and Good Mythology by The Mythology Podcast. Merry Christmas and Good Morning America. by . by the Mythology Project, by Cruncher. and , and , by Darnell McElmore and . . . by Crovan, and by Mr. Martin, is by Dr. John, and Mr. , also by John, and his , is ( ) by . and . is by , & by Paul, & & his by David, , etc., by Tom, and the rest is ,and by Peter, etc., and ) in this episode by Thanks to . , thank you, Paul AND thanks to , Paul, and this is . And can be found here . , by and his wife, and also ! or And so on, and so much more. thanks, and thanks, in the podcast so much on , so much love, so on to you, and all
00:04:06.000And we've been trying to actually keep the industry alive by just inundating the – there was like 25 or 30 of these hat makers in Transylvania 10, 15 years ago.
00:04:20.000And a friend of mine, David Summerlin, visited and said, Paul, this hat-making technology is on the verge of extinction.
00:04:26.000So we just sort of inundated them with orders in order to build the industry and keep it alive.
00:04:32.000How could someone contribute to that if they wanted to?
00:04:34.000If people are listening to this, how could they buy one of these hats?
00:04:37.000Well, if you go to my facebook.com slash Paul Stamets, I think his name is Mako, actually squatted on my page to sell the hats and more power to them.
00:05:22.000Not only revolutionized warfare, not only allowed for the portability of fire for us to save ourselves from the coldness, and we migrated into Europe from Africa.
00:05:30.000Not only did beekeepers use it for smoking, but fly fishermen use it also for drying flies.
00:05:37.000We have found that this mushroom is extremely powerful for reducing viruses that harm bees.
00:05:44.000It's been described today in CNN, an insect apocalypse.
00:05:55.000This is really an all-hands-on-deck moment.
00:05:58.000But I'm optimistic because I think we can find solutions in nature.
00:06:03.000With my colleagues, and when I was here before, I talked about my work with the BioShield Biodefense Program, and these wood conchs are very strong in antiviral properties against flu viruses and herpes, etc.
00:06:16.000I used these ideas and actually had a waking dream and I realized that the bees were being infected by mites with viruses and the deformed wing virus in particular is the worst virus.
00:06:31.000And so I contacted Washington State University.
00:06:33.000We started doing some research and I'm really, really happy because I love skeptics who become my supporters.
00:06:58.000Extracts of polypore mushroom mycelia reduce viruses in honeybees.
00:07:03.000And this mushroom, the amadou, reduces the deformed wing virus 800 times to 1. With one treatment, and then the reishi mushroom mycelium reduces the Lake Sinai virus more than 45,000 to 1. Now,
00:07:22.000these are wood conks that grow in trees, and we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh.
00:07:26.000But no one made the connection before me, apparently, that bees are attracted to rotted wood because of immunological benefit.
00:07:33.000So amadou and reishi mushrooms, we found and we published in this article, that high significance, and I think the reason why this article is in the top 1% of all nature articles is that I've been able to present...
00:07:48.000The theory, with proof now, that a natural product can have a broader bioshield of benefits than a pure pharmaceutical.
00:07:56.000Up to this time, there's been no agents to produce viruses in bees.
00:08:00.000Now, the deformed wing virus is being vectored by the varroa mite.
00:08:04.000It came in 1984, and it injects viruses into bees.
00:08:58.000So it's really – it's all hands on deck.
00:09:02.000This is – I'm really optimistic about the future because we have solutions in nature that we can now amplify and be able to deploy.
00:09:12.000So one of my inventions – and I'm giving these away – 10,000 of these for free – I've come up with a citizen scientist bee feeder that puts these extracts Into sugar water, and we have a sign-up sheet.
00:10:36.000And then this is where the citizen scientists all over the world can take action to be able to help bees from collapsing.
00:10:43.000And then you station these in neighborhoods for bumblebees, for other types of bees.
00:10:49.000And then we have it with a Wi-Fi enabled device with solar panels.
00:10:53.000And then we upload into the cloud all this data about bee pollination visits.
00:10:58.000So we can create a metric on the baseline of bee pollination services.
00:11:02.000So if you see bees that are declining and suddenly below a baseline.
00:11:07.000In Oklahoma, two years ago, 84% of the beehives...
00:11:14.000Now think if you're a cattle rancher and you lost 84% of your cattle.
00:11:18.000So the idea is to help bees' immune system and if we create baselines with bee feeders, upload the data, and this becomes a new form of internet because they have Wi-Fi ability.
00:11:30.000So it's a distributed network as well, but they...
00:12:41.000I will do it up to my capacity and then I'm hoping that we're going to give these away for free and then eventually we'll create networks of hubs where I have now 40 patents on this and helping bees survive from these extracts but not in Indonesia,
00:13:02.000not in India, not in Africa, not in China.
00:13:06.000I'm going to commercialize it so the haves can help the have-nots.
00:13:11.000And I think a lot of people want to help.
00:13:15.000And we're thinking about different ways of doing this.
00:13:17.000I'm open to all ideas, but the idea is to get maybe one person to sponsor 10 other people.
00:13:23.000They have a distributed network, their own social media community, where they end up getting schools.
00:13:29.000We will open source the code for 3D printers.
00:13:33.000So that's really important for schools.
00:13:35.000So the code is going to be open sourced.
00:13:38.000But then if somebody wants to make millions of these and sell them, of course, I wouldn't be happy with that.
00:16:18.000Well, actually, there's a slide that shows the pandemic spread of these viruses throughout the world.
00:16:24.000They came from Asia, and it's now a global pandemic.
00:16:28.000All bees in the world are now infected with these viruses because when the infected honeybee, for instance, visits the flower, it leaves viral particles.
00:16:57.000And you know, I have beehives and what happens in the colony collapse, you go out on Monday, the bees are happy, you go out on Thursday, they're all gone.
00:17:19.000What happens is because the newly hatched bees are called nurse bees and the nurse bees take care of the baby bees.
00:17:27.000But when the colony senses there's not enough pollen and food to support the brood in the colony, The nurse bees are prematurely recruited to go out and find pollen, so they abandon the babies.
00:17:39.000And then the varroa mites, they just go uncontrolled and they start injecting viruses.
00:17:46.000And so there are other cofactors, just like when you get an infection from a viral infection, you can get bacterial infections.
00:17:54.000And so there's a cascade of opportunistic infections as immunology is decreased.
00:18:02.000Isn't there a contributing factor that had to do with cell phones as well?
00:19:58.000The other bees took off and the bees that were there came back to their hive, their little colony.
00:20:07.000I'm glad you mentioned that because this also speaks to what's called bee drift.
00:20:10.000And so when we publish our article in Nature Scientific Reports, actually I think the data is understated because 10 to up to 20 percent of bees will drift from one colony to another.
00:20:22.000So we had treatment colonies and we had treated colonies.
00:20:26.000Well, because 10 to 20% of the bees in the treated colonies went to the control colonies, we actually diluted the differential because we had cross-movement of control bees and beehive versus treated bees.
00:20:42.000And so when we actually, I think, and some of my other co-authors think we actually have understated the data.
00:20:48.000But when you look at the P values of significance, you know, they're extraordinary.
00:20:53.000P is less than.009, and that for scientists is an extraordinarily significant data set that is clearly showing the evidence that these extracts help the immunity of bees and help them be able to survive and do a better job.
00:21:08.000That's awesome and it's crazy that it's just a natural mushroom but it makes sense what you're saying that they built their beehives in these rotting trees knowing that these fungi were there.
00:21:19.000Or somehow or another being attracted to it?
00:21:21.000You know, I like to say the first five seconds that I got the first patent award, my ego did swell.
00:21:27.000And then ten seconds later, I said, are you frigging kidding?
00:21:30.000We're Neanderthals with nuclear weapons.
00:21:32.000How could I be the first one to have discovered that bees benefit from mycelium immunologically?
00:21:37.000But there's no what's called prior art.
00:21:42.000We have the intelligence of nature underneath our feet.
00:21:45.000And this is something we need to tap into.
00:21:48.000And the fact that we can show a natural product, you know, if you had HPV, HIV, and you went to a doctor 12 days after having one treatment of these extracts, and your virus has dropped 45,000 to one, any physician would say,
00:22:06.000And this is what we'll be able to see.
00:22:07.000Now, we've been trying to find what's called a mode of action.
00:22:10.000How are these viruses actually being reduced?
00:22:13.000Putatively, Our strongest hypothesis now is as providing essential nutrients that are important for the immune system To activate gene sequences then that attack the viruses and give more host-defensive immunity of protection about further infection.
00:22:30.000Now, does this work with humans as well?
00:22:33.000Like chaga is supposed to be good for your immune system, right?
00:22:38.000So traditional Chinese medicine and European medicine and medicine from indigenous peoples all over the world have been using these mushrooms.
00:22:44.000Now we're finding scientific evidence that folklorically, the reputation of chaga, of reishi, of these mushrooms helping the immunity of humans, this is translational medicine.
00:22:59.000Bees have been stated as being, besides Drosophila, the second most well-studied animal in the world.
00:23:06.000This is an animal clinical study, past digestion, past what's called the cytochrome P450 pathway, which is your detoxification pathway, mostly in our liver.
00:23:15.000All animals use the cytochrome P450 pathway to break down toxins.
00:23:18.000And it's passed the microbiome into the blood.
00:23:21.000So this is actually, this is an animal clinical study.
00:23:24.000And I think it's a gateway for us to take this as credible evidence that natural products can be more useful and offer a broader bioshield of benefits than pure pharmaceuticals that go after one molecule with one target, one set of receptors.
00:23:40.000There are immunological fields that develop in the complexity of nature.
00:23:45.000We're in constant biomolecular communication with the ecosystem.
00:23:49.000We've evolved in this complex molecular environment.
00:23:53.000And so our immune systems are upregulated through multiple stimuli.
00:23:57.000And that's why I think these extracts, because of their complexity, they build upon the complexity of natural systems that help our immune system.
00:24:03.000So you have hope that this is something that we could eventually see being like a peer-reviewed, proven thing for human beings as well?
00:24:26.000For physicians, there's no branding, no selling of anything.
00:24:29.000I populate a website called mushroomreferences.com.
00:24:33.000I populate specifically for physicians.
00:24:36.000I just spoke at Singularity University, Stanford Medical School, in front of a thousand physicians.
00:24:41.000I try to make the bridge of the credibility of the science for physicians who are just not educated yet because they don't have the resources or the time.
00:24:50.000So mushroomreferences.com, you can go to that website.
00:24:53.000It's got Hundreds of references that then you can put in any symptom or species, etc., and you'll be able to find the peer-reviewed references.
00:25:02.000There's about 30 references, for instance, on psilocybin right now, which is an area of research that I'm particularly focused on.
00:25:10.000Now, there was for a long time a stigma associated with anything that had anything to do with mushrooms, particularly because of psychedelic mushrooms.
00:25:23.000I know the John Hopkins study on psilocybin has shown some pretty incredible benefits and there's a lot of people now that are starting to look to it for treatment for people with PTSD or addiction issues.
00:25:35.000Has that become more mainstream in your experience?
00:25:40.000There's a vast title change in medical science.
00:25:46.000These are just a few of the universities right now that have been approved by the FDA and other agencies for human clinical studies on psilocybin.
00:26:18.000The clinical studies that are coming out for, as you know, PTSD in particular has been extremely useful, but one of them that came out at Johns Hopkins for breaking tobacco addiction, 15 patients, small clinical studies, statistically significant, 10 out of 15 people after one or two heroic doses of psilocybin,
00:27:02.000I think the idea of microdosing and being able to increase our ability of cognition and creativity to come up with the solutions that can get us out of this mess.
00:27:14.000If we had hundreds of millions of people thinking about solutions like I've come up with to solve some of the environmental challenges we have today for food biosecurity, the loss of bees is a threat to our national security.
00:27:25.000Just think about the threat to our economy.
00:27:28.000So this microdosing, I think, has enormous potential as well.
00:27:32.000And when you think about one of the issues I see right now with the clinical studies is like it almost is too good to be true.
00:27:42.000Statistically significant, great universities, great science, published in peer-reviewed journals at the top of their game.
00:27:48.000But these mushrooms have so many benefits for fighting dementia, potentially Alzheimer's.
00:27:56.000Johns Hopkins has an Alzheimer's clinical study ongoing currently.
00:28:00.000For a dose of sulciben to see if it helps pre-Alzheimer's patients and not go into full-blown Alzheimer's.
00:28:08.000There's so many different benefits potentially.
00:29:26.000But the idea is to create baselines, you know, and then you create a baseline over time.
00:29:31.000So you find out how far you deteriorated.
00:29:33.000Or what your trend line is versus the general population.
00:29:36.000So the idea with microdose.me is that we'll create a massive data set, massive amount of data, and then we'll offer this to clinicians for them to see signal from the noise.
00:29:50.000I suspect, hypothetically, I don't have the evidence, but several doctors have collected case studies of tinnitus, or tinnitus, though those pronunciations are correct, of the buzzing in your ears, and people have resolved that from doing microdosing.
00:30:06.000And 30% of Americans have hearing loss or more.
00:32:48.000After 10 rotations, the mice realized, like Pavlov's dog, when there was a tone, there was going to be a negative consequence, a shock happening.
00:32:59.000So then they dosed them with a microdose, 0.1 milligrams per kilogram versus 1 milligram per kilogram.
00:33:05.000One-tenth of a dose versus a full dose.
00:33:09.000Interestingly, the full dose, it took ten rotations of no shock, the tone, no shock, before they forgot or became re-acclimated not to have the fear-conditioned response.
00:33:22.000With the micro-dose, one-tenth of that, it only took two rotations.
00:33:27.000Two rotations with a microdose and they dissociated potentially PTSD. Why do you think it's less?
00:33:34.000Well, that's a really good question and the evidence we have so far, and again this is very early evidence, lots of research is going on in this, it looks like the neurogenic benefits of microdosing are greater than the neurogenic benefits of macrodosing.
00:33:46.000You flood the receptors, you're having this incredible trip, it's fantastic, it's colorful, it's life-changing.
00:33:52.000Yes, that is all beneficial for changing your life, but Doing microdosing over the long term, because the nerves don't regrow in six hours, but over weeks of regeneration of nerves with microdosing,
00:34:11.000it seems to me that the microdosing, instead of flooding and overwhelming all the receptors, are feeding these receptors, they're allowing for neurogenesis.
00:34:22.000There's so many great people studying this right now.
00:34:25.000What I'm advocating to all of the clinicians at Johns Hopkins, at Stanford, UCLA, at Harvard, please do testing of the patients for hearing and vision and other behavioral tests that are not just about emotion and mood and PTSD,
00:34:45.000but let's actually get some physical measurements.
00:34:48.000So then you can track prior During is too complicated.
00:35:48.000Lion's mane is phenomenally powerful neurogenically and there's two clinical studies out of Japan with mild cognitive decline in dementia showing very positive results taking two to four grams of lion's mane per day,
00:36:04.000Interesting, not the fruit bite, the mycelium is much more powerful and we just have been contracting with a neurological testing laboratory in France and we just got some amazing results back Showing that when we had lion's mane extracts of the mycelium exposed to neurons,
00:36:26.000and the positive control was the brain-derived nerve growth factor, nerve factor, and it's used as a baseline for measuring neurogenic compounds comparatively.
00:36:38.000And the neurogenic benefits from, this is where pluripotent stem cells, stem cells that then differentiate in the neurons.
00:38:48.000But I can possess these psilocybin analogs.
00:38:51.000And so, since there was no reports in the scientific literature of whether this was truly toxic or not, I, with a doctor friend of mine, an M.D., That measured my vitals and hooked me up, you know, to blood pressure, ECG,
00:39:06.000did all the biometrics that are needed.
00:39:53.000But the next day we're going to Antarctica.
00:39:55.000So Pam looks at her cell phone, and this Russian research vessel crashed into a reef, tore a hole in it, and it's like, it's now, the trip is canceled.
00:40:06.000I mean, I have American Express, you know, plane tickets, hotels, I've got 24 hours to do it.
00:40:11.000Try to recapture all this money because we can't go.
00:41:20.000They activate other receptor sites, you know, in your neurological field.
00:41:26.000And that's why I think this is why looking at the natural form of these mushrooms, standardized to the psilocybin, a certain concentration, versus the pure molecule, I think that is the way of the future.
00:41:38.000Because pure psilocybin is up to $6,000, $7,000 a gram.
00:41:43.000And you can translate that into growing sulcibe mushrooms for $2 a gram.
00:41:48.000Now, there are people out there listening saying, well, the price is coming down.
00:41:52.000It's down maybe to $1,000 to $500 a gram.
00:41:55.000But how many people in the urban, lower-income area You know, impoverished populations suffering from PTSD who can't afford to go to Johns Hopkins to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a clinical treatment.
00:42:11.000I think this democratizes the use of psilocybin and microdosing that could be a benefit across our society.
00:42:19.000And then what I'm proposing is you stack it with niacin.
00:42:22.000And the reason why you stack it with niacin is you take one-tenth of a gram of psilocybin cubensis, microdose, you add 100 to 200 milligrams of niacin.
00:42:33.000Now, if someone tries to get high by taking 10 times as much, they'll have like 2 grams of niacin.
00:42:38.000This is flushing niacin, vitamin B3. And that flushing niacin will give you such an irritable reaction of skin-ditching of people who've taken vitamin B3. They know this.
00:42:49.000So it becomes the ant abuse for microdosing.
00:42:52.000But moreover, it excites the nerves at the end of the peripheral nervous system.
00:43:00.000And neuropathies oftentimes present themselves as a deadening of the nerves of the fingertips and toes.
00:43:14.000It dilates the blood vessels to deliver the neurogenic benefits of psilocybin to the endpoints of the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system.
00:44:35.000Maybe with these other people, they didn't have such an immediate anxiety moment, and maybe their anxiety was harder to measure whether it was coming or going.
00:46:36.000Now, association may not be causation, but it can be.
00:46:38.000But a more recent study from British Columbia, which I find to be so fascinating, is that they did a large population set And partner-to-partner violence.
00:46:50.000If your male partner had done one psilocybin trip, statistically significant reduction of the probability of that partner being violent towards their other partner.
00:47:35.000I mean, these companies that are seeking to profit off of pharmaceutical drugs, you can profit off this stuff, particularly with the protocol that you just described, with adding niacin to it to ensure that people are doing only microdosing.
00:47:49.000Look, man, this could be a very profitable enterprise for some company.
00:47:53.000And the benefits, if people can mirror the benefits that you had of this alleviation of anxiety, My God, that's like most of what people struggle with.
00:48:03.000So many people out there listening to this right now are like, fuck, I wish there was something that didn't get me high, but just alleviated this fucking angst that so many people are struggling with every day.
00:48:14.000It's a massive disease complex that's swept our societies.
00:48:42.000You know, we've entered into 6X, the sixth greatest extinction event known in the history of life on this planet.
00:48:47.000We've had two other extinction events from asteroid impacts 250 million years ago, 65 million years ago, but we're now involved in a massive extinction event.
00:48:56.000And the research that came out today and the other research has come out with 75% of the Insect population, 40% in immediate jeopardy.
00:49:07.000The research article came out and said in Europe and North America, they have good data collection.
00:49:12.000So we didn't even measure the insect loss in the Amazon.
00:49:16.000But if you're a trout, if you're a bird, if you like drinking coffee and you like chocolate and you like almonds, I mean, these are all dependent upon pollinators.
00:49:27.000So if we lose these flying insects, we lose the pollination services and it threatens worldwide food biosecurity.
00:49:33.000This is one of the biggest threats to our ecosystem now.
00:49:36.000I think we can invent our ways out of this if we creatively expand our ability to come up with novel solutions.
00:49:45.000And I think those solutions are literally underfoot and all around us today.
00:49:48.000We just have to wake up like I woke up to helping the bees.
00:49:53.000There are so many smart people out there.
00:49:54.000If they just started realizing that nature is a deep well of evolutionary knowledge and that we have evolved within this complexity, then to delve into that library of knowledge and pulling out applicable solutions, vetted by science,
00:50:11.000controlled studies, but not looking at these pharmaceutical pure molecules as the way of the future, but looking upon the complexity of the microbiome The complex interrelationships and selecting out microbiomes that then create guilds of solutions that are applicable to the problems that we face today.
00:50:34.000It's beautiful that there are these natural solutions that, you know, maybe if we could just shift people's ideas about how we view psilocybin, how we view the analogs, how we view The interaction with people in nature that you can,
00:50:50.000you know, we can make a real change, make a change that's tangible inside of our lifetime.
00:50:56.000And again, selling this stuff, like if, look, we're seeing what's happening right now with medical marijuana and then shifting to commercial marijuana and now hemp.
00:53:01.000As Terence McKenna and I think Alan Watts said, when you get the message from the phone, hang it up.
00:53:08.000So if you just have these psilocybin mushrooms growing in your backyard or you know how to collect them, then you only need one or two doses a year.
00:53:19.000And even microdosing, you get a lot more extension of that.
00:53:24.000But my view, and I've never had any problem with law enforcement.
00:53:29.000In Washington and Oregon and British Columbia and Canada in particular, law enforcement has a very pretty mature attitude towards this.
00:53:37.000If you have a small amount and you're not trafficking and you're for individual use, It just doesn't raise the level of the need for enforcement.
00:53:46.000No, I understand that, but I just wish there was no incentive at all.
00:53:50.000Just the idea that you have to rely on the good grace of a cop who understands that there's no incentive to arrest you, that seems like horseshit to me.
00:53:57.000We're grown adults in 2019 with a mountain of evidence.
00:54:01.000We're not living in the dark ages anymore, and the fact that it's still a possibility that you could get arrested, or you could face some sort of criminal charges.
00:54:10.000For having something that's only been demonstrated to be good.
00:54:13.000This is why the citizens movement, the federal government, I mean the republicans and conservatives and libertarians are all about state rights.
00:55:54.000So yeah, I mean he's a real pioneer in this.
00:55:57.000And so what's interesting in getting now from three different groups I've heard who've sat down with FDA scientists, there's been a new turnover within the FDA. And these scientists are looking at just pure science without politics.
00:56:13.000And several of them have said they've never seen, with psilocybin in particular, a safer drug with such a dramatic impact in frequency of use one or two times.
00:56:28.000There's a movie that just came out called Fantastic Fungi, and Michael Pollan's in there.
00:58:28.000I thought Archie Bunker was one of the most lovable, racist, conservative assholes I've ever seen on TV. Well, Norman Lear did a lot more than that, right?
00:58:38.000This is really interesting, though, that they've decided to release it in film theaters versus on the web.
00:58:47.000Because if you really want to reach a lot of people, is it selling this way?
00:58:52.000I mean, it seems like if you spend a lot of money...
00:58:55.000The way to get that money back would be to sell it to Netflix.
01:01:29.000And that's what's needed because those of us who understand the importance of this realize that this is something that we have to carefully shepherd for maximum benefit.
01:01:42.000And these commercialization of these companies, I call it Spore Wars.
01:01:47.000Very soon there's going to be Spore Wars between all these companies.
01:03:39.000This last time, I mean, I was treated like a super celebrity.
01:03:44.000I had these hugely, hugely powerful people, some of the names you probably know, who came up to me and would shake my shoulders going, now I understand!
01:03:58.000But they awoke into something and their mates, their friends, their business associates, you know, the common theme is, wow, he was such a jerk before and he's so nice now.
01:04:13.000And they're seeking cooperation and they still are productive.
01:04:19.000The coders in Silicon Valley know that microdosing helps their coding ability, so it's a competitive advantage to those other computer companies that do not.
01:04:30.000I think any new business Populated in particular by young people who are not doing microdosing are going to be at a competitive disadvantage.
01:04:41.000Because the creativity flow, the camaraderie of the community seeking to benefit the commons and also reward yourself.
01:04:48.000I'm not saying it's all, you know, just helping the commons.
01:04:52.000But the idea of being able to reward yourself and people rejoice in your success and they benefit from it as well, it really integrates people together.
01:05:02.000People need to understand that there's a lot of this squirreling away resources and money and things and trying to climb that corporate ladder.
01:05:16.000You get sucked into this trick and this trick is what every CEO and every Head of every corporation, every chief financial officer, all these people that are just trying to improve the bottom line, rake in more money, keep this company growing,
01:06:01.000It's been 10, 12, 14 hours a day in these stuffed offices under fluorescent lights, crunching numbers and trying to acquire things and And for what?
01:06:13.000Like, what impact have I made on humans?
01:06:16.000What is the negative impact of my ambition on the people that are around me?
01:06:21.000Like, all this is like, the one thing that psilocybin and particularly just psychedelics in general can provide is a break from patterns, a stopping, a ceasefire of all the momentum of our culture, civilization, finances,
01:06:37.000taxes, credit card debt, all that shit just...
01:06:42.000Stops and you get a chance to step back and look at the machine watch it all whirl and spin in front of you and you get to say oh I got sucked into the trick I'm sucked into a trick A lot of people I've talked to, exactly what you're mentioning,
01:07:50.000A sitter is there thinking meditation practice in place folks give these people some space who's just watching and then the people who are imbibing understand they have a watcher they have somebody who's anchored who can help them and then to have this the sun go down and I agree.
01:08:17.000I think there's one thing we should talk about, though.
01:08:19.000There are people that have a tendency towards schizophrenia.
01:08:24.000And these people have – sometimes they have psychedelic breaks.
01:08:29.000Like they'll have psychedelic experiences and then they don't do well.
01:08:34.000I'm so glad you brought that up and that is a de-selection from the clinical studies of candidates who want to engage.
01:08:42.000But my good friend Mark Hayden who runs MAPS Canada had a very interesting story with a schizophrenic.
01:08:50.000And he also cautioned, and every physician I know is on the same page as you.
01:08:55.000Including medical, not medical marijuana, edible.
01:08:58.000Edible marijuana seems to have a significant effect on people with it.
01:09:01.000What Mark noted with this one person who was a severe schizophrenic was that he still heard voices in his head, but the voices now were friendly.
01:09:15.000They weren't saying, you know, go kill somebody.
01:09:17.000It was like, you know, you are a good person.
01:09:19.000And so he still had the voice in the head, but the tenor and tone and attitude of the voices were supportive.
01:09:24.000What I'm talking about is it bringing on these schizophrenic experiences.
01:09:30.000There has been some evidence, particularly about marijuana.
01:09:33.000That high doses of marijuana for people that have tendencies, and we don't know, right?
01:09:38.000What causes someone to have schizophrenic breaks?
01:09:41.000Because there is a difference between pre and post, right?
01:09:44.000People have had deteriorating mental health that correlates with schizophrenia.
01:09:50.000What caused them to be less schizophrenic or not exhibiting any of the problems, and then all of a sudden having severe problems post- Psychedelic trip or post large dose edible marijuana and or even large dose smoking it or some people they dab and they smoke wax and then it happens to people that smoke too much pot there's certain people that have that tendency I would defer to clinicians who are extremely skilled in this area and who
01:11:36.000We're in a new realm of pharmacology and pharmacognosy.
01:11:42.000I think we have to navigate this carefully.
01:11:44.000The problem with natural products is how do you standardize them to the active constituent?
01:11:48.000When you have more than one active constituent, how do you standardize them all?
01:11:53.000There's an entourage or a symphony effect.
01:11:56.000This speaks to the complexity of nature.
01:11:58.000But I have a phrase that I like, is don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
01:12:01.000Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it necessarily does not have a valid outcome or, you know, can't be used.
01:12:09.000And I think that what we need to do is correct large data sets, and that's why I'm hoping Microdose.me is going to give us an enormous amount of data that clinicians can harvest from And going, we didn't anticipate this.
01:12:23.000And like these meta-studies about partner-to-partner violence, when if your partner men had tripped on mushrooms, they were less prone to violence.
01:12:33.000How many other signals from the noise of these big, big meta-files that we can pull out that we can get serious scientists to do really carefully controlled clinical studies to be able to see this?
01:13:40.000But he said in his book, so to speak, he says, Paul told me not to tell you where his secret mushroom patch is, but I can tell you that we slept in a yurt.
01:13:51.000There are three state parks along the Columbia River, and two of them have yurts.
01:14:20.000For the cops because they bust people.
01:14:23.000But the good news about that is I have gone on to these state parks and because there's big signs of no mushroom picking and law enforcement is there, There's lots of mushrooms.
01:16:00.000None of them give a shit about mushrooms.
01:16:03.000It's a hugely, hugely unfortunate consequence of really ridiculous laws.
01:16:09.000And the idea of grown adults telling other grown adults that they can't do something that is incredibly beneficial, that they themselves have never experienced, so they have no knowledge of it at all, other than the ancient stereotypes.
01:16:24.000Mushrooms being bad, mushrooms being for burnouts and losers and hippies and, oh, you can't handle life.
01:16:30.000Or they're walking hypocrites and they know it.
01:16:47.000So it's never been – but I don't subscribe to the defense that someone is doing for spiritual purposes and they have – You know, hundreds of pounds with Ziploc bags with scales in the basement and during a commercial operation.
01:19:49.000So I have met several people in the past several weeks at Stanford Medical School, at these other conferences that I go to, which there's a brain-mind conference at Stanford Medical School.
01:20:02.000In the first two sentences, they mentioned psilocybin.
01:20:05.000120 neuroscientists, you know, and $150 billion in a room, and psilocybin was immediately mentioned.
01:20:12.000And I met some people there that are intergenerational.
01:20:15.000Grandparent, parent, and 18, 19-year-old child all journeyed with mushrooms together.
01:20:24.000And their interpersonal relationships, they told me, you know, there's no reason for us ever to get mad at each other.
01:20:31.000I just thought that was really powerful.
01:20:37.000That sounds inconceivable to someone who's never experienced psychedelics, but someone who has, you go, yeah, I see how you could get there.
01:20:44.000Yeah, don't make mountains out of molehills.
01:20:46.000You can disagree without being angry, and you can be civil about it.
01:20:51.000Well, that's a lesson the world could use right now.
01:20:54.000I think this is, in many ways, the antidote for some of the problems that we're seeing with social media.
01:21:00.000One of the problems we see with social media is this disconnect from the human experience, disconnect from communication, person-to-person communication, and this anger and vitriol and hate and rage.
01:21:12.000And people hiding behind screen names and trolls.
01:21:14.000You know, you're Joe Rogan, I'm Paul Stamets.
01:21:18.000Well, who are these people with high-behind-screen names?
01:21:21.000A great TED Talk, which I did not understand, and the TED Talk was fantastic, talking about why trolls do the things that they do.
01:21:28.000They do it because they get excitement.
01:21:30.000The idea is just to disturb the fabric, and the more disturbance they get, that is a measure of their success in provoking a response, even if they're not wedded to it.
01:21:40.000They just want to be able to cause a ripple in the pond.
01:23:21.000And this company in France that we did the neurogenic tests with found that the mycelium was far more active than the mushroom fruit bodies.
01:23:30.000And so the lion's mane stimulates neurite outgrowth and basically extends the nerves from growing compared to baseline.
01:23:40.000So in 7 to 12 days, a substantial up to 22% increase in neurite outgrowth.
01:23:48.000What we found was actually, there was one that was at 8%, one was at 12%, and then separately we stacked it with an analog of psilocybin.
01:23:57.000And rather than that being the arithmetic additive of cumulative, we found a synergy.
01:24:04.000So we think that lion's mane, the research has shown, increases myelin regeneration on the sheath of the nerves.
01:24:12.000And the psilocybin proliferates nerve tip growth.
01:24:15.000So it should conceivably help you learn.
01:25:21.000And these are human cells, pluripotent stem cells.
01:25:24.000And what we found was originally we were told it's called 3 micrograms per milligram or 3 micrograms, a millionth of a gram.
01:25:34.000But when we went back to 0.03, 100 times less, the neurogenic benefits became greater.
01:25:44.000Now there's something called the PK conversion.
01:25:48.000The pharmacokinetics, when you ingest something, only a small portion of it may make it into your bloodstream.
01:25:54.000But the good news is that these things are so non-toxic and they're so potent.
01:26:00.000Now, looking at the dosing regimen, it appears so far, we haven't done this clinically, this is human cells in vitro, but this laboratory is predictive of neurogenic compounds that The neurogenic benefits are so substantial that the PK conversion of ingesting them can be seen in the bloodstream as a fairly good conversion rate.
01:26:26.000For instance, if you take vanillic acid, vanilla, about 2% will make it into your bloodstream.
01:26:33.000So if you take one whole gram of vanilla, only 2% actually gets in your bloodstream.
01:27:04.000So – and so we're – we see this as a tremendous horizon that lion's mane is legal.
01:27:12.000It's an edible and choice mushroom, thousand-year history of use.
01:27:17.000We found that the mycelium is far more potent than the mushrooms for really good reasons.
01:27:24.000Some of the compounds are called erinacines, and these are actually discovered by Kawagishi in 1994, looking for an antibacterial agent.
01:27:33.000And so when he was looking at the mycelium fighting bacteria, He found that the mycelium expressed this antibacterial sciathane derivative and he gave it the name arinacine after hericium arinaceous,
01:27:48.000just like penicillin is named after penicillium.
01:27:51.000And so he'd stumbled on the fact that it has neurogenic properties and antibacterial properties.
01:27:57.000So the mycelium is navigating through the ground through a hostile environment.
01:28:26.000You're taking out ingredients, but you're not harnessing within the immunological window of temperatures that the mycelium has evolved to fight off pathogens.
01:28:36.000And so what we have found is the mycelium is far more active than the fruit bodies.
01:28:40.000This is all new science, but then mushroomreferences.com is populated with dozens upon dozens of peer-reviewed articles showing the mycelium is far more active than the fruit bodies.
01:28:51.000And a whole genome sequencing of Reishi, for instance, founds 25% more genes coding for proteins are expressed at the mycelial state than at the mushroom state.
01:29:02.000Well, it makes sense because the mushrooms at the end of millions of cell divisions over months, years, even decades, finally produce a mushroom that rots in five days.
01:29:11.000The mushroom doesn't need a good immune system.
01:29:12.000It's attracting mycovores, animals, deer, John just showed me some photographs.
01:29:35.000So the idea – but mushrooms attract insects, people, animals because they're fragrant, they're protein, they're nutritionally dense and they want to engage humans.
01:29:47.000The mycelium is navigating through a microbially hostile environment.
01:29:51.000And a report came out in the literature of over a thousand species of bacteria in a single gram.
01:29:56.000There's more than eight miles of mycelium in a single cubic inch.
01:30:01.000So the mycelium is navigating through a hostile microbial environment.
01:30:03.000It's setting up guilds and microbiomes and collections of cooperating bacteria that can help them defend against pathogens.
01:30:38.000These are not only externalized stomachs.
01:30:41.000There are digesting nutrients and externalized lungs exhaling carbon dioxide, inhaling oxygen, but I believe these are extant neurological networks of nature.
01:30:53.000When you see that pervasiveness of those cells, and the climate change scientists are coming around to this, 70% of the carbon biologically is stored in mycelium in the ground.
01:31:03.000The way to fight climate change is not only replanting trees, which is great, I love it, But it's the mycelial networks you're building in the humus that creates the soil, that creates the biodiversity that then guarantees the health of the ecosystem.
01:31:16.000So it's the mycelial networks that govern because they're so pervasive.
01:31:19.000They set up because they're antibacterial properties, they're probacterial properties.
01:31:25.000Another example of this is in the microbiome of soils and inside of humans' stomachs.
01:31:30.000Turkey-tailed mushrooms and a placebo-controlled randomized clinical study with humans from a scientist associated with Harvard found that turkey-tailed mycelium is a prebiotic for the microbiome.
01:31:47.000That feeds Bifidobacterium lactobacillus and suppresses Clostridium, which is an inflammatory bacterium.
01:31:55.000So it's really, really interesting that the mycelium is feeding nutrients to the beneficial bacteria within the microbiome that then gives us health.
01:32:06.000And so these are precursor nutrients that elevate the populations of the beneficial bacteria.
01:32:23.000And there's been two also meta-studies that have come out this year showing that the ingestion of mushrooms with elderly people over the age of 60, there's a 50% increase.
01:32:39.000Decreased odds of Alzheimer's-like symptoms with a population of people consuming three mushroom meals per week.
01:32:47.000Now, they didn't specify the mushrooms.
01:32:58.000But that's one meta-study that came out.
01:33:00.000There was a study out of Japan from Dr. Ikikawa at the National Cancer Center that found statistically significant reduction in cancers across the board.
01:33:10.000I think 162,000 people in this data set.
01:33:13.000And he was sent over to Nagano Prefecture to look for this.
01:33:16.000And these are edible and delicious mushrooms.
01:33:27.000The division now between, you know, foods and medicines is blurred.
01:33:32.000And yet it speaks to Hippocrates and Dioscorides, stating that, let food be thy medicine, medicine be thy food.
01:33:40.000So it's interesting because physicians have been taught, you know, this sort of monomolecular approach to medicine, and now we're realizing that these foods are essential nutrients for your immune system that down-regulates inflammation.
01:33:54.000It's so interesting that we're learning all this during our lifetime, too.
01:33:58.000Do you think that would all be established by now?
01:34:02.000We have a paper coming out in the next two or three days, maybe in the next week.
01:34:07.000And it's on turkey tail mycelium, grown on rice.
01:34:11.000And we were able to find out something that no one had reported in the literature.
01:34:15.000The traditional Chinese medicine approach is that these are immunomodulators.
01:34:18.000They help the immune system, but they also are not inflammatory.
01:34:22.000When you have an immune response, oftentimes associated with an inflammatory response, blood rushes to the wound, you inflame, you have all these compounds that are being produced by the blood to suppress an infection.
01:34:35.000But you can over-amp the immune system and have a pro-inflammatory response that can cause a lot of oxidative stress damage collaterally.
01:34:44.000And so the article that's just coming out with BMC, Biomed Central, alternative and complementary medicine, peer-reviewed, we have found that the mycelium when it grows on rice Bioferments the rice to then produce a unique immunological response that upregulates what's called interleukin-1-RA and interleukin-10.
01:35:09.000These are anti-inflammatory cytokines.
01:35:18.000The rice like tempeh is transformed or like yogurt It comes from milk because of lactobacillus or acidophilus and that transformation then makes a novel product.
01:35:33.000We found the same thing that the rice compared to the rice control has no anti-inflammatory properties.
01:35:39.000The mycelium because of the extracellular metabolites changes the rice into a unique immunological product.
01:35:46.000That excites the expression of anti-inflammatory compounds while also exciting the pro-immune response.
01:35:55.000It's interesting too that you're bringing this up that it's growing on something else.
01:35:58.000That seems to be part of nature, right?
01:36:01.000This sort of symbiotic relationship that some of these mushrooms have with the plants and the environment around them.
01:36:07.000That's a really, really good point because The mycelium we found with the bees, when we grew the mycelium on rice compared to on birch wood, The mycelium grown rice reduced the viruses 10 to 1. The mycelium we grew it on birch reduced the viruses up to 1,000 to 1. Oh,
01:36:33.000So that speaks to the fact that there appears to be something that's coding within the ecosystem that then excites the mycelium to produce something that is more strongly resulting in antiviral activity.
01:36:48.000That's the case with cordyceps as well, right?
01:36:50.000Cordyceps mushrooms grow on other things.
01:36:54.000Yeah, but the cordyceps mushrooms, when they grow on the worms, this is something that was a big subject of debate because cordyceps sinensis is a mushroom that grows on a worm, basically.
01:37:10.000On a caterpillar larvae in the Himalayas, elsewhere in China and the Far East.
01:37:16.000And people were finding these cordyceps mushrooms and they were cloning them and then they got the culture going and then they analyzed the culture and they got what's called an anamorph.
01:38:57.000There's other ones that Hercetella sinensis is now thought to be the true anamorph for Cordyceps sinensis.
01:39:03.000What all this lingo means is basically there's a mushroom with a whole bunch of other fungi that are associated with it and when they cultured these other fungi, they did clinical studies or research studies and they came up with results.
01:39:13.000The problem is that they've mixed it up into four or five different species and you can't sort of D, disambiguate the data now because it's too complicated.
01:39:25.000The Cordyceps militaris does not have these issues.
01:39:28.000And so I would steer people to Cordyceps militaris right now because the Cordyceps sinensis, the Ophiocordyceps sinensis issues are still complicated.
01:39:38.000And now virtually thousands of research articles are all now suspect because no one has a foggiest idea what anamorph they were using.
01:40:10.000And the challenges went back and forth.
01:40:13.000And Fortunately, a group of Chinese scientists finally were able to narrow down the argument to understand that everyone was actually doing good culture work.
01:40:22.000They were actually expert mycologists taking the right tissue, taking it from the right cordyceps mushroom.
01:40:29.000It's just that at that time, they had a different fungus that was naturally part of the inside of the mushroom that was a mixture of fungi that were racing at different paces up the mushroom.
01:40:40.000Well, the Chinese were the first to use it for a performance benefit, right?
01:40:44.000Or they were the first to at least be publicized to use it in the Olympics.
01:42:07.000We say mushroom mycelium on all of our labels.
01:42:10.000And if you were going to take that, like if you weren't going to take Shroom Tech Sport, if you wanted to make your own concoction, you would recommend two grams and then...
01:42:18.000And make sure you know the chain of custody of where it came from because a lot of these companies buy on the spot market.
01:42:25.000What company is this that you gave me?
01:43:09.000But the evidence for physicians and people who want to look at peer-reviewed articles...
01:43:16.000The single species have the most elaborated and convincing evidence when you start compounding these.
01:43:24.000So what we're doing, we have five or six full-time researchers, several PhDs on our staff, We are, again, trying to disambiguate the complexity of all these benefits by looking at one species at a time.
01:43:38.000So we're doing this methodically, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars literally a year now.
01:44:10.000I have no idea what any of those words you just said were.
01:44:12.000Beta-glucans are big polymers of sugars.
01:44:15.000And so the big myth out there is beta-glucans are the golden compound that used to standardize products to.
01:44:23.000But there is not a certified method for beta-glucan analysis.
01:44:28.000We have an article coming out also on a 17-species blend using the same, it's called the Megazyme test, the same Megazyme test With the same exact test, the same samples,
01:44:43.000one sample got less than 1%, and the other sample got more than 30%.
01:44:48.000That is a disparate range of data that does not give you any confidence.
01:44:54.000And so the beta-glucan method, how big is the beta-glucans?
01:44:59.000The beta-glucans are a giant scaffolding.
01:45:02.000It's like the structure of this building.
01:45:04.000And inside that scaffolding is all these other compounds that are adornments that are embedded in this giant scaffolding.
01:45:12.000And so we did a clinical study with turkey tail mushrooms and breast cancer that was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
01:45:18.000And the scientists that I worked with, Ken Quayle et al, I think in 2016, I think, published an article where they use lipases, which is an enzyme that dissolves lipids.
01:45:33.000Because I was arguing the beta-glucans are a huge scaffolding.
01:45:36.000There's the other components inside the beta-glucans that are immunologically active.
01:45:40.000And they had been reading literature, it's all predominantly beta-glucans.
01:47:30.000But our ancestors, through trial and error, have narrowed the field of candidates down to about 20 to 40 species that we know, because of their molecular arrangements and complexity, benefit human health.
01:47:43.000Now, when people pick mushrooms, when they go out and pick mushrooms, the real issue seems to be that there's some mushrooms that are edible that look very close to mushrooms, very similar to mushrooms that are very poisonous.
01:48:18.000Which is commonly cultivated and collected in Asia.
01:48:21.000Many of the mushroom deaths in North America have come from, not displaced peoples, but people who've come from Asia, and because they're secretive in the language barrier and the culture of being wild collectors, they then mistake the destroying angel for a patty straw mushroom.
01:51:39.000And so we were long-haired hippies, you know.
01:51:42.000We ate these mushrooms and we thought for entertainment, let's go look at the Winnebago people.
01:51:48.000So we, it was so close, I don't know why we drove our car, but we drove the car out of my cabin, we went down like a half a mile, we turned left into the Squire Creek campground.
01:52:01.000And we parked the car and we wanted to go up to a beautiful view spot.
01:52:05.000And so we walked through the Winnebago people and their families and everything else and we get up onto a ridge.
01:52:12.000And we thought, this is a great view spot.
01:52:31.000And we waited a few more seconds and this big distortion field.
01:52:35.000And we had a beautiful view of the volcanoes and the valleys, a big viewscape, but we could see the air would have become sort of this liquid.
01:52:42.000And then it started coming on stronger and stronger and stronger.
01:52:47.000And we go, oh my God, this is getting intense.
01:52:50.000We better get the heck out of here and go home where it's safe because this is coming on so strong.
01:52:56.000So we come down off this little plateau and we had to come down through the Winnebago people.
01:53:03.000And then, oh my God, and here we're walking.
01:53:05.000The thing about Amanitas and Muscaria and Pantherina, you have dull yellows and browns, but you feel like this giant, and you're moving in slow motion.
01:55:02.000But Dave goes, Paul, you should look up.
01:55:05.000And a whole bunch of people from the Winnebago community had lined up, holding their children in close proximity, watching this repetitive motion syndrome where I'm just constantly...
01:55:17.000So they're watching you for entertainment where you went to watch them for entertainment.
01:55:21.000And now they're freaking out because I have this repetitive motion syndrome and I take one step, I drop my camera, Wow, Dave, I dropped my camera.
01:55:35.000And the berserkers, the word berserk came from the berserkers in Scandinavia, where the legend has it that there were these Scandinavians, the Vikings, were surrounded and outnumbered.
01:55:48.000And they were going to be killed the next day.
01:55:50.000And they ate a whole bunch of Amnita muscaria.
01:55:54.000And legend has it, and it's not been confirmed, but this is the legend that's very commonly reiterated, is that they drank a whole bunch of muscaria soup, and then they went, and the next day, even though they're massively outnumbered, they took off all their clothes and they attacked the enemy naked with swords.
01:56:13.000And that's where the word berserk came from, the berserkers.
01:56:16.000So I'm having this berserker experience of repetitive motion syndrome and I'm dropping my camera over and over and over again and I looked up and these parents were holding their children and were totally freaking out, you know?
01:57:16.000I needed to convulse because every time I convulse, I kind of got a reset of my neurology, you know, baseline, and then it's been out of control.
01:57:24.000And then I had this cascade of Einsteinian thoughts.
01:57:27.000I'm going, oh my God, I can save the world.
01:58:28.000But the other story I like to tell is my friend Dr. Andrew Weil was at the Cougar Hot Springs in Oregon.
01:58:35.000And Andy's a medical doctor from Harvard and he was walking the trail and people came running down and said, oh my god, this guy's trying to kill himself.
01:59:17.000It's a mushroom that's perfectly legal.
01:59:18.000It's probably one of the most dangerous mushrooms that anyone could eat.
01:59:21.000I definitely advise not doing this because I always thought if I was ever called as an expert witness having these experiences and someone who was watching Tales from the Crypt on TV and then they saw a knife It causes temporary insanity.
01:59:39.000I mean, the psilocyte mushrooms are wonderful, they're peaceful, they're loving, it's an empatico, right?
01:59:45.000But the Amanita mushrooms cause this strange, strange sort of behavior that is really potentially dangerous.
01:59:54.000And that is the mushroom that was documented in the sacred mushroom in the cross where John Marco Allegro alleged that the entire Christian religion was essentially misunderstanding.
02:00:06.000It was really all about the consumption of the psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals.
02:00:11.000These were all sort of captured in stories and tales and parables.
02:00:17.000Yeah, it was an academic suicide for him to come out with that statement and still very controversial.
02:02:05.000They had their big revelation through psychedelics.
02:02:08.000So the connection between psilocybin and magic mushrooms and religion I think has a lot of credibility and there's lots of great examples of that.
02:02:19.000The specificity Some of the arguments people make, I have great, great doubts about.
02:02:58.000I've always thought I was curious that the psilocybe cubensis is such a religious provoking mushroom and yet cows are highly revered as being sacred.
02:03:07.000Well, I would think you would keep the mother of the mushroom sacred.
02:03:13.000But again, these are at times when fables and parables and religious rites were controlled by the cognoscente.
02:03:22.000And they were the gatekeepers of knowledge that was too powerful for the general population to understand or appreciate, and so they protected that knowledge.
02:03:31.000And that's the rule of most religions, is that the inner circle, you know, holds the keys to the kingdom.
02:03:37.000And what's happened with orthodox religions is they create institutions where you have to pay tithings in order to have a gatekeeper to have a contact with God.
02:03:46.000And that, I think, is the problem of monotheism versus polytheism.
02:03:50.000Jack Herrer, before he died, was working on a book about psychedelic drugs, specifically mushrooms, and religious experiences.
02:04:00.000And he had some really crazy old paintings that he had found that showed people that were naked seemingly dancing in ecstasy with a translucent mushroom around them.
02:04:13.000The idea being that this image was supposed to represent someone who was tripping.
02:04:20.000There's a lot of really interesting books that have been published that show art going back hundreds of years, even into the late 1300s, showing You know,
02:04:36.000Christian art where mushrooms are pretty easily seen.
02:04:43.000So there's a lot of history to that, but it becomes the unfathomable.
02:04:47.000I mean, maybe you can imagine it to be true, but how can you prove it to be true?
02:05:01.000Yeah, but in modern times now, Johns Hopkins, the clinical studies are on mysticism, spirituality, showing that these are some of the most spiritually significant experiences of people's lives.
02:05:13.000The interesting thing about the Johns Hopkins studies is that 70% of the people had positive experiences, and 14 months later, We're good to go.
02:05:50.000And this may be a way of overlaying PTSD. Rather than having the reference standard that's associated with PTSD, you supplant it with a positive experience.
02:05:59.000But the people who had negative experiences during tripping did not have a negative – that negative consequences did not extend more than the experience itself.
02:06:09.000And so John Hopkins, Roland Griffiths just emailed me recently.
02:06:14.000They have other clinical studies that are ongoing, looking at one which just got published on meditators, giving placebos versus getting high doses of psilocybin, and then measuring the consequences of those experiences months or a year or two later.
02:06:33.000And again, the same thing is reinforced.
02:06:35.000These psilocybin mushroom experiences create a positive reference point that you can capitalize on by re-remembering them subsequent from this experience by not even having to take the mushrooms again.
02:07:00.000I wonder if we're ever going to see in our lifetime centers where you can go and a trained professional can guide you through something like this.
02:07:32.000But many have a really good structure for the responsible use of these substances.
02:07:36.000Us that are displaced peoples, and I would call us European-based people and many other people displaced, we don't have the same constructs historically that we can operate within.
02:07:47.000And so the psychedelic therapist movement is huge right now.
02:07:53.000The Canadian government is very, very positive towards psychedelic therapy because of the opioid crisis and because of significant results.
02:08:03.000As in the movie, this has come out called Dosed, and it tracks a heroin addict, a young lady in Vancouver.
02:08:13.000It is not one of these, you kind of feel good at the end of the movie, but it is intense.
02:08:20.000And she's doing iboga, and she also does high doses of mushrooms.
02:08:24.000But the opioid crisis is so pervasive, there's so poor treatments available, that through these psychedelic therapies, in several days, they're seeing a tremendous impact.
02:08:38.000Success and people breaking, you know, decades-long opioid addiction within a week.
02:08:43.000And so the psychedelic therapists are integral to that success.
02:08:47.000And so there are clinics now arising all over the world for this.
02:08:52.000In Portugal, in Mexico, in Spain, in Jamaica, the clinics are arising specifically to meet the needs of people who are trying to get these legally so they don't get in trouble with the law.
02:09:04.000So in Portugal, in Spain, in Jamaica, For instance, these are legal.
02:09:09.000Well, what gives me a lot of hope is that everything seems to be trending in a positive direction, like all these things that you're saying, your own personal experiences from TED from 2008 versus 2019, all these different treatment patterns or pathways that are available now to people that were never before,
02:09:25.000and that we're starting to see an acceptance overall, just the general population.
02:09:30.000People understand what this is and that this might literally be the cure to what ails us.
02:09:37.000For people out there who have not gone on a deep psilocybin experience, this is very important for me to emphasize and after you do a heroic journey of psilocybin, The next day,
02:09:53.000when you look at those mushrooms, you say, no way, dude, I'm not touching those for a long time.
02:09:59.000Give me six months, I'll come back to them.
02:10:00.000They're anti-addictive by their nature.
02:11:20.000Without your knowledge and information and the way you're able to so eloquently express all these ideas, a lot of people would know a whole lot less.