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