Latest / Drawn of History / Joe Rogan Experience _1035 - Paul Stamets(M4A_128K)

Transcript

Joe Rogan Experience _1035 - Paul Stamets(M4A_128K) · Drawn of History

• 0:07
  Speaker 1: And we're live. All right. Paul, first of all, welcome.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Thank you for coming here. And you are probably one
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: of the most requested people from the Internet that I've
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: ever had. So I feel good about that. I'm honored.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: And you're the first guy ever to wear a mushroom hat.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: That's really a hat made out of mushrooms? Yeah.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: It's made from this amadou mushroom. It's called Fomius fomenterius.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: It grows on birch trees throughout the world. But this
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: is an example of why I think shamanistically plants, mushrooms
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: become significant. There's a plurality. of benefits. So this mushroom
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: is a fire starter mushroom. It allowed for the portability
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: of fire. There's no doubt that we came from Africa.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: We migrated north. We discovered something new called winter. Oops.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: This allowed for the portability of fire. You can hollow
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: this mushroom out, put embers of fire inside, and carry
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: fire for days. If your clan could not rekindle fire
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: in Europe in the wintertime, you would die. So this
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: hat is actually made by some ladies in Transylvania.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Can I feel it?
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's a hardwood conch. Oh, wow. But when
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: you soak it in lye water, ashes and water, it
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: delaminates into this fabric.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: Whoa, let me feel that.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: It's very soft. It's also called German felt. Wow. It's
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: extremely flammable. So it revolutionized warfare because during Napoleonic times,
• 1:28
  Speaker 2: this is the punk that ignited gunpowder. Really? So even
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: the Chinese invented gunpowder. The Europeans invented the rifle. So
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: this allowed flint spark guns to ignite the gunpowder.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: This feels amazing. It is. How big a piece can
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: you get?
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: That's a great question. Depending on the size of the conch.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: On beech trees, they're much bigger than birch. Beech trees
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: just naturally get larger. So the larger the conch, the
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: more fabric you can tear. But this mushroom is made
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: of mycelium. And basically, that fabric is a cellular fabric
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: called mycelium.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: And... This is.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: I actually have one that caught on fire because somebody
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: was smoking a joint near me, and the embers of
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: the joint got on my hat.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Did it just immediately go up?
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: No, it burns really slowly, so it's a fuse. Oh.
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: It's fantastic for delayed explosions. It's because you can light
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: this thing, and beekeepers for hundreds of years use this
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: for smoking the hives of bees. Oh. Because it's just...
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: We could light it now. I mean, the whole thing would...
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: One flick of the bick, and this thing will smoke forever.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: entirely in about 10 minutes and turn nothing into white ash. Wow.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: Your fire alarms may go off though.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, probably. And so with this thing, this larger piece,
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: they would hollow this out, put an ember in there.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Would they have to blow on the ember as they hiked?
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Well, you could blow on a little bit and you
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: cap it and then you can put it in your pocket.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: The famous Iceman that was found in the border of
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Italy and Austria, he had this tethered to his right side,
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: which is a position of significance, you know, things that
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: you need, like your knife, you know, and things that
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: you want to make sure you have if you're right-handed,
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: it's on the right side. So this one example, we
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: have a thread of knowledge of use of mushrooms that
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: goes over millennia, and most of those threads have been
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: frayed or broken in the chain of knowledge, but this
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: is one of the threads that was not broken, and
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: it's significant, I think. We were much more dependent upon
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: mushrooms when we were forest people than we are now, seemingly,
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: in the cities, but It's coming full circle very quickly.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Well, mushrooms are weird in that some of them are
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: incredibly edible and nutritious, and other ones will kill you.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: And sometimes they look really similar to each other.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: Well, this is the mystery of mushrooms, and I think
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: it speaks to also mycophobia, the fear of mushrooms. R.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: Gordon Watson first coined that term. But when you think
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: about it, in your visual landscape with animals, you see
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: them for months, years, in plants.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: So you have a familiarity factor. But mushrooms that come
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: up and disappear in four or five days, some of
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: them can feed you. Some can kill you. Some can
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: heal you. Some can send you on a spiritual journey.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: So to have something so powerful and yet so ephemeral,
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: it's natural for humans to avoid that which they don't
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: understand out of fear because they don't know the difference. But,
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: you know, 23 primates consume mushrooms, humans being one of them.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: And so that speaks to a long ancestral use of
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: mushrooms going back, you know, in our primate evolutionary tree
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: for a very, very long time.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: How many species of mushrooms are there?
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: You know, you asked me that question five years ago.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: I would have said 1.5 million. And now we're up
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: to about 5 million is being estimated. Whoa. Fungi outnumber
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: plants 5 to 10 to 1. And I just, you know, I...
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: You know, I speak at TED, and I've gone to
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: these TED conferences, but it's shocking. With the smartest brains
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: in the world, not until just recently did they realize
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: what us mycologists have known for a long time. 30%
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: of the soil mass, when you're walking on soil, the
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: 30% of the biological carbon is fungal. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: Say that again.
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: 30%? 30% of soil is fungal mass, living and dead,
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: of healthy soil.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: And this is the biggest repository of carbon in the
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: world in the ground is related to these fungal networks.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: So there is about 8.3 to about 10 million species
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: on the planet. Right now, about half of those are
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: fungal species. The outnumber plants up to 8 to 1,
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: 10 to 1 by some estimates. A really nice, interesting metric.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: One meter of a tree root, for every meter of
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: a tree root, there's a kilometer of mycelium. Now think
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: of that. Three feet versus 2,200 feet. So the extensiveness
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: of the mycelial network in our landscapes is vast. I
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: call it Earth's natural internet. These are membranes that are
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: literally sensitive. I think they're sentient. They respond to every
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: footprint that we take on this planet. And As you
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: walk across landscapes, you're breaking wood, and that makes new
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: nutrition available. So the competition of fungi to find that
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: new nutrition is fierce. And so first to the menu wins.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: So this is something that we are now understanding how
• 6:33
  Speaker 2: essential they are for preserving biodiversity and for the health
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: of the ecosystems as well as our own personal health.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: So when you say you think they're sentient, To what degree?
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: I mean, and you're not talking about just like psilocybin
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: or Amanita muscaria.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: We're kind of intellectually provincial in that we are using
• 6:51
  Speaker 2: language and preventative terms in order to describe concepts that
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: we're struggling with. So let me describe it this way.
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: We separated from fungi 650 million years ago. Maybe you did, dude.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: I know some people that are probably still.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: Well, basically, we are descendants of fungi. We share a
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: more common ancestry with fungi than we do with any
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: other kingdom.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: And fungi are closer to animals than they are to plants.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: Animals came from fungi. You and I are actually fungal bodies.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: I'm speaking to basically another fungal body right now. So
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: Joe Rogan, I mean, whether you know it or not,
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: you're basically a fungal mask. And from a cellular point
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: of view, under the microscope, human cells, animal cells, and
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: fungal cells are very, very similar. We exhale carbon dioxide.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: We inhale oxygen.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: As do fungus.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: As the fungus does. We separate it from fungi, basically.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: We chose the route to encapsulate our nutrients in a
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: cellular sac, a stomach, digesting our nutrients within. The fungal
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: systems digest their nutrients externally. They exhale oxygen, inhale carbon.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Dioxide, and.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Their network-like design allows them to respond to catastrophic. And
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: what I mean by that is that the mycelial networks,
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: they're so dense in the soil, and they have literally
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: hundreds of billions of tips. And as these tips are
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: growing out, they tend to be polynucleate at the tips.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: And it allows them to upregulate naturally. new enzymes, acid sequences,
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: et cetera. So if there's a new ecological challenge, a
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: new food source, a new toxin or something, these fungal
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: networks have great plasticity in being able to code for
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: new sequences from their DNA. So all you need is
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: one of those hundreds of billions of tips to find
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: a new enzyme to break down a toxin or a
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: new food source. And what happens then is that information
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: then is incorporated genetically into the mycelial network and the
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: mycelium then surges because it has new food, logically. And
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: so when it surges and creates a new, what's called
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: a sector of mycelium, we now know there's evidence that
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: the mycelial network then, that it benefits from that TIP
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: exploration and discovery. So these are like massively resilient, adaptive
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: organisms that have a network-based design, not dissimilar from that
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: of our neural networks, not dissimilar from the computer internet.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: And the more and more that I explore this, the
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: more I'm convinced that we will find network-based organisms throughout
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: the cosmos, probably fungal systems. And fungal systems ultimately give rise,
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: in our case, to animals, and it's more likely animals.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: we'll find fungal-animal relationships all throughout the universe.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Do you think that there's some unknown way that animals
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: are connected in some sort of a similar way as well?
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: That if animals came from fungus, and fungus has this
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: incredible way of communicating with each other, do you think
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: that there's something like that with it? in the animal
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: kingdom that we haven't discovered.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: Well that stimulates my thought into talking about the microbiome
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: the mycelial landscapes networks they don't live by themselves they
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: select a microbiome of bacteria and other organisms and that
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: rest upon the mantle. These fungal networks are the foundation
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: of the food web. Well, similarly, we have a microbiome.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: And it's really interesting that many of the bacterial diseases
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: that infect fungi also infect us. Our best antibiotics against
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: bacteria come from fungi, penicillin being the obvious example. But
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: we have found now during next-gen sequencing, and this has
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: never been published before, that the mycelial mats growing in
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: the very same wood chips, in our case, that had
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: been fermented, we had a thousand-fold difference in the relative
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: abundance of genera of bacteria from the very same wood chips,
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: two different mushroom species planted on those wood chips, and
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: the microbiomes that were created and selected for by the
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: mycelium were vastly different. This really strongly supports the concept.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: This is a hypothesis with quickly becoming a theory. I'll
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: explain the difference in a minute. But this really supports
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: the concept that I've long believed and espoused, that these
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: mycelial networks are not just happenstance. They're creating the habitats
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: and the flora and ultimately the fauna that are resident
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: within the ecosystem to guarantee the plurality and the biodiversity
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: of the ecosystem by creating the plants that grow up
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: that feed the animals, the insects, to create the debris
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: fields and then feed the mycelium for the benefit of
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: the progeny of the mushrooms that will form thereafter. So
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: these are deterministic organisms that are setting the stage for
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: ecological evolution.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: And you think that they're doing this in a conscious manner?
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: Well, see, again, we're a victim of our consciousness trying
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: to define what is conscious and what is smart. And
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: one of the best arguments I've had, my brother Bill
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: is a super genius, is far smarter than myself. And
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: he was editing one of my books, Mycelium Running, How
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. And And he goes, Paul,
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: you cannot say that mycelium is intelligent. And he said,
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: you can't say nature is intelligent. I go, wait, Bill,
• 12:15
  Speaker 2: I respect you. But you didn't realize the hypocrisy of
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: the statement that you're giving me. You're telling me nature
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: is not intelligent. And yet you are born of nature
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: using the mind to conceive the concept to challenge the
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: idea that nature is not intelligent when you are part
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: of nature. I rest my case.
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's indefensible.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so we create language and words to describe concepts.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: So you feel like your brother was sort of hampered
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: by these predetermined categories that we like to put things into.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: You have a word, use that word. The word is
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: very clearly defined in our ideas.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you, yes. Language is code, and we
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: haven't elaborated the code yet to elucidate the concepts that
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: we're trying to articulate. That does not mean, just because
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: you can't prove it's true doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: So as our vocabulary increases, as our lexicon of language increases,
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: it becomes more robust, then I think we can better describe, test,
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: and prove that these concepts are true. But we're biologically
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: provincial when we think about how limited we are. We're
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: truly Neanderthals with nuclear weapons. I mean, this is, when
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: you look at how important natural ecosystems are, try to
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: replicate them. They're very, very difficult to replicate due to
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: their complexity. So I think the more that we study nature,
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: most all of us scientists subscribe to the adage that
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: the more we study this subject, the more we realize
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: we didn't know. And the hubris of us thinking that
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: these things cannot occur, did not occur, will not occur,
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: really speaks to our provincial attitude towards nature.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: The idea that these fungus, fungi, are creating their environment
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: and almost they're the architects of this environment. They're establishing
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: the landscape for all these different creatures and life forms
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: to live is unbelievably fascinating. And also that they're connected, right?
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: They're connected in some sort of almost like a neural
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: network and there's... What is that thing in the Pacific Northwest,
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: the one fungus group that's essentially the largest living organism
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: on the face of the earth?
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the largest organism in the world so far discovered
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: is a mycelial mat, 2,200 acres in size. And that's
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: equivalent to about 665 football fields.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: And that's one animal.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: It's one mycelial mat. One mycelial mat is a honey
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: mushroom that kills trees. It's an edible mushroom. But think
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: of this. I mean, think of it. So for those
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: listeners out there, if any soil biologists know this well,
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: if you go out and get some nice, rich soil,
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: a gram of it, and you analyze it, there typically
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: is a million, five million microbes per gram in that soil. Now,
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: the mycelium is growing out. We have five or six
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: skin layers that protect us from an infection. The mycelium
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: only has one cell wall. On the other side of
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: that cell wall are hundreds of millions of microbes per
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: gram that are trying to consume it, many of which
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: are The mycelium is able to upregulate in constant biomolecular
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: communication with its ecosystem, be able to prevent predators from
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: consuming it, thus allowing it to achieve the largest mass
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: of any organism in the world. This is amazing to
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: me because it means that it is constantly in communication
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: with the ecosystem, being challenged, accepting alliances. So guilds of
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: microbiomes are being created, selected by the mycelium. And these
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: guilds and communities then cooperate in order to prevent pathogens, parasites,
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: even competing guilds from coming into the landscape. So the
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: dominance of these fungi are to ensure the ecosystems that
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: give lives to their progeny. The rule of natural selection
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: in life is reproduction. So everything steers towards reproduction. So
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: from an evolutionary biology point of view, what will that
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: organism do to help survive so it can reproduce? And
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: And reproduction through creating guilds of communities of the microbiome
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: using the mycelial network as the structural foundation of the
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: food web seems to be the name of the game here.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: So this honey mushroom, is that what it's called, that
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: lives in the Pacific Northwest, how is it killing these trees?
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: It's a root parasite. So it comes in and it
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: kills the trees. And I spend a lot of time
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: in the old growth forest and a lot of hiking.
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: I've always been wondering about meadows in the subalpine regions.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: There's all these subalpine forests. And then you come out
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: and there's these giant meadows. I suspect that this honey
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: mushroom is a meadow maker. It climaxes these trees. It
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: kills them. They then die. And then they grow saprophytically.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: But then it clears the canopy so the grasses land. Saprophytically?
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: What is that?
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: Saprophytic means it's growing on dead material. So first it's
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: a parasite. You mean the mushrooms.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: The mushrooms.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: First it's a parasite. Kills the tree. Then it's a
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: saprophyt or a saprobe. There's another word for it. It's
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: a decomposer. It breaks down that material. But as it
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: decomposes the wood, 30% of wood becomes water. So the
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: mycelium generates water. And so water lenses are being created.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: Now you have more sunlight, grasses, and flourish. And so
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: I suspect that these mushrooms are actually meadow makers, allowing
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: then the elk and the deer and marmots and whatnot,
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: to exist in those grassland environments as a way of
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: rebuilding the nitrogen source in the soil. So I think
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: these are over great, huge time scales. We have to
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: get away from the concept of our lifespan or even 100,
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: 200 years. We need to think in millennial terms, you know,
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: over many, many millennia.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: This is unbelievably fascinating. The idea that they're sort of
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the architects of their ecosystem.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: They're the architects of our existence, right? This is something that,
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: there's some really fantastic research that's come out in the
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: past two years. I'm a science ambassador for the AAAS,
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: the American Association of Advanced Science, so I am a
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: little bit out there, but I'm really happy that I
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: have so much scientific support these days. A lot of
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: things I've been talking about for 20 years are now
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: well-rooted and been proven. One of the things that has
• 18:22
  Speaker 2: been so fascinating to me, and I'm still wrapping my
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: mind around this, You know, the universe was created about 13.8
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: billion years ago from the Big Bang. The Earth coalesced
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: out of stardust about 4.5 billion. The earliest records of
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: life we have is about 3.8 billion years ago, single-celled organisms.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: But just recently in lava beds in South Africa, they
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: found mycelium infused through the lava 2.4 billion years ago. Now,
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: we split from fungi 650 million years ago. And then
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: in Brazil this past year, they found a fully intact,
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: apparently a fossilized mushroom published in Nature, which is a
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: very reputable scientific journal. And that one is 1.4 billion
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: years old. So the oldest multicellular organism in the fossil
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: record today is this fungus and lava in South Africa 2.4
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: billion years ago. A fully formed mushroom who had its
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: form was growing 1.4 billion years ago. We separated from
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: fungi 650 million years ago. Mushrooms have had their form
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: longer than we've had our form by more than a
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: billion years.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Here, Jamie just pulled it up on the screen here
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: so we could take a look at it.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: It's the one from Brazil.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: So this is the– Paul, is this the image that
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: you're familiar with?
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the one that has just been published
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: in the past– They have a great name that's a
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: tongue twister to pronounce. It's Gondwana agaricides magnificus.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Why do they do that? Do they do that to
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: make people like me feel stupid? They don't have to.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: No, they do that because graduate students want to publish
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: papers instead of getting to invent names.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: And so it looks better if you have a long
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Latin-sounding name.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: But think of that. Mushrooms had their form before we
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: had ours. These are elders. These are ancient organisms. These
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: are really the overlord underlords of our ecosystem. And I suspect,
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: and as these neural networks, they have more neural connections
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: in the mycelial mass, they're over a thousand acres than
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: we have in our brain. They are actually accumulating not
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: only genetic intelligence, but I think that as time goes on,
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: I hope that we'll be able to interface with them.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Because I think that there is many benefits of us
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: communicating with mycelium that can give us rapid responses to catastrophe.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: That's how they've evolved. And we're now the biggest walking
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: catastrophe that I know, walking across the planet. And we
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: need to engage these fungal allies for the benefits that
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: we need to put into play in order to prevent
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: the loss of biodiversity.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: It seems like a communication gap would be very hard
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: to bridge. The communication gap, I mean, if we really
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: did find a way to communicate in some form with mushrooms,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: like The concept of language, like you were talking about
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: just the idea of nature and intelligence and these words
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: that we have, that we have these sort of concrete
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: definitions in our head that don't really apply to some
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: things that are very, very confusing to us, like the
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: idea of fungal intelligence. The idea that you could somehow
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: or another understand the language that these things– we don't
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: even understand dolphin language, right?
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Well, one classic example, Japanese are so clever at this.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: There's a slime mold called Physarium Polycephalum. And this slime
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: mold is very, very good at navigating through mazes and challenges.
• 21:59
  Speaker 2: I mean, first, the food wins. The conservation of energy
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: is rewarded.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: So how do they set this up?
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: They put a little bit of it? They did several experiments.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: The most fun one is they— They designed a nutrient,
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: basically a nutrient like maize, replicating Tokyo in the Japanese
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: subway system. And so they started with Tokyo and they
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: put oats, which is a nutritional source. They inoculated what
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: is on this basically kind of agro map with all
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: the major cities, the nodes around Tokyo. And then each
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: of those nodes had a piece of oat on them.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: It was a source of nutrition. The main oat was
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: where Tokyo was. They inoculated it. And then they let
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: the slime mold then grow. And first it grew out randomly, exploratorily,
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: you know, just like you would do if you're a
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: hunter or something. You're hunting on the landscape looking for things.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: And then after about 28 hours, it reorganized itself. in
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: the most efficient way possible and reorganize the Japanese subway
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: system in a more efficient manner than it's designed today. Thus,
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: they said, not me, not Paul Stamets, this is a
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: demonstration of cellular intelligence. So this is the tip of
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: the proverbial mycelial iceberg. This has broad implications. And I
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: just want people to suspend their disbelief. And this goes into...
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: it actually evolution of human consciousness. And Terrence McKenna was
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: a good friend of mine.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: I love Terrence.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: I especially love them the last five years of his
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: life because he made fun of himself so much. Terrence, um, uh,
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: people took Terrence way too seriously in many levels, but
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: as his brother, Dennis, uh, which I think has been
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: on your show.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: A couple of times.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Dennis is a great, great ally, great scientist. But
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: you know, Dennis said, even if 10% of what Terrence
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: said was true, it's, it's frigging amazing. And, and, Terrence
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: and Dennis both came up with a stoned ape theory.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Now it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis. A hypothesis
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: is speculative but cannot necessarily be as not yet proven.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: proven with facts. So I disagree with them in saying
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis. But the hypothesis
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: of the stoned ape, which I think you've alluded to before,
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: is that with climate change and as the savannas increase
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: and our primate ancestors came out of the forest canopies,
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: they're tracking across the savannah. And if you're a hunter,
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: what do you look? You look for footsteps and you
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: look for scat. And the most significant fleshy mushroom going
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: out of poop in Africa, hippopotamus, elephant, deer, antelope, et cetera,
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: is Schlossbycubensis. It's a very large mushroom. You're hungry. You're
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: with your clan. You consume it. And then 20 minutes later,
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: you are catapulted in this extraordinary experience. Psilocybin substitutes as serotonin,
• 25:08
  Speaker 2: becomes a better neurotransmitter, activates neurogenesis. It causes new neurons
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: to form, new pathways of knowledge. So that's the stone-date hypothesis,
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: and it speaks to a mystery that the human brain...
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: basically the brain cavity doubled in size in about 2
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: million years. Some people say it's less than 200,000. Less
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: than 200,000 years? Homo sapiens arrived at 200,000 to 300,000
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: years ago. That's a big gap, right? It's a big gap. Well,
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: the science is like that. So you want to be
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: scientifically accurate here, I need to show the extreme margins
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: of what's been estimated. So if we accept 2 million
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: years that the, and it's shown in the fossil record,
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: this is true, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils are 300,000
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: years old now. But we have a suddenly doubling of
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: the human brain. And with that, our language centers increased
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: our ability to prognosticate, to plan. And there's no explanation
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: for this currently. And even though we may not be
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: able to prove it, I ask people to suspend their
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: disbelief for a second. Now, think of this. Our primate
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: ancestors are going across the savanna. They ingest these mushrooms
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: as a clan. Massive input for anyone who's eaten these mushrooms.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: Huge amounts of data is coming in. Fractal patterns, geometrical
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: landscapes occur. You have empathy. You have greater courage. You're
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: fighting a saber-toothed tiger. One day you have a fear
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: of it. We know now from neurogenesis and the extension
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: of the fear response that has been clinically proven, psilocybin
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: allows you to reset and have different neurological pathways to
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: respond to fear, overcoming the fear of conditioned response, potentially PTSD,
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: and there's a lot of research on this currently. But
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: this wouldn't happen one time with one hominid group. It
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: wouldn't happen two times, ten times. It would happen millions
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: and millions and millions and millions of times over millions
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: and millions of years. This leads to what I think
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: is called, that should be called epigenetic neurogenesis. We know
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: that there's a regeneration of neurons. We know that psilocybin
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: substitutes the serotonin. It opens the floodgates of the senses.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: You have a lot more data coming in. And we
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: know that you have the extinction of the fear response.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: So if you're the leader of your clan, you've had
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: this traumatic event, either war or cataclysm from Earthquakes, whatever
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: the case may be, or encounter a saber-toothed tiger, whatever.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: If you're the leader of that clan and you can
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: overcome your fear response, you have courage and you have empathy.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: Those are leadership skills. I think people should take note
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: of it. People like to follow leaders who are courageous
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: and yet kind. who they can trust, they'll have their
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: best interests in mind. So I think this propelled, I
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: think it's a lot, it's a very good explanation. It's
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: an unprovable hypothesis. But now we're at a junction and
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: we're ready for the next quantum leap in human consciousness.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: I think psilocybin should be looked upon as a nootropic vitamin.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: And there's a huge amount of interest in this. Johns
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: Hopkins University, as you probably well know, New York University, UCLA,
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: elsewhere in Europe, There's major clinical studies that have been
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: conducted in the past two years showing exactly what I'm
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: saying about overcoming fear response, neurogenesis, overcoming PTSD. This is
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: now medically quite seriously considered and something that I think
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: that we should explore under controlled settings. I'm not into
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: partying with psilocybin mushrooms. Damn. Yeah. You're going so good.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: I can understand the urge.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Ari Shaffir is going to be here in an hour
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: and a half, and he's the creator of Shroomfest. He's
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: going to be very upset with your idea that you
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: shouldn't party with it.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: Well, I think there's greater benefit to yourself and humanity.
• 29:12
  Speaker 2: I think these are serious tools.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: California has it. I'm sure you're probably aware. It's up
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: for legalization. Yeah.
• 29:21
  Speaker 2: I was really quite surprised by that. Yeah. Yeah, all
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: my work, and to put some caveats here, all my
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: work is covered by a Drug Enforcement Administration license. I've
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: published now four new species in the genus psilocybe, including
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: the most potent psilocybe mushroom in the world called psilocybe azurescens.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: And to be clear, folks, nature provides I don't. So
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: when I had my DEA license, I mean, everyone I
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: suspected was a DEA agent who came to me and
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: wanted to get some psilocybin.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you probably got set up a bunch of times.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: Numerous times. Did you matrix at all? To a point,
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: it was pretty funny. I had this one person who
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: offered me just huge amounts of money, and I played
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: with him. And I said, no, it's not enough. And
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: he offered me more and more money pretty soon after that. $ 200, 000, $ 300, 000.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: And he was writing all these coded letters. It was
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: obviously a DEA agent trying to set me up. And
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: finally he got really frustrated because I was playing with
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: a guy. I said, I'm tired of being set up
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: like this. I'm just going to play with this sucker.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: And so it finally came to a point and he
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: got really, really frustrated. He's going to get mad at me.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: He goes, well, how much money? I go, there's not
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: enough money on this planet for me to ever give
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: you a psilocybin mushroom, so give it up.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: So, but But even if you say that's not enough money,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: could that be taken as a negotiation?
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: Well, not enough money on the planet? I suppose some
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: aliens would come.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: You've got to have not enough money on the planet.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: Before not enough money, it was not enough money. Right.
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: Before that, it was totally– Oh, I suppose so, but
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: I never committed a criminal act.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: Right. But isn't it sort of like a conspiracy to.
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: I'm not a lawyer. I wouldn't have- I mean, you
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: have to keep things in context.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't play. Yeah. Maybe you're more of a courageous
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: person when it comes to that stuff than me.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: Well, at some point, I just got, frankly, pissed off.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: I'm sure. Enough of playing with me.
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: It's a waste of your time.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: I'm going to play with you, and I'm going to
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: reverse the table. But in any event, this is serious research.
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: And that's- It's something that, unfortunately, because it can be
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: marginalized by the party atmosphere and used as a party drug.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: There's a really amazing study that just came out about
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: five days ago. It's a big data study. 440,000 people, prisoners,
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: were surveyed over 10 years in the Department of Human
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: Health Services data bank. And they found amazing correlations. If
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: you had in this patient, in this prisoners, one experience
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: with psilocybin in your life, one experience, it reduced in
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: that population compared to the people who did not take
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: psilocybin mushrooms, an 18% reduction in burglary and larceny and
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: up to a 27% reduction in other crimes, including violent crimes.
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: So that's phenomenal. Actually, I got my numbers reversed. There's
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: 27% reduction in burglary 18% reduction in violent crime. Now
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: think of the damage, not only to the victims and
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: the victims' families, the court system, the lawyers, the collateral damage,
• 32:30
  Speaker 2: people being upset because they're being criminalized in prison for something,
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: you know, for merely possessing the soul side mushrooms or
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: something like that. But think of the return on investment.
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: A four to six hour experience creates a lifetime benefit
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: to society, reducing criminal activity, By 18 to 27%. This
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: is phenomenal. This is something that can help the health
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: of our human psyche, of our social system, of reducing
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: trauma throughout our entire society. It's time for us to
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: wake up and look at this in a much more
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: seasoned and intellectual way. fashion than we have before.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: More rational and not weighed down by the ideas of
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: mushrooms being a silly thing.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: And so, I have a few pet peeves, and I
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: understand why people want to use them, but the word
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: shroom just drives me crazy.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: Shroom fest.
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: And the shroom fest. With all due respect, I understand...
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: But let's not be children about this. Let's be adults.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: You're a serious person. I get it.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: I'm also a non-serious person on many levels, but I
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: know when it comes to something that is so powerful,
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: that is so important, let's not jeopardize its use medically
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: and for the benefit of society in the future by
• 33:52
  Speaker 2: appealing to the lowest common denominator. Let's be adults in the.
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: Room on this. I agree with you to a certain extent,
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: but I also think that It's got to be incredibly
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: frustrating for a guy like you that has the kind
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: of information that you have bouncing around your head in
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: relationship to the way the rest of the world views it. See,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: to a person like myself, who I don't know nearly
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: as much as you know, but I know quite a
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: bit more than the average person when it comes to
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: psilocybin and mushrooms or Amanita muscaria or Terence McKenna's ideas,
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: the shroom fest doesn't bother me. But for a serious
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: researcher like yourself, it's got to be like, ah, you're
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: a part of the problem. Right? You're making it silly.
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: It's the Timothy Leary problem.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: Right, right.
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: It held back their bona fide research in this subject
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: for years. Explain that, please. There's a movement right now
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: to move psilocybin from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. Schedule
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: 1 means an illegal drug that has no medical benefits.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: Schedule 2 means it's a drug that has medical benefits.
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: So there's a serious movement going on right now within
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: the FDA to have it be recategorized because in the
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: words of FDA Researchers I know, one arm's length removed,
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: is that they've never seen anything with such a strong
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: safety profile that gives so much benefit at so little
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: cost for such a long time. This is a drug
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: in a category of its own. This is really important.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: So let's not jeopardize it.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: It is really important, but you're never going to stop
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: kids from calling it shrooms.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, and I want to give a pass here.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: I want to give a pass. And the coming of age,
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: you know, when I was 16 to, you know, the age,
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: you know, 22, 24, it's the coming of age ceremony. Now,
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: I'm going to tell you something that's very deeply personal,
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: and it's very significant in my life. I had a
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: congenital stuttering habit. I could not speak. I could not
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: look at Joe Rogan in the eye right now without,
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: you know, I had like the King speech. You've seen
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: the movie exactly like that, but worse in my case.
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: I went through six years of speech therapy. I was
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: interviewed for special education. I grew up in a small
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: town called Columbiana, Ohio, and I could not speak. Now,
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: the type of stuttering habit that I have and had,
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: I don't stutter to animals. I had pet snapping turtles
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: and I would talk to them all the time. and
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: I don't stutter when I sing. But I could not
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: elocute without stuttering constantly. And please, people out there, don't
• 36:23
  Speaker 2: finish a stutterer's sentence. The type of stutterer category that
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: I have been in is that we would try to
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: trick our brain with a prepositional or adverbial phrase halfway
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: through the sentence that we're stuck on because we're thinking
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: three or four sentences ahead, and the only way you
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: can do it is trick the brain. So I had
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: to come up with a new neurological pathway to trick
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: my brain so I could get out of my stuttering
• 36:46
  Speaker 2: rhythm that was just repetition I couldn't get out of.
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: And then one day, before I'd ever had psilocybin mushrooms,
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: I bought some, a bag of them, and I thought,
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: I had no information. I just bought the bag for
• 37:01
  Speaker 2: about 25 bucks, and I went out for a walk
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: in the woods in Ohio. And there was a beautiful
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: oak tree that I used to climb at the very
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: top of the tallest hill. In Ohio, we don't have mountains.
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: We have hills. And it was in the summertime. And
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: so I thought setting is important. I knew that. So
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: I went for a walk. And I ate. The bag,
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: the whole bag when I was walking.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: How many ounces do you think?
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: Well, it was about, I know it was about a
• 37:27
  Speaker 2: half an ounce to an ounce. So, I mean, yeah. So,
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: we're talking, this is the elevator ride beyond the 10th floor,
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: you know.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: So, 8 to 16 grams? Is that what you're talking about?
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: It was probably on the order of about 20 grams,
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: you know.
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: So, yeah.
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: But I didn't know I had no one to so
• 37:46
  Speaker 2: but I knew but I went to this my destination
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: was this tree right so I walked and walked and
• 37:53
  Speaker 2: I came at the tree and I was eating the
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: mushrooms and then I started feeling the effects and so
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: it was great because I was climbing the tree and
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: I was getting higher in the tree and higher in
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: my brain whoa that seems like a terrible thing to
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: do and I climbed to the top of the tree
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: and this beautiful landscape but it was there was these
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: in the summertime there was these boiling black clouds on
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: the horizon and I go oh that's cool And so
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: this big summer storm was coming, and the clouds were
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: dark and boiling, and they were coming close, and I
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: could hear the thunder, and then I'm going higher and higher,
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: and the winds pick up, and the trees started moving,
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: and I started to get vertigo because I was like, oh,
• 38:29
  Speaker 2: my God, I'm getting so freaking high on these mushrooms.
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: And so I grabbed the tree and held on the tree,
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: and it became my axis mundi into the earth. And
• 38:37
  Speaker 2: then the lightning started coming closer, and the lightning started
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: coming really close, and the lightning would hit, and I'd go.
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: I saw fractals for the first time. The atmosphere became liquid.
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: I saw these liquid waves of these multidimensional geometrical patterns everywhere.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: And the sparks of lightning would just create this amazing
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: crescendo of secondary, tertiary fractals all around me. And I
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: was like, oh, my. It was amazing. I said, this
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: is what I read about. So the storm came and
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: lightning strikes were all around me and I was washed
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: with rain and I was up there and I felt
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: in touch with Gaia, the universe. My heart opened up.
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: I felt one with all. I was like, oh my gosh,
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: this is such a powerful spiritual experience. I had no idea.
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: No matter what anyone has read, as you probably know,
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: it cannot describe the experience. And then it dawned on me,
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: wait a second, Stamets, you're on the tallest tree on
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: the tallest hill for miles in the middle of a
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: lightning storm. This is not the best place to be.
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: And so I realized I could be killed up here.
• 39:39
  Speaker 2: Suddenly I had a reality rush like, you know.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: Or you could turn into a god.
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: Imagine that.
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: Like a comic book, high on 20 grams of mushrooms,
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: hug at a tree, the lightning comes, it hits you
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: and maybe you were the savior. Maybe you need to
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: get back to that tree. Maybe you're the chosen one.
• 40:00
  Speaker 2: So I, so this, I was, you know, I, it
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: was an incredibly spiritual and wonderful experience, but I also
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: had the fear and this comes, comes with the hero's journey.
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: You know, you always have the, the dark side, you
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: always have not just the light side, but this counterbalance
• 40:17
  Speaker 2: of the dark side. And then I realized, oh my gosh,
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: I'm going to, I could die up here. And I said, well,
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: I don't die, Stamets. What's, what are your issues? This,
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: this gets something out of this experience. And I said,
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: this stuttering habit is ridiculous and I, I'm not stupid.
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: And so I said to myself, stop stuttering now, stop
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: stuttering now. I said that dozens, hundreds of times over
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: and over and over. And fortunately the storms went past
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: and held onto the tree and soaking wet. I came
• 40:48
  Speaker 2: out of the tree and walked back to where I
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: was living. And then the next day I got up,
• 40:54
  Speaker 2: I didn't see anybody. And I was walking along on
• 40:57
  Speaker 2: this path and a sidewalk. And there's a lady that
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: I really liked a lot. And, uh, but she was
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: always attracted to the super self-assured jocks and things like that.
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: She was actually very kind and sweet, but I didn't
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: want to stare at her in the eyes because I
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: would stutter. And it's humiliating for us So the more
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: humiliating us stutterers feel, the more we stutter. And so
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: it's a really slippery slope, and so I would avoid
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: eye contact. And so for the first time, she walked
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: towards me. She said, good morning, Paul. How are you?
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: She was always so nice to me, and I was
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: terrified because I would embarrass myself. And I looked at
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: her straight in the eyes, and I said, I'm doing fine.
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: How are you? And I stopped stuttering in one day. Whoa!
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: And this speaks to now what has been medically proven
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: is that we can reset the neurology of the human
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: brain through neurogenesis. I believe that experience allowed me to
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: map new neurological pathways that allows me to elocute in
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: a way that I could not elocute before. Now, just
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: to be truthful here, if I drink a lot of alcohol,
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: I'm in a loud bar because us stutterers, you're a
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: martial artist, I've been a martial artist all my life,
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: and we have peripheral consciousness. So if someone comes through
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: a door into the bar and I'm looking at you,
• 42:15
  Speaker 2: I know that they've come through. So this hyper alertness
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: that us martial artists have of knowing things in the
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: circumference around us, in the peripheral environment, is distracting. So
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: if I drink a lot and there's a lot of
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: noise and a lot of people coming in and out
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: of doors, I'm hypersensitive to intruders. And then that's what
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: I'll start stuttering if a person's talking to me, asking me,
• 42:38
  Speaker 2: how do you grow mushrooms? It's like filling a well
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: with a teaspoon. Because I'm worried about the guy who
• 42:42
  Speaker 2: just came through the door over there who looks like
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: he may not be a safe person to be in
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: this environment right now. So there's a time that I'll
• 42:51
  Speaker 2: only give 10% of my brain to communicating to the
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: person in front of me. My 90% of my brain
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: is hyper aware in the circumstantial environment around me.
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: Time for another trip to the tree to cure that
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: last 10%. Yeah.
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: But that's my personal story.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: That's amazing.
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: It's not going to work for everyone.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: But it worked for you. That's what's important.
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: It worked for me, and I was at Crater Lake Lodge,
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: and a waiter came up to me, and he goes,
• 43:18
  Speaker 2: he's about 17, 18 years of age, a busboy, actually.
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: And my wife and I, my wife looked at me,
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: and I looked at her, and I said, should I? Yeah,
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: go ahead. So I told this busboy the same story. Now,
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: this guy was totally straight, looked like he was a
• 43:33
  Speaker 2: super conservative busboy. from a super conservative family. And we
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: told him this whole story and his eyes were wide
• 43:38
  Speaker 2: open because when you meet other stutterers and you talk
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: to them, they're really desperate for a solution. So I
• 43:44
  Speaker 2: never knew what happened to this young busboy, but I
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: think I changed his life forever.
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: I hope you did. I had a good friend growing
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: up and his brother was severely stricken with it to
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: the point where he would have to wince, close his
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: eyes and look down when he would talk to you
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: and he just couldn't get over it.
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: But he won't stutter to animals. It won't stutter when
• 44:04
  Speaker 2: he sings.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: So what do you think it is? What is happening?
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: Do you recall? Well, there's several things. It could be
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: trauma when you're a child combined with neuropathy. I was
• 44:16
  Speaker 2: told by one psychiatrist who was a specialist in this
• 44:20
  Speaker 2: at a conference that there is a theory that in
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: the seventh or eighth month in the womb, your neurons
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: failed to make all the connections that it needed to.
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: So that makes sense to me because that's why I
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: would reroute with prepositional or adverbial phrases to try to
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: jump around the little habitual loop that I'm in. But
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: I think this speaks to increasing intelligence. And we all
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: will suffer from some form of dementia. And neuropathy occurs.
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: There is a really wonderful safe and legal mushroom to
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: use that leads to neurogenesis. And that's called lion's mane.
• 44:57
  Speaker 2: And lion's mane is a cascading white icicle mushroom. Edible
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: and choice mushroom they sell in the stores. What stores?
• 45:05
  Speaker 2: Grocery stores. Really?
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: All over, yeah.
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: Lion's Mane, they're called, they have various brand names. One
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: that I love is called Pom Pom Blanc. It looks
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: like pom poms from cheerleaders. And Lion's Mane contains a
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: unique group of compounds.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: Wow, beautiful.
• 45:19
  Speaker 2: Called aranacines and haricinones. And these regenerate myelin on the
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: axons of nerves. And so... This is a mushroom. Kawagishi
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: discovered this in 1994, a Japanese researcher, and he postulated
• 45:34
  Speaker 2: it as a potential preventative or treatment for Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy,
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: et cetera.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: Do you take it?
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: I take it every day.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: Every day?
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: Every day.
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: You take it in raw form?
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: I take it in capsules. Oh.
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: So you buy it?
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: We have an.
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: Extensive product line.
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: You do? Yes. How do you get to that?
• 45:55
  Speaker 2: Hostdefense.com.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: Hostdefense.com. Why host defense?
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: That's part of your innate immunity response, supporting your immunity.
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: But our main business is at fungi.com. And I registered
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: that name myself. I'm kind of proud of that. It
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: cost me $ 25.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: 1994. Wow, you were on ahead of the ball.
• 46:15
  Speaker 2: Winterize yourself. But lion's mane is a safe mushroom to consume.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: There are several clinical studies out on it treating mild
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: cognitive dysfunction. But there's two mouse studies that I think
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: are quite illustrative. And this is translational medicine. This translates
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: from mice experiments to humans. We already know that it
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: has aspects of neurogenesis. When you go into Alzheimer's, a
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: state of Alzheimer's, which is a big complex, but one
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: of the characteristics is the formation of amyloid plaques. Demyelination
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: of the neurons, myelin transmits the neural signals. Demyelination your
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: outer sheath on the neurons is interrupted by amyloid plaques
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: that then prevent neurotransmission. So the experiments with the mice,
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: which I think are so interesting, was one experiment was
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: the maze experiment where the mice were put into an
• 47:14
  Speaker 2: arena and they went out a corridor and they went
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: one way in the corridor, they'd find food, the other
• 47:19
  Speaker 2: way there's no food. Well, very quickly the mice learned
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: You know, you go out the corridor, go to the left,
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: you find food. They injected it then with a toxic
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: polypeptide that induces amyloid plaque formation that is a neurotoxin.
• 47:33
  Speaker 2: Very quickly, after two weeks or so, the mice developed neuropathy.
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: They got confused. They couldn't remember which way to go.
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: It randomized. Upon giving these mice again mushrooms for a
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: few weeks, they nearly renormalized. Upon sacrificing the mice... In
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: the first part of the experiment, they saw the amyloid
• 47:54
  Speaker 2: plaques and the demyelination. The second part of the experiment,
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: of course, another subset of mice, they found that the
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: myelin regrew and the amyloid plaque had resolved.
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: This is post-mortem. You say sacrifice your euphemism for killing
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: them and cutting their brains open.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: You're basically cutting off a representative sample. You sacrifice them.
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: You determine, yeah, that's representative of the population. Now, the
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: remaining population is alive. They fed them the mushrooms, and
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: they found that they— regained neurological function. The other experiment,
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: which I find is even more fun, is, and this
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: was done in Japan, they put like 100 mice in
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: an arena and they put a toy in the middle
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: of the cage. All the mice got excited. They came
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: up and sniffed it and smelled it and they got
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: really excited. And they sat there with counters to measure
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: the number of points of contact. How many points of
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: contact do the mice have exploring a new toy? So
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: they got a really good baseline, hundreds of data points.
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: And they did the same thing. Then they introduced this cyclopeptide,
• 48:55
  Speaker 2: this neurotoxin. And the mice then, after a while, were uninterested,
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: didn't have imagination, no curiosity. They put in a new toy.
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: They were disinterested. They did the same thing. Now, even
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: their full-blown dementia-like symptoms gave them lion's mane mushrooms. And
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: after a few weeks, when they put in a new toy,
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: they came back to near normal levels. Upon sacrificing the mice,
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: they found that the amyloid plaque had resolved. And Mylon
• 49:19
  Speaker 2: had reached out to me. and neurogenesis had occurred. This
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: is a smart mushroom. Now, the tragedy that we face,
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: I believe, as a society is we have people like yourself,
• 49:30
  Speaker 2: people like me. We're all going to suffer through neuropathy.
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: We have a lifetime of a body intellect of knowledge
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: that we're going to start losing. So what is the
• 49:39
  Speaker 2: loss to society of our elders forgetting, not remembering? So
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: I think this is something that's really extraordinarily exciting. It's
• 49:47
  Speaker 2: not patentable. The drug companies have no interest in this.
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: But this is probably the number one thing that people
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: can do, in my mind, to not only preserve cognitive function,
• 49:59
  Speaker 2: but to expand it. Now, I personally would love to
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: see it legal to stack them both together. Stacking psilocybin...
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: with lion's mane. And I think that stacking thing and
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: then combining it with vitamin D3. Now, I suggest vitamin D3, niacin,
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: because those of you who've had a niacin flush, you know,
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: 200 milligrams of niacin or more, you get red, you
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: get itchy. And neuropathy typically is presented at the fingertips,
• 50:28
  Speaker 2: at the end of your toes and your fingers and
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: your peripheral nervous system. As you have neuropathy, the nerve
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: endings begin to die backwards. So my idea here is
• 50:38
  Speaker 2: because there are different receptors being activated by psilocybin than
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: with the aranasins from lion's mane. If you stack lion's
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: mane with psilocybin mushrooms with niacin, the advantage is, and
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: this is hypothetical, but this is something I think is
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: well worth testing, is that niacin can help drive the
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: neurogenic benefits of psilocybin and aranasins to the end of
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: the peripheral nervous system. So we actually are planning right
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: now a clinical study in Oregon with lion's mane mushrooms
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: The physicians who've looked at the research, which is robust,
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: are convinced that it's worthy, and they have their own funding.
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: So we're going to do an N of 30 study
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: is what we hope to do, 30 patients, and we
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: hope to begin that study in the next year.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: It would be phenomenal to see how that would affect
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: people with CTE, people like football players, boxers, people with
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: brain damage. Across the board.
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Across the board.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: The benefits, and this is something that, When you're depressed,
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: you're not creative. And your immune system is depressed as well.
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: You're psychologically, emotionally depressed and you're not as creative. When
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: you are happy, you are creative and your immune system
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: is better. So this could be fundamental to disease mitigation
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: across the board. So this is some of the, this is,
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: there are so many different examples like this where mushrooms
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: need to be advanced to the front stage of consideration
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: by serious scientists And give up your mycophobia or even
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: what I call xylophobia, the irrational fear of psilocybin mushrooms,
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: and look upon these with new eyes and drop your
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: prejudices and just look at it as a serious scientific analysis.
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: Wow. How is this received in the general scientific community?
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: Is there skepticism?
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: Well, I love my skeptics because unless they're prejudiced against you,
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: and some people are, you can never convince them. But scientists,
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: when they see the data sets and they see there's
• 52:41
  Speaker 2: a dozen or more publications with scientists without commercial interests
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: who have done this independently, then it's being taken very seriously.
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: So the whole medical community right now You know, I
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: speak at a number of medical conferences, TEDMED, American Academy
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: of Dermatology, keynote speakers, you know, many medical conferences. And
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: it's great because I can take people who are totally
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: skeptical and most of them walk out of that room convinced.
• 53:12
  Speaker 2: And why shouldn't we think that fungi are sources of medicines?
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, penicillin may have tipped World War II in
• 53:19
  Speaker 2: our favor. So the Japanese and Germans did not have penicillin,
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: even though Alexander Fleming discovered it in 1928. In 1941,
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: a lab tech researcher went to a market in Chicago,
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: found a moldy cantaloupe, and Alexander Fleming's strain of penicillin
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: was too weak. It couldn't be commercialized. This lady researcher
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: who found this moldy cantaloupe found a penicillium strain that
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: was 200 times more potent. And as a result of that,
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: in war, most of the casualties died from infections. And
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: so the British and the English and the Americans had penicillin.
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: The Germans and the Japanese did not. And so there's
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: a great NPR analysis on this, on the history of penicillin.
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: And it is one of the major factors in helping
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: tilt the balance in the favor of of the Allied
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: powers against the Axis powers. So concerned were the researchers
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: in England, they impregnated their clothes with spores of this
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: mold strain. So if their laboratories were bombed or they
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: were captured, if one of them escaped, they could regenerate
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: the culture from their clothing.
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: Whoa. Wow.
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: And this speaks to panspermia. We're all carrying microbiomes of fungi.
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: The fact that you and I are here together... means
• 54:49
  Speaker 2: that I have now inoculated you with my microbiome of
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: selected fungi. So, Joe, you are now a vector.
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: Whoa. Awesome.
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: Congratulations.
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: Now, the frustrating aspects of, what is the word that
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: you use, fungiphobia? Is that what you used?
• 55:07
  Speaker 2: Mycophobia.
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: Mycophobia. The frustrating aspects are, first of all, prohibition, right?
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: The sweeping psychedelic act of 1970. that made psilocybin mushrooms illegal, right?
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: And then on top of it, the commercial pharmaceutical industry,
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: which doesn't want to have anything to do with anything
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: that it can't patent and has so many doctors and
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: so many researchers in its pocket. So you have two
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: issues there, right? You have one issue that people, which
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: is obviously why you don't like the word shroom, people
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: think of mushrooms as a party drug of like being silly,
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: You know, freaking out, doing something stupid, regrettable actions, and
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: then afterwards going, wow, we got so crazy. Thinking of
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: it as a frivolous sort of thing that you would
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: engage in. Whereas what you're trying to do is show
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: the absolute hard science. Do you feel that this absolute
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: hard science is, I mean, you must feel that it's
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: unfairly inhibited and hindered.
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: It has been, but there's been a tidal change in
• 56:19
  Speaker 2: pharmacology of the use of psilocybin and its utility as
• 56:26
  Speaker 2: a therapeutic agent. There's a tidal change. I think now
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: there's over 700 patients have gone through Johns Hopkins clinical
• 56:36
  Speaker 2: trials for things like end-of-life depression, PTSD. There are studies
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: out on treating alcoholics and drug addicts. So, and this
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: is important to communicate to people, and John Hopkins' study
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: in particular, Dr. Roland Griffiths, a great, great scientist who's
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: been running and championing these studies, came up with a
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: very interesting series of analyses. Some of the take-home points
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: were only 70% of the people described the psilocybin experience
• 57:09
  Speaker 2: therapeutically under controlled settings at John Hopkins. with a very
• 57:13
  Speaker 2: high dose of psilocybin as being beneficial.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: Only 70%.
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: 70%. 30% of them saying, I didn't like that. But
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: in a retrospective study, 14 months to two years later,
• 57:24
  Speaker 2: the 70% of the people who said it was a
• 57:27
  Speaker 2: beneficial experience still described it as one of the most
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: significant beneficial experiences and spiritual experiences of their lifetime. And
• 57:33
  Speaker 2: interviewing their friends, their spouses, they saw a permanent residual
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: effect from the benefits of the experience. They were nicer people.
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: They're nicer to get along. They're less prone to anger.
• 57:47
  Speaker 2: They had many values that we would cherish as an
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: improved community of individuals. The 30% of the people who
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: had a native experience, the negativity of the experience did
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: not extend beyond the experience themselves. So they didn't have
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: collateral damage where we had collateral benefit. So the positive
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: people saw it as a positive experience in the memory
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: of the experience. This is so cool. The memory of
• 58:12
  Speaker 2: the experience kept them optimistic, hopeful, and they felt benefits
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: from just remembering the experience. The people who had a
• 58:21
  Speaker 2: negative experience, they just wouldn't do that again. So these
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: mushrooms are obviously not for everyone. But for the people
• 58:28
  Speaker 2: who do benefit, they benefit substantially.
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: Don't you feel that a lot of the people that
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: have those negative experiences, at least from my understanding, a
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: lot of it are people that have some serious issues.
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: that they're not dealing with, and ego problems, and the
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: mushrooms expose that, and they try to wrestle the mushroom. Absolutely.
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: I think that's very well put. I think that's a
• 58:50
  Speaker 2: big issue. Some people are afraid of their inner self.
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: You can't paint the canvas black and white. We're a
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: big spectrum of complex personality traits. And what happens to
• 59:04
  Speaker 2: somebody when they're two years old, five years old, what
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: trauma they experienced. You know, it's very complex to be
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: able to make these statements. But I think as a group,
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: there are some people who are on the edge and
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: they may not control their innermost emotions and they're afraid
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: of that in normal state of consciousness. So they're afraid
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: they might lose their control.
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, I mean, I've had personally some terrifying psychedelic experiences,
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: but the way I've gotten through them is just to
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: give in, just to give in. And for a person
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: like myself who's kind of a control freak, especially when
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: I was younger, it's a hard thing to do just
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: because you're like, no, no, no, I'm going to be fine. No, no, no,
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: fuck this. You know, I'm going to, no, I don't
• 59:45
  Speaker 1: like where this is going. I'm going to stop this
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: right now. I'm going to put a halt to this.
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: I'm going to bring myself back to sobriety. Like, it's impossible.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: It's not going to happen. So you have to figure out.
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: How to just let go and how to just like
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: really let go and trust the mushroom or the DMT
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: or whatever it is that you're on to take you
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: on this ride and you'll be okay when it's over.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: And if you can't do that, that's the bad trip.
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: And I've seen a lot of people have bad trips.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: Close friends.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: We are the casualty of the fact that we don't
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 2: have an infrastructure tradition in our societies like First Peoples
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: and Native Americans do. They have set up a structure.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: They have a tradition. Shamanic tradition. Shamanic tradition, rituals, elders,
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: they've done this for a long time. They have set
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: and setting down. They know how to treat these powerful
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 2: medicines in the right context.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: And we lack that. Did you know that mushrooms were
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: specifically banned from beer in the Bavarian Beer Act of 1516? Whoa.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: And mushrooms and henbane and other plants were used in meads,
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 2: psychoactive beers, and And celebrated by people practicing pagan religions
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: in Europe in the forest. And the struggle between, I believe, Christianity,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 2: monotheism versus polytheism and nature-based religions, there was a collision course.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: And then under pressure of the church, they banned the
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: addition of these plants that could be your gateway to
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 2: God because the church wanted to be in between you
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 2: and God. They wanted to get the tithings. They wanted
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: to be your portal and control access to the divine.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: And so these mushrooms are looked upon as being specifically
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: a threat to monotheism and Christianity. So the Bavarian Beer
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 2: Act banned mushrooms.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: That's incredible. Terrence had some pretty interesting ideas about that.
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: Terrence McKenna did. One of the things that he said
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: that he believed that as the climate changed and some
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: mushrooms became less and less available, they started preserving them
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: in honey because you can preserve things in honey. And
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: that in preserving things in honey, you also run into
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: the possibility of fermented honey. And then fermented honey becoming mead,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: you go into more of an alcohol culture than a
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: psychedelic culture, which is really like on the opposite end
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: of the spectrum. Alcohol culture is loosened inhibitions, wild behavior,
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: less thought of the consequences of your actions, less introspective thinking,
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: much more chaos, right? and that he believes that this
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: has probably resulted in some sort of a shift, or
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: he believed, rather, before he passed, that it resulted in
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: some sort of a shift from these more communal mushroom-worshiping
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: cultures to what you saw in the Inquisition and some
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: of the more chaotic times in history.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: I would respectfully disagree with the second part of that analysis.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: Not what you're saying, but what Terrence would have been saying.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: Mushroom being preserved in honey is a way of preventing
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 2: them from rotting. Right.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: You don't think that had anything to do with mead?
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 2: Well, I think it did have something to do with mead. Right.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 2: But the amount of alcohol being produced versus the dose
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: that you would get. It seemed to me the psilocybin
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 2: dose would be so much more powerful than the small
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: amount of alcohol you'd be drinking.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: Am I misrepresenting what he was saying?
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: No, I don't think so. I think you have a...
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 2: So you just disagree with his initial idea? Yeah, and
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 2: that's okay. Terrence was a very smart guy, and I still...
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 2: appreciate and love him.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: Well, he had wandering thoughts, and they were amazing.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: Well, his time wave zero was totally BS.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: Well, that was crazy.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 2: That was crazy. He had the end of time occurring
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 2: on his birthday. I go, don't you think that's a
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: little egocentric?
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: Well, he also had some strange sort of a computer program,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: and I've tried to follow it many, many times, some
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: of the lectures that he gave on the computer program
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: that represented time wave zero. The idea was, for people interested,
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: he just thought there was going to come a point
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: of ultimate novelty, and Somehow or another, conveniently, he had
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: that point coinciding with both his birthday and the end
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: of the Mayan calendar, right?
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah. His birthday was December 21st, 2012 as well?
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: I think so.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: Somewhere in that area.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It would be a better thing to celebrate. That's
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 2: totally egotistical. I mean, I love Darren, but he basically
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 2: got the math to conform to the convenience of his birthday.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 2: So it's like... Whatever.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: We're all guilty of being human.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, even the great ones.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, and he was a great, he was one
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: of my favorite people in terms of like listening to
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: his recordings. Do you ever listen to Psychedelic Salon?
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: Amazing podcast.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 2: One of the best articulators of the English language I've
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 2: ever heard.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah, I agree. And as is his brother.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: Every time his brother, which brings me back to the
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: stoned ape theory. One of the things that his brother
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: talked about, and maybe you could elaborate on this, was
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: the impact that psilocybin has on the creation of language.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: And he thinks that the very pathways that you were discussing,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: that psilocybin sort of empowers, that that may very well
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: have been how human beings started elaborating on language.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 2: Oh, I think he's correct on that because glossolalia. And
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 2: we know that neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: What is glossolalia?
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: It is the ability to speak in eloquent languages and
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 2: new words, languaging. your ability to language is increased under
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 2: the experience of psilocybin. Speaking of neurogenesis, and exactly what
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: we've been talking about, is that basically your hippocampus is
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: your center for learning and memory. And this is why
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 2: the mice got better, because neurogenesis was occurring in the hippocampus.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 2: And so they regained their memory, and they were able
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 2: to learn. And so, yes, I think the neurogenesis not
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 2: only occurs in the hippocampus, but I think it can
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: also occur in the peripheral nervous system. I have an
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: extraordinarily powerful story that I would like to tell about neurogenesis.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: And it was from a good friend of mine named
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: Bill Webb. He lived in Big Sur, California. He was
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 2: a friend of Ansel Adams and Henry Miller. He wrote
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: Tropic of Capricorn, whatever it was. In the 60s, this
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: is a big part of the movement in the 60s
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: and 70s. And Ansel Adams is a very famous photographer.
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 2: And Bill Webb was a mentor to me. I met
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 2: him when I was around 20 years of age. I
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: wrote my first book, Philosophy of Mushrooms and Our Allies.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: You wrote your first book at 20?
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: Actually, when I was 18.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: You bad motherfucker.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 2: It was the weirdest. I mean, I haven't told anyone
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: this in 30 years. But I went up to a
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 2: place called Montana Books in Seattle, and I had my manuscript.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: And I walked into the bookstore because I was told
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 2: Montana Books was kind of an avant-garde book publisher in
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 2: the early 1970s. And so I was told to go
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 2: up there, and I made an appointment. And I go in.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: I'm meeting with a publisher. And he goes, listen, this
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 2: is an interesting little field guide you wrote, but this
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: is not our market. You really need a book representative.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: You need an agent. And he said, the best agent
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 2: I know by far is Bill Webb. But I haven't
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: seen Bill Webb in two years. But, you know, you
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 2: really need to see Bill Webb. And when he said
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: those words, the door opened, a little bell rang, and
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: in walked Bill Webb. It was like the publisher goes,
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 2: this is freaking crazy, you know. So Bill Webb and
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 2: I became tightly bonded. He was a father figure to me.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 2: He was in his 70s when I met him. So
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 2: Bill and I went down to Big Sur and we
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 2: tripped together. It was a great mentoring, you know, father-son relationship.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: And Bill and I became very tight. And then Bill
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: was about 82 years of age. And he calls me
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 2: up and he says, Paul, I have to tell you
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 2: something that's so important. And I want you to listen.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 2: So do you understand, Paul? I go, yeah, Bill, how
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 2: are you doing? He goes, well, I'm not doing too well.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 2: I'm losing my sight. I'm losing my hearing and getting
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 2: old sucks. I said, but I want to tell you
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: something that's really important. You know, great, Bill. I said,
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: tell me. He said, no, Paul, I want you to
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 2: Absolutely swear to me you'll tell this to other people.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 2: I go, got it, Bill. And I'm like, okay, Bill.
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: I made the promise. What is it? He goes, okay,
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 2: I've had this freaking hearing aid, and I hate it.
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 2: I can't hear the birds or the waves breaking on
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 2: the beach. And that's a big part of the Big
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: Sur experience. I lived above the cliffs of Big Sur.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 2: And I said, well, how does this relate? And he goes, well,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: I did it. a five-gram dose of Cubensis. That's the
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: hero's journey for people who are listening. Five grams is it,
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 2: you know, you're on the floor. And he was on
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 2: his deck of his house, and he noticed that he
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 2: didn't need his hearing aid. He could hear the birds
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 2: and the waves and things like that. And he's laying
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: there just, you know, he's like 80, in the mid-80s
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: at that point, and he's just like having this incredibly
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: blissful experience. He's coming to reconcile his own mortality, the
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: fact that he's going to die. He's thinking about his life,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 2: and he's kind of dreaming in that dreamscape, and he
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: hears click, click, click, click, click, click, click. he looks
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 2: around and he goes what's that noise he shakes his
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 2: ear maybe something in his ear and it's click click
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 2: click click click click click he looks around And he said,
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 2: he was driving me crazy. I go, where is the
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: sound coming from? And he finally looked over, and it
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: was ants walking on the deck near his head. He
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: could hear their footsteps. Neurogenesis.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: Jesus Christ.
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: And this is an easily measurable metric. From a psilocybin experience,
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 2: while he was fully on the experience, he said he
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 2: did not believe. uses hearing aid for three or four days.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 2: Now I've mentioned this.
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: Why don't you just do mushrooms again and keep the
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: hearing aid on?
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: Well, that's basically, he ran out of Cubensis. And so
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 2: he had to put his hearing aid on. He was
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: asking me for Cubensis and I said, I'm sorry, I
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 2: can't provide it to you. So I've mentioned this now
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 2: to several of the clinical researchers who have DEA license
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 2: who are doing clinical research. This is an easily measurable metric.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: As people are fully in these sessions, they could be
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: giving them auditory stimulation to see if the auditory nerve
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: is undergoing neurogenesis. And so this is something that I
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 2: think that can be incorporated in the clinical studies to
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 2: see if this is true. But Bill was emphatic. And
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: when Bill Webb spoke, he had an enormous gravitas. This
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 2: guy was a serious intellectual. So I think this is
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 2: an N of one study, you know, one individual. But
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 2: I think this is something that medical researchers should pay
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 2: attention to.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: What do you think could possibly regenerate anything that quickly though?
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: Like how could it happen so quickly that during a
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: four hour trip?
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 2: Because they're like nodes of crossing and there's an interconnectedness
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: that occurs. And there's a great graphic, um, which I
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 2: didn't send you in advance, um, showing this is your brain, uh,
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: without psilocybin, this is your brain with psilocybin. And there's
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 2: a massive amount of neural connections that are occurring. So
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 2: I think, um, you know, uh, Just like water chooses
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 2: the path of least resistance, I think that neurologically, if
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 2: there is a neurological pathway that can help you as
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 2: a species, as an individual, survive, should there be a
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: saber-toothed tiger on the horizon, then I think that the
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 2: economy of energy in nature would reward the neurological pathways
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 2: that are most likely to lead to your survival. So
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: I think that neurogenesis across the brain occurred just like
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: me with my stuttering, and it was another neurological pathway.
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 2: But in Bill's case, when he lost his access to
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 2: those mushrooms, the neuropathy became more resonant and prominent.
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: And so we're looking at these images. Amazing. Jamie's the best.
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: We're looking at these images, and could you explain to
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: us what these are? This is your brain on magic mushrooms.
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this is exactly opposite of... of Nancy Reagan's mantra here. Yeah,
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 2: this is.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: You can push this up to your face.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 2: Okay, the placebo is on the left. This is your
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: normal representation of interconnectedness between the nodes of your brain.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: So try to explain this to people. Most of the
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: people are just listening rather than viewing this.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 2: Okay, so the one on the left, it basically shows...
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 2: connections between neuronal nodes that may be on the order
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 2: of 40 or 50 different nodes of crossing. The one
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 2: on the right with psilocybin is literally in the hundreds.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 2: And the nodes of crossing not only are more of them,
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: but the thickness of the lines speaks to how robust
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 2: those nodes of crossing are for carrying neurological signals. So
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 2: this is pretty amazing. Now, this also influences, I think,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 2: and is important for our US military, for coders, for
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 2: people who are trying to solve very complex data sets.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 2: The ability of you to have increased cognition and increased
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 2: intelligence And this is why microdosing is the rage in
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: Silicon Valley. The enormous number of coders are microdosing right now.
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: And for those who are listening, let's use psilocybe cubensis
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 2: as a standard species because that's the one that's mostly grown.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: And at a half a gram to a quarter gram,
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 2: you have liftoff. Five grams is the full-blown hero's journey.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 2: A lot of people will take between two and four
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 2: grams as a moderately spiritual experience, four grams being higher.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 2: And so microdosing is taking a dose so low that
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 2: if at most you might feel it a little bit
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 2: giddy the first time you take it the first day,
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: but you build up a tolerance immediately the second day.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 2: So the second, third day you would feel nothing. So
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 2: it's on the order of like a tenth of a
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: gram of Cubensis. where people are taking this and then
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 2: they're taking it repeatedly over time. And coders in Silicon Valley,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 2: from the biggest computer companies that we all know, this
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: is not only a fashion but a tool that they're
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 2: seeing increased ability for coming up with codes. And it's
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 2: a competitive advantage in the capitalistic system.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: I have a good friend who's a world champion kickboxer
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: and one of the best in the world. He micro
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: doses daily and he's been doing it over the last, like,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: I want to say probably a year or so. And
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: he has achieved phenomenal improvements in his performance because of that.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: He says that when he's sparring, it's almost like he's psychic.
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: Like he knows what people are going to do before
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: they do it. He said his mood is better. He
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: feels better. He just feels more balanced and he'll take
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: days off. And when he takes days off and, Even
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: though he's completely sober while he's microdosing because he's really
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: only microdosing, there's something about taking days off where everything
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: just feels like kind of shitty. It just doesn't feel good.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: And then he's like, oh, I didn't take my microdose.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: And so he takes it again and goes right back
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: to that place. But he feels like he's in the matrix.
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 2: Well, actually, it's probably good that he interrupts it because
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 2: it washes those receptors clean of the psilocybin.
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: How much time do you think he should interrupt for?
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 2: Two days out of seven. So five days on, two
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 2: days off. Now, I'm not making official recommendations. I'm just
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 2: saying— I will. I'll do it for you. From my
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 2: small amount of knowledge on this subject, I think that
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 2: makes sense. That's consistent with traditional Chinese medicine. It's also
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: consistent for those of us who drink coffee like myself.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: You drink coffee for five days. You take two days off.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 2: That next day is the strongest cup of coffee you've
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: had in a long time.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: Well, we— Me and my friends who are just coming
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: to the next podcast after this, we just got done
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: doing Sober October. So no alcohol, no marijuana, no nothing. Well,
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: we drank coffee, but that's it. And when I stopped
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: smoking marijuana, the first thing that happened is my dreams
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: became rocket charged, like very bizarre, like crazy, lucid, strange,
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: weird dreams. Not lucid in the sense that I controlled them,
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: but lucid in the sense that I realized I was
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: dreaming and I was just– like having incredibly vivid vibrant
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: dreams and I would wake up from them and be
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: certain that what I had done was real like I
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: had one dream that I fell asleep on the couch
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: and while I did fall asleep on the couch but
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: while I was asleep I was like oh I'm struggling
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: to get this blanket over me while I'm on the
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: couch and I'm pulling it but it's stuck under the
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: cushions and I'm struggling and I kind of halfway got
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: it over me and I went to sleep again well
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: when I woke up in the morning there was no
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: blanket there was no blanket anywhere near me it didn't
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: exist I had a lucid dream about covering myself with
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: a blanket while sleeping on this couch. Very strange. And
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: very primal dreams, too, like being chased by wolves and
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: running into bears and caves and really bizarre, very, very
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: vibrant colors. And apparently, from what I've read, marijuana does
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: something to suppress REM sleep.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: And that in taking time off of it, your REM
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: sleep just gets jacked through the roof.
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 2: You know, I've heard this many, many times. I've never
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: seen a clinical study on it, but it's the type
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 2: of thing you hear so many times that you have
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 2: pretty good confidence that this is true.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: Well, we all experienced it. All my friends who did
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: it experienced it. Ari in particular probably smokes as much
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: as I do, maybe more. He experienced it deeply.
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 2: I'm glad that you mentioned lucid dreams because this is
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 2: a nice segue to, I think, the greatest discovery I've
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 2: made of my life. And I want us all came
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 2: through a lucid dream. So let me set the stage here.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 2: And colony collapse disorder is a threat to worldwide food
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 2: biosecurity and killing bees. Bees around the world are being decimated.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: Say the name of the disorder again.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 2: Colony collapse disorder. Now bees are dying off in enormous quantities.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 2: Oklahoma lost 85% of its beehives last year. 2016, 2017,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 2: the annual loss of bees report. And Maryland lost 75%. Nebraska,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: I think, lost 60%. I met a beekeeper in Washington
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 2: State who lost 75% of his 35,000 hives. Now, Apis
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: meleifera is a honeybee. And it's factory farmed now. And
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 2: the almond harvest in California is the biggest market for
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 2: beekeepers who send their bees to the almond orchards One
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: bee can pollinate a thousand flowers. flowers in a day.
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 2: So every flower that bee visits is an almond. So
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 2: it's one of the most bee-dependent crops in the world.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 2: 35% of your food is directly dependent upon bee pollination.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: The other 65%, much of that is indirectly dependent But hay, alfalfa,
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 2: and clover for cows. All of our dairy is dependent
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 2: upon bee pollination. All of our berries, all of our nuts.
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: Coffee is. Even cannabis and other non-dependent plants benefit from
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 2: what's called buzz pollination because the bees then can spread
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 2: the pollen better through the air. It is now... thought
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 2: by many of the entomologists that I've been dealing with
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 2: that we could have full colony collapse across the world
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 2: within 10 years. The cost, it will be astronomical to
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 2: our society. Prices of food will raise. Poverty will increase.
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 2: You could make the argument that increased poverty leads to
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: terrorism because people are poorer. They're desperate. And so colony
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 2: collapse now is much worse than most people realize because
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 2: all the wild bees have now been infected. So 80%
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 2: of pollination services come from wild bees, and 20% comes
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: from managed honeybees. Apis mellifera is from a honeybee from Europe,
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 2: brought over in the 1700s. In 1984, the varroa mite
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 2: was introduced in the United States. And the varroa mite
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 2: is a parasite on the backs of bees and injects viruses,
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 2: in particular the deformed wing virus. the Lake Sinai virus
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 2: and the black queen cell virus. The D form wing
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 2: virus is really the most important one. Bees used to go,
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 2: and they only live 30 days, but they used to
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: go pollinating for nine days. So they leave the hive
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 2: and they pollinate for about nine days. They bring back
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 2: pollen and that's their service to the hive and they
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 2: die off. Now the average time for pollination is only
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 2: four days. In order to fight the mites, they've been
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: using a toxic insecticide called Amitraz. Amitraz is licensed for
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 2: fighting ticks on cattle. Using cattle strength doses of Amitraz off-label,
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: beekeepers have been drenching their hives with Amitraz twice per year.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: Now the mites have built up tolerance and now they're
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 2: up to nine times a year. They're soaking the hives
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 2: in order to kill the mites because the mites are
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: injecting these viruses. This is all hands on deck. This
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 2: is the The proverbial shit's going to hit the fan
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 2: on this. This is extremely important. And interestingly, it's the
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 2: number one bridge issue between liberals and conservatives. So when
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 2: you're at Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas or Hanukkah, if you
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 2: want to avoid talking about Trump and politics and Hillary
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 2: or Benghazi or whatever the subject dispute is, talk about bees.
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 2: Everyone's on board on protecting the bees. So I had
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: a waking dream. First message. 1984, I had two beehives.
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 2: I planted a mushroom in my garden called the Garden Giant.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: And one time this summer, I came out to water
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 2: my mushrooms and it was covered with bees. And the
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 2: bees moved the wood chips aside and I could see
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: this white mycelium and they were sipping on the little
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 2: droplets of my, oozing from the mycelium. I got real
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 2: excited and I kept a journal. And for 40 days
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 2: from dawn to dusk, there was a continuous convoy of
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 2: bees to my mushroom bed. It was an edible, edible mushroom.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 2: And I made note of it. I published it in
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 2: Harris Smith Magazine in 1988. I put it in one
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: of my books in 1994, and then I forgot about it.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: So I got involved with the U.S. BioShield biodefense program
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 2: directly after 9-11. You can Google my name, Stamets and Smallpox.
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 2: There's a vetted press release from the U.S.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: Government.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 2: They did 2,200-plus analyses of our mushroom extracts. And we
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 2: found extracts that were highly active against flu viruses, including
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 2: bird flu, against herpes, and against pox viruses, including smallpox.
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 2: So I have a patent that issued on this. It's
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 2: a great secondary story because Black Hawk helicopter was coming
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 2: over my laboratory, all this other stuff.
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: What?
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 2: But I'll get to that in a second. Yeah, I'll
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 2: get to that in a second. It's a fine, true
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 2: conspiracy story. Um, so I had, uh, published this research
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 2: on the antiviral properties of mushrooms and mycelium. And then
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: I heard about the bees, you know, I'd raised bees.
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: And then a friend of mine, Louis Schwarzberg, we're doing
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 2: a movie called Fantastic Fungi that's been making for 10 years. Um,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 2: and Louis came to me and said, Paul, I, I
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 2: have eight patents on fungi that can control termites, ants, mosquitoes.
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 2: You can Google right now, stamets can take down Monsanto.
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 2: There's probably a thousand websites because my patents are disruptive patents.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 2: So I can very much control termites and ants from
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 2: consuming your house for about 20 cents. And I met
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 2: with all the big companies. But anyway, so Louis knew
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 2: about my research on that. I've spoken on this before.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 2: And he said, Paul, the mites are killing the bees.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 2: Can't you do something to help the mites?
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: And so now, okay.
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 2: That's two stories. We have this bio-shield, bio-defense story and
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 2: my antiviral stuff. We have me growing the mushrooms in
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 2: the garden. And I hike in the old growth forest
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 2: a lot. And I'm hiking in the old growth forest.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 2: And the way I orient here is one of the
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 2: few skill sets I have. I like just getting off trail.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 2: And I'm in the South Fork of the Ho River.
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: And I'm deep in the old growth forest. I come
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 2: around a corner and I see a bear strike. The
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 2: bear came up, bam, scratched this tree. huge paw strike
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 2: in the tree. And I told my wife, I said,
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: you know, the Washington state, the school system is dependent
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 2: upon funding from selling timber to the lumber companies. So
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 2: the school system depended upon timber harvest off of public lands.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 2: So in the human's great wisdom, they decided that the
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 2: bears were jeopardizing the educational funds in Washington state. So
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 2: they hired hunters to kill all the bears. So my
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 2: neighbor killed 400 bears. That's why we have a salmon
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 2: run right now on Skookum Inlet in Camilchee Point, Washington.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 2: There's no bears around because they saw the bears as
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 2: a threat to the economic stability of the school system.
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: I don't understand why the bears would be a threat.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 2: Because the bears, when they scratch the trees, it would
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 2: become an entry room for a polypore mushroom. So I
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 2: told my wife, If this is true, let's come back
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 2: in two years and see if this polypore mushroom is
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: growing there. These are wood conchs, similar to the one
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 2: my hat is made from. So we came back two
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 2: years later, and sure enough, this wood conch was growing
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 2: out of the tree. The tree had died, so they
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 2: kind of got it right. So when bears scratch trees,
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 2: resin comes out, and bees are attracted to the propolis
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 2: to make propolis from the resins to patch their hives
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 2: from cracks to prevent invaders coming into a beehive. These
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 2: are all seemingly disparate stories, and this is why this
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 2: waking dream put it all together. So I have my
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 2: garden giant in bed that the bees are coming to.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 2: I have the BioShield biodefense program where I found these
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 2: extracts are highly active against viruses. Bear scratch trees introduce
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 2: polypore mushrooms. And then my friend Louis Schwartzberg is saying,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 2: you know, how can you help the bees? So, and
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 2: I highly recommend this to everybody listening, is this lucid
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 2: dream state. At that state, when you're fully asleep, And
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 2: you just go into the ether of wakefulness. Stay there.
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: Reside there. We have random access memory. Before you get
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 2: your neurological pathways all set up by habit of what
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 2: you're going to do, just exist in that space. And
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 2: then I had synapses activate a new neurological pathway. I
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 2: had an epiphany. I think I know how to save
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: the bees. Fast forward now. I have multiple patents issuing
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 2: all over the world. We've done research for Washington State University.
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 2: We've gathered $ 2. 5 million. You can go to www.bees.wsu.edu, so WashingtonStateUniversity.edu
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: for education, and you'll see the research that we have there.
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 2: We now have found that the extracts of Amadou, the
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 2: one my hat is made from, doubles the lifespan to
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 2: bees and reduces the deformed wing virus by more than
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 2: a thousand fold in 10 days. I hit Joe the
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 2: frigging home run. I'm not an entomologist. I have two beehives.
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 2: I'm not even a big beekeeper. But I put these
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 2: thoughts together that if these mushroom extracts reduce viruses that
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 2: harm humans, pigs, and birds, what would they do with bees? Now,
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 2: we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh. So my U.S.
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 2: patent issued this past year, and now it's issued in Australia,
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 2: United States, issuing in Europe, Eurasia, and Canada. I plan
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 2: to open source it for the rest of the world.
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 2: But I was waiting on pins and needles because certainly
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 2: it would be something called prior art. Now, patents are
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 2: issued based on several criteria. One, no prior art. No
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 2: one's ever mentioned it. Secondly, contrary to conventional wisdom. So
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 2: if you invented the bicycle, the wheel, and you came
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 2: up with a tricycle, that's not patentable. That's pretty obvious
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 2: because it's logical. So you want something that has no
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 2: evidence in the literature, public or private or scientific or popular.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 2: You want it contrary to conventional wisdom, which means that
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 2: you want experts to teach a way for your invention.
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 2: So every time someone out there tells me, I hear
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 2: that Paul Stamets is full of crap, nothing he's is true,
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 2: I have one great response. I say, thank you. You're
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 2: helping my patentability because the more experts that teach away
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 2: from my invention, the more unconventional my invention is, hence
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 2: the more patentable it is. The third criteria is usefulness.
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 2: Benjamin Franklin could not have invented the iPhone. There's no
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 2: usefulness and no cell towers. So these are three criteria.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 2: After 17 years, it becomes open source. So the idea
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 2: is to incentivize inventors. That's why you have the iPhone,
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 2: the Droid, all your computers. I had one person call
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 2: me up on a cell phone and said, how dare
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 2: you patent this? I go, how dare you speak to
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 2: me on a cell phone that was enabled by a
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: patent so you could tell me that I shouldn't be
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 2: patenting things? I'm just like, the contradictions are pretty obvious.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 2: So the patents now have issued, and there was no
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 2: prior art. Even though we all grew up with Winnie
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: the Pooh, we knew that bears went into rotted trees
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 2: to find honey and beehives. No one, apparently until me,
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 2: made the connection that bees are attracted to the mycelium
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 2: and rotted logs because of immunological benefit. Now, let's go
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 2: back in time because this is a very big picture
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 2: concept here. 12,000 years ago, we invented agriculture. What did
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 2: we do? We started to deforest. When we started cutting
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 2: down the trees, we began to dismantle the immunological mycelial
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: nets of nature. Mycelium needs wood to decompose. You take
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 2: away the wood, the mycelium doesn't have a habitat. Because
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: the mycelium is producing these antiviral compounds rotting the wood,
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 2: the bees were attracted. And because of deforestation now, we're
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 2: stressing the bees. So there's not only the lack of
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 2: habitat deforestation, there's now neonicotinoids. Bayer and Syngenta, that produces neonics,
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 2: as they're known, a toxic insecticide, sponsored research in Europe
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 2: because they didn't believe that neonicotinoids harmed the bees. The
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 2: researchers then finally published, when they got the results, that
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 2: it was contrary to the interests of Syngenta and Bayer, that,
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 2: in fact, neonicotinoids harmed the second and third generations. Now,
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 2: neonicotinoids are now banned in Europe. They are not banned
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 2: in the United States. So you have drift of these
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 2: neonicotinoids on their adjacent fields. So you have loss of wood, deforestation.
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 2: You have neonicotinoids. You have glyphosates that are associated with
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: GMOs because they interfere with the microbiome of the bees
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 2: and their gut flora, so they can't detoxify. It's called
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 2: the cytochrome P450 pathway. We all have it breaking down toxins.
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 2: So there's a confluence of multiple stressors, but the nail
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 2: in the coffin by far is the deformed wing virus.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: And we have found now that the extracts of this
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 2: one drop per thousand drops, one milliliter in a liter,
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 2: can reduce the viruses in bees by more than a
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 2: thousand fold and double the lifespan. So it's a frigging
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 2: home run because it protects food biosecurity around the world
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 2: at a time that food ecosystems are collapsing. But think
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 2: of the bigger picture here. For millions of years, we
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 2: were forest people. We began deforestation when we got into agriculture.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 2: we began to dismantle the immunological networks of nature, the
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 2: mycelium that's resident. The fact that these same mushrooms reduce
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 2: viruses in bees, pigs, birds, people, speaks to me of
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 2: a bigger concept, that the mycelium is part of the
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 2: immunity of the ecosystem. And as we lose the debris
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 2: fields that the mycelium is dependent upon, we begin to
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 2: dismantle the immunological health of our environment, and zoonotic diseases,
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 2: diseases coming from factory farms, whether they're from pigs or
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 2: chicken farms. And we have one extraordinary experiment, and this
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 2: speaks to the Black Hawk helicopter story, is that I
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 2: was working with the Bioshield Biodefense Program directly after 9-11.
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 2: They contacted me because I wrote an article that was
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 2: a one-page story analysis of all the research on the
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 2: antiviral properties of mushrooms in scientific literature. I wrote this article,
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 2: I published it in a peer-reviewed journal. Bioterrorism became the
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 2: front and center of concern of the U.S. Defense Department.
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 2: A group of virologists saw my article and they got
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: funded by Dick Cheney and George Bush. And I have a,
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 2: you know, I want to say thank you, ironically, to
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 2: those two because they funded the BioShield. It's called Project Biodefense.
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 2: And they funded it with several billion dollars. And they
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 2: contacted me because I knew I had this large library
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 2: of about 700 strains of mushrooms in our culture library.
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 2: We have a company of 78 great employees. And we
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 2: had this large library. So they said, we want to
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 2: test your library based on this article that you've written
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 2: showing there are antiviral properties in some mushrooms. You have
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 2: a lot of them. Let's test your library to see
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 2: if you have antiviral properties.
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: So Great.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 2: So I started making extracts of mushrooms, the fruit bodies,
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 2: the mycelium, the little filamentous fuzzy stuff that gives rise
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 2: to mushrooms. And I sent off 100 extracts at a time,
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 2: all coded with alphanumeric codes. So the government didn't know
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 2: what I was sending them. So I get the first
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 2: reports come back and I'm flipping through them. No activity,
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 2: no activity against pox viruses because by far the concern
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 2: was smallpox. The biggest, that's, we have no immunological defense
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 2: against it. After 1974, they stopped immunizing. Do you have
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 2: a smallpox vaccination on your arm? Yeah. So you're probably
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 2: one of the last ones that were getting it. So
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 2: I'm going through and I come to sample 78 and
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 2: it said high activity. I went, whoa, you know, sample 81,
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 2: high activity.
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: Whoa.
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 2: I got really excited. I looked at my notebook, what
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 2: the codes were. And it was from this mushroom called
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 2: agaricon that grows exclusively in the old growth forest of
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 2: the Pacific Northwest.
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 2: It's the longest living mushroom in North America. It's a
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 2: perennial polypore. It looks like a giant beehive by coincidence,
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 2: you know, up on a tree.
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: So you can get a picture of that, Jamie?
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 2: And so agaricon, A-G-A-R-I-K-O-N. And so I got real excited.
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 2: And so I was given a contact person because he
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 2: had one point of contact with the U.S. Defense Department,
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 2: a physician. And I called him up saying, these research
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 2: results are wonderful. He goes, what research results? I go,
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 2: Federal Works Press just delivered me this whole dossier on
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 2: the first 100 samples. Wow, look at that. And he goes,
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 2: you're not supposed to get those.
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: I am.
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 2: And I said, well, I'll photocopy and send them to you.
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 2: So he didn't think that was too funny. But the U.S.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 2: government sometimes is not very well organized. The left hand
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 2: doesn't talk to the right hand. So we got these
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 2: research results. That's crazy.
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: That looks like a stick up a dude's butt.
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah. This one is particularly unusual because it was attached
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 2: to an upper branch. It fell through the air. Oh, wow.
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 2: It hit the other branch. It teeter-tottered. And then it
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 2: regrew its mycelium and connected back into the mother mycelium
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 2: inside the tree, and then it grew two legs. Whoa.
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 2: So this is like– this was first described by Diascorides
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 2: in 65 A.D. as elixirium ad longum vitam, the elixir
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 2: of long life. So this has been used in Greek
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 2: pharmacopoeia for– for thousands of years.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: So please get back to your story. Sorry for the interruption.
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 2: No, that's fine. So anyhow, I'm up in Canada and
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 2: one of my managers calls me up and says, Paul,
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 2: there's a helicopter over the laboratories. I go, no big deal.
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 2: The helicopter's coming. I go, no, it's really close. I said,
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 2: how close? He goes, listen. I go, whoa, that's really close.
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 2: I go, what are the numbers on the back of
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 2: the helicopter? He goes, There are no numbers. It's a
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 2: Black Hawk helicopter. And I went, oh, my gosh. Now,
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 2: just because this is very new in the program, because
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 2: when you have an antidote to a weapon, then it
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 2: can be weaponized by terrorists. So they didn't know who,
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: you know, not everybody in the government knew who I was.
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 2: Even though I was working with Project Biodefense, you know,
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 2: I was still sort of an unknown entity. And I
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 2: filed a patent application on this. And so I told
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 2: my manager, okay, shut down the business, give everybody cultures
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 2: of this mushroom, which was a garacon. I don't want
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 2: to know who has them. Shut down the business. Everyone spread.
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 2: So we decentralized ourselves at our target.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: But hold on. Let me stop you right there. So
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: you're in Canada.
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 2: I'm in Canada.
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: Your lab is where?
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 2: In the United States.
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 2: In Washington State.
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: And the helicopters are flying over your lab. What happens then?
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 2: Well, they were spooking us. They were doing it on purpose.
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 2: They were doing it on purpose. They were hovering.
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: To let you know they're there.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 2: I don't know what they were doing. I mean, they're
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 2: at treetop level right over the frigging laboratory. So I
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 2: had everyone go in their car, asked everyone to go
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 2: in their car, shut down the business immediately and decentralize
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: us as a target. So later on, when I came back,
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 2: I called my people in the defense department saying, what
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 2: the hell is going on here? And they go, oh, geez,
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 2: sometimes the left hand doesn't talk to the right. We're sorry.
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 2: So eventually.
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: So how did they find out that just from your
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: patent filing?
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 2: Well, the patent, I filed the patent and it disappeared.
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 2: Most patent applications, when you file them, show up on
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 2: the U.S. patent homepage within a year or two. I
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 2: filed this patent and four or five years later, it
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 2: still had not been published. So I get a hold
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 2: of my patent attorney who gets a hold of the
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 2: patent office and the U.S. Department of Defense considered it
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 2: to be a national security. So they quarantined my patent.
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 2: took it out of the patent office so it could
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 2: not be seen by potential terrorists because then they could
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 2: have an antidote to smallpox. So I had to do
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 2: an intergovernmental agency trace to recall the patent from DOD.
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 2: They had meetings. They allowed it to be released because
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 2: it was a natural product. and so the patent then
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 2: was put back in the patent application queue and it
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 2: was approved in 2013 I filed it in 2004 so
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 2: we have now done work at the University of Mississippi
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 2: School of Pharmacy we've isolated two novel anti smallpox molecules
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 2: and We also have done work at the Tuberculosis Research
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 2: Institute with Dr. Scott Franzblau in University of Illinois at Chicago.
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 2: We've identified a new anti-tuberculosis molecule. Agaricon in Dioscoridae's time
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 2: in Greek culture was used for treating consumption, later thought
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 2: to be known as tuberculosis. We have found that extracts
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 2: of this mushroom are duly active against bacteria and viruses.
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 2: Most people who die from viral pneumonia actually die from
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 2: bacterial pneumonia. They get a viral infection their immune system
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 2: over amps. And as a response, the lungs get flooded
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 2: with liquid, bacteria set up, and bacterial pneumonia usually kills
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 2: people who actually get a flu virus. They die from
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 2: bacterial pneumonia. So to find a natural product that's duly
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 2: active against viruses and bacteria is medically significant. So it's
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 2: a good argument for natural products because you have a
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 2: consortium of protective agents that are living in the soup
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 2: of this extract that can help protect you. So this
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 2: has now led on to are discovering molecules active against HPV,
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 2: the human papillomavirus. 70% or more of women have HPV.
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: That's a very controversial vaccine, apparently. It's very dangerous.
• 1:39:59
  Speaker 2: Well, I'm not anti-vaccination.
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 1: No, you're not either.
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 2: But I'm curious why they don't recommend the vaccine after
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 2: the age of 24. I can't wrap my mind around that.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: I think they're just trying to prevent infection from sexually
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: active kids.
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 2: Well, you're sexually active after the age of 24, so
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 2: why wouldn't they?
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: Right, but they're sexually active before then.
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 2: But if you didn't have the infection before 24 and
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 2: you're still active at the age of 24, why wouldn't
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 2: they recommend the vaccination after the age of 24? Maybe
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 2: there's a good medical reason.
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: Oh, they don't recommend it post-24? Is that what you're saying? Post-24. Oh,
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: so post-24 they don't recommend it because they think maybe
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: you already have it?
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 2: I don't know the answer to that.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: That's bizarre.
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 2: I've never been able to get someone to explain to
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 2: me why it's the case.
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: But mushrooms can suppress the expression of this? Is that
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: what you're saying?
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 2: The ingredients within the mushrooms, we have found five molecules
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 2: authenticated by NIH virology as being potently active against HPV.
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: Which mushrooms?
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 2: All the polypores that I have been talking about, Raciogaricon, Amadou,
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 2: are likely, I can't say de facto all of them,
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 2: to have varying amounts of these constituents. So these mushroom
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 2: extracts are a huge consortium of antiviral and antibacterial compounds. Now,
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 2: as I mentioned, there's maybe five million species of fungi.
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 2: There's about 150,000 species of mushrooms. We've identified around 14,000.
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 2: So think of it just from experiential evidence over thousands
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 2: of years of human experimentation. It'd be like you went
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 2: into a library and there's 14,000 books in your library, 14,000 species.
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 2: Our ancestors started selecting each of these species and testing them.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: We've narrowed the field down to about 200 species, of
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: which 50 species are superstars that have no adverse effects
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 2: to human ingestion that have been used for a very
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 2: long period of time. Within that set of 50 species,
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 2: we're finding these mushrooms which have tremendous potential health benefit.
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 2: So this is why I'm so excited in the field
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 2: of mycology, is we have translational science. We have applied mycology.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 2: And I think based on what we've discovered, we can
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 2: make the argument that we should save the old growth
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 2: forest as a matter of national defense. Our fungal genomes
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 2: are essential for our future and present survival. The more
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 2: we eliminate these landscapes of biodiversity, the more we're losing
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 2: potential agents that can fight disease. And so this is
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 2: something that I think we can build a bridge between
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 2: conservatives and liberals because Osama bin Laden didn't have access
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 2: to an old growth forest. You know, we did. And
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 2: we do. And I think this is really just indicative
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 2: of many other things that we can discover if we
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 2: pay attention to the vast genomic resources we have in
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: the biodiversity of the ecosystems that are still intact.
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: Now, do you recommend for personal consumption any particular mushrooms,
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: any particular supplements?
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 2: In terms of recommendations for gourmet mushrooms, I can make those.
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 2: In terms of recommendations for medicinal mushrooms, I cannot make recommendations.
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 2: I'm legally tied by the FDA. I cannot make recommendations.
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: Can you recommend a website that perhaps would recommend?
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 2: Well, I do recommend eating gourmet mushrooms for just as food.
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: Which ones do you consume?
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 2: Shiitake, lion's mane, maitake. And reishi and chaga.
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: And these all have medical benefits as well?
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 2: I don't know the difference between a gourmet and a
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 2: medicinal mushroom anymore.
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: They're just mushrooms.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, all gourmet mushrooms are medicinal mushrooms.
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: Really? So shiitake mushrooms are medicinal?
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 2: Shiitake mushrooms are very, very medicinal. The big stars right
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 2: now by far are reishi, chaga, and lion's mane.
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: What about portobello? They taste too good. They can't be
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: that good for you.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 2: Portobello's have a problem.
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: I knew.
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 2: It. All mushrooms should be cooked. And portobello's in particular
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 2: should be cooked at high temperatures.
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: Why?
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 2: There is an unfortunate group of compound called agaritines. Agaritines
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 2: are hydrazines that are heat unstable. So the good news
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 2: is you should cook them. And if you cook them well,
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 2: then those mushrooms are not a problem. If you don't
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 2: cook them well, then these hydrazines are potentially problematic. Now,
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 2: nature is a numbers game. So there are beneficial compounds
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 2: that in some balance may outweigh the negative effects of
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 2: the hydrazines, the agaritines in these mushrooms. But that jury is.
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: Still out, so to speak. What are the negative effects
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: of this?
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 2: This is an explosive area of conversation. And it puts
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 2: my life in danger. So I reserve the right not
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 2: to answer your question.
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: Whoa. I didn't expect that. It puts your life in
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: danger talking about portobello mushrooms? He's looking at me silently.
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: I will respectfully move on.
• 1:45:25
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: So anybody who's interested, just Google that and get back
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: to me. You know what? Next I'm going to have
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: a guy who is the same height as Paul. And
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: he's going to have a mask on, and we're going
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: to have some sort of electric box that distorts his voice.
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 2: No, but the good news is there's lots of mushrooms
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 2: that have tremendous benefit. And there are compounds inside of
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 2: portobello mushrooms that are very beneficial. And, in fact, there
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 2: is a positive study with some breast cancer patients, a
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 2: breast cancer study, showing that button mushrooms can confer benefits.
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 2: So there is that. We were funded by NIH with $ 2. 2
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: million for a breast cancer clinical study on turkey tail mushrooms.
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 2: And turkey tail mushrooms are fantastic as adjuncts to conventional therapy.
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 2: The clinical study that was conducted, funded by NIH and
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 2: the University of Minnesota Medical School and Vistier Medical College,
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 2: showed a dose-response curve, specifically in supporting the immune system
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 2: by taking turkey tail mushrooms. And the more you took,
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 2: the more benefit there was. I have a TED Med
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 2: talk that's very popular in front of 800 physicians where
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 2: my mother, who was challenged with advanced stage four breast cancer,
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 2: who is now almost 93 years of age. She had
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 2: advanced stage four breast cancer when she was 84 years
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 2: of age, given less than a few months to live.
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 2: And she had metastasized tumors all over her body. Her
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 2: breast was erupting with it. very, very bad carcinoma, and
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 2: she is alive, well, and fully recovered today. She had
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 2: a chemotherapy using Herceptin and a little short time Taxol.
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 2: She had a very bad reaction to Taxol. But there's
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 2: a scientific article that's now been published showing that turkey
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 2: tail mushroom constituents help conventional therapies like chemotherapy with Herceptin
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 2: and making Herceptin work better. So there's a nice blending
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 2: of integrative medicine with using natural products with conventional medicine.
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 2: I will never say that you should not consult a physician.
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 2: I will never say that you should not use conventional medicine.
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 2: You should. It's the state of the art of science
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 2: is right there. But the state of the art of
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 2: science is that we can upregulate immunity with these mushrooms.
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 2: And that's your front line of defense. And then the
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 2: other conventional therapies that are being practiced now, combined very,
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 2: very nicely according to many physicians and reports showing that
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 2: the combination of turkey tail mushrooms in combination with conventional
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 2: therapy can have a significant difference in improving your immunological defense.
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 1: No, I absolutely agree with you that conventional treatment are
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 1: state of the art. And this is state of the
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: art science. When you're talking about dealing with cancer, you
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: should deal with oncologists that are at the cutting edge.
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: But they're not state of the art when it comes
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: to the preventing of these things. And that's a giant
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: issue that a lot of people have when it comes
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: to nutrition and lifestyle, mitigating stress, all the various factors
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: that contribute to a bunch of different health ailments. Do
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: you think that mushrooms could also play a factor in
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: that as well?
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a great epidemiological study that came out
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 2: of Japan, and Dr. Ikikawa was an epidemiologist that worked
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 2: for the National Cancer Center in Tokyo. And they noticed
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 2: in surveying people in Japan in the 1960s, early 1970s,
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 2: there was a dearth, a drop in the overall cancer
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 2: rate in this one population in Nagano Prefecture in Japan.
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 2: So he was sent there by the National Cancer Center
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 2: of Tokyo by the government to say, what are these
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 2: people doing in this one cluster of villages where they
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 2: have statistically significant less cancer rates? We're talking about 30%
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 2: less than the national average. And then after an exhaustive study,
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 2: he found that they were eating enoki mushrooms, a lot
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 2: of them, because the enoki mushrooms are really thin ones,
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 2: they have really tall stems. You can buy them in
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 2: the store. Well, there's big farming centers for enoki mushrooms there.
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 2: And then the blemished ones, as cultivators know, you don't
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 2: sell to the public. The ones that have little spots
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 2: on them are deformed, but they are given to the workers.
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 2: And so their workers and then their families eat a
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 2: higher per capita consumption of enoki mushrooms than the other
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 2: residents of Japan. So they found that specifically the consumption
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 2: of enoki mushrooms resulted in a reduction of cancer across
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 2: the board of all cancers. Statistically significant. I think over 220,000
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 2: people in this epidemiological survey. I've written about 10 articles
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 2: for the Huffington Post. And you can Google Stamets Huffington
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 2: Post and enoki mushrooms and see all the citations on
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 2: enoki mushrooms, on lion's mane, on agaricon, all these mushrooms
• 1:50:29
  Speaker 2: I'm talking about. They're all peer-reviewed physicians. They're all very
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 2: short articles, but they summarize a lot of the research
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 2: that I'm talking about.
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: That's amazing. What do you know about the cordyceps mushroom?
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 2: I know a fair amount about cordyceps. Yeah.
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: I'm fascinated for two reasons. One, because of a supplement
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: that I take that my company makes called Trumtech Sport.
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: Sorry for the name. My apologies in advance. But it's
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: based on athletic performance. But the Shroom Tech is based
• 1:51:01
  Speaker 1: on the cordyceps and B12 and a bunch of different adaptogens.
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: And the idea being that when you take that, it
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: benefits athletic performance, benefits endurance and oxygen utilization. And apparently
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: they discovered this from– it's a weird one because they
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: grow it on a caterpillar. Do you know about all that?
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 2: Cordyceps is now, it's been split into several different genera.
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up. The
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: other one is the one that explodes on ants.
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's Cordyceps sinensis, now known as Ophiocordyceps sinensis. Cordyceps
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 2: has about 500 species in it. It's been a very
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 2: complicated taxonomy because when researchers would go in the Himalayas
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 2: and they find these caterpillars with the Cordyceps mushrooms coming
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 2: out of it, Very good scientists. And they did just
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 2: what I would do. They would take it in the laboratory.
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 2: They would break it open and take a piece of
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 2: tissue from the inside. It's called cloning. So you just
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 2: capture the genetic material. You grow out the culture. Very
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 2: confusing because there is five different fungi. They're called anamorphs.
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 2: Cordyceps is a dimorphic fungus. What that means is it
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 2: has two forms. It's got a mold state and it's
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 2: got a mushroom state. The mushroom steak comes up like
• 1:52:17
  Speaker 2: a little club, looks like your finger, like an orange
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 2: little finger coming up out of the ground.
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: So you can find that, Jamie.
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 2: Whoa, there it is.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So is this an expired caterpillar?
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 2: I can't actually see the species there, but it looks
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 2: like they're beetles.
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: It's hard to tell. There's a couple of things here.
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 2: So there's a number of cordyceps species. So when there
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 2: was a lot of scientific dispute on what the true anamorph,
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 2: now it's two sides of the same coin, You see
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 2: the cordyceps, and then you clone it, and you get
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 2: this mold growing, and then people will grow up the mold. Well,
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 2: now we know there are several species of molds that
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 2: are growing inside the caterpillar. So the true cordyceps sinensis
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 2: is now identified as Hirsutella sinensis. That's the true one.
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 2: Bacillomyces and Metarhizium and all these other ones are not
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 2: considered to be the true organism. They're chasing organisms. the
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 2: other cordyceps mold inside of the mushroom.
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: Whoa, whoa, whoa, you're freaking me out, Paul. I can't
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: keep up with you, man. This is going to be
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: one that I'm going to go over many, many, many, many,
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: many times.
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 2: It's a polyculture.
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: Okay, polyculture.
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 2: It's a polyculture of several different entomopathogenic fungi. These are
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 2: fungi that kill insects. So, I mean, this is very
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 2: disruptive because, oh, the FDA and the labeling and how
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 2: do you label this or what do you do and
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 2: who's right and who's wrong and How do you get
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 2: the labeling to conform to the current taxonomy based on
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 2: DNA research? The good news is, based on the best
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 2: of my knowledge, several of these companies that are selling
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 2: these cordyceps, the anamorphs, even though they may not be
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 2: the true cordyceps sinensis, those also confer benefits. So you
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 2: can argue in a sense about different species. The problem
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 2: with this is there's no less than a thousand peer-reviewed
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 2: articles on Cordyceps sinensis. And no one, or hardly anyone,
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 2: no one knows what species they were actually growing. Because
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 2: we don't know which of these animals they were actually growing.
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 1: You know, is this recent information? All very recent.
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 2: All in the past four or five years, and especially
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 2: in the past two years. So it's... Taxonomy is in
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 2: flux because of DNA-PCR amplification. In the region of DNA
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 2: that they've chosen, they amplified. They are idiosyncratic to the species.
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 2: Now that story has changed. Whole genome sequencing is really
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 2: the only way to go about this, where they sequence
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 2: the entire genome. And so there's a lot of elasticity
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 2: or plasticity in the expression of DNA. Now, going back
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 2: to what we've been talking about this whole interview... epigenesis.
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 2: Epigenesis is an environmental stimulus, has a selective influence on
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 2: the genomic expression of the individual, the species, yourself. And
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 2: so you upregulate or turn on genes that are otherwise,
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 2: quote unquote, asleep. And so what we're seeing now is
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 2: that epigenetic influences can cause different DNA expressions. And so
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 2: What was considered to be conformity of a species and
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 2: DNA types before, like 99%, and that was thought that, oh,
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 2: they're the same species. Now we know that's highly inaccurate.
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 2: So what was accurate a few years ago is considered
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 2: to be highly inaccurate today. The science is changing very,
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 2: very rapidly, and the regulatory environment cannot catch up. So
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 2: it doesn't really matter except for the following. And this is,
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 2: I do make a recommendation here. Make sure your mushrooms
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 2: or whatever products you're consuming are certified organic. And please
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 2: don't buy them from China. Anyone who's been to China,
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 2: I've been to China several times. The amount of massive
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 2: air pollution there is horrific. And the chain of custody,
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 2: as we call it, where these people are getting their mushrooms,
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 2: they had mixed, oftentimes distributors, mixed suppliers. And it's a
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 2: form of, quote unquote, Russian roulette. We've done analyses on
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 2: Chinese sourced mushrooms, and they've had up to 2,200 parts
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 2: per million of lead. where two or three capsules is toxic.
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 2: So why would you take a medicinal mushroom that's contaminated
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 2: with heavy metals and pesticides if you're trying to improve
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 2: your immune system at the same time you're sabotaging your
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 2: immune system? So getting mushrooms from clean environments is critically important. Unfortunately,
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 2: because of the USDA organic program, they can borrow from
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 2: the organic programs of China and still say they're certified organic.
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 2: So you really need to buy U.S.-grown, certified organic mushrooms
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 2: that have a clear chain of custody And hopefully one
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 2: that is from a reputable supplier or scientist and not
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 2: somebody who's just trying to make money. There's a lot
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 2: of opportunistic companies right now who are just trying to
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 2: exploit and ride the bandwagon of the popularity of medicinal
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 2: mushrooms without really having done their homework or without fully
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 2: informing the public that their mushrooms are actually coming from
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 2: China when they're not.
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: What is the strain of cordyceps mushroom that erupts, that
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: infects ants, kills them, sprouts out of them, and then
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: explodes and infects the ants near them? And other ants
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: will drag that ant, knowing that it's infected, deep, deep
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: away into the forest to get it away from the colony.
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 2: You just had cordyceps loidei up on the screen there.
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: Pull that up.
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, cordyceps loidei, unilateralis is another one. A lot of
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 2: these zombie movies you've been saying have been based on cordyceps.
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 2: And actually, I was a character in Hannibal Lecter.
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: You were?
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, in the series. I think it's number five. And
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 2: I think Alvin Stamets was this anesthesiologist.
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: They gave you your last name?
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he was my last name.
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: Why didn't they just call you Paul?
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 2: Well, they do on Star Trek. I'm a character on
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 2: Star Trek now.
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I know.
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and they actually call me Paul Stamets on Star Trek.
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: How bizarre is that?
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 2: So Hannibal Lecter, the series, I had all these people
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 2: write me and say, oh my gosh, you're this evil
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 2: doctor who overdoses his patients with drugs and then puts
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 2: them in the backyard and then inoculates them with mushrooms,
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 2: just like cordyceps, you know, coming out of the... So
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 2: you could have mushrooms going in the backyard. And some
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 2: of the Star Trek people called me up in August
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 2: of 2016. I'm talking to them. They... CBS set it up.
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 2: They have to talk to you. They saw my TED Talk.
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 2: And they said, Paul, we're the writers of the Star
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 2: Trek Discovery Series. We're kind of stuck. We want to
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 2: talk to you. We saw your TED Talk. We're really interested.
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 2: And I go, wait a second. Are you the one
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 2: who put me in Hannibal Lecter? He goes, yeah. And
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 2: I go, well, let's get it right this time.
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: So I said, OK.
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 2: I said, foolishly, or maybe to my benefit, foolishly, I said,
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 2: turn on your tape recorder. Give me the general idea.
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 2: And let me run with it. And they said, okay,
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 2: go for it. There's six of them, I guess, on
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 2: the conference call. Foolishly, I said, I'm a Star Trek fan,
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 2: which is not foolish, but I want no money for
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 2: these ideas. I give you all my intellectual property. I
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 2: want science fiction to predict science fact. The great thing
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 2: about Star Trek is the flip phone and the iPad.
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 2: I mean, those came out in Star Trek and then
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 2: it became reality. I said, so you have a unique
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 2: opportunity here of forming our future. Let's collaborate to create
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 2: a future that's better for our future generations. by inspiring
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 2: students and young people to get excited about the science
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 2: so they can help populate the universities to create the
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 2: inventions that can help save this planet that's in jeopardy.
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 2: And so I ran with a Star Trek theme, and
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 2: we just saw the last episode last night. And astromycologist
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 2: Paul Stamets is using the mycelium spore drive. It has
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 2: become I couldn't believe it. We're watching this thing, and
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 2: the Star Trek, the main theme of Star Trek is
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: based on mycelium and the concepts that I gave them.
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 2: They've elaborated this, I mean, six ways a Sunday, so
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 2: they've really taken it.
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: This is as some sort of a propulsion system?
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 2: It's a propulsion system because in my TED Talk, and
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 2: I've been talking about this a long time, about networks.
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 2: We have the mycelial network. We have the computer internet.
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 2: We have the neurological network in our brains. And the
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 2: organization of a dark matter conforms to string theory. So
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 2: these are three archetypes, the same archetype, the same dimensional
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 2: structures stacked on top of each other. And nature builds
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 2: upon its prior successes. So networks reward themselves by surviving
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 2: from catastrophe. So I said, and I'm still bound by confidentiality.
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 2: And there's an incredibly strict confidentiality agreement I can only
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 2: state which has been publicly displayed. But the mycelium spore
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 2: drive allows through the internet of nature, you might say,
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 2: to be able to go into hyperspace immediately by tapping
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 2: into the mycelial archetype. And so astromycologist Stamets now is
• 2:01:04
  Speaker 2: plugging himself into the mycelial network of the universe. And
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 2: they can jump rather than using their standard hyper drives,
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 2: which will You see them streaming across for hours from
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 2: one part of the universe to the other. They can
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 2: show up immediately and then disappear.
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 1: Is this something that you think could actually be real
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: one day?
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 2: Okay, we're pushing the envelope on this one.
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: Here we go, baby.
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 2: This is pushing the envelope on this one. But if
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 2: you look at the multiverse... And I've had one or
• 2:01:34
  Speaker 2: two in particular multiverse experiences where time and reality has
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 2: changed in a way that I cannot explain. How so?
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: What do you mean?
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 2: It's so incredibly profound that I still cannot wrap my
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 2: mind around it.
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: These are psilocybin experiences?
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 2: Psilocybin experience, yes. I think the psilocybin experience might be
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 2: a one-world portal, and now I'm going to sound like
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 2: Terence McKenna, of entering into the multiverse. The idea that
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 2: time can be bent, that there are multiple universes occurring
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 2: simultaneously in different realities. And I've had one experience in
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 2: particular that is just unfathomable to me. I don't know
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 2: how to explain it. Give it a shot. Okay, I'll
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 2: give it a shot.
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: You've already blown my mind apart 150 times today.
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 2: This is a very deeply personal experience to me, but
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 2: I was going to the Evergreen State College. I had
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 2: the Drug Enforcement Administration license. My brother John went to
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 2: Yale University. He got a graduate scholarship in neurophysiology at
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 2: the University of Washington. He came out to Washington State
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 2: in Seattle. I was living in Olympia, Washington. I had
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 2: a cabin up in the mountains near Darrington, Washington. Then
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 2: in the summertime for three years, I set chokers. I
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 2: was a logger. I really believe in the school of
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 2: hard knocks and the blending of academia with blue-collar hard work.
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 2: I love chopping wood. I love running a chainsaw. I
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 2: love hard labor. I think. It gives my mind some
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 2: respite to be able to think. So I'm in this
• 2:03:17
  Speaker 2: highly academic environment. My brother John, he died unfortunately two
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 2: years ago. So he got me involved in mushrooms. So
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 2: I'm going to segue and set the stage here, but
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 2: I need another two minutes to set the stage here.
• 2:03:30
  Speaker 2: So I'm growing up in a small town in Ohio
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 2: called Columbiana. My brother John is going to Yale. He
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 2: comes back one day, and he gives me a book
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 2: that he's using for his class. But he's on break,
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 2: and he says, and I'm really fascinated. Now, John went
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 2: to Mexico, Columbia, came back with great stories of eating
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 2: soul-sized mushrooms. And he's my older brother. I just idolized him.
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 2: And he has a book called Alder States of Consciousness.
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 2: And so I said, John, can I borrow your book?
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 2: He said, sure. And I said, but Paul, I need
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 2: it back. After my break is over, I'm going back
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 2: to college. This is part of our textbook. So I
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 2: borrowed his book, Alder States of Consciousness. I'm just fascinated
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 2: reading it, you know, about all these different ways of
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 2: expanding your consciousness. I'm 14 years of age. And so
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 2: my best friend, Ryan Snyder, says, Paul, can I borrow
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 2: your book? We're hanging together all the time.
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: And he goes, yeah, but I need it back.
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 2: And so he borrows my book. and he doesn't return it.
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 2: A day, several days pass, a week pass, two weeks pass,
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: my brother's coming back on break. He said, I needed
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 2: that book back, Paul. And I go to Ryan, I go, Ryan,
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 2: I need my book. I need my book. And Ryan
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: kept on avoiding answering the subject. And so I said, finally,
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 2: give me my book. And Ryan goes, I can't give
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 2: it to you, Paul. I said, why? He says, my
• 2:04:42
  Speaker 2: dad burned it. I said, your dad burned my brother's book?
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 2: I go, WTF, I didn't use this phrase back then.
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 2: I said, oh, my God. And I have a shout
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 2: out to Ryan Snyder's father that because of that event,
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 2: it stimulated my interest in all of our states of
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 2: consciousness even more. So John goes to Yale and goes
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 2: to the University of Washington. I have this DEA permit.
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 2: I'm at the Evergreen State College. John calls me up.
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 2: He says, Paul, I think I found some soul side mushrooms. Now,
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 2: John said, you're really smart. You've been collecting Salospicubensis in
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 2: Colombia and Mexico, but they're much more complicated up here.
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 2: And I said, let me ask you a few questions.
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 2: I said, okay, John, do you take a spore print?
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 2: He goes, yes. And I go, is the spores purple brown?
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 2: He goes, yes, they are purple brown. I go, good. Okay. Now, John,
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 2: does it have a separable gelatinous pellicle? And he goes,
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 2: what's that? And I go, well, break the cap. These
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 2: are growing on wood chips. Break the cap and separate
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 2: the cap very slowly. Do you see it? a little
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 2: skin that's translucent. And he breaks it and goes, yeah,
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 2: I see that skin. I said, John, they're growing in
• 2:05:48
  Speaker 2: wood chips. And he goes, yes. I go, are they
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 2: turning bluish? He goes, yes, they're standing really bright blue.
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 2: I go, wow. I said, John, how many did you find?
• 2:05:59
  Speaker 2: He goes, you would not believe it. It's a huge amount.
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 2: I said, wait. I said, but he says, Paul, they're
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 2: in a very sensitive place. You better come up here
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 2: right away. So I jumped in my car and I
• 2:06:11
  Speaker 2: drove up from Olympia to Seattle, about 60, 70 miles.
• 2:06:15
  Speaker 2: I get to his house and John's there. And I go, well,
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 2: where are we going? He goes, well, we need some
• 2:06:20
  Speaker 2: grocery bags, you know, and let's get on our bikes
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 2: and let's go down there. I go, well, why all
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 2: the secrecy? And the problem is, well, you'll see. And
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 2: it was the end of Boat Street. And right at
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 2: the University of Washington, right off of University Avenue, there's
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 2: Boat Street. And we get there and right across the
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 2: street is a police substation. So we're there and it
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 2: was an eruption of this mushroom. There had to be 10,000, 30,000 mushrooms.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 2: I don't know. It was about 50 feet by 30
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 2: feet with all the mulch and wood chips. There was
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 2: an eruption that picked up, you know, trash and, you know,
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 2: debris that picked up six inches of solid mushrooms. They're mushrooms.
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 2: They're mushrooms. everywhere. I've, to this day, never seen so
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 2: many mushrooms in one concentrated area. So we waited until
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 2: the police cars went away, and we're kind of idling there.
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 2: And then the police cars would go away. And from
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 2: the substation, we'd start picking mushrooms, picking mushrooms. And we
• 2:07:11
  Speaker 2: filled up a grocery bag or two. And And then
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 2: the other students are walking by, what are you doing? Oh, nothing.
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 2: And then we eventually go, yeah, there's plenty for everybody.
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 2: So it was like pretty good. Everyone's all hanging out
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 2: as a little group like at the bus stop, right?
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 2: We're not really waiting for the bus, right? We're waiting
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 2: for the police cars to go away. And then we
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 2: picked all these mushrooms. So we got about eight or
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 2: ten grocery bags full of these mushrooms.
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: How bizarre.
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 2: It turned out to be a new species called Salosibis tuncii,
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 2: named after Daniels.
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: A new species?
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: A new species.
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 1: New as in hadn't been discovered before you guys picked them?
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 2: Had never been described in scientific literature before.
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: So you picked a mushroom that no one knew existed.
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 2: Before or hadn't been– we had known about it for
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 2: about three years but this is the largest eruption and
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 2: from that collection became part of the type collection that
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 2: anchored the species taxonomically so I think some of the
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 2: specimens still exist in herbaria around the world because it's
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 2: the reference standard so we go back to the house
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 2: and it's like we gotta dry them so we lay
• 2:08:15
  Speaker 2: out newspapers and the whole newspapers were just Covered with mushrooms.
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 2: And so that night, there's about four guys from Yale,
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 2: all neurophysiology, all scientists on the scientist track. And they said,
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 2: let's eat them. And so, I mean, this is not
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 2: very potent. They're one-tenth the potency of cuvensis. So we
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 2: made smoothies. And, oh, my gosh. Talk about the gag reflex.
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 2: So we had to make these smoothies. We had to
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 2: eat 50 of them in order to have a dose equivalent.
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 2: Equivalent to what slossomycobensis would be.
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: So I knew that.
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 2: So we made these incredibly distasteful milkshakes and, uh, and
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 2: we chugged them and we drank them. And, um, and then, uh,
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 2: amazing experience. I bonded with my brother. It was beautiful.
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 2: And then you're peeking at this experience. You look around
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 2: and there's like tens of thousands of these mushrooms. Like,
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 2: oh my gosh. Um, all for science. Um, and so
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 2: I go to bed and, um, And I'm laying in
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 2: bed and, you know, full-blown experience. And, you know, I
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 2: can barely sleep because all the colors are keeping me
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 2: awake and my mind is racing. And then I have
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 2: a lucid dream. And I'm dreaming and I wake up
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 2: and I go downstairs and I go, I had this
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 2: crazy dream. And I said, what's your dream? And I said,
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 2: I saw thousands of cattle dead baking in the sun.
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 2: I said... I think there's going to be a nuclear war.
• 2:09:46
  Speaker 2: But what could kill all these cattle? There's a time,
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 2: the Reagan administration and all that, the tension was really
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 2: high between the Soviet Union and the United States. And
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 2: they said, and they were joking with me, saying, oh, well, okay,
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 2: when is it going to happen? I go, I know
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 2: I was in Olympia and I needed to rush up
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 2: to Darrington to stay in my cabin because my books
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 2: were up there and my manuscript was up there. I
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 2: need to save my research. So they laughed and they laughed.
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 2: They said, well, when's the world going to end, Paul?
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 2: And I go, well, it's not this weekend. That was
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 2: like in two days. It's next weekend. So they wrote
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 2: on the calendar, December 1st. I put it in my book.
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 2: I think it's 1975, the end of the world. They wrote,
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 2: Paul predicts the end of the world. So we forgot
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 2: about it. Massive rains the next week. Huge amounts of snowfall.
• 2:10:38
  Speaker 2: And then on Wednesday, Thursday, temperature inversion. And it flipped
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 2: to 75 to 85 degrees. All the snow started to melt.
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 2: All the rivers were flooding. And my little cabin was
• 2:10:49
  Speaker 2: right next to this river that would swell from day
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 2: to morning to night. It would go up six feet
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 2: just from the snow melt because it was very close
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 2: to this volcano and the glaciers. I said, oh, my gosh,
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 2: I'm going to lose my manuscript, all my research. I
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 2: need to get up there. I need to get up there.
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 2: And so I'm watching the news on the news and
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 2: the roads are being closed. So I had to go
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 2: through Rockport, Washington, the back way in order to get
• 2:11:10
  Speaker 2: back to my cabin. I get to my cabin and
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 2: the bank had eroded about 10 feet. I was only
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 2: about 10, 12 feet away from the river now. My
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 2: cabin was on the verge of falling into it. But
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 2: I got my manuscript. I got all my books. I
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 2: rescued all the material I had. But I couldn't get
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 2: out of there because the roads had been closed. And
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 2: so I had to wait two days, two days. And
• 2:11:29
  Speaker 2: the roads then opened up and I drove out. out
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 2: of the valley into the Snohomish Valley. And I went
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 2: around the bend and there the sun, it was a
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 2: brilliant sunny day, a warm day. And there floating in
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 2: the fields were hundreds and hundreds of dead cattle. Whoa.
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 2: How do you explain that? I entered, I think, into
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 2: the multiverse. Whoa.
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: Now as a scientist, You realize when you say something
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: like that, you open yourself up to ridicule. Do you
• 2:12:02
  Speaker 1: feel hesitant to communicate these ideas?
• 2:12:05
  Speaker 2: To a degree, yes. But, you know, I'm 62 years
• 2:12:07
  Speaker 2: of age. And, you know, at one point, I just
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 2: don't care. I just don't care. You know, this is true.
• 2:12:12
  Speaker 2: This happened to me. And I can push the envelope
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 2: on these ideas because the credibility of my research is
• 2:12:18
  Speaker 2: well established. I can save the bees. Do you care
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 2: whether I have taken psilocybe mushrooms, if I can save
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: your farm, your family, your country or the world? Billions
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 2: of dollars in protect biosecurity.
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 1: I care more.
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 2: I care more.
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 2: So I'm telling you things. I'm not making this up.
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 2: I don't think you are. I don't have to.
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 1: I just wondered.
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 2: But just because you can't explain it does not mean
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 2: it's not true. Right. And I think that we need
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 2: to accept the fact that the reality is not limited
• 2:12:46
  Speaker 2: to the perception that we have traditionally used.
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 1: That's a beautiful way to describe it. Let's end with that.
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 1: That's perfect.
• 2:12:54
  Speaker 2: Thank you, brother.
• 2:12:55
  Speaker 1: Paul, thank you so much. I'm so glad you came here.
• 2:12:58
  Speaker 1: And thank you to all the people that recommended you
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 1: and turned me on to your work. And can we
• 2:13:04
  Speaker 1: do this again?
• 2:13:04
  Speaker 2: I'd love to.
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: Please.
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 1: And if people want to research more of your stuff, fungi.com.
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 1: And what was the other website?
• 2:13:13
  Speaker 2: And hostdefense.com.
• 2:13:14
  Speaker 1: Hostdefense.com. And there's a ton of other information, TED Talk.
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 2: And I have a youtube.com slash Paul Stamets site. And
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 2: Louis Schwartzberg, a shout out. We have a fantasticfungi.com. Check
• 2:13:28
  Speaker 2: it out. Louie and I are coming out with a
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 2: movie that describes much of this stuff.
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 2:13:32
  Speaker 2: All right. Thank you, brother.
• 2:13:33
  Speaker 1: Ooh, that was awesome.