Joe Rogan Experience #1035 - Paul Stamets

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 and I'm honored he 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 foam nice momentary oh so it was on birch trees throughout the world but this is an example of why I think shamanistic aliy plants mushrooms become significant there's a plurality of benefits so this mushrooms a fire starter mushroom it allowed for the portability of fire there's no doubt that we came from Africa we migrated north we discover something new called winter oops this allowed for the portability of fire you can hollow this mushroom out put embers of a fire inside and carry fire for days if your clan could not rekindle fire in Europe in the wintertime you would die so when you this has actually made by some ladies in Transylvania yeah and it's a hardwood conk oh well 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 it's extremely flammable so revolutionize warfare because during the Napoleonic Napoleonic times this is the the Punk that ignited gunpowder even the Chinese invented you know the Chinese invented gunpowder the Europeans and that had the rifle so this loud Flint's bark guns to ignite the gunpowder this feels amazing it is as high get a piece can you get that's a great question depending on the size of the conch on beats trees are much bigger than birch these 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 have actually I have one that caught on fire because I'm gonna be smoking a joint near me and the and the embers of the joint got on my hat they just immediately go up no it burns really slowly so it's a fuse it's a fantastic for delayed explosions it's because you can light this thing and beekeepers for hundreds of years use this for smoking the hives of bees because it's it's just we could we could light it now I mean the whole thing with one flick of the BIC and this thing will smoke entirely in about 10 minutes and turn nothing to nothing into white ash Wow your fire alarms may go off though yeah and so with this thing this larger piece they would hollow this out put an ember in there what they have they'll have to blow on the Ember as they hello well you could blow on a little bit and you cap it and then you can put it in your pocket the famous Iceman that was found in the border of EA 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 right handed you this on the right side so there's a this one example is we have a threat of knowledge of use of mushrooms that goes over millennia and most of those threads have been frayed or broken and in the chain of knowledge but this is one of the threads that was not broken and it's significant I think it's we were much more dependent upon mushrooms and when we were forced people than we are now seemingly in the cities but this coming full circle very quickly well mushrooms are weird in that some of them are incredibly edible and nutritious and other ones I'll kill you and sometimes they look really similar to each other well this is with the mystery of mushrooms and I think it speaks to also Michael phobia the fear of mushrooms done mmm our Gordon Watson first coined that term but but we think about it in your visual landscape with animals you see them for months years and plants so you have a very already factored 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 for a long and sexual use of mushrooms going back you know and our primate of evolutionary tree for a very very long time what how many species of mushrooms are there you know that you asked me that question five years ago I would have said 1.5 million and now we're up to about five million just being is being estimated well plant fungi outnumber plants five to ten to one and I just you know I 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 thirty percent of the soil mass when you're walking on soil the thirty percent of the biological carbon is fungal and the biggest because whoa whoa whoa say that again thirty percent thirty percent of soil is fungal mass living in dead of healthy soil so 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 about right now about half of those or fungal species the outnumber plants up to eight to one ten to one by 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 2200 feet so that that the extensiveness of the mycelial network in our landscapes is vast and it's a you is I called Earth's natural Internet this is a these are membranes that are literally sensitive I think they're sentient they respond to every footprint that we take on this planet and as you walk across landscapes you're breaking wood and that makes new nutrition available so the composition of fungi to find that new new nutrition is fierce and so first to the menu wins so this is something that we are now understanding how essential they are for preserving biodiversity and for the health of the ecosystems as well as our own personal health so when you say you think they're sentient to what degree I mean and you're not talking about just like psilocybin yes we're kind of intellectually provincial and that we are using language invented terms and order to describe concepts that we're trying to we're struggling with so the let me describe it this way that we separated from fungi 650 million years ago maybe you did dude I know some people that are probably still well basically we we are descendants of fungi yeah we share more common interests with fungi than we do with any other kingdom and fungi are closer to animals and the art of plants animals came from funshine 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 a 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 about to encapsulate our nutrients in a cellular soccer stomach digesting our nutrients within the fungal systems digest their nutrients externally they exhale oxygen inhale carbon dioxide and their network like design allows them to respond to catastrophe and what I mean by that is that the my silicone 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 poly nuclei at the tips and it allows them to upregulate new enzymes acid sequences etc so if there's a new ecological challenge a new food source a new toxin or something the these fungal networks are so a 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 my silikal network and the micelle immense surges because it has new food logically and so when it surges name creates a new was called a sector of mycelium we now know there's evidence that that my silikal 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 problem probably fungal systems and fungal systems ultimately give rise in our case animals it's more likely we'll find fungal animal relationships all 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 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 within the animal kingdom that we haven't discovered well that stimulates my thought into and talking about the microbiome the mycelium 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 the the many of the bacterial diseases that in fact fungi also affect us our best antibiotics against bacteria come from fungi penicillin being the obvious example but we have found now doing such next-gen sequencing and this has never been published before that the mycelial mats growing in the very same wood chips in our case that had been fermented we had a thousand full difference in the relative abundance of genre of bacteria from the very same wood chips to different mushroom species planted on those wood chips and the micro biomes of that were created and selected for by the mycelium were vastly different this really strongly supports the concept is the hypothesis was quickly becoming a theory I was committing the difference in a minute but this really supports the concept that I've long believed in a spouse that these mice in little networks are not just happenstance they are just you're creating the habitats in the flora and then ultimately the fauna that are resident within the ecosystem to guarantee the plurality in the biodiversity of the ecosystem by creating the plants that crea that grow up that feed the animals the insects to create the debris fields and that feed the mycelium for the benefit of progeny of the mushrooms out 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 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 my celly I'm running how mushrooms can help save the world and and he goes Paul you cannot say that mycelium is intelligent and you can't say nature is intelligent I go wait bill I respect you but you didn't realize that hypocrisy of the statement that you're giving me you're telling me nature is not in and yet you are born of nature using the mind to conceive the concept that challenge the idea that nature is not intelligent when you are part of nature I rest my case yeah that's that's in defense so yeah so we're you know 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 it though you have a word use that word the word is very clearly defined in our ID thank you thank you yes you know we Lent languages code hmm and we don't have we haven't elaborated the code yet to elucidate the concepts that we're trying to articulate that does not mean just because you can't prove it's true doesn't mean it hasn't happened right so as our vocabulary increases you know as our lexicon of language increases it got more robust then I think we can better better describe tests and and prove that these concepts are true but we you know we're biologically provincial when we think about how limited we are we're truly new Neanderthals with nuclear weapons I mean this is when you look at the how how important natural ecosystems are try to replicate them they're very very difficult to replicate due to their complexity so I think the more that we study nature most all of us scientists that subscribe to the adage that the more we study this subject the more we realized we didn't know and the hubris of us thinking that these things cannot occur did not occur will not occur it really speaks to our provincial attitude towards nature the idea that these fungus fungi are creating their environment and and almost they're the architects of this environment they're they're establishing the landscape for all these different creatures and and life-forms to live is unbelievably fascinating that the idea that the and also that they're connected right they're connected in some sort of almost like a neural network and there's um what is that thing in the Pacific Northwest the one fungus group that's it 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 2200 acres in size and that's equivalent to about 665 football fields and that's one animal is one my a little man one my Suleiman is a honey mushroom that kills trees it's an edible mushroom but think of this I mean think so for those listeners out there if any soil biologist know this well if you go out and get some nice rich soil a gram of it and you analyze it the typically is a million five million microbes per gram in that soil then the mycelium is growing out we have five or six skin layers that protect us from the infection the mycelium only has one cell wall on the other side cell wall or hundreds of millions of microbes for ground that are trying to consume it many of which the mycelium is able to up regulate and 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 is constantly in in communication with the ecosystem being challenged accepting alliances so guilds of micro biomes are being created selected by the mycelium and these guilds in communities that cooperate in order to prevent pathogens parasites even competing guilds from coming into the landscape so the dominance of these fungi are to ensure the ecosystems that give lives their progeny the rule of natural selection of 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 and reproduction through creating guilds of communities the microbiome using the mycelium network as the structural foundation of the food web seems to be the name of the game here so this honey mushroom is what its camp and that lives in the Pacific Northwest how is it killing these trees it's a root parasite so it comes in and kills the trees and I spend a lot of time in the old-growth forests and a lot of hiking I've always been one wondering about meadows in the subalpine regions there's all these subalpine forests and then you come out and is giant meadows I suspect that the this honey mushroom is a meadow maker it climaxes these trees it kills them they then die and then they grow physically but then it clears the canopy for the grasses but it was a prophetic music is growing on dead material so first is a pair of media mushrooms - mushrooms first as a parasite kills the tree then I say saprophyte or sap probe that's another word for it it's a decomposer it it breaks down that material but as it decomposes the wood 30% of wood becomes water so the mycelium generates water as the water lenses are being created the Goethe now you have more sunlight grasses and flourish and so I've suspected that these mushrooms are actually meadow makers allowing then the elk and the deer and marmots and whatnot to exist in those Crossland environments it's a way of rebuilding the nitrogen a source in the soil so I think these are over great and huge the 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 they're sort of the architects of their ecosystem there are the architects of our existence this is something that there's some really fantastic research that's come out in the past two years I'm I'm a science ambassador for the Triple A estimates from the vastness science so I am a little bit out there but I'm really happy that I have so much scientific support these days because a lot of things I've been talking about for 20 years are now about well rooted and been proven one of the things that that has been so fascinating to me and I'm still wrapping my mind around this but you know the universe has created about 13.8 billion years ago from the Big Bang the earth coalesce autostart us about 4.5 billion there are the earliest records of life we have is about 3.8 billion years ago single-celled single-celled organisms but just recently and Lava Beds in south africa they found my psyllium infused to the lava 2.4 billion years ago now we split from fungi 650 million years ago and then in Brazil last 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 as its form grew was growing 1.4 billion years ago we were we separated from Funday 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 the one from Brazil so this is the pause as though the image that you're familiar with yeah this is the the one as that that has just been published in the past they have a great name as a tongue twister to pronounce Gondwana a garis I DS Magnificence why do they do that do they do that to make people like me feel stupid they don't have to students want to publish papers instead they can invent names so it looks better if you have a long Latin sounding name so but think of that mushrooms had their form before we had ours yeah these are elders these these are ancient organisms these are the really the overlord under Lords of our ecosystem and I suspect and as these neural networks they have more neural connections into my Sileo master 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 to interface with them because I think that there is a there is many benefits of us communicating with mycelium that can give us rapid responses to catastrophic that's how they've evolved and we're now the biggest walking catastrophe that I know I'm walking across the planet and we need to engage these fungal allies for the benefits that we need to put into plate 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 very confusing to us like the idea of fungal intelligence the idea that you could somehow or another understand the language that these things we wouldn't we don't even understand dolphin language right well what a classic example Japanese are so clever at this they there's a slime mold you know called Phi cerium poly supplement and they had a and this slime mold is very very good at navigating through mazes and challenges I mean first of food wins the conservation of energy you know is rewarded so I set this up they did several experiments the fun most fun one is they they designed a nutrient basic a nutrient like maze replicating Tokyo and 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 basic and Agra map with all the major cities the nodes around Tokyo and they then makes each of those nodes had a piece of oat on them was a source of nutrition the main boat was where Tokyo was they inoculated it and then they let the slime mold then grow and first I grew out randomly exploratory really you know just like you would do do if you're a hunter or something you're hunting on the landscape looking for things and then after about twenty eight hours it reorganized itself in the most efficient way possible and reorganize 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 Wow so this is the tip of the proverbial mycelial iceberg you know this is as broad implications and I just want people to suspend their disbelief and this goes into it actually the evolution of human consciousness and Terence Mckenna was a good friend of mine I love Terrence I especially love them the last five years of his life because he made fun of himself so much Terrence people who took Terence way too seriously in many levels but as his brother Dennis which I think has been on your show a couple times this is a great ally great scientists but you know Dennis said even if 10% of what Terence said was true it's freaking amazing and Terence and Dennis both came up with a stained stoned a theory now it's not a theory it's a hypothesis a hypothesis is speculative but cannot necessarily be as not yet proven a theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and proven with facts so I disagree with them and saying it's not theories on hypothesis but the hypothesis is the stone a part of the stone Dave which I think you've alluded to before is that with climate change and as a savannas increase in our primate ancestors came out of that are the forest canopies there they're tracking across the savanna and if you're a hunter what do you look you look for footsteps you look for Scott and the most significant fleshy mushroom bang out of poop and in Africa hippopotamus elephants you know deer antelope etc is sloppy cubensis it's a very large mushroom you're hungry you're with your clan you consume it and then 20 minutes later you're you are catapulted in this extraordinary experience psilocybin substitutes of serotonin becomes a better trip neurotransmitter activates neurogenesis it causes new neurons to form new pathways of knowledge so that's a stone date hypothesis and it speaks to a mystery that the human brain basically the brain cavity doubled in size in about two million years some people say is less is to less than 200,000 Homo sapiens around 200,000 years Homo sapiens arrived at 200,000 300,000 years ago that's a big gap right is it big guy well the science is like that you want you know to be scientifically accurate here I need to show the the extreme margins of what's been estimated so if we accept two million years that the innocents shown in the fossil record this is true the oldest Homo sapiens fossils are three hundred thousand years old now but we have a subtle 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 asked 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's eating these mushrooms huge amounts of data is coming in fractal patterns geometrical you know landscapes occur you have empathy you have greater courage you're fighting a sable sable saber-toothed tiger you know one day you're you have a fear of it we know now from neurogenesis and the extinction of the fear response that has been clinically proven psilocybin allows you to re set and have different neurological pathways to respond to fear overcoming the fear conditioned response potentially PTSD and there's a lot of research on this currently so but this wouldn't happen one time with one hominid group what happened two times ten times having millions and millions and millions and millions of times over millions and millions of years this leads to what I think is called this should be called epigenetic neurogenesis we know that there's a regeneration of neurons we know this all Saabs substitutes to serotonin it opens the floodgates of the senses you have a lot more data coming in and we know that it has the extinction of the fear response so if you're the leader of your clan you've had this traumatic event either a war or Cataclysm from earthquakes whatever the case may be or encounter 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 didn't take note of it people like to fall 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 for the net 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's 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 know so good I can understand are you sure here's gonna be here in an hour and a half and he's the creator of shroom fest he's gonna be very upset with your idea that you shouldn't party with it well I think there's greater benefit to myself and and humanity I think these are serious tools California has it you know I'm sure you're probably aware there it's up for legalization yeah I was really quite surprised by that ya know my work in did put some caveats here all my work is covered by a Drug Enforcement Administration license I've published now four new species in the genus philosophy including the most potent psilocybin mushroom in the world called Selassie our essence and to be clear folks nature provides I don't so Linda I have my DEA license I mean everyone I suspect there was a DEA agent who came to me and wanted to get some salts Ivan probably got set up a bunch time numerous times appointment at all it was it was for it the point was pretty funny you know 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 presented two hundred three hundred thousand dollars and and he was writing all these coded letters and they really it was obviously a DEA agent trying to set me up and and finally got really frustrated because I was playing with a guy I said I'm tired of being set up like this I'm just gonna play this sucker you know and so it finally came to a point and you got really really frustrated you get mad at me because well how much money I go there's not enough money on this planet for me to ever give you a solo Simon mushrooms so give it up so but but if you say that's not enough money could that be taken in as a negotiation well not enough money on the planet I smell some alien gotta come not enough money on the planet yeah afford not enough money it was not enough money right before that goes tell you know what see think that like if you had like a really you know loosely interpreting judge you come I suppose up I never committed a criminal act so I am but it's isn't it sort of like conspiracy - I'm not a lawyer I wouldn't have I mean you have to keep things in context yeah I wouldn't play yeah 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 playing with me waste of your time gonna play with you universe the table so but in any event this is serious research yes and that's um it's something that unfortunately because it can't be marginalized by the party atmosphere and yeah this is a party drug there's a really amazing study that just came out about five days ago it's at Big Data study four hundred and forty thousand people the prisoners were surveyed over ten years and the Department of Human and 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 and that population compared to the people who did not take assault on mushrooms an 18% reduction in burglary and and larvae and larceny and up to a twenty seven percent reduction and other crimes including violent crimes so that for Mama X I got my numbers reversed is 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 possession suicide mushrooms or something like that but think of the return on investment a four to six hour experience creates a lifetime benefit to society reducing criminal activity by 18 to 27 percent this is phenomenal mmm this is this is something that can help the health of our of our human psyche of our of our social system of reducing trauma throughout in our entire society it's time for us to wake up and look at this as a much more seasoned and intellectual fashion well we have rational and not weighed down by the ideas of mushrooms being a silly thing yeah and so I I mean I have a few pet peeves and I understand why people want to use a bit but the word shroom just drives me crazy shroom fest ran the truth with all due respect I understand but you know let's not be children about this let's be adults you know you're a serious person yeah I I'm also in a non serious personal in 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 benefit society in the future by appealing to the lowest common denominator but let's be adults in the room yes 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 and medium Amanita muscaria or terence mckenna's ideas the shroom fest doesn't bother me but for a serious research for 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 tip the leery problem right right it held back their bona fide research in this subject for years there's a movement right explain that please it is as a movement right now to move Saul sovereign from schedule one to schedule two the schedule one means illegal drug that has no medical benefits schedule two means it's a drug that has medical benefits so there's a serious movement going on right now within the FDA to have it be recategorize because in the words of FDA researchers I know one arms-length removed is that they've never seen anything with such a strong safety profile they gives so much benefit at so little cost for such a long time this is a drug and a category of its own this is really important so let's not jeopardize it it is really important but you're never gonna stop kids from calling it shrooms well you know and I want to give a pass here I want to get a pass and the coming of age you know when I was 16 - you know the age you know 20 to 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's 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 but 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 him all the time and I don't stutter when I sing but I could not l acute 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 neural a 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 ever had psilocybin mushrooms I bought some a bag of them and I thought I got I had no information I just bought the bag for about 25 bucks and I went out for a walk in the woods in Ohio and there was a beautiful oak tree that I used to climb the top of the very top of the tallest hill you know hi oh we don't have mountains we have Hills and it was in the summertime and so I thought sentence setting is important I knew that so I went for a walk and I ate the bag the whole bag I was walking how many I was well it was about I know it was about a half an ounce to an ounce so I'm here yeah so we're talking this is all this is this is the elevator ride beyond the 10th floor you know so 8 to 16 grams is probably on the order about 20 grams you know so no and but I didn't know no I had no wonder so but I knew that I wanted I wanted my destination with this tree right so I walked and walked and I came at the tree and I was eating the mushrooms and and then I started feeling the effects and so it was great because I was climbing the tree and I was getting higher in the tree and higher in my brain well that seems like a terrible thing to do and I climb to the top of the tree and this beautiful landscape but it was there was these summertime is a boiling black clouds in the horizon I go oh that's cool you know and so this big summer storm was coming then 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 gonna higher and higher and the winds pick up and the tree started moving and I started get a vertical because I was like oh my god I'm getting so freakin 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 then lightning strikes I got really close and the light would hit and I got I saw fractals for the first time the the atmosphere became liquid I saw there's liquid waves of this multi-dimensional geometrical patterns everywhere and the sparks of lightning would just create this amazing crescendo of secondary tertiary well you know fractals all around me and I was oh my there's amazing I said this is what I read about you know and so the storm came and lightning strikes are all around me and I was it washed with rain and I was up there and I feel 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 is read as you probably know it cannot describe the experience and then a dawned on me wait a second Stamets you're in the tallest tree on the tallest hill from miles in the middle of a lightning storm this is not the best place to be and so I realized I could be killed up here suddenly I had a reality rush like you know you're you could turn into a god imagine hi I'm 20 grams of mushrooms hug at a tree the Lightning comes it hits you maybe you were the Savior maybe need to get back to that tree maybe you're the chosen one so I thought I was you know I it was an incredibly spiritual and wonderful experience but I also had the fear and this comes comes with the hero's journey you know you always have the the dark side you always have not just the light side but as counterbalance with the dark side and I realized I'm like gosh I'm gonna I could die up here and that's a well I don't dice NamUs which where are your issues this this get something out of this experience and I said this stuttering hab is ridiculous and I'm not stupid and I saw I said to myself stop stuttering now stop stuttering now I said that dozens hundreds of times over and over and over and fortunately the storms went past and held onto the tree and soaking wet I came out of the tree and walked back to where I was living and then the next day I got up I didn't see anybody and I was walking on on this path and a sidewalk and there's a lady that I really liked a lot and but she was always attracted 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 their 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's a 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 and one day and this speaks to now what was 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 l acute in a way that I could not l acute before now just to be truthful here if I drink a lot of alcohol I'm in a loud bar because that's stutterers and your martial artists I've been a martial artist all my life and we have peripheral consciousness so if someone comes to 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 s 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 our doors I'm hypersensitive to intruders and then that's what I'll start stuttering if a person's talking to me asking me how do you go to mushrooms it's like filling a well with a teaspoon because I'm worried about the guy who just came through the door room there who looks like he may not be a safe person to be in this environment right now so that's there's a time that I'll you only give 10% of my brain to communicating to the person in front of me my 90% of my brain is hyper aware in the circumstantial environment around me time for another trip to the tree to cure that last 10% but that's my personal story that's amazing it's not an immortal one but it worked for you that's what's important work for me and I was at Crater Lake Lodge and and the 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 looked at her and I said should I yeah go ahead so I told her I told this busboy the same story now this guy was totally straight looked like he was a super conservative from a conservative family we told this whole story and his eyes were wide open because when you meet other stutterers and you talk to them they're really desperate for a solution so I never knew what happened to this young busboy but I think I changed his life forever I hope you did so I had a good friend growing up and his brother was severely stricken with it to the point where he would have to wince closed his eyes and look down you know he would talk to you and he just couldn't get over it it was but he won't stutter to animals hmm they won't stutter when he sings so what do you think it is like what is what is happening like do you well I think this well there's several things it could be trauma when you're a child combined with neuropathy I was told by one psychiatrist who was a specialist in this at a conference that there is a theory that in the seventh month in the womb you or your neurons failed to make all the connections that are needed to so that makes sense to me because I would reroute with preposition prepositional or adverbial phrases to try to jump around they're all habitual loop try man 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 the lets doors grocery stores grill over you lion's mane they're called um various brand names one night love is called pompom Blanc it looks like pom-poms some cheerleaders and lion's mane contains a we in unique group of compounds beautiful called Aaron a scenes and harissa nuns and these regenerate myelin on the axons of nerves and so this is a mushroom comedy she discovered this in 1994 Japanese researcher and he postulated as a potential preventive or treatment for Alzheimer's muscular dystrophy etc but do you take it I take it every day every day have you take it in raw form or dig it in capsules so you buy it yeah we have a we have an extensive product line you do yes how do you get to that host defense com host defense calm why host defense that's part of your innate immunity response supporting your immunity but we are main businesses at fungi calm and I registered that many myself I'm kind of proud of that it cost me 25 bucks 1994 wow yeah so winterize yourself but lion's mane is a safe mushroom to consume there are several clinical studies out on 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 is that it has aspects of neurogenesis when you go into Alzheimer estate 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 there's outer sheath on the neurons is interrupted by amyloid plaques that then prevent neurotransmission so the experiments of the mice which i think are so interesting was one experiment was the the maize experiment where the mice were put into an arena and they went out a corridor and they they went one way in the corridor they'd find food the other way is no food well very quickly the mice learned you know you go out the corridor go to the left you'll find food they injected it then without toxic polypeptide that induces amyloid plaque formation that is a neurotoxin very quickly after two weeks or so the mice develop 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 read normalized upon sacrificing the mice in the first part of the experiment they saw like my plaques and then demyelination the second part of the experiment of course another subset of mice they found that the myelin regrew and the amyloid plaque had resolved this is post mortem you say bye say so well there's 100 miles you're basically cutting off a representative sample where you sacrifice them you determine yeah that's representative the population now the remaining population is alive they fed them the mushrooms and they found that they regained neurological function Wow the other experiment which I find is even more fun is and this was known in Japan they put on like 100 mice in an arena and they put a toy in the middle of the cage now the mice got excited they came up and sniffed it and smelled it and they got really excited and and they sat there with with counters to measure there were points of contact how many points of contact that mice have exploring a new toy it's like a really good baseline hundreds of data points and they do the same thing then they introduced this cyclic peptide and this neurotoxin and the mice then after a while we run interested 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 day my plot quite resolved and Milan had regenerated and neurogenesis not 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 a loss to society of our elders forget not remembering so I think this is something that's really extraordinarily exciting is not patentable this is the drug companies have no interest in this but this is probably the number one thing that people can do in my mind to pranati 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 by suggest vitamin d3 niacin because those of you who've had a niacin flush you know 200 milligrams of niacin or more you get red you get itchy and neuropathy typically is presented at the fingertips at the end of your toes and your fingers and your peripheral nervous system as you have neuropathy the nerve endings begin to die backwards so my idea here is because there are different receptors being activated by psilocybin then with the Arron a scenes from lion's mane if you stacked lion's mane with psilocybin mushrooms with niacin the advantage is and is hypothetical but this is something I think is well worth testing is the niacin can help drive the neurogenic benefits of salsa Ivan and Aaron a scenes to the end of the peripheral nervous system so we actually have 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 and that it adds worthy and they have their own funding so we can do have any 30 study is what we hope to do 30 patients and we hope to begin that study in the next year it was a phenomenal to see how that would affect people with CTE people like football players boxers people with a cross damage yeah across the board yeah I'm the benefits and this is something that when you're depressed you're not creative and you're such that 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 so this is some of the this is 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 michael phobia or even your what I call silo phobia the irrational fear of psilocybin mushrooms and look upon these with new eyes and you drop your prejudices and just look at as a serious scientific analysis Wow how is this received like in the general scientific community is there skepticism or well I I love my skeptics because unless they're prejudiced against you and some people are you can never convince them but if you know scientists when they see the datasets 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 though the whole medical community right now you know I speak at a number of medical conferences TEDMED American Academy of Dermatology have been keynote speakers you know many medical conferences and 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 is tipped World War two in our favor so where the job the Japanese and Germans did not have penicillin even though Alexander Fleming discovered 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 this lady researcher who found this moldy cantaloupe found a Penicillium strain there was 200 times more potent and as a result of that in war the most of the casualties were died from infections and so the British and the English the English and the Americans had penicillin the Germans and Japanese did not and so it is as a great NPR analysis on this on the history of penicillin and it is one of the major factors in helping tilt the balance in the favor of the Allied powers against the Axis powers so concerned with the researchers in England they impregnated their clothes with spores of this mold strain so if our laboratories were bombed or they were captured if one of them escaped they could regenerate the culture from their clothing whoa Wow this speaks to panspermia we're all carrying micro biomes 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 there's the the frustrating aspects of what is the word that you use fungi phobia that were used in Biko phobia Michel phobia the frustrating aspects are first of all prohibition right the sweeping psychedelic Act of 1970 that made psilocybin mushrooms illegal right and and then on top of it the commercial pharmaceutical industry which doesn't want to have anything to do with anything that it can't patent and has so many doctors and so many researchers in its pocket so you have two issues there right you have one issue that people which is obviously why you don't like the word shroom people think of mushrooms as a party drug like being silly you know freaking out doing something stupid regrettable actions and then afterwards going wow we got so crazy thinking of it as a frivolous sort of thing that you would engage in whereas what you're trying to do is show the the absolute hard science do you feel that this absolute hard science is I mean you must feel but it's unfairly matando it's Iseman but there's been a title change in pharmacology of the use of the psilocybin and in his utility as a therapeutic agent is there's a title change I think now there's a over 700 patients have gone through Johns Hopkins clinical trials for things like end-of-life depression PTSD their studies out on treating alcoholics and drug addicts so and this is important to communicate to people and John Hopkins study in particular dr. Roland Griffiths a great great scientist he's been running in championing these studies came up with a very interesting series of analyses some of the take-home points were only 70% of the people described this awesome experience therapeutically under controlled settings at John Hopkins with a very high dose assault Simon as being beneficial only 70% 70% 30% was saying I didn't like that 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 of their lifetime and interviewing their friends their spouses they saw a permanent residual effect from the benefits of the experience there were nicer people there's no nice thing along or less prone to anger they had many of values that we would cherish as an improved community of individuals the 33% 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 had a negative experience they just you know wouldn't do that again so these mushrooms are obviously they're not for every one but for the people who do benefit they benefit substantially don't you feel that a lot of the people that have those negative experiences at least from my understanding a lot of it are people that have some serious issues that they're not dealing with and ego problems and the mushrooms expose that and they try to wrestle the mushroom I mean when absolutely that's I think they very well put I think that's a big issue some people are afraid of their inner self they you know we're all you can't paint the canvas black and white yeah we're a big spectrum of complex you know personality traits and what happened to somebody when they're two years old five years old what trauma they experienced you know it's very complex to be able to make these statements but I think as a group there are some people who are on the edge and they may not control their innermost emotions and they're afraid of that in normal state of consciousness so they're afraid they're 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 is kind of a control freak especially when I was younger it's it's a hard thing to do just because you like no no I'm gonna be fine no no I'll [ __ ] this you know I'm gonna know that I don't like where this is going I'm gonna stop this right now I'm gonna put a halt to this i'ma bring myself back to sobriety like it's impossible it's not going to happen so you have to figure out how to just let go and how to just like really let go and Trust the mushroom or the DMT or whatever it is you're on to take you on this ride and you'll be okay when it's over and if you can't do that that's the bad trip and I've seen a lot of people have bad trips what's the close friends we 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 shamanic tradition rituals elders they've done this for a long time I have set in setting down they know how to treat these powerful medicines in the right context yes and we lack that you know did you know that mushrooms were specifically banned from beer in the Varian beer act of 1516 whoa and mushrooms and henbane and other plants were used in Meads psychoactive beers and 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 Thai things they wanted to meet your portal and control access to the divine mm-hmm and so these mushrooms were looked upon as being specifically a threat to monotheism and Christianity so the the varium Burak banda mushrooms that's incredible terrence had some pretty interesting ideas about that pterence 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 and honey because you can preserve things and honey and that in preserving things and 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 is loosened inhibitions wild behavior less thought of the consequences of your actions less introspective thinking much more chaos right and that he believes that this has probably resulted in some sort of a shift or he believed rather before he passed it was resulted in some sort of a shift from these more communal mushroom worshipping cultures to what you saw like in you know 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 Terence would have been saying much and being preserved in honey is a way of preventing them from rotting right nothing to do with Mead well you did I think it did have something to do with me right the amount of alcohol being produced versus dose that you would get mmm it seemed to me this all Simon dose would be so much more powerful than the small amount alcohol you be right am i misrepresenting what he was saying no I don't think so I think you know you're you have a you just disagree with his initial yeah and that's okay you know Terrence isn't you know Terrance's it was a very smart guy and I still appreciate I love him but wandering thoughts and they were amazing well his time wave zero was totally BS well that was crazy that was crazy yeah the the end of time occurring on his birthday I go don't you think his low egocentric well he also had some strange sort of a computer program and I tried to follow it many many times some of the lectures that he gave on that computer program that represented time wave zero what the idea was for people interested he just thought there was going to come a point of ultimate novelty and somehow 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 celebrate that's totally but he basically got the math to conform to the convenience of his birthday so it's like whatever we're all guilty of being human yeah I mean even the great ones yeah I mean and he was a great but he was one of my favorite people in terms of like listening to his recordings he ever listened to psychedelics Ilan oh yeah amazing podcast one of the best articulate of the English language I've ever heard yes yeah I agree and as is his brother yeah every time is which what brings you 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 glossolalia is the ability to to speak and l acute languages and new words as languaging your ability to language is in you know under the experience that so Simon speaking the neurogenesis and exactly what we've been talking about is that basically your hippocampus is your Centre 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 and so yes I think this neurogenesis not only occurs in the hippocampus but I think it can also occur in the peripheral nervous system I have an extraordinarily powerful story that I would like to tell about neurogenesis and it was from a good friend of mine named Bill Webb he lived in Big Sur California he was a friend of Ansel Adams and Henry Miller wrote a copic Tropic of Capricorn whatever it was in the 60s 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 arise on 20 years of age I was writing about my first book philosophy mushroom philosophy mushrooms and our allies you wrote your first book at 20 action was 18 you bad [ __ ] yes it was a 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 a kind of an avant-garde book publisher in that and 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 so 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 we trip together of the 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 says Paul I have to tell you something that's so important and I want you to listen so you understand Paul I go yeah bill hi 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 a getting old sucks I said but I want to tell you something that's really important you know great bill hasn't tell me - no Paul I want you to absolutely swear to me you'll tell this to other people I go got it bill hang out okay bill you know you're late I 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 about the cliffs the big sur and I said well how's this for late and he goes well I did a five gram dose of cubensis that's the hero's journey where people were listening five grams as his is it you know you're on the floor and he was on this deck and it was house and and he noticed that he didn't his hearing aid he could hear the the birds and the waves and things like that and he's laying there just you know he's like 80 80 mid-eighties at that point and he's just like I'm just incredibly blissful experience he's coming there to reconcile his own mortality the fact he's going to die he's thinking about his life and he's you know kind of dreaming in that dreamscape then he hears click click click click click click click he looks around and he goes what's that noise he shakes his ear and maybe something is a yeren click click click click click click click he looks around and he said 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 easily measurable metric for my vasila psilocybin experience while he is fully on the experience he said he uses hearing aid for three or four days now I've mentioned it just do mushrooms again and keep the hearing you know well that's basically he ran out of cubensis and so he was asking me for cubensis night I'm sorry I can't get provided to you so I've mentioned this now to several the clinical researchers who have DEA license who are doing the clinical research this is the easily measurable metric you can as people are fully you know in these sessions they could be giving them auditory stimulation to see if the auditory nerve is undergoing region erosion ASIS 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 in Phatak and when bill webb spoke he had an enormous gravitas this guy was as serious intellectual so i think this is a n of one study you know one individual but i think this is something that medical researchers did you pay attention to what do you think could possibly regenerate anything that quickly though like how could it happen so quickly that during the excites for our trip because there's like nodes of crossing and is there's an interconnectedness that occurs and there's a great graphic which i didn't send you in advance showing this your brain without psilocybin this your brain will with psilocybin and there's a massive amount of neural connections that are occurring so I think you know the just like water chooses the path of least resistance I think that neurologically if 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 and nature would reward the neurological pathways they were like most likely to lead to your survival so I I think that neurogenesis across the brain occurred just like me with my stuttering we and it was another neurological pathway but in bills case when he lost his access to those mushrooms then neuropathy you know became more resident and prominent and so what we're looking at these images but Jamie's the best we just we're looking at these images and could you explain to us what these are well your brain on magic motion ANSI Reagan's mantra here yeah this is the push this up to your faces okay the the placebos on the left this is a your 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 okay so the the one on the left it basically shows connections between neuronal nodes that may be on the order of 40 or 50 different notes of crossing the one on the right was 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 for carrying neurological signals so this is pretty amazing now this also influences I think is important for our US military you know for for coders for people who are trying to solve very complex datasets the ability of you to have increased cognition and increased intelligence and this is why micro dosing is the rage in Silicon Valley the enormous number of coders are micro dosing right now and for those who are listening this loose use philosophy cubensis as the standard species because that's the one that's mostly grown and a half a gram to a quarter gram you have liftoff you know five grams is the full-blown hero's journey a lot of people will take between two and four grams as a moderately spiritual experience four grams being higher and so micro dosing is 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 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 is 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 micro doses 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 gonna 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 micro dosing because he's really only micro dosing there's something about taking days off where everything just feels like kind of shitty just doesn't feel good and then he's like oh I didn't I didn't take my micro dose and so he takes it again and goes right back to that place but he feels like he's in the matrix well actually he is probably good that he interrupts it because it washes those receptors clean of this whole siphon and my second time do you think you should interrupt for two days out of out of seven so five days on two days off now I'm not making official recommendations I'm just saying I will from from my my small amount of knowledge on the subject I 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 a strongest cup of coffee you've had in a long time you know because 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 charge like very bizarre like crazy lucid strange weird dreams not lucid in the sense that 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'd one dream and I fell asleep on the couch and while I did fall asleep on the couch but while I was asleep I was like oh I'm struggling to get this blanket over me while I'm on the couch and I'm pulling it but it's stuck under the cushions 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's no blanket there's no blanket anywhere near me didn't exist I had a lucid dream about covering myself with a blanket while I was sleeping on this couch very strange and in a very primal dreams - like being chased by wolves and running into bears and caves and really bizarre very very vibrant colors and and apparently from what I've read marijuana does something to suppress REM sleep and that in taking time off of it your 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 you have pretty good confidence that this is true well we all experienced it all my friends who did it experience that are in particularly probably smokes as much as I do maybe more I'm experienced it deeply I'm glad you mentioned lucid dreams because this is a nice segue to I think the greatest discovery I've made of my life and I want as all came through a lucid dream so let me let me set the stage here and 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 disorient colony collapse disorder lapse disorder now bees are dying off in enormous quantities Oklahoma lost eighty five percent of his beehives last year this 2016-2017 the annual loss of bees report and Marilyn lost 75% Nebraska I think lost 60% I met a beekeeper in Washington State who lost 75% of his 35,000 hives now apis mellifera is the 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 being can pollinate a thousand flowers in a day so every flower that bee visits is an almond so it's one of the most be 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 hey 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 could spread the pollen better through the air it is now thought by many of the entomologists I've been dealing with that we could have full colony collapse across the world within ten years the cost it will be astronomical to our society prices where food will raise poverty will increase you can make the argument that increased poverty leads to terrorism because people are poorer they're desperate and so colony collapse now is much worse than most people realize because all the wild bees have now been infected so 80% of pollination services come from wild bees and 20% comes from managed honeybees apis mellifera is from honey bee from Europe brought over in the 1700s in 1984 the varroa mite was introduced in the United States and the varroa mite has is like a is a parasite on the backs of bees and injects viruses in particularly deformed wing virus the lake Sinai virus and the black queen Saul virus the deformed wing virus is the really the most important one bees used to go and they only live 30 days but now they used to go Paul for nine days so they leave the hive and they pollinate for about nine days they 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 they order to fight the mites they've been using a toxic insecticide called Emma trows Emma tries fights is licensed for fighting ticks on cattle at using cattle strength doses of amitrano's off-label beekeepers been drenching their hives with a mattress twice per year now that might have build up tolerance and now they're up to nine times a year they're soaking the highs in order to kill the mites the mites are injecting these viruses this is all hands on deck this is the the per variable shit's gonna 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 that's subject you know 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 with the water my mushrooms and it was covered with bees and the bees moved the wood chips aside and I could see these white mycelium and they were sipping on the little droplets of my sneezing from the my cilia I got real excited and I kept a journal and for 40 days from dawn to dusk there's a continuous convoy bees to my mushroom bed there's an edible edible mushroom and I made note of it I published it and in herre Smith magazine 1988 I put it in one of my books in 1994 and then I forgot about it so I got involved with the US Bioshield bio defense program directly after 9/11 you can google my name Stamets and smallpox there's a vetted press release from the US government we-we-we they did two thousand two hundred plus analyses of our mushroom extracts and we found extracts that were highly active against flu viruses against including bird flu against herpes and against poxviruses including smallpox so I have a patent that issued on this it's a great secondary story because I'd you know Blackhawk helicopters coming over my laboratory all this other stuff it's a fine true conspiracy story so I had published this research on the antiviral properties of mushrooms the mycelium and then I heard about the bees you know I'd raise bees and then a friend of mine Louis Schwartzberg we're doing a movie called fantastic fungi that's in the making for ten years and Louie came to me and said Paul I have eight patents on fungi that can control termites ants mosquitoes you can Google right now stamps 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 twenty cents and and I met with all the big companies but but anyhow so Louie knew about my research on that I've spoken on this before and he said Paul the mites are killing the bees can't you do something to help the mites and so now okay that's two stories we have this Bioshield bio defense story and my anti viral stuff we have me going the mushrooms in the garden and a hike in the old-growth forest a lot and I'm hiking the old-growth forest and the way I orient here it's one of the few skills that's on how I like just getting off trail and I'm in South Fork of the whole river and I'm deep in the old-growth forest I come around a corner and I see a bear strike that bear came up Pam scratched his tree a huge paw strike and 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 lumber companies so the school system depended upon timber harvest off of public lands so in the humans great wisdom they decided that the Bears were jeopardizing the educational funds in Washington State so they hired hunters to kill all the bears so my neighbor killed 400 bears that's why we have a salmon run right now on Skookum Inlet and Kindle Check Point Washington there's no bears around because they saw the Bears that threat the economic stability this will suspend why the Bears get the Bears and they scratched the trees have 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 conch was growing out of the tree the tree had died so they kind of got a 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 prevent invaders coming into a bee hive these are all seemingly disparate stories and this is why this wakingdream put it all together so I have my garden giant and you know bed the bees are coming to I have the bio shield bio defense program where I found these extracts are highly active against viruses barren scraps trees introduced polypore mushrooms and then my friend Louie Schwartzberg is saying you know how can you help the bees so and I highly recommend this to everybody listening is these 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 exists in that space and then I had synapses activate a new neurological pathway I had an epiphany I think I know how to save the bees fast-forward now I have multiple patents issuing all over the world we've done research Washington State University we've gathered 2.5 million dollars you can go to WS w WB e SW su dot edu so the Washington University D U for education and you'll see the resource that have there we are now I have found that the extracts of Amadou the one my hat is made from doubles the lifespans of bees it reduces the deformed wing virus by more than a thousandfold in ten days I hit Joe the friggin homerun I'm not an entomologist I mean I 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 US patent issued this past year and now it's issued in Australia United States issuing in Europe Eurasia in 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 for 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 then you came out with a tricycle that's not patentable that's pretty obvious because it's logical so you want something there's no no evidence design in the literature the public or private or scientific or popular you wanted the contrary to conventional and conventional wisdom which means that you want experts to teach away for your invention so every time someone out there and tells me that that tells I hear that Paul Stamets this 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 with no self cell towers so these are three criteria after 17 years it becomes open-source the idea is to incentivize you know inventors that's why you have the iPhone the Droid your computers you know and one person called me up in a cell phone 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 is the contradictions are pretty obvious so the Pattinson now have issued and there was no prior art even though we all grew up with the Winnie the Pooh we knew that bears went into 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 the immunological benefit now let's go back in time because it's a very big picture concept here 12,000 years ago we invented agriculture what do we do we started to DeForest when we started cutting down the trees we began to dismantle the immunological mycelial Nets of Nick of nature mycelium needs wood to decompose you take away the wood there's mycelium doesn't have a habitat because the mycelium is produced 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 Sinden Syngenta that produces new necks as they're known a toxic insecticide sponsored research in Europe because they didn't believe that new and nick annoyed harmed the bees there be research the researchers then finally published when they got the results that was contrary to the interests of Syngenta and and bear that in fact new nick de noids harm 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 new and different noise you don't glide phosphates over there especially with GMOs because they interfere with a microbiome of the bees and their gut flora so they can't detoxify them it's called the cytochrome p450 pathway I think we all have it breaking down toxins so there's a confluence of multiple stressors but the nail in the coffin by far is the deformed wing virus and we have found now that the extracts of this one drop per thousand drops one milliliter and a leader can reduce the viruses and bees by more than thousand fold and double the lifespan so it's a frigging homerun 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 forced people we began deforestation we got into agriculture we began to dismantle the immunological networks of nature the mycelium this resident the fact that these same mushrooms reduced viruses and 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 began to dismantle the immunological health of our environment and zoonotic diseases ceases coming from factory farms whether they're from pigs or chicken farms and we have one extraordinary experiment and this speaks to the the blackhawk helicopter the story is that I was working with a bio shield by a defense 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 published in a peer-reviewed journal bioterrorism became the front and center of concern of the US Defense Department a group of virologists saw my article and they got funded by Dick Cheney and George Bush and I have a you know I want to say thank you ironically to those two because they front of the bow shield is called project by a bio defense and they found it with several billion dollars and they contacted me because I knew I had this large library of about 700 strains of mushrooms in our culture library we have a company of 78 great employees and we had this large library so they said we want to test your library based on this article that you've written showing there are antiviral properties in some mushrooms you have a lot of them this test your library to see if we have antiviral properties so great so I started making extracts of mushrooms the fruit bodies the mycelium the low elements as fuzzy stuff that gives rise to mushrooms and I sent off 100 extracts at a time all coated with alphanumeric codes so they didn't know government didn't know about sending them so I get the first reports come back and I'm flipping through them no activity no activity against poxviruses because by far the concern with smallpox the biggest that's we have no immune logical defense against it after 1974 they stopped immunizing do you have a smallpox vaccination on your arm yeah you're probably one of the last ones that were getting it so I'm going through and I come to sample 78 this at high activity whoa you know sample 81 high activity whoa I got really excited I look at my notebook with the codes were and it was from this mushroom called a gerakan that grows exclusively in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest this mat 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 that Jamie and so a gerakan AGA RI kon and so i got real excited and i so i I was given a contact person could he had one point of contact with you Justice Department a physician I called him up saying these these research results were wonderful he goes what research results I go Federal Express just delivered me this whole dossier on the first hundred samples Wow and and he goes you're not supposed to get those I am I said well I'll photocopy and send him to you you know and so he didn't think that was too funny but that's the US government sometimes it's not very well organized the left hand doesn't talked on the right hand so we got these research results it's crazy there looks like a stick up a dude's but what this one is this one is particularly unusual because if it was attached to an upper branch it fell through the air oh wow hit the other branch and teeter-totter and then it regrew its mycelium and connected back into the mother my selling beside the tree and then it grew two legs so this is like this was first described by the ice karate since 65 ad as elix cerium ad long in vitam the elixir of long life so this has been used in Greek pharmacopoeia for for for thousands of years so please get back to your store sorry for the interruption No so anyhow I am up in Canada and one of my managers calls me up says Paul there's a helicopter room whoever the laboratory is I know no big deal and helicopters come and go no it's really close I said how close he goes listen to me troop whoa that's really close I go what are the numbers in the back of the helicopter he goes there are no numbers there's a Blackhawk helicopter I want oh my gosh now just because this is very new in the program when because when you have an antidote to a weapon then it can be weaponized by terrorists so they didn't who you know not everybody in the government knew who I was even though I was working with a project bio defense you know I was still sort of unknown entity and I filed a patent application on this and so I told my manager okay shut down the business give everybody cultures of this mushroom which was a gerakan I don't want to know who has them shut down the business everyone spread so we decentralized assaulted our target but hold on so let me stop you right there so you're in Canada Jorma Canada you'll Abbas we're in the United States okay in Washington State and the helicopters are flying over your lab what happens then well they were trying to spook they were spooking us and we sued on purpose they were doing the purpose they were hovering to let you know they're there I don't know what they were doing I mean there are a treetop level right over the friggin laboratory right so I had everyone go to our car I asked everyone to go in the car shut down the business immediately and decentralize us as a target so later on when I came back I called that my people in the Defense Department saying what the right the hell's going on here I think 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 they just from your patent filing well the patent I filed the patent and it disappeared most patent applications when you filed them show up on the US patent homepage within a year or two I filed his patent and four or five years later he still had not been published so I get a hold of my patent attorney who gets a hold of Patent Office and the US Department of Defense considered to be an act natural security so they quarantined my patent took it out of the Patent Office and they so it could not be seen by potential terrorists because then it could have an antidote smallpox so I had to do the inter government a governmental agency traced to recall the patent from DoD that meetings they let out 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 found it in 2004 so we have now done work at the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy we have isolated two novel anti smallpox molecules we also have done work at the tuberculosis Research Institute with dr. Scott franzblau and University of Illinois in Chicago we've identified a new anti-tuberculosis molecule a gerakan and die square at his time and 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 died from bacterial pneumonia they get a viral infection they owed their immune system over amps and it's a response to get flood and 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 products as dually active against viruses the bacteria is medically significant so it's a good argument for natural products because you have a consortium of protective agents that are living in this soup of this extract that can help help protect you so this is now led on to are discovering molecules active against HPV the human papilloma virus 70% or more of women have HPV this is very controversial vaccine apparently it's very dangerous well I'm not anti evacuee oxidation but I'm 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 from sexually active kids well your secondly octave out for the age of 24 so why when tight but they're sexually active before then but if you were didn't have the infection before 24 and you're still active at the 24:00 why wouldn't they recommend the vaccinations half of the age of 24 maybe there's amend it post 24 is that we use 24 also post 24 they don't recommend it because they think maybe you already have it I don't know the answer to that that's bizarre I've never been able to get someone to explain to me what mushrooms can suppress the expression of this is that we'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 poly pores that I have been talking about reishi gerakan Amadou are likely we don't I can't say de facto all of them to have varying amounts of these constituents so these mushroom extracts are a huge consortium of of antiviral antibacterial compounds now as I mentioned this may be five million species of fungi there is about 150,000 species of mushrooms we've identified identified around 14,000 so think of them it just from experience all evidence over thousands of years of human experimentation it'd be like you went into a library and there's 14,000 books in your library 14,000 species our ancestors started selecting each of these species and testing them we've narrowed the field down to about 200 species of which 50 species are superstars that have no adverse effects to human ingestion that have been used for a very long period of time and within that set of 50 species we're finding these mushrooms which have tremendous potential health benefit so this is why I'm so excited in the field of my ecology is we have translational science we have applied my ecology and I think based on what we've discovered we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forests as a matter of national defense our fungal gene genomes are essential for our future and present survival the more we eliminate these landscapes of biodiversity the more we losing but seneschal 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 and have access to an old-growth forest you know 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 in the biodiversity of the ecosystems that are that are still intact now do you recommend for personal consumption any particular mushrooms any particular supplements I in terms of recommend recommendations for gourmet mushrooms I can make those in terms of recommendations for medicinal mushrooms I cannot make a recommendation so I'm legally tied by the FDA I cannot make recommendations can you recommend a website that perhaps would recommend well I I do recommend eating gourmet mushrooms for just consumed shiitake lion's mane maitake and reishi and chaga and these all have medical benefits as well he's all I don't know the difference between a gourmet and medicinal or medicinal mushroom and it just mushrooms yeah the much all gourmet mushrooms are medicinal mushrooms really social taki mushrooms are medicinal shiitake mushrooms are very very medicinal the big 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 much all mushrooms should be cooked and portobellos in particular should be cooked at high temperatures why there is a unfortunate group of compound called Garrett teens Garrett teens are hydrazines that are heat unstable so the good news is you should cook them and if you cook them well then there's mushrooms or another 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 Agera teens in these mushrooms but that jury is still out so what what are the negative benefit or the negative effects of this this is an explosive area of conversation and puts my life in danger so I reserve the right not to answer a 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 um so anybody who's interested just google that get back to me you know next I'm gonna have a guy who was the same height as Paul and he's gonna have a mask on and we're gonna have sort of electric box that distorts the voice no but the good news is tell you the story yeah there's lots of mushrooms that have a tremendous benefit and and there are compounds inside of portobello mushrooms that are very beneficial and in fact there is a positive study with some breast cancer patients breast cancer study showing that that button mushrooms can confer benefits so there is that yeah we were funded by NIH with a 2.2 million dollars for breast cancer clinical study on turkey tail mushrooms and turkey tail mushrooms are fantastic as adjuncts to conventional therapy this clinical study that was conducted funded by NIH and in the University of Minnesota Medical School in mr. McCall College showed a dose-response curve specifically and supporting the immune system by taking turkey tail mushrooms and the more you took the more benefit there was I have a TEDMED 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 90 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 or breast was erupting with a very very bad carcinoma and she is alive well and fully recovered today she did she had a chemotherapy using Herceptin and a little of short-time attacks all she had a very bad reaction attacks all but there's a scientific articles now been published saying that showing that turkey tail mushroom constituents help conventional therapies like chemotherapy Herceptin and making it Herceptin work better so there's a nice blending of Integrative Medicine with using natural products with conventional medicine I will never be saying that you should not consult a physician I would never say that you should not use conventional medicine you should yes the state of the art of science is right there but the state of the arts of science is that we can up regulate immunity with these mushrooms and that's your front line of defense and then the other conventional therapies that are being practiced now combined 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 in difference in improving your illogical defense now 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 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 doctor Ichikawa was a edema ologists that worked for the National Cancer Center in Tokyo and they notice and surveying people in Japan in the 1960s early 1970s there was a dearth a drop and the overall cancer rate and this one population and the perfec sure 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 percent less than the national average and an after exhaustive study he found that they were eating enoki mushrooms a lot of them because he enoki mushrooms are really thin ones that really tall stems you buy them in the store well the far the big farming centers for enoki mushrooms there and then the blemished ones is called reverted there's no we don't you know sell to the public the ones that have little spots on them or deformed but they are given to the workers and so they're 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 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 the enoki mushrooms on lion's mane on the gerakan all these mushrooms I'm talking about they're all peer-reviewed passed physicians they're all very short articles but they summarize a lot of the research that I'm talking about that's amazing what what do you know about the cordyceps mushroom I know a fair amount about cordyceps yeah I'm fascinated from 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 about the shrimp tech is based on the cordyceps and b12 and a bunch of different adaptogens and the idea being that when you take that it benefits athletic performance benefits endurance and oxygen utilization and apparently they discovered this from what it's a weird one because they grow it on on a caterpillar do you know about all that yeah cordyceps is now it's been split into several different genre yeah so I was gonna bring up another one is the one that explodes on ants yeah there's there's quarter SEPs census now known as a Pheo quarter census quarter steps 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 where the cordyceps mushrooms coming out of it very good scientists and they did this what I would do they would take it in a laboratory they'd break it open and take a piece of tissue from the inside that's called cloning so you just capture their genetic material you grow out the culture very confusing because there is five different fungi they're called Animorphs cordyceps is a dimorphic fungus what that means that's two forms it's got a mold state and it's got a mushroom state the mushroom snake comes up like a little Club looks like your finger we go you know orange the orange little finger coming up out of the ground so you can find that jam and the yeah so they say expired caterpillar I can't actually see the species there but it look like they're beetles so there's a number of course of species so when there was a lot of scientific dispute on what the true Animorph now as 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 cat except a quarter step census is now identified as hirsute Ella consensus that's the true one basilio my C's and meta resume and all these other ones are not considered to be the true organism they're chasing the other quarter SEPs mold inside of the mushroom whoa I'm gonna go over many many many many a polyculture polycomb as a poly called for several different animal pathogenic fungi these are front of the kill insects so I mean this is very it's very disruptive because all the FDA in the labeling how what do you do and who's right and who's wrong and how do you get the labeling to conform with the current taxonomy based on DNA research the the good news is based on the best of my knowledge the several of these companies that are selling these quarter steps they Animorphs even though they may not be the true core substances those also confer benefits so you can argue in a sense about different species the problem with this is there's no less than a thousand peer-reviewed articles on cordyceps and Ensis and no one or hardly anyone no one knows what species they were actually growing why is it we don't know which which of these animals that were actually growing there was this recent information that all very recent all in the past four or five years and especially in the past two years so Wow it's um taxonomy is in flux because of DNA PCR amplification in the region of DNA that they've chosen they amplify there are idiosyncratic to the species now that story has changed whole genome sequencing is really the only way to go about this with a sequence the entire genome and so there's a lot of elasticity or plasticity and and the and the expression of DNA now going back what we've been talking about this whole interview epigenesis epigenesis is the an environment emulation of influence on the genomic expression of the individual the species yourself and so you up regulate 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 these are the same species now we know that's highly inaccurate so what was accurate a few years ago was 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 procs 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 mass of air pollution there is horrific and the Chain of Custody as we call it where these people are getting their mushrooms today it mixed oftentimes distributors mixed 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 this contaminate with heavy metals and pesticides if you're trying to improve your immune system at the same time you're sabotaging your own immune system so getting mushrooms from clean environments is critically important unfortunately because the USDA Organic Program they can borrow from their organic programs of China and still say there are certified organic so you really need to buy US 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 we're 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 there are 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 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 well it away from the colony just a quarter steps lordy I up on the screen there hold on yeah of course employ di you you know you unilateralis is another one a lot of these zombie movies you've been saying they've been based on cordyceps and Knox I was actually I was a character in Hannibal Lecter you were yeah in this series I think it's number five and and this L I think Alvin Stannis was this anesthesiologist there was last name yeah use my last name and they just call you Paul well they do on Star Trek I'm a character yeah I know yeah they actually call me Paul Stan was on Star Trek but Hannibal Lector that series I always people write me said oh my gosh you're this evil doctor who overdoses his patients with with drugs and then puts them in the backyard and then inoculate them with mushrooms just like cordyceps you know so you 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 they CBS you know settled up they have to talk to you that's all my TED talk and and they said Paul were the writers of the Star Trek Discovery Series we're kind of stuck you know we want to talk to you we saw your TED talk we're really interested in I go wait a second are you the one who put me in the Hubble Lecter it goes yeah I go let's get it right this time you know so I said okay I said foolishly before maybe to my benefit foolishly I said turn on your tape recorder you know give me the general idea and let me run with it and they said ok go for it there's six of them I guess in 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 do 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 from 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 Astro mycologist Paul Stamets is a using the mycelium spore drive it has become I couldn't believe it we're watching this thing and the Star Trek the main theme of Star Trek is based on mycelium and the concepts that I gave them they've elaborated this I mean six ways to Sunday so they've really taken it this is as some sort of a propulsion system it's a partisan system because in my TED talk and I've been talking about a long time about networks we have the mycelial Network we have the computer internet we have the neurological network and our brains in the organization of a dark matter conforms to string theory so these are three are katha the same archetype the same dimensional structures stacked on top of each other and nature builds upon his prior successes so networks reward themselves by surviving and it was from catastrophic so I said and I'm still bound by confidentiality and there's an incredibly strict confidentiality agreement I can only state which has been publicly displayed but the mycelium sport 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 Astro mycologist amis now is plugging himself into the mycelial network of the universe and they can jump rather than using their standard hyperdrives which will you see them streaming across four hours from one part of the university of the other they can show up immediately and then and then disappear is this something that you think that actually be real one day I okay you know what pushing the envelope baby does it pushing the envelope on this one but if you look at the multiverse and I've had a I've had one or two in particular multiverse experiences where time and reality has changed in a way that I cannot explain it so what do you mean it's so incredibly profound that I still cannot wrap my mind around it and these are psilocybin experience psilocybin experience so I think the psilocybin experience might be a one rule portal and now I'm gonna sound like Terence Mckenna a vendor ring in to 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 is a shot okay I'll give it a shot and you've already blown my mind 50 times today is it a very deeply personal experience to me but um I was uh I was going to the Evergreen State College I had the Drug Enforcement Administration license my brother John went to Yale University he got a graduate scholarship in neurophysiology at the University of Washington he came out to Washington State in Seattle I was living in Olympia Washington I had a cabin up in the mountains near Darrington Washington then a summer time for three years I sat chokers I was a logger I really believe in the school of hard knocks and the blending of academia with with blue-collar hard work I loved chopping wood I loved 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 is he died unfortunately two years ago he sue see he got me involved in mushrooms so I'm gonna segue and set the stage here but I needed another two minutes to set the stage here so I'm growing up in a small town in Ohio called Columbiana my brother John goes that his going to Yale he comes back one one day and he gives me a book that he's using for his class but he's on break and he says I never really X fasted that John went to Mexico Colombia came back with a great stories of heating suicide mushrooms and was my older brother I just idolized him and his book called altered states of consciousness and so I said John can I borrow your book he said sure and I said but Paul you get back you know from my break is over I'm going back to college it's as part of our textbook so I bought his book altered states of consciousness I'm just fascinated reading it you know about all these different ways of expanding your consciousness I'm fourteen years of age and so my best friend Ryan Schneider says Paul can I borrow your book we're hanging together all the time anyway I need it back so he bought was my book and he doesn't return it a day you know several days passed a week pass you know two weeks passed my brother's coming back on break I said I needed that book ball back Paul and I go to Ryan I go Ryan I need my book I need my book and Ryan kept avoiding the answering the subject until finally give me my book and Ryan goes I can't give it to you Paul I said why this is my dad burned it I see your dad burned my brothers book I go WTF I didn't use this phrase back then I said oh my god and I have a shout out to Ryan Snyder's father that because of that event it stimulated my interest in altered states of consciousness even more so that 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 I says Paul I think I found some suicide mushrooms Johnson you're really smart you've been collecting salafi cubensis and Colombia and Mexico but you know they're much more complicated up here and then I said let me ask you a few questions I said okay John you take a spore print he goes yes I go as a spores purple Brown he goes yes they are purple Brown I go good okay no 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 great break the cap and and separate the cap very slowly do you see a little skin that's translucent he breaks it he goes yeah you see that skin the John the growing in wood chips and he goes yes I go but a turning bluish he goes yes they're staining really bright blue oh wow I said John how many did you find he goes you would not believe it there's a huge amount I said wait I say but he the Paul they're a very sensitive place you better come up here right away so I jumped in my car drove up from Olympia to Seattle about 6070 miles I get to his house and I and John's errand and I go well where are we gonna go so well we need some grocery bags you know and let's get on our bikes and let's go down there I go why all the secrecy and and the problem is is well you'll see and it was the end of boat Street and right at the University of Washington a 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 that had to be ten thousand thirty thousand mushrooms I don't know it was about 50 feet by 30 feet whether they all been multiple wood chips there was an eruption that picked up you know trash and you know debris that picked up six inches with 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 will go away and for the substation we start making much for picking my friend and we felt the groceries back back where to and and then the other students are walking by what are you doing oh nothing you know and then we eventually got yeah there's plenty for everybody so it was like pretty good everyone all hang and I was 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 eight or ten grocery bags full of these mushrooms on it turn out to be a new species called philosophy spoon see I'm named after a new species new species new as in hadn't been discovered by describe pictures of scientific literature before so you picked a mushroom that no one knew existed well we've been haven'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 what of the type collection that anchored the species taxonomically so I think some of the specimens still exist in her barrier around the world because it's the reference standard so we go back to the house and it's like we got to dry them so we lay out newspapers and the whole the whole newspapers were just covered with mushrooms and and so that night and we there's about the four guys from Yale all in neurophysiology all scientists and on scientists and Trackman it says eat them and so I mean this is not very potent they're 1/10 the potency of cubensis so we made smoothies oh my gosh talk about the gag reflex our we had make these smoothies we had eat 50 of them in order to have a dose equivalent equipment Westlaw speak events this would be so I knew that so we made it incredibly distasteful milkshakes and and we chucked them here we drank them and and then amazing experience I bonded with my brother it was beautiful and then you're peaking at the experience you look around like tens of thousands these Muslims like oh my gosh all for science and so I go to bed and and I'm laying about it and you know full-blown experience and you know 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 I go I had this crazy dream 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 gonna be a nuclear war well what could kill all these cattle you know there's a time the Reagan administration and and and all that and you know the the the attention was really high between the Soviet Union the United States and they said then they were joking with me saying oh well okay you know what it's gonna happen I go I know I was in Olympia and I needed to rush up to Darington to stay in my cabin because my books were up there my manuscript was up there I need to save save my research so they've laughed and they laughed and said well when's the world will end Paul and I go well it's not this weekend I was like in two days it's next weekend so they wrote on the calendar December 1st I put it in my book on [ __ ] 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 that day didn't of a morning tonight it would go up six feet just from the snow melting because very close to this volcano and big glaciers I said oh my gosh I'm gonna lose my managed kept all my research I need to get up there I need to get up there and so I'm watching the news on news and the roads are being closed so how to go through a Rockport Washington the back way in order to get back to my cabin I get to my cabin and the banquette eroded about ten feet I was only about 10 12 feet away from the from the river now my cabin was on the verge of falling into a pike my manuscript I got him all my books you know I rescued all the material I had but I couldn't get out of there because the roads have been closed and so I had a right wait two days two days and the roads then opened up and I drove out out of the valley into Snohomish Valley and I went around the bend and there the Sun it was a brilliant sunny day a warm day and they are floating in the fields for hundreds and hundreds of dead cattle how do you explain that I entered I think into the multiverse no as a scientist you realize when you say something like that you open yourself up to ridicule do you feel hesitant to communicate these into degree yes but you know I'm 62 years of age and you know at one point you don't care I just don't care you know this is true this happened to me and I can push the envelope on these ideas because the credibility of my research is well-established I can save the bees do you care whether I have taken sulfide mushrooms if I can save your farm your family your country or the world billions of dollars in protect biosecurity I care more I care more that's right so I'm telling you things I'm not making these up and make more I don't have to I just 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 and turn me on to your work and could we do this again I'd love to please all right and if people want to research more of your stuff fungi calm and what was the other website and host offense comm host defense calm and there's a ton of other information TED talk and I have a youtube.com slash Paul Stamets site and Louie Schwartzberg shout out we have a fantastic fungi calm check it out Louie now are coming out with a movie that describes much of the stuff thank you so much all right thank you brother [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 7,773,579

Rating: 4.8808413 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, JRE #1035, Joe Rogan, Paul Stamets, fungi, mushroom, Deathsquad, Freak party, 1035, JRE, comedy, comedian, jokes, stand up, funny, mma, UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship

Id: mPqWstVnRjQ

Length: 133min 48sec (8028 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Droid017]

Joe is entertaining to be sure, but if you want a podcast hosted by someone a little less agro and a little more composed, you should really try out the Tim Ferriss show. He interviews a lot of the same people and some other very fascinating characters.

• Paul Stamets

• Stan Groff, a Chech doctor who has administered 4500 doses of LSD in a clinical setting

[u/aenild]

Also check out the podcasts with Dennis McKenna, Terence Mckenna's brother

[u/OdwordCollon]

I've used Paul's story from this podcast about how magic mushrooms cured his stutter to convince about a dozen people to try psychedelics

[u/Bukuu]

One of the most interesting Joe Rogan podcasts I've listened to. Recommend.

[u/[deleted]]

This is one of the best I've listened to. It inspired me to start reading mycelium running and now I want to grow lions mane and oysters.

[u/Good-Vibes-Only]

Worth noting that Stamets is pretty controversial in mycology these days, as in he owns a company that sells fungal supplements while making dubious claims to sell product.

[u/Professional-Dragon]

As stated in the title:

"Joe Rogan Experience #1035 - Paul Stamets [a pretty interesting video, if you are interested about the relationship between our human psyche, culture & biology; Paul Stamets is a mycologist, author and advocate of bioremediation and medicinal fungi]"

You can read more about the guy here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Stamets

https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Stamets/e/B001JS0KV6%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

https://fungi.com/pages/about-us

[u/thesmeggyone]

And that hat too!!

[u/ceaselessbecoming]

I saw this for the first time a few months ago, and it just totally blew me away. Couldn't recommend it enough. Good choice OP!