The Tim Ferriss Show - #340: Paul Stamets — How Mushrooms Can Save You and (Perhaps) the World

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home.

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Starting point is 00:04:56 It is super simple. Go to audible.com forward slash Tim or text Tim to 500-500 on your telephone to get started today. Check it out. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, people who are the best at what they do, to tease out the routines, the life lessons, the habits, the favorite books, whatever it might be that you can

Starting point is 00:05:25 hopefully apply and test in your own life. My guest today is Paul Stamets. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have requested that I have Paul on the show. You can find him on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Paul Stamets, S-T-A-M-E-T-S. He is an intellectual and industry leader in the habitat, medicinal use, and production of fungi. That's F-U-N-G-I, fungi, some people say. And you might also think of mycelium or mushrooms. Part of his mission is to deepen our understanding of and respect for the organisms that literally exist under every footstep taken on this path of life. This episode is bonkers. The implications, applications, medicinal uses of many of the things that he'll discuss are truly mind-boggling. And we do get into some of my favorite subjects, including psychedelics and other aspects of

Starting point is 00:06:23 bending reality. Here we go. Back to the bio. Paul is the author of six books, including Mycelium Running, subtitled How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, and Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World. He has discovered and named numerous new species of psilocybin mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, or psilocybe mushrooms, better known as magic mushrooms, and is the founder and owner of Fungi Perfecti, makers of the Host Defense Mushroom Supplement line. And little known fact, I have been using Host Defense products for a few years now after Samin Nosrat said that one of them was her favorite purchase of less than $100 in the last year or two. And that was in my last book, Tribe of Mentors. So I do have some

Starting point is 00:07:11 familiarity with his products. Paul has received numerous awards, including Invention Ambassador for the American Association for the Advancements of Science, the National Mycologist Award from the North American Mycological Association, and the Gordon and Tina Wasson Award from the Mycologist Award from the North American Mycological Association, and the Gordon and Tina Wasson Award from the Mycological Society of America. His Instagram is awesome if you want to see some really, really, really weird fungi and him off in the woods all over the world doing weird things. And in very new and breaking news, we are actually holding the podcast waiting for this to happen. Paul is the author of a new study in Nature Scientific Reports, which details how mushroom extracts, specifically extracts from woodland polypore mushrooms,

Starting point is 00:07:55 can greatly reduce viruses that contribute to bee colony collapse. This is a huge, huge, huge deal. And we do get into the importance of bees and how without bees, pretty much everything goes down the toilet, including a lot of humanity. So I will include a link in the show notes, which you can always find at tim.blog forward slash podcast for everyone who wants to check that out. And two other announcements. If you are interested, as I am, and I'm certainly committed to the tune of seven figures over the next year or two, to supporting psychedelic science and research, please join me. And if you're interested in doing so at a higher dollar amount, meaning over $100,000,

Starting point is 00:08:41 please go to Tim.blog forward slash science. That's Tim.blog forward slash science. That's tim.blog forward slash science. And if you want to support at lower dollar amounts, check out maps.org. And for anyone who's already filled out that form, I will be reaching out soon. There's a lot of amazing stuff on the horizon that I hope you'll be involved with. And last but not least, the blog now contains transcripts of every podcast episode to date. People have been asking for this for a long, long time. I wanted to do it right. So now you can find transcripts to every episode of the podcast at tim.blog forward slash transcripts. And that is a long intro. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging

Starting point is 00:09:27 conversation with Paul Stamets. And if you can only listen to one part, jump ahead about 49 minutes or so, 49 minutes and 50 seconds, I believe, but yeah, let's call it 49 minutes, to listen to his description of his first experience with psilocybin mushrooms or psilocybin-containing mushrooms and the effect it had on his lifelong stutter. It is fucking nuts. So if you're going to skip around, jump ahead 49 minutes or so and listen to that story. It is really, really wild. So there you have it. Enjoy. Paul, welcome to the show. Thank you, it. Enjoy. Very comprehensive cameo in Michael Pollan's most recent book that served as the reminder that I had to reach out somehow. So I'm very pleased that you're here.

Starting point is 00:10:37 And I thought we could start with some definitions and pronunciation, which are very selfishly points of insecurity for me. So F-U-N-G-I, how should we pronounce that? Well, that's an excellent question. Fungi, according to Oxford English Dictionary, with a J is the correct pronunciation. But fungi, fungi, or fungi. So fungi is what us mycologists use, though people, Spanish mycologists will use fungi, Italian mycologists will say fungi, but English speakers, the standard pronunciation is fungi, with a J. Fungi. And then there are two terms that I suspect may not be totally synonymous. We have mushrooms and mycelium, or mycelium, I don't know the correct pronunciation.

Starting point is 00:11:20 Are mushrooms a subset of mycelium, one component part? Can you define or distinguish those two for us, please? The mycelium is the underground network analogous to the roots of a tree. And the fruit bodies are the mushrooms. So they are produced as reproductive structures long after many challenges on the path of growth in woods, underground, etc. The mycelial networks are vast. It's been called the proverbial tip of the iceberg. But just think of this as the mycelium navigates through a microbially hostile environment. Literally, there can be tens of millions of microbes per gram of soil.

Starting point is 00:12:01 And the mycelial, these fine filaments that look like cobwebs, are running underground. And this underground network is being challenged by all sorts of microbes. And as many people know, that bacteria like to eat fungi. That's why mushrooms rot. But the fungi are able to navigate with these mycelial networks, only one cell wall thick, and they can be up to eight miles of mycelium per cubic inch. And now they only have one cell wall between their internal cells and the external environment. We have five or six skin layers that protect us from infection. The mycelium basically has one cell layer and yet is able to overcome the challenges of millions of microbes, many of which want to consume it, and it navigates to create the largest organism on this planet.

Starting point is 00:12:49 It's a mycelial mat in eastern Oregon, over 2,200 acres in size. Now, it's one cell wall thick, and yet it's the largest organism on this planet. And that's a testimonial to the immunological power of the mycelium and this vast underground network that is so central to habitat and human and plant health is something that we have really tapped into. So mushrooms come from mycelium. The mycelium can grow literally for decades before a single mushroom forms. Mushrooms are highly perishable. They're like fish and four or five days they mature and then they rot. And in doing so, they sporulate just before they rot and they attract insects that then help spread the spores.

Starting point is 00:13:32 Much like, you know, birds spread and then the peach pit or seeds of an apple or another fruit are spread. So the fragrance of the mushrooms are beacons, fragrance beacons that emanate through the ecosystem, and these scent trails and entice animals to come to these bodaciously delicious fruit bodies. And then in the course of them eating them they spread the spores but the mycelium literally can be existent it seemed not not invisible invisible to us ridiculously stupid humans that are thundering giants upon these networks that are underneath their feet but the mycelium really races behind us, and we're the biggest walking catastrophe that I know on the planet. And as we walk, we break wood chips, we leave impressions.

Starting point is 00:14:30 Well, the mycelium is sensitive to those impressions of our footsteps. And as we create new debris fields, the mycelium reaches up behind our footsteps to gobble up that newly made material in competition with other fungi and other organisms. And mycelium, if we're looking at mycelium as one component of that, or rather not the product of that, I suppose, and please feel free to correct me if I screw things up by restating, mushrooms people have had a decent amount of exposure to, and they tend to associate it with, say, the produce aisle in a grocery store, and think of them perhaps as plants. From a genetic perspective or an evolutionary perspective, how should people think about mycelium? I love this question. Well, you bring up a very good point. For almost 100 years now, the mycology departments were a subset of botany departments. They really should be in the zoology departments. We separated from fungi about 650 million years ago. 650 million years ago, we had a common ancestor. In fact, there's a new super kingdom called a Paislaconta that joins fungi and animalia together. When basically these mycelial networks, when they hit the land from the ocean,

Starting point is 00:15:56 many people don't realize some of the largest networks of mycelium in the world now have been discovered below the sediment layers of the ocean. There's vast mycelial networks throughout the entire ocean. There's lots of dead organic plant material that's falling down to the sediments, and the mycelium is involved in gobbling those up. But from an evolutionary point of view, 650 million years ago, we chose the path of encirculating our nutrients, basically in a cellular sac, a stomach. the mycelium digests nutrients externally. It produces enzymes and acids and other compounds that break down complex organic molecules and then absorbs those through the cell walls. The entire mycelial network is like a

Starting point is 00:16:41 sponge. It absorbs selectively those nutrients that it needs. And animals went sort of overground, and we developed these digestive systems in a protective skin-enveloped structure or bodies. And then the mycelium continued on its course, very happily developing underground. So with the divergence of fungi and and animals is extremely well documented but an extraordinary article came out just this past year um and this article you know the the the big bang was about 13.8 billion years ago the Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The first unicellular organisms were found a few hundred million years later, but the first multicellular organism so far found, the oldest one, is 2.4 billion years ago. It was found in South African lava in the basalt,

Starting point is 00:17:42 and it's 2.4 billion years old, the oldest representation so far in the fossil record of a multicellular organism. And these are mycelial networks. So the mycelium had its form long before we've had ours. And moreover, in Brazil, 115 million years ago. This is before the great extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. And at that time, mushrooms also had their form. So these mushrooms are really ancient organisms. They had developed their forms long before we had developed ours. We are descendant from these fungal networks. They are progenitor ancestors. We are really descendants of fungi. This is why under the microscope so many of our cells look so similar to that of fungi,

Starting point is 00:18:34 and also why our best antibiotics that we have coming from fungi are very good at preventing bacteria from growing. But we have very, very few good antifungal antibiotics because of our close evolutionary history that are not toxic or highly toxic to us. So antifungal drugs are extremely dangerous. Those who've had immunosuppressants are well aware of this. And when you defeat the immune system of the human body using immunosuppressants for organ transplants and other reasons in medicine, you're really dancing with death because it's extremely damaging to your immune system that can hold many of these infections at bay. There are so many directions that I want to go with this. I'm going to try to contain my my ADD and focus this in a direction towards another type of utility and relates to a problem that if I were to walk 15 feet, I could observe with my own eyes right now, and that is carpenter

Starting point is 00:19:37 ants. And I was wondering if you could talk about your history with carpenter ants and the intersection with mycelium. This is a subject very dear to my heart. So, well, let me, I'm going to segue because there could be listeners out there who have children, and I'm going to tell their children through the story how vacuuming and helping your mother and your parents made me over a million dollars. And it ties into carpenter ants. So I grew up in a... So I need two minutes to set this up. We have all the time in the world. Okay. So I grew up in a small town in Ohio, Columbiana, Ohio, a very conservative town, about 5,000 people. And I grew up in a fairly wealthy household.

Starting point is 00:20:30 My family had steel mills and sawmills, and we were affluent. We had 400 people in the town under unemployment of a town of about 5,000. So the Stamets Enterprise Company, unfortunately because of after world war ii we bombed you know we bombed japan we bombed germany but they retooled they rebuilt their factories they had modern factories after the war um in the united states we didn't do that and so the machine tool industry really fell apart in the early 1960s a huge uh economic downturn and so i was the best experience of my life was the fact that i grew up in a wealthy environment and then i was 10 or 11 years of age the entire financial empire

Starting point is 00:21:12 collapsed we lost everything and we laid off over 400 people in the town were laid off i'm going to school these these kids and their parents you know are not very happy about what was happening. It was really devastating to us. And my parents separated, and we lived in this big house. The electricity was cut off. The water was cut off. I remember eating cat food. I was just so hungry. It gave me tremendous farts. But my mom was really desperate. My brother John went on to Yale. My brother Bill was at Cornell. And this is, you know, towards the end of their college experiences.

Starting point is 00:21:51 And I was there home alone with my mother and my twin brother. And I just really had to step up their plate to help my mother as much as possible. I remember running a hose for my neighbors, about 500 feet of hose, just to get two or three PSIs so we could trickle feed three PSIs so we could

Starting point is 00:22:05 trickle feed into the toilet so we could flush them. It was really strange and bewildering sort of Kafkaesque existence because we were shunned by the town. My mother went into religion. My dad went into alcohol. They both were self-medicating in a sense with those two avenues. But I got really good at helping my mom vacuum because she didn't help and we didn't have the support team we had anymore. So I was always tearing apart vacuum cleaners and borrowing parts and trying to help my mom any way I could. So I vacuumed, vacuumed, vacuumed. I'm really still passionate about vacuuming it's one of my i'm a really good house husband i like washing dishes and vacuuming a lot so how this worked segways in the carpenter ends is the following so i grew up in a you know in this affluent environment i came out to washington state became a logger hippie for

Starting point is 00:23:00 three years you know working in the woods then moved outside of Olympia, Washington. I went to the Evergreen State College. And I tried to start this little business. And I lived in a house that Dr. Andrew Weil said is the worst house he's ever seen anyone live in in North America. That's one statement. It was a flat house built with military surplus materials. And I had 12 buckets catching water from the flat roof. Why do you need to build a flat roof in Washington state with army surplus materials is another question. But there's so many leaks that I just keep on putting up buckets. And then one day I remember there's a storm and the house fell like two or three inches. And my wife goes, my God,

Starting point is 00:23:40 the house is falling. I said, don't worry, dear. We don't have to fill the buckets as much because the water will run out faster. I was just trying to be able to be optimistic because I was afraid that she was going to get up and leave me because the conditions were so bad. But anyhow, I would be making my espresso in the morning. And I looked over in the corner and there's a pile of sawdust from carpenter ants. And I see them running around and the carpenter ants are more nocturnal than they are active in the daytime. And so I'd make my espresso every morning. I'd look over at the pile of soda, pull out the vacuum cleaner, vacuum it up.

Starting point is 00:24:13 I'd do it the next day and the next day and the next day. I'd do this for hundreds of days, realizing the house is getting more less structurally sound with the carpenter ants munching them. And so I was, you know, I've got to do munching them and so i was you know i got to do something about this and so you know i didn't want to use raid i didn't want to use you know toxic insecticides um because the war against nature uh in my mind is a war against your own biology and it was toxic to other organisms is likely toxic to you and this has been well founded now with lots of examples so i went to the environmental protection agency home page and i looked up a group of fungi that would attack ants and these are called entomopathogenic fungi now it's a mouthful but entomo means insects

Starting point is 00:24:57 pathogenic means of course causing disease of insects and this group of entomopathogenic fungi that was particularly of interest and supported by scientific literature and with the encouragement of the EPA was a group of fungi in the genus metarhizium. So meta and rhizium, you know, lots of mycelium, lots of rhizomorphs. And so I looked in this group of metarhizium fungi, non-toxic to bees, non-toxic to fish, non-toxic to humans. I got some of these fungi, and I started growing them out. I started studying this, and I thought, well, this is really interesting. Why isn't this not available everywhere?

Starting point is 00:25:36 Why isn't Lowe's and Home Depot and Walmart, why aren't they selling this? Well, for a very good reason. The insects aren't stupid. When you see insects like carpenter ants that are constantly cleaning themselves, they're trying to get the spores of this fungus off of them. It's the most common fungus, according to some reports, in the soil underneath your feet. It is everywhere. It is a dance of dinner and death between insects and fungi. Many insects eat fungi.

Starting point is 00:26:03 Many fungi eat insects. The two of them don't like to be at the dinner table at the same time. So I ended up getting this fungus, and I studied it, and the reason why it never came to market is for the spore repellency property. Now, this is really important because these insects have realized that the scent of these spores meant that there's a disease threat to the colony. So the insects fastidiously cleaned themselves of these spores. So when these big companies like Bayer and Dow and Syngenta tried to make bait stations using these spores, even though in the laboratory they could dust the insects with the spores, and sure enough, five days later, they would kill the insects. When they made bait stations around people's houses, the insects wouldn't go near those bait stations because they would sell the spores. for preventing termites, fire ants, carpenter ants, moisture ants. All sorts of ants and termites are infected by these sporulating fungus, metarhizium. So I thought, well, I have a laboratory.

Starting point is 00:27:14 I have very large laboratories. We produce about 50,000 kilos of mycelium of many different gourmet and medicinal mushrooms per week. And my environments are class 100 clean rooms. These are high-tech clean room environments using HEPA filters, high-efficiency particulate air filters. And the last thing I want is a sporulating mold in my laboratories. So I got these cultures, and I was shocked at how much spores they were. It reminds somebody of a penicillium mold growing on cheese.

Starting point is 00:27:44 You want that flying around your laboratory because my oyster mushroom cultures or my shiitake cultures could become contaminated from airborne spores. So I cultured this out really quickly. And so the window of exposure was very short and I set up all these precautions. And then I'm culturing these fungi and then they grow out as green molds. And then I saw this white wedge, a V-shaped wedge that was all white. It had no sporulation on it. And I went, whoa, that's interesting. I looked up in scientific literature and everybody said, oh, the culture is losing the ability to reproduce. It is losing the ability to sporulate. It is senescent. Avoid sectors. That's what they're called, these wedges, or white sectors, because that path of genetic, a path down that gene trail will end up meaning the culture will die.

Starting point is 00:28:36 They partially got that right. But I was motivated by not having spores in my laboratory, so I chased those white sectors. And they grow out in about a week or two weeks on a standard size petri dish. And then after about five or six, seven transfers, that white wedge got bigger and bigger and bigger, and pretty soon no sporulation. And this is current day in your, the, this experiment that you were running was, is, is done more recently, not when you were under the, the flat roof built by military surplus. Is that right? I'm just trying to place the chronology.

Starting point is 00:29:11 This is, this is synchronous with that. Okay. Got it. So, but I had to go out in my laboratory to have enough mycelium to be able to treat the carpenter ants. Gotcha. So anyhow, so I finally grew it out. I grew it on a rice and I made a big deal to my daughter. Um, and I am so thankful to her for the reasons you're about to hear. Um, and I made a big deal in the middle of summer saying, we're going to trick the carpenter ants because every morning I'm sucking up all those others. And so I asked her for her Barbie doll dish, which I still have, I'm going to mount it in a frame. And I put like 25 kernels of white mycelium on rice of this metarhizium fungus without spores because they wouldn't go near the rice if it had spores. And I laid it out at around 830 at night in the summer afternoon or the summer evening.

Starting point is 00:30:01 And I made a big deal of it. And I got my daughter involved. You know, as a citizen scientist, young. She was only. oh, my gosh. She was probably 14 at the time. And so then we went to bed. So thankfully, my daughter woke up at 2 o'clock in the morning, and she – rather than going straight to the bathroom, she wanted to look at her Barbie doll dish. She went over there, turned on the lights, and it was swarming with carpenter ants. I go, oh, my gosh.

Starting point is 00:30:23 You've got to be kidding. And so she ran into our bedroom and said, dad, Dusty, wake up. You've got to see this. And we didn't want to wake up. It was two o'clock in the morning. But she dragged us out of bed. And we went over there. And it was just covered with carpenter ants. They're picking up the rice. And they're going into the recesses of the house, disappearing. And I'm like, oh my gosh, that was amazing. Because I had mice in the house. The mice could have eaten the rice. And like, oh my gosh, that was amazing because I had mice in the house. The mice could have eaten the rice and I would never have known. But we watched for a few minutes and they took away all the myceliated rice. So we fast forward. I'm making my espresso every morning, hundreds of times. I get the vacuum cleaner out. I go to that spot and there's no sawdust. The carpenter ants were gone.

Starting point is 00:31:06 And I went, oh, my gosh. I just think I figured out a way to overcome the spore repellency property. So now this has been elaborated. We published an article in the journal Sociobiology proving this was effective against subterranean termites, formosan termites. We've done experiments now with the USDA and other teams. Some of the biggest pesticide companies in the world, I'd have to check my NDAs to see if they're still covered or not, but everyone listening can imagine who, you know, mites. Phenomenal reach. And so I ended

Starting point is 00:31:53 up finding something that is a super attractant. And basically the opposite of the spore repellency property is the mycelial attractancy property. Two sides of the same coin, the yin and yang of nature. It's kind of harmonious in that sense. I like that. And we found that if we diluted the mycelial extracts on rice without the spores, these pre-cannidial, pre-spoilating sectors that I described, we end up creating a super attractant so powerful that when the attractant was diluted 500 to 1 with water, diluting the extract made it more potent in terms of attractancy. In one experiment, two drops of this were put on a pane of glass, and fire ants walked directly to that place and then scratched at that place until they died, walking about a meter uh creating a trail that other than uh uh fire ants would follow so so we have done this now with choices they're called t-tests we've done this with

Starting point is 00:32:54 the t-tests are even better t-tests oftentimes is you know go left for the control go right for the treatment but we ended up doing uh four and five choice experiments where there was only one corridor or avenue that had the treatment, and the other ones were all controls. So highly significant activity. And we found something that I can – my dream is to be able to attract a locust plague into a 55-gallon drum. We can put these in foggers in Africa and just create a massive, huge attractancy factor. The cool thing also is the attractancy is not lethal. So that comes later. The infectious state of the mycelium, it grows, and then it penetrates the exoskeleton with a hyphal peg.

Starting point is 00:33:40 It kind of anchors itself like a sticky little tongue, and then it dissolves the exoskeleton, the chitin, and then the hyphal peg invades into the body of the insect and mummifies them. So many people have heard about these zombie fungi. This is what they are. Some of them have a cordyceps representation. It is a little club fungi. In Costa Rica and elsewhere in the subtropics, many of the ants there there are well known for the leaf cutter ants and other ants are known that they have to get infected with this fungus they climb to the top canopy of the trees and they lock their mantel bowl underneath a leaf and boing a mushroom comes

Starting point is 00:34:17 out of their head and their anus uh and it sporulates in this way the fungus gets to sporulate and free air conditions high up in the canopy. So it causes uncontrolled behavior of climbing with these insects. So that was a breakthrough. And the reason why, and I ended up licensing this to a group of investors, and I got a million dollars. And so I like to tell my daughter. She was very instrumental in this. And the licensing agreement had some limits on it they had to take it to market within five years i pulled back the

Starting point is 00:34:51 licensing agreement um and they didn't take the market so i pulled it back and everything's actually quite friendly um but it's a little bit of a mystery why i did not make it to market um and i have a lot of conspiracy theories as to why i did not make it to market um i hesitate to mention those um but i was given a chunk of change and i was smart enough to realize that they can't crush this and that was a condition this has to come to market if it doesn't come to market then i get the patent rights back and now i've been issued uh nine patents on this people can go to the u.s patent home page look them up the latest patent that was issued on this. People can go to the U.S. patent homepage and look them up. The latest patent that was issued on this two years ago is really phenomenal because I have patents on antiviral properties of mycelium, and I have these patents on these entomopathogenic

Starting point is 00:35:38 fungi for all insects and all diseases vectored by insects. It doesn't get bigger than that. Are there any types, and there are a number of different areas I want to dig deeper. Are there any particular common viruses or particularly lethal viruses that you've seen applications for using mycelium? In terms of resistance or defeating? Yeah, well, there's a lot of examples of that. And so I published an article in a journal, peer-reviewed journal called Herbogram, in June of 2001, summarizing all the literature that's been published on the antiviral properties of mushroom mycelium. It was a whopping one page long with like six references,

Starting point is 00:36:36 there's virtually very, very little out there. Well, that was in June of 2001, September 11th, 2001, you know, 9-11 occurred. Very quickly, the greatest concern for the U.S. Defense Department and biosecurity was weaponizable viruses, pox viruses, anthraxes of bacterium. The anthrax attacks occurred a few weeks later. A group of researchers in the U.S. Defense Department who were scavenging the literature saw my article. And I said, wow, there's some evidence here. And they contacted me because I have a very large library. Now, it may sound large to people who don't have libraries. I have about 800 strains of different species of mushrooms, many of which are collected from the old growth forest.

Starting point is 00:37:21 So some libraries have 20,000, you know, cultures. So I'm small compared to them but i'm private i'm not not a big institution and so they said well listen you've published some interesting articles here there's some evidence uh we have been this fund funded by dick cheney and george george bush ironically i have a debt of gratitude to them with the BioShield biodefense program. It's called Project Biodefense, but then became known as the BioShield program. And so they elicited my support, and then I began to send them cultures of mushrooms boiled in hot water, ethanol extracts of the mushrooms, the mycelium that gave rise to the mushrooms, et cetera, et cetera. And so I ended up sending out sets of 100 of these samples.

Starting point is 00:38:08 I mean, for me, this is a coup d'etat. I have government laboratories that will give me free research, you know, on my extracts. And so we started sending these out and didn't hear from them for a while. And I realized they were really disorganized. It was a new program. And I got a colonel. I'd love to mention his name he worked at fort dietrich you know where they have smallpox and you know it's a bio bioweapons um facility biohazard um facility the u.s government with the most pathogenic bacteria and viruses and other disease organisms. And so I had an MD person who was my controller.

Starting point is 00:38:47 The Federal Express one day, you know, about two months later after I submitted the extracts, they gave me this big package of research reports on anti-pox properties, smallpox properties of our extracts. Well, I mean, going through it, no activity, no activity. I get the sample number 78, high activity against pox viruses. And sample 81, high activity. Sample 88, high activity. Whoa. I mean, it's like, you know, you're looking at not effective, no results in the first 77 pages, you know, and it's pretty disappointing. Then, bam, I got really excited, so I called my colonel at Fort Detrick, and I said, these results are amazing, it's exciting. And he goes, what results? I go, the results that Federal Express just delivered to me. He goes, you're not supposed to get those, I am. I said, well, I'll take a photocopy and I'll send them to you,

Starting point is 00:39:39 you know? He didn't appreciate the humor, but it was a very, very bizarre time. And some very, very strange things occurred at that time. But we ended up finding that those three highly active results came from an old growth mushroom called a garacon. A garacon is the longest living mushroom in the world, number one or number two. Some debate about that. It grows exclusively in the old-growth forests, northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and a few sky islands in Europe, in the Alps, Slovenia, and Austria, on large trees. But it is an indicator species of an old-growth forest. And those three anti-pox results came from three different separate strains of agaricon that I had isolated from my many adventures in the old-growth forest. So, whoa.

Starting point is 00:40:37 This has got people very excited. Now, I'd love to be taken to the mat. I'm reference-driven. Okay? So anybody out there skeptical of this, you can do two things. You can Google my name, Stamets, National Public Radio, NPR, and POCS, and you'll see a vetted press release interview on National Public Radio with me, the former deputy director of the FDA, and the head of one of the research divisions of BioShodefense Program, Dr. Jack Sechrist from Southern Research University. So because I'm in competition with pharma, and I'm a lone researcher, I have a little company,

Starting point is 00:41:16 and I thought, well, I checked into this, and I already had these entomopathogenic fungi patents that were just tremendous achievements because the entire pesticide industry missed all that. So I thought, well, if this is novel, I should protect myself. So I filed a patent on it, on agaricon against viruses, particularly pox viruses, flu viruses, herpes. These are all the other results that we received. These extracts were highly active against multiple viruses, not just not box viruses. Quick question for you. Is that for preventative use, curative use, both? What are the applications? This is, Tim, where I have to draw the line. Because these are in vitro tests with human cells and taking through three different uh uh testing protocols

Starting point is 00:42:07 to the point where the next test is in a in in vivo model right with an animal so this is the best of pharmaceutical drug discovery that you can go through before you get it get it go to a living host these are living human cells uh in in vitro um not in vivo in vivo means it's the it's the you know a small mammal like a uh a mouse you know a rat you know a monkey or or it goes into human clinical studies so these are vitro tests and to be even though we have identified now the molecules that are active against smallpox, we worked with the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy under Dr. Samir Ross. more potent than Sidofavir, which is the preeminent comparative antiviral drug control, with less toxicity and more efficacy than Sidofavir. But that being said, there's clearly an upregulation of the immune system. And so what is the contribution of these

Starting point is 00:43:20 molecules versus upregulating of the immune system? Is it a combination of both? Is there synergism? Is there multiple molecules being engaged, multiple of the immune system is a combination of both. There's synergism. There's multiple molecules being engaged, multiple immune pathways. This is where you can get lost. You cannot see the forest for the trees. If you end up focusing so much on the mechanism of action and don't see the result, if you are infected with one of these viruses, you really don't care about the mechanism of action. You just want to know whether you can overcome the virus or not. So we have found the anti-pox molecules. We have not yet found the anti-flu or the anti-herpes molecules to date. And I have another really good example of, specific to your original question of the mycelium being active against viruses can i pause for one quick second i i have to know what happened after the lieutenant

Starting point is 00:44:14 call because i imagine someone on his end had to have their head roll for that type of security breach by mailing fedex to the wrong place with those research reports what happened after that oh my god i don't have to make up these stories i don't have to make up any stories they're too mailing FedEx to the wrong place with those research reports. What happened after that? Oh, my God. I don't have to make up these stories. I don't have to make up any stories. They're too good to be true as they are. But this is what happened. I was in Canada. I'm speaking to you right now from Cortez Island, British Columbia. I was up here on Cortez Island. And one of my employees called up and said, Paul, there's a helicopter buzzing around the laboratories. I go, no big deal. Helicopters fly over all the time.

Starting point is 00:44:49 And he goes, no, it's really low. And I go, how low? And he goes, listen. He puts his cell phone up to the active. I go, well, I go, what are the numbers on the tail? He goes, there are no numbers. It's a Blackhawk military helicopter that's right on top of the laboratories. I go, oh, my God, you're kidding. I go, and this is right after we got the POCS results, right after I talked to the colonel, you know, like two weeks going to screw up here and they're going to, they're an abundance of a caution. They're going to end up overstepping their bounds. And I said, this is crazy. I've already been vetted. I've already been permitted. I've already in dialogue with these people.

Starting point is 00:45:31 And they, they're trying to spook me. I mean, what's going on here? So I shut down the business at the time. I only had 10 employees. Now I have a hundred. And I said, so shut down the business, give the cultures of a Garakicon to several of the employees. I never want to know who has them. You know, let's decentralize ourselves as a target right now. And so I shut down the business. All the employees left, you know, and the helicopter is still buzzing around. And so the next day I called up pretty pissed off to the colonel saying, what is going on?

Starting point is 00:46:03 You know, and he got really nervous nervous now he's got two black eyes right they deliver the wrong results the right results to the wrong person and now that one you know he goes oh the government you know one hand doesn't talk to the other and they got over exuberant and you know and you know if terrorists got this technology they could immunize themselves and they're critical and it's like whatever you know so anyhow it's funny because when i was going through the airports i got five stars on every single airline ticket i didn't joke to my wife here we go again i'm gonna get stopped and searched you know and then after this then all those those five stars got taken away and i streamed through security, no problem. But

Starting point is 00:46:45 I was obviously suddenly on their radar because I'm non-conventional. But the fact that I'm here today actually makes me more of a patriotic American than I was before. So anyhow, so this is, so I filed these patents, a patent on agaricon versus these viruses. I filed it in 2004. You can look this up, go to the US patent homepage, you'll see my filing dates. I filed this patent in 2004, 9-11 was 2001. So I had to write the patent, get more research results. We got lots and lots of positive results from the BioShield program. I talked to one of the researchers last year, and he goes, do you know that we analyzed 2,392 of your samples? I'm so glad I didn't have to pay for that.

Starting point is 00:47:31 But we got about 40 excellent hits from my 800 or so cultures that were surprising, which has led into, I think, a paradigm-shifting solution for many of the problems that we face today. But I filed this patent in 2004. In 2006, it's not even on the patent application homepage. Anybody out there who doesn't know about patents, usually six months to a year, the patent application shows up at the USPTO.gov website, US Patent and Trademark Office.gov website. And it didn't show up. It's over two years. So I got a hold of my patent attorney going, you know, what is going on here? He gets a hold of the patent office and the Department of Defense took the patent out of the patent office

Starting point is 00:48:16 because of national security. I said, you're kidding. That's kind of a pat on my back. I was like, well, really? You think that's that important? But I said, that's not right. So we did an intergovernmental agency trace and a request. And the DOD finally released a patent to go back into the queue. And so 10 years after I submitted a patent application, you know, folks, usually two to three years, you get a ruling. Ten years after I submitted the patent it was approved that's a long way that's a long way the good news is it's approved in 2014 so i've got 17 years and the whole thing about patents i mean we would not be talking today if there weren't patents

Starting point is 00:48:56 people think you know patents become open sourced after 17 years the idea is to reward the inventor to incentivize things to come to market because a patent that is not practiced is not useful or beneficial to society within that 17 years or outside the 17 years. It has to be brought to market. There has to be a commercial incentive. Patents are awarded for three reasons. One, no prior art, no evidence in the scientific or popular literature of anyone saying he's having the same idea. Two, unobviousness. You want experts saying, Paul Stamets, you're full of BS.

Starting point is 00:49:34 This will never work. And so I have a message to all my critics out there. I want to say thank you. You have helped me so much in ways that you did not intend, but I'm really happy that some people have come out and made these statements. And the third is usefulness. so those are the three things no prior art contrary to conventional wisdom you know and and usefulness and so you know obviously that fits all three of those categories so now then the the pox molecules i have not not patented. They're open source. Hopefully, we'll never have a smallpox epidemic or pandemic again. I think that obviously serves a greater good.

Starting point is 00:50:11 So another follow-up question that, out of self-interest, I'd love to ask related to the carpenter ants. For people who are eager to try to address something with carpenters specifically, are there any current recommendations that you would have? Number one, and then talking about conventional or contrary to conventional wisdom, I think at this point people are wondering, how did this guy become so obsessed with this stuff? So I do want to roll back the clock and talk about, among other things, your stutter. But first, I have to know, is there anything you would recommend as it relates to carpenter ants, or is it a waiting game? Well, the test of a patent is that it's reproducible. The EPA and the USDA now are allowing this fungus in food handling facilities, the first fungus ever to be allowed for controlling insects in food handling facilities. Is that safe? The safety documents

Starting point is 00:51:13 supplied by the EPA are now open source and in public domain. So the companies that did all the research proving that this fungus was not dangerous now have released all their commercial interest in it the strain of metarhizium called f52 is a public domain strain um so what i'm saying is you're not legal for you to go out and use this and commercialize it without epa registration but that test of the patent is reproducible and so all of the methods for doing this is published. And I just submitted my entire portfolio with all my research, you know, and all eight or nine patents, all the documentation of all these companies that have done the research, you know, in themselves. And I've submitted to a a very very well-known company that has a

Starting point is 00:52:06 extremely potent uh insecticide that many people know that use it on the market and as the word i got back is why would we want to disrupt a proven profit wheel it's something that my ants did not reinvade for 10 years because after the ants were killed, the carpenter ants, they sporulated. So the spore repellency property prevented future invasions. That's not a very good economic model when you can treat a house once and they don't come back. A far better economic business plan is having a consumer buying it every month and spraying toxic chemicals that kill the workers but don't kill the queen the whole the whole key to this is the mycelium is taken back

Starting point is 00:52:50 into the nest like a trojan horse is presented to the queen who then spreads it to the brood and they're all living in this honey this sort of myceliated uh um a palace. And then before they realize it, it sporulates and it kills the queen. If it can kill the queen, it can control the colony. After it sporulates, the spore repellency property prevents other carpenter ants from coming into your house. So it's a 10-year solution for about 25 cents. That's what it costs to produce of course the packaging and all that stuff you'd add up the numbers pretty quickly but it's incredibly it's very inexpensive to produce and it can be produced in huge quantities so it did not make it to market

Starting point is 00:53:36 and i've i'm exasperated um i have one really great story on this, that this woman named Chris that works for a company that has three letters in their name. She was given the mandate because their stockholders were really upset because the reputation of this company causing toxic spills that harmed thousands of people. And they wanted to grow green movement. Can you find green solutions? She was given the mandate to find a green solution to replace toxic insecticides. She was given a budget. She found me. We dialogued for months. I gave her samples. She set up experiments. Two of the researchers were so excited they called me up at home and both of them said, I'm not supposed to be telling you this, but this is the most exciting thing we've ever seen in our life, you know, as entomologists and fighting these problems.

Starting point is 00:54:31 She went to the board of directors prior to going. We connected, went over the data together, messaging, you know, how to create, you know, the most clear communication to the board of directors, all men. And she was a steel magnolia. I've never met her in person. I wanted to hire her immediately. She ran these meetings just so professionally. And she was really excited. And she goes in, and the next day in the afternoon, I'm waiting for her call. And she calls, and the person on the phone is so angry. I'm going, who is this? And I go, this is Chris. She goes, I'm so angry, I can't see straight. I go, I mean, she's totally composed before, and she's lost her composure. I go, Chris, what happened? She goes, I went in there, I made my presentation, all men, they looked at me steely

Starting point is 00:55:20 eyed, and she said, this is the best, you gave me this mandate, I found something said this is the best you gave me this mandate i found something this is a game changer it can again we can come with an ecologically rational and sustainable solution based on nature um and they looked at her a dour face and then the chairman of the company looked at her and said chris your budget never was in research. It was in advertising. Very much similar to BP. Remember Beyond Petroleum? How much of BP's budget actually is in alternative fuels versus how much is in oil? Now, how much of their advertising budget is in alternative fuels as opposed to oil? I mean, clearly, it's called greenwashing. And so that happened like seven or eight years ago,

Starting point is 00:56:12 and then this past month I just had the same thing happen again. It's a disruptive technology. It rocks the apple cart, and many of these insecticides are coming from the petroleum industry as byproducts from their waste material. So I want to talk disruptive and something challenging to the status quo and contrary to most conventional wisdom, but that requires going way, way back and talking a bit about perhaps your childhood, which you described in part already. But when did you develop a stutter and why don't you still have a stutter? Uh, but I started stuttering when really, when I was, um, about five years old. I mean, I started from the time that I could talk. Um, my family was

Starting point is 00:57:00 dysfunctional and I've been told that sometimes the type of stuttering that I have is related to a defect, a neurological development in the seventh and eighth month. That's one possible reason. But the type of stuttering I have, anyone seen the King's speech. I had that and worse. So I just could not speak. And I'd find alternative pathways to trick my brain with a prepositional or adverbial phrase, because your brain gets further ahead than your mouth can articulate. And then you become self-conscious. And the type of stutterer that I am, as most stutterers, we don't stutter when we sing. We don't stutter if I start speaking in a British accent, or you create an accent. And you don't stutter when you talk to animals. So it's a very interesting, it's something that's triggered

Starting point is 00:57:59 by social contact. And so it was very difficult for me to date ladies. They wanted the super jocks, the self-assured men. And I was a stutterer. And so I always stared at the ground and I found fossils, I found mushrooms. But it's very difficult for me. Now, I grew up in a small town in Ohio and my dad was an officer on the aircraft carrier, the Intrepid. And so during World War II, so after World War II, he got the Intrepid aircraft carrier radio, and it was in our basement. And so my brother John, who was very interested in chemistry, he created this huge, you know, huge, like three racks of chemicals, you know, in the basement and his laboratory. He had Bunsen burners, all sorts of experiments going all the time. And, but he never let me quote unquote play in the laboratory. I could play on the radio and I could watch him,

Starting point is 00:58:55 but he's my older brother. I was the youngest one in my family. So, and so John went on to Yale. My brother Bill went on to Cornell and they left and it left me this laboratory so my dream was always to have a laboratory you know and living in the country and that's kind of what i'm doing now but john when he came back from yale came back with a book called altered states of consciousness by charles tart and it was an anthology of research articles on changing your consciousness, either drugs or from spinning or from dreams. One of the early books from the University of California, Davis. So John lent me this book. And I said, John, I'd love to see it.

Starting point is 00:59:36 But he says, well, I'm on break for two weeks, but I need the book because it's part of our class. So I got this book. I'm just devouring this book. And John was my hero. He was my mentor. And John went to Mexico and Colombia, came back with these incredible stories of magic mushrooms and consuming them. I adored him. And of course, I wanted to do the same. Then he gave me this book. And so I'm really getting excited about this. But my best friend, Ryan Snyder, wanted also to read this book. And so Ryan goes, can I borrow your book, your brother's book? And I go, sure, you can borrow it. But I need it back.

Starting point is 01:00:12 And so he gave it back to me in two or three days. So several days passed, and I asked Ryan about the book. And he hemmed and hawed. And a week later, where's the book? And he wouldn't respond, sort of looking me in the eye. Always a good sign. Yeah. So I go, where's my book?

Starting point is 01:00:27 Where's my brother's book? And then two weeks in, my other John's now pressuring me, Paul, I need that textbook, you know, as part of the class. So I finally got a hold of Ryan and I said, where is my brother's book? And Ryan said, Paul, I can't give it back to you. And I said, why? So my dad found it and burned it. I said, your dad burned my brother's book?

Starting point is 01:00:56 What? He goes, yeah, it was considered to be counterculture and threatening, you know, to our family, you know, structure and all. I thought I could not believe it. I was so upset, and I was so apologetic to my brother, who did not take it well. Like, last time I'm going to trust you type of scene. So I was really bad. But I thought to myself, if this was so disturbing to this alpha male, conservative, neocon-like personality, then I think I found a subject I want to explore more. So that got me into magic mushrooms. And from my experience, and also a tremendous amount of guilt for my brother trusting me with his textbook, and I couldn't return it to him. So John was really interested in this subject. He inspired me. And then John went

Starting point is 01:01:47 on to chemistry, then neurophysiology, University of Washington Medical School on full scholarship. And I was left in the laboratory. And so I started experimenting with marijuana. I remember the DEA came to the Columbia in Ohio. They had a whole display of drugs. And a whole bunch of me and my friends just went there to look at them. Wow, that one how old were you at the time oh 14 15 years of age i mean drugs on display drugs you've heard about you've never seen look how small that lse is that's incredible so i still had this really bad stuttering habit and it was really socially debilitating um on multiple levels and so i ended up and i was in ohio and i ended up buying a bag of magic mushrooms i've never was not really into the drug scene so i don't really know how things should cost you know so i put 20 bucks up on a bag and i just i knew

Starting point is 01:02:39 set and setting was really important but i had no guide nobody else in my little circle was into it and so there was a really great walk that i would like to walk in the woods up on the hills and beautiful rolling hills of Ohio, Northern Ohio. And, and I thought, okay, set and setting is important. So I took the bag and, and, um, I thought that would be one dose. It was not one dose folks. I probably ate about 20 grams oh my god of a slossy cubensis now in in defense of this i need to make it clear these were not grown these were harvested and so they were exposed to the sun so they may have been only equivalent to like 10 grams of cubensis for people who are listening five grams of slossy cubensences to the hero's journey. You're full blown.

Starting point is 01:03:25 You're into starscape. You're changing dimensions. You're fractal patterns. The air becomes a sea of mathematical formulas and your mind is opened up. Your heart's opened up. You feel one with the universe. That's the hero's journey. That's five grams.

Starting point is 01:03:41 You know, you really don't get that until going over three grams. You start to get into it. But so to 20 grams is is the superhero's journey i've never eaten these before and so i walked i was walking into this place about an hour walk i started consuming them and drinking water because they were dried and then um i saw a tree that i love climbing and this tree had his limbs so it was a perfect climbing tree and at the very top of the hill so i thought that's a great place i mean set and setting getting a good view that's what i need and i could feel the mushrooms coming on i as i climbed up the tree you know stem uh branch by branch i got higher and higher so it was kind of a this ascending euphoria you know that kind of kind of went with everything it was very cool and i got

Starting point is 01:04:25 to the top of the tree and beautiful landscape and i'm up there and just the mushrooms are coming on i'm getting higher and higher and and i just realized well i'm really getting high here and it's a little it's dizzying so i'm holding on to the tree and on the horizon with this big black bank of boiling dark angry clouds it was a summer storm coming in. In Ohio, when you see the summer storms, they're terrifying. There are lightning bolts coming down and thunder and lightning. It was off in the distance, but it was coming at me really quickly. And I'm getting higher and higher as the thunderstorm, lightning storms coming closer and closer.

Starting point is 01:05:02 I'm getting vertigo. And I go, oh, my God, I can't get off the tree. I don't want to fall. So I held on the tree for dear life. storm lightning storms coming closer and closer i'm getting vertigo and i go oh my god i you know i can't get off the tree i don't want to fall so i held on the tree for dear life and it became my axis mundi sort of my axis right into the earth and i had this amazing experience i mean just beautiful experience but also the threat of lightning coming closer and closer and every lightning strike it would hit and be fractal patterns would just emanate out from every lightning strike. And synesthesia occurred, you know, where there, you know, sound and visions were merging together, and sounds had visions, and visions had sounds. And it was just an incredibly complex – one of my favorite books is The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, also called Magister Ludi. It's a rather erudite.

Starting point is 01:05:52 He got the Nobel Prize for it in 1955. But that was a deep dive into inner space exploration. But I felt like I was part of the glass bead game. And there I was was i was ascending into this higher state of consciousness and then i realized oh my god i'm in the highest point in miles doing a lightning storm this is not a good place to be and uh and then i was up there i was terrified and the lightning storm came closer and closer, and I had this pathogenic just empathy for the universe, one. Everything is fine.

Starting point is 01:06:28 If I die here today, my life is complete. Now I understand. I'm part of the fabric of all the matter that's around me. I'm one with everything. I'm made of stardust. Everything is made of stardust. This is a continuum of nature. Death is natural.

Starting point is 01:06:43 Birth is natural. Transitions are just a continuum of nature. Death is natural. Birth is natural. Transitions are just the way of existence. And then the lightning storm and the wind came up and washed with warm rain. And it was just terrifying, a lightning storm. And I'm up there and I'm thinking, oh, I'm going to die. But if I don't die, Paul, what are you going to learn from this experience? Challenge yourself right now. This is all great and wonderful, but let's get down to brass tacks. What's your biggest issues?

Starting point is 01:07:12 You're not going to die. What's your biggest issue? Stuttering. I'm having this dialogue with myself. I just can't overcome this stuttering habit. You know, I'm not stupid. And I went to, for people to understand how bad it was, I was interviewed for special education because of my stuttering, because I couldn't read in class. And so when it was my turn to read, they would pass on me because no one had the patience

Starting point is 01:07:37 to hear a stutterer. And please don't finish a stutterer sentence, look at them, smile, and engage. Help them finish their sentence. Don't finish it for them. That robs them of the opportunity of overcoming this speech deficit. So I scored high in my test, so I didn't get put into special education, but it was a pretty demoralizing to realize I'm going to go in to the special education class. But I didn't. So I didn't get to put into special education, but it was a pretty demoralizing to realize I'm going to go in to the special education class. But I didn't. So I thought stuttering was my issue. And so I started saying to myself, Paul, stop stuttering now. You can do this. You're not stupid. You come from a very smart family.

Starting point is 01:08:18 You have, you know, you can do this. And so I said, stop stuttering now over and over and over again, hundreds if not thousands of times. And the storm washed over me. I felt like I achieved a state of Godhead. I felt enlightened. I come from a Christian background, so I had this empathy with Jesus, you know. And now I understand why Jesus went in the wilderness. Now I understand why Jesus, you know, said don don't go into churches, go in the nature.

Starting point is 01:08:47 Whatever, you know, that's my cultural background. But I saw, I connected on that level. And I realized, oh my gosh, this is something I can overcome. So I came out of the tree, obviously did not get electrocuted. And I went back home. And then the next morning, there's this girl that I greatly admired, and she was super sweet and nice to me. And I really love her to this day because of her kindness. And I didn't want to talk to her because every time I talk, talk, talk, talk, I –

Starting point is 01:09:19 You know, and then you get these half breaths going on on and then you can't get out of this loop. And, um, she's coming along the sidewalk and the morning and she looks at me and she's so sweet. She said, good morning, Paul. How are you? And I cast my eyes up from the sidewalk and I looked at her and I said, I'm doing fine. Thank you for asking. And I stopped stuttering just like that now i do have i've had about four or five relapses you know um if it's a lot of noise and i've been drinking and somebody asked me how do you grow mushrooms it's like filling a well with a teaspoon it's like where do i begin you know it's like so or if i'm meeting somebody somebody is super famous or something like that, you know, but that's natural. You know, people get stage fright when they're, you know, so.

Starting point is 01:10:09 But it's it's something that I think is really important because there's one other aspect that is related to hearing that I want to mention. And I have a really good friend who's passed on now named Bill Webb. He's lived in Big Sur, California. And I was 19 years old when I wrote my first book, Psilocybe, Mushrooms and Their Allies. I was self-trained. I got involved in the University of Washington with Dr. Daniel Stuntz, part of a taxonomic key council. And I adopted the taxonomy of psilocybin mushrooms as my speciality. At the time, there's very little

Starting point is 01:10:45 literature on it most of the books and libraries have been razored the pages have been razored out dr students had an intact library so i could study with them i became a taxonomist i wrote taxonomic keys starting when i was 19 or 20 and that became the core of my book so i'm i have this manuscript and i go to go to Montana Books in Seattle to pitch the book. And Montana Books has produced some gay-friendly literature, and they were on the cutting edge, and I was recommended that I see them. And so I made an appointment. I go up to Seattle, and I'm meeting the head of Montana Books. And he goes, you know, this is not our market. It's an interesting subject. Really what you need is a book agent. And he goes, you know, this is not our market. It's an interesting subject. Really what you need is a book agent.

Starting point is 01:11:27 And he goes, the best book agent I know is Bill Webb, and I haven't seen him in two years. And at the sounds of those words, a little bell jingles on the front door of Montana Books. And in walks Bill Webb. And the publisher's like, no way. So Bill and I became tight friends. He invited publisher won. No way. So Bill and I became tight friends. He invited me down to Big Sur. He was a friend of

Starting point is 01:11:52 Henry Miller and was just a really fantastic individual. He became a father figure to me at a really critical time in my life. And so Bill and I did journeys together, sacred journeys. And he loved my Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Starting point is 01:12:10 You realize I'm 19, 20 years of age. I'm with a 75-year-old who's a friend of Ansel Adams. He had Ansel Adams' library of many of his imprints and working with his wife and curating them. I mean, really cultured, intellectually interesting guy, beautiful place. And so Bill and I tripped several times and it was a wonderful experience for me. It brings tears to my eyes just talking about Bill. So Bill, he died about 15 years ago and Bill calls me up about three or four months before he dies. And he goes, Paul, I have to tell you something that's so important. I'm Bill. I haven't heard from you

Starting point is 01:12:50 in years. How's it going? He goes, well, frankly, life sucks. I've lost, losing my sight. I'm losing my hearing. I can't hear the waves. So the sequels now, I live above the cliffs of Big Sur, except for this damn hearing aid aid which is always malfunctioning i said i hate it but i've got to tell you something that's so important that you know and i go okay bill and i said what is it and bill goes no i really want you to listen paul this is important i go bill i understand and then he kept on emphasizing it and finally i got frustrated bill i got the message okay i know what you're going to tell me is important because i want to make sure that you tell other people will you you promise me? And I go, I promise you. I said, Paul, I think

Starting point is 01:13:30 I found something medically very important about psilocybin. I go, what? He said, well, I don't want to run the hero's journey. I was, you know, took out my hearing aid. I'm laying, you know, in full bliss and one with the universe. You know, he's like 80 years age or 82 years of age when he's doing this by himself. And he said, I can hear the seagulls. I can hear the waves. I go, oh, my gosh, I can hear everything. And he reached for his hearing aid. He didn't have it in.

Starting point is 01:13:56 He goes, oh, my gosh, I can hear. And then he heard this click, click, click, click, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And he looked around going, that's weird. That's an unusual sound. And click, click, click, click, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And he looked around going, that's weird. That's an unusual sound. And click, click, click, click, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, click, click. And he couldn't figure out what it was. And he looked around, he looked around, and finally he saw what it was. There are ants walking on the deck, and he was hearing their footsteps. That is wild. Now, this is where even I, and I'm a liberal kind of guy, I'm going, wait a second, you know, tell me that again, you know? And that's why Bill set me up by saying you have to tell other people this.

Starting point is 01:14:35 So I've been working with Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University, the clinical studies on psilocybin, et cetera. And I really emphasize this to many of the researchers. They could easily do a test, you know, while these patients are in session, to test their hearing, to see if they have increased sensitivity, increased range, tonal ranges. It's a very easy metric. But I think what happened with me on the tree in the lightning storm is that I created a new neurological pathway of articulating my thoughts and overcoming the social phobia. The social phobia is a trigger. It's definitely an environmental trigger. And then we get locked into these loops that are really, really strange.

Starting point is 01:15:30 Another good thing to tell a stutterer is, can you demonstrate different ways of stuttering? They'll do it. You want me to stutter different ways of stuttering? I'll give you three different ways of stuttering. And so it's really weird. So does that act as a pattern interrupt that helps them to overcome, at least temporarily, the stuttering? Or is it just useful for a non-stutterer to hear different ways of stuttering? Hmm. I didn't thought of that. I'm not sure how to answer that. But I do think that once new neurological pathways are established, you can capitalize on them by re-remembering them. And this is the thing that John Hopkins University, some of the most surprising results is 14 months after these experiences, when many of the patients said it was the most important spiritual experience of

Starting point is 01:16:17 their lives, 14 months afterwards, not only did they have demonstrable benefits, being nicer people, being a better parent, a better husband, socially more well-adapted, but the fact that they re-remembered the experience reinforced those benefits that they experienced directly after the experience. So a lot of people who are listening may not understand, these are not drugs of abuse. You eat these mushrooms one day, the next day, you're like, no way, I'm not going to hear those things. You look at them and you've got the repellency property, right? The psilocybin repellency property, like, I'm not touching those for months, but boy, that was a great experience, you know? So, these are not substances of abuse, but they're shockingly powerful to the point that you're not ready for the hero's journey for a long time. So, these are not drugs of abuse by any stretch of the imagination. They really should be recategorized as a therapeutic drug. in many ways, relates to your, well, it relates to a few of your previous stories very well in so much as, A, psilocybin is very challenging as a medical model in several respects, one of which

Starting point is 01:17:36 is that it does not require, say, daily or weekly administration. And it is economically difficult to create a for-profit model unless you are monetizing the therapy and adjunct pre and post support and things of that type uh but not in the the sort of one and done or three times and done aspect of it actually makes it very challenging to commercialize and make widespread unless you're relating on or relying on donations, excuse me. I would love to hear your thoughts just to expand on this a little bit. Do you think, say psilocybin or another that I know very little about but wanted to discuss with you, but we can talk about both or either say lion's mane are there uh in this case should i say mushrooms or should i say mycelium or mycelia what would be the right

Starting point is 01:18:31 way to are what would be the right term to use here well i mean yeah i'm sorry mushrooms mushrooms are what people know but mycelium is emerging as a tremendously important reservoir of many bioactive molecules that are supersede the benefit of mushrooms 25 and whole genome sequencing of reishi mushrooms in the genus ganoderma these the common lingza lingchi lingcher reishi men and talking the 10 000 year-year mushroom, the mushroom of immortality. These are all common names out of Asia. There are 25% more genes are active and expressed in the mycelial form than it is in the fruit body form. The fruit body is a mushroom form that's the end of its life cycle. So much of our research has found, going side-by-side comparisons,

Starting point is 01:19:24 of mushrooms, which are protein-rich. They're beta-glucan-rich. They have lots of carbohydrates and polysaccharides. They're nutritionally dense. But the mycelium is articulating constantly a bio-shield of defense from exposure. When the mushrooms form, good luck to any bacterium that's going to rot it. It's going to spoil it in four or five days and then gives himself up anyhow. Moreover, I think that the sequence of bacteria that rots mushrooms is absolutely instrumentally important for the evolution of the ecosystem to give rise to the trees that create the debris fields that feed the mycelium.

Starting point is 01:20:00 So these are deterministic microbiomes and the microbiome, the fungal biome, is determining the microbiome. Because many of the bacteria are adversarial, some of them are commensal, some are actually mutualistically beneficial. So the mycelium is this articulation of this network that, because of epigenesis, the ability to respond to environmental stimuli and upregulate and express new gene expressions it is a fertile ground for learning for being able to articulate responses of new challenges in the environment the mushroom fruit body is at the end of us a thing but you know people are attracted to mushrooms and they fear that typically nature that which is ephemeral. Now, we're around trees and we're around dogs and animals and plants for weeks, months, years.

Starting point is 01:20:50 So the familiarity factor of constant exposure day to day gives us some confidence in, oh, that animal is not going to attack me or that plant is one that my ancestors have been using and we understand it. But mushrooms that come up and disappear in four or five days, some can feed you, some can kill you, some can heal you, some can send you on a psychoactive journey. That which is so powerful but so ephemeral is naturally to be afraid of them. So we have about 200 species of mushrooms that are edible medicinal. I don't know the difference between edible and medicinal medicinal anymore all edible mushrooms have medicinal properties but the mycelium expresses a lot more of these compounds and with lion's mane there's a group of aranacines now the lion's mane mushroom is called hericium aranaceous that's the latin binomial paul i don't want to interrupt but i

Starting point is 01:21:41 just want to pause for one second to plant a seed and we can come back to it or spore and come back to it later, which is potential applications to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. But I don't want to interrupt. I just want to plant that seed so that I don't forget it myself. So please continue. So the aranacines are some of the strongest nerve growth factors ever discovered by science. NGF factors are called nerve growth factors. And they regenerate myelin on the axons of nerves. So now Lion's Mane is perfectly legal.

Starting point is 01:22:13 It has a long history of use, multi-thousands of years of history of use. It looks like pom-poms that cheerleaders use. It has white cascading crystals, descending teeth. And it's a beautiful mushroom. It tastes like shrimp or lobster when you add butter to it, when you cook it. But the compounds that are most neurodegenerative are from the mycelium, not from the mushrooms. And so the aranacines are from the mycelium. Haricinones are another group of neuroglyph factors.

Starting point is 01:22:49 They're from the mushrooms. But the aranacines, by far, are much more neuroregenerative. There's been several clinical studies that have come out on mild cognitive dysfunction out of Japan. And they are very promising. It's the first smart mushroom. Well, soul-side a it's the first smart mushroom well soul side mushroom may be the first smart mushroom in my mind but but but lion's mane mushrooms is one mushroom that i take it on a daily basis my mother takes it on a daily basis she's almost 93 years of

Starting point is 01:23:17 age and a few days uh she's smart as a whip she beat my two brothers in scrabble not too long ago which was a lot of fun i went really i told my brothers mom beat brothers in scrabble not too long ago which was a lot of fun i went really i told my brothers mom beat you in scrabble you know my twin brother goes whoa you know she got lucky and i thought oh that was a clean win then my brother was very defensive but but nevertheless my my the lion's mane mushrooms i think are extremely helpful uh to prevent neuropathies. And I think stacking them with psilocybin is something I'm really keen on, is doing microdosing of psilocybin stacked with lion's mane. Now, lion's mane in and of itself, we know as neuroregenerative properties, is a big subject of research. If you go to PubMed or Google Scholar Alerts, you know, put in lion's mane and

Starting point is 01:24:05 neuroregeneration or NGF factors, and there's several dozen peer-reviewed articles extensively exploring the regeneration of myelin, which is the conductive sheath on the axons of nerves. And those who get Alzheimer's, for instance, have amyloid plaque formation that interrupts and erodes the myelin sheath, prevents neurotransmission. And so lion's mane mushrooms have been demonstrated behaviorally in people with cognitive tests, but also through dissection of mice prior to using lion's mane they would inject these mice with a polypeptide that induces amyloid plaque formation it's a very very potent toxin that's neuro neurotoxic but makes that of the what happens the nervous system of alzheimer's patients because amyloid plaque formation can be conform their changes, they lose the ability of navigating through mazes, they lose the novelty, inquisitiveness factor, the short-term memory is basically

Starting point is 01:25:11 erased or much of it. And then when they fed them lion's mane mushrooms and they dissected those mice, then sure enough they saw that the amyloid plaque formation was there. And then those fully diseased mice, when they would then feed them lion's mane mushrooms for 23 days, they regained the ability of navigating through maize. They reengaged inquisitiveness. It's called the novelty response, the novelty experiment. And then upon dissecting those knives and the resections of the tissue, they could see that the amyloid plaque had largely resolved, remyelination had occurred. And so you bundle

Starting point is 01:25:52 that with, you know, you've got a behavior as well as physical evidence of regeneration of myelin. So lion's mane mushrooms are just a very, very fascinating mushroom. I think about Einstein in his last days. I think about some of my mentors in mycology in their very last days. We are losing encyclopedic knowledge. These are mental giants that have so much to give to the next generation as part of our national heritage, our intellectual national heritage. And to lose these geniuses with all this experience, all this knowledge, all this sense of being and context, to lose them at the end of their life is us losing a library that just, as the library books that fall into pieces in your hands. And I think it's so important for

Starting point is 01:26:39 our cultures to preserve that knowledge. And I think's mane mushrooms is a huge one the the slow descent into sort of cognitive malfunction uh is is what i would cite when people ask me what i'm afraid of i mean that that is it i mean being trapped in your body without the cognitive capabilities that you would want or need to not just function but thrive and i completely agree with you uh this is something i've been fixated on for quite some time if you were to uh if you were to design a study involving the microdosing microadministration of psilocybin under proper supervision and uh you know sort of researcher controls, what might, do you have any idea what that might look like? What the protocol might look like? It's a very timely question, uh, because in two hours from now, I have a group of, uh,

Starting point is 01:27:36 of financial people, uh, that are key, uh, in supporting the current psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. They're arriving here specifically and staying with me for three days to talk about exactly this. I had an idea, and I'm going to probably open source this. Sometimes I file patents. I call them blocking patents. I file a patent that I think should be open source in order so other people can't get a patent on it, and this might be in that category um it's this whole patent landscape i'm i'm i see both sides of the arguments of open sourcing and then also keeping things closed source but i found a patent on neurogenesis you can look it up

Starting point is 01:28:17 stacking lion's mane psilocybin and niacin nicotinic acid. Now, I spoke before of what is patentable. It is no prior art. It speaks against conventional wisdom. And when I gave a talk at MAPS recently, I asked the audience, about 800 people, how many people remember during the 1970s and 80s, it was well known, especially on the West Coast, that if you want to come down from a bad trip on psilocybin or lsd you could take a bunch of niacin you'll get a hot flush and people who don't know it when you take like 500 milligrams of niacin you get red and you get tingly all over your skin you get this niacin flush and about 50 people raised their hands i actually recorded that i needed that for my patentability because that was common knowledge that niacin counteracted the effects of psilocybin. I think not. Number one, there's no evidence that that's true, but it was common knowledge. nerve endings and neuropathies oftentimes occur from the deadening of the nerves at the fingertips

Starting point is 01:29:25 and the toes it struck me that if i excite the nerve endings perhaps i could drive these lion main lion's mane aranacines and the psilocybin to the end points of the nervous systems if the vascular system is still intact to deliver these compounds to create neurogenesis and prevent neuropathy at the endpoints of the nervous system. So I filed a patent stacking niacin, psilocybin, and lion's mane. The psilocybin dosage is about 1 20th of a gram. Now that is below the threshold of what people would experience any change in consciousness. So I know lots of people who would not dare take a soul-saving mushroom. But the idea of taking one 20th below threshold dose that would create neurogenesis and perhaps make them cognitively more astute and make them a better person,

Starting point is 01:30:17 you know, socially and intellectually, I know a lot of people are interested in that. And plus it's kind of groovy. It's kind of sexy. You know, these older people say when they're kids, yeah, I'm microdosing. Microdosing is extremely popular right now, as you probably are well aware. But that's something that we would like to see a clinical study. Now, the clinical study, we already know for the many clinicians out there, you have too many variables in your clinical study, and I agree. So we were looking at psilocybin alone this lion's mane alone

Starting point is 01:30:46 psilocybin is stacked with uh uh with lion's mane uh the niacin will have to come uh later because it's just you and you need enough uh cohorts enough people uh enrolled in the clinical study in order to have a statistical significance almost uttered there um uh so that's that that's what we're looking at is looking at uh stacking this and and maybe do this clinical study in canada right now the fda is very favorable to these clinical studies i had a report from somebody met with the fda regulators and their scientists and they said they have never seen a drug that was so non-toxic, so effective from one treatment in the history of their looking at approving new drugs. And they were like, so the FDA scientists are quite focused on this. It's something we all,

Starting point is 01:31:43 you know, the difference between a medicine and a toxin is dose i wouldn't call psilocybin a toxin well there's maybe one funny example that just came out in the literature of that but um i wouldn't call it necessarily a toxin but having a sub-threshold dose i think makes a is a is a really valid approach because um and you probably shouldn't take these every day because you'd normalize the receptors you know and so watching the receptors and having them recalibrate themselves is probably a good thing to do so pulse therapy three to four days on three to four days off is um probably a better approach than taking them every day so So the jury's out on that. I mean, a lot of different opinions of it. It's endlessly fascinating though. And you are right on the money, so to speak,

Starting point is 01:32:34 or lack of money, given how effective they are in limited number of sessions at the combination, which is certainly has been studied and is being studied, of efficacy and low toxicity. And as you mentioned earlier, if a rat, if you put, and Michael Pollan and I have chatted about this a little bit in his podcast, but if you were to administer, say, to a rat in a box, cocaine or heroin, and they have to choose between those drugs or food, they will consume these types of opiates or stimulants until they die to the absence of food. Whereas with, say, LSD, I would also assume psilocybin, they take one dose, and that's the last time they touch that particular pedal. And this is, I don't want to take us too far afield

Starting point is 01:33:27 and focus on this exclusively, but I really appreciate you having spent so much time thinking about how these natural companions who have coexisted and have been ingested by humans for thousands of years can be applied for some of these epidemic-scale problems that we're experiencing. And I wanted to ask, we are going to talk about some of the applications of mushrooms

Starting point is 01:33:56 outside of human medicine, but I would love to read a description of you, and then it relates to something we were chatting about a little bit before we started recording, and talk about the decisions that made Paul Stamets, Paul Stamets, because there are so many mycologists out there. I certainly don't know the exact number, but you are, if not the best known,

Starting point is 01:34:21 certainly one of the best known. And the description is from Mother Jones. It says, Paul Stamets is a modern example of the amateur scientist from the 17th and 18th century who made wonderful contributions with only their native curiosity and keen sense of observation. And you can certainly comment on that if you don't feel like it's accurate, but what are the decisions you made, if any come to mind or habits you've cultivated that have allowed you, helped you to arrive where you are? I mean, you have made many discoveries. You've, you've excelled in multiple fields. Why is that? How did you become who you are in this current

Starting point is 01:35:06 moment? And you can start anywhere. I don't want to be one of the people who asks you, how do you grow mushrooms at a cocktail party? I have been exposed to a circle of kindness, and I believe in karma. I was a child who had a lot of problems. And I want a big debt of gratitude to my professor, Dr. Michael Bug. He never humiliated me. And at the Evergreen State College, I'd make some dumb statements. He was entertained by them. But entertained by them in a humorous way that engaged me to explore, you know, and dive more deeply into the subject matter but i was never humiliated um and as a circle of kindness and i really believe in karma because this has

Starting point is 01:35:56 meant this has been a huge thing in my life is the fact that um i believe evolution is an extension of gratitude and sharing. And it's not necessarily this neo-Darwinian concept of competition. The first to food wins. It's a collaboration of people who are allied together with common interests. And we need to shepherd all of ourselves from our weaknesses to become stronger. Lots of people know this, but very few different schools of people know this. I got into the martial arts when I was 14. I have two black belts.

Starting point is 01:36:34 I had schools for 30, 40 years. I have long-haired hippie, really nice person. And I kind of turned into a different individual. I've been in thousands of fights. I started the Aspen Academy of Martial Arts. I first got into Goju-Ryu, Shodokan, Shito-Ryu, got my first black belt in Taekwondo, and then began a black belt in Hwarang-do, which is by far one of the most sophisticated styles in the world,

Starting point is 01:36:57 similar to Hapkido and some other styles, Kuk-Sul. But I had one experience that I think is emblematic of this is uh i was an early young black belt in taekwondo and a big biker came in he was just seething with anger and wired on amphetamines and and um and he wants to fight a black belt you know just a biker dude and he just pissed off at the world and he came in and number one the head instructor does not fight at a challenge like this they have too much to lose you know if they screw up you know they lose space in front of their students so you know anyhow my my head instructor gene said paul i got another one okay and uh and so this biker came in and and then and

Starting point is 01:37:42 said i'll let you fight one of my black belts. It's fine. So Paul, come over here. And so I came over there and was really polite. And I extended my hand, shook my hand. He wouldn't shake my hand. He just was all piss and vinegar and wanted to fight me. And I said, well, we have a few rules. Take off your shoes. And then we got out on the mat.

Starting point is 01:37:59 And this guy just attacked me ferociously. I mean, it was no sort of like the boxers. They have a little bit of like okay let's do it and you know we have a little you know um compassion for each other you know a little simpatico for another fellow warrior now this guy was like out there hurting me it's like block block block block blocking him this guy's just you're just swinging and kicking and he can't kick well number one but he's just like overly aggressive and and you know after a while you know you can block 10 or 20 times but you know you started getting hurt right

Starting point is 01:38:29 you know these are these guys just ferociously trying to hurt me and so i looked over at the my head instructor and he nodded his head and said okay paul time to take him out so you know did three or four punches you know know, sucker punched him, did a jumping hook kick, bam, hit him in the temple, bam, and he went down on the ground, you know, semi-conscious. And then I'm hovering over and I put my hand onto his trachea. I put my middle finger into the inside of his eyeball. And that way I could pop his eyeball and pull out his trachea at the same time. Now, people are really concerned about their vision and also in their face you know so when you lock your finger into the eyeball and ready to take out the eyeball people want to give up

Starting point is 01:39:14 really fast he was terrified he had the look of like oh my god i'm gonna lose my eyeball and this guy's got you know he didn't he was just waking up from being stung from this kick you know and, and I got him like that. And I knew I had, okay, this is it. Now I can take him out right now. This is the end of his life, you know, end of his, you know, basically he's done. And then I go, I released, I said, you know, you actually did really well. And I extended my hand in friendship. He's laying on the mat. This big burly biker guy started crying because I was nice to him. I took him down, but I wasn't glorifying in my win. I was extending my hand in friendship. Changed his life. When I left the school, he was a brown belt. He became this big teddy bear. He's shepherding all these little... I told him, listen, the girl here, she's got a

Starting point is 01:40:04 yellow belt. You's got a yellow belt you've got a white belt you bow to her that's the way it works here it's based on your experience and respect totally changes life so so that's a story of my life is that you know the extension of and i think psilocybin mushrooms make people nice for people i just really believe that. There is this understanding that your life is not just your life. Your life is in the context of nature. And how are we going to inspire and lead and promote the forces of good and generosity and mutualism and how we're going to get away from the people who want to tear it all down. My work with bees, I think, is the cause celebre of my life.

Starting point is 01:40:52 And we're definitely going to dig into that. I absolutely want to explore it. I was just going to echo what you said about the power of kindness. A friend of mine, a very good friend of mine, was just telling me recently, who perhaps not surprisingly has a lot of psychonautic experience and some mileage with certain mushrooms that we've been discussing. And also, for anyone who doesn't know what MAPS is, it's the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. They're also focused very heavily on phase three trials for MDMA in the treatment of PTSD, which is fascinating. And I encourage people to take a look at that at maps.org. But what my friend said to me is not too long ago, several weeks ago, he went into a coffee shop, and it was some Dunkin' Donuts or something like

Starting point is 01:41:38 that in an airport. And this woman said, thank you at the end of the transaction. And he looked at her in the eyes, and he said, no, thank you. And he was just kind of being a joker and he's a charming guy, but he meant it very sincerely. And she just broke down crying. Similar experience. She had not had, it didn't seem anyone express kindness to her in God knows how long. I mean, weeks, months, who knows? And it just was such a stark reminder, just like your story about the power of those little acts,

Starting point is 01:42:06 those tiny little micro decisions that we all make thousands of times a day. And that's what, you know, I have a business, um, you know, but anybody who's ordered from our business, I own the business, so I run it. And I had several years ago, I got these little stickers that say, you are beautiful. And every time someone orders from our business, in their order are two, you are beautiful stickers. And I've had so many people write saying they were just a horrible day. A physician just wrote to me recently. He had said, oh, my God, I cannot believe this little messaging. I send two because then they can pass one forward.

Starting point is 01:42:44 So every order and every box there are two you are beautiful stickers and so many people have written saying that's what they needed to see that changed their entire day that again extension of gratitude and affirmation you know and we are all on this planet together we live to live in this time and space tim you're going to die i'm going to die everybody listening to this podcast is going to die but we ran we enter into the fabric of nature from which we sprung and i think that fabric in nature is based on the extension of goodness i just know it empirically and all the noise we have around politics and everything else is just so narrowly focused in the context

Starting point is 01:43:25 of the greater being i think that we are on the verge where science and spirituality are converging and now we're understanding nature and the extent of the cosmos the hundreds of billions of galaxies i mean just um i always wanted to be an astro-mycologist i kind of am now in some sense but i've always wanted to you know i think we'll find fungal networks throughout nature, throughout the universe, on multiple planets. Multicellular organisms will form as networks. Networks will give rise to animals. And I think that we are a descendant of this network-based paradigm that's represented not only in mycelium and neurons, the computer internet, the organization of dark matter. This is a continuation on different orders of magnitude of the way of being.

Starting point is 01:44:15 We are all involved in this network of being. And this is just one of our strands in that network that we're living today. And I want to get to bees, and I'm going to get to it by way of laying out some illustrations of these webs, these strands of interconnectedness. And this is from Discover Magazine from a few years back. And I'm just going to quote here. It'll take 30 to 60 seconds probably. And then I want to talk about bees specifically. It starts with this, and this is a very incomplete list, of course, but Stamets is researching a wide variety of ways in which fungi could help solve

Starting point is 01:44:56 human problems. Here's a partial list. One, environmental cleanup. Mushrooms could be used to break down petrochemicals or absorb radiation from contaminated soil and water two wastewater filtration mushroom mycelia could cleanse runoff from storm dreams farms or log logging roads they could be used to filter out the nitrates endocrine disruptors and pharmaceutical residues that disrupt ecosystems and damage human health three pesticides fungal bug killers which we discussed could be used to target troublesome species while remaining non-toxic to other four medicines which we've we've discussed could provide new antibiotic antiviral and immune boosting compounds and even chemotherapies five forestry planting symbiotic mushroom species could speed reforestation and clear-cut woodlands six agriculture adding oh this is the word that i can

Starting point is 01:45:41 never pronounce adding m-y-c-o-r-R-H-I-Z-A-L. How do we say that? Mycorrhizal. Mycorrhizal. Thank you. Adding mycorrhizal fungi to soil could improve crop yields without the need for toxic chemical fertilizers. Seven, famine relief.

Starting point is 01:45:56 Mushrooms could be grown rapidly in refugee camps and disaster zones using just wood chips or saltwater soaked straw. Eight, biofuels. Growing mushrooms for biodiesel could require far less soil and other resources than commonly cultivated fuel crops. Nine, which segues to what we were just chatting about, space travel because of their usefulness in soil creation and the tolerance of many species for radiation. Mushrooms could be grown by interstellar voyagers and used to terraform other worlds. So I'm going to pause here for one second just to

Starting point is 01:46:23 let people soak in that. And then second, in both preparation for this conversation, but also over the last two years, reading various descriptions of what has been called the wood wide web, I think is what they call it, the mycelium and how they facilitate communication between trees and other organisms, it's really mind bending stuff. I mean, it's, it's, it's the type of narrative and description and discovery that if described,

Starting point is 01:46:54 I'm just making this up perhaps, but like 50 years ago would have been thought science fiction. And, uh, I would love for you to describe, uh, what you have done in the world of bees. But I just find this so not only staggeringly fascinating and much of it counterintuitive, but important.

Starting point is 01:47:15 So that's my soapbox for the moment. But in any case, would love you to take that wherever you'd like. Okay, well, I would recommend that people read my book, Mycelium Running, How running how mushrooms can help save the world it covers into these subjects uh very very deeply um and the book is used now as a introductory mycology book at many universities um i i typically don't uh promote uh a product from stage there's no lectures out there you can find this but i do want to draw people's attention to fungi.com f-u-n-gG-I.com. There's an amazing letter from a Syrian refugee. And I want people, we obscured his face because we don't want him to be targeted by Assad's assassins. But he has brought in mushroom cultivation into refugee camps using recyclable materials from the

Starting point is 01:48:02 cardboard and all the paper. And he literally, you have to read the letter to, it just brings tears to your eyes. He's over a thousand people now engaged in growing mushrooms, oyster mushrooms in refugee camps and from the Syrian crisis that are helping people feed themselves. And think about all those thousand people now understanding how to grow mushrooms, what the downstream effect will be with their children. When they get out of those camps, they'll have skill sets that can really expand this in a huge way. I believe that mycelium is the foundation of the food web. It is essential for food biosecurity. I mentioned the mycelium creates the microbiomes. We've done next-gen sequencing. We've been able to prove this.

Starting point is 01:48:53 I've not published it, but people can see my talks on it showing that different mycelial mats control and destined populations of bacteria that are uniquely specific to the mycelium that is growing in wood chips or in straw. So they actually articulate the populations of bacteria downstream from the mycelial networks. But this is kind of a segue. So we talked about the antiviral stuff, you know, the BioShield biodefense program and 9-11 well and i had this entomopathogenic fungi patents and working um against you know termites and carpenter ants and and bed bugs and mites and so a good friend of mine louis schwartzberg he actually has finished a movie called fantastic Fungi. It's coming out in the next few months. We've been making it for over 10 years with Lin Lear, Norman Lear, and that group. And I just saw the final cut a few days ago. It is quite good. I'm really happy where it's going. But it talks about the

Starting point is 01:50:01 wood wide web. And Susan Simard is a British Columbia columbia mycologist and i'm a total fan of her work and a big kudos to her because she and i are two peas in the pod she was doing her work parallel to my going mine and and we ended up you know really in in the in the same intellectual ecosystem so to speak um but so when louis was doing a movie he was looking at butterflies and then he got into bees and colony collapse. And colony collapse is really a colony collapse disorder is a euphemism created by the media. But it does speak to a very serious issue. In Oklahoma last year, 74 percent of the beehives died. Now, think of it. If you were having cattle or sheep at your ranch and you lost

Starting point is 01:50:49 75% of your sheep or cattle, that is devastating. Well, it's also devastating to beekeepers. 35% or more of our food is directly dependent upon bee pollination. 70% is indirect. Many people don't realize that most of our dairy products are dependent upon bee pollination 70 is indirect many people don't realize that most of our dairy products are dependent upon bee pollination because alfalfa and hay is dependent upon bees all the almonds that you consume every one almond that you consume was visited by a bee on that flower and so the almond industry specifically needs honeybees in particular and so when louis came to me and said, Paul, there's a huge problem with colony collapse and bees are dying. What can you do about it? Well, I had a

Starting point is 01:51:33 series of events. And these events, when you string them together, led to me to an epiphany, and that I am a controversial mycologist. I have been trained academically in mycology as an undergraduate student, but I married a woman 11 years older than me who had three kids, 12, 14, and 16. When I was 22, I couldn't afford to move my kids to other cities to go to graduate school. I got accepted into several graduate schools, but I couldn't afford to move. So I started this little mail order business and packed 30,000 boxes i had a single employee now i have over 100 employees so it's a real testimonial to stamina and good luck and also the extension of generosity by some very kind people who came to my rescue a few times over my life but in the course of looking uh at the situation with bees i started looking looking at it, and there's many

Starting point is 01:52:27 cofactors. Now, health or disease, in my mind, is a series of coefficient variables, factors which are strung together. The end of the equation means health or disease. So there is not a single cause for colony collapse. It's a perfect storm of unfortunately bad things that have been happening to the bees. Habitat loss is one. Neonicotinoids, we already know they've been banned in Europe, ironically from a study that Bayer and Syngenta sponsored, thinking that neonics would not be toxic, and then they found out they were toxic, and so they were banned in Europe last month. Neonics are still used in the United States and Canada.

Starting point is 01:53:06 There are so many, 70% of the food is thought to be absolutely, critically dependent upon bee pollination services, you know, two arms length away from direct bee pollination contact. So bees are dying because of a confluence of variables, last habitat, neonics, pesticide exposure, factory farming. It's not natural for bees to be put on trucks and travel a thousand miles to the almond orchards of California. They all are concentrated. They spread diseases amongst themselves, and then they disperse.

Starting point is 01:53:38 And so that's a great, great scenario for diseases to be spread. But by far the biggest one that's been identified in scientific literature is the varroa mite and the varroa mite was introduced in 1987 it came from asia varroa destructor that's this latin by no and i know in the binomial it injects a whole slew of viruses into the bees and these uh these now all bees in the world have these viruses working with the usda dr jay evans and uh it was a usda virologist who's widely published and a senior scientist at the usda has not seen a virus free bee more than 10 years what's happened now is a virus is being spread by the varroa mite,

Starting point is 01:54:25 and the varroa mite was controlled by a miticide that was used to control ticks on cattle called amitraz. Now, amitraz is not legal to use by beekeepers, but they use it. They were soaking their beehives with this amitraz, this toxic tick miticide, and they're drenching it twice per year to control the mites. And now they're up to eight times per year within 10 years. The mites have developed a resistance. The mites are like having a pancake on your back. They attach themselves. They're extremely hard to dislodge. And now 27 viruses have been identified being vectored by mites. The big surprise is all the wild bees now have these viruses. And 80% of the pollination services that we benefit from bees pollinating are actually coming from wild bees, not the honey bee, which is Apis melefora,

Starting point is 01:55:21 which produces huge colonies. The wild bees are oftentimes called solitary bees. They're very small groups of a dozen bees or two dozen bees are ground dwellers. And those bees provide over 80% of the services that are benefiting agriculture. So the honey bees, the man, we have about 2 million hives in the United States. The average loss right now is over 50 percent nationally, a few hot spots, but those hot spots then emanate out and epidemics become pandemics. And so now we have evolved into a viral pandemic of these viruses spreading throughout the world. And it was just discovered in the past two or three years that these bees are infected with these viruses when they visit a flower and they get the pollen on them. They also spread the viruses to the pollen they leave.

Starting point is 01:56:12 And so when the wild bees come, they become infected. So this is a direct threat to worldwide food biosecurity. The loss of bees is such an important issue. And interestingly, it's the number one bridge issue between liberals and conservatives so i like to tell people you go on thanksgiving dinner you don't want to talk about hillary or trump talk about the importance of bees it's the number one issue that brings liberals and conservatives together because everyone recognizes the importance of bees as it is for food biosecurity so my friend louisie came to me, and I started studying this subject,

Starting point is 01:56:45 and I had five experiences in a row that led me to an epiphany. And no matter what my critics say, and I, you know, I've been wrong sometimes, I'm not right all the time, so I accept that. But I push the envelope because I don't have to worry about tenure. I'm self-employed. I can risk to be wrong. But the more I speculate, the more I test, the more I do research, you know, that's what it takes. It takes efforts to see if something will work. And so I failed a lot of times. And the failure is the price of tuition I paid to learn a new lesson. All that being said, this is what happened. In 1984, I had the garden giant mushroom going in my garden it's a wood chip mushroom that grows on wood chips produces mushrooms up to five pounds per specimen people can look it up um and i had these wood chips permeated with mycelium and i had two beehives

Starting point is 01:57:36 and one day in july i come out and i see the bees all over my wood chips i look really closely they're moving the wood chips to the side, just like you pushing a semi-truck to the side. Some of these wood chips are really big, to expose the mycelium. I looked very carefully, and from dawn to dusk for 40 days, there's a continuous convoy of bees to my wood chips of a garden giant mycelium in my garden, traveling about 800 to 1,000 feet. And so I went out there. I photographed it.

Starting point is 01:58:09 God, I found the photographs. There were Kodachrome 64 slides and sweltering heat two years ago. I found them up in an attic. But I published this in Harrow Smith Magazine in 1988. I published this in 1994 in Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, one of my books. And I speculated, oh, the bees are going after the sugar-rich exudates because the mycelium is producing these polysaccharides that are sweet and they're fragrant. And maybe that's why the bees are going there. Okay. That's one. I'm going to give you a mycofactorial equation. So that's the first

Starting point is 01:58:38 mycofactor. Factor number one, Paul sees bees attracted to wood chips in his garden. I forgot about it. Microfactor number two, Paul gets involved in the BioShield program, discovers that polypore mushrooms have antiviral properties, and many patents have issued now. I have more patents on this. People can look them up. And so that was another experience I had uh number three by getting rid of

Starting point is 01:59:07 the carpenter ants in my house using entomopathogenic fungus relating that insects are vectors of disease and then moving forward i'm looking at the research articles and andOS uh it's an open source you know online journal scientific journal there's an on the cover of the PLOS was a big article on the discovery that see when colony collapse happens most people don't know this is that you go out to your beehives on Monday everything is fine you go out there on Thursday and they're all gone. They're gone. It's not like there's a whole bunch of dead bees laying in front of the beehive. They're gone. They fly away.

Starting point is 02:00:05 It turns out that the bees are the deformed wing virus, which is the number one virus of concern that's been identified by researchers, almost a dozen papers have been published in the past three years identifying the deformed wing virus as the virus that is the most debilitating to the bees. It not only reduces the tensile strength of their wings, but they're deformed. They can't fly at all. We see bees on a flower. It's the last days of their life. Bees used to go out to get pollen for nine days, and now they're going out for four days. So they can't bring enough pollen back to the hive. So the newly hatched bees, which are nurse bees, are prematurely recruited to go out to get pollen because the colony is stressed. And then the brood has mites on them, and the bees can't attend to the brood, so they abandon the babies. And the mites then freely go around injecting these viruses into the bees.

Starting point is 02:00:48 And so at some point, it comes to a tipping point, and then the bees leave the hive, and they don't come back. So imagine if you were, again, a cattle rancher or sheep rancher. You're losing more than 50% of your—it's psychologically damaging as well as economically damaging and people just give up so i had these experiences and then i saw in this journal that when they looked at the honey and the abandoned beehives it lacked a certain chemical called p-cumeric acid p-cumeric acid is the chemical trigger that governs the detoxification pathway in bees. It's called the cytochrome P450 pathway. All animals use it. We have it mostly in our liver. It's how we break down toxins. Without P-cumeric acid, they found these bees, hundreds of pounds of honey, no bees

Starting point is 02:01:38 in the beehive, it lacks its essential nutrient, P-cumeric acid. Now, I'm not a chemist, but I'd seen P-cumeric acid before because in the'm not a chemist, but I'd seen P-cumeric acid before, because in the research I've done, I look at what's called the delignification of wood, how fungi gobble up wood and break it down. And I recognize P-cumeric acid as a chemical constituent that was present in breaking down wood. That's why you see myceliated wood, it smells fragrant and odiferous. There's a lot of outgassing of mycoplavonoids, phenolic compounds that are going into it. And that's why after a rain in the woods, the wood smells so good, that's the outgassing of mycelium. All these scent trails

Starting point is 02:02:18 are being created to entice us and insects and other animals to follow scent trails and part of the outgassing of the mycelium. Okay, I had all those four experiences, and then I go to sleep. And I have a waking dream. And this waking dream hit me like a lightning bolt. I said, oh, my God. I woke up. I said, I think I know how to save the bees. And so I first called a very good friend of mine, Leein i said listen i had this waking dream i just i just it shook me to the core he

Starting point is 02:02:52 said stop everything you're doing focus on this this is too important so i called the university california davis it's never a good idea to start a conversation with another scientist that you've not met with the words, I had a dream. That conversation went nowhere. It was like, crazy person, goodbye. So I called up Washington State University. I was at TED. I think I had the TED that you spoke at. And I was at TED, and I went out and I was given Steve Shepard's name from Washington State University. He's a chair of entomology in Pullman, Washington. Washington State University's Agricultural Science College. And I said, listen, Steve, please just give me a half an hour. It's going to sound crazy to you at first, but let me talk to you about this. About 15 minutes in, he said, stop, go nowhere else. We want to work with

Starting point is 02:03:37 you. So the end result of this is we tested this on 532 beehives in Southern California two years ago. We've done seven tests now on outdoor beehives. We have found something I think that's an extraordinary breakthrough. With our mycelial extracts of these polypore mushrooms, these wood conchs that look like, they're called hoof-shaped mushrooms that grow on trees everyone's seen them um with the mycelium that's extracted and water and ethanol the very same extracts that we use in the bio shield biodefense program we gave it to the bees and we've submitted an article to a renowned scientific journal and from one dose at one percent now all beekeepers feed sugar water to their bees. It's 50% sugar, 50% water.

Starting point is 02:04:28 So one milliliter per hundred, you know, one unit per hundred, 1%, we give it to the bees. And then seven to 12 days later, those viruses are reduced by thousands of times. In the article that we submitted, we reduced the Lake Sinai virus by more than 45,000 times, the deformed wing virus by more than 800 times with one dose, and it doubles the lifespan of bees. Think of the implications of this. This means that I think I have a window now in understanding something fundamental to the foundation of nature. The mycelium not only controls the microbiomes and are deterministic in a downstream evolution of ecosystems, but they also control the immunological health of the animal inhabitants.

Starting point is 02:05:18 Because the very same extracts that reduce viruses that harm birds, bird flu, H5N1, H1N1 in pigs, that harm people, pox viruses, herpes viruses, birds, pigs, people, bees. This speaks to something I think that is very deeply profound and understanding that within nature, these mycelial networks are everywhere. Every tree is infused with mycelium. Every vegetable you eat is infused with fungi. This is part of the mutualistic relationship that we have with these fungi that increases the host defense and resistance against disease. There's a plurality of fungi in such diverse populations that create a matrix of defense. We have found that these individual species now, we've tested five different polypore mushrooms, they're all active to different degrees. What we have not reported in the scientific article that we submitted is that we

Starting point is 02:06:20 have one result that's over 100 million times reduction of these viruses with one treatment. Many of these viruses, herpes viruses, are known as oncoviruses that cause cancer. A lot of them cause inflammation that destabilizes the immune system. This is something I think is so critically important. Everyone's talking about bad news, and we are in the sixth X, the sixth greatest extinction known in life on this planet. We have 8.3 million species. We're losing more than 30,000 a year. Do the math. In 100 years, that's more than a third of the biodiversity that's unraveling all around us. What can we do? This is actionable ecological

Starting point is 02:07:01 solutions. It's paradigm shifting. It's scalable, ecologically rational, economically sustainable. Again, all these fungi grow in every forest of the world. And we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh, and everybody missed this. Now I've been issued now 10 patents. The United States, Canada, Australia, new zealand and eurasia when i first got the first patent award for five seconds i was excited literally and then it became horribly demoralized i said you've got to be kidding there's no prior art no one they did the the patent office is the most massive massive search engines in every language chinese french, French, Japanese, English, German.

Starting point is 02:07:56 And there's not a single mention anywhere out there that bees benefit from mycelium immunologically, let alone reducing the viruses that are being vectored by mites. The fact that I'm the one who discovered this is horribly depressing. It means that we're truly Neanderthals with nuclear weapons. And people talk about climate change and how biodiversity is a place of liberal scientists. Are you freaking kidding? This is so fundamental to who we are and where we've come from. So I've open sourced at all the developing countries, but Europe and Eurasia, not Asia, not South America, not Mexico, not Africa.

Starting point is 02:08:29 In order for a solution to be effective, it's got to be practiced. In order for it to be practiced, it's got to be commercially successful. In order for it to be commercially successful, it's got to go to market with some protection of your idea. But the fact, Al, that these patents are issuing is, and I've made mistakes, and there's mycologists out there whose eyes roll, but I'm very happy to have received several rewards, one of which from the Mycology Society of America for bringing more students in the field of mycology than anyone in history. So they're kind of schizophrenic about me because I'm a psychedelic researcher not trained and you

Starting point is 02:09:05 have to bring in all these students into their classrooms i want to save the world and they said paul you created a huge problem we want to study yeast and these students want to save the world what do we do so um but so i think this is something that is actionable solutions and i think i can make the argument and this is very provocative but i can make the argument, and this is very provocative, but I can make the argument that natural products can be more powerful than pharmaceuticals with a greater bio-shield of defense, with less toxicity, and more utility in a sustainable way. And that, I think, is paradigm shifting. I hope you're right. I hope you're right. I hope you're right. And I look forward to learning more about this as the discussion opens.

Starting point is 02:09:50 Is there anything for people listening who are not mycologists nor future mycologists who want to help in some fashion, meaning they want to make personal decisions, maybe think of policy changes or types of support that would enable them to be part of an environmental and systemic solution rather than simply compounding the existing problems. Are there new behaviors, things they can do, anything that you would suggest to people who are listening? Absolutely. The simplest thing that people can do is let wood rot. Give up this idea of an Elizabethan yard that's highly manicured and managed. Nature likes fractal faces. Fractalization of nature at different orders of magnitude, it gives all these niches to microorganisms and microbiome biodiversity

Starting point is 02:10:46 that's critical for sustainability so rather than letting hauling the wood off having a running a lot let rocks rot in your in your garden in your yard mushrooms will come up that'll help feed the bees it'll help build these fractally intense environments that are really important for biodiversity. That's one. We have a campaign for supporting Washington State University, bees.wsu.edu. We've raised over three million dollars now for for bee research uh at wsu we have just begun to explore the role of these polypore mushrooms uh there's hundreds of them to test uh we've hit the home runs on our very first ones we're extremely lucky but the fact that you know this is it speaks to we can reduce these viruses 45 000 to one with one treatment mean, what antiviral drug will do that?

Starting point is 02:11:47 You know, that is a complex soup of constituents. You know, the contrast is surprising. So supporting B company, B nonprofits, joining a mushroom society, the North American mycological association which is a parent organization for called nama and their website is namico.org n-a-m-y-c-o.org they have a listing of all the local mycological societies you know in canada united states and United States and Mexico. That's one, joining your bee and get involved in supporting, frankly, farmers and developing biodiverse landscapes. And the march to monoculture and the march to the industrialization of agriculture is sacrificing the very

Starting point is 02:12:41 biodiverse networks that have evolved to help plants grow. When you add lots of fertilizers in its exercise, you defeat the natural systems of the mycelium that has engaged and helped plants for hundreds of millions of years. When you have mycelium helping plants, you do not need external inputs as much as fertilizers, etc. And I think there are ecologically rational solutions to many of the problems that we face today. But it really speaks to the concept of seven generations. And first peoples really have this so much as a pillar of their understanding and dealing with nature. We should give up this idea of making money in the short term, and we should embrace the idea of creating sustainability in the long term. True conservatives should be

Starting point is 02:13:31 conserving natural resources and thinking about downstream generations. Right now, we have hungry, greedy people whose morals have been hijacked for whatever reason. And I think that this nature-loving movement, with all of its strange characterizations, really is based on something that's fundamentally good for the commons. Well, it makes me think of what you said at the very beginning, or certainly in the earlier portions of this conversation, which is the war against nature is a war against your own biology. And ultimately, what is best for what you're discussing is also best for us, which means it's best for me, it's best for you, it's best for each person listening to this. And certainly,

Starting point is 02:14:17 if you're thinking out multiple generations, these problems can be solved in a very pragmatic, holistic fashion, or they can be compounded to underfunded, underappreciated, and yet has such an enormous elasticity of benefits. And if I was a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, I've met these people. It's just not part of my DNA to pitch. And I look at them going, I could do so much benefit for hundreds of millions of people, but I can't even begin to talk about this because I don't want to pitch. But thankfully, my company is soaring, and I have a great group, a community of individuals who believe in this, who see the results. And Michael Pollan's book and Fantastic Fungi and you're in support, help spread this message but you know i'm 63 years of age and i want to die with a smile on my face because it's the heritage that we leave not not the material possessions that we own during a short lifetime we all need

Starting point is 02:15:38 to create legacies there are our names will be heralded in the future as a person who cared more about other people than they cared about themselves. That is truly a Christian, a Buddhist, a Zen-like attitude. And I think that it's time for people to take action. We need a revolution. It is time. It is time for people to take action. I could not agree more. And you've given a number of recommendations that I will link to in the show notes as usual so everyone listening everything we've discussed all the links to everything certainly that i can track down

Starting point is 02:16:15 and that my team can track down will be in the show notes at tim.blog forward slash podcast for this episode and paul you've been very generous with your time. People can find you at fungi.com, fungi.net, hostdefense.com. And on social media, on Instagram, you're Paul Stamets, Facebook, Paul Stamets, YouTube, Paul Stamets. Is there a, for people who want to know where to go for what, is there one best place for certain things uh a certain best place to say hello if people want to reach out to you somehow oh that's kind of complicated like you tim you know we get so many uh people wanting to contact us but but for i'm i want to feed some of the researchers out there and people who want to get into some of the detailed research articles. We have a website that we populate called mushroomreferences.com.

Starting point is 02:17:08 Mushroomreferences.com has several hundred peer-reviewed articles that we link to with abstracts that talk about the most recent research from mycelium, and it's a deep dive. Many physicians are unfamiliar. And because the public expects that there would be experts about everything in health, they're actually quite ignorant. And so I have found this has been a challenge. This is why I speak to a lot of academic conferences, a lot of medical conferences, is that there is a desperate need by these physicians to get on board and be familiarized with some of the latest research.

Starting point is 02:17:50 But otherwise, Fungi.com is a hub, and we have a resource section on that website that links to many other nonprofits, lots of other resources, including Cornell University, which is particularly a good one. There is MycoWeb, which is extremely good, M-Y-K-O-W-E-B. MycoWeb is a really good one. And so there's a lot of mycologists out there that are genuinely really, really good people. But they have, I've, in a sense, have tasked them with expectations greater than some of which they can deliver. And I apologize for that, but time is short. It's so important that everybody gets aboard the starship and try to do good. Well, I thank you so much for your time today, Paul. This has been really fun for me. And I'm

Starting point is 02:18:44 sure for many, many people who are listening. Is there anything else that you would like to share or recommend before we wrap up at least this first conversation on the podcast? If you see somebody being abused

Starting point is 02:19:02 or somebody being shamed, step up. Extend a hand of generosity and show people a better way of acting. Hear, hear. That is an excellent way to wrap up. And once again, Paul, a real pleasure to spend this time with you. I have pages and pages and pages of notes, follow-ups for myself and for my family and also the many different avenues that I want to explore. And to everyone listening, find the show notes at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. And until next time, keep experimenting and express some kindness.

Starting point is 02:19:40 It is time to take action. So get off of the earphones, get off of the earbuds, get off of the pages in those books that you might consume one after the other and actually take a meaningful step forward with somehow bending the reality around you in a positive direction. And until next time, thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week.

Starting point is 02:20:25 That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out.

Starting point is 02:20:57 And just drop in your email, and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. I've used Audible for many years and I have several audiobooks to recommend right off the bat if you're looking for a new one.

Starting point is 02:21:13 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, you may have heard of it. The Tao of Seneca by Seneca, if you want to hear my favorite collection of letters of all time, as well as The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, which is a fiction book I use to reintroduce nonfiction purists to the beauty and truth and enjoyment of fiction. Graveyard Book. It is incredible. And I like the version that Neil reads himself, but the entire ensemble cast is also

Starting point is 02:21:40 fun. Audible members get a credit every month month good for any audiobook in the store, regardless of price, and unused credits roll over to the next month. So if you didn't like your audiobook, no problem. You can exchange it, no questions asked. Plus, your books are yours to keep. With Audible, you can go back and re-listen anytime, even if you cancel your membership. And for some books, again, Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, I've listened many, many times. You may even just start over as soon as you finish it the first time. Audible also helps you to listen to more books by letting you switch seamlessly between devices, picking up exactly where you left off, whether it's on your phone, through your car, from a tablet, or at home on Amazon Echo, whatever.

Starting point is 02:22:18 You can get through tons of books, hands and eyes free, while doing almost anything. So that is part of the beauty of audio. It is a secondary activity when you're walking the dog, cooking, whatever it might be. Thanks for watching. and business information providers. Maybe that's what I am, a business information provider. And right now, Audible is offering listeners of this podcast a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. So check it out. Go to audible.com forward slash Tim and browse the unmatched selection of audio programs. Download a title free and start listening.

Starting point is 02:22:58 It is super simple. Go to audible.com forward slash Tim or text Tim to 500-500 on your telephone to get started today. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home. And it's one of the first

Starting point is 02:23:34 things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20 minute ride in my undies. Hard to do that at the gym. Take a shower and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand. And you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and

Starting point is 02:24:21 watch many of the same classes over and over. But I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities. So you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time. And that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head.

Starting point is 02:24:54 I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was, and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out. Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer, go to one peloton.com that's O N E peloton P E L O T O N.com and enter the code Tim all caps at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase.

Starting point is 02:25:35 So get a great workout at home. Anytime you want, check it out, go to one peloton.com and use the code TIM to get started.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #340: Paul Stamets — How Mushrooms Can Save You and (Perhaps) the World

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #340: Paul Stamets — How Mushrooms Can Save You and (Perhaps) the World

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.