The Joe Rogan Experience - #1385 - Paul Stamets

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

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

Three, two, one. And we're live. Hello, Paul. Hey there. What's happening? How are you, sir? Very well. How are you?

And you have newfangled mushroom hats. These are surprisingly durable. So think about these mushroom hats. You would think, oh, it's going to fall apart in your fingers. But no, it's quite pliable. It's quite pliable, and it's known as German felt. And this allowed the Iceman, Otzi, to be able to travel into the alps it was a fire starter mushroom really and this were actually revolutionized warfare because it helped flint

spark guns ignite the gunpowder really so it's amadou and uh it comes from a birch polypore mushroom which is a subject of much of our research these days. Now, when this grows in the wild, what does it look like? Because you've fashioned it into this hat, or had someone fashioned it. That's what it looks like? Yeah, some ladies in Transylvania. You see that? Yeah. It's called Fomis fomenterius.

It allowed for the portability of fire. There's no doubt we all came from Africa, and we went north, and we discovered winter. This allowed for fire to be carried for days. And so your clan was absolutely dependent upon fire starting in order to survive the winter. And this mushroom allowed and enabled people to survive. Wow. It's very light. Is it edible? Excellent question. Hippocrates first described it in 400 BCE as an anti-inflammatory. So in teas, yes, but that's very, very tough. When you put it in ash and water, it delaminates into mycelium. And so some ladies in Transylvania still make these.

And it's a fabric that you pull, and that mushroom there will become one hat or maybe more. Really? Because it just keeps on elongating. and it's made of mycelium and so explain the process how would you take this slab of mushroom that i have that looks like sort of like an enormous hershey's kiss and then you would put that in water with ash from a fire from a fire and why ash what is that because it's highly alkaline and then it helps it separate it begins to delaminate and literally you start pulling us and it's highly alkaline, and then it helps it separate. It begins to delaminate, and literally you start pulling this, and it's a fabric that you keep on felting.

And so it's called German felt, and it's been used for literally thousands of years, and beekeepers actually use this for smoking hives. We could, but it would be kind of bizarre. We could flick a bick, and you'd burn up one of these things. It's just amazing how much this is a fuse. And one spark on this can ignite this entire thing over 15, 20 minutes. Really? Yeah.

And so beekeepers use it for a smoking. So if I lit this right now with this lighter. that if you let this the the powder what so you this the ash the powder powdered ash and then the water and then how does it flatten out and become what because it soaks up and mycelium makes mushrooms mushrooms make mycelium and so when you soak this and then it gets soggy and then it tenderizes and then you start breaking it and pulling it apart. This was actually probably the first discovery because our ancestors noticed when insects were born to this mushroom. Is that like the unprocessed version of it? So this is what it's like on one side? Well, it's just made into a little table thing.

But it's the same thing basically. So is this stitched together? How did they make it like this? Actually, it's using a wood glue and but that's all the natural colors nothing's been added to it um and uh these and so they just pull it apart pull it apart and eventually get flat yeah i really want to make a coat i'm that's my goal is to have somebody make a coat would it tear easily it's an amazingly strong tensile fabric. It absorbs water. But you have to be careful.

Someone smoking a joint or near a fire or smoking a cigarette. It happened to me. I got a big hole in one of mine. I was smelling the smoke. My head was on fire. More than once. How many folks are out there wearing mushroom hats these days? Just a few hundred. And we've been trying to actually keep the industry alive by just inundating the – there was like 25 or 30 of these hat makers in Transylvania 10, 15 years ago.

And then it shrunk down to four or five. And a friend of mine, David Summerlin, visited and said paul this this hat making technology is on the verge of extinction and so we just sort of inundated them with orders in order to build the industry and keep it alive so how could someone contribute to that if they wanted to if people are listening to this how could they buy one of these hats well if you go to my facebook.com slash paul stamets um i think his name is Mako, actually squatted on my page to sell the hats and more power to him. Okay. Yeah. Cool.

Interesting. But this mushroom is figuring to be very prominently important for saving bees. And that's where our research has been astonishingly interesting lately. And where is that thing that you brought in? What is that? What's going on there? This is – so to get some context to this, I think shamanistically mushrooms, plants, animals become important because of plurality, a multiplicity of benefits. This is one example.

Not only revolutionized warfare, not only allowed for the portability of fire for us to save ourselves from the coldness, and we migrated into Europe from Africa, not only did beekeepers use it for smoking, but fly fishermen use it also for drying flies. But we have found that this mushroom is extremely powerful for reducing viruses that harm bees. And it's been described today in CNN, a insect apocalypse, 40% of insects are under threat. This just came out. And this is really an all hands on deck moment. But I'm optimistic because I think we can find solutions in nature. So with my colleagues, and when I was here before, I talked about my work with the BioShield biodefense program,

and these wood conks are very strong in antiviral properties against flu viruses and herpes, et cetera. I used these ideas and actually had a waking dream, and I realized that the bees were being infected by mites with viruses, and the deformed wing virus in particular is the worst virus. And so I contacted Washington State University. We started doing some research, and I'm really, really happy because I love skeptics who become my supporters. We published in Nature. Only 7% of the articles submitted in nature get published in the nature publication ecosystem. To this day, our article is in the top 1% of all articles ever published in the nature

publication ecosystem. Now, that's phenomenal because that's the most credible scientific journal in the world. There it is right there. Extracts of polypore mushroom mycelia reduce viruses in honeybees. And this mushroom, the amadou, reduces the deformed wing virus 800 times to one with one treatment. And then the reishi mushroom mycelium reduces the Lake Sinai virus more than 45,000 to one. Now, these are woodconks that grow in trees. And we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh, but no one made the connection before me, apparently, that bees are attracted to rotted wood because of immunological benefit. So, Amadou and Reishi mushrooms, we found and we published in this article that high significance.

And I think the reason why this article is in the top 1% of all Nature articles is that I've been able to present the theory with proof now that a natural product can have a broader bio-shield of benefits than a pure pharmaceutical. Up to this time, there's been no agents to reduce viruses in bees. Now, the D4 wing virus is being vectored by the varroa mite. It came in 1984 1984 and it injects viruses into bees and so it's like a dirty syringe and these viruses debilitate the bees and shorten their their ability to fly now look at that poor bumblebee oh wow that's crazy i mean that i have that is so sad because that bumblebee can't fly now bees can pollinate up to 1,000 flowers a day. And the average flight time of honeybees used to be nine days, 1,000 flowers a day.

Every almond you eat was visited by a bee. So one bee can pollinate 1,000 flowers a day. Nine days was our pollination flight time. Now it's been reshortened to four days. So we lost by 50%. And the CNN article that we just showed, in China now, they're hand pollinating flowers. Yeah, with paintbrushes. Of apples. Yeah. So apples, cherries, almonds, strawberries, tomatoes.

Because of the lack of bees. Because of the absence of bees. So it's really, it's all hands on deck. This is, you know, I'm really optimistic about the future because we have solutions in nature that we can now amplify and be able to deploy. And so one of my inventions, and I'm giving these away, 10,000 of these for free. I've come up with a citizen scientist bee feeder that puts these extracts into sugar water. And we have a sign-up sheet. It's for free.

It says fungi.com slash bees. And we're going to give away the first 10,000 of these. And this basically allows Citizen Scientist to help wild bees because wild bees were given about 80% of the benefits. And if you scroll down, there's a really – we just got the CGI done. If you go all the way down and then click on that video and we just – so here's the bee feeder. And this is available on YouTube, folks. It says bee mushroomed feeder, bee mushroomed, all one word, and then feeder. Yeah.

Now watch. That's the bees visiting and they're taking the sugar water look how much they're sucking out of it those little greedy bastards yeah and that's crazy how it goes away so quickly and this is a maze and bees are better at navigating mazes and so you can see the bees going in and out my grandson was afraid of bees was really fascinated by this so i i got him to do this and so these are something that we're going to make these available all over and then i'm going to create vertical gardens in in apartment buildings it could be when you fly up 200 feet you create ladders then ecological ladders and then

this is where the citizen scientists all over the world can take action to be able to help bees from collapsing and then you station these um in neighborhoods for bumblebees for other types of bees and then we have it with a wi-fi enabled device with solar panels and then we upload into the cloud all this data about bee pollination visits so we can create a metric on the baseline of bee pollination services. So if you see bees that are declining and suddenly below a baseline. In Oklahoma, two years ago, 84% of the beehives died.

Now think if you're a cattle rancher and you lost 84% of your cattle. So the idea is to help bees' immune system and if we create baselines with bee feeders, upload the data, and this becomes a new form of internet because they have Wi-Fi ability. So it's a distributed network as well. Where is the Wi-Fi on that? Well, we don't have – this is in development right now.

We're working with a very, very large computer company who's making all the instrumentation, and they're into big data. So we have a solar panel going in here. We have blue LED lights. The bees are attracted to blue light. And they'll count the number of bees going in and out. And since bees are only flying that at daytime, we don't need a battery.

And so the solar power will then upload the data into the cloud. They'll create mega data sets. And then we can look at Africa, Indonesia. How is it going to upload into the cloud? What is it using? It's using LTE. Oh, so it's using like a cellular system. A cellular system or low-frequency, long-range communication systems.

Can we help? Can we contribute? Is there a way that this podcast can help? A lot. I want to enable people with solutions that they can teach their children the importance of natural systems and they can take action. This seems like a great one. I mean, I love this idea.

I think it's awesome. I can afford to give away $10,000. I talked to this computer company that everybody knows, but they asked me not to use their name. And they asked, how many do we need? I said, about $10 billion. The? Billion. Billion.

Billion. Billion. But I will do up to my capacity, and then I'm hoping that we're going to give these away for free, and then eventually we'll create networks of hubs where I have now 40 patents on this and helping bees survive from these extracts, but not in Indonesia, not in India, not in Africa, not in China, not in Japan. I've open sourced it for most of the world. I'm basically – I'm going to commercialize it so the haves can help the have-nots. And I think a lot of people want to help. And if you – and we're thinking about different ways of doing this. I'm open to all ideas. But the idea is to get maybe one person to sponsor 10 other people.

They have a distributed network their own social media community where they end up we getting um schools we will open source the code for 3d printers uh so that's really important for schools so the code's going to be open sourced um but then if somebody want to make millions of these and sell them of course you know i wouldn't be happy with that they have to work with me but individually we can empower individuals with and schools to have the open source 3d printing codes we just have to make it trendy to have one of these in your house like look i'm helping i'm helping the bees if we just did that it would really make a big difference i know that's a gross way to look at it but but my works. My grandson, Kai, is a perfect example. He was shuddering in fear of coming near to this.

And my friend, Dr. Steve Shepard, entomologist, taught me something about bees I didn't know. Bees are moving so fast, and we look like we're moving slow. But if you move really slow, the bees think you're a statue. And so my grandson and Kai said, look at this. And you can see underneath, you can see the bees going in and out. I said, they move really slow. And then he got fascinated watching the bees.

So he overcame his fear of bees. He was excited that he's helping bees survive. Now we've created something intergenerationally. And saving the bees is the number one bridge concept between conservatives and liberals. Everyone wants to save the bees. That's number one? It's the number one bridge issue between mending the fence, so to speak, across the political and social divide. Everybody wants to save the bees. So this is something, this is an actionable solution., the scientific data out there is pretty disturbing. You know, 75% of flying insects in the past 27 years in a report from Germany that just came out have disappeared.

Now, many of your listeners are out in the country. You know, I grew up in the country. Remember all the bug splatter you used to have against your windshield? You don't see that anymore because the insects are dying because of exposure to pesticides, monoculture. When you have monoculture, you have what's called pollination deserts. When you have lots of biodiversity and lots of plants and diversity, the plants are pollinating at different times of the season. When you do to a monoculture, all the plants, like almonds, will all produce flowers all at once. And then there's no pollen available.

So the immune system of the bees, due to factory farming, loss of habitat, deforestation, glyphosate, heavy metals, pollution, all those things are cofactors. But the nail in the coffin is by far these viruses. factors. But the nail in the coffin is by far these viruses. And so immunologically empowering and supporting the immune system of bees then gives the bees the opportunity or the ability to be able to survive longer, do more pollination. Is there a specific source of these viruses that they can isolate? Are these a new thing? Well, actually, there's a slide that shows the pandemic spread of these viruses throughout the world that came from Asia and it's now a global pandemic. All bees in the world are now infected with these viruses because when they infected honeybee, for instance, visits the flower, it leaves viral particles.

In the flower. In the flower. And then a wild bumblebee comes and visits it and it becomes infected. So there is an unfortunate, I don't want to use the word perfect storm, it's a terrible storm of cofactors. And because 80% of the benefit that farmers receive is from wild bees. Right. But we can't count them. And I have beehives and what happens in a colony collapse, you go out on Monday, the bees are happy. You go out on Thursday, they're all gone.

I mean, it's- Really? It's that quick? That quick. And it's not like there's hundreds of dead bees around your beehive. They're just gone. And there could be hundreds of pounds of honey, and the bees, they're gone. So they go off somewhere to die?

What happens is because the newly hatched bees are called nurse bees, and the nurse bees take care of the baby bees. But when the colony senses there's not enough pollen and food to support the brood and the colony, the nurse bees are prematurely recruited to go out and find pollen. So they abandon the babies, and then the varroa mites, they just go uncontrolled and they start injecting viruses. And so are there cofactors? Just like when you get an infection from a viral infection, you can get bacterial infections. And so there's a cascade of opportunistic infections as immunology is decreased because of these viruses. Wasn't there a contributing factor that had to do with cell phones as well? I actually, I'm really glad you brought that up. This is a contributing factor. I have not

seen convincing evidence. It's a hypothesis that's not fully fleshed out. There are some people quite adamant in their belief in this, but I'm driven by science and data. The rhythms, the frequency of cell phones is an argument that's made. It's not in the same cosine wave of the wavelengths that we experience in nature. And so this is disruptive. I understand that. I'm still on the fence. I'd like to see really strong data and scientific evidence of that. But it's a hypothesis that needs to be tested. That's why we're looking also at low frequency, long range communication systems. I think I told you this story. If I didn't, I apologize.

When we were on Fear Factor, we had a bee stunt. We had to cover these people in bees. And a local bee colony flew in to check out what was going on. And those bees and the bees that were brought there met in the sky and worked it out. And the beekeeper told us, okay, we have to shut down and everybody's got to back out of here. So we had to shut down everything and back out for like about an hour, at least a half hour, while these bees communicated with each other. So they're flying, a giant swarm of them flying in the eye, in the air,

trying to figure out why, hey, what are you guys here for? What are you doing? Why are you in our neighborhood? Like, oh, we're not moving in. We're just filming a TV show. Like they had to work it out. That is so unusual. It was really weird.

That's extraordinary. Yeah. So when a new queen splits from a a hive you know a colony they then take a big group of them with them so it's all about protecting the queen i just don't understand how they worked it out there was no fight to the death there was no nothing they just sort of worked it out and the other bees took off and the bees that were there came back to their hive their little colony yeah that's there's a lot of of – this is also – well, that's – I'm glad you mentioned that because this also speaks to what's called bee drift. And so when we publish our article in Nature Scientific Reports, actually I think the data is understated because 10 to up to 20 percent of bees will drift from one colony to another. So we had treatment colonies and we had treated colonies.

Well, because 10 to 20% of the bees in the treated colonies went to the control colonies, we actually diluted the differential because we had cross, you know, movement of control bees and beehive versus treated bees. And so when we actually, I think, and some of my other co-authors think we actually have understated the data. But when you look at the p-values of significance, you know, they're extraordinary. P is less than.009, and that, for scientists, is an extraordinarily significant data set that is clearly showing the evidence that these extracts help the immunity of bees and help them be able to survive and do a better job. That's awesome, and it's crazy that it's just a natural mushroom,

but it makes sense what you're saying, that they built their beehives in these rotting trees knowing that these fungi were there, or somehow or another being attracted to it. You know, I like to say the first five seconds that I got that first patent award, my ego did swell. And then 10 seconds later, I said, are you frigging kidding? We're Neanderthals with nuclear weapons. How could I be the first one to have discovered that bees benefit from mycelium immunologically? But there's no what's called prior art. There's no evidence.

And I mean, think of that. We have the intelligence of nature underneath our feet. And this is something we need to tap into. And the fact that we can show a natural product, you know, if you had HPV, HIV, and you went to a doctor 12 days after having one treatment of these extracts, and your viruses dropped 45,000 to one, any physician would say, wow, you're doing really well. And this is what we're able to see. Now, we've been trying to find what's called the mode of action. How are these viruses actually being reduced? Putatively, our strongest hypothesis now is as providing

essential nutrients that are important for the immune system to activate gene sequences that attack the viruses and give more host-defensive immunity of protection of a further infection. Now, does this work with humans as well? Like chaga is supposed to be good for your immune system, right? Well, this is a great convergence. So traditional Chinese medicine and European medicine and medicine from indigenous peoples all over the world have been using these mushrooms, is that now we're finding scientific evidence that folklorically the reputation of chaga, of reishi, of these mushrooms helping the immunity of humans, this is translational medicine.

But bees is an animal clinical study. Bees have been stated as being, besides Drosophila, the second most well-studied animal in the world. This is an animal clinical study, past digestion, past what's called the cytochrome P450 pathway, which is your detoxification pathway, mostly in our liver. All animals use the cytochrome P450 pathway to break down toxins. And it's past the microbiome, into the blood. So this is actually, this is an animal clinical study. And I think it's a gateway for us to take this as credible evidence that natural products can be more useful and offer a

broader bio-shield of benefits than pure pharmaceuticals that go after one molecule with one target, one set of receptors. Our immunological fields have developed in the complexity of nature. This is what our foods are. We're in constant biomolecular communication with the ecosystem. We've evolved in this complex molecular environment. And so our immune systems are upregulated through multiple stimuli. And that's why I think these extracts, because of their complexity, they build upon the complexity of natural systems that help our immune system. So you have hope that this is something that we could eventually see being like a peer-reviewed, proven thing for human beings as well? Absolutely.

I do believe that's on the near-event horizon. There's a lot of researches now. Pull this thing up closer to you a little bit there. I believe it's on the near-event horizon. It's something that we're going to see more and more. There's lots of clinical studies see more and more there's lots of clinical studies i bought for physicians it's not no branding no selling of anything it's i popular website called mushroom references.com i populate specifically for physician physicians i

just spoke at singularity university stand for medical school in front of a thousand physicians i try to make the bridge of the credibility of the science for physicians who are just not educated yet because they don't have the resources or the time. So mushroomreferences.com, you can go to that website. It's got hundreds of references that then you can put in any, you know, symptom or species, et cetera, and you'd be able to find the peer-reviewed references. There's about 30 references, for instance, on psilocybin right now which is an area of research that i'm particularly focused on now there was for a long time a stigma associated with anything that had anything to do with mushrooms particularly because of psychedelic mushrooms is Has that alleviated? I know the John Hopkins study on psilocybin has shown some pretty incredible benefits,

and there's a lot of people now that are starting to look to it for treatment for people with PTSD or addiction issues. Has that become more mainstream in your experience? There's a vast tidal change in medical science. There's a vast title change in medical science. There's a slide. These are just a few of the universities right now that have been approved by the FDA and other agencies for human clinical studies on psilocybin. Wow. Harvard, Stanford. Purdue, Penn, Toronto, University of Toronto.

That's amazing. So that's only a few of them. I actually could put up – Department of Veterans Affairs. That's very interesting as well, right? I could put up 20 more, but you couldn't read them because I had to be able to just – So this is a huge shift. And the clinical studies that are coming out for, as you know, PTSD in particular has been extremely useful.

But one of them that came out, Johns Hopkins, for breaking tobacco addiction. Fifteen patients, small clinical studies, statistically significant. Ten out of 15 people, after one or two heroic doses of psilocybin, 12 months later had not smoked a cigarette. Wow. So, I mean, to break tobacco addiction, which is one of the most addictive substances on this planet, is phenomenal. That's incredible.

And the other research for PTSD, depression, I'm really excited about cognition and creativity. I think we can – there's a lot of smart people out there, a lot of smart people listening to your podcast. I think the idea of microdosing and being able to increase our ability of cognition and creativity to come up with the solutions that can get us out of this mess. Just think of that. If we had hundreds of millions of people thinking about solutions like I've come up with to solve some of the environmental challenges we have today for food biosecurity, the loss of bees is a threat to our national security. Just think about the threat to our economy. So this microdosing, I think, has enormous potential as well. And when you think about, one of the issues I see right now

with the clinical studies is like, it almost is too good to be true. Statistically significant, great universities, great science, published in peer-reviewed journals, the top of their game. But these mushrooms have so many benefits for fighting dementia, potentially Alzheimer's. Johns Hopkins has an Alzheimer clinical study ongoing currently for a dose of psilocybin to see if it helps pre-Alzheimer's patients and not go into full-blown Alzheimer's. There's so many different benefits potentially. It's almost like a chaos of data. It's almost too good to be true.

So my team and Pam Krisco is an MD from British Columbia. We've been working with people. And we have just launched today an app that's at microdose.me, double entendre. Microdose.me, it's available on the Apple Store, it's available on Droid. And this is a quick little- Wait a minute, a microdosing study on- And Apple allowed this on the App Store? Yep. That's a big shift. And it's up to say. Because this is a Schedule 1 drug that they're talking about taking on microdose levels. I mean, I'm just saying what it is, right?

I mean, obviously, you know what camp I'm in. I want everybody to do it. But this is really significant. It measures your ability to hear, vision, the tap test, you know, and how quickly you can tap your fingers. It's whether you're stacking it with, but it's also good for non-psychoactive substance use. What is your baseline? So you're getting older. I'm getting older.

I'm getting younger, dude. I have a new thing. Okay. I vote for you. I figured getting older. I'm getting younger, dude. I have a new thing. Okay. I vote for you. I figured it out. But the idea is to create baselines, you know, and then you create a baseline over time. So you find out how far you deteriorated. Or what your trend line is versus the general population.

So the idea with microdose.me is that we'll create a massive data set massive amount of data and then we'll offer this to clinicians for them to see signal from the noise i suspect hypothetically i don't have the evidence but several doctors have collected case studies of tinnitus or tinnitus the with pronunciations are correct of the buzzing in your ears and being able, and people have resolved that from doing microdosing. And 30% of Americans have hearing loss or more, it's progressive over time. How much hearing loss leads to depression because you can't hear your loved one say things and you get in arguments and I didn't hear you and you didn't say that. I mean, it just ramifies out.

So the ability of being able to have better cognition, better neurological development, and helping hearing, vision, depression. The interesting thing about the microdosing that we've been collecting is that people tend to be happier. And they're happier when they're more creative. And when they're more creative, they're happier. You're learning a new kata you are excited the next day you nailed it you're up and going to do it again you're writing a new book you're doing an artist's work so creativity breeds happiness happiness breeds creativity and then the opposite is true malaise and depression you're not as creative you're you're you're not enjoying life you're not looking forward to the next day so i think it's almost a binary choice and the idea of using

microdosing and then the definite microdosing is is has sort of variable interpretations so the using the psilocybe cubensis scale, which is the most common soul-side mushroom in the world, one gram is liftoff. Five grams is what Terrence would say was the hero's journey. And when I was on last, I did 20 grams. You know, that was a little bit much, you might say. But when you do one-tenth of a one gram, you don't feel it. One-twentieth, for sure, you don't feel it. So the idea is you do microdosing below the threshold of intoxication, but then it benefits neurogenesis. Now, there's an extraordinarily

interesting study that came out with mice, but I think it's translational medicine, and they were doing microdosing versus macrodosing. So these are some numbers, but basically one gram is almost equivalent to one milligram per kilogram of body weight. 70 kilos is 152 pounds. And so at one milligram per kilogram with these mice, that's like one gram of cubensis. That's a dose. It's not a super high dose, but it's a dose. So what they did with these mice is they had them in an arena with a metal floor and they gave a tone. Then 40 seconds later, they were shocked. So they had the tone again a few minutes later. 40 seconds later, they were shocked. So they had the tone again a few minutes later. 40 seconds later, they got shocked.

After 10 rotations, the mice realized, like Pavlov's dog, when there is a tone, there's going to be a negative consequence, a shock happening. So the mice would cower in fear. So then they dosed them with a microdose, 0.1 milligrams per kilogram versus one milligram per kilogram, one-tenth of a dose versus a full dose. Interestingly, the full dose, it took 10 rotations of no shock, the tone, no shock before they forgot or became re-acclimated not to have the fear-conditioned response. With the microdose, one-tenth of that, it only took two rotations. Two rotations with a microdose, and they dissociated potentially PTSD. Why do you think it's less?

Well, that's a really good question. And the evidence we have so far, and again, this is very early evidence, lots of research is going on in this. It looks like the neurogenic benefits of microdosing are greater than the neurogenic benefits of macrodosing. You flood the receptors, you're having this incredible trip, it's fantastic, it's colorful, it's life-changing. Yes, that is all beneficial for changing your life. But doing microdosing over the long term, because the nerves don't regrow in six hours. But over weeks of regeneration of nerves with microdosing, it seems to me that the microdosings, instead of flooding and overwhelming

all the receptors, are feeding these receptors that are allowing for neurogenesis. Now, this is, again, a hypothesis. There's so many great people studying this right now. But I'm advocating to all of the clinicians at Johns Hopkins, at Stanford, UCLA, at Harvard, please do testing of the patients for hearing and vision and other behavioral tests that are not just about emotion and mood and PTSD, but let's actually get some physical measurements. So then you can track prior. During is too complicated. It's too much intervention. You're tripping your brains out. You don't have time to be tested, you know, for vision and audit.

But then post-wise and then looking at the residual effects. Now, Dr. James Fadimaniman he has the fadiman protocol i have my protocol the stamens protocol uh james fadiman's protocol was microdosing one day on two days off one days on my protocol that i'm suggesting is four days on three days off and james and i are good friends. We talk about this. We laugh. We're just basically, these are hypothetical potential treatments.

Are you comparing data between the two of you? This is what Microdose.me will do. We wanted to say, are you following the Stamets protocol, the Fatiman protocol, your own protocol? Are you using it with niacin? Are you using it with lion's mane?

What are you using? And lion's mane is phenomenally powerful neurogenically. And there's two clinical studies out of Japan with mild cognitive decline and dementia showing very positive results taking two to four grams of lion's mane per day, the mycelium. It's interesting. Not the fruit body. the mycelium. That's interesting. Not the fruit, but the mycelium is much more powerful. And we just have been contracting with a neurological testing laboratory in France, and we just got some amazing results back showing that when we had lion's mane extracts of the mycelium exposed to neurons, and the positive control was the brain-derived nerve growth factor, nerve factor,

and it's used as a baseline for measuring neurogenic compounds comparatively. And the neurogenesis benefits from, this is where pluripotent stem cells, stem cells that then differentiate the neurons. And the BDNF clearly shows that. It's a standard protocol. With a lion's mane, it also increased the number of neurons. And then we started looking at analogs of psilocybin. And the analogs, when we added the lion's mane mycelium with the psilocybin analogs, which are perfectly legal.

They're not Schedule I substances. Psilocybin analogs are not? What is exactly the psilocybin analogs, which are perfectly legal. They're not Schedule I substances. Psilocybin analogs are not? What is exactly a psilocybin analog? There's a number of them that have been reported in the literature. There's Beocystin and Norabeocystin are two of the more prominent ones. I'm a psychonaut, and in 1960, Bay of Cistern, a report of a child died outside of Kelso, Washington, from eating mushrooms in his yard. The family ingested the mushrooms. They went to the hospital. The child developed a fever, eventually had renal failure, and died.

The child developed a fever, eventually had renal failure, and died. A chemist by the name of Lung, and then Benedict and Tyler picked up on this, they analyzed the mushrooms looking for a new toxin. The mushrooms were identified as being psilocybe baocystis. It is a mushroom that grows in Washington State and Oregon, sometimes in British Columbia, but not in Northern California. It's a very rare species, but grows in yards. When they analyzed the mushroom looking for new potential toxins, they found this alkaloid.

It's a dimethyltrypamine-based compound, and they named it Beocystin, after psilocybe Beocystis. So Beocystin had the reputation of potentially being a deadly poisonous toxin. It's present in Cubensis. It's present in many psilocybin mushrooms. And my book, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, has charts that show how much Baocystin is in these things. But no one had ever consumed Baocystin because of this reputation. Baocystin is legal. I obtained some pure Baocystin from a laboratory legally.

I have no psilocybin. Nature provides. i don't people make this very clear um but i can have i can possess these psilocybin analogs and so uh since there was no reports in the scientific literature of whether this was truly toxic or not i with my with a doctor friend of mine md that measured my vitals and hooked me up to blood pressure, ECG, did all the biometrics that are needed. And so we did an N of one study. I decided that even though it had a history of potentially of killing this child, I think that's a false positive. I think it was bad science. I couldn't find no one who ever ingested this so i decided i would ingest it now my friend

pam she's an md that goes into um into antarctica she's the only doctor on a research vessel and so she goes down there and she gets to bring a roommate and it was me and so pam and i were working really hard we had all of our plane tickets we're ready to go to antarctica we've been planning this for months. And then we decided, well, just before we go, Paul, let's do the Bay of Cistern test. We've been talking about this for months. We finally got the time to do this. But the next day, we're going to Antarctica. So Pam looks at her cell phone, and this Russian research vessel crashed into a reef, tore a hole in it. And it's like, it's now, the trip is canceled.

Now, I mean, I have American Express, you know, plane tickets, hotels. I got 24 hours to try to recapture all this money because we can't go. The trip's been canceled. So I had super high anxiety. And I told my doctor friend, I have too much anxiety. I can't go. This is too crazy. And then she kind of looked at me and gone, listen, we've been planning this for months.

You know, please. And I listened to her. And so I did 10 milligrams of Beosustin. She measured my heartbeat, blood pressure, all those metrics. My eyes did dilate. She said that was good. So it was a drug-like effect. And then she checked in with me every 10, 15 minutes. 20 minutes, you usually have liftoff, one hour, you're full blown into it.

And she checked with me and she checked with me and she asked, and I didn't get high. I'm not at all. She goes, how do you feel? And I said, I feel great. I have no anxiety. Everything with this trip is going to be fine. So here we found an analog of psilocybin that does not get you high, that's legal, that reduced anxiety. I think this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg because all the clinical studies are approved right now for pure psilocybin. What about the analogs? They activate other receptor sites in your neurological field. And that's why I think this is why looking at the natural form of these mushrooms standardized to a psilocybin, a certain concentration versus the pure molecule, I think that is the way of the future because pure psilocybin

is up to $6,000, $7,000 a gram. And you can translate that into growing salzheimer's mushrooms for two dollars a gram now there are people out there listening saying well the price is coming down indeed it is it's down maybe to a thousand to five hundred dollars a gram but how many people in the urban low lower income you know impoverished population suffering from ptsd who don't can't afford to go to Johns Hopkins to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a clinical treatment. I think this democratizes the use of psilocybin and microdosing that could be a benefit across our society. And then what I'm proposing is you stack it with niacin. And the reason why you stack it with niacin is you take one-tenth of a gram of salicylic

covensis, microdose, you add 100 to 200 milligrams of niacin. Now, if someone tries to get high by taking 10 times as much, they'll have like two grams of niacin. This is flushing niacin, vitamin B3. And that flushing niacin will give you such an irritable reaction of skin itching of people who've taken vitamin b they three they know this so it becomes the antabuse for microdosing but moreover it excites um the uh nerves uh at the end of the peripheral nervous system and neuropathies oftentimes present themselves as a deadening of the fingertip

the nerves of the fingertips and toes. And it's also a vasodilator. So there's three attributes of stacking niacin with psilocybin mushrooms that prevents abuse, becomes the anti-abuse. It dilates the blood vessels to deliver the neurogenic benefits of psilocybin to the endpoints of the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system. And it then also excites the nerve endings. So I think those three reasons, this could be, I hope to see in the future, psilocybin and mushroom to being over-the-counter vitamins approved by the FDA, stacked with niacin that allows for the universality of use for the benefit of our culture.

We were talking last time. Can I pause you there for a second? Is there any other evidence of people taking these analogs and having this anti-anxiety effect other than you? I mean, this seems a very small sample size, right? It's just one person. Yes, there are. As an antidepressant, as far as anxiety and depression are interrelated,

there are reports reports james fadiman in his studies his population study which is admittedly small did not see an anti-anxiety component but other clinical studies that john hopkins also the anxiety of dying from cancer right but that was actually psilocybin that was actually psilocybin but what i'm saying with you is also you had a very profoundly stressful situation happening, something you had prepared for for a long time, then all of a sudden it was gone, and all this money's gone. You've got to try to figure out how to get it back.

It's like, it's immediate. Right. Right. Maybe with these other people, they didn't have such an immediate anxiety moment, and maybe their anxiety was harder to measure whether it was coming or going. Well, absolutely. It's the end of one study. This is just –

How many people? Me. No, the other one with the other people that have experienced it but didn't experience any anti-anxiety. There's no one else that we know in the scientific literature. Johann Garz mentions – I published Psilocybe Ageracens with wrestled with him the most potent soul side mushroom in the world johan gartz says and one thing that he was asked and he said that the bayo system was equal to that soul siren i don't have high confidence in that statement i consume bayo system i was ready for liftoff i was hoping for liftoff i know what liftoff feels like right and i didn't get it so so this is this is what happens in

science so much is the scientists when you can't do a clinical study you we bioassay this is very common this is how albert hofman you know discovered you know lsd he bioassayed it so didn't he do it accidentally though he did it accidentally right he got in and went for this famous bike ride but then he did it purposely after that. But nevertheless, this is what our scientific, you know, psychonauts must do sometimes. Sasha Shulgin. Yeah, Sasha Shulgin. Famous for it.

The most famous of all and the most revered. And he bioassayed based on his knowledge of chemistry. He wasn't going to try to commit suicide. So this is really an area that I think has enormous value. And several meta-studies have come out. One that I had mentioned before is a population of several hundred thousand prisoners. And there was a 18% reduction in violent crime and 22% or so reduction in larceny and theft in a population where they reported they had one psilocybin mushroom experience

and statistically significant now association may not be causation but it can be but a more recent study from the british columbia which i find to be so fascinating, is that they did a large population set and partner to partner violence. If your male partner had done one psilocybin trip, statistically significant reduction of the probability of that partner being violent towards their other partner. Statistically significant. So I always thought if there's a dating app, maybe you should have the dating app. Have you tripped on psilocybin?

Yes. Well, that may be a better candidate for dating. So I think psilocybin makes nicer people. And I think we need a lot more nicer people that are more creative that are dedicated to helping the community and i think this is a a potential paradigm shifting a drug unquestionably and here's the other thing this could be profit i mean these these companies that are seeking to profit off of pharmaceutical drugs you can profit off this stuff with particularly with the protocol that you just described with adding niacin to it to ensure that people are doing only microdosing.

Look, man, this could be a very profitable enterprise for some company. And the benefits, if people can mirror the benefits that you had of this alleviation of anxiety, I mean, God, that's like most of what people struggle with. So many people out there listening to this right now are like, fuck, I wish there was something that didn't get me high but just alleviated this fucking angst that so many people are struggling with every day. It's a massive disease complex that swept our societies. And facing all these problems, how could you not become depressed? Well, you cannot become depressed by becoming creative. And I think that psilocybin and microdosing enables the creative pathways

for ingenuity for us to feel that we have meaning. We can make a meaningful difference. And it's really important. You know, we've entered into 6X, the sixth greatest extinction event known in the history of life on this planet. We've had two other extinction events from asteroid impacts, 250 million years ago, 65 million years ago, but we're now involved in a massive extinction event. And the research that came out today, and the other research that's come out, with 75% of the insect population, 40% in immediate jeopardy. The research article came

out and said in Europe and North America, they have good data collection. In Amazon, they don't. So we didn't even have a measure of the insect loss in the Amazon. But if you're a trout, if you're a bird, if you like drinking coffee and you like chocolate and you like almonds, drinking coffee, and you like chocolate, and you like almonds. I mean, these are all dependent upon pollinators. So if we lose these flying insects, we lose the pollination services, and it threatens worldwide food biosecurity. This is one of the biggest threats to our ecosystem now. I think we can invent our ways out of this if we creatively, you know, expand our ability to come up with novel solutions. And I think those solutions are literally underfoot and all around us today. We just have to wake up like I woke up to helping the bees.

There's so many smart people out there. And that we have evolved within this complexity, then to delve into that library of knowledge and pulling out applicable solutions, vetted by science, controlled studies, but not looking at these pharmaceutical pure molecules as the way of the future, but looking upon the complexity of the microbiome, the complex interrelationships, and selecting out microbiomes that then create guilds of solutions that are applicable to the problems that we face today. All right. I like that idea. All of it. It's beautiful that there are these natural solutions, that maybe if we could just shift people's ideas about how we view psilocybin, how we view the analogs, how we view the interaction with people in nature. That you can, you know, we can make a real change, make a change that's tangible inside of our lifetime.

And again, selling this stuff, like if, look, we're seeing what's happening right now with medical marijuana and then shifting to commercial marijuana and now hemp. It's giant. I mean, it's then shifting to commercial marijuana and now hemp. It's giant. I mean, it's a huge industry. It's changed Colorado. Colorado, Denver's real estate has gone through the roof. People are moving there so much that they've got traffic problems now they never conceived of in the past. It's changed their economy.

And it's changed their economy due to just a really obvious shift. Here's the shift. Marijuana is not bad for you. It's not. We thought it's not we're sorry you could have it now and now you could sell it and now it's legal but federally we're still dealing with schedule one so it's it's these shifts are happening these companies are investing money there's a lot of profit to be made and a lot of people are profiting but it's still in this weird transitionary stage it is but this is a people's revolution yeah you have decriminalized uh nature coming out of oakland which i'm fully in favor of how dare we make a species illegal that makes no sense to me

what is oakland specifically they've made ayahuasca psilocybin what else um all natural products with psychoactive properties to the best of my understanding. Both Denver and Oakland, they removed the funding for prosecutors and judges in the courts. So you can't use public funds in order to prosecute people for possession. So this is a very— Can you still arrest them for it, though? Well, the law enforcement officer is not getting paid. He's not doing his job. He's violating his code of conduct.

You arrest him and you take him to a prosecutor. The prosecutor goes, I have no funding for this. You're wasting our time. You're just coming here is wasting my time. I have murders to solve. What if someone's selling it? Decriminalization does not – it doesn't prevent you from being prosecuted for selling a Schedule I substance, right? That's a really, really good question and i have um thoughts on it that's controversial uh because this speaks to the

ability of some people having access and not if you want i only trip on suicide mushrooms once or twice a year um that's all all i need as terrence menna and I think Alan Watts said, when you get the message from the phone, hang it up. So if you just have these soul-scied mushrooms growing in your backyard or you know how to collect them, then you only need one or two doses a year. And even microdosing, you know, you get a lot more extension of that. But my view, and I've never had any problem with law enforcement in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia, and Canada in particular, law enforcement has a very pretty mature attitude towards this. If you have a small amount, and you're not trafficking, and you're for individual use, it just doesn't raise the level of the need for

enforcement no i understand that but i just wish there was no incentive at all there was nothing there like just the idea that you have to rely on the good grace of a cop who understands that there's no incentive to arrest you that seems like horseshit to me yeah like we're we're grown adults in 2019 with a mountain of evidence this is not we're not living in the dark ages anymore and the fact that it's still a possibility that you get arrested or you could face some sort of criminal charges for having something that's only been demonstrated to be good this is why the citizens movement the federal government i mean the republicans and conservatives and libertarians are all about state rights this is a people's movement they should get behind this because individual community

rights uh against the the big man, against the federal government. The federal government, there needs to be a title change. And how do we do that? It's because we have decriminalized Nature in Oregon. We have the Denver Initiative, other cities around the country. It's now spreading throughout the entire country. other cities around the country. It's now spreading throughout the entire country.

There's probably 20 cities in the next 16 months that are going to have decriminalization at the city councils. I also think it's a significant solution to this problem that we're facing with pills and a lot of destructive drugs. There's a lot of self-destructive drugs that people are taking because these people are hurting. What psilocybin gives you that these drugs don't, it gives you a potential to heal. It gives you a moment to reflect. It gives you a change in the way you think and you interface with the world. And that just doesn't exist in those other

drugs. Those drugs are escape drugs. And the need to escape is what we got to eliminate. And I think that's one of the things that psilocybin can help. It can help alleviate the need to escape. That's one of the things that psilocybin can help. It can help alleviate the need to escape. And a shout-out to Rick Doblin and Leanna Galuli of MAPS, MAPS.org, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS.org and MAPS.ca in Canada have been instrumental in bringing forward psychedelic drugs for PTSD and clinical studies. MAPS is now in phase three. With MDMA. With MDMA. I've had Rick on a couple of times. I love that guy. So yeah, I mean, he's a real pioneer in this. And so what's interesting in getting now from three different groups I've heard who have sat down with FDA scientists, there's been a new turnover within the FDA.

And these scientists are looking at just pure science without politics. They don't care about politics. They want to help people. And several of them have said they've never seen, with psilocybin in particular, a safer drug with such a dramatic impact in frequency such infrequency of use, one or two times. And so there is a movie that just came out called Fantastic Fungi. And Michael Pollan's in there. I'm in there. Louis Schwartzberg has put it out.

He spent 12 years working on this movie. It's fantasticfungi.com. It's a grassroots movement. Theaters are selling out all over the country. They book it in New York City for one night. They have to keep it in for a week because there's standing lines, a standing room, long lines to get into the theater. And it's all about the use of mushrooms and the Johns Hopkins studies with end-of-life patients. It's very, very well done, but it speaks to this,

is that this is literally a quote-unquote underground movement that's welling up. And the attraction that people have for this is a reflection of the tidal change that is happening now. This is a worldwide movement that is sweeping through the mycelial underground and through connections. So something I'd very much encourage you to to see fantastic fungi is it on netflix it's not on netflix louis was offered a lot of money for netflix but once it gets to netflix it's a library book in the library and he wanted to build community so he's been out um and people can sponsor theater openings it's got a hundred% on Rotten Tomatoes. How many movies get 100% on Rotten Tomatoes? So it is really a people's movie and it's spreading.

Where can you get it? You go to fantasticfungi.com and you can sign up for theaters. So it has to be in a theater? Yeah, right now. It will be eventually, after this year, it's going to be available on the web. Right now, Louis spent a lot of money, or five million dollars i think uh norman and lynn lear uh norman lear all in the family you know and archie bunker they're also co-producers of this really yeah and so yeah lynn lear's out there tripping i allegedly i here it is are you ready to explore the magic that lives beneath our

feet wow i i thought archie bunker was one of the most lovable racist conservative assholes i've ever ever seen on tv but um well norman lear did a lot more than that right this is um really interesting though that they've decided to release it in in film theaters and versus on the web because if you really want to reach a lot of people i mean is it selling this way is this i mean it seems like if you spent a lot of money the way to get that money back would be to sell it to netflix like well that's i would agree with you except for amazon netflix offered him one quarter to one half of the cost and so it was not they didn't value it and they didn't see it i mean south by southwest turned them down

and it's got a hundred percent on rotten tomatoes i mean people just don't see this why did south by southwest turn them down because it's not part i think of the hollywood establishment south by southwest you know and so i, I can't explain why South by Southwest turned it down or, you know, or the other festivals, the Cannes Festival, et cetera. That's not my level of expertise. But what is happening

is that these theaters are selling out days upon days in a huge response. People have an appetite for this because it gives them hope and meaning. In a time of desperation, they see actionable solutions that cross political and cultural boundaries that can help the commons. And I think that we are suffering in our societies from the media, from the politics, from the science showing the loss of habitat health, that we're under lots of stressors just like the bees are. We have a

multiplicity of stressors and these stressors lead to malaise, depression, disease, crime, and poverty. And this is something that I think can help do a tidal change for the better, And this is something that I think can help do a title change for the better, provided it's done responsibly. Now, you've mentioned companies. There's 20 at least new psilocybin companies that have been formed in the past year. A lot of them from the Canadian cannabis industry. They made a ton of money, so several of them called me up. I've talked to two groups, and both groups, when I asked them, have you done a heroic dose on psilocybin?

None of them would admit that they did. They're scared. They hadn't even tripped. What? I asked them, have you done a small dose? They said, and everyone was silent. And at one group, I said, you folks just seem like economic opportunists. And one of them said, that's exactly what we are.

We just try to make money. So, anyhow. Just make a deal with them. Listen, I need one afternoon of your time. I think it's important that we- Come to Jesus. Yeah, that's a different subject. I mean, it would be amazing, right? Do that and say,

look, I'll do this deal with you, but just give me five hours. You take the five hours, have them all trip together, and now go, let's reevaluate this. I'm with you. I'm with you, but just give me five hours. You take the five hours, have them all trip together and now go, let's reevaluate this. I'm with you. I'm with you, brother. And that's what's needed because those of us who understand the importance of this realize that this is something that we have to carefully shepherd for maximum benefit and um at these commercialization of these companies i call it spore wars very soon there's gonna be spore wars

between all these companies good movie that's the that's a sequel yeah spore wars listen man what it's exciting to me is it's not dirty anymore okay when the first time i did mushrooms i think was very very early 2000s and god you tell people about it they were like what's wrong with you you're a grown adult you pay taxes you you know all my life it's like you what kind of a fuck up are you at your age you're doing mushrooms my god grow up that's what it was like and you would tell them no i don't think that's what it is i think it expands your consciousness i think it connects you to higher levels of of thinking and it just makes you more in tuned with the great beyond there's something

there's something more there and i'm like you listen to yourself yeah go to work go goddamn get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and go to work but now it's people are slowly but surely the dirtiness of even and then the term micro dosing is wonderful because people know you can take a little bit you know like we've micro dosed on this podcast before ari and i just took a couple stems recently and then like i guess it's probably a little more than micro dose it was it was a pretty we were we were definitely noticeably high but like an hour in and like an hour and a half in i go i forgot we took mushrooms i'm like why am i so happy but that feeling it's like i want people to experience that feeling because it's a it's a relatively clean feeling and i after mushrooms i

feel younger yeah and i go to these ted conferences every year and i feel lighter i feel like i was treated like a leper you know when i went to ted you know and the organizers of ted were so afraid i'm talking about psychedelic mushrooms how many years ago is this the 2008 when i first went my what's it like now though that's right this last time i mean i was treated like a super celebrity i had i these hugely, hugely powerful people, some of the names you probably know, who came up to me and would shake my shoulders going, now I understand. Now I understand. And I had to say, down boy. Keep down.

But they awoke into something. And their mates, their friends, their business associates, the common theme is, wow, he was such a jerk before and he's so nice now. And they're seeking cooperation. And they still are productive. They still are creative. They're banging it out. The coders in Silicon Valley know that microdosing helps their coding ability,

so it's a competitive advantage to those other computer companies that do not. I think any new business populated in particular by young people who are not doing microdosing are going to be at a competitive disadvantage because the creativity flow, the camaraderie of the community seeking to benefit the commons and also reward yourself i'm not saying it's all you know just just helping helping the commons but the idea of being able to reward yourself and people rejoice and your success and they benefit from it as well it really integrates people together yeah it's also people need to understand that there's a lot of this squirreling away resources and money and things and trying to climb that corporate ladder. This is a finite life. It doesn't last that long.

It's a trick. You get sucked into this trick, and this trick is what every CEO and every head of every corporation every chief financial officer all these people that are just trying to like improve the bottom line rake in more money keep this company growing and keep kicking ass it's a trick you're sucked up in a trick there's a natural human tendency to accumulate numbers for whatever reason go back to our early days when resources were scarce and if you get sucked into that trick one day you're going to wake up and that that's going to usually be too late you usually it's on your deathbed usually it's close to it like what did i do this is it my health is failing my life's falling apart and what has my life been it's been 10 12 14 hours a day in these stuffed offices under fluorescent lights crunching numbers and trying to acquire things and and for what like what what impact have i

made on humans what what what is the negative impact of my ambition on the people that around me like all this is like the one thing that psilocybin and particularly just psychedelics in general can provide is a break from patterns a stopping a ceasefire of all the momentum of our culture civilization finances taxes credit card debt all that shit just stops and you get a chance to step back and look at the machine watch it all whirl and spin in front of you and you get a chance to step back and look at the machine, watch it all whirl and spin in front of you. And you get to say, oh, I got sucked into the trick. I'm sucked into a trick.

A lot of people I've talked to exactly what you're talking, you're, you're mentioning and they, they do a heroic journey and they then look back and go, why was I prioritizing that? Yeah. I want to be out with my children. Yes. You know, and looking at birds or walking in the woods. Being in nature, yeah. Being in nature.

One of my books, Psilocybe and Mushrooms of the World, has a great chapter in it, I think, called Good Tips for Great Trips. And one of the things, I understand the clinically controlled settings for clinical studies, et cetera. A lot of us don't need that. But I really enjoy being on an ocean bluff or a high point and by being in the mushrooms about half an hour before sunset, being with a loved one. Also good to have an experienced person who's not tripping who is the watcher. A sitter. A sitter. A sitter is there taking meditation practice in place, folks,

give these people some space, who's just watching. And then the people who are imbibing understand they have a watcher. They have somebody who's anchored who can help them. And then to have the sun go downored who can help them and then to have this the sun go down and and the stars come out and the colors and then this oceanic expansive experience it's just there's nothing short of spiritual and i agree i think there's one thing we should talk about though there are people that have a tendency towards schizophrenia, and these people have – sometimes they have psychedelic breaks. Like they'll have psychedelic experiences, and then they don't do well.

They go off to deep end. I'm so glad you brought that up, and that is a deselection from the clinical studies of candidates who want to engage. candidates who want to engage. But my good friend Mark Hayden, who runs MAPS Canada, had a very interesting story with a schizophrenic. And he also cautioned, and every physician I know is on the same page as you. Including medical marijuana, edible marijuana, seems to have a significant effect on people with it. What Mark noted with this one person who was a severe schizophrenic was that he still heard

voices in his head, but the voices now were friendly. They were affirming. They weren't saying, you know, go kill somebody. It was like, you know, you are a good person. And so he still had the voice in the head, but the tenor and tone and attitude of the voices were supportive. What I'm talking about is it bringing on these schizophrenic experiences. There has been some evidence, particularly about marijuana, that high doses of marijuana for people that have tendencies, and we don't know what causes someone to have schizophrenic breaks.

Because there is a difference between pre and post, right? have schizophrenic breaks because there there is a difference between pre and post right people have had deteriorating mental health that's that correlates with schizophrenia like what what what it caused them to be less schizophrenic or not exhibiting any of the the problems and then all of a sudden having severe problems post psychedelic trip or post large dose uh edible marijuana and or even large dose smoking it or some people they dab and they smoke wax and then it happens to people that smoke too much pot there's certain people that have that tendency i i would defer to clinicians who are extremely skilled in this area and who have seen many many patients i'm not a doctor but i i concur with you i think that is a real concern um the difference between a toxin and a drug can oftentimes be dose and

at lower doses you can see things at higher doses you you don't right um so it's an entire spectrum and it's so complex and individualities of of people are so uniquely different. I have a friend who's a doctor. If he smokes a joint, he can't go to sleep. I smoke a joint, and I'm into a cuddle puddle, man. I'm ready for the pillow. At night, I use it for going to sleep. Yeah, I'm the opposite.

I start writing. I want to read. I want to watch documentaries. But it's a sativa thing too as well, right? Do you have a significant difference between the way your body responds to sativas versus indicas? I would like to be educated on this subject. I've used both for a very long time. I love acne, indica.

You have a beard. I have a beard. I love the smell of cannabis on my beard. You like the smell on your beard? Yeah. Oh, you weirdo. It's my perfume, right? I get it.

But there's a lot. We're in a new realm of pharmacology and pharmacognosy. And I think we have to navigate this carefully. The problem with natural products is how do you standardize them to the active constituent? When you have more than one active constituent, you know, how do you standardize them all? There's an entourage or a symphony effect. This speaks to the complexity of nature. But I have a phrase that I like, it's don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it necessarily does not have a valid outcome or can't be used. And I think that what we need to do is

correct large data sets. And that's why I'm hoping microdose.me is going to give us an enormous amount of data that clinicians can harvest from and going, we didn't anticipate this. And like these meta studies about partner to partner violence, when if your partner men had tripped on mushrooms, they were less prone to violence. That was signal from the noise. Then we can get serious scientists to do really carefully controlled clinical studies to be able to see this. And then how do you combine them? I mean, it's a whole new landscape that gets away from single molecules and into the complexity of nature that we can build upon. Navigating to that place is going to be a challenge. There's no doubt about it. But I think we're smart enough now. We have enough computer technologies and diagnostic tools that we should begin on that voyage today.

What do you think is responsible for that shift from TED of 2008 to TED of 2019? Michael Pollan's book, probably. Michael Pollan's book was the big bridge. And he has 40 pages on me. Paul's book was The Big Bridge. Yeah. He has 40 pages on me. And Michael, if you're listening, buddy, dude, I told him not to reveal my secret mushroom patch. Never trust a journalist.

And Michael Pollan, bless his heart, I love him. He's a great guy. But he said in his book, so to speak, he says, Paul told me not to tell you where his secret mushroom patch is, but I can tell you that we slept in a yurt. There are three state parks along the Columbia River, and two of them have yurts. He just basically – He gave up your spot. He gave up my spot. And it's like, okay, Michael.

Why would he do that? I think it's the urge of a writer trying to give something to their readership. So what happened to that spot? Get trampled? It's run over with people collecting soul-scied mushrooms. They have big signs everywhere. They arrest people. It's a huge income source now for the cops because they bust people.

But the good news about that is I have gone to these state parks, and because there's big signs of no mushroom picking and law enforcement's there, there's lots of mushrooms. They're everywhere. And so I can photograph them, but you're not allowed to touch them. So what do they check you on your way out? Oh, they're like bees on honey, so to speak. Come on. They are hiding in the bushes. They are alpha male types.

Can you imagine that? They've got drugs growing out of the ground. And they're like, don't touch it. They swarm it. Don't touch it. Well, I had a lot of fun with my friend because I got a stick. And I go, okay, I touched the mushrooms with a stick. Now, am I actually touching the mushrooms or not?

Because if you touch the mushrooms – Do they check your pockets? They will search you, yeah. They'll search you for just randomly? No, if they have – Reason to believe. Reason to believe they can search you. Stuff them in your underwear, bro.

Just take a big fat baggie. Or swallow them quickly. But, you know, I don't – this is – it is preposterous. Yeah, what if they find you lying down with your eyes dilated? You'd have to talk to them, you know, I don't – this is – it is preposterous. Yeah, what if they find you lying down with your eyes dilated? You'd have to talk to them, you know. I don't know if they would do a fecal sample later on or what. Oh, Christ. But it approaches the absurd.

Yeah. You know, and this is when the law enforcement becomes absurd. Even the law enforcement officers I know who, you know, you've been in the martial arts a lot all your life, myself as well. I had several schools for about 30 years, and I had several law enforcement officers as students. Yeah, they don't want to be involved in that nonsense. They don't want to be involved in that. No, they get roped into it by the system. Yeah, like this is not something they want to do.

I know a ton of cops. None of them give a shit about mushrooms. Yeah, it's it's hugely hugely unfortunate consequence of really ridiculous laws and the idea of grown adults telling other grown adults that they can't do something that is incredibly beneficial that they themselves have never experienced so they have no knowledge of it at all other than the ancient stereotypes mushrooms being bad mushrooms being for burnouts and losers and hippies and oh you can't handle life or they're mushrooms or they're walking hypocrites and they know it you know they use it themselves yeah and they're like tormented but

they have to do this so i i found that most law enforcement officers are extremely reasonable yeah as long as you show intent. You know, your intention – And respect. Yeah, 100%. So it's never been – but, you know, I don't subscribe to the defense that someone's doing it for spiritual purposes and they have, you know, hundreds of pounds with Ziploc bags with scales in the basement and doing a commercial operation. Right. You're avoiding taxes. Right.

You're producing this as a factory. You know, take it in the chin and during a commercial operation right you're avoiding taxes right you're producing this as a factory you know take it in the chin you get busted hey come to the territory yeah eyes wide open don't cloak it in like in the veil of spirituality you're trying to create a spiritual revolution unless you're a true saint you're giving that shit away yeah well that would be different but yeah i i have a phrase nature provides i don't because i don't want to be responsible for another person's experience oh for sure what if they have a meltdown and they blame joe rogan yes paul stanley yes i don't i can't control that circumstance i don't want the responsibility that's one of the reasons why i've hesitated on getting involved

in medical marijuana or you know commercial marijuana i've been offered and i'm always like i just don't think this is the right because you you can't especially with edibles you can't control people you don't know what they're going to do i don't i don't do edibles because that's hilarious well i was in kenyan college kenyan college in 1973 my dad was coming to visit and uh visit. And one of my people on the floor at this dormitory, they made some marijuana brownies. Oh, boy. Every good story starts that way. I ate two brownies. I go, my dad's coming in two or three hours, so what the heck?

And I was so frigging stoned. I could not believe it. And I could barely – my eyes were really, I was trying to maintain how it is. You're trying to look like you're not stoned, but you're blitzed out of your gourd. And so my dad was like, are you looking at me really curiously? This is the early 1970s.

And so the next day, I said, Dad, I've got to tell you something. I ate some marijuana around me. He goes, I knew something was wrong. I knew I could tell. I could tell. I go, well, no shit, Sherlock. I was on the floor. But it was,'s but marijuana did he get mad at you no he was actually amused and delighted that i explained to him why i look so stoned oh well that's great that you had that kind of communication yeah just before before he died he wanted to trip on mushrooms and uh and i i turned him down because he was close to the end of his

life and um he was very religious and i was concerned i would shake his reality tree so severely that he would question his entire life because he was like the death of the salesman figure is a tragic life that he led and the mushrooms could have helped him enormously but i was a concern that he would look back and goes i wasted my life oh so that was too much of too heavy for me you know maybe my maybe i'm being selfish because i was trying to protect my own feelings but he wanted to do it he asked me actually he said i want to i want to do soul side mushrooms with you and he wouldn't smoke pot do you have regrets about that about not doing it with him i do i have i have a lot of regrets about that um so i i have met several people in the past

several weeks at stanford medical school at these other conferences that i go to which there's a brain mind conference at stanford medical, in the first two sentences, they mentioned psilocybin. 120 neuroscientists and $150 billion in the room, and psilocybin was immediately mentioned. And I met some people there that are intergenerational. Grandparent, parent, and 18, 19-year-old child all journeyed with mushrooms together. And their interpersonal relationships, they told me, there's no reason for us ever to get mad at each other. I just thought that was really powerful. Wow.

Yeah, that is powerful. That sounds inconceivable to someone who's never experienced psychedelics, but someone who has, you go, yeah, I see how you could get there. Yeah, don't make mountains out of molehills. Yeah. You know, you can disagree without being angry and you can be civil about it. Yeah. Well, that's a lesson the world could use right now.

Yeah. I think this is in many ways the antidote for some of the problems that we're seeing with social media. One of the problems we see with social media is this disconnect from the human experience, disconnect from communication, person-to-person communication, and this anger and vitriol and hate and just rage. And people hiding behind screen names and trolls. Yes, yes. You know, you're Joe Rogan.

I'm Paul Stamets. Yeah. Well, who are these people hiding behind screen names? Yeah. They're just – and a great TED Talk, which I did not understand, and the TED Talk was fantastic, talking about why trolls do the things that they do. They do it because they get excitement. The idea is just to disturb the fabric. And the more disturbance they get, that is a measure of their success.

Yes. And provoking a response, even if they're not wedded to it. They just want to be able to cause a ripple in the pond. Yeah. Well, they don't feel significant, so they want to do something that they can get some sort of reaction they have a rock they see a window they want to throw it yeah it's it's a natural inclination but it's stupid it's barbaric but it's a waste of fucking time you know and some people celebrate it i'm like okay celebrate it you're not doing shit you're not doing shit for yourself you're not doing shit

for other people you're not improving whatever your art is, whatever it is that you try to do in this life to leave your mark or to contribute or to be creative. You're not doing that if you're trolling. You're just not. All trollers should eat mushrooms. Yes. Well, all angry people should eat mushrooms. That's true. I really agree with that.

angry people should eat mushrooms that's true i really agree agree with that so well you know there is good evidence that lion's mane also uh compensates in many of these uh neurogenic benefits that's all the stuff all the time this is like a lion's mane elixir that i i pour it tell me if that shit's any good well it comes from china and is that bad um every chinese expert i've met they said i wouldn't dare buy a mushroom from china jesus christ so this is we have a spoonable lion's mane and i put that in smoothies all the time and that's my go-to and that's exactly the research i put it in coffee yeah i put it in coffee and jamie do you can you pull up that how much i put in the neurogenesis benefits of lion's mane how much i put in here oh it's open it's not open yet right no it's sealed i put in there i'd put about a teaspoon teaspoon and stir it in what that but the the neuro that's good and the neurogenesis the this company company in France that we did the neurogenic test with found that the mycelium was far more active than the mushroom fruit bodies.

And so the lion's mane stimulates neurite outgrowth and basically extends the nerves from growing compared to baseline. Yeah. So in 7 to 12 days, a substantial up to 22% increase in neurite outgrowth. What we found was actually, there was one that was at 8%, one was at 12%. And then separately, we stacked it with an analog of psilocybin. And rather than that being the arithmetic additive of cumulative, we found a synergy. So we think that lion's mane, the research has shown, increases myelin regeneration on the sheath of the nerves, and the psilocybin proliferates nerve tip growth.

So it should conceivably help you learn. So this is an example. This is an unexpected result. This is lion's mane mycelium that's showing a 14, you know, basically a 14.8% over baseline. Then we have a psilocybin analog that didn't do all that great. Which analog is this again? This is a, I'm not going to describe the analog for now for obvious reasons, but it's a legal analog. It creates a 7% outgrowth of neurites. But then we stacked it

with lion's mane and the psilocybin analog. There's a theoretical additive effect, 114 plus 107, 122. But we got 136. It's statistically significant. The outlier actually is even higher. The outlier actually is even higher. So the neuroscientists in France that did this study was extremely excited. And we found that the more we titrated it to greater dilution, the more active it becomes. What does that mean? Well – Titrate? What does that mean?

Maybe we're diluting it. And these are human cells, pluripotent stem cells. we're diluting it and it is our human cells, pure pluripotent stem cells. And what we found was originally we were told is called three micrograms per milligram or three micrograms, a millionth of a gram. But when we went back to, to a 0.03,

100 times less, the neurogenic benefits became greater. Now there's something called the PK conversion, the pharmacokinetics. When you ingest something, only a small portion of it may make it into your bloodstream. But the good news is that these things are so non-toxic and they're so potent. Now, looking at the dosing regimen, it appears so far, we haven't done this clinically, this is human cells in vitro, but this laboratory is predictive of neurogenic compounds that the neurogenic benefits are so substantial that the PK conversion of ingesting them can be seen in the bloodstream as a fairly good conversion rate. So you, for instance, if you take vanillic acid, vanilla, about 2% will make it into your bloodstream. So if you take one whole gram of vanilla, only 2% actually gets in your bloodstream.

So that's the PK conversion. So what we're seeing is right now is the potency of this is so strong at lower and lower dilutions, we're getting more and more potency. So this is – yeah, it's – I like to say dilution is a solution to profitability. The more that we dilute, the more potent it becomes. So this is why the neuroscientists in France are doing this study going, this stuff is so potent. Please dilute it. Dilute it. Dilute it.

Wow. And so we see this stuff is so potent. Please dilute it. Dilute it. Dilute it. Wow. And so we see this as a tremendous horizon. Lion's Mane is legal. It's an edible and choice mushroom, 1,000-year history of use. We found that mycelium is far more potent than the mushrooms for really good reasons. Some of the compounds are called aranasins, and these are actually discovered by Kawagishi in 1994 looking for an antibacterial agent.

And so when he was looking at the mycelium fighting bacteria, he found that the mycelium expressed this antibacterial cyathan derivative, and he gave it the name aranasin after hericium aranasius, just like penicillin is named after penicillium. And so he stumbled on the fact that it has neurogenic properties and antibacterial properties. So the mycelium is navigating through the ground through a hostile environment. It's only one cell wall thick. The mycelium has an immune system that's operational between 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, 35 degrees Celsius.

That's the window it's growing in. So its immune system is operative in that window. When you do super hot water extracts, you're in the extreme zone. That's not part of the immunological lifespan of the mushroom. You're decocting it. the extreme zone that's not part of the immunological lifespan of the mushroom you're decocting it you're taking out ingredients but you're not harnessing uh within the immunological window of temperatures that the mycelium has evolved to fight off pathogens and so what we have found is the mycelium is far more active than the fruit bodies this is all new science but then

mushroom references.com is populated with dozens upon dozens of peer-reviewed articles showing the mycelium is far more active than the fruit bodies. And a whole genome sequencing of reishi, for instance, found 25% more genes coding for proteins are expressed at the mycelial state than at the mushroom state. Well, it makes sense because the mushrooms at the end of millions of cell divisions over months, years, even decades, finally produce a mushroom that rots in five days. The mushroom doesn't need a good immune system. It's attracting mycobores, animals, deer. John just showed me some photographs. He's going to show you. He was in a campground and found deer in the morning digging up mushrooms out of the ground.

Well, animals engage mushrooms. John Rue? One of your colleagues here. Or maybe it's Jeff. I'm sorry. Jeff, one of the guys who works here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay.

Oh, okay. So the idea – but mushrooms attract insects, people, animals because they're fragrant, they're protein, they're nutritionally dense, and they want to engage humans. The mycelium is navigating through a microbial hostile environment. And a report came out in the literature of over a thousand species of bacteria in a single gram. There's more than eight miles of mycelium in a single cubic inch. So the mycelium is navigating through a hostile microbial environment.

It's setting up guilds and microbiomes and collections of cooperating bacteria that can help them defend against pathogens. Look at that. Estimated up to eight miles of mycelium in a single inch of soil. And it's only one cell wall thick. That's such a weird-looking image. It's so hard to see what that is. That's a mushroom that's melted back into the ground. It's mycelium. Now the mushrooms generate generate mycelium and it goes underneath the ground so every time you're walking on the ground you're walking upon miles upon miles of mycelium

and it knows that you're there these are sensitive these are not only externalized stomachs that are digesting nutrients and externalized lungs exhaling carbon dioxide, inhaling oxygen. But I believe these are extant neurological networks of nature. When you see that pervasiveness of those cells and the climate change scientists are coming around to this, 70% of the carbon biologically is stored in mycelium in the ground. The way to fight climate change is not only replanting trees, which is great, I love it, but it's the mycelial networks you're building in the humus that creates the soil, that creates the biodiversity, that then guarantees the health of the ecosystem. So it's the mycelial networks that govern because they're so pervasive. They set up

because they're antibacterial properties, they're probacterial properties. They set up because they're antibacterial properties, they're probacterial properties. Another example of this is in the microbiome of soils and inside of humans' stomachs. Turkey tail mushrooms and a placebo-controlled randomized clinical study with humans from a scientist associated with Harvard found that turkey tail mycelium is a prebiotic for the microbiome that feeds bifidobacterium lactobacillus and suppresses clostridium, which is an inflammatory bacterium. So it's really, really interesting that the mycelium is feeding nutrients to the beneficial bacteria within the microbiome that then gives us health. And so these are precursor nutrients that elevate the populations of the beneficial bacteria.

So the two go hand in hand. What about edible mushrooms, things like shiitake and those type of mushrooms? Is there any nutritional benefit to those things? Enormous nutritional benefit. And there's been two also meta studies that have come out this year showing that the ingestion of mushrooms with elderly people over the age of 60, there's a 50% decreased odds of Alzheimer's-like symptoms with a population of people consuming three mushroom meals per week. Now, they didn't specify the mushrooms. This is out of Singapore. But the mushrooms they're commonly eating are oyster mushrooms, shiitake, and shimeji, and maybe some other mushrooms. But that's one meta-study that came out. There was a study out of Japan from Dr. Ikikawa at the National Cancer Center that found statistically significant reduction in cancers across the board, I think 162,000 people

in this data set. And he was sent over to the Nagano Prefecture to look for this. Now, these are edible and delicious mushrooms. Also, they empower the immune system. Again, signal from the noise, statistically significant reduction in overall cancer rates associated with a food. The division now between foods and medicines is blurred. And yet it speaks to Hippocrates in Dioscorides, stating that let food be thy medicine, medicine be thy food. So it's interesting because physicians have been taught this sort of monomolecular approach to medicine. And now we're realizing that these foods are essential nutrients for your immune system that downregulates inflammation. It's so interesting that we're learning all this

during our lifetime too. Do you think that would all be established by now? Well, I'm glad you asked that. We have a paper coming out in the next two or three days, maybe in the next week. And it's on turkey tail mycelium, the grown on rice. And we were able to find out something that no one had reported in the literature. The traditional Chinese medicine approach is that these are immunomodulators. They help the immune system, but they also are not inflammatory. When you have an immune response, oftentimes associated with an inflammatory response, blood rushes to the wound, you inflame, you have all these compounds that are being produced by the blood to suppress an infection. But you can over-amp the immune system and have a pro-inflammatory response that can cause a lot of oxidative

stress damage collaterally. And so the article that's just coming out with BMC, Biomed Central, Alternative and Complementary Medicine, peer-reviewed, we have found that the mycelium, when it grows on rice, bioferments the rice to then produce a unique immunological response that upregulates what's called interleukin-1-RA and interleukin-10. These are anti-inflammatory cytokines. And so the mycelium doesn't do that, the mushrooms don't do that, but the mycelium is biofermented, the rice, like tempeh, is transformed, or like yogurt comes from milk because of lactobacillus or acidophilus. And that transformation then makes a novel product. We found the same thing, that the rice compared to excites the expression of anti-inflammatory compounds while also exciting the pro-immune response.

So it's a buffered response. It's interesting, too, that you're bringing this up, that it's growing on something else. That seems to be part of nature, right? This sort of symbiotic relationship that some of these mushrooms have with the plants and the the the environment around them that's a really really good uh point um because um the mycelium will be found with the bees when we grew the mycelium on rice compared to on birch wood the the mycelium grown rice reduced reduced the viruses 10 to 1. The mycelium we grew it on birch reduced the viruses up to 1,000 to 1. Oh, so that's its natural environment.

So that speaks to the fact that there appears to be something that's coding within the ecosystem that then excites the mycelium to produce something that is more strongly result in an antiviral activity. That's the case with cordyceps as well, right? Cordyceps mushrooms grow on other things. Yeah, but the cordyceps mushrooms, when they grow on the worms, this is something that was a big subject of debate because cordyceps sinensis is a mushroom that grows on a worm, basically. Like a little caterpillar.

On a caterpillar larvae in the Himalayas, elsewhere in China in the Far East. And people were finding these cordyceps mushrooms, and they were cloning them. And then they got the culture going, and then they analyzed the culture, and then they analyzed the culture and they got what's called an anamorph it's not that complicated it's just two faces of the same coin there's a mushroom fruit body and then there's this imperfect form that is a different looking organism but they're actually the same they have two different expressions when they all the scientific literature kept on coming up with different anamorphs. And so they had all this competition in the scientific literature.

What is a true anamorph of Cordyceps sinensis? Well, now it's called Ophiocordyceps sinensis. They redefined it. It's called Sensu stricto. And when they analyzed the mushrooms, not until recently they discovered that another – a group of fungi are chasing the Cordyceps sinensis. As the fruit body develops, other fungi are chasing right behind the other fungus. So you have multiple fungi that are actually present in the Cordyceps worm. It's not just one species.

It's multiple species that are co-occurring, chasing each other inside the cordyceps mushroom as its fruits. So, again, it just speaks to the complexity of nature. Wow. So where should you get your cordyceps source for health benefits? You know, that's a really good question. Cordyceps militaris does not have these issues that cordyceps sinensis does. The problem is cordyceps sinensis, thousands of articles have been published, really which one they're

talking about. It's like it's all mixed up now. What is, what true anamorph were these scientists using? There are ones called Piscillio myces. You know, there's other ones that, Hercitalis sinensis is now thought to be the true anamorph for Cordyceps sinensis. Well, all this

lingo means is basically there's a mushroom with a whole bunch of other fungi. They're associated with it. And when they cultured these other fungi, they did clinical studies or research studies, and they came up with results. The problem is that they've mixed it up into four or five different species, and you can't sort of disambiguate the data now because it's too complicated. So it's a really good question. The Cordyceps militaris does not have these issues. And so I would steer people to Cordyceps militaris right now because the Cordyceps sinensis, the ophiocordyceps sinensis issues are still complicated. And now virtually thousands of research articles are all now suspect because no one has a foggiest idea what anamorph

they were using oh wow so it speaks to the complexity of the system so and how many people are actually working on this data too oh thousands of researchers and and i'm thankful that the chinese mycologists sort of were the ones who finally sorted this out there was a lot of conflict academically there's a lot of big egos in academia. People got wedded to their own research. We're all like that. And the challenges went back and forth. And fortunately, a group of Chinese scientists finally were able to narrow down the argument

to understand that everyone was actually doing good culture work. They were actually expert mycologists taking the right tissue, taking it from the right cordyceps mushroom. It's just that at that time, they had a different fungus that was naturally part of the inside of the mushroom that was a mixture of fungi that were racing at different paces up the mushroom. Well, the Chinese were the first to use it for a performance benefit, right? Or they were the first to at least be publicized to use it in the Olympics.

They were using cordyceps mushrooms. That was one of the reasons why at Onnit we developed Shroom Tech Sport, which is a cordyceps mushroom-based supplement, which I love cordyceps for workouts, for pre-workout. It's like it gives you an extra gear. It's really kind of crazy how effective it is, especially in combination with B12 and other adaptogens. It just has – it's a great pre-workout supplement because it doesn't get you jittery at all. It's not a stimulant. But you have like a little more juice when you exercise. And that's one of the things that those high-altitude herding populations have found, right?

That's exactly right. It's likely to be a vasodilator, and it has sterodal-like benefits as well. So yeah, the cordyceps for athletes has been tried and true and many of these anamorphs that I mentioned have those properties. So for athletes, what dose would you recommend if you're going to exercise? I'm not a medical doctor, so when people ask me recommendations, I know that the common usage of these is in the order of two grams. There are usually 500 milligram capsules. There's lots of good companies that are producing this. I would just make sure it's mycelial-based and it's not fruit body-based.

The clear evidence is showing that the problem— How would one find out whether something's mycelial based? It should declare it. We say mushroom mycelium on all of our labels. And if you were going to take that, like if you weren't going to take Shroom Tech Sport, if you wanted to make your own concoction, you would recommend two grams and then. And make sure you had known the chain of custody of where it came from. Because a lot of these companies buy on the spot market.

What company is this that you gave me? Host Defense. Host Defense. Is this yours? Yep. Is this your company? Oh, okay. We'll support you.

Host Defense and there's their website where someone can grab this? Yeah, funjay.com or hostdefense.com. And do you sell cordyceps as well? Yes, we do. Oh, there you go. Awesome. And do you take this stuff before you exercise? Do you take cordyceps?? Do you take cordyceps?

Yeah, I take cordyceps. I take lion's mane and a seven-species blend in particular. Seven-species blend. What's in that stuff? It's Stamets 7. It's got chaga. It's got reishi. It has a garacon.

It's got a birch polypore called pitipore specialinus. And so it has my talking in it and these are this is seven species blend but the the evidence for physicians and people who want to look at peer-reviewed articles the single species have the most elaborated and convincing evidence when you start compounding these so what we're doing, we have five or six full-time researchers, several PhDs in our staff. We are, again, trying to disambiguate the complexity of all these benefits by looking at one species at a time. So we're doing this methodically, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars literally a year now.

I have 110 employees, and I created my company in order a year now. I have 110 employees, and I created my company in order to do research. I have no partners. So I can now dedicate the resources to be able to do novel research. And we love going up against conventional wisdom, because you have to challenge conventional wisdom to see if it indeed meets the muster. For instance, beta-glucans. How big is a beta-glucan? 10,000 Daltons? A million Daltons? I have no idea what any of those words you just said were.

Beta-glucans are big polymers of sugars. Okay. And so the big myth out there is beta-glucans are the golden compound that you should standardize products to. But there is not a certified method for beta-glucan analysis. We have an article coming out also on a 17-species blend using the same, it's called the Megazyme test, the same Megazyme test with one, with going to the same exact test, two of the same samples. One sample got less than 1%, and the other sample got more than 30%.

That is a disparate range of data that does not give you any confidence. And so the beta-glucan method, how big is the beta-glucans? Well, the beta-glucans are a giant scaffolding. It's like the structure of this building. Well, the beta-glucans are a giant scaffolding. It's like the structure of this building. And inside that scaffolding is all these other compounds that are adornments that are embedded in this giant scaffolding. And so we did a clinical study with turkey tail mushrooms and breast cancer that was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Ken Quayle et al, I think in 19 – 2016, I think, published an article where they use lipases, which is an enzyme that dissolves lipids.

Because I was arguing the beta-glucans are a huge scaffolding. There's other components inside the beta-glucans that are immunologically active. And they had been reading the literature. It's all predominantly beta-glucans. I said, well, let's do an experiment. And they did. They took the ball and ran with it. And then they put this fat-dissolving enzyme, lipases, and they stripped the lipids, the fats, from the beta-glucan scaffolding.

And then they took that product without the lipids and it reduced immune response by 83%, thus proving that the lipids that were inside the beta-glucans were pharmacologically active. Now, why that's important is if you do hot water extracts, you don't get fats. As you know, fat is not miscible in water. And so that's why fat separates. So having these fats, and we're made of fat.

Cholesterol's good for you. Fats are good for you. Wait, what are you saying? Well, you're a paleo guy, right? So you know this, you know, from the fats are. Yeah, I don't like that word, paleo. Because I think it's a little inaccurate, like what people ate during the Paleolithic. I like calling it primordial. Yeah, that's a good one. like what people ate during the Paleolithic.

I like calling it primordial. Yeah, that's a good one. Primal. Some people call it the primal diet. But this just speaks to the fact that every mushroom species is like a miniature pharmaceutical factory. And what makes a species is the accumulation of those compounds that are different mixtures. species is the accumulation of those compounds that are different mixtures. There's around 1.5 million species of fungi, 150,000 species are mushroom-forming fungi. We've identified around 15,000 species. Of those 15,000 species, we have about 20 to 40 species that we know are beneficial for human health. Well, that's a pretty good selection criteria. Going from 14,000 identified species or potentially 150,000 out there,

we haven't identified most of them. But our ancestors, through trial and error, have narrowed the field of candidates down to about 20 to 40 species that we know, because of their molecular arrangements and complexity, benefit human health. Now, when people pick mushrooms, when they go out and pick mushrooms, the real issue seems to be that there's some mushrooms that are edible that look very close to mushrooms, very similar to mushrooms that are very poisonous. True to the uninitiated and the people who have not learned.

But once you learn the chanterelle, you will not mistake it. Nothing looks like a lion's mane mushroom. Once you learn a lion's mane mushroom, it's hard to mistake it. So there are some lookalikes. And with the Amanita phalloides, the destroying angel, and with the paddy straw mushroom, which is commonly cultivated and collected in Asia, many of the mushroom deaths in North America have come from not displaced peoples, but people who've come from Asia. And because they're secretive in the language barrier and the culture of being wild collectors, they then mistake the destroying angel for a poundy straw mushroom.

That's a real common mistake. There are other people who said, well, it just looked edible. That's a really dangerous thing to say. Jesus Christ. So you have to know species individually. Right. There's edible species of Amanita, and there's poisonous ones. There's deadly poisonous ones.

Amanita seems to have a lot of controversy as far as its efficacy, as far as its psychedelic efficacy. What's that? I don't know anybody that's ever really tripped off of it. Muscaria or yes yeah oh man do i have a story please oh my god because everybody that i know like and that was something that mckenna talked about as well terence talked about while he was alive he said that it seems that it's uh genetically variable seasonally variable perhaps even environmentally variable all those things are partially true.

I've eaten aminib muscaria four or five times. Aminib muscaria is the red mushroom with the white dots. It's a fairytale mushroom. It's perfectly legal. Santa Claus. Santa Claus mushroom. It contains muscimol, muscarin, and ebutynic acid. Actually, very small amounts of muscarin. But the muscarinic symptoms cause salivation and sweating.

of muscarine but the muscarinic symptoms cause salivation and sweating um and i tripped with my friend on on amnidamascaria and uh and um i looked at him and he was foaming at the mouth and i had all these bubbles coming out of his mouth and i go man dude you look like you have rabies he goes you should see what you look like so but then aminid muscaria i've i've eaten that a few times and people do boil it in water throw away the water twice and they can make it into an edible mushroom but it's it's not that great of an edible but there's another mushroom called aminid pantherina pantherina is a kick-ass mushroom it has five times or more the amounts of emulsimol and ibutinic acid, almost no muscarine. So the salivation effect of antimicrobial. So I had a very good friend.

We are not friends anymore, unfortunately. But I was in charge of the herbarium at the Evergreen State College. And I freeze dried aminata pantherina. They're called panther caps. They're brown in color and they have dots. Very good. The panther cap, perfectly legal mushroom and extraordinarily powerful. So I was living up in Darrington, Washington. I had this cabin. I was a logger hippie for a few years. And so my friend Dave came up and I had these freeze dried mushrooms from the herbarium.

And I said, let's go ahead and eat these. And I had read in the literature, and almost no one had eaten them. So we made an omelet, and we cooked it up. And he was much lighter than me, so I thought, well, I should have two-thirds of the omelet, right? Because he's lighter than me. And so we ate the mushrooms around 10 o'clock. And we're living in this cabin, but across the creek was the Squire Creek campground. We call them the Winnebago people.

Back then in the 70s, I hitchhiked across country 13 times. Winnebago never picked me up. They were always the enemy. We were long-haired hippies. We ate these mushrooms, and we thought for entertainment, let's go look at the Winnebago people. So, it was so close, I don't know why we drove our car, but we drove the car out of my cabin, we went down like a half a mile, and we turned left into the Squire Creek campground. And we parked the car, and we wanted to go up to a beautiful view spot and so we walked through the winnebago people and their families and everything else and

and we get up onto a ridge and we thought this is a great view spot but we're waiting like an hour no effect you know and i was talking to dave so wow maybe these aren't that potent and then right after we said that, I looked at Dave and I said, David, do you see that? He goes, yeah. And we waited a few more seconds and then this big distortion field. And we had a beautiful view of the volcanoes and the valleys, a big viewscape. But we could see the air had become sort of this liquid. And then it started coming on stronger and stronger and stronger.

And we go, oh, my God, this is getting intense. We better get the heck out of here and go home where it's safe because this is coming on so strong. So we come down off this little plateau, and we had to come down through the Winnebago people. And then, oh, my God, and here we're walking. The thing about Amanitas and Muscaria and Pantherina, you have dull yellows and browns, but you feel like this giant, and you're moving in slow motion, every step you're taking. You feel like this giant, but you're moving really slow.

And then I came to Winnebago's of no end. They were hundreds of feet long. I'm trying to i came to winnebago's of no end there were hundreds of feet long i'm trying to walk past this winnebago like when is this winnebago when i end i keep on walking further and further and then oh my god and so then we're really just really really high it was ridiculous i had a roly flex camera and we came up to the car and so for some friggin reason i locked the car and so i had my key i looked at my key and i look at the lock i went missed oh shit okay pull the key back missed but dave goes you okay i go i'm fine he goes you want me to drive and i go no way dude if i'm this high there's no way i want me to drive? And I go, no way, dude. If I'm this high, there's no way I want you to drive, right?

And so I did it over and over again. Then magically, just for repetition, it just made it into the lock. So I unlocked the door, and I get into the car, and I drop my camera. And then I'm in the car, and I'm trying to get my key in. Thank God I didn't get my key in. I was not safe to drive. And then Dave is going like, oh, my God, Paul, we're so freaking high right now. And I go, well, let's go home.

I said, did I drop my camera? And I went over and I looked on the ground. There was my camera. I picked it up. I'm going, wow, Dave, I dropped my camera. Dropped my camera again. I go, wow, Dave, did I drop my camera? Picked up my camera. I go, whoa, I dropped my camera again. I go, wow, Dave, did I drop my camera? I picked up my camera.

I go, whoa, I dropped my camera. I did this over and over and over again. Repetitive motion syndrome kicked in. It's a very common symptom of amniopathy. I dropped my camera dozens and dozens of times. How did it look at the end? Well, it was shattered. But Dave goes, Paul, you should look up.

And a whole bunch of people from the Winnebago community had lined up, holding their children in close proximity, watching this repetitive motion syndrome where I'm just constantly picking my camera. So they're watching you for entertainment where you went to watch them for entertainment. Them for entertainment. And now they're freaking out because I have this repetitive motion syndrome. And I take one step, I drop my camera. Wow, Dave, I dropped my camera. And I pick up my camera again. I go, did I just drop my camera?

Whoa, I dropped my camera again. Now, this speaks to the berserkers, and the berserkers, the word berserk came from the berserkers in Scandinavia, where the legend has it that there were these Scandinavians, the Vikings were surrounded and outnumbered. And they were going to be killed the next day. And they ate a whole bunch of amniotic muscaria and a big soup. And legend has it, and it's not been confirmed, but this is the legend that's very commonly reiterated, is that they drank a whole bunch of amniotic muscaria soup. And then they went, and the next day, even though they drank a whole bunch of endymuscaria soup, and then they went,

and the next day, even though they're massively outnumbered, they took off all their clothes, and they attacked the enemy naked with swords. And that's where the word berserk came from, the berserkers. So, I'm having this berserker experience of repetitive motion syndrome, and I'm dropping my camera over and over and over again and I looked up and these parents were holding their children they were totally freaking out you know I said we got to get out of here so we left the doors open in the car and I'm taking one or two steps dropping my camera picking it up dropping my camera we finally made it back he disappeared I didn't know so Dave you're

on your own dude I have enough I have enough to worry about you know I made it back to my cabin and I get to my cabin and and there's a combination lock. I go, oh, no. I don't need a combination lock right now. I can barely – so I'm spinning the lock back and forth, spinning it back and forth. And then eventually the lock just spontaneously opened, and then I fell on the ground, and I started convulsing. And the cool thing about convulsing was it felt good. Every time I convulsed, I actually went, oh, that feels so good.

So I would convulse some more. And I was just convulsing constantly. Like epileptic convulsions? Epileptic convulsions. Very, very intense. But they felt good. This is the weird thing about it. I needed to convulse because every time I convulsed, I kind of got a reset of my neurology, you know, baseline.

And then it would spin out of control. And then I had this cascade of Istenian thoughts. I'm going, oh my God, I can save the world. I know how to do this. And then I would have a prepositional or an inverbal phrase. And just before I came to the object of my thought that was Einsteinian insight, I would have a tangent. And then I would come to the course at the end of that sentence, and then I have another tangent. And I saw death as a perpetual series of alternatives that never gave me the satisfaction of a conclusive thought. And so it just lasted for about 12 hours. I fainted.

I went into a coma-like state. So you recommended it. No, I did not recommend it. And the biggest concern beside the repetitive motion syndrome is hypothermia. Because if you're out in the woods or something and you're exposed, you're not getting up. So you go and it's called soma for a reason. It's the soma mushroom. It's somniferous. It causes sleep.

Is that what soma is? Because isn't there some debate as to what soma actually is? That's what R. Gordon Wasson proposed soma in the Vedic literature. There's a big debate about that. But the other story I like to tell is my friend Dr. Andrew Weil was at the Cougar Hot Springs in Oregon. Andy's a medical doctor from Harvard and he was walking the trail and people came running down and said, oh my God, this guy's trying to kill himself. You've got to come up. And Andy went up and this guy had eaten a whole bunch of Andy Muscario, big biker dude.

And he was covered with blood. And he was up on a bridge. And he was swinging his legs back and forth. And he was above the rocks. And he threw himself off the bridge. Now, it was only about six or eight feet. But it's enough on the boulders down below. Smashed himself on the rocks.

And then he climbed back up on the bridge and he swung his feet and threw himself off the bridge so this this causes repetitive motion syndrome both of my camera etc it's a mushroom that's perfectly legal it's probably one of the most dangerous mushrooms that anyone could eat i definitely advise not doing this because i always thought if i was ever called as an expert witness having these experiences, and someone who was watching Tales from the Crypt on TV, and then they saw a knife, it causes temporary insanity. I mean, the psilocybe mushrooms are wonderful. They're peaceful. They're loving.

It's an empathico, right? But the amanita mushrooms cause this strange, strange sort of behavior that is really potentially dangerous. And that is the mushroom that was documented in the sacred mushroom in the cross where John Marco Allegro alleged that the entire Christian religion was essentially a misunderstanding. It was really all about the consumption of these psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. These were all sort of captured in stories and tales and parables. Yeah, it was academic suicide for him to come up with that statement and still very controversial. Have you read his work? Yes, I have.

What do you think? Well, linguistically, the guy's way over my head. If you read his book, it's all about linguistics. One of the translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Way beyond my ken of knowledge. It's so far beyond my ken of knowledge, I can't make rhyme or reason out of it. That seems to be the problem with it. Most people can't.

Yeah. I can't make rhyme or reason out of it. That seems to be the problem with it. Most people can't. Yeah. So – and there's threads of truth in all of this, but I don't buy it on its face, on the grandiose conclusions that he made. But clearly mushrooms have inspired religion. Yes.

And I teach these workshops on gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. And at one of these workshops, this very spiritual guy, he's very quiet, but very definitely, you know, walked his, it looked like the real deal. He waited until everyone was gone. And he said, Paul, I've been sent here. And I said, really? And he says, I'm a devout Christian. I'm in Billy Graham's inner circle. And a bunch of us take psilocybe mushrooms as sacraments. And it's brought us closer to Jesus, closer to our religion.

Now, I don't care if you're Muslim or Christian or Hindu. The idea of these mushrooms making you feel the spiritual universe, more spiritually connected, giving your cultural heritage and your reference points. But he said these are extremely important. Now, my mother was a charismatic Christian. I met some people in her group who came to their religious beliefs through psychedelics. Don't do psychedelics now. But that was their portal. They had their big revelation through psychedelics. Don't do psychedelics now. But that was their portal. They had their big revelation through psychedelics.

So the connection between psilocybin and magic mushrooms and religion I think has a lot of credibility and there's lots of great examples of that. The specificity of some of the arguments people make I have great, great doubts about. That's interesting. What about in the ancient Hindu religions? The ancient Hinduism and some of the ancient books speak of various sacraments that have sort of never been defined, right?

Yeah, and why is that Brahman cows are sacred? You know, when the slossy becubensis grows out of cow poop in India, and yet they won't eat cows. And Buddha supposedly died from a mushroom. And he was given a mushroom by a peasant and adjusted the mushroom and died. So there is that connection. I've always thought curious that psilocybe cubensis is such a religious-provoking mushroom, and yet cows are highly revered as being sacred. Well, I would think you would keep the mother of the mushroom sacred. You want to protect the resource.

But again, these are at times when fables and parables and religious rites were controlled by the cognoscente, and they were the gatekeepers of knowledge that was too powerful for the general population to understand or appreciate. And so they protected that knowledge. And that's the rule of most religions is that the inner circle holds the keys to the kingdom. And what's happened with orthodox religions is they create institutions where you have to pay tithings in order to have a gatekeeper just to have a contact with god and that i think is is the problem with monotheism versus polytheism jack

herrer before he died was working on um a book about psychedelic drugs specifically mushrooms and um and religious experiences and he had some really crazy old paintings that he had found um that showed people that were naked seemingly dancing in ecstasy with a translucent mushroom around them and the idea being that this is supposed to this this image was supposed to represent someone who was tripping there's a lot of really interesting books that have been published that show art, you know, going back hundreds of years, even, you know, into the late 1300s, showing, you know, Christian art where mushrooms are pretty easily seen. So there's a lot of history to that. But it becomes the unfathomable.

I mean, maybe you can imagine it to be true, but how can you prove it to be true? Right. How can you? So a lot of that is like it's great historical information. Probably a lot of it's true. Hard to say which is true and which is not. But it seems reasonable, right? Yeah, but in modern times now, Johns Hopkins clinical studies are on mysticism, spirituality, showing that these are some of the most spiritually significant experiences of people's lives. The interesting thing about the Johns Hopkins studies is that 70% of the people had positive experiences.

And 14 months later, they still described those experiences as being significantly positive. Their friends, their colleagues, their fellow workers also say that it materially changed these people's personality. But the 30% of people who had negative experiences, the negativity of the experience did not extend more than the experience itself. So this speaks to re-remembering. And what's been determined is when you have these really profound spiritual experiences, it sits with you. And when you re-remember it, you rekindle that thought. And this may be a way of overlaying PTSD. Rather than having the reference standard that's associated with PTSD, you supplant it with a positive experience. But the people who had negative experiences during tripping did not have a negative – that negative consequences did not extend more than the experience itself.

So this was a profound insight. And so John Hopkins, Roland Griffiths just emailed me recently. They have other clinical studies that are ongoing looking at one which just got published on meditators given placebos versus getting high doses of psilocybin and then measuring the consequences of those experiences months or a year or two later and again the same thing is reinforced these psilocybin mushroom experiences create a positive reference point that you can capitalize on by re-remembering them subsequent from this experience by not even having to take the mushrooms again that is profound when you have a happy memory that you can anchor your personality on it's a game changer yeah i just uh i wonder if we're

ever going to see in our lifetime centers where you can go and a trained professional can guide you through something like this. It's happening now. Is it? Yes. The California Institute of Integrative Studies, based in San Francisco, is training therapists. In Canada, there are therapists. In Europe, there are therapists. There are training programs now in psychedelic therapy.

This is something that has a tremendous momentum. Indigenous peoples have a really nice structure. Many of them do, not all. But many have a really good structure for the responsible use of these substances. Us, there are displaced peoples. I would call us European-based people and many other people displaced. We don't have the same constructs historically that we can operate within. And so the psychedelic therapist movement is huge right now.

Canada is leading the way. The Canadian government is very, very positive towards psychedelic therapy because of the opioid crisis and because significant results. In the movie, this has come out called dosed um and it attracts a heroin addict um young lady in vancouver um it is a heroic movie it is not one of these you kind of feel good at the end of the movie but it is it is it is intense and she's doing aboga and she also does high doses of mushrooms but the opioid crisis is so pervasive there's so poor treatments available that through these psychedelic therapies in

several days they're seeing a tremendous success and people breaking you know decades-long opioid addiction within a week and so the psychedelic therapists are integral to that success. And so there are clinics now arising all over the world for this. In Portugal and Mexico and Spain and Jamaica, the clinics are arising specifically to meet the needs of people who are trying to get these legally so they don't get in trouble with the law. So in Portugal and Spain and Jamaica, for instance, these are legal. Many of these substances are.

Well, what gives me a lot of hope is that everything seems to be trending in a positive direction, like all these things that you're saying, your own personal experiences from TED from 2008 versus 2019, all these different treatment patterns or pathways that are available now to people that were never before, and that we're starting to see an acceptance overall, just the general population. People understand what this is and that this might literally be the cure to what ails us. I, you know, for people out there who have not gone on a deep psilocybin experience, this is very important for me to emphasize. And after you do a heroic journey of psilocybin,

the next day when you look at those mushrooms, you say, no way, dude. I'm not touching those for a long time. Give me six months. I'll come back to them. They're anti-addictive by their nature. Because it's so powerful. It's so powerful and profound. And you've gone through the gauntlet and back. You're not ready to do it again.

And so how many drugs can have such a dramatic impact that are non-addictive, that can break addictive cycles with other drugs? I think this is a gateway opportunity for solving many of the ills of our society. I couldn't agree more. Anything else before we get out of here? No, I just want to thank you and your audience for having the courage to bring these subjects to the table in a coherent fashion. We don't have all the answers. We will make mistakes. I think it's really important that we take where the adults in the room, we see somebody spinning off the rails.

Rather than being judgmental, go up and put your arm around them, saying, hey, there's better benefits from this. I fully understand why people want to party with them, especially when they're younger and they're going to the coming of age. But as you mature, these are really important for your own sanity and for the health of your community and your family. Psilocybin mushrooms make nicer people. I think that's a great way to say it. And I agree, and I think it should be on a T-shirt, maybe a bumper sticker. And I want to thank you, man. Without your knowledge and information and the way you're able to so

eloquently express all these ideas a lot of people would know a whole lot less so thank you it's a team effort it's just not me it's a whole it's a whole it's an uprising it's a mycelial underground that's reaching up and telling people and sharing it with their friends so check out the movie fantastic fungi uh it's really good and d. Two good movies that speak to this. And your website, once again? Fungi.com. Fungi.com. Paul Stamets, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you, Paul. All right. Thank you, brother. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye.