Nov. 15, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:11:52
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| And we're live. | ||
| Hello, Paul. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey there. | |
| What's happening? | ||
| How are you, sir? | ||
| Very well. | ||
| How are you? | ||
| And you have newfangled mushroom hats. | ||
| These are surprisingly durable. | ||
| So think about these mushroom hats. | ||
| You would think, oh, it's going to fall apart on your fingers. | ||
| But no, it's quite pliable. | ||
| It's quite pliable and known as German felt. | ||
| And this allowed the Iceman, Otzi, to be able to travel into the Alps. | ||
| It was a fire starter mushroom. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And this actually revolutionized warfare because it helped Flint's spark guns ignite the gunpowder. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So it's Amadou and it comes from a birch polypore mushroom which is a subject of much of our research these days. | ||
| Now, when this grows in the wild, what does it look like? | ||
| Because you've fashioned it into this hat or had someone fashion it. | ||
| That's what it looks like? | ||
| Yeah, some ladies in Transylvania. | ||
|
unidentified
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You see that? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's called Fomis Fomentarius. | ||
| It allowed for the portability of fire. | ||
| There's no doubt we all came from Africa. | ||
| We went north and we discovered winter. | ||
| It just allowed for fire to be carried for days. | ||
| And so your clan was... | ||
| Absolutely depend upon fire starting in order to survive the winter and this mushroom allowed and enabled people to survive. | ||
| Wow, it's very light. | ||
| Is it edible? | ||
| Excellent question. | ||
| Hippocrates first described it in 400 BCE as an anti-inflammatory. | ||
| So in teas, yes, but that's very, very tough. | ||
| When you put it in ash and water, it delaminates into mycelium. | ||
| And so some ladies in Transylvania still make these, and it's a fabric that you pull, and that mushroom there will become one hat. | ||
| Or maybe more. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Because it just keeps on elongating. | ||
| And it's made of mycelium. | ||
| So explain the process. | ||
| How would you take this slab of mushroom that I have that looks like sort of like an enormous Hershey's Kiss... | ||
| And then you would put that? | ||
| In water with ash from a fire. | ||
| Why ash? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Because it's highly alkaline. | ||
| And then it helps it separate. | ||
| It begins to delaminate. | ||
| And literally you start pulling us. | ||
| And it's a fabric that you keep on felting. | ||
| And so it's called German felt. | ||
| And it's been used for literally thousands of years. | ||
| And beekeepers actually use this for smoking hives. | ||
| We could, but it would be kind of bizarre. | ||
| We could flick a bit and you'd burn up one of these things. | ||
| It's just amazing how much this is a fuse. | ||
| And one spark on this... | ||
| You know, can ignite this entire thing over 15-20 minutes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And so beekeepers use it for a smoking hot. | ||
| So if I lit this right now with this lighter? | ||
| Not that. | ||
| If you lit this... | ||
| The powder... | ||
| So the ash, the powdered ash, and then the water. | ||
| And then how does it flatten out and become... | ||
| Because it soaks up. | ||
| And mycelium makes mushrooms. | ||
| Mushrooms make mycelium. | ||
| And so when you soak this and then it gets soggy... | ||
| And then it tenderizes, and then you start breaking it and pulling it apart. | ||
| This is actually probably the first discovery because our ancestors noticed when insects were born to this mushroom. | ||
| Is that like the unprocessed version of it? | ||
| So this is what it's like on one side? | ||
| Well, it's just made into a little table thing, but it's the same thing basically. | ||
| So is this stitched together? | ||
| How did they make it like this? | ||
| Actually, it's using a wood glue, but that's all the natural colors. | ||
| Nothing's been added to it. | ||
| And so they just pull it apart, and it eventually gets flat. | ||
| I really want to make a coat. | ||
| That's my goal, is to have somebody make a coat for me. | ||
| Would it tear easily? | ||
| It's an amazingly strong tinsel fabric. | ||
| It absorbs water, but you have to be careful. | ||
| Someone's smoking a joint, or near a fire, or smoking a cigarette. | ||
| It happened to me. | ||
| I got a big hole in one of mine and I was smelling the smoke and my head was on fire. | ||
| More than once. | ||
| How many folks are out there wearing mushroom hats these days? | ||
| Just a few hundred. | ||
| And we've been trying to actually keep the industry alive by just inundating the – there was like 25 or 30 of these hat makers in Transylvania 10, 15 years ago. | ||
| Then it shrunk down to four or five. | ||
| And a friend of mine, David Summerlin, visited and said, Paul, this hat-making technology is on the verge of extinction. | ||
| So we just sort of inundated them with orders in order to build the industry and keep it alive. | ||
| How could someone contribute to that if they wanted to? | ||
| If people are listening to this, how could they buy one of these hats? | ||
| Well, if you go to my facebook.com slash Paul Stamets, I think his name is Mako, actually squatted on my page to sell the hats and more power to them. | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| But this mushroom is figuring to be very prominently important for saving bees. | ||
| And that's where our research has been astonishingly interesting lately. | ||
| And where is that thing that you brought in? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What's going on there? | ||
| So to get some context to this, I think shamanistically, mushrooms, plants, animals become... | ||
| It's important because of a plurality, a multiplicity of benefits. | ||
| This is one example. | ||
| Not only revolutionized warfare, not only allowed for the portability of fire for us to save ourselves from the coldness, and we migrated into Europe from Africa. | ||
| Not only did beekeepers use it for smoking, but fly fishermen use it also for drying flies. | ||
| We have found that this mushroom is extremely powerful for reducing viruses that harm bees. | ||
| It's been described today in CNN, an insect apocalypse. | ||
| 40% of insects are under threat. | ||
| This just came out. | ||
| This is really an all-hands-on-deck moment. | ||
| But I'm optimistic because I think we can find solutions in nature. | ||
| With my colleagues, and when I was here before, I talked about my work with the BioShield Biodefense Program, and these wood conchs are very strong in antiviral properties against flu viruses and herpes, etc. | ||
| I used these ideas and actually had a waking dream and I realized that the bees were being infected by mites with viruses and the deformed wing virus in particular is the worst virus. | ||
| And so I contacted Washington State University. | ||
| We started doing some research and I'm really, really happy because I love skeptics who become my supporters. | ||
| We published in Nature. | ||
| Only 7% of the articles submitted to Nature get published in the Nature Publication Ecosystem. | ||
| To this day are articles in the top 1% of all articles ever published in the Nature Publication Ecosystem. | ||
| Now that's phenomenal because that's the most credible scientific journal in the world. | ||
| There it is right that. | ||
| Extracts of polypore mushroom mycelia reduce viruses in honeybees. | ||
| And this mushroom, the amadou, reduces the deformed wing virus 800 times to 1. With one treatment, and then the reishi mushroom mycelium reduces the Lake Sinai virus more than 45,000 to 1. Now, these are wood conks that grow in trees, and we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh. | ||
| But no one made the connection before me, apparently, that bees are attracted to rotted wood because of immunological benefit. | ||
| So amadou and reishi mushrooms, we found and we published in this article, that high significance, and I think the reason why this article is in the top 1% of all nature articles is that I've been able to present... | ||
| The theory, with proof now, that a natural product can have a broader bioshield of benefits than a pure pharmaceutical. | ||
| Up to this time, there's been no agents to produce viruses in bees. | ||
| Now, the deformed wing virus is being vectored by the varroa mite. | ||
| It came in 1984, and it injects viruses into bees. | ||
| And so it's like a dirty syringe. | ||
| And these viruses debilitate the bees and shorten their ability to fly. | ||
| Look at that poor bumblebee. | ||
| Oh wow, that's crazy. | ||
| I mean, that is so sad because that mumblebee can't fly. | ||
| Now bees can pollinate up to a thousand flowers a day. | ||
| And the average flight time of, like, honeybees used to be nine days, a thousand flowers a day. | ||
| Every almond you eat was visited by a bee. | ||
| So one bee can pollinate a thousand flowers a day. | ||
| Nine days was our pollination flight time. | ||
| Now it's been reshortened to four days. | ||
| So we lost by 50%. | ||
| In the CNN article that we just showed, in China now, they're hand-pollinating plants. | ||
| Flowers. | ||
| Yeah, with paint brushes. | ||
| Apples. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So apples, cherries, almonds, strawberries, tomatoes. | ||
| Because of the lack of bees. | ||
| Because of the absence of bees. | ||
| So it's really – it's all hands on deck. | ||
| This is – I'm really optimistic about the future because we have solutions in nature that we can now amplify and be able to deploy. | ||
| So one of my inventions – and I'm giving these away – 10,000 of these for free – I've come up with a citizen scientist bee feeder that puts these extracts Into sugar water, and we have a sign-up sheet. | ||
| It's for free. | ||
| It says fungi.com slash bees. | ||
| And we're going to give away the first 10,000 of these. | ||
| And this basically allows citizen scientists to help wild bees. | ||
| Because wild bees are given about 80% of the benefits. | ||
| And if you scroll down, there's a really, we just got the CGI done. | ||
| If you go all the way down and then click on that video, and we just... | ||
| So here's the bee feeder. | ||
| And this is available on YouTube, folks. | ||
| It says bee mushroomed feeder. | ||
| Bee mushroomed, all one word, and then feeder. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now watch, that's the bees visiting, and they're taking the sugar water. | ||
| Look how much they're sucking out of it, those little greedy bastards. | ||
| That's crazy how it goes away so quickly. | ||
| And this is a maze, and bees are better at navigating mazes, and so you can see the bees going in and out. | ||
| My grandson, who was afraid of bees, was really fascinated by this, so I got him to do this. | ||
| And so these are something that we're going to make these available all over. | ||
| And then I want to create vertical gardens in apartment buildings because bees only fly up 200 feet. | ||
| You create ladders then, ecological ladders. | ||
| And then this is where the citizen scientists all over the world can take action to be able to help bees from collapsing. | ||
| And then you station these in neighborhoods for bumblebees, for other types of bees. | ||
| And then we have it with a Wi-Fi enabled device with solar panels. | ||
| And then we upload into the cloud all this data about bee pollination visits. | ||
| So we can create a metric on the baseline of bee pollination services. | ||
| So if you see bees that are declining and suddenly below a baseline. | ||
| In Oklahoma, two years ago, 84% of the beehives... | ||
| Now think if you're a cattle rancher and you lost 84% of your cattle. | ||
| So the idea is to help bees' immune system and if we create baselines with bee feeders, upload the data, and this becomes a new form of internet because they have Wi-Fi ability. | ||
| So it's a distributed network as well, but they... | ||
| Where is the Wi-Fi on that? | ||
| Well, we don't have... | ||
| This is in development right now. | ||
| We're working with a very, very large computer company who's making all the instrumentation and they're in the big data. | ||
| So we have a solar panel going in here. | ||
| We have blue LED lights. | ||
| The bees are attracted to blue light. | ||
| And they'll count the number of bees going in and out. | ||
| And since the bees are only flying out of daytime, we don't need a battery. | ||
| And so the solar power will then upload the data into the cloud. | ||
| Then we'll create mega data sets. | ||
| And then we can look in Africa, Indonesia. | ||
| How is it going to upload into the cloud? | ||
| What is it using? | ||
| Is it using a LTE? | ||
| Oh, so it's using like a cellular system. | ||
| A cellular system or low frequency long range communication systems. | ||
| Can we help? | ||
| Can we contribute? | ||
| Is there a way that this podcast can help? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| I want to enable people with solutions that they can teach their children the importance of natural systems, and they can take action. | ||
| This seems like a great one. | ||
| I mean, I love this idea. | ||
| I think it's awesome. | ||
| I can afford to give away 10,000. | ||
| I talked to this computer company that everybody knows, but they asked me not to use their name, and they asked, how many do we need? | ||
| I said, about 10 billion. | ||
| Billion. | ||
| Billion. | ||
| I will do it up to my capacity and then I'm hoping that we're going to give these away for free and then eventually we'll create networks of hubs where I have now 40 patents on this and helping bees survive from these extracts but not in Indonesia, not in India, not in Africa, not in China. | ||
| I'm going to commercialize it so the haves can help the have-nots. | ||
| And I think a lot of people want to help. | ||
| And we're thinking about different ways of doing this. | ||
| I'm open to all ideas, but the idea is to get maybe one person to sponsor 10 other people. | ||
| They have a distributed network, their own social media community, where they end up getting schools. | ||
| We will open source the code for 3D printers. | ||
| So that's really important for schools. | ||
| So the code is going to be open sourced. | ||
| But then if somebody wants to make millions of these and sell them, of course, I wouldn't be happy with that. | ||
| They have to work with me. | ||
| But individually... | ||
| We can empower individuals and schools to have the open source 3D printing codes. | ||
| We just have to make it trendy to have one of these in your house. | ||
| Like, look, I'm helping. | ||
| I'm helping the bees. | ||
| If we just did that, it would really make a big difference. | ||
| I know that's a gross way to look at it, but... | ||
| That works. | ||
| My grandson, Kai, is a perfect example. | ||
| He was shuddering in fear of coming near to this. | ||
| And my friend, Dr. Steve Shepard, entomologist, taught me something about bees I didn't know. | ||
| Bees are moving so fast. | ||
| And we look like we're moving slow. | ||
| But if you move really slow, the bees think you're a statue. | ||
| And so my grandson, Kai, I said, look at this. | ||
| And you can see underneath, you can see the bees going in and out. | ||
| I said to move really slow. | ||
| And then he got fascinated watching the bees. | ||
| So he overcame his fear of bees. | ||
| He was excited that he's helping bees survive. | ||
| Now we've created something intergenerationally. | ||
| And saving the bees is the number one bridge concept between conservatives and liberals. | ||
| Everyone wants to save the bees. | ||
| That's number one? | ||
| It's the number one bridge issue between amending the fence, so to speak, crossing the political and social divide. | ||
| Everybody wants to save the bees. | ||
| So this is something – this is an actionable solution. | ||
| And, you know, the scientific data out there is pretty disturbing. | ||
| You know, 75 percent of flying insects. | ||
| In the past 27 years, in a report from Germany that just came out, have disappeared. | ||
| Now, many of your listeners are out in the country. | ||
| You know, I grew up in the country. | ||
| Remember all the bug splatter you used to have against your windshield? | ||
| You don't see that anymore because the... | ||
| Insects are dying because of exposure to pesticides, monoculture. | ||
| When you have monoculture, you have what's called pollination deserts. | ||
| When you have lots of biodiversity and lots of plants and diversity, the plants are pollinating at different times of the season. | ||
| When you do to a monoculture, all the plants, like almonds, will all produce flowers all at once, and then there's no pollen available. | ||
| So the immune system of the bees, due to factory farming, loss of habitat, deforestation, glyphosphates, heavy metals, pollution, all those things are cofactors. | ||
| But the nail in the coffin is by far these viruses. | ||
| And so immunologically empowering and supporting the immune system of bees, then it gives the bees the opportunity or the ability to be able to survive longer, do more pollination. | ||
| Is there a specific source of these viruses that they can isolate? | ||
| Are these a new thing? | ||
| Well, actually, there's a slide that shows the pandemic spread of these viruses throughout the world. | ||
| They came from Asia, and it's now a global pandemic. | ||
| All bees in the world are now infected with these viruses because when the infected honeybee, for instance, visits the flower, it leaves viral particles. | ||
| In the flower. | ||
| In the flower. | ||
| And then a wild bumblebee comes. | ||
| It visits it and it becomes infected. | ||
| So there is an unfortunate, I don't want to use the word perfect storm, it's a terrible storm of cofactors. | ||
| And because, you know, 80% of the benefit that farmers receive is from wild bees. | ||
| But we can't count them. | ||
| And you know, I have beehives and what happens in the colony collapse, you go out on Monday, the bees are happy, you go out on Thursday, they're all gone. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's that quick? | |
| That quick. | ||
| And it's not like there's hundreds of dead bees around your beehive. | ||
| They're just gone. | ||
| And there could be hundreds of pounds of honey and the bees, you know, they're gone. | ||
| So they go off somewhere to die? | ||
| What happens is because the newly hatched bees are called nurse bees and the nurse bees take care of the baby bees. | ||
| But when the colony senses there's not enough pollen and food to support the brood in the colony, The nurse bees are prematurely recruited to go out and find pollen, so they abandon the babies. | ||
| And then the varroa mites, they just go uncontrolled and they start injecting viruses. | ||
| And so there are other cofactors, just like when you get an infection from a viral infection, you can get bacterial infections. | ||
| And so there's a cascade of opportunistic infections as immunology is decreased. | ||
| Isn't there a contributing factor that had to do with cell phones as well? | ||
| I'm really glad you brought that up. | ||
| This is a contributing factor. | ||
| I have not seen convincing evidence. | ||
| It's a hypothesis that's not fully flushed out. | ||
| There are some people quite adamant in their belief in this, but I'm driven by science and data. | ||
| The frequency of cell phones There's an argument that's made. | ||
| It's not in the same cosine wave of the wavelengths that we experience in nature. | ||
| And so this is disruptive. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| I'm still on the fence. | ||
| I'd like to see really strong data and scientific evidence of that. | ||
| But it's a hypothesis that needs to be tested. | ||
| That's why we're looking also at low-frequency, long-range communication systems. | ||
| I think I told you this story. | ||
| If I didn't, I apologize. | ||
| When we were on Fear Factor, we had a bee stunt. | ||
| We had to cover these people in bees. | ||
| And a local bee colony flew in to check out what was going on. | ||
| And those bees and the bees that were brought there met in the sky and worked it out. | ||
| And the beekeeper told us, okay, we have to shut down and everybody's got to back out of here. | ||
| So we had to shut down everything and back out for like about an hour, at least a half hour while these bees communicated with each other. | ||
| So they're flying, a giant swarm of them flying in the eye, in the air, trying to figure out why, hey, what are you guys here for? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Why are you in our neighborhood? | ||
| Like, oh, we're not moving in. | ||
| We're just filming a TV show. | ||
| Like, they had to work it out. | ||
| That is so unusual. | ||
| It was really weird. | ||
| That's extraordinary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when a new queen splits from a hive, you know, a colony, they then take a big group of them with them. | ||
| So it's all about protecting the queen. | ||
| I just don't understand how they worked it out. | ||
| There was no fight to the death. | ||
| There was no nothing. | ||
| They just sort of worked it out. | ||
| The other bees took off and the bees that were there came back to their hive, their little colony. | ||
| I'm glad you mentioned that because this also speaks to what's called bee drift. | ||
| And so when we publish our article in Nature Scientific Reports, actually I think the data is understated because 10 to up to 20 percent of bees will drift from one colony to another. | ||
| So we had treatment colonies and we had treated colonies. | ||
| Well, because 10 to 20% of the bees in the treated colonies went to the control colonies, we actually diluted the differential because we had cross-movement of control bees and beehive versus treated bees. | ||
| And so when we actually, I think, and some of my other co-authors think we actually have understated the data. | ||
| But when you look at the P values of significance, you know, they're extraordinary. | ||
| P is less than.009, and that for scientists is an extraordinarily significant data set that is clearly showing the evidence that these extracts help the immunity of bees and help them be able to survive and do a better job. | ||
| That's awesome and it's crazy that it's just a natural mushroom but it makes sense what you're saying that they built their beehives in these rotting trees knowing that these fungi were there. | ||
| Or somehow or another being attracted to it? | ||
| You know, I like to say the first five seconds that I got the first patent award, my ego did swell. | ||
| And then ten seconds later, I said, are you frigging kidding? | ||
| We're Neanderthals with nuclear weapons. | ||
| How could I be the first one to have discovered that bees benefit from mycelium immunologically? | ||
| But there's no what's called prior art. | ||
| There's no evidence. | ||
| I mean, think of that. | ||
| We have the intelligence of nature underneath our feet. | ||
| And this is something we need to tap into. | ||
| And the fact that we can show a natural product, you know, if you had HPV, HIV, and you went to a doctor 12 days after having one treatment of these extracts, and your virus has dropped 45,000 to one, any physician would say, wow, you're doing really well. | ||
| And this is what we'll be able to see. | ||
| Now, we've been trying to find what's called a mode of action. | ||
| How are these viruses actually being reduced? | ||
| Putatively, Our strongest hypothesis now is as providing essential nutrients that are important for the immune system To activate gene sequences then that attack the viruses and give more host-defensive immunity of protection about further infection. | ||
| Now, does this work with humans as well? | ||
| Like chaga is supposed to be good for your immune system, right? | ||
| Well, this is a great convergence. | ||
| So traditional Chinese medicine and European medicine and medicine from indigenous peoples all over the world have been using these mushrooms. | ||
| Now we're finding scientific evidence that folklorically, the reputation of chaga, of reishi, of these mushrooms helping the immunity of humans, this is translational medicine. | ||
| So, but bees... | ||
| It's an animal clinical study. | ||
| Bees have been stated as being, besides Drosophila, the second most well-studied animal in the world. | ||
| This is an animal clinical study, past digestion, past what's called the cytochrome P450 pathway, which is your detoxification pathway, mostly in our liver. | ||
| All animals use the cytochrome P450 pathway to break down toxins. | ||
| And it's passed the microbiome into the blood. | ||
| So this is actually, this is an animal clinical study. | ||
| And I think it's a gateway for us to take this as credible evidence that natural products can be more useful and offer a broader bioshield of benefits than pure pharmaceuticals that go after one molecule with one target, one set of receptors. | ||
| There are immunological fields that develop in the complexity of nature. | ||
| This is what our foods are. | ||
| We're in constant biomolecular communication with the ecosystem. | ||
| We've evolved in this complex molecular environment. | ||
| And so our immune systems are upregulated through multiple stimuli. | ||
| And that's why I think these extracts, because of their complexity, they build upon the complexity of natural systems that help our immune system. | ||
| So you have hope that this is something that we could eventually see being like a peer-reviewed, proven thing for human beings as well? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I do believe that's on the near event horizon. | ||
| There's a lot of researchers now. | ||
| I believe it's on the near event horizon. | ||
| It's something that we're going to see more and more. | ||
| There's lots of clinical studies. | ||
| For physicians, there's no branding, no selling of anything. | ||
| I populate a website called mushroomreferences.com. | ||
| I populate specifically for physicians. | ||
| I just spoke at Singularity University, Stanford Medical School, in front of a thousand physicians. | ||
| I try to make the bridge of the credibility of the science for physicians who are just not educated yet because they don't have the resources or the time. | ||
| So mushroomreferences.com, you can go to that website. | ||
| It's got Hundreds of references that then you can put in any symptom or species, etc., and you'll be able to find the peer-reviewed references. | ||
| There's about 30 references, for instance, on psilocybin right now, which is an area of research that I'm particularly focused on. | ||
| Now, there was for a long time a stigma associated with anything that had anything to do with mushrooms, particularly because of psychedelic mushrooms. | ||
| Has that alleviated? | ||
| I know the John Hopkins study on psilocybin has shown some pretty incredible benefits and there's a lot of people now that are starting to look to it for treatment for people with PTSD or addiction issues. | ||
| Has that become more mainstream in your experience? | ||
| There's a vast title change in medical science. | ||
| There's a slide. | ||
| These are just a few of the universities right now that have been approved by the FDA and other agencies for human clinical studies on psilocybin. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Harvard, Stanford. | ||
| Purdue. | ||
| Penn, Toronto, University of Toronto. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| So that's only a few of them. | ||
| I actually could put up... | ||
| Department of Veterans Affairs. | ||
| That's very interesting as well, right? | ||
| I could put up 20 more, but you couldn't read them because I had to be able to just to be able... | ||
| So this is a huge shift. | ||
| The clinical studies that are coming out for, as you know, PTSD in particular has been extremely useful, but one of them that came out at Johns Hopkins for breaking tobacco addiction, 15 patients, small clinical studies, statistically significant, 10 out of 15 people after one or two heroic doses of psilocybin, 12 months later had not smoked a cigarette. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, I mean, to break tobacco addiction, which is one of the most addictive substances on this planet, is phenomenal. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| And the other research for PTSD, depression, I'm really excited about cognition, creativity. | ||
| I think we can – there's a lot of smart people out there, a lot of smart people listening to your podcast. | ||
| I think the idea of microdosing and being able to increase our ability of cognition and creativity to come up with the solutions that can get us out of this mess. | ||
| Just think of that. | ||
| If we had hundreds of millions of people thinking about solutions like I've come up with to solve some of the environmental challenges we have today for food biosecurity, the loss of bees is a threat to our national security. | ||
| Just think about the threat to our economy. | ||
| So this microdosing, I think, has enormous potential as well. | ||
| And when you think about one of the issues I see right now with the clinical studies is like it almost is too good to be true. | ||
| Statistically significant, great universities, great science, published in peer-reviewed journals at the top of their game. | ||
| But these mushrooms have so many benefits for fighting dementia, potentially Alzheimer's. | ||
| Johns Hopkins has an Alzheimer's clinical study ongoing currently. | ||
| For a dose of sulciben to see if it helps pre-Alzheimer's patients and not go into full-blown Alzheimer's. | ||
| There's so many different benefits potentially. | ||
| It's almost like a chaos of data. | ||
| It's almost too good to be true. | ||
| My team and Pam Crisco is an MD from British Columbia. | ||
| We've been working with people. | ||
| And we have just launched today an app that's at microdose.me. | ||
| It's available on the Apple Store. | ||
| It's available on Droid. | ||
| Quick little... | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| A microdosing study on... | ||
| And Apple allowed this on the App Store? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's a big shift. | ||
| And it's up to say... | ||
| Because this is a Schedule 1 drug that they're talking about taking on microdose levels... | ||
| I mean, I'm just saying what it is, right? | ||
| I mean, obviously you know what camp I'm in. | ||
| I want everybody to do it. | ||
| But this is really significant. | ||
| It measures your ability to hear, vision, the tap test, you know, and how quickly you can tap your fingers. | ||
| It's what you're stacking it with, but it's also good for non-psychoactive substance use. | ||
| What is your baseline? | ||
| So, you're getting older. | ||
| I'm getting older. | ||
| I'm getting younger, dude. | ||
| I have a new thing. | ||
| I vote for you. | ||
| I figured it out. | ||
| But the idea is to create baselines, you know, and then you create a baseline over time. | ||
| So you find out how far you deteriorated. | ||
| Or what your trend line is versus the general population. | ||
| So the idea with microdose.me is that we'll create a massive data set, massive amount of data, and then we'll offer this to clinicians for them to see signal from the noise. | ||
| I suspect, hypothetically, I don't have the evidence, but several doctors have collected case studies of tinnitus, or tinnitus, though those pronunciations are correct, of the buzzing in your ears, and people have resolved that from doing microdosing. | ||
| And 30% of Americans have hearing loss or more. | ||
| It's progressive over time. | ||
| How much hearing loss leads to depression because you can't hear your loved one? | ||
| I mean, it just ramifies out. | ||
| So the ability of being able to have better cognition, better neurological development, and helping hearing, vision, depression. | ||
| The interesting thing about the microdosing that we've been collecting is that people tend to be happier. | ||
| When they're happier, they're more creative. | ||
| And when they're more creative, they're happier. | ||
| You're learning a new kata. | ||
| You're excited the next day. | ||
| You nailed it. | ||
| You're up and going to do it again. | ||
| You're writing a new book. | ||
| You're doing an artist's work. | ||
| So creativity breeds happiness. | ||
| Happiness breeds creativity. | ||
| And then the opposite is true. | ||
| Malaise and depression. | ||
| You're not as creative. | ||
| You're not enjoying life. | ||
| You're not looking forward to the next day. | ||
| So I think it's almost a binary choice in the idea of using microdosing. | ||
| And the definition of microdosing has sort of variable interpretations. | ||
| So using the psilocybe cubensis scale, which is the most common psilocybe mushroom in the world, one gram is liftoff. | ||
| Five grams is what Terence would say was the hero's journey. | ||
| And when I was on last with you, I did 20 grams. | ||
| You know, that was a little bit much, you might say. | ||
| But when you do one-tenth of a one gram, you don't feel it. | ||
| One-twentieth, for sure, you don't feel it. | ||
| So the idea is you do microdosing below the threshold of intoxication, but then it benefits neurogenesis. | ||
| Now, there's an extraordinarily interesting study that came out With mice, but I think it's translational medicine. | ||
| And they were doing microdosing versus macrodosing. | ||
| So these are some numbers, but basically one gram is almost equivalent to one milligram per kilogram of body weight. | ||
| 70 kilos is 152 pounds. | ||
| And so at one milligram per kilogram with these mice, that's like one gram of Cubensis. | ||
| That's a dose. | ||
| It's not a super high dose, but it's a dose. | ||
| So what they did with these mice is they had them in an arena with a metal floor, and they gave a tone. | ||
| Then 40 seconds later, they were shocked. | ||
| So they had the tone again a few minutes later. | ||
| 40 seconds later, they got shocked. | ||
| After 10 rotations, the mice realized, like Pavlov's dog, when there was a tone, there was going to be a negative consequence, a shock happening. | ||
| So the mice would cower in fear. | ||
| So then they dosed them with a microdose, 0.1 milligrams per kilogram versus 1 milligram per kilogram. | ||
| One-tenth of a dose versus a full dose. | ||
| Interestingly, the full dose, it took ten rotations of no shock, the tone, no shock, before they forgot or became re-acclimated not to have the fear-conditioned response. | ||
| With the micro-dose, one-tenth of that, it only took two rotations. | ||
| Two rotations with a microdose and they dissociated potentially PTSD. Why do you think it's less? | ||
| Well, that's a really good question and the evidence we have so far, and again this is very early evidence, lots of research is going on in this, it looks like the neurogenic benefits of microdosing are greater than the neurogenic benefits of macrodosing. | ||
| You flood the receptors, you're having this incredible trip, it's fantastic, it's colorful, it's life-changing. | ||
| Yes, that is all beneficial for changing your life, but Doing microdosing over the long term, because the nerves don't regrow in six hours, but over weeks of regeneration of nerves with microdosing, it seems to me that the microdosing, instead of flooding and overwhelming all the receptors, are feeding these receptors, they're allowing for neurogenesis. | ||
| Now this is, again, a hypothesis. | ||
| There's so many great people studying this right now. | ||
| What I'm advocating to all of the clinicians at Johns Hopkins, at Stanford, UCLA, at Harvard, please do testing of the patients for hearing and vision and other behavioral tests that are not just about emotion and mood and PTSD, but let's actually get some physical measurements. | ||
| So then you can track prior During is too complicated. | ||
| It's too much intervention. | ||
| You're tripping your brains out. | ||
| You don't have time to be tested, you know, for vision and audit. | ||
| But then post-wise, and then looking at the residual effects. | ||
| Now, Dr. James Fadiman, he has the Fadiman protocol. | ||
| My protocol, the Stamets protocol, James Fadiman's protocol was microdosing one day on, two days off, one days on. | ||
| My protocol that I'm suggesting is four days on, three days off. | ||
| James and I are good friends. | ||
| We talk about this. | ||
| We laugh. | ||
| Basically, these are hypothetical potential treatments. | ||
| Are you comparing data between the two of you? | ||
| This is what Microdose, not me, will do. | ||
| We wanted to say, are you following the Stamos protocol, the Fatiman protocol, your own protocol? | ||
| Are you using it with niacin? | ||
| Are you using it with lion's mane? | ||
| What are you using it? | ||
| Lion's mane is phenomenally powerful neurogenically and there's two clinical studies out of Japan with mild cognitive decline in dementia showing very positive results taking two to four grams of lion's mane per day, the mycelium. | ||
| Interesting, not the fruit bite, the mycelium is much more powerful and we just have been contracting with a neurological testing laboratory in France and we just got some amazing results back Showing that when we had lion's mane extracts of the mycelium exposed to neurons, | ||
| and the positive control was the brain-derived nerve growth factor, nerve factor, and it's used as a baseline for measuring neurogenic compounds comparatively. | ||
| And the neurogenic benefits from, this is where pluripotent stem cells, stem cells that then differentiate in the neurons. | ||
| And the BDNF clearly shows that. | ||
| It's a standard protocol. | ||
| With a lion's mane, it also increased the number of neurons. | ||
| Then we started looking at analogs of psilocybin. | ||
| And the analogs, when we added the lion's mane mycelium were the psilocybin analogs, which are perfectly legal. | ||
| They're not Schedule I substances. | ||
| Psilocybin analogs are not? | ||
| What is exactly a psilocybin analog? | ||
| There's a number of them that have been reported in the literature. | ||
| There's baocystin and norbaocystin are two of the more prominent ones. | ||
| Now, I'm a psychonaut, and in 1960, baocystin A report of a child died outside of Kelso, Washington from eating mushrooms in his yard. | ||
| The family ingested the mushrooms. | ||
| They went to the hospital. | ||
| The child developed a fever, eventually had renal failure and died. | ||
| A chemist by the name of Lung and then Benedict and Tyler picked up on this. | ||
| They analyzed the mushrooms looking for a new toxin. | ||
| The mushrooms were identified as being Psilocybe baocystis. | ||
| It is a mushroom that grows in Washington State and Oregon, sometimes in British Columbia, but not in Northern California. | ||
| It's a very rare species, but grows in yards. | ||
| When they analyzed the mushroom looking for new potential toxins, they found It's alkaloid. | ||
| It's a dimethylchirpamine-based compound. | ||
| And they named it Baocystin, after psilocybin Baocystis. | ||
| So Baocystin had the reputation of potentially being a deadly poisonous toxin. | ||
| It's present in Cubensis. | ||
| It's present in many psilocybin mushrooms. | ||
| And my book, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, has charts that show how much Baocystin is in these things. | ||
| But no one had ever consumed Baocystin because of this reputation. | ||
| Bayocystin is legal. | ||
| I obtained some pure Bayocystin from a laboratory, legally. | ||
| I have no psilocybin. | ||
| Nature provides. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| People make this very clear. | ||
| But I can possess these psilocybin analogs. | ||
| And so, since there was no reports in the scientific literature of whether this was truly toxic or not, I, with a doctor friend of mine, an M.D., That measured my vitals and hooked me up, you know, to blood pressure, ECG, did all the biometrics that are needed. | ||
| And so we did an N of one study. | ||
| I decided that even though it had a history of potentially killing this child, I think that's a false positive. | ||
| I think it was bad science. | ||
| I couldn't find no one who ever ingested this, so I decided I would ingest it. | ||
| Now, my friend Pam, she's an M.D. that goes into Antarctica. | ||
| She's the only doctor on a research vessel. | ||
| And so she goes down there and she gets to bring a roommate. | ||
| And it was me. | ||
| And so Pam and I were working really hard. | ||
| We had all of our plane tickets. | ||
| We're ready to go to Antarctica. | ||
| We had been planning this for months. | ||
| And then we decided, well, just before we go, Paul, let's do the Bay of System test. | ||
| You know, we've been talking about this for months. | ||
| We finally got the time to do this. | ||
| But the next day we're going to Antarctica. | ||
| So Pam looks at her cell phone, and this Russian research vessel crashed into a reef, tore a hole in it, and it's like, it's now, the trip is canceled. | ||
| I mean, I have American Express, you know, plane tickets, hotels, I've got 24 hours to do it. | ||
| Try to recapture all this money because we can't go. | ||
| The trip's been canceled. | ||
| So I had super high anxiety. | ||
| I told my doctor friend, I have too much anxiety. | ||
| I can't go. | ||
| This is too crazy. | ||
| And then she kind of looked at me going, listen, we've been planning this for months. | ||
| Please. | ||
| And I listened to her. | ||
| And so I did 10 milligrams. | ||
| She measured my heartbeat, blood pressure, all those metrics. | ||
| My eyes did dilate. | ||
| She said that was good. | ||
| She always had a drug-like effect. | ||
| And then she checked in with me every 10, 15 minutes. | ||
| 20 minutes, you usually have liftoff, one hour, you're full-blown into it. | ||
| And she checked with me, and she checked with me. | ||
| And I didn't get high. | ||
| I'm not at all. | ||
| She goes, how do you feel? | ||
| And I said, I feel great. | ||
| I have no anxiety. | ||
| Everything with this trip is going to be fine. | ||
| So here we found an analog of psilocybin that does not get you high, that's legal, that reduced anxiety. | ||
| I think this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. | ||
| Because all the clinical studies are approved right now for pure psilocybin. | ||
| What about the analogs? | ||
| They activate other receptor sites, you know, in your neurological field. | ||
| And that's why I think this is why looking at the natural form of these mushrooms, standardized to the psilocybin, a certain concentration, versus the pure molecule, I think that is the way of the future. | ||
| Because pure psilocybin is up to $6,000, $7,000 a gram. | ||
| And you can translate that into growing sulcibe mushrooms for $2 a gram. | ||
| Now, there are people out there listening saying, well, the price is coming down. | ||
| Indeed, it is. | ||
| It's down maybe to $1,000 to $500 a gram. | ||
| But how many people in the urban, lower-income area You know, impoverished populations suffering from PTSD who can't afford to go to Johns Hopkins to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a clinical treatment. | ||
| I think this democratizes the use of psilocybin and microdosing that could be a benefit across our society. | ||
| And then what I'm proposing is you stack it with niacin. | ||
| And the reason why you stack it with niacin is you take one-tenth of a gram of psilocybin cubensis, microdose, you add 100 to 200 milligrams of niacin. | ||
| Now, if someone tries to get high by taking 10 times as much, they'll have like 2 grams of niacin. | ||
| This is flushing niacin, vitamin B3. And that flushing niacin will give you such an irritable reaction of skin-ditching of people who've taken vitamin B3. They know this. | ||
| So it becomes the ant abuse for microdosing. | ||
| But moreover, it excites the nerves at the end of the peripheral nervous system. | ||
| And neuropathies oftentimes present themselves as a deadening of the nerves of the fingertips and toes. | ||
| And it's also a vasodilator. | ||
| So there's three attributes of stacking niacin with psilocybin mushrooms that prevents abuse. | ||
| It becomes the antabuse. | ||
| It dilates the blood vessels to deliver the neurogenic benefits of psilocybin to the endpoints of the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system. | ||
| It also excites the nerve endings. | ||
| I hope to see in the future psilocybin mushrooms being over-the-counter vitamins. | ||
| Approved by the FDA, stacked with niacin that allows for the universality of use for the benefit of our culture. | ||
| We were talking last time... | ||
| Can I pause here for a second? | ||
| Is there any other evidence of people taking these analogs and having this anti-anxiety effect other than you? | ||
| I mean, this seems a very small sample size, right? | ||
| It's just one person. | ||
| Yes, there are. | ||
| As an anti-depressant, as far as anxiety and depression are interrelated, there are reports. | ||
| James Fadiman, in his studies, his population study, which is admittedly small, did not see an anti-anxiety component. | ||
| But other clinical studies at John Hopkins also the anxiety of dying from cancer. | ||
| Right, but that was actually psilocybin. | ||
| That was actually psilocybin. | ||
| But what I'm saying with you is also you had a very profoundly stressful situation happening. | ||
| Something you had prepared for for a long time, then all of a sudden it was gone, and all this money's gone. | ||
| You've got to try to figure out how to get it back. | ||
| It's immediate. | ||
| Maybe with these other people, they didn't have such an immediate anxiety moment, and maybe their anxiety was harder to measure whether it was coming or going. | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
| It's the end of one study. | ||
| This is just... | ||
| How many people? | ||
| Me. | ||
| No, the other one. | ||
| The other people that have experienced it but didn't experience any anti-anxiety? | ||
| There's no one else that we know in the scientific literature. | ||
| Johann Gartz mentions, I published Cilosophy of Azorescence with him, the most potent suicide mushroom in the world. | ||
| Johan Gartz says in one thing that he was asked, and he said that the Bayo-System was equal to that of Sol-Sybin. | ||
| I don't have high confidence in that statement. | ||
| I consider Bayo-System. | ||
| I was ready for liftoff. | ||
| I was hoping for liftoff. | ||
| I know what liftoff feels like, and I didn't get it. | ||
| So this is – what happens in science so much is – The scientists, when you can't do a clinical study, we bioassay. | ||
| This is very common. | ||
| This is how Albert Hofmann discovered LSD. He bioassayed it. | ||
| Didn't he do it accidentally, though? | ||
| He did it accidentally, right. | ||
| He went for this famous bike ride, but then he did it purposely after that. | ||
| But nevertheless, this is what our scientific, you know, psychonauts must do sometimes. | ||
| Sascha Shulgin. | ||
| Yes, Asha Shogun's famous for it. | ||
| The most famous of all and the most revered. | ||
| And he bioassayed based on his knowledge of chemistry. | ||
| He wasn't going to try to commit suicide. | ||
| So this is really an area that I think has enormous value. | ||
| And several meta-studies have come out. | ||
| One that I had mentioned before is a population of several hundred thousand prisoners. | ||
| And there was an 18% reduction in violent crime. | ||
| And 22% or so reduction in larceny and theft. | ||
| In a population where they reported they had one psilocybin mushroom experience. | ||
| And statistically significant. | ||
| Now, association may not be causation, but it can be. | ||
| But a more recent study from British Columbia, which I find to be so fascinating, is that they did a large population set And partner-to-partner violence. | ||
| If your male partner had done one psilocybin trip, statistically significant reduction of the probability of that partner being violent towards their other partner. | ||
| Statistically significant. | ||
| So I always thought if there's a dating app, maybe you should have the dating app. | ||
| Have you tripped on psilocybin? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that may be a better candidate for dating. | ||
| So I think psilocybin makes nicer people. | ||
| And I think we need a lot more nicer people that are more creative, that are dedicated to helping the community. | ||
| And I think this is a potential paradigm shifting drug. | ||
| Unquestionably. | ||
| And here's the other thing. | ||
| This could be profit. | ||
| I mean, these companies that are seeking to profit off of pharmaceutical drugs, you can profit off this stuff, particularly with the protocol that you just described, with adding niacin to it to ensure that people are doing only microdosing. | ||
| Look, man, this could be a very profitable enterprise for some company. | ||
| And the benefits, if people can mirror the benefits that you had of this alleviation of anxiety, My God, that's like most of what people struggle with. | ||
| So many people out there listening to this right now are like, fuck, I wish there was something that didn't get me high, but just alleviated this fucking angst that so many people are struggling with every day. | ||
| It's a massive disease complex that's swept our societies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And facing all these problems, how could you not become depressed? | ||
| Well, you cannot become depressed by becoming creative. | ||
| And I think that psilocybin in microdosing enables the creative pathways for ingenuity for us to feel that we have meaning. | ||
| We can make a meaningful difference. | ||
| It's really important. | ||
| You know, we've entered into 6X, the sixth greatest extinction event known in the history of life on this planet. | ||
| We've had two other extinction events from asteroid impacts 250 million years ago, 65 million years ago, but we're now involved in a massive extinction event. | ||
| And the research that came out today and the other research has come out with 75% of the Insect population, 40% in immediate jeopardy. | ||
| The research article came out and said in Europe and North America, they have good data collection. | ||
| In Amazon, they don't. | ||
| So we didn't even measure the insect loss in the Amazon. | ||
| But if you're a trout, if you're a bird, if you like drinking coffee and you like chocolate and you like almonds, I mean, these are all dependent upon pollinators. | ||
| So if we lose these flying insects, we lose the pollination services and it threatens worldwide food biosecurity. | ||
| This is one of the biggest threats to our ecosystem now. | ||
| I think we can invent our ways out of this if we creatively expand our ability to come up with novel solutions. | ||
| And I think those solutions are literally underfoot and all around us today. | ||
| We just have to wake up like I woke up to helping the bees. | ||
| There are so many smart people out there. | ||
| If they just started realizing that nature is a deep well of evolutionary knowledge and that we have evolved within this complexity, then to delve into that library of knowledge and pulling out applicable solutions, vetted by science, | ||
| controlled studies, but not looking at these pharmaceutical pure molecules as the way of the future, but looking upon the complexity of the microbiome The complex interrelationships and selecting out microbiomes that then create guilds of solutions that are applicable to the problems that we face today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I like that idea. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| It's beautiful that there are these natural solutions that, you know, maybe if we could just shift people's ideas about how we view psilocybin, how we view the analogs, how we view The interaction with people in nature that you can, you know, we can make a real change, make a change that's tangible inside of our lifetime. | ||
| And again, selling this stuff, like if, look, we're seeing what's happening right now with medical marijuana and then shifting to commercial marijuana and now hemp. | ||
| It's giant. | ||
| I mean, it's a huge industry through, it's changed Colorado. | ||
| Colorado, Denver's real estate's gone through the roof. | ||
| People are moving there so much that they've got traffic problems now they never conceived of in the past. | ||
| It's changed their economy. | ||
| And it's changed their economy due to just a really obvious shift. | ||
| Here's the shift. | ||
| Marijuana's not bad for you. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| We thought it was. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| We're sorry. | ||
| You can have it now. | ||
| And now you can sell it. | ||
| And now it's legal. | ||
| But federally, we're still dealing with Schedule 1. So these shifts are happening. | ||
| These companies are investing money. | ||
| There's a lot of profit to be made, and a lot of people are profiting. | ||
| But it's still in this weird transitionary stage. | ||
| It is, but this is a people's revolution. | ||
| When you have decriminalized nature coming out of Oakland, which I'm fully in favor of, how dare we make a species illegal? | ||
| That makes no sense to me. | ||
| What is Oakland specifically? | ||
| They've made ayahuasca, psilocybin, what else? | ||
| All natural products with psychoactive properties to the best of my understanding. | ||
| Both Denver and Oakland, they removed the funding for prosecutors and judges in the courts. | ||
| So you can't use public funds in order to prosecute people for possession. | ||
| So this is a very- Can you still arrest them for it though? | ||
| Well, the law enforcement officer is not getting paid. | ||
| He's not doing his job. | ||
| He's violating his code of conduct. | ||
| If you arrest them and you take them to a prosecutor, the prosecutor goes, I have no funding for this. | ||
| You're wasting our time. | ||
| You're just coming here and wasting my time. | ||
| I have murders to solve. | ||
| What if someone's selling it? | ||
| Decriminalization doesn't prevent you from being prosecuted for selling a Schedule I substance, right? | ||
| That's a really, really good question, and I have thoughts on it. | ||
| That's controversial because this speaks to the ability of some people having access and not... | ||
| I only trip on psilocybin mushrooms once or twice a year. | ||
| That's all I need. | ||
| As Terence McKenna and I think Alan Watts said, when you get the message from the phone, hang it up. | ||
| So if you just have these psilocybin mushrooms growing in your backyard or you know how to collect them, then you only need one or two doses a year. | ||
| And even microdosing, you get a lot more extension of that. | ||
| But my view, and I've never had any problem with law enforcement. | ||
| In Washington and Oregon and British Columbia and Canada in particular, law enforcement has a very pretty mature attitude towards this. | ||
| If you have a small amount and you're not trafficking and you're for individual use, It just doesn't raise the level of the need for enforcement. | ||
| No, I understand that, but I just wish there was no incentive at all. | ||
| There was nothing there. | ||
| Just the idea that you have to rely on the good grace of a cop who understands that there's no incentive to arrest you, that seems like horseshit to me. | ||
| We're grown adults in 2019 with a mountain of evidence. | ||
| We're not living in the dark ages anymore, and the fact that it's still a possibility that you could get arrested, or you could face some sort of criminal charges. | ||
| For having something that's only been demonstrated to be good. | ||
| This is why the citizens movement, the federal government, I mean the republicans and conservatives and libertarians are all about state rights. | ||
| This is a people's movement. | ||
| They should get behind this because individual community rights against the big man, against the federal government. | ||
| The federal government, there needs to be a title change. | ||
| And how do we do that is because we have decriminalized Nature in Oregon. | ||
| We have the Denver Initiative, other cities around the country. | ||
| It's now spreading throughout the entire country. | ||
| There's probably 20 cities in the next 16 months that are going to have decriminalization at the city councils. | ||
| I also think it's a significant solution to this problem that we're facing with pills and a lot of destructive drugs. | ||
| There's a lot of self-destructive drugs that people are taking because these people are hurting. | ||
| What psilocybin gives you that these drugs don't, it gives you a potential to heal. | ||
| It gives you a moment to reflect. | ||
| It gives you a change in the way you think and you interface with the world. | ||
| And that just doesn't exist in those other drugs. | ||
| Those drugs are escape drugs. | ||
| The need to escape is what we've got to eliminate. | ||
| And I think that's one of the things that psilocybin can help. | ||
| It can help alleviate the need to escape. | ||
| And a shout out to Rick Doblin and Leanna Galuli of MAPS, MAPS.org, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. | ||
| MAPS.org and MAPS.ca in Canada. | ||
| I've been instrumental in bringing forward psychedelic drugs for PTSD and clinical studies. | ||
| MAPS is now in phase three. | ||
| With MDMA. With MDMA. I've had Rick on a couple of times. | ||
| I love that guy. | ||
| So yeah, I mean he's a real pioneer in this. | ||
| And so what's interesting in getting now from three different groups I've heard who've sat down with FDA scientists, there's been a new turnover within the FDA. And these scientists are looking at just pure science without politics. | ||
| They don't care about politics. | ||
| They want to help people. | ||
| And several of them have said they've never seen, with psilocybin in particular, a safer drug with such a dramatic impact in frequency of use one or two times. | ||
| There's a movie that just came out called Fantastic Fungi, and Michael Pollan's in there. | ||
| I'm in there. | ||
| Louis Schwarzberg has put it out. | ||
| He spent 12 years working on this movie. | ||
| It's fantasticfungi.com. | ||
| It's a grassroots movement. | ||
| Theaters are selling out all over the country. | ||
| They book it in New York City for one night. | ||
| They have to keep it in for a week because there's standing lines, standing room You know, long lines to get into theater. | ||
| And it's all about the use of mushrooms and the Johns Hopkins studies with end-of-life patients. | ||
| It's very, very well done. | ||
| But it speaks to this, is that this is literally a quote-unquote underground movement that's welling up. | ||
| The attraction that people have for this is a reflection of the tidal change that is happening now. | ||
| This is a worldwide movement that is sweeping through the mycelial underground and through connections. | ||
| So something I'd very much encourage you to see Fantastic Fungi. | ||
| Is it on Netflix? | ||
| It's not on Netflix. | ||
| Louis was offered a lot of money for Netflix. | ||
| But once it gets to Netflix, it's a library book in the library. | ||
| And he wanted to build community. | ||
| So he's been out. | ||
| And people can sponsor theater openings. | ||
| It's got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. | ||
| How many movies get 100% on Rotten Tomatoes? | ||
| So it's really a people's movie and it's spreading, you know. | ||
| Where can you get it? | ||
| You go to fantasticfungi.com. | ||
| And you can sign up for theaters. | ||
| So it has to be in a theater? | ||
| Yeah, right now. | ||
| It will be eventually, after this year, it's going to be available on the web. | ||
| Right now... | ||
| Louis spent a lot of money, four or five million dollars, I think. | ||
| Norman and Lynn Lear, Norman Lear, all in the family, you know, and Archie Bunker. | ||
| They're also co-producers of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, yeah, Lynn Lear. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Norman Lear's out there tripping? | |
| Allegedly? | ||
| I cannot. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Are you ready to explore the magic that lives beneath our feet? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I thought Archie Bunker was one of the most lovable, racist, conservative assholes I've ever seen on TV. Well, Norman Lear did a lot more than that, right? | ||
| This is really interesting, though, that they've decided to release it in film theaters versus on the web. | ||
| Because if you really want to reach a lot of people, is it selling this way? | ||
| I mean, it seems like if you spend a lot of money... | ||
| The way to get that money back would be to sell it to Netflix. | ||
| I would agree with you. | ||
| Or Amazon? | ||
| Netflix offered him one quarter to one half of the cost. | ||
| They didn't value it, and they didn't see it. | ||
| South by Southwest turned them down, and it's got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. | ||
| People just don't see this. | ||
| Why did South by Southwest turn them down? | ||
| Because it's not part, I think, of the Hollywood establishment. | ||
| South by Southwest? | ||
| I mean, I can't explain why South by Southwest turned it down or the other festivals, the Cannes Festival, etc. | ||
| That's not my level of expertise. | ||
| But what is happening is that these theaters are selling out days upon days, a huge response. | ||
| People have an appetite for this because it gives them hope and meaning. | ||
| In a time of desperation, they see actionable solutions that cross political and cultural boundaries that can help the commons. | ||
| And I think that we are suffering in our societies from the media, from the politics, from the science showing the loss of habitat health, that we're under lots of stressors just like the bees are now. | ||
| We have a multiplicity of stressors. | ||
| And these stressors lead to malaise, depression, disease, crime, and poverty. | ||
| And this is something that I think can help do a title change for the better, provided it's done responsibly. | ||
| Now, you've mentioned companies. | ||
| There's 20, at least, new psilocybin companies that have been formed in the past year. | ||
| A lot of them are from the Canadian cannabis industry. | ||
| They made a ton of money, so several of them called me up. | ||
| I've talked to two groups and both groups when I asked them, have you done a heroic dose on psilocybin? | ||
| None of them would admit that they did. | ||
| They're scared? | ||
| They hadn't even tripped. | ||
| What? | ||
| I asked them, have you done a small dose? | ||
| And everyone was silent. | ||
| And one group I said, you folks just seem like economic opportunists. | ||
| And one of them said, that's exactly what we are. | ||
| We're just trying to make money. | ||
| Just make a deal with them. | ||
| Listen, I need one afternoon of your time. | ||
| I think it's important that we... | ||
| Come to Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, that's a different subject. | ||
| I mean, it would be amazing, right? | ||
| Do that and say, look, I'll do this deal with you, but just give me five hours. | ||
| You take five hours, have them all trip together, and now go, let's reevaluate this. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| I'm with you, brother. | ||
| And that's what's needed because those of us who understand the importance of this realize that this is something that we have to carefully shepherd for maximum benefit. | ||
| And these commercialization of these companies, I call it Spore Wars. | ||
| Very soon there's going to be Spore Wars between all these companies. | ||
| Sounds like a good movie. | ||
| That's a sequel. | ||
| Spore Wars. | ||
| Listen, man, what's exciting to me is it's not dirty anymore, okay? | ||
| The first time I did mushrooms, I think, was... | ||
| Very, very early 2000s. | ||
| And God, you tell people about it. | ||
| They were like, what's wrong with you? | ||
| You're a grown adult. | ||
| You pay taxes. | ||
| All my life. | ||
| It's like, what kind of a fuck-up are you? | ||
| At your age, you're doing mushrooms? | ||
| My God, grow up. | ||
| That's what it was like. | ||
| And you would tell them, no, I don't think that's what it is. | ||
| I think it expands your consciousness. | ||
| I think it connects you to... | ||
| Higher levels of thinking, and it just makes you more in tuned with the great beyond. | ||
| There's something more there. | ||
| And I'm like, you listen to yourself. | ||
| Go to work. | ||
| Go, goddamn. | ||
| Get up in the morning and have a cup of coffee and go to work. | ||
| But now, people are slowly but surely... | ||
| The dirtiness of... | ||
| And then the term microdosing is wonderful, because people know you can take a little bit, you know? | ||
| We've micro-dosed on this podcast before. | ||
| Ari and I just took a couple stems recently. | ||
| I guess it was probably a little more than micro-dosed. | ||
| We were definitely noticeably high. | ||
| But like an hour in, an hour and a half in, I go, I forgot! | ||
| We took mushrooms! | ||
| I'm like, why am I so happy? | ||
| But that feeling, I want people to experience that feeling because it's a relatively clean feeling. | ||
| And after mushrooms, I feel younger. | ||
| I go to these TED conferences every year. | ||
| I feel lighter. | ||
| I was treated like a leper when I went to TED. And the organizers of TED were so afraid I was going to talk about psychedelic mushrooms. | ||
| How many years ago was this? | ||
| 2008, when I first went. | ||
| What's it like now, though? | ||
| This last time, I mean, I was treated like a super celebrity. | ||
| I had these hugely, hugely powerful people, some of the names you probably know, who came up to me and would shake my shoulders going, now I understand! | ||
| Now I understand! | ||
| I had to say, down boy! | ||
| Keep down! | ||
| But they awoke into something and their mates, their friends, their business associates, you know, the common theme is, wow, he was such a jerk before and he's so nice now. | ||
| And they're seeking cooperation and they still are productive. | ||
| They're still creative. | ||
| They're banging it out. | ||
| The coders in Silicon Valley know that microdosing helps their coding ability, so it's a competitive advantage to those other computer companies that do not. | ||
| I think any new business Populated in particular by young people who are not doing microdosing are going to be at a competitive disadvantage. | ||
| Because the creativity flow, the camaraderie of the community seeking to benefit the commons and also reward yourself. | ||
| I'm not saying it's all, you know, just helping the commons. | ||
| But the idea of being able to reward yourself and people rejoice in your success and they benefit from it as well, it really integrates people together. | ||
| People need to understand that there's a lot of this squirreling away resources and money and things and trying to climb that corporate ladder. | ||
| This is a finite life. | ||
| It doesn't last that long. | ||
| It's a trick. | ||
| You get sucked into this trick and this trick is what every CEO and every Head of every corporation, every chief financial officer, all these people that are just trying to improve the bottom line, rake in more money, keep this company growing, and keep kicking ass. | ||
| It's a trick. | ||
| You're sucked up in a trick. | ||
| There's a natural human tendency to accumulate numbers for whatever reason. | ||
| Go back to our early days when resources were scarce. | ||
| And if you get sucked into that trick, one day you're gonna wake up and that's gonna usually be too late. | ||
| Usually it's on your deathbed. | ||
| Usually it's close to it. | ||
| You're like, what did I do? | ||
| This is it. | ||
| My health is failing. | ||
| My life's falling apart. | ||
| And what has my life been? | ||
| It's been 10, 12, 14 hours a day in these stuffed offices under fluorescent lights, crunching numbers and trying to acquire things and And for what? | ||
| Like, what impact have I made on humans? | ||
| What is the negative impact of my ambition on the people that are around me? | ||
| Like, all this is like, the one thing that psilocybin and particularly just psychedelics in general can provide is a break from patterns, a stopping, a ceasefire of all the momentum of our culture, civilization, finances, taxes, credit card debt, all that shit just... | ||
| Stops and you get a chance to step back and look at the machine watch it all whirl and spin in front of you and you get to say oh I got sucked into the trick I'm sucked into a trick A lot of people I've talked to, exactly what you're mentioning, and they did do a heroic journey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they then look back and go, why was I prioritizing that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Would I want to be out with my children? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, and looking at birds or walking in the woods. | ||
| Being in nature, yeah. | ||
| Being in nature. | ||
| One of my books, Cell Side Mushrooms of the World, has a great chapter in it, I think, called... | ||
| Good tips for great trips. | ||
| And one of the things, I understand the clinically controlled settings for clinical studies, etc. | ||
| A lot of us don't need that. | ||
| But I really enjoy being on an ocean bluff or a high point. | ||
| And by being in the mushrooms about half an hour before sunset. | ||
| Being with a loved one. | ||
| Also good to have an experienced person who's not tripping who is the watcher. | ||
| A sitter. | ||
| A sitter. | ||
| A sitter is there thinking meditation practice in place folks give these people some space who's just watching and then the people who are imbibing understand they have a watcher they have somebody who's anchored who can help them and then to have this the sun go down and I agree. | ||
| I think there's one thing we should talk about, though. | ||
| There are people that have a tendency towards schizophrenia. | ||
| And these people have – sometimes they have psychedelic breaks. | ||
| Like they'll have psychedelic experiences and then they don't do well. | ||
| They go off to deep end. | ||
| I'm so glad you brought that up and that is a de-selection from the clinical studies of candidates who want to engage. | ||
| But my good friend Mark Hayden who runs MAPS Canada had a very interesting story with a schizophrenic. | ||
| And he also cautioned, and every physician I know is on the same page as you. | ||
| Including medical, not medical marijuana, edible. | ||
| Edible marijuana seems to have a significant effect on people with it. | ||
| What Mark noted with this one person who was a severe schizophrenic was that he still heard voices in his head, but the voices now were friendly. | ||
| They were affirming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| They weren't saying, you know, go kill somebody. | ||
| It was like, you know, you are a good person. | ||
| And so he still had the voice in the head, but the tenor and tone and attitude of the voices were supportive. | ||
| What I'm talking about is it bringing on these schizophrenic experiences. | ||
| There has been some evidence, particularly about marijuana. | ||
| That high doses of marijuana for people that have tendencies, and we don't know, right? | ||
| What causes someone to have schizophrenic breaks? | ||
| Because there is a difference between pre and post, right? | ||
| People have had deteriorating mental health that correlates with schizophrenia. | ||
| What caused them to be less schizophrenic or not exhibiting any of the problems, and then all of a sudden having severe problems post- Psychedelic trip or post large dose edible marijuana and or even large dose smoking it or some people they dab and they smoke wax and then it happens to people that smoke too much pot there's certain people that have that tendency I would defer to clinicians who are extremely skilled in this area and who | ||
| have seen many, many patients. | ||
| I'm not a doctor, but I concur with you. | ||
| I think that is a real concern. | ||
| The difference between a toxin and a drug can oftentimes be dose. | ||
| At lower doses, you can see things. | ||
| At higher doses, you don't. | ||
| So it's an entire spectrum and it's so complex. | ||
| Individualities of people are so uniquely different. | ||
| I have a friend who's a doctor. | ||
| If he smokes a joint, he can't go to sleep. | ||
| I smoke a joint and I'm into a cuddle puddle, man. | ||
| I'm ready for the pillow. | ||
| At night, I use it for going to sleep. | ||
| Yeah, I'm the opposite. | ||
| I start writing. | ||
| I want to read. | ||
| I want to watch documentaries. | ||
| But it's a sativa thing too as well, right? | ||
| Do you have a significant difference between the way your body responds to sativas versus indicas? | ||
| I would like to be educated on this subject. | ||
| I've used both for a very long time. | ||
| I love acne, indica. | ||
| You have a beard. | ||
| I have a beard. | ||
| I love the smell of cannabis on my beard. | ||
| You like the smell on your beard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You weirdo. | ||
| It's my perfume, right? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| We're in a new realm of pharmacology and pharmacognosy. | ||
| I think we have to navigate this carefully. | ||
| The problem with natural products is how do you standardize them to the active constituent? | ||
| When you have more than one active constituent, how do you standardize them all? | ||
| There's an entourage or a symphony effect. | ||
| This speaks to the complexity of nature. | ||
| But I have a phrase that I like, is don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. | ||
| Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean it necessarily does not have a valid outcome or, you know, can't be used. | ||
| And I think that what we need to do is correct large data sets, and that's why I'm hoping Microdose.me is going to give us an enormous amount of data that clinicians can harvest from And going, we didn't anticipate this. | ||
| And like these meta-studies about partner-to-partner violence, when if your partner men had tripped on mushrooms, they were less prone to violence. | ||
| That was signal from the noise. | ||
| How many other signals from the noise of these big, big meta-files that we can pull out that we can get serious scientists to do really carefully controlled clinical studies to be able to see this? | ||
| And then How do you combine them? | ||
| I mean, it's a whole new landscape that gets away from single molecules and into the complexity of nature that we can build upon. | ||
| Navigating to that place is going to be a challenge. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| But I think we're smart enough now, we have enough computer technologies and diagnostic tools that we should begin on that voyage today. | ||
| What do you think is responsible for that shift from Ted of 2008 to Ted of 2019? | ||
| Michael Pollan's book, probably. | ||
| Michael Pollan's book was the big bridge. | ||
| He has 40 pages on me. | ||
| And Michael, if you're listening, buddy, dude, I told him not to reveal my secret mushroom patch. | ||
| Never trust a journalist. | ||
| And Michael Pollan, bless his heart, I love him. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| But he said in his book, so to speak, he says, Paul told me not to tell you where his secret mushroom patch is, but I can tell you that we slept in a yurt. | ||
| There are three state parks along the Columbia River, and two of them have yurts. | ||
| He just basically gave up your spot. | ||
| He gave up my spot. | ||
| And it's like, okay, Michael. | ||
| Why don't you do that? | ||
| I think it's the urge of a writer trying to give something to their readership. | ||
| So what happened to that spot? | ||
| Get trampled? | ||
| It's run over with people collecting suicide mushrooms. | ||
| They have big signs everywhere. | ||
| They arrest people. | ||
| It's a huge income source now. | ||
| For the cops? | ||
| For the cops because they bust people. | ||
| But the good news about that is I have gone on to these state parks and because there's big signs of no mushroom picking and law enforcement is there, There's lots of mushrooms. | ||
| They're everywhere. | ||
| And so I can photograph them, but you're not allowed to touch them. | ||
| So what do they check you on your way out? | ||
| Oh, they're like bees on honey, so to speak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
| They are hiding in the bushes. | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| There are alpha male types. | ||
| Can you imagine that? | ||
| They've got drugs growing out of the ground. | ||
| And they're like, don't touch it. | ||
| They swarm it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't touch it. | |
| I had a lot of fun with my friend because I got a stick. | ||
| And I go, okay, I touched the mushrooms with a stick. | ||
| Now, am I actually touching the mushrooms or not? | ||
| Because if you touch the mushrooms… Do they check your pockets? | ||
| They will search you, yeah. | ||
| They'll search you for just randomly. | ||
| No, if they have... | ||
| Reason to believe. | ||
| Reason to believe, they can search you. | ||
| Stuff them in your underwear, bro. | ||
| Just take a big fat baggie. | ||
| Or swallow them quickly. | ||
| But, you know, I don't... | ||
| This is... | ||
| It is preposterous. | ||
| Yeah, what if they find you lying down with your eyes dilated? | ||
| You'd have to talk to them. | ||
| I don't know if they would do a fecal sample later on or what. | ||
| But it approaches the absurd. | ||
| And this is when the law enforcement becomes absurd. | ||
| Even the law enforcement officers I know who – you've been in the martial arts a lot all your life. | ||
| Myself as well. | ||
| I had several schools for about 30 years. | ||
| And I had several law enforcement officers as students. | ||
| Yeah, they don't want to be involved in that nonsense. | ||
| They get roped into it by the system. | ||
| Yeah, this is not something they want to do. | ||
| I know a ton of cops. | ||
| None of them give a shit about mushrooms. | ||
| It's a hugely, hugely unfortunate consequence of really ridiculous laws. | ||
| And the idea of grown adults telling other grown adults that they can't do something that is incredibly beneficial, that they themselves have never experienced, so they have no knowledge of it at all, other than the ancient stereotypes. | ||
| Mushrooms being bad, mushrooms being for burnouts and losers and hippies and, oh, you can't handle life. | ||
| Or they're walking hypocrites and they know it. | ||
| They use it themselves. | ||
| That's the worst. | ||
| They're tormented, but they have to do this, so... | ||
| I found that most law enforcement officers are extremely reasonable as long as you show intent. | ||
| Your intention and respect. | ||
| Yeah, 100 percent. | ||
| So it's never been – but I don't subscribe to the defense that someone is doing for spiritual purposes and they have – You know, hundreds of pounds with Ziploc bags with scales in the basement and during a commercial operation. | ||
| You're avoiding taxes. | ||
| You're producing this as a factory. | ||
| You know, take it in the chin. | ||
| You get busted. | ||
| Hey, it comes with the territory. | ||
| Eyes wide open. | ||
| Don't cloak it in the veil of spirituality. | ||
| You're trying to... | ||
| Create a spiritual revolution. | ||
| Unless you're a true saint, you're giving that shit away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that would be different, but... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I have a phrase, nature provides, I don't, because I don't want to be responsible for another person's experience. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| What if they have a meltdown and they blame Joe Rogan? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Paul Stamos. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I can't control... | ||
| That circumstance. | ||
| I don't want the responsibility. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why I've hesitated on getting involved in medical marijuana or commercial marijuana. | ||
| I've been offered and I'm always like, I just don't think this is the right. | ||
| Because you can't, especially with edibles, you can't control people. | ||
| You don't know what they're going to do. | ||
| I don't do edibles. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Well, I was at Kenyon College in 1973, and my dad was coming to visit. | ||
| And one of my people on the floor at this dormitory, they made some marijuana brownies. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every good story starts that way. | |
| I ate two brownies. | ||
| My dad's coming in two or three hours, so what the heck? | ||
| And I was so frigging stoned. | ||
| I could not believe it. | ||
| And I could barely – my eyes were really – I was trying to maintain it. | ||
| You know how it is. | ||
| You're trying to look like you're not stoned, but you're blitzed out of your gourd. | ||
| And so my dad was like, are you looking at me really curiously? | ||
| This is the early 1970s. | ||
| And so the next day I said, Dad, I got to tell you something. | ||
| I ate some marijuana brownies. | ||
| He goes, I knew something was wrong! | ||
| I knew! | ||
| I could tell! | ||
| I could tell! | ||
| Well, no shit, Sherlock. | ||
| I don't play on the floor. | ||
| Did he get mad at you? | ||
| No, he was actually amused and delighted that I explained to him why I look so stoned. | ||
| Oh, well, that's great that you had that kind of communication. | ||
| Yeah, just before he died, he wanted to trip on mushrooms. | ||
| And I turned him down. | ||
| Because he was close to the end of his life and he was very religious. | ||
| And I was concerned I would shake his reality tree so severely that he would question his entire life. | ||
| Because he was like the death of the salesman figure. | ||
| It was a tragic life that he led. | ||
| And the mushrooms could have helped him enormously. | ||
| But I was concerned that he would look back and go, I wasted my life. | ||
| So that was too heavy for me. | ||
| Maybe I'm being selfish because I was trying to protect my own feelings. | ||
| But he wanted to do it. | ||
| He asked me, actually, he said, I want to do soul side mushrooms with you. | ||
| And he wouldn't smoke pot. | ||
| Do you have regrets about that, about not doing it with him? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I have a lot of regrets about that. | ||
| So I have met several people in the past several weeks at Stanford Medical School, at these other conferences that I go to, which there's a brain-mind conference at Stanford Medical School. | ||
| In the first two sentences, they mentioned psilocybin. | ||
| 120 neuroscientists, you know, and $150 billion in a room, and psilocybin was immediately mentioned. | ||
| And I met some people there that are intergenerational. | ||
| Grandparent, parent, and 18, 19-year-old child all journeyed with mushrooms together. | ||
| And their interpersonal relationships, they told me, you know, there's no reason for us ever to get mad at each other. | ||
| I just thought that was really powerful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, that is powerful. | ||
| That sounds inconceivable to someone who's never experienced psychedelics, but someone who has, you go, yeah, I see how you could get there. | ||
| Yeah, don't make mountains out of molehills. | ||
| You can disagree without being angry, and you can be civil about it. | ||
| Well, that's a lesson the world could use right now. | ||
| I think this is, in many ways, the antidote for some of the problems that we're seeing with social media. | ||
| One of the problems we see with social media is this disconnect from the human experience, disconnect from communication, person-to-person communication, and this anger and vitriol and hate and rage. | ||
| And people hiding behind screen names and trolls. | ||
| You know, you're Joe Rogan, I'm Paul Stamets. | ||
| Well, who are these people with high-behind-screen names? | ||
| A great TED Talk, which I did not understand, and the TED Talk was fantastic, talking about why trolls do the things that they do. | ||
| They do it because they get excitement. | ||
| The idea is just to disturb the fabric, and the more disturbance they get, that is a measure of their success in provoking a response, even if they're not wedded to it. | ||
| They just want to be able to cause a ripple in the pond. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they don't feel significant, so they want to do something that they can get some sort of reaction. | ||
| They have a rock. | ||
| They see a window. | ||
| They want to throw it. | ||
| It's a natural inclination. | ||
| But it's stupid. | ||
| It's barbaric. | ||
| But it's a waste of fucking time. | ||
| And some people celebrate it. | ||
| I'm like, okay, celebrate it. | ||
| You're not doing shit. | ||
| You're not doing shit for yourself. | ||
| You're not doing shit for other people. | ||
| You're not improving whatever your art is, whatever it is that you try to do in this life to leave your mark. | ||
| Or to contribute or to be creative. | ||
| You're not doing that if you're trolling. | ||
| You're just not. | ||
| All trollers should eat mushrooms. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Well, all angry people should eat mushrooms. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| I really agree with that. | ||
| Well, you know, there is good evidence that lion's mane also compensates in many of these neurogenic benefits that psilocybin does. | ||
| I think this stuff all the time. | ||
| This is like a lion's mane elixir that I pour. | ||
| Tell me if that shit's any good. | ||
| Well, it comes from China. | ||
| Is that bad? | ||
| Every Chinese expert that I've met said I wouldn't dare buy a mushroom from China. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So, this is, we have a spoonable lion's mane. | ||
| Let's see what you got. | ||
| And I put that in smoothies all the time, and that's my go-to. | ||
| And that's exactly the research. | ||
| Can I put it in coffee? | ||
| Yeah, I put it in coffee. | ||
| And Jamie, can you pull up that? | ||
| How much did I put in here? | ||
| The neurogenesis benefits of lion's mane. | ||
| How much did I put in here? | ||
| Ooh, it's open. | ||
| It's not open yet, right? | ||
| No, it's sealed. | ||
| How much can I put in there? | ||
| I put about a teaspoon. | ||
| Teaspoon. | ||
| And then stir it in. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| That's good. | ||
| And this company in France that we did the neurogenic tests with found that the mycelium was far more active than the mushroom fruit bodies. | ||
| And so the lion's mane stimulates neurite outgrowth and basically extends the nerves from growing compared to baseline. | ||
| So in 7 to 12 days, a substantial up to 22% increase in neurite outgrowth. | ||
| What we found was actually, there was one that was at 8%, one was at 12%, and then separately we stacked it with an analog of psilocybin. | ||
| And rather than that being the arithmetic additive of cumulative, we found a synergy. | ||
| So we think that lion's mane, the research has shown, increases myelin regeneration on the sheath of the nerves. | ||
| And the psilocybin proliferates nerve tip growth. | ||
| So it should conceivably help you learn. | ||
| So this is an example. | ||
| This is an unexpected result. | ||
| There's lines named mycelium that's showing a 14, you know, basically a 14.8% over a baseline. | ||
| Then we have a psilocybin analog that didn't do all that great. | ||
| Which analog is this again? | ||
| I'm going to describe the analog for now for obvious reasons, but it's a legal analog. | ||
| It creates a 7% outgrowth of neurites. | ||
| But then we stacked it with lion's mane and the psilocybin analog. | ||
| There's a theoretical additive effect, 114 plus 107, 122. But we got 136. Statistically significant. | ||
| The outlier actually is even higher. | ||
| So the neuroscientists in France that did this study was extremely excited. | ||
| And we found that the more we titrated it to greater dilution, the more active it becomes. | ||
| What's that mean? | ||
| Titrate? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| We're diluting it. | ||
| And these are human cells, pluripotent stem cells. | ||
| And what we found was originally we were told it's called 3 micrograms per milligram or 3 micrograms, a millionth of a gram. | ||
| But when we went back to 0.03, 100 times less, the neurogenic benefits became greater. | ||
| Now there's something called the PK conversion. | ||
| The pharmacokinetics, when you ingest something, only a small portion of it may make it into your bloodstream. | ||
| But the good news is that these things are so non-toxic and they're so potent. | ||
| Now, looking at the dosing regimen, it appears so far, we haven't done this clinically, this is human cells in vitro, but this laboratory is predictive of neurogenic compounds that The neurogenic benefits are so substantial that the PK conversion of ingesting them can be seen in the bloodstream as a fairly good conversion rate. | ||
| For instance, if you take vanillic acid, vanilla, about 2% will make it into your bloodstream. | ||
| So if you take one whole gram of vanilla, only 2% actually gets in your bloodstream. | ||
| So that's the PK conversion. | ||
| So what we're seeing right now is the potency of this is so strong at lower and lower dilutions, we're getting more and more potency. | ||
| So I'm – this is – yeah, it's – I like to say dilution is a solution to profitability. | ||
| The more that we dilute, the more potent it becomes. | ||
| So this is why the neuroscientists in France are doing this study going, this stuff is so potent. | ||
| Please dilute it. | ||
| Dilute it. | ||
| Dilute it. | ||
| So – and so we're – we see this as a tremendous horizon that lion's mane is legal. | ||
| It's an edible and choice mushroom, thousand-year history of use. | ||
| We found that the mycelium is far more potent than the mushrooms for really good reasons. | ||
| Some of the compounds are called erinacines, and these are actually discovered by Kawagishi in 1994, looking for an antibacterial agent. | ||
| And so when he was looking at the mycelium fighting bacteria, He found that the mycelium expressed this antibacterial sciathane derivative and he gave it the name arinacine after hericium arinaceous, just like penicillin is named after penicillium. | ||
| And so he'd stumbled on the fact that it has neurogenic properties and antibacterial properties. | ||
| So the mycelium is navigating through the ground through a hostile environment. | ||
| It's only one cell wall thick. | ||
| The mycelium has an immune system that's operational between 40 degrees Fahrenheit and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, 35 degrees Celsius. | ||
| That's the window it's growing in. | ||
| So its immune system is operative in that window. | ||
| When you do super hot water extracts, you're in the extreme zone. | ||
| That's not part of the immunological lifespan of the mushroom. | ||
| You're decocting it. | ||
| You're taking out ingredients, but you're not harnessing within the immunological window of temperatures that the mycelium has evolved to fight off pathogens. | ||
| And so what we have found is the mycelium is far more active than the fruit bodies. | ||
| This is all new science, but then mushroomreferences.com is populated with dozens upon dozens of peer-reviewed articles showing the mycelium is far more active than the fruit bodies. | ||
| And a whole genome sequencing of Reishi, for instance, founds 25% more genes coding for proteins are expressed at the mycelial state than at the mushroom state. | ||
| Well, it makes sense because the mushrooms at the end of millions of cell divisions over months, years, even decades, finally produce a mushroom that rots in five days. | ||
| The mushroom doesn't need a good immune system. | ||
| It's attracting mycovores, animals, deer, John just showed me some photographs. | ||
| He's going to show you. | ||
| He was in a campground and found deer in the morning digging up mushrooms out of the ground. | ||
| Well, animals engage mushrooms. | ||
| One of your colleagues here. | ||
| Or maybe it's Jeff. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Jeff, one of the guys who works here? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So the idea – but mushrooms attract insects, people, animals because they're fragrant, they're protein, they're nutritionally dense and they want to engage humans. | ||
| The mycelium is navigating through a microbially hostile environment. | ||
| And a report came out in the literature of over a thousand species of bacteria in a single gram. | ||
| There's more than eight miles of mycelium in a single cubic inch. | ||
| So the mycelium is navigating through a hostile microbial environment. | ||
| It's setting up guilds and microbiomes and collections of cooperating bacteria that can help them defend against pathogens. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Estimated up to eight miles of mycelium in a single inch of soil. | ||
| And it's only one cell wall thick. | ||
| That's such a weird-looking image. | ||
| It's so hard to see what that is. | ||
| That's a mushroom that's melted back into the ground. | ||
| It's mycelium. | ||
| Now the mushrooms generate mycelium and it goes underneath the ground. | ||
| So every time you're walking on the ground, you're walking upon miles upon miles of mycelium and it knows that you're there. | ||
| These are sensitive. | ||
| These are not only externalized stomachs. | ||
| There are digesting nutrients and externalized lungs exhaling carbon dioxide, inhaling oxygen, but I believe these are extant neurological networks of nature. | ||
| When you see that pervasiveness of those cells, and the climate change scientists are coming around to this, 70% of the carbon biologically is stored in mycelium in the ground. | ||
| The way to fight climate change is not only replanting trees, which is great, I love it, But it's the mycelial networks you're building in the humus that creates the soil, that creates the biodiversity that then guarantees the health of the ecosystem. | ||
| So it's the mycelial networks that govern because they're so pervasive. | ||
| They set up because they're antibacterial properties, they're probacterial properties. | ||
| Another example of this is in the microbiome of soils and inside of humans' stomachs. | ||
| Turkey-tailed mushrooms and a placebo-controlled randomized clinical study with humans from a scientist associated with Harvard found that turkey-tailed mycelium is a prebiotic for the microbiome. | ||
| That feeds Bifidobacterium lactobacillus and suppresses Clostridium, which is an inflammatory bacterium. | ||
| So it's really, really interesting that the mycelium is feeding nutrients to the beneficial bacteria within the microbiome that then gives us health. | ||
| And so these are precursor nutrients that elevate the populations of the beneficial bacteria. | ||
| So the two go hand in hand. | ||
| What about edible mushrooms? | ||
| Things like shiitake and those type of mushrooms. | ||
| Is there any nutritional benefit to those things? | ||
| Enormous nutritional benefit. | ||
| And there's been two also meta-studies that have come out this year showing that the ingestion of mushrooms with elderly people over the age of 60, there's a 50% increase. | ||
| Decreased odds of Alzheimer's-like symptoms with a population of people consuming three mushroom meals per week. | ||
| Now, they didn't specify the mushrooms. | ||
| This is out of Singapore. | ||
| But the mushrooms they're commonly eating are oyster mushrooms, shiitake, and shimeji. | ||
| And maybe some other mushrooms. | ||
| But that's one meta-study that came out. | ||
| There was a study out of Japan from Dr. Ikikawa at the National Cancer Center that found statistically significant reduction in cancers across the board. | ||
| I think 162,000 people in this data set. | ||
| And he was sent over to Nagano Prefecture to look for this. | ||
| And these are edible and delicious mushrooms. | ||
| Also, they empower the immune system. | ||
| Again, signal from the noise. | ||
| Statistically significant reduction in overall cancer rates. | ||
| Associated with a food. | ||
| The division now between, you know, foods and medicines is blurred. | ||
| And yet it speaks to Hippocrates and Dioscorides, stating that, let food be thy medicine, medicine be thy food. | ||
| So it's interesting because physicians have been taught, you know, this sort of monomolecular approach to medicine, and now we're realizing that these foods are essential nutrients for your immune system that down-regulates inflammation. | ||
| It's so interesting that we're learning all this during our lifetime, too. | ||
| Do you think that would all be established by now? | ||
| Well, I'm glad you asked that. | ||
| We have a paper coming out in the next two or three days, maybe in the next week. | ||
| And it's on turkey tail mycelium, grown on rice. | ||
| And we were able to find out something that no one had reported in the literature. | ||
| The traditional Chinese medicine approach is that these are immunomodulators. | ||
| They help the immune system, but they also are not inflammatory. | ||
| When you have an immune response, oftentimes associated with an inflammatory response, blood rushes to the wound, you inflame, you have all these compounds that are being produced by the blood to suppress an infection. | ||
| But you can over-amp the immune system and have a pro-inflammatory response that can cause a lot of oxidative stress damage collaterally. | ||
| And so the article that's just coming out with BMC, Biomed Central, alternative and complementary medicine, peer-reviewed, we have found that the mycelium when it grows on rice Bioferments the rice to then produce a unique immunological response that upregulates what's called interleukin-1-RA and interleukin-10. | ||
| These are anti-inflammatory cytokines. | ||
| And so the mycelium doesn't do that. | ||
| The mushrooms don't do that. | ||
| But the mycelium is biofermented. | ||
| The rice like tempeh is transformed or like yogurt It comes from milk because of lactobacillus or acidophilus and that transformation then makes a novel product. | ||
| We found the same thing that the rice compared to the rice control has no anti-inflammatory properties. | ||
| The mycelium because of the extracellular metabolites changes the rice into a unique immunological product. | ||
| That excites the expression of anti-inflammatory compounds while also exciting the pro-immune response. | ||
| So it's a buffered response. | ||
| It's interesting too that you're bringing this up that it's growing on something else. | ||
| That seems to be part of nature, right? | ||
| This sort of symbiotic relationship that some of these mushrooms have with the plants and the environment around them. | ||
| That's a really, really good point because The mycelium we found with the bees, when we grew the mycelium on rice compared to on birch wood, The mycelium grown rice reduced the viruses 10 to 1. The mycelium we grew it on birch reduced the viruses up to 1,000 to 1. Oh, so that's its natural environment. | ||
| So that speaks to the fact that there appears to be something that's coding within the ecosystem that then excites the mycelium to produce something that is more strongly resulting in antiviral activity. | ||
| That's the case with cordyceps as well, right? | ||
| Cordyceps mushrooms grow on other things. | ||
| Yeah, but the cordyceps mushrooms, when they grow on the worms, this is something that was a big subject of debate because cordyceps sinensis is a mushroom that grows on a worm, basically. | ||
| Like a little caterpillar. | ||
| On a caterpillar larvae in the Himalayas, elsewhere in China and the Far East. | ||
| And people were finding these cordyceps mushrooms and they were cloning them and then they got the culture going and then they analyzed the culture and they got what's called an anamorph. | ||
| It's not that complicated. | ||
| It's just two faces of the same coin. | ||
| There's a mushroom fruit body and then there's this imperfect form that is a different looking organism but they're actually the same. | ||
| They have two different expressions. | ||
| All the scientific literature kept on coming up with different anamorphs. | ||
| And so they all had all this competition in the scientific literature. | ||
| What is a true anamorph of Cordyceps sinensis? | ||
| Well, now it's called Afiocordyceps sinensis. | ||
| They redefined it. | ||
| It's called Sensu stricto. | ||
| And when they analyzed the mushrooms, not until recently they discovered that another group of fungi are chasing the Cordyceps sinensis. | ||
| As the fruit body develops, other fungi are chasing right behind the other fungus. | ||
| So you have multiple fungi that are actually present in the cordyceps worm. | ||
| It's not just one species, it's multiple species that are co-occurring, chasing each other inside the cordyceps mushroom as its fruits. | ||
| So again, it just speaks to the complexity of nature. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So where should you get your Cordyceps source for health benefits? | ||
| You know, that's a really good question. | ||
| Cordyceps militaris does not have these issues that Cordyceps sinensis does. | ||
| The problem is Cordyceps sinensis, thousands of articles have been published, really which one they're talking about. | ||
| It's like it's all mixed up now. | ||
| What is a true anamorph for these scientists using? | ||
| There are ones called Pisciliomyces. | ||
| There's other ones that Hercetella sinensis is now thought to be the true anamorph for Cordyceps sinensis. | ||
| What all this lingo means is basically there's a mushroom with a whole bunch of other fungi that are associated with it and when they cultured these other fungi, they did clinical studies or research studies and they came up with results. | ||
| The problem is that they've mixed it up into four or five different species and you can't sort of D, disambiguate the data now because it's too complicated. | ||
| So it's a really good question. | ||
| The Cordyceps militaris does not have these issues. | ||
| And so I would steer people to Cordyceps militaris right now because the Cordyceps sinensis, the Ophiocordyceps sinensis issues are still complicated. | ||
| And now virtually thousands of research articles are all now suspect because no one has a foggiest idea what anamorph they were using. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It speaks to the complexity of the system. | ||
| And how many people are actually working on this data, too? | ||
| Oh, thousands of researchers. | ||
| And I'm thankful that the Chinese mycologists were the ones who finally sorted this out. | ||
| There was a lot of conflict academically. | ||
| There's a lot of big egos in academia. | ||
| People get wedded to their own research. | ||
| We're all like that. | ||
| And the challenges went back and forth. | ||
| And Fortunately, a group of Chinese scientists finally were able to narrow down the argument to understand that everyone was actually doing good culture work. | ||
| They were actually expert mycologists taking the right tissue, taking it from the right cordyceps mushroom. | ||
| It's just that at that time, they had a different fungus that was naturally part of the inside of the mushroom that was a mixture of fungi that were racing at different paces up the mushroom. | ||
| Well, the Chinese were the first to use it for a performance benefit, right? | ||
| Or they were the first to at least be publicized to use it in the Olympics. | ||
| They were using cordyceps mushrooms. | ||
| That was one of the reasons why at Onnit we developed Shroom Tech Sport, which is a cordyceps mushroom-based supplement. | ||
| I love cordyceps for workouts, for pre-workout. | ||
| It gives you an extra gear. | ||
| It's really kind of crazy how effective it is, especially in combination with B12. And other adaptogens. | ||
| It's a great pre-workout supplement because it doesn't get you jittery at all. | ||
| It's not a stimulant. | ||
| But you have a little more juice when you exercise. | ||
| And that's one of the things that those high-altitude hurting populations have found, right? | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| It's likely to be a vasodilator, and it has steroidal-like benefits as well. | ||
| So the cordyceps for athletes has been tried and true, and many of these anamorphs that I mentioned have those properties. | ||
| So for athletes, what dose would you recommend? | ||
| Well, I'm not a medical doctor, so when people ask me recommendations, I know that the common usage of these is in the order of 2 grams. | ||
| There are usually 500 milligram capsules. | ||
| There's lots of good companies that are producing this. | ||
| I would just make sure it's mycelial-based, it's not fruit-body-based. | ||
| The clear evidence is showing the How would one find out whether something's mycelium-based? | ||
| It should declare it. | ||
| We say mushroom mycelium on all of our labels. | ||
| And if you were going to take that, like if you weren't going to take Shroom Tech Sport, if you wanted to make your own concoction, you would recommend two grams and then... | ||
| And make sure you know the chain of custody of where it came from because a lot of these companies buy on the spot market. | ||
| What company is this that you gave me? | ||
| Host Defense? | ||
| Host Defense. | ||
| Is this yours? | ||
| Is this your company? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| We'll support you. | ||
| Host Defense, and is there a website where someone can grab this? | ||
| Yeah, fungi.com or hostdefense.com. | ||
| And do you sell cordyceps as well? | ||
| Yes, we do. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| And do you take this stuff before you exercise? | ||
| Do you take cordyceps? | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| Yeah, I take cordyceps. | ||
| I take Lion's Mane and Seven Species Blend in particular. | ||
| Seven Species Blend. | ||
| What's in that stuff? | ||
| It's Stamets Seven. | ||
| It's got Chaga. | ||
| It's got Reishi. | ||
| It has a Garacon. | ||
| It's got a birch polypore called Piptoporus betulinus. | ||
| And so it has Mitaki in it. | ||
| And these are a seven species blend. | ||
| But the evidence for physicians and people who want to look at peer-reviewed articles... | ||
| The single species have the most elaborated and convincing evidence when you start compounding these. | ||
| So what we're doing, we have five or six full-time researchers, several PhDs on our staff, We are, again, trying to disambiguate the complexity of all these benefits by looking at one species at a time. | ||
| So we're doing this methodically, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars literally a year now. | ||
| I have 110 employees. | ||
| And I created my company in order to do research. | ||
| I have no partners. | ||
| So I can now dedicate the resources to be able to do novel research. | ||
| And we love going up against conventional wisdom. | ||
| Because you have to challenge conventional wisdom to see if it indeed meets the muster. | ||
| For instance, beta-glucans. | ||
| How big is a beta-glucan? | ||
| 10,000 Daltons? | ||
| A million Daltons? | ||
| I have no idea what any of those words you just said were. | ||
| Beta-glucans are big polymers of sugars. | ||
| And so the big myth out there is beta-glucans are the golden compound that used to standardize products to. | ||
| But there is not a certified method for beta-glucan analysis. | ||
| We have an article coming out also on a 17-species blend using the same, it's called the Megazyme test, the same Megazyme test With the same exact test, the same samples, one sample got less than 1%, and the other sample got more than 30%. | ||
| That is a disparate range of data that does not give you any confidence. | ||
| And so the beta-glucan method, how big is the beta-glucans? | ||
| The beta-glucans are a giant scaffolding. | ||
| It's like the structure of this building. | ||
| And inside that scaffolding is all these other compounds that are adornments that are embedded in this giant scaffolding. | ||
| And so we did a clinical study with turkey tail mushrooms and breast cancer that was published in a peer-reviewed journal. | ||
| And the scientists that I worked with, Ken Quayle et al, I think in 2016, I think, published an article where they use lipases, which is an enzyme that dissolves lipids. | ||
| Because I was arguing the beta-glucans are a huge scaffolding. | ||
| There's the other components inside the beta-glucans that are immunologically active. | ||
| And they had been reading literature, it's all predominantly beta-glucans. | ||
| I said, well, let's do an experiment. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| They took the ball and ran with it. | ||
| And then they put this fat-dissolving enzyme, lipases, and they stripped the lipids, the fats, from the beta-glucan scaffolding. | ||
| Then they took that product without the lipids and it reduced immune response by 83%. | ||
| Thus proving that the lipids that were inside the beta-glucans were pharmacologically apt. | ||
| Now, why that's important, if you do hot water extracts, you don't get fats. | ||
| As you know, fats is not miscible in water. | ||
| And so that's why fats separate. | ||
| So having these fats, and we're made of fat. | ||
| Cholesterol is good for you. | ||
| Fats are good for you. | ||
| Wait, what are you saying? | ||
| Well, you're a paleo guy, right? | ||
| So you know this, you know, from the fats or... | ||
| Yeah, I don't like that word, paleo, because I think it's a little inaccurate, like what people ate during the Paleolithic. | ||
| I like calling it primordial. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good one. | ||
| Primal, you know, some people call it the primal, primal diet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this just speaks to the fact that every mushroom species is like a miniature pharmaceutical factory. | ||
| And what makes a species is the accumulation of those compounds that are different mixtures. | ||
| There's around 1.5 million species of fungi. | ||
| 150,000 species are mushroom-forming fungi. | ||
| We've identified around 15,000 species. | ||
| Of those 15,000 species, we have about 20 to 40 species that we know are beneficial for human health. | ||
| Well, that's a pretty good selection criteria. | ||
| Going from 14,000 identified species or potentially 150,000 out there. | ||
| We haven't identified most of them. | ||
| But our ancestors, through trial and error, have narrowed the field of candidates down to about 20 to 40 species that we know, because of their molecular arrangements and complexity, benefit human health. | ||
| Now, when people pick mushrooms, when they go out and pick mushrooms, the real issue seems to be that there's some mushrooms that are edible that look very close to mushrooms, very similar to mushrooms that are very poisonous. | ||
| True to the uninitiated and the people who have not learned. | ||
| But once you learn the chanterelle, you will not mistake it. | ||
| Nothing looks like a lion's mane mushroom. | ||
| Once you learn a lion's mane mushroom, it's hard to mistake it. | ||
| So there are some lookalikes, and with the Amanita phalloides, the destroying angel, and with the patty straw mushroom. | ||
| Which is commonly cultivated and collected in Asia. | ||
| Many of the mushroom deaths in North America have come from, not displaced peoples, but people who've come from Asia, and because they're secretive in the language barrier and the culture of being wild collectors, they then mistake the destroying angel for a patty straw mushroom. | ||
| That's a real common mistake. | ||
| There are other people who said, well, it just looked edible. | ||
| That's a really dangerous thing to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus Christ. | |
| You have to know species individually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There's edible species of Amanita, and there's poisonous ones, and there's deadly poisonous ones. | ||
| Amanita seems to have a lot of controversy as far as its efficacy, as far as like its psychedelic efficacy. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I don't know anybody that's ever really tripped off of it. | ||
| Muscaria or Amanita? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh man, do I have a story. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Because everybody that I know, like, and that was something that McKenna talked about as well. | ||
| Terence talked about while he was alive. | ||
| He said that it seems that it's genetically variable, seasonally variable, perhaps even environmentally variable. | ||
| All those things are partially true. | ||
| I've eaten aminine muscaria four or five times. | ||
| Aminine muscaria is the red mushroom with the white dots. | ||
| It's the fairytale mushroom. | ||
| It's perfectly legal, Santa Claus mushroom. | ||
| It contains muslimol, muscarin, and ebutynic acid. | ||
| Actually, very small amounts of muscarin. | ||
| But the muscarinic symptoms cause salivation and sweating. | ||
| And I tripped with my friend on Mnida muscaria and I looked at him and he was foaming at the mouth. | ||
| And I had all these bubbles coming out of his mouth. | ||
| And I go, man, dude, you look like you have rabies. | ||
| He goes, you should see what you look like. | ||
| But then Aminida muscaria, I've eaten that a few times. | ||
| And people do boil it in water, throw away the water twice, and they can make it into an edible mushroom. | ||
| But it's not that great of an edible. | ||
| But there's another mushroom called Aminida pantherina. | ||
| Pantherina muscaria. | ||
| It's a kick-ass mushroom. | ||
| It has five times or more the amounts of emusimol and ebutinic acid, almost no muscarin. | ||
| So the salivation effect of Aminida muscaria. | ||
| So I had a very good friend. | ||
| We are not friends anymore, unfortunately. | ||
| But I was in charge of the herbarium at the Evergreen State College. | ||
| And I freeze-dried Aminida pantherina. | ||
| They're called panther caps. | ||
| They're brown in color and they have dots. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| The panther cap. | ||
| Perfectly legal mushroom and extraordinarily powerful. | ||
| So I was living up in Darrington, Washington. | ||
| I had this cabin. | ||
| I was a logger hippie for a few years. | ||
| And so my friend Dave came up and I had these freeze-dried mushrooms from the herbarium. | ||
| And I said, let's go ahead and eat these. | ||
| And I had read in the literature and almost no one had eaten them. | ||
| So we made an omelet and we cooked it. | ||
| And he was much lighter than me. | ||
| So I thought, well, I should have two-thirds of the omelet, right? | ||
| Because he's lighter than me. | ||
| So we ate the mushrooms around 10 o'clock. | ||
| And we're living in this cabin, but across the creek was a Squire Creek campground. | ||
| And it was what we call the Winnebago people, right? | ||
| Back then in the 70s, I hitchhiked across the country 13 times. | ||
| Winnebago never picked me up. | ||
| So they were always the enemy. | ||
| And so we were long-haired hippies, you know. | ||
| We ate these mushrooms and we thought for entertainment, let's go look at the Winnebago people. | ||
| So we, it was so close, I don't know why we drove our car, but we drove the car out of my cabin, we went down like a half a mile, we turned left into the Squire Creek campground. | ||
| And we parked the car and we wanted to go up to a beautiful view spot. | ||
| And so we walked through the Winnebago people and their families and everything else and we get up onto a ridge. | ||
| And we thought, this is a great view spot. | ||
| But we're waiting like an hour. | ||
| No effect. | ||
| You know, and I was talking to Dave. | ||
| I said, wow, maybe these aren't that potent. | ||
| And then right after we said that, I looked at Dave and I said, David, do you see that? | ||
| And he goes, yeah. | ||
| And we waited a few more seconds and this big distortion field. | ||
| And we had a beautiful view of the volcanoes and the valleys, a big viewscape, but we could see the air would have become sort of this liquid. | ||
| And then it started coming on stronger and stronger and stronger. | ||
| And we go, oh my God, this is getting intense. | ||
| We better get the heck out of here and go home where it's safe because this is coming on so strong. | ||
| So we come down off this little plateau and we had to come down through the Winnebago people. | ||
| And then, oh my God, and here we're walking. | ||
| The thing about Amanitas and Muscaria and Pantherina, you have dull yellows and browns, but you feel like this giant, and you're moving in slow motion. | ||
| Every step you're taking, you know? | ||
| You feel like this giant but moving really slow. | ||
| And then I came to Winnebago's of no end. | ||
| They were hundreds of feet long. | ||
| I'm trying to walk past this Winnebago. | ||
| I'm like, when is this Winnebago going to end? | ||
| I keep on walking further and further. | ||
| And then, oh, my God. | ||
| And so then we're really, just really, really high. | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| I had a Roliflex camera. | ||
| And we came up to the car. | ||
| And so for some friggin' reason, I locked the car. | ||
| And so I had my key. | ||
| I looked at my key and I looked at the lock. | ||
| I went, bam, missed. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| Okay, pulled the key back, missed. | ||
| But Dave goes, are you okay? | ||
| I go, I'm fine. | ||
| He goes, do you want me to drive? | ||
| And I go, no way, dude. | ||
| If I'm this high, there's no way I want you to drive, right? | ||
| And so I did it over and over again. | ||
| Then magically, just for repetition, it just made it into the lock. | ||
| So I unlock the door, and I get into the car, and I drop my camera. | ||
| And then I'm in the car, and I'm trying to get my key in. | ||
| Thank God I didn't get my key in. | ||
| I was not safe to drive. | ||
| And then Dave is going like, oh my God, Paul, we're so friggin' high right now. | ||
| And I go... | ||
| And I said, well, let's go home. | ||
| I said, did I drop my camera? | ||
| And I went over and I looked at the ground and there was my camera. | ||
| I picked it up and I'm going, wow, Dave, I dropped my camera. | ||
| Dropped my camera again. | ||
| I go, wow, Dave, did I drop my camera? | ||
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Picked up my camera and I go, Whoa, I dropped my camera. | |
| I did this over and over and over again. | ||
| Repetitive motion syndrome kicked in. | ||
| It is a very common symptom of the Amity Pantherina. | ||
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I dropped my camera dozens and dozens of times. | |
| How did it look at the end? | ||
| Well, it was shattered. | ||
| But Dave goes, Paul, you should look up. | ||
| And a whole bunch of people from the Winnebago community had lined up, holding their children in close proximity, watching this repetitive motion syndrome where I'm just constantly... | ||
| So they're watching you for entertainment where you went to watch them for entertainment. | ||
| And now they're freaking out because I have this repetitive motion syndrome and I take one step, I drop my camera, Wow, Dave, I dropped my camera. | ||
| And I pick up my camera again. | ||
| I go, did I just drop my camera? | ||
| Whoa, I dropped my camera again. | ||
| Now, this speaks to the berserkers. | ||
| And the berserkers, the word berserk came from the berserkers in Scandinavia, where the legend has it that there were these Scandinavians, the Vikings, were surrounded and outnumbered. | ||
| And they were going to be killed the next day. | ||
| And they ate a whole bunch of Amnita muscaria. | ||
| And a big soup. | ||
| And legend has it, and it's not been confirmed, but this is the legend that's very commonly reiterated, is that they drank a whole bunch of muscaria soup, and then they went, and the next day, even though they're massively outnumbered, they took off all their clothes and they attacked the enemy naked with swords. | ||
| And that's where the word berserk came from, the berserkers. | ||
| So I'm having this berserker experience of repetitive motion syndrome and I'm dropping my camera over and over and over again and I looked up and these parents were holding their children and were totally freaking out, you know? | ||
| I said, we got to get out of here. | ||
| So we left the doors open in the car. | ||
| And I'm taking one or two steps, dropping my camera, picking it up, dropping my camera. | ||
| We finally made it back. | ||
| He disappeared. | ||
| I didn't know. | ||
| I said, Dave, you're on your own. | ||
| Dude, I have enough to worry about. | ||
| I made it back to my cabin and I get to my cabin and there's a combination lock. | ||
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I go, oh no, I don't need a combination lock right now. | |
| I can barely – I'm spinning the lock back and forth, spinning back and forth. | ||
| And then eventually the lock just spontaneously opened and then I fell on the ground and I started convulsing. | ||
| And the cool thing about convulsing was it felt good. | ||
| Every time I convulsed, I actually went, oh, that feels so good. | ||
| So I would convulse some more. | ||
| And I was just convulsing constantly. | ||
| Like epileptic convulsions? | ||
| Epileptic convulsions. | ||
| Very, very intense. | ||
| But they felt – Good. | ||
| This is the weird thing about it. | ||
| I needed to convulse because every time I convulse, I kind of got a reset of my neurology, you know, baseline, and then it's been out of control. | ||
| And then I had this cascade of Einsteinian thoughts. | ||
| I'm going, oh my God, I can save the world. | ||
| I know how to do this. | ||
| Then I would have a prepositional or an verbial phrase. | ||
| And just before I came to the object of my thought that was Einsteinian insight, I would have a tangent. | ||
| And then I would come to the course at the end of that sentence and then I have another tangent. | ||
| I saw death as a perpetual series of alternatives that never gave me the satisfaction of a conclusive thought. | ||
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And so I was – this lasted for about 12 hours. | |
| I fainted. | ||
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I went into – So you recommend it? | |
| No, I do not recommend it. | ||
| And the biggest concern besides the repetitive motion syndrome is hypothermia. | ||
| Because if you're out in the woods or something and you're exposed, you're not getting up. | ||
| So you go – it's called soma for a reason. | ||
| It's the soma mushroom. | ||
| It's somniferous. | ||
| It causes sleep. | ||
| Is that what soma is? | ||
| Because isn't there some debate as to what soma actually is? | ||
| That's what R. Gordon Watson proposed soma in the Vedic literature. | ||
| There's a big debate about that. | ||
| But the other story I like to tell is my friend Dr. Andrew Weil was at the Cougar Hot Springs in Oregon. | ||
| And Andy's a medical doctor from Harvard and he was walking the trail and people came running down and said, oh my god, this guy's trying to kill himself. | ||
| You've got to come up. | ||
| And Andy went up and this guy had eaten a whole bunch of Andy Muscaria. | ||
| Big biker dude. | ||
| And he was covered with blood. | ||
| And he was up on a bridge. | ||
| And he was swinging his legs back and forth, and he was above the rocks, and he threw himself off the bridge. | ||
| Now, it was only about six or eight feet, but it's enough on the boulders down below. | ||
| Smashed himself on the rocks, and then he climbed back up on the bridge. | ||
| And he swung his feet and threw himself off the bridge. | ||
| So this causes repetitive motion syndrome. | ||
| Both of my camera, etc. | ||
| It's a mushroom that's perfectly legal. | ||
| It's probably one of the most dangerous mushrooms that anyone could eat. | ||
| I definitely advise not doing this because I always thought if I was ever called as an expert witness having these experiences and someone who was watching Tales from the Crypt on TV and then they saw a knife It causes temporary insanity. | ||
| I mean, the psilocyte mushrooms are wonderful, they're peaceful, they're loving, it's an empatico, right? | ||
| But the Amanita mushrooms cause this strange, strange sort of behavior that is really potentially dangerous. | ||
| And that is the mushroom that was documented in the sacred mushroom in the cross where John Marco Allegro alleged that the entire Christian religion was essentially misunderstanding. | ||
| It was really all about the consumption of the psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. | ||
| These were all sort of captured in stories and tales and parables. | ||
| Yeah, it was an academic suicide for him to come out with that statement and still very controversial. | ||
| Have you read his work? | ||
| Yes, I have. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, linguistically, the guy is way over my head. | ||
| If you read his book, it's all about linguistics. | ||
| One of the translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| Way beyond my ken of knowledge. | ||
| It's so far beyond my ken of knowledge, I can't make rhyme or reason out of it. | ||
| That seems to be the problem with it. | ||
| Most people can't. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's threads of truth in all of this. | ||
| But I don't buy it, you know, on its face, on the grandiose conclusions that he made. | ||
| But clearly, mushrooms have inspired religion. | ||
| And I teach these workshops on gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. | ||
| And at one of these workshops, this very spiritual guy, he's very quiet, but very definitely, you know, it looked like the real deal. | ||
| He waited until everyone was gone. | ||
| And he said, Paul, I've been sent here. | ||
| I said, really? | ||
| And he says, I'm a devout Christian. | ||
| I'm in Billy Graham's inner circle. | ||
| And a bunch of us take suicide mushrooms as sacraments. | ||
| And it's brought us closer to Jesus, closer to our religion. | ||
| Now, I don't care if you're Muslim or Christian or Hindu. | ||
| The idea of these mushrooms making you... | ||
| Feel the spiritual universe, more spiritually connected, given your cultural heritage and your reference points. | ||
| But he said these are extremely important. | ||
| Now, my mother was a charismatic Christian. | ||
| I met some people in her group who came to their religious beliefs through psychedelics. | ||
| Don't do psychedelics now. | ||
| But that was their portal. | ||
| They had their big revelation through psychedelics. | ||
| So the connection between psilocybin and magic mushrooms and religion I think has a lot of credibility and there's lots of great examples of that. | ||
| The specificity Some of the arguments people make, I have great, great doubts about. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| What about in the ancient Hindu religions? | ||
| The ancient Hinduism and some of the ancient books speak of various sacraments that have sort of never been defined, right? | ||
| Yeah, and why is that Brahmin cows are sacred? | ||
| You know, when the slasabi cubensis grows out of cow poop in India, and yet they won't eat cows. | ||
| And Buddha supposedly died from a mushroom. | ||
| And he was given a mushroom by a peasant and ingested the mushroom and died. | ||
| So there is that connection. | ||
| I've always thought I was curious that the psilocybe cubensis is such a religious provoking mushroom and yet cows are highly revered as being sacred. | ||
| Well, I would think you would keep the mother of the mushroom sacred. | ||
| You want to protect the resource. | ||
| But again, these are at times when fables and parables and religious rites were controlled by the cognoscente. | ||
| And they were the gatekeepers of knowledge that was too powerful for the general population to understand or appreciate, and so they protected that knowledge. | ||
| And that's the rule of most religions, is that the inner circle, you know, holds the keys to the kingdom. | ||
| And what's happened with orthodox religions is they create institutions where you have to pay tithings in order to have a gatekeeper to have a contact with God. | ||
| And that, I think, is the problem of monotheism versus polytheism. | ||
| Jack Herrer, before he died, was working on a book about psychedelic drugs, specifically mushrooms, and religious experiences. | ||
| And he had some really crazy old paintings that he had found that showed people that were naked seemingly dancing in ecstasy with a translucent mushroom around them. | ||
| The idea being that this image was supposed to represent someone who was tripping. | ||
| There's a lot of really interesting books that have been published that show art going back hundreds of years, even into the late 1300s, showing You know, Christian art where mushrooms are pretty easily seen. | ||
| So there's a lot of history to that, but it becomes the unfathomable. | ||
| I mean, maybe you can imagine it to be true, but how can you prove it to be true? | ||
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Right. | |
| How can you? | ||
| So a lot of that is like, it's great historical information. | ||
| Probably a lot of it's true. | ||
| Hard to say which is true and which is not. | ||
| But it seems reasonable, right? | ||
| Yeah, but in modern times now, Johns Hopkins, the clinical studies are on mysticism, spirituality, showing that these are some of the most spiritually significant experiences of people's lives. | ||
| The interesting thing about the Johns Hopkins studies is that 70% of the people had positive experiences. | ||
| And 14 months later, they still described those experiences as being significantly positive. | ||
| Their friends, their colleagues, their fellow workers also say that it materially changed these people's personality. | ||
| But the 30% of the people who had negative experiences, the negativity of the experience did not extend more than the experience itself. | ||
| So this speaks to re-remembering. | ||
| And what's been determined is when you have these really profound spiritual experiences, it sits with you. | ||
| And when you re-remember it, you rekindle that thought. | ||
| And this may be a way of overlaying PTSD. Rather than having the reference standard that's associated with PTSD, you supplant it with a positive experience. | ||
| But the people who had negative experiences during tripping did not have a negative – that negative consequences did not extend more than the experience itself. | ||
| So this was a profound insight. | ||
| And so John Hopkins, Roland Griffiths just emailed me recently. | ||
| They have other clinical studies that are ongoing, looking at one which just got published on meditators, giving placebos versus getting high doses of psilocybin, and then measuring the consequences of those experiences months or a year or two later. | ||
| And again, the same thing is reinforced. | ||
| These psilocybin mushroom experiences create a positive reference point that you can capitalize on by re-remembering them subsequent from this experience by not even having to take the mushrooms again. | ||
| That is profound. | ||
| When you have a happy memory that you can anchor your personality on, it's a game changer. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I wonder if we're ever going to see in our lifetime centers where you can go and a trained professional can guide you through something like this. | ||
| It's happening now. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The California Institute of Integrative Studies based in San Francisco is training therapists. | ||
| In Canada, there are therapists. | ||
| In Europe, there are therapists. | ||
| There are training programs now in psychedelic therapy. | ||
| This is something that has a tremendous momentum. | ||
| Indigenous peoples have a really nice structure. | ||
| Many of them do, not all. | ||
| But many have a really good structure for the responsible use of these substances. | ||
| Us that are displaced peoples, and I would call us European-based people and many other people displaced, we don't have the same constructs historically that we can operate within. | ||
| And so the psychedelic therapist movement is huge right now. | ||
| Canada is leading the way. | ||
| The Canadian government is very, very positive towards psychedelic therapy because of the opioid crisis and because of significant results. | ||
| As in the movie, this has come out called Dosed, and it tracks a heroin addict, a young lady in Vancouver. | ||
| It is a heroic movie. | ||
| It is not one of these, you kind of feel good at the end of the movie, but it is intense. | ||
| And she's doing iboga, and she also does high doses of mushrooms. | ||
| But the opioid crisis is so pervasive, there's so poor treatments available, that through these psychedelic therapies, in several days, they're seeing a tremendous impact. | ||
| Success and people breaking, you know, decades-long opioid addiction within a week. | ||
| And so the psychedelic therapists are integral to that success. | ||
| And so there are clinics now arising all over the world for this. | ||
| In Portugal, in Mexico, in Spain, in Jamaica, the clinics are arising specifically to meet the needs of people who are trying to get these legally so they don't get in trouble with the law. | ||
| So in Portugal, in Spain, in Jamaica, For instance, these are legal. | ||
| Many of these substances are. | ||
| Well, what gives me a lot of hope is that everything seems to be trending in a positive direction, like all these things that you're saying, your own personal experiences from TED from 2008 versus 2019, all these different treatment patterns or pathways that are available now to people that were never before, and that we're starting to see an acceptance overall, just the general population. | ||
| People understand what this is and that this might literally be the cure to what ails us. | ||
| For people out there who have not gone on a deep psilocybin experience, this is very important for me to emphasize and after you do a heroic journey of psilocybin, The next day, when you look at those mushrooms, you say, no way, dude, I'm not touching those for a long time. | ||
| Give me six months, I'll come back to them. | ||
| They're anti-addictive by their nature. | ||
| Because it's so powerful. | ||
| So powerful and profound, and you've gone through the gauntlet and You're not ready to do it again. | ||
| And so how many drugs can have such a dramatic impact that are non-addictive, that can break addictive cycles with other drugs? | ||
| I think this is a gateway opportunity for solving many of the ills of our society. | ||
| I couldn't agree more. | ||
| Anything else before we get out of here? | ||
| No, I just want to thank you and your audience for having the courage to bring these subjects to the table in a coherent fashion. | ||
| We don't have all the answers. | ||
| We will make mistakes. | ||
| I think it's really important that we take where the adults in the room We see somebody spinning off the rails. | ||
| Rather than being judgmental, go up and put your arm around them, saying, hey, there's better benefits from this. | ||
| I fully understand why people want to party with them, especially when they're younger and they're going to the coming of age. | ||
| But as you mature, these are really important for your own sanity and for the health of your community and your family. | ||
| Psilocybin mushrooms make nicer people. | ||
| I think that's a great way to say it, and I agree, and I think it should be on a t-shirt, maybe a bumper sticker. | ||
| And I want to thank you, man. | ||
| Without your knowledge and information and the way you're able to so eloquently express all these ideas, a lot of people would know a whole lot less. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| Well, it's a team effort. | ||
| It's just not me. | ||
| It's an uprising. | ||
| It's a mycelial underground. | ||
| That's reaching up and telling people and sharing it with their friends. | ||
| So check out the movie Fantastic Fungi. | ||
| It's really good and dosed. | ||
| Two good movies that speak to this. | ||
| And your website once again? | ||
| Fungi.com. | ||
| Paul Stamets, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you, Paul. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
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Thank you. |
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