The Joe Rogan Experience - #1035 - Paul Stamets

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

Paul Stamets is a mycologist, author and advocate of bioremediation and medicinal fungi. Check out https://www.youtube.com/paulstamets

And we're live. All right. Paul, first of all, welcome. Thank you for coming here. And you are probably one of the most requested people from the internet that I've ever had. So feel good about that. I'm honored. And you're the first guy ever to wear a mushroom hat. Okay. That's really a hat made out of mushrooms? Yeah, it's made from this amadou mushroom. It's called Fomey's fomentarius. It grows on birch trees throughout the world. But this is an example of why I think shamanistically plants, mushrooms become significant. There's a plurality of benefits. So this mushroom is a fire starter mushroom. It allowed for the portability of fire.

There's no doubt that we came from Africa. We migrated north. We discovered something new called winter. Oops. This allowed for the portability of fire. There's no doubt that we came from Africa. We migrated north. We discovered something new called winter. Oops. This allowed for the portability of fire. You can hollow this mushroom out, put embers of fire inside, and carry fire for days. If your clan could not rekindle fire in Europe in the winter

time, you would die. This hat is actually made by some ladies in Transylvania. Can I feel it? Yeah. And it's a hardwood conch. Oh, wow. But when you soak it in lye water, ashes and water, it delaminates into this fabric. Whoa. Let me feel that.

It's very soft. It's also called German felt. Wow. It's extremely flammable. Wow. It's extremely flammable. So it revolutionized warfare because during Napoleonic times, this is the punk that ignited gunpowder. Really?

So even the Chinese invented gunpowder. The Europeans invented the rifle. So this allowed flint spark guns to ignite the gunpowder. This feels amazing. It is. How big a piece can you get? That's a great question. Depending on the size of the conch. Beech trees are much bigger than birch. Beech trees just naturally get

larger. So the larger the conch, the more fabric you can tear. But this mushroom is made of mycelium. Basically, that fabric is a cellular fabric called mycelium. And this is... I actually have one that caught on fire because somebody was smoking a joint near me.

And the embers of the joint got on my hat. Did it just immediately go up? No, it burns really slowly. So it's a fuse. Oh. It's fantastic for delayed explosions. It's because you can light this thing. And beekeepers for hundreds of years use this for smoking the hives of bees.

Oh. Because it's just, we could light it now i mean the whole thing would one flick of the bick and this thing will smoke entirely in about 10 minutes and turn nothing nothing into white ash wow your fire alarms may go off though yeah probably yeah and so with this thing this larger piece they would hollow this out put an ember in there would they have to have to blow on the ember as they hiked? Well, you could blow on a little bit and you cap it, and then you can put it in your pocket. The famous Iceman that was found in the border of Italy and Austria, he had this tethered to his right side, which is a position of significance, you know, things that

you need, like your knife, you know, and things that you want to make sure you have if you're right-handed, it's on the right side. So this one example, we have a thread of knowledge of use of mushrooms that goes over millennia, and most of those threads have been frayed or broken in the chain of knowledge. But this is one of the threads that was not broken. And it's significant, I think. We were much more dependent upon mushrooms when we were forest people than we are now seemingly in the cities. But it's coming full circle very quickly.

Well, mushrooms are weird in that some of them are incredibly edible and nutritious, and other ones will kill you. And sometimes they look really similar to each other. Well, this is the mystery of mushrooms, and I think it speaks to also mycophobia, the fear of mushrooms. R. Gordon Watson first coined that term. But when you think about it, in your visual landscape with animals, you see them for months, years, and plants. So you have a familiarity factor. But mushrooms that come up and disappear in four or five days, some of them can feed you. Some can kill you. Some can heal you.

Some can send you on a spiritual journey. you. Some can kill you. Some can heal you. Some can send you on a spiritual journey. So to have something so powerful and yet so ephemeral, it's natural for humans to avoid that which they don't understand out of fear because they don't know the difference. But, you know, 23 primates consume mushrooms, humans being one of them. And so that speaks to a long ancestral use of mushrooms going back, you know, in our primate evolutionary tree for a very, very long time. What, how many species of mushrooms are there? You know, you asked me that question five years ago, I would have said 1.5 million. And now we're

up to about 5 million is being estimated. Fungi outnumber plants 5 to 10 to 1. I speak at TED and I've gone to these TED conferences, but it's shocking. With the smartest brains in the world, not until just recently did they realize what us mycologists have known for a long time. 30% of the soil mass, when you're walking on soil, the 30% of the soil mass, when you're walking on soil, the 30% of the biological carbon is fungal. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Say that again.

30%. 30% of soil is fungal mass, living and dead, of healthy soil. And this is the biggest repository of carbon in the world in the ground is related to these fungal networks. So there is about 8.3 to about 10 million species on the planet. Right now, about half of those are fungal species. The outnumbered plants up to 8 to 1, 10 to 1 by some estimates. Really nice, interesting metric in one meter of a tree root. For every meter of a tree root, there's a kilometer of mycelium.

Now think of that. Three feet versus 2,200 feet. So the extensiveness of the mycelial network in our landscapes is vast. I call it Earth's natural internet. These are membranes that are literally sensitive. I think they're sentient. They respond to every footprint that we take on this planet. And as you walk across landscapes, you're breaking wood.

And that makes new nutrition available. So the competition of fungi to find that new nutrition is fierce. And so first to the menu wins. So this is something that we are now understanding how essential they are for preserving biodiversity and for the health of the ecosystems as well as our own personal health. So when you say you think they're sentient, to what degree? I mean, and you're not talking about just like psilocybin or amanita muscaria. We're kind of intellectually provincial in that we are using language and preventative terms in order to describe concepts that we're struggling with.

So let me describe it this way. We separated from fungi 650 million years ago. Maybe you did, dude. I know some people that are probably still. Well, basically, we are descendants of fungi. Yeah. We share a more common ancestry with fungi than we do with any other kingdom. And fungi are closer to animals than they are to plants.

Animals came from fungi. You and I are actually fungal bodies. I'm speaking to basically another fungal body right now. So Joe Rogan, I mean, whether you know it or not, you're basically a fungal mass. And from a cellular point of view, under the microscope, human cells, animal cells, and fungal cells are very, very similar. We exhale carbon dioxide, we inhale oxygen.

As do fungus. As the fungus does. We separate it from fungi, basically. We chose the route to encapsulate our nutrients in a cellular sac, a stomach, digesting our nutrients within. The fungal systems digest their nutrients externally. They exhale oxygen, inhale carbon dioxide. And their network-like design allows them to respond to catastrophic. And what I mean by that is that the mycelial networks, they're so dense in the soil, and they have literally hundreds of billions of tips. And as these tips are growing out, they tend to be polynucleotide at the tips, and it allows them to upregulate new enzymes, acid sequences, etc. So if there's a new ecological challenge, a new food

source, a new toxin, or something, these fungal networks have great plasticity in being able to code for new sequences from their DNA. So all you need is one of those hundreds of billions of tips to find a new enzyme to break down a toxin or a new food source. And what happens then is that information then is incorporated genetically into the mycelial network. And the mycelium then surges because it has new food, logically. And so when it surges, it a new, what's called a sector of mycelium, we now know there's evidence that the mycelial network then that it benefits from that tip exploration and discovery. So these are like massively resilient, adaptive organisms that have a network based design, not dissimilar from that of our neural networks, not dissimilar from

the computer internet. And more and more that I explore this, not dissimilar from that of our neural networks, not dissimilar from the computer internet. And the more and more that I explore this, the more I'm convinced that we will find network-based organisms throughout the cosmos, probably fungal systems. And fungal systems ultimately give rise, in our case, animals. And it's more likely we'll find fungal-animal relationships all throughout the universe. Do you think that there's some unknown way that animals are connected in some sort of a similar way as well? That if animals came from fungus, and fungus has this incredible way of communicating with each other, do you think that there's something like that in the animal kingdom that we haven't discovered? in the animal kingdom that we haven't discovered?

Well, that stimulates my thought into talking about the microbiome. The mycelial landscapes networks, they don't live by themselves. They select a microbiome of bacteria and other organisms that rest upon the mantle. These fungal networks are the foundation of the food web. Well, similarly, we have a microbiome. And it's really interesting that many of the bacterial diseases that infect fungi also infect us. Our best antibiotics against bacteria come from fungi, penicillin being the obvious example. doing next-gen sequencing, and this has never been published before, that the mycelial mats growing in the very same wood chips, in our case, that had been fermented, we had a thousand-fold difference in the relative abundance of genera of bacteria from the very same wood chips,

two different mushroom species planted on those wood chips, And the microbiomes that were created and selected for by the mycelium were vastly different. This really strongly supports the concept, this is a hypothesis with quickly becoming a theory. I'll explain the difference in a minute. But this really supports the concept that I've long believed and espoused that these mycelial networks are not just happenstance. They're creating the habitats and the flora and ultimately the fauna that are resident within the ecosystem to guarantee the plurality and the biodiversity of the ecosystem by creating the plants that grow up, that feed the animals, the insects, to create the debris fields and then feed the mycelium for the benefit of the progeny of the mushrooms that will form

thereafter. So these are deterministic organisms that are setting the stage for ecological evolution. And you think that they're doing this in a conscious manner? Well, see, again, we're a victim of our consciousness trying to define what is conscious and what is smart. And one of the best arguments I've had, my brother Bill is a super genius, is far smarter than myself. And he was editing one of my books, Mycelium Running, How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. And he goes, Paul, you cannot say that mycelium is intelligent. And he said, you can't say nature is intelligent. I go, wait, Bill, I respect you. But you didn't realize the

hypocrisy of the statement that you're giving me. You're telling me nature is not intelligent, and yet you are born of nature using the mind to conceive the concept that challenged the idea that nature is not intelligent when you are part of nature? I rest my case. Yeah, that's indefensible. Yeah. So we create language and words to describe concepts. So you feel like your brother was sort of hampered by these predetermined categories that we like to put things into. You have a word.

Use that word. The word is very clearly defined in our ideas. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. You know, we, language is code and we don't have, we haven't elaborated the code yet to elucidate the concepts that we're trying to articulate. That does not mean that just because you can't prove it's true doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

Right. So as our vocabulary increases, you know, as our lexicon of language increases, it becomes more robust, then I think we can better describe, test, and prove that these concepts are true. But, you know, we're biologically provincial when we think about how limited we are. We're truly Neanderthals with nuclear weapons. I mean, this is when you look at the how, how important natural ecosystems are, try to replicate them. They're very, very difficult to replicate due to their complexity. So I think the more that we study nature, most all of us scientists subscribe to the adage that the more we study this subject, the more we realize we didn't know. And the hubris of us

thinking that these things cannot occur, did not occur, will not occur, really speaks to our provincial attitude towards nature. The idea that these fungus, fungi, are creating their environment and almost they're the architects of this environment. They're establishing the landscape for all these different creatures and life forms to live. It's unbelievably fascinating that the idea that, and also that they're connected, right? They're connected in some sort of

almost like a neural network. And there's, what is that thing in the Pacific Northwest, the one fungus group that's essentially the largest living organism on the face of the earth? Yeah, the largest organism in the world so far discovered is a mycelial mat, 2,200 acres in size.

And that's equivalent to about 665 football fields. And that's one animal? It's one mycelial mat. Or one thing? One mycelial mat is a honey mushroom that kills trees. It's an edible mushroom. But think of this. I mean, think of it.

So for those listeners out there, if any soil biologists know this well, if you go out and get some nice, rich soil, a gram of it, and you analyze it, there typically is a million, five million microbes per gram in that soil. Now, the mycelium is growing out. We have five or six skin layers that protect us from an infection. The mycelium only has one cell wall. On the other side of that cell wall are hundreds of millions of microbes per gram that are trying to consume it, many of which. The mycelium is able to upregulate in constant biomolecular communication with this ecosystem, be able to prevent predators from consuming it, thus allowing it to achieve the largest mass of any organism in the world. This is amazing to me because it means that it is constantly in communication with the ecosystem, being challenged, accepting alliances. So guilds of microbiomes are being created,

selected by the mycelium. And these guilds and communities then cooperate in order to prevent pathogens parasites even competing guilds from coming into the landscape so the dominance of these fungi are to ensure the ecosystems that give lives to their progeny the rule of natural selection in life is reproduction so everything steers towards reproduction so from an evolutionary biology point of view what will that organism do to help survive so it can reproduce? And reproduction through creating guilds of communities of the microbiome using the mycelial network as the structural foundation of the food web seems to be the name of the game here. So this honey mushroom, is that what it's called, that lives in the Pacific Northwest, how is it killing these trees? It's a root parasite.

So it comes in and kills the trees. And I spend a lot of time in the old-growth forests and a lot of hiking, and I've always been wondering about meadows in the subalpine regions. There's all these subalpine forests, and then you come out and there's these giant meadows. I suspect that this honey mushroom is a meadow maker. It climaxes these trees. It kills them. They then die, and then they grow saprophytically, but then it clears the canopy so the grass is – Saprophytically?

What is that? Saprophytic means it's growing on dead material. So first it's a parasite. You mean the mushrooms. The mushrooms. First it's a parasite, kills the tree. Then it's a saprophyt or saprobe, that's another word for it. It's a decomposer. It breaks down that material.

But as it decomposes the wood, 30% of wood becomes water. So the mycelium generates water. And so water lenses are being created. Now you have more sunlight, grasses then flourish. Now you have more sunlight, grasses then flourish. And so I suspect that these mushrooms are actually meadow makers, allowing then the elk and the deer and marmots and whatnot to exist in those grassland environments as a way of rebuilding the nitrogen source in the soil. So I think these are over great, huge timescales. We have to get away from the concept of our lifespan or even 100, 200 years. We need to think in millennial terms, you know, over many, many millennia.

This is unbelievably fascinating. The idea that they're sort of the architects of their ecosystem. They're the architects of our existence. This is something that there's some really fantastic research that's come out in the past two years. I'm a science ambassador for the AAAS, the American Association of Advanced Science. So I am a little bit out there, but I'm really happy that I have so much scientific support these days. A lot of things I've been talking about for 20 years are now well-rooted and been proven. One of the things that has been so fascinating to me, and I'm still wrapping my mind

around this, but the universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago from the Big Bang. The Earth coalesced out of stardust, about 4.5 billion. The earliest records of life we have is about 3.8 billion years ago, single-celled organisms. but just recently in lava beds in South Africa, they found mycelium infused through the lava 2.4 billion years ago. Now, we split from fungi 650 million years ago. And then in Brazil this past year, they found a fully intact, apparently a fossilized mushroom published in Nature, which is a very reputable scientific journal. And that one is 1.4 billion years old. So the oldest multicellular organism in the fossil record today is this fungus and lava in South Africa, 2.4 billion years ago. A fully formed mushroom who had its form was growing 1.4 billion years ago.

We separated from fungi 650 million years ago. Mushrooms have had their form longer than we've had our form by more than a billion years. Here, Jamie just pulled it up on the screen here so we could take a look at it. It's the one from Brazil. So this is the – Paul, is this the image that you're familiar with? Yeah, this is the one that has just been published in the past. They have a great name that's a tongue twister to pronounce. It's Gondwana agaricides magnificus.

Why do they do that? Do they do that to make people like me feel stupid? They don't have to. No, they do that because graduate students want to publish papers instead they get to invent names so it looks better if you have a long latin sounding name so but think of that mushrooms had their form before we had ours yeah these are elders these are these are ancient organisms these are the really the the overlord underlords of our ecosystem and And I suspect, and as these neural networks, they have more neural connections

in the mycelial mass, they're over a thousand acres than we have in our brain. They are actually accumulating not only genetic intelligence, but I think that as time goes on, I hope that we'll be able to interface with them. Because I think that there is many benefits

of us communicating with mycelium that can give us rapid responses to catastrophic. That's how they've evolved. And we're now the biggest walking catastrophe that I know, walking across the planet. And we need to engage these fungal allies for the benefits that we need to put into play in order to prevent the loss of biodiversity. It seems like a communication gap would be very hard to bridge. The communication gap, I mean, if we really did find a way to communicate in some form with mushrooms, like the concept of language, like you were talking about just the idea of nature and intelligence and these words that we have, that have these uh sort of uh concrete definitions in

our head that don't really apply to some things that are very very confusing to us like the idea of fungal intelligence the idea that you could somehow or another understand the language that these things we wouldn't we don't even understand dolphin language, right? Well, one classic example, Japanese are so clever at this. There's a slime mold called Physarium Polycephalum. And this slime mold is very, very good at navigating through mazes and challenges. I mean, first a food wins. Conservation of energy is rewarded. So how did they set this up?

They put a little bit of it. They did several experiments. The most fun one is they designed a nutrient-like maze replicating Tokyo in the Japanese subway system. And so they started with Tokyo, and they put oats, which is a nutritional source. They inoculated what is on this basically kind of agri-map with all the major cities, the nodes around Tokyo. And then each of those nodes had a piece of oat on them, which is a source of nutrition.

The main oat was where Tokyo was. They inoculated it. And then they let the slime mold then grow. And first it grew out randomly, exploratorily, you know, just like you would do if you're a hunter or something. You're hunting on the landscape looking for things. And then after about 28 hours, it reorganized itself in the most efficient way possible and reorganized the Japanese subway system in a more efficient manner than it's designed today. Thus, they said, not me, not Paul Stamets, this is a demonstration of cellular intelligence.

Whoa. So this is the tip of the proverbial mycelial iceberg. This has broad implications. And I just want people to suspend their disbelief. And this goes into actually the evolution of human consciousness. And Terence McKenna was a good friend of mine. I love Terence. I especially love him the last five years of his life because he made fun of himself so much. I especially love him the last five years of his life because he made fun of himself so much. Terrence, people took Terrence way too seriously in many levels.

But as his brother Dennis, which I think has been on your show. A couple times. Yeah, Dennis is a great ally, great scientist. But, you know, Dennis said even if 10% of what Terrence said was true, it's freaking amazing. And Terrence and Dennis both came up with a stoned ape theory. Now, it's not a theory. It's freaking amazing. And Terrence and Dennis both came up with a stoned ape theory. Now, it's not a theory. It's a hypothesis. A hypothesis is speculative but cannot necessarily be as not yet proven.

A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and proven with facts. So I disagree with them in saying it's not a theory. It's a hypothesis. But the hypothesis of the stoned ape, which I think you've alluded to before, is that with climate change and as the savannas increase and our primate ancestors came out of the forest canopies, they're tracking across the savanna. And if you're a hunter, what do you look? You look for footsteps and you look for scat. and the most significant fleshy mushroom going out of poop in in africa hippopotamus elephant you know deer antelope etc is psilocybe cuvensis it's a very large mushroom you're hungry you're with your clan you consume it and then 20 minutes later you're you are catapulted in this extraordinary experience.

Psilocybin substitutes as serotonin, becomes a better neurotransmitter, activates neurogenesis, it causes new neurons to form, new pathways of knowledge. So that's the stone-date hypothesis, and it speaks to a mystery that the human brain, basically the brain cavity doubled in size in about 2 million years. Some people say it's less than 200,000. Less than 200,000 years?

Homo sapiens arrived at 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. That's a big gap, right? It's a big gap. Well, the science is like that. So you want to be scientifically accurate here. I need to show the extreme margins of what's been estimated. So if we accept two million years, and it's been shown in the fossil record this is true, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils are 300,000 years old now. But we have a suddenly doubling of the human brain.

And with that, our language centers increased our ability to prognosticate to plan and there's no explanation for this currently and even though we may not be able to prove it I ask people to suspend their disbelief for a second now think of this our primate ancestors are going across the savanna. They ingest these mushrooms as a clan. Massive input for anyone who's eaten these mushrooms. Huge amounts of data is coming in. Fractal patterns, geometrical landscapes occur.

You have empathy. You have greater courage. You're fighting a saber-toothed tiger. One day you have a courage you're fighting a saber saber-toothed tiger you know one day you're you have a fear of it we know now from neurogenesis and the extension of the fear response that has been clinically proven psilocybin allows you to reset and have different neurological pathways to respond to fear overcoming the fear of conditioned response potentially ptsd and there's a lot of research on this currently so but this wouldn't happen one time with one hominid group. It wouldn't happen two times, ten times.

It would happen millions and millions and millions and millions of times over millions and millions of years. This leads to what I think is called – this should be called epigenetic neurogenesis. We know that there's a regeneration of neurons. We know that psilocybin substitutes the serotonin. It opens the floodgates of the senses. You have a lot more data coming in. And we know that you have the extinction of the fear response. So if you're the leader of your clan, you've had this traumatic event, either war or cataclysm from earthquakes, whatever the case may be, or encounter a saber-toothed tiger, whatever,

if you're the leader of that clan and you can overcome your fear response, you have courage and you have empathy. Those are leadership skills. I think people should take note of it. People like to follow leaders who are courageous and yet kind, who they can trust. They'll have their best interests in mind. So I think this propelled, I think it's a lot, it's a very good explanation. It's an unprovable hypothesis. But now we're at a junction and we're ready for the next quantum leap in human consciousness. I think psilocybin should be looked upon as a nootropic vitamin. And there's a huge amount of interest in this.

Johns Hopkins University, as you probably well know, New York University, UCLA, elsewhere in Europe, there's major clinical studies that have been conducted in the past two years showing exactly what I'm saying about overcoming fear response, neurogenesis, overcoming PTSD. This is now medically quite seriously considered and something that I think that we should explore under controlled settings. I'm not into partying with psilocybin mushrooms. Damn.

You're going so good. I can understand the urge. Ari Shaffir is going to be here in an hour and a half, and he's the creator of Shroomfest. He's going to be very upset with your idea that you shouldn't party with it. Well, I think there's greater benefit to yourself and humanity. I think these are serious tools. California has it. I'm sure you're probably aware.

It's up for legalization. Yeah. I was really quite surprised by that. Yeah. Yeah, I was really quite surprised by that. Yeah, all my work, and to put some caveats here, all my work was covered by a Drug Enforcement Administration license. I've published now four new species in the genus psilocybe, including the most potent psilocybin mushroom in the world called psilocybe azurescens. And to be clear, folks, nature provides, I don't.

Right, of course. When I had my DEA license, I mean, everyone I suspected was a DEA agent who came to me and wanted to get some psilocybin. I'm sure you probably got set up a bunch of times. Numerous times. Did you matrix at all? To a point, it was pretty funny. I had this one person who offered me just huge amounts of money, and I played with him. And I said, no, it's not enough.

And he offered me more and more money, pretty soon about $200,000, $300,000. And he was writing all these coded letters. And it was obviously a DEA agent trying to set me up. And finally, he got really frustrated because I was playing with a guy. I said, I'm tired of being set up like this. I'm just going to play with a sucker. And so it finally came to a point. And he got really, really frustrated. He's going to get mad at me. He goes, well, how much money? I go, there's not enough money on this planet for me to ever give you a psilocybin mushroom. So give it up. But even if you say that's not enough money, could that be taken as a negotiation?

Well, not enough money on the planet. I suppose some aliens would come. No, but you've got to have not enough money on the planet. Before not enough money, it was not enough money. Right, before that. So I would think that if you had

a really loosely interpreting judge, you could- Well, I suppose so, but I never committed a criminal act. Right,

but isn't it sort of like a conspiracy to- I'm not a lawyer. I mean, you have to keep things in context. I wouldn't play. Maybe you're more of a courageous person. You have to keep things in context. I wouldn't play. Maybe you're more

of a courageous person when it comes to that stuff than me. At some point, I just got frankly pissed off. Enough of playing with me. It's a waste of your time. I'm going to play with you and I'm going to reverse the table. But in any event, this is serious research. And it's something that unfortunately, because it

can't be marginalized by the party atmosphere and uses a party drug. There's a really amazing study that just came out about five days ago. It's a big data study. 440,000 people, prisoners, were surveyed over 10 years in the Department of Human Health Services data bank, and they found an amazing correlation. If you had in this patient, in those prisoners, one experience with psilocybin in your life, one experience, it reduced in that population compared to the people who did not take psilocybin mushrooms an 18 percent reduction in burglary and larceny and up to a 27 percent reduction in other crimes, including violent crimes. So that's phenomenal.

Actually, I got my numbers reversed. There's 27 percent reduction in burglary, 18% reduction in violent crime. Now think of the damage, not only to the victims and the victims' families, the court system, the lawyers, the collateral damage, people being upset because they're being criminalized in prison for something, you know, for merely possessing soul-side mushrooms or something like that. But think of the return on investment. A four to six hour experience creates a lifetime benefit to society, reducing criminal activity by 18 to 27 percent. This is phenomenal. This is something that can help the health of our human psyche, of our social system, of reducing trauma throughout our entire society.

It's time for us to wake up and look at this in a much more seasoned and intellectual fashion than we have before. More rational and not weighed down by the ideas of mushrooms being a silly thing. And so I have a few pet peeves, and I understand why people want to use it, but the word shroom just drives me crazy. Shroom fest. Yeah, and the shroom fest. With all due respect, I understand, but let's not be children about this. Let's be adults. You're a serious person.

I get it. I'm also a non-serious person on many levels, but I know when it comes to something that is so powerful, that is so important, let's not jeopardize its use medically and for the benefit of society in the future by appealing to the lowest common denominator. Let's be adults in the room on this. I agree with you to a certain

extent, but I also think that it's got to be incredibly frustrating for a guy like you that has the kind of information that you have bouncing around your head in relationship to the way the rest of the world views it. See, to a person like myself, who I don't know nearly as much as you know, but I know quite a bit more than the average person when it comes to psilocybin and mushrooms or Amanita muscaria or Terrence McKenna's ideas, the shroom fest doesn't bother me. But for a serious researcher like yourself, it's got to be like, oh, you're a part of the problem, right? You're making it silly. It's the Timothy Leary problem.

Right, right. It held back their bona fide research in this subject for years. There's a movement right now. Explain that, please. There's a movement right now to move psilocybin from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. Schedule 1 means an illegal drug that has no medical benefits. Schedule 2 means it's drug that has no medical benefits. Schedule two means it's a drug that has medical benefits. So there's a serious movement going on right now within the

FDA to have it be recategorized because in the words of FDA researchers I know, one arm's length removed is that they've never seen anything with such a strong safety profile that gives so much benefit at so little cost for such a long time. This is a drug in a category of its own. This is really important. So let's not jeopardize it. It is really important, but you're never going to stop kids from calling it shrooms. Well, you know, and I want to give a pass here. I want to give a pass here. I want to give a pass.

And the coming of age, you know, when I was 16 to, you know, the age 22, 24, it's the coming of age ceremony. Now, I'm going to tell you something that's very deeply personal and it's very significant in my life. I had a congenital stuttering habit. I could not speak. I had a congenital stuttering habit. I could not speak. I could not look at Joe Rogan in the eye right now without, you know, I had like the King speech. You've seen the movie?

Exactly like that, but worse in my case. I went through six years of speech therapy. I was interviewed for special education. I grew up in a small town called Columbiana, Ohio. And I could not speak. Now, the type of stuttering habit that I have and had, I don't stutter to animals. I had pet snapping turtles, and I would talk to them all the time. And I don't stutter when I sing. But I could not elocute without stuttering constantly. And please, people out there, don't finish a stutterer sentence. The type of stutterer category that I have been in is that we would try to trick our brain with a prepositional or adverbial phrase halfway through the sentence that we're stuck on,

because we're thinking three or four sentences ahead, and the only way you can do is trick the brain. So I had to come up with a new neurological pathway to trick my brain so I could get out of my stuttering rhythm that was just repetition I couldn't get out of. And then one day, before I'd ever had psilocybin mushrooms, I bought some, a bag of them. And I thought, I had no information. I just bought the bag for about 2525, and I went out for a walk in the woods in Ohio. And there was this beautiful oak tree that I used to climb to the very top of the tallest hill. In Ohio, we don't have mountains. We have hills.

And it was in the summertime, and so I thought setting is important. I knew that, so I went for a walk. And I ate the bag, the whole bag, when I was walking. How many ounces, you think? Well, I know it was, the whole bag when I was walking. How many ounces you think? Well, it was about, I know it was about a half an ounce to an ounce. So I mean, yeah, so we're, we're talking, um, this is, this is, this is the elevator ride beyond the 10th floor, you know, so eight to 16 grams. It was probably on the order about 20 grams, you know?

So, and, but I didn't know, no, I had no one to, no one so but i knew but i went to this i wanted my destination was this tree right so i walked and walked and i came with the tree and i was eating the mushrooms and and then i started feeling the effects and so it was great because i was climbing the tree and i was getting higher in the tree and higher in my brain whoa that seems like a terrible thing to do and i climbed to the top of the tree and higher in my brain. Whoa, that seems like a terrible thing to do. And I climbed to the top of the tree and this beautiful landscape, but there was these, in the summertime, these boiling black clouds on the horizon. I go, oh, that's cool. You know, and so this big summer storm was coming and the clouds were dark and boiling

and they're coming close and I could hear the thunder, you know, and then I'm going higher and higher and the winds pick up and the tree started moving and I could hear the thunder, you know, and then I'm going higher and higher and the winds pick up and the tree started moving and I started to get vertigo because I was like, oh, my God, I'm getting so freaking high on these mushrooms. And so I grabbed the tree and held on the tree and it became my axis mundi into the earth. And then the lightning started coming closer and the lightning strikes started coming really close

and the lightning would hit and I go. I saw fractals for the first time. The atmosphere became liquid. I saw this liquid waves of this multidimensional geometrical patterns everywhere. And the sparks of lightning would just create this amazing crescendo of secondary tertiary fractals all around me. And I was like, oh, my, it was amazing. I said, this is what I read about, you know. And so the storm came and lightning strikes were all around me and I was washed with rain.

And I was up there and I felt in touch with Gaia, the universe. My heart opened up. I felt one with all. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is such a powerful spiritual experience. I had no idea. No matter what anyone has read, as you probably know, it cannot describe the experience. And then it dawned on me, wait a second, Stamets. You're on the tallest tree on the tallest hill for miles in the middle of a lightning storm.

This is not the best place to be. And so I realized I could be killed up here. Suddenly I had a reality rush like, you know. Or you could turn into a god. Imagine? Like a comic book high on 20 grams of mushrooms hug at a tree the lightning comes it hits you and maybe you were the savior maybe you need to get back to that tree maybe you're the chosen one so i so this i was you know i it was an incredibly spiritual and wonderful experience, but I also had the fear. And this comes with the hero's journey.

You know, you always have the dark side. You always have not just the light side, but there's counterbalance with the dark side. And I realized, oh, my gosh, I could die up here. And I said, well, I don't die, Stamets. What are your issues? Just get something out of this experience. And I said, this stuttering habit is ridiculous. And I'm not stupid.

And so I said to myself, stop stuttering now. Stop stuttering now. I said that dozens, hundreds of times over and over and over. And fortunately, the storms went past and held onto the tree and soaking wet. I came out of the tree and walked back to where I was living. And then the next day I got up, I didn't see anybody. And I was walking along on this path and a sidewalk. And there's a lady that I really liked a lot. And, uh, but she was always attracted to the super self-assured jocks and

things like that. She was actually very kind and sweet, but I didn't want to stare at her in the eyes because I would stutter and it's humiliating for us. So the more humiliating us stutterers feel, the more we stutter. And so it's a really slippery slope. And so I would avoid eye contact. And so it's a really slippery slope, and so I would avoid eye contact. And so for the first time, she walked towards me. She said, good morning, Paul. How are you? She was always so nice to me, and I was terrified because I would embarrass myself.

And I looked at her straight in the eyes, and I said, I'm doing fine. How are you? And I stopped stuttering in one day. Whoa. And this speaks to now what has been medically proven is that we can reset the neurology of the human brain through neurogenesis. I believe that experience allowed me to map new neurological pathways that allows me to elocute in a way that I could not elocute before. Now, just to be truthful here, if I drink a lot of alcohol, I'm in a loud bar because us stutterers, you're a martial artist. I've been a martial artist all my life and we have peripheral consciousness.

And so if someone comes through a door, you know, into the bar and I'm looking at you, I know that they've come through. So this hyper alertness that us martial artists have, you know, of knowing things in the circumference around us, in the peripheral environment, is distracting. So if I drink a lot and there's a loud – a lot of noise and a lot of people coming in and out of doors, I'm hypersensitive to intruders. And then that's when I'll start stuttering if a person is talking to me, asking me, how do you grow mushrooms? It's like filling a well with a teaspoon. Because I'm worried about the guy who just came through the door over there who looks like he may not be a safe person to be in this environment right now.

So there's a time that I'll – you only give 10 percent of my brain to communicating to the person in front of me. My 90 percent of my brain is hyper-aware in the circumstantial environment around me. Time for another trip to the tree to cure that last 10 percent. But that's my personal story. That's amazing. It's not going to work for everyone. But it worked for you.

That's what's important. It worked for me. And I was at Crater Lake Lodge and a waiter came up to me and he goes, he's about 17, 18 years of age, a busboy actually. And my wife and I, my wife looked at me and I looked at her and I said, should I? Yeah, go ahead. So I told this busboy the same story. Now, this guy was totally straight, looked like he was a super conservative from a super conservative family.

And we told this whole story and his eyes were wide open because when you meet other stutterers and you talk to them, they're really desperate for a solution. So I never knew what happened to this young busboy, but I think I changed his life forever. I hope you did. So I had a good friend growing up and his brother was severely stricken with it to the point where he would have to wince, close his eyes and look down when he would talk to you. And he just couldn't get over it. It was, but he won't stutter to animals. It won't stutter when he sings. But he won't stutter to animals. He won't stutter when he sings. So what do you think it is? What is happening?

Do you recall? Well, there's several things. It could be trauma when you're a child combined with neuropathy. in this at a conference that there is a theory that in the seventh or eighth month in the womb, your neurons failed to make all the connections that it needed to. So that makes sense to me because that's why I would reroute with prepositional or adverbial phrases to try to jump around the little habitual loop that I'm in. But I think this speaks to increasing intelligence. And we all will suffer from some

form of dementia and neuropathy occurs. There is a really wonderful, safe and legal mushroom to use that leads to neurogenesis, and that's called lion's mane. And lion's mane is a cascading white icicle, edible and choice mushroom they sell in the stores. What stores? white icicle edible and choice mushroom they sell in the stores what stores well grocery stores all over yeah lion's mane they're called um i have various brand names one i love is called pom-pom blanc it looks like pom-poms from cheerleaders and lion's mane contains a unique group of compounds beautiful called aranacines and haricones. And these regenerate myelin on the axons of nerves. And so this is a mushroom. Kawagishi discovered this in 1994, a Japanese researcher,

and he postulated it as a potential preventative or treatment for Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy, et cetera. Do you take it? I take it every day. Every day? Every day. You take it in raw form? I take it in caps cetera. Do you take it? I take it every day. Every day? Every day. You take it in raw form? I take it in capsules.

So you buy it? Yeah. We have an extensive product line. You do? Yes. How do you get to that? Hostdefense.com. Hostdefense.com.

Why Host Defense? That's part of your innate immunity response, supporting your immunity. But our main business is at fungi.com. And I registered that name myself. I'm kind of proud of that. It cost me $25. 1994. Wow, you were on ahead of the ball.

Winterize yourself. But lion's mane is a safe mushroom to consume. There are several clinical studies out on it treating mild cognitive dysfunction. But there's two mouse studies that I think are quite illustrative. And this is translational medicine. This translates from mice experiments to humans. We already know that it has aspects of neurogenesis. When you go into Alzheimer's, a state of Alzheimer's, which is a big complex, but one of the characteristics is the formation of amyloid plaques. Demyelination of the neurons, myelin transmits the neural signals.

Demyelination occurs. Your outer sheath on the neurons is interrupted by amyloid plaques that then prevent neurotransmission. amyloid plaques that then prevent neurotransmission. So the experiments with the mice, which I think are so interesting, was one experiment was the maze experiment where the mice were put into an arena and they went out a corridor and they went one way in the corridor, they'd find food, the other way there's no food. Well, very quickly the mice learned, you know, you go out the corridor, go to the left, you find food. They injected it then with a toxic polypeptide that induces amyloid plaque formation that is a neurotoxin. Very quickly, after two weeks or so, the mice developed neuropathy. They got confused. They couldn't remember which way to go. It randomized. Upon giving these mice, again, mushrooms for a few weeks, they nearly renormalized.

Upon sacrificing the mice in the first part of the experiment, they saw the amyloid plaques and the demyelination. The second part of the experiment, of course, another subset of mice, they found that the myelin regrew and the amyloid plaque had resolved this is post-mortem you say sacrifice your euphemism for killing them you're basically cutting off a representative sample you sacrifice them you determine yeah that's representative of the population

now the remaining population is alive they fed them the mushrooms and they found that they regained neurological function the other experiment which I find is even more fun, is, and this was done in Japan, they put like 100 mice in an arena and they put a toy in the middle of the cage. All the mice got excited. They came up and sniffed it and smelled it and they got really excited.

And they sat there with counters to measure the points of contact. contact, how many points of contact the mice have exploring a new toy. So they got a really good baseline, hundreds of data points. And they did the same thing. Then they introduced this cyclopeptide, this neurotoxin. And the mice then, after a while, were uninterested, didn't have imagination, no curiosity. They put in a new toy. They were disinterested. They did the same thing.

Now, even their full-blown dementia-like symptoms gave them lion's mane mushrooms. And after a few weeks, when they put in a new toy, they came back to near normal levels. Upon sacrificing the mice, they found that the amyloid plaque had resolved and myelin had regenerated and neurogenesis had occurred. This is a smart mushroom.

Now, the tragedy that we face, I believe, as a society is we have people like yourself, people like me. We're all going to suffer through neuropathy. We have a lifetime of a body intellect of knowledge that we're going to start losing. So what is the loss to society of our elders forgetting, not remembering? So I think this is something that's really extraordinarily exciting. It's not patentable. The drug companies have no interest in this, but this is probably the number one thing that people can do, in my mind, to not only preserve

cognitive function, but to expand it. Now, I personally would love to see it legal to stack them both together, stacking psilocybin with lion's mane. And I think that stacking thing and then combining it with vitamin D3. Now, if I suggest vitamin D3, niacin, because those of you who've had a niacin flush, you know, 200 milligrams of niacin or more, you get red, you get itchy. And neuropathy typically is presented at the fingertips, at the end of your toes and your fingers and your peripheral nervous system. As you have neuropathy, the nerve endings begin to die backwards. So my idea here is because there are different receptors being activated by psilocybin than with the aranasins from lion's mane. If you stack lion's mane with psilocybin mushrooms with niacin, the advantage is, and this is hypothetical, but this is something

I think is well worth testing, is that niacin can help drive the neurogenic benefits of psilocybin and aranasins to the end of the peripheral nervous system. So we actually are planning right now a clinical study in Oregon with lion's mane mushrooms. The physicians who've looked at the research, which is robust, are convinced that it's worthy and they have their own funding. So we're going to do an N of 30 study is what we hope to do, 30 patients. And we hope to begin that study in the next year. It would be phenomenal to see how that would affect people with CTE, people like football players, boxers, people with brain damage. Across the board.

Yeah. Across the board. Yeah. The benefits, and this is something that when you're depressed, you're not creative, and your immune system is depressed as well. You're psychologically, emotionally depressed, and you're not as creative. When you are happy, you are creative, and your immune system is better. So this could be fundamental to disease advanced to the front stage of consideration by serious scientists.

And give up your mycophobia or even what I call xylophobia, the irrational fear of psilocybin mushrooms, and look upon these with new eyes and drop your prejudices and just look at it as a serious scientific analysis. Wow. How is this received, like, in the general scientific community? Is there skepticism? Well, I love my skeptics because unless they're prejudiced against you, and some people are, you can never convince them, but if scientists, when they see the data sets, and they see there's a dozen or more publications with scientists

without commercial interests who have done this independently, then it's being taken very seriously. So the whole medical community right now, you know, I speak at a number of medical conferences, TEDMED, American Academy of Dermatology, I've been keynote speakers at many medical conferences. And it's great because I can take people who are totally skeptical and most of them walk out of that room convinced. And why shouldn't we think that fungi are sources of medicines? I mean, penicillin may have tipped World War II in our favor. So the Japanese and Germans did not have penicillin, even though Alexander Fleming discovered it in 1928. In 1941, a lab tech researcher went to a market in Chicago, found a moldy cantaloupe. And Alexander Fleming's strain of penicillin was too weak. It couldn't be commercialized. This lady researcher who found this moldy cantaloupe found a penicillin was too weak. It couldn't be commercialized. This lady researcher who

found this moldy cantaloupe found a penicillium strain that was 200 times more potent. And as a result of that, in war, most of the casualties died from infections. And so the British and the English and the Americans had penicillin. The Germans and the Japanese did not. And so there's a great NPR analysis on this, on the history of penicillin. And it is one of the major factors in helping tilt the balance in the favor of the allied powers against the axis powders. So concerned were the researchers in England. They impregnated their clothes with spores of this mold strain.

So if their lavatories were bombed or they were captured, if one of them escaped, they could regenerate the culture from their clothing. Whoa. Wow. And this speaks to panspermia. We're all carrying microbiomes of fungi. The fact that you and I are here together means that I have now inoculated you with my microbiome of selected fungi. So, Joe, you are now a vector.

Whoa. Awesome. Congratulations. Now, the frustrating aspects of, what is the word that you use, fungiphobia, is that what you used? Mycophobia. Mycophobia. The frustrating aspects are, first of all, prohibition, right? The sweeping psychedelic act of 1970 that made psilocybin mushrooms illegal, right?

And then on top of it, the commercial pharmaceutical industry, which doesn't want to have anything to do with anything that it can't patent and has so many doctors and so many researchers in its pocket. So you have two issues there, right? You have one issue that people, which is obviously why you don't like the word shroom, people think of mushrooms as a party drug. Like being silly, freaking know, freaking out, doing something stupid, regrettable actions, and then afterwards going, wow, we got so crazy. Thinking of it as a frivolous sort of thing that you would engage in. Whereas what you're trying to do is show the absolute hard science. Do you feel that this absolute hard science is – I mean you must feel that it's unfairly inhibited and hindered? It has been, but there's been a tidal change in pharmacology of the use of psilocybin and its utility as a therapeutic agent. There's a title change.

I think now there's over 700 patients have gone through Johns Hopkins clinical trials for things like end of life, depression, PTSD. There are studies out on treating alcoholics and drug addicts. So, and this is important to communicate to people. In John Hopkins' study in particular, Dr. Roland Griffiths, a great, great scientist who's been running and championing these studies, came up with a very interesting series of analyses. And some of the take-home points were came up with a very interesting series of analyses. And some of the take-home points were only 70% of the people described the psilocybin experience therapeutically under controlled settings at Johns Hopkins with a very high dose of psilocybin as being beneficial.

Only 70%? 70%. 30% of them saying, I didn't like that. But in a retrospective study, 14 months to two years later, the 70% of the people who said it was a beneficial experience still described it as one of the most significant beneficial experiences and spiritual experiences of their lifetime. And interviewing their friends, their spouses, they saw a permanent residual effect from the benefits of the experience. They were nicer people. They're nicer to nicer people. They're

nicer to get along. They're less prone to anger. They had many values that we would cherish as an improved community of individuals. The 30% of the people who had a negative experience, the negativity of the experience did not extend beyond the experience themselves. So they didn't have collateral damage where we had collateral benefit. So the positive people saw it as a positive experience and the memory of the experience, this is so cool, the memory of the experience kept them optimistic, hopeful, and they felt benefits from just remembering the experience. The people who had a negative experience, they just, you know, wouldn't do that again.

So these mushrooms are obviously not for everyone. But for the people who do benefit, they benefit substantially. Don't you feel that a lot of the people that have those negative experiences, at least from my understanding, a lot of it are people that have some serious issues that they're not dealing with and ego problems and the mushrooms expose that and they try to wrestle the mushroom i mean when absolutely that's i think very well put i think that's a big issue some people are afraid of their inner self they you know we're all you can't paint the canvas black and white yeah we're a big spectrum of complex you know personality traits and what happened to somebody when they're two years old, five years old, what trauma they experienced, you know, it's very complex to be able to make

these statements. But I think as a group, there are some people who are on the edge and they may not control their innermost emotions and they're afraid of that in normal state of consciousness. So they're afraid they might lose their control. Right. Yeah. I mean, I've had personally some terrifying psychedelic experiences, but the way I've gotten through them is just to give in, just to give in. And for a person like myself, it's kind of a control freak, especially when I was younger. It's a hard thing to do just because you're like, no, no, no, I'm going to be fine.

No, no, no, fuck this. You know, I'm going to know that I don't like where this is going i'm gonna stop this right now i'm gonna put a halt to this i'm gonna bring myself back to sobriety like it's impossible it's not going to happen so you have to figure out how to just let go and how to just like really let go and trust the mushroom or the dmt or whatever it is that you're on to take you on this ride and you'll be okay when it's over. And if you can't do that, that's the bad trip. And I've seen a lot of people have bad trips. Well, see, we are the casualty of the fact that we don't have an infrastructure tradition in our societies like First Peoples and Native Americans do. They have set up a structure. They have a

tradition. Shamanic tradition. Shamanic tradition, rituals, elders. They've done this for a long time. They have set and setting down. They know how to treat these powerful medicines in the right context. Yes. And we lack that. Did you know that mushrooms were specifically banned from beer in the Bavarian Beer Act of 1516? Whoa. Barian Beer Act of 1516.

Whoa. And mushrooms and henbane and other plants were used in meads, psychoactive beers, and celebrated by people practicing pagan religions in Europe in the forest. And the struggle between, I believe, Christianity, monotheism versus polytheism and nature-based religions, there was a collision course. And then under pressure of the church, they banned the addition of these plants that could be your gateway to God because the church wanted to be in between you and God. They wanted to get the tithings. They wanted to be your portal and control access to the divine. portal and control access to the divine.

And so these mushrooms are looked upon as being specifically a threat to monotheism and Christianity. So the Bavarian Beer Act banned mushrooms. That's incredible. Terrence had some pretty interesting ideas about that. Terrence McKenna did. One of the things that he said

that he believed that as the climate changed and some mushrooms became less and less available, they started preserving them in honey because you can preserve things in honey. And that in preserving things in honey, you also run into the possibility of fermented honey. And then fermented honey becoming mead, you go into more of an alcohol culture than a psychedelic culture, which is really like on the opposite end of the spectrum. than a psychedelic culture, which is really like on the opposite end of the spectrum. Alcohol culture is loosened inhibitions, wild behavior, less thought of the consequences of your actions,

less introspective thinking, much more chaos, right? And that he believes that this is probably resulting in some sort of a shift, or he believed, rather, before he passed, that it was resulted in some sort of a shift from these more communal mushroom-worshiping cultures to what you saw in the Inquisition and some of the more chaotic times in history. I would respectfully disagree with the second part of that analysis. Not what you're saying, but what Terrence would have been saying. Mushrooms being preserved in honey is a way of preventing them from rotting. Right.

You don't think that had anything to do with mead? Well, I think it did have something to do with mead. Right. But the amount of alcohol being produced versus the dose that you would get. It seemed to me the psilocybin dose would be so much more powerful than the small amount of alcohol you'd be drinking. Am I misrepresenting what he was saying? No, I don't think so. I think you have a...

So you just disagree with his initial idea? Yeah, and that's okay. Terrence was a very smart guy and I still appreciate and love him. Well, he had wandering thoughts and they were amazing. Well, his time wave zero was totally BS. Well, that was crazy. That was crazy. He had the end of time occurring

on his birthday. I go, don't you think that's a little egocentric? Well, he also had some strange sort of a computer program, and I've tried to follow it many, many times, some of the lectures that he gave on the computer program that represented time wave zero. What the idea was, for people interested, he just thought there was going to come a point of ultimate novelty. And somehow or another, conveniently, he had that point coinciding with both his birthday and the end of the Mayan calendar, right? Yeah. His birthday was December 21st, 2012 as well?

I think so. Somewhere in that area. It would be a better thing to celebrate. That's totally egotistical. I mean, I love Tehran, but he basically got the math to conform to the convenience of his birthday. So it's like whatever. We're all guilty of being human.

Yeah. I mean, even the great ones. I mean, and he was a great, he was one of my favorite people in terms of like listening to his recordings. Do you ever listen to Psychedelic Salon? Oh yeah. Amazing podcast. One of the best articulators of the English language I've ever heard.

Yes. Yeah. I agree. And as is his brother. Yeah. Every time his brother, which what brings me back to the stoned ape theory, one of the things that his brother talked about,

and maybe you could elaborate on this, was the impact that psilocybin has on the creation of language. And he thinks that the very pathways that you were discussing, that psilocybin sort of empowers, that that may very well have been how human beings started elaborating on language. Oh, I think he's correct on that because glossary.

And we know the neurogenesis occurs in the hippocampus. What is glossary? Is the ability to speak in eloquent languages and new words as languaging. Your ability to language is increased you know under the experience of psilocybin speaking the neurogenesis and exactly what we've been talking about is that basically your your hippocampus is your center uh for uh learning and memory and this is why the mice got better because neurogenesis was occurring in the hippocampus. And so they regained their memory and they were able to learn. And so, yes, I think this neurogenesis not only occurs in the hippocampus, but I think it can also

occur in the peripheral nervous system. I have an extraordinarily powerful story that I would like to tell about neurogenesis. And it was from a good friend of mine named Bill Webb. He lived in Big Sur, California. He was a friend of Ansel Adams and Henry Miller. He wrote Tropic of Capricorn, whatever it was. In the 60s, this is a big part of the movement in the 60s and 70s. And Ansel Adams is the very famous photographer. And Bill Webb was a mentor to me.

I met him when I was around 20 years of age. I was writing, I wrote my first book, Psilocybe Mushrooms and Our Allies. You wrote your first book at 20? Actually, when I was 18. You bad motherfucker. Yeah. It was the weirdest. I mean, I haven't told anyone this in 30 years, but I went up to a place called Montana Books in Seattle and and I had my manuscript. And I walked into the bookstore because I was told Montana Books was a kind of an avant-garde

book publisher in the early 1970s. And so I was told to go up there, and I made an appointment, and I go in, I'm meeting with a publisher, and he goes, listen, this is an interesting little field guide you wrote, but this is not our market. You know, you really need a book representative. You need an agent. And he said, the best agent I know by far is Bill Webb. You know, but I haven't seen Bill Webb in two years. But, you know, you really need to see Bill Webb. And when he said those words, the door opened, a little bell rang, and in walked Bill Webb. It was like, the publisher goes, this is freaking crazy, you know? So Bill Webb and I became tightly bonded. He was a father figure to me. He was in his 70s when I met him. So Bill and I went down to Big

Sur and we tripped together. It was a great mentoring, you know, father-son relationship. Great mentoring, you know, father-son relationship. And Bill and I became very tight. And then Bill was about 82 years of age. And he calls me up and he says, Paul, I have to tell you something that's so important. And I want you to listen. I said, you understand, Paul? I go, yeah, Bill, how are you doing? He goes, well, I'm not doing too well.

I'm losing my sight. I'm losing my hearing. And getting old sucks. I said, but I want to tell you something that's really important. Great, Bill. I said, tell me. He said, no, Paul, I want you to absolutely swear to me you'll tell this to other people.

I go, got it, Bill. And I'm like, okay, Bill. I made the promise. What is it? He goes, okay, I've had this freaking hearing aid, and I hate it. I can't hear the birds or the waves breaking on the beach. And that's a big part of the Big Sur experience. I lived above the cliffs of Big Sur.

And I said, well, how does this relate? And he goes, well, I did a five-gram dose of Cubensis. That's the hero's journey for people who are listening. Five grams is it. You're on the floor. And he was on his deck of his house. And he noticed that he didn't need his hearing aid. He could hear the birds and the waves and things like that.

And he's laying there just, you know, he's like 80, mid-80s at that point. And he's just like having this incredibly blissful experience. He's coming to reconcile his own mortality, the fact that he's going to die. He's thinking about his life. And he's kind of dreaming in that dreamscape. And he hears click, click, click, click, click, click, click. He looks around. And he goes, what's that noise?

He shakes his ear maybe something in his ear click click click click he looks around and he goes he's driving me crazy I go where is the sound coming from and he finally looked over and it was ants walking on the deck

by near his head he could hear their footsteps neurogenesis. Jesus Christ. And this is an easily measurable metric. From a psilocybin experience, while he was fully on the experience, he said he did not use his hearing aid

for three or four days. Now, I've mentioned this. Why didn't he just do mushrooms again and keep the hearing aid on? Well, that's basically, he ran out of Cubensis. And so he had to put his hearing aid on. He was asking me for Cubensis, and I said, I'm sorry, I can't provide it to provide it to you so i've mentioned this now to several of the clinical

researchers who have dea license who are doing clinical research this is an easily measurable metric you can as people are fully you know in these sessions they could be giving them auditory stimulation to see if the auditory nerve is undergoing neurogenesis. And so this is something that I think that can be incorporated in the clinical studies to see if this is true. But Bill was emphatic. And when Bill Webb spoke, he had enormous gravitas. This guy was a serious intellectual. So I think this is an N of one study, you know, one individual.

But I think this is something that medical researchers should pay attention to. What do you think could possibly regenerate anything that quickly, though? Like how could it happen so quickly that during a four-hour trip? Because there's like nodes of crossing and there's an interconnectedness that occurs. And there's an interconnectedness that occurs. And there's a great graphic, which I didn't send you in advance, showing this is your brain without psilocybin. This is your brain with psilocybin. And there's a massive amount of neural connections that are occurring.

So I think, you know, just like water chooses the path of least resistance, I think that neurologically, if there is a neurological pathway that can help you as a species, as an individual survive, should there be a saber-toothed tiger on the horizon, then I think that the economy of energy in nature would reward the neurological pathways that are most likely to lead to your survival. So I think that neurogenesis across the brain occurred, just like me with my stuttering, and there was another neurological pathway. But in Bill's case, when he lost his access to those mushrooms, the neuropathy became more resonant and prominent. And so we're looking at these images. Amazing. Jamie's the best.

We're looking at these images, and could you explain to us what these are? This is your brain on magic mushrooms. Yeah, this is exactly opposite of Nancy Reagan's mantra here. Yeah, this is... You can push this up to your face. Okay, the placebo is on the left. This is your normal representation of interconnectedness between the nodes of your brain. So try to explain this to people.

Most of the people are just listening rather than viewing. Okay, so the one on the left basically shows connections between neuronal nodes that may be on the order of 40 or 50 different nodes of crossing. The one on the right with psilocybin is literally in the hundreds. And the nodes of crossing not only are more of them, but the thickness of the lines speaks to how robust those nodes of crossing are for carrying neurological signals. So this is pretty amazing. Now, this also influences, I think, and is important for our U.S. military, you know, for coders, for people who are trying to solve very complex data sets. The ability of you to have increased cognition and increased intelligence.

And this is why microdosing is the rage in Silicon Valley. The enormous number of coders are microdosing right now. For those who are listening, let's use Psilocybe cubensis as a standard species because that's the one that's mostly grown um and at a half a gram to a quarter gram you have liftoff you know five grams is the full-blown hero's journey a lot of people will take between two and four grams as a moderately spiritual experience four grams being higher and so um microdosing is taking a dose so low that if at most you might feel it a little bit giddy the first time you take it the first day, but you build up a tolerance immediately the second day. So the second, third day you would feel nothing.

So it's on the order of like a 10th of a gram of Cubensis where people are taking this and then they're taking it repeatedly over time. And coders in Silicon Valley from the biggest computer companies that we all know, this is not only a fashion but a tool that they're seeing increased ability for coming up with codes and it's a competitive advantage in the capitalistic system. I have a good friend who's a world champion kickboxer and one of the best in the world. He microdoses daily and he's been doing it over the last, I want to say, probably a year or so. And he has achieved phenomenal improvements in his performance because of that

he says that when he's sparring it's almost like he's psychic like he knows what people are going to do before they do it he said his mood is better he feels better he just feels more balanced and he'll take days off and when he takes days off and even though he's completely sober while he's microdosing because he's really only microdosing there's something about taking days off where everything just feels like kind of shitty it just doesn't feel good and then he's like oh i didn't i didn't take my microdose and so he takes it again and goes right back to that that place but he feels like he's in the matrix well it's actually he um it's probably good that he interrupts it because it washes those receptors clean of the psilocybin. How much time do you think you should interrupt for?

Two days out of seven. So five days on, two days off. Now, I'm not making official recommendations. I'm just saying. I will. I'll do it for you. From my small amount of knowledge on this subject, I think that makes sense. That's consistent with traditional Chinese medicine.

It's also consistent for those of us who drink coffee like myself. You drink coffee for five days, you take two days off. That next day is the strongest cup of coffee you've had in a long time. Me and my friends who are just coming to the next podcast after this, we just got done doing Sober October. So no alcohol, no marijuana, no nothing. Well, we drank coffee, but that's it. And when I stopped smoking marijuana, the first thing that happened is my dreams became rocket charged, like very bizarre, like crazy, lucid, strange, weird dreams. Not lucid in the sense that I controlled them, but lucid in the sense that I realized I was dreaming and I was just like having incredibly vivid vibrant dreams and I would wake up from them and be certain that what I had done was real like I had one dream that I fell asleep on the couch and while I did fall asleep on the couch but while I was asleep I was like oh I'm struggling to get this blanket over me while I'm on the couch

and I'm pulling it but it's stuck under the cushions and I'm struggling to get this blanket over me while I'm on the couch. And I'm pulling it, but it's stuck under the cushions, and I'm struggling. And I kind of halfway got it over me, and I went to sleep again. Well, when I woke up in the morning, there was no blanket. There was no blanket anywhere near me. It didn't exist. I had a lucid dream about covering myself with a blanket while I was sleeping on this couch. Very strange. And very primal dreams, too, like being chased by wolves and

running into bears and caves and really bizarre, very, very vibrant colors. And apparently from what I've read, marijuana does something to suppress REM sleep. And that in taking time off of it, your REM sleep just gets jacked through the roof. You know, I've heard this many, many times. I've never seen a clinical study on it, but it's the type of thing you hear so many times that you have pretty good confidence that this is true. Well, we all experienced it.

All my friends who did it experienced it. Ari in particular probably smokes as much as I do, maybe more. He experienced it deeply. I'm glad that you mentioned lucid dreams because this is a nice segue to i think the greatest discovery i've made of my life and i want as all came through a lucid dream so let me let me set the stage here and um colony collapse disorder is a threat to worldwide food biosecurity and killing bees bees around the world are being decimated. Say the name of the disorder again.

Colony Collapse Disorder. Collapse Disorder. Now, bees are dying off in enormous quantities. Oklahoma lost 85% of its beehives last year. 2016, 2017, the annual loss of bees report. And Maryland lost 75%. Nebraska, I think, lost 60%. I met a beekeeper in Washington State who lost 75% of his 35,000 hives.

Now, Apis meleifera is a honeybee, and it's factory farmed now. And the almond harvest in California is the biggest market for beekeepers who send their bees to the almond orchards. One bee can pollinate a thousand flowers in a day. So every flower that bee visits is an almond. So it's one of the most bee-dependent crops in the world. 35% of your food is directly dependent upon bee pollination. The other 65%, much of that is indirectly dependent. But hay, alfalfa, and clover for cows, all of our dairy is dependent upon bee pollination, all of our berries, all of our nuts, coffee is.

Even cannabis and other non-dependent plants benefit from what's called buzz pollination because the bees then can spread the pollen better through the air. It is now thought by many of the entomologists that I've been dealing with that we could have full colony collapse across the world within 10 years. The cost will be astronomical to our society. Prices of food will raise. Poverty will increase. You could make the argument that increased poverty leads to terrorism because people are poorer. They're desperate. And so colony collapse now is much worse than most people realize because all the wild bees have now been infected. So 80% of pollination services come from wild bees, and 20% comes from managed honeybees.

Avis melephora is a honeybee from Europe, brought over in the 1700s. In 1984, the varroa mite was introduced in the United States. And the varroa mite is a parasite on the backs of bees and injects viruses, in particular the D-form wing virus, the Lake Sinai virus, and the black queen cell virus. The D-form wing virus is really the most important one. Bees used to go, and they only live 30 days, but they used to go pollinating for nine days. So they leave the hive, and they pollinate for about nine days, and bring back pollen, and that's their service to the hive, and they die off.

Now the average time for pollination is only four days. In order to fight the mites, they've been using a toxic insecticide called Amitraz. Amitraz is licensed for fighting ticks on cattle. Using cattle strength doses of Amitraz off-label, beekeepers have been drenching their hives with Amitraz twice per year. Now the mites have built up tolerance, and now they're up to nine times a year. They're soaking the hives in order to kill the mites, because the mites are injecting these viruses. This is all hands on deck. The proverbial shit's going to hit the fan on this. This is extremely important.

And interestingly, it's the number one bridge issue between liberals and conservatives. So when you're at Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas or Hanukkah, if you want to avoid talking about Trump and politics and Hillary or Benghazi or whatever the subject dispute is, talk about bees. Everyone is on board on protecting the bees. So I had a waking dream. First, 1984, I had two beehives. I planted a mushroom in my garden called the Garden Giant. And one time this summer, I came out to water my mushrooms and it was covered with bees. And the bees moved the wood chips aside and I could see these white mycelium and they were sipping on the little droplets of my, oozing from the mycelium. I got real excited, and I kept a journal.

And for 40 days, from dawn to dusk, there was a continuous convoy of bees to my mushroom bed. It was an edible mushroom. And I made note of it. I published it in Harris Smith Magazine in 1988. I put it in one of my books in 1994, and then I forgot about it. So I got involved with the U.S. BioShield biodefense program directly after 9-11. You can google my name, Stamets and Smallpox. There's a vetted press release from the U.S. government. They did 2,200 plus analyses of our

mushroom extracts, and we found extracts that were highly active against flu viruses, including bird flu, against herpes, and against pox viruses, including smallpox. So I have a patent that issued on this. It's a great secondary story because I had Black Hawk helicopters coming over my laboratory, all this other stuff. What? We'll get to that in a second.

Yeah, we'll get to that in a second. Yeah, we'll get to that in a second. It's a fun, true conspiracy story. So I had published this research on the antiviral properties of mushrooms, the mycelium. And then I heard about the bees. I had raised bees. And then a friend of mine, Louis Schwarzberg, we're doing a movie called Fantastic Fungi.

That's been making for 10 years. And Louis came to me and said, Paul, I have eight patents on fungi that can control termites, ants, mosquitoes. You can Google right now, stamets can take down Monsanto. There's probably a thousand websites because my patents are disruptive patents. So I can very much control termites and ants from consuming your house for about 20 cents. And I met with all the big companies. But anyway, so Louis knew about my research on that. I've spoken on this before. And he said, Paul, the mites are killing the bees. Can't you do something to help the mites? And so now, okay, that's two stories. We have this

BioShield biodefense story and my antiviral stuff. We have me growing the mushrooms in the garden. And I hike in the old-growth forest a lot. And I'm hiking in the old-growth forest, and the way I orient here is one of the few skill sets I have. I like just getting off trail. And I'm in the South Fork of the Ho River, and I'm deep in the old-growth forest. I come around a corner, and I see a bear strike. The bear came up, bam, scratched this tree.

A huge paw strike in the tree. And I told my wife, I said, you know, Washington State, the school system, is dependent upon funding from selling timber to the lumber companies. So the school system is dependent upon timber harvest off of public lands. So in humans' great wisdom, they decided that the bears were jeopardizing the educational funds in Washington State. So they hired hunters to kill all the bears. So my neighbor killed 400 bears. That's why we have a salmon run right now on Skookum Inlet in Camilchee Point, Washington. There's no bears around because they saw the bears as a

threat to the economic stability of the school system. I don't understand why the bears would be a threat. Because the bears, when they scratch the trees, it'd become an entry room for a polypore mushroom. So I told my wife, if this is true, let's come back in two years and see if this polypore mushroom is growing there. These are wood conks, similar to the one my hat is made from. So we came back two years later, and sure enough, this wood conk was growing out of the tree. The tree had died, so they kind of got it right. So when bears scratch trees, resin comes out, and bees are attracted to the propolis,

to make propolis from the resins, to patch their hivesives from cracks to prevent invaders coming into a beehive. These are all seemingly disparate stories, and this is why this waking dream put it all together. So I have my garden giant in bed that the bees are coming to. I have the BioShield biodefense program where I found these extracts are highly active against viruses. Bear scratch trees introduce polypore mushrooms. and then my friend louis schwartzberg is saying you know how can you help the bees so and i highly recommend this to everybody listening is this lucid dream state at that state when you're fully asleep and you just go into the ether of wakefulness stay there reside there Reside there. We have random access memory. Before you get your neurological pathways all set up by habit of what you're going to do, just exist in that

space. And then I had synapses activate a new neurological pathway. I had an epiphany. I think I know how to save the bees. Fast forward now, I have multiple patents issuing all over the world. We've done research for Washington State University. We've gathered $2.5 million. You can go to www.bees.wsu.edu, so the Washington state university.edu for education um and you'll see the resource that we have there we are now um have found that the extracts of amadou the one my hat is made from uh doubles the lifespan to bees and reduces the deformed wing virus by more than a thousand fold in 10 days. I hit Joe the frigging home run. I'm not an entomologist. I have two beehives. I'm not even a big beekeeper. But I put these thoughts together that if these mushroom extracts reduce viruses that harm humans,

pigs, and birds, what would they do with bees? Now, we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh. birds. What would they do with bees? Now, we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh. So my U.S. patent issued this past year, and now it's issued in Australia, United States, issuing in Europe, Eurasia, and Canada. I plan to open source it for the rest of the world. But I was waiting on pins and needles because certainly it would be something called prior art. Now, patents are issued based on several criteria. One, no prior art. No one's ever mentioned it. Secondly, contrary to conventional wisdom.

So if you invented the bicycle, the wheel, and you came up with a tricycle, that's not patentable. That's pretty obvious because it's logical. So you want something that has no evidence in the literature, be public or private or scientific or popular. You want it contrary contrary to conventional, conventional wisdom, which means that you want experts to teach away from your invention. So every time someone out there and tells me that,

that tells, I hear that Paul Stamets is, is full of crap. Nothing he says is true. I have one great response. I say, thank you. You're helping my patentability because

the more experts that teach away from my invention, the more unconventional my invention is, hence, the more patentable it is. The third criteria is usefulness. Benjamin Franklin could not have invented the iPhone. There's no usefulness and no cell towers. So these are the three criteria. After 17 years, it becomes open source. So the idea is to incentivize, you know, inventors. That's why you have the iPhone, the Droid, all your computers, you know. I had one person call me up on a cell phone and said, how dare you patent this? I go, how dare you speak to me on a cell phone that was enabled by a patent so you could tell me that I shouldn't be patenting things. I'm just like, the contradictions are pretty obvious. So the patents now have issued, and there was

no prior art, even though we all grew up with the Winnie the Pooh, we knew that bears went in the rotted trees to find honey and beehives. No one apparently until me made the connection that bees are attracted to the mycelium and rotted logs because of immunological benefit. Now let's go back in time because this is a very big picture concept here. 12,000 years ago, we invented agriculture. What did we do? We started to deforest. When we started cutting down the trees,

we began to dismantle the immunological mycelial nets of nature. Mycelium needs wood to decompose. You take away the wood, mycelium doesn't have a habitat. Because the mycelium is producing these antiviral compounds rotting the wood, the bees were attracted. And because of deforestation now, we're stressing the bees. So there's not only the lack of habitat deforestation. neonicotinoids. Bayer and Syngenta that produces neonics, as they're known, a toxic insecticide, sponsored research in Europe because they didn't believe that neonicotinoids harmed the bees.

The researchers then finally published when they got the results that was contrary to the interests of Syngenta and Bayer, that in fact neonicotinoids harmed the second and third generations. Now neonicotinoids are now banned in Europe. They are not banned in the United States. So you have drift of these neonicotinoids on their adjacent fields. So you have loss of wood, deforestation. You have neonicotinoids. You have glyphosates that are associated with GMOs because they interfere with the microbiome of the bees and their gut flora. So they can't detoxify.

It's called the cytochrome P450 pathway. We all have it breaking down toxins. So there's a confluence of multiple stressors, but the nail in the coffin by far is the deformed wing virus. And we have found now that the extracts of this one drop per thousand drops, one milliliter in a liter, can reduce the viruses in bees by more than a thousand fold and double their lifespan. So it's a frigging home run because it protects food biosecurity around the world at a time that food ecosystems are collapsing. But think of the bigger picture here. For millions of years, we were forest people. We began deforestation when we got into agriculture. We began to dismantle the

immunological networks of nature, the mycelium that's resident. The fact that these same mushrooms reduce viruses in bees, pigs, birds, people, speaks to me of a bigger concept, that the mycelium is part of the immunity of the ecosystem. And as we lose the debris fields that the mycelium is dependent upon, we begin to dismantle the immunological health of our environment. And zoonotic diseases, diseases coming from factory farms, whether they're from pigs or chicken farms. And we have one extraordinary experiment, and this speaks to the Black Hawk helicopter story, is that I was working with the BioShield biodefense program directly after 9-11. They contacted me because I wrote an article that was a one-page analysis of all the research on the antiviral properties of mushrooms in scientific literature. I wrote this article. I published it in a peer-reviewed journal.

Bioterrorism became the front and center of concern of the U.S. Defense Department. A group of virologists saw my article, and they got funded by Dick Cheney and George Bush. And I have a, you know, I want to say thank you, ironically, to those two, because they funded the BioShield. It's called Project Biodefense. And they funded it with several billion dollars. And they contacted me because I knew I had this large library of about 700 strains of mushrooms in our culture library.

We have a company of 78 great employees. And we had this large library. So they said, we want to test your library based on this article that you've written showing there are antiviral properties in some mushrooms. You have a lot of them. Let's test your library to see if you have antiviral properties. So great. So I started making extracts of mushrooms, the fruit bodies, the mycelium, the little filamentous fuzzy stuff that gives rise to mushrooms. And I sent off a hundred extracts at a time, all coded with alphanumeric codes. So the government didn't know what I was sending them. all coded with alphanumeric codes. So the government didn't know what I was sending them.

So I get the first reports come back, and I'm flipping through them, no activity, no activity against pox viruses, because by far the concern was smallpox. We have no immunological defense against it. After 1974, they stopped immunizing. Do you have a smallpox vaccination on your arm? Yeah. So you're probably one of the last ones that were getting it. After 1974, they stopped immunizing. Do you have a smallpox vaccination on your arm? Yeah. So you're probably one of the last ones that were getting it. So I'm going through and I come to sample 78 and it said high activity. I went, whoa, you know, sample 81, high activity. Whoa. I got really excited. I looked at my notebook, what the codes were, and it was from this mushroom called

agaricon that grows exclusively in the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. This is the longest living mushroom in North America. It's a perennial polypore. It looks like a giant beehive by coincidence, you know, up on a tree. So you can get a picture of that, Jamie? And so agaricon, A-G-A-R-I-K-O-N. And so I got real excited. And so I was given a contact person because he had one point of contact with the U.S. Defense Department, a physician.

And I called him up saying, these research results are wonderful. He goes, what research results? I go, Federal Express just delivered me this whole dossier on the first hundred samples. Wow, look at that. And he goes, you're not supposed to get those. I am. I said, well, I'll photocopy and send them to you. So he didn't think that was too funny.

But the U.S. government sometimes is not very well organized. The left hand doesn't talk to the right hand. So we got these research results. That's crazy. That looks like a stick up a dude's butt. This one is particularly unusual because it was attached to an upper branch. It fell through the air. It hit the other branch.

It teeter-tottered. And then it re-grew its mycelium and connected back into the mother mycelium inside the tree. And then it grew two legs. Whoa. So this is like – this was first described by Diascorides in 65 A.D.irium Adlongum Vitum, the elixir of long life. So this has been used in Greek pharmacopoeia for thousands of years. So please get back to your story. Sorry for the interruption.

No, it's fine. Childish way. So anyhow, I'm up in Canada and one of my managers calls me up and says, Paul, there's a helicopter over the laboratories. I go, no big deal. The helicopter's come and gone. He goes, no, it's really close. And I said, how close?

He goes, listen, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp. I go, whoa, that's really close. I go, what are the numbers on the back of the helicopter? And he goes, there are no numbers. It's a Black Hawk helicopter. And I went, oh, my gosh. There are no numbers. It's a Black Hawk helicopter.

And I went, oh, my gosh. Now, just because this is very new in the program, because when you have an antidote to a weapon, then it can be weaponized by terrorists. So they didn't know who, you know, not everybody in the government knew who I was. Even though I was working with Project Biodefense, you know, I was still sort of an unknown entity. And I filed a patent application on this. And so I told my manager, okay, shut down the business, give everybody cultures of this mushroom, which was a Garakon. I don't want to know who has them. Shut down the business, everyone spread. So we decentralized ourselves at our target. But hold on, let me stop you right there. So you're in Canada.

I'm in Canada. Your lab is where? In the United States. Okay. In Washington State. And the helicopters are flying over your lab. What happens then? Well, they were trying to- Did they land? They were spooking us.

They were doing it on purpose. They were doing it on purpose. They were hovering. To let you know they're there. I don't know what they were doing. I mean, they're at treetop level, right over the frigging laboratory. Right. So I had everyone go in their car.

I asked everyone to go in their car, shut down the business immediately, and decentralize us as a target. So later on, when I came back, I called my people in the Defense Department saying, what the hell's going on here? And they go, oh, geez, sometimes the left hand doesn't talk to the right. We're sorry. So eventually – So how did they find out just from your patent filing? Well, the patent – I filed the patent and it disappeared. Most patent applications, when you file them, show up on the U.S. patent homepage within a year or two.

I filed this patent and four or five years later, it still had not been published. So I get a hold of my patent attorney who gets a hold of the patent office and the U.S. Department of Defense considered it to be a national security. So they quarantined my patent, took it out of the patent office, so it could not be seen by potential terrorists because then they could have an antidote to smallpox. So I had to do an intergovernmental agency trace to recall the patent from dod that meetings they allowed to be released because it was a natural product and so the patent then was put back into the patent application queue and it was approved in 2013. i filed it in 2004. so we have now done work at the university of mississippi school of pharmacy we've isolated two novel anti-smallpox molecules.

We also have done work at the Tuberculosis Research Institute with Dr. Scott Franzblau and University of Illinois at Chicago. We've identified a new anti-tuberculosis molecule. Agaricon in Dioscoridae's time in Greek culture was used for treating consumption, later thought to be known as tuberculosis. We have found that extracts of this mushroom are duly active against bacteria and viruses. Most people who die from viral pneumonia actually die from bacterial pneumonia. They get a viral infection.

Their immune system over-amps. And as a response, lungs get flooded with liquid, bacteria set up, and bacterial pneumonia usually kills people who actually get a flu virus. They die from bacterial pneumonia. So to find a natural product that's duly active against viruses and bacteria is medically significant. So it's a good argument for natural products because you have a consortium of protective agents that are living in this soup of this extract that can help protect you.

that can help protect you. So this has now led on to our discovering molecules active against HPV, the human papillomavirus. 70% or more of women have HPV. That's a very controversial vaccine, apparently. It's very dangerous. Well, I'm not anti-vaccination. No, you're not either.

But I'm curious why they don't recommend the vaccine after the age of 24. I can't wrap my mind around that. I think they're just trying to prevent infection from sexually active kids. Well, you're sexually active after the age of 24. Right, but they're sexually active before then. But if you didn't have the infection before 24 and you're still active at the age of 24, why wouldn't they recommend the vaccination after the age of 24 maybe there's a good medical reason recommend it post 24 is that what you're saying 24 also post 24 they don't recommend it because they think maybe you already

have it i don't know the answer to that that's bizarre i've never been able to get someone to explain to me why is that the case mushrooms can suppress the expression of this is that what you're saying the ingredients that are within the mushrooms we have found five molecules authenticated by nih virology as being potently active against hpv which mushrooms uh all the polypores um that i have been talking about uh ratio garicon amadou um are likely we don't I can't say de facto all of them, to have varying amounts of these constituents. So these mushroom extracts are a huge consortium of antiviral and antibacterial compounds. Now, as I mentioned, there's maybe 5 million species of fungi. There's about 150,000 species of mushrooms.

We've identified around 14,000. So think of it just from experiential evidence over thousands of years of human experimentation. It'd be like you went into a library and there's 14,000 books in your library, 14,000 species. Our ancestors started selecting each of these species and testing them. We've narrowed the field down to about 200 species, of which 50 species are superstars that have no adverse effects to human ingestion that have been used for a very long period of time. And within that

set of 50 species, we're finding these mushrooms which have tremendous potential health benefit. So this is why I'm so excited in the field of mycology, is we have translational science. We have applied mycology. And I think, based on what we've discovered, we can make the argument that we should save the old growth forest as a matter of national defense. Our fungal genomes are essential for our future and present survival. The more we eliminate these landscapes of biodiversity, the more we're losing potential agents that can fight disease. And so this is something that I think we can build a bridge

between conservatives and liberals because Osama bin Laden didn't have access to an old-growth forest. We did, and we do. And I think this is really just indicative of many other things that we can discover if we pay attention to the vast genomic resources we have and the biodiversity of the ecosystems that are still intact. genomic resources we have in the biodiversity of the ecosystems that are still intact. Now, do you recommend for personal consumption any particular mushrooms, any particular supplements? In terms of recommendations for gourmet mushrooms, I can make those. In terms of recommendations for medicinal mushrooms, I cannot make recommendations. I'm legally tied by the FDA. I cannot make recommendations. Can you legally tied by the FDA. I cannot make recommendations.

Can you recommend a website that perhaps would recommend? Well, I do recommend eating gourmet mushrooms for just as food. Which ones do you consume? Shiitake, lion's mane, maitake, and reishi and chaga. And these all have medical benefits as well? These all, I don't know the difference between a gourmet and a medicinal medicinal mushroom they're just mushrooms yeah the mushroom all gourmet mushrooms are medicinal mushrooms really so shiitake mushrooms are

medicinal shiitake mushrooms are it's very very medicinal the big the big stars right now uh by far are reishi chagaaga, and lion's mane. What about portobello? They taste too good. They can't be that good for you. Portobello's have a problem. I knew it. All mushrooms should be cooked.

And portobello's in particular should be cooked at high temperatures. Why? There is an unfortunate group of compound called agaritines. Agaritines are hydrazines that are heat unstable. So the good news is you should cook them. And if you cook them well, then those mushrooms are not a problem. If you don't cook them well, then these hydrazines are potentially problematic. Now, nature is a numbers game. So there are beneficial compounds that in some balance may outweigh the negative effects of

the hydrazines, the agaritines in these mushrooms, but that jury is still out. What are the negative benefits or the negative effects of this? or the negative effects of this? This is an explosive area of conversation. And it puts my life in danger. So I reserve the right not to answer your question. Whoa. I didn't expect that.

It puts your life in danger talking about portobello mushrooms? He's looking at me silently. I will respectfully move on. Thank you. So anybody who's interested, just Google that and get back to me. You know what? Next, I'm going to have a guy who is the same height as Paul, and he's going to have a mask on, and we're going to have some sort of electric box that distorts his voice. No, but the good news is...

I can tell you the story. There's lots of mushrooms that have tremendous benefit. And there are compounds inside of portobello mushrooms that are very beneficial. And in fact, there is a positive study with some breast cancer patients, breast cancer study, showing that button mushrooms can confer benefits. So there is that. We were funded by NIH with $2.2 million for a breast cancer clinical study on turkey tail mushrooms. And turkey tail mushrooms are fantastic as adjuncts to conventional therapy. The clinical study that was conducted,

funded by NIH and the University of Minnesota Medical School and Vistier Medical College showed a dose response curve specifically in supporting the immune system by taking turkey tail mushrooms. And the more you took, the more benefit there was. I have a TED Med talk that's very popular in front of 800 physicians, where my mother, who was challenged with advanced stage four breast cancer, who is now almost 93 years of age. She had advanced stage four breast cancer when she was 84 years of age, given less than a few months to live. And she had metastasized tumors all over her body. Her breast was erupting with a very, very bad carcinoma. And she is alive, well, and fully recovered today.

She had a chemotherapy using Herceptin and a little short time Taxol. She had a very bad reaction to Taxol. Articles now have been published showing that turkey tail mushroom constituents help conventional therapies like chemotherapy with Herceptin and making Herceptin work better. So there's a nice blending of integrative medicine with using natural products with conventional medicine. I will never be saying that you should not consult a physician. I will never say that you should not use conventional medicine. You should. It's the state of the art of science is right there. But the state of the arts of science is that we can upregulate immunity with these mushrooms. And that's your frontline defense. And then the other conventional therapies that are being practiced now combine very, very nicely, according to many physicians and reports showing that the combination of turkey tail mushrooms in combination with conventional therapy can have a significant

difference in improving your immunological defense. No, I absolutely agree with you that conventional treatments are state-of-the-art, and this is state-of-the-art science when you're talking about dealing with cancer. You should deal with oncologists that are at the cutting edge. But they're not state-of-the-art when it comes to the preventing of these things. And that's a giant issue that a lot of people have when it comes to nutrition, lifestyle, mitigating stress, all the various factors that contribute to a bunch of different health ailments. Do you think that mushrooms could also play a factor in that as well?

Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a great epidemiological study that came out of Japan. And Dr. Ikikawa was an epidemiologist that worked for the National Cancer Center in Tokyo. that worked for the National Cancer Center in Tokyo. And they noticed, in surveying people in Japan in the 1960s, early 1970s, there was a dearth, a drop in the overall cancer rate in this one population in Nagano Prefecture in Japan. So he was sent there by the National Cancer Center of Tokyo, by the government, to say, what are these people doing in this one cluster of villages where they have statistically significant less cancer rates? We're talking

about 30% less than the national average. And after exhaustive study, he found that they were eating enoki mushrooms, a lot of them, because the enoki mushrooms are really thin ones, they have really tall stems, you can buy them in the store. Well, there's a big farming centers for enoki mushrooms there. And then the blemished ones, as cultivators know, you don't sell to the public. The ones that have little spots on them are deformed, but they are given to the workers. And so their workers and then their families eat a higher per capita consumption of enoki mushrooms than the other residents of Japan. So they found that specifically the consumption of enoki mushrooms resulted in a

reduction of cancer across the board of all cancers, statistically significant, I think over 220,000 people in this epidemiological survey. I've written about 10 articles for the Huffington Post, and you can Google Stamets Huffington, and enoki mushrooms and see all the citations on enoki mushrooms, on lion's mane, on agaricon, all these mushrooms I'm talking about. They're all peer-reviewed physicians. They're all very short articles, but they summarize a lot of the research that I'm talking about. That's amazing. What do you know about the cordyceps mushroom? I know a fair amount about cordyceps.

Yeah. I'm fascinated for two reasons. One, because of a supplement that I take that my company makes called Shroom Tech Sport. Sorry for the name. My apologies in advance. But it's based on athletic performance. But the Shroom Tech is based on the cordyceps and B12 and a bunch of different adaptogens. And the idea being that when you take that, it benefits athletic performance, benefits endurance and oxygen utilization.

And apparently they discovered this from – it's a weird one because they grow it on a caterpillar. Do you know about all that? Yeah. Cordyceps is now – it's been split into several different genera. Yeah, that's what I was going to bring up. The other one is the one that explodes on ants. Yeah, there's Cordyceps sinensis, now known as Ophiocordyceps sinensis. Cordyceps has about 500 species in it.

It's been a very complicated taxonomy because when researchers would go in the Himalayas and they find these caterpillars with the cordyceps mushrooms coming out of it, very good scientists. And they did just what I would do. They would take it in the laboratory, they'd break it open and take a piece of tissue from the inside. It's called cloning. So you just capture the genetic material, you grow out the culture. Very confusing because there is five different fungi. They're called anamorphs. Cordyceps is a dimorphic fungus.

What that means is it has two forms. It's got a mold state and it's got a mushroom state. The mushroom state comes up like a little club, looks like your finger, like an orange little finger coming up out of the ground. So you can find that, Jamie. Whoa, there it is. So is this an expired caterpillar um i can't actually see the species there but it looks like they're beetles hard to tell there's a couple of things here um so there's a number of cordyceps species um so when there was a lot of scientific dispute on what the true anamorph

now it's two sides of the same coin. You see the cordyceps and then you clone it and you get this mold growing and then people will grow up the mold. Well, now we know there are several species of molds that are growing inside the caterpillar. So the true cordyceps sinensis is now identified as hirsutella sinensis. That's the true one. Bacillomyces and metarhizium and all these other ones are not considered to be the true organism. They're chasing the other cordyceps mold inside of the mushroom. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You're freaking me out, Paul.

I can't keep up with you, man. This is going to be one that I'm going to go over many, many, many, many, many times. It's a polyculture. Okay. Polyculture. It's a polyculture of several different entomopathogenic fungi. These are fungi that kill insects. So, I mean, this is very disruptive because, oh, the FDA and the labeling and how do you label this and what do you do and who's right and who's wrong and how do you get the labeling to conform with the current taxonomy based on DNA research.

The good news is, based on the best of my knowledge, several of these companies that are selling these cordyceps, the anamorphs, even though they may not be the true cordyceps sinensis, those also confer benefits. So you can argue in a sense about different species. The problem with this is there's no less than a thousand peer-reviewed articles on Cordyceps sinensis and no one

or hardly anyone knows what species they were actually growing because we don't know which of these animals they were actually growing. Is this recent information? All very recent. All in the past four or five years and especially in the past two years so wow it's um taxonomy is in flux because of dna pcr uh amplification uh in the region of dna that they've chosen they amplify there are idiosyncratic to the species now that story has changed whole genome sequencing is really the

only way to go about this where they sequence the entire genome. And so there's a lot of elasticity or plasticity in the expression of DNA. Now, going back to what we've been talking about this whole interview, epigenesis. Epigenesis is an environmental stimulus, has a selective influence on the genomic expression of the individual, the species, yourself. And so you upregulate or turn on genes that are otherwise quote-unquote asleep. And so what we're seeing now is that epigenetic influences can cause different DNA expressions. And so what was considered to be conformity of a species and DNA types before, like 99%, and that was thought, oh, they're the same species, now we know that's highly inaccurate.

So what was accurate a few years ago is considered to be highly inaccurate today. The science is changing very, very rapidly, and the regulatory environment cannot catch up. So it doesn't really matter except for the following, and this is, I do make a recommendation here. Make sure your mushrooms or whatever products you're consuming are certified organic, and please don't buy them from China. Anyone who's been to China, I've been to China several times, the amount of massive air pollution there is horrific. And the chain of custody, as we call it, where these people are getting their mushrooms,

they mix, oftentimes distributors mix suppliers, and it's a form of, quote, unquote, Russian roulette. We've done analyses on Chinese-sourced mushrooms, and they've had up to 2,200 parts per million of lead, where two or three capsules is toxic. So why would you take a medicinal mushroom that's contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides if you're trying to improve your immune system at the same time you're sabotaging your immune system? So getting mushrooms from clean environments is critically important. Unfortunately, because of the USDA organic program, they can borrow from the organic programs of China and still say they're certified organic.

So you really need to buy U.S.-grown, certified organic mushrooms that have a clear chain of custody and hopefully one that is from a reputable supplier or scientist and not somebody who's just trying to make money. There's a lot of opportunistic companies right now who are just trying to exploit and ride the bandwagon of the popularity of medicinal mushrooms without really having done their homework or without fully informing the public that their mushrooms are actually coming from China when they are not. What is the strain of cordyceps mushroom that erupts, that infects ants, kills them, sprouts out of them, and then explodes and infects the ants near them? And other ants will drag that ant, knowing that it's infected, deep, deep away into the forest to get it away from the colony.

You just had Cordyceps loidei up on the screen there. Pull that up. Yeah, Cordyceps loidei, Unilateralis is another one. A lot of these zombie movies you've been saying have been based on Cordyceps. And actually, I was a character in Hannibal Lecter. You were? Yeah, in the series. I think it's number five.

And this, I think, Elvin Stamets was this anesthesiologist. They gave you your last name? Yeah, he was my last name. Why didn't they just call you Paul? Well, they do on Star Trek.

I'm a character on Star Trek now. Yeah, I know. Yeah, and they actually call me Paul Stamets on Star Trek. How'm a character on Star Trek now. Yeah, I know. Yeah, and they actually call me Paul Stamets on Star Trek. How bizarre is that? So Hannibal Lecter, the series, I had all these people write me, say, oh, my gosh, you're this evil doctor who overdoses his patients with drugs and then puts them in the backyard and then inoculates them with mushrooms,

just like cordyceps, you know, coming out of the – so you could have mushrooms growing in the backyard. Some of the Star Trek people called me up in August of 2016. I'm talking to them. They – CBS, you know, set it up. They have to talk to you. They saw my TED Talk. And they said, Paul, we're the writers of the new Star Trek Discovery series.

We're kind of stuck. You know, we want to talk to you. We saw your TED Talk. We're really interested. And I go, wait a second. Are you the one who put me in Hannibal Lecter? He goes, yeah. And I go, well, let's get it right this time, you know.

So I said, okay. I said, foolishly, or maybe to my benefit, foolishly, I said, turn on your tape recorder. You know, give me the general idea, and let me run with it. And they said, okay, go for it. There's six of them, I guess, on the conference call. Foolishly, I said, I'm a Star Trek fan, which is not foolish, but I want no money for these ideas. I give you all my intellectual property. I want science fiction to predict science fact.

The great thing about Star Trek is the flip phone and the iPad. I mean, those came out in Star Trek, and then it became reality. I said, so you have a unique opportunity here of forming our future. I said, so you have a unique opportunity here of forming our future. Let's collaborate to create a future that's better for our future generations by inspiring students and young people to get excited about the science. So they can help populate the universities to create the inventions that can help save this planet that's in jeopardy. And so I ran with a Star Trek theme. And we just saw the last episode last night,

and astromycologist Paul Stamets is using the mycelium spore drive. It has become, I couldn't believe it. We're watching this thing, and the Star Trek, the main theme of Star Trek is based on mycelium and the concepts that I gave them. They've elaborated this, I mean, six ways a Sunday, so they've really taken it. This is as some sort of a propulsion system?

It's a propulsion system because in my TED Talk, and I've been talking about this a long time, about networks. We have the mycelial network. We have the computer internet. We have the neurological network in our brains. And the organization of dark matter conforms to string theory. So these are three archetypes, the same archetype, the same dimensional structures stacked on top of each other. And nature builds upon its prior successes. So networks reward themselves by surviving from catastrophe. So I said, and I'm still bound by

confidentiality. And there's an incredibly strict confidentiality agreement that I can only state which has been publicly displayed. But the mycelium spore allows through the internet of nature, he might say, to be able to go into hyperspace immediately by tapping into the mycelial archetype. mycelial archetype. And so astromycologist Stamets now is plugging himself into the mycelial network of the universe and they can jump rather than using their standard hyperdrives, which you see them streaming

across for hours from one part of the universe to the other. They can show up immediately and then disappear. Is this something that you think could actually be real one day? Okay, we're pushing the envelope on this one. We're pushing the envelope on this one. Here we go, baby. This is pushing the envelope on this one.

But if you look at the multiverse, and I've had one or two in particular multiverse experiences where time and reality has changed in a way that I cannot explain. How so? What do you mean? It's so incredibly profound that I still cannot wrap my mind around it. These are psilocybin experiences? Psilocybin experience. So I think the psilocybin experience might be a one-world portal, and now I'm going to sound like Terrence McKenna, of entering into the multiverse.

and now I'm going to sound like Terrence McKenna, of entering into the multiverse. The idea that time can be bent, that there are multiple universes occurring simultaneously in different realities. And I've had one experience in particular that is just unfathomable to me. I don't know how to explain it. Give it a shot. Okay, I'll give it a shot. You've already blown my mind apart 150 times today. This is a very deeply personal experience to me, but I was going to the Evergreen State College. I had the Drug Enforcement Administration license. My brother

John went to Yale University. He got a graduate scholarship in neurophysiology at the University of Washington. He came out to Washington State in Seattle. I was living in Olympia, Washington. I had a cabin up in the mountains near Darrington, Washington. Then in the summertime for three years, I set chokers. I was a logger. I really believe in the school of hard knocks and the blending of academia with blue-collar hard work. I love chopping wood.

I love running a chainsaw. I love hard labor. I think. It gives my mind some respite to be able to think. So I'm in this highly academic environment. My brother John, he died unfortunately two years ago. He got me involved in mushrooms so I'm going to segue and set the stage here

but I need another two minutes to set the stage here so I'm growing up in a small town in Ohio called Columbiana my brother John is going to Yale he comes back one day and he gives me a book that he's using for his class but he's on break and he says

I'm really fascinated, now John went to, Columbia, came back with great stories of eating soul-scied mushrooms. And he's my older brother. I just idolized him. And he has a book called Alder States of Consciousness. And so I said, John, can I borrow your book? He said, sure. And I said, but Paul, I need it back. After my break is over, I'm going back to college.

This is part of our textbook. So I borrowed his book, Alder States of Consciousness. I'm just fascinated reading it, you know, about all these different ways of expanding your consciousness. I'm 14 years of age. And so my best friend, Ryan Snyder, says, Paul, can I borrow your book?

We're hanging together all the time. And he goes, yeah, but I need it back. And so he borrows my book and he doesn't return it. A day, several days pass, a week pass, you know, two weeks pass, my brother's coming back on break. He said, I needed that book back, Paul. And I go to Ryan, I go, Ryan, I need my book. I need my book. And Ryan kept on avoiding answering the subject. And so I said,

finally, give me my book. And Ryan goes, I can't give it to you, Paul. I said, why? He says, my dad burned it. I said, your dad burned my brother's book? I go, WTF? I didn't use this phrase back then. I said, oh, my God. And I have a shout out to Ryan Snyder's father that because of that event, it stimulated my interest in all the states of consciousness even more. So John goes to Yale and goes to the University of Washington. I have this DEA permit. I'm at the Evergreen State College.

John calls me up. He says, Paul, I think I found some psilocybin mushrooms. John said, you're really smart. You've been collecting psilocybin in Colombia and Mexico, but they're much more complicated up here. And I said, let me ask you a few questions. I said, okay, John, do you take a spore print? And he goes, yes.

And I go, is the spores purple brown? And he goes, yes, they are purple brown. I go, good. Okay, now, John, does it have a separable gelatinous pellicle? And he goes, what's that? And I go, well, break the cap. These are growing on wood chips. Break the cap and separate the cap very slowly.

Do you see a little skin that's translucent? And he breaks it and goes, yeah, I see that skin. I said, John, they're growing on wood chips. And he goes, yes. I go, are they turning bluish? He goes, yes, they're standing really bright blue. I go, wow. I said, John, how many did you find? He goes, you would not believe it. It's a huge amount. I said, wait. I said, but he says, Paul, they're in a very sensitive place. You better come up here right away.

So I jumped in my car and I drove up from Olympia to Seattle, about 60, 70 miles. I get to his house and John's there. And I go, well, where are we going? He goes, well, we need some grocery bags, you know, and let's get on our bikes and let's go down there.

I go, why all the secrecy? And the problem is, well, you'll see. And it was the end of Boat Street. And right at the University of Washington, right off of University Avenue, there's Boat Street. And we get there and right across the street is a police substation. So we're there and it was an eruption of this mushroom. There had to be 10,000, 30,000 mushrooms. I don't know.

It was about 50 feet by 30 feet, but they'd all been mulched with wood chips. There was an eruption that picked up, you know, trash and, you know, debris that picked up six inches of solid mushrooms. There were mushrooms everywhere. I've, to this day, never seen so many mushrooms in one concentrated area.

So we waited until the police cars went away, and we're kind of idling there. And then the police cars would go away. And from the substation, we'd start picking mushrooms, picking mushrooms. And we'd fill up a grocery bag or two. And then the other students are walking by. What are you doing? Oh, nothing. And then we eventually go, yeah, there's plenty for everybody.

So it was like pretty soon, everyone's all hanging out as a little group at the bus stop. We're not really waiting for the bus right we're waiting for the police cars to go away right and then we picked

all these mushrooms so we got about you know eight or ten grocery bags full of these mushrooms how bizarre it turned out to be a new species

called named after a new species new species new as in hadn't been discovered before you guys had never been described

in scientific literature before so you picked a mushroom that no one knew existed before or hadn't been hadn't been discovered before you guys picked them? Had never been described in the scientific literature before. So you picked a mushroom that no one knew existed before or hadn't been? Hadn't been described scientifically. We had known about it for about three years, but this is the largest eruption. And from that collection became part of the type collection that anchored the species taxonomically. So I think some of the specimens still exist in herbaria around the world because it's the reference standard.

So we go back to the house, and it's like, we've got to dry them. So we lay out newspapers, and the whole newspapers were just covered with mushrooms. And so that night, there's about four guys from Yale, all neurophysiology, all scientists on the scientist track. And they said, let's eat them. And so, I mean, this is not very potent. They're one-tenth the potency of cuvensis. So we made smoothies. And, oh, my gosh.

Talk about the gag reflex. We had to make these smoothies. Talk about the gag reflex. We had to make these smoothies. We had to eat 50 of them in order to have a dose equivalent to what slushy beacubensis would be. So I knew that. So we made these incredibly distasteful milkshakes, and we chugged them, and we drank them. And then an amazing experience.

I bonded with my brother. It was beautiful. And then you're peeking at this experience. You look around, and there's like tens of thousands of these mushrooms. Like, oh my gosh. All for science. And so I go to bed and I'm laying in bed and, you know, full blown experience. And, you know, I can barely sleep because all the colors are keeping me awake and my mind is racing. sleep because all the colors are keeping me awake and my mind is racing. And then I have a lucid dream. And I'm dreaming and I wake up and I go downstairs and I go, I had this crazy dream. And what's your dream? And I said, I saw thousands of cattle dead, baking in the sun. I said, I think there's going to be a nuclear war.

But what could kill all these cattle? You know, there's a time the Reagan administration and all that, the tension was really high between the Soviet Union and the United States. And they said,

and they were joking with me, saying, oh, well, okay, when is it going to happen? I go, I know I was in Olympia and I needed to rush up to Darrington to stay in my cabin because my books were up there and my manuscript was up there. I need to save my research. So they laughed and they laughed. They said, well, when's the world going to end, Paul?

And I go, well, it's not this weekend. That was like in two days. It's next weekend. So they wrote on the calendar, December 1st. I put it in my book, I think it's 1975, the end of the world. They wrote, Paul predicts the end of the world. So we forgot about it. Massive rains the next week, huge amounts of snowfall. And then on Wednesday, Thursday, temperature inversion, and it flipped to 75 to 85 degrees. All the snow started to melt.

All the rivers were flooding. And my little cabin was right next to this river that would swell from day to morning to night. It would go up six feet just from the snow melt because it was very close to this volcano and big glaciers. I said, oh, my gosh, I'm going to lose my manuscript, all my research. I need to get up there. I need to get up there. And so I'm watching the news on the news and the roads are being closed. So I had to go through Rockport, Washington, the back way in order to get back to my cabin. I get to my cabin and the bank had eroded about 10 feet. I was only about 10, 12 feet away

from the river now. My cabin was on the verge of falling into it, but I got my manuscript. I got all my books, you know, I rescued all the material I had, but I couldn't get out of there because the roads had been closed. And so I had to wait, wait two days, two days, and the roads then opened up. And I drove out, out of the valley into the Snohomish Valley. And I went around the bend. And there, the sun, it was a brilliant sunny day, a warm day, and there floating in the fields were hundreds and hundreds of dead cattle. Whoa. How do you explain that? I entered, I think, into the multiverse. Whoa.

Now, as a scientist, you realize when you say something like that, you open yourself up to ridicule. Do you feel hesitant to communicate these ideas? Well, to a degree, yes. But, you know, I'm 62 years of age, and, you know, up to ridicule. Do you feel hesitant to communicate these ideas? To a degree, yes. But, you know, I'm 62 years of age. And, you know, at one point, I just don't care. I just don't care. You know, this is true.

This happened to me. And I can push the envelope on these ideas because the credibility of my research is well established. I can save the bees. Do you care whether I have taken psilocybin mushrooms, if I can save your farm, your family, your country, or the world billions of dollars and protect biosecurity? I care more. I care more. That's right. So I'm telling you things.

I'm not making this up. I don't think you are. I don't have to. I just wondered. But just because you can't explain it does not mean it's not true. Right. And I think that we need to accept the fact that the reality is not limited to the perception that we have traditionally used. That's a beautiful way to describe it.

Let's end with that. That's perfect. Thank you, brother. Paul, thank you so much. I'm so glad you came here. And thank you to all the people that recommended you and turned me on to your work. And can we do this again? I'd love to.

Please. All right. And if people want to research more of your stuff, fungi.com and what was the other website? And hostdefense.com. Hostdefense.com. And there's a ton of other information, TED Talk. And I have a youtube.com slash Paul Stamets site.

And Louis Schwerzberg, a shout out. We have a fantastic fungiungi.com. Check it out. Louis and I are coming out with a movie that describes much of this stuff. Thank you so much. All right.

Thank you, brother. Ooh, that was awesome.