Paul Stamets: Mycology and Mushrooms as Medicines

[Music] [Music] it's my honor to be here I was here a few years ago and this is a continuation of my lifelong adventure it's not a scientific adventure that I've been been embarked upon so all of nature is interconnected and this talk is bifurcated into two subjects one is on bees and the other is on psilocybin mushrooms well in fact it has good reason we've come to a confluence and this image from 7,000 years ago then redrawn that's the original pictograph is of the bee man there's a long history of use of psilocybin mushrooms being put into honey and it may well have made psychoactive means and in the beer Purity act of 1516 actually specifically banned mushrooms from being put into beer so I want to start at the beginning so at the beginning of this universe and this is from the Max Planck observatory and going the furthest out reaches to be able to look back at the organization of the universe it follows the same archetype of that shared by mycelium neurons and the computer Internet this is no accident different orders of magnitude these are structures that are self-rewarding that that lead to resilience so when we look at the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago soon thereafter the planet Thea came and crashed into the earth jettison the rubble field into orbit and then coalesced be able to form the moon many scientists believe that the interface of the oceans and the tidal forces of the moon created a very ideal epigenetic environment for the evolution of life and so this recently was discovered is the oldest representation known so far of a multicellular organism 2.4 billion years ago and as that of mycelium so we advanced forward to 420 million years ago and this fossil fossil was found in 1843 from over a hundred years of the great mysteries before vascular plants before trees before flying insects well it was then recent determined by dr. Kevin voice that this this fossil named protects IDs was a giant fungus the tallest organism on earth at that time about ten to twenty ten to fifteen meters high so we advanced forward now to from 420 million years ago to a great extinction event 250 million years ago it was the permian-triassic extinction event caused by putative lee an asteroid impact the asteroid hit the earth huge amounts of debris jettison in the atmosphere sunlight was cut off plants animals died massive extinction and because sunlight was cut off and so much life of plants and animals fungi then inherited the earth this peaty boundary is very easily seen in the fossil record and indeed a fungus that was given the name Radu Bo sporran IDs was the predominant fungus found in the fossil record at this interface at the Pitti boundary so we go then from 250 million years ago to a hundred and ten million years ago and recently in Brazil and fossil was found of a fully intact mushroom now this is really important mushrooms had their form long before we had ours so well mushroom what are mushrooms mushrooms are the fruit bodies that the reproductive structures their fleshy they tend to be very temporal they're fragrant they tend to rot quickly but it's the mycelium that gives rise to the mushrooms of fruit bodies and so when you touch a mushroom it's really a window into an underground network that you can't see here's the mycelium of salafi commences growing over five days and the mycelium networks actually have enormous capacity for size the largest organism in the world is the mycelial Network in eastern oregon 2,200 acres in size and yet is only one cell wall thick now then by the we have multiple skin layers to protect us from the infection the mycelium as one and yet there can be a surrounding the mycelium that can be more than a thousand species of bacteria in a single gram and a single cubic inch of mycelium in the soil they came more than me more than eight miles of cells so the mycelium can grow for ten twenty ten a hundred years a thousand years and then surface in the reproductive form as in in the presence of a mushroom and they're mushrooms and released spores the mycelium is triggered in the mushroom formation primarily before for environmental stimuli the introduction of rain water evaporative cooling that's associated with it the mycelium wicks up then to the surface of the nearly surface this of this of the soil exhales a carbon dioxide inhales oxygen and the fourth one is light this is really interesting because the majority of Muslims require light in order for fruit parties to form from the mycelium so a primordial then is triggered grow is very very rapidly and the mycelium of most of the species that I grow and oh my then what we grow at our company are sensitive to the blue light this is really interesting because also with the psilocybin mushrooms blue light triggers psilocybin mushroom production at the time of primordial formation the most common psilocybin mushroom used in the world is philosophy cubensis it was easily grown and the mushroom then after it forms it quickly rots this is really important that you understand this Martians are highly perishable some people made the analogy there almost like seafood they can perish in just no matter a few days but upon them then sporulating spores germinate mycelium forms and then it quickly goes subterranean so a single cubic inch of soil can have more than eight miles of these fine threads this sets up the microbiome it is the foundation of the soil ecosystem fungi generates soil this is in the micro biomes that are established then help the plant communities rise up that create the debris fields that feed the mycelium guarantee the survival of the descendant fungi from the resident mycelium they are deterministic and setting up ecosystems that lead to biodiversity because that do biodiversity then will their own progeny so these are governing networks in the end and the food web well we now face another extinction event and this is something that's really important to me should be important to all of you we have now entered in the 6x we're losing more than 30,000 species per year in a genome of about 8.5 million species do the math on a hundred years that's more than a third of the species become extinct on this planet and a hundred years that hundreds of million years to get us here it is truly we're at a critical evolution on this planet that if we don't get our act together then we are going to experience unfortunately a very very desperate future more than a million species now our our our our subject of potential immediate extinction well this is also is affecting lots of insects and this study here seventy five percent decline over twenty seven years in a protected area there's no not an industrial area this is a nature preserve and 27 percent in 27 years 75% decline many of you may have noticed they used to drive down the country roads you have lots of bug splatter now you don't see that as much because there's an enormous loss of flying insect mass and in particular this is striking bees and this is where some of my research has steered in the past few years is looking at how we can be able to help the immune system of bees the deform wing virus is by far the biggest virus that is threatening bee colonies around the world and the deformed wing virus is vectored by the varroa mite varroa destructor and this might came to the United States in 1984 from Asia and it's like a dirty hypodermic syringe it locks on the back of bees and injects the a slew of viruses well is this now the deform wing virus has become a global pandemic it's considered to be the nail in the coffin of bees and moreover the virus is being spread to flowers and then other insects become infected so there's a cross vector of contamination with the flowers being a nexus point and so bumblebees and wild bees are being affected by honeybees and so this is a tremendous calamity and a threat I have about 10 beehives and most all beekeepers feed their bees sugar water so we found after many years of research and some of you who have seen my talk here before I was working with a bio shield by defense program we found extracts highly active against flu viruses and herpes viruses and so I thought maybe that these extracts could help the immunity of bees the summary of our research over about five years we found that the red belt at polypore Amadou which my hat is made from red reishi which has a multi thousand year history of use in Asia and chaga also used in Eurasia and Europe also for more than a thousand years these are species that had some of the most significant benefit to bees we conducted the largest B clinical trial in history 532 bee hives and the almond orchards of California this is also important because 1.2 million beehives from all over the United States congregate in the almond orchards of California it's another perfect storm because you have all these cross vectors of viral contamination consolidating in a close proximity and then the viruses that are spread to the other bees and beehives and then they're dispersed all over the country so the summary of our research doctor working with the USDA in Western State University dr. J Evans the senior virologist and bees with the USDA he's never seen such strong antiviral activity I guess B virus is a seamless tamás's extracts now the deformed wing virus in this case 879 to one a very significant p-value and also a eighty to one between the Amadou mushroom and the reishi mushroom against the black queen cell virus we found also significant antiviral activity 500 to one amazingly against the lake Sinai virus we found a 45,000 won reduction this is putting 1% of our natural extracts from mycelium into sugar water one drop 400 drops sugar waters 50% sugar 50% water so the summary these results are shown here highly a significant antiviral activity with a natural product moreover it also extended longevity dr. Steve Sheppard from the West State University has never seen in 40 years that anything that extends the lifespan of bees so we not only correlated a reduction of the viruses by thousands of times but we also were able to extend the lifespan of bees this is critically important because bees used to fly for nine days in search of pollen returning it to the mother colony one bee will pollinate up to a thousand flowers a day every almond that you eat was was visited by a bee so one bee thousand flowers a day nine days nine thousand flowers nine thousand almonds now that's been reduced down to four days it has been more than cut in half because a deformed wing virus then makes a tensile strength of the bees wings less strong and the bees then end up aborting and they can't do the pollination flights as well I've been awarded about 40 patents on this was an extraordinary because I'm not an entomologist I just looked at something different and came up with these ideas and the patents have been aboard United States Canada Eurasia Europe Australia New Zealand have open sourced it for the rest of the world so we make literally thousands of gallons of extract we've produced about 40,000 kilos of mycelium on heavy production weeks per week so we have these laboratories class 100 100 clean room laboratories we have laminar flow walls that's III I call it HEPA filter env for other scientists to come to visit because our we have walls of laminar flow hoods but the the patents are important because we wanted to be able to spread this solution around the world so our team here at Washington State University and within our company we've been coordinating on for the past several years and we put out a campaign to raise money for research and I was astonished that last year and we've actually raised much more than this but the last report I got we raised over five million dollars by just the through social media and a campaign asking people to contribute to Western State University bee pollination program so all of this was good but we realized we had to publish and I'm really mentioned that last night but we published the Nature scientific reports how many people here are published in nature really just I thought it'd be dozens of you but if you've know about nature only 7% of the articles submitted to nature get published we were published nation on the primary author of my other scientists and I checked this morning and we are still to this day and the top 1% of more than two hundred and sixty four thousand articles published in the nacre publication ecosystem the reason I think that this article has gotten such great attention in the article my other co-authors pointed out there's been no antiviral treatment to protect bees before this discovery that's why the patents have have also issued but I've been able to make the argument and I think is a strong one that natural products natural extracts with mycelium can offer a broader Bioshield of benefits than a pure pharmaceutical because we have grown up within the plek city of nature our me logical fields or very have very complex sets of receptors and by using these natural products we can up regulate the immune system defense and genes another genes to be able to consequentially empower the immune systems so the the bees are able to reduce the viruses immunologically so how can we scale this and this is exponential medicine so Daniel put out the call and I'm responding to his call so I invented a citizen scientist Beefeater and it's based on a maze bees can navigate through a maze better than Hornets Yellow Jackets and wasps and so you can put this extracts in this you can hang it an apartment building you can create ecological ladders and high-rise apartments and then you can help the bees be fed with sugar water and also reduce their viruses and it helps wild bees bumble bees so we are now thankfully thanks to Sergey Brin Sergey Brin thank you very much we are now collaborating with the X company and the bee feeders will have be able to be instrumented with the Google technology to be able to measure the number be is going in and out the type of bees and create baselines it will distribute this all over the world and the idea is it would up the data will go up literally into the cloud will use low frequency long range transmission and we'll create a new distributed network of B feeders throughout the entire world will create baselines and this is so important because once you have the baseline established and you're in Oklahoma and you see in the bee feeders you're only getting 10% of normal activity well you can predict that the hay crop is going to fail and it's gonna be hay is gonna be much more expensive so I decided to come up with a new blockchain crypto currency called the fungal and this will be the first crypto that is tied to ecological and economic benefit so this is the crypto that will power and created the funding so we can fund research like a Western State University or supplying beef feeders to people in Indonesia and so this blockchain technology we just receive a favorable patent response from the European Patent Office so this is something that I am really passionate about because I can create a huge fund I hope and it'll be the first one that people can actually vote for the ecosystem by involved and being involved in getting involved in a blockchain currency I'm dedicated to give a ten thousand to a hundred thousand of these beefeaters away if you go to be mushroomed dot-com be EE mushroom comm you can sign up and the idea for the beefeaters is that we create also an altar net we have another way of being able to transmit data when the higher internet is not functioning so the modality of this has many many different implications so what we were lots of mushrooms we have about 700 estranged and species and our cultural library this is my kitchen with some of my fellow workers here and these these mushrooms in particular are highly consumed especially in Asia enokitake shiitake and oyster mushrooms dr. icky Kalwa I met him and he came over in 2005 he works for the National Cancer Center this was the death rates for all cancers per hundred thousand people that again a perfec sure he was sent over there because there was a unusual dearth decline and the amount of cancer in Lugano after several years of doing a epidemiological surveys he found that was associated with enoki mushroom cultivators and their families it drew down the cancer rate so that's the heat really gets credit for doing this first study one hundred and seventy four thousand people in the survey and then a numerous other studies have come out just in the past few months 2019 eating mushrooms may reduce the risk of cognitive decline the Journal of Alzheimer's disease and this is 50% reduced odds of having mild cognitive impairment this is out a single poor mushroom consumption also has been associated with a statistically significant decline and prostate cancer especially advanced medicine metastatic I read this - about 18% reduction thirty six thousand four hundred ninety nine men studied now why is it we've seen these benefits amia logically well historically has been associated with beta glucans but the beta glucan i think is a is a false positive in the research data what what's the size of a beta glucan there's tens to tens to thousands of killed Alton's these are polymers of sugars and so the beta glucans have had a tremendous amount of research and attention because they do up really the immune system as if there's an infection in your gut but they're polymers or sugars and they create a scaffolding so it's like the macro scaffolding and molecular lee but inside the scaffolding i have long believed and postulated is the other compounds the fatty acids the polyphenols but our compounds that are embedded within beta glucan scaffolding and so a series of research projects that we did with the University of Washington and I finally was able to with my colleagues be able to say you need to look at removing the polyphenols and fatty acids from the beta glucan scaffolding they use a lip pace and they basically dissolve the fatty acids and when they did it the tlr-2 response fell by 83 percent and it showed de facto that the polyphenols in fact in fatty acids had a much more stronger immunological benefit than that of the beta glucans alone so this is not pot this has been accepted for publication this is a complex blend of 17 mushroom species think that many physicians are aware of LPS's the endotoxins coming from bacteria gram-negative bacteria it can give an alert to the immune system and so we use we then spiked these samples and geological surveys with it with endotoxins of the LPS and we found it was localized totally different in the CD it's a 69 out of a ssin pathways than what our mixture of mushrooms was doing so we clearly showed that the immune modulation and response was not due to LPS's many times it is due to LPS's because mushrooms rot and when you have rotting mushrooms and you dry them or you get a preparation or an extract from unknown the people who are don't have good quality control you are getting an LPS endotoxin immune inflammatory response this paper will be out any day as the mycelium of turkey tail mushrooms that showed that the rice that the mycelium has grown upon it ferments the rice and makes it into a very very powerful immune modulating product that stimulates the production of interleukin 1 RA and so it has an anti-inflammatory effect combined with immuno enhancing effect and this is the best of both worlds so we don't get over ampullae and amplification of the immune system so an excellent article on microbiome dr. David Newberg I think was associated with the National answer Institute this is shows that definitively that mycelium of the turkey tail mushrooms are prebiotic for the microbiome post amoxicillin treatment which obviously destroys a lot of your microbiome and also reduces clustering while supporting beneficial bacteria now I have lots of references and I've put up this website specifically for physicians and researchers such as yourself I agreed a lot of Google Scholar Alerts a lot of doctors just don't have time to look at the current literature several hundred pages long unbranded just pure science so you can go to mushroom references comm and you'll be able to put in treatment protocols mushroom species disease complexes and very quickly get some of the best of the peer-reviewed literature that's out there so now I'm going to segue back to the bee man and so a friend of mine said Paul maybe you are the reincarnation of the bee man so but this in the in the northern Algeria 7,000 years ago about seven of these pictographs were found they're associated with mushrooms and Anna be like figure well as I mentioned Sullivan mushrooms were preserved in honey for hundreds of years throughout Mesoamerica now we certainly come full circle this next slide I think is very powerful and tells the story of our times these are the current universities approved for doing clinical studies on psilocybin in humans today that are ongoing this is a movement and this is the only half of them I didn't couldn't put all of them up on this slide because you couldn't be able to read them but this is now a wave of interest recognizing that psilocybin can be pharmacologically a very very powerful psychotherapeutic agent now for those of you who have not tripped on psilocybin this is not an addictive drug those of you who have done a high dose of psilocybin when you look at it in the next day you go no way I'm not touching those for a long time right so it has a very powerful but it's not something that you're gonna be you know consuming you know on a daily basis it's a few experiences far in between then you have to process so how many primates eat mushrooms this is the question that I asked well there's 22 primates that are known 23 being humans the Goldie monkey consumes up to 35% of its diet 12 times its body weight and mushrooms well that speaks to an ancient ancestry of contact between primates and mushrooms and the knowledge of which ones are edible or poisonous two million to two hundred thousand years ago the human the hominid brain suddenly expanded Homo sapiens appeared around only 200,000 years ago that's a very short time at the time the rat radical climate change which we're having now homeless sapiens suddenly had to increase in their brain and language they and the arts began to develop you know only several tens of thousands of years ago so this is another view of primates walking across the vanna in response to climate change tracking animals what do you do look for dung you look for foot tracks the majority of primates eat grub flight larva grows in mushrooms as natural to presume that our ancestors would have found these mushrooms they're hungry and tracking animals they consume them and then 20 minutes later you have liftoff and you'd be sharing this with your family you're you're in a hunting group the mushrooms are but large they're bodacious and they stimulate and we know now neurogenesis now how dominant are these mushrooms well look at elephant dung look at the size that mushroom and so this would happen not once not twice not 10 times but millions upon millions upon millions upon millions of times over millions and millions of years I believe this has causes epigenetic neurogenesis and so now Terence Mckenna and Dennis McCann have proposed this as a stoned ape theory because of the ability of increasing language here acuity visual acuity etc and I disagree with them it's not a theory it's a hypothesis hypothesis an educated guess to explain an observable phenomenon a theories and hypotheses have been tested and proved proof actually but nevertheless I think we have the opportunity of proving that this hypothesis is indeed has the strengths of being factually supported to be a theory a fantastic connecter gram showing the network patterns of a placebo and during a peak experience on psilocybin now look at all those neural pathways think of you have a challenge if you have a hurdle to overcome from an evolutionary point of view a mathematical problem a coding problem which brain do you want and but I also want to propose to you that with these enhanced neurological activity with AI and the many smart people in this room we need to design navigation tools that allow us to be able to navigate through the hyper dimensional interconnectivity that we're seeing here that maximize the benefit I think these are fantastic potential tools not only for psychotherapy but for also creativity so we know now that through a dissection of mice that the psilocybin it causes neurogenesis in the hippocampus psilocybin encourages induces neurogenesis courage and kindness we've seen this from other studies well folks those are leadership skills and that leads to better citizenship so many people in the 70s were cultivating a solo Simon mushrooms a sauce to be cubensis in particular my work was covered by a Drug Enforcement Administration license I've published four new species in the genus Ossipee selasa be as your essence Linna formants santa fe below sense loss to be wily I'm the research really surged in the 70s then it kind of went quiet until dr. Roland Griffiths from Johns Hopkins University put in an application in 1999 there's published I think in 2006 and 2008 on the clinic relevance of soul simon for four with patients that attributed this is one of the significant spiritual experiences of their lives many of you saw the movie last night with Roland so so eloquently spoke but a number of other studies have come out and I think these are fascinating here is one of prisoners from DSHS there's over 480 thousand people surveyed now Association is not necessarily causation but it can be but statistically significant if the prisoner had one experience with psilocybin there's a 27% decrease odds of larceny 22% reduction of property crime 18% decrease odds of violent crime think of the return on the investment for society not to have people criminal committing criminal acts not not basically causing PTSD when their family units loading up the court system the distraction of law enforcement and our resources and our tax dollars this is substantial folks now another study that came out 1266 community members aged 16 to 17 this is extraordinary and it serves that males would use LSD or psilocybin a decreased odds of perpetuating physical violence against their current partner interestingly it only was with men so if your partner was another man or another woman and you had an experience with psilocybin mushrooms you were less prone to violence so I always thought if you have dating apps you should have like have you done psilocybin Chuck yeah better candidate right so another one this is basically the emotional responses of people after they have done a suicide and in reckon a and recognizing a people's faces and having a better reaction to it so a reset therapeutic mechanism has been proposed Rudy talked about the default mode Network this this is very much related to that as well and also there was an association with increased nature relatedness and a decreased tendency to authoritarian views folks this is extremely meaningful think about this one or two trips in your lifetime H I go on journeys you know once or twice a year that's all I need but I believe that psilocybin mushrooms make for nicer people I really do and I think this is a baseline consideration that all of us should take to heart so also released that I've mentioned pro-environmental behavior it's related to nature already a relatedness roland griffiths and his other colleagues at Johns Hopkins proposing them removing it from schedule one which means this is addictive and has no medical application the schedule for which is basically like that I have asthma medicine and so there is this advocacy now to remove it from schedule one to two a much lower much lower schedule so Johns Hopkins this is the set and setting they proposed I understand that you need to have had any control settings the reproducibility of data you know all in the same couch the same lights the same room etc so you can normalize the data sets but this is not where I would do it I'll be up on a cliff at sunset half an hour take the mushrooms wash the Sun set go down the heavens open up you have that literally the oceanic feeling that makes for an extraordinarily positive experience with a loved one and also to have somebody who's experienced who is not ingested the mushrooms they can be your watcher they can be your guide they may just come over and just hold your hand but having that other person there to be able to know that everything is okay and what I like to do is saying we're having a meditation experience here please don't bother these people and then you have somebody you know just basically watching to make sure the set in the setting is protected but I've visited Johns Hopkins and I was really excited to see that mushroom stone because that mushroom stone is one that I made and I made thirty of these with my partner with my with my friend and to see this mushroom stone there I felt like I was represented I was like I was I was there you know I'm rooting for you you know so Michael Pollan and I got together many of you how many people ridden Mario Holland's book quite a few of you there's he had put 40 pages on me and told everyone where my favorite mushroom patch was never trust a journalist but Michael Pollan did a great job in being at making a bridge you know helping the unfamiliar to become more comfortable with the idea of using psilocybin so throughout Silicon Valley now there is a use of mushrooms for micro dosing to increasing creativity I've personally talked to several of these people who are coders and are teaching other coders they feel as a competitive advantage and I think it's also likely that the majority of you here who have occasionally used psilocybin mushrooms are much more likely to be successful in your careers and your business and those of you who have not you are at a disadvantage because the coders in Silicon Valley strongly believe in micro dosing for increasing creativity and again it makes for a nicer people a nicer work environment a more collaborative environment less prone prone to anger so another mushroom we're very excited about as lion's mane mushrooms her ischium erinaceus there's two small clinical studies in Japan specifically with lion's mane mushrooms if they produce nerve growth factors Harrison owns from the mushrooms and Erin a scenes for the mycelium so there's a clinical study with a mild cognitive Department impairment double-blind controlled placebo controlled study interestingly when the individuals after several weeks went off the lion's mane their progression towards dementia then restarted so in this patient population the continued use of lion's mane seemed to stave off the the otherwise natural progression towards dementia well it is known that lion's mane mushrooms the era Nations remove amyloid plaques which interfere in with neurotransmission and cause remyelination that's specifically what they do they cause remyelination on the axial ins and nerves and the consequence of that the my plaques then are removed there's really good Studies on that so what our research has been doing is looking at specifically the neurogenic potential of lion's mane and the growth of neuro of neurite outgrows this is from a company neuro fit there's a preclinical research in in France we found surprisingly but also supported by other researchers the mycelium is far more powerful than the mushrooms so the mycelium in this case compared the brain derived nervous factors which is the we say the act of control was the passive control the Lions may increased about 8% of the mycelium I want you to focus on that could this this data I asked them to Russia this data came in yesterday and this is what I'm really excited about so there is lion's mane again the mycelium 111 percent so it's a replication of the of data that sort of confirms that the analysis is consistent but we've identified several analogues of psilocybin which are perfectly legal I no longer have a DEA license so I'm not allowed to possess else Ivan I like to say Nature provides I don't but I could go out and find them I'm gonna skilled tax anima sign a indulge once or twice a year this is no big deal for me I can just go out any backyard practically in Washington Oregon Northern California Hawaii you know South America and I can find these things really quite readily so but these other analogues of psilocybin are totally legal and the increase in the neuro outgrowth at seven days in sex stipulate so there's a profound increase in the right outgrowth was an extension of neurons from treatment now I file patents on this in June of 2016 I beat compass by 16 months I basically from the literature search in the Patent Office I beat everybody on this and the analogues of psilocybin not only being legal but dr. Prem Pam Crisco and I she's she's a doctor and I bio assayed these no one had to ever consume them the scientific literature so I did at end of one study actually the report of one of them killing a child so we totally monitored my own my vitals and we took some of these substances fully expecting they have liftoff and I have to say I was a little bit disappointed that I didn't get liftoff well we're able to prove that these were actually not psychoactive substances in making you become high so this is an example from neuro fit this is the neuro outgrowth of Ana's composure of silicide analogues in this in case ten days from exposure and they use fluorescent proteins that are dyed and they measure the outgrowth of the neurites so it's seven thousand dollars a gram but you can grow cells I have mushrooms for $1 a pound so this course the psilocybin career molecules per gram is gonna plummet there's never it will compete when you can grow suicide mushroom for the price of portobellos for a mushroom farmer so this study in particular is one that I've honed in on this is a mouse study and basically it found the the extinction of the trace fear conditioning the put mice in a cage with a electro and they had a tone dong forty seconds later the flu middle floor became electrified and they shocked the mice and then they'd wait a while they have the tone again that shocked the mice very Klee the mice when they hear the tone they work our and fear that's the condition if your response and then after they were fully you know trained to expect in fear the the tone and the shock subsequently they then dosed them with basically a high dose of psilocybin one milligram per kilogram of body weight where's the low dose point one milligram per kilogram of body weight and they found something very unexpected the high dose of psilocybin took ten repetitions of no shock after the tone before the mice dissociated the tone with the negative pain consequence on low doses and only took two times two times on low dose and the low doses tended towards neuro regeneration the high doses did not it actually looked like it restricted neuro degeneration though I think it's probably because it's so potent it flooded all the receptors they had to be washed out and Plus neurons take some days to grow so super high dose the I can understand why you wouldn't have neurological outgrowth as opposed to a titrate a dose at a lower amount as your cells are reproducing so I proposed an epigenetic neurogenesis formula of psilocybin or salami mushrooms of Erin a scenes or lions named mane mushrooms and I'm stacking it with niacin vitamin b3 this is the flushing niacin the idea to allow micro dosing to have a universality of use and the idea is that you'd have one xx or one tenth of a threshold dose of psilocybin you'll be 10 to 20 times less than that you had 100 milligrams to 200 milligrams of vitamin b3 and then if someone tried to get high but taking 10 or 20 of those pills they'll be taking like two grams of niacin so it becomes the antabuse that allows for micro dosing that could be approved by the FDA and moreover the niacin excites the nerve endings that's why you get itchy you're itchy and neuropathies often times present themselves in deadening of the fingertips and the toes it's also a vasodilator so it has three potential attributes that allow it to be bundled or stacked with psilocybin that allow it to be approved I think much more likely by the FDA then the knot because it will prevent the abuse factor so this is exciting to us so how do we get the data and I have no economic interest in this company but we are launching the largest micro dose study in the world it's just being launched in the next week the two has gone through ethics review and a few more things on an anonymization of the data and so my credo study comm is being launched it is an app for your Apple it will be also for droids and it has you agree and you could you consent you log in with the email to step in encryption and then you sell with people with your microdose saying how much you're taking and whether you're stacking it with liens made or niacin or chocolate and the idea is to then do all sorts of tests on memory pattern recognition hearing vision we have we're designing this so we can have maybe up to 100 to 200 endpoints because the idea is that we want millions of people to use this and then we'll look for signal from the noise you already saw all these other retroactive studies have unanticipated consequences that came out in the data partner to partner violence reduction you know Pro environmental influence anti-authoritarian influences so this is something that we're real excited about so go to micro dose study comm you can sign up for it when it's released you'll be notified this is when science becomes stranger than science fiction I will all invite you to a party I want to throw in the year 2033 I was 11 years old during the cicada outbreak in Ohio how many people have seen a cicada outbreak is like Armageddon cannot believe there are so many in sucks these cicadas come out what I didn't know when I was 11 the scientists have recently discovered that I'm fungus called masses poorer cicada ANSYS infects the cicada infects the male cicada and it rots off their butt and their genitals and that's packed full of soul asylum it also is producing and feta beans and then the male cicada adopt a female seduction dance to the uninfected males to get them uninfected males to get near them so the masses poor spores will infect the other males and so when they then burrow back into the ground then the mass of poor species survives so this is extraordinary because so such a weird story but I love this quote scientists advised against consuming hyper sexual zombies cicada is infected with a psychoactive fungus news alert so but this does illustrate I think that the complexity of the interface of fungi and animals is far beyond what our limited field of vision and imagination can currently anticipate and that these fungi are reaching out to us controlling our behavior at a time critical that we face 6x that we are likely unfortunately may be living in the best of the last of times unless we gather the creativity from people like you in this room to invent ourselves out of this mess but it doesn't matter how wealthy you are folks what is a heritage you're gonna leave and the legacy you leave for your children if you end up and we end up destroying this planet I feel there's our descendents calling back through time pleading with us to wake up because this is our time critical that we need to save our biosphere and save biodiversity and we can do this together if we were more civil more more polite or better citizens we have better leadership this is our time is now and I believe psilocybin is a new medicine a new category of medicines that can help us create the paradigm shift that is so critically necessary thank you very much Thank You Paula I mean a tour de force this is sort of feels like and it certainly doesn't fit into the traditional medical around but it's starting to get there and you mentioned maps give us a highlight of how they've been able to change the paradigm and take this now through FDA and and what lessons have been learned from that yeah Maps is the the multidisciplinary Association for psychedelic studies by Rick Doblin Maps org they've been working primarily with PTSD affected soldiers and they've been approved and there are now in stage 3 clinical studies with MDMA they have gone through the protocols they've had successful phase 1 and phase 2 they have extraordinary results that from one or two MDMA sessions PTSD resolved as I remember the data correctly roughly accurate 33 percent of the patients in 30 days had lost their PTSD but surprisingly nine months later 66 percent had lost them and this is interesting because and roland griffiths and other researchers have pointed this out from the psilocybin experiences that are the memory of the experience just like PTSD we associated with a horrific event and you hear a gunshot you hear something that reminds you of it it actually replaces that and the memory of the positive experience helps you psychologically without necessarily having the experience again just the pure memory of that in there Johns Hopkins studies 60 percent of the individuals at high doses 70 percent had a highly positive experience life-changing and but very positive 30 percent did not it was a negative experience 14 months later the people had positive experiences still reflected on how positive they were how beneficial where they were but the people had negative experiences the negativity the experience did not extended beyond the experience itself so this I think is remarkable is that it shows a neuro plasticity of the brain and you're able to rewire and we recondition the brain and supplant it well the positive memories on top of something that would otherwise you be suffering for the rest your life so maps org has done a fantastic job and they've done really good research and they're working with many some of the people here in this audience well let's think Paul four things doing for the planet and everybody else all right thank you thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Exponential Medicine

Views: 434,146

Rating: 4.9265838 out of 5

Keywords: psilocybin, magic mushrooms, mycology, pharma, pharmaceuticals, xmed, singularity university

Id: 1Q0un2GPsSQ

Length: 49min 55sec (2995 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/blues4buddha]

Paul Stamets is a goddamned national treasure and should be getting some sort of Medal of Honor for the work he does.

And he’s the only person in this world allowed to rock that ridiculous mushroom hat.

[u/CosmicCharlieHikes]

Paul Stamets is a world-renowned mycologist. In this lecture, he discusses microdosing, psilocybin's effects on PTSD, and covers topics like the stoned ape theory and how we can partner with fungi to improve the world.

[u/SyntrophicConsortium]

I first learned of Paul from the Fantastic Fungi documentary. I suspect that documentary is probably popular around here, so what I'm going to say will probably be unpopular.

I tried watching that Fantastic Fungi documentary and I couldn't finish it. What a mess that was. There was no clearly defined central thesis or point, it was a hodgepodge of science facts and half-baked ideas about the evolution of consciousness and the role fungi may have played in that (and other things that have a very tenuous connection to fungi).

From the trailer and promotional material, I thought it was going to be more about fungi facts, like a natural history documentary about fungi. I know quite a bit about fungi from my time in graduate school studying self-organizing systems, and I was looking forward to seeing how all of that was conveyed in a documentary. They did a pretty poor job on that count, to be honest.

If you're a McKenna fan, I could see why you'd like it, but I was expecting something a little more factual through and through. It felt more like, we have these ideas we want to convey, let's throw them all at the wall and see what sticks. I'm not a filmmaker, but I don't think that's the best way to make a documentary, personally.

[u/pro_skub]

Listened to the joe rogan podcast, I thought he spewed a lot of bullshit.

[u/meatmachine1001]

Man learns a thing; applies the thing to literally everything.

[u/BoiledDenimJeans]

For anyone that wants quality mushroom products that are not from this guy and are not a rip off, search mullers mushrooms, he is out of San Diego area and he uses fruiting bodies in his tinctures 👍

[u/xjbri]

Only now realized the character in Star Trek Discovery is named after him!