The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock and Fantastic Fungi’s Paul Stamets on Mushrooms & Mycelium

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Join host Sing For Science host Matt Whyte in this fungi fantastic episode about psilocybin research! We learn about mushroom properties that can stave off dementia, decrease social ills and hear about Isaac’s experience with UFOs. -- Sing For Science is a science and music podcast that pairs famous musicians and renowned scientists in conversation. The concept for each episode is that we take a song by our guest artist and discuss how it connects to our guest scientist’s area of expertise. Participating artists include Wilco, Sia, Run DMC, Blondie, Nick Kroll and dozens more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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really like. Sing for Science is a science and music podcast that pairs famous musicians and renowned scientists in conversation. Each episode takes a different song and breaks down how it relates to real research. Participants include Wilco, Run DMC, Blondie, Nick Kroll, and dozens more. So obviously that's an awesome concept for a show and one that Weirdest Thing fans are bound to love. But we've nabbed the exclusive premiere of an episode I'm especially excited about. It features two of my favorite things, the music of Modest Mouse and the Science of Mushrooms. Fellow Micology nerds will be thrilled to hear that Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock is chatting with Paul Stamett himself. And if you're not a Micology nerd, I'll just say,

say that there's a reason the writers of Star Trek Discovery named their space fungus expert after this guy. And I promise that you're going to be a mycology nerd by the end of the episode. Plus, Isaac and Paul aren't just talking about the joys of traipsing through the forest hunt for shrooms, which are so joyful. They get deep into the latest science on the use of psilocybin to treat mental illness, which is part of a massive psychedelic research boom that you should definitely be aware of. Okay, that's it for me. We'll be back soon with a regularly scheduled episode of the weirdest thing I learned this week. But for now, enjoy this little sneak peek of Sing for Science. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Sing for Science is made possible in part

by support from Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation. Today's episode was recorded remotely from British Columbia and Nashville, Tennessee. Don't forget to check out our episodes and please enjoy the show. The mycelium is in the ground for decades, sometimes hundreds of years. It's one cell wall thick surrounded by all these microbes, many of which want to consume it, but the mycelium is very smart and setting up an immune system that allows it to stay resident within the isotherm above freezing, below 110 degrees. And in that isotherm is the immunological window that has evolved, and from that immune system of the mushrooms, we can benefit. Welcome to Sing for Science, the show where musicians and scientists talk about music and science.

I'm your host, Matt White. Each week we'll talk about a song by our guest artist and how it connects with our guest scientists' area of expertise. Today we'll be speaking with Isaac Brock, lead singer of the band modest mouse. Their 2015 song, The Best Room, is a critique of typical Western lifestyles and includes the fungi-centric lyric, I'm going to bury my head in the woods right now, scan for some mycelium, and bring a little bit back to town. Also joining us is renowned mycologist Paul Stamets. Paul is perhaps the world's best-known mushroom expert, having written half a dozen books on the topic and been profiled in the chart-topping Netflix documentary, fantastic fungi. The focus of Paul's 40-plus-year career in mycology is the Northwest

native fungal genome mycelium. Research shows that during life's long history on our planet, it is only those organisms that paired with fungi that were the ones to survive. The title of this week's episode on the podcast is The Best Room, Upgrading Civilization Through Partnerships with Fungi. Hello, Isaac and Paul. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for having. Hey, how are you doing, man? Good. How are you? I'm good. A little worse for the wear. I hopped on the crew bus last night in order to make it here safe and sound.

Those people are pirates. They drink a lot. Is this song somehow connected to an experience with UFOs? Yeah, yeah, it actually is. It actually is. It's after I landed from, so I was flying from Montana to Phoenix to master a record called the Lonesome Crowd West. And now we got put in a holding pattern And I'm looking out of the window And it turns out Are you familiar with the Phoenix lights?

Yeah It's a UFOs event Well, that was the night And I was on a plane And so I initially see Basically just a discoloration I'm kind of looking at it I'm like, what is that?

And then a fighter pilot gets interested in it Which is let's say someone dispatched a jet And it was kind of scrambling This discoloration Then I noticed the second one and a second fighter pilot and then a helicopter and every you know and there's a by some at some point there's about 70s things I'm in a holding pattern and I think it probably I mean I I kind of lost track of time but I mean maybe maybe it was 15 minutes maybe it was you know that I was actually

on the same level kind of going by a case you know doing these little loops and I got to see the whole darn thing from a vantage point that when when they used government scientists to explain it away from like, oh, everyone who saw this sighting was on the ground and there was this time of day and this, and I was like, I was actually slightly above it. And yeah, they did. They ended up lightened up. They were appeared to be, you know, obviously

independent structures from one another or whatever vessels. But after I landed, after that event, my night kept getting interesting. So the song is only starts taking place after that event. Okay, so beyond the lyrics about mycelium that I quoted in the intro, I want to read read some of my favorites, and hopefully you can illuminate how this connects to the Phoenix Lights experience. You sing, the best room they have is the last room you want, and also

these Western concerns, we beg while we chew. I love that one. What is the combined meaning here that you're trying to get across and how it connects to the Phoenix Lights? That's the thing. This song doesn't actually have anything to do with the Phoenix Lights. It's a, like I said, after I hit the ground after that. My initial plan was like, you know, I was in my early 20s. I was like, I'm just going to go to the studio and sleep on the roof. This seems like a reasonable thing to do. And, you know, I'm walking and it turns out the area is much shittier than I thought.

The idea of climbing on the roof, I'm like, oh, this is a bad idea. The cops are going to get called. So I go and I find the cheapest hotel I can. And they give me a room. And the room they give me, I go to it, and there's actual. police tape, crime scene. It's padlocked. It's got, it's got crime scene tape all over it. And I'm like, you are aware that this is a crime scene. And they're like, oh, didn't, didn't even blink. Just reach for another key and handed it to me. And then I went in there and that thing.

It was basically a crime scene that they forgot to put tape on. My goodness. Yeah. Can you tell us about that lyric? I'm going to bury my head in the woods right now, scan for some mycelium and bring a little back to town. That's just basically lazy Lazy songwriting, which is to say it has nothing to do with the other part of the story. It's just what I enjoy doing. I like looking for edible like chantrelles,

Morales. Looking for chantrells, it's kind of one of my big hobbies because A, I can do it. I can identify them almost without fail. There's the fault, you know, the false chantrel. But yeah, I just tacked that into the song so I could sing that part. And it has nothing to do with any

linear story. It's just kind of a free-floating little moment of a song and another song. Sure. So you were well aware of Paul's work, because also I understand your brother studied under Paul many years ago. That's what I'm told, and I think 99, Ed Evergreen. Ansel Veskaya was his name. He since passed because Mount Rainier got him. He got by an avalanche.

He was like a boss rescue dude. He knew better, like, you know, to go camping on him, you know, ice sheet or something. and mid-spring is iffy at best, you know? Interestingly enough, I didn't realize that he, when he was studying under you, Paul, I did not realize this probably until after he passed away, and I was reading my selium running, and just flapping my gums about all the amazing information into it.

And finally, my dad just like, oh, yeah, your brother's studying under him. And I remember my brother, you know, living at my house with me and trying to cultivate mushrooms. But I didn't think that it was actually like because he was being educated on it. You know, I was like, that's what we're doing, I guess,

in the basement now. So I do wish I'd gotten a chance to talk to him about his experiences with you. Yeah, well, mushrooms are the great teachers. I'm just one person in the long lineage of thought leaders who are passing this knowledge forward, but we're all students of nature. And mycelium has a vast intelligence underneath our feet that can inform us in so many ways.

And it's surprising. And I'm really happy and excited that mushrooms have become the zeitgeist of our time, the metaphor of mycelium, connection, community. But it just keeps on getting bigger and more wonderful. So some of the things I'd love to share with you, Isaac and Matt in your audience, and the junction, the convergence of mycelium and music, I think, is a nice, nexus point to discuss you know a great thing about music and musicians is they bring people together as a community people come to hear great musicians such as

yourself but many relationships develop I just came from Burning Man I'm still kind of dusty right I saw the traffic it looked looked like you could see it from space oh my god some of my friends were 12 hours in line fortunately I was about five hours I left a day early but even the Burning Man at festivals and music festivals, you know, from so many musicians, Neil Young being an example, many other musicians in festivals are now having educational components. So lightning in the bottle, you know, Burning Man, many of these festivals, and saying, hey, we have an opportunity here. Not people coming together to listen to music, but this is the time for our culture to become

better educated about science. And so this program is a perfect convergence. of those two. So one of the things I'd like to share with you, which I think is a kind of blew my mind, I've been growing my cilium for over 40, 45 years. I'm 67. I don't feel 67, but I am. I've grown just lots and lots of species of 700 to 1,000 species in culture. And, you know, I did a lot of psilocybin mushrooms. I had a DEA license for many years at the Evergreen State College, so I can legally grow and study sulfide mushrooms. I was extremely careful and still am

in that regard. I have a motto, nature provides, I don't. Right. So throughout nature, folks, you know, you can find them on your own, but you have to be careful because of the poisonous species. But one of the epiphanies I've had recently in all the years, I've been studying mycelium under electron microscope,

and I think most everyone knows mycelium is. Just go outside to any log or stick on the ground, tip it over, you'll see mycelium. It's this fine thing. filamentous network and it's been estimated up to eight miles of mycelium in a single cubic inch. These are very, very fine filaments. But think of that, eight miles of mycelium in a cubic inch. That's amazing. More than a thousand species of bacteria can be in that cubic inch also.

So there is a constant communication and guilds of cooperating organisms are coming together. The mycelium sort of is a mantle, the foundation in the ecosystem. And then it selects the cooperating organisms that helps the plants ultimately grow to create the debris fields that feed the mycelium. So they're smart. They're deterministic. They're not going to engage pathogens that destroy the ecosystem. They're going to engage cooperators that help the ecosystem because the commons has benefited. And the lesson that I've learned is biodiversity is our biosecurity. Moreover, mycodiversity is our biosecurity. So the epiphany I have, with this background is these fine filaments of mycelium. It was recently discovered that sound

waves stimulate mycelium to grow. And started looking into this and I started playing around with it. And it turns out that low frequency sound waves, which travel a lot further than high frequency, we all know that. But these low frequency sound waves stimulate mycelium to grow. And then I just had this kind of a stoner epiphany putting these things together. Maybe I shouldn't say that. And I realized, oh my God, when lightning strikes, and it's been the folklore and First Nations of North America, in Europe, in Russia, and Japan, lightning strikes mushrooms form. Well, we know now that's actually true. After 50,000 volts of electricity stimulated in the Shetocchi logs can massively increase their yield. So I thought, okay, we know that electricity stimulates mycelium mushrooms to form from mycelium.

But now I thought, now wait a second, let's think about this. When lightning strikes or before lightning strikes, you hear thunder, the rolling waves of sound, low-frequency thunder on the horizon. Now, if you had evolved for literally hundreds of millions of years and you were in competition, you would awaken to the impending rain event, getting ready to absorb water. Okay. So as a low-frequency would stimulate mycelium to grow, it would then be ready for the ensuing rainfall and perhaps lightning strikes, less frequently, obviously, but the rain would come.

So when I realized that sound waves stimulated mycelium to grow, the epiphany I have is that nature is always listening via mycelium. Mycelium is like strings on a violin, strings on a piano, strings on a guitar. These are filaments that are sensitive to vibrations. And so that would mean then when the musicians come together in the forest or at a festival, and Isaac is playing his music, not only the people listening, the mycelium is listening. And it may well be that the mycelium is responding with joyous, bountiful nutrients. Because as the mycelium grows, it moves more nutrients in the ecosystem. So that being said, then there's more flowers, there's more berries, there's more nuts, there's

more food. So people coming together and celebrating with music, nature is responding with the nature is responding with the mycelial networks being invigorated and endorsing up-channeling nutrients to benefit the commons of the people who are coming together to celebrate. Now, this is where science and spirituality come to a convergence here.

I love that spot. And so interesting to me is this skeptics about us out there, you know, thinking about these very poetic philosophical ideas. So many of these ideas have been validated by science. Like, oh, mushrooms, former lightning strikes, oh, that's just folklore.

No, it's true. Oh, you know, sound stimulating mycelium to grow up. We know that's true. So think about that. When we celebrate nature in community with heart, with soul, with music, with happiness, nature's happy. Nature's happy that we're there. And if we honor nature and we pay attention, the nature will support our mission even more so. And so I think we're at this amazing stage in the evolution of humans where I think there's a, we're at this amazing stage in the evolution of humans where I think there's, a quantum leap in consciousness. And they work on psilocybin mushrooms, which I've been involved in for a long time, many decades. There's 101 clinical trials registered at clinical trials.gov. If you ever want to bring a drug to market, you have to be on clinical trials.gov.

101 clinical trials on psilocybin registered. Now think of that. They have to go through what's called IRB boards, institutional review boards, physicians, other scientists. And, you know, is it safe? Is it addressing a critical need? And can it be put into practice? Can it be scaled? There are some of the primary metrics that the review boards look at.

And it checks every one of those boxes. And there was just a recent study on alcohol use disorder, this published in JAMA psychiatry. So again, any skeptics out there, go to JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, and they found a statistically significant reduction in alcohol use with binge drinkers. So Isaac last night in Nashville. Right, exactly. It may have needed a few of this, but they found out that bin drinkers, four drinks

for women, women, five drinks for men per day. And then the habitual use of alcohol substantially was reduced if they had two sessions of psilocybin with therapy compared to therapy alone. Are these heavy, heavy sessions or like microdose sessions? No, these are heavy sessions, but we can talk about microdose. I do know a number of people who have quit very serious addictions to other things using psilocybin treatment in a controlled environment. Absolutely. Another article came out, I think April 22nd this year on opioid use disorder with similar results.

And this other study I mentioned is sort of a meta study observationally. and there is only one psychedelic that was associated with the reduction of opioid use, not LSD, you know, not ketamine, not MDMA, nothing, only psilocybin. Cilocybin seems to be uniquely positioned and being able to help us create new neurological pathways that can break out of the habits that have been deleterious. Why do you suppose that is that it's psilocybin over other hallucinogens? Because it's a neurotransmitter. Cilocybin itself is.

Is it? Yeah. Cilocybin defrostin. relates into sulson. Silicin is rock stable. Silicin is very, very fragile. But when you consume psilocybin, it defosphorylates, and silicin becomes a serotonin agonist. What that means is basically it substitutes and docs with a 5HT2A receptors and becomes the contact fluid, you might say, and opens up these pathways. Okay. And what has happened in the narrative that many scientists now, our thinking is a strong theory is that when you have these epiphanies of a high dose,

you have an opportunity of reset your neurological foundation sort of back to the beginning. And when you have these epiphanies, you think differently. You're in awe of nature, the unanimity of being. We're all connected. And then why am I doing this? Why is this drug controlling my life? And, you know, the other drugs. And so you have an opportunity of sort of, in a sense, almost being like reborn neurologically.

But then we found the study at Johns Hopkins that was so interesting is 14 months after the experience of a high dose of salcide, re-remembering the experience was therapeutically significant. Oh, really? 70% of the people had positive experiences. 30% of the people did not. The negative experience did not extend beyond the experience itself. So they said, oh, not for me. The 70% of people who had this epiphany experience re-remembering it brought back joy and peace

and the sense of gratitude, nephoria, and connection. So this is why we think macro-dosing, followed by microdosing, is probably the modality that's going to have the best benefit because it's just like muscle memory. You play the guitar, you put it down for a long time, you pick it up again. Right. you know, you get better. So, end up riding a bike. I mean, once you learn how to ride a bike, you kind of never forget how to ride a bike. You know, it may not be as coordinated, but you can ride a bike. So this idea of being able to revisit those neurological pathways that gave you

such sense of gratitude and connection and wanting to make your life better in this sense of love is huge. And so Solzibin's also been associated a reduction of crime, violent crime, larceny, burglary, partner-to-person violence, statistically significant again. So this is going to be an extraordinary thing for anyone involved in the judicial system and law enforcement, social workers, etc. psilocybin makes nicer people. Silicin reduces crime. Silicin reduces criminal behavior. If we can reduce violence due to alcohol, and alcohol,

with some people, you stimulate violent behavior. We all know that. But the idea that people could become kinder, more empathetic, less prone to road rage, more forgiving. The ripple effect is enormous. Yes. Now, my son has been in prison for opioid use. What we're seeing now, and what we're so excited about with these studies with alcohol and opioid use and other addictive behaviors is there's a really a tremendous opportunity to fundamentally reduce crime, reduce addiction, and to create more, you know, kinder, smarter, nicer people. But what is really extraordinary to me is that we have an opportunity right now with the fact that the FDA has declared self-siving as a least toxic drug.

they've ever looked at with the most potential for psychiatric benefit. Wow. There's no LD-50 for Solz Ivan right now. LD-50B. The lethal death that will kill 50% of rats. So the LD50 that was published, and I did the conversion on this, is about, I think, 15 kilograms of dried cuvences, slas to be cuvences, the saltive mushroom. That'll take a while.

You'd have to consume eat. Yeah. You'll probably die from dehydration. And even that metric is highly questionable because I think they did eight rats and one of them died. So they just made this speculation. So functionally, there is no LD-50. There is no toxicity of this drug that can have such a powerful medical effect. Paul, you know, earlier you used the phrase quantum leap in the context of psilocybin and what's that done for our species.

And I don't know if it's that you're one of the greatest living storytellers or if the story of fungi and specifically psilocybin is one of the greatest ever told. But regardless, I was hoping you could regale our listeners with Terrence McKenna's Stone-Dape hypothesis. Thank you for saying a hypothesis. So for the audience, hypothesis is a speculative set of ideas which, you know, are not yet rooted in fact. a theory is a hypothesis that's now been populated with factual support. And so, of course, there's a kind of a gray area, from a hypotheses to theories. But Terrence's hypothesis was during a time of climate change

when there was increased loss of forests, our primate ancestors who were living in the forests, then in search for food. And the majority of over 20, 23 primates eat mushrooms. Mushrooms, as Isaac knows, they harvest fly larvae. The majority of primates

eat grub, larvae of insects as a protein source. Mushrooms grow grub. When they get old, flies are attracted to them, eggs are laid, and the mushroom to get the rot. So they're swarming with little worms and maggots. So their idea was that

as our primate ancestors experienced desertification and climate change, loss of forests, they'd be tracking animals. Animals have scat, dung, mushrooms, slascavencis is glaringly obvious. If you've ever collected it, it's huge, like light bulbs going off. You can see them in Louisiana and Texas and Florida, going down the highway 55 miles an hour. You can see slasovicubensis growing in the pastures. Very easy to find. And so imagine you're a clan, your small family groups, you're going across, you're hunting animals. What do you look for, footprints in scat, you see poop, mushrooms are coming out of it. You're hungry.

You grub. You eat the mushrooms. So that's what they thought would stimulate this kind of perhaps a evolution of the human species. They were roundly criticized. You know, it was like, you know, the skeptics came out of the woodwork. And I would caution people, Galileo was criticized. Be very circumspect and careful about your skepticism of some of these ideas because I think now we know they're quite actually,

it looks more and more plausible in terms of neurogenesis. And if I can just say the, so the Stone Day hypothesis, this is to account for this missing link or something that can help explain how we made these huge advances in cognition from our primate ancestors, right? Well, yeah. Our species, Homo sapiens, is estimated to be just a little bit more than 200,000 years in age. We're a recently evolved species.

That's actually a lot more recent than I thought. Yeah, magnolia trees have been around for maybe 100 million years. So, you know, many species that we have today have been resident for tens of millions of years. and we've only been in existence for 200,000, what sparked that sudden split from the hominidate tree and evolution? It's an unexplained phenomenon. So Terrence and Dennis were trying to address this with this hypothesis. So as much fun and criticism as they received,

we know now that, in fact, psilocybin and psilocybin analogs, these are tryptomines related to psilocybin, that co-occur, in fact, do stimulate neurons to grow. So we have excellent evidence that gets into a little bit of science here, but they're called Mapcanases. These are receptor proteins, which when they are docked with, stimulate neurons into regrowth or cause stem cells to become neurons in the hippocampus. That's neurogenesis.

There's neurogenesis, which is newborn neurons from stem. cells, there's neurogeneration, which is just what it sounds like, cells are generating. There's no regeneration when neurons begin to atrophy or slow down, and then neurodegeneration, those atrophying neurons then regrow. And all of this ties into what's called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the cross-talk between the synapses, you know, and these nexus points in the neurons are then cross-talking. And that's what we think is happening. with psilocybin and making people change their behavior is that you have more synaptic junctions that are being activated.

So you have better and alternative and more enjoyable ways of thinking. You get out of despair. So what I was going to go back to is, and I'll return to neurogenesis, when my son got put into prison, there is a ripple effect of negativity that goes out from criminal behavior.

It affects not only the victim and the perpetrator and their families, but their neighbors, the community, the city, the state, the nation, the world. Solzibon is the opposite. When you meet somebody who's had this incredible experience, the ripple effect of positivity, you don't want to talk about things that are negative, but you really want to talk about things that are positive. Oh, my gosh, I know this person who is an addict who is violent. They did Solzibin, their life has been changed. Those stories have momentum, mycelial momentum, and like a pebble being put into a pond of positivity, it helps society. So what we have found now, we published two papers in Nature, Scientific Reports, 1 November 28, 2021 on microdosing. There's an app called at microdose.me.

It's an observational people respond. We have about 20,000 people now responding on their waves. of microdosing what they're taking, how much, what they're taking it with. The signal that we got that was outside any possibility of expectation was something called the tap test. How many times you can tap your two fingers and 10 seconds? Now, in age, when you're 22, you can tap real fast. When you're 82, you cannot. So it is a validated test for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, traumatic brain injury. I've had friends who've fallen and hit their heads and hockey players, football players, and they did do the tap test. Many traumatic brain injuries self-resolved, so the tap test begins

to return, not all. Many don't, but some do. But Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and dementia, it is a slope downhill. And so what we found that was so surprising is that I came up with a stack of Sulzibin, Nyasin, and Lyons mane. And about 28% I believe, of the people in microdosing were using this stack that I popularized. And the scientists, other scientists that colleagues did not want to tell, show me the data until they attacked the data three different times. Did you say niacin? Niacinic acid, the flushing form.

Okay, right. The reason being I added niacin to microdose nicotine because psilocybin is a vasoconstrictor. Okay. Niasin's a vasodilator. So I thought with vasodilation, you can get more of the beneficial properties of psilocybin or in psilocybin. or in silicin to your neurons. And then I also thought, when you take niacin, you feel you get itchy.

Yeah. And your nerve endings are excited. And I go, well, that's cool. Let's get psilocybin to your nerve endings. And then neuropathies oftentimes present themselves in a deadening the fingertips and the toes. So I thought, that's the vascular system collapsing. So, and then I thought, well, this is also like the antibuse for alcoholics. If you add enough niacin for a microdose, someone trying to macrodose would have.

have such a horrible experience from the niacin flush. Yeah. They wouldn't want to do that again. So I'm trying to get it so it's a neurotropic vitamin that everyone can use without the FDA saying this is a harmful potential drug. Okay. So I'm trying to get the thresholds down to a point where it would be permissible to be allowed for the universality of use.

And that's what I'm trying to enable here. So in our second paper in nature, we found something extraordinary. In the 55-plus-year-olds, I'm in that category, the tap test of alternating fingers of frequency went from 48 taps to 69 taps in 30 days. Silocybin in any other form had no effect, only with a stack of niacin, lion's main, and psilocybin. And moreover, it's called the P-value of significance with 0.004. that means one chance and 250 that it's just random. So with that degree of significance,

now, and you have to think, this is uncontrolled, the amount of Sulz Ivan that people are taking in the black market, variability and potency, people take it three times, five times a week, Nyerson, they're taking it different amounts, Lions may take it into amounts. All those would dilute significance. You've talked to any statistician, those variables would go up, not to, down. So we think we found something as a game changer is that Solzibon, Nyasin, and Lionsman, in combination, stimulates neurogenesis. And so then we spent literally over a million dollars, taking me to the mat on this, this is true. I spent over a million dollars on the mechanisms of action, the cellular mechanism of action. Because once we saw the signal of the tap test,

I thought, well, how many regions of the brain were involved in tapping your two fingers? Okay. Turned out, there's six regions of the brain. You visually see, you look at your fingers, you ideate, you send a signal, you get a feedback loop, and there's actually a paper on this, and how many regions the brain are involved in tap test. So the fact that these 55-plus-year-olds increased in their psychomotor demonstration cannot be explained by a placebo or expectancy. But think of this. Isaac, you know, as a musician, guitar players, piano players, as they get older, they actually might be able to get better as musicians.

And so I think microdosing, I said this also speaks to coordination. What if we reduced 5% of the elderly falling and breaking their hips? Many of us know elderly people fall, they break their hips, they get an infection, they go to the hospital, they die. So if we could just increase the agility of humans, people as they age, then we can reduce accidents. We can increase neurological function. So this potentially could be a game changer. So we have a clinical trial in 20, 23 designed for Parkinson's patients because they're the ones that, unfortunately, there's no medicines to help them.

That's right. So we're designing clinical studies to be able to test this. So I think it's a potential breakthrough. So that's a paradigm shift that I wanted to answer your question from the beginning. How have like studies about Alzheimer's in particular, Ben? Is Alzheimer's or any other mushrooms, for that matter, affect it? Well, there is, I populate a website for scientists and physicians. It's not branded, no advertising, mushroom references.com.

There is four clinical trials on Lionsman, one with Alzheimer's, one with progressive dementia, And it showed that the consumption of lions main mushroom mycelium, by the way, not mushrooms, not the fruit bodies, the mycelium is much more active. It was able to ameliorate the downslide neuropathy as long as they took the lion's mane. When they stopped taking the lion's mane mycelium, then they reverted back into this neurodegeneration demonstration of behavior. So what we're doing by adding psalcybin, it just, it actually helps regenerate neurons. And so we have found now, we found now these receptors that when we add niacin by itself, no stimulation and neuro regeneration, lions main by itself, no stimulation, solacidine by itself, no stimulation, all three together, massive, massive stimulation.

It's called the entourage effect. And so the ontological effect of three of these together is causing these map kinase receptor proteins to be activated, which then stimulate nerves to grow. That's crazy. And so mycelium is kind of like the roots of a tree, whereas the mushroom stem and cap are like the tree itself. Yeah, you can see the fruits of the tree is analogous to the fruit of the mycelium, and the fruit of the tree is coming from the root-like structure. But this is the thing to think about. The mushrooms themselves are high in protein, they're high in polysaccharides, beta glucans.

They're a great source of nutrition. But mycelium is different. There's an article that's published on rishi mushrooms that show that 25% more genes are activated in the mycelial state than in the mushroom state. It makes sense. It has to navigate through all these microbial,

really hostile community. so these lots of immune defenses. At the end of this life cycle, the mycelium compacts into a mushroom, which is nutritionally dense. So for food, a few exceptions here, but mushrooms are nutritionally dense as foods, mycelium is rich in the compounds that can upregulate your immunity and be able to help you better survive. And, you know, Isaac, one of the things that I know, and maybe you could phrase this better than I, but you had wanted to talk to Paul about the, I guess, maybe sort of the analogous network expressions of mycelium elsewhere, either in brains or in nature, and the stars. Yeah, the mycelium basically, correct me if I'm wrong, is a neural pathway, right?

It's its own brain. That analogy is increasingly being substantiated. We know that electrical conductivity now in signaling through the mycelial networks. which I postulated decades ago, but this past year, articles have been published just recently showing that these are neuroconductive networks as well. I just today read something that was saying that they actually, like the mycelium might actually use words to communicate with other things,

which is, I'm not sure how they get to that point to figure that out, but they might be you. Any insight on that? Yeah, the electrical impulse, were disambiguated to, I think they found 25 discrete word packets, you might call them. You know, again, we're guilty of trying to extrapolate our terminology. Exactly, yeah, yeah. To an organism that the words.

Anthropamorifies this. Yeah, that's one of that that was just recently discovered. I'm sure that the word bank of mycelium is going to be encyclopedic. Right. Because it's not only just individual words, it's like we put words into sentences. And as you mix these things up, there's cross-talk. And that's how our ideas are expressed. That's how I'm able to express my ideas right now.

And so I think as we look at these networks, and especially when they put it to be in contact with other microorganisms, this is where this collaboration or competition comes in. And the mycelium is so good at setting up guilds where these communities, have in common their own mutual self-preservation. And so that's what I think is a lesson that we all need to learn, is that communities survive better than individuals. And investing in communities, we actually invest in our own personal, self-serving survival

because the long view is far more important than the short view. Right. If I have a minute to ask a few questions, Please. One of the things that when I read the book Mycelium writing that I really, really loved about it and took away was, you know, mushrooms ability to break down complex things, oils, for instance, you know, petroleums and things, like kind of tear them apart on a molecular level and turn them into food, right? That's correct. And you figured out you had, you know, like at that point in time, you debris sacks with mushrooms in them that you'd use to clean up various things. logging roads would repair quicker, damaged soils,

would go back to being usable and healthy soils again. And did anyone like really like the forestry service or any types of business that actually, you know, like grab this? I tried to scale this. I taught lots of people how to do this as totally open source. And I wish, you know, and I hope people make advantage of this more. And people are. It's just breaking into the waste management industry as a Goliath that is a fortress that's protected.

So, adoption of these has been slow. However, we received a grant from NASA on astromycology. Asteroids have a material called regolith. Regolith is rich in hydrocarbons. So our work in breaking using oyster mushrooms is to break down oil-saturated soil. with the Battelle Laboratories. This got to be well known. So a group associated with NASA approached us. We received a grant with them. And we were able to demonstrate that oyster mushroom mycelium will break down regular. It breaks down the hydrocarbons. It splits the bonds,

and it reconstitutes them as sugars, as polysaccharides, carbohydrates. Right. So the hydrocarbons are separated. They're recombined as carbohydrates, and These are sugars which drive life. So we now have two experiments successfully completed. We have white paper, which will be coming out. But this idea of taking mushrooms into space in astromicology now is, quote, unquote, taken root. And I always wanted to be one of the first astromycologists. And so this is kind of a dream come true.

That's great. Well, wait a minute. Don't you have a character on Star Trek named after you, Paul? Yeah. Oh, really? I'm happy to say they did not kill off my character yet. Anthony Rapp is an amazing job. I spent about two hours for the writers of Star Trek. They called me up and say, we're in the dungeon. We saw your TED Talk. We saw my silly I'm running. You have any ideas? And I said, turn on your tape recorder.

And I just, you know, download it for an hour and a half. And I said, you can have all this information for free. I don't want any credit. You know, I'm a Star Trek lover. Science fiction can help science facts. The great thing about Star Trek is the acceptance of diversity, the prime directive, quote, unquote, and the idea that our diversity empowers us all. So I said, you have a great opportunity of helping young people formulate a better future. And then at the very end, I said, you know, I always wanted to be the first astramechologist. And they chuckled. And then I got a contract, and I signed my life away on terms of Star Trek.

Yeah. And then they ended up creating a character after me. So I think I'm a lieutenant commander now, Paul Stammerz, on Star Trek. Lieutenant Commander Paul Stamets. Yeah, I got promoted. Wow. Yeah, when you're talking about the mycelium actually like breaking down oils, has there been any work done on plastics?

You know, that's a very tough nut to crack. And I didn't know whether there was any proof that mycelium was able to do that or hope. Yeah, there are several endothetic fungi that have been discovered. I think one from the Costa Rica that breaks down plastic. It obviously takes longer. The microplastic pollution of our food chain is as dramatically threatening as climate change. It's a really huge issue. and far better to design new plastics that will fungi can more easily break down.

Never underestimate the power of fungi. The issue that we face is our timeline of our lifespan versus the evolution of these organisms to break down toxins. Will the remediation of its toxins with fungi be focused and powerful enough for us to observe it within our lifetime? That's the challenge. challenge. Over hundreds of years, thousands of years, these fungi will break down all the shit. You know, I'm convinced of that. You can't break down heavy metals. You can keelate them and

make them insoluble. So I'm not saying you can break down heavy metals, but all the pesticides, all the petroleum products, ultimately they all are decomposable, just finding out the best species. For instance, the United States has these massive oil reserves that we all know about those. The oil cannot be stored for more than about two years. The reason why is mold start growing on the oil. Oh, no kidding. So that's how microremediation was first discovered is that anyone having oil sitting in their barn or something for 10 years, you go out there and there's mold growing over the oil, and it separates

it from water into other components. So fungi break down all sorts of petroleum-based products and most hydrocarbons. Much more easily, these chains of molecules used in plastic production are a lot more recalcitrant and much more difficult for those molecular bonds to be broken down. That's far out. Okay. Chernobyl. Didn't they find giant mushrooms like around that?

And they were basically, you know, not able to break down the radioactive material, but turned into very great ways to remove it from the source. soil and kind of story. It's an amazing story is that in the remote cameras they had around the reactor that had melted down, over a million rads of radioactivity. This is lethal. They saw something beginning to grow on this concrete walls, and it was a black mold. Now there's no light in there.

And they said when in the sample what was growing, it turned out as a species of fusarium, it's a mold, and some other molds. they produce melanin, the same pigment on your skin, they become dark upon sunlight. So this led to an extraordinary discovery is that mycelium can benefit from radiation and use it for metabolism in a way analogous that light is used by plants for photosynthesis. Okay. Think of that. And the dark stars of the universe, fungi can use radioactivity for our life cycles, then that can break down regolith and hydrocarbons to generate soils for the organisms.

I mean, that I believe nature begets life. Molecules code for single organisms. Single organisms become strings of organisms, become chains, become networks. and that inevitably matter creates life. And I think we're in this vast continuum in this biomolecular universe. All of us are going to decompose, but we came from the decomposition of our ancestors and the plants and animals prior to us.

So we're all part of this nutrient recycling system. We will live forever. And I had an extraordinary psychedelic trip recently. And the one word that I got out of this trip, and the other trips I've had is like, Paul, step up for the earth, be a warrior, you know, save the planet, etc. This was very different. It was just one word that I got. And the word was existence. We will always exist.

Our atoms will always exist. Our atoms may reassemble into molecules in different forms. Can't remove anything from the universe. Yeah, we have a perpetuality of existence. It's just this form that we have. is temporal. So it made me feel a lot better, frankly, because I'm going to die, I've been told. No. It's nice, nice to know. Well, guys, I cannot thank you both enough. This has been really incredible to have both you together.

Both of you too. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Matt. And a shout out to all you, all you musicians. When you are playing, you're not playing music, just the people in the audience. Nature is listening, and nature is listening through these vibrational filaments. in the ground called mycelium. So you are, you are noble messengers of goodwill that inspire not only people, but enliven the ecosystem to give us more sustenance because we're all in this ship together. It's just that mycelium is one of the greatest pilots in the evolution of nature that we have. See Isaac with modest mouse on the lonesome crowded West 25th anniversary tour happening this fall.

Learn more about Paul's work in the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi or on his company's website, fungi perfecti.com. Sing for Science is co-produced by Talkhouse and made possible in part by a grant from Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation. Our music is by Panoran. Our mix engineer is Lou Carloso. Social media manager is Bailey Constis,

and digital producer is Kenan Cush. Special thanks to Lindsay Charbo, Robin Lanninen, Dana Erickson, Janelle Pagulayam, and Tobias Luong for their help with today's show. If you liked today's episode, please tell a friend about the show and give us a review and some stars. For more information, go to SyncforScience.org and follow us on social media at SyncforScience. Thanks for listening.