The Joe Rogan Experience - November 07, 2017


Joe Rogan Experience #1035 - Paul Stamets

Topics
mushroom intelligence psilocybin neurogenesis hypothesis psilocybin mushrooms psilocybin study benefits psilocybin movement psilocybin mushroom experience stacking lion's mane with psilocybin psilocybin benefits microdosing psilocybin bees and mushrooms mycelium and bee health mushroom antiviral compounds turkey tail mushrooms clinical study organic mushrooms psilocybin mushrooms
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Paul Stamets
Mentioned
Paul Stamets Bill Webb John Hopkins Terrence McKenna Ryan Sandberg Jamie Collapse Disorder Herceptin Dennis Alexander Fleming Louis Schwarzberg Alvin Stamets Nancy Reagan Ansel Adams TED Talk Amitraz Amadou R. Gordon Watson Osama Bin Laden Louis Schwartzberg and 25 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1034 - Sebastian Junger Joe Rogan Experience #1037 - Chris Kresser

Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 13 minutes

Words per minute

167.14

Word count

22,325

Sentence count

1,888

Harmful content

Misogyny

20

sentences flagged

Toxicity

47

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:07.000 And we're live.
00:00:08.000 All right.
00:00:08.000 Paul, first of all, welcome.
00:00:10.000 Thank you for coming here.
00:00:11.000 And you are probably one of the most requested people from the internet that I've ever had.
00:00:15.000 So I feel good about that.
00:00:17.000 I'm honored.
00:00:17.000 And you're the first guy ever to wear a mushroom hat.
00:00:19.000 Okay.
00:00:20.000 That's really a hat made out of mushrooms?
00:00:22.000 Yeah, it's made from this Amadou mushroom.
00:00:24.000 It's called Fomies Fomentarius.
00:00:26.000 It grows on birch trees throughout the world.
00:00:28.000 But this is an example of why I think shamanistically plants, mushrooms become significant.
00:00:35.000 There's a plurality of benefits.
00:00:38.000 So this mushroom is a fire starter mushroom.
00:00:40.000 It allowed for the portability of fire.
00:00:42.000 There's no doubt that we came from Africa.
00:00:43.000 We migrated north.
00:00:45.000 We discovered something new called winter.
00:00:47.000 Oops.
00:00:48.000 This allowed for the portability of fire.
00:00:50.000 You can hollow this mushroom out, put embers of a fire inside, and carry fire for days.
00:00:54.000 If your clan could not rekindle fire in Europe in the wintertime, you would die.
00:01:00.000 This hat is actually made by some ladies in Transylvania. 0.98
00:01:03.000 Can I feel that?
00:01:04.000 Yeah, and it's a hard wood conch.
00:01:06.000 Oh, wow.
00:01:07.000 But when you soak it in lye water, ashes and water, it delaminates into this fabric.
00:01:14.000 Whoa, let me feel that.
00:01:16.000 It's very soft.
00:01:17.000 It's also called German felt.
00:01:20.000 It's extremely flammable.
00:01:23.000 So it revolutionized warfare because during Napoleonic times, this is the punk that ignited gunpowder. 0.57
00:01:31.000 So even the Chinese invented gunpowder, the Europeans invented the rifle. 0.61
00:01:36.000 So this allowed flint-spark guns to ignite the gunpowder.
00:01:40.000 This feels amazing.
00:01:41.000 It is.
00:01:42.000 How big a piece can you get?
00:01:44.000 That's a great question.
00:01:46.000 Depending on the size of the conch, on beech trees, they're much bigger than birch.
00:01:48.000 Beech trees just naturally get larger.
00:01:50.000 So the larger the conch, the more fabric you can tear.
00:01:53.000 But this mushroom is made of mycelium.
00:01:55.000 Basically, that fabric is a cellular fabric called mycelium.
00:02:01.000 Actually, I have one that caught on fire because somebody was smoking a joint near me, and the embers of the joint got on my hat.
00:02:08.000 Did it just immediately go up?
00:02:10.000 No, it burns really slowly, so it's a fuse.
00:02:12.000 It's fantastic for delayed explosions.
00:02:15.000 It's because you can light this thing, and beekeepers for hundreds of years used this for smoking the hives of bees.
00:02:24.000 We could light it now.
00:02:26.000 One flick of the BIC, and this thing will smoke. 0.99
00:02:30.000 Entirely in about 10 minutes and turn nothing into white ash.
00:02:34.000 Wow.
00:02:35.000 Your fire alarms may go off though.
00:02:37.000 Yeah, probably.
00:02:38.000 And so with this thing, this larger piece, they would hollow this out, put an ember in there.
00:02:42.000 Would they have to blow on the ember as they hiked?
00:02:45.000 Well, you could blow on a little bit and you cap it and then you can put it in your pocket.
00:02:48.000 The 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.
00:02:55.000 You know, things that you...
00:02:57.000 Need, 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.
00:03:02.000 So 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.
00:03:12.000 In the chain of knowledge.
00:03:13.000 But this is one of the threads that was not broken.
00:03:15.000 And it's significant, I think.
00:03:18.000 We were much more dependent upon mushrooms when we were forest people than we are now seemingly in the cities.
00:03:24.000 But it's coming full circle very quickly.
00:03:27.000 Well, mushrooms are weird in that some of them are incredibly edible and nutritious and other ones.
00:03:33.000 They'll kill you, and sometimes they look really similar to each other.
00:03:36.000 Well, this is the mystery of mushrooms, and I think it speaks to also mycophobia, the fear of mushrooms.
00:03:43.000 R. 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.
00:03:53.000 So you have a familiarity factor.
00:03:55.000 But 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.
00:04:05.000 So 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.
00:04:16.000 Well, you know, 23 primates consume mushrooms, humans being one of them.
00:04:21.000 And 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.
00:04:29.000 How many species of mushrooms are there?
00:04:32.000 You know, you asked me that question five years ago, I would have said 1.5 million.
00:04:37.000 And now we're up to about 5 million is being estimated.
00:04:42.000 Fungi 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.
00:05:02.000 Mass, when you're walking on soil, the 30% of the biological carbon is fungal.
00:05:09.000 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, say that again.
00:05:12.000 30%?
00:05:13.000 30% of soil is fungal mass, living and dead, of healthy soil.
00:05:19.000 And this is the biggest repository of carbon in the world, in the ground, is related to these fungal networks.
00:05:27.000 So there is about 8.3 to about 10 million species on the planet.
00:05:32.000 Right now about half of those are fungal species.
00:05:34.000 The outnumber plants up to 8 to 1, 10 to 1 by some estimates.
00:05:39.000 Really nice interesting metric and one meter of a tree root.
00:05:45.000 For every meter of a tree root there's a kilometer of mycelium.
00:05:51.000 Think of that.
00:05:52.000 Three feet versus 2,200 feet.
00:05:56.000 So the extensiveness of the mycelial network in our landscapes is vast.
00:06:04.000 I call it Earth's natural internet.
00:06:06.000 These are membranes that are literally sensitive.
00:06:10.000 I think they're sentient.
00:06:11.000 They respond to every footprint that we take on this planet.
00:06:15.000 And as you walk across landscapes, you're breaking wood, and that makes new nutrition available.
00:06:22.000 So the competition of fungi to find that new nutrition is fierce.
00:06:26.000 And so first to the menu wins.
00:06:29.000 So this is something that we are now understanding how essential they are for preserving biodiversity.
00:06:36.000 For the health of the ecosystems as well as our own personal health.
00:06:39.000 So when you say you think they're sentient, to what degree?
00:06:42.000 I mean, and you're not talking about just like psilocybin or Amanita muscaria.
00:06:48.000 We'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.
00:06:56.000 So let me describe it this way.
00:07:00.000 We separated from fungi 650 million years ago.
00:07:04.000 Maybe you did, dude.
00:07:05.000 I know some people that are probably still...
00:07:07.000 Well, basically, we are descendants of fungi.
00:07:13.000 We share more common ancestry with fungi than we do with any other kingdom.
00:07:17.000 And fungi are closer to animals than they are to plants.
00:07:20.000 Animals came from fungi.
00:07:22.000 You and I are actually fungal bodies.
00:07:25.000 I'm speaking to basically another fungal body right now. 0.72
00:07:29.000 So Joe Rogan, I mean, whether you know it or not, you're basically a fungal mass.
00:07:34.000 And from a cellular point of view, under the microscope, human cells, animal cells, and fungal cells are very, very similar.
00:07:40.000 We exhale carbon dioxide.
00:07:42.000 We inhale oxygen.
00:07:44.000 As do fungus.
00:07:45.000 As the fungus does.
00:07:46.000 We separated from fungi, basically, we chose the route to encapsulate our nutrients in a cellular sac, a stomach, digesting our nutrients within.
00:07:53.000 The fungal systems digest their nutrients externally.
00:07:57.000 They exhale oxygen, inhale carbon dioxide, And their network-like design allows them to respond to catastrophe.
00:08:07.000 And 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.
00:08:19.000 And 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.
00:08:30.000 So if there's a new ecological challenge, a new food source, a new toxin or something, these fungal networks are so...
00:08:38.000 A 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.
00:08:51.000 And 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.
00:09:01.000 And 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.
00:09:13.000 So 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.
00:09:26.000 And 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.
00:09:36.000 And fungal systems ultimately give rise, in our case, animals.
00:09:40.000 It's more likely we'll find fungal-animal relationships all throughout the universe.
00:09:44.000 Do you think that there's some unknown way that animals are connected in some sort of a similar way as well?
00:09:50.000 That if animals came from fungus...
00:09:54.000 Fungus has this incredible way of communicating with each other.
00:09:58.000 Do you think that there's something like that in the animal kingdom that we haven't discovered?
00:10:02.000 Well, that stimulates my thought into talking about the microbiome.
00:10:10.000 The mycelial landscapes networks, they don't live by themselves.
00:10:14.000 They select a microbiome of bacteria and other organisms that rest upon the mantle.
00:10:20.000 These fungal networks are the foundation of the food web.
00:10:24.000 Similarly, we have a microbiome.
00:10:27.000 And it's really interesting that many of the bacterial diseases that infect fungi also infect us.
00:10:33.000 Our best antibiotics against bacteria come from fungi, penicillin being the obvious example.
00:10:38.000 But 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,
00:10:55.000 of 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.
00:11:08.000 This really strongly supports the concept, this is a hypothesis with quickly becoming a theory, I'll explain the difference in a minute.
00:11:16.000 But this really supports the concept that I've long believed and espoused that these mycelial networks are not just happenstance.
00:11:24.000 They'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.
00:11:36.000 That 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.
00:11:43.000 So these are deterministic organisms that are setting the stage for ecological evolution.
00:11:46.000 And you think that they're doing this in a conscious manner?
00:11:50.000 Well, see, again, we're a victim of our consciousness trying to define what is conscious and what is smart.
00:11:56.000 And one of the best arguments I've had, my brother Bill is a super genius, is far smarter than myself.
00:12:01.000 And he was editing one of my books, Mycelium Running, How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.
00:12:05.000 And he goes, Paul, you cannot say that mycelium is intelligent.
00:12:11.000 And he said, you can't say nature is intelligent.
00:12:13.000 I go, wait, Bill, I respect you. 0.52
00:12:16.000 But you didn't realize the hypocrisy of the statement that you're giving me?
00:12:19.000 You'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?
00:12:29.000 I rest my case.
00:12:31.000 Yeah, that's indefensible.
00:12:33.000 Yeah, so we create language and words to describe concepts.
00:12:37.000 So you feel like your brother was sort of hampered by these predetermined categories that we like to put things into.
00:12:43.000 You have a word, you use that word, the word is very clearly defined in our ideas.
00:12:47.000 Thank you.
00:12:48.000 Thank you, yes.
00:12:49.000 Language is code, and we haven't elaborated the code yet to elucidate the concepts that we're trying to articulate.
00:12:57.000 Just because you can't prove it's true doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
00:13:01.000 So 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.
00:13:12.000 But, you know, we're biologically provincial when we think about how limited we are.
00:13:18.000 We're truly Neanderthals with nuclear weapons.
00:13:20.000 I mean, this is...
00:13:24.000 How important natural ecosystems are, try to replicate them.
00:13:27.000 They're very, very difficult to replicate due to their complexity.
00:13:30.000 So 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.
00:13:41.000 And the hubris of us thinking that these things cannot occur, did not occur, will not occur, really speaks to our provincial attitude towards nature.
00:13:50.000 The idea that these fungus, fungi, are creating their environment and almost they're the architects of this environment.
00:14:00.000 They're establishing the landscape for all these different creatures and life forms to live is unbelievably fascinating.
00:14:08.000 And also that they're connected, right?
00:14:11.000 They're connected in some sort of almost like a neural network.
00:14:16.000 What is that thing in the Pacific Northwest, the one fungus group that's essentially the largest living organism on the face of the earth?
00:14:23.000 Yeah, 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.
00:14:32.000 And that's one animal?
00:14:34.000 It's one mycelial mat.
00:14:35.000 One mycelial mat is a honey mushroom that kills trees.
00:14:40.000 It's an edible mushroom.
00:14:42.000 But think of this.
00:14:44.000 So 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.
00:14:58.000 Now the mycelium is growing out.
00:15:01.000 We have five or six skin layers that protect us from an infection.
00:15:04.000 The mycelium only has one cell wall.
00:15:06.000 On the other side of that cell wall are hundreds of millions of microbes per gram that are trying to consume it, many of which.
00:15:12.000 The 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.
00:15:25.000 This is amazing to me because it means that it is constantly in communication with the ecosystem, being challenged, accepting alliances.
00:15:36.000 So guilds of microbiomes are being created, selected by the mycelium.
00:15:41.000 And these guilds and communities then cooperate in order to prevent We're good to go.
00:16:05.000 So it can reproduce.
00:16:07.000 And 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.
00:16:17.000 So this honey mushroom, is that what it's called, that lives in the Pacific Northwest, how is it killing these trees?
00:16:23.000 It'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.
00:16:31.000 I've always been wondering about meadows in the subalpine regions.
00:16:34.000 There's all these subalpine forests and then you come out and there's these giant meadows.
00:16:40.000 I suspect that this honey mushroom is a meadow maker.
00:16:44.000 It climaxes these trees.
00:16:46.000 It kills them. 0.96
00:16:47.000 They then die. 0.99
00:16:49.000 And then they grow saprophytically.
00:16:51.000 But then it clears the canopy.
00:16:54.000 Saprophytically?
00:16:54.000 What is that?
00:16:55.000 Saprophytic means it's growing on dead material.
00:16:57.000 So first is a parasite.
00:16:59.000 You mean the mushrooms?
00:16:59.000 The mushrooms.
00:17:00.000 First is a parasite.
00:17:01.000 Kills a tree. 0.68
00:17:02.000 Then it's a saprophite or saprobe.
00:17:05.000 That's another word for it.
00:17:06.000 It's a decomposer.
00:17:07.000 It breaks down that material.
00:17:09.000 But as it decomposes the wood, 30% of wood becomes water.
00:17:14.000 So the mycelium generates water.
00:17:17.000 And so water lenses are being created.
00:17:19.000 Now you have more sunlight, grasses, and flourish.
00:17:22.000 And 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.
00:17:37.000 So I think these are over great, huge time scales.
00:17:42.000 We have to get away from the concept of our lifespan or even 100, 200 years.
00:17:46.000 We need to think in millennial terms, you know, over many, many millennia.
00:17:50.000 This is unbelievably fascinating.
00:17:53.000 The idea that they're sort of the architects of their ecosystem.
00:17:57.000 They're the architects of our existence.
00:17:59.000 This is something that there's some really fantastic research that's come out in the past two years.
00:18:06.000 I'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.
00:18:16.000 A lot of things I've been talking about for 20 years are now well-rooted and been proven.
00:18:20.000 One 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.
00:18:33.000 The Earth coalesced out of stardust about 4.5 billion.
00:18:36.000 The 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.
00:18:50.000 They found mycelium infused through the lava 2.4 billion years ago.
00:18:56.000 Now, we split from fungi 650 million years ago.
00:19:00.000 And 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.
00:19:10.000 And that one is 1.4 billion years old.
00:19:14.000 So the oldest multicellular organism in the fossil record today Is this fungus and lava in South Africa 2.4 billion years ago.
00:19:24.000 A fully formed mushroom, who had its form, was growing 1.4 billion years ago.
00:19:32.000 We separated from fungi 650 million years ago.
00:19:35.000 Mushrooms have had their form longer than we've had our form by more than a billion years.
00:19:39.000 Here, Jamie just pulled it up on the screen here so we could take a look at it.
00:19:42.000 This is the one from Brazil.
00:19:47.000 Paul, is this the image that you're familiar with?
00:19:49.000 Yeah, this is the one that has just been published in the past.
00:19:53.000 They have a great name that's a tongue twister to pronounce.
00:19:56.000 It's Gondwana agaricides magnificus.
00:19:59.000 Why do they do that? 1.00
00:20:00.000 Do they do that to make people like me feel stupid? 1.00
00:20:03.000 They don't have to. 0.99
00:20:04.000 No, they do that because graduate students want to publish papers instead of they can't invent names.
00:20:07.000 And so it looks better if you have a long Latin sounding name.
00:20:11.000 So, but think of that.
00:20:12.000 Mushrooms had their form before we had ours.
00:20:15.000 These are elders.
00:20:16.000 These are ancient organisms.
00:20:19.000 These are really the overlord-underlords of our ecosystem.
00:20:23.000 And I suspect, and as these neural networks, they have more neural connections in the mycelial mass than we have in our brain.
00:20:30.000 They 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.
00:20:38.000 Because I think that there is Many benefits of us communicating with mycelium that can give us rapid responses to catastrophia.
00:20:50.000 That's how they've evolved.
00:20:52.000 And we're now the biggest walking catastrophe that I know, walking across the planet.
00:20:56.000 And 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.
00:21:04.000 It 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,
00:21:30.000 like the idea of fungal intelligence.
00:21:33.000 The idea that you could somehow or another understand the language that these things...
00:21:39.000 We don't even understand dolphin language, right?
00:21:42.000 Well, one classic example, Japanese are so clever at this. 1.00
00:21:48.000 There's a slime mold, you know, called Fisarium polycephalum.
00:21:53.000 And this slime mold is very, very good at navigating through mazes and challenges.
00:21:59.000 I mean, first a food wins.
00:22:01.000 The conservation of energy, you know, is rewarded.
00:22:04.000 So how do they set this up?
00:22:05.000 They put a little bit of it...
00:22:07.000 They did several experiments.
00:22:08.000 The most fun one is they designed a nutrient, basically a nutrient-like maze, replicating Tokyo in the Japanese subway system.
00:22:22.000 And so they started with Tokyo and they put oats, which is a nutritional source.
00:22:28.000 They 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.
00:22:41.000 It was a source of nutrition.
00:22:43.000 The main oat was where Tokyo was.
00:22:46.000 They inoculated it and then they let the slime mold then grow.
00:22:52.000 And 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.
00:22:59.000 And 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.
00:23:14.000 Thus they said, not me, not Paul Stamets, this is a demonstration of cellular intelligence.
00:23:21.000 So this is the tip of the proverbial mycelial iceberg.
00:23:24.000 This has broad implications.
00:23:27.000 And I just want people to suspend their disbelief.
00:23:31.000 And this goes into, actually, the evolution of human consciousness.
00:23:36.000 And Terence McKenna was a good friend of mine.
00:23:39.000 I love Terence.
00:23:40.000 I especially love him the last five years of his life because he made fun of himself so much.
00:23:44.000 Terence, people took Terence way too seriously in many levels, but as his brother Dennis, which I think has been on your show.
00:23:52.000 A couple times.
00:23:52.000 Yeah, Dennis is a great ally, great scientist.
00:23:56.000 But you know, Dennis said even if 10% of what Terence said was true, it's friggin' amazing.
00:24:01.000 And Terence and Dennis both came up with a stoned ape theory.
00:24:06.000 Now it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis.
00:24:08.000 A hypothesis is speculative but cannot necessarily be as not yet proven.
00:24:13.000 A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and proven with facts.
00:24:17.000 So I disagree with them in saying it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis.
00:24:20.000 But 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.
00:24:34.000 They're tracking across the savannah.
00:24:35.000 And if you're a hunter, what do you look?
00:24:37.000 You look for footsteps, and you look for scat.
00:24:41.000 And the most significant fleshy mushroom going out of poop in Africa, hippopotamus, elephant, deer, antelope, etc., is Silosopi cubensis.
00:24:53.000 It's a very large mushroom.
00:24:55.000 You're hungry.
00:24:56.000 You're with your clan.
00:24:58.000 You consume it.
00:25:00.000 And then 20 minutes later, you are catapulted in this extraordinary experience.
00:25:06.000 Psilocybin substitutes the serotonin, becomes a better neurotransmitter, activates neurogenesis, it causes new neurons to form, new pathways of knowledge.
00:25:16.000 So 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.
00:25:28.000 Some people say it's less than 200,000.
00:25:30.000 Less than 200,000 years?
00:25:32.000 Yeah.
00:25:33.000 Homo sapiens arrived at 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.
00:25:35.000 That's a big gap, right?
00:25:37.000 It's a big gap.
00:25:37.000 Well, the science is like that.
00:25:39.000 To be scientifically accurate here, I need to show the extreme margins of what's been estimated.
00:25:46.000 So 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.
00:25:56.000 But we have a suddenly doubling of the human brain.
00:26:01.000 And with that, our language centers increased our ability to prognosticate, to plan.
00:26:08.000 And there's no explanation for this currently.
00:26:13.000 Even though we may not be able to prove it, I ask people to suspend their disbelief for a second.
00:26:19.000 Now think of this.
00:26:21.000 Our primate ancestors are going across the savanna.
00:26:25.000 They ingest these mushrooms as a clan.
00:26:28.000 Massive input for anyone who's eaten these mushrooms.
00:26:31.000 Huge amounts of data is coming in.
00:26:33.000 Fractal patterns, geometrical landscapes occur.
00:26:38.000 You have empathy.
00:26:40.000 You have greater courage.
00:26:42.000 You're fighting a saber-toothed tiger.
00:26:44.000 One day you have a fear of it.
00:26:47.000 We 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.
00:27:04.000 But this wouldn't happen one time with one hominid group.
00:27:07.000 Wouldn't happen two times, ten times.
00:27:10.000 It happened millions and millions and millions and millions of times over millions and millions of years.
00:27:17.000 This leads to what I think should be called epigenetic neurogenesis.
00:27:21.000 We know that there's a regeneration of neurons.
00:27:24.000 We know that sulcibe substitutes the serotonin.
00:27:26.000 It opens the floodgates of the census.
00:27:29.000 You have a lot more data coming in.
00:27:30.000 And we know that you have the extinction of the fear response.
00:27:33.000 So 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.
00:27:45.000 If you're the leader of that clan and you can overcome your fear response, you have courage and you have empathy.
00:27:53.000 Those are leadership skills.
00:27:56.000 I think people should take note of it.
00:27:58.000 People like to follow leaders who are courageous and yet kind, who they can trust.
00:28:03.000 They'll have their best interests in mind.
00:28:05.000 So I think this propelled – I think it's a very good explanation.
00:28:10.000 It's an unprovable hypothesis.
00:28:12.000 But now we're at a junction and we're ready for the next quantum leap in human consciousness.
00:28:18.000 I think psilocybin should be looked upon as a nootropic vitamin.
00:28:22.000 And there's a huge amount of interest in this.
00:28:24.000 Johns 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.
00:28:49.000 I'm not into partying with psilocybin mushrooms. 0.99
00:28:52.000 Damn! 1.00
00:28:54.000 You're going so good! 1.00
00:28:57.000 I can understand the urge.
00:29:00.000 Ari Shafir is going to be here in an hour and a half and he's the creator of Shroomfest.
00:29:04.000 He's going to be very upset with your idea that you shouldn't party with it.
00:29:07.000 Well, I think there's greater benefit to yourself and humanity.
00:29:12.000 I think these are serious tools.
00:29:15.000 California has it, as I'm sure you're probably aware, it's up for legalization.
00:29:21.000 Yeah, I was really quite surprised by that.
00:29:23.000 Yeah, all my work, and to put some caveats here, all my work was covered by a Drug Enforcement Administration license.
00:29:30.000 I've published now four new species in the genus Psilocybe, including the most potent psilocybin mushroom in the world called Psilocybe azurescens.
00:29:38.000 And to be clear, folks, nature provides.
00:29:40.000 I don't.
00:29:41.000 So when I had my DEA license, I mean, everyone I suspected was a DEA agent who came to me and wanted to get some psilocybin.
00:29:47.000 I'm sure you probably got set up a bunch of times.
00:29:50.000 Numerous times.
00:29:51.000 Did you matrix at all?
00:29:53.000 To a point it was pretty funny.
00:29:56.000 I had this one person who offered me just huge amounts of money and I played with him and I said, no, it's not enough.
00:30:01.000 And he offered me more and more money, $200,000, $300,000.
00:30:05.000 And he was writing all these coded letters and it was obviously a DEA agent trying to set me up.
00:30:11.000 And finally he got really frustrated because I was playing with a guy.
00:30:14.000 I said, you know, I'm tired of being set up like this. 0.99
00:30:16.000 I'm just going to play with this sucker, you know. 0.99
00:30:18.000 And so... 0.98
00:30:20.000 It finally came to a point and he got really, really frustrated.
00:30:22.000 He's going to get mad at me.
00:30:23.000 He goes, well, how much money?
00:30:25.000 I go, there's not enough money on this planet for me to ever give you a psilocybin mushroom, so give it up.
00:30:32.000 But even if you say that's not enough money, could that be taken as a negotiation?
00:30:39.000 Well, not enough money on the planet.
00:30:40.000 I suppose some aliens were coming.
00:30:42.000 No, but it got to not enough money on the planet.
00:30:43.000 Before not enough money, it was not enough money.
00:30:46.000 Right, before that.
00:30:47.000 So I would think that if you had a really loosely interpreting judge...
00:30:55.000 Well, I suppose so, but I never committed a criminal act.
00:30:57.000 Right.
00:30:58.000 But isn't it sort of like a conspiracy?
00:31:01.000 I'm not a lawyer.
00:31:03.000 I mean, you have to keep things in context.
00:31:05.000 I wouldn't play.
00:31:07.000 Maybe you're more of a courageous person when it comes to that stuff than me.
00:31:10.000 Well, at some point, I just got, frankly, pissed off.
00:31:12.000 I'm sure.
00:31:13.000 Enough of playing with me.
00:31:14.000 It's a waste of your time.
00:31:15.000 I'm going to play with you, and I'm going to reverse the table.
00:31:17.000 But in any event, this is serious research.
00:31:19.000 Yes.
00:31:20.000 And 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.
00:31:32.000 It's a big data study.
00:31:37.000 440,000...
00:31:40.000 People, prisoners, were surveyed over 10 years in the Department of Human Health Services data bank, and they found an amazing correlation.
00:31:51.000 If 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,
00:32:10.000 and up to a 27% reduction in other crimes, including violent crimes.
00:32:16.000 So that's phenomenal.
00:32:17.000 Actually, I got my numbers reversed.
00:32:18.000 There's 27% reduction in burglary.
00:32:20.000 18% reduction in violent crime.
00:32:23.000 Now 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.
00:32:38.000 But think of the return on investment.
00:32:41.000 A four to six hour experience creates a lifetime benefit to society, reducing criminal activity, By 18 to 27 percent.
00:32:53.000 This is phenomenal.
00:32:54.000 This is something that can help the health of our human psyche, of our social system, of reducing trauma throughout our entire society.
00:33:06.000 It's time for us to wake up and look at this in a much more seasoned and intellectual fashion than we had before.
00:33:15.000 More rational and not weighed down by the ideas of mushrooms being a silly thing, right?
00:33:20.000 I mean, I have a few pet peeves, and I understand why people want to use it, but the word shroom just drives me crazy.
00:33:28.000 Shroom fest.
00:33:28.000 Yeah, and the shroom fest.
00:33:30.000 With all due respect, I understand, but let's not be children about this.
00:33:35.000 Let's be adults.
00:33:36.000 You're a serious person.
00:33:38.000 I get it.
00:33:39.000 I'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.
00:33:54.000 Let's be adults in the room on this.
00:33:56.000 I 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.
00:34:08.000 See, 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,
00:34:24.000 it's got to be like, ugh, you're a part of the problem, right? 0.75
00:34:27.000 You're making it silly. 0.90
00:34:28.000 It's a Timothy Leary problem. 0.81
00:34:30.000 Right, right.
00:34:31.000 It held back the bonafide research in this subject for years.
00:34:34.000 There's a movement right now— Explain that, please.
00:34:36.000 It is.
00:34:37.000 There'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.
00:34:43.000 Schedule 2 means it's a drug that has medical benefits.
00:34:46.000 So 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.
00:35:07.000 For such a long time.
00:35:09.000 This is a drug in a category of its own.
00:35:14.000 This is really important.
00:35:16.000 So let's not jeopardize it.
00:35:18.000 It is really important, but you're never going to stop kids from calling it shrooms. 0.97
00:35:21.000 Well, you know, and I want to give a pass here.
00:35:24.000 I want to give a pass.
00:35:25.000 And the coming of age, you know, when I was 16 to, you know, the age, you know, 22, 24, it's the coming of age ceremony.
00:35:32.000 Now, I'm going to tell you something that's very deeply personal, and it's very significant in my life.
00:35:40.000 I had a congenital stuttering habit.
00:35:42.000 I could not speak.
00:35:44.000 I could not look at Joe Rogan in the eye right now without...
00:35:48.000 You know, I had like the King's speech.
00:35:51.000 You've seen the movie?
00:35:52.000 Exactly like that, but worse in my case.
00:35:55.000 I went through six years of speech therapy.
00:35:59.000 I was interviewed for special education.
00:36:01.000 I grew up in a small town called Columbiana, Ohio.
00:36:04.000 And I could not speak.
00:36:06.000 Now, the type of stuttering habit that I have and had...
00:36:09.000 I don't stutter to animals.
00:36:11.000 I had pet snapping turtles and I would talk to them all the time.
00:36:14.000 And I don't stutter when I sing.
00:36:16.000 But I could not elocute without stuttering constantly.
00:36:21.000 And please people out there, don't finish a stutterer's sentence.
00:36:25.000 The 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.
00:36:41.000 So 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.
00:36:50.000 And then one day, before I'd ever had psilocybin mushrooms, I bought some, a bag of them, and I thought, I had no information.
00:37:00.000 I just bought the bag for about $25.
00:37:02.000 And I went out for a walk in the woods in Ohio.
00:37:06.000 And there was a beautiful oak tree that I used to climb at the very top of the tallest hill.
00:37:12.000 In Ohio, we don't have mountains.
00:37:13.000 We have hills.
00:37:14.000 And it was in the summertime.
00:37:16.000 And so I thought setting is important.
00:37:18.000 I knew that.
00:37:19.000 So I went for a walk.
00:37:21.000 And I ate the bag, the whole bag, when I was walking.
00:37:24.000 How many ounces, you think?
00:37:26.000 Well, it was about, I know it was about a half an ounce to an ounce.
00:37:29.000 So we're talking, this is the elevator ride beyond the 10th floor.
00:37:35.000 So 8 to 16 grams?
00:37:37.000 It was probably on the order of about 20 grams.
00:37:44.000 But I didn't know.
00:37:47.000 My destination was this tree.
00:37:51.000 So I walked and walked, and I came up to the tree, and I was eating the mushrooms, and then I started feeling the effects.
00:37:57.000 And so it was great, because I was climbing the tree, and I was getting higher in the tree, and higher in my brain.
00:38:01.000 Whoa, that seems like a terrible thing to do.
00:38:04.000 And 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.
00:38:11.000 I go, oh, that's cool.
00:38:13.000 And 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,
00:38:29.000 oh my god, I'm getting so freaking high on these mushrooms.
00:38:31.000 And so I grabbed the tree and held on the tree and it became my axis mundi into the earth.
00:38:37.000 And then the lightning started coming closer and the lightning started starting to come really close and the lightning would hit and I'd go.
00:38:42.000 I saw fractals for the first time.
00:38:45.000 The atmosphere became liquid.
00:38:47.000 I 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.
00:39:00.000 And I was like, oh my – it was amazing.
00:39:01.000 I said, this is what I read about.
00:39:03.000 So 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.
00:39:12.000 My heart opened up.
00:39:14.000 I felt one with all.
00:39:16.000 I was like, oh my gosh, this is such a powerful spiritual experience.
00:39:19.000 I had no idea.
00:39:21.000 No matter what anyone has read, as you probably know, it cannot describe the experience.
00:39:25.000 And then it dawned on me, wait a second, Stamets.
00:39:28.000 You're on the tallest tree on the tallest hill for miles in the middle of a lightning storm.
00:39:33.000 This is not the best place to be.
00:39:36.000 And so I realized I could be killed up here.
00:39:39.000 Suddenly I had a reality rush, like, you know...
00:39:42.000 Or you could turn into a god.
00:39:45.000 Imagine?
00:39:46.000 Like a comic book, high on 20 grams of mushrooms, hugging a tree, the lightning comes and hits you and...
00:39:52.000 Maybe you were the savior.
00:39:55.000 Maybe you need to get back to that tree.
00:39:58.000 Maybe you're the chosen one.
00:40:00.000 It was an incredibly spiritual and wonderful experience, but I also had the fear.
00:40:08.000 And this comes with the hero's journey.
00:40:11.000 You know, you always have the dark side.
00:40:14.000 You always have not just the light side, but there's counterbalance with the dark side.
00:40:18.000 And I realized, oh my gosh, I could die up here.
00:40:21.000 And I said, well, I don't die, Stamets.
00:40:23.000 What are your issues?
00:40:25.000 Get something out of this experience. 0.99
00:40:27.000 And I said, this stuttering habit is ridiculous. 0.99
00:40:31.000 And I'm not stupid. 0.99
00:40:33.000 And so I said to myself, stop stuttering now. 0.97
00:40:36.000 Stop stuttering now.
00:40:37.000 I said that dozens, hundreds of times over and over and over.
00:40:42.000 And 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.
00:40:51.000 And 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.
00:41:02.000 But she was always attracted to the super self-assured jocks and things like that.
00:41:06.000 She 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.
00:41:15.000 So the more humiliating us stutterers feel, the more we stutter.
00:41:20.000 And so it's a really slippery slope, and so I would avoid eye contact.
00:41:25.000 And so for the first time, she walked towards me.
00:41:28.000 She said, good morning, Paul.
00:41:29.000 How are you?
00:41:30.000 She was always so nice to me, and I was terrified because I'd embarrass myself.
00:41:34.000 And I looked at her straight in the eyes, and I said, I'm doing fine.
00:41:36.000 How are you?
00:41:37.000 And I stopped stuttering, and one day.
00:41:40.000 Whoa! 0.71
00:41:41.000 And this speaks to now what has been medically proven is that we can reset the neurology of the human brain through neurogenesis.
00:41:48.000 I believe that experience allowed me to map new neurological pathways that allows me to elocute in a way that I could not elocute before.
00:41:57.000 Now, 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.
00:42:10.000 And 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.
00:42:17.000 So this hyper alertness that us martial artists have, you know, of knowing things in the circumference around us in the peripheral environment is distracting.
00:42:26.000 So 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.
00:42:35.000 And then that's what I'll start stuttering if a person's talking to me, asking me, how do you grow mushrooms?
00:42:39.000 It's like filling a well with a teaspoon.
00:42:41.000 Because 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.
00:42:48.000 So there's a time that I'll only give 10% of my brain to communicating to the person in front of me.
00:42:54.000 90% of my brain is hyper aware in the circumstantial environment around me.
00:42:59.000 Time for another trip to the tree to cure that last 10%.
00:43:02.000 But that's my personal story.
00:43:05.000 That's amazing.
00:43:06.000 It's not going to work for everyone.
00:43:08.000 But it worked for you.
00:43:09.000 That's what's important.
00:43:10.000 It worked for me, and I was at Crater Lake Lodge, and a waiter came up to me, and he goes...
00:43:18.000 He's about 17, 18 years of age, a busboy actually.
00:43:21.000 And my wife and I, my wife looked at me and I looked at her and I said, should I? And she said, yeah, go ahead.
00:43:28.000 So I told this busboy the same story.
00:43:31.000 Now this guy was totally straight, looked like he was a super conservative from a super conservative family.
00:43:36.000 And 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.
00:43:43.000 So I never knew what happened to this young busboy, but I think I changed his life forever.
00:43:47.000 I hope you did.
00:43:48.000 I 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.
00:44:00.000 But he won't stutter to animals and he won't stutter when he sings.
00:44:05.000 So what do you think it is?
00:44:07.000 What is happening?
00:44:08.000 Do you recall?
00:44:09.000 Well, I think there's...
00:44:10.000 Well, there's several things.
00:44:11.000 It could be trauma when you're a child combined with neuropathy.
00:44:15.000 I 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.
00:44:31.000 So 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.
00:44:40.000 But I think this speaks to increasing intelligence and we all will suffer from some form of dementia and neuropathy occurs.
00:44:49.000 There is a really wonderful safe and legal mushroom to use that leads to neurogenesis and that's called lion's mane.
00:44:57.000 And lion's mane is a Cascading white icicle, edible and choice mushroom they sell in the stores.
00:45:04.000 What stores?
00:45:05.000 Grocery stores.
00:45:06.000 Really?
00:45:06.000 All over, yeah.
00:45:07.000 Lion's mane, they're called, they have various brand names.
00:45:10.000 One that I love is called pom-pom blanc.
00:45:12.000 It looks like pom-poms from cheerleaders.
00:45:15.000 And lion's mane contains a unique group of compounds.
00:45:18.000 Wow, beautiful.
00:45:19.000 Called arinacines and hericinones.
00:45:22.000 And these regenerate myelin on the axons of nerves.
00:45:28.000 And so this is a mushroom.
00:45:30.000 Kawagishi discovered this in 1994, a Japanese researcher, and he postulated it as a potential preventative or treatment for Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy, etc.
00:45:42.000 Do you take it?
00:45:43.000 I take it every day.
00:45:44.000 Every day?
00:45:45.000 Every day.
00:45:45.000 Do you take it in raw form?
00:45:47.000 I take it in capsules.
00:45:48.000 Oh.
00:45:48.000 So you buy it?
00:45:50.000 Yeah.
00:45:50.000 We have a...
00:45:51.000 We have an extensive product line.
00:45:53.000 You do?
00:45:54.000 Yes.
00:45:54.000 How do you get to that?
00:45:55.000 HostDefense.com.
00:45:57.000 HostDefense.com.
00:45:58.000 Why HostDefense?
00:46:00.000 That's part of your innate immunity response, supporting your immunity.
00:46:04.000 But our main business is at Fungi.com.
00:46:07.000 And I registered that many myself.
00:46:09.000 I'm kind of proud of that.
00:46:10.000 It cost me 25 bucks.
00:46:12.000 Wow, you were ahead of the ball.
00:46:16.000 Winterize yourself.
00:46:18.000 But lion's mane is a safe mushroom to consume.
00:46:21.000 There are several clinical studies out on it treating mild cognitive dysfunction.
00:46:28.000 But there's two mouse studies that I think are quite illustrative.
00:46:32.000 And this is translational medicine.
00:46:33.000 This translates from mice experiments to humans.
00:46:36.000 We already know that it has aspects of neurogenesis.
00:46:40.000 When 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.
00:46:49.000 Demyelination of the neurons.
00:46:51.000 Myelin transmits the neural signals.
00:46:53.000 Demyelination occurs.
00:46:55.000 Your outer sheath on the neurons is interrupted by amyloid plaques that then prevent neurotransmission.
00:47:03.000 So 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,
00:47:19.000 the other way there's no food.
00:47:20.000 Well, very quickly the mice learned, you know, you go out the corridor, go to the left, you find food.
00:47:25.000 They injected it then with a toxic polypeptide that induces amyloid plaque formation That is a neurotoxin.
00:47:33.000 Very quickly after two weeks or so, the mice developed neuropathy.
00:47:38.000 They got confused.
00:47:40.000 They couldn't remember which way to go.
00:47:41.000 It randomized.
00:47:43.000 Upon giving these mice again mushrooms for a few weeks, They nearly re-normalized.
00:47:49.000 Upon sacrificing the mice in the first part of the experiment, they saw the amyloid plaques and the demyelination.
00:47:55.000 The second part of the experiment, of course, another subset of mice, they found that the myelin regrew and the amyloid plaque had resolved.
00:48:05.000 This is post-mortem. 0.99
00:48:06.000 You say sacrifice your euphemism for killing them. 0.99
00:48:09.000 You're basically cutting off a representative sample. 1.00
00:48:13.000 You sacrifice them.
00:48:14.000 You determine, yeah, that's representative of the population.
00:48:16.000 Now, the remaining population is alive.
00:48:18.000 They fed them the mushrooms, and they found that they regained neurological function.
00:48:23.000 Wow.
00:48:24.000 The 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.
00:48:36.000 All the mice got excited.
00:48:37.000 They came up and sniffed it and smelled it and they got really excited.
00:48:40.000 And they sat there with counters to measure the number of points of contact.
00:48:45.000 How many points of contact do the mice have exploring a new toy?
00:48:48.000 So they got a really good baseline, hundreds of data points.
00:48:52.000 And then they did the same thing.
00:48:53.000 Then they introduced this cyclopeptide, this neurotoxin, and the mice then, after a while, were uninterested, didn't have imagination, no curiosity.
00:49:02.000 They put in a new toy, they were disinterested.
00:49:04.000 They did the same thing.
00:49:06.000 Now, even their full-blown dementia-like symptoms gave them lion's mane mushrooms.
00:49:10.000 And after a few weeks, when they put in a new toy, they came back to near-normal levels.
00:49:15.000 Upon sacrificing the mice, they found that the amyloid plaque cleared to resolve, And myelin had regenerated and neurogenesis had occurred.
00:49:22.000 This is a smart mushroom.
00:49:23.000 Now the tragedy that we face, I believe as a society, is we have people like yourself, people like me.
00:49:31.000 We're all going to suffer through neuropathy.
00:49:33.000 We have a lifetime of a body intellect of knowledge that we're going to start losing.
00:49:38.000 So what is the loss to society of our elders forgetting, not remembering?
00:49:43.000 So I think this is something that's really extraordinarily exciting.
00:49:47.000 It's not patentable.
00:49:48.000 The drug companies have no interest in this.
00:49:51.000 But this is probably the number one thing that people can do, in my mind, to not only preserve cognitive function, but to expand it.
00:50:02.000 Personally, would love to see it legal to stack them both together.
00:50:07.000 Stacking psilocybin with lion's mane.
00:50:09.000 And 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,
00:50:28.000 at the end of your toes and your fingers and your peripheral nervous system.
00:50:32.000 As you have neuropathy, the nerve endings begin to die backwards.
00:50:36.000 So my idea here is because there are different receptors being activated By psilocybin then with the arinacines from lion's mane.
00:50:44.000 If 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.
00:51:01.000 So we actually are planning right now a clinical study in Oregon with lion's mane mushrooms.
00:51:07.000 The physicians who've looked at the research, which is robust, are convinced that it's worthy and they have their own funding.
00:51:15.000 So 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.
00:51:23.000 It would be phenomenal to see how that would affect people with CTE. People like football players, boxers, people with brain damage.
00:51:30.000 Across the board.
00:51:31.000 Across the board.
00:51:33.000 Yeah.
00:51:33.000 The benefits and this is something that when you're depressed, you're not creative.
00:51:40.000 And your immune system is depressed as well.
00:51:42.000 You're psychologically, emotionally depressed and you're not as creative.
00:51:47.000 Are happy, you are creative, and your immune system is better.
00:51:50.000 So this could be fundamental to disease mitigation across the board.
00:51:55.000 So this is some of the...
00:51:57.000 There 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,
00:52:12.000 and look upon these with new eyes and Drop your prejudices and just look at it as a serious scientific analysis.
00:52:22.000 Wow.
00:52:24.000 How is this received, like in the general scientific community?
00:52:28.000 Is there skepticism?
00:52:30.000 Well, 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,
00:52:47.000 then it's being taken very seriously.
00:52:50.000 So the whole medical community right now, You know, I speak at a number of medical conferences, TEDMED, the American Academy of Dermatology.
00:52:58.000 I've been keynote speakers at many medical conferences.
00:53:02.000 And it's great because I can take people who are totally skeptical and most of them walk out of that room convinced.
00:53:12.000 And why shouldn't we think that fungi are sources of medicines?
00:53:16.000 I mean, penicillin may have tipped World War II in our favor.
00:53:21.000 So 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,
00:53:36.000 found a moldy cantaloupe, and Alexander Fleming's strain of penicillin was too weak.
00:53:41.000 It couldn't be commercialized.
00:53:43.000 This lady researcher who found this moldy cantaloupe found a penicillin strain that was 200 times more potent. 0.67
00:53:51.000 And as a result of that, in war, most of the casualties died from infections.
00:54:00.000 And so the British and the English and the Americans had penicillin.
00:54:07.000 The Germans and the Japanese did not. 0.98
00:54:09.000 And 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.
00:54:23.000 So concerned were the researchers in England, they impregnated their clothes with spores of this mold strain.
00:54:29.000 So if their laboratories were bombed or they were captured, if one of them escaped, they could regenerate the culture from their clothing. 0.96
00:54:37.000 Whoa! 0.71
00:54:40.000 Wow!
00:54:41.000 And this speaks to panspermia.
00:54:43.000 We're all carrying microbiomes of fungi.
00:54:45.000 The fact that you and I are here together means that I have now inoculated you with my microbiome of selected fungi.
00:54:54.000 So Joe, you are now a vector.
00:54:56.000 Whoa! 0.71
00:54:57.000 Awesome.
00:54:58.000 Congratulations.
00:54:59.000 Now there's the the frustrating aspects of What is the word that you use fungi phobia?
00:55:06.000 So 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.
00:55:34.000 So you have two issues there, right?
00:55:36.000 You 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. 0.98
00:55:49.000 And then afterwards going, wow, we got so crazy. 0.91
00:55:52.000 Thinking of it as a frivolous sort of thing that you would engage in.
00:55:58.000 Whereas what you're trying to do is show the absolute hard science.
00:56:03.000 Do you feel that this absolute hard science is...
00:56:08.000 I mean, you must feel that it's unfairly inhibited and hindered.
00:56:14.000 It has been, but there's been a tidal change in pharmacology of the use of psilocybin and its utility as a therapeutic agent.
00:56:27.000 There's a title change.
00:56:28.000 I 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.
00:56:48.000 So, 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.
00:57:02.000 Some 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.
00:57:15.000 Only 70%?
00:57:16.000 70%.
00:57:16.000 30% of them saying, I didn't like that.
00:57:19.000 But in a retrospective study, 14 months to two years later...
00:57:24.000 The 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.
00:57:33.000 And interviewing their friends, their spouses, they saw a Permanent residual effect from the benefits of the experience.
00:57:42.000 They were nicer people.
00:57:44.000 They're nicer to get along.
00:57:45.000 They're less prone to anger.
00:57:47.000 They had many values that we would cherish as an improved community of individuals.
00:57:54.000 The 30% of the people who had a negative experience, the negativity of the experience did not extend beyond the experience themselves.
00:58:01.000 So they didn't have collateral damage where we had collateral benefit.
00:58:04.000 So the positive people saw it as a positive experience and the memory of the experience.
00:58:09.000 This is so cool.
00:58:11.000 The memory of the experience kept them optimistic, hopeful, and they felt benefits from just remembering the experience.
00:58:21.000 The people who had the negative experience, they just, you know, wouldn't do that again.
00:58:25.000 So these mushrooms are obviously not for everyone.
00:58:27.000 But for the people who do benefit, they benefit substantially.
00:58:30.000 Don'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.
00:58:46.000 I mean, when...
00:58:47.000 Absolutely.
00:58:47.000 That's, I think, very well put.
00:58:49.000 I think that's a big issue.
00:58:50.000 Some people are afraid of their inner self.
00:58:53.000 They, you know, we're all, you can't paint the The canvas black and white.
00:58:57.000 Yeah.
00:58:58.000 We're a big spectrum of complex, you know, personality traits.
00:59:02.000 And what happened to somebody when they're two years old, five years old, what trauma they experience.
00:59:08.000 You know, it's very complex to be able to make these statements.
00:59:11.000 But 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.
00:59:24.000 So they're afraid they might lose their control.
00:59:26.000 Right.
00:59:27.000 Yeah, I mean, I've had personally some terrifying psychedelic experiences, but the way I've gotten through them is just to give in.
00:59:34.000 Just to give in.
00:59:35.000 And for a person like myself who's kind of a control freak, especially when I was younger, it's a hard thing to do.
00:59:41.000 Just because you're like, no, no, no, I'm gonna be fine. 1.00
00:59:43.000 No, no, no, fuck this. 0.99
00:59:44.000 You know, I'm gonna, no, I don't like where this is going. 1.00
00:59:46.000 I'm gonna stop this right now.
00:59:47.000 I'm gonna put a halt to this.
00:59:48.000 I'm gonna bring myself back to sobriety.
00:59:50.000 Like, it's impossible.
00:59:51.000 It's not going to happen.
00:59:52.000 So 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.
01:00:04.000 And if you can't do that, that's the bad trip.
01:00:07.000 And I've seen a lot of people have bad trips.
01:00:10.000 Close friends.
01:00:11.000 We are the casualty of the fact that we don't have an infrastructure tradition in our societies like First Peoples and Native Americans do. 1.00
01:00:18.000 They have set up a structure.
01:00:19.000 They have a tradition.
01:00:21.000 Shamanic tradition.
01:00:22.000 Shamanic tradition, rituals, elders.
01:00:24.000 They've done this for a long time.
01:00:26.000 They have set and setting down.
01:00:27.000 They know how to treat these powerful medicines in the right context.
01:00:32.000 And we lack that.
01:00:34.000 You know, did you know that mushrooms were specifically banned from beer in the Bavarian Beer Act of 1516?
01:00:42.000 Whoa! 0.71
01:00:43.000 And mushrooms and henbane and other plants were used in meads, psychoactive beers, and celebrated by people practicing pagan religions in Europe in the forest.
01:00:58.000 And the struggle between, I believe, Christianity, monotheism versus polytheism and nature-based religions, there was a collision course.
01:01:06.000 And 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.
01:01:16.000 They wanted to get the tithings. 0.99
01:01:18.000 They wanted to be your portal and control access to the divine.
01:01:22.000 And so these mushrooms were looked upon.
01:01:25.000 As being specifically a threat to monotheism and Christianity.
01:01:30.000 So the Bavarian Beer Act banned mushrooms.
01:01:33.000 That's incredible.
01:01:35.000 Terence had some pretty interesting ideas about that.
01:01:37.000 Terence 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,
01:02:01.000 which is really like on the opposite end of the spectrum.
01:02:03.000 Alcohol culture is loosened inhibitions, wild behavior, less thought of the consequences of your actions, less introspective thinking, much more chaos, right?
01:02:15.000 And 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.
01:02:36.000 I would respectfully disagree with the second part of that analysis.
01:02:39.000 Not what you're saying, but what Terence would have been saying.
01:02:43.000 Mushroom being preserved in honey is a way of preventing them from rotting.
01:02:45.000 Right.
01:02:46.000 You don't think that had anything to do with mead?
01:02:48.000 Well, I think it did have something to do with mead.
01:02:50.000 But 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.
01:03:01.000 Am I misrepresenting what he was saying?
01:03:03.000 No, I don't think so.
01:03:04.000 I think you have a...
01:03:06.000 So you just disagree with his initial idea?
01:03:08.000 Yeah, and that's okay.
01:03:10.000 Terrence was a very smart guy, and I still appreciate and love him.
01:03:14.000 Well, he had wandering thoughts, and they were amazing.
01:03:16.000 Well, his time wave zero was totally BS. Well, that was crazy.
01:03:19.000 That was crazy.
01:03:20.000 He had the end of time occurring on his birthday.
01:03:22.000 I go, don't you think it's a little egocentric?
01:03:24.000 No.
01:03:26.000 Well, 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.
01:03:36.000 What the idea was, for people interested, he just thought there was going to come a point of ultimate novelty.
01:03:41.000 And somehow or another, conveniently, he had that point coinciding with both his birthday and the end of the Mayan calendar, right?
01:03:49.000 Yeah.
01:03:49.000 Yeah.
01:03:49.000 His birthday was December 21st, 2012 as well?
01:03:52.000 I think so.
01:03:53.000 Someone in the area?
01:03:54.000 Yeah.
01:03:55.000 It'd be a better thing to celebrate.
01:03:56.000 That's totally egotistical.
01:03:58.000 I mean, I love Darren, but he basically got the math to conform to the convenience of his birthday.
01:04:04.000 So it's like, whatever.
01:04:07.000 We're all guilty of being human.
01:04:08.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:04:08.000 Yeah, I mean even the great ones.
01:04:10.000 He was one of my favorite people in terms of listening to his recordings.
01:04:15.000 Do you ever listen to Psychedelic Salon?
01:04:16.000 Oh, yeah.
01:04:17.000 Amazing podcast.
01:04:18.000 One of the best articulators of the English language I've ever heard.
01:04:21.000 Yes.
01:04:21.000 Yeah, I agree.
01:04:22.000 And as is his brother.
01:04:24.000 Which brings me back to the stoned ape theory.
01:04:27.000 One 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.
01:04:35.000 And 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.
01:04:47.000 Oh, I think he's correct on that because of glossialia.
01:04:51.000 And we know that neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus.
01:04:55.000 What is glossialia?
01:04:55.000 It's the ability to speak in languages and new words, languaging.
01:05:02.000 Your ability to language is increased under the experience of psilocybin.
01:05:07.000 Speaking of neurogenesis and exactly what we've been talking about is that basically your hippocampus is your center for learning and memory.
01:05:16.000 And this is why the mice got better because neurogenesis was occurring in the hippocampus.
01:05:21.000 And so they regained their memory and they were able to learn.
01:05:25.000 And so, yes, I think the neurogenesis not only occurs in the hippocampus, but I think it can also occur in the peripheral nervous system.
01:05:35.000 I have an extraordinarily powerful story that I would like to tell about neurogenesis.
01:05:40.000 And it was from a good friend of mine named Bill Webb.
01:05:44.000 He lived in Big Sur, California.
01:05:46.000 He was a friend of Ansel Adams and Henry Miller.
01:05:49.000 He wrote Tropic of Capricorn, whatever it was.
01:05:53.000 In the 60s, this is a big part of the movement in the 60s and 70s.
01:05:57.000 And Ansel Adams is a very famous photographer.
01:06:01.000 And Bill Webb was a mentor to me.
01:06:04.000 I met him when I was around 20 years of age.
01:06:06.000 I was writing, I wrote my first book, Philosophy of Mushrooms and Our Allies.
01:06:11.000 You wrote your first book at 20?
01:06:13.000 Actually, when I was 18. You bad motherfucker, you. 1.00
01:06:15.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:06:17.000 It 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.
01:06:27.000 And I walked into the bookstore because I was told Montana Books was kind of an avant-garde book— Publisher in the early 1970s.
01:06:35.000 And 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.
01:06:44.000 You know, you really need a book representative.
01:06:48.000 You need an agent.
01:06:50.000 And he said, the best agent I know by far is Bill Webb.
01:06:54.000 You know, but I haven't seen Bill Webb in two years.
01:06:56.000 But, you know, you really need to see Bill Webb.
01:06:59.000 And when he said those words, the door opened, a little bell rang, and in walked Bill Webb.
01:07:06.000 It was like, the publisher goes, this is freaking crazy, you know?
01:07:10.000 So Bill Webb and I became tightly bonded.
01:07:12.000 He was a father figure to me.
01:07:13.000 He was in his 70s when I met him.
01:07:16.000 So Bill and I went down to Big Sur and we tripped together.
01:07:19.000 It was a great mentoring, you know, father-son relationship.
01:07:24.000 And Bill and I became very tight.
01:07:26.000 And then Bill was about 82 years of age.
01:07:29.000 And he calls me up and he says, Paul, I have to tell you something that's so important.
01:07:35.000 And I want you to listen.
01:07:38.000 I said, you understand, Paul?
01:07:39.000 I go, yeah, Bill, how are you doing?
01:07:40.000 He goes, well, I'm not doing too well. 0.97
01:07:42.000 I'm losing my sight, I'm losing my hearing, and getting old sucks.
01:07:47.000 I said, but I want to tell you something that's really important.
01:07:50.000 You know, great, Bill.
01:07:51.000 I said, tell me.
01:07:52.000 I said, no, Paul, I want you to absolutely swear to me you'll tell this to other people.
01:07:58.000 I go, got it, Bill.
01:07:59.000 And I'm like, okay, Bill.
01:08:01.000 You know, I made the promise.
01:08:03.000 What is it? 0.98
01:08:03.000 He goes, okay, I've had this friggin' hearing aid and I hate it. 0.98
01:08:08.000 I can't hear the birds or the waves breaking on the beach.
01:08:12.000 And that's a big part of the Big Sur experience, lived above the cliffs of Big Sur.
01:08:16.000 And I said, well, how does this relate?
01:08:18.000 And he goes, well, I did a five gram dose of Cubensis.
01:08:22.000 That's the hero's journey for people who are listening.
01:08:25.000 Five grams is it.
01:08:27.000 You know, you're on the floor.
01:08:29.000 And he was on his deck.
01:08:32.000 And he noticed that he didn't need his hearing aid.
01:08:34.000 He could hear the birds and the waves and things like that.
01:08:37.000 And he's laying there just, you know, he's like 80, in the mid-80s at that point.
01:08:43.000 And he's just like having this incredibly blissful experience.
01:08:46.000 He's coming to reconcile his own mortality, the fact that he's going to die.
01:08:50.000 He's thinking about his life and he's, you know, kind of dreaming in that dreamscape.
01:08:55.000 And he hears click, [...
01:09:00.000 And he looks around, and he goes, what's that noise?
01:09:04.000 And he shakes his ear, maybe something in his ear, and it goes, click, [...
01:09:09.000 And he looks around, and he goes, he's driving me crazy.
01:09:12.000 I go, where is the sound coming from?
01:09:14.000 And he finally looked over, and it was ants walking on the deck near his head.
01:09:19.000 He could hear their footsteps.
01:09:24.000 Neurogenesis.
01:09:25.000 Jesus Christ.
01:09:26.000 And this is an easily measurable metric.
01:09:29.000 From a psilocybin experience, while he was fully on the experience, he said he did not use his hearing aid for three or four days.
01:09:36.000 Why don't you just do mushrooms again and keep the hearing aid off?
01:09:39.000 Well, that's basically he ran out of cubensis.
01:09:40.000 And so he had to put his hearing aid on.
01:09:42.000 He was asking me for cubensis.
01:09:44.000 And I said, I'm sorry, I can't provide it to you.
01:09:46.000 Wow.
01:09:46.000 So I've mentioned this now to several of the clinical researchers who have DEA license who are doing clinical research.
01:09:51.000 This is an easily measurable metric.
01:09:55.000 As people are fully, you know, in these sessions, they could be giving them auditory stimulation to see if the auditory nerve is undergoing neurogenesis.
01:10:08.000 And so this is something that I think that can be incorporated in the clinical studies to see if this is true.
01:10:13.000 But Bill was emphatic.
01:10:16.000 He had enormous gravitas.
01:10:18.000 This guy was a serious intellectual.
01:10:20.000 So 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.
01:10:28.000 What 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
01:11:00.000 like 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...
01:11:21.000 Reward the neurological pathways that are most likely to lead to your survival.
01:11:26.000 So I think that neurogenesis across the brain occurred, just like me with my stuttering, and it was another neurological pathway.
01:11:33.000 But in Bill's case, when he lost his access to those mushrooms, the neuropathy, you know, became more resident and prominent.
01:11:43.000 And so we're looking at these images and Jamie's the best.
01:11:47.000 We're looking at these images and could you explain to us what these are?
01:11:51.000 This is your brain on magic mushrooms.
01:11:53.000 Yeah, this is exactly opposite of Nancy Reagan's mantra here. 0.92
01:12:01.000 You could push this up to your face.
01:12:04.000 Okay, the placebo is on the left.
01:12:06.000 This is your normal representation of interconnectedness between the nodes of your brain.
01:12:12.000 So try to explain this to people.
01:12:14.000 Most of the people are just listening rather than viewing.
01:12:16.000 Okay, 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.
01:12:30.000 The one on the right with psilocybin is literally in the hundreds.
01:12:34.000 And 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.
01:12:49.000 So this is pretty amazing.
01:12:52.000 Now this also influences, I think, and is important for our U.S. military.
01:12:57.000 You 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.
01:13:11.000 And this is why microdosing is the rage in Silicon Valley.
01:13:15.000 The enormous number of coders are microdosing right now.
01:13:18.000 And for those who are listening, let's use Celosomy cubensis as a standard species because that's the one that's mostly grown.
01:13:26.000 And at a half a gram to a quarter gram, you have liftoff.
01:13:31.000 Five grams is the full-blown hero's journey.
01:13:35.000 A 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,
01:13:55.000 but you build up a tolerance immediately the second day.
01:13:58.000 So the second, third day you would feel nothing.
01:14:00.000 So 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
01:14:31.000 friend who's a world champion kickboxer and one of the best in the world.
01:14:34.000 He microdoses daily and he's been doing it over the last like...
01:14:38.000 I want to say probably a year or so, and he has achieved phenomenal improvements in his performance because of that.
01:14:45.000 He 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.
01:14:51.000 He 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.
01:15:07.000 It just doesn't feel good.
01:15:09.000 And then he's like, oh, I didn't take my microdose.
01:15:12.000 And so he takes it again and goes right back to that place.
01:15:15.000 But he feels like he's in the matrix.
01:15:17.000 Well, actually, it's probably good that he interrupts it because it washes those receptors clean of the psilocybin.
01:15:24.000 How much time do you think you should interrupt for?
01:15:25.000 Two days out of seven.
01:15:27.000 So five days on, two days off.
01:15:29.000 Now, I'm not making official recommendations.
01:15:31.000 I'm just saying...
01:15:32.000 I will.
01:15:33.000 I'll do it for you.
01:15:35.000 From my...
01:15:38.000 My small amount of knowledge on this subject, I think that makes sense.
01:15:42.000 That's consistent with traditional Chinese medicine.
01:15:44.000 It's also consistent for those of us who drink coffee like myself.
01:15:48.000 You drink coffee for five days, you take two days off, that next day is the strongest cup of coffee you've had in a long time.
01:15:54.000 Me and my friends who are just coming to the next podcast after this, we just got done doing Sober October.
01:16:00.000 So no alcohol, no marijuana, no nothing.
01:16:02.000 Well, we drank coffee, but that's it.
01:16:05.000 And when I stopped smoking marijuana, the first thing that happened is my dreams became rocket-charged.
01:16:11.000 Like, very bizarre.
01:16:13.000 Like, crazy, lucid, strange, weird dreams.
01:16:18.000 Not lucid in the sense that I controlled them, but lucid in the sense that I realized I was dreaming and I was just...
01:16:24.000 Like, having incredibly vivid, vibrant dreams, and I would wake up from them and be certain that what I had done was real.
01:16:33.000 Like, 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.
01:16:43.000 And 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.
01:16:49.000 Well, when I woke up in the morning, there was no blanket.
01:16:51.000 There was no blanket anywhere near me.
01:16:53.000 Didn't exist.
01:16:54.000 I had a lucid dream about covering myself with a blanket while sleeping on this couch.
01:17:01.000 Very strange.
01:17:02.000 And very primal dreams, too, like being chased by wolves and running into bears in caves and really bizarre, very, very vibrant colors.
01:17:14.000 And apparently, from what I've read, marijuana does something to suppress REM sleep.
01:17:20.000 Mm-hmm.
01:17:21.000 And that in taking time off of it, your REM sleep just gets jacked through the roof.
01:17:26.000 You know, I've heard this many, many times.
01:17:29.000 I'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.
01:17:36.000 Well, we all experienced it.
01:17:38.000 All my friends who did it experienced it.
01:17:39.000 Ari, in particular, probably smokes as much as I do, maybe more. 1.00
01:17:42.000 He experienced it deeply.
01:17:44.000 I'm glad you mentioned lucid dreams because this is a nice segue to, I think, the greatest discovery I've made of my life.
01:17:50.000 And this all came through a lucid dream.
01:17:53.000 So let me set the stage here.
01:17:57.000 Colony Collapse Disorder is a threat to worldwide food biosecurity and killing bees.
01:18:03.000 Bees around the world are being decimated.
01:18:06.000 Say the name of the disorder again?
01:18:07.000 Colony Collapse Disorder.
01:18:08.000 Collapse Disorder.
01:18:09.000 Now, bees are dying off in enormous quantities.
01:18:12.000 Oklahoma lost 85% of its beehives last year.
01:18:17.000 2016, 2017, the annual loss of bees report.
01:18:24.000 And Maryland lost 75%.
01:18:27.000 Nebraska, I think, lost 60%.
01:18:29.000 I met a beekeeper in Washington State who lost 75% of his 35,000 hives.
01:18:34.000 Now, Apis melephra is a honeybee.
01:18:37.000 And it's factory farmed now.
01:18:39.000 And the almond harvest in California is the biggest market for beekeepers who send their bees to the almond orchards.
01:18:47.000 One bee can pollinate a thousand flowers in a day.
01:18:51.000 So every flower that bee visits is an almond.
01:18:55.000 So it's one of the most bee-dependent crops in the world.
01:18:58.000 35% of your food is The other 65%, much of that is indirectly dependent.
01:19:07.000 But hay, alfalfa, and clover for cows...
01:19:12.000 All of our dairy is dependent upon bee pollination.
01:19:14.000 All of our berries, all of our nuts, coffee is.
01:19:19.000 Even 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.
01:19:32.000 It 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.
01:19:41.000 The cost will be astronomical to our society.
01:19:44.000 Prices when food will raise, poverty will increase.
01:19:48.000 You could make the argument that increased poverty leads to terrorism because people are poorer.
01:19:54.000 They're desperate.
01:19:55.000 And so colony collapse now is much worse than most people realize because all the wild bees have now been infected.
01:20:02.000 So 80% of pollination services come from wild bees and 20% comes from managed honey bees.
01:20:08.000 Apis melephra is a honey bee from Europe, brought over in the 1700s.
01:20:12.000 In 1984, the Varroa mite was introduced in the United States.
01:20:17.000 And the Varroa mite is a parasite on the backs of bees and injects viruses.
01:20:23.000 In particular, the deformed wing virus, the Lake Sinai virus, and the Black Queen cell virus.
01:20:29.000 The deformed wing virus is really the most important one. 1.00
01:20:32.000 Bees used to go, and they only live 30 days, but they used to go pollinating for nine days.
01:20:38.000 So they leave the hive.
01:20:40.000 And they pollinate for about nine days, they bring back pollen, and that's their service to the hive and they die off.
01:20:47.000 Now the average time for pollination is only four days.
01:20:51.000 In order to fight the mites, they've been using a toxic insecticide called Amitraz.
01:20:57.000 Amitraz is licensed for fighting ticks on cattle.
01:21:01.000 Using cattle strength doses of Amitraz off-label, beekeepers have been drenching their hives with Amitraz twice per year.
01:21:09.000 Now the mites have built up tolerance and now they're up to nine times a year.
01:21:13.000 They're soaking the hives in order to kill the mites because the mites are injecting these viruses. 0.85
01:21:17.000 This is all hands on deck. 0.99
01:21:19.000 The proverbial shit's going to hit the fan on this. 0.99
01:21:22.000 This is extremely important. 1.00
01:21:24.000 And interestingly, it's the number one bridge issue between liberals and conservatives.
01:21:28.000 So 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.
01:21:41.000 Everyone's on board on protecting the bees.
01:21:44.000 So I had a waking dream.
01:21:46.000 First, 1984 I had two beehives.
01:21:50.000 I planted a mushroom in my garden called the Garden Giant.
01:21:54.000 And one time this summer, I came out to water my mushrooms, and it was covered with bees.
01:21:59.000 And 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.
01:22:07.000 I 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.
01:22:14.000 This is an edible mushroom.
01:22:17.000 And I made note of it.
01:22:18.000 I published it in the Harrow Smith Magazine, 1988. I put it in one of my books in 1994, and then I forgot about it.
01:22:24.000 So I got involved with the U.S. BioShield Biodefense Program directly after 9-11.
01:22:29.000 You can Google my name, Stamets, and smallpox.
01:22:31.000 There's a vetted press release from the U.S. government.
01:22:35.000 They 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,
01:22:51.000 including smallpox.
01:22:52.000 So I have a patent that issued on this.
01:22:55.000 It's a great secondary story because a Black Hawk helicopter was coming out of my laboratory and all this other stuff.
01:23:03.000 I'll get to that in a second.
01:23:05.000 It's a fine true conspiracy story.
01:23:08.000 So I had published this research on the antiviral properties of mushrooms, the mycelium.
01:23:14.000 And 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.
01:23:24.000 And Louis came to me and said, Paul, I have eight patents on fungi that can control termites, ants, mosquitoes.
01:23:33.000 You can Google right now, Stamets can take down Monsanto.
01:23:36.000 There's probably a thousand websites because my patents are disruptive patents.
01:23:41.000 So I can very much control termites and ants from consuming your house for about 20 cents.
01:23:47.000 And I met with all the big companies.
01:23:49.000 But anyway, so Louis knew about my research on that.
01:23:52.000 I've spoken on this before.
01:23:54.000 And he said, Paul, the mites are killing the bees.
01:23:57.000 Can't you do something to help the mites?
01:23:59.000 And so now, okay, that's two stories.
01:24:03.000 We have this BioShield biodefense story and my antiviral stuff.
01:24:06.000 We have me growing the mushrooms in the garden and a hike in the old growth forest a lot.
01:24:11.000 And I'm hiking the old-growth forest, and the way I orient here is one of the few skill sets I have.
01:24:17.000 I like just getting off trail.
01:24:19.000 And I'm in the South Fork of the Ho River, and I'm deep in the old-growth forest.
01:24:23.000 I come around a corner, and I see a bear strike.
01:24:26.000 The bear came up, bam, scratched this tree.
01:24:29.000 A huge paw strike in the tree.
01:24:31.000 And I told my wife, I said, you know...
01:24:35.000 The Washington State, the school system is dependent upon funding from selling timber to the lumber companies.
01:24:44.000 So the school system depended upon timber harvest off of the public lands.
01:24:48.000 So in the human's great wisdom, they decided that the bears were jeopardizing the educational funds in Washington State.
01:24:57.000 So they hired hunters to kill all the bears.
01:25:00.000 So my neighbor killed 400 bears.
01:25:04.000 That's why we have a salmon run right now on Skookum Inlet and Camilche Point, Washington.
01:25:08.000 There's no bears around.
01:25:10.000 Because they saw the bears as a threat to the economic stability of the school system.
01:25:14.000 I understand why the bears would be a threat.
01:25:14.000 Because the bears, when they scratch the trees, it would become an entry room for a polypore mushroom.
01:25:19.000 So I told my wife, if this is true, let's come back in two years and see if this polypore mushroom is growing there.
01:25:25.000 These are wood conchs, similar to the one my hat is made from.
01:25:28.000 So we came back two years later and sure enough, this wood conch was growing out of the tree.
01:25:32.000 The tree had died.
01:25:33.000 So they kind of got it right.
01:25:35.000 So 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.
01:25:46.000 These are all seemingly disparate stories and this is why this waking dream put it all together.
01:25:51.000 So I have my garden giant in bed that the bees are coming to.
01:25:55.000 I have the BioShield Biodefense program where I found these extracts are highly active against viruses.
01:26:01.000 Bear scratched trees introduced polypore mushrooms.
01:26:05.000 And then my friend Louis Schwartzberg is saying, you know, how can you help the bees?
01:26:11.000 And I highly recommend this to everybody listening, is this lucid dream state.
01:26:16.000 At that state, when you're fully asleep and you just go into the ether of wakefulness, stay there.
01:26:24.000 Reside there.
01:26:25.000 We have random access memory.
01:26:27.000 Before you get your neurological pathways all set up by habit of what you're going to do, just exist in that space.
01:26:35.000 And then I had synapses activate a new neurological pathway.
01:26:40.000 I had an epiphany.
01:26:40.000 I think I know how to save the bees.
01:26:43.000 Fast forward now, I have multiple patents issuing all over the world.
01:26:47.000 We've done research for Washington State University.
01:26:50.000 We've gathered $2.5 million.
01:26:53.000 You can go to www.bees.wsu.edu.
01:27:01.000 So the washingtonstateuniversity.edu for education.
01:27:06.000 And you'll see the research that we have there.
01:27:08.000 We 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.
01:27:25.000 I hit, Joe, the friggin' home run.
01:27:27.000 I'm not an entomologist. 0.95
01:27:29.000 I have two beehives.
01:27:31.000 I'm not even a big beekeeper.
01:27:32.000 But I put these thoughts together that if these mushroom extracts reduce viruses that harm humans, pigs, and birds, what would they do with bees?
01:27:43.000 Now, we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh.
01:27:45.000 So my U.S. patent issued this past year, and now it's issued in Australia, United States, issuing in Europe, Eurasia, and Canada.
01:27:52.000 I plan to open source it for the rest of the world.
01:27:55.000 But I was waiting on pins and needles because certainly there would be something called prior art.
01:27:59.000 Now patents are issued based on several criteria.
01:28:05.000 One, no prior art.
01:28:06.000 No one's ever mentioned it.
01:28:07.000 Secondly, contrary to conventional wisdom.
01:28:10.000 So if you invented the bicycle, the wheel, and you came up with a tricycle, that's not patentable.
01:28:15.000 That's pretty obvious because it's logical.
01:28:18.000 So you want something that has no evidence in the literature, public or private or scientific or popular.
01:28:25.000 You want it contrary to conventional wisdom, which means that you want experts to teach a way for your invention. 0.99
01:28:32.000 So every time someone out there And I hear that Paul Stamets is full of crap. 0.97
01:28:39.000 Nothing he says is true. 0.98
01:28:40.000 I have one great response.
01:28:42.000 I say, thank you.
01:28:43.000 You'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.
01:28:52.000 The third criteria is usefulness.
01:28:54.000 Benjamin Franklin could not have invented the iPhone.
01:28:57.000 There's no usefulness.
01:28:58.000 There's no cell towers.
01:28:59.000 So these are the three criteria.
01:29:00.000 After 17 years, it becomes open source.
01:29:03.000 So the idea is to incentivize inventors.
01:29:06.000 That's why you have the iPhone that draws all your computers.
01:29:09.000 I had one person call me up on a cell phone and said, how dare you patent this?
01:29:12.000 I go, how dare you speak to me on a cell phone that was enabled by a patent so you could tell me that I shouldn't be patenting things.
01:29:20.000 The contradictions are pretty obvious.
01:29:22.000 So the patents now have issued and there was no prior art.
01:29:27.000 Even though we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh, we knew that bears went into rotted trees to find honey in beehives.
01:29:34.000 No one, apparently until me, made the connection that bees are attracted to the mycelium in rotted logs because of immunological benefit.
01:29:42.000 Now let's go back in time because this is a very big picture concept here.
01:29:46.000 12,000 years ago, we invented agriculture.
01:29:48.000 What did we do?
01:29:50.000 We started to deforest.
01:29:51.000 When we started cutting down the trees, we began to dismantle the immunological mycelial nets of nature.
01:30:00.000 Mycelium needs wood to decompose.
01:30:01.000 You take away the wood, the mycelium doesn't have a habitat.
01:30:05.000 Because the mycelium is producing these antiviral compounds rotting the wood, the bees were attracted, and because of deforestation now, we're stressing the bees.
01:30:14.000 So 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.
01:30:32.000 The 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.
01:30:42.000 Now neonicotinoids are now banned in Europe.
01:30:45.000 They are not banned in the United States.
01:30:47.000 So you have drift of these neonicotinoids on their adjacent fields.
01:30:51.000 So you have loss of wood, deforestation.
01:30:53.000 You have neonicotinoids.
01:30:55.000 You 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.
01:31:02.000 It's called the cytochrome P450 pathway.
01:31:04.000 We all have it breaking down toxins.
01:31:06.000 So there's a confluence of multiple stressors, but the nail in the coffin by far is a deformed wing virus. 0.96
01:31:12.000 And 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.
01:31:23.000 So it's a friggin' home run because it protects food biosecurity around the world at a time that food ecosystems are collapsing.
01:31:30.000 But think of the bigger picture here.
01:31:33.000 For millions of years, we were forest people.
01:31:35.000 We began deforestation when we got into agriculture.
01:31:38.000 We began to dismantle the immunological networks of nature, the mycelium that's resident.
01:31:43.000 The fact that these same mushrooms reduce viruses in bees, pigs, birds, people, speaks to me of a bigger concept.
01:31:55.000 That the mycelium is part of the immunity of the ecosystem.
01:31:59.000 And as we lose the debris fields that the mycelium is dependent upon, we begin to dismantle the immunological health of our environment.
01:32:09.000 And 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.
01:32:28.000 They contacted me because I wrote an article.
01:32:31.000 That was a one-page analysis of all the research on the antiviral properties of mushrooms in scientific literature.
01:32:38.000 I wrote this article.
01:32:39.000 I published it in a peer-reviewed journal.
01:32:41.000 Bioterrorism became the front and center of concern in the U.S. Defense Department.
01:32:45.000 A group of virologists saw my article, and they got funded by Dick Cheney and George Bush.
01:32:53.000 You know, I want to say thank you, ironically, to those two because they funded the BioShield.
01:32:59.000 It's called Project Biodefense.
01:33:01.000 And they funded it with several billion dollars.
01:33:02.000 And they contacted me because I knew I had this large library of about 700 strains of mushrooms in our culture library.
01:33:09.000 We have a company of 70 Eight great employees.
01:33:14.000 And 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.
01:33:23.000 You have a lot of them.
01:33:24.000 Let's test your library to see if you have antiviral properties.
01:33:28.000 So, great.
01:33:29.000 So I started making extracts of mushrooms, the fruit bodies, the mycelium, the little filamentous fuzzy stuff that gives rise to mushrooms.
01:33:36.000 And I sent off 100 extracts at a time, all coded with alphanumeric codes.
01:33:42.000 So the government didn't know what I was sending them.
01:33:46.000 So I get the first reports come back and I'm flipping through them.
01:33:50.000 No activity, no activity against pox viruses because by far the concern was smallpox.
01:33:56.000 We have no immunological defense against it.
01:34:01.000 After 1974, they stopped immunizing.
01:34:04.000 Do you have a smallpox vaccination on your arm?
01:34:06.000 Yeah.
01:34:06.000 You're probably one of the last ones that were getting it.
01:34:09.000 So I'm going through, and I come to sample 78, and I said, high activity.
01:34:12.000 I went, whoa!
01:34:14.000 You know, sample 81, high activity.
01:34:16.000 Whoa! 0.71
01:34:16.000 I got really excited. 0.71
01:34:17.000 I 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.
01:34:26.000 This is the longest-living mushroom in North America.
01:34:29.000 It's a perennial polypore.
01:34:31.000 It looks like a giant beehive, by coincidence, you know, up on a tree.
01:34:34.000 Let's see if you can get a picture of that, Jamie.
01:34:37.000 And 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. 0.66
01:34:49.000 And I called him up saying, these research results are wonderful.
01:34:53.000 He goes, what research results?
01:34:55.000 I go, Federal Express just delivered me this whole dossier on the first hundred samples.
01:34:59.000 Wow, look at that.
01:35:00.000 And he goes, you're not supposed to get those.
01:35:03.000 I am.
01:35:05.000 I said, well, I'll photocopy and send them to you.
01:35:09.000 He didn't think that was too funny.
01:35:11.000 But the U.S. government sometimes is not very well organized.
01:35:15.000 The left hand doesn't talk to the right hand.
01:35:18.000 So, we got these research results.
01:35:20.000 That's crazy. 0.99
01:35:20.000 That looks like a stick up a dude's butt. 0.99
01:35:23.000 Doesn't it? 0.98
01:35:24.000 This one is particularly unusual because it was attached to an upper branch.
01:35:28.000 It fell through the air.
01:35:30.000 Oh, wow.
01:35:31.000 It hit the other branch.
01:35:32.000 It teeter-tottered.
01:35:33.000 And then it re-grew its mycelium and it connected back into the mother mycelium inside the tree and then it grew two legs.
01:35:39.000 Whoa! 0.71
01:35:40.000 This was first described by Diascorides in 65 AD as elixirium ad longum vitum, the elixir of long life.
01:35:48.000 So this has been used in Greek pharmacopoeia for thousands of years.
01:35:53.000 So please get back to your story.
01:35:54.000 Sorry for the interruption.
01:35:55.000 No, it's fine.
01:35:57.000 So anyhow, I'm up in Canada and one of my managers calls me up and says, Paul, there's a helicopter over the laboratories.
01:36:07.000 I go, no big deal.
01:36:08.000 Helicopters come and go.
01:36:10.000 He goes, no, it's really close.
01:36:11.000 And I said, how close?
01:36:12.000 He goes, listen.
01:36:15.000 I go, whoa, that's really close.
01:36:17.000 I go, what are the numbers on the back of the helicopter?
01:36:19.000 And he goes, there are no numbers.
01:36:20.000 It's a Black Hawk helicopter.
01:36:22.000 And I went, oh my gosh.
01:36:24.000 Now, just because this is very new in the program, because when you have an antidote to a weapon, then it can be weaponized by terrorists.
01:36:34.000 So they didn't know who, you know, not everybody in the government knew who I was.
01:36:37.000 Even though I was working with Project Biodefense, you know, I was still sort of an unknown entity.
01:36:43.000 And I filed a patent application on this.
01:36:46.000 And so I told my manager, okay, shut down the business.
01:36:50.000 Give everybody cultures of this mushroom, which was a Garacon.
01:36:53.000 I don't want to know who has them.
01:36:55.000 Shut down the business.
01:36:56.000 Everyone's spread.
01:36:57.000 So we decentralized ourselves at our target.
01:36:59.000 But hold on a second.
01:37:00.000 Let me stop you right there. 0.98
01:37:01.000 So you're in Canada.
01:37:02.000 I'm in Canada.
01:37:03.000 Your lab is where?
01:37:03.000 In the United States.
01:37:04.000 Okay.
01:37:05.000 In Washington State.
01:37:06.000 And the helicopters are flying over your lab.
01:37:08.000 What happens then?
01:37:09.000 Well, they were spooking us.
01:37:12.000 They were doing it on purpose.
01:37:12.000 They were doing it on purpose.
01:37:13.000 They were hovering.
01:37:14.000 To let you know they're there.
01:37:15.000 I don't know what they were doing.
01:37:16.000 I mean, they're at treetop level right over the frigging laboratory.
01:37:19.000 Right.
01:37:20.000 So I had everyone go in their car.
01:37:22.000 I asked everyone to go in their car, shut down the business immediately, and decentralize us as a target.
01:37:26.000 So later on, when I came back, I called my People in the Defense Department saying, what the hell's going on here?
01:37:33.000 And they go, oh, geez, you know, sometimes the left hand doesn't talk to the right.
01:37:36.000 We're sorry.
01:37:38.000 So how did they find out that just from your patent filing?
01:37:42.000 Well, the patent, I filed the patent and it disappeared.
01:37:46.000 Most patent applications, when you file them, show up on the U.S. patent homepage within a year or two.
01:37:52.000 I filed this patent and four or five years later it still had not been published.
01:37:57.000 So 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.
01:38:06.000 So 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.
01:38:18.000 So I had to do an intergovernmental agency trace to recall the patent from DOD. They had meetings.
01:38:26.000 They allowed it to be released because it was a natural product.
01:38:29.000 And 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.
01:38:43.000 We've isolated two novel anti-smallpox molecules.
01:38:46.000 We also have done work at the Tuberculosis Research Institute with Dr. Scott Franzblau in the University of Illinois at Chicago.
01:38:52.000 We've identified a new anti-tuberculosis molecule.
01:38:56.000 Agaricon in Dioscorides' time, in Greek culture, was used for treating consumption, later thought to be known as tuberculosis.
01:39:03.000 We found that extracts of this mushroom are duly active against bacteria and viruses.
01:39:08.000 Most people who die from viral pneumonia actually die from bacterial pneumonia.
01:39:13.000 They 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.
01:39:25.000 Who actually get a flu virus, they die from bacterial pneumonia.
01:39:28.000 So to find a natural product that's duly active against viruses and bacteria is medically significant.
01:39:32.000 So 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.
01:39:42.000 So this has now led on to Are discovering molecules active against HPV, the human papillomavirus.
01:39:51.000 70% or more of women have HPV. That's a very controversial vaccine, apparently.
01:39:58.000 It's very dangerous.
01:39:59.000 Well, 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.
01:40:10.000 I think they're just trying to prevent infection from sexually active kids.
01:40:13.000 Well, you're sexually active after the age of 24, so why wouldn't they?
01:40:16.000 Right, but they're sexually active before then. 1.00
01:40:18.000 But 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?
01:40:27.000 Maybe there's a good medical reason.
01:40:28.000 Oh, they don't recommend it post-24?
01:40:29.000 Is that what you're saying?
01:40:30.000 Post-24.
01:40:30.000 Oh, so post-24 they don't recommend it because they think maybe you already have it?
01:40:34.000 I don't know the answer to that.
01:40:35.000 That's bizarre.
01:40:36.000 I've never been able to get someone to explain to me why it's the case.
01:40:39.000 But mushrooms can suppress the expression of this?
01:40:42.000 Is that what you're saying?
01:40:42.000 The ingredients within the mushrooms, we have found five molecules authenticated by NIH virology as being potently active against HPV. Which mushrooms?
01:40:53.000 All 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.
01:41:09.000 So these mushroom extracts are a huge consortium of antiviral and antibacterial compounds.
01:41:17.000 As I mentioned, there's maybe 5 million species of fungi.
01:41:20.000 There's about 150,000 species of mushrooms.
01:41:24.000 We've identified around 14,000.
01:41:26.000 So think just from experiential evidence over thousands of years of human experimentation.
01:41:33.000 It'd be like you went into a library and there's 14,000 books in your library, 14,000 species.
01:41:40.000 Our ancestors started selecting each of these species and testing them.
01:41:45.000 We'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.
01:41:58.000 And within that set of 50 species, we're finding these mushrooms which have tremendous potential health benefit.
01:42:08.000 This is why I'm so excited in the field of mycology, is we have translational science.
01:42:14.000 We have applied mycology.
01:42:16.000 And 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.
01:42:27.000 Our fungal genomes are essential for our future and present survival.
01:42:31.000 The more we eliminate these landscapes of biodiversity, the more we're losing potential agents that can fight disease.
01:42:39.000 And 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.
01:42:48.000 You know, we did.
01:42:50.000 And we do.
01:42:51.000 And 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.
01:43:05.000 Now, do you recommend for personal consumption any particular mushrooms?
01:43:09.000 Any particular supplements?
01:43:13.000 In terms of recommendations for gourmet mushrooms, I can make those.
01:43:17.000 In terms of recommendations for medicinal mushrooms, I cannot make recommendations.
01:43:21.000 I'm legally tied by the FDA. I cannot make recommendations.
01:43:26.000 Can you recommend a website that perhaps would recommend?
01:43:31.000 Well, I do recommend eating gourmet mushrooms just as food.
01:43:36.000 Which ones do you consume?
01:43:37.000 Shiitake, lion's mane, maitake, and reishi and chaga.
01:43:41.000 And these all have medical benefits as well?
01:43:44.000 I don't know the difference between a gourmet and a medicinal mushroom anymore.
01:43:48.000 They're just mushrooms.
01:43:49.000 Yeah, all gourmet mushrooms are medicinal mushrooms.
01:43:51.000 Really?
01:43:51.000 So shiitake mushrooms are medicinal?
01:43:53.000 Shitake mushrooms are very, very medicinal.
01:43:58.000 The big stars right now by far are reishi, chaga, and lion's mane.
01:44:05.000 What about portobello?
01:44:06.000 They taste too good.
01:44:07.000 They can't be that good for you.
01:44:09.000 Portobello's have a problem.
01:44:11.000 I knew it!
01:44:13.000 All mushrooms should be cooked.
01:44:15.000 And portobello's in particular should be cooked at high temperatures.
01:44:20.000 Why?
01:44:21.000 Why?
01:44:22.000 There is an unfortunate group of compound called agarotenes.
01:44:27.000 Agarotenes are hydrazines that are heat unstable.
01:44:32.000 So the good news is you should cook them.
01:44:34.000 And if you cook them well, then those mushrooms are not a problem.
01:44:38.000 If you don't cook them well, then these hydrazines are potentially problematic.
01:44:45.000 Now, nature is a numbers game.
01:44:47.000 So there are beneficial compounds that, in some balance, may outweigh the negative effects of the hydrazines, the agarotines in these mushrooms.
01:44:56.000 But that jury is still out, so to speak.
01:44:58.000 What are the negative effects of this?
01:45:03.000 This is an explosive area of conversation.
01:45:09.000 And that puts my life in danger.
01:45:11.000 So I reserve the right not to answer your question.
01:45:14.000 Whoa! 0.71
01:45:15.000 I didn't expect that.
01:45:17.000 It puts your life in danger talking about portobello mushrooms?
01:45:22.000 He's looking at me silently.
01:45:24.000 I will respectfully move on.
01:45:25.000 Thank you.
01:45:26.000 So anybody who's interested, just Google that and get back to me.
01:45:32.000 You know what?
01:45:32.000 Next, 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.
01:45:43.000 No, but the good news...
01:45:45.000 I can tell you the story.
01:45:46.000 There's lots of mushrooms that have tremendous benefit.
01:45:49.000 And there are compounds inside of portobello mushrooms that are very beneficial.
01:45:54.000 And in fact, there is a positive study with some breast cancer patients, a breast cancer study, showing that button mushrooms can confer benefits.
01:46:04.000 So there is that.
01:46:05.000 We were funded by NIH with a $2.2 million for a breast cancer clinical study on turkey tail mushrooms.
01:46:12.000 And turkey tail mushrooms are fantastic as adjuncts to conventional therapy.
01:46:18.000 The 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.
01:46:34.000 And the more you took, the more benefit there was.
01:46:37.000 I have a TEDMed talk.
01:46:39.000 That'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,
01:46:55.000 given less than a few months to live.
01:46:58.000 And she had metastasized tumors all over her body. 0.94
01:47:01.000 Her breast was erupting with a very, very bad carcinoma.
01:47:04.000 And she is alive, well, and fully recovered today.
01:47:10.000 She had a chemotherapy using Herceptin and a little short time of Taxol.
01:47:16.000 She had a very bad reaction to Taxol.
01:47:18.000 But 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.
01:47:30.000 So there's a nice blending of integrative medicine with using natural products with conventional medicine.
01:47:37.000 I will never be saying that you should not consult a physician.
01:47:42.000 I will never say that you should not use conventional medicine.
01:47:44.000 You should.
01:47:45.000 It's the state of the art of science is right there.
01:47:48.000 But the state of the arts of science is that we can upregulate immunity.
01:47:52.000 with 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.
01:48:15.000 No, I absolutely agree with you that conventional treatments are state-of-the-art.
01:48:21.000 And 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.
01:48:28.000 But they're not state-of-the-art when it comes to the preventing of these things.
01:48:32.000 And 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.
01:48:44.000 Do you think that mushrooms could also play a factor in that as well?
01:48:50.000 Absolutely.
01:48:51.000 Absolutely.
01:48:52.000 There'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.
01:49:04.000 And 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.
01:49:17.000 So 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?
01:49:28.000 We're talking about 30% less than the national average.
01:49:31.000 And 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.
01:49:39.000 You can buy them in the store.
01:49:40.000 Well, there's big farming centers for enoki mushrooms there.
01:49:44.000 And then the blemished ones, as cultivators know, you don't sell to the public.
01:49:49.000 The ones that have little spots on them are deformed, but they're given to the workers.
01:49:53.000 And so their workers and then their families eat a higher per capita consumption of enoki mushrooms than the other residents of Japan.
01:50:01.000 So they found that specifically the consumption of enoki mushrooms resulted in a reduction of cancer across the board, of all cancers.
01:50:11.000 Statistically significant.
01:50:12.000 I think over 220,000 people in this epidemiological survey.
01:50:16.000 I've written about 10 articles for the Huffington Post.
01:50:19.000 And 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.
01:50:30.000 They're all peer-reviewed physicians.
01:50:32.000 They're all very short articles, but they summarize a lot of the research that I'm talking about.
01:50:37.000 That's amazing.
01:50:39.000 What do you know about the cordyceps mushroom?
01:50:42.000 I know a fair amount about cordyceps.
01:50:45.000 Yeah, I'm fascinated for two reasons.
01:50:47.000 One, because of a supplement that I take that my company makes called Shroom Tech Sport.
01:50:53.000 Sorry for the name.
01:50:54.000 My apologies in advance.
01:50:56.000 But it's based on athletic performance.
01:50:59.000 But the Shroom Tech is based on the cordyceps and B12 and a bunch of different adaptogens.
01:51:05.000 And the idea being that when you take that, it benefits athletic performance, benefits endurance.
01:51:14.000 It's a weird one because they grow it on a caterpillar.
01:51:20.000 Do you know about all that?
01:51:21.000 Yeah.
01:51:22.000 Cordyceps has been split into several different genera.
01:51:25.000 Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up.
01:51:27.000 The other one is the one that explodes on ants.
01:51:29.000 Yeah, there's Cordyceps sinensis, now known as Ophiocordyceps sinensis.
01:51:38.000 Cordyceps has about 500 species in it.
01:51:41.000 It'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.
01:51:53.000 And they did just what I would do.
01:51:54.000 They would take it in the laboratory, they would break it open and take a piece of tissue from the inside.
01:51:58.000 It's called cloning.
01:52:00.000 So you just capture the genetic material, you grow out the culture.
01:52:04.000 Very confusing because there is five different fungi.
01:52:07.000 They're called anamorphs.
01:52:08.000 Cordyceps is a dimorphic fungus.
01:52:11.000 What that means is it has two forms.
01:52:12.000 It's got a mold state and it's got a mushroom state.
01:52:15.000 The mushroom state comes up like a little club, looks like your finger, like an orange little finger coming up out of the ground.
01:52:21.000 So you can find that, Jamie.
01:52:23.000 Whoa, there it is.
01:52:25.000 So is this an expired caterpillar?
01:52:28.000 I can't actually see the species there, but it looks like they're beetles.
01:52:33.000 So there's a number of cordyceps species.
01:52:36.000 So there was a lot of scientific dispute on what the true anamorph.
01:52:43.000 Now it's two sides of the same coin.
01:52:44.000 You see the cordyceps and then you clone it and you get this mold growing and then people will grow up the mold.
01:52:52.000 Well now we know there are several species of molds that are growing inside the caterpillar.
01:52:57.000 So the true cordyceps sinensis is now identified as hirsutella sinensis.
01:53:04.000 That's the true one.
01:53:06.000 Basileomyces and meteryzium and all these other ones are not considered to be the true organism.
01:53:12.000 They're chasing the other cordyceps mold inside of the mushroom.
01:53:18.000 Whoa, whoa, whoa.
01:53:19.000 You're freaking me out, Paul.
01:53:21.000 I can't keep up with you, man.
01:53:24.000 This is probably one that I'm going to go over many, many, many, many, many times.
01:53:27.000 It's a polyculture.
01:53:28.000 Okay.
01:53:28.000 Polyculture.
01:53:28.000 It's a polyculture of several different entomopathogenic fungi.
01:53:32.000 These are fungi that kill insects.
01:53:33.000 So, 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.
01:53:47.000 The 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.
01:54:01.000 So you can argue in a sense about different species.
01:54:05.000 The 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.
01:54:18.000 Wow.
01:54:18.000 Because we don't know which of these animals they were actually growing.
01:54:21.000 Is this recent information?
01:54:22.000 All very recent.
01:54:24.000 All in the past four or five years and especially in the past two years.
01:54:27.000 Wow.
01:54:28.000 Taxonomy is in flux because of DNA PCR amplification.
01:54:33.000 In the region of DNA that they've chosen, they amplified.
01:54:36.000 They are idiosyncratic to the species.
01:54:39.000 Now that story has changed.
01:54:41.000 Whole genome sequencing is really the only way to go about this, where they sequence the entire genome.
01:54:46.000 And 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.
01:54:59.000 Epigenesis is an environmental stimulus has a selective influence on the genomic expression of the individual, the species, yourself.
01:55:09.000 And so you upregulate or turn on genes that are otherwise quote-unquote asleep.
01:55:14.000 And so what we're seeing now is that epigenetic influences can cause different DNA expressions.
01:55:24.000 And 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.
01:55:33.000 Now we know that's highly inaccurate.
01:55:34.000 So what was accurate a few years ago is considered to be highly inaccurate today.
01:55:39.000 The science is changing very, very rapidly, and the regulatory environment cannot catch up.
01:55:44.000 So it doesn't really matter except for the following, and this is, I do make a recommendation here.
01:55:51.000 Make sure your mushrooms or whatever products you're consuming are certified organic.
01:55:56.000 And please don't buy them from China.
01:55:59.000 Anyone who's been to China, I've been to China several times, the amount of massive air pollution there is horrific.
01:56:05.000 And 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.
01:56:15.000 We've done analyses on Chinese-sourced mushrooms, and they've had up to 2,200 parts per million of lead.
01:56:21.000 Where two or three capsules is toxic.
01:56:23.000 So 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?
01:56:32.000 So getting mushrooms from clean environments is critically important.
01:56:36.000 Unfortunately, because the USDA organic program, they can borrow from the organic programs of China and still say they're certified organic.
01:56:45.000 So 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.
01:56:56.000 There's a lot of opportunistic companies right now who are just trying to exploit and ride the bandwagon of the popularity of medicinal mushrooms.
01:57:03.000 Without really having done their homework or without fully informing the public that their mushrooms are actually coming from China when they're not.
01:57:11.000 What 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?
01:57:22.000 And other ants will drag that ant, knowing that it's infected deep, deep away into the forest to get it away from the colony.
01:57:29.000 Just had Cordyceps loidii up on the screen there.
01:57:32.000 Pull that up.
01:57:33.000 Yeah, Cordyceps loidii.
01:57:36.000 Unilateralis is another one.
01:57:37.000 A lot of these zombie movies you've been seeing have been based on cordyceps.
01:57:41.000 And actually, I was a character in Hannibal Lecter.
01:57:46.000 You were?
01:57:47.000 Yeah, in the series.
01:57:48.000 I think it's number five.
01:57:51.000 And I think Alvin Stamets was this anesthesiologist.
01:57:56.000 They gave you your last name?
01:57:58.000 Yeah, he was my last name.
01:57:59.000 Why didn't they just call you Paul?
01:58:00.000 Well, they do on Star Trek.
01:58:02.000 I'm a character on Star Trek now.
01:58:03.000 Yeah, I know.
01:58:03.000 Yeah, and they actually call me Paul Stamos on Star Trek.
01:58:06.000 How bizarre is that?
01:58:08.000 So 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.
01:58:24.000 Some of the Star Trek people called me up in August of 2016. I'm talking to them.
01:58:30.000 CBS set it up.
01:58:31.000 They have to talk to you.
01:58:32.000 They saw my TED Talk.
01:58:34.000 And they said, Paul, we're the writers of the new Star Trek Discovery series.
01:58:37.000 We're kind of stuck.
01:58:38.000 You know, we want to talk to you.
01:58:39.000 We saw your TED Talk.
01:58:41.000 We're really interested.
01:58:41.000 And I go, wait a second.
01:58:42.000 Are you the one who put me in Hannibal Lecter?
01:58:44.000 He goes, yeah.
01:58:44.000 And I go, well, let's get it right this time, you know.
01:58:48.000 So I said, okay.
01:58:49.000 I 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.
01:58:59.000 And they said, okay, go for it.
01:59:00.000 There's six of them, I guess, on the conference call.
01:59:03.000 Foolishly, I said, I'm a Star Trek fan, which is not foolish, but I want no money for these ideas.
01:59:08.000 I give you all my intellectual property.
01:59:10.000 I want science fiction to predict science fact.
01:59:13.000 The great thing about Star Trek is the flip phone and the iPad.
01:59:16.000 I mean, those came out in Star Trek and then it became reality.
01:59:19.000 I said, so you have a unique opportunity here of forming our future.
01:59:24.000 Let'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.
01:59:42.000 And 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.
01:59:52.000 It 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.
02:00:01.000 They've elaborated this, I mean, six ways a Sunday, so they've really taken it.
02:00:04.000 This is as some sort of a propulsion system?
02:00:07.000 It's a propulsion system because in my TED talk, and I've been talking about this a long time, about networks.
02:00:12.000 We 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.
02:00:21.000 So these are three And the same archetype, the same dimensional structures stacked on top of each other.
02:00:29.000 And nature builds upon its prior successes.
02:00:32.000 So networks reward themselves by surviving from catastrophe.
02:00:39.000 So 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.
02:00:48.000 But 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.
02:01:01.000 And 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.
02:01:16.000 They can show up immediately and then disappear.
02:01:19.000 Is this something that you think could actually be real one day?
02:01:23.000 Okay, we're pushing the envelope on this one.
02:01:25.000 Here we go, baby.
02:01:25.000 This is pushing the envelope on this one.
02:01:27.000 But 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.
02:01:45.000 How so?
02:01:45.000 What do you mean?
02:01:47.000 It's so incredibly profound that I still cannot wrap my mind around it.
02:01:51.000 These are psilocybin experiences?
02:01:53.000 Psilocybin experience.
02:01:54.000 So I think the psilocybin experience might be one portal, and now I'm going to sound like Terence McKenna, of entering into the multiverse.
02:02:05.000 The idea that time can be bent, that there are multiple universes occurring simultaneously in different realities.
02:02:13.000 And I've had one experience in particular that is just unfathomable to me.
02:02:18.000 I don't know how to explain it.
02:02:21.000 Give it a shot.
02:02:23.000 Okay, I'll give it a shot.
02:02:25.000 You've already blown my mind apart 150 times today.
02:02:29.000 This is a very deeply personal experience to me, but I was...
02:02:34.000 I was going to the Evergreen State College.
02:02:36.000 I had the Drug Enforcement Administration license.
02:02:39.000 My brother John went to Yale University.
02:02:43.000 He got a graduate scholarship in Neurophysiology at the University of Washington.
02:02:48.000 He came out to Washington State in Seattle.
02:02:50.000 I was living in Olympia, Washington.
02:02:53.000 I had a cabin up in the mountains near Darrington, Washington.
02:02:58.000 In the summertime for three years, I set chokers.
02:03:00.000 I was a logger.
02:03:01.000 I really believe in the school of hard knocks and the blending of academia with blue collar hard work.
02:03:07.000 I love chopping wood.
02:03:08.000 I love running a chainsaw.
02:03:10.000 I love hard labor.
02:03:11.000 I think.
02:03:12.000 It gives my mind some respite to be able to think.
02:03:15.000 So I'm in this highly academic environment.
02:03:19.000 My brother John, he died, unfortunately, two years ago.
02:03:23.000 He got me involved in mushrooms.
02:03:25.000 So I'm going to segue and set the stage here, but I need another two minutes to set the stage here.
02:03:30.000 So I'm growing up in a small town in Ohio called Columbiana.
02:03:34.000 My brother John is going to Yale.
02:03:36.000 He comes back one day, and he gives me a book.
02:03:40.000 That he's using first class, but he's on break.
02:03:43.000 And he says, and I'm really fascinated.
02:03:44.000 Now, John went to Mexico, Columbia, came back with great stories of eating suicide mushrooms.
02:03:48.000 And he's my older brother.
02:03:49.000 I just idolized him.
02:03:51.000 And he has a book called Alder States of Consciousness.
02:03:53.000 And so I said, John, can I borrow your book?
02:03:56.000 He said, sure.
02:03:57.000 And I said, but Paul, I need it back.
02:03:59.000 After my break is over, I'm going back to college, and this is part of our textbook.
02:04:02.000 So 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.
02:04:08.000 I'm 14 years of age.
02:04:10.000 And so my best friend, Ryan Snyder, says, Paul, can I borrow your book?
02:04:15.000 We're hanging together all the time.
02:04:17.000 And he goes, yeah, but I need it back.
02:04:19.000 And so he borrows my book and he doesn't return it.
02:04:22.000 A day, several days pass, a week pass, two weeks pass, my brother's coming back on break.
02:04:27.000 He said, I need that book back, Paul.
02:04:30.000 And I go to Ryan, I go, Ryan, I need my book, I need my book.
02:04:33.000 And Ryan kept on avoiding answering the subject.
02:04:36.000 And so I said, finally, give me my book.
02:04:37.000 And Ryan goes, I can't give it to you, Paul.
02:04:39.000 I said, why?
02:04:41.000 He says, my dad burned it.
02:04:43.000 I said, your dad burned my brother's book? 0.99
02:04:47.000 I go, WTF? I didn't use this phrase back then. 0.87
02:04:51.000 I said, oh my God.
02:04:52.000 And 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.
02:05:02.000 So John goes to Yale and goes to the University of Washington.
02:05:07.000 I have this DEA permit.
02:05:09.000 I'm at the Evergreen State College.
02:05:10.000 John calls me up.
02:05:12.000 He says, Paul, I think I found some psilocyte mushrooms.
02:05:15.000 John said, you're really smart.
02:05:17.000 You've been collecting Sylasmicubensis in Colombia and Mexico, but, you know, they're much more complicated up here.
02:05:22.000 And I said, let me ask you a few questions.
02:05:24.000 I said, okay, John, do you take a spore print?
02:05:26.000 He goes, yes.
02:05:26.000 I go, the spore is purple-brown.
02:05:29.000 He goes, yes, they are, purple-brown.
02:05:31.000 I go, good.
02:05:32.000 Okay.
02:05:33.000 Now, John, does it have a separable gelatinous pellicle?
02:05:36.000 And he goes, what's that?
02:05:37.000 And I go, well, break the cap.
02:05:39.000 These are growing on wood chips.
02:05:40.000 Break the cap and separate the cap very slowly.
02:05:43.000 Do you see a little skin that's translucent?
02:05:45.000 And he breaks it and goes, yeah, I see that skin. 0.52
02:05:47.000 I go, John, they're growing on wood chips.
02:05:49.000 And he goes, yes.
02:05:50.000 I go, are they turning bluish?
02:05:52.000 He goes, yes, they're standing really bright blue.
02:05:55.000 I go, wow.
02:05:56.000 I said, John, how many did you find?
02:05:59.000 He goes, you would not believe it.
02:06:02.000 It was a huge amount.
02:06:04.000 I said, wait.
02:06:05.000 But he said, Paul, they're in a very sensitive place.
02:06:08.000 You better come up here right away.
02:06:10.000 So I jumped in my car and I drove up from Olympia to Seattle about 60, 70 miles.
02:06:15.000 I get to his house, and John's there, and I go, well, where are we going?
02:06:19.000 He goes, well, we need some grocery bags, you know, and let's get on our bikes, and let's go down there.
02:06:25.000 I go, well, why all this secrecy?
02:06:27.000 And 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.
02:06:42.000 So we're there and it was an eruption of this mushroom.
02:06:45.000 There had to be 10,000, 30,000 mushrooms, I don't know.
02:06:48.000 It was about 50 feet by 30 feet with all been mulched with wood chips.
02:06:52.000 There was an eruption that picked up, you know, trash and, you know, debris that picked up six inches with solid mushrooms.
02:06:59.000 Everywhere.
02:06:59.000 I've, to this day, never seen so many mushrooms in one concentrated area.
02:07:03.000 So 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?
02:07:15.000 Oh, nothing, you know, and then we eventually go, yeah, there's plenty for everybody, you know, so, and so.
02:07:20.000 So it was like pretty good.
02:07:21.000 Everyone's all hanging out as a little group like at the bus stop, right?
02:07:25.000 We're not really waiting for the bus, right?
02:07:26.000 We're waiting for the police cars to go away.
02:07:28.000 And then we picked all these mushrooms.
02:07:30.000 So we got about eight or ten grocery bags full of these mushrooms.
02:07:33.000 How bizarre.
02:07:34.000 It turned out to be a new species called Psilocybe stuntiae, named after Daniel's- A new species?
02:07:38.000 New species.
02:07:40.000 New as in hadn't been discovered before you guys picked them?
02:07:42.000 Had never been described in the scientific literature before.
02:07:44.000 So you picked a mushroom that no one knew existed before?
02:07:48.000 Well, it hadn't been described scientifically.
02:07:50.000 We had known about it for about three years, but this is the largest eruption.
02:07:54.000 And from that collection became part of the type collection that anchored the species taxonomically.
02:08:01.000 So I think some of the specimens still exist in herbaria around the world because it's the reference standard.
02:08:08.000 So we go back to the house and it's like, we've got to dry them.
02:08:14.000 So we lay out newspapers, and the whole newspapers were just covered with mushrooms.
02:08:21.000 And 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.
02:08:31.000 And so, I mean, this is not very potent.
02:08:33.000 They're one-tenth the potency of Cubensis, so we made smoothies.
02:08:38.000 And oh my gosh.
02:08:40.000 Talk about the gag reflex. 0.77
02:08:42.000 So we had to make these foods.
02:08:43.000 We had to eat 50 of them in order to have a dose equivalent to what salonsimicomensis would be.
02:08:50.000 So I knew that.
02:08:51.000 So we made these incredibly distasteful milkshakes and we chugged them and we drank them.
02:08:58.000 And then an amazing experience.
02:09:00.000 I bonded with my brother.
02:09:01.000 It was beautiful.
02:09:02.000 And then you're peeking at this experience.
02:09:04.000 You look around and there's like tens of thousands of these mushrooms.
02:09:07.000 Like, oh my gosh.
02:09:09.000 All for science.
02:09:10.000 And so I go to bed.
02:09:13.000 And I'm laying in bed and, you know, full-blown experience.
02:09:18.000 And, you know, I can barely sleep because all the colors are keeping me awake and my mind is racing.
02:09:24.000 And then I have a lucid dream.
02:09:28.000 And I'm dreaming and I wake up and I go downstairs and I go, I had this crazy dream.
02:09:34.000 And what's your dream?
02:09:36.000 And I said, I saw thousands of cattle dead, baking in the sun.
02:09:42.000 I said, I think there's going to be a nuclear war.
02:09:45.000 But what could kill all these cattle?
02:09:48.000 There's a time in the Reagan administration and all that and the tension was really high between the Soviet Union and the United States.
02:09:58.000 And they said – and they were joking with me saying, oh, well, OK. When is it going to happen?
02:10:02.000 I 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.
02:10:09.000 I need to save my research.
02:10:12.000 So they laugh and they laugh.
02:10:13.000 They say, well, when's the world going to end, Paul?
02:10:15.000 And I go, well, it's not this weekend.
02:10:18.000 That was like in two days.
02:10:19.000 It's next weekend.
02:10:20.000 So they wrote on the calendar, December 1st, I put it in my book, I think it's 1975, the end of the world.
02:10:28.000 They wrote, Paul predicts the end of the world.
02:10:31.000 So we forgot about it.
02:10:33.000 Massive rains the next week.
02:10:36.000 Huge amounts of snowfall.
02:10:38.000 And then on Wednesday, Thursday, temperature inversion.
02:10:41.000 And it flipped to 75 to 85 degrees.
02:10:44.000 All the snow started to melt.
02:10:46.000 All the rivers were flooding.
02:10:48.000 And my little cabin was right next to this river that would swell from day to morning to night.
02:10:55.000 It would go up six feet just from the snow melt because it was very close to this volcano and the glaciers.
02:11:01.000 I said, oh my gosh, I'm going to lose my manuscript, all my research.
02:11:03.000 I need to get up there.
02:11:04.000 I need to get up there.
02:11:05.000 And so I'm watching the news and the news, and the roads are being closed.
02:11:07.000 So I had to go through Rockport, Washington, the back way in order to get back to my cabin.
02:11:10.000 I get to my cabin, and the bank had eroded about 10 feet.
02:11:14.000 I was only about 10, 12 feet away from the river now.
02:11:17.000 My cabin was on the verge of falling into it, but I got my manuscript.
02:11:20.000 I got all my books.
02:11:21.000 I rescued all the material I had, but I couldn't get out of there.
02:11:25.000 Because the roads have been closed.
02:11:26.000 And so I had to wait two days, two days, and the roads then opened up.
02:11:31.000 And I drove out of the valley into the Snohomish Valley, and I went around the bend.
02:11:38.000 And there, the sun, it was a brilliant sunny day, a warm day.
02:11:42.000 And there, floating in the fields were hundreds and hundreds of dead cattle.
02:11:47.000 Whoa.
02:11:49.000 How do you explain that?
02:11:53.000 I entered, I think, into the multiverse.
02:11:57.000 Now, as a scientist, you realize when you say something like that, you open yourself up to ridicule.
02:12:02.000 Do you feel hesitant to communicate these ideas?
02:12:05.000 To a degree, yes, but I'm 62 years of age, and at one point, I just don't care.
02:12:10.000 I just don't care.
02:12:11.000 This is true.
02:12:12.000 This happened to me, and I can push the envelope on these ideas because the credibility of my research is well-established.
02:12:19.000 I can save the bees.
02:12:20.000 Do 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?
02:12:29.000 I care more.
02:12:30.000 I care more.
02:12:31.000 That's right.
02:12:32.000 So I'm telling you things.
02:12:34.000 I'm not making these up.
02:12:35.000 I don't think you are.
02:12:36.000 I don't have to.
02:12:37.000 But just because you can't explain it does not mean it's not true.
02:12:41.000 Right.
02:12:41.000 And I think that we need to accept the fact that the reality is not limited to the perception that we have traditionally used.
02:12:49.000 That's a beautiful way to describe it.
02:12:51.000 Let's end with that.
02:12:53.000 That's perfect.
02:12:55.000 Paul, thank you so much.
02:12:56.000 I'm so glad you came here.
02:12:58.000 And thank you to all the people that recommended you and turned me on to your work.
02:13:03.000 And can we do this again?
02:13:04.000 I'd love to.
02:13:05.000 Please.
02:13:05.000 All right.
02:13:06.000 And if people want to research more of your stuff, fungi.com.
02:13:11.000 And what was the other website?
02:13:13.000 And hostdefense.com.
02:13:14.000 Hostdefense.com.
02:13:15.000 And there's a ton of other information, TED Talk.
02:13:18.000 And I have a youtube.com slash Paul Stamets site.
02:13:22.000 And Louis Schwarzberg, a shout out.
02:13:25.000 We have a fantasticfungi.com.
02:13:27.000 Check it out.
02:13:28.000 Louie and I are coming out with a movie that describes much of this stuff.
02:13:31.000 Thank you so much.
02:13:32.000 All right.
02:13:32.000 Thank you, brother.
02:13:33.000 Woo! 0.99
02:13:33.000 That was awesome. 0.99